Five novels that feature the uncanny suspense of a third character's arrival

Nick Newman is the adult pen-name of Nicholas Bowling, author of several children’s novels including Witchborn and In the Shadow of Heroes, which was shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award. He works as a bookseller at Daunt Books in London.

His new novel is The Garden.

At CrimeReads Newman tagged five books by "authors who have made masterpieces of tension through a triangulating a single relationship." One title on the list:

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

I don’t need to extol the virtues of a book that won its author the Pulitzer Prize. It is terrifying, it is heartbreaking – not for the bleakness of its world, but for the tenderness of its central relationship between the unnamed man and his son. Here is all of humanity, in its defiance, its frailty, its compassion. Here is vast, devastated open world, and yet it is a story of extraordinary intimacy – the boy and his father are a candleflame in the darkness, and we are not privy to anything that is not illuminated by them. The unbearable tension of the novel comes not from any intrusion into the pair, but from the threat of one. We read it in a state of total vigilance – knowing, really, that at some point two will become three, or perhaps one, and either will be catastrophic.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Road appears on Linda Rodriguez McRobbie's list of yhirty of literature's best parents, Robert Lee Brewer's list of the ten best dystopian novels ever written, Pedro Hoffmeister's list of five titles with lessons to turn a post-apocalyptic novel into a thriller, Malcolm Devlin’s list of eight zombie stories without any zombies, Michael Christie's list of ten novels to reconfigure our conception of nature for the better, Emily Temple's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Ceridwen Christensen's list of ten novels that end their apocalypses on a beach, Steph Post's top ten list of classic (and perhaps not so classic) road trip books, a list of five of the best climate change novels, Claire Fuller's top five list of extreme survival stories, Justin Cronin's top ten list of world-ending novels, Rose Tremain's six best books list, Ian McGuire's ten top list of adventure novels, Alastair Bruce's top ten list of books about forgetting, Jeff Somers's lists of five science fiction novels that really should be considered literary classics and eight good, bad, and weird dad/child pairs in science fiction and fantasy, Amelia Gray's ten best dark books list, Weston Williams's top fifteen list of books with memorable dads, ShortList's roundup of the twenty greatest dystopian novels, Mary Miller's top ten list of the best road books, Joel Cunningham's list of eleven "literary" novels that include elements of science fiction, fantasy or horror, Claire Cameron's list of five favorite stories about unlikely survivors, Isabel Allende's six favorite books list, the Telegraph's list of the 15 most depressing books, Joseph D’Lacey's top ten list of horror books, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five unforgettable fathers from fiction, Ken Jennings's list of eight top books about parents and kids, Anthony Horowitz's top ten list of apocalypse books, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five notable "What If?" books, John Mullan's list of ten of the top long walks in literature, Tony Bradman's top ten list of father and son stories, Ramin Karimloo's six favorite books list, Jon Krakauer's five best list of books about mortality and existential angst, William Skidelsky's list of the top ten most vivid accounts of being marooned in literature, Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories, the Guardian's list of books to change the climate, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and the Times (of London) list of the 100 best books of the decade. In 2009 Sam Anderson of New York magazine claimed "that we'll still be talking about [The Road] in ten years."

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Sherry Rankin

From my Q&A with Sherry Rankin, author of The Killing Plains:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My working title for this novel was The Hare’s Mask, because the skinned rabbit faces that are left on the murder victims in this book create such a vivid, creepy image, to me. But I was never sold on it as a permanent title. It just helps me to have something to call a book while I’m writing it. The editorial team at Thomas and Mercer wanted the book to have a title that was indicative of the West Texas landscape and the nature of the crimes occurring in the novel. We briefly considered Dead Man’s Bluff; but my agent actually came up with The Killing Plains, and I liked it immediately.

What's in a name?

For me, a character’s name either springs up spontaneously, or I never do seem to get it quite right. As I was doing some pre-writing about the personality of my main character in The Killing Plains, the name “Colly Newland” just popped into my head, almost as if she were rising up out of nowhere and introducing herself to me.

“Colly” is actually a nickname. Her...[read on]

Visit Sherry Rankin's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Killing Plains.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains.

Q&A with Sherry Rankin.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Boyle's "Saint of the Narrows Street," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle.

The entry begins:

Saint of the Narrows Street opens on a hot summer night in August 1986, when main character Risa Franzone is pushed to the limit by her bad seed husband, Sav. She has an infant, Fabrizio, to take care of, and Sav has crossed one too many lines. Risa’s sister, Giulia, has also shown up looking for solace after a bad breakup, and Giulia tries to convince Risa to leave Sav. Things come to a boiling point in their sweltering apartment and eventually go sideways after Sav drunkenly storms in and assaults Giulia. Risa brains Sav with her cutlet pan, and he hits his head on the edge of a table on his way down. Not sure what to do, the sisters enlist the help of Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, who lives across the street and is Sav’s childhood friend, though he adores Risa and recognizes what Sav has become. What happens that night ripples out across the next three decades, and we drop in on these characters in moments of crisis in 1991, 1998, and 2004.

It’s a difficult book to imagine a cast for because of the elements of time and aging. Fab goes from nine months old to eighteen years old over the course of the book, so I’m leaving him off. I can’t say I was thinking of specific actors as I was writing, but here are some folks I’d love to see in the three main roles:

Risa: Cristin Milioti

Chooch: John Magaro

Giulia: Victoria Pedretti

I can also see Ray Romano as Joey Sends, Susan...[read on]

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: City of Margins.

My Book, The Movie: City of Margins.

Q&A with William Boyle.

The Page 69 Test: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

My Book, The Movie: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

Writers Read: William Boyle (December 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Saint of the Narrows Street.

My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy by Hiroshi Motomura.

About the book, from the publisher:

A uniquely broad and fair-minded guide to making immigration policy ethical.

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration.

In Borders and Belonging, Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept―national borders―and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them?

Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Borders and Belonging.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Romney is the author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769–1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).

Romeny's new books is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend .

At Lit Hub she tagged six books that "owe a debt to Austen’s work" by authors who "teased out threads from Austen in order to make something peculiarly their own." One title on the list:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Part of Austen’s modern appeal—the reason she is one of the most commonly read “classic” authors—is because her work pleases readers across today’s fractured genre landscape. Austen has a devoted following among romance readers. She also attracts admirers who don’t read romance at all.

Often cited as one of the greatest English novels of the past one hundred years, Atonement pulls inspiration primarily from Northanger Abbey. In both novels, a young girl’s literary turn of mind exacerbates her naive errors, complicating our conceptions of imagination and reality, dreaming and consequences. In an interview about Atonement, Ian McEwan made clear his debt to her: “The ghost that stalks this novel is that of Jane Austen.”

Read about another title on the list.

Atonement also appears on Kaley Rohlinger's list of fifteen top books with unreliable narrators, Ore Agbaje-Williams's list of seven scandalous betrayals in literature, Brittany Bunzey's list of 23 books about backstabbing and betrayal, Emma Rous's list of the ten top dinner parties in modern fiction, David Leavitt's top ten list of house parties in fiction, Abbie Greaves's top ten list of books about silence, Eliza Casey's list of ten favorite stories--from film, fiction, and television--from the early 20th century, Nicci French's top ten list of dinner parties in fiction, Mark Skinner's list of ten of the best country house novels, Julia Dahl's top ten list of books about miscarriages of justice, Tim Lott's top ten list of summers in fiction, Ellen McCarthy's list of six favorite books about weddings and marriage, David Treuer's six favorite books list, Kirkus Reviews's list of eleven books whose final pages will shock you, Nicole Hill's list of eleven books in which the main character dies, Isla Blair's six best books list, Jessica Soffer's top ten list of book endings, Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpieces of fiction that also worked as films, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best birthday parties in literature, ten of the best misdirected messages in literature, ten of the best scenes on London Underground, ten of the best breakages in literature, ten of the best weddings in literature, and ten of the best identical twins in fiction. It is one of Stephanie Beacham's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James L. Cambias reading?

Featured at Writers Read: James L. Cambias, author of The Miranda Conspiracy (The Billion Worlds Book 3).

His entry begins:

Lately I've been working my way through a big, dense, but fascinating book: The History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book includes the text of the original handwritten manuscript version of The Hobbit, with copious notes and commentary by Rateliff.

John Rateliff covers everything. There are notes on the physical manuscript itself — Tolkien apparently wrote a lot of his first draft on blank pages torn from student examination books (which suggests that an Oxford professor's salary in the 1920s didn't stretch very far). The color of the ink indicates when Tolkien took a break from the project and came back to it.

The book goes into the literary antecedents of the The Hobbit — everything from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle, and P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, to...[read on]

About The Miranda Conspiracy, from the publisher:

An ancient treasure in deep space holds the key to a deadly conspiracy which will shake the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium.

At the end of the Tenth Millennium, Zee and his AI buddy Daslakh arrive on the icy moon Miranda, hoping to make a good impression on his girlfriend Adya's upper-class parents. Instead they discover that Adya's father is the target of a political conspiracy. While Adya tries to discover who is trying to to ruin the family fortunes and expel them from Miranda's exclusive ruling class, Daslakh and Zee go on the trail of a lost treasure in deep space. As they both dig deeper they run afoul of rival political factions, romantic complications, space mercenaries, octopus gangsters, and ruthless secret agents—and all the while dealing with interference from Adya's parents and party-going sister. Love, power, wealth, and honor collide in the floating cities and palaces inside Miranda.

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Tamara L. Miller's "Into the Fall"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Into the Fall: A Thriller by Tamara L. Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

From debut author Tamara L. Miller comes a suspenseful psychological thriller tracking the mysteries of a seemingly mundane life as they come to light in the vast, unforgiving Canadian wilderness.

For better or for worse, Sarah Anderson has it all: a thriving career, a nice home in Ottawa, two young kids…and a marriage coming apart at the seams.

Then her husband, Matthew, vanishes without a trace during a family vacation up north. Sarah and her children are nearly lost among the slumbering lakes, treacherous cliffs, and brooding forests of the Canadian Shield. A glacier-scraped realm of ancient beauty and terror, it’s a world away from the safety of the suburbs. And a big storm is brewing.

A kind rural lawman comes to their aid and takes an interest in the case. The trail goes cold, however, launching Sarah into a yearlong odyssey to find her husband. On the way, she must reconnect with her estranged sister and duck the suspicions of a slick city police officer. But that’s nothing compared to unearthing the dark secrets buried deep in the granite of her marriage―and in herself.

Visit Tamara L. Miller's website.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Fall.

Q&A with Tamara L. Miller.

The Page 69 Test: Into the Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Atrocity: A Literary History by Bruce Robbins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, what we think of now as atrocities have not always invited indignation or been seen to violate moral norms. Venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins explores the literature of suffering, to show how, over time, abhorrence of mass violence takes shape. With it comes the emergence of a necessary element of cosmopolitanism: the ability to look at one's own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger.

Drawing on a vast written archive and with penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of violence as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. These essential texts do more than simply testify to atrocious acts. In their literariness, they take the risk of contextualizing and relativizing, thereby extending beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. They recognize atrocity as a moral scandal about which something should be done and can be done, while they also place that scandal within a larger and more uncertain history.

Learn more about Atrocity: A Literary History at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Atrocity: A Literary History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top contemporary novels with omniscient narrators

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel, Glassworks, was was longlisted for the Center for Fiction and VCU Cabell First Novel Prizes and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. Her new novel is Mutual Interest. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

At Electric Lit Wolfgang-Smith tagged eight "contemporary novels that use omniscient narrators in a fascinating way." One title on the list:

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

This first book of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota quartet is as much philosophical thought experiment as it is science-fiction epic, including in its narrative voice. Palmer writes in a self-consciously neo-Enlightenment style, matching her far-future setting in which a utopian (or is it?) Earth has reorganized its society around the aesthetics and ideas of the eighteenth century.

The narrator of Too Like the Lightning is in fact not omniscient, merely overambitious and highly unreliable—but Palmer invites the reader to interrogate the difference, if there is one.

Mycroft Canner, a convicted criminal living out his life in service to whoever may need him, prostrates himself before an imagined in-universe reader he addresses directly in frequent, often argumentative asides. It is Mycroft who affects the high-omniscient style in which Palmer writes, and though the book is theoretically his memoir, he often narrates scenes for which he was not present—some he claims to have heard summarized by characters who were present; some he imagines, wholesale; for others, muddying the stylistic waters still further, he passes the pen to secondary (often reluctant) narrators.

This is a novel of big swings, one that will give any book club enough to argue over for hours. I can’t promise the intrusive, patchily omniscient style will be at the top of your list of controversies to litigate, but hey—it depends on your crew!

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Too Like the Lightning.

--Marshal Zeringue

James L. Cambias's "The Miranda Conspiracy," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy (The Billion Worlds Book 3) by James L. Cambias.

The entry begins:

My new novel The Miranda Conspiracy is the first direct sequel I've ever written — the first time characters from a previous book go into a new narrative with almost no break. It's a followup to my 2021 novel The Godel Operation, chronicling the further adventures of Daslakh, Zee, Adya, and Pelagia in the final years of the Tenth Millennium. For imaginary film casting, this means I'm strongly tempted to repeat the casting ideas I suggested for The Godel Operation: Anya Taylor-Joy as Adya Elso, Adam Beach as Zee Sadaran, Alan Tudyk as the voice of Daslakh, and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the orca-brained spaceship Pelagia.

But that's no fun at all. Anyway, actors age but fictional characters don't. Some of the people I cited may be getting too old to play a pair of youngsters in their early twenties. It's time for a reboot!

So: who will be in the new and improved cast for The Miranda Conspiracy?

For Adya, I'll go with Jenna Ortega. She is good at conveying intelligence, which is important since Adya is "the smart one" in her family. But she's got range, and that's important because she's also going to be playing Adya's identical clone-sister Kavita, who is wild and outgoing, "the popular one." With a little makeup she'll also be playing their nearly-identical mother Mutalali. This means she'll...[read on]

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best book couples

Staffers at People magazine tagged "some of their favorite literary romances, from books within the genre and beyond." One title on the list:

Evelyn Hugo and Celia St. James from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Golden era movie star Evelyn Hugo may have had to marry multiple men in order to find her one true love, fellow Hollywood actress Celia St. James, but it was well worth the wait. Their relationship is one of our favorites from the Daisy Jones & the Six author.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is among Elizabeth Staple's eight titles about youthful mistakes that come back to haunt you, Katherine St. John's five top fiction titles about Hollywood, and Kerri Jarema's eleven top novels set in Old Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Abigail Ocobock's "Marriage Material"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships by Abigail Ocobock.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cutting-edge study of marriage’s transformative effects on same-sex relationships.

It is no secret that marriage rates in the United States are at an all-time low. Despite this significant decline, the institution of marriage endures in our society amid historic changes to its meaning and practice. How does the continuing strength of marriage impact the relationships of same-sex couples after the legalization of same-sex marriage?

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with LGBTQ+ people, Marriage Material reveals the transformative impact marriage equality has had on same-sex relationships. Sociologist Abigail Ocobock looks to same-sex couples across a wide age range to illuminate the complex ways institutional mechanisms work in tandem to govern the choices and behaviors of individuals with different marriage experiences. Ocobock examines both the influence of marriage on the dynamics of same-sex relationships and how LGBTQ+ people challenge heteronormative assumptions about marriage, highlighting the complex interplay between institutional constraint and individual agency.

Marriage Material presents a bold challenge to dominant scholarly and popular ideas about the decline of marriage, making clear that gaining access to legal marriage has transformed same-sex relationships, both for better and for worse.

Learn more about Marriage Material at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Marriage Material.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Tamara L. Miller

From my Q&A with Tamara L. Miller, author of Into the Fall: A Thriller:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Settling on a title is like casting into a very large body of water looking for just the right nugget. The best titles are layered, giving a sense of the story but also playing with the themes and readers’ expectations. Into the Fall came about thanks to some brainstorming with my agent. We wanted something that captured the Canadian wilderness at its most wild and unfamiliar, while also hinted at the fate of the characters.

The novel opens on a late season canoe trip when Sarah Anderson wakes up to a frost filled morning and a missing husband. We played with a few titles, all rooted in water or wilderness themes. Deep Waters was a holding title for a long time, but it didn’t quite capture the emotional journey that each of the characters goes through as they learn the people they loved were not who they seemed. Into the Fall, with its double entendre, was...[read on]

Visit Tamara L. Miller's website.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Fall.

Q&A with Tamara L. Miller.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sherry Rankin's "The Killing Plains"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains by Sherry Rankin.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the winner of the CWA’s Debut Dagger Award.

Two victims. Twenty years apart. One elusive killer.

Crescent Bluff, West Texas. Everybody knows everybody. And everybody has a secret.

When a boy is found dead with the skin of a hare’s head in his hand, everyone knows who killed him―Willis Newland, just released from prison after serving twenty years for an identical murder.

But what if everyone’s wrong?

Detective Colly Newland reluctantly agrees to investigate a case that seems to involve the whole town, including her dead husband’s extended family. But the deeper she digs, the more secrets she unearths. And as threats against her escalate, Colly realizes someone is willing to kill to keep theirs…

Visit Sherry Rankin's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Killing Plains.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels featuring flawed child prodigies

Jeff Macfee is a writer. The Contest, his latest crime novel, is about a former puzzle prodigy who returns to the contest of her youth.

He is also the author of the superhero noir Nine Tenths.

At CrimeReads Macfee tagged five favorite novels featuring flawed child prodigies "struggling with a talent that doesn’t always, or even often, make their lives easier." One title on the list:

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Haddon’s child protagonist Christopher John Francis Boone is saddled with many names, a superior mathematical mind, and behavioral conditions that make fitting in difficult. When his neighbor’s dog is murdered, his structured brain won’t let him leave the mystery alone. He starts to investigate and uncovers not only a surprising killer but some very uncomfortable truths about his own life. Christopher is an entertainingly unique main character, and a perfect example of a prodigy undone by their very nature.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is among Benjamin Buchholz's five best novels with devilishly unreliable narrators, John Mullan's ten best child narrators, Kim Hood's top ten books with interesting characters who just happen to have a disability, Julia Donaldson's six best books, and Melvyn Burgess's top ten books written for teenagers.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is E. J. Copperman reading?

Featured at Writers Read: E. J. Copperman, author of Good Lieutenant.

His entry begins:

When life starts piling on, I tend to look for a comfort read, something I’ve read before that will take my mind off… everything… and restore my general sense of humor. Most often, it is the book I’m re-re-re-rereading right now.

Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A Celebration of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World, by Joe Adamson. Probably not what you were expecting is it?

First, it helps to be a fan of the bros, and I am a sterling example thereof. Seeing Horse Feathers for the first time when I was in high school (just after the earth cooled) changed my life and my thinking permanently, and I’m grateful for that. But even beyond the exhaustive research that was clearly done in the preparation for this thick non-fiction book, which is extensive, is the writing. For me, it’s written exactly as it should be: admiring without being reverent, funny without being a collection of jokes, informative without being...[read on]

About Good Lieutenant, from the publisher:

LA lawyer Sandy Moss comes to falsely accused lieutenant Trench's aid in this final instalment of the critically acclaimed legal cozy mystery series.

While settling into her new home in Los Angeles together with her boyfriend and TV star Patrick McNabb, attorney Sandy Moss receives a phone call from the LA Men’s Detention Center. It’s a new client accused of murder: the near-stoic Lt. K.C. Trench!

Being good at his job but not well-liked in his department, Trench is accused of killing a fellow LA police officer whom he openly despised and threatened. With the odds against her, Sandy takes on the case of her sometime nemesis/sometime ally. She is certain that Trench can’t be the killer. It seems like someone is trying to pin the murder on him, but who and why? And what isn’t Trench telling her?

Sandy has a tricky case on her hands with all the evidence pointing at Trench as the murderer, but one thing is clear, she will help the stoic lieutenant, even if it puts her in unimaginable danger...

Think Suits with a touch of romance: This witty cozy mystery is perfect for fans of classic courtroom dramas: Loveable, streetwise heroine Sandy “could give Perry Mason a run for his money” (Kirkus Reviews).

Visit E. J. Copperman's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Thrill of the Haunt.

Writers Read: E. J. Copperman (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Thrill of the Haunt.

My Book, The Movie: Ukulele of Death.

The Page 69 Test: Ukulele of Death.

Q&A with E. J. Copperman.

The Page 69 Test: Same Difference.

Writers Read: E. J. Copperman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Constance E. Squires's "Low April Sun," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Low April Sun: A Novel by Constance E. Squires.

The entry begins:

It's fun to think about casting Low April Sun, and harder than I'd have imagined. I've got three main characters who turn up in two timelines, twenty years apart, so it's them I thought of casting. Edie Ash is a waitress applying for graduate schools and battling a drinking problem in the 1995 timeline of the story, when her half-sister disappears on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, and she's a sober oil executive with a guilty conscience about fracking, a little boy she loves, and a gambling-addict husband in the 2015 part of the book--which is the present of the story. Given the time jump, I could either cast young actors and age them up a little for the twenty-year jump or cast older actors for the 2015 timeline. Since money's no object here, I'll do the latter. So, for 1995 Edie, I think her young self could be played by Margaret Qualley, who was the best thing about the Coen Brothers' Drive-Away Dolls, and Rebecca Ferguson would be perfect for Edie in her 40s. Both actors convey smarts and vulnerability and energy. The question is: can they do Okie accents? One imagines that a Bene Gesserit witch like the one Ferguson plays in Dune could do anything she wanted, even making two syllables out of three-letter words (Dad=Dayed).

Keith Frayne, who is Edie's sister's boyfriend in 1995 and Edie's husband in 2015, is described as looking like...[read on]

Visit Constance E. Squires's website.

My Book, The Movie: Low April Sun.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robert Mann's "You Are My Sunshine"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song by Robert Mann.

About the book, from the publisher:

In You Are My Sunshine, Robert Mann weaves together the birth of country music, Louisiana political history, World War II, and the American civil rights movement to produce a compelling biography of one of the world’s most popular musical compositions. This is the story of a song that, despite its simple, sweet melody and lyrics, holds the weight of history within its chords.

The song’s journey to global fame began in 1939, when two obscure “hillbilly” groups recorded it. By the century’s end, it was a cultural phenomenon covered by hundreds of artists spanning every genre. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2012.

At the center of this story is Jimmie Davis, who capitalized on his country music stardom to win two terms as Louisiana’s governor. In 1940, Davis became the third artist to record “Sunshine,” after he bought it and claimed it as his composition. The song became his anthem and a staple of his political rallies, radiating warmth and wholesomeness. Its sunny tune encouraged listeners to forget Davis’s earlier recording career, marked by risqué blues recordings that clashed with the upright, gospel-singing image he later cultivated. As “You Are My Sunshine” grew in popularity, so did its link to Louisiana’s “singing governor.” In 1977, the Louisiana Legislature made it a state song.

In this biography, equal parts the story of Davis and the odyssey of his song, we discover that “Sunshine” shaped the early rise of country music but became tangled in Davis’s pro-segregation policies, briefly overshadowing its legacy. You Are My Sunshine explores the song’s contested origins, its rise to legendary status, and its ongoing resonance with millions. This is more than the story of a simple song; it’s a biography of a cultural icon, enduring and ubiquitous as sunshine itself.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

The Page 99 Test: You Are My Sunshine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven thrilling books about deadly games

Ande Pliego began writing stories when she discovered she could actually wield her overactive imagination for good. A lover of stories with teeth, she writes books involving mind games, dark humor, general murder and mayhem, and most importantly, finding the hope in the dark.

When not reading or writing, she can usually be found dabbling in art, scheming up her next trip, or making constant expeditions to the library. Born in Florida, raised in France, and having left footprints all over the globe, Pliego is settled in the Pacific Northwest, USA, with her craftsman husband and little son.

Her debut novel is You Are Fatally Invited.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven thrilling books set in a world where every move could be your last. One title on the list:

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
Game: hide and seek… ish

This delightfully dark little book brings such a smile to my face. As someone who grew up playing hide-and-seek in and out of wardrobes in IKEA, it’s a sheer delight to read about employees camping out overnight in a sentient IKEA—‘scuse me, ORSK—to try and figure out who (what) is trashing the store every night, leading them on a slightly… different type of hide-and-seek than the one I grew up playing. The book is also peppered with drawings of the furniture, complete with how-to-build instructions that become more and more sinister as the book goes on. Few people can wed horror and humor together like Grady Hendrix; IKEA veterans will nod knowingly at the pivotal (ha) use of a variant of the all-hallowed IKEA Allen wrench. It’s definitely not the darkest/goriest of Hendrix’s books, but it’s not for the (very) faint of heart.

Read about another entry on the list.

Horrorstör is among Arianna Reiche's seven books with a dark playfulness and Tiffany Gibert's eight scary stories for the Halloween season.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Tocqueville’s America and Ours

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Tocqueville’s America and Ours. It begins:

On April 23, 1794, Chretien Guillaume De Lamoignon De Malesherbes, better known as Lamoignon-Malesherbes, seventy-three years old, counsel to Louis XVI in the trial that condemned the king to death, watched helplessly while his daughter, his son-in-law, and all their children were, one by one, guillotined in front of a howling mob of Parisians. Only then was he allowed to meet his own death by the same method. Not all of his grandchildren were murdered; one of them survived to become the mother of Alexis Henri Charles Maurice Clerel, Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy In America, the most important book on American democracy ever written. The French Revolution made the equal rights of every one a new religion and made democracy the only legitimate form of government. Everyone was equal, no one was more important than anyone else; everything had to be decided by the majority, whatever the effect on the rights of the minority. The problem was how to prevent a majority, made up almost always of the ignorant and the poor, from following someone who appealed to their sense of grievance and resentment, their demand that those above them should be brought down to their own level? How, in other words, protect against the “democratic despotism” Tocqueville considered the greatest threat to liberty the world had ever seen? He thought he might find the answer in America.

The America Tocqueville discovered in the 1830s bears a striking, and sometimes almost eerie, resemblance to the America of the present day. Change the name of the president we have now and Tocqueville becomes a contemporary writer...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: James L. Cambias's "The Miranda Conspiracy"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy (The Billion Worlds Book 3) by James L. Cambias.

About the book, from the publisher:

An ancient treasure in deep space holds the key to a deadly conspiracy which will shake the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium.

At the end of the Tenth Millennium, Zee and his AI buddy Daslakh arrive on the icy moon Miranda, hoping to make a good impression on his girlfriend Adya's upper-class parents. Instead they discover that Adya's father is the target of a political conspiracy. While Adya tries to discover who is trying to to ruin the family fortunes and expel them from Miranda's exclusive ruling class, Daslakh and Zee go on the trail of a lost treasure in deep space. As they both dig deeper they run afoul of rival political factions, romantic complications, space mercenaries, octopus gangsters, and ruthless secret agents—and all the while dealing with interference from Adya's parents and party-going sister. Love, power, wealth, and honor collide in the floating cities and palaces inside Miranda.

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's "Making the Human"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans by Corinne Mitsuye Sugino.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.

Visit Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's website.

The Page 99 Test: Making the Human.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the worst fantasy worlds to live in

The son of a librarian, Chris M. Arnone's love of books was as inevitable as gravity. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri - Kansas City. His cyberpunk series, The Jayu City Chronicles, is available everywhere books are sold. His work can also be found in Adelaide Literary Magazine and FEED Lit Mag. You can find him writing more books, poetry, and acting in Kansas City.

At Book Riot Arnone tagged "eight book series (yes, they’re all series) [featuring] fantasy worlds [that] are bloody, dangerous, destitute, and so much fun to read." One title on the list:

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

The world of The Poppy War is East Asian, roughly based on the Second Sino-Japanese War (known in the West as the Asian Theatre of World War II). As a result, it’s a picture of a nation under siege and being subjected to horrors at every turn. Yes, there’s magic here, but the most brutal aspects are very human in nature and mostly based on actual historic brutalities. This is definitely one of the worst fantasy worlds to live in.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Poppy War is among Isabelle McConville's seven favorite book villains, Hannah Kaner's five top novels featuring gods, Sasha Peyton Smith's six magical schools you wish you could attend, Aigner Loren Wilson's five thrilling SFF books to motivate you while exercising, Megan Whalen Turner's eight SFF books featuring deities, Jennifer Giesbrecht's top five fantasy books steeped in history, and Ross Johnson's twenty-five epic fantasies for fans of Game of Thrones.

The Page 69 Test: The Poppy War.

--Marshal Zeringue