Pg. 99: Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe's "Growing Up Godless"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England by Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe.

About the book, from the publisher:

How children’s non-belief and non-religion are formed in everyday life

The number of those identifying as “non-religious” has risen rapidly in Britain and many other parts of Europe and North America. Although non-religion and non-belief are especially prevalent among younger people, we know little about the experience of children who are growing up without religion. In Growing Up Godless, Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe fill this scholarly gap, examining how, when, where, and with whom children in England learn to be non-religious and non-believing. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extensive ethnographic fieldwork with children, their parents, and teachers, Strhan and Shillitoe offer a pioneering account of what these children believe in and care about and how they navigate a social landscape of growing religious diversity.

Moving beyond the conventional understanding of non-religion as merely the absence of religion, Strhan and Shillitoe show how children’s non-religion and non-belief emerge in relation to a pervasive humanism—centering the agency, significance, and achievements of humans and values of equality and respect—interwoven in their homes, schools, media, and culture. Their findings offer important new insight into the rise and formation of non-religious identities and, more broadly, the ways that children’s beliefs and values are shaped in contemporary society.

Learn more about Growing Up Godless at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Growing Up Godless.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Michael Chessler

From my Q&A with Michael Chessler, author of Mess: A Sharp and Witty Tale of a Perfectionist Organizer Battling the Chaos of Hollywood and Her Own Heart:

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

My one-word title Mess does a good job of encapsulating my novel, which is about a personal organizer whose life’s work is tackling physical messes, yet is woefully inept at trying to organize her own internal messes—the tangles of negative thoughts and the overstuffed boxes of suppressed emotions.

What's in a name?

I chose the name Jane Brown for my protagonist because I think you’d expect someone named Jane Brown to be brisk and efficient. Also, the name “Jane” has...[read on]

Visit Michael Chessler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mess.

Q&A with Michael Chessler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top psychological thrillers with explosive family secrets

Claire Douglas is the Sunday Times number-one bestselling author of eleven stand-alone novels, including The Sisters, Local Girl Missing, Last Seen Alive, Do Not Disturb, Then She Vanishes, Just Like The Other Girls, The Couple at No. 9, The Girls Who Disappeared, The Woman Who Lied, and The Wrong Sister.

[Writers Read: Claire Douglas (December 2017)]

At The Strand Magazine she tagged ten "favourite psychological thrillers with explosive family secrets." One title on the list:

SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn.

This brilliantly twisty and creepy thriller is Gillian Flynn’s debut and my favourite of her books. It’s about Camille, a reporter sent back to Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the case of a murdered girl and another who goes missing. When Camille returns to her childhood home to visit her parents it’s soon obvious why she wanted to leave her dysfunctional family in the first place. Camille is traumatised by her past and she struggles with returning to Wind Gap. As she starts investigating what happened to the missing girl and who the murderer might be, she realises it might all be linked to her own childhood.

Read about another thriller on the list.

Sharp Objects is among Allison Gunn's seven top horror novels set in small towns, Lucy Foley's six top stories of folk horror, Katherine Higgs-Coulthard's top six crime-in-the-family thrillers, Zach Vasquez's seven dark novels about motherhood, Christina Dalcher's seven crime books that challenge the idea of inherent female goodness, Nicole Trope's six domestic suspense novels where nothing is really ever what it seems, Heather Gudenkauf's ten great thrillers centered on psychology, and Peter Swanson's ten top thrillers that explore mental health.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carla Malden's "Playback," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Playback by Carla Malden.

The entry begins:

Who would I dreamcast in the movie version of Playback? That’s a particularly fascinating and apt question because Playback’s predecessor, Shine Until Tomorrow, began its life as a screenplay. Much changed from iteration to iteration, but once upon a time, I envisioned these characters in a movie… and still do. Disheartened and disappointed – in life and in herself – Mari Caldwell is all the things she vowed she would never be: divorced, a single mother, a photographer shooting houses for sale instead of rock stars. When she makes an unanticipated trip back to 1967, she rediscovers her seventeen-year-old self, as well as the love she left there on a first visit. Mari is thirty-four on the inside, seventeen on the outside, and a mash-up of the two emotionally: a unique challenge for an actor.

Molly Gordon is spectacular at running the emotional gamut on The Bear. She makes each moment feel fresh, unpremeditated. She’s smart and funny and vulnerable all at once – precisely like Mari. She could pull off Mari’s self-protective, verbally convoluted rants while maintaining Mari’s core yearning for connection.

Jimmy Westwood is the singer-songwriter with whom Mari rekindles the first love that sparked during...[read on]

Visit Carla Malden's website.

My Book, The Movie: Playback.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Samuel Rutherford's "Teaching Gender"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939 by Samuel Rutherford.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities were one of many institutional state structures wherein gender difference, the male breadwinner ideal, and heterosexuality were central to a conception of citizenship. But while the state could enforce these norms through the parameters it set on the extension franchise or the distribution of welfare benefits, individual women and men also played active roles in creating and renegotiating them through the messy interactions of everyday life.

Teaching Gender immerses the reader in lecture theatres, University Senate meetings, student unions, nightclubs, and halls of residence to show how individuals' efforts to find workable paradigms for relating to one another across gender lines took shape within specific institutional, political, and financial constraints, and in the context of a historical moment when anxiety accrued around non-normative genders and sexualities as symptomatic of wider social and political instability. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of ten colleges and universities across England and Scotland, Samuel Rutherford shows that the nationalization and centralization of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century resulted incidentally in coeducation, over the protest of feminist activists who supported gender segregation; that students' negotiation of cross-gender interaction in coeducational universities ultimately led them to identify heterosexuality as a seemingly less fraught paradigm than more gender-neutral conceptions of 'corporate life'; and that single-sex men's and women's colleges, though increasingly marginal, became important sites for the theorization of life paths and identities outside the heterosexual norm. Through detailed recovery both of political and financial decision-making and of the experiences and emotions of faculty, students, administrators, donors, and national politicians, Rutherford paints a vivid and resonant picture of the university campus as a key site for the transmission of norms around gender and sexuality.

Visit Samuel Rutherford's website.

The Page 99 Test: Teaching Gender.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Amanda Sellet's "The Odds of Getting Even"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Odds of Getting Even by Amanda Sellet.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fling with a mysterious stranger leads to a rollicking adventure in the wilds of South Dakota in this madcap and romantic follow-up to Amanda Sellet’s Hate to Fake it to You.

The last thing reluctant resort employee Jean Harrington expected to find on a middle-of-the-night towel run was a bashful scientist in desperate need of company . . . and clothes. Charmed by his awkwardness and endearing tangents about reptiles, she returns the next day to give the handsome mystery guest she knows only as “Charlie” lessons in poker.

He’s reserved and she’s chaotic, but together, the two of them just click. It’s like a honeymoon without the hassle of a wedding, until Jean discovers there’s a lot more to Charlie’s story than shyness and snakes―and she isn’t the only person with a pressing interest in his whereabouts, not to mention his secretly scandalous dating history.

When Charlie has the audacity to abandon her without a word, Jean has a score to settle. She’ll do whatever it takes to get him back―no, get back at him―even if it means chasing him across an ocean to brave the wild west of his remote hometown, and the famous family business he neglected to mention. With flames from their pasts raising the stakes, Jean is gambling she can get the upper hand before Charlie calls her bluff.

The real trick will be remembering what they’re playing for, when the biggest risk is putting all their cards on the table.

Visit Amanda Sellet's website.

Q&A with Amanda Sellet.

The Page 69 Test: By the Book.

Writers Read: Amanda Sellet (December 2022).

Writers Read: Amanda Sellet (August 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Odds of Getting Even.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Leigh Dunlap reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Leigh Dunlap, author of Bless Your Heart: A Thriller.

Her entry begins:

I’m a big reader of non-fiction. I love nothing more than a 900-page book on, say, Andrew Carnegie. Having written a murder/mystery, however, I’ve been playing catch up on all the current writers in that genre.

Such a Lovely Family - Aggie Blum Thompson

Spoiler alert – they really weren’t all that lovely. The members of the Calhoun family were complicated and devious and funny and awful and a wonderful family to spend a book with. The characters in this upper-crust Chevy Chase family spin around the murder of the family’s patriarch. I loved that the novel weaved so much humor into a not so humorous premise. Thompson is great with detail and brings richness to the pages as well as red herrings and fantastic plotting that kept me turning the pages and trying to guess who did it in this whodunnit....[read on]

About Bless Your Heart, from the publisher:

Motherhood and murder link five very different women when a working-class detective clashes with wealthy moms in this upmarket thriller in the vein of May Cobb and Jeneva Rose.

Anderson Tupper, a member of one of Atlanta’s richest families, has been murdered in the dugout of the Little League field where he was a volunteer coach, and it’s up to Detective Shay Claypool, a single mother from the other side of town, to find his killer.

With the exclusive area of Buckhead threatening to secede from the city of Atlanta and take its tax revenue with it, Shay is under pressure to solve the murder of one of Buckhead’s own. Accustomed to handling drug dealers and prostitutes, she must now contend with an even more sinister group: the Buckhead Betties, the insufferably entitled women of Georgia’s most affluent zip code. One of them might be a murderer, but who? Is it the old-money queen of Buckhead? The mysterious new girl in town? The drug-dealing trophy wife?

It seems secrets and lies are as plentiful as luxury handbags in Atlanta and everyone’s guilty of something. Shay’s investigation will make her examine her own prejudices and discover that, as a woman and a mother, she might not be that different from the Betties after all. And if she isn’t careful, they just might take her down with them.

Visit Leigh Dunlap's website.

Q&A with Leigh Dunlap.

Writers Read: Leigh Dunlap.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Patrick Tarr

From my Q&A with Patrick Tarr, author of The Guest Children:

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

I think it gets them about halfway there, and the cover does the rest. ‘Guest Children’ was the term used for kids evacuated to Canada from cities in England that were under threat of bombing during World War II. I do think there’s something inherently spooky about those two words together, but the title in combination with a creepy photo of a remote, forested lake gives readers a pretty strong sense of what they’re in for. The original title was The Sand Palace, which is a structure that holds symbolic meaning in the story. But along the way, that element became less central and I needed a new title. The Guest Children was just sitting there, already waiting in the text. It felt just right.

What's in a name?

While they’re not the main characters in the story, the young brother and sister at the centre of the plot are...[read on]

Visit Patrick Tarr's website.

Q&A with Patrick Tarr.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel B. Thorp's "Seeking Justice"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family by Daniel B. Thorp.

About the book, from the publisher:

The amazing story of one illegally enslaved Virginia family’s dauntless legal appeal for freedom

Before the Civil War brought emancipation to the South, some enslaved people managed to use the legal system—the same one that had concocted and long perpetuated their bondage—to sue for their freedom from owners who unlawfully held them in slavery. In Seeking Justice, Daniel Thorp tells the story behind Unis v. Charlton’s Administrator, one of the most extensive of these freedom suits in all of American history.

It began when a woman, known only as Flora, was born in Connecticut and sold into slavery in Virginia. Her children sued, and over more than thirty years, four cases involving almost fifty plaintiffs moved through the Virginia court system before finally reaching a conclusion in 1855. Seeking Justice narrates this remarkable saga, illuminating Black Americans’ legal literacy and shining a light on the unusual permutations of the antebellum judicial world and the courage it took for Flora’s family to plunge into the legal heart of a slave society.

Learn more about Seeking Justice at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Seeking Justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books about female friendship in every decade of life

Michelle Herman's latest book is the essay collection If You Say So. Her books include three earlier essay collections – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – as well as four novels (Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up), the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life.

At Electric Lit Herman tagged "a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life." One title on the list:

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

This is a short, fierce novel sharply focused on a friendship (just as Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, was). The two women in What Are You Going Through, both writers, are at the tail end of middle age—rough waters for us all. They have been friends for a long time, but it is only now that they’ve become particularly close—so close that one of them, who’s dying, asks the other to help her die, to go away with her and stay with her until she’s ready to take the pills that will end her life before cancer takes her “in mortifying anguish.” The narrator (of most of the novel, I hasten to say; there is a brief, wry, utterly perfect first-person account by a cat of its early, terrible life) reckons with the knowledge that saying yes and saying no are both morally perilous. Empathy, love—friendship—wins.

Read about another book on Herman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Michael Chessler's "Mess"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Mess: A Sharp and Witty Tale of a Perfectionist Organizer Battling the Chaos of Hollywood and Her Own Heart by Michael Chessler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Marie Kondo meets The Real Housewives in this charming and perceptive story of a professional organizer to Hollywood’s elite who learns to find love and acceptance amid the messiness of life.

To the world, Jane Brown, a Los-Angeles based professional organizer, is a model of composure and reticence. But inside, she’s fiercely judgmental and critical of herself and others. A lover of order and tidiness, she struggles to accept the world’s exasperating messiness of both her own clients—a superficial sphere of influencers and rich creatives—and her live-in boyfriend, who is becoming as aggravating as he is comforting.

When she arrives at the home of a new client, a has-been Hollywood actress—a woman opposite to her in every way—Jane finds herself unexpectedly moved. Realizing how desperately she wants to lower her defenses and open her heart, Jane decides to declutter the mess of her own mindset. Organizing her own feelings turns out to be the most daunting job she’s ever tackled, but one that promises big rewards if she succeeds, including freedom—and even love.

Set against the dazzlingly rich, beautiful, and shallow world of Hollywood money and mansions, Mess is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious response to the disorder of our lives today.

Visit Michael Chessler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mess.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande's "The Politics of Islamic Ethics"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition by Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. Rooting her investigation in the two central passages in the Qur'an and Hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierachies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.

Learn more about The Politics of Islamic Ethics at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Politics of Islamic Ethics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top thrillers with beach and jungle settings

Jo Morey is a graduate of the Faber Academy and the Curtis Brown Mentoring Scheme. The manuscript for Lime Juice Money was awarded the 2023 Claire Mannion Literary Endeavour Prize, came runner-up in the Cheshire Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Primadonna Prize, the Plaza First Pages Award and Killer Nashville's Claymore Award in the literary category. Morey lives in West Sussex, England at the foot of the South Downs with her husband, two boys, and two Portuguese Water Dogs.

Lime Juice Money is her first novel.

[The Page 69 Test: Lime Juice Money]

At CrimeReads Morey tagged eight favorite thrillers with beach and jungle settings, including:

Erica Ferencik, Into the Jungle

Erica Ferencik’s Into The Jungle is a feverish dream of a literary thriller. It charts one woman’s journey of survival in the Bolivian jungle. During her adventure she meets poachers, shamans, missionaries, and a whole host of wildlife dead set on killing her.

Heart-pounding, and vibrant with life (and danger), this slow-burn novel is one of the best trips into the jungle I’ve ever taken.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mara Williams reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Mara Williams, author of The Truth Is in the Detours: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean. Sarah is the queen of historical romance, but in this book, she takes on a contemporary story about a dysfunctional billionaire family. After the patriarch’s death, they’re forced to spend a week on the family’s private island and undertake a twisted inheritance game. It’s messy, sharp, and full of all the high-drama and high-stakes I’ve come to expect of a MacLean novel. Her historicals take on issues of class, feminism, and power, and this contemporary one is no different. In this book, she shrewdly, subliminally draws parallels between the historical aristocracy and our current economy of the one percent. Plus, it’s...[read on]

About The Truth Is in the Detours, from the publisher:

In this sharp-witted and poignant novel, two former friends with a complicated history are thrown together on an unexpected road trip, where old lies unravel and new truths emerge with every mile marker.

Ophelia Dahl has just buried her beloved father when she finds among his personal effects a blindsiding document. The mother Ophelia thought died thirty years ago isn’t dead after all―she abandoned her. But how could she, and where is she now? With some neighborly help, Ophelia’s going to find out.

Beau Augustin is an acclaimed author and Ophelia’s childhood bestie turned teenage nemesis, still chafing after all these years. As luck would have it, Beau’s current project―family deceptions―is set to take him across the West Coast. Ophelia has a brilliant idea: Beau’s book. Her life. Win-win. In a Subaru filled with baggage, they hit the road.

Despite detours, dead ends, and old grudges, Ophelia is desperate to unravel a lifetime of lies. And Beau’s research is a little more personal than he’s letting on. Mile by mile, they’re getting closer to their truths―and to each other―than they ever thought possible.

Visit Mara Williams's website.

Q&A with Mara Williams.

The Page 69 Test: The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours.

Writers Read: Mara Williams.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Gabriella Buba

From my Q&A with Gabriella Buba, author of Daughters of Flood and Fury: The Stormbringer Saga:

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

I know some people think its overdone, but I have a real soft spot for blank of blank and blank title formats for epic fantasy, so Daughters of Flood and Fury does a great job setting genre and tone expectations for readers before they’ve even opened the first page. I want you to read the title and immediately think Southeast Asian seafaring Fantasy Feminine Coming of Rage....[read on]

Visit Gabriella Buba's website.

My Book, The Movie: Daughters of Flood and Fury.

Writers Read: Gabriella Buba.

Q&A with Gabriella Buba.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar's "Strictly Observant"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media by Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities have typically been associated with strict religious observance, a renunciation of worldly things, and an obedience of women to men. Women’s relationship to media in these communities, however, betrays a more nuanced picture of the boundaries at play and women’s roles in negotiating them.

Strictly Observant presents a compelling ethnographic study of the complex dynamic between women in both the Pennsylvanian Old Order Amish and Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and contemporary media technologies. These women regularly establish valuable social, cultural, and religious capital through the countless decisions for use and nonuse of media that they make in their daily lives, and in ways that challenge the gender hierarchies of each community. By exhibiting a deep awareness of how media can be managed to increase their social and religious reputations, these women prompt us to reconsider our outmoded understanding of the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the role that women play in these communities as agents of change, and our own relationship to media today.

Learn more about Strictly Observant at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Strictly Observant.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven books you want to see on your date’s shelves

Certain books are a "red flag," a sign that you might not want to date the person who has them on display. The staff at GQ (UK edition) and some literary friends tagged a few green flag books -- books that indicate the reader may have more positive qualities. Jessie Atkinson's contribution to the list:

Performative reading doesn’t get much more Olympian than Moby Dick, an interminably long book that was written to mimic the boredom of living and working on a whaling ship. If your suitor is more than just a few pages in, then you’re looking at someone with Leviathan patience, willing to sit through endless chapters dedicated to the very wrong idea that a whale is a fish in order to reap the thrilling, harpooning rewards. The relationship parallels write themselves.

Read about another entry on the list.

Moby-Dick appears among Eiren Caffall's ten titles on maritime disasters and ecological collapse, Emily Temple's ten notorious literary slogs that are worth the effort, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's top ten novels & stories about prophets, James Stavridis's five best books to know the sea, Robert McCrum's top ten Shakespearean books, Bridget Collins's top ten Quakers in fiction, John Boyne's six best books, Kate Christensen's best food scenes in fiction, Emily Temple's ten literary classics we're supposed to like...but don't, Sara Flannery Murphy ten top stories of obsession, Harold Bloom's six favorite books that helped shape "the American Sublime,"  Charlotte Seager's five well-known literary monomaniacs who take things too far, Ann Leary's top ten books set in New England, Martin Seay's ten best long books, Ian McGuire's ten best adventure novels, Jeff Somers's five top books that will expand your vocabulary and entertain, Four books that changed Mary Norris, Tim Dee's ten best nature books, the Telegraph's fifteen best North American novels of all time, Nicole Hill's top ten best names in literature to give your dog, Horatio Clare's five favorite maritime novels, the Telegraph's ten great meals in literature, Brenda Wineapple's six favorite books, Scott Greenstone's top seven allegorical novels, Paul Wilson's top ten books about disability, Lynn Shepherd's ten top fictional drownings, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, Penn Jillette's six favorite books, Peter F. Stevens's top ten nautical books, Katharine Quarmby's top ten disability stories, Jonathan Evison's six favorite books, Bella Bathurst's top 10 books on the sea, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best nightmares in literature and ten of the best tattoos in literature, Susan Cheever's five best books about obsession, Christopher Buckley's best books, Jane Yolen's five most important books, Chris Dodd's best books, Augusten Burroughs' five most important books, Norman Mailer's top ten works of literature, David Wroblewski's five most important books, Russell Banks' five most important books, and Philip Hoare's top ten books about whales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Williams's "The Truth Is in the Detours," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours: A Novel by Mara Williams.

The entry begins:

I don’t typically imagine actors while I’m drafting my books. I’ve never had a cast at the outset, simply because I visualize the characters as their own, individual people and have a hard time substituting an actor in their place. However, I do picture scenes, landscapes, gestures, and action like cinema, so I am constantly visualizing the book in my head. The Truth Is in the Detours centers around Ophelia, a pink-haired thirty-something virtual assistant whose life is a disaster, and Beau, a successful, uptight academic whose life isn’t as perfect as he’s pretending. I find these two characters incredibly hard to cast, simply because they feel like real people to me. But the book also has a large cast of side characters, who would be incredibly fun to imagine with veteran or character actors. This exercise has confirmed how far Hollywood still needs to go to diversify. When searching to fill a diverse cast of characters with big name actors, the options are more limited.

Scene: Road trip along the West Coast, beginning in San Diego, traveling into the southern California desert, the central and northern coast, and up into southern Oregon.

Ophelia Dahl: Amanda Seyfried. With her ability to shift between comedy and drama seamlessly, she would make a perfect Phe. I could see her playing sassy, prickly, and vulnerable equally well. Also, there’s a long-running Mean Girls joke in the book, and...[read on]

Visit Mara Williams's website.

Q&A with Mara Williams.

The Page 69 Test: The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jo Morey's "Lime Juice Money"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Lime Juice Money: A Novel by Jo Morey.

About the book, from the publisher:

With the sultry atmosphere and ratcheting tension of The White Lotus, The Mosquito Coast, and Nine Perfect Strangers, Lime Juice Money is an intoxicating, sensuous debut that follows a woman trapped in an increasingly volatile relationship 5,000 miles from home in a Central American jungle.

A woman losing herself. A brutal relationship. And a jungle full of secrets.

When disaster strikes, hearing-impaired Laelia Wylde leaves London with her new partner, Aidrian, and her young children, hoping for a fresh start in the verdant jungle of Belize. There, she can be closer to her botanist father, get away from her sister, and maybe find a way to open the restaurant she’s always dreamed of.

While the jungle is mesmerizingly beautiful, it is also unforgiving and brutally hot, filled with deadly creatures and sinister magic. Laelia’s fragmented recollections of the past are increasingly bewildering, the gunshots she hears at night through her worsening tinnitus seem to be getting closer, and she still doesn’t understand why her father tried to turn her against Aid when they first met—though maybe she just misheard.

Uncovering long-buried secrets that threaten to derail everything, Laelia must somehow find the courage and resilience she needs to survive. Or is she destined to disappear into the shadows, like the orchid her father named her after?

Lime Juice Money is a twisty, searing journey of raw love, betrayal, corruption, and greed in a shaken paradise, pulsating with danger both inside and outside the door.

Visit Jo Morey's website.

The Page 69 Test: Lime Juice Money.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Benjamin Mangrum's "The Comedy of Computation"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence by Benjamin Mangrum.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this cultural history of the computer, Benjamin Mangrum shows that comedy has been central to how we've made sense of the technology's sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films like You've Got Mail and joke-telling digital assistants, Mangrum assembles an extensive archive of work by writers, filmmakers, programmers, engineers, and other technologists who have coupled comedy with computation. Many have used comedy to make the computer seem ordinary. Others have tried to stage the assimilation of computers within corporate life as a kind of comic drama. Mangrum describes these and many other ways in which comedy and computation have come together as a new genre of experience: the comedy of computation. The modern world exalts advances in technology, but we are constantly haunted by the specter of falling behind and becoming obsolete. Mangrum examines how comedy serves as a stage for working out these conflicted modes of experience in writing by Dave Eggers, Curtis Sittenfeld, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., among others, arguing that when we look at the comic forms that shape the cultures of computing, we come to better understand the tensions and contradictions internal to the social world we inhabit.

Learn more about The Comedy of Computation at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Land of Tomorrow.

The Page 99 Test: The Comedy of Computation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books to explain the weirdest parts of religion to secular people

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She received her BA and PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Spellbound (2025), is a history of charisma as both a religious and a political concept from the Puritans to the Trump era. Apostles of Reason (2013) examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost (2006), is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography.

[Writers Read: Molly Worthen (November 2013); The Page 99 Test: Apostles of Reason]

At Shepherd Worthen tagged five of the "best books to help a secular person understand the weirdest parts of religion," including:

Testing Prayer by Candy Gunther Brown

When I picked up this book, I was vaguely aware that a lot of people pray when someone they know gets sick, and I had read that there’s interesting social science research on how religion helps people lead healthier, happier lives. But I had never really thought about whether prayer actually works.

Candy Gunther Brown takes up this dicey question of what scientists should do when people say that prayer cured cancer, restored sight to the blind, or even raised someone from the dead. She gets into the history of how people in the medical world and the church world have thought about whether it’s possible to “test prayer”—and, if it is, whether it’s a good idea to try.

I came to the subject of miraculous healing in a skeptical frame of mind, but Brown is so meticulous in going through medical records, clinical trials, a zillion surveys and interviews—plus, she is extremely cautious about drawing conclusions.

She made me think differently about the line between scientific investigation and religious belief, and question my own biases as a Western, minority-world person on a planet where most human beings rely at least as much on God for healing as on earthly medicine. I had to ask myself: am I really willing to say most of those people are nuts?

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Leigh Dunlap

From my Q&A with Leigh Dunlap, author of Bless Your Heart: A Thriller:

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

Bless Your Heart. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? As if someone is wishing you well. In the south, however, it’s a passive-aggressive put down. It’s someone smiling while stabbing you in the back. It’s a great title for a murder mystery about the rich and powerful people of Atlanta. The original title for my novel, though, was The Buckhead Betties. They are the Karens of Atlanta. Beautiful, rich and insufferably entitled. The publisher wanted to change the title because they didn’t think people would understand what a Buckhead Betty was, and that’s a fair point. Bless Your Heart was a fine alternative. You thought this was a romance novel? Well, bless your heart…...[read on]

Visit Leigh Dunlap's website.

Q&A with Leigh Dunlap.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels with storyteller main characters

Megan Cummins is the author of the novel Atomic Hearts and the story collection If the Body Allows It, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Bingham Award. The managing editor of Public Books and an editor at large at A Public Space, she lives in New York City.

At Electric Lit Cummins tagged seven novels showing that writer-protagonists can be a tool of versatility in a novel. One title on the list:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

One night in 1935, when Briony is an imaginative 13-year-old, she accuses the son of her family’s servant, Robbie, of committing a crime he’s innocent of. In general, Briony has a natural inclination toward storytelling; and in particular her mind on that night is influenced by a moment she witnessed between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie earlier that day. In 1940, Cecilia is a nurse and estranged from her family. Robbie’s enlistment is a condition of his release from prison. And Briony, a nurse-in-training, is still a writer. (In a rejection letter from a periodical, with an appearance by Elizabeth Bowen, we read a critique of a scene recognizable as one we’ve read earlier in the book.) While writing is central to Briony throughout the novel, it’s Atonement’s extraordinary metafictional twist of an ending (which I dare not give away to readers out there who don’t know) that to me emphasizes the lengths we’ll go, the detours we’ll take, in life as in writing, to try to find the right ending. It’s a book whose metafictional elements make it so famous it feels almost unnecessary to include it on a reading list 25 years after its publication, but it was probably the first book I read, back in college, that made me realize just how important metafiction can be to a novel.

Read about another title on the list.

Atonement also appears on Rebecca Romney's list of six books that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work, 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

Pg. 99: Robert W. Fieseler's "American Scare"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives by Robert W. Fieseler.

About the book, from the publisher:

A vital exposé for both our history and our present day, American Scare tells the riveting story of how the Florida government destroyed the lives of Black and queer citizens in the twentieth century.

In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in front of a state senator and the legal counsel for the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, nicknamed the “Johns Committee.” His crime? Being a suspected homosexual. And the government of Florida would use any tactic at their disposal—legal or not—to get Copleston to admit it.

Using a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time in history, journalist Robert Fieseler unravels the mystery of what actually happened behind the closed doors of an inquisition that held ordinary citizens ransom to its extraordinary powers.

The state of Florida would prefer that this history remain buried. But for nearly a decade, the Florida Legislature founded, funded, and supported the Johns Committee—an organization using the cover of communism to viciously attack members of the NAACP and queer professors and students. Spearheaded by Charley Johns, a multi-term politician in a gerrymandered legislature, the Committee was determined to eliminate any threats to the state’s white, conservative regime.

Fieseler describes the heartbreaking ramifications for citizens of Florida whose lives were imperiled, profiling marginalized residents with compassion and a determination to bring their devasting experiences to light at last. A propulsive, human-centered drama, with fascinating insight into Florida politics, American Scare is a page-turning reckoning of our racist and homophobic past—and its chilling parallels to today.

Visit Robert W. Fieseler's website.

The Page 99 Test: Tinderbox.

Coffee with a Canine: Robert Fieseler & Chompers.

The Page 99 Test: American Scare.

--Marshal Zeringue