Pg. 69: Sarah Warburton's "Once Two Sisters"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Once Two Sisters: A Novel by Sarah Warburton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Zoe Hallett and her sister, Ava, are the precocious offspring of two pioneering scientists, but the sisters have been estranged for years. When Zoe reads a news story about Ava’s mysterious disappearance, she assumes it’s just another of her sister’s twisted fictions, designed to blame Zoe and destroy the peaceful life she’s created with her husband and beautiful stepdaughter in Houston. But Zoe’s email is hacked to send threatening messages to Ava–and a more sinister picture begins to emerge.

Zoe returns to her home state of Virginia to prove her innocence to the authorities, to her parents, and to Glenn, her ex-boyfriend and current brother-in-law. For the first time, Zoe begins to believe Ava is in grave danger, and when Glenn catches her searching for clues in Ava’s home, she looks guiltier than ever–but maybe Glenn is not all he seems.

The clues Zoe finds point to a bizarre link between Ava’s disappearance and her mother’s “research”. Is there a secret someone is trying to protect? And would someone be willing to kill to protect it? As her sister’s life hangs in the balance, Zoe draws on hidden reserves of strength and hope to save the sister she never thought she loved.

Visit Sarah Warburton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Once Two Sisters.

Q&A with Sarah Warburton.

The Page 69 Test: Once Two Sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten goddesses in fiction

E. Foley and B. Coates are writers and editors based in London. They are the authors of the number-one bestseller, Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learnt at School and Promptly Forgot, as well as Advanced Homework for Grown-ups, The Homework for Grown-ups Quiz Book and Shakespeare for Grown-ups, and What Would Boudicca Do?: Life Lessons from History's Most Remarkable Women. Their latest book is You Goddess! Lessons in Being Legendary from Awesome Immortals.

At the Guardian, they tagged ten "brilliantly varied examples of how goddesses have been approached in fiction, sometimes revelling in the divine spotlight and sometimes in more background roles." One title on their list:

Circe by Madeline Miller

This magnificent story of the famous witch goddess from Homer’s Odyssey was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s prize for fiction. It is both hugely enjoyable, showing the very male classical epic from a female point of view, and profoundly affecting in its depictions of the trials of immortality. This book is the closest you can get to experiencing what it might really be like to be a goddess, with all its benefits and sacrifices.

Read about another entry on the list.

Circe is among Jordan Ifueko's five fantasy titles driven by traumatic family bonds, Eleanor Porter's top ten books about witch-hunts, Emily B. Martin's six stunning fantasies for nature lovers, Allison Pataki's top six books that feature strong female voices, Pam Grossman's thirteen stories about strong women with magical powers, Kris Waldherr's nine top books inspired by mythology, Katharine Duckett's eight novels that reexamine literature from the margins, and Steph Posts' thirteen top novels set in the world of myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Gerald Elias

From my Q&A with Gerald Elias, author of The Beethoven Sequence:

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

For The Beethoven Sequence, I took my cue from the master of the thriller, Robert Ludlum, he of The Bourne Identity and dozens of his other best sellers with a similar title structure. As a reader, when I see a title like that, I think, "Hmm, that's intriguing. I feel a secret conspiracy coming on, or an international plot, or power behind the throne lurking somewhere in the darkness. I wonder, "What that's all about?"

Of course, the title has to have an integral relationship to the story, whether it's the name of the main character or whatever device it is that functions as the drama's trigger. In the case of my book, the Beethoven Sequence is a musical construct that was created by the mentally imbalanced protagonist, Layton Stolz, whose obsession with Beethoven's vision of liberty is so perverted that in the end he becomes a monomaniacal despot. I hope the prospective reader will look at the title and say, "Ooh, The Beethoven Sequence. Now that...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Gerald Elias's website.

The Page 69 Test: Devil's Trill.

The Page 69 Test: Danse Macabre.

My Book, The Movie: Devil's Trill and Danse Macabre.

The Page 69 Test: Death and the Maiden.

My Book, The Movie: Playing With Fire.

The Page 69 Test: Playing With Fire.

My Book, The Movie: Spring Break.

The Page 69 Test: Spring Break.

The Page 69 Test: The Beethoven Sequence.

Q&A with Gerald Elias.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Christopher Capozzola's "Bound by War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America's First Pacific Century by Christopher Capozzola.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping history of America’s long and fateful military relationship with the Philippines amid a century of Pacific warfare

Ever since US troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the US armed forces. In Bound by War, historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos.

As the US military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted their Pacific rivals from Philippine bases. And from the colonial-era Philippine Scouts to post-9/11 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Filipinos were crucial partners in the exercise of US power. Their service reshaped Philippine society and politics and brought thousands of Filipinos to America.

Telling the epic story of a century of conflict and migration, Bound by War is a fresh, definitive portrait of this uneven partnership and the two nations it transformed.

Learn more about Bound by War at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Bound by War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top Native American crime novels

David Heska Wanbli Weiden is an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He's a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Tin House Scholar, and the recipient of the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. A lawyer and professor, he lives in Denver, Colorado, with his family.

Weiden's new novel is Winter Counts.

At The Strand Magazine he tagged seven of the most important crime novels by Native writers, including:

Mean Spirit (1990) by Linda Hogan (Chickasaw).

Not just one of the most important indigenous crime novels, this is a seminal work in the Native American canon. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the book tells the story of the Osage murders in the 1920s. The brutal killing of the character Grace Blanket drives the narrative although it soon expands to larger questions of societal justice. The novel is not only a mystery, but also an engrossing view into Native culture, spirituality, and the struggle against colonization. Kirkus Reviews in 1990 noted about the book: “Justice prevails for the most part, though not all of it is brought about through the courts. Meanwhile, the Indians’ efforts to influence events through the spirit world, their ever-tightening circle of defense, and their steady dread of the fate they fully expect to overtake them evoke a brutal time and place in American history, giving this tale an odd beauty.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenny Milchman's "The Second Mother," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Second Mother by Jenny Milchman.

The entry begins:

I’m going to try to set aside the experience I’m having now with my third novel, which is currently in development as a film—all the real world constraints of an industry as nuts as Hollywood—to focus on my fifth novel, which by the time you’re reading this will have just come out. If we’re not weighed down by reality, we can bring someone out of retirement.

If The Second Mother were being made into a movie, I would want Rob Reiner to direct it.

Rob (if I may call him that, and I think I can, because I worship the guy as a creative) has directed two of my all-time favorite movies, both based on works by...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Jenny Milchman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cover of Snow.

The Page 69 Test: Cover of Snow.

The Page 69 Test: Ruin Falls.

My Book, The Movie: Ruin Falls.

My Book, The Movie: The Second Mother.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jesse Wegman's "Let the People Pick the President"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman.

About the book, from the publisher:

The framers of the Constitution battled over it. Lawmakers have tried to amend or abolish it more than 700 times. To this day, millions of voters, and even members of Congress, misunderstand how it works. It deepens our national divide and distorts the core democratic principles of political equality and majority rule. How can we tolerate the Electoral College when every vote does not count the same, and the candidate who gets the most votes can lose?

Twice in the last five elections, the Electoral College has overridden the popular vote, calling the integrity of the entire system into question—and creating a false picture of a country divided into bright red and blue blocks when in fact we are purple from coast to coast. Even when the popular-vote winner becomes president, tens of millions of Americans—Republicans and Democrats alike—find that their votes didn't matter. And, with statewide winner-take-all rules, only a handful of battleground states ultimately decide who will become president.

Now, as political passions reach a boiling point at the dawn of the 2020 race, the message from the American people is clear: The way we vote for the only official whose job it is to represent all Americans is neither fair nor just. Major reform is needed—now. Isn't it time to let the people pick the president?

In this thoroughly researched and engaging call to arms, Supreme Court journalist and New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman draws upon the history of the founding era, as well as information gleaned from campaign managers, field directors, and other officials from twenty-first-century Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, to make a powerful case for abolishing the antiquated and antidemocratic Electoral College. In Let the People Pick the President he shows how we can at long last make every vote in the United States count—and restore belief in our democratic system.

Visit Jesse Wegman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Let the People Pick the President.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best romantic novels that aren’t riddled with cliches

Kate Kellaway is a feature writer and deputy theatre critic for the Observer.

A reader wrote in asking her to "recommend some good romantic novels that are not cliched." Part of Kellaway's reply:

Your question makes me think about what it is to be cliched – if only because you might argue that love is the greatest and most necessary of cliches, and if you steer too far from the heart’s core in literature, romance sometimes retreats. Or did you mean that there are obvious romantic books to mention – Gone With the Wind, Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre? You also got me thinking about Jane Eyre in particular because, in her case, it is the lack of cliche that makes for romance. Neither Jane Eyre nor Rochester is conventionally good looking, yet imperfection arrives at its own perfection (there is hope for us all). In her cunning way, Charlotte Brontë does what Mills & Boon novels are required to do: she sees that love triumphs over obstacles. But her casting (among other things) is superior. She knows about ordinary magic.

Read about more of Kellaway's recommendations.

Jane Eyre also made Julia Spiro's list of seven titles told from the perspective of domestic workers, Jane Healey's list of five favorite gothic romances, Annaleese Jochems's list of the great third wheels of literature, Sara Collins's list of six of fiction's best bad women, Sophie Hannah's list of fifteen top books with a twist, E. Lockhart's list of five favorite stories about women labeled “difficult,” Sophie Hannah's top ten list of twists in fiction, Gail Honeyman's list of five of her favorite idiosyncratic characters, Kate Hamer's top ten list of books about adopted children, a list of four books that changed Vivian Gornick, Meredith Borders's list of ten of the scariest gothic romances, Esther Inglis-Arkell's top ten list of the most horribly mistreated first wives in Gothic fiction, Martine Bailey’s top six list of the best marriage plots in novels, Radhika Sanghani's top ten list of books to make sure you've read before graduating college, Lauren Passell's top five list of Gothic novels, Molly Schoemann-McCann's lists of ten fictional men who have ruined real live romance and five of the best--and more familiar--tropes in fiction, Becky Ferreira's lists of seven of the best fictional depictions of female friendship and the top six most momentous weddings in fiction, Julia Sawalha's six best books list, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books list, Kathryn Harrison's list of six favorite books with parentless protagonists, Megan Abbott's top ten list of novels of teenage friendship, a list of Bettany Hughes's six best books, the Guardian's top 10 lists of "outsider books" and "romantic fiction;" it appears on Lorraine Kelly's six best books list, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, and Jessica Duchen's top ten list of literary Gypsies, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best governesses in literature, ten of the best men dressed as women, ten of the best weddings in literature, ten of the best locked rooms in literature, ten of the best pianos in literature, ten of the best breakfasts in literature, ten of the best smokes in fiction, and ten of the best cases of blindness in literature. It is one of Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: Jane Eyre.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerald Elias's "The Beethoven Sequence"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Beethoven Sequence by Gerald Elias.

About the book:

From the pen of Salt Lake City novelist Gerald Elias, author of the critically acclaimed Daniel Jacobus mystery series, comes his first thriller. The Beethoven Sequence is the story of a mentally imbalanced political outsider who makes an improbable ascent to the presidency of the United States.

A rural Colorado machine shop mechanic, Layton Stolz is obsessed with the music of Beethoven and its message of freedom for mankind. Building a cult-like empire of acolytes, by the time he is elected president his message has metastasized into a cancerous ideology, and his political machine is bent upon eliminating his opponents. One of them is Ballard Whitmore, a graduate of Brigham Young University who was imprisoned on trumped-up sexual misconduct charges. Whitmore and female reporter Sandy Duckworthy, the only person who believes his story, risk their lives in their quest for his exoneration and the downfall of President Layton Stolz.

The Beethoven Sequence is truly a novel suited to our turbulent times. Conceived well before the current White House administration, it contains prescient parallels of what could happen when political power, supported by a critical mass of indoctrinated acolytes, goes unchecked.

Learn more about the book and author at Gerald Elias's website.

The Page 69 Test: Devil's Trill.

The Page 69 Test: Danse Macabre.

My Book, The Movie: Devil's Trill and Danse Macabre.

The Page 69 Test: Death and the Maiden.

My Book, The Movie: Playing With Fire.

The Page 69 Test: Playing With Fire.

My Book, The Movie: Spring Break.

The Page 69 Test: Spring Break.

The Page 69 Test: The Beethoven Sequence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels on motherhood & maternal fear

Kate Riordan is a British writer and journalist who worked for the Guardian and Time Out London.

Her new novel is The Heatwave.

[Q&A with Kate Riordan; The Page 69 Test: The Heatwave.]

At The Strand Magazine, Riordan tagged five "novels about maternal fear which challenge as much as they chill," including:

Little Face by Sophie Hannah

New mother Alice returns home from a dutiful postpartum session at the health club to find the front door open, her husband fast asleep and baby Florence missing. Except that there’s a big twist: there is a baby in the crib – it’s just that Alice is certain it’s not hers. With a controlling live-in mother-in-law and a husband whose first wife was murdered, both of whom try to convince Alice she’s lost her mind, the relentlessly creepy and claustrophobic Little Face is not only a great example of modern gothic literature, but slyly political, too – demonstrating that the misogynistic trope of ‘hysterical woman’ is still alive and well.

Read about another entry on the list.

Little Face is among the Guardian's fifty top thrillers by women.

The Page 69 Test: Little Face.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Katja M. Guenther's "The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals by Katja M. Guenther.

About the book, from the publisher:

Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency.

Visit Katja M. Guenther's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Sarah Warburton

From my Q&A with Sarah Warburton, author of Once Two Sisters:

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

I chose Once Two Sisters because it felt like the beginning of a fairy tale. Right away you know that these two sisters are different, and that is the seed of the story. The older sister, Ava, used to tell stories to her younger sister Ava, and as an adult and best-selling novelist, she mined Zoe’s life for her plots. Ava is controlled, successful, and cerebral. Zoe is bold, reckless, and passionate. Each sister measures herself against the other. Also Once Two Sisters is only a half step away from Once Upon a Time, and throughout the novel Ava continues to use the storytelling technique as a coping mechanism. I hope that in addition to setting up the conflict, Once Two Sisters also hints at the promise of...[read on]

Visit Sarah Warburton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Once Two Sisters.

Q&A with Sarah Warburton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five crime novels that explore social issues

Alyssa Cole is an award-winning author of historical, contemporary, and sci-fi romance. Her Civil War-set espionage romance An Extraordinary Union was the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award’s Best Book of 2017 and the American Library Association’s RUSA Best Romance for 2018, and A Princess in Theory was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018.

Cole's new novel is When No One Is Watching.

At CrimeReads she tagged five "books that explore social issues, and the effects that ripple out from them in ways large and small," including:

And Now She’s Gone by Rachel Howzell Hall

Howzell Hall’s fantastic Detective Lou Norton series followed a Black female detective in LA through the underbelly of the glitz and glamor so often associated with the city. Her newest thriller takes readers back to LA with a taut, twisty tale about Grayson Sikes, an amateur private detective on her first case. Grayson, who’s not doing so hot herself, has to find a missing woman for a jerky client who claims to have been a caring boyfriend. As the parallels between the woman’s story and her own begin to stack up, a story unfolds of what women do to survive in a society that often looks the other way when they most need help.

Read about another entry on the list.

Hall's Lou Norton series is among Amy Stuart's five deeply flawed characters you’ll learn to appreciate and Sara Sligar's seven California crime novels with a nuanced view of of race, class, gender & community. Land of Shadows is among Steph Cha's top ten books about trouble in Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kenneth Austin's "The Jews and the Reformation"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive account of Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the European Reformation

In this rich, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched account, Kenneth Austin examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther’s writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. This book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities—and has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly.

Learn more about The Jews and the Reformation at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Jews and the Reformation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen great campus novels published in the last decade

Emily Temple holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow and the recipient of a Henfield Prize.

Temple's new novel, her first, is The Lightness.

At Lit Hub she tagged fifteen great campus novels published in the last ten years. One title on the list:

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members (2014)

A very funny, very cranky novel-in-recommendation letters: the academic’s version of the epistolary novel.

See also: The Shakespeare Requirement (2018).

Read about another entry on the list.

Dear Committee Members is among Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst's ten top modern epistolary novels, Maureen Corrigan's top 12 books of 2014, Kate DiCamillo's 3 favorite books of 2014, and Ellen Wehle's four top novels "in which teachers and students run just a little bit off the rails."

The Page 69 Test: Dear Committee Members.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Teri Bailey Black

From my Q&A with Teri Bailey Black, author of Chasing Starlight:

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

For a year, this book didn’t have a title as I waited for the right words to pop into my head. You know, that perfect little phrase that explained to readers that this is a murder mystery set in Old Hollywood, with a main character inspired by Katharine Hepburn and Nancy Drew; a mansion filled with quirky, aspiring actors; a gangster subplot; the inner workings of a movie studio; and romance.

Then cover design started and I needed a title fast. I frantically scribbled ideas in a notebook. At first, I wanted something a bit obscure and literary. Maybe ... The Luminosity of Stars? My publisher (wisely) wanted something more sellable.

Since my main character is an aspiring astronomer, I thought it would be fun to play off the double meaning of stars—both the glamorous type and heavenly. I wrote down every star-related phrase I could think of, but nothing felt right—until I wrote down Chasing Starlight and knew it was perfect. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. But isn’t that always the way with good ideas?

What's in a name?

My main character was inspired by Katherine Hepburn—a smart, no-nonsense, say-it-like-it-is girl, who’s trying to remain sensible as she’s caught up in the allure of Hollywood and a murder mystery. I named her Katherine Hildebrand, and she went by Kate.

As the story evolved, I realized something significant...[read on]

Visit Teri Bailey Black's website.

The Page 69 Test: Chasing Starlight.

Q&A with Teri Bailey Black.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Brandi Reeds's "The Day I Disappeared"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Day I Disappeared by Brandi Reeds.

About the book, from the publisher:

A terrifying crime reunites a mother and daughter in a novel of psychological suspense by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Trespassing.

Three months after four-year-old Holly Gebhardt was kidnapped, she was inexplicably returned to the same park from which she’d vanished…with no memory of the ordeal. Though a local handyman was convicted, suspicion also fell on his friend—Holly’s mother, Cecily. The troubling doubts about her involvement shattered the family, forever driving a wedge between mother and daughter.

Twenty years later, another girl goes missing under eerily similar circumstances. It’s just the latest in a series of kidnappings that Detective Jason Guidry thinks Holly can help solve. Though Holly has tried to move on with her life, a young girl’s life hangs in the balance. All she has to do is try to remember…

With her memory still mostly blank, Holly is missing vital pieces of the puzzle, and she believes her mother can put them in place. In desperation and fear, Holly and her mother come together again. But in a chilling rush toward the past, Cecily still has secrets she’s yet to share with her daughter. Should she dare to breathe a word, she could lose Holly all over again.

Visit Brandi Reeds's website.

My Book, The Movie: Third Party.

The Page 69 Test: Third Party.

The Page 99 Test: The Day I Disappeared.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top thrillers with riveting mother-daughter dynamics

S.F. Kosa (aka Sarah Fine) is a long-time clinical psychologist. She was born on the West Coast, raised in the Midwest, and is now firmly entrenched on the East Coast.

The Quiet Girl is her debut psychological suspense novel.

At The Strand Magazine, Kosa tagged five favorite thrillers with riveting mother-daughter dynamics, including:

Pretty Baby by Marie Kubica

This one isn’t a straight up mother-daughter focused tale, except it also is. In this twisty but grounded thriller, Heidi, who has a twelve-year-old daughter but had deeply hoped to have more children, invites a homeless teenage girl and her baby to stay with the family. Of course, this addition disrupts existing family dynamics in ever-escalating ways, as Heidi’s workaholic husband becomes suspicious about the teenager’s past, and as Heidi’s own psychological pain and thwarted mothering instinct drives her—and the plot—forward … straight over a cliff.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Warburton's "Once Two Sisters," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Once Two Sisters: A Novel by Sarah Warburton.

The entry begins:

I wrote Once Two Sisters with a very clear sense of setting in mind, but the two main characters, older sister Ava and younger sister Zoe, were always standing right behind me, directing my gaze. Because the novel is alternating first person, it’s almost like they are the camera and we experience the story through them. Stepping back to include Ava and Zoe in the frame was a lot of fun.

Ava is cerebral, successful and driven. Although she’s very much in control, once she’s in physical danger, she discovers she can be just as much of a fighter as her younger sister. I think Shailene Woodley would be great in this role. She’s got a great way of playing a character with secrets. She can be reserved, and yet hint at the passion underneath. And Ava is the character who’s literally in a life or death situation, and Shailene Woodley has also nailed action roles. She combines controlled strength with the capacity for great emotion.

Zoe is the rebel, the younger sister who burns her old identity and starts a new life under an assumed name. She’s angry, resentful, impulsive, and yet longs for a loving family. I would love to see...[read on]

Visit Sarah Warburton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Once Two Sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Emine Fidan Elcioglu's "Divided by the Wall"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Divided by the Wall: Progressive and Conservative Immigration Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border by Emine Fidan Elcioglu.

About the book, from the publisher:

The construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—whether to build it or not—has become a hot-button issue in contemporary America. A recent impasse over funding a wall caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, sharpening partisan divisions across the nation. In the Arizona borderlands, groups of predominantly white American citizens have been mobilizing for decades—some help undocumented immigrants bypass governmental detection, while others help law enforcement agents to apprehend immigrants. Activists on both the left and the right mobilize without an immediate personal connection to the issue at hand, many doubting that their actions can bring about the long-term change they desire. Why, then, do they engage in immigration and border politics so passionately?

Divided by the Wall offers a one-of-a-kind comparative study of progressive pro-immigrant activists and their conservative immigration-restrictionist opponents. Using twenty months of ethnographic research with five grassroots organizations, Emine Fidan Elcioglu shows how immigration politics has become a substitute for struggles around class inequality among white Americans. She demonstrates how activists mobilized not only to change the rules of immigration but also to experience a change in themselves. Elcioglu finds that the variation in social class and intersectional identity across the two sides mapped onto disparate concerns about state power. As activists strategized ways to transform the scope of the state’s power, they also tried to carve out self-transformative roles for themselves. Provocative and even-handed, Divided by the Wall challenges our understanding of immigration politics in times of growing inequality and insecurity.

Visit Emine Fidan Elcioglu's website.

The Page 99 Test: Divided by the Wall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten women-authored novels set in remote & forgotten places

Annie Lampman is the author of the novel Sins of the Bees and the limited-edition letterpress poetry chapbook Burning Time. Her short stories, poetry, and narrative essays have been published in sixty-some literary journals and anthologies such as The Normal School, Orion Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Women Writing the West. She has been awarded the 2020 American Fiction Award in Thriller: Crime, the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, a Best American Essays “Notable,” a Pushcart Prize special mention, a Literature Fellowship special mention by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and a wilderness artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness through the Bureau of Land Management. Lampman is an Associate Professor of Honors Creative Writing at the Washington State University Honors College. She lives with her husband, three sons, and a bevy of pets (including a tabby named Bonsai and a husky named Tundra) in Moscow, Idaho on the rolling hills of the Palouse Prairie in another 1800s farmhouse. She has a pollinator garden full of native flowers, herbs, berries, song birds, squirrels, butterflies, bumble bees, solitary bees, and honeybees.

At CrimeReads, Lampan tagged "ten novels [that] fulfill all the promise settings of the remote or forgotten have to offer to compelling and diverse women-authored fiction," including:

Perma Red, Debra Magpie Earling

Set on Montana’s Flathead Reservation in the 1940s, this lyrical novel explores the heart of the stark Montana landscape with characters and events that have stayed with me vividly over a decade-and-a-half after I first read it. The sensory detailing of the natural world is exquisite, conjuring the place so fully you feel it as deeply as your own experience and that of the characters as well. Gritty, horrific, gorgeous, haunting, and deeply-wrought portrayals of a place and the people within it make for a kind of rare magic that embodies the land and the characters of the land, making this novel have universal lasting power.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Alexandra Joel

From my Q&A with Alexandra Joel, author of The Paris Model: A Novel:

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

I knew immediately that my book’s title had to be The Paris Model. It evoked both the setting and the fabulous, high fashion world inhabited by my heroine. Fortunately, my publisher agreed!

Although the title takes the reader straight into the story, the book also depicts the early life of Grace Woods, who was raised on a vast sheep and wheat ranch in country Australia. Only after making a shocking discovery does she flee to glamorous post-war Paris in order to solve the mystery of her true identity.

Having become a model for the newly famous couturier, Christian Dior, Grace begins a complicated romance with the mysterious Philippe Boyer. As she is drawn into his dangerous world of international espionage, she not only discovers the dramatic truth of her origins, but als...[read on]

Visit Alexandra Joel's website.

Q&A with Alexandra Joel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rob Hart's "The Warehouse"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Warehouse by Rob Hart.

About the book, from the publisher:

Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. And when you’re here, you’ll never want to leave.

Paxton never thought he’d be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that’s eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he’d be moving into one of the company’s sprawling live-work facilities.

But compared to what’s left outside, Cloud’s bland chainstore life of gleaming entertainment halls, open-plan offices, and vast warehouses…well, it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s more than anyone else is offering.

Zinnia never thought she’d be infiltrating Cloud. But now she’s undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company’s darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn. If she can bear to sacrifice him.

As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble everything on a desperate scheme—one that risks both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question everything about the world he’s so carefully assembled here.

Together, they’ll learn just how far the company will go…to make the world a better place.

Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business–and who will pay the ultimate price.

Visit Rob Hart's website.

My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: The Warehouse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Ned Dobos's "Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military by Ned Dobos.

About the book, from the publisher:

If pacifists are correct in thinking that war is always unjust, then it follows that we ought to eliminate the possibility and temptation of ever engaging in it; we should not build war-making capacity, and if we already have, then demilitarization--or military abolition--would seem to be the appropriate course to take. On the other hand, if war is sometimes justified, as many believe, then it must be permissible to prepare for it by creating and maintaining a military establishment. Yet this view that the justifiability of war-making is also sufficient to justify war-building is mistaken.

This book addresses questions of jus ante bellum, or justice before war. Under what circumstances is it justifiable for a polity to prepare for war by militarizing? When (if ever) and why (if at all) is it morally permissible to create and maintain the potential to wage war? In doing so it highlights the ways in which a civilian population compromises its own security in maintaining a permanent military establishment, explores the moral and social costs of militarization, and evaluates whether or not these costs are worth bearing.

Learn more about Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about space travel

Samantha Cristoforetti is a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut of Italian nationality. Between November 2014 and June 2015 she spent 199 days on board the International Space Station as a Flight Engineer for Expedition 42 and 43. During ASI's Futura Mission, Cristoforetti conducted experiments in the Station's laboratories. She is a Captain in the Italian Air Force.

Cristoforetti is the author of Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut.

At the Guardian she tagged ten books that seem truest to the extraordinary experience of learning to be an extraterrestrial human being. One title on the list:

Carrying the Fire by Mike Collins

I am fascinated by Collins, by the absolute loneliness of his solitary orbits around the moon while his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the surface during the Apollo 11 mission. This is his autobiography – and it is honest, humble, unafraid to delve into the details. My favourite quote from the book: “I have not been able to do these things because of any great talent I possess; rather, it has all been the roll of the dice, the same dice that cause the growth of cancer cells, or an aircraft ejection seat to work or not.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Rosanne Parry

From my Q&A with Rosanne Parry, author of A Whale of the Wild, illustrated by Lindsay Moore:

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

Titles are hard, and A Whale of the Wild, had extra work to do. It is a companion novel to last year’s A Wolf Called Wander which has spent 40+ weeks on the NYT best seller list, so the title needed to be similar. And the wolf book sold a dozen translations, so we needed to pick a title easy to translate.

I had hoped to work the word “orca” into the title because my story is told from the point of view of a sister and brother orca in the Salish Sea, but we went with “whale” in the end because it’s more familiar in Europe and Asia.

I had also hoped to work in the word “journey” because the orcas travel from the San Juan Islands near the US Canadian border out to the open Pacific and back again to the Puget Sound south of Seattle all in search of their family and the salmon they need to eat.

In the end...[read on]

Visit Rosanne Parry's website.

Q&A with Rosanne Parry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jay Kirk's "Avoid the Day"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements by Jay Kirk.

About the book, from the publisher:

A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of life—all told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist’s journey.

Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Béla Bartók, and using the investigation to avoid his father’s deathbed, award-winning magazine writer Jay Kirk heads off to Transylvania, going to the same villages where the “Master,” like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, Bartók redefined music in the 20th Century. Kirk, who is also seeking to renew his writing, finds inspiration in the composer’s unorthodox methods, but begins to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartók’s darkest and most personal work, the Cantata Profana, which revolves around the curse of fathers and sons.

After a near-psychotic episode under the spell of Bartók, the author suddenly finds himself on a posh eco-tourist cruise in the Arctic. There, accompanied by an old friend, now a documentary filmmaker, the two decide to scrap the documentary and make a horror flick instead—shot under the noses of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the literal end of the world, alone, and under the influence of the midnight sun, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing question: can we find meaning in experience?

Learn more about Avoid the Day at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingdom Under Glass.

The Page 99 Test: Avoid the Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about medical breakthroughs

Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria.

At the Guardian, he tagged some of his favorite books about medical breakthroughs, including:

In The Vaccine Race, Meredith Wadman describes how in the early 1960s scientists at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute began working on a vaccine for rubella (German measles) using a controversial new method: germ-free cells from tissue extracted from an aborted foetus from a woman in Sweden. The Wistar cells were to revolutionise vaccine making, but ethical and political roadblocks meant it was 10 years before the institute was granted a patent, and it was not until 1978 that the Federal Drug Administration granted the pharmaceutical company Merck a licence for the vaccine in the US.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Celia Rees's "Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook: A Novel by Celia Rees.

About the book, from the publisher:

World War II has just ended, and Britain has established the Control Commission for Germany, which oversees their zone of occupation. The Control Commission hires British civilians to work in Germany, rebuild the shattered nation and prosecute war crimes. Somewhat aimless, bored with her job as a provincial schoolteacher, and unwilling to live with her overbearing mother any longer, thirtysomething Edith Graham applies for a job with the Commission—but she is also recruited by her cousin, Leo, who is in the Secret Service. To them, Edith is perfect spy material...single, ordinary-looking, with a college degree in German. Cousin Leo went to Oxford with one of their most hunted war criminals, Count Kurt von Stavenow, who Edith remembers all too well from before the war. He wants her to find him.

Intrigued by the challenge, Edith heads to Germany armed with a convincing cover story: she's an unassuming Education Officer sent to help resurrect German schools. To send information back to her Secret Service handlers in London, Edith has crafted the perfect alter ego, cookbook author Stella Snelling, who writes a popular magazine cookery column. She embeds crucial intelligence within the recipes she collects. But occupied Germany is awash with other spies, collaborators, and opportunists, and as she's pulled into their world, Edith soon discovers that no one is what they seem to be. The closer she gets to uncovering von Stavenow's whereabouts--and the network of German civilians who still support him--the greater the danger.

With a unique, compelling premise, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is a beautifully crafted and gripping novel about daring, betrayal, and female friendship.

Visit Celia Rees's website.

Q&A with Celia Rees.

My Book, The Movie: Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook.

The Page 69 Test: Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Frank A. von Hippel's "The Chemical Age"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth by Frank A. von Hippel.

About the book, from the publisher:

For thousands of years, we’ve found ways to scorch, scour, and sterilize our surroundings to make them safer. Sometimes these methods are wonderfully effective. Often, however, they come with catastrophic consequences—consequences that aren’t typically understood for generations.

The Chemical Age tells the captivating story of the scientists who waged war on famine and disease with chemistry. With depth and verve, Frank A. von Hippel explores humanity’s uneasy coexistence with pests, and how their existence, and the battles to exterminate them, have shaped our modern world. Beginning with the potato blight tragedy of the 1840s, which led scientists on an urgent mission to prevent famine using pesticides, von Hippel traces the history of pesticide use to the 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring revealed that those same chemicals were insidiously damaging our health and driving species toward extinction. Telling the story of these pesticides in vivid detail, von Hippel showcases the thrills and complex consequences of scientific discovery. He describes the invention of substances that could protect crops, the emergence of our understanding of the way diseases spread, the creation of chemicals used to kill pests and people, and, finally, how scientists turned those wartime chemicals on the landscape at a massive scale, prompting the vital environmental movement that continues today.

The Chemical Age is a dynamic, sweeping history that exposes how humankind’s affinity for pesticides made the modern world possible—while also threatening its essential fabric.

Learn more about The Chemical Age at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Chemical Age.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics

Hailed as “one of the best thriller writers working today” by Lee Child and “a wonderful writer” by Michael Connelly, Chris Mooney is the international bestselling author of over one dozen novels. His fourth book, The Missing, the first in the Darby McCormick series, was a main selection of the International Book of the Month Club and an instant bestseller in over thirteen countries. The Mystery Writer’s Association nominated Mooney’s third book, Remembering Sarah, for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. Foreign rights to his novels have been sold to twenty-eight territories. He has sold nearly two million copies of his books.

Mooney teaches writing courses at Harvard and the Harvard Extension School, and lives in the Boston area with his wife and son. His new novel is Blood World.

At CrimeReads, Mooney tagged six "genre-bending classics that prove the merit of mixing things together for spectacular results," including:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Another literary powerhouse, Ishiguro blends a dystopian sci-fi novel with a coming of age story that takes place in England, during the late 1990s. Kathy H. narrates her memories of growing up with her two friends, Tom and Ruth, at an exclusive boarding school insulated in the countryside. Teachers are known as guardians, and the children, who are monitored and create art projects instead of studying, have no family history. When they get older, they learn that they’re clones and will soon confront the harsh reality of their new life as a “donor,” where they will give away their organs, one at a time, until they die. Ishiguro’s brilliant use of language demands a slow and focused reading, but this award-winning book, with its themes of friendship, nostalgia, and grappling with identity, is well worth your time and attention.

Read about another entry on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on James Scudamore's top ten list of books about boarding school, Caroline Zancan's list of eight novels about students and teachers behaving badly, LitHub's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue