Pg. 99: Ke Li's "Marriage Unbound"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China by Ke Li.

About the book, from the publisher:

China after Mao has undergone vast transformations, including massive rural-to-urban migration, rising divorce rates, and the steady expansion of the country's legal system. Today, divorce may appear a private concern, when in fact it is a profoundly political matter—especially in a national context where marriage was and has continued to be a key vehicle for nation-state building. Marriage Unbound focuses on the politics of divorce cases in contemporary China, following a group of women seeking judicial remedies for conjugal grievances and disputes.

Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic data, paired with unprecedented access to rural Chinese courtrooms, Ke Li presents not only a stirring portrayal of how these women navigate divorce litigation, but also a uniquely in-depth account of the modern Chinese legal system. With sensitive and fluid prose, Li reveals the struggles between the powerful and the powerless at the front lines of dispute management; the complex interplay between culture and the state; and insidious statecraft that far too often sacrifices women's rights and interests. Ultimately, this book shows how women's legal mobilization and rights contention can forge new ground for our understanding of law, politics, and inequality in an authoritarian regime.

Learn more about Marriage Unbound at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Marriage Unbound.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Munier's "The Wedding Plot," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Wedding Plot: A Mercy Carr Mystery by Paula Munier.

The entry begins:

Dreamcasting The Wedding Plot is a fun exercise because it means finding actors not only for my series heroine, Mercy Carr, but also for her extraordinary family, all of whom are gathering together at a luxe resort in Vermont for her grandmother’s wedding. The ultra-glam extravaganza is thrown off course by missing persons, family feuds, and murder, not necessarily in that order. Everyone is hiding something, and it’s up to Mercy to save the day—and the bride and groom—before it’s too late.

For Mercy, I’d choose Rose Leslie from A Game of Thrones, another strong and passionate redhead who’s not afraid to fight the good fight, no matter the cost. Mercy served in Afghanistan as a soldier and a military policewoman; she’s a warrior, and Rose Leslie knows how to play a warrior.

When I write Grace, Mercy’s chic, perfectionist mother, I always see...[read on]

Visit Paula Munier's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Paula Munier & Bear.

My Book, The Movie: A Borrowing of Bones.

The Page 69 Test: A Borrowing of Bones.

Writers Read: Paula Munier (October 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Blind Search.

The Page 69 Test: Blind Search.

My Book, The Movie: The Hiding Place.

The Page 69 Test: The Hiding Place.

Q&A with Paula Munier.

My Book, The Movie: The Wedding Plot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Liz Alterman's "The Perfect Neighborhood"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Perfect Neighborhood: A Novel by Liz Alterman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Liz Alterman’s engrossing novel is a thought-provoking read about the dark side of suburbia and the secrets of close-knit communities, perfect for fans of Joshilyn Jackson.

When actress and model Allison Langley leaves her former rockstar husband, Christopher, in the middle of the night, it’s all her Oak Hill neighbors can talk about. The gossip comes to an abrupt halt when five-year-old Billy Barnes goes missing on his walk home from kindergarten.

Billy’s mother, Rachel, blames herself for being at work and letting her only child walk alone. Cassidy, Billy’s teenage babysitter, was also late to arrive on the afternoon he disappeared and blames herself for his disappearance.

As the clock ticks down, police are unable to find any trace of Billy, forcing Rachel to ponder the enemies she’s made in their well-off suburb. Could it be one of her neighbors who stole her son? Would they abduct Billy to hurt her? How easy would it be to take a child while the parents or nannies are distracted?

When another child goes missing, the town is put under a microscope as the police try to get to the bottom of the disappearances. Will they be able to find the two children, or will it be too late? What secrets lie at the heart of this tragedy, and how far will one go to keep those dangerous secrets buried?

Visit Liz Alterman's website.

Q&A with Liz Alterman.

My Book, The Movie: The Perfect Neighborhood.

The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Neighborhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eleana J. Kim's "Making Peace with Nature"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ by Eleana J. Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has been off-limits to human habitation for nearly seventy years, and in that time, biodiverse forms of life have flourished in and around the DMZ as beneficiaries of an unresolved war. In Making Peace with Nature Eleana J. Kim shows how a closer examination of the DMZ in South Korea reveals that the area’s biodiversity is inseparable from scientific practices and geopolitical, capitalist, and ecological dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with ecologists, scientists, and local residents, Kim focuses on irrigation ponds, migratory bird flyways, and land mines in the South Korean DMZ area, demonstrating how human and nonhuman ecologies interact and transform in spaces defined by war and militarization. In so doing, Kim reframes peace away from a human-oriented political or economic peace and toward a more-than-human, biological peace. Such a peace recognizes the reality of war while pointing to potential forms of human and nonhuman relations.

Learn more about Making Peace with Nature at the Duke University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Making Peace with Nature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten 21st-century fantasy novels

Scholar and editor Brian Attebery has won multiple awards for his work on fantasy and science fiction, mostly recently the World Fantasy Award for his longtime editorship of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2019 he was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in fantasy at the University of Glasgow. One of his projects there was helping to launch a scholarly series from Bloombury Academic, Perspectives on Fantasy, which he edits along with Dimitra Fimi and Matthew Sanger. He is the author of Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, among other books, and co-editor with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler of the Norton Book of Science Fiction. As editor of Le Guin's work for the Library of America he is currently working on a volume of her short fiction.

Attebery's new book is Fantasy: How It Works.

At the Guardian he tagged ten of the best non-Eurocentric fantasy titles, works that "not only tell engaging stories set in vividly imagined worlds, they are also worth reading for the way their versions challenge our sense of the ordinary and the limits of the real." One title on the list:

The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson (2007)

Caribbean Canadian writer Hopkinson is known for her science-fiction world-building, but she also excels at more intimate fantasies. The magic in this book involves the menopausal protagonist’s manifesting objects from her childhood as well as her encounter with a selkie child. The novel immerses readers in the sensory experience and social dynamics of its island setting, and its focus on the belated coming-of-age of a middle-aged woman challenges expectations about fantasy narratives.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with May Cobb

From my Q&A with May Cobb, author of My Summer Darlings.

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

For My Summer Darlings, title was very important to me. This one came to out of the blue, and very much hints at the villain's manipulation of the main characters. I also wanted to make clear that it was a summer book! There was some back and forth with my editor about the title - we considered naming it something else - but at the end of the day My Summer Darlings won out!

What's in a name?

I think the name that was most important to me as I sat down to write My Summer Darlings was the name of...[read on]

Visit May Cobb's website.

Q&A with May Cobb.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meghan Holloway's "Killing Field," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Killing Field by Meghan Holloway.

The entry begins:

I never have a model or actor in mind for a character as I am writing. The characters reveal themselves to me as fully evolved, entirely unique individuals, not based on any specific person. It is not simply a matter of looks that captures a character. The strength of the actor, the range of emotions they are able to portray, the actors’ presence on the screen balancing the parallel of the character on the page…I gave the subject of starring roles for Killing Field some consideration before I came up with my answer.

I wrote Hector more in the vein of an antihero than a hero. He lived a hard life from the time he was a boy, and he is a cold, driven man. The only gentling influences in his life are Frank, his dog, and Maggie, his wife’s closest friend. Hector has chased his missing wife’s trail of secrets to the end. He has no answers, no job, and no patience for the girl who has been following him. Her claim to be his lost daughter sets the town ablaze and forges an unexpected alliance with his most bitter enemy, his wife’s family. Although he is a bit younger than the character, I think Josh Brolin could pull off the stern, weathered, distant character of Hector.

Annie Between Lodges knows who murdered her sister and...[read on]

Visit Meghan Holloway's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

My Book, The Movie: Once More Unto the Breach.

The Page 69 Test: Once More Unto the Breach.

Writers Read: Meghan Holloway (May 2019).

Q&A with Meghan Holloway.

The Page 69 Test: Hunting Ground.

My Book, The Movie: Hunting Ground.

The Page 69 Test: Hiding Place.

My Book, The Movie: Hiding Place.

Writers Read: Meghan Holloway (December 2021).

Writers Read: Meghan Holloway.

My Book, The Movie: Killing Field.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sheila McManus's "Both Sides Now"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West by Sheila McManus.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do borderlands work? How do they maintain their distinctive features in the face of concerted efforts on the part of nation-states to make each of their borderlines into a harsh demarcation? According to most contemporary political discourse and popular perceptions, the two borders of the United States West have little in common but understanding their borderlands’ similarities can help us understand some of the most powerful forces shaping human history and the world around us; understanding their historiographies gives us insight into borderlands historians’ unique methodology.

Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West brings together leading scholarship in a focused, synthetic survey of five themes in the history of the northern and southern borderlands: the borderlands as aboriginal homelands and the persistence of Indigenous territories and ways of being; imperial and national efforts to create binary notions of territory and identity; regulatory efforts aimed at stopping or limiting the movement of certain people across their borders; the weakening of those efforts by cross-border movement of capital, goods, and people, usually aided by state power, and the complex, binary-refusing identities that persist in borderlands communities.

Historian Sheila McManus uses these themes to highlight the commonalities between the two borderlands’ histories and provides an overview and a starting point for experts and newcomers in the field of North American borderlands history to address new questions. By conceptualizing both borders together and focusing particular attention on race and gender as well as empire and nation, Both Sides Now provides a unique methodology in North American scholarship that emphasizes the connections between these borderlands and others around the world.

Visit Sheila McManus's website.

The Page 99 Test: Both Sides Now.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five SFF books that play with magic & its aftermath

Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of the Hazel Wood series (The Hazel Wood, The Night Country, Tales from the Hinterland) and a former bookseller and YA lit blogger. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and included in the New York Times list of Notable Children’s Books.

Albert's new novel is Our Crooked Hearts.

At Tor.com Albert tagged five "books and series that, like Our Crooked Hearts, play with magic and its aftermath." One entry on the list:

The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman

(Spoilers ahead, but no more than you’d read on the book’s jacket copy.)

All good portal stories of a certain type must end with their child protagonists being gently evicted from fairyland. By the time we reach this, the final book in the Magicians trilogy, we’ve watched protagonist Quentin Coldwater angst his way through magic school and into a throne in the Narnia-esque land of Fillory—before it throws him out on his ass. The Magician’s Land opens on a very humbled, deposed King Quentin lurking around a strip-mall bookstore, hoping to pick up a freelance magic job, which turns into one of my favorite fictional heists. It gets even better from there. In the earlier installments Grossman riffed magnificently on magic school narratives and quest books like The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Magician’s Land goes wider and weirder. If books one and two sprawl across the map of existing fantasy stories, this one lives off the edges, where dragons be.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Allie Reynolds's "The Swell"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Swell by Allie Reynolds.

About the book, from the publisher:

The waves are to die for.

Three years ago, passionate surfer Kenna Ward lost her two great loves—after her boyfriend drowned, she hung up her surfboard and swore off the water for good. But she is drawn back to the beach when her best friend, Mikki, announces her sudden engagement to a man Kenna has never met—a member of a tight-knit group of surfers. Kenna travels to a remote Australian beach, entering a dangerous world far from civilization where the waves, weather, and tides are all that matter. Kenna is tempted back into the surf, and drawn into the dazzling group and the beach they call their own.

But this coastal paradise has a dark side, and members of the group begin to go missing. Kenna realizes that in order to protect Mikki and learn more about the surfers, she must become one of them…without becoming one of their victims. What follows is an adrenaline-fueled thriller packed with twists and turns, exploring the dangerous edge between passion and obsession.

Visit Allie Reynolds's website.

Q&A with Allie Reynolds.

Writers Read: Allie Reynolds.

The Page 69 Test: The Swell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matt Waters's "King of the World"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great by Matt Waters.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Persian Empire was the world's first hyperpower, with territory stretching from Central Asia to Northeastern Africa and from Southeastern Europe to the Indus Valley. It was the dominant geopolitical force from the later sixth century to its conquest by Alexander in the 330s BCE. Much of the empire's territory was conquered by its founder, Cyrus the Great, who reigned from 559-530 BCE. Cyrus became a legend in his own lifetime, and his career inspired keen interest from Persia's unruly neighbors to the west, the ancient Greeks. The idealized portrait of Cyrus by the Greek Xenophon had a profound impact on ancient, medieval, and early modern debates about rulership.

King of the World provides an authoritative and accessible account of Cyrus the Great's life, career, and legacy. While Greek sources remain central to any narrative about Cyrus, a wealth of primary evidence is found in the ancient Near East, including documentary, archaeological, art historical, and biblical material. Matt Waters draws from all of these sources while consistently contextualizing them in order to provide a cohesive understanding of Cyrus the Great. This overview addresses issues of interpretation and reconciles limited material, while the narrative keeps Cyrus the Great's compelling career at the forefront. Cyrus' legacy is enormous and not fully appreciated— King of the World takes readers on a journey that reveals his powerful impact and preserves his story for future generations.

Learn more about King of the World at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: King of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books about psychology & the study of the mind

Gwen Adshead is one of the UK’s leading forensic psychiatrists and psychotherapists. She has spent thirty years working in Broadmoor, England’s largest secure psychiatric hospital, with groups and individual patients convicted of serious violent offences, as well as with people in prisons and in the community. Adshead has a Master’s degree in medical law and ethics and has published several academic books and over one hundred papers and commissioned articles on forensic psychotherapy, moral reasoning and ethics, and attachment theory. She is a founder member of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and has been a visiting professor at Yale University and Gresham College in the UK.

Adshead is the author (with Eileen Horne) of The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion.

At the Waterstones blog she tagged six books "that she has found invaluable throughout her career," including:

Regeneration by Pat Barker

I came across this book just as I was moving into working in the field of traumatic stress, meeting military personnel who had been exposed to a variety of traumas on and off the battlefield. Barker offers a sensitive and compelling fictionalised account of war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s admission to Craiglockhart hospital in 1917, and his meeting there with W. H. Rivers, anthropologist, psychiatrist and (later) politician. We are drawn into his world and the professional clashes of temperament and techniques that still characterise psychiatry as a profession today. Rivers is a quietly heroic figure, who tries to see his patients’ predicaments from their perspective – this is in contrast to the work of his colleague Dr Yelland who treats traumatic mutism in a soldier by applying electrodes to the tongue and turning up the pain until the man is forced to make a sound. We readers, ourselves the mute observers of this instance of brutality, are made painfully aware that this perhaps may not be the last time psychiatrists do harm to those they have power over in the name of clinical benefit. Powerful and moving, this is one of those stories that lives in the mind long after you set the book aside.

Read about another entry on the list.

Regeneration is among Bev Thomas's top ten books about psychotherapy, Daniel Mason's ten top novels about the First World War, Elizabeth Lowry's top ten books about psychiatry, Phil Klay's top ten books about returning from war, Sarah Moss's top ten hospital novels, and Hermione Norris's six best books. The Regeneration Trilogy is on William Skidelsky's list of the 10 best historical novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Allie Reynolds reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Allie Reynolds, author of The Swell.

Her entry begins:

I'm a massive reader. I'm not sure why, but what I most crave from fiction at the moment, is emotion. My favourite book last year was Beartown by Fredrik Backman. I was drawn to the book by the sports theme - the story centres around a small town in Sweden where everyone is obsessed with ice hockey - but I loved it for the emotions the author creates in the reader. One minute I was crying, the next minute I was bursting with pride for one of the characters. It takes such skill to create emotions so effortlessly. The prose is simple yet so powerful. The book is a translation from Swedish and I think the translator did an amazing job.

As I thriller writer, I read lots of thrillers. Some can feel a little cold and emotionless. I love when thriller authors capture...[read on]

About The Swell, from the publisher:

The waves are to die for.

Three years ago, passionate surfer Kenna Ward lost her two great loves—after her boyfriend drowned, she hung up her surfboard and swore off the water for good. But she is drawn back to the beach when her best friend, Mikki, announces her sudden engagement to a man Kenna has never met—a member of a tight-knit group of surfers. Kenna travels to a remote Australian beach, entering a dangerous world far from civilization where the waves, weather, and tides are all that matter. Kenna is tempted back into the surf, and drawn into the dazzling group and the beach they call their own.

But this coastal paradise has a dark side, and members of the group begin to go missing. Kenna realizes that in order to protect Mikki and learn more about the surfers, she must become one of them…without becoming one of their victims. What follows is an adrenaline-fueled thriller packed with twists and turns, exploring the dangerous edge between passion and obsession.

Visit Allie Reynolds's website.

Q&A with Allie Reynolds.

Writers Read: Allie Reynolds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve books that illuminate the long road to becoming an artist

Antonia Angress was born in Los Angeles and raised in San José, Costa Rica. She is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Minnesota MFA program, where she was a Winifred Fiction Fellow and a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, the artist Connor McManus.

Sirens & Muses is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Angress tagged twelve "Künstlerromans, novels about an artist coming into maturity," including:

Self-Portrait With Boy by Rachel Lyon

In this debut novel set in 1990s gentrifying Brooklyn, struggling photographer Lu Rile is scraping by and in danger of eviction when she accidentally captures a masterpiece: an image of her neighbor’s child falling to his death outside her window. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Lu is drawn into a friendship with the boy’s grieving mother and faces an increasingly painful dilemma: the photograph could jumpstart her career, but at what cost? This is an addictive, spellbinding exploration of sacrifice and the moral cost of ambition.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Self-Portrait with Boy.

My Book, The Movie: Self-Portrait with Boy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jon D. Wisman's "The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality: Sex, Politics, and Ideology by Jon D. Wisman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Argues that the struggle over income, wealth, status and privilege-inequality-has been the principal, defining issue in human history and provides a novel framework for understanding inequality today

Whereas President Barack Obama declared inequality as the defining issue of our time, in The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality, Jon D. Wisman claims more: it is the defining issue of all human history. The struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving human history's unfolding. Drawing on the dynamics of inequality, Wisman re-interprets economic history and society. Beyond according inequality the central role in history, this book is novel in two other respects: First, transcending the general failure of social scientists and historians to anchor their work in explicit theories of human behaviour, this book grounds the origins and dynamics of inequality in evolutionary psychology, or more specifically, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Second, this book accords central importance to ideology in legitimating inequality, a role typically inadequately addressed by social scientists and historians. Because of the central role of inequality in history, inequality's explosion over the past forty years has not been an anomaly. It is a return to the political dynamics by which elites have, since the rise of the state, taken practically everything for themselves, leaving all others with little more than the means with which to survive. Due to elites' persuasive ideology, even after workers in advanced capitalist countries gained the franchise to become the overwhelming majority of voters, inequality continued to increase.

Sweeping and provocative, Jon D. Wisman presents a fresh perspective on why economic inequality exists and how its dynamics have shaped human history.

Learn more about The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Tom Mead

From my Q&A with Tom Mead, author of Death and the Conjuror:

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

The title Death and the Conjuror does a great deal to transport readers into the story- it helps to establish an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue. The title went through various changes along the line, and in the end I came up with a number of alternatives and this was the one the publisher liked best. The titular "conjuror" is a retired music hall magician named Joseph Spector who is recruited by Scotland Yard to assist with the investigation into an apparently impossible murder.

What's in a name?

I spent a very long time coming up with the names for my characters; each has various interpretations and hidden meanings. Of course...[read on]

Visit Tom Mead's website.

My Book, The Movie: Death and the Conjuror.

The Page 69 Test: Death and the Conjuror.

Q&A with Tom Mead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Alterman's "The Perfect Neighborhood," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Perfect Neighborhood: A Novel by Liz Alterman.

About the book, from the publisher:

As The Perfect Neighborhood begins, residents of Oak Hill gossip about their neighbor, actress Allison Langley, who leaves her former rockstar husband in the middle of the night. For a while, her sudden departure becomes the talk of the town. But the gossip comes to an abrupt halt when five-year-old Billy Barnes disappears on his walk home from kindergarten. Is there a predator lurking in the leafy suburb? Or, does the child's abduction have something to do with a longtime rift between his mother and half-brother? Weeks later, three-year-old Amy-Pat Davies vanishes from her backyard. In addition to sharing a zip code, the missing children have another thing in common—their babysitter, Cassidy McLean, who has a secret of her own.

The novel is told from multiple points of view and as I wrote it, I envisioned it unfolding in a similar fashion to series like Big Little Lies or The Undoing or the film adaptation of Little Children—all of which had fantastic casts.

If The Perfect Neighborhood were a film or series, I’d love to see Ginnifer Goodwin star as Rachel Barnes, a real estate agent and the mother of the missing boy, who has made more than a few enemies in town. While I’m dreaming, Bryan...[read on]

Visit Liz Alterman's website.

Q&A with Liz Alterman.

My Book, The Movie: The Perfect Neighborhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best locked-room mysteries

Tom Mead is a UK crime fiction author specialising in locked-room mysteries.

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Society of Authors.

Mead's debut novel is Death and the Conjuror.

[ My Book, The Movie: Death and the Conjuror; The Page 69 Test: Death and the Conjuror]

At CrimeReads Mead tagged his ten favorite locked-room mysteries, including:

Bloodhounds (1996) by Peter Lovesey

Peter Lovesey is a leading light of the classic-style puzzle mystery, and his Peter Diamond series is a perfect blend of the fair-play problem with the police procedural. Bloodhounds is an exemplary novel in which a group of mystery fiction enthusiasts (the titular “Bloodhounds”) find themselves caught up in a real-life locked-room mystery. As such, John Dickson Carr is referenced prominently. The problem is also a highly unusual one: a murder on a locked and impenetrable canal barge. If you’re completely new to the genre and perhaps a little sceptical about it, this is a fine place to start.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michelle Karnes's "Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World by Michelle Karnes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cross-cultural study of magical phenomena in the Middle Ages.

Marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers’ stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature but also in the period’s philosophical writing. Rather than constructions of belief accepted only by simple-minded people, Michelle Karnes shows that these spectacular wonders were near impossibilities that demanded scrutiny and investigation.

This is the first book to analyze a diverse set of writings on such wonders, comparing texts from the Latin West—including those written in English, French, Italian, and Castilian Spanish —with those written in Arabic as it works toward a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Karnes tells a story about the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that experiences of the strange and the unfamiliar travel across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space and offering an ideal vantage point from which to understand intercultural exchange. Karnes traverses this diverse archive, showing how imagination imbues marvels with their character and power, making them at once enigmatic, creative, and resonant. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, these marvels challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers a rare comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized as central to medieval culture.

Follow Michelle Karnes on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Margarita Montimore "Acts of Violet"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Acts of Violet by Margarita Montimore.

About the book, from the publisher:

From Margarita Montimore, the author of GMA Book Club pick and national bestseller Oona Out of Order, Acts of Violet is a dazzling and twisty new novel about a famous magician who disappears, leaving her sister to figure out what really happened.

Nearly a decade ago, iconic magician Violet Volk performed her greatest trick yet: vanishing mid-act. Though she hasn’t been seen since, her hold on the public hasn’t wavered. While Violet sought out the spotlight, her sister Sasha, ever the responsible one, took over their mother’s salon and built a quiet life for her daughter, Quinn. But Sasha can never seem to escape her sister’s orbit or her memories of their unresolved, tumultuous relationship. Then there’s Cameron Frank, determined to finally get his big break hosting a podcast devoted to all things Violet—though keeping his job hinges on an exclusive interview with Sasha, the last person who wants to talk to him.

As the ten-year anniversary approaches, the podcast picks up steam, and Cameron’s pursuit of Sasha becomes increasingly intrusive. He isn’t the only one wondering what secrets she might be keeping: Quinn, loyal to the aunt she always idolized, is doing her own investigating. Meanwhile, Sasha begins to experience an unsettling series of sleepwalking episodes and coincidences, which all lead back to Violet. Pushed to her emotional limits, Sasha must finally confront the most painful truths about her sister, and herself, even at the risk of losing everything.

Alternating between Sasha’s narration and Cameron’s podcast transcripts, interspersed with documents that offer a tantalizing peek at Violet herself, Acts of Violet is an utterly original, propulsive story of fame, deception, and forgiveness that will make you believe in magic.

Visit Margarita Montimore's website.

The Page 69 Test: Oona Out of Order.

The Page 69 Test: Acts of Violet.

--Marshal Zeringue