Q&A with Kelsey Day

From my Q&A with Kelsey Day, author of The Spiral Key:

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

Every year at Lincoln Academy, a high school student named Madison Pembroke throws a highly exclusive birthday party that takes place in a virtual reality called Ametrine. The high school’s social order bends around who receives an invitation and who doesn’t. Those invitations take the form of custom-made spiral keys—sleek, shiny keys that fit into the VR consoles used at Madison’s party. Receiving a spiral key means everything, especially for the social outcasts of the school. That’s why the book is called The Spiral Key: the key initially symbolizes the promise of acceptance, friendship, desirability…but turns to something much darker as the party begins.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Teenage me wouldn’t be surprised, but...[read on]

Visit Kelsey Day's website.

Q&A with Kelsey Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Danielle Girard reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Danielle Girard, author of Pinky Swear: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

My Friends by Fredrik Backman.

I’m in awe with the way Backman portrays friendship and emotion with such remarkable tenderness and authenticity. His characters reveal love, loyalty, guilt, and forgiveness through subtle gestures and shared silences. Backman captures the fragility of human connection, showing how friendships endure through vulnerability, miscommunication, and unwavering compassion. When...[read on]

About Pinky Swear, from the publisher:

From Danielle Girard, the USA TODAY bestselling author who “effortlessly ratchets up the tension” (J.T. Ellison, New York Times bestselling author), comes a pulse-pounding thriller about a young woman whose surrogate disappears just days before the baby’s due date, leading to a frantic search that uncovers dark truths and the power of a mother’s love.

Lexi thought she knew everything about Mara Vannatta. Best friends since middle school, they drifted apart after a tragedy derailed their senior year. But when Mara shows up on Lexi’s doorstep sixteen years later fleeing an abusive husband, Lexi takes her in without question. Lexi’s own marriage has been strained by her desire to have a baby, and when Mara offers to become her surrogate, their friendship feels stronger than ever.

But four days before the due date, Mara disappears.

Lexi is shocked but certain there must be something wrong—Mara would never willingly leave with her unborn child. Or would she? As she embarks on a perilous cross-country hunt for the truth, Lexi is forced to reconsider a friendship she thought she knew—and what really happened that terrible night their senior year. How many secrets lie in their shared past, waiting to be uncovered? And just how far will Lexi go to bring her child safely home?

Visit Danielle Girard's website.

Writers Read: Danielle Girard (August 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Expose.

The Page 69 Test: Expose.

The Page 69 Test: White Out.

Q&A with Danielle Girard.

Writers Read: Danielle Girard.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Bianca J. Baldridge's "Laboring in the Shadows"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work by Bianca J. Baldridge.

About the book, from the publisher:

Youth workers are essential to the fabric of society. Schools, families, and many of our social institutions rely heavily on their work, yet their contributions often go unrecognized. Laboring in the Shadows explores the critical role of Black youth workers, especially in the lives of vulnerable youth, and the challenges they face in their unstable, underappreciated position.

Bianca J. Baldridge situates the experiences of Black youth workers within the broader context of anti—Blackness and historical inequities. Drawing on rich interview data from across the United States, Baldridge offers a nuanced analysis of how the precarity of this work—marked by high turnover rates, low wages, and housing insecurity—compounds the challenges these workers face. She highlights how Black youth workers resist these structural harms by adopting and implementing innovative pedagogical practices alongside practices of "freedom dreaming" and joy as forms of resistance and pathways to agency for youth despite their precarious roles.

Positioning Black youth workers within a broader network of informal care workers in the United States, Baldridge underscores the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of these dedicated professionals, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth.

Visit Bianca J. Baldridge's website.

The Page 99 Test: Laboring in the Shadows.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top modern classics of historical fiction

Leah Rachel von Essen is an editor, writer, and book reviewer. She is a copyeditor and fact-checker at Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a contributing editor, Adult Books, for American Library Association’s magazine Booklist. She writes regularly for Chicago Review of Books and is a senior contributor at Book Riot.

At Book Riot she tagged ten must-read modern classics of historical fiction. One title on the list:

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A young blind girl named Marie-Laure escapes to the walled city of Saint-Malo as the Nazis invade France, bringing a hidden treasure with them. Meanwhile, a German teen is slowly drawn into the Nazi ranks thanks to his instinctive skill with radios and tech. The two youth illuminate what it was like for kids and teens to try and survive, persist, and come of age in the midst of the violence, fear, and tragedy of World War II. This emotional, lovely work has quickly become a modern-day classic and must-read.

Read about another novel on the list.

All the Light We Cannot See is among Melanie Maure's five top novels about women discovering unimaginable strength through tragedy, Audrey Gale's five top novels about war, Jyoti Patel's top ten books about family secrets, Kimi Cunningham Grant's top six books featuring father-daughter relationships, Liz Boulter's top ten novels about France, Emily Temple's fifty best contemporary novels over 500 pages, Jason Allen's seven top books with family secrets, Whitney Scharer's top ten books about Paris, David Baldacci's six favorite books with an element of mystery, Jason Flemyng's six best books, Sandra Howard's six best books, Caitlin Kleinschmidt's twelve moving novels of the Second World War and Maureen Corrigan's 12 favorite books of 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Marina Evans's "The Cheerleader"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Cheerleader: A Novel by Marina Evans.

About the book, from the publisher:

Everyone wants to be a Dallas Lonestars Cheerleader, but fame can have a deadly price…

The Dallas Lonestars Cheerleaders are untouchable. They are the epitome of glitz and glamour, reeking of hairspray and perfection. But everything changes when America’s Angel and cheerleading captain Jentry Rae Randall is found murdered in the squad’s locker room.

Filmmaker Nikki Keegan has the opportunity of a lifetime. Brought in to document the Lonestars’ potential comeback after four disastrous seasons, Nikki is now perfectly placed to investigate the murder of the team’s iconic frontwoman.

Nikki turns to cheerleader Shaunette Simmons, the deceased’s best friend, for help. As Nikki becomes closer to Shaunette, the more she suspects that Shaunette is hiding something.

But when Shaunette is run off the road and left to die, it’s clear that nobody on this cheer squad is safe. Because some people would kill to be a Dallas Lonestars Cheerleader…

Marina Evans, a former NFL cheerleader herself, takes readers “behind the gloss” of this iconic American subculture in this high octane debut that is filled with twists, turns, and high kicks. Weaving between sisterhood and ambition, survival and scandal, The Cheerleader will keep you riveted until the final page.

Visit Marina Evans's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cheerleader.

Q&A with Marina Evans.

Writers Read: Marina Evans.

The Page 69 Test: The Cheerleader.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Aidan Seale-Feldman's "The Work of Disaster"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line by Aidan Seale-Feldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal.

In a world marked by escalating disasters, the forms that care takes are increasingly fraught. In this powerful book, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman focuses on Nepal, where in 2015 a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the country’s central region. The disaster claimed more than nine thousand lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, The Work of Disaster examines the possibilities generated by disaster, as well as the vexed relationship between crisis and care.

Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes the changes emergency services bring about in the places they seek to assist, the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations, and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the simultaneous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging along the way with broader debates about world making and the ethics of care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Work of Disaster.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six contemporary novels that center caretaking through crisis

Sarah Bruni is a graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis and the MA in Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She has taught English and writing classes in New York and St. Louis, and she has volunteered as a writer-in-schools in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is also the author of the novel The Night Gwen Stacy Died. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, and her translations have appeared in the Buenos Aires Review. She lives in Chicago with her family.

Bruni's new novel is Mass Mothering.

At Lit Hub the author tagged six contemporary novels that "explore the psychological toll of caretaking, the challenge of parenting through personal and political awakening, or the legacy of mutual aid within community." One title on the list:

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

The primary narrator of Lost Children Archive is a mother and a collector of soundscapes, embarking on a road trip with her husband and two children, from New York City to Arizona. It soon emerges that the family is on the brink of crisis, as it’s unclear whether her husband will return with the family once they reach their destination. Their children, a ten-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, also narrate, navigating their shifting network of family relationships, while also tracking the simultaneous voyages of unaccompanied children seeking political asylum in the US. When the mother-narrator’s children go missing and cross paths with the lost children, their narrative cohabitation unearths questions around what it means to mother in the same world that children are forced to flee violence alone. In prose that renders the inner architecture of kids’ minds at work, the novel is as much a meditation on childhood as it is on caretaking, collection, and the politics of bearing witness.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Isabel Booth

From my Q&A with Isabel Booth, author of Then He Was Gone: A Novel:

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

Then He Was Gone gets right to the heart of the story: someone’s missing. Combined with the cover art, the reader knows that it’s a story about a missing child. I came up with the title after I finished writing the book. The folks at Crooked Lane Books and I played around with some other titles, but ultimately it was the publisher’s decision, and they stuck with the original.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage reader self would be thrilled but not surprised. I was a voracious reader then, as now, and I started writing poems and stories at an early age. My teenage self might say, “Ah. Go ahead and be a...[read on]

Visit Isabel Booth's website.

My Book, The Movie: Then He Was Gone.

Q&A with Isabel Booth.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Karen E. Olson reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Karen E. Olson, author of A Defiant Woman: A Modern Tudor Mystery.

Her entry begins:

The Tudors are clearly top my non-fiction subjects—and while my new novels are re- tellings, I like to loosely base my plots on actual Tudor history. It was for this reason that I recently picked up Nicola Tallis’s Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey. Tallis’s easy narrative is more novel-like than a dry biography of the young woman who was officially queen for nine days after Edward VI died, casting aside his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession in favor of his cousin—who did have a direct line to the throne as her grandmother was Henry VIII’s youngest sister Mary. Jane, who was a scholar and a linguist rivaling her cousin Elizabeth, was first a reluctant bride when her father conspired with the Duke of Northumberland to marry her to his son—and then was a reluctant queen in the plot that would put both her and her husband on the throne. But no matter how reluctant she was, Jane did attempt to...[read on]

About A Defiant Woman, from the publisher:

Kate Tudor’s marriage to billionaire Hank Tudor continues to fray when his ex-wife resurfaces in the wake of their daughter’s kidnapping, in the latest novel in this genre-defying crime series.

Eight years ago, Nan Tudor escaped her husband, billionaire businessman Hank Tudor, afraid for her life and leaving a dead body behind—but in doing so, she abandoned her three-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Still wracked with guilt for that decision, she is living a quiet life as a restaurant cook in France with her son when she receives a mysterious text: “We have your daughter.”

Lured back to the scene of the crime on Martha’s Vineyard by a threat against Lizzie’s life, Nan believes the kidnapper is exacting revenge against her, stopping at nothing to do so—and discovers that she and her daughter may not be the only targets. Kate Parker—Hank’s sixth and latest wife—is also on the island and drawn into the kidnapper’s elaborate web of retaliation.

Keeping their alliance secret from Hank, Hank’s fixer Thomas Cromwell, investigator Steve Gardiner, and reporter Tom Seymour, the two women find themselves in a race against time to rescue Lizzie—and to make sure they both stay alive.

Visit Karen E. Olson's website.

The Page 69 Test: An Inconvenient Wife.

Q&A with Karen E. Olson.

The Page 69 Test: A Defiant Woman.

Writers Read: Karen E. Olson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Megan VanGorder's "A Mother’s Work"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse by Megan VanGorder.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mary Ann Bickerdyke led a remarkable life. A widowed mother from Illinois, she became an influential traveling nurse and Sanitary Commission agent during the American Civil War. She followed the Union army through four years and nineteen battles, established hundreds of hospitals, assisted surgeons with amputations, treated fevers, and fed the soldiers in her care. Known affectionately as “Mother” to thousands of soldiers, Bickerdyke bridged the private world of home caregiving and the public demands of wartime and institutional medicine.

Drawing on a rich archive of personal letters, military records, and newspapers, Megan VanGorder explores how Bickerdyke used her maternal identity to challenge norms, advocate for soldiers, and pioneer compassionate care practices before, during, and after the Civil War. A Mother’s Work uses key episodes from Bickerdyke’s life to reveal broader truths about motherhood, medicine, and women’s roles in the nineteenth century, and offers an intimate and historically grounded portrait of one woman’s evolving identity and the moniker that made her famous. In reassessing Bickerdyke’s work and legacy, this book also serves as a new perspective on how white working-class women contributed to the transitional period of the Civil War era and reshaped public health, social care, and national memory.

Visit Megan VanGorder's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Mother's Work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six atmospheric thrillers set during heatwaves

Elizabeth Arnott is an award-winning writer and journalist and has written critically acclaimed historical fiction as Lizzie Pook. Her work—covering everything from true crime to Arctic exploration—has featured in publications including The Sunday Times, National Geographic, The New York Times Book Review, and The Guardian. She lives with her husband and their young daughter in London, where she spends far too much time drinking iced coffee and watching serial killer shows.

Arnott's new novel is The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six "of the finest, most evocative crime novels that take place during heatwaves." One title on the list:

Jane Harper, The Dry

Harper is the undeniable queen of Outback noir, using boab-flecked landscapes and searing Australian heat to add tension to her stifling small-town narratives. With The Dry, her smash hit debut, we follow Federal Police agent Aaron Falk as he returns to his rural hometown for the funeral of his childhood friend, Luke Hadler, who died in an apparent murder suicide alongside his wife and young son.

But when Luke’s parents press Falk to investigate further, dark secrets bubble to the surface and Falk’s own murky past is called into question. The action takes place in the fictional farming community of Kiewarra during the arid, unbearably hot Dry season. With a backdrop of scrubby crop fields, desiccated riverbeds and vast Outback emptiness, the heat swells from every page, creating a claustrophobic yet utterly compulsive reading experience.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Dry is Peter Nichols's six novels whose crimes and mysteries grow out of place & manners, Kate Alice Marshall's five mysteries and thrillers about returning to your hometown, Olivia Kiernan's seven modern classics of small town mystery, Sarah J. Harris's top eight mysteries with images that might stay with you forever and Fiona Barton's eight favorite cold-case mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Isabel Booth's "Then He Was Gone," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Then He Was Gone: A Novel by Isabel Booth.

The entry begins:

In Then He Was Gone, six-year-old Henry English goes missing at the end of a family hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. Park ranger Hollis Monroe, a well-worn, gritty, former Montana sheriff, leads the search for Henry and teams up with a local detective to investigate the possibility that he was kidnapped. Monroe is the only character in the book for which I had an actor in mind while writing it: Robert Taylor, who played the role of Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, in the series Longmire. He was brilliant in the show: an old-time lawman in the present day, good at his job, and wise in his ways. He would be my first choice for Monroe.

I would love to see Kate Winslet in the role of Elizabeth English, Henry’s mom. There were so many layers to her performance as...[read on]

Visit Isabel Booth's website.

My Book, The Movie: Then He Was Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top bad moms from fiction

Ej Dickson is a senior writer at New York magazine’s The Cut. She previously worked as a senior writer for Rolling Stone and her writing has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Elle, and many others. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Dickson's new book is One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate.

At Lit Hub Dickson tagged six "favorite bad moms from fiction, from the archetypical overbearing suburban Jewish bubbes to horny housewives." One title on the list:

Katie Carr; How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

This is probably my favorite Nick Hornby book, in part because it’s one of the few with a female narrator and I think he actually writes women really well (mostly because, unlike most straight male novelists, he doesn’t write them that much differently than his male protagonists). Katie Carr is a married mother of two whose life spirals out of control after she has an affair with a younger man. She’s not a very likable protagonist—she cheats on her husband and she doesn’t like her kids all the time and she’s a doctor but she’s not super emotionally present for her patients and she’s kind of a shallow person in general. But that’s what makes her ring especially true. It’s one of the most honest depictions of marriage and motherhood that I’ve ever read.

Read about another entry on Dickson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu & Adrienne A. Winans's "Moving Mountains"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women's Conference by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Adrienne A. Winans.

About the book, from the publisher:

Illuminates a transformational event in the development of Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms

In November 1977, over twenty thousand participants, mostly women, gathered in Houston for the first and only US National Women’s Conference, funded by the federal government with the goal of creating a national women’s agenda. In Moving Mountains, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Adrienne Winans center the more than eighty Asian American and Pacific Islander delegates who politically mobilized around women’s rights and other issues to transform their communities and their status in the nation-state.

Foregrounding figures like Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink and poet Mitsuye Yamada, Wu and Winans position AA and PI women as central actors in the era’s feminist politics, engaging with, and at times resisting, state institutions to forge paths toward racial and gender justice. From Guam to New York, the women articulated intersecting demands―for inclusion, sovereignty, labor rights, and education reform―at a moment when conservative backlash and racial realignment were reframing feminist movements. More than a recovery of voices, this book offers a layered analysis of coalition and tension between Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms, complicating assumptions of unity and illustrating how feminist praxis evolved through disagreement, difference, and shared commitment.

This book is vital reading for anyone interested in feminist history, Asian American and Pacific Islander activism, and the unfinished work of collective liberation.

Learn more about Moving Mountains the University of Washington Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Fierce and Fearless.

The Page 99 Test: Moving Mountains.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Karen E. Olson's "A Defiant Woman"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Defiant Woman: A Modern Tudor Mystery by Karen E. Olson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Kate Tudor’s marriage to billionaire Hank Tudor continues to fray when his ex-wife resurfaces in the wake of their daughter’s kidnapping, in the latest novel in this genre-defying crime series.

Eight years ago, Nan Tudor escaped her husband, billionaire businessman Hank Tudor, afraid for her life and leaving a dead body behind—but in doing so, she abandoned her three-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Still wracked with guilt for that decision, she is living a quiet life as a restaurant cook in France with her son when she receives a mysterious text: “We have your daughter.”

Lured back to the scene of the crime on Martha’s Vineyard by a threat against Lizzie’s life, Nan believes the kidnapper is exacting revenge against her, stopping at nothing to do so—and discovers that she and her daughter may not be the only targets. Kate Parker—Hank’s sixth and latest wife—is also on the island and drawn into the kidnapper’s elaborate web of retaliation.

Keeping their alliance secret from Hank, Hank’s fixer Thomas Cromwell, investigator Steve Gardiner, and reporter Tom Seymour, the two women find themselves in a race against time to rescue Lizzie—and to make sure they both stay alive.

Visit Karen E. Olson's website.

The Page 69 Test: An Inconvenient Wife.

Q&A with Karen E. Olson.

The Page 69 Test: A Defiant Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Marina Evans reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Marina Evans, author of The Cheerleader: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I’m so happy to answer this question; I love talking up other authors!

First on my list is Saltwater by Katy Hays. I’m half-Italian and love everything Italian, so when I read the book blurb I was sold. It’s a sultry, seductive mystery set on the cliffs of Capri involving three key things: a valuable necklace that’s been passed down for generations, dishy family drama, and a decades’ old crime. Think Succession on a stunning Mediterranean island!

Next on my TBR list is...[read on]

About The Cheerleader, from the publisher:

Everyone wants to be a Dallas Lonestars Cheerleader, but fame can have a deadly price…

The Dallas Lonestars Cheerleaders are untouchable. They are the epitome of glitz and glamour, reeking of hairspray and perfection. But everything changes when America’s Angel and cheerleading captain Jentry Rae Randall is found murdered in the squad’s locker room.

Filmmaker Nikki Keegan has the opportunity of a lifetime. Brought in to document the Lonestars’ potential comeback after four disastrous seasons, Nikki is now perfectly placed to investigate the murder of the team’s iconic frontwoman.

Nikki turns to cheerleader Shaunette Simmons, the deceased’s best friend, for help. As Nikki becomes closer to Shaunette, the more she suspects that Shaunette is hiding something.

But when Shaunette is run off the road and left to die, it’s clear that nobody on this cheer squad is safe. Because some people would kill to be a Dallas Lonestars Cheerleader…

Marina Evans, a former NFL cheerleader herself, takes readers “behind the gloss” of this iconic American subculture in this high octane debut that is filled with twists, turns, and high kicks. Weaving between sisterhood and ambition, survival and scandal, The Cheerleader will keep you riveted until the final page.

Visit Marina Evans's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cheerleader.

Q&A with Marina Evans.

Writers Read: Marina Evans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four thrillers that capture the horror of missing or abandoned siblings

Isabel Booth is the pen name of Karen Jewell, a former trial attorney and now a writer. She holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master’s in Business Administration, and a Juris Doctorate degree. When she’s not writing she loves to read, travel, and cook dinner for friends. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband.

Booth's new novel is Then He Was Gone.

At CrimeReads the author tagged four thrillers "examine the effects on the sibling left behind." One title on the list:

John Hart, The Last Child

Set in a small town in North Carolina, the story is told one year after the abduction of thirteen-year-old Johnny Merrimon’s twin sister Alyssa. Johnny’s father disappeared shortly after the abduction.

His mother, drug-addled and depressed, suffers a brutal, abusive relationship with a prominent local businessman to keep a roof over their heads: “Johnny learned early….He learned early that there was no safe place, not the backyard or the playground, not the front porch or the quiet road that grazed the edge of town. No safe place, and no one to protect you. Childhood was an illusion.”

Hurting, wise beyond his years, Johnny becomes the adult in the family—driving the beat-up family car, buying groceries, feeding his mother, stealing guns, compiling a list of suspects and watching them, making it his mission to find who took his sister and hopefully bring his family back together. His desperate determination is heartbreaking. The Last Child was the winner of the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

Read about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.

The Last Child is among Chris Whitaker's six best kid narrators in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sonia Hazard's "Empire of Print"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media by Sonia Hazard.

About the book, from the publisher:

Empire of Print offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War.

It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered―it was the sophisticated media infrastructure that evangelicals developed for their message to reach readers, coast to coast. Media infrastructure refers to the material assemblages that work below the surface of media content, including the format of publications, the avenues of their movement, and the circumstances surrounding their reading. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts.

While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media.

Learn more about Empire of Print at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Empire of Print.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Ahmad Saber

From my Q&A with Ahmad Saber, author of Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions:

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

My book’s title, Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions, is aimed to drop the potential reader into a whirlpool of curiosity: who is Ramin Abbas? Why does he have questions? What kind of questions does he have? And why are they so… Major? Do his questions have answers? In some ways, it makes the reader come up with their own set of questions immediately. Our great hope is that the potential reader would get pleasantly curious enough to read the book description and the opening chapter, and then embark on the journey with Ramin– a closted gay Muslim teen who attends an all-Muslim school and feels that he has to choose between being gay and remaining faithful to Allah—as he explores his questions and embarks on an internal quest to find the answers.

The idea of “questions” was initially suggested by my genius agent Dan Lazar, who connected deeply with the story and hoped that readers, especially those struggling with reconciling their faith and sexuality, would remain curious about themselves and simply ask thoughtful questions. We’re not necessarily here to give answers.

Then, my equally genius editor Caitlyn Dlouhy identified that in the book, Ramin has questions upon questions upon questions, his biggest one being: why...[read on]

Visit Ahmad Saber's website.

The Page 69 Test: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

My Book, The Movie: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

Writers Read: Ahmad Saber.

Q&A with Ahmad Saber.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Gin Phillips's "Ruby Falls"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Ruby Falls: A Novel by Gin Phillips.

About the book, from the publisher:

One body. Five suspects. Total darkness.

A tense, claustrophobic historical mystery set almost entirely underground at the onset of the Great Depression about the discovery of a 150—foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain, the unthinkable crime that happens in its caves, and a woman who’s never felt more alive.

In 1928, a Chattanooga man disappears down a hole in the ground and discovers a 150—foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain that he names after his wife: Ruby Falls. Within months, visitors can buy tickets to see the falls for themselves. Ada Smith has been sneaking into the caves at night, entranced by the natural wonders around her and the freedom granted by this new underground world.

But it’s tough timing for a natural wonder. As the country flounders in the Great Depression, a shrewd public relations ploy seems like the only way to save Ruby Falls. A famous mind reader and mystic agrees to launch himself into the Ruby Falls caverns where he will attempt to locate a hidden hatpin using only his psychic abilities. He'll be joined by five others: his manager, his wife, a guide, a Chattanooga businessman, and a reporter from the Chicago Times. But they’re not alone in the caverns. Ada and another guide, Quinton, have been asked to follow the mind reader’s party at a distance, staying out of sight. They are a safety net, in case of a broken leg or busted flashlights.

One of them will be dead before the end of the day.

Faced with a corpse and the stark reality that one of the people in her midst is a killer, Ada needs to get everyone—the murderer and the innocents—back aboveground before their light runs out.

Ruby Falls is both a unique twist on the locked—room mystery and an exploration of loss and what it means to start over. It’s a heart—racing story of survival and a testament to the threads that bind strangers together. Set against the true story of the discovery of Ruby Falls, the novel also draws on the memoirs of Katie Stabler, a female guide at Wind Caves in South Dakota.

Visit Gin Phillips's website.

Writers Read: Gin Phillips (August 2017).

The Page 69 Test: Fierce Kingdom.

The Page 69 Test: Family Law.

Q&A with Gin Phillips.

The Page 69 Test: Ruby Falls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Samuel D. Anderson's "The French Médersa"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa by Samuel D. Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The French Médersa explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphens," drawing connections between larger French and Islamic forces.Samuel D. Anderson highlights this hyphenating idea, situating Franco-Muslim education between beliefs about not only France and Islam but also about tradition and modernity and about North and West Africa.

The médersa project had two goals: to create an elite class of Muslims friendly to the French imperial project and, subsequently, to mold Islam into a form that could be more easily controlled. A total of ten médersas opened across Algeria, Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania and closed only in the 1950s. The graduates of these schools, the medérsiens, went on to shape their societies profoundly but not always in the ways the French anticipated.

Drawing on archival and oral sources from Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and France, The French Médersa proposes new ways to approach trans-Saharan history. Anderson argues that across northwest Africa, and for more than a century, Franco-Muslim education was central to the history of French empire and Islamic education alike.

Learn more about The French Médersa at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The French Médersa.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top sunny destination thrillers

Robyn Harding is the international bestselling author of several novels including The Haters, The Perfect Family, The Arrangement, and Her Pretty Face. Her novels The Party and The Drowning Woman were both finalists for the Crime Writers of Canada best crime novel award. Her novel The Swap debuted at #1 on the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star Canadian bestsellers lists. She is also the screenwriter and executive producer of the independent film, The Steps. She lives in Vancouver, BC, with her family and two cute but deadly rescue chihuahuas.

[Coffee with a Canine: Robyn Harding & Ozzie; The Page 69 Test: The Arrangement; My Book, The Movie: The Swap; The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Family]

Harding's new novel is Strangers in the Villa.

At People magazine the author tagged ten destination thrillers set in warm and sunny locales. One title on the list:

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies by Catherine Mack

Catherine’s Mack's Vacation Mystery series offers a side of humor with your scenic getaway. The first novel in the series follows bestselling author Eleanor Dash on her book tour through Italy. But life imitates art when her ex (inspiration for her sexy main character) tags along and someone tries to kill him. Can Eleanor solve the real-life crime? With hilarious footnotes and a cast of kooky characters, this is a clever, charming escape.

Read about another thriller on Harding's list.

The Page 69 Test: Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ahmad Saber reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ahmad Saber, author of Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

His entry begins:

I must admit I am a relatively new reader, and I know this is not typical for many writers. After all, we know that in order to be a writer, you have to be a reader first. However growing up, I never had the chance to explore the reader within me, so now I have a huge backlog of classics to catch up on! I am overjoyed to have discovered the world of books (and not so overjoyed that I’m a “slow” reader.)

Nevertheless, as I gradually form my reading tastes, I already know I like YA literature (Hello, John Green!) and horror (hello, Stephen King!) the best, so I will give examples from each for my recent/current reads.

For YA, I recently read Emiko Jean’s Tokyo Ever After and as a lover of all things Japan, I loved this book. It hit the spot between a feel-good coming-of-age with romance, and a fun exploration of Japanese culture from an “outsider’s” point of view.

I also read...[read on]

About Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions, from the publisher:

An intensely brave, beautifully honest, and wryly funny story about a gay Muslim teen who has to choose between being true to himself or his faith—and his realization that maybe they aren’t as separate as he thought.

Ramin Abbas has spent his whole life obeying his parents, his Imam, and, of course, Allah—no questions asked. But when he starts crushing on the ridiculously handsome captain of the soccer team, so many things he’d always been so sure about are becoming questions:

1. Music is haram. But what if the Wicked soundtrack is the only thing keeping you sane because you’re being forced to play on the soccer team? With Captain Handsome?!

2. A boy crush is double haram, and Ramin’s parents will never accept it. But can he really be the only Muslim on Earth who feels this way?

3. Allah is merciful and makes no mistakes. Then isn’t Ramin just the way Allah intended him to be?

And so why should living your truth but losing everything—or living a lie and losing yourself—have to be a choice?!

Visit Ahmad Saber's website.

The Page 69 Test: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

My Book, The Movie: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions.

Writers Read: Ahmad Saber.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with James Cahill

From my Q&A with James Cahill, author of The Violet Hour: A Novel:

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

The title threads into the story in all kinds of ways. Colour plays an important role – the main character, Thomas Haller, is a famous painter who is celebrated for his abstract canvases. At the beginning of the novel, he has just created a new series of pictures in violet. The phrase itself comes from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ (“At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea …”). That timeless image of an evening sky is ironic, because what follows in Eliot’s poem is a bleakly realist episode: a young female typist comes home from work, bored and tired, before her boyfriend forces himself on her.

Like ‘The Waste Land’, this novel is about the fragmentary, cacophonous nature of experience. It is set in the high-end world of contemporary art, but its themes are universal – loss, longing, beauty and desire. Thomas, the painter, is caught between romantic ideals and the inescapable, haunting facts of his experience. More generally, the phrase captures the novel’s interest in endings. Another character, Leo Goffman, is a real-estate tycoon in his eighties – the twilight of his existence. He spends his days surrounded by his art treasures, looking back at his life with a mixture of regret and defiance. Lorna, the third main character, is a British art dealer in her forties who has arrived at a personal impasse. Her girlfriend is about to leave her, and she’s wondering what her life will now be like. Many scenes in the story take place at...[read on]

Follow James Cahill on Instagram.

Q&A with James Cahill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eric C. Smith's "Between Worlds"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Between Worlds: John A. Broadus, the Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Prospects of the New South by Eric C. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

John A. Broadus (1827–95) was a highly influential Southern Baptist leader, preacher, scholar, and educator during the latter half of the nineteenth century. He cofounded the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which today is among the largest seminaries in the world. Broadus’s enduring impact on American preaching stems in part from his 1870 homiletics manual, a widely adopted textbook that ministers continue to use today. A prominent southerner before and after the Civil War, Broadus actively shaped his region during the shift from the Old South to the New. Eric C. Smith’s Between Worlds―the first scholarly biography of Broadus―joins recent historical scholarship in reevaluating Broadus’s legacy.

Learn more about Between Worlds at the LSU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Between Worlds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top Hamptons novels

Nicole Sellew is a writer and English teacher based in Connecticut and New York City. In 2022, she received an MLitt in fiction from the University of St Andrews, where she is currently studying for her PhD.

Sellew's new novel is Lover Girl. The publisher calls it a "picaresque debut of forbidden desire, in which a young woman escapes NYC to work on her novel in the Hamptons, falling into a downward spiral of lovers and other destructive behaviors."

At Lit Hub the author tagged seven Hamptons novels to read this winter. One title on the list:

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

A coming-of-age story set in Sag Harbor in the eighties, told through the perspective of a prep-school teen boy spending his summer at the beach and navigating the racial politics of the East End. Read it if you like cocaine or The Smiths.

Read about another novel on Sellew's list.

Sag Harbor is among Brittany K. Allen's five novels to read if you’re fascinated by the Black bourgeoisie, Benjamin Markovits's top ten stories of male friendship, Amanda Brainerd's eight books to take you back to the Eighties, and Jeff Somers's top ten books to take you someplace you’ve likely never been.

--Marshal Zeringue