Pg. 99: Alec D. Walen's "The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War by Alec D. Walen.

About the book, from the publisher:

According to the dominant account of rights, there are two ways to permissibly kill people: they have done something to forfeit their right to life, or their rights are outweighed by the significantly greater cost of respecting them. Contemporary just war theorists tend to agree that it is difficult to justify killing in the second way. Thus, they focus on the conditions under which rights might be forfeited. But it has proven hard to defend an account of forfeiture that permits killing when and only when it is morally justifiable.

In The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War, Alec D. Walen develops an alternative account of rights according to which rights forfeiture has a much smaller role to play. It plays a smaller role because rights themselves are more contextually contingent. They systematically reflect the different kinds of claims people can make on an agent. For example, those who threaten to cause harm without a right to do so have weaker claims not to be killed than innocent bystanders or those who have a right to threaten to cause harm. By framing rights as the output of a balance of competing claims, and by laying out a detailed account of how to balance competing claims, Walen provides a more coherent account of when killing in war is permissible.

Learn more about The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of fiction's best bad women

Sara Collins is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Grand Cayman and studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before doing a Master of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. Her debut novel is The Confessions of Frannie Langton.

At LitHub Collins tagged six favorite bad women in fiction, including:

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

My idea of the kind of woman I wanted to be spilled into me straight from the pages of this book. Jane’s voice was a rallying cry against all the badges of my own supposed powerlessness: as a girl, a black person, and a child in a world where each of those adjectives moved you further away from the center of things. It’s because Jane was such an outsider, just as awkward and at times as angry as I was, that I wanted her to triumph, and it’s because of those same qualities that she does. She was a Victorian anti-heroine par excellence. For all its fierce, far-flung passions, Jane Eyre is a lesson in self-acceptance: “I care for myself.” Jane declares. “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Yes, modern women are disenchanted with the hand Bertha Mason was dealt, and yes, it’s a disgrace that Jane finds contentment in a marriage so far beneath her. But to read Jane Eyre is to bear witness to a consciousness coming alive, and to feel the quickening of your own consciousness as a result.

Read about another entry on the list.

Jane Eyre also made 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

What is Clark Thomas Carlton reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Clark Thomas Carlton, author of The Prophet of the Termite God: Book Two of the Antasy Series.

His entry begins:

I’m absorbed by T.C. Boyle’s Outside Looking In, a novel about the early days of LSD. It begins with its synthesis in Switzerland by Albert Hoffman and then its passionate embrace by Timothy Leary and his psychonauts in Zihuatanejo and Millbrook when Kennedy was president. These men, women and their children were the proto-hippies who lived communally, practiced “free love” and believed their experiences with acid and other hallucinogens were explorations as important as those of Columbus or Vasco da Gama. Midway through the book, the psychonauts are still considering whether acid is an entheogen: a piece of God’s own flesh that allows Him to be experienced directly after...[read on]

About The Prophet of the Termite God, from the publisher:

The powerful Antasy saga continues with The Prophet of the Termite God!

Once an outcast, Pleckoo has risen to Prophet-Commander of the Hulkrish army. But a million warriors and their ghost ants were not enough to defeat his cousin, Anand the Roach Boy, the tamer of night wasps and founder of Bee-Jor. Now Pleckoo is hunted by the army that once revered him. Yet in all his despair, Pleckoo receives prophecies from his termite god, assuring him he will kill Anand to rule the Sand, and establish the One True Religion.

And war is not yet over.

Now, Anand and Bee-Jor face an eastern threat from the Mad Emperor of the Barley People, intent on retaking stolen lands from a vulnerable and chaotic nation. And on the southern Weedlands, thousands of refugees clamor for food and safety and their own place in Bee-Jor. But the greatest threats to the new country come from within, where an embittered nobility and a disgraced priesthood plot to destroy Anand … then reunite the Lost Country with the Once Great and Holy Slope.

Can the boy who worked in the dung heap rise above the turmoil, survive his assassins, and prevent the massacre of millions?

Visit Clark Thomas Carlton's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Prophet of the Termite God.

Writers Read: Clark Thomas Carlton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books to read while staring death in the face

Michael Blumlein is the author of several novels and story collections, including the award-winning The Brains of Rats. He has twice been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and twice for the Bram Stoker. His story "Fidelity: A Primer" was short-listed for the Tiptree. He has written for both stage and film, including the award-winning independent film Decodings (included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and winner of the Special Jury Award of the SF International Film Festival). Blumlein's novel X,Y was made into a feature-length movie. Until his recent retirement he taught and practiced medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.

Blumlein's new novella is Longer.

At Tor.com he tagged five books to read while staring death in the face, including:

Pain: A Political History, by Keith Wailoo

The gripping story of pain and its treatment in the US from the 19th century to today. A master historian and storyteller, Wailoo examines our understanding of pain, our definition of pain, and our perception of pain through the decades. Shows the pendulum of treatment swinging back and forth, often holding whole groups hostage to misapprehension and prejudice. He pins today’s opioid crisis squarely where it belongs: on everyone. Big pharm, government, doctors, nurses, patients, pharmacists. How it did get so bad? Greed? Tunnel Vision? Deregulation? Put them together and what does it spell: free market capitalism.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jennifer Cody Epstein's "Wunderland"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Wunderland: A Novel by Jennifer Cody Epstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

East Village, 1989
Things had never been easy between Ava Fisher and her estranged mother Ilse. Too many questions hovered between them: Who was Ava’s father? Where had Ilse been during the war? Why had she left her only child in a German orphanage during the war’s final months? But now Ilse’s ashes have arrived from Germany, and with them, a trove of unsent letters addressed to someone else unknown to Ava: Renate Bauer, a childhood friend. As her mother’s letters unfurl a dark past, Ava spirals deep into the shocking history of a woman she never truly knew.

Berlin, 1933
As the Nazi party tightens its grip on the city, Ilse and Renate find their friendship under siege—and Ilse’s increasing involvement in the Hitler Youth movement leaves them on opposing sides of the gathering storm. Then the Nuremburg Laws force Renate to confront a long-buried past, and a catastrophic betrayal is set in motion…

An unflinching exploration of Nazi Germany and its legacy, Wunderland is a at once a powerful portrait of an unspeakable crime history and a page-turning contemplation of womanhood, wartime, and just how far we might go in order to belong.

Learn more about the novel and author at Jennifer Cody Epstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

Writers Read: Jennifer Cody Epstein.

The Page 69 Test: Wunderland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Cathryn J. Prince's "Queen of the Mountaineers"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman by Cathryn J. Prince.

About the book, from the publisher:

The true story of how one of the first professional female climbers triumphed in a high stakes, male-dominated world

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy brown hair tucked under a helmet, Workman was a force on and off the mountain. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers and became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London, whose past members included Charles Darwin, Richard Francis Burton, and David Livingstone. Her books—replete with photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of meteorological conditions, glaciology, and the effect of high altitudes on humans—remained useful decades after their publication. Paving the way for a legion of female climbers, Workman's legacy lives on in scholarship prizes at Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, and Bryn Mawr.Author and journalist Cathryn J. Prince brings Fanny Bullock Workman to life, revealing how she navigated the male-dominated world of alpine clubs and adventure societies as nimbly as she navigated the deep crevasses and icy granite walls of the Himalayas. Queen of the Mountaineers is the story of one woman's role in science and exploration, breaking boundaries and charting frontiers for women everywhere.

Learn more about the book and author at Cathryn J. Prince's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Cathryn J. Prince & Hershey and Juno.

The Page 99 Test: Death in the Baltic.

The Page 99 Test: American Daredevil.

The Page 99 Test: Queen of the Mountaineers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten teenage friendships in fiction

Kate Hamer's new novel is Crushed. "The three girls in the novel are from very different backgrounds," the author writes, "but the various alchemies of home life, coupled with their emotional trajectories, collide and explode and what could have become simply a rueful memory of youthful difficulties turns abruptly toxic and marks them forever."

At the Guardian, Hamer tagged ten top teenage friendships in fiction, including:

Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Abbott is brilliant at depicting teenage girls and this novel takes the stakes between them to new heights. When coach Colette French arrives at a new school she skews loyalties and turns the cheer squad into warriors. This is no anodyne high school story though, it’s a very dark tale that lays bare the power structures and plays between teenage girls and obsessive love that, in this book, proves to be toxically dangerous.

Read about another entry on the list.

Dare Me is among S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Candy Gunther Brown reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Candy Gunther Brown, author of Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion?.

Her entry begins:

I have seven books (so far!) on my summer reading list.

I just finished Seth Perry’s Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. I was interested in picking up this book because it’s in the field of my first book, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880. Perry’s book focuses on questions of authority. He offers illuminating examples (for instance creation of the Book of Mormon) of how Americans in the early national period used references to the Bible and myriad print bibles to make authoritative claims for themselves. This process, Perry claims, changed the Bible itself.

I am excited about five recent books about mindfulness, given that my most recent book treats this subject as well. I am...[read on]

About Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools, from the publisher:

Yoga and mindfulness activities, with roots in Asian traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have been brought into growing numbers of public schools since the 1970s. While they are commonly assumed to be secular educational tools, Candy Gunther Brown asks whether religion is truly left out of the equation in the context of public-school curricula. An expert witness in four legal challenges, Brown scrutinized unpublished trial records, informant interviews, and legal precedents, as well as insider documents, some revealing promoters of “Vedic victory” or “stealth Buddhism” for public-school children. The legal challenges are fruitful cases for Brown’s analysis of the concepts of religious and secular.

While notions of what makes something religious or secular are crucial to those who study religion, they have special significance in the realm of public and legal norms. They affect how people experience their lives, raise their children, and navigate educational systems. The question of religion in public education, Brown shows, is no longer a matter of jurisprudence focused largely on the establishment of a Protestant Bible or nonsectarian prayer. Instead, it now reflects an increasingly diverse American religious landscape. Reconceptualizing secularization as transparency and religious voluntarism, Brown argues for an opt-in model for public-school programs.

Visit Candy Gunther Brown’s Indiana University faculty webpage and Psychology Today blog.

The Page 99 Test: The Healing Gods.

The Page 99 Test: Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools.

Writers Read: Candy Gunther Brown.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Blaemire's "Birch Bayh: Making a Difference," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Birch Bayh: Making a Difference by Robert Blaemire.

The entry begins:

Birch Bayh remains a very distinct image in my mind and I find it difficult to come up with a good idea of who might portray him in a movie. He would be best described as handsome and virile, athletic, with striking blue eyes. An actor like Clive Owen might do the trick, black hair, masculine, he’d have to mask his British accent. On the other hand, George Clooney represents a handsome actor who does an equally good job being serious and being comedic. Birch liked to have fun and was quite playful, though he never told a joke very well. Going back further in time, Cliff...[read on]

Learn more about Birch Bayh: Making a Difference at the Indiana University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Birch Bayh: Making a Difference.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ryan Chapman's "Riots I Have Known"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Riots I Have Known by Ryan Chapman.

About the book, from the publisher:

An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrator’s final Editor’s Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened.

As he awaits imminent and violent interruption, he takes us on a roller coaster ride of plot and language, determined to share his life story, and maybe answer a few questions. How did he end up here? Should he have remained a quiet Park Avenue doorman? Or continued his rise in the black markets of postwar Sri Lanka? What will become of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere? And why does everyone think the riots are his fault? Can’t they see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons?

Smart, wry, and laugh-out-loud funny, Ryan Chapman’s Riots I Have Known is an utter gem—an approachable send-up that packs a punch. Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, says, “Ryan Chapman has written a rocket-powered ode to literary creation and mass incarceration. Weaving satire and seriousness into a singularly rambunctious monologue, Riots I Have Known is a breath of fresh air.”

Visit Ryan Chapman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Riots I Have Known.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top literary thrillers

J.S.Monroe is the pseudonym of the British author Jon Stock. Stock is the author of six spy novels. His standalone psychological thrillers, written under the pseudonym J.S. Monroe, include Find Me, Forget My Name, and the newly released The Last Thing She Remembers.

At CrimeReads Monroe tagged seven favorite literary thrillers, including:

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

Not, perhaps, Ian McEwan’s most well-known novel, but Sweet Tooth is one of my personal favorites. I’m a succor for metafiction and the self-referential elements of this book are delicious. Serena Frome, an MI5 operative in the early 1970s, is instructed by her bosses to persuade left-leaning novelists to stop bashing the West. She focuses her attention – and literary funds, distributed through a fake cultural organization—on Tom Haley, a Sussex university PhD student who has had some success writing short stories. If Haley sounds familiar, he’s meant to: the student is a thinly disguised young McEwan, who wrote short stories before turning to novels. As for the success of Frome’s mission, all is revealed—or not—in a mercurial final twist.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Erin Gough reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Erin Gough, author of Amelia Westlake Was Never Here.

Her entries begin:

Highway Bodies by Alison Evans and The Lost Arab by Omar Sakr

Both of these books are a dose of what I love best: queer writing by Australian authors. Highway Bodies is about a zombie apocalypse in Melbourne. It features a range of queer and gender non-confirming teens banding together to stay alive. It is Australian soap opera meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer - I'm loving it.

The Lost Arab is Sakr's second collection of poetry, and having just finished...[read on]

About Amelia Westlake Was Never Here, from the publisher:

A fiercely funny, queer romantic comedy about two girls who can’t stand each other, but join forces in a grand feminist plan to expose harassment and inequality at their elite private school.

Harriet Price is the perfect student: smart, dutiful, over-achieving. Will Everhart is a troublemaker who’s never met an injustice she didn’t fight. When their swim coach’s inappropriate behavior is swept under the rug, the unlikely duo reluctantly team up to expose his misdeeds, pulling provocative pranks and creating the instantly legendary Amelia Westlake–an imaginary student who helps right the many wrongs of their privileged institution. But as tensions burn throughout their school–who is Amelia Westlake?–and between Harriet and Will, how long can they keep their secret? How far will they go to make a difference? And when will they realize they’re falling for each other?

Award-winning author Erin Gough’s Amelia Westlake Was Never Here is a funny, smart, and all-too-timely story of girls fighting back against power and privilege–and finding love while they’re at it.

Visit Erin Gough's website.

The Page 69 Test: Amelia Westlake Was Never Here.

Writers Read: Erin Gough.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books featuring terrible monsters that tug on our human heartstrings

Kerstin Hall is a writer and editor based in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed her undergraduate studies in journalism at Rhodes University and, as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, continued with a Masters degree at the University of Cape Town.

Her debut novel, The Border Keeper, is out in July from Tor.com.

At Tor.com Hall tagged "five books featuring monsters that we might still pity as they bite off our ears," including:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Pigoons. Hybrid animals designed and grown as foolproof organ donors by OrganInc Farms. A pigoon is created by splicing human genes into pigs, which has the side-effect of greatly improving their intelligence. In order to accommodate the extra organs, they’re also much larger and fatter than their unmodified cousins.

In the early chapters of Oryx and Crake, six-year-old Jimmy expresses sympathy for the pigoons and sings to the animals from a safe distance. He particularly likes the little pigoonlets. But when he encounters the escaped animals as an adult, they aren’t quite as endearing, especially after they start applying human intelligence in their efforts to hunt him down.

Read about another entry on the list.

Oryx and Crake is among Ezekiel Boone's top five classic novels about when technology betrays us, Jeff Somers's six books in which the internet helps destroy the world, Chuck Wendig's five books that prove mankind shouldn’t play with technology, S.J. Watson's six best books, James Dawson’s list of ten ways in which writers have established barriers to love just for the sake of a great story, Torie Bosch's top twelve great pandemic novels, Annalee Newitz's top ten works of fiction that might change the way you look at nature and Liz Jensen's top ten environmental disaster stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel Okrent's "The Guarded Gate"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent.

About the book, from the publisher:

By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors” in the 1920s.

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

Learn more about the book and author at Daniel Okrent's website.

The Page 99 Test: Last Call.

The Page 99 Test: The Guarded Gate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roxana Robinson's "Dawson's Fall," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Dawson's Fall: A Novel by Roxana Robinson.

The entry begins:

For Frank, Hugh Grant; for Sarah, Kristin...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.

The Page 69 Test: Cost.

My Book, The Movie: Cost.

The Page 69 Test: Sparta.

My Book, The Movie: Dawson's Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five olfactory novels

Erica Bauermeister is the bestselling author of four novels including The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy for Beginners, The Lost Art of Mixing, and The Scent Keeper.

At LitHub Bauermeister tagged five books on the most underrated of literary senses: scents. One title on the list:

Kathleen Tessaro, The Perfume Collector

In the spring of 1955, Grace Munroe is informed she is the sole beneficiary of the estate of Eva D’Orsey, a name Grace has never heard before. Grace’s quest to discover the truth takes her to Paris and into the world of perfume. Deftly interjected chapters from Eva’s life in the late 1920s provide an edgier counterbalance. Tessaro has a gift for illuminating the alchemy of fragrances, while the mystery will keep you reading, hopefully while wearing just a drop of a mysterious perfume.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: The Perfume Collector.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Erica Bauermeister's "The Scent Keeper"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister.

About the book, from the publisher:

Erica Bauermeister, the national bestselling author of The School of Essential Ingredients, presents a moving and evocative coming-of-age novel about childhood stories, families lost and found, and how a fragrance conjures memories capable of shaping the course of our lives.

Emmeline lives an enchanted childhood on a remote island with her father, who teaches her about the natural world through her senses. What he won’t explain are the mysterious scents stored in the drawers that line the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them. As Emmeline grows, however, so too does her curiosity, until one day the unforeseen happens, and Emmeline is vaulted out into the real world--a place of love, betrayal, ambition, and revenge. To understand her past, Emmeline must unlock the clues to her identity, a quest that challenges the limits of her heart and imagination.

Lyrical and immersive, The Scent Keeper explores the provocative beauty of scent, the way it can reveal hidden truths, lead us to the person we seek, and even help us find our way back home.

Learn more about the book and author at Erica Bauermeister's website.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Essential Ingredients.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Art of Mixing.

Writers Read: Erica Bauermeister.

The Page 69 Test: The Scent Keeper.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that may help you understand yourself

Karen Rinaldi is a professional preacher of the gospel of suckitude. Before she found surfing, she sucked at plenty of things, among them skiing, horseback riding (which almost ended tragically), boxing (she doesn’t want to talk about it), running, rollerblading, cycling (for which she boasts the least suckiness.) Along with her side hustle of suckitude, Rinaldi has spent 20+ years in publishing and is the publisher of Harper Wave, an imprint she founded in 2012. Her first novel, The End of Men, was the basis for the 2016 feature film Maggie’s Plan, directed by Rebecca Miller and starring Julianne Moore, Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke. Her book, [It’s Great to] Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience and the Stuff That Really Matters, is a non-fiction deep dive into the joys that sucking can bring.

At The Week magazine, Rinaldi shared her six favorite books that will help you understand yourself. One title on the list:

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America by Joel Dinerstein (2017).

Dinerstein, who curated "American Cool" at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, explores how the concept of cool both occludes and elucidates. His deep dive into cool and its relevance in jazz, existentialism, literature, and pop music seems at first glance academic, but it is a riveting read, giving brilliant insight and context to one of the most elusive and misunderstood cultural concepts. It's totally cool.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: The Origins of Cool in Postwar America.

The Page 99 Test: The Origins of Cool in Postwar America.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jennifer Cody Epstein reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of Wunderland: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I currently have several books in bedside rotation (pretty standard practice for me):

The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro). A lyrical, dark, and subtly surreal novel about a famous pianist who comes to an unnamed Central European city to give the performance of his life, but instead finds himself being sent off on endless distractions and errands by the townspeople he encounters. I’ve loved other of Ishiguro’s novels—in particular, Never Let Me Go—and while this is a radically different and somewhat more challenging read for me (it’s a bit like being trapped in a very beautifully-rendered anxiety dream) I’m finding it both inspiring and compelling. It reminds me a little of...[read on]

About Wunderland, from the publisher:

East Village, 1989
Things had never been easy between Ava Fisher and her estranged mother Ilse. Too many questions hovered between them: Who was Ava’s father? Where had Ilse been during the war? Why had she left her only child in a German orphanage during the war’s final months? But now Ilse’s ashes have arrived from Germany, and with them, a trove of unsent letters addressed to someone else unknown to Ava: Renate Bauer, a childhood friend. As her mother’s letters unfurl a dark past, Ava spirals deep into the shocking history of a woman she never truly knew.

Berlin, 1933
As the Nazi party tightens its grip on the city, Ilse and Renate find their friendship under siege—and Ilse’s increasing involvement in the Hitler Youth movement leaves them on opposing sides of the gathering storm. Then the Nuremburg Laws force Renate to confront a long-buried past, and a catastrophic betrayal is set in motion…

An unflinching exploration of Nazi Germany and its legacy, Wunderland is a at once a powerful portrait of an unspeakable crime history and a page-turning contemplation of womanhood, wartime, and just how far we might go in order to belong.

Learn more about the novel and author at Jennifer Cody Epstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

Writers Read: Jennifer Cody Epstein.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven creepy fictional couples

Kaira Rouda's new novel is The Favorite Daughter.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven "literary couples whose relationships are deeply disturbing in the most fascinating ways possible," including:

Anderson Lake and Emiko, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi’s biopunk epic has a truly messed-up relationship at its center. The power dynamic in this one is not great from the get-go. Anderson is a powerful businessman from the United States, on a trip to Thailand to co-opt their resources. Emiko is an illegal synthetic human, a “Windup,” who is being forced to work in a sex club.

Emiko’s lack of power, choice and agency gives you a bad feeling immediately, and Anderson’s obsession with Emiko makes you feel even sicker. Emiko is kidnapped, bargained with and passed around while she longs for freedom, and Anderson seems truly convinced that he cares for her as all these things happen. The relationship is a grim reminder of how total power can corrupt, and how oblivious the person wielding this power can be to the damage they are doing.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Windup Girl is among Michael Johnston's five top books about extreme worlds, the Guardian editors' five best climate change novels, Maddie Stone's seven great novels that show the real terrifying prospect of climate change, Diana Biller's 22 great science fiction and fantasy stories that can help you make sense of economics, Torie Bosch's twelve great pandemic novels, Madeleine Monson-Rosen's top 15 books that take place in science fiction and fantasy versions of the most fascinating places on Earth and Annalee Newitz's lists of books to prepare you for the economic apocalypse and the 35 essential posthuman novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Chris S. Duvall's "The African Roots of Marijuana"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The African Roots of Marijuana by Chris S. Duvall.

About the book, from the publisher:

After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.

Learn more about The African Roots of Marijuana at the Duke University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The African Roots of Marijuana.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five monumental works to honor D-Day

At the B&N Reads blog Ross Johnson tagged five monumental works to honor the 75th anniversary of D-Day (June 6, 1944), including:

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (Liberation Trilogy, Volume 3), by Rick Atkinson

In the final volume of Rick Atkinson’s sprawling trilogy documenting Allied efforts to liberate Europe from the Nazis, D-Day is just the beginning—though his account of the campaign is riveting. Having already covered the Allied push through North Africa and Italy in earlier volumes, the author here turns his attention to the battle for Western Europe. This final stage of the war saw the Normandy landings, the liberation of Paris, the disastrous Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, and the final move into Germany itself—each of those representing powerful and traumatic moments in history. Atkinson utilizes extensive research and never-before-available source materials to tell the story of the final months World War II.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: S. C. Megale's "This Is Not a Love Scene"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: This Is Not a Love Scene: A Novel by S. C. Megale.

About the book, from the publisher:

Funny, emotional, and refreshingly honest, S.C. Megale’s This is Not a Love Scene is for anyone who can relate to feeling different while navigating the terrifying and thrilling waters of first love.

Lights, camera—all Maeve needs is action. But at eighteen, a rare form of muscular dystrophy usually stands in the way of romance. She's got her friends, her humor, and a passion for filmmaking to keep her focus off consistent rejection...and the hot older guy starring in her senior film project.

Tall, bearded, and always swaying, Cole Stone is everything Maeve can't be. And she likes it. Between takes, their chemistry is shockingly electric.

Suddenly, Maeve gets a taste of typical teenage dating life, but girls in wheelchairs don’t get the hot guy—right? Cole’s attention challenges everything she once believed about her self-image and hopes for love. But figuring this out, both emotionally and physically, won't be easy for either of them. Maeve must choose between what she needs and what she wants, while Cole has a tendency to avoid decisions altogether. And the future might not wait for either.

Visit S.C. Megale's website.

My Book, The Movie: This Is Not a Love Scene.

Writers Reads: S. C. Megale.

The Page 69 Test: This Is Not a Love Scene.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jacqueline West reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jacqueline West, author of Last Things.

Her entry begins:

The book that my husband and I are currently reading aloud to each other during car rides is Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. It’s ridiculously readable; the book is arranged both chronologically and thematically, so the narrative really flows, and it’s got interviews with everyone: Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Guns N’Roses, Slayer, Metallica, Pantera, Trent Reznor. I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever...[read on]

About Last Things, from the publisher:

New York Times–bestselling author Jacqueline West captivates readers with a dark, hypnotic story about the cost of talent—and the evil that lurks just out of sight. Fans of Holly Black and Victoria Schwab will be mesmerized by this gorgeous, magnetic novel.

High school senior Anders Thorson is unusually gifted. His band, Last Things, is legendary in their northern Minnesota hometown. With guitar skills that would amaze even if he weren’t only eighteen, Anders is the focus of head-turning admiration. And Thea Malcom, a newcomer to the insular town, is one of his admirers. Thea seems to turn up everywhere Anders goes: gigs at the local coffeehouse, guitar lessons, even in the woods near Anders’s home.

When strange things start happening to Anders, blame immediately falls on Thea. But is she trying to hurt him? Or save him? Can he trust a girl who doesn’t seem to know the difference between dreams and reality? And how much are they both willing to sacrifice to get what they want?

Told from Anders’s and Thea’s dual points of view, this exquisitely crafted novel is full of unexpected twists and is for fans of Holly Black’s The Darkest Part of the Forest and Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood.

Learn more about the book and author at Jacqueline West's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jacqueline West and Brom Bones (July 2011).

Coffee with a Canine: Jacqueline West and Brom Bones (July 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Books of Elsewhere, Volume Four: The Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Last Things.

Writers Read: Jacqueline West.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven essential summer romance novels

Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of long-time writing partners and best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The #1 international bestselling coauthor duo writes both Young Adult and Adult Fiction, and together has produced fifteen New York Times bestselling novels.

Their latest novel is The Unhoneymooners.

At Publishers Weekly the authors tagged eleven favorite summer romance novels, including:

One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

If you love women’s fiction, and want your brain and heart to be hijacked for a leisurely summer day, this is the book to get. This is the story of Emma, who loses her husband Jesse in a tragic accident. When she moves home in an attempt to move on from her loss, she runs into an old friend, Sam, and over time the two begin to fall in love. By now you’ve probably guessed that Jesse returns, but although we were scared to read this story because we like our hearts and don’t want to have them broken, we were delighted with how TJR carefully crafted the triangle. This book was everything we wanted it to be; both heartbreaking and delightful in equal, exquisite ways.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martine Bailey’s "The Almanack," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Almanack by Martine Bailey.

The entry begins:

My heroine Tabitha was a courtesan in London, and is sharp-witted, light-fingered and bold, a shrewd handler of people, and charming when she wants to be. To play her I had in mind Crystal Laity’s performance as harlot Margaret Vosper in Poldark, a mix of intelligence and physical allure.

Tabitha’s love interest is rakeish poet Nat Starling, a Cambridge University drop-out, obsessed with time. His creativity mixes with bouts of stupidity and drunkenness. No apologies for casting Aidan Turner (Ross Poldark) as the intense, long-haired writer.

Joshua Saxton is Tabitha’s devoted old flame, now a widower and the dogged village constable. Rugged Alex O’Loughlin would be ideal (convict Will Bryant in mini-series Mary Bryant).

Joshua’s daughter Jennet leads the younger generation: still girlish at 15, her pursuit of romance and superstition leads her into danger. I’d love a young Christina...[read on]

Visit Martine Bailey's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: An Appetite for Violets.

The Page 69 Test: An Appetite for Violets.

My Book, The Movie: A Taste for Nightshade.

My Book, The Movie: The Almanack.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Candy Gunther Brown's "Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? by Candy Gunther Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:

Yoga and mindfulness activities, with roots in Asian traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have been brought into growing numbers of public schools since the 1970s. While they are commonly assumed to be secular educational tools, Candy Gunther Brown asks whether religion is truly left out of the equation in the context of public-school curricula. An expert witness in four legal challenges, Brown scrutinized unpublished trial records, informant interviews, and legal precedents, as well as insider documents, some revealing promoters of “Vedic victory” or “stealth Buddhism” for public-school children. The legal challenges are fruitful cases for Brown’s analysis of the concepts of religious and secular.

While notions of what makes something religious or secular are crucial to those who study religion, they have special significance in the realm of public and legal norms. They affect how people experience their lives, raise their children, and navigate educational systems. The question of religion in public education, Brown shows, is no longer a matter of jurisprudence focused largely on the establishment of a Protestant Bible or nonsectarian prayer. Instead, it now reflects an increasingly diverse American religious landscape. Reconceptualizing secularization as transparency and religious voluntarism, Brown argues for an opt-in model for public-school programs.

Learn more about Debating Yoga and Mindfulness at the University of North Carolina Press website. Follow Candy Gunther Brown on Facebook and Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Healing Gods.

The Page 99 Test: Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven complex twin sets in recent science fiction & fantasy

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog, Nicole Hill tagged seven fascinating stories of sci-fi and fantasy twins, including:

False Hearts, by Laura Lam

After reading this indomitable thriller, I think you’ll agree with me in saying there are not enough conjoined-twin narratives in the world today. Admittedly, the sister protagonists at the heart of this novel, Tila and Taema, are formerly conjoined twins. But even a decade after the surgery that separated them, and the subsequent splintering of their lives, their bond remains unique—strong enough, certainly, to endure infiltration by an underground crime syndicate. When free-spirited Tila is accused of murder, reliable Taema is thrust into a world of secrets, danger, and terrifying dream-like drugs as she fights to save her sister’s neck.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Susan Shapiro Barash reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Susan Shapiro Barash, author of (writing as Susannah Marren) A Palm Beach Wife: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I'm happiest when I read a few books at the same time. For fiction my style is to read a classic at the same time that I'm reading new fiction.I've just read Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers concurrently with Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne and I'm about to begin Drawing Home by Jamie Brenner and at the same time will...[read on]

About A Palm Beach Wife, from the publisher:

For readers of Elin Hilderbrand, Susannah Marren's A Palm Beach Wife is a delicious and irresistible commercial novel set among the high society galas and gossip of Palm Beach.

Amid the glamour and galas and parties of Palm Beach, Faith knows that image often counts as much if not more than reality. She glides effortlessly among the highest of the high society so perfectly that you would never suspect she wasn’t born to this. But it wasn’t always so; though she hides it well, Faith has fought hard for the wonderful life she has, for her loving, successful husband, for her daughter’s future.

In this town of secrets and gossip and rumors, Faith has kept a desperate grip on everything she holds so dear, built from so little. And yet even she—the only one who knows just how far she has to fall—never suspects from which direction, or how many directions all at once, betrayal will come.

Visit Susan Shapiro Barash's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Palm Beach Wife.

The Page 69 Test: A Palm Beach Wife.

Writers Read: Susan Shapiro Barash.

--Marshal Zeringue