Q&A with Christina Dotson

From my Q&A with Christina Dotson, author of Love You To Death: A Novel:

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

I always envy writers who can create the perfect title. Unfortunately, that is not a gift I possess. I initially titled this book A Good Place To Stop, which my agent vetoed right away because it’s obviously terrible. We wanted the book’s title to have a wedding theme, but we knew that choosing one could potentially lead readers to think this was a romance novel. In the end, after several rounds of brainstorming, it was someone from my editor’s team who came up with the title, Love You To Death. And while we know this isn’t necessarily a unique title, it does give readers a deeper understanding of Kayla and Zorie’s bond. It’s a perfect reminder of the book’s themes surrounding loyalty, manipulation and...[read on]

Follow Christina Dotson on Instagram and Threads.

Q&A with Christina Dotson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Chris Sweeney's "The Feather Detective"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fascinating and remarkable true story of the world’s first forensic ornithologist—Roxie Laybourne, who broke down barriers for women, solved murders, and investigated deadly airplane crashes with nothing more than a microscope and a few fragments of feathers.

In 1960, an Eastern Airlines flight had no sooner lifted from the runway at Boston Logan Airport when it struck a flock of birds and took a nosedive into the shallow waters of the Boston Harbor, killing sixty-two people. This was the golden age of commercial airflight—luxury in the skies—and safety was essential to the precarious future of air travel. So the FAA instructed the bird remains be sent to the Smithsonian Institution for examination, where they would land on the desk of the only person in the world equipped to make sense of it all.

Her name was Roxie Laybourne, a diminutive but singular woman with thick glasses, a heavy Carolina drawl, and a passion for birds. Roxie didn’t know it at the time, but that box full of dead birds marked the start of a remarkable scientific journey. She became the world’s first forensic ornithologist, investigating a range of crimes and calamites on behalf of the FBI, the US Air Force, and even NASA.

The Feather Detective takes readers deep within the vaunted backrooms of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to tell the story of a burgeoning science and the enigmatic woman who pioneered it. While her male colleagues in taxidermy embarked on expeditions around the world and got plum promotions, Roxie stayed with her birds. Using nothing more than her microscope and bits of feathers, she helped prosecute murderers, kidnappers, and poachers. When she wasn’t testifying in court or studying evidence from capital crimes, she was helping aerospace engineers and Air Force crews as they raced to bird-proof their airplanes before disaster struck again.

In The Feather Detective, award-winning journalist Chris Sweeney charts the astonishing life and work of this overlooked pioneer. Once divorced, once widowed, and sometimes surly, Roxie shattered stereotypes and pushed boundaries. Her story is one of persistence and grit, obsession and ingenuity. Drawing on reams of archival material, court documents, and exclusive interviews, Sweeney delivers a moving and amusing portrait of a woman who overcame cultural and scientific obstacles at every turn, forever changing our understanding of birds—and the feathers they leave behind.

Visit Chris Sweeney's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Feather Detective.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen notable feminist books

Emma Specter is the Culture Writer at Vogue, where she covers film, TV, books, politics, news and (almost) anything queer. She has previously worked at GARAGE and LAist and has freelanced for outlets including The Hairpin, Bon Appetit, them, the Hollywood Reporter and more. Her first book is More Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing and the Lust for ‘Enough’.

Specter lives in Los Angeles. In her spare time, she shops for vintage purses and bakes a lot of bagels.

For Vogue she and her colleagues tagged thirteen feminist books that deserve a place on your nightstand. One title on the list:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

It may be surprising to see fiction on this list, but Evaristo’s skill at portraying 12 very different protagonists in this Booker Prize–winning novel, which spans decades’ worth of race, class, gender, and sexuality-based identity, more than deserves some good old-fashioned feminist acclaim.

Read about another entry on the list.

Girl, Woman, Other is among Sarah Davis-Goff's six top books about women working together, Ore Agbaje-Williams's seven books featuring very, very complicated friendships, Cecile Pin's seven novels featuring displacement in multicultural London, and Kasim Ali's nine top books about interracial relationships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Thomas Maltman's "Ashes to Ashes"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Ashes to Ashes by Thomas Maltman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Small-town Minnesota teenager Basil “The Brute” Thorson—a shy, reluctant wrestling star and “special” tracked into special education classes—vows to make his family whole again in the wake of multiple tragedies, during a year in which his community is roiled by strange religious and mythological events.

Another perceptive and empathetic novel from the author of Indie Next and All Iowa Reads selection Little Wolves, blending myth, history, and religion with a nuanced look at contemporary rural life, perfect for fans of Marilynne Robinson, Richard Russo, and Paul Harding.

When the ashes from an Ash Wednesday service in the prairie town of Andwhen, Minnesota, refuse to wash off, members of a small congregation are left wondering whether they’ve been blessed or cursed. For Basil—a “gentle giant” of a teen reeling from a farming accident that shattered his family and haunted by his mother’s decade-long confinement in a state mental hospital—the ashes become a sign. He embarks on a secret ritual of fasting and prayer, seeking meaning in his unraveling world.

Meanwhile, Basil and his friends, Lukas and Morgan (who self-identify as “a gay, a goth, and a giant”), stumble upon what may be the centuries-old remains of a Viking explorer in a local meadow, a find that brings its own complications, as folk history clashes with the agendas of online racists. As Basil’s relentless fasting warps his grip on reality, the danger he poses to himself and his family escalates.

Blending the fragments of a Norse saga with a finely observed portrait of rural Midwestern life at the start of the pandemic, Thomas Maltman delivers a novel of narrative daring and profound empathy—his most inventive and compassionate work yet.

Learn more about the book and author at Thomas Maltman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Little Wolves.

Writers Read: Thomas Maltman (February 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Ashes to Ashes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Richard J. Sexton's "Food Fight"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World by Richard J. Sexton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Society's most basic challenge is arguably to produce and distribute enough food for its citizens. In 2023, 733 million people faced hunger and 2.3 billion were moderately or severely food insecure. Feeding a growing world population is becoming more difficult in the face of climate change, pest resistance to traditional treatments, and misguided government policies that limit how much food ends up on our plates. Policies to support biofuels, organic agriculture, local foods, and small farms and to oppose genetically modified foods all reduce food production on existing land. This leads to higher food prices, increased carbon emissions, and less natural habitat as cropland expands. Food Fight documents the challenges to adequately feeding the world in the twenty-first century and illustrates the ways in which contemporary food policies in the United States, Europe, and beyond imperil food security. Richard J. Sexton provides a window into the world of modern agriculture and food supply chains. He separates the wheat from the chaff to distinguish policies that will limit, or expand, the global food supply, and he explains how we can construct a food system that forestalls future hunger and environmental degradation.

Learn more about Food Fight at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Food Fight.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books for "Murderbot" fans

At B&N Reads Margarita Polkowska tagged ten "Murderbot read-alikes with just enough existential dread." One title on the list:

Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel

A haunting tale of time travel, love and humanity, this book follows a host of interconnected characters that jump at the chance to make mindful choices that have the power to impact the timeline of the universe — in the best way.

Read about another entry on the list.

Sea of Tranquility is among Mark Skinner's twenty-five best time travel books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Camilla Trinchieri reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Camilla Trinchieri, author of Murder in Pitigliano.

Her entry begins:

After devouring Philip Miller’s The Goldenacre I am reading The Hollow Tree, the second book of his Shona Sandison Investigation series which takes place in Scotland, Miller’s home. Shona, a journalist whose newspaper has folded, attends a wedding where a guest commits. Shona wants to know why and investigates. The story is gripping but what adds to the pleasure of reading Miller is...[read on]

About Murder in Pitigliano, from the publisher:

Ex-NYPD detective Nico Doyle finds himself unwittingly stepping into the role of a PI to investigate a murder that has torn a young family apart in this rustic mystery set in the beautiful Medieval village of Pitigliano, Italy.

One morning at his favorite café, Nico Doyle notices Cilia, a seven-year-old girl he has never seen before, frolicking with his dog on the floor. He later discovers she has left a note in his collar—Please help my babbo.

With help from the local carabinieri, Nico discovers that Cilia’s father, Saverio, has fled town following an unfortunate incident. His business partner was killed at their electronics store, and Saverio is the hot-headed local carabiniere’s main suspect. Cilia’s mother, Livia, who just moved to Gravigna to get away from Pitigliano’s wagging tongues, asks Nico to find the real killer and hands him a long list of suspects. Against his better judgment, Nico accepts for Cilia’s sake. Since the case is outside of the local carabinieri’s jurisdiction, Nico finds himself on his own as he travels back and forth to Pitigliano. He goes down Livia’s list of suspects one by one in pursuit of the truth, putting his skills as a retired NYPD detective to work. But will Livia and her little girl be happy with what Nico finds?

Visit Camilla Trinchieri's website.

Q&A with Camilla Trinchieri.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pitigliano.

Writers Read: Camilla Trinchieri (July 2025).

Writers Read: Camilla Trinchieri.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini's "Monsters vs. Patriarchy"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Monsters vs. Patriarchy: Toxic Imagination in Global Horror Cinema by Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini.

About the book, from the publisher:

Across the globe, the violent effects of patriarchy are manifest. Women, trans people, gender-nonconforming people, and the racialized Other are regularly subjected to physical danger, beginning with the denial of vitally important health care, and, in its most horrific form, rape, trafficking, and murder. Monsters vs. Patriarchy links these real-world horrors to the monstrification and dehumanization of people as expressed in contemporary global cinema. This monstrification has been achieved through a toxic imagination attributed to women, a trait that historically referred to the power of women to negatively affect others, including their own children in the womb, with only the use of their imagination. This process reflects the misogynist and racist world in which we live, where female bodies, people of color, and alternative identities represent a threat to patriarchal power.

Monsters vs. Patriarchy examines female monstrosity as it appears in horror films from around the world and considers specific political, scientific, and historical contexts to better understand how we construct and reconstruct monstrosity, using an intersectional approach to examine the imposition of gender and racial hierarchies that support national power structures. The authors contend that monstrous female cinematic subjects, including ghosts, witches, cannibals, and posthuman beings, are becoming empowered, using the tools of their monstrification to smash the colonial, white supremacist, and misogynist structures that created them.

Learn more about Monsters vs. Patriarchy at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies by Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini.

The Page 99 Test: Monsters vs. Patriarchy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top books featuring cults

Lauren Wilson has a degree in Journalism and an MA in Creative Writing, both from Northumbria University. She has previously worked as a freelance radio reporter, set up her own content writing and social media management business, and she currently works for Mslexia, a magazine committed to championing women’s writing.

The Goldens is her first novel.

At CrimeReads Wilson tagged her eight favorite books featuring cults. One title on the list:

Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel

In this profound novel, art and humanity are examined through the dual lenses of the outbreak of a dangerous flu pandemic and the lives of a group of survivors twenty years later as they travel to perform music and plays. While Station Eleven isn’t necessarily about a cult, a solid chunk of the plot focuses on the survivors’ dealings with a doomsday cult (or is it a post-doomsday cult?) led by the mysterious Prophet. It’s one of my all-time favourite novels.

Read about another book on Wilson's list.

Station Eleven is among Barnaby Martin's seven titles featuring parents & children at the end of the world, Brittany K. Allen's ten books that get the theatre world right, Jeanette Horn's nine twisted novels about theatrical performers, Isabelle McConville's fifteen books for fans of the post-apocalyptic TV-drama Fallout, Joanna Quinn's six best books set in & around the theatrical world, Carolyn Quimby's 38 best dystopian novels, Tara Sonin's seven books for fans of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, Maggie Stiefvater's five fantasy books about artists & the magic of creativity, Mark Skinner's five top literary dystopias, Claudia Gray's five essential books about plagues and pandemics, K Chess's five top fictional books inside of real books, Rebecca Kauffman's ten top musical novels, Nathan Englander’s ten favorite books, M.L. Rio’s five top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

Also see Lisa Black's five books about cults, Kate Robards's five essential books about cults, Janice Hallett's five top books on cults, Melanie Abrams's seven novels about crimes in communes, cults, & other alternative communities, Joanna Hershon's seven darkly fascinating books about cults, Claire McGlasson's top ten books about cults, and Sam Jordison's top ten books on cults and religious extremists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kerry Cullen's "House of Beth"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: House of Beth by Kerry Cullen.

About the book, from the publisher:

A haunting and seductive tale of a young career woman who slides quickly into the role of stepmother, in a life that may still belong to someone else. “Vivid, addictive, and crackling with life (yes, even the ghost), House of Beth asks us to consider how and why we make the lives we make” (Lynn Steger Strong).

After a heart-wrenching breakup with her girlfriend and a shocking incident at her job, Cassie flees her life as an overworked assistant in New York for her hometown in New Jersey, along the Delaware. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend, Eli, now a widowed father of two. Their bond reignites, and within a few short months, Cassie is married to Eli, living in his house in the woods, homeschooling the kids, and getting to know her reserved neighbor, Joan.

But Cassie’s fresh start is less idyllic than she’d hoped. She grapples with harm OCD, her mind haunted by gory, graphic images. And she’s afraid that she’ll never measure up to Eli’s late spouse, who was a committed homemaker and traditional wife. No matter what Cassie does, Beth’s shadow still permeates every corner of their home.

Soon, Cassie starts hearing a voice narrating the house’s secrets. As she listens, the voice grows stronger, guiding Cassie down a path to uncover the truth about Beth’s untimely death.

Visit Kerry Cullen's website.

The Page 69 Test: House of Beth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Amir Moosavi's "Dust That Never Settles"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War by Amir Moosavi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead. Neither side emerged as a clear victor, but both sides would eventually claim victory in some form. Dust That Never Settles considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. It demonstrates how writers from both countries have transformed once militarized, officially sanctioned war literatures into literatures of mourning, and eventually, into vehicles of protest that presented powerful counternarratives to the official state narratives. In writing the first comparative study of the literary output of this war, Amir Moosavi presents a new paradigm for the study of modern Middle Eastern literatures. He brings Persian and Arabic fiction into conversation with debates on the political importance of cultural production across the Middle East and North Africa, and he puts an important new canon of works in conversation with comparative literary and cultural studies within the Global South.

Learn more about Dust That Never Settles at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Dust That Never Settles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels about class and racial tensions in the suburbs

Kate Broad holds a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a Bronx Council on the Arts award winner for fiction, and her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, No Tokens, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.

Greenwich is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Broad tagged eight "novels about class and racial tensions in the American suburbs, each of them engrossing and unsettling, concerned with the powerful forces that shape a community. These are books about belonging, about insiders and outsiders, that ask how far we’ll go and how much we’ll risk in pursuit of the good life."

One title on the list:

Our Best Intentions by Vibhuti Jain

High school sophomore Angela Singh is just trying to fit in with her Westchester classmates when she stumbles across a popular white boy bleeding on the football field with a knife in his abdomen. He accuses a Black girl, Chiara Thompson, of stabbing him, and while Angela isn’t sure that she believes him, she did see Chiara nearby. Chiara and Angela, who is Indian, are among the few students of color at the school, and Angela is caught between the mounting outrage of the powerful white community and her sense that something about the stabbing doesn’t line up. This portrayal of class, race, and belonging in Kitchawan, New York is heartbreaking and insightful, and a scene in which Angela tries to apologize to Chiara’s cousin has lingered with me years after reading.

Read about another novel on the list.

Q&A with Vibhuti Jain.

The Page 69 Test: Our Best Intentions.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Nicky Gonzalez

From my Q&A with Nicky Gonzalez, author of Mayra: A Novel:

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

Mayra is both a friendship novel and a Gothic novel, so I wanted a title that straddled both of those subgenres. There are a few Gothic novels that are titled with simply a person’s name (Rebecca, Dracula) and the same goes for friendship novels (Sula, Marlena). It’s definitely a subtle nod, but I hope it communicates the friendship/gothic connection to some readers, at least subconsciously.

What's in a name?

When it comes to naming Mayra...[read on]

Visit Nicky Gonzalez's website.

Q&A with Nicky Gonzalez.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Christopher Ojeda's "The Sad Citizen"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters by Christopher Ojeda.

About the book, from the publisher:

For many citizens, politics is depressing. How has this come to be the norm? And, how is it influencing democracy?

From rising polarization to climate change, today’s politics are leaving many Western democracies in the throes of malaise. While anger, anxiety, and fear are loud emotions that powerfully activate voters, depression is quiet, demobilizing, and less visible as a result. Yet its pervasiveness is cause for concern: after all, democracy should empower citizens.

In The Sad Citizen, Christopher Ojeda draws on wide-ranging data from the United States and beyond to explain how politics is depressing, why this matters, and what we can do about it. Integrating insights from political science, sociology, psychology, and other fields, The Sad Citizen exposes the unhappy underbelly of contemporary politics and offers fresh ideas to strengthen democracy and help citizens cope with the stress of politics.

Visit Christopher Ojeda's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Sad Citizen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top Civil War historical fiction books

Rachel Brittain is a writer, Day Dreamer, and Amateur Aerialist. Her short fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways, and others. She is a contributing editor for Book Riot, where she screams into the void about her love of books. Brittain lives in Northwest Arkansas with a rambunctious rescue pup, a snake, and a houseful of plants (most of which aren’t carnivorous).

At Book Riot she tagged five "Civil War historical fiction books [that] provide some insight into what it was like for people at the time—to choose sides, to unlearn their own prejudices and misconceptions, and to question everything about what it means to be an American." One entry on the list:

The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs

The author of The Hamilton Affair sets her sights on American icon Harriet Tubman, whose exploits as part of the Underground Railroad and a Civil War spy left an enduring legacy on this country. In May of 1863, with the Union Army facing heavy losses, Tubman, codename Moses, plots a daring expedition behind enemy lines to enact the largest plantation raid of the Civil War. Her plan: to recruit the freed men and women to her cause. Facing racism and sexism at every turn, Tubman takes command of a small team of Black scouts to pull off one of the greatest feats of the Civil War.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shelly Sanders's "The Night Sparrow," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Night Sparrow: A Novel by Shelly Sanders.

The entry begins:

The Night Sparrow opens just before dawn in Seelow, Germany, with Elena Bruskina lying on her stomach, “finger poised on the trigger of her rifle though she couldn’t see her own hand in the chilly darkness.” It’s April, 1945, and Elena, a university student before the war, has trekked thousands of miles from her home in Minsk, Belarus, as a Red Army sniper. She’s seeking vengeance, after the Nazis brutally murdered her family in the Minsk ghetto, but revenge by bullets is not as simple or as satisfying as she’d anticipated. When she’s injured and re-deployed as an interpreter, she finds herself on a hunt for the most dangerous Nazi of all—Hitler—and sees that retaliation comes in many forms.

If The Night Sparrow were made into a movie, Shira Haas would be my first choice as Elena, with her breadth as an actor. Her performance as Esther in Unorthodox was spectacular and riveting. The role of Elena is demanding, with its broad emotional scope from ghetto prisoner, to escapee, to partisan, to sniper, to interrogator. As well, Shira, like Elena, is young and she’s Jewish. With the current wave of antisemitism, having a non-Jew in such a pivotal role feels wrong and insensitive.

For Elena’s love interest, Major Purkayev...[read on]

Visit Shelly Sanders's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Sparrow.

Q&A with Shelly Sanders.

My Book, The Movie: The Night Sparrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Carolyn Dasher's "American Sky"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: American Sky: A Novel by Carolyn Dasher.

About the book, from the publisher:

Three generations of indomitable women navigate life on their terms in an epic and inspiring historical novel about love and war, family secrets, and mothers and daughters finding the freedom to fly.

It’s 1943. The war rages. The newly launched WASP program is recruiting. And barnstormer fan Georgeanne “George” Ector’s dream is to take to the skies. Grit is what she inherited from her mother, an Oklahoma farm girl at the turn of the century who preferred taking apart an engine to stitching linens for a hope chest. She taught her daughter well. George isn’t the only woman about to follow her calling.

Vivian Shaw, so similar to George they’re like sisters, also longs for a career flying the fastest planes in the American arsenal. For a time, George and Vivian triumph. But at war’s end, the adventurous women are grounded by the expectations of others: to get married, have children, and raise a family. Vivian has other plans. So, eventually, do George’s daughters, Ruth and Ivy, who embark on very different paths of their own.

Three generations of women staring down a vast horizon of possibilities are determined to navigate whatever comes their way―from the hardships of war and home to love and loss, and to the fallout of a long-held secret that could change their lives forever.

Visit Carolyn Dasher's website.

Q&A with Carolyn Dasher.

The Page 69 Test: American Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Aaron Kushner's "Cherokee Nation Citizenship"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Cherokee Nation Citizenship: A Political History by Aaron Kushner.

About the book, from the publisher:

For the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, citizenship is an active way of life. In this, Aaron Kushner contends, it differs from the general American understanding of citizenship as a statement. Cherokee Nation Citizenship is Kushner’s exploration of legal citizenship in the Cherokee Nation, how the law has developed and changed over time, and what lessons this living idea and its history hold for Americans, Native and non-Native alike. The first political history of Cherokee Nation citizenship laws, Kushner’s book challenges American presumptions about Indigenous politics and historical development, even as it encourages a rethinking of what citizenship is and does.

The Cherokee Nation’s understanding of citizenship is complex, encompassing legal entitlements and privileges but also notions of identity, belonging, and cultural practice. Kushner traces the evolution of this concept from 1710 to the birth of the Cherokee Republic with its first constitution in the early 1800s through the 2017 federal court decision that required the Cherokee Nation to extend full citizenship benefits to African American Freedmen. His account documents major shifts in the Cherokee Nation’s articulation of citizenship—changes introduced by the 1866 treaty that followed the Civil War, the allotment era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the Nation’s new constitution in the 1970s. The idea of Gadugi, which translates as “coordinated work for the common good,” is a foundational thread running through this history—an element that has helped the Cherokee Nation sustain itself, Kushner suggests, and that embodies a sense of responsibility and resilience that non-Native Americans can learn from.

Learn more about Cherokee Nation Citizenship at the University of Oklahoma Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Cherokee Nation Citizenship.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books that feature toxic friendships

Christina Dotson is an Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award runner-up. In addition to writing, she is a licensed clinical social worker for a palliative care practice and lives in Kentucky.

Dotson's new novel is Love You To Death.

At CrimeReads she tagged "five books guaranteed to give you the toxic friendship vibes we love to see." One title on the list:

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

As the only black woman at a major publisher, Nella Rogers is elated to see another black woman, Hazel, join the company. When messages telling Nella to leave the company begin appearing on her desk, she suspects Hazel may be after her job, after all, she’s the new office darling.

But is it Nella’s career she’s after, or does Hazel have darker intentions for her new office bestie? As the late, great Zora Neale Hurston once said: All my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk.

Read about another entry on Dotson's list.

The Other Black Girl is among Mary Keliikoa's eight top workplace thrillers, Tania Malik's five unconventional office novels, Stephanie Feldman's seven novels featuring ambitious women, Caitlin Barasch’s seven novels set in the literary world, and Ashley Winstead's seven titles that explore collective guilt & individual complicity.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Vicki Delany reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Vicki Delany, author of Tea with Jam & Dread (Tea by the Sea Mysteries).

Her entry begins:

I’m a summertime reader. I get far more reading done in the summer than any other time of year, except when I’m on vacation. I love nothing more than sitting in the sun by the pool, reading reading reading. And my house looks it, but I can tidy it in September.

What have I been enjoying this summer?

Shipwrecked Souls by Barbara Fradkin. Full disclaimer here, Barbara is a very close friend of mine. But that shouldn’t prevent me from enjoying her books and I do. This is the 12th of her popular Inspector Green series, set in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa. The books are gritty and tough, with difficult themes handled sensitively and well. In Shipwrecked Souls, the death of a woman recently arrived from Ukraine unravels...[read on]

About Tea with Jam & Dread, from the publisher:

Cape Cod tearoom owner Lily Roberts leaves New England for old England to attend a party for an aristocratic centenarian—but what goes on there is anything but noble...

Long ago, Lily’s grandmother Rose worked as a kitchen maid at Thornecroft Castle, and now Elizabeth, dowager countess of Frockmorton, is celebrating her one hundredth birthday. Rose still has fond feelings for her onetime employer, so a group trip to Yorkshire is planned. It’s also an opportunity for Lily to visit her boyfriend, who’s currently working in England—and to indulge in some British tea.

Much has changed, however, and the ancestral home is now a luxury hotel, which will be closed for a week to accommodate the big bash, much to the chagrin of Elizabeth’s grandson, Julien—leading Lily to overhear an argument among the younger generation about the fate of the family fortune. Little do they know that Elizabeth plans to sell the famous Frockmorton Sapphires out of the family for the first time in centuries...

The icing on the cake comes when the jewels suddenly vanish—and things really go nuts when a party guest dies from an allergic reaction to almonds that someone smuggled into Lily’s coronation chicken sandwiches. Now she’ll have to scour the property to find out who would commit murder in such a manor...

Visit Vicki Delany's website, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen.

The Page 69 Test: A Scandal in Scarlet.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in a Teacup.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (September 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Deadly Summer Nights.

The Page 69 Test: The Game is a Footnote.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2023).

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Sign of Four Spirits.

The Page 69 Test: A Slay Ride Together With You.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Incident of the Book in the Nighttime.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Carolyn Dasher

From my Q&A with Carolyn Dasher, author of American Sky: A Novel:

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

The original working title of the book was American Girls. That was too close to other titles already out in the world, so my publisher requested a change. Between my editor, my agent, myself, and my family, we generated a list of probably twenty possibilities, none of which fit the book. After a lot of back and forth, and some growing despair on my part, the words American Sky popped into my head. And that was the one.

The title nods at the aspirations of the characters and the tone of the book, but it doesn’t suggest much about the plot. It’s more of a vibes title.

What's in a name?

One of the main characters in the book is a young, female pilot who becomes a WWII WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilot). I called her...[read on]

Visit Carolyn Dasher's website.

Q&A with Carolyn Dasher.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stefan K. Stantchev's "Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517) by Stefan K. Stantchev.

About the book, from the publisher:

The later Middle Ages and the early modern period were important and overlapping historical moments for both Venice and the Ottoman Empire, yet the two--both the periods themselves and the Republic and Empire more generally--have often been considered in isolation. Seeking to understand better this interrelated transition, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea offers for the first time an integrated view of trade and sea power that transcends the overworn paradigms of trade--the Ottoman territories as a land of opportunity--and crusade--the Ottomans as a military threat--to uncover the complex interplay between economic structures and political decision making that shaped the period between the end of Venice's most devastating war with Genoa in 1381 and the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517.

Drawing on the full range of available Venetian sources, as well as Ottoman, Genoese, Florentine, and papal materials, the book clarifies the trajectory of Venice's trade with the Ottomans, the evolution of Venetian defensive measures in the Balkans and of Venetian naval warfare, Venice's attempt to aid the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the dynamics of the Venetian-Ottoman war of 1463-79, and the interconnections between Venice's social and political structures and its Italian and Ottoman politics. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive analysis of Venetian-Ottoman relations, ranging from macro to micro scales, and across matters of economic, political, and military history. From a broader Mediterranean perspective, this highlights the intersections of political, social, economic, and technological factors behind accelerated historical change in the late medieval and early modern periods and offers a case study in the ways in which a Mediterranean elite maintained its privileged position over time.

Learn more about Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517) at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Spiritual Rationality.

The Page 99 Test: Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top novels set in realistic but imaginary places

Dan Fesperman served as a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, based in Berlin. His coverage of the siege of Sarajevo led to his debut novel, Lie in the Dark, which won Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel. Subsequent books have won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, the Barry Award for best thriller, and selection by USA Today as the year’s best mystery/thriller novel.

Fesperman's new novel is Pariah.

At Lit Hub he tagged five favorite novels "set in seemingly realistic locations that exist in the here and now, and often within real continents and regions." One title on the list:

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Everything in this 2001 novel takes place within a few acres of an unnamed capital city of an unnamed country in South America, within the grounds of the home of the Vice President. The action begins when a diva soprano’s birthday performance for a wealthy Japanese businessman and a few hundred privileged guests is raided by terrorists.

Their botched kidnapping (their intended target, the President, never showed) evolves into a months-long hostage situation, an ordeal which transforms the house into a compact nation with its own tidy dramas of love, music, tension, tragedy and sublime beauty.

Read about another novel on the list.

Bel Canto is among Harriet Constable's five best books about classical music, Jamie Day's seven crime titles featuring special events going off the rails, Mark Skinner's twenty great contemporary love stories, Nicole Holofcener’s ten favorite books, Jenny Shank's top five fabulous works of fiction for musicians, Jeff Somers's top five novels set in a single pressure cooker location, Tatjana Soli's six favorite books that conjure exotic locales, Kathryn Williams's six top novels set in just one place, Dell Villa's top eight books to read when you’re in the mood to cry for days, John Mullen's ten best birthday parties in literature, and Joyce Hackett's top ten musical novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on the Novels of W.H. Hudson

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on the Novels of W.H. Hudson. It begins:

Ford Madox Ford, who knew every great writer of his time, and helped more than one of them with his writing, thought W.H. Hudson, not Henry James, or D.H. Lawrence, or Thomas Hardy, or even his close friend Joseph Conrad, “the greatest prose writer of his day.” Ford was not alone in this judgment. In London, before the Great War, the First World War, the war that changed everything, including, Ford would have argued, the way the world, especially the English speaking world, looked upon literature and those who spent their lives trying to make a serious contribution to what was worth reading, there was a “French restaurant called the Mont Blanc where, on Tuesdays, the elect of the city’s intelligentsia lunched and discussed with grave sobriety the social problems of the day.” Ford was there, of course; and so also were Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and W.B. Yeats.

The conversation followed a predictable pattern: talk about “Flaubert and Maupassant and Huysman and Mendes and Monet and Maeterlinck and Turgenev. And if Belloc came bustling in and Conrad was there, the noise would grow to exceed the noise of Irish fairs when shillelaghs were in use.” And that because “Belloc with his rich brogue and burr would loudly assert that his ambition was to make by writing four thousand pounds a year and to order a monthly ten dozen of Clos Vougeot or Chateau Brane Cantenac…and this to Conrad who would go rigid with fury if you suggested that anyone, not merely himself, but any writer of position, could possibly write for money.”

And then, suddenly, Hudson would walk in and the room would go silent, the immediate tribute of those who understood the nature, and the extent, of his achievement, “the greatest prose writer of his day.” Hudson would try to deny it, insisting that, “I’m not one of you damned writers: I’m a naturalist from LaPlata.” And then he would laugh, because he did not really mind at all that they held him in such high regard. It had taken him long enough to earn it.

Hudson was born in Argentina of American parents in 1841, and until he moved to London when he was forty had never, other than a few visits to Buenos Aires, been off the pampas. He never spent a day in a forest, or an hour in a jungle, and had never so much as stepped on the soil of Venezuela, but Green Mansions, one of the two great novels he wrote, is set in the jungle, and the other one, The Purple Land, is set in and around Venezuela. If Hudson was the “greatest living writer of English,” it was, at least in part, because...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Polly Stewart's "The Felons' Ball"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Felons' Ball: A Novel by Polly Stewart.

About the book, from the publisher:

The critically acclaimed author of The Good Ones returns with an edge-of-your-seat thriller about a powerful Southern family whose dark secrets set in motion a chain of events with deadly consequences.

In their younger years, Trey Macready and his best friend Ben Marsh were distributors and enforcers for the local distillers who made their small hamlet of Ewald, Virginia, the moonshine capital of the world. But that was years ago, and now the only tie to their criminal past is the Felons’ Ball—Trey’s annual birthday party where they regale the crowed with tales of their youthful exploits. But when Ben is found dead after Trey’s fiftieth celebration, it’s clear those connections may not be past at all.

Finding Ben’s body propels his much-younger secret lover, Natalie—Trey’s daughter—to search for Ben’s estranged son, Lanny, and to find the truth about his killing. Her quest will lead to a battle with a police department that refuses to ignore her family’s history, and to form unexpected connections with Hardy, the sheriff investigating the case, and her brother-in-law Jay, who had a very public fight with Ben on the night of his murder.

When Jay goes missing on the morning he planned to meet Natalie, she begins to wonder if her mother was right . . . and if the past should be left in the past.

Visit Polly Stewart's website and follow her on Instagram.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Ones.

The Page 69 Test: The Felons' Ball.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Andrew Porwancher's "American Maccabee"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews by Andrew Porwancher.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major biography of a mesmerizing statesman whose complex bond with the Jewish people forever shaped their lives—and his legacy

A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his earliest years he forged ties with Jews never before witnessed in a president. American Maccabee traces Roosevelt’s deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of his dazzling ascent. But it also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.

As a rising political figure in New York, Roosevelt barnstormed the Lower East Side, giving speeches to packed halls of Jewish immigrants. He rallied for reform of the sweatshops where Jewish laborers toiled for pitiful wages in perilous conditions. And Roosevelt repeatedly venerated the heroism of the Maccabee warriors, upholding those storied rebels as a model for the American Jewish community. Yet little could have prepared him for the blood-soaked persecution of Eastern European Jews that brought a deluge of refugees to American shores during his presidency. Andrew Porwancher uncovers the vexing challenges for Roosevelt as he confronted Jewish suffering abroad and antisemitic xenophobia at home.

Drawing on new archival research to paint a richly nuanced portrait of an iconic figure, American Maccabee chronicles the complicated relationship between the leader of a youthful nation and the people of an ancient faith.

Visit Andrew Porwancher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton.

The Page 99 Test: American Maccabee.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books for a feral girl summer

Beth Kanter is a writer with more than 20 years of experience working for national magazines and newspapers. Her essays, features, humor pieces, and reported stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Paste, The Writer, Shape, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Belladonna, Business Insider, Parents, Kveller, and Curbed.

At Provoked by Susan, Kanter tagged nine "loud, messy, sexy, wild, and unhinged ... books [that] tingle in all the right places: the brain, the body, and the memory." One title on the list:

Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn

Pandemic. Divorce. Midlife horniness. Sexual exploration. Intimacy. Welcome to Amy Shearn’s wildly smart, honest, and totally unfiltered tale of a woman who creates an AI lover to avoid bad dates. And maybe also to avoid herself.

Read about another book on the list.

Animal Instinct is among the Guardian's twenty top authors' summer reading list and Liz Doupnik's thirteen top books about breakups.

The Page 69 Test: Animal Instinct.

My Book, The Movie: Animal Instinct.

--Marshal Zeringue