The Mother Act: A Novel by Heidi Reimer

That’s the problem, isn’t it? I put my own life, my own self, first. It’s a fundamental right of every person in the world. Except mothers.

Jude has grown up feeling overlooked and neglected by her famous mother Sadie, in fact, she has kept a minimal list of visits with her mom throughout her lifetime (when the book begins, that lifetime is thirteen years). It is evident they are not close and that it is her father she adores, is loyal to, trusts. She has forever known about the play her feminist mother wrote and performed, The Mother Act (in short about the horrors and grim realities of motherhood). What her father does not know is that she read it, secretly, and it is a deep wound. Though she had been forewarned by her father that she could misinterpret the sentiments within, it was her only chance to discover the reasons why her mother left when Jude was a toddler. It is not about Sadie’s struggles, it is about not wanting to be a mother, the demands too heavy a burden to manage. Jude is burned by the knowledge that she was unwanted, despised even and that a creative life was worth more than being her mother. That Sadie is famous for rejecting Jude is a damning reality, one that Jude has had to bear the cross of. Now, she has the chance to get her mother’s attention, to prove her worth when Jude performs onstage in The Tempest. Jude’s life is all about acting too, touring with her father’s Shakespearian theater company, it is at his knee that she becomes a talented actress in her own right and through him she has a solid anchor, a guide. But absence shapes a child as much as presence, and in this complicated drama, we get front row seats.

Sadie overwhelms Jude, her sporadic visits are earthquakes in her life that even growing up on the road never seems to prepare her for. Her father still holds a flame for Sadie, it confuses and angers Jude. How could he love someone who has betrayed them so deeply with her desertion? How could her mother not love her own child? Is Jude defective herself, or is her mother truly a selfish, unaffected, disinterested, vain monster? Who is to blame? And why does Jude feel conflicted, both longing to reject and accept her mother’s attentions?

We journey back to 1989 when Sadie first met Damien (Jude’s father), as she is working with her own feminist theater collective- innovative, provocative, exploding with talent and ambition. There is immediate chemistry between them, and love takes its natural course, leading to hard realities that do not make room for artistic expression. Motherhood is burying her; she does not recognize the person she is becoming, and the world outside is beckoning. A rift is born from her choice. Once Jude is an adult, she faces similar challenges, but is it possible to bridge the distance years of misunderstanding and anger have left behind? Will Jude and Sadie always be strangers? What will happen when Sadie’s sequel hits the stage?

What it means to be a mother and the make-up of a woman is raked over in this complicated story of the expectations and demands of motherhood versus a career, one’s calling.  It is also about the mother/daughter relationship, the similarities, differences, resentments, and longings. It must be addressed that Damien has an interesting role in the father/daughter dynamic, being the one who has remained the sole caretaker, in fact fathers are revered for doing what mothers around the world take on without admiration. Truly in the past single mothers were often looked down upon and judged fiercely. Surely this book will launch conversations about feminism, the role of motherhood, and even creativity. It challenges what we owe those we are meant to love most and ourselves. Yes, read it.

Publication Date: April 30, 2024

Penguin Group

Dutton

Bear: A Novel by Julia Phillips

“What you have here is an interesting, perhaps once in a lifetime, brush with nature. Keep a respectful distance and enjoy.”

Sisters, Sam and Elena, born only thirteen months apart, live on an island in the Pacific Northwest with their mother, working hard to keep their lives afloat. They spend their spare moments longing for the day they will be able to escape the drudgery of their days. A tourist place, they feel more like peasants serving people who do not see them as anything but ‘the help’. Despite the weight of their days, they cling to hope and their plan, even as it gets harder and harder to believe in. The eldest, Elena, deals with practicalities, they need to save money before they can leave, and for now, all of it must go elsewhere- bills, food, and their mother’s care. The only thing of value is their house, “a 1979 vinyl-nightmare”. Rather than pulling them out of poverty, it has anchored them deeper in it. How will their lives ever change? How can they hope for better? They are too wise to believe anyone will save them but themselves.

Magic appears in the form of a wild creature, impossible and yet… Sam saw it with her own eyes while working on the ferry. A glorious thing, something to pull her out of the sorrows and the stark reality of facing their mother’s decline. Rather than feeling frightened, Sam is enchanted. Long ago they dreamed of something special happening, and finally it has. It’s like a fairy tale, it makes her feel young again, something they never really were, forced into adulthood too soon. They know all about sorrow, about being shattered, but for once, this experience is not something to come, it is now, it is here, and it lights up their lives. The past wounded them far more than any wild beast ever could. The experts do not have all the answers, do they? “All will be well”.

Will this be the turning point? Can the magic last? While reading, I was on the precipice of a big moment, smelling the musk, at one with nature, and boy did this tale pull me in. The end left me with a gasp. There is a perfect parable I wish I could share, but it would give too much away. Yes, yes, yes read it! I loved it.

Publication Date:  June 25, 2024

Random House

Hogarth

The Safekeep: A Novel by Yael Van Der Wouden

Only once the others were gone did she unzip herself, peel away her dress. She was never this bare at the mercy of others.

The Netherlands 1961 the war is a distant memory, life has returned to normal, as much as it can. Isabel lives in her “stately” old family home in the Dutch countryside, she and the abode are one and no one cares for it, oversees the place, protects it more diligently than she. When her brother brings his latest girlfriend Eva to meet Isabel, she isn’t much impressed, and tells her that Louis will be bored by her in no time, as is his way. When he informs Isabel that he has to oversee a conference and that Eva will be remaining at their home for an extended stay, something unravels inside of Isabel. She is an unwelcome, unwanted intruder in this museum of memories. Isabel is of the “A place for everything and everything in its place,” mindset and certainly Eva’s place is not here. Home is Isabel’s true relief, and her brother Louis has upended it all. He orders her, ‘you will be nice to her’ and her defiance is “I will be nothing to her.” As the days pass, Eva’s presence is a creep, like a fog blanketing her peace of mind. Eva makes her feel things, disturbs the atmosphere and all Isabel wants is for everything to go back to normal, to the comfort of emptiness.

Eva is lazy by comparison, free with her laughter, quick to share confidences with people, even the housekeeper Neelke who Isabel mistrusts. The house is alive at night with her energy, she is all over the place, even her blasted perfume lingers after she has left a room. She is loose in her ways, like a child without a care, unkempt. She dares to make light of the structure that Isabel keeps, does not respect boundaries, touching all the precious things that are Isabel’s ‘slivers of memory’. She dares too much! She knows it is only a few weeks, a month at most but oh how she measures the time when Louis will return. Even her voice grates on Isabel’s nerves, thinking her ‘an actress in a bad play.” Is she going mad? Why does she feel found out when Eva looks at her a certain way? About what? Why does it feel like Eva knows something untoward about her, shameful, a secret even to herself? She believes someone is stealing, things are disappearing, she is suspicious of the housekeeper and now Eva is ordering her to be nice to Neelke. Admonishing her? The gal!

Eva must not usurp her place; she will not allow it! She begins to behave strangely, obsesses over what Eva is getting up to, watches her like a hawk. Is she just a mad recluse of sorts, or are her suspicions founded? Is she just a bitter, lonely woman, projecting onto an innocent bystander? Anger bleeds into desire and it is oozing from her pores, soon she will not recognize the person Eva is driving out of her.

I loved this, it is a deceptively bucolic setting, but the head can be a minefield. The ending was moving, and really brought the start of the novel to deeper meaning. The motivations of the characters aren’t as set as we’re led to believe. Emotions have a tendency to trip people in their plans. Yes, read it. I can’t wait for her next novel and hope the characters are as complex.

A tale of obsession, desire and the darkness left by WWII.

Publication: May 28, 2024

Avid Reader Press

Simon & Schuster

The Observable Universe: A Memoir by Heather McCalden

I keep thinking about how the line from the living to the dead is just that, a line, the smallest of separations.

The Observable Universe is memoir that leaves me with a disjointed feeling just like grief and trying to make sense of life does. The directions for how to read the book tells us it is an album about grief, ‘every fragment like a track on a record’… the writing is beautiful, but the subject is painful. Where are the ghosts of one’s history hiding, why is fate a pointed gun aimed at some people and a shower of blessings for others? Is it all chaos? How do we know people who disappeared from our lives, who death took, before our most formidable moments? What happens to the organic matter that they were made of? How in the hell do we observe life, let alone ourselves? Can we grieve a connection, a thing we never had? Must we be content with grasping at ghosts, trying to make sense of fragments that can’t provide us the entire picture?

Aids has run parallel to artist Heather McCalden’s life, its emergence in1981 (she was born in 1982) and her parents’ death from AIDS-related complications in the early nineties. She writes about viruses, ‘they have changed us, and we have changed them,’ and the rise of the internet (the same can be said about that strange world). The hunt for lineage is one thing, but how do we know what someone thought, felt, how they truly lived with stale facts? Raised by her grandmother Nivia, they were of different natures, a woman who was steely, and intelligent but ‘had no time for poetry.’ Artifacts from her mother and father’s lives were scarce, the things her grandmother kept were useless, like the crumbling make-up. It was an erasure, and it wasn’t until her grandmother’s death that any artifacts that remained could truly be dug up, researched but often to dead ends. How can one locate moments that happened before they were born? It is heartbreaking to know more about what killed them than to know about one’s own parents but that is a large part of what haunts this memoir.

The journey I have been on, in reading this book, is living a moment inside an artist’s mind. One who has lived years without the anchor so many of us take for granted, who has been absorbing grief and trying to find connections between viruses, “the spread of ideas”, what going viral means, its power, the entity that is a place that both exists and doesn’t- not really, it’s not of flesh, but then neither is our memories. It is a collage that includes society, dreams, history, the future, the past, investigations, excavations, our instincts, preservation of ourselves and others. There is really no way to describe Heather McCalden’s book, but a crack in her heart. It evoked a strange mess of sensations in me, I found myself thinking about life, this moment right here, having been born in 1975 I too was witness to the internet, all that free information, filling us and often emptying something too. Can we rely on memory, so often a trick? McCalden spends her time throwing a line into the past, hoping to catch something that can connect her to her mother and father. What do you do with what you discover if that person is no longer around to question? To explain? There is no one to ask, her grandmother was too practical to stew in memories while she was alive, the keeper of her inheritance.

I know I do not make sense, there is so much to take in, science, art, networking, a Japanese phone booth, the dead, the living, man made worlds, disease, medicine, lineage… Just read it. I spent a month thinking about it all before I could attempt this review.

Publication Date: March 19, 2024

Random House

Hogarth

There’s Going To Be Trouble: A Novel by Jen Silverman

“Why are they feeding you politics?”

Minerva “Minnow” Hunter accidentally stumbles into a protest while in Paris, where she teaches at a university. Swept up in a sea of protestors known as gilets jaines (yellow vests), what she knows about them is vague at best or from television. Minerva understands only that they are mad at Macron about the fuel tax. She catches sight of fellow teacher Charles Vernier, charismatic, handsome, aristocratic, and beloved by his students, a man who has barely noticed her before, likely because she is quiet, swallowed up in the background. But here, he recognizes her, surprised by her presence, and finds himself drawn to her curiosity, enlightening Minnow about what the people are fighting against, the control and suffering; that it goes far deeper than passing politics and silly signs. His intense anger and passion illuminate her, but it is his attention she hungers for. Her father wouldn’t approve, she has spent her life measuring herself against her father Christopher’s character, values. A steady man and chemistry professor who raised her by himself, he has already been disappointed by the trouble she created at her last teaching job. Against her better judgement, she was engaged in helping a troubled student that slowly became threatening, overstepping her place according to the rules. For once, she wants to be her own guide, to vanquish her father’s voice in her head, to not be a parrot of his beliefs, his mirror. Right now, they are not in contact, and it is her chance to assert herself in her own life. She is oblivious to the fact that she is not the trailblazer in the family, for another has found himself involved radical acts.

It is 1968, Keen spends his days in a chemistry lab, with a two-year deferment from the Vietnam war, he is free to attain his PhD at Harvard. A life of science is all he cares about, until he falls in love with Olya, a beautiful activist who invites him to readings and teach-ins against the war. Keen doesn’t yet know about the involvement she has in protests. It isn’t long before she is exerting an influence on him, making him see the reality of what is happening on campus and the horrors of war, forcing him outside the basement. He is no longer viewing life through his perspective and dreams alone, now his mind is clouded by her vision, her fight. He finds himself enlisted in something as dangerous as the war itself, an act that will forever change the trajectory of his life.

Minerva has never understood her father’s fears, his exaggerated anger about parts of history, only that his views shaped her universe. She doesn’t know much of her parents love, the reason for her mother’s absence from their lives nor the shame and guilt that haunts her father’s days but fate has a way of coming full circle.

This novel is clever, and as much as Minerva pulled me in, it was Charles whose choices stunned me. It is a novel about the weight of politics, whether you are fighting or indifferent, but also about the sway of love, passion, and parenthood. How can you sink into the status quo when a fire is driving you to be the change? Some are anchors, others are fire, but no one can avoid the world as it is transforming.

Publication Date: April 9, 2024

Random House

Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne, PH.D.

𝙄𝙛 𝙨𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙤𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙥𝙨𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙨𝙤 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩, 𝙬𝙝𝙮 𝙙𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮 𝙖𝙡𝙬𝙖𝙮𝙨 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙡𝙪𝙢𝙥𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤𝙜𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧?

Digging into this memoir I was immediately drawn to the honest revelations, most memoirs expose vulnerabilities but there is always a risk when behaviors are abnormal, something the average person cannot relate to. It is true when most people hear the word sociopath they think of serial killers, in fact, Gagne’s mention of Ted Bundy was an interesting coincidence as I had just finished an inspiring memoir written by a survivor of his terror, brutality. Lumped together with psychopath, of course the word sociopath is a red flag. Sociopathy as a spectrum is a subject I never gave much thought to until reading this book. As human beings we want to understand the how and why of ourselves, having raised a child on the Autism spectrum (now an adult) I have watched people become more educated about it, but in the past when you mentioned autism immediately people turned to stereotypes or Hollywood versions, obviously the same is true for other conditions. It is important to find your people, to know there are others out there like you who relate to the world and others as you do rather than feeling like an outcast.

The compulsions providing relief, the shame and anger at being judged, the inability to feel unless pushing boundaries, the crimes… all starting at a tender age, how do you moderate your behavior, maintain a semblance of ‘normalcy’ when your understanding, explanations are limited? It is a fascinating subject, particularly Patric’s stories of navigating her mental disorder, in a sense a pioneer in the field, facing the wall of experts who have claimed it incurable. How better the outcome would be if parents and partners had tools but more importantly if patients themselves could finally have a voice for all the things they cannot name? There is light in knowing someone gets it, someone sees you, that you do not have to hide in shame, broken. How can anyone change or control their urges, fixations without comprehending the source, the reason? Gagne’s said at one point, “I want to understand my urges instead of reacting to them,” an incredible insight. Patric also finds the good in who she is, yes, good. Like anyone else, as individual as we are, it isn’t all doom and gloom.

There are people out there who need this book. Every illness is not the same, and these experiences truly can be a lifeboat for patients and a bridge for those who love them.

Publication Date: April 2, 2024

Simon & Schuster

Between Two Trailers: A Memoir by J. Dana Trent

These pages are filled with casings of blown-up lives. Herein is a true story, one that is at its best when uncovering healing in the very places where violence thrives.

Dana Trent divulges in the first chapter that in preschool, her little hands were occupied by helping her “schizophrenic drug-lord father chop, drop and traffic kilos in kiddie-ride carcasses across flyover county.” It was the 1980’s, Dana’s parents were working for a big drug boss. The question is, how did two educated people end up dealing themselves content with their poverty level circumstances? The biggest issue was their wild-ideas, dependence on drugs, and of course mental illness. Home was razor blades, the smell of marijuana, and the Christian Broadcasting Network as the soundtrack. Her father “King” was a cult leader, her mother “the Lady” his queen but his visions did not keep Dana fed nor safe in their shotgun trailer. Her mother could not be bothered with cooking, cleaning, nor nurturing while tucked away in her king-sized bed nesting. Her father’s wildness inducing fear in locals was the only security system they truly had, but the real threat was within the walls.

Instead of her ABCSs and 123s, little Dana was becoming a hustler, learning switchblade thrusts. Captive to her parents’ fights, depression, and delusions, she spent her childhood with an empty belly and surrounded by explosive moods. If there was any luck, it was in the fact that Dana had grandparents and extended family nearby when things got too bad, always a place for food and shelter. There were exciting nights, for a time she was her father’s little shadow, sucking up his courage with glee but that was before she began to see with clarity. With every grand scheme, Dana grew up watching their dreams die. Reaching into the past, she learns about the cycle of abuse and violence. Just how did her parents end up like this? How will Dana herself escape a similar fate? Not everything is a disaster, at times she almost admires her father’s wildness and strength, as much as her mother once did, until she gets older and begins to feel embarrassment, recognizing how others react around King. Longing for her mother to wake up, participate in life, shuck her weed and benzos instead she must live with the grandiosity “the Lady” feels. The combination of her parents as a couple is an unfortunate toxic bomb but even when they are apart life is just as complicated and dark.

Disassociation, trauma, and the poisonous thinking of her unwell parents were facts she had to confront. Abuse exists in various forms, none more painful than the hope born from fresh starts that fizzle out. Family patterns of manipulation, paranoia, muddied perception, all had roots in the past. But how did Dana evolve from such dangerous origins? Is it possible there were life lessons she took from both her mother and father that were beneficial? How did she heal and why did she return home at all? How did she keep love for those who hurt her most? This book is an incredible read, engaging, shocking but inspiring too. I think about the state of mental health in our country, how different family homes would be with the proper help, because it is still a mess today. Dana’s strength resonates throughout the pages. Yes, read it!

Publication Date: April 16, 2024

Convergent Books

A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy by Kathy Kleiner Rubin, Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, PhD

“How has this bizarre narrative even existed? The Bundy victims have been treated like cartoon characters who saw a handsome man, developed red hearts in their eyes, and then idiotically trailed behind them to their own deaths.”

I grew up in Florida and remember hearing about Ted Bundy’s death in the electric chair on a January morning in 1989. Of course, it was jokes about old sparky and power surges, but the rage and disgust people had was understandable. Naturally, I already knew a lot about his crimes. During my early childhood only Adam Walsh’s shocking murder haunted me as much as the gruesome, evil actions of Ted. I have watched many of the movies, and tv shows about him, including the recent one starring Zac Efron. It’s handsome actors that take on the role. I clearly recall Mark Harmon’s performance in The Deliberate Stranger, too. Books, popular culture references, shows about serial killers, merchandise, let’s not forget being the boogeyman he was tends to lend him notoriety but after this memoir, written by a survivor of Bundy, my vision of him has changed. No longer does he seem like the sleek, brilliant, irresistible charmer on the prowl, seducing women with his good looks and charisma as he is so often portrayed. I, too, fell for the fiction that he was a masterful would-be lawyer who could have been a raging success. I was surprised to learn more about his failures, that people often felt uncomfortable in his presence. Who is this Ted, not the stud we’ve been sold. Not someone who mesmerizes women with smoldering looks, leaving them helpless, mindless idiots. Not a man that inspired trust in everyone.

In 1978, asleep in her bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University, Kathy Kleiner was bashed in the head with an oak log, others were not so fortunate to survive their encounters with Ted. “Fortunate” to survive, but the trauma, crippling pain, and expensive lifelong surgeries is the price that survival cost.  To read Kathy’s horrifying experience and everything that followed, the recovery, the failure for people to reach out that should have, the fear, the vile reality of Ted Bundy’s fame, brings to light that his shadow has far too long eclipsed all the victims and their stories. Nine years of waiting for justice, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Kleiner has been a survivor, death is something she has faced as early as age 12 through a mysterious illness that she learned at 13 would kill her, but Bundy would not be the end of her, a born fighter. It is this strength that pulls her through when she must undergo breast cancer and chemotherapy yet again as a young mother. What makes her story, her voice so incredibly important is that her life did not begin nor end with Bundy. She is a person, not a brief headline. Why do we give the criminals a microphone and erase the victims? This is one of the most moving books I have ever read, enlightening. It reminds me how much human beings are capable of, what we can overcome. As a single mother after her first marriage fell apart, Kathy was determined to raise her son Michael without the ghosts of the past poisoning his childhood. He only knew she was once hurt by an evil man, but not the shocking details, nor that he was a notorious serial killer. “I tried to keep Bundy from inserting himself into our daily lives,” so she controlled her triggers as best she could, even as Bundy’s violence reached further into the future, causing more loss. It is stunning that she was able to control the relevance he had, evicting him from the present.

She faced the demands of motherhood, moved past a trauma very few people will ever experience or understand (violence so heinous that it changed her plans for her future, left lasting physical hardships, mental wounds) and kept fighting when new challenges presented themselves, it is what makes her an incredible human being. I am fascinated and humbled by her courage and endurance. I felt sick to my stomach putting myself in her place, as much as I could in a book, safe from the actual physical pain, just a trace of the actual experience. The imagination can only go so far, it’s the aftermath that broke my heart so deeply. This is an inspiring read, one that brings attention to the victims because that is the story that should go on. In a better world the what might-have-been would be about them, not Bundy. I don’t want to give away too much of her story, this memoir is a journey, and you will not be disappointed. I devoured the advanced reader’s edition and then was dealing with illness, hence posting it in March. I did not want to fail to put a spotlight on how important this read is.

Published October 3, 2023

Chicago Review Press

Mother Doll: A Novel by Katya Apekina

“I believe that in order to survive, I betrayed everybody who was ever dear to me, including myself.”

I’m a fan of Katya Apekina, I devoured The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, from the title to the entire story and am delighted that her latest is a completely different tale. Mother Doll is an interesting read that is hard for me to categorize. Historical fiction, paranormal, family trauma, revolutions, abandonment, unwanted pregnancy, flailing relationships, dead that cannot move on- there is a lot to sink into. Zhenia’s beloved grandmother Vera is dying, losing cognitive ability, a fact she cannot face, when she receives a strange voicemail from a man named Paul Zelmont. Returning his call, he tells her he is a psychic medium and has been speaking to her dead maternal great-grandmother, Russian spy Irina Petronova. He informs her that Irina must tell her life story to them, naturally he doesn’t speak Russian he will need Zhenia to translate it, the memoirs can then be published, Irina’s legacy. Believing it’s a scam, Zhenia is stunned when he mentions her own pregnancy, which not many people know about. Why would Irina want to enlist her from beyond the grave, she abandoned her little girl, Vera, at a Russian orphanage so long ago sailing off to America and building a whole new family. Obviously a cold, cruel, self-serving monster of a woman. Not that she believes this madness, but who cares if she led a fascinating life when she gave up the one person Zhenia loves more than herself? Humoring him, she writes down what he channels, and is told that she is the closest thing to Vera herself, an absolute truth. Irina’s story unfolds, beginning with her spot at finishing school in Petrograd secured by her father before his death, their financial ruin, forcing her to live at her wealthy aunt’s house, in the servants quarters as she finishes out her schooling. Her job, to help her cousin Hannah get accepted into Petrograd society, closed off to them “on account of their being Jewish”. Her German teacher Fräulein Agata takes her under her wing, once a governess for a prominent family, she is popular with the students for her youth and wild, romantic ideas. Her connections are the catalyst for what befalls Irina and her cousin Hannah, during the Russian Revolution. It is also the birth of generational trauma and conflict. Zhenia resents her great-grandmother, she doesn’t want to open her heart to her, however magical this event is.

 There is a line in the book, “We can make new worlds out of old bricks”, and certainly that is what occurs, as the gaps in her great-grandmother’s past are filled in. How could she have left Vera? Is there a path to forgiveness so Irina’s soul can rest? Is it Zhenia’s to give? This bridge to the dead is not without risks, Paul has never experienced this intense of channeling, it is affecting him and his partner. He is a man possessed. Zhenia’s own life is falling apart, her work as a translator at the hospital is lackluster, she fears for her marriage, her husband Ben doesn’t want to have a child with her, she feels deep down that he doesn’t want her period. She hasn’t always been loyal, faithful nor honest either. Does she really want to hold on to him? The one person she has always turned to, her grandmother, appears to no longer be of this world, one foot in the next, fading away. She isn’t ready to grasp reality but through Irina, she will receive a far more important inheritance than money. What about her pregnancy? Does this child truly carry shards of those who came before? Is that why Irina insists on telling her side posthumously?

A hell of a read, from the Russian revolution to modern day  struggles, maybe they are vessels carrying each generation within them and on and on it goes. Yes, read it!

Publication Date:  March 12, 2024

ABRAMS

The Overlook Press

The Extinction of Irena Rey: A Novel by Jennifer Croft

𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒘𝒆 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒓𝒏, 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒂𝒎 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝒏𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒍 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝑳𝒆𝒏𝒂.

Grey Eminence, author Irena Rey’s masterpiece, is finally finished. Her eight loyal translators jump on a plane and head to her house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. The home is as alive as the protected reserve Białowieża, in harmony with the forest, and off limits to the public. It is one of the best-preserved ecosystems that Irena feels is her mission to protect, as real to her as any human being. The one thing the translators have in common, despite coming from different countries around the world, is their belief that Irena’s words are sacred. Always worshipful, they are surprised to learn that she isn’t her usual regal self. With her husband absent, her fire appears to have gone out. They understood that the place is made up of unconnected events connecting, unpredictable, unstoppable, much like the group themselves.  So begins the story about book people about to be swallowed by the earth.

They have dedicated their lives to understanding Irena, supplicants, but suddenly they cannot decode her behavior. As they venture into the reserve, she scares them a little with the strange gift she hands out without explanation, and someone gets hurt. The next day, she is more collected until she begins to speak about Białowieża and extinction, falling apart over the destruction of the trees, a network. On she goes about fungi and its purpose, leaving them all disoriented. She will not tell them what Grey Eminence is about but her impassioned speech, however disjointed, leads them to believe Białowieża is the heart of it all. Is she losing her mind? Is this the result of being isolated? Shame overwhelms them over their failure to comprehend Irena and the ecological horrors traumatizing her. Already sensitive to their beloved author’s state of mind, they are shocked by helplessness when they realize she has disappeared.

In this bizarre setting, the translators are lost, their minds in a frenzied state, searching the place for clues, hoping to excavate truths about Irena based on their surroundings but Białowieża is a hungry place, a beast on its own, impossible to make sense of, filled with threatening forces. Nothing in the rooms, her office, forest or the new book contain answers, they only serve to puzzle them more. Is her writing non-fiction disguised as fiction? She has maintained total authority over her work and her identity, and over the translators too. What are they to do now without her guidance, as the spell they have been under is breaking? Their languages, little worlds unto themselves, may alter Irene’s original work but too they effect how they understand their current circumstances.

This is a strange read; I am sure that I missed the meaning in many places. Translation changes a work, and each character is as clueless as me. Are they making more of her unraveling because of how they see her, as a god to them? As they dedicate themselves to discovering her whereabouts, their very lives are threatened, they are jealous of each other, who means more to her? Who understands her better? Could this be a big test, with the possibility of being replaced? As they get closer to solving the mystery, truth rears its ugly head. In cultlike fascination they have always believed they were special, a part of the magic that makes Irena unforgettable, enchanting. But how does Irena feel about them? Have they ever truly considered their purpose from her perspective, unclouded by hero worship?

This book is too clever for me by half, but I enjoyed the strange journey.  

Publication Date: March 5, 2024

Bloomsbury USA