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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #607 "Fin del mundo y principio de todo" (The end of the world and the beginning of everything)
by muffy
My Last Continent by Midge Raymond is "a delicate romance, a fragile habitat, and two people who literally have gone to the end of the earth to find each other." (Booklist).
Every year, environmental scientist Deb Gardner makes the arduous journey to Ushuaia, commonly regarded as the southernmost city in the world - literally the end of the world. For a few weeks on the remote Petermann Island, she studies the Emperor and Adélie penguins in solitude, and conducts eco-tours for the cruise ship company that sponsors the research.
Keller Sullivan, a former Boston attorney appears one season to work as a dishwasher but shares Deb's passion for the environment. Soon they look forward to the blissful few weeks each season spent among their penguin family, to escape the frustrations and sorrows of their separate lives and find solace in their work and in each other. Then Keller fails to show up at the beginning of a new season.
Shortly into the journey, Deb’s ship receives an emergency signal from the Australis, a cruise liner that has hit desperate trouble in the ice-choked waters. Among the crew, Deb finds, is Keller.
"Midge Raymond’s phenomenal novel takes us on a voyage deep into the wonders of the Antarctic and the mysteries of the human heart. My Last Continent is packed with emotional intelligence and high stakes—a harrowing, searching novel of love and loss in one of the most remote places on earth, a land of harsh beauty where even the smallest missteps have tragic consequences... Half adventure, half elegy, and wholly recommended." ~ Karen Joy Fowler
Suggested read-alikes: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney; The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman; and Euphoria by Lily King.
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #606, Capitol Crimes
by muffy
The Second Girl * * by former D.C. police detective David Swinson is "an auspicious, and gleefully amoral, series debut" (Kirkus Reviews), featuring retired DC cop Frank Marr - damaged, damned, and an unrepentant drug addict who works sporadically as a private investigator for defense attorney (and occasional bed-mate) Leslie Costello.
When Frank breaks into a drug den to replenish his personal stash, he discovers a teenage girl doped up and chained to the bathroom. Rather than calling the authority and trying to explain his involvement, he hands her off to Leslie, but not before he manages to draw out all the details of her kidnapping. As the news of Amanda Meyer's return to her family, another suburban family with a missing girl hires him to find her, and Frank is not above administering his own brand of justice to get the job done.
"Swinson delivers an excellent addition to the noir genre as he unveils layer after layer of his gritty protagonist. Readers of Dennis Lehane and Richard Price as well as fans of The Wire will appreciate the bleak description of inner-city Washington, DC." (Library Journal)
The Dead Don't Bleed * by David Krugler is a mystery/police procedural/spy thriller set in Washington, D.C at the waning days of WWII.
With victory in sight, the suspicion of communist spies in the capitol is palpable, spies who seem to stop at nothing to get their hands on the atomic bomb project. When Naval Intelligence officer Logan Skerrill is found dead in a back alley of the Navy Yard, Lt. Ellis Voigt is called in to investigate.
With clues of the murder pointing to Skerrill's connection to a news-clipping service suspected of Communist affiliations, Voigt goes undercover. Pursuing crosses and double-crosses, he discovers a defecting German physicist, a top secret lab in Los Alamos, and Uranium-235 which suggest something far larger than the usual spy v. spy shenanigans.
"Voigt is an engaging character.... (History professor) Krugler’s portrait of wartime Washington, particularly the rivalries within ONI and the enmity between the FBI and ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), is thoroughly absorbing." (Booklist) For fans of David Downing and Philip Kerr
* * = 2 starred reviews
* = starred review
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #605
by muffy
A best-seller in Europe, the first foreign-language romance novel to be translated and published in the U.S, All In * by Swedish author Simona Ahrnstedt is "sexy, smart, and completely unputdownable." (Tessa Dare)
David Hammer, the upstart, infamous venture capitalist and corporate raider, known for his brutal take-overs is poised to pull off the biggest deal in the history of Swedish finance, make it world-wide finance. His sight is set on Investum - one of Sweden's biggest and oldest financial institutions, owned and controlled by the De la Grip Family. After years of planning, all the players are in place; he needs just one member of the owning family on his side—Natalia De la Grip. He invites her to lunch.
(Countess) Natalia is everything David despises - upper-class, traditional, as close to royalty as you could get without actually being royal and yet he finds her brilliant, driven to succeed in a man’s world, and enchanting. Natalia is intrigued by this way-too handsome man who is rich, dangerous, and in the business circles - utterly unethical. However, the powerful chemistry between them leaves both of them exhilarated and vulnerable.
As the deal goes through, it turns out that it is not all about business. Past history, family secrets and revenge will force David and Natalia to confront their innermost fears and desires as they make deeply difficult choices.
“The author’s ability to skillfully fuse a luxurious lifestyle, a refreshingly different Swedish setting, a plot riddled with revenge and financial intrigue, and plenty of steamy romance means All In will be the must-have leisure read everywhere this summer.” (Booklist). For fans of the glitz-and-glam novels of Judith Krantz, Beatriz Williams, and perhaps Sylvia Day.
* = starred review
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #604 "It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment... " ~ Sue Monk Kidd
by muffy
With references to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Suzanne Feldman's debut (and a winner of the Missouri Review Editors' Prize) Absalom's Daughters * is a tale of sisterly adventure through the 1950s Jim Crow South.
Young Cassie helps run the family laundry with her mother and grandmother in the black part of Heron-Neck, Mississippi. She has no idea that Judith who is white, is her half-sister, though she knows that it is her grandmother's plan to orchestrates the births in her family so that her descendants can, one day, pass for white.
When their father Bill Forrest runs off leaving the family destitute, Judith finds a letter from a mysterious sender in Virginia explaining they are heirs to a rumored family fortune, surely enough money for her to run off to New York City to be a singer. Sensing her grandmother's design on the jazz-playing Albino boy from New York City visiting one of the white families on the hill, Cassie realizes this may be her only opportunity to escape. The girls steal a car, and with a ham, a gun, and a map so old that state lines are blurred, they head north. While getting their first taste of freedom, courting danger at every turn, they are reminded of the tyranny of skin color, and the heavy responsibility of being the master of your own fate.
"Feldman’s prose blisters and pops with sparks... In this novel, most things are not as they seem, and Feldman doesn’t hew too close to reality. The sisters encounter mules who were once men, discover towns that appear in one place on the map and another on the road, and Cassie even spends a few days as a white girl. Eventually she decides to return to the skin she was born with; as a mysterious woman tells her near the end: 'What’s important is the past.' " (Kirkus Reviews)
* = starred review
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #603 “Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal...” ~ Marisha Pessl
by muffy
If you loved Jennifer Close's Girls in White Dresses (2011), you would not be disappointed with these two debuts just now hitting the shelves.
A Dangerous Age by former model and the editor of Elle Accessories Kelly Killoren Bensimon catches up with four friends over the course of a sweltering Manhattan summer.
These fortysomething best friends have been meeting every Tuesday night for twenty years. Once the toast of the town, they are secretly falling apart at the seams. As Lucy, once a supermodel, now a freelance writer, watches her marriage to a renowned artist slowly falling apart, she becomes reckless when she starts receiving mysterious text messages from another man. Billy, an unemployed food and wine expert, quietly struggles to make rent each month, is exploring supper-club subscriptions. Lotta, a successful art dealer, dependent on cocktails and recreational drugs, is courting a total breakdown; while Sarah, a well-heeled socialite chasing after reality-show fame is paying the price with her reputation.
As these women of a very dangerous age navigate their ways around a city that worships only the young, it is anyone's guess how they will emerge at the end of a very bumpy summer.
"The dialogue is funny, and a plotline involving a mysterious blogger who’s terrorizing all of New York is intriguing and twisty."(Kirkus Reviews). A breezy beach read for fans of Sex and the City.
Bestselling author Emma Straub praised Rich and Pretty as "smart, sharp, and beautifully made", Rumaan Alam's portrait of two childhood best friends transitioning into their adult lives is vividly rendered, set against a tantalizing background of moneyed New York City that is impossible to resist.”
Sarah is rich - the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite. Lauren is pretty, and smart enough to snag a scholarship to a fancy private school in Manhattan where they met. They have been inseparable through high school and college, first jobs, first loves, and the uncertainties of their twenties. Now in their thirties, Sarah works at a charity thrift store and is planning her wedding to her doctor fiance. Lauren, steadily making a good name for herself in publishing is care-free and single. As a way to reconnect, Sarah asks Lauren to be her maid of honor and help plan the wedding. But the closeness Sarah was hoping to reignite seems like a thing of the past when Lauren misbehaves on a bachelorette trip.
"With astute descriptions of how values, tastes, desires, and ambitions change over two decades, Alam’s tale of a divergent friendship smartly reflects the trial and error nature of finding a mate and deciding how to grow up." (Publishers Weekly) Try this if you enjoyed Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead.
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #602
by muffy
Inspired by Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and sets out to write stories of Chinese women who succeeded in mapping their own destinies, debut novelist Weina Dai Randel tries to redress the often misrepresented and misunderstood Empress Wu with The Moon in the Palace *
When a monk foretells that 5 year-old Mei will one day be both the mother of emperors and an emperor in her own right, her father takes this to heart and sees that she is schooled in poetry, history, mathematics, calligraphy, and even Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
At 13, the orphaned Mei enters the palace to serve in the royal household where she will need to draw on all she had learned from her father to survive the intrigue and duplicity of the Imperial Court, and to earn favor with the emperor. Her only ally is a boy named Pheasant but their involvement might put both of them in danger.
Mei's story continues in The Empress of Bright Moon as she ascends to rule as China's only female emperor in more than four millennia.
For historical fiction readers who enjoyed Empress Orchid and The Last Empress by Anchee Min.
* = starred review
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Fabulous Fiction First #601 Spotlight on Australian Fiction
by muffy
In Antonia Hayes' debut novel Relativity, nerdy, bookish and a ready target for bullies, 12 year-old Ethan Forsythe is obsessed with physics and astronomy. Raise by Claire, a single-mother who gave up her career as a ballerina, Ethan is increasing curious about his father whose identity Claire refuses to disclose.
When a seizure sends Ethan to the hospital, they discover his remarkable abilities might be related to a previous brain injury suffered as an infant that sent his father, Mark to prison. Meanwhile, Mark, who tries to rebuild his life in the far-reaches of Western Australia, is back in Sydney, to attend to his dying father who is asking to see Ethan, his only grandson. When Ethan secretly intercepts a letter from Mark to Claire, he unleashes long-suppressed forces that—like gravity—pull the three together again, testing the limits of love and forgiveness.
"With a heart-wrenching plot and a style reminiscent of Jodi Picoult, this is an excellent novel with deep characterization and powerful imagery.” ~ Library Journal
2014 winner of the Colin Roderick Award, and set in the remote coastal town of Thirroul at the end of WWII, The Railwayman's Wife by Ashley Hay is the story of Anikka "Ani" Lachlan, a transplant from Scotland who is trying desperately to make a home for herself and her 11 year-old daughter Isabelle.
After her husband, the railway-man Mac(kenzie) was killed in an accident while on the job, Ani was given the job as the librarian in the railway's lending library. Returning to settle at Thirroul are Roy McKinnon and Dr. Frank Draper, childhood friends who for years, have vacationed at this idyllic spot with their families. McKinnon, a published poet has lost his words from his battlefield experience; while Draper who could not reconcile with his inability to save the 550 prisoners in one of Hitler's concentration camps, has turned bitter and sardonic. They soon find refuge in the library, and gradually a friend in Ani.
Over the course of a year, with Ani as his muse, Roy manages to write again. His first poem is an anonymous offering to Ani, who mistakes it for a hidden birthday gift from Mac. Despite the promise of a new publisher, Roy's despondency grows as Ani never acknowledges the gift. Frank fares better, being taken in hand by Roy's patient and take-charge sister, Iris.
"Multilayered, graceful, couched in poetry, supremely honest, gentle yet jarring, Hay’s thought-provoking novel pulls you along slowly, like a deep river that is deceptively calm but full of hidden rapids. Much to ponder." ~ Kirkus Reviews
Readers interested in the Australian setting might enjoy (the film adaptation of) Peter Carey's Oscar & Lucinda; the winner of the 2001 Orange Prize - The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville; The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman (a soon-to-be released feature film); and Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany.
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #600
by muffy
The word is getting out about The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper * by Phaedra Patrick.
It is a must-read for fans of A Man Called Ove; The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; and Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand - another curiously charming debut about a lonesome widower's life-changing adventure.
Clinging to the simple daily routine established long before his beloved wife of 40 years, Miriam's death a year ago, Arthur Pepper finally feels strong enough to sort through her things. He comes across an exquisite gold charm bracelet hidden inside her winter boots. Puzzled and curious, he senses that Miriam has kept secret an extraordinary life lived before meeting him.
What follows is a surprising and unforgettable odyssey as Arthur traces the origin of each of the charms: The elephant charm with a valuable emerald takes him to Goa, India; the tiger sends him to a dilapidated estate near Bath; an engraved book brings him face to face with a renown poet. Paris is where he tracks down the lovely giver of the golden thimble...
Along the way he was robbed, mauled by a tiger, confronted by a nude portrait of his wife, but he also met kindness and friendship where it was least expected. More importantly, Arthur found strength within, a sense of adventure, and a new zest for life.
* = starred review
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #599 "Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not." ~ Oprah Winfrey
by muffy
The Assistants * * by Camille Perri "is addictive, hilarious, and smart. It’s 9 to 5 for the student loan generation.” ~ J. Courtney Sullivan
For six years, 30-year-old Tina Fontana has been executive assistant to Robert Barlow (think Rupert Murdoch, but with a Texas accent), the CEO of Titan Corp., a multinational media conglomerate. She is dedicated, resourceful, and invaluable to her famous boss. It is her routine on Fridays to submits his national debt-sized expense report for reimbursement. But a clerical error presents her with a chance to wipe clean her student loan, and for the first time since graduation (NYU), financial freedom.
While Tina suffers for her financial prestidigitation, the only person who notices the error is Emily Johnson in Accounts. Rather than turning Tina in, she wants her even-bigger student loan paid as well. Before long, other assistants with crushing debt and fewer scruples demand the same deal.
Complicating matters is blue-blooded, Kennedy-handsome corporate lawyer Kevin Hanson, Tina's lunch buddy (he has other ideas though) who wants to help by talking up her "nonprofit project for disadvantaged women" with a journalist friend...
Camille Perri, former librarian/books editor for Cosmopolitan and Esquire magazine came up with the concept for the novel while working as the assistant to David Granger, then Esquire’s editor-in-chief, processing his expenses on the Hearst online portal. Read more of Kirkus' interview with Perri.
* * = 2 starred reviews
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Fabulous Fiction First #598 “A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.” ~ Stephen King
by muffy
Two debut story collections, nothing short of stunning.
Beasts & Children * * by Amy Parker (Michener fellowship, University of Texas at Austin, and Iowa Writers Workshop) offers "an unrelenting examination of the loneliness, helplessness, and daily cruelties of our contemporary world."
These 10 linked stories pursue three families, from a sagging, grand porch in Texas to a gated community in steamy Thailand, to a lonely apartment in nondescript suburbia, as Parker follows Carline and Cissy Bowman, Jill and Maizie Foster, and Jerry and Danny Guzman over several decades, first as children and then reappear, later in the book, married and with children of their own. "Parker brings all six characters together in a zestfully inventive and satisfyingly organic way as they navigate their dark and imperiling childhoods to emerge as flawed, fragile yet fiercely resilient adults. An electrifying, daring, and magical debut collection sure to appeal to fans of Karen Russell and Lorrie Moore."
The 23 stories in The Bed Moved *, Rebecca Schiff's debut collection is "audacious, and savagely funny", that offers the reader a singular view of growing up (or not) and finding love (or not) in today’s ever-uncertain landscape.
The narrators are young women - brainy, underemployed, and thwarted in their search for intimacy. They sleep around and suffer consequences as in the titular story -“The Bed Moved”. A daughter learns about her recently deceased father through his cached Internet search history in “http://www.msjiz/boxx374/mpeg”. In “Rate Me,” a woman sends her actual body parts to a rating agency in order to improve herself, piece by piece.
"An observer extraordinaire, Schiff elucidates her characters’ thoughts and moments, sharing them like little, unassuming gems. Schiff’s stories are piercing and playful, witty and wise."
* * = 2 starred reviews
* = starred review