Atwood, Margaret & Douglas Preston (eds).

Fourteen Days. NY: HarperCollins, 2024.

I’ve been a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s novels and short stories eve since I first read The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 — and I personally think she’s due for a Nobel — but this volume is a different sort of project for her, and she’s not only one of its three dozen cooperative authors but its co-editor with Douglas Preston. (It was published under the aegis of The Author’s Guild Foundation.) The scene is the Fernsby Arms, a down-at-the-heels six-story apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, right on the Bowery, and the time frame is the opening days of the Pandemic. The primary narrator, through, is the building’s new super, a thirty-year-old woman of Romanian heritage whose name we are never told and who learned the trade from her immigrant father. She’s big and strong and there’s nothing she can’t fix, and right now, she’s in agony over being unable to get a phone connection through to her father’s nursing home, where he’s in a memory care unit with Alzheimer’s.

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Phillips, Stephanie & Peter Krause.We Only Kill Each Other.

Vol. 1. np:The Authors, 2021.

There were lots of gangs in large American cities in the 1920s and ’30s, mostly as a result of Prohibition, and they naturally tended to reflect the ethnicity of the communities where they developed and which they came to control. And that includes New York Jewish gangs in Queens and the Bronx that were just as ferocious and bloody-handed as any mob of Italians or Irishmen. The two protagonists and territorial rivals in this graphic novel, set in 1938, on the brink of World War II, are the aging Levi Solomon, who has gotten wealthy running drugs, gambling, and other rackets, and the much younger Jonas Kaminskyy, who is still basically a cocky punk with ambitions.

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Stevens, Elizabeth. Keeping Up Appearances.

Adelaide, South Australia: Sleeping Dragon Books, 2018.

I discovered Stevens a few months ago via her most recent YA rom-coms, The Roommate Mistake and The Art of Breaking Up, and I was sufficiently impressed by them that I went looking for her earlier work. This one isn’t as sophisticated as the later two, and it depends on the somewhat cliched trope of fake dating, but even there, the author handles it in an original way. She also digs deep into the personalities of the two protagonists and makes them come alive in a way that not many YA novelists can pull off.

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Goldberg, Lee. Dream Town.

Seattle, Thomas & Mercer, 2024.

This is the fifth in a very enjoyable series about young Eve Ronin, a hard-nosed, driven, ambitious detective deputy with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Less than a year ago, she grabbed herself a spot in robbery-homicide by leveraging the publicity she gained by taking down a drunken movie star assaulting his girlfriend in public, and thereby also gained the resentment of nearly everyone else at her station. She didn’t really didn’t know what she was doing at the beginning, but she has solved several more major crimes since then, plus uncovering a network of secret criminal gangs within the department (yes, those really have been a scandal in LA), which involved her shooting one deputy, watching while another committed suicide in front of her, and being literally bombed out of her house.

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Anderson, Poul. Brain Wave.

NY: Ballantine, 1954.

Poul was one of the stars of science fiction’s Golden Age, from roughly the end of WW II into the mid-1960s, when the whole field changed rapidly and dramatically. He produced more than fifty novels, of which this was one of the most original and influential, and which I first read as a young teen sometime in the late ’50s. The ideas he put forth stuck with me and I re-read my worn paperback copy a couple of times in later years. And it all originates with a single, not impossible premise: At some point in its journey through space millions of years ago, the Earth entered an “inhibitor field,” a cone of unknown energy originating at the center of our galaxy that has the effect of suppressing intelligence. Not destroying it, just reducing it to a lower level. Since this event predated the evolution of mammals, we weren’t affected by it, but the field presumably led to the extinction of many lower-level species. And now, the Earth has emerged from that field.

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Evison, Jonathan. Again and Again.

NY: Dutton, 2023.

When one of the caregivers in his desert retirement home in the Mojave north of Los Angeles remarks on how short life is, 105-year-old Eugene Miles silently begs to differ. His earliest memory is as a homeless street thief in Seville in the 11th century, and after a thousand years of inhabiting a succession of bodies (including six years as Oscar Wilde’s cat), most of it lonely and loveless, he’s had enough. He’s ready to die. But he’s afraid he’s only facing yet another unwanted reincarnation to add to the seven he has already suffered through. Eugene has become adept at being alone and largely avoiding the company of others, but when Angel, a young Hispanic room-cleaner is openly friendly, Eugene surprises himself by opening up and telling the young man his story. And so we follow him from the days when he was Euric, a Visigoth — and of lower status than the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Berber-dominated Andalusia.

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Frazier, Song Mei Sheng. Off the Boks.

NY: Henry Holt, July 2024.

Mei Brown is Chinese-American and a native of the Bay Area — Chinese mother and Anglo father, and it’s hinted that Mom married him to acquire citizenship — and she’s very bright but she has issues. She was at Dartmouth on a scholarship, only one term away from graduation, when he father, an Army linguist at Monterey, killed himself, and Mei quit school and went back home. She hasn’t forgiven her mother, either, but she’s still very close to her hard-case widowed grandfather, who now lives in their renovated garage and who really raised her in all the important ways.

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Mosqueda, Andrea. Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster.

NY: Macmillan, 2022.

The author is a Chicana and a native of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, which is also the setting of this beautifully written YA novel. She’s also some variety of non-straight, and she now lives in NYC, which starts out being the protagonist’s target college destination, so she’s writing very much from experience. She’s an assistant editor somewhere in the publishing world, so she also knows her way around words, but given that this is her first published work of fiction, it’s amazingly well written, with often striking prose, multidimensional characters, and a sophisticated eye for the look and social feel of the Valley, especially as experienced by its younger inhabitants.

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Heyer, Georgette. Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle.

NY: Putnam, 1957.

Among other works, Georgette Heyer wrote nearly three dozen “Regency romances.” They have various things in common — a romance (naturally), humor, and an especially well-researched milieu — but they’re not all alike. Far from it. Some of the books, like Cotillion, are light and frothy, a sort of literary meringue. Others, like The Grand Sophie and An Infamous Army, display much deeper plot development and characters of much greater depth. With only a couple of exceptions, though, they are all very well written and vastly entertaining. In this one, Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, is pushing thirty and still single, but he knows he’s going to have to marry soon and has essentially drawn up a list of specifications. Having held the title since he was nineteen, he never had the experience of being trained into his role and has always had everything entirely his own way. In fact, his mother, the Dowager Duchess, is becoming rather worried over signs of unthinking arrogance in her son, such as the assumption that any girl to whom he proposes will, of course, accept. All he has to do is make his selection.

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Connelly, Michael. Resurrection Walk.

NY: Little, Brown, 2023.

Connelly’s “Harry Bosch” series of police procedural detective novels started in the early ’90s and Harry has aged in real time since then (and he was already a veteran cop in that first story), so after two dozen books, he’s getting pretty old and a bit fragile. He’s been struggling with bone cancer, and his young daughter is now an LAPD officer herself, so time is taking its toll on him. But he’ll be a homicide detective until the day he dies. A few years back, Connelly started a spin-off series featuring Harry’s previously unknown half-brother, Mickey Haller, known all over LA as “The Lincoln Lawyer,” and those have been pretty good, too, as their latest joint adventure demonstrates.

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