Author: Jennifer Graham

(Spiegel & Grau, 638 pages)

When your debut novel sells more than 15 million copies, spends nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list and becomes an Oscar-winning movie with a star-studded cast, what do you do for an encore?

Take your time, and go stay for a while in Peterborough.

That’s how Kathryn Stockett finally finished The Calamity Club, her second novel, which was stalled out when she went to the renowned MacDowell artist retreat in 2016 after five years of working on the book. Ten years after that stay, the novel is vexing reviewers across the country with its sheer heft. At a daunting 638 pages, this is not a book picked up lightly — some readers have gone so far as to weigh it. (It’s 2.2 pounds, according to The New York Times.)

But Stockett, and her publisher, are betting that the people who loved her first book, The Help, will be willing to invest a not-insignificant portion of their time on this new story, which revolves around an orphanage in Oxford, Mississippi, during the Great Depression. For those willing to do so, there is, indeed, a payoff. It’s a satisfyingly complex and well-plotted novel that grows more enjoyable after the first couple of hundred pages, if you can stick with it that long.

There are two central characters in this story, both immensely likeable. Meg is a spunky 11-year-old who was brought to the orphanage two years earlier after her mother disappeared and is being mistreated by a malevolent director. Birdie is a 24-year-old spinster, “churchy and chinless,” who lives with her mother and grandmother in circumstances that are fast dissolving into insolvency.

At first Meg and Birdie have nothing in common except their status as first-person narrators, but their lives will intersect when Birdie travels to Oxford for the uncomfortable task of asking her younger, prettier sister (who’d married a wealthy banker) to give her money so the family won’t lose their house for having not paid the taxes on it for nearly two years.

Birdie’s sister, Frances, is neither villain nor ally. She’s a woman who’s been told she’s beautiful so much that she has come to occupy another, ethereal plain of existence, and she is oblivious to the problems that Birdie can see in her marriage, problems that soon threaten her luxurious existence and that of her distinguished widowed mother-in-law, with whom Frances and her husband live. (In shades of The Help, the Tartt family employs two Black women who run the household, Picador and Polly.)

Getting money out of Frances and her husband is no small task, and Birdie has to move into the house for a while. It’s during this stay that she encounters and befriends Meg, while helping the orphanage balance its books. Although the time they spend together is brief, this connection spins the narrative in unexpected ways, as the young girl and the young woman seek to escape the difficult circumstances of their lives.

For Meg, it’s not just the mistreatment that she is suffering at the orphanage, where she is banished each day to a dank room where mold is blooming. She’s also haunted by the sudden disappearance of her mother, who, as we learn from her memories, had been a devoted and joyful parent right up to the day when she never came home. She dreams of reuniting with her mother, even as she dreams of being adopted. But Meg’s circumstances are more complicated than the child knows, and there are people conspiring to keep her from the happy ending of which she dreams.

Meanwhile, a devastating sequence of events causes Birdie to stay with her sister months longer than she anticipated, and in a major plot twist, she winds up conspiring with the unlikeliest of characters in order to keep Frances and Mrs. Tartt in their house as financial ruin threatens to overtake them.
Like The Help, Stockett’s second novel is threaded with history, much of it disturbing, such as the practice at the time for states to sterilize people, mostly women, that they have declared “feeble minded,” a criterion that included not only disabled people but those addicted to alcohol and those deemed promiscuous. “Feeble-mindedness” was considered hereditary, and sterilization was the solution, according to Mississippi and more than two dozen other states with such laws on the books.

Stockett also writes realistically of what it was like to live during the Depression years in the deep South, and in Mississippi specifically, where in one year, more than a quarter of homes were seized for nonpayment of taxes. Few were exempt from hardship, and Birdie’s struggle to retain hope and dignity in light of odds stacked overwhelmingly against her reflect the situation of many other families, both then and now.

Did this novel need to be 600 pages? Definitely not, and The Calamity Club reminds me of a favorite saying of my mother: Work expands to fill the time. And Stockett had a lot of time to write this novel.

More debatable is whether Stockett needed to give Birdie a love interest, which felt formulaic from the moment this person was introduced. It may be what Hollywood wanted, but it’s not what this character needed. But that’s a quibble, and the fact is that Stockett kept me interested in what happens to these characters throughout all 2.2 pounds of this book, which was no small task. But I finished it thinking of Apollo Creed’s immortal words to Rocky Balboa, “Ain’t gonna be no rematch.”

Ain’t gonna be no sequel. Six hundred-plus pages is plenty, thank you very much. A

Featured Photo: The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett

(W.W. Norton & Co., 326 pages)

Other than Rome, is there any ancient civilization that commands more attention than Sparta?

Sparta remains front and center in the popular imagination in part because of the Spartan Race franchise, headquartered in Vermont, as well as the many books and films about the culture, to include Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. And most everyone who is well-read knows the adjective “Spartan” and has an opinion about whether it should be capitalized.

But the popular view of Sparta is largely informed by myth, which is why historians talk about “the Spartan mirage.” British historian Andrew Bayliss proposes to correct the record in Sparta, The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower.

Although Sparta’s glory days began two centuries earlier, the first surviving history was written in the fifth century BCE. Little was written by actual citizens of Sparta, and even then, that’s “a few hundred lines of verse,” Bayliss writes. How then, did Sparta become so important that it was seen as aspirational by a diverse collection of thinkers, including Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Robespierre and even Samuel Adams, who wanted the United States to become “the Christian Sparta”?

Part of the answer appears to be selective memory because, as Bayliss explains, we have cherry-picked the good of Spartan culture and conveniently excised the abhorrent, such as the practice of throwing prisoners and babies deemed inferior off a cliff and the violent enslavement of “helots” in order to enable the lifestyle of the citizens of Sparta — who were called Spartiates, by the way, not Spartans. (Bayliss uses the terms interchangeably, however.)

Slavery was common at the time, even in Athens, where historians believe there were about 80,000 enslaved people in the fifth century BCE.

“What singled the Spartans out was the ruthlessness with which they conquered and enslaved their fellow Greeks, in order to ensure that each of their own citizens possessed a captive, self-producing human workforce,” Bayliss writes.

The official citizenry of Sparta, determined by their land holdings, did not work at all, at least not in order to sustain themselves and their families. They worked on their bodies, readying themselves for battle and for their famed athletic games. The women, too, participated in athletic games and were required to maintain a high level of fitness, although they were not required to serve in the military. (Women were also allowed to inherit and own land in Sparta, unusual for their time; Bayliss points out that this wasn’t allowed in Britain until 1870.)

Theirs was a communal lifestyle, with everyone required to gather together for meals in the evening, in which the main feature was “unbaked barley burgers” and something called “black broth,” which scholars believe was a liquid derived by boiling pork in salt and blood. “The broth was so unpleasant that a visitor … remarked that he no longer considered the Spartans to be brave after trying their food, because ‘anyone in their right mind would prefer to die ten thousand times than share such a poor living.’”

For the Spartiates, death on the battlefield was considered a privilege, an idea that was inculcated from childhood, and one that enabled the battles that have become legendary, including the “Battle of the Champions” in which 300 elite warriors of Sparta fought an equal number of warriors from the region of Argos. All but three died — two from Argos and one Spartiate; the Spartan warrior later committed suicide because he was ashamed for having survived.

Interestingly, Spartan men who died in battle were the only citizens permitted gravestones, and the ones that have been found are reminiscent of the uniform graves at Arlington National Cemetery: small, identical markers engraved with the name of the warrior and the words en polemoi, “in war.”

In their ideals and practices, Spartan culture lingers in modernity; “Come and take them,” the popular retort of gun enthusiasts, is said to have originated with Leonidas, the Spartan king who died with his men at Battle of Thermopylae, depicted in the 2006 film 300.

Despite their fierceness, the Spartiates were a superstitious people who thought that the devastating earthquake in the fourth century BCE was punishment sent by the god Poseidon. “A tremor at the wrong time would halt a Spartan army in its tracks, in the belief that the god was expressing his displeasure at the mission.”

And yet their government was oddly predictive of modern democracies. Sparta had two kings, from separate families, and a ruling council of elders composed of 28 citizens over the age of 60. The system, Bayliss writes, provided stability and worked to cancel out “the excesses” of the leaders, much like the American system of government is supposed to do. Citizens of Sparta could vote on bills the council had put worth, although the value of this seems dubious since the Sparta constitution said, “If the people choose crookedly, the kings and elders shall set it aside.”

The Spartan Race philosophy is that people become “unbreakable” by doing hard things. Unfortunately, the Spartans proved not to be unbreakable themselves; like Rome, they had a rise and fall, and the fall of Sparta came relatively fast, in less than three months. Their power, too, proved to be “illustory,” Bayliss writes. “Their alliance system gave the impression — both to insiders and onlookers — that Sparta could dominate the Greek-speaking world for generations, and even allowed them to think that they might be capable of taking on and conquering the Persians. In fact, none of this was really possible, because there were simply too few Spartans.”

In short, they overextended themselves, and not for a noble cause.

“The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own — and particularly the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased,” Bayliss says.

Although Sparta is superbly researched, it often feels like required reading for a history class. One must be very interested in Sparta, its enemies and the Peloponnesian War to remain engrossed throughout. Fortunately for Bayliss, a good many people are. For everyone else, there is a lasting takeaway: Choose your heroes wisely. B-

Featured Photo: Sparta, by Andrew Bayliss

(Simon Six, 226 pages)

Aliens are having a moment.

Of course, it could be argued that they’ve been having a moment since 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill, a Portsmouth couple on their way home after visiting Canada, said they encountered a mysterious disc-shaped aircraft near Franconia. Their story is among the most famous of so-called alien abductions.

The Hills, however, appear only briefly in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Take Me To Your Leader, a semi-serious handbook of alien adventures. Capitalizing on the current interest in all things extraterrestrial, driven in part by the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day and the slow drip of formerly classified UAP [formerly known as UFO] videos coming from the government, the book proposes to tell us how to interact with our new alien friends (or overlords) when they come.

Tyson, according to his publisher, is America’s favorite astrophysicist, so you might think he would bring a serious, scholarly bent to the subject. You would be wrong. The book, at times, is more like a BuzzFeed reporter ran a couple of questions about aliens through Claude, and out came this manuscript.

Tyson begins by talking about aliens in popular culture. There have been a lot of aliens in movies and TV shows, probably more than you recall. And as he recounts them, Tyson wonders why they are always so human-looking and predictable, with a few exceptions, like Project Hail Mary.

“Once, just once, I want to see a gray Alien portrayed with a full head of coiffed hair,” he writes.

Humans pride ourselves on our intelligence and imagination, but we probably shouldn’t. Voltaire conceived of aliens 23 miles tall, and astronomer Frank Drake of aliens the size of a pinhead, and Tyson offers 12 archetypes of aliens, but few of us go beyond little green men.

That may be because, as Tyson points out, there is just 2 percent of DNA that separates us from the chimpanzee. He invites us to consider the differences in capabilities between humans and chimps, and then to consider aliens that are 2 percent more advanced than us — or 20 percent. “For all we know, they created Earth as a literal aquarium-terrarium for their own amusement,” as we do with fish, turtles and ants. “Do they know we built their domicile? Do they know we are looking in on them through transparent walls? Do they care?”

And of course, building a world like ours, or the one in The Matrix, is “nothing that a smart Alien couldn’t accomplish in an afternoon.”

Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, brings a wrecking ball to every commonly held notion about extraterrestrials. In a chapter on what alien technology would look like, he concludes that “smooth, rotating flying saucers are not a thing,” because the staid, steady laws of physics are literally universal. He goes on to explore what’s known as Fermi’s Paradox (named for the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi), the conundrum presented by the probability that life exists outside our planet and the lack of actual evidence for it. That lack of evidence should relieve us, given our vast vulnerabilities. As Tyson notes, “The world’s fastest human, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, would be easily caught and eaten by a half dozen different species of mammal predators.” That said, it could also be the case that the evidence for aliens is just not apparent to mere mortals: “We are three-dimensional creatures. Nothing to stop an Alien from living in four or five or more dimensions. If they never deigned to pass through our measly three dimensions, we would never know they were there,” Tyson writes.

So where does America’s favorite astrophysicist stand on all of this? Do aliens exist or not? In his conclusion, Tyson offers his response to an invitation he received to inspect purportedly alien mummies recovered in Peru. In declining, he encouraged the team to publish their research in a peer-reviewed journal and offer samples of the specimens to scientists for analysis. “We do this for findings much less extraordinary than what you have presented. … So it will never be about what I think, it’s about the quality of the data and its verification.” (Reviewer’s note: Scientists later said the “mummies” were dolls made with human bones.)

So until there is a peer-reviewed study of alien remains, he says, “Alien visitations will remain a belief system like any other.”

It’s notable that throughout Take Me To Your Leader Tyson says things like, “Nobody knows how or why that happened.” I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or disturbing that astrophysicists still know so little about the universe, but rest assured, Tyson knows much more than most of us.

Regardless, when it comes to aliens and alien culture, this is a thin and often frothy take on the subject. You can do better with Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s The Ghost Lab, published last year. C —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Take Me To Your Leader, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Grand Central Publishing, 389 pages

By her admission, Ember Agni was a weird kid. For fun, she liked to bury things in her backyard and then dig them up over time to analyze the stages of decomposition. Like other children, she had a “penchant for dirt,” but her play had a purpose: observing history in the process of being made.

So of course she became an archeologist, but a frustrated one. When we meet Ember in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, she is sleepwalking through her life: stuck teaching faceless students at a university where she’d intended to work for only a few years before returning to the field; stuck in a marriage to a man whose interests and goals seem to grow more distant from hers every day.

But as Ember begins a new semester, a letter arrives from a former student. It informs Ember that the writer, named Ish, has found an artifact, and “It’s as we hoped. Intact. Good condition. A few thousand years? It’s hard to pinpoint. Two? Three?”

And with that, Ember’s world is upended, as the missive tantalizingly dangles a different life, one in which she might finally be able to get funding for an archaeological dig that frees her from the drudgework of the university and from her increasingly tense marriage.

The dig, she believes, has the potential to explode existing narratives about the origins of humanity, which is not a small thing. And yet, also not a small thing, I struggled mightily to care.

That’s because Ember is the worst kind of protagonist: the unlikeable one. We’re told early on that she is “not well liked at the university. By anyone: students or faculty or administrators.” She is hard on her assistant, hard on her husband, hard generally; in part because she’s miserable because of decisions she has made, in part because of her difficult single mother, now dead, “embittered, vain, endlessly critical Ola, who had never hesitated to remind her daughter how costly being a parent was.”

That parenting helped turn Ember into someone who was ambivalent about being a parent herself, which is a problem because her husband, Jerome, finds his joy on the homefront. The difference between the two of them is illustrated by the care he puts into a garden in their backyard; she hasn’t so much looked at it in months. Jerome wants children; Ember wants professional success. She’d made that clear when they met, but he’d thought she would change. To Ember, it is Jerome who is changing. He had, she observes, “become increasingly rigid over the years. Unimaginative. Boring, in fact. By association, she was becoming boring also, as if his desire for the banality of procreation and home improvements and a back garden was leaking into their union, and further, into her.”

The arrival of the artifact that Ish found, however, sends Ember charging down a new path of discovery, one that will reunite her with an important woman from her past and raise questions about her culture’s beliefs about what the societies that came before them. To her this dig is everything, andwe realize early on that the title of the books, Ruins, represents not just Ember’s professional focus but also other aspects of her life.There is nothing subtle about this.

More subtle is the gradual unpacking of mysteries — minor ones, such as the nature of Ember’s relationship with Ish, and major ones, such as the genesis of the “Pre-Crisis” civilization and a “Thermal Epoch” that has occurred. The novel is intentionally vague about where and when it is set; Ember lives in a “Commonwealth” that is most certainly not Massachusetts. And indeed, what we know about Ember’s society we are invited to doubt: An excerpt from her unpublished manuscript says, “The endurance of any given historical narrative is never a function of its factual accuracy but rather, of its utility to those who perpetuate it.”

As is noted in every podcast and article about Ruins, this is a novel that suffers from spoilers, making it difficult to talk about the plotting in detail. Suffice it to say that Brooks-Dalton, whose previous novels include The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight (the basis for the film The Midnight Sky), has described Ember as a “polarizing” woman and the novel as “a rumination on how we uncover, interpret, and teach about ancient civilizations.” Those naturally interested in such things may find it fascinating. For those of us who aren’t, Ruins presents a challenge to remain engaged, even with a consciousness-altering plot twist. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Meet Henry Parsons — although he’d rather you not.

Henry is socially awkward and reticent; he’s most comfortable in the third-floor New York apartment he shares with a roommate he’d found on Craigslist and two betta fish. He likes “sitting on his own frayed, moss-green couch, in the company of familiar books and plates and towels; they gave him a sense of belonging. Life anywhere else in the city required breathing borrowed air, occupying temporary space, infringing on someone else’s territory.”

So the conflict-averse Henry moves cautiously about his life, going to work, seeing a therapist every week, trying to recover from a friendly break-up three years ago. And things are mostly fine until animals start talking to him.

That might be nice if the animals were friendly, like the woodland creatures who helped Snow White clean the Seven Dwarfs’ kitchen. But the animals talking to Henry in Robert Isaac’s It’s Hard to be an Animal are wicked snarky, with a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush. Also, they seem to hate everybody.

The first time it happens, Henry is in Central Park on a blind coffee date arranged by a coworker. Molly Bent, his date, is admiring a bird, which Henry knows is a magnolia warbler, when it unleashes a torrent of profanities at the pair. But only Henry can hear.

Later, when he goes home, he watches in bewilderment as the two betta fish hurl Shakespearean insults at one another. (Example: “Malodorous and repugnant though you be, I am indebted to you for one thing: your cursed, unenviable existence serves as a sobering corrective to my own baser instincts.”)

After a couple of dogs being walked mock a woman who petted one of them, Henry fears he is losing his sanity. The therapist, who always keeps Henry waiting, is of no help at all. But before Henry has a chance to fully process what is happening, a new problem arises: he learns — from a couple of subway rats — that bodies are being dragged into a tunnel below the subway and left there to rot. “Maybe it was all rat bravado,” he thinks. But maybe not.

Meanwhile, an elderly neighbor that Henry is friendly with is hospitalized and asks Henry to pick up her crotchety Pomeranian, who is at the vet. This is an alarming development — not only will it take Henry away from a planned lunch date with Molly, but it will expose him to a disturbing number of animal conversations, as will a later visit to a dog park in the city.

It all sounds quite absurd, but surprisingly this is a novel with unexpected heart, revealed early on, when Henry is asked to watch the young daughter of a co-worker for a few minutes and the two instantly develop a rapport. Henry, we quickly realize, isn’t quite as maladapted for the world as he initially seems.

Nor is Molly, the human sprite who is making Henry’s heart flutter with hope. She is an effervescent soul who works at an anti-poverty nonprofit and, like Henry, has conversational skills above her paygrade. Their banter is as delightful as the baleful betta fish.

Talking animals isn’t a new literary device — hail, Charlotte — but in Isaacs’ hands, these events feel fresh and whimsical, particularly since most of the animals here are full-on trash talkers, contemptuous of the humans that surround them.

“Although he’d grown up with no pets of his own, due to parental allergies, Henry had always accepted as an uplifting, feel-good truth that humans had ‘befriended’ certain animals thousands of years ago, brought them into their warm, dry homes for comfort and companionship, fed and sheltered and doted on them. … Did all our fellow creatures hate us? Every last one of them?”

This is the first novel by Robert Isaacs, who the publisher notes “in his youth supported himself as a juggler and unicyclist on the streets of San Francisco” and went on to become a Grammy-nominated musician.

Whatever his life experiences, they prepared him well for fiction, and It’s Hard to be an Animal is both charming and witty, despite the dark mystery at the center of it. Will Henry and Molly become a couple and survive a relationship-threatening event? Will they survive an REI-outfitted excursion in an underground tunnel looking for the corpses which the rats foretold? How did the corpses get there? Is Henry having a psychotic breakdown? Is he really hearing voices at all? And most importantly, what will happen to the warring betta fish, who are the breakout stars of this ridiculously endearing show?

And we haven’t even talked about Henry’s Eastern European roommate whose burgeoning English vocabulary is informed by a bathroom thesaurus and doesn’t always come across the way he intends. Or Gracie, the Pomarian, whose philosophical observations about the world differ sharply from those of the other animals that Henry hears.

Some books you don’t want to end because they are absorbing; some, because you love the characters so much. It’s Hard to Be An Animal achieves both. A+

Featured Photo: It’s Hard to be an Animal, by Robert Isaacs

(Alfred A. Knopf, 391 pages)

One of the stranger things to emerge from the internet is the tradwife influencer, a woman who uses the most modern of technology to promote a lifestyle that is decades or even centuries old.

Natalie Heller Mills is that woman, though the fictional creation of Caro Claire Burke’s soon-to-be-blockbuster novel Yesteryear. Think Ballerina Farm or Nara Smith or any other influencer with millions of followers who makes her own butter in which to fry eggs that she has collected from her yard in a flowing dress. Then give her an affable, aimless husband who is part of a political dynasty, a $5 million infusion in cash and a staff. It’s a novel made for our time, which is why Amazon has already acquired the film rights.

Burke brings a cynical eye to the enterprise, not so different from the “Angry Women” in the Instagram comments that Natalie is always complaining about. A blurb on the book cover calls it a “bold and biting satire,” but it’s darker than that, and Yesteryear tests how long a reader is willing to stick with a narrator who is deeply unlikeable.

When we meet Natalie, on “the last day of the life I imagined for myself,” she is living her best life, or at least the best life she presents to the world, on a 500-acre farm in Idaho, where she lives with her husband, Caleb, and five improbably named children: Clementine, Stetson, Samuel, Jessa and Junebug. Other than giving birth, she does very little mothering. Or farming. Two nannies who share small quarters in a barn do the child care and homeschooling, while Natalie mostly putters about being filmed while she does things like make sourdough boules with herbs positioned in the shape of a Nativity scene.

Natalie’s followers on social media love her and hate her. She mostly hates them. “It was a symbiotic relationship. I was a shark, and they were five million tiny fish, nipping at the nutrients along my belly,” she observes. “Little idiots. They were desperate to eat me. They had no idea I was the one who was keeping them alive.”

She built a profitable business, follower by follower, by showing them carefully curated images of her idyllic life and then selling them things in her online store. She has no moral qualms about putting her kids out into the world on social media, “Their best selves preserved inside the four walls of my phone like little bugs preserved in amber.”

But there are signs that things aren’t quite what they seem to be. She’s estranged from her sister, who also has five kids, and is mildly obsessed with the career path of her college roommate, Reena, even while having contempt for the life Reena has chosen. Clementine, turning 13, suddenly doesn’t want to be photographed. Her producer and videographer of two years has suddenly given notice, leaving a cryptic note that says, “I don’t think you’re a bad person. I think you’re just confused.” There are allegations of assault and adultery.

As bad as all that is, nothing is as bad as Natalie waking up one morning, freezing cold, in her house that isn’t her house anymore but is a rough cabin with no modern amenities, showing the date as 1855. In this house, she has a husband, also named Caleb, and four children, who look somewhat like hers but aren’t. But they all seem to think she is their mother.

When Caleb and Natalie had moved into the ranch they called Yesteryear, they’d spent untold money gutting it of modern renovations and making it look old but in a luxurious way: It had modern kitchen appliances but all hidden from view, a clawfoot tub “dripping in natural light” and a $30,000 chicken coop with doors that open and shut automatically. This was pioneer living, the kind that her great-great-grandparents lived. Terrified, she tries to flee, but finds this new version of her husband has turned abusive.

From there, we go back and forth into Natalie’s old life, and Natalie’s new life, slowly learning how the magical, fictional Yesteryear world came to be, and trying to figure out, with Natalie, how and why she came to be in this new, horrible place. Is it a reality show that she’s been deposited in without her consent? Is she going mad or being drugged? Which world is real?

It is a long time getting to the answers; Burke has shrewdly plotted this corn maze, although she overplays her hand with symbolism that is rich with contempt for religious zeal. Natalie was raised by a religious woman, and she makes a show of piety herself in ways that at times seem overly calculated. In one memorable line, she muses, shockingly, that Mary Magdalene was a woman who understood her assignment. It’s a line that will thrill the secular elites, but perhaps not land so well in the deep South. Then again, as we learn from the opening pages, Natalie is not meant to win our hearts, but to mess with our heads.

This is not a book that will warm your heart in any way, but it will keep you engrossed as it spins you every which way like a clothes dryer (which you will appreciate all the more for having spent some time in Natalie’s 1855 world). I closed the book wanting to shake it off like a bad dream. Will I watch the movie, which Anne Hathaway has already signed on to? Absolutely, because once she is in your head, Natalie will not easily leave. She’s not the Hannibal Lecter of tradwives, but she’s definitely no Ballerina Farm either — or rather let’s hope Ballerina Farm is no Natalie Heller Mills. A

Featured Photo: Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke