Category: Books

(Flatiron, 283 pages)

Two years ago Dr. Sasha Hamdani filmed a TED talk in Kansas City on the subject “How to Hack Your Brain for Better Focus.” A psychiatrist who was diagnosed with ADHD in childhood, Hamdani was so nervous about the presentation and how it would be received that she ran out of the room after finishing, heart racing, one of her shoes coming off. “In my head, there was a relentless ticker tape that read: You sounded like an idiot. … Everything felt urgent. I had to get out of there.” To this day, she hasn’t been able to bring herself to watch the whole speech in full.

Hamdani confesses this and a whole lot more in Too Sensitive, her prescription for recovery for anyone who has ever been told they should toughen up. She comes to the subject by way of personal experience. In childhood, she realized that she seemed to take things much harder than other people, a condition that followed her into medical school, where her tendency to cry made it especially difficult to work in her intended field: pediatric intensive care. When an attending physician finally told her, “You can’t do this for a month, let alone the rest of your life,” Hamdani realized her boss was right and asked herself “What specialty can I cry in?” That’s how she came to be a psychiatrist looking for ways to help herself and other people who have repeatedly been told they are “too sensitive.”

Hamdani believes she has “rejection sensitive dysphoria,” or RSD, a condition that is not recognized as a clinical diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but is widely considered a deviation in “how the brain anticipates, perceives and stores emotional pain.” It is, Hamdani says, most common in people with ADHD but can exist outside of that diagnosis. It’s a kind of emotional dysfunction that can grow worse over time, even causing people to experience physical pain. Hamdani argues that the condition is not a personal failing, but a sign of certain parts of the brain overcompensating to try to keep us safe — “the nervous system working overtime to protect you” is how she describes it.

Cynics might be inclined to call this “snowflake syndrome” and will certainly roll their eyes at Hamdani’s promise to keep readers emotionally safe with “clean fonts, shorter sections, and plenty of white space” to keep them from feeling overwhelmed while reading her book. “Each section focuses on one main idea at a time so the material feels manageable, especially when the topic is emotionally heavy,” she writes, adding, “this book respects your emotional limits.”

It does not, however, respect our intellect.

While Hamdani’s experience with excessive sensitivity is one familiar to many of us, particularly young adults wracked with anxiety, she has turned what could have been a useful magazine article into a highly repetitive book that is, at times, highly annoying. It begins well, and ends badly, like that season-opening Patriots game in Seattle.

RSD, she explains, is the result of neurobiological, genetic and environmental factors; in short, you can blame your body, your parents and job, or any combination of the above. It is the result of dysregulation in two important parts of the brain — the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. “This neurocircuitry becomes overly responsive to social cues, misinterpreting them as threats.” This is compounded when a person has a history of bullying, trauma or chronic criticism, Hamdani says. As a result, “the brain becomes primed to detect rejection even where none exists, triggering the same physiological response as actual danger.”

The evolutionary reasons for this are well-established. For much of human history, our continued existence depended on strong social bonds. Without a tribe, it was almost impossible to survive. “Being excluded wasn’t just emotionally painful; it could mean starving, being attacked, or failing to reproduce.” Hamdani writes. “That is why rejection activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical injury.” Researchers have found that the region of the brain that processes physical pain (the anterior cingulate cortex) responds to rejection by a friend or a lover the same way that it responds to a physical wound. That’s true for all of us, to varying extents, but in people with RSD, Hamdani says, the response is heightened, and when others tell us to “deal with it” or “toughen up,” it creates a cycle of shame and self-blame, making the sufferer feel even worse.

Hamdani offers a test of 25 questions in order for us to self-diagnose our own RSD, although it seems more like one of those Captcha “Are you human?” tests. The questions include “Do you frequently feel anxious or upset when you think others might not like you?” and “Do you feel a deep sense of inadequacy or failure when someone expresses disappointment in you?” (My own score might make her wonder how I even get out of bed in the morning, let alone leave the house.)

She then offers help in the form of a “Calm Your Mind toolkit,” using science-backed strategies from cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy and other forms of therapy employed in mental-health treatment. It is here that the structure of the book begins to work against us. For the next 184 pages Hamdani presents the myriad challenges that people with RSD face, from repeated negative thoughts to catastrophizing to being emotionally devastated or paralyzed from ghosting, criticism or even something as minor as a text that goes unanswered. The strategies she offers are at times physical (movement, like a brief round of jumping jacks, or taking “three slow grounding breaths” as a way to tell your amygdala to settle down); other times, mental (“think of five things you can touch, four things you can see, and so forth).

And there are an exhausting number of questions that she wants us to ponder, many of which are anxiety-inducing in themselves. (“Think of a time recently when you felt invisible or unappreciated … Think of the last time you felt triggered by your appearance … Think back to the last mistake you spun out about.”)

Hamdani wants us to realize how often negative feelings have more to do with the past than the present, and to cut ourselves some slack by recognizing that we are not the sum of an overreactive part of our brain the size of a shelled peanut. She wants us to know how to tell that brain, “You are safe. You can come down from high alert.” There is value here, for sensitive people and people who love them, and kudos to Hamdani’s insistence that difficult relationships, especially those with family members, can be worked through instead of cut off altogether. C+

Featured Photo: Too Sensitive, by Sasha Hamdani

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 270 pages)

When I was a kid, each October I scoured the library shelves, looking for children’s books about Halloween, like the new one by LeBron James. It was part of the fun of the spooky season. So it’s delightful to find grown-up Halloween fare, like Micaiah Johnson’s The Unhaunting.

Described by one writer as a cross between the work of Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison, The Unhaunting signals that this is not your traditional fare with its cover illustration: a spooky-looking house surrounded by creatures that look like bats until you realize they are butterflies — which Johnson later reveals to be moths. The Addams Family this is not. But it’s a genuinely spooky tale about a haunted house, with complex underlying themes (“There is an undercurrent in this book cautioning us to be careful about making a home in institutions or people that love you for the wrong reasons,” the author says in the acknowledgments).

“A house, itself, is nothing. It’s not a shelter until it is sheltering someone. Not a home until it is digesting a family. It is an empty theoretical. A house is a house fire, waiting for its match. A house is a ghost story, waiting for its death,” the novel begins.

The house in The Unhaunting is a two-story Civil-War era home with aged carpet the color of wine, bizarrely wallpapered throughout with scenes of duck hunting. The house has been left to Avery Abernathy after the death of a cousin, and he has convinced his best friend since childhood, Shantell, to move there with him to fix it up.

Avery and Shantell, despite their close bond, couldn’t be more different. Avery comes from money and enjoys a worldview informed by that. Shantell’s worldview is informed by loss. Her father died in military service, her brother was killed by police, and her mother died by suicide. She suffers from anxiety and agoraphobia. She can’t imagine anyone leaving her a whole house: “For Shantell, death had meant debt. Her father’s death had cost them their house in the city, and her mother’s funeral had taken two years to pay off. Imagine getting money when you lose someone. She’d be a millionaire.”

Avery has his own anxieties, including a fear of heights and a complicated relationship with his often unpleasant and sometimes cruel brother, Tobias. But Tobias is a contractor, and so he, too, has been invited to help renovate the house.

As the trio move in and start working on the house, it becomes clear that the house is quite strange and possibly home to one or more ghosts. It has an attic with no visible entry point. Markings on the wall that indicate children’s growth have an unexplained date related to Avery. And a first-person voice that occasionally addresses the reader appears not to be a friendly Casper-like presence but something much more sinister — if we can trust it. (“I’m not used to telling the truth,” the voice says at one point.)

Whatever the being is — it will be a while before its provenance becomes clear — it is evil and smart. Reflecting on Tobias, it says, “There was a time when he would have been my favorite. I’ve always found use for a blunt instrument, and a person with calloused knuckles attached to a damaged heart is capable of nearly anything. But these days I crave encounters more satisfying than ending lives…. Murder is an unsatisfying harvest. It only happens once. Conversion is a bit better; they kill themselves in little ways a million times before the end.”

The appearance of what seems to be a ghost and the disappearance of a swarm of moths that were at the house when Shantell and Avery first arrived don’t drive them away, however. A local tour guide tells them cryptically, “Nothing bad ever happens in the big house,” which seems oddly enough to be true. The old house and its inhabitants seemed to have escaped troubles that had plagued others in the town; even its walls are oddly unmarked under all the wallpaper. Yet when Avery’s girlfriend, Emily, arrives, she remarks, “Oh wow. You weren’t lying about the ghosts. This place is … heavy.”

It is heavy not only with what is happening in real time but what has taken place in the past. We realize that the otherworldly presence has been watching Shantell since long before the day she showed up at the house, that it is obsessed with her, and that the ghosts of slavery still hang over the region. The mystery of the house, as is gradually revealed, is one that was created by design.

“No one comes to a ghost story looking for survivors,” the being that is the narrator says at one point. Similarly, don’t look to a haunted house for a happy ending, but in this case, at least there’s a satisfying one. B+

Featured Photo: The Unhaunting, by Micaiah Johnson

(HarperOne, 320 pages)

The business of burying a loved one is much different in Greece than in America. Because of the country’s size, there isn’t enough land to bury everyone, and so people typically rent grave sites for a few years, just long enough to allow for the decomposition of the body. Then, the bones are exhumed and interred in a building called a charnel house.

The writer s.e. smith grew up in Greece and had a father who thought a visit to a charnel house was a good way to pass time with a child.

“The ossuary was a tumble of boxes, some of which were actively breaking open or losing their plaques, decorated with moss and small plants if they were close to the entrance, green tendrils yearning for the sun,” smith writes. “It had a dark, earthy scent, thick under your tongue, an old-bone smell that I sometimes catch on the wind thousands of miles and decades away.”

Such is the promising beginning to All My Dead Cats and Other Losses, a meditation on“practicing good grief in a culture that fears mourning.” A lifelong lover of cats, the author frames the book around the instructive passing of an eclectic assortment of cats, then uses each story as a springboard to investigate some aspect of death, American style. “Each unique death told me something about myself and the culture I live in, even as it felt like the world passed me by, missing the moment,” smith writes.

There was, for example, Sofie the Sofa Cat, smith’s first cat, who became an important part of the author’s childhood after their parents separated, “becoming a constant in an inconstant life.” Sofie was hit by a car one day while smith was at school, and their father inexplicably gave the cat’s corpse to the driver who hit her for burial, which denied the chance for ceremony and closure. “Sofie was simply there in the morning and gone in the afternoon, but not gone in a definitive way that I could see and feel.”

From there, smith goes on to discuss, with reporting and interviews with various people, how children grieve and the ways in which we fail them by insulating them from death. “You do not forget your first dead body — human or animal — and the sense of absence that it projects, the spark of whatever made it alive gone, leaving something inert and somehow smaller than it was before. At any age it’s a jarring event. Does that mean it is one that should be avoided, shrouded in mystique? Or is it a moment in which children should be invited to participate — if they want — to ground their understanding of death in something present, real, and concrete?”

The quick and unexpected death of a cat named Mr. Bell allows smith to consider how sudden deaths affect us differently from drawn-out ones — “the freak event that forever changes our lives: the riptides and falls, the heart attack while mowing the lawn, the senior cat who has a seizure after a brief period of feeling unwell.”

In this chapter, smith leans into a lecture mode only hinted at previously, noting, for example, how “medical racism” is in part to blame for higher incidence of cardiac deaths among Black Americans, and how “structural inequalities” determine which people work in dangerous jobs. Both assertions may well be true, but the digression, and other similar ones that betray the author’s political leanings, detract from the overlying theme of “we’re all on a march to the grave” and need to better support each other in times of grief. It’s a small quibble, but one that some readers will note and dislike.

Beyond that, the transitions between dead-cat anecdotes and reporting are sometimes jarring, a departure from the lyrical and memorable writing that the author is clearly capable of. Smith’s story of witnessing the euthanasia of a cat named Leila can bring you to tears, and their subsequent musing on guilt associated with a death is tender and thoughtful. “We can poke and prod the dying seemingly indefinitely, if we want. We forget, sometimes, that just because you can doesn’t mean that you should, and that what is true for you, and works for you, is not universal.”

Then, we’re suddenly talking about the Affordable Care Act and spiritualism, and then encounter a sentence that looks like it was dropped into the book by an errant Walmart drone: “Even today, experimenting with Ouija boards is a classic rite of passage.”

Is it really? Who knows? Can you get back to Leila, please?

“But I digress” is a punchline, but it is all too often a stop sign in this otherwise beautiful book.

The author also digresses in a difficult-to-read chapter on volunteering at an animal shelter, discussing animals that are put down despite the prevalence of “no kill” shelters in the United States. But smith, who preserved pieces of their dead cats in urns and memorial jewelry, does a yeoman’s job in exploring the many layers of “It’s just a cat” — the central mystery of why an animal’s death affects people the way it does.

“He was just a cat. But also, he was a whole world,” the author writes while recounting a frantic trip to the animal emergency room with a cat named Loki howling in pain. “I am not alone in feeling like a bad person, or a cold one, for being more affected by the death of an animal than that of a human.”

All My Dead Cats and Other Losses is a very good book that could have been great with a bit more time and some strategic editing. As for the absence of dogs, dog lovers, do not worry; you will find community and solace here as well. B+

Featured Photo: All My Dead Cats and Other Losses, by s.e. smith

(Avon, 496 pages)

I may have picked up Alexandra Bracken’s Immortal Rose for its gorgeous cover and pretty stenciled edges, but I stayed for the story. The romantasy follows the very common enemies-to-lovers trope, but there’s not much else that’s common about this book, from the use of scent as a source of magic to the vastly disparate cast of characters.

The book centers around Viola Lockwood, the final — and illegitimate — heir of House Rosebourne, who has inherited the family’s fairy-born gift of creating fragrances with a touch of magic that can heal or hurt, emotionally and physically. Her sense of smell is so intense that she can tell who’s approaching before she sees them and often knows if someone is lying, or what kind of person they are, based on their essence alone.

Viola is living on the streets when we meet her, forced to sell her concoctions illegally, and during a raid she’s thrown into jail with ruthless guards who have no qualms about abusing women. She’s saved, though, by a stranger: royal spymaster Hugh Thornton, Earl of Foxcourt.

This unexpected act of kindness is anything but — Hugh is the one who had her thrown into jail in the first place. King Alfred III has been poisoned, and Viola is the only person alive who can create Immortal Rose, a magical perfume that can act as an antidote to save the king. If the king dies, his throne will be overtaken by the Duke of Glenmoor, a villain — such a villain — who wants nothing more than to bring down the kingdom for his own gain. Viola begrudgingly agrees to create Immortal Rose, in exchange for her eventual freedom and the rights to her Rosebourne inheritance.

And so begins her tenuous alliance with Hugh. Viola has a fraught, violent past and has learned to take care of herself, so she wants nothing to do with a male “keeper.” Unfortunately for her, Hugh has just as much at stake in this quest, so they team up to search for the magical ingredient to make Immortal Rose, facing danger every step of the way.

As with any good romantasy, there is growing chemistry between these two “enemies,” much to Viola’s frustration. Can she trust Hugh? Does she want to?

“I could feel myself softening to the possibility of this place, to these people, to him, and there were few things more dangerous to a woman than an unguarded heart,” she thinks.

Hugh, meanwhile, is frustrated with Viola’s stubbornness and unwillingness to accept help, and also because she continues to engage with Oliver Radcliffe, her childhood friend who proposed marriage to get her out of prison. But despite his air of haughty arrogance, we see over time that he’s committed to keeping Viola safe, no matter the cost.

The book gets off to a slow start. You really have to be locked in to understand what’s going on as the Regency-era world unfolds with its complicated political system and family histories, and the mysteries start to build. I had to go back a page or two more than once, trying to identify all the pieces in a complex but very intriguing puzzle.

The pace picks up in the second half, with more action and unraveling backstories. Along with the many battles and interpersonal conflicts, we also watch Viola’s development as she tries to figure out who she is within the confines of her family history. She’s given some advice about this, an exquisitely written line spoken by Felicity, aka Fizzy, a maid at Foxcourt House (Hugh’s residence and, reluctantly, Viola’s temporary home): “The past is only a backstory, unless you allow it to wield the quill.”

Fizzy is actually a wonderful side character all around; she isn’t afraid to call Hugh out on his behavior, adding a level of comfort to Viola’s stay and revealing a more fallible and compassionate side of Hugh. Brecken gifts us with other compelling supporting characters too, like the rest of the gang of “servants” at Foxcourt House, each with a distinct personality and questionable background.

This is a character-driven story from the start; really, the magic and mysteries feel like a bonus, as do some unexpected plot twists at the end. Immortal Rose is the first in a duology, and thank god, because no book should be allowed to end the way this does without the promise of a follow-up. A-

Featured Photo: Immortal Rose by Alexandra Bracken

(MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 281 pages)

Some books take a while to grow on you; some endear themselves right from the start. The latter was my experience with Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a witty and smart crime novel with a deceivingly dull cover that does it no favors.

The protagonist is Tim, a freelance climate journalist in New York City, struggling to make ends meet by writing articles for magazines that pay by the word. He is “pathologically nonthreatening: not too tall, not too strong, not too quick, not too surprising, and not at all noticeable. Strangers were deeply unintimidated by me.”

After student-loan payments, health insurance and rent, he clears about $20,000, “enough for a weekly burrito, a monthly bender, a quarterly taxi.” When things are especially tough, as they are when we meet him, he rents out his tiny apartment for the night while he crashes on a friend’s couch.

But the night Tim is about to bunk with his friend Ces, Ces has other ideas. A brilliant eccentric whose main job is designing web pages, he’s hatched a plan to break into mini-storage units in Manhattan and steal anything of value in order to sell it. Tim is dubious but Ces has rented one of the storage units, so it’s not technically breaking and entering to enter the facility. So Tim follows along, guiltily aware that he is now, “according to the letter of the New York City Administrative Code, a misdemeanant.”

But things will get worse. And, as Tim muses, “The guilt, as with any sin, felt most acute at first occurrence. Each subsequent commission, no matter how severe, did not intensify the original guilt. Each crime alleviated it.”

Tim and Ces will part ways when they encounter a woman living in one of the storage units. Virginia has arranged her unit to lock from the inside, and she only goes outside for a few hours each night, when no one will notice her odd comings and goings.

Tim, still more journalist than thief, is intrigued and convinces Virginia to let him come in and interview her about her life, why she chose it and how she pulls it off, telling her (and himself) that it would be a great magazine story. But they become more than interviewer and subject, and together hatch a plan to pull off a much greater heist than breaking into mini-storage units. They decide to break into a data center near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and steal its most valuable data, an act they justify because of (a) the evil that technology companies perpetuate by collecting and selling our data and tracking us and (b) they are so desperate and broke.

Virginia is broke because she has chosen to take herself completely offline in order to escape from Big Tech’s all-knowing eye. She’s mastered the art of hiding not only from people but from Google, having realized that the best way to assure anonymity is to create lots of you’s. She also has acquired a lot of skills that will come in handy as she and Tim enact their plan.

Tim’s situation is more sympathetic. His financial struggles, aside from having low income in a high-cost city, are exacerbated by the fact that he is financially responsible for his sister, named Zoe, who has a genetic disease causing her to progressively lose her hearing and sight. Their parents are out of the picture, and Zoe is still able to live on her own, but both brother and sister know that at some point she is going to need full-time care.

All of this is happening in an America that is increasingly feeling the effects of a warming planet, which both Tim and Virginia refer to as “the Collapse.” Both are increasingly nihilistic, which enables them to easily make decisions that would have given others pause. They are also convinced that they can pull off the heist because of poor security in rural states. As Tim explains to Zoe, “This treasure trove is just sitting there. In giant empty warehouses surrounded by cornfields.”

Several perspective-shifting twists propel the story forward, as if a data-center heist isn’t enough to hold our attention. But the most compelling part about Cloudthief is how intelligent it is. Rich doesn’t assume that we know anything about data centers or how technology tracks us, but he explains everything in a way that is not insulting to readers. (One exception: how he uses initials to ostensibly disguise actual companies — as if we don’t know what G. and M. mean — although to be fair, the publisher’s legal team might have made that decision.) The dialogue between characters, even minor ones, is snappy and smart, and everything about the story seems thoughtful, from the contrast between mini-storage units and vast data centers, to the rich symbolism offered in a book that both Virginia and Tim treasure, a memoir by a French woman who spent 111 days in an underground cave.

And the data-center break-in, as it turns out, is but a prelude to another crime, which takes place in Boston and again, pivots the story in an unforeseen way.

Cloudthief is a story of descent, both societal and individual, and although it tries to leave us with a sense of hope, not everyone will experience it that way. Still, it’s the rare novel that will equally appeal to both women and men, and even rarer, teach you how to live in a storage unit, if that’s on your bucket list. B+

Featured Photo: Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich

(Berkley, 373 pages)

You’d never know it from the title, but Tessa Yang’s The Jellyfish Problem is a good, old-fashioned ghost story, the kind to lose yourself in on chilly weekends in October when you’re not out pumpkin spicing or leaf peeping. It’s a bit fantastical, as ghost stories usually are, and asks us to care a bit too much about an invertebrate that lacks a brain and heart. But this is a mystery/thriller informed by marine science, and we will learn about jellyfish whether we want to or not. The author, Tessa Yang, clearly intends for us to appreciate jellyfish more after reading her debut novel, but that may not be the effect.

Dr. Jo Ness is a marine biologist who has been obsessed with jellyfish since childhood, when she came across one at the beach and admired “a raw gray thing slouched on the sand like an angel’s lung dropped from heaven.” All grown up now, she worked her way into a job at a struggling aquarium where she tends jellyfish in the first, tiny stages of life while working on a book about jellyfish with her best friend — a brash South American scientist named Aldo who has a remarkable resistance to animal venom.

Jo, who always said she liked jellyfish more than people, made an exception for Aldo, but he died in a scuba accident seven months ago, and Jo is still mourning. They were diving together but became separated in poor visibility, and Jo is wracked by the sense that she was responsible for Aldo’s death.

His loss was the second blow since she finished college: The first was becoming estranged from her college best friend, Nadia, a woman with whom she thought she had the makings of a romantic relationship. But Nadia went AWOL after commencement and they haven’t spoken in 11 years. She knows nothing about Jo’s current life other than that she had been obsessed with jellyfish. Then she unexpectedly calls and tells Jo she is living on an island off the coast of Maine and that they have a “jellyfish problem.”

Nadia doesn’t offer much more information and admits she hasn’t seen the creature herself. But Jo, listless and miserable since Aldo’s death, has plenty of accrued leave and books a cross-country flight, interested not only in the mysterious jellyfish but also in the possibility of rekindling her relationship with Nadia, or at least learning why it abruptly ended.

What she finds there, however, is nothing she expected. Nadia is happily married and nowhere to be found. The jellyfish is singular, not plural. It is said to be a massive, brightly colored, luminescent creature that appears for three days at the time of the full moon and has a strange effect on the locals who see it. They regard the jellyfish as not a fascinating object of study but a literal sea monster, the kind that Jo’s Japanese mother used to tell her stories about when she was a child.

Complicating matters is the geographic isolation of Shattering Point, “800 acres of spruce forest and granite shorelines and bracing, choppy waters that deter all but the gutsiest swimmers.” Twenty-two miles off the Maine coast, the island is reachable by ferry twice a week, but only during the summer season. Other times, to get on or off the island, you have to take an air taxi or catch a ride with the mail boat, which only goes out once a week.

Even though the island relies on tourists during the summer, Jo is not universally welcomed. Some of the islanders are hostile to her, and as she tries to find Nadia and unravel the mystery of the jellyfish, which the people of Shattering Point call Clementine, there is a bitter divide about what should be done about the jellyfish. The danger is not exaggerated or imagined: People are physically affected by even seeing Clementine, and one man has to be hospitalized.

That said, Clementine is not the ghost of this story, but an apparition that Jo begins seeing, which she understands to be a yōkai, a supernatural being that her mother used to tell her about.

The relationship Jo has with her mother is one of the many layers in the story: Her father, who used serve as an intermediary of sorts between mother and daughter, is dead, and their relationship is both distant and fraught, in part because the mother is resistant to her daughter’s sexual orientation and had been hoping that Jo would marry Aldo.

Each chapter of The Jellyfish Problem begins with an excerpt of the book that Jo and Aldo were writing, which serves not only to only impart jellyfish information but also to give us a glimpse of the closeness between the two. The conversation in the document’s editing notes grows poignant over time, and Jo begins to speak to her dead friend in editing mode, as if hoping he could see it. It’s a small but smart thing that Yang does to break up a novel that can feel overly long at times, especially when the suspension of disbelief is called for repeatedly.

When the explanation of everything arrives, it is — well, let’s just go with unusual: perhaps not wholly satisfying, but consistent with the novel’s intelligent foundation and supernatural overlay. The quirkiness of the story, however, is eclipsed by the gorgeous writing. Yang has the voice of a poet and hardly a page goes by without some elegant sentence construction that makes you take note of its grace. Give her bonus points, also, for assigning a cameo role to the University of New Hampshire. Wildcats beat jellyfish every time. A

Featured Photo: The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang