Category: Books

(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

(Thomas Nelson, 352 pages)

Courtney Walsh’s newest novel, Brighter Than Before, was the right escape at the right time for me. Main character Claire is 46 (same), unexpectedly single (same) and an empty nester (same). The journey to the inevitable happy ending that awaits Claire was a balm for my soul. That’s not a spoiler — this is undeniably a happily-ever-after novel.

The book starts out a bit heavy-handed with a scene that has Claire, the jilted ex-wife, eating an absurd amount of junk food in her car while stalking her ex and his new girlfriend. Let’s just say she ends up soaking wet and the subject of a very embarrassing viral video. It all felt a little dramatic — and yet, the emotions behind the actions are so real that I can see how Claire’s actions may not be so far from reality. I personally have never resorted to stalking an ex, online or otherwise, but I hear it’s a thing.

That moment for Claire is, at least, her rock bottom, and she realizes it’s time for her to make some changes and move on. So she does, literally and figuratively. She starts by making a list of what she really wants in life (a question that her therapist asked her months prior that she couldn’t answer at the time):

“I want a job or career I love.

I want friends. Real ones.

I want to live in a new city.

I want a dog.

I want to figure out who I am — apart from a wife and a mom.

I want a place where I fit in. I want a place where I belong.

I want a hobby …

I want to do the things that scare me.”

Claire crosses off No. 3 on her list immediately, selling her house in Denver and moving to an apartment in Chicago, where she’s always wanted to live. With her daughter Minnie attending college in London and her country-club “friends” casting her aside, she has no reason not to.

Claire meets some fun, quirky people in Chicago, often thanks to her list, which encourages her to make friends, try to belong and do things that scare her — like meeting new people. She meets neighbors as well as a stranger who quickly becomes her friend after standing up for Claire in what could have been another publicly humiliating incident.

And, of course, there are some love interests as Claire navigates the new-to-her world of dating via app. Without consulting Claire, Minnie creates Claire’s profile and sets up dates for her (another change in relationship dynamics that shakes Claire’s sense of self as she ultimately gives in and allows herself to lean on her adult daughter for help). She racks up quite a few terrible dates — so real — before finding a man with a little more potential who makes her feel safe.

And then there’s Miles, who owns the apartment building Claire is living in. She pegs him as a player from the get-go as she watches women come and go from his place night after night. Somehow, though, he ends up being an ally, even joining Minnie in her attempts to jump-start her mom’s love life. Against Claire’s better judgment, she allows Miles to join her ever-growing group of new friends.

Claire also takes a leap of faith career-wise, opening a bakery with money from the house sale as her ex continuously tries to tell her she’s going to fail and he’ll figure out how to bail her out before it’s too late. And she does fail, at first, with a distracted mistake leading to some pretty gross baked goods that, of course, make quick social media news. It could be devastating — but obviously not in a happily-ever-after story, so don’t expect a big plot twist. Do, however, expect some heartwarming feels as Claire’s newfound friends step in and help.

It’s hard to be middle-aged and have your whole life turned upside down. The question is, when the dust settles, what are you going to do about it? Claire grieves, deeply, for a year, then pulls herself out of it and creates a life that is most certainly brighter than before. The story is full of hard truths but also plenty of hope for those of us who could use it. B+

Featured Photo: Brighter Than Before by Courtney Walsh

(MCD, 240 pages)

Cory Doctorow writes with a cynic’s eye about the frontiers of technology, with titles including Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, Chokepoint Capitalism and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Although he is primarily a writer of science fiction, he has opinions about how technology is changing society for the worse, and he scratches the itch to share those opinions with a popular newsletter and short books that double as grouchy sermons. Last year’s Enshittification is a good example: It’s about “why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.”

He’s back with something that reads like a sequel and brings to mind the old meme about honey badgers that don’t care. Doctorow doesn’t care if the titans of AI don’t like him. He doesn’t care if his clunky, insider-trading title repels potential readers. He doesn’t care if they sit, blinking, while he expounds on the minutiae of tech. He has stuff to get off chest.

For starters, the hype surrounding AI. Doctorow sees it as driven by “growth” businesses (meaning companies like Uber and Lyft, whose worth is calculated not by their current profitability but by their forecast growth) and companies that gleefully see dollar signs in every employee they can let go. “Your boss almost certainly loves AI. Bosses will not shut up about AI,” Doctorow writes.

That’s because, according to Doctorow, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between garden-variety employers and the tech overlords, with each one feeding the other. Tech companies need hype about AI to sustain the illusion of growth, which in turn balloons their profits; once a company is no longer seen as “growing,” it becomes what is known as a “mature” company. “If you’re holding a lot of stock in a growth company, you can certainly enjoy the ride up, but you need to sleep with one eye open and one fist poised over the sell button.”

He offers Meta, circa January 2022, as an example. The company reported “less growth,” which led to a $230 billion devaluation over the next 24 hours, the largest in history. Moreover, because stock options are a large part of the compensation of tech executives, they are not just professionally but personally invested in the market’s perception that the company is growing. This is among the reasons that Doctorow believes, “Even by the standards of tech bubbles, the AI bubble is a whopper.”

The title of the book derives from the tech-bros’ use of the word “centaur,” which in Greek mythology is a creature that is half man, half horse. In the tech world (and in automation theory), a centaur is a human aided by a machine; a reverse centaur, then, according to Doctorow, is a “human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.” The “conscripted” part matters. Doctorow is no Luddite; he welcomes AI that is legitimately helpful to a human end; he has used, for example, an OpenAI technology called Whisper that can transcribe and search through downloaded audio, even though he calls the company behind Whisper “grossly overhyped and terrible.”

But there is a segment of the population who aren’t getting to choose how to use AI, but having AI foist upon them for aims that don’t sit well with Doctorow’s democratic-socialist heart. The plight of the Amazon worker comes up a lot, as does the perceived threat to the livelihood of a wide range of artists.

It’s not that the threat is entirely unsupported.

Feed a chatbot the storyline of any popular movie with a couple of key changes and it will spit out an entire screenplay in minutes. And unlike human writers, who are prone to complaining and striking and resisting changes ordered by producers and directors, the chatbot is serenely compliant. But Doctorow explains why the AI product is usually so unsatisfying: The product of any artist — from a novel to a sculpture to a symphony — is the physical representation of a “big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling” in the artist’s mind, an idea the artist wants to convey. AI, on the other hand, “has no feelings, so it has no feelings to transmit,” and that hollowness comes through in the finished product.

All that said, AI is in its infancy and will improve, and does improve, according to the complexity of prompts it is given. And Doctorow writes all this cognizant that when photography emerged there were people who said it was hollow when compared to a painting, as was the reproduction of sound when compared to a live musical performance. (He notes that the famous composer John Philip Sousa was enraged when people started recording his music and distributing it; he warned about the “menace of mechanical music” and complained to Congress, “Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day.”)

And yet the problem is not so much that AI is flawed and soulless as it is that AI is being manipulated by capitalistic cartels, Doctorow believes, and so The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is very much a socialist manifesto that may not sit well with some whose political ideology runs counter to his. But there is a strong and growing backlash to AI even among fervent capitalists, so there will be an appetite for his recommended solutions “to strike at the source of AI’s power” by raging against the AI machine and its bitter, everyday fruits, like surveillance pricing.

Doctorow is a compelling writer and one of the most interesting thinkers in the world of technology, as such, worth paying attention to as we figure out what’s happening around us, and to us, as AI proliferates. In a world of reverse centaurs, be a centaur, is his message du jour. B+

Featured Photo: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, by Cory Doctorow

(Alfred A. Knopf, 234 pages)

Richard Russo labors in the shadow of another Maine novelist who shall go unnamed. He’s the only one of the two who has won a Pulitzer Prize, which Russo was awarded in 2002 for Empire Falls, a story about people caught in the grip of an economically struggling town in Maine.

Russo’s latest, Under the Falls, has a similar theme, but with a different origin story. He began writing with the intention of its being a TV series, but the project fell apart during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, and so he recast it as a novel — lucky for us. The book, as they say, is a page turner, a sophisticated one that explores the limits and obligations of childhood friendships, and the hold that a home town can have on a person even after they leave it.

The main character, Tyler Sinclair, left his home town, Stone Mountain, when he turned 18, taking nothing with him but clothes, a guitar and a little money he’d swiped from his dad. He left behind a dysfunctional home — his father had been physically abusive to Tyler’s mother and verbally abusive to the both of them — and also a circle of close friends. When Tyler left, he didn’t say goodbye to anyone, and he didn’t respond when those friends tried to reach him later.

Eighteen years later Tyler is a celebrity, the lead singer of a band named after his home town. Some of his most famous songs are about things that had happened at Stone Mountain, including one called “The Long Fall” that is evocative of a tragedy that befell one of Tyler’s childhood friends. That friend, nicknamed Doc, became paraplegic after an accident that Tyler was involved with. Doc still lives in Stone Mountain, as does Tyler’s long-ago best friend, Curt, and as Under the Falls opens, Tyler is reluctantly headed to Stone Mountain with his band, having been booked to play a fundraising concert for Doc, without his consent or knowledge.

As unhappy as he is about going back to Stone Mountain, Tyler sees it as a one-and-done. He’ll have an uncomfortable, on-camera reunion with Doc — the band’s manager had contacted a local TV station seeking publicity for the band’s first show after the pandemic — and then play a concert at his old high school and return to his comfortable post-Stone Mountain life. Tyler’s parents have passed, so there’s no family drama to navigate, just the awkwardness of seeing former friends who had not escaped the town and did not enjoy his success.

The conversation with Doc goes better than Tyler expected — his old friend has made the most of his post-accident circumstances and is able to drive, using a tricked-out hearse modified for his use. But after the camera and lights are turned off, the conversation takes a serious turn, with the topic of blame for Doc’s accident coming up. Doc assures Tyler that he doesn’t blame him, but says not everyone in the town feels that way. And the bad feelings aren’t just about the accident, but about Tyler’s success. “It’s not just that you made all that money. It’s that you made it writing songs about us. About our lives,” Doc tells Tyler.

The sense of dread that Tyler had about returning to Stone Mountain turns out to be prescient. There’s a huge turnout for the event, and at first it’s like every other concert — an exuberant, appreciative crowd. But then there is a shocking announcement and the tone drastically changes, setting into motion a series of events that will upend Tyler’s life and those of his friends.

The trajectory is dark, and as it unfolds we vault from one perspective to another, including those of Curt, Tyler’s closest childhood friend who is now Stone Mountain’s chief of police, and Deb, a young officer whose good heart and honest questions about what happened that day threatens to unravel lives. The story moves fast and packs an emotional punch.

Tyler and the people of Stone Mountain aren’t necessarily likeable; Russo didn’t develop his characters deeply enough for us to feel comfortable picking sides. We get information about the characters’ back stories on a “need to know” basis. His decision to give one lesser character a MAGA hat and a presence at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is curious, as these details aren’t relevant to what transpires at Stone Mountain and could alienate some readers. In fact, I’m not sure that dating the story in any way was a good choice — the Covid-19 pandemic keeps coming up in this and other recent novels, in a soon-to-be wearisome way.

Russo’s latest resonates not because of its modern touchpoints and questions but because of old ones: How do dynamics change between childhood friends over time? What do we owe our friends and family members if we achieve financial success and they don’t? Is it ethical to walk away from a bad situation, leaving others in it, without explanation? And Under the Falls is an exploration of how small missteps over the course of a lifetime can lead to enormous regret. As one of Tyler’s friends muses, the circle of friends were all “good people” decades earlier, and yet what happens the day of the benefit concert, and its aftermath, suggests that at least some of them aren’t now.

“No way to uneat the apple,” Russo writes, positing a double meaning for the titular falls. Stone Mountain was never Eden, not for Tyler or for his friends, but like every small town and large city, it was a breeding ground for the best and worst of human impulses. Their struggles are our own, writ large. And the 2023 writers’ strike notwithstanding, they’d still make for a great TV series. B+

Featured Photo: Unseen, by David Lewis and Keelan Leyser.

(Bloomsbury Sigma, 273 pages)

At first glance, Unseen looks like a typical make-your-life-better book, a compilation of research distilled for a general audience by a social scientist or academic. But early on, Keelan Leyser and the late Dr. David Lewis put readers on notice that Unseen is different, given that one of the authors describes himself as “magician, mentalist and pickpocket.”

OK, we’re in.

It’s not every day one has the chance to get life advice from a pickpocket.

Thankfully, Leyser’s light-fingeredness is in the interests of social science rather than a product of criminal intent. The success of both magicians and pickpockets depends on their ability to manipulate attention.

“Whether secretly removing a watch from someone’s wrist or making a pack of cards appear to turn into a block of glass in someone’s hands, the principles remain the same: the brain’s attention can be redirected through calculated psychological triggers,” Lewis and Leyser write.

In short, both magicians and pickpockets expose our cognitive blind spots, the ways in which we go through life “looking, not seeing.” In Unseen the authors convey these lessons leaving our wallets untouched. The everyday workings of the human body, especially the eye and brain, may seem miraculous, but we are largely unconscious of the way in which its processes fail us, sometimes catastrophically.

Researchers say that human error is responsible for 70 percent of vehicle accidents and 80 percent of aviation accidents, and cognitive blind spots play as much a role in this as inattention or exhaustion. In fact, we are most likely to suffer from blind spots when we are one of the “3 Fs” — fatigued, frightened or furious, Lewis and Leyser write. Even when not noticeably impaired by one of the 3Fs, human beings make three to six errors every hour, “regardless of the task or activity being conducted,” one safety expert tells the authors.

This is because there are so many ways in which our brains can fool us, as evidenced by the famous sketch “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law,” an illusion created in 1915 by a British cartoonist. When looking at the drawing (seen as sexist by today’s standards), some people see an old and unattractive woman, whereas others see a stylish young woman. Lewis and Leyser offer dozens of other examples that similarly show how our perception is altered by the shortcuts our brains take in processing information. They not only present photos and illustrations, but also provide QR codes throughout the book that take the reader to webpages where the concept is more fully explained. It’s an interesting approach, although I’m still not sure how I feel about having to have a smartphone on hand while reading a book.

Nor am I sure whether I’m happy to have learned about how accident prone all of us are because of these blind spots.

While most people believe we have five senses, Lewis and Leyser explain there are many more than that, and the shortcuts that the brain takes are necessary because of the millions of pieces of information it is constantly bombarded with. Blind spots basically are an adaptation that allows us to maintain our sanity, and there are varieties of them. There is, for example, “change blindness” in which we can be oblivious to a difference that becomes obvious when it is pointed out to us; this is particularly worrisome when applied to the work of those reading X-rays at a hospital and screening luggage at the airport.

There is “choice blindness,” in which people fail to notice a change in a choice they have previously made, which has had disturbing repercussions for those picking out suspects in a police lineup. And there is “expectation blindness,” in which people’s expectation of an outcome or act influences how we perceive what actually happens, which has resulted in wrongful police shootings and fatal medical mistakes, as when a nurse picked up a drug syringe and read the label as she expected to see it, rather than the way it was, resulting in the death of a patient.

In a chapter on visual illusions, Lewis and Leyser lay out why we are so easily fooled by what we think we see, such as the drawing known as “Shephard’s Tables,” which seems to depict two tables of varying sizes, but does not. Things get even weirder when they take up the intra-body communication that goes on between the brain and the gut, our so-called “alien brain” run by billions of microbes, and blind spots driven by other body parts, including the bladder. (“An empty stomach reduces our decision-making powers, while a full bladder increases them,” the authors write.

Unseen also delves into the complex machinations of why we remember faces and why we find some people attractive but not others, and how marketers exploit our blind spots to sell us things. The authors recall a famous psychology experiment from 1967 in which a person dressed from head to foot in a black cloth bag went to a college class every day for a semester. The “Bag Man,” who has never been identified, was at first mocked by other students, but as time went on they became protective of him. One researcher later said that Bag Man illustrated that “people will grow to like a thing they initially detest — even with no new information — if they are repeatedly exposed to it,” which is one reason brands bombard us with familiar products repeatedly.

In addition to showing us how certain popular magic tricks work, Lewis and Leyser offer some tips on banishing, or at least finding workarounds for, our blind spots. Cutting down on the fatigue in the 3Fs is an obvious one; when we’re tired we’re more likely to succumb to them. (It’s harder to stop being frightened or furious, although they have suggestions for that as well.) Perhaps the most helpful is being aware of all this social science research and how it applies to ordinary life.

Unfortunately, the authors spend 250 pages warning us about cognitive blind spots and only 22 telling us to banish them, with some suggestions that seem banal (tart cherry juice or milk to help you sleep, yawn). More helpful would have been 20 pages of warnings, 250 pages of solutions. B

Featured Photo: Unseen, by David Lewis and Keelan Leyser.

(Little A, 413 pages)

New Hampshire native Joyce Maynard has said that she likes to write about things people don’t talk about. That can be a plus or a minus, especially in a coming-of-age story that explores uncomfortable family dynamics through the eyes of a 14-year-old on the cusp of puberty.

Literary fiction laced with suspense, In Wonderland is as sophisticated a novel as one would expect from someone who has been writing books for a half-century. Maynard knows her craft and builds tension slowly, like a tea kettle placed on low heat.

As June 1986 begins, Frances — her last name is not given — is miserable in the way all 14-year-old girls are miserable pre-social-media, with the added stress of parents who barely speak to each other or to her. Her father drinks too much, they live in a sad, dark apartment in New Jersey, and their only fun family ritual is going to visit her father’s childhood friend at his lakefront home in Maine each Labor Day.

This year, however, she gets to spend the entire summer there. Her father’s friend and his wife need a mother’s helper for the summer, and they invite Frances to fill the position, which involves little more than lightly supervising the two children (one of whom is just two years younger than Frances) and getting them to tennis lessons. Frances is thrilled just to get out of the gloomy house for the summer.

But she also has fond memories of being at the estate, named Wonderland, and her father’s friend, Forrest, is the only person in her life who treats her with respect. Even better, he is the kind of person everyone wants to be friends with — active, engaging, generous, energetic, attentive to a fault, especially to his wife, Regina, whose family’s wealth enables their lifestyle.

For Frances, Regina was a wan figure in the background on her previous trips to Wonderland. She has an unspecified medical condition that requires her to take lots of pills and lots of naps. What energy she has seems to be used up in the evening when she types instructions for everything her family needs to know and do the next day. “The thing about dealing with Regina is recognizing she’s just not a normal person,” Frances’s father tells her.

But the presence of Forrest makes up for that, and as the summer begins, Frances fits seamlessly into the family’s routines, marveling that this will be her life for a little more than three months. “It was all so beautiful,” she observes. “Outside now, a pair of loons called out to each other. Lace curtains fluttered at the window, moonlight glittering. From the other side of the lake, someone was setting off fireworks for no particular reason except that at Lake Catherine every day felt like a special occasion.”

But Forrest’s affection for Frances becomes an obsession for her, fueled by the hormones of adolescence. When Regina gives her a gift — a leather-bound journal — telling her that every girl should keep a journal, Frances starts writing about her interactions with Forrest and eventually slips from the real to the imagined. The journal, which she hides under her mattress, is a ticking time bomb throughout the novel, with all the subtlety of golden retriever. We know somebody is going to find this journal eventually; we just don’t know who or when.

Meanwhile, as Frances’s relationship with Forrest develops and changes over time, so too does her relationship with Regina, who wants to both mother the girl and also treat her as some kind of unpaid therapist. Regina begins to confide in Frances about the strengths and deficiencies of her marriage, including the couple’s sex life, not knowing that Frances is always going to be on Team Forrest. But Regina says nothing to shed light on other secrets, including her physical and mental condition, and a mysterious locked room in the house. Every story is supposed to have a villain, they say, but it’s unclear whether there is a villain here at all or just a bunch of spoiled, entitled, clueless or heartbroken people trying to play the cards they’ve been dealt.

It’s not a spoiler to say there is a pivotal death in the story since Maynard opens In Wonderland with Frances’s memory of encountering the corpse. It might be a spoiler to say I have no idea why she did this. To anyone paying close attention, the scene foreshadows a future event and diminishes the eventual shock of it.

This is not to say that there aren’t other shocks throughout the book, going right down to the final pages. The biggest surprise of all, however, is what a page-turner a novel about a 14-year-old sex-curious girl can be, even if you can do without all the cringy inner dialogue about nonexistent breasts and a menstrual cycle that refuses to start. The characters in this world may not be wholly lovable, but they are interesting, and as such, we are invested in what happens to them. Lake Catherine may be fictional, but the emotional punch Maynard delivers is real. B+

Featured Photo: In Wonderland, by Joyce Maynard.