Category: Books

Our reviewers read a lot of books this year; these are the ones they gave A grades to.

Fiction

The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy, is “a beautiful, messy journey as Lila searches for her identity among two very different cultures and within a family defined by each other in the best and worst of ways.” A- —Meghan Siegler

Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson, is “a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy…. If Hollywood options this … I’ll be at the theater on opening day.” A- —Jennifer Graham

The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett: “…at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.” A- —M.S.

Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger, has “a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics…. Culpability moves slowly at times … [but] Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —J.G.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is “an achingly beautiful story that will send readers to Kang’s previous novels, which include 2017’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, published in the U.S. in 2016. Bring on the K-lit.” A —J.G.

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige: “In simple and sparse narration that blooms with lyrical descriptions of New England landscapes, Heartwood manages to be part mystery, part thriller, part how-to-hike-the-Appalachian-Trail guidebook — or it might convince you to never set foot in the woods again. Either way, start Heartwood and you’ll likely be a thru-reader, all the way to the end.” A —J.G.

Tilt, by Emma Pattee, “is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called ‘apocalypse genre,’ [but] it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans.” The book “thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. … Tilt is a remarkable literary debut.” A —J.G.

Nonfiction

The Ghost Lab, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, resulted from “a years-long investigation into paranormal enthusiasts and their work” and is “a fascinating book …. Regardless of how you feel about the paranormal, Hongoltz-Hetling is a first-rate reporter and storyteller, and The Ghost Lab is easy to love — as long as you’re not one of its subjects.” A+ —J.G.

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp, is “a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries. A —J.G.

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green: “We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general.” A —J.G.

All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert, “is … a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.” A —J.G.

Aflame, by Pico Iyer: “In Aflame … Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.” A —J.G.

Featured Photo: The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy

(Celadon, 269 pages)

As possibly the only person on the planet who hasn’t read Gone Girl, I am unqualified to compare Gillian Flynn’s 2014 novel to any other book, but I know enough about it to know what it means when other people do this. The comparison promises multiple twists that will knock you out of your chair, your perception of the events and characters totally skewed.

Best Offer Wins is the latest novel to pulsate with the Gone Girl vibe, earning Marisa Kashino the kind of buzz that rarely accompanies a first-time author. It has an entirely relatable premise: a young woman is shut out of the housing market because of too many buyers (and hedge funds) flush with cash and becomes caught up in her quest to be the winning bidder on a suburban D.C. house she wants to raise a family in.

Margo Miyake and her husband, Ian, don’t have children yet, but they’re trying. They’re living in an apartment “so small you can vacuum almost all of it from a single outlet,” having sold their modest starter home planning to upgrade with the profits. But then they find out that the housing market has changed in terrible ways since they’d bought their first house.

Every house they want is getting dozens of offers, many well over the asking price and all cash. Margo and Ian are well off compared to most Americans — she’s in PR, he’s a government lawyer — and they are prepared to spend more than a million on their forever home. But even that’s not enough, and so when Margo gets an insider tip that a four-bedroom home in a desirable neighborhood in Bethesda will soon come on the market, she decides to pull out all the stops, sneakily befriending one of the homeowners and snagging an invitation to dinner at the house.

Friends, the cringe doesn’t come in on little cat feet; it bursts in like a golden retriever left too long outside in the cold.

But the cringe turns into something darker as Margo, the narrator throughout, becomes more and more obsessed with the house. She’s mentally moving in, imagining her new, perfect life within its walls so vividly that she even orders new house numbers to replace the current ones that she doesn’t like. When the homeowners, a gay couple with an adorable adopted daughter, grow suspicious and Margo realizes that her Plan A isn’t going to work, she recalculates and embarks on another scheme, and then another, even as her obsession begins to negatively impact her work and her marriage. It’s not at all clear whether, if she somehow places a winning bid when the house formally comes on the market, she and her husband will still have the income to qualify for a mortgage, or even if they will still be together at all.

As Margo plunges deeper into her quest, we learn, in bits and drabs, why this particular house matters so much to her, and what the life she imagines living there represents. We learn that she had a deeply insecure childhood, that her parents once lost a house to foreclosure, that she once lost a dog to which she was deeply attached. She may or may not be mentally unstable; she may or may not be justified in the increasingly bizarre ways in which she tries to obtain the house.

We’re also not so sure about her husband, Ian, who at first seems devoted to Margo and undeserving of the derision she casts on him. Later events call his devotion into question, but that’s par for the course; it’s unclear if anyone in this story is who they initially seem to be, except for a neighbor’s dog, Fritter, with whom Margo is infatuated.

Margo moves in and out of our sympathy, as she botches important work assignments, comes to the brink of losing her job and takes advantage of good-hearted friends who help when she asks. Yet she is also surrounded by people who have what she wants — to include great homes and children. At times she is even envious of her husband, who had a stable upbringing: “He grew up with a dad who coached his little league teams and a mom who sent him to school with homemade cupcakes on his birthdays. Two loving parents who call us at least once a week to check in,” Margo tells us. “But my childhood, erratic as it was, gave me something even more valuable, something I have come to accept that Ian will never have: hunger.”

There is a dark humor that underpins the narrative, and the story moves swiftly; except for the backstory, the events happen within a couple of weeks. The answers to the two questions that power the book — will Margo get the house, and if so, at what cost? — are impossible to to guess, right up to the final pages of the book, making Best Offer Wins the proverbial page-turner.

But making it to the end of a book doesn’t necessarily mean the reader will like it once they get there, and the ending raises other questions. Is a book enjoyable just because it is engrossing, because it distracts us so effectively from the real world? Sometimes that seems to be the case. But what if we rush to the end of a book, caught in its current like a fast-moving river, and once there, the ending turns out to be deeply unsettling? Is the book still enjoyable then? Those are the unexpected questions that Best Offer Wins presents, ones that I’m still mulling. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino

(Summit Books, 352 pages)

Is there anyone over the age of 20 who hasn’t seen an Anthony Hopkins film, or 20? It’s hard to imagine. As he approaches his 88th birthday on New Year’s Eve, the Welsh actor best known for his Academy Award-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs has amassed a formidable body of work, and became the oldest actor to win the Oscar for best actor for The Father in 2021.

Talent on the silver screen, however, doesn’t always translate to talent on the printed page, as any number of Hollywood memoirs attests.

But Hopkins’ new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, is surprisingly compelling and will be of interest to even people who aren’t especially enthralled with cinema. Like all good celebrity memoirs, it is strongest in reflecting the experiences of a human being, not a star. Hopkins’ luminous career is almost incidental to the lessons learned over the course of a lifetime as someone who was underestimated in his youth and had to overcome parenting that was, let’s just say, not always ideal.

The title comes from Hopkins’s own message to the child that he was, at age 3, in a photo that appears on the jacket of the book. He had a slightly enlarged head that worried his parents and elicited teasing from cruel peers who called him “elephant head.” Making things worse, he was not much of a student. A pivotal moment came when he was sent to boarding school by his parents, against his will.

He writes: “I vowed, I’ll take my chances and never get close to my mother and father again — or anyone else for that matter. I no longer cared. I decided to live life on my terms, to open my eyes to the future. Forget the past. Childhood over. Copy that. Over and out. The ghost had entered the machine.”

He was 11 at the time.

Despite this steely girding of adolescent loins, Hopkins continued to perform poorly in school. He recounts the dreaded opening of the envelope containing his grades that would arrive at his home. On one such occasion, his father exploded, saying, “Honestly, you’re bloody hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere, amount to anything in life, the way you’re going on. … Can’t you do anything useful?”

Young Hopkins, who had been cultivating a demeanor of “dumb insolence,” listened to the rant coolly and then told his parents, “One day, I’ll show you. I’ll show both of you.”

It wasn’t a relationship-ending exchange — father, mother and son then went out to see a movie — but something changed again that day, in Hopkins and in the way that his father viewed him. It is one in a series of memorable scenes that the actor recounts throughout the book, like his first encounter with a young Richard Burton (another legendary Welsh actor, who died in 1984), and having drinks with Laurence Olivier, to name a few.

The first indication that young Hopkins had the seeds of an extraordinary orator within him came when he was asked to read a poem before his class at the boarding school. (His teacher’s response was “Thank you. Rather good.”) The poem was “The West Wind” by John Masefield, and it’s among the meaningful verses and monologues he shares in an appendix of the book — a nice touch.

Bumbling his way through his first stage-related jobs, Hopkins was told more than once that he wasn’t careful or attentive enough; he was fired from one job. But everyone he encountered seemed to recognize a raw talent in him despite the rough edges. He earned a scholarship to an acting school on the strength of an interview. One woman recommended him for a job after briefly interacting with him in a restaurant. His capacity for memorization is legendary, and it was a skill he developed as a child when he repeated words and phrases over and over. His current wife, Stella, believes he has some form of Asperger’s syndrome, “given my proclivity for memorization and repetition … and my lack of emotionality.”

“But,” he writes, “like any stoic man from the British Isles, I’m allergic to therapeutic jargon. Even if the world might prefer I accept the Asperger’s label, I’ve chosen to stick with what I see as a more meaningful designation: cold fish.”

The “lack of emotionality” comes across on the page in stark, clipped prose. No one will ever accuse Hopkins of overwriting. He tells what needs to be told, nothing more, and yet the book sometimes feels like a confessional. He writes, for example, of his failures as a father to his only child, Abigail, after leaving her mother when she was a toddler “after the worst two years of my life.” Although he went on to marry again twice, he vowed not to have more children. “I knew I was too selfish. I couldn’t do to another child what I’d done to her,” he says. Performing in a production of Lear, “the line that hit me harder than perhaps any I’ve ever spoken was ‘I did her wrong.’”

He wonders if his failure to connect with his daughter was in some way connected to his experiences in his own parents’ house, even though his father turned out to be a complicated person. Despite his harshness to his son, he also cried when young Hopkins delivered his first line in a play at a local YMCA (it was a beatitude: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the world.”) And he asks his son to recite lines from Hamlet when he is on his death bed.

Like father, like son, Hopkins grew up to drink heavily, which contributed to the abrupt end of his first marriage. After a doctor warned him that he was drinking his way into the grave, he started attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At the first one, “I was moved by the speaker’s story. He’s just like me, I thought. He was a truck driver, not an actor, but we were the same.”

Sitting in that room, Hopkins thought, “They’re all misfits like me. Like all of us. We feel we never belong. We feel self-hatred. All of us are the same. I’m not alone.”

It is that sort of revelation that makes this more a human story than a celebrity memoir. Yes, there are big names in this book, but coming as they do from Sir Anthony Hopkins (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1993), they never feel like name-dropping; how could they? In most cases, he is the bigger star. He did far more than OK. And yet in the deeply human memoir, Hopkins plays an ordinary man, perhaps his most extraordinary role of all. B+

Featured Photo: We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins

(Simon & Schuster, 408 pages)

Esther was 3 years old, almost 4, when she was left outside a Maine orphanage, where the staff found her angrily kicking the door. “Esther doesn’t cry — she just gets angry,” it is later said of the child.

The toddler had a well-developed vocabulary and had memorized passages from the Book of Esther of the Bible. She knew she was Jewish. But it would be years before anyone would learn that she was born in Vienna and came to the U.S. with her parents, both now dead.

The orphanage where tough little Esther is left, St. Cloud’s, is well-known to those familiar with The Cider House Rules, the John Irving novel that later became a film for which Irving won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay 25 years ago. Queen Esther is not a sequel, although its themes will be familiar to Irving fans — perhaps wearily so.

Esther will live at St. Cloud’s for a decade until she is offered a job — and a home — with Thomas and Constance Winslow, residents of Pennacook, New Hampshire, and the parents of four daughters named after the virtues: Faith, Hope, Prudence and Honor.

Like Dr. William Larch, the physician who runs the orphanage (played by Michael Caine in the Cider House movie), the Winslows are not fans of religion or the concept of God. They are ideologically at odds with the pearl-clutching “townspeople of Pennacook,” despite Thomas Winslow’s best efforts to open their minds at “Town Talks” where he endeavors to instruct them about the great books and convince them that morality is not the equivalent of conventionality.

Thomas Winslow is comically opposed to anything related to Maine; at one point, his wife thinks “Oh, Tommy, please give up the grudge you have against Maine!” But the couple need a new au pair to care for their youngest child, Honor, and they have run out of options elsewhere. So they travel to St. Cloud’s and adopt Esther despite the objections of people shocked that they would want “the Jewish one.”

It’s a good match, for the child and the couple. Like Esther, the Winslows are prodigious readers (which gives Irving a chance to proselytize his most favored 19th-century authors through his characters, as is his habit), and they are taking in a young woman who intends to get a tattoo that is a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

The quote permeates the novel, even as Irving wrests the focus from Thomas and Constance Winslow, to Esther Nacht, to Jimmy Winslow, the child that Esther ultimately gives birth to and gives to Honor to raise, in accordance with a pact they have made.

The journey is winding, complex and transcontinental. Esther goes off to Israel to fulfill what she sees as her life’s purpose, and the child she conceived, Jimmy Winslow, grows up and becomes a father and a writer and tries to sort out his complicated roots, insisting all his life that he is “just a New Hampshire boy,” although in reality he is not a Pennacook townie and never will be.

This is ironic, since the Winslow line was genealogical royalty in America; the ancestors of both Thomas and Constance sailed on the Mayflower, and, as Irving writes, “If you grew up in Pennacook, in southeastern New Hampshire, in the 1940s and 1950s, where you came from mattered.” But so did adherence to a certain set of standards that didn’t include unconventional families and overlooked far more grievous sins. And Jimmy’s conundrum is that he isn’t really a Winslow by blood and doesn’t identify as Jewish; despite being ardently loved by people on multiple continents, he is not really sure who he is.

Irving is a master at character development, and 100 pages in, I was so invested in the lives of Thomas and Constance Winslow that I was reluctant to leave their world to delve into Esther’s, and Jimmy’s. Nor was I prepared for the degree of preaching to which I would be subjected about social and international issues.

Indeed, it is Irving’s preaching that is an obstacle to be overcome in enjoying this novel. As evidenced here and throughout his body of work, he has strong opinions on reproductive choice, on non-traditional families and on religion, opinions which he intends to inculcate into his readers with all the subtlety of a hammer. Even as Irving riffs on the pious townspeople of Pennacook for their moralizing, he moralizes with the same unyielding zeal, denying the microphone to any timid nuance that might want to offer an opposing view. This belligerent approach at times comes off as a grudge.

In one scene, Jimmy visits what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and observes a weeping man who leaves the cave, “his face streaked with tears, his smile radiant.”

“Jesus touched me — I felt him touch me!” the lunatic Christian cried,” Irving writes, and in the insertion of the word “lunatic,” we feel the full force of those who harbor animosity toward religion and believe its ills outweigh its good, even though it later becomes apparent that the man had been touched by a cat, and not a deity.

Irving once told an interviewer that he believes “it’s vain and presumptuous to presume that what you believe, everyone else should also believe. …. In other words, people who are so convinced of their religions that they proselytize it to others, I find very tiresome.”

It’s unclear if Irving is aware of how much he proselytizes to others of his own values and beliefs. Nonetheless, he is, like Jimmy Winslow, “a New Hampshire boy” and one of New England’s most important contemporary writers. If some parts of Queen Esther feel like reconstituted sermons from The Cider House Rules or The World According to Garp, this does not preclude the reader taking pleasure in the world of the Winslows.

But offer thoughts and prayers for the poor. maligned, monocultural “townspeople of Pennacook” — not to be mistaken with the good people of the village of Penacook in Concord — as you read. B

Featured Photo: Queen Esther

Books from local authors

Want to add to a friend’s book collection? Here are some recent releases from local authors. Look for them at your favorite bookstore.

• The True and Lucky Life of a Turtle,written by Sy Montgomery and illustrated by Matt Patterson, is the story of a real-life 42-pound snapping turtle named Fire Chief. Montgomery has written many other books about animals, including some for adults and other picture books illustrated by Patterson. Kirkus Reviews named this 40-page hardcover one of the Best Picture Books of 2025 for Animal Lovers.

• Frankie the Ghost Train, written by LaBelle Winery co-owner Cesar Arboleda, “is a heartwarming tale of a quiet boy, a mysterious train, and the power of imagination,” according to the book’s description on LaBelle’s website. “Set in the forgotten corners of Milltown, this story reminds readers young and old that sometimes the places we stumble upon are the ones that shape us the most.” About the author, the website says this: “Cesar Arboleda immigrated as a young boy from Colombia, South America, to Lowell, Massachusetts. He is a proud American citizen, a storyteller, dreamer, husband, father, and lifelong believer in the quiet magic found in unexpected places.” This 40-page hardcover children’s book is available for $20 at labellewinery.com/shop.frankie-the-ghost-train-book-by-cesar-arboleda.

• The Shopkeeper of Alsace is the debut novel from former NHPR host Laura Knoy. It’s based on a true story and “brings to life a little-known corner of wartime history — and an inspiring real-life heroine you’ll cheer for,” says the book description at lauraknoy.com. Visit the website to read about the background behind the book and to order a copy. (Michael Witthaus talked to Knoy about the book; see the story in the Nov. 6 Hippo on page 14. Find the issue in the digital library at hippopress.com.)

• A Better Loser is a collection of short stories set in southern New Hampshire, written by Manchester resident and high school teacher Nate Graziano. “Whether facing romantic troubles, addiction, or struggling to rein in their passions, these characters will not allow their failures to define them — instead, they become ‘better losers,’” according to the author’s website, nathangraziano.com, which has links for purchasing the book.

• Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front, by Leah Dearborn, is “a non-fiction military history of a vanished air base,” says the author’s website, leahmdearborn.com. Dearborn is associate director of the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire; the book is available at the Museum’s website, aviationmuseumofnh.org/shop, where it goes for $35. The author’s website says a portion of all proceeds goes to AMNH programming.

• The Weight of Snow and Regret, by Elizabeth Gauffreau, is a novel that “tells the story of the closure of the last poor farm in Vermont in 1968,” according to a press release from Paul Stream Press. “The Weight of Snow and Regret tells the poignant story of what it means to care for others in a rapidly changing world.” Gauffreau grew up in Vermont and lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

• The Gospel According to Jack: Tracking Kerouac In My Life is written by Rev. Steve Edington, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and Minister Emeritus of the UU Church of Nashua. “Through meditations on Kerouac’s life, art and restless searching, Edington weaves together literary reflection and personal journey. The Gospel According to Jack offers an uplifting and wise exploration of faith, creativity, and what it means to seek meaning in a vast, mysterious universe,” said the website for Balin Books in Nashua (balinebooks.com), where Edington will discuss the book on Saturday, Jan. 10.

• Courtship in Purgatory, by Robert Perreault, is described as “an intimate look at the difficulties faced by two middle-aged lovers” and “a sincere look back at family and Franco-American traditional attitudes and constraints following World War II.” Perreault is a bilingual writer of books and articles about the New England Franco-American experience and the history of his hometown, Manchester. This is his first novel in English. He holds a B.A. in Sociology from Saint Anselm College (1972), including a year of study in Paris; an M.A. in French/New England Franco-American Studies from Rhode Island College, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction/Nonfiction) from Southern New Hampshire University, according to a press release, and Manchester’s Franco-American Centre proclaimed him Franco-American of the Year in 2012.

• Perfidy: The Silver River Series 2, by Emily Siems, is the second book in a planned romantasy trilogy. Visit the author’s website, emilysiems.com, to read Siems’ blog and an excerpt from Springhaven, the first book in the series.

Featured Photo: The Shopkeeper of Alsace by Laura Knoy

(Harper, 224 pages)

When my son was little and found it hard to sit through movies, he once announced in the middle of a showing, “If they don’t start blowing stuff up soon, I’m outta here.”

Even as an adult, he wouldn’t make it halfway through a Catherine Newman novel.

Newman’s success comes not from explosive plots but from the memorable characters she develops and the dialogue she crafts that makes the experience of reading her books not like reading a book but like eavesdropping on your neighbors or the people at the next table at a diner. In Wreck she returns to the family she introduced in 2024’s Sandwich, which was a nod to both the Cape Cod town and to challenges of people caring for both children and parents.

Two years older, 50-something parents Nick and Rachel (who goes by Rocky) are still looking for that empty nest. Son Jamie is married and working as a consultant in New York, and daughter Willa has a university job that involves caring for fruit flies in a lab, but Rocky’s father has moved in with the family after the death of his wife. While prone to missing a beat in a conversation, Grandpa is otherwise in good shape, and things are going well for the family in general.
But then, as Newman writes in a memorable opening in which an horned owl looks down from its perch as a car and a train are about to collide, “a great screeching has begun.”

The young man who dies in the accident, Miles Zapf, was a local; the family knew him, but only casually. But there is an unexpected connection that gradually becomes clever as the investigation continues and Rocky and Willa become increasingly obsessed with the case, and Rocky starts paying attention to Miles’s mother’s posts on social media.

Meanwhile, Rocky has a strange rash that is spreading all over her body, sending her from one perplexed doctor to another and finally into Boston for a spiral CT scan, and into the rabbit hole of the internet, where every ailment is just one click away from being seen as a malignancy.

Again, there is nothing in the way of a hang-on-to-your-seats plot to find here, just a slow unraveling of normalcy, the loss of which no one notices until it’s gone. Newman herself told an interviewer she struggled to find an elevator pitch for the book, “because nothing really happens,” which isn’t exactly true, but the events do unfold, shall we say, languidly. At times, Newman seems reluctant to even let her characters finish a meal, because they are all enjoying being together so much. (More than one chapter is just the family having breakfast and talking.)

And yet how can you not love a writer who uses Godzilla as a verb? As in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, there are surprises around every corner, surprises in packages of words.

Readers will recognize people in their own lives in Newman’s characters, who are rich in human foibles while deeply empathetic. Rocky’s late mother, for example, appears in one memory in which she is reporting on the health of someone she barely knows. Trying to figure out why, Rocky muses that her mother must have been trying to connect with her, maybe about their own frailty or mortality. “I don’t know why all our tender feelings have to masquerade as news,” she thinks.

In one of my favorite scenes — which takes place at yet another family meal — Rocky mulls over how validated she feels when her adult children take up one of her habits. It feels like a vote of confidence, she thinks, when a child later comes to buy the same kind of olive oil, for example, that you do.

But then she recounts the day that Jamie suddenly announced to his parents, “It turns out, I really like lamb.”

“The utterance was a little more heated than one might expect. ‘You guys have always been like, We don’t like lamb. Like, as a family. We are a people who don’t like lamb!’”

The ensuing conversation is both comical and full of the best kind of family drama, the kind that will one day result in a story, not lingering bitterness.

Combining humor and poignancy can be hard to pull off, but Newman is a master. In the matter of her health, Rocky says, “I’m the kind of kale-eating person who nonetheless has a massive stable of doctors, everybody whinnying and rearing up on their hind legs and neighing out their copay requests.” It is in writing about Rocky’s journey through the health care system that Newman’s gifts shine through, pointing out the frustrations that a patient can have with the system while at the same time being grateful for the technology and the professionals who see us through illness. And, of course, the bewilderment of a once-healthy person suddenly thrust into this strange world:

“One minute, you’re with all the healthy people on the beach, everyone enjoying the sunshine and salt spray, maybe tossing a Frisbee around. And then suddenly you’re alone in the waves, getting yanked out to sea by some medical undertow, the shore receding from view while all the healthy people wave to you pityingly.”

Newman writes about pill organizers and stool samples, and teaching hospitals and patient portals, while making wry observations about the sort of stuff offered on Buy Nothing websites and the aching love a mother has for her children, which subsides not in the least when they move out. In other words, she writes about real life. It is, Rocky says, kind of like the game Chutes and Ladders: “The constant ascending and descending — every good and bad thing seeming, in moments, so random and temporary.” In Wreck, Newman gives us a diversion from our own, reassurance that we are all in this together, and there are laughs to be had even when things don’t turn out the way we hope. Readers will hope they’ve not seen the last of Nick and Rocky. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Newman will read from Wreck at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough beginning at 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 21.

Featured Photo: Wreck, by Catherine Newman (Harper, 224 pages)