Category: Books

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, 369 pages)

When her ne’er-do-well mother dies, Jane Flanagan’s only inheritance is a dog named Walter, “an orange powder puff of a thing” that Jane was convinced her mother loved more than her daughters. She knew her mother had nothing of value to pass on, but “Walter was so much worse than nothing.”

Even in death, her mother caused Jane trouble.

In life, her mother’s drinking and other poor choices led the teenage Jane to hide out at an abandoned house, pale purple and creepy, that sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine. The home had been built in 1846 and it had the vibe of houses abandoned in zombie movies — dusty furniture, random toys, a collapsed railing, food expired decades ago that animals had gotten into. Still, Jane felt drawn to the house and didn’t feel she was breaking any laws by going into it to sit quietly or read: “It felt like honoring whatever came before.”

That’s how we meet Jane in The Cliffs, the sixth novel of acclaimed Massachusetts author J. Courtney Sullivan. A smart and conscientious young woman, Jane soon leaves the dumpster fire that is her family home, earns multiple degrees, travels and gets a great job and boyfriend. The purple house recedes in her mind.

Meanwhile, the house beckons another woman, Genevieve, who is the polar opposite of Jane. Married, moneyed and entitled, Genevieve convinces her husband to buy the house and to entrust her with its renovation as a vacation house for the family of three. Unlike Jane, she is not respectful of the home’s history; when a contractor she hired to install an infinity pool overlooking the ocean discovers a small cemetery, she has no qualms about disturbing the dead.

Not long afterward, Genevieve is shaken when she walks into her young son’s room and finds him conversing with a girl that he claims to see, but she can’t. And we’re off and running with what at first appears to be a classic New England ghost story. Only it’s not.

While there are ghosts in The Cliffs, and a psychic named Clementine who claims to connect Jane with her mother and grandmother, the sprawling story is primarily about human beings who are alive, or once were, and their legacies. Rich in history, it also delves into the lives of indigenous people who named the (fictional) town Awadapquit, and the ethical issues of living on their land. (“What does it mean to acknowledge that this land had been stolen, when no one had any intention of giving it back?” Sullivan writes.)

These are side stories that are so expertly woven into the narrative that they never feel preachy or pretentious.

As the story progresses, Jane returns to her hometown to help clean out her mother’s house, and also to escape fallout from an alcohol-induced humiliation that is also threatening her job and her marriage. Meanwhile, Jane’s friend Allison’s mother, who was a mother surrogate for Jane when she was in high school, is slipping into dementia, and Allison connects Jane with Genevieve, who wants someone to research previous owners of the house.

There’s more than one mystery here: In addition to the spirit that Genevieve’s son thinks he sees, Jane had been told by a psychic that she needed to get a message from a girl identified only by the initial “D” to her mother, assuring her that she is at peace.

Jane, who has a Ph.D. in American history, hadn’t wanted to meet with this medium at all — the visit was a gift, and she is highly skeptical of psychics in general, and bewildered as to why some random child would be connected in any way to her family.

“And by the way, why is it that dead people always come back to tell their loved ones, ‘I’m at peace.’? Why is it never, ‘This absolutely sucks, get me out of here,?’ Jane tells Allison when recounting the visit.

As in every human life, there is so much pain that the characters don’t see, much of it caused by each other.

“Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people,” Sullivan writes.

We also all have ghosts, real or not, in the sticky shadows of people who have passed and left their mark on us. The Cliffs is a study of family that is deeply affecting, even if you don’t care much for the learning about spirits, like why children are receptive to ghosts (it’s said that they see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that older people can’t) and what happens at a real-life “spiritualist camp meeting” in Maine (renamed Camp Mira in The Cliffs, but which is actually called Camp Etna).

(Unrelated to spirits, but New Hampshire also has a couple of cameos in here — Jane sneaks across state lines to buy alcohol, and a pivotal event happens while one character is on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough.)

Lots of dubious writers come to be “New York Times best-selling authors” through marketing campaigns and purchasing gimmicks. The Cliffs is fresh evidence that Sullivan is one by virtue of talent. It is an engrossing and deeply New England novel, with characters that will burrow into your heart. A

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf, 304 pages)

American women who chafe at the Sisyphean nature of household chores will adore Priyanka Mattoo’s grandfather.

A physics professor who once calmly shot a python in his house, he raised free-range kids at his family’s compound in India. If the children weren’t at school, “they were up to something, somewhere in the house, unsupervised,” and his household rules were simple, Mattoo writes: “study, don’t lie, and don’t embarrass the family.”

More importantly, Nanaji (“nana” is the word for the maternal grandfather in Hindi, “ji” the suffix of respect) insisted that the girls and women around him do no menial household work, believing “The only useful pursuits for a young woman were those of the mind.”

In her engrossing new memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, Mattoo recalls another family story: Her mother decided to take up knitting as a teen and was working on a sweater when her father sternly asked why she was doing that. “Did all the stores burn down?” he demanded.

Nananji was not against work, just domestic labor, and as such, Mattoo’s mother, and indeed the whole extended family, became remarkably competent adults and “pathologically assertive women.”

“The Kaul girls — doctors, engineers, professors, and some now grandmothers — have no patience for wallflowers, or fools. They enter every unfamiliar room as though they own it. Greet each stranger as though they’ve been reading up.” She adds, “I’m not sure anyone on that side of my family knows how to whisper, and I’m happier for it.”

But despite this remarkably strong and loving family unit, Mattoo and her immediate family suffered the loss of their treasured family home in Kashmir, the region at the center of a bitter territorial dispute between Pakistan and India. The property was ransacked and destroyed by militants, and the family lost not just their physical center but also the decorative contents gathered from all over the world. It is these precious belongings that give the book its title. “Bird milk and mosquito bones” is a phrase Kashmiris use to describe things “so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence.”

Mattoo’s writing is exquisite in exactly that way, and she builds this series of discrete and elegant essays on the scaffolding of her transcontinental search for home in the aftermath of loss. Her experiences are often exotic by American standards; she writes somewhat disparagingly of the homogeneity of the American experience:

“What a crazy place America is, where you can drive for three straight days and everyone’s still speaking English, and all were seemingly raised on the same episodes of eighties television. But they’ll tell me, in a lather, that the barbecue is dry here, whereas in another place it’s more … wet.”

She adds, “I stare blankly, feeling like an alien that’s landed on a well-meaning planet, one that believes that it is the beating heart of the universe.” She’s got a point.

But there are universal themes here, of longing and loss and the desire for connection. And this is ultimately a book about family, one that is frankly captivating. Here, for example, is Mattoo’s description of a family vacation: “ … we vacation hard, my family. Ideally three weeks, and always a home rental, never a hotel. We settle in like we own the place and have always owned the place. … In the places we stay, there is no turndown service, often no air-conditioning, and the elevator always breaks on day two.”

A “thinky” child, Mattoo is now married with children and lives in the United States, and “presents as American” but is always searching for connection with her home continent. When a music app recommends a song that she becomes obsessed with (“Pasoori” by Ali Sethi), she tracks down the artist, who is from Pakistan, and asks him to speak on WhatsApp (“official communication tool of the global diaspora”). She says, “I need to connect with the person who has made me feel this way.” She later connects with another Pakistani singer, who turns out to also be a medical doctor. “Our countries still bristle with tension — they might always — but I’m encouraged by evidence of this generation’s desire to create,” she writes.

Mattoo veers off delightfully into asides about her children and her childhood. Consider this opening to an essay titled “You Are My Life,” which may be the best start to a chapter I read this year:

“The only grudge I ever held was in nursery school, thanks to a tiny witch named Christina.”

Or this, from a chapter simply titled “A Toothache”:

“I had a terrible toothache the summer my great-aunt Indra was murdered, but that wasn’t the worst part.”

One of the most interesting essays involves Mattoo’s search for a husband, aided in part by her parents, who respectfully asked if she’d be open to them setting her up — a challenge since they were by then living in the United States, where there are about 400 Kashmiri Pandit families, in which there were about 20 “single, age-appropriate men.” Mattoo said OK, but she wanted someone who would make her laugh, to which her mother said, “Funny’s not important!” But funny was. She wound up marrying a Jewish comedy writer.

The book appears to have taken shape in Peterborough at the MacDowell Artists Colony, where the author was in residence in 2022, working on a book that was then titled “16 Kitchens.” That’s now the title of a chapter in Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, in which Mattoo talks more about her mother and the family’s experience of living in Saudi Arabia, where the weather felt like “being warmed up in a low oven.” The MacDowell team can be proud of this one. As can Mattoo’s Nanaji. It’s been a while since I enjoyed a collection of essays so much. A

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley (William Morrow, 350 pages)

The jacket of Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast promises a “deliciously twisty murder mystery,” which is more a nod to the title than a description of the book itself.

Foley, a British author who has been compared to Agatha Christie, has enjoyed success in the genre (her 2020 book The Guest List was a Reese’s Book Club pick) despite a parade of cookie-cutter covers that may be all the rage but to me suggests that the content within lacks originality.

That can’t be said of The Midnight Feast, which is complexly plotted and tries at times to deliver cultural commentary within the core mystery. But the novel suffers from an unsatisfying pileup of perspectives that prevents readers from developing any real connection with the characters.

The Midnight Feast begins at the gala opening of an opulent resort called “The Manor,” which overlooks a cliff on the Dorset Coast in southern England. The owner, Francesca Meadows, is a wealthy wellness influencer of sorts reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow, and is determined to give her guests a goopy good time despite the objection of locals who believe her dream estate has desecrated sacred ground.

Francesca, “very good at living in the now,” wears a black opal ring because the stone signifies “purification for the body and soul” and “provides you with a shield against energy.” She’s very much into crystals. Every room at The Manor has a selection of stones in it for the guests’ well-being and sticks of sage to burn “for cleansing.” The place has signature scents and a signature cocktail whose ingredients include ginger, vodka and a dash of CBD oil. The guests themselves are “carefully curated” to keep out the wrong kind of people.

Francesca, newly married to the architect who designed The Manor’s infinity pool, is introduced as something of a dopey villain. Disdainful of the locals and their spooky folk tales, she is scheming to acquire an old farm down the road where “the animals look sad, like they’re begging for a better life. They honestly do!”

She inherited the property from her grandmother, and she had treated her grandfather poorly in his last years of life, thinking that he was simply daft when he warned her repeatedly, “You must keep the birds happy; don’t upset the birds.”

The birds, of course, aren’t literal birds in this context, although there are plenty of them in the story, which is heavy-handed with the bird imagery. According to local legend, The Birds are human-size creatures with beaked faces that occupy the woods and demand sacrifices and on occasion take a life for themselves, leaving behind a feather or two.

Snippets of this are revealed as the story unfolds in staccato, told by five narrators interspersed with excerpts from the diary of one of the characters, and yes, this is just confusing as it sounds. In fact it’s more confusing than it sounds because the story also jumps around in time, from June 2025 to July 2010, and back and forth between the day before the solstice (i.e. the titular “midnight feast”) and the day after it. There’s so much whiplash here that the book could be a ride at the Big E.

The narrators include Bella, a single mother who has come alone to opening weekend for reasons that we learn right away are Very Mysterious, since she has brought with her a folder of articles about Francesca.

There’s also Eddie, a young employee at The Manor, whose family owns the dilapidated farm down the road and who is hiding from his family the fact that he works here. There’s Owen, Francesca’s new husband, who doesn’t seem to be a very happy newlywed; and a DI (detective inspector) named Walker who is tasked with investigating a fire and mysterious deaths at the property. Along with Francesca, they all take turns narrating what’s happening in real time and revealing snippets of the past that connect them to each other and to the land.

Although the language is simple (too much so, one might say) and the chapters short, the constant change of perspective is wearisome and diminishes character development. Also, for a book that is heralded for its plot twists, alert readers can see many of them coming, and there is nothing revealed at the end that will leave us mulling the story in disbelief for days afterward. More likely, the ending is likely to result in a feeling of relief — we’re glad things are resolved so we can move on to a more compelling book.

On the plus side, for a murder mystery, there is very little gore involved, and only a couple of scenes that might be problematic for PETA.

Credit the author for managing to neatly tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; she had a destination in mind and gets us there eventually. No doubt some people will consider her a mastermind for navigating such a complicated plot, but it comes at the expense of the reader. C

Frostbite, by Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press, 327 pages)

In 1911, a grand banquet was held in Chicago to showcase an exciting new kind of food.

At the event, put on by the national Poultry, Butter and Egg Association, the five-course meal featured food that had been preserved in cold for six months to a year. The purpose of the event was to prove to a skeptical public that it was safe to eat previously frozen food.

“At the time, suspicion of refrigerated food was widespread,” Nicola Twilley writes in Frostbite, her deep dive into “the vast synthetic winter we’ve built to preserve our food.”

While most of us take refrigeration for granted, just a little more than a century ago it was new technology that didn’t inspire confidence. The 400 diners at that Chicago banquet were considered brave. At the time, gastrointestinal infections were the third leading cause of mortality; people were dying of cheese and ice cream poisoning, and the purveyors of manufactured cold were desperate to convince people that meat and produce that had been stored for months were not only safe, but healthier than fresh food.

It took some time, but they succeeded, and in doing so they revolutionized the American diet. Today there is a largely unseen industry called the “the cold chain,” compromising warehouses, trucks, shipping containers and other apparatus that enable a dizzying array of food choices at supermarkets and restaurants. You may think your own office is too chilly at times, but at companies like Americold and NewCold, workers have to wear specialty clothing in order to endure sub-freezing temperatures during their eight-hour shifts.

In Frostbite, Twilley descends into the chill, donning thermal underwear to work in an Americold warehouse for two weeks and criss-crossing the planet to explore how artificial cold is generated, the mechanics of refrigeration and how the food supply has changed because of it. Amazingly, she manages to make all this all compelling.

She begins with an explanation of how cooling works, a process that seems simple enough now but took decades to develop, with a few tragedies along the way. One was at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where “the Greatest Refrigerator on Earth” — a five-story cold storage building — attracted admiring crowds until it caught fire, killing 16 people, some of whom jumped to their deaths in front of horrified onlookers.

For the better part of a century, the development of refrigeration was a process marked by trial and error, with multiple entrepreneurs advancing the technology for their own purposes. They included a Trappist monk in France who created the first hermetically sealed compressor because he wanted to cool his wine.

While how a refrigerator works is fairly simple — Twilley travels to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to watch the construction of a rudimentary one in a garage — it’s not so simple to know exactly how to store food for optimal results and a long life. That involved a long process of trial and error, too.

Apples, for example, remain edible for a year or more when the conditions are right, but fractions of degrees determine whether an apple will rot, and the perfect temperature range changes with the variety of apple. A century of research, however, allows us to buy “fresh” apples at the Market Basket year-round.

“Today, we know more about how to lengthen an apple’s lifespan than a human’s,” Twilley writes.

Which is a good thing, because in Twilley’s telling, harvesting produce sounds practically inhumane. Celery and bananas, for example, don’t immediately die when they are picked, but continue to “breathe” and burn through their own sugars and enzymes “in a desperate attempt to get their cell metabolism going.”

Cold works to preserve the life of produce by slowing the rate of respiration, which is why a green bean you select at the supermarket has typically spent less than two hours in temperatures above 45 degrees, having been rushed from the field to chilling machines and then one of the massive cold-storage facilities.

But the biggest way that refrigeration has altered our eating, and by extension, the planet, is how cold storage has driven the rise of meat consumption. Prior to refrigeration, humans ate only the meat on their farm or their neighbor’s, or animals that were walked to slaughterhouses in cities. Later, animals destined for slaughter were shipped cross-country on box cars, but that was inefficient and costly. It wasn’t until cold storage became widely available that animals themselves were not shipped, but their frozen parts, and this upped the demand for meat, not only because of the accessibility but because freezing improves the texture and taste.

As Twilley writes, “muscle … needs time and cold to ripen into meat.” It also benefits from electric shocks given to the animal carcass, which is information many people might prefer to not know. (“… Shocked beef is brighter red, which consumers prefer.”) Most notably, cold storage gave birth to the factory-farm industry that raises, slaughters and processes animals in numbers that are hard to imagine. To supply our poultry needs alone, Twilley notes that “there are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens living out their five-to-seven week spans on Earth at any given moment.”

Twilley takes the slow road to her final chapter, in which she travels to the ultimate frozen warehouse, the “doomsday vault” of seeds kept underground in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

Along the way, she segues into refrigerator-related topics that are much less serious, such as the man who ran a dating service based on what the inside of people’s refrigerators look like. (John Stonehill was very impressed with Twilley’s — seeing photos, he said, “Your fridge is one of the most date-ready fridges I’ve seen in a hell of a long time. Are you married?”). As a writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times magazine, she says she has been “thinking and talking about refrigeration for a decade now,” and it’s hard to imagine that anyone is more well-versed in the topic. While refrigeration isn’t, on the surface, one of the most compelling of conversation topics, it’s a testament to Twilley’s skills as a writer and researcher that she has managed to make this niche subject engrossing. A

Sandwich, by Catherine Newman (Harper, 229 pages)

Since it’s set in an idyllic village at Cape Cod, Catherine Newman’s novel Sandwich could refer to the town of that name, the oldest on the Cape. It’s more of a nod, however, to the “sandwich generation,” the term for adults who are caring for their aging parents and their own children.

That’s the life stage of the protagonist, Rachel, who (somewhat bewilderingly) goes by the name Rocky, and who, at 54, is “halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents.” Rocky has been married nearly 30 years to Nick, “a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says.”

I will confess right now that I love her, and did by the beginning of the second chapter, when she dubbed a toilet malfunction “Plungergate.”

Rocky and her husband have been renting the same modest cottage for a week every summer since the children were young, and as the novel begins, they are headed there again, as Rocky muses on how time whitewashes our perception of experiences, and how a beach vacation is often filled with things that have little to do with the actual beach.

“You might picture the wild stretches of beach backed by rugged dunes or quaintly shingled houses with clouds of blue hydrangea blossoming all over the place. … Which is funny because most of the time you’re actually at the surf shop or the weird little supermarket that smells like raw meat, or in line at the claim shack, the good bakery, the port-a-potty, the mini-golf place. You’re buying twenty-dollar sunscreen at the gas station.”

On this particular trip, Rocky and her husband are accompanied by their daughter, Willa, who is a junior in college; their son Jamie, who works for a start-up in New York, and his girlfriend, Mya. (Also, the family cat, named Chicken — which was the only deeply unrelatable part of the book for me — taking a cat on vacation.) Rocky’s parents are due to arrive later in the week.

Rocky and Nick, who bicker constantly, are glad to have their children with them in this familiar space, as they are still navigating their almost empty nest, having to “make nervous small talk over our early dinners, as if we’re on an awkward zillionth date at a retirement home.”

Their quarreling is obvious to all; at one point, their daughter asks Rocky if something is wrong, but there is also clearly a deep affection between husband and wife that is tested as the week unfolds and a couple of secrets from Rocky’s past are slowly revealed. These revelations are related tangentially to a storyline involving Jamie’s girlfriend and a health issue she is having. There is a plot here that is thoughtfully crafted, but honestly, it doesn’t matter.

Newman is the kind of writer who could write 200 pages about paint drying and keep the reader entranced throughout. She has a gift for taking ordinary experiences and draping them in gorgeous language, the kind that stays with you, as when Rocky reminisces that when her kids were young they would “vibrate with excitement” at the mere mention of a visit to a Cape candy store.

She also has a sharp wit and bestows Rocky with a self-deprecatory wryness that stays at the ready whether she’s trying on a swimsuit (“One big wave and my boobs will definitely be celebrating their dangly freedom”; smelling zero SPF tanning oil (“the scent of my future squamous cell carcinomas”); or revisiting memories (“ … Jamie at four, Willa a baby in the sling, me with my permanently trashed perineum”).

The joy of Sandwich, in other words, isn’t about the plot, but instead about Newman’s charming and funny musings about decades of family vacations at the beach. Much of this book could have been a memoir, and we suspect some of it is, at least the parts about parents and children vacationing together at the beach: the small happiness of rubbing sunscreen on the backs of grown children whose bodies used to be so familiar but are now off limits to you; the weird time warp that takes over at the beach (“It is always one o’clock when we leave for the beach, regardless of when we start readying ourselves”); the constant scanning for shark fins, ticks and other dangers that never stops no matter how old your children are; and the relative ease of going to be beach with older children as opposed to the physical labor of going to be beach with young ones and their paraphernalia, everyone “breaded with sand.”

People who also rent the same beach house every year will also enjoy the observations relative to that — such as Rocky mourning that the old coffee maker has been replaced with something shiny and new, and the family assessing the changes to the house since they’d last been there. (Willa says, “Is it weird that I’m kind of offended when they replace stuff? Like, they didn’t even consult with us!”)

At the beginning of Sandwich, the novel felt physically thin to me, which sometimes feels foreboding, as if the book didn’t ripen and the author didn’t take the time to develop it fully. But Sandwich turned out to be short for the same reason that A Christmas Carol is short — the author said exactly what needed to be said, in the ordained time frame, and didn’t waste words or the reader’s time on the superfluous. Sandwich is a lovely and disciplined novel that accomplishes something remarkable: It’s a book about the beach that is too good to be considered a beach read. A

Pets and the City, by Dr. Amy Attas (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 311 pages)

The rich are different from you and me, except when their dog gets diarrhea or starts limping, and then they panic just like the rest of us do and call a vet.

Well, since they’re rich, they summon a vet to their brownstones and summer homes, and a lot of the time, when they do that in Manhattan, it’s Dr. Amy Attas who shows up.

Whether you’re wealthy or just-gettin’-by, Attas is the kind of vet you want: a person who was pretending to give injections to her stuffed animals as a child, who started working as an assistant at an animal clinic and age 13 and considers James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small as holy writ. She was born for this profession. It turns out, she can write, too.

Attas’s first book is a memoir that moonlights as a tell-all gabfest, spilling the tea on her most interesting clients and former bosses, albeit in a way that won’t get her sued. She has a lot of stories to choose from, having worked in New York City for more than three decades. The official tally is 7,000 families and more than 14,000 pets, most of which were house calls and which included celebrity clients like Joan Rivers, Billy Joel, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Steve Martin.

Mattas started her business, City Pets, after getting let go by an Upper East Side practice run by a man who promised to make her a partner but then abruptly fired her, apparently because he was jealous that his VIP clients were asking for Attas instead of him. (Every story needs a villain, and this guy, identified only as Dr. B, certainly qualifies.)

The day after Attas was let go, when she was still mulling what to do, two of her former clients tracked her down and asked for house calls. The day after that, she had four more homes to visit, even though this was before house-call practices were common in veterinary medicine. She kept at it, and placed a few ads, and eventually worked up the nerve to call Joan Rivers, who’d been a client at Dr. B’s business, and to tell the comedian she was available for house calls for Spike, the Yorkie who traveled with Rivers everywhere.

“What happened?” Rivers asked, and Attas answered, “Do you want the long story or the short version.” To which Rivers replied, “I want every single detail, and I promise you every single person on the Upper East Side is going to know every single detail, too.”

And with that, City Pets was off and running; no word on what happened to the notorious Dr. B.

For an Ivy League-educated veterinarian who serves a largely privileged clientele, Attas is surprisingly down-to-Earth and willing to dish on humiliating moments, like the time the urine of a male cat soaked her during an exam just before a date, and her genuine, child-like excitement every time a new client turned out to be a celebrity. When she went to a hotel to treat the pug of a yet-unknown VIP — she was told to ask for John Smith at the front desk — Billy Joel answered the door and said, “Hi, I’m Bill.”

While she replied calmly, Attas writes that “Inside, my thoughts were screaming Holy moly! It’s Billy Joel! BILL-Y JOEL! Looking and sounding like … Billy Joel!!!”

She also confesses that, in her scramble to get to the hotel, she forgot her stethoscope and instead of admitting to it, pretended to check the dog’s heartbeat with blood pressure headphones.

It is this kind of vulnerable disclosure that makes Pets and the City quirky and charming; the book’s subtitle is “true tales of a Manhattan house call veterinarian” and we don’t doubt the true part since, in addition to animal stories, Mattas is also telling us how she pretty much badgered her future husband into dating her after they met when his puppy took ill, how she fainted while watching another veterinarian draw blood, and how she once removed dew claws off a litter of 12 two-day-old puppies after letting them suck on Q-tips soaked in sweet wine.

Many of these tales are not so much stories as they are confessions.

The celebrities’ pets are interesting enough, as are the friendships that Mattas forms with some of their famous owners. But the stories I found most interesting were just ordinary cases — the Siamese cat named Itchy undergoing chemotherapy for intestinal lymphoma, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Chowder with heart disease — the lengths to which people will go to keep a pet alive for a few more months or a few more years.

And the owners themselves, of course, are a large part of the story, like the woman who, after her terminally ill cat was euthanized, threw herself on the floor and started screaming that she didn’t want to live anymore. (Mattas searched the house until she found prescriptions, and then called the woman’s psychiatrist for help.) A much more touching story of euthanasia comes when Mattas unexpectedly goes to the house of the late Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author of Night, among other books, while the family is agonizing over whether to put a beloved cat to sleep.

The Wiesel encounter is poignant, but for the most part, Pets and the City, like its author, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Mattas did not try to build a lofty narrative arc in which she and the people in her life undergo great and meaningful changes. She just tells entertaining stories, as if sitting around the dinner table with her readers, sharing what happened that day at work.

As such, there are no real lessons to learn here, other than that there are people who are even crazier about their pets than we are. And if you ever have a pet emergency while visiting Manhattan, don’t call Dr. B. B