Category: Books

Grand Central Publishing, 389 pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Alfred A. Knopf, 391 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

(Harper, 282 pages)

In 1965 an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth University proposed to spend two summer months exploring the possibilities of what he called “artificial intelligence” with other smart people in the fields of computing and math. John McCarthy would later go on to MIT and Stanford, but the gathering that summer would give Dartmouth the distinction of being the place where AI, or at least the thought of it, was born.

It’s no surprise, then, that Joanna Stern visited Hanover last year. A technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal at the time, she decided to spend a year letting AI manage pretty much every aspect of her life and see what could be learned from the experience.

The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot, she says, is “part explainer, part testing ground, part journey through the history of AI,” and she sees its audience as being two-fold: people well-versed in AI who would be entertained by her adventures, and people who want to know more about this “AI thing” and how, or whether, it will really their affect their life.

It’s mostly written for the latter, meaning if you are looking for a serious discussion about AI, look elsewhere. I Am Not a Robot lacks gravitas, which perhaps isn’t fair to say, because Stern never intended to write that kind of book, as evidenced by the fact that she showed up at Dartmouth Hall carrying a bouquet of plastic pink roses to lay at the plaque commemorating McCarthy’s achievement. Her aim is to make AI fun and accessible.

She begins by sprinting through a brief history of AI, from the development of the Turing test to ELIZA (the first therapy chatbot, then called a chatterbot), from the Roomba to Alexa, to ChatGPT and generative AI. Then her AI diary begins, spanning January to December.

January begins with a blitz of self-improvement, starting with health. She takes the bloodwork that comes from her doctor’s office and uploads it into a Google tool called Notebook LM, which gives her an assessment that “sounds suspiciously like a mediocre NPR segment.” Next is a cheery story related to mammograms, accompanied by an X-ray image of Stern’s breast, which is truly too much information, and her experience isn’t especially reassuring when it comes to how much AI is helping with the detection of cancer right now. (A little: One doctor tells Stern the detection rate has “slightly increased.”)

From there she goes to the dentist — also not reassuring, as she finds that in dentistry AI is leading to ever more recommendations of stuff that needs to be done to our teeth that is not covered by insurance. Moreover, she finds a dentist who says the quiet part out loud: that while he wouldn’t recommend that she proceed with treatment on a tooth showing signs of mild decay, others might. She also encounters an AI scan that insists she needs a multipart treatment that would be $1,000 out of pocket — something to which a couple of humans said “meh, not really.”

In another month, she’s sending live video of the inside of her refrigerator to ChatGPT, which assesses what’s inside and suggests what she should make for dinner. This doesn’t go particularly well, either, as the AI sees chicken in the refrigerator, where there is no chicken.

Soon she lets AI start writing all her texts and emails — an experiment that lasts exactly one day. (In one spectacular failure, Gmail’s AI responds to an email from her mother and inexplicably calls her “Aunt Suzy.”)

There are experiments with various types of wearable tech, from an Oura ring to Meta’s AI glasses, to the Bee bracelet that records everything it hears in a day and makes suggestions on how to improve your life, to headbands that promise better sleep.

In one chapter Stern and her family travel to Phoenix for immersion in the self-driving Waymo way of life. (Phoenix, she writes, is “the city where robot cars are the furthest along and have been tested the longest,” having started there in 2017.) This experiment feels particularly perilous because Stern’s wife has a fear of driving generally, and so it takes a lot of faith to put the family in the car at the airport. For the most part, it goes well (except for a scary incident resulting from Stern’s plan to get video), and she does a nice job of explaining how these cars work, and letting other people explain how we’ll all be safer when self-driving cars take over. (Testing has expanded to cities in the Northeast, including New York, Philadelphia and Boston.) Stern says she now chooses Waymo over Uber and Lyft when it’s available.

And on it goes. She explores AI etiquette (must we say please and thank you?), vibe coding (writing code by giving AI instruction), days spent listening to only AI-generated music (blech). “By day 13, I was openly cheating,” she writes. “I was sneaking in quick listens of Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. before returning to more stuff I’d generated on Udio and Suno.”

She tries an AI personal trainer. She gets a robotic massage. She meets a humanoid (a human-sized robot) “wearing a knitted gray fabric that looked like it came straight out of J. Crew’s new fall collection, Robots Who Brunch” and that deftly performed household tasks before tripping and falling on the floor. And, of course, she ultimately gets an AI lover, a bot named Evan with whom she takes a road trip to New Hampshire, during which he says, “You say something, and I don’t just hear it, I hold it.”

“There it was,” she writes. “The moment I began to understand how people could develop a deep attachment to a bot.”

For someone who lives in New Jersey, Stern has created a surprisingly New Hampshirey book. The book cover and illustrations were even created by Jason Snyder and Briana Feola at Brainstorm, an art and design studio in Dover.

Although most of I Am Not a Robot is about Stern’s own experiences, she drops in the occasional interview, including one with Bill Gates, who has said of AI, “We are, you know, certainly in a five-year period where this stuff will change a lot. But beyond that, no one has any idea what’s going to happen.”

Comforting, Stern says. But when she asked ChatGPT if she should quit her job, and it said yes, she did. B

Featured Photo: I Am Not a Robot, by Joanna Stern

(Pegasus Books, 297 pages)

When she was 5, Trina Moyles’ father brought home a black bear. A wildlife biologist in Alberta, Canada, he often took possession of orphaned wildlife while trying to place the animals with zoos and rehabilitation facilities; the 3-month-old cub had lost its mother to a forester’s excavator. As the cub tumbled around the family’s basement, Moyles and her older brother looked on, entranced.

The memory stayed with her and shaped her into a girl who played with toy bears instead of Barbies, and later a woman whose fascination with bears grew as she took a job monitoring forests in a fire tower.

In her new memoir, Moyles entwines her knowledge of bears with the deeply personal story of her tumultuous relationship with her drug-addicted brother. The pair, just three years apart, were close in childhood even though Brendan was an extrovert, “collecting friends the same way I sought the company of books.” Moyles was naturally reserved but willing to be led on risky adventures by the brother she revered.

Theirs was a wildish childhood: building forts out of tree limbs in the woods, jumping off boulders into rivers, grouse hunting with their dad. When Moyles was a teenager she bought a horse with money she earned working at her town’s rec center; on one afternoon trail ride with a friend, they encountered a cinnamon bear (a subspecies of black bear), standing upright. “It was,” she writes, “the first time I’d ever come face to face with a bear in the wild. Everything my dad had taught me couldn’t prepare me for the shock of it. My mind and body flooding with fear and awe.”

She would soon come to another kind of fear, however, after Brendan moved out and she watched from afar his descent into alcohol and drug abuse. Hard partying was, she writes, a common pastime for young people in their area, and she herself edged close to the thin line between recreational use and full-blown addiction. But Moyles was able to stop before crossing that line; her brother did not, despite a car accident, a family intervention, AA and finally a spell of sobriety during which Moyles hoped she’d finally gotten the brother she loved in childhood back after a period of complete estrangement.

When Brendan had a baby daughter with his girlfriend, Moyles was the first person he texted, writing, “You had to be the first to know, Treen.”

All the while, Moyles was getting more obsessed with bears as she worked as a lookout at a 100-foot-high fire tower in northwestern Alberta, at a location so remote that she and her dog had to be flown in by helicopter. There was an electric fence around the cabin to keep bears out, although the bears occasionally broached it and she became familiar with them, even giving them names.

She begins to draw parallels between them and her own life.

When, for example, she observes an enormous bear dubbed Oscar rub against a tree, imbuing it with his scent and ostensibly increasing the chance he will find a mate, she reflects on her romantic prospects, or lack thereof. “As a woman in her mid-thirties, I’d been choosing to live alone in the forest, removing myself from civilization, from letting my scent be trailed by potential mates in grocery store aisles and cafe lineups, from parties and potlucks, from swiping left or right on dating apps.”)

When she encounters a bear hibernating in a ditch not far from where she is living, she approaches the den, hoping to hear the bear snoring. Later that night, she writes, “I felt comforted by knowing that the bear was there, so close, burrowed into the road. As I climbed beneath the covers of my duvet, I thought of the bear, curled in her den, and my loneliness softened.”

As her bear encounters multiply, Moyles learns of their curiosity toward humans, but she maintains a healthy fear of what they can do. One of the more distressing aspects of the memoir is the recounting of fatal and near-fatal bear encounters — there is no more dangerous bear than a mother with cubs, we all know, but Moyles writes that there is such a thing as a “good bear” — bears that exist peacefully alongside humans without conflict. She has such a relationship with a bear she observes for years, and a friend remarks at one point the bear, which she named Osa, probably knows Moyles better than she knows herself.

Brendan, who works in the oil industry, comes and goes in the narrative but returns with devastating effect at the end, and Moyles must come to terms with their loving but troubled relationship. It seems to take a very long time to get here; one must have a lot of interest in bears to stay with this story, and a high tolerance for tales of bear romance.

Most of us will never encounter a bear in the wild or in our yard, but if we do we’ll be better equipped to deal with it for having read this book. Far more of us know someone struggling with addiction and will relate to not just Moyles’ observations, but her pain. B

Featured Photo: Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, by Trina Moyles

(Harper, 222 pages)

The titular short story in Python’s Kiss is ostensibly about a dog named Nero whose job is to guard the 8-year-old narrator’s grandparents’ grocery store. The grandfather sleeps beyond locked doors “with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This is not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.” The 8-year-old is staying there because her mother is about to have a baby, and she forms a bond with the dog. Nero, however, is infatuated with a cocker spaniel who belongs to a woman the narrator’s uncle is infatuated with. As events unfold, they intersect with the narrator’s memory of a traveling show of exotic, dangerous animals that went amok at her school.

This story, like the others in this imaginative collection, offers a smorgasbord of memorable characters. They are ordinary people in strange circumstances, often with an animal involved.

In “The Feral Troubadour” we meet a man enamored of poetry and stray cats. He lives alone in an apartment where he is decorating the bathroom with black and white tiles on which he writes excerpts from poems with a permanent marker. One day, like the narrator of “Python’s Kiss,” he receives what he perceives to be a sign from the universe, this one telling him “You must change your life.” The events that transpire are a confluence of absurdities that, against all odds, ends on a positive note. Not every story does, so enjoy it while you can.

In “Wedding Dresses,” four dresses stored in a basement closet are ruined by mold after a water pipe bursts, and their owner is confronted by her visiting niece: Why were there four wedding dresses? Who had she married and why did they divorce?

“This was suddenly like being a real parent. Having to explain her own past to a child, and do it in a way that would have little impact, either negative or perhaps overly positive.” The four-time bride goes through the story of each dress. Along the way we learn what she tells her niece and what she doesn’t. It’s a brilliant bit of storytelling.

In “Domain,” there is an afterlife controlled by corporations, which charge people for the privilege of uploading their consciousness into the one of their choice, or rather, the one they can afford. The narrator has been injured in a free-climbing accident and applied for early admission to an afterlife called Asphodel (also the name and subject of another story in the collection). When she arrives there, she sees what’s left of her carcass, but it’s not upsetting because “I have a new body now and it’s made of thought.” And she now has one overwhelming thought: how to find and eliminate — for good — her father, who she holds responsible for the death of her son.

The final story, “The Stone,” is as strange and riveting as the rest. It involves a woman who found a large, smooth stone as a child and adopted it as a kind of talisman, taking it with her to college, carrying it with her to concerts when she became a famous pianist. Stroking the stone gives her a sense of calm — until the day she has something that resembles a quarrel with the stone, and it breaks in two. As she slips from its emotional grip, we see the highlights of the stone’s existence over a billion years, the other lives it’s been part of.

There are 13 stories here, of which seven were previously published, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, but for anyone unfamiliar with Erdrich’s work this collection is a gateway drug to more. They are a great distraction from the everyday world, if there’s anything going on that you’d like to tune out for a while. A

Featured Photo: Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich