Category: Books

(Summit Books, 229 pages)

A dozen years ago Tom Layward learned his wife had an affair. He decided he’d stay with her until his youngest child left home.

Now that milestone has arrived. Tom’s son, Michael, is living in Los Angeles, coming home as rarely as he can get away with; he has become “one of those young people who decides that contact with their family is not a source of happiness, so you have to limit it to unavoidable occasions.” His daughter, Miri, is headed to Carnegie Mellon University and trying to extract herself from a romantic relationship before she goes.

For Tom and his wife, Amy, the past 12 years have been an exercise in marital managed care. Most people who stay married for the long haul, Tom observes, do so because “you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.”

With that, author Ben Markovits signals what the ride of Tom Layward’s life will be like in his 12th novel, The Rest of Our Lives: an excavation of a marriage and its attendant family life, served with droll wit that is a welcome interruption to Tom’s matter-of-fact recitation of events.

It’s a quite manly book, unusual in a fiction market oversaturated with women’s points of view.

Tom, the first-person narrator, is a 55-year-old law professor who departed from literature when he realized he actually would have to write a book. He met his future wife (who “looks like the kind of woman who can ride a horse, which she actually can”) when they were both graduate students in Boston. Amy’s family has a vacation home on the Cape, which is where we first observe the Layward family’s dynamics: the simmering conflict between husband and wife, and between wife and daughter, of which Tom notes, “from the beginning their relationship was one long argument.”

Tom’s relationship with his kids is less fraught; he feels comfortable talking with his son, and he is looking forward to driving his daughter from their home in Scarsdale, New York, to Pittsburgh, as a family. When Amy decides not to go, he doesn’t object and is still planning to drive home after moving his daughter in.

But after spending the night in the spare bedroom of a friend in Pittsburgh, he takes off on an impromptu road trip that will begin with a visit to his brother and end with a visit to his son, first visiting a Walmart to buy clothes, snacks and a basketball for the road. (“If you ever want to feel your place in the scales of the universe, go into a Walmart Supercenter,” Tom says.)

He has the bandwidth for a road trip because, unbeknownst to Amy, he’s on leave from his job, having inadvertently become entangled with a scandal through a client. When she reaches him, bewildered, he’s in Akron and vaguely explains that he needs a few days to himself. It’s clear he’s not even really sure what he is doing or what he will do next. Meanwhile, the physical problems he’s been having for months — waking up with a puffy face and draining eyes — are worsening. Everyone has been telling him to get medical help, but Tom is too involved in his existential crises and keeps writing the symptoms off as long Covid.

Throughout the trip Tom ruminates on his marriage, which he concludes “was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than B overall on the rest of your life.” Along the way we learn more about Tom’s childhood and other aspects of his life.

He doesn’t have an especially compelling voice, which can make it difficult to want to stick with him when he’s talking about minutiae, such as what he and others are eating. There are no made-for-Hollywood plot twists here, just the quiet unspooling of a life, with two questions that beckon the reader to the end: What’s wrong with Tom physically, and will he leave his wife?

The Rest of Our Lives, first published in the U.K.,was on the short list for 2025’s Booker Prize, which may baffle some readers who find the novel’s plodding pace tough sledding. But it doesn’t so much intend to dazzle as to evoke, and its heart and intelligence won me over, as did its understated ending. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

(Entangled Publishing, 464 pages)

It’s been a minute since I’ve been so enraptured with a book that I removed myself from real-life obligations to immerse myself in a different world, and I have no shame about the fact that the book that brought me to this magical place is a young adult novel. Dragon Cursed is in good company, living on the same shelves as The Hunger Games and Harry Potter.

My skepticism in starting this was less about the genre and more about whether I wanted to read another dragon-themed book, having recently read the non-YA Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros and other dragon-adjacent books. I’m glad I didn’t let that stop me. Dragon Cursed is unique despite some typical tropes, and it’s fun, fast-paced and full of compelling characters. I loved the heroes and hated the villains — and I love that sometimes it was hard to know who was who.

This was only my second experience with an Elise Kova novel, but she’s published many fantasy/romance books and series for adults and young adults. Prior to this I listened to her most recent adult novel, Arcana Academy, on audiobook and really enjoyed it.

Dragon Cursed is set in Vinguard, where dragons are an eternal threat to the people. The main character, 18-year-old Isola, was deemed “Valor Reborn” at age 12 after she survived a face-to-face encounter with a dragon. She then spent six years training with the vicar of Vinguard, who pushed her to her limits, assuming she has the ability to battle the Elder Dragon, as Valor had done.

Isola doesn’t believe she’s Valor Reborn. She’s terrified that she’s actually dragon cursed.

Being dragon cursed means someday transforming into a dragon that can and will destroy anything and everything. To prevent this, every year Vinguard holds a Tribunal for all 18-year-olds.

“Every moment of this Tribunal is a test — a test to ensure that a dragon cursed does not draw breath within the walls of Vinguard,” the vicar says. If there are any signs that there’s a dragon within a tribute, he is killed by Mercy Knights, so called because it is seen as an act of mercy to kill someone before they become a beast.

Heading into the tribunal, Isola worries that every challenge she faces could out her as dragon cursed. She’s not alone, though. She’s there alongside her best friend, Saipha, as well as a few enemies who seem to dislike her because of the attention she’s received as Valor Reborn. And then there’s Lucan, a maybe enemy or maybe friend, who follows her as if he’s been assigned to watch her every move. Lucan was taken in by the vicar and is assumed to be his prodigy, but Lucan’s motives become less clear as he both hurts and helps Isola throughout the trials.

The “is he friend or foe?” trope of course paves the way to a simmering romance between Lucan and Isola. It’s PG, definitely YA appropriate, and just the right balance of frustrating tension, complicated feelings and tender moments.

My 17-year-old daughter just finished the Empyrean series and loved it — except for the rather explicit spicy scenes. So I gave her Dragon Cursed and assured her that it is full of action and drama and dragons, but way lighter on the intimacy.

One minor complaint: The use of magic was confusing at times. There were several instances during the trials where I thought, “Wait, what just happened?” I’m pretty new to the fantasy genre, though, so that could be my lack of understanding of how, for example, sigils work. Fantasy requires a fair amount of suspending disbelief anyway, so this didn’t impact my enjoyment.

Finally, one small pet peeve: the book jacket and promo materials call the human city “Vingard,” but throughout the book it’s “Vinguard.” The first edition of the book is so visually beautiful and the story so well-written that it’s a shame this was overlooked.

Regardless, Dragon Cursed is a fun, moderately suspenseful, lightly romantic addition to the ever-growing lineup of dragon tales. A

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 401 pages)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, George Packer often traveled between rural New York and New York City. They seemed like two different worlds, he told the Pittsburgh Review of Books. The dichotomy underpins Packer’s dystopian novel The Emergency.

It centers on 48-year-old surgeon Dr. Hugo Rustin, struggling to adapt to his new life after the collapse of the government, defined only as “the empire.” There was a standoff in the capital that lasted for weeks and devolved into fighting between mobs, and before long the leadership and police fled and looting began. A new form of governance emerged, more egalitarian than the old system, marked by the motto “Together.”

Rustin was happy to do what he could to keep the hospital running. But as Together took hold, he began to resent some of the changes — how people under his command called him by his first name, how titles like “nurse” or “housekeeper” were replaced with “healing associate” and patients were called “healing recipients.”

He finally snaps when a junior associate points out a mistake at the end of a grueling day. That results in Rustin being called into a meeting — a “Restoration Ring” — where his colleagues recite principles of Together like “I am no better and neither are you” and “Listen to the young.” Rustin tries to apologize without compromising his values, and it doesn’t go well. He is advised to spend a month wandering around the city and then come back and share the lessons he has learned.

Meanwhile, Rustin’s wife, Annabelle, is caught up in the spirit of Together and starts a ministry of sorts helping to care for the homeless “Strangers” constructing tent encampments near their home. His son Pan and his daughter Selva, too, have taken up the cause.

It is the father-daughter relationship that is at the heart of this book, as Dr. Rustin and Selva attempt a dangerous journey in a dystopian world even while bickering about the ordinary things families bicker about. Rustin understands that Selva’s beliefs, as much as he thinks they are wrong, come from a good place — at one point, she tells him, she has been angry with him “because you never believed the world could be better or worse than the one you gave me. And that breaks my heart.”

And Packer makes it clear that there were things wrong in the pre-Emergency world; for one thing, the disdainful way Rustin and those of his standing referred to the bottom 10 percent, the ones barely getting by and often succumbing to addiction, as “Excess Burghers.”

But there are uncomfortable things in the new world, too, such as the “Suicide Spot” — a gallows where young people go and put a noose around their neck, and are then talked out of the act by young people serving as “Guardians.” It is a ghastly sort of therapy, but the Guardians take pride that they have not lost a child. And there are ghastly things that father and daughter encounter as they venture beyond the city’s borders in hope of reuniting a “Stranger” father in the city with his missing son.

From the opening pages of the novel it is clear we are being asked to consider what happens when a society of disparate means and morality throws out the old ways of being for a new order. But it is not clear whether Dr. Rustin is the hero or the antihero in this world. That is one of the mysteries that propels the reader through the story; it is as compelling as whether Hugo, Annabelle and their children can stay together in a Together world. Give Packer credit for not revealing his hand; this is a deeply nuanced book. Most astonishingly, it’s also occasionally funny. B+

Featured Photo: The Emergency, by George Packer

(St. Martin’s Press, 287 pages)

From Hollywood stars who microdose the drug to people who were once hundreds of pounds overweight, many people have found Ozempic and its imitators to be game-changers. Ozempic has also been a game-changer for Novo Nordisk, the Denmark-based company that brought the drug to market at a time when its fortunes were failing.

In the 1990s the company had what was internally described as “an innovation problem,” Aimee Donnellan explains in this deep dive into the history of Ozempic and similar drugs. But Novo Nordisk had a promising project, a drug to help people with diabetes. It was a synthetic version of a gut hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1), discovered through research on anglerfish caught in Boston Harbor, and it proved a powerful means of lowering blood sugar in people with diabetes — and, fortuitously, of helping these same people lose weight.

The weight loss industry has long been profitable in America, and it was clear there was money to be made. Ozempic was used for weight loss off-label; word spread and so did its use.

Several researchers did the work that would lead to this breakthrough, among them Danish chemist Svetlana Mojsov, whose work preceded the approval of Ozempic by more than a decade. But science is as competitive as politics, especially when its result is lucrative, and Donnellan takes up the banner of Mojsov here, presenting her as a woman done wrong by men who attempted to take credit for her work (and might have succeeded had she not kept detailed notes).

The story of the behind-the-scenes infighting seems incongruent with other parts of Off the Scales, which can’t seem to decide what sort of book it wants to be.

Donnellan, a Reuters columnist who covers the pharmaceutical industry, begins with the story of a marketing specialist in Michigan who lost more than 100 pounds on Ozempic and saw her world change. At work Sarah started getting promotions, even though her performance was the same. “At her parents’ house, her father, previously loving but somewhat absent, seemed to take a newfound interest in her. She could visibly see how proud he was of her. Now 34, she had never before seen this look on his face.”

Through Sarah’s story and others, Donnellan offers a picture of lives changed. Formerly invisible people gain social status as their bodies shrink and gain peace as the “food noise” that had dominated their lives quiets.

She also shares disturbing stories, like that of a Los Angeles hairstylist who lost weight on Mounjaro, albeit while also taking an anti-nausea medication because she constantly felt sick. After four months a friend told her she looked gaunt; she started getting facial injections to restore volume to her face. (Donnellan notes that not everyone can afford dermal fillers.) Moreover, Donnellan writes, “for a small minority of GLP-1 users, the side effects are so severe that they may wish they never even heard of the medication.”

Donnellan presents these and other stories without judgment. Toward the end she touches on what may be the most underreported part of the story: how these drugs will affect the culture as people who use them change their eating habits (several writers have tried to tackle this, as Kari Jenson Gold did in a First Things essay titled “The Night Ozempic Came to Dinner”). Donnellan suggests that changed eating patterns may spell doom for fast food restaurants and the makers of ultra-processed food, and says weight-loss drugs may also affect alcohol consumption.

But we are new to the GLP-1 world and we don’t know the drugs’ effect decades out. Donnellan’s examination, while sometimes disjointed and uneven in its readability, raises interesting questions. B-

Featured Photo: Off the Scales, by Aimee Donnellan

Alexandra McCollum has conjured some incredibly endearing characters in Into the Midnight Wood, their debut novel about two comically disparate roommates, each trying to figure out who they are and what they want amidst family drama, dark magic and a tenuous friendship.

I’m relatively new to the fantasy/romantasy genre but in the past year have devoured many books that feature magic, witches, fae, vampires, gods and god complexes, dark academia and other common tropes, but most especially strong female main characters — which is wonderful and commendable, but also made Into the Midnight Wood a refreshing change. Its main character is David, a cisgender gay man, whose roommate and love/hate interest is Meredith, referred to as he/him in the story but who outwardly rejects labels, often dresses femme and is romantically attracted to all genders.

McCollum calls the novel a “queer contemporary fantasy romance that is intended for adult readers” on their website, the latter part alluding to the fact that there are several very explicit “open door” scenes.

Along with the spice, this book is laugh-out-loud funny, thanks mainly to the dialogue between David and Meredith, and to Meredith being a vibrant, charismatic human. But David has lived with him for five years and has grown tired of Meredith’s quirky behaviors. As he tries to remind himself of why he’s looking for a new place to live and a chance to be rid of Meredith for good, David starts a tally, a la “10 Things I Hate About You” — David, though, is mentally cataloging not 10, but 100 things that are “wrong” with Meredith.

David’s list is full of annoyances, some of which are incredibly inane and some of which would absolutely get aggravating over time.

A small sample:

“#11: His accent.” Because “David had never before heard someone manage to sound both American and British at the same time, yet Meredith somehow accomplished it.”

“#13: He persists in outfitting his dog in this humiliating fashion,” referring to Bianca’s rhinestone collar.

“#23: He never puts anything back in its proper place.”

“#48: He insists on holding an impromptu funeral for a rodent.”

“#94: He acts as if an absence of hours or days has been years,” David mentally tallies after Meredith runs up to hug his friend (before noting with a semblance of surprise that he’s kind of missed Meredith greeting him that way.)

But behind Meredith’s persona is a more subdued, almost defeated, side that starts to seep out as his family, full of disapproval and a brother who crosses the line of typical sibling squabbling into full-on emotional abuse, re-enters his life. There’s a wedding at the center of this reunion, because all good family drama happens when there’s a wedding involved.

So where’s the magic? Most of it happens in the Midnight Wood, while the rest of the book is set in a relatively normal, human-occupied place — with a few exceptions that are sprinkled in here and there with little explanation and zero world-building. But it’s an enchanting space, and I didn’t feel any real need for an explanation as to why David and Meredith are fully human while their neighbor, Mrs. Jupiter, is a straight-up witch with a cauldron and a penchant for casting spells. There are hints of otherworldly creatures mentioned throughout as well, like a real estate agent who is presented as human — or, at least, not presented as not human — who turns out to have tentacles.

But the Midnight Wood is where most of the magic happens. It’s where Meredith seems to have a connection with a lot of the creatures he meets in the Midnight Wood, like magic mice (hence the rodent funeral noted in #48). He seems to feel at home in these woods, engaging with misfit beings who, like Meredith, are hard to define.

There’s some dark magic looming among the trees too though, in the form of Erlking of the Midnight Wood, who feeds on others’ misery and is especially interested in getting to Meredith’s deep, dark feelings that he tries so hard to shove down. It’s an interesting way to bring life to Meredith’s self-loathing, essentially taking on the form of a monster that threatens to destroy him if he gives in to his despair.

Could this story have been told without the moderate dose of magic? Probably. But the magic tempers the serious themes, adding a dose of whimsy without taking away from the real, heartfelt messages.

If you’re looking for a typical romantasy, this isn’t it, but it’s well worth the journey if you’re looking for something enchantingly eccentric. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Photo: The Midnight Wood by Alexandra McCollum

(Knopf, 177 pages)

Thomas McGuane’s 18th book, A Wooded Shore, fits nicely on a shelf in a man cave. Comprising eight stories and a novella, the collection is mostly about ordinary men: men striving but failing to rise to the myriad occasions that life presents. The fact that most take place in Montana shouldn’t be a deterrent to anyone in New England.

Take “Slant Six,” my favorite of the bunch. It is a deceptively simple slice-of-life story about a couple, Drew and Lucy, going through common problems of life, like dealing with an aging mother/mother-in-law. The story opens with Drew, a lawyer, stopping by a hardware store. There he runs into a former client trying to figure out what shade of white his wife would want off a color wheel featuring 27 different shades. As the story unfolds, we learn that the couple, despite Drew’s profession, live in a rental with a “tall, lean and Lincolnesque” landlord named Jocko who lives with a parrot named Pontius Pilate and likes to mow the lawn in a thong. “The fact that Jocko was their landlord seemed to stand for everything they hadn’t gotten in life,” McGuane writes.

The fact that Drew and Lucy work hard at being good people, even volunteering to pick up trash along two miles of a highway, seems to offer no karmic benefit. In the seminal scene of the story, the couple go to a party at a client’s house, where they interact with the various people who cross paths in their life. The story concludes with a smart callback to the paint color-wheel scene and an observation by Drew that is haunting and likely universal.

Memorable also is “Balloons,” which has just a little more than eight pages but delivers a surprise punch in the final paragraph. It’s narrated by a doctor who had an affair with a woman, Joan, who “stirred up our town with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to Roger couldn’t last.” That was true: Joan eventually left Roger, leaving her former husband and her former paramour to awkwardly interact with one another, around town and in the examination room. Even after the divorce, the narrator was unsure whether Roger had known about the affair. When he comes to the doctor’s office with news and a surprising request, he doesn’t question the motive. Theirs had seemed an idyllic marriage at the start: The narrator reflects, when looking at the church where they were married, “I had never seen two such good-looking people as Joan and Roger at their peak.”

Some writers of short fiction end their stories so abruptly that it seems they got tired and decided to stop and let the reader figure out where they were going. That’s not the case in this collection; the endings appear well-thought out, even if the story itself drifts a little bit. That’s the case in “Retail,” which introduces us to Roy, an insurance salesman who achieved modest success selling policies to people who owed him something in some way: old classmates, distant relatives, an abusive foster mom. When Roy achieves local stardom by rushing into a burning house to save a child’s cat, his fortunes improve, but he still finds himself managing an unimpressive group of salesmen and trying unsuccessfully to court a widow in an adjacent office.

And so it goes: despair and hope, hope and despair, one foot in front of the other, and occasionally a flash of revelation. Each story can be seen as mildly to enormously depressing, but for the schadenfreude.

There is pain and loss at the heart of these stories, which gives them their depth. McGuane’s extraordinary voice, honed over 85 years of living, gives them their meaning. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: A Wooded Shore, by Thomas McGuane