Books – Page 24

What We Wish Were True, by Tallu Schuyler Quinn

What We Wish Were True, by Tallu Schuyler Quinn (Convergent, 187 pages)

After Tallu Schuyler Quinn was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2020, she started a journal on Caring Bridge, a website where people struggling with an illness (or their families) can share updates on their condition.

It’s hard to see how she had time — or frankly, the capacity — to write.

Quinn, who had just turned 40 when she became ill, was the leader of a nonprofit she had founded a decade earlier, the Nashville Food Project, and was married with two young children. Her diagnosis was stage IV glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and doctors removed a tumor “the size of a big meaty fist.” The surgery extended her life slightly but also knocked out part of her vision and some of the gray matter that processes words.

“Almost overnight I have had to let a lot of things go,” Quinn wrote. “I’m not cooking as much, I can’t drive any longer, my gardens are overgrown, I can’t really help my kids with their schoolwork, and my own writing comes with a new difficulty and requires a new effort.”

Her cancer battle was relatively short; Quinn died in February. Unlike another young mother and author with a stage IV cancer diagnosis, Kate Bowler (Everything Happens for a Reason, and Other Lies I’ve Loved), she didn’t get to see her finished book, which is a collection of short essays about her life, her work and her dying.

It’s a surprisingly upbeat book, given the subject and Quinn’s frank disclosures about her deteriorating condition and her profound grief. She believed in God and even had a master’s degree from a seminary, but was not willing to go gently into the dark night. But she found a way to be grateful for life even as she grieved how the tumors “mix me up in these sad and terrible ways.” She writes of wailing her thanks to God as salty tears poured into her mouth. Whatever the tumors took from her, they left the gift of poetry.

Although Quinn had earned a degree in papermaking and bookbinding, before cancer, she had not planned on being a writer. “After graduating from seminary, with a diploma in hand from a reputable institution, I did what any promising ministerial student would do: I moved to Boston with my friends and started working at a grocery store.” On the night shift, stocking shelves and throwing out aging meat, she started thinking about food waste and spent resources and the immorality of it all. These ideas would later percolate as part of her vision to feed hungry people in Tennessee, but first she spent six months working in Nicaragua, witnessing the kind of need that many Americans never encounter. She tells a wonderful story of a ride in a truck where they kept stopping to pick up people who asked if they could catch a ride, too. “If there’s only one thing I understand from living there, it’s that no expectation of how much I can carry or ask another to carry for me is too swollen,” she writes. It’s apropos of nothing, and everything at the same time.

This is stage IV brain cancer: Weight gain from steroids. Acne. Nausea. Nasal passages so dry they bleed. Constant bruising. Itchy skin. Sleepless nights. Lost words. Confusion. Prayers offered in tears instead of words. Yet still a primal urge to hold onto life. “I am sicker than I have ever been and am still faithfully, scrappily striving to heal. My lips hurt. My throat is dry. My skin is cracked. Come drink this broth with me and we can get quiet.”

Quinn writes that is incredibly lonely being so sick, but at the same time, she is ultimately sustained by the community that springs forth to help her. The quote she chooses for the beginning of the book is from Gunilla Norris’s Becoming Bread: “We become who we are, together, each needing the other. Alone is a myth.”

It’s unclear how much help, if any, Quinn had in writing this book; it’s clear that she was rapidly deteriorating in her final months; she died in hospice and did not enter any new journal entries on Caring Bridge toward the end. The last two pages of the book are her imagining what death might be like, coming back as a leaf, a pelican, a star, a song or a quilt. It feels petty to ask for more from a dying woman writing a book, but I still wished for dates on the essays, some sense of when they were written, given the quick trajectory of her illness. And I also wished for a coda of sorts from her family. For a memoir as intensely personal as this is, Quinn departs too abruptly from it, as from her life. Still, it’s a deeply moving reflection on mortality, a snapshot of an ordinary person who was asked by life to endure something horrible and did so wreathed in courage. B+

Book Notes

New England is well-represented in publishing this spring, with a lovely new reflection from New Hampshire author Sy Montgomery, a smart thriller set in Vermont and a memoir from a former flight attendant who grew up in Rhode Island.

Montgomery’s latest offering is The Hawk’s Way(Atria, 79 pages). Props to her and her publisher for revealing on the cover that the narrative of the slim volume was originally published as a chapter in her 2010 book Birdology (Atria, 272 pages). It’s common for accomplished authors to present previously published material in a new book (as Ann Patchett did recently in These Precious Days) but unusual for this to be revealed right up front.

In this case, however, the repackaging makes perfect sense. The story is a taut and gorgeous telling of Montgomery’s friendship with a renowned local falconer and her own grappling of conscience with a majestic beast of prey and what they represent. (The falconer, Nancy Cowan of Deering, was founder of the New Hampshire School of Falconry and died earlier this year.) There are also 16 pages of color photographs. It’s a great gift for any bird lover in your life.

The novel is The Children on the Hill (Gallery/Scout, 352 pages) by Jennifer McMahon, which has been described as a modern take on Frankenstein. Fellow Vermont author Chris Bohjalian has called McMahon, the author of 10 novels, “a literary descendant of Shirley Jackson.” The story involves three children (two siblings and another child brought into the family by their grandmother) who are obsessed with monsters; one grows up to have a podcast called “The Monsters Among Us” and she returns to her Vermont hometown to investigate a crime and reported monster sightings. There’s buzz about a Gone Girl-worthy plot twist that makes this an especially satisfying read.

Finally, Fly Girl (W. W. Norton, 288 pages) is the book you want to read on your next flight in hopes of getting special attention from flight attendants.

Ann Hood, a native of Warwick, Rhode Island, went to work for TWA in 1978, when flight attendants were still called stewardesses and advertised as onboard “sex kittens,” she writes. Hood is an accomplished memoirist and author, but says when she meets people socially, they’re more interested in hearing about her years as a flight attendant than her writing. This is her answer to everything we want to know.

Book Events

Author events

• DONALD ANTRIM Author presents One Friday in April. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 17, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• R.W.W. GREENE Author presents Mercury Rising. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., May 20, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• TAMMY SOLLENBERGER Author presents The One Inside: 30 Days to Your Authentic Self. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Wed., June 1, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• PAUL BROGAN Author presents A Sprinkling of Stardust Over the Outhouse. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., June 30, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Book sales

• SPRING BOOK SALE Bag sale features thousands of hardbacks and paperbacks including fiction, nonfiction, mystery and a variety of children’s books, plus a large selection of DVDs, CDs and audio books. Baked goods will also be sold. Brookline Public Library, 4 Main St., Brookline. Sat., May 14, and Sun., May 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

Writer submissions

• UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews

The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews (St. Martin’s Press, 437 pages)

Mary Kay Andrews is, by many accounts, “queen of the beach read,” although Elin Hilderbrand would probably like a word about that. So would Emily Henry, the Ohio author who published a book called Beach Read in 2020.

It’s a little early for beach reading in New England, but Andrews’ latest, The Homewreckers, is a doorstop of a novel at 437 pages, so if you start now, you might finish by Labor Day. Hard-working readers can get through it quicker, but not without pain.

It’s not that Andrews isn’t an expert wordsmith; she’s written 30 books in 30 years and so has well more than 10,000 hours invested in her craft. It’s just that the story isn’t interesting enough to hold our attention for that long. As either Blaise Pascal or Mark Twain said (depending on which book of quotations you consult), they would have written shorter if they’d had more time. Andrews must have written The Homewreckers very quickly.

The premise is decent enough: A Hollywood producer visiting the charming Deep South town of Savannah, Georgia, encounters Hattie Kavanaugh, a young woman who works with her father-in-law restoring homes. In a bit of slapstick comedy that serves little purpose other than setting up a scene for a TV movie, the producer literally falls through a rotting kitchen floor on top of her.

Although Hattie is a widow who’s still not fully recovered from her husband’s death in an accident, she operates in the high rungs of Maslow’s tiers of self-actualization and is not impressed by the credentials of the man who fell on her while she was crawling around under the house inspecting its plumbing. She merely observes to her friend and co-contractor that Mo Lopez appears to have all his teeth before shooing him away.

Mo, however, has not only teeth but vision. He works for a TV network that specializes in home fix-up reality shows; his most recent was Killer Garages and he needs a new show. He sees past Hattie’s grungy work boots and dirty coveralls and sees a TV star. Also, in case we need to know on page 17 where this is going, he sees “hazel eyes and full lips,” someone who “had that fresh-faced girl-next-door-thing going on, her hair in a careless pony tail. Slender, but curvy in the right places.”

He — and I quote — “couldn’t manage to get Hannie Kavanaugh off his mind.”

At this point, you might be tempted to toss The Homewreckers and look for a mountain read instead, but give the queen of beach reads her due. There are challenges to be overcome here, not least of which is that Hattie Kavanaugh has no interest in being a star of a reality show. She does need money, however, and it doesn’t take long for Mo to convince Hattie to be part of a show called “Saving Savannah” — pitched to her as a sort of love letter to her work. The show would follow her as she takes a deteriorating home with good bones and loves it back to life. Hattie thinks hopefully that something like this might inspire other people to do the same.

In her first reel of video, she says, with sweet sincerity, “I’m Hattie Kavanagh. And I’m saving Savannah. One old house at a time.”

Problem is, the cynical executive back in L.A. doesn’t see anyone watching that sappy drivel. So she renames the show and revamps the concept. “Homewreckers” will be “the space where a dating show meets a flip show.” She sends in a sexy, big-city designer to “help” Hattie, in hopes that there will be real-life sizzle between them, to add to the drama.

Hattie, of course, doesn’t know this. Mo, who knows it, doesn’t like it. But Hattie has signed the contract, and off to the races they go.

This seems enough drama for a beach read, but there’s also a murder mystery entwined, which is kind of distasteful, given the lighthearted fare that surrounds it. “Love, murder and faulty wiring” is the tagline on the cover. Three of these things are not like the others. “Let’s throw in the murder of a 25-year-old mother” to add complexity to a beach read is a painful stretch.

Ultimately, the problem with The Homewreckers is not the bloated verbiage, or the predictable ending, or the never-ending yapping about Savannah, but that I didn’t care about the characters to hang with them as long as was required of me. This was surprising because Hattie is not a one-dimensional character; she is still mourning her husband and has a fraught relationship with her felonious dad; there are layers to this story, and genuine humor. Hattie’s father-in-law is named Tug and has a penchant for exclaiming “Jesus, Mary and Fred.” And Andrews can throw out some good lines as when she has Mo tell Hattie she smells like rainbows and joint compound.

Granted, I’m a person who thinks a beach read is a magazine — something easy to hold and easy to discard when it gets wet and smells like beer. So maybe you’ll love it. But more likely, Elin Hilderbrand has nothing to fear. B-

Book Notes

In this age of body positivity, we aren’t supposed to talk about beach bodies, except in the concept of the meme that says “How to have a beach body: 1. Have a body. 2. Go to the beach.”

True that, but it’s also true that some of us might be a little more comfortable at the beach minus a few pounds. If you are in that camp, please know that everything old is new again when it comes to diet books. In other words, old diet books never die, they just get reissued.

Behold the “New 2022 Edition!” of The South Beach Diet, introduced in 2003 by Florida cardiologist Andrew Agatston. Yep, he’s still around and runs the Agatston Center for Preventive Medicine, which these days promotes intermittent fasting. The South Beach Diet has been so popular for so long that it has its own category on Amazon.

Dr. Agatston did issue a new paperback version of The South Beach Diet in 2020 (Rodale, 336 pages). But the hottest-selling diet and fitness book right now is The Whole Body Reset (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages) by Stephen Perrine. It may or may not be a selling point that Perrine is editor of the AARP magazine, which explains why the book is targeted at people in midlife or beyond. Like South Beach, it promises a flatter belly and overall improved health with a focus on protein with fewer carbs.

Another new health book that promises weight loss is Glucose Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages) by Jessie Inchauspe. She’s a social media influencer (@Glucosegoddess on Instagram) but, interestingly, has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in biochemistry and comes to the subject well-educated. Worth a look.

Finally, I’m interested to read the provocatively titled Drop Acid (Little, Brown Spark, 336 pages), the latest offering from Dr. David Perlmutter, the controversial physician-author who wrote 2013’s Grain Brain and several follow-up books that posited that grains and sugar are the brain’s “silent killer.” In this book, the villain is uric acid, which is a waste product that circulates in our blood. Perlmutter argues that elevated levels of uric acid, caused in part by consuming too much fructose, are contributing to obesity, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline and other ills.

At this rate, there will be nothing left for us to consume but water, which naturally leads to the best title ever for a health book: You’re Not Sick, You’re Thirsty. For all I know, it could be malarky, but the title is good for a smile. It’s an oldie, from 2003; Warner, 304 pages.

Book Events

Author events

• ANDREW BIGGIO Author presents The Rifle. Tues., May 10, 7 to 8 p.m. The Wright Museum of WWII (77 Center St., Wolfeboro). Seating is limited, and reservations are required. Admission costs $5 for museum members and $10 for non-members. Call 569-1212 or visit wrightmuseum.org.

• DONALD ANTRIM Author presents One Friday in April. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 17, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• R.W.W. GREENE Author presents Mercury Rising. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., May 20, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• TAMMY SOLLENBERGER Author presents The One Inside: 30 Days to Your Authentic Self. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Wed., June 1, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• CASEY SHERMAN Author presents Helltown. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Sun., Aug. 14, 1:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Book sales

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

Riverman: An American Odyssey, by Ben McGrath

Riverman: An American Odyssey, by Ben McGrath (Knopf, 272 pages)

The curious life and mysterious death of Dick Conant makes for a story that is the lovechild of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

Unlike Thoreau’s sometimes tedious account, this is a Riverman that sings. It is a story that author Ben McGrath owns, having spent time with Dick Conant and written about him for The New Yorker, both while he was alive and after he went missing.

Conant was 49 years old when he became a nomad of America’s waterways. You could say he started America’s “Great Resignation” two decades early, having quit his job as a hospital janitor and left his rented house with a dramatic flourish. (He left frozen fish hidden in the attic, “a stink bomb on delayed fuse,” McGrath wrote.) Conant bought a canoe at Walmart, stocked it like a prepper and put it in the water pointed south. And he spent much of the remainder of his life either on the water or preparing to go back out there again.

Conant was not an uneducated man — McGrath describes him as “an old art major with Falstaffian appetites” looking like a cross between Santa and a lobster — who, when he won some money gambling, bought a book, Journals of Lewis and Clark, with his winnings.

Nor, for all his eccentricities (like drinking soy sauce from a bottle), was Conant crazy. The copious journals discovered after his disappearance (McGrath draws on thousands of pages of Conant’s musings) revealed a methodical man who employed the scientific method, if a bit crudely, to solving problems that arose on his travels.

For example, searching for solutions to the age-old bane of outdoorsmen — insect bites — Conant studied the ingredients of expensive store-bought products and realized that many products for itch-relief contained ammonia. So he bought a cheap bottle of plain ammonia and tested it on his skin. Having no unpleasant reaction, he began using it daily. (Probably shouldn’t try this at home, kids.) He was practical and industrious, once fashioning a rudimentary temporary bed out of driftwood.

Like Chris McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild who died after becoming ill in the wilderness of Alaska, Conant took chances most of us wouldn’t take; for example, he drank from some of the rivers he paddled. But unlike McCandless, who likely would have returned to civilization eventually, it was unclear that Conant ever would. His journals reveal a man who expected to die on his travels and was comfortable with that.

His journeys weren’t interludes but his life, unlike Cheryl Strayed’s adventure on the Pacific Coast Trail, detailed in Wild, or Sebastian Junger walking East Coast railroad lines in Freedom. Conant wasn’t seeking publicity or attention; in fact, his life and (presumed) passing might have gone unnoticed by the larger world had he not met McGrath by chance in the riverside town in New York where the writer lives.

The next day, unable to stop thinking about the strange traveler, McGrath literally tracked Conant down the river until he found him, in order to write about him.

Conant proved a cooperative subject, and the men became friendly enough that he stayed in touch, writing to McGrath from the road. He kept McGrath’s phone number on a scrap of paper in the canoe, which is why law enforcement contacted the writer when Conant went missing.

In this book, McGrath engages in what is sometimes known as embedded, or immersive, journalism, having become a part of his subject’s life. This is a perspective we don’t have in reading about another famous “riverman” — the New Hampshire hermit called “River Dave.” Of course, Conant wasn’t a hermit; by all accounts, he was gregarious and made friends easily, many of whom McGrath tracks down as he tries to unravel the mystery that is Conant’s life.

Surprisingly, Conant also had a large family with siblings leading conventional lives. At one point McGrath travels with one of Conant’s brothers to explore a storage unit that reveals more about the sojourner’s hidden life. At age 56, for example, he had applied to (and been rejected by) the University of Nevada School of Medicine. It also turned out that Conant was an artist — the storage locker contained more than 300 original paintings and sketches, done over four decades. In short, the deeper McGrath probes into Conant’s life the more fascinating it becomes. At the same time, the more McGrath learns about Conant during his investigation, the more questions arise.

Conant became a folk hero in river culture because of his travels, but even before he set off in his canoe, his was a colorful and robust life, though one that would not have ever made the pages of The New Yorker. As such, Riverman is, in many ways, the world’s longest obituary, and one of the most beautifully crafted, with the occasional aside into the canons of American river life and literature.

Not long after they met, Conant told McGrath that his life was dangerous and free and exciting, but “at this point in my life, I’ve had enough of this excitement. I’d much rather be home with a woman and a family like you have, than out here on the water. But this is the alternative.”

Those words and Conant’s strange disappearance in North Carolina in 2014 — the canoe was found capsized with the paddle attached, no remains were found — suggest that this story is as much a tragedy as a mystery. Whatever the genre, McGrath’s telling is utterly engrossing. A

Book Notes

Those of us fortunate enough to have a mom who is still living have (checks calendar) a little more than a week to come up with a Mother’s Day gift. Speaking as a mother, a 10-day cruise to somewhere sunny is best, but a book and some flowers will do.

Beyond the boring and predictable (cookbooks and chick lit are to Mother’s Day what grilling books are to Father’s Day), there’s an edgy genre that moms with a wicked good sense of humor might like.

For example: There Are Moms Way Worse Than You(Workman, 64 pages) by comedy writer Glenn Boozan is a Seuss-like ode to offbeat parenting in the animal kingdom and promises to offer “irrefutable proof that you are indeed a fantastic parent.” At first glance it looks like the worst children’s book ever, but it’s actually for moms. Illustrations are by Priscilla Witte.

For moms who like dystopian fiction, check out Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages), given an “A” here recently.

Nonfiction for the working mom: Ambitious Like a Mother (Little, Brown Spark, 272 pages) by Lara Bazelon examines “why prioritizing your career is good for your kids.”

The Three Mothers, How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation explores a topic that is often overlooked: How the hands that rocked the cradle had an often unacknowledged role in history. The book is from Flatiron, 272 pages.

Also Mom Genes (Gallery, 336 pages) by Abigail Tucker is a scientific exploration of the power of maternal instinct that was well-reviewed.

Maybe not: My Evil Mother, a new short story by Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) that’s available only on Amazon as a Kindle original. Unless your mother is a witch. Then chances are she will love it. (It’s about a teenager in the 1950s who suspects her mother might be a witch.)

Book Events

Author events

• SY MONTGOMERY Author presents The Hawk’s Way. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 3, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book sales

• SPRING BOOK SALE Features thousands of hardbacks and paperbacks including fiction, nonfiction, mystery and a variety of children’s books, plus DVDs, CDs and audio books. Brookline Public Library, 4 Main St., Brookline. Sat., May 14, and Sun., May 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly; the next meeting is scheduled for Tues., April 5, from 5 to 7:15 p.m., and will be held virtually over WebEx Meetings. To reserve your spot, email [email protected].

Writer submissions

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Tobacco Wives, by Adele Myers

Tobacco Wives, by Adele Myers (William Morrow, 344 pages)

Is there any good reason for a parochial New Englander to read trade fiction set in the South?

I’d argue yes, although the stories need to be extra compelling, such as Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, a book about Black maids in 1960s Mississippi that turned out to also be a decent movie. However, novels that draw much of their oxygen from a particular setting have to work harder to appeal to readers in distant regions.

Adele Myers tries to do that in Tobacco Wives, a story set in her home state of North Carolina, where the tobacco industry reigned in the years after World War II. It’s the story of a teen, Maddie Sykes, who goes to live in a town, Bright Leaf, where almost everyone, from field hands to executives, gets their money from tobacco and worships it like a god.

Tobacco was for more than cigarettes, Maddie was told. “Farmers and gardeners misted their plants with tobacco-soaked water to keep moles and gophers away.” Doctors prescribed it for asthma attacks, “and, of course, we all used tobacco poultices to calm a croupy cough or beat back a bad cold.”

Maddie is an aspiring seamstress like her aunt, with whom she goes to live after her widowed mother decides a teenager in the house is inhibiting her hunt for a new husband. Aunt Etta, who lives alone, makes good money by outfitting the glamorous wives of tobacco executives, and Maddie dives eagerly into that world.

But she soon learns (cue ominous music) that there is an unseen danger in the community, something that seems to be afflicting everyone in the tobacco community.

There is, alas, no opportunity to be shocked at what the villain is ultimately revealed to be, not with Maddie coming home from her first visit to a tobacco factory with grainy black specks all over her hands and body. “My calves, my ankles, even between my toes, were caked in a sticky brown dust that smelled of tobacco. We couldn’t have been in the factory more than fifteen minutes and I looked like I’d been there all day.”

If that wasn’t enough of a spoiler, while Maddie was at the factory, she noted a “tall, forbidding fence covered with yellow and orange signs: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. NO TRESPASSING. RESTRICTED AREA. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I didn’t know there were so many ways to say ‘Keep Out.’”

Anyone who’s ever visited an Amazon warehouse has seen similar signs, but I digress. The point is, this is not so much foreshadowing as it is hitting us over the head with a shovel. Tobacco: Bad. Maddie: Good. We get it.

This sort of heavy-handed narration follows Maddie throughout the book, as she gets to know the people of Bright Leaf and starts to be concerned about seemingly unrelated health problems that dog them, from lost pregnancies to chronic asthma. At the same time, a local tobacco company is unveiling a new cigarette called MOMint, targeted for women. The mint-flavored cigarette is to be marketed as something that will calm nerves, ease indigestion and control appetite.

This sets up what little bit of tension there is in the novel: what Maddie should do about her increasing alarm about the effect of tobacco, given the impact it will have on the lives of the people she has grown to care about.

Tobacco Wives seems, in some way, a fictionalized knock-off of Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls, narrative nonfiction of 2017 that exposed the terrible impact of radium on young women who worked with it early in the 20th century, when the element was seen as a miracle substance, not a killer. Their story was also told in a movie and play, and I suppose Tobacco Wives is also headed to a big or small screen, although it feels stale compared to the radium story. To be fair, this is partly because the demonization of the tobacco industry is relatively new, owing to whistleblowers like Jeffrey Wigand (whose efforts were also made into a movie, The Insider, which starred Russell Crowe).

Tobacco Wives is a perfectly serviceable, middle-brow novel, and Myers adds a layer of interest by adding details about the war-related rationing that was going on at the time it was set. (Everyone knows about the tin foil, but I was interested to learn that fabric was also rationed.) But it suffers from a predictable villain made even more predictable by a debut novelist’s overenthusiastic foreshadowing. It might be a laborious read for the people of New England, particularly if they happen to smoke. The good people of North Carolina, however, will surely love the book, unless they happen to grow tobacco. C

Book Events

Author events

• WILD SYMPHONY READING AND CONCERT WITH DAN BROWN New Hampshire native and bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown will join the University of New Hampshire Wind Symphony to debut his classical work based on the musical album, released in conjunction with a corresponding children’s book of the same name. Sun., April 24, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Johnson Theatre at University of New Hampshire (30 Academic Way, Durham). Free; purchase tickets in advance. Visit unh.universitytickets.com.

• BRANDON K. GAUTHIER Author presents Before Evil: Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 27, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SY MONTGOMERY Author presents The Hawk’s Way. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Tues., May 3, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book sales

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

Writer submissions

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi

The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi (Tor, 258 pages)

What kind of creature is Godzilla? If you answered “giant lizard,” you’ve got lots of company, but you’re wrong.

Godzilla and other movie monsters out of East Asia have a formal name — kaiju — which translates roughly to “strange beast.” And kaiju are at the center of the new novel by John Scalzi, a popular writer of science fiction who lives in Ohio. The Kaiju Preservation Society is a fun and engaging story that perfectly entwines the real life of the past two years with an alternative universe where kaiju dwell.

It begins with the untimely firing of Jamie Gray, a well-educated employee of a DoorDash-type startup that calls its gig workers “deliverators” and requires them to announce that it is their “passion” to deliver their customers’ vegan egg rolls and Korean fried chicken.

Jamie loses his job at the start of the pandemic and can’t find anything else, so he’s reduced to delivering for his former employer to pay his bills. One of his regular customers on the Lower East Side of New York turns out to be someone he vaguely knew, and they strike up a conversation about why a former Ph.D. candidate is now delivering food. (The sly punchline: “I was looking down the barrel of adjunct professorships for the rest of my life.”)

As it turns out, the customer, named Tom Stevens, has a job opportunity for Jamie, because one of his team members had just come down with Covid-19. He doesn’t explain much about the job — only that it’s for an “animal rights organization” that works with large animals, and that the job requires only “a warm body that can lift things.” It turns out to be a job that pays extremely well, includes a $10K signing bonus and even covers his monthly rent and student-loan payments.

Jamie is desperate enough for a reliable income that he accepts the position with no further information. And he doesn’t back down even when the recruiting officer tells him that the animals are “very wild, very dangerous” and that death is a possible outcome of employment, so he would need a will, an alarming number of shots and a Covid test involving a “a cotton swab through my nostril all the way back to my brain.”

By this point, Jamie has established himself as a totally endearing narrator, possessed of a snarky sense of humor that could have gotten him a job as a writer for late-night TV. (When the recruiter asks if he has any dietary restrictions, Jamie says he disdains vegan cheese because it is “orange and white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”)

And Scalzi is a master at crafting snappy dialogue seeded with bon mots, making the story flow easily, even when it leaves the solid footing of early pandemic life in the U.S. and flies into another dimension enabled by nuclear explosions, where an Earth look-alike is populated with strange flying beasts the size of small mountains and other strange animals.

Yeah, it’s weird, and it gets even weirder when there are billionaire tourists who come to this alternative Earth to “pet the monsters.” And when a complication is revealed that threatens life on the “real” Earth, requiring Jamie to do much more than the “lifting things” he signed on to do.

It’s pretty astonishing that Scalzi was able to craft a science-fiction story that so perfectly aligns with the pandemic, while even throwing in a lot of talk about nuclear bombs, which definitely weren’t in the conversation in March 2020 but suddenly are now a foreboding part of the news. It’s even more astonishing that Scalzi wrote this one in the span of two months — February and March 2021. (There’s a super interesting back story to how that happened that Scalzi reveals in his author’s note, and that alone is worth the price of the book, especially if you’ve ever had a malign computer eat your work.)

Although there are shades of Jurassic Park here, The Kaiju Preservation Society is not preachy or brooding; it’s more like a timeline cleanser on Twitter, something light and fun and memorable. I wasn’t surprised to learn that it’s already been picked up by Fox Entertainment for serialization.

B+

Book Notes

At the recent Grammy Awards, rapper Jay-Z became the artist with the most lifetime nominations, with a total 83. The person he surpassed is Quincy Jones, who had 80 nominations between 1961 and 2019.

But Jones is far from retired and is out with a new book. 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity (Abrams Image, 192 pages) is described by the publisher as a “self-development guide,” which sounds a couple of bars better than self-help. The youngest millennials may not be familiar with Jones, but they’ll know the artist who wrote the foreword, The Weeknd, who says that Jones “changed not only the course of my life, but the course of history.”

On the subject of history, there are also two new books about royalty — the American kind, and the British monarchy.

American royalty, of course, would be the Kennedys, and journalist Neal Thompson has written what looks to be an engrossing account of the first couple of that lineage to arrive on U.S. soil. Bridget and Patrick Kennedy were poor Irish Catholics, and when Patrick died of tuberculosis at age 35, his body had to be carted outside of Boston because the city didn’t allow his kind to be buried in its cemeteries.

Thompson began researching the couple after covering the plane crash that took the life of John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999, and early reviews of The First Kennedys (Mariner, 352 pages) are great.

Then there’s Queen of Our Times, a biography of Queen Elizabeth II, by Robert Hardman. You’ll have to be a serious fan of the monarchy to get through this, coming in at 690 pages (Pegasus Books). Then again, she’s been queen for seven decades, so there was a lot to write about.

For less history and more gossip, you’ll have to wait a few weeks for Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers (Crown, 592 pages), a follow-up to her 2007 bestseller The Diana Chronicles. It releases April 26.

Book Events

Author events

• MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD Author presents The Great Circle. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 6 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

Writer submissions

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Heartbreak, by Florence Williams

Heartbreak, by Florence Williams (W.W. Norton & Co., 279 pages)

Like termites and prairie voles, human beings seem made for monogamy or, to be precise, “pair-bonding.” We are among the 2 to 10 percent of animals who organize their lives in pairs, even if there is some occasional straying involved. (Even more remarkably, about 90 percent of birds have lifelong mates.)

But bereavement happens, either in death or divorce, and as the Irish rock band The Script told us, when a heart breaks, it don’t break even. That was the experience of journalist Florence Williams, whose 2017 book The Nature Fix explored why being outdoors makes us happier and healthier. Her new book is a “personal and scientific journey” into why breakups hurt so much, and while she’s primarily talking about divorce, the science also applies to grief over the death of a loved one.

Between 10 and 15 percent of divorced and bereaved people experience a debilitating inability to get past their heartbreak, a condition known as bereavement disorder or complicated grief. Williams doesn’t put herself into that category, but she was devastated when her husband of 25 years announced that he was moving out to find his soulmate when she was 50.

While she was able to function well enough, taking care of her children and continuing her work, she was shocked at the depth of her pain. She stopped eating and lost 20 pounds. “I felt power-washed by sadness and anxiety. I looked like a stray animal who was trying to paw her way out of a kill-shelter,” she writes.

Trying to understand why it was so difficult for her to recover, Williams began doing research, interviewing therapists and researchers who study love and loss. She learned that love is as much of a survival drive as it is an emotion, and that stress hormones increase even when monogamous partners are separated for a short time. When a longtime partner vanishes forever, the loss kindles ancient and evolutionary responses: the loss of safety and inclusion that are necessary for our well-being, the loss of connection to extended family, the loss of resources.

Having a stable relationship is even integral to our physical health: “Scores of robust studies across different cultures have shown that married people live longer, experience fewer cancers, strokes, and heart attacks, are more likely to survive serious illnesses, and are less likely to be depressed and overweight.”

Learning all this, of course, made Williams feel even worse. (“I was like, Please stop talking,” she wrote.) So she went to therapy. She gave lots of speeches. She accepted the invitation of a scientist — a divorced friend of a friend — to make out after a party under a cottonwood tree.

Here, Williams is able to show off that she is not just an able investigator and reporter, but an elegant wordsmith. She writes of that encounter with the scientist: “My hard little heart hiccuped and started to soften, along with everything else.”

Unfortunately, Williams’ first post-divorce swim in the dating pool didn’t end well, for deeply uncomfortable reasons, and her continued contact with this man may cause the reader to question her judgment. So, too, her inability to keep up with small things in the aftermath of her husband’s leaving. (She drove for months with an expired car registration, she admits.)

But an even harder reality arrives when Williams’ continued weight loss is finally diagnosed as Type 1 diabetes, which is most commonly diagnosed in children. She learned that high levels of cortisol can affect the production and regulation of insulin, and inflammation markers rise with sustained stress. One researcher told her of the “cellular carnage” of heartbreak, “This is one of the hidden landmines of human existence.”

At this point, the narrative becomes a confluence of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Williams’ own The Nature Fix. She resolutely sets out to heal her heart before her heartbreak kills her, on a wilderness trip in search of awe. This wasn’t just an emotional experiment, but a scientific one: She had her blood drawn before and after the trip to see if her health measures had improved.

Williams set out looking for prescriptions to easily fix her broken heart; readers who go to this book looking for the same might be disappointed. There’s no broken-heart pill; that gold mine still awaits anyone who might invent it, and even her experiments with psychedelic drugs didn’t seem to help.

But Williams’ journey is interesting and her research solid, and anyone suffering from a heartbreak of their own might benefit from her story. Just stay away from any scientist named Ennis who wants to kiss you under a cottonwood tree. B+

Book Notes

It’s probably no surprise that a memoir released in November was near the top of the charts on Amazon last week.

The author: actor Will Smith (assisted by a co-author, Mark Manson). Last year, Oprah Winfrey called it “the best memoir I’ve ever read,” and as everyone knows, she reads a lot. I read the opening when it first came out, but just re-read the first chapter in a new light, after Will’s assault of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards.

The opening sentences of Chapter 1: “I’ve always thought of myself as a coward. Most of my memories of my childhood involve me being afraid in some way — afraid of other kids, afraid of being hurt or embarrassed, afraid of being seen as weak.” The memoir, Will, is from Penguin Press, 432 pages.

Not taking a side here, but Chris Rock has written a book, too. It came out in 1997, and Winfrey didn’t say a word, although the first page is literally a bit about her leaving a message on his answering machine declining to feature it in her book club. Rock This! is from Hyperion, 224 pages, and also in paperback.

Meanwhile, there’s a new book out about the Academy Awards that necessarily omits the most interesting thing that’s happened in years, as it was published in February. Best Pick (Rowman & Littlefield, 332 pages) has three authors: John Dorney, Jessica Regan and Tom Salinsky. They take us on a history of Oscars beginning in the 1920s, with close-ups of the best pictures and the authors weighing in on whether the Oscar was deserved. Looks like a winner.

If you care nothing about film and would rather be outdoors, you might be interested in Riverman, An American Odyssey (Deckle Edge, 272 pages) by Ben McGrath. It’s about the life of Dick Conant, a folk hero who traversed the country’s rivers alone in a canoe before disappearing in North Carolina while he was on his way from New York to Florida. McGrath has written about Conant before in The New Yorker; he expounds on those stories to fill in the details of Conant’s life, if not his death, which remains a mystery.

Book Events

Author events

• MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD Author presents The Great Circle. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 6 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

Writer submissions

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Category: Books

What We Wish Were True, by Tallu Schuyler Quinn

The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews

Riverman: An American Odyssey, by Ben McGrath

Tobacco Wives, by Adele Myers

The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi

Heartbreak, by Florence Williams

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!