Category: Books

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

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

Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonfiction

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy

(Celadon, 269 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino

(Summit Books, 352 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

He was 11 at the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins

(Simon & Schuster, 408 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: Queen Esther