Category: Books

Mad Honey, by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ballantine, 450 pages

The new novel by Jodi Picoult, co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, is too much about bees. Its protagonist, a divorced New Hampshire mother whose profession is apiarist — beekeeper — describes her work this way: “Like firefighters, we willingly put ourselves in situations that are the stuff of others’ nightmares.”

That includes schlepping out to rescue bees in the cold and dark after a bear has broken into their hive, a first-world problem for sure, but also an old-world problem; beekeeping is the second-oldest profession. And also: informing the bees when their beekeeper has died and formally requesting that they accept the replacement. “In New Hampshire, the custom is to sing, and the news has to rhyme.”

And you thought your job was tough.

This custom is so fanciful that it seems made up, especially being told by two master storytellers. But a quick search of Google confirms that “telling the bees” is actually a thing — not just of deaths, but births, marriages and other momentous events. Mad Honey indeed.

The novel could have been subtitled “more than you ever wanted to know about bees,” and the constant presentation of bee facts at times makes Mad Honey seem like it has a third co-author named Wikipedia. But there is, in fact, a good story here to justify the bee trivia.

Olivia McAfee lives in Adams, New Hampshire, with her son Asher, having moved there from Boston after her marriage to an abusive surgeon blew up. Their lives intersect explosively with a young woman named Lily, who takes turns narrating the novel with Olivia. The narrative conceit is that Olivia tells her side of the story going forward, while Lily tells her side looking back.

Lily moved to Adams seven years ago after her forest-ranger mother found a job that would enable them to escape a bad situation in Seattle. (In one funny moment, when Lily’s mother is telling her about the move, she says she has one question: Where are the White Mountains?)

Asher and Lily are dating and are finding in each other kindred souls, as both are being raised by single mothers and have fraught relationships with their fathers. (Asher meets his dad surreptitiously once a month at a Chili’s in Massachusetts.) They reach the point in their volatile but passionate relationship where they are confiding their deepest secrets and on the verge of becoming intimate.

Soon after, Lily is found dead, and when police arrive, Asher is standing by her body. Despite his insistence that he wasn’t responsible, Asher is charged with first-degree murder. As we work our way to the apex of the trial, we learn more and more about both families’ backgrounds — the difficulties of both the mothers and their children.

Aside from the occasional stilted recitation of bee facts, Mad Honey is skillfully plotted, and Picoult and Boylan have created deeply sympathetic characters who are intelligent and interesting; it’s impossible not to care about them. They authors are, however, a bit slow getting to the point; it’s as if when divvying up the writing tasks, they dispensed with the pesky business of editing and decided they would both write the equivalent of a full book, readers be damned.

But Mad Honey also has an underlying purpose, which is to pull back the curtain on a certain divisive social issue and give readers a glimpse into the humanity at the center of it. I can’t say any more without spoilers. Of course, the biggest spoiler of all is that we know Lily dies at the start, and so there’s no happy ending to be had. But it is not an unhopeful novel, nor depressing; it is saturated more with love than with cruelty. And the ending is as perfect as it can get under the circumstances.

How this book came to be is a story in itself. As Boylan tells in the authors’ notes, she dreamed the basic plot of this book, and that she had co-written it with Picoult. Then she tweeted about her dream, and Picoult reached out, asked what the book was about, then said, “Let’s do it.” (The two had read each other’s work, but never communicated before.) So it’s hard to be too critical of a book that seems to have sprung fully formed from the universe; it was clearly a book meant to be. Picoult says she expects to get hate mail about it, but it won’t be from beekeepers clearly. And for those who just can’t get enough of the sweetness, there are a handful of character-connected recipes at the end of the book. For those of you who like this sort of thing, you’ll love it. For those who don’t, wait for the movie. B+

Survival of the Richest, by Douglas Rushkoff (W.W. Norton, 212 pages)

Five years ago, Douglas Rushkoff was offered a large sum of money (half of what he makes each year as a professor) to give a speech at a secluded resort somewhere in the West. He arrived expecting his audience to be “a hundred or so investment bankers” who wanted to hear his thoughts on the future of technology. Instead, he had an audience of five hedge-fund billionaires, and they were only peripherally interested in technology. What they really wanted to talk about was how they can better survive the coming apocalypse.

Writing about this experience in 2018 on Medium, Rushkoff said that the billionaire preppers didn’t have a particular apocalypse in mind, just a general collapse of the world as we know it, which they called “the event.” “That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.”

The men were already building their apocalypse-proof compounds, but needed guidance on how to protect themselves from people: not only the mobs who would want to get in, but the security forces they’ve already hired and have on standby at this very moment. How do they keep their post-apocalypse employees from turning on them? How will they deal with the uncomfortable moral dilemma of shutting doomed people out?

It’s a safe bet that Rushkoff hasn’t been invited back for a follow-up session, as he takes a dim view of the billionaires’ worldview and suggests that some of their business practices are what make an apocalypse possible in the first place. He expounds on that criticism in Survival of the Richest, the book-length expansion of that initial Medium essay. It’s a relatively short but compelling look inside the apocalypse industrial complex, even if it does make your bug-out bag look woefully insufficient and the billionaires look morally bankrupt. (For the record, he’s not talking Musk and Bezos billionaires, but “low-level” billionaires, meaning they’re probably guys we wouldn’t have heard of even if Rushkoff had named them.)

There are, living among us, people whose everyday lives are all about imminent annihilation — not for them maybe, but for the rest of us. In New York, for example, there’s a venture called American Heritage Farms that is designed as communities where people can thrive after a grid collapse. In Texas, a company called Rising S is selling luxury underground bunkers in which people who can afford the $8.3 million can ride out a nuclear strike with their own underground pool and bowling setup. And perhaps weirdest of all, there’s an entire “aquapreneur” subset of billionaire preppers who are planning a Waterworld-type escape by living on their own seagoing city-states. “Why fear rising oceans if you’re already living on the ocean?” Rushkoff asks.

Rushkoff, who is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/City College of New York, explains his theory of how the billionaire prepper mindset evolved contrary to the promise of the internet, which was supposed to unite humanity. Instead, he argues, it created the techno-bubble that drove us further apart, not only in terms of income inequality but also in how we see the world and our place in it. The billionaires, he says, see themselves as uniquely valuable, which forms the moral basis for their plans for self-preservation. “The would-be architects of the human future treat the civic sector as antagonistic to their grand designs. They believe they can do it better,” Rushkoff writes. As an example, he devotes one chapter to the “Great Reset” promoted by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, who promotes sweeping technological changes such as biometrics, mass surveillance and geoengineering in order to repair the sins of capitalism. Some of our political and technological overlords, he argues, are not only preparing for doomsday but actively trying to bring it on.

Despite the grand talk of building a better world with or without a life-as-we-know-it-altering event, Rushkoff says the billionaires see the rest of us as “little more than iron filings flying back and forth between the magnetic poles set up by the rich and powerful.”

But he doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. All of us suffer to some degree from the apocalypse-now mindset. “We either mirror the mindset or rebel in a way that reaffirms it,” Rushkoff writes.

It’s only in the last pages that he offers hope: “We are not yet over the cliff. We still have choices,” he writes, then throws out a few pages of suggestions, many of which seem to have nothing to do with the various doomsday scenarios at the fore of the conversation today. (It’s hard to see how “buy local” and “promote the rights of gig workers” relate to Vladimir Putin launching nukes at Ukraine.) But he has a powerful message in his indictment of the billionaires whose strategy for armageddon is leaving the rest of us behind. “Our nervous systems do not operate independently but in concert with other nervous systems around us. It’s as if we share one collective nervous system. Our physical and mental health is contingent on nurturing those connections. Leaving others behind is futile and stupid.”

It’s a bit of a kumbaya ending to a generally incisive book. More hopeful is a quote he includes from an interview with aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, who said, “Apocalypses are never just complete extinction, you know. My people have been through heaps of apocalypses and they’re quite survivable, as long as you’re still following the patterns of the land and the patterns of creation. As long as you’re in touch and moving with the landscape.” So even if you can’t afford an underground bunker, there’s hope. B+

— Jennifer Graham

Shuna’s Journey, by Hayao Miyazaki (First Second, 160 pages)

At a glance, Shuna’s Journey feels like well-mapped territory for author and acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki. Originally published in 1983, the story about a prince who leaves his home on an ungulate steed for parts unknown bears a striking resemblance to Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke. Assumingthe graphic novelis only a springboard for the acclaimed animator’s later film, it would only seem accessible to mega-fans of his work. Assumptions are often proved wrong and Shuna’s Journey is much stranger than anyone could hope to assume.

The book itself is not laid out like a traditional comic or manga, stereotypically filled with sliced and diced frames meant for frenetic page-turning. In fact, the layout of Shuna’s Journey shares more commonality with a children’s book of myths and legends. Pages primarily consist of large single-columned panels, the maximum being only three per page. They bleed over onto the corresponding pages in uneven hand-painted watercolor, bringing humanity to the larger-than-life renderings.

The book opens peacefully among the mountains that tower over Shuna’s village with the lines, “These things may have happened long ago, they may be still to come.” and it could almost serve as an excuse for an unrealized, undeveloped setting. Instead, the stage is set with background art portraying an environment triumphant over human civilization. Empty ruins look like dry bones against barren plains and the desert lands stretch endlessly into the horizon, marbled in red and blue hues. Even human creations feel alien in this land. As Shuna makes his way west he takes shelter under giant abandoned robots as well as a colossal battleship, grounded and wasting in a sea of sand. All serve as breadcrumbs of a mythic past where humans thrived, making the reader wonder what happened to make Shuna’s world this way.

There is also an anthropological element that helps flesh out Shuna’s world. In his home village, walls painted with cosmological designs hint at a culture with deep-rooted beliefs and customs. The fur hat Shuna wears marks him as someone of high status, and other characters who also wield power wear similar headgear. Some of the bigger antagonists in the story, those participating in the slave trade have their own menacing iconography differentiating themselves from the small village kingdoms. These details help cut down on exposition that could cramp the page. The narrative does not need to slow down with backstory exposition when Thea (a character whose perspective takes over for the final third of the book) is introduced. Her distinctive hair ornaments tell everything about how she treasures her past and fights for her individuality even as the slave trade tries to take it from her.

Storywise, the book follows the archetypal hero’s journey, making the narrative easy to follow. Shuna and his people are caught in a cycle of hunger and scarcity. There’s not enough food for the people and animals, so when there is a chance to break the cycle, the hero sets off on his quest for a crop that will sustain his people. Miyazaki makes sure to impress upon the reader the constant looming state of desolation in which the characters find themselves. While Shuna must overcome physical challenges to survive, he needs more than muscle to accomplish his goal. The trials during the story test his resolve to complete the journey, making him learn what it means to both help and hurt others.

The pacing is even; the climax hits when Shuna finally makes it to the land of the god-folk. This is where the graphic novel’s art and story both reach their peak. The environment, with its vibrant forests filled with animals and large cultivated fields, is completely different from the wastelands Shuna previously journeyed through. The land of the god-folk is more than paradise and it is here where Shuna’s Journey dips into the realm of cosmic horror. The creatures that make the land their home look like they come straight from the Cambrian explosion, while the mechanisms that cultivate grain are beyond human comprehension. When the truth is finally revealed the reader may find themselves so horrified and filled with existential dread that they wonder whether it was worth it for Shuna to have left his home after all.

The story does not end in the land of the god-folk, but comes to a satisfying, if not complete, conclusion. The final third of the book, with Thea at its center, feels slightly disjointed from the first two-thirds of the story, but it would be much more disappointing if Thea’s section were not included. Since the core of Shuna’s Journey focuses on the quest to cultivate grain it makes sense that part of the story should involve farming. After all, the problem of hunger in Shuna’s world will not solve itself with force, but instead with patience, understanding and kindness. A

— Bethany Fuss

Leech, by Hiron Ennes (Tordotcom, 336 pages)

If you’re looking for gothic fiction, horror spiced up with adventure, LGBT representation or just plain good writing, check out Hiron Ennes’s debut novel, Leech. Fair warning: This novel is packed with spookiness, body horror and psychological dread. Upsetting things that happen in this book that make it appropriate only for older teens and adults, like murder and rape. A few times I had to put the book down and felt my skin crawl (or I was delightedly disgusted).

Anyway, I liked Leech quite a bit! I was immediately hooked by the first few pages. You follow the narrator, a doctor traveling to a haunted château in a remote alpine town to investigate the death of their colleague. When a string of hideous discoveries threatens the doctor’s existence, their control of the situation and themself unravels. It’s later revealed that the main characters are not the people you were at first led to believe they were.

The story has good pace; each chapter ended with a discovered secret or new information that underscored the horror and kept the plot surprising. As the reveals pile up, you slowly learn more and more about the narrator, their relationship to the denizens of the château, and what secrets they keep hidden.

The writing is heavily erudite and had me reaching for a dictionary even more often than Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. I wrote down more than 50 terms to double-check. Many of these are medical or scientific, like “atrophic,” “hyphae,” and “enucleated.” The obscure vocabulary sometimes distracted me (if I bothered at all to stop and discover its meaning), but I also think that the vocabulary supports the narrator’s character as an overly educated doctor. Regardless of that, the writing was obviously talented and enjoyable on its own.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic steampunk-ish version of Earth orbited by the pulverized chunks of a destroyed moon and beset by natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes that are as normal as the weather. Some of the details felt a bit disjointed when put together. Why was it mentioned that one city is paved with ruby bricks? This didn’t turn out to be important. Nevertheless, other elements of the setting well support the genre and themes. The very landscape seems to haunt humanity for its past transgressions, isolating modern society into a huddled clan terrified of science, the sky and the unknown. Fantastical elements such as the mineral wheatrock used for fertilizer, the arctic cryptids called the ventigeaux, and the native Montish with their black eyes give the novel a mystical feel like a fairy tale or myth.

The plot was always exciting and the reveals unexpected, sometimes putting me on the edge of my seat. I was caught off guard when the narration changed focus to different characters midway through the novel, and the genre took a swing toward hopeful adventure, fast-paced, full of danger and action. The uplifting final act was a sweet way to wash out the doom and gloom from earlier. My only critique is that the very ending was a bit abrupt and open-ended for my taste.

In Leech, some characters suffered, some heroes became the villains, and others got the second chances they deserved. This novel’s horror lightened by relief, clever writing, and compelling characters made it an enjoyable read. Give Leech a shot for a spooky Halloween! A-

— Alaina Tocci

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine, 384 pages)

You know when a book’s protagonist is really hard to like but, for reasons that you can’t quite understand, you root for her anyway? That is Carrie Soto.
When we meet Carrie, she’s 37 and has been retired from professional tennis for six years. After watching Nicki Chan match her Grand Slam record, she decides to come out of retirement and win back her spot at the top of the tennis world.
Taylor Jenkins Reid has created a character in Carrie who is so real, I keep expecting her to show up in daily sports headlines. But her name appears in fictional media stories time and again, as Jenkins Reid uses sports commentary and news articles to help shed light on what the world thinks of Carrie. And the world sees her exactly as she is: supremely talented but ruthless. In fact, she was given the nickname of “the Battle-Axe” when she was in her prime.
We see some of that ruthlessness during a press conference that takes place during her first event back, the Australian Open. One of the reporters asks if there’s truth to her comeback being a stunt. Carrie responds, “I’ve proven so far that my game is outstanding. So everyone can whine and moan all they want about me being here, but I’ve earned the right.”
Another reporter asks about her upcoming match, to which she replies, “I’m gonna crush Carla Perez and anyone else I play on my way to the final. I’m going to hold their beating hearts in my hand.”
That’s Carrie, inside and out. She’s as abrasive internally as she is externally; it’s not just a show for the media. She’s hard on everyone else, and she’s equally hard on herself. We see this in the thoughts that permeate her mind during her games, including during a tight match against Natasha Antonovich, one of her more formidable rivals.
“I do not look at my father. I do not want to see the worry in his eyes. I tell myself: Do not let her win this set. You are either a champion or a ****up. There is no in-between.”
Rarely, we see Carrie’s vulnerability. She puts a hard wall up against Bowe Huntley, a fellow tennis pro with whom she’d gotten too close to in the past. She has the chance to train with him again, and she imagines a scenario in which she does let him back into her life.
“He’ll say something wonderful at some point, and I’ll start to believe he means it, despite all evidence to the contrary. And then I’ll start to like him or love him or feel something that I swear I’ve never felt before. And then one day, when I’m in too deep, he’ll stop liking or loving me, for one reason or another. And I’ll be left with a hole in my heart.”
Also softening the storyline is Carrie’s relationship with her dad and coach, Javier, a former pro himself. Their relationship, at first, seems all business; when Carrie trains with him as a child, Javi is demanding and has what some might see as unrealistically high expectations. But as the story goes on, we see how deeply he loves her and just wants her to be happy. And Carrie’s feelings for him change, seeming to soften over the years. She had fired him as her coach during her pre-retirement career, but she agrees to work with him for her comeback. Javi becomes a likable character, an endearing foil to Carrie’s hard-headedness.
Carrie Soto is Back is very much about tennis, but don’t let that stop you from picking it up, even if you care nothing about sports in general or tennis in particular. I’ve never played tennis, never watched more than a few minutes of tennis, and never really cared to. But Carrie is tennis, and who she is is expressed through her intense tennis practices, tennis games and tennis relationships.
It helps that Jenkins Reid has done her homework. According to an Aug. 29 interview on The Cut, Reid has played tennis for fun, but “I don’t think I’ve ever won a game, let alone a set or a match. … I had to learn it all for this book, and I’m very insecure about it. Did I learn it right? I don’t know, guys. I’m an imposter. I’m trying really hard. I’m trying to learn as much as I can so that I can give you a good time.”
Jenkins Reid has done just that. Carrie Soto is Back is a good time, not in spite of Carrie’s brashness — or the intense focus on tennis — but because of it. A-

Sacred Nature, by Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 224 pages)

In the opening to Sacred Nature, Karen Armstrong tells a story of visiting a British library to look at original manuscripts of the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and John Keats. She was deeply moved by the visit, which she described as “a kind of communion.”

“I was looking at the moment that these poems, which were now part of myself, had come into being. I did not want to analyze the manuscripts. I simply wanted to be in their presence.”

Today, she is troubled by the people who walk through museums seeming more interested in taking photos and selfies than allowing themselves to become absorbed in the extraordinary things stored there. This tendency is also reflected in our relationship to the natural world, which Armstrong says has become an irrelevant backdrop in our busy lives. She quotes Wordsworth to describe this: “light and glory die away / and fade into the light of common day.”

It’s not all because of social media. In fact, the disconnect between humans and nature can’t be fully explained without also explaining the ways in which Western culture dissociated from nature when it embraced monotheistic religions.

The ancient Egyptians believed the annual flooding of the Nile was a “divine event,” as was the rising and setting of the sun; as such, it was near impossible to ignore Mother Nature, who could, at any moment, be ready to unleash divine wrath. As science and theology ran down separate paths that grew further apart, the thought of nature being somehow divine, or even vaguely important, was swept aside as dusty myth.

Armstrong wants to change that, by gleaning wisdom from the myths and practices of the Axial Age, 900 to 200 BCE, a time she says was “pivotal to the spiritual and intellectual development of our species.”

The religions of that time, including Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, had practices that can profoundly benefit us today if we can look beyond our modern view of a myth as being a fabrication, a “charming story,” and instead look at the meaning of the myth and allow it to be a guide. Yes, that is Oprah-level malarky, but hear her out. “A myth is true because it is effective,” she writes.

Armstrong begins by exploring the Confucian belief in “qi,” the energy that links all life, animal or plant, human or divine. Interestingly, Chinese religions are unlike others because they have no creation story, no God-creator, but the opposing forces of yin and yang. (They also were among the first to articulate what is known in Christianity as the Golden Rule.)

Early Buddhism, too, taught that enlightenment could be achieved in not just human beings but was “inherent in plants, rocks, trees and blades of grass.”

Armstrong walks through practices of other ancient modern religions, including the respectful rituals of animal sacrifice (many of the ancients who practiced it would be horrified by our mass slaughter of animals today, she says) and the practice of kenosis, or “anatta,” the “emptying” of the self required in many faiths. St. Paul, Armstrong notes, used the language when he wrote that Christ had “emptied himself” on the cross.

Although Armstrong makes clear the ways that Christianity dissuaded people from seeing nature as sacred, there have been exceptions. A disciple of St. Paul called Denys saw the natural world as revelatory of God, believing “We can only intuit God’s presence through the veils of natural objects, which conceal as much as they reveal. If we could see God clearly, it would not be God. But if we learn to contemplate nature correctly, we find that the tiniest particle of soil can yield a glimpse of the ineffable divine.”

At the end of each chapter, Armstrong offers what she sees as “the way forward.” Her recommended practices include altering our perception of “God” to be not a male dwelling apart from the Earth, but a “dynamic inner presence that flows through all things”; embracing not only stillness and silence, but images of suffering in order to develop compassion; developing our own “Five Great Sacrifices” similar to Hindu practice; the ritual practice of gratitude for the natural world that sustains us; and adopting the Indian rule of “ahimsa” or harmlessness that holds every creature deserves to live, or at least not to suffer. (The Jains took this to the extreme, believing that even stones were capable of pain.)

Regrettably, there is an overarching preachiness in Sacred Nature with regard to deepening “our spiritual commitment to the environment” that will repel some readers.

“Recycling and political commitments are not enough,” Armstrong says, later adding, “We must re-form our attitude to nature and that will entail sacrifice. We can no longer board airplanes, drive our cars or burn coal with our former insouciance.”

You can agree with her completely but still wish for a book that is more poetry, less sermon. Although it is an interesting compilation of major religious traditions’ teachings on the natural world, Sacred Nature will appeal mostly to those who already share Armstrong’s views. B-

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Book Events

Author events

• JOSH MALERMAN, a horror novelist, will be at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) to presentDaphne on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 6:30 p.m.

• MELODY RUSSELL will sign and discuss her book Noni and Me: Caregiving, Memory Loss, Love at Toadstool Bookshop (12 Depot Square in Peterborough, toadbooks.com, 924-3543) on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 11 a.m.

• RICHARD LEDERER will discuss and sign his books about language at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Monday, Oct. 17, at noon.

• JOHN IRVING The Historic Music Hall Theater (28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth, 436-2400, themusichall.org) will host novelist and Exeter native John Irving to present The Last Chairlift, at the Music Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 18. Tickets are $49 and include a book voucher.

History, stories & lectures

• BRET BAIER, the Fox News Chief Political Anchor and author of several books, will discuss his career in media and news journalism, followed by a book sale and signing, on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the Palace Theatre (80 Hanover St. in Manchester; palacetheatre.org). Tickets start at $59.

Poetry

• GAIL DiMAGGIO and KAY MORGAN hosted by the Poetry Society of NH at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord, 224-0562, gibsonsbookstore.com) on Wednesday, Oct. 19, from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

Writer events

• THREE-MINUTE FICTION SLAM Monadnock Writers’ Group is hosting its regional Three-Minute Fiction Slam on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 9:45 a.m. at the Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Prizes will be awarded to the top three winners. The first-place winner will advance to the statewide finals and a chance to win $250. Everyone is invited to take part in the free competition by either participating or observing the fun. The competition challenges writers to perform original pieces of fiction in three minutes or less before an audience and a panel of judges. The regional event is part of an annual competition sponsored by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. See monadnockwriters.org.

• TENACITY PLYS and JULES PERLARSKI host a craft class on nonlinear storytelling for all at the Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester, 836-6600, bookerymht.com) on Saturday, Oct. 22, at 4 p.m.