Rating: ★★★★★ 

Nostalgia for the past, this book reminds me, is almost always for an imagined past. When I think of how publishing and news “used to be,” I imagine somber, serious, reliable news. I think of reporters and publishers whose interest lay in the “facts” rather than in opinions and sensationalism.  And I think of the average man and woman as far too busy getting the crops in and the laundry done to concern themselves with what may or may not have happened on the other side of town.

How very, very wrong I am. The Murder of the Century—a nonfiction account of a gruesome New York murder in 1897, the search for the killer, and the ensuing trial and newspaper coverage—makes clear that our current obsession with scandal (especially the kind that involves sex and death) and celebrity gossip masquerading as “news” is nearly indistinguishable from that of a hundred years ago.

The papers covering the trial ran (much like our current 24 hour news cycle) morning, afternoon, and evening editions so that the public would have access to the unfolding events almost as they happened.  Courtroom artists were hired for the speed of their sketches, which were then rushed to a waiting coop of carrier pigeons, strapped to the birds legs, who then flew them directly to the newspaper production offices. The drawings of witnesses were often at the printing presses ready to go before the witnesses had even left the stand.

And the public (clearly not the staid New Englanders of my imagination) ate it up. They fought to get a seat in the courtroom, they pushed their way to the front of the line to be the first to get their hands on the latest edition of the paper, they talked exhaustively and endlessly with their neighbors and co-workers about who the possible murderer was, what the murder weapon could have been, how the body had been disposed of. In short, they were every bit as obsessed with this murder as the public of 1994 was with the O.J. Simpson murder.

What with this particular cast of characters (a public ravenous for gossip, journalists lying, manipulating, and stealing to get the scoop, not to mention the murderer responsible for the decapitating and chopping up of the victim) one would think Murder of the Century would be a bit of a depressing read. The fact that it is, in actuality, a delightful, laugh-out-loud, even charming story is, I think, a testament to Collins’ clear love of humanity. He doesn’t judge these people. He doesn’t criticize them. He is not repelled by the most repellent of characters. He seems to be enjoying them all the way one might enjoy the naughty behavior of a small child. And he does this with such a sparkling wit that it becomes impossible for the reader to do anything but smile fondly along with him.

In the acknowledgements page Collins credits his agent and editor for the idea of expanding his book beyond the story of a murder and trial to include the story of the papers (Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s Evening Journal) that covered it. This is without a doubt the best advice the author could have received, as it elevates his book from a merely interesting story about a murder to a hugely entertaining history of the birth of the tabloid wars.

Murder of the Century is one of the best nonfiction books I have read in years.

EXCERPT:
The courtroom tittered, and Thorn smiled quietly while still staring fixedly ahead. The two moved close together until few in the courtroom could see or hear what happened next: a quick squeeze of their hands. It was exactly two weeks since the alleged murder, and the first time they’d seen each other in more than a week. Mrs. Nack leaned in to her lover and whispered.
“Shweige still,” she murmured to him.

Or perhaps she didn’t. A reporter for the New Yorker Staats Zeitung, a paper eminently qualified to eavesdrop on a German defendant, heard this instead: “Halt den Mund und Spricht nicht!” But both messages were the same: Tell them nothing.

“Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn refuse to talk,” Hearst mused over the proceedings. “All of which is very strange, considering that she is a woman and he is a barber.”

They had already said plenty, of course, as had their witnesses; the mythologizing of the case had begun. Within hours of the indictment, Hearst had a team assembling Journal clippings and reporters’ notes into a 126-page illustrated book titled The Guldensuppe Mystery. The instant book hit the streets just days later, as the first title by the newly launched True Story Publishing Company. Naturally, it heaped priase on the Journal as a “great newspaper” while calling for the miscreants to be electrocuted.

The city followed that prospect so avidly that New Yorkers even attempted trying Thorn themselves. One Lower East Side summer school teacher found that his charges only wanted to discuss Guldensuppe, and he allowed his bookkeeping course to be turned into a mock trial. The result was covered in the Times, which noted that “the bookkeeping lessons quickly dwindled in interest and the full details of the cutting up and hiding of Guldensuppe’s body were gone over by the boys with the greatest relish.” Amid the blackboards and inkwells, “Thorn” and his “attorney”—two eleven-year-old boys—wilted under the aggressive questioning of a roomful of street urchins. Despite an impassioned half-hour-long closing argument by the diminutive attorney, his client was found guilty and sent to the electric chair—which, this being a Manhattan classroom, was simply a chair. School trustees were none too pleased when they learned of this extracurricular jurisprudence. Children were sent back to their bookkeeping texts with a stern admonition from the principal: “I shall permit no more murder trials.”

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Flynn is a writer in the mystery and crime genres—two categories I almost never read. Her latest book, however, was described as a psychological portrait of a marriage—a plot I almost always want to read if it is done well. The usual superlatives: “brilliant,” “extraordinary,” “amazing,” etc., were strewn across the back cover, but there was something about the emotion in these blurbs that struck me as more than the customary, fawning quid pro quo. These authors sounded genuinely thrilled by Gone Girl.

I was both surprised and delighted to find the book lived up to these reviews… for the first two-thirds. Unfortunately there is a reversal that takes place at this point that has the effect of undoing all of what the author had been so brilliantly building. Flynn has a real talent for portraying the detailed moment-by-moment psychological complexity behind her character’s thoughts and actions. Her ability to do this is what elevates the plot from what could, in other hands, have been an ordinary read-it-a-thousand-times piece of chick-lit.

It’s not the plot reversal itself that is the problem—the initial turn is actually genuinely shocking and delightful—but rather the way she takes it to such an extreme that the reader can no longer believe in the characters. It is as if we are watching one of Woody Allen’s finely-tuned character studies, let’s say, Interiors, and then half-way through it turns into an axe-murderer/slasher movie. The people in Interiors are simply not the same kinds of people who, seeing several decapitated bodies on the ground, decide to go outside in the dark to see what that strange sound was.

I have spoken with many readers who have complained about the very end of the book, the last fifty pages, when there is yet another reversal, as being unsatisfying and unrealistic. I think it falls apart much earlier than that. By the time that final, final ending comes, I’m not surprised at all because I lost faith in where the author was taking me long before.

This is a review that is painful to write because Flynn is so good at a particular sort of thinking and writing that is not easy to find in fiction. To see her choose to make a one hundred and eighty degree turn into the thriller category, and in doing so reduce her well-thought out characters to two-dimensional cartoons causes me some real anquish.

EXCERPT:
Maureen, the tristate’s hardies cancer patient, introduces me to all her friends the same way you’d show off a slightly dangerous new pet: “This is Nicks wife, Amy, who was born and raised in New York City.” And her friends, plump and welcoming, immediately suffer some strange Tourettesian episode: They repeat the words—New York City!— with clasped hands and say something that defies response: That must have been neat. Or, in reedy voices, they sing “New York, New York,” rocking side to side with tiny jazz hands. Maureen’s friend from the shoe store, Barb, drawls “Nue York Ceety! Get a rope,” and when I squint at her in confusion, she says, “Oh, it’s from that old salsa commercial!” and when I still fail to connect, she blushes, puts a hand on my arm, and says, “I wouldn’t really hang you.”

Ultimately, everyone trails off into giggles and confesses they’ve never been to New York. Or that they’ve been—once—and didn’t care for it much. Then I say something like: You’d like it or It’s definitely not for everyone or Mmm, because I’ve run out of things to say.

“Be friendly, Amy,” Nick spits into my ear when we’re refilling drinks in the kitchen (midwesterners love two liter of soda, always two liters, and you pour them into big red plastic Solo cups, always).

Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung. Viking (2010), 288 pages.

I don’t know if there any other novels about abandoned Russian children raised by feral dogs. (If you know of any, please let The Book Shark know!) The fact that Dog Boy may be the only such book in existence is reason alone to read it. Who hasn’t been mesmerized by the true stories of Russian orphans growing up believing themselves to be actual canines? (And why is it always Russia?) We’ve all watched the video of Oxana Malaya barking at the camera and panting in a grassy field, and periodically we read of others (true, many have been proven to be hoaxes, but the 2009 story of the five-year-old from Siberia has been corroborated by a number of news sources).

Dog Boy opens with a four-year-old’s Muscovite’s abandonment in the outskirts of the city, near the edge of the forest. The book has a rather slow pace for the first 130 pages as the child is adopted by a pack of strays and gradually learns how to survive. I have ambivalent feelings about these first 130 pages. On the one hand, the monotony of daily life spent eating, sleeping, and excreting became wearisome, and I worried that if it didn’t stop soon I would have to quit the book. On the other hand, though, I appreciated that Eva Horning was trying to show us—in real time, so to speak—the gradual evolution of the boy’s development through the ongoing minutia that made up his daily life and that finally turned him fully into a dog boy. In other words, perhaps there’s no other way to make his story understandable.

I also tired of the numerous detailed descriptions of eating carrion, which felt at times to be too much gratuitous grossness:

The wonderful rich smell of flesh and viscera rose in their faces. Romochka’s hands slapped and wriggled around the grinding jaws, feeling for the bits he wanted. He worked his hands deep into the cooling innards, feeling over and under the slippery sweetness for gizzard, heart, and liver. He felt the delicious taut globe of the heart and wrestled with the carcass to rip it out. It slipped through his urgent fingers three times, then the threads and sinews gave and it was his. He popped it into his mouth and couldn’t quite shut his jaws around it. He struggled to bite, chew, growl and at the same time feel for the smooth flaps of the liver. White Sister was pulling the intestines away under him. He found the tight juicy ball of the gizzard…. He felt the liver over until he found the gall bladder, bit it off gingerly and spat it to the floor…. He squeezed the grit and meal out onto the ground and settled down to chew through the rich flesh and its rubbery inner skin, spitting out small bits of grit and occasional feathers.

This is just a small excerpt from the pages-long meal that was enjoyed, and there are many other meals of different varieties that are treated with similar depth. How much of this is too much?

Fortunately, the book picks up pace dramatically after scientists enter the narrative. The scientists capture both Romochka and another child to study in the laboratory/hospital, and at this point there was no question of quitting the book. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that these are not evil, one-dimensional scientists but well-meaning, sympathetic characters who bring a welcome complexity to the narrative. They do not force Romochka to stay against his will, but allow him to travel back and forth via the subway system—a skill that he learned from his dog pack. If you are unaware of Moscow’s subway-riding dogs, I hope you’ll take a moment right now to read this article.

To the incredibly talented cover artist Astrid Chesney: Your art is perfect for this book (in contrast to all the other ill-suited English-language versions).

To Australia: your happy white husky says “an Iditerod tale.”

To Canada: this reads “an adventure staring a happy pioneer boy in 1880.”

To England: are you aware this is not a children’s book?

Australia again: You’ve made this reminiscent of Japanese manga why?

Astrid Chesney probably actually read the book. Her art says: dark, visceral, wild; bleak Soviet housing. The dogs are shadowy figures, not exuberant pets about to go to the local dog park. And the boy isn’t easily seen at first, and then you realize he’s crawling (rather than tromping joyfully towards adventure).

Excerpt:

He knew when the dogs were pleased. He could feel it and see it in the way they used their bodies. Their joyous wriggle and the smile of a sweeping tail were an immediately comprehensible body of happiness. Mamochka’s contented sighs in their bed filled him, too, with bliss. He knew when someone was annoyed, because they bit him. He learned teeth: the friendliness of a gesture that held teeth low and nonthreatening, and slowly all the gradations from bared-teeth threat, lip-veiled threat, and teeth set aside or used for play. He found himself quickly fitting in with teeth serious and teeth playful, reading easily the bodies around him with eyes, fingers, nose, and tongue.

Everything was ritual. He began to emulate the greeting, in which every absence was healed. He made his body joyous too, his head low, mouth small; he helped in delight and licked the mouth corners of the elder dogs as they entered. The greeting was also the moment of all confessions. Body joyous or body contrite, pure of spirit, or guilt-ridden, waiting for punishment. The dogs all confessed truthfully to each other at first meeting, crawling low, with face averted, then rolling over to take whatever punishment was theirs. Usually their abasement was enough. If the puppies had exceeded their boundaries, or eaten Golden Bitch’s bones, or ripped up the bed and spread it around, they told on themselves as soon as an adult entered.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House (2011), 353 pages.

I borrowed this from a friend with the understanding that it is a quiet story about two old widowed people falling in love, which admittedly doesn’t sound terribly interesting. However, my friend spoke enthusiastically of the book’s British sensibility and understated eloquence, so I gave it a chance. To my surprise, within just a few pages I was seized with concern for what would happen to the Major’s family heirlooms: a pair of highly collectible Churchill hunting guns, one of which has been confiscated by the Major’s materialistic sister-in-law. Since I don’t care for hunting guns generally, my concern should be seen as a testament to Simonson’s writing skills.

This is a quiet book, at first, and its tone, combined with very strong, very realistic characters, reminds me of Ann Tyler’s Digging to America. Like Tyler, Simonson focuses on the nuances of family dynamics and what happens when someone from another culture enters the fray. (Digging dealt with American-Iranian cultural misunderstandings; Major Pettigrew is centered on British-Pakistani relationships.)

The sixty-eight-year-old Major was raised in Lahore when it was under British colonial rule; he now lives in an English coastal village that, while relatively sleepy, nonetheless has lots of small-town politics going on, mostly centered around upper-crust fussiness such as proper manners at the local hunting club. His growing interest in the Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali, naturally causes some consternation.

The descriptions of these two people spending time together are delightful. Who knew that old people quietly falling in love could make for enjoyable reading?  They stroll through town, there is much drinking of tea, and they discuss their love for Kipling in great detail. I have to say, their conversations about Kipling are written so well that I suddenly felt I needed to go seek out something of his to read—perhaps Puck of Pook’s Hill, which I had never heard of before but which, according to Major Pettigrew, “expresses something important about the foundations of the land.”

The Major bemoans modern society’s loss of tradition and good sense in a very engaging way. His retorts to his annoying family members are clever and sarcastic. And what’s not to love about a book that constantly references “the atrocities of Partition”?  Unfortunately, the end becomes melodramatic—almost absurdly so. There is a suicide attempt at the coastal bluffs, a shooting incident during the suicide rescue effort, and even an attempted murder via knitting needle!

Excerpt:

The Major poured them each a second cup of tea and wished there were some way to stop the late afternoon light from traveling any further across the living room. Any moment now and the golden bars would reach the bookcases on the far wall and reflect back at Mrs. Ali the lateness of the hour. He feared she might be prompted to stop reading.

She had a low, clear reading voice and she read with obvious appreciation of the text. He had almost forgotten to enjoy listening. During the dusty years of teaching at St. Mark’s preparatory school, his ears had become numb, rubbed down to nonvibrating nubs by the monotone voices of uncomprehending boys. To them, “Et tu Brute” carried the same emotional weight as a bus conductor’s “Tickets, please.” No matter that many possessed very fine, plumy accents; they strove with equal determination to garble the most precious of texts. Sometimes, he was forced to beg them to desist, and this they saw as victory over his stuffiness. He had chosen to retire the same year that the school allowed movies to be listed in the bibliographies of literary essays.

Mrs. Ali had marked many pages with tiny slips of orange paper and, after some prompting from him, she had agreed to read from the fragments that interested her. He thought that Kipling had never sounded so good.

Fans of Dry, Running With Scissors, and A Wolf at the Table, who are expecting Augusten’s (after three memoirs, I feel we are on a first-name basis) usual biting sarcasm, are likely to be disappointed by this book—especially since the cover tells readers, as directly and clearly as it is possible for a cover to speak, that the self-help industry (of which Burroughs has more than a passing familiarity) is about to be viciously skewered.

Imagine my confusion when page after page I find instead a thoughtful, compassionate, sincere(!) Augusten dispensing wisdom and advice on how to live one’s life. He is not making fun of self-help books—he has actually tried to write one. And then, within a chapter or two, it dawns on me that not only is he being an Augusten I didn’t know existed, but that almost everything he is saying is absolutely true. Yes, true. He’s right. About nearly everything. And furthermore, he is saying things you won’t find in any of the other self-help books on your shelf. There are no pages of affirmations to tape to your mirror, no 10 Steps to Success lists, no attempts to become your best friend/cheerleader or to urge to attend the author’s thousand-dollar-weekend workshop. This book is just Augusten, telling the truth as he knows it, and getting it absolutely right.

He covers pretty much every topic one might have a problem with: feeling fat, lack of confidence, loss of a loved one, anorexia, addiction, suicide, unemployment, just to name a few. And best of all, he has subtracted the bitter wit from his writing without losing his sense of humor. This Is How is very, very funny.

All the other would-be self-help gurus may now put down their pens. The definitive book has been written. Nothing more need be said.

Augusten I love you. You’re brilliant. Thank you.

EXCERPT:
If affirmations were effective, a rape victim should be able to walk in her front door following the attack, go into the bathroom, and, with her silk blouse hanging in shredded strips from her collarbones, scratch marks bleeding on her breasts—one nipple missing—and her bangs pasted to her filthy forehead with dirt and dried semen, say to her reflection, “I am too strong and independent to be hurt by negativity. I feel unafraid and powerful. I am grateful for the opportunity I have had tonight to experience something new, learn a little more about myself, and triumph in the face of adversity,” and then feel perfectly okay, maybe even a little bit rushy on those feel-good endorphins runners are always going on and on about.

When in fact, what does help the person who has been raped is to chew it up and then spit it the hell out. And by chew it up I mean talk about it, write about it, paint it, make a movie about it, and then be done with it and move on. Because here’s the truth about rape: you do not have to be victimized by it forever. You can take this awful, bottomless horror the rapist has inflicted on you, and you can seize it and recycle it into something wonderful and helpful and useful. You can, in this way, transform what was “done” to you into something that was “given” to you in the form of brutally raw material. You can, in other words, accept this hideous thing and embrace it and take complete control of the experience and reshape it as you please. This is not to deny the experience and how devastating it is; it is to accept the experience on the deepest level as your own possession now.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

“I think I first realized something was wrong when our next-door neighbor, oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered. I must have been about six then.”

Is this not a just-right opening sentence for a memoir of Rhodesia on the cusp of its war for independence, as seen through the eyes of a British boy who was born in a tiny town near the border with Mozambique?

If your shelf of “Memoirs of Childhood in Colonial British Africa” is sparse, and you’re looking for something to sidle alongside Twenty Chickens, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin, then this is the book for you. There’s a caveat, though—the first half and the last half of the book are so radically different from each other that they might as well have been published separately. I had to skim (skimming ever faster and faster) the tediously uninteresting second half.

Mukiwa is divided into three parts: Book One (the first 200 pages) covers the author’s childhood from the mid 1960s until the late 1970s; Books Two and Three (the remaining 200 pages) cover his adult years, first fighting in the war and then returning from England in the 1980s as a journalist to revisit the land of his youth. Again (see Twenty Chickens), an African-childhood memoir attempts to do too much over too many years.  Book One on its own would have earned between 3 and 4 stars, but instead Mukiwa earns just 2 stars because the fighting years are just unbearably boring.

But—perhaps you have a shelf of “Wars, Fighting, and Battles,” and that shelf is sparse (though I can’t imagine how it possibly could be, given the serious and ongoing glut of this category). In that case, you’ll probably skim the first half, revel in the war half, then shelve the book accordingly.

Memoir enthusiasts usually expect that social/familial relationships will be delineated (and we at The Book Shark have been critical in the past of memoirs that do not do so satisfactorily), but I appreciate Book One of Mukiwa as a memoir of a boy’s relationship with a particular place, rather than with people. His family members are almost entirely absent; two sisters are mentioned but are of so little relevance that when one of them is suddenly referenced halfway through the book as the reason that the author could dance well (“My sister Jain had taught me well, jiving with me on the verandah at home to her Beatles and Sonny and Cher records”) I was floored, thinking “Wow, they talked sometimes? And danced together?!”  [1]

But I accept this memoir as being about the author’s relationship with Africa—the land itself—and at this he very much succeeds: I felt his love for Rhodesia, I was there with him on childhood hikes in the Chimanimani mountains on the Mozambique border, and I could cry over the fact that walking there now is impossible because of the landmines that were buried during the war:

Up here I felt like the last human being on earth. The range was sixty miles long and thirty wide, and there were no roads or human habitation anywhere within it. Rock dassies scurried between the boulders, and in the distance a baboon sentinel marked a low mastiff bark to warn his troop of my approach. His bark hung in the air, echoing between the outcrops… Way below the timber forests rolled away into the hazy blue distance, punctuated here and there by tea and coffee plantations. I got up and strode on up the trail, higher and higher.

Soon the terrain opened out on to a steep slope covered with a fine sandy loam, beach white, from which rose cedar and yellowwood trees. Their branches were draped with vines, and delicate orchids clung to them too. Klipspringers, disturbed at their grazing, bounced away from me in dainty bounds. Then another barrier of granite and I was above the tree line. Only ferns, the odd protea and aloe survived up here. It was a strange vista, called the Mountains of the Moon, a barren landscape dotted with craggy rock formations, whipped by a cool wind, the southeast monsoon that swept unhindered across the flood plains of Mozambique before coming up abruptly against the formidable 8,000-foot barrier of the Chimanimanis…

…the commanders decided to turn the Chimanimanis into a lethal barrier by seeding them with anti-personnel mines. The whole range was transformed into a vast minefield. In the valleys below, in the fortified homesteads on the timber estates and the coffee plantations, they would hear loud booms rolling down from the mountains from time to time. Not thunder, but explosions, as klipspringers, baboons, sable, eland, and blue duiker set of mines and blew themselves to pieces. And for almost ten years humans never ventured there at all.

This passage (which is longer than what I’ve excerpted here and includes a dramatic walk during a thunder and lightning storm) is almost worth the price of the book. I cannot stop thinking about the tragedy of the landmines and wishing I could go back in time to walk there as the author experienced it before the war.

My only other complaint is about the plethora of distracting comma splices—there’s one every five pages or so! This is unacceptably bad editing. (“Few could afford cars, I encountered just the odd jalopy held together by wire and optimism.”)

[1] This lack of interest in social relationships does lead to some annoying confusions here and there. Albert and Violet, for example, suddenly appear to sit near the fire with the author to look over a Wanted notice, “gathered round with their sleeping babies.”  The author is six so doesn’t read well, so he gives the Wanted flier to Violet, “who was the best reader among us. With some difficulty and the occasional stumble, she began to read it aloud by the flicker of the boiler fire.”  Hmmm…Albert and Violet haven’t been mentioned yet, but clearly, from context, they must be either siblings or playmates. Puzzling over the clues, I conclude the following: Violet doesn’t read well, so she’s around the author’s age…the sleeping babies are of course dolls…Albert plays with dolls too so he is probably younger than Peter, perhaps 3 or 4.

Can you imagine my exasperation upon finding out later that Violet and Albert were native illiterate adults who were married to each other, and the sleeping babies were their actual living offspring?

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Reviewed by Donna
I happened to read this book immediately following The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, although they were published two years apart. They are interestingly similar: both are psychological suspense, both are told from the point of view of middle schoolers, and both are creepy as hell in similar ways.

Mr. Hibma is a geography teacher who doesn’t “teach the subject of geography.” He lectures about whatever randomly strikes his fancy, and leaves “the memorizing of topographical terms and state capitals to the kids. They had books. They had exercise manuals. If they were smart and curious they’d end up knowing a lot, and if they were dumb they wouldn’t.”  I really loved this teacher and empathized with his severe case of cynicism over the state of public education these days.

The writing in this book is excellent. The pacing, too, is perfect: only gradually do we realize that the middle-school boy is not mentally healthy; he is quite depraved. Mr. Hibma, too, is equally (or more so?) depraved, but for a long time we are unclear about how seriously to take him. His fantasies of murder are made clear in the opening pages of the book (see the excerpt, below), but the reader doesn’t know if this is the sort of harmless fantasy we all have at one time or another, or if Mr. Hibma is actually serious.

The reason for three stars instead of four or five is the ending: a neat and tidy Hollywood ending that doesn’t ring true to who these characters actually are.

One last thing. I hated the trim size of this book. It’s oversized and weird. Why couldn’t it be normal book size?

*                    *                    *

Reviewed by Cindy
The point of view taken by the previous reviewer is tragically, catastrophically narrow. I have been compelled to write a second review in order that potential Citrus County readers are not driven away by Donna’s characterization of the novel as a well-written, but essentially one-dimensional murder mystery with a “Hollywood ending.”

EXCERPT
Citrus County was a couple hours north of St Petersburg, on what people called the Nature Coast, which Mr. Hibma had gathered was a title of default; there was nature because there were no beaches and no amusement parks and no hotels and no money. There were rednecks and manatees and sinkholes. There were insects, not gentle crickets but creatures with stingers and pincers and scorn in their hearts. There was the smell of vegetation, every plant blooming outrageously or rotting by the minute. There was a swampy lake and a complex of aging villas surrounding that lake, and one of these villas was now Mr. Hibma’s home.

Teaching had been the only job available to him, and for a while it was amusing, another lark, but now he’d been doing it a year and a half. It was February. It was Thursday. It was fourth period. Mr. Hibma was sick of skinny, smelly, hormone-dazed kids staring at him and lying to him and asking him questions. He was sick of their clothes, their faces. And the teachers were worse. Mr. Hibma did his best to keep to himself—ate in his classroom, avoided heading clubs or committees, kept all his discipline in-house instead of dealing with the office, and kept away from “7th hour,” which was what the younger teachers called meeting at a Mexican restaurant Friday afternoon and getting drunk.

The teacher in the next room, Mrs. Conner, was not young and had likely never been drunk. She was about fifty, a grammar Nazi with bronze-colored hair who wore sandals that were too small and caused her toes to spill out onto the floor. She was an English teacher who refused to assign any literature that was morally corrupt. Poe was morally corrupt. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson was morally corrupt. Probably the Russians. Certainly the French. Mrs. Conner often informed Mr. Hibma that his shirt was wrinkled. She asked him pointed questions about his lesson plans, about all the games the kids played in his class. She and her husband, a retired cop or fireman or something, owned a ministorage place. Mrs. Conner’s classroom was decorated with posters about life not being a destination but a journey, posters of kittens hanging from ropes, posters of a ship or a whale with one word displayed across the top, like Persistence. Mr. Hibma often fantasized about murdering this woman. This was her last year of teaching before she retired and lived snidely off her pension and her husband’s pension and their ministorage profits, rising at dawn to greet her open days, getting more heavily involved in her church. The idea of letting her smirk through the last day of her twenty-fifth year as a teacher, loping around in her undersized sandals feeling as if everything she’d ever done was right, of letting her go home and sit on her porch on that warm June evening with her tea, and then, just as she dozed off, sneaking up behind her and….  The idea sustained Mr. Hibma.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Easily the best book I’ve read in the last fourteen months. It has everything: Russian fairy tales, pioneer homesteaders, a lost child, a red fox, Alaskan wilderness, an orphan, and lots of snow and ice. The snow and ice here is written in such a descriptive way I feel as though I’ve never before read a book with so much cold in it. Now, this is certainly not true, since I’ve read plenty of Jack London, including “To Build a Fire,” but the fact that Snow Child had a colder effect on me than London’s works is strong evidence that Ivey may be the most descriptive and best writer of icy, frozen, arctic environs ever.

This book is perfection.

The story is loosely based on the legend of Russia’s Snow Maiden, specifically Arthur Ransome’s version “Little Daughter of the Snow,” which appeared in Ransome’s 1916 collection of Russian folktales, Old Peter’s Russian Tales.

(Sidenote: About seven years ago, a version of “Little Daughter of the Snow” was published in picture-book format. The story is greatly abridged, but the art is delightful and the book is a must-have for young children.)

Ivey has made this story very much her own, however, first by making the setting 1920s Alaska rather than 1800s Russia, and second by not hewing too closely to the events chronicled in the folktales. Instead, she brings in various threads of the traditional stories that complement her unique plotlines, but always leaves the reader in suspense about which of the threads will be followed and which will not. If you are familiar with Ransome’s story, fear not—the end of Snow Child is quite different, but wholly true to the Snow Maiden’s spirit.

The cover art is so appealing I had to simply hold the book for a long while before starting it. It’s whimsical and very true to the story, and at first I thought it was surely the best possible cover for the book. I have to give kudos, however, to the United Kingdom version, which was published simultaneously with ours. Their cover reminds me of an Astrid Lindgren book for young adults. It’s less childlike, less playful, more mysterious, and more feral. While our cover speaks of friendly innocence, their cover implies a certain feral wildness that perfectly captures an important facet of the Snow Child.

Excerpt:
She had imagined that in the Alaska wilderness silence would be peaceful, like snow falling at night, air filled with promise but no sound, but that was not what she found. Instead, when she swept the plank floor, the broom bristles scratched like some sharp-toothed shrew nibbling at her heart. When she washed the dishes, plates and bowls clattered as if they were breaking to pieces. The only sound not of her making was a sudden “caw, cawww” from outside. Mabel wrung dishwater from a rag and looked out the kitchen window in time to see a raven flapping its way from one leafless birch tree to another. No children chasing each other through autumn leaves, calling each other’s names. Not even a solitary child on a swing.

There had been the one. A tiny thing, born still and silent. Ten years past, but even now she found herself returning to the birth to touch Jack’s arm, stop him, reach out. She should have. She should have cupped the baby’s head in the palm of her hand and snipped a few of its tiny hairs to keep in a locket at her throat. She should have looked into its small face and known if it was a boy or a girl, and then stood beside Jack as he buried it in the Pennsylvania winter ground. She should have marked its grave. She should have allowed herself that grief.

It was a child, after all, although it looked more like a fairy changeling. Pinched face, tiny jaw, ears that came to narrow points; that much she had seen and wept over because she knew she could have loved it still.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Back-cover reviews describe this as “atmospheric” and a “modern fairy tale,” words that fail to convey that the last quarter of the book is actually a bona fide horror story. True, there are many enjoyable “atmospheric” elements: small-town Germany is convincingly portrayed (in fact, the setting is inspired by the actual little town of Bad Münstereifel), and the character of Herr Schiller, an elderly man who regales our middle schooler with dark, disturbing legends ostensibly from the town’s past, provides a wonderfully eerie and folktale-ish mood and is the most engrossing aspect of the book.  The end of The Vanishing, however, unexpectedly turns into Hollywood horror. I had a weird sense that I was no longer reading a book, but a screenplay for a gruesome movie in the Wes Craven genre, à la The People under the Stairs. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I just felt that the book inexplicably changed tone somewhere toward the end, which took me aback.

A minor flaw is the voice of the middle schooler. She doesn’t come quite fully alive, and her relationship with her guy friend feels slightly off.

The death of her grandmother in the first few opening pages is also very odd. As another reviewer pointed out, nobody would “explode” from putting on too much hairspray near an open flame; that premise is ludicrously farfetched. Since the scene sets the stage for the book and is meant to explain something about the girl’s treatment by the other students at her school, the reader is left confused: are we to accept the death at face value? Or is it meant to mirror the mythical folktales told by Herr Schiller? If we aren’t meant to take it seriously, then the girl’s ostracism doesn’t make sense. Then again, why would an exploding grandmother necessitate ostracism? None of this really adds up.

Still, I’ve given the book three stars for its folktale-imbued sense of life in small-town Germany. I recommend it if you have a particular interest in Bad Münstereifel, and/or serial killers with unusual ideas about what to do with dead bodies.