Bear Necessity

 

A delightful story about a grieving British father and his young son who refuses to speak and how they learn to communicate with each other through a dancing panda bear.

 

British-born author James Gould-Bourn bursts onto the U.S. literary scene with a charming, deeply comforting story about a father and son entrenched in grief.

 

After a car accident claimed the life of Danny Malooley's beloved wife--and mother to their son, Will--father and son grapple with their loss, trying to shore up their shattered world. Matters hit rock bottom when Danny suddenly loses his construction job and cannot pay the bills. But worst of all is the fact that 11-year-old Will has refused to speak to anyone--including his dad--since his mother's death.

 

Depressed, destitute and desperate, Danny ambles through a park one day and spots street performers entertaining passersby and raking in money. This proves a moment of enlightenment as he decides, on a lark, to join their ranks. Barreling through a host of amusing complications, he secures an old panda bear suit and sets off to earn some money covertly.

 

Meanwhile, Will struggles with his lingering silence and being taunted by older kids at school. When the boy is bullied in the park one day, a goofy-looking, dancing panda performer unexpectedly comes to his rescue.

Heartfelt themes and wit further elevate charming plot twists and a well-tuned cast of quirky, supporting characters who prove that the spirit of friendship can build bridges to greater understanding and brighter days. Gould-Bourn is a perceptive writer who has crafted a moving, sensitive story that is also very funny. Bear Necessity is a perfect literary antidote to anxious, troubled times.

Bear Necessity: A Novel by Jason Gould Bourn

Scribner, $26.00 Hardcover, 9781982128296, 320 pages

Publication Date: August 4, 2020

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 7, 2020), link HERE

 

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (July 14, 2020), link HERE

 

Rachel Kushner: Writing That Grows Out of Living

The Writer's Life

Rachel Kushner's novels The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba were both finalists for the National Book

Author Photo by Chloe Aftel

Award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review. Kushner's new novel, The Mars Room (Scribner; reviewed below), centers on the harrowing life of a young mother serving two consecutive life sentences in a California prison.

Why set the book in San Francisco?
Partly because I am from there. The main character, Romy Hall, is from the Sunset, the San Francisco neighborhood where I grew up. It's not a bad neighborhood at all, and yet it was a rather gritty adolescence there. When I meet book-learned people now, they always tell me they went to some fancy private school in San Francisco, and the conversation stops there, because we are basically not from the same city. Where I am from is very specific, a time and a place, and no one who didn't experience it might ever understand, which was my challenge: trying to transmute that experience, my knowledge of it, into literature.

Do you live in California now?
In Los Angeles, half a mile from the city jail complex and the criminal courts.

Did this proximity inspire the book?
Most of those who fill the state prisons in California come from metropolitan L.A. and the surrounding counties (Riverside, San Bernardino). Like many writers, I'm interested in other people and in the world around me, and that world, here in California, unfortunately includes a massive carceral system.

Your descriptions of prison life are richly detailed. How did you research the novel?
I'm sort of opposed to the concept of research, because I consider my process more organic. I live in a certain way, and my writing comes out of that. In 2012, I decided to try to learn everything I could about the criminal justice system in California, to understand the deeper layers of the carceral net, the penal zone of the world, which can very often be invisible to middle-class people, and can entirely dominate the lives of poor people. I went "under cover" on an extensive tour of state prisons in California (mostly men's) with criminology students who were effectively being wooed for jobs with the California Department of Corrections. The context meant that guards, prison litigators and public information officers spoke to us as if we were "of their own kind," and thus, I was able to see quite a bit into the mentality of the people who work at the prison, at all levels.

How much access were you granted?
I was allowed to roam prison yards, even maximum security yards, and to talk to people who were serving long, mostly life, sentences. I got to go in their cells, see the so-called "mental health" facilities, the so-called job training, the education programs, so-called, the prison industries like license plate stamping and registration sticker printing. Separately, I became involved, as a volunteer, with a nonprofit organization called Justice Now, which advocates against human rights violations in the women's prisons in California, and whose leadership is partly made up of people serving life sentences. I learned a great deal from the people I met inside who are involved with Justice Now and developed friendships with many lifers that way.

This exposure must have been helpful in creating the psyche of the main character and her difficult life.
It took me a long time to create Romy. I needed to be able to inhabit her fully, and I kept coming up against the irrefutable facts of my own circumstance: I have middle-class resources and would never go to prison, I probably wouldn't even go to jail.... If I did run into trouble, like if I just lost it and did something crazy, I have high-powered lawyer friends who would get me off. That's how it works.

What a leap, then, for you fully to envision her predicament.
I thought and thought into this, and eventually, I invented a girl who was with us growing up in San Francisco, among the girls I knew--I mean most of the people I knew, whose lives didn't turn out like mine, who had parents who struggled with poverty and addictions and who themselves nursed nihilist streaks. I had resisted that because I didn't really want to revisit anything from my own youth, but it rose up and demanded to be dealt with. And suddenly everything made sense about Romy--her past and future.

You divvy out the details of Romy's experiences with great suspense.
The creation of a narrator's tone has to be done delicately, factoring in the way people don't present information about their lives all at once. In fact, prison is not a place that leaves a lot of room to think into the worst thing you've ever done. The idea of a convicted person's remorse and pain and anguish over an irreversible act they themselves have committed, as I understand these things, isn't quite what a middle-class person imagines. Because you have to be closed up and hard in prison, there is no privacy, there's a lot of hostility and dysfunction, and people are trying to survive on a day-by-day basis. So it seemed natural enough that certain elements of Romy's old life--her memories, her regrets and some type of "account" of what happened that resulted in her life sentence--should leak out in parts.

How did the rest of the story, as a whole, take shape?
I wrote the book in parts. The book that resulted was from many years of my ruminating on what I saw, felt, thought, have learned and also read. Dostoyevsky was a help to me on some level, as was Nietzsche. The Doc character, the rogue cop, was the easiest and most fully formed right away. Honestly, he really wrote himself, in all his dirty outrageousness. The main character, Romy, was more challenging. It took me two years to write the first long chapter of the book, her bus ride on "chain night," when women are hauled up highway 99 to the Central Valley, because it had to have all of the foundational elements of her narrative, her tone, her cadence in it, her predicament. I had to push myself into certain corners to figure that out.

Your writing has been described as "persuasive" and "moving." What will readers take away from The Mars Room?
I write to please myself or grapple with my own unanswerable questions. In terms of what people take away, I can't claim to have a project in mind for the readers of my book, but if this book were to change the way someone thinks about, say, our society and how it's structured, about life, about class, race, America, women, poverty, dirty jokes, bad cops, all cops, literature, good, evil, God, violence, highways, dead ends, or justice--well, that would be just fine. 

This interview is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this Q&A on Shelf Awareness for Readers (May 18, 2018), link HERE 

The Mars Room

A gritty, authentic fictional account of a 29-year-old mother serving two consecutive life sentences at a Women's Correctional Facility.

Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers) paints a dark and gritty picture of the U.S. prison system and the larger, contemporary world in her provocative novel, The Mars Room. The action is set at the fictional Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, in the remote Central Valley of California. A diverse cast of inmates--hardscrabble women who formerly lived on the margins of society, suffering from poverty, abuse, neglect, drug addiction and sex exploitation--are forced to adapt and make a life inside prison walls. 

The central protagonist is Romy Leslie Hall, a 29-year-old inmate and former lap dancer at the Mars Room, a notorious, seedy strip club in San Francisco. Romy is serving two consecutive life sentences for murdering a man who relentlessly stalked her. 

Romy--bright and well-read, despite having grown up in unseemly conditions--has a young son, Jackson, who becomes entangled in the child welfare bureaucracy. Although prison separates Romy from Jackson for four long years--and she is ultimately stripped of her rights to find him--her desperate longing and love for him endures. She goes to great lengths to learn more about his status and track him down.

Romy's tragic, hard-luck story is one of many explored in a complex novel that keeps readers off-balance yet fully immersed. Supporting characters and their sordid proclivities and recidivism--along with subplots about an incarcerated dirty cop and a sensitive teacher at the prison--provide an unflinching look at brutality and power plays within the perimeters of razor wire--and beyond. 

The Mars Room: A Novel by Rachel Kushner

Scribner, $27.00 Hardcover,  9781476756554, 352 pages

Publication Date: May 1, 2018

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (May 18, 2018), link HERE

Dear Mr. You

In her inventive, unconventional memoir, Dear Mr. You, award-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker offers glimpses into her life via 34 letters written to and about significant men in her life, showing how masculine presences--fleeting, long-term and imagined--have influenced her, for better or worse.

The letters range widely in subject, form and tone. Most pay homage to family, as in "Dear Grandpa," which tells the story of Parker's grandfather and a creative act of love he undertook to brighten a son's dark days during World War II. In "Dear Daddy," Parker writes longingly of her father, his war experiences and how an injury sustained in battle changed his life--and Parker's.

Other letters are odes to--or denunciations of--lost loves, sexual exploits and long-ago intimacies. Tenderness and sensitivity gravitate to the fore in a letter about Parker's short-lived friendship with a man battling cancer. She writes an affectionate portrait about the two-way street of friendship, and humbly recalls meeting the biological uncle of her adopted, Ethiopian-born daughter. In "Dear Future Man Who Loves My Daughter," Parker admiringly glances back at the protectiveness of her own brothers when she was growing up. The men at the center of each letter often serve as mirrors, reflecting much about Parker and those who populate her world.

Whether writing to NASA, poets, musicians, a goat facing castration, an ash-covered firefighter on 9/11 or doctors, Parker's prose is infused with a perfect balance of sarcasm, humor and poetic language. Her letters shine with candid, self-aware depth--unabashed in revealing the truth of her own nature and experiences. 

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker
Scribner, $25.00 Hardcover, 9781501107832, 240 pp
Publication Date: November 10, 2015
To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (11/24/15), link HERE

This review was also featured (in a longer form) on Shelf Awareness: Book Trade (11/3/15). To read the longer review click HERE

 

The Removers

In 1990, when Andrew Meredith was 14 years-old, his family fell apart. The downfall was caused by his 50 year-old father, a teacher fired from La Salle College in Pennsylvania after he was accused of sexual misconduct with a female student. The scandal and its lasting impact on the lives of his mother, sister and himself bind this powerfully drawn, often wrenching debut memoir, The Removers. The story of Meredith's experiences working alongside his father, who later found work as a "remover," taking away the bodies of people who died in their own homes, becomes the central thread and metaphor for the dissolution of his family.

A remover is someone who is "paid to be invisible . . . We are men made to be forgotten." Fortunately for the reader, however, Meredith never forgets incidents from an 18-year period in his life, which vividly recall details from his often gruesome, sometimes exhilarating, experiences in handling corpses while grappling with his bitterness toward a father who broke his heart.

Meredith's fluid, unabashed prose is delivered in a stream-of-consciousness style interspersed with scenes of how he floundered for fifteen years after high school. He worked a job he didn't want, taking ten years to finish college, and endured a series of failed romantic relationships. After ultimately moving to California, Meredith missed his hometown—the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia. Might his work with the dead have been his true professional calling, his salvation? Meredith's circuitous journey of self-discovery, his trying to reconcile his life by working with the dead, will fascinate those interested in the mysteries of life and death.

The Removers: A Memoir  by Andrew Meredith

Scribner, 24.00 Hardcover, 9781476761213, 179 pp

Publication Date: July 15, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Readers (7/25/14), click HERE

Martha Grimes: Every Book the Last Book

The Writer's Life

Since 1981, fans of the Richard Jury mysteries have come to expect eccentric characters, peculiar murders and a smart, cultured, analytical detective who searches for killers from a cast of disparate suspects. One of the more consistent hallmarks of a Richard Jury novel are the titles derived from clever names of actual pubs and bars, like The Old Fox Deceiv'd and The Stargazey. Martha Grimes has largely set the atmospheric series in London and quaint, small-town villages in the English countryside, but a few titles are also set in America--The Horse You Came in On in Baltimore, Md., and Rainbow's End in Santa Fe, N.Mex. Her new Jury novel, Vertigo 42 (see review below), is set in London and environs.

Grimes is a writer of authority and great wit. She continues to reinvent and put refreshing new spins on the traditional mystery form. She has also penned several other books, not all of them mysteries. Her novels Foul Matter and The Way of All Fish offer funny, suspenseful send-ups of the publishing industry.

You are a U.S. born-and-bred writer, yet most of the Jury novels are set in Britain. What is your connection to England?

None, other than I've always liked it.

Do you often travel to England and the British countryside for research?

Not as often as I used to. Perhaps every couple of years now.

You've written 23 books in the Jury series. How and why do you stay engaged in this series and keep it fresh?

Because I like the characters, not simply Richard Jury and Melrose Plant, but all of the characters, including the ones readers appear to hate.

How was Richard Jury's character originally created?

As with all of my characters, Richard Jury simply popped into my mind. So did Melrose Plant. So did all of the others. There's no backstory; there's no searching for names; there's nothing prior. All I knew about the main character was that I wanted a Scotland Yard detective.

Do you have favorite characters from the Jury series? If so, who are they and why do they appeal to you?

Carole-anne Palutski (Jury's neighbor) is one because she's always intruding. She has no respect for Jury's personal "space." This amuses me. I'm especially fond of the kids and the animals. I always enjoy writing scenes with them in it. Mungo (the dog) was a total relief from boredom.

I also really like Harry Johnson because he's more clever, most of the time, than Richard Jury. Jury needs a nemesis.

The names of pubs and bars play a significant role in each Jury novel. Was this a conscious choice from the inception of the series?

Yes. I couldn't imagine better titles.

The name and atmosphere of the champagne bar, Vertigo 42, is a departure from your usual small-time pubs. Why did you make this choice?

Because of the name. How could one resist it?

How did the story of Vertigo 42 germinate?

Stories don't really "germinate" for me. I start writing and keep writing and the story goes on. Vertigo 42 started because, as I said, I was fascinated by the name. That's the way a lot of the books in the series started: because of the name.

Do you carefully plot out your novels in advance of writing them?

I never plot them out. I tried once and couldn't do it. The reason for this is (1) I can't write unless characters are moving and talking in some setting that I can see and hear, and (2) plots bore me. There is a famous writer/editor, whose name escapes me, who was approached by a student who asked him to look at a plot she'd formed for a novel. He said, "There is no plot." I loved that. A plot cannot be foretold separately from the whole story.

You studied at the University of Iowa writing program and concentrated on poetry. How and why did your writing career veer toward mystery novels?

My poetry was complicated by elements of mystery--dark houses, fleeing children, bodies, blood. The book of poetry I published is a British mystery in poetry form, or a satirical treatment of one.

Your memoir, Double, Double--co-written with your son, Ken--deals with your shared struggles with alcoholism. Would fans of the Richard Jury mysteries want to read this book?

I don't know if they'd want to read it because they like Jury. But everyone knows someone who's been touched by alcoholism, so perhaps that would be a reason to read it.

Is there a difference between writing a novel "under the influence" versus being sober?

Yes, "under the influence" is more fun. However, "under the influence" suggests some sort of drunken stupor. I never actually drank when I wrote, but that had to do with my writing schedule more than my being a good little writer. Insofar as the books are concerned, I doubt anyone could tell where the line was drawn.

If readers have not yet experienced a Richard Jury novel (pity the fool!), should they start with the first book (The Man with a Load of Mischief) or can they jump into the series midstream?

There's no need to start at the beginning. I'd suggest The Anodyne because it introduces the Cripps family and features Emily Louise Perk, who serves as a perfect example of Jury's and Melrose Plant's interactions with children. But one could start anywhere in the series, I think.

Do you have a favorite Richard Jury novel?

The Old Wine Shades because it's intelligent. I enjoyed writing about quantum mechanics and, also, it introduces both Harry Johnson and the dog Mungo. How could I ask for more?

You've been writing and publishing books for decades. Does the process get easier or more difficult?

More difficult. Much, much more difficult.

You are an esteemed and lauded "mystery writer." Do you often have the urge to write fiction other than mysteries?

I've written nine novels that are not mysteries--two books in the Andi Oliver series certainly aren't mysteries! How do readers come by this naive idea that any book that contains a mysterious death or a disappearance or something else inexplicable is a "mystery"? If that were the case, even Henry James would be thought to have written several "mysteries." I'm getting tired of the assumption that any book I write must be a mystery.

Throughout the series, Richard Jury has been rather unlucky in love. Do you think he'll ever find a true, lasting soul mate?

I thought he had. But I was wrong. I think he will. I could be wrong again.

Do you foresee a conscious end or conclusion to the Jury series some day?

Robert Frost said, "Make every poem your last poem." Every Jury novel has a note of finality to it, although the only one readers ever paid attention to was the ending of The Blue Last. Every book is the last book, in a very real sense. I have no plans for closing down Richard Jury. But life does. --Kathleen Gerard

Note: This interview is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this Q&A on Shelf Awareness: Maximum Shelf (5/21/14), click HERE

Vertigo 42

New Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns to the page with a visit to Vertigo 42, a stylish high-rise champagne bar in London. Jury is meeting friend-of-a-friend Tom Williamson, whose wife, Tess, died 17 years earlier. Her fatal fall down a flight of garden stairs was ruled a result of a misstep, but Tom isn't convinced. He asks Richard Jury if he'll use his connections to investigate.

Five years before Tess's death, she'd hosted a party for some children at her estate; tragically, nine-year-old Hilda Palmer fell into a drained pool on the grounds and died. Could Tess's death been an act of revenge?

For the next seven days, Martha Grimes (The Man with a Load of Mischief) plots the journey of Jury and his dependable sidekick, Sergeant Wiggins. As they travel through the English countryside, they seek out the five surviving party guests (all now adults with secrets of their own), hoping to unearth new insights into Tess's death. Their quest is complicated by two more deaths--in Long Piddleton and Sidbury--that may or may not be related.

With each new discovery and red herring, Grimes leads readers deeper into dark, winding labyrinths of suspicion and doubt. Jury remains an engaging protagonist: smart, witty, sarcastic and wholly unafraid to follow his instincts. As in the other 22 books in the series, Grimes's fondness for classic movies, literature and cleverly named British pubs resurface.  In Vertigo 42, Grimes, a master of the genre, pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock. While some of the identifying descriptions of the large supporting cast are a bit sketchy, Grimes surprising mystery gives just enough information to refresh old fans and whet the appetites of new readers.

Vertigo 42 by Martha Grimes

Scribner Books, $26.00 Hardcover, 9781476724027, 326 pp

Publication Date: June 3, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/3/14), click HERE

To read the full review of this novel as originally published as a special feature of Shelf Awareness: Maximum Shelf (5/21/14)--a much longer and much more comprehensive review--link HERE

Eight Girls Taking Pictures

In Eight Girls Taking Pictures, Whitney Otto has woven a well-crafted tapestry of vibrant, moving, historically based short stories about women ahead of their time and how the complexities of their lives enabled them to make distinct and wholly original contributions to the world of photography.

The stories span from 1910 through the 1990s and are set in locales from the United States to Europe and South America. Each story features a richly textured character and explores how specific facets of a woman's life can influence her vision, craft and ambition.

The Author's Note indicates that these stories were inspired by Otto's (How to Make an American Quilt) affinity for the work of six real women photographers from around the world:  Imogen Cunningham, Madame Yevonde, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Grete Stern, and Ruth Orkin.  Two additional stories are purely a product of the author's imagination, though one can make inferences to other noted female photographers.  What Otto has done--with great skill and care--is craft a collage of stories using a factual basis of reality as a launch pad to creatively explore, via fiction, the undocumented parts of each woman's life and career.

Photography is all about perception, seeing the world through a unique vantage point. These stories evolve in a similar fashion, as they seek to reveal and understand how these women pursued their passion for photography through adversity, motherhood and the challenges of love and romantic relationships.  The stories all share photography as a common thread and the medium is explored via aspects of photochemistry, black-and-white versus color, photojournalism/war, botanical, nudes, still life, advertising/fashion, travel and photographing everyday domesticity. But a deeper thread that emerges is the male influence on each of these women's lives, in particular the often complicated relationships between fathers and daughters. Many of the fathers of these photographers were progressive for their time, and it was that paternal bond and influence (however positive or negative) that encouraged these women to seriously pursue photography as a means of self-expression and ultimately, a fine art form.   

 

You don't need to be a photographer or to be familiar with some of the most prominent female image-makers of the 20th Century to appreciate and admire Eight Girls Taking Pictures. But once you finish reading this well-rendered collection, you'll more than likely be inspired to learn more. 

Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto

Scribner,  $25.00, Hardcover, 9781451682694, 352 pp

Publication Date: November 6,  2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

American Ghost

A town and culture are haunted by acts of violence in American Ghost by Janis Owens (My Brother Michael, The Cracker Kitchen). Set in Hendrix--a fictional, contemporary, hardscrabble Florida Panhandle town--this perceptive, well-paced novel was inspired by true events and centers upon a notorious lynching from 1938, the result of a white shop owner who was brutally shot and killed in a robbery by a black man. Secrets and long-buried acts of racism are unearthed when Sam Lense, a Jewish, Miami graduate student in anthropology, comes to town to study and write an academic paper about the ethnic inhabitants of the region, a group of close-knit townsfolk who are distrustful of outsiders.

While doing his research, Sam falls in love with Jolie Hoyt, the humble, sheltered daughter of a protective, old-school preacher. The intensity of the young couple's three-month affair is the talk of the town. Some believe Jolie is rapt by Sam because he is a "rich Jew" while others feel that Sam is using Jolie and her connections to the "useless old lynching" for his own gain. Tensions mount and threaten the small community until Sam's work is dramatically cut short and the bond between the lovers is ultimately severed. 

The second half of the book fast-forwards twelve years. Jolie and Sam, transformed for better and worse, are reunited when a black businessman embarks upon Hendrix to reconcile his father's memory. Complex strands weave together this captivating narrative rife with historical context and characterizations that reflect the foibles of human nature.

American Ghost by Janis Owens

Scribner, $25.00, Hardcover, 97814516774637,  288 pp

Publication Date: October 9, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (10/19/12), click HERE.