The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

When he was four years old, Apollo West’s father vanished without a trace. Shortly after, Apollo began having a terrifying and recurrent nightmare. The dream never varied until, on an evening in his junior year of high school, a cardboard box labeled Improbabilia turned up on his doorstep. Inside were keepsakes, obviously collected by his father, Brian. Among these treasures was Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, Outside Over There, a tenuous link to a father he barely remembers. From that moment onward, Apollo devours every word he can lay hands on; magazines, books, the backs of cereal boxes, etc.   Starting in high school, reselling the waiting room cast-offs brought home from his mom’s office, he is able to parlay his new passion into a career as a “book man.” Nearly a decade later, on the heels of a fortuitous find, he meets Emma, an adventurous librarian.  The two marry and are soon happily expecting their first child.  Despite a headline-making delivery, the little family seems to be settling in well. Apollo, determined to be the father he always wished for, is over the moon with little infant Brian. However, things may not be as they appear.  Emma seems to change shortly after returning to work. Drawn and haggard she begins acting strangely.  She never seems to call Brian by name, incensing Apollo by referring to baby Brian as “it.” Over the next few months she enlists the help of an online community of “wise ones,” whose advice will dramatically alter their family’s life forever. What follows is an Odyssean journey that spans centuries and oceans without ever leaving New York.  

Jennifer Wilson

The Evening Road by Laird Hunt

The Evening Road is ostensibly about the events surrounding a lynching in the fictional town of Marvel, Indiana, but it is really the story of two very different women, Ottie Lee Henshaw and Calla Destry, who are changed by the events of the day.

Ottie Lee is at her job in an insurance office when her boss tells her to put her things away, they’re going to a “rope party”. Everyone in the office is aflutter with the excitement. Ottie and her boss pick up her husband and begin a very circuitous trip to Marvel on which they see two dogs wearing neckties, get threatened by a Civil War veteran, and meet many other colorful characters. They also learn more about themselves and each other than any of them expected.

Calla comes home from a picnic only to find that her foster parents and many neighbors have left Marvel. She sets off to find them and finds a good amount of trouble along the way. Calla’s story, much like Ottie’s, is both funny and sad, but also carries with it an overarching sense of fear. As a person of color so near to a lynching, Calla is in danger from the minute she walks out the door. While both women’s stories occur at roughly the same time and even overlap in strange ways, their experiences of the day could not be more different.

Hunt does not use the terms “cornsilk” and “cornflower” as racial epithets. While this could have easily been a hokey literary device, it was instead a way to encourage the reader to slow down and think. By removing known words for race from the vocabulary of the characters, Hunt forces the reader to think about what words we ourselves use that so often reduce someone to one aspect of their personhood. Each time a character refers to someone as a cornsilk or cornflower, the reader is confronted with the assumptions that are being made about that person and why.

The Evening Road is inspired by real events that happened in Marion, Indiana in 1930. A photograph of the Marion lynching was the inspiration for the song “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol and made famous by Billie Holiday. 

-Portia Kapraun

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

A stunning debut novel, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman, is a gripping tale of loneliness and betrayal.  The novel opens in 1990, as witnessed from the point of view of 14 year-old Charlotte Freeman.  The Freemans, Charlotte’s father, mother, and nine year-old sister, have been selected to take part in an important research study at the reclusive Toneybee Institute.  The family, specifically Charlotte’s ambitious mother Laurel, are fluent users of sign language, though they are neither deaf, nor mute. In turns crushingly earnest and insouciant, Charlotte is the “experiment’s” first skeptic. The research goals are suspiciously vague, and it soon becomes apparent (if only to the reader) that the study has far more psychological aspects than linguistic ones. The general idea is that the family “adopt” a young chimpanzee named Charlie.  Charlie had been abandoned as an infant by his adolescent, cage-reared mother, and it is the belief of the research team that, if he becomes fully integrated into a family setting, it may lead to ground-breaking data with regards to language acquisition and interspecies communication. The Freemans believe that their unique gift with sign language secured them this prized spot on the Toneybee team, but all is not as it seems. What none of the family can predict, as we learn as Greenidge gives each member their own narrative voice, is the toll the experiment will extract from all concerned.  Startling secrets, both within the family, and the institution itself, will keep you turning pages far past your bedtime!

-Jennifer Wilson

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Coming November 15th 2016!

Spanning over twenty years and two continents, Zadie Smith’s new novel Swing Time is a charming account of one woman’s coming-of-age during those bygone heydays when video was still killing the radio star.  Smith’s unnamed narrator, a mixed-race child of a striving Jamaican mother and a peaceable, hard-working white father, lives in one of London’s many low-end housing units.  She meets Tracey, her first and only best friend, during dance class at their community center.  The two are bonded over the shared experience of being poor and “brown” in a class that is predominantly white, but an increasing gap in talent and two very different home lives begin to draw the girls apart before puberty even finishes its ravages. As the two stumble towards womanhood, the differences become more stark and divisive, and their friendship is ultimately fractured by what the storyteller perceives as Tracey’s final, unforgiveable act. The past and present simultaneously unfold through the narrator’s musings on her childhood, college days, and finally, her career as an assistant to the long-time pop idol Aimee.  Demanding and charismatic, Aimee requires total submission.  The protagonist’s success in this role is telling, and of a piece with her tendency to allow dominant women to manipulate her life: her mother, Tracey, and Aimee.  She seems content in her subservience until she begins to question the true cost of “privilege” during her time overseeing Aimee’s project, a school for girls, in Africa. This book will appeal to lovers of character-driven fiction because, despite the author’s hints at past hurts and scandal (doled out with a sweet slowness), it’s not the suspense that keeps you coming back. Swing Time is much like a favorite friend whose visits you anticipate, not because of their exploits, but because you simply enjoy their company.

-Jennifer Wilson