 Thanks to partners NetGalley and Vintage Anchor Books for the digital ARC of Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky. The book is available now for purchase!
Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky features the elements that I’ve loved in so many of her books: a touch of magic, multiple generations and eras, and different threads that ultimately weave together. The novel begins with a drop of rain and King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, a cruel king whose legacy affects the lives of many, including Arthur, born in a sewer in Victorian England; Narin, a Yazidi girl in Turkey with a disorder causing deafness; and Zaleekah, a hydrologist whose crumbled marriage leads her to take a new life direction. As the narrative shifts between their stories, Shafak explores the impacts of climate change, of poverty and inequity, of ignorance. Her writing is simply gorgeous, both on the sentence level and in the ways it peels back the layers of the characters’ connections. There were moments when the whimsy of the raindrop didn’t work for me, occasions when I felt as if the pace of the narrative could have been a little faster. Ultimately, though, this one ranks in the top half of Shafak’s books for me, driven by her exploration of the cycles that spin through human history.
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 Thanks to partners NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the digital ARC of Emma Lord’s The Break-Up Pact. The book will be published tomorrow.
You can’t go wrong with a book by Emma Lord. Her five YA novels have made her an auto-read author, so when I saw she was expanding into adult romance, I was thrilled! Her new book The Break-Up Pact, which features , friends to lovers, second-chance romance (of a sort), AND fake dating does right by its tropes and confirmed my commitment to reading everything she writes. June and Levi were—along with June’s sister Annie—inseparable as kids and clear through high school. And then, as Levi and Annie, and then June, went to college, they drifted apart. June started dating Griffin, joining him on global adventures—and, by extension, on his quest for fame. She thought they were happy . . . until he returned from a solo trip with someone new, breaking up with June on a reality tv show and making her (the Crying Girl) a viral sensation. Levi has achieved fame of his own, and his fiancee left him for an action movie star, meaning that Levi, too, has become a viral object of pity. Levi returns to town, finding June running Tea Tides, the tea shop that she and Annie had always dreamed of opening. Now, in the wake of Annie’s death, June is struggling on all fronts, failing to make the business a success, losing the love that she thought she had, and finding herself unsure how to deal with the unresolved feelings she still has for Levi. June and Levi wallow in misery for a while, and then June’s best friend Sana has an idea: they can each emerge with a little more dignity, a chance for Tea Tides, and some envy-inspired romance for Levi if they just pretend to revenge date for a while. And so the Break-Up Pact is born. Lord has such a fantastic touch with characters that I fell in love with June and Levi and all of their family and friends right away. The Break-Up Pact is steamier than Lord’s YA books for sure, but it captures the same giddy sense of new relationships and possibilities while balancing the wistful longing for the days when June and Levi were best friends and Annie was still alive. I so appreciate the way the novel peels back the layers of each character’s recovery and of the rebuilding of their multifaceted relationships. It’s a lovely read, a moving portrait of compassion and friendship, grief and love, and it’s about characters figuring out who they are and how being with the right person can help them build stronger individual identities.  Thanks to partners NetGalley, Simon Element, and Marysue Rucci Books for the digital ARC of Helen Phillips’s Hum. The book will be published on August 6!
Helen Phillips’s Hum is one of those books that crawls into the deepest parts of my brain—the niggling thoughts and fears that surface most often in the middle of the night—and just won’t leave. It’s speculative fiction set in the very near future, a novel that unearths the ugly threat of our pathways and habits. The setting is a city devastated by the climate crisis. May and her family—her husband Jem and children Lu and Sy—have struggled to survive on his gig work since May lost her tech job to hums, robots driven by the very AI she’d been training. Out of desperation, May signs up for adversarial tech surgery. These small modifications to her face will prevent her from being recognized by the technology that runs her city. The large payment she gets in exchange is meant to go to practical costs like rent and medical bills, and May does take care of some of those. But in a spontaneous (but not really) move, she also buys nonrefundable tickets for a family weekend at the Botanical Garden, the only place where they can access the type of nature that is now lost, the type of nature that surrounded May while she was growing up. Despite Jem’s misgivings, the family embarks on this trip within the city, with May determined to make the weekend a perfect oasis within the gritty darkness of their lives. This world is one where adults are always on their phones; where children’s lives are tracked and fueled by “bunnies,” wearable wrist technology; and where people spend much of their time within Wooms, immersive isolation pods in which occupants are completely surrounded by screens. But May wants to break these connections, insisting that they leave their phones and bunnies behind. Hum isn’t a comfortable book; there’s too much that’s recognizable, and I often felt deeply seen (and not in a good way), and every page of the book is thought provoking. But. It’s when May’s children go missing in the midst of the Botanical Garden, untrackable (no bunnies!), that the story really ramps up . . . as did my anxiety . . . even (especially!) when a Hum steps into help. Phillips, the author of The Need (another amazing book), is juggling so much here: Hum features deeply drawn characters and an incredibly compulsive plot alongside resonant questions about the path we’re all on and where it may be leading. I couldn’t look away, from the book or from what it reflected back at me. This will be one of my top books of the year.  Thanks to partners NetGalley and Atria Books for the digital ARC of Alli Dyer’s Strange Folk. The book will be published on August 6!
Alli Dyer’s Strange Folk is a story of generations of women in Appalachia and is—in the synopsis—compared to the works of “Alice Hoffman, Deborah Harkness, and Sarah Addison Allen.” Yes, please. The novel centers on Opaline, now called Lee, who left her home and family in Craw Valley for college and never came back. Now, with her marriage disintegrating, Lee and her children have returned to her grandmother Belva’s home to find that not much has changed. Belva is still the community healer, magic worker, and occasional outcast; Lee’s mother Redbud is still an addict; and Lee still yearns to be elsewhere, promising herself that they won’t stay long. Lee has never told her kids, Meredith and Cliff, anything about her home, so she’s surprised to find that they’re enchanted by the natural beauty, Belva’s mysterious knowledge, and a deep history that draws them in. Then the deaths start. There’s suspicion of Belva and a vague sense of threat permeates everything around Lee’s family. Lee is reminded of why she left and what she was running from. She’s drawn into considering just why the deaths have happened just as she’s rediscovering the entirety of who she was and who she wants to be. Strange Folk is such a compelling novel, one both firmly rooted in the realities of its rural community setting and in the magic that’s woven through each page. I appreciated the way Dyer makes apparent both the attraction that Craw Valley holds and the reasons that Lee might have felt the need to experience something different in her youth. The author illuminates the problems epitomized by Lee’s family—addiction and poverty and prejudice—without discounting the very real beauty of a tight-knit community, rich traditions, and natural beauty. Dyer weaves together Lee’s coming home with a suspenseful plot beautifully. |
AuthorI'm Jen Moyers, co-host of the Unabridged Podcast and an English teacher. Archives
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