nonfiction

compelling voice for the youthful narrator, and her portrait of a
bereaved father is equally affecting, though the novel’s claustrophobic
atmosphere will not be to everyone’s taste.
An odd but haunting debut.
HAWKWOOD
McGee, James
Pegasus Crime (416 pp.)
$25.95 | May 15, 2012
978-1-60598-368-4
Even though he’s a Bow Street Runner,
Matthew Hawkwood can get caught
up in international intrigue.
The dashingly mysterious Hawkwood
is entirely suitable as a Regency-era James
Bond. Hawkwood’s reputation for intelligence
and bravery earned him a spot working for the chief magistrate,
James Read, at the Bow Street Public Office. He’s a Runner,
a top-level investigator, tackling the toughest assignments. Even
though Bonaparte is still messing about on the continent, Hawkwood,
a veteran of the famed 95th Rifles in Wellington’s Peninsular
War, needed assignment elsewhere because he killed the son
of an aristocrat in a duel. Now Hawkwood has been assigned to
find the pair of highwaymen who killed a Royal Navy courier outside
of London, but there’s more afoot, and Hawkwood doesn’t
get all the story. McGee (Ratcatcher, 2006, etc.) decorates his
adventure with historical personages and incidents, including
the American Robert Fulton’s attempt to sell the British or the
French, or both, a “submersible” to deliver a “torpedo” capable
of sinking a ship of the line. There are the requisite good guys,
including a patriotic clockmaker; an appropriate number of traitors
among the aristocracy and the admiralty; and a beauty to be
bedded, Catherine de Varesne, a French woman posing as a refugee
royalist while working to further the emperor’s ambitions.
The story is slow to come together, although pleasantly intriguing
in atmosphere, but seemingly lacking one big bad villain for
the reader to want to see drawn and quartered. The derring-do is
close to standard, and McGee’s characterizations are easy to
buy into, especially well-sketched minor players like Nathaniel
Jago, Hawkwood’s sergeant from his days in the 95th, and
Ezra Twigg, Read’s never-to-be-outwitted assistant. The best
of the writing, however, comes through McGee’s capacity for
rendering Regency-era London, from the street corner Godbotherers
to the ubiquitous packs of feral children to the
footpads and ne’er-do-wells lurking in the grimiest corners of
cesspools like St. Giles Rookery.
Acceptable action. Vague villainy. Intriguing milieu.
THE YEAR OF
THE GADFLY
Miller, Jennifer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (384 pp.)
$24.00 | May 8, 2012
978-0-547-54859-3
Journalist Miller (Inheriting the Holy
Land, 2005) makes her fiction debut with
a smoldering mystery set in a New England
prep school.
Iris Dupont’s parents have relocated
to western Massachusetts, ostensibly so she can attend the
prestigious Mariana Academy, but really because they’re worried
about Iris. Her best friend Dalia recently committed suicide,
and Iris has been observed talking to a wall—actually, she
confides, she’s talking to her idol, Edward R. Murrow, and, yes,
she knows he’s dead; but their imaginary conversations help
smart, ambitious Iris sort out her feelings and remain focused
on her goal of becoming a great journalist. She gets plenty to
investigate, beginning with a science book containing a mysterious
inscription that she finds in the bedroom of Lily Morgan,
daughter of Mariana’s former headmaster. The Duponts are
temporarily staying in the absent Morgans’ house, a rare contrived
premise in an otherwise well-plotted tale that mingles
first-person narrations by Iris and biology teacher Jonah Kaplan,
who was once a student at Mariana, with the grim story of Lily’s
ordeal and departure from Mariana in 2000. The novel occasionally
recalls Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), with its
tale of a covert student group (Prisom’s Party in this case) up to
no good, but it’s far less pretentious, and Miller’s portrait of the
way basically decent kids get sucked into destructive behavior
is more credible. Prisom’s Party does engage in some very ugly
antics, however, and as Mariana’s scandal-racked history unfolds
through Iris’ detective work, we see that Jonah was implicated
in past wrongdoing as well. The author skillfully ratchets up the
tension as Iris (and the reader) finds it harder and harder to tell
who the good guys are, particularly after Prisom’s Party sends
an appealing boy to recruit her. It’s scarily possible that she will
come to share Jonah’s guilt and grief, as she is manipulated into
the sort of betrayal that shattered Lily’s life.
A gripping thrill ride that’s also a thoughtful comingof-age
story. (Author tour to Boston, New York and Washington,
D.C. Agent: Mollie Glick)
THE HUNGER ANGEL
Müller, Herta
Translated by Boehm, Philip
Metropolitan/Henry Holt (304 pp.)
$26.00 | Apr. 24, 2012
978-0-8050-9301-8
This novel of the Gulag was first published
in Germany in 2009, the same year
that its German-Romanian author won
the Nobel Prize.
Müller was born in 1953 and raised in a German-speaking
enclave of Romania. In 1945 the Red Army had deported thousands
from these enclaves to forced labor camps on the Russian
steppe. Years later, the recollections of one of the former
deportees inspired her to write this novel. Her narrator, 17-yearold
Leo Auberg, has just started having sex with men in the park,
fearfully, risking jail; when the soldiers come calling, he’s glad
to escape his watchful small town. That gladness disappears on
the cattle cars. Dignity goes too, as the deportees are ordered
off the train to do their business in a snowy field. What follows
are dozens of short sections as Leo riffs on conditions in the
camp. He will do different kinds of work: unloading coal, servicing
the boilers, loading pitch in a trench. That last assignment
is life-threatening, but before he succumbs to a fever Leo
notes that “the air shimmered, like an organza cape made of
glass dust.” The poetic sensibility sets the novel apart. There
is a much-hated adjutant, a German like themselves, but it is
hunger, death’s henchman, that is their greatest adversary. Leo
fights it in practical ways: begging door to door, saving or trading
his bread (echoes of Solzhenitsyn). But he also uses a kind
of reverse psychology when he calls this devil hunger an angel.
The inversion is crucial to Leo’s morale and survival. Keep the
enemy off balance. Flatter him; be gallant. This may sound
whimsical, but there is steel in the writing.
Müller’s work is not without flaws. Leo’s sexual orientation
is not well integrated into the narrative; his post-camp
experiences are too compressed. The novel is still a notable
addition to labor camp literature.
CHILDREN IN
REINDEER WOODS
Ómarsdóttir, Kristín
Translated by Smith, Lytton
Open Letter (198 pp.)
$14.95 paperback | Apr. 17, 2012
978-1-934824-35-1
A literary allegory filled with truths and
absurdities about the human condition.
An unspecified army invades an
unspecified country. Three soldiers arrive
at a farm that is also a “temporary home for children” named
Children in Reindeer Woods. Without apparent motive, they
murder everyone except an 11-year-old girl, Billie. Then the
soldier named Rafael murders his comrades. Now he wants to
stop killing and become a farmer. Billie is oddly unmoved by
the killings and becomes his (platonic) companion as he tries to
remake himself into a peaceful human being. Meanwhile, puppet
masters on another planet pull strings as they try to manipulate
events on Earth. This novel, translated from the Icelandic,
takes getting used to. Many phrases are repeated numerous
times, giving the story a strange cadence not often seen in Western
literature. The characters are not from a particular country
or a particular culture; they are from everywhere or anywhere
or nowhere. Rafael wants to transform himself from every-soldier
to everyman. Can he go from blowing up bombs to helping
Billie play with her Barbies Others pass through Reindeer
Woods, such as the wandering nun who stays overnight and
either sleeps with Rafael or doesn’t. Rafael shoots off one of his
toes every time he fails to live up to his own standards, but pain,
bleeding and infection seem not to hobble him as he tends his
cows and sheep. Despite all the bodies Rafael buries, there is
also humor buried in the tale—not hilarity, but perhaps a few
wry smiles at mankind’s foibles.
This is the first of Icelandic author Ómarsdóttir’s novels
to appear in English, and it shouldn’t be the last. Somewhere
in the reader’s mind, Catch-22 echoes faintly.
MORE LIKE HER
Palmer, Liza
Morrow/HarperCollins (336 pp.)
$14.99 paperback | Apr. 17, 2012
978-0-06-200746-9
After escaping death in a school shooting,
a mild-mannered woman begins to
demand a little respect.
New headmistress in the Markham
School Emma Dunham is beautiful and
accomplished—a kind of Grace Kelly
figure in the stuffy staff lounge. She is just the kind of woman
speech therapist Frannie Reid would like to be, but that would
require a kind of easy confidence she can’t imagine. Frannie does
have a cheering team—Jill, a fellow therapist at Markham, and
Lisa, a new science teacher. Their relationship is palpable—they
swear and joke and snipe like real friends—and the two encourage
Frannie to date since pompous Ryan, head of the history
department, dumped her. On a rare faculty night out, she meets
Sam. An architect working on an expansion to the school, he is
handsome, has a lovely Southern drawl and really gets Frannie.
It feels like kismet until the night of Emma Dunham’s birthday
party at the school. Emma’s creepy husband Jamie walks in and
shoots Emma in the head. He spins around and begins aiming
at anyone close enough, and then Sam gets hold of the gun and
shoots. Afterward Sam goes home with Frannie to change out
of their bloody clothes, and they have desperate, frightened,
bone-shattering, love-inducing sex. And then, they don’t see
each other for a very long time. Sam is coming to terms with
having killed a man (while being praised as a hero) and Frannie
is wondering why the woman she wanted to emulate turned out
to be an abused wife. Although the romance between Sam and
Frannie has pull, Palmer spins a few enticing subplots: Frannie
adopts Emma’s beautiful dog, Lisa and fellow architect Grady
decide to marry after the shock of the shooting, Frannie contacts
Emma’s estranged sister and finds that their childhood
primed Emma for a life of abuse. All this has to happen before
Frannie and Sam can decide whether their relationship can survive
the shooting.
Palmer brings wit and wisdom to her tale of love, damage
and self-acceptance. (California regional author appearances)
792 | 15 april 2012 | fiction | kirkusreviews.com |
| kirkusreviews.com | fiction | 15 april 2012 | 793