(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Contemporary Fiction Views: A restorative story after what is dear is lost [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-07-02 People in Leif Engler's new novel who are not in subservient labor to the astronauts (think of the type of billionaire that builds his own space ships) live in desiccated towns. They garden, barter and pick through junk to repair machines and new ways to live by reviving old ways. Reading is nearly a forgotten art, since the former head honcho couldn't and was against it. Rainy, a bear of a man, keeps things from falling down in his three-story ramshackle home, and plays bass on the weekends in a bar band. His wife, Lark, is not only the love of his life. She is the light of their town. She rescues books and has a second-hand bookstore in the local bakery. She is one of those people who make life better by existing. He first fell in love with her voice and knowledge of books when she was a librarian. When such things existed. She knew he became a reader to find things to ask her about. It's a sweet love story of how two people can reflect and support the best in each other. Earlier in their married life, they sailed from their small town on Lake Superior to the Slates, a beautiful, calm cove in the middle of an inland sea with a mind of its own. An older woman anchored nearby may or may not have been Molly Thorn. Her book, I Cheerfully Refuse, is among the most difficult to find. This also is the title of this novel, but this is not Molly Thorn's novel. Lark now has an old advance copy. It was bartered by a young man who came to the store seeking a place to stay. Lark brings him home to sleep in the spare room upstairs. She probably would have given Kellan a place to sleep regardless. But the young man, who is obviously on the run, has touched her generous heart. He helps her at the store, he goes with her to collect books for the store. Rainy hopes for the best, because he trusts Lark. Meanwhile, Rainy preps a birthday party for Lark at their home. The food, the music, the friends and neighbors, are all portrayed in a pastoral of good will and comradery. The party itself is a success, with people eating, dancing and enjoying being together. Another new arrival in town, who appears to be a genteel professor, has been at the bookstore and is enthralled by the Molly Thorn book. He toasts Lark at her party. He ended with a quote from Molly Thorn about the soul that knows itself "and knowing, spends it freely." Then he raised his communion cup, we all of us drank, and it was a moment of love. It is Lark's last night. Rainy is forced to flee, and his journey across Superior and along its coastline is the journey through his world and this novel. This bear of a man's world has crumbled. But when he is forced back to life, to flee for his life, the novel becomes the journey it was destined to be. The people he meets along the way are sometimes good-hearted, sometimes venal, and mostly broken. The endurance that Rainy shows in keep his small boat afloat is emblematic of the way Rainy lives. He notices, he tries, he endures. His actual name is Rainier, after the mountain that means so much to us Washingtonians, and is a clue to his character. When it comes to his way of not giving up, Lark tells him that he is Quixote himself. Rainy's odyssey is a travelogue of how people may react to a collapsed civilization. The what of how they live now, rather than the why of how they got there, is the focus of the story. Even when the reader learns about a much-valued drug that brings a peaceful death, and the medical ships on which those paid by the astronauts conduct experiments, the focus is on the human character. The focus is rendered beautifully and with a philosophical bent. Lake Superior is a major character in the story. At a turning point in the narrative, Rainy reflects on how she has treated him. Again and again I'd fled to the lake for refuge, and the lake had not refused me. I'd given myself to storms, and it had kept me safe. I felt, in fact, set up. The damn lake had carried me all this way only to turn on me now -- sleep starved and responsible for two lives not my own -- and deliver me so precisely to my enemies they barely had to move. As Rainy watches and takes part in what happens, there is both the overarching story of how people come back from devastation, and the immediate story of how Rainy comes back from his life being ripped apart. Along the journey, there is peace, there is perhaps a small measure of justice, and there is the sense that somehow, people will make themselves more whole. ------------------------------------- New books this week include several translated works from around the world, and one of the summer's biggest thrillers. Blurbs are from the publishers, and links are to The Literate Lizard, the online bookstore of our Readers and Book Lovers colleague DebtorsPrison. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother. Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation. Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.” Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind. The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel A beguiling debut novel about friendship and failure Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman – a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession. Mysterious Setting by Kazushige Abe A madcap, darkly comic novel about the strange fate of a tone-deaf girl who just wants to sing. Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih A group of friends journey to a remote part of West Khasi Hills, in northeast India, to witness the performance of an ancient Lyngngam funeral ceremony that lasts six days. Concluding with the cremation of a beloved elder, a woman whose body has been preserved in a tree house for nine whole months, this may well be the last time Ka Phor Sorat, the feast of the dead, is performed. The Road to the Salt Sea by Samuel Kolawole Able God works for low pay at a four-star hotel where he must flash his “toothpaste-white smile” for wealthy guests. When not tending to the hotel’s overprivileged clientele, he muses over self-help books and draws life lessons from the game of chess. But Able’s ordinary life is upended when an early morning room service order leads him to interfere with Akudo, a sex worker involved with a powerful but dangerous hotel guest. Suddenly caught in a web of violence, guilt, and fear, Able must run to save himself—a journey that leads him into the desert with a group of drug-addled migrants, headed by a charismatic religious leader calling himself Ben Ten. Teddy by Emily Dunlay Lessons in Chemistry meets Mad Men in this wildly entertaining debut novel, set in glamorous Rome in the late 1960s, which follows the free-spirited wife of an American diplomat as she desperately tries to contain a scandal of her own making. Misrecognition by Madison Newbound For fans of Rachel Cusk and Patricia Lockwood, an unflinchingly sharp and funny debut novel about the internet, post-postmodern adulthood, and queer identity. Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal Passionate about conservation and fleeing an argument with her mother, newly qualified London vet Charlotte Walker has taken up a fellowship on the tiny South Atlantic island of Tuga de Oro to study the endangered gold coin tortoises in the jungle interior. She can claim the best of reasons for this year in paradise—What better motivation than to save a species?—but the reality is more complex. For Charlotte has secretly come to believe that she has her own connection to this remote and eccentric community, and she is finally determined to solve the mystery that has dominated her life. Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a stunning debut that follows a vibrant multi-generational cast of characters through a London heatwave as their simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over a feverish, life-changing weekend. 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