NCBR review of The Good Song by Alexandria Giardino, illustrated by Penelope Dullaghan

Cameron Kids

Set in Hawaii and inspired by Hawaiian musician Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole's medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World," The Good Song is the story of a little boy whose grandfather holds him on the day he is born and tells him that the world is singing him a "a good song" in the drumbeats of the waves, the chants of the wind, and the sound of the rain, which is plunking down like ukulele notes. As the boy grows, his grandfather continues to urge him to continue to listen for "a good song," that goes from "heart to heart." The boy listens, but all he can hear is the growling of his stomach and the beeping, honking, and roaring of a Hawaii undergoing change. When his grandfathers "great heart breaks" at last, the boy can hear only silence, but then he falls asleep and dreams and his grandfather speaks to him in the whispers of the wind and rain and waves. At that moment, the boy finally discovers the "good song" whose words—no matter where the come from or what they are or how they sound—always say "I love you" —a song that is the song of the world that "rises up over the rainbow" and fills the entire world.

In this beautifully illustrated, joyful, touching story, young children will find not only reassurance and a sense of security but an understanding of the gentle healing powers of nature.

NCBR review of You Matter by Christian Robinson

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

How big or little do you have to be to matter? The answer, Christian Robinson tells children in You Matter, is that you don't have to be as big as the earth or as small as an ant. Just by existing, you matter. The tiny things you see under a microscope matter. Little fish that swim in great oceans matter. Those who go first, and those who go last matter. Even if you're lost, or people think you are being a pest, or no one has time to pay attention to you, or you fall down and skin you knee, you still matter. You can be sad or lost; old or young; you can be any race or any gender, and you still matter.

Robinson, who has worked for Sesame Street and Pixar Animation Studios, both wrote and illustrated this book for younger readers. The result is a nearly perfect match between words and images that combined create a deeply reassuring message for children and adults alike.

NCBR review of A Book for Escargot by Dashka Slater, illustrated by Sydney Hanson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers

Going to the library is quite the adventure when traveling with our narrator—and self-declared daring snail hero—Escargot in A Book for Escargot. Escargot is the story of a French snail who is bored of eating salad and is on a quest to try new French recipes from a French cookbook from the library. The book begins with Escargot asking the reader directly about favorite books and replacing snail characters in beloved children's book titles including Goodnight Snail and Where the Snails Are. Escargot is jealous of animals that get interesting roles in books like "guinea-pig detectives" and "flamingo astronauts' whereas snails are always "slow" or "shy." This envy drives the book's storyline as we accompany Escargot on his mission to rewrite children's literature's portrayal of snails with a story of his own. Not only must the daring snail hero Escargot navigate the library at a snail's pace and scale to borrow the French cookbook, but must also figure out what to do when he finds a recipe for himself in the cookbook. Sacré bleu!

The author instantly draws the reader into the book with direct questions and meta-level storytelling. The child becomes part of the narrative and in the process learns to dream big, embrace adventure, and creatively solve problems when you find yourself on the menu for dinner.

NCBR review of Orphan Eleven by Gennifer Choldenko

Wendy Lamb Books

When eleven-year-old Lucy can no longer tolerate abuse at the Home for Friendless Children, she escapes with three other orphans. Their lucky encounters along the road result in potential apprenticeships with Saachi's Circus Spectacular, where they begin to create an alternative family. Lucy excels in caring for the performing elephants but she is selectively mute due to past mistreatment—and without her voice she presents a problem to both animals and performers. Moreover, the traveling circus is unwilling to take her on permanently unless she can conquer her fear of speaking, and staying with them is the only way Lucy can get to Chicago where she hopes to find Dilly, her long-lost older sister. Meanwhile, a despicable headmistress from the orphanage has enlisted the authorities to help return Lucy and is about to catch up with her.

Set in the realistically rendered year of 1939, this narrative relates the adventures of destitute children whose freedom from tyrannical matrons and unethical human experimentation takes precedence over guaranteed meals and a roof over their heads. Letters from Lucy's sister are embroidered into the main plot, enhancing both pacing and tension while revealing sinister attempts to keep the siblings apart. A glossary of circus terms is provided at the end along with an author's note explaining how she based her ideas on actual facts culled from the time period. This meticulously researched story is homage to hope, survival, and the true meaning of friendship.

NCBR review of The Lonely Heart of Maybelle Lane by Kate O'Shaughnessy

Knopf Books for Young Readers

The Lonely Heart of Maybelle Lane is an achingly beautiful coming of age novel that explores the notion of friendship, family, and asks what does it really mean to belong? Maybelle is an eleven year-old girl with a stunning singing voice whose lack of self-confidence and panic attacks make it impossible for her to sing on a stage. But when she finds out that the father she's never known is judging a singing contest, Maybelle sets in motion a daring plan to enter the contest; and win it.

Accompanied by a misunderstood boy who has a lot on his plate, a teacher trying to overcome her own sense of loss and grief, and a dog who badly needed a second chance, this unlikely band of heroes is set to drive from Louisiana to Nashville and get Maybelle on that stage. Along the way Maybelle discovers what courage, friendship, and love truly are. As well as learning that there is a whole lot more to everyone you meet, including herself.

O'Shaughnessy deftly tackles a range of subjects from abuse to mental health, from grief to estranged families, and even class structure. With so many subjects at hand it would be easy for a book to get bogged down in all the points it's trying to make. But O'Shaughnessy tackles each subject with warmth, honesty, and depth. Readers will make an instant connection with Maybelle and her ragtag group of friends and cheer her .

NCBR review of Land of the Cranes by Aida Salazar

Scholastic Press

Papi tells Betita that "long ago, our people came from a place / called Aztlán, the land of the cranes / which is now known as the Southwestern US." It is prophesied that those cranes "one day will fly back home." Betita loves her cozy casita in East LA where she lives with Mami and Papi, down the street from Tío Juan, Tía Raquel, and Tina with the bouncy golden-yellow satin quince dress. One morning over huevitos and café, Mami mentions something called a sanctuary state, a "place where cranes can't get caught." Betita quickly learns other words: cartel, petition, ICE, undocumented. And then one day Papi does not pick her up from after care. They learn he has been deported and make a plan to see each other at the border. But one wrong turn with the wrong papers lands Betita, Mami, and Tía Raquel in a "detention facility, / not cranes, [now] criminals." For months they suffer through heat, cold, dirt, hunger, sickness, abuse, and separation, with only glimmers of a hopeful future.

Aida Salazar's sophomore effort asks readers to bear witness to Betita's difficult story, one shared by countless migrant children and their families. The author's accomplished verses combine with evocative line art to tell a sadly realistic tale with respect, beauty, even humor, and above all, love. Salazar uses a young person's lens to carefully craft her characters, voice, and plot. The result is a compelling, empathic, verse novel that ends with one hopeful young girl's dream of flying with her flock.

NCBR review of We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

HMH Books for Young Readers

This historical YA novel takes fourteen characters, all Nisei teenagers from San Francisco's Japantown coming of age during WWII, and weaves them into a narrative tapestry by rotating from one POV to the next as the characters become both united and divided by their experiences in internment camps. By turns sassy, gut-wrenching, and surprisingly funny, this novel deftly stays true to its historical context; the language manages to sound subtly "period" without blunt over-use of 1940s teen vernacular. As the narrative rolls from one character to the next, we see how each individual reacts to the horrors of their situation and how those reactions strengthen or weaken their connections. Chee doesn't pull punches about the squalor, violence and rank injustice of the camps, or about the betrayal of Japanese-descended Americans during the war…but she also renders each of her subjects in such 3D that we are continually reminded that teenagers are still teenagers even in that kind of adversity, and that squalor, violence and injustice don't put a stop to dreams and ambitions, budding love, sibling rivalry, and the hero's quest that is figuring out who you are in the world. Considering that she gives roughly equal time and space to so many characters, their distinctness and psychological complexity are all the more striking. Chee's prose is crisp, her vision broad and deep, and her characters vividly rendered, with a sort of authorial impartiality that a single-narrator POV would make impossible. This is a beautiful, provocative, unflinching historical fiction.

NCBR review of Dark and Deepest Red by Anna-Marie McLemore

Feiwel & Friends

Young Lavinia lives in medieval Strasbourg and is romantically involved with Alifair, a trans boy her aunt has taken in. Being secretly Romani, however, they fear becoming a magnet for suspicion as a mysterious dancing plague spreads throughout the city and witchcraft is blamed. Lavinia finds she may need to make the ultimate sacrifice to save everyone she loves.

Fast-forward five centuries where Rosella Oliva dances uncontrollably due to a pair of enchanted shoes that have fastened themselves to her feet. The shoes magically draw her to Emil, the son of two history professors whose Romani ancestors were accused of the dancing fever back in 1518. To help Rosella survive, Emil will need to acknowledge his Romani heritage and give in to his visions of the past in order to discover the truth of what transpired 500 years ago—but there's more to the story than he suspects.

This uniquely re-imagined version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes ingeniously blends the fairy tale with an actual historical event and connects them by using alternating viewpoint characters who live parallel lives in different eras. The dance obsession they experience evolves into a conceit for why we must acknowledge history or be condemned to repeat it. Themes such as diversity, prejudice and marginalization are examined through elegant prose that also conveys how an act of defiance can transcend time and have unforeseen consequences. Ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity do indeed play an important role in how we define ourselves.

NCBR review of The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Candlewick

Maggie Tokuda-Hall's fantasy debut is a love story, a fantasy adventure, a semi-mystical swashbuckler, and perhaps above all, a dissertation on fluidity. Identities are watery and shifting; power dynamics build upon and undermine one another like waves. Florian, born Flora, sails on the pirate ship that's taking Lady Evelyn Nasegawa to her arranged marriage in the Floating Islands. Amid an ocean of concealments and betrayals, mermaid trafficking and human enslavement, they fall in love, are separated by circumstances, and find their way back to one another. Tokuda-Hall is surefooted and adroit in all of this shapeshifting, seamless in her POV shifts and even inhabiting the mind of the sea itself. This is a rich, clever story about how our identities are forged by the clashing of internal impulse and external force, rendered in poised, elegant prose by a writer with a poet's eye for metaphor.

NCBR review of Plagios / Plagiarisms, Volume One by Ulalume González de León, translated by Terry Ehret, John Johnson, and Nancy J. Morales, from the Spanish

Sixteen Rivers Press

The poetry of Ulalume González de León, who was born in Uruguay, the daughter of two poets, is immediately and uniquely engaging. She believes that everything has already been said, so therefore everything is plagiarism. But of course everything is also creation, because it has been transformed. The poetry in this bilingual volume, written between 1968-1971, is divided into three sections (Games, Comments, and Descriptions), each preceded by a perfect, relevant quote. Even the titles of the poems take the reader on an enticing journey, for example: "Inventing that I Live," "Words Take a Break from Their Meanings," "Songs Almost Without Words," "Parenthetical Homage to Shakespeare," "Dot Over the I," "Tired of All Metaphysics." The mesmerizing poems range in length from two short lines to two dense pages. The translators have not only done a wonderful job of recreating the twists and turns of the poetic language, resulting in exceptional smoothly flowing verse, but they also did a superlative job of recreating the visual look of the poetry, adding to the melody and artistry of the work. The introduction, written by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, with whom she worked as editor of two literary journals, calls her the "best Mexicana poet since Sor Juana de la Cruz." Surprisingly, very little of her work has been translated into English, but one can hope to see Volume Two in the near future, to continue this marvelous journey.

NCBR review of Etudes: A Rilke Recital by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Art Beck, from the German

Shanti Arts Publishing

Etudes, A Rilke Recital, is the perfect title for Art Beck's rich new collection of Rilke translations since it comes out of his decades long engagement with understanding Rilke from the inside out, beginning in the late 1970s when he first began to explore, scrutinize and translate (as he says in his introduction), to "internalize the poems, the way a pianist's fingers, say, absorb the spontaneity of the score through long repetitive practice."

Etudes, recitals—Beck's translations capture and bring to life a Rilke aflame with spiritual passion and an emotional urgency that incorporates what seems like the past, present and future existing now for us all in an invisible plane—a Rilke alive for us in the twenty-first century. "Music, after all, can be, and is performed, transposed, adapted and sung in ways the composer never anticipated…but the overriding criterion of judgment (at least in our informal age) is how they work on their own stage, rather than how they work vis-a-vis the composer's score."

In addition to the poems themselves, Beck has also included an insightful ending commentary that illuminates both his own journey and that of Rilkean translation in general. When, in the famous last line of "Archaic Torso of Apollo"—which is most often translated as "You must change your life"—Beck offers us "You must live another life" instead, we feel that Beck himself must have obeyed that command, and the new life he lived is Rilke's.

NCBR review of My Village: Selected Poems, 1972–2014 by Wu Sheng, translated by John Balcom, from the Chinese

Zephyr Press

This comprehensive bilingual anthology of Wu Sheng's work introduces a celebrated and popular Taiwanese poet and environmental activist who documents the transformation of his rural community and traditions in the face of the encroaching industrial economy and values. After taking a university degree, Wu Sheng returned to his family farm to teach, cultivate the land, and write in the "native soil" tradition of the 1920s and 30s, an anti-colonial movement that embraced the Taiwanese vernacular and daily life in a down-to-earth, accessible style. Eschewing any romantic aura and keeping nostalgia sweaty and dusty and labor-intensive, Sheng depicts his mother's daily toil in the fields, the constant worry about weather, a village of old folks and children, family members who write from abroad asking for money, fields sold, factories built. And yellow fields of rapeseed flowers. He writes with the stark honesty that poetry can do nothing against this loss of traditional Taiwanese culture, the land and the fauna. In 2010 he bolstered a movement that stopped the construction of a petrochemical plant—blending his poetry and activism in his poem "Poetry is All I Can Do For You": "It looks like out water resources will be diverted / With drought as a result for us / It looks like you, the silent masses, will soon vanish / Not to mention the New Guinea mudskipper, fiddler crabs, and corn crakes / Not to mention the egret and white dolphins / And the farmers and fishermen. All for the slogan of prosperity." John Balcom has translated these poems with such care and accuracy, capturing tones and expression whole-heartedly.

NCBR review of Heaven and Earth by Paolo Giordano, translated by Anne Milano Appel, from the Italian

Pamela Dorman Books/Viking

Paolo Giordano is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, including How Contagion Works, about the COVID pandemic. His latest novel, Heaven and Earth, begins in the 1990s as fourteen-year-old Teresa is on her yearly summer visit from her home in Turin in the north of Italy to her grandmother's house in Speziale, a small town in Puglia. One night she sees three young boys sneak in from the next-door farmhouse to swim in the pool. She begins to get to know Nicola, Tommaso, and Bern, to whom she is immediately attracted. The bond grows stronger over the ensuing summers, and the four develop a complex and powerful relationship. When Teresa is seventeen, she and Bern fall in love and consummate their relationship. However, this is only the beginning of an epic journey, which will link them forever, in both joy and tragedy. The story then jumps forward to 2012, when Teresa returns to Speziale with her parents for her grandmother's funeral. She sees Bern, visits the farmhouse, and her life changes abruptly, as she chooses to stay. New characters are in the group, secrets are uncovered, details of the past are revealed. Every page turn is a potential surprise. Anne Milano Appel's translation, in all its 400 pages and multiple characters, never misses a beat and keeps the reader fully engrossed. All in all, the novel is a captivating, engaging, and emotional read.

NCBR review of Surrender: A Novel by Ray Loriga, translated by Carolina de Robertis, from the Spanish

Mariner Books

Part allegory, part dystopian nightmare, Ray Loriga's Surrender narrates one man's futile search for a separate peace under a totalitarian regime. A war is on, a seemingly endless war, in which the nameless narrator's son has died. A refugee, a speechless boy, wanders onto the farm and is given food and shelter by the narrator and his wife. Soon, however, they are removed from the farm, and sent to a "safe" location, a totally transparent city where everything—buildings, vehicles, streets—is made of glass. A descendant of Orwell's Winston Smith and Kafka's nameless protagonists, he endures his country's authoritarian whimsies with stoicism and surface submission. His voice is deadpan, non-confrontational, yet every so often he sneaks in a telling comment, slyly critical of the authorities. The challenge for the translator, Carolina de Robertis, which she handles with terrific aplomb, is to capture the subtle shifts in tone that signal his inner rebellion. Finally, fed up with life in the glass city, he walks away, returning to the abandoned fields where he began, only to be hunted down and executed by the orphan whom he had earlier saved. Oddly, he doesn't complain, even as he contemplates a future where people like him do not exist. "People like me," he tells us, "with no faith in the future, were always the enemy," adding ruefully but clearsightedly, "You have to know when your time has passed.…And learn to admire other victories."

NCBR review of Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, from the Spanish

Seven Stories Press

Odd and mysterious, even to themselves, the characters in Guadalupe Nettel's Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories struggle with their eccentricities and compulsions. In "Bonsai" a Japanese salaryman develops an inexplicable affinity for the cacti in a nearby botanical garden. Eventually he realizes that he himself is a cactus and his wife an unhappy vine clinging to him. When he rejects her sexual advances ("her libido became very persistent," he tells us), she leaves. Equally strange is the protagonist of the title story, who can't stop pulling out her hair and eating it. Luckily, unluckily she finds a lover with a similar compulsion—he can't stop cracking his knuckles. At first she's relieved to have someone with whom she can share her secret, but eventually she too flees: "Seeing our own defects in the person we share a life with is intolerable," she tells us. Nettel's characters look and act "normal" most of the time, but what counts as "normal" —jobs, family life, children—is pure torment for them. One feels the ghosts of Poe and Kafka lurking in the background, but also the shade of Dr. Freud. Finally, the girl in the title story checks into a seaside psychiatric clinic, her only hope to throw herself off the promontory into the ocean below. What is Nettel telling us? Perhaps, that some depths are too deep for even depth psychology. Skillfully translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, the unsavory, obsessive inner lives of the characters is subtly communicated in language that always seems appropriate to their surface calm and inner torment.

NCBR review of Savage Kiss by Roberto Saviano, translated by Antony Shugaar, from the Italian

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Following on his previous novels Gomorrah and The Piranhas, Savage Kiss by Roberto Saviano details the decline and fall of Naples' young gangsters. Having driven the older mob into the shadows, the new kids on the block take to the violence of their chosen life, a life of cunning and endless suspicion, with ferocious enthusiasm. Betrayal and early death are constants. We've seen such mayhem before, in The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface, but never with protagonists this young. Saviano's gangsters are not one-dimensional killing machines; they're children, often confused and frightened. Nicolas, the leader, embarks on a mission to kill a rival's infant son, only to leave the nursery without pulling the trigger. Creativity, humor even, also comes into play, as when the gang releases an aging capo's pet lion onto the streets of Naples. It's easy to get drawn into the story; the short, cinematic chapters are packed with action, yet Saviano makes his reader aware of the larger social forces which shape these grim lives. As he tells us in one of the several interludes: "You who have educated your children to be respectful and obedient…you've gotten it all wrong. You've given your children the promise of a just world they will never see." The translation, by Antony Shugaar, skillfully navigates the abrupt changes in pace and tone at the heart of this novel.

NCBR review of Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Jessica Powell, from the Spanish

Restless Books

Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener is a latter-day practitioner of "the new journalism." In Sexographies, an earlier book about sex and the city (of Barcelona), she channels her inner Gay Talese. In this new book she might be a Spanish-language Hunter S. Thompson, if Thompson were pregnant and had sworn off drugs (most of them anyway). We get the same irreverence toward received pieties, the same deconstruction of law and order (as embodied in sex roles and family structure). Begin-ning with everything you didn't want to know about getting pregnant, she then delights the reader with a month-by-month account of the indigni-ties of "the delicate condition," those imposed by the body but also those encoded in medical protocols and the culture of her adopted Spain. This is a very funny book, from the unexpected conception ("'I promise not to come inside you.' It's the first promise that gets broken") to the Key-stone Kops comedy of her arrival at Barcelona Maternity. As she tells us, "Barcelona seemed like a good place for two naive journalists with literary aspirations who believed in the possibilities of their résumés, but not for two aspiring journalists with a child." Or as she imagines telling her un-born child: "Europe is the best place for a Latin American to starve to death. And drink good wine." Artfully translated by Jessica Powell, we hear the narrator's irrepressible egoism, her wry optimism as she navigates one of life's most challenging passages.

NCBR review of Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase

Chronicle Books

If Ruth Asawa were to hold this book of her life in her hands, she would no doubt be pleased beyond her natural inclination of quiet acceptance. It is a compelling story filled with the words of Asawa from letters and journal entries that allow us, as readers, to become immersed in her life, her art, her family.

Many of us who grew up during the Second World War were ignorant of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans; in this book, we see an intimate picture of what it was like for thousands of citizens to be forced into squalid, cold converted buildings for the years of the war. We see Ruth and her family as they survive, separated from Ruth's father, an added burden. Ruth does have teachers, however, who recognize her talent and help guide her when she graduates from high school.

The section on Black Mountain College is especially vivid and instructive. Here she not only knows and studies with major art figures, including Buckminster Fuller; this is where she meets the man who will become her husband, the architect Albert Lanier. They faced difficulties in contemplating their mixed race marriage. They also had to resolve the question of whether they could be true to their work and have the family that Ruth had always envisioned—six children.

Ruth always managed to find solutions; in the 1990s, she (dubbed the Woman Warrior) managed to get approval to open her dream since Black Mountain, her San Francisco School of the Arts.

There were many honorary events in her later life, complicated by a protracted illness; but she continued, even when she was extremely frail, to persevere, sustained by her art and family. Her wire sculptures have become iconic and continue to intrigue not only San Franciscans, but also the major museums of the country.

NCBR review of Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano

W.W. Norton

On Wednesday evening, November 7, 2018, fire, whipped by seventy mph winds, and fueled by five years of little precipitation, raged up Butte Canyon along the North Fork of the Feather River toward Paradise California, population 27,000, eventually incinerating most of the town so fast that few had time to fight back. Eighty-five people died, and thousands of homes were destroyed. More than twenty thousand people were rendered homeless.

In comparison, Paradise had been larger than Albany, California, or many of the famous Silicon Valley cities along the San Francisco peninsula. Cities don't burn, not the whole city, especially cities that had taken steps against fire. Paradise had its experienced resident firefighters, had cleared land, had expected fire. They had an emergency contact system. Paradise was ready enough, if vulnerable.

But cities and towns do burn—areas of Oakland repeatedly, Malibu Canyon, dozens of smaller towns in Oregon and Washington, danger looming anywhere humans live among forests and brushlands. Global Warming had brought years of drought and the Sierras were covered with dry brush and dying trees. By the morning of November 8, it was clear that the hard work Paradise residents had done to protect themselves was being overwhelmed. All their emergency systems were too flimsy, too disorganized. It was each person for him or herself.

Just north of town, John Sedwick, a volunteer firefighter, and his daughter Skye saw the jam-up on the highway of cars with panicked people. John said, "People are crazy down there. Go through the woods." He meant run. He would stay to try and save their home. Though her hair caught fire, she survived. He didn't.

This is an exciting work of intensively researched, well written journalism, a warning that few may take. "Riveting," says Michael Kodas, author of Megafire. "A landmark moment," says Bill McKibben, author of Falter and perhaps the most famous environmentalist of our era. "So…evocative you can almost smell the smoke," says Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.

NCBR review of The Forests of California: A California Field Atlas by Obi Kaufmann

Heyday

The purpose of this handsome guide to California's forests, author Obi Kafumann tells us, is to teach us that "the intrinsic value of biodiversity outweighs the capital value of its dismantlement." He warns that we are squandering the precious capital of our vast and unique woodlands. Accompanied by his beautiful watercolors, graphs, and charts, Kaufmann leads us to a deep appreciation of our sylvan surroundings. At a hefty 600-plus pages, the book provides an exhaustively mapped encyclopedia of trees, plants, animals, birds, fish, butterflies, insects—everything that exists within these treasured spaces.

We learn such things as the residency status of forest species, endemic to cryptogenic. For example, Kaufmann estimates that there are over 100 cryptogenic (of unknown origin) species in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. He provides useful maps of California's myriad wilderness areas, pointing out that in these wildernesses we find "the seed of connectivity and the heart of the forest." We see the western barn owl, the Pacific wren, the Sierra night lizard. Next to his painting of the threatened Northern Tidewater Goby, he chides, "its presence or absence is an indication of the stewardship or lack thereof of the human community.…"

The book also features his poems and journal notes, set in handwritten text on the page. On the Shasta River he finds "a warm and romantic smell, full of wildflowers and ginger swept down from those funneling valleys, running into the weird table land at my back."

NCBR review of American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Graywolf Press

Some readers might approach Mockett's American Harvest with trepidation, not sure that they want to read about religion in our heartland. But while Mockett considers this topic carefully, that is not what her book is about: it is about healing the wounds that divide our rural areas from our coastal cities, about helping us understand lives and beliefs differing markedly from our own.

A San Francisco resident, Mockett is also an owner of a family farm near Kimball, Nebraska. Several years ago she decided to follow a five-month wheat harvest from Texas to the Snake River plain in Idaho, accompanying the harvest crew led by her acquaintance Eric Wolgemuth, an Anabaptist who wants to share his America with her. This summer odyssey alters her views of those who live on the land: committed Republicans, closeted Democrats, lots of Christians. She also learns to value the beautiful landscapes of these "flyover states."

In elegant, measured prose Mockett shares her journey. She adapts to Eric's crew, aided by his college-age son Juston. She visits evangelical churches, small town museums, a Sun Dance festival (which reminds her of her mother's Japanese matsuris), always carefully weighing what she learns against her own preconceptions. She finds that questions of GMO and organic food are complicated, and that some deeply religious individuals believe in science.

Her poetic descriptions of the natural world alone make the book worth reading. Of a dawn she writes, "A blotch of plum stains the blackness, cracking open the night for the sunlight to begin to seep through."

NCBR review of Empire of Resentment: Populism's Toxic Embrace of Nationalism by Lawrence Rosenthal

The New Press

For those amazed or horrified by the rise of billionaire Donald Trump, Lawrence Rosenthal, founder of UC Berkeley's Center for Right Wing Studies, presents a vivid picture of the marriage of populism with white nationalism, two hells merging into a near Fascist groundswell, as embodied by leaders like Italy's Berlusconi, Brazil's Bolsonaro, and Trump. These are not true leaders, but sociopathic power seekers, con artists who skillfully use the code words of resentful conservatives. Trump steeped himself in right-wing media talk. His political slogan, Make America Great Again, obviously meant make America white. The Republican Party got on board, cleverly merging issues like immigration, nationalism, globalism, job loss, taxes, Tea Party constitutionalism, evangelical outrage over abortion, the rich v. poor divide, urban v. rural, uneducated v. educated, into a powerful racist voice of resentment against a shadowy government defined by FOX shock jocks as a condescending, bleeding heart, lying, overeducated, privileged liberal ruling class. Over and over FOX and others have told us that global warming and science are liberal lies, that Blacks and Latinos and "illegals" have gained unwarranted privileges. Conservative Republicans have convinced their mostly white male followers that these gains are a zero-sum loss for whites, the "True" Americans. Former President Reagan and subsequent reactionaries helped turn the slogans and civil rights advances of the sixties and seventies on their heads.

Rosenthal analyzes groups such as the Alt-Lite, embittered cyberpunk nerds who sit at home playing massive multiplayer online games. He covers the rise of modern conservatism, the web sites, the networks. Though progressives and conservatives have important common interests—in a living wage, better distribution of wealth and power—both sides have been tricked into playing a vicious game where the ultra rich and powerful egg on hostilities while raking in fortunes through unfettered business practices and lower taxes.

NCBR review of Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place by Joan Frank

University of New Mexico Press

This is at once a collection of essays and a study in essays. Disparate as they are in length and subject, the pieces construct an ongoing conversation about time and place: our eagerness (and resistance) to travel and the discoveries that come from that devotion and struggle. Frank begins by positing the notion that place, more than any other element, "saturates the stories we tell" about ourselves and the world, and ends with time—a "glimpse into the infinite"—in a drive homeward listening to Rachmaninoff. In between, she shuttles among scenes: Paris as it glows in memory and as it reappears on return, Florence during a cold winter, Germany, England visiting in-laws. She takes on airports; the multiple meanings and fantasies wrapped up in the word "hotel," the mini-biographies of transient writers. She laughs at her obsession with luggage, cringes at her growing weariness as a traveler, mocks and treasures the way she and others offer advice to those new to the open road. Her self-deprecating wit and intelligence is never more penetrating than when she remembers a harrowing visit to her childhood home in Arizona. As she recounts memories, details email exchanges with an old neighbor, and offers glimpses of a previous visit with her now-dead sister, she reveals both the ghosts that haunt her and the strength and self-compassion that account for her braveries. One terrific story follows the next; each modifies, extends, and enriches the ones before. Together, they create a landscape of time, change, and thought as well as an homage to places missed but not forgotten.

NCBR review of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays by Megan Harlan

The University of Georgia Press

A wholly original take on memoir, this collection of essays approaches its subject from varying perspectives to give the reader a rich and enveloping experience of a life. In the first seventeen years of her life Megan Harlan lived in seventeen different homes, ranging from a Los Angeles motel to an elegant London hotel to trailers located in the Alaskan tundra, the Arabian desert, and the South American jungle. To her "emotionally itinerant" parents—an engineer father and a super-homemaker mother—this nomadic life seemed not only necessary but desirable. For Harlan herself, it was a mixed blessing. Her lively voice renders the complex, quirky, sometimes tragic family life that resulted, in a vivid story laced with ongoing meditations on wanderlust, on place, on belonging, on love. The wide-angle lens Harlan trains on her experiences accommodates many delightful facts: that the Bedouin oral tradition included something called stellar poetry; that spiderwebs are the strongest substance in the world; that the Crusaders brought the design element of the octagon to Europe; that Stonehenge may be a center for ley-lines (and what in the world these are). And Harlan, an award-winning poet, makes us experience the places she describes—their look and sound and feel and taste and smell: "a redwood forest's deep feathery sweetness," "sand silky as sugar," "damp glowing greenery," "beetle-black cabs," "huskies with ice-blue eyes." Mobile Home combines the lyric, the factual, and the dramatic in a prose style that is both hugely enjoyable and deeply moving.

NCBR review of Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose by Kay Ryan

Grove Press

"I laughed and laughed and laughed," Kay Ryan tells us, in a short essay in Synthesizing Gravity describing the moment she decided to be a writer. Ryan is laughing because she has realized that, regardless of her level of talent or chances at success, poetry is what she likes and values the most. That simple choice, and the existential comfort it implies, powers the essays in this book—literary reviews, aesthetic commentaries, and craft considerations, written over a period of thirty years.

Ryan's criticism is on a continuum with her poetry: wry, witty, intellectually rigorous, emotionally capacious. Her analysis is unsparing and refreshingly unfuzzy, yet she stops on the edge of biting wit or sarcastic wisecracks. She is in love with what and who she is in love with, unapologetically. Synthesizing Gravity focuses on the poets who share and have informed that ethic: Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Phillip Larkin.

Ryan's approach to poetry is both deeply knowledgeable and irreverent, sometimes hilariously so. "I Go to AWP" sends up the conventions of the literary conference with bracing directness. The preceding essay extols the values of what she names "Derichment," her "stern faith" that children and other people don't need to be enriched, like bread: "Weren't they rich already?" Ryan lays out an aesthetic for all of those who like to think deeply yet take life lightly.

NCBR review of Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit

Viking

It should surprise no one who has been reading Rebecca Solnit to discover that her memoir is unlike any other. She does tell us what happens to her and what she does about it. She reveals something of her childhood, describes her early life living in San Francisco, provides details about her time wandering the American West, mentions figures who have been significant in her life. And, as we might expect from a writer's memoir, this is a book about how Solnit came to discover and live into her distinct voice. But each of these stories is embedded in argument, each argument fleshed out in narrative. Solnit writes polemically without being polemical, lyrically while remaining political, historically while never nostalgic. The stories she tells are about how she learns who she is through her struggles with gender violence and exclusion, the frequent moments when her intelligence was slighted, the fears and threats she has encountered as a woman. She emphasizes the times her own experience echoed and mirrored those of countless others—not only women but gay men, Native peoples. Her skills as an activist, thinker, and political pundit are apparent on every page, woven seamlessly into memories of friendships, partners, casual encounters, reading, travels. As she has so often, by offering glimpses of how she has challenged her own longstanding, often unquestioned, beliefs, she models how we might challenge our own.

NCBR review of Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism by Elizabeth Tallent

Harper

"As a perfectionist I leave a lot to be desired," Elizabeth Tallent begins in this stunning memoir. Tallent's problem—deeply crippling, yet hard to talk about because saying you're a perfectionist seems like a boast—begins when she scratches her face in utero. Her mother is so disturbed by this that she refuses to hold or care for her newborn until her appearance is fixed, a fact she confesses later to the teenage Elizabeth. The author discovers the joy of crafting fiction on a typewriter late nights in a bookstore in Santa Fe, going on to write several well-received books that land her a teaching job at Stanford. After that, her past catches up with her; succumbing to "the police state inside my head" that is perfectionism, she does not publish another book for more than twenty years.

Tallent is quick to identify her parents' emotional desertion of her—and threatened physical desertion, when she doesn't measure up—with her own abdication of writing, which "left a trail of stories crouched tightly down into themselves, hiding in the last place they'd been seen." How can a writer inhabit her own psyche enough to write, after all, if she cannot accept the fallible contingency of each lived moment? Tallent's prose style is exquisitely crafted and deeply rewarding: like a sensitive instrument lowered into the depths, the words pulse with a meaning at once emotional, intellectual, and lyrical. In what appears to be a small yet perfect literary miracle, Tallent was able to overcome her perfectionism and resume writing books, including this one. We are the better for it.

NCBR review of Indigo by Ellen Bass

Copper Canyon Press

Indigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, presents the reader with an examination of many life cycles—examining the past and attempting to imagine the possibilities ahead, whether promising or dire. Do not be lulled by poems about her old dog, orange and white high heels, a woman's naked bottom lifted to the kitchen counter, overgrown zucchini, her father's illness or her wife's. If the reader sees only the surfaces of these poems, their value and power will be overlooked. Though they have a feigned casualness, they are complex and probing. Love and loss may be the focus of the book, but Bass has a resilient way of finding joy among losses and heaping praise on things small and large to remind us what makes a life worthwhile. In the poem "Roses," she writes of her wife's long illness: "Death woke me each morning / with its bird impersonation." Then in "Ode to Fat," she declares: "Oh praise the loyalty of the body / that labors to rebuild its palatial realm." Yet she possesses the kind of balance that offers hope. In "Any Common Desolation," she ends her luminous book with a poem that insists: "You may have to break / your heart, but it isn't nothing / to know even one moment alive."

NCBR review of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) by Judy Halebsky

The University of Arkansas Press

If given the chance, how would you describe contemporary American life to a master Chinese poet from the eighth century? This concept is central to Judy Halebsky's Spring and A Thousand Years (Unabridged), in which she welcomes Li Bai (aka Li Po) into our world of dead malls, streaming platforms, divisive politics, and world on the brink of ecological disaster. In the book's first poem, "Between Jenner and a Pay Phone," Halebsky writes, "Li Bai, the shadows tonight are from street lights // I'm in the middle of a parking lot / wondering where the locals drink beer // from now on: / only practical clothing / only blank pages." In a moment of isolation and alienation, she turns to her literary forebear for encouragement and inspiration. There's also in this book a resolute sense of play from poem to poem. Halebsky shapes her feeling tones into odes, prose poems, instruction manuals, private anecdotes, found poems, and a contemporary "Glossary" poem for Li Bai that, in seventy-five entries, attempts to explain America as the tragicomic place it has become. Whatever political or philosophical statements are to be found here are offset by moments of humor, and that is the true marvel of this book. The pleasure that Halebsky experienced while composing these poems easily carries over to us, her readers.

NCBR review of Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris

University of Pittsburgh Press

Sometimes the most compelling landscapes are the ones where worlds collide: where a desert meets the sea, a civilization, no-man's land. Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and love grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house full of ripe persimmons, a lost baby who is the ghost in her garden. Coyotes cry out on the hill, and lovers find themselves kissing, "bee-stung, drunk" in the middle of road. In a piece about feeding delicious morsels to worms in her compost she admits forgetting for a moment her own "place on the menu." The lines of her poems—even if they are about worms or a retreat sign that warns not to tempt the monks—are always lush and musical. One can select any page in the book at random and find a memorable and singular artistry. In "O Darkness" she considers just before sleep that her arm "is so brown and so beautiful" then moves deeper and deeper toward "How hidden is the sacred, quickening in the dark." Here, the dust is holy, as is life, death and the dark, unknown. These are poems that praise the impossible, wild, often sad or terrifying world, finding consolation and beauty in its wake.

NCBR review of Transformer by Kathleen Winter

The Word Works

Transformer invites the reader to consider electrical charges and a response to them. The poems are concerned with memory, violence, small everyday challenges as well as the large wilderness of trauma. Here the world is full of shouts, slaps, stairs, a body splayed at the bottom, and desperate words. Kathleen Winter—as she has done in her two prior books—has crafted her words and lines so that they radiate a mastery of many poetic forms and supple language whether the topic is personal or surreal, whether violent or deceivingly gentle; she insists on raw truth telling. Her short poem "Housekeeping," tells the reader "In this jar, a dead bat. / I don't want to talk about my mother." And it ends "Don't you dare / tell me you love me." She enlarges the scope of the book by braiding her present and past with the experiences of well-known figures like Mrs. Gaskell, Hieronymus Bosch, Henry VIII, or John the Baptist. Amid the struggle and strife, "Mean Time, Prime Time" adds hope, "Still in our prime, we lie in the moon's tow. / I wind around your sleep, my limbs / the nameless shade inside our shell." This book takes the reader on challenging paths yet alongside them, these paths widen and encompass us in a way that promises light and transformation ahead.

NCBR review of Storage Unit for the Spirit House by Maw Shein Win

Omnidawn

Maw Shein Win, a Burmese-American poet, has channeled her South Asian ancestry to produce this strange, rich, wondrous book. It's primed with an epigraph by a South Asian scholar explaining that nats are spirits holding power over particular localities, which often build small shrines called spirit houses for offerings to their local nat, that must be placated to avoid injury or disaster. Nats begin and end the book and flit mischievously throughout. Early on, in "Storage Unit 202," comes a list of five items, the last of which is "directions to the otherworld," providing a supernal tingle to the rest, although 'other worlds' are never referred to again. Indeed, this is a totally unpredictable, continuously surprising book of poems, which is comprised of abbreviated voices, often disembodied, occasionally in the first person, for instance, "Hospital" begins, "tinctures for pain, capsized vessels / hand reaches into warm body / she believes in magic & so do I / painted things," though there's no way to know if "I" there actually refers to the poet. The voices, then, say the book, surreal, often, and richly languaged. Storage Unit for the Spirit World is a book to be savored, ridden like a spiritual roller coaster for surprise and poetic thrills.

NCBR review of Piñata Theory by Alan Chazaro

Black Lawrence Press

In his debut collection, Piñata Theory, Alan Chazaro's contemporary references (video games, rap artists, clothing styles, neighborhood shout-outs) lend intimacy and personality to his meditations on life as a young Latinx man coming of age in Oakland, his hometown. The image of the piñata is skillfully used in this book. The title poem imagines the speaker as a metaphor for communal vulnerability: "This glue was never meant to hold us // together. / We were covered in layers // of pretty colors, papier-mâché faces, / superhero // assemblages of warehouse scraps." Later in this short lyric Chazaro writes, "We were made for beatdowns." This figuration nods to the scrappiness of Chazaro's own working class immigrant community while also recognizing its vulnerability in a city growing more plutocratic every day. The piñata also serves as a structural element in the book, with sections labeled "Body," "Break," and "Gather." The first section introduces us to Chazaro's stand-in as he navigates adolescence and gender roles. In "Break," the poet toggles between "Mexican" and "American" cultural influences in a struggle to make himself whole. The final section, "Gather," synthesizes the components of Chazaro's personality and points toward a hopeful future in which his offerings will be gathered in by a community that transcends boundaries. The most vital feature in this book is Chazaro's resolute spirit and big-heartedness, no matter his circumstance.

NCBR review of Tell Me, Signora by Ann Harleman

Elixir Press

Kate Hagesfeld is an archaeologist and a recent widow, still grieving the loss of her husband, whose final years demanded her loving assistance as his MS progressed. In Italy for several months of residency at the venerable Centro Studi Internazionali in Genoa, she devotes her research to excavating the history of the sixteenth century painter Sofonisba Anguissola. Kate also becomes involved in a risky plan to help a small group of refugees of wounded but amazingly strong Kosovar women, and she takes as her lover the much younger man tutoring her in Italian. Unfailingly both feminine and feminist, this is the story of a strong, smart woman seeking to reconstruct a self after decades of selfless caretaking. She is haunted by ghosts of the dead and of the living: her semi-estranged twenty-four-year-old daughter, Rachel, grieving back in the States; her cousin and best friend of forty-nine years, Janet, a doctor who has just gone on a dangerous mission to Africa; and Ceiling-Katherine, Kate's alter-ego, always ready to pounce and criticize. Harleman transports the reader to Italy both past and present, and against this backdrop of delicious food, wine, scenery and lovemaking, Kate becomes Signora Caterina and tries to sort out her own life as she continues to study the work and retrieve the "lost year" of her beloved Sofonisba. Expertly woven of equal parts vibrant travelogue, political thriller, and a woman's road to healing, Tell Me, Signora satisfies both as a richly detailed contemporary novel and as a classic quest.

NCBR review of The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories by Caroline Kim

University of Pittsburgh Press

To say that the unifying thread of Caroline Kim's exquisite collection of stories is the Korean diaspora would be true, though that characterization gives short shrift to the complexity of the characters and their voices of narration in stories set in ancient Korea, Korean War Korea, today and the future. Winner of the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Kim's stories weave the perspectives of a teenage girl, an old man, a depressed married wife and mother, and a king into a masterpiece of an arc that radiates unique yet universal loss. In one story a couple worries that a third child would be impossible financially. Ultimately, the husband decides, and after the procedure he and his wife park the car and stare at the Merrimack River. After some time she says, "It's curious, that one speaks of loss when someone dies. It isn't loss at all….It is a weight that must be held, must be carried. It lives while we live. And that is all right." The pain on the pages of this stellar collection is something we will carry with us, and indeed, it is all right.

NCBR review of A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Little, Brown and Company

Daniel Mason has published three novels that can roughly be called "historical," and this collection of nine stories is also steeped in history. He takes some of his characters here from life, including Alfred Russel Wallace, a follower and contemporary of Charles Darwin's, and King Psammetichus of Egypt's 26th Dynasty. Two of the stories highlight nineteenth century women, a celebrated balloonist flying above Paris and a single mother attempting to save her asthmatic son from London's industrial pollution. Throughout Mason ranges widely in time and space: from the rain forests of Brazil, to the docks of Regency England, to the battlefields of the American Civil War, to the apartments of contemporary San Francisco. Mason's rhetorical modes are as varied as his protagonists and settings. A few of the stories are told with relatively conventional narration, but one takes the form of a letter, one of a continuation and gentle parody of Herodotus's History, another of scientific observations. And in the title story, the most daring in the book, Mason creates the fractured diary (or "registry") of Arthur Bispo do Rosario, the real life sailor, boxer, madman and religious fanatic who spent the last fifty years of his life in a mental institution in Rio de Janeiro where he, miraculously, created great works of art from found objects. A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth is itself something of an aesthetic miracle of found material, an extraordinarily rich and varied collection in which Mason's erudition shimmers with insight and deep feeling.

NCBR review of Only the River by Anne Raeff

Counterpoint

Only the River is even better than Anne Raeff's last novel, the NCBA nominated and California Book Award Silver Medalist Winter Kept Us Warm. Raeff specializes in multigenerational, multinational narratives. That description, though, implies big sprawling epics, and her books are not that; rather they are compact, taut, contemplative. Here during the Second World War two Austrian Jewish doctors flee Europe with their young children Pepa and Karl. They travel first to the rain forests of Nicaragua, where they spend several years vaccinating the local inhabitants against yellow fever. Then the family abruptly moves to New York City where the parents set up a practice in the Puerto Rican section of the Bronx and the children, now teenagers, struggle to fit into this strange new urban world. Many years later two of Pepa's grown, New York-reared children return, each for very different reasons, to Nicaragua in the midst of the Sandinista revolution and become involved in the civil war and with some of the ghosts of their mother's Nicaraguan past. All of the characters in the novel, both major and minor, are finely etched, but one is never absolutely sure about why they do what they do: one of Raeff's distinctive gifts as a writer is that she preserves the mystery at the heart of human action. Only the River explores families, blood and extended ones, wars, geographic, historical and cultural displacements, many types of love, and many types of courage. It does so elegantly, piercingly, and at times heartbreakingly.

NCBR review of The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio

Ecco/HarperCollins

It takes a writer of certain talent to bring our famous city of the dead to life. Lysley Tenorio is that writer as he sets this modern-day hero's journey in Colma, San Francisco's own necropolis and brings the elements of a classic tale—star-crossed lovers, a strong and fierce mother, the elemental struggle between human beings and their collective struggle with an indifferent or hostile universe—authentically to our time and place. Our hero, Excel and his mother, Maxima, (a once upon a time Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online) live the shadow existence of undocumented people in our country today. Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap by joining his girlfriend Sab on a journey to Hello City, a rundown off-the-grid desert town settled by drifters, hippies, and artists. Excel tries to forge his own path and then, of course, fate intervenes. All the ingredients of great fiction are written with such elegance that the prose feels transparent, so that only the story remains. The Son of Good Fortune is Shakespearean in the way it translates the old, timeless tragedies into current situations, culture, and vernacular language. The result is a book that feels universal and, most important, immediately relevant.