Front Porch Books: September 2019 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.

Sea Wife
by Amity Gaige
(Knopf)

Jacket Copy:  From the highly acclaimed author of Schroder, a smart, sophisticated literary page turner about a young family who escape suburbia for a year-long sailing trip that upends all of their lives. Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her anemic dissertation when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. The couple are novice sailors, but Michael persuades Juliet to say yes. With their two kids—Sybil, age seven, and George, age two, Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four-foot sailboat awaits them—a boat that Michael has christened the Juliet. The initial result is transformative: their marriage is given a gust of energy, and even the children are affected by the beauty and wonderful vertigo of travel. The sea challenges them all—and most of all, Juliet, who suffers from postpartum depression. Sea Wife is told in gripping dual perspectives: Juliet’s first-person narration, after the journey, as she struggles to come to terms with the dire, life-changing events that unfolded at sea; and Michael’s captain’s log—that provides a riveting, slow-motion account of those same inexorable events. Exuberant, harrowing, witty, and exquisitely written, Sea Wife is impossible to put down. A wholly original take on one of our oldest stories—survival at sea—it also asks a pertinent question for our polarized political moment: How does a crew with deep philosophical differences and outmoded gender roles bring a ship safely to shore?

Opening Lines:  Where does a mistake begin? Lately I’ve found this simple question difficult. Impossible, actually. A mistake has roots in both time and space—a person’s reasoning and her whereabouts. Somewhere in the intersection of those two dimensions is the precisely bounded mistake—in nautical terms, its coordinates.
       Does my mistake begin with the boat? Or my marriage itself?

Blurbworthiness:  “Taut as a thriller, emotionally precise yet threaded with lyricism, Sea Wife is at once the compelling story of a family’s glorious, misbegotten seafaring adventure and an allegory for life itself. This is an unforgettable novel.”  (Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl)

The Prettiest Star
by Carter Sickels
(Hub City Press)

Jacket Copy:  Small-town Appalachia doesn’t have a lot going for it, but it’s where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he’s chosen to return to die. At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape. Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson’s death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, The Prettiest Star is part Dog Years by Mark Doty and part Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. But it is also an urgent story now: it a novel about the politics and fragility of the body; it is a novel about sex and shame. And it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch.

Opening Lines:  He went out with his camcorder. The sun was just beginning to rise. He left his place on Fourth Street, between A and B, and walked west, passing the park and empty lots and boarded-up buildings with broken windows, and graffiti-sprayed storefront metal gates. Sidewalks were littered with city souvenirs: an empty Coke can, a greasy paper plate, crack vials with balloon-colored tops—red, green, yellow, purple. Hardly anybody was up this early on a Sunday. An old man swept church steps. A wino dug through a trashcan, and a sturdy mule-faced woman with a floral-print kerchief tied over curlers walked her little dog. Crackheads huddled in a doorway. Two pretty guys in jeans and leather jackets and boots crossed the street, chirping like excited birds. Probably still coked up from a night out, bodies exhausted, alive.
       Record everything, Shawn told him. Even my death, he said, especially my death.

Blurbworthiness:  “The Prettiest Star is a lyrical and compulsively readable novel about the intricate, tangled bonds of family and the way human beings can be both profoundly cruel and surprisingly wonderful. These characters are people we know, and they’ll stay with me for a very long time. This deeply moving novel is much more than the story of one family dealing with the worst tragedy of their lives in a small Ohio town in 1986. It’s the story of all of us—the story of America, then and now, how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.”  (Silas House, author of Southernmost)

The End of the Ocean
by Maja Lunde
(HarperCollins)

Jacket Copy:  In 2019, seventy-year-old Signe sets sail alone on a hazardous voyage across the ocean in a sailboat. On board, a cargo that can change lives. Signe is haunted by memories of the love of her life, whom she’ll meet again soon. In 2041, David and his young daughter, Lou, flee from a drought-stricken Southern Europe that has been ravaged by thirst and war. Separated from the rest of their family and desperate to find them, they discover an ancient sailboat in a dried-out garden, miles away from the nearest shore. Signe’s sailboat. As David and Lou discover Signe’s personal effects, her long ago journey becomes inexorably linked to their own. An evocative tale of the search for love and connection, The End of the Ocean is a profoundly moving father daughter story of survival and a clarion call for climate action.

Opening Lines:  Nothing stopped the water. You could follow it from the mountain to the fjord, from the snow that fell from the clouds and settled on the peaks to the mist that rose above the ocean and again became clouds.

Blurbworthiness:  “If we somehow manage to save the planet from ourselves, it will be because of big-hearted beautiful books like this one, that make us feel the devastating cost of our current climate inaction. Not just the planet-wide consequences, but the human-scale ones as well. Gripping and powerful.”  (Sam J. Miller, author of Blackfish City)

The Captain and the Glory
by Dave Eggers
(Knopf)

Jacket Copy:  A savage satire of the United States in the throes of insanity, this blisteringly funny novel tells the story of a noble ship, the Glory, and the loud, clownish, and foul Captain who steers it to the brink of disaster. When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn’t much like boats, he solemnly swears to shake things up. Together with his band of petty thieves and confidence men known as the Upskirt Boys, the Captain thrills his passengers, writing his dreams and notions on the cafeteria wipe-away board, boasting of his exemplary anatomy, devouring cheeseburgers, and tossing overboard anyone who displeases him. Until one day a famous pirate, long feared by passengers of the Glory but revered by the Captain for how phenomenally masculine he looked without a shirt while riding a horse, appears on the horizon. Absurd, hilarious, and all too recognizable, The Captain and the Glory is a wicked farce of contemporary America only Dave Eggers could dream up.

Opening Lines:  The aging captain, gray at the temples now, had steered the great ship Glory for many years, and was ready to retire. On a bright fall day of white clouds and melancholy, the ship’s passengers, thousands of them, gathered to see him off. They were docked at a lush tropical isle, where the departing captain planned to retire, to eat the freshest fruit and drink from the purest springs. He had been a kind and unflappable skipper for many years, through seas turbulent and tranquil, and watching him descend the gangplank brought more than a few of the Glory’s passengers to tears.
       Among the citizens of the ship there were carpenters and teachers, painters and professors and plumbers, and they had come to the ship from the planet’s every corner. They did not always agree on everything, but they shared a history, and over centuries together they had faced death and birth, glorious sunrises and nights of unease, war and sorrow and triumph and tragedy. Through it all they had developed a sense that they were a mad, ragged quilt of humanity, full of color and contradiction, but unwilling to be separated or torn.
       With the old captain leaving, the passengers talked about who should succeed him. It was a daunting task. The departing captain was both war hero and learned man, was indeed so accomplished a sailor and diplomat that he had earned the nickname the Admiral—an honorific never given to another captain before him.
       There were a number of possible replacements for the Admiral—a dozen or so crew members who had steered great ships before, who knew nautical navigation and maritime law. There were at least ten, in fact, who had worked on this particular ship for decades and knew its every last gauge and gudgeon. As the passengers were contemplating which of these qualified person could take the helm, one of the passengers spoke up.
       “I’ll do it,” he said loudly with a voice at once high-pitched and hoarse. This man was large and lumpy, and a bit hunched over, and wore a yellow feather in his hair.

Blurbworthiness:  “There is a peculiar kind of cathartic feeling that comes from desperate, worried laughter. This kept happening to me while reading this book. The Captain and the Glory is completely absurd and true. It is as funny as it is scarily reflective of our times and current president. Eggers has given us an essential American satire, a depiction of this administration that doesn’t simply deny it as an abomination—which it is—but carries us through an illustration of a parallel imaginary world that delights and defames and is just so good and funny.”  (Tommy Orange, author of There There)

Godshot
by Chelsea Bieker
(Catapult)

Jacket Copy:  Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances. Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.

Opening Lines:  To have an assignment, Pastor Vern said, you had to be a woman of blood. You had to be a man of deep voice and Adam’s apple. And you should never reveal your assignment to another soul, for assignments were a holy bargaining between you and your pastor and God Himself.

Blurbworthiness:  “Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot is an absolute masterpiece. A truly epic journey through girlhood, divinity, and the blood that binds and divides us, it is a feminist magnum opus of this, or any, time. Bieker is a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity. Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women...Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed.”  (T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls)

Code Name Hélène
by Ariel Lawhorn
(Doubleday)

Jacket Copy:  Based on the thrilling real-life story of socialite spy Nancy Wake, comes the newest feat of historical fiction from the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia, featuring the astonishing woman who killed a Nazi with her bare hands and went on to become one of the most decorated women in WWII. Told in interweaving timelines organized around the four code names Nancy used during the war, Code Name Hélène is a spellbinding and moving story of enduring love, remarkable sacrifice and unfaltering resolve that chronicles the true exploits of a woman who deserves to be a household name. It is 1936 and Nancy Wake is an intrepid Australian expat living in Paris who has bluffed her way into a reporting job for Hearst newspaper. She is fighting to cover the disturbing reports of violence coming out of Vienna and Berlin when she meets the wealthy French industrialist Henri Fiocca. No sooner does Henri sweep Nancy off her feet and convince her to become Mrs. Fiocca than the Germans invade France and she takes yet another name: a code name. As Lucienne Carlier she smuggles people and documents across borders under the guise of an oblivious mistress. Soon enough the Gestapo hears of a female operative with a remarkable ability to evade capture, and Nancy earns a new nickname: The White Mouse. But this one carries with it a five-million-franc bounty on her head. Forced to escape France and leave Henri behind for the safety of both of them, Nancy enters training with the Special Operations Executives, who transform her into Hélène. Finally, with mission in hand, Nancy is airdropped back into France as the deadly Madam Andrée. She soon becomes one of the most powerful leaders in the French Resistance, known for her ferocious wit, her signature red lipstick, and her ability to summon weapons straight from the Allied Forces. But no one can protect Nancy if the enemy finds out these four women are one and the same, and the closer to liberation France gets, the more exposed she—and the people she loves—will become.

Opening Lines:  I have gone by many names.
       Some of them are real—I was given four at birth alone—but most are carefully constructed personas to get me through checkpoints and across borders. They are lies scribbled on forged travel documents. Typed neatly in government files. Splashed across wanted posters. My identity is an ever-shifting thing that adapts to the need at hand. But tonight, I am simply Hélène and I am going home.