Rachel is the operations and events director at Avid Bookshop. She also manages the widely popular Avid Snail Mail subscriptions program featured in the New York Times Wirecutter's Gifts We Want to Give for 2020 and 2022! She's a fig farmer who listens to audiobooks via Libro.fm while tending to her chicken flock. Reading in the hammock with her dog, Dolly Parton, is pretty great too.
Daniel Mason's North Woods is a masterful literary art form exploring the four-hundred-year history of the woods surrounding a particular house in western Massachusetts. Mason uses songs, journals, letters, medical notes, and other techniques to share the lives of those who live, love, suffer, create, and die there. The manner in which this book reveals the life cycles of flora and fauna is lyrical, respectful, and full of wonder and awe. Throughout North Woods humanity shapes and changes the environment, but the natural world very much reveals itself to be omnipotent.
When a young servant girl escapes a colonial settlement in 17th century Virginia, her life is saved while her struggle to survive begins. Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds is a window into one soul's effort to square the beauty and awe of the natural world and the existence of a god that would allow the sheer blight and destruction the english colonizers inflict. Zed's will to live coupled with her crisis of faith is absolutely gorgeously conveyed with breathtaking prose.
All of Edan Lepucki's novels contain an almost palpable tension, and Time's Mouth is her most suspenseful. It's not the pseudo-cult, the rituals, or the time travel orchestrated with moon cycles that makes Time's Mouth enchanting. What's beguiling is the manner in which Lepucki cracks open the emotional fissures of families, motherhood, and loss. This fierce generational family saga haunted me between chapters. You won't be able to put this down.
CJ Hauser's The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays is unlike anything I've read and it blew my mind. At its core, the interconnected essays are about love. Hauser uses both personal and family history to dissect parts of her life that give her pause. Hauser's technique for performing autopsies on her previous loves include deep introspection of the impact of specific works on her analysis such as du Maurier's Rebecca and Baum's Oz. Deep inquiry into Mulder and Scully's relationship or the gender dynamics in the 1940 film adaptation of The Philadelphia Story provides a very relatable setting for a reader to also scrutinize romantic choices. Hauser's writing is smart and razor-honest as she peels back layers. What a brilliant process to witness. Nineteen different passages sung so clearly to me, they are underlined, highlighted, dog-eared.
Emma Starling comes home to a small village in New Hampshire because her father Clive is dying and she really should check on her brother Auggie after his second stay in rehab. She's been astray for a while and living back in Everton with her family seems wise. Once there she finds that her high school best friend is missing and the only person looking for her is her retired poetry professor father. Because of the opioid crisis, the two police officers don't feel it's worth their time. The book's narrators in the Maple Street Cemetery are practically omniscient and their commentary lets you in on the village's secrets while also witnessing the longings of the dead. In Unlikely Animals, Harnett has done what she does best: create a brilliant cast of messy human beings that you don't want to leave. With a hand-drawn map, a menagerie of animals (a fox, a dog, a goat), and beautiful prose, this book is perfect.
Motherthing is a feminist horror story featuring a motherless daughter haunted by her mother-in-law. Ainslie Hogarth has written a love story that is funny, bizarre, and bloody featuring guidance from a couch, cookbook, and soothsayer.
Hanif Abdurraqib's exploration of Black performance in America is a cultural keystone that is chillingly relevant. Whether discussing the fact that a knowing look or advice on a route from a cashier is a form of a living Green Book that still exists because there are places Black people are not safe, to the origin of the card game spades or the difference between showing out or showing off, at the heart A Little Devil in America circles back to the fact that Black Americans have been forced to survive in places they were not welcome. The section on Black funerals pierced my heart. This book needs to be read, taught, underlined and discussed.
Fresh Water for Flowers encompasses so much in each lovely short chapter. Valérie Perrin has written what could be called the perfect novel. At first glance, Violette Toussaint lives an uncomplicated life as the caretaker of a cemetery in a small town in Burgundy. Just as you relax into the luscious descriptions of the gardens, of the tombstone inscriptions, of the fascinating visitors, several love stories hidden in a mystery or two reveal that there are more than funerals at the heart of this book. Perfection!
Early in the pandemic when all we could do was hunker down in our familial pods and hope for the best, unexpected time with loved ones provided a space unlike others. This is where Ann Patchett's Tom Lake begins. The entire book unravels the story of a young love affair. Lara's romance with the famous actor Peter Duke is family lore but her three grown daughters have never heard the entire tale start to finish. When the girls come home in spring 2020 to northern Michigan, Lara shares (most of) the details as they pick cherries on the family farm. Tom Lake is Patchett at her finest. She has crafted a superb story of family and belonging that is extremely satisfying to read.