Anchorage Daily News book reviewers Nancy Lord and David James present, in no particular order, the 2021 works — including fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels — that they found most memorable and meaningful.
News & Review Type: Review
The Book of Timothy by Joan Nockels Wilson and Everything Never Comes Your Way by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell were featured as favorite books of 2021 by Anchorage Daily News!
Jan Beatty’s new memoir AMERICAN BASTARD reviewed on Pittsburgh City Paper!
The cover photo shows a young girl smiling as she points a toy gun at the camera. At first glance, the book’s title seems to be American Badass. But the correct name of Jan Beatty’s memoir is American Bastard.
Both titles ring true. Beatty, a poet and writer from Regent Square who was adopted just after birth, calls herself a bastard throughout the book. And the sobriquet “badass” exemplifies Beatty’s determination and doggedness in searching for her birth parents.
Tess Taylor’s RIFT ZONE featured in Magma Literary Magazine!
A CAMERA OBSCURA, by Carl Marcum, reviewed for Pedestal Magazine!
Just as the James West Space Telescope (the J.W.S.T.) is about to supersede the Hubble Telescope (offering the difference between myopia and 20-20 vision, at least when it comes to the far-far-far reaches of the universe), Carl Marcum offers us A Camera Obscura, a book which aims its lens at the mysteries of astronomy but also those of life.
Thea Prieto’s FROM THE CAVES is a staff pick at Bear Pond Books!
A fantastic novella of literary merit about a small family living in a cave after the climate apocalypse. Told in language that sings from the point of view of Sky, the youngest member who learns that responsibility is as necessary as the stories they tell each other to survive. The book is dark and bleak at times, but the fresh and lyrical language and the wildness of the hot and desolate future world really keep you turning pages. Picture Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but told from the child’s point of view. A necessary tale to think about the effects of climate change and how language and stories may be the key to our survival.
THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY Featured in New York Journal of Books!
“Wilson has created a panoramic saga of cruelty, injustice, loyalty, and devotion. This is a heartbreaking, loving, moving story told by a sister, daughter, mother, woman who demands and deserves to be heard.”
Anchorage Daily News Features THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY Review!
Sexual abuse of children by clergy is once more in the news. Last month, a new report estimated that some 330,000 French children were abused by Catholic clergy and other authority church figures dating back to 1950. This first accounting by France of a global scandal found that at least 3,000 French priests abused children and that that abuse was covered up in a “systematic manner.” Once again, we are all reminded of the extent of abuse and, once again, the church apologizes.
THE BOOK OF TIMOTHY Reviewed in New York Journal of Books!
“Wilson has created a panoramic saga of cruelty, injustice, loyalty, and devotion. This is a heartbreaking, loving, moving story told by a sister, daughter, mother, woman who demands and deserves to be heard.”
AMERICAN BASTARD by Jan Beatty reviewed in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette!
“As an adoptee, one of the toughest things is the idea of shifting identities,” writes Jan Beatty in “American Bastard: A Memoir.””
“No one is who they say they are: The adopted parents are masquerading as the ‘real’ parents, the ‘real parents’ don’t seem to exist, the adoptee’s story is invisible, and the adoptee herself is operating under an alias. It’s essential to the adoptee to be able to cut through the bull**** in life and find what seems like the ‘truth.’”
FROM THE CAVES by Thea Prieto reviewed in Diagram 21.5!
Being an elder millennial (see: I refuse to use the term ‘geriatric’), I’ve come to accept that I no longer know any of the cool lingo that the kids these days use. That said, the first thing that comes to mind when reading Thea Prieto’s From the Caves is that it gives off “major A24 vibes.” This novella screams out to be made into a movie. It is filled with rich language and vibrant imagery in a way that lends itself to cinema: I could see grainy memories of the narrator swimming like a sequence from Moonlight; the terse sound design and lighting from The Lighthouse or It Comes at Night as the characters huddle inside the cave; and there’s even a scene reminiscent of the violent vibrance of Midsommar. Prieto paints scenes with visceral, creative phrasing that is at once innovative and yet still somehow familiar. There is an instinctual nature to how phrases are strung together, starting from the very beginning where “[a] palm slaps red to Sky’s face.” Her writing is without flourish but rather strips language down to an ancestral level that simply pairs words that we have forgotten belong together. It is some of the most palpable writing I have encountered in my elder millennial life.
AMERICAN BASTARD by Jan Beatty reviewed in On the Seawall!
Any baby, let alone a bastard baby, is born a mystery, and babies don’t come with directions. But Jan Beatty’s iconoclastic memoir American Bastard does come with directions. Here is how she tells us to read her story:
“Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA – reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”
Marie Tozier’s poetry book OPEN THE DARK featured in a review for First Alaskans!
The strong, measured, and contemplative voice in Open the Dark, a debut collection of forty-two lyric poems, belongs to poet Marie Tozier (Inupiaq/Puerto Rican.) The book’s release in August 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, prevented Tozier from giving any public readings. The work drew attention, however, and last winter the Poetry Foundation chose her poem “Little Brother” as a Poem of the Day and included two more on its site, and Poetry Daily featured “Aakuaksrak” as a Poem of the Day.” Marie wrote the poems for her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Alaska Anchorage, which she received in 2016.
Originally from Nome, Marie celebrates a life that harmonizes with seasonal rhythms and the land’s varied offerings throughout the year. Most of her short lyric poems focus on family, the northwest landscape, nature, seasons, gathering food, fishing and hunting. Other poems, however, highlight the challenges and problems that beset Native people. The writing, subtle and restrained, explores joyful moments, personal traumas, memory and loss. The language is accessible and clear but with layers of complexities and meanings.
Enchanted Prose Reviews WEATHER WOMAN And SINKING ISLANDS By Cai Emmons!
Cai Emmons is an extraordinary wordsmith who’s created a two-book series on the magical powers of personal relationships and their interconnected relationships with Nature, and how individuals and groups have the power to change the trajectory of the climate change crisis. Each stands alone; together their strength is multiplied so this review encompasses both.
Dariel Suarez’s THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE is Featured on Los Angeles Review of Books
American’s fascination with the mystery and allure of an island that for years they couldn’t access has led them to mythologize Cuba’s history. Those myths of a land stuck in time are only reinforced as American tourists are now ferried about Havana in restored 1950s Buicks, Chevys, and Oldsmobiles, and sit in cafés sipping rum and smoking cigars, being entertained by musicians, romancing and being romanced by beautiful Cuban men and women. “Just like in the old days,” they might think, when Havana was America’s playground and tourists acted as if they owned the place.
Check out the review of Cai Emmons’s SINKING ISLANDS by Thoughts on This ‘n That
In Cai Emmons’ popular novel, WEATHER WOMAN, Bronwyn Artair drops out of her prestigious doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT to take a job as a television meteorologist in New Hampshire. It’s there that she learns she has the power to control the weather.