Many new August titles are receiving good advance reviews. Here are a few that I have been able to preview and one that I am anxious to read:
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
For generations, Rich Gundersen’s family has chopped a livelihood out of the redwood forest along California’s rugged coast. Now Rich and his wife, Colleen, are raising their own young son near Damnation Grove, a swath of ancient redwoods on which Rich’s employer, Sanderson Timber Co., plans to make a killing. In 1977, with most of the forest cleared or protected, a grove like Damnation—and beyond it 24-7 Ridge—is a logger’s dream.
It’s dangerous work. Rich has already lived decades longer than his father, killed on the job. Rich wants better for his son, Chub, so when the opportunity arises to buy 24-7 Ridge—costing them all the savings they’ve squirreled away for their growing family—he grabs it, unbeknownst to Colleen. Because the reality is their family isn’t growing; Colleen has lost several pregnancies. And she isn’t alone. As a midwife, Colleen has seen it with her own eyes.
For decades, the herbicides the logging company uses were considered harmless. But Colleen is no longer so sure. What if these miscarriages aren’t isolated strokes of bad luck? As mudslides take out clear-cut hillsides and salmon vanish from creeks, her search for answers threatens to unravel not just Rich’s plans for the 24-7, but their marriage too, dividing a town that lives and dies on timber along the way.
Told from the perspectives of Rich, Colleen, and Chub, this is a realistic portrait of a community clinging to a vanishing way of life amid the perils of environmental degradation and a mystery that threatens to derail its way of life.
Songbirds: A Novel by Christy Lefteri
“It began with a crunch of leaves and earth. So early, so cold, the branches shone with ice. I’d returned to collect the songbirds. They are worth more than their weight in gold.”
Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works on the island as a nanny and maid—having left her native Sri Lanka to try to earn enough to support her daughter, left behind and raised by relatives. But Nisha has vanished; one evening, she steps out on a mysterious errand and doesn’t return. The police write off her disappearance as just another runaway domestic worker, so her employer, Petra, undertakes the investigation.
Petra’s unravelling of Nisha’s last days in Cyprus lead her to Nisha’s friends—other maids in the neighborhood—and to the darker side of a migrant’s life, where impossible choices leave them vulnerable, captive, and worse. Based on the real-life disappearance of domestic workers in Cyprus.
This is the title I have not yet read. Christy Lefteri, is the author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, a favorite title that I recommend to book clubs for it's insights into the plight of immigrants. Songbirds promises to be a story of the fight for truth and justice, and of women reclaiming their lost voices.
Chicago, 1944: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki’s older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family’s reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train.
Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose’s death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth.
Inspired by historical events, Clark and Division features a heartbreakingly real crime fiction plot with rich period details. Naomi Hirahara has gleaned many personal stories from her thirty years of research and archival work in Japanese American history.
Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor by Anna Qu
As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family’s garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life.
Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life’s truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work.
Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi’an to New York, Made in China is a memoir that is unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.
A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress by Alison Hawthorne Deming
As the book begins, Deming is remodeling an old family home and discovers objects in the walls, among them: a shell button, a hand-crafted wooden shoe, a tiny awl with a needle point, and a fancy brass hatpin. This time capsule suggests people crafted their own shoes, and valued simple ornaments to accessorize clothing and hairstyles. Then she goes to The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of art to view the sardine dress designed by Yves Saint Lauren in 1983. This dress reminds her of the herring seiners at the Bay of Fundy that she visited as a child.
Part memoir, part cultural history, A Woven World celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations. Deming’s grandmother and mother sewed coats and dresses for her and later she made a satin prom dress for herself. The reader revisits clothing—camel hair, crinolines—and family history in delightful ways that may have you searching for a photo or two from your own past.
I hope your summer adventures continue to be varied and safe
Remember to support Independent Bookstores and your local library!
