The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World's Strangest Syndromes by Frank Bures

Summary from Goodreads:
Jon Ronson meets David Grann in this fascinating, wildly entertaining adventure and travel story about how culture can make us go totally insane

The Geography of Madness is an investigation of "culture-bound" syndromes, which are far stranger than they sound. Why is it, for example, that some men believe, against all reason, that vandals stole their penises, even though they're in good physical shape? In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures travels around the world to trace culture-bound syndromes to their sources—and in the process, tells a remarkable story about the strange things all of us believe.

While I was traveling to and from Book Riot Live, I read Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.  I was really intrigued with the way a non-Westernized culture viewed illness and how those views clashed with the medical establishment.  So when I saw Melville House (a favorite publisher) was putting out a book about culture-bound syndromes - those conditions that seem to exist in the psychology of a culture that contribute physical morbidity or mortality - I was immediately interested.

The Geography of Madness begins as Bures is searching through Lagos, Nigeria, for someone to talk to him about "penis theft" - yes, that's a thing, and it's generally been covered in the Western media with ridicule so Bures has a bit of trouble getting someone to admit it has happened to them.  He also visits rural areas of China searching for sufferers of similar types of syndromes and practitioners who treat them.  In between Bures discusses his own life living outside the US and the culture-shock he has felt.

This wasn't the book I was looking for - I was looking for something with more science and less memoir.  However, the concept is very interesting, how our cultural beliefs play upon the mind and body to create syndromic diseases with physical symptoms that are unique to time and place.  The syndromes don't have to be fantastical, either.  Bures cites syndromes like "lower back pain" - which can have myriad causes and manifestations - where the incidence varies from country to country even among those populations with shared cultural backgrounds (the US vs Germany, for instance).

I could have done without constant comment on whether the brown and/or non-US people he communicated with spoke quality English. That got annoying.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this book via Edelweiss.

Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

Summary from Goodreads:
Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th-century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when “being a writer” was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen’s attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was “Mad Madge,” an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years.

Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past, rather than “historical fiction.” Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new narrative approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Back when I thought I was going to back and pick up a PhD in literature (as one does), I took a graduate-level course in Restoration literature. Included in the reading list was this very curious piece of writing, The Blazing World.  It was written by one Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, and is considered to be the one of the first science fiction genre novels.  So when Liberty mentioned there was this new historical novel based on Margaret's life you can bet I was all over that in a hot second.

Margaret the First is a gorgeous historical novel, so very lush for such a slim book (also that beautiful cover). I really loved how Dutton managed to combine her own prose and imagining of Margaret's inner life with that of Margaret's own writing - and Margaret started writing and publishing because her husband was broke (penniless Royalists were not uncommon at the time, but Margaret was a bestselling writer who miraculously kept them afloat). There's a great deal of attention paid to the fact that Margaret cannot do the one thing expected of her - settle down and be a baby-making factory - and all the really ghastly treatments that she and her husband William go through to boost their fertility (which probably made everything worse). All that sort of distills into the visions Margaret has that find their way into her writing. What would she have created had she been given the education men received?

Go order this beautiful book - out from Catapult Press.

Dear FTC: I bought my copy of this book.

Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman

Summary from Goodreads:
A groundbreaking biography that places an obsessive, unrequited love at the heart of the writer's life story, transforming her from the tragic figure we have previously known into a smoldering Jane Eyre.

Famed for her beloved novels, Charlotte Brontë has been known as well for her insular, tragic family life. The genius of this biography is that it delves behind this image to reveal a life in which loss and heartache existed alongside rebellion and fierce ambition. Claire Harman seizes on a crucial moment in the 1840s when Charlotte worked at a girls' school in Brussels and fell hopelessly in love with the husband of the school's headmistress. Her torment spawned her first attempts at writing for publication, and the object of her obsession haunts the pages of every one of her novels--he is Rochester in Jane Eyre, Paul Emanuel in Villette. Another unrequited love--for her publisher--paved the way for Charlotte to enter a marriage that ultimately made her happier than she ever imagined. Drawing on correspondence unavailable to previous biographers, Harman establishes Brontë as the heroine of her own story, one as dramatic and triumphant as one of her own novels.

Charlotte Brontë seems to be having a moment right now.  Jane Austen has had the market on fandom for a while but Charlotte's gaining some ground (Re-Jane and Jane Steele are both on Mt. TBR).  And this includes a new biography from Claire Harman.

Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart is a very readable biography of Charlotte that concentrates on her intellectual and emotional life and how her experiences translated (sometimes word-for-word) into her novels.  And she is one interesting lady, no lie. Harman was allowed access to many letters that had only recently been published for the first time which recasts some events in Charlotte's life, including her death. Even as well-versed as I am in Brontë biography, this was a treat to read.  I loved it - and if I Instagram or Litsy (hi, y'all! Have we made Litsy-ing a verb yet?) my annotations you know I am into it.

As a bonus, Harman also included Emily and Anne in the biography since their lives were so closely intertwined with Charlotte's (and Branwell, unfortunately...ugh, that dude should have been dropped in a vat of spiders, what a spoiled brat).

Dear FTC: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher (thank you thank you!)

PS: I haven't read her Jane Austen biography, yet, and now I really want to!

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah

Summary from Goodreads:
Scientists agree that a pathogen is likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future. But which one? And how?

Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where they’ve never been seen before. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new. While we can’t know which pathogen will cause the next pandemic, by unraveling the story of how pathogens have caused pandemics in the past, we can make predictions about the future. In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, the prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah—whose book on malaria, The Fever, was called a “tour-de-force history” (The New York Times) and “revelatory” (The New Republic)—interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of contagions, drawing parallels between cholera, one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens, and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.

To reveal how a new pandemic might develop, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey, from its emergence in the South Asian hinterlands as a harmless microbe to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world, all the way to its latest beachhead in Haiti. Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in cholera’s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.

By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next global contagion might look like— and what we can do to prevent it.

I think Pandemic was pretty good. I do like how Shah tried to organize the material into chapters according to the ways infectious diseases take advantage of human behaviors to spread into pandemics. However, that meant the narrative ping-ponged around between different diseases and often felt too disjointed for my taste. More distinction should have been made between the different modes of transmission of the different agents (she did cover cholera fairly extensively). I have a lot more "insider baseball" information packed into my head on this subject so can fill in detail better.

(If you're interested in a real-time example of many ideas in this book, look up the news and medical articles surrounding the current health crisis surrounding Zika virus.  Also, David Quammen's Spillover is an excellent take on the same topic.)

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this book via Edelweiss.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald

Summary from Goodreads:
Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen...

Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist—even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory.

All she wants is to share the books she loves with the citizens of Broken Wheel and to convince them that reading is one of the great joys of life. But she makes some unconventional choices that could force a lot of secrets into the open and change things for everyone in town. Reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, this is a warm, witty book about friendship, stories, and love.

1. Book about loving books...yes!
2. Books help people overcome problems...yes!
3. Book set in Iowa...YES!

Ok, I was so down for this book when The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend was pitched to me.  A book about books! Set in Iowa!  Yes, yes, yes.

And it is a very sweet, feel-good read with hits of 84 Charing Cross Road, Chocolat, and the movie Green Card (which gets an oblique reference). Directionless outsider brings books to a small town and finds love.  It's a basic plot that works.

However, being an Iowan (Cedar County, where the book is set, is directly east of where I live), I have to say that none of the Iowa characters in the book particularly sound like they're from Iowa.  At all.  And Sara sounds exactly like them - she shouldn't, given that she's from Sweden. Maybe that's an artifact of translation but Broken Wheel felt just...generic.  It's like any old one-dimensional small town if you've read about small towns in a book.  There's a town stoic-doesn't-talk-much-love-interest, a town drunk, a town busybody, a town gossip, and a town hard-bitten-straight-talking-lady-who-runs-the-diner.  In addition, a few B-plots got crammed in there without much breathing room.

If you're looking for a book set in "Iowa" - this really isn't it.  The Bridges of Madison County, for all it's faults, feels nailed into its setting.  It feels Iowan.  So does Shoeless Joe.  But Broken Wheel?  Not so much.

But if you're just looking for a nice spring/beach read with a lot of fuzzy, warm feelings about books and reading with a happy ending?  This is your book.

Super side note: Iowa legalized gay marriage in April 2009, before the action of the book begins (there was a throw-away line that bothered me).

Dear FTC: I bought my copy of this book.

The Literature Book by DK Publishing

Summary from Goodreads:
A global look at the greatest works of Eastern and Western literature and the themes that unite them, for students and lovers of literature and reading.

The Literature Book is a fascinating journey through the greatest works of world literature, from the Iliad to Don Quixote to The Great Gatsby. Around 100 crystal-clear articles explore landmark novels, short stories, plays, and poetry that reinvented the art of writing in their time, whether Ancient Greece, post-classical Europe, or modern-day Korea.

As part of DK's award-winning Big Ideas Simply Explained series, The Literature Book uses infographics and images to explain key ideas and themes. Biographies of important authors offer insight into their lives and other writings, and a section on Further Reading details more than 150 additional works to explore.

Discover masterpieces from the world's greatest authors, and explore the context, creative history, and literary traditions that influenced each major work of fiction with The Literature Book.

Series Overview: Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics, along with straightforward and engaging writing, to make complex subjects easier to understand. These award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.

The DK "Book" series, where they take a large concept and break it into chronological or technical parts with lots of pictures and graphics ("big ideas explained simply"), are really pretty books.  And they do look very helpful.

The Literature Book is a decent overview of major works of narrative (mostly) fiction and they do make an effort to get outside the European/North American focus. The infographics were really fun, I particularly enjoyed the one for Dante's Inferno.  I wasn't all that interested in the actual words or descriptions of the books - for something that claims to Explain Big Ideas Simply the editors used a lot of complicated phrases (what, exactly, is Literary Montage or meter/foot in poetry?  And don't tell me to look in the glossary). So the book straddled a weird space between being for newbies and being for experienced readers.  I think this would be a good book for literature teachers as a classroom resource since they could then use it as jumping off points or for students to start research.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this book via Edelweiss.

Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin

Summary from Goodreads:

The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel.

Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply.

“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.

Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.

Books with a unique construction are kind of a thing I like. How can you tell a story without using a traditional point-A-to-point-B narrative?  In Forty Rooms Olga Grushin has chosen to tell the story of her protagonist - who is never actually referred to by her given name at any point in the story - using only the forty different rooms she will inhabit over her lifetime.  Her childhood bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom.  A college dorm room, a boyfriend's dorm room.  A first apartment.  A shared home.  The rooms of the "perfect" house.

I really loved the structure.  After a while the rooms began to feel like cages or ways to define the main character from the outside.  The inner life of the character, the poet she intended to be, becomes smaller and smaller, swallowed by the wife and mother she becomes.  I also feel like the character uses those same definitions as an easy "out" when she failed to become a spectacular poet - by her own yardstick -  like her childhood heroes (which is a tall order for pretty much any person in any profession, to outshine one's heroes).  I didn't like a couple of the minor characters (Mrs. Simmons was unnecessary, I think) although the decision made near the end of the book with the school friend Olga was an interesting one.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC provided via Edelweiss.

And After Many Days by Jowhor Ile

Summary from Goodreads:

An unforgettable debut novel about a boy who goes missing, a family that is torn apart, and a nation on the brink

During the rainy season of 1995, in the bustling town of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, one family's life is disrupted by the sudden disappearance of seventeen-year-old Paul Utu, beloved brother and son. As they grapple with the sudden loss of their darling boy, they embark on a painful and moving journey of immense power which changes their lives forever and shatters the fragile ecosystem of their once ordered family. Ajie, the youngest sibling, is burdened with the guilt of having seen Paul last and convinced that his vanished brother was betrayed long ago. But his search for the truth uncovers hidden family secrets and reawakens old, long forgotten ghosts as rumours of police brutality, oil shortages, and frenzied student protests serve as a backdrop to his pursuit.

In a tale that moves seamlessly back and forth through time, Ajie relives a trip to the family's ancestral village where, together, he and his family listen to the myths of how their people settled there, while the villagers argue over the mysterious Company, who found oil on their land and will do anything to guarantee support. As the story builds towards its stunning conclusion, it becomes clear that only once past and present come to a crossroads will Ajie and his family finally find the answers they have been searching for.

And After Many Days introduces Ile's spellbinding ability to tightly weave together personal and political loss until, inevitably, the two threads become nearly indistinguishable. It is a masterful story of childhood, of the delicate, complex balance between the powerful and the powerless, and a searing portrait of a community as the old order gives way to the new.

I stumbled across And After Many Days via Rebecca mentioning it at some point on a Book Riot podcast.  And it sounded really, really good.  The intersection of Western drives/interference and traditional Nigerian family and cultural traditions told through the lens of one family's experience seemed like a good fit for my reading mood at the time.

I really liked the book's construction and how the reader kept getting bits and pieces of how the Utu family is connected or not connected to the political upheaval in Nigeria in the 1990s and whether Paul's disappearance is connected to those events.  It mimicked the viewpoint of a child who does not have the same knowledge or scope an adult would. I wished, though, that Ile had also included one or two chapters set between Ajie being brought home from school by his mother and the final epilogue-like three sections. I would have liked to see how Ajie and Bibi were impacted by the loss of their older brother as they finished school and went to college rather than see an end product at the end of the book.

As I was reading, I was reminded of Stewart O'Nan's Songs for the Missing in subject. The settings are quite different, obviously, but the way the "missing" child is presented within the family's life and how the families are both disrupted was similar.  Even the way the older, missing sibling relates to the younger sibling(s) was very similar.  It provided an interesting contrast to how we in the US deal with a missing child, who has likely been abducted by a private citizen, compared to the possibility in Nigeria, at the time Ile set his novel, that the government or police may be the culprit.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this book via Edelweiss.

The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer

Summary from Goodreads:
• Costa Book Award for First Novel finalist
• Dagger Award finalist

"Kate Hamer’s gripping debut novel immediately recalls the explosion of similarly titled books and movies, from Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, to The Girl on the Train to Gone Girl … "—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Keeps the reader turning pages at a frantic clip... What’s most powerful here is not whodunnit, or even why, but how this mother and daughter bear their separation, and the stories they tell themselves to help endure it.” —Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You)

“Compulsively readable...Beautifully written and unpredictable, I had to stop myself racing to the end to find out what happened.” —Rosamund Lupton (Sister)

“Both gripping and sensitive — beautifully written, it is a compulsive, aching story full of loss and redemption.” —Lisa Ballantyne (The Guilty One)

"Hamer’s dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down.” —Booklist

Newly single mom Beth has one constant, gnawing worry: that her dreamy eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, who has a tendency to wander off, will one day go missing. And then one day, it happens: On a Saturday morning thick with fog, Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in the crowd, and Carmel is gone. Shattered, Beth sets herself on the grim and lonely mission to find her daughter, keeping on relentlessly even as the authorities tell her that Carmel may be gone for good. Carmel, meanwhile, is on a strange and harrowing journey of her own—to a totally unexpected place that requires her to live by her wits, while trying desperately to keep in her head, at all times, a vision of her mother…  Alternating between Beth’s story and Carmel’s, and written in gripping prose that won’t let go, The Girl in the Red Coat—like Emma Donoghue’s Room and M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans—is an utterly immersive story that’s impossible to put down . . . and impossible to forget.

I don't know if you'd call The Girl in the Red Coat a "literary" thriller.  It's not as "thriller-y" as the blurb makes it seem, so not a traditional thriller mystery.  However, this is an excellently plotted examination of a mother and daughter after the child is kidnapped. Each of them has to survive in less than ideal situations.  Beth has to work through loss and guilt; Carmel not only has to decide what to believe in her new reality but decide whether or not to take on a specific belief system since her kidnappers turn out to be religious fanatics (FYI: she is NOT molested, if that is a thing that you don't want in your fiction; I was a bit "eeeeeeeee do I need to read this with one eye open?" when I started).

If you're a little leery of child narrators - which are a tricky thing to pull off - I would suggest giving this one a try.  The narrative jumps back and forth between the mother and the child as the story moves forward in time.  The voices establish themselves quickly without Carmel sounding too old or too cloying.  Beth's sections are outstanding.  Hamer really nails down how a parent goes through an ordeal like this, how one keeps living and believing when everyone else starts giving up. Carmel's sections aren't strong narratively, which makes since she's a child, but are phenomenal in the atmosphere and imagery they contain. The "laying on of hands" sensation as narrated by a child was extremely interesting.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this book via Edelweiss.

Arcadia by Iain Pears

Summary from Goodreads:
Henry Lytten - a spy turned academic and writer - sits at his desk in Oxford in 1962, dreaming of other worlds.

He embarks on the story of Jay, an eleven-year-old boy who has grown up within the embrace of his family in a rural, peaceful world - a kind of Arcadia. But when a supernatural vision causes Jay to question the rules of his world, he is launched on a life-changing journey.

Lytten also imagines a different society, highly regulated and dominated by technology, which is trying to master the science of time travel.

Meanwhile - in the real world - one of Lytten's former intelligence colleagues tracks him down for one last assignment.

As he and his characters struggle with questions of free will, love, duty and the power of the imagination, Lytten discovers he is not sure how he wants his stories to end, nor even who is imaginary...

Being my first experience with Iain Pears, I was expecting Arcadia to be a twisty, literary, very smart novel.  There's a lot going on here: an Inklings-like writing group with fantasy elements (do you like Narnia?  There's a Narnia call back.), time-travel, 1984-like totalitarian future.  Mixed in among the hard SF elements and the fantasy elements is a chicken-and-egg type question:  did Lytten dream up his Arcadia pastoral society which was then realized through Angela's technology or did he dream up the futuristic world which seeded his own reality?  I don't know.  This book twists and turns with characters that jump in and out and change as the narrative moves between settings.

I'm not quite sure Pears pulls the whole thing off - the fantasy and hard SF and Shakespeare and Cold War antics....it's easier if you just go with it and don't think about it too much.  The story doesn't quite gel and some elements - like the "psychomathematician" stuff - pale next to novels where they're used better (think the meta-physics David Mitchell handled in The Bone Clocks).  However, the ending of the book is excellent.  Pears leaves everything for the reader to piece together and I appreciate that greatly.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this book via Edelweiss.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Summary from Goodreads:
Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.

A disturbing, yet beautifully composed narrative told in three parts, The Vegetarian is an allegorical novel about modern day South Korea, but also a story of obsession, choice, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

I don't know if I can distill into words the experience of reading this book. This was a vivid, intense one-sitting read.  The line between reality and distortion kept shifting.  Is mental illness at the root of Yeong-hye's behavior?  What about the brother-in-law?  Does it spread?  Three linked novella-like chapters constantly re-framed why Yeong-hye has stopped eating meat and also commented on societal expectations (I think I missed a few deeper points because I'm not familiar with Korean cultural norms as Korean readers certainly would, but it definitely didn't detract). We are never given a portion of the narrative that is explicitly from Yeong-hye's perspective.  We get snippets of dreams or visions, but no complete perspective so she is always presented through other characters.

The translation is excellent - shout-out to the translator Deborah Smith.

Dear FTC: I started with a DRC of this novel via Edelweiss and switched to a library copy.

The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

Summary from Goodreads:
Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all. As she mines her memories for clues, she recalls her life as an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept up into the glitzy, gritty world of Second Empire Paris. In order to survive, she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from empress’s maid to debut singer, all the while weaving a complicated web of romance, obligation, and political intrigue.

Featuring a cast of characters drawn from history, The Queen of the Night follows Lilliet as she moves ever closer to the truth behind the mysterious opera and the role that could secure her reputation -- or destroy her with the secrets it reveals.

The second I heard that Alexander Chee had a novel coming out about a Belle Époque opera singer with a secret I went on a mission to figure out how I might ferret out an advance copy.  I put The Queen of the Night on pre-order in hardback but I knew I was going to need time to read, and re-read, and digest.  Basically, I just want to snuggle the book and pet it because it is that good so I'll try and write something reasonably coherent.

Lilliet Berne is what is known as a Falcon soprano (named for the first such singer, Cornélie Falcon), with a voice of incredible darkness and power but a very fragile physical instrument.  Lilliet's secrets have secrets, secrets that could be deadly.  When she is offered an original role, an accolade that would cap her career, the opera's libretto threatens to bring her secrets to light.  The librettist is an unknown, the novel it is based on unknown to Lilliet.  As she recalls her life, delving through many layers of intrigue and disguise to determine which person betrayed her, the reader begins to wonder: who is Lilliet and what will happen to her?

The Queen of the Night is a novel at the intersection of Romanticism and Realism, two major movements in nineteenth-century art.  The surreal nesting of Lilliet's many-layered life inside the harsh reality of an orphan in Paris during the Second Empire.  The sturm und drang of the opera next to the monotony of being a grisette in Empress Eugénie's vast wardrobe.  The glittering heights of celebrity outline the horrifying years when Lilliet is treated as a possession.  Were this to become an opera, Verdi would have to compose the music.

Throughout the novel, Lilliet muses on the ideas of fate, hubris, and vengeance, giving us a glorious line:

...the gods did not kill for hubris - for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn. (p46)

Lilliet is the Queen of the Night - a role she loves for its dark power and famous for the fiendishly difficult "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen"/"The vengeance of hell boils in my heart," is Carmen - trapped by the hand of cards dealt to her, is Violetta - caught between her heart and her past as a courtesan, is Leonora - the casualty of a revenge plot decades in the making.  As Lilliet notes: "victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat."  As I was re-reading the book, I noticed that I wanted to listen to Mozart's Don Giovanni and Pucinni's Tosca.  Odd, because Giovanni is a baritone role, clearly not something Lilliet would sing, and Tosca did not premiere until 1900, well after the events of the book.  But there is something echoed in Lilliet's struggle against what she views as a curse brought on by hubris: Giovanni brazenly inviting his doom to supper and Tosca singing her haunting aria "Vissi d'arte" about art and prayer.

Tucked in among all the activity with circuses and Emperors and celebrity and opera, there is the simple story of a teenage girl who believes she is to blame for a karmic misfortune.  In her haste to get away she commits error after error as any inexperienced, grieving teenager might do, stumbling into misfortune and by sheer strength of will and cleverness keeping herself alive.  She becomes the famous Lilliet, leaving the adult woman to salvage what is left of the little girl from the Minnesota prairie.  Whatever your thoughts on opera as a music form, this coming-of-age tale with its mysterious twists and turns is the heart of Chee's novel.  A brilliant book to start 2016. 

Bellissima.  Bellissimo. Bravo.

PS: If you aren't familiar with opera - it isn't all Valkyries with blond braids and Viking hats, trust me - I suggest the following list of discs to check out:
Renée Fleming, "The Beautiful Voice", "Bel Canto", "Renée Fleming"
Jonas Kaufmann, "The Verdi Album", "The Best of Jonas Kaufmann"
Bryn Terfel, "Bad Boys", 1996 Don Giovanni recording
Joyce DiDonato, "Drama Queens", "Diva Divo"
José Carreras, "Passion"
The #1 Opera Album and The #1 Opera Album II - these are compilations with both older and newer recordings but wide range

Dear FTC: I did a first-read of this novel using a DRC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss and then I bought a copy because why the hell wouldn't I?