A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Nuance and Culture in A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

by Leave a Comment

In an age of easy jet travel, very little of the world seems inaccessible anymore. But some places, because of their extreme location (the peak of Mt. Everest) or the political boundaries we’ve set (Tibet), retain their exotic flavor. For me, Iran is one of those places–so remote and inaccessible that I hadn’t, until recently, even explored it through literature. The couple of films I’d seen–Persepolis and Argo left me with very specific impressions–but it wasn’t until reading A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by that the richness of the Iranian culture began to open for me.

Through the story of one girl, Saba, and her twin sister, Mahtab (who may have emigrated to the US), Nayeri unfolds the complexities of post-revolutionary village life in Iran. The book is so gorgeous and thought-provoking that I was still looking for excuses to bring it up in conversation even weeks after turning the final page. This book reminded me of work by Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Diana Abu-Jaber in its layered insights into a foreign culture and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I thought I was reading this book because like my novella, Polska, 1994, it’s about a girl looking for the truth of what happened to her mother. But it was so much more…

Juxtaposing Cultures

Part of the magic of the book is in the relationship between Saba’s reality and the imagined world of her twin as she navigates a new life in America. Because the communication between the two countries is so poor, it remains plausible that Mahtab is living it up in America like Saba’s twin sense intimates. But it’s equally plausible that Mahtab is a vehicle to describe the stifled desires of Saba.

Because we are seeing two worlds at once, we learn more about both of them. Saba buys tapes of American TV shows smuggled into the country and Mahtab lives the life of an American TV show. Clothed in a headscarf, Saba dreams of escaping to a foreign university where she can study anything she wants–a path that may involve marrying and then getting the consent of her husband. Meanwhile Mahtab the free attends Harvard where she Americanizes her name and experiments with dating. Saba’s dreams in many ways seem very small, but in comparison to Mahtab’s life, each tiny detail rings with importance. And Nayeri imbues each small desire with such sweet innocence that it’s easy to crawl inside of Saba’s life and begin to understand the complexity of the world she lives in.

Literature of Exile

“The moral police don’t hate indecency as much as their own urges.” – Dina Nayeri

Of course in many ways the writing of this book must have functioned in reverse. Nayeri, an Iranian exile who emigrated to the US at age ten. So while she is writing of a sister in Iran dreaming of life in America, in reality Nayeri is living an American life and projecting back to what life might have been like if she stayed in Iran. It’s a complicated relationship, particularly because Nayeri easily could have used this book as a chance to either throw potshots at the revolutionary government of Iran or to wax nostalgic about a homeland lost.

What I love and respect about this book is that she does neither. Instead, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a nuanced and loving look at the people of Iran that deals with the strict Islamic government as thoughtfully as it considers the relationships between village women. Each time I wondered whether the peek into Iran I was getting was politically biased, Nayeri would once again display her love of the underlying culture and I don’t think I could have picked a better book to begin to understand Iran.

But of course when you’re dealing with two countries in political opposition, there is always a slant and I did wonder what an Iranian woman would think of this book. My hunch is that whatever she would think of the politics, the daily life and human experience would ring true.

Resisting Expectations

“Women always do these kinds of jobs–cleansing each other of filth and sin. It is a way of showing the world that it is not by the standards of men that they are judged and found lacking.” – Dina Nayer

Because there is such a tortured political history between the US and Iran (and because my understanding of the situation is so limited), I did come into this book with some baggage. I expected total subjugation of women. I expected tight control and arbitrary regulations. I expected to come out hating the revolutionary government. But Nayeri deals more in human truths than political ones, which is a far better tack, and when given the opportunity to fulfill some cliche or other, she turns the cliche on its head and teaches the reader about thinking beyond the normal expectations.

For example, when Saba consents to a marriage with a man she does not love but who might offer her freedom in the future, I honestly expected (as she expected) for her to be raped on her wedding night. Instead what happens that night and throughout the course of her marriage is infinitely more nuanced, thoughtful, and (at times) heartbreaking. And when Saba’s beautiful but poor (and therefore powerless) friend Ponneh is attacked in the marketplace for revealing too much (or because her beauty is heartbreaking), Nayeri reveals some of the human frailty that goes into terrorizing others. It’s not always a comfortable look, but it’s an important one.

Our Global Village

“Now that she is older… with her own home and family, she considers all the mothers she has been offered, each good for a handful of things: Khanom Basir for household tricks, Khanom Mansoori for mischief, Dr. Zohreh for educated advice, Khanom Omidi for wisdom. Together they have failed to replace her mother, who was good at none of these things.” – Dina Nayeri

One of the highlights of this book is the relationships whether the triangle of love and friendship between Saba, Reza, and Ponneh or the chorus of village women who both enforce and thwart norms in ways that are infinitely interesting. Their relationships are complex and as much as they have their own lives and desires, there is also an underlying level of support and love.

As I was reading this book, I was feeling very lonely. I nearly cried when I read about the women in Saba’s village and how they gathered in her home after her marriage and “showed her how to store her spices, and bone her fish, and every other mundane thing they could think of”. At the same time, my American friend who is an expat in Singapore wrote a blog post about the village of people she’s finally found to support her. And another friend, a Romanian emigrant to America, replied about the instability of an adopted community. I realized that one of the things I was most attracted to in this book was that feeling of connection and community. I grew up in a small town that I yearned to leave, but now as I get older and am thinking about starting a family, I wonder where my support system is. I have a global network of beloved friends who can speak to my soul, but here in Seattle I have only a few people I would burden with requests to help build a deck or babysit our theoretical children.

I could relate to Saba’s pulling away from her home and I also saw in this book the way the women around her were trying to teach her what they had done to survive and to show her that she is part of something greater. By opening up in a comment to my friend’s post, I let myself see what I was missing. I also let others see what I have been missing and I’m realizing that my village here in Seattle is stronger than I thought.

Now that I’ve tasted a bit of Iran, I’m excited to learn more about her people and culture. Maybe I’ll sneak down to Portland for a sumptuously relaxed dinner at Persian House (I have a wicked craving for doogh) or just cuddle up on the couch while streaming The Patience Stone.

If you want to experience this gorgeous look at Iran for yourself, pick up a copy of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Ambiguity and The Effect of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits

by Leave a Comment

Confession time. I have a crush on . I’ve never met her and can’t really conjure up an image of what she looks like–no, it’s her brain that I love. I adored both The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment because they opened up a whole world of literature for me that exists between science fiction and conventional narrative. She delves so deeply into the complex ways that our thoughts shape us, that her stories almost become alternate realities. Anyway, I was casting about for something to read this week and when I saw The Effect of Living Backwards on my shelf, I knew I had to read it.

Casting About

Unmoored, lost… all these words come up a lot lately in my reviews. I’ve been searching. This has been a really crazy year for me as I’ve published two books, started to write for the LA Review of Books, and most recently as I’ve accepted a new job. A really wonderful year, but also one that’s upended just about everything and I find myself seeking balance, consistency, and stability. None of that is likely to happen in the near term and I’m trying to embrace how wonderful change can be. Maybe that’s why I sought out The Effect of Living Backwards this week–because I knew that Julavits would force me to think deeply and in new ways.

Alice, the protagonist of The Effect of Living Backwards, is in the middle of her own mind fuck. So much so that I don’t know why I questioned for a second if her name was a Carroll reference. She’s at The International Institute for Terrorist Studies and she’s being asked to question everything about her life. Not just the events themselves–most importantly a hijacking that she and her sister were involved in–but her perceptions of those events. She’s asked to flip everything on its head and try and uncover what’s really real.

“After four more bewildering sessions with Clifford, my autobiography lay in penciled tatters on her metal desk. I admitted to the possibility… that the Moroccan Air plan on which my sister and I were passengers had never been a proper part of the Moroccan Air fleet. The pilots on Flight 919 were part of the hijacking, as were the other passengers, as were the police.” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Crazy as this is going to sound, I could relate to this complete and total deconstruction of her life. At this point I don’t know whether it was having a professor for a father or being raised around a bunch of gifted and talented kids, but the impulse to take every aspect of my life apart and look at each component from all angles (including the “it was all a dream” approach) is ingrained in me. Sometimes to a paralyzing degree. This kind of flexible, deep thought is part of what makes me a novelist (for which I’m grateful), but it’s also something that leads me to watch shows like Alias and Orphan Black and start to develop (paranoid) theories about my upbringing.

Part of the mastery of The Effect of Living Backwards is that although Alice is going through this process of casting about to see what is (or might be) real, the story of the hijacking (which occupies much more of the book than I anticipated) feels deeply real. It takes real craft to be able to portray indecision and confusion on the part of a character in a way that feels concrete and relatable. This is not a comfortable book to read. And I’m so glad I read it anyway.

Ars Poetica

“Because we were our father’s daughters, I continued, which was to say because we were attracted to the justified manipulation of the scientific method, we decided to initiate our own secular Shame Book project” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Alice and her sister Edith concoct (or do they transcribe?) stories of the shame experienced by people in their lives. Alice recounts tales of her entire life for Dr. Clifford. The hijackers and hostage negotiator create conflicting narratives about what’s happening with the plane.

This book is, on one level, about the art of storytelling. Alice’s questioning and unraveling of characters and actions and motivations felt very much like the process of writing a book. As I was hunting for the significant detail in the hostage negotiator’s calls, I was remembering carefully selecting these types of details in my own writing so that they would give my readers the information they need to ground themselves in time. And the same happened when I encountered a repeated passage, or, more interestingly, a passage that was slightly torqued in its repetition.

“People do not tell accurate stories about themselves when they are given the chance. They tell, as Miles Keebler called them, ‘representative anecdotes.'” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Reading this book, I realized that I use fiction to create stability and comprehension in my world. I narrow the threads of the narrative down. I eliminate nonessential characters. I seek the themes and also the wonder so that the book is coherent without being didactic. By reading about Alice’s “childhood of theoretical decision-making,” I was starting to understand what an asset all those hours of brain games were. As uncomfortable as I was in a narrative that did not have a concrete reality, The Effect of Living Backwards upended my thinking just enough to see the bright side of having he ability to see–and ultimately parse–all the possibilities.

Ambiguity Done Well

I still don’t fully know the truth of this book. And I’m fine with that. I think on a second and third read, The Effect of Living Backwards would continue to unfold. It’s the type of book I could write a dissertation about. Creating those layers of nuance and potentiality is a true art. One I appreciated even more this week when watching the season finale of Hannibal. Although at first I really loved that show, I’ve begun to feel more and more like even the writers don’t know what’s happening next. And in the final scene of the season (which I will not reveal here), I was left with yet another moment of “what the hell, why?”

As much I don’t know which version of reality to trust in Julavits’ book, I trust Julavits to have embedded the right details and motivations to make the story ambiguous rather than arbitrary. I may never read deeper into the book and get beyond the ambiguity (turns out I might like living in this state more than I thought), but I love knowing that the possibility exists.

As I’m working to delve into my next writing project, I’m also living my life a little backwards right now. I’m so glad I read this book at this time. I needed to see that ability to first see and then winnow all the factors as a strength rather than as the instrument of paralysis it can sometimes seem like. I don’t know what I’ll publish next (or when), but I hope it’s at least a tiny bit as transformational and intelligent as Julavits’ writing is.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Effect of Living Backwards from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

My Writing Process (A Blog Tour)

by 2 Comments

I’ve been tagged in the My Writing Process Blog Tour by Ann Hedreen, filmmaker, soon-to-be author of Her Beautiful Brain, and all-around great human being.

What am I working on?

My first novel, Polska, 1994 publishes this Thursday and I want to be able to tell you about the gorgeous next novel I have queued up and waiting for the masses to demand it. But I’m also realizing that there isn’t a lot of conversation around the postpartum slump that some authors (me!) experience.

I spent six years perfecting that book and it’s based on ideas I’ve been mulling for almost two decades. I’m not saying I don’t have another book in me, I do (more on that in a second), but the transition from gorgeously polished work to starting over with a blank page is flat-out brutal. And I just wanted to acknowledge that for a minute before telling you about projects that are so nascent they are basically ephemeral right now. They may well take the shape I describe and they might morph and change into something else entirely. My challenge is to not get impatient with myself and force them into being something they either aren’t or aren’t ready to be.

There are two projects I’ve been playing with since finishing Polska, 1994. One is a second novel entitled Hungry Ghosts. I sometimes say this book is about the way we change ourselves to be loved. I often believe this book is my final embrace of feminism. Right now it’s 50,000 words of starts and ideas. I’m hoping there are some gems in there, but it’s not fair to call it a novel yet. I have a structure in mind, but I’ve had many structures in mind in the nearly four years I’ve been mulling the idea. I think it will be an experimental book that draws (somehow) on the style of Alain Robbe-Grillet, but it’s really too early to say.

The second project is a book of poetry entitled Port Townsend Elegy which investigates my unfurling as an artist (and human) in grad school as well as my deep personal connection to Port Townsend, WA. This book is actually a lot more formed in terms of drafts (thanks to a lovely writing residency at The Whiteley Center in Friday Harbor), but it’s my first foray into poetry since high school and I don’t trust yet that I have the craft to pull off the book in the way I want to. So I’m learning about poetry as I write and rewrite the poems in this book. I don’t know when I’ll be comfortable to let it fly, but I do know this book is far from ready for the public eye.

I’ve also been considering writing a memoir about how living abroad changed my life. That sounds much more pat than it is. Maybe? That project is still just a glimmer in my eye.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is actually a really good question, because the way we write tends to determine the genre we write in. I write in what I consider to be a literary style, which means I pay a lot of attention to observation and the language that observation is expressed in. Plot is never the first thing I think of when writing (though it’s something I focus a lot on when editing because it is important to a certain extent). I find the writers I am most closely drawn to are novelist-poets, so I hope I don’t differ from them all that much.

But saying that your work is just like someone else’s rankles, doesn’t it? I suppose my unique “blend” comes from the fact that I read so very widely, I pay so much attention to the language (the various languages I’ve spoken over the years has taught me a syntactic flexibility that I’m proud of), and also that I’m deeply interested in culture and how that affects a character’s circumstances. That last bit is most often expressed as an obsession with oppression which leads us naturally to the next question…

Why do I write what I do?

Micheline Aharonian Marcom once said, “Write into the heat.” She also talked a lot about obsessions. After putting the final, final edit on Polska, 1994 this weekend, I can’t see how people write literature about things they aren’t obsessed with, because to work that deeply in a project for so long, you’d murder the writing (or perhaps a family member) if the story wasn’t something you needed to tell.

My obsession is oppression–both political and personal. I’m a quiet person which means it’s often easy for people to run themselves right over me (intentionally or not). I don’t usually push back too hard because I have a strong sense of who I am (and am not all that concerned with what others think). But still, over time you want someone to notice who you are and acknowledge that you matter. I especially want some sort of shared purpose and understanding and I’m learning that in order to get that, I have to assert myself more.

And I’ve lived in both Chile and Poland–experiences that changed my perspective–helped me see how governments and corporations sometimes run right over people. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how oppression also happens on a gender level.

I write about becoming. About rising up and blossoming. I write about creating the world that I want to live in and the ways I can and cannot help others live in that world too.

How does your writing process work?

I could tell you about how I split up my day to get the most writing time possible while still holding down a full time job. I could write about the hour of writing time in the morning I too often sleep through or the hour in the evening I often give up because I just want to see my husband before I pass out on the couch.

Instead I want to write about ideas and how a project comes about. A poem or story starts for me with a nagging question or feeling. Something that isn’t sitting just right either because it’s something that feels wrong or even simply alien (without judgment). Oftentimes I’ll mull it over for a significant period of time (though not always decades) and fuss about it and read about it and talk about it. But nothing ever feels resolved until I finally sit down with paper and pen. It’s funny how even a few minutes can make everything feel all better or more comprehensible or manageable. I don’t solve the problem there in the first few minutes or in the first draft (or really ever), but each time I sit down and write about one of these rubs, I learn more about it and how I feel about it. I keep digging and learning and often discover that the “problem” is something entirely different than I even imagined. Eventually I have a narrative or a pretty good capture of the feeling and then I edit, edit, edit. The honing of language and shaping of elements that happen during the editing process are very important to the end product and with Polska, 1994, I went through over twenty drafts to get it just right.

By nature, a blog tour should have a “here’s who’s up next,” but it’s been a crazy busy month and every chain letter has to end somewhere, right? Instead, here are a few of my favorite bloggers (besides, Ann, of course):

SILENCE & HONEYSUCKLE by Gwendolyn Jerris
PEACE & CENTER by Natasha Oliver
PURPLE HOUSES by Nikki Kallio
REWRITING HISTORY by Roxana Arama
A LITTLE ELBOW ROOM by Kim Mayer

They may not be answering this same set of questions directly, but their work nourishes me all the time and I think it will do the same for you.

Coping with a Personal Apocalypse in The End of the City

by Leave a Comment

Some events so change a generation, a society, that it’s difficult to imagine how you’d even write about them or their aftermath. In The End of the City, introduces us to one boy who’s rebuilding his life after losing his dad in events that may or may not be precipitated by the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Alternate Realities

The narrative of this book actually takes place in two realities that alternate throughout the book. One is the land of teenaged Ben Moor living in Reston, VA and dealing with his dad’s death. He’s a pretty typical teenager–trying to mask the hurt while also trying to build a life of his own. Nevertheless, the world is carefully created and well imagined which makes it all very interesting, immediate, and personal. While Ben, Bobby Jihad (Ben’s brother) and their friends are living it up on spiked ginger ales and track meets, I worried about Ben’s sadness. I worried more about Bobby Jihad’s bravado. And sometimes I wanted to see Kitty kick Ben in the nuts.

The secondary world, that of an assassin in New York who has just been ordered to knock off one of his own crew. Although the action here takes place in 2011 New York, it’s so dark that I frequently wondered if it was an alternate history. I actually spent a lot of time wondering about its relationship to the first story. But even as the back of my brain puzzled over why both main characters drank ginger ale and had strangely similar ill-fitting suits, I was wrapped up in the cinematic pace of the action.

The Voice of a Generation

“I look down on you from the ridge, on you and what remains of you, and in your blood I see a map of your own making (and mine). I recognize it; I’m quite sure I at least half understand the language.” – David Bendernagel, The End of the City

Part what makes these two worlds so effective is the dense and evocative language Bendernagel uses. Although not as turgid as the dialogue in Rian Johnson’s Brick, The End of the City has a lingo all its own. The language–a kind of disaffected shorthand that feels very male and very much set in its generation–sets the mood immediately. It also forces the reader to slow down and inhabit what’s happening or be lost forever. For example, Ben’s reference to the events of September 11, 2001, “Jet fuel goes up. Two towers collapse.” is cryptic, but there’s a lot of story (and emotion) held just below that surface.

Cultural Referents

One distinctive aspect of that voice is the cultural referents Bendernagel uses. I beamed when reading how one character “pulled a McConaughey” and also wondered how many readers would miss the reference to Dazed and Confused. This decision between being specific (which sometimes means being oblique) is something I’ve struggled with in my own writing. Reading The End of the City, I realized how close the connection between writer and reader can feel when you’re on the inside of the jokes.

The other side of cultural referents is that they can easily be misunderstood. I struggled with this as I tried to reconcile the two story lines in this book. Bendernagel kept dropping references to Back to the Future and 12 Monkeys: two referents that signaled to me that time travel was imminent. When I finally understood the actual relationship between the narratives, I felt a little led astray.

Writing about Tragedy

In the end, it doesn’t matter if Ben’s dad’s death is suicide, a heart attack, or an accident. It doesn’t matter if it’s related to 9/11 or not. What matters is the personal tragedy to Ben of losing his dad at twelve. And that’s the perfect approach and what I love about novels–they take the whole big world and break it down into individual characters and experiences we can get inside and empathize with. I mostly avoid books about 9/11 (and, actually, the phrase “9/11”) either because I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with it or because I’m terrified of the sanctified air we apply to that day. I really appreciated how, by dealing not with the tidy euphemisms we’ve developed to talk about that day but instead with the loss experienced by one boy, Bendernagel let me feel the pure weight of the emotion. He let me get inside the feeling.

While the voice in The End of the City was so strongly male and so American that for a couple of weeks after finishing this book I found myself drawn to books about foreign lands written by women just to balance myself out, it was a treat to read something so different than what I’d been reading lately. When Bendernagel offered me this review copy, he said people had compared the book to the work of Jonathan Lethem. There’s some of that, but I’d say it’s even more grounded in the gritty and weird movies of the late 1990s like 12 Monkeys, Heat, and even Se7en. That may sound like a stretch for all the emotional impact I promised in the previous paragraph, but for a someone who fell in love with her husband while watching and discussing those very films so many years ago, it’s all a pretty good fit.

Reading The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Against Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

by 2 Comments

I want to write about this gorgeous little book I read and how it made me ponder questions like ,”What if your entire life could be gathered into one work of art?” I want to consider how memoirists rarely stop at one book, poets and fiction writers scatter bits of themselves throughout their entire oeuvre, and visual artists capture one image or scene at a time. I want to think about how literary critics and art historians piece the clues together, but the story of an artist’s life is rarely whole. But as I was reading In The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by , all I could think about was Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.

Two very different books that both revolve around a single painting. In The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, that painting is a four-kilometer artwork painted over the course of Salvatierra’s lifetime which has been kept in a shed. In Bluebeard, that painting is a secret work that is kept hidden in a barn until the very end. Both painters, Juan Salvatierra and Rabo Karabekian, are outsider artists (although Karabekian is a museum guard and is in constant contact with the New York art scene). And while Salvatierra has casually tried to exhibit his work, Karabekian keeps his completely secret.

The Legacy of Bluebeard

So what was it that made these two books meld in my mind? For one, Bluebeard is one of those books that has stuck with me strongly in the decade since I read it. Not all parts of the book, in fact I’m sure to get a fact or two about the book wrong here, but the reveal of the painting. I think because I read the book when I was realizing that visual art was never going to be my forte and I was rediscovering how much I love writing. And then there’s the strength of the reveal. If you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here and skip ahead to the next section.

Karabekian’s barn contains a large scale canvas that portrays what he saw on the day that World War II ended. The way Vonnegut unfurls that information, the perfect mix of visual information and letting my imagination fill it in. For years after I read the book, I’d scan gallery exhibits and find paintings that I thought were like Karabekian’s work. I was obsessed. Eventually I relegated the book to the annals of my brain, but something about the opening page of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra where Salvatierra’s son, Miguel, is sitting in an exhibit in Europe watching a replica of his father’s painting slowly pass by brought the memories back.

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

None of that is to say that this book cannot stand on its own. If I had never read Bluebeard, I would have loved the opening of this book. I would have loved the spacious way that Mairal allows the reader to transition from chapter to chapter. Each chapter is so short and yet so complete as you follow the story of Miguel’s search for the one missing canvas that represents one year in his father’s life.

Mairal beautifully balances exposition about Juan Salvatierra’s life (he became mute as a child and this painting became one of the primary ways he expressed himself), the visual details of the painting, and Miguel’s search. Although I was relatively certain from the beginning that all the rolls of canvas would eventually be reunited, and I was not surprised at why that canvas had gone missing, I was so immersed in the family’s story that I couldn’t put the book down.

Some novellas achieve that perfect amount of engagement and openness that allow them to feel bigger and more complete than the longest saga. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is one of those novellas. It is the story of the search for the one roll of canvas that’s missing after Salvatierra’s death. It’s the story of two sons unfurling and understanding their father’s life and lifework. And it’s the story of how everything we do in our lives really does add up to one whole. I hope you’ll love it as much as I did.

I have no way of knowing if Mairal ever read Bluebeard and it’s possible that the connection exists only in my mind, but when I say that The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra brought me back in mind to Bluebeard time and time again, I mean it as the highest compliment.

If this review made you want to read either book, pick up a copy of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra or Bluebeard from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.