6 great books with Minnesota connections you might have missed
Moon Witch, Spider King
Marlon James
Riverhead Books, 656 pages, $30
December 12, 2022 — 1:48pm
Marlon James' "Moon Witch, Spider King," the second novel in his Dark Star trilogy, is a medieval feast of dazzling fantasy. It's vulgar and vivacious, big and brutal, full of rivaling monarchies, Machiavellian ministers, feuding families, revengeful prostitutes, evil priests and a century-old witch, all vying for power in James' extraordinarily imagined African kingdoms.
Like the first book in the trilogy, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf," "time is a cobra," coiling in and around itself in fascinating and fantastic ways. In "Moon Witch," James explores the same story of the missing boy (spoiler to say more) as the first book, but from a different character's perspective, Sogolon, the Moon Witch.
The novel is divided into five meaty sections (two or three might have been enough). Each section moves us closer to the events in the first novel, spiraling around Sogolon's stories reflecting on her Rabelaisian life (it's a perfect word for this novel). This is the Moon Witch's creation story told from Sogolon's point of view in her vernacular, a patois that's often hilarious and profound in its literal crudeness (metaphor does not come easily to her).
One of my favorite sections of the novel is toward the end when a character decides that maybe someone should write down Sogolon's story before she forgets, or, as happens early in her life, someone like the Aesi (the Spider King), and every King's chancellor (he's eternal), erases not just her memories but the memories of entire empires (there's a metaphor for colonialism here).
Sogolon's voice is so engaging that it invites readers into this novel with more ease and generosity than Tracker in the first book. Sogolon punctuates the five sections in ways that remind us she's talking. Like this.
"See the girl. The girl who live in the old termite hill." Sogolon's story takes her from a hole in the ground where she's held captive by her three older brothers, "all wicked." She escapes to a brothel in a city where she learns that "girlhood is a waste of time," and that the "burden of a woman" is "having to act stupid to make a stupid man think he smart" (duh).
"See the girl as certain things come to pass." Sogolon ends up at the royal court of a prosperous kingdom, where the King Sister enjoys Sogolon's company because she "don't come with a use." Sogolon's magic saves her life more than once, until eventually she becomes a legend in her own time, the Moon Witch. She's a kind of patron saint of abused women because women's lives in this world are measured by their menses, their "moonblood" (I'm getting to this).
"This is what the women say" (well, me). Unlike the first novel, several female characters are in the forefront of this one, and, indeed, Sogolon is a formidable one. But whether they're princesses or prostitutes, almost all the female characters' fates are tied to their biology and breeding potential. Rape is a fact of their lives (let me warn here that the violence in this book is graphic; a lot involves children and women). Women's power in this fantastic world is intimately connected to their ability to use sex to their advantage.
Sogolon rises beyond this fate because of her magic, but she's an exception. I couldn't help wondering why for all his phenomenal world-building, James couldn't imagine a different one for women (I know it's a fantasy medieval world, but still).
When I read the first book in this trilogy, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf," a National Book Award finalist, I knew I was reading a genre-altering trilogy, a series Victor LaValle describes in Bookforum that "tears down the traditional pillars of fantasy" and "rebuilds the temple." After reading "Moon Witch, Spider King," I remain convinced that James is rebuilding the genre, but I'm no longer sure he's demolishing the entire temple.
Carole E. Barrowman is an author and a professor at Alverno College in Milwaukee.
Seven Aunts
Staci Lola Drouillard
University of Minnesota Press, 312 pages, $21.95
December 8, 2022 — 10:15am
Staci Lola Drouillard's new memoir has many merits, none more important than its generous spirit. Rather than grabbing the lead role for herself, the Grand Marais, Minn., author cedes the spotlight to family members who taught her valuable lessons about history, love and family.
"Seven Aunts" is a rich group portrait of her parents' sisters. Betty, Carol, Diane, Doreen, Faye, Gloria and Lila all spent at least some of their lives on Lake Superior's North Shore. Mothers and wives, homemakers and wage-earners, they stabilized families threatened by privation, illness and discrimination.
Drouillard's aim — "to help ease the pain of the past" — implicitly encourages readers to step away from modern life's hurries and consider their forebears' experiences. A chapter on her Aunt Lila showcases this candid, affectionate book's understated charms.
When Drouillard was 10, her mother, Joyce, who had obsessive-compulsive disorder, underwent electroshock therapy. During Joyce's hospitalization, Drouillard stayed with Lila and her husband, Leroy. Lila, married at 17, raised a big family while enduring her husband's binge drinking and the repossession of her home.
In Grand Rapids, Minn., Drouillard's aunt and uncle would take their canoe to a rice bog, where Leroy "would pole the canoe" as Lila gathered "ripened rice grains" with "hand-fashioned wild rice knocking sticks." Using her aunt's sticks as an adult helped Drouillard "reconnect" with Lila and Leroy. "Good work done with strong hands can help us heal from the hurts of the past," she writes.
But healing isn't easy, as we're reminded by Drouillard's Aunt Carol chapter. Carol was so terrified of her "gruff and explosive" father that, according to Drouillard's mother, she "wouldn't even walk by his chair to go to bed." Carol's "angst" manifested itself in upsetting ways, Drouillard writes: "Aunt Betty and my mother both remember seeing [Carol] ritualistically pull out her own eyelashes and put them in her mouth."
Conversely, Drouillard's Aunt Diane managed "to break free" from convention, having a romantic relationship with a woman and getting a college degree. Committed to forthrightness, Drouillard also informs us that Diane was somewhat scandalous. While working as a prison guard in St. Cloud, Diane and a male prisoner were "allegedly embroiled in a love affair."
This book has its cliches and missteps. If there's one phrase that ought to be stricken from the language, it's surely "labor of love." Meanwhile, when writing about mental illnesses that are complicated and mysterious, Drouillard tends to oversimplify. More often, though, her prose is clear and personable.
As she noted in her book "Walking the Old Road," Drouillard has strong Ojibwe roots on her father Francis' side. Bullies mocked Francis' heritage when he was a boy. One day, two kids ganged up on him — until "his older sister Doreen showed up and started beating the hell out of" his antagonists, Drouillard writes.
"The carrier of our family Ojibwe history," Doreen "was of the earth. She fought with her hands, fists, legs, and wit," earning herself a role as a righteous scrapper in her niece's disarming book.
Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.
Marshmallow Clouds
Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek
Candlewick Press, 72 pages, $19.99
December 15, 2022 — 8:49am
Of his approach over his half-a-century-and-counting career, former U.S. poet laureate and former "American Life in Poetry" columnist Ted Kooser has said, "I write for other people with the hope that I can help them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short, I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention."
In their new book, "Marshmallow Clouds: Two Poets at Play Among Figures of Speech," Kooser and acclaimed fellow poet Connie Wanek offer 30 poems to inspire readers ages 10 and up to relish this magic in the seemingly quotidian. Organized by the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, these poems encourage the notion that, "as if it were a favorite cat or dog, playing with your imagination can keep it healthy and happy," as Kooser writes in their afterword.
Wanek adds that "Sometimes trees or clouds or horses or other people — or even a certain car or the fuel that runs it — seem to summon our imaginations."
Wanek, who lives in Duluth, is the author of four collections of poetry for adults, including most recently 2016's "Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems," published by University of Nebraska Press as the second in their Contemporary Poetry Series, edited by Kooser. The shared affinity for a simple and direct style and an alertness to quiet yet moving moments displayed in each of their solo work for adults blends harmoniously here in their work for kids.
A figure of speech, of course, is a word or phrase used in a nonliteral sense for rhetorical or vivid effect, and this book revels in showing young people how they work and why they are so much fun. In a poem called "Thunderstorm," for instance, the titular phenomenon comes alive as a person who has "gotten up in the night / and, not wanting to wake us, / stumbles around, bumping the walls / of the long empty hallway leading away, / now and then lighting a match / and then, just as quickly, blowing it out."
In one called "July," the joy of words leaps off the page: "One summer day I was boiled and salted / like a peanut. I was the meat / in a heat sandwich, the dog in a hot." The book feels attuned to the fanciful way so many children are naturally inclined to view the world, and to guide them to an even deeper immersion into seeing a tadpole as "a huge comma, / soft and black" or a harpist as having "taken a great golden moth / into her arms."
Spare and wholesome yet richly evocative, Richard Jones' illustrations — of meteor showers, snowy moonlit fields, horses amid papery white birch trees and more — enhance and deepen the charm of each poem.
Wanek points out that "it's fun to listen for voices from unexpected places." In "Marshmallow Clouds," she and Kooser enchantingly embolden readers of all ages to open their ears, not to mention their minds and hearts.
Kathleen Rooney is author of the novel "Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey" and the poetry collection "Where Are the Snows."
Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore
Lawrence Jackson
Graywolf Press, 344 pages, $17
December 15, 2022 — 8:51am
To get from beginning to end of Lawrence Jackson's "Shelter," you'll probably need the following: a detailed map of Baltimore's neighborhoods, especially the ones bordering the sprawling campus of Johns Hopkins University, a dictionary to look up the occasional obscure or archaic word, and a great deal of patience.
Not quite a memoir or a typical collection of essays, Jackson's book skews biographical, its chapters adorned by heady, churchly titles ("Lent: Appraisement of Negroes at the Folly, or Dinner," or "Epiphany: Sunday Boys") and its pages filled densely with antebellum histories, reflections on race relations — some of which are self-directed and unsparing — and revelations on the trials and triumphs of homeownership as a single Black father.
For a book with a meandering narrative, including lots of excursions by foot, boat or bus and whiplashing digressions, a story line actually exists, thin yet compelling.
When we first meet Jackson, he has accepted a prestigious job as a professor of English and history at Johns Hopkins and is house-hunting in Baltimore, after leaving behind a failed marriage in Atlanta. He has decided against the predominantly Black neighborhood in the Northwest where his mother still lives and where he was raised. With a Realtor, he begins the search in Homewood, a neighborhood of "elegantly appointed, English-style rowhouses" near the university campus, and then makes his short way toward the predominantly white Homeland onto "a street filled with meticulous, retiring, brick or stone colonial style cottages."
Here, instinctively, Jackson puts in an offer on a "three-bay-wide, two-story, stone colonial cottage" that "bespoke an unimpeachable middle-class standing."
Ever attuned to racial undercurrents, the slipperiness of privilege, especially in the wake of Freddie Gray's shocking death, Jackson is aware of how this decision lands in his Baltimorean world — Uncle-Tommery among his old neighborhood friends and a lack of solidarity with more working-class or diverse communities that would better align with his line of work.
But he's already made his argument in the early pages of the book: Even with ancestry dating back to slavery — more specifically, the period after the Civil War when his great-grandparents owned land — he has never been the beneficiary of generational wealth. Now he wishes to mend that discontinuous cycle and pass something on to his two sons, however it defines him or his relationship with the ailing Black communities in Baltimore, some situated right by the well-endowed Johns Hopkins.
With the purchase of the Homeland house comes the usual upkeep and tasks, quite a few, like lawn care, tedious and time-consuming — and Jackson takes great pride and pains in dwelling on these moments, including every bag of sod purchased or trip to Lowe's with his reluctant teenage son.
But in the end, the book's most vital and memorable moments are when Jackson redials the focus away from himself and his preoccupations, big and small, and turns outward to, yes, those ailing Black communities, whether it is to attend church with family and old friends, or pick up trash, or facilitate much-needed, difficult conversations with the university.
Angela Ajayi is a Minneapolis-based writer and critic.
The Sisters Sweet
Elizabeth Weiss
The Dial Press, 398 pages, $27
December 15, 2022 — 8:54am
How do you grow up and make your own life when you're tethered to others? Even harder if the people you're tethered to are both needy and slightly bonkers.
In her debut novel, "The Sisters Sweet," Minneapolis writer Elizabeth Weiss has spun a fascinating coming-of-age novel around this question, even imagining a literal tether. The result is a highly original, engrossing story about family secrets, hypocrisy and betrayal.
Set in the 1920s and '30s in Chicago, the novel is narrated by Harriet, twin to Josie, daughter to Maud and Lenny. Maud once was a vaudeville performer, with a voice so beautiful "light pours from her throat" when she sings. Lenny was a talented designer of sets and costumes who won Maud's heart by carving exquisite tiny animals out of pilfered bars of soap.
But hard times have hit — diva Maud can no longer perform, and dreamer Lenny has started to drink. They have twin toddlers to care for, and no income. It's Lenny who hits on the clever scheme to truss the girls together, tell the world they're conjoined twins, and put them onstage.
For 10 years, between the ages of 5 and 15, the girls are a hit, singing and dancing in one big dress with two holes for their heads. Josie is a natural, the one with the talent. Harriet's skill is melting into her sister, becoming one with her. "For the duration of the show, it wasn't a lie; it was simply a different sort of truth. ... I was Josephine and Harriet both."
I won't tell you exactly how Josie rebels — that scene is too audacious to spoil — but afterward the burden of everything falls on Harriet, who at 15 now must be the good girl, the wage-earner, and, eventually, the perfect woman who will marry a fortune and thus provide for her mother's future.
Harriet is a wonderful, full character — wise, observant, torn between duty to her feckless parents and a desire to live her own life. It's not surprising when she tries to maintain a dual existence — isn't that all she has ever known? But it's also not surprising when the center will not hold.
"The Sisters Sweet" has a couple of jarring structural oddities; it's bookended by brief chapters when a reporter ambushes an aged Harriet to find out her story. The device of nosy journalist is a tired one, and, in this case neither necessary nor believable. ("I called up your publisher and got your address," the bubbly reporter says.)
And Harriet's narration, the bulk of the novel, is interrupted by third-person chapters set deeper in the past. They tell the story of Maud and Lenny, but names are withheld and it takes half of the book for the reader to understand who these people are. While they provide important back story, the chapters are unnecessarily confusing.
But these are quibbles. "The Sisters Sweet" is fiendishly well imagined, a powerful family story about selfishness and duty, sacrifice and freedom. As all around her the people who would use Harriet get what they want in various ways, the reader hopes madly that she will finally figure out a way to undo those ties that bind.
Laurie Hertzel is the Star Tribune's senior editor for books. E-mail: books@startribune.com.
The Temps
Andrew DeYoung
Keylight Books, 264 pages, $27.99
December 15, 2022 — 8:56am
What's your preferred plot about the end of the world? Zombie hordes? Viral contagion? Some inhumane corporate scheme that gets out of hand?
Andrew DeYoung's seriocomic second novel, "The Temps," has an apocalypse for every taste. It opens with a mass human catastrophe that's witnessed by Jacob, a temp on his first day at Delphi, an omnivorous megacorp. ("What don't we do?" he's told when he asks someone what his new employer does.) An open-air all-staff meeting is interrupted by a yellow mist that leaves every attendee crazed and homicidal. The mist soon goes global. But 350 Delphi temps, sealed in the headquarters building, are spared the madness.
DeYoung delivers this global catastrophe with a bit of a wink: Finally, no more all-staff meetings! Among the novel's chief targets is the anonymizing, dehumanizing world of corporate drudgework. Jacob and his cohort need to fight the mist, but also a brain-killing workplace cult of compelled ignorance.
And one of the jokes is that this takes some doing. A self-appointed leader introduces himself via PowerPoint. While the temps gather resources and brace for attack, they also get back to work, hoping to spreadsheet their way back to civilization. As one temp observes, "Isn't this basically what people have been doing for hundreds of years, with religion? Some absent, all-seeing god is watching — and if you do certain things, do them exactly the right way, that god will rescue you, bring you into paradise."
So in large part, "The Temps" is an allegorical yarn about the modern workplace, with a dash of "The Walking Dead" and Don DeLillo's "White Noise" tossed in. It fits well on the ever-growing shelf of novels that similarly critique corporate conformity, like Ling Ma's "Severance" and Dave Eggers' "The Circle."
But DeYoung, who won a Minnesota Book Award for his 2017 novel, "The Exo Project," distinguishes this book by working in a more meta theme: Why are we so obsessed with these tales of mass destruction anyway? And why do they fall into such familiar ruts? Characters make multiple references to quest tales and hero's journeys. (Jacob was an English major before working at Delphi.) Hero narratives have ways of making people selfish, DeYoung suggests: The temps' first organizing efforts take on a survivalist and macho bent. And when the reason behind the yellow mist emerges, it has a grim, selfish narrative behind it, too.
The gears in DeYoung's own narrative sometimes grind because he's working at cross-purposes — he strives to construct a thriller-like dystopian narrative while pulling at the threads of thriller and dystopian tropes. Characterization is sacrificed for the sake of point-scoring. But the temps do make good points: "They gave us the jobs they didn't want and asked us to thank them for it," one notes. And the main point gets across firmly, and darkly: Stories have consequences, so be careful about whose story you trust.
Mark Athitakis is a writer in Arizona.
