Burkham professor of human geography at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a self-described “Midwesterner by birth and disposition” makes the case for immigration as a way to stave off the impacts of population decline in the Midwest. Outmigration lower fertility rates an aging baby boom cohort and low rates of immigration have led to “demographic winter”—where death rates exceed birth rates. While the environmental impact of a lower population is undoubtedly good for the planet Burkham zooms in on the local level to explore the negative consequences for communities: fewer consumers for local businesses fewer taxpayers to keep up roads and public transportation fewer workers to fill job openings less funding for schools and more. Grounded in a historically contextualized overview of federal policies of restriction and reform the book makes a case for a place-based immigration strategy that would prevent this fate from befalling the Midwest. In opposition to current U.S. immigration policy (which prioritizes family reunification over economic immigration) Burkham proposes a model based on Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program which allows provinces to prioritize immigration based on their needs (students businesspeople skilled workers semi-skilled workers) with the objective of balancing where immigrants settle across the nation. A system of this sort the author says would boost population and fill the gaps in industries that are in need of workers—namely manufacturing health care and construction. Burkham explores the current unprecedented levels of diversity and education levels of immigrants and the process of integration into suburbs. In our current political atmosphere where debate about immigration often lacks nuance Burkham’s measured tone and practical approach rooted in research is welcome.

Sloane whose books include The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History (2018) continues to shine a light on the overlooked contributions of female politicians in her latest biography. Margaret Bondfield (1873-1953) led an extraordinary life. At age 16 after working in a London drapery store she went undercover to report on the appalling conditions for women and domestic servants. She was intimidated and fired and even though she was only 5 feet tall (eventually having trouble seeing over the podium in the House of Commons) she began working for her trade union. Bondfield was a founding member of what became the Labour Party. The First World War brought opportunities for women but after the war women returned to unemployment. Sloane writes of Bondfield’s relationship with Maud Ward. She was “an elusive figure” Sloane says of Bondfield’s friend but the author writes touchingly of the two women going on a walking holiday together. “They walked miles every day over every kind of terrain enjoying stormy weather as much as the hot sunshine. Bondfield who had never really had the time for proper holidays before was converted.” Bondfield was eventually elected as a Member of Parliament for Wallsend. She traveled to Moscow and met Lenin: “He suggests by his manner a more or less confidential exchange of opinions. But when the interview is over it is found that he has told you far less than you have told him.” In 1929 she was made Minister of Labour. The government fell and she lost her seat. It is to Sloane’s credit that she brings attention to a largely forgotten and important figure. Nonetheless much of the narrative is devoted to tedious legislative arguments written in lackluster prose. Bondfield was a plucky woman who rose from West Country poverty to the British Cabinet. Sloane doesn’t help us understand enough why so many not only voted for her but also loved her.

This collection of essays presents institutional personal and aesthetic reasons for keeping access to all publications free and open. Fiction makes us question. History pulls aside the curtain to reveal the darker players in our heroism. The novelist Jane Smiley interviewed in the book says “Here’s what I always say as a writer: the first person you write for is yourself.” Emily Drabinski a library and information studies scholar writes “How many of us discovered we were not alone in the pages of a book?” Jeremy C. Young and Jacqueline Allain both with teaching experience write “Public universities are places where all ideas can be debated and get a fair hearing free from ideological control by the government.” Edited by University of Missouri scholar Cohen the book includes case studies (schools banning books by Toni Morrison) and syllabi (plans for a class based on banned books). The essays are short and conversational in tone. There is a lot of preaching to the converted of assuming that “the social enterprise of the left is rightly the expansion of enfranchisement and equity.” Is it ever right to ban a book? Germany has banned Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Should we ban “Thomas Dixon’s noxious and reprehensible Reconstruction Trilogy of novels whose popularity in the early twentieth century says a lot about the racialized character of American Progressivism?” Individualism and communitarianism remain two opposing forces of American society. Caring about our own and caring about others often conflict. Should we legislate against feeling bad? While there are no specific answers in this book one contributor scholar Leonard Cassuto offers the most hopeful path: “If we are to find any possibility of shared interest in our troubled polity we all might benefit from looking more closely at what the other people think.”

Sports historian Taylor turns to golf with a biography of Ted Rhodes (1913-1969). Born into poverty in Nashville he first encountered golf when he was 8 making his own club and balls and a rudimentary course in a park. He began caddying at a country club learning to play from the caddy master. In 1941 Rhodes played in his first tournament the Joe Louis Open—the popular boxer organized the event for Black golfers; Rhodes finished a remarkable third. Louis hired him as his traveling caddy. Later the singer Billy Eckstine hired Rhodes as his golf tutor. After finishing fourth in an all-Black tournament in Ohio Louis hired him back. He played in the Los Angeles Open but failed to make the cut. A series of wins led the Los Angeles Sentinel to declare “Ted Rhodes is perhaps the greatest Negro golfer in the country and rates high with the Whites.” Taylor does a good job of chronicling the lengthy battle over racism in the game. When Rhodes qualified for the Phoenix Open in 1952 “for the first time Black professional golfers would compete in a PGA event.” From 1946 to 1950 he won 28 times. Even with success the money was always tight. An endorsement deal for clubs helped. The author’s in-depth research allows readers to experience his individual rounds and specific shots. With cameos by Ben Hogan Sam Snead and other greats including many fascinating unheralded Black players Taylor provides a thorough portrait of the sport at this time. In 1961 in a unanimous vote the PGA eliminated its “Caucasian-only” membership clause. Thanks largely to Rhodes Taylor writes “Hope for Black golfers was realized.”

In the 1980s the Madrid slum of San Blas was at the heart of the heroin epidemic on the continent. It was an unlikely place for an American couple to raise their young children but when God calls you must answer—Christian missionaries Elliott and Mary Tepper packed up their boys and traveled from Mexico to Spain eager to find a way to serve the Lord. At first Elliott and Mary along with their children handed out religious tracts to “yonkis” hoping to bring the Word to the addicts living on the streets of their neighborhood (“My father told us we had planted seeds in men’s hearts” the author recalls). But the Teppers weren’t naive about the effectiveness of Bible verses alone to get people off drugs and see the light. Their apartment became an ad hoc detox center for those looking to kick their habits and as word spread the couple formally founded Betel a free donation-funded addiction clinic. It wasn’t long before the horrific specter of AIDS began to haunt the drug community with most cases spread by intravenous infection. That only emboldened the Teppers to continue their care for the yonkis regardless of their HIV status. As the author recounts his unconventional childhood brought him into proximity with HIV positive addicts who became his friends. The faith that powered the Teppers’ desire to do good wasn’t conditional or biased; that fulsome affection is felt throughout this memoir even as the family’s beliefs were routinely tested. Not only did they see their nearest and dearest friends succumb one by one to AIDS—the Teppers were also shaken by unthinkable personal tragedies. These were faced with the same clear-eyed fortitude that the Teppers brought to their mission.

Most jazz aficionados may not have heard of Mura Dehn (1902-87) but she played a significant role in the genre’s development. A white woman Dehn discovered jazz as a young girl studying classical dance in her native Russia. Her appreciation deepened when she moved to Paris in the 1920s to further her studies hanging out with progressive artists such as Josephine Baker. Dehn eventually came to New York where she was a regular at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom and “immersed herself in Black social dance.” As Vaccaro professor emerita of dance at Rider University puts it Dehn “boldly wrote about it beginning in the 1930s when few others were paying attention.” Vaccaro has written this revelatory biography “to uncover what led a white Russian Jewish woman to an act of cultural preservation and serves to credit name and bring to the fore some of the artists who were the creators and originators of Black social dance during her lifetime.” She focuses on three main areas of Dehn’s career: the Academy of Swing which Dehn co-founded in “an attempt to define the form and rhythm of jazz dance”; a film The Spirit Moves four volumes of footage shot between 1950 and 1984 that Vaccaro calls “one of the most important films made of the chronology of jazz dance in her time”; and Dehn’s Traditional Jazz Dance Company the achievements of which included the show Rag to Rock and worldwide tours under the auspices of the State Department including an eight-country tour of Africa. Vaccaro interviews figures who worked with Dehn including Allen Blitz who served as the dance company’s manager. And she does a good job of showcasing Dehn’s achievements as well as the resistance she encountered from those who distrusted her because she was an outsider a woman and white.

Dunaway an author and professor of English speculates on how some artists’ styles evolved because of their sight. The haziness of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings he writes “probably resulted from cataracts. For Turner visual limitation became visual transcendence.” Paul Cézanne who was myopic “disdained help from lenses: ‘Take those vulgar things away’ he reportedly said.” Dunaway discusses his own near-sightedness and how it affected him growing up: “The fact that my sight was weak left me with the feeling that I was not right or whole—a visual loser.” The author’s own experience has him wondering about the origins of glasses. He writes about Roger Bacon the 13th-century Oxford scholar “imprisoned for inventing glasses (or trying to).” The “first published mention of spectacles” he notes dates to a Venetian document from 1300 that refers to “discs for the eye.” Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing (1942) Dunaway tries living a week without them keeping readers posted on his progress: “It oddly resembled a drug trip….colors pulsed madly; walls undulated.” Dunaway touches on various conditions including myopia noting that the number of people needing glasses keeps going up. He delves into the longtime stigma to wearing glasses. One of the lines he heard as a kid—“a personal favorite”—was “You reading that book or smelling it?” He devotes a chapter to fashion and writing about literature and film argues that “glasses in films have historically indicated a character’s disability or inadequacy.” Dunaway eventually gets cataract surgery. “Awaiting renewed vision I am deeply grateful” he writes. “For the entire optical industry and of course for friends and family who put up with me endlessly saying ‘Would you move that a little closer?’ ‘What does that say?’ or ‘I’m sorry; I can’t see that.’”

Weisser a historian at the University of Massachusetts Boston delivers a history lesson with a novelist’s eye for detail resurrecting a London that is filthy fearful and alive with commerce and contagion. She begins fittingly with Samuel Pepys in 1664 fretting over his brother Tom who is “deadly ill—and which is worse that his disease is the pox.” Pepys calls in a second opinion desperate to erase the stain and persuades himself (and others) that the initial diagnosis was wrong. Weisser compares this quiet act of denial to the families of gay men in the 1980s and ’90s who altered obituaries to disguise AIDS-related deaths. The “pox” she explains was an elastic term encompassing many afflictions mostly sexual and all freighted with moral reproach. Londoners hid their shame behind wigs face patches and mercury-based ointments while the city thrummed with peddlers and backstreet quacks hawking cures. At Bartholomew Fair she conjures dancing monkeys Venetian girls on rope and prostitutes offering a good time—and a bad infection scenes echoed in the bawdy ballads of the age. Remedies mixed mercury sassafras and jalap; some involved digesting quicksilver and turpentine. Edward Jewel’s “Incomparable Extractum Humorale” was sold in 23 shops across London from grocers to cheesemongers—a forerunner of modern pharmaceutical branding. Each chapter opens with a vignette—a maid hiding pills under her bed a wife using her infection as evidence in court of her husband’s infidelity—and together they trace the disease from street to sickroom to courtroom. The author draws heavily on John Marten’s A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1707) one of the few substantial sources available to her. “The pox was the first modern disease” Weisser writes “but not for the reasons we like to think.” Her argument—that shame not science shaped how people experienced illness—feels startlingly contemporary.

The hamlet of Meat Cove gets its name from the carcasses that marauding Vikings once tossed into the sea at the northern tip of Cape Breton. Fundy Sutherland a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police lives a complicated life there with her 16-year-old daughter Skye and her married lover Pascal. She also has a secret past as a Canadian Armed Forces “sniper with kills on four continents.” Her cruel mother Geneva who had a temper that “could melt a Coke bottle” ran off on Fundy’s fifth birthday leaving her alone with an alcoholic unemployed father. After a well-off local family with three boys took her in Fundy became fiercely competitive excelling in sports and winning the Junior National Championship in the biathlon. Skye’s latest school assignment requiring an at-home DNA test sends Fundy into panic mode as it could reveal aspects of her life that she’d rather stay hidden. In addition a criminal whom Fundy helped to put in prison six years ago has been released—and he appears headed for Meat Cove. Adding to her worries are sightings of two Venezuelan boats which may be carrying drugs. Weber’s novel is populated with colorful sharply drawn characters—especially Fundy a no-nonsense cop who describes herself as “like Dudley Do-Right and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon but instead of a horse I ride a Taurus. And I wear a bra.” Also of note is Snuki Finsterblast Skye’s science teacher: “the only woman in Cape Breton with a worse name than mine” says Fundy and who dyes her long gray hair “black but only once a year.” The author also appealingly shows Fundy’s relationship with Pascal to be loving and physical marked by mutual acceptance of occasional absences and divided loyalties. The story moves quickly shifting back and forth in time with much of Fundy’s past revealed through passages she writes to Skye detailing a life that’s both harrowing and exhilarating.

Margo and Matilda the Halifax twins have been turning heads and causing whispers since the day they debuted. There’s not a man in London who wouldn’t recognize their red hair and Margo has enjoyed the company of several but the twins are too notorious for anyone to court them conventionally. Margo starts to think they may have finally gone too far though when she thinks she discovers Matilda eloping to Gretna Green with the Marquess of Ashford. Panicked she begs her straightlaced friend Henry Mortimer to help chase them down before it’s too late. As Henry has been in love with Margo for years he agrees and on the road together sparks soon start to fly. It’s also not long before the twins run into each other and discover each has more going on than the other realized. This volume brings together two novellas previously available in digital editions starting with Margo and Henry’s madcap adventure followed by Matilda and Christian’s more intense relationship. Both stories move quickly with little extraneous action but plenty of steamy encounters. Though the tales complement each other well they each have their own dynamic and pacing. Matilda’s story is longer and explores mild BDSM elements while Margo’s is faster and more of a romp. Ultimately both twins face the same quandary as they separately struggle with feeling they may have outgrown their reputations while being unsure what the next phase of their lives might look like. Vasti’s fans will be delighted with the addition of a new epilogue.

Her firstborn daughter Onyesonwu a powerful witch—introduced in Who Fears Death (2010)—transformed the world and left it while Najeeba herself has become more dangerous and powerful—the kponyungo sorcerer of fire wind and dust. Her mission to find and kill the awful spirit that terrorized her father’s family remains unfinished. But where to begin? First birth her miracle child. Warned about the dangers of this baby’s birth she journeys deep into the desert. With only Dedan the baby’s father and their two mighty camels she must find the Vah people who live in a great sandstorm to help her survive the birth. Though the temptation to live in the wind and sand with the community who saves her is strong she must continue her mission. With an unlikely friend from the desert people she finds a way forward. Najeeba will face off with the spirit the Cleanser and become the revenge her father sought. She will finish it once and for all even if it ends her. This is a page-turning novella for all the mothers and daughters faced with impossible tasks who have the resolve to carry on anyway a fable-like story about how to walk straight into the storm face insurmountable challenges and fight for freedom.

This exploration of Canada’s health network is also part leadership manual blending the personal reflections of the author with stories of his hands-on expertise. Those stories are taken from Rosenberg’s decades in medical practice study and executive positions. The book opens with the author’s career at a crossroads when he was let go as CEO of Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital as part of a restructuring of Quebec’s hospital system. Rosenberg eventually was rehired in an expanded position in the revamped system where he has overseen its transformation into a value-based (as opposed to numbers-based) operation. The author provides real-world insights from someone who’s worked in the field making heavy topics approachable even to readers not familiar with Canada’s health care infrastructure (or even medicine in general). Along the way readers learn Rosenberg’s leadership philosophy: Do the right thing take responsibility for it stay curious and never lose sight of the human stakes behind every decision. The book has a lot of drama—the author takes readers inside operating rooms and ERs aboard shaky helicopters and even to a remote Arctic medical post offering hard-won wisdom about choosing paths forward (his time in the Arctic taught him “key leadership lessons about resourcefulness adaptability responsibility and the importance of decisive action in critical situations”). Rosenberg points out that leaders lose when they rely only on strict rules and numbers missing what works when teams band together around common purpose. The author does an excellent job of distilling complex subjects; he clearly explains value-based care which is basically putting patient results above numbers. The material is clearly aimed at an audience steeped in medical knowledge but lay readers will find it easy to follow. The questions he raises—who takes responsibility how decisions are made under pressure and what organizations owe the people they serve—are universal. Rosenberg’s book is a surprisingly readable examination of leadership in health care that eschews easy answers in favor of moral clarity.

Rachel Del Rio describes herself as “42 childless and single” and while her comedy career is thriving and her lesbian best friend Scout McDonough is supportive she’s insecure about her personal life. She’s reluctant to attend her 20th college reunion—everyone “who isn’t gay or a crackpot is married with kids.” Rachel finds an unsigned love letter and decides it must be from Jason Smith her sophomore-year boyfriend; when she’s magically transported back in time 22 years she decides it’s an opportunity to win him back. She can also do better by her friends own up to her self-centered behavior and possibly even save someone’s life. Rachel is missing the full picture however and she’ll have to figure everything out before she’s transported back to her adult life. The book doesn’t unpack some internalized misogyny or unhealthy coping behaviors like excessive drinking. This queer-friendly story also includes frequent positive Harry Potter references in the past timeline and readers may be surprised that Rachel who’s distinguished by her sharp tongue and no-holds-barred language doesn’t mention this irony particularly given her commentary on other societal cultural shifts. The full-color art has a nostalgic feeling reminiscent of comics from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rachel has tan skin and black hair Scout presents white and Jason has brown skin.

Curie’s pioneering research into radioactivity is the hallmark of her astounding career and in this vivid work of historical fiction Jersild a writer and psychologist imagines what her inner thoughts and desires might have been. She does this so well that Curie feels alive. Excavating Curie’s life Jersild lets readers experience the sexism and misogyny that permeated the scientific world in the early 20th century. Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the first person to win two Nobels yet she was berated as selfish and unfeminine and “merely” the widow of another scientist. Jersild recreates the way this might have made Curie feel and how it never stopped her from doing the research to which she dedicated her life. Curie’s scientific work was complex and not easy for a layperson to understand and Jersild wisely keeps the terminology and details of experiments to a minimum without undermining their complexity and nuance. She focuses strongly on the things that shaped Curie: her childhood in Poland; the early loss of her mother; her shortened marriage to Pierre Curie who died in a freak accident; and more provocatively a love affair after her husband’s death with a married scientist that nearly toppled her (but not his) career. With a gimlet eye Jersild uses this affair to spotlight the double standards to which male and female scientists were held and the way Curie understandably devastated by her treatment by journalists and the public managed to pull herself back into her research and new discoveries through the force of her will.

Stine kicks off what he dubs in his introduction an “Everything Scary Story” (inspired by eating an everything bagel) for middle graders and their parents “who read my books when they were kids!” He throws in a cheery evil laugh—“Mmmmwahahaha…!”—before launching into a four-part story that packs a creepy old house just off Cthulhu Street that serves as the main setting with all the stuff of nightmares from his considerable arsenal. In short chapters alternating between two equally surreal storylines that may each be a dream of the other he chucks in an impressive array of disquieting tropes and elements—ranging from spooky creaks and howls to purple worms emerging from noses a mom who sells crocheted body parts online teachers in “weird animal masks” and classics like evil toys and an ominous message scrawled in blood. Even though the point-of-view characters are in a constant state of round-eyed terror this outing is plainly meant to be in fun and aside from being splashed with hot green vomit or spending a little time as ventriloquist’s dummies none of the young people here suffer actual harm from the cascade of supernatural threats for reasons the author explains at the end. The cast presents white.

Li’s astute sophomore novel opens with lifelong pals Diana Zhang Justin Yu Errol Chen and Vivian Wang graduating into the Great Recession and moving back into their childhood homes in North Potomac Maryland. Navigating a historically bad job market and their Chinese immigrant parents’ unrealistically high expectations the friends must also contend with their own sense of failure: “The four of them formed a line of defense against the cautionary tales other people hoped to make of them.” Their friendships are tested when Grace Li—their sometimes-friend and their parents’ idea of a model child—returns to town. Grace who dropped out of Harvard Law School to the others’ delight is trying to become a documentary filmmaker and asks the group if she can make a film about them. As the novel is set in the early days of internet fame the friends agree without fully understanding what this will mean for them—until Grace’s documentary Bad Asians goes viral. The video which propels Grace into YouTube stardom reveals long-held secrets unspoken animosity and growing cracks among the four friends. Declaring a “delicate truce” to “hold them together through this larger crisis” the friends try to rehab their image in the most ill-fated way possible. Years later when it all comes back to haunt them they must each figure out how to survive the consequences of their actions. The novel follows the friends in the eight years after graduation as they grapple with the ways the video—and their foolish attempt to course correct—has changed the trajectory of their lives. Li is a master at drawing characters that feel distinct layered and outrageously human even if the pacing sometimes suffers. Imbued with humor and sharp social commentary the novel beautifully explores Asian American identity; economic instability; relationships as both anchor and buoy; the malleability of success; and the ways that ambition manifests itself for better or worse.

The unnamed and unmoored protagonist of Shannon’s debut novel has reluctantly moved back in with her parents: “I swapped the city I found for the city I came from.” Overeducated and underemployed she deals with her lack of direction by becoming obsessed with cleaning. When she gets a job as a cleaner at a local art gallery and meets fellow artist Isabella her life begins to change. The two women immediately hook up despite the fact that Isabella lives with her successful rich and bland boyfriend Paul. As the narrator becomes more enmeshed in their lives she thinks she may be able to have it all (“I wanted both of them at the same time. I wanted both of them in bed”). When Isabella leaves one day without a word the narrator begins to slip into a life that doesn’t belong to her. Written in stream-of-consciousness style the novel is told in one long gulp with no chapters paragraph breaks or quotation marks. The form situates you directly in the protagonist’s mind which can feel claustrophobic because she’s an absolute disaster. Her thoughts ping-pong among sex art death money children thrifting cleaning cooking and everything in between. She is flaky a liar and makes decisions that seem detached from reality. Unfortunately the novel is both too absurd and not absurd enough. The plot when it surfaces between the narrator’s thoughts is so outlandish at times that it’s distracting. Despite this Shannon has imbued the novel with a sardonic humor that serves as a bright spot. When the artist sits down with her family to fill out the census she tells them she’s not heterosexual to little reaction—and thinks “I questioned whether pure uncut indifference was in fact homophobic or progressive.” These moments of levity help the book become less mired in the narrator’s seemingly endless nonsensical loop.

Ms. Wilson’s lived in apartment 1A so long that she’s become an expert in the weekday comings and goings of her upstairs neighbors the Lams. She knows every step scuffle and squeak. Best of all the absence of sounds means the building is finally empty and she can play her many instruments in peace. Enter Gus the Lams’ new pup. When they leave for the day on Monday morning he happily barks along as Ms. Wilson plays her piano downstairs. But the silence that Ms. Wilson has come to treasure is gone. Just when it seems like the Lams will have to give up Gus however they hit upon the perfect solution. Sookocheff gently establishes mounting tension on both sides all resolved with a realistically satisfying ending where empathy and cooperation win the day. She captures the complexities of apartment life—the ways in which neighbors fall into familiar routines and negotiate a shared existence. Relying on a muted palette of browns beiges and grays her illustrations are enlivened by action lines swirls and confettilike dots that visually convey sound and emotion; thoughtful details make the characters feel all the more vivid. Ms. Wilson is brown-skinned; the Lams present East Asian.

Ariana thinks of Nowruz as her “secret holiday” because she’s the only one in her class who observes it. Usually Mama helps prepare but this year she’s out of town. So Ariana and her father step into her shoes with some help from Ariana’s grandmother (Nana). Ariana and Dad shop for food and boil and paint eggs; later Ariana decorates baklava with Nana. As they work Nana explains the holiday’s origins. Nowruz which means “new day” is “like a birthday party for Mother Nature. People welcome spring with clean homes new clothes and clear hearts.” Best of all it’s “a chance to start over and be better people.” When Mama returns she’s happily surprised to see a table brimming with vibrant eggs carefully organized cookies a live goldfish and other significant objects including the haft-seen a spread of seven plant-based items. Later Ariana asks Nana why the whole world doesn’t celebrate Mother Nature’s birthday. Nana’s suggestion that Ariana invite her friends to celebrate with her leads nicely into backmatter discussing Nowruz further. Readers unfamiliar with the holiday will emerge enlightened while youngsters who observe it will feel kinship with Ariana. Warm engaging illustrations rife with bright patterns include recognizable Persian holiday hallmarks such as tiny chickpea cookies sabzeh (greens) and elegant gold-bottomed tea glasses.

In 1910 a year of Halley’s Comet fire breaks out at the Earthshine Soap factory killing seven women. In 1986 another year of the comet 40-year-old Nona Dixon first hired as a 7-year-old to represent Earthshine in its marketing is acting in a soap opera sponsored by the company. Childless and facing divorce Nona lives in fear her character will be killed off. When Nona’s closest friend Halley Tuttle dies after falling out with her grandmother Earthshine’s 99-year-old owner Bertie Tuttle she leaves Nona an old notebook with a recipe for “Comet Pills” signed by someone named Opal Doucet. Domet’s narrative shifts between Nona and Opal with Opal plotting her future and Nona trying to figure out who Opal was. In 1910 Opal isn’t sure herself. A pregnant runaway wife and self-proclaimed spiritualist she’s confused by the voices she hears but believes that her pills make women happy and fertile. Her most important client is sterile Bertie whose husband wants to sell the company unless she can stop him. But is Bertie trustworthy? Is Opal? In 1986 Earthshine is under siege as various anonymous Jane Does claim the soap causes addictive side effects. Nona begins to distrust the Earthshine world to which she has pledged loyalty. As connections between 1910 and 1986 reveal themselves—sterility lost love infidelity greed and ambition to name a few—real mysteries remain unsolvable: What is choice misdeed and/or unintended consequence? Can one person’s spirit be called forth to inhabit another’s body? Is laughter the correct reaction when a striking 1910 factory worker shouts “Our bodies our soap.” Domet’s writing is uneven sometimes overblown sometimes murky but also highly imaginative. Her characters are intriguing if ambiguous.