BEWARE OF GOD: STORIES | Shalom Auslander | Simon & Schuster
These stories aren’t just witty–they’re written with the cynical glee that only someone controlled by religion for most of his life could produce. (Auslander was raised Orthodox.) He doesn’t parody religion for a cheap laugh; his stories have soul. –Jessa Crispin
Frankly, after you’ve been led to fear the worst about the old man, his story, once dragged out, is a bit of a letdown. But this skillfully told tale raises chilling questions that Thayer refuses to give easy answers to. How does Jonah know things Carl never told Jessie? Is Jessie, speaking in the first person through most of the book, remembering things correctly? What is really wrong with Sylvie? If Thayer hints at Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” rather bluntly, she’s also a model of stylish subtlety, able to wire suspense into a description of a woman making tea. –Patrick Daily
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Betty deserves better. Finding Betty Crocker purports to be an examination of the history and meaning of one of our country’s longest-running, most visible corporate spokespersons: Betty Crocker, created in 1921 as the face of a flour company that was a forerunner of General Mills. There are enough interesting, relevant facts in this book to make it clear that anyone–real or not–representing the confluence of history, commerce, and women’s lives (in 1945 Betty Crocker was named the second most popular woman in America, behind Eleanor Roosevelt) is worthy of real thoughtfulness.
A GIRL LIKE SUGAR | Emily Pohl-Weary | McGilligan Books
The beginning of Sam Brumbaugh’s debut novel–about an upper-middle-class loser who’s related to Annie Oakley–drags. The prose is riddled with obnoxious tics, such as separated contractions when things get serious (“Tears rolled down my cheeks and I did not know exactly why”), and the dialogue is irritatingly authory (“Last time I saw her her eyes were like a girls’ school. . . . I mean dark windows surrounded by heavy stone. There was a pressure of silence behind them.”). A few chapters in, the writing becomes mildly addictive despite the affectations and the lite philosophy that leavens the internal monologues, but by midbook the tics have become annoying again, along with the coy flash-forwards and flashbacks. One of Brumbaugh’s well-born-but-backsliding characters goes insane, another dies in a drug-related accident, and I didn’t give a damn about either. The best parts of the book are the bits of history about Oakley, in which the author stops trying to do structural and linguistic triple gainers long enough to show that he’s wasting real storytelling talent. –Ann Sterzinger
