Seventeenth-century Salem gets a neon update in Barry’s novel about the meteoric rise of the 1989 Danvers High School Women's Varsity Field Hockey Team to championship material—after they make a pact with the devil. In this case, the devil’s book is a spiral notebook with Emilio Estevez grinning up from the cover. Following each member of the team as they win matches and go to increasing lengths to gain Emilio’s favor, We Ride Upon Sticks is chock full of '80s lingo and nostalgia and both darker and sweeter than expected.
In a narrative that examines the cost and consequences of bearing witness, Sarah Perry introduces a new figure to the cast of characters that haunt children at bedtime. Melmoth, or Melmotka to the citizens of Prague— the city where translator and principal character Helen Franklin lives— is an ancient wanderer, doomed to track a path through some of the darkest chapters of history on bleeding feet. The cobbled-together chronicle of Melmoth that is given to Helen by a friend who is convinced he has begun to see the same ghastly presence forms the bulk of the story, weaving together historical moments of moral crisis: a German boy living in Nazi-occupied Prague, an airport where a gay man is being deported from France to Kinshasa, and a hospital room in Manila where a woman lies in terrible pain from an acid attack. The gothic style which Perry mastered in The Essex Serpent is on full display in this engrossing follow-up.
Nunez’s extraordinary technique might be summed up in the first line of her mesmerizing novel: “I went to hear a man give a talk,” an unnamed narrator states, aptly introducing a narrative woven of stories, conversations, and ruminations, one in which the listening is no less important than the telling. Nunez’s narrator is expert at both, and her profiles of passing acquaintances—a woman at her gym, her Airbnb host, even her host’s cat—are as vivid and engaging as those of her oldest friends, like her ex, a misanthropic public intellectual obsessed with the climate crisis and her best friend from college, a sharp woman with a dark sense of humor and a daughter estranged nearly from birth. Each story is told—mostly—without judgment, and all are mined for what they suggest about how to live. And how to die, which may or may not be the same question, as Nunez’s protagonist discovers when she agrees to help her college friend end her “battle” with cancer, a partnership that opens new directions in their relationship and leads not only to pathos but to unexpected moments of humor. As with her National Book Award-winning The Friend, there is a lot to think about here, but Nunez couches her deft novel of ideas within a full gamut of emotions.
