ABOUT US

Although The Printed Garden is a new store, it has been built on a foundation of over twenty years of work in the book industry and a great deal of related higher education.  It is a traditional, independently owned, brick-and-mortar bookstore in Sandy's Historic Union Square shopping plaza.  When you walk in, you'll probably smell the coffee brewing - it's complimentary to our guests.  But this is Utah, after all, and if coffee's not your cup of tea, we can offer you a cup of tea (Earl Grey or Green) or a cup of hot peppermint cocoa!

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Ordering From The Printed Garden online:

We're actively creating online listings for all of the signed, rare, and less common books in our store!  They can be browsed or shopped at www.abebooks.com, where we have a storefront:

(https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/StoreFrontDisplay?cid=516397)

You can copy and paste the link or:
When you get to the abebooks homepage, click the "booksellers" link.  Enter "Printed Garden" in the name field and click the link that comes up.  This will take you to our storefront, where you can search our listings for a specific title or can simply click "list this seller's books" to browse.  You're also always welcome to simply call the store at 385-695-2042.  Your purchase will be carefully packaged, and shipped in a box.

About the Owner
(if you're still interested
​after reading this far)

In 1996, I was offered my first bookstore job at Crossroad Books (look for them online - they're great people!), a shop in Eau Claire, WI, that carried secondhand and rare books.  After moving on to the sole proprietorship of Rupert's Room, a small, online business that brokered the sale of rare and secondhand books, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, working a five year stint at Barnes & Noble in Sugarhouse (after moving to Salt Lake City, of course), a one year period of working at Ken Sanders Rare Books, earning a Master of Arts degree in British and American Literature from the University of Utah and, most recently, eight years of work at The King's English Bookshop (where I learned more than I could ever possibly have imagined!), I have arrived at this great new place . . . and look forward to serving you!

Here are a few recent books that we've LOVED!

Lawn Boy
by Jonathan Evison

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

Experience has taught me that the release of any new novel by Jonathan Evison is truly a cause for celebration, and this year’s Lawn Boy is no exception.  His early opus, West of Here, aside, Evison’s books typically operate around a small constellation of vividly imagined characters, characters so artfully and intricately rendered, they remind you of someone you either know or are related to.  Lawn Boy is no different in this respect, but is arguably Evison’s most politically charged book to date, taking a long, unflinching gaze at the stark income inequality of twenty-first century America, and at the difficulty with which many Americans meet even their most basic needs.

Young Mexican-American Mike Muñoz has a way with the landscape and an eye for sharp lines, for the movement and flow of any given yard.  He’s a master of composition, and fancies himself a sculpture artist with a pair of pruning shears.  However, most people decide what to expect from him before he even opens his mouth.  Living from paycheck to paycheck with his loving but downtrodden mother and his developmentally disabled brother, Nate, there seems to be nothing he can do to get ahead, and dreams of anything beyond basic survival seem an outright impossibility.  In his orbit are his uncouth best friend Nick, who’s holding down a job at the local Les Schwab Tire store, Freddy, an unemployed pseudo-philosopher-musician (who’s underwear rarely contains everything it should) who’s taken up residence in the family tool shed, Chaz, an unabashed alcoholic capitalist who’ll let nothing stop him from thinking big, and his new friend Andrew, a local librarian, who offers him small doses of salvation in the form of book recommendations.

Evison’s readers will find themselves rooting for Mike Muñoz intuitively because most people have worked, at one time or another, at a job that offered no upward mobility, and Mike, after everything is said and done, really just wants to be something better.  He doesn’t want to con, cheat, or steal his way home, but is simply looking for a path to a better life for himself and his family.  Alternately hilarious and frustrating, exuberant and infuriating, Lawn Boy reads like an anthem for the common man, and makes as strong a statement as a street march, while at the same time offering an absorbing narrative, which is consistently one of Evison’s greatest talents as a writer.  Like Steinbeck, Evison keeps his heroes close to the ground, and finds nobility and goodness in even the most rough and ragged hearts.
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Even as it lays bare the ways in which the American dream has become seemingly inaccessible to so many, Lawn Boy is not without its notes of optimism.  One of its finest qualities is, in fact, how it explores how success is still a possibility for those, who like Evison’s Mike Muñoz, have the character, perseverance, and stamina to hold their ground and put all obstacles behind them.  It may not be as accessible to everyone as it once was, and there is good deal of work still to be done to a buoy up the working poor, but being a good person does matter, and the American Dream, whether it takes the form we’ve imagined it would or not, can still take shape unexpectedly.

Algonquin Books - $26.95 - April 2018

My Absolute Darling
​by Gabriel Tallent

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

It’s an easy thing, in the bookselling industry, to give oneself over to hyperbole. This is not just because it is a business of sorts, and we want to sell books, but also, largely, because really good booksellers are always reading (always!), and after about five or ten years treading the constant currents of new material being produced, the avid reader develops a pretty reliable sense for what he or she should pick up to read, and for what may be left alone.  Because of this developed sense, we end up discovering a disproportionate amount of very talented writers and reading a great many very good books.  And then we proceed to rave about them precisely because they really are very good books.  But how, then, to approach a book that stands above and beyond such a context, a book that is so tempestuous, so unforgettable, that the narrative, the setting, the protagonist, are indelibly branded into memory?

I was tempted to try to write about My Absolute Darling as a thunderstorm of a book that appears on the horizon, ominously flashing, but the truth of the matter is that it’s really much more the storm that comes, of a sudden, upon an unsuspecting ship at sea and, even before escaping the first chapter, the reader is terrified, and inescapably in its clutches.

At the outset, we find fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston living with her father, Martin, in their long since overgrown, Northern California home.  It takes only a few pages and some indoor target shooting with the family Sig Sauer to realize that something’s not quite right about her life, and only a few more, the balance of the opening chapter, for all the horrifying details to come into focus, a few at a time.  Tallent, you see, does not need to save a sucker punch for the novel’s denouement because he has laid them, like landmines, in virtually every chapter throughout his remarkable debut - so much so that the reader begins to see danger at every turn, much like Turtle does.  The difference, of course, is that many of us have the luxury of being shocked by the world that Turtle takes for granted.  It is, though, the only life she has, and the only life she’s ever known, until a chance encounter with a stranded classmate leaves her with an acute awareness of an ordinary world lying only a stone’s throw from her own, a world that she wants.
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It’s dangerous to say too much about the narrative of My Absolute Darling.  It is, after all, a novel that takes many unexpected turns, most of which are truly shocking and ugly - but the end result, I would argue, all possible accusations of hyperbole aside, is an incomparable survival story, a debut novel infused with the same spirit and raw power as To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and other works we consider to be modern classics, and it will hold its own among them.  The world Gabriel Tallent has written for My Absolute Darling is so vivid and so rich in detail that the reader feels confined to it, as if the reading were much more of a reality than usual, and reality a welcome respite from the book’s own dark happenings.  His Turtle Alveston feels everything with the primordial ferocity only possible in someone her age, and those who read her will never, ever forget her.

Riverhead Books - $27.00 - August 2017

The Best Land Under Heaven:  The Donner Party in the Age of
Manifest Destiny
by Michael Wallis

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Most of us know what we believe to be the basics of the infamous Donner Party expedition stranded in the High Sierras in winter and forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. The story is much more complex and meaningful in a larger sense than the “history lite” version we’ve been given. To obtain significant meaning from the unimaginable suffering and fortitude of these people it is necessary to examine the motives and inspirations for their actions. To this end Michael Wallis has exerted extraordinary effort in researching and interpreting the results of research into the subject.
Beginning with the family histories of the participants as an explanation of the original motives behind the dream-fueled desire to conquer and subdue the west, the book guides the way to understanding the why. Evidence is given to show that numerous famous personages were involved in intimate ways with what was to become known as the Donner-Reed Party and their tragic journey. Among them are Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd. It is intriguing to contemplate that if the coin had fallen to another face we would not have had the benefit of Mr. Lincoln’s presidency. This is only one example of the tangential participation of well-known historical figures in this fascinating account.
With consummate attention to detail and an impressive array of references to original material, published works and personal interviews the author presents a nearly day-by-day account of not only the expedition but the individual feelings of the members of the party. Diaries, letters and written remembrances by the very people who went through the ordeal are employed to paint a vivid picture that furnishes compelling reading. While the reader is given references to previously published works on the subject, it seems clear that this work is, if not definitive, certainly among the most comprehensive written.
One comes away with a profound respect for those who struggled and suffered and a degree of contempt for those who exploited them. The courage and dedication of the leaders of not only the original traveling party, but those who sought to rescue them from their peril is remarkable. The hard work, unwavering faith and nearly unbelievable fortitude and self-sacrifice these proponents of the notion of manifest destiny have meaning for the present. The lessons are there even if we feel distantly removed from the concept of a continent created for our sole inhabitation and benefit. I give this book my highest recommendation.

The Hour of Land:  A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
by Terry Tempest Williams

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Terry Tempest Williams is a published author with an admirable body of work. She is an acknowledged writer on natural history and earth science. But she is also a traveler of spiritual roads whose sensitivity and perception combined with a strong intellect make her worth reading and remembering. Her observations of nature and the relationship of the human creature to the world are profound and moving. As a result the reader of this book may find that feelings of fear, pity and despair elicited by the accounts of atrocities committed by our species upon the natural world are ultimately redeemed by a vision of hope and optimism for the future of our planet.

The subtitle of the book is “A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks”. These accounts are intensely personal and intimate revelations of the author’s love and advocacy for our great national treasures, the lands set aside for preservation and stewardship. The reader may feel ashamed for not harboring the passion and commitment evident in Ms. William’s worldview, but there is no odor of judgement of her audience in her writing. Rather, a joyful sense of bringing the word to the reading world seems the point, here. She is less gentle with agencies and organizations that have striven to turn these lands to profit. It is not too late, she tells us, to change the pattern of neglect and exploitation our of which our culture has been sadly guilty.
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With an intriguing variety of approaches and literary styles, the author treats each place with respect for its individuality. Every chapter of this book can stand alone stylistically and in terms of content as works worthy of note. Together they comprise a magnificent sweep of emotion and intellect. I recommend it to anyone who cares about our national natural heritage or wants to learn more.

Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

A perpetual enthusiast of African-American Literature, there were two books that I was waiting for this summer with great anticipation:  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.  The first of the two has arrived and, as it turns out, has not only lived up to the pre-publication excitement, but has risen, seemingly, above it.  Yaa Gyasi’s remarkable debut appears to have broken free from its framework, growing organically through, and out of, all of the forms and various types of writing that have inspired it while, at the same time actually seeming to satisfy the various functions of those types, and pay homage to them.  Homegoing is not just a work of historical fiction.  It is not a slave narrative. It’s not a novel of the Harlem Renaissance or the Jazz age. Neither is it a sixties black power narrative or a contemporary success story.  It is, unbelievably, all of these things together.  And, while it might seem impossible to accomplish such a feat without the benefit of a thousand printed pages, Gyasi, quite simply, just does it.

The book’s most remarkable quality, and that which acts as the catalyst for it’s multifaceted range, is it’s structure.  Gyasi’s work is a multi-generational epic and, while it may seem odd, at a comparably modest three hundred and five pages, to refer to the book as an epic, it certainly does have that feel about it. The well-read, when they hear the word, might remember working their way through Homer or Virgil or, later, it may even invoke Milton’s shattering Paradise Lost.  But that the epic had to be a work of great length has never actually been codified, but does historically come, rather, from a sense of imaginative expansiveness not unlike that found in Homegoing.  The old epics never provided their readers with a concrete sense of space or time, allowing the imagination to roam freely within the space of the story.  This young author has provided some temporal parameters, but has given her readers a very broad field in which to roam.

Yaa Gyasi opens her narrative in 1754 Gold Coast Africa, introducing her readers to Cobbe Otcher, Big Man Asare, and Maame, the woman with whom they birth two half sisters, Effia and Esi Asare.  This might sound like it’s going to become complicated but it never really does, at least not on a narrative level. I have always been the type of reader that much prefers not to have a family tree or dramatis personae in the opening pages of a novel, feeling that a good writer should be able to introduce (even multiple) characters in a way that will make them memorable.  I don’t want to destroy a work’s dramatic tension by flipping back and forth between my place in the book and a chart in the opening pages.  However, Gyasi has structured Homegoing in such a way that each successive chapter is constructed entirely around, and titled after, a singular character, The chapters then also alternate between the lineage of Effia and that of Esi, moving sequentially through time.

​What results is what could arguably be considered a project not unlike Hemingway’s In Our Time or, perhaps more appropriately, Jean Toomer’s brilliant Cane (sans poetry) with with a much greater sense of historic expansiveness.  Each chapter is constructed as a self contained unit and operates like a fully developed short story of its own while, the entire time, contributing to a significantly more vast macrocosm, giving the reader a longer view of history while not losing sight of the details.  Each character directly contributes to the arc of his or her historic context and, in turn, each is shaped by that context, as well.  The real genius that the observant reader will find in Homegoing, too, is that each successive character is not built independently, but is constructed from the characters and situations that predicated them, and the family tree, rather than being a nuisance, becomes, instead, a helpful guide that may be consulted between chapters.

What this young writer brings to the table is nothing short of a narrative feast, exploring, by way of a multiplicity of meticulously crafted voices that span over two hundred and fifty years of history, all the different dimensions of the African slave trade and their historic ramifications for African-Americans today.  Gyasi rises above the desire to scapegoat any one particular party involved in favor of her quest for a broader and deeper understanding of the cultural forces, both colonial and indigenous, that contributed to the shameful trafficking of human beings from one continent to another.  It is a story in which no one is entirely guilty and no one entirely innocent, and the candid and often painful trail that she forges through over two centuries of time doesn’t find it’s conclusion in the suffering and grief of her characters, nor in their shame or their anger, but breaks through, in the end, to the light.

American War
by Omar El Akkad

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

It is commonly accepted knowledge that in the very best works of dystopic speculative fiction, the reader can identify a clear and uninterrupted extrapolative arc between the known world with which he or she is familiar and the dysfunctional world of the novel.  It is what lends the fantastic literary world of the fictional future its grounding in something resembling a reality.  Nothing, however, is quite so unsettling as the experience of identifying clear and undeniable precursors of the terrors of the extrapolated fiction of the book already extant in today’s world, and this is what makes American War such a chilling tale.

The reader finds, in the opening chapters of Omar El Akkad’s dark debut, the America of 2075.  It is a country that has been devastated both by environmental collapse and a significant deterioration of social order:  parts of the coastline are virtually unrecognizable and a political assassination orchestrated by policy extremists has kick-started a second civil war between the “Blue” northern United States and the “Red” Free Southern States.  The ever increasing hostilities resulting from political polarization in the United States, we learn, has finally torn the country into two irreconcilable halves and has, it seems, propelled us all into a burned out husk of a future in which America is imagined as looking, very much, like twenty-first century Syria.

Six year old Sara Chestnut and her family live in extreme poverty in a shipping container in Louisiana until, caught in encroaching crossfire, they are forced into Camp Patience, a refugee camp near the border with the Blue United States.  After six years in the camp, she catches the attention of, and is taken under the protection of the shadowy figure Albert Gaines, who, channeling her gradually accumulated anger and survival instinct, begins her slow transformation from the young teen Sara Chestnut into the instrument of vengeance Akkad’s readers come to know as Sarat.  
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I was only about half finished with American War when James Hodgkinson stepped onto Eugene Simpson Stadium Park ball field in Alexandria, Virginia, and opened fire on a number of Republican congressmen with a Soviet made semi-automatic rifle, which, of course, only drove home the point that I suspect Akkad was making, and, although one cannot draw direct parallels from one to the other, it certainly did provide the book with a disturbing new dimension and potential for reality.  Akkad’s American War is more than a brilliantly conceived work of science fiction; it is more than a fresh and frighteningly innovative dystopian invention.  It is, as are the best novels of its genre, a cautionary tale with a lesson that we dare not disregard as implausible.

Knopf Doubleday - $16.95 - January 2018

The Salt Line
by Holly Goddard Jones

Reviewed by Eric Boss

As post-apocalyptic dystopian novels go, this one is first class. It features fewer sci-fi gimmicks than some, but a more profound sense of real menace. The characters are believable and evoke the reader’s sympathy or antipathy as the story requires. Altogether, it’s a skillfully rendered tale with plenty of action and personal interaction to keep interest high.

Set in a time when society has retreated either to virtually-walled territories or a primitive wilderness existence by the prevalence of a vicious type of tick which carries a virulent disease, the principals are seeking meaning in their lives by venturing outside the confines of protection to experience something of the world as it was. Equipped with special suits and extraction devices to minimize the danger of tick attacks or removal of them if such an attack occurs, they are a mixed bag of wealthy tourists and a few refugees from lives of bleak desperation. They have journeyed beyond the border of safety: outside the “salt line."

The term “salt” has come to mean a number of things including an addictive drug, a remedy for disease and a protection against the ubiquitous ticks. The salt forms a background for the good and evil done by this disparate group.

The reader may be reminded of other survival stories where a group of unrelated people find themselves in a lifeboat, plane wreck or other situation in which they must either work together or perish. They become much more intimately involved in each other’s lives than any one of them would ever have imagined before this harrowing experience.
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The pace is brisk, the writing clear, the characters fully rendered and while entirely imagined, the plot is well within the realm of believability. In short, it’s a cracking good yarn with a satisfying denouement.

Putnam - $26.00 - September 2017

The Western Star
by Craig Johnson

Reviewed by Eric Boss

This is the thirteenth book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire mystery series, but there’s no hint of bad luck here, except maybe for those in Walt’s sights. The author has once more delivered a read that’s pure pleasure. This will come as no surprise to his fans, but for those who have not yet had the opportunity to read one of these, expect to be entertained, enlightened and moved to emotions you might not expect from a murder mystery.

As always, the story is propelled by the characters. The outstanding aspect of it all is that you come to care deeply about them. Each one is a fully realized human with all the standard issue faults and strengths we expect in “real” life. In this tale, we see those frailties and virtues on display as Walt makes the difficult transition from single life in the Marines into both a new marriage and a new job as deputy to Lucian Connelly, a genuine curmudgeon and wise elder who sees what others don’t in the young lawman. Lucian senses the seriousness of his young protégé’s commitment to doing the right thing, always.

The action alternates between present and past in ways that reveal more to us about Walt’s motives and demons. The author strings pearls of information into a whole that reveal more about why Walt is who he is. Small decorative pieces are inserted, flavoring the whole, such as an interlude with a famous hippie singer and details about a historic annual excursion of Wyoming sheriffs via steam-powered rail on the Western Star. The richness of experience is enhanced by this and the subtle literary allusions common to Mr. Johnson’s books. While there is doubtless a melancholy echo here, the general tone is light and amply supplied with typically sly humor.
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The readers’ only likely complaint is that there is never enough. One is moved to request one of those nine-hundred page doorstops that some mystery authors produce. But quality is always better than quantity and that’s what The Western Star delivers.

Imaginary Vessels
by Paisley Rekdal

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

It occasionally becomes necessary to step back from the unadulterated pleasures of the actual reading of poetry to pause to take into consideration just what it is that makes good poetry good.  Whether this takes place in a classroom, an online chat, or a backyard discussion with a couple friends over some good wine, I default, almost without exception, to the philosophy of poetry provided by William Wordsworth in his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads because very few of the arguments made about poetry since have rung as surely and truly as his.  The job of the poet, Wordsworth writes, is to "choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect," the end result of which is that these "incidents and situations" might "more easily be comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."  

In a luminescent prose, Paisley Rekdal's fifth collection of poetry, Imaginary Vessels, explores a broad assortment of both the anticipated and most unexpected spaces in life, prying open their containers like oysters, using language as her blade, for our consideration, thought, and pleasure.  Less physically grounded than Animal Eye, the contrasting flashes of beauty and violence found in the poetry collected in Imaginary Vessels remind the reader that the spaces that we notice, the spaces that we create, the spaces that we discover, the spaces we occupy, both invite and defy articulation.  They are identifiable, yet resist definition.  

​Rekdal's efforts to consider, and understand, these spaces and their containers reach a dark and intimate crescendo in the fourth section of the book, "Shooting the Skulls:  A Wartime Devotional," in which she offers verse to accompany a series of photographs by artist Andrea Modica.  Modica's gallery of photographs displays a series of anonymous human skulls (of hundreds) discovered buried in the grounds of The Colorado Mental Heath Institute.  Where Modica's photography arrestingly captures the broken contours and unavoidable physicality of the skulls, Rekdal's poetry seems to seek their missing souls, the flash of life that, once present in these housings, has long left.  The skulls are empty houses, abandoned by their occupants, and narratives of the shocking and violent lives of the patients at the Institute, a microcosmic reflection, in general, of the Stygian mysteries of the human condition and, more specifically, of our willingness to inflict violence upon one another.

Wintering
by Peter Geye

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

I grew up on Wisconsin’s lakes and rivers.  I still have some nebulous, albeit abstractly pleasant, memories of making the three and a half hour drive north with my dad and grandfather in the late seventies to go freshwater smelting along the Lake Superior coastline. If you tried to describe smelting to someone who had never done it, it would surely sound like some type of insanity - you wait until the coldest part of the night (the water’s a handful of degrees above freezing), unroll a large net, peer into the water with a flashlight for fish the size of your fingers, and drag the waters along the coastline while the smelt make their spring migration to their spawning streams.  We were never out there alone - the coastline was alive with the subdued thumping of Willie Nelson songs, the quiet crackle of bonfires, and you could smell the beer in the air.  All around us, at a distance, was the vast, otherworldly darkness of the timber.Large smelt are only about seven inches long, so it takes a bunch to feed a family of six - but that’s neither here nor there because a good run will bring up a net full of the tiny, flipping fish.  In the end, we’d sleep away the drive home, and ate beer battered smelt for a few days and freeze the rest for other meals, firmly convinced that there’s nothing so indescribably delicious as eating right out of nature’s hand.

Over the years, pretty much everything in this heavily forested part of the world has changed, except, perhaps, the seemingly limitless expanse and potential ferocity of its wilderness, and I’ve become convinced that there aren’t very many writers who have captured it in its beautiful and violent fullness as well as Peter Geye has in his work.  I’ve felt the razor coldness of the north shore air, smelled the heady greenness of its forests, and heard the ice snap and pop like gunshots beneath my feet.  This landscape is reborn, and yet remains true, in Geye’s work, and when his new book, Wintering, hits the bookstore shelves next month, it’s truly cause for celebration on many levels.

First and foremost, readers will find, in Peter Geye, an author who creates with both brutality and deep sensitivity, his work having the rocky edges of a Cormac McCarthy novel, but who’s characters have, also, an uncommon psychological depth, some of which is laid bare before his readers and some of which is felt, almost as intuition.  Make no mistake.  This is truly a gift.  It’s one thing to explain in your work what your characters think; it’s another thing altogether to write in such a way that your readers can actually feel what what they’re thinking.  In his haunting previous work, The Lighthouse Road, Geye explores the diaphanous frontier between the ferocious landscape of the Minnesota northwoods and the psychology of its population, directing his readers into the darkened wilderness behind the eyes of each of his characters.  Delightfully, this is not an anomaly unique to his second book, but is, indeed, the driving force of his new novel, Wintering, and Geye knows these characters - these families - intimately because they are the descendants of the characters who populated his previous book.

Wintering opens with Gustav (Gus) Eide, grandson of The Lighthouse Road’s Odd Eide, visiting close family friend (and narrator) Berit Lovig, His aged and ailing father, Harry, it seems, has disappeared into the frozen wilderness just outside of town, presumably for the final time.  The atmosphere is bittersweet, and over the course of ensuing visits to Berit’s home, Gus begins to gradually disclose the yet-untold account of his father’s previous disappearance - one that took place some thirty years earlier - when Harry and a then eighteen year old Gus left Gunflint with a reconstructed map, setting out to cross seemingly immeasurable tracts of woodland to find, and “winter” at, the mythic Fort le Croix, as did French-Canadian voyageurs generations earlier.  But Harry has not been altogether honest with his son, and, unlike my considerably gentler interactions with this landscape, what begins for Gus as a journey seemingly meant to repair their tenuous relationship turns into nothing less than a savage struggle for survival,
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Aside from being a significant new work of Midwestern literature, Wintering is also a victory, I would suggest, for writers everywhere who are dedicated to their craft.  Peter Geye’s first two books, Safe From the Sea and The Lighthouse Road are both beautifully composed novels published by a small, literary-minded press called Unbridled Books, whom discriminating readers would do well to seek out .  As an observer of the publishing world, I can’t help but to feel, when a hard-working and talented writer like Geye is picked up by a major publisher of literary fiction like Alfred A. Knopf, that all of the industry’s mechanisms are operating just the way they should be. ​

Enlightenment Now
by Steven Pinker
​
Reviewed by Eric Boss

The subtitle of this book clearly states the intention of the author which I believe most readers will find fulfilled: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. In fairly dense but easily readable fashion, Pinker shows how we have made a better world in spite of our continual mistaken impression that we have only made it worse. With persuasive arguments, a raft of charts, duly attributed, and remarkably insightful thinking, he paints a picture of a world not without hope, but full of the prospect of a better future for our species and incidentally for the other inhabitants of our planet. No Pollyanna, he recognizes the challenges and the difficulties we face and has proposed solutions and strategies make good sense. The book is written with a light touch and spiced with tidbits of humor, pop culture and an occasional sly dig at our penchant for taking ourselves too seriously. Pinker shows us that we owe a great deal, perhaps everything to the principles embodied in The Enlightenment of 18th and 19th century.
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As a testament to the work involved in putting together this impressive work, the author has included an astonishing sixty-seven page appendix of notes and thirty-one pages of indexed citations listing theories by name, authors quoted, political movements and references to philosophies, fallacies and religious notions. It is clear that this is not the product of ephemerality.

In chapters dedicated to the components of the larger argument, Pinker explains his views on the history of humankind’s improvements in health, wealth, minimization of war and its siblings, torture, oppression and destruction, and progress in understanding threats to the global environment with special attention to methods whereby all these efforts can be continued and enhanced. He asserts that it is our duty as a species to apply what we’ve learned from science to make the world an increasingly better place. The proposition is compelling.

Attention is also given to the spiritual side of our collective condition with special note taken of the place religion has occupied historically and in the present. The place of spirituality in the health of our fellow creatures is not ignored and is in fact given a prominent place in the discussion. Science and its contributions are, however, given the front seat in creating the artistic, cultural, social, political and psychological environment in which charity, humility and empathy for our fellows can prosper. At root it is science and reason that have given us the leisure and the tools with which we enjoy a better life than our ancestors.

In the current atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and skepticism of the value of science and technology it is more important than ever to emphasize the usefulness, indeed the necessity of maintaining the work of discovering how and why the universe works and what we can do with what we learn about it. With this important and meaningful work Steven Pinker has provided a roadmap to appreciating our achievements and assuring that this progress will not cease to advance.

Shelf talker: The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries with its blossoming of thought in science and reason has provided a framework upon which the modern world has been built and great progress in human welfare has resulted. Rather than the increasingly chaotic and violent world many of us perceive, the author shows us that things are truly much better now than ever before. Solid, verifiable evidence to back up his assertions are difficult if not impossible to contradict.

Penguin Books - $35.00 - February 2018

Celine
by Peter Heller

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Peter Heller has once again delivered a superior novel, not unlike his previous works; The Dog Stars and The Painter, both stellar achievements. It is gratifying to a serial reader that each book this author produces is completely unlike the one before. That is not always what a reader wants, but in the category of literary fiction it’s a joy. While I am reluctant to make comparisons between authors and books, this puts me in mind of Amor Towles’ latest, A Gentleman in Moscow in that the writing is elegant and fluid and the characters are endearing. My admiration for both is great indeed.

Heller has told us that his story is based on that of his mother, and I can only say I wish that I had known her. She is what would have been, at one time, called a “hellbender”. An American child living in Paris at the time of the Nazi invasion who barely escaped, as did her father at the very last moment, she grows up in an eccentric household of New England aristocrats taking the role of the “strange child” who knows too much too early, and not because anyone taught her. She’s just like that: fiercely independent. She senses moods, attitudes, emotional schisms, societal reluctance and any number of other things some of us never master all our lives, and yet this little girl “knows” what’s going on around her, sometimes to the sorrow of her family. She and her sisters are a handful and then some for parents, grandparents, teachers and extended family.

Celine endures personal tragedy with astonishingly adult and stoic strength to become a private investigator specializing in finding the lost parents of abandoned children. Also, she did a stretch with the FBI, but left to do more important work, that of reuniting families. This gives an insight into her character that is seminal to the book. Empathy, “the underdog gene”, outrage at social injustice, ill-treatment of women, are all part of her makeup.

I don’t want to say too much about this book because I want the reader to enjoy the fullness of the experience themselves. I will say that I am truly in awe of Peter Heller’s skills as a writer and a chronicler of human strengths, weaknesses, loves and hates. In addition, it’s a helluva story, with all the bells and whistles: suspense, violence, outstanding courage, tugging of the heartstrings, you name it, it’s here. Kudos to this most worthy writer.

​Vintage Books- $16.00 - January 2018

Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

It’s embarrassing to admit that, not having read her literary debut, Everything I Never Told You, three years ago, I was not among the camp of enthusiasts who had been waiting, eagerly, for this novel.  Earlier in the year, however, I found myself at a Penguin dinner at a Minneapolis sales conference where both Celeste Ng and fellow Penguin author Gabriel Tallent were introducing their new books, Gabriel speaking about his debut, My Absolute Darling, and Celeste, of course, introducing Little Fires Everywhere.  Saying that I picked the book up, in the first place, out of a sense of gratitude to Penguin for the lovely evening would probably be the most honest way to begin, but I have to immediately proceed to add that I’ve chosen to write about this incredibly clever book entirely on account of how much I loved reading it.

As the novel opens, Pearl Warren moves to idyllic Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her artist mother Mia.  It is “a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland,” a suburb where the lawns are manicured to painful perfection, and the world has been tamed into rigid order.  Pearl and Mia find and rent a small house from the Richardsons, a prominent, wealthy, and well known family who are thoroughly integrated in the Shaker Heights community, and Mia, wanting to earn some extra money for the family also begins to work for the Richardsons as a housekeeper.  This is where things begin to get realiy interesting.

Disenchanted with her mother’s vagabond lifestyle of moving from one city to another, one rental unit to the next, Pearl longs for the more ordered way of life, and the stability that she sees in the Richardson household.  In diametric opposition to Pearl is the Richardson’s youngest daughter Izzy, who feels she is in thrall to her mother’s authority and sense of order, and yearns for Mia’s passion for life and free flowing approach to living.  As the two families become more closely intertwined, the two teens virtually trade places.  To significantly complicate matters, Ng also introduces a custody battle for a Chinese infant in which most of the characters become entangled to some degree.
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The way the characters have all become intertwined implies a complicated mess, and things certainly don’t work out simply, but the final result of Ng’s efforts is, ultimately, an extraordinarily well written novel, in which every reader will be able to identify some degree of his or her self.  Little Fires Everywhere presents readers, also, with a broad and startlingly accurate cross section of characters, and, by way of this clean social sampling, Ng conducts a brief, but powerful, survey of race, class, gender, and income inequality in twenty-first century America with savvy and a great deal of precision, disguising it, all the while, as an entertaining novel.

​Penguin Books - $27.00 - September 2017

Who is the Dancer,
What is the Dance?
by Alex Caldiero

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

"The words were summer on the tongue.  The wine was summer caught and stoppered . . . sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks" 
- Ray Bradbury

It would be shamefully reductive to refer to Alex Caldiero's latest selection of work as a collection of poetry, because the pieces that make up Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance? are much more experiential in nature.  The best point of entry into the book is, in fact, its subtitle, "Six Days On the Colorado River Thru Cataract Canyon."  Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance? is a collection of poetry, but a closer examination, an engaged reading, opens up something bigger and far more substantive than what one could reasonably expect to find in so slender a volume.  Caldiero's project, it seems, is to use a symphony of language, tone, texture, and the movement of line to convey a richer account of the actual experiences described in the book than language alone is capable of providing and, in this sense, the book is a triumph.  By way of Caldiero's words and illustrative efforts, readers will not only smell the water and feel the sky but are also somehow able to encounter the Colorado River in a way that provides a sense of its raw power, and lays bare the vulnerability of the flesh in a wilderness context.  Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance? pushes its way into, and seemingly through, the fabric of physical reality to provide access to the spiritually transformative power of such a personal encounter with nature, even coasting into the end of the journey with all of the unfathomable disappointment that usually accompanies the end of such a communal experience.  Readers who are unable, or perhaps no longer able, to have a river experience like the one written about here will find the very next best thing in Caldiero's project, "caught and stoppered . . . sealed away for opening" whenever the reader desires.

Exit Strategy
by Steve Hamilton

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

​Never really drawn, in the past, to series books with recurring characters, I did find myself experiencing a delicious sense of anticipation in the months leading up to the release of Exit Strategy, the second book by Steve Hamilton to feature the character Nick Mason. Hamilton’s readers were, after all, forced to leave Nick Mason in an unusual predicament as they finished his first book in the series, The Second Life of Nick Mason. Mason, five years into a twenty year sentence, has made a devil’s bargain with an incarcerated crime boss, Darius Cole, and finds himself, once again, on the streets of Chicago. The catch is that Mason now has a new cell phone that he’s beholden to. When it rings, he answers it wherever he is, regardless of what he’s doing. A voice on the other end provides him with instructions, and he is to follow them to the letter, and unquestioningly.

Hamilton’s first book in the series, The Second Life of Nick Mason, was a cleanly written crime story with a hard, spare prose that propelled his readers through the narrative. Despite it’s contemporary setting, it even seemed to have a bit of a Raymond Chandler feel about it, and accomplished some wonderful character building, following Nick Mason through his rite of passage from thief to killer while, at the same time, building a believable cast of secondary characters, from Quintero, Mason’s contact, facilitator, and guide on the outside, to Sandoval, the relentless detective who smells foul play all over Mason’s early release and follows him doggedly, to his old friend from the streets, Eddie.

Nick Mason rockets out of the starting gate in the opening pages of Exit Strategy on a job for Darius Cole in some high octane sequences that move along so quickly, I almost felt as if I had to sprint to keep up. Cole, it seems, has maneuvered his way into a retrial, and Mason’s new job is to make sure that none of the key witnesses survive to testify. At this point, Hamilton’s second Nick Mason installment could very easily have slipped into being a book that I’d already read many times, under many different titles - and this is what I was afraid was going to happen - but it didn’t. Hamilton, instead, complicated the circumstances of the narrative and exploited the inherent complexities of his characters to turn out a second Nick Mason story that was just as engaging and fresh as the first.

Mason, while working for Cole, is, of course, formulating the titled exit strategy in an effort to extricate himself from the agreement that he finds himself bound to, but it’s not said exit strategy that makes the book interesting, as readers might first suspect. Don’t get me wrong. There is material here that feels familiar, but the book does become something much more interesting. What really makes Hamilton’s second foray into Nick Mason’s world an absolute page turner is more of the same strong, sharp writing, his brilliant penchant for taking chances and defying the expectations of his readers, and his willingness to take some really sudden and shocking hard corners. After all is said and done, and the bodies lie, bleeding out, Hamilton’s readers, myself among them, can only begin the wait for more.