Author Archives: Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

The Civil War in Washington: Two Perspectives

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Join me and Jeff Richards at Upshur Street Books (827 Upshur Street, N.W.) on Tuesday, July 19 at 7:00 p.m., when we discuss our respective views on the Battle of Fort Stevens, in which Confederate General Jubal Early nearly marched into Washington, D.C.

Fort Stevens is located in what is now the Brightwood neighborhood of D.C., where most of my my novel Up the Hill to Home takes place, and the battle is described in the chapter “Jubal’s March”. Jeff’s Civil War novel Open Country visits the aftermath of the battle, which includes an appearance by “Uncle Walt” Whitman, who was a fixture at army hospitals throughout D.C. during the war as he visited wounded soldiers.

Jeff and I will take turns reading from our novels, and we’ll discuss our approaches to writing about the war. We hope to see you there!

Historical Gold from INDIEFAB!

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indiefab-gold-imprint On June 25 at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Orlando, Foreword Reviews magazine announced the winners of the 2015 INDIEFAB Awards, which recognizes the best work in independent publishing. Up the Hill to Home, which was a finalist in both general and historical fiction, won the Gold in the historical fiction category.

“Foreword’s INDIEFAB judges are the key to our winners selection process, and, in our minds, the most foolproof way to choose award-winning books,” said Victoria Sutherland, publisher of Foreword Reviews. “We work with a librarian and bookseller in each category to provide us with an insider’s perspective on what would do well on consumer and library shelves. Using industry professionals confirms the trade quality of a book.”

Last May, the Foreword Reviews 2015 summer issue highlighted Up the Hill to Home in a feature article as one of eight debut novels to watch.

Historical Novels Review Spring 2016 Issue

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The following reviews initially appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of the Historical Novels Review of the Historical Novel Society.

THE TRANSLATION OF LOVE, Lynne Kutsukake, Doubleday

This touching and thought-provoking debut novel follows the storylines of several Japanese, Japanese-American, and Japanese-Canadian characters living—and sometimes barely surviving—in Japan during the post-Word War II American occupation. The stories weave together to create a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of the civilian Japanese experience before, during, and after the war.

Central to the story is General Douglas MacArthur. As one character observes, MacArthur seems almost to replace the emperor in the eyes of the Japanese people. In his role as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur invites the Japanese to write him letters, and they respond in astounding numbers.

Pervading the novel is a constant sense of dislocation. Aya, a Canadian schoolgirl whose mother died while the family was interned, has been “repatriated” to Japan with her father but speaks virtually no Japanese. Corporal Yoshitaka “Matt” Matsumoto is a second-generation American who joined the army from an internment camp to prove his loyalty, and, now part of the occupation force, uses his rusty language skills to translate those letters to MacArthur. Matt’s coworker and fellow American citizen Nancy Nogami was visiting relatives in Japan in December 1941, and so was never allowed to return home. For the native Japanese, the social and cultural dislocation they face in their occupied country is seismic and stark.

This seismic shift in culture is most clearly illustrated through the stories of Fumi, who gradually befriends Aya, and Fumi’s sister Sumiko, who naively accepts employment at a dancehall, which immediately turns into indentured servitude. When Sumiko can no longer return home, Fumi and Aya write a letter to MacArthur to beg for his help in finding her.

Kutsukake has created a nuanced, empathetic but unsentimental story that considers what it means to rebuild an identity, both as an individual and as a nation.

THE RISEN: A NOVEL OF SPARTACUS, David Anthony Durham, Doubleday

In David Anthony Durham’s novels of ancient Rome, Rome plays the villain. Pride of Carthage mapped Hannibal’s attempt to overthrow that seat of world power, and now The Risen traces the great slave uprising lead by the gladiator Spartacus. Credit the power of Durham’s storytelling that it doesn’t matter that readers already know the outcome of both ill-fated campaigns; the journey to get there is absolutely worth the trip.

Durham’s approach to the story is both inventive and well-suited to the task. He’s broken the book into three sections, each made up of chapters told from the point of view of the same set of characters. Thus, readers get to know and follow a handful of characters through the shifting tides of the story, including a hapless Roman soldier, an old woman whose early servitude taught her routes up and down the length of Italy, a Greek medic, a Roman general’s slave scribe, several of Spartacus’s most trusted lieutenants, and Spartacus himself.

Spartacus is a born leader, able to think both strategically and tactically, helped also by a priestess’s visions of triumph. The gladiators’ escape, early sorties, and first two engagements with the Roman armies sent against them are thrilling in their planning and execution. Spartacus takes the long view of his eventual objectives, though not everyone in his expansive following agrees with his plans.

Halfway through the book, the tide starts to turn against The Risen, slowly at first with small setbacks, but soon in wave after wave of bad luck, betrayal, and strategic miscalculations. As one character says, Spartacus was so strong he could only be brought down through betrayal, but it may be that Spartacus simply didn’t understand that, however much Rome was hated, an army of slaves could never command the respect necessary to gain true allies.

NOT ALL BASTARDS ARE FROM VIENNA, Andrea Molesini, translated by Antony Shugaar and Patrick Creagh, Grove Press

This restrained, beautifully written debut novel looks at war from the microcosm of a single location, that of a villa in the small Italian town of Refrontolo, just north of Venice, in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Caporetto. It is November 1917, and the German/Austro-Hungarian armies are pressing their advantage to drive deeper into Italy. The novel opens as a contingent of Germans commandeers the villa of the Spada family for the officers’ use, and billets the infantry in the almost-deserted village. The adult narrator, Paolo Spada, looks back on the story through the eyes of his 17-year-old self, describing events with just the right mix of understanding, naiveté, and desire for grown-up adventure that a boy on the cusp of manhood would have in that situation.

Engaging characters populate the Spada household: strong-willed grandmother Nancy; contrary, charming grandfather Gugliemo; fiercely loyal housekeeper Teresa; beautiful, eccentric neighbor Giulia; intelligence-officer-cum-house-steward Renato; and, at the center, Paolo’s intelligent, resourceful aunt Donna Maria. Paolo observes the chastely tender relationship that grows between Maria and the Viennese major in charge of the billeted army, Baron Von Feilitzsch. These two aristocrats with similar educations and cultural influences share far more in common than does the monied family with the local peasants, but war both divides and unites along national boundaries. Maria and the Baron are the last products of old empires that will not survive the war. As many in the family are drawn into helping Renato’s insurgency missions, those boundaries are fully drawn.

Molesini’s language is simple and lovely, and his story draws the reader in close to the family. He notes that this novel was inspired by Maria Spada’s privately published Diary of Invasion; he has written a book that is equal to such a remarkable woman.

More from the Historical Novels Review Spring 2016 Issue

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The following reviews initially appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of the Historical Novels Review of the Historical Novel Society.

HYSTOPIA, David Means, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The conceit of Hystopia, author David Means’ first novel, is that the novel it contains was written by a Vietnam vet, Eugene Allen, who leaves the completed manuscript and a set of notes behind when he commits suicide. Eugene’s novel is bracketed by a series of editor’s notes and snippets of interviews with Eugene’s friends, family, and acquaintances, through which we come to understand how much of his novel is autobiographical.

Means makes it clear from the start that all of this is alternative history. The book opens with an editor’s note mentioning, “Details of the seventh assassination attempt made on John F. Kennedy, now known as the Genuine Assassination, have been changed slightly in Allen’s narrative . . . ”

As the novel inside the novel describes, Kennedy’s administration has developed a therapy called enfolding, which attempts to heal returning veterans’ psychological trauma. Vets take a drug called Tripizoid, re-enact the scene of their trauma, and thereby cancel the event out of their conscious and unconscious memory. It doesn’t work on everyone, and a failed treatment deepens the damage.

The story alternates primarily between Singleton and Wendy, agents of Kennedy’s Psych Corps, and a variety of characters roaming the wastelands of Michigan, burned to the waterline by rampaging gangs and failed enfoldees. The worst of these is psychopathic Rake, who has kidnapped a young woman and is holding her at his buddy’s cabin. All of these characters are damaged, some irretrievably, but as the story lines eventually converge, Means allows Eugene to give his characters a measure of light at the end of their dark tunnel. For us, Means has woven an ingenious, compelling, brutal story of the ravages that war exacts on the society that wages it.

WEST OF EDEN: AN AMERICAN PLACE, Jean Stein, Random House

This is the book for anyone who needs to be reminded that money does not buy happiness. In fact, the lesson taught by West of Eden is that having lots of money simply opens the door to buying unhappiness on a truly breathtaking scale.

Author Jean Stein is the daughter of Jules Stein, founder of MCA and one of the most powerful men in entertainment for many years. Each of five sections focuses on a selected family, such as that of Jack Warner of Warner Bros. fame; Jennifer Jones, among whose husbands was hugely powerful producer David O. Selznick; and Stein’s own. It’s fitting that sections are subtitled with the addresses of the houses these people lived in, since each is a character in its own right.

The book is made up of interwoven interviews with friends, family, business associates, and other witnesses to the goings-on of the rich, powerful, and famous. It’s compulsively readable but often disturbing, in particular as readers understand the frequency with which stunningly self-absorbed parents utterly ignore or discard their children. Rarely are stepfamilies blended; the old family is merely left behind somewhere to make room for the new one. It’s a sobering portrait.

THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT, Edited by Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer, Yale University Press

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .” One of Shakespeare’s most rousing speeches is declaimed by King Henry V in advance of the Battle of Agincourt, which took place October 25, 1415, and in which the far-outnumbered English army emerged victorious against the French. That battle is the subject of this gorgeous, richly illustrated, and scholarly coffee table book, a project developed under the auspices of Britain’s Royal Armouries to commemorate the 600-year anniversary of a battle that its predecessor, the Office of Armoury, actually outfitted. The book features a collection of essays that discuss various aspects of Agincourt, from the English and French commanders, to the weapons and armaments, to the precipitating factors and aftermath, to Shakespeare’s Henry V, and even to the 1944 Laurence Olivier film of the play, which was filmed in Technicolor and released at the height of World War II as a huge boost to national morale. Though Agincourt was not a decisive battle in the Hundred Years War, the editors credit Shakespeare’s play with making the battle a cultural touchstone in the English historical narrative.

Book Review: The Human Cost of Welfare

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This review initially appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 20, 2016.

Screen Shot 2016-07-02 at 5.29.09 PM It may be hard to believe that a book discussing welfare policy can be described as a page-turner, but here it is. Authors Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers spend the bulk of The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help laying out engaging and often compelling arguments in support of the title, but readers may find themselves hurrying to reach the payoff: possible solutions to the endemic problems of the current welfare system.

You don’t need to be a policy wonk to find much that is thought-provoking and possibly eye-opening in here. Best of all, in the midst of this exceptionally brutal and grueling election cycle, it is refreshingly non-partisan. That’s not to say it’s non-controversial, simply that conservatives and liberals will find elements to argue with in equal measure.

Also refreshing is its willingness to remember that, at the core of all of this, we’re talking about human beings, each of whom has a life and a story. The authors have included snippets of some of these stories, which they collected through nationwide field interviews with people on the receiving end of the welfare system — which, as the authors illustrate, might not always be described as a benefit.

The organizing philosophy of Welfare is best summarized by this quote: “‘There is nothing to suggest that people on welfare are lazy,’ notes Cato’s Michael Tanner. ‘But there is also nothing to suggest they are stupid. If you pay someone as much for not working as you do for working, it should come as no surprise that many take advantage of the offer.’”

The evidence that Harvey and Conyers lay out clearly illustrates the unintended consequences inherent in the current welfare system, primarily in the myriad ways in which it offers disincentives to working. The authors’ “fundamental point: earning money is economically dangerous for low-earning families with substantial welfare income.”

They describe the complex, contradictory, and arcane rules associated with the combination of various alphabet-soup programs like SNAP, TANF, WIC, SSDI, and SSI, and the calculus involved for recipients in determining where they will hit the “welfare cliff” — the specific amount of earned income that will cause their benefits to shut off like a light switch.

Looking at the overall system from the 10,000-foot level — which, let’s admit it, is the view for most people not directly involved in the system — it’s easy to see how these rules have come to exist. The simplistic argument is: If you’re working, you don’t need welfare. The next argument becomes: If you can work, you shouldn’t get welfare.

Nowhere is this concept more clearly demonstrated than in the rules surrounding SSDI, the Social Security disability program, whereby it is basically impossible for applicants to get benefits if they are still working — the obvious argument being if you can work, you’re not disabled. As the authors point out, the barriers to work that SSDI puts up “run directly counter to the intent of the American with Disabilities Act, which seeks to empower the disabled to join the workforce.”

Within the solution space, the authors focus on shifting welfare incentives to tie them to work benefits for both the recipients and the employers who hire them. While not revolutionary ideas, since the book addresses much that has arisen from the 1996 “welfare to work” legislation, there is a wide range of suggestions to consider.

Harvey and Conyers find much to like in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and describe ways to improve and expand the program. They also describe a number of ways to make it less burdensome on employers to hire workers. One unexpected recommendation toward eliminating the current unintended encouragement of poor single girls and women to have children is to provide free access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).

For all the valid issues the book raises and to some degree addresses, the underlying implication is that the jobs are out there if only people had the correct incentives to secure them. This is the point on which the book seems weakest: Except for a brief discussion of apprenticeships as a way of training workers in certain fields, there’s little examination of the inherent mismatch between available jobs and the skills of the underemployed.

The authors note the plummeting engagement of working-class men in the workforce, but do little to address the fact that the loss of traditional manufacturing and farm jobs is increasingly offset by higher-skilled work in technology industries with a far steeper learning curve.

Ironically, one of Welfare’s complaints is that SNAP benefits — what we all know as food stamps — are supposed to be tied to work requirements, but almost never are. That changed as of April of this year, though, as most states now require people without children or a disability to work at least 20 hours a week in order to receive benefits.

In the Washington Post on April 1, 2016, Max Ehrenfreund and Roberto A. Ferdman quoted Rebecca Vallas of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress: “Making people hungrier isn’t going to make them find work faster.” In many ways, this book argues that it will.

The crux of the problem, though, may be as simple as it is immoveable. Though they’re only describing one suggested program, the authors may as well be talking about all of them when they say, “The major flaw in this plan is that Congress would never bring itself to enact it.”

Truly, it is hard to envision achieving the political will to enact substantive changes to welfare under the bitterly partisan atmosphere of non-cooperation we’ve engendered over the course of the last few election cycles. Perhaps the authors would be willing to hand out copies of this book to new and returning members of Congress as they convene in January 2017.

Historical Novels Review Winter 2016 Issue

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The following reviews originally appeared in the February 2016 print and online edition of the Historical Novels Review of the Historical Novel Society.

THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, John Wray, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Taken together, John Wray’s first three novels clearly demonstrate his facility in representing a broad, eclectic range of subjects, time periods, and characters; thus, this novel should come as no real surprise, but it does. Defying easy categorization, the book weaves elements of science, science fiction, history, pop culture, and religion to produce a funny, mordant, thoughtful, and thought-provoking exegesis on the nature of time.

Waldemar Tolliver is both the hapless victim and natural product of his notorious family’s history. When his great-grandfather, pickle baron and amateur physicist Ottokar Toula, dies just hours after making the stunning but ill-documented discovery that it’s possible to move freely within the dimension of time, Ottokar’s descendants are trapped in lifetimes of attempting to unlock those lost secrets. Waldy’s family, certain it has the inside track on the right answer, dismisses Einstein as “The Patent Clerk.” “The belief that every physicist since Newton has been a fraud or a sucker (or both) is our family dogma, passed from generation to generation like a vendetta or an allergy to nuts.”

The details unwrap themselves slowly as we read over Waldy’s shoulder while he pens his family’s sordid history for the faithless woman he loves, Mrs. Haven. He writes from inside the depths of his late aunts’ huge, stuffed-to-the-rafters New York apartment where, incidentally, he finds himself entirely outside the stream of time. How he came to be there, how he is named after his great-uncle the war criminal, how his father’s bad science fiction writing is responsible for the founding of a cult (Wray doesn’t bother to hide that he’s describing Scientology), and how his thoroughly eccentric aunts may have finally solved the puzzle are all eventually revealed in this story that, like a black hole, winds ever tighter around its core.

THE VATICAN PRINCESS: A NOVEL OF LUCREZIA BORGIA, C.W. Gortner, Ballantine

Pity Lucrezia Borgia and the legacy of historical gossip permanently attached to her. Simply saying the name conjures up titillating visions of wealth, power, evil, and lots of illicit sex. C.W. Gortner, who specializes in Renaissance fiction featuring strong female protagonists, uses his latest novel to cut through the innuendo and perhaps shine a more historically accurate light onto this notorious woman, who seems to have simply had the misfortune of being born into the wrong family.

Gortner has Lucrezia narrate her own story, and he presents her as a credible witness. She and her siblings are the children of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and one of his many long-term mistresses; the barest of charades is used to maintain the required appearances. The story opens when Lucrezia is twelve and the conclave of cardinals is set to elect a new pope. We immediately plunge into the stunning complexities, intrigues, and cold-blooded cynicism of life among the Vatican elite. Rodrigo’s machinations win him the papacy, a thoroughly political office that demands constant power-brokering and frequent wars to protect it. Lucrezia is used as any Renaissance princess would be, as a useful tool for cementing allegiances, and she has precious little real influence. However much Rodrigo dotes upon her, or her brother Cesare claims to love her, the entire Borgia clan uses her horrifically and eventually causes her nothing but misery.

The author has invested his novel with impressive historical detail that is woven neatly into the threads of the story, and his afterword and references offer excellent insight and final wrap-up. Though he strikes a few false notes – Lucrezia’s relinquished child seems to play almost no part in her emotional make-up – Gortner gives us a sympathetic portrait of a woman who was treated badly both in life and by the historical record.

THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH, Andrus Kivirähk, translated by Christopher Mosley, Black Cat

In The Man Who Spoke Snakish, Estonian writer Andrus Kivirähk weaves a melancholy, often brutal, tale of the last gasp of an ancient folkloric culture. He describes a people who live entirely in the forest, keep wolves to ride (like horses) and milk (like cows), command wild deer and goats to come to slaughter, and speak the language of their friends the snakes. It is this ability that offers the people dominion over the wolves, deer, and goats, and the forest in general.

Even as the novel opens, though, we find a culture in steep decline. People are leaving the forest in droves, drawn into the tantalizingly modern life of the village with its foreign invaders’ concepts that appear to offer a better life. The title character, Leemet, lives with his widowed mother and sister in their hut in the forest surrounded by an ever-shrinking community. Leemet’s uncle Vootele is the last fluent human speaker of Snakish, and he insists that Leemet learn it equally well. Vootele teaches Leemet about their ancient protector, the Frog of the North, and about Leemet’s grandfather, the last man to have poisonous fangs, which he used to tear into the “iron men” before those invading knights were able to capture him, chop off his legs, and throw him into the sea.

Though there is humor, particularly in some of the early descriptions and observations, the novel becomes ever darker as Leemet finds himself increasingly isolated. Kivirähk can perhaps be forgiven for drawing caricatures on both sides of the culture clash that traps Leemet, since every folktale features archetypes rather than well-drawn characters. Nonetheless, Kivirähk’s tale is poignant in its depiction of the loss of community, of the utter loneliness of living without the people who most understand who we really are.

Book Review: Almost Everything Very Fast

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 22, 2016.

There are two parallel narratives running through Almost Everything Very Fast, German author Christopher Kloeble’s first novel to be translated into English. The connections between the storylines reveal themselves gradually, and it takes almost the entire book before they fully intersect. But we know they will eventually, and the journey to bring them together is a compelling one.

It’s tempting to describe this book as charming, which is surprising given that it describes murder and other violent deaths, rampant incest, Nazi brutality, and a host of lesser ugliness. Credit Kloeble’s unshowy, matter-of-fact — even tender — delivery for bringing in the light.

The primary narrative belongs to Albert, a 19-year-old who has spent the last 16 years in St. Helena’s orphanage, outside his hometown of Königsdorf. Albert is not actually an orphan, though: while he is desperate to know who his mother was, his father, Fred Driajes, is still alive. Unfortunately, Fred has the mental capacity of a young child — a six-and-a half-foot-tall, happy, enthusiastic child whose favorite word is “ambrosial” — and Albert has served as the parent in their relationship for many years.

The lone stable adult in Albert’s childhood is St Helena’s steely headmistress, Sister Alfonsa, with whom he has a close but complicated relationship. She recognizes his intellect, teaches him to play chess, and is obviously fond of him, but also levies his punishment each time Albert runs away to Fred, convinced that this time he can forge a real connection with his “Papaa.”

It never happens, of course. Through years of summer vacations, Fred’s primary occupations are reading entries in the encyclopedia and counting green cars each day from the town’s bus stop. Albert cannot glean any information from him. “Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.” But when a cardiologist callously waves five fingers at them to indicate how many months Fred has left to live, Albert makes up his mind to move in with Fred in a last-ditch effort to discover who his mother is.

The second narrative belongs to Julian, who serves as our link to a difficult past. Readers meet him in the prologue, a sharp old man with painful memories. He starts his story from a tiny Bavarian hamlet called Segendorf, a village so remote that the inhabitants don’t hear about World War I until after it’s already been lost.

Segendorf is so small that a significant amount of inbreeding mars the village: “It frequently happened that somebody’s brother was also his cousin, or somebody’s daughter also her sister. Quite a few local families had produced a ‘Klöble’ — a ‘clumsy, stupid fellow.’ Mothers of such children were spat upon.” (Kloeble seems to have made up this definition for his own name.)

Thus, the characters Jasfe and Josfer Habom are not just sister and brother, they are also mother and father to Julian and his sister, Anni. Tragedy ensues when 11-year-old Julian discovers the truth of that dual relationship, and thereafter he leaves the village and his beloved sister behind.

Though he lives a rich life with his savior and mentor, the undertaker Wickenhauser, he is drawn back to Segendorf for love of Anni, and arrives the night before she marries the one foreigner who has ever survived stumbling into the village, a Pole named Arkadiusz Driajes.

While Julian bides his time and stews over the interloper, he fathers a child with Mina, the Klöble who loves him, who helped him to abscond years before. His child and Anni’s are born days apart. And if the Great War bypassed Segendorf, the Nazis do not, and they perform their own brand of “housecleaning,” rebranding the village as “Königsdorf.”

At its heart, this is a novel about absent parents. Some characters try to spin that absence into a positive. Fred’s next-door neighbor Klondi, who fully understands her own stunning failure as a parent, comforts a young Albert by saying, “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” Wickenhauser makes the same point to Julian: “We’re all better off without our parents.”

But, of course, that’s not really true. The void is always too large to fill, though it doesn’t stop any of the parentless characters from trying. Even Fred stalks the sewers of Königsdorf in search of his father, while Albert continues his detective work into the identity of his mother. All he has is a single photograph and a compact that contains two strands of hair that are just as red as his own. And Sister Alfonsa, firmly believing that Albert and Fred should be staying at St. Helena’s in Fred’s last few months, knows exactly the way to lure her favorite back: “I could show you who your mother is.”

Sister Alfonsa has never before hinted that she knows this truth, and her bait does the trick. Albert, Fred, Klondi, and Albert’s old girlfriend Violet pile into Violet’s Volkswagen for the road trip back to Sister Alfonsa and the answers to their many questions.

Ultimately, these answers may not be very satisfying, because, truly, what can ever make up for a lifetime of absence? Perhaps Fred has the answer to this question when he remarks, “We are all Most Beloved Possessions” of those to whom we are most present.

Join me for Kensington Day of the Book

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thumbnail_autograph The DC/Baltimore area is blessed with a vibrant book scene, illustrated in part by the increasing number of independent book stores and popular local book festivals the region supports. One of those festivals is Kensington Day of the Book, which is celebrating its 11th year on Sunday, April 24, from 11-4 on Howard Avenue. I’ll be one of the participating authors this year, so I hope you’ll come out to wonderful little Kensington, Maryland to celebrate all things book-related, and enjoy mingling with a slate of local and nationally known authors to talk books. Fingers crossed for warm, sunny weather!

Finalist in Two INDIEFAB 2015 Book of the Year Categories

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Foreword Reviews Magazine is dedicated to exploring, discussing, highlighting, and celebrating all that is best in independent book publishing. On March 7th, Foreword Reviews released the list of finalists in its 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, and Up the Hill to Home is a finalist in both the General and Historical Fiction categories. Award winners will be announced at the American Libraries Association annual conference in June.

Book Review: The Cabaret of Plants

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This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 10, 2016.

An orchid that flowers entirely underground. A rainforest vine that closely mimics the leaves of each tree it encounters, changing leaf shape, size, and color within the space of a few yards on the same vine. Passionflowers that have developed a back-and-forth competition with the zebra longwing butterfly to outsmart the other, with the current advantage going to the passionflower, which produces growths on its leaves that resemble butterfly eggs in a botanical “No Vacancy” sign.

We are treated to these wonders and many more in The Cabaret of Plants. Its subtitle, Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, perfectly sums up this gorgeous and engaging book from British naturalist/author Richard Mabey. A prolific writer, Mabey specializes in delivering accessible, thought-provoking discussions of plant life as it intersects with humanity, as he did in his 2011 book, Weeds.

In Cabaret, Mabey muses that we humans cannot think of plants without using ourselves as a frame of reference. While many people regard animals as beings in their own right, worthy of compassion and respect, there is little of that impulse toward flora.

Mabey worries that modern thinking considers plants purely in terms of their economic value, “defining plants as a biological proletariat, working solely for the benefit of our species, without granting them any a priori importance.”

The author isn’t here to scold his readers, but hopes to make us think “about plants as authors of their own lives,” and tells us, “Most of my own personal encounters with plants…have confirmed this conviction that plants have agendas of their own.”

Cabaret is organized into sections by subject or theme, and each of these has multiple chapters. Every one of them is fascinating. Mabey mixes history, science, and anecdote in roughly equal parts to compulsively readable effect.

The chapter “The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet,” for example, describes the early investigations into the why and how of carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap and the sundew, but spends as much time on the search for the name’s origin. Rather than being Native American, as first thought, tipitiwitchet is a bit of ribaldry, likening open “flytrap leaves — a pair of moist, red semicircles fringed by hairs, which remorselessly gripped their hapless prey” to female genitalia. A glance at the accompanying color plate, painted in 1847, makes that association hard to refute.

Though the book is wide ranging, it spends most of its time in the Europe and America of the 18th and 19th centuries, eras in which scientific discovery, romantic ideals, and the inculcated Judeo-Christian beliefs in the proper order of things mixed in a heady, disorienting brew.

It’s worth being reminded of the simple, everyday tools that people like Joseph Priestly, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton — all of whom Mabey accurately describes as “pre-professional scientists…the last non-specialists” — used in making their discoveries, the most important of which was close observation.

“Unravelling the process of photosynthesis in plants was arguably the most important development in the history of biology,” and Priestly did it with a bell jar, a bowl of water, and a mint sprig.

When it came to having a general fascination with plants, no one beat the Victorians. These folks had the deep and abiding curiosity about plants that Mabey would like to see reignited in modern-day thought, but that curiosity led to rapacious demand to possess the plants that most excited them, much to the detriment of the plants themselves.

It is painful to read about the plunder caused by the Victorians’ love affair with ferns and orchids, in which huge trees were felled to get at the epiphytes living high in the canopy, orchid varieties were purposely destroyed in order to keep supply low and prices high, and most plants didn’t survive anyway because the orchid hunters didn’t bother to note the particulars of the native environment in which the plants grew.

Not everyone loved orchids, however. Darwin in particular found them frustratingly inefficient. In the endlessly inventive reproductive methods plants have evolved to overcome their immobility, few can compete with the jaw-dropping variety of orchids, many of which use insects’ sex drives to help themselves along.

Darwin shook his head at, as Mabey describes, the “extraordinary mechanical contrivances which orchids employ to ensure cross-pollination — rocket launchers, pistons, trap doors, levers, triggers,” as an overly complicated expense of energy.

But even Darwin couldn’t argue with success. When he found a Madagascan orchid with an exceedingly deep well in which it held its nectar, Darwin intuited that there must be a Madagascan insect, probably a moth, with a tongue long enough to get at the nectar and serve as the orchid’s cross-pollinator. Finally found after Darwin’s death, the moth, with its 12-inch-long tongue, was dubbed in his honor “the predicted one.”

There are so many delights to be found in Cabaret — from the hunt for the elusive Amazonian moonflower, to the wonder of self-rejuvenating yews that defy efforts to determine their age, to the sprouting of an extinct Judean palm from a 2,000-year-old excavated seed — and Mabey keeps us enthralled from first to last.

He leaves us with a description of the fallen Queen Beech of Hertfordshire, which tumbled in a 2014 storm after dominating its site for 400 years. He muses, “Trees are used to catastrophes, big and small. They have been tacking around them for millions of years.” The message is clear: Plants in no way depend on us to survive and thrive; we would do well to remember that we depend on them.