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Book Review: The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

Inkyard Press, 2021

ISBN-13: ‎978-1335402509

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Buy;   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

Wow. Polydoros set out to write a work of historical fantasy about Jews and Judaism not set during the Holocaust, and was inspired by an article about H.H. Holmes to set his story among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

 

Alter, the main character, was ill as a baby and named to avoid the notice of the Angel of Death, but people around him frequently die. Alter is also gay, but in denial and ashamed. He is in love with his roommate Yakov, who leaves to meet someone and is found drowned the next day, the most recent of several Jewish boys who are dead or missing.

 

Alter, a member of the burial society, is helping immerse Yakov in the mikveh when he thinks he sees Yakov move, and jumps in the mikveh to pull the body out. Instead, he is possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk (a dybbuk is a malicious spirit, usually the dislocated soul of a dead person with unfinished business). Alter’s only choices to save his own soul are either0 to exorcise the dybbuk or to find Yakov’s killer and exact revenge. Luckily, he has the help of Raizel, a unionist working for an anarchist newspaper (the local matchmaker keeps trying to hook them up), and Frankie, an ambitious Russian Jewish teenage criminal and boxer who heads a gang of thieves.

 

This is such a layered, detailed story, both in the integration of the various aspects of Jewish culture and the Eastern European immigrant experience, and the vividness of the Chicago and World’s Fair setting. In addition, it really reveals the viciousness of antisemitism in this country and how it also traveled from overseas. I think people don’t really think about how insidious and common it was. It’s truly a Jewish horror story, and there aren’t too many of those around. I’m so impressed with the research and writing on some very difficult-to-address topics.

 

The City Beautiful won the 2022 Sydney Taylor Award and was a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the 2021 National Jewish Book Award, and the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Toung Adult Novels. The attention is well-deserved.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on August 29, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: In the Lair of Legends by David Buzan

In The Lair of Legends by David Buzan

Black Rose Writing, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-68513-250-7 (Paperback), 978-1-68513-331-3 (Hardcover)

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

In The Lair of Legends by David Buzan is a well-written, exciting tale that combines action, myth and history.

 

Jolon Winterhawk is a Nez Perce warrior who was one of thousands of Native Americans who fought for the Union and Confederacy in the Civil War. Ten years later Lieutenant Winterhawk has one last assignment for the Union before returning to his wife and daughter. He is accompanying a large shipment of confiscated gold ore to an Army post in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. The train carrying the ore is ambushed by a vengeful, renegade Mexican general. The raid sets off a chain of clashes between Winterhawk, the general, corrupt Union officers, lumberjacks and the Native people’s legendary Nu’numic (Ancient Ones, Sasquatch, Bigfoot).

 

The plot is fast-paced. Almost very chapter brings new, deadly clashes. The author describes the fights in stop-action detail and with abundant gore. However, the author presents the action with interesting and important pieces of history. The role of Native Americans in the Civil War, their plight after the War and the role of railroads in the West put the story in perspective. The author has done a lot of additional research. His detailed descriptions of weapons, ballooning and logging add verisimilitude to his novel.

 

Young adult and adult readers should enjoy the novel’s action and learning about history at the same time.

 

Highly recommended for young adults and adults

 

Contains: gore, mild profanity

 

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

 

Posted on August 2, 2023 by , 1 comment

Book Review: The Fervor by Alma Katsu

Cover art for The Fervor by Alma Katsu

The Fervor by Alma Katsu

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593328330

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

( Amazon.com | Bookshop.org )

 

 

The Fervor takes place during World War 2 and alternates between five points of view. Meiko Briggs is a Japanese immigrant married to a white man, Jamie Briggs, a pilot in the army. She and their daughter Meiko are living in the Japanese internment camp Camp Minidoka, where residents are becoming infected with an illness that makes them violent and murderous. Archie Mitchell is a pastor who saw his pregnant wife and several children killed in an explosion thought to have been a Japanese bomb, who was friends with Jamie and has now gotten entangled with local white nationalists. Fran Gurstwold is a Jewish woman reporter who witnessed a similar explosion and decides to investigate locations where she suspects other explosions have happened. These alternate with journal entries from 1927 by Mieko’s father, Japanese scientist Wasaburo Oishi, who discovered poisonous spiders related to the yokai jorogumo, that cause the illness now spreading through the camps and nearby towns. The story follows Mieko, Aiko, Archie, and Fran as their stories intersect and begin to make sense in the context of Oisho’s writings, while dealing with a coverup by the government.

 

Katsu notes that this book differs from her previous ones because rather than portraying a specific historical event she was using a wider lens to explore the bigotry and violence against Asian-Americans in the past as a way to deal with it in the present, so while period details are correct , events and places may have been moved around for plot purposes.

 

This was a fascinating book, and better than The Deep. I am a fan of yokai whenever I see them, and I enjoyed the way Katsu incorporated this into the book. The portrayal of Archie as a person who is drawn into a white nationalist group due to weak character rather than malice, was accurate and well-written. Unfortunately, there continue to be too many people like him today.

 

Contains: racial slurs and violence

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on January 26, 2023 by , Reply
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