Just like mom
Anne Helzel
Tor Nightfire, 2022, $26.99
Anne Heltzel’s first modern gothic horror film (based on the YA Charlie novel, Presumed Dead), is a gripping and timely story that highlights the dangers of confusing womanhood with motherhood. In the wake of recent events at the Supreme Court, the backdrop of this book, focusing on the autonomy of women’s bodies, makes it a particularly timely and thought-provoking read. Although its atmospheric themes may be found to be reminiscent of other classic reproduction-themed thrillers such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Handmaid’s Tale and even The Stepford Wives, Heltzel’s visceral and vibrant imagery and dialogue, paired to a page-turning plot and feminist undertones, make her a fresh and exciting voice in this genre.
Maeve, the main protagonist of the story, and her older cousin Andrea (closely related, they made a pact never to be separated from each other), were born into a radical feminist cult called “The Mother Collective ‘, a Vermont-based commune who has a bigoted and rigid view of motherhood and the role men play in women’s lives.
The book begins with a glimpse into the cousins’ strange and mysterious childhood when, one day, while lunch is being served by “Lazy-Eyed Mother”, they hear an unrelenting “boom, boom, boom from the next room and growls like pigs at watering hole. When “Mother with red hair” comes out of the locked room, red-faced and smelling of musk, the girls ask “to go weed the garden” “It’s something they do to appease Mother’s ‘no idle hands’ rule and to talk and speculate about the source of the disturbing noises they’ve heard. What could it be?” new baby?” “A new puppy?” When Andrea shares that she knows where mothers keep the key, Maeve reminds her, “We never disobey” but when “I think of the puppy. Alone in the room. Scared. Doing these noises.
The heartbreaking events that occur from this point lead Maeve to bravely escape the cult, aged 8. She is adopted by Patty and Tom; good people who refuse to allow him to live in the past. Andrea was not so lucky. They are lost for each other until a DNA test reunites them 25 years later in New York. Maeve works as a struggling book publisher and Andrea, a wealthy entrepreneur, has just moved from the West Coast. The two had always been looking for each other; constantly harassed wondering what had become of the other. “It drove me crazy not knowing,” Maeve says. “More than not having her in my life, maybe. It was the lack of connection to who she was, the lack of noise where I had once been able to read her thoughts as easily as mine.
Andrea’s reappearance in her life reinforces Maeve’s tenuous understanding of her own personal identity as Andrea is the connection she desires and needs to help her move on from her traumatic past. Andrea is the CEO of NewLife, a company that provides hyper-realistic dolls to women to help them prepare for motherhood or help them grieve a lost child. Andrea has a personal experience of grief when she lost her three-month-old daughter, Olivia. The prototype of the doll now bears his name.
When Andrea invites Maeve to spend her birthday weekend at the mansion she and her husband, Rob, bought in the Catskills, she accepts without hesitation. She wants to spend time with her cousin and mend the bond that was severed when the cult broke up. However, Maeve’s marital status and decision not to have children is confusing and problematic for Andrea and everyone associated with NewLife and providing thThe author has the opportunity to convey several different perspectives on motherhood as well as society’s expectations around the experience. Filled with chilling, unexpected scenarios and vivid descriptions, this chilling look at modern motherhood through the prism of true horror will stick with you long after you read the last page.
—Jane Kinney Denning
Please wait to be tasted
Carla Perez-Gallardo, Hannah Black, Wheeler
Princeton Architectural Press, $35, 2022
The first cookbook from the James Beard-nominated team at Lil’ Deb’s Oasis is a fun portal to the technicolor LGBTQ+ oasis at Hudson’s beloved restaurant. Fun, approachable, and deliciously sensual, the cookbook gives restaurant tips and tricks for recreating Lil’ Deb’s playful, community spirit right in your own kitchen. Nearly 70 recipes for Perez-Gallardo and Black’s acclaimed (and whimsically named) tropical comfort food classics like its cousin’s ink-charred octopus, ceviche mix with popcorn, sweet plantains with green cream and abuela flan are punctuated with tips on everything from loves lobster feasts and how to dream up a killer wine poem. Reading these pages alone is enough to lift your spirits and inspire you to hunt a bunch of plantains.
Snowstorm in August
Marshal Karp
Blackstone Editions, $26.09, 2022
Four thousand pounds of uncut cocaine falls on Central Park from the summer sky, suffocating hundreds. This weather anomaly is the work of the most powerful drug lord on the planet, Joaquin Alboroto. Danny Corcoran, a former NYPD captain mourning the death of his wife, is on the case. Backed by funding from anonymous billionaires, Corcoran and his team are suing Alboroto. A serious adventure of gunfights and car chases ensues as Woodstock resident Karp uses the same skills he put to work when co-writing with James Patterson.
And You Might Find Yourself… Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen X Weird
Sari Botton
Heliotrope Books, $18.50, 2022
In this series of essays, the writer from Kingston Botton covers the process of finding yourself later in life. Botton has always felt like an outsider, from not appreciating pop music in elementary school to not understanding office politics as an adult. Yet instead of embracing these differences, Botton realizes as an adult that she has been pretending to be someone else in order to keep authority figures happy for most of her life. . She turns to writing to make sense of herself, connecting the weirdo child she was with the woman trying to live her truth in the present day.
Rethinking the ground rules
Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group
Mediac Books, $19.95, 2022
In their second anthology, members of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group offer their insights on topics including memory, nature, and COVID-19. In one story, to pass the time, the teachers make a game of imagining the naked speakers at a boring superintendent’s meeting. A narrator in a poem depicts himself as a refrigerator and God as a hungry teenager looking for a snack. All the guns in the world suddenly jam and fire only for women. Poetry and prose range from the funny to the melancholic, evoking the past, pondering the present, and speculating about the future.
Nothing but a good time
Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock
Macmillan Publishers, $20.99, 2022
Co-written by Woodstocker Beaujour, Nöthin’ But a Good Time serves as an encyclopedia of 80s rock. The narrative begins in the 70s and extends to the 80s rock revival today, as well as the rise of grunge in the 90s. Opening with a seven-page cast of characters, each chapter consists of bits of interviews with bands, managers, customers and roadies. The stories include the time Ozzy Osbourne sniffed out ants after losing a push-up contest with Nikki Sixx. Other than those wild moments, the book doesn’t shy away from the ugly side, including the sexism prevalent in the music industry.
—Emma Cariello and Ashleigh Lovelace