Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra
There’s a lot going on in this beautifully written novel. Maria Lagana immigrates to Hollywood from Mussolini-controlled Italy with her mother and by 1941, has managed to work her way up to the #2 job at B-movie studio Mercury Pictures. Her boss, studio co-head Artie Feldman, is caught up in the competing pushes for isolationism and entrance into the war already raging in Europe, and is about to be hauled in front of Congress to justify his pro-war “propaganda.” Maria is in a relationship with a Chinese-American actor, Eddie Lu, who can’t get the leading roles he’s trained for due to racist stereotyping. Back in Italy, Maria’s father has been in “confino,” or internal exile, for years, after his critical notes on the legally dubious convictions of political prisoners are discovered by the secret police — an event for which Maria was unintentionally responsible. But now her father is part of a plot to escape and find his way to America, with the help of an Italian young man who has stolen another’s identity. If this sounds overstuffed, it is! But this novel, full of characters’ back stories and historical details, is an absolute delight. (Did you know that the Americans created replicas of German villages in the boonies of Utah to test how the military’s incendiary bombs would perform? Or that the Nazis were obsessed with finding the tomb — and riches — of Alaric, King of the Visigoths, who sacked Rome in the year 410?) I borrowed this from the library but will end up buying a copy for my own collection.
Wake, by Shelley Burr
If you’re into mysteries where the terrain is as much a character as the people, try this first novel, set in the unforgiving landscape of the Australian outback. Mina McCreery lives a purposely solitary existence on her family’s sprawling, mostly inactive farm, wary of the outsiders who are morbidly curious about the years-ago disappearance of her twin sister Evelyn from their shared childhood bedroom. Her one friend, Alanna, also has loved ones who went missing — in her case, her father and sister — but who have attracted much less public attention. Then a private investigator, Lane Holland, turns up, and tries to convince Mina to cooperate as he digs into her sister’s cold case. Lane certainly needs the hefty reward money put up years earlier by the police and Mina’s family, but through carefully parceled out breadcrumbs, we learn that he has other motivations for pursuing this particular case. It becomes clear that his family carries its own trauma, which may or may not be connected to Mina’s. Entries from a fictional true crime fan site provide context for the theories regarding the case — and show how Evelyn’s private tragedy has been appropriated by internet rubberneckers as a puzzle to argue over. This is outback noir at its finest.
Celebrities for Jesus, by Katelyn Beaty
Katelyn Beaty, a former editor at Christianity Today, writes that celebrity has become “a feature, not a bug, of the contemporary evangelical movement.” Beaty grew up in the midst of this movement, accepting Jesus into her heart after a church youth rally, rocking out to Christian bands that stylistically imitated secular ones, and reading bestselling Christian authors. But an adult — and still very much an active Christian — she is dismayed by the insidious effects of celebrity, which she calls “social power without proximity,” on the church. Her thoughtful critique covers the rise of megachurches and of media-savvy pastors who rarely have actual face-to-face contact with their congregants, and whose true selves can diverge greatly from their public images — not to mention from Jesus’s own example of power stewarded well — in often disturbing ways. As a non-Christian, I also found Beaty’s perspective applicable far beyond the church. The solution to the focus on celebrity, Beaty argues, is to engage more with each other as “ordinary, flawed, messy fellow humans.” Because really, who among us on Instagram doesn’t need to hear this?: “None of us need another fan. We all need another friend.” (H/T to pop culture podcaster and writer Knox McCoy, who recommended this book in his newsletter.)
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