C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 , 2022book worldClear your nightstand, virtual or oth-
erwise, in anticipation of some excellent
reading coming up this month. Riveting
historical fiction shares shelf space with
propulsive thrillers, a true-crime tale
and books fostering cultural under-
standing.‘The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, A
Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for
Justice’ by Benjamin Gilmer
(Ballantine, March 1)
Fans of both true-crime podcasts and
medical mysteries are in for a treat. Ben-
jamin Gilmer began his medical career
in a rural North Carolina office where
the previous doctor had the same last
name. Shocking his patients and the
community, Vince Gilmer was impris-
oned for his father’s murder. As Benja-
min delves into the circumstances sur-
rounding the conviction, with the help
of a pre-“Serial” Sarah Koenig, he begins
to wonder whether an undiagnosed
medical condition may have played a
role. The search for answers sends him
on a years-long crusade through the le-
gal and prison systems, where medical
compassion can be hard to come by.‘The Old Woman With the Knife,’ by
Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-
Young Kim (Hanover Square Press,
March 8)
At 65, the uncomplaining, modestly
dressed Hornclaw appears to be a model
senior citizen. Nobody suspects an unas-
suming elderly woman might be lethal
with a dagger. But at the sunset of a 45-year career as a hired killer, worrying
that her skills are declining, a bout of
compassion has her questioning wheth-
er she should retire. Darkly funny, this
South Korean novel examines the uni-
versal challenge of aging while main-
taining societal relevance.‘Red Paint: The Ancestral
Autobiography of a Coast Salish
Punk,’ by Sasha taqšblu LaPointe
(Counterpoint, March 8)
An indigenous artist, LaPointe was
given the gift of a middle name from her
great grandmother, Violet taqšblu Hil-
bert (pronounced “Tock-sha-blue”) as a
reminder of the strong women wearing
the red paint of healers who came be-
fore her. It was a strength she had to
find for herself to overcome the chal-
lenges of a nomadic upbringing wheremoney was always tight. A creative-writ-
ing class prompted her to write a per-
sonal essay about her most traumatic
memory, unleashing flashbacks to sex-
ual abuse. Throughout her difficulties,
dreams of her ancestors guided her until
she was ready to wear the red paint her-
self.‘Booth,’ by Karen Joy Fowler
(Putnam, March 8)
John Wilkes Booth’s family were not
enslavers, and his grandfather aided in
the efforts of the underground railroad.
How, then, did the ninth Booth child be-
come so enamored with the Southern
cause that he would assassinate Abra-
ham Lincoln? Families of such notorious
criminals must bear the burden of lov-
ing someone capable of monstrous vio-
lence. Fowler’s riveting saga explores
these strains of familial devotion and
sorrow connecting the colorful Booth
brothers and sisters.‘The Last Suspicious Holdout,’ by
Ladee Hubbard (Amistad, March 8)
The award-winning author of “The
Ta lented Ribkins” and “The Rib King”
has demonstrated distinction in chroni-
cling the Black experience through fic-
tion. It’s no surprise, then, that her
sharp new story collection shines a light
on recent decades of life for Black Amer-
icans. Spanning the years from Ronald
Reagan to Barack Obama, these loosely
connected stories portray the expansion
of the Black middle class — and the
pushback that followed.‘Nine Lives,’ by Peter Swanson
(William Morrow, March 15)
Nine strangers receive a letter in themail with an identical list of nine
names, including their own. With no
further information, most of the recipi-
ents dismiss the lists as junk. But when
those named start disappearing, finding
a relationship between the strangers be-
comes a matter of life and death. Swan-
son’s short chapters contribute to the
frantic sense of breathlessness as an FBI
agent, also on the list, races to discover
the connection that is putting them all
in danger.‘Things Past Telling,’ by Sheila
Williams (Amistad, March 15)
Inspired by the real-life census record
of an 1870 Ohio woman, along with fic-
tionalized stories of Williams’s ances-
tors, this novel chronicles a Black wom-
an’s eventful journey of self-determina-
tion in the face of cruelty. Stolen from
her African home in the late 18th cen-
tury, an 11-year-old girl is brought to the
Caribbean, initially avoiding enslave-
ment because of her facility with lan-
guages. As a pirate’s translator and spy,
she finds a community, eventually learn-
ing midwifery skills that provide a foun-
dation for her identity, even when she is
recaptured and enslaved. During her
century-long life, she endures both for-
tune and tragedy, yet retains strength
from knowing who she is and where she
came from.‘Drowning Practice,’ by Mike
Meginnis (Ecco, March 15)
In a literary landscape littered with
post-apocalyptic novels, Meginnis has
created something distinctive: a pre-
apocalyptic novel set in a world of ran-
sacked grocery stores and empty neigh-
borhoods. This world has not yet ended,but everyone on Earth has simulta-
neously dreamed they will be led by a
loved one to a watery death on Nov. 1.
With the future uncertain, Lyd sets out
to escape from a controlling husband
with her daughter, Mott. On a road trip
though a changed landscape, the moth-
er-daughter duo gain insight into what
really matters.‘A Ballad of Love and Glory,’ by
Reyna Grande (Atria, March 15)
Almost half the U.S. soldiers who
fought in the Mexican-American War
were foreign-born, and many ended up
deserting to fight with the Mexican
army, according to Grande’s author note.
This fact inspired her to imagine an
Irish soldier with shifting allegiances
and a Mexican Army nurse who fight for
their beliefs and for love. Grande, best
known for her moving memoir of immi-
gration “The Distance Between Us,” ex-
plores a different migration experience,
and gives voice to an often overlooked
episode of U.S. history.‘The Shame Machine: Who Profits
in the New Age of Humiliation,’ by
Cathy O’Neil (Crown, March 22)
Shame can be useful, a way for society
to encourage acceptable standards of be-
havior. But when society uses the tool of
shame without regard for empathy, it
becomes a weapon of humiliation,
prompting only division. Its painful ef-
fects are exponentially amplified on dig-
ital platforms, where an electronic scar-
let A, just or unjust, can have far reach-
ing consequences. O’Neil, a mathemati-
cian, methodically uncovers the engines
running the shame machine to consider
when “cancel culture” goes too far.Literary Calendar
FRIDAY | 7 P.M. Frank Bruni discusses
“The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and
Found” with John King at Politics and
Prose at Union Market, 1270 5th St NE.
Free. (202) 544-4452.MARCH BOOKSby Becky MeloanBY RON CHARLESI
n 2007 , Stewart O’Nan accom-
plished something impossible: In a
novel titled “Last Night at the Lob-
ster,” he made the closing of a Red
Lobster restaurant as compelling as
a murder mystery.
He h as now done the opposite: His new
novel, “Ocean State,” makes a murder
mystery as compelling as the closing of a
Red Lobster restaurant. It’s a curious but
apparently intentional achievement in a
book that feels allergic to its own sus-
pense.
“Ocean State” opens with this shocking
line: “When I was in eighth grade my
sister helped kill another girl.”
Even with the killer’s i dentity revealed,
much remains tantalizingly hidden but
only for a few pages. The full horror of the
crime is soon revealed: The victim was a
popular high school student. The two
girls were fighting over a boy.
Disclosing these material details be-
fore the crime is reenacted in the novel,
before the police investigation uncovers
the truth and before the trial produces a
verdict, O’Nan has purposefully drained
the tension from this tragedy. What’s left
for us in “Ocean State” are doleful reflec-
tions on various characters’ motives and
reactions. It’s a gamble.
The novel’s first narrator, Marie, intro-
duces us to her poor family in Rhode
Island. Her pretty sister, the teenage
murderer, goes by the exceedingly ironicgeriatric beau, she might have noticed
what her daughter Angel was up to. But
maybe not. As Marie notes, “My sister
seemed to move through an underworld
of secrets, the hidden currents of desire.”
Indeed, that underworld of clandestine
teenage desire is the ostensible subject of
“Ocean State.” O’Nan spends much of the
novel shuttling between Angel and her
nemesis, Birdy Alves. They’re both sleep-
ing with Myles, a good-looking senior
from a wealthy family. He’s savvy enough
to try to keep his relationship with Birdy
on the down-low, but when photos of
them sneaking around slip out on social
media, their classmates turn sharply
against her. And then Angel lashes out.
High school girls fighting over and
even killing for the affections of a boy
make this a n inherently g ripping p lot. But
O’Nan’s approach is — pardon t he w ord —
deadly. Two-thirds of the novel are spent
chronicling teenage angst and school-hall
drama without the verve necessary to
make this story pump with authentic
adolescent energy. O’Nan’s careful, sepia-
toned observations offer no satirical wit
on the machinations of horny teenagers
nor any chilling insight on the horrors
that sexual desire can activate.
Instead, we get a lot of passages like
this:
“Myles hangs out front between the pil-
lars with Ryan and his crew. Birdy knows
his schedule b y heart, s miles to herself e ach
time she passes his locker. All morning,
sitting i n class, w atching the rain fall on thetennis courts and the soccer field, she
pictures their room at the beach, but then,
after lunch, he texts to let her know he has
to cancel. No explanation, just sry.”
Such generalized prose relies on us al-
ready knowing how Ryan and his cocky
crew pose with studied nonchalance, how
pandemonium breaks out in the hall of
lockers between classes, and especially
how a savvy girl suspends the knowledge
that the object of her devotion is a cad. At
this late date, after so many comedies,
dramas, mysteries and thrillers about high
school romances, double-dealing jocks, vi-
cious mean girls and toxic social media
platforms, we’re deeply familiar with the
tropes of the genre. But for that very
reason, we don’t particularly need a novel
that feels so unwilling to tell us something
we haven’t already heard. Even the act of
murder itself is politely obscured in these
pages, and the trial that takes place late in
the story does so largely offstage.
More than a decade ago, O’Nan pub-
lished “Songs for the Missing,” a d evastat-
ing story about parents crushed by the
endless search for their 18-year-old
daughter. No one who read that relent-
lessly static tragedy will ever forget i t. But
this new novel, about the loss of another
teenage girl under circumstances that
are so much more dramatic, leaves little
impact at all. Sry.Ron Charles writes about books for The
Washington Post and hosts
TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.BY RON CHARLESA few years ago, I accidentally left my
Kindle at a bus stop on Santorini. I
console myself by imagining that some
Greek goddess is enjoying Madeline Mil-
ler’s “Circe” and dozens of other titles
stored on that e-reader.
Alas, most old Kindles don’t end up on
an isle in the Aegean Sea.
That’s where Mark Isero comes in.
About 11 years ago, Isero founded the
Kindle Classroom Project, a nonprofit
group that cleans up donated e-readers
and gives them to classrooms in the San
Francisco area. So far, the group has put
more than 2,600 Kindles in the hands of
thousands of kids. (Amazon has provided
tech help to the project; Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Isero thought of the idea when he was
a high school teacher and noticed his
ninth-graders didn’t h ave access to books
because the school didn’t have a library.
His first step was to create a classroom
library, but there weren’t enough copies
of the titles that kids wanted to read. In
desperation, he handed out a couple of
Kindles. “They thought it was great,”
Isero tells me, “because they could really
just find any book that they wanted.” The
Kindle Classroom Project was born.
The organization maintains a com-
panion fund that purchases e-books that
students request. Those titles remain
permanently in the project’s ever-grow-
ing e-book library. They’re never lost,
they never wear out, and they can be read
by up to six people at once. “We found
that students have really good taste in
what’s popular,” Isero says. “A nd sure
enough, once one student says, ‘Hey, I
want a book,’ then their friends and other
students at the school start reading it as
well.”
Isero has no interest in replacing
physical books, but he’s noticed that
e-readers are particularly effective with
“reluctant readers” in middle school.
“They may have had years of shame as far
as their reading level or what kinds of
books that they like to read,” he says.
“Especially in those middle grades, they
want to continue developing their own
interest and passion and identity, but
they may also want to have some safety.”
The Kindle provides a level of privacy
that a physical book doesn’t.
Instant access may be the most impor-
tant quality. But being able to increase
the text size, access a built-in dictionary,
employ the text-to-speech feature and
use a special font designed for readers
with dyslexia also makes the Kindle
attractive for some students.
Isero’s group cleans the devices and
restores their factory settings to scrub
away the original owners’ account infor-
mation. If you’d like to donate a Kindle,
visit http://www.kindleclassroomproject.org
for more information. Santorini is lovely,
but for an old e-reader a classroom is
paradise.This article was excerpted from the Book Club
newsletter. To subscribe, visit wapo.st/
booknewsletter.Initiativerekindles joyfor readingin studentsALLA DREYVITSER/THE WASHINGTON POST‘Ocean State’:Early revealdoesn’t pay o≠name “A ngel.” Their mother is a nurse’s
aide with one talent: “finding new boy-
friends.” That e nsures a precarious life for
the family. “My mother’s boyfriends tried
to be sweet, but they were strangers,”
Marie says in her poignant, retrospective
voice. “Sometimes they paid our rent and
sometimes we split it. When they broke
up with my m other — suddenly, drunken-
ly, their shouting jerking us from sleep —
we would have to move
again. Like her, we
were always rooting
for things to work out,
far beyond where we
should have.”
As usual, O’Nan
writes about financial-
ly stressed people with
a clear and empathetic
sense of the constant
pressures they endure.
Their plight is well rep-
resented by Marie and
Angel’s 42-year-old
mother. When she dis-
covers that the latest man she’s dating
lives in “an active adult community” —
that is, a retirement home — she feels
humiliated but also excited by the chance
for stability. “Is it wrong to want some-
thing better than where they are?” she
wonders. “It’s not like she could ever
afford it herself. How many chances like
this will she get?”
Perhaps if she hadn’t been so focused
on manufacturing a romance with herOCEAN STATE
By Stewart O’Nan
Atlantic. 226 pp.
$27