Three Terrific Debut Novels

From auburnpub.com:

Finding interesting debut novels are one of the great joys of reading. Picking up a book from someone you don’t know, taking a chance, and then being rewarded for that can be very fulfilling. This month’s Book Report will introduce you to three debut novels.

Since so many of us have been consumed watching cable news since the election of 2016, the timing of CNN morning show New Day anchor Alisyn Camerota’s debut novel about a young cable news reporter “Amanda Wakes Up” is fortunate. 

Camerota has worked for many news organizations- Fox, CNN, ABC, MSNBC- and she gives the reader an insider’s look at what that is like. Amanda Gallo works for a small local NYC TV news station when she finds herself the only reporter on scene at a bank robbery in progress.

Her reporting lands her a job as a morning anchor at FAIR News, a new cable news network trying to make a big splash in a crowded space. Her boss wants to score huge ratings, her male cohost is a sexist blowhard, her liberal boyfriend is unhappy that she works for a company pushing a conservative agenda, and her best friend is a producer at a competing news organization who believes in anything for a story.

Camerota wrote “Amanda Wakes Up” following the 2012 election, but so many of the things that happen in the story are eerily prescient to the 2016 election. She sheds a compassionate light on people on both side of the issues, something that many people in the media have been unable to accomplish. If you are a cable news junkie, this one is for you, although I found the ending a little too pat.

If you grew up loving Louisa May Alcott’s classic “Little Women”, Elise Hooper’s debut novel “The Other Alcott”, about May Alcott and to a great extent her complex relationship with her sister Louisa, is a book you will want to read. 

May wants to be an artist, but she is torn between her love and obligations to her family and her desire to strike out on her own. She longs to study in Europe, but she also wants to break free of her financial dependence on her sister. 

Hooper takes us to late 19th century Europe, where May studies to be an artist, meeting famous artists like Elizabeth Jane Gardner and Mary Cassatt, and fighting for the rights of female artists to be taken seriously.

“The Other Alcott” is for fans historical fiction like “The Paris Wife” and “Loving Frank”, and for people who like stories about siblings. 

The best debut novel I have read in a long time is Nigerian writer Ayobami Adebayo’s “Stay With Me”, a featured book at this year’s Editor’s Buzz Panel at the Book Expo in May in New York City. 

Yejide and Akin are a young married Nigerian couple troubled by their inability to have a baby. When their family brings a second wife to become pregnant by Akin, it creates a untenable situation. 

This strains Yejide and Akin’s marriage, and Yejide goes to great lengths, including going on a controversial religious pilgrimage, to become pregnant. Yejide will do anything to get pregnant, and Akin is helpless as he watches his wife struggle with their infertility.

Adebayo’s setting of 1980’s Nigeria, with its troubled political times, is enlightening and adds to the tension of the situation that Yejide and Akin find themselves in. I loved learning about the food, customs and life in general in Nigeria.

“Stay With Me” is one of the most compelling, heartbreaking books I have ever read. It is also one of the most surprising. Just when you think you know which direction it is going, it does a 180 degree turn, and you are taken to a new place.

Adebayo is a superb writer, one who combines fascinating, realistic characters and puts them in a storyline that just breaks your heart at so many different places in the story. I found myself so taken in by her beautiful writing, I would lose myself in the story. This is a book you must read in a quiet spot, where you will be uninterrupted.

The title, “Stay With Me” brings the whole story together at the end, and I confess to tearing up and even outright weeping at the end of this beautiful story. I give “Stay With Me” my highest recommendation.

“Amanda Wakes Up” by Alisyn Camerota- B+

Published by Viking

Hardcover, $26, 327 pages

“The Other Alcott” by Elise Hooper- A-

Published by William Morrow

Trade paperback, $15.99, 432 pages

“Stay With Me” by Ayobami Adebayo- A+

Published by Knopf

Hardcover, $25.95, 272 pages

In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
Published by Gallery/Scout Press ISBN 9781501115523
Hardcover, $26, 320 pages

People looking for a read similar to The Girl On The Train have a new mystery to savor. Ruth Ware's In A Dark, Dark Wood is a worthy successor, also featuring an unreliable narrator.

The story opens with Nora waking up with a head injury in a hospital bed. She wonders what has happened and what she has done. And why is her room being guarded by a police officer? Is it to protect her or keep her from leaving?

Earlier, Nora received an invitation to a hen (bachelorette) party for someone she hasn't seen since high school. Since she didn't get an invitation to the wedding she finds this strange, but when her friend Nina calls and begs to go with her to the party, she reluctantly agrees.

The party takes place in a secluded house in the woods, and we meet the people at the party- Nora (a writer), Nina (a doctor), Melanie (a lawyer and new mom), Tom (a playwright), Flo (the party hostess and best friend of the bride) and Clare (the bride).

We slowly find out that Clare and Nora used to be best friends until something drastic happened to end that. And now Clare is engaged to Nora's ex-boyfriend. Why would Clare invite Nora to her hen party?

In A Dark, Dark Wood has a setup reminiscent to an Agatha Christie novel: a small group of people trapped in a place, when strange things begin to happen. There is too much drinking, some drug use, a ouija board, a shotgun on the wall, and then the truth telling begins and people begin to turn on each other. (There's even a Ten Little Indians shout-out in the story.)

When it appears that someone out there is trying to break into the house, the shotgun comes into play. And Nora ends up in the hospital with ahead injury with only flashes of a shooting and a car accident.

Like The Girl On The Train, the reader is led to believe that our narrator may be responsible for a death. Nora's head injury, like Rachel's alcohol-induced blackouts, causes her to wonder what she may have done. Ware does a terrific job creating an atmosphere of panic and confusion, and even though the reader feels confident she has cracked the mystery, she begins to doubt herself just as Nora does.

In A Dark, Dark Wood is a page-turner, the kind of book you can curl up with on a rainy day and read all the way through. And if someone you know from high school invites you to a weekend at a secluded house in the woods, you will know enough to decline. I recommend this book for those who liked The Girl On The Train and Agatha Christie mysteries. It was an Editor's Buzz book at BEA this year, and a well-deserved choice.

The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

Writers are told to 'write what they know' so it's no surprise to discover that Michele Young-Stone is a lightning strike survivor. She titled her first published novel The Handbook for Lightning Survivors, and it's an emotional powerhouse of a book.

Using the conceit of placing a 'book within a book', one of the main characters, Buckley, a young man, has written a non-fiction book titled The Handbook for Lightning Survivors. Parts of his book are sprinkled within the novel, which tells the story of Buckley, who has had brushes with lightning strikes, and Becca, who has been struck twice by lightning.

Becca was struck by lightning as a young child, but her parents didn't believe her because she did not appear to be harmed. When a photograph of Becca appears to have a halo of light around her, her mother starts to believe it may be true. She is struck again when she is teenager, but this time, her boyfriend witnesses the strike.

Becca loves her father, who leaves his wife Mary. Mary falls apart, drinking, taking pills, ignoring her daughter. Becca turns to creating art, and indiscriminate sex, to deal with her emotions.

Although the story is about Becca, an actual lightning strike survivor, Buckley is a survivor in a different manner. His obese mother marries a shady, lazy man, who mistreats Buckley in the name of 'toughening him up'. When Buckley's mom has had enough, she leaves her husband behind with her mother and starts a new life with Buckley far away.

They meet another type of survivor, Paddy John, a Vietnam war vet, who has more than a few problems. But he falls in love with Buckley's mom, and his courtship of her is tender and sweet. Their relationship, and Buckley with his mom's, is the heart of this moving story.

How can you not love a young boy, of whom is written,

Buckley wanted a lot of things, but at the top of his list was for his mother to be happy. It seemed to him that she was always sad. She was a good mom- never a mean word crossed her lips- but like Buckley, she seldom smiled. She was fat, and it was hard for Buckley when they went places to hear people snicker and know she heard it too.

Within the novel are parts of Buckley's book, mostly statistics and anecdotes from lightning strike survivors. One mantra that is repeated is

TREAT THE APPARENTLY DEAD FIRST. Most lightning strike fatalities are caused by cardiac arrest.

The importance of this advice becomes apparent by the end of the novel.

Stone-Young is a wonderful writer. She weaves Buckley's book and the novel together with skill, and her characters are complex and drawn with compassion. You feel that you know these people, and Buckley and Paddy John are two of my favorite characters in contemporary literature.

I look forward to Stone-Young's next effort; she has a talent for creating characters who stay in your heart long after you finish the book. It's also no surprise that this is a Shaye Areheart imprint; her imprint always means a quality book. It's a shame that her imprint is no more.

Rating 5 of 5 stars

Thanks to the publisher for providing a NetGalley copy for review.

THE LIE by O.H. Bennett

A teenager in trouble will often find it easier to lie when confronted with a bad situation. When Terrell Matheus accidentally shoots and kills his older brother Lawrence, his instinct is to lie. He tells his parents and the police that a truck with white boys accosted Lawrence on the front porch of their home and shot and killed him.

So begins The Lie, the powerful debut novel by O.H. Bennett. The African- American Matheus family moved from the projects to a nice home in a middle class neighborhood in Evansville, Indiana. Mom and Dad both work full-time jobs, the boys go to a good high school.

The story is set in the 1970's, but if I didn't read that in the book summary, I might not have known that. The situation is one that could be seen on the nightly news today, and there isn't much in the story that struck me as 1970s. The clothes, the language- it all seemed contemporary.

Terrell sticks to his story, somehow thinking that it will be less painful for his parents than the truth. Students at the high school lionize Lawrence, making him into a martyr. Tensions between blacks and whites rise in the community.

When Terrell's uncle believes he has found the men who killed his nephew, and the police find the evidence doesn't fit Terrell's version, his story unravels. Terrell's parents, destroyed by their older son's death, come undone when the truth of how he died is finally known.

The scene where Terrell is forced to confront his lie will leave the reader stricken. As a parent of two college aged sons, I related to the worst pain a mother can feel- one son causes the death of the other. Bennett writes with such power and emotion, it literally took my breath away.

Terrell's road to redemption is a long, difficult one. He has no friends, and his parents can't have him at home; he is a pariah. He forms a bond with his brother's girlfriend, a young woman with many problems of her own. Their fragile relationship is the one hopeful thing in his life.

Bennett captures the family dynamic; this is a family that could live down the street. The way in which the parents deal with the pain of their loss of both sons hit home for me. The relationship between the brothers- close when they are young, changing as they became teens, reflects the reality of many families.


The Lie will break your heart, and though it is not aimed at high school students, it would be a great book for them (especially young men) to read. It reminded me of George Pelecanos's The Turnaround, another powerful novel about race relations and how one lie can damage the lives of many people for years to come.

Rating 4 of 5 stars