Austinite Elizabeth Crook builds a sumptuous, surprise-filled third novel, The Night Journal (Viking), on six volumes of diaries by fictional New Mexico protofeminist Hannah Bass. The handwritten notebooks from the 1890’s have become the quiet battlefield in a cross-generational war between Bassie, the daughter who edited them into a best-seller, and Meg, the granddaughter who refuses to read them. The contentious mother-daughter duo find themselves questioning the Bass matriarch’s legacy when an archaeologist excavates several suspicious objects—including a set of human remains—from Dog Hill, where Hannah allegedly buried her favorite dog. As secrets from the past are revealed, the journal’s turn-of-the-century characters become vividly real. The Night Journal is near perfect, a beautifully restrained epic with nary a wasted word. Reviewed by Mike Shea
The Secret Sisters (Harper Collins) opens with Pia Ramone’s husband keeling over at one of Houston’s glitzier black-tie-and-tails affairs—a cringe-inducing lapse into melodrama. But Joni Rodgers, best known for her memoir, Bald in the Land of Big Hair, regains her footing in time to craft a modern tragedy that joins Pia’s devastating grief to her upper-middle-class family’s other, larger troubles. Sister Lily is in prison for a tipsy car wreck that killed Easter, her and Pia’s niece. Sister-in-law Beth is predictably numbed by her daughter’s death but still dutifully appears at Lily’s parole hearings to appeal for leniency. Years pass. Things get better, things get worse. Rodgers wisely resists the temptation to whip up tidy endings for the tragic trio, and her smart choices give The Secret Sisters the necessary measure of grit to make it safely home again. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic Gail Caldwell shines such a persistent light on her Texas family (especially colorful dad Wild Bill Caldwell) that she becomes nearly invisible in her own mem- oir, A Strong West Wind (Random House). When she does write herself into the spotlight, we see an immensely likable, if somewhat scattered, character who has clearly not forgotten the issues that shaped the liberals of her generation: women’s rights, civil rights, and questionable military adventurism. And we witness her own formative years, as she makes an escape to the liberal climes of Austin and the University of Texas, where her Vietnam War protests drive a wedge between herself and her WWII-vet father. Caldwell knows her way around the English language and even makes a dusty Amarillo upbringing sound remarkably appealing. Reviewed by Mike Shea
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