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July 17, 2020

George Ernsberger - Columnist
Posted 7/17/20

CROOKED HALLELUJAH by Kelli Jo Ford (Grove). The column's new favorite book of the year is full of scruffy, rough-edged poor people who are not exactly easy to love; but once they're in your head …

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July 17, 2020

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CROOKED HALLELUJAH by Kelli Jo Ford (Grove). The column's new favorite book of the year is full of scruffy, rough-edged poor people who are not exactly easy to love; but once they're in your head you'll love having them there. Native Americans, most of them, in the rural west. And it's by a serious artist who seems at first just a laconic storyteller with an almost supernatural gift for living in rough-edged people's brains and bodies. It travels with some of them from childhood to grandparenthood and from temptation to sin to redemption, all with patience and open-eyed and open-hearted discernment plainly expressed—plainly, but so delicately you don't even catch her being careful.

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE GOD LAUGH by Bianca Marais (Putnam). Three women in South Africa, in the Mandela years (the '90s). Two sophisticated, but rather testy, white sisters and a desperately poor Black servant girl with a baby, the product of a rape—and warmth and resolution ensues. It's a sort of comedy, at least in the formal sense—things turn out better than seems possible, at first. But it's essentially a dramatic, lively and enlivening novel, quickly involving and then gripping. Marais is the author of the much loved HUM IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE WORDS of three years ago (also set in South Africa).

THE MIST by Ragnar Jónasson (Minotaur). Iceland, the whole country, is famous for having about as much crime (hardly any) and as many crime writers (a lot), as, say, the upper west side of Manhattan. While the column has been paying attention to Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (and not regretting a moment of that), Jónasson has begun establishing a dark trilogy of thrillers, the Hulda series, centered on a police detective with that first name. They're fiendishly plotty, violent and scary—but intelligent, even thoughtful, all the while (full of convincingly smart people, for one thing). The first, THE DARKNESS, and the second, THE ISLAND, are out in paperback, now, and THE MIST, just now, in hard cover. I haven't noticed any loss of pleasure in reading them out of order, so I urge you to grab whichever comes to hand first; this is a writer to follow wherever, and however, he leads.

OF MUTTS AND MEN: A Chet & Bernie Mystery by Spencer Quinn (Tom Doherty/Forge). Okay, a column favorite featuring a smart dog, two weeks in a row. I didn't see this one coming, but it certainly isn't to be neglected, and anyway, they're far from alike. No sophisticated lawyer in this one, Bernie's actually a fairly hardcase private eye. And Chet, the dog, is, well, our narrator. What the two books share is genuine wit, and intelligence, and crime. And, surely, readers.

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