The new issue of Booklist arrived last week with many good books that sounded interesting. Here are a few that caught my eye:

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. I recently reviewed The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emling so I'm all about Mary Anning and quite excited to see what Chevalier can do with such an interesting subject. From the review: "The “remarkable creatures” of the title are both the fossils found on the rocky beaches of Lyme Regis in England during the 1800s and the fossil hunters, working-class Mary Anning and middle-class spinster Elizabeth Philpot, a London exile...When Mary finds an unusual skeleton unlike anything that has ever been discovered before, her work is brought to the attention of the scientific community, but what should be a heady achievement becomes a struggle for recognition from the male-dominated profession, one that ultimately pits the two women against each other."

Booklist gave Neverland: JM Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan a starred review, noting the many skeletons revealed about multiple famous people but Jessa pretty much found it impossible to read and linked to about the smartest and snarkiest takedown/review that I've read in a long time over at the NYT. So, I guess view this one as a sort of the Gawker version of literary biography and another example of why we can never read Peter Pan without recoiling in horror (apparently). I do love the cover though.

Louise Erdrich has a new one coming out, Shadow Tag. It was also starred, this time by my fabulous editor Donna Seaman: " The intensity of this exquisite, character-driven tale, its searing efficiency in encompassing the painful legacy of the Native American genocide, and its piercing insights into sex, family, and power are breathtaking. Irene America, of Ojibwe descent, hopes to complete her doctorate in history in spite of the demands of her volatile painter husband, Gil, and their three children: sons Florian, a secretive math prodigy, and gentle little Stoney, and daughter Riel, named after Louis Riel, a Metis resistance leader. Irene’s subject is the nineteenth-century artist George Catlin, whose portraits of Native Americans raise disturbing questions about exploitation. As do Gil’s erotic paintings of Irene, icons of violation born of his maniacal possessiveness, violent rage, and paranoia. Once Irene, who is drinking heavily, realizes that Gil is reading her diary, she begins writing entries calculated to push him to the brink. As their domestic civil war escalates, Irene remembers her mother’s stories about how a “soul can be captured through a shadow,” a vision with profound implications in this masterfully concentrated and gripping novel of image and conquest, autonomy and love, inheritance and loss."

A year ago I reviewed a great book on Catlin (Painting the Wild Frontier) who did some amazing portraits of Native Americans and the west. But this would be another perspective on him and Erdrich does write about crumbling families incredibly well. We shall see.

Total Oblivion by Alan De Niro. Now this sounds - well pretty amazing: "For 16-year-old Macy, the whole world has gone crazy, quite literally. Barbarians from antiquity have invaded America, while bizarre plagues and impossibly shifting landscapes ravage her Minnesota homeland. Together with her parents, sister, brother, and a possibly evil dog, Macy sets out down the Mississippi on an adventure that takes her into the smoldering ruins of St. Louis, aboard a wooden submarine that’s bigger on the inside than outside, and finally into the stone-skyscraper capital of Nueva Roma. All the while she dodges oil-men turned slavers, plague-instigating wasps, an albino bounty hunter, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, her scheming younger brother."

We will hopefully have an interview with Alan in the Winter Blog Blast Tour in mid-November.