It’s the beginning of summer vacation season — a perfect time for themes of travel and adventure. Here are three new books sure to fill the bill for your change of pace.

“Searching for Tamsen Donner”
by Gabrielle Burton
University of Nebraska, $26.95
“Last night, I dreamed you were going to write a book about people surviving without eating each other,” one of Gabrielle Burton’s writing instructors tells her in 1972. Later, a chance remark by Burton’s husband, Roger, provides her introduction to the Donner party, the ill-fated westward expedition that culminated in starvation and cannibalism.
Burton becomes fascinated by the story of Tamsen Donner, the wife of the expedition’s leader. She decides to weave Tamsen’s story into her novel-in-progress, and in the summer of 1977, Burton, Roger and their five daughters set out to retrace the Donner party’s path. “Searching for Tamsen Donner” is largely a chronicle of that journey, of the people and places encountered on the way. But this family trip also provides an opportunity for Burton to reflect on her own life and the choices she has made as a writer and a feminist who is also a wife and a mother.
Imbued with Burton’s adventurous spirit and her awe in the face of history and her place in it, “Searching for Tamsen Donner” is a superior travelogue.

“Yes, My Darling Daughter”
by Margaret Leroy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25
Four-year-old Sylvie is the center of the world for her single mother, Grace. But the child’s behavior is becoming stranger and stranger. Eventually, Sylvie gets expelled from daycare, forcing Grace to leave her job. Desperate, Grace finally connects Sylvie’s behavior to a seaside town called Coldharbour, which Sylvie claims to remember, though she has never been there.
Grace enlists the help of Adam Winters, a psychology professor who specializes in past life regression therapy, and the two of them travel with Sylvie to Coldharbour. There, it becomes apparent that whatever Sylvie is remembering might have the very real power to harm her now.
The novel’s power lies in Margaret Leroy’s ability to convey Grace’s day-to-day anxieties: the economic pressure bearing down on her, the feelings she still has for her cold, ex-lover, the strain Sylvie’s behavior puts on Grace’s adult friendships. “Yes, My Darling Daughter” is a brilliant portrait of a modern woman under pressure. The gothic atmospherics, though well done, are merely icing on the cake.

“Transit”
by Bernard Share
Dalkey Archive, $12.95
A trip to the men’s room leads to a journey of quite a different kind in Bernard Share’s latest novel. “Rimmer” and “A N Other,” as they nickname themselves, are two modern-day Irishmen who meet in an airport. A N Other gets up to use the restroom and returns with a startling discovery: one of the stalls is a portal that allows travel through time and space. Both men step through to investigate and find themselves in an Irish pub in 1949, struggling to adjust to the customs of the times.
A second trip through the stall lands them back in their college days, where they relive a disastrous student performance of “Hamlet,” A N Other meets the past incarnation of his future wife, and Rimmer accidentally merges his older and younger selves. All these hijinks lead to a pitch-perfect conclusion, which suggests the two men’s troubles may not be quite behind them.
“Transit,” with its ribald humor that never crosses the line into outright bad taste, should bring a smile to the face of even the grumpiest summer traveler.  

Rebecca Oppenheimer, a recent Towson University graduate and National Book Critics’ Circle member, continues to dive into the latest books from her home in Stevenson.

---

user comments (0)