Daniel Kraus, Angel Down ***

Angel Down has a fantastic premise (in both senses of the word): Soldiers fighting in France during World War I save a fallen angel from the battlefield. It tackles the story with an audacious stylistic gambit: the book starts with the word "and" and consists of a single sentence.

I applaud the author's ambitions but his execution was merely serviceable. The various characters' reactions to the angel were predictable and shopworn. The single sentence was just a lot of normal sentences connected with "and." The prose is laid out in paragraphs that imply a poetic intention, like a modern Illiad, but the vivid brutal violence lacks a spiritual or metaphorical dimension, save for a visit to hell in the late going.

Tom Newlands, Only Here, Only Now ****

Only Here, Only Now is a coming-of-age story narrated by a Scottish teenage girl in the mid-1990s. She lives in a rundown former coal-mining town and dreams of moving away to the big city of Glasgow.

I was a bit bored in the early going, due to a lack of dramatic action. The introduction of a new stepfather felt rather clichéd. What kept me going was the colorful Scottish dialect and the sense that the people in Cora's life genuinely had her best interest at heart—meaning I wasn't in for the miserabilism so common in this type of book. On the contrary, Cora seemed to recognize the virtues of the people she interacted with even as she felt disappointed in them. This sense of positivity increased as I grew fond of Cora and her milieu.

My one complaint is that the author leans too hard on the idea that Cora is not neurotypical. The first words in Tom Newlands author biography are "multiply neurodivergent," reviewers compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and the book finishes with a note about the rate of ADHD diagnoses in the UK in the 1990s. Cora frequently cites diagnostic phrases from "printouts" she got from the school counselor.

The emphasis on ADHD bothered me for a few reasons. First, I felt that most of Cora's actions and responses seemed appropriate for any discontented teen, and that attributing them to a condition made them less relatable. Second, Cora is too self-aware and articulate about her behavior. Third, Newland expects us to believe that Cora's mam and her stepfather Gunner are unaware of her ADHD despite the explicit diagnosis from the school counselor. I think the story works better if we don't read it as being about "loss, resilience, and undiagnosed ADHD in 90's Scotland."

Allegra Goodman, Isola ****

Inspired by a true story, Isola is about a sixteenth-century French woman whose guardian squanders her fortune and abandons her on a small island in the Gulf of St Lawrence. 

The first half of the book paints a convincing picture of our heroine's privilege and her powerlessness. The machinations that determine her fate all happen elsewhere, at court, only whispered about in the rumors of servants. The settings—her childhood château, the guardian's house in town, the merchant ship, the island—are well drawn. Overall, I found the novel engaging.

My only problem with Isola was the anachronistic attitudes of the heroine and narrator. I found most of the characters' actions to be appropriate for the period (1531 - 1545), but Marguerite's reactions to them are conspicuously modern. The cover of my paperback edition calls the book "a feminist castaway tale about love, faith, and self-actualization"; feminism and self-actualization are twentieth-century notions which would have made no sense to a sixteenth-century noblewoman. I appreciated the times when Marguerite struggled with her faith, and cringed when she demanded respect for things to which she felt she was entitled.