When Callie aces her Briarwood entrance exam (thanks in part to having studied the science journal belonging to her great-grandfather Teodore Gartzia, who worked with Nikola Tesla), her teacher accuses her of cheating and withholds her results from the contest. But when a personal invitation arrives from the camp director, her summer takes an unexpected turn. Knowing her proud father will reject the much-needed scholarship, Callie agrees to earn her way by working as an assistant mechanic, helping to keep the steam-powered machines humming. Briarwood isn’t about typical summer camp activities like kayaking and crafts—it’s filled with mechanical marvels and science in which “inspiration and creativity combine in weird and wonderful ways to produce something unexpected.” As she navigates new friendships, self-doubt, and a missing-persons mystery, Callie comes to realize that innovation depends on both intelligence and learning to trust and work with others. The camp setting is vividly imagined and bursts with energy. The prose is clear and brisk, making even complex concepts accessible, while the plot balances the thrill of discovery with reflections on belonging and confidence. Though one subplot feels underdeveloped, the worldbuilding and emotional resonance make up for it. Readers will find themselves wanting to revisit Briarwood. Callie’s parents are immigrants from an unspecified country that’s “halfway around the world.”
Playwright Okuni ranges through Shakespeare’s oeuvre for lesser-known snippets of dialogue, which he reshapes into sonnet-like stanzas of 11 or 12 lines. The poems play very loosely on classic Shakespearean themes, prominent among them being the travails and traps of (especially royal) power. “My Crown” features lines from Henry VI, in which a furious Queen Margaret offers a paper crown to the pretender York before killing him, and concludes with Falstaff’s jibe, “and this cushion my crown,” mocking all such foolish headgear and pretense. “Brutish” cites Richard II and Coriolanus on the insincere cant, accretion of sycophants and henchmen, and lack of integrity that attach themselves to power. “Proclamation” invokes various Henrys to skewer the theatricality and empty promises of demagogues. (“All the realm shall be in common. All things shall be in common. There shall be no money.”) “This is and is not” reprises Shakespeare’s fascination with false fronts and illusions, while “How Like a Dream” explores his notion of life as a series of actors’ roles. Echoing Lear’s plaint—“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”—“This Abruption” ponders the confusion about identity and purpose that bedevils us. And the title poem—taken from a line accusing Coriolanus of shredding his oath as contemptuously as he would a ragged piece of cloth—warns of the indeterminacy and treachery of language and memory. (Okuni emphasizes this message by including versions of the poem in Arabic and Japanese, repeating the English version verbatim two pages later.)
The writing in these poems is excellent since so much of it is cribbed from Shakespeare’s rich, chewy dialogue, as in “Beware My Follower,” a lugubrious medley of lines, mainly from Macbeth and Lear—“Croak not, black angel, I have no food”—on death, hunger, wounds, and spookery. Okuni’s project is to arrange the lines to tease out—or at least obscurely hint at—patterns and cryptic meanings. But meaning is frequently a secondary concern to the sheer aural effect of Shakespeare’s verse; indeed, “Kerelybonto” consists entirely of the nonsense language—“Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo”—that Shakespeare invented for All’s Well that Ends Well. Okuni’s arrangements emphasize the rhythm, repetition, and resonance in Shakespearean lines, blenderized down, in some cases, to commonplace phrases and words. The surprising result is poetry whose hypnotic incantations supersede its sense, giving it a high-modernist feel that brings to mind the work of Gertrude Stein, as in the contradictory cadences on the enigma of the self in “I Am Hers I Am His.” (“I am hers. I am his. I am hurt. I am I. / I am in this. I am in this earthly world. / I am in this forest. I am in tune. I am left out. / I am light and heavy. I am like you they say. I am lost. / I am mad. I am meek and gentle. I am merry….I am not mad. I am not merry. / I am not of many words. I am not old. I am not sick.”) The Bard would have been impressed.
In this revealing and dishy memoir, Rinna leads with intense family trauma, describing the tragic losses of her beloved mother, Lois, from a stroke in 2021, as well as intimately detailing her father’s assisted suicide and her half-sister’s accidental overdose at age 21. Rinna attributes her Season 12 departure from Bravo’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to the immense grief and repressed anger she was processing while trying to film episodes for the series and keep her composure intact. Her on-camera appearances became rage-filled and volatile; she posted about them on social media, and they collectively drove home the fact that her relationship with the Real Housewives franchise has always been complicated. Rinna’s juicy ordeals with Bravo form the simmering centerpieces of the book, giving fans what they want most, despite the author’s attempts to dispense early-career highlights or perspectives on how she lost her mojo in her 30s but regained her power in her 40s and beyond. She never skimps on the scandalous when describing the “enemy territory” toxic atmosphere of a Housewives reunion, her resignation from Bravo at age 60, or warning then-newcomer Erika Jayne that “Bravo is the casino, we’re the players, and the house always wins.” Incorporating plenty of sass, hype, personality, and unflinching honesty, Rinna presents a smoothly written, satisfying combination of intimate anecdotes and family stories, commentaries about aging and cosmetic preservation in Hollywood, female friendship dynamics, motherhood, marriage to Harry Hamlin, fashion, and “the ongoing evolution of being a woman.” Then she gleefully circles back to the melodramatic “blood sport” dustups on the series, a subject she reliably depicts with brio.
The titular first essay is a perfect way into this almost dauntingly intelligent book, employing a few of the author’s signature gambits to winning effect. There are 13 numbered sections: How To Disappear, Ways To Disappear, What They Will Say, People Who Disappeared, Why You Are Not Famous, and so forth. Each of these is an exhaustive list of possibilities for that item, funny, provocative, relatable, vulnerable, cynical, and sobering by turns. This essay is one of the two most straightforward in the book, the other being the third, The Uber Diaries, a series of vignettes describing the author’s experiences as a rideshare driver after a big Hollywood project he had been involved in fell apart and left him disastrously overextended. All the terrible things one might imagine could happen to a driver at the hands of his riders do indeed happen, but lead to an epiphanic ending where the line between driver and rider dissolves. The next essay is much more conceptual or theoretical, titled On the Desire To Reject Narcissism: Notes Toward a Follow-Up Essay to “The Uber Diaries.” Possible openings for such an essay, numbered from 1 to 131 follow, though some are printed with strikethroughs and others only vaguely described, and some sections simply reprint poems by other people, among them Franz Wright, Fred Chappell, and Molly Peacock. Heady stuff. Subsequent essays contain autobiographical material from a painful childhood and a spiky writing career, plus detailed recountings of certain stories Minor is obsessed with, most importantly the fate of eight sailors in a 1968 sailing race. His favorite competitor: “Bernard Moitessier, the sailor who quit the race because he simply wanted to sail the seas.” It is poignantly evident that that’s exactly what Minor means to do with this book: quit the race, sail the seas. You don’t have to be as smart as he is to enjoy the ride.
After Dr. John McKenzie destroys the equipment of a fellow member, the wolf-watching group to which he and his long-suffering wife belong are glad to see him go, tired of his tirades. Then Lew Ferris, sheriff of the Loon Lake area of northern Wisconsin, gets a call about a couple of missing wolf watchers—the McKenzies—whom the state patrol thinks might be in her area. Lew calls part-time deputy Ray Pradt, fisherman extraordinaire and the best tracker she knows, to help in the search. Ray, who coaches a high school muskie fishing team, has other things on his mind—he’s furious that one of the members of his team has been threatened by someone demanding he cheat in order to give the man’s sports-betting business an edge. Turning his attention to Lew’s problem, Ray has a hunch the McKenzies are in Robideaux Forest, and he and Lew set off. Seeing that an old loggers’ cabin has been rebuilt and is now housing crates of high-powered weapons, Lew calls in a larger police presence in the hope of catching the gunrunners. Lew is in a long-term romantic relationship with dentist Doc Osborne, who shares her love of fly-fishing. His house is on a lake and across the road from Ray’s trailer, where Lew meets back up with the deputy, who has some new ideas about where the McKenzies may be. Sure enough, Ray finds them shot dead and partially buried, presumably by gunrunners who caught them near the cabin. When someone takes a shot at Lew through Doc’s window, it only spurs them on to solve the murder, catch the gunrunners, and unravel the sports-betting scam.
