Sitting Bull’s War, by Paul L. Hedren (Pegasus). This chronicle of the Hunkpapa war chief Sitting Bull is told primarily from the perspectives of the Lakotas and the Northern Cheyennes who fought in the Great Sioux War of 1876, in which Army forces battled for control of the Black Hills. Hedren creates a vivid portrait of Sitting Bull by drawing on a vast array of sources, from interviews with Lakotas conducted by the military to twentieth-century accounts by survivors. Ultimately, the book is both a fine military history and an affecting study of the intertwined calamities that ended the Lakota way of life, including the decimation of the Northern Plains buffalo.
Homeschooled, by Stefan Merrill Block (Hanover Square). A highly unorthodox homeschooling experience is the subject of this precisely rendered memoir, written by a novelist. While Block is in the fourth grade, after his family moves from Indiana to Texas, his mother withdraws him from school, convinced that a traditional academic environment will stifle his budding writerly gifts. What follows is less an education than an enclosure: days in which lessons are improvised or abandoned, and experiments such as being forced to crawl in order to improve his handwriting. Written largely in the present tense, the book sustains an almost unnerving intimacy as it relates the story of how Block’s childhood and adolescence became “a sometimes scary quicksand of time.”
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Lightbreakers, by Aja Gabel (Riverhead). In this thrilling work of speculative fiction, a quantum physicist is invited by a billionaire to participate in a secret project at a laboratory in Marfa, Texas. At first, the physicist’s wife, an artist, is excited to go along—her day job has lost its lustre. But, once in Marfa, the couple finds themselves drawn to former lovers. The physicist also learns that one reason he has been invited is because he suffered the loss of a child, and that the project involves transporting him into his memories. Though his prospective journey carries risks, he judges that the project may be worth it. The novel is a penetrating meditation on time and grief. “You never get over it,” one character notes. “There is only the day you turn the corner, when something new is born.”
Before I Forget, by Tory Henwood Hoen (St Martin’s). Cricket Campbell, the protagonist of this novel, endured an unspeakable tragedy at her family’s summer house when she was sixteen—one that changed the trajectory of her life and fractured her relationship with her father, Arthur. Ten years later, Cricket returns to the house for the first time to become a full-time caregiver for Arthur, who has Alzheimer’s. As she steadily adjusts to her new role, and as Arthur’s dementia progresses, Cricket begins to notice something uncanny: Arthur has developed a keen, almost miraculous, ability to tap into the emotions of others, hers included. This quietly charming narrative asks readers to reconsider who is caring for whom, and to ponder the illimitability of human connection.
