Adverbs
Daniel Handler
(Harper Collins)

The latest book from Daniel Handler is a series of interwoven stories about love in all its embarrassing, inappropriate, creepy, tragic and wonderful forms. It explores love as a common element in all of our lives that none of us experiences in the same way. Because of this, no matter how wrong love seems in certain instances – such as in, well, “Wrongly,” when a girl relies on an unsavory jerk to help her get home; in “Collectively,” when a group of people gather at the home of a man they’ve never met to tell him how much they love him; or when a man breaks up with his girlfriend and instantly falls in love with the confused cabbie who picks him up in “Immediately” – it’s still easy to relate to, or at least understand. Despite the overlapping characters, settings, songs, natural disasters and high school teachers, the stories are not a puzzle that fits neatly together – I spent a bit of time paging back to see where certain characters had appeared before, before realizing that it didn’t really matter. But what I loved about Adverbs, as with all of Handler’s work, is his incredible way with words, his brilliantly matter-of-fact way of describing feelings or situations that make us wonder how we didn’t think of it before, like we’ve been missing something all along.

- Jennifer Elks

The May Queen
Andrea N. Richesin, ed.
(Penguin Group)

This collection of essays, subtitled Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling It All Together in Your 30s, will make a great gift for a lot of my friends who, like me, have been a bit adrift in one way or another since leaving our twenties behind. Thirty wasn’t the catastrophic milestone I’d expected it to be, but with the freedom of adulthood come the trappings of tradition, expectation and generational angst, and confusion is inevitable. What’s great about the accounts in The May Queen is that all these women have experienced, in one way or another, the same confusion, and are reporting back from the other side. “To All the Men I’ve Loved Before,” by Amanda Eyre Ward, is an amusing string of the kind of matter-of-fact letters to ex-boyfriends a lot of us wish we had the clarity and maturity to write. In Erin Ergenbright’s “I’m the One,” she talks about finally “getting” things in your thirties that you had countless opportunities to get in your twenties (hallelujah!). All the contributors share an enviable self-awareness, acceptance and fulfillment that come from knowing you made the right choices for yourself. Though patience isn’t one of my biggest virtues, I know wisdom does come with age and experience, and I sure look forward to it.

- Jennifer Elks

Rose of No Man's Land
Michelle Tea
(MacAdam/Cage)

Michelle Tea has this ability to perfectly capture the most painful, awkward and excruciating moments of adolescence, wring out the essential essence of that time, and create sentences that unerringly strike to the core yet can also leave you laughing. Far from being your usual coming of age story, Rose of No Man’s Land is as twisted as it is amusing. Fourteen-year-old Trisha, initially defined by her lack of gender-specific fashion sense, manages by way of subterfuge (at the hands of her older sister, who is obsessed with landing a role on The Real World) to land a job at Ohmygod!, a mall store catering to teenage girls trapped in a perpetual ‘80s nightmare, complete with Chaka Khan soundtrack. The utterly artificial world of the mall sets the stage for her meeting with Rose, a grimy, shoplifting fry cook who introduces our heroine to cigs, nefarious drug dealers and lonely tattoo artists with a taste for go-fast. Rose of No Man’s Land is a nasty, sweet, queer love story for the Really Real World.

– Tristan Crane

Teachers Have It Easy … The Big Sacrifices
and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers
Daniel Moulthrop, Ninive Clements Calegari,
Dave Eggers
(New Press)

There is no reason for teachers to read this book: After 35 years in the teaching profession, I am painfully aware of the problems facing public education in America, especially the meager salaries. In order to provide adequately for my family, I luckily was able to teach adult education night school, extra classes during the regulation day, and several long-distance classes through the local community college. However, I was deeply moved and troubled by the personal accounts in this book of the drastic measures many dedicated teachers resort to in order to make ends meet.

This book focuses on the financial aspects of teaching and the rigors of recruiting and retaining good teachers, and offers overviews of pilot programs in Denver, Los Angeles, and Helena, Montana, that center on the premise that higher salaries attract innovative and creative teachers. These plans incorporate professional evaluations, student attendance and performance, relevant professional development, and in some cases, extra responsibilities outside of the classroom. The positive effects of these programs are still clouded but appear promising; time will tell.

Like I said, teachers don’t need to read this book – they live it daily. However, it should be required reading for parents and politicians in the hopes that it will open their eyes to the financial, emotional, and physical sacrifices that teachers make every day in an effort to educate their children, the future of our country.

– Margaret Parnas

Music Through the Floor
Eric Puchner
(Scribner)

I have to admit it – I didn’t want to like this book; I really wanted to throw it down onto the ever-growing pile of offerings from other “promising young writers” expectorated out of MFA programs around the country. I started out at a back table at the Expansion with two fingers of bourbon, this collection of nine short stories and a scowl, expecting the worst. However, what I found from this former Wallace Stegner Fellow was a slew of stories filled to the brim with a raw, often funny, but always poignant pathos that kept each page following the last in rapid succession. In nearly all of the stories, but most of all in “Child’s Play” (after which no one will look at a bottle of Prell shampoo the same way) and “A Fear of Invisible Tribes,” Puchner focuses on themes of alienation and insecurity with dulcet care. But it was “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan” – told in the form of a mediocre but heartfelt high school essay by a love thirsty teenage girl – that sent ripples of adolescent nostalgia down my spine, leaving my heart a bit heavy and wiping away my scowl.

– Joshua Steele