love what is book review

Loving What Is Summary

1-Sentence-Summary:   Loving What Is gives you four simple questions to turn negative thoughts around, change how you react to the events and people that stress you and thus end your own suffering to love reality as it is.

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I used to think that anyone, who claims to have had some kind of spiritual awakening, was a quack. But I also used to think making a lot of money was important. Ah, the ignorance of being young 🙂

In my 20s, I’ve had profound overnight turnarounds more than once. Some came from getting sick , others were just major shifts in perspective. The right book, the right video, the right phrase uttered at the right time and all of a sudden, I know I  have to make a big change.

I think spiritual awakenings are similar to this. It’s just that the thought process that went into them might not be as obvious. Maybe even completely subconscious. So when someone like Eckhart Tolle wakes up one morning as a changed man, it’s not because he’s crazy. It’s because the right things happened to fall into place in an instant.

Byron Katie has also had such a profound realization. At 43 years old, after a 10-year struggle with rage, anxiety and depression, she woke up knowing that she only suffered, if she believed her own thoughts. If she didn’t, there was no suffering. What’s left is joy and gratitude to be alive, and she’s been teaching that ever since.

She’s taught the process, which she calls “The Work” to millions of people over the past three decades, and today, I’d like to share it with you.

Here are 3 lessons from Loving What Is :

• You can overcome stress by dissecting your thoughts with four simple questions.
• Give yourself more options to think differently by turning thoughts around.
• You can’t change reality by being frustrated about it.

Are you stressed, unhappy or frustrated? Then let’s learn to love what is!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: Ask yourself four simple questions to overcome stress by changing your perspective.

When we talk about stress, we usually say “this project is stressing me out,” or “Jason’s really stressing about us going to this event next week.” Using this kind of language has one fatal flaw though: it puts the responsibility on other people and external events. But stress isn’t inherently created by those things. It’s only in how we process these things that they suddenly become stressful in our heads.

Our interpretation of what’s going on is what causes us to stress about it – or not . So if we change our interpretation, we’ll change our definition of what’s stressful too!

Byron Katie’s “The Work” approach helps us pull off this shift in perspective by asking and answering four very simple questions for any stressful thought:

• Is this thought true?
• Can I be absolutely sure that it’s true without a doubt?
• How do I react when I believe this thought?
• Who would I be without this thought?

For example, let’s say you have an assignment for class and your partner hasn’t sent you his slights the night before it’s due. You might think: “Peter is really unreliable. How can he do this to me?”

Write this thought down and then go through the questions. Is Peter really unreliable? Can you tell from experience? Has this happened before? Are you 100% certain he’s unreliable? What’s your reaction to it? Do you get defensive? Angry? Helpless? What if you didn’t think this thought? What would the world look like?

Once you start digging, most negative thoughts quickly fall apart. And then, you can turn them around. Literally.

Lesson 2: Turn your thoughts on their head to give yourself more options to think differently about a situation.

After you’ve done some serious interrogating with your thought, it’s time for what Byron calls the “turnaround.” Flip the original thought on its head in various ways and just observe how each one makes you feel.

Sticking with the example above, the thought “Peter is unreliable” might become “Am I unreliable?” or “Peter is reliable to his friends, why shouldn’t he be to me?” or “Does Peter think I’m unreliable?” etc.

The feelings and reactions you’ll have to all these options will differ greatly – and they should! Just carefully consider all of them and follow what your gut tells you is right. A turnaround will never give you one right answer – just a lot more options for your thoughts.

You can even answer the four questions again for those that you feel particularly strong about.

Lesson 3: Being frustrated about reality doesn’t change anything, so stop it.

The weather’s always a good icebreaker. It’s neutral, it’s always there, everyone has to deal with it and no one can do much about it. However, it’s also a good way of spotting complainers, because people who complain about the weather tend to complain about a lot of other stuff they can’t control too.

Complaining has a value of zero . Always. Everybody has problems. Most people don’t care about yours. Whining to empty air isn’t going to change anything. You can’t change reality by being frustrated about it . Unless you use that energy to do something about it, your frustration is useless.

Don’t try to change the realities you can’t control. Find your place within those and do what you can. That’s what’ll make you happy.

Loving What Is Review

What I like about Byron Katie’s approach is that it’s simple. There’s not much to it. Four questions. And a lot of thinking. That’s it. It’s a really good way of quickly cutting through the clutter. So if you feel frustrated, anxious or outright depressed, give Loving What Is a try.

Who would I recommend the Loving What Is summary to?

The 38 year old wife, who’s depressed because her marriage feels broken, the 54 year old lawyer, who’s very disappointed with his collaboration partners, and anyone who curses when they see it’s raining outside.

Last Updated on August 4, 2022

Niklas Göke

Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Born and raised in Germany, Nik also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration & Engineering from KIT Karlsruhe and a Master’s Degree in Management & Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He lives in Munich and enjoys a great slice of salami pizza almost as much as reading — or writing — the next book — or book summary, of course!

*Four Minute Books participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon. We also participate in other affiliate programs, such as Blinkist, MindValley, Audible, Audiobooks, Reading.FM, and others. Our referral links allow us to earn commissions (at no extra cost to you) and keep the site running. Thank you for your support.

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WHAT IS LOVE?

by Jen Comfort ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2024

A sizzling and smart rivals-to-lovers romance with a half-baked setting.

Two record-setting trivia nerds combine forces to dethrone a game-show champion.

Although Maxine Hart dropped out of high school in Brooklyn, she has a lust for information that she chalks up to ADHD. Knowing a little about a lot is what earns her a spot on the trivia game show Answers! , where she beats stuffy Theodore Ferguson III, a Princeton professor and holder of the show’s record for longest winning streak. Maxine isn’t sure whether Teddy was dazzled by her natural genius or distracted by the fact that they’d shared a steamy kiss the night before the taping. Regardless, both players are eager to face one another again, and their only hope is to make it onto the Answers! tournament of champions. Once there, though, they’re both up against the undefeated Hercules McKnight, who Maxine thinks is a “fake-tanned douchebag.” Neither she nor Teddy wants to see Hercules win, so they vow to help each other strengthen their weak categories. Through clandestine meetings ripe with sexual tension, Maxine and Teddy hone their skills. The quiz show setting makes a compelling pressure-cooker of an environment; unfortunately, it overstays its welcome, beginning to feel like a gimmick for increasing Maxine and Teddy’s forced proximity. The characters’ opposite natures are what keep the momentum of their romance going. They play well off one another, slinging cutting barbs and sexy flirtations faster than their speed on the buzzer. Teddy, buttoned up and Oxford educated, often clashes against Maxine’s bold, brash, and affable nature. Her goal for being on Answers! is to show that intelligence isn’t tied to degrees and that one’s desire to learn can be cultivated in a more personal way. This is a romance for readers who love “smart is sexy” main characters or prefer banter as part of their foreplay.

Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024

ISBN: 9781662516443

Page Count: 351

Publisher: Montlake Romance

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Jen Comfort

THE RULE BOOK

by Sarah Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024

Haphazard and undemanding.

A sports agent’s first official client is the man she dumped years ago in college.

After two years of hard work as an underling, Nora Mackenzie is finally being promoted to full-time sports agent. She’s worked hard, kept quiet, and allowed men in the office to call her Mac—a nickname she hates—all to show she’s a team player and “one of the guys.” Unfortunately, her boss instructs her to sign Derek Pender, a football player coming off an injury, who happens to be the man she heartlessly dumped in their senior year of college. Derek signs with her for revenge, seeing it as his opportunity to pay Nora back for callously breaking his heart eight years earlier. He insists she be at his beck and call: answering his emails, running his errands, cooking dinner for his dates. He also refuses to let her explain why she broke up with him without warning or explanation. Nora feels she has no choice but to acquiesce to Derek’s humiliating demands, since she’s worked too hard to let him ruin her dream job. She hopes he’ll thaw and they might become friends, but Derek’s bad behavior is designed to hide the fact that he’s still in love with her. Nora’s characterization is uneven, veering between anger at how she’s treated in the male-dominated field to immature bickering and bantering with Derek. Although Adams likely meant for Derek and Nora’s interactions to have an enemies-to-lovers vibe, the characters instead seem juvenile and stuck in the past. The novel is fueled by a string of tropes—second chance romance! married in Vegas! only one bed!—each randomly deployed to keep the book going despite thin characterization and wan plotting.

Pub Date: April 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593723678

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Dell

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

More by Faïza Guène

by Faïza Guène & translated by Sarah Adams

by Ali Hazelwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.

A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.

As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9780593550403

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023

ROMANCE | PARANORMAL ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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by Ali Hazelwood

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  COMFORT

Charmingly bonkers rom-coms.

"Sensual, funny, and heartwarming, this brings the goods."

- Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

What is Love?

BACK COVER TEXT: Answer: From the Latin word for crossroads, this is knowledge so common as to be obscure, the pursuit of which engages millions daily. Question: What is trivia? Trivia is the magic in the mundane, the connection in the commonplace, and Maxine Hart’s second-favorite pastime. A self-proclaimed Brooklyn street rat and a high school dropout, Maxine has never been a fan of formal education, but thanks to her ADHD “superpowers,” she’s a glutton for knowledge—and a good fight. And when Maxine enters the trivia game show Answers!, her brilliance, coupled with her penchant for big bets, devastates her competition. Even record-holding, 76-time-winner Teddy Ferguson. ​ Or was it their kiss the night before they faced off that threw the buttoned-up professor off his game? Now, Maxine and Teddy cross paths again in a high-stakes tournament against all-time Answers! winners, including undefeated champion Hercules McKnight. With nothing in common but an insatiable appetite for knowledge and a desire to win, Maxine offers Teddy a deal: combine their strengths to shore up their weaknesses. She’ll push his tolerance for risk and improve his buzzer speed, if he’ll find creative ways to fill in the gaps in her education. Except neither one of them foresaw just how scintillating learning could be…

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"Comfort (Midnight Duet) goes “to the Max” with her plot choices, bold and hilarious banter, and full-on smoldering sexual tension, featuring two completely opposite yet perfect for each other trivia nerds. Patrons will want to buzz in early to get their hands on this wonderfully campy rom-com."

The Library Journal (Starred Review)

"Comfort (Midnight Duet) delivers a riveting blend of passion and intellect in this sultry enemies-to-lovers rom-com... Sensual, funny, and heartwarming, this brings the goods."

Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

 "This is a romance for readers who love “smart is sexy” main characters or prefer banter as part of their foreplay. A sizzling and smart rivals-to-lovers romance..."

'The Love Hypothesis' won Amazon's best romance book of 2021, has a near-perfect rating on Goodreads, and is all over TikTok. Here's why it's such a unique love story.

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• " The Love Hypothesis " grabbed the attention of romance readers everywhere in 2021.
• It was named Amazon's Best Romance Novel of 2021 and was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.
• This book checks off all my boxes for a great romance read and is definitely worth the hype.

This year, Amazon named " The Love Hypothesis " by Ali Hazelwood the best romance book of the year. Even though it was only recently published in September 2021, "The Love Hypothesis" has quickly become a fan-favorite, with 88% of Goodreads reviewers giving it four- or five-star-level praise .

It was also nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award and is hugely popular amongst Book of the Month members , with only 1% of readers giving it a "disliked" rating.

"The Love Hypothesis" is about Olive Smith, a third-year Ph.D. candidate studying pancreatic cancer at Stanford. In an attempt to convince one of her best friends that she's moved on from an old crush, she impulsively kisses Dr. Adam Carlsen, the department's notoriously brutal (but undeniably attractive) professor. After the kiss, Adam and Olive agree to fake a relationship so she can prove to her friend that she's happily dating and he can convince their department that he isn't planning to leave anytime soon.

I'm a little picky about my romance novels , so giving this read every bit of a five-star review didn't come lightly. My standards are high because the best romance novels have the potential to expose readers to authentic and imperfect relationships and offer new topics of discussion without making us feel like it's a story we've already read. 

With all the hype surrounding this new romance read, I couldn't resist picking it up.

Here's why "The Love Hypothesis" is one of my favorite recent romance books:

1. the story focuses a lot on olive and adam's lives outside their romance, making their love story more believable and interesting..

Romance novels tend to fall into a few popular tropes such as " enemies-to-lovers " or "forbidden love." "The Love Hypothesis" combines two of the most popular tropes right now, "Fake dating" and "grumpy/sunshine," really well — I loved the contrast between Adam's serious attitude to Olive's bright and sugary one. 

But despite following these tropes, the story feels fresh because it's also largely about Olive's work and its meaning to her. The only other romance book I've read featuring a STEM heroine is "The Kiss Quotient" , so I loved seeing that representation and learning about something new. 

The story honestly reflected the challenges Ph.D. candidates face in academia and that authenticity — deepened by the author's personal experiences — brought the characters, the settings, and the romance to life even more as Olive and Adam faced challenges with funding, time-consuming research, and questioning their sense of purpose.

2. The steamier scenes are also awkward and realistic, which made them even better.

In romance books, there are a few different levels of how graphic a steamy scene can get , from little-to-no detail to explicitly outlined movements. (I personally prefer mine to "fade to black.")

There was only one chapter with adult content, and it was definitely graphic. While I made a ton of ridiculous faces while reading and tried to skim past the parts that made me audibly gasp, I loved that it wasn't a movie-made, perfect sex scene with graceful movements and smooth dialogue. The scene was a little awkward, imperfect, and full of consent and conversation, making it refreshingly real.

3. The book deals with other topics besides the main love story, making it a much deeper read.

While it's wonderful to get swept up in the magic of a romantic storyline, having a secondary plot that addresses real issues is what makes a romance novel truly great . 

Mild spoilers and content warnings ahead: While "The Love Hypothesis" is a fun romantic read, it also addresses the pain of familial death, power differentials, intimacy challenges, and, most prevalently, workplace sexual harassment. 

Love is beautiful, fun, and amazing, but "The Love Hypothesis" takes the opportunity to also include conversations about serious issues. While these topics may be tough for some readers, I think these plot points, hard conversations, and complicated emotions take "The Love Hypothesis" to the next level and make it a five-star read. 

The bottom line

"The Love Hypothesis" has everything I personally look for in a romance novel: A unique storyline, authentic characters, and an important message. If you're looking for a perfectly balanced romance read, "The Love Hypothesis" is worth the hype and definitely one of the best romance books to come out in the past year.

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...because writing "the end" is just the beginning.

What Is Love?

Myung sook jang.

The title says it all in this heartfelt personal story from Myung Sook Jang, a Korean woman in her 60s reflecting back on her earlier years. She describes the first 20 years of her married life as those of dutiful sacrifice, caring not only for her husband and three children, but working laboriously for her husband’s in-laws while rarely having time for her own parents.

The author feels no love from her husband (unnamed here), who insists on sleeping in bed without touching and who doesn’t want to ever kiss her or even hold her hand. In her 50s, the author unexpectedly runs into Mug, an old high school classmate. Through an affair with him she finds the emotional outlet lacking in her marriage. The intimate contact with Mug also affords the author, an elementary school teacher, new insight into becoming the person she truly wants to be.

This short memoir is simply written reading much like a letter to a friend. “That day, When (sic) I was driving to an undefined destination I didn’t know where I was. My brain was empty. So, I got on a strange road.” Nevertheless, the story conveys strong emotion in the sparest of words and likely expresses the feelings of many women from this author’s era and homeland who were expected to give their all to others with no opportunity to fulfill dreams of their own. As she laments in her own first chapter heading, “Who Am I?”

While the punctuation and paragraph structure is weak throughout (many paragraphs consist of a single sentence), the story holds its own. In the end, Jang finds her happiness while beginning to understand her husband’s inability to express his feelings. It’s an uncomplicated message, yet has universal appeal.

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Book Review: What Love Is and What It Could Be by Carrie Jenkins

I had the delight to get back to my original interests and read some metaphysics of love.

This is the way she frames it. “At its core is the idea that romantic love has a dual nature: is it  ancient biological machinery  embodying a  modern social role ” (82). The analogy is an actor embodying a character: William Shatner embodying the role of Captain Kirk is her analogy. If you take out one, then you miss out on the other.

Admittedly, I’m having trouble seeing this. As I was reading this and came across the notion of dual nature, I was half expecting the result would be love  qua biology and love  qua  social construction as two sides of the same coin. Or that one would be the emergent property of the other. Indeed, I’m inclined to think that with any sort of metaphysics about social construction, it is the way we value the facts. So love  qua biology is simply the fact about humans. Love  qua social construction is how we value those facts. For example, love for Victorian women is much different than modern love because society back then had different values than we do today. However, they had the same biology. So it’s the same fact but different ways of valuing those facts. Now one problem I have with Jenkins’s process is that I’m not so sure it really is a dual nature. Suppose early humans had no robust culture or a very rudimentary society. Any social constructionism would be very minimal. Let’s suppose that it’s so minimal that it is non-existent. Yes, they would be very early humans. Yet, their biology would be the same.  Would we say they are in love? Well, biologically yes, but social constructively no. In my mind, this makes sense. These early humans would love each other, but there aren’t any valuations about this love. It’s a heavily biological process.

But now let’s suppose there are some rudimentary creatures that are very complex (perhaps early mammals) but do not have the biology that can bring forth love. It seems that they are incapable of love because they don’t have the biological processes to do so. Thus, the biological process needs to be there in order for love to happen, and then the social constructionism can take place. Without the biology, the social constructionism is moot. Therefore, the biology is prior to social constructionism. Therefore, the dual nature of the metaphysics of love is faulty. And yet, when we think about the dual nature of love, we can either see it as either biological or social constructionist. This recognition, however, doesn’t seem to be based on the reality of the situation, but more on our perspective of the situation. Thus, I think the dual nature of love is more epistemological rather than metaphysical. If there is no Captain Kirk, we can still have William Shatner. But if there is no William Shatner, there is no Captain Kirk that we wold recognize. Thus, William Shatner is  prior to Captain Kirk. “Ah,” a critic might say, “couldn’t we say that even if William Shatner didn’t exist, someone else could simply embody Captain Kirk? We could simply have an actor embodying the character.” Now this is true, but suppose, along with my example, there was no biology. By analogy, there are no humans but just simple creatures (early mammals, let’s say). In that case, nothing could embody Captain Kirk. With my analogy, the biological aspects need to be there for the social construction to take place. As I mentioned before, social constructionism is how we value the facts (in this case, biology). But without the facts, there is nothing to value. No biology, no constructionism. Likewise, no William Shatner (or no humans, let’s say), no Captain Kirk.

The metaphysical implications of Jenkins also needs to be addressed. Here’s a thought that may have troubling consequences. Jenkins argues that we need both biology and social constructionism to make sense of love, but the biology doesn’t necessarily have to be human. We can imagine aliens or advanced robots being in love as long as they go through the romantic-love-like behavior. This speaks to what is known as functionalism in the philosophy of mind. Now, there’s a debate within functionalism about whether philosophical zombies are logically possible. Let’s suppose there are. If that’s the case and if Jenkins theory is correct, then these philosophical zombies are not really in love. They just exhibit romantic-love behaviors. So at the very least, they can be in love qua social constructionism. But hold on. If love has a dual nature, and these philosophical zombies can be in love  qua social constructionism, then they have to be in love  qua biology. If that’s the case, then this implies that philosophical zombies cannot be logically possible. If, however, philosophical zombies are logically possible, then the dual nature theory that Jenkins proposes cannot work since they can only love  qua social constructionism. I’m not sure if Jenkins considers this a high stake implication. Perhaps she’s willing to embrace the idea that philosophical zombies cannot logically be possible, but it’s an issue that grabbed my attention.

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What Is Love?

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A beautiful fable about the nature of love, from beloved, award-winning picture book creators Mac Barnett and Carson Ellis. What is love? a young boy asks. I can’t answer that, his grandmother says, and so the boy goes out into the world to find out. But while each person he meets–the fisherman, the actor, and others–has an answer to his question, not one seems quite right. Could love really be a fish, or applause, or the night? Or could it actually be something much closer to home? This tender, funny tale is an original take on the I love you story, a picture book treasure for all ages to read and cherish. A CLASSIC LOVE STORY: A wonderful narrative voice and spectacular pictures give this book the feel of a modern classic. Fans of The Runaway Bunny, Guess How Much I Love You, and Love You Forever will adore this book. A BOOK THAT KIDS AS WELL AS PARENTS WILL ENJOY: Many books about the love between parents and children are told from an adult’s point of view. This book begins from the child’s perspective, and it’s funny and unexpected in ways that children can relate to, while being thoughtful in ways that adults will appreciate. Like all great children’s books, this book can be understood on many levels. A BOOK ABOUT FINDING YOURSELF: The boy’s journey takes him to many different people, whose descriptions of what love means to them is very much about how they see themselves and their lives. A GREAT READ-ALOUD: The engaging text is full of surprises and the distinctive voice of the narrator invites audiences to respond. STAR TALENT: Mac Barnett is a New York Times bestselling author and a beloved figure on the school speaking circuit. Carson Ellis is a Caldecott Honor-winner and illustrator of some of the most interesting and beautiful children’s books published today. They’re an incredible creative duo and long-time friends, working together for the first time on this book. Perfect for: - Mac Barnett fans- Carson Ellis Fans- Parents and grandparents- Educators- Librarians

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The Creatives Behind the Book

Mac Barnett is the coauthor of the Terrible Two series and the author of many picture books, which have won multiple Caldecott Honors.

Carson Ellis previously illustrated The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket and Dillweed’s Revenge by Florence Parry Heide. She also collaborated with her husband, Colin Meloy, on the best-selling Wildwood series. Carson Ellis lives with her family outside Portland, Oregon.

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Book Review: ‘Nothing But the Bones’ is a compelling noir novel at a breakneck pace

This image released by St. Martin’s Publishing Group shows “Nothing But the Bones” by Brian Panowich. (St. Martin’s Publishing Group via AP)

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Nelson “Nails” McKenna isn’t very bright, stumbles over his words and often says what he’s thinking without realizing it.

We first meet him as a boy reading a superhero comic on the banks of a river in his backcountry hometown in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia. There, a bully picks on him and then does the same to a pretty girl Nails secretly fancies. Enraged, Nails, ignorant of his own strength, gives the bully a fatal beating.

Nails’ friend Clayton Burroughs, who watches it happen, doesn’t call the police. Instead, he calls his brutal father, Gareth, who runs the rackets on Bull Mountain, to cover it up.

So begins “Nothing But the Bones,” a prequel to the first three Southern noir novels in Brian Panowich’s critically acclaimed Bull Mountain series.

After the killing, the story skips forward nine years and finds history repeating itself. Nails, now working as an enforcer for Gareth, is drinking apple juice in a seedy bar when he sees a punk mistreating a young woman. Moments later, the punk lies dead on the barroom floor.

There are too many witnesses for Gareth to fix things this time. Instead, he hands Nails a bag of cash, orders him to head south, and gives him a phone number to call when he gets to Jacksonville, Florida. As Nails speeds away, he discovers the young woman, a fellow outcast who calls herself Dallas, hiding in the backseat. She persuades a reluctant Nails to take her with him, and as they drive on, an unlikely love story emerges. As readers learn Dallas’s backstory, it becomes clear that they need each other.

When Clayton hears what’s happened, he’s knows that his father, who avoids legal entanglements at all costs, hasn’t sent Nails away for a new start. Nails is driving to his death. So, in defiance of his father, Clayton heads for Jacksonville to save his friend. Their friendship may remind readers of George Milton and Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella, “Of Mice and Men” — although Nails isn’t as limited as Lennie.

The compelling tale, its tone alternately brutal and tender, unfolds at a breakneck pace. The character development is superb, the settings are vivid, and the prose is as tight as a noose. The plot is full of twists. Among them is a startling revelation about Dallas’s identity, introducing a sensitive subject that Panowich handles with understanding and grace.

Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Mamá's panza, common sense media reviewers.

Body-positive story about a boy's love for mom's belly.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Filled with body positivity, kids learn to love an

Positive messages about self-love, self-care, acce

The young boy in the story is curious about bellie

Seen from the perspective of a young child who fee

Parents need to know that Mamá's Panza , written by Isabel Quintero ( My Papi Has a Motorcycle ) and illustrated by Iliana Galvez, is a body-positive picture book about a young boy's love for his mother and her belly. Beautifully illustrated, the charming narrative shares a young boy's admiration and…

Educational Value

Filled with body positivity, kids learn to love and celebrate their bodies just as they are.

Positive Messages

Positive messages about self-love, self-care, acceptance, and the strong bond between mother and child. Everyone has a panza or belly and no matter its size, it's a beautiful and important part of our unique bodies. Themes include curiosity and communication.

Positive Role Models

The young boy in the story is curious about bellies. Mamá is strong, confident and loving. She communicates body positive messages to her little boy.

Diverse Representations

Seen from the perspective of a young child who feels connected to his Mamá and her belly. Portrays the everyday lives of a brown-skinned family that reads Latino. Celebrates diversity and being different. Bodies of all shapes and sizes are accepted and celebrated.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Mamá's Panza , written by Isabel Quintero ( My Papi Has a Motorcycle ) and illustrated by Iliana Galvez, is a body-positive picture book about a young boy's love for his mother and her belly. Beautifully illustrated, the charming narrative shares a young boy's admiration and love for his mama's panza and teaches kids to appreciate the uniqueness of their loved ones and themselves. Affirming text makes this a great picture book for families to read together. Simultaneously published in Spanish as La panza de mamá .

Where to Read

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What's the Story?

MAMÁ'S PANZA follows a young boy who loves his mama's panza (belly) and all the love and stories it holds. Everyone has a panza -- it can be big and round, soft and small, or somewhere in between. But a young boy's favorite panza of all is Mamá's. Her panza is capable of remarkable things, and she loves it as an important part of herself. Her panza was also the young boy's first home. Even before he was born, it cradled and held him. When he's feeling shy and needs a place to hide or when he wants somewhere to rest during a bedtime story, Mamá's panza is always there.

Is It Any Good?

Through a young boy's eyes, we see how his mama's panza is not just a part of her body but a treasure trove of wisdom, comfort, and warmth. Filled with body positivity affirming text and vivid art, Mamá's Panza is a young boy's love letter to his mother, along with a celebration of our bodies and our bellies. This relatable story is a celebration of family and the beauty of embracing ourselves just as we are. Mamá's Panza is not just a book; it's a journey of love, culture, and self-discovery that both kids and parents will cherish.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the different ways people show love and care for themselves and their bodies in Mamá's Panza . Discuss the importance of accepting and loving ourselves just as we are. In what ways are you unique?

In what ways do the main characters show curiosity and communication ? What is the boy curious about? How does Mama communicate love?

Use the Spanish words sprinkled throughout the book as an opportunity to learn together. Practice using the word "panza" and saying it out loud. Talk about our bodies in a positive way. How do you feel about your panza? How is it an important and beautiful part of your body?

Book Details

• Author : Isabel Quintero
• Illustrator : Iliana Galvez
• Genre : Picture Book
• Character Strengths : Communication , Curiosity
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Kokila
• Publication date : March 29, 2024
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 3 - 7
• Number of pages : 32
• Available on : Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : April 17, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

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Love: What Life Is All About › Customer reviews

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Love: What Life Is All About

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

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Review: In ‘Reading Genesis,’ Marilynne Robinson treats the Bible like a great work of literature

Considering how often the Bible is characterized as a great work of literature, it is rarely read like one. Few would suggest a piecemeal approach to Crime and Punishment , jumping from chapter to chapter with little regard to the whole, but a book like Genesis is often studied only as a collection of isolated episodes.

In her latest book, Reading Genesis , Marilynne Robinson argues that such a reading is “so deeply ingrained that the larger structures of the text, its strategies of characterization, its arguments, can be completely overlooked.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 352p $29

Perhaps Robinson’s concern about missing the forest for the trees explains why she decided not to divide her exploration of Genesis into chapters, sections or even subheadings. It is a bold choice for a book so dense, but at the very least, it forces readers to take in the Scripture as a grand narrative, one that resists easy fragmentation. The result is a meandering journey through Genesis guided by one of the foremost Christian humanists of our age. Robinson’s sharp literary eye and clear, lyrical prose shine new light on some of our oldest stories.

Robinson argues that the early chapters of Genesis tell the story in detail of “a series of…declensions that permit the anomaly” of how human beings, flawed and foolish as we are, are so beloved and exalted by God.

Through her comparison of the Hebrew creation and flood narratives with the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh , Robinson illustrates how distinct the Hebrew story’s insistence upon the goodness of God and creation would have been among other Near East peoples. Her comparative-literature approach reminds modern Western audiences just how radical the notion really is that there is one God who made all things good—and how much responsibility that bestows upon human beings. Since the Hebrews believed all things were made good, human agency is the root of toil, suffering and even natural disaster, as in the story of the flood.

Adam and Eve’s sin leads God to curse the ground but not humanity; our culpability affects the world but never denigrates our being, Robinson insists. She faces our faults dead-on, unflinching in her commitment to humanity: “That human beings were so central to Creation that it would be changed by them, albeit for the worst, is, whatever else, a kind of testament to who we are,” Robinson writes. Human beings are co-creators with God.

Because Robinson constantly jumps back and forth between episodes while drawing comparisons to other Near East literature, reading the first 80 or so pages of Reading Genesis can feel like wading through a “formless void” (Gen 1:2). The structure is sometimes circuitous and difficult to follow, but patient readers will find astute insights on the power and gravity of human agency, and even some hope. After all, our great power points to our divine origins. In her stirring prose, Robinson asks, “If we could step back from the dread we now stir in ourselves and look at all of this with some objectivity, would we not feel awe? Would we not feel struck by how absolutely unlike everything we are, excepting God Himself?”

But Reading Genesis is strongest when it turns to Robinson’s analysis of the lives of Abraham and his descendants. As a novelist, Robinson is most comfortable in the domestic, intimate complexities of human relationships, making her well-suited to tell the story of this remarkable family. As a result, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and the other men and women throughout Genesis are shown to be living, breathing human beings, flawed and complex, who nevertheless play major roles in providential history.

Although Robinson insists on a broad, thematic read of Genesis, she is ever-attentive to the sequence of the narrative in her analysis. For example, she sees Hagar and Ishmael’s exile in the desert and the binding of Isaac as parallel cases, told one after the other. They are commentaries on child sacrifice: two people exercising profound faith, entrusting their sons’ lives to God’s word, only for God to deliver them from harm’s way.

This attention to structure invites sometimes startling revelations. She says, for instance, that Isaac’s journey to find a wife and Jacob being cast out after stealing Esau’s birthright frame Isaac’s life to show his decline in fortune. But she takes this a step further to suggest that it also calls attention to Rebekah’s unhappiness: “Though the text says that Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob, there is really no evidence that Rebekah loved anyone.” And as she traces out Rebekah’s life from Isaac’s arrival to her pregnancy to her relationship with her sons, Robinson makes a strong case that this might be true, and even providential.

And so while Robinson explores the family feuds that exist throughout Genesis, her writing is attentive to God’s presence even in the most silly, self-serving and confounding moments of the book. “The remarkable realism of the Bible, the voices it captures, the characterization it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” She treats all of Genesis’s “domestic malaise” with deep reverence, because, after all, so does God.

Unfortunately, Robinson’s vastly connective interpretive vision sometimes comes at the expense of accuracy. For example, early in the book she says that the boast of Lamech (Gen 4:23-24) closely mirrors his son Noah’s drunken rage (Gen 9:18-29) in order to comment on humanity’s tendency toward vengeance; it is a powerful insight. The only problem is that Lamech, the boastful descendent of Cain, is not Noah’s father, but rather a distant cousin. Noah’s father is also named Lamech, but he descends from Seth, not Cain.

So her conclusion, over 100 pages later, that “providence would act through the life of Cain to arrive at Noah,” is less of a brilliant callback than a stuttering reminder of Reading Genesis ’s shortcomings. A more thorough investigation of Robinson’s claims throughout the book would require a biblical scholar, or at least a bibliography. (At no point does she cite any external source, save the occasional, offhand reference to another book of the Bible. You wonder how she got away with it. You then remember that she wrote Gilead ; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists earn a certain editorial license that theologians lack.)

And yet, from her attention to the intimate, human reality at the heart of Genesis, we gain insight into this family affair that only a once-in-a-generation novelist like Robinson could provide. Noting that “at no point are the actors’ motivations insufficient to account for events, and at no point are their actions out of character,” Robinson concludes, “The story could, no doubt should, function as a theological proof that the earthly and the providential are separate things in theory only.”

God’s will is not dependent on us, but using the unique, fickle motivations of each of his co-creators, God is able to make something great. To anyone who wonders where God could be in such a broken world, Reading Genesis reminds us that this question has always plagued humanity, and God has always drawn near to us anyway. Robinson’s book is an insightful exploration of “the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind.” The stability of the covenant is not due to our worthiness, but to God’s love for human beings.

In her 2004 novel, Gilead , Robinson’s protagonist, the Congregationalist minister John Ames, reflects on how the theologian is never truly separate from the God about whom he or she writes: “I suppose Calvin’s God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction.” In the same way, Marilynne Robinson’s God is in love with humanity. In all our flaws and folly, power and glory, she insists, “Human beings are at the center of it all.”

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Abraham and Family,” in the April 2024 , issue.

Delaney Coyne is a Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., Fellow at America.

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For Caleb Carr, Salvation Arrived on Little Cat’s Feet

As he struggled with writing and illness, the “Alienist” author found comfort in the feline companions he recalls in a new memoir, “My Beloved Monster.”

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By Alexandra Jacobs

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MY BELOVED MONSTER: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, by Caleb Carr

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons . Caleb Carr has done so in cats.

Carr is best known for his 1994 best-selling novel “ The Alienist ,” about the search for a serial killer of boy prostitutes, and his work as a military historian. You have to prod the old brain folds a little more to remember that he is the middle son of Lucien Carr , the Beat Generation figure convicted of manslaughter as a 19-year-old Columbia student after stabbing his infatuated former Boy Scout leader and rolling the body into the Hudson.

This crime is only fleetingly alluded to in “My Beloved Monster,” which tracks Carr’s intimate relationship with a blond Siberian feline he names Masha — but his father haunts the book, as fathers will, more sinisterly than most.

After a short prison term, Lucien went on to become a respectable longtime editor for United Press International. He was a drunk — no surprise there, with famous dissolute-author pals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hanging around the house. But that he regularly beat Caleb and threw him down flights of stairs, causing not just psychological but physical injuries that persist into adult life, adds further dark shadings to this particular chapter of literary history.

In a boyhood marred by abuse, neglect and the upheaval of his parents’ divorce, cats were there to comfort and commune with Caleb. Indeed, he long believed he was one in a previous life, “ imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated ” as human, he writes.

Before you summon Shirley MacLaine to convene 2024’s weirdest author panel, consider the new ground “My Beloved Monster” breaks just by existing. Even leaving aside the countless novels about them, dogs have long been thought valid subjects for book-length treatment, from Virginia Woolf’s “ Flush ,” about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, to John Grogan’s “ Marley and Me .” Meow-moirs are thinner on the ground.

It’s taken a younger generation of feminists, and probably the boredom and anxiety of quarantine, to destigmatize (and in some cases monetize ) being owned by a cat. Male cat fanciers, however, have long been stereotyped as epicene or eccentric, though their number has included such national pillars of machismo as Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando . When one male lawyer accidentally showed up to a civil forfeiture hearing behind a kitten filter on Zoom in 2021, America went wild with the incongruity.

Carr, though he’s a big one for research, doesn’t waste much time, as I just have, throat-clearing about cats’ perch in the culture. He’s suffered from one painful illness after another — neuropathy, pancreatitis, peritonitis, Covid or something Covid-like, cancer; and endured multiple treatments and surgeries, some “botched” — and his writing has the forthrightness and gravity of someone who wants to maximize his remaining time on Earth.

He capitalizes not only Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the roles played by various important anonymous humans in his life, which gives his story a sometimes ponderous mythic tone: there’s the Mentor, the Lady Vet (a homage to Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve”; Carr is a classic movie buff), the Spinal Guru and so forth.

Names are reserved for a succession of cats, who have seemingly been as important to Carr as lovers or human friends, if not more so. (At least one ex felt shortchanged by comparison.) Masha is his spirit animal, a feminine counterpart better than any you could find in the old New York Review of Books personals . She eats, he notes admiringly, “like a barbarian queen”; she enjoys the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Wagner (“nothing — and I’ll include catnip in this statement,” he writes, “made her as visibly overjoyed as the Prelude from ‘Das Rheingold’”); she has a really great set of whiskers.

Before Masha there was Suki, blond as well, but a bewitching emerald-eyed shorthair who chomped delicately around rodents’ organs and disappeared one night. Suki was preceded by Echo, a part-Abyssinian with an adorable-sounding penchant for sticking his head in Carr’s shirtfront pocket. Echo was preceded by Chimene, a tabby-splotched white tomcat the adolescent Caleb nurses miraculously through distemper. Chimene was preceded by Ching-ling, whose third litter of kittens suffer a deeply upsetting fate. And before Ching-ling there was Zorro, a white-socked “superlative mouser” who once stole an entire roast chicken from the top of the Carr family’s refrigerator.

To put it mildly, “My Beloved Monster” is no Fancy Feast commercial. All of the cats in it, city and country — Carr has lived in both, though the action is centered at his house on a foothill of Misery Mountain in Rensselaer County, N.Y— are semi-feral creatures themselves at constant risk of gruesome predation. Masha, rescued from a shelter, had also been likely abused, at the very least abandoned in a locked apartment, and Carr is immediately, keenly attuned to her need for wandering free.

This, of course, will put her at risk. The tension between keeping her safe and allowing her to roam, out there with bears, coyotes and fearsome-sounding creatures called fisher weasels, is the central vein of “My Beloved Monster,” and the foreboding is as thick as her triple-layered fur coat. More so when you learn Carr keeps a hunting rifle by one of his easy chairs.

But the book is also about Carr’s devotion to a line of work he likens to “professional gambling.” Despite his best sellers, Hollywood commissions and conscious decision not to have children to stop the “cycle of abuse,” Carr has faced money troubles. The I.R.S. comes to tape a placard to his door and he’s forced to sell vintage guitars to afford Masha’s medications, for she has begun in eerie parallel to develop ailments of her own.

“My Beloved Monster’ is a loving and lovely, lay-it-all-on-the-line explication of one man’s fierce attachment. If you love cats and feel slightly sheepish about it, it’s a sturdy defense weapon. If you hate them, well, there’s no hope for you.

MY BELOVED MONSTER : Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me | By Caleb Carr | Little, Brown | 352 pp. | $32

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Author Interviews

Doris kearns goodwin newest book is about her late husband's work in the 1960s.

NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about her late husband Dick Goodwin and her new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s .

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

When Doris Kearns Goodwin got married, her husband brought along some baggage.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: All of our married life, Dick had dragged 300 boxes with us, and they were kind of rundown boxes. I saw them, I looked in them a little bit at a time, and I knew that they were an extraordinary time capsule of the '60s, but he would not open them.

INSKEEP: Dick was Richard Goodwin. He was older and had a life before Doris met him in the 1970s. In the '60s, he'd been a presidential aide and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, then for Lyndon Johnson and then for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. The boxes included artifacts from that time.

KEARNS GOODWIN: So they were in barns. They were in storage. They were in basements - until finally, he came down the stairs once when he was 80 years old, saying, OK, it's now or never. If I've any wisdom to dispense, let's start dispensing now. So...

INSKEEP: They hadn't, like, gotten wet in the barns...

KEARNS GOODWIN: No, they had. Oh, no.

INSKEEP: ...Or decayed or whatever?

KEARNS GOODWIN: No, no. In fact, there were mice in them at the beginning or droppings of mice.

INSKEEP: (Laughter).

KEARNS GOODWIN: We had to vacuum them out. We had to move them from these small boxes into bigger boxes.

INSKEEP: The documents became material for a book about the 1960s, which Goodwin began while her husband lived and finished after he died. It's called "An Unfinished Love Story." As the Goodwins went into the boxes, they began to relive moments in history, like the 1960 presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

KEARNS GOODWIN: What Dick decided is we would have a debate date night, and we'd get a bottle of wine, and we would watch it on YouTube.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN F KENNEDY: I know that there are those who say that we want to turn everything over to the government. I don't at all. I want the individuals to meet their responsibilities, and I want the states to meet their responsibilities. But I think there is also a national responsibility.

KEARNS GOODWIN: And then he would describe to me how he was preparing Kennedy for that. We go backward and forward. So it was really fun. You know, I remember he said to me at the beginning, are you nervous? Do you wonder who's going to win?

KEARNS GOODWIN: And you have to imagine you don't know what's going to happen in order to make it suspenseful. But then he would describe the whole experience of the day before the debate and the day of the debate. John Kennedy was sitting on the bed with all of his notecards spread out on the bed with the question and the answer, the one-sentence or two-sentence answer.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

KEARNS GOODWIN: And once he had memorized them, then he threw them on the floor like cards and just seemed eerily relaxed.

INSKEEP: Richard Goodwin advised Kennedy in the White House and, after Kennedy's assassination, stayed on with President Johnson.

LYNDON B JOHNSON: This time, on this issue, there must be no delay or no hesitation or no compromise with our purpose.

INSKEEP: In 1965, Johnson addressed Congress and decided on short notice to support passage of the Voting Rights Act.

KEARNS GOODWIN: So my husband had only that day to work on that speech. It was a brilliant maneuver to be able to get those words together. They came out little by little from the typewriter, Johnson screaming at the other end, where are they? They're not even here in time. But he never bothered Dick until the very end.

INSKEEP: The key line - you called it the We Shall Overcome speech. This is a line from a spiritual that people sang as they were demonstrating for civil rights. Johnson just says it. What did it mean that Johnson just said that?

KEARNS GOODWIN: I mean, what it really meant was that's a moment when the person in the highest level of power is connecting to an outside group, the civil rights movement, who are pressuring the government to act. And that's when change takes place in our country.

(SOUNDBITE OF ACHIVED RECORDING)

JOHNSON: And we shall overcome.

INSKEEP: How do you think Richard was able to win the favor of and the trust of powerful men without losing himself, as some staffers do?

KEARNS GOODWIN: It wasn't always easy. I think the fact that he had been with John Kennedy before Lyndon Johnson meant there was always a layer in Lyndon Johnson of not fully trusting him because he thought he was a Kennedy.

KEARNS GOODWIN: You know, that was that fault line. You were either a Kennedy, or you were a Johnson. Even the first time when he calls Bill Moyers on the phone and there's this great tape where he's saying, I need someone to be my speechwriter. This was only months after John Kennedy had died.

KEARNS GOODWIN: And he says to Moyers, I need someone who can put sex in my speech, who can put rhythm in my speech, Churchillian phrases. Who could that be? And Moyers says, well, there's Dick Goodwin, but he's not one of us. And he knew then that that would always mean that he would always have a layer of not full trust.

INSKEEP: I feel that that relationship in microcosm is something that goes all the way through American life because this is a class difference along with everything else, right? Guy from Harvard versus the guy from a teacher's college in Texas.

KEARNS GOODWIN: So true. I mean, one of the things Johnson used to say a lot was that his father always told him that if you brush up against the grindstone of life, you'll get more polished than anyone who went to Harvard or Yale ever did. But then he would add, but I never believed that.

KEARNS GOODWIN: I mean, there was always - and he was so much more brilliant than many people who go to Harvard or Yale. I mean, he used to call me Harvard half the time. You know, Harvard, come on over here.

INSKEEP: Doris Goodwin herself had been a young aide to Lyndon Johnson. In later years, she became one of the nation's most acclaimed historians. Her husband began to wonder if anyone would remember him, which is why he at last agreed to the book on his earlier life.

When you met your husband, your future husband, in the early '70s, he's still a relatively young man but had had his greatest accomplishments. Would you say that that's true?

KEARNS GOODWIN: I think that was the thing that was hard for him the rest of his life. I mean, he did do work after that. He wrote a play that was put on in London. He wrote columns. He wrote manifestos about America's revolution, the need for a new revolution. He got more radical as time went on. And he did work on Al Gore's concession speech. I think there was a...

INSKEEP: That's a gracious speech, Al Gore's concession...

KEARNS GOODWIN: It was a...

INSKEEP: ...Speech in the 2000 election.

KEARNS GOODWIN: ...Lovely speech. And Al Gore had called him and said that he wanted a victory speech or a concession speech. But Dick knew that the concession speech would be more important. And what a great, important memory is that right now that in that year 2000, he was able to say, the law of the land is this. I don't agree with the decision, but I cherish this tradition and congratulate President Bush. We need that so badly right now.

INSKEEP: I'm struck by the idea that he thought people would not remember.

KEARNS GOODWIN: I'm not sure what it was, but yeah, he did feel that need. It wasn't so much even for his work but for the work that he did together with these presidents because he wanted people to remember that the '60s was a time when young people in particular were powered by the conviction that they could make a difference. And tens of thousands of people joined the Peace Corps, were marching against segregation, against denial of the right to vote, were anti-war marching - and the beginning of the women's movement, the gay rights movement. It was a great time to be alive and a great time to be young. And I think he was hoping that the book might be able to power people to remember that. It's so necessary today.

INSKEEP: Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of "An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History Of The 1960s." It's a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming by.

KEARNS GOODWIN: Oh, thank you so much for having me. We could go on for a long time. I could talk to you forever.

INSKEEP: (Laughter). I would like that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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This vivid novel of mental illness captures the power of living on

‘what kingdom,’ by fine grabol, is set at a residential facility meant to transition residents out into the world.

The mad have long haunted the borderlands of our fiction. Consider the attic-bound wife in “Jane Eyre,” the deluded ranters of Dostoevsky and Gogol, or all of Kleist’s lunatics, driven crazy by their dogged adherence to absurd principles. These figures can be comic or tragic, jesters or men who have fooled themselves into believing they’re the kings. All destabilize the reality of a narrative, injecting a dangerous dose of irrationality into circumstances otherwise defined by decorum and rigorous self-interest.

As madness became mental illness, the unwell and their institutions have taken on a more central role in their own stories. Memoirs and autobiographical novels such as “The Eden Express” and “The Bell Jar” foregrounded mental breakdowns, from delusions and hallucinations to hospitalization and treatment. These institutions then became subjects in themselves, their straitjackets and barred windows standing in for social repression at large. Books like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ” present illness and treatment through a metaphorical lens, as symptoms of something else, and not as subjects in and of themselves.

These precisely are the concerns of “What Kingdom,” the Danish poet Fine Grabol’s prizewinning debut novel. Grabol’s unnamed narrator lives on the fifth floor of a psychiatric housing facility, in the temporary accommodations for young people (the book’s Danish title translates to “Youth Unit ” ) transitioning back into society following periods of hospitalization. With her schizotypal personality disorder and bipolar disorder diagnoses, the narrator has already experienced her share of institutionalization, and has come to “the residential facility” to learn skills and routines that might allow her to live on her own again. “Those of us with no place to live and no place to die end up in this trial home,” she writes in Martin Aitken’s vivid translation, “this impermanent halfway house.”

Grabol’s narrator cannot sleep, hallucinates that the building is breathing, and experiences memory loss in the aftermath of electroconvulsive therapy and her pharmaceutical regimen. She longs to devour neon tubes, then vomits up her food. Violent episodes are followed by recessed ones, as hyper-attunement to minute details — the fingerprints left on a computer screen, the thud of a fellow resident’s unique gait — gives way to numbness. “I sometimes wake up,” she observes, “and realize that what’s going to happen has no name.”

This results in “a self-narrative with gaps,” told in an episodic present tense that directly plugs you into each moment — from floor meetings and outings to the grocery store to insomniac periods and manic episodes — even as it elides her self-harming and occasional suicide attempts. A single period can separate the preparation of a razor blade from the staff bandaging her arms. These gaps reveal the novel’s fundamental instability. However close we feel to Grabol’s narrator, there is much more she won’t or can’t convey to us.

Her floor of the residential facility is meant to transition residents out into the world, teaching them routines that will place guardrails around their instability. They shop and cook for one another, sing karaoke, go on outings, play in a band. After periods of confinement, they need to learn to be comfortable in their own rooms, with their own things, managing, for the most part, their own time.

It is an environment of deliberate limits, providing its residents the safety of their “incomplete individuality.” The staff are not authoritarians, but custodians, aides who “see the two poles ill and well as an acknowledgment of the individual’s pain.” They want to keep their charges out of the hospital, and to ease their way back into society. We are a long ways from the sadism of Nurse Ratched. Yet this security and support come with real trade-offs: The narrator’s room might be hers to design and keep up, but the staff will always have an extra key. Her home there will always be provisional, temporary, subject to changes in the law and her own situation.

When she was a teenager, Grabol was institutionalized in a series of psychiatric hospitals, and much of “What Kingdom” appears to be autobiographical. Her descriptions can be both beautiful and queasily intimate, a record of treatment’s effects on both mind and body. In the hospital, the narrator takes “something that would make me disappear.” The staff make her drink activated charcoal, turning her excrement into “thin, oily jets of liquid,” which only adds to her distress.

This period is now in Grabol’s past, and even though the novel is written in an insistent present tense, her narrator conveys the experiences at hand in a variety of registers. She discusses the gendered qualities of diagnosis — “boys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive” — relays how various laws affect their housing, and questions how mental illness is theorized and treated. These digressions can be aphoristic, and sometimes they extend to become minor essays on how we conceive of the ill and the well. “Psychiatry exists on the premise of internally directed treatment forms,” she writes. “Could we not imagine treatments that are instead externally directed, involving the outside world gearing itself towards a wider and more comprehensive emotional spectrum?” Yet her conclusions are unresolved and ambivalent: “I don’t know.”

The result is a novel deeply versed in the experience and terminology of psychiatric treatment, without taking on the tenor of therapy. In “What Kingdom,” a diagnosis is only one part of the explanation, and it certainly is not a cure. Grabol’s narrator cannot escape or resolve her illness, and there is no third-act revelation of buried trauma that might yet be resolved. Instead, the poet tries to place us within her experience, conveying through an accumulation of acute details the alternately mundane and hallucinatory qualities of deep mental illness. From one page to the next, a description of sluggish summer boredom will give way to a dream in which the narrator transforms into a massive esophagus and swallows the entire facility, with only a chapter heading to separate them. And by fracturing the narrative, Grabol effectively scrambles all sense of progress, highlighting the stop-start, backsliding reality of treatment. Hers is not a novel of overcoming or repudiating. “What Kingdom ” is about the living-through and the living-with, about the hard-won routines of survival, and the remarkable persistence of a life from one day to the next.

Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.

What Kingdom

By Fine Grabol, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

Archipelago. 146 pp. $18, paperback

An earlier version of this review misidentified the husband of Bertha Antoinetta Rochester in “Jane Eyre.” It was Edward Rochester, not Heathcliff. This version has been corrected.

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