Widowland by C. J. Carey. Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2022]

All I can say about Widowland is, wow. This book pulled me in from the first page, and I had trouble putting it down.

Widowland is an alternate history historical fiction, in a world where England created an “Alliance” with Germany in the 1930s. It is now the 1950s, and England is a protectorate of Germany. Women are sorted into castes, prescribing what jobs they can have, what clothes they can wear, how many calories they get each day, and who they can associate with. Most English men have been sent to the mainland to work (or have been killed for resisting), so young women often marry older men, and often German men (or become the mistresses of German men who are stationed in England). While Germans on the mainland live in luxury, the people of the protectorates live in deprivation for the most part. They still don’t have access to sugar, butter, and other cooking and baking needs, the only clothing and shoes they have access to are cheap, and there are no extras, unless you are the highest caste.

Rose works in the Chamber of Culture. Her main job is rewriting classics to fit the German standards – women shouldn’t think themselves above men, they shouldn’t celebrate their own intelligence, no characters should question the government – to be used in the school curriculum. She also is having an affair with Martin, who is the Assistant Culture Minister. She is a Geli, the highest caste, and while her life is better than other women’s lives, she is constantly on edge to make sure her behavior, clothing, and work measures up to the standards of the Germans. There are watchers everywhere, and you never know who will turn you in for a stray remark that could be deemed seditious.

The entire country is obsessed with the royal coronation that is coming up – Edward and Wallis will finally be crowned by the Leader. Rose is asked by the Culture Minister to investigate a spate of vandalism. Someone is painting quotes about feminism, education, and fighting tyranny on walls. First, they appeared near a library in Oxford, then in other cities, mostly ones where the Leader will be visiting when he comes for the coronation.

 Rose is sent to one of the Widowland complexes, where women who are past the age of reproduction and meaningful work are placed. They are in the lowest caste, the Friedas, and are all “known readers.” The law says people can’t discuss literature in groups larger than 3 persons, but the minister believes these women are flouting that rule, and trying to make the Protectorate look bad with this obscene graffiti. Her cover is that she is to interview the women about heritage and folk traditions for a book that Protector Rosenberg is writing about England. But really, she is to see if there is any evidence the women are behind the graffiti.

As Rose investigates, she notices her coworker Oliver always seems to be lurking around. Is he spying on her, or does he have his own agenda? Can she really live with herself if she reports on the Friedas she interviewed? Is this a world she wants her niece to grow up in? And is there anything she can do about it?

Like Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Widowland shows us what the world could look like if we (as a society) take a step in a different direction. While Carey uses the names of a lot of Nazi leaders, the words “Nazi” and “Hitler” never appear in this book, and Carey says in an interview that she did that deliberately to “convey the generic nature of an oppressive regime.”

While this book is heavy and depressing in its subject matter, it also shows the strength of those who resist authoritarian governments and policies. The book includes the popular quotation: ​“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” by George Santayana, and to me, this is why this book is so important. When you look at history, you see how authoritarian governments take over when people feel disenfranchised and powerless, and how some people are always looking for the easy way out if it means they don’t lose their power (even if everyone else does). It is important to remember as we as a society debate the rights we afford our fellow man that when one of us loses a right, that is opening the door for someone to take a right that is important to us.

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for the Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2022. 401 pages, $28.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a love story between two characters who never have a romantic relationship. Through masterful storytelling, Zevin tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two complicated people who keep finding their way back to each other.

One cold day in December, Sam Masur spots Sadie Green at a subway stop in Massachusetts. Sam and Sadie used to be best friends, but a falling out years prior led to them losing touch until years later. Now in their early twenties, this chance encounter leads to the old friends reconnecting and bonding over the shared interest which first brought them together as children, video games. Sadie is at MIT, designing games that her classmates hate, but her professor Dov finds brilliant. When Sam and his roommate, the irresistibly charming and good-natured Marx, play one of Sadie’s games, they decide to collaborate on a video game of their own. The protagonist of Ichigo is a small child, who is swept out to sea by a giant wave. With limited tools, players must find a way to guide this child back to sea. Through connections provided by Dov, Sam and Sadie, and their producer Marx, sell Ichigo to a larger company, and it becomes an immediate success. This also brings about the creation of their company, Unfair Games, which will serve as Sam and Sadie’s life work.

While the story is full of personal and professional highs for the characters, tragedy is always lurking in the background. Sam and Sadie first meet in the hospital when Sam is recovering from a life-altering accident, and Sadie’s sister Alice undergoes cancer treatment. Sadie later finds herself in an abusive relationship with her professor Dov, and even when she is free of the relationship, she still finds herself seeking his approval, and his presence throughout the story feels invasive.  Racism, sexism, suicide, homophobia, depression, and gun violence all impact the characters’ lives in major ways, and it feels like in spite of reaching great success, Sam and Sadie are never able to truly enjoy it.

What makes Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow a fantastic read is Gabrielle Zevin’s extraordinary writing. Much like in a friendship, where secrets are gradually revealed the more you get to know someone, Zevin often hints at occurrences before she eventually reveals the full story. Zevin takes the narrative back and forth through time effortlessly. While some supporting characters could be slightly more fleshed out, Sam and Sadie have rich character development, and readers can understand their motivations, even through their more selfish actions.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is at its core a story about two friends who in spite of their best efforts, need each other. Though they have many falling-outs and failures to communicate, they always manage to find their way back to each other and they are at their best when they are collaborating. With beautiful writing and a narrative that will hook readers, this story is not to be missed.

Elizabeth Weislak is the Youth Services Coordinator for the Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at eweislak@alamancelibraries.org.

“Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It” by David M. Ewalt; Scribner (288 pages, $26).

Published in 2013 in celebration of D&D’s 5^th Edition, David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men is a deep dive into the classic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game and cultural phenomena that is known as Dungeons & Dragons.

In Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), players form an adventuring party to explore grand fantasy worlds together, embark on epic quests, loot lost treasures, and level up. The Dungeon Master (DM) is the game’s referee and storyteller. There’s no winning or losing in D&D, at least, not in the conventional way. D&D focuses on storytelling, the dice rolls just help you along. Everything is the player’s decision, from how they look, to how they act, to what happens next. The collective creativity in a D&D game builds stories that players will tell again and again—ranging from the stuff of legend to absurd incidents that’ll make them laugh years later.

From D&D’s creation in 1974 by American boardgame designers Ernest Gary Gygax and David Arneson, to the copyright battles with J.R.R. Tolkien and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, to the game’s rise to fame and influence in modern pop culture, books, video games, and films, Ewalt has done a fantastic job encapsulating the gargantuan cultural impact of Dungeons & Dragons into a single book of just under 300 pages.

Along the way, Ewalt happily regales the reader with his own experiences playing Dungeons & Dragons from both his childhood as well as his ongoing man-child years. Of Dice and Men easily doubles as a memoir of Ewalt’s time with D&D. I greatly enjoyed hearing about his epic and amusing D&D adventures, both those that occurred in the game and those that occurred in real life because of the game.

My one critique of the book would be that while Ewalt does a generally excellent job of summarizing the many topics of D&D’s long and complicated history, there are some missed opportunities for flushing out the more complex or controversial topics that would have been of great interest to long time D&D players and outsiders alike. My guess is that since the book was published as a celebration of D&D’s latest edition of rulebooks, the author wished to paint the game in a positive light overall without dragging out any of D&D’s skeletons in the closet for discussion, such as how Gary Gygax lost the creative rights to his own creation.

That being said, Of Dice and Men is still a great read full of fun facts you probably never knew! Ewalt’s writing style is easy on the eyes and flows well from topic to topic. Whether you’ve played D&D for years or never rolled dice in your life, this book remains a great overview of Dungeons and Dragons, as well as a study of how this simple game of dice and imagination wonderfully infects every form of media it touches.

David M. Ewalt is an award-winning journalist and author widely regarded as an expert on the intersection of technology and gaming. He currently works as the Editor in Chief of Gizmodo, a news website for design, technology, science and science fiction. Previously he was an editor at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, and has written for a wide range of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and New York magazine.

Donavon Anderson is a reference library assistant at May Memorial Library. He can be reached at danderson@alamancelibraries.org.

Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen

Other Birds is a wonderfully written story by Sarah Addison Allen. Her quirky, magical tales are always a delight to read.

When Zoey arrives on Mallow Island, South Carolina, she feels both like she’s come home and like she’s an outsider who doesn’t belong anywhere. Her mother emigrated from Cuba many years ago, and landed on Mallow Island, South Carolina. When she married, she and her husband lived in the South for a few years, until he lost his job and decided they would move back to where his family lived in the Midwest.

Zoey’s mother brought her back to Mallow Island a few times before she passed away, when Zoey was only 7. She remembers very little about her visits to Mallow Island as a young child, but now that she is 18 and headed to the College of Charleston, she is glad to have her mother’s apartment to live in during the summer and on school breaks. She doesn’t have a great relationship with her father or her stepmother, who was all too excited to turn Zoey’s room into a crafting space.

The apartment is the loft unit at The Dellawisp, a small complex of apartments hidden off a side street. The dellawisps (birds) fly everywhere, and seem to communicate with the manager, Frasier. The other apartments house a chef, an artist, two middle-aged sisters who don’t talk to each other, and a bevy of ghosts. When a tragedy occurs at The Dellawisp, the other residents slowly begin connecting with each other. It turns out Zoey is the breath of fresh air they all needed to move on and exorcise the ghosts in their lives, and they’re the family that Zoey has always needed to support and celebrate her.

I really adore the way Allen writes, and her take on magical realism. Her books feel both grounded in Southern culture and alive with magic and fantasy. Maybe that’s less of a contradiction than it should be, given that the South is a place where ancestors are kept alive through their descendants’ storytelling. Allen’s characters, too, feel both familiar and unique, like someone you’d run into at the corner drugstore and want to follow home because they’re just a little different and therefore fascinating to you.

If you love this book (and her other novels), I highly suggest you follow Allen on social media. Most Sundays, she shares short short stories and invites others to comment and continue the story. They are entertaining to read, and encourage us all to flex our creativity muscles.

“Legends & Lattes,” by Travis Baldree. Copyright 2022, Cryptid Press (305 pages, $12.00).

Picture this: You’re sitting at home, reading your fantasy novel, and it ends. Do you ever ask yourself, “What about after? What happens next for those beloved characters that are always in high-stakes scenarios?”

In his debut novel Legends and Lattes, Travis Baldree answers this very question. Enter Viv, a mercenary who is wanting to do one final job, get that big pay out, and then retire to a quiet place and open up her own coffee shop. Once she’s retired (she literally hangs up her sword), Viv moves on and settles in the town of Thune, where she converts an old livery into the town’s first coffee shop, and tries her best to just immerse herself in the simple life, a tall order for the tall orc. Viv befriends other “outcasts,” like Calamity, the hard working and genius hobs; Tandri, the misunderstood succubi; Thimble, the pastry chef extraordinaire rattkin; and Pendry, the farmhand who just wants to become the bard he was born to be. With every one of Viv’s new friendships, her shop begins to flourish – from kitchen expansions, to new pastries, and even an open mic night! Don’t think that this novel of high fantasy and low stakes doesn’t have its trials though. Viv has to figure out how to run a new business for a market that didn’t know they needed a coffee shop (and were apprehensive at first), all while working around a corrupt government system in her town that wants to collect extra taxes from the top of her funds.

This cozy-fantasy book has opened a new genre to me that is only continuing to grow. Who wouldn’t love a “normal” kind of life but where magic and creatures roam? If you love this idea too, then put Legends & Lattes on hold with your library card!

Kayleigh Dyer is a library technical processing assistant at May Memorial Library. Contact her at kdyer@alamancelibraries.org.