Anu Recommends #33
Commemorating hotumn with the debut of Anu's Auto-buy Authors series
Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!
Your first question before or on opening this issue probably is, and rightly so, whatever in all the multiverses is hotumn?
For that, I would pass you over to Mr. Jeff Zentner, who is also the author spotlight today, and the debut recipient of the title of Anu’s Auto-buy Author (as well as all-round great human I'm privileged to know).
Click through to his post below to find out what he dubs hotumn and why.
Funnily enough, many sections of Jeff’s books feel like the “wonderful liminal space between seasons” he references in the above post. Though they start mainly in the summertime, they carry in their souls a strong essence of the distinct quality possessed by the time between the waning days of summer and the first crisp of fall/autumn. Transition, anticipation, hope. I’ve tried and failed to truly vocalise and capture this feeling. Until I find better words, I’m simply going to recommend you go and read his.
For new subscribers of the Storyteller, Jeff was an interviewee, in issue #6 of the old format, back on August 1, 2020. I’ll be talking more about his upcoming releases later on in this issue (and also his multi-return to this newsletter to chat with me about it all), but for now, here’s the original interview:
Anu’s Auto-buy Authors #1
For those of you wondering what auto-buy means, it’s when all you need to know to pre-order or buy a new book is that a particular author has written it. I don’t have too many auto-buy authors, but there are enough that this new series makes sense.
I first heard of Jeff’s work sometime in 2018 or 2019 (or maybe it was even in 2017, I can’t remember) from my dear book friend, Therese, whose taste in favourites fairly often overlaps with mine—she had raved about his debut Young Adult title, The Serpent King. But, as it is with many books, it lay in wait for the right time. Which happened to be on a long bus journey to New York from Boston a mere week before the pandemic arrived in the city. I haven’t looked back since.
Here are my thoughts on his books, in the order I read them.
The Serpent King
This is a magnetic, real, hopeful story of three misfit teenage friends navigating life and senior year in rural Tennessee. There's Dill aka Dillard Jr., the son of a disgraced and currently incarcerated Pentecoastal minister (who was caught with child porn) and a rigidly religious mother who still believes in her husband and blames her son. There's Lydia, an already popular fashion blogger who dreams of going to NYU, feels like an outcast in her small town, but comes from a stable, well-off family with parents who love and support her. And there's Travis, a gentle giant who escapes from his abusive, alcoholic father into the world of Bloodfall, a popular high-fantasy series (very clearly modelled on Game of Thrones).
Each character gets their own point of view chapters and since each has a unique voice, an individual narrative arc within the larger story, and is a fully realised character, it's the perfect way to tell this story.
Rich, layered teens. Conversations that appeared effortlessly unscripted and hence natural. Real issues with no easy answers or magical solutions. An almost brutal honesty about life's realities without taking away that glimmer of hope, even for these kids from the poor, rural hinterlands.
You can tell that Jeff is a musician and songwriter (we even share a love of American post-rock band, Explosions in the Sky, which I found out only later, but whose music I was constantly reminded of while reading this book. There is a certain cadence to the prose, to the details of beauty and pain and melancholy against a landscape that is as picturesque as it is harsh and unforgiving.
In the Wild Light
“You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous.”
Jeff Zentner's teen protagonists should, by all accounts, be broken, shattered long before we meet them. Instead, these “survivors of quiet wars” search for beauty and carry its fierce hope even in their most overwhelming despair and grief. Despite the spidery cracks threading their existence, they have the ability to let in moments of light and love.
Cash Pruitt has already lost his mother to an opioid addiction; now his dear Papaw is battling emphysema. When his genius best friend and town misfit Delaney Doyle makes a scientific discovery that lands both of them scholarships to the prestigious Middleford Academy in Connecticut, there are no easy decisions.
Do you trade a small and simple life, one better than you ever thought you would have, for a vague promise of the unknown? How do you leave beloved grandparents who raised you at a time when you feel like you need to be there the most? What will you regret more?
As in The Serpent King, Jeff's stellar debut, the teens in In the Wild Light embody what it means to open yourselves up to the magic and risks of the universe for a chance at discovering your place in it. These brave folk walk into your hearts intentional in their pronouncements and make you hope they're living happy lives somewhere there off the edge of the pages.
This book feels messier, for want of a better word, than said debut, whether in its more meandering plot or character arcs. But it has the same pulsing heart that I've come to associate with Jeff's work. The same dignity, respect, and sincerity of character, emotions, ideas. The same unexpected grace and gentleness amid the harsh ruins.
A story deeply grounded in the reality and duality of the landscape of Tennessee that embraces the “electric space of possibility” while cherishing the smaller, quieter moments of beauty, wonder, and love, stealing them from a hungry world, sheltering them in cupped hands even if for a moment.
Put this on your wishlist. That's all I can say 💜
Goodbye Days
“Funny how people move through this world leaving little pieces of their story with the people they meet, for them to carry. Makes you wonder what'd happen if all those people put their puzzle pieces together.”
What do you do if you lose all three of your best friends in a single devastating incident, and believe that you were, at least obliquely, to blame?
The writing here is as poetic as ever, the characters complicated enough, the emotional stakes weighty, with no easy solutions. The beauty and melancholy in the simple, in the small, in the everyday. A vivid sense of place. Meditations on love, loss, grief, friendship.
Jeff, oh Jeff. This man has a gift and I will happily read even his grocery list. Each of his books have seen me through specific times in my life that they will be forever connected with—future rereads simply building on those first associations and memories.
Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee
(This was originally written for Jaden Magazine.)
There are books you pick up knowing exactly what you’re in for; others that pleasantly or unpleasantly surprise you; then, there are those like Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee that you start only because you have them on your Kindle after having loved all three of the author’s books that you’ve so far read. But it ends up surprising you in the best possible way.
Josie Howard and Delia Wilkes are two upcoming high-school seniors in Jackson, Tennessee who host a super campy public-access horror show every Sunday night. Josie, aka alter ego Rayne Ravenscroft, is not a huge horror fan but is an aspiring actress and writer; for her best friend Delia, aka alter ego Delilah Darkwood, old-timey horror movies are the only connection she has left to her dad who abandoned her (and her mum) at age seven, even though she has a fear of being on camera. It’s their weird little thing but now, with senior year and all the indecision and uncertainty that lies ahead, all that could, and will, change.
Josie’s family wants her to move to the big city to attend college so that she can also intern at the Food Network through a family contact. But that would mean leaving their show and, also, Delia who lives with her single, depressed mother in a trailer, is desperate to trace and reconnect with her long-lost father, and worries that most people she loves end up leaving her because there is something fundamentally wrong with her. Then there is Lawson, Josie’s slow-at-first-but-soon-fast romantic interest, but is it advisable to get into a new relationship that might only last the summer?
This is a story about friendship, unconditional love and support, about finding your dream, taking that first step on the path to becoming who you want to be. It’s real life with all of its complications, in all of its everyday, quiet ache.
Which one of us hasn’t felt the complicated emotion of change and the unknown, that sweet melancholy when you’re already reaching the end of a beginning? Who hasn’t done their very best but sometimes come up short?
Josie and Delia learn that you don’t have to be (completely) excellent to not be forgotten, that you are allowed to just enjoy the stuff that is fun, no matter how silly, that all we can do sometimes is “line our space with what will be our talismans against sadness”. And that there are days that may not be perfect but are worth hanging on to because of rogue, flashing waves of contentment and joy.
There is a raw but positive depiction of mental health through the character of Delia and her mum, including a refreshing attitude supporting the use of antidepressants without judgement, as well as an unfiltered peek into poverty without pushing the reader to a particular conclusion. These are welcome forays to tether a story that is so much goofier than the author’s other books.
Also, as with his other books, Jeff manages to portray teens that feel real and nuanced, with real-world problems and imperfect, difficult lives. Here, he also pulls off centering female leads and their friendship in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s written by a man, not even when one of them starts a relationship. The sillier nature of this story makes the moments of heart even more surprising, and harder when they hit. The dialogue between the two is quippy and super sarcastic, but even at its most unbelievable, it somehow works.
This book is tonally the most different of his books and there is a sub-plot in the final third that defies most logic; yet he manages to retain his beautiful writing, his three-dimensional teenage characters, and his ability to tell stories that make us feel all the feelings (this one was purported to be the one that wouldn’t make one cry, but it lied). Rayne and Delilah may be the weird outlier in the author’s backlist but I’m glad he wrote it and that, as happens more often than not, it found me when I most needed it.
“Sometimes small and spectacular things can be a universe.”
And now for the promised update about his upcoming work. Jeff has not one, but two (!) books out in 2024: his adult novel debut titled Colton Gentry's Third Act (more about this in a planned future issue; I've kindly been sent a digital advance review copy and can't wait to get started), and a Young Adult novel-in-verse co-written with fellow YA author Britanny Cavallaro called Sunrise Nights.
That's all for the first edition of Anu's Auto-buy Authors. Did it pique your interest about Jeff's work?
I'd love to know who some of your auto-buy authors are, if you have any!
As always, please feel free to send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue 😊 Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.
Take care and see you next week!
Anu
If you really like the newsletter, please feel free to buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/anushreenande
You can find me on Twitter at @AnuNande (follow for all the football chatter) and on Instagram at @booksinboston.