The Literate Kitty

Imagine you, but on a different Earth… one perhaps not so very much changed, just not quite the same. Now, imagine you in a dozen such worlds. In a hundred. Or, in The Space Between Worlds (Micaiah Johnson’s dazzling debut), 382 different versions of you, on 382 different Earths.   _______________ In a not-so-distant, dystopian future, traveling within the multiverse is possible—not for the average Joe, mind you, being crazy-expensive—but doable .  [Let’s back up for a sec, though, to break down “multiverse”: consider our universe, then assume that—since space is literally infinite —multiple universes essentially identical to ours probably exist within that vast expanse, including multiple earths populated by our doppelgängers… who may— or may not —behave as we do, given the vagaries of human decision-making, behavior, and whatnot. Yeah?] Anyway, back to traversing the multiverse. For the few people allowed to do so, it’s a job: go to whatever Earth the assignment calls ...

It could be a scene from anywhere… a couple of young mothers—good friends—taking their kids to play in a neighborhood park. The women kick back on a bench in the shade to chat, while their little boys climb on the jungle gym, swoosh down the slides, and burn off excess energy as only a couple of active seven-year-olds can.   When one of the women heads off to the restrooms, the other decides to sneak a quick cigarette—she’s been trying to quit, but isn’t there, yet—which requires rooting around in the depths of her handbag for the elusive lighter.  It’s only once she’s finally lit up and taken that first drag, that she notices the children are nowhere in sight… but then she hears them, faintly, in the woods bordering the park on one side, and relaxes. They’ll soon tire of the trees and come tearing across the playground again.  The first mom returns, upset enough to find her friend smoking… but far more so when she doesn’t see the boys. Waving off the other’s explanat...

The meandering, old roads of rural Northumberland, in the dark of a frigid winter’s night, with the season’s first blizzard raging away, as a cantankerous older woman grips the wheel of her ancient Land Rover, determined to make it home rather than giving in and finding a room somewhere. But, as fate would have it, she misses her turnoff in the whiteout her truck’s headlamps fail to penetrate, and ends up creeping down an unfamiliar road… nearly running into another vehicle, that has partially slid off the slippery, narrow lane.  Grumbling, she hauls herself out of the Rover and makes her way to other car, where she finds the driver’s door wide open, but no driver in sight. One passenger, however, remains: a toddler, strapped into a baby seat, all alone in the frigid cold and dark. As put out as she might feel, though, the woman is nonetheless a Detective Inspector, and she isn’t about to let a child freeze to death… or its missing parent go unfound.  So begins Ann Cleeve...

After holding off for the longest time, I finally decided to plunge into (the ridiculously-named) Money Heist , last month. It’s not for wimps, time-wise—it took me the better part of July to stream, finishing late on the first night of August (although, with stay-at-home orders during the ongoing worldwide pandemic, time is something most of us have a hella lot more of, anyway)—but What. A. Ride. La Casa de Papel (the Spanish show’s actual name, which is far more elegant than the Americanized title) tells the story of a grand heist--conceived and orchestrated by a quiet genius called the "Profesor", and carried out by his hand-chosen band of merry men and women (each given the name of a city rather than using their own names to maintain some anonymity and separation... in theory ). In reality, though, that’s only part of the story; at its heart, this is a grand romance… or a series of them, actually. (And those romances? They run the gamut: intellectual, nerdy love; wild...

You know those rare moments, when everything is so absolutely perfect—so utterly right —that you wouldn’t change one solitary thing? That, for me, is literally every single page of Julia Heaberlin’s We Are All the Same in the Dark … and no matter what I else I read this year, this is gonna be my favorite book of 2020, without question. _______________ A trucker spies something near the edge of the road on one of those endless stretches of you-can’t-see-anything-for- way -too-many-miles flat Texas highway. The man, Wyatt, thinks it could be a dog, and he likes dogs, so he stops to check. Instead, it turns out to be an injured young girl, barely a teen—bruised, bloodied, and missing an eye—lying in the parched grass, a ring of dandelions circling her. Seeing as how he’s always taken dandelions as a sign—and heaven knows you don’t leave a wounded creature out in that kind of brutal heat, anyhow—Wyatt grudgingly puts her in the truck with him, and heads for home. The same evening, a...

I’m about to do something I don’t think I’ve ever done before (and writing this during a global pandemic, when my city has already been under lockdown for more than four months, that’s really sayin’ something). I’m going to recommend a book I basically hated. “Wait, you’re gonna whuh..??” , right? Believe me, I. Know. Just bear with me for a few, and we’ll get there… via Alex Pavesi’s The Eighth Detective . _______________ Grant McAllister—an elderly mathematician who’s been living life as a recluse on a remote island in the middle of the Mediterranean for the last three decades—did something noteworthy, a long time ago… but almost no one on the planet knows what he did. Julia Hart—an editor for a London publishing company—is one of the few who does… so she flies out to his tiny island with a proposal. Grant wrote and self-published (with a minuscule run) a book back in the early 1940s, shortly before he hied off to the island, in which he laid out precise mathematical formulas t...

There may be a worse combination than sudden fame and all the trappings of mega-success for a group of young lads, but you’ll have to work to come up with one. Or, you can just dive headfirst into Tie Die , Max Tomlinson’s delicious new thriller, to see just how bad “worse” could be… _______________ Stevie Cook was the lead singer of an up-and-coming band—The Lost Chords—living the high life with his bandmates and rubbing elbows with the likes of the Stones in London. All of eighteen years old, he’d been swept from a normal life, to a crazy whirlwind of swinging 1960s excess, with all the booze, drugs, fancy clothes and gear, and female companionship he could lay his hands on.  Until one morning, that is, when he woke up, hung-over after a big show, with a naked young girl stone-cold dead in the bed next to him… and everything changed, again. Only this time, for the so-much-worse. Stevie fled Great Britain, fearing arrest, and vanished, and The Lost Chords disband...