Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth is a spooky exploration into the most dangerous thing you can do on Earth!

I have always been equal parts fascinated and scared of caves. Imaging exploring on underwater!

From Penguin Random House:

As one of the most celebrated cave divers in the world, Jill Heinerth has seen the planet in a way almost no one has. In a workday, she might swim below your home, through conduits in volcanoes or cracks in the world's largest iceberg. She's an explorer, a scientist's eyes and hands underwater—discovering new species and examining our finite freshwater reserves—and a filmmaker documenting the wonders of underwater life. Often the lone woman in a male-dominated domain, she tests the limits of human endurance at every tight turn, risking her life with each mission. To not only survive in this world but excel, Jill has had to learn how to master self-doubt like no other.

Heinerth, Jill. (2019). Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver. New York: Ecco. 

The Thirty Names of Night

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar is a story set in the Syrian American community in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. This is a beautifully told story.

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. [from Fantastic Fiction]

Joukhadar, Zeyn. (2020). The Thirty Names of Night. New York: Atria Books.

The Safekeep

 

The Safekeep by Yael Van der Woulden is an historical fiction novel that packs a punch. 

1961, Dutch province of Overijssel. 

Isabel lives by herself in her mother's house. She spends her time maintaining the house and garden, and managing the maid who comes in the daytime. By all accounts she is lonely and closed off.

When she is coaxed to have dinner with her two brothers in the city, her brother Louis arrives with his latest girlfriend. Eva is the opposite of Isabel, and Isabel dislikes her on sight. 

A few weeks later, when Louis have to travel for work, he show up at the house (which he technically owns) with Eva in tow. Eva is to stay with Isabel for a few weeks. 

What follows is a rough push and pull as they get to know more about each other. Using flashbacks, Van der Wouden explores what happened to each of their families in the war - an how they are tied together.

The Safekeep is on the long list for the 2024 Man Booker Prize, quite deservedly. If the only book you have read about the Dutch in WWII is the Diary of Anne Frank, this will be a surprise! Read it today.

Van der Wouden, Yael. (2024). The Safekeep. New York: Avid Reader Press.