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CBS News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
The Book Report: Ron Charles on new summer reads (July 20)
By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles As summer revs up, here are three cool new novels, and a work of history that's wilder than fiction! Lucas Schaefer's debut novel, "The Slip," takes place in and around a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, where everybody is trying to become somebody different. Following two White teenagers – one obsessed with his African American mentor, the other discovering their transgender identity – this sweaty, comic masterpiece jumps in the ring with our most pressing social debates, and lands a knockoutv . Read an excerpt: "The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer "The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and At the start of Michelle Huneven's "Bug Hollow," the sweetest, smartest son any parents could ask for has just graduated from high school and headed off with his friends for a weeklong road trip. But what starts as a domestic comedy soon becomes a tragedy, and Huneven turns her gracious eye to the way families carry on, even when shattered, and thrive. Read an excerpt: "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven (Penguin Press), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and In "The Satisfaction Cafe," a gently witty new novel by Kathy Wang, a woman from Taiwan makes her way in America with patience and determination. For decades, she struggles to fit in with a complicated, wealthy family, until she can finally create a little safe space where people can find what they really want: just to be heard. Read an excerpt: "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang "The Satisfaction Café" by Kathy Wang (Scribner), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and A century ago, Western scientists knew almost nothing about giant pandas. Now, in a thrilling work of history, Nathalia Holt follows Teddy Roosevelt's sons, Ted and Kermit, as they set out with a team to China to track down these black-and-white creatures. How would the brothers survive this treacherous expedition? And what would the implications be for these gentle animals? Holt explores these fascinating questions and others in "The Beast in the Clouds." Read an excerpt: "The Beast in the Clouds" by Nathalia Holt "The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda" by Nathalia Holt (Atria/One Signal), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and That's it for the Book Report. For these and other suggestions about what to read this summer, talk with your local bookseller or librarian. I'm Ron Charles. Until next time, read on! For more info: Produced by Robin Sanders. Editor: Joseph Frandino. For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles:
CBS News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. A summer lark turns tragic, and a shattered family must carry on, in "Bug Hollow" (Penguin Press), the latest novel by Michelle Huneven, the author of "Round Rock" and "Blame." Read an excerpt below. "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. The summer when Sally Samuelson was eight, her brother Ellis graduated from high school and a few days later, he and his best friends, Heck Stevens and Ben Klosterman, drove up the coast in Heck's '64 Rambler American. They promised to be back in a week. Sally was the only one who went outside to see them off. She waved a dishrag and dabbed at pretend tears, then one or two real ones. "Bye, little Pips!" Ellis yelled from the back seat—he called her Pipsqueak, with variations. "See you in the funny papers!" Ellis had thick, curly yellow hair long enough to tuck behind his ears and he wore a baseball cap to keep it there. He'd lately grown incredibly tall and skinny; his pants rode so low on his hip bones, they seemed about to slip off. Sally's sister, Katie, who was fourteen, called him El Greck after they saw El Greco's Christ on the Cross at the Getty; even their parents confirmed the resemblance. His last two years in high school, Ellis had a girlfriend named Carla, who was also tall and blond and liked to show off her stomach. In front of Ellis, she would say hi to Sally. Sometimes Ellis would come into Sally's room when she was drawing on the floor; he'd sit by her and talk about his last baseball game or his weird calculus teacher, and sometimes he'd wonder how much he liked Carla and if she was even nice. Sally somehow knew not to say what she thought. Anyway, Ellis spent most of his time playing ball with Ben and Heck. For their trip, they packed Heck's old Rambler with sleeping bags, the small smelly tent the Samuelson kids used on camping trips, and a cooler full of sodas. After ten days, when Ellis hadn't come back, Heck showed up at the Samuelsons' front door with the tent. Sally answered his knock. "Ellis decided to stay away for a few more days," he said. "Stay where?" Sally's mother said from behind her. "With some girl he met," said Heck. "Not sure where, exactly." "Well, where did they meet?" "On a beach around Santa Cruz." That was all her mother could get out of Heck. "Some girl has snagged Ellis," she told Sally's father when he came home from work. "Good for her," he said. "How can you say that, Phil?" her mother cried. "El's such an innocent. What if she's trouble?" Hinky, their Manchester terrier, cocked her head at one parent, then the other; she followed conversations—they'd tested her by standing in a circle and tossing the conversation back and forth. Hinky shifted her attention to each speaker in turn. "What if he doesn't come back in time for his job?" Ellis was supposed to be a counselor at the day camp he'd attended since first grade. "Let's worry about that when the time comes," Sally's father said. The camp's start date came and went. An excerpt from "Bug Hollow," published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Michelle Huneven. Reproduced with permission. Get the book here: "Bug Hollow" by Michelle Huneven Buy locally from For more info:
New York Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Memory of a Teenage Golden Child Ripples Across Generations
BUG HOLLOW, by Michelle Huneven Entering the lives of the Samuelson family in 1970s Altadena, Calif., feels like getting into a warm bath. Michelle Huneven's sixth novel, 'Bug Hollow,' instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details (those pay phones!) and superb gift for description — of a sprawling cast led by a supportive engineer father, Phil, and a prickly elementary-school teacher mother, Sibyl; and especially of California's many wildly differing landscapes. The Samuelsons' simple suburban world turns upside down when 17-year-old Ellis, the sunny eldest child of three, goes camping with his friends outside Santa Cruz and doesn't bother to come back. 'Some girl has snagged Ellis,' Sibyl frets. 'Good for her,' Phil says, and the marital tension is established: Dad is chill and Mom is a control freak. Days turn into weeks with little contact from Ellis and a lot of panicking from Sibyl (is her son dropping out of college before he's even begun?), until the family tracks him to a rundown house in the Santa Cruz Mountains called Bug Hollow, the part commune, part crash pad where Ellis has moved in with Julia, an artsy, beautiful girl he met on the beach. The young couple's joy brings back all the feels, as the kids say today — the aha-ness of falling in love for the first time — but Sibyl isn't having any of it, and brings her boy home to spend his last pre-college week with his family. As Ellis's youngest sister, Sally, the precocious and dryly hilarious narrator of the first chapter, puts it: 'Julia made a little speech about how she didn't want our parents to be mad at her because she and Ellis truly loved one another and would be together forever, and she hoped to love and be loved by his family, too.' My eyes filled. It is not a spoiler to reveal that by Page 21, Ellis is dead: accidentally drowned in a quarry five days into his freshman year at Ole Miss. Phil goes down to Mississippi and returns with 'a box wrapped in shiny ivory paper and tied with a thick purple ribbon,' Sally narrates, thinking 'it was probably candy, and for everyone, another big assortment of chocolates he'd bought at the airport.' In fact, it is Ellis's remains. The lack of sentimentality surrounding this death is as shocking to the reader as it is to this repressed and soon-to-be fractured family who will carry this dead child along with them emotionally for generations. The novel evolves from its innocent opening into something more intriguing. Nothing (aside from the book jacket summary) prepares the reader for the five-decade international saga that unfolds in 10 discrete but interwoven chapters, each narrated by a different member of the Samuelson family or its widening circle. Formally, the result is something like a narrative love child of Alice Munro's novelistic short stories and Elizabeth Strout's novels of interconnected short stories. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Bug Hollow' perfectly captures the unpredictability of life
Don't be fooled by Michelle Huneven's warm welcome. She can be just as capricious and brutal as real life. Her new novel, 'Bug Hollow,' begins with a perfectly calibrated bit of domestic comedy set during a golden summer in the mid-1970s. Ellis Samuelson — the sweetest, smartest son any parents could ask for — has just graduated from high school and driven off on a week-long road trip with some buddies. The first intimations of trouble start dripping in when his friends come home and report, 'Ellis decided to stay away for a few more days.' Apparently, he met 'some girl' on a beach near Santa Cruz. More time slips by. Ellis doesn't return for his job as a camp counselor, but a few postcards suggest he's having a blast working at an ice cream parlor. 'I'm extremely happy here,' he writes, 'so please don't worry.' Yeah, right. 'I knew we shouldn't have let him go off like that,' his mother, Sib, says. 'One fast girl on a beach and he's a goner!' A straight-A kid with a full scholarship to Ole Miss: What if he doesn't come back in time for college? 'Something's fishy.' 'I'm sure he's fine,' his father says. 'It's high time he gave us something to worry about.' Not to be dissuaded, once Sib learns Ellis is camped out at a place called Bug Hollow in Boulder Creek, she throws everybody — the dog, too! — into their VW van, and they barrel off to retrieve the wayward son. 'He won't have a choice,' Sib says. 'We'll play it by ear,' Dad predicts. Teenagers! Huneven knows just how to seduce us with this family's adventures. We recognize their high jinks — the goofy, good-looking kid, the sharp-eyed mom, that easygoing dad. This is practically an episode of 'The Brady Bunch' written by Anne Tyler. The whole chapter is honey glazed in good humor, the passions of youth and the histrionics of loving parents. But then, with no more movement than the turn of a phrase or the slip of a knife, the Samuelson family suffers a gutting loss from which they will never move on. Except, of course, they do move on because that's time's cruel and blessed effect on grief. With extraordinary candor and tenderness, Huneven shuffles through those raw months when hope feels like a cheat as the Samuelsons are unmade and remade by tragedy. 'How weird life was, how absolute, how irremediable,' she writes. The important thing is to resist 'that sticky, toxic terror that life — this life, which gave you the beautiful sparkling world — squashed you like a gnat.' Sib, a prickly fourth-grade teacher who 'undercut any good, tender moment,' grows even sharper and more difficult in the fog of mourning. (Is that the smell of alcohol on her breath?) Cruelly, sorrow makes time with her children feel unbearable. Even driving home from the grocery store with 8-year-old Sally is a strain. 'Sib is about at the limit of what she can take of the girl,' Huneven writes. 'Those big eyes exaggerated by her glasses are so woozy and beseeching, they make Sib shrink back. Sib knows — they both know — that this is the time for her to check in, to ask how her daughter's doing. But Sib can't; she won't, she doesn't have it in her, whatever it is. She's all but holding her breath until they can go their separate ways.' And yet that sense of dread about being with her own children is transformed into zealous advocacy for the students in her classroom. How much safer it feels to care about somebody else's children. In the pages that follow, Huneven dares us to get comfortable only to yank us years or thousands of miles away. The family that initially felt so shiny and self-contained gives way to individual stories that butt up against one another at skewed angles. It's not confusing; it's eye-opening. The very structure of 'Bug Hollow' reminds us that the smoothly progressive chapters of most novels are a fanciful creation of some chiropractic narrator who's artificially aligned the disorder of actual lives. Here, the Samuelsons' fates play out in ways that feel preposterous and completely believable. In Saudi Arabia, we discover an entanglement that will complicate the family much later. A trip back to Bug Hollow doesn't offer the nostalgic closure some of them thought it would. One of the novel's finest stories slips away from the Samuelsons entirely to explore the surprising ways love can evolve. And in a particularly deft chapter of tragicomedy, we watch one of the central family members die. But, as always, Huneven reminds us, 'The world still ached with beauty.' Or at least it still does in this unassuming book written with such graceful compression. Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds. 'Funny,' she writes, 'how the days you weep, you can also have the fullest, deepest laughs.' There are many such days here. Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for 'CBS Sunday Morning.' By Michelle Huneven Penguin Press. 288 pp. $29
Los Angeles Times
13-05-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Michelle Huneven's homes burned down in the Eaton fire. Her new novel, coincidentally, celebrates Altadena
Situated on an incline in Echo Park, Michelle Huneven's house is cozy in all the right ways: Kilim rugs, an invitingly plush couch, a kitchen that is used for more than just putting on the coffee. But something is amiss. Huneven is a novelist, a journalist and a lecturer in creative writing at UCLA, so where are all the books? Gone in the Eaton fire, it turns out. Huneven lost two homes in the deadly conflagration last January. Her insurance company is paying for this Echo Park rental while she and her husband, an environmental lawyer, inch toward building a new house on their property. 'Some friends of ours in Altadena showed up at 6 p.m. the night of the fire, thinking that it would be safe at our place,' says Huneven. 'Then the lights went out.' By 4:30 in the morning, Huneven and her husband were forced to abandon their house, which, along with a home they used as a rental, burned to the ground. 'I've got a lot of processing going on, but a lot of it is being done unconsciously,' says Huneven, who is preoccupied with trying to negotiate the state's Kafkaesque laws to rebuild her home at the same time that her new novel, 'Bug Hollow,' is being published. 'There are a thousand bureaucratic details to deal with, like applying for a [Small Business Administration] loan, and you can't concentrate on anything else, because you get a call in the middle of the night asking you to attend a meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers the next day. With all this going on, I forget that I have a book coming out.' The Samuelsons, the middle-class Altadena family at the heart of Huneven's novel, are also confronted with crises at every turn, negotiating the vicissitudes of modern life across decades with hard-won grace. But 'Bug Hollow' is not another novel about family dysfunction, secrets and lies. Rather, Huneven's bighearted family is bound together by the power of love, and doing right by each other. In that way, 'Bug Hollow' (out June 17) is of a piece with Huneven's previous work, in which seemingly incompatible characters reach out across social and cultural divides in a bid to grasp some measure of redemption and comity. Her 1997 debut, 'Round Rock,' gathers a small group of burnouts in a halfway house in the Santa Bernita Valley as they try to repair the wreckage of their lives. In 2003's 'Jamesland,' three damaged souls living in Los Feliz find solace in one another's company, disparate lives connected by empathy and compassion. Huneven, who was born and raised in Altadena, finds herself circling back to the same familiar patch of land in her fiction. 'Altadena is in my DNA and it's always been,' she says. 'Full of artists, spiritual seekers and soreheads. I know the flora and fauna and many of the trails. Why look farther afield when there's enough choice material to write about, even on my own property, which was once home to the nurseryman who brought the Fuerte avocado to America.' Huneven's new book, her sixth, didn't come easy. 'I initially wanted to write short stories but I didn't have any ideas,' says Huneven. She is sitting on the deck of her rental home, which offers a view of the Hollywood sign in the near distance. 'When I teach fiction, I give a lot of prompts to my students. I printed up all my prompts, 126 of them, and went through all of them in order to jump-start some ideas.' Huneven methodically worked through nearly 50 prompts, but nothing good came to her. Then, she stumbled upon the following: 'Write about a sibling you never had.' 'My mother had an uncle Ellis who drowned, and if she had a boy, I was to be named for him,' she says. Huneven wrote a story about Ellis and showed it to her first reader, novelist Mona Simpson. 'She wanted to know more about Ellis' girlfriend, so I wrote that.' That story begat others, which became the foundation for 'Bug Hollow.' Huneven slowly fashioned a larger arc from bits and pieces of other stories, until she had created a full-bodied, cohesive narrative. Unlike so many sprawling family sagas, 'Bug Hollow' is taut and compressed; the novel jumps across time and space in short, sharp chapters stripped of sentiment. 'I drew from Alice Munro because she swerves and time-jumps,' says Huneven. 'I've learned a lot from her; I teach her a lot.' In 'Bug Hollow,' Ellis is the only son of Phil and Sybil Samuelson. Ellis, a venturesome dreamer with a promising academic future, drowns during the summer before college. His girlfriend, Julia, gives birth to their daughter soon after. Phil and Syb decide to adopt the child, despite the fact that Syb, a middle-school teacher, derives far more satisfaction from teaching her students than tending to her own children. It is this lack of maternal attention that sends Ellis' two older sisters on different paths, with the same goal in mind: to fill the lacuna left by their mother's benign neglect. Sally moves to the southern Sierra Nevada Foothills and has an unrequited love affair with a married stonemason, while Katie is drawn to the medical profession, to the rational side of her nature — the side she can control. 'A lot of what happens between Syb and her daughters is taken from my background,' says Huneven, whose mother was an elementary school teacher in the Pasadena Unified School District. Her father, whom she calls a 'working-class English German mutt,' was an attendance counselor for LAUSD. 'I was a total misfit in my family, in that I was creative and I cared about how things looked. And I was a crazy reader.' Huneven's mother was a fierce critic whose métier was the unprovoked insult. 'My mother would just cut me and my sister down to size, ya know? And that's a very unstable feeling, to have your mother suddenly tell you that you stink, you should use deodorant.' In contrast, 'Bug Hollow's' Phil Samuelson is a sturdy, calming influence — the conciliator who brings a measure of stability when things get sticky with Syb. 'I love Phil,' says Huneven. 'I want Phil to be my father.' The three Samuelson girls, including Ellis' child, Eva, pass through different versions of their lives, as so many of us do, trying on and shedding identities. While Katie and Eva turn toward more conventional career paths, Sally, who displays an artistic temperament early on, persists in pursuing a career in art — an outlier in a family of ambitious careerists. It's a choice Huneven understands all too well, having worked as a restaurant critic and freelance journalist before selling her first novel, 'Round Rock.' 'Pursuing art as a life choice was something I wanted to explore,' says Huneven. 'In a family where there are ambitious children who want to be psychologists or doctors, the artistic life is frowned upon, like it's a stupid thing to do. But you can't get anything done artistically without some naivete.' As someone who makes a living from her art, Huneven now finds herself torn between two jobs: doing all she can to move along her home rebuilding project while also promoting 'Bug Hollow.' 'Obviously it's been difficult, but we've had a soft landing compared to others,' she says. 'My students have been so generous, as have our friends. We are very fortunate to have a community behind us. Everyone needs that.'
