Leah Hager Cohen

A remarkable novel in which the reader chooses whether to begin with TO or with FRO. In each case, at the halfway point, you turn the book upside-down and begin again. I began with TO, and fell in love with young Ani, who journeys through a pre-industrial land, encountering travelers, mourners, scholars, possible friends along the way. Many of them help her care for the too-young kitten she took from its mother, as she was separated from her own mother. Ani's voice is naive, wondering, frustrated (especially at her inability to read), and delightful. In the other half, Annamae Galinsky is in very different circumstances: modern-day New York City, living with her scholarly mother and annoying brother. Like Ani, she encounters teachers and wiser adults who help her to navigate the uncertain waters of girlhood. Annamae notices when words have multiple meanings; she endeavors to understand whether something is a question of curiosity or a question of agenda; she longs for a friend exactly like her. But is an identical match a good basis for friendship? Somehow these two girls seem to connect across time and distance...as if they could reach through a looking glass. Leah Hager Cohen captures the voices of children perfectly, both inner and spoken, in this captivating read. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Bellevue Literary Press for the gratis copy.
… (lisätietoja)

Strangers and Cousins is a book with many happenings, much complexity, many sub-plots, and with large ideas, all tucked into barely three hundred well-written pages.

As in many novels, there was no table of contents. One would have been handy. There are five "Episodes" corresponding to chapters or sections, which recount four days before and the day of, a wedding.
Each of the first four episodes ends with a multi-topic "Nocturne" full of thoughts and acts of people, and animals awake and asleep. The weather, the moon, sunlight and rain are almost characters, well described.

The first few pages introduced so many characters and potential characters that at first I despaired of ever getting a handle on all of them, but things settled down quickly, so it seldom took more than a moment to recall who Hanna was or where Lloyd fitted into the scheme of things. There are stories of peoples pasts and likely futures, which make them even more real. This is a tribute to Cohen’s skill at naming and at putting people into context.

I won’t try to explain characters and plot, since other reviewers have done this. Every character is quirky in their own way, every one believable, and every one of them fits into the story.

This is the third book by Leah Hager Cohen that I've read. Time to look for more.… (lisätietoja)

To & Fro is a remarkably unique book; it's two mirrored stories bound together, and can be read in either order, with each story "ending" in the middle. I started with "To," which features a young girl, Ani, who sets off on a journey, ostensibly following the Captain. The other story, "Fro," is about Annamae, a girl growing up with her mother and older brother Danny in Manhattan.

Serious Annamae has a deep interiority; she writes and draws constantly in a notebook she calls "Company," or Coco for short, from age 7 until about 12. This notebook seems to be the very one that Ani sets out to return to the Captain, along with his glasses; on Ani's journey, she brings an apricot-colored kitten, which she names Company, and she overhears a song - the lyrics of which are a poem Annamae wrote in her notebook.

More mirroring: Both Ani and Annamae each find a "ferryman": in Ani's case, a man who brings people across the river in a ferry, to Tewanfrough (to and fro); Annamae used to address letters to a "fairy man" but when she gets older, a bar and restaurant called the Ferryman opens on her street.

Both are fascinated with letters - "signs and wonders" - and study, after a fashion, the Torah and its commentary. To & Fro itself is full of signs and wonders, deep thinking, and a strong connection to what it's like to be a child, and begin growing out of childhood.

WaPo review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/05/21/to-fro-leah-hager-cohen-book/

Quotes from "To"

"No one's not broken in some way or other." (Cook to Ani, 22)

I like pretending objects are a kind of book. That they can be read. I like making up stories about them. Where they came from, whose hands used them, where they might be headed next. (52)

"A messenger doesn't have to understand the message. A messenger just has to receive it." (Ottla to Ani, 117)

Who can say what's beyond repair? (118)

[The notebook] had become like a song whose words I didn't know but whose tune I could hum. (147)

...and because I could not leave her, because maybe the old story didn't have to determine the new, because maybe I could invent a different story this time, I stayed. (155)

In a story riddled with holes, a single newfound scrap can have the power to recast the others. (158)

What I felt was, This has not happened to me only.
Maybe stories don't make things happen, but maybe through stories we find we are not alone. (170)

From "Fro"

"[A contranym] is a word with two opposite meanings." (Annamae's mom, 36)

"No two people can ever know the exact same thing!" (Annamae to her mom, 82)

"Questions of curiosity" vs. "questions of agenda" (98)

This was what Annamae had realized. No one could ever understand anybody. Not really.
They were all doomed.
Doomed not to understand one another.
Worse: doomed to go around thinking they were understanding one another, thinking they were being understood.
It was language's fault. People mistook language for solid ground, when really it was just a net. (119)

[The story of Akhnai's Oven, 166-167]

And yet she wondered...might it be possible to create something beyond your control? To imagine something into being that yet had a life of its own, an unruliness, an ability to disobey, perhaps to invent you in return? (183)… (lisätietoja)

Leah Hager Cohen's "No Book but the World" is about stories, about being different, about growing up and becoming adults who now are trying to understand themselves and others close to them, past and present.

It is told, in all its parts, by Ava, who in the final few pages describes how she began, in a journal, to tell what she knew, what she remembered, how she tried to research and ask questions of other people involved. She admits she will never completely understand all the things that might have happened, but has written what she believed could have been, how others might have acted, even though she could not be sure.

Ava and her brother Freddy were raised among a small group of families, each living in their own buildings in a remote woodland that once was a school run by their parents, Neel and June. Neel founded the now closed school, believing the role of teachers was to let children roam, and to guide them only when needed. Freddy was born "different", and "difficult", maybe autistic, but never diagnosed. Ava, two years older, was often his caretaker.

As adults, Ava and Fred seldom see each other. Then Fred becomes a suspect in the death of a young boy, and Ava goes to Perdue, the town near where he has been jailed, to meet his lawyer and try to be of aid. There she begins her journal.

Each section of the book is beautifully written, even the unhappy parts. Each character, major and minor, is memorably described, both their features and their actions.

And there is a real sense of Ava remembering, trying to discover, and
trying to understand her brother, as well as the parts she and the other people around him have played in his fate.… (lisätietoja)