NONFICTION: NATURALIST MYSTERY
Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer by David Roberts (Broadway)
In 1930, Everett Ruess, age 16, began a series of solitary wanderings across the Southwest, hiking throughout the mesas and canyons, a landscape that left him, as he himself wrote, “roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty.” And then, during a 1934 trek, he simply vanished. After his disappearance, a cult of Everett flourished, nurtured by environmentalists, explorers and others who admire his “ecstatic vision of the wilderness.”
Growing up in a “compulsively literary” family, Ruess was a lifelong diarist and sent home hundreds of letters: lovely, wise, immature and selfish by turns. His poetry, treasured by some for its rapturous nature worship, was also marked by adolescent solipsism. In 1942 Wallace Stegner remarked that Ruess was “not a good writer” but added, “he knew it, and he was learning.”
“Finding Everett Ruess,” David Roberts’ compelling, humane book about the young adventurer, seeks to replace hagiography with explanation, pondering “a riddle that has no parallel in the history of the American West.” As he explores the Ruess myth and reality, Roberts leaves us with great sympathy for this lost boy and especially for his family, who never stopped believing he might someday return.
FICTION: PARANORMAL ROMANCE
Graveminder by Melissa Marr (Morrow)
With “Graveminder,” Melissa Marr, author of the best-selling “Wicked Lovely” series for young adults, gives us her first adult novel. It’s a paranormal romance adventure set in the singular town of Claysville, where two families are tied together by a long-held tradition of tending the dead.
Long ago, the villagers made a deal with the mysterious Mr. D to provide a chain of Undertakers and Graveminders to ensure that all those born in Claysville would make quick and safe journeys to the other side when they die. And so, for 300 years, generation after generation, one man from the Montgomery family and one woman from the Barrow family have handed down their odd jobs. Byron and Rebekkah, the new team, are shocked by their sudden call to duty but have no time to question fate: The hungry dead are already wandering the streets.
The town and its antiquated rituals make an appealing setting: the Graveminder, or Last Mourner, ringing a bell as she follows the coffin to the cemetery; the sprinkling of the earth with whiskey; the entrance to the land of the dead behind an old cabinet in the funeral parlor — it’s all splendidly creepy. Even the ashes-to-ashes name, Claysville, is a charmer. And the peculiar setting — half Western ghost town, half Renaissance bodice-ripper — is vivid and original. But the sexual tension between the new Undertaker and his Graveminder is less compelling than the premise suggests.
Marr creates sympathetic characters, she takes readers to places both sinister and delightful, and there’s a satisfying end to a wonderfully awful villain. It’s a fast read, spooky enough to please but not too disturbing to read in bed.
