Books: 801

“Mistër E’s Eclectic Compendium of Wondrous Hits”
Elias Mondegreen
Beaver’s Pond Press
$29.95

If you like music, trivia and lists, then the book’s subtitle will give you the gist of the “Eclectic Compendium”: “The Musical Universe of One Boy—His 101 Favorite Songs, Every Year, Since 1976.” Have your own ready to compare? Bravo! If not, throw your memory back and see how it compares to the 4,949 entries here. If you weren’t around in 1976, just keep building your very own. It was the 2020 isolation and emptiness that what had been his love of music since a teen, spurred E to gather his lists together and — under the nom de plume Elias Mondegreen — to complete this unique volume, urging music lovers to share it with others. He follows year-end lists with tidbits and discussions, histories, controversies and an Artist Cross-Reference.

“Nobody’s Baby”
Olivia Waite
Tor
$24.99

Waite’s first volume, “Murder by Memory,” was reviewed here earlier. Now, the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner, is further along its journey, all running smoothly until a newborn infant appears on ship detective Dorothy Gentleman’s nephew Ruthie’s doorstep. Not his, nor should it be anyone else’s, since all fertility has been paused until landfall. A rival detective is eager to declare it a stowaway and wrest it from the arms of Ruthie and her husband; Dorothy must hustle to winkle out the whos and hows of the mystery, and, as a good sleuth and auntie, she does. It’s Waite’s twists and turns of detection that will hold you right to the end. Read both.

“The Merriest Misters”
Timothy Janovsky
St. Martin’s Griffin
$18

Starting off as an ordinary gay-romance-true-love between Patrick Hargrave and Quinn Muller, the quickly married couple is feeling the strains of reality. The ordinary plot turns on its head when, on Christmas Eve, Patrick attacks an intruder and fears he may have killed Santa Claus. Ordered by elf Hobart, the pair are sleigh-borne to the North Pole to assume the Santa role the visitor (not deceased) quit. An incredible life now opens before the couple with Patrick as Santa and Quinn as … Merriest Misters. Bliss! Till it isn’t, and the gilded wonder begins to pall. Lessons to be learned here for the ordinary as well as the magical, and author Janovsky wraps up the tale in an unexpected and satisfying solution.

“Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus”
Betsy Golden Kellem
The Feminist Press
$20.95

Something women have always had to do, one might say, but these ladies did so in public, and for money, competing with men in derring-do and risk of life and limb, constrained at the same time to present as ‘respectable’ under the microscope of a critical public. Kellem traces the history of the American traveling circus from primitive “mud shows” to P.T. Barnum extravaganzas to international big business, while interweaving the biographies of women willing to go against the prevailing ideas of the time (often still held) of women as mute stay-at-homes, subservient to household and husband. Meet Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale, Ella Zohar the “Boy-Girl” and numerous Bearded Ladies, who you won’t soon forget.