Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore by Emily Lieb (University of Chicago Press). Reviewed by Patricia Schultheis. “Lieb’s impressive research reaches back to when the vast estates of Baltimore’s gentry were converted into neighborhoods like Rosemont, communities of neat rowhouses for white working people. But by 1950 — just about the time the first maps for I-70 were drawn — the city’s demographics were changing: Baltimore’s Black population had risen to 25 percent, and pressure was growing to end redlining, the city’s vicious codified system of housing segregation.”

The Scrapbook: A Novel by Heather Clark (Pantheon). Reviewed by Anne Eliot Feldman. “Perhaps the biggest gift The Scrapbook offers, however, derives from its title, a nod to the faded album Anna’s grandfather left behind. Its vivid testimony — in the form of red armbands, black swastikas, green badges decorated with grey eagles, and photos of Dachau’s cadaver-stuffed cattle cars — speaks louder than words. Clark’s own grandfather, who served in the 86th Infantry Division and to whom she dedicates the novel, left a wartime scrapbook with those same photos. Years later, they remain haunting. Silently, they demand not only that we bear sober witness to the evils of war, but also that we consider whether such evils can ever be righted.”

Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth, and Power by Victoria Bateman (Seal Press). Reviewed by Elizabeth J. Moore. “A prime example is women’s labor in textile production, an age-old key driver of economic prosperity both at home and abroad. After all, it was women who wove the highly sought-after silk for which the Silk Road was named, as well as the cotton cloth at the center of the Industrial Revolution. But women’s ability to succeed in the economy wasn’t simply a matter of whether they were ‘working,’ which could be indicative of exploitation or outright slavery. Rather, the determining factor was whether they lived in a society that allowed them to earn, spend, invest, and share their money as they chose.”

Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories by Bora Chung; translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin Books). Reviewed by Karl Straub. “Ghost stories — tales about people and other animals who’ve died and returned to haunt us — are about the ultimate border, of course. Appropriately, this kind of tale has long been a vehicle for writers who want to travel repeatedly back and forth across literary borders until readers lose sight of the lines altogether. In the hands of a modern master like Korean author Bora Chung, the borders are porous indeed.”

The Good Daughters: A Novel by Brigitte Dale (Pegasus Books). Reviewed by Madeleine de Visé. “These places, characters, and events comprise a condensed, dramatized version of the actual WSPU. In a postscript, the author draws parallels between her novel and its sources — the fictive Hurstons stand in for Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, for example — and clarifies her creative choices. The protests depicted in the book occur in one year (whereas the actual WSPU protests spanned several), and the novel is peopled with both real and imagined figures, all of them rendered beautifully.”

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