January 15, 2025
Essayist and short story writer Menger-Anderson melds history and SF in her debut novel about loss, yearning, and the nature of reality. The intricate plot tacks between contemporary California, where a young woman awaits a visit from her father, and 1930s Vienna, where a group of brilliant mathematicians becomes increasingly vulnerable to violence and antisemitism erupting with the rise of fascism. Hase's father has told her that if ever he fails to appear when expected, she must go to a public library in Berkeley and retrieve a certain book by the Austrian mathematician Walfried Engelhardt and turn to page 71. When the Coast Guard finds her father's abandoned boat, Hase follows those instructions, which set her on a circuitous path of discovery. Besides eking out a living tutoring and doing odd jobs, Hase has been devoted to editing Wikipedia entries, as was her father. "Like me," she knows, "he enjoyed the site because he could be invisible and visible, an outsider and a participant simultaneously, a contradiction realized." She finds comfort in browsing deleted pages, a "shadow history" of content. "Most people don't even know it exists," she admits, "but I'm a connoisseur of untold stories." As Menger-Anderson's narrative unfolds, Hase's own shadow history emerges: She realizes her parents' true identity, and she suddenly understands that her mysterious music box can effect time travel. Menger-Anderson drew on a memoir by her grandfather, a mathematician and member of the internationally renowned Vienna Circle in the 1930s, who was caught up in the political events that made intellectual life impossible; in 1936, he accepted a position in the U.S. and fled. As Hase discovers, though, the past can never truly be escaped; the present is haunted by shadows. Caught in the swirl of time.
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March 1, 2025
An enigmatic young woman seeks clues to the whereabouts of her father, but the answers may lie, a century previous, with the Vienna Circle of Austrian mathematicians. Hase, as we know her, defines herself by what she lacks--close friends, identification documents, a cell phone, a digital footprint. She loves only two things: editing Wikipedia articles (which she treats "as if it were my own personal web page") and the reclusive mathematician who raised her but has now disappeared from the sailboat he called home. Mathematics books at a Berkeley public library may provide some answers. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative set in 1933 Vienna, we meet Anton, a geometry instructor whose involvement with a small group of elite mathematicians leads to romantic temptation, political peril, and the metaphysical magic of a very special music box. Melding a historical narrative (inspired by her grandfather's own experiences with the Vienna Circle) and a mind-bending time travel story, Menger-Anderson delivers a thought-provoking critique of digital existence. "The silence of my time," her narrator suggests, "is not a pressed hand over lips but the illusion that I'm present.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.