The girls, for example, discover the miracle of their first kiss but are soon confronted with the sexual implications suggested by the murder. The architecture of the murder mystery unifies this story, with the usual elements of crime, investigation, and revelation however, the novel becomes much more than a “whodunit” by using the mystery as a metaphor for the passage from innocence to experience, between knowing the world as a place of wondrous summer days and learning how dark is the night. Told in multiple points of view, with little dialogue, the novel is mostly about the effect this horror has on the people in the area. Three prepubescent girls are enjoying what is likely their last summer of childhood when one of them is murdered gruesomely in the woods with a bear trap. The story takes place in an area just inside Québec near the US border, where outsiders keep summer cabins and locals struggle through the winter. Boundary is one of those rare novels, rich in character and detail, evoking a place made as iconic as Yoknapatawpha by the author’s sensitive depiction. To hurry through such a book misses the point of its art.

Crime novels are commonly praised as “page-turners,” but there is a different kind of excellence in which each page invites savoring. Sarah Davies Cordova University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Andrée A. Using Ebola as exemplum, and refuting simplistic explanations about the dire epidemic’s source with Baobab’s wise and cautionary storytelling, with En compagnie des hommes Véronique Tadjo draws up a polyphonic ecological fable for the twenty-first century. Ancestrally wise like Tadjo’s urban Mask in Le Seigneur de la danse (1993), the sacred tree draws on the Congolese researcher’s understanding of the universe and Bat’s advice to accept the world’s biodiversity to suggest a pact of mutual goodwill between humans and nature in order to preserve the planet’s well-being. As arbre à paroles, the symbolic tree expresses the hope that lessons have been learned to prevent another deadly Ebola outbreak. As arbre à palabres, he listens to the contemporary voices and remembers the elders’ confidences and discussions of matters of justice and survival under its branches. Recalling Ken Bugul’s Le Baobab fou (1982), Baobab affirms the essential role of trees in the history and future of the world. That Ebola provokes and leaves one at times shivering, wanting a scrub-down in a chlorine bath. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Last Summer by Andrée A. Michaud