Shelf Awareness for Readers for Tuesday, March 25, 2014


Thames & Hudson: The Lives of Lee Miller: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture Lee by Antony Penrose

From My Shelf

Jane Green: Tempting Fate

"Recording definitely feels more comfortable this time around," said author Jane Green, chatting during a short break from recording her newest audiobook, Tempting Fate (Macmillan Audio, March 25). "The last book had lots of teenage tantrums; I got pretty into the screaming and yelling. Now this is a little more temperate."

Green explores the fallout of betrayal and the effects of guilt in Tempting Fate; Gabby, who has been happily married for 18 years and has two teenage daughters, puts everything at risk with what begins as just an "emotional affair." As things spiral out of control, she struggles to keep her life together.

Tempting Fate is Green's 16th book, but only the second audiobook that she's narrated. Another Piece of My Heart, which came out in March of 2012, was her first foray into the recording studio. Although the audiobook received positive reviews, Green, who is English, drew some complaints for doing the voices of American characters.

"I fell off the wagon and read the reviews," explained Green, laughing. "I saw the complaints, and I thought: I can correct that. So now I've done all British characters."

Green spent three days recording at Beatstreet Productions in New York City, overseen by Laura Wilson, Macmillan's director of production. Green read straight ahead through her novel, pausing only occasionally to repeat lines. Said Wilson: "It's been great. She's perfect." --Alex Mutter


Louisiana State University Press: Bequeath: Essays by Melora Wolff


Book Candy

Books on Reading and Writing; Strong Female Characters

Ready for spring: the Guardian's Swimming Blog offered its picks for the "top five classic swimming books."

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Brain Pickings highlighted "9 books on reading and writing," noting that "hardly anything does one's mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write better."

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After asking Buzzfeed's editors about the first strong female characters in literature they related to, the website shared "22 strong female characters in literature we all wanted to be."

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"On the Magic of Reading." The Huffington Post showcased "10 acclaimed writers as they reveal what the magic of reading is to them, and why they feel literature is so powerful."

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Flavorwire recommended "50 essential mystery novels that everyone should read."

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Mental Floss found "11 ridiculously overdue library books (that were finally returned)."


Great Reads

Now in Paper: March

Mary Coin by Marisa Silver (Plume, $16)
Silver's sensitive, multi-generational novel gives life to the "Migrant Mother" of Dorothea Lange's iconic Dust Bowl-era photograph, beginning with 16-year-old Mary, barely surviving with her widowed mother and little brothers.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead, $16)
Hamid's new novel combines extremely lean prose and a wry sense of irony in a dramatic monologue with a wickedly satirical vision of modern times.

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma (Penguin, $16)
An unusually clever debut novel--a literary conundrum with recurring details and doppelgänger characters--that romps through a writer's coming-of-age while simultaneously exploring the relationship of fiction to truth.

Honor by Elif Shafak (Penguin, $16)
In a novel spanning three generations, Shafak (The Bastard of Istanbul) delves into the complex circumstances that allow old-country values to distort an Anglo-Turkish family in 1970s London.

The Retrospective by A.B. Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman (Mariner, $14.95)
An aging Israeli film director and his muse go to Spain for a retrospective of his work; he finds there an examination of his life, his relationships and his artistic choices.

Ordinary Grace by William Krueger (Atria, $16)
A mystery writer shifts gears with a coming-of-age story set in a small Minnesota River Valley community, where a family is tested in ways they could never have imagined.

The Mapmaker's War by Ronlyn Domingue (Washington Square Press, $15)
In an epic fantasy setting, an old woman looks back at her momentous life, remembering the events that shaped her identity--part legend, part romance, part fairy tale.

Quintessence by David Walton (Tor, $14.99)
A wildly imaginative and utterly addictive historical-fantasy adventure set during the religious turmoil of mid-16th-century Tudor England and the European Age of Exploration.

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan (Touchstone, $16)
An evocative view of the Manhattan Project through the eyes of the women who worked and lived in the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tenn.--a compelling and unusual new perspective on the Project and World War II.

Her: A Memoir by Christa Parravani (Picador, $16)
A moving account of love and anguish by a twin who survived her sister's death.

Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Artmitage (Liveright, $15.95)
English poet Simon Armitage offers an engaging account of a 19-day trek across the spine of his native country; possessed of an ample supply of sharp and self-deprecating British wit, Armitage is erudite but still in most respects an Everyman.

Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling by Becca Stevens (Jericho Books, $15)
A heartfelt exploration of the power of healing, both through natural remedies and through community and service. Stevens is the founder of Magdalene, a network of homes for abused women, and Thistle Farms, the all-natural cosmetics company that both funds Magdalene and employs its residents.

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov (Grove Press, $17)
A compelling biography of Frederick Bruce Thomas, the son of former slaves, and a powerful and complex man, who left the U.S. and made his fortune in early 20th-century Moscow.

Public Apology by Dave Bry (Grand Central, $15)
Some people find a good old-fashioned unburdening of their past therapeutic; in this funny, poignant memoir, David Bry takes this process a step further by writing letters to all those he has ever slighted.

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15)
An anthropologist's perspective on how New York City cleans up after itself, based on a decade's study of the Department of Sanitation and its army of nearly 10,000 workers.

Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses by Sarah Gristwood (Basic Books, $17.99)
The familiar story of the Wars of the Roses, the so-called "Cousins' War" between the houses of Lancaster and York over the throne of England, from a new perspective: the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman (Ballantine Books, $16)
Nelly Bly wasn't the only American woman journalist who circumnavigated the globe in 1889; Goodman tells the suspenseful story of both attempts to beat Phineas Fogg's time.


Book Review

Fiction

Visible City

by Tova Mirvis


Nina's world, now that she is an ex-lawyer and mother of two, is a lonely one. On an ordinary evening, waiting for her husband to come home from work, Nina idly picks up her son's Fisher-Price binoculars and trains them on the apartment across the street. What she sees is a picture of quiet contentment; a couple reading and massaging each other's feet. Another time, in the same living room, she sees a 30-something couple--who are they?--in the throes of passion. She knows something is missing from her life. Is it contentment she wants or passion?

Nina and several other of Tova Mirvis's characters carom off each other, intersecting in amazing ways, some personal and intimate, some more incidentally. Mirvis (The Outside World) takes the reader along as these disparate people start asking questions about what's next in their lives. Can they keep faith with the decisions they made as 20-somethings and stay the professional course through the next decade? Most interestingly, now that one couple approaches their 60s, do any of the same rules apply?

Such is Mirvis's finesse and insight that she makes the reader completely sympathetic to each character's dilemmas. She shows us not just two friends walking, but their illuminated interiors--who they were and who they might be again. What happens when ordinary people begin to weigh the cost of change? Are stability and commitment more desirable than change? Visible City is a beautifully rendered novel that takes on art, parenting, betrayal and the nature of love. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Discover: In this examination of the consequences of past choices, three couples' lives intersect (and collide).

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24, hardcover, 9780544047747

The Writer's Afterlife

by Richard Vetere


The Writer's Afterlife begins jarringly and plainly: "I died typing mid-sentence in a T-shirt and boxer shorts in front of my computer." The unusual opening sets the tone for Richard Vetere's philosophical, self-aware and darkly funny novel.

After dying at 44, Tom Chillo finds himself in the Writer's Afterlife--a special heaven where imagination rules supreme. In what is perhaps a nod to Dante's Inferno, people in this next world are divided into a hierarchy based on their levels of fame. The most well-known reside in the realm of the Eternals, while Tom, who is not quite famous, must wait in the Valley of Those on the Verge. Though his existence there is pleasant, he is haunted with an acute anxiety that will follow him until he either achieves fame or leaves for the "non-artist" heaven. He has only one chance to influence his fate: return to life for one week and do whatever he can to advance his work. After that, he will have to surrender his future to the living.

Vetere is an accomplished playwright, screenwriter, poet and actor. His experience informs The Writer's Afterlife--the quick pace is reminiscent of television, while the punchy dialogue is easy to imagine on a stage. Thematically, the entire novel is a sort of homage to the literary world, with cameos from Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson and other famous figures, all cavorting blissfully with their fictional creations. It is both an incisively critical look at writers' neurosis and a celebration of literature's transcendent power. --Annie Atherton

Discover: A recently deceased writer returns to Earth to try to make his work famous.

Three Rooms Press, $16.95, paperback, 9780988400887

Seducing Ingrid Bergman

by Chris Greenhalgh


On a dare, photographer Robert Capa slips a note under actress Ingrid Bergman's hotel room door, asking her out to dinner--and is astonished when she accepts. So begins Chris Greenhalgh's Seducing Ingrid Bergman, a fictional version of a real-life reckless but tantalizing relationship set against the backdrop of post-war Paris and Hollywood. The two appear at first to be an odd match: Capa, an outwardly lighthearted man who enjoys reading books in the bathtub and frequenting racetracks, and Bergman, a reserved and hesitant film star whose silence conceals a marriage on the rocks and a deep insecurity about her work. Yet the pair managed to keep their relationship secret from Bergman's husband and children for several years.

Appropriately, given Capa's profession, the story is told in scenes that alternate between Capa's first-person point of view and third-person descriptions of Bergman. The result is a story that positions the reader in the same place as the photographer. As audiences did during Bergman's life, readers of Seducing Ingrid Bergman find themselves looking at her--but, thanks to Greenhalgh's storytelling, they'll see an Ingrid Bergman those audiences didn't view on the silver screen.

Seducing Ingrid Bergman allows imagination to fill in the gaps history leaves behind, developing both Capa's and Bergman's characters in a richly detailed narrative that shades into the lyric, offering an intense emotional pull without ever becoming sentimental. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

Discover: A hauntingly beautiful novelization of a classic love story between a movie legend and an iconic war photographer.

St. Martin's Press, $24.99, hardcover, 9781250034960

Red Now and Laters

by Marcus J. Guillory


The fruit-flavored taffy candy that gives Red Now and Laters its title is a favorite of the novel's protagonist, young Ti' John, or John Paul Boudreaux, Jr. As he tells us, red was the "official color and flavor of all little black boys" in Houston: "If God ain't black then He's red, brother."

When Marcus J. Guillory's stunningly powerful, captivating debut novel starts, the Great Flood of '77 has just hit South Park, one of the poorer neighborhoods in Houston, and life is about "growin' up wet." Ti' John is four, and his dad, John Frenchy, a rodeo cowboy and a healer, is carrying him through the mud. His mom is a devout Catholic who tries her best to keep her young boy away from the ghetto and the violence. The boy has a guide, a spiritual leader, who appears to him, "a dark figure in a tattered gray suit," the ghost of his great-uncle, Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, also known as "Nonc." The novel is lush with Ti' John's Creole culture, language and voodoo (some footnotes guide us along).

As it travels back and forth from the Houston "hood" to the Creole world of mid-19th-century Louisiana, we are carried along by a special "voice," as Ti' John shares a joyful coming-of-age tale where "we are not promised angels," but hope "to catch a glimpse of their fluttering wings." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Discover: A powerful multigenerational coming-of-age novel about growing up black and Creole in Houston.

Atria, $24, hardcover, 9781451699111

Mystery & Thriller

You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz


Manhattan therapist Grace Reinhart Sachs is just about to publish a book condemning women who choose the wrong men. If only single ladies would stop ignoring their instincts, she insists, they'd be able to spot a creep during the first date--and exit accordingly. Luckily, Grace is happily married to a loving and faithful pediatric oncologist... or is she?

As Jean Hanff Korelitz's darkly compelling You Should Have Known unfolds, Grace's life begins to unravel. The mother of a student at the exclusive private school her son, Henry, attends is violently murdered. The crime is unsettling but Grace is equally troubled by her husband's failure to return from a medical conference. Worried sick about his disappearance, Grace is floored when police insist she has the answers to both of these mysteries.

In Grace, Korelitz (Admissions) has crafted an anguished character who is ultimately humbled by her arrogance--a dedicated mother whose life has become incredibly isolated as she struggles in vain to keep up with the excessively rich social set at her son's school. With no close friends to lean on, she bravely navigates the horrifying revelations in this story, determined to discover the painful truth. Along the way, she gains allies and even some redemption. It's an outstanding tale with a perfectly imagined setting and mesmerizing mood. And no one will blame you if you check your partner's cell phone records after you close the book. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Discover: This disturbing yet addictive mystery will make you wonder how well you really know your spouse.

Grand Central, $26, hardcover, 9781455599493

The Cairo Affair

by Olen Steinhauer


Over dinner one night in a Budapest restaurant, U.S. consul Emmett Kohl confronts his wife, Sophie, with his knowledge of her affair with a CIA spy. Before Sophie can overcome her shock, a gunman enters the restaurant and shoots Emmett dead at the table. In the ensuing chaos, the gunman gets away. So begins Olen Steinhauer's The Cairo Affair.

Instead of accompanying her husband's body back to Boston for burial, Sophie eludes her official escorts to return to Cairo, where Emmett was stationed before Budapest. She believes the answer to his murder lies there, and needs to find it to reassure herself her affair did not lead to his death. She contacts her old lover, Stan, for help, but can she trust him--and if not him, then who?

The story is complex and shifts point of view among its major players, but Steinhauer manages to guide readers through the twists and turns without making the plot too dense or confusing, even if one isn't up on current events in Northern Africa. Sophie is unlikable, however: a bored diplomat's wife who makes rash, selfish decisions to add drama to her privileged life without consideration for the consequences. Her awareness of her weakness doesn't mitigate her sometime devastating actions.

Luckily she's only one of the narrators; the others, including an American contractor who works for the embassy in Cairo and an Egyptian agent with the Central Security Forces, are more interesting and sympathetic, people doing their best to retain their humanity in unsettling times. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, crime-fiction editor, The Edit Ninja

Discover: In this complex tale of espionage and intrigue, a U.S. diplomat's wife in Cairo tries to solve her husband's murder.

Minotaur, $26.99, hardcover, 9781250036131

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Raising Steam

by Terry Pratchett


In Raising Steam, the 40th volume of the Discworld fantasy series, Terry Pratchett takes his famously satirical setting firmly into the modern age of railroads with a tale about technological progress and the need for several influential men and women to shepherd it along, as if it were a newborn not quite capable of entering the world without some clever midwifery.

Ankh-Morpork may be the most populous city in Discworld, but there are plenty of other places that need to connect with each other. Patrician Lord Vetinari is a schemer and planner of the best sort, and he appoints Moist von Lipwig, a former scoundrel and rogue who now runs most of the city's banking and mail services, to take the inventor of the railway system under his wing. The young inventor, Dick Simnel, has improved upon his tragically exploded father's design to create a fully functioning steam engine, which he brings to the big city to show off to potential investors.

Waste disposal magnate Harry King, the richest non-noble in Ankh-Morpork, is initially unimpressed with the device, but knows a good business opportunity when he sees it. Along with von Lipwig and his wife, Simnel and King must see the railroad through, especially as the far-flung race of the Dwarves faces their own possible civil war over tradition versus modernity.

Raising Steam is laugh-out-loud funny while remaining subtle and irreverent, conveying Pratchett's humanist and liberal political views through his delightfully realized fantasy world. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Discover: Terry Prachett's long-running fantasy series continues with this engaging tale of the modern era catching up with the Discworld via the magic of the railroad.

Doubleday, $26.95, hardcover, 9780385538268

Food & Wine

Greg Atkinson's In Season: Culinary Adventures of a Pacific Northwest Chef

by Greg Atkinson


When Greg Atkinson's collection of food essays and recipes was first published in 1997, it was well before the local and sustainable food movement became as widespread as it is today. The new introduction to this edition reveals an Atkinson who is older, wiser and no less enthusiastic in his support of seasonal produce as he prepares to celebrate the second anniversary of Restaurant Marché, his inspired bistro on Bainbridge Island, Wash.

Much like his inspiration, M.F.K. Fisher, Atkinson writes observant pieces that respect the simplicity and spontaneity of the ingredients. A writer well before he became a chef, Atkinson regards food with the joy and appreciative wonder of first discoveries: learning to cook, cultivating gardens and harvesting the fruits of one's labors, foraging from the land and all the unexpected surprises bound with it. These experiences shape his understanding of food and, more philosophically, life in general. The stories are personal and emotional, a reminiscence into what once was and is now slowly disappearing. He recounts a day of spring cleaning that leads to the discovery of morels in his own backyard and the subsequent pilgrimage into the forest, family in tow, searching for the one item that "evokes the timeliness of the forest, the eternal qualities of spring."

Interspersed among these gems of time and place are recipes that Atkinson has developed and honed, organized by the seasons and simple enough for amateurs to attempt. Despite its age, In Season remains relevant as a statement of what can be possible with time and commitment, and its content is meant to be savored throughout the year. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Discover: A reissued collection of essays and recipes from a gifted chef and champion of sustainable, local cuisine.

Sasquatch Books, $22.95, paperback, 9781570619168

Biography & Memoir

The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change

by Adam Braun


As a college student, Adam Braun participated in the Semester at Sea program, an experience that exposed him to some of the world's most impoverished countries. Everywhere he went, he asked children, "If you could have anything, what would you want most?" The idea was to collect answers like souvenirs, but one child's response--"a pencil"--changed Braun life.

Following that semester, and a later internship with the Cambodian Children's Fund, Braun set his sights on creating an organization to change people's lives. His friends and family encouraged him to pursue a job in finance so he could save money and, after a couple of decades, start a nonprofit. After less than a year with Bain & Co., the global management consulting company, though, Braun realized he couldn't wait.

Divided into sections he labels as mantras, The Promise of a Pencil is a young entrepreneur's memoir, detailing the bumpy but exciting road to his dream. From making a $25 deposit to landing on Forbes's 30 Under 30 list, Adam Braun took a vision and made it a reality. His story is motivating: he enlisted new technologies, made many sacrifices and found supportive mentors and colleagues. It's equally uplifting: he made mistakes, learned hard lessons and persevered in order to do something monumental for those less fortunate.

"Every person has a revolution beating within his or her chest," Adam writes. "I hope this book helps you find yours." The Promise of a Pencil certainly has the potential to do just that. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Discover: A privileged young man determined to make a difference in the world abandons a posh financial career to put pencils in the hands of children.

Scribner, $25, hardcover, 9781476730622

History

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

by Ben Tarnoff


San Francisco in the 1860s was home to what Ben Tarnoff (A Counterfeiter's Paradise) calls " an extraordinary literary scene." The Bohemians is an entertaining, engaging foray into U.S. literary history, with Mark Twain at the head of the pack, closely followed by Bret Harte and the poets Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coldbrith. While the Eastern old guard was genteel, moralistic and grandiose, the western Bohemians were ironic and irreverent. They belonged to Bohemia "because they didn't belong anywhere else."

San Francisco, urban and rural, crude yet cultured, with its unmistakably western atmosphere and its thriving publishing tradition, became their perfect home--at least for a while. Twain was an aspiring journalist when he arrived at his "city of startling events" in 1864. Three years later, he published "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras County," with The Innocents Abroad following two years after that. Then he moved back east. Similarly, Harte, the soft-spoken dandy, arrived in San Francisco in 1860, published his breakthough piece, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and left in 1871.

Stoddard, the gay bookstore clerk whom Jack London called the "Love Man," became co-editor of the Overland Monthly, a welcoming home for all the literary Bohemians. His colleague Coldbrith, by far the most active in the city's literary scene, became California's poet laureate and librarian of the city's famous Bohemian Club. Together, they created a new American literature. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Discover: This entertaining literary history sheds light on the lasting legacy of San Francisco's 19th-century "Bohemian moment."

Penguin Press, $27.95, hardcover, 9781594204739

Children's & Young Adult

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton


In a sweeping intergenerational story infused with magical realism, debut author Leslye Walton tethers grand themes of love and loss to the earthbound sensibility of Ava Lavender as she recollects one life-altering summer as a teenager.

"To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel," Ava begins in the prologue. Now 70 years old, Ava embodies all the sorrows and experiences of the generations that came before her. Emelienne, Ava's grandmother, was betrayed by the great love of her life, who had a child with her sister, Margaux. Ava's mother, Viviane, falls in love with a man who cannot return it, yet leaves Viviane pregnant with twins--Ava, who was born with wings, and Henry, who rarely utters a word. Viviane has not left the house since, and attempts to protect her children by keeping them with her. Walton deftly handles decades in a few chapters, and assuredly shows the minute details of one tragic night when Ava Lavender leaves the house, and accepts an invitation from Nathaniel Sorrows to step inside out of the rain.

Walton presents challenges that most teens will hopefully never face. She writes of love, betrayal, birth, murder, affection and rape--and wraps them in prose so radiant that readers feel carried by Ava's narrative. The heroine's humor and wisdom as she looks back at her life let us know that she is a survivor. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A beautifully crafted intergenerational story, infused with magical realism, from debut author Leslye Walton.

Candlewick, $17.99, hardcover, 320p., ages 14-up, 9780763665661

Elusion

by Cheryl Klam, Claudia Gabel


In Elusion, authors Claudia Gabel and Cheryl Klam collaborate to create a chilling, strangely plausible dystopian vision.

Living in a noxious futuristic Detroit, Regan is proud of her father for building an elaborate way to escape. Elusion, an alternate reality experience, uses a special visor, wristband and earbuds to generate "a world with plant life and fresh air instead of Florapetro factories, grease clouds, and acid rain." Citizens now dodge the reality of their Standard 7 jobs (7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 7 days a week) in make-believe, digital adventures. When Regan's father is killed in an accident, 17-year-old Patrick, a family friend and protegé, takes over the technical details of the project. It all seems perfectly safe, but just when worldwide distribution rights are granted, accusations begin to fly that Elusion is highly addictive to teenage minds, "more like heroin than a great achievement in science." At first, Regan refuses to believe that her father's creation could pose any danger. But as evidence builds, she begins to question whether teens may be dying from overuse. Helped along by a friend of Patrick, the handsome "man candy" Josh, Regan digs deeply into the mystery surrounding Elusion.

Given society's love affair with handheld devices, readers will not find it too big of a stretch to imagine taking technology to this new, extremely troubling level. This is compelling, accessible science fiction with enough mystery and romance to keep readers hooked and waiting for the sequel. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators

Discover: A noxious future world in which Elusion, an escape into computer-generated fantasies, may be addictive--even fatal.

Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins, $17.99, hardcover, 400p., ages 14-up, 9780062122414

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