Miss Subways: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of May 2018: In a poem by W.B. Yeats about Irish mythological figures, Emer and Cuchulain (coo-cullen), he calculates the cost of Cuchulain’s wandering eye, describing how a dalliance with another woman meant Cuchulain “lost the world and Emer for a kiss.” In David Duchovny’s Miss Subways another Emer faces a similar dilemma. Emer lives in New York City with her boyfriend Con, her writerly aspirations diverted into doing research for Con’s opus on New World pre-Christian deities and folklore, her life devoted to Con’s needs. Then Sid, a “mini-me in a monkey suit” with an Irish accent turns up on her door to tell her that Con has fallen for a fellow academic, Anansi, and that Emer must give him up to save his soul. When she protests, he asks “Where are your lady balls? You need to remember why you fell in love in the first place.” So begins a supernatural, darkly comic, downright weird quest, populated with a cast of mythical figures from every continent, for Emer to find her lady balls and take control of her destiny. Some mythical figures Emer must conquer on her way to finding her power; others appear in unexpected locales to do battle by her side. This inventive, philosophical, comic romp is a Valentine to the New York familiar to its residents (the subways, the cheap umbrellas, the doormen, the delivery guys). And although Emer may feel as though she’s in a shaggy dog story for much of the book, the reader will recognize this as a fairy tale for grown-ups, one that restores the world, and Emer. --Vannessa Cronin