Damn Book Review: History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook

In Zoe B. Wallbrook’s mystery novel “History Lessons,” released over the summer, Detective Asma Ahmed ponders the unlikelihood of a murder in the college town of Calliope, where she works:

With a population of just about 150,000 when school was in session, its status as an elite research hub stuffed with PhDs suggested a mecca of NPR listeners, bookstore lovers, hipster beer drinkers, and amateur beekeepers. Sometimes the shoe fit: Just last month Asma had leaned against the side of the Calliope Amphitheater, watching a bunch of dads whip out wads of cash from inside their windbreakers to buy bootleg Neil DeGrasse Tyson tickets.

This could be any American college town, notoriously overrun as such places are with Neil DeGrasse Tyson superfans. (“You know Neil DeGrasse Tyson was a competitive ballroom dancer in college”: a real sentence said to me by Damn Arbor when he was trying to get me to care about Neil DeGrasse Tyson. BTA, of course – “Before The Allegations.”) No reason to believe we are anywhere specific.

Later, the novel’s main character Daphne Ouverture, a young Black tenure-track history professor at Harrison University in Calliope, goes out to drinks with her friends:

In a university town like Calliope, there were certain items that poured onto the tree-lined streets in overabundance: artisanal vegan cheese makers, microbiologists who made mead out of their garages, yoga studios offering hot vinyasa classes, bike stores, coffee shops for writing the Next Great American Novel, and, of course, bars. Lots of bars.

Sure, maybe more like ten years ago for some of that stuff, but sounds familiar. But it’s still describing a type of city, and Ann Arbor isn’t the only one.

Daphne walking her dog before coming upon a murder scene:

The bright promises of spring in the air kissed her cheeks as she wandered through neighborhood streets, past countless overpriced historical homes with organic vegetable gardens, white picket fences, and the occasional obligatory “Black Lives Matter” or “Love Is Love” sign next to a bed of daffodils.

OK, “overpriced” might be zooming in closer, but again, could be said about a lot of similar places.

But then, a conversation among Daphne’s students in her French Empire class about the murder, kicked off by an intense electrical engineering student:

“Calliope can be dangerous.”

“Are you kidding?” Tabitha said. [Tabitha is a high-achieving Black student but has no interest in European history; Daphne funnily comments that Tabitha is likely only taking this class because she, Daphne, is one of the few Black professors at the university.] “This town just held a teach-in on how to apply hormonal birth control to its deer population.”

The #deerlivesmatter signs from protesters had caused Daphne’s eyes to become temporarily glued to her brain, they had rolled so far back in her skull.

Ope, she got us. I’d recognize that proprietary blend of misguided environmental activism and tone-deaf racial politics anywhere. Ann Arbor, I believe we have the beginnings of our very own mystery series.

(In fairness to Wallbrook, I will highlight the fact that her protagonist is committed to staying in Ann Arb–er, I mean Calliope, so the gentle ribbing of the locale seems to come from a place of love. As it does around here. Mostly.)

You may pick up “History Lessons” for the sick Ann Arbor burns, but you’ll stay for a delightful, good-humored crime story with a genius, kind of dorky main character. There’s a lot going on here. We’ve got campus intrigue (plagiarism, sexual harassment, interdepartmental politics). We’ve got a mostly unexplained animus toward anthropology (the murdered anthropology professor’s library “...contained volumes on fitness regimens, an innumerable list of works on prison reform, and three paleo cookbooks…” and no novels. And he only had the prison reform books because that was his area of study. This is character assassination far beyond his actual murder). We’ve got quirky professor friends, some relevant family background, references to books that will expand your to-read list, pop-culture nods, a multilingual exploration of the word “butterfly.” Of course, we’ve got Daphne Ouverture deducing her way to an answer, not once but several times over, relying on her knowledge of a specific book and her ability to remember everything she’s ever read. Pretty satisfying stuff.

Somehow, there is also a romance. (I wondered at one point if there is so much going on in this story because novels now have to maintain our Internet-addled attention spans by constantly offering new intrigues, but I settled on the explanation that Ms. Wallbrook herself may be a genius and this is just how her brain works–on all cylinders, at all times. This is also a debut novel, so there is likely some throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks.) The love interest is Rowan, a bookish (Daphne swoons when he correctly identifies that the French Revolution happened in the second half of the eighteenth century, which is probably an accurate reflection of her dating experience but was nonetheless a depressing swoon to read about) former detective who had developed reservations about the criminal justice system. Before the events of the novel, Rowan fortunately was able to leave the police force when he was gifted Earthseed Bookstore.

Not Dawn Treader Book Shop.

Earthseed Bookstore.

Daphne notes:

Earthseed had a reputation for being less of a bookstore and more of a maze, its narrow aisles stacked to the ceiling with old paperbacks and musty hardcovers. It had been the kind of bookstore that made it impossible to tell if the book you had fished out of the maw was worth ten thousand dollars or ten cents. At one point that might have been cute, but the threadbare carpets and stuffy air had just felt sad.

Rude.

So Rowan has taken over Not-Dawn-Treader and turned it into essentially Literati, down to the “black-and-white tiles sparkl[ing] on the floor, and rows of bookshelves lin[ing] the exposed brick walls.” Daphne describes this as a huge improvement, a “most intoxicating mix of erudition, comfort, and charm.” On this point I depart from Daphne’s assessment–there is room in this town for both musty hardcovers stacked to the ceiling and neat piles of the latest bestsellers.

Bookshop misjudgments aside, I thoroughly enjoyed my time bouncing around Daphne Ouverture’s expansive brain, walking with her the streets I kind-of recognized, and noodling with her on puzzles only she could solve.

I hope, in the next one, we get her thoughts on the new Comprehensive Plan.