CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg

“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”

The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.

It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.

Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.

When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)

In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.

The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.

Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.

On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.

On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”

In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.

As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.

In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.

Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.

Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.

Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.

“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.

CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99

CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, by Benjamin Hale

Benjamin Hale’s “Cave Mountain” begins as many true-crime stories do: with a missing girl. In April 2001, 6-year-old Haley Zega got separated from her family in the Buffalo National River Wilderness in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

Haley’s disappearance led to “the largest search-and-rescue mission in Arkansas history,” as authorities began to fear that she’d been abducted. But Haley was not kidnapped, or killed, or even harmed. She was found two days later, two miles away from where she’d gone missing, having simply gotten lost.

Though not itself a crime story, the incident clearly holds great significance for the author, a fiction writer who teaches at Bard and Columbia, and who is Haley’s cousin. Though he was in high school in Colorado at the time and not involved in the search, for him the memory recalls “the way things were in that brief period of time book-ended by the end of the Cold War … and the constitutional crisis of the 2000 presidential election.” Much of the book is steeped in nostalgia for this “never-such-innocence-again era.”

Haley’s disappearance serves as Hale’s personal way into the account of a horrific crime committed very near the spot where his cousin went missing. In 1978, two members of a small religious cult known as the Church of God in Christ Through the Holy Spirit, Inc. murdered one of their own, a 3-year-old girl whom Hale calls Bethany, because their teenage prophet claimed God had told him that “Bethany was ‘anathema’ and had to die.”

“Anathema” was the cult’s term for anyone who didn’t follow their highly specific interpretation of Christianity. They shot the girl eight times and buried her in a garbage bag stuffed into a bucket.

The author’s connections to this tragedy go beyond the geographical. Bethany’s mother, Lucy, who was a member of the cult and may or may not have been complicit in her killing, would later become friends with Haley’s grandmother Joyce, who’d taken Haley hiking that day in 2001 and was the last person to see her before she disappeared. Despite that case’s positive outcome, Joyce remained racked by guilt — a pain Lucy understood all too well. And Hale himself developed a friendship with Mark Harris, the teen prophet who ended up spending 40 years in prison.

Hale dives into the region’s history, including the Nixon administration’s forced displacement of residents via eminent domain in order to build a reservoir, to establish the “longstanding tensions between local residents of the area and the government, which they see as meddlesome, untrustworthy and incompetent.”

More relevantly, he provides some context about the rise of cults and religious and political extremism in America in the past century; but his version of political insight consists of bad-faith contrasts between the “extremely delicate constant censorious moral paranoia” of his classroom at Bard and the people he meets in Arkansas. “After that suffocating environment,” he writes of his mask-wearing, scarf-knitting, emotional-support-poodle-needing students, “my God was it a relief sometimes to be among the roughs, sounding their barbaric yawp.”

Repetition is inevitable, even necessary, in a work of nonfiction involving multiple story lines, but Hale reiterates some details too often, or too identically. He block-quotes his sources liberally in lengthy excerpts from personal interviews, email and text correspondences, court records, self-published memoirs and news articles, some of whose language he repeats either verbatim or with uncomfortable similarity in his own wording. For example, he reports three different times, once in a quote from a news article and twice in his own paraphrasing, that the police confiscated from Mark Harris’s cult “22 firearms” and around “2,000 rounds of ammunition.”

These repetitions, as well as Hale’s incorporation of so many threads that are irrelevant to the main one, start to feel like the author’s attempts to mask the fact that the cult crime story didn’t quite provide him enough material for a full book. The result is a mess of narratives and ideas, and as the pages turn it becomes clear they won’t gel into a satisfying whole.

CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks | By Benjamin Hale | Harper | 287 pp. | $30

JAPANESE GOTHIC, by Kylie Lee Baker

In 2026, Lee Turner flees to the centuries-old wooden house his father has just purchased in Kagoshima Prefecture, in southern Japan. He’s pretty sure he killed his college roommate back in New York, but he can’t remember how, or why, or what he did with the body. In 1877, a samurai-in-training, Sen, is hiding with her family in the same house after her father’s disgraced return from the failed Satsuma Rebellion.

Both carry heavy baggage. Lee is grieving the unsolved disappearance of his mother, who vanished during a trip to Cambodia a few years earlier, a suspected victim of sex trafficking. Sen idolizes her father and the samurai way of life, but he’s cruel and cold, even as he prepares her for what they both expect will be her death at the hands of the imperial officers who pursue him.

All is not well in this house, sheltered behind sword ferns. In Sen’s time, edible plants and prey animals have disappeared from the surrounding forest, and her family’s food supplies are dwindling fast. Lee can’t figure out what’s scratching at the walls of the house, or what his father’s girlfriend isn’t telling him. And then there’s the closet door in Lee’s room, which opens onto a concrete wall, except when it doesn’t. Sometimes, instead, it opens into Sen’s room in 1877.

Why can Sen and Lee visit each other’s times through the closet door, and why is it only accessible at low tide? Why can’t Lee remember what he did with his roommate’s body? What really happened to his mother? Did Sen’s father actually return from the rebellion that killed his fellow samurai, or is something else wearing his face like a mask? What brought Sen and Lee together, and what keeps them connected?

“Japanese Gothic,” Kylie Lee Baker’s second novel for adults (following last year’s “Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng”) is polished and surprising both in plotting and in execution. I’ve come to regard interesting, intricate structure as something of an endangered species in contemporary fiction — too many books are content to splash in thematic puddles rather than delving into deeper waters. But Baker has shown herself to be an author with the confidence and dexterity to carry a variety of story lines and ideas without stumbling; “Japanese Gothic” displays an elegant layering of character motivations, psychologies and motifs.

With dual-timeline stories, it’s easy for one story to overwhelm the other, but Lee and Sen’s narratives are well-balanced, and a Japanese folk tale provides some connective tissue between the two protagonists. As for the central mystery, Baker refrains from telegraphing exactly what’s going on until the final pages, and the reveal is a satisfying one. If the middle section drags a little in its pacing, it’s hard to hold that against the novel’s overall effectiveness.

Where “Japanese Gothic” really shines is in its mirrored portraits of two melancholy, isolated young adults. It’s difficult to create a character as damaged as Lee without letting his trauma overwhelm everything else about him. Lee moves through his life in a dissociative state partially fueled by Benadryl and Ativan. He has no friends, and his relationship with his father is strained at best. He knows things he can’t readily access, and the worst parts of his life haunt him from around corners and behind closed doors, but he’s kind and tenderhearted, not to mention capable and cleareyed when properly motivated.

Sen, meanwhile, knows her gender will prevent her from ever being fully accepted as a samurai, but still struggles to become the kind of fighter her father will be proud of. But allegiance to him comes with a cost: Her mother and siblings are afraid of him, and by extension, increasingly afraid of her, and not without good reason. Though Sen knows she has to harden herself to become a true warrior, she can’t quite shed the last of her humanity, nor is she entirely sure she wants to: “But her soul clung to her hands like tree sap, her fear screaming bright across the horizon every morning, shocking the birds away from the trees. It was her shadow, and it would not leave her, no matter how fast she ran.”

In a samurai house, Lee’s father’s girlfriend tells him, the ceilings are low to prevent a katana from being raised overhead to deliver a killing blow. Even so, the house behind the sword ferns has seen its share of violence, past and present. As strange similarities echo across Sen and Lee’s timelines, the truth emerges, jagged and harsh, yet cathartic. What connects these two characters is something deeper than romance and more tragic than death.

Japanese Gothic | By Kylie Lee Baker | Hanover Square Press | 352 pp. | $30