April 2025 BookPage

EMMA DONOGHUE

A famous real-life disaster in Belle Epoque Paris inspired the ‘Room’ author’s thrilling, thought-provoking new novel

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Meet Regina Linke, authorillustrator of ‘Big Enough’

You’ll fall in love with Ron Currie’s criminal matriarch, Babs Dionne Crackling essays from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu

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COVER STORY | EMMA DONOGHUE

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FEATURES

feature | read-alikes

Hot for Rebecca Yarros’ smash-hit Empyrean series? Here are five books to keep the fire burning.

feature | fake dating

In these two rom-coms, the PDA is paramount and the subterfuge is swoony.

q&a | ron currie

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne could only have been set in the author’s home state of Maine.

interview | andrea long chu

For the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writing a takedown is an aggressive form of friendship.

feature | science fiction

Three sci-fi novels investigate alternate visions of our own world, with results both inspiring and terrifying.

q&a | ray nayler

12

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Step into a dystopian world of AI prime ministers, body-hopping tyrants and the resistance that bravely fights against them both q&a | tiana clark

The poet’s exquisite second collection, Scorched Earth, reckons with history and rings with joy.

feature | poetry

New books by Maggie Nelson and Martín Espada speak to the moment.

| graphic novels

Stay in during April showers with these four poignant and contemplative middle grade graphics.

| meet the author

Cover photo of Emma Donoghue © Woodgate Photography. Cover design by Pablo Riquelme.

of The Diary of Anne Frank. The play adaptation won

Take wing

Hot for Rebecca Yarros’ smash-hit Empyrean series? These five read-alikes will keep the fire burning .

If you want an intense enemies-to-lovers romantasy

How’s this for a meet-cute? In Milla Vane’s A Heart of Blood and Ashes (Berkley, $9.99, 9780425255070), barbarian warrior Maddek fully intends to kill Princess Yvenne to avenge his parents’ death. But he changes his mind after she kills her own brother in front of Maddek and proposes marriage to him so that they can team up to kill her father and win back her kingdom.

If you want a story with an epic scale

If what you love about the Empyrean series is having a whole lot to dig in to—lots of pages, lots of characters, lots of drama and a vast world—pick up Samantha Shannon’s A Day of Fallen Night (Bloomsbury, $21.99, 9781639732999). It’s not only 880 pages, but also the prequel to Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree You’ll find exquisite dragons and angsty enemies-to-lovers subplots, too.

If you want to read an OG dragon fantasy series

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight (Del Rey, $19, 9780345484260) kicks off her iconic Dragonriders of Pern series. Be warned: Some of the aspects of this series, particularly in regard to sexuality, have not aged well, but there’s no denying that modern science fiction and fantasy takes on dragons owe a huge debt to McCaffrey.

If you want even more dragons

Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon (Del Rey, $18, 9780593359549) is the start of a nine-book series that boasts one of the most lovable and complex dragons in fantasy. A polymath with a heart of gold and an increasingly radical social consciousness, Temeraire completely upends the life of stalwart naval captain William Lawrence when he chooses him as his rider.

If you want to be a dragon

If reading Fourth Wing and Onyx Storm left you wanting to be a dragon yourself, pick up Kelly Barnhill’s fiery and subversive adult debut, When Women Were Dragons (Vintage, $18, 9780593466575). Part Lessons in Chemistry, part Left Behind, the novel stars a young heroine who’s trying (along with the rest of the world) to understand the Mass Dragoning of 1955, during which thousands of ordinary women grew scales, talons and wings and launched into the sky, never to be seen again.

feature | fake dating

Cross your heart

In these rom-coms, the PDA is paramount and the subterfuge is swoony .

Love at First Flight

An air traffic controller on the autism spectrum, Pippa Edwards is good at her job. But while she thrives at guiding planes through the takeoff and landing processes, the thought of going to her impending high school reunion and answering questions about why she’s still single fills her with dread.

When Pippa finally meets one of her favorite pilots faceto-face, she discovers that handsome Andrew Boyce-Jones is also in desperate need of a date. They make a pact to fake a relationship so that Pippa has a date for her reunion and Andrew’s moms hopefully stop pestering him to settle down.

Just Our Luck

Optimist Sybil Sweet lives up to her name. Her hankering for donuts lands her in Joe’s Donut shop, where she has an impetuous encounter with Kieran Anderson that leaves them wanting more of their mutual sizzle. When Kieran discovers that Sybil dropped a winning lottery ticket before she disappeared into the night, he decides to return it. His public plea for Sybil to claim her ticket sparks a viral media response, which leads to them deciding to fake a romance for three months.

Love at First Flight (W by Wattpad, $18.99, 9781998854608) soars. Author Jo Watson used her own autism diagnosis to help craft the character of Pippa; she’s both highly competent and incredibly awkward, with some delightfully nerdy hyperfixations. While Andrew does work to smooth things out socially for Pippa, he also allows her to be herself, even if that self finds multiple ways to bring up human and animal anatomy at the absolute wrong moment. Andrew never laughs at Pippa when she fumbles a social interaction, but finds a way to help her find the humor in the moment and laugh together.

Love at First Flight will have readers clamoring to watch this relationship take off, and will especially delight fans of Helen Hoang and Rachel Lynn Solomon.

—Katie Garaby

romance by christie ridgway

H Code Word Romance

A down-on-her-luck chef takes on a lucrative assignment as a body double for the CIA in Carlie Walker’s delicious combination of romance and suspense, Code Word Romance (Berkley, $19, 9780593640418). Approached by the government because of her resemblance to the prime minister of Summerland, Margaux “Max” Adams only has to masquerade as the prime minister during her annual Italian vacation while the authorities smoke out a would-be assassin. Sounds simple enough, until Max’s handler turns out to be none other than Flynn, the first love who ghosted her long ago. Walker’s tight pacing and Max’s first-person viewpoint fuel the excitement, and the supporting cast adds smile-worthy comedic touches in this winning romance.

Denise Williams’ Just Our Luck (Berkley, $19, 9780593641439) delivers flirtation, drama and tender moments alike. Sybil is impulsive yet thoughtful, an endearing heroine with realistic flaws and relatable struggles like her strained relationship with her mother, while Kieran’s commitment to keeping his grandfather’s shop in business makes him a perfect catch. As Kieran and Sybil navigate their public relationship, moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding add tension and chemistry to their dynamic. While the narrative occasionally feels overburdened by Williams’ attempts to address multiple social messages, the plot remains engaging and the characters compelling.

Just Our Luck will leave readers craving more and will be especially tempting to fans of Sadie on a Plate by Amanda Elliot and Chef’s Kiss by TJ Alexander.

—Maya Fleischmann

Sweet Obsession

Katee Robert takes readers away in Sweet Obsession (Sourcebooks Casablanca, $18.99, 9781728284750), another engrossing and erotic installment in the Dark Olympus series. Circe, Olympus’ great enemy, has positioned ships in the waters around the city-state that appear ready for attack. Rugged and determined Poseidon pledges to protect his people, but the politics involved in dealing with the ruling council takes all his patience. Then there’s the problem of Icarus, who, as the book opens, has just failed in killing him. The spoiled playboy prince becomes Poseidon’s captive, then his dominant lover, then his true love. But can Icarus be trusted with the plans to save Olympus, not to mention Poseidon’s heart? Teeming with intrigue and smoking hot sex scenes, Sweet Obsession is a showcase for Robert’s compelling and imaginative storytelling.

A Duke Never Tells

Suzanne Enoch’s A Duke Never Tells (Bramble, $18.99, 9781250331090), is a Regency romance with a delightful trading-places storyline. Meg Pinwell’s parents have always admonished her to be proper, so she’s shocked when her father promises her in marriage to the very improper James Clay, Duke of Earnhurst. Before committing herself, Meg decides to anonymously visit the duke’s country estate with her beloved Aunt Clara to get a better understanding of the man. But to their dismay, the duke is in residence. So, in great rom-com tradition, aunt becomes lady, Meg becomes maid and, well, the duke and his man of business, Riniken, make their own switcheroo in order to test whether “Meg” is a fortune hunter. Then the fun and games really begin in this kisses-only tale that keeps spinning in new directions as the cast falls in love. Multiple viewpoints add depth and humor to this feel-good story.

Christie Ridgway is a lifelong romance reader and a published romance novelist of over 60 books.

The Railway Conspiracy

The Railway Conspiracy (Soho Crime, $29.95, 9781641296601) by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan is the follow-up to their critically acclaimed historical mystery The Murder of Mr. Ma, the first book in the Dee and Lao series. The Chinese central characters, Judge Dee Ren Jie and Lao She, are, um, not exactly detectives, not exactly spies, but well-equipped with the skill set to be either should the situation demand. Their kung fu skills range from decent to exemplary, their disguises are easily Mission: Impossible-class and their powers of deduction run the gamut from exceptionally insightful to exceptionally flawed, depending upon the beauty and/or the deviousness of the women in their sphere(s) at any given moment. The narrative is set in 1924 London, where Chinese Communists are gaining a bit of traction and influence following the success of the Russian Revolution a few years earlier. Real-life figures Zhou En Lai, Bertrand Russell and banker A.G. Stephen figure strongly in the story, albeit with a markedly different take regarding the death of the latter, whose murder kicks off the story. The villainy is delicious in an Agatha Christie sort of way, with rare poison and Japanese katanas as the means of dispatching unwanted rivals. It is always a good sign when a book in a series makes the reader want to dive back into the one(s) that preceded it, and that is definitely the case for me with The Railway Conspiracy.

The Reluctant Sheriff

It is kinda hard to imagine a suspense novel set in both small-town Kentucky and the French island of Corsica, but Chris Offutt makes it work rather well, actually. The Reluctant Sheriff (Grove, $27, 9780802164032) begins in the town of Rocksalt, in the eastern hills of the Bluegrass State. Mick Hardin is the temporary (and as the title suggests, reluctant) sheriff of Eldridge County until his sister, who was shot in the line of duty, is cleared to resume her work. When a murder rocks the town, the prime suspect is none other than the current husband of Mick Hardin’s ex-wife, which dredges up all the emotional and conflictof-interest baggage one might expect. Meanwhile, in Corsica, Johnny Boy Tolliver, former deputy of Eldridge County, is lying low in a one-room stone cottage deep in the countryside. We don’t know why, but we do know that someone is after him. It takes remarkably little time for him to “get into it” with some talented—but not talented enough—adversaries, sending them on their way, alive but battered. What little we do glean about his situation is that he has an on-site handler named Sebastien, whose services Mick has secured for some reason. Offutt toggles between these two distant locales, chapter by chapter ratcheting up the suspense levels until just before the snapping point. A very well-rendered action novel, The Reluctant Sheriff is sure to appeal to Jack Reacher fans.

A Lesson in Dying

A Lesson

in Dying

(Minotaur, $18, 9781250389862) is the first book of Ann Cleeves’ successful Inspector Ramsay series. Originally released in the U.K. in 1990, it is now, 35 years later, being released for the first time in the U.S., and it has aged quite well indeed. You may be surprised to find that Inspector Ramsay plays a less conspicuous role than he does in later installments, but don’t let that put you off: The book is strong in other aspects, and Ramsay has ample amateur assistance. The mystery centers on the murder of Harold Medburn, a thoroughly despised school headmaster in the Northumberland village of Heppleburn. Adding a sinister element of suspense to the proceedings, the events surrounding the murder take place on Halloween or, as the English refer to it, All Hallows’ Eve. There is no dearth of suspects; the victim in question was universally loathed, so much so that if none of the villagers would do the deed, the reader would be sorely tempted to do so on the villagers’ behalf. A Lesson in Dying, like the five books in the series that followed it, is a very English mystery, beautifully written, neatly splitting the difference between, say, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ruth Rendell.

H The Impossible Thing

Belinda Bauer’s magnificently executed The Impossible Thing (Atlantic Monthly, $27, 9780802164414) has my vote for the most unusual crime novel in recent memory. The narrative spans a century or so and involves a brace of oologists, both then and now, bent on pursuing their quite illegal hobby. Do you know what an oologist is? Or a guillemot? Neither did I. An oologist is a collector of eggs (seriously), and a guillemot is a North Atlantic seabird known for its eggs, the most colorful in all the avian world. Red ones are the rarest and thus the holy grail of oologists. In the modern day, Nick, an avid gamer living at home with his mum, prowls their attic in search of things to sell so that he can buy a pricey new gaming chair. When he happens upon a carved wooden box containing a pointy red egg, he figures he can offload it on eBay. A respondent to the ad gets Nick’s address to view the egg, but before that can happen, the egg is stolen. Nick’s analytical friend Patrick leaps to the quite reasonable hypothesis that the would-be buyer must be the thief, so they concoct a scheme to expose the miscreant and retrieve the egg. Subplots abound—some of them dating back to the years between the World Wars, when a plucky young Yorkshire lass made the startling initial discovery—with the egg as the unvoiced yet central character of them all.

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Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.

cozies by jamie orsini

Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)

The endlessly endearing Vera Wong is back in a new installment of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s hilarious cozy mystery series. The Chinese mother, tea shop owner and part-time sleuth is ready for a new mystery to solve when she meets a young woman named Millie, whose friend Thomas is missing. Unfortunately, Vera’s investigation reveals that Thomas is dead, and that Millie knew him by an alias. Who was this mystery man, who had a strong social media following and legions of fans but few, if any, real friends? Vera is a standout character: She’s wholly original, deeply funny and committed to her found family. Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) (Berkley, $19, 9780593546253) is full of humor and heart, despite touching on heavy topics.

Big Name Fan

Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare’s Big Name Fan (Kensington, $28, 9781496751331) offers a pitch-perfect blend of mystery, romance and Hollywood drama. For six years, Bexley Simon and Sam Farmer played detectives on the smash television hit Craven’s Daughter. But following the accidental death of the show’s makeup artist, Craven’s Daughter was canceled. Five years later, Bex and Sam are asked to do a reunion special and podcast. While they navigate long-simmering feelings for each other, the actors learn that anonymous fan fiction author Big Name Fan, who wrote real events from set into their popular stories, was actually part of the Craven’s Daughter team. Bex and Sam hope to figure out who Big Name Fan was, and if they know what really happened all those years ago. Reallife couple Knox and Mare juggle a lot in Big Name Fan and balance it all beautifully, creating an enjoyable read for fans of mystery and romance alike.

Haunting and Homicide

Haunting and Homicide (Crooked Lane, $29.99, 9781639109289), Ava Burke’s new cozy mystery, introduces a tour guide who sees ghosts—and helps one solve his own murder. Tallulah “Lou” Thatcher runs a ghost tour company in New Orleans. Rival tour guide Adam Brandt is convinced that Lou is faking her supernatural abilities, and launches a campaign to shut down her tours. But when Lou stumbles upon Adam’s lifeless body, she still promises his confused and angry ghost that she’ll help solve his murder. Haunting and Homicide takes readers on an atmospheric tour of New Orleans; Lou’s tours incorporate actual local history. The real-life details and paranormal elements combine for a memorable and exciting series premise.

Knives Out meets Top Chef in this “clever locked-room mystery.”

—Booklist The Chef Paul Delamare Mystery Series

Nimble Needle Mystery Series

Can a needlepoint shop owner catch a crafty culprit?

“Charming with well-drawn characters and recipes.”

Oliver Popp Mystery Series

A young, gay, autistic travel writer takes a detour into romance and murder.

Cleo Coyle

Jamie Orsini is an award-winning journalist and writer who enjoys cozy mysteries and iced coffee.

THE GODMOTHER

A family drama wrapped in a crime drama, Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne could only have been set in his home state of Maine .

Babs Dionne is the undisputed queen of Waterville, Maine. But after a rival drug kingpin begins to threaten her territory and one of her daughters is found dead, Babs stands to lose her hard-won place at the top of the heap. We talked to author Ron Currie about the real Maine, the failures of modernity and ghosts—familial or otherwise.

You began a wonderful interview with Maine writer Carolyn Chute ( The Beans of Egypt, Maine ) by asking, “Why do you write, why did you start and why do you continue?” I’ll ask the same of you.

Turnabout is, after all, fair play! So, in order: 1) I write as an effort to understand what I think and how I feel, but also to escape the prison of my own head—to experience, insofar as possible, what it’s like to be someone other than myself; 2) I started writing very young for all those same reasons, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate them; 3) I continue writing because I am utterly mediocre (or worse) at every other thing in the panoply of human endeavor.

Maine has been in the literary spotlight lately, with many books set there. The Maine you write about, however, certainly isn’t the one that tourists write home about. As you note while describing a crucial event near the beginning of your novel, “The ocean that in so many people’s minds was synonymous with Maine might as well have not existed.” What lends the state such literary appeal?

You say that Babs “is a tribute to the spirit of my grandmother Rita, with whom I was uncommonly close.” Tell us more about her, and about naming another very important character “Rita.”

I’m intrigued by a line near the end of the book: “Aunt Rita who, together with Babs, just about made one complete mom.” How might your grandmother have reacted to this book?

My grandmother was a deeply loving woman who also, I think, had to be hard in certain ways. And that’s the essence of Babs, the push and pull at her core: She loves so fiercely it’s almost unbearable, but she also can be vicious, often in the service of love. In the (still forthcoming) second book of the Dionne family saga, Babs’ own mother tells her, “Fathers can coddle their daughters. Mothers—we know too much.” This is something Babs very much took to heart with regard to raising her own daughters. And her best friend and adopted sister, Rita, was the woman Babs’ daughters went to for the softer kind of love that kids also need. Thus the line you referenced.

It’s a good question that I’m not sure I have a good answer for. I think the Maine of the popular imagination—the lobster boats and rocky coast and charming accents—lends itself readily to certain kinds of stories, but to me, as to Babs, that’s not the Maine I recognize. Every place on Earth, I suppose, has its flip side, and that was the Maine this story needed to take place in—the Maine of endless forest and paper mills, of hard luck and hard people.

Dionne Putnam, $29, 9780593851661

SUSPENSE

How and when did you decide on the title? This speaks to Babs’ rejection of modernity, perhaps: I see her as a kind of noble savage, in a very positive way. She refuses to be influenced, let alone corrupted or broken, by the larger forces the world brings to bear on her. As such, she’s free to follow her “genius,” as the transcendentalists might have put it, wherever it leads. When you transpose the two words, though, in modern usage they seem almost antonymous— something that’s “savage” is not often “noble,” and vice versa. But Babs is both of those things, in life and in death, and I wanted the title to reflect that contradiction.

I love how Babs’ daughter Sis frequently reminds her son, Jason, “French is your superpower.” Did you grow up speaking French, and did it serve you well?

I don’t speak a lick of French (other than the curses, of course; somehow those always seem to get passed down), despite the fact that my father spoke only French until he went to school. That loss is a big part of my motivation for creating Babs in the first place. She’s a person who defends the language and culture she grew up with tooth and claw, even when it costs her dearly. In fact, she’d probably say that the fact it costs her is evidence of its worth.

Many of my favorite writers are New Englanders who write about families rooted in one place: Cathie Pelletier, Howard Frank Mosher, Richard Russo and Elizabeth Strout. As a boy growing up in the Little Canada neighborhood of Waterville, Maine, how did you identify geographically? Now that you are an adult living in Portland, has that outlook changed?

I’ve been thinking lately about the ways in which modernity has failed us, and it occurred to me that rootlessness is one of those failures. Those of us who grew up in small nowhere towns, in particular—the greatest aspiration was to get out as soon as humanly possible and, I guess, live in some featureless, cultureless suburb. In this way, Babs’ determination to stay where her family has been for generations is a rejection of the hypermobility of modern times and the idea that you can’t really live

H The Savage, Noble Death of Babs

unless you’ve seen the whole wide world. She’s happy with her tiny little slice of it, thanks very much. It keeps her plenty busy.

Waterville, Maine, is home to Colby College, and your town and gown encounters between Babs and the college trustees are marvelous. What was compelling about that dynamic for you? I’m really glad those parts jumped out at you. I’ll answer indirectly by saying that after my first book came out and I read at Colby, I started by making a crack about how as a kid I had been asked to leave campus many times, but this was the first time I’d ever been invited to come to campus.

A large, apocalyptic wildfire burns at the end of the book, which seems like it could be laced with several layers of personal meaning: For instance, your dad was a firefighter and you have written about climate change and environmental concerns. In addition, you note that the Little Canada neighborhood that you grew up in is gone: “the culture, the religion, and the language have all but disappeared.” Was this fire symbolic of that disappearance? For sure. Of course, everything we do, as individuals and a species, will sooner or later burn. And I’m fascinated by our persistence in the face of this certainty. Of all the many things this book is about, it’s also about that: how we take all our losses, and the certainty that more will come, and keep moving forward instead of just lying down in the street and calling it a day. It seems heroic, to me.

feel it but you, and if it takes up too much space in your life people treat you like you’re crazy.

Your author photo reveals a prominent tattoo on your right forearm, a quote by David Foster Wallace. How did that come about, and what significance does that quote have for you?

I have a morbid habit of getting authors’ lines tattooed on me when they die; this one I had done shortly after DFW’s suicide in 2008. “I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.” It’s possible this wraps back around to the earlier question about why I write: to fight against solipsism, to try vainly to bridge the gap between my mind and others’. It’s the same reason I read. It’s all ultimately tilting at windmills, because we remain trapped in what Wallace called “our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But we’ve gotta at least try to get out.

Tell us about the mysterious fox that shows up a few times. What about ghosts? Those that Babs’ daughter Lori sees add another dimension to the book. Have you ever felt the ghostly presence of your ancestors? The fox and the ghosts function somewhat differently in the story, but both are born of my memory of the brand of Catholicism we practiced, which is a lot like the Catholicism in Gabriel García Márquez’s work. There’s a magic, a sort of pagan element to it, in which otherwise inexplicable or impossible things happen all the time and no one finds it strange in the least. What outsiders see as “magical realism” is just, you know, life. Of course there are ghosts. Of course there are demons. Of course there’s a fox that’s actually God. Why wouldn’t there be? Do we really think we know or understand anything at all about this life? About what is and is not? About the nature of the divine?

“Everything we do, as individuals and a species, will sooner or later burn. And I’m fascinated by our persistence in the face of this certainty.”

You’ve also been a screenwriter. Has that writing affected your work as a novelist?

I was already a believer in trying my best not to waste the readers’ time, to reward the effort and attention they bring to the story by making it a story that continues to demand their attention. Not to ask for it—to demand it. Screenwriting has, I think, made me even more cognizant of that. The form just doesn’t tolerate dallying or navel-gazing. Stuff has to happen.

I’m excited that this is part one of a trilogy. While it’s set mostly in 2016, the next one takes place in 1984. Why not write these stories chronologically? What about part three? (I’m hoping it takes place after 2016—I’d really like to see what happens to several characters, especially Jason.) I’m glad you’re looking forward to more! Telling a story out of chronological order can be a way to make things blossom with new meaning. For example, in the first book we see the ghost of Babs’ husband, Rheal, a handful of times, and those moments are hopefully cool and intriguing in and of themselves. But when we get into the second book, in which Rheal is very much alive and plays a central part, suddenly those moments in the first book kind of explode with new layers of significance. I guess it’s a version of an Easter egg. And it also goes back to what I was saying about continuing to reward the reader’s attention—my ambition with these books is for someone who’s read them three or four times to still find new layers, new feeling and meaning, each time.

Another way to think about the ghosts in the story is that they’re dramatized grief. One of the chief features of grief is its omnipresence—it never relents and it rises unbidden long after the loss, but that’s hard to dramatize. Having a character in constant conversation with ghosts feels a lot like grief, to me. No one else can see or hear or

—Alice Cary

Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.

© TRISTAN SPINSKI

There’s a book in this book!

We love when authors get meta by placing a second text—a novel, play or diary—within the first . Here are four picks for books featuring nested stories . If We Were Villains

When my book club selected M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains (Flatiron, $18.99, 9781250289780), I was initially hesitant. I hadn’t read any Shakespeare since college, and wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy a novel so heavily influenced by his work. It was a pleasant surprise to be drawn in right away by the characters, seven actors in their final year at an elite performing arts college. As they immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the lines between reality and performance begin to blur. When one of the students dies mysteriously after a Halloween production of Macbeth, the rest, now suspects, must confront the roles they play both on and off the stage. The plot deftly mirrors the thematic elements of the plays the group performs, including Romeo and Juliet and King Lear—exploring ambition, betrayal and revenge. Even if you’re not a Shakespeare buff, the connections between the characters and the plays are easy to grasp. If you do love the Bard, the parallels will be icing on the cake.

—Katherine, Subscriptions

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

In Lorrie Moore’s beguiling 2023 novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Vintage, $18, 9780307740878), a man and his dead ex-girlfriend take a road trip, he desperate to understand her suicide, she slowly decomposing in the passenger seat. Nested in this story are letters from Elizabeth—a Civil War-era mistress of a boardinghouse that has “lost its spank”—to her sister, long dead at the time of her writing. Elizabeth is a crackerjack writer: formal yet irreverent, self-effacing and selfaware. She writes of a “handsome lodger” who is “dapper as a finch” and “keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood.” But after she hears of the assassination of President Lincoln, she starts to see her lodger in a different light. Moore suspends Elizabeth’s story for much of the novel, and readers may yearn to get back to the boardinghouse. It’s no surprise that Moore, a master of pacing and timing, delivers on Elizabeth’s story with an unexpected, delightful convergence of the two narratives.

—Erica, Associate Editor

The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin (Vintage, $19, 9780385720953) opens with Iris Griffen recounting the death of her 25-year-old sister, Laura, who drove her car off a bridge while, as Iris makes sure to note, wearing white gloves, as if “washing her hands of me.” Through prose interspersed with excerpts from The Blind Assassin —the posthumous novel that launches Laura into notoriety—Margaret Atwood’s puzzle of a book reels us in to an enigmatic life dotted by tragedy and death. However, it’s a true testament to Atwood’s genre-spanning talent that the most enthralling element is the pulp science fiction story told within the eponymous novel-within-anovel. This third layer explores Sakiel-Norn, a grand city on the planet Zycron that is famous for producing carpets woven by child slaves who inevitably go blind from the work. Atwood is the rare jackof-all-trades, master of everything: She dances effortlessly between the realistic and the speculative, while fashioning a narrative that is not only suspenseful and exciting, but also contemplative.

—Yi, Associate Editor

A Tale for the Time Being

If you write in a journal, you may be familiar with an occasional prickling feeling—a feeling that makes you wonder, what would someone think if they read this? The act of writing seems to suppose a connection with an audience, even writing that you never intend to share. In Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (Penguin, $19, 9780143124870), novelist Ruth feels a powerful connection to a stranger when she discovers a diary washed up on the shore of her home in British Columbia. In alternating chapters, we read from the diary, which belonged to Nao, a high schooler from Tokyo, and hear about Ruth’s life with her husband, Oliver. As she reads, Ruth becomes increasingly, desperately concerned for Nao, whose father is deeply depressed, and whose classmates grotesquely bully her. Was the diary carried to Ruth by the 2011 tsunami? Or was it abandoned before that, and if so, what happened to Nao? Ozeki incorporates Buddhist spirituality in layers both explicit and subtle, meaning there’s always more to uncover in this complicated book.

—Phoebe, Associate Editor

book clubs by julie hale

Take it outside

In Birding to Change the World (Ecco, $18.99, 9780063223165), Trish O’Kane shares the story of how she became a committed bird watcher after losing her New Orleans home during Hurricane Katrina. Relocating to Madison, Wisconsin, O’Kane begins surveying the birds in Warner Park, haven to 141 species, and becomes involved in local preservation efforts. Her touching memoir is a testament to the magic of nature and the power of one individual to make a difference. Themes of personal evolution and community revitalization make this a terrific pick for book clubs.

H Memorial Days

When Geraldine Brooks got the call that her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz, had died, her life was thrown into chaos. Three years later, Brooks finds herself at a retreat on a remote island to hopefully, to finally give herself space to mourn.

Commemorate Earth Day with an inspiring book that celebrates the natural world.

The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors (Catapult, $17.95, 9781646222506) by Erika Howsare is a shrewd evaluation of humanity’s complex relationship with deer and the greater natural world. Through skillful, accessible analysis of science, history, mythology and folklore, Howsare sheds fresh light on our fragile coexistence with deer and how that bond has evolved through the centuries. Howsare also interviews deer hunters, ecologists and other experts as she explores our multifaceted connection with the timeless creature. She writes with authority and heart in this lively, revealing book.

Memorial Days (Penguin Audio, 5 hours) is an intimate peek into the many facets of loss: the overwhelming crush of the unexpected, the confusion of a lost future, the bittersweet quality of once-happy memories. Brooks is both writer and narrator, and you can hear a tumultuous mix of exhaustion, pain, wonder and love as she recounts her story. Sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, Memorial Days is a beautiful testament to love that goes beyond life and death. Whatever your experience with grief, this audiobook offers a nuanced, expansive exploration of loss, living and shared humanity.

—Tami Orendain

The Last Room on the Left

Paleontologist Thomas Halliday considers the amazing ways in which the Earth has adjusted to change across the ages in Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (Random House, $22, 9780593132906). Halliday visits 16 fossil sites around the world as he looks at the major shifts that have taken place in the life of the planet and examines the impact of geologic activity over time. Filled with fascinating talking points on topics such as climate change and extinction, Halliday’s wide-ranging book will generate great dialogue among readers.

Sy Montgomery’s Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell (Mariner, $21.99, 9780063394230) is a moving chronicle of the author’s involvement with the Massachusetts-based Turtle Rescue League. As volunteers with the organization, Montgomery and nature artist Matt Patterson dedicate themselves to the preservation of turtles who are threatened by poachers, environmental hazards and busy roadways. In this intriguing account of their work, Montgomery delves into the history and symbolism of turtles and their significance around the world. Nature enthusiasts will savor her unique insights into the culture of the revered reptile.

In a flash, Kerry’s life has fallen apart: Her marriage is over; her best friend, Siobhan, isn’t speaking to her; and she just can’t make any headway on writing the novel that scored her a juicy book deal. Kerry’s tendency to drink too much probably isn’t helping, so when she is offered a stint as a winter caretaker for an upstate motel, she hopes to use the opportunity to escape her problems and focus on her writing. But when Kerry encounters a dead body in a snowdrift, her writing retreat goes out the window . . . and then a winter storm moves in, and the power goes out. Though two of the narrators’ voices (Karissa Vacker as Kerry and Erin Bennett as Siobhan) are perhaps overly similar, Leah Konen’s clever homage to The Shining, The Last Room on the Left (Penguin Audio, 10 hours), is a near-perfect listen, especially on a chilly night.

—Norah Piehl

The Queens of Crime

The Queens of Crime (Macmillan Audio, 10.5 hours), by Marie Benedict, unites Golden Age mystery writers Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Emma Orczy to solve a crime. Based on an actual murder Sayers investigated, The Queens of Crime is both a great cozy mystery and a nuanced portrait of cooperation and competition.

Bessie Carter’s excellent dialect work makes the banter between feminist New Zealander Marsh and Hungarian-born aristocrat Orczy both fun and revelatory. She delivers Christie’s journey from trauma to new strength with convincing subtlety, while Allingham, the youngest, blossoms through her friendship with the older women. Carter’s interpretation of Sayers is especially superb, portraying her wit, but also her vulnerability as the keeper of a secret that could destroy her career.

—Deborah Mason

On good authority

For Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu, writing a takedown is an aggressive form of friendship .

If you’re reading this, chances are that you read BookPage as devotedly as I do, and you know that you won’t find a negative book review in these pages. That’s BookPage’s core philosophy: genuine recommendations only. If a book is not worth your time, BookPage doesn’t review it. The only downside to this is that BookPage readers miss out on the fundamental pleasure of an absolutely vicious review—the takedown, the hatchet job. For that, we recommend Andrea Long Chu.

Chu is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic for New York magazine whose first book, a 112-page work on gender and desire titled Females, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction in 2019. Her second book, Authority (FSG, $30, 9780374600334), includes 22 previously published essays, plus two new pieces, “Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority.” The book features a quad of n+1 essays, including “On Liking Women” (Chu’s iconic 2018 essay, which is now taught in many gender studies programs), as well as spectacularly edible pieces on Yellowstone, The Last of Us, Myra Breckinridge, Curtis Sittenfeld’s weird Hillary Clinton novel, Zadie Smith’s entire literary career and more.

rarely served a dramatic end—rather, it strutted around the stage like it owned the place,” she writes.)

“I think that there needs to be a good reason to be that negative, probably more than just the face pleasure,” Chu tells BookPage. “When I’m writing these negative reviews, I’m not going in, first of all, trying to make them negative. I’m going in with high expectations that are dashed. And I am really trying to understand what the person is doing. I think in the best cases, I am really trying to understand what this person’s whole deal is and see them in their wholeness.”

When you write this brutally, you’re inevitably inviting someone else to be brutal to you.

If it’s possible to sum up the satisfaction of reading a Chu review, it’s that her evaluation of a piece of media—be it a single book, an author’s oeuvre, a television show or a webcomic—is so profoundly well-informed that it feels encyclopedic, which is what makes her angle-grinder critiques so valid. Even if you’re a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Chu’s evisceration of The Phantom of the Opera is defined primarily by her clear devotion to musicals. (“The music in Phantom

Considering the intensity of Chu’s work, it feels necessary to ask, what does it feel like to talk about—be interviewed about—a book like this? When you write this brutally, you’re inevitably inviting someone else to be brutal to you.

“I’m excited and nervous. There’s a breadth of things that I could be asked about. [When] you collect a bunch of essays together, it’s a little tricky to anticipate what someone might want to talk about, so I do feel a kind of need to, you know, square my shoulders a little bit.”

But other than that initial inclination to square up and gird loins, it’s apparent she’s not intimidated by what could come her way during the book’s promotion. That steadfastness is reflected within Authority as well, as all the essays included are printed exactly as they were originally published, regardless of whether she agrees with them now. In a few rare cases, she includes a short note to address any leftover thoughts. Her review of Bret Easton Ellis’ book White—“a deeply needless book”—ends with her reinstating the hilarious original ending that an editor purged prior to its 2019 publication. “On Liking Women”

includes a note in which Chu reflects that “reading it today, I am irritated by the obscurity of the antagonists and the amateurish tone, that kind of bloggy ‘voiceyness’ was dated even then—and I am amused by how little I understood about myself, including my own gender.”

To resist updating your old work shows a tremendous amount of restraint. But to do so would be anachronistic to Chu. She describes each piece as being like an “artifact,” and gathered together they become an exhibition of her work to date. Each essay includes the year of publication, which Chu considers to be one of the most important elements of the book: “Understanding a writer through a progression of their work is something that I am doing a lot in my day-to-day, so to get to do it a little bit for myself is actually quite pleasing. It also is a way of saying, happily, while I need to be responsible for everything that appears in the book, I don’t have to necessarily defend it, and that is a nice feeling. It is actually very freeing in that way. If there is a criticism of [Authority], I probably also have it, or at least there is a good chance that I do.”

One of the collection’s two original essays, “Criticism in a Crisis,” includes some of those self-critiques. Chu has been seen as a trailblazer in pop culture criticism’s shift away from the concept of “art for art’s sake,” with more readers expecting their movie and book criticism to include politics, rather than shy away from it. But “Criticism in a Crisis” is ruthless toward critics who bemoan a “self-aggrandizing existential crisis” in the profession, who worry that “the health of the republic turns on one person’s review of the latest film or novel.” Rather, Chu writes, “The more relevant changes to the profession are the material ones—the decline of print, the merging of the publishing houses, the evaporation of staff writing positions, the pressure to churn out ad-supported content.”

To an invested reader of literary fiction, Chu’s evaluations of novelists are her best work. She writes about Smith, Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh and others consummately, consumingly—and at the precise moment in their careers when you’d be tempted to shruggingly accept that the author is just going to do what they’re going to do, and either you like it or you don’t. That’s when Chu steps in and pushes back, because someone has got to talk about how much Hanya Yanagihara tortures her poor gay characters, or how much Moshfegh writes about poop.

“The ‘takedown’ quality of it is, in a way, a kind of byproduct of a desire to really try and see what’s going on with an author,” Chu says. “That, to me, is where it can be the most valuable, rather than just attacking for the sake of attacking. Not that I am completely against such a thing. But I’d like to think it’s in service of, I don’t know, a very aggressive form of friendship. The moment when you start to notice, as you read through someone’s oeuvre, words that they use too much, or a metaphor that is the same between two different [works]— Rachel Cusk loves to describe things as glittering, for instance. It’s a very important part of [her work] and often a very key moment. I could write a couple hundred words about the meaning of the word glittering in Rachel Cusk’s work. I really like those moments in reading where you’re reminded that someone actually wrote this.”

Authority reveals that to be critical is not necessarily about gathering all the information you possibly can in order to poke holes in a piece of art, but more about organizing the knowledge you’re tending and then applying it to the media you’re consuming. Why do you love what you love, and why do you devote yourself to your own personal temples of entertainment? Chu asks a lot of her subjects, but she asks just as much of herself, and the result is the finest criticism of our time.

—Cat Acree

lifestyles

by laura hutson hunter

H Picturing Black History

In this fascinating and important collection of previously unseen or underappreciated photographs, a team of art historians and archivists have created the definitive photographic account of the Civil Rights Movement. Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World (Abrams, $40, 9781419769559) features an expansive array of photography, from slice-of-life snapshots to photojournalism to portraits. Together, the multifaceted truth of Black American history comes into focus. The book presents the argument that there is a symbiotic relationship between photography and Black history, because photography introduced a previously unavailable type of self-representation. The stories told through the photographs run the gamut from joy and sorrow to ennui and perseverance, making this volume a necessary addition for library and personal bookshelves alike.

Live With the Things You Love

Mary Randolph Carter’s Live With the Things You Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After (Rizzoli, $55, 9780847843985) is a fresh, welcome antidote to the slick, consumer-driven vibe that seems to dominate interior design media. Carter encourages us to celebrate the stuff we already have. Each chapter is devoted to a different home and inhabitant, and the inventory of their possessions unfolds like a personal archive. A plate that artist Keith Haring drew on for model Bethann Hardison is among many works of art in Hardison’s New York City apartment. A small ceramic pumpkin made by painting teacher Willie Binnie in second grade now functions as an incense holder in his lodge-style Massachusetts home. These mementos are wellsprings for the kinds of idiosyncratic stories that Carter is so talented at spinning.

The Regional Italian Cookbook

The best kind of regional cookbook also functions as a travel guide, and The Regional Italian Cookbook: Recipes From the Silver Spoon (Phaidon, $59.99, 9780714849218) is no exception. With 160 classic recipes that span Italy’s 20 distinct regions, this definitive resource is a modern classic. If you head straight to the index, you’ll find all the standards in these pages, from the deceptively straightforward tiramisu to a perfect caprese salad. But the organization of the book allows readers to cook their way through Italy, one region at a time. Choosing an area based solely on the gorgeous, scenic photographs that accompany each section, like Piedmont’s rolling vineyards and Liguria’s brightly painted houses, makes cooking a heightened sensory experience. It’s a fascinating dive into culinary tourism that will be a welcome addition to beginner chefs and, ahem, seasoned professionals, regardless of their familiarity with Italian cuisine.

Laura Hutson Hunter is a writer, curator and the arts editor of the Nashville Scene

In another life

Three sci-fi novels investigate alternate visions of our own world, with results both inspiring and terrifying .

When We Were Real

In an increasingly AI-wary world, acclaimed sci-fi author Daryl Gregory’s latest novel, When We Were Real (Saga, $29.99, 9781668060049), entertains the ultimate question of technological sentience: What if we are really living in a simulation?

It’s been seven years since the Announcement that human existence—all of history and science, art and culture, relationships, conversations, sensations—is nothing more than lines of code run by the Simulators. Amid the continuous, collective existential crisis spurred by this new understanding, engineer JP faces the return of his brain cancer. While he is still physically fit, JP and a longtime friend, comic book writer Dulin, decide to join a bus tour of North America. Unlike ordinary sightseeing tours, this one visits the Impossibles, a series of science-defying glitches in the simulation: a tornado made of unidentifiable matter, geysers that turn off gravity, sheep you can stick your hand through, etc.

If ever a novel multitasked, When We Were Real does so with aplomb. Gregory delivers a philosophical feast, while maintaining an adventure quest plot and pace. His characters and their dilemmas lead readers down almost every thought spiral associated with the simulation premise. What is the role of God? How can you avoid deletion? Does one simulation imply there are others? Are there Non-Playable Characters, or bots, living among “normal” humans? This is not a lighthearted sci-fi saga; rather, Gregory seriously interrogates the implications of the Announcement. In doing so, he renders this high-concept world believable, often terrifyingly so. The story remains grounded through characters like JP and Dulin, whose primary concerns are ones readers will find relatable: health, grief, finding purpose and fear of death. This novel is a fine accomplishment for Gregory— an intellectual, enriching and emotionally resonant read.

—Jessica Peng

H The Martian Contingency

firmly tied to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth and the moon that it is surprisingly difficult to translate them offworld. How will the Jewish Elma and Nathaniel mark Rosh Hashanah on a planet with a year of a different length, two moons and no tidal cycles? What do those holidays mean, anyway? Watching the piecemeal emergence of a unique spacefaring culture is both fascinating and inspiring. The moments when the old rules fail to translate drive Kowal’s plot, which revolves around Elma’s investigation into a cover-up of a horrible event during the first wave of Martian exploration. The Martian Contingency is no Roddenberry-esque utopia; rather, it is riddled with the brutal legacies of our worst demons. Kowal’s Martian pioneers cannot escape the myriad traumas we humans have inflicted on each other over the years. The result is a deeply personal novel about whether the human race will survive and, if it does, what it will be.

—Noah Fram

Where the Axe Is Buried

Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest exquisitely crafted and meticulously researched Lady Astronaut novel, The Martian Contingency (Tor, $18.99, 9781250237057), continues her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning series set in an alternate 20th century. It’s 1970, and Drs. Elma and Nathaniel York are among the second wave of spacefarers building a permanent home for humankind on Mars. Years earlier, a meteor strike obliterated Washington, D.C. and set off an extinction-level series of climate catastrophes. Like other writers documenting humanity’s often hubristic, Ozymandian response to such existential threats, Kowal contends with whether the disparate and all too dissonant components of Earthbound society will unite to survive. But in so doing, she probes more intimate questions: What would it be like to live your life on that precipice? And how would a society built in one reality adjust to a wholly unrecognizable one?

In The Martian Contingency, Kowal emphasizes this sense of alienation through the calendar. Our celebrations and rituals are so

Ray Nayler’s view of our future in Where the Axe Is Buried (MCD, $28, 9780374615369) can be described as bleak, at best. In the West, AI constructs have replaced prime ministers. Their programs of rationalization, meant to optimize human life and each country’s economic well-being, seem instead to entrench their citizens semicomfortably in the class divisions that have ruled society for generations. Meanwhile, in the Federation to the east, autocracy has seemingly reached its final form. By uploading himself from one body to another, the Federation’s strongman president has found a way to rule forever without the fuss of making himself ruler for life. As one AI PM seemingly starts to go mad, a resistance group looks to recruit a woman whose work might be able to bring down the Federation’s president.

An engrossing exploration of consciousness, autocracy and global politics, Where the Axe Is Buried is a cybernetically enhanced thriller with the pacing of a literary novel. Much of that pacing is due to its massive scope. Much like Kim Stanley Robinson, Nayler’s view is global, showing us the consequences of a future world where technology that is currently only in its nascent form has come to adulthood. After all, “rationalization” is but the final form of AI that has been fed our current biases, and an autocrat extending their life by jumping from one body to another is just a natural next step for those who have declared themselves “rulers for life.” Nayler shows us the human consequences of these technologies—as well as a cast of characters who are fighting against them. Intricate and thought-provoking, Where the Axe Is Buried successfully strikes a balance between creating a global narrative and a deeply personal one.

—Laura Hubbard

Rage against the machine

Ray Nayler’s dystopian novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, takes place in a world of AI prime ministers, body-hopping tyrants and the resistance that bravely fights against them both .

Most of the countries in which you’ve set the action don’t have proper names. They’re referred to by terms like “The Federation” or “The Republic” instead. Why make the locations vague (even if their real-world counterparts are seemingly clear in some cases)?

Naming things and places often locks down people’s imaginations, and creates a false sense of a 1:1 relationship with reality, in which the fictional world is viewed as nothing more than a commentary, a gloss on the real. Not allowing them to be named invites, I think, a greater degree of cross-pollination. I hope it also invites broader, richer comparisons.

In a world where authoritarians can effectively become rulers for life, why body hop? This, like everything in speculative fiction, needs to be viewed both as a practical concern (it may be easier to keep power if you constantly stage the overthrow and replacement of your own regime, which is a practical method of self-correction and reinforcement) and as an allegory (the mask and body changes, autocracy remains fundamentally the same).

beings and human institutions, filled with bias and financial concerns. Open enough drawers, dig down through enough layers and there is always a human being behind the process.

The idea of using artificial intelligence as a part of the political process is not a futuristic invention—it is already upon us. The decisions of these supposedly automatic mechanisms will be presented as ideal, as neutral, as unbiased. They will not be. There is always human motivation, bias and avarice hidden in the cabinet of the Immortal Turk.

This book features a fairly wide array of characters spread across a vast amount of land. Did you know at first how it was all going to come together?

“Behind all of these ‘artificial’ intelligences are human beings and human institutions, filled with bias and financial concerns.”

“Garbage in, garbage out” is a phrase that’s often thrown around when referencing AI models. Why do you think the people in your world (and by extension, ours) are drawn to using AI in political decisions, seemingly in spite of the GIGO concept? I think the concept I introduce in the book of the “Immortal Turk” is worth introducing here. It’s a reference to the Mechanical Turk—the fraudulent automaton of a Turkish-costumed person at a chess table that was supposedly able to beat anyone at chess, but was really just a cabinet concealing a man inside who was a chess master, and who determined all the moves of the “automaton.”

That is what artificial intelligence is, at its core. It is a way of concealing the biases of decision making behind a mechanized process, and then presenting the products of that process as both original and correct. Behind all of these “artificial” intelligences are human

I knew how it was all related, in its skeletal outlines, but for me writing is process. The real composition of a book is in the writing itself. Plot and theme and character and setting and everything else come together in a way that is emergent and hypercomplex, and the narrative pathways which are opened and closed as they do that can’t be perceived in some kind of initial planning process. I always have a sense of where I am going, but the characters and situations they create and respond to soon have their own sense as well, and we work our way through it all together, inside that process of composition.

What sort of influences—whether fictional or not—did you turn to while creating the world of Where the Axe Is Buried? Everything is an influence. Where I am living at the time, what I am reading, what is occurring in the world at the time, what films I am watching. It can be hard to pin down. But while I was composing this book, we were seeing a massive extension of surveillance and control capacities worldwide, being used by governmental, corporate and other entities. In many ways, I think you could say that during the composition of Where the Axe Is Buried, the feared totalization of surveillance that seemed a futuristic concern, a worry on the horizon, became

fully integrated into the present medium in which we exist.

The balance between control and autonomy is everywhere in this book. Do you think this is inherent in the technology that’s been created in this future, or is something else going on?

I think the concept of control is one which we, as human beings, have always been concerned with. We’re looking for a balance of some kind: a structure that is capable of enabling us to live well, but also does not suffocate our freedoms. What does that structure look like? What limits need to be placed on it so that it does not encroach on our freedoms? What does “freedom” even mean within a cooperative structure? How does surveillance impinge upon freedom? During the writing of Where the Axe Is Buried, I reread Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and a number of other ancient works.

Consistently, the concerns of the ancients remain our concerns: How do we organize our political life? I think one answer is that we must constantly continue to work at it— that it is a continual process and struggle. Technologies, from the stone axe to the chariot to the airplane, the rocket, the nuclear bomb and massive computational power, all shape and often threaten both our potential future freedoms and our present structures. I believe only total, knowledgeable engagement of the population offers a positive way forward. That engagement is always going to feel like argument and struggle, and that is precisely what it has to be in order for us to make progress and not simply cede control to others.

—Laura Hubbard

Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this Q&A.

BLAZING VERSE

Hughes wouldn’t leave me alone. I felt his ghost pinging me, insisting I was supposed to be a poet, not a historian. Instead of writing paragraphs for my research paper on the Harlem Renaissance, my time with the archive and microfiche at the library poured out as poems. Bewildered, I took the F train to Coney Island, and while staring out over the pier at the shore, I finally shouted back at the waves, “OK, Langston! Fine—I’ll be a poet!”

This catalytic moment crystallized my relationship with the historical archive, shaped by my compulsion to translate research through the alchemy of creative writing—colliding the personal and the political through the raw, transformative power of metaphor and prosody. It didn’t have to be a binary choice. I could be a poet utilizing the methods of a historian, excavating the buried African American stories of survival and beauty beyond the brutality and erasure foregrounded in the archive.

These poems are often remarkable in their willingness to contradict or correct—which you acknowledge in these lines from “Proof”: “I think it’s important to implicate / the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean.” Could you tell us why this double-edged sense of implication is important to you?

I think self-implication is vital for a poet. The weight of the poetic gaze can be heavy and all-consuming. In the past, I’ve made mistakes when writing about complex situations inspired by real-life events and people who have hurt me. Through those experiences, I realized that while it wasn’t wrong to write about my pain, I wished I had done a better job of balancing that harm with an acknowledgment of my own complicity—turning the intensity of the gaze back onto myself with the same level of scrutiny and examination.

Seven years after I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, poet Tiana Clark returns with an exquisite collection that reckons with history and rings with joy .

When Tiana Clark was asked to write a poem in response to a work in the Smith College Museum of Art for a book commissioned by the college’s Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, she saw Kara Walker’s Buzzard’s Roost Pass and was immediately inspired—and not only for a single poem. Clark printed the lithograph and wrote “dream cover” on it. Now, that dream has been realized in her remarkable second collection, Scorched Earth

Something I love in your work is how you amalgamate history and popular culture—The Bachelorette, the Great Train Wreck of 1918, FOMO, Phillis Wheatley, Cardi B, the Middle Passage. I read in an interview in Booth that you entertained the idea of becoming a historian in college. Has that aspiration transmuted into your poetry? Yes, I initially thought I wanted to be a historian because of my deep love for African American history, which led me to major in Africana Studies in college. During my junior year, I applied for and received an incredible summer internship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York—a decision that pinballed my life into poetry by provocation.

During the summer of 2008, I walked daily over the ashes of Langston Hughes, interred underneath the glittering terrazzo of the Schomburg lobby, where his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is inscribed.

Natasha Trethewey has one of the most selfimplicating lines I’ve ever read. In her poem “Elegy,” about fishing with the speaker’s father, she writes: “I can tell you now / that I tried to take it all in, record it / for an elegy I’d write — one day — / when the time came. Your daughter, / I was that ruthless.” Chills! I think about those last four words all the time. It’s astonishing how the speaker confesses to this compulsion. As writers, we often can’t resist the uncontrollable urge to alchemize moments into metaphors, even as they’re happening before us. I certainly have!

What draws me to this line is how deeply relatable it is, how flawed and human—especially when trying to render our parents in our poems (calling on Philip Larkin [“This Be The Verse”] here, ha!). I connect with it because I, too, have been merciless. I, too, have a complicated relationship with my father. To me, self-implication functions like adding acid to a dish: its brightness cuts through and balances the bitterness.

You’ve taught poetry at Smith College (I was one of your students!), the Sewanee School of Letters and elsewhere. A wonderful moment in “50 Lines after Figure (2001) by Glenn Ligon” comes when you describe helping students see what rules they can break in their poems: “50 invisible permission slips sparkling in their eyeballs— THAT GLEAM THOUGH.” What’s something new you granted yourself permission to do in this book?

So many poets I adore have written poems that feel like potent permission slips, encouraging me to take risks, play with form, employ new techniques and explore themes I once considered taboo or forbidden—poets like Sharon Olds, Terrance Hayes and Hanif Abdurraqib, to name just a few from my ever-expanding list of luminaries.

For Scorched Earth, I wanted to remind myself and relearn what I strive to impart to my students by graciously granting myself the

utmost permission to be fully myself—flaws and all—in whatever wonky, silly, verbose, irreverent or sentimental ways my beloved quirks and idiosyncrasies manifested in my work. I wasn’t trying to make mistakes, but if they came, then I wanted to let my blunders become material for radical embodiment and lyrical aliveness.

I love these magnificent lines from Rainer Maria Rilke: “I want to unfold. / I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, / because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” I love this idea of unfolding—unfurling flaws, unspooling the self—which, for me, means releasing myself from the stress of perfection, from the urge to conceal how awkwardly human, feverishly feral and gloriously weird I am.

You’ve spoken before about how much you love epigraphs, and there’s even a “Broken Ode for the Epigraph” in this book, which hails the device as a “little cup holder” and an “amuse-bouche.” I wondered if you would tell us about your favorite epigraph in the collection. How did you come across it, and why did you choose it? It’s hard to choose my favorite epigraph from the book because I truly love them all. Today, I’ll focus on Jericho Brown’s epigraph from my poem “When I Kissed Her Right Breast, I Became Myself Entirely,” which reads, “Gratitude is black—” from his stunning poem “Hero” in The Tradition. I see this epigraph in conversation (and holding hands) with a line from Robin Coste Lewis’ poem “Landscape,” which is also referenced in my book and begins, “Pleasure is black.” I love the idea of situating Blackness within the tender worlds of gratitude and pleasure as a form of soft reclamation—a necessary step toward freedom. This reminds me of radical selflove and bell hooks, who wrote, “Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed.”

H Scorched Earth Washington Square, $17.99 9781668052075

POETRY

Fans of your essays (on Black millennial burnout and writing after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics) will be excited to hear about your upcoming memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved. Can you share about the experience of working in prose?

I will never forget when Ann Patchett visited Vanderbilt during my MFA program for a talk. She emphasized that in our work, we should always reach for something higher—beyond what we believe we can accomplish. Venturing into prose has been that ambitious leap and feat for me.

Writing this memoir has been a wild joy—a broader river to wade into my obsessions and themes as I reckon with Black burnout—both what it is and what I hope lies beyond the racialized stress and terror— alongside millennial divorce, faith, art-making and the evolving, radical methods of Black survival. I’m excited to share it soon!

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this Q&A and our starred review of Scorched Earth.

Poets of the times

Two new books speak to the moment .

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth

In Maggie Nelson’s (Bluets, The Argonauts ) characteristic genre-bending style, Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave, $25, 9798891060111) stretches poetic verse to the brink of prose to chronicle the life of a working spouse and parent. At the center of the book is an undiagnosable and untreatable mouth pain that sends the speaker from practitioner to practitioner.

Pathemata is a fascinating study in how collective and individual suffering can isolate us but also teach us the necessity of fully inhabiting each moment of our lives. How does one live with pain, and how does one live in the moments in between? Like any good poet, Nelson does not offer an answer as much as a series of observations. As she makes clear, it is difficult to learn anything meaningful during a catastrophe, and even our most loving intentions sometimes fall short of connecting us to each other. However, it is still possible to survive, to appreciate what is, and to live robustly, even as fear and exhaustion threaten to swallow us whole.

and painful and precious a lovely ride.”

—Destiny O. Birdsong

Jailbreak of Sparrows

Jailbreak of Sparrows (Knopf, $29, 9780593537121), a bold, raw collection of narrative poems by National Book Award winner Martín Espada (Floaters), confronts the reader with images that are unforgettable, visceral and lyrical, and verses that fly “like a jailbreak of sparrows from the poet’s hand.” In “Your Card Is the King of Rats,” the speaker describes being a newly minted Legal Aid lawyer, starkly relating the conditions facing many immigrants in the U.S. In “Big Bird Died for Your Sins,” Espada juxtaposes childhood nostalgia with the loss of innocence in an elegy for Roberto Clemente, the legendary Pittsburgh Pirates player who leveraged his fame to bring attention to racial and economic inequality, and died in a plane crash while delivering relief supplies after an earthquake in Nicaragua.

The word pathemata, one half of the Greek phrase pathemata mathemata (“knowledge gained through adversity”), can mean either “suffering” or “passion.” Nelson leans beautifully into this ambiguity, acknowledging that, for many of us, the first half of the 2020s has been riddled with heartbreak, but, as one particularly touching letter written in the voice of the speaker’s deceased father states, “Life is beautiful

Espada’s unflinching language torments and tantalizes the reader, provoking the heart and soul. Amid the darkness, there is humor and tenderness, too. Poems like “My Mother Sings an Encore” and “Love Song of the Disembodied Head in a Jar” bubble with wit and warmth, lauding the connections between loved ones. Stirring and provocative, Jailbreak of Sparrows inspires contemplation and is a call to recognize and respond to the unseen and unheard within our communities.

—Maya Fleischmann

A TICKET TO CALAMITY

Emma Donoghue takes readers on a doomed train ride in 1895 Paris .

When Emma Donoghue realized that she and her partner were moving to the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse for a year, a quick internet search about the area revealed something unexpected: a stunning 1895 photo of a train crash at the Montparnasse station—a locomotive dangling from a jagged hole in the second-floor facade. “That train sort of burst out of my screen at me,” she recalls, the excitement of the moment still fueling her voice. And just like that, she had the makings of her 16th novel, The Paris Express.

“The photo has this mysterious quality, because it’s so surreal,” she says. Culturally, it captures a familiar experience when “we’ve invented all these amazing things and something’s gone horribly wrong— just as nowadays.” Plus, trains, Donoghue notes, “have been not just a plot point, but a setting in novels from, really, before the middle of the 19th century, so it was an irresistible combination.”

During a video call from her home in London, Ontario, the Dublin-born writer speaks rapidly, revealing unbridled enthusiasm and humor. Near the start of our chat, she comments, “When you write a book like this, you’re offering reviewers an easy way to be cruel to you. You know—a train wreck of a novel.”

The book is anything but, of course. Over the years, Donoghue has juggled a variety of subjects, including a middle grade series about a family of 11 and a fictionalization of the youth of British diarist Anne Lister. However, as she remarks on her website, since publishing Room, her novel about a 5-yearold boy being held captive with his mother, “I’m mostly known as the locked-up-children writer.” The Paris Express is also set in a confined space, which she says she’s often written about: “I thought a train would be both claustrophobic—because especially in those days, you couldn’t leave your carriage while it was moving—but also broader in terms of the variety of people on board.”

The train carriages become “a series of little rooms,” each with their own small group of characters, a very different setup from the classic 1930s train novel “where people are racing through or hiding from each other.”

Her fast-paced thriller is filled with intriguing characters based on actual passengers and crew who were on the train on the day of the crash, as well as real people who were living nearby and “could have been there plausible guests I have invited onto my train,” as she explains in an author’s note. The book takes place during the course of a morning and afternoon, from the train’s 8:30 a.m. arrival at the Granville station until its crash in Paris at 4:01 p.m., with chapters marking various arrivals, delays and departures along the way.

been like in 1895?” Readers, meanwhile, may experience the opposite effect—while immersing themselves in the 1895 world that Donoghue has conjured, they will notice numerous parallels to today.

“Sometimes I felt like the stationmaster, actually. I was like, ‘Come on, everybody back on the train. It’s been five minutes.’ ”

Donoghue calls Paris “just a gift to write about,” especially because in the 1890s it “was such a destination city for people from all over the world.” Writing about a place while living there, she says, “not only makes the writing easier, but it makes being in the place more interesting because it means I get to live there in a sort of double sense. So yes, I was enjoying contemporary Montparnasse, but always with a sort of slight kind of haunting feeling of, what would this have

Donoghue deftly uses her real and imagined cast to ponder numerous topics, including the motivations behind terrorism, racism and class, and sexual attraction and secrets: the very same subjects that propel today’s news headlines and the narrative threads of contemporary fiction. For example, one young French passenger, activist Mado Pelletier, seems ready to transform her revolutionary thoughts into action—through sabotage. Meanwhile, American painter Henry Tanner, who is Black, isn’t comfortable riding in a first-class carriage out of fear of reactions to his race, even though French law doesn’t prohibit it, unlike in the United States. And since this is France, this excursion includes romance and more—the relatively short train ride reveals quite a bit about the erotic activities of several passengers. As Donoghue develops relationships among characters, she delicately weaves in a brief but broad tapestry of historical events, innovations and concerns, all while ramping up dramatic tension that

will keep readers on the edge of their seats, especially since they know catastrophe lies ahead.

Donoghue knew she wanted her story to be expansive, yet “squeezed very tight.” That said, reader: Do not read the author’s note before finishing the novel. Instead, allow Donoghue’s marvelous action to play out first, preserving her surprises. In fact, she says, “If I could, I would design books so the back pages didn’t open until you have read the entire novel.”

The author emphasizes that “pace is what the novel is all about,” given that the driver and stoker’s pay was tied to the timeliness of the train. For all the characters, “there are no toilets to hide in,” she explains. “There are no dining cars. It meant there was a kind of urgent pressure on me to find somewhere for my passengers to pee, or to find a way for them to buy food. So it was like a ticking clock, basically. Each chapter was either you’re on the train, you’re stuck with these people in this carriage, you’re effectively trapped with them, or else it’s a chapter set in a station where everybody leaps out and tries to meet their needs. And that gave me a chance to have people occasionally change carriages or have brief conversations or sexual encounters while the minutes were ticking away.” Donoghue laughs, adding, “Sometimes I felt like the stationmaster, actually. I was like, ‘Come on, everybody back on the train. It’s been five minutes.’ ”

Donoghue researched many aspects of the novel both before and as she wrote, devouring “some wonderfully geeky specialist works,” including a “goldmine” of a book by a rather fastidious English stationmaster in the mid-19th century who wrote at length about parcel sorting—which Donoghue translated into a pivotal plot point. She also “haunted” the YouTube feeds of people who restore vintage trains, and she says, “I’m so grateful to the train geeks. I found videos of, in particular, elderly English men who will spend three years lovingly restoring a carriage or even an engine. And then they take it out and do videos of themselves pulling all the knobs. All these people you would not want to get trapped with at a party, but they’re so useful to the novelist.”

‘Oh, since you asked what I’m working on, let me tell you.’ ”

Donoghue parsed all of these minute details with care. “My rule with fiction is that I only put in details if I think my point of view character would care about them. So, in my novel about Irish monks on an island [Haven], there’s a lot about theological subtleties, because they would care. Sometimes, I think, will the reader care? But I have to say to myself, ‘I must be loyal to my point of

H The Paris Express Summit, $26.99, 9781668082799

HISTORICAL FICTION

view character, and then maybe the reader will come with me.’ ”

Passengers, in contrast, had to earn their way in. “It did take me a while to sort of choose my cast,” she says. “I researched quite a few people thoroughly, and I even started writing scenes for them on the train. And then I was like, ‘No, you’re not quite earning your place here. You’re interesting people with great backstories, but nothing particularly interesting is happening to you on this day in October 1895.’ So, I would say to my partner, ‘I tipped that one off the train. I pushed that one out the window.’ ” Donoghue laughs, adding, “Nobody could be on the train unless they had something interesting to offer.”

More often than not, when writing historical characters, Donoghue imbues them with traits borrowed from family and friends. For instance, she modeled the murder victim in Slammerkin after her mother. “My loved ones are very tolerant,” she says. “They know that I need some raw material to work on. When I was writing my novel The Wonder about this intelligent, virtuous little girl who stops eating, I used to look at my daughter—who’s never skipped a meal in her life—and think, ‘What would it be like if somebody like her was in 19th-century Irish Catholicism?’ And all her powers and skills kind of got twisted into abstemiousness?’ ”

After completing The Paris Express, Donoghue handed her manuscript to a Polish friend, only to suddenly realize that she had fashioned the character of Russian emigre Elise Blonska after her. She also channeled some of her tender feelings about her daughter, who will start college in the fall, into concerns that another character has for her teenage daughter. Her muses “know that the result is not really them,” Donoghue adds. “I think they’re usually quite happy to have been useful.”

“Of course,” she adds, laughing, “When I’m writing a novel about something, I become that person you don’t want to get trapped with at a party. Because I’m like,

The train crew became equally crucial. Donoghue says, “Maybe because I’ve never had colleagues, I’m kind of fascinated by working relationships. Shows like The Office or shows about spies—you know, how people work together.” She loved the idea that “the working partnership would be crucial to the success of the journey. That everything depended on the driver and stoker being able to pretty much read each other’s minds” because they couldn’t talk over the noise of the train.

On her website, the award-winning historical novelist says that if she had a time machine, she would go back to late 18th-century London to be a “rich spinster of scandalous habits.” An unabashedly practical time traveler, Donoghue says, “Let’s face it, none of us really want to go back and be a street urchin without asthma medicine. Especially as then our time travel wouldn’t last long, if we’re going to die of diphtheria on day four. We all want time travel on our terms.”

—Alice Cary

H Twist

By Colum McCann

LITERARY FICTION

Colum McCann ranges widely in his fiction, from multitimeline historical novels like TransAtlantic to the National Book Awardwinning Let the Great World Spin, which followed New York City characters through one day in 1974. With Twist (Random House, $28, 9780593241738), McCann focuses on the present day and a timely issue: the surprising fragility of the internet, whose traffic is carried in fiber-optic cables across ocean floors, and the unseen labor it takes to keep us all connected. Despite the contemporary time frame, Twist opens with an almost 19th-century feel as it sets up a mystery. On page one, narrator Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and would-be playwright, tells the reader: “I am not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway, or to create a praise song for how he spent his days.” Instead, he says, he’s going to tell Conway’s

Rooms for Vanishing

By Stuart Nadler

FAMILY SAGA

What if the innocent dead of the Holocaust had gone on to live alternate lives? That’s the premise of Rooms for Vanishing (Dutton, $28, 9780593475461), Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel.

At the center of this grief-soaked, nonlinear narrative are the Altermans, a Jewish family originally from Vienna. In 1979 London, Sonja Alterman is looking for her missing husband, Franz, an orchestra conductor “successful enough that he occasionally appeared on television looking appropriately bewildered.” Before he departed, Franz left behind a curious artifact, “a photograph of a woman standing in the center of a church.” That woman, who appears to be about 18 years old, may or may not be Anya, their daughter. But Anya died a decade earlier at age 9 from a misdiagnosed illness. Adding to the mystery is another wrinkle: Sonja herself died years earlier after her father, Arnold, put her on a Kindertransport to London and warned her, “Do not under any circumstances say anything in Yiddish.” After Sonja’s departure, the Nazis killed her father, her mother, Fania, and her 6-month-old brother, Moses.

story, which others have gotten wrong.

That story begins with Anthony’s first meeting with the enigmatic Conway, who goes by his last name. A shipboard engineer, Conway heads a crew that repairs internet cables, often at the bottom of the ocean—a near-impossible job. Anthony has an assignment to write about the cables, and he’s in Cape Town, South Africa, to interview Conway.

After a storm in the Congo snaps a cable, cutting off internet access for much of Africa, Anthony joins Conway aboard as the ship chugs north along the coast to find and repair the breaks. The alcoholic Anthony, not drinking

Ghosts and doubles abound in Rooms for Vanishing. Like many stories involving alternate realities, Nadler’s novel can get needlessly complex, but it compensates with exceptionally powerful moments, as when Moses notes, regarding the young boys who were Nazi soldiers, “the face of mid-century evil, I discovered, was a cleanly shaven face.” One can’t erase the travesties of the past, but one can imagine a different future, as Nadler does in this emotionally resonant work.

—Michael Magras

The Expert of Subtle Revisions

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson LITERARY FICTION

How does one review a book when discussing even the basics of the plot might spoil it? Such is the dilemma with Kirsten MengerAnderson’s fascinating The Expert of Subtle Revisions (Crown, $28, 9780593798300). The novel reminded me of 1950s Russian puzzle book The Moscow Puzzles, because the solution to its main question is so devilishly clever. The book opens in 2016, on the birthday of a strange woman named Hase (German for “Rabbit”). Her equally strange father lives

for the first time in years, begins to reckon with his own failings as he tries to get to the heart of Conway’s story.

As the title suggests, the novel features a plot twist that feels both surprising and inevitable. But the book is also an homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like that 1899 novella, Twist comments on predatory colonialism: the environmental degradation that falls on the world’s poorest. It’s a lot to carry, but McCann does it seamlessly, and in the bargain creates memorable characters in both Anthony and Conway, making Conway Gatsby-like, noble in his doomed pursuit.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

on a rickety boat and is missing. Hase grows more and more anxious as the day goes on and he doesn’t show up; it’s not like this meticulous man to forget her birthday.

Then, in its fourth chapter, the novel jumps backward to 1933 Austria, a most perilous time and place. You’ll wonder what this era has to do with Hase, an impoverished Wikipedia contributor who has neither birth certificate, Social Security number nor any of those other documents that lets the government know you exist. The answer is everything. Chapter 4 is narrated by a young man named Anton who has been named a Privatdozent, or an unpaid lecturer, at a university in Vienna. His part of the tale is fraught with nasty rivalries, secret loves, weird cults, blackmail, seances, political turmoil and even an assassination. Then, Anton comes into possession of a music box full of strange little gears and an especially haunting melody. Meanwhile, in 2016, Hase is on the lookout for a book her father wants her to find “in the event.” In the event of what, exactly?

The author’s cool writing style is deceptive, for her characters who so value their intellect are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions. These passions, and the one great problem that drives the book, have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds. It leads to an ending that’s surreal, impossible and a tad Lynchian. Menger-Anderson’s talent makes you believe in it.

—Arlene McKanic

H O Sinners!

By Nicole Cuffy

LITERARY FICTION

Nicole Cuffy’s ambitious second novel, O Sinners! (One World, $28, 9780593597446), opens with New York journalist Faruq Zaidi on assignment to embed with “the nameless,” a spiritual group with their headquarters in Northern California. Led by Odo, a charismatic Black Vietnam War vet, the nameless’ residential compound in the midst of the forest is part experiment in utopian communal living, part inflexible sect. Its members follow a creed that encourages them to view death as a natural part of life and to live without the “distortion” which they believe warps and disfigures the world’s beauty. At first, their so-called Forbidden City is appealing—gorgeous surroundings, attractive people and a rich cultural life. Faruq retains his skepticism, however, and on his daily runs through the forest and in his interactions with Odo and second-in-command Minh-An, something continues to bother him. He becomes more suspicious when it appears that someone is going through his things. And how does Odo know so much about Faruq’s family? But Faruq’s experience with the faithful of the Forbidden City also makes him question his own lack of faith and drives home the way conflicts with his strict Muslim father were exacerbated by his mother’s death and the aftermath of 9/11. The nameless offer a rosy worldview and a tempting way of life. But is it the one for Faruq?

Cuffy includes chapters chronicling Odo’s tour of duty in Vietnam, an experience that encompasses moments of extreme danger as well a deep camaraderie with fellow combatants. She also interleaves the transcript of a documentary about the nameless’s face-off with an evangelical church at the group’s original home in rural Texas. Though neither of these narratives provides irrefutable answers to Faruq’s questions, they give important context to the group’s origins.

Dances, Cuffy’s first novel, explored the physical and psychological toll felt by a Black ballerina in a classical company. Cuffy brings that same clear-eyed honesty and fearlessness to O Sinners!, but on a whole new level, exploring the ways rage and racism can shape a life, and how doubt can lead us to new paths of belief.

—Lauren Bufferd

H Audition

By Katie Kitamura

LITERARY FICTION

In her 2017 novel, A Separation , Katie Kitamura expertly explored the sometimes fraught territory of marriage. Kitamura returns to the subject of family life in Audition (Riverhead, $28, 9780593852323), a spare, shape-shifting story of one woman’s encounter with unresolved aspects of her domestic existence.

The novel opens with a middle-aged woman meeting a much younger man named Xavier for lunch in Manhattan’s financial district. The woman’s husband, Tomas, unexpectedly enters the restaurant before quickly departing, leaving it unclear whether he’s seen them. This is only the first piece of the carefully constructed scaffolding on which Kitamura hangs her coolly precise story.

The unnamed narrator is a modestly successful actress, while Tomas is an art critic. The narrator is immersed in rehearsals for the starring role in a new play, a role of “seemingly endless depth and variation, so that no two performances were the same.” But her companionable relationship with Tomas is disrupted after Xavier confronts her with a startling claim about their connection—and then is hired as her director’s assistant.

The novel makes a daring transition in its second act, which is foreshadowed by the narrator’s obsession with a scene that “continued to resist me, it was the one thing I couldn’t fully parse, and without it I was unable to make sense of the part as a whole.” While retaining the triangular character structure, there’s a shift reflecting a radical and deeply suspenseful discontinuity that simultaneously brings the trio closer and fractures their fragile equilibrium, compelling the reader to reconsider everything that came before.

Kitamura’s characters are adept at indirection and evasion. Every utterance or gesture is freighted with subtext, a quality that consistently dominates over explicit expression as spoken words are filtered through the narrator’s acute, but often flawed, perceptions. Kitamura’s prose is spare and deliberate, serving up one elegantly polished sentence after another. In Audition, she delivers another psychologically acute and challenging novel of the sort that have become her signature.

—Harvey Freedenberg

Theft

By Abdulrazak Gurnah

LITERARY FICTION

Theft (Riverhead, $30, 9780593852606) is Tanzanianborn British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel and his first since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set mainly in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the story comes into focus slowly. Gurnah is an unhurried storyteller, interested in examining the quiet but complicated lives of ordinary people. His language is rarely flashy, and yet there is a submerged sense of urgency in Theft that bursts to the surface in its final section.

Theft centers on three people coming of age in Tanzania in the first generation not born under colonial rule. Karim’s mother quickly divorces the much older husband she has been forced to marry, leaving Karim to be raised by his grandparents and, later, his older half brother. Karim longs for the father he does not know, but he is bright and charming, and soon on a path that will eventually lead to high government office.

While in school, Karim meets Fauzia, an education student whose parents worry that she is unmarriageable because of a childhood bout of “falling sickness.” But Fauzia is in the first blush of liberation and is vibrantly alive. The awkward, good-humored courtship between Fauzia and Karim is beautifully rendered, an emotional high point of the novel.

Like Karim, Badar also longs to know his father. As a child he learns the family raising him are distant, impoverished relatives who see him as a toxic obligation. At 13, he is taken to serve in a household whose elderly patriarch despises him for unknown reasons. The lady of the house turns out to be Karim’s mother, and when Badar is unjustly accused of theft, Karim takes Badar home to live in his household and helps find him work in a tourist hotel.

In the final section of the book, the close relationships among its characters fall apart. It’s not incidental that this coincides with the arrival of British nonprofit aid organizations and tourists, who’ve come to “help” the country and “experience” its people. As an empathic reader begins to wonder who are the real thieves, Theft reveals itself to be a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies.

—Alden

Mudge

The Eights

By Joanna Miller

HISTORICAL FICTION

The past feels astonishingly present in Joanna Miller’s debut, The Eights (Putnam, $29, 9780593851418), a stirring work set in 1920s England on the heels of World War I, during the first year women are officially admitted into Oxford University’s hallowed halls. Among the incoming female “freshers” are Beatrice, Marianne, Dora and Otto: the titular Eights, thus named for the dormitory floor they share. Strangers at first, they soon forge a bond of sisterhood stronger than blood as they head into the academic trenches, where they realize that the minds that most need educating may not be their own.

Rigorously researched, The Eights brilliantly synthesizes fact and fiction, and the trials and triumphs of the quartet are deeply relatable. A debate about whether women have any business being at Oxford prompts the novel’s own version of the famous Barbie movie monologue, “Women are mocked for being too dowdy or too attractive, too feeble-minded or too diligent. They are criticized for breaking rules, for slavishly adhering to rules, for using the university’s resources lavishly, for operating on a shoestring. . . . The truth of the matter is that with some men they can never win.”

The Eights is a rewarding read for anyone who enjoys emotional, character-driven narratives and for anyone who celebrates impeccable writing. But most of all, it’s for anyone who has ever been told they couldn’t do something but did it anyway.

—Stephenie Harrison

white widow and eventually bought a substantial number of acres where they built homes, sold lauded herbal remedies and thrived for several decades.

Happy Land opens in the present day with Nikki visiting her grandmother Rita in North Carolina, then alternates between Nikki’s timeline and the 1870s, when her ancestor Luella ruled the Kingdom. As the novel unfolds, we learn Nikki’s family history and walk with her as she encounters family secrets. The book also sheds light on the often deceitful ways developers took property from Black landowners during the 20th century.

Though the book occasionally gets bogged down in legalities, Perkins-Valdez’s characters are tenacious and industrious, thoughtful and curious, and their desire to preserve where they came from forms the heart of the novel. Through delving into her past, Nikki finds a deeper connection to her present and begins to chart a new, more fulfilling course. Just as her ancestors did.

—Melissa Brown

Stop Me If You’ve Heard

This One

By Kristen Arnett

Happy Land

By Dolen Perkins-Valdez

POPULAR FICTION

For her fourth novel, Happy Land (Berkley, $29, 9780593337721), Dolen Perkins-Valdez extensively researched the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a community established along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina that was home to 200 or more formerly enslaved people. These men and women worked on land owned by a

COMIC FICTION

Clowns go in and out of fashion. Sometimes they are twisted killers skipping sinisterly in the streets, other times they are brave and bold antiheroes who laugh in the face of normalcy and sing duets with Lady Gaga. Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead, $28, 9780593719770) shows clowns in a somewhat less dramatic and flattering light: In these pages, clowns are losers. Cherry is a 28-year-old lesbian stoner working at an aquarium store, but her true passion is clowning. While Cherry seems like someone this reviewer would be friends with, middle-class central Floridian society feels differently about her. Even her stage persona, Bunko, a rodeo-aspiring goofball with a fear of horses, is a loser (in the best way). But as Cherry narrates her tragicomic life, the dullness of Orlando takes on a whimsical and erotically charged atmosphere where the butt of the joke is as callipygian as rich housewives. Though her clowning might make her seem a bit strange, Cherry’s incorrigible horniness makes her as relatable as any non-clown main character. Enter Margot, an older lesbian

magician who coolly and easily woos Cherry with her knowledge of performance, schooling her in the storied tradition of clowns and magicians. Margot’s industry connections give Cherry a tantalizing glimpse of success in entertainment. It seems like the perfect match, but Cherry’s baggage is as crammed as a clown car, and just as dangerous to unpack. As Cherry struggles to be a true artist and find love, Arnett’s prose perfectly blends the tragedy and humor of life, leaving readers alternately gut-punched with grief and bursting with laughter.

—Eric A. Ponce

H Tilt

By Emma Pattee

LITERARY FICTION

In Portland, Oregon, Annie decides to go to Ikea to buy a crib for her soon-to-beborn child. But soon after she arrives in the store, there is an earthquake: the big one, long predicted on the West Coast’s Cascadia Subduction Zone fault line. Emma Pattee’s debut novel, Tilt (Marysue Rucci, $27.99, 9781668055472) is the intense, taut story of Annie’s day as she navigates each step through and after the natural disaster.

When the shaking stops and the dust settles, the only choice available is to walk, so Annie pulls herself from the collapsed aisles and sets off down the roads and bridges of the city, hoping to meet her husband, Dom, at the cafe where he works. Pattee creates a keen sense of environment, built and natural, as Annie takes in the scale of the destruction and the vast uncertainty of what could come next.

Annie’s narrative voice is striking, moving between her present moment and reflections on the past, all addressed to her unborn baby, whom she calls Bean. She tells Bean about her life in fragments and what-ifs—because what does a disaster do if not clarify what really matters? Readers will move at a rapid pace through the short chapters, urgently needing to know what will happen to Annie and Bean as they continue on their journey.

Pattee brings her expertise as a climate journalist to this remarkable debut, examining how we question our lives when the earth takes control. Ultimately, Tilt is fascinating, haunting and surprising at every turn.

—Freya Sachs

H Everything Is Tuberculosis

By John Green MEDICINE

John Green’s exceptional combination of memoir, medical history and cultural analysis, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course, $28, 9780525426059), reveals how tuberculosis has shaped human culture, and illustrates the ways that we understand and treat the disease, and the steps doctors and researchers have taken to eradicate it.

Green traces the history of tuberculosis from ancient Greece through the early 21st century. Some ancient philosophers held that TB was inherited, while others thought the illness was contagious. By the end of the 19th century, the germ theory of the disease prevailed, and scientist Robert Koch discovered a test that would confirm a TB diagnosis in patients. In 1921, scientists developed a vaccine for TB. Still, it is the world’s deadliest

H Valley of Forgetting

By Jennie Erin Smith SCIENCE

In Valley of Forgetting:

Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure (Riverhead, $30, 9780525536079), author Jennie Erin Smith is walking a two-way street. The families of mostly poor and working-class Colombians afflicted by a rare neurological condition serve as a narrative framework that allows Smith to tell the technical story of decades of groundbreaking brain research. But the research and the rare condition also serve to introduce the reader—and scientists and journalists around the world—to a multigenerational saga that is a compelling story in itself.

Valley of Forgetting illustrates the lives of families from the hills around Medellín whose parents and cousins succumb to aggressive forms of Alzheimer’s disease, with symptoms first popping up in patients’ 30s and 40s. Doctors and researchers, both from Colombia and abroad, have spent decades trying to learn from the families, in the hopes that this unusual concentration of a rare form

disease, killing more than 150 million around the world since the 1950s. One million died of TB in 2023 alone, in large part, Green writes, because “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”

Green deftly weaves the story of Henry, a 17-year-old boy with TB whom Green met at a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019, into his larger narrative. Emaciated from malnourishment and taking a regimen of TB drugs, Henry remains positive, even though his friends and many of his extended family have abandoned him because of the stigma of tuberculosis. When Green first meets Henry, the young man’s case looks hopeless; he doesn’t have access to resources that a TB patient elsewhere might have, namely effective

drugs, abundant food and clean water.

“Tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty,” writes Green, “an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.” He traces the impacts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s fragile health care system and economic depression in Sierra Leone. In the end, Henry’s case has a positive outcome, but it illustrates Green’s emphasis throughout the book that the cure for TB is not only in medication but also in allocating resources and health care justly. Everything Is Tuberculosis memorably probes the intersections of medicine and human emotion, while sounding the alarm on this crisis.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

of the illness could lead to a cure. The book brings together tales of Big Pharma, academic colonialism, professional jealousy and medical ethics, all with the coincidental backdrop of the epicenter of an international drug war.

It also raises tough-to-answer questions. Should patients at the highest risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s be told of their genetic precondition? Is it moral for those patients to have children, knowing the risk of passing on the genes is high? What does the global medical community owe poor people who participate in clinical trials?

Two elements of the story stand out. First, the dedication with which the Colombian team has obsessively tracked and sought out new families over the course of decades, traipsing through militia-infested rural areas to add to their family trees and find new potential carriers. Second, the devotion of Smith herself, who has spent years inside the homes of both the patients and the researchers, and in exam rooms and other intimate spaces that give the author a stunning level of vivid firsthand detail.

Smith’s bright, crisp portraits of both the studiers and the studied make the various scientific stumbling blocks encountered along the way all the more upsetting. The Alzheimer’s community, after all, had pledged to find a cure by 2025.

—Stephen Elliott

The Last American Road Trip

By Sarah Kendzior

MEMOIR

There are moments when anthropologist and journalist Sarah Kendzior’s The Last American Road Trip (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250879882) feels like a mashup of William Least HeatMoon’s bestselling 1982 travelogue, Blue Highways, and National Lampoon’s Vacation. In truth, Kendzior’s memoir combines an elegiac account of her family travels with a frank political and cultural critique of the United States in the first quarter of the 21st century as, she argues, it “went from being a flawed democracy to a burgeoning autocracy.”

Despite her memoir’s title, Kendzior (The View From Flyover Country) doesn’t chronicle a single family trip, but instead offers a lovingly curated photo album in prose describing serial journeys “through a country falling apart” with her husband, daughter and son, now 17 and 14 years old. The book opens with a nighttime trip she and her husband take in a voyageur canoe from their St. Louis home down the Mississippi River and concludes with a

survey of American caves, from Missouri to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns.

Kendzior hopes to aid her children in constructing a sort of memory palace to preserve a sense of the country she believes is quickly disappearing. Beginning in 2016, they visited 38 states and 21 national parks, places whose physical beauty and emotional impact she captures. Among their stops are historically significant locations that include the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut; the site of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and multiple excursions along a once-mythic Route 66, now little more than the “faulty memory of a faded dream.” Other highlights include irreverent drop-ins at oddball tourist attractions like the World’s Largest Fork and World’s Largest Holstein Cow.

Kendzior readily confesses to an incurable wanderlust, but hers is infused with a sense that America has lost touch with its core values and a passion to keep them alive, if only in her offspring. “I love this country more than anyone I know,” she tells her daughter. “But you have to love it honestly.” If The Last American Road Trip doesn’t spark the urge to see more of America yourself, or if that yearning can’t be fulfilled, traveling with such an intelligent, perceptive guide isn’t a bad substitute.

—Harvey Freedenberg

H There Is No Place for Us

By Brian Goldstone

SOCIAL SCIENCES

One of the pervasive myths about people experiencing homelessness is that they refuse to work.

This paints them as freeloaders deserving of stigma, a notion that rationalizes our nation’s failure to address root causes of poverty: minimum-wage pay, rising rents, scant tenant protections and the inclusion of credit scores on rental applications. The reality is that many people—over 12 million, in fact—work multiple jobs and still cannot afford safe, stable housing. This complicated reality of homelessness is explored in There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown, $30, 9780593237144), a deep-dive work of reportage by Brian Goldstone. The Atlantabased journalist followed five families for several years as they struggled to keep a foothold. All of them lost stable housing because of lost jobs, car troubles, illness, rent hikes or landlords ending leases. They slept in their

cars, crashed on friends’ and family members’ floors and paid hard-earned money for downright scuzzy rooms in the extended stay hotels that have become a de facto replacement for affordable housing in Atlanta.

The families’ narratives compose the majority of this 400-plus page tome. Keeping track of their many names and experiences can get unwieldy, but Goldstone’s extensive experience reporting from the trenches is evident. Readers truly get a full picture of how many of the working poor are essentially trapped in homelessness. His forays into subjects like the history of Atlanta housing projects and how the structure of credit scores impacts housing add meat to the narrative.

There Is No Place for Us belongs on the shelf next to Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. In illustrating how homelessness is skyrocketing in the richest country in the world, Goldstone has accomplished an incredible feat that is a must-read for anyone with interest in social sciences, equity and one of the defining American crises of our time.

—Jessica Wakeman

Children of Radium

By Joe Dunthorne MEMOIR

Joe Dunthorne thought he knew the basic outlines of his great-grandparents’ story when he set out to write about his family’s history. Over the years, he had heard about their 1935 flight by car from Nazicontrolled Germany to a safer life in Turkey where other Jews had moved. In Ankara, his great-grandfather Siegfried Merzbacher worked as a chemist for the Turkish Red Crescent, similar to the Red Cross. His daughter, Dunthorne’s taciturn grandmother, usually ended the story there. After her death, her family archives led to surprising and disturbing discoveries that Dunthorne relates in his unusual and very readable memoir, Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance (Scribner, $28.99, 9781982180751).

The archives contained a trove of letters, diplomas, war medals, interviews conducted with his grandmother and a memoir by his great-grandfather. As Dunthorne picked up clues that led to more research, a picture emerged: Merzbacher worked in a laboratory in Oranienburg, Germany, where he produced radioactive items for the home, including a

very popular radioactive toothpaste. In the 1930s, he was given two other tasks: making and testing gas mask filters and developing a secret chemical weapons laboratory where he would be the director. He knew that making chemical weapons was a clear violation of the law, but was assured that the military did not plan to produce these chemicals; their development would make Germany prepared in case the need arose. He was advised to take the job because otherwise they might find another chemist “with fewer scruples.” As events unfolded, however, he became responsible for developing weapons for the Nazis. His role in creating weapons of war tormented him for the rest of his life.

As Dunthorne was exploring family history, his mother, quite by coincidence, was preparing the family’s application to reclaim German nationality as descendants of victims of Nazi persecution. They found themselves exchanging documents on subjects of mutual interest, and following their research findings is a compelling part of Children of Radium. A poet and novelist, Dunthorne’s careful attention to detail will hold the reader’s attention as he tries to determine what is true, partially true or false about his family’s past.

—Roger Bishop

H Let Only Red Flowers Bloom

By Emily Feng

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

The title of Emily Feng’s dazzling look at President Xi Jinping’s efforts to weed out diversity and instead establish a monocultural Chinese identity comes from a Hui Chinese Muslim man named Yusuf. “Let only red flowers bloom” is Yusuf’s ironic reference to a famous quote from Chairman Mao that, for a moment, opened a relaxation in ideological and cultural control.

As author Feng points out in Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China (Crown, $29, 9780593594223), Chinese government efforts to control thought and expression have ebbed and flowed since the Communists took control in 1949. We see that movement in her fascinating account of Yusuf’s discovery and nurturing of his religious identity. Unlike the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority physically distinctive enough that they can be monitored and controlled by facial recognition technology,

Yusuf and his family members are not physically distinct from the majority Han population. But Xi Jinping’s policies risk alienating the Hui people from their deeply integral role in Chinese identity and history as efforts large and small slowly but inexorably suppress Muslim communities. Yusuf himself has been driven into exile.

Yusuf’s is but one of a dozen riveting stories Feng tells here. The opening story is of Yang Bin, a brilliant prosecutor who feels ethically compelled to witness the execution of each person whose terminal conviction she has won. But when she decides to change sides and work for the defense—perhaps because of her conversion to Christianity—she falls into a world of surveillance and suppression. The final story is a chilling look at the Chinese government’s long reach into the Chinese diaspora, including Chinese American communities. In between are other stories of minorities, booksellers and legal activists being hounded and imprisoned. Feng, a correspondent for NPR, was based in Beijing until 2022 when the Chinese government refused to readmit her to the country, presumably because of her attentive coverage of the Hong Kong protests. Her writing here is concise yet replete with empathy, insight, context and narrative momentum. China is a nation with 55 recognized ethnic minorities and hundreds of local and regional dialects. “It is not,” writes Feng, “a monolith.” Let Only Red Flowers Bloom warns that to make it so will likely require wresting blood from stone.

—Alden Mudge

A Better Ending

By James Whitfield Thomson TRUE CRIME

“Heads is anger, tails is guilt.” A friend of James Whitfield Thomson used that phrase to explain how it felt to survive a loved one’s death by suicide.

Years later, Thomson experienced that grief firsthand after his sister Eileen’s death. During a fight with her husband, Eileen shot herself in the heart. Thomson was shocked. It was news to Thomson that his sister and her husband, Vic, had separated months earlier. Thomson confronted his brother-in-law to learn what happened the day of Eileen’s death, accepted his explanation and moved forward as best he could. Vic went his separate way.

But decades later, when Thomson began writing a novel based on his sister’s death, he was confronted by a possibility: What if Eileen hadn’t chosen to die? What if she’d been murdered?

In A Better Ending: A Brother’s TwentyYear Quest to Uncover the Truth About His Sister’s Death (Avid Reader, $28.99, 9781668062869), Thomson recounts the questions and research that drove his investigation. With help from a private eye, he interviewed numerous people who were close to Eileen. But their recollections don’t always neatly align, and Thomson is often left asking how reliable memory—including his own—can be.

Thomson’s research and curiosity propel A Better Ending, creating a true crime narrative thread that begs for resolution. He weaves the mysteries surrounding his sister’s death with his own self-examination, taking a clear-eyed approach to his shortcomings. Reexamining the circumstances that led to her death won’t bring Eileen back, Thomson knows. But as he pursues a better ending, he revisits the sister he knew and reckons with his own guilt, anger and memory.

—Carla Jean Whitley

Off the Spectrum

By Gina Rippon

PSYCHOLOGY

With the awareness of neurodivergent symptoms in women and nonbinary people increasing in online discussions, generations of people are coming to better understand themselves and their lives. But many wonder: If autism spectrum disorder is so prevalent in individuals assigned female at birth, where have they been all this time? Gina Rippon’s Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls (Seal, $30, 9781541605022) presents a comprehensive exploration of how gender-based scientific bias has erased autistic women from research, diagnosis and, ultimately, care. A cognitive neuroscientist, Rippon unpacks the history of autism studies, exposing how generations of researchers—including herself—have fixated on classifying autism as a “male disorder,” leaving countless people undiagnosed and unsupported.

Both scientifically rigorous and accessible, Off the Spectrum recounts case studies, research from other scientists and testimonies from autistic women, parents and teachers

alike as Rippon exposes how social attitudes toward gender lead to medical bias and educational barriers, to the detriment of children. Ultimately, Off the Spectrum leaves the reader with a hopeful outlook for the future, as awareness of autism beyond men and boys continues to grow. It’s an urgent read, necessary for parents, educators, doctors and, most importantly, autistic women and nonbinary people themselves who may gain solace and a sense of belonging from the text.

—Natalia Berry

In Blood, Flowers Bloom

By Samantha Bresnahan

HISTORY

To the victors go the spoils. It’s a rule as old as war itself. In her book, In Blood, Flowers Bloom: A World War II Story of Valor and Forgiveness Across Generations (Public Affairs, $30, 9781541702578), CNN International producer Samantha Bresnahan briefly speculates on the reasons why soldiers collect war trophies, but she is far more interested in the power of these souvenirs to promote peace, reconciliation and forgiveness.

It begins with the story of a silk Japanese flag. Once owned by a Japanese soldier killed on the Philippine island of Leyte in 1944, it was found in 2003 in a backyard shed near Buffalo, New York. In Blood, Flowers Bloom recounts how a network of Japanese and American men and women have worked tirelessly and without compensation to reunite mementos like this flag with the families of the fallen Japanese soldiers.

After the battle of Iwo Jima, Marty Connor came home with a duffel stuffed with souvenirs. Decades later, he began to question why he had brought all those letters, flags and swords home with him. First returning his own items, Connor went on to encourage other marines and their families to send their artifacts back to Japan. There are many heroes in this book besides Marty, on both sides of the Pacific, and Bresnahan does an excellent job piecing together the many aspects of this complex story of war, loss and memory. The returned items provide the expected closure and peace to the families receiving them. But the act of returning the souvenirs also helps heal the memories and trauma of the men who survived the war, allowing them to recognize the humanity of their former foes and opening a path to reconciliation.

—Deborah Mason

H Story of a Murder

By Hallie Rubenhold

TRUE CRIME

In a suburban London neighborhood on a cold night in February 1910, two women awoke to what sounded like two shots coming from the vicinity of their neighbor’s house. When the street went quiet, they decided it was merely a car backfiring, and returned to bed. The events of the next few months, however, made the denizens of Hilldrop Crescent take notice: the disappearance of the lady in number 39, a plump, good-natured former performer who loved entertaining in her home; the appearance of a dark-haired young woman none of the neighbors had ever seen before; the unusual amount of refuse that she and the vanished woman’s husband burned in the back garden. It must have made terrible sense when the police made a gruesome discovery in the cellar: chunks of skin, flesh and hair that turned up when the officers removed the brick flooring and dug their shovels into the earth.

In Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen (Dutton, $32, 9780593184615), author Hallie Rubenhold takes on another of England’s most notorious murder cases. For decades after the trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Le Neve for the murder of his wife, Belle Elmore, the public was fascinated by the disturbing murder, and romanticized the love affair between the two accused that sparked it all. Rubenhold strips away the fantasy to reveal what misogyny and sensationalized news have buried. Belle Elmore was loved and loving, far from the florid monster the media turned her into. Likewise, Ethel Le Neve was not remotely the demure, easily swayed woman in love she appeared to be. And, perhaps most shockingly, the unassuming, bespectacled Dr. Crippen had been married once before, to another woman who died suddenly in Salt Lake City in 1892. Belle Elmore overcame considerable challenges to lead an active, joyful life, while Ethel Le Neve displayed a greed, ruthlessness and cold cunning that still chills to the bone. As in The Five, in which Rubenhold chronicles the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, Story of a Murder masterfully reinvestigates an infamous case in a thoroughly modern way, revealing the women behind the gruesome headlines and restoring dignity to Belle Elmore.

—Anna Christensen

H The Ride

By Kostya Kennedy

AMERICAN HISTORY

Journalist and author Kostya Kennedy is best known for his books about sports, including biographies of Jackie Robinson and Pete Rose. With The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America

(St. Martin’s, $29, 9781250341372), Kennedy brings his clear prose and flair for play-by-play storytelling to unravel fact from legend in one of the best-known stories in American history: the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Timed just ahead of the 2026 semiquincentennial, Kennedy’s examination of American hero Paul Revere is informative, thoughtful and a welcome reminder that the fledgling nation’s independence was not at all guaranteed. Kennedy sets the stage by reminding us of the stakes in mid-April of 1775, asking readers to imagine what might have happened had Revere (and other midnight riders as well) not spread the word that British redcoats had marched out of Boston in search of munitions stored at Concord: “If not for that first morning of battle—of impudent, plucky, stunning, and world-shifting Patriot success—would the rebelling American army have continued to mobilize so confidently?”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem immortalized Revere’s ride; for many of us, that’s where our knowledge begins and ends. Kennedy takes time to delve behind the myth to paint an intimate portrait of Revere himself, a silversmith and dedicated revolutionary messenger. Enhanced by photographs and period illustrations, Kennedy’s brisk, well-researched narrative provides helpful historical context as well as information about other early revolutionaries including Revere’s friend, the underappreciated Dr. Joseph Warren, who sent both Revere and rider William Dawes out the night of April 18, 1775. (Speaking of unsung figures, Kennedy also includes mention of rider Samuel Prescott and an entire chapter on Dawes.)

From the distance of 250 years, it’s easy to forget these early patriots were real men and women, embarking on a dangerous, often controversial and uncertain enterprise. In the years to come, there will be many books about the American Revolution. But readers can’t go wrong beginning with The Ride. Because, in a way, it all began that night with Paul Revere.

—Deborah Hopkinson

In the Rhododendrons

By Heather Christle

MEMOIR

In her debut memoir, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin, $27, 9781643755922), poet and The Crying Book author Heather Christle reckons with her youth, her troubled relationship with her English mother and the ups and downs of early midlife, through the lens of the life and works of Virginia Woolf.

Christle grew up in New Hampshire with an English mother and American father. In 2018, now married with a child, Christle visited London with her mother and sister, and as they strolled through a suburban neighborhood, Christle’s mother pointed down an alley, saying this was the place she’d been molested as a girl. This unexpected revelation marked the beginning of Christle’s attempt to come to terms with an incident from her own youth that had reverberated into adulthood: At 14, she was sexually assaulted outside a London bar. At the time, she felt abandoned by her mother, who seemed not to care.

Over time, Christle writes in the book’s introduction, “I have learned to gather subjects through which I can perceive my mother indirectly, the way people will watch an eclipse through a pinhole camera so the sun cannot burn their eyes. The life of Virginia Woolf has proved to be an especially reliable space within which I can make my explorations.” Like Virginia Woolf, Christle’s mother spent years living near Kew Gardens in London, and the two women’s “biographies overlap at certain points of shared suffering.” In 2018, Christle begins a series of pilgrimages, tracing the settings of Virginia Woolf’s life and writing, as well as her mother’s paths. During the years Christle wrote this memoir, her life went on, bumpily: She took a teaching job in a new city, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, a friend died by suicide—and the memoir recounts these events too.

Christle writes with a poet’s close attention to language and nature, precisely recording her thoughts and emotions throughout, which can sometimes feel a little claustrophobic. Still, In the Rhododendrons is a meditative and often beautiful narrative, a reminder that the experiences and words of the writers we love can illuminate our own lives.

—Sarah McCraw

Crow

H Hunger’s Bite

By Taylor Robin GRAPHIC NOVEL

Emery and Neeta grew up together aboard the SS Lark, a cruise ship voyaging around the world. Now Emery, the captain’s son, hopes to become captain himself, while Neeta, one of the captain’s wards, dreams of exploring the world on her own. But their plans are interrupted when the ship’s new owner, Mr. Honeycutt, joins their latest voyage. Strange things start happening: First-class travelers grow aggressive, and the crew seems more exhausted than usual. When a mysterious passenger named Warwick Farley reveals that he’s not only a vampire, but also a supernatural secret agent, Emery and Neeta start to realize they’re up against something more sinister than anything they could’ve imagined.

The incredibly atmospheric Hunger’s Bite (Union Square, $24.99, 9781454950240) transports readers to the deck of a cruise ship

I Am the Swarm

By Hayley Chewins

FANTASY

Every girl in the Strand family knows their magic will come when they turn 15 years old. It happened to Nell’s mother, causing her age to fluctuate day by day: Sometimes she’s a reliable adult, while at other times she’s a moody teen. For Nell’s older sister, Mora, magic comes in the form of beautiful music that pours from her veins, leading her to self-harm. When the insects appear after she turns 15, Nell isn’t surprised. Ladybugs as she plays piano, stick insects during difficult conversations, wasps that match a surge of her anger—the insects become part of Nell. As the start of Grade 10 looms, magic becomes another burden that Nell must carry—as if being a teenage girl, putting up with her piano teacher’s leering glances and understanding her own changing body aren’t hard enough.

Told in intense verse, I Am the Swarm (Viking, $19.99, 9780593623862) dives deep into the adolescent experience, unafraid to tackle difficult topics like self-harm, sexual harassment and parental neglect. Readers come into contact with these tough realities

sailing during the time of the Titanic. From the high-class dining rooms to the cramped crew’s quarters, Taylor Robin’s vivid, colorful illustrations bring the social dynamics and the uncanniness of these spaces to life. His expressive illustration style captures both humor and horror expertly: Heartwarming banter can turn into cold-blooded chills in just a few panels.

These vibrant illustrations support a bold plot that manages to integrate socioeconomic inequality and supernatural horror into the anxious transition from youth to adulthood. Mr. Honeycutt’s arrival is the origin of mysteries as well as a catalyst for change, forcing Emery and

through Nell’s innermost thoughts. Her words, which initially appear straightforward and even meager, hide deep emotion and potent questions bubbling underneath.

Through creative forms of magic, author Hayley Chewins challenges the notion that feelings are unimportant. In their attempts to understand and control their magic, characters demonstrate different ways of dealing with emotions—some devastating, some healthy.

I Am the Swarm packs a range of emotional experiences into smooth, simple verses. With a compelling, original depiction of inherited magic, this book is sure to resonate with those seeking thoughtful speculative fiction.

—Tami Orendain

The House No One Sees

By Adina King

COMING OF AGE

Once upon a time, there was a little doll who lived in a house perched on the corner of a busy street with bright lights. The road was so busy and the lights so bright that no one could see the house. The doll lived with a princess who slept and slept and almost never woke up. The doll tried to wake the sleeping princess, but once the princess

Neeta to navigate facing difficult truths about their world. The SS Lark is no longer a playground as, suddenly, they see classbased disparities that exist even in their personal relationships. The mysterious and endearing Warwick challenges even more of their beliefs.

As Emery and Neeta find themselves having different plans for the future, they must come to terms with the fact that growing up could mean growing apart. What does that mean for their relationship?

Scary and hilarious all at once, Hunger’s Bite is an intense and charming graphic novel perfect for readers seeking an emotionally charged supernatural mystery.

—Tami Orendain

opened her eyes, she called the little doll terrible names. The little doll ran away and found a new version of home. But some part of her remained, buried deep in the foundation of the house that no one saw.

The doll is really Penelope Ross, a 16-yearold girl contending with a childhood spent in the trenches of her mother’s drug addiction. On the night of her 16th birthday, surrounded by friends, Penny is finally feeling a sense of normalcy—until the sleeping princess sends a text, summoning her back home.

Adina King’s debut novel, The House No One Sees (Feiwel & Friends, 19.99, 9781250337191), depicts a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief and must subsequently learn the art of both deconstructing and reconstructing her life. Written in a hybrid of verse and prose, Penny’s story comes in nonlinear pieces. In the present, Penny navigates her way through the house and a flood of memories, while the details of her past are filtered through poems. Though King’s metaphors occasionally become muddled, this figurative exploration of the effects of parental drug addiction is brilliant. After all, trauma and its aftermath is not usually a legible experience: It exists in the margins of a life, coloring everything contained in between. The House No One Sees is not a perfect book, but it is an important one that might offer a guiding light to countless other little dolls.

—Mariel Fechik

For a rainy day

Stay in during April showers with these four poignant and contemplative middle grade graphic novels .

H Crumble

Emily, her mom and her aunt Gina are more than just bakery owners: They can literally bake their emotions into their treats. A cannoli gives contentment, a steamed cheesecake provides relief. Emily’s mom is a traveling lecturer, while Emily and Aunt Gina hold down the business, making new goodies with the help of Emily’s best friend, Dae.

When Aunt Gina dies in an accident, Emily goes to drastic measures to not feel devastating sadness, and breaks her family’s one rule: Do not bake with negative emotions. The resulting “crumble” is horrible tasting, but her classmates can’t seem to get enough, and Emily can’t seem to stop baking it to feel temporary numbness.

The recipe for Crumble (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9781523530687) incorporates author Meredith McClaren (who has also worked as an artist on titles like the Eisner-nominated Black Cloak) and illustrator Andrea Bell—plus equal parts love and heartbreak. Bell’s illustrations have a video game quality, which makes the tragedy startling against the backdrop of such a bright and colorful world. The concept is unique and poignant, and characters such as the nonbinary Dae are thoughtfully portrayed. Back matter provides resources for anyone experiencing a hard time, and inspired bakers will find a plethora of delicious recipes throughout that they can try in real life.

How to Talk to Your Succulent

After 11-year-old Adara’s mom dies, there are a lot of things she doesn’t understand—first of which is why her dad is moving them from sunny California to freezing Michigan. And why doesn’t he seem to want to spend any time with Adara? She also never understood why everyone said her mom could talk to plants. That is, until one day her new succulent says “heeeelllooooo” to her. Now she has Perle and a plethora of her mom’s plants to talk to, but Adara’s going to have to learn that being a good friend means listening, too.

How to Talk to Your Succulent (Tundra, $13.99, 9781774883143) is Zoe Persico’s first graphic novel, but she has contributed her vibrant illustrations to other children’s books such as Greta and the Giants The color palette throughout is beautiful, and the visual metaphor of anxieties as red, thorny vines growing out of Adara and Perle’s backs is powerful. All the characters, human and plant alike, are endearing, but Adara’s new friend Winnie shines as an accepting person who also enforces boundaries and stands up for herself. Instructions on how to propagate succulents will delight horticulturalists. This emotional and stunning graphic novel will root deep in hearts and inspire readers to listen to even the quietest of voices.

H A Song for You and I

If Rowan passes their ranger test, they’ll have to carve their name into an ancient doorway alongside those of all past pegasus rangers. But they’re worried that they will have to carve a name that they no longer use: a name that isn’t “Rowan.” After a rash decision endangers their pegasus, Rowan is reassigned to the slower, less glamorous task of helping a violin-playing sheep herder, Leone, with wool deliveries. Leone’s own nonconformity starts Rowan on a personal journey that requires as much bravery as becoming a ranger.

Eisner Award-winner K. O’Neill always delivers tender, introspective narratives accompanied by breathtaking illustrations, and A Song for You and I (Random House, $21.99, 9780593182314) is no exception. Dialogue is effectively spare throughout this graphic novel, with long stretches of pages that feature only panels of beautiful scenery or expressive depictions of the protagonists. Even without O’Neill’s lovely letter to readers in the front matter, the gentleness with which they approach the topic of identity in A Song for You and I gives the story a deeply personal feel. All that anyone wants is to be taken at their word, especially when it comes to trying to express who they are. Leone proves that they will do that for Rowan, just as O’Neill promises to do that for readers of A Song for You and I

Sea Legs

Janey may be the only fourth grader who wants to go to school on her birthday . . . because normally she’s homeschooled by her mom, while her family sails around the Bahamas and Virgin Islands. Life on her parents’ handcrafted boat is an adventure, but Janey rarely comes across other kids her age. When her family is temporarily harbored, and she spots Astrid on another boat, she is ecstatic. Astrid is unfathomably cool and daring, but her moods are as unpredictable as the sea. Is this really the friendship Janey’s been craving?

Both funny and intense, Sea Legs (Graphix, $24.99, 9781338835885) is illustrated by Niki Smith (The Golden Hour and The Deep & Dark Blue), who teams up with debut author Jules Bakes, whose uncommon childhood growing up on a boat provided the basis for this graphic novel. Smith’s art accurately reflects the eclectic nature of the story, with lively illustrations that switch from comical expressions that convey Janey’s humor, to more serious moments involving sudden uses of red, like in Astrid’s pupils when the tension of her home life becomes apparent. Life at sea is complex, and Bakes and Smith—lifelong friends who met after the events that inspired the book—lovingly depict it as both a privilege and a burden. The valuable portrayal of a complicated friendship makes Sea Legs relatable to any landlocked reader.

—Emily Koch

reviews | children’s

H Stalactite & Stalagmite

By Drew Beckmeyer

PICTURE BOOK

Two charming anthropomorphic nubs of cave rock take center stage in Drew Beckmeyer’s Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave (Atheneum, $19.99, 9781665926638), a superbly funny and profound introduction to the history of the world thus far.

Beckmeyer is an elementary school teacher known for imaginative books like The First Week of School, and Stalactite & Stalagmite does not disappoint. His titular mineral formations are a pointy practicalminded fellow who hangs from the ceiling and a squat little dreamer-philosopher who rises from the cave floor. Together, the duo have amusing chats, host a variety of animal visitors and bear witness to millions of years

H Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend

By Bob Shea

PICTURE BOOK

I Am a Baby author-illustrator

Bob Shea splashes back onto the shelf with Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend (Abrams, $19.99, 9781419771552), a hilarious and fun story of friendship. A turtle meets a bear—but, wait, is it a bear? After all, the turtle is a bear expert, and this bear doesn’t seem to be doing very bear-like things. Upon quizzing their new friend, the turtle considers that maybe they were wrong, and the bear is truly a bear . . . except the “bear” can’t live these lies any longer. They’re actually a turtle in a bear suit, and they lied to their new friend. Can the friendship survive this deception?

Sometimes, a book is simply joyous and funny, and Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend is one such book. Shea, an Eisner Award nominee and the designer of the PBS Kids logo, understands the power of subversive humor and honest truth. Combining the two makes the first of this new series a laugh-outloud romp that won’t just have kids giggling: It will have them begging for a reread.

of earthly transformation as viewed through their picture window-esque cave entrance.

And oh, the changes they see! Inside the cave, an Ichthyostega (“kind of like a fish mixed with a frog”) with appealingly buggy eyes and bright green skin wraps the stalagmite in a friendly hug. It heralds the arrival of new creatures, too, being “one of the first animals that could walk on land and swim in the water.” Outside, the Cretaceous Extinction meteor shower creates a breathtaking backdrop for a poignant portrait of a red-dotted triceratops mesmerized by “dazzling lights flying across the sky.”

As the epochs and eras roll along, the dripping of the mineral-infused water that formed the nubs remains as steady and enduring as their friendship. Whether shooing

Shea’s spare, colorful art and conversational text work in perfect unison. Simple swooping lines expertly convey the movement of the two turtle friends. Real turtles might not have eyebrows, but Shea’s turtles make excellent use of theirs.

Fans of Jon Klassen, Mac Barnett and Mo Willems will fall in love with Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend. This is a must for librarians, teachers and parents looking for a delightful read-aloud to add to their collection. More, please!

—Nicole Brinkley

H Whale Eyes

By James Robinson Illustrated by Brian Rea MIDDLE GRADE

Young documentary filmmaker James Robinson was born with strabismus— misaligned eyes. Although his vision is 20-20, his brain doesn’t fuse the images it receives from each eye. As a result, as he writes, “Since each eye sees a slightly different view, every time my brain switches between eyes, it looks like my entire world jumps.” Inspired by his short film of the same name, Robinson’s Whale Eyes

away a bat that rudely hangs from the stalactite’s tip or asking each other, “If you had arms, what would you draw?” the chatty duo’s conversations punctuate the inexorable passage of time with humor and sweetness. There is trepidation as the day they merge into a stalagnate (also known as a column) looms large. “I don’t know what I will be when we are us and I am not me anymore,” the stalagmite says. “Maybe becoming the us is where our story really starts,” the stalactite posits. It’s an affecting, thought-provoking exchange in a book filled with opportunities for readers to ponder the wonder and beauty of our world—and the loveliness of having a trusted companion through it all.

—Linda M. Castellitto

(Penguin, $18.99, 9780593523957) is an exceptionally well-done memoir about how he perceives and navigates the world, and the difficult stares he often receives.

Robinson immediately draws readers in by showing them how he sees: He instructs them to try exercises that require twisting the book, holding it upside down, reading backwards and flipping pages to let them experience afterimages. As for the catchy, apt title, Robinson explains, “We love looking at whales. And yet none of us have ever questioned the fact that we can look into only one of their eyes at a time. It felt as if the whales were afforded the acceptance that I was seeking.”

When Robinson was in school, reading seemed particularly impossible, and he vividly describes his classroom frustration and survival strategies. As his eyes grew further apart, he felt increasingly stared at: “Sometimes the stares feel like a thousand little pokes.” Luckily, Robinson had extraordinary family support and encouragement, especially from his mother, who put her career on hold to help Robinson and his brother, who has dyslexia. Robinson’s prose is conversational and seemingly light, yet it will leave readers with plenty of substance to ponder. The layout is often fun and always pleasing to the eye— plenty of white space and an easy-to-read font, as one might expect. Colorful illustrations from Brian Rea add to the book’s appeal and readability. Whale Eyes is a superb memoir

that champions empathy and understanding on every level.

—Alice Cary

H Alberto Salas Plays Paka Paka con la Papa

By Sara A. Fajardo

Illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal

PICTURE BOOK

Alberto Salas Plays Paka Paka con la Papa (Roaring Brook, $19.99, 9781250838612) tells the inspiring story of real-life Peruvian conservation scientist Alberto Salas, now in his 80s, who identified and conserved more than 60% of the potato (“papa”) collection now stored at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. His important contributions preserve vital specimens of plant diversity, helping farmers and families around the world.

Paka paka means “hide and seek” in Quechua, an Indigenous language in Peru, and the book illustrates how Salas used many of the games and skills he learned as a child to enhance his plant-collecting superpowers. Sara A. Fajardo’s informative, playful text vividly showcases Salas’ adventures: This is both an epic quest and a serious game, and Salas’ ingenuity, determination and spirit sparkle on every page as he uses eagle-eyed observations to map “the potato constellation.” Fajardo seamlessly interweaves Spanish and Quechuan phrases into the text (a glossary appears later) while highlighting the scientist’s plant-finding skills in places that vary from the peak of a remote mountain to the middle of a city zoo.

Both Fajardo and illustrator Juana MartinezNeal have Peruvian heritage, and both have personally observed Salas’ work, lending extraordinary enthusiasm and authenticity to this book. Martinez-Neal, who received a Caldecott Honor for Alma and How She Got Her Name, depicts Salas as a lovable, balding, ruddy-nosed character who has his head in the clouds in the very best way, while coated in a patina of potato dirt. Earthy browns and sunshine yellows are pronounced throughout, and mixed media collages impart texture and grit on each and every page, whether showing tuber roots intertwining beneath the soil or Salas delicately wrapping a mountain specimen to transport it to the Potato Center. This tribute to a contemporary figure will no doubt strike a chord with young readers.

Extensive back matter further enriches Salas’ story. Alberto Salas Plays Paka Paka con la Papa is not to be missed and may have readers gazing at potatoes in an entirely new light.

—Alice Cary

The Couch in the Yard

By Kate Hoefler Illustrated by Dena Seiferling PICTURE BOOK

In The Couch in the Yard (Neal Porter, $18.99, 9780823456758), Kate Hoefler uses gentle, rhyming verse to introduce an Appalachian family that takes a magical journey each night, when they load the old couch that sits in their yard onto the roof of their rusty station wagon and set out for a drive. It’s a soothing, inspiring tale for preschoolers and young elementary students, offering a glimpse of mountain life as well as an appreciation for overlooked beauty in things often discarded.

Dena Seiferling’s moody illustrations set the stage beautifully, showing the family’s cabin-like home high in the hills, with their beloved dog, couch and car in a front yard full of long grasses and wildflowers. A grandmother sits on the front porch while chickens roam, and a baby plays near tools and car parts. Meanwhile, a mother tinkers with the clunker of a car, getting it running. As dusk settles in, with “the sky pink as a petal,” the mom and her three kids pile into the car and drive off, passing a school bus sitting in a neighbor’s yard as a whistling train rumbles across the hollow. Suddenly, however, a tire pops, seemingly bringing this adventure to an end.

These scenes unfold like a movie, showcasing the beauty of a landscape dotted with aged, beloved objects. Darkness falls, and Seiferling depicts glorious, pitch-black sequences lit only by stars and the car’s headlights. Like an Appalachian Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the car rises into the sky, flying with the couch on its roof, transporting this family to—where else—the moon! In an ethereal spread, the travelers sit on their couch, with front-row seats to “a moon that is wondrous, that will never break: This is the shine that nothing can take.”

The Couch in the Yard takes readers on an unforgettable adventure that focuses on the wonder and transportive beauty that

surrounds us, and the joys to be found in old, treasured things.

—Alice Cary

H Faith Takes the Train

By Kesi Augustine Illustrated by Mokshini

PICTURE BOOK

Faith is used to riding the train back from Grandma’s house. She always sees the same commuters, hears the same musicians, walks through the same stations. But when Faith one day shares her sandwich with a hungry friend, the “same old” becomes a little bit more wondrous. Written by Kesi Augustine and illustrated by Mokshini, Faith Takes the Train (HarperCollins, $19.99, 9780063251342) turns a sandwich and a subway into an unpretentious and sweet story of kindness and compassion.

Faith Takes the Train is narrated in first person, which lets us into Faith’s inner thoughts as she undergoes her journey, making for a story that is reflective, observant and even a little silly in turns. Augustine makes fruitful use of alliteration, keeping Faith’s voice childlike while also making for an easy read-aloud. One of this picture book’s best aspects is how it manages to be sweet and earnest without being overly sentimental or heavy-handed. Faith Takes the Train is full of a child’s open-hearted innocence and joy at sharing and helping others. Adults and older readers will appreciate the deeper layers to the narrative that address societal issues such as homelessness and charity, which underscore a broader, simpler lesson of being kind to those around us.

Mokshini’s art is bold and colorful, illustrating not only Faith’s journey but also life in a fascinating New York community. Crowded and bustling, every image tells countless stories. Mokshini fills each page with personality and detail (don’t miss the mouse with a suitcase), and the result is a world that feels exciting and alive, seen from up close. There’s a timeless, distinctly New York feel to the black outlines of Mokshini’s characters that is particularly visually appealing.

Despite all the hustle and bustle it portrays, Faith Takes the Train retains a sense of calm and safety, which makes for an excellent bedtime story. Faith Takes the Train gently reminds us that sometimes kindness is as simple

as a sandwich, uplifting even those among us who are most prone to getting bogged down by the woes and complexity of the world.

—Jill Lorenzini

H A Book of Maps for You

By Lourdes Heuer

Illustrated by Maxwell Eaton III PICTURE BOOK

Moving can be hard on kids, due to not only leaving a beloved house and town behind, but also becoming a newcomer faced with navigating a new home. This is something

the young, unnamed narrator of Lourdes Heuer’s delightful new picture book, A Book of Maps for You (Neal Porter, $18.99, 9780823455706), knows firsthand.

As the story opens, we see him hard at work in a mostly empty attic room, creating the special titular book for the house’s next occupants. The text begins simply, “I made a book of maps.” What follows is a colorful, annotated tour guide that highlights some of the young artist’s favorite places, including the orange groves near Blossom Lane in spring and the house on the corner of Pip Street that goes all out on Halloween. Maxwell Eaton III’s bright, cartoon-inspired art captures the people and events that comprise the home this mapmaker is leaving behind. The book is full of engaging elements that paint a picture of a vibrant, diverse community. We see kids playing in the park, meet mottled ducks named Doris and Duncan, and get a recommendation for the best cafeteria lunch at school. There’s also a guide to the busy shops lining Main Street, which include a bookstore, a patisserie and Mrs. Chang’s art supply store (clearly a special favorite).

There’s a sweet poignancy to the story’s final pages, as the maps move from the school and town to a depiction of the young artist’s home. We return once again to the attic room of the first spread to glimpse what it was like before packing—art on the wall and a bed placed to get the best view of the stars. The book’s final pages introduce us to the house’s new resident, poring over this generous gift. Readers will delight in the small, often humorous details of Heuer and Eaton’s ingenious creation. A Book of Maps for You is the kind of story that will follow you wherever you go.

—Deborah Hopkinson

meet REGINA LINKE

Regina Linke is a Taiwanese American artist specializing in contemporary Chinese gongbi painting, an ancient form of brush painting that depicts narrative subjects in colorful high detail. She writes and illustrates stories that celebrate East Asian folklore and philosophy in an accessible and modern way. In Big Enough (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316531153), Ah-Fu has to fetch his family’s ox from the woods. Will he be able to overcome his self-doubts on the way?

© REGINA LINKE

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