June 2025 BookPage

H E R E

C O M E S

THE S U N HERE CO M ES SUN

12 terrific titles to take on your summer adventures, plus interviews with Ocean Vuong, Amal El-Mohtar and Barbara Demick.

COVER STORY | SUMMER READING

12 terrific titles for long days and warm nights.

FEATURES

q&a | amal el-mohtar

The audiobook of The River Has Roots features some extra magic: original music performed by the author.

interview | melissa febos

How the memoirist fell in love with her divine creative spark during a year of celibacy.

interview | ocean vuong

The author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous breaks new ground with his sophomore novel.

feature | pride

Check out a rainbow of celebratory reads across genres.

q&a | barbara demick

China’s one-child policy separated a pair of twin toddlers. Decades later, this veteran journalist reunited them.

feature | world war ii stories

Two books illuminate the life of groundbreaking but little known World War II-era sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

feature | juneteenth

These impactful picture books will guide readers of all ages through the history of Juneteenth.

q&a | kyle lukoff

The protagonist of the author’s latest middle grade novel finds help in the unlikeliest of places: the trash.

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COLUMNS

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REVIEWS

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With a Vengeance

A train is a pretty perfect setting for a locked-room mystery, as evidenced by the number of noir novels (and their famous film adaptations) employing the premise: Strangers on a Train and Murder on the Orient Express, to cite two examples off the top of my head. A tale of revenge taking an unexpectedly lethal turn aboard a nonstop night train, Riley Sager’s With a Vengeance (Dutton, $30, 9780593472408) hews to that genre faithfully. The date is 1954, and the train is bound for Chicago from Philly, a 13-hour trip. Lured aboard under false pretenses, the passengers are set to be delivered to the authorities in the Windy City. The unassailable proof of their misdeeds will send them to prison for years, exacting revenge for their having destroyed the family of wealthy transportation magnate Arthur Matheson. His daughter, Anna, is the last family member standing. She organized the subterfuge and is on the train, looking forward to being on hand when her adversaries receive their just deserts. And then things begin to go pear-shaped. First one person turns up dead by unnatural causes, then another. This was never Anna’s plan; she wanted each to live out a long life in prison, knowing that they had been bested by a young woman whose resources they had vastly underestimated. Oh, and a gun, previously in the hands of one of the good guys, has gone missing. To paraphrase Chekhov (the author, not the Star Trek character): If you’re gonna introduce a gun in an early chapter, it’s gonna have to get fired later on. Suffice it to say, it’s gonna get fired. The pacing is relentless, the plotting Agatha Christie-esque and the cinematic feel is worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock. My suggestion is that if this book is to be adapted for the silver screen, it must be rendered in black and white . . .

The Ascent

As Allison Buccola’s The Ascent (Random House, $29, 9780593730003) opens, first-time mom Lee is being more than a bit overprotective of her infant daughter. If you know Lee’s backstory, this becomes very understandable: Some 20 years back, 12-yearold Lee was the sole remaining member of a small cult outside Philadelphia that vanished off the face of the earth. With the help of the aunt who raised her from that point forward, Lee changed her name in hopes of eluding the phalanx of journalists who remain obsessed with the cult, even all these years later. She has never even confided to her husband about her earlier life. But now, the walls are closing in. A young woman claiming to be Lee’s longlost younger sister has shown up on her doorstep, in possession of facts that suggest she may be telling the truth, but something indefinable is off about her. The presence of her sister (?) is causing a serious rift between Lee and her husband. And then there’s a dogged journalist, motivated by a TV miniseries about the cult. Is she a friend or an oppressor, seeking lurid details thus far unrevealed? The Ascent is a parable

for these days, where cults and conspiracy theories abound, where loyalties shift seemingly on a whim and it is all documented automatically—if not always factually—on social media.

Women Like Us

Joni Ackerman, Katia Lief’s protagonist in Women Like Us (Atlantic Monthly, $27, 9780802164926), is a rather unusual one in that—spoilers for Lief’s Invisible Woman—she poisoned her husband by pouring radiator coolant into his mixed drink and was then able to pass it off to the authorities as a suicide. Not that the husband was entirely undeserving, necessarily, but still. Some years have passed, and Joni has resumed a more or less normal existence. And then her ne’er-do-well estranged brother, Marc, shows up unannounced, backpack in hand, clearly intending to sponge off his tolerant sis for a while. That all quickly turns sour when he is exposed as a grifter who married for money under a false name, absconded with some of the spoils and is now on the run. There is nobody in this story who is exactly lovable, nobody you will be rooting for without some qualms, but even the shady characters are somewhat relatable, if also richly deserving of some comeuppance. Women Like Us is a thoroughly original book, full of characters you will love to loathe, and there is a significant amount of satisfaction to be had from the ending for all you fans of poetic justice.

The Surf House

“Surf noir” is arguably one of the most under-the-radar subgenres of suspense fiction. Author Kem Nunn is widely regarded as having founded surf noir with his 1984 masterpiece, Tapping the Source, but others have jumped on board since then, most notably Tim Winton and Don Winslow. The latest entrant to the fold, Lucy Clarke, takes a markedly different approach, eschewing California beaches for the Atlantic coast of Morocco with her gripping The Surf House (Atlantic Monthly, $28, 9780802166456). The premise is not dissimilar to that of Nunn’s Tapping the Source: A woman has gone missing and was last seen in a surfers’ enclave; things take a turn toward the dark side. But from that starting point, the narrative follows a markedly different path, one that winds through the starlit Sahara desert and a labyrinthine Marrakech souk, with its ill-concealed perils for newbies, and ends at the iconic rogue waves of the African Atlantic coast. Two storylines following different young women take place a year apart, overlapping in unexpected ways. Chapters alternate between the two, the points of connection being a sun-drenched bedand-breakfast (the titular Surf House) atop a seaside cliff and its sketchy surfhound denizens of both then and now. A supporting cast of misfits—some likable, others decidedly less so—does nothing whatsoever to relieve the apprehension, either for the two young women or for the reader. The Surf House is a certified page-turner from prologue to Big Reveal.

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.

lifestyles

by laura hutson hunter

Wild Dyeing

With Wild Dyeing: From the Garden to Color—An Introduction to Natural Vegetable Dyes (Rizzoli, $35, 9780847845460), Céline Philippe provides both a beginner’s guide to plantbased dyeing and an accessible study of the science of the craft. She breaks down complicated chemistry, like how the aluminum content and the pH of any given plant will affect its ability to dye. At the same time, her instructions for making dyes are as straightforward and easy-to-grasp as you can get. A section called “The Quest for Colors” functions a little like a cookbook, with recipes for how to create specific dyes. Wild Dyeing is also a kind of botanical dictionary, with beautiful photographs of flowers and plants that will inspire readers of all kinds, from professionals to the dye-curious.

Garlic, Olive Oil + Everything Mediterranean

With Garlic, Olive Oil + Everything Mediterranean: Simple Recipes for the Home Cook (Simon Element, $28.99, 9781668074961), Melbourne-based cook Daen Lia pares cooking down to the most essential of ingredients: garlic, olive oil and whatever is fresh. “Growing up with a Spanish-Italian mum, olive oil ran through our veins and garlic seeped through our pores. We didn’t spread butter onto our breakfast toast, we fried the bread in olive oil.” That uncomplicated, lived-in approach to cooking is the backbone of this freeing collection of Mediterraneanbased recipes, including one for Lia’s mother’s beloved fish soup, which she teasingly says will cure any ailment “from tonsillitis to a broken heart.” Of her focaccia recipe, Lia writes: “If there was one recipe I could dedicate to all the olive oil fans out there, it would be this one.” If you count yourself among those fans, this book will be indispensable.

Blow Up!

If you’ve ever been curious about the history of contemporary art, there’s no better introduction than Blow Up! The Explosion of Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, $24.95, 9780500027981). This graphic novel by writer Robert Shore and illustrator Eva Rossetti collects the biggest milestones in contemporary art into a comic book primer with a straightforward narrative. It begins with the 1917 scandal concerning Marcel Duchamp’s repurposed porcelain urinal, which sets off a chain of events that carries through 2019, when Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a gallery wall. Shore and Rossetti introduce readers to some of contemporary art’s biggest players: Yayoi Kusama, Kara Walker and the Guerrilla Girls, among them. For those unfamiliar with contemporary art, Blow Up! provides a thorough and authoritative background. But even if you’re an expert, there’s plenty to love.

romance by christie ridgway

H Rules for Ruin

A determined heroine finds love in Victorian London in Rules for Ruin (Berkley, $19, 9780593639290) by Mimi Matthews. Raised in a charity home that trains its charges to combat the patriarchy, orphan Euphemia “Effie” Flite infiltrates aristocratic society to bring down a conservative politician. There, she meets Gabriel Royce, a powerful betting shop owner from the slums. He has reason to protect the very same politician, putting him and Effie at immediate odds. And yet, Effie and Gabriel’s attraction for and understanding of each other cannot be ignored. This fascinating romance explores not only class prejudices but also how women of the time were repressed and how they managed to rebel—all within the frame of an imaginative plot peppered with passionate kisses. The first installment of the Crinoline Academy series, Rules for Ruin is an original idea brilliantly executed.

Roommating

If you find libraries and love stories soul-nourishing, you’ll swoon over Meredith Schorr’s Roommating (Forever, $17.99, 9781538758267), in which two NYC 20-somethings fall in love between library stacks and within the walls of their shared apartment. Grad student Sabrina Finkelstein adores her older roommate, Marcia, and is happy to hear she’s invited her estranged grandson, Adam Haber, for an extended visit. But when he turns out to be smart, charming and hot, Sabrina’s world turns upside down. She had it all figured out, but now Adam is making her rethink her single status and what she wants for her future. Told in Sabrina’s fresh voice with plenty of pop culture and book references, this love story has snappy dialogue and more than one character who readers will want as friends.

Along Came Amor

Though a passionate, romantic rich guy is many people’s dream man, heroine Ava Rodriguez in Alexis Daria’s Along Came Amor (Avon, $18.99, 9780062960009) is postdivorce and particularly relationship-shy. But a one-night stand with an intriguing charmer proves irresistible. And then, one night proves to not be enough: Successful hotel CEO Roman Vázquez thought he was content to settle for booty calls, but he has to have more of Ava. Things get complicated as she deals with her growing feelings for him, her demanding family and a wedding she’s planning for her cousin. Family drama erupts, sizzling love scenes abound and readers will be ready to shake Ava into realizing she needs to think of herself first for once. Roman might be obsessed with his job, but he’s ready to change to have Ava, proving him to be the best kind of hero: one who listens as well as loves. This is the third and final entry in Daria’s Primas of Power trilogy, and it’s delightful to see all the happy endings come to fruition through glimpses of the characters’ rosy futures.

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

Q1: You made yourself into a prolific writer with a worldwide audience. What first motivated you to share your stories with the world?

Looking back, I’d say I chose to publish because I had nothing to lose. I am an attorney by training, but I never enjoyed the work. Reading was my favorite escape. After writing my first book, I figured I might as well see if anyone else liked my stories as much as I did such that I could leave my legal job behind. I ended up quitting my day job well before I was making money as an author because I’d found my passion. A few years later and all my hard work has paid off!

Q2: What made you choose the indie publishing route, and how has that decision shaped your success?

I’d always heard agonizing stories about authors in search of a traditional publishing deal spending years getting rejections from agents. While the probability of repeated rejections was daunting, it was my inherent impatience that made my decision for me. I wrote my first book at age forty and didn’t feel like I had a decade to sit around and wait for someone to give my books a chance. I believed in my writing and decided to invest in myself, and I’m so glad I did!

Q3: Many authors dream of seeing their book in bookstores and libraries. What does it feel like to see that come to life?

Oddly enough, I try not to think about the success of my books because it can be overwhelming. I’ve struggled with panic attacks since I was a teen and have found the pressure of expectations can be triggering. What I prefer to focus on is the incredible feeling of providing for my family by doing the job that I love. I get to keep my own schedule, work in my pajamas, and still get to treat my family to the occasional travel excursion—for me, that is the epitome of fulfillment.

Q4: What do you love about your readers?

My readers are exceptional in every way—their generosity of praise over my work, their compassion

Author of Three Runaway Hit TitkTok Series

and understanding when it comes to my writing schedule, and their voracious enthusiasm about the world of characters I’ve built are just some of the ways my readers bring me joy every single day. I can tell that my readers genuinely appreciate the effort I put into crafting each book, and that makes every second of the sometimes grueling endeavor worthwhile.

Q5: What should new readers expect to find in your ever-growing list of hits?

People are creatures of habit. We like what we like, and we want more of what we like because we like it. It’s important to me to give my readers more of what they love. They read my books for a reason, and I plan to reward them with more possessive alphas, confident yet vulnerable heroines, sizzling slow burn tension, and plot lines that keep them guessing. For now, that means more spin-off series branching into other family units in my mafia world, and possibly, one day, exploring a next-generation series of books spotlighting our favorite characters’ grown children.

BOOKS IN STYLE

JUNE 10

JUNE 24

Tune in for the newest nail-biting novels from your favorite bestselling authors .

JUNE 2

The First Gentleman

By James Patterson and Bill Clinton Little, Brown, $32, 9780316565103

In this political thriller, a president’s reelection campaign is threatened when her husband, a burly former NFL star, is tried for murder.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

By V. E. Schwab

Tor, $29.99, 9781250320520

Three vampire women flirt with immortality and develop a thirst for revenge in Schwab’s interconnecting tales of female rage that span three centuries.

King of Ashes

By S.A. Cosby

Pine & Cedar, $28.99, 9781250832061

Roman Carruthers discovers just how destructive unwavering loyalty can be as family drama takes center stage in Cosby’s latest Southern noir crime novel.

The Primal of Blood and Bone

By Jennifer L. Armentrout

Blue Box, $31.99, 9781963135411

In the penultimate installment of Armentrout’s From Blood and Ash series, Poppy and Casteel waver between love and duty as they strive to save the realm.

The River Is Waiting

By

Wally Lamb

Marysue Rucci, $29.99, 9781668006399

A young father learns how to atone for his sins from the confines of a prison cell in popular book-club author Lamb’s gutting redemption story.

Don’t Let Him In

By Lisa Jewell

Atria, $29.99, 9781668033876

At the heart of Jewell’s newest thriller is a deceitful man and the three women who must puzzle together the crumbling pieces of his charming facade.

Facets of fatherhood

Adam Nimoy reflects on life with a high-profile parent in The Most Human: Reconciling With My Father, Leonard Nimoy (Chicago Review Press, $19.99, 9780897335553). Growing up, Nimoy had a complex bond with his father, who played the emotionally remote figure who struggled with alcoholism. Refreshingly forthright and enriched by themes of self-accountability and commu nication, the younger Nimoy’s memoir is a rewarding book club pick. In Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces 9780062851123), Michael Chabon delivers seven perceptive, funny essays about his experiences as a parent. A dad of four, Chabon writes

Four notable memoirs spotlight the modernday dad.

and describes in wonderful detail the house calls they made together when Chabon was a child. As he ponders his parenting years, Chabon celebrates small, daily satisfactions. This is a revealing collection writ ten from the front lines of fatherhood. Will Jawando’s Family, and the Mentors Who Made Me Whole 9781250867186) is a rich exploration of fatherhood in its varied forms. From boyhood onward, Jawando had a fraught relationship with his Nigerian dad. In this moving mem oir, he honors the men who guided him—from high school coach Wayne Holmes to President Barack Obama—in the absence of his biological father. Now a civil rights lawyer, Jawando explores shifting notions of male identity and the importance of men torship in this powerful, deeply personal narrative.

After suffering a major stroke, Jonathan Raban endured a lengthy stay in a rehabilitation center, himself. He looks back on that interlude and recounts stories about his father’s wartime experiences in the wise, insightful memoir, and Son (Vintage, $18, 9781400033669). Drawing poignant parallels between past and present, Raban chronicles the early years of his par ents’ relationship during World War II and considers his own role as a dad. Topics like family legacy, the father-son bond and the power of perseverance will spark inspired discussion among readers.

A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale recommends the best

A tale of two sisters

Author Amal El-Mohtar put some extra magic into the audiobook of her beautiful fable of sisterhood: She wrote and performed original music with her own sister, Dounya El-Mohtar .

The Hugo Award-winning author of This Is How You Lose the Time War has given us a fairy tale for our time. In The River Has Roots, the West Country of England lies alongside the magical land of Arcadia. Music binds the two realms together through a force called grammar. For Audiobook Appreciation Month, Amal El-Mohtar spoke to BookPage about the audiobook of her novella, narrated by Gem Carmella.

How did the idea of grammar come to you, and how did you decide to transform the academic meaning of the term into something radically new?

I can’t remember where or when I learned that grammar and grimoire and grammarye share etymological roots—from the French grammaire, in turn drawing on Latin and Greek—but the idea that any sort of learning or reading was seen as potentially supernaturally powerful has always appealed to me. I grew up in Quebec and first learned grammar in French, where we were drilled in verb forms and parts of speech from grade school on; later, in university, I was struck by how little anglophones seemed to have any formal instruction in grammar, because the ubiquity of English just made everyone absorb it in a kind of cultural osmosis. But when it came time for me to teach students, I wanted them to have that connection between grammar and magic as a hook for their interest: This thing that’s a synonym for boring and dry used to be revered as powerful, as the means of structuring and organizing thought, and through thought, will.

line breaks—really fill a whiteboard with variations on them—I go through them and point out all the ways those things also exist in prose. What’s a paragraph break if not a line break?—and so on.

This is all a sort of jerky pedagogical way of bringing them to my own definition: that the difference between poetry and prose is the difference between singing and speaking. That they’re not opposites, but related modes with different emphases. That they use different parts of our brains, that we experience and embody them differently. Which is in turn a way of bringing them to another insight: that what poetry does to language, what singing does to speech, is what fantasy does to reality. It breaks the real into the true. It excavates and enshrines a feeling.

“[It] felt like magic when we sang it together the first time. It felt like we’d opened a door to the past and were holding it to let something vital come through.”

At a culminating point in the story, you write, “This is the grammar of Arcadia, which breaks the real into the true.” I would love to hear what you have to say about the difference between what’s real and what’s true. One of the workshops I teach invites students to define the difference between poetry and prose. I ask them what, for them, are some properties of poetry? After they list a bunch of things like rhythm, alliteration, metaphor,

Your prose sings with a unique syntactical energy, right down to the placement of verbs or commas. Would it be possible to propose that your writing—and Gem Carmella’s reading—are embodiments and enactments of your story’s grammar?

Oh, absolutely, and how flattering! That was very much my intention, so it’s a real treat to have it received that way!

Can you tell us about the challenges and joys of composing and recording music with your sister, Dounya, for the audiobook?

Oh, it was so stressful but ultimately so wonderful! My sister’s a proper musician,

conservatory trained, and spent years teaching music; I’m just a writer who happens to play the harp. But we both had fallen into the feeling that our best music-playing days were behind us, and there’s a lot of anxiety around trying to live up to our memories of how good we used to be at our respective instruments, when we had so much more time to practice, when we semi-regularly performed. I kept saying that we didn’t have to be album-good, that we just needed to be practiced enough to turn up in the studio and have some lines to improvise along on our instruments and some songs practiced enough to sing harmonies on. I really love what we did—especially our singing of “Tarweedeh Shmaali,” or “Lover’s Hymn,” which, I can’t say this any other way, felt like magic when we sang it together the first time. It felt like we’d opened a door to the past and were holding it to let something vital come through.

Were other sisterhoods in literature part of your inspiration for the unbreakable bond between Esther and Ysabel?

Honestly they weren’t! Mostly I was working from my own relationship with my sister and inverting the usual sibling animosity in ballads and fairy tales. Ultimately, Esther and Ysabel came from a desire to put more loving sisters on the page.

—Michael Alec Rose

H The River Has Roots Macmillan Audio, 4 hours AUDIOBOOK

H The Antidote

In The Antidote (Random House Audio, 17 hours) Karen Russell takes listeners to the stark landscape of Dust Bowl Nebraska and a magical town called Uz as she explores the ugly underbelly of Western settlements. Voiced by Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, Shayna Small, Jon Orsini and Natasha Soudek, the ambitious full-cast audiobook of The Antidote is an aural prism in which each narrator’s reading gives light and color to Russell’s tale. The performances are excellent. Bramhall, as the shy bachelor farmer Harp Oletsky, is truly exceptional. With a voice as parched and desolate as the prairie land he plows, Bramhall makes Harp’s journey convincing and moving. James Riding In, a Pawnee professor of history, reads the historical note he contributed to the end of the novel, providing powerful context.

—Deborah Mason

Mornings Without Mii

For the late Japanese poet and novelist Mayumi Inaba, Mii, the beloved cat that shared her life for 20 years, was much more than a pet. In Mornings Without Mii (Blackstone Audio, 5 hours), translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, she pays tribute to the cat whose presence gave her life shape, companionship and, at its lowest moments, meaning.

Nancy Wu does an excellent job narrating Inaba’s honest (and sometimes harrowing) account of life with Mii. Additionally, the audiobook is enhanced by the happy coincidence that “Mii” is a homophone of “me.” Seen on the page, it’s easy to spot the difference, but for a listener, there is often a brief moment of hesitation when one wonders whether Inaba is referring to herself or the cat. As a result of this little blip, which doesn’t exist in Japanese, the listener feels even more profoundly the bonds between author and cat, and the enormity of Inaba’s loss.

—Deborah Mason

H A Gentleman’s Gentleman

Lambda Literary Award-finalist TJ

Alexander brings listeners a charmingly offbeat queer Regency romance in A Gentleman’s Gentleman (Random House Audio, 8.5 hours). Christopher, the Earl of Eden, finds bittersweet freedom in living his authentic gender identity following the tragic death of his family years earlier. As he comes of age, however, he faces pressure to marry or lose his right to the Eden title and estate. Christopher grudgingly secures a valet to keep up appearances during the London season, and it turns out that the maddeningly fetching James Harding is hiding more than a few secrets of his own. Harrison Knights brings A Gentleman’s Gentleman to life with wry narration and vivid characterizations, enhanced by his skillful accent work. Between the slow-burn romance and a veritable trove of plot twists, this thoroughly delightful audiobook will have listeners’ hearts racing.

—Norah Piehl

Dive into new audiobooks

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Eyes wide open

How Melissa Febos fell in love with her divine creative spark during a year of celibacy .

It’s unequivocally true that Melissa Febos knows how to write about sex and relationships. We knew that as far back as her debut memoir, 2010’s Whip Smart, about her years working as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon, which contains more descriptions of enemas than I ever needed. So you may be surprised to hear that sex is the least interesting part of Febos’ books. Her slim 2022 guide to personal narrative, Body Work, includes a limber essay on writing sex scenes that should be applied to writing any scene well—or to simply existing.

“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance,” she writes in Body Work. “But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. . . . Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.”

Febos, who has been a professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program since 2020, is in relentless pursuit of

making her own choices. When I write relentless, I do suggest obsessiveness, but I also mean unremitting, a heartbeat. This verdant energy is at the very heart of Febos’ fifth book, the nourishing and bold The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex—which is why it’s funny that Febos genuinely thought it was just going to be a “sharp little book” that was “very small and very tight.”

And it certainly could’ve been. The first half of The Dry Season would, on its own, be a bestseller in the spirit of Body Work. It’s the story of a woman who chooses to take a hiatus from sex and romance after a “ruinous two-year love affair” that was, in Febos’ words, “more painful than kicking heroin, than the migraine that split my skull at sixteen and the spinal tap that followed.” Febos refers to these toxic years as the “Maelstrom,” a term, she notes, introduced to the English language by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “A Descent Into the Maelström,” about a monstrous whirlpool that sucks in boats and leaves its victims haggard and destroyed. (It is only near the end of The Dry Season that Febos reveals to readers that the Maelstrom is the same relationship that was described in her second memoir, Abandon Me.)

Yet the Maelstrom is a crucible that leads to a year of great change, in which Febos explores obsession, shame, addiction, sobriety and the burden of being “yoked by the desire of others,” topics she has covered in all her books. She figures out what celibacy means to her and makes an inventory of former lovers. She takes a hard look at her role models, such as French author Colette and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose lives were defined by love, passion and, consequently, pain. She also finds some new role models: the Middle Age lay nuns known as beguines, Christian mystics like Hildegard von Bingen, the Greek poet Sappho and more.

At the end of her experiment, her revelations are ascendant, transcendent: “I had flung myself against other bodies like a mystic in rapture, wet at both ends, face bright with tears,” she writes. “I had nursed the softest parts of women, made a sacrament of them no less holy than the blood and the body of any other savior. I wouldn’t take back a moment of it. I wouldn’t return to it, either.” It’s a perfect point to end a book— but Febos is just getting started.

“There is a comfort and a confidence that I think I feel inside my own voice that is different than it’s ever been.”

“When my wife [poet Donika Kelly] read the full manuscript for the first time, she was like, ‘Here’s your off-ramp . . . [but] I don’t think you should end it there,’ ” Febos says. “After the revelation is always more interesting than what leads up to it. It’s harder to summarize. It’s harder to publicize or market. But that’s what I’m looking for.”

This second half of The Dry Season is a ferocious opening up to Febos’ divine creative purpose unlike anything you might expect from the best book this year to feature artfully covered nipples on its cover. She dives further into the lives of the beguines and the words of von Bingen, in particular the mystic’s concept of viriditas, “the greening power of God,” which Febos points to as a perfect term to describe her “own sublime sense of the everythingness around me.”

This sublime everything is what Febos discovers in her year of celibacy, and then she goes further to show how she maintains her relationship to that divine spark while going about her daily life and even after she returns to the sexual landscape. “When you don’t belong to anyone, you belong to everyone,” an Italian scholar named Silvana Panciera, who specializes in the beguines, tells Febos. “You feel able

to love without limits. . . . When you don’t belong to anyone you belong to God.”

“This is totally a love story,” Febos says, “but it’s a love story between me and my friends, and me and these women I’ll never meet who are showing me how I want to live. . . . [The beguines’] refrain was ‘all for all.’ Love is how we care for the people in our community. It’s how we care for each other. It’s our artistic practice. It is our defiance of a hostile government. It’s living according to our deepest and truest beliefs, and it’s participating in a tradition that is as old as human history, which is particularly helpful right now. I’m so glad I got to spend some years reading about these medieval women who were like, sure, we might be killed or raped as soon as we step outside the wall of our beguinage, but we’re definitely going to keep illegally preaching and tending to the sick and doing ecstatic dance and song every night with our women.”

For all the spiritual goodness that Febos shares in The Dry Season, it’s also her funniest book—not outright hilarious, but cheeky and wry, with the possibility that this element of her writing may become stronger in future books. Febos, who is a little silly but in a very sexy, cool, smart way—is clearly delighted to see her natural sense of humor start to make its way into her work.

To write comfortably about one’s year of zero sex requires a sense of humor. It’s also the sign of an author who has—to use a cliché—come into her voice. Earlier this year, Febos wrote on her Substack about how memoirists are often secretive: “The idea that memoirists are oversharers who crave attention is erroneous,” she wrote. “We are usually people who have hidden large swaths of ourselves in order to appeal to others, to feel safe. By the time we write our memoir, those concealed parts have become too heavy to bear.” Many of Febos’ earlier books, in particular Abandon Me, showcase a much more lyrical style of writing than in The Dry Season. In those works, her secrets are wrapped in beautiful language, veiled in poetry. In The Dry Season, her lyricism is deployed only when she chooses to obscure; otherwise, she is crisp and clear, her literary comparisons as sharp as Salman Rushdie’s, her writing voice much more akin to her speaking voice.

“When people meet me, they’re always [intimidated] because they think I’m going to be like, hi, I’m Professor Dominatrix. Nice to meet you, ” Febos jokes. “[But] I think I saved all of the heavier parts of myself and my experience for my writing, because I didn’t feel comfortable expressing them. . . . I have four books of processing behind me, so in this book, I actually feel like it’s much more representative of the personality that the people in my life know.”

review | H the dry season

From her first memoir, Whip Smart, to her fifth and latest book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Knopf, $29, 9780593537237), Melissa Febos has written beautifully, brilliantly about her body, mind and that divine light we call, perhaps too simply, the spirit. Her personal narratives about sex, romance, addiction and art-making are written with candor, brio and compassion for herself and others. For every book in which she’s described boundaries and restrictions, whether self- or externally imposed, she’s equally pushed for some sense of what freedom could be.

The Dry Season is Febos’ most triumphant book to date, both as a memoir and as a guide to creative practice. The author knows that the only thing more seductive than the possibility of sex is the choice to withhold it, and her memoir begins with the salacious hook of giving it up. Initially, the

The Dry Season returns to the more traditional narrative structure of her first book; it is chronological, with a clear arc from beginning of the celibacy project to the end. But all the elements from her previous books—narrative tension, lyrical language, research and reportage—appear effortless. “I think with this book, it just felt easier,” she says. “I was comfortable with all of those tools, and it felt much more instinctive. I had developed an ear for my own aesthetic toolkit and also my own instincts on the page, so I was able to sort of bring things in when I needed them. There is a comfort and a confidence that I think I feel inside my own voice that is different than it’s ever been.”

“How do you write a book about being happy?” Febos says. “I’ve never done that before.” The Dry Season is exquisite, expansive and joyful—a stunning book on creativity, and Febos’ best yet.

—Cat Acree

plan is to abstain for a few months—just a little breather. Febos begins by defining her boundaries and then by looking at abstinence as a practice. Obviously, nuns are the first place to turn, those feminist forebears who maintained their independence through religious celibacy. While ruminating on these icons and their legacy, Febos also makes a list of her lovers, with special attention paid to the tortured, toxic affair first chronicled in her second memoir, Abandon Me

By halfway through, Febos has come to some conclusions about seduction, romance, sex and power, but beyond this point, The Dry Season reveals its true intent as an exploration of creative purpose—how to reconnect with your sublime and how to keep it forever. Creativity as a divine pursuit is a concept that Febos first began to explore in 2022’s Body Work, and it’s wonderful to see her return to and grow those ideas.

Febos flexes her signature lyrical style only when she needs it, and her writing has never been more crystalline. She makes limber connections between literary and historical figures—Hildegard von Bingen, Annie Dillard and Sappho—alongside conversations with friends and would-be lovers. This is also the first of Febos’ books that has a sense of humor. It’s often very subtle—when she describes herself as a “Helen Gurley Brown-type feminist,” referencing the proto-Sex and the City sex-positive Cosmopolitan editor who created the “wine and eggs diet” from 1977, is she poking fun at herself?—but if we know anything about Febos, it’s that once she tries out something new, it is a surefire preview of something excellent. The Dry Season is an exciting chapter in Febos’ story, both for the ways her work continues to grow and for the elation we feel for her liberation.

—Cat Acree

H The Dry Season Knopf, $29, 9780593537237

MEMOIR

HOT OFF THE P R E S S

H O T O F F T H E P R E S S

12 terrific titles for long days and warm nights.

FOR FANTASY LOVERS

Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil

by Oliver Darkshire

Oliver Darkshire’s debut fantasy is just as charming and slyly funny as Once Upon a Tome, his acclaimed memoir about his life as a rare bookseller. A wry spin on one of the tales from Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil (Norton, $27.99, 9781324105916) follows a medieval woman’s adventures in magic.

—Stephanie Cohen Xu

The Palace of Illusions by Rowenna Miller

Inspired by The Nutcracker, Rowenna Miller’s historical fantasy novel The Palace of Illusions (Redhook, $19.99, 9780316571944) expands the story of the ballet and reconstructs it in an unforgettable way, transporting readers to the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris.

—Stephanie Cohen Xu

A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde

M.H. Ayinde’s meticulously constructed debut fantasy, A Song of Legends Lost (Saga, $19.99, 9781668086834), is a grand escape from reality—and absolutely rad. This series starter throws readers into a post-apocalyptic fantasy world of robotic zombies and tech priests.

—Ralph Harris

FOR POP CULTURE

MAVENS

Waiting for Britney Spears

by Jeff Weiss

Music journalist Jeff Weiss’ Waiting for Britney Spears (MCD, $19, 9780374606138) is a rollicking memoir of the author’s career as a tabloid journalist and a sensationalist narrative of one of the world’s most famous (and most attacked) pop stars.

—Joy Ramirez

H Stupid TV,

Be More Funny by Alan Siegel

Alan Siegel dives into how the early years of The Simpsons influenced comedy, adult animation and even consumer culture in Stupid TV, Be More Funny (Grand Central, $30, 9781538742846), a love letter to America’s favorite dysfunctional family.

—Alejandro Ramirez

What Is Wrong With Men by Jessa Crispin

Jessa Crispin’s What Is Wrong With Men (Pantheon, $27, 9780593317624) grapples with masculinity in a surprising manner: through the films of Michael Douglas. Examining everything from Fatal Attraction to The Game, Crispin’s historical analysis situates Douglas’ films against the changes in women’s status.

—Catherine Hollis

FOR CHIC CAFE-DWELLERS FOR THRILL-SEEKERS

H Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Taylor Jenkins Reid masterfully ratchets up the tension in Atmosphere (Ballantine, $30, 9780593158715), as ambition and affection collide for a posse of trainee astronauts. Academic Joan Goodwin and her colleagues undergo rigorous schooling and later, a terrifying crisis, discovering along the way that inner space can be as difficult to navigate as outer space.

—Thane Tierney

Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

A fascinating exploration of the corrosive effects of guilt, Peter Swanson’s latest thriller, Kill Your Darlings (William Morrow, $30, 9780063433625), tracks a marriage in reverse chronological order, eventually uncovering the dark secret that rots at its heart.

—Linda M. Castellitto

H A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell

An artfully executed Regency romp in the queer historical romance tradition of Cat Sebastian and Alexis Hall, Joanna Lowell’s A Rare Find (Berkley, $19, 9780593549742) delivers what the title promises: a singular treasure.

—Carole V. Bell

Mansion Beach by Meg Mitchell Moore

Like The Great Gatsby, Mansion Beach by Meg Mitchell Moore (William Morrow, $30, 9780063336964) looks at class and wealth, though this time through the eyes of two women. It’s a summer read with a bite, like a cocktail with an extra shake of bitters.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor

In Austin Taylor’s Notes on Infinity (Celadon, $29.99, 9781250376107), the partnership of two nerdy, brilliant Harvard students could be the makings of the most ambitious biotech startup ever—or a spectacular disaster.

—Carole V. Bell

The Doorman by Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone proves himself a master of deception in The Doorman (MCD, $30, 9780374604790), keeping the reader guessing which direction violence may come from during one terrible day in NYC.

—Thane Tierney

Visit BookPage.com to read the full versions of these reviews and to get even more picks for summer reading!

A MONUMENTAL RETURN

Don’t call Ocean Vuong’s sophomore novel “triumphant”: In this story, overcoming isn't the answer .

If you’ve spent any part of your life in New England, something about The Emperor of Gladness will be immediately familiar. Much of the novel takes place behind the counter of a fast-casual chain called HomeMarket, known for comforting American classics like rotisserie chicken, cornbread and meatloaf, and a general ambience of “Thanksgiving every day of the year.” I couldn’t help but think of Boston Market, and when I ask Ocean Vuong, speaking over Zoom from New York City, he confirms the inspiration. Like his protagonist, Hai, Vuong worked at Boston Market for three years in college to help support his single mother without putting their combined income over the cap for Section 8 housing. His first choice would have been to work at Bruegger’s Bagels— another East Coast staple—but he had a friend working at Boston Market already, so it was the easiest option. While searching for their menu to refresh my memory, I discovered that the once-ubiquitous chain has crumpled in on itself in recent years, with widespread closures prompting devastated op-eds: “My heart sunk into my chest” wrote Nicoletta Richardson for TODAY.com. The outsize emotions don’t make sense unless you accept the promise of Boston Market’s marketing—that it offers more than just a meal. The food Vuong describes in the novel is mass-produced, loaded with dyes and preservatives and shipped to HomeMarket in frozen sacks; it’s certainly nothing like what grandma would make. Yet there is indeed something of a spirit of family created within HomeMarket’s walls, where 19-yearold Hai, his cousin Sony and their coworkers take care of one another and their customers.

through their shifts with their own albatross around their neck. Hai is maintaining a lie to his mother that he’s attending medical school in Boston, though he never even applied (and couldn’t have, since he dropped out of college). Sony doesn’t want to talk about it, but his mother is in jail, and he’s living in a halfway house while he tries to come up with her bail. Russia, who takes the drive-thru orders, is working to put his sister through rehab in New Hampshire. However much affection their circumstantial intimacy breeds, there’s little to nothing any of the crew can do to help one another. And yet again and again, each goes out of their way to offer the others small kindnesses—what Vuong describes as “kindness without hope.”

“I wouldn’t think of it unless I lived through it,” he explains. “What I saw growing up severely poor, under the poverty line, is that these acts of kindness don’t change anyone’s life; they don’t even alleviate anything.” It’s an idea Vuong’s been trying to capture in his work for years, beginning with his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in which a young man works on a Connecticut tobacco farm.

H The Emperor of Gladness Penguin Press, $30, 9780593831878

COMING OF AGE

“I call it circumstantial family,” Vuong says. “So much of our time in this country . . . is founded on this arbitrary group of people cobbled together in an office or a shift, whether it’s in a restaurant or a loading dock or a factory, a warehouse. . . . And all of a sudden kinships arise in places where they’re not really supposed to. . . . After a while, you start to know what someone’s cough is. You can tell [who they are] by their gait, by the gum that they chew, what kind of perfume they wear. I mean, you even start to know their BO, right? After three or four hours into a shift, I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s that person behind me. And then you can never forget it.”

Our story’s HomeMarket franchise is located in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Each member of its crew suffers

“It’s easy to give when you have so much, right?” Vuong continues. “It’s easy for a millionaire or billionaire to just give. But for folks in those communities, they don’t have those funds. So they have to give themselves. . . . And I haven’t seen anything like that in the world that I’m in now, in academia or this professionalized white-collar world. I just haven’t seen it. I’ve seen a lot of kindness, but not kindness without hope. Not kindness that has nowhere to go.”

The first glimpse of this kindness comes early in the story, in a vivid scene between Hai and Grazina, a Lithuanian octogenarian who has given him a place to stay in exchange for his help. Grazina has been living alone since her medical aide left, and she’s struggling to manage her dementia. When she meets Hai, he’s in deep despair, and she tells him that she knows “the secret to getting rid of every sorrow known to man” before bringing him outside with a bag of dinner rolls. Together, they scatter the rolls in the mud and crush them under their feet. In Vuong’s redolent prose, it’s an absolutely gorgeous moment: “the crumbs sloughing off, leaving a powdery comet shooting across the mud.”

Reading that passage, it’s impossible not to want to stomp on some rolls. Vuong says that while he doesn’t know anyone who’s actually made a self-care practice out of trampling baked goods, he does

have some personal experience. A decade ago, while walking in Philadelphia, he came upon a surreal vision: 12 croissants inexplicably stacked in a pyramid at the foot of a tree.

“I don’t know what got into me. I was, like, possessed, and I just started stomping on them,” he says. “I did exactly what I described in the book, scratching them around. It felt—I’ve never been so joyful in my life, right? Stomping croissants.”

After coming down from his elation “like a psychopath,” Vuong thought, “All right, I’m a poet. I’ve got to make something. Why did I do that? There’s got to be some sort of significance.”

“It felt so decadent, so unimaginable that it . . . broke through. A new feeling. And I wanted Hai and Grazina to have the joy that I felt. . . . I was like, you guys have got to feel this because I can’t be the only one. And then maybe part of the craziness of being a novelist is that you create people who share your values, but, on the other hand, they don’t exist.”

Bringing this level of absurdity and even humor—the novel is quite funny—into his work was a distinctive shift for Vuong, whose debut was, for the most part, unrelentingly devastating.

“If I wrote for myself, what would it look like? It looks like this book.”

“When On Earth came out,” he says, “it became a big book.”

This is an understatement: It swept best of the year lists and was recently named one of the New York Times readers’ picks for the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. But Vuong’s friends knew how much funnier he could be. “A lot of people were excited. My friends were disappointed.”

It was hard to express the witty side of himself while “carrying my family’s story. It’s carrying history. And I was very aware that publishing in America in the 21st century means that a lot of non-Vietnamese people will read the book, if I’m even lucky to have a wide readership. So I knew that I just did not want an invitation for readers to laugh at the story in On Earth.”

In 2019, Vuong’s mother died of breast cancer, and The Emperor of Gladness is his first book written entirely after her death. It was the hardest book he’s written yet, “maybe the hardest ever.”

“Everything else was writing for my family, in a way. Not exactly to give to them, but, oh, this will get me a job. This will get me a career so I can take care of them. And then by the time I wrote this book, I had all that. But also a lot of my family were gone,” he says. Far sooner than he wanted to be, he found himself faced with the question, “If I wrote for myself, what would it look like?” The answer: “It looks like this book.”

Since publishing his debut, Vuong had grown as a writer, expanding his skills and broadening his vision, building on the techniques

he used in his first novel (He says “it doesn’t matter if a reader knows this,” but I was very struck by learning that he thinks of The Emperor of Gladness as the debut novel that the aspiring writer protagonist of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog, would write.) He felt ready to tackle different tones and a heftier scope: This new novel is over 400 pages. He was also now spending time in a different sphere, academia, which had a noticeable dearth of humor. In the rarefied circles of the literary elite, it’s hard to imagine someone giving in to the vulnerability required for a moment of absurd, truthful connection like what Hai and Grazina share over the trampled rolls.

“Everyone is so uptight and self-conscious that they would never do anything like that. And sometimes I feel like I want to turn to someone and say, ‘Have you ever stepped on a baguette?’ at a gala. I think I would be thrown out,” Vuong laughs, “but I kind of want to just ask people—or ‘Have you ever questioned the validity of your body in a bathtub?’ or ‘Did you ever want to jump off a bridge?’ But, you know, you can’t say that. So I think only in literature now can I utter it.”

When he was growing up, Vuong says that people asked questions like those all the time on their smoke breaks, at the bus stop—and they did it “half jokingly, half as a way of invitation into the dark world of confession.” The Emperor of Gladness is stitched from similar scenes of connection stolen in scraps of downtime around its characters’ labor.

Capturing the value of these idle moments in a novel meant consciously going against the relentless American imperative to optimize—“learn a language in 20 days, you know, lose 20 pounds in a month”—which hovers over all of us like a bad manager. We’re supposed to want progress at all costs, and if we can’t have progress, we must at least have the appearance of it. In fiction, that means action and conflict and that, by the end, our heroes overcome what’s holding them back.

“It’s cathartic to say, oh, God, they got out of there, right? And I’m like, well, people don’t, and also when they don’t, it doesn’t mean their lives are failures.”

Instead, Vuong’s book “handles the people as they are.” He says that “the central premise of this novel is that there is no improvement. Nobody gets a better job. No one gets a raise. It’s just all stagnant.”

Still, we’re left with something precious. “The question is, if you have nowhere to go, if you end up nowhere, then what do you have? And I hope the answer for some readers would be you have people. You have characters, and that should be enough.”

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

Full spectrum A rainbow of Pride reads across genres Graphic Novels

H Spent

Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic novel after graphic memoirs Are You My Mother? and Fun Home—now a hit Broadway musical— takes a sharp, hilarious and humane look at social and cultural politics. The protagonist of Spent (Mariner, $32, 9780063278929)— named Alison Bechdel, funnily enough— lives in Vermont with her eternally optimistic partner, Holly, who posts wood-chopping videos and sells compost bins. They run a pygmy goat sanctuary, an expensive endeavor that adds to the mounting pressure on Alison to get her latest book picked up by a publisher. When Megalopub, which she believes is owned by a “conservative media mogul who’s destroyed American democracy,” shows interest, Alison wrestles with the idea of selling out. She’s already disillusioned by the transformation of her breakout graphic memoir, Death and Taxidermy (which sports a cover suspiciously reminiscent of Fun Home), into a successful television series. In an era marked by sensationalist media and short attention spans, Alison laments how the themes of her book have been diluted for TV through the addition of corny plot points and even dragons.

Bechdel’s signature wry humor, keen observational skills and masterful storytelling take center stage in Spent. Every panel is packed with nuance down to the smallest background details, and the book is in full color, done by Bechdel’s partner, Holly Rae Taylor. Grounded, witty and tender, Spent captures what it means to be flawed yet striving to live by your values, while navigating the joys and absurdities of life.

—Maya Fleischmann

H Gaysians

Pride Month is a celebration of love, and many queer people know that no love is as powerful or as unpredictable as the love of found family. In Lambda Literary Award-winner Mike Curato’s first graphic novel for adults, Gaysians (Algonquin, $32, 9781643755120), a group of mostly gay men in Seattle create their own community, though they have to go through fire before they are forged together as family.

AJ is new in town and freshly out of the closet. Finally free to live his life how he wants, he goes to a bar on his first night out in Seattle to try his hand at gay nightlife. After he spills his drink all over one of the best drag queens in the city, he realizes he has a lot to learn about being young and single. The drag queen, K (stage name Sakura Usagi), proves to be forgiving and decides to take AJ under her wing. K introduces him to a small friend group of other young gay Asians, including lonely stoner gamer John and lithe and libertine Steven. The group calls themselves the “Boy Luck Club,” and as they induct AJ into their lifestyle, teaching him terms like “rice queen” and how to score a date with a guy who doesn’t treat you like a fetish object, they all learn the true meaning of community and the responsibilities it entails. Meanwhile, K has bigger problems to deal with, and how the friends react will test all of their bonds.

Gaysians is a brilliant and beautifully drawn celebration of family and belonging—the perfect book to peruse when you need a boost of pride.

—Eric A. Ponce

Pioneer Summer

Written by Kateryna Sylvanova and Elena Malisova, Pioneer Summer (Abrams, $27, 9781419773105) took Russia by storm when it was originally published in 2022. A romance for the ages, the book follows two boys who meet at a Boy Scouts-style camp run by the government and spend the summer discovering all the joys and sorrows of young love in the waning Soviet Union.

—Katie Garaby

Rebel in the Deep

Katee Robert delivers a satisfying conclusion to their swashbuckling Crimson Sails series with Rebel in the Deep (Berkley, $19, 9780593639122). High stakes and deep water have dominated this fantasy trilogy, and in this go-round, the leader of the rebellion forms a queer power throuple for the ages. The heart wants what the heart wants, even in the face of pirates and magical beasts.

—Dolly R. Sickles

The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet

A sapphic reimagining of two side characters from Pride and Prejudice, The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet (Carina Adores, $18.99, 9781335928269) exposes the queer underbelly many readers hoped was there. Which, in this reviewer’s opinion, is the best and only way to improve upon Austen.

—Katie Garaby

History

H The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick

On a summer evening in July 1982, Atlanta artist Michael Hardwick and his partner were arrested for sodomy by a cop with a reputation for harassing gay men. Thus began the torturous legal saga that wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986, and placed Hardwick at the center of the struggle for gay rights. A gifted historian and writer, Martin Padgett is an excellent guide to the case as it moved from state to federal courts in what Hardwick’s attorneys hoped would be a stirring victory for privacy and gay rights. The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS (Norton, $31.99, 9781324035411) also paints a vivid portrait of queer culture in 1980s Atlanta and elsewhere as LGBTQ+ men and women contended with legal peril and the horror of the AIDS epidemic, and grasped the promise of liberation.

—Alden Mudge

H Before Gender

Trans activist Eli Erlick’s groundbreaking Before Gender: Lost Stories From Trans History, 1850-1950 (Beacon, $29.95, 9780807017357) upends the fallacious notion that trans people are a new or modern phenomenon. Erlick details 30 stories of trans individuals who lived between 1850 and 1950. In 1939, British teen brothers Mark and David Ferrow were celebrated in the press when they first publicly spoke about their transitions. Around 1869, a formerly enslaved Georgia woman named Sally-Tom was the first trans person in recorded U.S. history to have her gender recognized by any governmental institution. Trans readers will find powerful validation within Before Gender, and all readers will learn history that helps them make sense of our current moment. As Erlick quotes activist José Rizal in the afterword: “Know history, know self. No history, no self.”

—Kelly Blewett

Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line

In Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line (Legacy Lit, $29, 9781538774496), Elizabeth Lovatt uncovers an unbeatably cool archive: the 1993-1998 logbook of the Lesbian Line, a clandestine helpline provided as a support service to lesbians in London beginning in the 1970s. The logbook records powerful and emotional moments and reveals the hard work of the volunteers on the other end of the line. But they had very real limitations. Many South Asian, Black and trans callers felt failed by the line’s mostly white volunteers. Lovatt spends time profiling organizations founded for and by lesbians of color during the years the Lesbian Line existed, and the book is richer for it. Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line is a fun, informative, heartfelt and passionate book of lesbian history that shows how across generations, lesbians have found their way to one another.

—Kelly Blewett

H Marsha

In Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson (Tiny Reparations, $30, 9780593185667), artist and activist Tourmaline weaves personal narrative and extensive research to thoughtfully explore the magnetic life and legacy of the Black trans activist, actress and artist. Perhaps best known as one of the people who “threw the first brick” at the Stonewall Uprising, Marsha P. Johnson’s activism included organizations like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. When the AIDS crisis hit the nation in the 1980s, Johnson became a caretaker for many friends, even as she navigated her own HIV diagnosis, chronic pain from being shot in the back by a john in 1980, depression and PTSD. Tourmaline’s focus on Johnson’s life as an artist is a refreshing facet of this biography. Readers will be deeply moved by her empathy, selflessness, bravery and visionary spirit.

—Vanessa Willoughby

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

The third book in the Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, Malka Older’s Hugo- and Nebulanominated science fiction mystery series, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses (Tor, $28.99, 9781250396068) has all the charm of its predecessors, plus an exploration of the Jovian interuniversity and interplatform rivalries hinted at in previous installments. A cozy, thought-provoking mystery with just a dash of science-fiction action flair, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses combines the best of classic detectives like Hercule Poirot with the imaginative impulse of Becky Chambers.

—Laura Hubbard

H The Starving Saints

With The Starving Saints (Harper Voyager, $30, 9780063418813), Caitlin Starling delivers a melding of fantasy and horror so smooth that it defies both easy categorization and easy dismissal as another traveler of a well-worn path. Set in a castle now in its sixth month under siege, The Starving Saints follows three desperate women whose already challenging lives are upset by the sudden and mysterious arrival of the Constant Lady, the deity worshiped by the people of the castle, and her three attendant Saints, who supply the castle with an influx of much-needed food, but at a tremendous cost. This is a novel that doesn’t just creep into your mind, it chills you to your core and dares you to keep reading.

—Matthew Jackson

A world away

China’s one-child policy separated twin toddlers . Decades later, veteran journalist Barbara Demick reunited them .

On May 30, 2002, a Chinese toddler named Fangfang was kidnapped by baby snatchers working for China’s family planning agency, which enforced the policy prohibiting families from having more than one child. Separated from her twin sister, Shuangjie, and other relatives, Fangfang was soon given by Chinese authorities to an American family that adopted her and renamed her Esther. Years later, journalist Barbara Demick (Nothing to Envy) interviewed Esther’s birth family, setting off the remarkable series of events, chronicled in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, that led to the twins’ emotional reunion as teenagers.

You’re an experienced foreign correspondent who has written previous books about the Balkans, North Korea and Tibet. What about Esther and Shuangjie’s story convinced you to pursue it and ultimately write this book?

It’s funny. I didn’t seek out this book so much as it came to me. I had originally set out to help the Zeng family find their missing daughter. Long after I identified her, her American adoptive family came to me asking for help connecting with the Chinese family, which meant traveling with them to China. It all unfolded into the obvious conclusion: that I should write a book. I had been given an extraordinary opportunity to witness a primal human experience and chronicle the unfolding relationship between these two genetically identical human beings, one Chinese and one American.

nonsensical and would eventually be lifted. But the children would be theirs forever. In fact, the one-child policy was abolished in 2015. Almost comically, the family planning staff are now encouraging people to have more babies. Chinese people have an expression: They say the Communist Party is like the weather. It frequently changes.

What created the U.S. boom in international adoptions, and why were evangelical Christians like Esther’s American family so heavily involved in it?

In the United States, birth control, sex education, the legalization of abortion and the growing respectability of single motherhood led to a precipitous drop in the number of unwanted babies. Americans had to look abroad to poorer countries. Chinese girls were very appealing. Relatively healthy, no fetal alcohol syndrome. It wasn’t just childless couples [who wanted to adopt]. Stories about abandoned babies wasting away in orphanages tugged at the heartstrings. People wanted to help. And they felt like saviors in doing so. This was especially true for evangelical Christians attending churches that depicted saving orphans as a religious imperative.

As your book shows, U.S. adoptive parents often were deceived about the origins of their Chinese babies, many of whom had been kidnapped and trafficked. Why did Chinese authorities turn a blind eye to this abuse, and were U.S. adoption agencies complicit or just ill-informed?

1980s and early 1990s, there truly were large numbers of abandoned babies who needed homes. But that changed by the late 1990s. Just as demand was peaking in the U.S. for healthy babies, the supply ran low. Chinese people were getting wealthier and gutsier and refusing to give up their children. That’s when abductions and trafficking picked up. I don’t think the adoption agencies were aware until maybe 2005, when the first scandals broke.

Initially, after Esther learned of her true origin from your reporting, she and her American mom, Marsha, were deeply reluctant to be in contact with her birth family. Why was that, and why did it change?

As an adoptive mother, Marsha’s first obligation was to her daughter, who was just 9 years old when [I broke the families’ story]. Esther was initially traumatized to learn about her past. It was only when she became a teenager that she started asking to meet her twin and birth parents. Marsha told me later she knew it would happen one day and that the story would come out, but that it had to wait until Esther was ready. I respected Marsha’s decision. I think any responsible mother would have done the same.

Your book documents the brutal punishment China used to enforce its oppressive one-child policy. What drove the Zengs and so many others to defy the law by having more than one child?

I think the Zengs were prescient. They sensed that the one-child policy was

This was a classic “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For the Chinese, adoption brought in money and helped reduce the population, which was, after all, the goal of the one-child policy. And it was a beautiful thing for Americans who desperately wanted those babies. Nobody questioned too closely. In fairness, in the

Your reporting and subsequent assistance to the two families were crucial to the twins’ reconnection. It’s unusual for a journalist to be so personally involved. Why did you decide to do that?

My hunt to find the missing twin was really a challenge to myself. Sure, I wanted to help, but I also wanted to see if I could do it. I hadn’t given enough consideration to what I

H Daughters of the Bamboo Grove Random House, $32, 9780593132746

BIOGRAPHY

would do if I found her or on the psychological impact for Esther. By the time I met her, I realized how much trauma had resulted from my mucking around in their lives. I felt obliged to help as best I could. And yes, it is unusual for a journalist to be so personally involved. In my other books, I’m almost entirely invisible, like the proverbial fly on the wall. I find it uncomfortable to insert myself into a story, but there was no choice in this case.

Esther’s and Shuangjie’s personal stories are the heart of the book. Like any twins or other siblings, they have personality similarities and differences. Which of those differing traits do you think can be attributed to their childhoods in such different cultures?

So much is cultural. Raised in the U.S., Esther was told she could be anything she wanted. She has an almost stereotypical Texan “can-do” attitude. Shuangjie is less confident, in part because she was the youngest daughter in a still-patriarchal society and because a rural upbringing carries a stigma in China. But both young women are creative, emotionally mature, stable. I think their core personalities are very similar.

provide translations. And of course, DNA testing. Many adoptees and birth families are taking DNA tests to look for one another, and they are succeeding. I know of hundreds of adoptees who have located their birth parents. Some have visited. The numbers are increasing exponentially as more adoptees and birth families realize that it is indeed possible.

How do you think Esther and Shuangjie’s relationship will evolve? Do you hope to continue writing about it?

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H daughters of the bamboo grove

Esther was a 9-year-old American girl living with her mom and older sister in Texas, all of them mourning the recent death of her dad, when she realized she had a twin sister in China. Her first reaction to the revelation: fear and avoidance.

“All of my books have had the same goal: to show readers how much they have in common with people from other cultures.”

Your descriptions of the Zengs’ life in rural China and the circumstances of Esther’s birth and kidnapping are incredibly detailed. You say in the book that they’re based on multiple interviews over a number of years. How did you persuade the Zengs to be so forthcoming?

There was never any persuading. I just hung out with them. They’ve always been very friendly and welcoming. I found that to be common in the Chinese countryside. But I wouldn’t say the Zengs were unusually forthcoming. They are modest people who don’t like to talk about themselves. I’ve found other rural Chinese people to be much chattier.

When you started your reporting, it was very difficult for American adoptees from China to find their birth families. How has that changed?

It’s incredible how much has changed. Social media, for one, has made the world so much smaller. Back in 2009, I was able to identify Esther through a Yahoo page for families who had adopted from a particular Shaoyang orphanage. A decade later, Esther was able to chat instantly with her Chinese family through messaging apps that also

If it had not been for the COVID-19 pandemic, Shuangjie probably would have come to the United States to visit Esther in 2020 or 2021. We lost that momentum. Right now, it’s difficult for Chinese people to get visas, so there are no immediate plans for another reunion. Esther communicates with Shuangjie and her birth mother through WeChat, but there’s only so far you can get with online translation. I’ve read studies by the scholar Nancy Segal saying that separated identical twins become more alike with age, as they shed the distinctions brought from their upbringing and revert to their more essential selves. I suspect that Esther and Shuangjie will reconnect somewhat later in life, bringing more depth to their relationship. If so, maybe I will write about it again. Or they will.

What were you most hoping to convey or accomplish with Daughters of the Bamboo Grove? And what’s up next for you?

All of my books have had the same goal: to show readers how much they have in common with people from other cultures. The two families profiled, American and Chinese, are both rural, not terribly wealthy, but loving and intelligent. The mothers in particular shared many of the same frustrations as young women. This book, though, is dedicated to adoptees. I hope it can be a salve for other adoptees to better understand how they got to where they are today.

As for what’s next, I’m reverting to something more in the vein of my previous books, which are all microhistories of small places that reveal truths about the larger wholes. I’ve written in the past about a Sarajevo street (Logavina Street), a North Korean city (Nothing to Envy) and a Tibetan town (Eat the Buddha ). The upcoming book is about a street in Berlin, as it happens, a place I used to live.

—Anne Bartlett

Journalist Barbara Demick’s reporting led to the identification of Esther as a twin who had been kidnapped from her relatives by China’s family planning agency in 2002, during period when countless families faced severe penalties for violating China’s one-child policy. The agency had given Esther to an unwitting American family of evangelical Christians who believed they were saving her from abandonment. Now both families had to come to terms with the consequences. Demick tells this story with insight and sensitivity in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins (Random House, $32, 9780593132746). She initially held off writing about Esther because of the adoptive family’s wishes. But in time, Esther changed her mind about contacting her twin, Shuangjie, and Demick’s help was pivotal in bringing the teenagers and their families together, first virtually, then in person.

Although Demick and other journalists reported for years on the corruption that existed within China’s one-child enforcement and on the well-intentioned but ill-informed U.S. international adoption boom that it fed, the details will still shock many readers. Years after the repeal of the onechild policy, Demick shows that China is still coping with its troubling fallout. So are the Chinese American adoptees like Esther, who are now able to find the birth families they were separated from through DNA but face obstacles from a Chinese government trying to limit interaction with the West.

Demick’s in-depth interviews and evocative writing portray Esther, Shuangjie and their relatives both as emblematic of their different cultures and as the complex individuals they are. The twins’ journey to reunite, undertaken with the support of the parents in both countries, is a moving story of fortitude and emotional growth.

—Anne Bartlett

H Disappoint Me

By Nicola Dinan

LITERARY FICTION

Bellies author Nicola Dinan takes a victory lap with her second novel, Disappoint Me (Dial, $28, 9780593977873). Following Max, a trans woman entering her 30s, as she faces crisis after existential crisis, this novel is perfect for the aging zoomer (or the developmentally arrested millennial) who has no idea what they want out of life.

Max’s reckoning begins after a drunken and drugged-up tumble down a flight of stairs at a New Year’s party, which forces her to look in the mirror and “grow up”—whatever that means. She thinks that part of this new-yearnew-me could be a turn toward the traditional, a move to take her life in a more conventional direction. Enter Vincent: a corporate lawyer, the son of Chinese immigrants. He’s the perfect boyfriend to turn Max into a respectable and polished girlfriend. But naturally, it’s not that easy. Vincent, while charming, kind and excellent at cooking, has baggage to account

The Listeners

By Maggie Stiefvater

HISTORICAL

FICTION

The Listeners (Viking, $30, 9780593655504)— bestselling young adult author Maggie Stiefvater’s adult debut—is a World War II-era story with a different focus from what we often encounter: It revolves around the abrupt changes in the position of Axis powers diplomats in the United States immediately following Pearl Harbor. In West Virginia, the Avallon is a luxurious hotel with a spring of mountain sweetwater rumored to cure all visitors’ troubles and woes. Managed by June Hudson, the hotel takes exquisite care of its guests, setting up their stays with precision. But June is brought up short when the hotel is requisitioned by the U.S. government to house FBI agents and Axis diplomats. What secrets must she keep? What strange moments will she observe? And how can she manage to maintain the hotel’s reputation for luxury and hospitality? There’s magic in the sweetwater. June feels it, feeds it, coaxes it, tends to it. She must figure out how to keep the water’s powers working, even as the

for, and there’s friction between his wealthy trad friend group and Max’s queer cosmopolitan friends. By the book’s cascading and emotional ending, Max is forced to choose what values to live her life by and consider whether romance has any place in it.

Dinan is one of the contemporary masters of high drama. In interviews, she has spoken about her enjoyment of the Real Housewives franchise, an affinity which is reflected in her ability to raise the tension in her novels to a fever pitch. This is not to say that the drama feels manufactured or over-produced, but rather that the build and release is nail-biting and exquisite. It’s comparable to the brilliant wit and aching emotion of Colette, or the mix of humor, heart and headiness found in Lorrie Moore’s novels. Take Disappoint Me ’s trippy and theatrical climax, which involves

a mansion in the south of France, some overpowered edibles and several tearyeyed confessions. This explosive moment is followed by several pensive and subtle ones, showing a range that eludes many fiction writers today. And in Dinan’s prose, all this action is effortlessly readable and relentlessly quotable: She’s a paragon of the postalt lit era, where instead of writing like they’re blogging or doomscrolling, writers reflect the internet-consciousness of contemporary readers much more thoughtfully. Max thinks in quips and moves through the consumer world as a woman with particular and peculiar tastes and the ability to express them. It makes sense that Max is a failed poet—who else could speak with such pain and passion? Dinan, on the other hand, is anything but a failure.

—Eric A. Ponce

hotel that she has known for so long becomes enmeshed in subterfuge.

With romantic entanglements, lies and secrets, the tension is high and the stakes are consequential. Amid all this, Stiefvater creates a complex and subtle story of how politics, jobs and social class hinder and complicate people’s paths to becoming who they would like to be. The Listeners asks the reader to see a familiar time period from a new angle and notice the variety of ways lives can be upended by the war. It’s dramatic, swift-paced and compelling, with a delightful mix of realism and enchanting what-if.

—Freya Sachs

The Book of Records

By Madeleine Thien

LITERARY FICTION

Madeleine Thien’s ambitious fourth novel, The Book of Records (Norton, $28.99, 978132407865), is a tale of exile and migration inhabited by characters both imagined and drawn from the historical record. The novel traverses the globe, from China to Staten Island, and

encompasses centuries, from the 8th century to the 20th and beyond.

The central thread of The Book of Records is the story of Lina and her father, who have left their home in Foshan, China, and arrived at a mysterious building called the Sea which is part hotel, part refugee camp and ambiguously located in time and space. Confused and mourning her mother and brother, who have been left behind, Lina takes solace in the three volumes of an encyclopedia about travelers that she has brought with her. She also befriends three neighbors, Bento, Blucher and Jupiter, who appear to be historical figures from her encyclopedia. Bento is Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher who was excommunicated for his radical views on religion; Blucher is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who fled Europe after the rise of the Nazis; and Jupiter is Du Fu, the Tang dynasty poet who lived in poverty despite repeated attempts to find employment with the imperial government. Each shares their life stories with the group in alternating chapters—tales fraught with disappointment, betrayal and political upheaval but also joy, community and love.

Though Lina’s story provides a narrative frame and the novel ultimately explores the cause of her family’s rupture, the historical characters are much more developed, especially Arendt, whose flight from Berlin to Paris to the United States makes for exciting storytelling

reviews | fiction

which Thien handles magnificently. However, the novel never quite bridges the imbalance between Lina’s hazy narration and the evocative, almost crystalline recollections from Blucher, Bento and Jupiter.

Thien has grappled with government repression, abandonment and loss in novels such as the Booker finalist Do Not Say We Have Nothing and Dogs at the Perimeter. The Book of Records casts an even wider net, exploring the impact of climate change and political upheaval on global migration. Though the results are inconsistent and sometimes frustrating, Thien’s case for the search for home as a central tenet of our humanity makes this complex novel worthy of attention.

—Lauren Bufferd

Flashlight

By Susan Choi FAMILY SAGA

Some families don’t need politics to complicate their lives, but when politics do intervene, the repercussions can be devastating. That’s especially true for the family in Flashlight (FSG, $30, 9780374616373), a challenging and volatile novel by Susan Choi, whose last work, Trust Exercise, received the National Book Award.

In 1945, Seok, a 6-year-old ethnic Korean, lives with his family in a small town in Japan, where he was born. As he grows up, Seok is filled with “bone-deep competitiveness,” leading him to move to Tokyo for college after the end of the Korean War and then to the U.S. for graduate school. Most of the rest of his family returns to North Korea and hopes, in vain, that he will do the same.

In the U.S., Seok, now known as Serk, falls in love with Anne, a 23-year-old college student. At 19, Anne had a son and signed away custody to the boy’s father. That’s heartbreaking enough, but Choi isn’t done. Serk and Anne marry and have a daughter, Louisa. When Louisa is in second grade, Anne gets a call from her son’s father, who asks if the boy, now a teenager, can spend some of the summer with her and her family. It would spoil the novel to reveal the misfortunes that occur during the boy’s stay, but they set up the most cataclysmic development yet.

One day, after the family has moved from Michigan to Japan for Serk’s visiting professorship, he and Louisa go for a walk along the breakwater. Later, Louisa is found on the beach,

barely alive, while Serk has disappeared and is presumed drowned.

Choi has many more punishments, sicknesses and plot twists to inflict in this satisfyingly unpredictable work. Flashlight is overly dense with historical detail, especially in its first 50 pages, but once it gets going, it’s an astute portrait of political upheaval, family dynamics and the constant need to recalibrate one’s expectations. The novel is an intellectual workout, but a rewarding one.

—Michael Magras

H So Far Gone

By Jess Walter

LITERARY FICTION

For all the efforts of journalists to explain some of the stranger aspects of contemporary American life, sometimes it takes the skills of a novelist to do them justice. That’s the task Jess Walter has set for himself in his seriocomic novel, So Far Gone (Harper, $30, 9780062868145).

The story’s main action revolves around the Kinnick family of Washington state. Rhys, the patriarch, has an altercation with his sonin-law, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, over Thanksgiving, which drives Rhys to retreat into the Washington woods. He spends more than seven years off the grid while working fitfully on a book “rethinking philosophy and ethics through a naturalist’s lens.” But Rhys’ isolation is disrupted when his daughter, Bethany, disappears and her neighbor shows up on his doorstep with his grandchildren, Leah, age 13, and Asher, age 9, who have only visited his rustic dwelling once, years earlier.

Rhys learns that Bethany’s husband, Shane, has become deeply involved in the activities of a Christian nationalist church that boasts its own militia. Aided by his ex-colleague Lucy Park, retired detective “Crazy-Ass Chuck” Littlefield and his neighbor Brian, Rhys sets off on a frantic search for his daughter. His breakneck travels take him to a compound in Idaho and an electronica festival in British Columbia, passing through moments of both violence and sharply observed humor and pathos.

But as one would expect from a writer of Walters’ empathy and intelligence, So Far Gone transcends the madcap misadventures of the Kinnick clan. At the heart of the story is the seemingly unbridgeable rift between Bethany and Rhys, the origin of which dates to her teenage years. It’s been exacerbated in adulthood by

Rhys’ dim view of her romantic partners. Even as they’re caught up in the chaotic weirdness of 21st-century America, they manage to take the first faltering steps toward a reconciliation. Against that backdrop, Walters makes an affecting, persuasive case that our deepest happiness is the sort we find closest to home.

—Harvey Freedenberg

The Phoenix Pencil Company

By Allison King

COMING OF AGE

In Allison King’s debut novel, The Phoenix Pencil Company (William Morrow, $28.99, 9780063446236), Monica Tsai uncovers the magic of her ancestors and in turn, her own true purpose, thanks to an unassuming pencil. It is August 2018, and Monica has just wrapped up her first year as an engineering undergrad at Swarthmore. She is eager to spend the rest of her summer at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was raised by her Grandma Yun and Grandpa Torou, both now in their 90s. If ever there was an award for the best grandparents, Yun and Torou would certainly be top contenders; they raised Monica with all the care humanly possible. However, they’ve told Monica little about their turbulent past escaping the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. When Yun accidentally lets slip a story about her cousin Meng flicking sesame seeds at her as a young girl, Monica’s interest is piqued. She is determined to find Meng and reunite the cousins, who last saw each other over 70 years ago. And she has a starting point, thanks to her computer science professor’s project, EMBRS, a platform for private journaling that scans users’ entries to recommend personal connections.

Monica’s EMBRS search for a mention of Meng connects her to Louise Sun, a Princeton student who met Meng while researching in Shanghai. Louise agrees to meet Monica, and brings a strange gift from Meng for Yun: a single pencil. The gift prompts Yun to tell Monica about their family’s pencil company in Shanghai, and reveal the ancestral magic running through their veins: the ability to “reforge” pencils, causing them to share the words they’ve written and the memories of whoever wrote with them.

King’s tender story has a lovely balance of the old and new. Through chapters that alternate between the journal entries of Monica and Yun, we see a shifting world, the blessings and

curses of their family’s ability and above all, the power of perseverance. Parallels between the magical pencils and the EMBRS software raise important ethical questions about data and privacy. The Phoenix Pencil Company is a coming-of-age novel that will resonate.

—Chika Gujarathi

Park Avenue

By Renée Ahdieh

POPULAR FICTION

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is notoriously rough, but with her debut novel for adults, bestselling young adult author Renée Ahdieh (Flame in the Mist) makes it look effortless.

A sly and sophisticated skewering of the ultra-wealthy, Park Avenue (Flatiron, $28.99, 9781250897954) is filled with the kind of secrets, lies, backstabbing and betrayals that would be at home in a K-drama. Our heroine, Jia Song, is a scrappy second-generation Korean American determined to be the fastest person at her New York City law firm to make senior partner. So when Jia gets assigned as the lead attorney on a sensitive case involving the powerful Park family, who own one of the top beauty brands in the world, she feels like she’s hit the jackpot. Of course, almost immediately, the opportunity that could make Jia’s career reveals itself to be far more twisted and sinister than the cut-and-dry business cases she normally handles: The Park family patriarch is divorcing his dying wife and attempting to cheat her and his three children out of most of the family business.

Featuring a mysterious unreliable narrator, whiplash-inducing twists and the dishy tone of a friend who always has the best gossip, Park Avenue is fun and frothy, but it also has fangs. Ahdieh’s depiction of the outwardly glittering and gorgeous but emotionally bankrupt Parks is less aspirational fairy tale and more cautionary story about the corrupting influence of unchecked wealth and power. As Jia is sucked deeper into their world, Ahdieh thoughtfully explores conflicts between desire and duty, want and need, and the true price of success. Park Avenue will undoubtedly appeal to fans of writers like Taylor Jenkins Reid, Liane Moriarty and Kevin Kwan: anyone who likes a colorful cast of characters, pointed social commentary and a splash of romance.

—Stephenie Harrison

Recovering Magnus Hirschfeld

Two books illuminate the groundbreaking—but little known—World War II-era

H The Einstein of Sex

You’ve probably never heard of Magnus Hirschfeld—and this is an injustice to a truly great man.

Daniel Brook’s excellent biography, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (Norton, $32.99, 9781324007241), resurrects Dr. Hirschfeld’s status as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, whose insights into human nature can illuminate our turbulent times.

Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in Prussia, the youngest son in a family of cultured, highly educated, assimilated German Jews. After graduating from medical school, Hirschfeld eventually became the preeminent sexologist of his time. Having realized from an early age that he was gay, Hirschfeld believed that homosexuality was neither criminal nor an illness, but inborn. At his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, he presented his theories and research in exhibitions available to the public alongside his extensive library of sexual research. People traveled to the institute to access gender-affirming counseling and medical care; activists and legislators gathered there to strategize policy reform. Hirschfeld’s identity as a gay, Jewish man, as well as his refusal to slot people into neat categories, put him in direct opposition to the fascism of the rising Nazi party. In 1933, Nazi soldiers destroyed the institute and burned its library. Forced into exile, Hirschfeld traveled to the U.S., Asia and Africa.

sexologist .

The Lilac People

Milo Todd’s debut novel, The Lilac People (Counterpoint, $27, 9781640097032), is a sweeping historical drama centered on a German trans man named Bertie and his girlfriend, Sofie, who spend World War II hiding on the farm of a friend’s grandparents, having assumed their identities after their deaths. Soon after the war ends, the pair find Karl, a trans man, collapsed in their field after escaping from Dachau. He informs them that as Allied forces liberate the camps, they are sending gay and trans people to jail. Meanwhile, Bertie and Sofie receive notice that they must report to a work camp, where their secrets will likely be revealed. Instead, the couple take Karl in and begin planning a dangerous escape to America, their only hope for survival.

The book’s title refers to “Das Lila Lied” (“The Lilac Song”), a queer anthem written to honor trans rights advocate Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in 1920. The first part of the novel alternates between Bertie and Sofie’s life in 1945 and scenes in 1932 Berlin, where Bertie worked with Dr. Hirschfeld at his renowned Institute for Sexual Science. The multiple timelines occasionally feel less fluid than a strictly chronological account might have; however, they succeed in sharply contrasting Bertie and Sofie’s lives before, during and after the war.

Brook does an excellent job explaining Hirschfeld’s intellectual achievements. But the soul of The Einstein of Sex comes from Brook’s focus on Hirschfeld’s humanity. Hirschfeld was a man of huge appetites— sexual, cultural, intellectual, social, even dietary—and Brook is clear that Hirschfeld’s scholarship resonates so powerfully today because it is supported by not only his research, but also the generosity of his soul and his exuberance for life.

—Deborah Mason

Throughout, Todd expertly mixes the historical with the dramatic, for instance, laying out the rapid, chilling disintegration of trans rights under Hitler, while offering a harrowing account of Bertie’s narrow escape from the Nazi attack on the Institute in 1933. The Lilac People notes that when Hitler came to power, “one of the first orders of business” was to revoke identification cards for trans people. Sound familiar? Sadly, Todd’s soulful and suspenseful account of trans people fighting for survival amid political persecution could hardly be timelier.

—Alice Cary

H The Salt Stones

By Helen Whybrow MEMOIR

Helen Whybrow and her husband own a 200-acre farm in Vermont, where they raise grass-fed Icelandic sheep and organic blueberries while running an on-site retreat center devoted to exploring issues of conservation and social justice. It’s just the sort of place where many of us might dream of escaping to, but in her eloquent debut memoir and “love song to this hillside,” The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life (Milkweed, $26, 9781571311627), Whybrow celebrates its transcendent beauty while always keeping it real. “Farming, I had learned, is a giant game of Jenga.”

Moments spent enjoying panoramic vistas, plunging into swimming holes and being surrounded by birdsong contrast with heartbreaking moments of injury, illness and death among her flock; long, uncomfortable nights spent trying to shoot marauding coyotes; bone-tiring days of sheep shearing; and the sadness of sending animals to the slaughterhouse to keep

Things in Nature Merely Grow

By Yiyun Li

MEMOIR

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes in the opening line of Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG, $26, 9780374617318).

It’s the same thing a police officer says before delivering the worst possible news: that Li’s son James, a college freshman, has taken his own life. James has followed his brother, Vincent, who died by suicide in 2017, at 16.

Li is the author of two previous memoirs (one that’s partly about her own depression) and six works of fiction (one that’s about Vincent’s death), and she begins to write again, knowing that language falls short. “Words are what I will do for James too, even if I cannot learn a new alphabet and invent a new language, even knowing, right before starting, the inevitability of failing him.” As she makes clear to the reader, Things in Nature Merely Grow is not a memoir about getting past grief: “This book is about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly

the herd a manageable size. “I’ve been called Little Bo-Peep by visitors,” Whybrow writes. “I’ve been called a murderer when I try to sell our meat. I don’t feel like either of those things.”

Just as the late National Poet Laureate Donald Hall wrote so beautifully about life on his New Hampshire homestead in Seasons at Eagle Pond, Whybrow writes in compelling, finely chiseled prose about the annual seasonal rhythms at her beloved Knoll Farm, beginning with a vivid scene of a tricky lamb birth on a cold spring night and continuing through the year until winter, whose melancholy, dark months she finds conducive to contemplation and writing.

“This ancient primal thing of caring for a flock is ultimately about human attachment,”

abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer.”

Instead, in this short book of just around 200 pages, Li describes her life as she learns how to keep living in “the abyss” in the months after James’ death. She writes, gardens, keeps silent company with cherished friends. She recounts the shockingly insensitive things other parents say. And she circles back to both sons’ childhoods, as well as her own in Beijing, growing up in the crosshairs of an emotionally abusive mother.

Li also turns to the writers she loves, like William Trevor and Shakespeare, as well as the writers her sons read. As she delves into her sons’ differing personalities and quirks, she recounts the difficult choices involved in parenting two gifted and sensitive children.

This is trying terrain for a reader, as Things in Nature Merely Grow is not an uplifting book. But I marked many striking passages, like this one: “The immediate days after a child’s death (or the death of any loved one, I think) share something with the immediate days after a child’s birth . . . the days go so fast, and maternity leave is over in no time.” Li is a plainspoken, clear-eyed guide to the worst that a parent can endure.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

Whybrow writes. She organically weaves her own life story into the details of farm life, especially focusing on her beloved mother’s years with dementia and eventual death, along with the birth and growth of Whybrow’s daughter, Wren, whose woodcuts illustrate the book. As Wren graduates high school and prepares to bike solo cross-country, Whybrow reminds herself that “letting go of something is not the same as losing it.”

Like James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s View, The Salt Stones offers widespread appeal to a large audience. Readers will likely find it the perfect tonic for these turbulent times, and yet, with Whybrow’s keen awareness of so many aspects of our world, she never shuts her eyes to what hurts.

—Alice Cary

H By the Second Spring

By Danielle Leavitt

HISTORY

In By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (FSG, $30, 9780374614331), Danielle Leavitt portrays Ukrainians not as cartoon superheroes or helpless victims, but as normal human beings. Leavitt, an American, has spent much of her life in Ukraine, falling in love with its people, culture and history, and earned a Ph.D. in Ukrainian history from Harvard. When the war began in 2022, she took part in a project where Ukrainians could record their wartime experiences. Inspired by these oral histories, Leavitt eventually contacted the seven people whose stories she tells in this remarkable book.

All seven are extraordinarily ordinary. Tania is a pig farmer from south Ukraine, Vitaly owns a coffee shop in a town near Kyiv and Maria is a young wife and mother from Mariupol. Anna is a police cadet in Luhansk, Polina is a fashion designer who

lived in the U.S. before the war and Yulia is a craftswoman from eastern Ukraine. Volodymyr is an engineer who used to work in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but is now a writer and director. While their particulars are unique, the stories generally follow the same pattern over the course of the first year and a half of the war: the violent end of their prewar life and a shocking descent into hell before finally adapting to life in a daily state of war, punctuated by the loss of homes, hideous injuries and the deaths of friends.

Leavitt provides historical context to demonstrate how Putin’s war is a continuation of Russian oppression dating from the czarist and Soviet empires, and skillfully uses the seven stories to reveal the full magnitude of that history. Volodymyr’s 1989 effort to exhume and rebury the body of a Ukrainian poet who died in a Soviet gulag in 1985 reflects not only Russian hostility, but also Ukrainian persistence. Tania’s refusal to leave her farm and Vitaly’s decision to rebuild his café are the result of their dogged determination to remain human and Ukrainian in the face of Putin’s determination to subjugate them. By the Second Spring celebrates the ordinary people who ultimately are heroes because of their humanity, not despite it.

—Deborah Mason

Freedom Season

By Peniel E. Joseph

AMERICAN HISTORY

1963 was a year of great tragedy and extraordinary promise for the Civil Rights Movement. As the country celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Black citizens were still waiting for full racial and economic equality. Then Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, the South’s most segregated city. They believed such a confrontation would demonstrate the evils of segregation and the moral clarity of nonviolent protest.

In his sweeping, inspiring yet heartbreaking Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution (Basic Books, $32, 9781541675896), acclaimed University of Texas historian Peniel E. Joseph expertly guides readers through the effects of the decision to desegregate Birmingham, as well as other major events of that defining

year. Joseph’s carefully crafted narrative captures how various people, from protesters to high government officials, held divergent views about the movement.

Among the events that year were the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the killing of four Black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, the March on Washington, Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the beginning of serious discussions by national political leaders about meaningful civil rights legislation and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A central figure in Joseph’s account is the author James Baldwin, who played a unique role as a friend to not only King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, but also many Black luminaries less frequently mentioned, such as playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activist Gloria Richardson. Though there was often disagreement among Black activists and intellectuals over the goals and strategy of the movement, Baldwin’s incisive condemnations of whiteness and injustice inspired artists, journalists, politicians and celebrities of all stripes. Freedom Season pays fitting tribute to how Baldwin’s brilliant, prophetic essays and public appearances inspired many to join the Civil Rights cause.

Joseph has authored books about Malcolm X and King ( The Sword and the Shield ), Stokely Carmichael (Stokely), racism in the 21st century (The Third Reconstruction) and more. The vivid narrative of Freedom Season captures a year when, he writes, “America came undone and remade itself.” While many problems were not resolved and still exist today, Joseph reminds us that 1963 “altered national conceptions of race, democracy, and citizenship in ways that permanently and fundamentally shaped the rest of the century. ”

—Roger Bishop

Forest Euphoria

By Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian NATURE

“I hope that in sharing these stories, you too will feel the closeness of the earth, the lack of space between our cells, and the memory of each other,” writes mycologist and author Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian in the opening pages of her book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature (Spiegel & Grau, $30,

9781954118904). In this boundary-busting debut, Kaishian blends her knowledge of science and social histories to tackle the societal division brought on by adherence to binaries: male and female, nature and human. In so doing, Kaishian investigates organisms that are “those furthest banished from human society, those least associated with the ‘desirable’ traits of being human—upright and logical, two-legged and binary-sexed.”

Forest Euphoria dives into the world of swamps and slugs, eels and cicadas, and especially fungi. Kaishian lovingly defines these organisms as “queer” in their mating habits, how they are sexed (if they can be at all) and how they freely trouble binaries that define human existence. “My personal connections to these organisms have brought me a sense of queer belonging and comfort in the heaviest of times,” Kaishian writes. “In exchange, I hope to do my small part by sharing their stories.”

Woven throughout this paean to a queer natural world is Kaishian’s sometimes tentatively revealed memoir of growing up and growing into her vocation. Like many of the organisms featured, Kaishian straddles boundaries herself. She is a descendant of refugees of the Armenian genocide, a trauma survivor, neurodivergent and queer. It is from this life experience that Kaishian understands how other—and othered—organisms are closer to the human world than we typically think. It is a message gorgeously delivered: Kaishian possesses a poet’s understanding of lyricism and language, and her writing invites you to sink into a pool of wonder. I cannot think of anything better we ought to be doing right now.

—Anna Christensen

Peace Is a Shy Thing

By Alex Vernon

BIOGRAPHY

Tim O’Brien’s memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and his semiautobiographical collection of stories, The Things They Carried, continue to be staples in high school and college courses because they capture the ambivalence, fear and psychology of young men facing the horrors and inanities of the Vietnam War. Now, O’Brien’s friend, literary historian and Gulf War veteran Alex Vernon devotedly offers a comprehensive glimpse into O’Brien’s life and work in Peace Is a Shy

Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien (St. Martin’s, $37, 9781250358493).

Drawing on interviews with O’Brien and on close readings of his work, Vernon traces the writer’s life through his upbringing in Minnesota, his days at Macalester College, his tour of duty in Vietnam and his marriages. The “tropical killer-dreamscape” of Vietnam seeped into O’Brien, fueling his desire to be a great writer and providing him with the subjects and themes of his many books. As Vernon points out, the struggle between competing moral positions lies at the heart of O’Brien’s writing. Although O’Brien was opposed to the war in Vietnam, he also believed in civic service and the American dream. This dichotomy manifests in the storylines and tensions of novels such as Going After Cacciato and In the Lake of the Woods, as protagonists struggle with uncertainty when faced with ethical quandaries. Vernon points out that in O’Brien’s fiction, “movement is essential” and “counterpoints the writer’s and reader’s sitting, sitting, sitting.” O’Brien’s writing requires readers to be actively engaged with the movements of characters in hellish landscapes, and his writing also asks readers to be actively engaged in the moral dilemmas of his characters. It’s a hefty volume at over 500 pages, and Veron’s plot summaries of O’Brien’s novels are sometimes overly long. However, splicing illustrative passages from the texts allows him to zero in on key aspects of O’Brien’s writings. Peace Is a Shy Thing is in part a fan’s notes; the men’s 20-plus year friendship provides the bedrock of O’Brien’s candid interviews, presenting a portrait of a giant in American letters.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

H The Afterlife of Malcolm X

By Mark Whitaker

most influential political activists in history. Malcolm’s influence spans generations, from John Coltrane to Tupac Shakur to President Barack Obama, and his political ideas have served as the foundation for nearly every leftist activist movement in America since his death.

‘The

Afterlife of Malcolm

X’ is a powerful and inspiring examination of how one man’s legacy has grown far beyond his lifetime.

Most notably, Whitaker analyzes the impact of Malcolm’s 1965 death itself by investigating the media’s portrayal of the murder and trial following it, and the wrongful convictions of Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam— two men exonerated in 2021 after spending decades in prison. This section is among the strongest, packed with firsthand accounts, compelling reporting, insights from activists of the era and stories about Malcolm before his assassination. Though extensive, it never feels sensationalized. Whitaker strikes a careful balance between crime drama and rigorous historical narrative. He skillfully unpacks how the news media shaped—and continues to shape—the public perception of Malcolm, both suppressing and amplifying the mystique surrounding his image and the frenzy around his death.

Erased

By Anna Malaika Tubbs

AMERICAN HISTORY

Reexamining the history you thought you knew can be both unsettling and astounding. In Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250876690), Anna Malaika Tubbs succeeds in making it a worthy exploration. As the saying goes, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. In this case, “it” is patriarchy: societal control by men to harness and maintain power. “The further one is from being a white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied man, the less their lives will be valued,” Tubbs asserts in the book’s introduction.

Tubbs is the celebrated author of 2021’s The Three Mothers, in which she revealed how the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin influenced America and the world at large. In Erased, Tubbs uncovers why the stories of those women and countless others throughout recorded history do not make it into textbooks and are not commemorated. She insists that women are and have always been powerful beings, as evidenced by, for one, their ability to bear children. But patriarchy undermines this power. Tubbs demonstrates how sexist policies, laws and gender norms limit mothers’ options and support.

BIOGRAPHY

Mark Whitaker’s The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America (S&S, $30.99, 9781668033296) is an interesting take on biography because, in many ways, it isn’t one. It’s a eulogy. Whitaker frames Malcolm’s assassination as the beginning of the activist’s legacy, and he focuses on how a man once considered to be a dangerous extremist became recognized as one of the

Another highlight of the book is its thoughtful analysis of Malcolm X’s impact on contemporary pop culture. While Whitaker’s examinations of artistic movements and athletes are valuable, the deep dive into Spike Lee’s 1992 film Malcolm X, the first exposure to Malcolm’s legacy for many young people, is particularly fascinating. The film bolstered Malcolm’s image and marked a turning point in how he was perceived. Whitaker offers a wide-ranging look at Lee’s uphill battle to campaign for, finance and direct the film. In many ways, this section becomes a broader commentary on how racial discrimination continues to permeate Hollywood and the arts—and the struggles Black artists face to tell their own history.

Ultimately, The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a powerful and inspiring examination of how one man’s legacy has grown far beyond his lifetime. As we mark the centennial of Malcolm X’s birth, Whitaker’s work serves as a vital reminder of his enduring impact—and why his story continues to matter.

—Natalia Berry

At every turn, Erased illuminates how our recorded history has been distorted. Tubbs asks us to consider the iconic painting of Sacagawea standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their 1804 exploration of the West. Sacagawea was described by women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony as an example of a woman who “accomplished patriotic deeds.” In reality, barely a teenager, Sacagawea was kidnapped from her Lemhi Shoshone tribe and sold to a Frenchman before being forced to join Lewis and Clark as an interpreter. She was pregnant when they embarked; the board visible on her back in the portrait was how she carried her son for their two-and-a-half year journey, for which the Frenchman who owned her was paid a salary.

Tubbs writes that her goal with Erased was “to make American patriarchy as obvious to you as it is to me, so that together we could put our hands on it and take it apart.” Thanks to her exhaustive research and talent for storytelling, readers may be inspired to do just that.

—Priscilla Kipp

H One of the Boys

By Victoria Zeller COMING OF AGE

Up until her senior year, Grace Woodhouse was strictly “one of the boys”—the starting kicker for Pageland High School’s football team, enmeshed in the tight-knit culture of ball and boyhood, with strong college prospects and a devoted girlfriend.

One of the Boys (Levine Querido, $19.99, 9781646145027) introduces Grace just after she has come out as transgender, at the beginning of her senior year. Having quit football and ended her relationship, she now hangs with a new crowd—the other queer students. Navigating radical change is hard enough, but when Grace’s old teammates ask her to reincorporate football into her life and kick for them again, her present is complicated by her past. Suddenly, she is breaking Pageland’s “stick to the status quo” social scene, charting new territory: How can she be both a

Hyo the Hellmaker

By Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

FANTASY

Hyo Hakai and her brother, Mansaku, are newcomers to Onogoro, an isolated island where gods live among humans. As a hellmaker—someone commissioned to create personalized hells for customers’s foes— Hyo is drawn into the mysteries of Onogoro, especially when she and Mansaku discover that their friend and host, Makuni Junichiro (Jun), is missing.

Loosely based on Japanese mythology, Hyo the Hellmaker (Scholastic, $27.99, 9781546152668) is a lore-filled fantasy romp through a world alive with gods and mysticism. Accompanied by dynamic illustrations by the author, Mina Ikemoto Ghosh, the story drops readers into a vibrant universe. From gods working day jobs, to pears that turn humans into demons to en—the “fateful connections” that exist between everything— the world of Hyo the Hellmaker is a delight to discover.

Readers are introduced to a large cast of characters, each of whom has their own abilities and secrets. Todomegawa Daimyoujin, a short-tempered god and curse-mediator who

football player and a trans girl? Is it possible to reenter such a masculine, dominance-oriented sphere and simultaneously feel feminine and safe?

While Zeller’s novel tackles the important issue of queer representation in sports, One of the Boys is not a trauma-heavy narrative. Zeller places Grace in an overall accepting community, and her story encompasses the range of adolescence’s highs and lows: friend group drama, parties, injuries, parents, romance, insecurities. Grace is a wonderfully well-rounded character whose depiction goes beyond challenges she faces as a trans girl. At the same time, Zeller writes Grace with an eye to the discomfort and othering that trans folks endure even in mostly welcoming spaces. Through Grace’s story, Zeller

emphasizes the power of solidarity between marginalized students, especially as a means to break cycles of toxic masculinity and discrimination.

One of the Boys is an amazing feel-good read for any teen (or adult!) who loves football—but for those who know nothing about the sport, Zeller does a great job making it accessible. Alongside great sports plays and banter, Zeller also prioritizes “feelingsball,” or mapping Grace’s mental and emotional journey as she works to unite the football world and the LGBTQ+ world, two spaces with long-held stereotypes and prejudices against each other. One of the Boys is a standout work of YA fiction, as inspiring and illuminating as it is funny and relatable.

—Jessica Peng

rides a headless, flaming horse, was working with Jun around the time of his disappearance. Ukibashi Awano is a secretive heiress whose escape from a kidnapping remains a mystery to the public. Hyo and Mansaku both have abilities and personalities that make them stand out: Hyo is clever and headstrong, confident in her hellmaking abilities even when faced with obstacles. And Mansaku, host to a weapon-spirit, is unexpectedly deadly under his cheerful and calm demeanor.

Part myth, part horror and part mystery, Hyo the Hellmaker is a fresh take on divine fantasy that’s replete with the unexpected. Full of striking illustrations, this novel is perfect for readers seeking to dive into a new, alluring world.

—Tami Orendain

H Kill Creatures

By Rory Power

THRILLER

The town of Saltcedar, Utah, spent the past year mourning the loss of Nan’s three best friends— girls that Nan knows would be disgusted by the way they’ve been memorialized. Girls who, to Nan, were “the light off the water.” Girls who

disappeared into thin air after they, along with Nan, took a trip to a hidden swimming hole called Devil’s Eye.

As the town gathers for a ceremony to honor the missing girls, Nan tries to grit her teeth and get through it. But when the ceremony is interrupted by the shocking return of Luce, one of her lost friends, Nan is forced to confront what she recalls of that night. She lied to the police. She knows what happened. She caved Luce’s skull in with a rock before drowning their other friends. So how is Luce back—and what does she want?

Wilder Girls author Rory Power creates a tantalizing, must-read thriller in Kill Creatures (Delacorte, $19.99, 9780593302316). Power weaves the unfolding mystery of Luce’s return together with flashbacks to the previous summer, which Nan spent with the girls. The result is a propulsive narrative that casts doubt on everything Nan thinks and actively grapples with obsession and friendship. In the present, Luce’s distant, occasionally cruel demeanor juxtaposed against Nan’s frantic concern keeps scenes compelling.

Power does not waste a second, and she leaves just enough clues for readers to piece together the mystery as it unfolds, while keeping the experience fluid for those who simply want to follow along for the ride. For teenagers looking for a summer read that will fill the hole We Were Liars left behind, Kill Creatures will more than satisfy.

—Nicole Brinkley

CELEBRATING FREEDOM

These two impactful picture books will guide readers of all ages through the history of Juneteenth .

troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued orders to free the state’s entire enslaved population—two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect. Juneteenth, a portmanteau of that date, honors what is often seen as America’s second Independence Day, and was recognized as a federal U.S. holiday in 2021. So Many Years and The Juneteenth Alphabet join the legion of picture books introducing young readers to this day of remembrance and jubilation.

H SO MANY YEARS

On the title page of So Many Years: A Juneteenth Story (Clarion, $19.99, 9780063081147), readers are introduced to a Black family: a father taking care of a horse drawing a wagon, a mother hanging laundry and a daughter and son running through their yard. As the family gets ready for a celebration, each spread asks readers to ponder how a person would celebrate if, after “so many years” of being enslaved, they finally had the freedom to do so.

Ezra Jack Keats Honor recipient Anne Wynter has demonstrated her skill for thoughtful yet concise text in previous offerings such as Everybody in the Red Brick Building, and she takes it a step further here. The minimalist text of this picture book, which

takes the form of a series of ques tions (“How would you sing after so many years of writing your songs in code?”) and their ensuing responses, creates a powerful call-and-response effect. Readers will leave knowing this particular family’s story, though they may spend even more time reading the “About Juneteenth” section at the end, where Wynter succinctly gives a history of the holiday.

The stunning illustrations are unmistakably the work of Jerome Pumphrey, one half of the Pumphrey brothers, who received a Caldecott Honor for their illustrations in Jason Reynolds’ There Was a Party for Langston. Pumphrey’s use of acrylic paint on hardboard panels gives texture and depth to his beautiful, impactful spreads as the first half of the book offers glimpses of the family preparing for a Juneteenth celebration, memorably juxtaposed

with the harsh reality of their previous life as enslaved people. We are then, in the second half, taken through a series of future Juneteenths, with time jumps cleverly hinted at in the details.

THE JUNETEENTH ALPHABET

From A for “ancestors” all the way to Z for “zeal,” The Juneteenth Alphabet (duopress, $14.99, 9781464219016) uses the ABCs to guide conversations about the complexities of the holiday. It offers valuable context to the historical events before, during and after emancipation, and pays tribute to those who brought the celebration into the mainstream, such as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” Opal Lee.

The text by debut author Andrea Underwood Petifer is a joy to read, while maintaining the picture book’s informative

mission. Petifer opts for alliteration any chance she gets. For example, on the page for H (“happy”), Petifer writes, “This history can be hard, and at times it can feel heavy, but with hugs and hope, we can continue to hold space for truth.” In addition to historical details that provide helpful context, Petifer also offers a generous variety of prompts such as “turn and talk” and “focus and find” to guide discussions.

Illustrator Ana Latese contributes digital art that pops from the page. Creating a series of illustrations to effectively represent the themes of 26 words is not an easy feat, yet Latese keeps all the spreads cohesive, and her inclusion of a wide range of skin tones, hair and bodies truly celebrates the vast diversity of America’s Black population.

—Emily Koch

Oh, how you would dance!

Oh, how you would eat!

Art from So Many Years © 2025. Words by Anne Wynter, pictures by Jerome Pumphrey. Reproduced by permission of Clarion.

Treasure in unexpected places

The protagonist of Kyle Lukoff’s latest middle grade novel finds help in the unlikeliest of places: the trash .

In A World Worth Saving (Dial, $18.99, 9780593618981), a trans boy named A goes on the run after escaping what turns out to be a literally demonic conversion therapy group, and discovers a golem that can form itself out of trash, anywhere and anytime.

According to the golem, A embodies the “holiness inherent to every transition” as a trans 14-yearold. Can you share more about this idea of holiness?

Erin Bow wrote that “the root of holiness, it turns out, is to do things deliberately.” (“The Scorpion Rules,” 2015), and I have carried that piece of wisdom with me for the last decade. While it is, of course, not a complete answer, it feels beautiful and true enough to me.

rehearsing for—I mean, imagining—how I will behave if I am ever plunged into a fantastical situation (time travel, here I come). While my characters’ reactions don’t always reflect how I might react in a given situation, I am fairly sure that my first step in A’s shoes would also be to try and establish appropriate channels of communication. And, though ancient folklore is by its nature also about ancient people, I am somewhat convinced that human beings have, at our core, always been the same, so whatever lessons folklore taught our ancestors are also probably lessons that we ourselves could stand to learn.

that wouldn’t attract undue attention, since it would be a very different story if the golem was an obvious companion for casual passersby to see. I figured that trash was something that would be everywhere, but could dissipate into the background if needed.

What led you to use Jewish folklore and traditions in telling this story?

At first I thought that I’d have to draw consistently from other folklore and tradition to complete the story, because while I knew that Jews had golems, and a giant bird, I didn’t know much about our stories beyond that. I learned about certain Jewish teachings about ghosts and spiritual possession somewhat by accident, and heard about a podcast about Jewish demonology also unintentionally, and from those two sources discovered more than enough to craft a fantasy narrative around (and possibly even a sequel). So I guess that in addition to Erin’s teaching, holiness can also be the meaning that we, as human beings blessed with imagination, fashion out of the seeming chaos of life.

A seeks refuge in his family’s old synagogue, which inspires plenty of nostalgic memories. Did you draw upon your own childhood when writing?

In many ways, yes. Any time A talks about what he experiences or feels as the only Jewish kid in an overwhelmingly Christian community is a direct reflection of how othered I felt as a young person. It was an otherness that I embraced, since I am a person who enjoys being difficult, but it also made me feel uncomfortably isolated from my peers—not just around the holidays, but all year round.

“What does it mean to find value in what has been thrown away? What can we learn from what we refuse?”

The golem first speaks to A in archaic language, until A—ever the 21st-century teen—asks it to just talk “normally.”Did you find it challenging to mix together ancient folklore with contemporary life?

Not at all! I have watched and read a LOT of fantasy, and so have spent a lot of time

But I also remember feeling out of place at synagogue (which, in my imagination, is identical to the synagogue I describe in the book), because most of the other kids knew each other from their more urban schools. Part of why it took me so long to write a story with a Jewish protagonist is because I don’t like writing from a place of alienation, but those are the feelings that largely shaped my identity formation as an American Jew, far more so than being queer or trans ever has.

Why did you make this story’s golem constructed from trash, not the usual clay?

For reasons both practical and symbolic! For one, I needed the golem to be something

Metaphorically, what does it mean to find value in what has been thrown away? What can we learn from what we refuse? Can the stone the builders rejected become the cornerstone?

Also, I lived in an apartment furnished with stuff I picked up from other people’s stoops, and dumpster dived for a lot of my 20s (as do some of the characters), so I really embody that dichotomy of trash/treasure.

As A journeys all over Seattle, we’re treated to memorable locations such as the Transhack, an abandoned basement repurposed as a home by unhoused queer youth, and Burger Queen, a restaurant that hosts drag shows. Do any of the places in the book draw inspiration from real life?

Kind of! Transhack was inspired by two different places I spent time in: a friend’s probably illegal apartment that shared a basement with an Indian restaurant on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, and the SS Gay/Handsome Transom, a houseboat on a canal in Brooklyn (which did in fact feature a bucket toilet. I only used it once). Burger Queen is kind of Hamburger Mary’s [a restaurant chain known for its drag shows] a little bit? I have spent uncountable hours in diverse queer spaces since I first came out in 2001, and, magpie-like, bits and pieces of everywhere I’ve ever been show up in unexpected or unexplained details throughout my books.

—Yi Jiang

H Anything

By Rebecca Stead Illustrated by Gracey Zhang

PICTURE

BOOK

Anything (Chronicle, $17.99, 9781797215150) starts with the busyness of moving day for a little girl and her father— boxes, a new bedroom, new sights and sounds outside. And since it’s a big event, they are marking the day with cake. Daddy invites his daughter to make three wishes aloud for “anything.” But deep down inside, she’s also making “secret wishes” about something she’s too afraid to share: The new apartment doesn’t feel like home. What follows is one of the most touching and lovely stories published in years. Rebecca Stead’s narration throws open the door to the girl’s world with blunt, straightforward statements. Like most kids, our unnamed main character has strong opinions about favorite colors (rainbow), favorite foods (pizza) and not-so-favorite smells (paint). But

Blue

By Suzanne Kaufman

PICTURE BOOK

Suzanne Kaufman, who has illustrated a number of children’s books (All Are Welcome , Hello Dog ), makes her solo debut with Blue (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316311663), a fantasy about a young boy who befriends a blue heron. It’s hard not to be enchanted by those alluring, seemingly magical creatures, which are notoriously skittish around humans. In this tale, however, when the boy spots one at sunrise, they instantly bond. First, he tiptoes closer and imitates the bird’s stance. Soon they are following and mimicking each other, having a grand time splashing and shrieking together.

By the time the sun sets, the boy is calling his new best friend “Blue,” and is sad to see him fly away. As darkness falls, Blue returns, this time taking the boy on a wondrous flight over the ocean, rising up toward the gleaming moon.

Kaufman’s immersive art will captivate young readers, and her gentle tale is particularly good for bedtime reading. The boy’s antics are endearingly comical, full of childlike energy, while the majestic bird remains

underneath this confident, outspoken exterior lie her worries about an unfamiliar home. She doesn’t like the new bathtub, the closet is too small and her new plant makes scary shadows.

One of the standouts of Anything (and there are many) is how the father handles his daughter’s fears and grief. He doesn’t flood the room with saccharine statements, nor does he ignore her concerns. Instead, he calmly helps her feel at home. It is beautiful, gentle and so deeply, achingly honest, touching the heart with its poignant humanity. Readers will fall head-over-heels for this book’s art. In a stunning mash of pen and

paint, using black and white alongside vibrant primary colors, Gracey Zhang’s art perfectly captures myriad feelings: anxiety, joy, fright, calm. It’s all there, scribbly and sketched, bold and confident. Zhang’s characters are simple but full of emotion, and her created world feels vibrant, growing increasingly colorful as the story progresses. Most of us, at one time or another, have felt unmoored and far from home. Stories about moving are relatively common—however, this picture book is anything but. Have a tissue at the ready.

—Jill Lorenzini

mysterious. Kaufman’s pages are awash with gorgeous shades of blue that draw readers in, while splashes of color accentuate details like the sun’s reflection on the water, the yellow of the heron’s beak and the red glow of a shooting star. Her playful, loose style is perfectly suited for this make-believe adventure— including real details about herons and their environment, while adding imaginary gestures such as the heron’s friendly, delighted glances at his new friend. Expressive linework adds bursts of energy throughout in the curls of the boy’s hair, the frothy waves of the ocean and swaying reeds of seagrass.

Blue will leave young readers with a newfound appreciation for and curiosity about blue herons and their watery worlds—and a desire to fly away with their own feathery friend.

—Alice Cary

H Sakina and the Uninvited Guests

By Zahra Marwan

PICTURE BOOK

A young girl’s ambivalent feelings about a museum visit spark an unexpected encounter with the past in Zahra Marwan’s Sakina and the Uninvited Guests

(Bloomsbury, $18.99, 9781547613427), which explores art’s relevance to the contemporary world. Sakina had been looking forward to a day at the seashore, but an overpowering sandstorm diverts her and her mother to a museum. Evocative prose describes the sandy onslaught: “The dust had made the city orange—like a tangerine, the waves like clementine peels.”

At the museum, while her mother is overcome with sentiment at the sight of the art, Sakina plunks herself on the floor with a giant yawn. Marwan, author of the award-winning Where Butterflies Fill the Sky, immediately establishes a relatable counterpoint between the mother’s emotional response and Sakina’s confusion and disappointment. This humorous standoff eventually leads to a series of revelations that beautifully unfold like a series of nesting dolls.

Impatient Sakina hardly notices statues of a crocodile, a blue jaguar and a winged lion, but later, she discovers the figures have followed her home. These lively surprise visitors cause comical chaos in clever ways, while helping Sakina understand her mother’s relationship with art. Mawarn’s text and watercolor and ink illustrations exquisitely convey Sakina’s changing outlook. At the start, scenes are inviting but straightforward. But as Sakina begins to comprehend how art can connect her mother—and her—to their family’s history, scenes transform into swirling Chagalllike tapestries.

The back matter contains an author’s note and a description of Marwan’s artistic process that offer plenty of discussion points for young readers, who are likely to share fresh observations and insights with each new reading. Just as the museum grows on the book’s young heroine, Sakina and the Uninvited Guests is worth visiting time and time again. It’s a unique celebration of the beauty and mysteries of art, language and the importance of remembering our ancestors.

—Alice Cary

Nightsong

By Sally Soweol Han

PICTURE

BOOK

Lovers of books about the night sky will know at first glance they will like Sally Soweol Han’s Nightsong (Bloomsbury, $18.99, 9781547615063). Lewis and his mom have caught the bus home, zooming away from a busy day and the cacophony of the city. But when a flat tire pauses their journey, Lewis follows a firefly into a nearby meadow and discovers a whole new world of sounds. Simple and charming, Nightsong will entertain younger readers and kick off some nostalgia for older ones.

Han’s art is full of detail and delightful to explore. Readers won’t be able to help but wonder at the time Han has spent creating each meticulous illustration. Mostly black and white, Nightsong is illuminated by pops of color wherever there is sound. Colorful bugs, owls, swimming fish, swaying branches and even people make a visual orchestra that seems to glow against the monochromatic world—so vivid you can almost hear it. A few close-ups are so lush that you feel like part of the moment. While Lewis might be energized by all he hears and sees, little eyeballs and brains will be quieted by Nightsong, whose mix of shadowed tones and illuminated moments creates a calm atmosphere that is great for winding down.

There is little exposition or character development in this picture book, because none is needed. Han’s narration is calm and even, without much flourish, save for the onomatopoeia of human, machine and animal sounds. Moments of subtle alliteration make it a pleasant read-aloud. This simple approach is fitting, as younger readers will likely be too absorbed in the art—which stands on its own—to appreciate a narrative that is too complicated.

Nightsong is a beautiful bedtime story that will have you fondly remembering warm nights lit by fireflies and the sounds of the many creatures who live their lives by moonlight.

—Jill Lorenzini

H Gus and Glory

By Sarah Guillory

MIDDLE GRADE

In the acknowledgements at the end of her heartwarming Gus and Glory (Roaring Brook, $18.99, 9781250349361), Sarah Guillory (Nowhere Better Than Here ) writes, “This story would not exist without the love of a dog. My first bloodhound, Gus . . . was funny and mischievous and I still miss him every day.”

Guillory’s fictional Gus is a lovably rambunctious and drooly tribute to her real dog. The girl who befriends him is the wonderful Glory St. Romain, a smart and thoughtful 12-year-old who adores puzzles and mystery novels, especially ones by Agatha Christie. As Gus and Glory begins, her drive toward discovery is stronger than ever: Her mom left three weeks ago, leaving behind only a pile of unpaid bills and a disconnected telephone number.

As a result, Glory’s dad (a long-haul trucker who’s barely around) has sent her to live in the small town of Sweet Olive, Louisiana, with her estranged maternal grandparents, Nana Pat and Pawpaw Jack. A distraught and confused Glory wonders, “Where was Mom? Did she miss me? What had I done wrong?” The adults won’t talk about it with her, so Glory decides to put together the pieces of what she knows and solve the mystery on her own. When Gus comes galloping into her life, Glory realizes she has not only an adoring and hilariously messy new friend, but also the ideal collaborator: She’ll train the bloodhound to track, and together they’ll hunt down the truth.

As the two build their tracking expertise, they begin to form an affectionate found family around them, offering hope for a happier future despite Glory’s heartbreak. Glory’s voice is strong and affecting, and Gus is absolutely the goodest boy. They’re two funny, poignant, memorable characters in this moving and hopeful tale about a transformative time in a girl’s life—a time that leaves the people around her changed as well.

—Linda M. Castellitto

Colette

By Jean-François Sénéchal Illustrated by Pascale Bonenfant

Translated by Nick Frost and Catherine Ostiguy

PICTURE BOOK

Colette is a bee of many talents, an adventurous insect who does all sorts of things on her own. Whether she’s sipping nectar from a flower through a redand-white-striped bendy straw, fending off lightning with a sturdy mushroom cap or hiking her way through a dense forest, “Colette doesn’t need anyone else.”

The adorable and accomplished star of JeanFrançois Sénéchal’s Colette: The Solitary Bee (Milky Way, $17.99, 9781990252396) is a helpful bee, too. When others ask her for assistance, “how could she say no when she knows how to do so many things?” So Colette energetically flaps her wings as she tows a snail up a mountain, and smiles as she helps a trio of worms retrieve buried treasure. But sometimes, even the confident Colette must ask her neighbors for assistance. A firefly shares its warm glow on a dark night, and a snail offers her a spot under a leaf during a rainstorm—which gives her neighbors the pleasure of knowing they, too, helped make someone’s life better.

Translated from French by Nick Frost and Catherine Ostiguy, Sénéchal’s engaging tale celebrates the joys of independence and solitude while gently encouraging individualistic readers to embrace the warmth of community—something they can do as much or as little as they like. For example, Colette learns that while being a sought-after party guest is flattering and festive, it’s absolutely OK to need a break sometimes, since socializing “is not always easy for a solitary bee.”

Groovy, colorful illustrations by Pascale Bonenfant delightfully depict the busy, rich lives of Colette and her neighbors. Bonenfant’s expressive faces convey these creatures’ curiosity, excitement and exhaustion (see: the bags beneath Colette’s eyes as she trudges through a confounding underground maze) with impressive visual wit. There are lots of fun little details for readers to discover and giggle at in this uplifting, memorable story about Colette choosing to live her best buzzy life, whether that means being self-sufficient, sociable or a life-affirming mix of the two.

—Linda M. Castellitto