May 15, 2023: Volume XCI, No. 10

Featuring 297 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children's and YA books

KIRKUS REVIEWS

VOL. XCI, NO. 10 | 15 MAY 2023

Justin Cronin

The bestselling novelist genuinely hopes you’ll scream and throw The Ferryman across the room

Also in the issue: Samantha Irby, Gary D. Schmidt, Ariel Aberg-Riger

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK | Tom Beer

finding inspiration at the movies

There’s a long and complicated relationship between books and movies. If literary types tend to view the film world with suspicion—films are, at least theoretically, competing for the leisure time of the masses—there’s also the recognition that we are all in the storytelling business and that written stories often provide source material for the visual medium. Here at Kirkus, our coverage of “Book to Screen” news has become a popular staple (see Page 142); if you loved the book you’ll want to check out the movie—even if you’re frequently disappointed by the adaptation.

When authors can set aside this seemingly innate rivalry, the film industry, especially Hollywood, makes a rich setting for a novel. The tyrannical directors, ambitious actors, high-stakes business, dedication to make-believe, and closed world of the film set—all of it is ripe for fictional imagining. Think of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (2012), which uses the Mediterranean shooting location of the 1963 sword-and-sandals epic Cleopatra as a jumping-off point for a narrative that even features a cameo by the film’s star, Richard Burton. Or Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents (2022), which follows an Italian émigré to Hollywood as she makes her way as a typist, and later a producer, at a financially strapped B-movie studio in the 1930s and ’40s.

If full-time novelists need to do copious amounts of research to set a work of fiction in the film world, a bona fide movie star simply follows the old writer’s dictum: write what you know. That’s what Tom Hanks does in his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (Knopf, May 9)—with some creative license, of course. One of the biggest stars on the planet, winner of Academy Awards for his performances in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, Hanks turns out to be an appealing writer with a sly sense of humor and a personable narrative voice (as readers of his 2017 story collection, Uncommon Type, discovered). Here, Hanks takes us behind the scenes on the making of a Marvel-style superhero movie titled, credibly, Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall, and introduces us to the many characters who make the movie magic happen. It’s no spoiler to say that things go a bit awry; our critic calls it a “loose-limbed, bighearted Hollywood yarn.”

If Hanks gives us gentle satire, Sammy Harkham offers a darker vision of Hollywood machinations in Blood of the Virgin (Pantheon, May 2). The protagonist of this graphic novel is Seymour, a horror-film editor in seedy 1970s Los Angeles who gets the opportunity to have his own film script produced—but at what price? As Seymour descends deeper into the lurid excesses of the business, including bacchanalian parties at his boss’s mansion and shoots in Palm Springs, his home life implodes and his wife takes off to New Zealand with their young son. The only word for Harkham’s illustrations is cinematic—in fact, it’s not hard to envision this story up on the big screen.

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John Paraskevas

Richard Russo returns to North Bath, New York, for a third round of misadventures, tomfoolery, and personal growth. Read the review on p. 25.

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The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.

fiction

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

ROGUE JUSTICE

Abrams, Stacey

Doubleday (368 pp.)

$29.00 | May 23, 2023

9780385548328

In a sequel to While Justice Sleeps (2021), Abrams gives Supreme Court law clerk–turned–reluctant sleuth Avery Keene another deadly conspiracy to unravel.

Last time out, Keene, a Black woman in her late 20s who worked for loose cannon Justice Howard Wynn, who’s White, used damaging information he had gathered before falling into a coma to help force the semi-Trump-ish President Brandon Stokes (a reviled authoritarian wannabe but one with a deep intellect) at least temporarily out of office, as his Cabinet used the 25th Amendment to sideline him. Now, on the eve of Stokes’ impeachment trial, Keene stumbles on what turns out to be a revenge plot to crash the nation’s power grid. Before being shot to death for his efforts, a young law clerk desperately passes her privileged information about factors leading to the suicide of his boss, a federal judge in Idaho. The judge’s death has great significance because she was one of the members of the powerful United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose duties include monitoring national security. Several of its 11 judges had connections to energy companies and exhibited “nonconforming judicial behaviors.” A persona non grata in Washington “who’d roiled a presidency,” Keene finds the going tough, not to mention dangerous. The plot features murderous government officials and an ex-Mossad assassin known as Nyx. While carefully and sometimes cleverly plotted, the novel never really gains momentum. Abrams fails to make the grid conspiracy very threatening, and the story is slowed by awkward writing: “Rage. Grief. Betrayal. Vengeance. Any of these had been known to drive good people to extremes, yet the combination of this tragic quartet manifested in a plot that boggled the mind.” And how jaded have we become that an impeachment is mere background noise?

A competent but only moderately suspenseful thriller.

CHAMELEON

Adeleke, Remi Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.)

$30.00 | July 25, 2023

9780063238831

Kali Kent, a master of disguise working for Black Box—an ultrasecret CIA special ops program—pursues a superrich baddie out to help the Russians destroy the free world.

Kent, like the author, a Nigeria native raised in the Bronx, has a crack team of agents backing him up. Among them is Thane, a theater actor and director who learned how to get into character as an operative while studying Method acting in New York. But ultimately, it will be up to Kent to nab Lucas van Groot, an ex-commando from South Africa whose game has been to take rich people hostage, collect ransoms, and manipulate stock markets. Now, having rebuilt an air squadron inside Afghanistan, equipping the planes with stateof-the-art stealth technology, van Groot hopes to hook up with Russia, which, having taken over Ukraine, is looking to wipe out Poland and Hungary and “decimate NATO.” The U.S. president laughs at the idea. “The big bad Russkies are gonna take over the world? Like Dr. Evil?” Inside their mobile SCIF unit, the spies know better. The first novel in a projected trilogy by Adeleke, a former Navy SEAL who’s also a film actor, is packed with action scenes, strategizing, and tech talk. The story tends to bog down in details, and Kent’s struggles with demons from his childhood seem added on. But the book’s cool efficiency and straightforward style work in its favor, and its protagonist is worth a second look in the sequel.

A solid, if not gripping, fiction debut.

ONLOOKERS

Beattie, Ann Scribner (288 pp.)

$28.00 | July 18, 2023

9781668013656

A half-dozen loosely interconnected stories chronicle life in Charlottesville in the grip of Covid.

Beattie taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and her familiarity with the town surrounding it shows in the references to the streets, shops, and local landmarks through which her anxious characters wander—masked or social distancing in some stories, as the collection moves from the early days of the lockdown through the turmoil over the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. The decision to remove the statue and rename the park Market Street Park prompted the 2017 Unite the Right rally that ended with the death of a counterprotestor. Beattie’s protagonists are middle-class, liberal people appalled by the rally but ambivalent about “Lee’s visage [serving] as a magnet for all that was wrong with race relations,

the past, the present, the future.” They are also preoccupied with personal issues. The woman living with her fiance’s father during lockdown (“Pegasus”) wonders how committed her absent lover is and worries about the father’s failing memory. He’s not the only one getting lost in familiar places; the confusion of several elderly characters serves as a metaphor for the larger bewilderment of people who once had a comfortable, secure existence and now feel adrift in an angry world. Of course, as memories unfold in “In the Great Southern Tradition,” “Alice Ott,” and “Monica, Headed Home,” we see that family relations, marriages, and friendships have always had tensions, but the furious outbursts in “Pegasus” and “Nearby” seem fueled by outside forces as well. Beattie allows her characters to speak for themselves as they grapple with old problems and the new normal. Their underlying malaise becomes explicit in the collection’s closing story, “The Bubble,” set in a nursing home housing several characters we have met previously. Charlottesville was once envied as existing in a bubble, thinks the facility’s head nurse, “but in Lee Park, that bubble had popped—as had her own protective bubble.”

Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.

THE DISENCHANTMENT Bell, Celia

Pantheon (368 pp.)

$28.00 | May 16, 2023

9780593317174

A secret romance between two noblewomen in 1680s Paris is threatened by the Affair of the Poisons in this bewitching work of historical fiction.

Marie Catherine la Jumelle, Baronne de Cardonnoy, lives a life of prosperous repression. Married to a mercurial and ambitious husband she cannot love, she finds solace in her two children, the opportunities to spin fairy tales at women’s salons, and the affections of Victoire de Conti, an impetuous, androgynous Princess of the Blood. Their love affair thrives despite the ever looming threat of discovery, until a misunderstanding with a portrait painter, paranoia sweeping the city in the wake of several high-profile poisonings, and an unexpected act of violence combine to endanger the secret life the two have built. Murder plots, assignations, investigations, and court machinations all follow and drive the novel to its nerve-wracking and moving conclusion. Bell elegantly balances the passion of a romance with the tension of crime fiction, all while conjuring a Paris rich in sensuous detail. From the first page, she situates the reader in a very specific moment in time without overloading the prose with self-congratulatory evidence of her own research. Marie Catherine and Victoire’s alienation from heterosexual society and longing to find others like themselves cannot help but resonate with contemporary queer readers, but Bell deftly avoids ascribing modern identities to them and allows them to be women of their own time. With similar precision, Bell uses her extensive

FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

contributions to jewish literature

For the past nine years, it’s been my pleasure to serve as a judge for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, helping to choose the fiction winner every other year (alternating with nonfiction). The prize comes with $100,000 and is “presented to an emerging writer who demonstrates the potential for continued contribution to the world of Jewish literature,” according to its mission statement. This time around, the fiction judges were choosing from four years’ worth of eligible titles, since we took a detour in 2021 to present an “Inspiration” award to author Nicole Krauss. As of this writing, we haven’t yet chosen the winner, but if you check the Kirkus website, you’ll be able to find the news (as of May 2). The four finalists represent a range of styles and interests.

Israeli author Iddo Gefen conducts neurocognitive research into storytelling. His debut book, Jerusalem Beach (translated by Daniella Zamir; Astra House, 2021), is a collection of stories that range from the realism-adjacent (in “The Geriatric Platoon,” an 80-year-old grandfather enlists in the army) to the whimsically science fictional (in “The Girl Who Lived Near the Sun,” a young man on a tour of the solar system visits a woman, whom he met “in one of those tacky space parties on the Rings of Saturn,” at her home on a tiny planet with no other occupants). Our starred review said “Gefen’s background as a neurocognitive researcher filters through the collection in stories that meditate on dreams, cognition, mental illness, and the inner lives of his characters.”

New York journalist Max Gross’ debut novel, The Lost Shtetl (HarperVia, 2020), imagines a small Jewish town called Kreskol that’s so isolated in the Polish forest that the last century has passed it by. Its inhabitants don’t know about electricity, airplanes, or the internet, and most tragically of all, they don’t know about the Holocaust—and since the outside world doesn’t know they exist, they passed through it unscathed. When an unhappy bride decides to take her chances on leaving town, Kreskol’s iso-

lation comes to an end. Our starred review said the book is “great fun, packed with warmth.…Reaching into the storytelling tradition that stretches from Sholem Aleichem to Isaac Bashevis Singer to Michael Chabon, the author spins an ingenious yarn about the struggle between past and present.”

Mikołaj Grynberg, a photographer, psychologist, and writer who lives in Poland, has written several works of oral history about Polish Jews, and I’d Like To Say I’m Sorry, But There’s No One To Say Sorry To (translated by Sean Gasper Bye; New Press, 2022), his fiction debut, takes off from there. It’s composed of brief monologues by characters who may have just learned that they’re Jewish, or don’t want anyone to know they’re Jewish, or are pondering how their lives have been different because of their religion. Our starred review said, “taken as a whole, the collection traces the commonalities as well as the differences between all these experiences.…At times witty, at others devastating, Grynberg’s first foray into fiction is a major triumph.”

In The Book of V (Henry Holt, 2020), Brooklyn-based Anna Solomon takes the biblical story of Esther and connects it to the lives of women in different time periods, much as Michael Cunningham did with the story of Clarissa Dalloway in The Hours. There’s Vivian, a political wife in 1970s Washington, D.C., whose husband asks her to do something she can’t forgive, and Lily, a contemporary Brooklyn mother trying to hold onto her pre-baby self as she creates Purim costumes for her two daughters , as well as Esther herself. Weaving through all three stories is the figure of Vashti, the queen whose refusal to cater to her husband’s demands was the necessary precondition for Esther’s marriage to the king—which allowed her to save her people. Our starred review called it “a bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.”

Laurie

Muchnick is the fiction editor.

cast of characters, whose various points of view the reader glimpses through shifting third-person limited narration, to explore class tensions. Poor women and rich women may come up against different limitations and employ contrasting methods of self-reinvention, but all of them are hungry for freedom— watching them strive for it is utterly captivating.

An astonishingly accomplished debut that brings a past full of intrigue and ardor to life on the page.

THE 9TH MAN

Berry, Steve with Grant Blackwood Grand Central Publishing (368 pp.)

$29.00 | June 27, 2023

9781538721070

A cryptic message sends an intelligence agent hurtling into a turbulent plot with deep roots in American history.

When her grandfather Benjamin Stein, a retired Army colonel dying of cancer, starts raving about something called Kronos, Jillian Greenfield Stein emails an anonymous contact on a scrap of paper he’d marked “Kronos” to ask, “Tell me what you know about Kronos.” The result is immediate: Somebody with a lot of nefarious connections targets her for death. So she reaches out to her ex-lover Luke Daniels, of the Justice Department’s Magellan Billet, who saves her but not her grandfather from a squad sent to execute them both. The killers turn out to be only the first wave of professionals working for ancient fixer Thomas Henry Rowland’s security forces under the command of Jack Talley. As their successors make it clear, their real interest isn’t in Benjamin Stein’s papers or valuables but in a rifle he’s supposed to be hiding. And not just any rifle, but one that most readers of a certain age will have heard of and even seen in photographs. Luke’s quest to keep Jillian one step ahead of Rowland and Talley’s hirelings is stymied by the fact that he doesn’t know what Kronos is himself. But he can figure out that Stein’s death is linked to retired Secret Service agent Ray Simmons, who killed himself a month ago at age 94. The advanced ages of so many of the parties involved, in fact, provides a prominent clue to the secret Jillian’s unearthed, or not quite unearthed. Berry and Blackwood keep the pot boiling vigorously until their final surprise, though savvy fans will have seen this one coming.

My country, ’tis of thee, land of conspiracy.

KILLINGLY Beutner,

Katharine Soho Crime (360 pp.)

$27.95 | June 6, 2023

9781641294379

The disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897 threatens to unearth any number of unholy secrets.

Most of the other residents in Porter Hall have little to do with Bertha Mellish, whom they regard as unstylish, plain, and not especially sociable. Even her senior mentor, the glowing and polished Mabel Cunningham, has little to say about her. Only two people are really close to Bertha: her much older sister, Florence, a schoolteacher back in Killingly, Connecticut, where they both grew up; and Agnes Sullivan, a fellow student who’s notably gifted at drawing but who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Unlike anyone else at Mount Holyoke, Agnes knows everything there is to know about Bertha—maybe even, as Beutner hints

young adult

early on, what happened to her when she vanished from campus. When someone identified as Bertha Miller is reported to have been seen in a neighboring town, Bertha’s father, Rev. John Hyrcanus Mellish, goes to check her out but forbids Florence to accompany him. Later, Florence will go herself to identify the body of a young woman who’s been fished from a nearby lake. Both leads are dead ends, leaving it uncertain whether Bertha’s vanishing was connected to a series of petty thefts at the college; to Joseph Poirier, the unsavory millworker she’d taken up with; or to her home life back in Killingly. Beutner’s decorous prose effectively establishes a hothouse atmosphere, but the suspense endures without ever quickening, and after a shocking revelation halfway through, the rest of the story, rooted in an unsolved real-life Mount Holyoke mystery, seems to wind down rather than winding up.

Warning: serious violence against cats, who have a lot more to endure here than humans.

HOW TO LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER

Blum, Hila

Trans. by Daniella Zamir

Riverhead (272 pp.)

$27.00 | July 25, 2023

9780593539644

Why has an adored child abandoned her parents’ home, lied about her whereabouts, and concealed her new family?

Israeli writer Blum’s brief, sometimes stiflingly close-focus new novel opens with Yoella Linden secretly watching her daughter Leah’s family from the outside, through a window. Leah walked out of her parents’ home in Israel at age 18 and pretended she was traveling the world; in fact, she had settled in Groningen, Holland, married, and become a mother herself, to two daughters. In a cool narrative voice, Yoella takes her time to unpack the mystery of Leah’s disappearance, interleaving memories of

the girl’s childhood with glimpses of her own marriage, references to the mother-daughter fiction she has read, and episodes depicting her mental fragility. Yoella has been seeing a psychiatrist for 16 years to help her deal with intermittent depression that began at age 9. Leah’s childhood is conveyed in intimate domestic scenes, often filled with reciprocated feelings across the years. Despite occasional power struggles and discord, Leah was “one of those girls who was endlessly loved by their parents…the love of our lives.” But around the edges of this familial norm, we learn about more troubling aspects of Yoella’s marriage to Meir: his occasional affairs; his love for Leah but opposition to having further children, leading to abortions. And slowly another narrative takes center stage—Yoella’s response to a crisis of Leah’s making, leading to collusion and manipulation and a devastating outcome. Bit by bit Blum’s novel reveals itself to be a dissection of misapplied maternal love in one particular instance, in which emotions and impulses contradict themselves and turn inside out. Part detective story, part morality tale, this is a disturbing story of being damaged and damaging.

A deft, claustrophobic tale that takes the shine off motherhood’s halo while sideswiping men, too.

HALF-LIFE OF A STOLEN SISTER

Cantor, Rachel Soho (384 pp.)

$26.00 | July 11, 2023

9781641294645

An antic novel follows the Brontë siblings through an alternate version of their lives.

Cantor transports her characters (here called the Bronteys), complete with 19th-century diction and sensibilities, into a hazily 20th-century version of what seems to be—though it is never explicitly labeled—New York. Her skewed take on their lives plays fair with their limited life spans and general relationships to each other and the world while throwing them into a setting replete with bagels, McMansions, subways, television, and soy milk. The structure of the novel is playful, patching together email exchanges—including deleted emails—letters, scenes from plays, passages from memoirs of all the Bronteys, an advertisement for a replacement wife from father Paddy (“I am an upright man with a rent-controlled apartment,” he notes), plenty of time with older sisters Maria and Elizabeth, who died as children, and some not unexpected scorn for feckless “Only Boy” Branwell. While everyone in the family, and several characters outside it, gets a say, Charlotte is granted the largest amount of time on the page, and not just because she survives longer than most of the others. Her love affair with a teacher (here transposed to Rome) and her relationships with several later, though not as beloved, suitors take up a good deal of the narrative space. Emily, who will be an object of fascination for many readers, remains largely opaque

apart from a few cryptic passages. The novels themselves, with names like The Heights and Surely! receive far less attention than the lives. While it’s possible the novel could stand on its own, it will be best appreciated by readers with a relatively thorough knowledge of the Brontës, who will be able to spot the gaps and parallels between real biographical events and their fictional transformations.

Intriguingly odd with a few surprising insights.

young adult

SAVE WHAT’S LEFT

Castellano, Elizabeth

Anchor (304 pp.)

$26.00 | June 27, 2023

9780593469170

Long Island beach house update: still ruining lives, one zoning violation and bachelorette party at a time.

“Never buy a beach house. Don’t even dream about one. Don’t save your money or call real estate agents or pick out a white couch. If you must do something, pray for the people who do own beach houses.” Following in the fearsome footsteps of Amy Fusselman’s The Means (2022), Castellano’s wickedly funny debut unfurls in miserable yet gleeful detail the soul-sucking nightmare of owning a house on the Long Island oceanfront. As the novel opens, its narrator, Kathleen Deane, explains that just three years ago she was “a normal person [with] a husband, a job, and a house with no view in Kansas City.” But when her husband

leaves her to “find himself” on a four-month world cruise, she falls prey to a decade of Christmas letters from a childhood friend singing the praises of living in a beach town on Long Island. She purchases a 700-square-foot oyster shack, recently updated to include indoor plumbing, located in a spot so close to the waterfront that it’s “practically floating.” Then she drives out there, using the interstate highway system to traverse the five stages grief—denial in Missouri, anger in Illinois, etc.— ultimately becoming “the first person in history to reach acceptance on the Long Island Expressway.” Arriving at her new digs, she’s greeted by Rosemary, her neighbor from across the street, who draws her attention to a gigantic McMansion being built right next door to her shack. Rosemary will become her partner in a futile war against the construction of the Sugar Cube, which is steaming along with town-sanctioned exceptions to every ordinance on the books. Long and deeply hilarious emails from Kathleen to the town supervisor enumerate the outrages as they pile up, including the time the Sugar Cube’s septic tank contaminates the water supply, sending her to the hospital; the illegal rental of the finished house as an Airbnb party venue; and her embroilment in an FBI money-laundering and racketeering sting. Not long after she gets settled in her new home, she takes a depression quiz from the AARP magazine: “a fun little treat!” When she reports that she’s only “moderately” depressed, Rosemary comments presciently, “Well, there’s still time.”

Clearly, the key requirement for successful beach house ownership is a (possibly illegal) sense of humor. Bring it on!

A QUITTER’S PARADISE Chang, Elysha

SJP Lit/Zando (336 pp.)

$27.95 | June 6, 2023

9781638930525

Eleanor Liu is a “chronic avoider”— she runs from every difficulty life presents, but how long can she outrun grief?

After dropping out of her Ph.D. program in neuroscience at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Eleanor works as a lab tech for her husband, Ellis, while continuing her personal research on the side. Penny, Eleanor’s former supervisor, disapproves of the arrangement because she believes Eleanor is a good scientist who’s not living up to her potential. Eleanor, however, is comfortable and thinks to herself, “Yes, I have had to face the fact that I quit. I have had to watch as my friends, now in their fourth year, settle into their labs and their research projects. But I’m not ashamed. Generally, I’m content. There’s hope for quitters, too. There’s a paradise on the other side of giving up.” This attitude extends to all aspects of her life. After her mother’s death, Eleanor’s behavior becomes more erratic until she doesn’t even understand her own actions—pursuing an affair with a colleague, stealing a marmoset, and abandoning her husband to return to her childhood home. Rather than confront her grief and the ways she’s complicated her own life, she allows her actions to put her job and relationship in jeopardy.

“Funny, original, and overflowing with wisdom this is an absolute delight of a debut.”

a quitter’s paradise

harrowing slow burn with feminist undertones.”

a good house for children

The book is primarily centered on Eleanor in the present day, but there are chapters that focus on her parents’ relationship and the building of their business, her older sister, and the family’s dynamic. These chapters enrich the characters by allowing space for their individual stories to be told and provide insight into how Eleanor’s upbringing influences her present life. They also offer up the idea that her parents’ experiences have had an impact on her life through the ways they inform the advice they give her. Now that her mother is gone, Eleanor—who acknowledges how much her mother’s approval and disapproval influenced her choices—must consider how to live her life and make sense of it on her own.

Funny, original, and overflowing with wisdom—this is an absolute delight of a debut.

THE GULF

Cochran, Rachel Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.)

$30.00 | June 13, 2023

9780063284128

When a hurricane hits Parson, Texas, in 1970, bartender Louisa Ward’s past and present collide as she seeks to build a future.

Lou doesn’t want to leave the town where she grew up, but her aunt and niece have already relocated to San Antonio, and her partner, Heather—who’s also her brother’s widow—is getting ready to pull up stakes and join them. Lou’s also still reeling from the sudden, violent death of Miss Kate, the owner of an old plantation just outside of town. When Miss Kate’s daughter, Joanna, returns, planning to sell the plantation, Lou agrees to help clean up the house. They had been childhood friends but had a falling-out in high school and haven’t been in touch since. Joanna’s presence draws Lou back into memories of the past—of their complicated friendship; of her brother, Robby, who died in Vietnam; of Joanna’s sister, Cass, who died in a mysterious accident. But slowly she begins to realize that the memories she’s held as “true” are actually missing vital pieces, most notably Miss Kate’s involvement with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There’s also a mysterious group of women, led by the charismatic Peg, who live outside of town and have their money bound up in Miss Kate’s house. Despite the inherent drama, this novel is a slow burn. The pacing works wonderfully, though, because just when we think we know something—about Lou’s past, about Peg’s group, about Joanna’s motives—Cochran spins in a new perspective or memory or piece of information that completely alters our understanding of plot, characters, even genre. The constant reversal of certainty is masterfully executed and adds tension in unexpected ways. Cochran also uses the time period to draw a deeper reflection on belonging—and to emphasize the danger for those who will always be “outsiders.”

A thoughtful novel with a hint of mystery. Its still waters run deep.

A GOOD HOUSE FOR CHILDREN

Collins, Kate

Mariner Books (336 pp.)

$28.99 | July 4, 2023

9780063291027

Lives and minds unravel in this dualtimeline gothic horror debut.

English painter Orla McGrath and her husband, Nick, are residing in Bristol with their 4-year-old son, Sam, and infant daughter, Bridie, when Sam stops speaking. Doctors diagnose selective mutism and counsel patience, but domineering Nick declares that a scenery change will help and buys The Reeve, a sprawling, centuries-old home on a remote Dorset cliffside. The patchy cell and internet service worry Orla, as she’ll be alone and carless during the week while programmer Nick stays in the city for work, but Nick insists the isolation will be good for her and her art. That initially proves true, though the atmosphere quickly turns disquieting. Phantom footsteps sound, objects appear and disappear, doors open by themselves, and Sam draws shadowy figures he indicates are friends. Nick refuses to move, however, despite spending more and more time away. Forty years earlier, London nanny Lydia Price relocates to The Reeve when her newly widowed boss, Sara, decides she and her four kids need a fresh start. Though inexplicable phenomena vex Lydia from the outset, including disembodied voices, invisible children’s playmates, and dying birds, Sara scornfully dismisses her concerns. Lydia would love to leave but can’t bring herself to abandon her young charges to the house or their increasingly distant mother. Collins skillfully intercuts the two storylines, making clever use of structure to maximize tension, resonance, and fright, while the familiar setup fools readers into thinking they know what path the plot will follow. A moody, evocative, close-third narrative underscores the keenly rendered characters’ mounting distress and claustrophobia.

A harrowing slow burn with feminist undertones.

THE ABSOLUTES Dektar, Molly

Mariner Books (336 pp.)

$27.99 | July 11, 2023

9780063282704

A young American woman spends 15 years in the obsessive, erotic thrall of an Italian nobleman who lives by the rigid “principles” described by the title of Dektar’s second novel.

Nora first meets the handsome, mysteriously charismatic Nicola in a ski gondola while she’s staying with relatives in Turin. She’s a troubled 15-year-old who self-cuts and obsesses about “different kinds of power,” and he’s slightly older. Nora’s cousin Federica, with whom Nora shares an erotically charged connection, describes Nicola vaguely as “evil,” but

“A

when he touches Nora’s shoulder to calm her fear of heights, she experiences a thrilling shock. Five years later, she runs into Nicola at a party at her American college. After they speak briefly, she becomes convinced that, for her, Nicola will always be “the pinnacle of something.” Just what that “something” is becomes the novel’s central unanswered question. Years pass. At 28, Nora believes she’s content living with a “good” man in Brooklyn and working as a researcher for a financial intelligence company. Nora claims she no longer “dwell[s] on control and power.” Wrong! Nicola shows up yet again, and the rest of the novel charts Nora’s slide into their long, increasingly sadomasochistic affair. Recently married and working for his extremely rich, corrupt, perhaps even murderous father, Nicola initially stokes Nora’s desire through talk without touch. His religious mysticism, philosophic pronouncements concerning good and bad, and brutal views on (his own) superiority strike Nora as “romantic,” full of “grand passion, honor, irrational, primitive devotion.” Soon the two are sharing not only interminable conversations, but graphic sex, by turns violent and demeaning as Nicola’s demands intensify. His willing partner, Nora craves his

control. She wants to be hit and strangled even while recognizing “something wrong” with Nicola’s entwining of vengeance and intimacy. The book lives inside Nora’s perceptions, which after a while become as redundant as the sex itself.

Perfect for those who like a soupçon of Wittgenstein and a dollop of Meister Eckhart with their sadomasochism.

TO HAVE AND TO HEIST

Desai, Sara Berkley (416 pp.)

$17.00 paper | July 18, 2023

9780593548509

Best friends support each other when one of them is set up to take the fall for a robbery that evolves into a caper of their own.

Simi Chopra’s the kind of ride-or-die friend who’s always there with bleach

BY MICHAEL SCHAUB

Fans of Justin Cronin have been waiting a long time for his latest novel.

The author made his literary debut in 2001 with the PEN/ Hemingway Award–winning Mary and O’Neil, following that up three years later with The Summer Guest. But he became a bona fide literary star in 2010 with The Passage, the first installment in a trilogy of novels that became bestsellers and inspired a 2019 television series. The books dealt with a postapocalyptic world ravaged by a scary, contagious virus.

The final novel in the trilogy, The City of Mirrors, was published in 2016. Since then, he’s been at work on The Ferryman (Ballantine, May 2)—but not consistently, due to forces beyond his control although not beyond his foresight.

“The pandemic was not good for me at all as a writer,” Cronin says. “I just took long naps and watched Netflix. There were some people who were writing like mad; I was not one

of them. And a funny thing happened: I got vaccinated and I finished the book just like that.”

The Ferryman follows Proctor Bennett, who lives in the archipelago state of Prospera. The nation’s main island is a planned utopia, where residents live the good life and pursue artistic endeavors. When they become ill or older, they’re escorted to a boat—by people like Proctor—bound for another island, where they’re reborn, younger and fitter.

When Proctor is assigned to escort his father to the boat, things fall apart. The older man starts uttering what Proctor thinks are nonsensical words and phrases like “Oranios,” insisting that things aren’t as they seem. After Proctor loses his job, he’s contacted by a woman with ties to the Annex, an island that houses Prospera’s increasingly dissatisfied lower-income support staff, and he begins to realize that his father might have been trying to pass on an unsettling secret. In a starred review, a Kirkus critic calls the novel “yet another excellent offering from an author with a boundless imagination and talent to spare” and “twisty, thrilling, and beautifully written.”

Cronin, who lives in Houston and Cape Cod, talked to Kirkus about The Ferryman via Zoom from Texas. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the idea for The Ferryman come to you?

This one started when I was taking a walk on a starry night on the Cape. This word dropped into my head; I had no idea what it was, what it meant. It was “Oranios,” which is kind of the “open sesame” word of the novel, the key to the book. I looked it up later; it’s the name of the god of the heavens. At the same time, this scene came to mind, which became the first major scene in the novel: An old man is on a pier, having some kind of psychological break, and another man who is wearing a black suit is trying to talk to him.

This book deals with themes including aging, health care, and class.

In The Ferryman , the novelist takes on weighty themes—and delivers one hell of a plot twist (no spoilers)

Tim Llewellyn Photography

The book is basically looking at the very top level of society and how they live, the ideal life for people of immense privilege. Eventually, for the people who can afford it, we will become enormously long-lived. They say that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born. So as life expectancy increases, an enormous number of social institutions will have to be completely rethought.

In the book, the people who are very, very wealthy need to build a society around constant renewal to stay interested in life. And as Proctor says in the book, the problem is that time itself has weight. The human body can be sustained for an enormously long time via technology, but at some point, the experience of being alive reaches a maximum. One of the things that gives meaning to life is that it’s temporary, it has a sell-by date. So these people have devised a system under which they can experience constant refreshment and have these wonderful lives. It’s like Marin County on steroids. Then when it’s all over, they don’t have to die; they just wipe the slate clean. They get to go back and do it all again. Sounds great—except it’s not.

And then there’s the people of the Annex, who are starting to rebel.

The best analog is the French Revolution, and we know how that went. One of the problems with the massive gap in wealth in this country, apart from its immorality and complete ethical bankruptcy, is the fact that this story only ends one way. Sooner or later, the have-nots do the math. They say to themselves, Not only do they have everything, but there are a lot more of us than there are of them. So unless Jeff Bezos and all these guys start giving it all away and acting responsibly, it’s not going to end well for them. It’s not sustainable.

You’ve said before that The Passage was influenced by The Odyssey and Lonesome Dove. Was there a literary work that influenced this one?

There was, but I didn’t realize it until I was about halfway through the book—The Tempest. The funny thing about that is that I read it in 1982, and I cannot recall reading it another time. I have never seen it performed. I never saw any of the film adaptations. It’s simply a play that I read in college that I did indeed love a great deal. So I’m halfway through the book and it hadn’t even occurred to me that I’ve chosen the name Prospera and that I have an Ariel and a Caliban and a Miranda. And the themes that are present in The Tempest—a magic island, a magician at the court—all these things are very much in the novel and eventually get quoted directly in the later portion of the book.

There’s a major plot twist in the book, and some early reviewers have mentioned they were really surprised by it. Did you know that was going to shock readers?

That was the plan. That’s why I wrote 17 drafts of this novel. Because I wanted it to be a perfect surprise. I wanted to write a holy-shit novel. A holy-shit novel is a novel where threequarters of the way through, you scream, Holy shit! and send it flying across the room. That was my goal: to write a book that had a twist that revised everything that the reader had thought and known or experienced reading it. I wanted the reader to reach a moment in the novel and realize that there’s a way they’d been reading it, and then they look down the hallway of the book and realize everything is not quite what they thought. And my literary antecedent for that was the last two minutes of the original Planet of the Apes.

There was a time in America when it was possible to see Planet of the Apes without knowing how it ended [beforehand].

I saw it when I was 10 to 12 years old, and of course there’s that final moment, which is now the origin of a thousand million memes. It’s become an indelible cultural touchstone. But it blew the top of my head off. I’ve always wanted to be able to pull off that trick, but it had eluded me. I’d never been able to do it. So far the word on [the twist] is good. I’m feeling great about the fact that people don’t seem to see it coming.

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas. The Ferryman received a starred review in the May 1, 2023, issue.

the lost journals of sacajewea

and gloves for emergencies like the potential death of her octogenarian landlady Rose’s latest “gentleman caller” in the midst of some extracurricular activities. So when Simi’s bestie, Chloe, calls with her own emergency, Simi’s ready to help. In this case, Chloe’s trapped in a small museum on Chicago’s Gold Coast, and Simi knows it must be a true emergency because Chloe even phones. Chloe seems to have been set up in some sort of million-dollar necklace heist by her mysterious employer, Michael P., who’s used Chloe for her computer expertise to break into the museum’s security while telling her that he works for the museum and is trying to enhance their security. When she gets to the museum, Simi tries to convince Chloe to take an actual fall from the second story in a bid to avoid the police who will surely arrest her. But Simi’s help is neutralized when a man puts a hand over her mouth and drags her into the bushes. Oliver Twist, or maybe Jack Danger, informs Simi that he’s just saved her from arrest. Whether or not she believes him, Simi can’t stay upset at a captor and/or rescuer who’s so handsome. So begins a jam-packed heist with the requisite slowly assembled team of misfits, from a life coach who’s more of a gigolo to a drone-loving nerd determined to rebrand himself “The Butcher.”

Even a good friend can stay too long, but that doesn’t mean the visit wasn’t fun.

THE PLOTINUS

Ducornet, Rikki Coffee House (88 pp.)

$14.95 paper | July 11, 2023

9781566896818

Imprisoned for his lack of streamlined perfection, a subversive eco-guru (or perhaps ordinary human man) finds solace in the minute remnants of the natural world that infiltrate his cell.

The narrator of this dashingly absurd novel has been imprisoned for the crime of appearing outside his dwelling in possession of a “knobby stick” whose organic imperfections offend the robot Plotinus, which apprehends him. Stripped of his coveralls, shoes, socks, and stick, the narrator is flung into a closet whose only aperture aside from the locked door is an air vent set high up in the wall. Here he is attended solely by the Plotinus, who arrives clanging and screeching to deliver ancient breakfast rolls or punish forbidden hoarding of dust and twigs. Rather than succumbing to his deprivations, however, the narrator sets himself the task of “consider[ing] the positive aspects of exile and of [his] diminished circumstances,” as he raps his knuckles against the air vent in the coded sequences that translate into the novel. In addition to the Plotinus, the narrator has another caller: the gullible Vector, who, “cloaked in his Ginza and treading air,” pops in to marvel over the narrator’s own organic knobbiness and quest to become “a thing that knows nothing beyond what it is.” The narrator fully expects to spend his incarceration, which will surely equate to the rest of his life, trading the pseudo-mysticism of

his memories with the Vector for the twigs, sacks, and crumbs the Plotinus will shortly discover and whisk away. But then a third entity enters his orbit: a hornet who flies in through the air vent and stings him on the knuckle. The insect, whom he names Smaragdos, becomes the central focus of the narrator’s impressive powers of attention and offers a way of reinhabiting the world outside his closet. Ducornet’s latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity’s severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. Ultimately, whether or not the Plotinus succeeds in breaking our narrator’s spirit, the Vector succeeds in mythologizing his failing body, or Smaragdos succeeds in living her alien life alongside his own, the reader is assured that what will be left for us is the truism that “the poor will inherit the earth. (Such as it is.)”

An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.

THE LOST JOURNALS OF SACAJEWEA

Earling, Debra Magpie Milkweed (264 pp.)

$26.00 | May 23, 2023

9781571311450

How early America may have looked to an iconic figure in Native American history.

This novel offers a revisionist history of Sacajewea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who, while still a teenager, provided critical assistance to the Lewis and Clark expedition in their exploration of the Louisiana Territory. Drawing on the limited historical information available, the author—who’s Bitterroot Salish—conjures a nuanced and compelling rendition of her title character, who recounts her experiences in a distinctive mode of English. What we discover here is a startlingly new perspective on watershed historical events, particularly as they relate to the contributions of Native Americans in both aiding and resisting Western expansion across the continent in the early 19th century. The journal entries gradually build a convincing imaginative world through finely observed descriptions of daily life as well as philosophical reflections on the significance of the cultural transformations underway. Through Sacajewea’s eyes we learn, for instance, of the personal and collective impacts of violent encroachments on Indigenous land and the gradual unfolding of cultural genocide along with the significance of traditional lifeways in managing the evolving conditions of survival. The suffering—and bold, ingenious agency—of women held as captives by both Native and Euro-Americans is rendered with special vividness; among the most poignant sections of the work are those in which the narrator recounts her endurance of a forced “marriage” to the French Canadian trader known as Charbonneau. The narration is rich in realistic detail but animated by a dreamlike intensity:

“A startlingly new perspective on watershed historical events.”

“We have come to the place inhabited by the ghosts of my Taken Relations. We are not ourselves here. We are only shimmer of self.” Throughout the text, Sacajewea memorably enacts what Gerald Vizenor dubs survivance, the negotiation of existential challenges with a spirited, oppositional inventiveness.

A profoundly moving imagining of the impressions and contributions of a major historical figure.

VANISHING MAPS

García, Cristina Knopf (272 pp.)

$28.00 | July 18, 2023

9780593534748

A sequel of sorts to the author’s acclaimed first novel.

In the follow-up to her beloved Dreaming in Cuban (1992), García revisits the multigenerational del Pino family,

which has sprawled since we last saw them, from Miami to Los Angeles, with stops in Moscow and Berlin. Two decades have passed, and the willful Pilar, a teenager in Dreaming, is now a middle-aged sculptor with a young son of her own; the motherless Ivanito has grown into a polyglot drag queen; Lourdes, Pilar’s mother, as imperious as ever, has involved herself in Miami politics; and Celia, the 90-something matriarch, is revisiting an old flame. García, who has published half a dozen novels since Dreaming, did not really need to come full circle, and perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t. Though her latest book has the same fluid momentum, flowing dialogue, and flights of magical realism, it doesn’t have the same charming magic. García keeps trying to hit the same note. Again and again, she returns to vivid images from the earlier book—like Pilar’s painting of the Statue of Liberty with a safety pin stuck through the nose—which, like carbon copies, lose their vibrancy with each repetition. The plotline isn’t much to speak of, and the prose isn’t quite as fresh as it might have been—there are all too many adverbs, so Celia, hospitalized, feels a “sharp twinge” where an IV is “snugly taped.” A subplot about a long-lost twin

feels like a stretch. All in all, the book has a kind of matte, lackluster quality that is especially disappointing when compared to García’s earlier work.

The del Pino family continues their machinations but without the same vibrancy.

PROMISE

Griffiths, Rachel Eliza

Random House (336 pp.)

$28.00 | July 11, 2023

9780593241929

Jim Crow was at home not only in the South.

This is a gorgeous and heart-stopping account of the casual and calculated racism endured by a Black family in 1950s Maine as well as the love and strength that sustain them. Hyacinth “Cinthy” Kindred, the bookish and observant 13-year-old narrator, begins her story with a description of the idyllic last days of summer 1957, before school begins in her seaside hometown of Salt Point. Matterof-fact references to the isolation in which her family lives take on increased resonance as Cinthy relates the events of several months in the life of her family, which has endured decades of generational harm that still echoes at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Cinthy and her older sister, Ezra, negotiate the early days of their adolescence and their growing awareness of the ways in which their lives will differ from those of their White schoolmates, particularly the impoverished and preternaturally ambitious Ruby. Griffiths’ origin stories for several characters serve to reveal the horrors the Kindreds face. Lynchings, burnings, drownings, beatings, legal threats, and vicious schoolroom taunts create the backdrop for the deliberate steps taken by Cinthy’s parents—and by their only local Black friends, the Junketts—to instill the pride and strength that will be required for their children to follow “the Path” they are on to self-determination, equality, and respect. Griffiths’ considerable talent as a poet creates space for descriptions of otherwise unspeakable horrors. (One character’s suicide is described as his having “swallowed the mercy of his own gun.”)

A stunning and evocative portrait of love, pride, and survival.

THE DROWNING WOMAN

Harding, Robyn

Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.)

$28.00 | June 13, 2023

9781538726761

A woman living in her car saves a wealthy housewife from drowning, sending both of their lives into turmoil.

Lee Gulliver was once a plucky young restaurateur in New York City. That is,

until the pandemic hit and her business—and life—fell apart. On the run from a shady businessman to whom she owes money, Lee flees to Seattle to start a new life, with very little to her name. One morning, when sleeping in her car near the beach, Lee hears a disturbance and awakens to find a beautiful young woman trying to drown herself in the ocean. Lee saves the woman, whose name is Hazel Laval, and, after a brief misstart where Hazel is annoyed at said saving, the two forge an unlikely friendship. As the women get closer, Hazel reveals that she and her husband, Benjamin, are in a BDSM relationship turned deeply abusive, and she begs Lee to help her escape. Lee, desperate for companionship in her itinerant life, wants to do anything she can to save Hazel (again). But all is not as it seems, and as Lee starts to get closer to handsome and charming Jesse Thomas, whom she meets while getting her car fixed, secrets and lies begin to unravel. Switching between Lee’s and Hazel’s perspectives, the story is fast-paced and packed with action. The dialogue, however, is stilted and clichéd, with a villain saying things like “It played into my hands nicely” and a heroine waxing poetic about how in “this next chapter, I must rely on my wits and courage to survive.” While this book won’t satisfy readers looking for psychological intrigue, it does check certain boxes: It’s quick moving with a plot intricate enough to keep the reader hooked.

A serviceable thriller with a few unexpected twists.

NIGHT WILL FIND YOU

Heaberlin, Julia Flatiron Books (368 pp.)

$27.99 | June 20, 2023

9781250877079

A psychic astrophysicist returns to her Texas hometown to heal old family wounds and help the police solve a cold case.

When Vivian Bouchet returns home to Fort Worth to bury her mother, she gets pulled back into old relationships, agreeing to help her policeman friend Mike, with whom she was once in love, with some cold cases. In addition to having a Ph.D. in astrophysics and conducting research into extraterrestrial life based on a “glimpse of artificial light” from deep space, Vivvy has psychic visions, possibly inherited from her mother, who hung her shingle as a psychic for years and was infamous for discovering a dead body buried in the yard of their rental house when Vivvy was just a girl. Mike gives her the file on a famous missing person case, that of 3-year-old Lizzie Solomon, who disappeared nearly 11 years earlier. Lizzie’s mother is serving time for her daughter’s murder though the girl’s body was never found. Mike isn’t the only one who’s interested in the case and in what Vivvy might be able to glean from old photos or Lizzie’s hair clip; Jesse Sharp, a skeptical, magnetic detective, is soon following her all over town, maybe to intimidate her into “confessing” that she’s a con artist, maybe to protect her from the fallout when a local conspiracy theorist gets her in his sights. Vivvy’s not sure, but she can’t deny the attraction between them even as she knows Jesse

has secrets related to another case. Heaberlin’s evocation of the dusty, insular Texas town is the perfect backdrop, and both Jesse and Vivvy are appealingly prickly characters with believable sexual tension. Vivvy’s role as a scientist sets her apart from many fictional psychics and makes her a formidable heroine—there are rational layers to this supernatural thriller.

Mysterious, sexy, and smart.

OLD ENOUGH

Jakobson, Haley

Dutton (336 pp.)

$27.00 | June 20, 2023

9780593473009

Savannah Henry faces a traumatic experience from her high school years at the same time that her life expands at college.

Away from home and everyone she knows for the first time, Savannah finds her understanding of sex, consent, gender, and sexuality evolving through both an academic lens—in her Gender and Sexuality Studies 101 seminar—as well as through her own lived experiences. Befriending a group of queer people around whom she can be her authentic self and pursuing romantic relationships with polyamorous, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming folks, Savannah begins to recognize the unresolved trauma of her teenage years, including the fact that an unwanted sexual encounter was actually rape: “This haunts me every waking day of my fucking life.” Her relationship with her childhood best friend, Izzie (whose brother was Savannah’s rapist), begins to disintegrate as Savannah identifies the lasting harm of the rape and the social castigation she suffered in its aftermath. Izzie’s looming wedding forces Sav to confront her trauma and the vastly disparate lives she and Izzie lead with fresh eyes: “We were different now, more different than I had ever thought.” Jakobson brilliantly blends complex ideas and relationship dynamics with Savannah’s witty stream of consciousness and sharp dialogue. The author’s fearless approach to depicting sex refuses euphemism, reveling in the awkward with unflinching accuracy. Indeed, the language of the book is strikingly intentional, and Jakobson demonstrates how easy it is to respect pronouns, the damage misgendering can do, and the myriad nuances of gender and sexuality—which are removed from their binary definitions and set free. Sav’s therapist tells her “We are never beholden to the person we were yesterday,” and the reader breathes a sigh of relief when Savannah finally believes and forgives her younger self.

This poignant rendering of one young woman’s journey out of denial and shame into a budding self-love is essential reading.

DEAD ELEVEN

Juliano, Jimmy

Dutton (448 pp.)

$27.00 | June 27, 2023

9780593471920

On an insular island in Lake Michigan, a mother mourning her dead son finds a community apparently frozen in time in this supernatural-thriller debut.

When sports journalist Harper’s sister goes missing on Clifford Island, he is determined to find her. Clifford is an anomaly in an otherwisepopular tourist area in northeast Wisconsin: no ferry goes there, and there’s no information about it to be found in the usual brochures and publications. Also, any online information about the island appears to be swiftly deleted. With this intriguing setup, the novel kicks off with an attention-grabbing scene in which the daily routines of two elderly neighbors on Clifford Island are permanently disrupted: One of them doesn’t appear at their

“The author’s fearless approach to depicting sex refuses euphemism, reveling in the awkward with unflinching accuracy.”

usual time, leading to a hilarious set piece involving a corpse, zip ties, a carpenter just trying to rev up his old Dodge truck, and the involvement of the local sheriff. It’s a virtuoso scene that recalls the heady, charged atmosphere of horror-comedy movies such as Lake Placid (1999). Around the same time, Harper’s sister, Willow, a grieving mother, comes across the words Clifford Island written on the floor under her dead son’s toy chest and decides to go there. Her gradual recognition that something is rotten in the state of Clifford is perfectly and sinisterly paced: Why, she wonders, does everyone drive old bangers around? And why is everyone so fascinated by the 1994 O.J. Simpson car chase? Told from various characters’ perspectives—including those of Harper, Willow, and Lily, a Clifford resident and high school basketball player—the paranormal-infused revelations toward the end of the book come thick, thorny, and fast—so much so that by the denouement, unfortunately, the story has lost much of its propulsive steam.

A tension-fraught horror story that starts with a bang but ends with a whimper.

NO ONE PRAYED OVER THEIR GRAVES

Khalifa , Khaled

Trans. by Leri Price

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.)

$30.00 | July 18, 2023

9780374601928

An elegantly written multigenerational novel set in 19th- and early-20thcentury Syria.

Khalifa, the most prominent Syrian writer at work today (albeit in exile), opens with a scarifying moment from history: a 1907 flood that swept away a small town along the Euphrates River. There are few survivors. Two are friends, the Christian Hanna Gregoros and the Muslim Zakariya Bayazidi, both of whom were away at the time; of those at home, only Bayazidi’s wife, Shaha Sheikh Musa, and Mariana Nassar lived through the flood. The destruction is total, and both friends lose their sons. For his part, “Hanna felt like the flood hadn’t just drowned his wife and son; it had drowned all his sordid and uproarious past, his entire life.” Sordid it was, and Bayazidi, less inclined to repentance, was only too glad to take part in the brothel visits and drunken nights that, even before the flood, Hanna was tiring of, although he had committed to building a citadel of sin with, as Bayazidi says, “a stage especially for suicides.” With a star-crossed artist friend named William Eisa, their Xanadu on the Euphrates grows until the disaster changes everything, whereupon Mariana takes a more central role in the story. It’s not the first catastrophe to have struck the village, as Khalifa writes, taking the friends to their childhood a quarter-century earlier and a massacre of Christians by the Ottoman government; nor will it be the last, as plague and famine strike and religious fundamentalism hardens, foreshadowing the horrors that have beset Syria in our own time. The Syria Khalifa evokes is one where

Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs overlook their differences to forge friendships and family ties; and although his storyline sometimes wanders between seemingly disconnected episodes, the extraordinary closing pages, poetic and prophetic, speak to the possibility of building a “kingdom where life is fresh and tender and the fish never die.”

A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably.

8 LIVES OF A CENTURY-OLD TRICKSTER

Lee, Mirinae HarperCollins (304 pp.)

$30.00 | June 13, 2023 9780063240421

A North Korean woman recounts a dramatic and traumatic life.

The protagonist and occasional narrator of Lee’s smart, complex debut contains multitudes. Asked by a writer to describe herself, she responds: “Slave. Escape-artist. Murderer. Terrorist. Spy. Lover. And Mother.” In the pages that follow, she describes all those roles and more. During her childhood she poisons her violently abusive father. During World War II she’s taken by the Japanese army and sent to a “Comfort Station” in Indonesia where she and others are routinely raped by soldiers. During the Korean War she translates for U.S. troops whom she is eventually determined to undermine. After the war she settles into a more comfortable life in Pyongyang, but her survival skills make her both insular and an expert at deception—a perfect temperament for a spy, which is a gift (and burden) she passes on to her daughter. Though Lee jumbles the timeline somewhat, it’s clear that the trickster of the title has had to develop a Scheherazade-like talent as a storyteller and deceiver as survival tactics, and Lee’s style echoes the cool, unaffected delivery of someone who’s seen it all. The narrator is defiantly proud, for instance, in describing her childhood habit of eating dirt: “I savored its taste, its tang and texture that are like no other in this world.” But as her daughter, Mihee, claims more of the story in the novel’s later pages, it’s clear that a lifetime of abuse and deceit took a serious toll. Mihee has inherited her mother’s wit and capacity to change personas as easily as clothing, but it means swallowing tyrannical treatment from men and the state, and Lee’s understated approach puts the damage in clearer relief.

An inventive, melancholy debut.

PARALLEL

Lehmann, Matthias

Trans. by Ivanka

Hahnenberger

Oni Press (464 pp.)

$29.99 paper | June 13, 2023

9781637151006

A gay man leads a life of quiet desperation in repressive postwar Germany. This poignant graphic novel, translated from German, tells the story of Karl Kling, beginning with his World War II service as a cook in the German army, through two unsuccessful marriages, long years spent at a factory job, estrangement from his adult daughter, and lonely retirement in the 1980s. Karl’s desire for men—and his unwillingness to sacrifice it for a conventional domestic life—is the novel’s throughline; these men include a fellow soldier with whom he had a romantic friendship, a man encountered swimming at a countryside pond, and a “rent boy” he brings home to board in the apartment he shares with his wife. (Predictably, that doesn’t end well.) Framing the story of Karl’s life is a letter he’s drafting to his daughter, Hella, in hopes that they can reconnect after eight years of silence. “Lies and deception create distance,” he writes. “But I didn’t see that at the time.” Karl’s story is handled with delicacy and restraint, especially his marriage with Lieselotte, the sympathetic daughter of his Leipzig landlady, with whom he shares a genuine bond, if not a sexual one. Lehmann’s gorgeous black-and-white artwork establishes the melancholy tone with its depiction of bombed-out cities and gray East German streetscapes. A somber, compassionate remembrance of life in the closet.

THE VEGAN

Lipstein, Andrew Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.)

$27.00 | July 11, 2023

9780374606589

A hedge fund manager on the brink of astronomical financial success develops a sudden connection to animals.

Herschel Caine is a young Jewish Brooklynite with nearly $3 million in the bank. He’s the manager of a new quantitative hedge fund that has the potential to be game changing not just for his own wallet, but for the entire world of finance. But first the fund needs investors. That’s Herschel’s job, and he’s not having a lot of luck. Nevertheless, he’s optimistic one late spring night when he and his wife, Franny, host a dinner party at their Cobble Hill brownstone. But when the night ends in tragedy, Herschel’s whole life begins to unravel. He begins to develop hyperempathy with animals—he can’t tolerate even wearing leather or drinking milk in his coffee. Then there’s the plum investor Herschel’s courting who sends Ian, a mysterious and increasingly aggressive emissary, to meetings. Just as the

hedge fund seems on the brink of a massive—and potentially illegal—breakthrough, Herschel finds himself unbearably vulnerable: to the machine of his career, to Ian’s manipulations, and, above all, to his guilty conscience. This is Lipstein’s second novel to feature pre–middle-aged men behaving badly, but where Last Resort (2022) tackled ethical gray areas in the world of publishing, Lipstein here sets his sights on finance. And while this may seem a more obvious place to explore the kind of moral conundrums Lipstein likes, this new novel uses juxtaposition to surprising effect: philosophy mixes with financial thriller, high capitalism with animalia. But things are never as dissimilar as they first seem—sometimes, the book says, when our lives and beliefs bend so far, they can ultimately make a full circle.

A topsy-turvy investigation of that most disorienting question: What does it mean to be a good person?

DO TELL

Lynch, Lindsay

Doubleday (352 pp.)

$28.00 | July 11, 2023

9780385549370

Glitz and gossip in the film world. Lynch sets her entertaining debut novel in 1940s Hollywood, where aspiring actors are manipulated by studio executives and gossip columnists can make or break reputations with a keystroke. Edith “Edie” O’Dare, whose acting contract is nearing its end, becomes one of those reporters: After growing up poor in Boston, at 19 she won a trip to Hollywood and jumped at the chance to leave home. She was never catapulted to stardom, though; instead, she was cast in forgettable roles as “someone’s provocative best friend or madcap coworker.” Now, years later, she is looking for her next act. To earn a bit of extra money, she had long served as a source for Poppy St. John, the widely syndicated “Tinseltown Tattler.” But when Edie becomes the confidante of a young actress claiming to have been sexually assaulted by a popular star, she decides to branch out on her own. Not surprisingly, all of Hollywood circles the wagons around the star: “You go under contract, you say what they tell you to say,” Edie well knows. She needs to decide, in the actress’s case and many others, what she is willing to disclose, whom she is willing to hurt or to help. In the Los Angeles Times, her column is christened “Do Tell.” Edie knows she’s not a corrective for the myths and legends that Hollywood creates about itself: “A large part of what I do is tell America what they want to hear,” she is convinced. And what America wants to hear—even as war rages in Europe—is salacious dirt. Although the plot lags when Lynch describes clothing, hairstyles, and makeup in too much detail, she doesn’t lose sight of a salient theme: Edie’s success depends on others’ vulnerability. Lynch’s characters—clad in designer gowns, inhabiting sumptuous mansions, and drinking champagne at lavish parties—are replaceable cogs in a powerful industry.

An intimate look at Hollywood’s dark secrets.

“A somber, compassionate remembrance of life in the closet.” parallel

THE MILITIA HOUSE

Milas, John Henry Holt (272 pp.)

$26.99 | July 11, 2023

9781250857064

Q: What happens when the fog of war gets inside one’s head? A: The military novel gone gothic.

2010. Loyette, a corporal newly assigned to a forward base in Afghanistan, has been tasked with leading a small group in offloading cargo from helicopters. After his brother was killed in action, Loyette—in what he now sees as a gung-ho blunder—left college to join up, and he’s mostly marking time until he can go home. The work is lonely, intermittent, often dreary; he and his squad are safe within the walls of the compound but bored and anxious and hypervigilant. Just outside the camp’s gates sits the empty husk of a Soviet-era barracks in which, they’re told, a massacre of the occupiers occurred, and—an idle mind being the gothic novelist’s workshop—they decide to make a brief tour; perhaps they can snag a souvenir. While there, Loyette and his men grow disoriented, lose track of time, and a staircase to a basement seems to disappear. Once they emerge, they ignore or explain away the oddity and get back to their stultifying routine, but strange things start happening—inexplicably altered drawings, a notebook disappearing and reappearing (Loyette has been in trouble for acts of too-candid journalism, which is part of how he’s ended up here), porcupine quills showing up in odd places, sleepwalking—and then, it seems, the shadows and strangenesses extend beyond them, start to affect everyone on the base. When one of Loyette’s men goes missing, there’s only one place he could possibly be. Loyette and another member of the squad feel they have no choice but to attempt a rescue mission...straight down the rabbit hole that is the militia house. At this point, Milas nimbly and delicately balances the book between genres: It would be a relief for Loyette, and for the reader, if we could classify it—label it, defang it—as horror rather than having, agonizingly, to view it as a realistic portrait of a war-damaged mind collapsing in on itself. The novel turns, as the gothic often does, on what happens when one can no longer distinguish inside from out, mind from world, fear from menace.

A mostly sharp, disturbing debut.

SOCIAL FICTION

Montellier, Chantal

Trans. by Geoffrey Brock

New York Review Comics (200 pp.)

$24.95 paper | June 27, 2023

9781681377407

Montellier’s comics from the late 1970s and early ’80s are reissued with new translations.

This collection gathers three comics (Wonder City, Shelter, and 1996) originally published in France’s Métal Hurlant and updates them with new English translations. (When they appeared in the American Heavy Metal magazine, “her dialogue was translated from straightforward French into such outlandish English that readers essentially had to translate it again,” according to translator Brock.) Wonder City is the story of a couple who meet and fall in love in a dystopian near-future New York before uncovering a terrible secret about the statesupplied birth control given to every woman. In Shelter, a group of strangers is trapped in an underground mall after a nuclear attack, and survivors live under the thumb of a tyrannical mall director. 1996 is a collection of shorter pieces; most are only a page or two long and echo the ideas and themes in the other two comics: totalitarian societies; oppression of women and people of color; violent suppression of protests, and more. The art consists of simple pen-and-ink drawings, done entirely in black and white except for some swaths of vibrant pink. A translator’s note by Brock and an interview with Montellier offer compelling and illuminating insights into the times in which these comics were written. However, as is often the case with older SF, what was once innovative is now commonplace—and, as such, these comics currently feel unsubtle and unsurprising. It’s a dystopian future but one viewed through the lens of the late 1970s with few 21st-century concerns. There are female protagonists—unusual for the time—but they’re constantly victimized by men or society or both; there are scenes of actual or implied sexual assault that feel exploitative. Although this collection can (and should) be appreciated as a piece of comic history, readers might be better served by translations of Montellier’s work from this century.

An interesting piece of SF canon but one that feels somewhat dated.

I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME

Moore, Lorrie Knopf (208 pp.)

$27.00 | June 20, 2023

9780307594143

Visits to a Civil War–era boardinghouse, a hospice in the Bronx, and the underworld.

“WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD” is Finn’s answer when asked what words of wisdom he would like inscribed on his tombstone—by his dead ex-girlfriend, whom he has retrieved from the green cemetery where she was buried and is now giving a lift to...the other side.

IT CERTAINLY WAS, thinks the reader of the novel Finn occupies. This otherworldly fairy tale opens with a letter written by the proprietress of an inn in the Confederate South to her sister, describing some trouble she is having with a handsome boarder. One is slightly bewildered, but also relieved, to find the second section of the book transporting us to what Finn, a recently fired schoolteacher, thinks of as “No York,” home of

neighborhoods NoHo, NoMad (“of course that was where he was staying”), and Nolita (“Didn’t he date her in high school? Or rather, junior high?”). On the way to see his brother, Max, on his deathbed, Finn is planning some patter to amuse him, and if you know Moore, you can foresee that this will be some fine patter indeed. But then Finn is torn away from “the bardo of the hospice [with] its trapped souls and the steel beds and alarmingly colored drinks” by a phone call informing him of the suicide of his one-time girlfriend Lily, who had left him for another man but in death will be his alone. The story of Lily and Finn’s road trip and their passionate banter about life and death and love is interspersed with more letters from the landlady. Perhaps you will understand why, but if not you can focus on other Mooreish delights, among them extraordinarily lovely descriptions of the hues and aromas of a decomposing body.

It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.

THE BEE STING

Murray, Paul Farrar, Straus and Giroux

(656 pp.)

$30.00 | Aug. 15, 2023

9780374600303

An Irish family’s decline is rendered in painful, affecting detail.

The opening line says “a man had killed his family” in another town, and “rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.” Are these portents of what awaits the Barnes family, who will inhabit the next 650 pages? Certainly they are struggling with an array of problems. In the wake of a recession, the Volkswagen dealership run by Dickie Barnes has seen sales plummet amid a surge in complaints about repair work. A disgruntled client’s son threatens to beat Dickie’s boy, PJ, with a hammer. PJ’s sister, Cass, is struggling with a fickle bestie and booze. Their mother, Imelda, facing her neighbors’ schadenfreude, has stopped shopping and dreams that a flood is taking everything away from her. Flashbacks reveal the poverty and old passions that color Dickie and Imelda’s marriage. She’s still mourning her late fiance, Frank, a handsome star athlete, when she weds his unexceptional brother, Dickie, whose sexual adventures at Trinity College loom over his business worries 20 years later. In his three previous novels, including Skippy Dies (2010), Murray showed a talent for blending humor and pathos. His fans may be dismayed to find almost no humor here. Mainly there is an inexorable trudging from bad to worse, with Murray tirelessly inventing fresh woes for the Barneses. And while financial pressure is a propulsive force—as it is to varying degrees in all his novels—other pressures come into play: sexual, religious, educational, community, parental, peer. It’s hard not to feel the author is piling on, not to wonder how the novel might have gained from some comic relief. At the same time, no moment or episode is implausible, and carried by Murray’s fine, measured prose and uncanny plotting, the book presents a striking abundance of what for too many may be normal life.

A grim and demanding and irresistible anatomy of misfortune.

PEOPLE WHO TALK TO STUFFED ANIMALS ARE NICE

Omae, Ao

Trans. by Emily Balistrieri

HarperVia (176 pp.)

$13.99 paper | June 6, 2023

9780063227231

A story collection about the complications of coming-of-age in modern Japan.

One way or another, all of Omae’s young, introspective characters grapple with questions around gender expectations, social performance, and the idiosyncrasies of romantic love. In the title novella, Nanamori is a university student in Kyoto who struggles with belonging. He feels at odds with the prevailing notions of masculinity and the trappings that come with dating in young adulthood. He finds a kindred spirit in Mugito, another gentle soul who has an experience that changes the way she sees the world. Together, as new students, they explore the various clubs their university offers and find one that revolves around talking to stuffed animals. The Plushie Club ultimately helps them understand people in their orbit and open up to each other. The development of their friendship is fascinating; indeed, the story is at its best when it’s tracing the mental and emotional gymnastics its characters enact to avoid burdening others and what it means to truly connect. Social media adds a layer of complexity to common, but still confusing, human interactions in each story. In the novella, the president of the Plushie Club, a secondary character, seems unmoored by news of a shooting taking over his feeds. While the narrator doesn’t say where this shooting occurred, he says that a more recent one was livestreamed by a perpetrator spewing White supremacist rhetoric. It’s a relatively small but potent point for an American audience: an illustration of the ways in which our choices and their consequences impact a global community when we all share a timeline. The author excels in using simple but surprising scenarios to capture a range of emotions, especially anxiety, fear, ennui, malaise, disillusionment, and alienation. While the stories examine serious and often heartbreaking aspects of daily living, Omae injects them with just enough humor and tenderness to provoke thought and inspire curiosity rather than despair.

Nuanced and moving explorations of the intricacies of interpersonal relationships.

“An Irish family’s decline is rendered in painful, affecting detail.”

the bee sting

erotic yet high-minded literary achievement.”

mrs. s

HAPPY STORIES, MOSTLY Pasaribu,

Norman Erikson

Trans. by Tiffany Tsao Feminist Press (168

pp.)

$16.95 paper | June 6, 2023

9781952177057

In intimate detail, Indonesian writer Pasaribu’s debut collection explores the way colonial violence and anti-queer prejudice permeate contemporary culture.

Looking through a queer lens, the reader is invited to witness the psychic damage done by heteronormativity and homophobia. As hinted in the title, the stories here see characters come close to finding happiness only to have it stolen from them, which Pasaribu positions as typical of queer life: “To almost get in, to be almost accepted, to be almost there, but, at the same time, to be not there/accepted/ in.” In “So What’s Your Name, Sandra?” a mother travels from Jakarta to Mỹ Sơn, Quảng Nam, Vietnam, a place she found while googling the words my son following her own son’s suicide. While there, she’s forced to recognize her homophobia as the root of his despair. Similarly, in “Our Descendants Will Be as Numerous as the Clouds in the Sky,” Pasaribu introduces a mother who discovers that her insistence on grandchildren is the reason her son’s marriage is failing. Here, and throughout the collection, the heteronormative blueprint of marriage and children shatters the well-being of queer people. Religion features in every story, but Pasaribu’s adroit cynicism is realized most emphatically in “Welcome to the Department of Unanswered Prayers.” The protagonist embarks on a new job in heaven, but the work is revealed to be bureaucratic, soulless, dissatisfying: “Once you receive your quota of prayers for the day, and make sure the total corresponds to the total number of names on the register, all you have to do is file them in a binder.” God’s absence is also evident in “Ad maiorem dei gloriam.” Sister Tula, a retired nun, meets a bereaved father and son when she sneaks out of the convent, and this new relationship accentuates the loneliness of a life dedicated to a God with whom she feels no connection. Rendering characters with refreshing nuance and raw honesty, Pasaribu’s is a promising new voice. A beautiful collection that refuses to shy away from the often complex and difficult queer experience.

TOM LAKE

Patchett, Ann Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.)

$27.00 | Aug. 1, 2023

9780063327528

It’s time to harvest the cherries from their Michigan orchard, but the pandemic means that Joe Nelson; his wife, Lara; and their daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, must pick all the fruit themselves.

To lighten the lengthy, grueling workdays, and prompted by the recent death of world-famous actor Peter Duke, the girls press Lara to tell them about her romance with Duke at Tom Lake, a summer stock company in Michigan, and her decision to give up acting after one big movie role. Lara’s reminiscences, peppered by feisty comments from her daughters and periodic appearances by her gentle, steadfast husband, provide the foundation for Patchett’s moving portrait of a woman looking back at a formative period in her life and sharing some—but only some—of it with her children. Duke flashes across her recollections as a wildly talented, nakedly ambitious, and extremely crazy young man clearly headed for stardom, but the real interest in this portion of the novel lies in Patchett’s delicate delineation of Lara’s dawning realization that, fine as she is as Emily in Our Town, she has a limited talent and lacks the drive that propels Duke and her friend and understudy Pallas. The fact that Pallas, who’s Black, doesn’t get the break that Duke does is one strand in Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web, which also enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice. Lara’s daughters are standouts among the sharply dawn characterizations: once-volatile Emily, now settled down to be the heir apparent to the farm; no-nonsense veterinarian-in-training Maisie; and Nell, the aspiring actor and unerring observer who anticipates every turn in her mother’s tale. Patchett expertly handles her layered plot, embedding one charming revelation and one brutal (but in retrospect inevitable) betrayal into a dual narrative that deftly maintains readers’ interest in both the past and present action. These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming.

Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists.

MRS. S

Patrick, K.

Europa Editions (240 pp.)

$18.00 paper | June 20, 2023

9781609458409

Dark academia meets forbidden love as an English boarding school matron falls in love with the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. S.

Unfolding through interior monologue, the novel follows the matron as she navigates her growing attraction to Mrs. S amid the politics of school administration and the complicated adolescent power dynamics of “The Girls,” as she calls the students. The protagonist, identified only as “Miss,” is drawn to Mrs. S from their first encounter, commenting, “I am discovered, I burn. Like her I stand my ground. Dare her to wave, to give that hand to me.” Given the circumstances, however, their erotic relationship evolves slowly and behind closed doors—via glances held just a moment too long or a finger grazing a back. As desire trumps vigilance, they increasingly risk exposure by colleagues, Mr. S,

“An

and even The Girls. “Loving her will be impossible,” the narrator confesses. “There is nothing I can do to stop it.” Patrick’s deft manipulation of narrative time and use of interior monologue to describe the tensions among thought, intention, and action recall the work of Virginia Woolf. The novel is also strikingly cinematic in its rendering of intimate moments: the setting sun filling the space between bodies moving closer toward each other in a kitchen, Mrs. S’ hand sliding slowly across the spines of the narrator’s books during a secret rendezvous. The drama of the forbidden affair keeps the reader voraciously turning the pages, but on a deeper level, the novel also offers an incisive and nuanced reflection on self-evolution as the narrator navigates the complexities of gender identity, social power, and the dynamic tension between private and public selves.

An erotic yet high-minded literary achievement.

MY MOTHER SAYS

Pilgaard, Stine

Trans. by Hunter Simpson

World Editions (160 pp.)

$17.99 paper | June 6, 2023

9781642861266

Reeling from a breakup, a young Danish woman recovers her sense of self through conversations with parents, friends, and strangers.

When her girlfriend ends their relationship, the narrator moves in with her father, a gentle, optimistic, and Pink Floyd–obsessed priest. She wanders around Copenhagen, sees a psychologist, and puts off writing her English thesis. But nothing distracts her from an intoxicating obsession with the past and the desire to replay memories of her ex. When her psychologist mentions that the hippocampus is named after a seahorse because of its unique shape, she playfully imagines “a seahorse in my brain who rules over all my memories.” The question becomes how to manage this dictatorial seahorse as she spirals into increasingly alarming antics to regain the attention and affection of her ex. While she won’t discover a definite answer, she is pushed toward recovery through conversations with her doctor, her best friend and “spin doctor” Mulle, and her divorced parents’ new partners. Attentive to linguistic connections, the narrator is interested in the mysterious and shadowy powers of words and the always present possibility of miscommunication. Sometimes this makes for vivid and entertaining writing; when she speaks to an ear, nose, and throat doctor about various diagnoses, she “imagine[s] a sinusitis to be a lesser-known dinosaur roaming the tundra.” Breezy and droll prose is punctuated by sections of meandering poetry—what the narrator entitles “Monologues of a Seahorse”—in which she imagines memories of past lovers inhabiting different parts of her body. These slim, evocative sections vary in success. Without a propulsive plot, this meandering novel relies on its sharp rendering of characters and often clever dialogue.

A sweet and quirky debut about heartbreak, memory, and the endless potential of language.

THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND

Russell, Craig Doubleday (368 pp.)

$28.00 | June 20, 2023

9780385549011

In pre-talkie Hollywood, a murder probe and a spooky movie form the core of this convoluted tale.

Film scholar Paul Conway drives to an old hotel in the Mojave Desert in 1967, hoping to find the one existing print of the “greatest horror movie” ever made: The Devil’s Playground Flashback to 1927 Hollywood, where Mary Rourke works for the film studio Carbine International as a fixer, the person who cleans up the messes made by actors that could damage careers and business. Her current mess is the death of Playground’s star, Norma Carlton, a murder made to look like a suicide. Flashback again, to the bayous of Louisiana in 1893 and 1907, where nasty things happen to people who trifle with Hippolyta Cormier and her daughter, Anastasie. There’s witchcraft and Voodoo, gunplay, arson, and premature burial. In his previous novel, The Devil Aspect (2019), Russell handily managed two parallel narratives concerning madness and murder. Here the 1927 story dominates, with the evil that lurked in Louisiana now looming over Tinseltown and Rourke’s investigation of Carlton’s killing. Corpses accumulate. Russell tosses in what may be red herrings, but nothing is what it seems to be amid the artifice of Hollywood. In Rourke he has a strong character who carries much of the narrative as she digs into the money, power, and corruption of 1920s Los Angeles, allowing Russell to play with some colorful Hollywood names and legends. Her sections often have a noirish tone that sets them apart from the somewhat gothic atmosphere in the other time frames. The conclusion ties up a lot of loose ends in what has been a busy plot, but some readers may figure things out sooner, as Russell drops a few obvious clues early on. He also has a weakness for unsubtle foreshadowing—“His destiny. He would bring people fear”—that recalls the screen-size title cards of silent films.

Intriguing and entertaining.

SOMEBODY’S FOOL

Russo, Richard Knopf (464 pp.)

$29.00 | July 25, 2023

9780593317891

Back to North Bath, New York, for a third round of misadventures, tomfoolery, and personal growth.

The demise of Donald “Sully” Sullivan, Russo’s beloved main character, in Everybody’s Fool (2016), is no obstacle to the success of the author’s return visit to the benighted North Bath, though at its opening the town is put out of its misery by being officially dissolved, its environs annexed to its bright and

shiny neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Despite his death, Sully casts a long shadow over the doings of the remaining population: Peter, his college professor son; Rub, his old sidekick; Chief of Police Douglas Raymer, his erstwhile nemesis; Ruth, his longtime paramour—all constantly find themselves recalling his instructions and example. Though the closing of the North Bath police department puts Raymer out of a job, when a body is found at the long-shuttered Sans Souci hotel, he is sent to investigate by his former employee and on-again, off-again girlfriend: the new chief of police of Schuyler Springs, Charice Bond. Charice is attractive and Black, while middle-aged Raymer looks like “he and the Pillsbury Doughboy might have a common ancestor,” but Charice’s twin brother, Jerome, is on hand to teach Raymer a few things he needs to know about the Black experience. In other news, a third generation of Sullivan shows up in town— Peter’s son Thomas, from whom he has been long estranged. Thomas looks a lot like his brother Will, the only one of the boys Peter raised, now abroad on a Fulbright scholarship as a result of advantages that Thomas and his younger brother lacked and about which they are bitterly resentful. Another three-generation plotline involves the thorny relationships among Ruth, her daughter, Janey, and her granddaughter, Tina. Bad cops, bigotry, partner violence, nefarious schemes, and confusing therapy sessions aside, almost all of the characters experience significant improvements in their self-concepts, relationships, and circumstances. The king is dead, long live the king!

Russo’s version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling.

THE ONLY ONE LEFT

Sager, Riley Dutton (400 pp.)

$28.00 | June 20, 2023

9780593183229

Sager returns with his take on a gothic whodunit set on the coast of Maine.

The year is 1983. Kit McDeere is a disgraced home caregiver who has one chance to redeem herself: She’s assigned to look after the ailing, elderly Lenora Hope, a local Lizzie Borden figure. Back in 1929, Lenora allegedly murdered her parents and sister, and now, along with her remaining staff, she resides at Hope’s End, the Gothic mansion on Maine’s crumbling cliffs where the murders took place. Lenora can’t speak following a series of strokes, but with Kit’s help, she can type, and she wants to tell her story once and for all, confiding in Kit what happened on the night of the infamous murders. The novel moves between Kit’s narration in the present and Lenora’s typewritten account of her life leading up to the incident. Early on, the novel evokes such genre classics as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Rebecca, establishing a moody atmosphere and intriguingly suspicious characters. However, this novel lacks the psychological realism of its influences. Sager doesn’t play with gothic tropes so much as he simply traffics in them. The

first half of the book is tense and propulsive, but in later chapters the narrative takes so many outlandish turns so quickly that it borders on camp. Characters act in ways that are clichéd and implausible, and they are given cartoonish dialogue to match their behavior. Villains confess easily, in long speeches that strain credulity, and a subplot around paternity takes on the flavor of a telenovela. Multiple scenes involve characters emerging from doorways to reveal they were there all along. (Gasp!) That said, the novel reads quickly and provides a thrilling, if goofy, ride for those with a high tolerance for plot hijinks and a fondness for Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

An entertaining thriller if you can give yourself over to its sillier plot devices.

LADY TAN’S CIRCLE OF WOMEN

See, Lisa Scribner (368 pp.)

$28.00 | June 6, 2023

9781982117085

The lives of women in 15th-century China are illuminated in this engrossing novel.

Tan Yunxian was a real historical figure who published a book about her career as a physician, but little is known about her personal life. See creates a rich story about a girl born into an aristocratic family. That accident of birth should have written her fate: limited education, bound feet, arranged marriage, childbirth, and a life spent entirely behind the walls of family compounds. She doesn’t escape all of those things, but after the early death of her mother, she’s raised by her paternal grandparents, who are both doctors, and given an unusually advanced education, including in the healing arts they practice. Yunxian’s life is constrained by rules governing her class and gender, and she is literally never alone—even when she sleeps, her maid sleeps at the foot of her bed. Her family’s wealthy extended household has an elaborate structure, and she learns early to negotiate the gradations among first wives, second wives, and concubines and to recognize that, like them, she is valued for beauty and fertility and little else. She breaks a rule, though, when she becomes friends with Meiling, the daughter of Midwife Shi, who delivers the family’s babies. As Yunxian’s grandmother says, midwives are “indispensable”—male doctors are not allowed to look at or touch their female patients—but they’re also reviled for their contact with blood and practice of abortion. The lifelong friendship between Yunxian and Meiling will have an indelible impact on both women, and in a later portion of the book they’ll even be involved in an attempted murder trial. Yunxian’s arranged marriage is a fairly happy one, but as she matures, she grows more focused on practicing as a physician. She sometimes has insight into the inequities of feudal China, especially the treatment of working-class women. But she’s hardly revolutionary; even though she experienced the brutal pain of foot binding and watched her mother die of an infection caused by

it, she binds the feet of her three daughters without question. Although the book’s pace can sometimes slow, it’s packed with historical detail.

Women’s friendships in a world where they have little freedom shape a quietly moving book.

THE OCEAN ABOVE ME

Sites, Kevin HarperCollins (272 pp.)

$30.00 | July 11, 2023

9780063278288

A South Carolina shrimp boat capsizes, imperiling not only the crew, but the journalist accompanying them.

The first novel from Sites, a journalist acclaimed for his nonfiction accounts of what it’s like to report on war and crisis, features a protagonist who seems very much like him— an intrepid war correspondent with psychic battle scars from Iraq and Afghanistan who is committed to telling stories that encompass all the collateral damage of warfare. This multimedia journalist, Lukas Landon, has also suffered damage—his war experience pretty much ended his marriage and sent his career into a downward spiral—and he has been bottoming out at a small-market paper. He launches a “series on South Carolina’s beleaguered commercial shrimping industry,” which offers him a microcosm with which to address all sorts of issues—climate change, racism, competition from Asian fishing operations, and increasing regulations, often violated. The ship on which he is embedded is named Philomena, “one of the patron saints of lost causes”; the captain, Clarita Esteban, is a Black U.S. Army veteran with a war background similar to Lukas’ and a motley crew. This December trip is the last of a disappointing virgin season for the captain and crew, and they need to shore up their losses. Instead, a bad storm sinks the boat on the novel’s very first pages, breaking Lukas’ ribs and knocking some teeth out of his mouth, trapping him in the latrine, where an air bubble allows him a few days’ leeway. For the rest of the novel, he has no idea whether the others are dead or alive, as he ruminates on what has brought him to this peril (and existential crisis) and how he might survive to tell the crew’s stories that have given him reason to live. Framed by passages from T.S. Eliot, Conrad, and Shakespeare, and with Thoreau as the protagonist’s lucky talisman, the novel dresses an action thriller’s survival story in literary filigree.

The plot and social commentary feel a little bloated, but the suspense is sustained to the end.

DIRECT SUNLIGHT Sneed,

Christine

TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ. (244 pp.)

$19.00 paper | June 15, 2023

9780810146174

Tales of family entanglements that often find absurd undertones in domestic scenarios.

Sneed could teach a master class in opening sentences. Many of these witty stories open with a line that establishes the slightly off-kilter circumstances Sneed’s characters find themselves in. The opener, “The Swami Buchu Trungpa,” begins this way: “Her mother had been sober for seven months when Nora moved to Paris with her employer, a man from Queens who had changed his name from Jim Schwartz to Swami Buchu Trungpa twenty years earlier.” Not only is the line admirably economical, establishing characters and hinting at the story’s conflict (Nora’s mother comes to visit in Paris, and Nora is caught in the middle of the mutual dislike between her mother and her guru-boyfriend), but it tantalizingly reveals the wrench Sneed loves to throws into family and romantic relationships. “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis” features history professor Louis, whose childless sister adopts a capuchin monkey. (“Here are the names we’re thinking about for our monkey. Can you rank them from 1 to 5, with 1 being your first choice, and send them back to me?” Louis’ sister writes to him in an email.) Not all of Sneed’s stories feature comical complications; some are complex, bittersweet swerves into the unexpected. In the title story, 20-something siblings whose father died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 learn long after his death that he had a second family who now wants to get to know them. “Mega Millions” is about a family torn apart after winning an astronomical sum playing the lottery. At their best, these narratives are both piercing and wry, somewhere near a less-acerbic Lorrie Moore—though some stories feel cut off just as they sink their teeth into the drama.

This sprightly, witty collection reveals the gamut of emotions inherent in our closest connections.

THE LATE AMERICANS

Taylor, Brandon

Riverhead (320 pp.)

$27.00 | May 23, 2023

9780593332337

A Booker Prize–shortlisted author chronicles the lives of graduate students at a Midwestern university.

There’s a perverse energy to writing workshops. The ostensible goal is for writers to help each other improve their writing by critiquing it, but what everybody in the room—aside, maybe, from the presiding genius—wants is affirmation. Taylor captures this tension wonderfully in the opening scenes of his

“This sprightly, witty collection reveals the gamut of emotions inherent in our closest connections.”

direct sunlight

new novel. The central figure here is Seamus, a poet who not only refuses to praise “personal history transmuted into a system of vague gestures toward greater works,” but also dares to reveal his honest evaluation of another poet’s work. In addition to writing poetry, Seamus cooks for hospice patients. He’s an interesting character, and even readers who think he’s a jerk— an easily defended assessment—are almost certainly going to care about what he does and what happens to him. The opening chapter—Seamus’ story—could stand alone as a piece of short fiction, but the same is not true of what follows. In the next chapter, Taylor follows Fyodor and begins to introduce more characters than a reader can reasonably be expected to get invested in or even remember. The characters begin to lose specificity. Noah is a dancer, as is Fatima. Ivan was a dancer, but now he’s studying finance and making money via something that looks like OnlyFans. Fyodor works in a slaughterhouse, and his partner is a vegetarian. But Taylor only intermittently gives these characters and their situations the same attention he gave Seamus, and there are characters swirling around the periphery who barely register but require keeping track of. Complicated and unhappy relationships and sex that seems more like a reflex than a choice are the main motifs throughout much of the novel. Some readers might see the introduction of a new point-of-view character on Page 231 as a fresh start. Other readers might just give up.

Lots of characters. Not a lot of depth.

HOW TO BE REMEMBERED

Thompson, Michael Sourcebooks Landmark (368 pp.)

$16.99 paper | June 27, 2023

9781728265803

Over the course of decades, a child— then young adult, then man—figures out how to live and succeed when the universe erases his existence each year on his birthday.

The world around Tommy Llewellyn resets on his birthday every year: All his possessions disappear, no one remembers him, and his presence in every memory, story, and photo is erased. The first time it happens, his doting parents wake up the morning of his first birthday confused as to why an infant is sleeping in a crib in their living room. And the Reset, as Tommy eventually calls it to himself, continues every Jan. 5 from then on. Author Thompson has written a story that follows Tommy through his life—17 years in foster care at Milkwood House, dubbed the Dairy, and then through his 20s and into his 30s. Rather than being a story of hopelessness, however, it’s a tale of resilience and how Tommy figures out how to survive from year to year when his best friends forget him like clockwork. Even Miss Michelle—the generous, kind, loving woman who raises him—and Carey Price, the girl he falls in love with at the Dairy and whose life he saves, forget he even exists when Jan. 5 rolls around. This quirky story doesn’t offer an explanation of why this happens, but it’s enthralling

to watch how Tommy evolves through the years as he comes to terms with his situation, the setbacks it creates, and ultimately how he can work within the system to create the family that he wants.

A story of optimism in the face of one of the hardest things to overcome: an existence where no one knows you exist.

THE NIGERWIFE

Walters, Vanessa

Atria (320 pp.)

$27.99 | May 2, 2023

9781668011089

A British woman goes missing in Nigeria in this solid thriller.

Nicole Oruwari has lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for seven years, but she’s never really felt quite at home. The Black British woman moved to the city with her husband, Tonye, where they planned to raise their two sons in the palatial home of Tonye’s family. Nicole is a member of the Nigerwives, a group of foreign women in the city married to Nigerian men, and most of her social life revolves around the organization’s parties, seminars, and fundraisers. When one of her friends from the group suddenly leaves the country, Nicole withdraws and starts showing signs of depression: “The days went quickly and then not quickly enough….The hours passed in a haze. It didn’t seem to matter whether she stayed in bed or not.” Her relationship with Tonye begins to sour after she discovers bondage gear in his suitcase and a hotel receipt in his blazer; he gaslights her, and she eventually starts seeing a man named Elias—then she disappears after a boat trip. Enter Nicole’s estranged Auntie Claudine, a Londoner who flies to Lagos determined to track her niece down. She finds Tonye, his family, and the police unhelpful and suspicious, and Nicole’s friends fail to ease her mind with pronouncements like “All I’ll say is people in Lagos are not what you think. Everyone is hiding behind a façade that matters more than the truth. We play our roles too well.” But every blind alley and dodged question make her more determined to find out what happened to her niece. Walters is gifted at building suspense, and the novel’s ending is legitimately surprising. Her prose is fine, but her dialogue— sometimes funny—is the novel’s real treat. This is a more than competent thriller; it’s not earth-shattering, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a satisfying thriller that works on its own terms.

A surprising ending and well-done dialogue make this a perfectly good way to spend a night or two.

THE KING’S PLEASURE

A Novel of Henry VIII

Weir, Alison Ballantine (608

pp.)

$27.00 | May 30, 2023

9780593355060

Weir regales readers with the life of England’s King Henry VIII.

What a life to be king, answerable only to God! Full of hormones and high privilege, Prince Henry, barely into his teens, can hardly wait to feel the weight of the crown on his brow and to marry his late brother’s wife, Katherine of Aragon. But the “Church, for some unfathomable reason, had decreed that boys could not bed their wives until they were fourteen.” Such backward thinking. Finally, in 1509, the 17-year-old ascends to the throne and marries Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, so they can produce an heir. It’s a wonderful life at first. “He was doing his husbandly duty—and pleasure— nightly now, and soon, surely, Kate would be with child.” That turns out to be a sticky point, as Kate bears him eight children but no surviving son—her fault, of course. Then after 18 years, he ditches Kate for a series of other women such as Anne Boleyn. He is obsessed with siring a future king, believing it against the natural order of the world for a woman to rule (inferior beings, don’t have the wits, etc.). There is much more of course, like his wish for a joint English-Spanish conquest of France. But there is a bigger issue with consequences through the centuries. England is a Catholic country in Henry’s day, and his insistence on annulling his marriage to Kate goes down poorly with the pope. That personal issue, as the world knows, leads to the establishment of the Church of England. Meanwhile, Henry (or Harry, as he is sometimes called) takes great pleasure in his adulterous dalliances, in eating and jousting, and in his exercise of power. And don’t even think of defying him or plotting against him because you will die. Even predicting the king’s death is deemed treason. Weir takes the abundant history and weaves imagined conversations and motivations into a delightful yarn. It’s so much better to read about Henry VIII now than to have lived back then.

An all-around fun read about a king and a cad.

MY MURDER

Williams, Katie

Riverhead (304 pp.)

$27.00 | June 6, 2023

9780593543764

A young wife, mother, and serialkiller victim seeks answers after she is brought back by cloning.

In Williams’ adult debut, Tell the Machine Goodnight (2018), a Kirkus Prize finalist, the author cleverly conjured a near future in which technology could both remove us from and deliver us back to ourselves and one another. With this suspenseful,

smart sophomore effort—a briskly paced story with charming characters at its core—Williams again imagines a near-futuristic, science-altered reality that offers an intriguing perspective on the push-pull of family and freedom. Lou, a 30-ish wife and mother of a 9-month-old daughter, whose work entails offering therapeutic hugs to people in a virtual reality setting, returns to her old life along with several other victims of a serial killer thanks to a controversial government cloning program. As Lou struggles to readjust following her murder, supported by her sweet, supportive husband, Silas, she finds herself dogged by lacunae in her memory: How, exactly, did her murder go down? What happened in the hours leading up to and just after it? And how does she, ostensibly the same woman in a replicated body, differ from the woman she was before? With other members of her serial killer survivors’ group, cloned women who convene weekly to process their emotions and experiences, Lou goes in search of answers. The search propels her—and us—along unpredictable paths to destinations that shed light not only on Lou’s life choices, but also those we all face.

Williams has delivered an intelligent, insightful murder mystery that illuminates her imagined world and our own.

HOLDING PATTERN

Xie, Jenny Riverhead (288 pp.)

$27.00 | June 20, 2023 9780593539705

A woman returns home in the aftermath of a breakup and rekindles a relationship with her estranged mother.

Kathleen Cheng, recently dumped by her longtime boyfriend, drops out of a Ph.D. program in cognitive psychology and goes home to Oakland, where she is promptly swept up in preparations for her mother Marissa’s upcoming wedding to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. When Kathleen was very young, she and Marissa had immigrated to the U.S. from Shanghai to reunite with their father and husband, but their reunion didn’t last. Marissa suffered from depression and alcoholism in the wake of her husband’s departure, but at the beginning of the novel she’s a different person: aggressively healthy and upbeat, she is on the cusp of a new life. Adrift herself, Kathleen reconnects with high school friends who stayed behind when she moved to the East Coast for college. She also signs up on a whim to become a cuddle therapist at Midas Touch, a startup “cuddle clinic” operating under the premise that “a kind touch lowers stress, boosts your immune system, and releases oxytocin.” She eventually grows close to a widower named Phil, one of her clients. Though some of the metaphors at the beginning of the novel strain (a white comforter is “like a pane of milk across the mattress”), the prose grows more confident as the novel progresses. Xie is a deft chronicler of the ways power shifts between people. What emerges is a novel offering a lucid examination of a range of relationships: those between a mother and daughter, old friends, and more passing acquaintances.

An engaging and heartwarming story.

“A young wife, mother, and serial-killer victim seeks answers after she is brought back by cloning.”

my murder

THE MAN TRAPPED BY SHADOWS

Zacharias, Pete

Thomas & Mercer (315 pp.)

$16.99 paper | July 11, 2023

9781542039673

A serial killer, one who’s clearly playing a long game, makes life hell for truecrime writer Rooker Lindström and everyone else in Itasca County, Minnesota—especially his victims.

Eight years after Malin Jakobsson goes missing and the same week her body is discovered in Itasca State Park, Christine Vandenberg asks Rooker to find her daughter, paralegal Nora Vandenberg. Rooker, an alcoholic with a past that goes way beyond troubled, does his best to turn her away until she drops a hint that links Nora’s disappearance to Malin’s, and maybe to a third. Working with ex-cop private eye Millie Langston, his partner in Manor Investigations—a moniker they come up with while the client is sitting in front of them—Rooker identifies the third victim. It isn’t Camile Hedstrom, whom conspiracy theorist Warrel Haney points them toward with devastating results; it’s Amy Berglund, a local high school student who vanished 30 years ago. The evidence seems to point toward Gerald McAntis, a flamboyant lawyer whose services were recently requested by murderous gangster Luis Barrios from his solitary confinement cell (how did he even know the lawyer’s name?). But given the barrage of revelations, which keep the ground treacherously shifting under Rooker’s feet, it’s anyone’s guess who had the patience to kidnap and torture the victims over the course of a generation. The insultingly casual identification of the killer, who has indeed been lurking in the deepest shadows, and the mystery that continues to hang over his motivation even after the fade-out, make it clear that this grueling thriller isn’t aimed at readers who expect the ending to answer their questions or dispel their nightmares.

Grisly, overheated, and sensational in good ways and bad.

mystery

THE POISONER’S RING

Armstrong, Kelley

Minotaur (352 pp.)

$28.00 | May 23, 2023

9781250820037

A time traveler solves a string of grisly murders.

While in Edinburgh attending her dying grandmother, Canadian police detective Mallory Mitchell found herself

inexplicably inserted into the body of a Victorian housemaid. Fortunately, the Gray family, whom she now serves, is just unconventional enough to accept her account of the transposition at face value, even to the point of calling her by her modern-day name rather than Catriona, the name of the nowmissing maid. In return for their generosity, Mallory agrees to help youngest child Duncan Gray in his criminal investigations, which he undertakes alongside his day job as a mortician. Their latest challenge is to track down a purported ring of homicidal wives who do away with their unwanted spouses through an untraceable toxin that Mallory recognizes as thallium, which is so little known in 1860s Scotland that even Duncan’s chemist sister, Isla, is unaware of it. Their search for the killers becomes all the more urgent when Duncan’s oldest sister, Annis, is suspected of poisoning her own husband, the philandering Lord Leslie. Armstrong embellishes her already elaborate mise-enscène with enough steampunk trappings—dimly lit bars, knife fights, and secret laboratories chock full of poisons—to satisfy die-hard fans of Victoriana. But the real interest lies in observing the offbeat Gray family and seeing how the involuntary time traveler integrates into their equally loopy world.

Highly niche but effective.

MURDER OFF THE BOOKS

Berry, Tamara

Poisoned Pen (336 pp.)

$8.99 paper | May 30, 2023

9781728248660

Murder disrupts a bookstore’s grand opening in Winthrop, Washington.

Tess Harrow is going all out for the launch of Paper Trail, the painstakingly renovated bookshop on the site of her father’s old hardware store. Not only has she scheduled her latest novel, Fury Under the Floorboards, for release the night of the store’s launch party, but she’s allowed her daughter, 15-year-old Gertie, to plan a menu of tasty treats, including sushi-grade tuna flown in fresh that morning from Seattle. So she’s less than thrilled when her mother, mega-diva Bernadette Springer, shows up even earlier than the fish with her boyfriend, Levi Parker, in tow. Parker is famous all over Instagram, accused of murdering two women in New York and one in Detroit, although no one’s been able to make the charges stick. But this time, he’s the one who ends up in the morgue. Relieved as Tess is that her mother won’t be Parker’s next victim, his death derails the plans for her gala reopening big-time. First, journalist Mumford Umberto ditches his plans for an extended interview with Tess in favor of covering the crime. Next, podcaster Neptune Jones sets up shop down the street, drawing away the huge crowds that Tess expected at Paper Trail. Worst of all, Sheriff Boyd, who Tess keeps hoping will declare his feelings for her, invites Neptune to stay at his house and help him crack the case. Tess spends so much energy grieving the injustice of it all that she barely has time to solve the mystery, even when it looks as if her mom is a prime suspect. Although Berry’s

dialogue is crisp and funny, her scattershot plotting may leave some readers wishing for a bit less.

A little humor, a little romance, a little detection, but no solid takeaway.

THE SHADOW GIRLS

Blanchard, Alice Minotaur (320 pp.)

$28.00 | July 25, 2023

9781250783080

An upstate New York detective investigating a series of girls held captive wonders if a lost friend could have been one of them.

Det. Natalie Lockhart isn’t good at waiting, especially when she’s sitting fruitlessly in the hospital room of longtime colleague Lt. Det. Luke Pittman waiting for him to come out of a coma. Luke’s a fighter, so Natalie’s hoping for the best, but the dire straits of the situation have left her shaken and questioning what her relationship with Luke really is. Sorting it all out is put on hold when Natalie is called to a particularly chilling murder scene. Sitting in the middle of Murray’s Halloween Costumes is the corpse of Randolph Holmes, onto which someone has placed a red nose like a cherry on top. When Natalie looks around for motives, she’s disturbed by a discovery in Randy’s home: binders full of detailed descriptions of girls being held captive by whomever wrote them. Are they sick fantasy or sicker fact? The information in the binders seems to dovetail with a series of women who disappeared over a yearslong span, dubbed by one reporter “The Shadow Girls.” As she learns more about the case, Natalie can’t help wondering whether Bella Striver, her childhood best friend, might have been one of these shadow girls. Whether or not she is, Natalie is determined to solve the case of her long-missing friend.

Just when this police-driven story seems to wind down, there’s a bonus mystery on top.

THE BITTER PAST

Borgos, Bruce Minotaur (320 pp.)

$28.00 | July 18, 2023

9781250848079

An unspeakably brutal contemporary murder has roots in the 1950s.

Sheriff Porter Beck, whose jurisdiction is sparsely populated Lincoln County, north of Las Vegas, is called to the scene of a singularly savage crime. Retired FBI agent Ralph Atterbury has been bound to the recliner in his home and systematically tortured. Beck and his team have barely begun their investigation when the FBI storms in, in the person of stylish, no-nonsense Special Agent

Sana Locke. Interspersed flashbacks take the story to 1955, when destined lovers Freddie Meyer and Kitty Ellison meet at the newly opened Dunes Hotel and Casino, where they both work. Through a family friend, Kitty helps Freddie get a job at the nearby atomic testing site. The more elaborate third-person prose of these chapters plays nicely against Beck’s more direct first-person narrative. Borgos’ debut is solidly anchored in the lively banter between Beck and Locke, who soon give in to their sexual chemistry. More deaths add urgency to the investigation. The 1950s plot, which centers around nuclear testing and the mysterious Project 57, thickens when the ingenuous Freddie is introduced to Georgiy, a Russian whose malevolence will be instantly apparent to everyone but him. This plotline, though interesting, is more successful as history than mystery. Along the way, this series kickoff introduces Beck’s elderly dad and his team of deputies, Wardell, Pete, and Tuffy, the latter of whom proves the most valuable of the three. A clever plot twist gives the third act a welcome infusion of energy.

A solid crime story with an evocative sense of place.

THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF

Clark, Cassandra

Severn House (256 pp.)

$31.99 | June 6, 2023

9781448306664

England in 1400 is a dangerous place for Brother Rodric Chandler—friar, lover, and solver of mysteries.

After having narrowly escaped being burned at the stake in London, a badly beaten Chandler is in Chester on his way to Dieulacres Abbey, where he hopes to find a home for the banned booklets penned by Master Chaucer. His host is Master John Willoughby, a wealthy merchant whose much younger wife, Evelyn, is rebuffed by Chandler when she crawls into his bed. She steals a booklet, but Chandler recovers it and leaves immediately for the abbey, where the monks support the legitimate King Richard against the usurper Henry IV. Since Henry’s minions are burning books and slaughtering anyone who gets in their way, the monks agree to hide Chaucer’s booklets. They urge Chandler to return to Willoughby, who knows someone who’ll help keep banned books safe, and he arrives to hear that Evelyn has died after falling (or getting pushed) from her roof garden. When Willoughby asks Chandler to find her killer, he talks to some servants who reluctantly admit to having seen a stranger enter the house. Chandler’s other responsibilities include a trip in disguise to London, where he hopes to see his lover, who’s about to give birth to their child. Eventually his journey takes him to Wales, where Henry’s troops have been beaten back. With no idea whom to trust, he must rely on his wits to survive.

Packed with historical detail and dangerous exploits, the least of which is finding a killer.

“England in 1400 is a dangerous place for Brother Rodric Chandler friar, lover, and solver of mysteries.”

the night of the wolf

DEAD MAN’S WAKE

Doiron, Paul Minotaur (320 pp.)

$28.00 | June 27, 2023

9781250864390

Maine Game Warden Investigator

Mike Bowditch’s engagement party is interrupted by a suspicious noise that leads to the discovery of two corpses.

The sound that interrupts the celebration that Mike’s stepfather, tax attorney Neil Turner (who was married to Mike’s late mother), is hosting at his lake house for him; his fiancee, Stacey Stevens; her parents; and Neil’s new wife, yoga instructor Jubilee Batchelder, is that of a Jet Ski, which no one’s supposed to be running on the lake after dark. Stacey notes that it’s not Mike’s district or his job, but when he hears the thump of a collision, he ventures out with Neil and Stacey’s father, Charley, a retired game warden, and they find first a severed arm and then the rest of Kipling Whitcomb, the husband of Mouse Island owner Dianne FentonWhitcomb, a wealthy invalid who had no idea (or did she?) that her mate was spending Labor Day weekend in their lake house with another woman. That other woman was hair colorist Gina Randazza, 22, whose husband, petty criminal Joey Randazza of the Direwolves motorcycle gang, becomes the instant suspect of choice for Det. Roger Finch of the Maine State Police once her body is also found in the lake. The investigations are awkwardly divided between Finch’s search for Gina’s murderer and Mike’s look at the apparently accidental death of Kip. Further awkwardness is provided by lake constable Galen Webb, whose longing to take an active role in the case is torpedoed by his quick temper and unwillingness to share everything he knows. Could he possibly be at the bottom of all this?

Another well-crafted case beautifully built on a foundation of the local geography Doiron knows so well.

THE TRAITOR BESIDE HER Evans, Mary Anna

Poisoned Pen (368 pp.)

$16.99 paper | June 6, 2023

9781464215582

Two young women work to root out spies on the homefront in 1944.

Justine Byrne, who’s already used the knowledge of physics she learned from her parents to stop industrial espionage, is working as a welder at the Washington Navy Yard in an effort to catch more spies. She’s partnered with Jerry Jenkins and Paul, his mysterious boss, who’ve shepherded her and her best friend, Georgette, through a rapid course on spycraft; the stint at the Navy Yard is intended to show her how much she still has to learn. Soon Justine is sent to Arlington Hall, the headquarters of an operation to intercept, decrypt, and translate enemy messages,

where it’s hoped that her excellent German and knowledge of code-breaking will help her find the spy or spies. As Samantha Ogletree, she’s supposed to be an assistant to Dr. Edison van Dorn, who leads the German section, but her plans quickly change when Dr. Karl Becker recognizes her as the daughter of his old friends Isabel and Gerard Byrne, rendering her disguise useless. Working for Karl—who thinks she’s been sent in as his assistant—actually puts Justine in a better position to meet and interact with potential spies, and Paul loses no time in bringing in Georgette to take over the job with van Dorn. Any number of Justine’s co-workers are acting suspiciously, and at least two of them take a romantic interest in her. After several women who live in the dorm vanish and one of them turns up murdered, the roommates realize they’re in danger of sharing the same fate unless they can uncover the truth.

An exciting read with historical tidbits, a hint of danger, and a touch of romance.

DEATH OF A CLAM DIGGER

Hollis, Lee

Kensington (320 pp.)

$8.99 paper | July 25, 2023

9781496736512

When her best friend’s sworn enemy dies, a restaurateur digs into a case with some surprising connections.

Hayley’s Kitchen, the restaurant local food columnist Hayley Powell owns, is such a staple of the Bar Harbor food industry that not even the nemesis of her good friend Mona Barnes can stay away. In spite of Lonnie Leighton’s ongoing war over all things seafood with Mona, he can’t resist the many iterations of clams on Hayley’s menu, though his temper challenges his ability to keep his truce with Mona. It’s not as if Mona has her own temper in check, and the two almost ignite the place in a firestorm of anger when they find out that Mona’s son Dougie is engaged to Olive, one of Lonnie’s three daughters. It might just be the first thing Mona and Lonnie have ever agreed on. Before the dust can settle on the news and the outraged parents can decide how to punish their erstwhile offspring, Hayley discovers Lonnie’s body in the dunes, presumably having keeled over while he was clamming. Worse still, Dougie might be implicated in this mess. Mona insists that Hayley do some digging of her own—metaphorically, of course—and draw on her past success in solving mysteries to help her. The profusion of both Hayley’s food columns and her cocktail and clam recipes throughout leaves just enough room for Hayley to solve the case as she’s giving readers ideas for dinner.

Like her heroine’s chatty columns, this is for those who want their murder with a side of personal drama. And lots of clams.

in a hard wind

POPPY HARMON AND THE SHOOTING STAR

Hollis, Lee Kensington (320 pp.)

$27.00 | May 23, 2023

9781496738899

A retired actress is forced to sleuth on behalf of a longtime rival.

When Poppy Harmon was a TV star, one of her least favorite parts of the job was having to work with divas like Serena Saunders. So stuck on herself that she once refused to attend an on-set birthday party when she found out she’d have to share the place of honor with Poppy, Serena went on to have a longer and slightly more illustrious career than her former castmate. Meanwhile, Poppy retired to Palm Springs, where she now runs the Desert Flowers Detective Agency with partners Iris Becker, Violet Hogan, and Matt Flowers. But if you thought running her own business would give Poppy the freedom to turn snooty Serena down flat when she asks for Desert Flowers’ help running a background check on her brand-new fiance, local entrepreneur Ned Boyce, you’d be underestimating the sway Serena’s star power has on Poppy’s partners. After several days investigating the wealthy businessman, Poppy finds herself wondering whether it’s the bride, not the groom, who should be vetted. Discovering who, if anyone, in the Saunders-Boyce union is in peril is only part of the fun. As the investigation unfolds, Poppy is dogged by the growing indifference of her boyfriend, Sam. She also finds herself reviewing her career path and pondering how long to hold onto old grievances. It’s only the very end of the story, when Hollis decides to introduce new drama into a case that seemed solved, that might leave readers wanting a little less.

Sneaky fun but just a twist too far.

IN A HARD WIND

Housewright, David Minotaur (320 pp.)

$28.00 | June 27, 2023

9781250863584

Unofficial Minnesota investigator Rushmore McKenzie, who maintains that “I just do favors for my friends,” ends up doing a whale of a favor for the friend of a friend of a friend.

Sgt. Michael Swenson of the Ramsey County Police has every reason to think that Jeanette “J.C.” Carrell killed developer Charles Sainsbury. She’d threatened to kill him before witnesses after Charles’ son, William, who runs his company, purchased the Circle, the isolated parcel her home shared with a handful of others, in order to tear down the owners’ houses and replace them with some more profitable dwellings; he was found buried in a shallow grave on her land; and her neighbor Katherine Hixson reported seeing J.C.

coming down the hill from the gravesite that night carrying a shovel. But Sara Vaneps, J.C.’s dearest friend—whose Alzheimer’s-stricken grandfather, Carson Vaneps, apparently sold Sainsbury the Circle without J.C.’s knowledge—is convinced that she’s no killer. So McKenzie gets to work and, after several unspectacular rounds of questioning, produces another witness whose statement gets assistant county attorney Ted Kaplan to drop the charges. That’s when things get really interesting. For no sooner has the county removed J.C.’s ankle bracelet than she takes a powder, obligingly leaving her phone and identification papers behind, three days before a bulldozer operator discovers two more bodies buried under her gazebo. Now that the authorities have every reason to recapture the woman they just freed, McKenzie goes looking for her too, armed only with the obviously false stories she’s told him about her background. The results, however messy and unsatisfactorily wound up, are as powerfully affecting as the structure is original.

Housewright’s finest hour, bar none.

A FATAL ILLUSION

Huber, Anna Lee Berkley (368 pp.)

$17.00 paper | June 20, 2023

9780593198483

Married sleuths go all out to save a family member.

Keira and Sebastian Gage have a wellfounded reputation as private inquiry agents. So when Sebastian’s father, Lord Gage, is attacked in Yorkshire in 1832, they rush to his side along with their baby daughter, Emma; a small entourage of trusted servants; and Sebastian’s half brother, Lord Henry Kerr, whom Lord Gage has never acknowledged. Indeed, Lord Gage is a difficult, secretive man whose relationship with Sebastian is not an easy one for myriad reasons, including the elder Gage’s numerous affairs; his scorn for Keira, who’s overcoming a scandalous past; and their political differences. Lord Gage is housed in the home of Dr. Josiah Barker, who treated him after he was shot in the thigh by a local band of highwaymen. Sebastian and his father have a nasty row, but Lord Gage is surprisingly taken with Emma and shows a softer side. Although the local authorities have been informed because Lord Gage’s footman was killed in the incident, Sebastian and Keira decide that they must investigate if justice is to be done. The highwaymen are protected by the local populace, who benefit from their Robin Hood–style largesse, but since they’ve never injured anyone before, the sleuths suspect that the incident may have been a vendetta against his lordship, whose checkered past with women and secret work for the government have made him many enemies. Together with their servants and Lord Henry, they travel the area asking inconvenient questions that both put them in danger and ultimately reveal the truth.

A thorny mystery provides a shocking, historically based denouement.

“Housewright’s finest hour, bar none.”

A MURDER OF ASPIC PROPORTIONS

Lillard, Amy Kensington (304 pp.)

$8.99 paper | June 27, 2023

9781496733474

The murder of a Tomato King in his greenhouse entices an amateur sleuth to snoop once more around the quiet town of Yoder, Kansas.

Sissy Yoder, whose parents left the Amish community before she was born, moves back to Kansas to help her Amish aunt Bethel Yoder, who has a broken leg, run her cafe. On the way back from taking Bethel to have her cast removed, the two women head over to Walt Summers’ farm stand to check out the tomatoes for some recipes they’re planning to add to the menu. A roadside sign says Walt’s tomatoes are “to die for,” and it’s not kidding, since the women find Walt clobbered with a shovel, his tomato plants ripped out and missing, and very little of his special fertilizer left. As Bethel’s nephew Weaver Justice, who lives next door, is telling them that Walt’s wife is away, Earl Berry, the police chief Sissy has tangled with before, shows up, since the women dialed 911. He’ll have his hands full, for Summers has been the most hated man in Yoder ever since his magic crop-growing fertilizer quit working. Sissy, who used to be a reporter before a bad breakup left her with the need to get away, has been busy writing an advice column as “Aunt Bess,” a secret she keeps from everyone, including her friend Gavin Wainwright, a reporter for the local paper who has no car and bikes everywhere. But when quiet Emma Yoder, who lives next door to the tomato farm on the other side from Weaver, surprisingly confesses to the crime and Chief Berry is happy to lock her up, Sissy knows she must go all out to find the real killer no matter the dangers.

Suspects abound, but the true motive is hard to find in this charming combination of murder and romance.

TAKE THE HONEY AND RUN

Marts, Jennie

Crooked Lane (336 pp.)

$28.99 | July 18, 2023

9781639103072

When a Colorado beekeeper’s honey causes the death of her small town’s mayor, her mystery-writing granddaughter tries to clean up the mess.

As Bailey Briggs speeds toward her Granny Bee’s mountain home and beekeeping ranch in Humble Hills, she knows she’s in big trouble. Not only has she not visited Honeybuzz Mountain, her childhood home, in more than two years, but now she’s late to high tea. Trying to cut corners by passing the world’s slowest tractor on the way only leads to trouble: She and her 12-year-old daughter, Daisy, wind up stuck in a ditch, leaving the tractor’s driver to

rescue and shuttle them the rest of the way. Oh, and that driver is Sawyer Dunn, whom Bailey hasn’t seen since the two of them joy-rode a tractor into trouble years ago. Things get even more embarrassing when Daisy announces that she’s heard her mom talk about Sawyer, their young love, and how cute he was. Bailey’s relieved for a change of subject when she finally arrives at Granny Bee’s just in time to see her grandmother chasing mayor and local lothario Werner Humble off her property after an unwelcome advance. Granny’s threats to Werner’s health and well-being seem figurative and entirely warranted until the next morning, when Bailey discovers that Werner’s had a fatal allergic reaction to Granny Bee’s hot spiced honey (recipe included). When Bailey calls the police for help, she learns that Sawyer is the man in charge on the force. Can she use her skills as a mystery writer to rescue Granny Bee from suspicion in this sticky mess?

All things cozy come together with a bow in this well-done series “bee-ginning.”

THE MISTRESS OF BHATIA HOUSE

Massey, Sujata

Soho Crime (432 pp.)

$27.95 | July 11, 2023

9781641293297

The only female lawyer in colonial Bombay again turns sleuth to aid a hapless servant.

Before presenting a party on June 1, 1922, that celebrates wealthy Uma Bhatia’s founding of a charity hospital, Massey reveals the lamentations of Oshadi, the elderly housemistress of the Bhatia domestic staff, over the constant friction between Uma and her sister, Mangala. At the party, attorney Perveen Mistry meets India’s only female obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Miriam Penkar, but the celebratory mood is marred when the clothing of Uma’s young son, Ishan, catches fire. Sunanda, a young servant who rushes to dowse him, is scolded by Mangala, who says she should have been watching the boy. Perveen notices that Sunanda herself has been badly burned. A few days later, while collecting a bail refund, Perveen is shocked to see that Sunanda is now under arrest. Her alleged crime is taking “an oral abortifacient,” abetted by Oshadi. Sunanda’s pleas of innocence prompt Perveen to step up immediately to represent her. She naturally enlists the help of her new friend Miriam. Sunanda’s situation has clear resonance a century later. This complex case is just the tip of an iceberg whose corruption is progressively revealed by Perveen’s investigation. As tradition dictates, Perveen lives with her parents; a buoyant subplot follows the family’s adventure with the arrival of new baby Khushy, daughter of Perveen’s brother. While anchoring her novel in a mystery, Massey offers a striking depiction of India in the 1920s, complete with maps, detailed descriptions of the customs of the time, and a panoramic cast of characters from every social stratum.

A complex whodunit that also provides a fascinating immersion in a bygone era.

THE MURDER WHEEL

Mead, Tom Mysterious Press (288 pp.)

$26.95 | July 11, 2023

9781613164099

Mead returns to the golden-age world of locked rooms, impossible crimes, and 1930s England with a triplebarreled puzzle.

It’s a trying week for Edmund Ibbs. The newly anointed solicitor has just stepped into a leading role in the defense of Carla Dean, whose ride on a Ferris wheel with her husband, bank manager Dominic Dean, ended with him fatally shot. Carla swears that she didn’t kill him, but who else could have committed the murder as the pair circled alone above the earth? Ibbs, an enthusiastic amateur magician, welcomes the chance the impossible crime brings to rub shoulders with Joseph Spector, who so handsomely produced a solution to Death and the Conjuror (2022); with Professor Paolini, the prestidigitator who’s performing nightly at the Pomegranate Theatre; and with whomever wrote The Master of Manipulation, a tell-all handbook whose pseudonymous byline turns out to conceal the identity of a wholly unexpected author. But worse is yet to come. First, a corpse tumbles out of a suit of armor that was supposed to provide a much more upbeat surprise during Paolini’s performance. Then, summoned to Paolini’s dressing room, Ibbs is knocked unconscious and awakens to find himself in a sealed room with the magician’s corpse, the murder weapon literally glued to Ibbs’ hand. It will take not only a good deal of slack from Inspector George Flint, but some seriously extended explanations and reexplanations of these impossible, and impossibly stylized, murders before Mead is ready to detonate a final surprise that’s well worth waiting for. Even readers who live to match wits with canny authors and detectives are likely to be outwitted by this one.

A STOLEN CHILD

Taylor, Sarah Stewart

Minotaur (352 pp.)

$26.95 | June 20, 2023

9781250826688

A newly minted Garda helps solve a highly publicized case.

After years as a detective on Long Island, Maggie D’arcy has relocated to Dublin to live with her boyfriend and train for the Garda. Given all her experience, she’s frustrated to be on street patrol, but DI Roly Byrne, whom she’d worked with on several cases before becoming a Garda, wants to expedite her move to detective. Her chance comes when a woman is murdered and her child stolen in the neighborhood patrolled by Maggie and her partner, Jason Savage. Jade Elliott was a gorgeous young model who got pregnant and kept now-2-year-old Laurel but refused to stay with the

father, Dylan Maguire, a well-to-do older man who still pays her bills. Finding phone numbers for Dylan and Jade’s sister and mother, Maggie and Jason call around, but none of them have Laurel. Because the crime took place in Maggie’s area, Byrne gets her temporarily assigned to the case, whose combination of a missing toddler and a murdered beauty has provoked a nationwide sensation. Using her nose for sleuthing, Maggie follows up numerous leads and turns up some clues, but Laurel remains missing. Jade, who had made some dicey connections in her modeling career, had a mother with mental health issues and an older sister who wasn’t up to helping out. Maggie senses that the sister is hiding something and also suspects Dylan, who has a solid alibi but gives off an odd vibe. Some old-fashioned police work, luck, and hunches will lead to a killer.

Characters you care about plunged into mysterious circumstances.

THE ISOLATED SÉANCE

Westerson, Jeri

Severn House (224 pp.)

$31.99 | June 6, 2023

9781448310746

A White Sherlock Holmes trainee teams up with a Black man of a scientific bent to solve a murder in Victorian London.

Having encouraged former Baker Street Irregular Tim Badger to use his methods to become a successful private detective, Holmes recommends him to a desperate man. Tim, who’s looked down on because of his dirt-poor family background, and his partner, Ben Watson, who faces prejudice because of his race, take on the case of a valet accused of murdering his employer at a séance and going on the run. Though they’re not warmly welcomed at the late Horace Quinn’s home, they learn that Quinn was a nasty skinflint disliked by a wide range of people. The only clues are the mention during the séance of the letters “A-T-I-C” and some dirt on the windowsill. After Tim is arrested for breaking into Quinn’s house, he’s rescued by Holmes, who, for reasons of his own, provides the two new detectives with a better place to live, servants, and money for nicer clothes. Even as Tim’s nemesis, attractive reporter Ellsie Moira Littleton, considers him a thief and writes less than flattering stories about him, the partners’ newly upscale appearances allow them to question more people. It’s widely believed that Quinn had a wife and baby who died, but after talking to his lawyer, Tim and Ben, who’ve been intent on finding the medium who led the séance, learn that there’s much more to that story. The medium proves elusive, but hotheaded Tim and quietly determined Ben won’t quit until they find the truth.

An enjoyable Holmes pastiche whose many twists are complemented by pointed social commentary.

“Even readers who live to match wits with canny authors and detectives are likely to be outwitted by this one.”

the murder wheel

science fiction & fantasy

FRACTAL NOISE

Paolini, Christopher Tor (304 pp.)

$23.99 | May 16, 2023

9781250862488

When crew members aboard the spaceship SLV Adamura discover that the planet Talos VII is sporting a strange alien artifact, they decide to investigate.

Xenobiologist Alex Crichton isn’t very engaged in his work aboard the Adamura. He’s in the depths of grief after his partner, Layla, was killed on the planet where she and Crichton were colonists. But then the crew picks up something strange on the surface of remote planet Talos VII: a hole. An enormous, perfectly circular opening that was clearly made by a race of intelligent beings and seems to function as a huge speaker. After heated debate on whether the Adamura crew should try to investigate the phenomenon themselves or wait for a mission better equipped for such an exploration, Crichton joins a small team tasked with crossing the hostile Talos VII landscape to explore the alien artifact. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong, and as the team gets closer to the crater, their equipment, bodies, and minds start to fracture. What starts off as a bitter but contained tension between geologist and rationalist Volya Pushkin and the deeply religious team leader, Talia Indelicato, heats to a boiling point as supplies and patience run low. And Tao Chen, the timid chemist, struggles to stay out of their arguments until he hurts his leg and becomes a literal, physical pawn in their fights. Crichton, who was already on shaky psychological ground, becomes determined to make it to the site if only to honor what Layla would have done had she been in his place. Paolini effectively creates a gradual creep of dread as the doomed team slowly falls apart. While some aspects of the crew tensions fall a bit flat—the ongoing talking points between Pushkin and Talia about religion versus reason feel uninspired— the team’s descent into paranoia and violence is effectively rendered. Paolini understands that in the best character-driven science-fiction stories, the alien tech is never as interesting as the human relationships.

Tense and gripping.

THE ROAD TO ROSWELL

Willis, Connie Del Rey (416 pp.)

$28.00 | June 27, 2023

9780593499856

A skeptic abducted by an extraterrestrial with a mission finds herself on a road trip around the desert in Willis’ latest cheerily frenetic genre-blending romp.

Francie Driscoll’s college roommate and best friend, Serena, has a habit of getting engaged to the wrong guy. So when Serena announces that she’s marrying a true believer at the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico, Francie agrees to be her maid of honor, hoping she can help bring her friend back down to Earth. As Francie is retrieving wedding decorations from Serena’s car, a tentacled life form resembling a tumbleweed grabs her and forces her on the road. They pick up oddballs like burrs: Wade, a hitchhiker; Eula Mae, a retiree who frequents casinos for the free buffets; Lyle, a UFO nut; Joseph, a fan of classic Western movies who’s touring his favorite film locations in an RV (though he insists on calling it a Western trail wagon). Francie and Wade nickname their captor Indy, for Indiana Jones, and try to figure out what “he” wants, where “he” is trying to get to, and how to communicate with “him,” soon concluding that Indy is benevolent and needs help. Willis shapes readers’ expectations by tossing around hints and clues in the form of references to various genres—science fiction, Western, romantic comedy—until it’s not a surprise but a pleasantly satisfied expectation to discover that this or that character is not who he or she (or it) appears to be. A few logic problems strain credulity: For example, how does Francie survive more than 24 hours in the desert without water with no sign of heat stroke or even much thirst? How does Indy both understand everything Francie and Wade are saying and need to be taught English? But it’s easy to suspend disbelief, and churlish not to.

There’s nobody quite like Willis for good-hearted, fastpaced fun.

romance

THE ONLY PURPLE HOUSE IN TOWN

Aguirre, Ann Sourcebooks Casablanca (368 pp.)

$16.99 paper | July 11, 2023

9781728262499

A woman finds the family she was looking for when she inherits a house in this charming romance, the third set in Aguirre’s magical town of St. Claire, Illinois.

Iris Collins never quite fit in with her family. All three of her sisters have found wealth and success using their vampire magic, but Iris has dropped out of college four times, and her magic has never awoken. She’s deeply in debt, too, but her problems seem to disappear when she discovers she’s inherited her Great-Aunt Gertrude’s sprawling Victorian house in St. Claire. As the new owner of five bedrooms and an attic space, she decides to make some cash by renting rooms. Meanwhile, Eli Reese—a hawk shifter who, when they were children, had an encounter with Iris that he’ll never forget—is in St. Claire visiting his grandmother, and he’s delighted to learn that Iris is there, too. When he goes over to speak to her, she mistakes him for an applicant for a room, and Eli doesn’t correct her. Now he’s rented a room with an ever increasing number of oddball housemates and is trying not to fall in love with his landlady. Aguirre has constructed a cozy community in this novel, each of the characters adding their own unique flavor to the story. The housemates are a well-drawn, diverse, and engaging bunch, and watching them support and come to love each other is just as interesting as the main story of Iris and Eli’s developing relationship. The mystery of Iris’ (lack of) powers, her battles with a conservative neighbor, Eli and Iris’ family baggage, and the romance between them all weave together to form a propulsive narrative. Even if things get a bit chaotic toward the end, the world is magical enough to make it feel believable. There’s room for more stories in this universe, and they would be very welcome.

Cozy, witty, and full of heart.

WHAT’S A DUKE GOT TO DO WITH IT

Britton, Christina

Forever (352 pp.)

$8.99 paper | July 11, 2023

9781538710425

One lord flattens her life and the next one restores it.

Katrina Denby’s life has been ruined twice by the same man. Four seasons ago, Lord Landon tried to climb into

her window, despite her complete lack of interest in him. Now, he’s tracked her down to the sleepy seaside resort on the Isle of Synne to do it again, and the problem is that, this time, he’s fallen out of the window and died. Even though she’s been living quietly with her beloved dog, Mouse, as a companion to a dowager viscountess, her already-tenuous reputation is suddenly in tatters. She’s accepted the fact that at this point, she just needs to marry any man who’ll have her to avoid being completely shunned, but that changes when she learns that Sebastian, Duke of Ramsleigh, is in town. Both are shocked to see each other again, as their flirtations were on the verge of becoming more serious just before Lord Landon ruined her season. Unfortunately, Sebastian has had a rough few years as well and is now practically engaged, desperate to marry an heiress to save his bankrupt dukedom. He’s only on Synne at his future father-in-law’s request, charged with helping his soon-tobe fiancee’s brother, but both he and Katrina quickly forget the depths of their despair when they feel the flame they were stoking four years ago flare back into life. Though their chemistry is instantly obvious to everyone they know, there are real obstacles between them, so their connection is the driving force of the plot, giving the story an almost naïve sweetness through some difficult circumstances and a few steamy moments. Katrina and Sebastian are easy to root for, and the small-town setting provides a Regency backdrop that shows life at the beach could be as cruel as society in London—readers are advised to check the content warnings at the start of the book. Though the ending is almost unbelievably tidy, devoted historical romance readers will enjoy another trip to the Isle of Synne.

A charming and thoughtful Regency romance.

SOMETHING SPECTACULAR

Hall, Alexis Montlake Romance (336 pp.)

$16.99 paper | April 11, 2023

978-1-5420-3528-6

Two gender-nonconforming people find love with each other in Regency London.

Peggy Delancey loves herself and her body but knows she doesn’t fit into society’s rigid gender norms. She and her neighbor Arabella Tarleton have been friends and casual lovers for years, and Peggy is convinced that her feelings for Arabella are true love and not just sexual attraction even though Arabella doesn’t feel the same. Nevertheless, Peggy’s sense of duty and loyalty make her unable to resist Arabella’s pleas for help in wooing Orfeo, a famous castrato opera singer. Peggy is troubled by her instant feelings of attraction to Orfeo, wondering if it makes her disloyal to find them more attractive than Arabella. Even more thrilling, Orfeo is the first person who has ever preferred quiet, unassuming Peggy over the brash, beautiful Arabella. Orfeo instantly recognizes Peggy as someone special, and their magnetism and confidence show Peggy how to be honest with herself and others about her own identity. Hall’s trademark

“This historical rom-com will delight readers looking for a fun, rompy read.”

an island princess starts a scandal

witty banter and impeccable comedic timing are on full display here. The book is a campy Regency, full of fabulous fashions and over-the-top plotting. The large returning cast of characters from the first book in the series, Something Fabulous (2022), adds a delightful feeling of camaraderie and a reminder of the importance of found family. Hall is explicitly claiming and making space in the historical romance subgenre for queer people to be main characters on their own terms. Peggy and Orfeo’s tender friendship and romance shows that queer people do not need to justify or explain their presence or identities to find love and that love, in some form or fashion, is for everyone. This historical rom-com will delight readers looking for a fun, rompy read.

AN ISLAND PRINCESS STARTS A SCANDAL

Herrera, Adriana

Canary Street Press (368 pp.)

$30.00 | May 30, 2023

9781335006349

A lesbian artist wants to make the most of her summer in Paris in this belle epoque romance.

Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan would like to be thoroughly debauched before returning to Venezuela and entering into a loveless marriage for the benefit of her family’s finances. After she bonds with the enticing Duchess of Sundridge, Cora Kempf Bristol, over their mutual appreciation for art, the women come to an agreement. Business-minded Cora wants to buy land owned by Manuela to complete a railroad, and Manuela agrees to sell in exchange for Cora’s introducing her to the parts of Paris where women who like women gather throughout the remainder of her trip. Cora was once involved in a scandal and has no desire to be part of another, so she tries to push aside her desire for vivacious Manuela, but their attraction proves irresistible. As Manuela’s sojourn approaches its end, though, the women realize they don’t want a future without each other. Herrera delivers another sumptuous and historically rich romance, following A Caribbean Heiress in Paris (2022). The queer and Latine characters are lively and bold, and they get to embrace a full, earned happily-ever-after despite all obstacles and detractors. The big emotions, exciting drama, and toe-curling sensuality make for an engrossing tale, but what stands out is the sense of community. This is a riveting story of finding one’s person, but equally important, it’s about finding one’s people—the friends who understand, accept, embrace, and encourage. It’s with that support that these characters are able to be their full, vibrant selves and open themselves up to love and be loved.

Empowering and exhilarating.

THE DUCHESS EFFECT

Livesay, Tracey

Avon/HarperCollins (352 pp.)

$16.99 paper | July 11, 2023

9780063084568

The continuing adventures of an American rapper’s romance with an English prince.

Danielle “Duchess” Nelson and Prince Jameson, grandson to the queen of England, had a whirlwind romance in the first book of the series, American Royalty (2022). This second novel is a contemporary romance rarity: a full-on sequel that features the same characters, not starting from a cliffhanger or breakup but instead picking up from the previous book’s happily-ever-after. The plot focuses on Dani and Jameson’s new relationship. Given that they are both global celebrities, they make a pledge to keep their relationship separate from their jobs and professional duties. The plot shows them facing a series of difficulties, many of them carried over from the first book and summarized with a fair amount of exposition. Jameson’s family is pressuring him to stay in his public role in the hopes of distracting the press from his uncle’s latest scandal. His grandmother resorts to blackmail to ensure Jameson remains a working member of the royal family even though he hates catering to the voracious British tabloids. The shady businessman acquiring Dani’s skin-care company now insists that Jameson’s presence is part of the deal, hoping to keep riding the wave of free publicity. The book relies heavily on guilt, secrets, and miscommunication to cause strife between the lovers. Dani knows it’s wrong to keep the details about her deal a secret from Jameson, especially since he’s so sensitive to being in the public eye. Readers will be frustrated and mystified as to why the confident, assured woman from the first book acts so out of character.

An unusual romance novel that tells the story after the happily-ever-after fails to deliver.

HOW TO TAME A WILD ROGUE

Long, Julie Anne

Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.)

$9.99 paper | July 25, 2023

9780063280915

A smuggler-turned-privateer and a lady on the run are forced to seek shelter together in a stormy London.

The latest guests in the Grand Palace on the Thames boardinghouse have never known the safety of a loving home. When Lorcan St. Leger crosses paths with Lady Daphne Worth, he’s just brought his ship into port ahead of a storm that’s shutting down the city. Lady Daphne is escaping out the window of a house where she fears assault from her new employer’s lecherous husband. Unwilling to abandon her to the dangers of the docklands, the

“Empowering and exhilarating.”

hardened sailor escorts her to what he first assumes is a bordello but discovers is a cozy hotel filled with unusual occupants. Learning that there is only one available space—a two-bedroom suite—they claim to be married so they may wait out the tumultuous weather. Thus begins a lovely new episode in the Palace of Rogues series, in which the author works romance alchemy on the familiar tropes of forced proximity, opposites attract, and a fake relationship, with magical results. Along with the pleasures of peeking in on series regulars, readers will witness the slow build of sexual and emotional ties between a former orphan from the slums and a woman once destined to marry a fellow aristocrat. As they spend time alone in their suite to build a convincing story about their nonexistent couplehood, Lorcan and Daphne realize they’re revealing hidden facets of themselves that no one else has known or could have been trusted with. Long imbues their every gesture and utterance with delicate weight. Metaphor and similes abound, making visible the ineffable threads that weave two people into one self when they share past griefs, present desires, and future wishes. The emotional punch is lightened from time to time by the other guests’ quirks, culminating in the classic arc of a harmonious society. The couple’s dark moment of choosing between prescribed paths and taking a risk is inevitable but the narrative moves past it speedily. The epilogue might split readers, but most will enjoy its promise of more stories to come.

A Regency romantic drama seething with emotional quakes in the vein of Lisa Kleypas.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD

Sebastian, Cat

Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.)

$18.99 paper | June 6, 2023

9780063272767

Two men who work for a newspaper in New York City in the late 1950s fall in love. Nick Russo worked his way up the ranks to become a reporter for the Chronicle, a reputable progressive newspaper. As a gay man, he keeps his personal life private. Even outside of work, he’s cautious about his actions since he knows cops regularly throw people like him in jail. Andy Fleming is set to inherit the newspaper from his father, but first he has to get experience by working in the newsroom with Nick. Scatterbrained, amiable Andy becomes unlikely friends with grouchy Nick, but after Andy is jilted by his fiancee and moves in with Nick, their friendship deepens into more. The story is grounded in its time and place with specific New York references, including visits to Yankee Stadium, and thoughtful mentions of real historical heroes and queer media. The hardships queer people faced because of intolerance are present, yet the focus remains on the revolutionary act of queer joy—sometimes simply feeding each other soup and cuddling on the couch. Nick’s reporting work on police corruption adds some intensity but mostly hangs out at the periphery of the tale. Both men have complicated relationships with

family—Nick with his extended Italian family, particularly his cop brother, and Andy with his ailing father—which function to deepen the characterizations of the leads. A found family element contributes to the hopefulness and heart that are the cores of this story.

A vividly portrayed midcentury romance filled with queer contentment.

UNORTHODOX LOVE

Shertok, Heidi

Alcove Press (336 pp.)

$17.99 paper | July 11, 2023

9781639103768

A 29-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman is contending with her last hope for an arranged marriage when new possibilities allow her to hope for something more.

Ten years of bad first dates haven’t stopped Penina Kalish’s matchmaker from trying. Penina herself is stalwart, cajoling herself into meeting the increasingly unimpressive bachelors in public places and attempting to find a nice Orthodox man to marry. With 22,000 Instagram followers hungry for her modest yet sexy outfits each day, a job at a jewelry store, and an offbeat sense of humor, Penina is loath to complain about her predicament. “Maybe G-d was distracted the day He assigned soulmates, and accidentally skipped me,” she thinks. Despite her beauty and kindness, Penina ranks low on the marriageability scale because of her infertility. To Penina and her community, a woman unable to bear children is “missing the most important part of [her] womanhood. Like an ornate jewelry box that’s empty inside.” For that reason, when Penina is set up with a young, handsome, penthouse-dwelling man, she knows there must be a catch, and she’s right. Still, marriage to an affluent man would solve her family’s financial woes and would also help her avoid thinking too hard about Sam Kleinfeld, her secular boss at the jewelry store, and why her heart rate mysteriously doubles when he’s nearby. Penina wonders whether the satisfaction of her family and community is worth the sacrifice of her own happiness. In the time it takes her to decide, she spends more time with Sam, revealing her vulnerabilities and puzzling over his obvious interest in her. A slow burn is to be expected, but Penina’s naïveté turns the reader’s eagerness into impatience as the dim Hanukkah-candle chemistry just keeps burning and burning and burning. Though her community is obviously of central importance to her, Penina’s unquestioning commitment to her religious lifestyle is difficult to reconcile, both with the many obstacles it presents to her happiness and with the more regressive beliefs she asserts—the largely unremarked upon pregnancy of a 14-year-old cousin is difficult to overlook.

A familiar feel-good love story dressed in modest clothing.

THE DUELING DUCHESS

Spencer, Minerva

Kensington (288 pp.)

$16.95 paper | May 23, 2023

9781496738110

A skilled markswoman becomes the target of an impoverished duke.

As the daughter of a gun manufacturer patronized by the nobility, Cecile Tremblay was forced to flee France in the wake of the revolution. A teenager when she lost both home and family, Cecile has survived through sheer grit. She has gone from working at Farnham’s Fantastical Female Fayre as an adept and entertaining shooter to co-owning the circus. While she doesn’t allow herself to think of her distant past, her recent encounter with Gaius Darlington, a duke who frequently appears in gossip columns as an inveterate skirtchaser, refuses to leave her mind. After several passionate weeks together, the insolvent duke makes Cecile an insulting offer she cannot help but refuse. While Cecile is seething over Gaius’ treatment, he regrets that he cannot offer her more than a role as his mistress; the responsibilities he has toward his dukedom mean that he must quickly marry an heiress. But things change when a new claimant to his title causes Gaius to lose both position and fiancee, and he suddenly finds himself free to pursue Cecile. While Gaius is chasing a future with Cecile, trying to convince her of his feelings, Cecile’s past threatens to upset their dynamic once again. In this second installment of the Wicked Women of Whitechapel series, Gaius and Cecile’s story of reconciliation is peppered with spunk, angst, heat, and wit. Cecile’s talent with guns, which extends beyond an ability to unerringly hit a target, is juxtaposed intelligently with her vulnerability to emotions and circumstances. Although the repercussions of Gaius’ abrupt descent to penury remain underexplored, his emotional struggles and determination to win Cecile back inspire empathy.

An entertaining and heartfelt ode to the potential of second chances in love and life.

nonfiction

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

QUEEN OF THE COURT The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice

Marble

Blais, Madeleine

Atlantic Monthly (432 pp.)

$30.00 | Aug. 15, 2023

9780802128324

An adept biographer chronicles the life of a resilient Renaissance woman and tennis champion who should not be forgotten.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Blais, author of In These Girls Hope Is a Muscle and other books, presents a vividly complete portrait of Alice Marble (1913-1990), one of the first celebrity champions in women’s tennis, who also happened to be an actor, singer, writer, and civil rights pioneer. The author deftly shores up inconsistencies in the two memoirs that Marble penned while also utilizing that material and her own thorough research to form a definitive story. Blais includes a fascinating chapter about the origins of tennis and its evolution in the U.S., the rivalry between the coasts, and the popularity of tennis in California—particularly the Bay Area’s production of players like Marble, Helen Wills Moody, and Helen Jacobs. The author also focuses on the significance of the idyllic Golden Gate Park to Marble’s life and career and writes evocatively—and with just the right amount of detail—about significant tennis matches at places like Forest Hills, Wimbledon, and Paris. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the author’s exploration of Marble’s relationship with Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, who served as coach, agent, defender, and friend. Tennant introduced her student to the worlds of Hollywood, wealth, and fame that Marble loved, and she traveled the world with Marble as they built a career that saw Marble defeat men and women alike—most notably, the misogynistic tennis promoter Julian Myrick. Blais is excellent when describing what could be viewed as Marble’s greatest contribution, the 1950 editorial that appeared in the influential journal American Lawn Tennis, which was instrumental in the integration of U.S. women’s tennis and helped pave the way for the ascendance of Althea Gibson. The high level of detailed research and compelling writing show why tennis player Hazel Wightman described Marble as “the first girl who became sensational.”

An engagingly thorough biography of a dazzling woman.

THE UNDERWORLD Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean Casey, Susan Doubleday (352 pp.)

| Aug. 1, 2023

| Eric Liebetrau

histories with sweep

Though I’m generally not a fan of lengthy historical tomes—I can do without yet another battle-bybattle account of the Civil War or World War II—I sometimes enjoy sweeping, global histories that take in numerous cultures, time periods, and historical figures large and small. Two such books will be publishing this month.

The first one is doorstop-length (more than 1,300 pages), but its wealth of globespanning material and expert storytelling make it well worth reading over the course of a few weeks or months. According to our starred review, The World: A Family History of Humanity by British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, May 16) is a “richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time.” A consummate historian whose other titles include The Romanovs, Jerusalem, and Young Stalin, Montefiore spent more than 30 years researching this “panoramic, abundantly populated” history.

What I like most about this book is the scope, as the author moves from Mesopotamian culture all the way up to the present, revealing how family dynamics have driven much of world history. As our reviewer writes, “some families that Montefiore examines are familiar to most readers— Medici, Bonaparte, Romanov, Habsburg, and Rockefeller— but Montefiore’s view is capacious, as he recounts the histories of Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hawaiian, and African dynasties as well as the more recent Bushes, Kennedys, Castros, and Kims.” This one is a can’t-miss for history buffs, but it will also appeal to fans of lush cultural history. More tightly focused but equally well rendered and prodigiously researched is The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoíse Mac Sweeney (Dutton, May 23), a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna. In a starred review, our critic writes,

“the Enlightenment may have had its good points, but as prizewinning British scholar Mac Sweeney notes, it was thoroughly racialized in its mania for classification, leaving little room in the rise of the West for ‘someone like me (female, mixed-race) [who] did not belong in a tradition personified by…elite white men.’

” Mac Sweeney’s broad narrative begins with Herodotus and runs up through Edward Said and Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong—“a place,” writes the author, “where the cultural, political, social, and economic traditions of the West overlap and interact with those of China.”

In between, Mac Sweeney chronicles the lives and work of a few household names (Said, Francis Bacon, Phillis Wheatley), but she truly excels in her excavation of longforgotten historical figures, including ninth-century Muslim philosopher Al-Kind ī ; Theodore Laskaris, emperor of Nicaea from 1205 until his death in 1221; 16th-century Italian poet Tullia D’Aragona; Safiye Sultan, the mother of an Ottoman sultan, who rose from being an enslaved child to becoming an empress in 11 years; and 17th-century monarch Njinga of Angola, whose life, notes Mac Sweeney, “illustrates how racialized ideas formed, reformed, and informed Western imperialism in Africa.” The author should be commended for bringing these lives out of the dustbins of history and tying them together to demonstrate her thesis that “the grand narrative of Western civilization is factually wrong,” the “evidential basis” for which “has long crumbled.” Her text, our critic concludes, is “a highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.”

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.

Leah Overstreet

the he-man effect

THE HE-MAN EFFECT How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood

Brown, Box First Second (272 pp.)

$26.99 | July 11, 2023

9781250261403

An entertaining and fact-filled explanation of how toy manufacturers have used psychology and state-of-the-art advertising techniques in children’s programming in order to maximize their profits.

In his latest, Brown, author of Tetris, André the Giant, and other well-received works of graphic nonfiction, methodically builds his case that the same strategies developed for wartime propaganda and corporate takeover purposes are deployed in stealth advertising aimed at children. With simple but clever and appealing drawings, he illustrates how Disney and other corporate behemoths have become adept at tying emotional experiences and nostalgia to their media properties. We see just how closely Americans emulate what they see on TV, the sly “salesman in every living room.” Toymakers often exploit the fact that children cannot differentiate TV programs from their commercials, and they sponsor Saturday morning cartoons indistinguishable from their playtime products. Brown capably draws the history of breakthrough toys created by the industry’s major players: Hasbro, whose G.I. Joe, “basically a boy’s Barbie,” pioneered the idea of action figures; Marvel, whose comic books were fundamentally commercials to sell their toys; and Mattel, whose bodybuilding He-Man “made Star Wars and G.I Joe figures look like wimpy pencil-neck geeks.” The author continues his exploration of “advertising content disguised as programming” through the eras of syndicated animation, cable TV, video games, and numerous new entries in the Star Wars franchise. Throughout the book, Brown emphasizes that children’s imaginative play is crucially important in order to learn cooperation, problem-solving, and the nuances of language. He shows how children’s media have colonized this crucial area of cognitive development through his depictions of cartoon icons such as Mickey Mouse, idealized masculine role models such as He-Man, and other potent examples of what the New York Times called a “fusion of commerce and childhood imagination.” Both Brown’s well-studied subject and his playful graphic art are truly “Toyetic!”

A boffo cartoon history of the deliberate manipulation of children’s minds.

BEASTLY The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us

Carew, Keggie Abrams (400 pp.)

$28.00 | July 18, 2023

9781419767036

An intriguing study of “the gargantuan story of our paradoxical relationship with the animal world.”

British nature writer Carew, author of Dadland and Quicksand Tales, offers a compelling mixture of memoir, history of human dealings with animals, and accounts of human-animal relations today, which includes fascinating and gruesome stories, brilliant individuals, and a modicum of hope. Most religious origin stories portray humans as having authority over animals, and humans have waged a centurieslong “war against nature,” selecting animals based on “characteristics useful to us: meatiness, hardiness, woolliness, adaptability, docility,

“A boffo cartoon history of the deliberate manipulation of children’s minds.”

young adult

and we dispatched the individuals who didn’t suit. Quite sinister. A bit like The Handmaid’s Tale for farm animals.” Still, writes the author, “we are more similar than alien, closer than far apart. When apes touch their lips together like kissing, it is kissing. When they put their arms around each other as if they were embracing, they are embracing.” In addition, “fish feel pain.” There follow two dozen vivid chapters describing human-animal relations, and readers should expect a rough ride. The mass slaughter of birds to decorate 19th-century women’s hats is a conservation cliché, but the details will disturb even the most enlightened reader. They will also marvel at the dazzling accomplishments of homing, racing, and performing pigeons. Carew makes a convincing argument that killing animals for pleasure (fox hunting, trophy hunting) is a form of necrophilia, with hunters expressing intense, physical love of their victims. As “the smartest animals,” humans have the tools for environmental preservation, although billionaires seem to accomplish as much as national governments. The author argues passionately for making “ecocide” a crime against humanity under international law along with genocide and war crimes. Since international law

is unenforceable, nations can join for superficial reasons, but this turns out to produce some inconveniences for industries bent on destruction.

Beautiful nature writing, the usual horrors, and modest optimism.

THE UNDERWORLD Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

Casey, Susan Doubleday (352 pp.)

$32.00 | Aug. 1, 2023

9780385545570

A fascinating account of the ocean below its twilight zone.

Many scientists and adventurers have explored waters down to 600 feet, where the sunlight barely reaches, but award-winning journalist Casey, author of the bestseller Voices in the Ocean, points out that this zone, the epipelagic, “occupies only 5 percent of the ocean’s volume. For all its loveliness, it’s merely a ceiling. The real action takes place below.” Real action is not in short supply, as the author, an oceanography enthusiast, demonstrates her journalistic professionalism, beginning with a compelling history. Clumsy exploration persuaded some 19th-century experts that the deep was lifeless, but 20th-century technical advances allowed scientists to descend to the bottom (36,000 feet at its deepest) to reveal wildly strange life forms, boiling hydrothermal vents, and volcanoes—an entire ecosystem living on chemicals and heat pouring from the center of the Earth. At these depths, there are creatures that breathe methane, fish with glasslike skeletons, and other animals that communicate through their skin. The farther down you go, “the more astonishing everything becomes.” Today, dozens of deep-sea vehicles, built and operated by governments and universities as well as the occasional entrepreneur and billionaire, roam the oceans. Casey chronicles her travels around the world interviewing designers, adventurers, and scientists; she also joined some expeditions and participated in deep descents. She reminds readers that far more people have visited the International Space Station than the ocean floor, and getting down there remains more dangerous. Readers will be thrilled by the author’s descriptions of truly bizarre sights and creatures as well as dazzling archaeological treasures (according to estimates, some 3 million ships linger on the seabed). Less moving is the human detritus that has reached the deepest trenches, including ubiquitous microplastics; synthetic fibers as well as industrial, chemical, and pharmaceutical waste; and bombs, live ammunition, and unneeded weapons, which the world’s armies routinely dump into the sea.

Space exploration gets the headlines, but Casey makes a convincing case that the deep ocean is more interesting.

IS MATH REAL?

How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths

Cheng, Eugenia

Basic Books (336 pp.)

$30.00 | Aug. 15, 2023

9781541601826

An abstract if oddly entertaining foray into the more philosophical realms of mathematics.

A noted popularizer of mathematics, Cheng, the author of Beyond Infinity and How To Bake Pi, works at the frontiers of the discipline in an arcane area “called category theory,” which “doesn’t involve numbers and equations at all.” If the thought of math without numbers makes your head hurt, the author’s latest book will be a constant challenge. Math is real, she tells us, in much the same way that Santa Claus is real: as an idea. Thus, as she puts it, it’s entirely possible that another idea can come into play, namely that 1 + 1 does not equal 2; the question then becomes not “What is 1” or “What is 2,” but instead, “What is a world in which 1 + 1 = 2?” Given that math, in concert with physics, admits the possibility of an infinite number of worlds, or dimensions, a world where 1 + 1 = 1 isn’t out of the question. Our world gives the answer of 2 because that’s the abstraction we agree on, just as we agree (for the most part) on the laws of logic—and that’s a key idea, for, as Cheng says brightly, “Mathematics is the logical study of how logical things work.” The strict rules of logic can, of course, make a person’s head hurt, too; one has only to think of Zeno’s paradox, wherein neither the tortoise nor the hare actually wins a race because “the sum doesn’t converge.” Some of the author’s examples take the form of equations, and while it helps to be numerate, the numerophobic shouldn’t shy away from digging in. Despite her provocative title, others are fun examples from the very real world, such as using a recipe for mayonnaise to discuss the process of commutativity.

For the budding mathematician in the house, to say nothing of lovers of puzzles and enigmas.

THE DADDY DIARIES

The Year I Grew Up

Cohen, Andy Henry Holt (288 pp.)

$29.99 | May 9, 2023

9781250890924

The host of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live recounts a year in his life as a single working parent.

Celebrities are indeed just like us—or at least Cohen seems to be. In his fifth book, the author displays the relatable wit and honesty that have made him a TV star. After the introduction to this “continuation of The Andy Cohen Diaries and Superficial ,”

Cohen begins on Jan. 1, 2022, and he ends his diary entries on Dec. 31, after which he offers a brief epilogue. “It’s kind of like the diary was my shrink for a year,” he concludes. Though some readers may get tired of the exclamation points scattered like glitter across nearly every page, it’s clear the author uses them to express genuine joy and gratitude. Even when stressed or anxious, we see Cohen acknowledge his feelings, process them, and get back at it the next day. Housewives come and go, as do nannies, feuds, and firefighters, but underneath it all is the author’s love and excitement for the world he now shares with his two children, Ben and Lucy. Refreshingly, there is very little cynicism or exclusivity in this book. Cohen names his favorite restaurants and dearest friends, and he is unabashedly delighted at getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. For a book that is all celebrity and (first) name-dropping, readers feel like they are part of the action. However, he’s careful not to fall victim to gossipy dirt about his love life: “I would love to share every sordid detail of nights of passion with you, because I consider us friends in my head, but I’m just…not writing about

ENGLISH 2021; page count, 762; 6 x 9”

ISBN: 978-1-934984-90-1 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-948258-02-9 (eBook)

“This seminal, all-encompassing pregnancy guide just got a lot more authoritative and informative.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“…a thorough health guide that’s designed to calm and empower prospective moms…”

—Melissa Wuske, Foreword Reviews

SPANISH

2022; page count, 808; 6 x 9"

ISBN: 978-1-948258-36-4 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-948258-37-1 (eBook)

This best-selling, award-winning newest edition is a trusted resource for patients.

it.” Cohen is here to share his experiences and make you feel seen while doing it—and he does it well.

Universal truths combine with kindness and optimism in a memoir from a single working parent who just happens to be a star.

THUNDERCLAP A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death

Cumming, Laura Scribner (320 pp.)

$30.00 | July 11, 2023

9781982181741

A tender homage to art.

Scottish art critic Cumming, the author of The Vanishing Velázquez, melds memoir, art history, and biography in an elegant, beautifully illustrated meditation on art, desire, imagination, and memory. Central to her narrative are two

artists: her beloved father, James Cumming (1922-1991), selfdescribed as a painter of “semi-figurative art,” and Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), one of some 600 to 700 painters working in Holland during what has been called the Golden Age of Dutch art. A contemporary of Rembrandt, with whom he studied, and Vermeer, Fabritius was killed in a devastating explosion of gunpowder stores—a great thunderclap—that leveled his studio and nearly killed his neighbor Vermeer as well. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Fabritius is survived by scant biographical information and barely a dozen paintings, of which two—A View of Delft and The Goldfinch—are the most well known. From shards of evidence, Cumming has created a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic artist whose works have profoundly affected her. A View of Delft, she writes, “is like a seer’s dream, a vision materialising as if through an adder stone, floating in mind and memory.” The Goldfinch, a single bird held captive by a chain, speaks to her of the “isolation and withdrawal” that she imagines characterized Fabritius himself, a man who had buried his wife and children and who faced indebtedness and loneliness. “This bird,” she writes, “has a specific force of personality, an air of solitude and sorrow, a living being looking out at another living being from its prison against the wall.” Cumming recalls the paintings she saw as a child growing up in Edinburgh, the richness of the works that she saw on a family visit to the Netherlands, and her careful observations of her father, engrossed in the work that, for her, keeps him alive. “The painter dies,” she writes, “though I still cannot believe it. He dies, but his painting survives.”

Moving reflections rendered in precise, radiant prose.

FUNNY THINGS A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz

Debus, Luca & Francesco Matteuzzi

Top Shelf Productions (440 pp.)

$39.99 | Aug. 29, 2023

9781603095266

A graphic imagination of the life of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000).

“I just wanted to be a cartoonist and draw those funny things that made life so much more beautiful….Nobody told me that this could have actual consequences in the world.” That’s how Italian cartoonists Debus and Matteuzzi imagine one of Schulz’s late-in-life epiphanies. Some of the consequences were controversial, as when Schulz introduced a Black character, Franklin, to the cast of his “Peanuts” cartoon strip on July 31, 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Confronted by an agent and editors who wanted no part of this cartoon integration, Schulz issued an ultimatum: “Let’s put it this way….Either you print it just the way I draw it, or I quit.” That’s an accurate quotation, though Debus and Matteuzzi confess that they’ve “imagined” much of the dialogue here, a problematic ploy for a biography. In doing that and on other points, there are a few flubs: They have Schulz’s mother telling the young boy—Schulz was born in 1922—that she understands his difficulties reaching

“Moving reflections rendered in precise, radiant prose.”

thunderclap

out beyond his “comfort zone,” a term that would not come into use for another half-century, and there are no saguaro cactuses in Needles, California. Still, Debus and Matteuzzi pay appropriate homage to Schulz and his creation, which came about from his love of “gag cartooning” and a hint from his dying mother that Snoopy would be a good name for a dog. One of the happier consequences of Schulz’s long career was NASA’s creation of the Silver Snoopy award for employee excellence. Readers with a deep interest in the subject would do better to turn to David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts, but this book covers most of the bases, including his complicated religious faith and frequent bouts of anxiety and existential crises.

Second-tier peanuttery for the shelves of Schulz completists.

THE VISIONARIES Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times

Eilenberger, Wolfram

Trans. by Shaun Whiteside

Penguin Press (400 pp.)

$30.00 | Aug. 8, 2023

9780593297452

An exploration of the philosophical foundations of four of the 20th century’s most controversial and influential writers.

Following his critically acclaimed 2020 book, Time of the Magicians, German author and philosopher Eilenberger holds to a similar template in this group biography of writers Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil, interweaving the trajectories of their lives and work from 1933 to 1943. These were harrowing years in particular for Beauvoir, Weil, and German-born Arendt, as the war was gradually unfolding throughout Europe and the German occupation of

WORDS WITH…

Samantha Irby

Nobody does embarrassment like Irby. Quietly Hostile offers readers more laughs—and insights

BY LISA KENNEDY

Samantha Irby knows her shit—figuratively and, as fans of her bitches gotta eat! blog and four collections of personal essays know, quite literally. Her carnal knowledge—sexual but especially scatological, thanks to Crohn’s disease—is vast. Her grasp of American poverty, earned.

In her latest collection, Quietly Hostile (Vintage, May 16), Irby offers her version of bathroom etiquette but also shares a wrenching scene of her and a sister at their mother’s deathbed. In the extended and episodic “Superfan!!!!!!!” she riffs on Sex and the City; Irby was hired to write for the reboot of HBO’s iconic series. For a self-described queer, Black, fat girl who lives in rural Michigan with wife Kirsten Jennings and two stepchildren, penning lines for Carrie Bradshaw and Co. has been a little mind-blowing.

In Irby’s able hands, the embarrassing can be harrowing and hilarious, but it seldom takes on the patina of shame. We recently spoke about Quietly Hostile on Zoom; earlier in the week, she’d been recording the audiobook. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So how did the recording go?

You know, I write a lot of very long, circuitous sentences that are funny in print, but when it comes to recording, they’re not. So, I’m always figuring out where to breathe in real time and how to make it sound like I’m effortlessly telling a story. I should rehearse, is basically what I’m trying to say.

There’s a deep generosity to how you share the bodyawareness stuff, the illness-awareness stuff. It must be freeing for your readers.

When I first got diagnosed with Crohn’s, I had never even heard of it before, let alone known people who have it. And it’s one of those diseases that is embarrassing—at least my version of it has been more embarrassing than life-altering in the bad way. Writing about it at first for me was just amusing. It’s like, I’ve got to turn this into something funny or I will just cry and feel like I’m the only person on Earth who’s wearing a diaper. But then when my first book came out, I did a bookstore event in Milwaukee, and one of the people brought me a roll of fancy toilet paper. And she was like, “OK, this is a joke, but I just want to tell you I have irritable bowel disease, and it’s just nice for someone to be writing about it.”

How do you modulate your vulnerability?

There’s one part in this book where I finally admit, I think for the first time in one of my books, how—what is the word? It’s not bad—how self-conscious I am about having never finished college. I often talk about people coming home from college when I was a teenager or being in a situation where everyone knows the right words to say, and I’m like, Ha, here are some jokes. So, it took me a minute to say that and admit it and put

Lori Morgan Gottschling

that out in the world. But the only time I really think about the vulnerability is if I’m writing something sad; I try not to write anything that would make me cry if you asked me about it.

You have a way of distinguishing between embarrassment and shame. They’re not the same thing, right? Right. Embarrassment, I think, is more about the people who may be seeing you. It would be awkward for me to explain to this woman waiting outside the single-stall bathroom, the one who thinks I passed a dead body in the 15 minutes I’ve been in here. That’s embarrassment. Shame is, I’m terrible and should never leave the house because this thing is going on inside me. I can eventually spin embarrassment into a funny anecdote. To go down the shame spiral of Yeah, of course I’m bad, and it’s unfixable, and this is going to be who I am—resisting that is like an everyday practice for me.

Is it a little “pinch me, I must be dreaming” to have loved Sex and the City and now work on And Just Like That…?

I thought it was bullshit when my agent told me, “Michael Patrick King would like to talk to you.” I was like, f- you. What day is it? April Fools’? I feel like the only way I got through it— especially the first season—was because we were remote. If I had been in a fancy conference room with posters of Carrie Bradshaw on the wall, I would have felt very intimidated. But because I was just sitting in the corner of my living room on my same laptop, it took some of the pressure off.

Was the pressure a surprise?

It caught me off guard, like, how big the show was and how many people had opinions. The thing about the opinions is, I don’t get mad. But my response to them was, Oh, wait, you misunderstood. Let me tell you what I was trying to do. And you can’t do that.

OK, so the “Shit Happens” chapter reads like the new rules of grown-ass etiquette. It’s so charming. I’m so glad, because it’s one of those things that my editor will never say, “It’s too much.” But it does feel like a coup every time I’m trying to do something disgusting and they’re like, OK. For real? I can have a pee chapter and a poop chapter?

You utilize lists a lot.

What am I writing, a term paper? We need a commercial break.

Do you laugh when

writing?

Yes, I’ll just be chuckling, and my wife will be thinking I’m looking at a meme or something. She’ll ask, “What’s funny?”

And I’m like, “I just wrote this sentence.” What an asshole, right? The one kind of sad thing about audiobooks (because they discourage it) is when I perform my work, I always laugh because sometimes people don’t quite know when to laugh. Especially when you’re revealing a lot. She said her body looks like a bag full of tennis balls. Do I get to laugh? I have to help them.

You tend to have little existential asides through the book, like “but since we live in hell….” How bad is this mortal coil?

I think that urge in me comes from wanting to push back against…I don’t know what to call it other than a sort of toxic positivity. And I don’t think all positivity is toxic, OK? A thing I hate is the kind of unrealistic platitudes we get from people, like, “buck up,” “be happy,” and “I did this. You can do it.” I’m not going to tell you exactly how I did it, but I’m going to tell you that you, too, can have this beautiful life that you see on my Instagram. I don’t ever want to connect to someone in a phony way, even if it is humiliating. We live in rural southwest Michigan. There’s no money [here]. The number of kids my wife has to refer to the teen homeless shelter—the fact that there’s a need for a teen homeless shelter, it’s like, I can’t ignore that. I also can’t get bogged down in it. So, I kind of view what I do as like, listen, we’re all in a landfill. Let’s make fun of that garbage pile over there. It’s connection through commiseration. And I think that’s part of what people appreciate. Even when I’m funny and telling a good story, I never get too far away from, well, remember, life is awful—right? And we’re all going to burn up.

Lisa Kennedy writes for the New York Times, Variety, the Denver Post, and other publications. Quietly Hostile was reviewed in the Feb. 15, 2023, issue.

France was impacting all three. Rand had moved to the U.S. in 1926. With the same acumen as he displayed in Magicians, Eilenberger draws compelling narratives around these women’s lives while ably synthesizing much of their core thinking. Their ideas were germinating during this period, informing their more significant output in years to come. The increasingly controversial writing of Arendt, Rand, and Beauvoir would prove particularly relevant in shaping sociopolitical discourse up through the later years of the 20th century—and even to the present day. While Eilenberger frequently argues the case for Weil’s greatness, her ideas, increasingly inclined toward religious and mystical matters, may feel less tangibly relevant to contemporary American readers. She is somewhat of an outlier within this ambitious group of legacy-minded writers. While never quite providing a cohesive rationale for joining these four disparate writers together, Eilenberger offers solid insight into a center-minded way of thinking applicable to each. “The philosophizing person,” he writes, “seems to be essentially a pariah of deviant insights, the prophet of a life lived rightly....They simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been. And deep inside they remained certain of who or what the problem needing treatment was: not themselves, but the Others. Possibly, in fact—all the Others.”

An absorbing, well-grounded study.

BEYOND EVERYWHERE How Wi-Fi Became the World’s Most Beloved Technology

Ennis, Greg Post Hill Press (224 pp.)

$32.00 | July 18, 2023

9781637587485

The story of the creation of Wi-Fi, an epic journey of turning complexity into simplicity.

Younger readers may not even remember when the internet was a technology of wires, cables, and plugs. Wi-Fi connectivity has become so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it, but as this book shows, it was a long haul to get there. Ennis was at the center of it, first as one of the authors of the technical proposal that became the foundation for Wi-Fi systems and later as the vice president of technology for the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry association that handles certification and compliance issues. The seed for it was a project to create a system for the Chicago Board of Trade, known for its chaos and corruption. Ennis and his associates were faced with a range of technical and regulatory restrictions. However, once the local area network was built, they could see the potential for expansion and began working on rules to allow for compatibility of hardware and software. The outcome, after much pushing and shoving within the emerging field, was a set of standards known as IEEE 802.11. Going global presented new challenges, but the standards eventually caught on, and the introduction of mobile

phone connectivity and video streaming cemented the place of Wi-Fi. Ennis explains all this with the authority of an insider and largely avoids the trap of jargon. He estimates that there are currently 18 billion devices using Wi-Fi, but with a solid set of protocols in place, he sees no limits to growth. “The economic value of Wi-Fi to the world…is expected to be nearly $5 trillion by 2025,” he writes. “More than four billion new Wi-Fi devices are sold every year. The likelihood that Wi-Fi will be replaced anytime soon is very small indeed.”

An accessible account of how Wi-Fi tech became a crucial part of our work, society, and lives.

NECESSARY TROUBLE Growing Up at Midcentury

Faust, Drew Gilpin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.)

$30.00 | Aug. 22, 2023

9780374601805

A distinguished historian remembers coming-of-age in the 1950s and ’60s.

Faust, a Bancroft and Francis Parkman Prize winner and former president of Harvard, examines her personal history in a memoir set between her 1947 birth and her 1968 graduation from Bryn Mawr. In the early chapters, the author resurrects the Virginia of her White, privileged childhood, touching on her father’s racehorse business and emotional coldness; her mother’s desire that she grow up a meek and passive “lady” (“I was not meant to become a woman, for that category carried dangerously sexual and sensual implications”); her brother’s backyard Civil War reenactments (he made her play Grant to his Lee); the family’s unspoken belief that they deserved every advantage they had; and their staff of Black cleaners and cooks who used the back door and ate in the kitchen. In the rest of the book, Faust chronicles her flight from the racial and gendered assumptions of her upbringing. She wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower in favor of desegregation, skipped midterms to participate in civil rights protests, endured an assault by a National Guard member in Alabama, rallied against the war in Vietnam, and organized her college classmates against sexist double standards. The author is at her best when she immerses readers in a young person’s experience of the era’s moral urgency and passion, illuminating how “coming of age as a thinking and feeling person in those years [was] like walking on the edge of a precipice.” It was an era whose specific clashes “fewer and fewer living humans can remember” and whose “strangeness…can perhaps encourage us that at least some things have changed for the better in my lifetime.” And yet, writes Faust, “when we see many of those advances challenged or even overturned, it can remind us why we don’t want to live in such a world again.”

An inviting, absorbing look at a privileged childhood in the segregated South and the birth of a questioning spirit.

“An inviting, absorbing look at a privileged childhood in the segregated South and the birth of a questioning spirit.”

necessary trouble

BIRDING WHILE INDIAN A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Gannon,

Thomas C.

Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press

(248 pp.)

$19.95 paper | June 27, 2023

9780814258729

An Indigenous bird-watcher’s memoir about his hobby and his life.

Gannon, a professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska and enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, begins by describing what he is attempting to create with this book: “the untoward anti-memoir of a mixed-blood fellow who began birding around age eight, when he discovered that he was a neurotic introvert who preferred to be away from other people. Birding was a ready escape from hearing his food-stamp-welfare part-Lakota mother called a ‘squaw.’ And nor could suddenly being sent to a Catholic

Indian boarding school be an especially fortuitous event for any healthy continuity of ego consciousness.” In this chronological series of essays, all of which are dated, beginning in 1965 and ending in 2018, and range from heartbreaking to infuriating to joyful, the author examines his upbringing as a resident of the Great Plains, plagued by the “racist politics of western South Dakota,” and his fascination and involvement with a hobby he describes as “yet another Western colonial act of epistemic violence , however seemingly benign.” Gannon takes us along on his journey through a part of the nation that is often ignored or misunderstood, and despite plenty of heartache and sorrow, he offers much-needed moments of levity. A standout anecdote involves the author’s car getting hit by a pronghorn, who jumped in front of him “like some kind of crazed gazelle.” Reflecting on the incident, Gannon writes, ruefully, “my idealistic pride as a post-human environmentalist was rendered moot and pathetic.” Whether recounting his encounters with a great horned owl, sandhill crane, wood duck, field sparrow, bald eagle, white stork, or snowy egret, the author is consistently engaging and

thoughtful about his place in a world that we share with a wondrous assortment of other species.

A fascinating search for personal and cultural identity.

THE SONG OF SIGNIFICANCE A New Manifesto for Teams

Godin, Seth

Portfolio (208 pp.)

$25.00 | May 30, 2023 9780593715543

Offbeat business leadership manifesto that often morphs into a prose poem.

Godin, author of many bestsellers, including Tribes, Poke the Box, and This Is Marketing, begins with a provocation: “If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you already know: work isn’t working.” Bosses are burned out, workers too, and everyone hates being evaluated as if a machine. “Humans are not a resource,” he writes. “We are not a tool.” If you’re running a fast-food outlet or making widgets, notes the author, you may be inclined to keep things as they are since the objective is to produce and sell as much as you can at the lowest possible cost. But burgers and widgets do not innovations make, and in the longer view, they don’t materially add to the advancement of human civilization or constitute anything approaching “significant work.” Nor, in the end, do most Zoom meetings, metrics of how many hits an article gets online, or time-motion studies that include how many minutes an employee spends in the bathroom each day. If you want to get to the significant stuff—in Godin’s repeated but nicely alliterative mantra “Mozart, not Muzak”—then a boss must stop being merely a boss and be a leader. That involves an entirely different way of thinking and being, a mindset that measures how healthy and happy the people inside an organization are and, in turn, how healthy and happy the organization is. Godin’s staccato, sententious style (“Until our existential needs are met, it’s difficult to produce the emotional labor needed for progress and possibility”) may be a little jarring to readers accustomed to graphs and charts and other business-book appurtenances, but there’s a lot of substance underlying the piece on better employer-employee relations and arriving at common, humane goals.

Think of Godin as an anti–Elon Musk and this seemingly lightweight book suddenly acquires a lot of heft.

CREDIBLE The Power of Expert Leaders

Goodall, Amanda PublicAffairs (272 pp.)

$30.00 | July 11, 2023

9781541702509

The benefits of an expert-led world.

Drawing on more than 15 years of empirical research, Goodall, a professor of leadership at London’s Bayes Business School, makes her book debut with a persuasive argument about the need for expertise in leaders. “When nonexperts are put in charge of organizations,” she writes, “disaster often strikes.” She attributes the devaluing of expertise to a growing distrust of authority, a populist bent toward “majority decision-making,” and a belief “that everyone’s views are of equal validity.” While in the past, leaders emerged from those who rose through the ranks of an organization, leadership ability has come to be assessed “in terms of verbal skills” and an individual’s “personal characteristics or, more simply, their charisma.” Business schools, she asserts, have contributed to an “unfortunate shift towards generic management,” creating “business and management” as a separate academic field. Citing many examples in areas such as health care, manufacturing, sports, and technology, Goodall has found that expert leadership leads to success. Top universities are led by scholars, not outsiders recruited from business, and the best performing hospitals are led by clinicians. Basketball teams, too, “won more games if they were led by coaches who were former allstar players or had long playing careers in the NBA.” Expert leaders convey a clear sense of purpose, take a long view, create a productive work environment, perform to high standards, and signal excellence. They share their organization’s culture and values. Once experts are found, though, they often need to be persuaded to lead. Financial remuneration may help, as does their capacity “to identify psychologically as leaders.” They also need to know “that they will be developed and supported in the transition from expert to leader while being assured that they will be able to make tangible differences for the benefit of their teams, organizations, and stakeholders.” Well-grounded arguments for effective leadership.

COMPLETELY MAD Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race To Row Solo Across the Atlantic

Hansen, James R. Pegasus (384 pp.)

$28.95 | July 4, 2023

9781639364176

The story of the 1969 race to be the first person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

A former history professor and historian for NASA, Hansen has written extensively about science and technology, particularly aerospace history. In his latest, he turns his attention to the ocean, chronicling the lives of two adventurers who “could not have been more different.” Tom McClean (b. 1942) was a British paratrooper who had been orphaned as a child, a man in the classic tough-guy mold. Traveling west to east in his rowboat, Super Silver , his route took him from Newfoundland to Ireland. John Fairfax (1937-2012), who was known as a gambler and a playboy, traveled from east to west in his rowboat, Britannia , from the Canary Islands to Florida. In a page-turning narrative, Hansen shares the personal background of each contender as well as the challenges they faced along their nautical journeys, particularly noting the contrasts between the two men. Along their impressive voyages, they both battled gale-force winds, violent storms, shark encounters, hunger, and loneliness. Not only were their routes different; so were their approaches. “To the very end,” writes Hansen, “Tom’s commitment was very different from Fairfax’s, as he would do nothing less than complete his journey totally unassisted.” Fairfax also had a head start and tended to blame his boat for any problems he encountered. The one thing they did have in common was questioning their sanity for taking on such a monumental venture. As McClean recalled about the day he set out, “There were a few sad eyes amongst that crowd….I’ll never forget all those watching faces as I rowed out for the open sea. No question that many of them thought they were watching the departure of a man who would never see land again.”

The remarkable adventures of two men fighting nature and their own demons.

EMPIRES OF THE STEPPES

Harl, Kenneth W.

Hanover Square Press (320 pp.)

$32.99 | Aug. 1, 20233

9781335429278

Academic survey of the horse-based cultures of the Eurasian plains, which often rode out to conquer neighboring lands.

Harl, a professor of classical and Byzantine history, took the occasion of a sabbatical canceled by the pandemic to write “a sweeping narrative covering forty-five centuries.” This book is just that, and though the text is occasionally labored, the author covers an impressive amount of ground. His early pages deal with the proto–Indo-European peoples who ranged out of the steppes to settle in places as far-flung as Ireland and western China, the latter known to us through remnants of an ancient language called Tocharian as well as DNA analysis that shows a blend of European and Siberian origins. A succession of nomadic peoples—Scythian, Parthian, Mongol, Turkic, Khazar—followed over the centuries, many of them using their military advantages (including the innovations of war carriages and massed cavalry) to seize territory as distant from their epicenter as the outskirts of Paris and the whole of India. Still, as Harl writes, their successes were often short-lived. When Attila died in what is now Budapest after having “overindulged in a wedding celebration to his newest wife,” the vast empire that he built fell apart. Only Genghis Khan’s lasted much beyond his life, while his descendant Kublai Khan succeeded in unifying China after overthrowing the Song dynasty—though he frittered away his energies by trying to absorb the jungles of Southeast Asia, which were not conducive to Mongol cavalry tactics. For all the evanescence of the conquests by people like the Uzbek hero (and mass murderer) Tamerlane, Harl observes that the nomads had a lasting effect on the world. The Mongols, for one, brought gunpowder and the arts of papermaking and printing to Europe, and Tamerlane inadvertently shifted the seat of power to the north and west of his homeland from Kiev to Moscow.

An ambitious, impressively researched study that will interest advanced students of world history.

THE BRONX NOBODY KNOWS An Urban Walking Guide

Helmreich, William B.

Princeton Univ. (472 pp.)

$27.95 | Aug. 8, 2023

9780691166957

Inveterate city walker Helmreich continues his on-foot exploration of New York’s five boroughs.

In his latest journey, Helmreich takes on the Bronx, perhaps Gotham’s most underestimated (in terms of both reputation and real estate prices) area. “The tenements are slowly diminishing in number,” he writes, “and affordable housing, while not luxurious, is newer and far more attractive.” The author insists that the Bronx has much natural beauty to recommend it, even if you might not know it along some of his routes, with grand hotels and art deco structures of yore gone to seed and parks full of addicts. Head down Arthur Avenue, though, and you’re in what used to be a handsome Little Italy that rivaled the one in downtown Manhattan—though, as Helmreich notes, many of its pizzerias, like those of nearby Belmont Avenue, are now owned by Albanians. That’s a constant story. “In the not-so-distant future,” Helmreich

“In his latest journey, Helmreich takes on the Bronx, perhaps Gotham’s most underestimated (in terms of both reputation and real estate prices) area.”

the bronx nobody knows

writes, “they will be the dominant group, if they aren’t already.” The same is true in other parts of the borough, with enclaves of immigrants from all over the world. Sometimes there’s tension: One young Dominican woman he talked to strongly dislikes the Haitians who shared her island homeland, and one elderly White man grouses about the “5,000 killings a year on average” (the correct number, Helmreich notes, is 300). Thankfully, the author discovered more harmony than discord from block to block and refreshing diversity everywhere. Naturally, not everywhere is Eden: In Seton Falls Park, for instance, he observed garbage strewn everywhere, with sullen maintenance workers picking up “perhaps 10 percent of the total.” Refuse and occasional ill tempers notwithstanding, readers will be inspired to don sturdy shoes and head out to see some of the sights for themselves, especially little-known places such as Billie Holiday’s grave and tiny City Island, with “all the trappings of a New England coastal town.”

An opinionated, entertaining tour of a “gritty, tough, nononsense” place well worth visiting.

62 Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees, and the Pursuit of Greatness

Hoch, Bryan Atria (352 pp.)

$29.99 | July 11, 2023

9781668027950

Inside Aaron Judge’s record-breaking 2022 season.

On Oct. 4, 2022, the Yankees outfielder smashed his 62nd regular-season home run, breaking the American League record set in 1961 by another Yankees great, Roger Maris. Sluggers Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds broke Maris’ record decades ago, but as various observers note in this book—including Maris’ son, who contributes a foreword—those were steroid-era achievements, and Judge likely stands alone as the “clean home run king.” However you cut the numbers, Judge had a remarkable season, and Hoch, a Yankees beat reporter for Major League Baseball, had excellent access to the triumphs and grind of the season. Speeding through Judge’s backstory—adopted, mixed-race, very tall, and prodigiously talented—the author offers a clout-by-clout rundown of every homer, but he works some interesting side stories into the main narrative. The question of whether Judge would sign a new deal with the Yankees loomed over the season, and his efforts to serve as a team leader intensified as the season dragged on. The team suffered a serious second-half slump, and divisive teammate Josh Donaldson fielded accusations of racism after an on-field confrontation with the White Sox’s Tim Anderson. Interspersed with Judge’s story are flashbacks to Maris’ 1961 record-setting run, which entailed a lot of understandable stress and (less understandably for an athlete) cigarettes. Hoch can be fussy on pitchby-pitch approaches and other minutiae (what did the Yankees offer fans in exchange for those home-run balls?), and the ending is anticlimactic: The Yankees fell short in the playoffs, during

which a gassed Judge hit an anemic .139. Still, the book holds interest as a tale of leadership claimed and tested; Judge’s earning the rare title of Yankees team captain the following season, it’s clear, was no small feat.

Solid baseball reporting, rich with both stats geekery and human-interest stories.

EMPIRE OF THE SUM

The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator

Houston, Keith Norton (352 pp.)

$32.50 | Aug. 22, 2023

9780393882148

The success of the pocket calculator relied on operational simplicity, but it involved a complex process of false starts, slow advances, and ingenious thinking.

Houston is a writer with a taste for the esoteric, as he showed in his book about punctuation, Shady Characters. In his latest, he charts the development of the pocket calculator, delivering a fascinating, witty tale. The human search for reliable ways of counting has been long and circuitous, ranging from notches on bones to the abacus to clunky mechanical machines. Houston has a good time hunting down some of the attempts of the 19th century; most of them did not work very well, but they laid the groundwork for later improvements. War and navigation were the key drivers in the search for arithmetic accuracy, and the author introduces us to a cast of colorful characters along the way. He takes a variety of fun detours, such as a discourse on the history of pockets and a discussion of the Curta, a hand-held calculating device of gears and wheels. Slide rules became essential tools for the numerically minded, and the development of crank-operated accounting machines was a huge step forward. But the real genesis of the pocket calculator came with the Casio line, which switched the focus from mechanics to electronics. The next major improvement was the addition of builtin formulae and logarithmic tools, which turned arithmetic into math. Houston unpacks the breakthrough products, including the Hewlett-Packard HP-35 and the Texas Instruments TI-81. He believes that the heyday of the pocket calculator was the 1980s and ’90s. After that, cellphones and laptops became unbeatable competition. However, the fact that these digital advances integrated calculators into their operations meant that the idea lived on, albeit in another form. “The calculator is dead; long live the calculator,” he concludes.

An entertaining, informative story about a technology that defined an era.

random acts of medicine

RANDOM ACTS OF MEDICINE

The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health

Jena, Anupam B. & Christopher Worsham

Doubleday (320 pp.)

$30.00 | July 11, 2023

9780385548816

An ingenious exploration of “natural experiments” that influence medical care.

Physicians and researchers at Harvard, Jena and Worsham open with a teaser claiming that children born in summer suffer influenza more often than those born in autumn. Readers may be confused until they reveal the results of millions of insurance claims. Parents tend to follow pediatric guidelines for yearly checkups, and they recommend using a child’s birthday as a reminder. Flu shots become available in the fall, so some

children are immunized during their yearly checkup. The vaccine isn’t available during the summer so those parents are told to make a fall appointment; many don’t follow up, so their children get sick. The text is full of such intriguing and surprising facts and trends. When cardiologists go on vacation, their patients’ death rates drop significantly, likely because the substitutes are less aggressive in treatments. Most doctors prefer action over inaction, and so do those they care for. Sick patients want their doctor to “do something.” Hearing that waiting is the best course is often greeted as bad news. In a parallel study, patients with metastatic lung cancer were either given standard cancer treatment or simple palliative care. The palliative care patients were more comfortable—and also lived longer. Few readers will ignore the long section on who makes the best doctor. Backed by millions of records, mostly of hospital discharges and deaths, the authors determine that graduating from the best medical school makes no difference. Experience matters for surgeons, who improve with age, but not for internists. Women doctors perform as well as men in most specialties and a little better as internists, and doctors trained internationally

“A well-documented, unnerving, fascinating study for anyone adrift in the American health care system.”

are just as effective. Pandemic politics provides a concluding shock. Republicans and Democrats died in equal numbers early in the pandemic, and with the vaccine came a highly politicized anti-vaccine movement, after which excess deaths among registered Republicans jumped to over 150% higher than those of Democrats.

A well-documented, unnerving, fascinating study for anyone adrift in the American health care system.

DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF A Memoir of Four Years

Julavits, Heidi

Hogarth (304 pp.)

$27.00 | June 27, 2023

9780451498519

A son grows up and away. Novelist, memoirist, and Guggenheim Fellow Julavits offers a touching meditation on time, motherhood, and memory centered on four years, beginning when her 6-year-old son slowly, fitfully emerges from childhood. She calls those years “the end times,” marking his growing independence and her own unsettling loss of feeling deeply connected and needed. “Before,” she writes, “I was accumulating experiences; now, on certain days, it feels like all I’m accumulating is the experience of losing the experiences I’d gained.” As her son became increasingly drawn to his peers, she observed that around some other boys, his behavior changed in response to “the energy of the group”; he shared the excitement of video games not with her, but with his friends. The author felt like she was “left out and I hate to be left out. I’m also excluded from learning. He’s gaining specific knowledge about a new world and I’m not.” As he moved forward to adulthood, Julavits found herself ruminating about the past: teaching at Columbia, a monthlong stay in Florence with her children when her husband had to return home unexpectedly, her pregnancies and the births of her two children, and growing up on the rugged coast of Maine. “It’s sometimes hard to know whose childhood I’m missing anymore,” she reflects, “my children’s or mine.” Her son’s maturing also urged her to think about how she could prepare him for moral complexities surrounding gender and sexuality. Despite his growing resistance, she refused to cut his hair, causing him to be mistaken, often, for a girl. Yet she is convinced that long hair produces nutrients that promote “greater intelligence, heightened empathy, kindness, intuition, and the ability to sense enemies,” qualities she knows will serve him well. “For him,” she writes, “I am no longer his sole point of orientation and will never be again. He will not always be mine.”

Affecting reflections on life’s transitions.

TRANS CHILDREN IN TODAY’S SCHOOLS

Key, Aidan Oxford Univ. (384 pp.)

$29.95 paper | June 27, 2023

9780190886547

A comprehensive look at genderdiverse youth in the classroom.

As the transgender student population continues to become more widely visible, navigation tools have become critical for educators and parents alike, notes Key, a veteran gender diversity educator. While written with parents of trans+ children in mind, the book is primarily directed at teachers, administrators, and school staff who directly impact students’ lives on a daily basis. Key shows readers what is involved when a child considers a gender transition process, and he confronts the challenges of gender inclusion, which may be a new topic for some readers. Particularly striking are the stories from parents of trans+ students who are managing the stages of their own apprehension alongside those of their child. Key incorporates learning points on gender vernacular and fighting community stigmatization. Personal anecdotes and timely discussions from school educators complement instructive illustrations and Q&A sections that answer sensitive questions regarding sports participation, bathroom choices, and changing areas. In an encouraging, consistently positive manner, Key addresses the overt political and/or cultural resistance that proliferates within heated debates and public forum discussions, and he asserts that accurate information is the best way to educate and collaborate. He stresses the importance of delivering practical, real-world discussion tools and assistance to parents and educators of trans+ children, who often find themselves without resources, advice, answers, or support to fortify what can often be an overwhelmingly complex experience. Key’s checklists of suggestions successfully bridge the gap between trans+ kids, adults, and school educators with strategically supportive approaches and behaviors. Authoritative yet written in pleasant, straightforward language, this book is an invaluable resource for understanding what it clearly means (and doesn’t mean) to be transgender while ensuring that every student has access to an optimal learning environment free from discrimination.

Essential guidance on proactively navigating the challenges of gender-diverse student bodies.

RISING UP

The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice

Kolhatkar, Sonali City Lights (176 pp.)

$16.95 paper | June 27, 2023

9780872868724

How to fight for justice through storytelling.

Journalist and activist Kolhatkar, host and producer of the Pacifica Radio show “Rising Up,” argues persuasively for the necessity of “narrative-shifting” in order “to change public consciousness to the degree necessary for society to achieve justice.” While she applauds efforts to promote inclusivity and diversity in employment, communities, and schools, she sees justice at the heart of her distinction between equality and equity. “Equality for Black people means removing official barriers to home-ownership, education, health care, and more,” she asserts. “But equity for

Black people means reparations to compensate for centuries of enslavement, oppression, Jim Crow segregation, and ongoing systemic racism so that home ownership, quality education, and health care are actually within reach. Equality ignores the past. Equity addresses historical injustice.” According to Kolhatkar, reforms that can lead to equity must be grounded in revised narratives from news media, film, TV, and social media, all of which—even those purporting to be liberal—are dominated by White voices. Newsrooms in major publications, she has found, are mostly White, as are individuals who critique journalism’s problems; therefore, these critics fail to notice “that white domination is a serious problem.” Likewise, the White-dominated film and TV industries perpetuate “ugly and reductive narratives” about people of color and present images of police that “are in line with white reality and at odds with what people of color experience.” Both independent media and young filmmakers of color—such as Ava DuVernay—offer crucial new perspectives. Kolhatkar praises the rise of Black Twitter, “an organic collection of the unfiltered opinions of Black Americans on any number of topics, big and small, that has the

the many lives of mama love

unique ability to create trends.” Powerful forces for narrativeshifting, she asserts, include courses such as ethnic studies and critical race theory as well as one-on-one discourse: conversations that encourage “actively taking the perspective of others.”

A thoughtful prescription for social change.

BEHOLD THE MONSTER Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer

Lauren, Jillian Sourcebooks (496 pp.)

$26.99 | July 18, 2023

9781728267753

Lauren reflects on her relationship with a serial killer.

Samuel Little confessed to killing 93 women between 1970 and 2005. The FBI has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 of these murders, making Little the most prolific known serial killer in U.S. history. Before Little died in a Los Angeles prison in 2020, Lauren, the author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted and Some Girls, exchanged letters with him and, ultimately, conducted hundreds of hours of face-to-face interviews over the course of a few years. This book is an amalgam of scenes from the author’s relationship with Little, records of her interactions with law enforcement, vignettes from her travels to understand the murderer and his victims, a memoir of this time in her life, and imagined narratives about the women Little killed. Attempting to give Little’s victims a voice through fiction makes emotional sense, and it might make artistic sense in a different kind of narrative. However, this is a nonfiction book, and this choice casts a cloud of confusion over the entire text. Re-creating important moments and filling the gaps between the known and the unknown with educated guesses is an important skill for nonfiction writers, but Lauren doesn’t make it easy for readers to understand when she’s quoting someone directly or when she’s making a guess at what they might have said. It’s not always clear when she’s relating something she knows because she was there or because she has solid documentary evidence—or, instead, cobbling together a scene from bits and pieces of information she’s gathered. The lack of any obvious chronological throughline also makes this book difficult to comprehend and appreciate. Perhaps the material worked better in Confronting a Serial Killer, a docuseries Lauren hosted on the Starz network. The book includes an introduction by Michael Connelly.

A true-crime grab bag.

THE MANY LIVES OF MAMA LOVE

A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

Love Hardin, Lara

Simon & Schuster (320 pp.)

$28.00 | Aug. 8, 2023

9781982197667

A writer and literary agent tells the story of how she overcame addiction, a criminal record, and social ostracism to lovingly embrace her “beautiful mess of a life.”

As Love Hardin recounts, during adulthood, her love of escape led her to anything—sex, food, Vicodin, and eventually heroin—that could induce self-forgetfulness. By 2008, she was living a double life as a “perfect [suburban] mom” and heroin addict who had bankrupted herself to feed the addiction she shared with her husband. Police arrested her after she used stolen credit cards to rent a hotel room that had the electricity and heat she could not afford at home, and her life quickly descended into further chaos. Separated from her children and newly convicted, she experienced a “tsunami of shame and grief and guilt and loss” that plunged her into suicidal despair. Love Hardin eventually found solidarity with other women who had also lost their children and became a surrogate mother to the “lost girls” who were “desperate for things they [had] no name for.” Slowly, the author began the hard fight to regain custody of the children she adored, the self-respect her codependent marriage to a drug addict had destroyed, and the credibility among acquaintances who publicly pilloried her as the “neighbor from hell.” Work as a collaborative writer for a media firm brought the author into unexpected contact with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, both of whom helped her develop the selfcompassion she needed to understand that she was “a work in progress.” As Love Hardin writes, “spending a week listening to Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama alternate between teasing each other for not acting holy enough, and then crying over the profound suffering that is the human experience, changes me.” In addition to revealing the struggles of female felons in a misogynist justice system, the author celebrates her own determination to accept herself and begin again.

A courageous and inspiring memoir.

The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair

Mann, William J. Harper/HarperCollins (656 pp.)

$40.00 | July 11, 2023

9780063026391

Drama in the lives of legendary actors. Mining recently available archival material, Mann, who has chronicled the

“A courageous and inspiring memoir.”

lives of Marlon Brando, Barbra Streisand, and Elizabeth Taylor, sifts through myths and gossip about Humphrey Bogart (18991957) and Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) to offer a cleareyed, sympathetic dual biography. Bogart, who grew up in a wealthy family devoid of outward displays of affection, harbored a profound sense of inadequacy throughout his life. Mann follows his acting career from stage to screen. He debuted on Broadway in 1922 and won his first movie lead in 1930. In 1936, he starred with movie icons Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in The Petrified Forest, a movie, Mann notes, that “changed everything” for an actor who was “as unlikely a star as they came.” But acting success belied personal turmoil. Bogart “was already a serious drinker by the age of twenty-two,” and his drunkenness often resulted in public brawls. Married and divorced twice, his third marriage was foundering when he was cast opposite newcomer Bacall—producer Howard Hawks had just changed her name from Betty—in To Have and Have Not. Bacall, 18 at the time, recalled thinking that “he was a good actor, but I never palpitated over him like many a lady did….He was not the prince on the white horse that I had imagined.” Nevertheless, by the end of filming, they had become lovers, and in 1945, they married. The ambitious Bacall also craved her absent father’s love; despite undeniable success, she felt like an imposter, “unworthy of what she’d been given, while at the same time convinced that she deserved more. She was still the little girl whose father didn’t love her.” After Bogart’s death from cancer, Bacall married hard-drinking Jason Robards Jr., a tumultuous liaison that soon ended; and, happily, she reignited her career on Broadway.

A star-studded, well-researched portrait of two superstars.

The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It A Memoir

Marshall, Greg Abrams (304 pp.)

$26.00 | June 13, 2023

9781419763601

A man born with cerebral palsy reflects on his life.

Essayist Marshall recounts his childhood in 1990s Utah as the middle sibling of five “in a rowdy family where someone was always almost dying or OD-ing.” His father managed a small community newspaper group, and his mother wrote an inspirational column called “Silver Linings” while enduring debilitating cancer treatments and years of remissions and recurrences. Marshall walked with a perpetual limp, documented in his mother’s columns, and he underwent numerous therapies, surgeries, and recovery bouts in wheelchairs. In an effort to somehow shield their son from ridicule, however, his parents kept his cerebral palsy diagnosis a secret throughout his childhood, calling his chronic limp a nagging case of “tight tendons.” In a zesty, forthright series of humorous, heartfelt, and often wincingly oddball anecdotes, Marshall shares how his hypochondriacal family “leaned into” all of “life’s

curveballs.” Brotherly boyhood shenanigans involving a back massager introduced him to masturbation, and at the same time, he nurtured a simmering fondness for other boys and struggled with HIV/AIDS education (“Did everyone know I was gay? Was this lesson for me? These other assholes weren’t going to get AIDS, but I was”). In the second half, Marshall chronicles his coming out as a disabled gay man, acknowledging life with CP, and navigating the nuances of first impressions, intimacy, and forgiveness for his parents. Marshall was 30 when he accidentally confirmed his CP diagnosis after uncovering one of his mother’s columns exposing “the Watergate tapes of my childhood, revealing both crime and cover-up.” The author, who confesses that “my cerebral palsy has made me see my life, and my leg, with renewed appreciation,” displays a natural storytelling ability, and he writes with a good dose of self-effacing humor, exposing the murky consequences of secrets, even when they’re kept with the best intentions.

A sparkling portrait of personal discovery and a celebration of family, forgiveness, and thriving with a disability.

DEVIL’S COIN My Battle To Take Down the Notorious OneCoin Cryptoqueen

McAdam, Jennifer

Morrow/HarperCollins (256 pp.)

$28.99 | Aug. 8, 2023

9780063219182

A personal account of a Scottish woman’s fight against a fraudulent organization. When she invested in the cryptocurrency OneCoin, McAdam sought to create a secure nest of savings for her family. Swayed by the enigmatic business tycoon Dr. Ruja Ignatova, the author didn’t realize she was giving her money to one of the world’s most sinister scams. OneCoin targeted “unbanked” and “underbanked” populations, and the vast majority of victims were unable to fight back when they lost everything. In this hybrid of memoir and vigilante origin story, McAdam clearly shows how she fell into OneCoin’s trap, but she dedicates most of the text to her journey of retribution. Spreading awareness about the scheme, she gave voice to the victims even as she received death threats from OneCoin. The author begins and ends the book with an overflow of emotion, while the middle concentrates on the scrupulous details of the con. Some readers may get lost in the wave of characters that weave through the labyrinth of Ignatova’s criminal network. McAdam’s work is an incredible story that requires focused attention. Meticulous readers will be at the edges of their seats, but others may feel the urge to skim. However, even without knowledge of cryptocurrency or OneCoin, it’s easy to empathize with the author. The prose is largely straightforward, reflecting the tone of a testimony with interviews and data. “Ruja had kidnapped my life and I was a changed person,” she writes, “still caring and concerned for others, but I was much more cynical, acutely aware of life’s dark side and finding it almost impossible to trust

the war came to us

others….These bastards made people lose their lives, get sick, become hopeless—and then took off with all they had without regret or even a glance at their victims, who were nothing but a commodity.”

A poignant dive into the rabbit hole of financial fraud and mysterious scammers.

PULLING THE CHARIOT OF THE SUN A Memoir of a Kidnapping

McCrae, Shane Scribner (272 pp.)

$27.00 | Aug. 1, 2023

9781668021743

A poet describes a traumatic upbringing after being kidnapped. McCrae, a Guggenheim fellow, Whiting and Lannan Literary Award winner, and professor of writing at Columbia, was 3 years old when he was kidnapped from his father by his maternal grandparents, who were White supremacists. It took him years to understand what had happened—to even associate the word kidnap with himself—and his new book traces his attempt to reconstruct meaning from a life that was rooted, early on, in lies and abuse. The author’s father was Black, his mother was White, and his grandparents carried a deeply ingrained racism. McCrae is an acclaimed poet, and the tools of that trade are evident here, as he emphasizes metaphors, symbols, and images over character. He writes of his grandfather: “I know my life continued after him, like a plant growing alone in a hole the size of a house. Here I am in my life, in the middle of it, but I have buried so many memories of my life with my grandfather that my life is like a plant grown in a house-sized hole, a void.” McCrae’s attention to word choice is studied and precise, and at times, he repeats certain words or phrases: “We left the Piggly Wiggly carrying something red. My grandfather left the Piggly Wiggly carrying something red. Or the packaging was mostly another color, but the product inside the packaging was red, and was represented by an attractively staged photograph, mostly red.” The first half of the text sings with a gorgeously wrought tension. In the second half, however, the tension starts to sag. In these chapters, McCrae is a young teenager learning to skateboard, but his prose doesn’t carry the nearly excruciating tautness of the early pages. Still, as a whole, the book is original and satisfying. Intricately wrought and unrelenting in its honesty.

QUIET STREET On American Privilege

McDonell, Nick

Pantheon (144 pp.)

$27.00 | Aug. 22, 2023

9780593316788

A bestselling novelist and journalist reflects on how the ruling class perpetuates its own privilege.

McDonell (b. 1984) grew up in a wealthy, well-connected Manhattan family. His mother is a writer, and his father has served as an editor at Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. Friendships with Upper East Side elites, attendance at prestigious schools like Buckley, Harvard, and Oxford, and travel to exotic locations were all part of his birthright within “The Fortress” of privilege. Where he differed from many of his peers was in how close he stood to the “ninety-nine percent.” Just one generation removed from the working- and middle-class families that made them, the author’s new-rich father and mother understood “how rare” their son’s upbringing was. McDonell only began to see how charmed that life really was after his parents connected him to a publisher who helped transform his writing aspirations into a lucrative career. The author readily admits that he, like all members of The Fortress, existed within a bubble that spared them from “the societal traumas of racism, poverty [and] state violence. We never even had to wait in line, really.” Set apart from the realities of those living difficult, just-scraping-by lives, they were also encouraged to believe in the meritocracy that masked “a profound entitlement” to the resources that supported a luxurious lifestyle—just as they were taught the (superficial) lessons of noblesse oblige that ultimately did little to change a global system designed to benefit them. Like Quiet Street, the stretch of East Harlem through which Buckley sporting event buses sometimes ran, wealth demanded moving in denial of race and class violence rather than actively speaking out against social injustice. As McDonell illuminates a rarified world of money, power, and connections, he also offers candidly sobering insight into the systemic cultural mechanisms designed to protect long-standing social inequalities.

An eloquent and compelling study.

THE WAR CAME TO US Life and Death in Ukraine

Miller, Christopher Bloomsbury Continuum (400 pp.)

$28.00 | July 18, 2023

9781399406857

A penetrating account of the reality of Putin’s war on Ukraine.

It is easy to think about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in terms of geopolitical maneuvering and armchair commentary. The value of

“A penetrating account of the reality of Putin’s war on Ukraine.”

this book is that it demonstrates the real toll in lives lost and broken. Miller is a journalist who writes for a number of publications, but he has a deep connection with Ukraine, going back to a stint as a teacher in the Peace Corps. He emphasizes that the invasion is merely the latest chapter in the long story of conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and he delves into the background through stories and interviews. He clearly has great affection for the country and its people, and he wonders why it has been plagued by brutal, corrupt governments. Putin, for his part, has argued that Ukraine does not have legitimacy as an independent state and is historically part of Russia. Miller dismisses this claim, like most of what Putin says about Ukraine, as ludicrous, although the presence of a Russian-leaning minority complicates the picture. Most Ukrainians were not surprised when Russian forces came streaming across the border, and the preparations they had made were crucial in their capacity to beat back the invaders. There were plenty of Nazi-level atrocities, but if the Russians had thought that the Ukrainians would be intimidated, they were utterly mistaken. The Ukrainian military was supplemented by legions of volunteers, and advanced weapons from the West leveled the technological battlefield. Traveling around and speaking with people, Miller often finds it hard to maintain journalistic detachment, but his compassion and honesty are appreciated. He avoids a simplistic conclusion, but it looks as if the war has become a slogging match of attrition. Eventually, the Ukrainians will probably expel the Russians, but the final cost will be enormous.

With powerful stories and insightful background, Miller provides a human dimension to a bloody conflict.

OWNER OF A LONELY HEART A Memoir

Nguyen, Beth Scribner (256 pp.)

$27.00 | July 4, 2023

9781982196349

A quietly moving memoir that grapples with what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a refugee, an American.

Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, was 8 months old when her father spirited most of her family out of Saigon the day before the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975. Her mother, however, was left behind, and much of the book probes her mother’s absence and reappearance. The title of the first chapter, “Twenty-Four Hours,” refers to the total time Nguyen spent with her mother “over the course of my life.” Each meeting was fleeting, and despite her attempts to connect, they remained strangers. “Our histories had separated long ago and had never truly met again,” she writes. Once, instead of meeting Nguyen and her 1-year-old grandson for the first time, she visited the local casino. Surprisingly, the author wasn’t angry. After all, when they left Saigon, “family meant my dad, uncles, grandmother, sister, and me.” Over the course of the text, Nguyen’s autobiography becomes a meditation on motherhood and

memory. The author considers her other maternal figures: her grandmother Noi; her stepmother, her “real” mom; and White mothers such as her high school boyfriend’s mom. Nguyen also wonders how her two young sons will remember her—“My relationship with my children is also my relationship with time… with the mothers I have known, with the mother I have never known,” she writes, “It is a catch in the throat. It is the edge of tears”—and she explores her identity as a refugee navigating an America that saw her as an outsider. One chapter focuses on her name, which she changed from Bich (a kind of jade) to Beth. “As Bich, I am a foreigner who makes people a little uncomfortable,” she writes. “As Beth, I am never complimented on my English.” A ruminative, unadorned, lyrical look at origins, family, and belonging.

THE UNIVERSE IN A BOX Simulations and the Quest To Code the Cosmos

Pontzen, Andrew Riverhead (272 pp.)

$29.00 | June 13, 2023

9780593330487

A cosmologist explains how ultramodern computer simulations are advancing scientists’ ability to explore the universe in unprecedented detail.

From forecasting the weather to predicting the spread of infectious disease, computer simulations are among the most powerful tools used by modern researchers. In this compelling book, Pontzen, a professor of cosmology at the University College London, delves into how simulation technology has advanced in recent decades, providing a wealth of new insights into one of the biggest questions in cosmology: how a “coherent, organized” universe—and one that supports, and is even contingent upon, the emergence of life—emerged. In elegant language that avoids technical jargon, the author lays bare the challenges and triumphs of computer modeling, explaining that even though supercomputers have an accelerating ability to crunch big data, there is an art to interpreting the results and detecting meaningful patterns. Taking simulations at face value, such as with certain financial modeling programs in the early 2000s, can have disastrous real-world effects. Yet simulations allow physicists to model the entire universe on both a macro and micro scale, yielding vital new information about phenomena including dark matter and energy, black holes, and even the formation of the universe. Indeed, one of the most enticing aspects of simulation, writes Pontzen, is the very humanness of collaborative creation and interpretation of code. “The most exciting results from simulations are not the virtual worlds they generate,” he writes, “which are ever only a poor shadow of reality….The exhilaration lies in the human domain, where simulations express and explore relationships between different scientific ideas.” This book is a testament to the amazing potential of simulations to reveal new truths about the world around us and our place within it.

this must be the place

An enthralling analysis of simulation, a formidable technology that may usher in a new era of cosmology.

DARK DAYS

Fugitive Essays

Reeves, Roger Graywolf (232 pp.)

$26.00 | Aug. 1, 2023

9781644452417

The acclaimed poet plunges into prose with dense literary and cultural criticism accented by personal reflection.

In his nonfiction debut, Reeves, the Whiting Award–winning author of the poetry collections King Me and Best Barbarian, rigorously analyzes works by Black cultural paragons, from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison to Outkast and Michael K. Williams. The author balances this commentary with his own experiences as a Black man in America, including his childhood in the Pentecostal Church and conversations with his young daughter following the killing of George Floyd. “I gropingly understood that her ability to see into people’s questions, to find the question below the question was not only a gift of discernment,” he writes, “but necessary in the struggle for Black folks’ freedom in the United States—seeing what was obscuring freedom and its articulation and getting underneath it, unshackling freedom from fear.” Each essay probes this concept of “underneath,” and each paragraph is packed both emotionally and intellectually, requiring close, conscientious reading to fully grasp the author’s examination of the abundance of irony and contradiction in Black experience. Reeves’ call to resist the salacious and decenter the self is stringent, and nothing is immune from his piercing pen—not even such heralded projects as Hamilton or The 1619 Project. Reeves acknowledges where his critiques may meet opposition, particularly in this “loquacious” age, but he insists on a more honest understanding of history, the complications and complicities on which protests are built, and the method by which tragedy and death become the property of the public imagination. The author’s lyrical prose reflects frenzy and desperation, imbuing a new literary canon with urgency and relevance that is both personal and political. For Reeves, “feeling for the future is a matter of art.” With this text, he inclines toward his ideal of the ecstatic, defiantly daring to build the sort of life—intellectual and free—so easily denied to Black Americans.

A cerebral, ruminative essay collection brimming with insight and vision.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City

Rifkin, Jesse

Hanover Square Press (320 pp.)

$32.99 | July 11, 2023

9781335449320

A lively history of New York City’s many musical scenes and their settings. Some observers say that New York is dead, merely the playground of the idle rich and tourists. Nonsense, replies cultural tour guide Rifkin. It’s just that “many people feel strongly that New York’s final golden era occurred when they personally just so happened to be in their twenties, and that the city’s decline roughly coincided with them entering their mid or late thirties,” when they stopped club hopping and following bands. Rifkin covers several golden eras from the 1950s to the present. Many people and places are gone: Tom Verlaine and Joey Ramone are dead; ditto the legendary club CBGB and almost all the old Village folk clubs and No Wave hangouts. Only Yoko Ono could afford to buy one of the places where she used to do her version of jazz before she met John Lennon. The Mercer Arts Center, the former home of the New York Dolls, is now an NYU dorm, and Max’s Kansas City has housed “a succession of unspectacular delis.” But for every anti-folk, hip-hop, or hardcore locus that’s fallen to the wrecking ball, there are both remaining old places and, more important, new places with scenes that, Rifkin challenges, should not be discounted without going out every night “most nights of the week, every week, for at least a couple years”—at which point you’re qualified to complain. Drawing on oral histories by those who were around at places like the Mudd Club and Studio 54, who frequented gay discos in the 1970s and break dancing parks in the ’80s, and who made their own fun and noise, Rifkin turns in an essential chronicle of the city’s cultural history.

A pleasure—and an education—for every fan of popular music and its most important Gotham venues.

OUTRAGE MACHINE How Tech Amplifies Discontent and Disrupts Democracy—and What We Can Do About It

Rose-Stockwell, Tobias Legacy Lit/Hachette (256 pp.)

$29.00 | July 11, 2023

9780306923326

A study of how social media has become a driver of division and hatred. When the internet first appeared, many observers thought it would bring people together through the exchange of information, news, and opinions. While that is true, it has also become

“A pleasure and an education for every fan of popular music and its most important Gotham venues.”

a collection of dangerous echo chambers where minor disagreements quickly escalate into savage confrontations. Rose-Stockwell, a journalist specializing in technology issues, delves into how this happened. There are evolutionary reasons, he notes, for the human brain to focus on urgent, emotional signals, and a crucial aspect of civilization is that it tamps down instinctive responses in favor of moderation and tolerance. Social media aims at the primal parts of the psyche, including a desire to be part of a tribal in-group. The companies that run social media quickly realized that there was money to be made by promoting extremism on both sides of the political spectrum and, conversely, little profit in asking people to think rather than feel. Rose-Stockwell examines the key words, phrases, images, and ideas that are used to keep people glued to their screens, simmering with anger and fear. Eventually, the brain accepts outrage as the norm, and social ties contract to a small circle of the like-minded. The author suggests ways to reverse this pattern— e.g., think before you post, keep track of how much time you spend on social media, and seek to build relationships instead of shouting at strangers. These are solid ideas, but there is a sense of too little, too late. Like most addictions, the process of recovery begins with an acceptance that there is a problem, and it seems unlikely that the chronically outraged would do that. There is a way out of the anger trap, but you have to want to leave. Rose-Stockwell capably diagnoses the illness, but the remedy remains elusive.

Based on solid research, this is a disturbing examination of the destructive impact of social media.

THE QUICKENING Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

Rush, Elizabeth

Milkweed (416 pp.)

$26.00 | Aug. 15, 2023

9781571313966

An account of the first research voyage to the so-called Doomsday Glacier.

In 2019, Rush joined an international group of marine biologists, oceanographers, and geologists aboard a research vessel heading toward the calving edge of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. Because Thwaites sits partially below sea level, exposed to the Southern Ocean, it is vulnerable to warming seas and liable to contribute upward of 2 feet to sea-level rise. However, the rate of its disintegration is poorly understood. In this follow-up to Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, Rush shows us how data collection happens, capturing the intriguing details of climate science in the field. The scientists’ goal is to “gain a clearer understanding of Thwaites’s past and present to better predict the future,” and the author brings us along as they send their submersible under the ice, take sediment samples from the ocean floor, gather the bones of penguins, and face down uncertainty and stormy seas. The scientists are not the only heroes of Rush’s book, which emphasizes above all the collaborative and interdependent nature of such voyages, where so

much depends on support staff and crew. In addition to her own poetic voice (“the edges of Thwaites’s unfathomable fracturing, its hemorrhaging heart of milk”), the author incorporates the voices of everyone on the ship, highlighting women and racial and ethnic minorities, who have been overlooked in the canon of Antarctic literature. As Rush captures shipboard conversations about the planetary future evident in the data, she also weaves in what her fellow passengers are thinking about a quickening of another kind: Given everything we know about climate change, what are the ethical implications of having children? Considering all sides of the debate, Rush finds that “having children can be an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it.”

The fascinating inside story of climate science at the edge of Antarctica.

BURN IT DOWN Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

Ryan, Maureen Mariner Books (400 pp.)

$29.99 | June 6, 2023

9780063269279

An exposé of the entertainment industry and its patterns of abuse, hypocrisy, and staggering arrogance.

Hollywood likes to think of itself as a dream factory, but for many people who try to build a career in the industry, it can seem like the stuff of nightmares. Vanity Fair contributing editor Ryan has been writing about the film and TV industries for many years and has collected a huge number of stories about abuses. While the revelations about Harvey Weinstein shone a light into shadowy corners, the author argues that a propensity for abuse is effectively institutionalized, especially among producers and directors. One of the myths of Hollywood is that creativity and awful behavior are tied together, so the abuse of people with no power by those at the top is allowed, even expected. In fact, some of the worst abusers have shelves of awards and receive massive paychecks. Even post-Weinstein, anyone who dares to complain about abuse is risking their career or more. Women suffer much of the abuse, ranging from protracted harassment to rape. At the same time, minorities are cut out of opportunities or pushed into stereotypical roles. Ryan accepts that there has been improvement in the past few years, but the pace is glacial. For many abusers, there are still no consequences for their behavior, and therefore no reason to change it. Ryan devotes the final third of the book to possible options for reform. She notes that a portal for reporting abuse has been established, although it is too early to assess its effectiveness. The key to real improvement is a change of mindset. Industry companies must stop employing known abusers, take complaints seriously, and create an effective process to assist victims. Hopefully, the author’s suggestions will be implemented, but genuine change will be a long and painful haul.

Ryan has the experience and insight to explore Hollywood’s dark underbelly, and she finds plenty of monsters.

DEFECTORS

How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World

Scott, Erik R. Oxford Univ. (304 pp.)

$34.95 | July 21, 2023

9780197546871

A densely researched examination of the defector program constructed in the West as a response to Soviet restriction of movement during the Cold War.

The harboring of defectors from the Soviet Union in their “leap to freedom” was a tremendous coup for the West. However, as historian and Russian Review editor Scott shows in this multilayered academic study, it was also a delicate balancing act between the two Cold War powers. The right to seek asylum was affirmed in the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and refugee protections were later detailed in the 1951 Geneva Convention. Although originally designated as those who fled from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, political defectors came to encompass migrants from China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere in the socialist world. The backgrounds of the defectors were diverse—from artist to sailor to politician to embassy administrator—and their cases often uneasily straddled the “political and ideological fault lines of the Cold War.” In the U.S., the National Security Council created a defector program by the early 1950s, with the aim of selecting Soviet defectors who could be helpful in relaying intelligence information and whose stories of flight would aid the Cold War narrative of West versus East. However, not all defectors were welcome, nor did they have an easy time adjusting, and many even returned to the Soviet Union. Scott looks at many cases that were more complicated than that of Victor Kravchenko, “the Soviet official who fled while on assignment in Washington [and] published I Chose Freedom in 1946, just as the battle lines between the Cold War’s superpowers were being drawn.” Scott makes a strong argument that limiting border movement became an integral part of “globalization’s architecture” and that “defectors were both the catalysts for the delimiting of previously open spaces and the most visible representatives of the consequences of enclosure.”

A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey “from tyranny to liberty.”

CHINESE PRODIGAL A Memoir in Eight Arguments

Shih, David Atlantic Monthly (304 pp.)

$28.00 | Aug. 15, 2023

9780802158994

A Chinese American English professor reflects on how race has shaped his life.

When Shih was growing up, he never identified as Asian American, a racial moniker forged in the crucible of political struggle that felt illegible to young people like him, who couldn’t imagine a pan-Asian identity. “I grew up in the seventies and eighties,” he writes, “a time when the significance of Asian-ness was still being hashed out.” As he grew, though, experiences like the birth of his biracial son, his appointment to the English department of a predominantly White university, and the murder of a Black man, Akai Gurley, at the hands of an Asian American cop changed the way he viewed his place in America’s complex racial geography. It was an evolution his immigrant parents did not always share. “Back then,” he writes, “I couldn’t explain [to my parents] how our rights had been fought for by the Black Americans they didn’t know and not gifted to them by the white Americans they did.” Eventually, Shih came to understand himself as an Asian American who troubled the model-minority myth by losing an engineering scholarship and unexpectedly gaining an affirmative action–based fellowship to graduate school for English several years later. He also began to make sense of his parents who, he writes, ultimately supported his stereotype-defying decisions as well as his White wife and future in-laws, relationships he situates within the context of the Supreme Court decision allowing interracial marriage. Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart.

A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir.

THE WOUNDS THAT BIND US Shinn, Kelley

West Virginia Univ. Press (296 pp.)

$21.99 paper | June 1, 2023

9781952271861

A harrowing memoir about a mother who set out to visit former war zones in a Land Rover with her 3-year-old daughter. When she was 16, Shinn lost both her legs below the knee after an initially misdiagnosed bout of bacterial meningitis

“A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir.”

chinese prodigal

that left her with a large malpractice settlement from the hospital. Fitted with prostheses but missing the kind of running that had given structure to her high school life, she took up off-road driving. In her late 20s, in 2001, divorced and with a young child, she decided to spend some of her settlement on a trip with her daughter, Celie, to raise awareness of the impact of land mines. Her plan was to visit Bosnia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Vietnam, and El Salvador. After she had spent a year in England interning at a Land Rover training school, she and a friend drove her Land Rover through Bosnia, leaving Celie with the girl’s father. After that, she and Celie spend the rest of their time in a little town in Greece, where Shinn got pregnant. The narrative alternates between Shinn’s misadventures during the trip, some of which are bound to leave readers worrying about Celie’s welfare, and her memories of the past, when she was raised by an adoptive family she describes as abusive. While readers may disapprove of some of Shinn’s actions, she gives us plenty of memorable scenes and characters, including an overnight stay in a brothel, the friends she made and lost along the way, her run-ins with the law, and her near-death experiences while precariously driving the Land Rover. To the author’s credit, she doesn’t pretend to have accomplished more than she did, and she doesn’t sugarcoat her many mistakes. Readers may not want to follow in her footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion. A scruffy take on female adventure travel.

HOMICIDE

The Graphic Novel, Part One

Squarzoni, Philippe

First Second (320 pp.)

$29.99 | July 25, 2023

9781250624628

Graphic adaptation of the book that begat The Wire Journalist David Simon worked the police beat so assiduously in Baltimore that the chief eventually gave him a backstage pass to the homicide unit. In that role, Simon trailed homicide detectives as they worked their ways through mountains of paperwork and rivers of blood and gore. His 1991 book, Homicide, led to the TV series of the same name and underlay the HBO series The Wire, which he created—and which some critics argue is the best TV show ever. Squarzoni works faithfully in Simon’s noirish, jutting-jaw, exploding-brain milieu, following detectives whose hours alternate between tedium and terror. Set in the late 1980s, the book opens on a gallows-humor note, as one detective says to another, “He’s got a slow leak,” adding, for the benefit of the victim, “You’re gonna have to get a new head.” The mayhem doesn’t let up from there, while the period details reflect a police culture that was resolutely racist and sexist. When women were admitted onto the force, the resentful old boys called the newcomers “secretaries with guns,” and it’s telling that nearly every one of the detectives’ suspects, to say nothing of the victims, are people of color. Meanwhile, “the homicide unit remained a bastion of male law enforcement.”

Throughout, there’s a sullen nostalgia to the beat. As Squarzoni, speaking for his period subjects, notes, “A quarter century ago, a law officer could fire his weapon without worrying whether the entrance wound would be anterior or posterior.” Following Simon’s example, Squarzoni also offers a closely detailed account of the fine points of police politics (nobody appreciates a martinet), the brutalizing of the poor and especially the homeless, and the terrible things people do to one another.

Skillfully drawn and written, with a perfectly rendered cliffhanger to set the stage for the next volume.

GALLOP TOWARD THE SUN

Tecumseh

and William Henry

Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation

Stark, Peter Random House (416 pp.)

$28.99 | Aug. 29, 2023

9780593133613

Lively joint biography of two bitter enemies: William Henry Harrison and Shawnee chief Tecumseh.

Popular historian Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places, offers a kind of thought experiment at the outset: What might have happened if Tecumseh, the builder of a geographically extensive and ethnically diverse Indigenous confederacy, had been successful in keeping White settlers out of the Ohio River Valley and environs? After all, for a time, when he was a young war fighter, it looked as if the Native peoples might have been able to pull it off, having inflicted “the worst massacre the U.S. Army ever suffered at the hands of Native warriors” when they attacked an American column that George Washington sent to destroy Miami and Shawnee villages in northern Ohio. Harrison, a footloose medical school dropout, came to the area as a soldier on another expedition, and he and Tecumseh led parallel lives, the one trying to seize the Wabash River Valley and the other trying to keep the White invaders out. Stark effectively contrasts Tecumseh, a man of his word who preferred peace to war, and Harrison, who had ambitions that included the White House, fueled by “a voracious and bottomless appetite for acreage—in the tens of millions.” The author notes that historians consider his 1840 run “the first modern presidential campaign,” though Harrison held office for only a month before dying of typhoid. Stark’s prose is occasionally overwrought, especially when he’s enthusiastically building battlefield set pieces: “The gunners wanted permission to put their fuses to the touchholes unleashing sheets of flame and smoke, the muzzle roar, and a winging spray of death.” Still, his book provides a solid bookend to Peter Cozzens’ somewhat better Tecumseh and the Prophet, particularly in its account of Harrison’s many machinations.

Readers will likely come away with deeper admiration for Tecumseh—and disdain for his conniving foe.

EVERYBODY’S FAVORITE Tales From the World’s Worst Perfectionist

Stone, Lillian Dey Street/HarperCollins (224 pp.)

$27.99

| July 18, 2023

9780063241039

Personal essays mining the author’s struggles to improve and, ultimately, accept herself.

Stone, a freelance humor and finance writer, introduces her debut essay collection with a piece about who she was in 2004, “on the cusp of puberty, preparing to plunge into a lifetime of deep, sweaty self-hatred.” She named her prepubescent shame and anxiety Madison, described as “a phantom formed by everything I’d never be” whose message to the author was, “Everything about you is wrong and gross, and everyone can tell.” The author recounts making a list of her failings, such as “cavernous pores and…social ineptitude,” in order to work her way through them and remake herself. While this original list has since been lost, Stone’s inner critic is alive and well. “Madison’s 2004 demands were nothing compared to the round-the-clock hellscape that is the internet,” she writes. The following essay, “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked,” begins, “I was five the first time I felt weird about my boobs.” After cataloging a series of incidents involving what she calls “body shame,” the author shares her realization that obsessing over physical imperfections comes at the cost of forging connections. In a piece that recounts the effects of religion on her lifelong perfectionism, she notes, “Childhood Evangelicalism is packed with ready-made rituals designed to annihilate the obsessive-compulsive brain.” Regarding how she eventually abandoned religion: “I ditched the church, but I kept the fear.” A self-described “insufferable goody-twoshoes” by the time she started high school, the author admits that she has “no idea exactly who or why the people-pleasing took root.” The book closes with “Madison Forever,” in which she tells us that “Madison’s still here, representing the parts of myself I’d most like to ignore.” This stands in contrast to the rest of the largely surface-level text, in which Stone maintains a hyperfocus on these parts.

While Stone’s self-deprecating humor is occasionally endearing, the self-absorption and vapidity wear thin.

THE BIDEN MALAISE How America Bounces Back From Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years

Strassel, Kimberley

Twelve (288 pp.)

$30.00 | July 18, 2023

9781538756218

A conservative commentator lays into the current president with a familiar litany of complaints.

Strassel, author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, juxtaposes Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, linking the two on the undeniably problematic issues of inflation and energy as well as foreign policy. According to the author, it was all Carter’s fault that the mullahs held the embassy staff in Tehran for so long (never mind the Reagan team’s back-channel deal to delay their release until after the election), just as “Biden’s reckless withdrawal from Afghanistan embarrassed our allies, abandoned Afghanis, and made the U.S. look weak” (never mind that Trump’s team negotiated that retreat). Furthermore, Biden exaggerated in the midterms when he “crisscrossed the country recalling the January 6 riot and insisting ‘democracy’ was on the ballot.” Strassel excoriates the supposedly radical-left administration now in the White House, contrasting Biden with the more centrist Carter crowd and drubbing both by comparison with her apparent hero, Ronald Reagan, who “didn’t lead with cultural issues.” It’s a relief when Strassel eventually finishes wailing away on liberals and gets to work on her own team, allowing that the midterm election didn’t quite work out the way the GOP wanted because voters preferred Democrats to “disfavored Republicans [who] had something in common: strong ties to Trump.” The author spends much of the latter part of the book conjuring up notions of a big-tent Republicanism that eschews Proud Boys–like militancy, at least in public, and instead urges that “if politicians want to see a change in the culture, they could start by acting like grown-ups.” Perhaps, for starters, by not insisting that “many of Biden’s people… were picked because they checked an identity-politics box.”

If “Let’s go, Brandon” is your idea of elevated political discourse, then this is your book.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA Essays

Wainaina, Binyavanga

One World/Random House (368 pp.)

$27.00 | June 6, 2023

9780812989656

A generous collection of writing by the Kenyan journalist and essayist. Originally from Nakuru, of Kikuyu descent, Wainaina (1971-2019) spent his young adult years in South Africa, where he attended university as the country was on the verge of apartheid. In Cape Town, he worked as a food and travel writer. Back in Nairobi, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002 for his essay “Discovering Home”—“When I left, I was relieved that I had escaped the burdens and guilts of being in Kenya, of facing my roots, and repudiating them. Here I am, looking for them again”—and he founded the influential Kwani? (“So what?”) literary magazine. The author writes extensively about the changing nature of Kenya and the new elite who prefer to send their children to English schools as well as the pull of the old traditional ways. As a young gay writer, he was burdened by the responsibility to represent his young country and its many tribes: “I can’t be, nor do I want to be, Mr. AllPanAfrica when I write.” In the titular, satirical piece, which was published in Granta in 2005 and became widely reissued, he explores the many entrenched stereotypes about the African continent. “In your text,” he writes, “treat Africa as if it was one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, nine hundred million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.” His own provocative work, in contrast, aims to be as specific as possible. The book includes an introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

A lively selection of work that well represents the scope of this fine author.

THE SUPERMAJORITY How the Supreme Court Divided America

Waldman, Michael

Simon & Schuster (400 pp.)

$29.99 | June 6, 2023

9781668006061

Alarming exposé of the Supreme Court’s “hard right supermajority.”

Along with legislatures stripping minorities of civil and voting rights and gerrymandering safe districts, the Supreme Court, writes NYU School of Law scholar Waldman, is among the foremost “threats to American democracy.” While in office, Donald Trump installed three Supreme Court justices who have transformed

the moderate Roberts court into an extreme right-wing institution that, in just three days in June 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade, forbade federal agencies from addressing climate change, and “radically loosened curbs on guns, amid an epidemic of mass shootings.” These actions, Waldman fears, are just the beginning of a struggle over the meaning of the Constitution—a struggle fought, by his reckoning, three times before, most recently in rulings concerning civil rights after Brown v. Board of Education. The current court is focused on “originalism,” which involves trying to “discern exactly what the Founders were thinking.” However, Waldman urges, the Founders assumed that the Constitution would be frequently amended to reflect social change. One great reform came in the 19th century to extend the power of the Bill of Rights to state-level as well as federal actions. Today, with the sullenly taciturn Clarence Thomas and his election-denying spouse at the center of the court, stripping rights, Waldman charges, is the order of the day. In an institution with almost no ethical controls, “Thomas managed to run afoul of the few existing rules that govern conduct.” Waldman counsels a program to sidestep the Supreme Court not by packing it, as some have urged, but instead by strengthening lower courts (Justice John Roberts himself having called for 79 new federal judges), limit court tenure to 18 years instead of a lifetime appointment, and concentrate on building a progressive legislative branch.

A damning account of a Supreme Court gone wildly activist in shredding the Constitution.

LEAD LIKE A MARINE Run Towards a Challenge, Assemble Your Fireteam, and Win Your Next Battle

Warren, John & John Thompson

Harper Business (272 pp.)

$32.50 | July 11, 2023

9780063264373

A business-leadership manifesto full of gung-ho bluster along with a few useful pointers.

Mr. Grenade is not your friend: The old Army saying is true, but it’s an admonition that translates only metaphorically to civilian life. Marines (for there’s no ex-Marine, it’s said) Warren and Thompson try a few such metaphors, and they make for often awkward fits. The authors take some of their business pointers from their own experiences running a real estate finance firm (and now chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of cryptocurrency), peppering those pointers with sometimes-gruesome scenes from firefights and violent ambushes in Iraq. Mix up the two, and here’s what you get: “At the end of the day, we would kill fifty to one hundred insurgents without losing a single Marine. How did we do it? While we had some good fortune, the key factor was the leadership choices, discipline, and habits we’d developed over months and years.” For all the battlefront bravado, the authors offer some helpful advice. Just as Marines favor someone with the right mindset for combat and the

“A lively selection of work that well represents the scope of this fine author.”

how to write about africa

willingness to learn, they counsel, bosses shouldn’t worry overmuch about a high-ticket college degree or even a degree at all, and the authors’ urging would-be leaders to “do everything for a reason” is worth keeping in mind. Still, there’s a certain sameness to every business and self-help book by former Delta Force gunners, SEALs, snipers, and, yes, Marines. For all the talk of speaking bluntly, clarifying the mission, allowing decision-making to take place at the lowest echelons, and being last in line at the mess hall, this one doesn’t really stand out above pack.

A mix of Napoleon Hill and Napoleon Bonaparte—or Lee Ermey, anyway—that doesn’t quite mesh.

PARACHUTE WOMEN

Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones

Winder, Elizabeth

Hachette (320 pp.)

$29.00 | July 11, 2023

9781580059589

A vivid portrait of the women behind “the world’s first rock stars.”

The Rolling Stones have made an incredibly long career out of singing about women. Think of all the honky-tonk denizens, ingenues out of the West End, tent-show queens, and consorts of stars who inhabit their lyrics, and it becomes clear that objectifying and mythologizing women have been major parts of their stock in trade. Winder, a biographer of Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath, refreshingly turns the tables by writing about several women who were critical in various ways in shaping the Stones but whose contributions were “devoured, processed, spat out, and commodified by the relentlessly male music industry.” At the center of Winder’s narrative is the German Italian model and actor Anita Pallenberg, who, having formed a sort of androgynous duo with ill-fated band founder Brian Jones, turned him from a country lout into an Edwardian dandy, one of the first great evolutions of the Stones into style mavens. When Jones’ sad time was done, it was Keith Richards’ turn, and if anyone could out-Keith him, it was her—so much so that he had to leave her to break his heroin addiction. “Only a fool would call Anita Pallenberg a muse,” writes Winder. “She was a force of nature, and rapidly becoming the central axis of the Stones.” Meanwhile, Mick Jagger’s former lover Marianne Faithfull, who was quite capable of writing her own songs (“Sister Morphine”), fell under his…well, Winder uses thumb a couple of times too many, but the pun is apposite. Winder’s treatment is both deeply researched and endlessly dishy, especially when it comes to Jagger, who has become “a conservative Englishman,” emotionally unavailable, for whom social climber seems far too mild a term.

Gossipy, entertaining, and quite right in insisting on the central role of women in making an iconic band iconic.

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

SWEET VALLEY TWINS Teacher’s Pet

Andelfinger, Nicole

Illus. by Claudia Aguirre

Dev. by Francine Pascal

Colors by Sara Hagstrom

Random House Graphic (224 pp.)

$20.99 | $13.99 paper | $23.99 PLB

June 27, 2023

9780593376515

9780593376508 paper

9780593376522 PLB

Series: Sweet Valley Twins, 2

Twins Elizabeth and Jessica both covet the lead role in their ballet recital.

The blond, blue-eyed middle schoolers are accomplished dancers in Madame André’s ballet class. But Jessica believes that because of her rocky first day, depicted in Sweet Valley Twins: Best Friends (2022), the teacher overlooks her in favor of Elizabeth. When dancers are chosen for their recital performance of Coppélia, Elizabeth is selected for the lead, Swanilda. The dancers’ work of learning a position or a pirouette is nicely pictured in several scenes. The various skill levels among dancers are convincingly depicted, and a variety of skin colors and hair textures denote a racially diverse group both at ballet and in school. Elizabeth’s single cowlick distinguishes her from Jessica, whose hair is always smoothly styled. Elizabeth’s role as the more thoughtful and kinder of the pair is confirmed here, while Jessica’s ongoing interest in hanging out with the Unicorn club and gossiping about boys will entertain middle-grade readers. Eventually Elizabeth realizes, when Jessica points it out, that Madame André really has not fully seen Jessica’s skills, and she engineers a plan to save the day when disaster strikes. The middle-class suburb, where the girls can ride their bikes or walk to most places, feels safe and, as Elizabeth says, “It’s California—every day is beach weather.”

Guaranteed to appeal to fans, who will soon be asking when the next one will be out. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

|

are you there, judy? puberty books

for a new generation

It’s been years since I read a Judy Blume novel, but her characters still seem to live inside my head. I’m not alone in that, as I realized after watching Judy Blume Forever, an Amazon Prime documentary that chronicles this groundbreaking author’s life, work, and legacy. Her novels were many children’s primary source of information on everything from bras and breasts to family strife and friendship woes. Published in 1970, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. was one of the few children’s books of its era to speak frankly on menstruation, while Deenie (1973) broke barriers by discussing female masturbation. Although Blume encountered opposition from censors who deemed her books inappropriate—she recalls a day when she received several hundred death threats—she refused to back down; being honest with her readers was paramount.

minders that no matter how adrift we may feel, we’re never alone.

Interviews with young people illustrate that Blume’s books still resonate, though details like rotary phones or mothers who don’t work outside the home feel dated today. And, as interviews with authors Alex Gino, Jacqueline Woodson, and Mary H.K. Choi demonstrate, Blume has passed on the torch to a new generation of writers.

The slew of adoring fan letters featured in the film is a testament to her empathy, sensitivity, and awareness of how children see the world. Blume wrote back to many of her readers, forging enduring bonds with some. She attended the college graduation of Lorrie Kim, with whom she had corresponded for years. Blume was the first person in whom Karen Chilstrom confided her childhood sexual abuse. Judy Blume Forever gets to the heart of why children’s literature matters: These aren’t merely stories; they’re lifelines, re-

When it comes to the subjects of puberty and changing bodies, I’m happy to note that many middlegrade authors have taken up Blume’s mantle; due in no small part to her efforts, discussing menstruation is no longer as taboo as it once was. I especially love Calling the Moon: 16 Period Stories From BIPOC Authors (Candlewick, March 28), edited by Aida Salazar and Yamile Saied Méndez. Salazar says in an editor’s note that her 2019 book, The Moon Within, was the first middle-grade novel since Margaret to focus on menstruation, and it was the first by an author of color to do so—a fact that galvanized her to create this anthology. One of my favorite stories is Guadalupe García McCall’s “Ofrendas,” in which a Latine teen whose mother has just died wonders how she’ll be able to afford to buy pads and whether to ask her father for help. McCall deftly explores how menstruation and socioeconomic status often intersect—an issue I never saw in Blume’s books, which reflected the author’s suburban middle-class upbringing. Though Margaret fretted about being the last in her group of friends to start her period, she never had to worry about affording pads (or, if you read the original version, the dreaded sanitary belt).

Similarly, Joy McCullough’s Code Red (Atheneum, June 13) addresses period inequality. Eden, a wealthy White teen whose mother founded a company that creates menstrual products, becomes keenly aware of her own privilege after befriending Maribel, a Latine girl whose mother manages a food pantry, and Mari-

Mahnaz Dar

Scene from Judy Blume Forever

bel’s socially conscious friends. McCullough’s absorbing narrative deftly conveys Eden’s awakening as she seeks a way to make period products available to all who need them.

In the documentary, Blume recalls putting down an encyclopedia with disgust after reading an entry on sex that told her nothing she wanted to know. She would have devoured Allison K. Rodgers’ We Need To Talk About Vaginas: An Important Book About Vulvas, Periods, Puberty, and Sex!

(Neon Squid, Macmillan, Feb. 28), illustrated by Annika Le Large. An OB/GYN, Rodgers matter-of-factly and reassuringly discusses everything from the color of menstrual blood to body hair to intercourse.

More than 50 years after Margaret, we’ve come a long way. But I don’t think we’d be here, opening the door for middle graders to have even richer, more nuanced conversations around menstruation and bodies, if not for Blume. Her stories may be rooted in a particular time and place, yet somehow they transcend setting. As author Jason Reynolds says in the film, “I don’t think that Judy Blume wrote her books to be timeless. I think she wrote her books to be timely. And they were so timely that they became timeless.”

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.

THE TAKEOUT

Badua, Tracy

Clarion/HarperCollins (240 pp.)

$18.99 | May 9, 2023

9780358671732

A Filipino American girl endeavors to save her family’s livelihood with a little bit of magic.

Twelve-year-old Mila Pascual and her dad help run the Banana Leaf, a Filipino Indian fusion food truck they own with their friends Mr. Ram and his nephew, Ajay, in Coral Beach, California. Following their recent move from suburban Los Angeles, Mila’s adjusting to being “the only chubby, short-blackhaired, dark-brown-skinned Asian girl in a sea of beach mansion Barbies.” Her sister, Catalina, is attending college in LA, and her mom is caring for Mila’s grandfather in the Philippines. Mila loves inventing new recipes but feels less certain of her abilities with the albularyo, or folk healer, skills passed down through her mother’s line. Trouble comes when TV celebrity chefs Chip and Chaz, Mila’s idols, open their own Filipino and Indian restaurant in town—with menu items exactly matching the Banana Leaf’s. Mila and Ajay’s suspicions of sabotage are confirmed by a sudden health department inspection of the food truck following an anonymous complaint. The friends’ sleuthing also reveals the celebrities’ past shady behavior. Mila’s albularyo potions might help save the day, if only she can believe enough in the magic she creates to make it work. Badua sensitively explores Mila’s struggles with cultural identity and a sense of belonging in relation to both family and peers, particularly as her experiences with marginalization diverge from Catalina’s. The ending neatly ties up all the loose ends.

A magical and delicious read that’s filled with love. (Fiction. 9-12)

WHAT A MAP CAN DO

Balkan, Gabrielle

Illus. by Alberto Lot

Rise x Penguin Workshop (48 pp.)

$18.99 | July 25, 2023

9780593519981

So many places to go. How to explore them? With maps!

A cheery cartoon raccoon opens the world—i.e., a figurative foldout map—to young explorers and explains the wonderful ways maps help people navigate. In a chatty, conversational voice, the narrator explains how maps show a bird’s-eye view of a place, allow people to get where they want to go, use symbols (e.g., a compass rose, map keys), and much more. The raccoon also discusses various kinds of maps, including city and road maps, museum maps, star maps, weather maps, even maps of the inside of the body. Grown-ups, take note of the plethora of foundational skills kids can hone here, such as visual literacy, counting, color recognition, directionality, spatial concepts, and size relationships, not to mention the fun, ease, and sense

where the water takes us

of adventure they’ll experience in learning to confidently find their way about. The raccoon guide asks children frequent questions throughout, so they get ample seek-and-find opportunities while negotiating varied, easy-to-follow maps and learning from this stimulating, fact-filled book. Colorful, lively artwork does much to make the book itself a map of sorts, as spreads teach and guide youngsters in navigating and interpreting the elements of simple maps step by step. A map index concludes the volume. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A standout picture book that both entertains and teaches. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

WHERE THE WATER TAKES US

Barillaro, Alan Candlewick (208 pp.)

$18.99 | July 4, 2023

9781536224542

In former Pixar animator Barillaro’s debut novel, a girl must spend the summer at her grandparents’ Canadian island house when her mother’s pregnancy turns risky.

Although Ava Amato, 11, loves the island, this time she’s preoccupied with worries. Are the twins, in utero, more important than her mother’s life? When Ava witnesses a woodpecker’s death, she believes she is cursed, especially after Nonna tells her that a bird in the house is said to foretell death. Ava makes a deal with the dead bird: Her mother must survive even if the twins don’t. In an effort to stave off the curse, she rescues two robin eggs she finds and raises the babies, with her grandmother’s help. She eventually opens up about the deal to Cody MacDonald, an 11-year-old boy visiting the lake with his dad after his parents’ recent divorce. Though initially she finds him brash, a friendship slowly sparks, and when a perilous situation arises during a big storm, Ava must summon her swimming skills and courage to save the day. Warm intergenerational relationships, strongly drawn characters, lyrical descriptions of nature, and nuanced depictions of Ava’s worries create an engrossing read that explores the boundary between childhood and adolescence. Ava is of Italian and Korean heritage; Cody presents White. Barillaro’s occasional, delicate watercolors and vignettes in the margins accompany this quietly powerful story.

A lyrical and sensitively rendered coming-of-age tale. (Fiction. 10-12)

THE ART OF REWILDING The Return of Yellowstone’s Wolves

Belhadj, Nadja

Illus. by Marc Majewski

Trans. by Nick Frost & Catherine Ostiguy

Milky Way (44 pp.)

$19.99 | May 23, 2023

9781990252198

An accordion-folded introduction to rewilding projects in Yellowstone and elsewhere.

The pages unfold to reveal a single long illustration by Majewski that tracks the recovery of a riverine habitat that starts out stripped by elk but gradually regains both lush greenery and diverse animal life after wolves are reintroduced to prey on them. On the flip side, images of individual wild creatures illustrate brief before-and-after accounts of how select animal populations have been encouraged to recover—mostly in Yellowstone but also in the Alps, where the bearded vulture has made a return; the importance of bison and wild bees to ecosystems is also discussed. The flowing, roughly brushed, painterly art features burgeoning numbers of stylized but recognizable flora and fauna filling the vivid front landscape and, on the back, illustrating a diagrammatic “trophic cascade” or posing alertly in isolation. The impact of the images is only fitfully echoed in the narrative, though, which was originally published in French and suffers from not only what are probably translation issues (in one section elk and deer are used interchangeably, and two consecutive sentences make the same observation), but also fuzzy logic in claiming that the reintroduction of brown bears to the Pyrenees fosters ecotourism but “doesn’t really have an impact on its ecosystem.” (How that even counts as “rewilding” isn’t addressed.) (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Visually effective; textually lacking. (Informational picture book. 7-9)

WITCH & WOMBAT

Belote, Ashley

Random House (40 pp.)

$18.99 | $21.99 PLB | July 4, 2023

9780593569634

9780593569641 PLB

A bespectacled young witch longs for a cat but ends up with something unexpected.

Though Wilma is excited for her first feline pet, when she goes to the Beast Buddies Pet Shop there are no more cats; instead, she is offered a wombat. She begrudgingly takes the dumpy, snoozy chum but worries: “Everyone else brings cats to school. Cats have been friends to witches for centuries. What a cat-tastrophe!” Unfortunately, Wombat is afraid of heights, which makes mastering Broom-Flying Basics a challenge; can’t perch on the edge of a cauldron during Brewing Potions

“A lyrical and sensitively rendered coming-of-age tale.”

for Beginners; and doesn’t stay in the required spell boundary zone, causing a spell to go disastrously wrong. Wilma is so frustrated she wishes Wombat would disappear. And Wombat does just that—by burrowing deep into the ground. Sprinkled with wombat facts (Wilma’s remembering that wombat scat is cube-shaped helps her follow a trail of poop to find her pal), this is a winning testament to true friendship. Wilma sets aside her assumptions of what a witch’s companion should look like and realizes just how wonderful Wombat truly is. This is a notso-spooky tale perfect for Halloween and beyond. Wilma has bluish-black hair and pale skin among a diverse class. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A spellbinding tale that encourages readers to accept—and celebrate—what makes us different. (Picture book. 4-7)

STRANDED! A Mostly True Story From Iceland

Benediktsson, Ævar Þór

Illus. by Anne

Wilson

Barefoot Books (32 pp.)

$17.99 | Aug. 8, 2023

9781646869916

Two amateur explorers become stranded on a newly formed volcanic island when the fishing boat that drops them off fails to come back.

“Iceland,” the author writes, “is a small and beautiful island in the middle of nowhere” with plenty of volcanoes—including one dubbed Surtsey, newly emerged from the sea, that his grandfather and a friend one day impulsively think would be a noteworthy place to visit and photograph. And so it turns out to be despite the ground’s boot-melting heat and a total lack of food or fresh water, which become issues when their return ride fails to show up. Still, when the night turns cold, sleeping next to a volcano is a perfect idea for keeping warm, right? (“It really isn’t.”) A day and a night later, the weary explorers reach the top of a hill…and find a friendly, dark-skinned man from America waiting with a helicopter to take them back to the mainland! How’s that for wishes come true? Using a storyteller’s tricks as well as tone, Benediktsson swears there’s only one thing in his yarn that isn’t true…and that, he waits to the end to reveal, was the color of his forbear’s melty footwear. Wilson sets the hapless, light-skinned duo in a forbiddingly rocky landscape depicted in lurid hues and lines that wriggle and flow in suggestively molten ways, where lava dances “like some fire red northern lights.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Definitely a case of fools rushing in, made all the funnier by its scary bits. (maps; information on Iceland, Surtsey, and gods of Norse mythology; author’s and illustrator’s notes) (Informational picture book. 6-10)

THE PUMPERNICKELDAFFODIL

Bernstein, Galia Abrams (40 pp.)

$18.99 | June 20, 2023

9781419759451

The travails of the privileged turn into a down-to-earth, feel-good story.

Wodehouse Chili Pepper Pumpernickel the Third—a big name for a little poodle—has a lot to live up to, coming from a long line of best-in-show winners. His parents tell him that to get a human and win ribbons, he must “sit up straight and look bored.” When 8-year-old Isadora Alexandra Ball comes looking for a show dog, however, WCPPIII is asleep. When he wakes up, he yawns (a no-no), then has to flap his ear right-side-out. Isadora is sold. To her stylish mom, he’s “a bit scrawny” and “scruffy,” but his family name wows her. Izzy calls him Chili. Mom preps them both for an upcoming dog show; Dad, a dog groomer, dictates a pre-show bath and haircut for both. Izzy is dressed as a mini-Mom, while Chili is “fluffy,” “poofy,” and “HALF NAKED!” At the show, the duo gamely turn missteps to comedy. They’re not abashed by losing the ribbon, and though Izzy’s mom briefly wonders about the break in tradition, both sets of parents are entirely supportive. Bernstein here does for dogs what she did for felines in I Am a Cat (2018). As in that book, backgrounds are mostly white, but the style is, suitably, fluffier, with baroque squiggles on trophy cups, picture frames, and poodle cuts. Izzy and her parents are light-skinned; dog-show attendees are diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An endearing tale of not being daunted by family expectations. (Picture book. 5-9)

DEAR ROSIE

Boehman, Meghan & Rachael Briner with Tom Pickwood

Illus. by Meghan Boehman & Rachael Briner

Colors by Tom Pickwood

Knopf (208 pp.)

$20.99 | $13.99 paper | July 11, 2023

9780593571866

9780593571859 paper

A group of anthropomorphized animals cope with their BFF’s death.

The new school year offers a fresh start after a tragic summer accident. But Millie, a deer, still misses her friend Rosie, a cat. At school, Millie meets up with the rest of her squad to share cupcakes in honor of Rosie’s birthday (Rosie would have been 13). While the girls still have each other, things just don’t feel the same in a quartet. Some days are harder than others, like when someone tries to sit in Rosie’s old chair in art class. Fate offers a glimmer of hope: Millie finds a strange book with Rosie’s signature symbol at her family’s laundromat. The book sets the girls on a quest to get closer to Rosie, who loved to add

“a little mystery to the world.” Could this be what stops the gang from falling apart altogether? Co-creators Boehman and Briner show off their backgrounds in animation with expressive, full-color sequences that convey the depth of loss, occasionally without words. The setting is fully realized, based on their hometown of Frederick, Maryland. Though the story is fiction, the authors’ note reveals further real-life inspiration. All characters are animals, which may add a bit of emotional distance between readers and the story. One of the girls has parents who are two different species.

A moving tale of loss and healing. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

YOU CAN’T BE A PTERODACTYL!

Breakwell, James

Illus. by Sophie Corrigan

Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.)

$18.99 | July 25, 2023

9780593110652

It is possible to be whatever you want.

When his teacher tells students they can be anything they want, Tommy announces his ambition: to be a pterodactyl. Unsurprisingly, classmates jeer. Tommy’s sure a pterodactyl’s diet of live fish would be an improvement over cafeteria fare; living in a cave in a cliff overlooking the sea where no one could visit him sounds ideal; and, as he explains to the bus driver, people would pay him, as a pterodactyl, not to pick them up and fly them places. Kids on the bus tease him mercilessly. When Tommy arrives home, his dad listens to him carefully and suggests that Tommy “live like a pterodactyl, even if on the outside you still look like Tommy.” Dad accepts and understands his son’s aspirations, and the two pretend to be pterodactyls all afternoon. The result: Because of his strongly held, actually logical beliefs and dad’s affirmation, Tommy does grow up to be a pterodactyl—sort of; kids will cheer the satisfying, makes-perfect-sense ending. This empowering story is all about having seemingly unattainable goals and being lucky enough to have supporters willing to help achieve them. Tommy’s a sweet, realistic, albeit dreamy, character; his dad, a model, caring parent. The colorful, somewhat stylized illustrations are lively and humorous. Tommy and his dad are light-skinned. Classmates and school personnel are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Affirmation that you can have dreams the size of a prehistoric flying reptile. (Picture book. 5-8)

THE VERY UNFORTUNATE WISH OF MELONY YOSHIMURA

Brown, Waka T.

Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (272 pp.)

$19.01 | July 18, 2023

9780063230767

A shape-shifting demon takes over an Oregon girl’s life in this chilling tale.

Twelve-year-old Melony is sure life would be better if her strict, overprotective parents gave her the same freedoms as other kids, not to mention cool clothes and a new phone, and if her real name, Uriko, wasn’t fodder for bullies. Melony’s parents have lived in the U.S. for years, and she hates the way they constantly talk about Japan and how things were different there. So Melony fights back by being the opposite of the “good girl” she’s supposed to be—and it feels amazing! Unknowingly, this opens the door for an Amanjaku, a demon who feeds on a person’s most base desires. At first, Melony is drawn in by its playful nature. But as time goes on, its horrifying true nature begins to sour everything good, including Melony herself. Can she realize the error of her ways and save her family and friends before it’s too late? Based on the Japanese folktale “Urikohime to Amanjaku,” or “The Melon Princess and the Amanjaku,” this modern Japanese American version is woven throughout with intergenerational, as well as cultural, tension and specificity. This well-paced story uses foreshadowing to create suspense and build anticipation while exploring themes of independence and autonomy so important to tween development. Blurring the lines of reality, it relies on psychological elements, rather than leaning on blood and gore, before ultimately leading to a safe, comforting homecoming.

A satisfyingly scary story about pushing boundaries. (Fiction. 9-12)

ROCKET SAYS SPEAK UP!

Bryon, Nathan

Illus. by Dapo Adeola

Random House (32 pp.)

$18.99 | July 18, 2023

9780593431269

Series: Rocket Says...

After previous outings that saw Rocket learning about space and addressing ocean pollution, our hero speaks up for libraries.

Rocket and her family are saddened to learn that their local library will be closing. But Rocket, who recently read a book about Rosa Parks, is inspired to stage a peaceful protest. The whole community shows up wearing astronaut suits—a nod to Rocket Says Look Up! (2019). Though the protest gets press coverage, the library will still close. But just as Rocket starts to lose hope, letters from supporters start pouring in. The town’s mayor even pays her a visit and invites Rocket’s family to a celebration,

“A quick and appealing read focusing on second chances.”

the showdown

where she informs everyone that not only is the library not closing, but that many people, inspired by the protest, sent money— enough to refurbish the building and buy new books. Rocket is an admirable protagonist whose can-do attitude will spur readers to action and whose passion for libraries is infectious as she spouts off facts: “DID YOU KNOW…there are libraries in Portugal with families of bats that eat book-damaging bugs?” Given the issues facing libraries today—from budget issues to censorship—a story that champions them is timely and important. Adeola’s cheery illustrations match the energetic text beat for beat. Rocket and her family present Black, while their community is a diverse one. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An upbeat story that empowers young readers to fight for libraries. (more information on speaking up, recommended reading) (Picture book. 4-8)

THE SHOWDOWN

Burkhart, Jessica Aladdin (272 pp.)

$18.99 | July 25, 2023

9781665912938

Series: Saddlehill Academy, 2

Young competitive rider Abby faces social media bullying from an equestrian rival as she grapples with the consequences of a mistake that haunts her.

In this sequel to Sweet & Bitter Rivals (2023), Abby continues to struggle with her new stepfamily, especially when stepsister Emery doesn’t stand up for her after classmate Nina distributes a video showing Abby in a negative light. When her dad can’t make it to the competition she’s been diligently preparing for because of work, she is devastated, believing his career has yet again taken priority over her. Seeing Emery’s mom, who is Abby’s stepmom, is painful, as Abby laments the absence of her own mother from her life. Her

pa, me, and our sidewalk pantry

spirits brighten when she starts crushing on Mila, the cute new girl auditioning for the team. Meanwhile, the conflict with archnemesis Nina continues to intensify, leading to an argument at the meet that goes viral on TikTok and may have a destructive effect on the whole team. The book ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, setting readers up for the next volume. Abby and Mila are White; the previous book established that Abby’s two best friends are Black and Korean. Abby’s father ultimately plays a supportive role in her journey. Though slow paced at times, this story holds appeal as it deftly explores middle school family and friendship challenges.

A quick and appealing read focusing on second chances. (Fiction. 9-13)

THE BIG FLUSH

Buxbaum, Julie

Illus. by Lavanya Naidu

Delacorte (256 pp.)

$14.99 | $17.99 PLB | July 25, 2023

9780593429501

9780593429518 PLB

Series: The Area 51 Files, 2

A projectile toilet spells danger—and mess—for Area 51 and its residents.

Sky Patel-Baum has had a lot of firsts since moving from boring California to Area 51. The latest first: Her alien bestie’s long-lost (read: assumed dead) parents come to visit via UFO with a surprise little brother in tow. Complicated family dynamics abound, and the interstellar visitors warn that the Arthogus (an exiled alien species) are in cahoots with someone on the base to exact their revenge. Their method of destruction: launching a poop-filled space toilet at Area 51. The odds of survival? 13.875%. But who could the double agent be? Sky and friends team up once again to get to the bottom of the latest mystery—and flush the intruder out. Buxbaum’s second series entry one-ups its predecessor in ridiculousness, including a bounty of fart puns. The first-person narration allows Sky’s infectious personality to shine. Well-placed clues and red herrings help keep the mystery fresh while expanding the setting. The pseudo “Scooby-Doo gang” welcomes a new member in talented hacker Gertie, an astronaut’s daughter. Naidu’s blackand-white cartoon illustrations effectively punctuate jokes and offer occasional helpful asides. Characters are drawn in a range of skin tones; Gertie reads Black. Another cliffhanger ending makes a key revelation in addition to hinting at the next installment.

Out-of-this-world potty humor with heart among the toots. (recipes) (Mystery. 8-12)

LIGHT COMES TO SHADOW MOUNTAIN

Buzzeo, Toni

Holiday House (272 pp.)

$17.99 | July 11, 2023

9780823453849

A young girl in a remote Appalachian community confronts resistance and dreams of the possibilities of electricity.

It’s 1937, and few rural Americans have access to electricity—in stark contrast to those in urban areas. So when 11-year-old Cora reads that it could be coming to her southeastern Kentucky home, an area settled by Scotch Irish immigrants, she sees nothing but the wonderful opportunities that this would mean: light to study by in the evenings, better schooling, and machines to help with chores. If enough people join the rural electric cooperative, electricity will come to Shadow Mountain. Not everyone shares Cora’s enthusiasm, though, especially her herbalist mother, who fears the erecting of electric poles will disrupt the flora and fauna and that this new technology will change the way of life she values. Cora, a determined and creative problem solver, works to raise money for her one-room schoolhouse to join the cooperative and to change the minds of those most resistant, and after a moment of considerable bravery during which electricity plays a role in a lifesaving event, her mother comes around. The book takes a sensitive approach that tempers the promise of progress with an appreciation of the traditions and ways of living that will be altered. Historical details about the Frontier Nursing Service and the Pack Horse Library Project add layers to the well-developed setting.

Shines a nuanced light on rarely explored historical events. (map, author’s note, notes and resources) (Historical fiction. 9-12)

PA, ME, AND OUR SIDEWALK PANTRY

Buzzeo, Toni

Illus. by Zara González Hoang

Abrams (40 pp.)

$17.99 | July 11, 2023

9781419749377

In Buzzeo’s latest, a grandfather and grandchild establish a sidewalk pantry for their neighborhood.

Jelly Bean and Pa, who present Black, have a sidewalk library full of free books for their community. However, Jelly Bean declares, “We need food as much as we need books”—especially with Jelly Bean’s mom out of work. Pa agrees and asks, “So, what do you propose?” In Pa’s workshop, one of Jelly Bean’s favorite places, they build a wooden cabinet using recycled wood and set the new pantry next to the library. The new sign, painted by Jelly Bean, tells passersby to “read all you want” and “take all you need.” Later, after some of the food the two of them place inside the pantry is taken, Jelly Bean discovers a handwritten

“A charming, intergenerational story of compassion, creativity, and community.”

note of gratitude from an anonymous friend. The heartwarming gesture inspires the child, who, along with Pa, organizes an outreach strategy to involve their neighbors. They knock on doors and hang flyers throughout their vibrant, diverse neighborhood to request book and food donations. This energizes their entire community and results in a collective effort to keep both the library and pantry stocked. Buzzeo has written a timely book on the underrated power of libraries and mutual aid. Hoang’s delicate use of colored pencil and watercolor gives the tale an endearing and pleasant touch. (This book was reviewed digitally.) A charming, intergenerational story of compassion, creativity, and community. (more information on the Little Free Pantries movement, tips on helping fight hunger) (Picture book. 5-9)

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED AFTER SCHOOL...

Cali, Davide

Illus. by Benjamin Chaud Chronicle Books (44 pp.)

$12.99 | July 11, 2023 978-1-4521-8300-8

Excuses accompany another excursion into the explanatory unknown. Henry, hero of such books as A Funny Thing Happened at the Museum (2017), returns with a trip into deep space. Confronted by their teacher on the whereabouts of their homework, Henry and his friend Ali (short for “Alien”?) launch into an extended excuse about the barriers they confronted when they left school the day before. As in other collaborations from this team, the mundane text is at odds with the visual accompaniment. Henry will say something relatively benign (“We took a detour because Ali’s mom had to get something from work”), while the illustration tells a different story (everyone disembarks from a spaceship on what appears to be the surface of the moon). Often these pairings work well, though on occasion text and image are at odds (as when Henry tells us what he and Ali had for dinner, while the art eschews an ironic interpretation for a flagrant lie). In the end, confirmation of Henry and Ali’s tale is just outside the teacher’s door. This tale is much in the same vein as other books in the series; the author and illustrator see little reason to deviate from their established form. More’s the pity that the words and images do not align as perfectly as they might. Henry, Ali, and their teacher are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Same old, same old. (Picture book. 5-8)

VIKING STRONG Cenko, Doug Viking

(48 pp.)

$18.99 | July 25, 2023

9780593202326

A Viking helps his girlfriend achieve a goal.

This tale focuses on Stig’s girlfriend, Ingrid, introduced in Cenko’s Viking in Love (2021), who wants to enter the Strongest Viking Contest to fulfill a childhood dream. The only problem? Swimming is a required part of the competition, but Ingrid can’t so much as doggy paddle. Stig convinces her to enter anyway, and she begins a rigorous training schedule, with Stig assisting each step of the way. By the day of the contest, however, she still hasn’t mastered swimming. Though the other Vikings tower over Ingrid, she easily excels at feats of strengths—as well as “Patting Your Head While Rubbing Your Belly and Then Switching Really Fast” and the “Running of the Kittens!” To complete the swimming portion of the contest, Ingrid brings along a flotation device—and so have the other Vikings. When the others get tangled up in a “floatie jam,” Ingrid’s ingenuity saves the day. Throughout, Stig and the couple’s adorably funny kittens cheer on Ingrid. Illustrations are packed with cues that reinforce children’s visual intelligence and will prompt big laughs. Themes of persevering despite the odds and supporting a loved one are valuable reminders for readers of all ages. Fans of Viking in Love will see that Stig has finally become comfortable in the water himself, his fear of water being the central conflict when he was trying to woo Ingrid. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Even funnier and sweeter than its predecessor. (Picture book. 4-9)

FURY OF THE DRAGON GODDESS

Chadda, Sarwat

Rick Riordan Presents/Disney (384 pp.)

$17.99 | Aug. 1, 2023

9781368081825

Series: The Adventures of Sik Aziz, 2

In this follow-up to City of the Plague God (2021), 14-year-old Iraqi American Sikander Aziz and friends find the tablet of destinies and encounter a god who intends to use it to destroy the world.

Visiting London accompanied by Rabisu, a demon and social media influencer with an appetite for the unsavory, Sik meets up with his late brother Mo’s friend Daoud, a former deli employee–turned–international supermodel. He’s also reunited with warrior Belet, daughter of the goddess Ishtar, who uses Daoud’s fame to access an auction of priceless looted antiquities in search of the tablet of destinies once owned by Cleopatra and Saladin. Malevolent deity Lugal, seeking the same treasure, disrupts the auction—but not before Sik manages to inadvertently use it to bring Mo back to life, reshaping the timeline

Gary D. Schmidt

The celebrated author explores grief and growth in The Labors of Hercules Beal

BY NINA PALATTELLA

In his decadeslong career writing children’s literature, Gary D. Schmidt has covered a lot of ground, from early-20th-century New England in Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (2004) to junior high in the 1960s in The Wednesday Wars (2007)—both Newbery Honor–winning books—and beyond. In his latest, The Labors of Hercules Beal (Clarion/HarperCollins, May 23), the titular 12-year-old delves into the labors of the mythological Hercules for an assignment at his new school. This task (or, rather, series of 12 tasks) holds more real-life significance for Hercules than he could have imagined as he grieves the loss of his parents; adjusts to having his older brother, Achilles, around the family garden nursery again; and endures many more trials (and joys) of growing up. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus calls the book “at once an epic journey toward self-discovery and a wonderfully entertain-

ing yarn.” Schmidt spoke to us over Zoom from his home in Michigan, and our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to incorporate mythology and specifically the Hercules mythology into this story?

There’s this great dictionary that I got as a graduate student in this wonderful, old used bookshop that was going out of business. Of course, one of the entries is Hercules, who is one of the most interesting because he’s so incredibly complicated. One of the things that happens with Hercules is that he loses his family, mostly because of his own fault. His family is wiped out, and his grief is just huge. So the gods give him this task of putting together 12 labors, which seems so random. That seemed to be just right for my story, because here’s this kid, and I knew that he was going to be dealing with grief, and he’s going to have to live with his brother, which is itself going to be a trial.

Is the book that you mentioned very similar to the book that Hercules then uses when he’s working through his labors?

That’s exactly it—Anthon’s Classical Dictionary. When he complains about all the dust from the leather coming off in his hands, that’s because it was coming off in my hands. It was such a mess, but it was fun.

You’ve explored grief in other novels, including Just Like That and Pay Attention, Carter Jones. Grief has a relevance for the mythical character of Hercules, but what made you want to explore that path again?

In an earlier book of mine, called Orbiting Jupiter, there’s a story about loss and grief, which really reflected what was happening to me, because I lost my wife in the middle of that book. It was stopped for about a year because of that until I started to work again. It feels in these last three or four or five books that that’s

Mayma Anderson

really the large theme. How is it that you survive trauma, particularly as a middle school kid? How is it that you survive loss? How do you go on from that? It feels to me like I’m still working through that and that this book is the last in that series, because Hercules does come at the end to a very, very good place, with this community of quirky characters around him and a brother who is quirky in his own right and who experienced that loss, too. It feels like I’ve finally come to the place when I’m done with that, and I know that the next couple of books are going to be super different.

The notion of community is really strong in this book, from Hercules’ relationship with Achilles to his friends and the other supportive people in his life. That’s super intentional in this book. I mean, it’s Hillary Clinton, right? “It takes a village.” And she was right, she is right. It feels to me like that’s something that’s important to stress in the arts for a middle-grade kid, that you don’t have to go it alone. You shouldn’t be going it alone, but that there should be this community that rises up around you, just for day to day, if not especially when you’re really in a moment of grief and loss.

Why do you write for children?

I write specifically for middle-grade kids, and it is a fascinating age to write for. As a writer, I want to look for tension—what’s the thing that’s going to spark the rest of this story? Where better can you look for tension than in middle grade, where you get a character who may be acting like a child and then, a few minutes later, seems almost like an adult? It’s not a time that a lot of people think they would love to go back to. People will sometimes say, I’d like to relive college or I’d like to relive high school—but no one ever says, Please let me relive middle school, because it’s such a confusing time for the individual. And yet, in middle grade, that’s when we’re thinking of growing up. We’re discovering new kinds of relationships that are really, really powerful in us. We want a driver’s license, maybe we’re becoming active politically. That’s the time when this is all starting. To go to a middle school is amazing to me, because you just see it at work.

What similarities do you observe between writing for children and writing for adults?

I teach [writing and literature] at the college level, though I’m about to retire from teaching, which has been wicked good—38 years at one school [Calvin University in Grand Rapids]. It is true that there’s a lot of carryover: the creation of a character, the arc of a plot, the use of setting beyond just having it as a stage, try-

ing to make decisions that work in terms of narrators. All the things that go into writing for a younger reader might go into writing for an older reader.

Has the recent rise in book bans and challenges, especially in children’s literature, impacted the way that you write and approach writing?

That we are to the point that we now have people who are often not even readers who are saying to authors, you shall not do this, you shall have this kind of project but not this kind of project. Instead of celebrating the fact that we can enjoy and love and learn from people of all stripes and all persuasions, instead of saying, what a remarkable experience that the arts can bring us together, we’re now using them to divide or to attack or to silence. I haven’t changed in terms of what I’m doing right now, and I celebrate the writers who are doing such amazing work, and I hope I can be participatory in that. Let’s have the pleasure of the big circus. Let’s have the whole tent. Let’s hear everyone with wisdom and grace and understanding. Let’s not condemn, except when it’s clearly obvious you need to condemn. Let’s bring people together and say, I want to hear what you have to say about this. Anything that does that seems to me to be a gain for the arts. Anything that doesn’t do that seems to be a loss.

Palattella is the editorial assistant. The Labors of Hercules Beal was reviewed in the March 15, 2023, issue.

Nina

young adult

of events at devastating cost. Lugal’s later theft of the tablet results in continued alterations of time, with the ultimate goal of resurrecting Tiamat, the primordial dragon goddess of chaos, with world-ending consequences. Chadda excels in this actionpacked adventure peppered with scenes examining Western theft of cultural artifacts, xenophobia, and Islamophobia and grounded in emotional depth and tenderness for humanity. Arabic words and Islamic concepts, terminology, phrases, and practices are effortlessly included throughout. In this novel centering Muslim characters—the Aziz family and Daoud— Chadda delicately reconciles the fundamental Muslim belief in one God with the presence of Mesopotamian deities. An epic tale that contains multitudes. (glossary) (Fantasy. 10-14)

FLORA LA FRESCA & THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP

Chambers, Veronica

Illus. by Sujean Rim

Dial Books (272 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

9780525556299

Ten-year-old Flora struggles after her best friend moves away.

Flora LeFevre would rate her best friend, Clara Londra, full marks on the BFF-ometer the girls programmed in Scratch. Clara makes Saturday Spanish school bearable, and she’s down for any adventure. They both have parents from far away—Flora’s are from Panama, and Clara’s are from Argentina. So, when Clara’s mother announces that they are leaving Rhode Island to move to California, Flora feels lost even though the girls resolve to remain best friends no matter what. Maylin, Flora’s older sister, is too obsessed with planning her quinceañera to pay attention to her. Worse, Clara quickly finds a new friend in California. Flora thinks no one can hold a candle to Clara until a new student arrives in class: Hailing from Paris, Lebanese Zaidee Khal seems too sophisticated for fifth grade. As Flora slowly warms up to Zaidee, they begin to form a new friendship. But can Flora have two besties? Chambers places universal friendship trials within the specific joy and beauty of an Afro-Panamanian family, capturing the deep, intense emotions of childhood bonds. Rim’s delightful illustrations punctuate the text and capture the mood of the characters’ journeys. The dialogue is peppered with Spanish in the natural cadence of bilingual families, with each member possessing varying degrees of proficiency. Non-Spanish–speaking readers won’t miss a beat and may even pick up a phrase or two.

Funny, heartwarming, and sweet. (Fiction. 8-12)

WE WAITED FOR YOU Now We’re a Family

Chupack, Cindy

Illus. by Emily Hamilton

Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (32 pp.)

$17.99 | July 11, 2023

9781492678960

In her debut picture book, screenwriter and director Chupack pens a rhyming ode to the perseverance, love, and care of expecting parents. Written from a collective parent perspective, the book starts by sharing the narrators’ hopes and frustrations while watching other families with children. As the poem builds, the illustrations show parents dreaming about what they would do if they had kids, from reading books to blowing out birthday candles. Interspersed are spreads depicting children waiting for their parents in dreamlike settings. Finally, after dreaming, searching, wishing, crying, and singing, two light-skinned parents are rewarded with a blond-haired, light-skinned baby. The final spread shows other happy, loving parents and their children. This rhyming picture book is structured around an ever so slightly changing refrain, highlighted in a swirly font. The illustrations are bright and enticing, with diverse families and characters amid bright spring colors and crayonlike textures. Although the illustrations are kid-friendly in color and tone, the narration centers parents in such a way that skews it toward adult, not child, validation. In addition to an occasionally forced rhyme scheme, the transitions between fantasy and reality are whimsical but potentially confusing for little ones. While the sentiment is lovely, there’s a lack of discussion around the reasons why some parents might have to wait for a child to be born. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A gift book for new parents rather than their wee ones. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE TALE OF THE GRAVEMOTHER

Chupeco, Rin

Amulet/Abrams (256 pp.)

$15.99 | June 27, 2023

9781419763496

Series: Are You Afraid of the Dark?, 1

A campfire tale with a memorably macabre ghost.

Chupeco assembles a new Midnight Society to gather around the campfire for this tie-in to the TV series Are You Afraid of the Dark? and cleverly fashions a spooky yarn with themes that apply directly to the frame story. Levi, the new kid in middle school, gets a hostile reception from rival Blake, who’s trying out for the same position on the basketball team. Levi auditions to join the society with a story about Zane and Garrett, two like rivals who, after repeated visitations from the locally famous ghost of a woman with no lower jaw, find themselves allied in uncovering a

200-year-old mystery involving three vanished and presumably murdered orphaned children. Along with plenty of weird noises, creepy manifestations, and old books and bones unexpectedly revealed, the author adds extra measures of grossness by casting Garrett as the child of undertakers whom Zane watches carrying out their explicitly described work. (They also truck in Mr. Vink, an enigmatic recurring character on the show, for a guest appearance.) Nonetheless, come an end to the lurid dreams and screams, the ghost turns out to be benevolent for all her appearance, and like Zane and Garrett, Levi and Blake wind up on the road to friendship, differences resolved. One society member is nonbinary; Garrett’s dad is cued Filipino, and other cast members are minimally described.

Eerie and icky but benign both in specter and theme. (Paranormal. 9-13)

ABENI’S SONG

Clark, P. Djèlí Starscape/Tor (336 pp.)

$17.99 | July 25, 2023

9781250825827

Series: Abeni’s Song, 1

A 12-year-old West African girl attempts to save children who were stolen from her village.

Abeni and her best friend, Fomi, plan to enjoy their annual Harvest Festival, but the festivities are interrupted when Asha, the local witch, appears. She reminds everyone that she gave three warnings that they must leave their homes, but they did not obey; she can no longer protect the village from the coming war. After watching over them for generations, Asha is here to collect her payment: a child. To her great shock, Abeni’s mother gives her to Asha. And then war does in fact come to their peaceful valley where they lived quietly, surrounded by a forest. Abeni watches in horror as storm women assisted by magical black ropes capture the adults before a mysterious goat man plays a haunting melody on a flute that ensnares the other children. Abeni, trained in selfdefense by Auntie Asha, sets out to find the kidnapped children. She crosses paths with porcupine spirit Nyomi and panther spirit Zaneeya who join her as they pursue quests of their own. The magical storytelling and West African spirit elements will keep readers engaged, while authentic relationships between the central characters offer a nice counterbalance for the fantastical plot points, making this work appealing to fantasy and realistic fiction readers alike.

An original, enjoyable coming-of-age story with complex fantasy worldbuilding and multifaceted characters. (Fantasy. 9-13)

MISFIT MANSION

Davault, Kay

Atheneum (304 pp.)

$22.99 | July 25, 2023

9781665903080

A sheltered young monster discovers that the world isn’t as hostile to her kind as she had been led to believe.

Readers who like their monsters cute as well as scary are in for a treat, as Davault fills her panels and montages with the (mostly) humanoid but variously horned, clawed, fanged, and multiheaded inhabitants of Mr. Halloway’s Home for Horrors. They possess expressive faces, stylishly disarranged bangs (or, as the case may be, tentacles), and distinctly childlike ways. Blue-skinned, tufty-tailed Iris has always been told by (human) Mr. Halloway that he is protecting her and her fellow creatures in his isolated manor house from being hunted down. But when she takes advantage of a rare chance to venture into nearby Dead End Springs, she gets a warm welcome—from everyone except Mathias, an orphan raised by his traumatized aunt to believe that monsters are dangerous. Some actually are, it turns out…but after the frightening dolls one horror creates sell like hotcakes to the delighted locals and Iris’ companions help to save the town from an escaped dreamon who has turned into a nightmare, even Mathias comes around. Better yet, Iris emerges with her yearning to belong to a family fulfilled by the discovery that she has really been living with one all along, and she joins her housemates in turning the mansion into a monster hotel.

A warm play on the theme of inclusivity, with horrors more huggable than otherwise. (author’s note, concept art) (Graphic fantasy. 8-11)

HOW TO CATCH A POLAR BEAR

DeKeyser, Stacy McElderry (272 pp.)

$17.99 | June 27, 2023

9781665925617

When Nick Spirakis spots Frosty the polar bear in the alley behind his house, he knows that the summer of 1948 will not be tranquil.

Nick, the son of Greek immigrants, lives in Wisconsin, only a few blocks from the city zoo. His mother even mentions an episode involving an escaped monkey in 1929. But this is not the 12-year-old’s first encounter with a zoo animal, as told in The Rhino in Right Field (2018). Nick shines shoes on Saturday mornings in his Pop’s shop and works at Uncle Spiro’s frozen custard shop in the afternoons. This summer Spiro has the frozen custard concession at the zoo, and Nick and a 14-year-old boy will run the freezer cart. Nick is sure his presence at the zoo will help him and pals Ace

“A warm play on the theme of inclusivity, with horrors more huggable than otherwise.”

misfit mansion

angus is here

and Penny solve the mystery of Frosty’s escape. What follows is a breathless, often hilarious, series of events. A custard war, a secret ingredient, dastardly deeds, animals behaving strangely, a bit of romance, and a stand for girls’ rights are all part of the adventures. Nick will win readers’ hearts as he narrates the tale, speaking with enthusiasm, humility, and honesty. The characters are charming, funny, and quirky, and DeKeyser seamlessly weaves in cultural references and slang expressions from the postwar period.

Wonderfully imaginative with just a touch of earnestness. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)

TIGER LILY AND THE SECRET TREASURE OF NEVERLAND

Dimaline, Cherie Disney Press (288 pp.)

$16.99 | March 21, 2023

9781368080460

Series: Peter Pan & Wendy

Told from the perspective of Tiger Lily, this story reframes Disney’s retelling of J.M. Barrie’s classic.

A foreword by Dimaline (Métis) sets the stage: At the book’s heart lies 13-year-old Tiger Lily, whose tribe are the original people of Neverland; their fictional culture reflects “pieces of collective Indigenous philosophy and worldview”—without conflating those diverse cultures. Tiger Lily has a brave and adventurous spirit that has led her to develop true, loyal friendships with Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, who are English in origin, as well as with the fairy Sashi. But when a monstrous bear attacks, Tiger Lily realizes that she is not as brave as she thought. Ashamed that Peter took the lead in saving the day, she begins to contemplate growing up in order to better protect her people. Tiger Lily has conflicted feelings about growing up, however: Peter makes it sound terrible, but her grandma offers a more positive vision. An opportunity for bravery presents itself when she discovers two White men she realizes are pirates, a shock after years of peace on Neverland. These thick-skulled pirates seem to be searching for a treasure of unmeasurable value. Can Tiger Lily find it first, save her community, and keep her friends out of trouble? Respect for animals, plants, land, and family are all central themes of Tiger Lily’s heritage. Her conflicted feelings about leaving childhood behind will resonate.

A lighthearted tale with substance beautifully extending the world of Neverland. (Adventure. 8-11)

B IS FOR BELLIES Dyball, Rennie Illus. by Mia Saine

Clarion/HarperCollins (32 pp.)

$17.99 | July 11, 2023

9780358683650

An alphabetical affirmation of body diversity and individuality.

The heart of this picture book can be summed up nicely with “D is for diverse: / all the shades of our skin. / We respect other people and the bodies they’re in.” With colorful and inclusive images, the text is a celebration of how bodies “jiggle” and “bounce” as well as encouragement to be aware of what your body needs. The uppercase letter of the alphabet is prominently featured at the start of each short rhyming stanza, the lowercase letter appearing as a part of the accompanying illustration. Saine depicts bodies that are diverse in various ways, including skin tone. One character uses a wheelchair, while others have missing limbs, and another uses a prosthetic leg. One character has an eye patch. There are bodies of all sizes with different hairstyles and colors. Readers are also urged to express their gender “in a way that feels true” and to feed their bodies: “You need fuel to have fun.” The rhyming text is short and moves along at an appropriate pace for a readaloud. The letters of the alphabet are less important than the larger theme, and the book mostly structures the various topics rather than teaching the ABCs; this is above all an early introduction to body inclusivity. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Simple and powerful. (Picture book. 4-7)

ANGUS IS HERE

Dyer, Hadley

Illus. by Paul Covello

Annick Press (36 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9781773217468

A family processes the death of a dog together.

A youngster keeps getting glimpses of Angus the dog—seeing a quick tail wag under the dinner table, hearing his snores at night—but as the tot realizes, “he only seems to turn up when I’m not looking.” Readers slowly shift into the awareness that Angus has died. Dyer handles the discussion directly. The child’s parents explain that “when someone dies, their body stops working.” And “once someone has died, their body does not come back to life.” We see a scene of the family burying Angus, sprinkling seeds over the freshly dug dirt. They also tell stories about his life and create a memory book full of photos and drawings. After the many waves of grief (feeling guilty for forgetting sometimes, giving away the dog’s toys to a relative with a new puppy), the young protagonist comes to realize that the titular phrase does ring true: Angus is here, always. Covello’s gentle palette of mixed warm yellows, with Angus’ leash and other items in crisp green, adds comfort

“A reassuring choice for those who have lost a loved one, pet or otherwise.”

during the exploration of various emotions. The family members are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A reassuring choice for those who have lost a loved one, pet or otherwise. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-8)

WINDOW FISHING

Dyson, D.K.

Illus. by Rudy Gutierrez

Knopf (40 pp.)

$18.99 | $21.99 PLB | Aug. 1, 2023

9780593429013

9780593429020 PLB

A whimsical ode to finding friendship in unexpected places. Rudeday, an artist, spends his days toiling for a paycheck but fears that his work “will never bring people joy.” Hearing a “TAP! TAP! TAP” at his window, Rudeday attempts to ignore it. However, he is unable to resist the invitation to play that has arrived in the form of an improvised fishing line made from string and a paper clip descending from the apartment above his studio. He draws a charming picture of a fish, which he sends back up to the mysterious fisher. Rudeday and his neighbor begin their fishing game in earnest, and the artist taps into his creativity to create a veritable aquarium of colorful fish to send up on the line. As mysteriously as it began, the window fishing game ends, and Rudeday is plunged back into his humdrum daily routine. Weeks later, a young boy named Amir stops by Rudeday’s apartment to thank him for cheering him up with the fish drawings while he was sick. Rudeday thanks Amir for reminding him that art can be fun. Gutierrez’s acrylic illustrations invoke movement and playfulness; with swirling linework and bright colors, they have a mural-like feeling. Rudeday reads as Latine; Amir has brown skin and an Afro hairstyle. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A sweet story of connection and rekindling artistic passion. (Picture book. 5-8)

SUNSHINE PIE A Story To Grow, Bake and Share

Edmonds, Sarah Welbeck Flame (32 pp.)

$9.95 paper | July 18, 2023

9781801301114

Olive and Aunty Jen are making a sunshine pie for a picnic with friends, but how do you turn sunshine into pie?

Together, the two shop for the pie crust ingredients, then head to a farm for the sunshine filling. It turns out that any fruit that grows sweet and juicy thanks to the sun’s rays can fill a sunshine pie. In this case, Olive and Aunty Jen pick blackberries, raspberries, and apples (not usually in season simultaneously). At home, they make the crust and stir the filling (readers may be confused here about the directive that Olive make a wish while

stirring, and many will be unfamiliar with the object they place in the middle of the completed pie—a pie bird—before baking). But when Olive goes out to find the perfect spot for a picnic, it’s raining! Looks like the picnic will become a kitchen party, and the pie will be a “sunshine-and-rain pie,” the rain having contributed to “help[ing] the fruit trees grow.” While the tale is pretty simple, it’s a sweet look at relatives working together to make a treat for their friends. A recipe with ingredients listed by weight is included. Edmonds’ illustrations are bright and cheerful. Both Aunty Jen and Olive are light-skinned. Olive sports blue shorts, a red T-shirt, and dark braids. The invitees are diverse in race and age. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A low-key tale that’s tasty whether it’s sunny or rainy. (Picture book. 4-8)

GHOSTS BITE BACK

Foulkes, Alex

Aladdin (336 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

9781534498389

Series: Rules for Vampires, 2

A young vampire falls afoul of a persistent vampire hunter in this tumultuous sequel.

The long-standing enmity between ghosts and vampires comes to a boil as 111-year-old Eleonore “Leo” von Motteberg—having kept her forbidding, undead mother from finding out that she not only failed to bite a living victim in her centenary rite of passage, but has actually befriended a spectral child—is summoned to the Ghostly Realm to stand trial for killing the evil Orphanmaster. Readers who don’t mind a tale with ghosts who can be solid or not, depending on the needs of the moment, or a vicious but futile climactic melee between the dead and the undead that leaves no casualties beyond a few body parts will enjoy following Leo. On the one fang, her soul travels into the great beyond to confront a spectral judge still, as in life, stubbornly bent on staking vampires, while on the other, her soulless body chows down on tasty eyeball canapes at a formal dinner and starts a loose-jointed dance craze. If logic isn’t Foulkes’ strong suit, he at least sets his redoubtable protagonist, who has a wooden leg and can run up walls and whose pacifism is strong enough to bring the main battle to a close and convince her judge that it’s OK to have different priorities after dying, at the head of a White-presenting cast centering strong girls.

Doesn’t hang together very well, but there are some tasty morsels, and peacemongers will bite. (Paranormal. 8-12)

BRICK DUST AND BONES

Fournet, M.R.

Feiwel & Friends (256 pp.)

$16.99 | July 18, 2023

9781250876027

New Orleans may be called the Big Easy, but it certainly hasn’t been easy lately for Marius Grey.

One would imagine 12-year-old Marius’ life as a cemetery boy is quiet and solitary, but that’s dead wrong. Although he’s lived alone since his father’s disappearance and his mother’s untimely death, he’s far from lonely: There are the ghosts of those interred in Greystone Cemetery, where he is caretaker of the souls before they pass on to the next place and has the disembodied voice of his mother for company. He spends a lot of time at the hybrid school for “fringe kids” like him, frequenting local stores like the Habada-Chérie, which sells magical supplies. Armed with a magical book of monsters, his father’s enchanted coat, brick dust, salt, his mother’s raven skull necklace, and an effective spell, Marius catches monsters and exchanges them for Mystic currency, hoping to save enough to resurrect his mother. The only one who knows his desperate plan is his mermaid best friend, Rhiannon, whom he befriended instead of capturing. The book offers nods to the rich history of storytelling devoted to ancestors, cemeteries, and the veil between the ordinary and the magical, and it provides readers with a determined protagonist, unlikely allies, and a satisfying conclusion that promises a sequel. Marius has black hair, blue eyes, and a grayish complexion; many supporting characters are coded Black.

A strong mix of bone-chilling and full of heart. (Fantasy. 9-12)

SPANISH IS THE LANGUAGE OF MY FAMILY

Genhart, Michael Illus. by John Parra

Neal Porter/Holiday House (40 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9780823450046

To prepare for the school Spelling Bee en Español, a young Latine boy gets a much-needed boost from his cherished Abuela.

Manolo seems prepared for the bee, as there are many words he can already spell: “F-a-m-i-l-i-a.”

“J-u-n-t-o-s.” “C-o-r-a-z-ón.” Still, the lista de palabras includes words that Manolo doesn’t know how to spell, so Abuela helps him. During their lessons together, she shares stories from her childhood, when the “rule at school was ‘English only.’ ” Speaking Spanish—even in secret on the playground—resulted in punishments for the students, including being sent home, paddled, or having their mouth washed out with soap. Spurred by Abuela’s stories of the recent hurtful past, Manolo throws himself into practice even when frustrations set in. “Tengo fuerza.” On the day of the spelling

bee, Manolo stands tall on stage thanks to Abuela’s strength. A measured reckoning with an oft-overlooked period in U.S. history, Genhart and Parra’s poignant collaboration explores the echoes of generational trauma and the power of societal change and hope. An author’s note explains that Genhart drew from the 1930s through the 1960s, including his mother’s experiences in Southern California. The closeness between Manolo and Abuela adds a layer of warmth to this poignant tale, making this spelling bee journey an eventual resonant triumph. The splendid, textured acrylic-based artwork is rich and vibrant; an especially inspired spread sees a determined Manolo scaling the word practico. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Tenderly tremendous. (references, Spanish alphabet) (Picture book. 4-8)

WITCH IN THE COUNTRY

George, Kallie

Illus. by Birgitta Sif

Candlewick (80 pp.)

$15.99 | July 11, 2023

9781536214642

Series: Crimson Twill

In her second outing, Crimson invites her city friends for a country visit. Spunky, independent-thinking witch Crimson Twill is excited that the friends she made during her New Wart City trip are coming to Cackle County to visit her. Planning a perfect visit for Wesley and Mauve, both of whom, like Crimson, stand out from the crowd, is all she’s been able to think about. But nothing goes according to plan. First, Crimson’s spell mishap in the rotten apple orchard results in a messy rain of rotten applesauce. Then, at the broom fields, where magic flying straw for witch broom bristles grows, an enthusiastic cutting mishap leaves acrophobic Wesley in need of an aerial rescue. Finally, at the croaking corral (where witches catch frog croaks in bottles), an accidental full-force croak to the face leaves quiet Mauve ribbitting uncontrollably at the top of her lungs. The gentle tensions—along with the comedic examples of witch culture (“untidying” rooms is one of their chores)—will charm readers. Just when Crimson accepts that things don’t have to go according to plan for the visit to be a success, the plot tosses a giant curveball at the kids, which gives them another opportunity to turn a mistake into a day-saving, happy accident. Grayscale illustrations play up the humor—especially when it’s messy—and depict Crimson (and family) and Wesley (and his mother) as pale, and Mauve (and her father) with dark skin.

Will leave readers cackling with delight. (Fantasy. 7-10)

YOU AND THE BOWERBIRD

Gianferrari, Maria

Illus. by Maris Wicks Roaring Brook Press (48 pp.)

$19.99 | Aug. 15, 2023

9781250849878

The stressful courtship ritual of a male bowerbird, as seen by a young observer.

Satin Bowerbirds are native to Australia, and during mating season the males build elaborate structures on the ground out of natural and found blue materials—buttons, bottle caps, pieces of glass, even socks—to attract females. It is not an easy job—not only are the females picky, but rival males will swoop in at the slightest opportunity to steal the best bits and mess up the rest. Here Gianferrari records the ups and downs of Satin, one such hopeful swain, as he carefully builds and rebuilds his bower, drives off interlopers, and dances enthusiastically when green-feathered Pea, a likely looking prospect, doubtfully lands for a lookie-loo. There’s really nothing for it but to cheer him on. Playing this arduous ritual as a romantic comedy, Wicks depicts Satin looking over his bower with a critical eye, fussing over it, expressing confusion and astonishment when he returns from various forays to find it wrecked, and climactically casting a flirtatious side-eye at Pea as she watches him flapping and highstepping. A dark-skinned child in the illustrations, watching all of this as raptly as readers will, fills notebooks with sketches and comments and provides a satisfying sense of closure by later spotting Pea in a tree, presiding over a nest full of eggs. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Delightful, tongue-in-cheek, and compellingly romantic. (more information on bowerbirds) (Informational picture book. 6-9)

PRINCESS TRULY PICKS A PUMPKIN Greenawalt, Kelly

Illus. by Amariah Rauscher

Cartwheel/Scholastic (24 pp.)

$5.99 paper | July 18, 2023

9781338830903

With the help of her magic, a young girl finds the perfect Halloween pumpkin.

In this latest in the series, Princess Truly, who has brown skin and Afro puffs and sports a purple tutu, heads to the pumpkin patch with her pup, Sir Noodles, looking for just the right pumpkin. After passing up several, the pair notice a purple vine with a sign saying “Please add water.” With a shake of her magic curls, Princess Truly conjures rain that gives way to an unusually colorful pumpkin, just what she wants for Halloween night. The text is made up of simple, short rhymes that read aloud smoothly though a shade awkwardly in places. Rauscher’s illustrations really bring the story to life as Sir Noodles looks on

curiously, and a sweet little mouse can be found on each page. All of the usual fall colors are here, but a touch of watercolor rainbow effect when Princess Truly taps into her magic gives the illustrations a little extra flair. Though there isn’t a lot of substance to the story, its seasonally festive theme and adorable protagonist make it a charming read; those looking for depictions of young girls of color enjoying the season should seek this one out. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An endearing autumnal romp. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE MIDNIGHT BABIES

Greenberg, Isabel

Abrams (40 pp.)

$18.99 | June 13, 2023

9781419759543

Wakeful babes, unite and toddle on!

The nefarious forces of sleep are working hard to entice babies into a deep slumber, but light-skinned WideAwake Baby is determined to overcome them. She’s assembled a stalwart army of pajama-clad Midnight Babies to ensure they remain awake all night. Armed with noisemakers, this defiant band makes its cacophonous way through enemy lines. The terrain is treacherous: There’s the Forest of Nightlights, the Sea of Stories, the Garden of Lullabies, the Rockabye River, and, finally, the perilous shores of Nodoff with its menacing Army of Teddies. Unsurprisingly, one baby after another succumbs to temptation along the way and slips into blissful snoozing until Wide-Awake Baby is alone. Finally, even she falls deeply asleep, giving in to the ever so heavenly Cuddle. She finds herself in the land of Sleep, surrounded by frolicking Midnight Babies, enjoying games and treats galore; they’re all unable to remember why they tried so hard not to go there. Next morning, Wide-Awake Baby, having been duped, determines to put up resistance again that very night. This clever, tongue-in-cheek story will be best appreciated by parents familiar with sleep-delaying tactics. Very small tots may not pick up on the tricky niceties—yet. The dynamic, cartoony pencil-and-charcoal illustrations, colored digitally, are lively and imaginative and feature lots of endearing, wide-eyed, racially diverse infants. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Fun but probably not the best book to read aloud to little ones immediately before bedtime. (Picture book. 2-5)

“Delightful, tongue-in-cheek, and compellingly romantic.”

you and the bowerbird

“A thrilling tale brimming with spirit.”

the boy with wings

CHASING THE SUN

Hao, Liu Clavis (32 pp.)

$17.95 | July 25, 2023

9781605378428

Series: Art for Kids, 1

An illustrated story inspired by Van Gogh’s masterpieces.

A tan “sunflower baby” with hair resembling sunbeams emerges from a sunflower still life in Van Gogh’s bedroom and chases the sun. It eludes the child, who pursues it through a sun-dappled landscape. The sprite is disconsolate when night falls. Then day becomes “a starry night sky,” and the sunflower baby is embedded in a glowing orb in that revered painting. The book re-creates seven works of art by Van Gogh; they are named on the title page, and the museums where they are exhibited are listed. (One is privately owned.) The referenced paintings are used as backgrounds for the sunflower baby’s escapade, beginning with a scene inspired by the renowned painting of Van Gogh’s bedroom, continuing with “The Sower,” and concluding with the final pages, encompassing “Starry Night.” Some scenes include distant views— familiar to Van Gogh aficionados—of a straw-hatted artist with easel and pipe; some scenes depict a red-haired man meant to represent Van Gogh. Note the latter’s sly “nighttime” message on the final page. The book is translated from Dutch, and the creator uses vivid colors and bold brush strokes à la Vincent. However, the story makes little sense narratively (why does the child’s hair suddenly turn gold?), and anyone unfamiliar with Van Gogh’s work won’t understand the artistic homages. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Doesn’t work as a children’s introduction to Van Gogh’s art; stick with the master’s actual paintings. (Picture book. 4-7)

WOLFBOY IS SCARED

Harkness, Andy Bloomsbury (40 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

978-1-5476-0445-6

In this follow-up to Wolfboy (2021), an innovative art technique jazzes up a familiar narrative.

After a long night of playing, Wolfboy and his rabbit friends head home. They hope to arrive before moonset, so Wolfboy advises that they use a shortcut “through the lair of the GRUMBLE MONSTER.” As the title suggests, Wolfboy is the one scared by this plan, not the rabbits. Harkness uses perspective to make Wolfboy and the rabbits seem very small as they enter the forest. Wolfboy thinks he sees the monster lurking behind trees, but the rabbits reassure him otherwise (those “claws” are just branches, and that “tail” is just a bramble vine). Readers, however, will notice parts of the monster’s large body in the foregrounds of the illustrations, unseen by the characters. The pacing recalls Julia Danielson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo, as the monster

is revealed bit by bit, and when Wolfboy and the rabbits finally meet him, he’s not so scary after all. This twist brings to mind stories like Rachel Bright’s Love Monster (2012) or even Andrew Clement and Yoshi’s Big Al (1991), but the distinctive artwork sets Harkness’ picture book apart. The Claymation-like illustrations, which Harkness explains in a note he created using a virtual-reality headset, sculpting each page “in much the same way I would sculpt with real clay,” have a 3-D effect, like stills from stop-motion animation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Sure to soothe anyone who’s ever fretted about what’s out there in the dark. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE BOY WITH WINGS

Henry, Lenny

Illus. by Keenon Ferrell & Mark

Buckingham

Andrews McMeel Publishing (208 pp.)

$12.99 paper | June 27, 2023

9781524880002

In actor and comedian Henry’s latest, an adopted 12-year-old English boy has an epic adventure after discovering his origin story.

As one of the few Black kids at his primarily White school, Tunde Wilkinson often feels like an outsider, but his adoptive parents, Ron and Ruth (British Caribbean), make sure to show him examples of influential Black people so that he knows he is capable of anything. He has his close-knit group of friends— Jiah Patel (cued as Indian), Kylie Collins (who is assumed White and uses a wheelchair), and Nev Carter (cued as Black). This supportive community becomes vital after Tunde disobeys his parents’ wishes never to play sports because it would risk his safety. During a game, Tunde sprouts wings, shocking everyone and unveiling his identity to the alien species looking for him. With the truth revealed, Tunde and his friends are tasked with preventing intergalactic war and ensuring lasting peace. This is a funny, fast-paced story with an authentic voice; the use of wacky, emphasized fonts will immediately hook readers. Children will be invested in Tunde’s attempts to lead with kindness and be courageous in the face of adversity. The illustrations are detailed but simple enough to inspire young artists to recreate their own adventures with Tunde and his friends. Tunde’s exploits continue at the end with a comic book feature written by Henry and illustrated by Buckingham, hinting at more to come for the dynamic group.

A thrilling tale brimming with spirit. (Fantasy. 8-12)

BENITO JUÁREZ FIGHTS FOR JUSTICE

Hernandez, Beatriz Gutierrez

Godwin Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | Aug. 1, 2023

9781250257772

A romanticized introduction to an unfairly lesser known Mexican hero.

Writing in first person, Hernandez traces the course of young Benito from village sheepherder to trained lawyer, from exile to repeatedly elected president—emphasizing his lifelong dedication to human rights and protecting the poor and vulnerable. The author’s close focus on his values not only leaves her narrative free of dates until the afterword, but so unanchored in historical context that at the end Benito just trails away— walking down a road to a mystical vision of his country and its residents. Also, though his strong and able wife, Margarita, receives proper attention and the fact that the two belonged to different ethnic groups (Benito was Zapotec; Margarita was of European heritage) is at least signaled in the wedding tableau by their different skin colors, his earlier relationships and children go unmentioned, and his ruthless execution of the forcibly installed French “emperor” Maximilian in 1867 is described, at best, obliquely: “I make the tough decision to punish him.” Overall the illustrations do underscore his liberal, republican principles in richly atmospheric scenes of dark-skinned figures gathering to work, talk, and march collectively beneath flags and banners. And if, as the author notes in her closing remarks, Benito “has become unreachable through time and hard to identify with,” her eloquent tribute will go some way toward spurring younger readers to look into his life and legacy. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An inspiring, if selective, character portrait. (bibliography) (Picture-book biography. 7-9)

BRUCE AND THE LEGEND OF SOGGY HOLLOW

Higgins, Ryan T.

Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9781368059589

Series: Mother Bruce

Halloween? Bah, humbug!

Everyone’s favorite curmudgeonly bear, Bruce, is predictably irritated to find that his least favorite holiday, Halloween, is coming up. Tricks, treats, and visitors? Bruce is not impressed. His chosen family of mice and geese completely disagrees and, to inspire him, decides to dress up and act out a scary story (“The Legend of Soggy Hollow,” featuring the Horseless Horseman), with our ursine protagonist in the role of schoolteacher Ichabod Bruce. Text bubbles and boxes further develop the story of these charming characters as they embark, albeit less than happily in the case of Bruce, on a performance that is dramatic, mysterious, and laugh-out-loud funny. Higgins’ quirky

sensibility is as comical and appealing as ever, and his illustrations are full of kid-friendly and engaging details. Bruce’s unwilling foray into acting—which involves a meetup with a possible ghost and an attempt to escape the amorous moose playing his love interest—will have readers dissolving into giggles. They’ll delight in the humor of Bruce’s less-than-enthusiastic participation, and the story wraps up with a ghostly—but fun—twist. This is a feel-good and funny choice, perfect for Halloween or any time of the year. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Laughter abounds in this spirited tale with a sprinkle of spookiness. (Picture book. 3-8)

WE DON’T LOSE OUR CLASS GOLDFISH

Higgins, Ryan T.

Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.)

$18.99 | March 28, 2023

9781368076982

Series: A Penelope Rex Book

You’d think a T. rex wouldn’t be afraid of anything. You’d be wrong.

In her latest outing, Penelope Rex is terrified of Walter, the class goldfish. One might suppose a goldfish would be petrified of her, a large dinosaur with a disproportionately sized head. Penelope has reasons to be frightened, though: Walter is “bitey” (Penelope’s discovered this firsthand—literally) and has “menacing fins” and “unblinky eyes.” Unfortunately, her teacher announces that each student will have a chance to care for Walter over a weekend. When Penelope’s turn arrives, she strives to make the best of it, including Walter in her usual activities and attempting to distract him (and herself). After a few peculiarities—weird nighttime noises and a broken lamp—Walter disappears; the ensuing search leads to a complete overhaul of Penelope’s feelings for her nemesis. Following Walter’s subsequent reappearance, the rest of the weekend goes swimmingly, and Penelope’s parents have a big surprise for her. We don’t lose a class pet, but we gain a humorous, relatable story about taking dinosaur-sized pride in overcoming fears. Kids have anxieties, and this tale makes them recognizable—and a little less frightening. The lively, comical illustrations, created with graphite, ink, Photoshop, and scans of treated clayboard for textures, are appealing; Penelope is most expressive, her oversized head and large, dewy eyes emphasizing her winsome vulnerability. Penelope’s human classmates are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A resonant tale of gaining self-esteem by conquering what seems scary. (Picture book. 4-7)

OLD ENOUGH TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE Be Inspired by Real-Life Children Building a More Sustainable Future

Hui, Rebecca Illus. by Anneli Bray Magic Cat (32 pp.)

$18.99 | March 28, 2023

9781419765995

Series: Changemakers

Informative and inspiring accounts of ambitious worldimproving projects initiated by children.

Devoting two spreads to each child, Hui describes the organizations founded by 12 young social entrepreneurs of varying ethnicities and from all over the world; one child is a wheelchair user. They tackle fast fashion, period poverty, paper waste, and single-use straws and work toward green energy, cleaner oceans, sustainable farming, disability access, and accessible health care. “Supporting women and girls through art and education,” “redistributing food destined for landfills,” and “promoting ocean education” are others’ aims. Tidbits about the impacts of harmful practices and situations are seeded across the bright, detailed illustrations, which are naïve and engaging. In the background, racially diverse, cheerful kids keep busy; several use wheelchairs, and some wear hijab. As in Old Enough To Save the Planet (2021), the projects have a positive though naturally limited impact. Ten brief hints on how to be a social entrepreneur and 10 more on being a responsible consumer provide goals perhaps more accessible to ordinary readers. A map showing the young people’s countries of origin and acknowledgment that it isn’t all on individuals to make a difference would have been welcome, but a dozen websites for further exploration are a useful addition. Younger readers might need help with vocabulary (and small print). (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Driven, resourceful kids could be galvanized by these stories. (Informational picture book. 6-10)

SHADOW

Hunter, Erin Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.)

$18.99 | April 4, 2023

9780063050211

Series: Warriors: A Starless Clan, 3

Feral cats Frostpaw, Sunbeam, and Nightheart process agonizing personal choices while Frostpaw’s RiverClan remains leaderless.

This third series installment begins as a strong continuation of the previous book, gracefully incorporating plot, meaningful thoughts and conversations, and humor. Nightheart’s clever solutions to his future mother-in-law’s challenges are especially enjoyable. Adolescent readers will appreciate anthropomorphic angst over finding one’s calling and navigating

relationships. Should Frostpaw reveal her certainty that her previous visions were not of medicine-cat caliber and instead become a warrior? Is Sunbeam ready for a commitment to Nightheart? Will Nightheart pass difficult tests so he can join ShadowClan? Sadly, after Chapter 16’s revelation that StarClan—sky-dwelling, ancestor spirits—disapprove of ShadowClan’s occupying RiverClan, the book’s quality plummets dramatically, with the last third feeling less carefully presented. More than once the text confusingly uses the tired conceit of a character’s dreams to show anxiety—ill-advised in a fantasy series with established ideas about mystical visions. More importantly, the tone precipitously darkens, unraveling earlier gains in insight and decision-making. As ShadowClan escalates its occupation of RiverClan, mistrust and treachery increase. Under the shadow of possible war, Sunbeam and Nightheart vacillate ad nauseum over the newly legalized possibility of switching clans for love; does loyalty belong first to clan or to mate? Nevertheless, established fans will appreciate spending more time with their beloved characters.

A mixed bag that starts off well. (lists of clan members, maps) (Fantasy. 11-13)

EXPLORE! AMERICA’S WILDLIFE

Jazynka, Kitson

Illus. by Hannah Bailey

Kane Miller (96 pp.)

$18.99 | May 1, 2023

9781684644711

A companion book to Explore! America’s National Parks (2019) by Krista Langlois, illustrated by Bailey, offers encounters with charismatic creatures for the factoid-hungry.

Jazynka divides the United States into regions (the West and Alaska, the South, the Midwest, and the Northeast), then highlights general habitats (tallgrass prairie) or, more frequently, specific places (Katmai National Park) within each region. A final “Wild Animals in Your Backyard” section highlights animals that can be found in desert, woodland, tropical, and suburban locations. Each habitat showcases creatures—among them caribou, mountain lions, beluga whales, and alligators—within gorgeous landscapes and captioned spot illustrations or photographs: “Watch this!” “Hear this!” “Spy this!” Periodically, Jazynka references topics such as climate change; most content focuses on organisms’ adaptations. The text is well crafted but might be less accessible to younger readers, who may skip over it to instead pore over the illustrations. The range of animals covered is a bit limited; there’s more information on mammals and birds compared with insects, fish, amphibians, or reptiles. Some captions incorporate information relating to Native Americans: “Alutiiq people, native to Alaska, call black-capped chickadees ‘Uksullaq’ ”; “Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge takes its name from a Narragansett Indian chief.” People depicted in the illustrations are racially diverse.

Captivating illustrations offer an appealing armchairtravel invitation to sample wonders both micro and macro. (map, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

DANGER IN THE DEEP SEA

Jerome, Kate

Weldon Owen (112 pp.)

$7.99 paper | May 2, 2023

9781681889085

Series: OceanX Adventures, 2

A young stowaway takes an unexpected trip on a marine research ship and gets a chance to search for sunken treasure in this second outing.

Marena Montoya doesn’t mean to stow away aboard the OceanXplorer—she just gets locked in a refrigerator storage room during a tour and isn’t found until the ship departs Miami. Her older brother Lucas, onboard as an intern, is not happy. Luckily the captain and crew welcome her and even let her try her hand at using the arm controls on a Remote Operated Vehicle—experience that comes in handy later when she saves her brother’s life by remotely untangling ropes fouling his submersible’s propellers. Along with a suspenseful climax, this information-rich tale offers Marena and readers a quick tour of the OceanXplorer (a real-life research ship) both through the narrative and an appended photo spread, quick looks at some of its personnel and research activities, and thrilling encounters with a giant squid and other marine life. Better yet, Marena’s fascination with sunken treasure leads both to learning about some famous shipwrecks and an invitation to join a modern salvage expert in searching for one. Names cue some diversity in the cast; illustrations not seen. An expert mix of infodumps and action makes for smooth sailing. (Informational fiction. 9-11)

HOW DOES OUR FOOD GROW?

Jorden, Brooke

Illus. by Kay Widdowson

Familius (40 pp.)

$17.99 | Aug. 8, 2023

9781641709910

Rhymed introductions to common fruits and vegetables, with recipes that use them.

Widdowson’s lively scenes of smiling, racially diverse people cultivating or shopping for brightly colored foodstuffs create a positive mood for this international survey, but the written portions are lacking. Not only does Jorden dangerously assert that “All berries are yummy AND good for your brain” and, nonsensically, that “Corn has ‘ears’ but it can’t talk,” her unrhymed side notes include hard-to-answer questions like “How many different kinds [of apples] have you tried?” (no examples are provided) as well as a simplistic translation of the scientific name for pineapple and an equally questionable claim that frozen bananas are a popular treat in the United States. Of the seven recipes at the end, which are drawn from a 2022 cookbook for adults, an amusing “Make Do Ratatou(ille)” includes “4 medium bruised tomatoes,” “2 medium red onions on their last legs,” and “2 teaspoons

fresh rosemary that has been in your refrigerator far too long” but, like the others, comes with a long list of ingredients and isn’t particularly child appropriate. The spread of exhortations to develop sustainable eating habits sandwiched between the two sections is too generalized to be convincing. Laura Mucha, Ed Smith, and Harriet Lynas’ Welcome to Our Table (2023) makes a more nourishing choice for cluing children in to where their food comes from. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Likely to have trouble finding an audience. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

PINKALICIOUS AND THE PINKAMAZING LITTLE LIBRARY

Kann, Victoria

Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.)

$17.99 | $5.99 | June 27, 2023

9780063257320

9780063257313 paper

Series: I Can Read!

Our popular, pink-loving protagonist promotes reading skills and persistently pursues reading pleasures.

Seeing Pinkalicious with her nose in a book, schoolmate Jade is incredulous: “Are you reading AGAIN?” Pinkalicious admits that reading was hard to learn, “but now it’s pinkamazingly fun!” On the bus, in bed, eating, or walking, she reads. At home there is nary a screen in sight, and she looks up from her book at dinner only when Dad fears he has forgotten her face. But Pinkalicious falls into a bibliophile’s nightmare: She “has read every book at least twice!” Desperate, she tries reading catalogs, cereal boxes, and recipes: arid narrative deserts. Brother Peter casually comments, “Too bad you can’t trade yours for new ones.” Bingo: Pinkalicious promptly mounts her bookfilled dollhouse on a pedestal outdoors and publicizes her free lending library. (Encountering no pesky zoning code or HOA obstacles.) That night, too excited to sleep, Pinkalicious finds her old books gone, replaced by new-to-her books. The whole pale-faced Pinkerton family reads through breakfast, with predictably messy consequences. Illustrations hew to the series’ formula, as does the text: problem develops; problem grows more complex; creative solution found by our hero. The advocacy of reading makes this pleasant new entry particularly palatable. Jade presents Asian; Pinkalicious’ community is diverse.

Another perky pink easy reader sure to delight Pinkaholics. (Beginning reader. 4-8)

“Our popular, pink-loving protagonist promotes reading skills and persistently pursues reading pleasures.”

MIXED UP

Korman, Gordon Scholastic (256 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

9781338826722

A freaky Phenomenon leads to a mysterious memory swap.

After athletic Reef Moody’s single mom checked into the hospital a year ago with Covid-19, he went to live with the family of her best friend, Jenna Helmer. Mom’s death made the arrangement permanent. Reef’s grief is complicated by the fact that Jenna’s volatile youngest, 14-yearold Declan, has made his life miserable. Across town, studious Theo Metzinger spots a menacing rabbit, whom he nicknames Jaws, with giant teeth preparing to destroy his precious flowers…again. But his controlling, macho dad, who clearly favors Theo’s younger sister, scolds him and whisks him off to karate class so he will “toughen up.” When Reef also starts seeing Jaws, readers will be clued in that something really unusual is happening. Over time, the two 12-year-olds each acquire memories belonging to the other and begin changing, bit by disturbing bit. Discovering a shared birthday seems to validate their shared suspicion of some sort of mind swap. A thunderstorm and the help of a handful of secondary characters are key to a solution for the distressed duo. Korman packs his story with colorfully delineated characters and believable middle school set pieces. Dueling first-person narratives capture subtle character differences between Theo and Reef while staying in a convincing preteen vernacular. Main characters are cued White.

An engaging tale of weird science as well as a celebration of individuality. (Fiction. 9-13)

THE BELLWOODS GAME

Krampien, Celia Atheneum (320 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

9781665912501

Sixth grader Bailee Heron must win a ghostly game to keep her town, her family, and herself from losing everything.

On Halloween in 1982, sixth grader Abigail Snook disappeared in the Bellwoods forest behind Beckett Elementary. Now, every Halloween, Beckett’s sixth graders have to play the Bellwoods Game, or her ghost will terrorize the town for the next year. If she catches you, and you don’t have a gift to sacrifice, the ghost will take something else—like your tongue. But if you manage to ring the old bell in the woods first, you’ll banish her for another year, and she’ll give you anything you want. Bailee, lover of all things horror, just wants things to go back to normal. Ever since the factory closed two years ago, her parents have worked long hours to make ends meet, often leaving Nan and Bailee alone. Then Nan got sick at the same time a vicious

rumor ostracized Bailee from the rest of the class. Winning the game is Bailee’s only chance to set things right, but she soon learns everything is not as it seems in the town of Fall Hollow, where stories are weapons, friends come from strange places, and Abigail Snook isn’t the scariest thing hiding among the trees. This gorgeously illustrated, atmospheric, and evocative debut captures the fun of being scared and the hard truths of middle school. Bailee presents White; names and illustrations point to some racial diversity in secondary characters. Beautifully creepy. (Supernatural. 9-13)

HAMMERS OF THE GODS

Lanzing, Jackson & Collin Kelly

Illus. by Billy Yong

Marvel Press (240 pp.)

$15.00 | July 25, 2023

9781368074353

Series: Thor Quest, 1

Junior versions of Thor, Sif, and Loki set out for the land of the Dwarves, with a young bard and a battle kitten in attendance.

With references to Xemnu from the Magic Planet to further cement its connection to the Marvel Universe, this series kickoff assembles a cast of juvenile Norse godlets and hangers-on to, mostly, get each other into and out of jams after the vainglorious god of thunder decides that the only way to impress his oneeyed dad is to snatch a mysterious artifact from the Dwarves. So it’s off to Nidavellir for mighty battles with titanic robots and dwarf lord Brokkr Warcrafter (wielding a magic hammer called, imaginatively, Hammr). Meanwhile, as Thor literally fulminates when he doesn’t get his way, and Sif fumes at being rewarded for her years of martial training by being assigned as his minder, shape-shifting trickster Loki makes suspiciously friendly overtures to Thor’s sidekick, self-described “Bard of Bards,” Fandral. Even though the chapter heads come with cues, it’s hard to keep the multiple narrators distinct, except perhaps Wygul, Sif’s new feline companion who chimes in at the close. The gags, too, come off as perfunctory, and the story, which is framed in short chapters festooned with frenetic scenes of outsized monsters and costumed kids in stylized postures, barely gets underway before cutting off abruptly. Most characters are drawn with light skin other than Heimdall, Bifrost’s gatekeeper.

Thin sauce over a half-baked side dish. (Adventure. 7-10)

“An engaging tale of weird science as well as a celebration of individuality.”

mixed up

CAT JOKES VS. DOG JOKES/ DOG JOKES VS. CAT JOKES A Read-From-Both-Sides Comic Book

Lewman, David Illus. by John McNamee

Workman (128 pp.)

$9.99 paper | Aug. 15, 2023

9781523512058

Dogs and cats tell jokes at each other’s expense.

A mustached, light-skinned scientist has a machine to translate barks, while a tan-skinned scientist with long hair unveils a contraption that can translate meows. Their parallel discoveries: Most of the time, pets are making jokes about their rivals. Thanks to the unique, “read-from-both-sides” format, readers can flip the book over to see what each species has to say about the other. What follows is a series of comics in which felines and canines tell corny, groan-producing jokes and puns, ranging from the head-scratching (“What do you get when you toss a cat in a Utah lake?” “Salt Lake Kitty”) to the punny (“What do you call two dogs talking side-by-side?” “Parallel barking”) to, at times, the inspired (“What do you call an insect in a cat’s bathroom?” “A litterbug!” “What dog is always inventing desserts?” “The Chocolate Lab”). The perceived snobbishness of cats is a theme. Some jokes will need explaining; parents will brace themselves. A daily limit might be tempting, but the book will inspire many kids to read—often and aloud. The cartoonish illustrations, in subdued colors, feature quite a number of dog breeds and cats of many coats, colors, and body types; in some scenes, dogs are dressed as astronauts in space, while others depict superhero cats flying through the air.

Cheesy fun for cat and dog lovers alike. (Graphic fiction/joke book. 7-11)

MY POWERFUL HAIR

(48 pp.)

$18.99 | March 21, 2023

9781419759437

A Native girl reflects on hair, both her own and her family’s.

The young narrator’s Nokomis (Ojibwe for grandmother) and mother were not permitted to have long hair—her mother’s was deemed “too wild,” while Nokomis’ was shorn at a residential school. The phrase “Our ancestors say” repeats throughout as we learn that “stories and memories are woven” into the young narrator’s hair. Long Indigenous hair is a form of self-expression, honors ancestral knowledge, and is healing medicine, according to the ancestors. Littlebird’s (enrolled Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) bold art matches the power of We Are Water Protectors author Lindstrom’s (Anishinabe/Métis, enrolled Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe) words.

Crisp, striking illustrations reminiscent of woodcuts celebrate life and depict characters’ connections to Mother Earth as leaves swirl and splashes of vibrant colors dance across pages like confetti. Parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, and aunties are included, making for a loving portrayal of a tightknit extended Native family. The stages of the protagonist’s hair growth serve as a timeline of events: When Nimishoomis (grandfather) taught the child to fish, her hair reached her ears; when her brother was born, it was shoulder-length. When Nimishoomis dies, the young girl cuts her hair to send powerful energy into the spirit world with him. As the book ends, the child decides to regrow her hair, and so does her mother. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A deeply moving and inspiring celebration of long hair and its significance in Indigenous cultures. (information on the importance of hair to Native/Indigenous peoples, Ojibwe glossary, author’s note) (Picture book. 5-11)

UNSTOPPABLE How Bayard Rustin Organized the 1963 March on Washington

Long, Michael G.

Illus. by Bea Jackson

Little Bee Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | May 2, 2023

9781499812060

A civil rights luminary finally gets his due.

The March on Washington is most widely remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, but the event and its impact were a dream built by many whose names are criminally undercelebrated. This vital book broadens the narrative by introducing readers to Bayard Rustin, whose contributions to its success are sometimes downplayed or obscured. From the opening line of the book, Long’s narrative lovingly presents Rustin’s history of good troublemaking, starting with his first arrest for sitting in the White section of a movie theater in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania, to the influence of his mentor, A. Philip Randolph, who, with Rustin, came up with the idea for the 1963 March on Washington. The prose works in perfect harmony with Jackson’s warmly colored, stunning illustrations, which present Rustin as a gifted, passionate visionary whose talents helped turn the march from a dream into an unprecedented success. This work’s greatest contribution is its unflinching honesty in demonstrating the backlash Rustin faced for being gay, both from White America and his own Black colleagues within the movement, who felt that his sexuality would detract from its success. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A joyful tribute to the work of an important American hero. (author’s note, information on Long’s research) (Picturebook biography. 6-9)

Lindstrom, Carole Illus. by Steph Littlebird Abrams

CLEMENTINE FOX AND THE GREAT ISLAND ADVENTURE

Luna, Leigh Graphix/Scholastic (208 pp.)

$22.99 | $12.99 paper | May 16, 2023

9781338356250

9781338356243 paper

Series: Clementine Fox, 1

An escape from math class takes a turn for the magical.

Clementine, an anthropomorphic fox, loves adventure and hates math, but tell that to her concerned mom, who wants her to start seeing a tutor. Eager to escape the pressures of school, Clementine hatches a scheme to stow away on a ferry turtle and visit her great-aunt Marnie’s island with her friend Nubbins the squirrel. The resulting quest ends up involving Penelope the rabbit, Jesse the otter, fairylike siblings Puck and Flora, and several worried family members. The story nimbly balances all of these characters and their branching subplots without shortchanging any of them. For example, tension between Clementine and Penelope starts with rude comments but gives way to genuine connection, with each of them given time and space to grow. The cuteness and hilarity of the animal cast and richness of the coastal setting make every page a treat for the eyes. Hungry giants, conversations with trees, and a magic kiln all expand the possibilities of this story’s world without straining credulity. Clementine finds a style of learning math that works for her in a satisfying character arc that feels natural.

Winsome adventures in friendship, magic, and hands-on visual learning. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

KETANJI Justice Jackson’s Journey to the U.S. Supreme Court

Magoon, Kekla

Illus.

by Laura Freeman

Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (40 pp.)

$19.99 | June 20, 2023

9780063296169

Magoon and Freeman collaborate for a picture-book biography of the first Black female Supreme Court justice.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s parents named her “lovely one,” dressed her in dashikis, and kept her hair natural, helping her to develop pride and belief in herself and her future. As a young person, she exuded confidence and sought ways to spread her “shining light,” from student government to the debate team. She excelled at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She married, had two daughters, and held 10 different law-related positions before being nominated to the Supreme Court, an event that placed her in the national spotlight, where once again she inspired people with her poise. Her 2022 confirmation as the first Black woman Supreme Court justice broke a new barrier. Magoon’s straightforward prose allows Ketanji’s life story to speak for itself. While younger readers

may get lost in some of the details of Ketanji’s adult experiences in law, the theme of Ketanji’s “shining star” connects the phases of her life and shows how she found her purpose. Freeman’s digital illustrations work hardest on spreads showing relationships between characters, highlighting the special roles of her parents and children in her life. The images of Ketanji become a bit repetitive, but readers won’t tire of the still too rare positive imagery of a superstar Black woman. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A needed celebration of America’s potential. (author’s note, glossary, timeline, bibliography, further reading) (Picturebook biography. 6-10)

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE PARTY

Marks, Darcy

Aladdin (416 pp.)

$18.99 | July 18, 2023

9781534483392

Life at a new school can be hell, especially when you’re in Hell.

After accidentally trapping themselves on Earth and battling the escaped soul of evil Salem witch trial judge Samuel Parris in Grounded for All Eternity (2022), fallen angels Malachi (the group’s leader), Lilith (the intelligence officer and potential love interest), Crowley (the suave magic user), and Aleister (the muscle) are back in Hell and ready to take on a new challenge: being separated into different schools for the first time. They’re coping with it as best they can, but when odd things start happening in Hell—odd enough to get even Lucifer’s attention—the foursome work alongside friends old and new, discovering that the primordial force of Chaos is on the rise, threatening all the dimensions. Fans of the first book will be thrilled to catch up with these fallen angels, but the story unfortunately drags, continually hinting that something bad is coming but meandering aimlessly as the characters try to find it. Finally, three-quarters of the way through the book, the pacing picks up. Readers who make it this far may discover the spark of the fun that made the first book enjoyable, but it’s a long trek to get there and for little reward. It’s a shame because the premise is interesting.

Sadly unfocused. (Fantasy. 9-12)

WALKING TOGETHER

Marshall, Albert & Louise Zimanyi

Illus. by Emily Kewageshig

Annick Press (40 pp.)

$18.99 | May 2, 2023

9781773217765

In Mi’kmaq culture, honoring the interconnection among humans, plants, animals, and land is everyone’s responsibility.

In their debut picture-book collaboration, Elder Marshall (Mi’kmaq) and Zimanyi emphasize the power and importance of

having the right relationship with the Earth and its many inhabitants. “When we walk together / in a good way on Turtle Island, / we learn we are all connected. / We are never alone. We need each other. Mawikwayk—Together, we are strong.” Alongside glowing, colorful illustrations from Anishnaabe illustrator Kewageshig, this tale goes beyond discussing mere environmental responsibility. Emphasizing intergenerational learning, Indigenous storytelling, and the wisdom of nonhuman life, Marshall and Zimanyi describe the concepts of Etuaptmumk (“Two-eyed seeing”) and Netukulimk (“protecting Mother Earth for the ancestors and for present and future generations”). These ways of Indigenous knowing underscore interdependence and reverence, helping young readers understand that “we take only if there is enough. / We ask before we take / and we listen for the answer. / We share.” Though the narrative is simply told, the deep lessons of Mawikwayk, Etuaptmumk, and Netukulimk will provide readers with much food for thought. Backmatter includes an acknowledgment of the late Mi’kmaq spiritual leader and healer Chief Charles Labrador, whose teachings are reflected throughout. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A moving read to instill love and respect for the natural world. (Picture book. 4-10)

THERE’S ALWAYS ROOM FOR ONE MORE

PUMPKIN DAY AT THE ZOO

Meissner, Susan

Illus. by Pablo Pino

Thomas Nelson (32 pp.)

$17.99 | July 4, 2023

9781400243389

Once a year, families and farmers bring barrow-loads of squash for the zoo animals.

McGrath,

Robyn Illus. by Ishaa Lobo

Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.)

$18.99 | Aug. 29, 2023

9781665925372

Preparing for Grandpa to move in means saying goodbye to a beloved table and embracing the chance to make memories with a new one.

Although excited for Grandpa’s arrival, young Clare feels conflicted when Mama announces that their family needs a bigger dining table. Memories of their old table and anxious questions swirl in Clare’s mind as the family brings home and lovingly fixes up their new one. Neighbors, friends, and family stop by with things to help Grandpa feel at home and receive cordial invitations (“There’s always room for one more”) to join them for dinner in return. But change is hard, and Clare eventually dissolves into tears. Mama comforts an overwhelmed Clare and says that Grandpa might be missing what feels like home to him, too. Clare is encouraged by the suggestion that a larger table means more room to make new memories, and the child’s first memory will be to help bake a peach cobbler, Clare and Grandpa’s favorite treat. The family puts the finishing touches on their feast with the arrival of guests and then finally Grandpa, who is pleased at the surprise. McGrath deftly immerses readers in Clare’s mind, while Lobo’s warm and whimsical illustrations capture this caring, tightly knit Black family and their diverse community. With the party now in full swing and new memories to cherish, Clare fully understands that “there’s always room for one more.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A helpful tale for building empathy and navigating change. (Picture book. 4-9)

Popular novelist Meissner branches out into children’s picture books with this joyous paean to animals and pumpkins. We learn that pumpkins are “crunchy” and “slippery” and that they have seeds. Every page conveys the same message: The animals really like eating the pumpkins! Some rhymes are slightly strained (tummies is rhymed with yummy), and to fill out a line, the author sometimes resorts to repetition: “it’s true, it’s true”; “make way, make way!” Luckily, the exuberant illustrations carry the day. True to Pino’s usual style, the animals are cute, fluffy, and capable of behavior that their wild counterparts aren’t. An airborne hippo leaps acrobatically to grab a lobbed pumpkin, jaws agape in a hungry smile; Dumbo-esque elephants grin toothily. Most of the eating occurs against the backdrop of a zoo with very casual fencing, where zebras cavort close to tiger predators, separated only by a moat. Overindulging produces distended bellies and a peaceable kingdom, with the fiercest carnivores ignoring prey just a paw-length away. Green and brown are relieved by the bright orange on every page. Though most pumpkin-related books are typically tied to spooky season, there are no jack-o’-lanterns here—just voracious animals and the gourds they love. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Refreshingly, an autumn book that isn’t about Halloween. (Picture book. 4-8)

ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE Orozco Belt, Gabriela

Illus. by Richy

Sánchez Ayala

Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (32 pp.)

$18.99 | June 27, 2023

978-0063206632

A young Latine girl’s housing uncertainty reveals the strength of her family’s bonds.

Maribel helps pack as her family prepares to move in with Tía Carmen. Maribel’s father has lost his job, and they all hope the situation is temporary—just for a little while, “un ratito,” until they can find a permanent home. Maribel recalls other situations where family members made way for guests such as when Tía Hector stayed with them after he was flooded out of his house. Maribel muses on how sometimes “un ratito” can feel like an eternity, like when she had to stay indoors after breaking her arm last summer. Other times, like when her grandparents visit from Costa Rica, un ratito isn’t nearly enough time. Maribel’s sister, Aurelia, worries that Tía Carmen’s house will feel crowded with so many people, but Maribel reassures her that it will be like a fun sleepover. Though ultimately the experience

“This story about temporary situations makes for a book that is likely to resonate for a long time.”

only for a little while

is sometimes difficult, Maribel loves being with her family and hearing stories of her father and her aunt’s childhood in Mexico. Unitalicized Spanish words and phrases are incorporated; sometimes an English translation is included. The message is solid: Families provide and sacrifice for each other, especially when times are hard. The illustrations use warm tones and affectionate body language and friendly faces to convey the love shared by Maribel’s family. (This book was reviewed digitally.) This story about temporary situations makes for a book that is likely to resonate for a long time. (Picture book. 4-8)

PLEASE DON’T BITE ME! Insects That Buzz, Bite and Sting

Pakpour, Nazzy Illus. by Owen Davey

Flying Eye Books (64 pp.)

$19.99 | July 4, 2023

9781838748623

Introducing irritating insects. Slightly mistitled, this British import covers six insect families that have been annoying humans throughout history (but not all of whom bite): mosquitoes, lice, wasps, cockroaches, fleas, and bedbugs. Opening with a definition of insects and the entomologists who study them, Pakpour proceeds to describe each of these large families in three to five spreads: appearance, impact on humans, habits and habitat, and development from egg to adult insect. The author differentiates between the complete metamorphoses of mosquitoes, wasps, and fleas and the incomplete metamorphoses of lice, cockroaches, and bedbugs. She notes that, unlike most of the other insects covered here, cockroaches don’t feed on human blood—though our food, wallpaper, and fingernails are all on the menu. For fleas, humans are a second choice. Pakpour describes how to distinguish between male mosquitoes, which don’t bite, and females, which do. The text is presented in short paragraphs with clear headings and subheadings, all set against Davey’s colorful, stylized images of an astonishing variety of insects. In an elementary overview of such a large subject, obviously much will be left out, but Pakpour has picked intriguing details about the specialized spit of mosquitoes and lice, how wasps pre-chew food for their babies, and cockroach-inspired robots. She concludes with a statement about the importance of insects to the world’s ecosystems.

An intriguing look at bugs (and other insects) that bug us. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 7-10)

KITTY-CAM Ready-To-Read Pre-Level 1

Palatini, Margie

Illus. by Dan Yaccarino

Simon Spotlight (32 pp.)

$17.99 | June 27, 2023

9781665927321

Series: Critter-Cam

A handful of mostly monosyllabic words conveys a cat’s active day.

Webcam on its head, the cat gets up to a variety of activities. Each spread switches from the cat’s antics on the verso to what the camera captures on the recto. Vulnerable in an open fishbowl, a goldfish peers up and expresses surprise, submission, and fear. The cat grabs for the fish only to discover with dismay that water is “WET!” and to try vigorously to dispel the drops (“Shake. Shake. Shake”) while the fish laughs smugly. Luckily, the cat has now spotted a box of cat treats atop a nearby table. The cat shakes the table, causing the box to topple and releasing a rain of fish-shaped kitty treats: “Yum! Yum! Yum! Yum! YUM.” Washing, stretching, and yawning naturally follow. Then the cat spots a ball of “yarn? YARN!” Then it’s time for a brief mouse chase. When the rodent hides in a hole in the wall, the cat proceeds to “Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.” Waiting isn’t easy, and soon the cat falls asleep: “Kitty-Cam…FADE OUT. Good night, Kitty.” Though some scenes might initially puzzle viewers, Yaccarino’s signature stylized illustrations manage the changes of perspective quite deftly. Spotting the gradually diminishing battery images adds more excitement.

Effectively combines a novel storytelling strategy and limited vocabulary. (Early reader. 3-6)

SHARK-CAM Ready-To-Read Pre-Level 1

Palatini, Margie

Illus. by Dan Yaccarino

Simon Spotlight (32 pp.)

$17.99 | June 27, 2023

9781665927352

Series: Critter-Cam

For pre-readers familiar with screens and too young for Jaws

A shark (“Swim, Shark. Swim”) sporting a webcam on its head grins at us. Right-hand pages show the webcam feed: the terrified faces of small, shell-less sea creatures exclaiming, “TEETH!” “LOTS OF TEETH!” After the sea life frantically departs (“BYE!”), a pink octopus comes into view. In real life, the octopus is prey, but here the two bow cordially to each other as the shark asks the octopus to dance. “Tango? Mambo? Cha-cha-cha?” wonders the octopus, and they proceed to “swing” and “sway” before the blissed-out octopus and shark part. Suddenly, the following page reveals a huge whale, and Shark is sucked into its maw along with smaller fry. The whale

gender identity for kids

seems to have baleen plates, but everything in its mouth is swallowed down a gullet (with a uvula, which whales don’t have). It’s “very dark” inside the whale, but somehow, when the mouth opens again, shark and fry swim out. Now the “hungry!” shark spots the bottom of a small boat on the surface and jumps in, ejecting the tan-skinned person fishing. As the human swims away in the distance, Shark contentedly reclines, eating an apple abandoned in the quick exit: “Party on, Shark!” Small viewers might struggle with the illustrator’s whale-mouth sequence, but the use of simple, short words makes it a solid choice, and the bright graphics convincingly simulate a camera’s-eye view. Unreliable on marine biology but effectively deploying a limited vocabulary. (Early reader. 3-6)

THE BEST WOULD YOU RATHER? BOOK

Hundreds of Funny, Silly, and Brain-Bending Questionand-Answer Games for Kids

Panton, Gary Illus. by Andrew Pinder Penguin Workshop (128 pp.)

$6.99 paper | July 4, 2023

9780593523742

Arranged into quests, pathways, and games, a series of “would you rather” scenarios will entertain a wide swath of readers.

While some of the questions are listed thematically (“Odd Bods,” “All Grown Up”), the text is also broken up by an interactive “choose your own adventure”–style treasure hunt through the book, board game–type paths to follow, and flowchart exercises. The nonlinear nature of the book makes it great for browsing or jumping around. Some questions offer opportunities for internal reflection and deeper conversations (such as whether readers would prefer working a job they hate for lots of money or one they love for free), while many are silly and nonsensical (superhuman strength or X-ray vision? A nose that always runs or a butt that always itches?). Though there’s plenty of potty humor and gross-out gags that will make adults groan, hilarious illustrations add a lot of visual interest. This will be a huge hit with readers of joke books and an excellent pick for spur-of-the-moment conversation starters with young people. The drawings depict characters who are diverse in terms of age and race. Beware of a handful of potentially body-shaming scenarios.

Will provide much entertainment for young readers and their grown-ups. (Activity book. 8-12)

CLOUDS OVER CALIFORNIA

Parsons, Karyn

Little, Brown (320 pp.)

$16.99 | July 11, 2023

9780316484077

An almost 12-year-old in 1970s Santa Monica, California, navigates family and friendship tensions.

Stevie, perceptive and introverted, has recently moved with her parents to a new house on the other side of town and is starting over at a new school where she struggles to make friends. Her former best friend has been hanging out with the mean girls and ignoring her. As if that wasn’t enough change, her parents are fighting: Against her White father’s wishes, her Black homemaker mother wants to get a degree and a job. Having her rebellious 15-year-old cousin from Boston move in shakes things up even more—with Naomi around, Stevie gets exposed to the ideals of the Black Panther Party, which helps boost her confidence. Meanwhile, Stevie’s mother is acting strangely—receiving secret phone calls, running odd errands, and spending time with a mystery friend. Stevie is desperate to know what’s going on—and, assuming the worst, to keep her father from finding out. Despite Stevie’s attempts to hold her family and friendships together, she may have to come to terms with a new normal. The author weaves together multiple storylines exploring the changing social landscape of the times, such as the Black Power movement and shifting gender roles. However, a lack of depth and uneven pacing hinder the story. Nevertheless, the characterization is strong throughout as Stevie demonstrates growth, and the secondary characters are well defined.

A relationship-driven novel that is strongest in its portrayal of one girl’s journey. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

GENDER IDENTITY FOR KIDS A Book About Finding Yourself, Understanding Others, and Respecting Everybody!

Passchier, Andy Little, Brown (96 pp.)

$15.99 | June 6, 2023

9780316411226

This straightforward guide invites readers to explore all things gender.

Doodle-style illustrations, lots of white space, and casual, direct text set an accessible and supportive tone right from the opening pages. A cast of characters who are diverse in terms of race, gender, and ability are introduced with their names and pronouns, spotlighting different ways of existing and expressing oneself. Characters’ identities are deepened in subsequent chapters alongside stylized, speech bubble–filled art. The kids explore (sometimes comedically, as in a joke comparing

“A thoughtful, thorough, and inclusive resource.”

party for everyone

pizza and cinnamon rolls to gender roles) concepts and ideas presented, including sex versus gender, the gender binary, and more. A variety of typefaces and text colors help to clarify the information-packed pages; inset boxes highlight definitions; and kid-friendly metaphors engage and inform: “Having a gender assigned to you at birth, along with your sex, is a little bit like having your favorite color picked for you.” Topics like labels, pronouns, coming out, and anti-trans attitudes are confronted head-on, carefully and with age-appropriate nuance. Self-care suggestions and affirmations abound, and readers are encouraged to focus on their wants and needs and to take a break from the book at any time. At the end of each chapter, main ideas are revisited, followed by a list of questions that prompt deeper personal reflection.

A thoughtful, thorough, and inclusive resource. (author’s note, recommended resources) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

TRIBECA

Pearlstein, Howard & Amanda Pearlstein

Illus. by Renate Potter Marshall Cavendish (32 pp.)

$9.99 paper | July 18, 2023

9789815009484

A cat with three legs fears she won’t be accepted in her new home.

Tribeca’s foster mom says she’s just “purrfect,” but the bright orange-and-black calico kitty feels like “a total CATastrophe.” The neighborhood cats laugh at her missing front leg even though she can still run, pounce, and “chase those pesky birds off the balcony like nobody’s business.” So when her foster mom tells her she’s going to her new home tomorrow, Tribeca bristles with worries. What if her new family wants a “normal” cat? When she imagines being kicked out— literally—into a downpour, bedraggled and dejected, even dog lovers will want to scoop her up for a hug. To Tribeca’s astonishment, not only does her new dad pronounce her “perfect,” she gets a shaggy canine sister, too…who’s missing a back leg. Tribeca, whose experiences being bullied have led her to internalize ableist attitudes, laughs at her new sibling and tells her that having three legs isn’t “normal.” But the dog is unfazed; why be “normal,” she asks, “when you can be dog-gone pawsome?” Encouraged, Tribeca adopts a self-accepting “cat-itude.” Appealingly, the resilient Tribeca is more than a furball of anxiety. Her narration, sprinkled with puns and feline quirks, balances self-deprecation with humor, while endearing, animated illustrations convey Tribeca’s feistiness as well as her fear. Tribeca’s foster mom is light-skinned; her new dad is brown-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A warm and fuzzy testament to the importance of pawsitive role models. (Picture book. 4-8)

PARTY FOR EVERYONE

Pirrone, Francesca Clavis (32 pp.)

$18.95 | July 11, 2023

9781605378442

Series: Piggy, 4

Near catastrophe awaits an altruistic piggy, but true friends will always come to the rescue.

It’s Piggy’s birthday, and you know what that means. Time to throw a party! Piggy handles all the decorations as well as a plethora of delicious (and healthy!) treats. Everything from sweet strawberries to fun fruit kabobs is on display, and as Piggy invites Rabbit, Cat, Mouse, Turtle, and Bird in, they load up their plates with the goodies. Finally, everyone has arrived, and Piggy can’t wait to dig in…only to find that all the food (except the corncobs, which he doesn’t really like) is gone. Chagrined, Piggy’s friends find a perfect solution when they pop that corn on the stove, and Piggy gets a tasty treat, too. Right from the get-go, the book is steeped in good feelings, as Piggy indulges in the simple pleasures of caring for others first. Images from this little Dutch import are mostly black and white, punctuated with bright red, yellow, blue, or green. By the time everyone is performing the “popcorn boogie-woogie” at the end, kids will be wanting to throw their own friends a birthday party worth remembering. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Selfless party hosting for the win. Charm incarnate. (Picture book. 2-5)

INVISIBLE THINGS

Pizza, Andy J. & Sophie Miller Chronicle Books (52 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

978-1-79721-520-4

A field guide of sorts to the intangibles of life.

Encapsulating the old saying “The important things in life aren’t things,” Pizza and Miller shepherd readers through visual representations of and reflections on emotions, sensory experiences, and concepts. First, opening endpapers direct readers to put on a pair of “invisible ‘invisible things’ spotting glasses.” Rather than plunging right into the representation of abstract emotions like fear, gratitude, or love, the text starts with the senses (apart from sight) that help us experience and navigate the world. No mention is made of people with sensory disabilities as the book examines sounds, smells, tastes, and touch, all with cartoonstyle representations that would fit right in with the Little Miss and Mr. Men books. Next come more complex concepts and emotions, also visualized on the page. Direct address, humor, and text that prompts readers to answer questions and reflect on their own feelings and perceptions combine with the art to encourage engagement. The resulting interactive nature of the book may make it best suited to one-on-one or small-group

“Selfless party hosting for the win. Charm incarnate.”

readings rather than large-group storytimes, but no matter how this book is shared, it is sure to spark conversation. Human characters depicted are diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Make sure you see this playful, wise title. (Picture book. 4-10)

PETE AND LEONIE

The Great Baby Swap

Poster, Zoë Tilley

Dial Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | July 18, 2023 9780525553793

A pair of babies switch places for the day.

Lively Leonie, a human baby drawn to climbing “dirty, dangerous things,” and peaceable Pete, a coyote pup who enjoys a tidy bed and whose politeness sets him apart from his pack, wander into each other’s homes one morning. Pete’s mother mistakes the small energetic creature in a pointy-eared hoodie for her own child, and Leonie’s tired dad is too exhausted to realize that the baby who has crawled into the crib has fur. Though “there was something a little off about the way Pete smelled…and the way Leonie’s nose twitched,” the parents go with the flow. Poster’s figures are both delicate and comical. Leonie has a look of kinetic determination, Pete of mildness and calm; both have the soft, rounded look of the very young. The babies enjoy their new environments. “Pete liked the woods. They were dirty!” accompanies an image of Leonie romping with coyotes. “Leonie liked the cottage. It was pleasant,” the text observes dryly as Pete settles in— readers in on the switch will be amused. Eventually the parents exchange the babies for their own (but meet again for a picnic). Poster’s brushed velvety gray backgrounds, adept use of light and shadow, and muted palette—warm pinks and peaches with blue highlighted dialogue balloons—convey a sense of friendliness and safe exploration. Human characters are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A comfortably silly adventure for wild babies and tame ones, too. (Picture book. 2-5)

THE HORRIBLE BAG OF TERRIBLE THINGS

Renzetti, Rob Penguin Workshop (224 pp.)

$17.99 | July 25, 2023

9780593519523

Series: The Horrible Series, 1

Eleven-year-old Zenith Maelstrom is on a thrilling mission to save his older sister, Apogee, who was taken by a scary creature down into the world of GrahBhag.

Zenith is stuck at home with 13-year-old Apogee when a mysterious weathered and worn bag appears on their front porch. Curious about this unmarked carryall, he brings it

inside—and out crawls the horrific, spiderlike Shlurp, which drags Apogee down into the bag. Zenith follows her, and once inside, the magical, eerie world of GrahBhag opens up before him. He’s thrust into a harrowing journey to save his sister before the unthinkable happens. Renzetti’s story is fast paced and fully imagined, with completely original creatures and characters. The small, literal-minded gargoyle Kreeble proves an unlikely helpful companion for Zenith, perched on his shoulder throughout. The large ravens, Muncie and Hugh, are likable, interesting characters whose work in gathering and preserving history and knowledge makes the descriptions of the Collectory some of the most vivid in the story. The bond between brother and sister is well drawn and believable, as Zenith is desperate for a chance to protect and save his sibling. A painful story from their past shines light on just how much they rely on each other. The ending, resolved and yet open, sets the stage for a follow-up. Imaginative and immersive. (Horror. 8-12)

SAM WITH ANTS IN HIS PANTS

Reynolds, April Illus. by Katie Kordesh

Anne Schwartz/Random (40 pp.)

$18.99 | $21.99 PLB | June 20, 2023

978-0-593-56460-8

9780593564615 PLB

The tale of a wild imagination put to good use.

Sam, a Black boy whose Momma says he has “ants in his pants,” can’t be still. It’s time for his afternoon nap, but Sam is uninterested. Although he yells “NOOO!” he goes to his room, shuts the door…and opens his favorite book, African Wildlife, which features a lion on the cover. Immediately, a herd of gazelles jumps out and bounds around his room, followed by a pride of lions, a zeal of zebras, and several other groups of animals. Each zoological collection makes a sound that provides great fodder for interactive read-alouds. Observant readers will notice that Sam’s drawings on the wall of his room and his stuffed animals resemble those that have emerged from the book. Like Maurice Sendak’s Max, Sam isn’t intimidated by wild things—he even dances with the leap of leopards. He also attempts to retrieve his shoes from the crash of rhinos, which find his soles quite tasty. The loudest growl of all—from Sam’s tummy—gets everyone’s attention and leads to a satisfying ending. Throughout this lively picture book, readers will learn many collective nouns for animals and even a few facts. Kordesh’s whimsical illustrations, rendered in watercolor and ink, make the animals that could be frightening humorous and entertaining. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Clever, immersive fun. (Picture book. 3-7)

THE SUN AND THE STAR A Nico di Angelo Adventure

Riordan, Rick & Mark Oshiro

Disney-Hyperion (480 pp.)

$19.99 | May 2, 2023

9781368081153

In this stand-alone featuring Nico di Angelo from the Percy Jackson universe, the young ghost king and his luminous boyfriend must journey back to nightmarish Tartarus to rescue an old friend.

As the last summer-infused days at Camp Half-Blood fade away, Nico, son of Hades, can no longer ignore a voice that calls for his help. A recurring prophecy drives Nico to accept his quest involving a dreaded return to Tartarus, the deepest, bleakest part of his father’s domain, to rescue Bob, a reformed Titan formerly known as Iapetus and an unfortunate casualty of one of Percy and Annabeth’s adventures. Joining him this time, however, is his buoyant boyfriend, Will Solace, son of Apollo. From the onset, their descent into the Underworld introduces new foes—both seen and unseen—that push Nico and Will to the psychological brink, confronting them with persistent traumas from Nico’s past and ever present doubts over their burgeoning relationship. The further Nico and Will venture into Tartarus, the more the demigods must grapple with the darkness that awaits. This collaborative effort between Riordan and Oshiro maintains earlier Percy Jackson entries’ glorious knack for mythical machinations, profoundly sharp conflicts, and contemporary humor. At its core, this stellar tale centers a richly woven love story that shines with ease between two boys who are seemingly different from one another—“grumpy little ball of darkness” Nico and “demigod Care Bear” Will. A standout. (glossary) (Fantasy. 10-14)

WISHING SEASON

Rissi, Anica Mrose

Quill Tree Books/

HarperCollins (240 pp.)

$18.99 | June 27, 2023

9780063258907

Eleven-year-old Lily Neff struggles to accept the death of her twin brother, Anders.

Summer break has begun, but Lily, emerging from the school bus and trudging up to her home on Deer Isle, Maine, isn’t looking forward to it. Her single mother, deeply depressed following Anders’ death from cancer four months earlier, doesn’t greet her—and Lily doesn’t expect her to. Lily also feels Anders’ death keenly, but she has a secret: She can go to a space in the field behind her house that she calls the overlap, and Anders shows up, just as solid as he was in life. The two play and talk together, and this

eases Lily’s grief. Less a ghost story than a poignant allegory, the scenes of Lily and Anders together are peppered with an appealing gallows humor (“Anders grinned and took a practice stroke. ‘Croquet chaos. I like it. Rule Three: Dead kid starts,’ ”) that sidesteps the maudlin and adds a delightful layer of wit. As the weeks go by, Anders appears less frequently and becomes less substantial, and Lily panics, trying not to lose him. Meanwhile, Lily is befriended by Quinn, an older girl, and starts to accept a new friendship. By turns gentle and forthright, this well-paced story leads readers to questions about loss and the durability of relationships. The island setting is authentically and lovingly described, adding measurably to the story’s ambiance. Characters read White.

A droll, well-paced, and deeply moving book about loss and friendship. (Fiction. 9-12)

I ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY LOVE MY SPOTS

Rivera, Lid’ya C.

Illus. by Niña Mata

HarperCollins (40 pp.)

$19.99 | June 6, 2023

9780063119970

A Black girl with vitiligo celebrates what makes her different.

This utterly charming picture book from vitiligo advocate Rivera exudes self-love from cover to cover. The story opens with the protagonist admiring herself in the mirror: “I stand up and I stand out / I am the light and the spark.” She admires the beauty marks on her face, hands, and legs. Others are curious about her “patches,” “dots,” or “blotches.” The child introduces the term vitiligo to explain why her skin looks the way it does. Her mother tells her, “Vitiligo makes you YOU!” while her father says she’s “royalty through and through.” The young protagonist proudly proclaims, “My skin is fly!” Whether she is playing in a cardboard house, floating paper boats in a stream during a rainy day at the park, or attending art class, her confidence is infectious. Depicting a diverse community, Mata’s digital illustrations are full of texture and joy; the protagonist cuts an undeniably endearing figure. In an author’s note, Rivera discusses the bullying she confronted growing up due to her vitiligo; she also includes photos of herself as a child, a brief explanation of the condition, and a short glossary of terms such as depigmentation and melanin (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Much-needed encouragement to love the skin we’re in. (Picture book. 4-8)

BARELY FLOATING Rivera,

Lilliam Kokila (240

pp.)

$17.99 | Aug. 29, 2023

9780593323120

Tough-talking 12-year-old Natalia never backs down from a challenge.

Whether it’s a fistfight with a boy who is disrespecting her cousin or a swimming race against a much older teen at the city pool, Nat’s confidence and tenacity compel her to finish anything she starts, no matter what the odds. Nat’s parents, a community activist and a college professor, have instilled a strong sense of justice in her and her three older brothers. When she becomes enchanted with Black-owned synchronized swimming team the L.A. Mermaids, she knows she needs to try out—even if her fat body and Latina heritage aren’t the norm for the sport. Her parents veto the idea, citing the dominance in elite synchronized swimming of thin, White girls. In an ill-conceived plan, headstrong Nat decides to join the team anyway and begins learning the sport in secret. Joining the L.A. Mermaids brings her new friends— Daniel, whose race is not specified and who is the sole boy in a female-dominated sport, and Ethiopian American Ayana, who struggles with an overzealous mom. In contrast to these blooming friendships, Nat’s connection with her best friend has frayed over the summer, and she isn’t sure why. She must tame her temper and learn to own her mistakes to keep her relationships with family and friends afloat. Nat’s radical selfacceptance is a beautiful example for readers: Her unapologetic self-love and empathy make her a compelling character. A body-positive story of growing up that’s sure to make a splash. (Fiction. 9-13)

I AM HUNGRY

Rosen, Michael Illus. by Robert Starling Candlewick (32 pp.)

$17.99 | July 11, 2023

978-1-5362-2510-5

This little squirrel is hungry enough to eat a….

The feeder is empty. The yard seems barren, too. The squirrel says, “I’m so hungry I’ll…eat a warm roll, popcorn in a bowl, one plate of steamed rice, two chocolate mice….” This ravenous rodent could eat cheese or peas. Very soon, the squirrel’s imagination runs away with them—the protagonist dreams of eating a fleeing “gingerbread man, a frying pan, a nasty fright, a dark and stormy night.” In the end, the squirrel seems to have found one last peanut from the feeder to satisfy their hunger. Prolific author Rosen reteams with artist Starling for the follow-up to I Am Angry (2021). Instead of a furious, adorable kitten, the child stand-in is an earnest red squirrel. The author’s “Note to Grown-Ups” lets readers know that the squirrel is playing a game and using their imagination. Even so,

the conclusion may perplex some. This one isn’t entirely a miss for Rosen, but it isn’t as amazing as many of his others. However, Starling’s cartoon illustrations are silly and wonderful as usual—the little squirrel is an endearing hero, whether making off with ice cream cones, climbing a ladder to nibble on “a bit of the moon,” or darting off with a piece of fried fish while a flock of ravenous sea gulls follows. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A peculiar poem about being peckish. (Picture book. 2-5)

THE ABSENT ALPACAS

Roy, Ron & Kayla Whaley

Illus. by Chloe Burgett

Random House (96 pp.)

$6.99 paper | $16.99 PLB | July 4, 2023

9780593488997

9780593489000 PLB

Series: A TO Z Animal Mysteries, 1

In this chaper-book spinoff from Roy’s A to Z Mysteries series, an amateur sleuth and friends work to solve a disappearance case.

Abbi Wallace and her twin best friends, Lydia and Daniel Herrera, are bound for the Maine State Fair. They’re excited to see the costume contest—for alpacas! They’ll be rooting for the Herreras’ family friend’s entry, Alpaca in Wonderland. But when they arrive, the contest is delayed indefinitely, since all the alpacas (except for Alpaca in Wonderland) are missing! Now the Herreras’ friend Margery Meadows has fallen under suspicion. Abbi’s adoptive mom is a mystery writer, so Abbi feels up for looking into the disappearance. The trio look for clues in the contestants’ barn, which take them into the woods behind the fair, where Lydia and Daniel help to clear a path for Abbi’s electric wheelchair. They find the missing alpacas at Meadows’ Meadows, Margery’s farm and animal sanctuary, but the reason is more complicated than they realize. This easy-to-read chapter book begins an alphabetically titled series sure to intrigue amateur sleuths and animal lovers. As in many children’s mysteries, the low stakes keep the crime fairly benign, but the characters’ personal investment gives the search meaning. Burgett’s illustrations are Saturday-morning-cartoon friendly, nearly ready to leap onto your television screen. Abbi appears White in the illustrations, while Margery and her adult son are tan-skinned. The twins are brown-skinned and cued as Latine.

Good fun. (Fiction. 7-11)

SPRECKLE’S SNACK SURPRISE

Salsbury, Sandra

Peachtree (40 pp.)

$18.99 | July 4, 2023

9781682634820

Is life without decent snacks worth living?

Spreckle, a red dragon inexplicably hatched among farm chickens, appreciates

“A body-positive story of growing up that’s sure to make a splash.”

barely floating

her fine home, cozy bed, fluffy mama, and snuggly siblings but dislikes the between-meals fare that the chickens appreciate. You try slimy slugs and dried corn. So Spreckle flies the coop. Life outside the henhouse is rife with goodies, but Spreckle is unimpressed. A colorful ice pop from a passing ice cream truck looks perfect but is a melting, messy disappointment. Spreckle glumly decides there are “no good snacks anywhere in the entire world.” When it starts to rain, Spreckle realizes that maybe food isn’t as important as her loving mama and siblings, who find and comfort the cold, lonely dragon. Spreckle catches a cold in the rain, and a fiery sneeze results in Spreckle’s inadvertently discovering the best snack ever. (Hint: Think heated dried corn kernels.) This sweet, comical tale is downright delicious, and children will gobble it up. Spreckle is an adorably winning character who finds what she’s been looking for at home in the bosom of family—a reassuring message for kids. The spirited illustrations, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and Photoshop (art media are riotously noted on the back cover’s “nutritional label”), are enhanced with amusing font changes, insets, arrows, and onomatopoeic sound effects. Background human figures are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Readers will savor this delectable treat and will want to return to it again and again. (Picture book. 4-7)

BUZZING

Sattin, Samuel Illus. by Rye Hickman Little, Brown (224 pp.)

$12.99 paper | July 18, 2023

9780316628419

A middle schooler with obsessivecompulsive disorder navigates family, friendship, and role-playing games. Isaac, who has light brown skin and dark curly hair, was recently diagnosed with OCD. He constantly hears the metaphorical buzzing of his intrusive thoughts, depicted as cute but cruel cartoon bees. The artwork makes good use of color to bring readers into Isaac’s world. His bees are always brightly colored, as are the panels depicting positive experiences such as his art, the friends he is beginning to make, and the fantasy world of their Dungeons & Dragons–like role-playing game. In contrast, school and home are shown in drab, largely gray and beige tones. Isaac’s mom does her best to support and protect him, but her efforts slide into being overprotective and controlling. Over the course of the narrative, however, she learns to trust Isaac and support him as he figures out his own path. With their mom’s attention on Isaac, his sister, Miriam, feels ignored, and she takes this out on him. This is a sensitive depiction of an unfortunate reality: When one sibling has a difficult diagnosis, others often feel pushed aside. In this case, both siblings are ultimately able to support each other while expressing their needs to their mother. This book provides a positive, sympathetic introduction to living with OCD, with appeal for readers who have the same diagnosis as well as those who do not.

An original exploration of living with mental illness. (supplemental art) (Graphic fiction. 9-13)

BUBBLE TROUBLE

Shang, Wendy Wan-Long

Scholastic (240 pp.)

$18.99 | July 18, 2023

9781338802146

Boba tea may be the source of—and the solution to—this middle schooler’s troubles.

Twelve-year-old music lover Chloe desperately wants to go on her school’s Broadway trip despite the teasing of her classmate Henry, “Mr. I-Hate-Broadway.” But the cost for the shows, meals, and transportation is $375, and ever since Chloe’s mom died, her dad has been working from home as an inventor, and she’s sure the money’s not there. Sabrina, Chloe’s best friend, is eager to help her raise the funds, but when it becomes clear that Chloe’s not cut out for babysitting and she gets banned from Henry’s family’s bubble tea shop for disruptive behavior, the two of them, with help from Chloe’s new dog, develop a brilliant and delicious moneymaker. This is buoyant fare, touching only lightly on tough topics like grief and financial troubles. Chloe’s and Henry’s families are Chinese American; Sabrina is cued Latina. Chloe’s intense desire for organization and neatness hints at neurodivergence, and while this is not explicitly identified, her family and friends seem to recognize and accommodate her needs. The story’s primary and secondary romances are predictable, sweet, and age appropriate. What may linger longest are the fantastic bubble tea descriptions, which will have readers salivating—and curious about the science of popping boba. Indeed, the only thing missing here may be a recipe. Sweet fun. (Fiction. 8-12)

THE LEGEND OF GREYHALLOW

Short, Summer Rachel

Simon & Schuster (256 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

9781665918879

An action-filled tale brimming with real-world and fantastical tensions.

Twelve-year-old Ainsley Galloway has moved to the town of Lowry with her parents and brother, 10-year-old Tobin. The area is the setting for the famous movie trilogy The Legend of Greyhallow, and Ainsley’s parents have bought longmissing director Ambrose Ripley’s mansion to renovate into an inn dedicated to its fantasy world. After Ainsley and Tobin are gifted a wooden box from a mysterious woman at the town’s Greyhallow-themed movie festival, they discover inside it a brass key that unlocks Ripley’s attic. The attic contains a magical projector, movie costumes, clapperboard, and more, transporting the duo into the world of Greyhallow. Only all is not well there, and the siblings must work to help the characters of the medieval fantasy setting while navigating between their

“Sweet fun.”

bubble trouble

world and ours—something that becomes especially critical as the line between the two blurs. This fun read artfully combines our reality with Greyhallow’s, allowing readers to explore Ainsley’s realistic relationship struggles with Charlotte, her best friend back home, and cheer her on as she spars with gargoyles and other magical creatures. Watching the siblings gain confidence as they solve puzzles both real and cinematic is satisfying, and fans of The Lord of the Rings and portal fantasies will find much to enjoy. Main characters present White; Charlotte is cued Korean American.

A delightful, engaging otherworldly adventure sure to charm. (Fantasy. 10-14)

SKY ROPES

Soderborg, Sondra Chronicle Books (320 pp.)

$16.99 | July 11, 2023 978-1-79721-564-8

What is true strength? Tough girl Breanna is about to find out.

Sixth grader Breanna Woodruff has finally made some friends, 5 years after she and her mother moved to Beecham, 50 miles away from Detroit and the father they have a restraining order against. Making her mark as the gutsiest kid in school, Breanna cannot let the other kids find out how afraid she is of heights. Therefore, she is adamant that she will not be going to the sixth grade team-building camp that features a treetop obstacle course that fills her with terror. Her mother, however, has other ideas, and in due course, Breanna finds herself at camp, trying desperately to keep up her reputation. But the stunning natural beauty of the place, the wisdom of the camp counselors, and the lure of a softball game against mean girl Cami slowly take down Breanna’s protective defenses. Although the first half of the story repeats its main topics too often and the rote delineation of secondary characters’ personality traits substitutes for deep character development, the metaphors are refreshingly original, and the descriptions of the setting are keenly observed. The second half of the story perks up considerably, and the truly powerful denouement will not easily be forgotten. Impressively, the story’s conclusion delivers nuanced, hard-fought realizations on the natures of fear, friendship, and past traumas. Breanna is White; there is ethnic diversity among the secondary characters.

A debut whose slow beginning belies its powerful conclusion. (Fiction. 10-13)

INTO THE SHADOW MIST Soontornvat, Christina Illus. by Kevin

Hong

Scholastic (160 pp.)

$16.99 | July 18, 2023

9781338759174

Series: Legends of Lotus Island, 2

A group of young Novices at a magic school learn more about using their powers to protect the land.

Plum has passed the first test necessary to remain at the Guardian Academy and now is a true Novice, training to use her magic in service of the Santipap Islands. Like her classmates, Plum has the ability to shape-shift into a fantastic creature, the mark of a Guardian. But unlike her classmates, Plum does not seem to have a Guardian power, at least not one that makes sense. Plum worries that she may be like another one of her classmates who had to leave the academy because she used unauthorized workarounds to pass a test. And Plum’s next test is fast approaching: She and a few of her friends must journey to another island in the archipelago to use their magic in the field. Something is threatening the trees on Bokati Island, and Plum and her friends must help—but will Plum be able to use her magic and live up to being a Guardian? Touching on friendship, confidence, environmentalism, belonging, and the notion that sometimes actions aren’t black-and-white, this second installment of the Legends of Lotus Island series sheds more light on Plum’s mysterious powers but still hints at more to come. Plum and her friends live in a loose fantasy version of Thailand.

A fun, magical journey featuring a relatably conflicted protagonist. (map) (Fantasy. 7-11)

SORRY, SNAIL

Subisak, Tracy

Little, Brown (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 16, 2023

9780316537728

Big emotions can have big consequences. Ari, an Asian-presenting child with olive skin and dark hair, is mad. She’s not allowed to yell, so she tries dancing, but it doesn’t help. Irritated by loud munching sounds nearby, she stomps over to a bush, where she finds a target for her anger: a tiny mollusk, Ms. Snail. Ari whispers insults (“That silly shell.” “Those tentacle eyes!”) at the snail and jeers. Later that night, Ari is awakened by Ms. Snail, now portrayed much larger, who demands an apology. Startled, the girl tries to comply, but Ms. Snail doesn’t believe her. At school the next day, Ari discovers Ms. Snail has slimed the monkey bars, preventing Ari from swinging. And Ms. Snail’s friends pressure Ari for a real apology. Realizing that she has hurt Ms. Snail, Ari eventually finds a solution that satisfies the snails and restores peace. Although Ari learns that it’s not OK to take out her anger on an innocent

bystander, she doesn’t find an appropriate alternative for handling big emotions, which feels like a missed opportunity. Still, exaggerated perspectives and proportions, as well as enlarged type, effectively invoke both humor and hyperbole. Subisak’s vivid palette of deep blues, greens, and oranges draws readers into both Ari’s and Ms. Snail’s dynamic emotional journeys. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A reminder that everyone—no matter how small— deserves kindness. (Picture book. 3-6)

GIRAFFE MATH

Swinburne, Stephen R.

Illus. by Geraldo Valério

Christy Ottaviano Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | Aug. 22, 2023 9780316346771

Giraffes by the numbers.

“Giraffe numbers are everywhere,” coos twiggy Twiga, giraffe narrator, who goes on to lay out typical measurements for their bodies and select parts, from ossicones atop their heads (“They can reach a length of over 10 inches. If you’re seven or eight years old, that is almost the length of your arm”) to pizza-pie–sized hooves. Along with other number-based nuggets like speed, she names the four giraffe species (reticulated, Masai, southern, and northern)—distinguishable in Valério’s paint and paper collage scenes by their patterns of spots—and mentions predators, diet, social behavior, and other basic non-numerate facts. The “math” is more notional than exact as, for instance, schematic lines show how the stiff-legged postures of drinking giraffes form equilateral or isosceles triangles, but the difference between the two is not explained. Also, a reference to “percentages” at the end may be confusing, since neither the word nor the symbol is used elsewhere. Invitations to compare measurements with those of other animals remain an abstract exercise, as the accompanying illustrations are not consistently to scale. The backmatter includes a range map and a note on the giraffe life cycle. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Weak on the math but should interest a number of wild animal lovers. (glossary, quiz, metric conversion chart, further reading) (Informational picture book. 6-8)

THE WITNESS TREES Historic Moments and the Trees Who Watched Them Happen

Van Cleave, Ryan G.

Illus. by Đóm Đóm

Bushel & Peck Books (56 pp.)

$19.99 | May 9, 2023

9781638191254

A gallery of stately trees around the world associated with times and events both historic and prehistoric.

Along with showing an adept hand at portraying botanical detail and a sense of individual character for each of these 21 trees, Đóm Đóm underscores their significance and longevity by posing historical figures and children of eras past and present in or around them—from the Buddha sitting with two young adherents, one light-skinned, one tan-skinned, beneath the “Bodhi Tree” where he found enlightenment to Abraham Lincoln next to a honey locust near the Gettysburg battlefield, visitors contemplating a Hiroshima “survivor tree,” and a lone Callery pear in New York that weathered the fall of the World Trade Center. Each tree is paired with an inconspicuous identifying caption and, more prominently, poetic reflections from Van Cleave: “Our roots run deep— / they grip history, / a restless forever.” Though the more speculative ages the author assigns to older “witnesses” may be exaggerated (80,000 years for the clonal aspen Pando takes no account of intervening glaciation, for instance), he does admit that Newton’s apple tree is actually a descendant of the original. To a world map showing each witness tree’s location he also attaches briefer notes on 11 more and, sadly, lists several renowned ones that have died or been destroyed in recent years. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Moving and, as a way of connecting today’s readers to significant moments of the past, effective. (afterword, timeline, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

WHAT DO YOU DO TO FALL ASLEEP?

van Genechten, Guido Clavis (32 pp.)

$18.95 | June 20, 2023

9781605378466

Series: Little Mouse, 2

A mouse polls his friends about their bedtime routines.

Little Mouse is introduced as inquisitive, and he certainly is. He has big questions, like how to get to the moon and back and how many stars are in the sky, but this energetic, repetitive bedtime tale focuses on more down-to-earth concerns: how Little Mouse’s pals get themselves to sleep. Dressed in pajamas covered in stars, Little Mouse appears quite matter-of-factly in his friends’ bedrooms in succession. Lift-the-flap elements reveal that Pigeon goes to bed with a huge collection of objects, including a tennis racket, a teddy bear, and a coloring book. Dog rolls around to his back, his stomach, and his side, which will encourage movement. Koala jumps on the bed to ward off ghosts, which might address bedtime fears—though this is a story about finding a bedtime routine rather than dealing with nervousness. Each spread has a similar layout and flow, making it perfect for young children who thrive on repetition. There’s a good mix of strategies shared and an ensemble moment before the cozy conclusion. The art is nothing special, but the chance to explore the different bed spaces through lift-the-flap magic will delight tots. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A soothing, sweet, and eager little book. (Picture book. 1-3)

WHEN YOU CAN SWIM

Wong,

Jack Orchard/Scholastic

$18.99 | May 2, 2023

9781338830965

(48 pp.)

Debut author Wong celebrates the freedom and joys of swimming.

With endpapers that depict an Asian child gazing uncertainly at their own reflection in a pool, this book offers beginning swimmers both reassurance and compelling promises of adventure and discovery that will ensue “when you can swim.” Images portray adults sharing the gifts of the water with their young ones, from shallow waters perfect for lazy afternoons to the otherworldly landscape of watery depths. Wong’s beautiful watercolor-andpastel illustrations demonstrate a mastery of light and shadow, creating a textural quality that makes each page dance with life and movement. Combined with the lyrical text (“When you can swim, / we’ll bend like boulders / beneath rushing waterfalls”), each frame immediately immerses readers in the sights, sounds, and sensations of summer. Swimmers who are diverse in terms of body type, age, skin tone, and ability can be seen enjoying the natural world. In his author’s note, Wong shares his own experiences with swimming as a young person of color, explaining that this conscious representation is an affirmation that swimming is for everyone: “Yes, this belongs to you, too.” The title is bound to inspire all swimmers to embrace nature, no matter where they are on their journeys. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A gorgeously rendered love letter to swimming and the magical experiences that it can unlock. (Picture book. 4-8)

I WANT TO BE SPAGHETTI!

Wright-Ruiz, Kiera

Illus. by Claudia Lam Kokila (56 pp.)

$19.99 | July 11, 2023

9780593529874

Learn to love yourself for who you are.

A bright orange instant ramen package, with big round black eyes and a tiny red mouth, sits on a supermarket shelf with fellow ramen packages. Ramen announces they would much rather be spaghetti—after all, the spaghetti aisle is much bigger, and there are so many people shopping for it. The other ramen packages try to change our hero’s mind by saying how cool they are—to no avail. After being purchased and driven home, Ramen hopes their new owners will prepare them with meatballs and tomato sauce. However, upon arriving in the kitchen, Ramen discovers their true destiny as well as accompanying treats that make ramen a tasty, unique dinner. WrightRuiz’s first-person narrative combines jaunty dialogue with rich vocabulary, like penne and fettuccine as well as nori and narutomaki Her message that children should embrace what makes them different comes through clearly. Lam’s vibrant illustrations have a striking mangalike feel, with large round eyes, exaggerated

expressions, and paneled vignettes that evoke humor and energy. Her vivid palette of yellows, oranges, and browns is mesmerizing, with pop art–style endpapers that feature ingredients from the story. An author’s note provides a short history of ramen. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Use your noodle and add this saucy tale to your collection! (Picture book. 4-8)

OUT OF THE BLUE

Yulo, Nic

Dial Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | July 25, 2023

9780593353875

On a class trip to the aquarium, an octopus helps Coral see the beauty of being small in a big world.

Coral feels invisible. Small in stature, she is overwhelmed and overlooked by her peers while on a visit to the aquarium. When she stays behind alone in the Bioluminescence Hall, she notices a tiny octopus named Kraken. As she observes him blend in among his surroundings, she realizes that being unnoticed has advantages. When her classmates find her, she shows them that quiet and invisibility have the power to reveal an entire world they otherwise would have missed. Yulo distills a difficult, relatable concept—even the small and seemingly unseen have a light to shine—into a digestible story for young readers. The illustrations deftly use background color to distinguish between the white expanse of the aquarium and the solid black darkness of Kraken’s habitat. One all-black page with white text and no illustrations except for an image of Coral conveys the girl’s loneliness and fear. The cartoonlike characters are drawn in a range of skin tones; Coral has slightly orange skin, wide, red-rimmed glasses, and curly pink hair. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Concise and effective storytelling brings the invisible to light. (Picture book. 4-7)

WHEN RUBIN PLAYS

Zhang, Gracey

Orchard/Scholastic (56 pp.)

$18.99 | July 18, 2023

9781338648263

A budding musician finds an unexpected audience.

Entranced by the soaring, beautiful sounds of his small Bolivian town’s orchestra, brown-skinned Rubin embarks on a journey to master the violin. His first try does not go as planned, with the screeching sound of his instrument eliciting giggles from the other young musicians. But the determined child quietly perseveres, and after the day’s practice, he ventures into a thick, verdant forest to practice alone. There, his discordant notes attract the attention of cats who accompany his violin with their howling mews, keeping to his volume and

“A gorgeously rendered love letter to swimming and the magical experiences that it can unlock.”

when you can swim

tempo with gusto. Night after night, the group continues to practice with enthusiasm, with their efforts culminating in a uniquely magnificent performance for the town. Zhang’s rough, expressive brush strokes make each page vibrate with sound and movement in a lively visual symphony. The dramatic and exaggerated expressions of the cats—who grow in number and are chaotically strewn about the pages—are bound to draw delighted laughter. This charming story of a boy finding his sound will inspire beginners to persist in their endeavors and to approach their creative journeys with passion and confidence— even if their skills may not be there yet. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A tale that is truly mew-sic to the ears. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

CRANE JANE!

Zimmerman, Andrea Illus. by Dan Yaccarino

Holiday House (32 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9780823451586

Series: Big Jobs, Bold Women, 2

Let’s hear it for Crane Jane!

While listening to this book, the second in the Big Jobs, Bold Women series, following Firefighter Flo! (2022), readers will hear cacophonous noises in Jane’s wake given all the rhythmic, onomatopoeic sounds accompanying her efforts as a crane operator at the dock. Jaunty, terse rhymed couplets describe Jane’s hectic, exciting workday as she expertly maneuvers her crane to lift, move, and set down heavy cargo—freight containers and trucks—on and off ships. What a joyful din (“TROMP! TROMP!” “CLANGCLANG!” “WHOOSH! WHOOSH!”) her job produces. The sound words generally appear in pairs or trios and are usually set in yellow boldfaced capitals so they stand out, and construction-site and vehicle mavens will be eager to simulate them. Children will be especially intrigued by a scene in which a firetruck, lifted from a ship and caught in a heavy wind, dangles precariously from the crane and is improbably saved by a flock of helpful gulls. The digital illustrations feature bold, eyepopping colors and lots of detailed activity. It’s great that kids see a woman, especially a woman of color, carry out her job so skillfully and effortlessly in a predominantly male-dominated profession. Jane has light brown skin and dark braids beneath her pale-green hard hat. Her co-workers and crew are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

When it comes to doing heavy lifting, you can count on this tale. (Picture book. 3-6)

MARTA! BIG & SMALL

Arena, Jen

Illus. by Angela Dominguez

Roaring Brook Press (20 pp.)

$8.99 | June 6, 2023

9781250886859

The comparisons between a young girl and the animals she encounters make for a unique Spanish primer.

Marta, a brown-skinned child cued as Latine, with her hair up in double buns, is “an ordinary girl,” but her adventure is anything but. Starting from the base of her treehouse, she sees an elephant, a horse, a lion, even a huge snake. Readers discover how the child is viewed very differently by each creature. “To a bug, Marta is grande. Big. Very big.” But “To an elephant, Marta is pequeña. Small, very small.” A horse might see Marta as “lenta” (“slow, very slow”), while a turtle sees her as “rápida” (“Fast, very fast”). Each Spanish word is explained clearly in context without it feeling like a dictionary-style translation. At the end of the book, a two-page spread uses a new set of Spanish words to show how she and each creature are alike. She’s “fast like el caballo” (the horse), “small like el insecto” (the insect), and, of course, “clever, very clever, like una niña.” Illustrations, dominated by Marta’s expressive face and body, paired with animal action shots on white backgrounds, are effective and fun, helping the Spanish vocabulary lesson go down easily. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A simple but effective Spanish-word lesson for little ones. (Board book. 3-5)

WELCOME TO PRESCHOOL

Carluccio, Maria

Chronicle Books (12 pp.)

$16.99 | July 11, 2023

978-1-79721-084-1

What fun: Exploring a preschool classroom without even being there!

Each spread in this adorable board book contains an embedded groove that gives listeners the opportunity to move a character around a different brightly colored, inviting area of the school. Thus, kids will play while enjoying this book, and they’ll also learn about a preschool environment before they’re actual students themselves. By moving figures around the varied spaces in this school, where the students and teacher are friendly, welcoming, gaily dressed animal characters, children will enjoy a light adventure, gain a safe sense of autonomy, and

“When it comes to doing heavy lifting, you can count on this tale.”

crane jane!

learn in advance what they will see and do when they join the preschool set officially. The whole joyful experience is described in jaunty, lively rhymes, while the sweet, appealing illustrations, created digitally with markers, collage, and watercolors, depict lively scenes of young animals engaging harmoniously in typical preschool activities. There are cubbies for hanging up outdoor clothing, a tank with two turtles, instruments to play and songs to sing, arts and crafts activities, books to read and storytime, movement games, toys and a kitchen corner to share—and, best of all, new friends to meet and play with. Preschool’s great—and students can return for more fun tomorrow! (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Children will appreciate this preschool tour and be eager to revisit. (Board book. 2-4)

MY FIRST BOOK OF HOUSE PETS

Illus. by Gilland, Åsa

duopress/Sourcebooks (22 pp.)

$8.99 | June 23, 2023

978-1-955834-46-9

Series: Terra Babies at Home, 4

An amiable introduction to a menagerie of house pets.

Within this board book’s warmly illustrated pages, young readers meet and learn brief facts about a variety of fluffy, scaled, and feathered critters. Told in short sentences, this work of early nonfiction introduces readers to general types of house pets (cats, dogs, fish, reptiles, birds) and gives a few brief facts about several different species (parakeets, guppies, yellow-bellied sliders). It also reminds readers that pets are a big responsibility, requiring attention and vet care. Unfortunately, the book’s overall look is marred by inconsistent fonts and styles that break each page into choppy sections, making it difficult to read with ease. Factual, if unremarkable statements, like “Dogs are the most popular house pet,” are presented in a large font, while blurbs in a smaller font are more specific and engaging. Animal lovers will likely enjoy learning about cockatiels’ “colorful crest[s]” and how “they really like to whistle!” More consistent than the text are painterly, full-bleed illustrations that showcase the joy of pets. Children and adults who are diverse in skin tone visit an animal shelter, play with a Chihuahua, feed carrots to a thrilled hamster, and brush a pleased-looking cat. The warm, sunny palette with saturated backgrounds is especially appropriate when highlighting the small, precious moments of pet ownership, such as a beaming child hugging a pup. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Though approaching the text is somewhat challenging, the combo of pets and children is appealing. (Board book. 2-4)

BEING BRAVE

Jin, Cindy

Illus. by Ashley Dugan

Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.)

$7.99 | June 27, 2023

9781665933391

Practical tips for toddlers dealing with difficult feelings.

This board book tackles childhood situations such as feeling left out, becoming angry with someone, or feeling different from everyone else. In each scenario, Jin offers a useful suggestion that begins with being brave starts with…. “When you’re feeling anxious or worried, being brave starts with…taking one deep breath,” the text explains, while the accompanying illustrations show a little bear appearing nervous about jumping into the water before doing a cannonball. Notably, Jin not only identifies different emotions, but also gives readers realistic strategies for dealing with them. Rather than suggesting distractions, the text points to concrete coping skills and first steps a child might take—among them asking for help or apologizing. The illustrations depict simple, cutesy animals engaged in various scenarios. There is just enough detail to appeal to readers while keeping the focus on the action. This simplicity of the images clearly communicates how the character is feeling and, with a flip of the page, what approach they take to move forward. While there is, of course, so much nuance to all of these situations, this book serves as a starting place for young readers in identifying, discussing, and hopefully normalizing what are very common, uncomfortable feelings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A helpful option to spark conversations with little ones about emotions. (Board book. 2-5)

LITTLE DUMPLINGS

Kuhlmann, Jekka, Krissy Kuhlmann & Haley Hazell

Illus. by Manita Boonyong Chronicle Books (24 pp.)

$8.99 | May 9, 2023

978-1-79721-692-8

Celebrate dumplings from around the world.

Rhyming couplets introduce the idea that dumplings are ubiquitous. “We’re little dumplings! / We’re found everywhere! / All the world’s cultures / have dumplings to share.” Written for very young readers, the poem sticks to generalities and few specifics. “We take many shapes, / some big and some small. / And we’re delicious! / You’ll love us all!” Accompanying digital illustrations dominated by bright blocks of color portray diverse people with dot eyes and smiley faces, but it is the exuberant dumplings themselves that steal the show. Dozens of different types of dumplings with kawaii-style happy faces populate landscapes, are fried in pans, or are served on platters. Every happy dumpling is captioned with its name (from wontons to pierogi

to samosas), and backmatter lists every one that appears in the book along with its pronunciation and associated regions. No information is given about what fills them or what they taste like, and the poem’s meter is often uneven, making it awkward to read aloud. Little ones won’t mind—they’ll be captivated by the plethora of wrapped cuteness, and the simple message will resonate. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Yummy cuteness for toddlers and preschoolers. (Board book. 2-5)

TOGETHER A First Conversation About Love

Madison, Megan & Jessica Ralli

Illus.

by

Anne/Andy Passchier

Rise x Penguin Workshop (36 pp.)

$8.99 | Dec. 27, 2022

978-0-593-52096-3

Series: First Conversations

Children are “born ready to love,” but that doesn’t mean the concept isn’t complicated!

Wisely starting with the most intimate first relationship—a cozy newborn being cuddled by a caregiver—the authors of this inclusive book scaffold outward to more complicated relationships. Love of pets, people, and pizza are described dynamically, and constant open-ended questions like “who do you love?” invite readers to tie it back to their own lives. Branching into romantic love, the authors name examples of adult relationships, with special attention paid to the oft-glossed-over LGBTQ+ community. Tonally, the frank, unflowery text works especially well here, with enough information to be clear without overwhelming. The book doesn’t shy away from depicting love as challenging—one page portrays children fighting over toys. This is also the rare book that acknowledges that some children lack love and family. The text briefly but poignantly notes that “people in power have made unfair rules about who can love each other and who can be a family.” But by closing with an actionable ministory about a community that changes a Father’s Day event to an inclusive family day, Madison and Ralli remind readers that “we’re building that world together.” Joy and inclusion abound in digital illustrations, with a raucous wedding attended by people of various ethnicities, gender expressions, and abilities. Comprehensive backmatter can facilitate deeper discussions. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Many caregivers will appreciate this concise, useful, and ultimately hopeful conversation starter. (Board book. 2-6)

WE SHARE THIS SCHOOL A Community Book

Saks, Dan

Illus. by Brooke Smart

Rise x Penguin Workshop (24 pp.)

$8.99 | June 20, 2023

9780593658253

Series: Community Books

Children and families come together at their school. Saks, known for the popular kids podcast Noodle Loaf , uses rhyming text to describe what makes this school special. From making music to sharing food to dancing, the story shows that “a classroom is a place to share. / It is a place to grow.” The rhyming stanzas bounce along merrily. The message that we all belong feels a bit heavy-handed, though it’s a much-needed one. The illustrations demonstrate that everyone has a role to play in this school. Smart’s images convey the movement and vibrancy of a classroom, keeping all details simple and similarly styled. True to its message, the illustrations include people of varying skin tones, hair colors and styles, and abilities. In one scene, the group gathers around the table to taste the gulab jamoon that one family brings in to share with the classroom. In another, the children gather round a huge sheet of paper, painting as Saks encourages: “So when you paint a picture, leave room for a friend. Our world is made more vibrant / when we welcome others in.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A portrait of a welcoming community that demonstrates the values of care and inclusion. (Board book. 3-5)

CHOMPY HAS A FRIEND FOR LUNCH

An Interactive Picture Book

Satterthwaite, Mark & Pedro Eboli

Scholastic (32 pp.)

$17.99 | Aug. 1, 2023

9781338847062

Here’s a chance to get up close and personal with a friendly monster!

Chompy, a multicolored monster with bulging eyes, a large mouth, and horns, is thrilled to have a play date with the reader. Unlike Chompy’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, Chompy doesn’t eat people…right? That is the story’s central question. Noticing that something smells great, Chompy realizes that it is the reader producing that wonderful aroma and nervously asks for a tiny lick of an elbow. A flap extends Chompy’s tongue for slurps. Uh-oh. The reader is delicious. What if the adorable monster does eat people? To test that theory, Chompy asks for a little “chomp” of the reader’s toe, pinky, or nose. Mouth open wide, Chompy takes a bite. After two spreads of the creature gagging and moaning, Chompy reveals that the reader tastes awful, “like sweat and sandboxes and boogers and dirty socks and all that gross human stuff.” Chompy is elated,

group of animals helps readers explore eight different hues.”

let’s go to color camp!

though (being a human-eating monster makes it tough to have friends!) and asks the human reader for one last favor— a big hug. Flaps on both sides of the spread create a truly big Chompy hug. Hyperdramatic illustrations bring Chompy to life and add layers of laughter to this wonderfully interactive story. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An endearing and over-the-top funny way to turn those scary monsters under the bed into friends. (Novelty book. 3-6)

LET’S GO TO COLOR CAMP!

Illus. by Slater, Nicola Chronicle Books (18 pp.)

$12.99 | June 22, 2023

978-1-79721-872-4

Series: Beginning Baby

At Color Camp, a group of animals helps readers explore eight different hues.

Paisley the octopus looks for green things on a nature walk, Riley the narwhal goes for a swim in the blue lake, and Layla the llama makes pink bracelets. Each page focuses on a different color, and a corresponding tab encourages readers to flip to the page of their choice. The text speaks directly to little ones with phrases like, “Use your finger to touch all the things you see that are brown.” The brightly colored, big-eyed animals participate in related activities on each page. There are plenty of objects in the focal color to identify as well as contrasting colors that allow readers to practice discerning these differences. The tabbed pages provide fine motor practice for growing hands and allow little ones to decide how to read the book. Each page stands on its own, and though the first and last have intro statements, they can be read in any order. The final page shows off tie-dye swirls as the friends make T-shirts. It’s all sweet enough, but bookshelves are crowded with concept titles featuring colors, and while this one certainly fits in, there is little here that truly makes it stand out. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Hits the mark, but so do dozens of other similar titles. (Board book. 1-3)

“A

I’D RATHER BURN THAN BLOOM Rogers, Shannon C.F.

Feiwel & Friends (320 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9781250845665

young adult

TOGETHER WE ROT

Arndt, Skyla Viking (272 pp.)

$18.99 | Aug. 29, 2023

9780593526279

When a religious cult threatens everything they know, former friends Wil’s and Elwood’s purposes collide. In the small Michigan town of Pine Point, 18-year-old Wilhelmina Greene’s mom has been missing for a year, and everyone, including the local police, thinks she left voluntarily. Wil, on the other hand, is certain that her ex–best friend, Elwood; his father, local preacher Pastor Clarke; and Elwood’s ultrareligious family and church are involved. Channeling her journalist mother’s investigative skills, Wil refuses to give up, determined to find answers on her own. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Elwood has done his best to follow the path his parents have laid out for him even though it meant losing Wil’s friendship. When he finds out that his parents have never truly loved him and in fact have been planning to sacrifice him for their cause, he flees, joining forces with Wil and their friends to find answers. Together, Wil and Elwood learn that everything they thought they knew was a lie, and they are in more danger than they could have imagined. Arndt’s sparkling prose deftly explores the complicated nature of loyalty and religion against the lush background of the forests of the Upper Peninsula. The mythology of the town and its founders is compelling and convincing, setting up the history for the story at hand. Main characters are cued White.

Haunting and spellbinding. (Horror. 13-18)

YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DIE TONIGHT

Bayron, Kalynn

Bloomsbury (350 pp.)

$19.99 | June 20, 2023

9781547611546

A “final girl” finds herself in a real-life thriller in which survival isn’t an option.

Seventeen-year-old Charity works at Camp Mirror Lake, a horror-simulation camp in the woods of upstate New York. She’s moved up to being manager as well as Final Girl, the most desirable role in their nightly performance,

Ed. by g. haron davis

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

thanks to her lifelong horror fandom, her mastery of fake blood, and her ability to navigate co-workers with all-tooreal murderous impulses. But her real commitment to the faux frights comes from not having much of a home to go back to when the dust clears each season. The camp, owned by a Mr. Lamont, is located on the site where a 1980s cult classic was filmed. When her co-workers mysteriously don’t show for their roles as victims, Charity reaches out to her friend Paige and her girlfriend, Bezi, inviting them to fill in. As an aficionado of the genre and one of the few Black staff members, Charity is well aware of the usual tropes; as Bezi reminds her, “You know what happens to Black folks in slasher movies,” (Charity reassures her, “I’m the final girl…. Guaranteed to survive the night”). Unfortunately, the slowly paced story meanders toward a reveal that readers may themselves have already anticipated. Ultimately, the tropes of the final girl and Black people’s roles in horror are reconciled in an inexplicable hurry.

An homage to horror stories that doesn’t quite land. (Horror. 14-18)

STARS, HIDE YOUR FIRES

Best, Jessica Mary Quirk Books (304 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

978-1-68369-351-2

The bigger the potential payout, the bigger the risk in this genre-bending debut.

Cassie’s life on Sarn, a dusty, arid minor moon of the planet Danae, is less than glamorous. She works with her nonbinary friend Jax, executing a two-part routine they’ve perfected to swipe jewels and trinkets from tourists. The well-rehearsed con earns Cassie enough to care for her ailing father—but just barely. When an unlucky mark tells Cassie the location of the upcoming Ascension Ball, which will be attended by the most influential people in the galaxy and where a new emperor will be crowned, she realizes that her pickpocketing skills could net her enough valuables to retire from her life of crime forever. As if enigmatic, intriguing Amaris (an attractive girl who is clearly hiding something) isn’t distraction enough at the ball, finding herself pinned in the crosshairs of the hunt for a murder suspect is far from the heist Cassie expected to pull off. Descriptive worldbuilding, inventive and gender-inclusive slang and symbolism, a vividly drawn cast, and fast-paced banter are joined by nonstop action and twisty revelations as Cassie finds herself ever more deeply embroiled in a world she knows little about. Cassie is cued White; the cast of characters varies in appearance, and race holds no significance in this world.

A high-stakes murder-mystery science-fiction thrill ride; great fun. (Science fiction. 13-18)

THE MURDER MYSTERY RACE

Cohen, Andrew S. Permuted Press (256 pp.)

$19.99 | July 25, 2023

9781637588260

Nine days at sea, 16 contestants, and one killer.

Welcome to the Murder Mystery Race, in which the person who unmasks the killer wins $1 million and the chance to compete in the following year’s challenge. It’s 2054, and the Knife Thrower has been terrorizing a small New Jersey town with a vicious murder spree. Ten-yearold Andrew Mikaelson has been selected as one of this year’s contestants. They must try to uncover the identity of the Knife Thrower, who will be one of their fellow passengers on the cruise out of Palm Beach. All the contestants are kids under age 18 who qualified through solving a series of puzzles. Andrew, the youngest, is a calculating fifth grader who has theories about who the killer is, but he is initially treated dismissively by the older teens. Andrew leaves the safety of home for a cruise filled with both fun and deadly games as he and his new friends piece together clues. The concept is original, and the tween author, who possesses an advanced vocabulary, shows potential. However, the story needs better pacing and editing. It has a very slow buildup, as the initial chapters set up the world and introduce the characters, and the stilted writing is unfortunately heavy on unnecessary exposition, but it hits its stride when the cruise starts. Characters seem to be White.

A precocious boy enters the race of his life in this work that doesn’t live up to its promise. (Thriller. 12-16)

ALL ALONE WITH YOU

Coombs, Amelia Diane Simon & Schuster (352 pp.)

$19.99 | July 25, 2023

9781534493575

A misanthropic loner’s community service starts off motivated by self-interest but ends up changing her life.

Seventeen-year-old gamer Eloise Deane’s dream is to attend the University of Southern California’s computer science program. But since her father was recently laid off, Eloise needs to both apply for admission and try to get a generous scholarship, forcing her to pad her impressive academic resume with community service. She begrudgingly agrees to volunteer with LifeCare, a nonprofit that matches volunteers with older people in need of regular conversation and companionship. Friendless after ghosting her best friends during a difficult episode with anxiety and depression the previous year, sarcastic and introverted Eloise is taken aback by Austin Yang, LifeCare’s smiley, outgoing star teen volunteer who’s assigned to train her. Eloise joins Austin for his regular house visits to Marianne Landis, a lonely 73-year-old who’s no

young people’s right to read

This spring, bestselling author Jodi Picoult wrote an op-ed in which she spoke out strongly against the recent wave of book bannings. One passage is being shared widely by U.S. librarians and authors on social media:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a parent deciding a certain book is not right for her child. There is a colossal problem with a parent deciding that, therefore, no child should be allowed to read that book.

It was interesting to consider how much this statement resonated in light of a talk I attended by Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, authors of The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden. They explained a source of cross-cultural misunderstanding: Swedes consider policies affecting children in terms of children’s rights, whereas Americans of all political leanings generally emphasize parental rights.

In 2013, Sweden was the guest of honor at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The Swedish Arts Council took this opportunity—being center stage at the most important global event for children’s literature professionals—to release a statement that read, in part:

Children have a right to culture.…Most children’s writers and illustrators have a genuine child’s perspective. They make children and children’s issues visible—both to children themselves and to adults.… By children’s right to culture, we also mean children’s right to art, to participate in artistic and cultural life, as the Convention on the Rights of the Child puts it. To be presented with challenging art. Different perspectives. A diversity of expression. Relevant, fun, surprising, inquisitive art.…Children are human beings, fellow citizens.

The U.S. remains the sole member nation not to have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Book-banning campaigns actively reject diverse, challenging perspectives that might lead to disagreement with parental views. But a response that prioritizes parents’ rights to restrict their own children’s reading fails to universally uphold young people’s rights as individual citizens.

Contemporary books for teens are rich, provocative, and engaging. The following titles stimulate critical think-

ing and encourage the creation of more inclusive communities. They might make some adults uncomfortable, but they speak to concerns that adolescents are already living with and deserve to engage with through literature.

Three outstanding titles that explore politics and society are The Making of Yolanda la Bruja by Lorraine Avila (Levine Querido, April 11); Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay by Kelly McWilliams (Little, Brown, May 2); and Those Who Saw the Sun: African American Oral Histories From the Jim Crow South by Jaha Nailah Avery (Levine Querido, June 6). Each skillfully shows how deeply present-day injustices are entwined with past events: We can’t build a better future if we deny painful historical realities.

Adolescence is naturally a time for thinking about gender roles and sexuality. Becoming a Queen by Dan Clay (Roaring Brook Press, April 25); Lion’s Legacy by L.C. Rosen (Union Square & Co., May 2); From Here by Luma Mufleh (Nancy Paulsen Books, May 16); and The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch (Little Island, June 13) are intelligent, passionate works that help teens develop a deeper understanding of toxic masculinity, homophobia, and related subjects.

Mental health concerns often strike at the heart of family life, making them particularly sensitive to address. Three new and forthcoming books treat readers with an honesty that shows respect for their ability to grow emotionally: Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying, with colors by Lynette Wong (First Second, April 25); Killing the Wittigo: Indigenous Culture-Based Approaches to Waking Up, Taking Action, and Doing the Work of Healing by Suzanne Methot, illustrated by Jessica Albert and Mapris Purgas (ECW Press, June 6); and Everyone Wants To Know by Kelly Loy Gilbert (Simon & Schuster, June 13).

Laura

ADULT | Laura Simeon

“Meaningful magical resistance.”

transmogrify!

stereotypical senior; she’s the former lead singer of The Laundromats, a famous 1970s and ’80s rock band. As Eloise and Austin, who is an open and kind musician with surprising layers, begin regularly visiting Marianne together, Eloise grows unnervingly attached to both her new friends. The slow-burn, grumpy-sunshine romance develops organically, as does Eloise’s strengthening sense of selfworth. The author convincingly details Eloise’s family dynamics (unemployed dad, self-employed mom, pesky 11-year-old sister) as well as the MMORPG game she’s mastered. Austin is Korean American in a main cast that otherwise presents White.

A delightfully compelling coming-of-age romance. (Romance. 14-18)

KAYA

Craig, Wes Colors by Jason Wordie Image Comics (160 pp.)

$9.99 paper | April 4, 2023

9781534324824

Series: Kaya, 1

A girl with a magical prosthetic arm valiantly protects her half brother to fulfill a prophecy.

Kaya is tasked with getting Jin, the 8-year-old sibling she barely knows, to safety after their home of Kahaka is destroyed by the Atrian robots. Kaya’s golden mechanical arm, obtained from the wizards of the Black Mountains by the uncle who raised her, contains extraordinary power and saved her life when she was younger. Besides being the former prince of their nation, Jin is the hero of a prophecy that declares that he will overthrow the robots and save humanity. Kaya just has to evade the Atrians and get the boy to Monk Island. Jin is spoiled and naïve thanks to being raised as royalty with many privileges—a far cry from Kaya’s life. Her oath to safeguard and escort Jin is tested as their journey brings threats to their survival, including dangerous enemies and monsters. Told from Jin’s perspective and set in a world where humans, robots, and reptilian humanoid creatures coexist, this graphic novel is illustrated in saturated, highly contrasting colors, with black-and-white flashbacks for scenes of Kaya’s and Jin’s pasts. The vibrant artwork is the real standout, as the writing and storyline are less than gripping. Brown-skinned Kaya wears her hair in locs; Jin has light skin, elfin ears, and a shock of red hair. A tepid series opener with potential. (Graphic science fiction. 13-18)

TRANSMOGRIFY! 14 Fantastical Tales of Trans Magic

Ed. by davis, g. haron HarperTeen (416 pp.)

$19.99 | May 16, 2023

9780063218796

In this fantasy anthology featuring entries by a broad range of trans authors, transgender teens discover strength, truth, and magic in themselves as they fight oppressive societal expectations and define their own destinies.

Tilluster College couldn’t take away Rae’s magic, so instead they threaten to kill everyone Rae loves. Ari thought magic school would solve their problems, but as they struggle with incantations, they still feel like an outcast. Defying the genderbound traditions enforced by the Council of Elders, Ciano braves siren-infested waters to pursue their dream. Treacherous

rana joon and the one and only now

deals with ancient powers, alluring curses, prowling monsters, and fairy-tale enchantment fill the pages of this timely collection that centers transgender characters figuring out where they belong and choosing themselves. Several stories feature magical regimes enforcing binary traditions that protagonists dismantle not only for themselves, but for their entire communities, whether that means standing up to the director of the Intramural Broomstick Derby summer league or a clan guarding the door between the realms of life and death. Some characters undertake a different battle—unlearning the rules they’ve enforced on themselves. In addition to common themes of selfdiscovery and belonging, a subtle thread of recurring images ties the stories together. Well-crafted prose and enticing worldbuilding heighten the collection’s appeal. The cast of characters also centers, reflects, and celebrates other types of diverse identities. Although the tones range from soft to suspenseful, every story is resolved with hope.

Meaningful magical resistance. (content warning, author bios) (Fantasy anthology. 14-18)

AFTER DEATH

de la Cruz, Melissa

Disney-Hyperion (368 pp.)

$18.99 | July 4, 2023

9781368067003

Series: Blue Bloods

This follow-up to After Life (2022) completes the Blue Bloods series offshoot duology.

It’s been two months since Schuyler Cervantes-Chase and Jack Force stopped Lucifer from carrying out a plan to exterminate all mortal Red Bloods in Manhattan with a plague. However, Jack’s twin brother, Max, was captured, and their friend Kingsley Martin was killed. Jack went searching for Max, and Schuyler hasn’t heard from him since. Without her bondmate, she’s relied more heavily on Oliver Golding-Chang, her human Familiar and best friend, for emotional comfort. Her secret life as a half-blood vampire, one of the immortal Blue Bloods, is complicated enough on a regular day. But now there’s a new girl at school, Aoife Hayward, and her grunge fashion sense stands out from the crowd at exclusive Duchesne. She also catches Schuyler’s attention as a possible supernatural threat. Who—or what— could she be? Meanwhile, Jack and Max are dealing with different types of confinement. This volume brings the journeys of Schuyler and her true love, Jack, to a close (at least in this parallel universe) while still being accessible to readers new to this world. De la Cruz has added a lot of conceptual layers to this fictional world, and not everything is wrapped up neatly and tidily, but those who have followed the series will likely feel satisfied in seeing off these characters. The author once again delivers supernatural melodrama that’s both high-spirited and absorbing. Contextual clues point to some ethnic diversity.

Beyond climactic. (Paranormal. 12-18)

RANA JOON AND THE ONE AND ONLY NOW

Etaat, Shideh

Atheneum (304 pp.)

$19.99 | July 25, 2023

9781665917629

High school senior Rana finds a way to honor her late best friend—and express her own voice.

It’s almost one year since Louie’s sudden death, and the loss feels just as fresh as the day Rana heard the news of his car accident. Fast friends who first bonded over a Tupac concert and rap, Louie pushed Rana to explore her interest in poetry and encouraged her to speak her truth. Feeling inspired for the first time since losing Louie, Iranian American Rana decides to fulfill his dream: competing in the Way of the Wu rap battle. First prize: opening for Wu-Tang. Set in 1996 San Fernando Valley, California, this intimate narrative deftly weaves together grief, art, immigrant family dynamics, gender expectations, sexuality, disordered eating, and self-discovery. Communication runs through the core of each theme: From learning to speak up in class and overcoming her fear of public speaking to being confident enough to share her emotions through her poetry and rap, Rana discovers the value of verbalizing her thoughts and opinions. She becomes vulnerable with those who are accepting and pursues her first romance with a girl. With family, Rana voices her complicated feelings toward her distant father, golden-boy brother, and controlling mother, and together the family begins mending their communication breakdown. Rana is an engaging lead with a satisfying journey of self-growth. A full, diverse, and well-developed secondary cast rounds out this lyrical read.

Emotionally honest and open. (Fiction. 14-18)

THOSE WE DROWN Goldsmith, Amy Delacorte (416

pp.)

$18.99 | $21.99 PLB | June 27, 2023

9780593570098

9780593570104 PLB

When Liv’s friend Will disappears the first night of their semester at sea, it’s unclear what really happened, who can be trusted, and what horrible darkness might be onboard.

Liv feels lucky to have scored a full scholarship to participate in the trans-Atlantic SeaMester program aboard the Eos, a posh cruise ship. But surrounded by wealthy, beautiful students, including the stunning and untouchable trio of social media influencers known as the Sirens, Liv starts to feel uneasy. Will’s inexplicable disappearance triggers a host of unanswered questions about his well-being, staff members get caught in lies, and her sophisticated, alluring classmate Constantine proves a complicated mix of friendly ally and untrustworthy love interest. As

“Lyrical.”

more people go missing, Liv races to find Will and make sense of murky, mysterious incidents and behaviors. Goldsmith deftly keeps readers in the dark, unsure of which characters to believe but also wondering whether Liv is a reliable narrator. The ship is the perfect setting for just such a thriller: isolated and eerie. The slow unraveling of the mystery is captivating and surprising, the ending deliciously—horrifically—ambiguous. The plot ramps up slowly, but it’s worth the wait. Liv is a White English girl; there is some diversity in nationality and ethnicity among the supporting cast.

An original, suspenseful, and atmospheric debut. (Horror. 12-17)

BUT SHE LOOKS FINE From Illness to Activism

Goodreau, Olivia

Gaudium (140 pp.)

$24.99 | May 9, 2023

9781592112104

Young activist Goodreau recounts how she became an advocate for people with Lyme disease.

In second grade, Goodreau began suffering blackouts, vision loss, and shooting pains. She saw over 50 specialists in one year to no avail; doctors blamed her symptoms on hypochondria or the Colorado altitude. Finally, in third grade, she was diagnosed with Lyme disease—but antibiotics didn’t work. Though a doctor declared she’d have Lyme her whole life because of delayed treatment, Goodreau, always adventurous, resolved to get better. She created Lyme fundraising challenges on social media, and celebrities and politicians took up the cause. But school bullies targeted her, and as her fame increased, people even accused Goodreau of faking. Undaunted, Goodreau, who presents White, started the LivLyme foundation at age 12 to help families dealing with Lyme disease. Further advocacy included creating TickTracker, an award-winning app, and helping Sen. Susan Collins pass the Kay Hagan Act, which funded research for tick-borne diseases. Though her narrative is somewhat disjointed, interspersed letters to parents, kids, doctors, researchers, and politicians offer insightful advice. Suggestions include reminding parents to be mindful of their children’s feelings, encouraging kids to defend bullied classmates, and urging doctors to be persistent in finding solutions. Acceptance from her new high school classmates and improved health—after a regimen including 86 daily pills and a leprosy drug—provide a hopeful conclusion. Sidebars offer facts about Lyme disease.

A tale of persistence amid invisible illness. (Memoir. 12-adult)

ALL THE YELLOW SUNS

Kannan, Malavika

Little, Brown (384 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9780316447324

An Indian American girl navigates the stakes and sacrifices of rebellion in this queer coming-of-age story.

At Citrus Grove High School near Orlando, it’s an unspoken truth that students of color are disproportionately punished over their White counterparts. Maya Krishnan, a sophomore and talented artist, is used to playing the invisible observer. But deep inside her, rage is simmering, and she can’t keep quiet about the injustice she sees anymore. Maya stumbles on an opportunity to make waves when her paintings catch the eye of Juneau Zale, a rebellious White girl who leads the Pugilists, a secret group of students who protest Citrus Grove High’s policies through guerilla activism. Under their wing, Maya feels

WORDS WITH…

Ariel Aberg-Riger

A visual storyteller’s debut book offers young readers a fresh look at U.S. history

BY LAURA SIMEON

In America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, May 2), Ariel Aberg-Riger combines captivating collage art with text written in an energetic and fluid font she created herself to illuminate pivotal and often rarely discussed episodes in U.S. history, from celebrations of eugenics at county fairs to the decision to turn Diné and Hopi lands into a national sacrifice zone for destructive coal mining. Her nonlinear approach features brief chapters that feel as if they are in conversation with one another; these loosely related stories invite readers in, engaging them with history in a thought-provoking and invigorating way. Aberg-Riger, whose art and visual stories, both fiction and nonfiction, have appeared in diverse publications and formats, answered questions over email; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to write for young adults?

When I was writing visual stories as articles for places like CityLab, my work was written for adults, but my favorite feedback was always when educators would tell me they were using my pieces in their classrooms and that young people were really responding to them. As I went through the process of finding the book a home, it really became clear to me that it was meant to be made for young people. I never connected with history when I was younger. It was always my least favorite subject (and I was a kid who really loved school!). It felt like date after date, discrete fact after discrete fact, war after war. And when that is the model of history you’re given, it’s really easy to disengage. Unlearning how I thought about history took decades. If I can get a 16-year-old super amped about history, to see it as this living, breathing, cool, collage-based thing that they have the power to influence, that they are history? That to me is just the ultimate.

Did you develop the visuals alongside the text?

The process is definitely intertwined. I start out in a way that I imagine is how most nonfiction writers start out—I get excited, and I start digging! I read and watch and listen and read and read and read. On the visual side, as I am doing that deep dive, I’m also tentacle-ing across the internet to see what images are available—looking through digital archives, doing image searches, and following images back to their sources.

Once I’ve collected as much as I think I’ll need, I get to the hardest part (for me at least), which is figuring out the story I am trying to tell. Where am I placing the start? How much am I trying to get my arms around? What is the arc? What am I including? What do I have to leave out? As I’m figuring that out, the visual tone and approach are also evolving in my mind—what will the visual atmosphere for the story be? The colors? The style? The feeling?

Ariel Aberg-Riger

Both are driven by the material I’ve collected, and there are always constraints out of my control. For example, in the chapter about AIDS activism and ACT UP, the majority of images I could find in the public domain were centered around the Storm the NIH protest, because they were protesting a governmental agency and the NIH had them in their archive. That led me to frame the chapter around that one specific protest, which helped me tighten my focus, so I wasn’t trying to recap every action the group organized (which I was tempted to do because they were all so rad!).

I’m always thinking and blocking visually in my head as I do the words. Even though I always start with the writing, if I get stuck, I switch to collaging. It’s one reason I love visual storytelling so much—you can just go back and forth, switching sides of your brain. And working on one side always manages to unlock and illuminate pieces of the other.

Photography often feels “true” to people even though it’s as subjective as any other medium; the way you juxtapose photos against each other and the text in your collages will lead readers to perceive them in a more critical way.

You’re completely right, of course, photography is just as subjective as any other medium. Who took the photo, how they took it, who decided to add it to the archives, how they cataloged it—there are so many layers. I could pull a single image from the archives and put it onto a page in a thousand different ways—against different stories, layouts, coloring, cropping, alone, with other images, how it’s placed, what it’s juxtaposed against. It all matters.

One thing I love about visual storytelling is that the images not only create an atmosphere for the reader to swim in, but they also change the reading experience. Our eyes and brains are so accustomed to racing along strings of words. Visual storytelling slows us down, and that changes how we enter the stories and how we feel them.

One thing that infuriates me about traditional history textbook design is how ugly it is, and what terrible treatment the images get—shoved into the corner of the page, teeny tiny, black and white. There are so many incredible images in our archives! Why not let them take up space? I want to be engulfed, I want to see them.

Another thing that was always important was that I make the sources transparent so that readers could not only see the original image and who took it, but also the context in which it was created. I created a database, which readers can access on the book’s website, so you can not only learn more, but also download the images and play with them.

There are so many attempts to censor history that some people find uncomfortable; you shed light on topics many try to erase from the curriculum. One thing that that history does so beautifully is that it exposes power. When you go back in time and follow the stories, you realize that nothing just “is”; everything—every system, every structure, every norm—has been created and built and fought for. Certain people worked really, really hard to gain power and build power and hold on to power, sometimes by doing pretty brutal things. I find that the people most inclined to want to censor history are the people who are most afraid of exposing, and therefore possibly losing, their power. Whether it’s about race or gender or class—the people who have power often have a very hard time reflecting on how they got it. And what they’re doing every single day actively (or passively) to keep it. It’s much easier to just pretend like it’s some natural state of the universe, and when you read history, it’s really hard to pretend that! Once you start asking questions it all comes undone, in the absolute best of ways.

What do you hope readers will take from your book?

In the preface I say, “Forms change us, and I hope this book changes you.” I hope readers take this book as an invitation. An invitation to keep digging and reading and questioning and making.

America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History received a starred review in the April 15, 2023, issue.

young adult

one of us is back

empowered to be more daring than she ever imagined, but it comes at a cost: Her friends are resentful of her sudden secretiveness, her relationship with her single mother is faltering, and her future will be on the line if she’s caught. Complicating things further is Maya’s growing infatuation with Juneau, whose fearlessness both exhilarates and unnerves her. As she’s pulled deeper into Juneau’s orbit—and her whims—Maya begins to realize that she may be in over her head. The protagonist’s passion, outrage, and longing are vividly expressed through ruminative first-person prose and sharp dialogue. Maya’s problems pile up quickly, but the author handles each plot thread deftly and brings the journey to a satisfying conclusion.

A turbulent and cathartic account of self-discovery, activism, and first love. (Fiction. 14-18)

WHAT A DESI GIRL WANTS

Khan, Sabina

Scholastic (288 pp.)

$18.99 | July 18, 2023

9781338749335

Mehar Rabbani reluctantly travels from Newton, Kansas, to Agra, India, over winter break for her father’s wedding, hoping to mend their relationship and meet his new family.

Mehar’s famous polo player father’s luxurious royal lifestyle, his impending wedding to a socialite, and the constant online documentation by his fiancee’s social media influencer daughter ensure many soirees and paparazzi always hot on their trail. Though reconnecting with her grandmother and aunts brings back fond childhood memories, Mehar is often baffled by royal etiquette. Sufiya, her grandmother’s young assistant, helps her find her bearings, which leads to a growing friendship that blooms into a romance. Mehar uncovers secrets behind the unravelling of her parents’ marriage and continues to harbor nagging suspicions about her future stepmother’s and stepsister’s motivations. Convinced they have less than noble intentions for marrying into her father’s family, she plans to stop the wedding. The story explores the secret Sapphic romance as well as concepts such as personal sacrifice and societal pressures to bow to tradition over pursuing self-realization and love. Richly described palatial surroundings, lavish feasts, and bedazzling clothes and jewelry embellish the plot. However, the lightly developed characters end up in contrived situations, and the revelations of family skeletons and internal relationship dynamics don’t have the intended tensions or satisfying resolutions.

Leans on glamour and the countdown to an opulent wedding to balance out a thin plot. (Fiction. 12-18)

ONE OF US IS BACK McManus, Karen M.

Delacorte (368 pp.)

$19.99 | $22.99 PLB | July 25, 2023

9780593485019

9780593485026 PLB

Series: One of Us Is Lying, 3

A new game is starting in Bayview… but no one knows the rules in this latest installment in McManus’ bestselling One of Us Is Lying series.

After all they’ve endured, the Bayview Crew—made up of the original Bayview Four (Nate, Bronwyn, Cooper, and Addy); their successors (Maeve, Phoebe, and Knox); Cooper’s boyfriend, Kris; and Maeve’s boyfriend, Luis—attempt to move on with their lives. But Jake (Addy’s ex who tried to frame her for murder and almost killed her himself) has been released from jail and might even get a new trial. When a digital billboard in town ominously announces, “TIME FOR A NEW GAME, BAYVIEW,” the crew becomes vigilant, clinging to one another—because if they’ve learned anything since Simon’s death two years ago, it’s that everyone has secrets, and everyone is a target. While McManus, as expected, succeeds at engaging readers in another thrilling mystery, she focuses much attention on various characters’ challenges as they grow: Nate is determined to make himself worthy of Bronwyn’s love; Phoebe struggles to accept Knox’s affections while holding onto the secret of her brother’s involvement in Jared’s revenge on Addy’s brotherin-law; Addy must learn how to live in a world where she may have to encounter Jake again (despite the restraining order). And even from the grave Simon continues to have an impact on the community. Main characters read White; an earlier title describes Addy and Maeve as Colombian American.

A satisfying and hopeful closer in a masterful trilogy. (Thriller. 14-18)

IT’S TOTALLY NORMAL! An LGBTQIA+ Guide to Puberty, Sex, and Gender

Mehta, Monica Gupta & Asha Lily Mehta

Illus. by Fox Fisher

Jessica Kingsley Publishers (208 pp.)

$18.95 paper | May 18, 2023

9781839973550

A mother and her teen explore sexuality-related issues inspired by anonymous questions submitted to Normalizers, their nonprofit for autistic and LGBTQ+ youth.

Most of the content is written by mom Monica, an educator and psychologist who peppers in her own experiences, including those related to her Indian cultural heritage. Nonbinary lesbian teen Asha contributes anecdotes, some culled from comments on the Normalizers’ social media accounts, and, in a letter to readers, offers clear context for the book: How we understand

“A satisfying and hopeful closer in a masterful trilogy.”

and talk about sexuality and gender are continually changing. The work’s greatest strength is the clear, comprehensive discussion of current terms; even as specific language evolves, the open-minded and matter-of-fact definitions presented here will provide a good basis for understanding. The chapters on puberty, sexual activity (including safer sex and consent), and relationships give readers accurate information in relatable language. Other subjects covered are how to masturbate and the safe use of chest binders and sex toys. The chapters focusing on gender, sexuality, and issues specific to the LGBTQ+ community and their allies are somewhat dense but have an accepting and reassuring tone. Notable throughout the book are the use of inclusive language, the careful attention paid to being transgender or nonbinary, and the exploration of how sexuality and gender intersect with having autism. Line drawings illustrate the text sparingly. Each chapter ends with a Q&A drawn from real teens’ questions.

A valuable, no-holds-barred resource on gender and sexuality. (glossary, resources, index) (Nonfiction. 14-18)

A GUIDE TO THE DARK

Metoui, Meriam

Henry Holt (368 pp.)

$17.99 | July 18, 2023

9781250863218

Best friends run afoul of a cursed motel room.

Layla and Mira’s spring break college-visit road trip comes to a sudden halt with a nighttime car crash in a small Indiana town. Little do they know that Wildwood Motel’s Room Nine, their impromptu lodging, has been steadily claiming lives for decades. To Layla, Room Nine’s just a room. She’s far more concerned with getting to show her portfolio at her dream college, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at an event the following day and hopefully getting off their waitlist (even though her parents want her to stay close to home in Michigan—the same parents Egyptian American Layla can’t come out to for fear of losing their love). But Mira— deeply grieving her younger brother’s drowning death last summer during a visit to family in Tunisia—immediately feels the weighty wrongness of the room and starts experiencing impossible things. While trying to figure out if it’s concussion, grief, or something else, Mira befriends the teenage son of the motel’s owner, a boy who lost his father to Room Nine. As their investigation deepens, so does the sense of doom and danger. The prose is punctuated by Layla’s black-and-white photographs, lending a lovely sense of immersion. The ending balances emotional growth (and a touch of romance) with pain and a horror stinger. Layla and Mira are both Muslim and grapple with their immigrant parents’ expectations and their sexualities.

Introspective, character-driven, and—most importantly— haunting. (Horror. 12-18)

GHOSTED A Northanger Abbey Novel

Quain, Amanda

Wednesday Books (384 pp.)

$20.00 | July 25, 2023

9781250865076

A teenage girl must decide between normalcy and being true to herself.

Hattie Tilney has been a skeptic since her ghost-loving father died right before the family moved to Northanger Abbey boarding school, a hotbed for supposed paranormal activity where her mother became headmistress. All Hattie wants is to have a normal senior year with her friends and get into a good college, but when she’s assigned by her mom to be school ambassador to disarming transfer student Kit Morland, Hattie is horrified to find out that he is a ghost hunter on a scholarship from the National Paranormal Society of Investigators. Worse, Hattie must partner with Kit for their journalism class to investigate claims about paranormal activity at Northanger. Still grieving and determined to avoid anything to do with the paranormal world her dad loved, Hattie agrees to the project under one condition: Kit will try to prove the stories are true, and she will try to debunk them. It isn’t long before Hattie finds her feelings for Kit growing as he pulls her into exploring subjects she has avoided for several years. In her second novel inspired by a Jane Austen classic, Quain draws a realistic portrait of a young person struggling with loss, social pressures, and familial expectations. Readers need not be familiar with the original to appreciate this retelling with a supernatural twist. Main characters read White; there is some racial diversity in the supporting cast.

Fresh and compelling. (Paranormal romance. 13-18)

I’D RATHER BURN THAN BLOOM

Rogers, Shannon C.F. Feiwel & Friends (320 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9781250845665

In New Mexico, a grief-stricken family grapples with the sudden loss of their matriarch.

Marisol Martin is a sophomore when her Filipina immigrant mom dies in a car accident after one of their many screaming fights—they were constantly, painfully at odds with one another. Marisol’s final condescending question, “Why don’t you understand anything?” reverberates in her guilty conscience; she believes the accident was her fault. Left with her emotionally unavailable White dad, a nonresponsive younger brother, and Filipina childhood best friends Yvonne and Tes, all of whom are unable to help her in her sadness, Marisol spirals. Despite never having been drunk or “even made out with a boy” before her mother’s death, the

vicissitudes of grief lead Marisol to drink vodka, sleep with Yvonne’s boyfriend, and even punch Yvonne in the face. Suspended from school and sent to juvie, Marisol meets Mexican American Elizabeth, a clever, adventurous overachiever who breathes new possibility into her life. Readers who relish deep character development will appreciate Marisol’s messy evolution toward self-forgiveness. Her confessional first-person narration often reads like a movie, and it teems with vivid insights about crushes, longings, friend breakups, and complicated family dynamics set against the burning backdrop of the Albuquerque desert. The representation of a Filipino experience in the United States is done with superlative skill, rendering this beautifully written debut a model for how to expertly weave culturally specific cues into a universal story.

Heart-wrenching and heart-filled. (Fiction. 14-18)

THE ALCHEMYST

The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: The Graphic Novel

Scott, Michael

Adapt. by Nicole Andelfinger

Illus. by Chris Chalik

Delacorte (256 pp.)

$23.99 | $17.99 paper | Aug. 29, 2023

9780593304679

9780593304686 paper

Series: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

A graphic adaptation of the series opener carries humani twins Sophie and Josh into their first encounters with magic plus hordes of mythological and undead beings and creatures. Events follow the general course of those in the original, and Andelfinger preserves enough of the significant dialogue to capture the flavor of Scott’s language—but that’s not enough to rescue this reworking. Lacking captions to smooth transitions or explain what’s happening, the visuals just string together scenes in which the pacing turns herky-jerky and talky banter or explication overflows up or sideways into adjacent panels in often hard-to-follow sequences. Dialogue balloons throughout point to characters who are sometimes depicted with closed mouths and wooden features and also frequently shown as (non)talking heads or just standing around with arms hanging loosely, reacting in overly exaggerated ways, or posed with cocked hips like flirtatious fashion models. The magic that Flamel and John Dee hurl at each other in the opening duel looks (and sounds: “Hiss!” “Pop!” “Zzzzk!”) like sprays of effervescent, colored mist. That battle, like the later ones with cat goddess Bastet’s minions and Dee’s army of zombies, are tableaux with neither visual coherence nor any sense of flow. Some characters, such as the goth teen/immortal warrior Scathach and regal Hekate (the only person of color in the cast), do look suitably powerful, but overall, this whole episode has the look and feel of a stiff walk-through.

A drab, mechanical remake. (Graphic fantasy. 12-14)

AQUEOUS Shyback, Jade

Xeno/Red Hen Press (288 pp.)

$14.95 paper | May 2, 2023

9781939096098

Climate disasters amplified by greed have rendered Earth’s surface uninhabitable and space travel impossible; now just three deep-ocean merstations stand between humankind and extinction.

Desperate to ensure her last child’s safety, Sunniva’s mother surrendered her to Adm. Blaise and his wife, who name her Marisol. They’re Aqueous’ power couple, living in the merstation off the California coast (the other two are located in the Marianas and Kuril-Kamchatka trenches). A decade later, though grateful for the opportunities her loving adoptive parents provide, Marisol privately grieves her lost family. A top student and fierce competitor, she longs to become Aqueous’ first woman cuvier, navigating the ocean beyond the merstation. Earth’s surface needs time to become habitable, so Aqueous’ inhabitants must pass on the scientific and technical skills that sustain their complex, vulnerable facility to future generations. Specialization is a must, innovative problem-solving, essential. Naviah, Marisol’s ingenious friend, creates fashion from what fabric is available on Aqueous, where everyone receives Standard-Issue Dress clothes. In grueling trials that determine career placements, Marisol will need to beat her crush, Creighton, and her vulnerable friend, Felix. Ingeniously configured and persuasively detailed, this biosphere has heft. Pop culture is largely history, and race, nationality, and other cultural identifiers of the dying world have disappeared; social class, privilege, and binary gender norms have not. The cliffhanger ending guarantees sequels. Main characters read White. Refreshingly original, this dystopia delivers more than a dash of hope. (Dystopian. 14-18)

GIVE ME A SIGN

Sortino, Anna

Putnam (320 pp.)

$18.99 | July 11, 2023

9780593533796

A Deaf teen from the Chicago suburbs explores her identity at summer camp.

Seventeen-year-old Lilah was born severely deaf. Though she’s able to get by with hearing aids, FM units at school, and lip reading, she feels disconnected from the hearing world around her. Camp Gray Wolf, designed for deaf and blind kids, was the only place where she could use ASL and accept her deafness. But the rising high school senior hasn’t been there since eighth grade. Feeling pulled back to the community, she applies for a counselor position. But camp isn’t perfect either—her signing isn’t fluent, and she feels like she doesn’t totally fit in

their vicious games

with the Deaf world. Readers will relate to and root for Lilah as she starts a summer romance with Isaac, a Deaf fellow junior counselor, and confronts her feelings about her own deafness. The author captures a common feeling for people who fall into the hard of hearing category: feeling like they are not hearing enough and yet not deaf enough. She also explores other Deaf experiences such as meeting condescending saviors and navigating scary interactions with the police. Secondary characters, including a Deaf family in which one member gets a cochlear implant and a child whose father belittles and all but forbids ASL, expose readers to experiences of deafness other than Lilah’s. Lilah reads White; there is some racial diversity among the supporting characters.

Readers will love this sincere Deaf coming-of-age story. (note on the text, author’s note) (Fiction. 12-18)

THE STONE, THE CIPHER, AND THE SHADOWS

John Bellairs’s Johnny Dixon in a Mystery

Strickland, Brad Open Road Media (167 pp.)

$18.99 | Aug. 8, 2023

9781504081634

The cast of John Bellairs’ classic Johnny Dixon series is resurrected for a creepy new story with contemporary elements.

Strickland’s tale is set in the mid-1950s—with telephones on cords, black-and-white TVs, doctors making house calls, and other period details—but in the midst of a more timely feeling flu pandemic and general shutdown. Johnny, with friends Sarah Channing and Fergie Ferguson plus, of course, crusty Professor Childermass, faces a sorcerer seeking power over a shadow realm as well as eerie manifestations ranging from glimpses of spectral figures and a horribly distorted face in the window to a midday spell of townwide darkness. The members of the all-White cast, from methodical Johnny and competent Sarah on, remain true to type, and Bellairs fans will also find the way the author slows the pacing with references to the professor’s culinary treats, what everyone is wearing or eating, conversations about this epidemic and the one in 1918, and like minor details to be quaintly reminiscent of the original series. Still, along with ciphered messages to decode, old legends of a local woman who could foretell events, characters with secrets, and nighttime expeditions to a Colonial-era graveyard, the author tucks in increasingly macabre visions and incidents on the way to a climactic supernatural struggle over a certain grave and a suitably spooky fate for the villain.

The buildup is leisurely by current standards, but the cast and plot offer a seamless fit into the classic series. (Horror. 12-14)

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR Vinesse, Cecilia

Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (368 pp.)

$19.99 | May 30, 2023

9780063285873

Hooking up with your ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend? Because reasons.

All Cleo wants to care about is getting into New York University to study film and make horror movies. She does not want to care that Daniel, her ex, cheated on her with girly girl Kiki. She is going to finish her screenplay, get into her dream college, and get the heck out of North Carolina. There is absolutely no need to fake-date Marianne, who is Kiki’s ex and Cleo’s next-door neighbor. Marianne and Cleo were besties back when they were kids, but ever since middle school, Cleo’s been in the artsy crowd and Marianne’s been popular. Maybe this faux relationship will torment Daniel and help Marianne win back Kiki, but it’s painful taking Marianne to homecoming. Gorgeous, funny Marianne, who’s like a Brazilian American “Kristen Stewart with her hair slicked back” and “James Dean bathed in vintage cinematography.” Marianne, who is funny, loves her family, and has anxiety. The slow-moving train wreck of Cleo’s senior year gains momentum and accelerates to the extent that some essential epiphanies are rushed. But Cleo’s filmmaker eye frames the entirety of her life like a classic movie, and the rushed ending fits in a world where she’s learned she’s not the director. In this multiracial setting, race is primarily mentioned only for characters who are not White; Cleo is implied White by default.

A warm, charming tale of a horror-loving film buff who’s stuck in a romantic comedy. (Romance. 13-17)

THEIR VICIOUS GAMES

Wellington, Joelle Simon & Schuster (416 pp.)

$19.99 | July 25, 2023

9781665922425

A teenager enrolls in a lethal competition to salvage her reputation and repair her broken future.

As the valedictorian of Edgewater Academy, 18-year-old Adina Walker planned to attend Yale University and escape the predictability of suburban Massachusetts, where old money, classism, and casual racism are as ubiquitous as Brooks Brothers. Fortunately, Adina has her best friend, Toni, who is one of the few other Black students on campus. After a long-simmering conflict between Adina and queen bee Esme Alderidge turns physical, Adina’s Yale acceptance is rescinded. Just when all hope seems lost, Adina is invited to participate in the Finish, a high-pressure, exclusive contest sponsored by the town’s ruling blueblood family, the Remingtons. But soon after

“Readers are rewarded with heart-stopping reveals.”

nuanced, hilarious page-turning romantic mystery.”

Adina arrives at Remington Estate, she learns this competition isn’t a test of feminine etiquette—it’s a battle for survival. In this debut thriller that calls to mind the Japanese dystopian film Battle Royale (2000) and the American horror film Ready or Not (2019), power and privilege are depicted as twin evils that decimate empathy and corrupt morality. Adina’s outsider status amplifies the desperate greed and calculated sociopathy of the upper crust. While the worldbuilding is thin in some places, particularly around the dark traditions of the Remingtons and the unquestioning compliance of their sycophants, readers are rewarded with heart-stopping reveals.

A twisty chronicle, filled with equal parts glory and gore, of an outlier who transforms into a modern “final girl.” (Thriller. 14-18)

MURDER ON A SCHOOL NIGHT

Weston, Kate

Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins

(384 pp.)

$18.99 | July 4, 2023

9780063260276

Mean Girls meets Midsomer Murders with a dash of Louise Rennison in this genre-blending story that centers girls’ friendships and two ambitious best friends.

Amateur detective Annie and aspiring journalist Kerry are feminist teens living in the sleepy English village of Barbourough. When Selena, their bullying classmate, is found murdered at a party with a menstrual cup in her mouth, Heather, party host and foremost among the clique self-styled Les Populaires, recruits the two Agatha Christie enthusiasts to clear her name as a suspect. Kerry and Annie are self-absorbed friends whose obsession over their lack of popularity results in hysterically funny dialogue and a lighthearted tone. As the story progresses, two more murders occur. Kerry’s crush on newcomer Scott and the pair’s subsequent romantic exploits offer sweet diversions from the intensity of the additional gruesome, period-product–related murders. However, what really elevates the goofy capers and over-the-top scheming is how well Kerry and Annie know both themselves and each other. Despite struggling with anxiety, first-person narrator Kerry deftly analyzes the cases and supports her brilliant best friend as she sleuths her way through the murderous local chaos. The cast largely reads White; brown-skinned twins Colin and Audrey play begrudging roles in Heather’s friend group, and their individual secrets add depth and complexity to this insightful parody of teenage life.

A nuanced, hilarious page-turning romantic mystery. (Mystery. 14-18)

THE FAINT OF HEART

Wilson, Kerilynn

Greenwillow Books (304 pp.)

$24.99 | June 13, 2023

9780063116214

A teenage girl refuses a medical procedure to remove her heart and her emotions.

June lives in a future in which a reclusive Scientist has pioneered a procedure to remove hearts, thus eliminating all “sadness, anxiety, and anger.” The downside is that it numbs pleasurable feelings, too. Most people around June have had the procedure done; for young people, in part because doing so helps them become more focused and successful. Before long, June is the only one among her peers who still has her heart. When her parents decide it’s time for her to have the procedure so she can become more focused in school, June hatches a plan to pretend to go through with it. She also investigates a way to restore her beloved sister’s heart, joining forces with Max, a classmate who’s also researching the Scientist because he has started to feel again despite having had his heart removed. The pair’s journey is somewhat rushed and improbable, as is the resolution they achieve. However, the story’s message feels relevant and relatable to teens, and the artwork effectively sets the scene, with bursts of color popping throughout an otherwise black-and-white landscape, reflecting the monochromatic, heartless reality of June’s world. There are no ethnic or cultural markers in the text; June has paper-white skin and dark hair, and Max has dark skin and curly black hair.

A fast-paced dip into the possibility of a world without human emotions. (Graphic speculative fiction. 12-18)

BEYOND SEX ED Understanding Sexually Transmitted Infections

Yancey, Diane & Tabitha Moriarty

Twenty-First Century/Lerner (128 pp.)

$38.65 PLB | Aug. 1, 2023

Series: Healthy Living Library

9781541588950

A forthright and instructive guide to a number of sexual intimacy–related health risks.

Brief chapters, short paragraphs with clear headings, and frequent text boxes offering supplemental information help make the information presented here accessible. The authors, one a nonfiction writer for teens and the other a medical student, assume no prior knowledge and explain the reproductive organs and how they work, content supplemented by detailed, labeled anatomical illustrations. Seven different sexually transmitted infections—chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes, HIV, human papillomavirus, and hepatitis—each get a chapter that describes their transmission, diagnosis and

“A

tests, symptoms, and treatment. Sometimes the material is somewhat scientifically dense, as in the explanation of antibiotic resistance. The final chapters discuss why STIs have not been eradicated, how to reduce your risk of acquiring an STI (including both through abstinence and safer sex); and living with a chronic STI. Religious and cultural taboos are acknowledged, as are the influences of media and substance use. The book explains the distinction between sex and gender and uses unambiguous, neutral language that is inclusive of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people. The stock photos show young people of a variety of diverse backgrounds.

Offers direct, clear, useful, and possibly lifesaving information to teens. (glossary, source notes, bibliography, resources, further reading, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

indie

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

THE FEAR OF LARGE AND SMALL NATIONS

Agabian, Nancy Nauset Press (348 pp.)

$23.99 paper | May 9, 2023

9798985969238

A bisexual Armenian American writer in the midst of an identity crisis visits her homeland in this explorative novel.

“I’m about to journey to Armenia, to live for a year among people who I resemble,” writes Natalee, a feminist author based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, some of Na’s friends and family had journeyed to “the closest thing we had to a homeland” and returned remarking on the “emotional power” of the experience. In 2006, curious to do the same, Na boards a plane for Yerevan, wondering what the country will think of her. She is met with the troubles experienced by many travelers, such as not being able to figure out the code to call the United States. But she is disheartened to discover that she finds it difficult to assimilate to local life, struggles with the language, and begins to feel forlorn as an outsider. She is also aware that despite a new human rights bill protecting LGBTQ+ people, it is dangerous to be openly gay in Armenia. She discovers that “queer women were invisible.” Wrestling with loneliness, Na meets Seyran, a young, rebellious bisexual leader of a punk band, who shows her around Yerevan. They connect based on the fact that they appear to accept each other’s marginal identities, and Na agrees to marry Seyran so that he can avoid conscription. They return to New York City together, where Seyran’s attitude toward Na rapidly changes and she finds herself caught in an abusive relationship.

CHESTER AND THE MAGIC 8 BALL Katz, Lynn Black Rose Writing (209 pp.)

$19.95 paper | $5.99 e-book | Feb. 8, 2023

9781685131340

Written imaginatively as a series of fragmented narratives, journal entries, blog posts, and meta passages, Agabian’s novel describes Na’s journey from shifting perspectives. First-person accounts reveal Na’s intimate inner monologues as she wrestles with the importance of identity: “Part of the reason I’m here is to find what was lost in me. It’s upsetting to see that the West is already here…with its destructive, homogenizing effects of globalization.” Deeply thoughtful segments of meta-writing will stop readers in their tracks by boldly challenging preconceptions of identity and sexuality using penetrating questions: “How do you explain a gay man who loves his wife and has created a life around a family?” The narrative also comes with a provocative twist, as Seyran shifts from being the oppressed to the oppressor: “The assumption was that the immigrant was the one who was weak, dependent on others. The one vulnerable to beating and rape.” In a passage focusing on Na, the author eloquently and believably captures the thought processes of an abuse victim:

“I’d already said no a couple of times, and he didn’t listen to me, he never stopped…chipping away at my resolve where he found my female indoctrination, my hesitancy to say no still ingrained at this late date.” Unfortunately, Agabian does not look often enough toward the Armenian landscape to describe it in great detail—but this matters little, as her attention is elsewhere. This is a courageously fragmented approach to storytelling that depicts a valiant search for self-understanding while challenging traditional gender roles, discrimination, and homophobia. Beautifully textured writing in a compelling tale that ponders identity and belonging.

DOCTOR MAY’S CABIN

Arnstein, Pam

Illus. by Gigi Bocek

Self (203 pp.)

$10.99 paper | $7.99 e-book

Dec. 13, 2021

9798784092168

Arnstein’s debut middle-grade novel explores a young girl’s relationship with her trailblazing relative in 1960s Minnesota.

The year is 1969, and grade schooler Pam is enjoying the last days of summer camp. When her parents have to attend her grandfather’s funeral, however, she’s sent to stay with her grandmother May and great aunt Grace for a few days until her parents can pick her up on their way home. Pam is nervous since May is notoriously fastidious and lives in a house with no TV or running water. But the more Pam gets to know her grandmother, the more she comes to appreciate the extraordinary things the old woman has accomplished throughout her long life. May and Grace both bucked tradition by electing to pursue professions (May is a doctor; Grace teaches high school math) and remain unmarried—shocking choices for women in the early 1900s. May further proved herself a maverick by adopting a child (Pam’s mother) in her late 30s as a single woman. Pam grows closer to her grandmother and great aunt and develops a love of the rugged landscape around the cabin, which is nestled in Minnesota’s Iron Range. There is no climactic event or major conflict in this story. Instead, it presents a series of small, quiet snapshots that depict a simpler time: cooking chicken and wild rice soup, exploring the woods, and going into town to enjoy a butterscotch malt and peruse the “variety store.” The relationship that develops between Pam and May, which starts off cautiously and blossoms into a sweet understanding, largely offsets the stilted dialogue: “My doctor grandmother has high standards for behavior and cleanliness, so staying at her cabin probably won’t be much fun.” The simple black-and-white illustrations by Bocek do a wonderful job of complementing the quiet nature of the story.

This simple, sweet story of a girl unlocking the mysteries of her grandmother’s past will appeal to middle-grade readers.

I LOVE YOU MORE THAN CEREAL Maeva and Dad Redefine Love

Black, Justin & Alexis Black

Illus. by 1000 Storybooks

Global Perspectives Publishing (34 pp.)

$12.99 paper | $7.99 e-book

April 2, 2023 9798986577302

This illustrated children’s book from Justin Black and Alexis Black teaches a lesson about loving oneself as well as others.

Maeva, who appears to be about 6 years old and has light brown skin, loves her new purple bicycle and wants to show it off to her friends, who are “going to be so jealous.” Maeva’s father is saddened by her desire to make the other kids “eat [her] dust,” but Maeva thinks the jealousy and admiration of her friends will make her happy. Before Maeva heads to the park, her father says: “You used the word ‘love’ quite a bit when you were talking about your bike….What does ‘love’ mean to you?” Dad asserts that love is “about how we treat ourselves and other people too.” Together, Maeva and Dad conclude that love is “patient and kind,” “warm and happy,” and “doesn’t make other people feel bad.” Happily, Maeva sets off to the park to share her candy with her friends and ride alongside them. The authors use this simple conversation between Maeva and her father to teach young readers about love. Their story is simply written and easily understood, with a clear message. The fullcolor illustrations, credited to 1000 Storybooks, complement the text with their simplicity and use of a soft color palette. A charming lesson in love seen through a child’s eyes.

TOPANGA CANYON Fire Season

Bryan, Barbara Atmosphere Press (338 pp.)

$18.99 paper | Jan. 10, 2023

9781639887286

In Bryan’s debut YA novel, a teenage boy adjusts to life on his grandfather’s ranch and takes a stand against animal cruelty.

Matt Barrett, a 14-year-old, finds himself on a bus from Chicago to Los Angeles; sent away by his alcoholic mother and her abusive boyfriend, Matt goes to stay with his grandfather Silas Phillips and help out on his ranch. Unhappy even before he arrives, Matt soon grows utterly miserable. Silas is stern and unaffectionate and puts him to work mucking out stables. Matt’s days are long and tiring, and there’s no phone reception. His only true friend on the ranch is the housekeeper Esmerelda Montoya, whose cooking enchants everyone and whose Native American Tongva heritage seems to afford her a deep connection to the land. As the weeks pass, Matt starts to feel more at home and bonds with some of the horses. Working as a stable hand, he is

INDIE | Arthur Smith odd jobs

Celebrity memoirs and biographies can be irresistible—we’re all curious about the formative experiences of folks like Mariah Carey or Bono (and the promise of salacious gossip doesn’t hurt). Independently published truelife chronicles may not boast the highest-profile authors, but they can provide a window into fascinating lives and experiences unfamiliar to the general reader. The following Indie titles provide unique insights into some unusual professions.

Leslie Y. Dawson’s Swindler (2022) recounts the history of her felonious father, an upright, successful insurance salesman who, after losing everything in the stock market crash of 1929, turned to selling stock in fictitious mining companies he had invented out of whole cloth. Our review calls the book a “mesmerizing biography, full of drama and subtlety.”

An Improbable Astronaut by Roy D. Bridges Jr. (2022) follows the author’s journey from Southern farm boy to space-faring explorer, a trajectory filled with seemingly insurmountable obstacles that the author overcame through sheer determination and force of will. Our reviewer concludes, “Even readers with just a casual interest in space travel and interstellar exploration will find much to savor in this admirable, inspiring, and heartfelt account.”

The 2022 memoir Attaboy by James Scurti traces the Emmy-winning cameraman’s fivedecade career, which includes colorful encounters with luminaries, from screen legend Bette Davis to the fire-breathing rock band Kiss. In one memorable anecdote, pop star Lady Gaga forbids Scurti from eating doughnuts in her presence. Top that, Bono! Our reviewer concluded, “fans of celebrity culture, as well as on-set and backstage drama, will eat up Scurti’s sensational stories.”

Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.

assigned to help Robert Sinclair, a callous trainer who leases barn space at the ranch. Sinclair cares only for money and employs brutal, illegal practices when preparing his horses for show events. Matt is shocked, but the ranch is in financial trouble and Silas doesn’t want to hear about what Sinclair is doing. Can Matt end the horses’ abuse without ruining his grandfather’s livelihood? The prose is straightforward but elegant (“He stared at the traffic. It flowed like the liquid mercury in Mr. Rocker’s science class, cascading down the pass in its shiny liquid form, fast-moving, unstoppable, poisonous quicksilver”), serving both to relate the story and to capture the simplicity of life on a working ranch. Matt makes for a relatable protagonist: His family life is tough, and he is justifiably self-pitying until the change in his environment brings out the best in him. The plot moves slowly but unfolds in a natural, rather appealing fashion; Bryan takes time to describe things like different horse gaits and to detail the building of a sweat lodge to build the novel’s world, grounding the narrative in a sense of place and adding weight to the revelations of animal cruelty. Readers both teenage and adult, horse-loving and horse-ignorant, should find themselves heavily invested in Matt’s life on the ranch.

A gentle and compelling coming-of-age story.

THE SYNDICATE SPY

Butler, Brittany Greenleaf Book Group Press (320 pp.)

$28.95 | $9.99 e-book | March 21, 2023 9798886450248

This debut novel pits an Army Ranger–turned-spy against a terrorist organization bent on destroying alternative energy sites.

Set in a near future when the planet’s oil reserves are essentially gone—and former oil-rich nations are desperate to regain their power on the world stage—the story revolves around Juliet Arroway. She’s an operative for the Syndicate, a partnership of intelligence agencies whose mission is to hunt down and eradicate energy terrorists. Arroway’s main goal is to stop the mysterious Abu Hassan, the head of a terrorist group that has been responsible for the deaths of countless people over the years—including her father. With the help of her longtime partner and friend Mariam al-Saud (who happens to be the estranged daughter of the king of Saudi Arabia) and cocky FBI agent Graham Harding, Arroway slowly uncovers the complicated motivations behind the attacks. Early on, Harding tells her: “If I were you, I would go into this investigation with an open mind.” She eventually finds that the conspiracy goes much deeper than a group of misguided jihadis seeking to establish an Islamic caliphate. Butler obviously understands what thriller fans want in a story. The action is nonstop, the pacing is relentless, and the bombshell plot twists are numerous—but it’s the brilliantly developed characters that power this narrative. In this series opener, Arroway is a badass in every sense of the word, but she also has an impressive emotional depth and a vulnerability underneath

dynamic cast drives this striking, historically rich crime thriller.”

the devil you knew

her tough exterior that make her relatable. Her tumultuous relationship with Harding, for example, is more intimate than any romance and more arousing than any work of erotic fiction. But perhaps the understated hook in all of this is the author’s vivid writing style, which makes characters and scenes come alive on the page. As Arroway and Harding are evacuated from a horrific battle scene, Butler writes: “Fragments of light grew into thick saffron beams as they glided above the smoke-filled cities below.”

A storytelling tour de force—this espionage thriller delivers the goods in a big way.

FACING THE BEAST WITHIN

Cheverton, Mark

Gameknight Publishing (208 pp.)

$9.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Sept. 1, 2023 9781735878164

Cheverton’s middle-grade fantasy series starter shares a timely tale of childhood anxiety about a young camper assisting in a battle to save Earth.

Cameron Poole has only two real friends at Camp Pontchartrain, where he’s the “smallest sixth-grader”: self-confident, tech-oriented Bobby and the always-encouraging archery enthusiast Elisa Jarreau. His bullies include new kid and baseball team captain Karl Macarthur, among others. However, Cameron finds an unlikely ally in football team captain Leonard O’Malley, who comes to his aid when hassled by soccer players. Mrs. Chakoté, the camp director, shares that the campers will soon witness a “Super Blood Moon” eclipse; around the same time, Cameron sees a “creature no bigger than a small child…its skin dark red. Tiny wings stuck out from its back, short stubby horns jutting up from its head, and its eyes glowing like two burning embers.” It isn’t long before Cameron learns that Camp Pontchartrain is not what it seems; in fact, it contains a doorway to a parallel universe known as Agartha—and Mrs. Chakoté is on a mission to stop Malphas, Agartha’s Demon Lord leader, and his minions from invading Earth. The anxious Cameron and his friends soon find themselves helping Mrs. Chakoté to stop the Agarthan threat. Over the course of Cheverton’s well-crafted story, he offers engaging insights into childhood anxiety and strategies for working through anxious moments, including helpful exercises such as box breathing (“breathing in for five counts, waiting for five counts, exhaling for five counts, then waiting again for five counts before repeating”). And there’s evocative imagery that draws readers into Cameron’s world: “The buzzing in my head morphed from a collection of bees to a hive of angry hornets.” The protagonist’s internal struggle and the battle against the Agarthans are seamlessly intertwined; the tale may give hope to young readers that they, too, can successfully deal with anxiety.

A compelling fantasy adventure with intriguing selfhelp elements.

THE DEVIL YOU KNEW Cobb, Mike M G Cobb Books (480 pp.)

$18.88 paper | $4.99 e-book | Sept. 1, 2022 9780578371436

In Cobb’s mystery novel, a reporter aims to prove a wrongfully convicted man innocent by unmasking the actual killer.

People in 11-year-old Billy Tarwater’s Atlanta community are shocked when a young girl turns up missing. Before long, someone has abducted and assaulted three girls, leaving two dead and the other comatose. It’s 1963, the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the police seemingly want to pin these crimes on Sam Jepperson, a local Black man. Despite a lack of evidence against him, he winds up behind bars. Years later, in 1980, Billy is a family man working at a newspaper as a reporter. He’s convinced that the wrong man sits in prison for the crimes against the girls, and he’s determined to track down the real culprit. He’s not after a story—he’s on a personal mission, as his wife has strong ties to the 17-year-old case. But there’s unmistakable potential for danger, especially if the murderer still walks free. Cobb’s mystery features compellingly drawn characters who draw the reader in. Much of the novel unfolds in 1963 and alternates narrative perspectives among copious people entangled in the crimes; Billy’s investigation dominates the latter half. A White man, he’s faced neither racial injustice nor a sexual assault, but the theme of the destructive effects of discrimination remains strong throughout. Punchy dialogue propels a series of interrogation and interview scenes from the police’s investigation in 1963 (“They put him through the mill. Ground him down like a sorghum kernel”) and Billy’s rounds of questions in 1980. These sequences highlight the alarming differences between the two paths of inquiry, as it’s disturbingly clear that the cops have a preconceived idea as to who’ll be serving time. Although most readers will unravel the mystery well before the end, the chilling denouement packs a punch.

A dynamic cast drives this striking, historically rich crime thriller.

THE WOOD AND THE TREES Davies, P.G. Manuscript

An England-born Scot lives a life in the 1980s that teems with eclectic acquaintances in this debut novel.

Archie Henderson sees attending university as an escape from life with his unpleasant mother. He studies history and becomes particularly fond of stories of the United States’ past, so he and his best friend, Tommy, obtain student work visas and travel around America. As the young men make their way south,

“A

Archie learns about the country’s history of slavery, the Civil War, and current racism. Along the way, he meets remarkable people, including the amicable New Orleans local Willie B. Back in the U.K., Archie gets a job working the Asian equities desk at an investment firm, which finds him mingling with colorful clients and colleagues. He reunites with someone he once rescued from a bully at their all-boys school; now she goes by Vincenza and waits tables at a drag club in Soho. Archie later focuses on his own life, including a possible romance and a family secret. Davies’ appealing, selfless protagonist often puts himself at risk to help both friends and strangers. However, he frequently comes across as a tourist in supporting characters’ more compelling stories. Willie B, for example, is a Black man who’s victimized by a justice system that doesn’t do much harm to Archie, who’s White. At another point, Archie witnesses someone else jump into a raging river to save a young girl, and he spectates during a character’s entanglement in an attempted murder trial. Still, the cast is superb, including a surprisingly charming undertaker and a former Royal Marine who’s the son of a British noble and a stage performer. Sharply written prose maintains a steady narrative momentum, as when Archie and Tommy travel through Texas: “Discovering the delights of Tex Mex cuisine they headed for a bar where they found a crowd of students enjoying Freshers Week….Being back among their own kind Archie and Tommy soon got into the swing of it with plenty of stories and plenty of nonsense.” The marvelous opening and closing scenes also enrich the novel.

Well-developed characters energize this story of camaraderie.

ROADS

Dean, Daren Self (321 pp.)

$16.99 paper | Feb. 1, 2023

9798373634687

A bleak novel focuses on a teen’s fight to survive in rural Missouri.

Sixteen-year-old Dannie Gail Posey and her sister, Carley, scrape out a meager existence in East Egypt, Missouri. Their mother dropped them on the doorstep of their Uncle Smith and his handicapped mother, Aunt Esther, when they were little—and Dannie has dreamed of getting out ever since. When Carley disappears, no one thinks much of it at first since she’s always getting into trouble. But then she’s reported dead in Stinson Creek, and chaos ensues. Sheriff Del Hampton tells Uncle Smith that Carley was likely raped before being killed and dumped in the creek. The prime suspects? The members of the Lynch family. After all, “the Poseys had always hated the Lynches; the Lynches hated everyone else. There had been bad blood between the families” for longer than Dannie could remember. As an all-out war between the feuding families threatens to boil over, Uncle Smith goes on the offensive, while Dannie takes it upon herself to learn what really happened to her sister. Along the way, she learns a shocking truth about her family that changes everything. With haunting prose (Dannie “tossed a

tail of dark hair, shiny as a grackle’s wing, over her shoulder. Her skin was translucent, revealing heart-breakingly delicate green veins that crisscrossed just beneath the surface of her pale face”), Dean deftly creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and desperation that practically seeps out of the pages. Dannie’s attempts to make sense of both her past and present echo protagonists’ struggles in some classic Southern novels, with this grim, twisty tale providing its own cast of memorable characters. And perhaps most impressively of all, every bit of the story’s tension manages to implode in a jaw-dropping final act.

A gripping tale of brutal murder, betrayal, and redemption that will challenge readers’ assumptions.

TALES OF URATH Of Dragons and Drakes

Dorety III, Arthur J.

BookBaby (186 pp.)

$38.99 paper | $2.99 e-book | Dec. 7, 2022 9781667867724

War is brewing on the planet of Urath in this intricately built universe where the power of dragons rivals that of the gods.

Journal entries by “a visitor from another world and dimension” introduce us to the world of dragon-ruled Urath: The “light” dragons have been at war with the “dark” dragons, called drakes, for centuries. Only when nine magic pearls are brought together will the corruption of the drakes be corrected. Meanwhile, godlike beings compete for the attention of Urath mortals in a world filled with both magic and science. Dragons can shape-shift, for example, and genetic research revealed that elves, dwarves, humans, and gnomon are all descendants from the same species. The Order of the Balance keeps the universe in check with the help of a small group of Urath mortals imbued with special powers. A host of characters, including Ertha, Mistress of the Rock, and Sirenia, Mistress of the Water, attempt to keep peace. But after they induct two new members—half-elf Alira Zell and her half sister, a full-blooded elf named Al Khimia—to the Order of the Balance, they soon find themselves betrayed by one who wishes to steal the pearls and wield the ultimate power. All of this occurs amid a brewing war that may force dragons and drakes to work together in order to defend themselves from the wrath of the gods. While the prose can be stilted and occasional typos occur, the nonstop action and vivid details largely compensate for the distractions. Reminiscent of a particularly engaging Dungeons and Dragons campaign, author/illustrator Dorety combines scraps of Greek mythology (“The Divine…are powerful super humanoids, and they live and come from their own ‘immortal realms’ on the other side of astral space”) with Tolkien-esque worldbuilding. Loaded with colorful illustrations, this wholly realized universe is wildly fun. A unique take on fantasy lit that ably tackles science, magic, and mythology.

A DREAM OF SHADOWS

Eliott, Peter Further Press (404 pp.)

$19.99 paper | $4.99 e-book | Nov. 1, 2022

9798986706504

In Eliott’s fantasy novel, an assassin’s contract leads him into a mystery.

Vazeer the Lash is, by his own admission, a villain. But villainy is relative in Hell’s Labyrinth, formally known as Sullward, a crime-ridden city in which survival comes at the edge of a blade. When he bids on a mysterious and lucrative contract, Vazeer is drawn into a treacherous game. The assignment is the elimination of Count Ulan Gueritus, a known torturer nicknamed The Raving Blade who mutilates and brands his victims. Amenable to a justifiable homicide, Vazeer joins a team of five fellow criminals in an elaborate scheme to hunt the target in his own home, posing as expected guests. As their tenuous plans unravel, the conspirators discover that nothing is as it seems, including the identity of their target. Blending beautiful prose (“In the claustrophobic web of alleyways, the air was as smothering as a horse blanket, textured even, to the point where you could separate out its various threads of sour pungency and dull sweetness”) and gritty suspense, the novel keeps the reader on edge with every passing page. Though the action is intense, the violence is seldom graphic. Vazeer the Lash repeatedly justifies his moniker in his fight to survive, proving to be a thoughtful antihero who, despite a flippant demeanor, struggles with the cruelty of his world. Evolving over the course of the story, Vazeer commits to letting go of his dark and tortuous past—but it appears that the darkness is not yet done with Vazeer.

Part fantasy, part mystery, this suspenseful tale is completely unforgettable.

BY THE SWEAT OF HIS

BROW

The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm

Engelhardt, Carroll

FriesenPress (306 pp.)

$42.99 | $24.99 paper | $9.99 e-book

Jan. 5, 2023

9781039158498

9781039158481 paper

Engelhardt recounts a German family’s experience living in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in the late 19th century.

In 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfield was born near Koblenz in the Prussian-controlled Rhineland in western Germany, the son of devoutly Catholic parents who encouraged him to enter the priesthood and were bitterly disappointed when he did not (Probstfield observed, “If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be...a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer...earning

his bread by the sweat of his brow”). Like many other Germans before him in search of a better life, he immigrated to the United States in 1852, traveled extensively, and worked a dizzying array of jobs before he finally settled in Minnesota in 1860, a time when Germans were the state’s dominant immigrant group. In an effort to assimilate, he altered the spelling of his last name, which was originally Probstfeld. For the rest of his life he would maintain a delicate balance between his enthusiastic loyalty to the United States and pride in his German ancestry. Eventually, Probstfield’s indefatigable work ethic paid off, and he bought Oakport Farm in the Red River Valley in 1868. He would eventually purchase thousands of acres of land and enjoy the prosperity that came with a great agricultural boom at the end of the 19th century, a period depicted with a scrupulous exactitude by the author. Engelhardt delivers much more than a family history—his book is a granular account of frontier life in America, a life of punishing toil that also held the promise of wealth and freedom. Probstfield emerges as a fascinating patriarch of his family (he married Catherine Goodman, with whom he had 13 children); a rugged, secular individualist, he held progressive political and cultural views, including a great attraction to socialism. He was exceedingly active in local political life, a contentious milieu diligently reconstructed by the author. His extraordinary rigor can be a bit overwhelming—there are minutely detailed discussions of Oakport’s small-grain production, Probstfield’s horticultural experiments, and various meat-preservation methods. However, for the reader looking for a finely detailed treatment of this period in American history, this is an edifying study.

A magisterially researched work of American history.

CRYO

Fisher, Blake Self (310 pp.)

$12.99 paper | $4.99 e-book | Jan. 8, 2022 9780578356358

The future is bleak in a supposed future paradise in Fisher’s SF novel.

In the early 2020s, Louis King lives a comfortable life as a professor of religious history at the University of NebraskaLincoln with a doting wife, Violet, whom he comes home to every day. But everything changes when he starts experiencing mysterious symptoms—including blackouts, one of which causes him to crash his car. Soon, he’s diagnosed with advanced terminal brain cancer, and Violet convinces him to be cryogenically preserved until a cure can be found. The next thing Louis knows, a faction leader named Augustus awakens him in the year 2231. He finds himself in a walled kingdom called Arcadia, which replaced the United States after World War IV and whose government promises its inhabitants happiness—if they obey the rules. Each resident is placed in one of six factions: Medics, Scouts, Administrators, Enforcers, the Assembly, and Donors. Louis is quickly recruited into Augustus’ faction, the Scouts, and charged with venturing outside the city’s walls to find other “Cryo Kids” like himself and bring them back to

“A magisterially researched work of American history.”

by the sweat of his brow

the extraordinary curiosities of ixworth & maddox

Arcadia. The dystopian plot has elements that are strongly reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Divergent; these are especially noticeable during a climactic battle that takes place in an arena where contestants are forced to fight to the death. It all ends in a twist that wraps everything up—perhaps a little too neatly. The story shines, though, when it pauses to linger on society’s small details, such as meal replacement pills that can taste like anything a person wants or tech that can change the color of one’s apartment with the flick of a dial: “I slid my finger around the circle, and the wall rapidly changed colors like a futuristic funhouse.” As Louis learns about how Arcadia functions, readers will share in his mingled confusion and horror.

An often entertaining, if somewhat familiar, dystopian tale.

COOL

Women Leaders Reversing Global Warming

Gianturco, Paola & Avery Sangster

powerHouse Books (186 pp.)

$30.99 | Sept. 6, 2022

9781576879542

Gianturco and Sangster present a guide to organizing grassroots movements to help combat climate change.

The authors sound a powerful call to arms in the fight against global warming; as they write, “we can’t wait for others to figure this out for us.” Entries in their guide include “Increasing Awareness” and “Reducing Emissions,” which feature interviews with various female movers and shakers in the world of environmental health. A “What You Can Do” section ends each chapter, with suggestions like “make changes on your property to support ecosystems where you live,” and “get involved in your city or community’s planning council.” The interviews are edifying, including a conversation with Nelleke Van Der Puil, Vice President of Materials for LEGO. The toy company has pledged to be 100% sustainable by 2030 and has already created more than 80 LEGO brick shapes from sugar cane that look and feel identical to the old plastic ones. The authors offer statistics to support their assertion that women are especially effective leaders in combating global warming, and they make it as easy for the reader to get involved by including a QR code list that can be scanned to get started on various projects, including “help a woman entrepreneur bring solar power to her community in rural Africa” or “take action with a global network of women environmental and climate leaders.” A combination of regular printed text and handwritten slogans, peppered alongside wildly colorful pictures and photographs of activists around the world, creates a visually chaotic yet appealing layout. There are copious facts and figures provided, but the clearly defined blocks of text don’t overwhelm readers with large amounts of information all at once. Instead, this upbeat primer provides a fresh, inspiring, and fun look at how everyone can make an impact when it comes to protecting the planet.

An engaging tome packed with statistics, personal stories, and helpful suggestions.

WHERE THE GRASS GROWS BLUE Gibbs, Hope

Red Adept Publishing (354 pp.)

$2.99 e-book | May 16, 2023

A woman’s reluctant return to her hometown leads to unexpected romance in Gibbs’ debut novel.

When Penny Crenshaw discovers her husband, Teddy, is cheating on her with a much younger woman, she thinks her life is going to fall apart. Having grown up in a broken home, with only her grandparents as her emotional anchors, Penny thought she had cultivated the perfect life and marriage in Atlanta, Georgia, miles away from Camden, Kentucky, the hometown she ran away from. Soon, the gossip about her marriage becomes too much to bear, and, after Teddy whisks their three children away to Africa for the summer, Penny decides to go back to Camden to sort out the estate of her grandmother Ruby Ray. The narrative introduces flashbacks to Penny’s childhood to illustrate why she left Camden (and why she took to heart the lesson, “You don’t go poking the bear. You might not be so lucky next time”). When she runs into Bradley Hitchens, her high school sweetheart, the situation grows more complicated. The author crafts a complex will-they, won’tthey romantic dynamic that delves into the importance of confronting personal demons and the irony of finding yourself in the place you tried to leave behind. Though the constant interference by various well- and ill-meaning characters in Camden can grow a little frustrating at times (and read as an overemphasis on the politics of small-town gossip mills), Gibbs’ thoughtful handling of Penny’s setting herself free by returning to her past is so engrossing that it seldom matters. Although primarily a romance narrative, the multifaceted plot is refreshing in that the hero, a mother entering middle age, is allowed the room to find and understand herself in addition to becoming embroiled in a romance plot.

A sweet tale of finding love and redemption that fans of strong female leads will particularly enjoy.

THE EXTRAORDINARY CURIOSITIES OF IXWORTH & MADDOX

Grolic, J.D.

Self (270 pp.)

$12.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | May 1, 2023

9781738870707

In Grolic’s middle-grade fantasy, a young girl is caught up in a threat to London’s hidden world of magic.

The author pulls readers in from the start with a description of the mysterious, soon-to-open Extraordinary Curiosities shop, located on a narrow London lane. When 11-year-old Chloe Ashley ducks into the place after school to avoid the rain, she’s surprised to find tiny, pointyeared folk, tidying up and arranging shelves of oddities. After

“An inventive book that offers wit, eccentric worldbuilding, and a look at magic’s dark side.”

Chloe meets the magician proprietors of the shop—Mr. Ixworth (short and tweedy, “with one of those funny ‘I’ve a bit of chocolate on my lip’ moustaches”) and tall, nattily dressed Mr. Maddox (who’s never “one to use one word when two would do”)—it’s clear that her life will never be the same. Thrilled to discover that magic is real, Chloe is clued into wondrous merchandise that’s ordinarily shown only to magicians, including a magical flying taxi, spectacles that reveal “the paths of the departed,” and a “Memory Desk” for the forgetful. She becomes a welcome visitor to the shop and, before long, Mr. Maddox’s apprentice. One day, after Chloe is followed by a skeletal man with sharklike teeth, she finds that Mr. Ixworth is nowhere to be found. His nemesis, Oswin Blythe, is suspected of being behind other disappearances, but could there be a different, more horrific explanation? The author increases the momentum and the stakes of the story by widening the world of magicians, showing how they occupy strictly bordered realms, which they can lose through death, departure, or intrigue. Clever magical elements pepper the plot, including a spell-conjured pond, magic-detecting fish, travel via hat-rack, and comical and deadly potions. The character of Chloe, meanwhile, retains a relatable, human dimension; readers will relate to her plight as an outsider at school and as a daughter of busy parents who don’t take much notice of her, and this characterization gives believable weight to later, life-threatening tests of her intelligence and inner strength. Luckily, the author leaves some questions unanswered, making room for a sequel.

An inventive book that offers wit, eccentric worldbuilding, and a look at magic’s dark side.

A IS FOR AUTISM

Haendiges, Dani Bublish, Incorporated (56 pp.)

$29.99 | $19.99 paper | $7.99 e-book

June 16, 2022

9781647045326

9781647045319 paper

A mother explores autism in this illustrated alphabet book.

Using each letter of the alphabet as a starting point for multiple themes, Haendiges depicts her family’s experiences with her son Ollie’s autism and how it makes him special. As she travels through the alphabet, one core theme resonates: “It is important to know that our neurodiverse kids are not sick; they are just wired differently.” Starting with apple (Ollie only likes green apples because of the way he processes the world) and ASL, which the boy uses to communicate more smoothly, the author immerses readers in a detailed journey. She discusses big topics like sensory processing, sensory dysregulation, proprioceptive sense, vestibular sense, and neurodiversity. Haendiges fully explains each of these subjects, making big ideas approachable for young listeners and readers. The text on each page is quite dense, often with multiple words associated with the letter on each two-page spread. Some, like checklist for X—because Ollie and his sister, Rosie, mark off tasks from their daily lists with an X—offer insight into techniques that help the family

members manage their days. Haendiges delves into the complexity of transitioning and how Ollie’s unique way of experiencing the world has changed her strategies as a parent. She also doesn’t shy away from discussing Rosie’s struggles as a big sister. Rosie is Ollie’s champion, but she can sometimes feel left out when he is the center of attention. The author strives for inclusion in the text, using Ollie and Rosie as her touchstones while focusing on how everyone has an individual experience. Haendiges’ vibrant illustrations feature one image associated with the letter, which is also spelled out in ASL. The detailed, colorful hands (sometimes with painted or decorated nails) are wrinkly to emphasize their shapes; the forms of the ASL letters are clear and easy to mimic. While this text is too complex for most young readers despite the author’s efforts to use simple sentences, families wishing to understand neurodiversity can take this worthwhile journey together.

A detailed, valuable introduction to one family’s experience of autism.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY PLAYBOOK Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human

Helbig, Karolin & Minette Norman

Illus. by Karolin Helbig

Page Two Press (166 pp.)

$17.95 paper | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 22, 2023 9781774583098

Helbig and Norman declare that it’s time to make the office friendly to dissenting ideas, diverse employees, and human foibles in this leadership primer.

The authors, leadership consultants who were formerly a management consultant and a corporate executive, introduce readers to the corporate “psychological safety” movement, which seeks to enable employees to fully participate in the organization, speak their minds, and pursue novel initiatives without fear of punishment, enabling them to counteract the tendencies toward groupthink and institutional sclerosis in organizations that are rigidly hierarchical. Helbig and Norman present a series of “plays” that can be developed by learning practical skills. These skills include “communicating courageously” with underlings about uncomfortable issues; listening attentively; managing one’s reactions and avoiding getting defensive and angry when co-workers disagree with you; tolerating risk and failure as the necessary prices of learning new things; admitting when you need help and thanking people for their contributions; and knowing how to “design inclusive rituals”—like appointing an “Inclusion Booster”—to make sure that everyone gets heard. The authors convey all this with a mix of concise theory, bullet-pointed tips, and Helbig’s sprightly stick-figure illustrations. The book in large part boils down to a hands-on manual for running team meetings, a central institution of corporate life, in a productive fashion. Writing in lucid, evocative prose, Helbig and Norman offer a deep analysis of

the manager’s leadership role in meetings, covering everything from individual psychology (“notice your feelings and your bodily reactions”) to the nuances of group dynamics (“Be aware of people who look as if they want to contribute but are having trouble figuring out how to jump in, and invite them to speak”). The authors provide simple, deft scripts (“Rhonda didn’t get to finish what she was saying; I’d like to hear what she has to say before we move on”) that leaders can use to keep everyone involved in the conversation. The result is an enlightening look at improving corporate cultures at their roots.

A useful, pithy guide to a respectful and welcoming workplace.

DEATH FUND

Hemming, Stina

Ice Queen Press (304 pp.)

$19.95 paper | $9.95 e-book | Dec. 1, 2022

9781738736829

An insurance investigator is the only thing standing between a high-powered law firm and its billion-dollar payday in Hemming’s thriller.

Nick Martin is the team leader on his prestigious Boston law firm’s Prosperity Fund initiative, which uses money from investors to buy people’s life insurance policies. Just as the Prosperity Fund stands on the verge of a billion-dollar listing on the New York Stock Exchange, Nick’s colleague (and lover) Jennifer Rose discovers that the fund is not in compliance with an obscure piece of federal legislation, rendering the sales of the life insurance policies to the fund invalid. This development sets him on a collision course with Mihkel Ivanov, a partner at the firm whose clients include KGB members and who is “notorious for his bad manners and ill-temper.” Some of the desperate people who sold their life insurance policies begin meeting untimely deaths, as do people within the firm who question the fund or want out. Nick and the fund come to the attention of Alex Greene, a Paris-based insurance investigator, described by her 13-year-old niece Hanna as “Nancy Drew on steroids.” The Prosperity case puts Alex in the crosshairs: a contract on her life is assigned to Joshua Workman, a former Mossad agent, who just happens to be a former one-night stand. In Hemming’s debut thriller, Greene makes a strong first impression. She’s a formidable action hero who feels her best when pummeling an adversary and who has a zest for sex to rival James Bond’s (“She could say ‘let’s fuck’ in any language”). Hemmings efficiently establishes Greene’s world for future adventures, giving her a backstory that includes a long-missing sister who abandoned Hanna on her doorstep. The author neglects to follow through on an early scene in which Greene trains Hanna in self-defense—the reader will want to see Hanna use those skills. But the ending is a corker that sets up a much-anticipated sequel.

A solid series starter that never flags in its sprint to a sinister climax.

EUDORA SPACE KID Do the Robot!

Horn, David

Illus. by Judit Tondora

Self (106 pp.)

$4.99 paper | $2.99 e-book

March 24, 2023

9781736677452

A young girl aboard a starship uses her skills to cover up a costly blunder in this third installment of Horn’s middlegrade SF series.

Nine-year-old math and science whiz Eudora Jenkins lives with her family and many others on the space fleet flagship Athena. The inhabitants of this vessel represent the 20 planets in the Planetary Republic. Eudora’s mother is from Pox and resembles an anthropomorphic gray wolf, and her dad, of Pow, looks like an octopus—neither of them much resembles their two adopted human daughters. Life in outer space can be fun but not when Eudora’s goody-two-shoes older sister Molly gets the lead in the school play. Eudora pulls a prank during a performance, which gets her in trouble and earns her a trip to the surprisingly comfy brig. Later, she craves a game of Woggle (a word-based game similar to Boggle); most people are too busy to play, but Eudora finally finds an opponent in Lt. Cmdr. Walter, Athena’s sole, very expensive, robot officer. After she repeatedly loses the game, she throws a fit and accidentally breaks Walter, who stops functioning entirely. To avoid trouble, she hooks Walter up to a “remote-control-person device” of her own design. With her human bestie Arnold providing Walter’s voice through a voice box, they manage to make the robot officer seem somewhat like his normal self as he traverses the flagship. But an unexpected threat from the Qlaxons, the Planetary Republic’s greatest enemies, complicates Eudora’s plan.

The young protagonist’s continuing misadventures make for an entertaining read. The author gives the story a life lesson as well: Eudora may be acting out, but she learns that talking about your feelings is better than suppressing them. The novel also promotes acceptance, as in the case of Arnold’s stepdad, Lt. Londo, a Qlaxon (whose lionlike appearance makes him impossible to miss); despite planet Qlaxonia’s bad reputation, Londo is unquestionably respected (“Arnold loves his cool Qlaxon dad. Except when they do math homework. Math is very important to Londo, and he can be tough about it”) and serves as the ship’s chief of security. The nonhuman cast includes individuals with appearances akin to familiar Earth animals, including an alligator and a bird. Tondora’s black-and-white artwork beautifully captures the diverse species aboard Athena. Facial expressions are especially remarkable, from Eudora’s exaggerated frown/ eye-roll combo to the infectious smiles of so many characters. The 9-year-old’s first-person narrative is, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly lighthearted. Eudora explains things clearly and concisely for younger readers, such as the basic rules of the game Woggle. Her antics provoke laughter as she and Arnold struggle to make certain Walter doesn’t look stiff and unnatural like a more traditional metallic robot. Unfortunately, the resolutions

chester and the magic 8 ball

to both the Walter dilemma and the Qlaxon threat are overly tidy and unimaginative. But there’s plenty here for readers of all ages to enjoy, and they’ll surely savor another installment with this gleefully brash and brainy girl. A delightful animated tale among the stars.

BLACKWATER

Jacuzzi, Paul Vincent

FriesenPress (420 pp.)

$48.99 | $31.99 paper | Feb. 23, 2023

9781039160651

9781039160644 paper

The past reaches out and grabs an ex–intelligence agent in this debut spy thriller.

Dalton Drake, a former Canadian Security Investigation Service agent–turned–private eye, is drinking after work at his favorite Winnipeg bar when a stranger delivers the message “Ice Castle is falling. Find Farhad.” He also learns that his former MI6 colleague Alexander Marshall-Page has died under suspicious circumstances. By the next morning, the messenger is also dead. Soon, Dalton gets summoned to Washington, D.C., where he is quickly assigned to Operation Blackwater, which seeks to recover nuclear material stolen by terrorists. Dalton teams up with MI5’s Kenton Stone, Royal Air Force Second Lt. Kathleen Baker, and, later, his long-lost former lover Beverley Foster. They’re chasing terrorists Layla Farhad, who Dalton thought was dead, and her lover, Hassan Taheri, who are smuggling their radioactive prize first by cargo ship and then by submarine. In the background of this dogged pursuit through Africa and Europe, scientists work with the military to develop alternate defenses in case Blackwater fails. All involved also have to determine the target of the terrorists’ nuclear missile. What results is a ton of close calls in this highstakes global game of cat and mouse. Old bonds are revisited and new relationships form as a multinational force races to avoid Armageddon at the hands of Farhad and Taheri. Jacuzzi has successfully found a way to blend his multiple interests in travel, history, weapons systems, intelligence services, and aviation in this electrifying novel. He skillfully has set up a Dalton Drake series by creating a longtime spy and seducer who has reached a point when he’s considering settling down, if only his past will let him. By having Dalton be a private investigator in the author’s hometown of Winnipeg, Jacuzzi creates the flexibility to place him on an international stage or give him a complex local case to solve. And by leaving most of his characters alive, the author has positioned himself to pick and choose from his large cast for future volumes in the series. Based on this exhilarating series opener, he certainly knows how to pen a breakneck narrative. Here’s hoping Jacuzzi can continue to build on this promising beginning.

An intriguing, complex hero emerges in this riveting espionage tale.

RED TIGER HUNTING

Juden, Alexander C.

5PointsPress (346 pp.)

$15.99 paper | $1.99 e-book | Nov. 18, 2022 9798986790510

A battle-scarred WWI veteran travels to Jazz Age Paris to find the missing daughter of a New York financier in Juden’s debut novel.

John Griffin dropped out of college to go to war and has just returned from Europe. He suffered some scarring, but his psychological damage runs deeper. John finds peacetime concerns to be trivial (“How could the humdrum, meaningless, contemptible lives of so many of the people I saw daily...warrant the extinction of the men I knew?”). He is aimless in New York when a Wall Street financier asks him to go on a mission. Harry Armistan’s daughter Patricia has married an Englishman named Gavin Kingsbury. They were supposed to visit Italy for their honeymoon, but they have disappeared. Harry has a financial stake in the matter also; Gavin was supposed to deliver some documents to men in London, but he didn’t. Intrigued, and encouraged by the large sum of money Harry is offering, John accepts the offer and sets out to find the missing couple. In England, Gavin’s sister, Sarah, becomes a distraction and a complication for John’s investigation, and a journey to Paris raises the stakes when it becomes clear that Europe’s fragile peace is under threat. Juden’s historical thriller transports the reader back in time and gives a convincing account of the postwar experience at home and abroad. John is battle weary but still young and eager for adventure while cunning enough to not buckle while handling a complex job. Many scenes are lengthy and the story is somewhat protracted, but the century-old settings are both familiar and sleek, and the characters (including real historical figures, such as war hero and jazz musician Eugene Bullard) are mysterious enough to keep the action scenes interesting.

A rousing adventure in jazzy post–WWI Europe.

CHESTER AND THE MAGIC 8 BALL

Katz, Lynn Black Rose Writing (209 pp.)

$19.95 paper | $5.99 e-book | Feb. 8, 2023 9781685131340

A girl whose parents are going through a breakup clings to the belief that her rescue dog has psychic powers in Katz’s middle-grade novel.

Twelve-year-old Georgia wants a dog. She always has, but even more so now that her best friend, Emma, is away and her parents are fighting all the time. With her dad absent at work, Georgia convinces her mom to check out the dogs at the Humane Society. They fall in love with Chester, a gentle, affectionate, toothless

“An uplifting middle-grade story that meets sadness head-on and cuddles up to what’s important in life.”

schnoodle (a cross between a schnauzer and a poodle), but don’t consult Georgia’s dad before signing the adoption papers. Her dad promptly dubs Chester “Last Straw” and walks out on them. Georgia is distraught. She takes comfort in Chester but can’t help feeling that bringing him home drove her dad away. Then she discovers that Chester is psychic: Using Georgia’s Magic 8 Ball toy to give answers, he can predict the future—an ability that Georgia hopes to make use of in bringing her parents back together. But Georgia has other problems. Not only is Emma drifting into the friendship circle of Reagan (Georgia’s elementary school ex-friend and nemesis), she is also diagnosed with cancer. Can Georgia cope with both losing her best friend and her parents’ split? Does she even want to know the future? The author imbues Georgia with an upbeat voice and wild, fluctuating hopes (“I need a dog to love, to play with, a dog who will listen to me, and hang out with me, and maybe a dog who will stop my parents from arguing so much and bring us all together”) but also the doubts, insecurities, and moody despair one might expect from a 12-year-old going through tough times. The prose is a polished mix of dialogue, inner voice, and narrative. The characters all feel authentic (children and adults alike), and the story rattles along at a good pace through a series of short chapters, drawing the reader into Georgia’s world. While Katz tackles difficult issues of relevance to young readers—neither shying away from Georgia’s pain nor offering a trite, happy ending—Chester’s presence is a constant reassurance both to the characters and readers.

An uplifting middle-grade story that meets sadness headon and cuddles up to what’s important in life.

BROKEN The Suspicious Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing’s Golden Age

Kray, Fred M.

Live Oak Press (346 pp.)

9798987213803

9798987213810 paper

Kray presents a true-crime book, set in the high-stakes world of horse racing and breeding, about the life and tragic death of a thoroughbred racehorse in the 1970s.

Horse-racing aficionados, and even some who have only a passing familiarity with sport, will know the name Alydar. The championship steed came in second to the champion thoroughbred Affirmed in all three of 1978’s Triple Crown races: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes. Those races are covered in exciting detail in this nonfiction account, but it’s the events of Nov. 13-15, 1990, that form the crux of this work. During that period, Alydar, then retired and the top breeding stallion in the United States, was injured in his stall at Kentucky’s Calumet Farm and then euthanized. Although $36.5 million was paid out in insurance, there were questions raised about Alydar’s death that wouldn’t become public until more than a decade later. The author, an attorney

specializing in animal law, presents a theory that the horse was killed for monetary gain. Kray details an official investigation, an insurance-fraud trial, and his own search for the truth in which he painstakingly interviewed key players to reconstruct what might have happened that fateful night in Alydar’s stall. It’s a heartbreaking but compelling story, meticulously researched and skillfully written. Kray’s love of horse racing shines in his recaps of races and equine descriptions, and his pacing and storytelling skills make this true-crime work feel like a gripping thriller. The fraud trial put two men behind bars, but no one was ever tried for the death of Alydar, and the last portion of this book offers a poignant closing argument that Kray says he would have made if he’d tried the case: “Today, I am representing Alydar, who never had a voice of his own. Today, I will be his voice,” he says, in part, to his imaginary jury. “Today will be his day. He deserves that, at the very least.” With this book, Kray has indeed given Alydar his day.

A poignant and thorough look at a real-life horse-racing mystery.

DEATH TANGO

Lachi

Running Wild Press (372 pp.)

$19.99 paper | $9.99 e-book

Oct. 2, 2023

9781955062732

A small group in the 23rd century investigates a murder and fights to end a plague in Lachi’s SF thriller.

When Dr. George Q. Ferguson, the brilliant scientist founder of a prestigious New York City academy, dies in a chemical explosion, several of his former students don’t believe that it was an accident (“Dr. Ferguson did not make mistakes….Accidental death wasn’t in the cards for this guy,” one asserts), and they assemble to look into it as a potential homicide. The group includes sex worker and empath Rosa Lejeune, who prefers interacting in a virtual world rather than in the flesh, and Torian “Tory” Ross, the chief crisis officer at the world’s largest conglomerate, who also happens to be transhuman (outfitted with technological implants and grafts). They team up with the same company’s CEO and founder, Paul Oscar Ryland Perry, and skilled biohacker Kris Johnson to investigate and question a host of murder suspects. Things take an unexpected turn when a flu outbreak hits the city that has a link to a brand-new element that the professor discovered. Now they’re determined to do something about the infected people, whose groans and surging numbers make them akin to zombies. Lachi loads the narrative with multidimensional characters and subplots. Rosa, for example, endures a disturbed ex’s relentless harassment and enters into a complicated relationship with the magnetic but entitled CEO. Such characterization makes for a sharp thriller, and it’s one that boasts chic tech—most notably the complicated Ncluded wristbands that keep everyone connected. There’s welcome humor, too; Kris’ blasé attitude is quite charming, as is the talking, sable-spotted

Jack Russell robot at his side. The tale veers into a surprising direction in the latter half, as Rosa learns that she has a powerful ability. This, coupled with the intensifying plague, sidelines the entertaining murder mystery, but Lachi’s swift pacing propels a story that manages to wrap up nearly everything while leaving a few juicy items for a possible sequel.

An impressive cast enhances an engrossing distantfuture tale.

RESTLESS

Lewis, Alicia Cahalane

Tattered Script Publishing (220 pp.)

$25.00 | $8.99 e-book | April 4, 2023

9781737521945

A lyrical historical novella about an elusive young Parisian woman who flees from her family and romantic relationships.

When Guy, a solitary banker, buys stolen roses from an 18-year-old “vagabond” named Emilie, they forge a tempestuous connection that binds them together for years. Though she now lives on the streets, the young woman is a member of one of the wealthiest families in the City of Light; she ran away as a child after the deaths of her parents in a train crash. Guy is enthralled with her after their first meeting, but after they become lovers, he finds that Emilie refuses most of the constrictions of Edwardian society, from corsets and hats to marriage. The traditionally minded Guy takes this as rejection, and after he impulsively abandons her at a train station, they’re separated forever, which tortures Guy for years. The novella gradually coalesces around the theme of the desire to define the people one loves in order make oneself feel safe. For Emilie, this is shown to feel like imprisonment, even though she longs for love. She continues to elude all who seek her—even her aunt and former nurse who’ve never forgotten their lost child. This novella is comprised of many poetic vignettes that come together for a tantalizing whole that still somehow feels incomplete, as if the reader is searching for, and failing to find, Emilie. The chapters are told in a series of intimate stream-ofconsciousness first-person perspectives, as in this narration from Guy: “I construct a play without words because I have said nothing to you, and you, in turn, have said nothing to me. Where in this universe are you that I should know your lost language?” All the characters feel like brief sketches except for Emilie herself, and some chapters are figments of her imagination. Indeed, the story circles her like a haunting dream, with imagery taking precedence over plot.

A brief but memorable tale with prose that sings.

GET MAHONEY!

A Hollywood Insider’s Memoir

Mahoney, Jim

BookBaby (384 pp.)

$16.19 paper | $8.99 e-book | Feb. 17, 2023 9781667879307

A former Hollywood public relations executive tells of a life working among film legends in this debut memoir.

Mahoney grew up in Culver City, California, in the late 1930s, in the shadow of the MGM film studios. Industrious from a young age, he would sneak onto film sets to sell colas to cast and crew members, netting a profit of 2 cents per bottle. He gained a reputation as a “troublemaker” at school but got a break when his father, a painter, took him to a house that he was working on. There, Mahoney met the actor Clark Gable and his friend and film publicist Howard Strickling. The latter later offered the author a job in the MGM publicity department, where he rubbed shoulders with celebrities and ran errands as Gable’s personal gofer. He also gained firsthand knowledge of how the Hollywood establishment dealt with celebrity scandals. After returning from a tour of duty in Korea in 1952,Mahoney built a notable career for himself as a “media fixer”; at one point, he was tasked with advising Frank Sinatra after his 19-year-old son, Francis Wayne “Frank Jr.” Sinatra, was kidnapped. Throughout his career, Mahoney and his company represented many “high profilers,” including Judy Garland and Steve McQueen. Mahoney has an affably efficient descriptive style; regarding MGM studio executive Eddie Mannix, for instance, he writes: “He was good at greasing palms and burying bones, too.” Fans of Sinatra will take particular interest in Mahoney’s behindthe-scenes perspective. Once, the singer/actor asked the author to “get rid of” a drunken gambler who was bothering him. Characteristically, Mahoney’s take is dryly humorous: “I was a war hero, he thought of me as a tough guy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. My specialty was typewriters and bullshit.” This energetic memoir is bursting with other celebrity anecdotes, as when he describes the MGM commissary: “There were Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford and Van Johnson at one table…Marilyn Monroe, Jane Powell, and Ann Miller sat behind them.”

A must-read remembrance for anyone interested in the golden age of Hollywood and beyond.

TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS

Poems

Millikin, Claire Unicorn Press (127 pp.)

$25.00 | $18.00 paper | April 27, 2022

9780877750802

9780877750826 paper

Millikin’s poetry collection offers a powerful meditation on trauma and ancestral legacy.

The poems collected here evoke forgotten, in-between places; in these verses, the author’s trademark imagery of cold pine forests and dark motel rooms continues to abound. Millikin is a poet preoccupied with the often painful imprint left by family legacy that manifests itself across several generations; in “The Dark Birds,” she observes, “My father was haunted by the wars / in which his father fought….” The speaker continues, “He brought home the bad dreams of war, and I inherit them / through my father….” Abuse is another sickening inheritance, as addressed in the poem “Barbie Doll as Tutelary Spirit for the Too-Early Dead,” in which a father gives his daughter a doll to appease his guilt: “As a small child, you weren’t ready / for your father’s love. / But with the ones who lead you / to death, it is never easy, / touching the beauty of their offerings.” The poet often intertwines memory with natural imagery to render nuances of pain: “my father’s love, that ran too deep, / stung and burned by nettles on descent. / The Romans used nettles to march their soldiers through winter. / Nettles burn the skin creating painful warmth.” While Millikin’s poetry is intensely personal, in poems like “Trailer Parks” it also presents a broader truth: “The abused learned to accept abuse / that’s what I know from my childhood at the outskirts.”

The author has the ability to effortlessly locate complex emotional states. The opening of “Straight Line” advises, “To manage grief, cut your hair each evening.” The poet later goes on to declare that “All those years, I grew my hair longer, / preparing for what I’d have to face” (readers who have spent their lives braced for the worst will relate immediately to Millikin’s shrewd observations). Still, her writing can prove discomforting. There is a deep, artful sorrow in the manner in which the poet captures the passing of time in poems such as “Ocean Closets,” which suggests, “On a day of heavy weather, stay in the house, listen. / Trees stretch their branches into cries. Your child will grow up / leaving behind outgrown pairs of shoes for you to discard.” Elsewhere, the cautionary poem “Outskirts” describes a deplorably rapacious world: “If you are beautiful, they will rape you. / If you are strong, you will carry their burdens.” The poem “Outdoor Parties” observes, “If you don’t talk, no one will know / how strange you are, and they’ll like you / because you’re a pretty girl, with the right make-up. / I used to think it would work, following this advice / of my pastor uncle.” Millikin expresses horror over the idea of other women being manipulated and subjugated by men similar to her uncle; her thorough unpacking of how patriarchy operates is a call for other women to emphatically reject it. This collection demonstrates a profound understanding of suffering and resilience.

Intricate, incisive writing that traces the fallout of the past and righteously rails against abuse.

TALES OF A FIFTH GRADE KNOW-IT-ALL

Moore, Darryl Alexander

BookBaby (200 pp.)

$24.99 paper | Feb. 8, 2023

9798985433654

In this middle-grade novel, fifth grade isn’t all fun and games for the second-smartest kid in his class.

It’s 1973, Brooklyn fifth grader Reggie Cleverlove’s last year in elementary school. He is not happy about it. His sister, Toni, has told him about “gangs, fights, smoking, and teachers who just didn’t care” at her junior high school, and Reggie wants no part of it. He prefers his class for gifted students at the Granville T. Woods School even though he sticks out because “not only am I ‘the know-it-all.’ I’m also known as the weird kid.” After all, he does have a fascination with exploring World War II and becoming a Navy officer. Moore’s first middle-grade novel and his third book overall after Delirious Tiberius (2022) details Reggie’s antics and everyday escapades during his last year of elementary school. The boy navigates the troubled waters of his crushes on the pretty girls in class, his determination to get 100 RBIs in punchball before graduation, and his life with a single mom struggling to make ends meet. Alongside Reggie is a memorable cast of characters, including his father, Dee Dee; his friend Derek Boswell; and police officer Patricia Harvin. Moore’s story is relaxed; it is more character-driven than plot-driven, as the only things propelling the tale forward are Reggie’s growth and the elapsing time bringing him closer and closer to junior high. The text can be repetitive, as when Reggie introduces Spaldeen balls and his father’s nickname twice. But the story shines in certain episodes, namely when Reggie is preparing to play the piano with his church choir. The engaging chapter book will appeal to fourth and fifth grade fans of ’70s fiction.

An enjoyable tale about a quirky fifth grader’s adventures.

NOTES FROM THE ROAD

A Filmmaker’s Journey Through American Music

Mugge, Robert

The Sager Group (364 pp.)

$28.00 | $20.95 paper | March 28, 2023

9781958861103

9781958861097 paper

A documentarian revisits the funkiest musical byways in this scintillating memoir.

Mugge, a documentary filmmaker, offers production narratives of 25 of his nonfiction movie depictions of musicians and their performances, shot from 1976 through 2015. His subjects include headliners like saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who broke his foot after jumping from the stage but kept playing while

delightful, nostalgic tribute to innocent fandom.”

lying on his back; soul singer–turned-minister Al Green, who gave a riveting performance of gospel tunes at his Sunday church service and regaled Mugge with the story of being scalded with hot grits by a lover who then shot herself with his gun; and Sun Ra, leader of the celebrated jazz group “Sun Ra Arkestra” and an Afrofuturist who claimed to be immortal and to hail from the planet Saturn. “Slowly, quietly, like a hurt child, he asked me how he could work with someone who did not believe the things he said,” Mugge recalls of a conversation during which he asserted that Sun Ra would die someday. Equally fascinating are Mugge’s accounts of less-known performers, including a musical battle between Beau Jocque and Boozoo Chavis for the title of King of Zydeco and the journey of blues band Scissormen through white-bread Indiana, where frontman Ted Drozdowski “dropped his guitar onto a young woman’s outstretched arms and momentarily played it there, only to have her male companion…pour beer on the bridge of [his] guitar.” Mugge’s vivid prose mixes piquant sketches of musicians with atmospheric evocations of the music. (“What the three played was… elemental but with a droning, modal quality, and a drive that set the crowded and increasingly inebriated locals to dancing or gyrating in place, with a glow on their faces and electricity crackling through the room,” he writes of a set by Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough and his band.) The book is also a master class on the director’s craft. Music fans and indie film aficionados will find here a beguiling homage to both art forms. A vibrant, entertaining panorama of music-making and the picaresque struggle to capture it on film.

WORLDWIDE CRUSH

Nilsen, Kristin SparkPress (272 pp.)

$12.95 paper | $8.49 e-book | July 11, 2023

9781684631926

A seventh grader fixates on a Bieberesque heartthrob in this middle-grade novel. Millicent “Millie” Jackson loves 15-yearold Rory Calhoun with all her 12-year-old heart. So what if she’s never met him and millions of others feel the same way? Rory’s beautiful honey-blond hair, freckles, and golden voice have captivated Millie, and when Rory announces he’s going on tour, Millie knows she has a shot at finding love. When she’s not navigating the halls of Susan B. Anthony Middle School near Minneapolis and enduring dinners with her family—including sassy Grandma Cheryl and precocious 5-year-old brother Billy—Millie pens earnest letters to him, her very own “worldwide crush,” and fixates on Bodega Bay, California, Rory’s sleepy beach hometown. When Millie’s mother is able to procure concert tickets, the show is canceled at the last minute due to a family emergency involving Rory’s beloved mother, much to the heartbreak of Millie and Rory’s legions of fans. Will Millie ever cross paths with Rory Calhoun? Nilsen was inspired to write the novel based on her own childhood crushes—Shaun Cassidy, Davy Jones, and the Bee Gees—and after witnessing the more recent pop-star

phenomenon of Justin Bieber. The author’s prose style is perfect for middle-grade readers—fast-paced and natural, with the accuracy of the high highs and low lows that come with the emotions of a seventh grader experiencing her very first crush. Millie’s narrative voice is as bubbly and sweet as Rory Calhoun’s song lyrics. She’s a typical tween girl who’s embarrassed by her family but loves them anyway and is consumed by a distant love that feels as real as the romantic relationships she’ll eventually have as an adult. Even Rory, who makes an appearance later in the book, feels like a real teenager, albeit one who’s experiencing global stardom.

A delightful, nostalgic tribute to innocent fandom.

WINNING AT PUBLIC SPEAKING Proven Principles From Great Trial Lawyers That Will Transform Your Next Presentation or Speech

Read, Shane Westway Publishing (272 pp.)

$29.95 | $24.95 paper | Feb. 24, 2023

9798985115253

9798985115246 paper

A former attorney reveals trial lawyer techniques for improving public speaking.

One of the most challenging forms of presentation—arguing a case at trial in front of a jury—is the basis for this outstanding public speaking manual. Read, the author of Winning at Persuasion for Lawyers (2021), combines his own prior experience as a trial attorney with illustrative stories of other lawyers and orators to offer a soup-to-nuts guide to effective speaking. As “a big believer in the Rule of Three,” Read appropriately divides the book into three logical parts, addressing public speaking basics in Part 1, presentation delivery in Part 2, and great orators and attorneys in Part 3. The first two sections provide a wealth of speaking strategies and techniques that culminate in the third part, which pointedly demonstrates a mastery of the subject. The book begins by discussing the fear of public speaking, a common affliction that the author suggests “most textbooks fail to candidly address.” Read’s frank reflections on his own nervousness are likely to be relatable to many readers; he also talks about how professional athletes overcome fear, provides specific ways to allay it, and then details the “seven principles of public speaking.” For each of the seven, Read offers excellent examples, a number of which are augmented by links to videos of speeches that are available on the book’s website. Part 1 includes valuable guidance on storytelling; once again, Read outlines specific suggestions for weaving compelling stories, such as “deliver a bottom-line message,” “give your story a soul,” and “start strong with a lightning bolt.” Also in Part 1 is a stimulating discussion of psychological principles that affect audience perceptions and receptivity, such as confirmation bias, “the nudge theory,” and the use of counterthemes.

Part 2 is a detailed section on presentation delivery, delivering a wealth of information on the correct use of PowerPoint

young adult

“A

divisible man: ten keys west

slides. The chapter on “how to never use notes again” may cause stomach flips in some readers, but it’s crucial, the author says, to making headway in one’s career. In addition, there’s valuable advice on such physical aspects as posture, hand gestures, and voice control as well as useful tips for practicing presentations. Part 3 is a treasure trove of examples, with descriptions of the stylistic qualities of orators including Aristotle, Winston Churchill, and Abraham Lincoln. Additional chapters delve into the expertise of two exceptional lawyers: Mark Lanier (who provided the book’s foreword) and Allyson Ho; particularly revealing are the graphics that Lanier used in a high-profile case involving company Johnson & Johnson and the highlights of an argument that Ho made before the U.S. Supreme Court. These chapters contain truly remarkable “insider” excerpts that are rarely seen outside of a courtroom. Each chapter in the book typically begins with a “Chapter Road Map,” is supplemented by suggested additional readings, and ends with a “Chapter Checklist.” The text is clear and straightforward, the book’s organization facilitates readability, and numerous examples further enhance the advice.

An exceptional, comprehensive resource for any presenter.

JOYFUL SELLING A Better Way to Yes for Heart-Centered Coaches

Rockwood, Michelle

Lioncrest Publishing (182 pp.)

$26.99 | $16.99 paper | $0.99 e-book

March 1, 2023

9781544531748

9781544531731 paper

A business coach urges her colleagues to take a new approach to selling their services. Rockwood makes it clear from the opening pages that her book’s audience is limited to one profession: her fellow coaches. “It’s not for those who are selling tangible goods, like books, trinkets, or toilet plungers,” she explains. For her intended readership, she offers a guide for applying the framework of coaching to the process of selling its services. Along the way, it allows coaches to lean into their skills—building connections, presenting opportunities for growth, helping clients to reach their own conclusions—instead of spending their energy trying to reach large numbers of people, many of whom aren’t potential candidates for coaching. Rockwood contrasts traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to sales and argues that people of all genders would benefit from aspects of both styles, noting the advantages of relying on emotional connection instead of massive lead generation. She offers numerous examples from her experience selling services and helpfully provides plenty of moments of putting the techniques she recommends into action. The book covers the practical aspects of pricing, taking payment, overcoming objections, and closing a sale, all within the contours of a coach-led experience. The book is comprehensive but not sprawling, concisely guiding the reader through the process of selling. (Rockwood mentions a paid course she offers that explores the topic in more detail and features

additional resources on her website.) The information is actionable, easy to understand, and written in a clear, engaging style. As it is intended for trained coaches, its references to alignment, energy, transformation, and intentions are appropriate in a way they might not be for general readers. For its target audience, it will be an effective tool for developing selling skills, and other readers may still find some of its concepts useful.

A well-crafted argument for treating sales as an integral part of coaching.

DIVISIBLE MAN

Ten Keys West

Seaborne , Howard

Trans World Data (448 pp.)

$34.99 | $18.99 paper | May 1, 2023

9781958005781

9781958005798 paper

Seaborne’s thriller features the return of superpowered action hero Will Stewart. In this 10th installment in his contemporary adventure series, the author continues the exploits of Will Stewart, an air charter pilot, and his wife, Andy, a detective in Wisconsin’s Essex County Police Department (characterized by her husband as “an equal opportunity juggernaut of justice”). Will and Andy are briefed by FBI Special Agent Leslie Carson-Pelham and her colleagues on the inner workings of a paramilitary insurgency group known as Company W (“The W stands for White and the military grade high-capacity semiautomatic rifles they carry promise supremacy of arms, if not intellect”). Will and Andy have had near-fatal encounters with Company W before and have always been stymied by the compartmentalized nature of the group. “It’s not an organization with a headquarters,” they’re told by Carson-Pelham. “It’s like a cloud or a fog moving across the landscape. Arch conservativism. Racism. White supremacy. Grievance. Fascism by a dozen different names.” The couple are swept up in a complex plot involving the desperate plight of children in a hospice program, with tendrils of corruption and evil extending from Galveston to the Florida Keys. The narrative includes a number of suspicious figures, some of them connected to an evil pharmaceutical company that will arouse readers’ suspicions right from the start. Though the narrative gives a generous amount of the spotlight to Andy, Will is a natural scene-stealer by virtue of his actual superpowers: He can both fly and vanish from sight.

Considering the outsized, comic-book premise, it continues to be downright amazing how grounded Seaborne’s world consistently feels. Yes, Will Stewart has some Marvel-style paranormal gifts, but both his abilities and personality are so thoroughly fleshed out and believable that, in no time at all, the reader matter-of-factly integrates these fantastical elements into the standard heroics-and-gunfire action without a second thought. “This isn’t one of your silly action movies where all the clues line up in the third reel,” Andy deadpans. “It’s hundreds of hours of boring investigative work, connecting dots, scouring phone records, scraping through emails and

“An irresistible, high-stakes, cross-country adventure about a man with amazing gifts.”

texts, building cases.” This latest entry in the series maintains the same grounded, workaday feeling, but both Will and Andy consistently strain against it—they’re full-fledged action heroes, always ready to respond with Hollywood-style quips and largerthan-life violence. The author effectively fleshes out even minor walk-on characters, and his portrayal of the loving relationship between his two heroes continues to be the most satisfying aspect of the series, the kind of three-dimensional adult relationship remarkably rare in thrillers like this one. The author’s skill at pacing is razor-sharp—the book is a compulsive pageturner right up until the obligatory exposition dump near the end. The descriptions of the actual workings of Will’s powers are uniformly gripping; it makes the book feel like the best possible combination of the Odd Thomas novels of Dean Koontz and the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child.

An irresistible, high-stakes, cross-country adventure about a man with amazing gifts.

WHO AM I? A Basketball Riddle

Skinner, Fritz

Illus. by Lauren Lamb

Dorrance Publishing (48 pp.)

$24.00 paper | Nov. 27, 2020

9781646108336

Basketball players tackle a creative riddle in Skinner’s rhyming tale that stresses good sportsmanship.

This picture book offers a series of clues regarding an unnamed narrator’s identity, and it’s jam-packed with basketball lingo: “I can work out in the post, too, / Deposit at the bank like Big Fundamental. / Drop-step with power, and finish / With touch, oh so gentle.” As the narrator describes what they can do, they note that not every move they make is a flashy audience pleaser. Moves such as deliberately not taking an open shot to be a better teammate or avoiding a pass to a crowded player may seem like poor choices to the uninitiated, but experienced players and coaches prefer such team-focused, situation-aware plays. So who is the mysterious “I”? Basketball players and fans alike will appreciate the answer’s subtlety. Skinner’s rhyming phrases sometimes stretch over two pages, and the opening couplet features a challenging slant-rhyme (drives/dimes). The rhythms, however, are strong, making later rhymes easy to parse. Lamb’s full-color cartoon illustrations are action-packed, showing the Sharks (the narrator’s team) and their opponents. The coed Sharks feature a diverse group of players, including one who wears glasses, who display a variety of heights and abilities.

A clever framework for emphasizing teamwork over seeking glory.

A DRESS TO REMEMBER

Small, K.L.

Illus. by Brandon Dorman

Carousel Acres Publishing (192 pp.)

$24.99 | $15.99 paper | $4.99 e-book

March 6, 2023

9798987444023

9798987444016 paper

A magical dress leads a beautiful but selfish princess on a life-changing adventure in Small’s middle-grade fantasy novel.

In the fairy-tale–like kingdom of Cygnia, lovely, vain, self-centered Princess Zarina wants the “most beautiful dress ever” for her birthday gala. Ignoring warnings that hordes of plundering raiders threaten the kingdom (“I am entitled to my special day,” she pouts), Zarina travels to a cottage deep in the forest where a gifted dressmaker named Mydori is reputed to live. Ignoring Zarina’s rudeness and seeming to acquiesce to her imperious demands for a golden ball gown, the mysterious Mydori instead fits the princess into a sumptuous, tightly laced, black gown. It is a magical “storytelling dress,” the seamstress explains, and before leaving Zarina alone in the forest, she cautions her that the amount of magic in the dress is limited, that it “must be used to benefit others,” and that, when it is gone, Zarina’s fate will have been determined. The dressmaker’s cottage disappears, the woods deepen around Zarina, and she is left to try to find her way home on foot, clad in the black gown that she can’t loosen or remove no matter how hard she tries. The author doesn’t let Zarina off lightly, deftly expressing her redemptive journey through the woods with lessons in humility (hunger, discomfort, and remediated disdain for the poor), painful revelations (the ill treatment of the peasantry under the king’s brutal overseer), a dire prophecy of loss, and dangerous conflict. Small conveys the magical nature of the gown through vivid imagery; as the magic dissipates, the garment gradually sheds bits of tulle, sequins, and beads. And although the deaths of certain characters close to Zarina seem a bit gratuitous, it rings true that the insights Zarina gains through adversity render her capable of a powerful act of selfless courage. Dorman’s three full-page, black-andwhite illustrations are a welcome addition, depicting Zarina’s gown, alive with dancing fire fairies; dungeon guards bound with spiderwebs; and Zarina on horseback, racing away from a deadly pursuit. This refreshing debut is a well-crafted fantasy, nearly pitch-perfect in the cautionary fairy tale tradition. An imaginative, well-told story with a hero who believably discovers her better self.

SAVING THE ART OF MEDICINE Observations of a Practitioner

Sussman, Allen

FriesenPress (210 pp.)

$34.49 | $19.99 paper | $7.99 e-book

Jan. 30, 2023

9781039161795

9781039161788 paper

Sussman asserts that doctors need to embrace empathy, intuition, and a dash of alternative medicine in addition to traditional science in this medical memoir.

The author, a retired endocrinologist, looks back on a 50-year career in clinical practice and research during a time of extraordinary advances in medical technology that, he concludes, “caus[ed] doctors to lose sight of the essence of their practice—connecting with their patients as individual human beings.” He begins with a critique of scientific medicine, touching on his view of the medical school training that reduces patients to assemblages of pathologies; the diagnostic tests that sometimes yield false positives and unnecessary interventions; and the randomized clinical trials that focus on profitable pharmaceuticals rather than lifestyle changes to treat chronic conditions like hypertension, among other topics. Drawing on his

This Issue’s Contributors #

ADULT

Colleen Abel • Stephanie Anderson • Mark Athitakis • Colette Bancroft • Tom Beer • Sarah Blackman

Amy Boaz • Rhea Borja • Kate Brody • Jeffrey Burke • Catherine Cardno • Julia Case-Levine • Kathy

Chow • Emma Corngold • Coeur de Lion • Dave DeChristopher • Melanie Dragger • Lisa Elliott

Chelsea Ennen • Rosalind Faires • Katie Flanagan • Mia Franz • Jenna Friebel • Roberto Friedman

Michael Griffith • Geoff Hamilton • Katrina Niidas Holm • Natalia Holtzman • Jessica Jernigan

Jayashree Kamblé • Maya Kassutto • Damini Kulkarni • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey

Elsbeth Lindner • Kirk MacLeod • Matthew May • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Molly

Muldoon • Jennifer Nabers • Christopher Navratil • Liza Nelson • Therese Purcell Nielsen • Sarah

Norris • Mike Oppenheim • Derek Parker • Elizabeth Paulson • Jim Piechota • Margaret Quamme

Kristen Bonardi Rapp • Amy Reiter • Bella Rodrigues • Lloyd Sachs • Bob Sanchez • Michael Schaub

Polly Shulman • Leah Silvieus • Linda Simon • Jennifer Smith

• Wendy Smith • Leena Soman • Margot

E. Spangenberg • Daneet Steffens • Mathangi Subramanian • Valeria Tsygankova • Laura Villareal

Marion Winik

CHILDREN’S & TEEN

Autumn Allen • Sandie Angulo Chen • Sally Battle • Elizabeth Bird • Christopher A. Biss-Brown

Nastassian Brandon • Melissa Brinn • Jessica Brown • Abby Bussen • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs

Alec B. Chunn • Amanda Chuong • Jeannie Coutant • Maya Davis • Dave DeChristopher • Rodney

Fierce • Amy Seto Forrester • Ayn Reyes Frazee

• Elisa Gall

• Omar Gallaga

Goldman • Melinda Greenblatt • Vicky Gudelot • Tobi Haberstroh

Isaacs • Darlene Ivy

• Wesley Jacques

Kmail • Megan Dowd Lambert

Malewitz • Thomas Maluck

• Danielle Jones

• Hanna Lee

• Laurel Gardner

• Carol

• Ariana Hussain • Kathleen T.

• Betsy Judkins

• Patricia Lothrop

• Michelle H Martin

McLaughlin • Emma K. McNamara

Mitra • Lisa Moore

John Edward Peters

Thalia Reynolds

• Deborah Kaplan

• Leanne Ly

• J. Alejandro Mazariegos

• Kathie Meizner

• Katrina Nye

• Andrea Page

• Elissa Bongiorno

• Jasmine Riel

Siddique • Allie Stevens

• Susan Messina

• Sarah Parker-Lee

• Vicki Pietrus

• Alyssa Rivera

• Desiree Thomas

Willoughby

Alana Abbott • Paul Allen

Gina Elbert • Alec Harvey

McGarrigle

• Bean Yogi

• Lyneea

• Kaia MacLeod

• Sierra McKenzie

• J. Elizabeth Mills

• Hal Patnott

• Kristy Raffensberger

• Amy Robinson

• Renee Ting

own experiences, Sussman suggests a more holistic approach, which mostly consists of simply listening to and forming connections with patients. The author discusses the mind’s effects on the body—including the placebo effect, which, Sussman asserts, can be as powerful as drugs, and the way a sense of higher purpose can reduce one’s risk of early death—and details his own meditation routine. Less convincingly, he extols alternative therapies, from acupuncture and homeopathy to the traditional Tibetan medicine that cured his swollen throat during a sojourn in India (“I have not been able to determine which herbal preparations I was given,” he writes, “but the experience made me a believer”). Sussman supports his very readable discussions of medical issues with vivid case studies and anecdotes. His writing conveys the technical aspects of medicine in elegant, straightforward prose while probing the doctor-patient relationship with painful honesty: “It is not that every patient with a panic disorder needs a CAT scan to rule out a brain tumor, but rather that I needed to be more aware of that possibility when I developed my diagnostic plan.” The result is a soulful account of the physician’s craft, one that reveals both its successes and its uncertainties.

A captivating journey into the psychic and spiritual dimensions of healing.

WAITING FOR WOVOKA Envoys of Good Cheer and Liberty

Vizenor, Gerald

Wesleyan Univ. Press (120 pp.)

$55.00 | $16.95 paper | $13.99 e-book

March 7, 2023

9780819500427

9780819500434 paper

Vizenor’s novel celebrates Indigenous culture and the cultivation of a sense of belonging.

• Joan

• Zoe

• Cristina

• Deb Paulson

• Julia Reffner

• Christopher

• Christina Vortia

• Jean-Louise Zancanella

INDIE

• Kent Armstrong

• Darren Carlaw

• Lynne Heffley • Tracy Kelly

• Andrea Moran • Randall Nichols

R. Rogers

• Angela Wiley

• Jenny Zbrizher

• Steve Donoghue

• Nancy

• Sadaf

• Vanessa

• Jacob Edwards

• Ivan Kenneally • Donald Liebenson • Dale

• Matt Rauscher

• Sarah Rettger

• Lizzie Rogers

• Barry Silverstein

• Sharon Strock

• Audrey Weinbrecht • Lauren Emily Whalen

On the White Earth Reservation, Truman La Chance is a young orphan who creates poetic dream songs to understand the world around him. Adrift from others, he finally finds a sense of belonging at the Theatre of Chance in his local community. The theater, a “curious sanctuary for runaways,” is the brainchild of Dummy Trout, a puppeteer who has not spoken in over 50 years, since the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, in which, at the age of 18, Dummy lost her family and loved ones and was consumed by grief. Decades later, following the Second World War, Dummy and her pet dogs preside over the theater, where she makes puppets and encourages the runaways and strays on the reservation to present stories to each other and the community. Over 12 chapters, the author uses the connections that a diverse range of Indigenous characters have to the theater to illustrate the building of a community amid the difficult circumstances on the reservation. Vizenor presents, in the context of puppetry performances, imagined conversations between historical figures such as Sitting Bull and President John F. Kennedy,

hunt for eden’s star

Aristotle and James Baldwin, and Sacagawea and Tallulah Bankhead, which are the novel’s most intriguing feature. He also links Western cultural works, such as the opera Madama Butterfly , to the feelings and experiences of his Indigenous characters. The short novel is curious and winding and is at times hard to follow. But the author’s background as a poet is obvious in the lyrical prose (“He described the slight hesitations of his speech as the unexpected silence between a flash of lightning and crash of thunder”), making much of the language so beautiful that the meandering threads of the storyline do not detract from the reader’s enjoyment.

A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.

HUNT FOR EDEN’S STAR

Williams, D.J.

Wander (480 pp.)

$24.99 | $15.99 paper | $11.99 e-book

April 4, 2023

9781496462657

9781496462664 paper

In this thriller, a teenager in Hong Kong must find and protect a supernatural artifact from warring factions after his sister’s death.

Rachel Reynolds is dead, and her teenage brother, Jack, has all but been denied by his rich, domineering father, Addison, a chance to mourn her. Jack returns to the Beacon Hill boarding school in Hong Kong under a vengeful pall after his bodyguard informs him that his sister was murdered. Jack and his loyal schoolmates have sworn to discover exactly what happened to Rachel. But through their investigation, Jack uncovers much about his sister he did not know relating to the Cherub, a religious group that worships the god Elyon (“Even when I was tired of listening, she never stopped talking about Elyon. She encouraged me to discover for myself what she had found”). With her gone, Jack must take her place and travel to another realm to track down powerful artifacts that could destroy the world. Jack is opposed by his father and the Merikh, criminals with ties to China who control illicit activities in the Golden Triangle. The Cherub’s leaders’ past failures leave Jack struggling with trust issues and the question of whether his faith in Elyon is strong enough to help him protect Eden’s Star and his Beacon Hill friends. Williams’ series opener moves briskly, with short, quick chapters and lots of action. A showdown with a fire-throwing villain and a double-decker bus particularly stands out but is far from the only excitement in the tale. Beacon Hill and the surrounding streets of Kowloon come alive in the novel. While some world traveling is a key facet of the genre, every chapter away from the school is disappointing because of how well established Beacon Hill and Jack’s classmates are. Hong Kong’s history and present-day protests deliver a nice touchstone in a story that deals mainly in fantasy. Visions of a destructive future and the haven Beacon Hill will provide haunt the protagonist: clever foreshadowing for his next adventures. But in looking

toward the sequel, the volume neglects to offer enough closure to allow the tale to stand on its own.

Fast-paced action and a rich setting boost the beginning of a promising paranormal saga.

GLASSES, WALLET, KEYS Stories

Williams, John Collins

BookBaby (90 pp.)

$9.99 paper | $9.99 e-book

March 31, 2023

9781667880914

A brief collection of five short stories explores universal themes from a variety of perspectives.

Williams’ debut book opens with the title tale, in which a man deals with life at home with his geriatric dog in the early days of the pandemic. In “Uncle Duck,” a fraught relationship between uncle and nephew becomes more complicated with a bathroom renovation. “Ludmilla This, Ludmilla That” tells of a New Yorker’s sequentially unsuccessful attempts at romance. “Bunny” jumps back to the early days of the Great Depression as a woman tries to ensure that her sister’s death is treated respectfully, at least by the local newspaper. The final work, “The Guru Had an Off Night,” returns to the present as a father and son suffer through a tedious sales pitch with appropriate skepticism. The five stories are varied in topic and style, and they demonstrate an appreciable versatility; for example, Williams experiments with a choppy, commandlike prose in the opening tale: “Stop & Shop. Short line out front. Social distance. Grim faces. Mask up, eyes down.” Other stories offer more traditional narratives and delve into familiar themes, such as masculinity, family, and connection, from different angles (“I was more comfortable as the father of a little boy than of a teenager, even less so now of a young man,” the narrator of “The Guru Had an Off Night” muses), offering thought-provoking and challenging interpretations of human beings’ responsibilities toward one another. Manhattanites and those from other parts of New York state will particularly appreciate the precision of most stories’ carefully developed settings, which are full of subtle, realistic details. Some characters are less engaging than others—in particular, the protagonist of “Ludmilla” grows tedious with his expectations of reciprocated affections—but most are compelling and multilayered, offering readers plenty to ponder.

Varied, engaging, and skillfully written tales.

“Fast-paced action and a rich setting boost the beginning of a promising paranormal saga.”

UNDERSTANDABLE ECONOMICS

Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know

Yaruss, Howard Prometheus Books (272 pp.)

$24.26 | $1.99 e-book | Sept. 15, 2022 9781633888364

Yaruss presents an introduction to economics designed to help Americans understand—and participate in—current political debates.

The author contends that rationally informed political decisions on the part of the American citizenry is the only mechanism that will usher in substantive economic progress but that many find economics a prohibitively technical discipline and do not adequately comprehend the terms of debate. He also casts a gimlet eye at the media, which he sees as being “dominated by all sorts of very serious-looking people pontificating on the future of the economy and recommending policy based on their very self-assured predictions” and failing to alleviate this collective ignorance. Yaruss aims to “demystify our economy” by providing an “easily understandable overview” of it, one that serves not to supply facile answers but to help the reader to understand the basic questions. To this end, the author takes the reader on a scrupulously thorough tour of the subject, discussing the nature of money, the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, the national debt, and the structure of corporations, among many other topics. He limns a marvelously accessible discussion of some technically formidable subjects, such as derivative securities. Yaruss doesn’t shy away from registering his own opinions; the author argues that, partly as a result of the “technological revolution,” commercial competition has increasingly become a “winner-take-all” system—a trend that

has resulted in grotesque inequality—a viewpoint that informs the entire work. Only very occasionally that perspective results in some strident rhetoric: “Income taxes can discourage work, sales taxes can discourage the purchase of goods, and property taxes can discourage the development of more and better housing. What might inheritance and estate taxes discourage? Dying?” Nevertheless, this is a valuable introduction to a difficult field that accomplishes its principal objective: to educate the public so it can more fully comprehend the economic arguments of the day.

An impressively clear presentation that should prove useful to those looking for a one-stop primer.

Books of the Month

I EAT MEN LIKE AIR

Alice Berman

An intriguing whodunit with richly drawn characters.

A PERSISTENT ECHO

Brian Kaufman

A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.

LITTLE KNOWN STORIES

Eric B. Miller

A beautiful and piercing look at grief handled with delicacy.

TO BIRD OR NOT TO BIRD

S.J. Russell & Lucy Noland

Illus. by Kaity Lacy

A great book for young nature lovers showcasing two unique ecological niches.

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF COLLEGE

Elliot Felix

A knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide packed with strategies and encouragement.

A DEBT TO THE STARS

Kevin Hincker

Enjoyable, funny, and thought-provoking speculative fiction.

Book To Screen

film and tv adaptations in the works

BY MICHAEL SCHAUB

A HARRY POTTER TV SERIES IS IN THE WORKS

Harry Potter is headed back to the screen.

A television series based on J.K. Rowling’s series of novels about the boy wizard is being developed for Max, the upcoming Warner Bros. Discovery streaming service that will combine HBO Max and Discovery+, Deadline reports.

Harry Potter made his debut with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997; it was published in the U.S. a year later under the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Six more novels followed, with the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, being published in 2007.

The books became a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 600 million copies and serving as the basis for a series of blockbuster films starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint.

The Max series will feature a different cast, and Rowling will be among its executive producers. “Max’s commitment to preserving the integrity of my books is important to me, and I’m looking forward to being part of this new adaptation which will allow for a degree of depth and detail only afforded by a long form television series,” Rowling said.

In recent years, Rowling has become controversial for making a series of statements widely seen as hostile to transgender people. According to Variety, Casey Bloys, HBO and Max’s chief content officer, brushed off concerns about that controversy during a press interview, saying, “No, I don’t think this is the forum. That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated, and not something we’re going to get into.”

BILLY PORTER TO PLAY JAMES BALDWIN IN BIOPIC

Billy Porter will star as James Baldwin in a biopic about the legendary author, Deadline reports.

Porter, known for his Tony Award–winning role in the 2013 Broadway musical Kinky Boots and his Emmy Award–winning turn as Pray Tell in the FX series Pose, is co-writing the screenplay for the film with playwright Dan McCabe (The Purists). The film will be based on David Leeming’s 1994 biography, James Baldwin

Baldwin (1924-1987) is widely considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953; Giovanni’s Room, now considered a classic of gay literature, followed three years later. His other notable works include the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, and the novels Another Country and If Beale Street Could Talk

Porter will serve as a producer of the film alongside D.J. Gugenheim ( Vox Lux ).

“As a Black queer man on this planet with relative consciousness I find myself, like James Baldwin said, ‘in a rage all the time,’ ” Porter said. “I am because James was. I stand on James Baldwin’s shoulders, and I intend to expand his legacy for generations to come.”

David M. Benett/WireImage Dominik Bindl/WireImage

J.K. Rowling

Billy Porter

| Marion Winik

You’ve Got To Hear It To Believe It

If anyone had told me I’d thrill to the oral recitation of a recipe for Bolognese sauce, I’d have had my doubts. But there’s something about the way Stanley Tucci delivers a list of ingredients that is shockingly compelling. In Taste (Simon & Schuster Audio, 6 hours and 50 minutes), the actor’s elegant, precise, yet personable elocution makes the procedures for preparing his favorite dishes—the foods of his childhood, of his years as a family man, and of his peregrinations in Italy—quite inspiring. The anecdotes that introduce them are even more so. (If only a PDF with the recipes were included with the audio!) Tucci was inspired to write this tribute to the tastes he loves when he almost lost them forever due to tongue cancer, an interlude he details toward the end of the book. First he had to eat through a tube, then could eat almost nothing but a delicious-sounding version of pasta fagioli, and finally was able to resume the enviable life of eating and drinking documented here. Tucci’s dry account of a dinner he shared with Meryl Streep in France, during which a dish they believed would be miniature sausages turned out to be a giant horse penis, is a high point.

Master Slave Husband Wife (Simon & Schuster Audio, 12 hours and 54 minutes) is the rare work of historical scholarship that could make great listening on a family road trip. With miraculously detailed research and not a bit of fictionalizing, author Ilyon Woo fashions a breathtaking adventure from the true facts of an 1848 escape from bondage. William and Ellen Craft disguised themselves as master and slave, with light-skinned Ellen playing the young planter and William her devoted bondsman. The first half of the book reconstructs their getaway in vivid detail, with chapters alternating between narrators Janinia Edwards and Leon Nixon. Their four-day journey from Macon, Georgia, to freedom took them by stagecoach, rail, and steamship, included stops at fine hotels, and was filled with narrow escapes and nail-biter moments. Ellen could not read or write, requiring some fancy footwork every time “Master Johnson’s” signature was required. Not long after the couple arrived in Boston, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act could have snatched it all away—but those hired slave hunters didn’t know who they were dealing with.

The title of Will Schwalbe’s memoir has it right—We Should Not Be Friends (Penguin Random House Audio, 9 hours and 43 minutes). It’s surprising that the friendship whose history he recounts ever took root, much less that it survived and thrived. Will Schwalbe and Chris Maxey’s initial meeting at college in the 1980s was an archetypal nonstarter: dweeb meets jock. It could have ended right there. Then Maxey offered Schwalbe a ride back from an event on his motorcycle. Schwalbe, one of the few out gay kids on campus, tied himself into mental pretzels worrying about whether hanging on to Maxey’s waist would give the impression he was making a pass at him or if not hanging on would be even more of a dead giveaway. Nothing could convey his many anxieties and concerns more acutely than the slightly nasal, anxious voice of the author himself. For decades, through sickness and health, through slights and misunderstandings, the pair went on to navigate the complications of a close friendship between a gay man and a straight man, a scaredy-cat and a daredevil, a book nerd and a Navy SEAL. At the end of the audiobook, Schwalbe phones Maxey from the studio, and the two talk about the book for several heartwarming minutes.

Marion Winik is the host of the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader.