January 1, 2024: Volume XCII, No. 1

JANUARY 1, 2024 | VOL. XCII NO.1

FEATURING 351 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children’s, and YA Books

LESA CLINE-RANSOME & JAMES E. RANSOME The acclaimed children’s book creators bring a Civil Rights hero to life

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FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

I’M NOT A big believer in New Year’s resolutions, but regular readers of this column know that every January 1, I set myself some reading goals for the year to come. If nothing more, they give me a sense of purpose as I embark on my reading journey. In truth, my track record for actually sticking to them is spotty, but who keeps all their New Year’s resolutions? Here are four for 2024: Dive into a series. Is there any greater pleasure than encountering a fictional character (or characters) that you’ll get to keep hanging out with?

Even better if a few series titles are already in the can, allowing for an uninterrupted binge read. As fate would have it, there’s a new Finlay Donovan mystery,

Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice (Minotaur, March 5), on its way—giving me three months to catch up with the comic adventures of this struggling romantic suspense novelist and divorcée who keeps being mistaken for a hired killer.

Finn’s three previous outings earned author Elle Cosimano a spot on our list of 13 Mystery Writers Who Are Transforming the Genre, so I know I’m in for a treat.

Explore a writer’s backlist. We all have gaps in our reading—books and writers that we’ve meant to read but somehow have never gotten around to. Why haven’t I read more Percival Everett? I read and enjoyed So Much Blue several years ago, but my exploration of his oeuvre ends there.

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Everett has been writing smart, inventive fiction since the 1980s and has won multiple literary awards; American Fiction, the new film adaptation of his 2001 novel Erasure, has exposed him to a wider audience.

The publication of his latest novel, James (Doubleday, March 19)—a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn that centers the enslaved character of Jim—offers the perfect excuse to go back and read such Kirkus-starred backlist titles as The Water Cure (2007) and American Desert (2004).

Get to know an artist/ musician/celebrity better.

Among other things, 2023 was the year of well-received memoirs by public figures.

Prince Harry’s Spare, Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, and Barbra Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra impressed critics and found enormous audiences who wanted not just dish but psychological insights and backstage access. This year, I’m eagerly awaiting The House of Hidden Meanings (Dey Street/ HarperCollins, March 5), the memoir by Drag Race

producer and queer icon RuPaul. Kathleen Hanna— Riot Grrrl trailblazer and frontwoman for Bikini Kill and Le Tigre—promises a front-row perspective on the indie music scene in Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (Ecco/HarperCollins, May 14).

Discover a new classic.

The literary canon is continuously evolving, with little-known authors at last gaining recognition and underappreciated works receiving renewed attention.

In recent years, efforts to elevate work by marginalized writers—especially queer writers and writers of color—have expanded our sense of what makes a classic. This spring, I’m eager to discover the work of Pedro Lemebel, a Chilean artist and writer whose crónicas are collected in A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays, edited and translated by Gwendolyn Harper (Penguin, May 14).

TOM BEER

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

MY NEW YEAR’S READING RESOLUTIONS

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Contents FICTION 4

Editor’s Note

5

Reviews & News

6

Q&A: Shubnum Khan

19 Booklist: Great Story Collections To Explore NONFICTION 50

Editor’s Note

51

Reviews & News

58 Profile: Madeline Pendleton 75

Audiobooks

99 Booklist: Books That Should Be Movies CHILDREN’S 100

Editor’s Note

101

Reviews & News

One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit.

OUR FRESH PICK An enslaved Black girl in antebellum New Orleans joins a female spy network against the Confederates.

Read the review on p. 5 PURCHASE BOOKS ONLINE AT KIRKUS .COM

108 On the Cover: Lesa Cline-Ransome & James E. Ransome 125 On the Podcast: Leah Henderson 135 Booklist: Picture Books for a Snowy Day

YOUNG ADULT

148

Editor’s Note

149

Reviews & News

154

Q&A: Mason Deaver

165 Booklist: Books From Series We Never Want To End INDIE 166

Editor’s Note

167

Reviews

ON THE COVER: Lesa Cline-Ransome & James E. Ransome; illustration by Randy Glass, based on a photo

by John Halpern; background from Fighting With Love, published by Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster

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KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Ending the legacy of abuse...a story that begins in south Texas and ends at a sycamore tree in Tennessee.

ISBN: 978-1-950495-33-7 [paperback] ISBN: 979-8-212640-89-3 [audiobook] ISBN: 978-1-950495-34-4 [eBook]

“Jennie Helderman’s thoroughly documented book proves the cycle of domestic violence can be broken, hope exists for the batterer and the abused, and the written word has the power to heal.”

—Retired Lieutenant Lynn D. Hesse, Author of Well of Rage

“…a life-story of emancipation, personal fulfillment, and escape—not only from a padlocked cabin in the woods, but from a backwards anti-feminist culture into the broader world of contemporary human rights that is America's mainstream attitudes towards women's rights.”

—Midwest Book Review For Agent Representation and Information on Film Rights, Email jenniehelderman@gmail.com • jenniehelderman.com 010124 KR FOB Rd_F.indd 2

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a .

Co-Chairman HERBERT SIMON

Co-Chairman MARC WINKELMAN

Publisher & CEO MEG LABORDE KUEHN mkuehn@kirkus.com

Editor-in-Chief TOM BEER tbeer@kirkus.com

Chief Marketing Officer SARAH KALINA skalina@kirkus.com

President of Kirkus Indie CHAYA SCHECHNER cschechner@kirkus.com

Publisher Advertising

Nonfiction Editor ERIC LIEBETRAU eliebetrau@kirkus.com

& Promotions RACHEL WEASE rwease@kirkus.com Indie Advertising & Promotions AMY BAIRD abaird@kirkus.com

Author Consultant RY PICKARD rpickard@kirkus.com Lead Designer KY NOVAK knovak@kirkus.com Social Media Coordinator SEYANNA BARRETT sbarrett@kirkus.com Kirkus Editorial Senior Production Editor ROBIN O’DELL rodell@kirkus.com Kirkus Editorial Senior Production Editor MARINNA CASTILLEJA mcastilleja@kirkus.com

Fiction Editor LAURIE MUCHNICK lmuchnick@kirkus.com Young Readers’ Editor LAURA SIMEON lsimeon@kirkus.com Young Readers’ Editor MAHNAZ DAR mdar@kirkus.com Editor at Large MEGAN LABRISE mlabrise@kirkus.com Senior Indie Editor DAVID RAPP drapp@kirkus.com Indie Editor ARTHUR SMITH asmith@kirkus.com Editorial Assistant NINA PALATTELLA npalattella@kirkus.com

Kirkus Editorial Production Editor ASHLEY LITTLE alittle@kirkus.com

Indie Editorial Assistant DAN NOLAN dnolan@kirkus.com

Copy Editor BILL SIEVER

Indie Editorial Assistant SASHA CARNEY scarney@kirkus.com

Magazine Compositor MARISELA SMUTZ

Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Writers GREGORY MCNAMEE MICHAEL SCHAUB

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Contributors

Alana Abbott, Colleen Abel, Mahasin Aleem, Reina Luz Alegre, Paul Allen, Jenny Arch, Kent Armstrong, Mark Athitakis, Colette Bancroft, Robert Beauregard, Heather Berg, Amanda Bird, Elizabeth Bird, Ariel Birdoff, Sarah Blackman, Amy Boaz, Elissa Bongiorno, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Susan Breitzer, Jessica Hoptay Brown, Justina Bruns, Cliff Burke, Charles Cassady, Sandie Angulo Chen, Tamar Cimenian, Carin Clevidence, Anastasia M. Collins, K.W. Colyard, Rachael Conrad, Emma Corngold, Perry Crowe, Sara Davis, Michael Deagler, Cathy DeCampli, Dave DeChristopher, Amanda Diehl, Anna Drake, Jacob Edwards, Lisa Elliott, Lily Emerick, Chelsea Ennen, Gillian Esquivia-Cohen, Joshua Farrington, Angela Firkus, Katie Flanagan, Amy Seto Forrester, Ayn Reyes Frazee, Harvey Freedenberg, Jenna Friebel, Elaina Friedman, Robbin Friedman, Roberto Friedman, Elisa Gall, Glenn Gamboa, Laurel Gardner, Maura Gaven, Chloé Harper Gold, Carol Goldman, Amy Goldschlager, Danielle Galván Gomez, Michael Griffith, Ana Grilo, Christine Gross-Loh, Geoff Hamilton, Sean Hammer, Silvia Lin Hanick, Peter Heck, Lynne Heffley, Bridey Heing, Zoe Holland, Katrina Niidas Holm, Natalia Holtzman, Abigail Hsu, Julie Hubble, Ariana Hussain, Kathleen T. Isaacs, Wesley Jacques, Kerri Jarema, Jessica Jernigan, Danielle Jones, Betsy Judkins, Jayashree Kamblé, Deborah Kaplan, Marcelle Karp, Tracy Kelly, Ivan Kenneally, Colleen King, Stephanie Klose, Maggie Knapp, Susan Kusel, Carly Lane, Chelsea Langford, Tom Lavoie, Judith Leitch, Coeur de Lion, Corrie Locke-Hardy, Barbara London, Patricia Lothrop, Georgia Lowe, Wendy Lukehart, Joan Malewitz, Thomas Maluck, Gabriela Martins, Matthew May, J. Alejandro Mazariegos, Breanna McDaniel, Jeanne McDermott, Dale McGarrigle, Kathie Meizner, Lisa Moore, Andrea Moran, Molly Muldoon, Ari Mulgay, Jennifer Nabers, Sarah Norris, Katrina Nye, Erin O’Brien, Connie Ogle, Mike Oppenheim, Nick Owchar, Nina Palattella, Derek Parker, Hal Patnott, Deb Paulson, John Edward Peters, Jim Piechota, Vicki Pietrus, Margaret Quamme, Judy Quinn, Kristy Raffensberger, Matt Rauscher, Darryn Reams, Nancy Thalia Reynolds, Amy Robinson, Lloyd Sachs, Hadeal Salamah, Bob Sanchez, Caitlin Savage, E.F. Schraeder, Jeff Schwaner, Gene Seymour, Sara Shreve, Sadaf Siddique, Linda Simon, Jennifer Smith, Margot E. Spangenberg, Mo Springer, Allie Stevens, Sharon Strock, Mathangi Subramanian, Jennifer Sweeney, Deborah D. Taylor, Paul Teed, Bill Thompson, Renee Ting, Martha Anne Toll, Amanda Toth, Francesca Vultaggio, Elliott Walcroft, Barbara Ward, Erica Weidner, Audrey Weinbrecht, Kerry Winfrey, Marion Winik, Bean Yogi, Jenny Zbrizher

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RESOLVE TO READ MORE FICTION IF YOU’VE MADE any New

Year’s resolutions, I hope they were about books!

There’s plenty of exciting fiction coming out in the next few months, so be sure to block off some reading time on your 2024 calendar.

I’m always excited to see new work from authors who haven’t published in a long time. Kirsten Bakis’ Lives of the Monster Dogs made a splash when it came out late in the 20th century (1997, to be exact), so anticipation is high for King Nyx (Liveright,

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Feb. 20). The description in our review is like catnip: “At the home of an eccentric millionaire, a woman discovers out-of-the-ordinary events.” Our review has some reservations, despite calling the book “almost impossible to put down,” so I’m eager to read it and see what I think.

Adelle Waldman’s first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was published in this millennium, at least, but 11 years feels like an eternity when you’re

waiting for a new book from a favorite author.

Her latest, Help Wanted (Norton, March 5), takes place behind the scenes of a big-box store in upstate New York. “The workplace dramedy of the year,” declares our starred review.

Though she’s written nonfiction books in the interim, Marie Mutsuki Mockett hasn’t published a novel since her first, Picking Bone From Ash, in 2009. She returns with The Tree Doctor (Graywolf, March 19), the story of a writer separated from her family by the pandemic as she cares for her elderly mother and rediscovers her body through the ministrations of an arborist known as the Tree Doctor.

Readers who’ve been dying to know what happened after the ending of Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) are in luck—his new novel, Wandering Stars (Knopf, Feb. 27), is the sequel we didn’t know was coming, as well as a sort-of prequel, moving back in time to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. It’s “a searing study of the consequences of a genocide,” according to our starred review.

And then, of course, there are debut novels. Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars (Tin House, Jan. 30) tells the story of a college romance between

two young men that “spirals into a border-crossing story of tragic death, family secrets, and unexpected revelations,” according to our starred review. Ours by Phillip B. Williams (Viking, Feb. 20) also gets a starred review, which calls it “a gorgeously written, evocative saga of Black American survival and transcendence, blending elements of fantasy, mythology, and multigenerational history.”

Further down the road are books we haven’t reviewed yet, including Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday, March 19), a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn. American Fiction, a movie based on Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, was recently released, so he’s sure to be on even more reading lists than usual.

Finally, fans of Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin (2017) will be looking forward to Real Americans (Knopf, April 30), an expansive novel covering the last few decades in the lives of Lily Chen; her mother, May, who left China during the Cultural Revolution; and her son, Nick, who’s grown up without a father. All of them are trying to figure out, as so many of these novels are, just what makes a real American.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

LAURIE MUCHNICK

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FICTION

EDITOR’S PICK An enslaved Black girl in antebellum New Orleans joins a female spy network against the Confederates.

The impulse toward freedom is ingrained in Ady, born in slavery to her mother, Sanite, who spent part of her own childhood in a runaways’ settlement.

When Ady is 10, she and her mother are sold to the vulpine John du Marche, who’s living his best 1850s life as a decadent businessman and political insider in the French Quarter. Sanite provides her daughter with a taste of freedom as they escape from du Marche, making camp in the outlying woods.

It isn’t long before they’re returned to their master and Sanite dies from scarlet fever. Ady’s customary high

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

spirits are laid low by grief, melancholy, and fear until she becomes friends with another African American she at first knows only as “the Free Woman.” Lenore owns a racially integrated establishment in the French Quarter called the Mockingbird Inn, with “the strong pleasant scent” of “lemons, sawdust, cloves, beer, and warm bread.” Inspired by seeing Lenore compel a gang of slave hunters to leave the Mockingbird, Ady seeks employment there as a helper on those occasions when she can get away from du Marche’s manse. She soon learns that Lenore and other women are working as a far-flung spy network to subvert the emerging Confederacy. Ady later finds out that the network has a name: 8

Mother Doll

By Katya Apekina

10

Under the Storm

By Christoffer Carlsson; trans.

by Rachel Willson-Broyles

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Say Hello to My Little Friend

By Jennine Capó Crucet

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The American Daughters Ruffin, Maurice Carlos One World/Random House | 304 pp. | $28.00 Mar. 5, 2024 | 9780593729397

“the Daughters.” (“In honor of our mothers,” Lenore tells her.) As Ady and the other “Daughters” covertly wreak havoc in various ways, the novel becomes all at once a high adventure, a revealing history, and a chronicle of one woman’s self-realization.

Ruffin also displays some of the cunning imagination

14

and caustic wit he showed in his previous work—most recently We Cast a Shadow (2019)—by interspersing his narrative with imagined transcripts from the past, present, and even the future.

Black women as agents— literally—of their own liberation. Who wouldn’t be inspired?

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27

30

26

28

34

Fruit of the Dead

By Rachel Lyon

Leaving

By Roxana Robinson

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5

28

Great Expectations

By Vinson Cunningham

20

Smoke Kings

By Jahmal Mayfield

21

Wandering Stars

By Tommy Orange

Twilight Territory

By Andrew X. Pham

The American Daughters

By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

27

Love Novel

By Ivana Sajko; trans. by Mima Simić

Werewolf at Dusk

By David Small Cahokia Jazz

By Francis Spufford

Ours

By Phillip B. Williams Knife Skills

By Wendy Church

44

The Visitors

By Jessi Jezewska Stevens

The Warm Hands of Ghosts

By Katherine Arden

29

46

Help Wanted

By Adelle Waldman

Right on Cue

By Falon Ballard

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F I C T I O N // Q & A

THE KIRKUS Q&A: SHUBNUM KHAN The South African novelist makes her U.S. debut with the enthralling tale of a haunted house and a tragic secret.

BY COLETTE BANCROFT

You’ve published a novel and an essay collection in South Africa. Is this the first book that will be published in the United States?

Yes, it’s the first time I’m being published in the U.S. and the U.K.—the first time I’m being published internationally. I’m really excited about it. It’s something I’ve always wanted to have happen, but it took a while.

We don’t have an agent culture here, so I had to get an agent. That’s really the only way you can get your books out internationally if you’re an author in South Africa (or any author from Africa). I had to work to get 6

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here, but I always knew I wanted my books to reach a larger audience.

Your novel is very immersive—it creates its own world, full of ghosts and stories and what’s called magic realism. I’m curious— what was the starting point for the book?

It really did start from a small idea and blew up. I knew for my next novel the idea was to have a conversation between a younger person and an older person.

The idea was that a young girl would move into this apartment, and there would be an older character living

upstairs, and they would start these conversations.

The older character would tell her about this great love she’d lost—or something about life. Then it really grew. First the apartment became a house, and the house ended up on a cliff, and the house grew and grew, and if you have so many rooms, you have to fill them with characters, and then the house became haunted, and it just grew over the years into this uncontrollable thing.

How long did it take you to write the book?

Eight or nine years. I don’t mean that it was so research-heavy or took up so much of my time. A lot of that time, ideas were stewing, or I was thinking about the writing. It was eight or nine years that the house was growing.

People often say that setting becomes a character in some books, but in this book the house really is a character—it reacts to what people do, it gets cranky, it keeps secrets. Is it based on a real place?

It’s not based on a place I’ve seen, but I am fascinated by haunted houses, and I’m fascinated by the history of things, by the feelings of things. I’m fascinated by what happens to the button that rolls under the couch.

I think about inanimate objects as living things, and in this book that’s just transferred over to the whole house. The house came alive in its own way without much work from me.

And where did the djinn who lives in the house come from?

I’ve always been interested in magical things. I do believe

Nurjahaan Fakey

IN THE NEW NOVEL The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (Viking, Jan. 9), a teenage girl named Sana moves with her widowed father into a once glorious, now ramshackle mansion on the seacoast in Durban, South Africa. The house is filled with tenants down on their luck, and with ghosts—whom Sana recognizes, being haunted herself by a spiteful spirit. Trying to make sense of her surroundings, Sana discovers the house’s great tragic, joyful secret: a longago love affair that forms one of the book’s two timelines.

In the hands of Shubnum Khan, it all adds up to an enthralling tale. The author, 38, is a native and resident of South Africa whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Sunday Times, O magazine, and other publications.

She talked about her new book via Zoom; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Q & A // F I C T I O N

in djinns, so I was a little afraid to write about one. But I was intrigued by this idea of a magical being that you can’t see, that can watch you.

In Islamic lore, we believe that djinns can fall in love with human beings, and that there are good djinns and bad djinns. I was interested in exploring that idea of a djinn being in love but unable to be seen, not having a voice. Also, I wanted to take control of the narrative about the djinn. Western audiences only know it as the blue genie who grants wishes, and I know it personally as something from the Quran.

In some of the stories we tell, the djinn is created out of fire.

The book has two timelines; also, it’s a mystery as well

as a ghost story and a romance. Why did you decide to use that dual timeline to tell the story, and how did you maintain suspense?

I always worry that I [won’t be able to pull off a dual timeline], so it feels good to hear someone say I did!

I’m not a writer who very meticulously plans things.

I wish in my heart I was. I really want to be that writer someday. But I just love creating characters, and then I let them lead me where they want to lead me. The house gave me the space for these things to appear. I knew I was telling a story about the house. This girl moves into this place, and she finds out about something that happened there a long time ago. It came to me as I was

getting into it that I had to tell the story of what had happened in the past.

That story has to come to life. We can only feel what Sana is feeling as she reads those diaries if I tell that story as it’s happening. It became clear to me very early on that I needed to have two timelines. But I really struggled. That’s one reason it took so long.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer, and which writers have inspired you?

My grandfather would tell us stories when we were young. My grandmother died when she was fairly young, and he was lonely.

So the way to not be lonely was to gather all his grand-

children around and tell them stories. He would put all these things together— Aesop’s Fables, Enid Blyton stories, Arabian Nights, stories from the prophets, stories from the Quran.

He would raise his hands, change his voice, and I’d sit there enthralled, thinking, There’s a whole new world out there. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer, pretty young, because of my grandfather’s stories. I wanted to be part of this magical world somehow. I dedicated the book to him.

As for writers, there’s Arundhati Roy. When I read The God of Small Things, I think I was 22. I just was like, You can do so much with language; you can make people feel so much with language. You can make a sentence be a whole world.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on a nonfiction book about being single for so long. I’ve been single my whole life. I also wanted to explore what it’s like being a modern Muslim woman in the world today—traveling, expectations and pressures to be in a relationship, my own personal concerns.

I’ve always been interested in magical things. I do believe in djinns, so I was a little afraid to write about one.

Colette Bancroft is the book critic at the Tampa Bay Times.

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years Khan, Shubnum

Viking | 320 pp. | $28.00 Jan. 9, 2024 | 9780593653456

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For a review of The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, visit Kirkus online.

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FICTION

Good Material Alderton, Dolly | Knopf (336 pp.) | $28.00 Jan. 30, 2024 | 9780593801307

A struggling 35-year-old British comedian navigates a breakup with his long-term girlfriend.

With unmissable echoes of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Alderton examines Andy Dawson’s excruciating inability to accept the fact that Jen Hammersmith no longer wants to be with him, which leads to various self-destructive behaviors—drinking before noon, cyber-stalking Jen, and embarking on a morally dubious sexual relationship with a woman in her early 20s. Andy is a man who suffers simultaneously from an enormous ego, poor self-confidence, and little self-awareness—character traits that combine to produce mortifying moments. His relationship with Avi, his long-suffering best friend, brilliantly captures the stereotypical male reluctance to express platonic love and to retreat to the pub in times of need. Andy’s mum—a single mother who isn’t keen on displays of emotion but will readily offer up a medicinal whiskey— deserves more airtime. Pep talks from a more successful comedian friend and an overzealous personal trainer provide a respite from the monotony of Andy’s misery, which begins to bore his closest friends and the reader alike. Echoing her earlier novels, Alderton examines how bewildering it can be for single people to find themselves alone in a crowd of married friends who suddenly have more pressing commitments than another pint of lager. But save for a couple of quips about Boris Johnson and the wealth disparity between Andy and Jen, the novel lacks any meaningful social commentary. The way the book makes a late switch to Jen’s perspective might remind readers of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, but Alderton lacks Groff’s mastery and Jen’s point 8

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of view is dull. While the book is hardly original, it displays a quintessentially British sense of humor (ironic, self-effacing, coarse), and Alderton has a talent for depicting love, flaws and all.

An easy read for those with a soft spot for the hopelessly doomed romantic.

Kirkus Star

Mother Doll Apekina, Katya | Overlook (320 pp.) | $28.00 March 12, 2024 | 9781419770951

A pregnant woman is contacted, via a medium, by her dead great-grandmother, who was a Russian revolutionary.

Zhenia, frankly, is a mess.

Feeling like a “helpless passenger in her own life,” she works as a medical translator for Russians in Los Angeles. Her young marriage is wobbly: She has a history of infidelity and can’t shake the feeling that her husband would rather have married someone else. Back home in Boston, Zhenia’s beloved grandmother Vera is near death, in a near-vegetative state.

Into this chaos, two events avalanche: First, Zhenia ends up pregnant by accident. Then, out of the blue, she’s contacted by a New York psychic named Paul, who has a proposition for her. He’s being urgently contacted by the spirit of Zhenia’s mysterious great-grandmother Irina—Vera’s mother—and he wants to relay her narrative to Zhenia in Russian, which he doesn’t speak, so she can translate it into English. Apekina alternates between Zhenia’s and Paul’s increasingly desperate circumstances and the story that Irina tells about her own life with Paul as the mouthpiece.

(Literally: Paul crosses into the “cloud of ancestral grief” that Irina exists in with a bunch of other chattering souls, and she opens his mouth and yells into his throat to tell her story to Zhenia.) The secrets that Irina

reveals about her coming-of-age in a Jewish family during the Russian Revolution force Zhenia to reexamine her past, her present, and her future. In lesser hands, this narrative nesting-doll structure might have been merely a clever way of parsing intergenerational trauma or the impulse to explore family history as loved ones are born or pass away.

But Apekina’s keen portrayals of morally complicated women transcend any gimmickry, and her depictions of Petrograd in the early 20th century feel startlingly present.

Like the Russian nesting dolls that inspired it, this novel reveals layer after layer of poignant delights.

Ready or Not Bastone, Cara | Dial Press (400 pp.) | $17.00 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780593595718

An unexpected pregnancy changes everything and leads to love.

Eve Hatch doesn’t usually have one-night stands with hot bartenders, and she certainly doesn’t expect to get pregnant from such an encounter, especially when using protection. But that’s exactly what happens after a particularly fun night out with her two childhood best friends, siblings Willa and Shep Balder. Everyone has feelings about this. Willa struggles with the news, since she and her husband are having fertility issues.

Ethan Rise, the bartender/father, is overwhelmed, happy, and confused.

And Shep is so wildly, enthusiastically supportive that readers will have no trouble discerning what it takes the protagonist many pages to figure out—he’s a goner for her.

Eve herself feels all kinds of things: hurt by Willa’s reticence and Ethan’s confusion, appreciative of Shep’s ministrations, worried about finances (her administrative job at a nonprofit isn’t likely to cut it), and also fairly well in denial. Add to that: nauseous, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a newcomer to watch.

THE HEARING TEST

hungry, weepy, and horny. She’s sure from the jump that she doesn’t want an abortion, but, beyond stating the fact, there’s no discussion of her reasons. There’s also no mention of financial child support from Ethan, who, it turns out, owns the bar where he works. Perhaps including these issues would have marred the truly heartwarming emotional journey of the book, but they’re such deeply practical considerations that leaving them out seems like a mistake. Especially when Bastone is wonderfully unflinching when considering the way pregnancy changes relationships. Luckily for Eve, most of her relationships ultimately change in positive—and, in one case, romantic—ways.

Funny and touching; Eve’s snappy voice and poignant vulnerability are a good match for the subject matter.

Here in Avalon Burton, Tara Isabella | Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) | $28.99 | Jan. 2, 2024 9781982170097

Two sisters chase a fairy tale across Manhattan.

Being raised by an eccentric grifter who fancies herself a “professional muse” affects sisters Rose and Cecelia Foster in different ways.

Musician Cecelia blows off Juilliard to become an irresponsible, “idiotically openhearted” mess, flitting from lover to lover and continent to continent while seeking something ineffable; talented artist Rose, on the other hand, eschews creativity KIRKUS REVIEWS

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for predictability, double-majoring in math and computer science while maintaining the lease on their childhood apartment so that Cecelia will always have somewhere to land.

Rose is a 28-year-old coder, engaged to pragmatic tech bro Caleb, when Cecelia, 30, leaves her new husband, Paul, and moves back in with her sister, claiming she’s there to stay.

Rose’s hopes are high until Cecelia comes home one night clutching a card calligraphed with “THE AVALON CABARET” and “Another life is possible.” Cecelia starts behaving erratically, and when she ghosts Rose on Thanksgiving, then turns up the next morning rambling about magic and a little red boat, Rose snaps and evicts her. Weeks pass, and then Paul reaches out: Cecelia called him to say goodbye and asked him to tell Rose she was “going away with the fairies.”

Caleb tells Rose to forget Cecelia; instead, Rose secretly teams up with Paul to search for answers, growing increasingly disillusioned with her own staid existence as their investigation progresses. Set in a New York by turns gritty and glittering, Burton’s latest enthralls while exploring the frequently fraught nature of adult sibling relationships. Cecelia serves as the book’s third rail, dividing its characters and imbuing every scene with a crackling tension.

At once spellbinding and sincere.

For more by Tara Isabella Burton, visit Kirkus online

The Hearing Test Callahan, Eliza Barry | Catapult (176 pp.) $24.00 | March 5, 2024 | 9781646222131

A year in the life of a young New Yorker who has a condition that causes progressive deafness.

As this work of philosophical fiction opens, it’s August 29, 2019, and the narrator is about to fly to Venice to attend a friend’s wedding. But, she says, “When I awoke that morning, I felt a deep drone in my right ear accompanied by a sound I can best compare to a large piece of sheet metal being rocked, a perpetually rolling thunder.” Doctors are consulted, the trip is canceled, courses of treatment are begun. The novel then proceeds by recounting the narrator’s experiences and observations over the next 12 months. Though there’s no plot to speak of, Callahan’s debut features a number of interesting characters—an ex-boyfriend who’s a filmmaker in L.A. and his current girlfriend as well as the narrator’s mother, landlord, neighbors, and small black dog.

Constantly interrogating her condition, she often refers to other artists, writers, composers, and works of art, finding unusual connections among them. A visit to an audiologist named Robert Walther leads to the thought that “days before, in bed, I had been reading a book titled A Little Ramble written by a group of visual artists in response to the work of Robert Walser, a writer whom artists always embarrassingly seem to think belongs to them like a secret.” The audiologist goes on to administer a hearing test that’s recorded like a list poem: “Say the word wince. / Wince. / Say the word want. / Want. / Say the word war. / War.” And so on. A sentence that appears near the end reflecting on the narrator’s experiences of the preceding year seems to apply just as much to the experience of the person reading the text that recounts them. “I JANUARY 1, 2024

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was thinking that if you think about something long enough, it will make sense even if you haven’t made any sense of it at all—you’ve just gotten used to it.” The impression of a sly, subtle joke shared between reader and author is a frequent treat of Callahan’s prose style.

A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch.

Kirkus Star

Under the Storm Carlsson, Christoffer | Trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles | Hogarth (416 pp.) | $19.00 paper | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593449387

The murder of a young woman in rural Sweden has wrenching, far-reaching consequences for the policeman investigating the crime and the nephew of the

man convicted of it.

Seven-year-old Isak Nyqvist has a warm relationship with his mother’s 25-year-old brother, Edvard Christensson, his regular Sunday companion.

But for residents of tiny Marbäck, Edvard is a bad sort who’s cut from the same cloth as his father, “a troublemaking bastard who no one liked.” So no one except the devastated Isak is all that surprised when Edvard is arrested for killing his girlfriend, Lovisa, who died of blunt force trauma to the head before her body was left in a raging house fire. Nor are locals surprised when Isak, cursed by the same bloodlines, becomes a social misfit himself by his teens. The one person

who remains unsure of Edvard’s guilt is police detective Vidar Jörgensson, who’s unable to let go of the case even after his decades-long obsession with it leads to his getting pushed off the force and his once-loving marriage runs into trouble. (Vidar’s fraught relationship with his own father, a corrupt cop, was the basis for Carlsson’s great Blaze Me a Sun, from 2023.) In the end, the smallest, most slowly emerging details provide answers to the mystery.

Boasting the psychological intensity of a Hitchcock film and gloomy atmospheric elements including a ferocious storm, this is a gripping, utterly distinctive mystery by a newly established Swedish master. As in Blaze Me a Sun, Carlsson explores the nature of grief and generational trauma, all while keeping readers unsure of what’s going to happen next.

A brilliantly woven, unsettling crime novel.

The Turtle House Churchill, Amanda | Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) | $30.00 | Feb. 20, 2024 9780063290518

A multigenerational family saga set in World War II Japan and contemporary rural Texas.

Churchill’s debut unfolds in parallel the stories of an immigrant Japanese woman and her American granddaughter. Mineko’s story begins in Kadoma, a district of Osaka, in the summer of 1936, when the little girl discovers a beautiful abandoned estate on a hill, its entrance presided over by a stone turtle, with a pond full of live

A taxi driver who’s seen it all gets to see it all again, and then some.

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turtles out back. Over the years, this becomes her special place, a refuge for the athletic, bright young woman who’s gotten none of the beauty her mother and sister share. When she meets an upper-class boy named Akio, it’s at this “turtle house” where she teaches him to swim, and where they fall in love, though his future holds an arranged marriage and, even more threatening, the wartime draft. In parallel chapters set in Curtain, Texas, in 1999, we see Mineko as “Grandminnie,” relating her stories into a tape recorder for her 25-year-old granddaughter, Lia, who’s back home after abruptly quitting her first job out of architecture school under mysterious circumstances. The two are sharing a bedroom at Lia’s parents’ house, since Grandminnie’s own home has burned to the ground, also under mysterious circumstances.

Based on the life of the author’s grandmother, Mineko’s story illuminates an impressively wrought series of settings, from prewar provincial Japan, to wartime housing on a U.S. Army base, to small-town postwar America.

Meanwhile, Lia’s story takes us to architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin. In each of these places, Churchill highlights the challenges faced by girls and women, from oppressive cultural norms to domestic violence and sexual harassment. She deftly manages a very large cast of characters and a complicated plot.

This lovingly illuminated double portrait asks us to think about what has changed and what has not, and at what cost.

Nobody’s Angel Clark, Jack | Hard Case Crime (224 pp.) | $15.95 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 9781803367477

A Chicago taxi driver who’s seen it all gets to see it all again, and then some, in a fast-moving thriller first published in 1996.

To the stand-by rules that govern KIRKUS REVIEWS

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cab driving in the Windy City—don’t go west, don’t go south, don’t go back, don’t go to Cabrini–Green—a new one has been added: Don’t pick up anyone who might be the person who killed three inner-city drivers and has now branched out to the suburbs with a fourth victim. The thing is, when he stops to pick up someone who’s flagged him down, night-shift cabbie Eddie Miles, who’s already got the jitters from the night he found teenage prostitute Relita Brown brutally stabbed in a deserted street and saved her life by calling the cops, never knows where any trip will take him.

Maybe his passengers will throw up in his cab. Maybe they’ll try to stiff him for the fare. Maybe they’ll lead him to a tavern, where he’ll spend the hours till closing time drinking with strangers while his cab’s meter chugs along profitably in the parking lot. Maybe they’ll give him legal advice about renegotiating the ruinous divorce settlement that allowed his ex-wife to move to California with their daughter, whom he hasn’t seen for seven years. Maybe they’ll pull a gun on him and tell him his number’s up.

Clark plots like a driver with tunnel vision who can’t see beyond the next curve, writes the clipped prose of a caffeine-fueled insomniac, and records every fare and tip, or lack thereof, with the precision of a bookkeeper.

Readers who know better than to worry about whodunit will hurtle from one seat-of-the-pants ride to the next.

The Extinction of Irena Rey Croft, Jennifer | Bloomsbury (288 pp.) $28.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781639731701

An acclaimed author disappears, leaving her translators to fend for themselves.

When eight translators arrive at the home of a renowned author in a remote Polish village, they expect to be put to work translating her latest title—her masterpiece!—into each of the eight KIRKUS REVIEWS

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languages they not only represent but also call each other in lieu of actual names. There’s English, of course, but also German, Ukrainian, the inseparable Serbian and Slovenian, Spanish—who’s narrating this novel-about-a-novel—French, and so on. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned. To start, within a day or two, and without notice, the renowned author goes missing. Not long after, the translators, who’ve maintained a cultlike devotion to “Our Author,” begin developing habits of their own—like discussing the weather, drinking alcohol, and eating meat, all previously forbidden—and even referring to each other by name.

Croft, a renowned translator in her own right (of Olga Tokarczuk, among others), makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviors involved in the translator-author relationship.

At the same time—even in the midst of a joke—she writes profoundly about the philosophical stakes of translation. “Translation isn’t reading,” she writes. “Translation is being forced to write a book again.” Near the author’s house is the Bia�owie�a Forest, which plays as central a role as any of the human characters. Climate change, myth, and fungi are stirred into the mix as well, which certainly makes for an interesting canvas, if not an entirely successful one.

Though her insights tend to inspire wonder, Croft’s storytelling can occasionally drag, and she sometimes seems to lose track of her characters, not all of whom feel fully fledged.

A striking if imperfect novel about language, the earth, and what it means to make art.

For translations

by Jennifer Croft, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Say Hello to My Little Friend Crucet, Jennine Capó | Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) | $27.99 | March 5, 2024 9781668023327

The author of Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015) delivers a stunning second novel.

In this captivating narrative, Crucet immerses readers in the life of Ismael Reyes, a young man trying to come to terms with his Cuban heritage and the truth about his mother while navigating both the glamour and the danger of Miami.

This is one way to describe this novel, and it’s not wrong. But neither is it quite right. What this summary leaves out is that Izzy needs to find another job, since lawyers have informed him that impersonating the rapper Pitbull at parties is not a viable career choice, and that, confronted by this impasse, he has decided to model his life on Tony Montana, as portrayed

by Al Pacino. While savvy readers may have guessed the Scarface connection from the title, it seems safe to assume that few will anticipate the role that Lolita—an orca imprisoned in a tiny tank in the Miami Seaquarium—plays in Izzy’s life. Indeed, to call this a novel about Izzy at all is maybe to miss the point. Is Lolita a supporting player in Izzy’s story, or is he a supporting character in hers? One thing that should be clear by now is that Crucet isn’t interested in presenting a straightforward narrative, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. For both Lolita and Izzy, the beginning never ends. Lolita spends many lonely decades remembering what it was like to be part of a community. Izzy’s need to know how he got from Cuba to the United States when he was 7 overrides his instinct for self-preservation. And Crucet fills a whole chapter listing Miami cliches that a novel >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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F I C T I O N // S E E N A N D H E A R D

Julianne Moore “Begged” To Narrate Day Audiobook The actor told People that she’s “in awe” of author Michael Cunningham’s talent.

Julianne Moore “begged” to narrate the audiobook version of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, Day, the actor told People.

Cunningham’s novel, published in November

by Random House, follows a brother and sister on the same day in three different years, including 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic had just paralyzed the United States.

In a starred review, a

For a review of Day, visit Kirkus online.

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critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “This subtle, sensitively written family story proves poignant and quietly powerful.”

“I was in heaven recording his dense and elegant prose; I’m in awe of his talent, his ability to convey so much emotion in a single challenging sentence,” Moore said.

“The book is so deeply felt, and magical.”

Moore earned a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role in The Hours, the 2002 Stephen Daldry film based on Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1998 novel.

Cunningham said he didn’t play a role in Moore being selected to narrate the Day audiobook.

“I don’t really know the particulars, but she saw a copy of the novel and volunteered to read it,” he said. “I really don’t know how she got a copy, but she did.”

He told People that he sent the actor an email that read, “Maybe we do something together about once every 25 years, I think. I look forward to our next collaboration 25 years from now.”

—MICHAEL SCHAUB

Gilbert Flores/Deadline via Getty Images

SEEN AND HEARD

Moore starred in the film based on Cunningham’s The Hours.

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SEEN AND HEARD Mitski at Work on Queen’s Gambit Stage Musical Eboni Booth will write the book for the show based on Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel.

Mauricio Santana/Getty Images

Walter Tevis’ novel The Queen’s Gambit is headed to the stage, with musician Mitski and playwright Eboni Booth on board the planned musical, Deadline reports.

Tevis’ book, first published in 1983 by Random House, tells the story of Beth Harmon, a troubled young chess prodigy.

The novel became a cult classic over the years and was adapted into an Emmy-winning Netflix miniseries in 2020, directed by Scott Frank and starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth.

Mitski, the singersongwriter known for albums including Puberty 2 and The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will provide the music and lyrics for the show, with Booth (Paris) writing the book. Whitney White (The Amen Corner) is attached to direct.

Mitski said that she was “a fan of the Netflix show, and an even

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greater fan of the original novel.”

“I was already determined to be a member of this team,” she said.

“And then I met Eboni and Whitney, and my determination grew tenfold! I absolutely had to be a part of this! I am ecstatic to get to work with all of these amazing creatives, who’ve each built beautiful and unique repertoires of their own.”

Booth also expressed her enthusiasm, saying that she “couldn’t be more thrilled to explore this world in the company of such extraordinary artists.”–M.S.

To read our review of The Queen’s Gambit, visit Kirkus online.

Mitski says she is a fan of both the TV series and the book.

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such as hers should maybe contain more of—cigars, thongs, music, food smells, color—while also asking if we’re looking for Pitbull Miami or Miami Vice Miami, because they are not the same, and neither one is the real Miami. None of this is to say that Crucet sacrifices story for postmodern flourishes. Both Ismael and the whale are singularly compelling characters, and both will break your heart.

Unclassifiable and unforgettable.

Kirkus Star

Great Expectations Cunningham, Vinson | Hogarth (272 pp.) $27.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9780593448236

A young man reckons with race, family, and disillusionment on a presidential campaign.

David, the narrator of Cunningham’s elegant and contemplative debut, is a 20-something Black man who in 2007 has stumbled into a minor role on the fundraising team for a U.S. senator and upstart presidential candidate. (He’s unnamed, but it’s plainly Barack Obama.)

David needs something to believe in: A young father, he’s flunked out of college and is making ends meet by tutoring. Even so, the campaign’s high-flown hope-and-change rhetoric is a world removed from his job greeting wealthy donors, accepting checks, and helping to arrange more meet-andgreets. So he contemplates how he fits in as he scrutinizes the backgrounds of the high-dollar donors and celebrity boosters, particularly the Black ones.

(Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and André Leon Talley have brief cameos.) The campaign’s conclusion is no surprise, of course, but the book is alive in its intellectual detours, with Cunningham considering religion, race, sex, film, politics, fatherhood, and more. (David’s memories are particularly affecting when it comes to music, especially his experience 14

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A young man reckons with race and disillusionment on a presidential campaign.

G R E AT E X P E C TAT I O N S

singing in church.) The tone of these asides is essayistic—Cunningham is a cultural critic at the New Yorker—yet none of them feel stapled-on. Rather, the campaign offers a sensible springboard for contemplation of pretty much everything. As David’s mentor, Beverly, tells him, “The real thing is: How about you get some power and then use it?” She’s talking about Black leadership, but her comment also relates to David’s sense of self. Cunningham’s choice of title is nervy, but though the story only vaguely echoes Dickens (Beverly is Havisham-adjacent), it perfectly encapsulates the kinds of anxiety that follow a smart young man still coming into being. Why let a perfectly good title go to waste?

A top-shelf intellectual bildungsroman.

Self-Portraits Dazai, Osamu | Trans. by Ralph F. McCarthy New Directions (200 pp.) | $15.95 paper Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780811232265

Snapshots from a worldly Japanese writer’s troublesome life.

Born in 1909 to a powerful, landed family in Aomori prefecture, Dazai lived a rambunctious socialite’s life—one marred by quarrels, suicides, adulteries, and addictions. He survived the communal traumas of World War II and the atomic bombings before dying, by suicide, in 1948. All this is summarized neatly in translator McCarthy’s introduction, where he praises Dazai as “the one Japanese author who consistently turned out entertaining

and worthwhile literature…when the entire nation was toeing the ideological line of militarism and fanatic patriotism.” While the introduction can only hint at Dazai’s interior life, the “self-portraits” collected here present it in colorful, thinly fictionalized detail. Together, they depict a figure at once melancholy and sardonic; a self-serious artist and self-aware butt of every joke. The narrator begins one story analyzing the angles of Mount Fuji’s slopes, only to decide, iconoclastically, that it’s “pathetic, as mountains go.” Still, he spends several months at a secluded teahouse with a Fuji view, hoping for inspiration to finish his novel but tormented by “interminable wavering and agonizing over my view of the world.” The double meaning suggests that, for Dazai, contempt is both a pathology and a point of pride.

Another narrator entertains himself by pranking a young businessman, pretending to mug him. But, with his rent due, the narrator decides to keep the money after all. Buoyed by the thrill of the windfall, he ends the piece by saying, “My suicide was postponed for another month.” Many early stories double as confessions; later ones chronicle wartime traumas.

As a tranquil scene turns violent, one narrator’s literary collaborator says: “Stop right there. You’re not just making this up.” No, he’s not.

A vivid collection of stories—as sophisticated as they are mundane.

For more by Osamu Dazai, visit Kirkus online.

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The Trouble With You Feldman, Ellen | St. Martin’s Griffin (368 pp.) | $19.00 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781250879462

Set during the 1950s Red Scare, this novel features Fanny Fabricant, an unlikely heroine who makes a journey from conformity to independence and strength.

Fanny Baum, whose mother died when she was a child, marries Max Fabricant just before he ships off to World War II, and she immediately becomes pregnant with their daughter, Chloe. Unlike the husbands of some other women in Fanny’s circle, Max returns from the war, but Fanny ends up a single mother anyway when Max dies a few years later. Written in the third person, the story unfurls from Fanny’s point of view and, to a lesser extent, Chloe’s. Coaxed by her fearsome “maiden” Aunt Rose, as well as her own ennui and financial straits, Fanny gets a job as a secretary at a company that produces daytime radio serials—don’t call them soap operas. Feldman does a fine job of evoking the 1950s, using language and cultural references to films, books, and, most of all, social mores to make the period spring to life. She brings Fanny into focus through the presence of her loving and traditional extended Jewish family. Fanny’s growing opposition to restrictions on women’s independence drives her narrative.

Aunt Rose emerges as a hero, bluntly questioning Fanny’s timidity and subtly encouraging her niece’s growing ambition. Two men vie for Fanny’s attention: Ezra Rapaport, a kind and caring family doctor, and Charlie Berlin, a screenwriter with an acerbic wit and a kind heart. Fanny’s search for who she wants to be evolves into a captivating love story, complicated by the career-destroying threats of the McCarthy era. Chloe, too, grows from a sad little girl missing her daddy to a perceptive young woman.

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Feldman has created a compelling woman who knows her own mind and insists on using it.

The Queen’s Lender Findlay, Jean | Scotland Street Press (200 pp.) | $19.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 9781910895559

A royal jeweler to King James VI of Scotland finds his life uprooted when James succeeds Queen Elizabeth as the ruler of England.

The most surprising thing about Findlay’s fictionalized history of the court of King James Vl is its length. Historical novels tend to be colossal in size, laden—and sometimes weighed down—with facts and descriptions. But Findlay’s nimble work clocks in at less than 200 pages without losing any of its appeal. A playwright and journalist, she makes every word count in this entertaining retelling of Scottish history. The story is largely seen from the perspective of George Heriot, jeweler to the king of Scotland and a special favorite of the gem-besotted Queen Anna. Like the rest of the court, Heriot finds his life in Edinburgh uprooted in 1603, when Queen Elizabeth dies. King James takes over the British throne, and the move to England alters Heriot’s life in tragic and lucrative ways. Findlay’s seamless narrative weaves confidently through court intrigue and hard economic realities. Heriot, who is also a moneylender, is particular about his ledgers, but the king is careless and extravagant: He’ll risk the displeasure of all others to please his wife. Religious complications abound throughout the story: The king’s Catholic mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed, but he has sworn to uphold Protestant values and sees himself as a peacemaker. Other real-life characters appear throughout the book, among them poet William Drummond, architect Inigo Jones, and playwright Ben Jonson, as well as his

more famous counterpart, William Shakespeare. Sometimes storylines could have been fleshed out more—the creation of the King James Bible, for example, deserves more attention—and sometimes Heriot’s personal losses feel a bit passed over. But, overall, Findlay’s economy of words works in the novel’s favor. She leaves the reader wishing for more, which is really all a writer can hope for.

A slim but intriguing view of the court of James VI of Scotland.

The Hunter French, Tana | Viking (480 pp.) | $32.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780593493434

A divorced American detective tries to blend into rural Ireland in this sequel to The Searcher (2020).

In fictional Ardnakelty, on Ireland’s west coast, lives retired American cop Cal Hooper, who busies himself repairing furniture with 15-year-old Theresa “Trey” Reddy and fervently wishes to be boring. Then into town pops Trey’s long-gone, good-for-nothing dad, Johnny, all smiles and charm.

Much to her distaste, he says he wants to reclaim his fatherly role. In fact, he’s on the run from a criminal for a debt he can’t repay, and he has a cockamamie scheme to persuade local townsfolk that there might be gold in the nearby mountain with a vein that might run through some of their properties. (What, no leprechauns?)

“It’s not sheep shite you’ll be smelling in a few months’ time, man,” he tells a farmer. “It’s champagne and caviar.”

Some people have fun fantasizing about sudden riches, but they know For more by Tana French, visit Kirkus online.

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better. Johnny’s pursuer, Cillian Rushborough, comes to town, and Johnny tries to convince him he could get rich by purchasing people’s land. Alas, someone bashes Rushborough’s brains in, and now there’s a murder mystery.

The plot is a bit of a stretch, but the characters and their relationships work well. Trey detests Johnny for not being in her life, and now that he’s back, she neither wants nor needs him. She gets on much better with Cal. Still, she’s a testy teenager when she thinks someone is not treating her like an adult. Cal is aware of this, and he’s careful how he talks to her. Johnny, not so much: “I swear to fuck, women are only put on this earth to wreck our fuckin’ heads,” he whines about Trey’s mother, briefly forgetting he’s talking to Trey. The book abounds in local color and lively dialogue.

An absorbing crime yarn.

The Still Point Greenwood, Tammy | Kensington (304 pp.) | $16.95 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781496739339

The lives of three Southern California women and their teenage ballerina daughters are thrown into turmoil during rehearsals for The Nutcracker.

Ever Henderson, Josie Jacobs, and Lindsay Chase (mothers of Beatrice, Savannah, and Olive, respectively) have spent most of their daughters’ lives ushering them to and from the Costa de la Luna Conservatory of Ballet, where the girls have undertaken intensive training under master teacher Vivienne. All three girls, now seniors in high school, are preparing to fight for their last big roles in The Nutcracker. But when the CLCB announces that controversial 27-year-old wunderkind Etienne Bernay will be directing this year’s production and will select one dancer to receive a scholarship to the Ballet de Paris Académie, the always-fierce competition among the girls turns 16

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A maverick assassin squares off against a ruthless AI magnate.

LONE WOLF

cutthroat. And Bernay’s arrival does even more to shake up their family lives. Ever, who’s still grappling with the death of her husband, hasn’t been able to write since her last novel failed, and this scholarship may be the only way she can afford to keep Bea in ballet. But while Bea needs the scholarship most, Josie and Savannah may be the only two prepared to do whatever it takes to get it. Meanwhile, Lindsay senses that her marriage is falling apart just as Olive seems to be losing interest in dance and, perhaps most concerning, spending more time with Savvy as her best-friendship with Bea deteriorates. As dark secrets lead to explosive revelations, all six of their lives will be forever changed. The author sometimes stretches things out, but the plot is deliciously propulsive, pairing the brutally beautiful world of ballet with universal human foibles that will keep the reader guessing at characters’ motivations to the end.

More twists and turns than a pirouette; readers will stay rapt till the final curtain.

Lone Wolf Hurwitz, Gregg | Minotaur (400 pp.) | $29.00 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781250871732

A maverick assassin squares off against a ruthless AI magnate and a mercenary doppelgänger.

Franchise fans will be pleased to learn that The Last Orphan (2023) wasn’t. “Nowhere Man” Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, is back for his ninth taut thriller. He comes to consciousness, bloody and

broken and barely alive, in a remote part of Texas outside the range of the RoamZone tracker that monitors him.

While Evan reestablishes contact with teenage sidekick/protégé Joey and undertakes the goofy but heart-tugging challenge of finding his niece Sofia’s missing dog, Loco, efficient assassin Karissa Lopatina is hard at work, drowning software engineering manager Anwuli Okonkwo in her bathtub, then killing AI expert Dr. Benjamin Hill, whose path happens to have crossed Loco’s. She’s still on the scene when Evan arrives (what are the odds?). Their showdown takes a tragic turn when Hill’s teenage daughter tries to intervene, allowing Karissa to get away and leaving Evan to deal with the police. His narrow escape, combining guile and muscle, is vintage Hurwitz, set forth with gritty edge and puckish humor in short, punchy chapters that include several similar nail-biting scenes. Loco remains at large as Evan’s twisty path takes him to a creepy megalomaniac ironically named Allman and eventually to a face-to-face with Karissa, who, gender aside, could be his identical twin. A handful of characters from previous Orphan X capers return, including Tanner and Devine, who make cameo appearances. Crisp character delineation and a propulsive, forward-moving plot should keep new readers engaged.

Another crackling caper for the solitary Orphan X.

For more by Gregg Hurwitz, visit Kirkus online.

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Island Witch Jayatissa, Amanda | Berkley (384 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780593549261

When village men start getting attacked, one young woman finds herself caught in the middle.

Amara Akki is an 18-year-old who lives in a Sri Lankan village with her mother, a talented seamstress whom she calls Amma, and her father, a spiritual leader and demon exorciser whom she calls Thaththa. Despite the influence of British colonialism and Christianity, Amara’s father holds fast to his traditional ways, causing him to be looked down upon by the community, which is rapidly Westernizing in order to gain access to power and wealth. Therefore, when local men start getting mysteriously and brutally attacked, villagers cast a skeptical eye toward Thaththa, whom they believe may be summoning demons to ambush innocent men. When the situation becomes more dire, Amara— herself something of an outcast, teased by her former schoolmates and called a witch—decides it’s her duty to figure out what the attacked men have in common so she can find out who (or what) is responsible. Along with Bhagya, an enigmatic new friend she met in the jungle, Amara sneaks around the village gathering insight into the men’s lives. But Amara has a nagging secret. Many nights in her sleep she finds herself the one vividly attacking, only to startle awake with the taste of blood on her tongue and the voice of a demon saying “You’re mine now” ringing in her ears. Jayatissa’s novel is slow to get going, and her characters feel a little flat. But the twists and turns to this fantastical mystery, as well as the author’s commentary on colorism, colonialism, and feminine outrage, shine through: “He would suffer as I once did. Suffer for everything he had done. Suffer for the wrongs that KIRKUS REVIEWS

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were committed before him and those that would no doubt come after him.

That was all I wanted. For them to all suffer as I have.”

A cautionary tale for men who wrong women.

All the Way to Summer: Stories of Love and Longing Kidman, Fiona | Gallic Books (368 pp.) | $15.95 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 9781913547646

New Zealand novelist and poet Kidman celebrates turning 80 by gathering 13 stories about the theme that has long preoccupied her: love.

“They are about love that changes the lives of my characters, one way or another,” Kidman writes in the preface. “Love, long or short, and often dangerous, is never forgotten.” The danger her characters face is the risk of being stifled by love; of losing independence and agency; of betrayal, too, and of succumbing, unwisely, to desire. In “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” Veronica, as a young teacher, explains to her students that history is “like a jigsaw puzzle or a mystery story, one piece leading to another. We can, each one of us, look at a landscape or a character in history, or even a set of dates, and see something different from what anyone has seen before.” Years later, she looks back at a landscape that shifts her sense of her own reality. Other women recall narrow escapes, willful blindness, or a “wild card” that changed “the symmetry” of their lives. A woman who returns to her ex-husband explains why: “It was because I had a second chance to choose. You don’t at the beginning when you’re young. Or not when I was young. You got swept away by forces beyond your control.”

Her decision, she adds, “was quite unconventional.” Kidman’s quiet, deft narratives startle with flashes of sensuous images: “salmon-pink carpets

that roll fleshily through the rooms.”

A distraught new mother holds a baby asleep in her arms, “as if he were a snake in a basket.” Lovers lie in bed, their “skin like twin silks sliding together.” At best, in Kidman’s telling, love creates a place of safety and calm for characters who learn, at last, “that what seems romantic on the outside can be a substitute for grief.”

Wise, subtle tales.

The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard Lester, Natasha | Forever (464 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781538706954

Three generations of sartorially inclined women struggle to make their marks on the world.

Through alternating viewpoints, Lester weaves together the stories of Mizza, Astrid, and Blythe Bricard, who were all involved in the fashion industry. First up chronologically is Mizza, the only character based loosely on a real person; she’s Christian Dior’s assistant and muse and, likely ahistorically, a member of the Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Next up is Mizza’s daughter, Astrid Bricard, a talented designer the media sees only as the muse and lover of Hawk Jones, a designer wunderkind à la Halston minus the ego. Finally there’s Blythe Bricard, Astrid and Hawk’s daughter, who was abandoned by both her famous parents and has cast her sustainable-fashion dreams aside in order to raise her two children as a single mother. Astrid’s disappearance (murder?) at the 1973 Versailles designer face-off between France and America is the central mystery of the novel. But it’s the chapters exploring Astrid’s tumultuous rise and fall, as well as her relationship with Hawk— which Lester writes with heartbreaking tenderness—that form the heart of the novel. Unfortunately, Mizza’s plot is somehow the most superficial >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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“A truly absorbing mystery by a writer at the top of her game.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Publishers Weekly Bestseller “…an expertly paced thrill ride.”

—Publishers Weekly ISBN-13: 979-8888452110

“Nothing short of brilliant.”

—Annabel Monaghan, National Bestselling Author “Reef Road is magnificent. It has left me shaken to the core.”

—Luanne Rice, New York Times Bestselling Author For All Inquiries, Please Email deborah@roycemail.com • deborahgoodrichroyce.com 010124 KR Fiction Rd_F.indd 18

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B O O K L I S T // F I C T I O N

5 Great Story Collections To Explore 1

1 Good Women

4 Old Crimes

A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.

Wonderfully rich and emotionally complicated stories.

2 So Late in the Day

5 Other Minds and Other Stories

By Halle Hill

By Claire Keegan

Compact but deep explorations of human vulnerability from a master of the form.

3 The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

By Louise Kennedy

Irish in its lyricism and landscape, universal in its portrayal of the vagaries of the heart.

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By Jill McCorkle

2

3

By Bennett Sims

This ambitious collection finds the right balance of familiar and experimental.

For more great short fiction, visit Kirkus online.

4

5

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of the three, despite the Nazi fighting.

That being said, Blythe’s and Astrid’s stories more than make up for that weakness, and Lester deftly delivers a scathing critique of the lies that are told to keep women in their place: “What if this is all there is? [Astrid wonders.] Her always scrabbling at the base of a mountain, knocked back by an avalanche of misogyny.”

An exploration of the lengths to which society will go to subdue a powerful woman.

Kirkus Star

Fruit of the Dead Lyon, Rachel | Scribner (320 pp.) | $28.00 March 5, 2024 | 9781668020852

A young woman gets caught in the orbit of a wealthy, suspicious executive in this contemporary retelling of the Persephone and Demeter myth.

Cory Ansel, freshly 18, returns to River Rock, the summer camp of her youth, to work as a counselor after graduating high school without being accepted to a single college. On the last night of camp, she meets Rolo Picazo, father of one of her campers and CEO of Southgate Pharmaceuticals, whose “highly effective, highly popular, highly pleasant, highly safe, frankly groundbreaking painkiller” is now the subject of a damning investigation.

Smooth-talking Rolo offers Cory $20,000 to be his children’s temporary nanny on his private island. Once Cory arrives on Little Île des Bienheureux, the unsettling events that readers will surely anticipate by now begin to rack up—the other staff confuse her with Kelly, the former babysitter who “went away”; her employer, when he’s around, is alternately indulgent and cruel; and there’s no cell service.

Third-person chapters describing Cory’s increasingly perilous adventure alternate with first-person chapters narrated by Cory’s furious and 20

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deliriously worried mother, Emer.

With a professional crisis of her own imminent and her child seemingly vanished, Emer sets off on a daunting quest to track down her daughter.

Cory, described by her mother as “arrogant, beautiful, and dumb,” is so painfully naïve that readers should be forgiven for their inevitable frustrations with her, and yet Lyon’s skillful and luscious prose encourages empathy for both Cory and Emer.

The book gets to the visceral heart of Cory’s broken spirit, her fractured relationship with her mother, and the love that binds them together despite everything. Readers need not be overly familiar with the myth to enjoy the well-told story.

An affecting novel with touches of the fantastical, weaving explorations of power, youth, wealth, and familial love.

Mona of the Manor Maupin, Armistead | Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) | $27.49 | March 5, 2024 9780062973597

A late-breaking 10th installment in the beloved Tales of the City series.

In 1978, we met a landlady named Anna Madrigal with a rooming house on Barbary Lane in San Francisco.

Among her boarders were a lovable gay man named Michael Tolliver and a bohemian bisexual woman named Mona Ramsay, in whom Anna seemed to take a rather maternal interest, which made sense when we eventually found out that pre-transition, she was Mona’s father. (Even if

you only watched the TV series, you know all this.) After moving the story as far as Anna’s 93rd birthday in The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), Maupin returns now with an installment set in the 1990s, when Anna was only 73, and focusing on a character who’s been AWOL for a while. Turns out Mona Ramsay’s lavender marriage to the now-deceased Lord Teddy Roughton left her with a sprawling estate in the Cotswolds. Lady Mona has also acquired an adopted gay son; 26-year-old Wilfred identifies as native Australian—“Aborigine, with some Dutch thrown in”—and the two are running Easley House as a country lodge. As the book opens, Rhonda and Eddie Blaylock of North Carolina arrive. Eddie has just headed up Jesse Helms’ reelection campaign, though the senator has been snubbing him since then. When Rhonda suggests Helms is not a nice man, Eddie throws a casserole dish at her. Her concealer stick doesn’t cover the damage, and Mona and Wilfred get involved. Other plotlines feature Poppy the postmistress, Mona’s sometime girlfriend, who wants to paint Mona underwater in the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; George Michael, whom Wilfred encounters briefly at a London cruising spot with a condom table; and Michael Tolliver and Anna Madrigal themselves, popping in for a visit just in time for the Midsummer party.

Though AIDS sits large upon the land, the characters are determined to enjoy what time they have, both in and out of bed. When Mona laments all the gorgeous hunks already lost, Michael replies, “I know plenty of ugly guys who died of AIDS.” Pure Maupin.

The fans rejoice.

A young woman gets caught in the orbit of a wealthy, suspicious executive.

FRUIT OF THE DEAD

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Kirkus Star

Smoke Kings Mayfield, Jahmal | Melville House (400 pp.) | $19.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781685891114

Following the murder of his teenage cousin Darius, young Black political activist Nate Evers devises what his friend Isiah calls a “crazy-ass

reparations scheme.”

Along with Darius’ older brother, Joshua, and their friend Rachel, Nate and Isiah track down descendants of men who committed hate crimes in the South decades ago, abduct them, and teach them a fatal lesson. One of their victims is a man inaptly named Chipper whose forebears lynched a formerly enslaved man who’d been wrongly imprisoned for raping a white woman. Following the disappearance of Chipper, who was known for having torn down a memorial to the hanged man, the avengers are pursued by Chipper’s brother, Samuel, “a cross-burner with psychosis” who leads the white supremacist Righteous Boys. Nate and his mates, who gradually begin to differ over their aims and methods, are also pursued by Mason Farmer, a former white Birmingham cop with a racist streak. He went to work for a private investigative firm so he could afford the prescription drugs his wife needed after having been badly traumatized by a gang of “homeboys” who forced her off the road. There’s nary a moment in Mayfield’s bravura debut that isn’t tense and unsettling or lets readers off the hook. Inspired

by Black activist Kimberly Jones’ fiery video, “How Can We Win?,” this politically charged crime novel refuses to settle for easy answers, or easy anger. “We’re doing Darius a disservice making this just about terrible white people,” Isiah argues. One white character asks Nate, “How can KIRKUS REVIEWS

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there ever be any meaningful change if it’s your people and my people?” He replies, “Race is a complex issue.”

That complexity has rarely been captured as powerfully or affectingly as it is here.

A provocative, page-turning treatment of racism in America.

The Rumor Game Mullen, Thomas | Minotaur (368 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781250842770

A wave of antisemitic cruelty in 1943 Boston entangles two well-meaning souls who can’t avoid the passions it generates and implants even within themselves.

Anne Lemire writes the Rumor Clinic, a column debunking vicious innuendos, for the Boston Star. Devon Mulvey is a philandering FBI agent with an eye for married women.

Despite the war effort, which seems to have united most Americans except for Devon’s father, unregenerate isolationist John Mulvey, nothing would seem likely to bring the two together. That all changes when Anne’s teenage brother, Sammy, is beaten up by an Irish gang targeting the city’s Jews, and the national security concerns surrounding the fatal stabbing of Abraham Wolff, an employee of Northeast Munitions, bring Devon onto the case along with the Boston Police Department. To his surprise, Devon finds himself at odds with the whole BPD, including his cousin, Officer Brian Dennigan. At the same time, Anne’s investigations of antisemitism force her to confront traumatic ruptures within her own family. Once they meet each other, the pair make common cause by going after the Christian Legion, which, under the politically ambitious attorney Charles Nolan, has printed up Nazi leaflets and counterfeit ration stamps, selling the latter to local Jewish families they plan to expose as cheaters and traitors. Devon

and Anne also end up in a predictable romance. But their relationship is brutally torpedoed by pressures on both their jobs, family members whose complicity on different sides they can’t overlook, and scathing accusations against each other that bring the conflicts the Christian Legion has stoked mercilessly to a boil. Looks like the country is a bit less united than it seemed.

An unnervingly timely tale of prejudice, hatred, and violence.

Kirkus Star

Wandering Stars Orange, Tommy | Knopf (336 pp.) | $29.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593318256

A lyrical, multigenerational exploration of Native American oppression.

Orange’s second novel is partly a sequel to his acclaimed 2018 debut, There There—its second half centers on members of the Red Feather family after the events of the first book.

But Orange moves the story back as well as forward. He rewinds to 1864’s Sand Creek Massacre, in which Natives were killed or displaced by the U.S. Army. One survivor (and Red Feather family ancestor), Jude Star, is a mute man imprisoned and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of several institutions designed to strip Native Americans of their history and folklore. As Orange tracks the generations that follow, he suggests that such schools did their jobs well, but imperfectly—essential traces of Native

For more by Tommy Orange, visit Kirkus online.

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heritage endure despite decades of murder, poverty, and addiction.

That theme crystallizes as the story shifts to 2018, depicting Orvil Red Feather’s struggles after he was shot at a powwow in Oakland, California.

His path is perilous, especially thanks to a school friend with easy access to addictive pain medications. But Orvil doesn’t quite lose his grip on history, whether that’s through stories of his mother participating in the 19-month Native American occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, or cowboys-and-Indians lore he contemplates while playing Red Dead Redemption 2. “Everyone only thinks we’re from the past, but then we’re here, but they don’t know we’re still here,” as Orvil’s brother Lony puts it.

Orange is gifted at elevating his characters without romanticizing them, and though the cast is smaller than in There There, the sense of history is deeper. And the timbre of individual voices is richer, from Orvil’s streetwise patter to the officiousness of Carlisle founder Richard Henry Pratt, determined to send “the vanishing race off into final captivity before disappearing into history forever.” He failed, but this is a powerful indictment of his—and America’s—efforts.

A searing study of the consequences of a genocide.

Dixon, Descending Outen, Karen | Dutton (336 pp.) | $28.00 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780593473450

Two Black American brothers push themselves to the top of the world.

This debut novel tells the story of Dixon Bryant, a middle-class and rather ordinary man who embarks on a quest to climb Mt. Everest with his charismatic brother, Nate.

A complex history of sibling rivalry pushes the two into perilous risk-taking, ultimately leading to tragedy.

The narrative alternates between 22

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Two Black American brothers push themselves to the top of the world.

DIXON, DES CENDING

the brothers’ time on the mountain and Dixon’s life before and after his Himalayan adventure. A subtle portrait emerges of a man whose career as a middle school psychologist in suburban Maryland is rewarding but can’t quell deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Having missed athletic glory by the tiniest of margins in his youth, Dixon seeks confirmation of his distinctiveness in becoming one of the first African American men to summit Everest. Dixon’s feelings about the potential achievement are deeply personal while also linked to broader thoughts about American racism and the nation’s exclusionary promises of freedom: “Black men on Everest, which was to say freed men. Because their burdens here were of their own making.” Returning home after his ascent, Dixon begins the difficult process of managing the trauma he experienced on the mountain, and he commits himself to helping his students however he can.

The author’s handling of the novel’s themes of simmering resentment, crushing failure, and precarious redemption is skillful and absorbing, and she generates real suspense in the unfolding of the book’s mysteries.

Particularly striking are Dixon’s well-intentioned but bumbling interactions with two of his students, neither of whom has he managed to mentor successfully. Memorable, too, are Outen’s descriptions of the

For more by Zibby Owens, visit Kirkus online.

mountain environment—brought to life through copious detail—and the culture of extreme adventurism, with its dangerous mix of competitive recklessness and commercial exploitation.

A haunting story of ambition, guilt, and personal salvation.

Blank Owens, Zibby | Little A (270 pp.) | $28.99 March 1, 2024 | 9781662516696

After taking drastic measures to deal with writer’s block, a struggling author finds herself part of some unexpected plot twists.

Once upon a time, Pippa Jones was a big name in the book world. Her debut novel was a smash and was made into a movie. But since then, she hasn’t published anything—even though she’s three years past the deadline for her next novel. But as a busy mom who feels more distant from her husband every day, she finds it hard to focus on writing—that is, until her agent calls and says she needs to turn a novel in ASAP or pay back her advance.

Of course, she’s already spent the advance on an office renovation.

In desperation, Pippa turns to a suggestion from her son: What if she wrote a book that was intentionally empty? A novel called Blank, full of literal blank pages, could highlight the fakery of the publishing world and, if it became a bestseller, show how ridiculous it is that some books succeed regardless of their content while truly great books languish KIRKUS REVIEWS

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in obscurity. Pippa’s out-there idea could revive her career…or completely tank it. Meanwhile, Pippa also faces family and friendship issues, but maybe she’ll be lucky enough to have second acts in both her work and her personal life. Owens (an author as well as a podcaster, bookstore owner, and publisher) clearly understands the publishing industry and has many thoughts about what she sees as its limitations. Her book shines, though, when focusing on Pippa’s personal drama and the way her support system surrounds her when she’s in crisis. It’s unclear if readers would actually shell out money for an empty book, but they’ll always be interested in scandal, betrayal, and heartwarming bonds.

An enjoyable read full of book industry antics and plenty of dramatic surprises.

Kirkus Star

Twilight Territory Pham, Andrew X. | Norton (400 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 23, 2024 | 9781324064848

A novel of love and loss, betrayal and war during the Japanese occupation of Vietnam.

France has ruled the colony of Indochina for three generations by the time the Japanese army invades. In 1942, Le Tuyet is a young, divorced mother who confronts a local French bureaucrat and catches the attention of Yamazaki Takeshi, a major in the Imperial Japanese Army.

The major admires her beauty and spirit and eventually begins to earn her trust. The two honorable people both speak the language of loss and loneliness, and they fall in love and eventually have children. “They had all that could be good and kind and sweet between two people,” and she hopes their spirits will be “unassailable by the evil to come.” But tragedy inevitably abounds, with many Viets KIRKUS REVIEWS

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resisting occupation by either foreign power. French colonial official Gaspar Feraud bears a deep grudge against Takeshi and asks a colleague to “help me…get [him].” Readers may lose themselves in the quiet scenes so rich in detail, and yet the violence and degradation come as a punch in the gut. On a canvas ceiling is “a constellation of blood.” A rape is horrific, the retribution medieval.

Conditions in a women’s prison are grim, with rats and lice being far from the only problems. The story extends beyond Japan’s surrender and into the early 1950s as the Resistance against the French evolves into the group called the Viet Minh. Perhaps Takeshi can bring his family to his beloved Hokkaido, where the cherry trees blossom in the spring and there will be peace. Or perhaps not. “In the name of the lady Buddha, [Tuyet] would fight the French until her last heartbeat.” Indeed, a friend says that “her totem is the tiger.” Little does Tuyet know that driving out the French is only the beginning; the true cataclysm is to come, when the United States can’t leave well enough alone—but that’s another story. The main characters are deeply sympathetic in their struggles against continual heartbreak.

An engrossing story set amid a rich historical background.

I Am Rome: A Novel of Julius Caesar Posteguillo, Santiago | Trans. by Frances Riddle | Ballantine (624 pp.) | $31.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780593598047

Young lawyer Julius Caesar takes on an impossible case that threatens to end his career and his life.

“They chose you because you are, by far, the lesser man, the lesser orator. Because you don’t know what to say or when to say it.” Thus says the great Roman orator Cicero to 23-year-old Julius

Caesar, who’s competing against him to be selected to prosecute a case. Thanks to hindsight, we know Cicero’s assessment couldn’t be more wrong, but Posteguillo takes us back to a moment long before Caesar was undisputed master of the world.

Though it’s easy now to say Caesar was destined for greatness, Posteguillo shows his fate was far from certain.

Caesar is chosen over Cicero to prosecute the corrupt former Macedonian governor Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, and it’s an impossible situation.

Though clearly guilty of plunder and rape, Dolabella is a favorite of Roman dictator Sulla and a member of the optimates, an exclusive group in the Roman Senate unwilling to concede power to anyone, especially a young upstart from a lower-level patrician family. The novel traces the history leading up to Dolabella’s trial in 77 B.C.E. and depicts the hidden grudges and motives behind the efforts to ensure Caesar’s defeat. The author describes invading barbarian armies in Gaul, rebellions in Greece, and the brutal silencing of anyone brave enough to speak the truth.

He also shows us the hypocrisy of a society that embraced high ideals but accepted violence as part of the political process. What hampers the story is a plodding narrative style and the author’s penchant for cliffhangers that seem better suited for TV. He puts too much potted history in his characters’ mouths, too much language that seems unrealistic or verging on the soap operatic. And yet, at other times, his writing has a strikingly contemporary sound, especially when Caesar makes his closing argument in the trial: “We may call our form of government a ‘democracy,’ but to truly be democratic, our laws, as Pericles points

For more fiction about ancient Rome, visit Kirkus online.

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B O O K T O S C R E E N // F I C T I O N

Book to Screen

Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

PBS and BBC To Adapt The Mirror & the Light The series, starring Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, is based on the final novel of Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed trilogy.

PBS and the BBC are bringing Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII back to the small screen.

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The broadcasters are adapting The Mirror & the Light, the third installment in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of historical novels, Deadline reports.

Mantel’s series follows Cromwell, the 16th-century English statesman who served as an officer of state to Henry VIII. Cromwell later fell out of favor with the king, who ordered him executed in 1540.

The trilogy began in 2009 with Wolf Hall, which won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and continued three years later with Bring Up the Bodies, which also took home the Booker. The Mirror & the Light was published

in 2020, two years before Mantel’s death at 70.

Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were adapted for a 2015 BBC limited series, titled Wolf Hall and starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn.

Rylance and Lewis will return in the new series, called Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.. Also returning are director Peter Kosminsky and screenwriter Peter Straughan.

To read our review of The Mirror & the Light, visit Kirkus online.

“I’m overjoyed to be able to reunite the extraordinary cast we were lucky enough to assemble for Wolf Hall,” Kosminsky said. “We are all determined to complete what we started—and to honor the final novel written by one of the greatest literary figures of our age, Hilary Mantel.”—M.S.

Mark Rylance returns as Thomas Cromwell in the new series.

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out, must defend the interests not of the very few, but of the majority.”

Posteguillo’s story is a reminder that, though more than 2,000 years separate us from ancient Rome, some conflicts haven’t changed.

A book that’s far more interesting for its insights into Roman history than for its style or storytelling.

The Little Liar Robert-Diard, Pascale | Trans. by Adriana Hunter | Other Press (192 pp.) $15.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781635424164

A defense attorney in France takes on a client who challenges her assumptions about what it means to be a victim.

Alice Keridreux, who’s in her early 50s, is a divorced mother of two adult children and an impassioned attorney who represents both the accused and their victims. When Lisa Charvet appears in Alice’s office, it seems at first like a straightforward case. Five years prior, when Lisa was 15, she was sexually assaulted by Marco Lange, a laborer hired to work at her parents’ home. With the support of her parents, schoolmates, and teachers—many of whom wrote witness statements attesting to the depths of Lisa’s distress after the assault—Lisa won her case against Lange, a lifelong misfit who was given 10 years for his crime. Lange’s appeals trial is in four months, and Lisa has come to Alice’s office because she’d like to dismiss her hotshot Paris lawyer—Rodolphe

Laurentin, who “specializes” in rape victims—in order to be “represented by a woman.” Alice agrees, but the clear-cut case she expected quickly becomes something much more when Lisa reveals a secret that calls into question which of the two, plaintiff or defendant, is really the victim.

In a story that addresses the many different kinds of truth available for the telling, even as it asks to what purposes those truths should be used, Robert-Diard writes a fast, tight, character-driven tale that refuses the easy answers so readily available in an era of social media activism in favor of the complexity of the all-too-human natures that motivate us all.

Complex, provocative, and timely.

Kirkus Star

Leaving Robinson, Roxana | Norton (344 pp.) $28.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781324065388

Forty years after their breakup, lovers run into each other at intermission in the opera house, and nothing will ever be the same.

Warren Jennings and Sarah Watson dated in their youth, but between the miles separating their colleges, a silly but fatal misunderstanding, and a new face on the horizon, she chose to end the relationship. By the time they reconnect, he is long married, living near Boston, a successful architect. She is divorced, a grandmother, on her own in Westchester County. After they serendipitously meet at a performance

Elegantly structured and written, shimmering with feeling and truth.

LEAVING

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of Tosca in New York City, the error of their separation is quickly evident and they begin an affair. To them, it feels less like adultery than a course correction, likely to lead to the greater happiness of all. But as Warren will one day explain to his wife, Janet, “In an opera, the tragedy involves passion and honor,” and so it is here, with passion and honor at odds, and the irrevocable responsibilities and emotions of parenthood complicating the situation in unforeseen ways.

“They’re sort of at the heart of everything now,” says Sarah, speaking of her adult children. “…We’re marginal.

At sixty.” “But that’s not how I feel,” Warren replies, his whole being rekindled by the force of this unexpected, ferocious emotion. Every character and relationship in the two families is beautifully drawn, in sentences that manage to be both spare and rich at once. Also in play is the power of art to give our lives shape and meaning: Tosca, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, and the paintings of the Bloomsbury Group add texture to the story. As the novel builds toward its operatic conclusion, Robinson’s profound, complex depiction of family relationships and responsibilities and the difficult choices they entail will resonate with readers in every phase of their own lives.

Elegantly structured and written, shimmering with feeling and truth. A triumph.

This Disaster Loves You Roper, Richard | Putnam (400 pp.) | $18.00 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780593540701

A British man searches for his missing wife while reflecting on their lives together in this bittersweet tale.

Brian’s wife, Lily, disappeared from their pub six years ago and hasn’t been heard from since, though he keeps hoping that she’ll return one day.

In the meantime, he spends his time KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Small convincingly makes the case that we are beset on all sides by monsters.

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chatting with Jeff, his one regular, and hoping his tiny staff will stay on board despite the increasingly negative reviews the pub is receiving online. One night while doing his obsessive daily check of the reviews, he ends up stumbling on the profile of someone who’s been commenting on places around the U.K. since about six months after Lily disappeared; her user name is the title of Lily’s favorite song and the year of her birth. Could it be Lily herself?

Despite the state of the pub, Brian decides to head off in search of some sort of closure, following the reviews left by PinkMoonLily1970. Along the way, he connects with a woman named Tess who’s on her own journey of discovery; she’s thinking about ending her 20-plus-year marriage and decides to tag along with Brian while he shares his and Lily’s story with her. Roper is a good writer, able to evoke feelings with small turns of phrase, skilled at details that make a world and a relationship feel solid and lived in. Despite the potential tragedy inherent in the plot, the book is also very funny, from Jeff’s stories to Brian’s foibles and Lily’s sly wit in the stories Brian tells about her.

The biggest downside is that Lily, the heart of the narrative, exists only in Brian’s memories rather than as a fully fleshed-out person in her own right. Though it’s clear why the book

For more by Richard Roper, visit Kirkus online.

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is framed this way, the absence of Lily is felt, and Tess, the other main female character, functions more in service to Brian’s story than as a character herself. This is such a good book that its stumbles feel bigger than they might otherwise.

A story of love and finding yourself that just slightly misses the mark.

Kirkus Star

Love Novel Sajko, Ivana | Trans. by Mima Simić Biblioasis (112 pp.) | $15.95 paper Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781771965989

In this short novel by award-winning Croatian writer and theater director Sajko, a young couple struggles with parenthood, unemployment, and the anxieties of the historical moment.

In an urban apartment complex, a husband and wife are fighting again.

He’s an unemployed writer and Dante fan, trying to protest government corruption. She’s an actress, now home with the baby. “Words, words, words,” he screams. She slams a door, waking the child. “There was no one to turn to for help, for support, for some understanding or a grain of optimism, because like they said on the news, and like he always claimed too, it will only get worse…”

She’s right. Things do get worse. Yet out of this unlikely material, Sajko conjures a brutally honest, richly layered story about the fate of those caught in the inequalities of late

capitalism and the inertia of governments. We see the actress “on the verge of a nervous breakdown while she was scraping burnt milk off the bottom of a pot, with the pee-soaked child trying to climb her leg, while she was begging the baby to wait, to wait for just one second, all the while trying with enormous difficulty to refrain from screaming or breaking something, because the child was bawling angrily and slapping at her thigh with tiny hands, demanding the right that every child should be able to claim, not to have to wait, just as he demanded the right that every man should be able to claim to pursue goals more noble than washing the dishes and wiping up urine.”

Moving deftly between past and present, with evocative sentences that unspool propulsively, Sajko delves into her characters’ souls, and the title that seemed initially facetious becomes increasingly apt. Her compassionate attention extends beyond the unhappy couple to a neighbor attempting to grow flowers, a security guard, protestors at a political rally.

And the child, absorbing this miasma of vituperation and crushed hopes.

A devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant.

Kirkus Star

Werewolf at Dusk: And Other Stories Small, David | Liveright/Norton (160 pp.) $25.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9781324092827

The latest from writer-artist Small is a triptych of short illustrated stories (two adaptations and one original) that explore the idea of lurking monsters.

In the first, adapted from Lincoln Michel’s short story “The Werewolf at Dusk,” an aging lycanthrope laments his lost vitality: The years have rendered his once-fearsome lupine form mangy, stooped, and medicated. The Small JANUARY 1, 2024

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original, “A Walk in the Old City,” follows a psychotherapist lost and imperiled on strange, circuitous streets who recognizes his surroundings as nothing more than a dream but then must confront the identity of the dreamer—and a pack of dog-sized spiders. The final tale is based on Jean Ferry’s “Le Tigre Mondain,” in which a theatergoer in 1920s Berlin has his night of frivolity ruined by the surprise performance of a popular farce featuring a tiger behaving like a man, from wearing a suit to not eating a baby, with the salivating beast held in check only by the will of the nearby and increasingly exhausted Adolf Hitler. The collection is more adult picture book than graphic novel and is immensely enjoyable. Small’s linework is striking in its expressiveness and energy, figures and forms leaping across the page while eyes and lips simmer with emotion. Broad patches and layers of color imbue the illustrations with a gorgeous painterly quality. An introduction from Smalls connects the three stories thematically and challenges the reader to not fall victim to that most insidious of monsters lurking within so many of us: passivity. From the unceasing and enervating march of time to the uncertainty of our agency to the crass manipulation of the masses by the elite, Small convincingly makes the case that we are beset on all sides (especially inside) by monsters.

Surreal and searing.

Kirkus Star

Cahokia Jazz Spufford, Francis | Scribner (464 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781668025451

A brutal murder threatens to set off a race war in alternative-history Illinois.

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Louis. In Spufford’s cleverly conceived, well-made police procedural, it’s the hub of a thriving Native-led U.S. state in 1922. Native leadership there is stubbornly opposed by local whites, and the Klan is ascendant. So the murder of a white man on the roof of a downtown building, made to look like an Aztec sacrifice, is a powder keg. Was the killing committed by Natives pushing back against prejudice, or whites stirring tensions to stage a government overthrow? Joe Barrow, a Cahokia police detective investigating the case, is quickly enmeshed not just in the murder but in the politics of a city on edge. (A country, too: Mormons are agitating for their own state out west, and tensions have flared on the border of Alaska, still Russian territory.)

Spufford has cleverly thought through all the Risk-board elements of this setup, from Cahokia’s industries, to the intersection of Native folkways and Catholicism, to the city’s various ethnic enclaves. (A lengthy afterword delivers a plausible case for its creation.) But at heart the novel is a straightforward, smart noir, with Joe torn among his police duties, his sideline as a talented piano player at a local club, an erratic white detective partner, a budding romance, and his own grim upbringing in an orphanage. The concept owes a debt to Michael Chabon’s 2007 counterfactual detective yarn, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but Joe is an original invention, steeped in complex history—a “Mississippian fusion” of European, American, and Native ideas—and torn over what do for himself, his city, and his culture.

A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might’ve been.

For more by Francis Spufford, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

The Visitors Stevens, Jessi Jezewska | And Other Stories (288 pp.) | $18.95 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781913505707

C is lonely, ill, in debt, in danger, and on the verge of the most radical reinvention of all—total erasure.

In 2008, C was an up-and-coming fabric artist in Manhattan, married and hoping for a child. Then, “on the day the market crashed,” she underwent an emergency hysterectomy and awakened to what her lifelong friend Zo, a trader on Wall Street, described as an almost literal new world, one where “everyone [is] now in debt.” Three years later, C is still struggling to adjust to the normalcies of a life in constant crisis.

Her medical debt is stubbornly eating away at the resources she needs to keep her arts and crafts store afloat, her marriage has ended, she has a nagging pain in her side and experiences unpredictable fainting spells, and she’s begun to be visited by the specter of a gnomelike little man in a navy three-piece suit with a gleeful penchant for expounding on systems theory.

Add to this the ongoing urgency of the Occupy Wall Street movement—in this world, a collectivist effort that has grown in the years after the financial crisis rather than petered out—and the looming threat of GoodNite, an organization of “homegrown terrorists” bent on crashing the world’s electrical grid and taking down all of society with it, and it seems no wonder that all of C’s attempts to put her life in order seem to unravel into individual twists of wasted energy and ennui. And yet, C does go on, pouring herself into an artistic gesture that refigures the hopeless tangle of economic, biological, and climate systems as a generative act that embraces the nihilism embodied by GoodNite even as it makes something KIRKUS REVIEWS

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never before seen out of the fabric of the denuded world. Elements of the novel (particularly its exploration of cybernetics as a ubiquitous controller of domestic life) recall the work of such 20th-century greats as DeLillo or Sebald, but Stevens’ voice—which is meticulous, wide ranging, and moored in a different perspective from the 20th century’s predominantly white male hegemonies—makes her work particularly suited for the current century’s artistic needs.

Ambitious and powerful—a remarkable novel.

Burma Sahib Theroux, Paul | Mariner Books (400 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780063297548

From a distinguished literary veteran, a compelling historical novel about callow youth.

George Orwell wrote that for each of us comes a brief period in which “character is fixed forever.” Theroux’s premise is that for Orwell, that period was a 5-year stint in Burma during the early 1920s, where he—then Eric Blair—spent time as a trainee and junior policeman. From the start, Blair stands out from his fellow recruits.

He’s bookish, intimidatingly tall (one superior officer won’t speak to him unless he’s seated), a recent graduate of swanky Eton, adept with languages, and intent (to the consternation of many) to learn the languages of the Raj. Theroux’s portrait of young Blair is complex and nuanced. Steeped in the violence of English public schools, Blair is both repulsed by and amenable to casual violence to enforce order and hierarchy. He’s similarly appalled by, dependent on—and implicated in—the paternalistic racism that created and sustains British rule.

Blair is torn between hatred of the moral position of the Brits here… and contempt for the often brutal criminals it is his job to pursue. A KIRKUS REVIEWS

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similar ambivalence—self-disgust, guilt, shameful pleasure—haunts Blair’s sexual life, which consists of discreet visits to brothels, liaisons with Burmese women in his employ, and an affair with the wife of another Brit.

Theroux nimbly weaves in episodes Orwell would write about in Burma Days, “Shooting an Elephant,” and other works. The result is in many ways an old-fashioned novel—large in scale, slowish to build—but one that exemplifies the best virtues of such novels: steadily accruing momentum and depth, rich detail, psychological intricacy, and immersion. Best of all, the big canvas allows Theroux to depict a Blair whose wounds and offenses and flaws and guilty knowledge are changing him as we watch. The battered, self-loathing man who limps home at the end of the five years is recognizably on the cusp of being Orwell: keen-eyed, morally complex, skeptical of authority and what it allows—or requires—of those who wield it.

Theroux is always great with setting; here it’s not just Burma but the mind of Orwell that he persuasively inhabits.

Kirkus Star

Help Wanted Waldman, Adelle | Norton (288 pp.) $28.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781324020448

At a big-box retailer in upstate New York, a team of workers is energized by a secret plan. “‘Roaches’ was what other employees called the people who

worked Movement, because they descended on the store in the dark of night, then scattered in the morning, when the customers arrived.” Waldman’s long-awaited follow-up to The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) is set in a totally different world—bye-bye, literary Brooklyn; hello, blue-collar Potterstown, a forlorn small town with a view of the Catskills, stuck in a downward spiral ever since the local IBM plant closed. What remains the same is the author’s emotional intelligence, wry humor, and sensitivity to matters of money and class. Meanwhile, the details of daily operation and workplace culture at Town Square Store #1512 are evoked in fine and fascinating detail.

The members of Team Movement (formerly “Logistics”) are introduced in the org chart that opens the book, and that org chart is the heart of the plot. Currently the nine “roaches” are managed by a guy they call Little Will. Everybody loves Little Will, but his self-absorbed boss, Meredith, a Fashion Institute of Technology dropout, is a nightmare. Now the top dog, Big Will, whose “nonthreatening air of diversity, combined with his good looks and his youth,” make him a corporate dreamboat, is getting his hoped-for transfer to his home state of Connecticut. Does that mean the hated Meredith will get his job? But if so, would Little Will move up and leave a management slot free for one of the roaches, who get no benefits whatsoever? This situation inspires a smart lesbian mom named Val to cook up a plot in which each of her sympathetically imagined Movement compadres plays a role. Even the coffeepot in the break room during a team meeting is a character: “hissing and sputtering wildly, like a small

At a big-box retailer, a team of workers is energized by a secret plan.

HELP WANTED

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animal trying to scare off a larger predator.”

The workplace dramedy of the year.

The Cleaner Wells, Brandi | Hanover Square Press (320 pp.) | $27.99 | Jan. 30, 2024 9781335018106

An unnamed cleaner cares for an office building and the people who work there in this quiet thriller.

The woman comes to the office every night, diligently cleaning four floors under the unofficial supervision of L., the security guard. As she works, she develops elaborate personas for the people whose desks she cleans: Yarn Guy is a mild-mannered knitter who leaves his projects in his drawers, Sad Intern is a frazzled young woman struggling to make herself noticed, and Mr. Buff is most concerned with working out. In her way, the cleaner tries to help them, sometimes by invading their privacy; when she finds cigarettes in Mr. Buff’s desk, she douses them with cleaning solution before putting them back.

She sees her role as a shepherd, all-knowing because of her access to their desks and eager to help ensure the employees of the company are at their best. She reads their emails and tries to drum up relationships by putting one person’s belongings on another’s desk. She also steals, re-creating elements of the office in her own apartment. But when her spying reveals that the CEO is having numerous affairs, she begins to fear his indiscretion could threaten the

For more debut fiction, visit Kirkus online.

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well-being of the company, and she takes things into her own hands to save it. Reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work in its excavations of a troubled woman’s descent into more and more uncomfortable behavior, this novel is a suspenseful, though slow-paced, examination of one woman’s delusion.

This gripping, sometimes shocking novel relies on quiet twists to keep the reader guessing.

Kirkus Star

Ours Williams, Phillip B. | Viking (592 pp.) $32.00 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780593654828

A gorgeously written, evocative saga of Black American survival and transcendence, blending elements of fantasy, mythology, and multigenerational history.

The title of this crowded, resonant, and wildly imaginative first novel is taken from the name of its setting, an all-Black community just north of St. Louis in the 1830s. It came into being because a tough-minded, inscrutably powerful woman named Saint has, through “conjuring,” brought death and destruction to Southern plantations, freed their slaves, and provided a haven for them and their loved ones in “Ours”—a place that has the added convenience of being magically shrouded from outsiders.

For a time, Saint’s daring attempt at establishing a secure, self-sufficient community for her people in the divided heart of antebellum America seems to be working. But, however shielded its inhabitants are from slave trackers and other white predators, Ours is no unmitigated paradise, with strains soon becoming apparent among its residents. “Freedom didn’t mean safety,” Williams writes, “and if there’s anything more shockingly unpredictable than freedom, it’s love.” And it’s not just love between

men and women but love between parents and children, and the love Saint has for those she’s freed, that’s tested over decades of conflict, transition, and even transformation as a result of such new members of the community as a contingent of conjurers from New Orleans led by the formidable Frances, who “[switches] between ‘he’ and ‘she’ without care.” These transients add to the town’s complexity and strain its cohesiveness. As in the magical realist sagas of Latin America or the grand fictions of Russian literature, time itself becomes a morphing, enigmatic character in Williams’ novel as the town’s insular sense of security is buffeted by the Civil War and its bruising aftermath. The reader is often challenged to keep up with worldly and otherworldly happenings.

But what keeps you attentive, and the sweeping narrative anchored, are the rich characterizations and, most of all, the often-startling impact of Williams’ poetically illuminated language.

A multilayered, enrapturing chronicle of freedom that interrogates the nature of freedom itself.

No Better Time Williams, Sheila | Amistad/HarperCollins (288 pp.) | $30.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 9780063307933

Two young Black women experience the highs and lows of enlisted life during World War II. Leila Branch is a single mother in Dayton, Ohio, raising her son and living in her mother’s boardinghouse, when President Franklin Roosevelt declares the United States at war. In Atlanta, Spelman College librarian Dorothy Thom is bored and eager for adventure. Though very different, the two women both see the opportunity of a lifetime in the newly formed Women’s Army Corps: For Leila, it’s a chance to KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A lively juxtaposition of two self -serious worlds: tech and fashion.

VALLEY VERIFIED

build a better life for her son, while for Dorothy it’s a chance to see the world. When they both enlist, they find that the WACs are put to hard work despite their distance from the front lines—but the two have each other when they strike up a close friendship ahead of being assigned to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a job that takes them across the Atlantic. Although the author succeeds at laying out a broad and readable history of the WACs and the postal directory’s work, there’s little in the way of sustained conflict or tension to add interest to the plot. Challenges faced by the women, such as racism, are resolved quickly; when Leila is threatened with an involuntary hysterectomy, the matter is resolved within hours, with no ensuing difficulty. These deus ex machina resolutions are swift and frequent, undercutting what could be an interesting and layered novel.

Readers wanting to learn the history of the WACs will find much to enjoy, but this novel remains a surface-level exploration.

Valley Verified Zhao, Kyla | Berkley (384 pp.) | $16.99 paper Jan. 16, 2024 | 9780593546154

Tech, but make it fashion.

Zoe Zeng is a progressive fashionista, frustrated that her job as junior fashion writer at Chic magazine requires her so often to regurgitate mainstream content, when she’d rather write about size inclusivity or women with KIRKUS REVIEWS

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alopecia. So when a slick young tech guy from Silicon Valley named Bill Lawrence offers her the role as VP of Marketing at his start-up, she moves across the country to try something new. The app is called FitPick, and it allows users to crowd-source opinions on two competing outfits in hopes of providing them a “safe space to explore their style.” Whether such a space could be maintained in the wilds of the internet is open to question, but Zoe digs the concept and proves to be a dab hand at marketing. Unfortunately, she misses many clues that Bill is a sleaze who cares nothing for FitPick’s stated philosophy. Zhao is intent on casting Zoe as a knowing champion of those on the margins, with the personal experience of being Chinese American and not straight-sized. So her naïveté around Bill and her quickness to judge female COO Lillian Mariko as a nemesis are surprising.

When FitPick is written up positively on the infamous gossip website ValleyVerified, things are looking up for the team. But the success of the app and a burgeoning office romance are about to come crashing down on Zoe, upending many of her assumptions and giving her her biggest challenge yet.

A lively juxtaposition of two distinct and self-serious worlds.

For more by Kyla Zhao, visit Kirkus online.

The Wife You Know Zunker, Chad | Thomas & Mercer (207 pp.) $28.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781662515514

An act of sudden heroism plunges a woman and her family into danger.

As Ashley Driskell drives past a day care center in Vail, Colorado, it bursts into flames. Launching herself into the building, Ashley doesn’t stop until she’s led everyone inside to safety. Another passerby has caught the one-woman rescue operation on video, and that video proves to be Ashley’s undoing. After her husband, millionaire software developer Luke Driskell, visits her in the hospital, she sneaks out around 2 a.m. The next morning, when Luke checks on Ashley’s 3-year-old daughter, Joy, she’s gone, too, presumably snatched by the mother who’s gone on the lam. So far, so suspenseful: The opening chapters are as irresistible as the first precipitous drop in a roller coaster.

But when Luke looks for clues to Ashley’s whereabouts, the formulaic complications undermine the suspense. Ashley, it turns out, had several alternative identities, and as FBI agent Danny Lamar tells Luke, “The wife you know doesn’t exist.”

Lamar’s murder leaves Luke to pick up the pieces, an endeavor that involves travel by hired jet to the far-flung places where people knew Ashley under different identities, the unmasking of another self-proclaimed FBI agent as an imposter, and mounting rumors of misdeeds long ago during a trip Ashley made to China as evangelical Sarah Bowman. Readers coming to this novel from Family Money (2022) will find that although the details have changed, an awful lot of its plot feels as if it’s been recycled from Zunker’s last novel.

The same but different, only not that much different.

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F I C T I O N // S E E N A N D H E A R D

Brooklyn Sequel Coming in 2024 Scribner says it will publish Long Island next spring.

Scribner will publishColm Tóibín’s Long Island next spring, the press announced in a news release. The novel will be a sequel to Tóibín’s 2009 book, Brooklyn, which a critic for Kirkus praised as “a fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.”

Brooklyn follows Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant seeking work in New York in the 1950s. She falls in love with Tony Fiorello, a

To read our review of Brooklyn,, visit Kirkus online.

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plumber, before returning to Ireland to mourn her sister, who has died of a heart condition.

The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into an Oscar-nominated 2015 film directed by John Crowley and starring Saoirse Ronan.

Long Island, Scribner says, takes place 20 years after the events of Brooklyn. Eilis and Tony have two children and are living in Long Island when a man visits their home to tell them that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s baby; Eilis returns to Ireland and reunites with an old flame.

“The love triangle at the center of this novel is unforgettable, and the story of Eilis and her return to Enniscorthy is told with Tóibín’s trademark restraint and glorious prose,” Scribner says. “Long Island is the work of a writer at the height of his powers, returning to one of his greatest characters and most memorable settings.”

Long Island is slated for publication on May 7, 2024.—M.S.

Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

SEEN AND HEARD

Tóibín will revisit the characters of Brooklyn 20 years later.

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A W A R D S // F I C T I O N

AWARDS Bob Mortimer Wins U.K. Prize for Comic Fiction His debut novel, The Clementine Complex, took home the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

Bob Mortimer has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for his novel, The Clementine Complex.

Wine producer Champagne Bollinger, which sponsors the British prize for comic literature, announced Mortimer’s win in a news release, calling the book a “funny and clever debut novel.”

Lawyer and comedian Mortimer’s book was published in the U.S. by Scout Press; its title in the U.K. is The Satsuma Complex. It follows a legal assistant who goes for a drink with his co-worker and encounters a beautiful woman; when his co-worker goes missing, he tries to track

To read our review of The Clementine Complex, visit Kirkus online.

down the mysterious stranger. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “quirky, lighthearted, but easy to forget—it could have been a gem with more polish.”

The award comes with a prize of wine, a set of books by literary legend P.G. Wodehouse, and “a pig named after [Mortimer’s] winning book.”

“I’m really chuffed to have won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and what a treat to have an old spot pig named after the book,” Mortimer said in a statement.

“I still have no idea if I can actually write but this award gives me fresh hope. Cheers!”

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction was established in 2000.

Previous winners have included Gary Shteyngart for Super Sad True Love Story and Percival Everett for The Trees.—M.S.

Photo Credit goes here

A pig has been named after Mortimer’s prizewinning book.

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JANUARY 1, 2024

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F I C T I O N // M Y S T E R Y

A Smoking Bun Alexander, Ellie | St. Martin’s (304 pp.) | $9.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781250854421

A weird murder that stuns residents of Ashland, Oregon, threatens to blight the coming New Year’s celebration.

Ashland is popular with residents and tourists alike for its natural beauty and its vaunted Shakespeare Festival. Juliet Capshaw Montague, the owner of Torte, a local bakeshop, is busy dealing with in-laws visiting from Spain. The first excursion she has planned, a nighttime snowshoe trip high on the ski mountain, doesn’t turn out quite the way she pictured. Their guide, Hero, is professional and cautious, but the outing is rudely interrupted by another guide, Fitz, a rule-breaking bully who shoves past them with two ladies, all on cross-country skis. The trio quickly get into trouble when Fitz takes his charges off the trail, and Hero has to call the ski patrol to rescue them. That minor bump in the road is nothing compared to what happens at the yearly downhill dummy contest, where fantastical dummies are sent down a slope to face spectacular wipeouts. Fitz, who seems to have been in the wrong place, is impaled by pieces of the last dummy, and Kendall Hankwitz, whose family owns the resort, insists that his death is murder. Jules has worked with her detective stepfather, known as the Professor, before.

Despite a busy schedule entertaining her in-laws and furiously cooking and baking for holiday parties, she and her pals in crime-solving step up to help. Fitz was certainly disliked, but some of the revelations they uncover about the resort may provide even stronger motives for murder.

A many-faceted mystery often overwhelmed by delightfully detailed descriptions of culinary prep sure to delight foodies.

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Kirkus Star

Knife Skills Church, Wendy | Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781448312597

A Chicago chef with a troubled past must cope with an even more troubled present.

Louie Ferrar may have hired Sagarine Pfister when nobody else would give her a second look, but now that he’s been stabbed to death and frozen solid inside his freezer, Sags is on her own.

She reacts by instructing the few staffers at Louie’s who know what’s happened not to report it till they’ve completed their dinner service for the guests of Anatoly Morzov, the majority owner of the restaurant.

Det. Carter isn’t crazy about the nine-hour delay before he was notified, but the dinner otherwise goes off so well that Anatoly demands that Sags cater a party at his house.

Meanwhile, FBI Agent Jebediah Smith demands that she accept the job, allow the feds to install hidden microphones around the restaurant, and report back to him on Anatoly and his mobbed-up friends—unless she wants Smith to come down hard on her sister, Gigi, whose own past includes drugs, prostitution, and a nasty childhood secret. An already complicated situation, which includes Sags’ stalking by an all-seeing correspondent who acts both smitten and possessive, gets even dicier when impossibly beautiful Ekaterina Belyaev, the sister of Anatoly’s lieutenant Valentin Belyaev, makes a play for Sags, who’s more than ready to respond in kind. Church tosses in loving descriptions of world-class cuisine, detailed accounts of how to weaponize kitchen appliances against attacking gangsters, and a climax that will leave you gasping. Audiences who wish the TV series The Bear could make room for Russian mobsters are in for a treat.

A kickoff to a possible series whose later installments will be hard-pressed to live up to its dizzying standards.

Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice Cosimano, Elle | Minotaur (320 pp.) $28.00 | March 5, 2024 | 9781250846006

Another rollicking round of high-speed felonies for mystery author Finlay Donovan and those unwary enough to get pulled into her orbit.

The opening challenge is terse and to the point. “You have seventy-two hours to pay back what you owe,” reads a note stuck under the windshield wiper of a van abandoned by Finn’s friend Javi. But nothing ever follows a straight line in Finn’s life.

Since Javi owes $200,000 to loan shark Marco Toscano, Finn and Vero Ramirez, her resourceful nanny, read the note as a ransom demand and set out to find Javi and somehow raise the funds to repay Toscano. Their journey takes them—together with Finn’s two children, her mother, and Steven, her ex-husband (don’t ask)—from Virginia to Atlantic City on a trip that carefully avoids Maryland, where there’s a warrant out against Vero. They don’t find Javi, but the trip isn’t a total loss: They stumble upon two dead bodies in a hotel room, one of them Marco’s.

Even though that discovery renders Javi’s debt moot, news of a flash drive containing information about how to access $14 million in cryptocurrency brings Finn up against two of her old antagonists, Russian mobster Feliks Zhirov, who’s escaped from prison For more by Elle Cosimano, visit Kirkus online.

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The waters of England’s scenic Lake District are turned to menacing use.

in an attempt to get away from her parents, who try to control her every move. Falling in love with Cuban soldier Joaquín Montero convinces her to stay in Havana and make the island her own. As Mercedes begins sorting through childhood memories with Mamina, Sarah makes a home with Joaquín, all the while learning about Cuban culture and customs, from the language to the rations. Unspooling limited information from Mamina, Mercedes continues to wonder if it’s worth searching for her mother, or if the woman’s long absence means that she’s dead.

travails of Calvin Matheson, who’s opened Therapy, a coffee shop, after helming an earlier restaurant that died on the vine. Urged to promote the shop through social media by his wife, Vicky, who manages an animal shelter, and Tara, their sole employee, Calvin succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. That’s because his wildest dreams didn’t include BlondieMel, who follows up her flirtatious texts to Calvin by showing up at Therapy seeking a job. In the first of many bad decisions, Calvin hires her, and in no time at all he’s been lured to her place for several hours, Vicky has vanished in his absence, and all those anonymous souls who’ve been following him on social media have turned against him with a vengeance.

When he demands that Imogen take Vicky’s disappearance seriously, she sets about methodically linking it to the murder of Leo James and a fatal secret Calvin’s been hiding for most of his life.

The Darkest Water

Crime and Cherry Pits

Edwards, Mark | Thomas & Mercer $16.99 paper | May 1, 2024 9781662508943

Flower, Amanda | Poisoned Pen (336 pp.) | $8.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781728273051

The waters of England’s scenic Lake District are turned to menacing use.

The head found by a jogger on Drigg Beach turns out to be attached to painter Leo James, who’s been buried up to his neck and left to drown in the incoming tide. D.I. Imogen Evans, still levelheaded and unflappable despite the celebrity status her last case brought her, promptly identifies the body, but suspects and motives are few and far between. And since James, who lived like a hermit, left no one to mourn him or hound the police, Imogen’s investigation is soon eclipsed by the

A family feud and romantic difficulties are just minor problems for an organic cherry grower confronted by murder.

Shiloh Bellamy, who gave up a career in Hollywood to take over the family farm in Michigan, has improved the orchard and even helped solve some murders, but she still has to contend with drama. Her father and uncle each inherited half the farm, and after her uncle died, his daughter, Stacey, sold their portion. Now Shiloh’s discovered some valuable stock certificates her grandmother

T H E D A R K E S T W AT E R

just in time to join the festivities, and Ekatarina Rybakov, his star attorney, who in some ways is even more dangerous than him. As usual, Finn compensates for her limitations as a sleuth by her unexcelled ability to improvise, turning the most dangerous situations into set-up lines for droll payoffs.

Perfect escapist fare for stay-at-home readers who wonder why nothing ever happens to them.

Last Seen in Havana Dovalpage, Teresa | Soho Crime (352 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781641295390

A novel told in alternating narratives of one woman searching for an explanation for her mother’s disappearance and another adjusting to life in 1980s Cuba.

Mercedes Spivey, a professional baker who’s recently been widowed, flies from Miami to Cuba in 2019 to take care of her ailing grandmother.

Mamina has been the primary parental figure in Mercedes’ life ever since her American mother, whose name she doesn’t know, disappeared when she was a toddler and her Cuban father, Joaquín Montero, died in combat in Angola. Mercedes is determined to make sure that Mamina’s in the best health she can be and that their family’s beautiful but fragile Art Deco home, Villa Santa Marta, can make it through hurricane season. Interspersed with Mercedes’ story are chapters set in the 1980s that follow a free-spirited woman named Sarah as she leaves San Diego for an impulsive trip to Cuba KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Interest in the past supersedes interest in the present until the ending inevitably wraps things up the only way possible.

Lots of coincidences, but readers caught up in the swift-moving current won’t notice till they’ve turned the last page.

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had hidden before her death, and Stacey thinks she’s entitled to half the money, which she wants for her theatrical enterprises. Though Shiloh is willing, her father isn’t, and somehow Shiloh gets all the blame.

The good news is that Shiloh’s been selected to have a booth at the Cherry Farm Market, which is a great honor.

As Shiloh watches the cherry-spitting contest, Dr. Dane Fullbright, a teacher and actor who’s just had a nasty argument with Stacey, appears to choke on a pit. Shiloh tries the Heimlich maneuver but can’t prevent his death, which proves to have been no accident. Someone who knew about his penicillin allergy may have used Stacey’s pills to coat that pit, so Stacey naturally insists that Shiloh clear her name by investigating.

Although Stacey infuriates Shiloh, she can’t believe her cousin’s a killer.

The local law officers, meanwhile, get help from Antrim County Sheriff Milan Penbrook, with whom Shiloh has a tenuous romantic relationship.

To prove Stacey innocent, Shiloh must dig into Fullbright’s past and uncover secrets that could provide a motive for murder.

A likable heroine once again proves her chops.

The Wharton Plot Fredericks, Mariah | Minotaur (304 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 23, 2024 | 9781250827425

A Pulitzer Prize–winning author probes the murder of a colleague.

Edith Wharton was no admirer of David Graham Phillips. She found the journalist’s dress affected and his opinions overzealous. But the day after their one and only meeting, the muckraker is shot to death near Gramercy Park, and the novelist’s curiosity is decidedly piqued. She leaves her invalid husband, Teddy, back at the Belmont in care of his valet, and persuades her lover, 36

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Pulitzer Prize winner Edith Wharton probes the murder of a colleague.

THE WHARTON PLOT

Morton Fullerton, to accompany her to Phillips’ funeral. After the service, Phillips’ sister, Carolyn Frevert, seeks out Wharton and invites her back to the apartment she shared with her brother. Wharton continues to be intrigued by her glimpse into a social occasion without an Astor or Vanderbilt in sight. Frevert, on the other hand, has a more sharply focused mission. She wants Wharton to advocate for her brother’s novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, convincing his publisher to release it in its current form. Wharton finds Lenox as overheated as its author, but the more she reads, the more sympathetic she grows toward Phillips and his circle.

She also becomes more sensitive to the dangers an author faces in standing up to the rich and powerful. As her relationship with Teddy becomes more trying, Wharton starts to think about new ways to look at a world where the intrigues of New York’s Four Hundred don’t always get top billing.

Fredericks’ elegantly written narrative gives a lively look at an author way ahead of her time.

A High Tide Murder George, Emily | Kensington (320 pp.) | $17.95 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781496740502

Specialty chef Chloe Barnes gets another unwanted chance to solve a murder.

Just as Chloe is musing on how her life has taken a turn for the better, largely because of the success of

the cannabis-infused goodies at her new cafe, Baked by Chloe, she finds herself smack in the middle of an investigation of another suspicious death. The police think surfer Aaron Gill took his own life, but Aaron’s roommate, Ethan Wilson, isn’t so sure. After all, Aaron had been looking forward to competing in the Azalea Bay Pro Challenger Surf Competition and talking with optimism about his future. Chloe’s last stab at sleuthing was to protect her Aunt Dawn when the police suspected Dawn of killing an unsavory old acquaintance. Now the neophyte entrepreneur decides to help Ethan, her good friend Matt’s younger brother, prove that Aaron was the victim of foul play. Reluctant as she is to snoop, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. George paints a lively picture of the world of competitive surfing and offers welcome updates to the shopkeeper cozy formula, from Chloe’s weed wisdom to her aunt’s same-sex love interest. But she neglects some of the genre’s tried and true elements, giving short shrift to her heroine’s budding romance with her next-door neighbor, Jake, and leaving precious few clues for readers who want a shot at solving the puzzle.

Strong on innovation, but needs work on the fundamentals.

For more by Emily George, visit Kirkus online.

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The Woman Who Lowered the Boom

The mystery is nothing special, but Hoagy is always good company.

Handler, David | Mysterious Press | $26.95 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781613165133

Perfect Opportunity

Murder among the Big Apple’s literati.

The good news for successful debut novelist turned drug abuser turned ghostwriter Stewart Hoag—and it’s very good news indeed—is that Norma Fives, the editor who’d offered him a contract for his long-delayed second novel, My Sweet Season of Madness, thinks it’s the best American novel she’s read in five years, a truly great piece of work.

The bad news arrives via a phone call Hoagy gets the day after he and Norma meet: Star NYPD Homicide Det. Romaine Very, Norma’s live-in lover, wants him to help identify the sender of an anonymous note threatening Norma with death. Asked to name people who might have a grudge against her, Norma sends Hoagy and Det. Very to Boyd Samuels, a literary agent whose scams she’d helped unmask, but their interview with him ends in a way that pretty much eliminates him as a suspect. So Norma comes up with three more candidates: plagiarizing presidential biographer Alexander McCord, whose latest tome was abruptly pulled from publication; agoraphobic suspense novelist Richard Groat, whom she’d cut loose when he couldn’t deliver the goods; and Penelope Estes Poole, whose highly successful Weaverton Elves cozy mysteries seem to have reached their sell-by date. When Norma’s assistant, Alissa Loeb, is stabbed to death on the Broadway local, presumably by someone who’d intended to kill Norma herself, things heat up, but it’s not long before Hoagy’s ready to confront a murderer who obligingly delivers such a remarkably detailed and extended confession that you’d swear another twist was coming. No such luck.

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Havill, Steven F. | Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781448311675

Neither years of retirement nor his wheelchair can keep former Posadas County Sheriff Bill Gastner from joining forces with Undersheriff Estelle ReyesGuzman to solve a murder and thwart some grand-scale sabotage.

A year after Johnny Rabke beat a murder rap for killing Pablo Ramirez during a barroom brawl, and a day after Estelle spotted him chatting with his hand on the shoulder of Deputy Lydia Thompson, Johnny’s found stabbed to death in his truck, the corpse of Pablo’s brother Arturo shot dead in a ditch nearby. It looks like a clear case of mutually assured destruction until Estelle’s husband, Dr. Francis Guzman, the medical examiner, explains the impossibility of the two men having killed each other, since the dying Arturo would never had had the strength to deliver the fatal blow to Johnny. That leaves Estelle and her boss, Sheriff Jackie Taber, searching for suspects who might have wanted to kill both of these mortal enemies. The mystery, set against the background of the NightZone astronomical center, the brainchild of wealthy developer Miles Waddell, takes an even more challenging turn when Bill, relieving himself near a handy support girder for the train that serves NightZone, discovers

saw marks on the girder that suggest someone’s planning to bring the train crashing down. It’s hard to know what to do next, since, as Jackie sagely opines, “A twenty-five-mile [long] crime scene is a challenge.” After the unusually detailed and gripping preliminaries, the story settles into a more relaxed and familiar groove, skipping from one suspect to the next with the solicitous care of a photographer at a family reunion.

Forget the mystery and enjoy some more quality time with the series regulars in the heart of New Mexico.

Hanging With Hugo Hyde, Katherine Bolger | Severn House (224 pp.) | $29.99 | March 5, 2024 9781448311866

Their honeymoon over, Lt. Sheriff Luke Richards and his bride, Stony Beach Inn owner Emily Richards, return to Tillamook County, Oregon, for another round of nuptials and homicide.

Emily’s half brother, Oscar Lansing, is ready to tie the knot with psychology professor Lauren Hsu, but nothing else is ready.

St. Bede’s Church is undergoing intrusive reconstruction work, Oscar’s forgotten to engage a photographer, and Emily’s inn, which should be housing the wedding guests, is unexpectedly crowded. At the request of her former priest from Portland, she’s taken in Moses Valory and his teenage ward, Charlotte, who doesn’t speak, presumably as a result of the abuse she and her late mother, Faye

Forget the mystery and enjoy some quality time with the series regulars.

PERFECT OPPORTUNITY

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Just because the library’s swathed in ivy doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

M U R D E R AT T H E C O L L E G E L I B R A R Y

Lovelace, suffered at the hands of Faye’s common law husband, Terry Garner. Moses and Charlotte need to get away from Portland for a while, since in his search for Charlotte, Terry has engaged aggressively misnamed social worker Janine Vertue, who soon manages to unite the citizens of Windy Corner. They all hate her, a surprising number of them because, in the course of her career, she’s threatened their own domestic happiness and peace. When Janine is found hanging in her bathroom at the inn, the only dissenting voice from the chorus of general contentment is that of Oscar, who forthrightly underlines the genre’s priorities by asking, “Murder? Right before our wedding?” The obvious suspect turns out to be the killer, and Victor Hugo, the author honored in this installment of Hyde’s franchise, makes a disappointingly marginal appearance. But the ceremony and reception come off fine, courtesy of an unexpected photographer.

Strictly for fans whose expectations don’t include any more novelty or mystery than you’d find at most weddings.

The Silver Bone Kurkov, Andrey | Trans. by Boris Dralyuk HarperVia (304 pp.) | $28.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780063352285

Murder in Kyiv in the Bolshevik Revolution’s aftermath.

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Samson Kolechko, an unemployed electrical engineer who lands a detective job in 1919, launching him into the investigation of a theft that evolves into the pursuit of a murderer that almost claims his life.

After his father is slaughtered in the street by Cossack marauders and his own right ear is severed in the attack, Simon finds himself isolated in his Kyiv flat until some of his space is appropriated by two Red Army soldiers. When he reports their theft of his father’s beloved desk to the local police station, he’s improbably offered a job as a detective to help stem the tide of property crimes in a city that’s roiled by violence in the unsettled aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. With relative swiftness but no small amount of personal peril, Simon follows a trail that eventually leads to the discovery of a theft of silver objects, including the eponymous body part, after he survives an ambush and is nearly murdered alongside a soldier who’d been assisting him and a witness in the case. He’s aided in his pursuit of their killer by his friendship with Nadezhda, a young woman who works in Kyiv’s census office and has become the object of Samson’s romantic interest. Kurkov deepens his story with a vivid portrait of Kyiv that emphasizes the city’s “atmosphere of fear and danger” and considerable material deprivation in

For more by Andrey Kurkov, visit Kirkus online.

the wake of Russia’s epochal political change. Simon and his colleagues must function in what amounts to a barter economy that involves frequent nighttime blackouts caused by the theft of the firewood fueling Kyiv’s power plant, along with food and water shortages. It’s a bleak, but fitting, backdrop to one man’s grimly determined quest for justice.

An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.

Murder at the College Library Lehane, Con | Severn House (240 pp.) $29.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9780727823052

Who’s even more likely than library curators to be involved in murder most foul?

Academics, of course, especially when their number includes librarians and curators.

Lehane wastes no time plunging Raymond Ambler, curator of the New York Public Library’s crime fiction collection, into the intrigue swirling around fictional Trinity College. While visiting the Bronx campus to explore a tentative offer from Professor Sam Abernathy to sell Trinity’s collection to the NYPL, Ray finds that despite the college’s financial woes, Trinity president Edward Barnes and faculty senate president Doug Stuart are determined to keep the collection under their own control. The plot thickens when an anonymous donor offers Harry Larkin, Ray’s boss at the Public Library, a gift of $200,000 to purchase the collection (assuming of course that it really is up for sale), and when George Olson, the mild-mannered biology professor who served as vice president of the faculty senate, is fatally shot. The tension stirred up by all the infighting abates once the story settles into a familiar groove of questioning the suspects, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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all of whom piously insist that they’re above suspicion, and no one but the police could possibly believe that Sam Abernathy, who served as a sniper in Vietnam, is the killer.

But although the murder mystery is much less interesting and intense than the thrusts and counterthrusts among Trinity’s faculty, Lehane still has a few tricks up his sleeve, from the news that an eclectic batch of possibly valuable volumes have gone missing from the collection to the non-fatal shooting of Ray himself.

woman was about to release a tell-all book that might have told a little too much for some people. Along with her best friend, Kevin “Scoop” Blake, Winter starts to do what she must to learn the truth, arousing the suspicions of actual police officer Kip Michaels and Tom Bellini, his difficult partner. Will Winter find the real killer or be framed for the murder?

More likely to get readers to sleep like the dead than take an interest in them.

Just because the library’s swathed in ivy doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder

The Last Word

Miller, C.L. | Atria (304 pp.) | $27.99 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781668032008

Lewis, Gerri | Crooked Lane (304 pp.) $29.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781639106318

A freelance obituary writer’s newest client isn’t dead…yet.

Winter Snow’s job as a chronicler of the recently deceased of Ridgefield, Connecticut, often puts her in touch with fond memories of lives well lived. But she’s truly shocked when she’s hired to write an obit by a woman who’s still alive. Leocadia Arlington is on a deadline that Winter doesn’t understand. Though she isn’t even sick, Mrs. Arlington wants her obituary written by the end of the week. It’s Winter’s job to memorialize her subjects by capturing all the important details of their lives, so despite her bewilderment, she dedicates herself to learning more about the wealthy philanthropist. She meets with Mrs. Arlington at her great estate, even getting to know her recently rescued dog, Diva, a puppy version of a Great Pyrenees. Not only does the meeting yield little information, but it marks the beginning of the end for Mrs. Arlington, who’s killed not long after, right on schedule. Now Winter knows that she really does need to learn more about Mrs. Arlington’s life, especially once she learns that the KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A murder in an antiques shop sends a woman back to her long-abandoned career as an investigator.

Freya Lockwood’s life in London has already been turned upside down—her beloved only child has left for college in the U.S., and her ex-husband is making her sell their house. Then comes the news that her former mentor, Arthur Crockleford, has died under mysterious circumstances in his antiques shop in the town where Freya grew up. He had trained her to follow his footsteps as an antique hunter: a detective who works for private owners or insurance companies to recover stolen antiques. The two have been estranged for 20 years, though, ever since her career ended in disaster. But Freya, who was orphaned young, was raised by her glamorous Aunt Carole, and Arthur and Carole were best friends. So Freya goes home to Little Meddington, and soon she and Carole find that Arthur has left a welter of clues indicating that he was murdered—and that Freya needs to hunt down not only his killer but an enigmatic object that will explain what really happened two decades before. They’re off to a weekend retreat for antiques and antiquities

collectors at a decaying mansion that was the home of a certain Lord Metcalf, an associate of Arthur’s who also died recently. There they meet a contentious group that practically overflows with suspects who might have killed Arthur—and might be involved in the criminal side of the antiques world. Freya’s instinct for investigation comes back to life, but she and Carole are clearly in danger.

The book’s setting offers interesting details about the antiques trade, but most of the characters are one-dimensional. And the overstuffed plot and frequent exposition drag down the pacing—at one point, a character says, “Shall we recap?” And does so, for several pages.

A promising mystery setup gets bogged down in an overcomplicated plot.

Fur Love or Money Ryan, Sofie | Berkley (288 pp.) | $9.99 paper Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780593550243

The owner of a secondhand furniture shop in Maine probes the murder of a grifter.

The author of the Second Chance Cat Mysteries doesn’t seem to know much about felines. Her story begins with the owner of Second Chance, Sarah Grayson, listening to her friend Rose Jackson crowing about how “it’s impossible to take a bad picture of Elvis,” Sarah’s sleek black rescue cat.

Black cats are so notoriously hard to get good pictures of that most photographers won’t even try. Later on, Sarah’s friends reward Elvis with treats like sardine crackers, though much human food is terrible and sometimes dangerous for cats. But Ryan’s main problem isn’t cats but people. She jams her story with characters but doesn’t always explain how they’re connected. Mac seems to be Sarah’s boyfriend, but who knows?

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clear how Sarah knows them. Nor is it clear how she knows Liz French, whom Sarah describes as one of her favorite people in the world. It’s out of love for Liz that Sarah agrees to investigate the murder of Ian Stone, who faked his death several years back after his Ponzi scheme was uncovered. When Ashley Clark’s dog, Casey, finds Ian’s body in the storm cellar of a cottage belonging to Channing Caulfield, Liz asks Sarah to investigate, lest Channing be blamed.

Sarah’s childhood friend Michelle Andrews, a police detective, warns Sarah that civilian sleuthing can be dangerous. Sarah ignores her counsel, with predictable results.

Though sometimes confusing, Ryan’s tale is mostly anodyne, unless readers follow her advice about what to feed cats.

Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes keeps turning up. At last Gates calls and denies being Martin, but he agrees to come to Wilfred to put Helen’s doubts to rest. As soon as he arrives, Helen knows he’s not her husband, but unfortunately for him, his kindness isn’t repaid and he’s found dead the next morning. Is it possible that someone else was fooled, someone who’d kill him? Moved to act by his death, Josie finally opens the Sherlock Holmes book, only to have the great detective jump off the page and offer to help her. Shlepping the book everywhere so that Sherlock can see and hear the people she’s questioning, she follows a trail to the past in the hope of explaining the present.

Whether Holmes fans are amused or appalled, the great detective adds spice to an otherwise ordinary mystery.

Gone With the Witch

Circles of Death

Sanders, Angela M. | Kensington (304 pp.) | $8.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781496740939

Talley, Marcia | Severn House (192 pp.) $29.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781448307975

A witch must harness all her newly found powers to solve a series of crises in small-town Wilfred, Oregon.

Soon after human remains are found in a decayed outhouse due for demolition, Helen Garlington thinks she sees her long-missing husband, Martin, on a TV quiz show using the name Bruno Gates. Helen begs Wilfred librarian Josie Way to track down Martin, who left a pregnant Helen more than 40 years ago. Josie, an expert researcher who’s had some experience with crime, reluctantly agrees, although her law enforcement officer boyfriend, Sam, who doesn’t know she’s a witch, is skeptical. Josie, who lives in the local library along with her black cat, Rodney, can often get answers just by using her powers to question the books. When Gates refuses to take her call, she resorts to research. Oddly enough, The Complete 40

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After genetic testing suggests that a young woman’s family may not be who they say they are, her investigation into the past is interrupted by a local wildlife emergency.

Twenty-seven years ago, a young mother on the Eastern Shore of Maryland chose to place her infant on a minister’s doorstep rather than let the baby be sold by her cruel partner to “a loathsome couple from Baltimore.” After leaving the baby with only a note reading “My name is Noel,” the girl vanished into the night. In the present day, Noel Sinclair runs into Hannah Ives, whose grandchildren she used to babysit. Hannah says she’s been busy “building family trees from DNA data that’s been uploaded to recreational databases like Ancestry, 23andMe and GenTree” to help the police solve crimes. Noel soon shares the results of a recent DNA test

she and her sister both took, which suggest that they aren’t even remotely related. Given her knack for diligent investigation, Hannah wants to help Noel figure out what’s going on, so she dives into the rabbit hole that is genealogical research. The two women also spend time catching up with each other at Our Song, the vacation cottage Hannah recently bought with her husband. As Hannah shows Noel some bald eagles there, the women spot a set of birds that seem to have gotten sick from eating a dead fox.

But when they bring the birds to Hoots, the local bird rescue, it begins to look like someone deliberately poisoned the fox with carbofuran and that the birds may have died as a result. Now that Hannah and Noel are focusing on the question of who might want to poison local wildlife, Hannah leads the investigative charge with her meticulous research and ability to fly under the radar, hoping, like Noel, to find a happy resolution before more animals become victims.

Two mysteries plotted with an eye for the details of both subjects set this series apart.

Deadly to the Core Tremel, Joyce | Crooked Lane (240 pp.) $29.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 | 9781639105434

A recent widow opens a cidery.

Still mourning the loss of her husband and healing from the car crash that took Brian’s life, Kate Mulligan is ready to turn the page. So when she inherits her great-uncle Stan’s orchard, she leaves her home in Pittsburgh for rural Orchardville. Working in a cidery has given her the tools she needs to turn Stan’s apples into cider, and watching Brian restore houses has taught her how to frame walls and build a bar and tasting room. But no one’s taught her how to solve crimes. So when Carl Randolph, Stan’s on-site manager, turns up KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A rivalry between film stars escalates to murder in Salem, Massachusetts.

MRS. MORRIS AND THE MERMAID

dead in his cabin, Kate has to learn fast. Her neighbor Daniel Martinez is willing to help with sleuthing as well as carpentry, throwing in an occasional home-cooked breakfast for good measure. Her childhood friend Marguerite Yost comes along for the ride as Kate chases down leads. But it’s a map she finds stashed in Carl’s freezer that promises to be the most intriguing clue, if Kate can only figure out what it means. Tremel moves slowly and deliberately both in releasing clues and in chronicling Kate’s complicated friendship with Daniel, but readers will find her measured pace worth the wait. The solution to the puzzle is surprising, sensible, and satisfying.

A refreshing take on the wine bar mystery.

Mrs. Morris and the Mermaid Wilton, Traci | Kensington (368 pp.) $8.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781496741394

A bitter rivalry between film stars escalates to murder.

Charlene Morris’ lovely bed-and-breakfast in witchy Salem, Massachusetts, is playing host to families visiting for the inaugural Mermaid Parade, featuring former Salem native Trinity Powers, who made her mark 25 years ago as the mermaid in the romantic drama Sirena. Unfortunately, another visitor is Alannah Gomez, who starred in the recent remake, has an equally loyal fan base, and takes every opportunity KIRKUS REVIEWS

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to denigrate Trinity. Charlene’s emergence from grief over the loss of her husband is bolstered by her friendship with resident ghost Dr. Jack Strathmore and a burgeoning romance with Det. Sam Holden.

Trinity is at odds with her father, who lives in town, and her fear of traveling has blighted her film career.

She’s been short with artist Bobby Rourke, who designed the lovely Sirena T-shirts, none of which she likes. When Trinity’s late for the parade, Charlene, sent to find her, discovers her dead body, one of the hated T-shirts stuffed in her mouth.

Charlene has prior experience in helping to solve murders, with Jack’s assistance. To Sam’s chagrin, she can’t help but get involved in this one. The T-shirt makes the police take a hard look at Bobby, who adds to their suspicions by taking off. The rivalry between the two stars has certainly stirred up a lot of bad feelings, and Trinity’s estrangement from her father may also provide a motive for murder, but unmasking the culprit will be no easy task.

A touch of witchcraft, a sleuthing ghost, and a troubled romance add up to an amiable read.

Village in the Dark Yamashita, Iris | Berkley (288 pp.) | $28.00 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780593336700

A trio of strong women face multiple challenges, including murder.

Former Anchorage police detective Cara Kennedy has been so

devastated by the unexplained death of her husband, Aaron, and their young son, Dylan, that her grief has led to long-term disability. A possible clue to the mystery leads her back to remote Point Mettier, whose 205 residents all live in the same apartment building. Pretending she’d been sent by the Anchorage police, Cara solved a baffling murder there several months ago. This atmospheric sequel effectively leans into the darkness, literal and figurative, of its frigid setting. Ellie Wright, who owns the Cozy Condo Inn, which occupies a floor of that huge building, has just learned that her estranged son, Timothy MacCullum, has been found dead in his apartment. Cara’s condolence call turns weird when Ellie spots a photo of Timmy on Cara’s phone. Drugs and gangs provide possible links between his death and the murder that Cara recently solved. Cara and Ellie had clashed often in the past, but the tragedy they share brings them together as “a regular Cagney and Lacey.” As in Yamashita’s debut, the perspective rotates in short chapters among multiple female characters, from Cara to Ellie to Mia Upash, a half Indigenous waitress at the drolly named Lonely Diner who’s being stalked by the dangerous and volatile Derek. The author’s career as a screenwriter is reflected in crisp and concise character descriptions that bring a hardscrabble community alive. Reaching beyond its core whodunit, her story probes the lives of people struggling to survive.

A sharp and gritty mystery with a compelling sociopolitical undercurrent.

For more by Iris Yamashita, visit Kirkus online.

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Kirkus Star

The Warm Hands of Ghosts Arden, Katherine | Del Rey (336 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780593128251

Set on and off the battlefields of Belgium in the final year of World War I, this novel adds a supernatural touch to its vividly realized historical details.

Arden moves on from her fantasies set in medieval Russia—The Bear and the Nightingale (2017) is the first in the trilogy—to a more realistic and often grueling depiction of the horrors of war. In January 1918, 24-year-old combat nurse Laura Iven has been sent home from Flanders to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after receiving serious wounds.

When she’s notified that her younger brother, Freddie, who’s serving in Belgium, is missing and presumed dead, she becomes convinced he’s still alive and heads off to search for him. In an alternating timeline that begins several months earlier on the front lines, Freddie finds himself buried underground in a concrete German pillbox, his only companion the wounded German soldier Hans Winter. The two form a strong bond and eventually dig their way out, only to be confronted by more mud, blood, and death.

Freddie, ashamed of his feelings for Winter and what he sees as his betrayal of his country, takes what seems like refuge with the mysterious fiddler Faland, who shows the guests at his glimmering hotel a mirror that reveals their hearts’ desires and then steals their memories to make his music. As the novel proceeds, the two storylines merge, with Laura attempting to save Freddie before it’s too late. Arden titles her chapters with quotations from Paradise Lost and the biblical Book of Revelation, and appropriately so: The landscape, both physical and spiritual, that the characters navigate is hellish, and for better or worse, their old world 44

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is being transformed into a new one.

Unabashedly grim though laced with faint hints of hope, the novel immerses the reader in a war often overshadowed by the one that would follow a couple of decades later.

A surprisingly successful merger of history and fantasy.

The Book of Doors Brown, Gareth | Morrow/HarperCollins (416 pp.) | $30.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780063323988

A debut novel about a bookseller who discovers the real power of books—if they’re magic.

When an elderly customer dies at Manhattan’s Kellner Books, Cassie Andrews finds herself in an inexplicable situation.

In Mr. John Webber’s possession is a small, leather-bound book in a language Cassie doesn’t recognize.

There are a few lines in English: “This is the Book of Doors. Hold it in your hand, and any door is every door.” And then: “Cassie, This book is for you, a gift in thanks for your kindness.”

Cassie shows the book to her roommate, Izzy, who’s wary. And yet, when Cassie thinks of a door she once saw on vacation in Venice, that door opens for her. Naturally, there are people who want this powerful book, and soon enough the underworld of rare book collectors is buzzing. Drummond Fox, known as the Librarian, happens upon Cassie using the Book of Doors, thanks to his own Book of Luck. But while Drummond seeks to protect books like Cassie’s, there are others— notably, someone known only as “the woman”—who seek to use them for evil.

Drummond is eager to show Cassie the danger she’s in by revealing the full potential of the Book of Doors: “You can open a door to the past….That’s why people will want your book.” What follows is a multilayered exploration of how the book can influence past, present, and future, and how individual choices can have unimaginable rippling

effects. Fans of books like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore will love this world, though by the end Brown has moved from his initial focus on magical books toward a case study of the rules of time travel. One unexpected aspect is the gory depiction of torture at the hands of “the woman” and the books she possesses. These scenes are jarringly at odds with the initial tone of wonderment, but if you stick with it, you’ll reach a conclusion that’s both disorienting and deeply satisfying.

A whirlwind journey that opens doors into other worlds but also into the heart of the human experience.

A Fate Inked in Blood Jensen, Danielle L. | Del Rey (432 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593599839

The mortal daughter of a god fights to become the mistress of her own fate in this tightly plotted series starter.

Twenty-year-old Freya has spent her entire life hiding her ancestry. In her world—a take on medieval Scandinavia—the Norse pantheon blesses mortal babies with drops of the deities’ own blood, imbuing them with fractions of divine power.

As the daughter of Hlin, Freya is the shield maiden prophesied to “unite the people of Skaland beneath the rule of the one who controlled her fate.” After her abusive first husband learns her true identity, he turns her over to the jarl, Snorri, who grants him a divorce so that Snorri may marry Freya himself.

Snorri believes his new bride is his key to becoming Skaland’s king. So does his beloved and cunning first wife, Ylva, who desperately wants to see her own son on the throne, but it’s Bjorn—the For more by Danielle L. Jensen, visit Kirkus online.

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A gender-f lipped Zorro figure with magical powers struggles to find her path.

SUN OF BLOOD AND RUIN

jarl’s firstborn, Ylva’s stepson, and the child of Tyr—who’s in line to inherit.

Snorri appoints his heir as Freya’s personal bodyguard, not knowing that his son happens to be the object of his new wife’s forbidden affections. As for the shield maiden, she barely has time to consider her hopelessly complicated position in Snorri’s court, with other jarls beginning to launch attacks on her people, determined to steal her away from her new husband. All these men are certain she’ll crown a king, thereby determining the fate of their entire nation, but they’ve forgotten one very important rule: The children of the gods aren’t bound by fate. Jensen offers a vibrant and perfectly paced novel that’s sure to delight readers of historical fantasy. Although some of the writing reads a little too contemporary at times—an early passage in which one character is dubbed a “narcissist” is a prime example—the tension among Freya, Bjorn, and the rest of Snorri’s court is simply irresistible.

A captivating first installment in what promises to be a compelling, feminist Viking fantasy.

Sun of Blood and Ruin Lares, Mariely | Harper Voyager (384 pp.) | $14.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9780063254312

A gender-flipped Zorro figure with magical powers struggles to find her path in an alternate Mexico a few decades after Cortés’ conquest.

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Mexica people. As a child, she stumbled into the realm of the gods known as Tamoanchan, where she was known by the Nahua name Tecuani and trained in martial arts and sorcery, including the ability to shapeshift into a panther.

Evicted from paradise after 10 years, she dons a black mask, calls herself Pantera, and uses her powers to help the Nahua fight Spanish rule. Now, Lady Leonora is betrothed to Prince Felipe of Spain, unexpectedly shipwrecked on their shores, and trading barbs with the annoyingly attractive Andrés de Ayeta, a Nahua man attached to the Spanish military. Like Leonora/ Tecuani/Pantera, neither Felipe nor Andrés is entirely whom he appears to be, and a variety of dark secrets will be revealed once the loose confederation of Nahua rebels known as La Justicia move toward open warfare with the Spanish.

In these challenging times, Leonora needs to figure out who she is and what she owes to herself and to others on various sides of the conflict. The book soon darts away from merely being a reimagining of the Zorro story, which is both a strength (because it allows the plot to travel into much more original territory) and a weakness (in that we never actually learn about the feats that gained Pantera her reputation). Pantera is mostly there as an established part of Leonora’s identity crisis and a source of conflict; she mainly has the best of intentions, but her need to keep secrets and defend herself in a hostile world, as well as some entirely understandable mistakes she makes, have devastating consequences that she’s forced to reckon with. Despite her fantastical circumstances, the resulting character is not a stereotypical high fantasy hero but a real person whom readers can believe in.

A bloody, intriguing bildungsroman with a fascinating plunge into the

mythology of Mexico’s original inhabitants.

To Cage a God May, Elizabeth | DAW (384 pp.) | $28.00 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780756418816

Two women plot to overthrow a powerful empress in the first installment of May’s These Monstrous Gods duology.

In this epic fantasy world, the ruling class has not just economic power over the commoners but literal, magical power as well. These elites, called the alurea, are born bonded to gods called zmei, dragon spirits from another world whose power the alurea can channel and wield themselves.

Empress Isidora is able to channel “godfire,” a rare and powerful skill that she uses to smite her enemies and terrorize her people into submission.

Commoners Galina and Sera, who are secretly bonded to zmei themselves, were part of a plan to infiltrate Isidora’s court before the leaders of their rebel group were caught and executed.

When Sera’s estranged husband, whose methods are violent and dangerous, puts his own schemes into motion, she and Galina decide to try their version of the old plan, which would bring Isidora down and end the alurea’s reign with minimal bloodshed. But when Galina gets into the palace and meets Isidora’s reclusive daughter, Vasilisa, Galina wonders if overthrowing an oppressive government will have to take precedence over her growing attraction to the princess. May’s mythology of dragon gods imprisoned in human host bodies is an effective magical system, and this series opener delivers on not just epic fantasy, but epic action and romance as well.

Still, an overabundance of dramatic imagery, with voices sounding “like a blade skimming the surface of a lake,” might be a bit much for some readers.

A dragon-themed romance fantasy that’s appropriately steamy.

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Kirkus Star

Right on Cue Ballard, Falon | Putnam (336 pp.) | $18.00 paper | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593712900

A screenwriter finds herself starring in her latest romantic comedy…alongside the hunky nemesis who made her leave acting years ago.

Emmy Harper is one of the most popular screenwriters in Hollywood, and she even has an Oscar under her belt. Now she’s working on her latest film with her best friend, Liz Hudson, as the director. Everything should be going great—except that they can’t find an actress who fits Emmy’s vision.

Liz convinces Emmy to take on the role herself, even though she’s hesitant to attempt it. The child of two well-known actors, Emmy had one disastrous role as a teenager that convinced her she worked better on the page than in front of the camera.

But now she’s excited to try again, looking forward to working with her BFF on a fun movie…until she gets to the charming small-town inn where they’re filming and discovers that her leading man is none other than Grayson West. These days Grayson is a two-time Sexiest Man Alive who’s known for his work in action flicks, but Emmy knows him as her co-star in her first and only movie. She blames him for her career going up in flames, and now they’ll have to pretend to be in love again. The only problem, of course, is that Emmy still hates him with the fire of a thousand suns. If they want this movie to work—and if Emmy wants to avoid tanking her acting career for the second time—they’ll have to pretend they can’t keep their hands off each other. But what happens when their on-screen pretending crosses over into real life? Ballard creates a winning romantic comedy full of simmering chemistry. Emmy and Grayson’s 46

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A fun and sexy ode to rom-coms, full of joy and chemistry.

RIGHT ON CUE

intense sexual tension makes the pages fly by. The cozy small-town setting gives the story all the charm of a Hallmark movie—but with way more steam and snark.

A fun and sexy ode to rom-coms, full of joy and chemistry.

How To Dance Dutton, Jason B. | Alcove Press (352 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781639106370

Falling in love exposes the insecurities of a seemingly confident man.

Nick Freeman has good friends, loves his job as a high school math teacher, and is the star of the weekly karaoke night at his favorite bar in Columbus, Ohio. The only thing missing from his life is a romantic partner. One night at the bar, he’s enthralled by the joyful, fluid dancing of Hayley Burke. She and her boyfriend are professional dancers who have just moved to Columbus, hoping to make it big at a local studio. Hayley notices Nick’s interest and encourages him to dance, but she’s mortified and embarrassed when she realizes he uses a walker.

Although Nick knows Hayley wasn’t trying to be hurtful, her casual assumptions run headlong into his own painful insecurities. During college, Nick’s long-term girlfriend unexpectedly dumped him, and he believes that she couldn’t see a future with him because of his cerebral palsy. Nick’s experiences in the intervening years have proved to him that women aren’t interested in a lover

with a disability. After their initial misunderstanding, Hayley and Nick strike up a friendship and spend time together while her boyfriend is at work. The strength of Dutton’s debut is his portrayal of Nick, a man who longs for love but is afraid of being hurt. Hayley is not a fully realized character, and romance readers will balk at plotting that keeps her in a relationship with her boyfriend for more than half the book. The ensuing romance between Nick and Hayley is rushed and underdeveloped, with both characters stuck in negative patterns of thinking.

One strong, interesting character isn’t enough to save this underdeveloped debut romance.

Canadian Boyfriend Holiday, Jenny | Forever (384 pp.) | $16.99 paper | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781538724927

A dance teacher falls for a professional hockey player who happens to have been her pretend boyfriend in high school.

When she was 16 and working as a barista at the Mall of America, Aurora Evans met a Canadian guy in town for a hockey tournament. They hit it off, and for years afterward, she used the excuse of her “Canadian boyfriend” to get out of social obligations. Now, 13 years later, Rory has left behind a career as a ballerina and runs a dance studio for kids.

When Olivia, one of her students, returns to class following the death of her mother, Rory meets the girl’s father, Mike Martin, a pro hockey KIRKUS REVIEWS

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player, and she senses something familiar about him. She strongly suspects that Mike may just be the original inspiration for the fake Canadian boyfriend she conjured in high school, and she covertly attempts to connect the dots. Holiday provides a brief content warning about potentially triggering material, but it doesn’t fully describe the depth of Mike’s grief and Rory’s experiences with a toxic upbringing and disordered eating as they’re explored in the book. Mike and Rory become friends, but Rory is increasingly worried that her longtime lie about her imaginary boyfriend will come to light. While the book focuses on healing from trauma, complete with some wonderful mentions of therapy, the romance feels secondary to Rory’s reckoning with her harmful childhood and her experience as a professional dancer.

Mike is sweet and kind, but he serves primarily as the impetus for Rory to make some changes. Considering that Rory and Mike are now adults, the focus on a somewhat inconsequential lie from Rory’s teen years feels silly, undermining the emotional and nuanced portrayal of love amid loss and recovery.

Emotionally intense in a way that overwhelms the slow-burn romance.

How To End a Love Story Kuang, Yulin | Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Feb. 27, 2024 9780063310681

A bond that starts with a tragic death transforms into love.

Grant Shepard and Helen Zhang have a history— when they were in high school, he was driving the SUV her younger sister darted in front of, ending her life. When, 13 years later, they meet at a Hollywood studio that’s adapting Helen’s YA novels for television, their unresolved grief means a minefield of painful interactions. Helen has KIRKUS REVIEWS

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been ignoring her complex feelings of anger, sadness, and guilt, while Grant has struggled with anxiety even as he’s continued to be the popular guy in every circle. Despite her prickly armor and his polite facade in the writers’ room where they’re both working, the extended intimacy of the project forces them past the chasm of their past and into a new chemistry in the present. But Helen’s parents would never accept a relationship between them—would they? In her debut romance novel, screenwriter and director Kuang starts with high stakes. Helen’s absent sister and her family’s trauma loom over the sunny California setting, amplified by the protagonists’ individual visits to their New Jersey hometown. Though leaning slightly into commonplace images of Chinese American parents, Kuang avoids cliches about second-generation immigrants in her depiction of Helen. The potential end of Grant and Helen’s fiery sexual liaison gives the book the feel of a ticking clock, with Kuang coloring all their interactions with a sadness that signals the third-act breakup often found in the novels of Emily Henry (which Kuang is adapting for the screen).

For readers who like romances threaded with operatic sorrow.

Hannah Tate, Beyond Repair Lee, Laura Piper | Union Square & Co. (336 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 9781454948841

Nursing a broken heart, a newly single Atlanta mother moves to the Georgia mountains, where she befriends her sexy yogi neighbor.

Ten weeks into motherhood, Hannah Tate can’t help but feel like one milk-filled, showerless hot mess. It doesn’t help that Killian Abbott, her musician boyfriend, is out playing gigs while

she’s busy deciphering which type of newborn baby fluid is congealed in her hair. When she finds an engagement ring hidden in Killian’s boot, she thinks he’s finally willing to settle down…but then, instead of proposing, he dumps her. No amount of “conscious co-parenting” can convince Hannah to stick around, and since she’s also just been fired from her heinous disaster communications job while on maternity leave, she decides to leave the big city behind in search of a better, less messy existence. Hannah 2.0 takes shape in the middle of the Georgia mountains, with a promise to renovate her mom and stepdad’s dilapidated Airbnb. Soon enough, her new normal is taxidermized animals, snake sightings, and gun-toting, baby-holding neighbors.

Not all her neighbors are Wild West material, though: There’s also the “emotional vagabond” River Aronson, who lives in an epic treehouse and does yoga shirtless. When River agrees to help reno the Airbnb in exchange for Sunday night dinners at the Tate cabin, Hannah can’t help but imagine her chiseled neighbor as part of the family, but first she has to decide if she’s ready to let another man into her and baby Bowie’s lives.

Lee’s romance is witty and heartwarming, a refreshing take on family dynamics and loving yourself first.

Hannah, though a self-proclaimed mess, is a strong mother intent on creating stability for her son and finding success in her personal life, and readers will easily root for her victories in love, life, and motherhood.

Babies, bears, and B&Bs reign in Lee’s cozy rom-com.

For more romance, visit Kirkus online.

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That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon Lemming, Kimberly | Orbit (288 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Jan. 2, 2024 | 9780316570275

A trader is swept up into an epic adventure after she inadvertently saves a demon’s life.

Cinnamon Hotpepper has only ever known a quiet, unassuming life on her family’s spice farm, and she doesn’t expect that to change. When it comes time for their village’s deity—the goddess Myva—to choose her new patrons, Cinnamon’s plan is to keep her head down and avoid getting involved with anything too far outside her comfort zone.

Staggering home after one too many mugs of wine that same night, though, she inadvertently crosses paths with a demon, someone who should terrify her, and narrowly escapes with her life. The next morning, who should knock on the farm’s front door but the demon himself? Something about Cinnamon has given Fallon Ozul the ability to break out of the spell that has kept him in a monstrous frame of mind. Now he wants her help in seeking out the witch responsible for keeping his kind enslaved and telling everyone they’re evil, putting an end to her once and for all. And who is that witch? None other than Myva, who isn’t actually a goddess. Cinnamon knows she’s not cut out for an adventure like this, but she can’t deny her growing attraction to Fallon, so maybe she won’t try that hard to resist his efforts to persuade her to join him.

In the process of destroying Myva’s hold on the demons, they might succeed at changing their world for the For more fantasy romance, visit Kirkus online.

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better. While the contemporary-feeling dialogue and characterization might clash with the setting and worldbuilding for some readers, and the book’s evolving romance could have benefited from more room to spread out, the story is a charming addition to the fantasyromance realm.

A quirky, steamy fantasy that’s just what the romance genre needs.

Lonely for You Only Murphy, Monica | Blackstone (350 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9798212385978

A demure heiress falls for a bad-boy rock star with a sordid past.

Scarlett Lancaster has everything a rich teenager could desire, but all she really wants is for Ian Baldwin to realize she’s been crushing on him for years. Scarlett is sure Ian will confess his feelings at her 18th birthday bash, held at the Plaza Hotel courtesy of her wealthy father.

Instead, Ian is practically missing in action the entire night, leaving Scarlett to celebrate with her father’s surprise gift: a performance by Tate Ramsey, ex-member of Five Car Pileup. Having received a check for $1 million, the washed-up former boy bander rocks the stage at Scarlett’s soiree, much to the birthday girl’s irritation (she was hoping for Taylor Swift). After a confrontation between the two gets snapped by the paparazzi, Scarlett spontaneously kisses Tate to help him avoid more negative press. When pictures of their kiss go viral, Tate is skyrocketed back into the public’s good graces: the bad boy saved by the virginal ingénue. All of a sudden, Tate is given a second chance at stardom and a new gig with a record label, as long as Scarlett continues to be in the picture. In hopes of making Ian jealous, Scarlett agrees to join Tate in L.A. as he records his new album, even signing a legal agreement to appear as his girlfriend in public. Swept up

by the excitement of fame and Tate’s undivided attention, Scarlett can’t help but fall under the rock star’s spell. Murphy’s fake-dating romance teems with allure and tension, but her characterizations tend to miss the mark. Scarlett is devoid of personality, and Tate often feels more crass and borderline pedophiliac than sexy.

Though the prospect of a rock star/ fan love story is promising, readers will be hard-pressed to find anyone to root for here.

A rock star romance that’s mostly off-key.

Simply the Best Phillips, Susan Elizabeth | Avon/ HarperCollins (384 pp.) | $29.00 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780063248564

A classic underachiever falls in love with a man who seemingly cares only about business.

Rory Meadows Garrett has always felt like a failure in her family; she’s a broke, unemployed chocolatier who drifts from job to job while Clint, her half brother, has found fame and fortune as a professional quarterback.

After interfering in Clint’s love life, Rory attends a team party, intending to come clean about her meddling.

Instead, Rory falls into bed with Brett Rivers, Clint’s agent. For Brett, sleeping with Clint’s sister is the ultimate fireable offense, and he was already in hot water for suggesting that Clint’s girlfriend, Ashley Hart, is a gold digger. After a few days of failing to reach Clint on the phone, Brett drives out to his house, but he only finds Rory, also looking for Clint. As they search the house, they discover Ashley’s dead body and realize she was murdered. Although Rory and Brett’s quest to find the killer and clear Clint’s name drives the plot, it’s the shifting kaleidoscope of personal, business, and family relationships that makes this such a captivating novel.

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A woman newly arrived in Harlem falls in love with a man out of time.

A LOVE SONG FOR RICKI WILDE

Rory and Brett seem to be complete opposites, but Phillips is a pro at creating characters who turn out to be perfect for each other in unlikely ways.

Brett’s staunch belief that professional success is all that matters is challenged

by Rory’s laid-back approach to life, while Rory’s feelings of inferiority are vanquished by Brett’s assurance and belief in her skills. Ashley is more plot device than real person, which is the one discordant note in an otherwise emotionally generous novel about romantic and familial love.

Not quite a touchdown, but still a winning romance novel.

The Last Days of Lilah Goodluck Scott, Kylie | Graydon House (304 pp.) | $18.99 paper Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781525804809

When a young woman saves a clairvoyant witch while crossing the street, the course of her life changes dramatically.

Lilah Goodluck has lived a perfectly happy, if rather unremarkable and unadventurous, life as a librarian in Los Angeles, but all of that changes the evening she saves the life of a professional entertainer known as the Good Witch Willow. To show her thanks, Willow reveals five predictions about Lilah’s imminent future, including the fact that her soulmate is Alistair George Arthur Lennox— which happens to be the name of the handsome and mysterious illegitimate son of the king of England—and that she will die in a week’s time. Lilah, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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naturally, doesn’t believe her. At least, that is, until some of the predictions quickly come true. Things take an even stranger turn when Lilah nearly runs Alistair off the road and totals her own car in a disastrous meet-cute.

The two immediately hit it off, and when Lilah confides in Alistair about Willow’s predictions, he takes it upon himself to help her check off a bucket list of activities (which range from driving in a convertible with the top down like a classic movie star to having really great sex), just in case she does meet an abrupt and untimely end. Because the story is set over the course of a week, it leaves very little time for the chemistry between Lilah and Alistair to develop, and the resulting relationship between them lacks both emotional depth and charm.

The same, unfortunately, goes for the truly incredible cast of supporting characters. Both Lilah’s best friend and Alistair’s mother are delightful the moment they appear on the page, but so little time is spent with them that their personalities, like the rest of the story, feel underdeveloped.

A rushed and underwhelming romance.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde Williams, Tia | Grand Central Publishing (352 pp.) | $29.00 | Feb. 6, 2024 9781538726709

A woman newly arrived in Harlem falls in love with a man out of time.

Ricki Wilde has never fit in with her buttoned-up, high-society Atlanta family—

she’s always been a rule-breaker who values creativity over comportment.

Her family owns a funeral home business, but she dreams of opening a flower shop. The financial and logistical impediments seem insurmountable, though, until she meets Della Bennett, a 96-year-old woman who’s come into one of the Wilde Funeral Homes to arrange a homegoing for her husband. It turns out that she owns a brownstone in Harlem, and she offers to let Ricki rent out the bottom floor, which has room for both a shop and a small living space.

Even with a fairy godmother, opening a new business is hard; she struggles to keep it afloat but draws media attention by placing her dazzling, inventive flower arrangements at sites made famous during the Harlem Renaissance. One February evening, she meets a mysterious man in a neighborhood garden full of night-blooming jasmine, just one of many hints that something magical is bringing them together. Ezra Walker is a traveling musician with courtly manners and an unbelievable secret. The book slowly eases into Ricki and Ezra’s love story, with a secondary timeline set during the Harlem Renaissance providing hints about Ezra’s tragic past. He knows he has no future with Ricki and tries to avoid her, but they’re drawn together like magnets. It’s a beautiful romance, tackling big ideas about the burden of family, the weight of time, and the gift of love. But for a novel with such a careful, meticulous unspooling of plot and characters, the ending is rushed, with the strangely passive lovers surrendering to the same forces of fate and time that initially brought them together.

Richly layered characters give this romance broad crossover appeal.

For more by Tia Williams, visit Kirkus online.

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Nonfiction THE WORLD IS a mess—no further details required—so let’s welcome 2024 with a heavy dose of positivity, hope, and inspiration.

These five books, which all received starred reviews, provide the spirit we need to begin the year in the right mental frame of mind.

Let’s start with a delightfully odd book about human connection. Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (Hanover Square Press, Jan. 9), by Shoji Morimoto, translated by Don Knotting, describes how the author started a business where people could hire him to do nearly anything, from attending a divorce proceeding or visiting someone in the hospital to simply going out for ice cream. Morimoto charges a small fee for most of his services, but the most important element is the act of helping someone. Often, it involves easing loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions. Our reviewer calls it “an eccentric, charming book, showing how humans can connect in the strangest of circumstances.”

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Decades ago, Hannah Arendt provided significant philosophical guidance about making the world a better place. In We Are Free To Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Hogarth, Jan. 16), Lyndsey Stonebridge resurrects her lessons about morality and the urgency of battling against a society’s descent into authoritarianism. That lesson couldn’t be more timely, and Stonebridge’s book, “a splendid, ever-so-timely consideration of Arendt and her thoughts on how nations sink into tyranny,” according to our review, is lively brain food.

I recently turned 44, so Chip Conley’s Learning To Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age (Little, Brown Spark, Jan. 16) is a welcome breath of fresh air as I contemplate my next chapter. The author takes on the youth-focused elements of American culture, showing readers how they can profitably reconsider their journeys with the wisdom of age. From staying physically active to maintaining strong personal relationships,

Conley has the answers, and his “enthusiasm for grasping the full potential of the midlife years is contagious and inspiring,” our reviewer says.

Enthusiasm and energy are on full display in Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading (Crown, Jan. 23), by Chris Anderson, which we call “an inspiring, timely book about ways to bring out the best in people rather than focusing on the worst.” The author, who’s helped launch more than 100 magazines, asks us to turn away from predatory capitalism and toward helping others, providing concrete examples of people engaging in acts of true generosity. The book is vibrant, uplifting, and, in today’s chaotic culture, maybe even necessary.

In her new book, Ijeoma Oluo, bestselling author of So You Want To Talk About Race, also provides numerous examples of people doing good via focused activism. Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—And How You Can, Too (HarperOne, Jan. 30) is “an urgent plea for individual and collective action,” says our reviewer—an important handbook for any activist, whether fighting for justice regarding gender, race, education, incarceration, disability, the arts, or the environment.

It’s all about transformative justice, and Oluo is just the guide we need right now.

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

FIVE INSPIRING BOOKS TO START THE NEW YEAR

ERIC LIEBETRAU

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EDITOR’S PICK A celebration of a wily mammal.

Nature writer Darlington, author of The Wise Hours, has been enchanted with otters since childhood, and she recounts her travels across England, Scotland, and Wales in search of the elusive creature. She devoted a year to plodding across moors, wading through marshes, walking along peat bogs, traversing rivers, and swimming in the sea, and she records her journey in precise, poetic prose. She read widely, met others obsessed with otters, and visited nature sanctuaries.

Early in her exploration, she spotted one: “Just over a metre in length, he has the dimensions of a male or dog otter, with a broad,

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

flat head, large back feet and a long, tapering tail.

It’s the magnificent ruff of whiskers that surprises me, and the bulk of him, the fur sleek from fishing out in the loch.” Although otters have few natural predators, they live “on a knife-edge,” needing “to be resilient and versatile enough to cope with sudden fluctuations in food sources, pollution incidents and other environmental changes such as floods and the encroachments of human activity.”

Those challenges have not kept them from returning to territories where they have long thrived, but they have proven perilous when otters have been run over when crossing roads.

Darlington became an

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John Lewis

By Raymond Arsenault

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Cracking the Nazi Code

By Jason Bell

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The Making of a Leader

By Josiah Bunting III

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Candy Darling

By Cynthia Carr

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Otter Country

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Otter Country An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World Darlington, Miriam | Tin House | 368 pp. $27.95 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781959030348

expert at tracking otters by following their droppings, and she teaches us about their evolution, behavior, and life cycle. She evokes in sensuous detail the flora and fauna (including a threatening wild boar and swarming midges) that she encountered along the way, as well as the detritus of modern life: discarded

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Beverly Hills Spy

By Ronald Drabkin

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Mother Island

By Jamie Figueroa

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Remembering Peasants

By Patrick Joyce

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3 Shades of Blue

By James Kaplan

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Tired of Winning

By Jonathan Karl

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Collisions

By Michael Kimmage

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diapers, plastic water bottles, fast-food packaging, and more. Her immersive year proved revelatory: Rainer Maria Rilke, she observes, put it aptly: “T here is no part of the world that is not looking at you. You must change your life.”

Darlington delivers another delightfully lyrical nature chronicle.

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Like Love

By Maggie Nelson

An End to Inequality

By Jonathan Kozol

The Garretts of Columbia

By David Nicholson

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What We’ve Become

By Jonathan M. Metzl

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The Age of Magical Overthinking

By Amanda Montell

Catastrophe Ethics

By Travis Rieder

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Countdown

By Sarah Scoles Ian Fleming

By Nicholas Shakespeare

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Putin and the Return of History

By Martin Sixsmith with Daniel Sixsmith

Metaracism

By Tricia Rose

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Takeover

By Timothy W. Ryback

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I Finally Bought Some Jordans: Essays Arceneaux, Michael | HarperOne (240 pp.) | $19.99 paper | March 12, 2024 9780063140417

A bestselling author muses on reaching maturity in an era of decline and chaos.

In this follow-up to I Don’t Want To Die Poor and I Can’t Date Jesus, Arceneaux reflects on being a “geriatric” Black millennial who has survived—his trademark humor darker but more or less intact—the many upheavals of the early 21st century. One of the main disrupters he explores is the pandemic, which left him reeling from the death and disorder it brought into his life. In response, he sought normalcy however he could, even if it meant defying lockdown orders to visit his barber.

Gallows humor on display, he writes, “I [got] fades to feel alive.” While the pandemic took away part of his 30s, a six-figure debt that included student loans had overwhelmed him in his 20s. His success as a writer helped get him out of debt, but racism and climate change stood in the way of achieving other goals, such as home ownership. Unless he found a house in a white neighborhood and “put pictures of white people in the house should I want to sell it,” his property would be regarded as less valuable. If he chose to settle in Los Angeles, he would be in a region vulnerable to earthquakes, flooding, and extreme drought. Arceneaux finds relief from anxiety through art, especially the music of Beyoncé, his “Lord and Gyrator.” He may be growing older in unforgiving times, but her music still reminds him that “there is so much joy and life to have, no matter the age.” Arceneaux’s latest essays are still as pointed and funny as those from his earlier books. At the same time, they also reflect the angst of a young generation forced to navigate 52

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the unprecedented new realities of a changing planet.

A mordantly irreverent essay collection.

Kirkus Star

John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community Arsenault, Raymond | Yale Univ. (588 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 16, 2024 | 9780300253757

A comprehensive biography of the Civil Rights leader and legislator.

A telling anecdote comes early in Arsenault’s life of John Lewis (1940-2020), when he traveled to the Capitol to fundraise for a Freedom Rides Museum. Lewis kept the delegation waiting for an hour because he had promised to discuss Civil Rights history with a high school student from Ohio: “The day’s schedule had gotten backed up, but Lewis was not about to short-change the boy.” Though Lewis became a luminary late in life, his early years were marked by struggle: He was hounded as both a radical and an idealist, and he bore the scars to prove it. One perhaps surprising revelation is the significant divisions within the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. may be remembered as the iconic leader, but his leadership was heavily contested, and Lewis himself became alienated from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over the phrase “Black Power.” Said Lewis, “As an organization we don’t believe in slogans. We believe in programs.” After the police riot at the Edmund Pettus Bridge— now meaningfully renamed the John Lewis Bridge—in Selma, Alabama, the movement turned away from Lewis’ message of peaceful resistance, but he kept pushing. As Arsenault writes, one reward for his ceaseless efforts was the election of Barack Obama, whom he supported after turning away from old ally Hillary Clinton because of her

support of the Iraq War. At the end of his life, Lewis, always inclined to try to find the good in even his fiercest opponents, saw Civil Rights take a giant step backward with the election of Donald Trump: upon Lewis’ death, the “only major Republican officeholder to withhold praise for the man others mourned as an American hero.”

An exemplary biography of an exemplary person, essential to the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom Azizi, Arash | Oneworld Publications (288 pp.) | $28.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780861547111

According to this passionate book, Iranians want a liberated life in a free country.

Azizi, the author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions, is a writer and historian based in New York City who specializes in Middle East issues.

He shows how in Iran, even the most basic rights are either nonexistent or severely curtailed, with women and ethnic minorities facing the most severe oppression. The author tracks through the history of the country since 1979, when the aging cleric Ayatollah Khomeini led a revolution to install a hard-line Islamic regime.

His shadow still looms large over Iranian politics, in everything from the requirement that all women wear hajib to the militant gangs who roam the streets looking for transgressors.

Azizi ably describes the tenures of subsequent leaders who have promised reforms, only to crack down when pressed; the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is perhaps the most ruthless and manipulative of all.

With the media effectively under government control, it is difficult for any organized opposition to form.

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A masterful profile of a significant historical figure.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE

responds with murderous force and arbitrary detention. Azizi chronicles his interviews with many of Iran’s dissidents and believes that pressure is building for real change. His optimism, however, might be misplaced.

The government, while plagued by corruption and incompetence, still has considerable support, and it holds all the guns. Still, the author lays out the situation in a cleareyed manner, and readers will leave with a deeper understanding of Iran’s historical and current circumstances. “No matter what comes after Khamenei,” he writes, “Iran’s formidable mass movements will continue to fight for Women, Life, Freedom: the fullest democracy and social, economic, environmental and gender justice.”

In a brave, disturbing book, Azizi exposes the nature of the Iranian regime and applauds the courage of its opponents.

Notes From the Henhouse: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing Barker, Elspeth | Scribner (240 pp.) | $18.00 paper | March 19, 2024 | 9781668022153

A posthumous collection of writing from Scottish novelist Barker (19402022).

In her obituary, the New York Times remembered Barker as “the author of a beloved if unsung” novel, O Caledonia, now considered to be “one of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century.” In this more personal tribute, the author’s estate presents some of her best nonfiction and fiction, featuring an introduction KIRKUS REVIEWS

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home life, in Norfolk, in nature with family and animals.”

A quiet delight.

Kirkus Star

by her daughter, novelist Raffaela Barker. The essays were first published in a compendium of the elder Barker’s nonfiction writing, Dog Days, while the stories appeared in an appendix at the end of a 2010 reissue of O Caledonia.

The current volume comprises five sections, spanning the entirety of Barker’s unconventional life: feral childhood caring for wild birds; adult years reveling in rural living while tending to chickens and the many children of her partner, poet George Barker; widowhood, when she learned compassion for the women left bereft of companionship after World War I; and contented later years spent with an American husband who “fetch[ed] bowls of snails for [the] degustation” of their family of ducks. The fifth and final section brings together short fiction that highlights what Raffaela describes as her mother’s “love affair with words.” These enjoyable, evocative stories—such as a tale about a nightingale trapped indoors that hurled itself repeatedly against a window trying to get out—often draw on personal experiences. Warm, witty, and insightful, this book reveals the rich inner world of an unassuming woman with a gift for transforming the mundane realities of her existence into narratives filled with magic and wonder. “Elspeth, the countrywoman, the shy Scottish linguist,” writes Raffaela, “greatly enjoyed the after-parties with other writers at festivals, and post-book-launch drinking sessions, but always only as a contrast to her

To read our review of O Caledonia, visit Kirkus online.

Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code Bell, Jason | Pegasus (352 pp.) | $29.95 April 30, 2024 | 9781639366316

A Canadian scholar tells the story of a dynamic yet understated Renaissance man who was the first to decipher the plans for Hitler’s Final Solution.

University of New Brunswick professor of philosophy Jason Bell presents a remarkable book about a remarkable man heretofore unknown.

Yet in this author’s capable hands, the name Winthrop Bell (1884-1965) should resound in the annals of history. The author was granted access to the previously classified espionage documents of the other Bell (no relation), a Canadian academic and MI6 spy known as A12 who diagnosed the rise of the Nazi conspiracy in Germany just after World War I and became one of the Hitler regime’s greatest enemies. The author’s own academic talents serve him extremely well throughout this fascinating, well-paced text. He’s cobbled together information gleaned from unpublished papers in Canadian, German, and British archives to demonstrate how Winthrop Bell’s knack for intelligence gathering, his intellectual prowess, and his keen reading of the subtext of Mein Kampf, along with his facility in the field of phenomenology, enabled him to decipher Hitler’s plans to eradicate not only Jews, but all non-Aryans. Winthrop Bell’s notes, writes the author, became “the world’s first published warning of Hitler’s plans for worldwide genocide.”

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descriptions of Winthrop Bell’s often harrowing experiences, observational powers, and yeoman efforts to warn those in power in Great Britain and elsewhere of what was really happening in Germany and how to stop it.

This book is a significant and timely achievement, and the author should be commended for bringing to colorful life the story of the courageous, intelligent, and infinitely interesting Winthrop Bell, a man whose name should always be registered in the first rank of heroic freedom-fighters and who, as the author points how, cracked not only the Nazi code but the peace code as well.

A masterful profile of a significant historical figure.

Imagination: A Manifesto Benjamin, Ruha | Norton (192 pp.) | $22.00 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781324020974

Princeton sociologist Benjamin takes Toni Morrison’s advice to “dream a little before you think” and runs with it.

In this brief treatise, imagination is both a noun and an imperative, and the author’s usage is “unruly.”

In essence, Benjamin invites readers to consider a different world, one that the imagination of others tells us is the best of all possible worlds.

It’s fruitful, for instance, to imagine not an America in which exceptional “unicorns” of color are marked as evidence that the educational system is colorblind, but instead one in which a new system of education is created to “cultivate everyone’s creativity and curiosity.” Just so, Benjamin writes, we need to collectively imagine ways to combat such things as racism, climate change, economic inequality, and the like. Sometimes the author’s language is a touch jargony, unless you like rubrics such as “transition imaginaries,” but more often she’s refreshingly direct: “We can transform the hostile environments that try to 54

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trap us—whether they are literal cages, barbed wire–encircled playgrounds, or bullet-friendly classrooms. We can imagine otherwise.” The author also examines efforts to put this kind of imagining into practice, such as a board game that turns Monopoly on its head by teaching the values of economic cooperation, and an imagined border in which steel walls give way to binational cities. One of Benjamin’s experiments, as she describes it, was a delightful remaking of daily life in isolation via beekeeping. “Not only do bees teach us that collaboration is how we survive, that decision-making should be collective…but also that we don’t have to choose between working hard and creating beautiful, sweet things.” Benjamin closes with a set of writing and thinking prompts that will enliven curricula and dinner-table conversations alike.

A provocative manifesto indeed, and one that deserves a wide audience.

Hit ʼEm Where It Hurts: How To Save Democracy

by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game Bitecofer, Rachel with Aaron Murphy Crown (288 pp.) | $30.00 | Feb. 6, 2024 9780593727140

A packet of recommendations for selling the Democrats—and democracy—to the American public.

“Until the Republican Party gets its own shit together, America will always be just one Election Day away from fascism,” writes political scientist and strategist Bitecofer.

There’s not much incentive for the GOP to head for the center, however, because they’re doing a good job of messaging the Big Lie of election theft, to say nothing of prepping Americans to give up their rights and their money to support authoritarianism. The author demonstrates that while the Democrats have the better product, they’re also unable “to accept

that the American voter is, at best, rough clay….We can soften it, mold it, change it.” Put another way, the American voter is ignorant about history, politics, and civics. The GOP knows this—not for nothing did Trump praise the uneducated as his kind of people—and meets voters where they are. The GOP is also skilled at turning nuanced slogans such as “Defund the police” into political kryptonite. In a narrative that’s refreshingly stuffed with strong language (“As I told the neo-fascist Charlie Kirk…I was happy to argue CRT with him, but just like the rest of America, I had no fucking idea what it was”), Bitecofer offers commonsensical solutions to the messaging problem—such as not turning every campaign postcard into a white paper and instead grabbing people in the 10 seconds between mailbox and trash can: “Republicans are coming for your pot.” “Republicans said they made America great again, but now your kid’s school is open only four days a week.” “Extremist Republicans refused to expand Medicaid and now your community is losing its only hospital.” Scrap the niceties, in short, and go for the jugular.

Progressive political activists will want to take Bitecofer’s well-argued recommendations to heart.

The Darkest White: A Mountain Legend and the Avalanche That Took Him Blehm, Eric | Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) | $32.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 9780062971401

The life and death of a celebrated athlete.

Adventure biographer Blehm chronicles the storied career of Craig Kelly (1966-2003), a self-taught, world champion snowboarder, who died in an avalanche in British Columbia.

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up across the country,” he writes, consisting mostly of surfers and skateboarders who “looked at mountains and saw frozen waves, halfpipes, and glorious glassy-smooth powder to ride.” Ski areas thought they were a nuisance: Of around 500 sites, only about 50 allowed snowboarding. By the 1990s, about 2 million people were participating in the sport, and Kelly was the brightest star. Skiing, he said, felt “disjointed,” but snowboarding “felt like an extension of my body.”

He dropped out of college to train for competition, focusing on perfecting entire halfpipe runs and adding flourishes to stand out. In 1987, he “swept the field” of the Grand Prix of Snowboarding in Aspen; in 1988, for the second year in a row, he was named “Freestyle World Champion and Overall World Champion.” As Blehm writes, “He levitated down mountains, raced avalanches, aired cliffs, and landed on the covers of magazines.” But though he loved the challenge of the sport, he was not invested in the glitz and glamor of being a celebrity. Preferring to snowboard in natural terrain, he studied “the mechanics of the mountains, the engineering of avalanches, and the science of snow down to the granular, if not microscopic, level.” He aspired to join the elite Association of Canadian Mountain Guides and was in the midst of training when the avalanche hit “with cold, hard indifference” and dragged him and 12 others into the icy darkness. Blehm recounts in gripping detail the terrifying disaster, the desperate rescue efforts, and the ensuing investigations into the cause.

A stirring adventure narrative and sports bio.

Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong―and Right―About America’s Leading Universities Bok, Derek | Yale Univ. (248 pp.) | $28.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780300273601

A former Harvard president examines the moral and political criticisms leveled against elite universities.

Economic inequality in American society permeates its systems of higher education. In his latest book, following The Struggle To Reform Our Colleges, Bok examines the challenges facing these elite institutions through critiques made by the left and right. Liberals have decried practices such as legacy admissions (which favor applicants from wealthy families) and investing in companies that perpetuate “evils and injustices.”

The author suggests that while legacy admissions might offer “modest financial gains” for the institutions, the practice is also at odds with “the more important public purposes that our leading colleges and universities ought to serve.” On other issues, such as investing in problematic companies, the ethics become murky. Divestment affects everything from faculty salaries to student aid. A moral compromise, like the one Bok tried to achieve by offering scholarships to Black South African students, tries to balance all factors, though with admitted difficulty. Where liberals tend to focus on social issues, conservatives focus on what they see as attacks on

Bok presents an all-too-rare moderate perspective on a system as ravaged by extremes as the society it serves.

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personal freedoms—for example, what they perceive as liberal indoctrination of students by leftist professors and a concomitant loss of free speech.

While empirical evidence suggests the professoriate tends to attract more liberals, Bok suggests that elite colleges and universities can bring faculties into greater political balance by hiring professors based on realworld credentials, such as conservative representatives and staffers. At the same time, while diversity is the key to a thriving university, it can also give rise to incidents of bigoted speech, which Bok believes should be addressed through reassurances offered to offended students and reasoned conversations with perpetrators. In this evenhanded and pragmatic text, Bok presents an all-too-rare moderate perspective on a system as ravaged by extremes as the society it serves.

A skillfully argued study of higher education.

The Gardener of Lashkar Gah: The Afghans Who Risked Everything To Fight the Taliban Brown, Larisa | Bloomsbury Continuum (288 pp.) | $29.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 9781399411028

A focused look at the interpreters and other Afghans who have suffered during the West’s war on terror.

As journalist Brown recounts, Shaista Gul was hired in 2007 to tend gardens at Britain’s Helmand province headquarters, where he earned a reputation for his skill and dedication. In 2009, his teenage son Jamal was hired as an interpreter and was wounded in battle shortly thereafter. When British forces left the country in 2014, Shaista’s job ended, and Jamal took a temporary assignment interpreting in a prison. The following year, his service qualified him for a British visa, but many others who had aided the anti-Taliban JANUARY 1, 2024

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cause did not meet the requirements.

Shaista’s belated permission to enter Britain came only after the American exodus, when both Lashkar Gah and Kabul had fallen to the Taliban.

Amid frantic mobs at the gates of the airport, Shaista and select family members were stalled and misdirected for days before abandoning their attempt to board a departing plane.

Their ensuing escape overland, guided by messages from Jamal and others, was perilous. Throughout, Brown interweaves accounts of others who similarly aided Western forces. Some made it out; others suffered torture or execution. The author depicts not only desperation on the ground but also the heroic endeavors of those who labored to extract those left behind. Even for those who made it to the West, however, there was no tidy resolution. The necessities of work, food, and housing were complicated by the struggle to learn English, cope with trauma, and adapt to a foreign culture. Without belaboring the politics, the author outlines the developments that opened the door wider—but often not wide enough—for Afghan asylum-seekers. Despite occasionally clunky exposition, this is a moving book.

Brown ably depicts the plight of those who opposed a brutal regime alongside Western forces and still await reprieve.

Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds Broyles, Michael | Norton (416 pp.) | $29.99 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780393634204

A study of three paradigm shifts in American pop and classical music.

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A superb account of the early life of an unsullied American hero.

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were significant decades, thanks in large part to the intersection of race, technology, and new ways of thinking about and performing music. The 1840s marked the rise of minstrelsy, a product of American racial tensions as well as “the first popular genre that was distinctly American.” That decade also saw the arrival of the first serious classical symphonies in a country whose public “did not consider music art.” In the 1920s, the explosion of phonograph recordings and commercial radio sparked the growth of jazz, blues, and country music. In the 1950s, the commingling of genres and the rise of car radios meant American teens were drawn to an ever widening crop of R&B and rock artists. In Broyles’ estimation, the decade’s key transformational rock figure wasn’t Elvis Presley but Johnnie Ray, a white crooner who cut his teeth in Black Detroit supper clubs and had a knack for country and R&B styles. In the classical realm, avant-garde works

by Pierre Boulez and John Cage set the stage for decades of experiments to come. Though this is a scholarly work, it’s highly readable, with plenty of surprising detours. For example, the polka was an enormously influential genre in the 1840s, even if one nabob wished to find its inventor and “scrape him to death with [an] oyster shell.” Broyles is skilled at exploring the ways that, from the minstrelsy days on, racial lines often crossed despite labels’ and chart-makers’ attempts to separate them. Every decade likely could support the author’s argument, but these three make for engaging reading.

A well-researched and provocative look at the long-term, uneasy connections between race and music.

Kirkus Star

The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall Bunting III, Josiah | Knopf (272 pp.) | $30.00 March 19, 2024 | 9781400042586

An early-life biography of one of America’s greatest leaders.

George C. Marshall (18801959) was vital to the Allies’ victory in World War II. Unlike most other American military figures, his postwar career was not an anticlimax: He served as secretary of state, designed the Marshall Plan, and became the only general to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The author, a historian, doesn’t aim to add another standard biography but rather to examine Marshall’s formative years. Clearly an admirer, Bunting makes it clear that Marshall was a significant figure long before he became nationally known. Son of a Pennsylvania businessman, he yearned for a military career from early adolescence. Sent to the Virginia Military Institute, he didn’t excel in academics or athletics but did finish as the “outstanding man of the class” of 1901 and obtained a commission in 1902. The author emphasizes that he was already demonstrating a rigorous dedication to duty, absolute dependability, and a “cool, distancing courtesy.” He was so efficient that commanding officers loved having him on their staff, so that was where he spent most years before 1939.

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division overseas in 1917, overseeing its training and early battle success.

In 1918, Commander-in-Chief George Pershing brought him in, and he performed brilliantly in planning operations, following Pershing when he became chief of staff after the war. During the bleak interwar years, Marshall occasionally fulfilled his desire to command troops, and he modernized training and operations as assistant commandant of the Fort Benning infantry school and as chief of war plans in the War Department.

Although among the most junior brigadier generals when the existing chief of staff retired, everyone who mattered, including President Franklin Roosevelt, supported Marshall as his replacement. In this illuminating biography, Bunting agrees with the decision.

A superb account of the early life of an unsullied American hero.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Butler, Judith | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) | $30.00 | March 19, 2024 9780374608224

A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.

In her latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from KIRKUS REVIEWS

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such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. She also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. The author is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For Butler, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.”

She imagines “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of her recommendations with her astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.

A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.

Kirkus Star

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar Carr, Cynthia | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) | $30.00 | March 19, 2024 9781250066350

The biography of a transgender performer whose brief life illuminated 1960s and ’70s New York.

“She began life as a tortured effeminate boy because she wasn’t

really a boy,” writes Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Candy Darling’s 1950s Long Island childhood was miserable, with a mother who was ashamed of her and a volatile father who drank to excess; at school, she was bullied. “Nobody gets who I am,” she told a classmate. Her escapes were TV, movie magazines, and, eventually, cosmetology school. New York City beckoned, with its gay scene—but also its 19th-century laws that still criminalized cross-dressing. Candy developed an image as a glamorous fantasy woman inspired by Hollywood starlets like Lana Turner and Kim Novak; friends recall her as a “natural star” emanating an “ethereal light.” Candy was taken up by Andy Warhol, photographed by Richard Avedon and Peter Hujar, and cast in off-off Broadway shows and underground films such as Flesh. Yet wider success eluded her, as Hollywood wanted nothing to do with a trans actor (the casting of Raquel Welch in Myra Breckinridge was a particular blow). She rarely had a stable address, often slipping back to her mother’s suburban house under cover of darkness. She was plagued by bad teeth, longed for love yet shied away from intimacy, and died of cancer at the age of 29. Carr devotedly pieces together this incandescent portrait from irregular diary entries, hilariously unreliable narrators, and taped interviews conducted by Candy’s friend Jeremiah Newton after her death. “You must always be yourself no matter what the price,” Candy once wrote. “It is the highest form of morality….Don’t dare destroy your passion for the sake of others.”

Carr resurrects a trans icon whose life, artistry, and struggle speak directly to our moment.

To read our review of Fire in the Belly, visit Kirkus online.

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N O N F I C T I O N // P R O F I L E

In her spirited new book, a punk rock feminist offers DIY financial advice for millennials.

BY GREGORY MCNAMEE

BORN IN 1986, Madeline Pendleton came of jobseeking age, along with her millennial cohort, just as the Great Recession was shredding the world economy.

She was used to living on the edge. Her father, she tells Kirkus Reviews by telephone from her California home, was a part-time drug dealer, part-time bar bouncer, and part-time whatever work he could pick up. Her mother worked for minimum wage at an art-supply store. “I learned two entirely different ideologies about money from them,” she says. “My mother was a nose-to-the-grindstone, we’ll-get-by kind of person, but my dad said, ‘Spend it while it’s there, because it soon won’t be.’”

Pendleton took the former course, as she writes in her new book, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had To Learn About Money (Doubleday, Jan. 16). She slogged. She endured sorrow when, as she recounts near the 58

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opening of the book, her lover, a decade older than she, committed suicide in the depths of despair over his poverty. Recalls Pendleton, “I experienced it as a very individual, personal thing, and it wasn’t until I started learning more about suicide that I realized that it was not an individual experience. He was unfortunately part of this statistic, of this trend, where many middle-aged men were driven to these deaths of despair, and a lot of it had to do with money. It’s interesting, being a punk rock feminist, knowing that the world is horrible to women, but you look at that and you see that the patriarchy intersects with capitalism in ways that adversely affect men, too.”

Pendleton took her mother’s example and worked, among other jobs, for a photographer who cheated her out of a significant portion of her pay. The experience was infuriating, made better only because she soon landed another job as an assistant to a woman photographer

who was nothing but encouraging. Still, Pendleton says, it rankled. “There I was in my late 20s,” she recalls, “and I was really stressed out about money.

There’s got to be a better way to be living, I thought. Everything I’m doing is wrong, and I want to know why.”

She took a deep dive into the chaotic world of financial advice, where no two people seem to agree on much of anything, especially when it comes to younger people who don’t have much to spend or invest. “None of it was quite right,” she says.

“None of it quite applied to me or my life or what I wanted to do.”

And thus, in a whirlwind of relentless spreadsheeting and tracking every cent,

I Survived Capitalism was born. “The whole time that I was doing this, I just kept [wishing] there was some sort of financial resource from somebody I could trust. And it just seemed like all those financial experts, they were older, right? But they came from a world that didn’t seem to exist for me.”

What existed for her was disgust at capitalism.

Pendleton, at 28, was barely subsisting in Los Angeles on less than $2,000 a month, saddled with $65,000 in student loans.

Her rent accounted for about half her income, far beyond what most financial advisers counsel is a healthy percentage but frequently necessary for her and her cohort. She did without

Lizzie Klein

THE KIRKUS PROFILE: MADELINE PENDLETON

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P R O F I L E // N O N F I C T I O N

I wanted to read a book about money that made sense to me, but it just did not exist.

I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had To Learn About Money Pendleton, Madeline

Doubleday | 336 pp. | $27.00 Jan. 16, 2024 | 9780385549783

many comforts in order to pay off her loan, month by bitter month. She put the punk ethos to work by appropriating an abandoned van and hotwiring it into service. And after coming to the conclusion that she was going to face hard reality and live to tell the tale, she returned with some unhappy observations: “Remember that your co-workers are not your friends.” “The goal is not perfection. The goal is survival.” “Right away, remember that you should never care more than your boss does.”

Those realizations shaped her book, a blend of often blunt advice on handling finances and a memoir of hard times. “I wanted to read a book about money that made sense to me, but it just did not exist in the market,” she recalls. So KIRKUS REVIEWS

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did the people around her, and when she set to work, she was determined to be as honest as she could be about her experiences. “I’m telling you about my life, my qualifications, so you know whether or not you can trust me. You have to know when someone is conning you to pad their own pockets or when someone’s saying, ‘I genuinely care about people, and here’s what I learned, and I want you to be OK.’ That’s me.”

Pendleton’s advice isn’t the sort you’ll find in the typical financial self-help book. She believes, for instance, that home ownership is essential—but only because “we live in a hypercapitalist society where there’s no safety net, and your home is your only asset. Instead of renting, it makes sense to take that same amount of

money you would be spending anyway to keep a roof over your head and put it into an asset that’s going to appreciate in value.” That’s especially true, she notes, in a place like Los Angeles, where rent can easily exceed mortgage payments. But since most younger people can’t afford to pull together a down payment on their own, an anticapitalist hack is in order: “I had to get creative with it, and so some friends and I went in together and purchased one property with multiple units on it, kind of like making your own condo.

My share of the down payment to purchase this way was $7,500, and the average going rent at the same time for a one-bedroom apartment where I lived was $2,500 a month.

The goal that capitalism seems to have is making

us all a nation of renters, which only serves to benefit the people with the massive real estate portfolios, and this was our answer.”

Asked if she’s angry about the financial precarity she and her peers face, Pendleton reflects before replying. “Anger is the first step,” she says. “You look at the world and you go, This isn’t fair, this is bad, this is hurting people, and you get mad. But you need that anger to channel yourself into something productive, something geared toward change. Anger and optimism go hand in hand, and to build a better future, you have to acknowledge that there are things in the present that need fixing.”

Or, as she puts it in the book, “Feel joy as an act of resistance. Be happy despite all the bullshit.”

Indeed, anger is an energy, as the eminent punk rocker John Lydon observed. I Survived Capitalism is an energetic, encouraging manifesto for socially conscious financial self-care. Meanwhile, Pendleton is pondering what might be next. She’s received many requests for a budget cookbook, “Which is funny,” she says, “because I do not fancy myself much of a cook.”

But given the unexpected turns that her life has taken so far, she concedes with a laugh that it could well happen. “The next thing you know, maybe you’ll see me on the Food Network, and I’ll have a whole new career as some sort of weird lentil-bean-rice chef.” Stay tuned.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.

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Up in Arms: How Military Aid Stabilizes― and Destabilizes―Foreign Autocrats Casey, Adam E. | Basic Books (336 pp.) $30.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781541604018

A Cold War–era study of how military aid to “friendly tyrants” often created as many problems as it solved.

Realpolitik was the idea that informed much of the thinking of U.S. policy during the Cold War, especially when it came to supplying military aid to autocratic regimes. In this book, government analyst Casey explores the question of whether such support was successful and how American strategy differed from that of its main competitor, the Soviet Union. The author worked on much of this book while he was a research fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, so he was able to draw together a large body of evidence, which he puts to good use in this carefully researched history. Casey readily accepts that many U.S. clients were, to say the least, unsavory. Still, if they were fighting communist insurgencies, or claimed to be, they received military and financial support. One of the primary policy goals was to separate the military from the political leaders, based on the American model. But as the author shows, this strategy often backfired, and the most common reason for the fall of an autocratic leader was a military coup, which then led to more autocracy. The Soviet aim, in contrast, was to integrate the army with the government party, which circumvented the problem of coups but led to mismanagement, stagnation, and corruption. Many autocracies would eventually move toward democracy, although Casey argues that this was only possible once the threat of communism faded away.

He explains all this material with authority, though the book is written 60

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An authoritative investigation of emerging scientific problems.

S PAC E O D D I T I E S

mainly for specialists in Cold War history and politics.

Casey capably delves into a key U.S. policy of the Cold War and the reasons for its successes and failures.

Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe Cliff, Harry | Doubleday (288 pp.) | $29.00 March 26, 2024 | 9780385549035

A leading experimental physicist and science presenter examines how new evidence is upsetting old scientific models, ideas, and precepts.

“Science does not progress in a straight line, running from ignorance to understanding,” writes Cliff, a particle physicist at Cambridge and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

“It is a messy business, full of false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends.”

Without a doubt, the author has the credentials to explain how physicists are currently confronting a host of new puzzles. Over several decades, a sense of complacency developed, but in the past few years, a series of anomalies have undermined the old certainties. Why, for example, are stars moving away faster than expected?

Why do neutrinos refuse to behave as the theoretical models predict? What are the powerful pulses of energy that occasionally burst through the Antarctic ice? Cliff describes his treks around the world, visiting research facilities and interviewing some of the

people hunting for answers. There’s an ongoing conflict between the theoreticians, who trust in complex mathematical models, and the observers, who focus on experiments and connections. Both sides show a sense of groping for new paradigms and a novel way of defining reality. One problem with the book is that, despite Cliff’s attempts to explain the issues in non-specialist terms, cosmology and particle physics are extremely complex areas, and some sections of the text are difficult to follow. Readers with a background in advanced physics will find plenty of the material fascinating, while general readers are in for a challenge. But Cliff’s optimism, light sense of humor, and enthusiasm for his subject shine through: “Nature does not yield its secrets easily; they must be fought for. But in the end… this winding road does inexorably lead to deeper understanding.”

An authoritative investigation of emerging scientific problems.

Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality Cox, Josie | Abrams (336 pp.) | $30.00 March 5, 2024 | 9781419762987

A history of women’s struggles for economic rights and financial freedom.

Focusing on the period from World War II until the present, journalist and broadcaster Cox explores women’s progress in the fight for economic equality. The author zeroes in on the personal and KIRKUS REVIEWS

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professional stories of those who were especially influential in this history, along with a look at “what ultimately went wrong; why, fifty and sixty years ago, progress seemed abundant with promise and why now, in 2024, it appears to have stalled so dramatically.” A clear strength of the book is Cox’s attention to the contributions of lesser-known figures in the liberation movement as she chronicles in revealing detail the significance of “unsung heroes” such as Alice Paul, Pauli Murray, Shirley Chisholm, Lindy Boggs, and Muriel Siebert. The author’s commentary on Murray’s life is particularly astute; she not only highlights her extraordinary achievements as an activist on behalf of women and people of color, but also illuminates the often intersecting goals and strategies of the feminist and Civil Rights movements. Cox persuasively argues that contemporary understandings of intersectionality are deeply indebted to Murray’s work.

Also memorable is the discussion of the development and wide-ranging impact of the birth control pill. The emergence of the pill at the beginning of the 1960s was the culmination of long-standing efforts on the political, legal, and scientific fronts to secure reproductive freedoms, and its economic ramifications were enormous. A major obstacle standing in the way of equality today, the author ultimately demonstrates, can be found in the striking gap between women’s and men’s pay across a range of professions. That gap, research shows, “has hardly budged for years.” Cox offers an accessible and instructive overview of how money and power have intersected with gender in modern America.

A vigorous, often inspiring account of women’s quests for economic equality.

For more on the wonders of gravity, visit Kirkus online.

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Portrait of a Body Delporte, Julie | Trans. by Helge Dascher & Karen Houle | Drawn & Quarterly (268 pp.) | $29.95 paper | Jan. 16, 2024 9781770466807

A queer woman narrates the evolution of her sexuality, womanhood, and capacity for love in this graphic memoir.

“Time hasn’t healed all my wounds and yet here I am, still very much alive,” writes Canadian artist Delporte at the beginning of this exploration of her journey as a “late-life lesbian.” Her expressive prose makes copious references to books

by Annie Ernaux, Dorothy Allison, and Lauren Berlant, as well as such provocative films as Chantal Akerman’s 1975 cult classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which depicts a widowed housewife’s mundane routine spiced up by sex work (and murder). The author admits to episodes of unwanted sex with men, considering it “the price I paid for a bit of affection.” Later, she would “come to call what happened an inadvertent rape.” To cope with these ordeals, Delporte sought out psychotherapy in her later years, and she also dealt with disassociation and extended respites from intimacy. In cursive text featuring tender poetic declarations and line drawings in both colored pencil and watercolor brushstrokes, the author/illustrator describes her gradual emergence as a lesbian: cutting her hair, changing her dress code, and feeling liberated from the “demands” of conventional femininity. She began a punk rock band, channeled French philosopher Monique Wettig and Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson, and fell in love with a woman with whom “for the first time, there was space for my trauma when we had sex.” Delporte’s eye for artistry shines throughout both the text and illustrations, and her evocatively resonant watercolors illustrate her deeply felt sexual trauma, her insecurities and

early trepidations about her queer inclinations, and, in pages bathed in vibrant swaths of intermingling colors, her most intimate desires. Delporte’s memorable artwork brims with vitality and authenticity.

An artistic confessional of identity, sexual deliverance, and self-acceptance.

The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity de Rham, Claudia | Princeton Univ. (232 pp.) $27.95 | April 2, 2024 | 9780691237480

An acclaimed physicist takes a deep dive into one of the most fundamental and mysterious forces of the universe.

On a superficial level, gravity seems to be a fairly simple concept—it makes objects fall—but to inquiring minds like de Rham’s, a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, gravity represents a series of puzzling challenges. The author admits to a long-standing obsession with it, fueled by her pursuits of scuba diving and piloting a light airplane. She recounts how she was extremely close to becoming an astronaut but was thwarted at the last minute by a diagnosis of latent tuberculosis. The setback led de Rham to delve even further into the subject of gravity; in this book, she explains its nature and operations, from Newton’s theories to black holes. This is an inherently complex subject, and the author sometimes seems to forget that not everyone has an advanced degree in physics. She works through Einstein’s theory of gravity, taken as scientific gospel for decades. The emergence of quantum mechanics led to cracks in the Einsteinian picture, and de Rham capably traces the arguments. Gravity appears to work in light-like waves, known to physicists as “glight.” The author and her colleagues, however, believed that the jigsaw puzzle still had missing pieces, so they began to JANUARY 1, 2024

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develop a theory of a new force called “massive gravity,” which has led to a widespread questioning of prevailing views. The theory is the subject of heated debate within the physics community; if proven, it would create a critical shift in thinking about astrophysics. This book may lose general readers in the scientific thickets, but those who enjoy the work of James Gleick and Brian Greene will find it an intriguing read.

At the leading edge of science, this book combines innovative research with a personal story.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson Dickinson, Emily | Ed. by Cristanne Miller & Domhnall Mitchell | Belknap/Harvard Univ. (960 pp.) | $49.95 | April 2, 2024 9780674982970

A newly expanded, annotated edition of the poet’s letters, the first in more than 60 years.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of the most recognizable poets in history.

Yet, as the editors note in the introduction, she “was a letter writer before she was a poet.” She was a prolific and passionate correspondent, and this new edition contains 1,304 of her letters, “as well as all of the extant letters that [she] received.” This extraordinary collection shows her to be a masterful prose writer, and, contrary to her popular image as a recluse, the letters reveal that “Dickinson was by no means an isolated, lonely, woman.” The editors include hundreds of new letters, redate many of the previously published ones based on careful research, and provide essential annotations. Additionally, where possible, they restore omissions by previous letter transcribers. In some cases, the restorations are critical to our ability to reevaluate who Dickinson was in relation to those in her correspondence. While her prose 62

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writing is noteworthy in itself, the editors also include many “letter-poems.”

Dickinson frequently sent poems in her correspondence, often without an accompanying note. Included in this edition alongside her regular letters, they provide beautiful texture to the collection. Perhaps the most delightful materials, though, are the writing notes. Like many writers, Dickinson collected scraps of language and fragments of poems, which she may have used to draft both her letters and poems. Seeing them together shows how “a retained metaphor or sequence of language might serve as the germ of a letter, or it might linger in her workshop until a letter seemed just right to house it, just as a poem might begin with a resonant phrase.” The notes, in particular, provide illuminating insight into the mind and process of a truly brilliant writer.

An exciting new standard in Dickinson scholarship.

Kirkus Star

Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor Drabkin, Ronald | Morrow/HarperCollins (272 pp.) | $29.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780063310070

A beguiling tale of espionage and double-dealing in the years leading up to World War II. He was known as Agent Shinkawa, a spy for the Imperial Japanese Navy. His real name was

Frederick Rutland (1886-1949), a hero of early British aviation. As Drabkin relates, Rutland turned to Japan for work after having been passed over for promotion as one of the proletariat, even as another pilot “of a superior class…realized his skills were no match for Rutland’s.” Rutland had worked out practical solutions to launching warplanes from aircraft carriers, and, as early as 1920, the Japanese were both planning on using that new technology to forge a Pacific empire and preparing for war with the U.S. Rutland was particularly useful once he set up shop in Beverly Hills, plying pilots, aircraft manufacturers, and military officers with booze and letting them do the talking. Drabkin’s cast of characters is surprising: The bon vivant Rutland got actionable intelligence out of Amelia Earhart and had dealings near and far with the likes of Charlie Chaplin (the target of a Japanese assassination attempt), Boris Karloff (an unlikely but real counterspy), Graham Greene’s brother, and Yoko Ono’s father. It wasn’t long before the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence caught on to Rutland, who became a double agent to save his own skin, gaining protection from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the bargain. Both ONI and the FBI missed out on a trail of clues that might have prevented the attack at Pearl Harbor, in which Rutland was implicated enough to spend time in a British prison. Drabkin’s expertly narrated yarn, based on a trove of recently declassified documents, is constantly surprising, and it’s just the thing for thriller fans who enjoy kindred fictions of the Alan Furst variety.

Strap in for a narrative that demands a suspension of disbelief—and richly rewards it.

The notes provide illuminating insight into the mind and process of a truly brilliant writer.

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It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing From Narcissistic People Durvasula, Ramani | Open Field (368 pp.) $29.00 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780593492628

A guide to dealing with psychological abuse.

A psychologist who works with survivors of narcissistic abuse—and who has personally faced narcissists in family, personal, and work relationships—Durvasula draws on a range of experiences to offer guidance, affirmation, and support. “We can pull ourselves out of the stories of the narcissistic people who defined us, silenced us, clipped our wings, taught us our dreams were grandiose, filled us with shame, and for a time, stole our joy,” she writes, whether we stay in relationships with narcissists or extricate ourselves from them. Narcissism is a complex set of personality traits involving “a deep insecurity and fragility offset by maneuvers like domination, manipulation, and gaslighting, which allows the narcissistic person to stay in control.” Narcissists can be charming and seductive, often attracting partners with “love bombing,” but soon their self-serving behavior surfaces. As her detailed case histories reveal, among the traits that mark a narcissistic personality are a craving for constant validation and admiration, delusional grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy. They abuse those close to them with behaviors such as gaslighting, dismissiveness, rage, threats, revenge, isolation, and betrayal. Victims of this abuse, she

For more titles by Richard Paul Evans, visit Kirkus online.

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has found from her patients, tend to blame themselves and feel shame, confusion, depression, and anxiety.

They censor themselves, trying to become “progressively more careful to avoid the criticism, contempt, or anger of these challenging people in their lives.” Because narcissists are resistant to seeking therapy—and rarely change their behavior—Durvasula offers suggestions for self-protection: watching for telling signs of narcissism, setting boundaries, trusting your own instincts, disengaging from a narcissist’s enablers, and refusing to be told how you feel. For those who decide to continue in a relationship with a narcissist, out of love and attachment, she offers suggestions for coping and healing.

Helpful counsel for emotional survival.

Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare Ephraim, Michelle | Univ. of Massachusetts (244 pp.) | $22.95 paper | March 1, 2024 9781625347824

How Shakespeare changed the author’s life.

The only child of Holocaust survivors, Ephraim grew up with a volatile, controlling father whose anger blighted her life. Both parents, deeply wounded, distrustful, and overly protective of their daughter, created an atmosphere of “encompassing gloom.” “I understood that my father said terrible things to me,” Ephraim writes in her engaging debut memoir, which was awarded the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction. “I accepted that my mother held me responsible for her well-being and made no secret that I’d failed at the job. The way they treated me was often unbearable, and I spent every waking minute wanting to get away.” Escape came when she left for college; initially aspiring to become a poet, she decided instead to pursue a

doctorate in literature and landed at the University of Wisconsin, where she discovered Shakespeare. Ephraim was drawn to the enigmatic characters of Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, in The Merchant of Venice. “Angry fathers, absent mothers, and defiant daughters are typical characters in Shakespeare plays,” writes Ephraim. “But these three are the only Jews Shakespeare ever wrote,” and they struck a chord of recognition. Like her own father, Shylock is “a lonely outsider forced to live in the Jewish ghetto. He takes out his anger and paranoia on his only child, a daughter.” Jessica, like Ephraim, struggled with the shame of wanting to leave her oppressive family. Ephraim immersed herself in research and worked tirelessly to meet the demands for tenure. On the rocky road to becoming a Shakespeare scholar, she discovered what literary critics call the “Green World”: a refuge in the woods for a character fleeing from a major problem at home.

“In that Green World,” she writes, “romantic and familiar conflicts are resolved, and the troubled heroine finally finds some peace.”

A sensitive, deftly crafted memoir.

Sharing Too Much: Musings From an Unlikely Life Evans, Richard Paul | Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) | $22.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 9781982177461

A bestselling author reflects on life’s gifts.

Evans has written more than 45 books, including romance novels, Christmas tales, children’s stories, and more. Here, he shares a half-century of his thoughts and ruminations on his life and career, love and friendship, and the abiding faith that sustains him. When he was around 8 years old, Evans showed symptoms of Tourette syndrome, which led to bullying. His home life was tense as well: The family struggled financially, JANUARY 1, 2024

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and his mother showed “suicidal tendencies.” He learned that problems need not be setbacks, however. In fact, “more times than not, we do not succeed in spite of our challenges and difficulties but because of them.”

Overcoming challenges is a central lesson throughout. “Life,” he writes, “requires that we let go of the rung we cling to in order to climb higher.” Fear of failure keeps people from fulfilling dreams and desires. “Imagination is the soil in which your future is planted,” the author counsels. “It is the power to see past the four walls around us, past borders, cultural and physical, even cosmic.” The power of prayer, the strength he derives from faith, his experiences with visions, and a sense of divine protection permeate his writing.

“While for some the mathematics of the universe suggests the existence of a Supreme Being, to me, it is that which defies math’s probabilities that gives the most evidence of God—the improbability of two objects colliding in an infinite void.” Evans extols gratitude, humility, and love, which he defines “not as much to desire a person as it is to desire their well-being, their mental and spiritual growth.” In “How I Saved My Marriage,” the author reveals how he put that desire into practice when he and his wife were on the brink of divorce.

Succinct musings meant to inspire.

Kirkus Star

Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico Figueroa, Jamie | Pantheon (240 pp.) $29.00 | March 19, 2024 | 9780553387681

A novelist turns to memoir to mine the spirit and substance of what a mother is.

Reeling from a divorce and underemployment, Figueroa, author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, found herself in Santa Fe, New Mexico, vulnerable and primed to more deeply reflect 64

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A searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.

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on and return to her roots. In her memoir, she excavates these roots from her childhood, cutting into them across generations and unearthing them on the island of Puerto Rico, the homeland of her Taíno ancestors. As a child, the author first understood herself as a member of a “feminine collective” that contained her mother and her two older sisters, even as they all rode the roller coaster of her mother’s history of trauma, her resulting emotional unpredictability and dependency, and her series of marriages to white men. Figueroa enchantingly shifts and sifts through her memories of a childhood spent between these marriages, and of the way her mother leaned into and out of her “exotic” beauty and its snarly, disorienting attention, power, shame, menace, and safety. Chronicling her journey through her work in the healing arts, the ending of her own marriage to a white man (“a hand-me-down version of one of my mother’s”), and the practice and profession of writing and teaching, she teases further discussion of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the mainland U.S. In the final third of the book, Figueroa returns more fully to this matter, along with its associated topics of race, internalized colonization, and assimilation. Throughout the text, the author sprinkles an artful balance of just-personal-enough details, magical imagery, and insightful analysis. Her exceptional command of her craft builds narrative tension while granting force to the way her personal history mirrors geopolitical devastation and imbuing her voice with the power of one no longer unclaimed by, but ready to lay claim to.

A searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.

Devout: A Memoir of Doubt Gazmarian, Anna | Simon & Schuster (192 pp.) | $27.99 | March 12, 2024 9781668004036

A young woman’s account of faith, church, and mental illness.

During her freshman year of college, Gazmarian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her diagnosis and subsequent struggle to find adequate treatment was complicated by her evangelical Christian upbringing. “I was determined to be a good Christian, but I struggled with doubt,” she writes. “In my community, doubt wasn’t welcome.” As the author narrates her path through therapists’ offices and experiences with a variety of medication regimens, she also notes the way that Christian teachings, narcissistic church authorities, and the prayerful passivity of the faithful created their own obstacles to mental stability and support resources.

The text is a whispered challenge to the evangelical church and a subtle critique of how Gazmarian’s faith tradition accounts for and engages with mental illness, with hints at the inadequacies of other institutions, such as schools and medical professionals, to right this failure. Gazmarian also writes about seeking out Christian therapists, and she integrates into the text Scripture passages on which she continually relies, even in her darkest moments. The authentic version of the author’s personal faith journey is complicated and nuanced and may elude literary expression; the writing reflects a restless and distracted quality that KIRKUS REVIEWS

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suggests as much. However, both the doubts of the author and the solace she ultimately finds are presented in a manner that feels overly cautious, and many of the descriptions could have benefitted from tighter editing.

The resulting rather anticlimactic reconciliation blunts the potential force of a much-needed exploration of the intersection between mental illness and faith. Readers are left knowing that Gazmarian’s ideas of faith, religion, and church have changed and expanded, but not the reasons why faith truly matters to her.

A mostly surface-level story about both the flaws and hopeful possibilities of religion.

Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution Ghaziani, Amin | Princeton Univ. (288 pp.) $29.95 | March 19, 2024 | 9780691253855

A sociology professor examines why gay bars are shuttering in major cities around the world.

In recent years, writes Ghaziani, author of Sex Cultures and There Goes the Gayborhood?, a “global epidemic of [gay bar] closures” has occurred.

Drawing on research, interviews, and his own work as “an urban ethnographer of nightlife,” the author explores the possible reasons behind this phenomenon as well as emergent trends in the world of LGBTQ+ venues. These closures, he argues, are “disruptive event[s]” that “have forced us to think about the significance of place.” Like the recessions, pandemics, and terrorist attacks that have characterized the early 21st century, they have altered routines and ways of thinking. Economic forces, such as skyrocketing urban land values and taxes, along with increasing income inequality, have catalyzed such closures. What’s taken the place of gay bars are pop-up clubs that happen wherever there’s (affordable) space, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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even if only for short periods of time.

Symbiotic relationships have also emerged between remaining party venues and event-based nightlife. As one LGBTQ+ event habitué puts it, queer nightlife is far from dying; rather, it’s “thriving” through a period of rapid change. Ghaziani suggests that changes in the nightclub scene may also be generational. Traditional gay bars, for example, have tended to be bastions of whiteness that haven’t always provided a refuge for nonwhite people. Like the young people who tend to frequent pop-up events, in contrast, the new queer nightlife scene enthusiastically embraces “intersectional lives” lived at the crossroads of race, gender, ethnicity, and other identifiers. Thoughtful and well researched, Ghaziani’s book looks beyond the binaries and prejudices within LGBTQ+ communities to celebrate a more inclusive space of queerness that actively identifies and accepts difference in all its forms.

A wonderfully lively and open-minded intellectual inquiry.

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks Gibbins, David | St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $32.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781250325372

A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.

There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all… levels,” he writes. “Unlike many

archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost).

Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time.

He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.

Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.

Race Rules: What Your Black Friend Won’t Tell You Gilliam, Fatimah | Berrett-Koehler Publishers (384 pp.) | $24.95 paper Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781523004485

How to fight racial injustice.

As a lightskinned woman of color, Gilliam, a former corporate attorney and diversity expert, has witnessed “a consistent, daily pattern” of transgressions by white people in their remarks and attitudes about race. “I see you, you don’t see me,” she writes, “and in not seeing me, you don’t see yourselves but reveal yourselves to me, and I see you even more.” These >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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Authors Told Not To Read From Book at School Visit The authors of His Name Is George Floyd were instructed not to discuss racism during the Tennessee event.

The authors of a biography of George Floyd were not allowed to read from their book at a school event in Tennessee, NBC News reports.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa visited Whitehaven High School in Memphis, but event organizers asked them not to read from His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.. They were

To read our review of His Name Is George Floyd, visit Kirkus online.

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also asked not to discuss systemic racism.

The book, published in 2022 by Viking, recounts the life and death of Floyd, who was killed in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Chauvin was convicted of murder in 2021; three other officers were convicted of aiding and abetting manslaughter.

Floyd’s murder spawned worldwide protests against police brutality and racism.

His Name Is George Floyd won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised it as “a brilliant biography, history book, and searing indictment of this country’s ongoing failure to eradicate systemic racism.”

“It was really disappointing to hear that our speech was going to be limited,” Olorunnipa told NBC News. “Not only for us, but for the students whose access to knowledge is going to shape their journey in this world and in this country.”

A spokesperson for Memphis-Shelby County Schools denied that they had placed restrictions on the authors’ event.—M.S.

Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

SEEN AND HEARD

From left, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa.

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SEEN AND HEARD

Book: Trump Hung Up on Kim Kardashian Jonathan Karl reports that the former president rejected a clemency plea from the star.

Monica Schipper/Getty Images

A new book claims that Donald Trump abruptly ended a phone call with Kim Kardashian after she called asking him to endorse her efforts to gain clemency for prisoners, Axios reports.

Jonathan Karl makes the claim in Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, published in November by Dutton.

Kardashian, the socialite and media personality, is known for her prison reform activism. In 2018, she urged Trump to commute the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a Tennessee woman who had been convicted of a first-time nonviolent drug offense; Trump did so.

After Trump left the presidency, Karl writes, Kardashian called him to ask for his endorsement of more commutations.

“Hell no, the former president told her,” Karl writes. “He wouldn’t do it.

‘You voted for Biden and now you come asking me for a favor,’ Trump told her.” (Kardashian has never publicly said who

she voted for in 2020.)

Trump, according to Karl, then hung up on her.

A spokesperson for Trump responded with what Axios says is an all-purpose statement about Karl’s book, calling it “filth” that “belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”—M.S. paper.”

Kardashian is known for her prison reform activism.

To read our review of Tired of Winning, visit Kirkus online or see p. 72.

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white people would bristle at the idea that they are racist; many are liberal Democrats or “wannabe wokes” who vigorously denounce white supremacy. Still, Gilliam asserts, they’re steeped in a racist culture that’s taught them racial stereotypes and fed their assumptions about people of color. “Real racism,” she’s discovered, “involves everyday white people who work with you, screen candidates at your job, live with you, walk dogs near your home, play with your kids, and sit at your holiday dinner table.” The author provides a practical manual for white people who are “floundering in cross-racial interactions and slipping when sharing views on people of color.”

In seven sections that encompass 30 rules, the book presents situationspecific dos and don’ts on issues such as racial injustice, violence, cultural appropriation, microaggressions, and tokenism, with one overarching Race Rule: “Choose To Disrupt Racism Every Day.” Each section ends with questions for self-reflection, which Gilliam underscores as crucial for change. “Without self-reflection and personal accountability,” she writes, “few will see nor admit that through their actions and apathy they oppress, cause pain, and disadvantage people of color to maintain power and privilege.” Systemic advantages fuel white privilege, Gilliam argues, debunking the myth of the American dream, which she sees as elusive for people of color, while white people benefit from White Welfare: “society’s ultimate entitlement program for whites built on historic oppression, racial discrimination, and white-centered opportunity.”

Well-informed, hard-hitting advice for antiracists.

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring Gooch, Brad | Harper/HarperCollins (512 pp.) | $37.50 | March 5, 2024 9780062698261

The life and legacy of an instantly recognizable artist.

Biographer, novelist, and memoirist Gooch draws on archival sources to chronicle the energetic life of Keith Haring (1958-1990), who “occupied a space both in high fine art culture and low demotic street art.”

The son of an amateur cartoonist, as a child Haring was obsessed with Dr. Seuss and Disney. “His number one obsession through all his school years,” Gooch writes, “remained the magic box of television,” which transported him outside of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The author traces Haring’s exposure to art at several art schools, notably New York’s School of Visual Arts, where he enrolled in the fall of 1978. There, Gooch reveals, he “quickly adopted and adapted the various innovative movements and styles” to which he was being exposed. As Haring searched for his identity as an artist, he also came to terms with his sexuality. At camp, when he was a young teenager, he’d felt his first attraction to a boy.

By the time he came to New York, he methodically “made coming out into a project, an item on a to-do list.”

Haring is the central figure in Gooch’s lively portrayal of a roiling art world and of gay culture in the 1980s. By 1981, Haring was sought after by collectors, but he became frustrated

A sympathetic and well-researched portrait.

RADIANT

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“at the disconnect between his popular success and his lagging acceptance by the art establishment.” Nevertheless, among the glitterati populating “the moveable scene” he created around himself were Madonna, Sean Lennon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol. Gooch’s Haring was a romantic, “boyish, sweet, innocent” and “not quite grown-up.” His logo was the image of a baby, “the purest and most positive experience of human existence,” wrote Haring.

“Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form.”

A sympathetic and well-researched portrait.

My Brother’s Keeper: Netanyahu, Obama, & the Year of Terror & Conflict That Changed the Middle East Forever Harow, Ari | Bombardier Books (272 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 23, 2024 | 9798888450130

An insider’s account of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government in a time of crisis.

Though Harow’s book is unquestionably timely, given the renewed hot war with Hamas, the narrative centers on the military operation that gives the book its title.

In 2014, Hamas terrorists kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers, leading to a fierce Israeli response that included aerial and naval bombardment of Gaza and, soon after, an invasion by the Israeli Defense Forces.

According to Harow, a former chief of staff to Netanyahu, he was just the right man for the task, “an alpha male who was perfect for the job of prime minister.” But Netanyahu had to contend not just with Hamas but with Barack Obama, who hoped to broker peace in the region, a nuclear deal with Iran, and, eventually, the creation of a Palestinian state. “The Obama White House did not want to see an escalation of hostilities between KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A lively history of early New York through one woman’s horrendous ordeal.

TH E WITC H O F N EW YO R K

Israel and Hamas,” Harow writes, “but it offered no other solution to defend the population of southern Israel and preserve our national integrity.” In the end, Hamas’ actions were selfdestructive, bringing American arms to bear in the region while helping heal some of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu. Furthermore, notes the author, Netanyahu, though known to be abrasive, has also shown attributes of a shrewd diplomat, maintaining an uneasy status quo relationship with Putin’s Russia while also exploiting the desires of surrounding Muslim nations to improve their standing with the U.S. Harow is unapologetic in his support for Netanyahu and a hardliner in defense of Israel (“Evil [has] to be shown no quarter”), but, allowing for that, he also offers a revealing look at how the Israeli government works within what he characterizes as “a fractious nation.”

A useful aid to understanding today’s headlines as well as Israel’s recent past.

Back From the Deep: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead Horner, Doug | Steerforth (320 pp.) | $29.95 March 12, 2024 | 9781586423841

The story of an Idaho couple who have spent their retirement years searching for and recovering the bodies of drowning victims.

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number of recovery missions over a three-year period. Traveling in a motor home and hauling their specially equipped boat, the couple have covered much of the U.S. and Canada, using sonar to explore lakes and rivers for lost bodies. Despite a somewhat rambling presentation, the author provides a good general picture of how the Ralstons’ technology works, but this narrative is less about tech than human interest: the story of the Ralstons and the people they have encountered during their missions.

Sandy and Gene met on a college biology trip to Mexico and went on to work as environmental consultants and take part in scuba diving trips around the world. Later they built and raced jet boats. In 1996, when they lost a friend in a boating accident while surveying the Snake River, they found a new focus in life. After experiencing the loss of a friend, they found they were adept at connecting with the families and friends of those they were searching for. Working in concert with local police and the families of the missing, they use eyewitness evidence and other local knowledge to help them narrow their search patterns, but when it comes time to drop their sonar “torpedo” into the water and look for objects on the bottom, their expertise is the deciding factor. Not all their searches are successful—of the ones Horner was along for, only a couple yielded results—but their

For more on early NYC tabloid journalism, visit Kirkus online.

record, and their dedication, are truly impressive.

A straightforward, inspiring look at two people doing demanding work to bring closure to the families of drowning victims.

The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice Hortis, Alex | Pegasus Crime (368 pp.) $29.95 | March 5, 2024 | 9781639363919

The sad, sordid story of the first American woman to face trial for capital murder.

Mary Houseman Bodine (c.

1810-1892) was excoriated as “a fallen woman” and murderer before she was even tried in court for the deaths of her sister-in-law and infant niece in 1843.

Having moved back to her father’s house on Staten Island, after leaving her abusive husband and taking her two children with her, Bodine often stayed over at her brother’s cottage, which was adjacent to her father’s.

On the night of the crime, with only a shaky alibi when the house next door burned down, and perhaps the last to have seen her sister-in-law alive, Bodine was quickly suspected of the murders and also robbery, compounded by her disappearing into Manhattan and apparently pawning items at shops around town. Hortis, a constitutional lawyer, crime historian, and author of The Mob and the City, looks at how the rivaling tabloids and their owners—including James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Moses Yale Beach of the Sun—tried to outdo each other in sensational coverage of Bodine’s story, relying on hearsay and fabrication to sell more papers. The author capably describes the melee of commerce and scandal that bristled in early New York City. The details that emerged—of Bodine’s romance with an apothecary in Manhattan, the boss of her teenaged apprentice son, JANUARY 1, 2024

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and her advanced pregnancy—added to the prurient interest at the time, as did articles by Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman and a witchlike wax figure in P.T. Barnum’s museum.

Hortis has combed the archives for material related to Bodine’s three explosive trials, and the book ultimately ends in her acquittal in a Newburgh, New York, court in 1846; he makes palpable the shameful character assassination and “slut-shaming” that Bodine endured.

A lively history of early New York through one woman’s horrendous ordeal.

Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation Hunter, Marcus | Amistad/HarperCollins (336 pp.) | $29.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 9780063004726

A heartfelt exploration of disenfranchised Black lives and what long-awaited reparations for slavery could look like.

In 2018, Hunter, a professor of sociology and African American Studies and “coiner of #BlackLivesMatter,” began working with Congresswoman Barbara Lee to develop Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) “as a significant marker and movement toward repair after four hundred years of living with and in the sin of slavery.”

In this work, the author delineates seven forms of reparations for formerly enslaved people—political, intellectual, legal, economic, social, spatial, and spiritual—in the form of parables based on historical events. The first story takes place days before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, legitimizing, among other things, Black property ownership rights in Jubilee, South Carolina, which was founded in 1865 by Rev. Calvin John Calhoun and his small congregation using the provision of 40 acres 70

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Jay combines therapeutic experience with personal insights, providing a wealth of guidance.

T H E T W E N T Y S O M E T H I N G T R E AT M E N T

stipulated by Gen. Sherman’s Special Field Order Number 15. In a second parable, a longtime Black housekeeper for the Hoffmans, a white family living in a Jewish settlement in Uganda, has just been awarded the deed for the spacious house in 1979 and moved in, along with her family, as the Hoffmans departed for Israel—before being caught in the coup d’etat that deposed former president Idi Amin. Hunter also looks at the descendants of an enslaved African father and son, set adrift after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1827. They arrived in South Africa and started a business that was eventually ruptured by apartheid. Though occasionally long-winded, the deeply layered parables touch on all levels of psychic and physical wounds involved in the history of slavery in the U.S. For another powerful case for reparations, turn to David Montero’s The Stolen Wealth of Slavery.

A moving collection of human stories underscores a hope for “radical reckoning.”

The Twentysomething Treatment: A Revolutionary Remedy for an Uncertain Age Jay, Meg | Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $27.99 | April 9, 2024 | 9781668012291

Caught between adolescence and maturity, twentysomethings are spiraling into crisis, argues a developmental clinical psychologist.

The time between the ages of 20 and 30 is often depicted as a time of freedom,

experimentation, and personal growth.

Jay, a clinical psychologist who specializes in this age group, disagrees.

Her experience, which she bolsters with medical statistics, is that members of this demographic are likely to face depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and loneliness, and their common responses—to reach for therapy, medication, recreational drugs, or social media—often make their problems worse. They seem to have little idea about how to make friends and build relationships, and they’re constantly worried that any emotional connection will leave them hurt and scarred. They crave certainty, but as the author shows, that’s not going to happen. Jay has plenty of stories to illustrate her points, and she’s constantly surprised that the people she treats seem so unprepared for adult life. She covered some of this territory in an earlier book, The Defining Decade, and this book can be read as a follow-up concerned primarily with possible remedies. Even with her solid psychotherapy credentials, Jay’s focus is on non-medical solutions. She offers practical advice on developing social relationships, choosing a suitable job, finding a purpose, and even falling in love. Learning to cook—actual cooking, not throwing something into the microwave—is surprisingly beneficial.

So is physical movement, whether it’s a dance class or a stroll around the block. The author also notes that readers should be prepared to accept some scrapes and bruises as essential parts of growing up. “Life is the best therapist of all,” Jay concludes, “and it is affordable, accessible, and right outside your door.”

Jay combines therapeutic experience with personal insights, providing a wealth of guidance to those who most need it.

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Kirkus Star

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World Joyce, Patrick | Scribner (400 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781668031087

A British historian looks deeply into the lost past of the peasantry, people who “hope for the future but do not forget the past.”

For most of history, Joyce writes, most people belonged to the peasantry, the class of people who made their living from the land. They were concentrated in scattered villages that favored something approaching democratic rule, even in the face of larger, more autocratic systems. The author focuses on Ireland, Poland, and southern Italy, but he also ranges widely. One surprise is how rapidly peasant communities have declined as agriculture has become less central to national and international economies. The famed English village of Akenfield, for example, the subject of a canonical book of rural sociology, has largely been gentrified and its past commodified, although the village does have “some Polish immigrant workers, people now more likely to have been peasants than anyone in the place.” Across the narrow sea, “rural Ireland has receded from people’s daily awareness,” with farmland now retired for leisure and tourism. Even the Mezzogiorno of Italy, considered “among the most ‘backward’ [areas] in Europe,” has become relatively wealthy. Joyce lauds many of the habits of agricultural peoples, including economic awareness, adaptability, and generosity. For example, he notes, in rural communities, money was loaned without interest, which by definition separated peasants from capitalists; politics tended to be decentralized, resistant to central authority, and bent in many cases toward anarchism (“not surprisingly, given peasant distrust KIRKUS REVIEWS

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of the state”); and religious belief preserved archaic and even pre-Christian beliefs while being being marked by “its lack of dogma, its indifference to theology, its human-centered God.” Why remember these peasants? As Joyce replies resoundingly, “We have a debt to those forgotten by history”: a debt that this elegantly written book seeks to repay.

A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider Kakutani, Michiko | Crown (256 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780525574996

A prize-winning literary critic delves into the reasons for social dislocation.

Kakutani, author of The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, was a book reviewer for the New York Times from 1983 to 2017, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1998. She has attracted ire as well as applause throughout her career, and her latest book will probably continue that trend. Her unoriginal thesis is that we are living in a period of radical change, technological disruption, and spreading chaos. She lines up the usual suspects for assessment: the Covid-19 pandemic, the dangers of social media, the loss of faith in institutions, the collapse of geopolitical and cultural boundaries. The problem is that all of this has been examined in countless articles and books over the past decade, and Kakutani fails to add unique insight. It’s clear that the author has read widely, but the text’s saturation with references often becomes a distraction. The author is snarky in a way that may appeal to denizens of New York City literary circles, and, given the nearly 170 references to him, the book could have been titled Reasons To Hate Donald Trump—some version

of which has been written many times already. Kakutani’s previous book was almost entirely about her disdain for the former president, and she re-tills too much of the same ground here. She extends her antipathy to conservative Supreme Court judges and, in most cases, to anyone not as far to the left as she is. This admittedly well-researched book, which contains justified anger at the current political landscape, will appeal mostly to those who share the author’s ideological views. Others will find the instructive messages buried under too much rancor and spite.

Kakutani ranges broadly across issues but ultimately has little new to say.

Kirkus Star

3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool Kaplan, James | Penguin Press (496 pp.) $32.00 | March 5, 2024 | 9780525561002

How three titans of jazz came together to create magic.

Kaplan, the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, gives us a peek inside group genius at work. In smooth, evocative prose, Kaplan memorably demonstrates the “thrill of this great and never-fading music” during the period between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. After riffing on interviewing Miles Davis for Vanity Fair and Davis’ bumpy relationship with Wynton Marsalis, the author smoothly transitions to a host of meticulous narratives about the intersecting lives of iconic musicians. Davis, a highly gifted young trumpeter, joined Billy Eckstine’s star-studded band—Sarah Vaughn, Art Blakey, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie—after high school. Then it was on to New York City and Juilliard, briefly, before a series of club bands, playing alongside JANUARY 1, 2024

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Parker and Gillespie and laying down new vibes and bebop. Then Kaplan digs deep into John Coltrane and the legendary jams and recording sessions, everyone’s frustrations at playing in Parker’s shadow, and mounting deaths from heroin. Throughout this vibrant text, the author captures the time and atmosphere perfectly—the music, the personalities, the fragrant aroma of weed in the air—and he brings us right into the performances, unwinding the subtle nuances in the music and keeping up with the always-fluctuating band configurations over the years in numerous cities. Heroin took a toll on Davis as well, and in 1955, Parker died at age 34. The third piece of this musical tale, the accomplished pianist Bill Evans, got “thrown into the deep end of the pool—and, to his own surprise, stayed afloat” in 1958, performing in the Miles Davis Sextet. A year later, they came together again, “heading for parts unknown,” and created a “timeless album,” Kind of Blue.

A marvelous must-read for jazz fans and anyone interested in this dynamic period of American music.

Kirkus Star

Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party Karl, Jonathan | Dutton (336 pp.) | $32.00 Nov. 14, 2023 | 9780593473986

Another damning portrait of a disastrous administration.

“I am your retribution,” Trump promised his followers in a recent speech, since elaborated on with threats to root out “junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals, and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.” As ABC News chief Washington correspondent Karl writes, none other than Steve Bannon himself pointed out to him that retribution was a code word employed by Confederate agents in a plot to assassinate Lincoln.

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Trump may be undisciplined and often unhinged, but he tells you who he is and what he means: The promised concentration camps for undocumented immigrants are likely not metaphors.

After the 2020 election, Karl reveals, an irate, ego-deflated Trump threatened to leave the GOP and form his own party. He was dissuaded from doing so not by RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s pleas for party loyalty, but instead by her threat of withdrawing millions of dollars in funding from him.

Karl rightfully asks, Why not let the “wounded, vindictive, and angry former president” go? After all, as many GOP insiders have said behind closed doors, Trump is a loser. With him, the GOP has lost two midterms and a presidential election, and it’s demonstrable that non-Trump GOP candidates won in 2022 while pro-Trumpers lost. Still, Karl notes, Trump has a stranglehold on the GOP, so much so that “there may be no quicker way to lose a 2024 Republican presidential primary than to admit you’d consider trying to oust Donald Trump from office.” Just ask Liz Cheney. Other intriguing nuggets from this news-packed and newsworthy book: Trump fell full tilt under the sway of a QAnon theory that he’d be reinstated as president by a court decision, and, “more detached from reality than ever,” he now views the Jan. 6 rioters as heroes.

Excellent reporting and assured writing—an ominous warning.

Kirkus Star

Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability Kimmage, Michael | Oxford Univ. (304 pp.) $29.99 | March 22, 2024 | 9780197751794

The background to one of the most dangerous geopolitical clashes of the post–Cold War era.

Kimmage, a history professor and author of Abandonment of the

West, admits that he is not an expert on Ukraine. As a scholar in political science, however, he provides wellinformed and realistic, if bleak, context for current events. Russia’s 2022 invasion, writes the author, marked the end of “three of the most peaceful, most promising, most prosperous decades in European history.”

Upon Ukrainian independence in 1991, U.S. officials treated the new nation lazily, overpromising (dangling but refusing NATO membership in 2008) and then refusing to arm it after Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014.

With no nostalgia for communism but yearning (along with most Russians) to make his nation powerful again on the global stage, Putin noted that NATO had also declined to admit Georgia in 2008. A few months later, his army invaded Georgia, and America and its NATO allies expressed outrage but took no action. In 2014, the Russian army occupied Crimea and other areas in eastern Ukraine. Most Russians were pleased, while the U.S. and other powers expressed outrage and imposed sanctions but failed to take real action.

Putin regularly proclaims that the U.S. is an empire in decline. Kimmage admits that this is a reasonable impression, observing that 21st-century America has stumbled badly through two stalemated wars, a depression, and a disastrous presidency. Having triumphed in two earlier wars, Putin had no doubt he was on a roll, but matters did not work out so well in his third.

In a fitting conclusion to his wellresearched book, the author expresses mild approval of Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he knows too much history to predict a satisfying outcome.

Political maneuvering rarely begets a page-turner, but Kimmage’s insightful account is just that.

To read our review of Jonathan Karl’s Betrayal, visit Kirkus online.

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Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines Kino, Carol | Scribner (432 pp.) | $29.00 March 5, 2024 | 9781982113049

The story of identical twins who forged bright careers as photographers.

Arts journalist Kino makes her book debut with an engaging dual biography of Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin, notable photographers whose work both reflected and shaped women’s changing lives. In their second year as art students at the Pratt Institute, both became enraptured by photography and took to the streets of New York with their cameras. Their first published photographs appeared in the 1940 edition of College Bazaar, one of many new magazines marketed for “fashionable and discerning coeds.”

A combination of talent, ambition, and luck marked their careers: At 23, Franny was hired as a staff photographer for Condé Nast Photo Studios, the lone woman “in a firmament of male stars” such as Irving Penn and André Kertész. Her sister, known as Fuffy, became the assistant of Toni Frissell, the only woman photographer at Vogue, who became an intrepid photojournalist. As Kino traces the twins’ growing successes, she chronicles changes in fashion, women’s roles and opportunities, magazine rivalries, and the effects of World War II on the profession of photography. After the war, “photography had fully infiltrated magazines, but America was no longer obsessed with college and career girls, and the swell of publications tied to the boundless opportunity symbolized by their youth, talent, and beauty was receding.” Franny stayed at Condé Nast, Fuffy turned to children’s portraits, and their lives proceeded in twin trajectories. Both married New York photographers: Fuffy to “supersuccessful studio specialist” James Abbe, noted for his fashion and KIRKUS REVIEWS

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celebrity portraits, and Franny to Leslie Gill, “the father of modern American still life photography,” for whom she’d worked as his girl Friday. They celebrated their successes in a joint autobiography, Twin Lives, and died within months of each other, in 2014.

A colorful cultural history emerges from two eventful lives.

Kirkus Star

An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America Kozol, Jonathan | The New Press (224 pp.) $24.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781620978726

A celebrated educational thinker takes stock of segregation in American schools.

Kozol, a former public school teacher, has been writing about America’s educational system for more than five decades, and he’s the author of such classics as the National Book Award–winning Death at an Early Age and Savage Inequalities. Although Brown v. Board of Education theoretically ended segregation, the author points out that the practice “continues unabated and is presently at its highest level since the early 1990s.” Students who attend predominantly Black and Latine schools must contend with a host of unnecessary disciplinary tactics, including being forbidden to ask questions in class, getting sent to “isolation rooms” for minor infractions, and even getting arrested at ages as young as 6. None of these tactics, writes Kozol, affect their white peers.

The culture of these schools isn’t the only problem: Many of their buildings are bastions of “squalor and decrepitude,” with unusable bathrooms and shockingly dangerous levels of lead exposure. Ever since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, schools serving Black and brown students have tended to prioritize testing over

content. This is particularly true in language arts, where districts eschew novels for bite-sized passages and ban books that “foster critical thinking or address the conflicts that divide us, based on gender, class, and race.” Citing the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, as well as his own experience teaching for a school integration program, Kozol convincingly argues that integration is the only way to address “the achievement gap between Black and white students.” The book thoroughly displays the author’s eloquence, conviction, expertise, and attention to detail. Most impressive is Kozol’s ability to draw connections among disparate events to illustrate the underlying systems driving the nation’s greatest inequities.

An inspired and insightful analysis of race-based challenges in the American school system.

Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan Lal, Ruby | Yale Univ. (296 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780300251272

A historian of India reveals the lush world of a 16th-century Mughal princess and her extraordinary pilgrimage to Mecca in 1578.

Lal, a professor of South Asian studies and author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, brings us the fascinating story of Gulbadan Begum (1523-1603), daughter of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. In her position, she became a valuable literary witness to this rich period of Indian history. Deeply immersed in the early nomadic lifestyle of the court, which “inhabited the urbanity of Persian culture,” Gulbadan, at age 6, moved from the royal household in Kabul to Agra when Babur subdued Hindustan and needed “extensive settlement in this new land.” Raised by several of >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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“An undeniably unique metaphysical adventure.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) for Shallcross: The Underwater Panthers

ISBN: 978-0-9894256-8-1

“Surreal, poetic and unforgettable: a truly original voice.”

“Another beautifully original, striking, and poetic novel.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) for Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral

ISBN: 978-0-9894256-2-9

— Kirkus Reviews for Flame Vine

ISBN: 978-0-9894256-0-5

“An unforgettable tale...”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) for Shallcross: Animal Slippers

“...the work of a brilliant novelist.”

— Blue Ink (starred review) for Shallcross: Animal Slippers

ISBN: 978-0-9894256-4-3

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A U D I O B O O K S // N O N F I C T I O N

Great American Stories Three new audiobooks offer true tales full of local color—and big personalities.

BY MARION WINIK

REBECCA RENNER

narrates the introduction to her dazzling debut, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades (Macmillan Audio, 12 hours and 2 minutes), explaining how a student in her small-town Florida literature class first told her this wild-sounding tale about a sting operation that had brought down a poaching racket in the Everglades.

John Pirhalla takes over the reading when the main narrative begins, proving himself a master of the various drawls and twangs

that bring to life Renner’s compelling characterizations of people on both sides of the law. At the center is Jeff Babauta, a wildlife officer who went undercover for more than a year as a dude named Curtis Blackledge.

Using an imaginary trust fund to open an alligator farm outside the town of Arcadia, Blackledge befriended the local players and accompanied them on their illicit journeys into the swamp, using hidden cameras, hat-brim recorders, and even invisible ink to gather evidence while nearly

being unmasked. Renner illuminates the roles played by development, tourism, and economic hardship, showing us that the line between heroes and bad guys is not easy to draw.

Devoted readers of the New York Times will quickly find themselves obsessed with The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism, by Adam Nagourney (Penguin Random House Audio, 18 hours and 53 minutes). This history of the paper, 19762016, written independently by one of the Times’ finest reporters, is enlivened by you-are-there scenes in the newsroom, in hotel bars, and at the Hudson Valley corporate retreat center, and by revealing excerpts from private correspondence and journals. Robert Petkoff’s lucid voicing of the story lets the listener discover, alongside Nagourney, the shocking twists of fate, betrayals, and ego-driven mistakes that lay behind the rise and fall of Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Jill Abramson, Judith Miller, and others. Delving into the paper’s struggles with institutional racism and sexism and the challenges of the digital era (including backstory on the popular Cooking app), the narrative traces a throughline of great aspirations—and the hubris that goes with them.

“What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods,” gushed our reviewer in response to My Name Is Barbra (Penguin Random House Audio, 48 hours and 13 minutes), recorded by its superstar author with audio-only enhancements that mean you may have to take a week off to absorb the whole megillah! For the diva’s fans, that won’t be too long to immerse themselves in her wonderfully throaty, famously Brooklyn-accented storytelling. In fact, the truly faithful will probably buy the book as well, just so they can gain access to the photo section. The audio has over 50 ad libs and bonus elements—from a chance to hear the author/narrator illustrate her problems with the lyrics of Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End” by playing an excerpt from the recording (“What did ‘going down the stoney end’ even mean?” she demands), to substantial additions to the histories of other signature songs.

For “The Way We Were,” for example, she includes clips from a documentary about the film so we hear the original tune played by the composer on the piano and recordings of different versions of the melody and lyrics. Too much? Never!

Marion Winik hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader.

Jukka Aahlo/Unsplash

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the emperor’s wives, within a deeply erudite and warlike culture, Gulbadan suffered the death of her father in 1530 and witnessed the beginning of the rule of her nephew Akbar, whose long reign (as a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I) achieved the apotheosis of Mughal power and glory in India. Akbar permitted Gulbadan and a dozen other aristocratic women to travel the dangerous pilgrimage route to Mecca, where they caused such a sensation that Sultan Murad III of Turkey, custodian of the holy sites, ultimately evicted them. The entourage then wandered for four mysterious years, which Lal tracks through Gulbadan’s own book, which she called Conditions in the Age of Humayun Badshah. The author’s impressive scholarship encompasses Gulbadan’s immense influences and distinctive style, and she successfully raises this “audacious and unclassifiable” account of a keen observer and chronicler of her age into the literary ranks it deserves. Only one copy of this work survives, translated

by Annette Beveridge, “a British colonial-era scholar,” in the 1890s.

Lal also includes a helpful cast of characters at the beginning.

Finally, a serious consideration of Gulbadan’s achievement, long “sidelined by modern historians.”

Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty Larman, Alexander | St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $32.00 | April 30, 2024 | 9781250289599

The final installment of Larman’s royal trilogy.

The author concludes with more shocks to the Windsor dynasty: the death of George VI and the succession of Elizabeth II. Once again, the villain is the former king—Edward VIII, who became the Duke of Windsor after his abdication—whose postwar machinations 76

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A candid and instructive memoir about neurodivergence.

B U T E V E R Y O N E F E E L S T H I S W AY

sent his brother into an early grave.

Edward’s pertinacity in trying to secure a sinecure from the British government, bankroll his lavish expat lifestyle, and assure the use of the title HRH for Wallis Simpson, his duchess, continued to roil the British powers, specifically a Labour Party that had been voted in, booting out George VI’s favored Winston Churchill. The country was demoralized and still rationing when the young Elizabeth came of age and injected much-needed spirit and energy into the sclerotic dynasty, lifting the gloomy national mood. At the same time, she and her Greek-born prince, Philip Mountbatten, were courting, and rumors abounded. As usual, Larman offers many delicious behind-the-scenes details to this fairly well-known story, mining copious correspondence—such as from the gossipy then queen (aka the Queen Mother), who blamed the abdication crisis for her husband’s failing health.

With the king’s lung cancer advancing, one of Edward’s former courtiers at the palace even suggested that now was the time for him to finagle his way into being appointed regent for the next king. It is Larman’s depth of research into—and evident dislike for—the self-serving Edward that makes the narrative crackle, and the author is particularly critical of his use of a ghostwriter to craft his venal memoirs, essentially whitewashing the true story of his treachery. Among other relevant topics, Larman writes movingly about Churchill’s growing admiration for the new queen, and the five-page dramatis personae is helpful for keeping the characters straight.

A fitting conclusion to a memorable history.

But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life Layle, Paige | Hachette Go (240 pp.) $28.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9780306831256

A 20-something Canadian autism activist and social media influencer discusses how psychiatric diagnosis liberated her from the painful ignorance in which she had lived regarding her own autism.

As a child, Layle struggled with frequent panic attacks, hyperventilation, fits of crying “from stress, frustration, exhaustion, or all three at once,” and the inability to deal with changes to her daily routine. Others would try to comfort her with the observation that “everyone feels this way,” but no one could offer insights that could help her understand why her reactions were always so extreme or why she missed social cues and often felt so uncomfortable in her own skin. She wrote her first suicide letter when she was 8 and showed it to her mother, who could only tell her that “the things you’re upset about aren’t as big of a deal as you think.” In school, Layle discovered that while she excelled at anything that involved pattern recognition, like math or dance, she had extreme difficulty with tasks that required inference, such as literary analysis. On the verge of taking her own life, she was hospitalized at age 15 and diagnosed with autism. Gradually, the author learned that all the techniques—especially the social ones that had made her seem “too happy, too smiley, too skippy, too preppy” KIRKUS REVIEWS

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to her peers—were part of a larger strategy of “masking.” Medication helped—“With the medication, I’m no longer trapped in a situation where everything’s happening all at once and I can’t focus on one thing”—and the author was eventually able to celebrate her neurodivergence. Genuine and heartfelt, this book will appeal to Layle’s many followers on YouTube and TikTok as well as anyone seeking insight into what it means to live as a young woman navigating autism.

A candid and instructive memoir about neurodivergence.

My Effin’ Life Lee, Geddy | Harper/HarperCollins (512 pp.) $45.00 | Nov. 14, 2023 | 9780063159419

The thunderous bassist and vocalist for the prog rock band Rush tells all.

“It’s a common mistake to assume that when a kid (or an adult for that matter) is quiet, he must be some sort of deep thinker. In my case I’m afraid it was simply that I didn’t have much to say.”

So writes Lee, born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib in 1953 to Holocaust-survivor immigrants to Canada. It turns out that he has plenty to say. Part of this mostly good-natured memoir is an account of growing up as a “nerdy Jewish kid” in the Toronto suburbs. Like other budding musicians, Lee found a turning point when Ed Sullivan aired the Beatles, though he was less impressed by the Fab Four than his sister was.

Forming a band with schoolmates, he picked up the bass after drawing a literal short straw, which “was fine by me—it had fewer strings.” Eventually falling in with drummer Neil Peart For more titles by Lawrence Lessig, visit Kirkus online.

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and guitarist Alex Lifeson, he formed Rush, opening for the likes of Kiss before becoming a headliner act. Lee is full of good humor as he recounts his experiences on the road: “Rock Star Lesson #1: Do NOT drop psychedelics before an interview.” “Rock Star Lesson #2: Famous people can be dicks.” The author is testier when he writes about his personal politics, and he has high praise for Canada’s social safety net.

“Sure, we pay more taxes than many others do,” he writes, “but I prefer to live in a world that gives a shit, even for people I don’t know.” Lee also has choice words for those who criticize his histrionic, high-pitched vocal delivery: “Don’t like the way I sing? Well then, I invite you to fuck the fuck off and move along to something more suitable to your sensitive tastes.”

A grand entertainment for fans of Rush and classic rock.

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life Lenz, Lyz | Crown (288 pp.) | $28.00 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780593241127

The joys of being unmarried.

Journalist Lenz, author of God Land and Belabored, celebrates freedom, independence, and love in an irreverent memoir about her deeply unsatisfying marriage and eventual divorce. Drawing on interviews with women, newspaper and magazine reports, and academic studies, the author portrays marriage as “a political and cultural and romantic institution that asks too much of wives and mothers and gives too little in return.”

Nevertheless, women face abundant cultural pressure to marry. Persuaded by movies, books, religious leaders, and their own parents, many women grow up convinced that finding a husband defines their self-worth: The roles of wife and mother become pinnacles of achievement. Government policies promote heterosexual, monogamous

marriage by providing tax breaks and financial incentives to married couples. Even women with demanding, abusive, or unfaithful spouses are exhorted to stay married for the sake of their children. Country music, Lenz observes, pictures “our cowboys taking us away, claiming there is freedom in love.” Sociologists, cultural critics, and historians, though, have revealed widespread unhappiness consistent with her own experiences. Her husband resented her professional success. “The closer I came to achieving my dreams,” she writes, “the more my home life fell apart.” He constantly demeaned her, going so far as to take things of hers that he didn’t like and hiding them in a box. Finding the box set her on the “demolition project” that ended the marriage. “At what point is the misery worth it?” she asked herself. To women who worry that being a single parent is harder than having a husband, Lenz attests that divorce freed her to find help from a supportive community, have better sex, and achieve happiness for herself and her children. Far from being a sign of failure, divorce, she argues persuasively, can be a source of liberation.

A well-researched, acerbic critique of a sacred institution.

How To Steal a Presidential Election Lessig, Lawrence & Matthew Seligman Yale Univ. (176 pp.) | $26.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780300270792

Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.

“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman.

We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, JANUARY 1, 2024

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trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election.

The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”

Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.

Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future Lewis, Daniel | Illus. by Eric Nyquist Avid Reader Press (336 pp.) | $30.00 March 12, 2024 | 9781982164058

The lifestyles of 12 magnificent trees conveyed through science and history.

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A well-informed, staunch defense of trees’ capacity to multiply biodiversity.

T W E LV E T R E E S

dozen. Each has captivated the human imagination even as we have drastically reduced their numbers, from the coast redwoods of Northern California and baobabs of Africa to the olive trees of the Middle East and the bald cypress of the southeastern U.S. coastal plain. The author, environmental historian and curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Southern California, offers a meticulous survey of these species, as well as their personal histories and importance, without succumbing to familiar bromides. He writes not in a hectoring, calamitous tone, but in a comradely one, hoping we are as concerned as is. He deals with the complexities of conservation efforts (and resistance to them) with an even hand, and the book is as rigorous as it is readable. The author, who also serves on the faculty at Caltech, reminds us that the time to campaign for a species’ survival is when it is at its most prolific, rather than being in decline, because abundance offers more lessons than loss. He also questions our certitude as to what, over the passage of time, is and is not an indigenous or “invasive” tree—such as the alternately loved and loathed blue gum eucalyptus, introduced to California from Australia. Lewis also explores the strategies, old and new, involved in aiding species’ survival.

The author clearly regards trees as the heartbeat of the world, providing “a bulwark against a changing climate, offering nourishment, rest and sustenance for other species, and space and quiet in their midst.”

A well-informed, staunch defense of trees’ capacity to multiply biodiversity and support life on Earth.

We’re Live in 5: My Extraordinary Life in Television Margolis, Jeff with Loren Stephens Post Hill Press (240 pp.) | $32.00 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9798888451168

A memoir by an acclaimed live-TV event director and producer.

As the director of the Academy Awards for numerous years, Margolis has been in charge of shaping stories as they happen for millions of viewers. Shaping his own story has proven a bit tougher. It’s a difficult balancing act, with the author explaining how he’s driven enough to helm the biggest TV specials yet avuncular enough to handle many of the biggest stars in entertainment (and their egos). Margolis is more interested in exploring the latter than the former, though even his 11 rules of advice for how to follow in his footsteps include “Be kind” three times. Considering his live-TV background, it’s no surprise that he wants to keep things moving quickly, but Margolis has plenty of wisdom to impart. His decision to stick with Steven Spielberg’s mother’s reaction to his Best Director win for Schindler’s List in 1994 is a smart and fascinating tale of preparation and moment-making—and, no doubt, such things happen at least once during every Oscar or American Music Awards ceremony. In much of the narrative, the author focuses on who was nice to him (Paul Newman, Amy Grant) and who was not so nice (Barbra Streisand, Bill Cosby). Cosby wanted more diversity on his show KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Cos, but Margolis said he couldn’t find enough experienced minorities.

“Thinking about this moment in light of today’s efforts to bring more diversity in front of and behind the camera, it’s embarrassing,” writes the author. “But that’s the way things were.” A little more introspection would have gone a long way in taking this from a breezy career retrospective to something more meaningful for the entire entertainment industry. Billy Crystal provides the foreword.

Margolis’ memoir speeds through his life like a live TV show, blunting the impact of fascinating experiences.

Attack From Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America McQuade, Barbara | Seven Stories (416 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781644213636

A legal scholar examines disinformation as a go-to in the authoritarian toolbox.

Disinformation is ubiquitous and often laughably transparent, as when Trump brays about the 2020 election, but it works. As McQuade notes, twothirds of Republicans believe that “the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true…and that violence is a legitimate response.” The Jan. 6 insurrection may just have been a practice run, but meanwhile the disinformation flows, abetted by election deniers who have been busily taking over state and local GOP branches and becoming overseers of future elections. McQuade examines several aspects of the playbook. One longtime Trump ploy is to paint his opponents with idiotic epithets such as “Sleepy Joe” and “Ron DeSanctimonious,” which “seem juvenile, but they serve the same manipulative purpose as other forms of disinformation.”

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government malfeasance and corruption are more widespread than the facts warrant, constantly hunting for the next scandal. Disinformation is a Clausewitzian war by other means, a way of dominating and diminishing opponents without violence, and it relies on constant lying. The current GOP dogma, for example, is not just that Trump won in 2020, but also that we live in a republic and not a democracy that demands that our leaders should make decisions for us, “providing cover for far-right values that are not shared by the majority of Americans.” McQuade’s handbook doesn’t add much to the literature on disinformation, but as a national security prosecutor, she’s well placed to liken what’s going on now to al-Qaeda’s mastery of digital media “to recruit and radicalize members with propaganda”—a thought guaranteed to trouble one’s sleep.

The book has little news for anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s a useful overview all the same.

Kirkus Star

What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms Metzl, Jonathan M. | Norton (304 pp.) $29.99 | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781324050254

A penetrating look at our failed attempts to curb gun violence.

In April 2018, 29-year-old Travis Reinking, “another angry white man with a gun,” drove from his home in Illinois to Nashville, where he opened fire on the late-night patrons of a Waffle House, most of them young, working-class Black and Latine people. Four died in the shooting, and Reinking eluded capture for a couple of days. When he was caught, it was revealed that he suffered from mental illness and had acted in a threatening manner before. Metzl, a Nashville-based doctor

and sociologist and author of Dying of Whiteness, has been arguing for years that gun violence is a public health issue, an analysis that he now considers incomplete. “Strategies from the tobacco wars, the seat belt wars, or other last-century profits-versus-people contests were never going to change the terms of the debate,” he writes.

Instead, the epidemic of mass-shooter gun violence, almost all committed by young white men, is the logical manifestation of “a larger racial conflict that [aims] to correct past wrongs and guard against encroachment from woke liberals, undeserving minorities, coastal elites, and overreaching governments.” In other words, it’s not a bug but a feature, and any meaningful gun reform must be a subset of a larger effort to erase inequalities and advance civil rights. The problem of Reinking, like that of all those other angry young white men, is structural, his actions “buoyed by laws, judges, social mores, financial systems, permissive policies, and centuries of history that [have] defined guns as symbols of white liberty.” Metzl’s argument is consistently persuasive and, unfortunately, both timely and probably timeless, given the reluctance of those in power to do anything to halt the bloodshed.

A powerful, convincing effort to reframe the discussion around gun control and its discontents.

Kirkus Star

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality Montell, Amanda | One Signal/Atria (320 pp.) | $27.99 | April 9, 2024 9781668007976

A leading social commentator puts the weird trends of our time under the microscope.

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profound, timely question: How do we get out of the constant cycle of confusion, obsession, second-guessing, and information overload? The author approaches the dilemmas of the 21st century with her tongue firmly in her cheek, although she recognizes the way that “magical thinking,” or the belief that internal thoughts and feelings can affect unrelated events in the external world, is slowly unraveling our society.

The book is more a series of essays than a cohesive narrative, but Montell ably demonstrates the fundamental mismatch between the way our brains operate and a world defined by the internet, media saturation, and AI systems. It’s become almost impossible to separate truth from marketing ploys, so there’s a tendency to retreat into cynicism—or, even worse, conspiracy theories. Everything seems to be a crisis, pushed along by attention spans that continue to shrink. Montell covers a great deal of ground, from the “stans” (that is, stalker-fans) of celebrities, to mental health gurus selling “vibes,” to the allure of commercialized nostalgia. On the psychological side, the author leads us through the thickets of confirmation bias, the recency illusion, and the sunk-cost fallacy, and how such flawed thinking can undermine our attempts to make sense of the world. Montell is better at analysis than providing answers, but she believes that a good dose of considered self-awareness can go a long way. Getting away from the screen and doing something physical, even assembling furniture, can also be an antidote. The author presents an engaging package suitable for anyone who wants to better understand the chaos of our modern society.

Montell’s take on how irrationality went mainstream is informed by erudite wit and an eye for telling images.

For more on the battle to eradicate cancer, visit Kirkus online.

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Cat and Bird: A Memoir Mori, Kyoko | Belt Publishing (216 pp.) | $19.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9781953368690

A writer’s lessons and insights gleaned from a life spent with cats.

Mori, author of Polite Lies and The Dream of Water, unabashedly admits that her quest for solitude is central to her identity and critical to her contentment. “Both of my parents were charismatic extroverts,” she writes, “and I was the opposite.

I looked forward to rainy days so I could play alone in my room.” While the author broaches the subjects of painful family relationships left behind in Japan, her marriage and its dissolution, and a host of personal and professional friendships, her latest book focuses on her series of beloved pet cats. As companions, dependents, and mysterious creatures in their own right, Mori’s cats have given inimitable meaning and an understanding of what it means to bond or be connected in a life otherwise shaped by seclusion. Observing and reflecting on the animals’ patterns of behavior as well as her own attachment to them, the author indicates a profound self-awareness and personal intention, rooted in and driven by her mother’s death by suicide and the author’s subsequent adolescence spent, unhappily, with her father and his new wife. Mori’s style is quiet and subtle, marked by steady pensiveness rather than a rich personal narrative.

With sweet, touching humor, she teases metaphors and insights inspired both by her cats and by the birds that she studies and rehabilitates, but she largely leaves these thoughts to be fleshed out by readers. While this approach offers gravitas, it also reflects aloof detachment. As she moves among stories of her cats, jobs, and elements of her past, Mori explores how, in the company of only animals and oneself, one can come to

understand many different things that may elude comprehension in larger social settings.

A muted memoir that’s both meandering and meditative.

An Arrow’s Arc: Journey of a Physician-Scientist Nathan, Carl | Paul Dry Books (260 pp.) | $19.95 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9781589881853

The eloquent memoir of a doctor and medical researcher.

An excellent student, Nathan skipped several grades, attended Harvard Medical School, and specialized in oncology and immunology.

Working in two extremely challenging fields with countless complex, unsolved problems, he devoted himself to solutions and discovered a few, winning awards and honors before retiring as department chair at Weill Cornell Medicine. The son of two freelance writers, Nathan struggled socially in school: As the smartest in the class as well as the youngest and smallest (the result of skipping grades), he was a magnet for bullies.

His mother’s death from breast cancer did not drive his career (he had already been accepted to medical school), but a lifetime of near-death experiences— a consequence of the disordered immunity of severe asthma—gave his research its focus. Such experiences also seem to have driven his sympathy with the oppressed, because he digresses regularly to describe his political activism. At one point, Nathan makes an ingenious point: Identical cells and chemicals of our immune system fight both infections and cancers, but they have more success against infections. Why not examine this difference to find ways to do a better job against cancer? After an explanation of the immune system that may flummox readers who have forgotten college biology, the author describes his and colleagues’ efforts KIRKUS REVIEWS

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to do just that, relishing in detail that will appeal mostly to readers with a scientific background. Throughout, he aptly describes the thrill of discovery: “A discovery scientist needs to position herself or himself at the edge of what is known. To work at the edge requires high tolerance for anxiety. The reward can be the greatest scientific privilege of all: to see something for the first time, and then to see it again.”

A well-rendered portrait of an intense medical life devoted to equally intense research.

Kirkus Star

Like Love: Essays and Conversations Nelson, Maggie | Graywolf (336 pp.) $32.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781644452813

An exciting new essay collection from the author of The Argonauts and Bluets.

Poet and critic Nelson draws from nearly 20 years of her career to create this perceptive and lively book. She pulls together conversations, critical essays, cultural criticism, and tributes to the artists she loves, including Björk, Eileen Myles, Carolee Schneemann, Hilton Als, and Judith Butler.

Featuring her direct and incisive prose, Nelson’s examination of art and the people who make it is poignant and provocative. Her statement that “the art of our lives may not always be exactly where we presume it to be” is an assertion she demonstrates throughout. In assembly, these essays build a quilt of influences, friends, and loved ones. Nelson’s admiration and enthusiasm for her subjects is a palpable driver of joy and delight.

Additionally, the author possesses the ability to provide surprise and enchantment, and the chronological arrangement allows recurring themes to emerge and flow across the essays, creating an effective sense of a larger whole. Among the many topics Nelson KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A revelatory gathering of beloved art and artists presented with distinctive prose.

LIKE LOVE

explores are motherhood, pleasure, literature, violence, music, queerness, liberation, feminism, transgression, and, of course, love. Throughout the book, the author asks insightful, thought-provoking questions about the nature of art: “What does it really mean for a work of art or a body of work to perform a critique? Can images provide—and do we really want them to provide—‘critique’ in the same way that, say, discursive prose does?”

In an essay on Nayland Blake, Nelson asks, “How does someone fully inhabit and model a space of generosity, good witchery, and ‘niceness’ while making decidedly ‘not nice’ work? What is the relationship between grimness and pleasure?” The true delight in this winning collection is tracking the development of various themes across years and topics.

A revelatory gathering of beloved art and artists presented with distinctive prose.

Kirkus Star

The Garretts of Columbia: A Black South Carolina Family From Slavery to the Dawn of Integration Nicholson, David | Univ. of South Carolina (328 pp.) | $27.99 | Jan. 9, 2024 9781643364544

A searching family history, unfolding into a larger social history, by the noted Washington Post Book World writer and editor.

Nicholson’s forebears were descendants of enslaved people who

worked the fields of South Carolina, then defied societal expectations by becoming soldiers, Civil Rights workers, lawyers, writers, and scholars.

Such expectations extended into the author’s own time. As a student in Washington, D.C., it was “assumed all Black kids played basketball,” while a well-meaning if clueless schoolmate’s mother delivered a Thanksgiving meal out of concern that the Nicholsons could not provide a feast for themselves (they could). The author is a splendid storyteller. Having grown up hearing tales of “the African,” for instance, he relates what he was able to discover of a distant ancestor who “put down [roots] where he was, made the best of where he’d found himself, [and] reinvented himself as an American.” He purchased freedom for himself and that of his wife and two of his children, while his other children were sold, since he couldn’t afford to buy freedom for all.

Nicholson gamely admits that because the facts are scarce, “not knowing who he was, I can make him who I need him to be.” That ancestor provided a template for others, including a great-grandfather who was fearless and combative, “perhaps the most respected disliked man in Contemporary Negro life in South Carolina during the early years of the twentieth century.” That ancestor, an “Afro-Victorian” who believed in education, ambition, and hard work, set a template of his own.

Working these and other lives into a fluent and swift-moving narrative, Nicholson delivers a vivid portrait of eminent lives carried out in a society that did little to accommodate them: “They were far more faithful than the nation they loved deserved.”

A fascinating excursion into a past that, though relatively recent, has long been hidden from view.

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B O O K T O S C R E E N // N O N F I C T I O N

Book to Screen

Gotham/WireImage

Chris Rock To Direct King: A Life Film The movie will be based on Jonathan Eig’s bestselling biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is headed to the big screen with Chris Rock slated to direct and Steven Spielberg

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executive producing, Deadline reports.

Eig’s book, published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is the life story of Martin Luther King Jr. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the biography, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, “an extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.”

Universal Pictures optioned the rights to Eig’s book. Rock, the comedian and actor, is in negotiations to produce and direct; he has previously helmed the films Head of State, I Think I Love My Wife, and Top Five.

Spielberg will executive produce the adaptation. He

has expressed interest in making a movie about King before; in 2015, actor David Oyelowo said Spielberg had asked him if he would be open to playing the Civil Rights leader in a film. Spielberg bought the film rights to King’s speeches in 2009.

There’s no word yet as to who might portray King in the film. He has previously been portrayed by Oyelowo in Selma, LeVar Burton in Ali, Nelsan Ellis in The Butler, and Anthony Mackie in All the Way.—M.S.

Rock is in negotiations to executive produce the biopic.

To read our review of King: A Life, visit Kirkus online.

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Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services―Notes of a Former Caseworker Pryce, Jessica | Amistad/HarperCollins (288 pp.) | $28.99 | March 19, 2024 9780063036192

A child welfare activist tells the story of how she went from working with Child Protective Services to advocating for a complete overhaul.

Pryce began interning at CPS shortly after enrolling in a social work master’s degree program at Florida State. At first, she believed her job would simply entail “making sure that kids [were] safe.”

When she transitioned into a full-time role as a CPS investigator, however, recurring nightmares hinted that her work was far more problematic than she’d realized. Trauma seemed a built-in part of every case she worked on—and not just because of the parent/child separations CPS often enforced. Families, most of whom were Black, found themselves subjected to processes and procedures that never took into account individual circumstances and sometimes did more harm than good. Determined to find ways to speak on behalf of struggling parents rather than being part of a system that punished them, Pryce went into academia. During that time, she was asked to give expert witness testimony in a CPS court case, where she observed how systemic racism worked against an (ultimately innocent) Black mother named Jatoia. An episode of public domestic violence had caused Jatoia and her husband, Lawrence, to be charged with felony child abuse. Jatoia was fully exonerated after Lawrence confessed to dropping their infant son while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Yet CPS still legally terminated Jatoia’s parental rights. “A realization hit me with nauseating force: The system had more power than I ever knew,” writes the author, who began to 84

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work directly with community activists to support parents “reeling” from a white supremacist system bent on policing families rather than helping to rehabilitate them. As compelling as it is humane, Pryce’s book offers timely insight into a racist institution in desperate need of reform.

An illuminating, necessary sociological report.

A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into the Russian Civil War Reid, Anna | Basic Books (392 pp.) | $32.00 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781541619661

A thorough reconsideration of a conveniently forgotten “sideshow” to World War I: an ill-fated two-year attempt by the Allies to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution.

Historian Reid, author of The Shaman’s Coat, revisits a humiliating “little war” that ended with few tangible gains—other than independence for Latvia and Estonia—and did nothing to reverse the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. The fall of the tsarist regime at first came as a relief to the Allies then fighting Germany in WWI, yet when the ascendant revolutionary Reds, among the warring factions battling tsarist Whites, made the “outrageous” treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in late 1917, the Allies grew alarmed.

Up to that point, they had taken a “wait and see” attitude toward how the leadership would shake out in Russia— until they decided to secure the ports at Murmansk and Vladivostok. Reluctant U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to send troops to help Czechs wipe out pockets of resistance and secure the Trans-Siberian railroad.

Reid unearths significant information on the White-sponsored (and British-condoned) antisemitic pogroms across Ukraine and elsewhere that took place in 1919. “Even at the distance of a century, with 1919’s killings long overshadowed by the Holocaust,”

writes the author, “the fact that Britain knowingly funded, supplied, trained and sent men to fight alongside the armies that committed them is shocking and shameful.” Reid also knowledgeably chronicles the work of various Allied officers and Russians involved in the war, including their somewhat comic interactions and clashes of culture. The intervention ultimately involved 180,000 Allied troops from 15 countries; by 1920, Britain and America had moved on to domestic crises. The author astutely points out that the intervention contributed to “Europe’s fragmentation between the wars”—and later fed the Nazi demonization of Jews.

An elucidating work of research that resonates amid another ongoing intervention involving Russia.

Kirkus Star

Catastrophe Ethics: How To Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices Rieder, Travis | Dutton (336 pp.) | $30.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780593471975

An informed, careful investigation of the connection between individual choices and large, complex problems.

The problem of how to lead a good, unselfish life is timeless, and Rieder, an academic specializing in bioethics and author of In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle With Opioids, argues that the question has become even more important in the era of climate change, resource depletion, and other world-changing issues.

“What is each of us to do?” he asks as he examines various historical approaches. “How do we live a morally decent life when we can’t even get our arms around the problems?” Rieder doesn’t have much time for those who apparently hate to see anyone enjoying themselves, and even less for those who simply deny the challenges. Individual KIRKUS REVIEWS

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actions—such as reducing resource use and recycling—are important, but every action can generate new dilemmas. For example, does driving a Tesla mean supporting the exploitation of African cobalt miners? Must we calculate our environmental footprint on a daily basis? These kinds of inquiries can entirely consume one’s energies and lead to a dismal, over-audited life. There is an obligation to do the right thing, but you don’t have to be a miserable bully about it. In the closing sections, Rieder proposes some solutions. Do what you can with the resources and skills you have; push for major policy changes where possible; act rather than merely talk; and accept responsibilities small and large. In this multifaceted way, “we rescue our moral agency from the threat of nihilism” and “build a meaningful life.” This approach might disappoint readers who wanted a rousing to-the-barricades ending, but upon reflection, it might be the best advice possible.

With an open mind and a firm grasp of the issues, Rieder brings the question of living a decent life into the modern era.

Me and Mr. Jones: My Life With David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars Ronson, Suzi | Pegasus (352 pp.) | $29.95 April 4, 2024 | 9781639366569

A memoir from the stylist who created David Bowie’s iconic Ziggy Stardust look.

“I was plucked from a suburban hairdressing salon, whipped up in the frenzy of Ziggy Stardust,” writes Ronson, and wound up “marrying the man of my dreams,” Mick Ronson, Bowie’s guitarist. The author had left school at 15 and trained to be a hairdresser in Bromley, where her client Mrs. Jones boasted, “My David is such an artistic boy.” Ronson met Angie and David Bowie, who wanted her to give him a short, spiky KIRKUS REVIEWS

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haircut, a women’s hairstyle. From there, she was invited to join Bowie and the Spiders From Mars on tour, helping with costumes and hair. In this glam-rock era, makeup for the boys was mascara, gold and silver eyeshadow, and glitter. Using diaries she kept on the road, Ronson recounts her experiences as the only working woman in Bowie’s touring party.

“Onstage, Mick’s masculine sex appeal plays off against David’s femininity,” she writes. “It’s thrilling, irreverent, and oh-so appealing.” Throughout, the author captures the exciting adventures of pop stardom. “My life was all black and white until I met David,” she writes, “and afterwards it was glorious technicolour, as bright as the hair on his head.” On the flip side, she notes “how ruthless David [could] be,” casting off the Spiders for a solo career. Bowie blamed both his Ziggy character and cocaine for his callous disregard of his bandmates, but, Ronson insists, “It was raw, naked ambition.” The final 100 pages of the book follow the author’s life on tour and in domestic harmony with Mick, making the book’s title something of a misnomer. One particularly intriguing moment involves the Ronsons attending a Sex Pistols concert and realizing that rock music had moved on: “I feel as old as my mum!”

An entertaining glam-rock portrait that loses some verve toward the end.

Kirkus Star

Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives― And How We Break Free Rose, Tricia | Basic Books (288 pp.) | $29.00 March 5, 2024 | 9781541602717

An academic exposes the inner workings of systemic racism in accessible, concrete terms.

Throughout her three decades of experience teaching about

racism, Rose—director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University and author of Black Noise and The Hip Hop Wars—constantly heard others denying the existence of the racist systems that she had experienced throughout her life. She began to suspect that these denials were part of a larger system that denied Black people’s realities. “Compelling stories that expose the workings of systemic racism were not…simply missing,” she writes; “they were created and then disappeared over and over.” In her frustration, she “half-jokingly” told her husband, “I wish there were a handbook on systemic racism,” and her husband encouraged her to write it. The result is this highly structured, deeply practical analysis of systemic racism. After defining a system as “an interdependent, interconnected group of components, parts or elements that work as a whole,” Rose explains that the “metaeffects” of American systemic racism are the “containment, extraction, and punishment of Black people.” The author illustrates each of these metaeffects using case studies, beginning with Trayvon Martin’s murder, which the author connects to both redlining and the media’s “role in reproducing and tightening the connection between Black people and criminality while simultaneously overrepresenting whites as victims and defenders of law.” Particularly interesting is her analysis of Kelley Williams-Bolar, a Black woman imprisoned for “stealing education” after she falsified her address so she could enroll her children in the school serving her father’s neighborhood.

Throughout this trenchant book, Rose’s analysis is rigorous, insightful, and lucid, and her language glimmers with lyrical clarity. She infuses every page with passion and expertise, For more on the hidden effects of systemic racism, visit Kirkus online.

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A masterfully narrated story of how a democracy committed suicide, with lessons for today.

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backing up each argument with an impressive amount of research.

A brilliant guide to a systemic malady that cannot be denied.

American Girls: One Woman’s Journey Into the Islamic State and Her Sister’s Fight To Bring Her Home Roy, Jessica | Scribner (352 pp.) | $28.00 Jan. 16, 2024 | 9781982151317

The story of Samantha Sally, whose family was torn apart when her extremist husband joined the Islamic State group, and her sister, Lori, who was instrumental in getting her back to the U.S. from Syria.

In a book based on more than three years of interviews, Roy, the former digital director at Elle, digs into an intriguing question: “How did a young mother from Arkansas… end up living in Syria under a murderous militant group?” In 2015, on the border of Turkey and Syria, Samantha watched her husband, Moussa, running away—with their toddler, their savings, and Samantha’s passport—toward the then-headquarters of IS. Desperate, she followed them and ended up imprisoned there

by Moussa. The author delineates not only the beginning of their relationship (the couple met in Indiana, introduced by Lori, who was married to Moussa’s brother), but the sisters’ earlier trauma. As children, both had been “sexually abused by a family member,” and they did not 86

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report it out of fear that their family would be divided. Roy argues that the experience manifested itself in “lack of trust, feelings of guilt and shame, revictimization.” Later, Sam was beaten and raped as part of a boyfriend’s gang initiation; Lori could hear it through the wall. “Even when they were kids,” the author writes, “Lori had always tried her best to shield Sam…but Sam never wanted protection.” In addition to reporting on the sisters’ interactions, Roy explores related issues of culpability and criminality: “Was it possible that Sam had chosen to stay—not because of her commitment to the cause, necessarily, but because she was too afraid to be sent to jail when she got home? Other Americans who had so much as tried to join IS had been charged and jailed.”

The details are shocking, but Roy provides a chilling reminder that this could happen to anyone.

Kirkus Star

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power Ryback, Timothy W. | Knopf (400 pp.) $32.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9780593537428

An expert account of the dizzying months when Hitler solidified his power in Germany.

Some readers may be shocked when Ryback, author of Hitler’s Private Library and The Last Survivor, points out that Hitler’s assumption of absolute power was executed legally. His failed 1923 coup made

him famous as a hypernationalistic right-wing fanatic, one of many in post–World War I Germany. His brown shirts were thugs, and his rhetoric was hateful, but the National Socialists became a legitimate political party, participating in elections throughout the 1920s and winning a few seats until the devastating Depression, after which membership exploded. Ryback begins his riveting account in July 1932, when the party won 37% of the vote, making Hitler a legitimate candidate for chancellor.

Germany’s conservative establishment included national icon Paul von Hindenburg, who was president, a position that held the power to appoint the chancellor. All shared Hitler’s hatred of communism, the Treaty of Versailles, and the “haggling and compromise” essential to “weak-kneed democracies.” Hitler enjoyed scattered conservative support, but most were put off by his fanaticism and his followers’ savagery. Hindenburg disliked him and, in a painful August interview, announced that he would not be appointed. Of course, this infuriated Hitler, and readers curious to learn his ultimately successful tactics may be shocked that he simply went on as before, with equal fanaticism. His Nazis did not tone down their violence, and the times worked in his favor. Germany was a mess, with rampant unemployment and a wildly unpopular government. The fear of a communist revolution, far more than right-wing vulgarity, obsessed conservatives. No more rational than Hitler, in early 1933, they convinced themselves that they were clever enough to control Hitler as chancellor. Everyone knows how that turned out.

A masterfully narrated story of how a democracy committed suicide, with lessons for today.

For more from Timothy Ryback, visit Kirkus online.

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Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair Samuels, Maurice | Yale Univ. (224 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780300254006

A deeply sympathetic reexamination of the life of Alfred Dreyfus and the role antisemitism played in the affair that enflamed the French Republic.

Samuels, the director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and author of The Betrayal of the Duchess, places Dreyfus the man at the center of this biographical reconsideration—though he admits that the reticent, proud officer from Alsace “would not have wanted to be the subject of this book.” The subject of countless scholarly works, Dreyfus remains an enigmatic figure, and Samuels only occasionally penetrates his armor. His sudden arrest on October 15, 1894, for passing secrets to the Germans seemed to prove to the growing body of rabid antisemites that Jews were not true Frenchmen and were eager to betray the country. Without sufficient evidence of his guilt—and considering the behind-the-scenes military coverup that had clearly targeted him as a scapegoat—Dreyfus became a symbol of the betrayal of the liberal values so cherished by the leaders of the French Revolution. Samuels thoroughly revisits the scholarship over the decades and wonders whether Dreyfus was accused because he was a Jew or because he was a modernizer of an army stuck in calcified ways.

The author challenges the argument about Jewish assimilation at the time and rebuts the myth that French Jews did not come to Dreyfus’ support. In terms of Dreyfus himself, he was a deeply devoted family man who kept his faith from public scrutiny. “Rarely has so private a person been forced to live so public a life,” writes Samuels.

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for exoneration and the restoration of honor for his family.

A capable introduction to the intense factionalism the Dreyfus Affair ignited and how numerous relevant arguments remain.

White Rural Rage: The Heartland Threat to America Schaller, Tom & Paul Waldman Random House (320 pp.) | $32.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593729144

A view of rural America as a font of white privilege—and of resentment that the privileges aren’t greater.

Political scientist Schaller and journalist Waldman open with an example taken straight from the headlines: the uproar over Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town,” with its implied promises of retribution in a “fantasy of vigilante violence meted out against urbanites supposedly ready to bring their criminal mayhem to the idyll of rural America.” While it’s true that rural America has been suffering, rural Americans haven’t exactly helped themselves. “There is no demographic group in America as loyal to one political party as rural Whites are to the GOP that gets less out of the deal,” write the authors, showing how this situation arose because no rural political organization exists to make the vast region an object of true interest for either Republicans or Democrats.

Schaller and Waldman come close to blaming the victim in that analysis, but, as they painstakingly document, rural white Americans actually enjoy outsize influence in such things as electoral votes, to say nothing of the increasing rightward radicalization of the GOP. It’s no coincidence, they note, that nearly 75% of the votes opposing the certification of Joe Biden for president came from rural congressional districts. There’s a certain vicious circularity at work:

With few news sources reaching out to rural audiences, radio is king, and radio is almost invariably hard right in orientation, eager to fuel the resentment that comes from the sense that the “real America” is disappearing in the face of demographic change.

So it is that while white rural America is getting poorer, sicker, and more isolated, it’s also getting angrier—and that anger is poisoning the rest of the nation.

A book of broad explanatory power that’s not likely to help mend any fences.

Kirkus Star

Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons Scoles, Sarah | Bold Type Books (272 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781645030058

Worries about nuclear Armageddon, on the back burner for decades, seem to be reviving.

In early November 2023, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was revoking its ratification of the 1996 global nuclear test ban treaty. In this astute assessment of the current situation regarding nuclear weapons, Scoles, a contributing writer at Popular Science and author of Making Contact and They Are Already Here, offers a must-read overview of America’s nuclear arsenal, emphasizing the technical details of keeping it up to date in the absence of testing, along with efforts at avoiding catastrophic surprises such as accidental explosions, unwanted actions by other nuclear powers, and simple theft of radioactive material for “trafficking or malicious use,” which has occurred more than 300 times during the past 30 years. The author reminds us that by 1992, the year after the Cold War ended, the U.S. had performed 1,054 nuclear tests—and none since. Readers wondering if these complex devices still work after resting in warehouses JANUARY 1, 2024

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for three decades may be encouraged to know that government officials are also concerned about their viability.

The Departments of Defense and Energy have long supported immense, expensive research programs in arcane areas of nuclear chemistry and physics.

As backup, the government will soon resume production of fresh plutonium “pits”—hollow spheres that form the heart of a hydrogen bomb—for the first time since the 1980s. In her interviews, Scoles discovered that few of these scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats are war hawks; instead, they’re a mixture of people who constantly debate whether or not maintaining a nuclear arsenal deters a nuclear war. She also explores the work of antinuclear activists. Older readers who remember this debate from the Cold War years will not feel nostalgic; all readers will learn much vital information, some of it disturbing.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the current nuclear-weapon landscape.

Kirkus Star

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man Shakespeare, Nicholas | Harper/ HarperCollins (864 pp.) | $40.00 March 12, 2024 | 9780063012240

A fresh appraisal of the creator of James Bond.

In the introduction, award-winning biographer and novelist Shakespeare recounts how he was approached by the Fleming Estate to write another biography of Ian Fleming (1908-1964) using family materials never before seen that shed “new light that leads to new conclusions about the man.” Indeed, writes the author, “under the jarring surface of his popular image I could see a different person.” Drawing on these materials, diaries, and numerous interviews, Shakespeare neatly weaves the dramatic history of Fleming’s times 88

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into a very detailed narrative of his rise to success. Shakespeare is insightful in his explorations of how Fleming’s experiences influenced his books: his Scottish roots; his privileged, loveless upbringing; expensive private boarding school and then Eton, which furnished many characters’ names. After a brief, difficult stay at Sandhurst and a bout of gonorrhea, he was off to Austria and Switzerland, preparing for a possible government job and honing his considerable language and wooing skills. Working for Reuters, he was sent to Stalin’s Soviet Union to cover a high-profile trial of British engineers.

After a lucrative banking job—when he got the book-collecting bug and had numerous affairs—he was selected for “intelligence work, the secret war that could save lives.” Six years as the personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, Shakespeare writes, “gave him the secret material that he drew on to write his novels.”

He emerged a “complete man,” and “he would spend the rest of his life in peacetime, trying to recapture moments of time like these.” Living in Jamaica, Fleming began Casino Royale: “Ian took the cards he had been dealt and slipped them to Bond.” Later, with some chagrin, a wealthy, unhealthy Fleming said, “I have become the slave of a serial character.”

Shakespeare leaves no stone unturned in this exhaustive, highly readable biography.

Insurrection: What the January 6 Assault on America Reveals About America and Democracy Short, John Rennie | Reaktion Books (224 pp.) | $18.00 paper | March 14, 2024 9781789148411

A former professor of public policy analyzes the roots and underlying structural causes of the 2021 insurrection.

Accounts of the January 6th assault on the U.S.

Capitol have tended toward insider narratives that focus on “rumor and gossip” rather than on the many different causes that worked together to instigate the event. Short carefully examines “two long-term processes that unfolded over decades and two shorter-term events that came into full force in 2020.” Long before Trump became president, the public was losing trust in government. Short offers the example of the eternal clash between states’ rights and federal supremacy, a contest that took its bloodiest form in the Civil War. Amid this ongoing battle, the author points to what he calls “a mounting democratic deficit,” which stems from issues such as a political system flooded by too much money and the engineering of specific political outcomes through gerrymandering. Political polarization, along with widening ideological rifts (fueled by an increase in conspiracy thinking) that transformed America into a flawed democracy, came to a head in early 2020 by the pandemic and the policing crisis. Trump’s blatant mishandling of the pandemic called his leadership competence into question.

Yet when seething racial tensions in New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere boiled over into violent protests, Trump seized on the moment to pose as a “strong figure in a time of disorder” by contemplating the use of federal troops to quell the chaos. Short argues that it was not a stretch for Trump to go from that extreme to the even greater one of calling for military intervention in the face of election results unfavorable to him. This highly readable study will appeal to anyone seeking to make sense of the uprising that forever changed modern American politics.

A concise and incisive look at a democracy in peril.

For more on Ian Fleming, visit Kirkus online.

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A tremendous study of how Putin has tragically manipulated national myths.

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Before the Badge: How Academy Training Shapes Police Violence Simon, Samantha J. | New York Univ. $28.95 | March 5, 2024 | 9781479813278

A sociologist examines American police academies, describing the year she spent training alongside cadets.

In 2016, Simon was completing her graduate work at the University of Texas when a professor approached her about an “ethnographic project about gun ownership.” She interviewed firearms instructors, many of whom were former police officers, as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam. The author wondered about how new officers were “being trained to use force,” and thus this project was born. Simon took “a deeply embedded, embodied approach to research,” spending a full year with cadets at four different American police academies, running laps, shooting guns, and learning to use handcuffs.

In one notable section, the author recalls her participation in “OC Spray Day,” when cadets get sprayed in the face with oleoresin capsicum, aka pepper spray. Simon conducted interviews with officers, cadets, recruitment personnel, and even those who had resigned from the academy, an institution that’s “designed to encourage attrition.” Though many of her conclusions are bleak, they’re also thoughtful, clear, and supported by her research. “The academy,” she explains, ensures that cadets believe “that their job [has] recently become KIRKUS REVIEWS

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exponentially more dangerous and that they [will] be in physical danger at all times,” despite data showing that policing is safer now than it has ever been. This “adversarial and volatile institutional worldview” selects for candidates who use violence “enthusiastically or competently or both.” Given its prominence in conversations of police reform, Simon expected to find “de-escalation training” on the curriculum, but most officers dismissed the subject as “just a buzzword.” While the writing is sometimes overly academic, Simon also brings her subject to life, and her rapport with the officers and cadets reads as genuine.

A troubling, nuanced report on the way American police academies train their graduates in the use of force.

Kirkus Star

Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War Sixsmith, Martin with Daniel Sixsmith Bloomsbury Continuum (368 pp.) | $35.00 March 19, 2024 | 9781399409865

An eloquent report probes the complicated, competing narratives of Ukraine–Russia history.

Martin Sixsmith is a former BBC Moscow correspondent and author of An Unquiet Heart, and his son, Daniel, is a historian and author of The War of Nerves. Despite the optimism in the West for the emergence of liberal democracy in Russia after the

collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Putin over the last two decades has assured the resurgence of the militarized autocratic model first installed during the time of the Mongols in the 14th century. As a correspondent in Moscow in 1991, Martin joined the triumphal voices at Russia’s disintegration and reported—wrongly, he admits—that “Russia would re-enter the community of nations after seven decades of self-imposed exile and become a responsible member of the international order.” Instead, Putin has only grown more resentful about what the former Soviet Union has lost. Most recently, Putin has reembraced the “Great Russian nationalism” favored by Catherine the Great, and he stresses the concept of Russian vulnerability to Western aggression and the need to protect the allegedly persecuted Russian minorities in places such as the Donbas—hence the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the authors note, Hitler used a similar casus belli to invade the Sudetenland in 1938. “Like Stalin before him,” the authors write, “Putin has appointed himself the supreme arbiter of the meaning of history.

He declares his strict adherence to historical facts, but they are the ‘facts’ according to the ever-growing number…of Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations that he himself has created.” As the authors capably demonstrate in this stimulating text, Putin’s massive folly in invading Ukraine—and expecting a warm welcome—has opened a perilous new chapter in the Russian historical narrative.

A tremendous study of how Putin has tragically manipulated national myths for personal gain and revanchist patriotism.

For more on the dangers of Putin’s regime, visit Kirkus online.

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SEEN AND HEARD

The Tonight Show guest told Jimmy Fallon she “totally chickened out” while writing the first draft.

After a pause, Cher has resumed working on telling the story of her life (after love).

In an appearance on the Tonight Show with host Jimmy Fallon, the singer and actor, known for hit singles including “Half-Breed” and “If I Could Turn Back Time” and her roles in films such as Silkwood and Moonstruck, said she is once again working on writing a memoir.

Fallon mentioned the memoir, which elicited an “ugh” from Cher. “No, what do you mean?”

Fallon said.

“You know why?” Cher replied. “Because I just totally chickened out.…I didn’t put in some things that need to be in, and they’re not comfortable, but they need to be in.

So I have to go back and man up.”

“It’s like therapy,” Fallon said. “It’s tough.”

Cher agreed, adding, “And also I’ve lived too long and done too much, and so it’s like, it should be the encyclopedia.”

Fallon asked Cher if the book had a title yet; she said that it does not.

“Should we come up with one?” Fallon asked.

“You’re going to tell some things you probably shouldn’t tell. Maybe I Got Scoops, Babe?”

Cher shook her head, and the audience groaned. Fallon tried again: “Maybe Over Chering?” Cher gave Fallon a withering glance and shook her head again.—M.S.

Stephane Cardinale–Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Cher Says She Has Resumed Work on Her Memoir

For more celebrity memoirs, visit Kirkus online.

Cher said she had to face uncomfortable things in writing the memoir.

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A W A R D S // N O N F I C T I O N

AWARDS Winner of Science Book Prize Is Revealed Ed Yong took home the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize for An Immense World.

Ed Yong has won the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize for An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, the British fellowship of scientists announced at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.

Yong’s book, published in the U.S.

by Random House last year, recounts the ways in which various animals experience senses. The book won the Andrew Carnegie Medal and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; in a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised it as “one of the year’s best popular natural histories.”

Alain Goriely, the chair of judges for the award, said in a statement, “Meticulously researched and elegantly presented,

this book is a triumph of scientific storytelling, making the intricacies of animal perception both accessible and enthralling.”

“This is a book about animals for their own sake—a book about curiosity and empathy,” Yong said. “We could all use a little more empathy in the world, and I think empathy is a muscle that you can build by repeatedly flexing. The fact that so many readers have gravitated towards these themes and found meaning in them means a lot to me.”

The Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize was established in 1988. Past winners include Jared Diamond for The Third Chimpanzee and Caroline Criado Perez for Invisible Women.—M.S.

To read our review of An Immense World, visit Kirkus online.

The Royal Society

Yong’s book was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

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The Ballad of Speedball Baby Smith, Ali | Blackstone (332 pp.) | $25.99 Jan. 16, 2024 | 9798212337250

The bassist of a 1990s punk band chronicles her complicated childhood and stint in the limelight.

“We’re a chaotic, shambolic, confrontational, poetic band from the bowels of New York City’s Lower East Side,” Smith writes about Speedball Baby. Her tone is conversational and engaging as she recounts her tales, weaving memories of her scattershot upbringing as an “anxious kid who performed every song-and-dance routine in her repertoire in order to keep two fairly unhappy parents as happy as possible,” alongside glimmers of sordid, exciting, and dangerous experiences from her 20s. The latter is rife with drinking, drugs, and scrambling to survive as Smith navigated one crazy circumstance after another. Following “the nuclear-family explosion,” she identified herself as the “one person that had come into this world broken, unfixable, unredeemable,” and she saw music as her “ticket to….well, everything.” On tour, the reactions of audiences ran the gamut from rowdy, violent enthusiasm to boredom, even hatred. “I don’t usually know where we’ve been,” writes Smith, “until I read about it later in my journal….

It is a fucked up town because they’re all fucked up towns and ‘the man’ is always bringing you down, so let’s burn it all down to the ground….A music orgasm.” The narrative features many memorable descriptions of the downtown New York scene—the stage at CBGB, for example, was “almost like one you’d build in your garage out of wood stolen from a nearby construction site.” Of life with Matt, her significant other, Smith writes, “No rules. No limitations. No fear.” The author’s other main relationships are with her band members. “We survived 92

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Readers will eagerly wait to see if prosecutors act as Snell hopes they will.

TA K I N G D O W N T R U M P

the death of our major label deal without infighting, without (additional) overdoses, without blaming each other,” she writes, looking back on the grittiness with genuine gratitude.

An appealing book for punk fans and those interested in 1990s women musicians.

Taking Down Trump: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully Snell, Tristan | Melville House (208 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781685891251

A trial lawyer explores the many ways that Donald Trump has succeeded in evading punishment—and how to thwart him henceforth.

Snell, who successfully prosecuted Trump for the Trump University fraud, argues that when confronted with lawsuits or criminal charges, Trump is his own worst enemy, “a cheap, predatory asshole who doesn’t pay his bills” and who doesn’t listen to his own underqualified lawyers. Trump has managed to stay out of trouble, Snell opines, by using tactics that can be overcome. One is the mob-boss trick of intimidating witnesses, which a few recently delivered gag rules haven’t done much to curb—but, if the judges do their jobs, could land Trump in jail. “If at all possible, get Trump under oath—and he will hang himself,” Snell urges. It’s possible but unlikely, writes the author, that Trump will agree on a plea deal that will still land him in prison, for the

walls are closing in. “He’s losing in court, and he knows it,” Snell writes, “so now he’s aiming to undermine the courts entirely, to declare them all illegitimate.” But the courts are where he is, and it’s not because anyone’s out to get him. As Snell observes, he’s in court in 2023 and 2024 because he committed a swarm of alleged crimes in 2020 and 2021, and it takes a couple of years for things to go before the bench. When the former president lashes out at his legal opponents, most viciously against women and especially women of color, take that as a sign that the prosecutors are on the right track. Cheapness, narcissism, bullying: They’re not likely to work this time, Snell concludes, as they have for so many years in the past.

A valuable set of program notes; readers will eagerly wait to see if prosecutors act as Snell hopes they will.

Private Equity: A Memoir Sun, Carrie | Penguin Press (352 pp.) $29.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780593654996

A memoir about the alluring world of high finance.

“No one…

Yes, that’s right, no one has ever voluntarily left Carbon.” So says the pseudonymous billionaire behind a pseudonymous Manhattan hedge fund that showed every promise of making him the world’s first trillionaire. Sun recounts how she took a job as a personal assistant to “Boone Prescott,” which required her to be available around the clock and to “make the world work for Boone” in KIRKUS REVIEWS

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whatever way he saw necessary. To call Prescott a control freak is to undervalue the term, but Sun found herself falling into a sort of corporate fantasy world in which he was one of the good capitalists, an illusion that she eventually shed even after working hard enough to land her on a therapist’s couch. The author is candid in acknowledging that she was a willing participant for far too long, giving up what she really wanted to be—a writer—in order to take part in a lucrative but draining world in which the boss slowly transformed into Gordon Gekko (“Carrie, remember, money can solve nearly everything”).

There’s a Devil Wears Prada dimension to the narrative, which becomes increasingly grimmer as it goes, and a few self-indulgent moments, while doubtless cathartic for the author, make for tiresome reading. On the whole, however, Sun’s memoir provides both a measured account of how soul-devouring the corporate world is and of how employees as well as bosses are complicit: “I became in­terned in a reality in which succeeding at Carbon took me further away from the self I had longed to set free….The trauma plot and the capitalism plot are increasingly the same plot. Each one rewards you for staying inside the other.”

Middling, but still a useful cautionary tale about the dangers of unfettered capitalism and unquenchable greed.

The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America Swanson, James L. | Scribner (384 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781501108167

A consequence of centuries-long imperial rivalries, the 1704 Deerfield Massacre in Massachusetts revealed what could befall settlers of the colonial interior: captivity, terror, and slaughter.

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Lincoln’s Killer, correctly calls “one of the most dramatic episodes in colonial American history,” didn’t greatly alter New England’s settlement. However, it did exemplify the extraordinary risks that pious, land-seeking colonists were willing to take to settle and farm lands claimed not only by Britain, but also by France and Indigenous people always threatened by Europeans’ dispossession. On the snowy Massachusetts frontier that January day, Deerfield lost 63 of its 300 inhabitants to tomahawks, rifles, and arson; 112 others were seized, of whom 89 survived a 300-mile, two-month trek into Quebec. The story’s central figure is the Rev. John Williams, who lost his wife and one child but whose daughter survived to spend her life voluntarily among the Native Americans who’d captured her. Relating the harrowing story, its survivors’ three-year captivity, and the international context in which their release unfolded, Swanson doesn’t add much to what’s long been known. His fresh contributions appear in the chapters on the massacre’s aftermath over the next four centuries.

Native raids continued, spurring politicians, orators, and clerics to draw various lessons—many moral, some opportunistic. Townspeople and heirs of the victims erected memorials to the victims, and pageants built around heritage became a tradition. Films were shot, preservation undertaken, nostalgic tears shed for simple ways lost, and, recently, descendants of the Native assailants warmly received. “By 1776,” writes Swanson, “the Deerfield Massacre was a long distant past in a place that the Founders would have found unfamiliar, strange, and even alien to them.”

A solid, up-to-date, briskly told history of death, resilience, and recovery in the American past.

To read our review of Crown of Blood, visit Kirkus online.

Young Elizabeth: Elizabeth I and Her Perilous Path to the Crown Tallis, Nicola | Pegasus (400 pp.) | $29.95 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781639365845

A new biography of Elizabeth I’s early life.

British historian Tallis, author of Crown of Blood, reminds readers that England was a rare monarchy that did not forbid a woman from inheriting the throne, although if a male child was available, he was always preferred. Of course, Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, yearned obsessively for a male heir. He was disappointed when his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, bore a daughter, Mary. But divorce was forbidden, even for a king, so 15 years passed before his obsession with Anne Boleyn persuaded him to make himself head of the English Catholic Church in place of the pope, approve his own divorce, and marry the already pregnant Anne in 1533. Elizabeth’s birth was another disappointment to the king, and she was not yet 3 when Henry executed her mother on trumped-up charges of adultery and incest, declared Elizabeth illegitimate, and married Jane Seymour, who gave birth to a boy before her death. The birth took the pressure off Henry’s two female children, who were raised in comfortable households and worked hard and mostly unsuccessfully to win his affection. After his death in 1547, Henry was succeeded by Elizabeth’s 9-year-old brother, Edward VI, who ruled for six years, followed by her elder sister, who ruled for five.

Elizabeth remained close to Edward, who shared her Protestant beliefs; however, along with the nation, they suffered through Mary’s persistent attempts to restore Catholicism. Tallis shows how Elizabeth, even though she mostly abided by the era’s insistence on subservient women, laid the groundwork for future women leaders by soaking up education, choosing advisers wisely, and avoiding religious JANUARY 1, 2024

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controversies. Though the author sometimes pays too much attention to clothing and home furnishings, this book is a useful addition to British royal history.

A largely insightful account of the stormy run-up to an immortal reign.

Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance Targoff, Ramie | Knopf (320 pp.) | $30.00 March 12, 2024 | 9780525658030

A study of four women pioneers in the age of Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

Humanities scholar Targoff, author of Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna, focuses on a “small but not insignificant group of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who did what [Virginia] Woolf deemed impossible: they wrote works of poetry, history, religion and drama.” These four overlooked women “against all odds… found rooms of their own, if only to be buried inside them.” They followed the example of Queen Elizabeth, who loved to write. Jumping back and forth somewhat awkwardly from one woman to another, Targoff provides extensive, insightful historical material along with in-depth biographies, including information about families, money, education, and marriages. Mary Sidney’s brother Philip, the acclaimed poet, went to school, while she was homeschooled.

After his early death, Mary “paved her own way,” editing and publishing all of his major works before turning to translations published with her

To read our review of Renaissance Woman, visit Kirkus online.

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Featuring crisp, engaging prose, Targoff ’s eye-opening book welcomes general readers.

SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS

name on the title page—including her “dazzling poetic translation” of the Book of Psalms as well as her own poetry. Aemilia Lanyer’s musician father came to England and became middling gentry thanks to a wealthy countess dowager. Lanyer is famous for writing the first “country house” poem in English. In 1610, she made history as the first woman in the 17th century “to publish a book of original poetry.” Elizabeth Cary, part of the wealthy class, read and knew five languages, and she began her career with translations, later writing the first play by a woman in English, The Tragedy of Mariam, about King Herod’s marriage, and a biography of Edward II. The well-educated Anne Clifford wrote annual chronicles and revealing day diaries, rare for a woman, as well as a memoir titled The Life of Me, in the early 1650s.

Featuring crisp, engaging prose, Targoff’s eye-opening book welcomes general readers.

Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State Tau, Byron | Crown (400 pp.) | $28.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780593443224

A revealing examination of how government and corporate collaborations have eroded our privacy.

Over the last two decades, the data trails we all create every day have been followed with increasing sophistication by big

business and government authorities, who now often work together. Unless we take unusual measures to protect ourselves, both our online and offline behavior is thoroughly recorded by data-harvesters. Not only surfing the internet, but simply walking or driving from place to place while carrying a smartphone can expose us to detailed tracking. The collection of such data is immensely useful to advertisers interested in understanding and exploiting consumer preferences; it’s also tempting to government agencies seeking to deliver public services more efficiently and managing ostensible security threats. As investigative reporter Tau explains in this startling book, the result is that our privacy is routinely and profoundly compromised, with threats to civil liberties accelerating at an alarming pace. The author argues persuasively that the U.S. is “trending discomfortingly in the same general direction” as authoritarian China, where state authorities now exercise powers that rival those imagined by Orwell. Tau’s explanations of how surveillance techniques have evolved in the 21st century in response to the trauma of 9/11—and how they might yet be put to use in ordinary circumstance—are exceptionally clear and unsettling.

He rightly points out that the special vulnerability of racial and religious minorities to surveillance and harassment has already been demonstrated.

The author also compellingly shows why governments are attracted to “big data” and how difficult it will be to balance its legitimate use by government powers with concerns about the protection of civil liberties. This timely book carries a crucial message about the stakes involved in government-corporate partnerships.

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A fascinating, sometimes terrifying examination of the decline of privacy in the digital age.

Chipped: Writing From a Skateboarder’s Lens Vadi, José | Soft Skull Press (200 pp.) $26.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9781593767556

An essayist, poet, and filmmaker expounds on his lifelong love of skateboarding.

Vadi, author of Inter State: Essays From California, began skateboarding in 1996, around the start of what some would call the industry’s creative and economic boom.” Soon after, skateboarding became a vital part of the author’s life, redefining how he saw and related to public spaces and, later, seeing him through the isolation of the pandemic. In his second essay collection, Vadi details exactly how deeply skateboarding has affected him. For example, he considers how the soundtracks to some of his favorite skateboarding videos created an unexpected connection with his immigrant parents, who “initially viewed skateboarding as a materially disruptive, potentially cop-attracting activity that I shouldn’t be doing.” In other chapters, the author imagines the visionary musician Sun Ra as a skateboarder, compares “chipping” a skateboard to the inevitability of aging, and examines the way Black skateboarders responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. Central to the entire narrative is Vadi’s obsession with public space. In describing his aversion to skateparks, he writes, “Many skaters don’t even use the regulated skateparks designed and legalized for their convenience….Why skate there when you can take your board and hit the streets, basking in the temporal ownership you feel as you repurpose underutilized public space, knowing an unmarked, red-painted curb first grinded by you and your board is somehow now KIRKUS REVIEWS

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‘yours’?” At their best, the essays are poetic, compassionate, and vulnerable, drawing rewardingly original connections among a host of seemingly disparate topics. Unfortunately, Vadi’s language is often densely laden with jargon, and he sometimes gets lost in esoteric details that feel unnecessary.

Still, Vadi clearly takes great pleasure in the vocabulary and syntax of skateboarding; at times, this pleasure feels contagious, even for non-skaters.

Occasionally off track, but a largely illuminating collection about skateboarding, race, and relationships.

The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History Valby, Karen | Pantheon (288 pp.) | $29.00 April 30, 2024 | 9780593317525

A journalist uncovers the forgotten legacy of a group of pioneering Black ballerinas.

In 1969, Arthur Mitchell—“the first Black principal dancer” of George Balanchine’s famed City Ballet—“formally incorporated” the Dance Theatre of Harlem, writes Valby, an Austin-based journalist and former EW writer. Begun in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the theater’s purpose was to “once and for all prove that a person’s skin color was irrelevant to their right or relationship to classical dance.” To this end, Mitchell recruited and trained a collection of talented Black ballerinas, including Lydia Abarca, the company’s prima ballerina, who dreamed of one day buying her parents a house; Sheila Rohan, whose widowed mother had raised her on Staten Island; and Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton, who left their Connecticut, Ohio, and Colorado families (respectively) to try to make it in the world of New York dance. In its early

years, the theater grew thanks to the talent, strength, grit, and ingenuity of these remarkable women, who, in a time of intense racial inequality, earned standing ovations on European tours and solicited donations that would keep the company afloat for decades to come. Together, they weathered Mitchell’s tyrannical training techniques, colorism, and sexual harassment, all of which complicated their idolization of the man they credited with the success of their careers. Valby, “a white woman with two Black daughters who are dancers themselves,” is a skilled storyteller with an eye for significant details and thematic complexity. While her decision to begin and end the book with Misty Copeland’s widespread misidentification as the first Black prima ballerina detracts from the dynamic, tumultuous, and inspiring journey of the five central ballerinas, the book is deeply researched and full of heart.

A rich, detailed, and complex history of Harlem’s first prima ballerinas.

Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World Van Reybrouck, David | Norton (672 pp.) $32.50 | April 9, 2024 | 9781324073697

A study of Indonesia’s complex, conflicted, and inspiring path to freedom.

Despite being the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia often seems to float on the periphery, unknown and ignored.

Van Reybrouck, a historian with connections to the region and author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, sheds valuable light on Indonesia’s struggle for independence, which became a liberation model. Before the Dutch arrived with imperial dreams in the 19th century, Indonesia was a sprawling archipelago of disparate kingdoms and sultanates. It was JANUARY 1, 2024

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unified under a colonial administration, but cultural divisions persisted.

When the Japanese conquered the region during World War II, they were welcomed as liberators, although it soon became clear that they were worse than the Dutch. A national consciousness and a generation of anti-colonial leaders soon emerged, most notably the charismatic but volatile Sukarno. The one-named leader declared independence soon after the Japanese surrender, but making the new nation work was problematic.

The Dutch tried to reclaim their former position but eventually realized that the country no longer had a place for them. Sukarno unified the communists, nationalists, and Islamists, although once the colonialists had been expelled, the coalition fell into disarray, leading to a cycle of violence and retribution. Sukarno’s government became increasingly chaotic and socialistic, and when he was displaced by an American-sponsored coup, another round of bloody strife followed. Van Reybrouck manages to keep this convoluted account flowing, punctuating the story with interviews to provide a human dimension. At nearly 600 pages, the book is not an easy read, and it has a huge cast of players. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to understand Asian political development and the process of decolonization will find it a useful, important text.

This comprehensive, detailed book reiterates and deciphers a critical chapter in Asian and global history.

I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir Vellekoop, Maurice | Pantheon (496 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780307908735

Vivid pictures from a gay life.

In an honest, often self-deprecating coming-of-age graphic memoir, Canadian cartoonist and illustrator Velle96

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koop recounts growing up gay in 1970s Toronto, where his family was a member of the conservative Christian Reformed Church, which viewed homosexuality as a sin. As a young boy, Vellekoop was passionately in love with his mother, treasuring their outings to department stores and lunches and helping her in the beauty salon she ran in the basement.

He feared his father, who was given to unpredictable rages; surprising to the young Maurice, his father took him to see Fantasia, which incited an obsession with all things Disney.

The author recalls his love of 1960s TV sitcoms, Barbie dolls, and Carol Burnett. He preferred watching TV to doing anything else; like his siblings, he was bad at sports. He wasn’t much of a reader, either, but when his mother introduced him to C.S. Lewis, he became enraptured by the Narnia books. Vellekoop structures his memoir in short chapters, each focused on a particular period in his life: teenage angst; finding a welcoming cohort in art school; career highs and lows; and many episodes of “fumbled romance.” Throughout, he pictures himself with two competing angels on his shoulders: one steering him to be good, kind, and compassionate; the other, cynical and bitter, intensifying his feelings of darkness. In 1995, seeing himself as a “smart, urban homosexual” who had outgrown Toronto, he moved to Manhattan.

Although he had an agent and was gaining attention for his work—Vogue, for example, sent him to cover Paris couture—his personal life was difficult. He drank too much, fell into recurring depressions, and lost friends to AIDS. When he finally decided to get therapy, he struggled to find someone who could help him—and,

after finally succeeding, he turned his life around.

A raw, revealing chronicle.

One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America Waterhouse, Benjamin C. | Norton (288 pp.) $29.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 | 9780393868210

A thoughtful examination of the myths, reality, and cultural dimensions of self-employment.

Waterhouse, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Lobbying America and The Land of Enterprise, focuses his research on the practice and politics of business in America.

In his latest book, he engagingly explores how the idea of self-employment has developed and evolved. The U.S. has always had small businesses, but Waterhouse identifies the 1970s as a turning point. Before that, the emphasis had been on the regular paycheck, but after a protracted economic slowdown and rounds of layoffs, the idea of self-employment took off—although it was often a necessity more than a choice. Over the next few decades, increasing numbers of women started their own businesses after realizing that corporate advancement was unlikely.

Bad jobs, stagnant wage growth, and inequality pushed the trends, but the reality is that self-employment often requires long hours for a small, unstable income. In fact, outright failure is common. Nevertheless, the

A thoughtful examination of the myths, reality, and cultural dimensions of self-employment.

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precepts of freedom and self-reliance connect to deep themes in American culture. The arrival of the internet added the element of tech-driven disintermediation and generated an array of exciting new opportunities. It also created the gig economy, which provides many advantages but can easily lead to exploitation and fraud.

Waterhouse makes a strong argument that gig workers should receive a decent, assured income and legal protections, although he admits that this would be difficult to do. “Our national culture remains fixated on the emancipatory potential of the individual business owner, the risktaker, the Shark Tank entrepreneur,” he concludes. That is not entirely a bad thing, but the author shows us ways in which to think more deeply about what the gig economy means.

A clear-minded account of the link between self-employment and culture—and where the path leads.

Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation Williams, Kyle Edward | Norton (336 pp.) $29.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780393867237

How reformers have taken on—and might yet transform— big business in the U.S. In this astute history, Hedgehog Review senior editor Williams charts the evolution of the corporation into its outsized and seemingly predatory role in American life, along with prominent efforts undertaken to reform it. Drawing on “the stories of businesspeople, employees, consumers, and activists who have waged battles over business decisions, managerial strategies, and public policy,” the author traces key stages of the corporation’s rising autonomy and activists’ resistance to its undemocratic powers. The severing of “noneconomic considerations from the ability to act on them,” Williams KIRKUS REVIEWS

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argues convincingly, “is nothing less than a moral fracture at the heart of the corporation—a fatal and rarely understood flaw that makes its history over the past century a regrettable tragedy.” The author provides a detailed and accessible account of reform movements that have checked corporate power, and he reminds us that neoliberal deregulation is a recent phenomenon that might, in spite of daunting obstacles, be reversed or revised. Williams shows how a view of the corporation as necessarily being responsible to more than shareholders’ profits is not only familiar from history, but should be reinvigorated. Though some of the economic and legal minutiae of the topic can be dry, the author’s consistently lively presentation of the drama involved in battles over profits and social welfare creates an engaging narrative. Williams memorably renders the personalities of key figures in debates about the corporation’s role, such as Ralph Nader, and we gain a vivid sense of the passions informing competing ideologies. The author makes it clear that a moral reckoning for corporations is possible, and a thoroughgoing reformation of the institution would promise enormous benefits for the common good.

A fascinating account of efforts to rein in the excesses of capitalism.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned To Write Yi Tenen, Dennis | Norton (192 pp.) | $22.00 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780393882186

An intriguing glimpse into how the secret machinery that makes our technology work has deep roots in philosophy, poetry, and linguistics.

We’ve become so used to computers that can understand what we put on a screen—checking our spelling and correcting our grammar—that we

forget that they use complex, clever processes to do so. In this brief, pithy book, Yi Tenen, a former software engineer at Microsoft and current affiliate at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, suggests that giving computers literacy should be seen as one of the most essential technological feats of the 20th century. Locating the beginning of the story is difficult, since Arabic philosophy, Chinese numerology, and other intellectual traditions from around the world and across centuries all have antecedents.

Mechanical cypher systems also played a role, as did early attempts at creating a math-based language.

Babbage, Bacon, and Leibniz were all interested in giving machines an interactive element, and Turing made a huge contribution with his theories of coding. For decades, people had contrasting ideas on how to get computers to “read,” but all ran into the problems of defining intelligence, communication, and understanding.

As Yi Tenen shows, we tend to see the human mind as a metaphor, but the author believes that this is not really an appropriate comparison: The repetitive, algorithmic pattern of machine learning does not reflect the conceptual, intuitive nature of human development. The advent of personal computers started tech on the path to artificial intelligence, although getting everything to work together has required extensive collaboration and creativity. Yi Tenen, stirring some wit and anecdotes into the story, sets out the material in non-technical terms, making for an entertaining, informative read.

An eclectic and erudite tale of how wide-eyed visions become smart, interactive tools.

To read more about the power of corporations, visit Kirkus online.

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B O O K L I S T // N O N F I C T I O N

5 Books That Should Be Movies 1 Pure Wit

By Francesca Peacock

A sensitive, nuanced biography of an idiosyncratic woman.

4 Glitter and Concrete

By Elyssa Maxx Goodman

An essential addition to the literature of both drag and queer history.

2 Gator Country

5 Klan War

An examination of the underground world of alligator poaching in Florida….

Enlightening and full of suspense.

An award-winning historian digs into the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan….A critically important revisionist history.

By Rebecca Renner

3 Two Roads Home

By Daniel Finkelstein

Two progenitors survive the Holocaust, against all the odds, in this extraordinary narrative.

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By Fergus M. Bordewich

For more nonfiction books that would make great films, visit Kirkus online.

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Children's

MAHNAZ DAR

LAST NOVEMBER, I joined author Jennifer Swanson on the radio program Science Friday. We shared our favorite STEM kids’ books of 2023 and fielded questions from listeners seeking recommendations.

We both agreed that the STEM books we read as kids were worlds away from the compelling offerings of today. One of Swanson’s favorite books as a child in the ’70s was Science in Your Own Backyard (1958),

by Elizabeth K. Cooper, and while it was chock-full of intriguing, hands-on experiments, the black-andwhite line drawings were on the dry side. Growing up in the ’90s, I remember librarians recommending lots of fun novels and even the odd history text or biography. But the science titles were dull, textbooklike selections, pulled out only when I had a research paper due and then just as quickly reshelved.

Happily, things have changed, and when an audience member asked us to suggest STEM titles similar to Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a 100

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Wimpy Kid series, I had the perfect book: Oliver’s Great Big Universe, by Jorge Cham (Amulet/Abrams, 2023). A blend of prose and comics, the story follows a self-described average kid with a passion for astrophysics who decides to write a book explaining everything from the Big Bang theory to dark matter. Cham has a gift for making complex concepts understandable as well as a keen sense of what makes kids laugh (here be fart jokes!). The result is side-splitting, irreverent, and insightful—Kinney’s Greg Heffley would approve.

The experience got me thinking about the wealth of other great middle-grade STEM books published last year—like Terry Virts’ The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet: Everything You Need To Know, From Training to Re-Entry (Workman), illustrated

by Andrés Lozano. A former astronaut, Virts blends facts about space exploration with compelling accounts of his own experiences. He also answers questions that will be top of mind for young readers: What do astronauts

eat in space? Where do they sleep? And, of course, how do they go to the bathroom?

Both Swanson and I named Search for a Giant Squid: Pick Your Path, by Amy Seto Forrester (Chronicle Books), illustrated by Andy Chou Musser, as one of our favorites—and with good reason. This Choose Your Own Adventure–style tale invites kids to join an expedition to the twilight zone of the ocean to find the elusive giant squid. Will they succeed? That’s up to readers, who are tasked with picking a pilot, a submersible, and a dive site.

Facts on ocean exploration are artfully woven into this dynamic work. Laudably, all the scientists depicted are

people of color, and the cast is diverse in terms of ability and body type.

Readers who can’t get enough of all things undersea should also pick up Lindsey Leigh’s The Deep!: Wild Life at the Ocean’s Darkest Depths (Penguin Workshop), a hilarious graphic novel about the bizarre creatures that make their homes there.

Realistically rendered but brimming with personality, animals such as a vampire squid, a dumbo octopus, and a yeti crab expound on the traits that make them well suited to life in this seemingly most inhospitable of regions.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

STEM BOOKS TO GET TWEENS GEEKING OUT

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EDITOR’S PICK Reflections on clouds and other wonders of our atmospheric “ocean.”

“This is a book for wonderers,” McClure accurately notes in her illustrator’s afterword. Originally written as a script for a children’s television show in 1956 and unpublished until 2021, Carson’s quietly eloquent essay offers a stirring mix of natural observations and insights.

Our planet has two mighty oceans, she points out, both necessary for life. We live at the bottom of the one made of air, beneath clouds—described as “the writing of the wind on the

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

sky”—that are born and die. After detailing the broad types—foggy stratus, flat-bottomed cumulus, and high-altitude cirrus—and the messages they convey in their distinctive forms and compositions, she concludes that the ocean of air, like the watery one, is still full of mysteries…but we are “learning to read the language of the sky.” Using sumi ink and washi paper with cut-paper overlays, the illustrator creates misty, evocative cloudscapes behind and above views of seas and mountains in various weathers and seasons, as well as spare

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What’s New, Daniel?

By Micha Archer

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The Last Zookeeper

By Aaron Becker

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Animal Albums From A to Z

By Cece Bell

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One Day This Tree Will Fall

By Leslie Barnard Booth; illus. by Stephanie Fizer Coleman

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Something About the Sky Carson, Rachel | Illus. by Nikki McClure Candlewick Studio | 48 pp. | $19.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781536228700

glimpses of human figures diverse in terms of age, with skin the color of the page, mostly with inward gazes. Overall, the effect is solemn, stately…bound to

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Something About the Sky

By Rachel Carson; illus. by Nikki McClure

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One Big Open Sky

By Lesa ClineRansome

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Ferris

By Kate DiCamillo

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Everyone Gets a Turn

By Marianne Dubuc

leave readers in a meditative mood.

Contemplative and stirring— definitely for wonderers.

(Informational picture book. 7-9)

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Partly Cloudy

By Deborah Freedman Ant Story

By Jay Hosler

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Come Closer, Tatita

By Imapla

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Rumi—Poet of Joy and Love

By Rashin Kheiriyeh

When Forests Burn

By Albert Marrin My Antarctica

By G. Neri; illus.

by Corban Wilkin

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The Iguanodon’s Horn

By Sean Rubin Pretty Ugly

By David Sedaris; illus. by Ian Falconer

Odin

By George O’Connor

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Gifts From Georgia’s Garden

By Lisa Robinson; illus. by Hadley Hooper

Poetry Comics

By Grant Snider Are You Big?

By Mo Willems

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Kyra, Just for Today

By Sara Zarr

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Awe-Samosas!

Abbas, Marzieh | Illus. by Bhagya Madanasinghe | Clarion/HarperCollins (40 pp.) | $19.99 | March 26, 2024 9780063257276

A young girl of Pakistani descent whips up a traditional treat with a twist.

Noor is excited for her friends to visit, but she can’t decide what to serve them. Her father offers to order pizza, but Noor wants to make grandmother Dadijaan’s special potato and pea samosas. Her excitement turns to disappointment when she realizes she doesn’t have the recipe or the right ingredients—and it’s too early to call Dadijaan, who lives in Pakistan. Her father advises her to make do with what she has, and her pet parrot pipes up with an encouraging Urdu phrase that Noor’s grandmother often says: “Sab theek hai. Sab theek hoga!” (“Everything’s great. Everything’s going to be okay!”) Noor decides to make samosas with unique fillings.

Soon, father and daughter are chopping, peeling, and grinding away.

When it’s time to fill the samosa wraps, however, Noor’s attempts are less than successful. But she refuses to give up, and inspiration strikes when she recalls that her grandmother wraps the samosas the same way she ties her scarf into a turban—“TWIST, FLIP, FOLD, AND…TUCK!” Her friends bite into little triangles of delicious and unexpected flavors of apple-cinnamon, cheesy pepperoni, and honey-pistachio samosas. Though the word awe-samosas is a bit overused, Noor’s plucky problem-solving and her encouraging cheerleaders help buoy the book. Illustrations that

For more by Marzieh Abbas, visit Kirkus online.

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A joyful story of one child’s can-do spirit and tasty endings.

AWE-SAMOSAS!

vary between close-ups and lively alternating perspectives evoke a cozy, bustling kitchen.

A joyful story of one child’s can-do spirit and tasty endings. (samosa recipe, Urdu glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)

The Book That Almost Rhymed Abed, Omar | Illus. by Hatem Aly Dial Books (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9780593406380

A little sister adds a unique spin to her brother’s story.

A boy who’s proud of his rhyming prowess has written a book in verse. As he recounts his story, his younger sib repeatedly butts in and completes each stanza with her own peculiar, non-rhyming twists that take his masterpiece in riotous directions.

Readers will mostly figure out what the brother’s “real” rhyming word should be in almost every interrupted instance throughout, courtesy of the author’s strong hints (for instance, cutting off part of the intended word with hyphens). Thereafter, the author assumes missing rhyming words are obvious enough that further hints are unnecessary, though picture clues help. For example, little sis chimes in with “his pocket” when “book” is clearly intended, and so on for the duration of this clever, humorous exercise in poetry appreciation, wordplay, and vocabulary development. The brother complains that his sibling’s spoiled his rhyme scheme, but when he takes a closer look at her additions, he realizes there was a method to her madness. All’s forgiven,

and the brother acknowledges she’s a “rhyming prodigy.” Readers will appreciate these rollicking rhymes and laugh at the sister’s out-there ideas.

The comical digital illustrations will elicit chuckles. The boy’s dialogue is set in blue type, while the sister’s is in red and emphatically boldfaced. The brother is tan-skinned; his sister is brown-skinned.

Readers will have a fine time with these rhymes and certainly won’t be averse to the verse. (Picture book. 5-8)

The Gabi That Girma Wore Adefris, Fasika & Sara Holly Ackerman Illus. by Netsanet Tesfay | Little, Brown (40 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 9780316470773

The journey of an Ethiopian garment, from the literal seeds of its inception all the way to the people who wear it proudly.

The Gabi, defined in the glossary as “a multilayered traditional Ethiopian cloth,” starts out as cottonseed sown into the rich brown earth. Rich digital illustrations show the cotton sprouting and growing, a farmer plucking fluffy white fibers from the plant, and shemanes (the Amharic word for weavers) working the heddles and wooden treadles of the looms to produce workable textiles. Cumulative verse, similar to “The House That Jack Built,” shows what a slow—but meaningful—process it is (“This is the cottonseed, oval and slight…to sprout the Gabi that Girma wore”). As the Gabi takes shape, with an amber and burgundy border woven into the white fabric, rhyming narration thoughtfully emphasizes the “brightness and light” KIRKUS REVIEWS

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that decorate the garment. At the marketplace, the Gabi sits alongside other wares before being bought by a woman named Genet, who gives it to a man named Girma. The authors place this purchase into cultural context, making it clear how important it is to Girma; he wears his Gabi on festive occasions and at church on Christmas and Easter, and he and a whole family of smiling and loving faces snuggle up under it on the couch.

An illuminating tale of the love and care that go into creating this East African garment. (authors’ note) (Picture book. 4-8)

Look How Much I’ve Grown in Kindergarten Ahiyya, Vera | Illus. by Joey Chou Random House Studio (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780593643969 Series: A Kindergarten Book

Everything grows better with a little help.

Mason doesn’t want to attend school anymore because there are things she can’t do and everyone else seems to do everything right.

Mom encourages her to discuss these concerns with her teacher the next morning. Mason does, and at school, Ms. Perry thanks her for articulating her feelings. Later, Ms. Perry announces that, since today’s the first day of spring, the class’s morning meeting will focus on growth. She tells the class that everyone’s growing and changing in myriad ways. Next day, Ms. Perry displays a chart on which she invites students to indicate ways they’d like to grow. Ms. Perry encourages Mason to reflect on how much she’s growing—she knows the letters in her own name, for instance, and is “growing to be a reader”—and provides tools to help Mason learn to tie her own shoelaces. Mason begins to realize that some classmates also need help learning a few things. On the last day of school, Ms. Perry reminds everyone it’s always OK to request help in order to grow. This is a rather bland story, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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but it should reassure youngsters who feel doubtful about their ability to learn new skills. The colorful digital illustrations depict a multiracial cast of characters in a lively, active classroom setting. Mason, her mom, and Ms. Perry have skin in various shades of brown.

A valuable reminder that learning and growing take time, practice, and patience. (how to write a thank-you card, author’s note, tips for fostering a growth mindset) (Picture book. 4-7)

Hooray for She, He, Ze, and They!: What Are Your Pronouns Today?

Amer, Lindz | Illus. by Kip Alizadeh Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) | $18.99 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781665931144

With their debut picture book, LGBTQ+ activist and YouTube host Amer expounds on the joy of finding the

right pronoun.

The author, who narrates and appears in this story, waves to their audience: “Hi, friend! I’m Lindz, and my pronouns are they/them.

What are your pronouns today?”

Light-skinned with glasses, short black hair, and purple overalls, Lindz explains that pronouns “tell people about our gender” and that “gender is that tingly feeling inside that tells you who you are and how you want to express yourself to the world.”

Alizadeh depicts gender-diverse kids in colorful, swirling watercolor and pencil illustrations, all with varying skin tones, hairstyles, and clothing.

The pronouns that the children pick for themselves include she, he, they, and a few that might be new to some readers: ze, hir, fae, and per. What’s the big deal about pronouns, though?

“When someone uses your right pronouns, it feels like pulling on your favorite sweater that fits just right,” Lindz explains. The narrative invites readers to consider which pronouns “feel as cozy as sleeping under a million blankets,” while making space

for those who may not know yet.

Focusing on affirmation rather than dysphoria, this book is a positive introduction to pronouns. The text is uplifting, but it’s the arresting illustrations that will truly capture readers’ attention. Author’s and illustrator’s notes aimed at adults further discuss gender euphoria.

Vibrant, swirling illustrations steal the show in this sweet tale about pronouns. (Picture book. 5-8)

Monday Amores, Eva & Cosgrove Matt | Illus. by Matt Cosgrove | Scholastic (192 pp.) | $7.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781338857542 Series: Worst Week Ever, 1

A supremely unlucky kid’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first day at a new school.

Only a bold or foolish narrator would start a book by calling out the upcoming story beats like Babe Ruth predicting a home run. But Justin Chase does just that, warning readers of the mortification to come.

Now that his mom has married Vlad, his new stepdad, both of whom work the night shift, he’ll be living with his dad during the week and spending weekends with his mom—and that means attending a new school. His ill-fitting clothing, the embarrassing car his plumber father drives (“a giant TOILET on wheels”), and the fact that he shares his name with a famous singer set him up for bullying from the get-go. Neighbor and classmate Mia is a rare social lifeline throughout Justin’s trials, which include two scatological incidents so gross that the book cuts away to images of cute animals.

Cosgrove’s humorous, cartoonish illustrations appear on nearly every page.

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be able to look away while wondering how much worse this day can get.

Justin and most of the cast have skin the white of the page.

A worst day to remember among the pantheon of Wimpy Kids and Dorks. (trivia, how to draw Justin, authors’ note) (Fiction. 9-11)

What if You Wish?

Appert, Anne | Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) | $19.99 | March 5, 2024 9780063036130

A child experiences the joy of imagination and the darkness of doubt.

A nameless character with pigtails and bangs, freckles, skin the color of the page, and a tunic top over leggings slips through a broken chain-link fence and makes a wish on a dandelion. The world bursts from black and white into color as the child flies through a dreamscape, but darkness and monsters menace, hues darken and fade to dark gray (“Doubt lingers”), and the protagonist returns to Earth, alone. But a bright little yellow star spreads its glow, colors and a sense of wonder return, and the child sails through a seascape, through the sky, and into outer space. Appert’s art, which looks like watercolor but was digitally created, carries the story entirely; this could easily have been a wordless book, like JonArno Lawrence’s Sidewalk Flowers (2015), illustrated by Sydney Smith, and maybe it should have been.

The text is vague and metaphorical, addressing topics such as wishes and worries, dreams and doubts, possibilities and promises—possibly too abstract for younger children to understand, although the art provides a wonderful opportunity for conversations around social-emotional learning topics such as worry, uncertainty, and hope. Appert’s use of color effectively shifts the tone and mood throughout, and young readers may want to share their own stories of wishing on dandelions and stars.

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Little Brown Nut

Kirkus Star

What’s New, Daniel?

Archer, Micha | Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780593461303

Spring is here.

Daniel is an inquisitive tyke, and when Grandpa asks him what’s new, the investigation is on. Daniel searches all over a lush park nestled at the center of the city. Stunning illustrations rendered in acrylic ink and patterned paper collage depict a bright and richly textured world as the child climbs his favorite rock beneath the warm sun and hears the whistling of redwing blackbirds flying by. The cattails tell him that winter has come to an end, Mother Duck says that her babies are hatching, and Polliwog is growing legs.

Snake, Squirrel, and Butterfly also add to the chorus of voices offering Daniel lively updates on what’s changing in the world around him. By the end, he’s more than prepared to answer Grandpa’s original question with details of the flora and fauna; he also tells Grandpa how his own recently discovered whistling ability, new tooth, and growing legs fit into the bigger picture of the natural world. “Now it’s your turn, Grandpa,” Daniel says, shifting focus as the book ends with a dynamic backdrop of park goers—human and animal—on a path beneath a tree canopy. Featuring appealing, child-centered text and lush visuals, this tale will surely lead readers to more adventurous investigations of their own. Grandpa and Daniel present Black.

A beautiful invitation to spring for the curious nature lover. (Picture book. 4-8)

For more by Micha Archer, visit Kirkus online.

Auld, Mary | Illus. by Dawn Cooper Red Comet Press (28 pp.) | $15.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781636551050 Series: Start Small, Think Big

In an invitation to “Think Big,” a fallen Brazil nut explains where it came from and what it will grow into.

In Amazon rainforest settings that teem with flora and fauna, Auld and Cooper follow the nut as it is buried and forgotten by an agouti (“like a guinea pig, but with longer legs”), then germinates and over many years grows into a majestic tree that houses wildlife from tiny Brazil-nut poison frogs to harpy eagles. Adding additional details delivered in smaller type to join the nutty narrator, the author describes how the flowers, which have evolved to be accessible only to female orchid bees, are pollinated and become nuts that fall either to grow, to be eaten by animals, or to be gathered by human “castañeros”—who also protect their livelihoods by helping to protect the trees from illegal loggers. The Brazil nut tree is a “rainforest superstar,” she concludes on a foldout page at the end, and can live for a thousand years if allowed.

The same foldout features maps of rainforests worldwide, as well as images of animals that appeared in previous scenes for readers to go back and spot.

Nutritious and digestible, just like its narrator. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Small Speckled Egg Auld, Mary | Illus. by Anna Terreros-Martin Red Comet Press (28 pp.) | $15.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781636551074 Series: Start Small, Think Big

An introduction to Arctic terns, the animals with the longest migratory routes on Earth.

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Between a die-cut front cover hole exposing the titular egg on the title page and a foldout map at the end, a tern describes its life cycle from hatchling to parent as, in smaller type, the author fills in details about diet, predators, behavior, and the annual migratory cycle that takes these birds from Arctic to Antarctic regions and back. Further comments on the foldout map expand on the main narrative with references to the terns’ amazing navigational abilities, sensitivity to magnetic fields, and other topics. Terreros-Martin caps her set of accurately detailed images of birds in rocky and nautical settings with a fetching mixed gallery of eggs and chicks representing the 50 offspring that tern couples will produce on average over their 30-year lifespans, then closes on the foldout leaf with both global range maps and images of whales and other animals, which alert young viewers can go back to spot in previous scenes. Specific but easily absorbable facts combined with illustrations that reward closer (and repeated) looks make this book particularly appealing for younger readers, alone or in groups.

More than enough verbal and visual appeal to fly off shelves. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

All Aboard for Noah’s Ark! Azose, Elana | Illus. by Monica Garofalo Kar-Ben (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781728486826

When a storm of biblical proportions looms, who will help Noah?

Noah gathers the animals together to announce that “a big rain is coming” and that he’ll build an ark for their safety. Lionel, a diminutive hedgehog, immediately offers his assistance. Noah dismisses Lionel (he’s too small to help, Noah claims) and says that he’ll seek help from the bears. Next morning, Noah doesn’t know how to alert the animals who live far away. “Already taken care of!” declares Lionel. Dolores, his hedgehog KIRKUS REVIEWS

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partner, sent them invitations. And so it goes: Noah repeatedly rejects help from Lionel and Dolores—sort of party planners/cruise directors.

Happily, some animals pitch in with the ark building, but the labor doesn’t make them forget they’re hungry predators. Guess who forestalls that crisis—and also prevents the ark from overturning in giant waves? When the rain finally stops and the ark reaches dry land, Noah admits the hedgehogs have saved the day, sending readers the important message that even the smallest of creatures can be a huge help, especially when friends are in a jam. This new take on the Noah story will be welcome to those familiar with the tale and newcomers alike for its freshness and flashes of modern humor, particularly in the colorful, rollicking illustrations. All characters are expressive. Noah is light-skinned.

Proof that well-meant help, whether in big or small doses, is always appreciated, rain or shine. (Picture book. 4-7)

pedestrians, and playful puppies, Puck is gently scolded by Mamma to “keep up, Duck!” several times and must come up with clever ways to catch up.

Ultimately, plucky Puck is appropriately puckish and with a “Hop! Hop! Hop! Plop!” finds a creative and deeply satisfying solution. Sweet watercolor and colored pencil artwork accompanies rhythmically paced prose from Ivan Bates and the late Rachel Bates. Richly illustrated spreads set the scene, and whimsical panels chop up the action, with Puck hop-hopping his way across the pages to plop back into place with the other ducks. Adorable ducklings and a sense of urgency but a distinct lack of any danger keep the stakes compelling but not concerning, and the combination of fun sound effects and sweet visuals will keep readers entertained—especially those lucky enough to hear this tale read aloud.

Lighthearted, onomatopoetic fare.

(Picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Star

Keep Up, Duck!

Bates, Ivan & Rachel Bates | Illus. by Ivan Bates | Candlewick (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781536209389

Puck the duck keeps falling behind.

Mamma Duck and her little ones are swimming to the lily pond.

Puck, a scruffy straggler with brown splotches on his back that differentiate him from his siblings, becomes distracted by all the wonderful sights and sounds along the way. Armed with only “downy wings and tiny feet,” Puck can’t keep up. Dazzled by pastel paddle boats,

The Last Zookeeper Becker, Aaron | Candlewick (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781536227680

Caldecott Honoree Becker’s dystopian imaginings once more find fruit in picture-book format.

The biblical Noah as a gargantuan robot? Stranger things have been conceived of. In flooded lands replete with incredibly detailed architecture (think David Macaulay meets WALLE’s world) but with no humans in sight, a towering yellow robot, the word NOA on its arm, powered by

Epic storytelling erupts on the page without the use of a single word.

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wind turbines from its back, sets forth to collect all the animals of the world.

The waters rise to NOA’s knees, but still our robotic avatar collects with infinite kindness every giraffe, panda, tiger, and elephant it can find. The crumbling world around them hints at the zoos and circuses where once these creatures made their homes. Now, they sail away with NOA on a boat built by the automaton. This wordless tale outlines their struggles, from storm to shipwreck and, ultimately, to hope.

The allusions to both Noah’s Ark and Eden are sly but ever present, set as they are against Becker’s sumptuous watercolor and pen-and-ink backdrops.

Here, the very existence of life on Earth hangs in the balance, and the stakes have never been higher. Minute details pepper each scene, giving sharp-eyed readers the chance to find something new every time they page through this book (like the fact that the meat-eating tigers are kept in their own separate cage on the robot’s boat).

True fans will find themselves poring over these pictures for hours.

Epic storytelling erupts on the page without the use of a single word.

Superb. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Star

Animal Albums From A to Z Bell, Cece | Walker US/Candlewick (64 pp.) $19.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781536226249

For record collectors and fans of old-timey music, an alphabetical sampler of rockin’ tunes from the likes of Mandy and the Meerkats and the Fabulous Foxes of Folk.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Bell explains in her introduction that she’s a collector of records by animal musicians, from the 1940s to the ’80s. Thanks to a QR code, young audiences can listen to the “original” vinyl tracks and follow along as armadillo accordionist Arnie Dillow regales listeners with “My Aromatic Armpit Is Astonishing to 106

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Hilarious, high-stepping tributes to a musical niche that never was.

ANIMAL ALBUMS FROM A TO Z

All” and the Barbershop Beagles bark out “Bud Believes in Betty (But Betty Believes in Brad).” Other performers holler out their hits, from Darryl and the Dodo Devilettes to the Hip-Hop Hedgehogs and the Zydeco Zebras.

Like the psychedelic “Philip, Phone the Plumber (It’s Time To Plumb the Pot),” featuring the lyrics “The faucet oozes out rainbows / And unicorns hot and cold / They sneeze on my towels, I’ve gotta move my bowels / But the toilet’s overflowing with silver and gold,” most of these uproariously funny, clever lyrics don’t need their musical accompaniment to stand up. Along with an introduction and background notes on the careers of these bands or solo performers, Bell supplies paintand cut-paper images of album covers expertly evoking eras from big band to disco, with the occasional concert ticket and other memorabilia tucked in.

Hilarious, high-stepping tributes to a musical niche that never was. (Picture book/poetry. 6-9)

Glenn Burke, Game Changer: The Man Who Invented the High Five Bildner, Phil | Illus. by Daniele J. O’Brien Farrar, Straus and Giroux (40 pp.) | $18.99 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780374391225

Following up his middle-grade novel A High Five for Glenn Burke (2020), Bildner pens a picture-book biography about a remarkable gay Black baseball player.

A rare “five-tool talent” (he could run, catch, throw, and hit for both average and power), young Glenn Burke was snatched up by the Dodgers, and teammates and fans alike soon

delighted in his high-spirited humor and enthusiasm for the team and game they loved. Burke enjoyed a strong rookie season and is credited with inventing the high-five with teammate Dusty Baker. Burke was also a closeted gay athlete, vulnerable to the homophobia of people such as his manager, Tommy Lasorda, who traded Burke mere months after he’d helped get the Dodgers to the World Series. Burke’s story has plenty of sadness—ongoing homophobia, a debilitating car accident, and an HIV diagnosis, which led to his far-too-early death in 1995 at age 42. But it also has joy: He found his community after leaving baseball, won gold in the Gay Olympics, and lived to see his special handshake become a widespread symbol of celebration.

O’Brien’s illustrations, opaque and with highly defined detail, are both imposing and intimate, and they move readers through Burke’s trials and triumphs. Bildner’s honest and weighty text is balanced by spreads full of motion, whether figures round bases or connect with high-fives.

A bittersweet legacy now accessible to younger readers and sports fans. (author’s note, bibliography, timeline) (Picture-book biography. 5-8)

Kirkus Star

One Day This Tree Will Fall Booth, Leslie Barnard | Illus. by Stephanie Fizer Coleman | McElderry (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781534496965

The long and busy life of a tree, from one small seed that beats the odds to a fertile locale for another, later one to grow.

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Booth begins with a tiny, windblown Douglas fir seed and follows its history from seedling on—through years of damage from storms and cold, drought and fire that leave it “wounded, worn, twisted, torn”—but at every stage nurturing the lives around it by providing places for birds and butterflies to rest, for spiders to spin their webs, and for woodpeckers to excavate nesting cavities that later shelter other wildlife.

Even after the tree finally falls, its story doesn’t end, for it becomes home to fungi, insects, earthworms, and microscopic creatures. The author discusses this steady, long-term “nutrient cycling” more specifically in her afterword and closes with a nod to the past and present efforts of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, where this tale is set, to sustainably “steward, restore, and diversify forests.”

In close-up views, Fizer Coleman poses meticulously detailed pine forest flora and fauna near, on, and inside an increasingly battered, mossy trunk that stands in one scene amid logged stumps of straighter trees and finally lies as a brown bed beneath a tiny, needled successor. “One day this tree will fall / and this story will end. / Won’t it?” Readers will come away with a more perspicuous answer to that pointed final question.

A lyrical evocation of an essential natural cycle. (glossary, source list) (Informational picture book. 6-9)

The Wild River and the Great Dam: The Construction of Hoover Dam and the Vanishing Colorado River Boughton, Simon | Christy Ottaviano Books (256 pp.) | $19.99 | March 12, 2024 9780316380744

An extensively researched exploration into the people, the river, and the economics behind the creation of Hoover Dam.

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Completed in 1936, Hoover Dam was heralded as a human victory over the wild Colorado River, providing water and electricity for millions, including the residents of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other cities.

Less than a century later, climate change, combined with increased demands for water, have depleted the once seemingly endless river. Primary sources and quotations from several oral history projects put readers in the boots of some of the more than 20,000 men who worked in dangerous conditions and sweltering heat to complete this feat, made possible by cutting-edge technology and clever engineering. The absorbing chronological narrative follows the construction of the dam, delving into the social, economic, political, and cultural issues that propelled the project forward.

Visual aids add immediacy, including maps, construction plans, advertisements, and black-and-white photos showing the vast scope of the project, the powerful white men in charge, the workers and their families, and the devastating environmental consequences. The impacts on Indigenous and Black people are mentioned—for example, exclusion from compensation for land taken, destruction of sites and artifacts, forced labor, and unequal wages and work conditions.

The inclusion of many exact measurements provides insight into the enormity of the project but at times overwhelms the narrative.

A fascinating blend of social and environmental history and engineering. (timeline, dams on the Colorado River, notes, sources, picture credits, index) (Nonfiction. 10-16)

Lost Words: An Armenian Story of Survival and Hope Boukarim, Leila | Illus. by Sona Avedikian Chronicle Books (44 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781797213651

An Armenian grandfather reflects on his past.

Cooking with his mama, a

young boy has no reason to believe anything is out of the ordinary. But people are leaving town, and Mama tells the child and his sisters that they must go, too. She and their father will follow soon. The boy has much he wants to express, but he has lost the words. He endures a long, weary march through the desert and makes it to safety but doesn’t reunite with his parents. The boy grows older and has children and grandchildren. The pain recedes, but the words don’t return—until his grandson, on a day so like the first, asks where they are from.

Stories of the Armenian genocide are rarely committed to paper, but nearly every diasporic Armenian family has them, keeping them as close as the ubiquitous sepia-toned photos of relatives whose lives were lost but whose names remain. Though inspired by the experiences of the author’s husband’s grandfather, this is also the story of the countless children forced to leave their homes for reasons they couldn’t articulate and of their children and grandchildren, who will always strive to know where they come from. The warm, soft illustrations add a dreamlike quality to the spare words, moving in their simplicity. The tale might seem detached on the surface, but it can hardly be anything else, when the words to tell it fully have been lost.

Heartbreaking yet warmly tinged with hope. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, history of the Armenian genocide, facts about Armenia, glossary, selected bibliography) (Picture book. 5-8)

Miles of Style: Eunice W. Johnson and the Ebony Fashion Fair Brathwaite, Lisa D. | Illus. by Lynn Gaines Lee & Low Books (40 pp.) | $20.95 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781620143124

An African American fashion pioneer turned her love of style into a way to help others.

Born in 1916, Eunice Johnson (nee Walker), the daughter of a doctor and a school administrator, grew >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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ON THE COVER

LESA CLINERANSOME & JAMES E. RANSOME In a new picture book, the husband-and-wife team pay tribute to a Civil Rights icon and personal hero.

BY MAHNAZ DAR

Over the past two decades, author Lesa Cline-Ransome and illustrator James E. Ransome have set the gold standard for picture-book biographies. The husbandand-wife team have collaborated on acclaimed works about Harriet Tubman, Venus and Serena Williams, Alvin Ailey, and Satchel Paige. Their latest, Fighting With Love: The Legacy of John Lewis (Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster, Jan. 9), focuses on key moments in the life of the late Civil Rights leader-turned-congressman: the sit-ins he took part in, his travels through the South with Freedom Riders in the

summer of 1961, and the March on Washington, where he spoke alongside luminaries such as Martin Luther King Jr. Though it’s only January, this potent work is already one of the most relevant books of 2024, certain to inspire the next generation of activists to fight for what they believe in.

The book was a natural next step for the pair, who’ve long idolized Lewis.

“I’ve been admiring him through history books and watching him in the halls of Congress for years and years,” Cline-Ransome tells Kirkus via Zoom from the couple’s home in Rhinebeck, New York. “One of the things that’s most impressed me about John Lewis is both his passion for politics and for justice, equality, and civil rights, but also the ways that [all] intersects with his faith and immense love of humanity. He’s a fighter, but he’s also incredibly honest and believes and trusts in our humanity.”

Ransome, too, has always looked up to Lewis, in large part because of his courage, exemplified by his actions on Bloody Sunday in 1965, when he led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. “I

Life’s just way too short to carry this boulder of hate around with you.

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John Halpern

The couple has collaborated on several picture books about Black American icons.

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was just a baby [at the time],” he says.

“Lesa wasn’t even born yet. Seeing that footage of him—standing there and knowing that in the next few minutes, there’s going to be pain. He’s going to be beaten, and beaten hard. To cross that bridge and to walk into that—it’s always moved me.”

He’s long felt a kinship with Lewis, too. James’ family were sharecroppers, like Lewis’, and Lewis reminded him of his uncles. “I felt very connected to him from the beginning,” he says. In 2017, Lesa and James met Lewis briefly at the 10th National Conference of African American Librarians in Atlanta—a moving experience for both. “I’m pretty sure I started crying,” says Lesa.

“He was so comfortable among his constituents. You could see wherever he went, he was treated like family.”

Creating this work was daunting, especially for Lesa, who finds that the more she admires someone, the tougher it is to write about them. “I felt that way with our book Before She Was Harriet. I was very concerned about my ability to capture this incredible woman in a 32-page picture book.”

When James proposed writing about Lewis, Lesa was initially hesitant, but editor Paula Wiseman encouraged her to try. “It took me a very, very long time to figure out how to tell the story,” she says. “I had to go through a lot of different versions in order to find the right one.”

Lesa started by reading biographies of Lewis, including Jon Meacham’s His Truth Is Marching On (2020). “One of the things that really stood out was his immense faith and his belief that no child is born in hate.” She initially structured the book as a more linear biography, but that approach didn’t capture his essence. “I felt that I wasn’t really a believer in this principle of nonviolent protest; I still wasn’t fully understanding it.”

That changed in November 2020.

The week before the presidential election, caravans of Trump supporters descended on Rhinebeck, honking horns and yelling. She and other protesters stood outside with signs, making it clear hate wasn’t welcome in their community. As one of the few people KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Fighting With Love: The Legacy of John Lewis

Cline-Ransome, Lesa; illus. by James E. Ransome Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster 48 pp. | $18.99 | Jan. 9, 2023 9781534496620

of color in her predominantly white town, Lesa was immediately targeted by the MAGA crowd, who yelled racial epithets at her. “Lesa before researching John Lewis might have responded differently,” she says. “But I started thinking about how John Lewis might have responded in this moment. When he attended these protests, he would always try to envision the people who were spitting at him and beating him as babies, [to imagine] who they were before they became ingrained with hate. And that’s what I did.”

Thinking of Lewis helped get her through the experience. “I realized that this is what nonviolent protest is—that you can experience a certain calm and an understanding of the people who are opposing you.” His example also radically transformed the book. “I remember coming home, going to my desk and sitting down, and because I understood what nonviolent protest was about, I better understood John Lewis. He was protesting, but he was doing it with love. And that changed the direction of the story.”

James found himself shifting gears, too. The book ends just before Lewis crosses the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and

James initially wanted to conclude with wordless depictions of the protesters being attacked by police. Remembering a promise he’d made to himself years ago “not to show someone being hit or beaten,” he instead closed with an illustration of Lewis praying. Lesa knows that he made the right choice: “It’s a beautiful final spread because it shows who [Lewis] is: He’s a man of faith.”

James opted to use collage rather than paint, as he’s done with previous works on the Civil Rights Movement.

“I didn’t want to paint the same sort of pictures. I tried to challenge myself.”

On one spread, he glued newsprint to the page to depict the chicken coop on the Alabama farm where Lewis grew up.

On another, he used images of maps to show how far Lewis and the other Freedom Riders traveled. “Those types of visual challenges are what I look forward to when I’m doing a book these days, so I’m excited when that hard work pays off.”

Collaborating with a spouse on a book brings many benefits. As Lesa notes, “The best part about being a married working couple is that we get to do our research together.” While she was preparing to write her YA novel, For Lamb (2023), the two visited several Civil Rights–related sites in Montgomery, Alabama, and stopped at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, all of which informed Fighting With Love.

“It’s one thing to read great books, but there’s really nothing like visiting an area, talking to people, walking in the footsteps of the people that you are writing about,” Lesa says.

Both Lesa and James hope that readers will attempt to walk in Lewis’ footsteps. James advises young people to choose love, as Lewis did. “Life’s just way too short to carry this boulder of hate around with you,” he says.

Lesa wants readers “to keep marching forward and continuing the work that John Lewis left us.” She acknowledges how hard that is, especially now.

“But I think that on the journey to embracing a philosophy of love, we could certainly embrace a philosophy of listening and understanding.…I think listening is the first step in the journey toward love.”

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up in an elegant home that reflected her art teacher mother’s sense of style.

She loved fashion and sewing, but her parents wanted her to attend college.

As a student at Loyola University in Chicago, she met a young businessman named John H. Johnson. Once married, they founded a magazine about Black Americans in order to counter negative media depictions of their people. First published in 1945, Ebony quickly became popular.

When Eunice was asked to help raise funds for a local hospital by hosting a fashion show, she was able to employ models like those in the magazine.

Soon the Ebony Fashion Fair grew, showcasing the work of Black designers, gaining the involvement of top fashion houses, raising millions of dollars for Black charities and scholarships, and promoting the beauty and elegance of African American communities. Brathwaite’s account of Eunice Johnson’s impact on Black culture is charming and straightforward, and her determination to help her community is palpable throughout. Gaines’ digital illustrations are bright and colorful enhancements for the text.

A compelling tale of an intriguing subject who left an indelible mark on fashion and culture. (author’s note, photos, photo credits, quotation source, author’s sources) (Picture-book biography. 8-11)

Snail in Space Bright, Rachel | Illus. by Nadia Shireen Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 23, 2024 | 9781665951173

The travails of the first mollusk on the moon.

Gail the snail stands out from the rest, as the bright color-block art makes clear. Unlike the other identical snails, Gail has a spotted shell, her body is dark, her eyes are red-rimmed, and her mouth is a tiny expressive curve. “She sets her stalks on stuff that’s big,” her ambitions represented by her “Gail Was Here!” flag. She perseveres through 110

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Proof that a switch of perspective on a tough day can be a lifesaver.

B I G S I S T E R , L O N G C O AT

challenges—making her way up hills and through rain—and uncertainty.

She arrives at Space-Camp, studies diligently, and passes a “SPACE-FIT TEST.” Finally, climbing the ladder into a standard-issue spaceship, she slips and falls. Upside down on her shell, she replays her critics’ comments (“Give up! Stay safe”), but her heart tells her to go on, so she does. After her triumph, sporting flashy red eyeglasses, she hits the lecture circuit with a lesson: “If you’ve tried, you cannot fail.” It’s a well-meaning conclusion that might discourage kids who encounter failure when trying something new; after all, grit alone is no guarantee of success. And conversely, Gail’s final advice—“Believe you can…and then you will”—glosses over all the effort she expended along the way. These promises of assured achievement ring false.

a car drives through a puddle. The pair must cut their visit to the zoo short. They rush to find shelter, but everything is closing (including the library) or has long lines that stretch out the door. Can they turn this day around? Short, staccato sentences convey the string of disappointments: “We were soaked. And hungry. With nowhere to go.” Large-scale paneled art fills the pages, offering more details to pore over. Readers will enjoy spotting the stuffed lemur that the older sister gives her younger sibling after they attempt a visit to the lemur exhibit, although some kids may wonder if it’s real (it looks rather lifelike in some scenes). Luckily the duo find joy in small moments: stargazing, puddle jumping, and just being together. The older sister is tan-skinned; the younger sibling is lighter-skinned.

An amusing but oversold endorsement of persistence. (Picture book. 4-8)

Proof that a switch of perspective on a tough day can be a lifesaver. (Picture book. 3-6)

Big Sister, Long Coat

Falling Hard

Buchet, Nelly | Illus. by Rachel Katstaller NorthSouth (40 pp.) | $19.95 March 5, 2024 | 9780735845510

Burkhart, Jessica | Aladdin (288 pp.) $18.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781665912990 Series: Saddlehill Academy, 3

Two siblings have an unexpected day out together.

The day is supposed to be fantastic, but nothing goes as planned. First, the sun beats down and it’s unbearably hot—“legs-stick-to-the-seat hot.” Ice cream immediately melts into sweet rivulets. Then, a sudden rainstorm appears. Everyone scatters under colorful umbrellas, and the big sister pulls on a long yellow slicker. But that offers little protection from the wave of water that splashes up as

Seventh grader Abby St. Clair manages friend drama and competition at school and on her riding team in the lead-up to a big horse show.

In this third series entry (which readers can jump into midstride), Abby sees winning the upcoming horse show at Canterwood Crest Academy in Connecticut as a big step toward her goal of becoming a career equestrian. But conflict with KIRKUS REVIEWS

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her teammates poses more of an obstacle than her riding skills do.

Abby and her enemies on the team, Nina and Selly, had a fight at the last competition and are being closely monitored by their coach, Rebecca.

On top of that, Abby’s best friends, Thea and Vivi (established in earlier entries as Korean American and Black, respectively), seem to be excluding her.

Abby also initially bungles how she handles her crush on new girl Mila. At least she’s made up with her stepsister, Emery. At Canterwood, Abby meets Sasha Silver, one of her heroes, whose winter riding clinic she applied for— but Sasha reveals that someone tried to sabotage her application. Abby’s team experiences more surprises during the event, setting things up for the next entry. Parents are mostly absent from the narrative; Abby talks to her dad via FaceTime. The dialogue and social media use are realistic, the pacing is snappy, and the equestrian details are accurate. Most characters read white.

Clears the bar for horse fanciers.

(Fiction. 10-13)

Ice Cream Everywhere: Sweet Stories From Around the World Campbell-Smith, Judy | Illus. by Lucy Semple | Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $18.99 | March 15, 2024 | 9781534113084

A mouthwatering global tour of some favorite frozen treats.

Each spread in this book features children around the world sitting down to a host of desserts.

Leo and his parents have hazelnut gelato served in a warm brioche in Italy, Neza eagerly anticipates soft serve in Rwanda, Omar and Papa serve baklava-sprinkled gelato in their gelateria in Libya, Zara and Syed buy mango-flavored kulfi in India, Uncle John cheers up a disappointed Tui with hokey pokey in New Zealand, and children at a birthday party eat sundaes in the U.S. This last scene is realistic (one small child has a grubby KIRKUS REVIEWS

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hand plunged into the chocolate sprinkles). Smaller text offers more context about each sweet treat. Some readers might feel surfeited, but no brain freeze will follow the informative descriptions. A world map at the end locates the treats, and a final page explains the differences among four types of frozen dessert. The illustrations use mostly soft pastel color blocks that are free of lines as well as simplified forms and facial expressions. People are diverse throughout.

A final scene depicts eight of the far-flung children picnicking together with their treats. Parental warning: The possibility of ice cream for breakfast is posed as a valid option.

All in all, ice cream lovers will emerge satisfied—and eager to try out some potentially unfamiliar confections.

Not a history: a celebration of some of the world’s cold, milky confections, familiar and novel. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-9)

Lost Kites and Other Treasures Carr, Cathy | Amulet/Abrams (272 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781419767999

Writing down her concerns and creating art with found objects are things that help calm Franny—and lately, she has big worries.

Years ago, Franny Petroski’s mom, Mia, left her to be cared for by her maternal grandmother. But now Nana has broken her leg and can’t get around without assistance. Twelve-yearold Franny could use some help—or even emotional support—from her best friends, but Lucy Bernal’s family is moving back to London, and Ruben For more by Cathy Carr, visit Kirkus online.

Yao is busy befriending school loudmouth Tate. Enter Uncle Gabe, Mia’s estranged brother, who moves in for a few weeks to help. While he’s there, he starts telling Franny about Mia and raises the subject of her mom’s mental health, an issue Franny hadn’t heard much about before. This sparks some discomfort, a disagreement with Ruben, and difficult conversations with family members. Carr sensitively explores mental illness, incarceration, and families in crisis, and she portrays her characters as flawed but caring.

As Franny works through it all, she discovers that she no longer needs to list her worries. The creative process of working on a lost, damaged kite she finds—covering it with pieces of fabric that represent family and friends—helps her express and resolve her complicated feelings. It’s a rocky ride, but everyone, especially Franny, emerges stronger and with their spirits lifted. Franny and her family are white; Ruben is Filipino American.

Unusual and gratifying. (why you should be an artist) (Fiction. 8-12)

Surfin’ Sharks Chanani, Nidhi | Viking (80 pp.) | $12.99 March 26, 2024 | 9780593464687 Series: Shark Princess, 3

Finny friends leap into a third round of adventures and attitude adjustments.

Mako shark Mack is proud of his surfing prowess—until slender, graceful sawshark Telo beats him out at the first Surfin’ Shark Competition, and he grumpily announces that if he can’t be the best, he’s done. Whale shark Kitana, his canny fellow “princess,” thereupon leads him to a “shark spa,” or undersea geothermal vent where the dark water’s too hot for all but other sharks. By the time Mack has used his “sharkle”—the shark sparkles that emanate from his crown—to help reunite a lost baby shark with its mama, he’s mellowed out enough to JANUARY 1, 2024

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realize that surfing is too much fun to worry about being best or not (which the other sharks have been telling him all along). So, in a “fintastic” finish, he joins the whole cartilaginous cohort of contestants and spectators in acrobatically riding a collective “party wave,” before going back to chillax in the smoky “spa.” As in the previous installments, lessons on being true to oneself and supporting one’s friends are deftly layered into the humorous, lighthearted narrative. Chanani’s two leads sport crowns but, like all the species of sea life in the cartoon panels here, are otherwise drawn with reasonable fidelity to nature.

Another “jawsome” combination of small adventures and clear, worthy messaging. (“hide and sea” game, facts about sharks and geothermal vents, drawing lesson) (Graphic fiction. 7-9)

Tricky Chopsticks Chen, Sylvia | Illus. by Fanny Liem Atheneum (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 19, 2024 | 9781665921497

A young girl of Chinese descent struggles to use chopsticks.

Despite her best efforts, Jenny Chow cannot figure out how to use “slippery, wobbly, and tricky” chopsticks.

Everyone she knows can pick up dumplings and noodles with ease; even her little sister has mastered the skill! Jenny’s plight is obvious to everyone. Her mother encourages her to keep trying, her cousin laughs at her, and even the waiter at the dim sum restaurant knows to bring Jenny a fork, to her great embarrassment. As the Chow family’s Annual Chopsticks Challenge approaches, Jenny is determined to learn how to use the troublesome utensils once and for all.

She perseveres through extensive trial and error, but will she finally wow her family? Chen’s use of onomatopoeia (represented in both English and Mandarin characters) perfectly conveys Jenny’s frustrations, while Liem’s appealing cartoon illustrations capture 112

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Jenny’s experiments in chopstick re-engineering with slapstick humor and cleverness. Young chopstick users will find comfort in this story about a common rite of passage, but all readers will be delighted by Jenny’s problem-solving prowess. Most characters appear East Asian. In an author’s note, Chen discusses how, when she was younger, her mother set up “chopstick challenges” for her and her sisters. Instructions for making chopsticks tongs conclude the work.

A funny, relatable tale about the value of creative thinking and persistence.

(Picture book. 4-8)

God’s Little Astronomer Cho, Tina M. | Illus. by Marta Álvarez Miguéns | WaterBrook (40 pp.) | $12.99 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780593579411 Series: God’s Little Explorers

Cho surveys space with a Bible focus in her latest book.

Readers can follow along as two child astronomers, a brown-skinned child with orange puff pigtails and an Asian-presenting child with short dark hair, explore the stars, planets, comets, Earth, and the moon. Each subsequent spread after the opening features three bits of text.

Paragraphs set in a larger font offer basic explanations related to both science and religion; text in a different color often picks out important messages or concepts: “God cares for you” or the names of the planets, for example. In a smaller font, more science is presented with appropriate vocabulary. Finally, a Bible verse ties in with the information on each spread. Throughout, Cho emphasizes

the awesome wonder that is God’s creation and stresses that each reader is part of it: “Litte astronomer, know that our Father in heaven, our cool Creator, sees you as His most special creation in all the universe.” Miguéns’ brightly colored illustrations, which appear to have been created digitally, keep the focus on each spread’s topic.

When the action shifts to Earth, several spreads show ways for kids to enjoy the outdoors and observe space on their own: viewing constellations through a telescope, watching a meteor shower, and keeping track of the moon phases.

An informative and inspirational bridge between science and religion for Christian households. (Religious nonfiction picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Star

One Big Open Sky Cline-Ransome, Lesa | Holiday House (304 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9780823450169

An African American girl and her family experience hardships as they leave Mississippi for a better life out West.

Lettie is growing up in Natchez in 1879 when her father, Thomas, decides the family should join a wagon train heading to Nebraska.

There he would no longer have to work on a white man’s land but could acquire his own property. Lettie’s mother, Sylvia, is reluctant to leave her family, but Thomas is determined.

When the steamships taking travelers

A relatable tale about the value of creative thinking and persistence.

TRICKY CHOPSTICKS

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up the Mississippi River to St. Louis leave Black groups behind, they band together to take an alternate route. The families become a community, even electing leaders—although Thomas is disappointed and resentful when he isn’t chosen for a top position. The journey is arduous, but Lettie, with her head for numbers, records their miles and tracks their supplies. Their family dynamic changes when a young woman named Philomena, who’s heading to Nebraska for a teaching job, joins their wagon. Along the way, her presence becomes fortuitous.

This is a beautifully crafted novel in verse: Cline-Ransome once again demonstrates her incredible literary skills as characters’ personalities are revealed by their actions. The intergenerational voices provide depth as the events unfold, and the emotionally resonant writing is rich in details that add texture and meaning to this unique depiction of African American homesteaders that’s full of resilience and hope.

A deeply moving story that centers a distinctive part of the African American story. (map, author’s note) (Verse historical fiction. 8-12)

Don’t Ask Cat! Cocca-Leffler, Maryann | Whitman (32 pp.) $18.99 | March 7, 2024 | 9780807517031

Cat takes being honest to extremes.

Cat’s blunt comments result in hurt feelings and confusion among his animal friends. He deems a friend’s bathing suit “ridiculous,” leaves a baseball game because he’s bored, and even mocks the gift another pal presents to him. Cat also

For more by Maryann CoccaLeffler, visit Kirkus online.

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says that a baby bunny “stinks like POOP!” and rudely refuses sprinkles on his ice cream. When Cat realizes that his friends think that he’s mean, a bluebird offers to help him learn some better manners. It’s hard, but with a little effort, Cat manages to find something positive to say about the bird’s nest. Later, he puts into practice what he’s learned—thinking before speaking.

It’s not that he’s being dishonest with his friends. Instead, Cat realizes that he doesn’t need to say everything he is thinking and that some things should be kept to himself. The text flows smoothly, and the artwork effectively depicts the characters’ emotions in various circumstances. An especially winsome image depicts Cat’s almost baffled expression, paws pressed against his mouth, as he realizes how his thoughtless remarks are being perceived and struggles to find something unoffensive to say about Bird’s nest.

Humorously imparts an important lesson about candor and discretion.

(Picture book. 5-7)

Albert’s ABCs: A Sibling Story Cole, Henry | Peachtree (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781682636534

A day in the life of two siblings.

Albert, a young alligator (or perhaps a crocodile), just wants to play in peace, but as most older siblings understand, that’s easier said than done when there’s a baby in the house. Cole employs just one or two words per page, arranged in alphabetical order throughout the book. Our protagonist happily plays with blocks on one page (“Albert”), while on the facing page baby Baxter wails with increasing intensity (“Baxter”). As Baxter—doing what babies do best—noisily takes up space (“Hungry”), Albert’s annoyance compounds (“Irritated”). A messy meal served by Grandma (“Lunch!”) leads to a rest for Baxter (“Nap”) and a much-needed respite for Albert (“Oh…Peace. Quiet”), but again, as

most older siblings understand, those moments are short-lived, and before you know it, the baby chaos starts all over again (“Rises / Races // Stumbles.

Scrapes / Tantrum!”). Many children will recognize Albert’s all-too-relatable experiences: Cleaning up all the food that Baxter spilled while eating is particularly aggravating. Albert’s expressive face tells the whole story as the day unfolds. The narrative is a familiar one, but it’s done effectively.

The pictures are bright and charming, and the choice to make this tale both a sibling story and an alphabet book is clever; youngsters will enjoy following it through to the end.

The perfect selection to share with a new—and frustrated—big sibling.

(Picture book. 2-5)

Kirkus Star

Ferris DiCamillo, Kate | Candlewick (240 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781536231052

Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.

Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century smalltown setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, JANUARY 1, 2024

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serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.

Tenderly resonant and memorable.

(Fiction. 8-12)

Kirkus Star

Everyone Gets a Turn Dubuc, Marianne | Princeton Architectural Press (60 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781797227290

Everyone has something to teach and to learn in this cozy story.

Bear, Mouse, Turtle, and Hare are outside reading, snacking, and playing when Mouse finds an egg.

Everyone calls dibs on raising it, so they make the decision that everyone will get a turn. Each caretaker exhibits a unique strength that supports the egg and (eventually) the hatched chick, dubbed Little Bird. The animals provide warmth and comfort, strength training, sustenance, and a sense of wonder and imagination, and Little Bird receives the tools she needs to embark on a fulfilling life. The foursome must learn to give Little Bird her space and independence, as well as respect the name she chooses for herself. Soon enough, the egg raised by a village becomes a beloved neighbor with her own lesson to impart. All four surrogate parents’ unique traits and strengths are efficiently conveyed, whether through their choice of activities or background details such as the framed pictures adorning each 114

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Everyone has something to teach and to learn in this cozy story.

EVE RYO N E G ETS A TU R N

home. Made up of comic-like panels and featuring desaturated colors, the art portrays a gentle, verdant world filled with welcoming homes where neighbors share their expertise and support each other. Readers will want to take several turns revisiting this anthropomorphic village.

Layers of consideration for not only raising a youngling, but learning from one, too. (Picture book. 3-6)

Pearl Dunrea, Olivier | Clarion/HarperCollins (32 pp.) | $12.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780547867595 | Series: Gossie & Friends

A singer develops a frog in her throat—literally.

Pearl, a tiny gosling with sleek black feathers and a bright orange bill and webbed feet, loves to sing. She sings “every day, everywhere” and tailors her melodies to her animal friends: She serenades the ewe with “sleeping songs,” the piglets with “slurping songs,” and the cow with “mooing songs.” Pearl doesn’t ask if they want her to sing to them, though they listen attentively and don’t seem to mind. One morning, Pearl encounters something quite unexpected: A little green frog leaps into her open mouth while she’s vocalizing! Thereafter, Pearl doesn’t sing: Bill closed, she croaks. No more songs of any sort fall from Pearl’s bill. There’s only silence…until a piglet issues—what’s that?—encouragement! “Sing, Pearl, sing!” her small porcine pal calls out. Could it be Pearl’s friends miss her tunes?

At that, Pearl opens her mouth, and the frog escapes its confinement. Pearl sings out in joy once more. This sweet

tale, expressed in simple, declarative sentences, is about someone who happily goes about doing what she loves best. It’s also about cheering on those who are good at something and letting them glow like the “pearls” they truly are. The vividly colored, uncluttered illustrations capture Pearl and her friends at their adorable best and allow readers to focus on them; musical notes dance merrily throughout.

A delightful pearl of a story. (Picture book. 3-6)

Og Meets Mog!: Ready-To-Read Pre-Level 1 Dyckman, Ame | Illus. by Elio Simon Spotlight (32 pp.) | $17.99 Jan. 2, 2024 | 9781665941440 Series: Monster Og, 1

Thinking turns out to be better than hitting.

Og, unthreatening scion of a family of cartoonish, Popsicle-colored, Play-Doh-y monsters, all horned, with projecting teeth but goofy grins, is out helpfully collecting firewood when he spots a large block of ice with a blue lump inside it. Only two eyes are visible, and when one blinks, Og yelps. After futilely bashing the ice with sticks for a while, Og decides to use his brain instead of brute force.

Lacking tools, he karate-chops two trees to make rollers, finds rope, slides the block onto the logs, and pulls it home. The tiny fire in his yard melts the huge ice block, and quite surprisingly something orange and furry begins to emerge. Somehow, the ice KIRKUS REVIEWS

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was hiding an enormous marmalade cat (in British nursery slang, a “mog”).

Og is nice, Mog is nice, and together, Og and Mog are “twice as nice.”

Besides being big enough for Og to ride, as a bonus, helpful Mog chases off the mice that have been plaguing Og and his family. Rollicking rhymed verses, almost-monosyllabic vocabulary, and super-large type will attract beginning readers, who might also enjoy the wacky, harmless mini-monsters.

Very easy words, a small hero, and enough action to keep the pages turning. (Early reader. 4-8)

Tsunami

balanced mixes of discourse, bantering dialogue, and simply designed and drawn cartoon scenes and schematics.

Along with useful and enlightening details such as the recommended contents of a go-bag, how earthquakes are classified these days (not by the Richter scale), and the various causes of tsunamis besides earthquakes, the message that such large-scale phenomena are genuinely dangerous and need quick, smart action to survive comes through loud and clear. Scout returns in an appendix to remind readers about essential emergency supplies and guidelines and to offer a set of tsunami information sources. She and her mom present as white.

Eaton III, Maxwell | Roaring Brook Press (160 pp.) | $12.99 paper | March 19, 2024 9781250790453 | Series: Survival Scout

Informative and suspenseful. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

A peaceful idyll on the Alaskan coast turns literally topsyturvy for resourceful young Scout and her skunk companion.

As in the previous book, the storyline serves as a base for an instructional manual on the causes of a natural disaster and best practices for surviving it. Though Scout is temporarily separated from her scientist mom when successive earthquake shocks leave the cabin in ruins and presage an oncoming tsunami, she’s well prepared—both with knowledge of proper gear and procedures and with pithy but specific background lectures to her furry foil on relevant topics from plate tectonics and seismology to tsunami formation and characteristics. Young readers will easily absorb both thanks to the nicely

Faris, Stephanie | Aladdin (288 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781665938907

For more by Maxwell Eaton III, visit Kirkus online.

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Finding Normal

After a flood upends her neighborhood, 12-year-old Temple Baxter tries to help.

When heavy rains threaten the stability of the dam near their home, Temple, her parents, and her 3-year-old sister, Kennedy, are forced to evacuate in the middle of the night.

Fortunately, the dam holds, but water spills over the top of it, and their onestory house is flooded up to Temple’s mom’s knee level. It needs extensive repairs, but the family doesn’t have flood insurance. Pulled out of her private school to save money, Temple has to cope with the unexplained enmity of her former classmates and the challenge of making new friends.

She also embarks on an ambitious community fundraiser to collect money to help flood victims. Faris’ writing is smooth, but she stays at the surface level: The flood and its damage remain in the background, and readers never get a visceral sense of the magnitude of the family’s losses; Temple mourns her old bedroom in

the abstract, as a place she used to inhabit but not as the repository of a collection of memories or items with emotional impact. The mean girls and annoying-neighbor-who-turns-out-tobe-a-friend feel more like types than fleshed-out people, and the difficulties of putting on a fundraiser dissolve too easily to ring true. Main characters read white.

These floodwaters don’t run very deep.

(Fiction. 8-12)

Grandmas Are the Greatest Faulks, Ben | Illus. by Nia Tudor Bloomsbury (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781547613151

A celebration of grandmothers’ talents and strengths.

As several grandmas with many different body types, skin colors, heritages, and religions gather on a beach for a “Grandmas’ Beach Picnic” with their grandchildren, a brown-skinned child asks a grandmother if she had a grandma, too. “You bet I did, the very BEST! / So STRONG and brave and true. / There’s a great long line of grandmas / that leads all the way to YOU.” Readers might expect a family history of grandmas. Instead, each child at the picnic introduces their own grandmother: an actor, a backyard gardener, an ambulance driver. One’s a chef who makes “yummy starters, / gorgeous mains.” Some of these escapades might just be imaginary—we see one grandma in midair, ready to be caught by her grandchild, who swings by the knees from a trapeze. A racecar driver sits with her grandchild and their toy cars before a miniature race course. The text then loops back to the original pair: Grandma’s not an actor or spy, but the duo have fun together telling jokes and secrets, snuggling and playing games, and sharing love. Tudor’s cartoon illustrations match Faulks’ bouncy rhymes and highlight the >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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C H I L D R E N ' S // S E E N A N D H E A R D

Bush Sisters Talk Kids’ Book With Jimmy Fallon Love Comes First is the latest collaboration between Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush.

Sisters and former first daughters Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush stopped by the Tonight Show to talk about their new children’s book with host Jimmy Fallon.

Hager and Bush’s Love Comes First, illustrated

by Ramona Kaulitzki, was published by Little,

Brown. The book follows two young sisters who welcome a new brother and cousin into their family; a critic for Kirkus called it “an inspiring message for all” that “will also be appreciated as a new-baby gift.”

The Bush sisters, daughters of former President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, have co-written three previous books, all sibling-themed: Sisters First, a memoir; a children’s book of the same name, also illustrated

by Kaulitzki; and The Superpower Sisterhood, a picture book illustrated

by Cyndi Wojciechowski.

Their new book is a sequel of sorts to the children’s book Sisters First, inspired by the 2021 birth of Bush’s daughter, they said.

“We sort of cornered the sister market,” Hager told Fallon. “We’ve written everything you could possibly write about having a sister. But what we realized is that people on book tours would say, ‘I don’t have a sister, but here’s my best friend’ or ‘Here’s my brother, they’ve always made me feel brave,’ and we realized the common denominator is love, people up.”—M.S. that lift us up.”

Jenna Bush Hager, left, and Barbara Pierce Bush.

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Gary Gershoff/Getty Images

SEEN AND HEARD

To read our review of Love Comes First, visit Kirkus online.

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B O O K T O S C R E E N // C H I L D R E N ' S

Book to Screen Series Based on Charlie Bone Books in the Works Joseph Fiennes and Carmen Ejogo will star in an adaptation of Jenny Nimmo’s fantasy novels.

Ejogo: Matt Winkelmeyer/WireImage; Fiennes: Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty Images

Charlie Bone is headed to the small screen.

Deadline reports that Amazon MGM Studios has ordered a pilot based on Jenny Nimmo’s series of children’s fantasy novels about a haunted schoolboy who attends a school for teens with special gifts.

Joseph Fiennes and Carmen Ejogo are among the actors signed on to the adaptation.

Nimmo’s series debuted in 2003 with the novel Midnight for Charlie Bone.

A critic for Kirkus wasn’t impressed with the book, calling it a “formulaic, thinly disguised placeholder for the next Harry Potter.” Nine books followed, along with three prequels and two supplementary books.

Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love, Enemy at the Gates) will star as Dr. Bloor, the principal of Charlie’s school.

Other cast members include Ejogo (Selma, Selma, Fantastic Beasts and caption goes Where To Find here for Them), Emma this person lorem in the Sidi (Pls Like),

and Cory McClane (Hollyoaks) as Charlie.

Max Gill is writing the pilot episode, with Toby MacDonald (Extraordinary) directing; both are executive producers. Filming on the pilot has begun in the U.K., but the series doesn’t have a name yet. Deadline reports that the show will be marketed to a young adult audience; the books were written for middle-grade readers.—M.S.

To read our review of Midnight for Charlie Bone, visit Kirkus online.

news

Carmen Ejogo, left, and Joseph Fiennes have begun filming the pilot in the U.K. KIRKUS REVIEWS

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An inspired twist lets everyone participate in a Passover tradition.

AF I KO MAN , W H E R E ’ D YO U G O ?

intergenerational interactions. The grandchildren all appear to be only children of about the same age. Each of the pairs shares the same skin tone.

A festive intergenerational shindig.

(Picture book. 3-7)

Meatballs for Grandpa Fazzari Jones, Jeanette | Illus. by Jaclyn Sinquett | Two Lions (40 pp.) | $17.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781662512049

Can taste and smell help Grandpa recognize his grandchild?

“On the days we make meatballs for Grandpa, my feet fly up my grandparents’ driveway.”

A double-page spread shows a child— auburn hair tied back in a ribbon, red-shoed feet sprinting houseward, loose shirt and green skirt flapping.

Turning the page, readers learn that although Grandpa hugs Felicia, “sadness pokes through my smile when Grandpa looks at me without knowing who I am.” Grandma cheerfully tells Felicia not to worry: “Taste and smell are all we need.” She winks when Felicia asks whether Grandma is referring to meatballs or Grandpa.

In the kitchen, Grandpa continues to look confused, even when reminded of his own nickname for Felicia. Felicia and Grandma prepare a pot with olive oil, garlic, and onion and let Grandpa pour in a can of tomatoes. Giggles ensue. Colorful, semirealistic art and an excellent layout complement the text, showing the trio happily engaged. Throughout, Felicia’s joy is intermittently punctuated by worry about Grandpa. The text continues 118

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its gentle humor and carefully chosen phrases—including some in (translated) Italian—until the table is set and all three sit down to a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. Readers with relatives affected by dementia now have Grandma as a role model; all readers will feel closure from Grandpa’s breakthrough moment. Characters are light-skinned.

A sweet tale about the power of food, laced with meaningful lessons. (author’s note, recipe) (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

Partly Cloudy Freedman, Deborah | Viking (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9780593352670

The scoop on clouds, led by two long-eared skywatchers trading observations and outlooks.

“Rapunzel!

Rapunzel! Let down your hair! ” cries one plushy little white rabbit, gesturing theatrically at the sky. Responds a second bunny, with eyeglasses: “Those are CIRRUS clouds, and they are basically a lot of microscopic ice crystals.” That’s just one of several similar exchanges beneath gathering cumulus clouds of various sorts, but when storm clouds deliver a mighty BOOM! of thunder, the roles reverse, and it’s the one without glasses delivering the cerebral disquisition on cumulonimbus while the other squeaks about a “humongous monster!” They are, of course, both right…as readers able to let their imaginations roam and also absorb Freedman’s unusually expansive gallery of cloud types will be well

equipped to understand. Along with the pleasures of viewing diaphanous watercolor portraits of the 10 main types of clouds and less common sorts ranging from virga and lenticularis to mammatus and wavelike Kelvin–Helmholtz, Freedman offers additional facts in inset boxes, plus lucid schematic views of how clouds form and of the whole water cycle to boot. “There is so much to learn about clouds!” marvels one bunny. And indeed, so much to learn about the world and how we perceive it.

Cirrus-ly great. (selected resources, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Afikoman, Where’d You Go?: A Passover Hide-and-Seek Adventure Gardyn Levington, Rebecca | Illus. by Noa Kelner | Rocky Pond Books/Penguin (40 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780593617786

An inspired twist lets everyone participate in a Passover tradition.

A delightful part of any seder is when the children in attendance scour the house in search of the afikoman, a hidden piece of unleavened bread.

This tale allows readers to experience the fun for themselves—without even eating any horseradish. The scene is set as a diverse group crowds around the seder table, including a sneaky anthropomorphized afikoman with a face and stick arms and legs, clearly about to dash off. A chair has been saved for Elijah, complete with a note and a Haggadah on the seat.

With a cheeky grin, the afikoman makes an appearance on the title page and leads readers on a merry chase throughout the book. As a group of young cousins searches each room of the house, Gardyn Levington’s bouncy verse propels the plot forward.

With rhythm and repetition, this book has the makings of a storytime hit. Kelner rivals Where’s Waldo? illustrator Martin Handford in her KIRKUS REVIEWS

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ability to find unusual hiding places on purposefully busy and imaginatively designed spreads. The artwork is charming, allowing sharp-eyed readers to outwit the book’s characters and locate the afikoman on every page.

Though a glossary defines terms such as seder and matzah, those seeking more detailed explanations of Passover may want to supplement this title with other resources.

each character participates in moments of poignant humanity, but many supporting characters feel more lightly sketched in, including Thai American former corporate lawyer Wally, who experiences anti-Asian racism related to the unfolding pandemic; purple-haired coder Candace, Rodeo’s new girlfriend; and a grieving older Englishwoman named Doreen.

Coyote Lost and Found

Heroes: A Novel of Pearl Harbor

Joyful, interactive holiday fun. (Picture book. 3-6)

Gemeinhart, Dan | Henry Holt (288 pp.) $17.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781250292773 Series: Coyote Sunrise, 2

Coyote hits the highway again in this follow-up to 2019’s The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise.

Set one year later, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, this sequel finds Coyote Sunrise and her father, Rodeo, both cued white, having settled into a house in Oregon, with Rodeo receiving counseling and Coyote attending school for the first time in five years.

But with school canceled for three weeks, it’s the perfect time for father and daughter to traverse the country in their bus. They’re off in search of a lost volume of poetry by Mary Oliver in which Coyote’s mother wrote down the location where they should scatter her ashes. As before, the pair accumulate a motley assemblage of fellow travelers who fall under the spell of the quirky duo. Coyote’s narrative flair propels the novel, but the emotional underpinnings have shifted. Thirteen-year-old Coyote’s parentified role has lessened, and, aggravated by challenges with classmates, she displays a believably volatile early-adolescent tone in her narration and behavior. Her friend Salvador, who’s Latine, is an empathetic, well-developed character. Thanks to Gemeinhart’s trademark compassion, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Fans of the first book will find much to appreciate in this heartfelt story of growth and change. (Fiction. 9-12)

Gratz, Alan | Illus. by Judit Tondora Scholastic (272 pp.) | $17.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 9781338736076

A vivid account of the Pearl Harbor attack through the eyes of a tween boy.

It’s December 1941 in Hawaii.

The war overseas feels distant for 13-year-old Frank McCoy, a white Florida transplant and son of a Navy fighter pilot, and his best friend, Stanley Summers, a biracial (Japanese American and white) local boy whose dad works at the Naval Air Station. The boys are preoccupied with the superhero comic they’re creating together. But on December 7th, while Frank’s sister’s sailor boyfriend is giving them a tour of the USS Utah, Japanese planes begin bombing Pearl Harbor. In the fast-paced chapters that follow, the boys witness numerous horrors. They also recognize that Stanley is increasingly perceived with hostility by many white people; this awareness ultimately allows Frank to address an episode that haunts him from his

For more by Alan Gratz, visit Kirkus online.

past relating to friendship, loyalty, and mental health. The humanity of the characters and the on-the-ground perspective evoke sympathy for those who perished in the attack. Foreshadowing Spider-Man’s most famous line, the book ties together the friends’ love of superheroes (“Getting superpowers is one thing. Choosing how to use your powers is another”) with commentary in the author’s note on America’s responsibility to use its immense powers wisely (“what we continue to do now and in the future, will decide if we are heroes”). The novel closes with Frank and Stanley’s 10-page comic, which serves as an epilogue.

A propulsive wartime story with an earnest protagonist at its heart. (language note, map) (Historical fiction. 9-13)

A Friend for Eddy Ha, Ann Kim | Greenwillow Books (40 pp.) $19.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9780063315464

A lonely goldfish wants a friend, but there are complications.

One day Eddy hears tapping on his bowl and spots something bright yellow—another goldfish? He asks it if it wants to play, and it nods, and a game of tag begins. The next day, two yellow fish are ready to join the fun. More than anything, Eddy wants to be outside his bowl with his friends.

He gathers his courage, swims in ever faster circles, and launches himself out of his bowl. After a moment of joy, he lands with a thud, unable to breathe, swim, or blow bubbles. Will his new friends rescue him from disaster? This is the tale set forth in the text, but the visuals tell a deeper, more subtle story that depends on readers’ sharp eyes and understanding. The simple setting depicts a table and a bowl against a shining blue background, but children will notice that beyond Eddy’s bowl is a black shape that appears to be the top of a cat’s head, soon followed by the cat’s face. Those “fish” are actually the black cat’s bright yellow eyes. Will that mean doom for Eddy, or will JANUARY 1, 2024

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Solemn, respectful, and informative, with art worth lingering over.

WEST COAST WILD RAINFOREST

his sweet innocence and joy in his friendship lead to a hoped-for happy conclusion? This clever and inspired story will hold readers’ attention and have little ones begging for rereads.

A tender tale of an unusual friendship, with just a touch of mystery. (Picture book. 4-8)

All Aboard the Alaska Train Hartman, Brooke | Illus. by John Joseph Red Comet Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781636550992

A rousing, rhyming tour of Alaskan wildlife and scenery.

The Alaska Railroad is 120 years old, covers more than 500 miles, and boasts a string of midcentury modern cars, electric blue with gold streaks. At a station labeled “Seward,” a crowd of passengers waits to board, and soon we’re off: “Chugga-chugga, clickety-clack! / Racing down the railroad track.” Racing is replaced by a succession of lively verbs on subsequent spreads: roaring, rushing, rocking, rolling, rumbling, rambling, and rattling. And with every new spread, a new habitat and a new animal are featured: buffalo (aka bison), otter, sheep (with curly horns), moose, porcupines, grizzly bears, caribou. The landscapes are of course spectacular; we’re treated to steep cliffs, boggy meadows, fir and aspen groves, and, finally, a mountain so high that it halts the train. Throughout, the animals have been climbing aboard surreptitiously, until their presence becomes obvious.

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and pull the train up the impossibly steep track. Their reward: the northern lights spread across the night sky! The conductor and passengers vary in skin tone, and panoramic pictures offer lots of details and extra wildlife for searching eyes to find—especially amid the chaotic detraining in Fairbanks. Like Hartman and Joseph’s earlier collaboration, The Littlest Airplane (2022), this book offers a perfect pairing of big, bright, expressive color illustrations and engaging read-aloud text.

For budding train enthusiasts, animal lovers, and nature buffs. (map, history of the Alaska Railroad, diagram of the train, glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)

Log Life Hevron, Amy | Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 9781665934985 | Series: Tiny Habitats

A picture of the long and beneficial role played by a “nurse log” in the forest’s cycle of growth and renewal.

A tall fir tree begins a “new life” when it falls in a storm—first as a site for a “big, mushroomy party,” then as a host for carpenter ants that draw hungry birds, and then through years and even centuries to nurture new seedling trees while serving as “a soggy shelter to all kinds of critters.”

Hevron’s airy tone (“Snails vacayed in the decay”) is mirrored in forest scenes featuring mushrooms with smiley faces and cute though otherwise accurately detailed creatures of many sorts snoozing or scampering about while exchanging comments: “I’ll lay some larvae here.” “Me too!”

“Me three!” By the time the log has disappeared (1,000 years later, a running label suggests), a towering successor stands in its place…to fall itself one day and bring the natural process full circle. Though the flora and fauna depicted here are specific to the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, as the author notes in the backmatter, she closes with a list of old-growth forest sites in other parts of the U.S. where readers can explore nurse log habitats.

Natural history, served with a smile. (source and reading lists) (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Penelope Rex and the Problem With Pets Higgins, Ryan T. | Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.) $18.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781368089609 Series: A Penelope Rex Book

Penelope’s parents give her an overzealous pet that just might be too much to handle.

What is an appropriate pet for a young T. rex? A saber-toothed cat, of course. Penelope doesn’t even want a pet. But she’s willing to give Mittens a try. Mittens, however, is a bit energetic and very large. He takes up the entire bed and bowls Penelope over with excited leaps every time she walks through the door. Plus, he eats everything he’s not supposed to (even possibly the neighbor, Mrs. Phillips) and has a habit of burying Penelope’s underwear in the backyard. But when the family puts Mittens outside (he looks in longingly through the sliding glass door with large, sorrowful eyes) and attempts to crate him at night, Penelope’s feelings begin to change.

With a lot of hard work and training,

For more by Ryan T. Higgins, visit Kirkus online.

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Mittens becomes a lovable—but still very large—part of the family. Higgins explores the frustrations of new-pet ownership and the time it takes for all involved to parse out their new roles. Clad in her trademark pink overalls, Penelope experiences a range of emotions (disgust when Mittens uses the bathtub as a litter box, anger over a torn backpack, remorse at losing her temper) in exaggerated, snout-quivering style.

A first-pet tale bursting with personality. (Picture book. 4-7)

Turtle-Turtle and the Wide, Wide River Hillenbrand, Jane & Will Hillenbrand | Illus.

by Will Hillenbrand | Holiday House (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9780823453979

Help comes in unexpected ways as a lone baby turtle battles a storm-tossed river.

Heron, Frog, and Otter all know the signs: “The reeds rustled. / The waves crashed. / The lightning flashed. / The thunder clapped, / and the rain pelted down, down, down.” Turtle-Turtle, however, is too young to understand what’s happening. So while the others run for cover, he cowers under his shell on their small island. After a climactic double-page spread in which the little reptile is tossed this way and that in the water, he learns that he can hold his breath underwater and keep his eyes open—qualities he didn’t know he had. With the support of the other animals, Turtle-Turtle reaches land once again. The authors’ use of alliteration, onomatopoeia, and internal and end-of-line rhymes makes this story flow effortlessly and dramatically when read aloud. These elements, as well as the repetition of words and a refrain, will encourage even the youngest listeners to participate. Will Hillenbrand’s digital scenes employ diagonal lines, signs of motion, and a darker palette to signal the danger, whereas the aftermath depicts a return to calm KIRKUS REVIEWS

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and a gradual brightening, leading to a rainbow. The book’s dedication suggests that the inexperience and resilience of children during the pandemic—and the support of helpers—were inspirations.

The target audience will appreciate this tale of getting by with a little help from one’s friends. (author’s note from Will Hillenbrand) (Picture book. 2-5)

West Coast Wild Rainforest Hodge, Deborah | Illus. by Karen Reczuch Groundwood (44 pp.) | $19.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781773068398 Series: West Coast Wild, 5

A lushly illustrated introduction to the ecosystem of the American Northwest’s coastal rainforest.

Focusing on the role of spawning salmon as a keystone species—they’re eventually a food source for the trees as well as the local insects, bears, wolves, and bald eagles—Hodge lays out in measured tones a web of cycles and interrelationships, from Douglas squirrels that help to spread conifer seeds by gnawing on cones, to wolves that make their dens in hollows beneath gnarled roots, to fallen trees that become “nursery logs” for new seedlings. In keeping with the titular theme, an Asian-presenting family appearing at the beginning and the end are the only human intrusions in Reczuch’s cool, green forest scenes; mostly she offers close-up portraits of characteristic flora and fauna depicted in fine, accurate detail amid misty glimpses of sturdy trunks, leafy glades, and clear, rocky streams. The afterword offers a nod to the Indigenous stewards and other conservationists

For more by Deborah Hodge, visit Kirkus online.

who have led the fight in British Columbia against indiscriminate logging, but the beauty of these old-growth forests and the ecosystem that sustains them comes through clearly enough to make a compelling argument for preserving them.

Solemn, respectful, and informative, with art worth lingering over. (resource lists) (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Star

Ant Story Hosler, Jay | HarperAlley (160 pp.) $24.99 | $15.99 paper | March 26, 2024 9780063294004 | 9780063293991 paper

A small leafcutter ant with a flair for dramatic recitations squires a new friend through a fantastically dangerous rain forest world.

Being a “cartoon ant” who can talk (and talk), Rubi has had a lonely time of it. Her larger, nonverbal ant sisters scurry busily about cutting up leaves and cultivating underground fungus gardens rather than paying her (or even her melodramatic accounts of ant colony life) any mind. That all changes, though, when Rubi meets an ant who likewise talks but seems newly awakened and unaware that there are “a gajillion ways to die out here.” The breathless ensuing odyssey provides quick and continuing proof of the danger, with the two barely surviving threats from swarming army ants and a chameleon’s (as Rubi puts it) “DEATH TONGUE!” to voracious antlions and a gut-slurping assassin bug. Not to mention serious friction when Rubi’s ballad about a type of parasitic fly that lays its eggs in ant bodies to hatch, feed, and grow (“Once there was a horrid phorid / flying in the sky…”) gets an unexpectedly strong reaction from her mysterious new acquaintance. The development of the pair’s improbable bond becomes a storyline every bit JANUARY 1, 2024

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as enthralling as the teeming, vividly depicted tropical milieu, with its rich arrays of intricate, clearly laid-out biological cycles and patterns. Bright red Rubi is easy to track through the graphic panels’ luxuriant and otherwise accurately detailed flora and fauna.

A must-read for lovers of ants, ecosystems…and unlikely friendships.

(Graphic fantasy/nonfiction. 8-11)

What’s Inside a Bird’s Nest?: And Other Questions About Nature & Life Cycles Ignotofsky, Rachel | Crown (48 pp.) $19.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9780593176528 Series: What’s Inside

Learn about the life cycle of a bird.

Opening with appealing images of baby birds crying out for food from all kinds of nests and parents finding food for them in wide-ranging environments, Ignotofsky draws young readers into this latest title in her engaging What’s Inside series. An experienced science writer, she simplifies and accessibly presents important information through minimal text set on spreads filled with carefully labeled drawings. Her illustrations are colorful, stylized, and full of detail.

Birds all around the world court mates, construct nests, lay eggs, and guard their nestlings. Cutaway images show stages of embryo development, while sequential images illustrate a baby hatching and fledglings beginning to fly. One page discusses feathers; another labels bird anatomy.

Ignotofsky also touches on the diet

For more by Rachel Ignotofsky, visit Kirkus online.

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A sly caper featuring a particularly clever, memorably clad sleuth.

TH E CAS E O F TH E C U R I O U S CANARY

of various types of birds, points out ways they help the environment, and explores migration. Along the way, she defines important words such as incubation and embryo, highlighting these terms in orange. Humans who appear are racially diverse. One child, watching birds with an adult, reminds us, “You can look, but never touch a bird’s nest.” The author-illustrator wraps up by encouraging readers to help protect birds and learn more about them; suggestions for doing so and resources are provided in the backmatter.

A thoughtfully organized and delightfully illustrated introduction.

(Informational picture book. 6-9)

Kirkus Star

Come Closer, Tatita Imapla | Minerva (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781662651571

A child mourns the loss of a beloved grandmother.

For the young child who narrates this story, Tatita looms large. She was there when the child was born and then accompanied the little one everywhere—until she went somewhere, far away, where the child could not go.

Now that Tatita is gone, the narrator cannot see, smell, hear, or touch her.

Grieving, the child looks for her everywhere. Finally, “I look into my heart, and I can see you again. I listen to my heart, I can hear you again. I can hug you again. I can smell you again.” With this newfound understanding, the child learns to love

Tatita in a new way. Imapla’s simple yet deeply moving work evokes love and loss with language and images to which young readers will relate.

Her mixed-media illustrations use a palette of fewer than 10 tones applied in flat, monochrome fields and incorporate elements of children’s drawings—facial expressions rendered in single strokes of black crayon, oversized hands—to reinforce the sense that a youngster is telling the story. This highly effective combination of words and illustration makes for an intimate reading experience; this is a stirring mentor text for children navigating grief. Characters are light-skinned. Publishes simultaneously in Spanish.

A subtle yet powerful tale about love and loss. (Picture book. 3-8)

Rainbows, Unicorns, and Triangles: Queer Symbols Throughout History Jessica Kingsley Publishers | Illus. by Jem Milton | Jessica Kingsley Publishers (40 pp.) $17.95 | March 21, 2024 | 9781805010418

An illustrated primer of LGBTQ+ symbols tied to community, history, pride, and resistance.

Organized in loose chronological order, the book explores green carnations, violets, Polari (slang adopted in the U.K. in the 1920s and the only nonvisual symbol covered here), lavender rhinos, purple hands, the lambda, the labrys, pink and black triangles, and more. A few brief lines introduce the text, explaining why these symbols hold significance. Some served as a tool to help queer people KIRKUS REVIEWS

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secretly signify their identities; others were demonstrations of pride and resistance in the face of persecution.

An entry on rainbows, which touches on how the pride flag has changed over time, creates a bridge to the last entries, which look at symbols from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including two devoted to asexuality.

Overall, however, the text is spare, with little tying one entry to the next.

No suggestions for further reading on the topics introduced are provided.

As the title suggests, unicorns are covered, but their inclusion interrupts the chronology (no historical context is given in this entry, unlike in the others), and the explanation for why unicorns are a queer symbol is vague and sweeping. The bland prose relies on the lively illustrations to sustain interest. People depicted throughout are racially diverse.

A thin, disconnected overview. (discussion questions) (Illustrated nonfiction. 7-12)

You’re Going To Love This Book!

John, Jory | Illus. by Olivier Tallec Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780374388539

Can reading a book ever not be fun?

The narrator, an orange aardvarklike creature, addresses readers directly, enticing them to pay close attention by announcing that this book contains sure-fire kid-favorite topics as homework, Brussels sprouts, the dentist, chore lists, raisins, and early bedtimes. Can’t miss with those page-turners. The narrator exudes feverish elation, desperate to arouse enthusiasm. Who wouldn’t savor those talking points—every child’s first choices in reading material, no?

The speaker’s frenzied excitement is emphasized via creative typesetting: Some words are set in larger fonts, colored capitals, and exclamation points, and the frequent expression “Ahhhhhhhhh Yeahhhhhh!” suggests KIRKUS REVIEWS

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the idea “You can’t beat this for good times.” Of course, this is all played for raucous guffaws. Many children will catch on to and chuckle over the author’s obvious, sustained gag.

Younger readers, however, won’t have experienced daunting homework and may not have visited a dentist yet, so they might miss the point that those things are considered fearsome; additionally, lots of kids do enjoy raisins.

The real reason for loving this book is saved for last, though—and it’s a reassuring goodie. The acrylic paint, gouache, and pencil illustrations are a dynamic, comic hoot and certainly one fine reason to love this tale.

Who wouldn’t love a book you can really laugh over? (Picture book. 4-7)

The Case of the Curious Canary Jolivet, Joëlle | Illus. by Jean-Luc Fromental Trans. by Jill Phythian | Thames & Hudson (64 pp.) | $12.95 paper | April 2, 2024 9780500660263 | Series: Miss Cat, 1

In this tale translated from French, a young detective in a cat suit takes on a case involving a talking canary and a fabulous jewel.

Going for a noir tone and with tongues firmly in cheeks, the creators send their small, hooded sleuth on the urban prowl at the behest of Mr. Maximus, a sad gent who reports that his beloved bird has been stolen.

Miss Cat interviews Mr. Maximus’ daughter-in-law, Doris, a very skinny and oddly hissy suspect with a bulldog named Wolfgang who barks in a Norse accent (“WØØFF WØØFF”).

She returns that night to overhear Doris and Wolfgang conspiring For more by Joëlle Jolivet, visit Kirkus online.

with the fugitive bird to rob Mr. Maximus—who (a bit of archival research reveals) is actually retired magician Mixus the Magnificent, owner of a jewel known as the Eye of Elzob that can transform people into animals and back. It all turns out to be a family affair, as the climactic denouement reveals. Settling that situation amicably not only requires further use of the Eye but also leaves the magic gem in Miss Cat’s charge.

What will she do with it? Human figures are uniformly light-skinned; the cast includes a helpful archivist in a wheelchair, and in place of the requisite barkeep confidant, there’s a soda fountain jerk who happens to be an octopus.

A sly caper featuring a particularly clever, observant, and memorably clad sleuth. (Graphic fiction. 7-9)

While You’re Asleep Kastner, Emmy | Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $18.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781665931335

I f you knew what was happening while you were fast asleep, you’d wake up right away.

This enjoyable picture book begins as a typically hushed, lull-yourkid-to-sleep rhyming tale replete with cute animals settling down. It quickly turns into a vehicle for the author’s witty commentaries on less sedate nighttime doings—nocturnal creatures getting up to busy hijinks in the night. Raccoons raid trash cans, skunks tiptoe through the night, and crickets sing their hearts out.

The author interrupts the verse to comment on what’s going on—that skunk is probably just making her way to bed, and those crickets are singing lullabies before going to sleep…right? Near the end, she imagines what several critters might get up to at night: Perhaps the bats don fancy clothes, and the fox prepares a lavish dinner. But who knows? Most of us are snoozing, so we don’t really know, do we? This isn’t your ordinary sleepy-time picture book, but >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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P O D C A S T // C H I L D R E N ' S

Fully Booked

EDITORS’ PICKS:

When You Can Swim by Jack Wong (Orchard/ Scholastic)

Author Leah Henderson helps us celebrate the Best Picture Books of 2023.

BY MEGAN LABRISE

Do You Remember? by Sydney Smith (Neal Porter/Holiday House) You and the Bowerbird by Maria Gianferrari, illus. by Maris Wicks (Roaring Brook Press) The Tree and the River by Aaron Becker (Candlewick) Papá’s Magical Water-Jug Clock by Jesús Trejo, illus. by Eliza Kinkz (Minerva) Desert Queen by Jyoti Rajan Gopal, illus. by Svabhu Kohli (Levine Querido) THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Sometimes Cruel: Short Stories

by Demetrius Koubourlis The Carry-On Imperative: A Memoir of Travel, Reinvention & Giving Back by Robin Pascoe Modern Speed Reading: Learn To Inhale and Absorb Written Content and Improve Speed, Retention, and Comprehension

by Jimmy McMaster Dragon Garage by James Turner Fully Booked is produced

by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.

Courtesy of the author

To listen to the episode, visit Kirkus online.

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EPISODE 348: BEST PICTURE BOOKS OF 2023

On this episode of the Fully Booked podcast, Leah Henderson joins us to discuss The Courage of the Little Hummingbird: A Story Told Around the World, illustrated by Magaly Morales (Abrams, April 11), one of Kirkus’ Best Picture Books of 2023. This vibrantly illustrated tale shows how one small creature can make a big difference in a challenging world. “It’s a powerful message, made accessible and engaging through both Henderson’s writing and Morales’ vibrant, vividly textured illustrations,” Kirkus writes in a starred review.

Here’s a bit more from our review: “This version of the story, told around the world and likely originating among the Quechua people, imagines a setting in which animals from all over the globe live together in a forest until they’re forced to flee a fire. While they rest and recover, the eponymous hummingbird asks for help fighting the blaze, but they all refuse. Undaunted, the brave bird begins bringing water droplets from the river to the forest.…

The animals are shocked, thinking the bird’s actions foolhardy and futile.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ asks the lion. ‘I’m doing all I can,’ is the succinct, inspirational reply. This call to action is for the animals and for anyone who fears the insignificance of their efforts.”

Henderson begins by giving thanks to illustrator Magaly Morales, for “bringing this hummingbird to life in ways that I couldn’t have even imagined,” which leads to a spirited exchange of compliments for Morales’ extraordinary work. Henderson and I then discuss the hummingbird story, which assures readers that any effort on behalf of the common good, no

The Courage of the Little Hummingbird: A Story Told Around the World Henderson, Leah; illus. by Magaly Morales

Abrams | 32 pp. | $18.99 April 11, 2023 | 9781419754555

matter how small, is both beautiful and necessary. We discuss the abundant backmatter; cool hummingbird facts; how much Henderson knew about hummingbirds going into this project; how she chooses her projects; collective nouns; how she first heard the story of the little hummingbird; knowing when to defend your darlings in the editorial process; the questions she’s fielded from young readers; some of her favorite reads of 2023; and much more.

Then young readers’ editor Mahnaz Dar describes her approach to making the Best Picture Books list.

Megan Labrise is an editor at large and host of the Fully Booked podcast.

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A new-baby story that will serve as a welcome mirror for queer families.

HARPER BECOMES A BIG SISTER

it’s fun and may help kids relate to and dream about other sleepers. The contrast between the factual and fanciful material may confuse some readers, though. Grown-ups, beware: If youngsters imagine exciting adventures occurring while they’re supposed to be falling asleep, uh-oh…The illustrations, rendered in acrylic gouache, watercolor, and colored pencil and adjusted digitally, are delightful.

Captivating musings on what happens when we drift off for the night. (Picture book. 4-7)

Mihi Ever After: Off the Rails Keller, Tae | Illus. by Geraldine Rodríguez Henry Holt (208 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 9781250814258 | Series: Mihi Ever After, 3

A threat to the survival of the Rainbow Realm brings bigger stakes and more questions in this third series entry.

Directly following the events of Mihi Ever After: A Giant Problem (2023), Mihi Park and best friends Reese and Savannah somberly travel back to the Rainbow Realm, aware that, due to the dangers of their mission, they may never return home. The girls must venture across worlds to retrieve Princess Pat, who’s traveling to various lands and taking the dust that’s a source of magic in order to save the Rainbow Realm, where magic is waning. Bertha, an antagonist turned ally, brings the friends to the bazaar and the shop Masters of Disguise, where old helpers Dae Ho and Conan equip them with Follow Feet, tracking shoes that lead 126

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the wearer to the person they want to find. The action-packed story quickly picks up in pace as the trio set off on mechanical dragon trains. Elements from global fairy tales are incorporated, including a Korean kumiho (fox demon) and dokkaebi (goblins) and Irish leprechauns. As the trio close in on Pat, Mihi questions whether it’s right to let one realm die in order for another to survive. Mihi’s choices spur a shift in the magic that affects the portals, ending the book on a cliffhanger. Engaging black-and-white illustrations add to the suspense.

Enthralling adventures and plot twists will leave readers impatient for the next installment. (Fantasy. 8-12)

Kirkus Star

Rumi—Poet of Joy and Love Kheiriyeh, Rashin | NorthSouth (40 pp.) $19.95 | March 5, 2024 | 9780735845442

An enthralling introduction to the 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic.

Young Rumi grew up with a fondness for birds, nature, and books, as well as curiosity about the world around him. He loved the epic poem “The Conference of the Birds,” in which a group of birds seek the mythical Simurgh to be their king, and he often reflected upon the story’s mystical implications. As he grew older, he became a sought-after scholar and teacher. Rumi befriended another spiritual teacher, Shams, and began to consider friendship, love, and God.

In celebration, he would dance the Sama, raising his hands to the sky and spinning in joyous circles. Rumi’s students, however, became jealous of Shams and forced him to leave. Bereft, Rumi turned to writing. His collection of reflections became his masterpiece, The Masnavi. This absorbing narrative traces Rumi’s childhood inspirations and life-changing events. Though the parts about mysticism are a bit clunky at times, the focus is on Rumi’s childhood and his stories written for children, which will spark readers’ curiosity about his works and their deeper meaning. The gorgeous illustrations, rendered in bright vivid colors with stylized nature-inspired details, feature traditional Persian clothing, motifs, and calligraphy.

A beautifully rendered biography that will spur readers to contemplate themes of love and connection. (author’s note, biographical information on Rumi) (Picture-book biography. 4-8)

Harper Becomes a Big Sister Kirst, Seamus | Illus. by Karen Bunting Magination/American Psychological Association (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781433843143

Harper excitedly anticipates the arrival of her new brother and imagines everything they’ll do together.

Harper loves spending time with Daddy and Dad. When her fathers tell her that they’ll be adopting a new baby soon, she’s eager to share all her favorite family activities with him, from playing hide-and-seek to going down the slide.

When Wyatt comes home, Harper gets to hold him, but all her beloved pastimes are put on hold when her dads spend their time tending to Wyatt’s needs. Harper finally vents her frustrations when Taco Tuesday is canceled, leading to a family discussion about what has changed and what has not.

Dreamy illustrations depict Harper being swept away with her hopes for KIRKUS REVIEWS

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the new baby; after reality sets in, the artwork shows her frowning. While Harper’s emotional outbursts are resolved unrealistically quickly—and Harper’s response feels implausibly mature (“Instead of the three of us loving each other, the four of us will love each other…I have loved him from the second I met him”)—the message that there’s more than enough love to go around nevertheless is effectively conveyed while giving families with two fathers a sweet and useful tool to help introduce new siblings. Harper and Daddy are brown-skinned, while Dad and Wyatt are lighter-skinned.

howls. It’s not that the cat “can’t be bothered.” Rather, Greg’s feeling sad: “All I want to do is nothing.” The animals immediately understand and ask to join in the inertia, a gentle, satisfying gesture. Though the twist at the end falls a bit flat, the artwork is tremendously appealing, alternating simple but expressive drawings with splashy, detailed spreads. The palette gives the pictures a rich, vintage feel.

Kids who are working on identifying and expressing their feelings will relate to Greg, and grown-ups will appreciate that the book offers a model for using one’s words to convey one’s needs.

The Cat Who Couldn’t Be Bothered

Emily Posts

A new-baby story that will serve as a welcome mirror for queer families.

(Picture book. 3-5)

Kurland, Jack | Frances Lincoln (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9780711287457

Sometimes doing nothing is everything.

Greg, a blackand-white cat, is unconcerned with others’ preoccupations. When a peppy, teal cat tries to engage Greg in play, Greg declines. The feline is invited to a party by a well-meaning red pup, but, imagining the canine shenanigans that might ensue, Greg politely demurs. The invitations keep rolling in (Exploration! Space travel!), but upon considering each scenario, Greg can foresee only bad outcomes.

Undeterred by Greg’s reticence, a friendly astronaut kitty finally asks what Greg would like to do. A colorful explosion of suggestions burst forth from an array of friendly animals, but Greg is not having it. “STOP!” Greg

A sweet reminder that being honest about your feelings yields kindness and understanding. (Picture book. 2-6)

Kyi, Tanya Lloyd | Tundra Books (264 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781774882047

An aspiring social media influencer navigates friendship woes while advocating for climate change.

Inspired by her idol, Emily Post, 13-year-old Emily Laurence has a precise plan for her rise to social media influencer fame—guided by proper etiquette, of course. Unfortunately, things aren’t going according to plan. For starters, she’s acquired an infuriating new stepfamily. Emily’s mom also confiscated her phone when she violated her social media restrictions, and she needs it back in time for the local climate march. The school principal is punishing her for posting an unauthorized episode of the podcast she

A sweet reminder that being honest about your feelings yields understanding.

T H E C AT W H O C O U L D N ’ T B E B O T H E R E D

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hosts with best friend Simone Ahn, which means likely losing out on meeting Asha Jamil, her social media influencer idol, when she comes to their middle school. And now the annoyingly alluring (and vegan!) new girl, Amelie Cattaneo, is co-hosting the podcast with Simone. Written from Emily’s first-person perspective, this story neatly lines up plot points, and the friendship dynamics are handled deftly, but quick resolutions and interrupted conversations prevent authentic, age-appropriate explorations of relevant topics. There’s a clear message that climate change is a problem, but ways to have a meaningful impact are explored on a surface level.

At times, Emily’s narration seems oblivious to her own affluent privilege.

Emily reads white; contextual clues point to some ethnic diversity in the supporting cast.

Useful as a starting point for more nuanced conversations about internet safety and climate change. (Fiction.

10-14)

Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice Lapera, Anna | Levine Querido (336 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781646143719

Inspired by her aunt, who was an activist in Guatemala, a 12-year-old finds the courage to stand up to rampant sexual harassment at school.

Manuela Semilla’s grandmother is losing her memory, but she urges her granddaughter to find her “quetzal voice.” Mani initially struggles to understand what Abuelita means, and why she’s comparing her to a quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, which, according to Mayan legend, hasn’t sung heartily since before the Spanish invasion centuries ago. Mani, who’s of Guatemalan, Filipino, and Chinese descent, sometimes feels torn between her family’s opinions and what she wants to do as a contemporary JANUARY 1, 2024

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American preteen, such as wearing clothes her mami deems immodest.

Her adolescent angst—over everything from debating when she should speak up to fretting over not getting her period yet—is extensively and realistically conveyed. Teachers are condescending. Boys are mean if not outright abusive. Her mother is unfair for forcing Mani to visit Guatemala this summer. But after Mani finds letters from her late Tía Beatriz describing her bravery in speaking out about violence against women, she begins to observe a common thread between the injustices her aunt fought and the bullying and harassment that her school administration allows to escalate. Mani’s feelings evolve into a firm resolve to help make things better. The second half of the story flows well, culminating in heartwarming moments of understanding between Mani and Mami, as well as actionable steps toward real, positive change.

A poignant, feminist coming-of-age story. (Fiction. 10-14)

Not Yet: The Story of an Unstoppable Skater Lari, Zahra & Hadley Davis | Illus. by Sara Alfageeh | Orchard/Scholastic (40 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781338865202

In her debut picture book, Lari, the first figure skater to compete internationally while wearing a hijab,

tells her story.

After watching Disney’s Ice Princess, young Zahra dreams of taking to the rink herself. Family and friends express skepticism, but she responds to comments such as “You don’t know how to skate” with “Not yet.” Family members point out that she’s too old to start training, that she lacks access to skating rinks in the United Arab Emirates, that it’s cold out on the ice, and that figure skaters don’t look like her. As Zahra’s “Not yet” shrinks into a whisper, her father hears its soft persistence and takes her to get a pair of skates. Though Zahra’s first time 128

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on the ice doesn’t meet her expectations, she refuses to give up, and her aspirations and skill continue to grow.

The authors’ notes in the back are delightful, emphasizing the power of realizing one’s dreams. While the text focuses on the internal and familial barriers Lari faced, the backmatter discusses the obstacles she encountered when wearing her headscarf on the international stage. Alfageeh’s illustrations capture contemporary and cultural designs, clothing, and landscapes of the UAE along with characters’ cartoonish comedic facial expressions. Young Zahra’s scarf flows with fantastic joy in many spreads, while the adult Zahra is depicted wearing sportswear hijabs.

A stirring tale of perseverance. (illustrator’s note) (Picture-book memoir. 4-8)

All of Those Babies

images and typeface is likely too small for group use but perfect for a lap— and there’s plenty to pore over. From the first page, where the wombat’s joeys are scaling a fluffy ewe while two lambs cavort on the wombat’s back, to a scene where a puffin parent looks concerned as a pair of pufflings fight over a tasty fish, to an image of a cygnet catching a lift on a colt’s back, there’s a lot to see. The refrain “everyone grows” is accompanied by developmental sequences showing creatures such as penguins, octopuses, and meerkats maturing. Toward the end, the focus shifts: “You once were a baby.” Additional animals look on, bemused, as “you” learn to roll, crawl, and walk. Humans depicted are tan- or brown-skinned. Many more unidentified animals (such as the uncommon axolotl), some with unlabeled young, are portrayed; reader research advised.

Larsen, Mylisa | Illus. by Stephanie Laberis Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781665921442

Bound to be a repeat-reading request.

(Informational picture book. 1-6)

Meet some cute offspring—and many humans’ favorite little animal: ourselves.

This delightful book nails rhymes and rhythms and features relatable content. Confidently employing a familiar two-beat-per-line quatrain, Larsen cleverly incorporates the proper terms for the young of a wide variety of animals. Porcupettes, peeps, puggles, codlings, crias, eyas, keets, poult, and pinkies will be new to many readers, while other words, such as goslings, tadpoles, calves, and kits may be more familiar.

The colorful, cartoon-style illustrations are sharp, and the layout is packed but clear and unfussy. The size of the

Latham, Joe | Andrews McMeel Publishing (272 pp.) | $14.99 paper | March 12, 2024 9781524884734 | Series: Haru, 1

Haru: Spring

A bird and a boar embark upon an adventure and encounter a fearsome foe.

In this first entry in a new graphic novel series, Haru, a blue, flightless bird who uses they/them pronouns, is picked on by the other birds (“Are they even a real bird?” “Looks more like a blueberry!”). Their best friend, Yama, a kindhearted pig, does her best to offer Haru warmth and reassurance,

A bird and a boar embark upon an adventure and encounter a fearsome foe.

HARU

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but their confidence falters nevertheless. One day, after chasing an errant paper airplane, Yama discovers “the heart of briar,” which “glows with darkness” and has a mysterious past. Frightened by this heart that’s wrapped in thorny brambles, Yama tries to rid herself of it by throwing it into the water, but it magically reappears and slowly infects her with negative, unkind thoughts. Haru and Yama soon find themselves having a wild and thrilling adventure through an unusual shopping mall, befriending an anthropomorphized mushroom and a firefly, and ultimately coming up against a terrifying nemesis who harbors his own secrets. Latham’s tale is lush and evocative, recalling the quirky whimsicality of Hayao Miyazaki and striking an original balance between contemplative and exciting. The muted, earth-toned palette stylishly plays off the dreamy, lyrical text, which brims with alliterative descriptions. Despite portraying no humans, Haru’s world is familiar, with mentions of electricity, Google, and an automobile; perhaps in later volumes, this intriguing but undeveloped element of the worldbuilding will be explored further.

A series opener that both enchants and captivates. (Graphic animal fantasy. 8-11)

Gigi Shin Is Not a Nerd Lee, Lyla | Aladdin (192 pp.) | $17.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781665939171 Series: Gigi Shin, 1

Seventh grader Gigi Shin and her friends come up with an idea to raise money for art camp.

Gigi loves art, but her traditional Korean parents would rather she pursue science or engineering. One day, Gigi and her best friends spot a poster advertising the Starscape Young Artists’ Program, a prestigious summer camp in New York City. It’s a perfect opportunity, but it’s expensive, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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and none of the girls can afford it.

That’s when Gigi comes up with an idea: an after-school tutoring service.

Gigi keeps the idea secret from her parents, and though the friends pull it off, Gigi learns a few lessons along the way, including the importance of collaboration, time management, and honesty. While the prose is breezy and readable, reminiscent of Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club books, there’s a lot for younger tweens to chew on as Gigi navigates multiple identities: daughter, sister, friend, artist, and entrepreneur. Those who relish stories about older, more independent kids will be pleased. Lee leaves some loose ends unresolved, keeping the focus on Gigi’s journey; future books in the series may shed light on what happens next. There’s racial and economic diversity among the cast.

Move over, Baby-Sitters! There’s a new club in town. (Fiction. 8-11)

Avocado Magic Levi, Taltal | NorthSouth (48 pp.) | $19.95 March 5, 2024 | 9780735844988

A little girl can’t wait to get bigger.

After celebrating her birthday, Ellie is disappointed to realize she’s still the same size.

Ellie’s father shows her an avocado seed and tells her that she’s like the little seed: “small but full of magic.”

While she may not always notice, she’s constantly growing and changing.

They place the seed in a jar of water, and though Ellie’s impatient for it to become a tree, she learns to take care of it. Gradually, the leaves stretch and reach, and Ellie and her father move the plant to a bigger pot, just as Ellie moves to a bigger room. Both Ellie and the avocado blossom, take root, and start the circle of life anew; Ellie matures, leaves home, and finds a partner. The story will be meaningful for adults and children alike, a lesson on both the day-to-day steadiness of growth and the overwhelming speed with which life moves forward. Serving

as a touchpoint for Ellie and readers, a rhyming refrain emphasizes that change takes time. The soft illustrations convey a sense of growth through luscious greens and other bright hues.

The careful blending of colors makes the images feel warm and alive. Ellie and her immediate family members are brown-skinned and dark-haired, while her partner is light-skinned and red-haired. Backmatter explains how to sprout an avocado at home.

A tender and cozy tribute to the magic of growing up. (Picture book. 4-6)

Walkin’ the Dog Lynch, Chris | Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) $17.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781481459204

A boy launches a lucrative business walking his neighbors’ dogs in order to help his family financially and to cope with big changes in his life.

After reluctantly looking after Amos, his family friend’s dog, 13-year-old Louis realizes he can turn a profit through dog care. He’s anxious about starting high school in the fall after years of home schooling and isolation from kids his own age. His dread is compounded by his family’s economic struggles in the wake of his mother’s being injured at work, losing her job, and going to an inpatient program for painkiller addiction. The stress of this separation also strains Louis’ relationship with Ike, his older brother, and Louis uses sarcasm and silence to avoid talking about family issues with his stoic fisherman dad and 11-monthsyounger sister, Faye. His dog-walking business, however, unexpectedly helps him make new friends among the neighborhood kids, and Louis begins to grow as a person and nurture new relationships, including a first love.

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A sweet, gentle tale about tradition, family, and celebration.

T H E G R E AT H E N N A PA R T Y

illustrates the central importance of building community and friendships as a key to surviving and overcoming difficult times. There’s also plenty of engaging canine content that will appeal to animal lovers.

Without sugarcoating crises, tenderly underscores how love and trust can shepherd lost kids toward hopeful futures. (Fiction. 10-13)

My Luck Charm Mabry, Sheri | Illus. by Tiffany Chen Whitman (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 7, 2024 9780807547830

A child learns the power of both nature and kindness in this sweet tale of an early morning spent fishing.

The young narrator tiptoes through the quiet house, promising Mama a surprise from the stream. Mabry’s text effectively emphasizes the natural world and the senses, from the smell of the pines to the sounds of the birds, frogs, and wind. The titular charm, carved specially for the child by Grandpa (unseen in the story), turns out to be more than just for luck; it’s also a sort of moral compass. Upon finally reeling in a beautiful rainbow trout, the child has second thoughts about taking it home for breakfast; the little one’s pride in catching the fish turns to a feeling of For more by Sheri Mabry, visit Kirkus online.

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responsibility for the beautiful creature lying on the shore next to the charm that’s fallen out of the child’s pocket.

Without so many words and without judging others who may make a different choice, the child gently puts the fish back in the water and determines that blueberries will be an equally good breakfast surprise. Vibrant colors, small details, and spot-on facial expressions keep the focus on the child’s experience of nature. Mother and child have lightbrown skin, dark curly hair, and brown eyes, and Mom is ever watchful from the porch while the child, clad in an orange life jacket, fishes from a rock.

A stirring, nonpreachy lesson in kindness, responsibility, and the restorative power of nature. (Picture book. 4-8)

The Great Henna Party Malik, Humera | Illus. by Sonali Zohra Lantana (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781915244604

A young girl plays the henna name game.

Noor’s cousin is getting married, and Noor and her female relatives have gathered to have their hands painted with henna, a plant-based paste that, when left on the skin, stains the skin red. Noor’s mother tells her that in their tradition, the bride sometimes plays “the henna name game”: The henna artist weaves the groom’s name into the designs painted on the bride’s hands. “If the groom finds it, he wins, and if he doesn’t, the bride wins!” Noor wants to join in, so her mother tells her to choose the name of someone she loves and to ask the artist to stencil it onto her hand. But who should she choose? Her father,

her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, or her sister? In the end, she comes up with a creative solution that celebrates her entire family. The book’s vivid, whimsical illustrations beautifully accompany the tender, well-paced text. Clear explanations of the henna party make this title a good window for children unfamiliar with the tradition. Characters are brownskinned, though in varying shades, and while it’s never explicitly stated where the book takes place or what ethnicity Noor is, hints in the text suggest that she and her family are of South Asian descent.

A sweet, gentle tale about tradition, family, and celebration. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Star

When Forests Burn: The Story of Wildfire in America Marrin, Albert | Knopf (256 pp.) | $24.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780593121733

Scorching case studies of the United States’ mismanagement of its natural resources.

Marrin has plenty to say about how passenger pigeons were driven to extinction and bison nearly so. But he reserves his choicest language for recording how huge swaths of North American forest were left vulnerable to massive, uncontrollable firestorms, first by loggers who swept in, ignoring the management practices of Indigenous populations, and then by racist preservationists and conservationists, led by John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, who misguidedly decided that all forest fires were bad. In chapters with titles such as “Peshtigo: The Night Hell Yawned,” the author describes the horrific results of those practices and policies in vivid detail: “Fire had transformed some of the dead into tiny heaps of gray ash; others, still recognizable as human, lost fingers, ears, and arms when burial parties touched their remains.” Along with KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A fast-paced adventure offering a fresh, feminist take on popular themes.

MEDUSA

saluting the work of modern wildland firefighters, Marrin covers eye-opening topics ranging from how the U.S. military studied natural firestorms in order to create artificial ones in enemy cities in World War II to the toxic environmental effects of modern fire-retardant chemicals dropped on forests. The book closes with ominous evidence that climate change is bringing increasingly less controllable conflagrations. Though spare and dark, the photos add memorable contemporary and historical images of fires and their aftermaths, as well as of a diverse range of firefighters.

Vivid, wide angled, and all too timely. (notes, sources, picture credits, index) (Nonfiction. 11-16)

Medusa Marsh, Katherine | Clarion/HarperCollins (288 pp.) | $19.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 9780063303744 | Series: The Myth of Monsters, 1

Ava and her new friends, descendants of mythological monsters, journey across ancient and modern worlds to change their fates.

Seventh grader Ava Baldwin is about to choose her favorite goddess as the topic for her report when she’s interrupted. Owen King, an arrogant white boy, talks over her to claim Athena, and after they’re assigned to share the topic, he tries to snatch her library book.

“Chill out,” he tells Ava; “It’s not a big deal.” Overcome with rage, Ava’s anger explodes—and Owen freezes, remaining still as stone even as he’s KIRKUS REVIEWS

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taken away in an ambulance. Ava soon discovers that through her mother, she’s a descendant of the monster Medusa; like Medusa, Ava can freeze men. She’s sent to the Accademia del Forte, a boarding school in Venice, where she’ll learn to control her powers along with other kids from around the world who are descendants of mythological monsters. There, Ava shares a room with an Empusa, befriends a Chimera, and schemes with a Harpy. When her friend Fia is cruelly punished for attempting to expose injustice within the school, Ava leads her companions on a journey to restore power to those who deserve it, traveling from Tartarus, “the deepest pit of the underworld,” to Olympus, the home of the gods. Readers familiar with this genre will still find plenty of new twists to thrill and delight.

Curly-haired Ava has West African and European heritage.

A fast-paced adventure offering a fresh, feminist take on popular themes.

(Fantasy. 8-12)

Mamas and Babies Matheson, Christie | Rise x Penguin Workshop (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 9780593659281

A look at mama animals and how they care for their babies.

Toddlers and young children are fascinated with babies, whether they’re human or animal, and this book takes advantage of that fact. Spread by spread, children are introduced to a mother and her baby or babies and something the mom does to take care of her child.

Mama swan teaches her cygnets how

to swim and offers her back as a resting place. Mama wolf spider carries her hundreds of hatchlings on her back. Mama elephant bathes her calf using her trunk. Though heavy on mammals, this book does show a couple of birds (in addition to the swan, a mother penguin also appears), a reptile (alligator), and, still within the mammal category, a whale and a marsupial (kangaroo). Largely white backgrounds with the simplest of habitat details keep the focus on the mother-child pair and their interaction. The animals are not anthropomorphized; instead they are depicted with realistic faces free of sentimentality, though their natural inclinations (nuzzling, licking, bathing, and watching over their little ones) may seem quite human to child readers, especially the orangutans holding hands as they sleep.

A sweet intro to many animal species and a winner for baby-obsessed youngsters. (Picture book. 3-7)

It’s Holi!

Mathur, Sanyukta | Illus. by Courtney Pippin-Mathur | Henry Holt (40 pp.) | $18.99 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781250903037

A family finds a way to help their youngest enjoy a beloved holiday.

It’s Holi, the Hindu festival that celebrates the coming of spring.

After his older sibling wakes him up, a young South Asian boy dons a traditional white outfit and snacks on mitai, jalebi, and samosas. The boy watches as family and friends fill water balloons and small cannons with water and colored powder. Although the boy loves colors, he seems uncertain, and when he’s splashed with water, he tells his family he doesn’t want to play. They urge him to join in, but he says that he’s worried about getting water on his face, especially in his eyes. His sibling brings him a pair of goggles, and he joins the fun. While it’s commendable to see a holiday book that centers a character coded as neurodiverse, the story feels rushed: The young protagonist isn’t given the JANUARY 1, 2024

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opportunity to opt out of participating or much time to calm down before jumping back into the fray, nor does the child have the chance to come up with his own solution. While the simple, clear language and vibrant cartoon images make for an upbeat tale, many kids who are similarly overwhelmed by holiday festivities will find the resolution unsatisfying.

An appealing Holi celebration that falls short in its treatment of sensory issues. (what is Holi?, glossary, how to make your own Holi colors!, suji ka halwa recipe) (Picture book. 2-5)

Peggy the Always Sorry Pigeon Meddour, Wendy | Illus. by Carmen Saldaña Trans. by Nanette McGuinness Little Bee Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781499815948

A pigeon learns how to stand up for herself.

Peggy the pigeon can’t catch a break.

No matter where she perches, someone objects to her presence and shoos her away. Peggy invariably apologizes and skedaddles, convinced she’s done wrong. Then, Peggy meets a seagull named Joan, who explains that she’s been watching Peggy and has carefully noted her ever contrite behavior. Joan points out that Peggy was victimized and further counsels her to stop saying “sorry” when she isn’t wrong. Joan advises skeptical, shy Peggy to stand up for herself by saying anything other than “sorry” when unjustly picked on. This is good—and hilarious—advice, as Peggy turns out to be quite the wordsmith.

Next day, Joan is at Peggy’s side when the same bullies attempt to shoo her off “their” respective patches.

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Warm memories of cold places and the people who brave them for science.

M Y A N TA R C T I C A

standing up to bullies and taking back one’s own space. Uttering ridiculous, unexpected remarks—as Peggy does—actually isn’t a bad way to completely disarm a tormentor. Kids will howl at Peggy’s snappy retorts and will enjoy volunteering their own wildly silly phrases. The lively illustrations move the story along briskly; Peggy and Joan are feisty, well-realized characters. Humans are racially diverse.

A sound lesson in empowerment and self-respect. (Picture book. 4-8)

The First Day of May Moreira, Henrique Coser | Levine Querido (40 pp.) | $15.99 | March 5, 2024 9781646143825

This wordless Portuguese import celebrates the joy of being outdoors from a distinctly childlike perspective.

In sets of square panels that read like comics, cartoon images featuring thick outlines and limited solid colors introduce a community. We see playground equipment, children at windows, and various trees, all setting the stage for a youngster with pink skin and a black bob to discover that the weather has turned sunny and to head outdoors. But first, shoes!

And off the starry-eyed child goes.

The landscape alternately fills one large square per page, then several small squares, all conveying a fluidity between reality and perception. The wind picks up, and the child flies through the air, past mountains and birds and over a river, first soaring, then floating like a leaf, finally

settling near a clump of forest. On the ground, the child discovers flora and fauna large and small (sometimes distortedly so). The little one enjoys nature with a quirky physicality and soon tumbles down to rest, whereupon a pink-skinned hand reaches into the panel with a steaming mug and a pat on the head. Moreira’s deceptively simple art is expressive, relying less on detail than on shape, line, and movement to evoke the fantastical experience of a beautiful day outside.

A quirky and buoyant romp through spring. (Picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Star

My Antarctica: True Adventures in the Land of Mummified Seals, Space Robots, and So Much More Neri, G. | Illus. by Corban Wilkin Candlewick (96 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781536223323

A lively and revealing visit to our remotest continent.

Childhood dreams of being an explorer went nowhere, Neri writes, but as an adult, he had a chance to realize his ambitions by taking a grant-funded trip to Antarctica. Along with other artists and writers, he joined researchers (“mostly white, but I see a few folks of color like me”) living and working at McMurdo Station to record discoveries and impressions. Funny and informative as his comments are, though, it’s his photos, which are joined by others drawn from a KIRKUS REVIEWS

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multitude of sources and mounted here as snapshots, that really bring the forbidding locale to life…particularly since Wilkin enhances many of them with superimposed cartoon images that catch the author looking on as scientists engage in a range of specifically described projects, meeting penguins, imagining flights over rapidly melting ice, urgently surveying a photo gallery of outdoor loos (brrr), and, all too soon, cheerily waving goodbye. Maps, galleries of rugged vehicles and outerwear, lists of things visitors to the station will find (a coffee shop, an ATM) and won’t (polar bears, guns), and multiple closing factual roundups will give armchair travelers all the more incentive to put trips to the still largely unexplored continent on their bucket lists.

Warm memories of really cold places and the people who brave them for science. (author’s note, recommended reading and viewing, photo credits) (Illustrated nonfiction. 7-11)

If You Want To Ride a Horse Novesky, Amy | Illus. by Gael Abary | Neal Porter/Holiday House (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780823456956

Climb into the saddle of your imagination.

So you want to ride a horse?

Who doesn’t! It’s really quite simple. All you have to do, advises this lovely book that proceeds at the rhythm of a gentle trot, is close your eyes and visualize the horse of your dreams. Think about your horse’s coloring, markings, shoes, and mane—braided or not?

Then think of a name. The name’s important because you’ll want to call that horse of yours so you can go for a ride. If you’re ever so lucky, your steed will love you and greet you with “a nicker, a lick, a nudge” and “rest his splendid head on you.”

Oh, and don’t forget to “slip him a peppermint,” which you should always carry in your pocket. The KIRKUS REVIEWS

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text proceeds with suggestions about how to groom horses and keep them clean and how to ride them carefully, safely, and joyously—if only in your mind’s eye. Readers who were already lovers of these gorgeous, wonderful creatures will find their fancies galloping away in delight. Others may well become instant equine converts as they pick up horse lore and facts aplenty and may eagerly trot toward other titles to learn more about their new favorite animals. The soft mixed-media illustrations suggest a landscape of the imagination with their muted palette.

Horse lovers, take note: This is a sweet, tender book to ride off into the sunset with. (information on horses, photos, author’s and illustrator’s notes) (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Star

Odin O’Connor, George | First Second (96 pp.) | $12.99 paper | March 26, 2024 9781250760777 | Series: Asgardians, 1

Kicking off a new theogony, the author of The Olympians series begins with the origins of the Nine Worlds according to Norse myth, and an introduction to the Aesir’s enigmatic chieftain.

Anchored, as in the brilliant previous series, by bountiful source notes and commentary at the end, O’Connor’s account sets the tone at once with Valkyries swooping down to lift the unseen reader up from a battlefield strewn with corpses, then flashes back to chronicle a whirl of worlds and peoples arising from a huge and doughy frost giant floating in the void of Ginnungagap. If it all seems hard to follow—indeed, as the author complains, nearly everyone and even certain inanimate items have one or more names—it still makes for a grand tale. The story’s capped by the arrival of Odin, who

plucks out his own eye in exchange for wisdom. That’s not the only gruesome deed depicted here in loving detail, but in general the artist goes more for an exhilarating mix of hulking, skulking monsters and, at least in cameos (anticipating fuller portraits in future volumes), Thor, Freya, and the rest of the brooding, swaggering, Nordically light-skinned Aesir and Vanir looking larger than life.

A rainbow bridge to a fresh set of mythological places and faces. (portrait gallery, glossary) (Graphic mythology. 11-13)

The Quiet Forest Offsay, Charlotte | Illus. by Abi Cushman Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781665926423

A mischievous mouse sets off a chain reaction in a quiet forest.

The mouse— who looks a bit like the clever star of Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo (1999), illustrated

by Axel Scheffler, lands in a rabbit’s pancakes (“Splat!”), then makes off with the plate. The rattled rabbit disturbs a beaver in its dam, and, amid the splashing, the mouse takes some of the beaver’s chewed wood and paper blueprints and builds a little boat. Meanwhile, the beaver’s splashing soaks a nearby deer, who runs into a moose. Animals careen one into the next, and the forest gets noisier and noisier, leading to a moment of tension when the moose’s grunting awakens a bear slumbering in her den with her cubs—but any fear is quickly allayed when one of the cubs gives Mama a much-needed hug.

Animals work together to cheer each

For more by Charlotte Offsay, visit Kirkus online.

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B O O K L I S T // C H I L D R E N ' S

6 Picture Books for a Snowy Day

1

3

2

4

1 Oh, Panda

By Cindy Derby

Melding lovely art with toddlerlike determination, this amalgamation of ice castles and vibrant butterflies soars.

3 Out Cold

By Ryan T. Higgins

Silly mix-ups for the younger set are sure to bring a smile.

By Jashar Awan

A simple but beautiful story about how little perfection matters.

Breathtaking images and lively text.

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5 Just One Flake

By Travis Jonker

A satisfying snow day saga.

4 On a Flake-Flying Day: Watching Winter’s Wonders

2 I’m Going To Build a Snowman

6

5

By Buff y Silverman

6 The Magical Snowflake

For more snowy-day picture books, visit Kirkus online.

By Bernette Ford, illus. by Erin J. Robinson

Beautifully executed.

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other up and make necessary repairs, and there are pancakes for all. The use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and repetition makes for a lovely read-aloud experience, and the many humorous details in the art (such as the bear’s bunny slippers) make rereading a treat. From not-so-quiet to this-is-more-like-it, one gets the sense that the togetherness was the mouse’s plan all along.

At once fresh and familiar, silly and soothing. (Picture book. 3-7)

Four Bad Unicorns Patterson, Rebecca | Andersen Press USA (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9798765625286

A child’s bossy behavior threatens to spoil a game.

Narrator Connie, who uses a wheelchair, and her big sister, Frankie, have gone “UNICORN CRAZY!” They can’t wait to play Unicorn Farmers. Then the doorbell rings: Ada and Colin Beswick want to play, too. But Ada has her own ideas and assigns roles to everyone: First, Connie is a wall in the Unicorn Palace of Wonder; next, she and Colin are sleeping unicorns. Ada dubs herself the Queen of Unicorns— and takes Frankie’s twinkle high heels and then Connie’s wheelchair for her Throne of Rolling Power. Finally, after they’re sentenced to prison for “very BAD” dancing, Ada’s subjects revolt. Ada tearfully protests they’ve been bad unicorns; Colin counters that Ada’s been a bad queen. When Frankie opines they’ve all been bad unicorns, Connie proposes that they all be good unicorns together. The bright, expressive, unicorn-cluttered cartoon illustrations are inviting, and the matter-of-fact portrayal of Connie’s disability is refreshing.

However, although Ada learns to be a better playmate, the author never makes clear that taking Connie’s wheelchair is a far greater misstep than taking Frankie’s high heels; the scene is a missed opportunity to 136

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A sympathetic read for children adapting to not being “onlies” anymore.

MY BABY S I STE R I S A D I P LO D O C U S

emphasize that wheelchairs are not toys, but necessities that many users consider extensions of their bodies.

Readers may also take issue with Frankie’s statement that they’ve all been “bad unicorns,” as the rebellion seems fully justified. Connie and her family present white; the Beswicks are brown-skinned.

A well-meaning but flawed take on conflict resolution. (Picture book. 4-6)

My Baby Sister Is a Diplodocus Petit, Aurore | Trans. by Daniel Hahn Gecko Press (44 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781776575725

A big brother reacts to his newborn sister.

A young boy excitedly dangles a favorite toy over his baby sister, plays music, and gives her a house tour. He shows his sister her crib, then peers curiously over its side. Like many children with newborn siblings, the boy hears “no” repeatedly. He acknowledges that the baby “only drinks milk” (two illustrations depict nursing) but is gently stopped when he proffers his glass. He’s told “no” when his bike’s front wheel crashes into the baby’s carriage; he gets a firm “no” when he stacks building blocks atop his sister’s forehead. But big kids say “no,” too, like when he’s asked if he likes being a big brother. He angrily retreats to his room, hastily dons T. rex pajamas, then tearfully trashes the place. Compassionate Dad carries his “big dino” to the parental bed, joined

by Mom; a tiny red caption “explains” that the boy is a tyrannosaurus.

Afterward, the child lovingly reassesses his sister and decides she’s really a

diplodocus. This sweet tale, translated from French, deals realistically with a firstborn’s conflicted feelings when a newborn arrives. Readers may be confused when the boy dubs the infant a dinosaur, but when he identifies as a T. rex, he feels powerful and in control; thus, he regards the “smaller dino” and new situation benevolently.

The simple, colorful illustrations suit the engaging, concise text well. The family is light-skinned.

A sympathetic read for children adapting to not being “onlies” anymore.

(Picture book. 4-7)

Mamá’s Panza Quintero, Isabel | Illus. by Iliana Galvez Kokila (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 26, 2024 9780593616420

Everyone has a panza!

A precocious child declares that “panza is another word for belly.” Mamá’s panza is soft and ample, and it’s the little one’s favorite panza of them all. The young narrator interacts with Mamá’s body in various ways: playfully using it as a drum, snuggling up to Mamá’s panza while she reads a story, and hiding behind Mamá’s body during moments of shyness. Gleeful smiles and tender embraces make it clear that the child loves Mamá dearly. Mamá explains that she loves her panza, too: “Our bodies are miracles for what they can do…My panza kept you alive and keeps me alive as well. How could I not love it?” She shares that her panza was the child’s first home, and it stretched as the little one grew.

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sturdy mother using the strength and size of her curvy body to grow and raise a child. Her brown skin and black hair glow with health and affection. The child has short, curly brown hair and lighter brown skin; both are cued Latine. This affirming ode to bellies shows readers the strength of a woman’s love for her child and the wonderful things a body can do.

Publishes simultaneously in Spanish.

A sweet, body-positive celebration of motherhood and its physical expression. (Picture book. 3-6)

Junia, the Book Mule of Troublesome Creek Richardson, Kim Michele | Illus. by David C. Gardner | Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 15, 2024 | 9781534113039

A tale of bringing a very valuable commodity to people in the Kentucky hills.

During the Great Depression, Junia the mule and her “Book Woman” carry precious cargo to the residents of remote areas in the eastern Kentucky hills. Folks here have no access to reading materials, except for those delivered by “Pack Horse librarians,” like the one in this story, set in 1936. The two make a stalwart team, starting their rounds before dawn, traversing difficult terrain in all weather, and finishing after dark.

Every month they travel “hundreds of miles to drop off thousands of reading requests.” Narrator Junia describes a day’s adventure: The duo encounter a menacing rattlesnake, ford waterways, and narrowly escape disaster when a rickety bridge collapses into a creek before they cross it. They’ve formed

warm bonds with their patrons; Book Woman knows their reading preferences perfectly and tailors her collections to meet their needs. This is a warm, heartfelt, and humorous tale; readers who regularly visit school and public libraries will marvel that such librarians once existed (an author’s note offers background on the real-life Kentucky Pack Horse librarians). The colorful illustrations capture the cozy spirit and feel of the rural setting and residents. Junia’s a delight; kids would love to meet her on their next library trip. The “Book Woman” presents white; there’s diversity among the background characters.

It’s heartening to learn that books and libraries—no matter their form—have always prevailed. (photograph, mule fun facts, additional resources) (Picture book. 5-8)

Kirkus Star

Gifts From Georgia’s Garden: How Georgia O’Keeffe Nourished Her Art Robinson, Lisa | Illus. by Hadley Hooper Neal Porter/Holiday House (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780823452668

Picture-book biographies about this important American artist abound; this one takes a path less traveled.

The book opens with Georgia O’Keeffe’s famed flower paintings but quickly shifts focus. After fleeing busy New York for “the wide skies” of New Mexico, the artist bought a home in Abiquiú in 1945. In addition to painting, she

A tale of bringing a valuable commodity to people in the Kentucky hills.

JUNIA, THE BOOK MULE OF TROUBLESOME CREEK

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grew a garden, cooked, and baked.

Readers will learn what she planted, how she relied on organic means to keep destructive insects at bay, and how her gardening and painting were deeply intertwined. When showcasing O’Keeffe’s art, Robinson employs quotes (undocumented, but a bibliography is provided). Hooper incorporates her subject’s style and content in key scenes: city skyscrapers against a darkened sky; puffy, isolated clouds foregrounding the garden.

While O’Keeffe’s relationship to Alfred Stieglitz is not mentioned, the title does connect her childhood experiences on a Wisconsin farm to her adult pursuits. Shifting perspectives and dynamic design accompany interesting details, beautifully described. In one scene, a pea vine crosses the gutter diagonally, while small, sequential insets in mustard and black show O’Keeffe painting, sewing, and collecting bones as her garden grows. Following the harvest, a bountiful table with home-grown goodness and delectable desserts is paired with a recipe card for pecan butterballs. Who knew?

A veritable feast for the eyes and the mind. (photograph, biographical note, information on sustainable gardening, pecan butterballs recipe) (Informational picture book. 5-9)

Dear Muslim Child Rodaah, Rahma | Illus. by Aya Ghanameh Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780063091993

A heartfelt love letter urging Muslim children everywhere to courageously embrace the tenets of their faith.

The author of Dear Black Child (2022), illustrated by Lydia Mba, unapologetically puts Muslim children at the center of this picture book. The story begins with the narrator telling little ones about the divine plan for their birth: “Did you know that your birth was meant to JANUARY 1, 2024

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be?” An explanation about some of Islam’s foundational principles follows: “Dear Muslim Child, / Can I tell you about Islam? // Islam is rooted in peace. / So live in peace. / Inspire peace. / And invite peace into your life.” Next, Rodaah poses questions: “Do you know the meaning of Nur?” “Do you know how special your name is?” “Do you know the power of words?” These queries lead to reminders to remain rooted in Islamic practices and to live proudly and publicly: “Pray in public as you would at home. / Perform your salat without feeling shy. / Be graceful and let each movement bring you comfort.” Poetic language and a palette of cool colors that complements the comforting words together evoke warmth, safety, and pride. Illustrations featuring children and adults who have a variety of skin tones, body shapes, and clothing styles reflect the rich diversity of the global Muslim community.

Nurturing, encouraging, and necessary. (Picture book. 5-8)

The Great Lakes: Our Freshwater Treasure Rosenstock, Barb | Illus. by Jamey Christoph | Knopf (40 pp.) | $19.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780593374351

An invitation to marvel at, and care for, North America’s largest sources of surface fresh water.

Dug out by a massive ice sheet and just 3,000 or so years old in their current form, the Great Lakes are the “youngest major geological feature on the planet,” as Rosenstock writes. She traces the course of a drop of water as it drains from Lake Superior (the deepest) to each lake in succession and then past Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean—a trip that takes around 300 years and passes more miles of U.S. coastline than the Atlantic and Pacific coasts combined. She also sounds an alarm at the threats posed by habitat 138

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destruction, pollution, and invasive species in the wake of the arrival of European settlers. Christoph’s opening scenes of native wildlife and unspoiled natural beauty give way to views of human use, including both a racially diverse group of modern young people drinking, cooking, and bathing and earlier Indigenous residents in canoes, harvesting “only what they needed.” Then, images of clear-cut forests and waters polluted enough to catch fire are followed by a glimpse of environmental protesters led by figures in Native American ceremonial garb. Rosenstock invites readers to do their part by caring for wild places and conserving fresh water, after Great Lakes caretaker Kathleen Smith (Enrolled Member, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community) chimes in with a statement of support in the backmatter.

A fervent tribute to a treasured natural resource. (author’s note, source list) (Informational picture book. 6-8)

There’s No Such Thing as…Mermaids Rowland, Lucy | Illus. by Katy Halford Scholastic (32 pp.) | $7.99 paper Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781339038186

A child searches for a mermaid.

When the narrator’s sister declares that “there’s no such thing as mermaids,” a search for evidence of the mythical creatures is in order, soon including a stream, a pond, an indoor pool, and the beach, among other places.

The narrator doesn’t have any luck, but readers will catch brief glimpses of a mermaid—a tail appears on one page; bright pink hair can be found on another. Children will enjoy this Where’s Waldo?–esque element. The rhyming text follows a predictable pattern that will appeal to preschool-aged readers. Busy but never overwhelming, the illustrations effectively prevent the mermaid from being too obvious at first glance.

Some of the scenes contain puzzling elements. A beach scene shows the narrator and sister in long sleeves and pants, but a nearby shopkeeper is wearing a sleeveless shirt, and it’s clearly hot enough for beachgoers to wade in the water. What season is it?

These details don’t make or break the story, however, especially given that this is a tale about a magical creature who can seemingly float from one body of water to another. Narrator and sister are both brown-skinned; background characters are diverse in terms of skin tone, age, and dress.

Fun and breezy fodder for mermaid fans. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Star

The Iguanodon’s Horn: How Artists and Scientists Put a Dinosaur Back Together Again and Again and Again Rubin, Sean | Clarion/HarperCollins (48 pp.) $21.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9780063239210

In lavish visual detail, Rubin chronicles our changing perceptions of what dinosaurs were like.

“Science is a process,” Rubin writes, and he picks a terrific case study to demonstrate the point. He specifically looks at fossil spikes that were thought by early discoverers to go on Iguanodon’s nose until later studies proved that they were parts of the dino’s front feet. The author more generally chronicles how dinosaurs have been transformed in our minds over the past century or so from drab, lumpish, lizardlike behemoths to today’s vivid visions of active, often riotously decorated creatures with “baggy bits and saggy bits.” In both the narrative and in exuberant whirls of historical reconstructions and fanciful prehistoric scenes rich with stylistic homages, often linked by sinuous ribbons of running dates and facts, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A tender ref lection on the relationship between a child and a beloved pet.

SAM AND LUCY

he pays fulsome tribute to many of the amateur and professional paleontologists (and particularly paleoartists) who shaped these visions over the years. So it is that young dinophiles who linger over the art will meet a host of individualized human figures from solitary diggers and sketchers to racially diverse crews of museum workers painstakingly assembling, and reassembling, fossil bones. The dinosaurian cast includes Iguanodon, who appears repeatedly in evolving iterations making grumpy or punning comments (“I DO look pretty terrible here”) at its head.

Readers will come away vastly more appreciative of, and knowledgeable about, the architects of the ongoing “Dinosaur Renaissance.”

Lively, funny, and mesmerizing. (endnotes) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

Louder Than Hunger Schu, John | Candlewick (528 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781536229097

This coming-ofage novel in verse depicts one boy’s harrowing experiences with his eating disorder in the late 1990s.

Jake Stacey loves rollerblading, Emily Dickinson, Broadway shows, and his grandmother, but he’s not well. Jake has been starving himself since seventh grade—and concerned adults in his life have caught on. They admit Jake against his will to an inpatient program, where he’s treated for anorexia nervosa, depression, and OCD. Jake’s striking first-person voice and the ups KIRKUS REVIEWS

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and downs of his emotional journey toward healing are centered through a variety of poetic forms and styles, as well as journal entries and confessions Jake makes to an angel statue at a park. Jake experiences grief, gets a feeding tube, confronts horrifying memories of bullying, learns to talk back to “the Voice” of his disorder, befriends another patient, and embraces known and emerging parts of himself without over-explanation or exoticization. The emphasis on internal contradictions and the carefully rendered ending, hinting at hope without promising certainty of recovery, are especially honest and notable. Secondary characters are less well developed, and the middle of the book drags at times. A note from the author, who is white, reveals that Jake’s story is inspired by his own.

While Jake, who turns 14 while in treatment, reflects on his emotionally intense tween experiences, his goal setting is relevant to older teens and includes milestones like getting a driver’s license and attending college.

A sensitive, true-to-life narrative that is respectfully and indelibly portrayed. (resources) (Verse fiction. 11-18)

Sam and Lucy Scott, MaryJo | Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $18.99 | March 15, 2024 | 9781534112766

The story of a boy and a very special chicken.

Sam loves Lucy. Once his smallest hen, she became the “star of the flock” after he lavished extra attention on her. Now Lucy watches over the chicks, looks out for hawks, and ensures that the other

hens have places to roost. As time passes, her bond with Sam grows stronger. She helps him with chores, finds him the biggest worms when he goes fishing, and waits for his return from school. One day, Sam notices her limping. The vet explains that Lucy is getting old; all Sam can do is watch over her and give her extra love. Soon, Lucy can’t move from her nesting box, so Sam handfeeds her.

One day, he observes the other hens standing beside her nearly motionless body. Sam picks her up, strokes her, listens to her cluck softly, and wraps her in a blanket. Together, the friends sit under a tree for a long time, Sam recalling happy memories.

Children will probably understand, even without this heart-tugging book’s explicitly saying so, that Lucy dies at the end. Youngsters who’ve lost beloved pets will especially feel sorrow at Lucy’s loss; the description of the bond between boy and animal is warmly and realistically portrayed.

The soft, gently colored illustrations suit this earnest tale. Sam and other characters are light-skinned.

A tender reflection on the relationship between a child and a beloved pet.

(Picture book. 4-7)

Down to Business: 51 Industry Leaders Share Practical Advice on How To Become a Young Entrepreneur Scurlock, Fenley & Jason Liaw | Random House (416 pp.) | $19.99 | March 5, 2024 9780593651599

In condensed interviews, a small army of business owners and corporate executives dish out general reflections and advice for tween capitalists.

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Consider this monstrosity a much-needed corrective to smarmy platitudes.

P R E T T Y U G LY

free to hand this book to anyone who feels picture books are too “safe” these days. Characters have skin the white of the page.

Consider this little monstrosity a much-needed corrective to smarmy platitudes. (Picture book. 4-7)

Home official with a business background sound off on topics including significant character traits they see in themselves and look for in their employees, identifying missions and potential markets, leveraging social media, and networking. In deference to self-starters with shorter attention spans, the authors (both high school students) end each entry with pithy lists of “Key Takeaways” pulled from the Q&A profiles. Considering the wide range of backgrounds and experiences represented, the book includes much difference of opinion—in particular, about the value, or even necessity, of going to college—but the interviewees have a general consensus that climate change, social inequities, and sustainability are crucial issues to consider for every product or enterprise. And, if some interviewees lean into jargon, many more set out clear, concise expressions of their approaches, challenges, and goals (the nonfinancial kind: Money is seldom mentioned, even in passing). While nearly all the contributors are based in the U.S., many are immigrants or children of immigrants, and in addition to ethnic diversity, there’s equity in gender balance, including one genderfluid, nonbinary app creator, offering readers a broad range of perspectives on entrepreneurial life.

A many-voiced chorus of encouragement for business-minded readers. (resources) (Nonfiction. 10-14)

For another finance title, visit Kirkus online.

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Simler, Isabelle | Trans. by Vineet Lal Eerdmans (68 pp.) | $18.99 | March 26, 2024 9780802856203

Kirkus Star

Pretty Ugly Sedaris, David | Illus. by Ian Falconer TOON Books/Astra Books for Young Readers (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 9781662665271

Beauty (and horror!) is in the eye of the beholder in essayist Sedaris’ disgustingly hilarious debut picture book, illustrated by

the late Falconer.

Anna Von Ogre is usually a “good” little monster; she talks with her mouth full and stomps on flowers.

Unfortunately, she’s also prone to “bad” behavior, such as making terrifyingly adorable faces. Though she’s been warned that someday one might stick, she ignores this advice, and the unthinkable happens. Stuck with the face of a kewpie doll, Anna is assured by her grandma that “Real beauty is on the inside.” But it isn’t until she takes that advice literally that she finds a fitting and grotesque solution to her problem. Sedaris shows a keen knack for page turns and timing.

Adult readers will recognize hints of Maurice Sendak and William Steig and maybe even a smattering of Tim Burton in this remarkable outsider tale. Anna’s solution (to literally pull herself inside out) is rendered in hot pink, much in contrast with the subdued olive green and touches of red in the rest of the book. Be prepared for the shock of this image, sure to elicit both gasps of disgust and barks of surprised laughter. Kids will be transfixed. Adults should feel

From an octopus’ “stony villa” to a satin bowerbird’s “blue pavilion,” Simler takes young readers on a poetic, fanciful tour of animal homes.

Architectural drawings of human habitations on the endpapers set the tone for the gentle anthropomorphization of Simler’s descriptions.

Spread by spread, the animals describe their dwellings in short poems, translated by Lal from the original French.

“I live in the vertical plane,” declares the cross orbweaver spider, “in a complex structure / made from the strongest / and most elastic material there is.” Simler’s trademark style of digitally finished hair’s-breadth strokes of colored pencil creates a “lace citadel” that occupies two-thirds of the spread, tiny breaks in the white lines allowing the web’s strands to glimmer against a black background.

The spider’s delicate hairs beg readers to touch them. Simler introduces 27 animal abodes in all, from every continent except Antarctica, most of them rarely depicted in books for young readers. Refreshingly, only two (the golden eagle and the Sumatran orangutan) represent charismatic megafauna. Readers will meet Australia’s cathedral termites, for instance, which build a “clay skyscraper,” and the Kalahari’s sociable weaver, which inhabits a “straw apartment complex,” a tree-enveloping nest that holds 500 birds. Backmatter includes a short prose paragraph about each animal, a glossary, and recommended resources.

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Standing out in beauty and breadth, a lyrical addition to the animal-homes shelf. (Informational picture book/ poetry. 5-8)

La Mala Suerte Is Following Me Siqueira, Ana | Illus. by Carlos Vélez Aguilera | Charlesbridge (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781623544546

Misfortune follows when La Mala Suerte comes into Miguel’s life.

Once the “luckiest boy in town,” Miguel invites La Mala Suerte by opening his umbrella inside the house.

Abuelita cautions Miguel that Mrs. Bad Luck—cheekily depicted here as a grinning shadow—is “invisible and follows you wherever you go.” The young soccer player brushes off her warning but subsequently slips and falls as he attempts to outrun his bad luck. Uh-oh. And at school, La Mala Suerte trips him up during a math exam and fútbol practice. ¡Ay, no! Miguel tries everything to get rid of his bad luck before his upcoming soccer tournament, including sweeping away the bad luck, seeking a four-leaf clover, and using his tía’s “existential” oils. Nothing works until Mami encourages him to make his own luck. Can it really be that easy?

Written in first person from Miguel’s perspective, Siqueira’s humorous take on superstitions balances zaniness and sincerity with ease, complemented by Aguilera’s vibrant, expressive artwork.

The text incorporates Spanish words throughout. An appendix on common superstitions and their origins in

different countries provides intriguing background information, with a brief activity and research prompt. Miguel and his family are brown-skinned and Latine, while secondary characters are racially diverse.

Good, clean superstitious fun. (glossary) (Picture book. 3-7)

Some Days Are Yellow Slade, Suzanne | Illus. by Michelle Lee Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 Jan. 15, 2024 | 9781534112940

What a difference a day can make!

Life’s an awesome adventure, filled with highs and lows—sometimes all in the same day. This delightful book explores the idea of life’s shifting sands. Through simple, bouncy verses and charming, colorful illustrations depicting a variety of scenarios, readers learn that some days will be filled with triumphs, friendship, and excitement, while others might deliver disappointment, hurt, sadness, fear, loneliness, and self-doubt. In other words, life isn’t static. The author and the illustrator present relatable ideas and visuals that will help children easily grasp the message. Happy days are described as yellow; sad ones are blue. The cheerful rhymes and bright, lively images—a mix of full-page art and vignettes— work together well, using the concept of opposites to help kids compare the inevitable ups and downs of daily life: “Some days are fast! Others seem slow.” “Some days are ‘Yes.’ Others all ‘No!’” Children will feel reassured by the book’s auspicious premise that no matter what’s occurred today, a brand-new tomorrow is inevitably on

Conveys thought-provoking ideas in a gentle, easily comprehensible manner.

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the horizon. Characters are racially diverse; one light-skinned child is depicted using a wheelchair. After reading, kids may want to volunteer their own ways to describe yellow and blue days.

Conveys thought-provoking ideas in a gentle, easily comprehensible manner.

(Picture book. 4-7)

Escargot and the Search for Spring Slater, Dashka | Illus. by Sydney Hanson Farrar, Straus and Giroux (40 pp.) | $18.99 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780374314279 Series: Escargot

Escargot tires of winter and searches for signs of spring.

Even with a cozy blanket, stacks of good books, and a salad puzzle strewn on the floor, poor Escargot is feeling out of sorts. The tiny snail questions readers: “Does it seem like my eyes are not so bright? / Do my tentacles look droopy? / Perhaps my trail isn’t quite as shimmery as before?” Escargot has “ennui.” Not even hot chocolate sounds good anymore.

Escargot decides to dig away at the snow that’s piled up at the front door (readers will realize that the “snow” is in fact a fluffy bunny’s hindquarters) and slide outside to find the first signs of spring. Escargot saunters off.

But wait. Escargot leans in to whisper conspiratorially: “Is it just me, or is that snowbank following us?” “Oh lá lá! ” Indeed, it’s not snow; it’s a bunny!

With sad eyes and bowed tentacles, Escargot sighs, “You probably think the bunny rabbit is adorable. / More adorable than a French snail…” Hanson’s gentle watercolors bring to life a charming verdant landscape. Equal parts insecure and boastful, Escargot embodies the roller coaster of emotions that many youngsters feel on any given day. Not to fear: Flowers are finally found and friendships are formed, but the steady, slimy path of chatty dialogue is, as usual, magnifique.

Sure to banish cold-weather doldrums.

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This Wolf Was Different Slivensky, Katie | Illus. by Hannah Salyer Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781665900959

ogs and people D got together many thousands of years ago; here is one such imagined early encounter.

Salyer’s softly textured charcoal and colored pencil illustrations add a lyrical quality to this prehistoric meeting, which is related from the point of view of a wolf cub. More interested in watching snails crawl than joining the general tussle and in lingering near the den than chasing voles, the cub feels somehow less “wolfish” than her littermates. She yearns to be more like a real wolf.

One day she becomes separated from her pack and, after a lonely interval, meets “a new kind of creature,” who approaches cautiously on two legs, drops a snail from her “paw”—and joins in watching that snail’s progress. A pat on the head seals a permanent companionship and a feeling of gratitude for finding a place at last: “How lucky I am to not be like a real wolf. How lucky I am to be something new.” In her afterword, Slivensky tallies fossilized evidence of a relationship that may go back as far as 40,000 years and suggests some possible reasons why early humans and a certain extinct type of wolf became natural partners. The dog’s human friend is brown-skinned.

Speculative, but sweet and not implausible. (sources) (Picture book. 6-8)

For more illustrated

by Hannah Salyer, visit Kirkus online.

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A winning tale of two pals engaged in a safely silly competition FOX VERSUS FOX

Kirkus Star

Poetry Comics Snider, Grant | Chronicle Books (96 pp.) $18.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781797219653

In a wryly introspective vein, a cartoonist offers a four-season round of illustrated observations on topics as varied as clouds, school, and the search for a perfect pumpkin.

“I want to put down / on paper the feeling / of fresh possibilities,” Snider writes in his “Spring” section. With reflections on the tricky art of writing poems serving as a thematic refrain, he goes on in a seasonal cycle to explorations of nature (“How do the birds / decide where / to alight?”), indoor activities (“In wool socks on thick carpet / I am MR. ELECTRIC”), and common experiences, from loading up a gigantic backpack with new books for the first day of school to waiting…and waiting… and waiting for a bus in the rain.

He also invites readers to consider broad ideas, such as the rewards of practicing and the notion that failure can lead to the realization that “I’m still a work in progress.” Snider writes mostly in free verse but does break into rhyme now and then for the odd sonic grace note. Though he identifies only one entry as an actual haiku, his tersely expressed thoughts evoke that form throughout. His art is commensurately spare, with depictions of slender, dot-eyed, olive-skinned figures, generally solitary and of indeterminate age, posing balletically in, mostly, squared-off sequential

panels making up mini-narratives of one to three pages.

Personal but personable, too, with glints of quiet humor. (Graphic poetry.

10-13)

If I Were a Fungus Stella, Gaia | Trans. by Nanette McGuinness Millbrook/Lerner (40 pp.) |$19.99 March 5, 2024 | 9798765627136

A quirky introduction to fungi, translated from Italian.

In the first pages, small, pink-skinned Leo rides a bus, then fantasizes about an alternative identity as a fungus. A fungus, he says, could be hard to spot—indeed, since readers may not yet know what a fungus is. When we’re shown a variety of fungal forms, they all look like mushrooms, and Leo is later depicted as a typical hemisphere-ona-stem. Bystander creatures eventually offer some information: “A fungus is a tangle of tiny tubes.” Incongruously, fungal bodies are said to change shape constantly, “like a bowl of spaghetti.” (Do noodles mutate?)

The statement “A fungus is always growing in different directions” is accompanied by a potentially confusing image of a rather menacing, yellow, not-to-scale, boalike creature invading a house and garden, and a fungus is shown eating some dismayed children’s birthday cake.

But the author also notes a positive aspect of fungi: their potential to clean up pollution. Known for her spare, shapely designs, Stella uses flat, often geometric forms and primary colors to emphasize the paradoxical KIRKUS REVIEWS

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nature of fungi: living organisms that are neither plants nor animals.

The backmatter presents more information, but words that might help readers associate fungi with their own understanding of the world—for instance, rot, rash, compost, microscopic, or antibiotic—are not to be found. The pictures are pleasing, but how much readers will learn here is questionable.

Characters vary in skin tone.

Attractive illustrations struggle to convey adequate information about fungi. (a few things we know about fungi, glossary, bibliography, further reading) (Picture book. 5-9)

Lost Stick Syed, Anoosha | Viking (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9780593405192

Louise is Milo’s favorite human in the whole world.

The fluffy white dog will do anything to make her smile. Today, brown-skinned Louise has found a beautiful stick. It seems to make Louise happy when she throws it and Milo brings it back. If Stick is so important to her, he’ll see that she always has it. On her last throw, he’s unable to find Stick, but not to worry; he’ll get it somehow. First he searches the neighborhood, even putting up flyers depicting the lost Stick, while Louise is doing the same for her missing dog. But Stick is nowhere to be found. And so begins Milo’s great adventure. He travels far and wide, on trains and buses and airplanes, all over the world, checking every kind of stick he sees, and asking every person and animal, all to no avail. Finally, he realizes that he must go home, for deep down he knows that Louise loves him and will forgive him for not finding Stick. Milo tells his own tale from his doggy point of view and within the limits of his understanding of humans. He is a lovable, stalwart, and altogether wonderful picaresque hero. The lively, bright, and highly detailed illustrations add dimension and provide sharp-eyed readers with KIRKUS REVIEWS

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hints about Louise’s emotions, and especially her part as an instigator of the proceedings. Even the endpapers evoke a chuckle.

A delightful, heartwarming romp.

(Picture book. 4-7)

Fox Versus Fox Tabor, Corey R. | Balzer + Bray/ HarperCollins (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780063277939 Series: My First I Can Read

Two foxes challenge each other and become friends in this beginning reader.

A white fox and a red fox are startled to realize that they’re both named “Fox.” The red fox is determined to show off all of its foxy skills: It’s sneaky, it can do tricks, and it can jump. It’s clear from the white fox’s delighted expression that, far from being intimidated by the red fox’s impressive talents, the white fox finds them positively wonderful and wants to play together.

If the red fox grinds down a stairway on its skateboard (wearing a helmet, of course), then the white fox applauds, appearing genuinely pleased—before upping the ante by soaring through the air on a snowboard. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a rocket pack on the title page, and indeed, the slightly competitive play of Fox and Fox escalates (literally). Two sparsely illustrated double-page spreads complete the cheery rise and fall of their competition. “Two characters are friends” is a classic of the limitedvocabulary beginning reader for a reason, and the lovely artwork, sketched out in simple lines, does the well-trodden tropes justice. The red fox’s superciliousness and the white fox’s indefatigable happiness come through clearly. Visuals and text featuring repetition and simplicity will charm while building reading skills.

The Most Exciting Eid Talkhani, Zeba | Illus. by Abeeha Tariq Scholastic (24 pp.) | $7.99 paper Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781338877816

The best part of Eid is sharing with others.

When Safa and her family see the new moon, which marks the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, she’s excited to start their evening traditions. Mom applies henna to their hands, Dad gets out the decorations, and Safa goes to sleep dreaming of the party they’ll have the next day. Safa is ecstatic when she gets everything that she asked Allah for, but she doesn’t want to let her cousin Alissa take a turn on her new bicycle.

Mom tells Safa that she’s old enough now to accompany her on visits to their neighbors. Mom and Safa share their treats with others, and Safa reflects on her actions and sees how the gifts make her neighbors happy, all of which adds to her own joy. Safa and her mother go to her grandparents’ house to continue celebrating before heading home. Some readers may be confused by the sequence of events; the story ends with Alissa asking Safa where she went—was Alissa left out of the festivities at Safa’s grandparents’ home? Nevertheless, brightly saturated, celebratory colors and decorations capture the spirit of Eid. The neighbors are of diverse backgrounds and abilities. Cues in the text and in the glossary suggest that Safa and her family are Pakistani.

The glossary includes some common Islamic phrases and terms that are not used in the text.

A joyful celebration of Eid with a message of community and gratitude. (glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)

For another Eid story, visit Kirkus online.

A winning tale of two pals engaged in a safely silly competition. (Early reader. 4-6)

>>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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Absolute Zeros: Camp Launchpad Tanner, Michael & Greg Smith | Illus.

by Gabrielle Gomez | Little, Brown Ink (224 pp.) | $12.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9780316048583 | Series: Absolute Zeros, 1

Three kids attending a run-down space camp in Florida learn valuable lessons, even without all the fancy gizmos.

Camp Launchpad, which has seen better days, welcomes a group of young summer campers, including new podmates Mark Maxon, who reads Black, is the vice president’s son, and is good at flying drones; brown-skinned scholarship recipient Pete Duarte, who’s handy with tools; and aspiring leader Valerie Hermans, who appears white and whose mom is an astronaut. The Launchpadders must put up with unreliable technology, bad food, and a pool that has an alligator living in it. How can they compete in the annual intercamp Space Race when they’re up against slick, glamorous, well-funded competitors? Fortunately, they have dedicated adult trainers in the forms of Dr. Rhea Hae, a NASA mission planner who’s cued East Asian, and Colonel Gage McGuff, a Black military pilot. They help prepare the campers for all the disastrous things that can occur during a space mission. With each activity they fail, Mark, Pete, and Val learn to function better as a team, developing selflessness and mutual trust. Their obnoxious rivals turn their pod name, A-Zero, into “Absolute Zeros,”

but they don’t let the bullying stop them from doing their best—and even trying to save their camp. The cartoonlike art, clean backgrounds, and bright palette support a fastpaced story that weaves in interesting space facts.

An appealing and uplifting underdog tale. (interview with a NASA scientist) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

Out of Control Towers, Andrea | Illus. by Alexis Jauregui Andrews McMeel Publishing (192 pp.) $11.99 paper | Jan. 2, 2024 | 9781524883614 Series: Gamer Girls

The arrival of a California cousin and one of his moms for a visit touches off a round of tension between Lucy Wong and her gaming club classmates.

Along with showing four middle school girls wholesomely and safely taking delight in playing online building and racing games as alternatives to shoot-’em-ups, Towers shifts the thematic territory here to highlight issues related to gender, relationships, and romance. Lucy’s failure to mention that her cousin Jordan is a boy not only makes his initial introduction to her New Jersey friends awkward but all too soon results in ramped-up fashion choices and other signs of crushing.

Meanwhile, Nat’s big sister, Dylan, has promised to introduce the girls to her partner Marc, who’s nonbinary, as a reward if the club can engineer at least one adoption from the local animal shelter. Though Lucy hasn’t hit puberty yet, she reflects frankly on

High scores for a fun and inclusive depiction of gaming, plus...puppies!

OUT OF CONTROL

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the healthy relationships she knows, from her own parents’ to Dylan’s to Jordan’s two moms, all of which signals an attitude of easy acceptance that (along with her absolute mania for gaming) young streamers will be inclined to absorb with ease. Jauregui’s sparse spot art adds a limited number of reaction shots. Lucy presents as biracial (her father is Chinese, while her mother is white), Nat is Jewish, and there’s diversity among the rest of the cast.

High scores for a fun and inclusive depiction of gaming, plus...puppies!

(Fiction. 10-13)

Gravity Is Bringing Me Down Van Draanen, Wendelin | Illus. by Cornelia Li | Knopf (40 pp.) | $18.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 9780593375921

Leda learns about gravity the hard way.

This cheerful tale uses Leda’s case of the clumsies to introduce the concept of gravity. The child falls out of bed, spills her cereal, trips while getting on the bus, and tips the book cart over. Gravity must be in a bad mood, she concludes. Leda’s teacher works in a hands-on lesson on how gravity keeps planets in orbit around the sun and points out that it’s also what keeps everything in its place on Earth. Still, nothing seems to go right until a trip to a children’s museum, where she climbs and slides and simulates space flight, which brings a peaceful resolution between an active Leda and anchoring gravity.

The appealingly bright, textured illustrations lift this title above other STEM-themed picture books. Leda’s bedroom is filled with space-themed objects, the school playground is enticing, and the museum’s activities seem designed for an energetic child’s after-school enjoyment. A popular middle-grade writer noted for several successful fiction series, Van Draanen proves adept at KIRKUS REVIEWS

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conveying STEM-related info for the picture-book crowd. Very different in approach from Jason Chin’s Gravity (2014), the two books would nevertheless make an excellent pairing. Leda and her family are Asian, while the students and museumgoers are racially diverse.

An engaging flight of imagination, grounded in fact. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Insectorama: The Marvelous World of Insects Voisard, Lisa | Trans. by Jeffrey K. Butt Helvetiq (224 pp.) | $29.95 | March 5, 2024 9783039640164 | Series: The Marvelous World

Introductions to over three dozen common insects from pea aphids to praying mantises, along with helpful advice for observing and

identifying them.

Originally written in French and published in Switzerland but still featuring insects easily found in North America, this guide follows Voisard’s Arborama: The Marvelous World of Trees (2023), both in general format and in offering a broadly appealing mix of background basics and specific detail. After an overview of insect morphology, pithy profiles appear of representatives from the eight major insect orders, commonsensically grouped by habitat.

Each insect entry features large painted portraits (including male and female specimens in cases where the differences are easily visible), with labels for distinctive features, images of metamorphic stages and favorite foods, and even depictions of similar-looking related species. The accompanying descriptive notes are as colorful as the art: Sevenspotted ladybug nymphs “look like tiny brains,” while beneath an adult’s “cute exterior lurks a true predator.”

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on where and when to look for insects, then presents broader pictures of migration, metamorphosis, and other relevant topics before closing with eco-friendly tips and activities.

Overall, the book has more than enough material not just to kindle and feed an abstract interest in our six-legged neighbors but also to push any young nature lover out of doors to check them out directly.

Broad, bright, and systematic. (resources and activities, scale index, alphabetical index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

How To Catch a Mamasaurus Walstead, Alice | Illus. by Andy Elkerton Sourcebooks Wonderland (40 pp.) | $12.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781728274300 | Series: How To Catch…

Another creature is on the loose.

The long-running series continues its successful formula with this Hallmark card of a book, which features bright illustrations and catchy rhymes. This time, the mythical creature the racially diverse children set out to catch is an absent mom who does it all (lists of descriptors include the words banker, caregiver, nurse, doctor, driver, chef, housekeeper, teacher, entertainer, playmate, laundry service, problem solver, handywoman, cleaner, and alarm clock) but doesn’t seem to have a job outside the home and is inexplicably a dinosaur.

As the children prepare gifts and a meal for her, the text becomes an ode to the skills the Mamasaurus possesses (“Day or night she’s always there. / She meets every wish and need”) and values she instills (“Sometimes life can mean hard work,” “kindness matters,” and “what counts is doing your best”). This well-intentioned selection veers into cliche generously sprinkled with saccharine but manages to redeem itself with its appreciation for mothers and all that they may do. Endpapers include a “to” and “from” page framed in a heart, as well as a page where young gift givers or

recipients can draw a picture of their Mamasaurus.

A syrupy tribute to mothers that may please fans of the series. (Picture book. 3-6)

Bros Weatherford, Carole Boston | Illus. by Reggie Brown | Candlewick (32 pp.) $17.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781536220414

Five young Black boys come together for a day of ecstatic play at the park.

The rosepainted landscape of sunrise greets readers as this book opens on three friends meeting in the morning quiet of a playground.

After the kids enjoy a rollicking wagon ride and build an imaginary time machine, two more friends join the group, and the five play pretend, explore a garden, visit the library, shoot hoops, and have adventures until the sun goes down.

Weatherford’s spare, subject-verb text captures Brown’s vibrant spreads (or perhaps it’s the other way round) in a heartbeat of rhyme: “Bros dare. We care. We speak. We geek. We lead. We read.” Brown’s soft but textured illustrations feel fresh and open, with all the energy of cartoon callbacks and the spontaneity of playground fun.

The crew of bros represent an array of melanin in rich shades of brown; they’re also diverse in terms of body type and ability, to say nothing of the fresh cuts and fly natural styles atop their heads. The text lends itself to rhythmic storytimes, first-time forays into solo reading, and even some sight-word practice. But more than this, this book’s significance is the simple, uninterrupted joy and For an interview with Carole Boston Weatherford, visit Kirkus online.

>>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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shared belonging present in each of the spaces the group of five chooses to be—a liberation that Black boys can’t always find outside (or indeed within) a book’s pages.

Delightful. (Picture book. 4-8)

Vast charm in a (relatively) small package yields big laughs.

AR E YO U B I G ?

Land of Lost Things Weldon, Cat | Illus. by Katie Kear Macmillan Children’s Books (288 pp.) $8.99 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781529045055 Series: How To Be a Hero, 2

Whetstone, a young, reformed thief-turned-Hero, and Lotta, a Valkyrie trainee, reunite on a quest from Asgard to Helheim and back in this second series entry.

A few stanzas of Viking verse orient readers to prior events, in which Whetstone, who reads white, bested trickster Loki and defeated a dragon.

He’s been tasked by Odin to find and return cursed harp strings to the Dwarves in Svartalfheim and is seemingly coincidentally reunited with Lotta, who is coded Black, and her trusty flying steed, Thighbiter. The brave but argumentative pair find themselves tumbling over the edge of Midgard, falling past Muspell, and eventually hauling themselves from the icy waters of Helheim, the Land of Lost Things. In the Lower Worlds inhabited by the dead, Lotta’s Valkyrie strength is waning, goddess Freyja’s cat needs returning, and the harp strings are nowhere to be found.

Whetstone and Lotta learn to put aside their initial self-interest and backbiting to work together, showing growth and teamwork as they stand up to the denizens of Helheim. The humorous combination of creative names (Krud, Awfulrick, Snotra), genuine Norse elements (like Naglfar, a ship made from the toenails of the dead), and dramatic illustrations will appeal to middle-grade readers.

The timely arrival of Freyja in her chariot sets the scene for the next installment.

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Silly adventures sure to amuse Norse mythology fans. (map, guide to the Nine Worlds, activities, name generator, rune puzzle, author’s note) (Adventure. 8-11)

Kirkus Star

Are You Big? Willems, Mo | Union Square Kids (32 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781454948186

Size may be relative, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also get silly.

How large or small a kid is can take on outsized importance, so right from the start, an unseen narrator poses the titular question.

Well, what is “big,” exactly? Our stand-in, purple-skinned child is placed next to an anthropomorphized bespectacled hot-air balloon. After all, hot-air balloons are big. On the next spread, the balloon is beside an even larger cloud. And beside the cloud? A storm. When the continent of Australia walks onto the scene, grinning wide, dwarfing the storm, we get a hint of how ridiculous things are about to get. And indeed, in walks the moon. Then Earth. Then the sun.

Then the star Pollux, and beyond that are galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Suddenly the question returns. “So, are you big?” A little bug cries out, “You are to ME!” Further facts about relative sizes appear at the story’s end, as well as a necessary caveat that the images are not to scale. With aplomb, Willems plays with textures, colors, and layering in a style that resembles cut paper. Meanwhile the steady one-upmanship of the large bodies

allows for the rare combination of scientific backing, read-aloud humor, and a concrete message about where one stands in the grand scheme of things.

Vast charm in a (relatively) small package yields big laughs. (Picture book. 3-6)

Swallows Swirl Wilsdon, Christina | Illus. by Jess Mason Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 15, 2024 | 9781534112742

Seasons and swallows whirl through a year in a child’s rural life.

Favoring denim overalls and long brown hair with bangs, the light-skinned narrator romps as the swallows’ lives unfold. A small barn, house, and henhouse are the backdrop for the changes that 12 months bring to rolling farmland. Vivid language enlivens this quiet appreciation of avian life. In spring, the swallows’ nests “bloom with hungry chicks, their buttercup-bright mouths open wide”; the acrobatic birds “rocket,” “flit,” “slip,” “skim,” and “loop-theloop.” The narrator, accompanied by a delighted dog, races downhill like the birds. In summer, dressed in a pink-checked swimsuit, the child jumps through a sprinkler while swallows fly through the spray, “their blue backs glittering.” In autumn the narrator is “cozy-sweatered”; the idling school bus “grumbles.”

Winter brings snow and chickadees while the swallows are far south. In early spring, the “snuggle-sweatered” child’s rainboots pinch. Finally, KIRKUS REVIEWS

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the swallows reappear: “Their sharp wings flash like scissors as they slice through the sky,” and the narrator, “new-booted and sweater-free,” welcomes them. A refrain—“days slip by”—conveys the passage of time. Graceful barn swallows, with curved, tapering wings, pointed split tails, and aerial acrobatics, are a gift to a skilled illustrator, and Mason delivers. Compositions are varied, with close-ups and middle-distance portrayals, while the birds’ migration offers sky-view perspectives. Against a subdued palette, the blue swallows shimmer.

Deftly intertwines observations on nature with moments in a child’s everyday life. (swallow facts) (Picture book. 5-8)

Bear Finds Eggs Wilson, Karma | Illus. by Jane Chapman McElderry (40 pp.) | $18.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 9781665936552 | Series: The Bear Books

In his latest outing, Bear and his pals go in search of eggs.

Bear “lumbers with his friends through the Strawberry Vale.” Raven finds a nest; climbing up, “The bear finds eggs!”: a refrain that appears throughout. Instead of eating the robin’s eggs, however, Bear leaves a gift of dried berries in the nest for the “soon-to-be-chicks.” Next, the friends find 10 mallard eggs (as bright blue as the robin’s), and Bear leaves sunflower seeds. Then the wail of Mama Meadowlark, whose bright yellow undercarriage strikes a warm golden note, leads them to promise to find her lost eggs. With his friends’ assistance, Bear finds one, and they decide to paint them “so they aren’t lost again.” Another is discovered, painted, and placed in Hare’s basket.

After hours of persistent searching, Bear suddenly spots the remaining two eggs “in a small patch of clover.”

Before they can return these eggs, the chicks hatch and rejoin their mother.

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robin, mallard, and meadowlark moms: “And the bear finds friends!”

Though this sweet spring tale centers on finding and painting eggs, it makes no overt references to Easter.

The soft green and blue acrylics, predictable rhymes, and rolling rhythm make this series installment another low-key natural read-aloud.

Cheery fun that will leave series fans “egg”-static. (Picture book. 3-6)

Meena Can’t Wait Zaman, Farida | Orca (32 pp.) | $21.95 March 12, 2024 | 9781459836396

A South Asian grandmother and grandchild make tea—and learn a lesson in patience.

Meena is visiting Nanu, and it’s a very special day: Together, they’re going to prepare a Bengali tea called doodh cha using tea leaves from Bangladesh and mint leaves from Nanu’s garden. As they start, Meena is already craving the cake and samosas that are filling Nanu’s house with a delicious aroma. Though Meena wants to rush, Nanu slows the child down and emphasizes that making tea takes time. While they let the tea simmer and wait for the mint, cloves, ginger, and cardamom to steep, Meena looks at old pictures of Nanu in her childhood kitchen, makes a “fancy card” for Nanu, and listens to Nanu’s childhood stories about going outside to play. At long last, the tea is ready—and it’s perfect! Meena and Nanu agree that their doodh cha, which they made together, was absolutely worth the wait. This vibrantly illustrated book is a quiet tribute to intergenerational relationships and family traditions. Though it may not offer concrete strategies for helping eager little ones wait for a much-anticipated event, it does teach a valuable lesson without ever verging on didacticism.

A tender, gentle tale that will help children live in the moment. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Star

Kyra, Just for Today Zarr, Sara | Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (320 pp.) | $19.99 | March 5, 2024 9780063045132

A middle-grade novel showing how children pay the price of living in families where alcohol is abused.

Thirteen-yearold Kyra lives with her mother in Pacifica, a coastal suburb south of San Francisco. Mom, who’s in recovery from alcoholism and has been sober for more than five years, has a house-cleaning business. Kyra often helps her out around the holidays—even skipping school (with her mom’s permission) so she can pick up more jobs. Kyra also makes her mother breakfast, packs her lunch and snacks, tidies the house, and prepares dinner—in addition to negotiating her self-consciousness at school over being “taller and bigger than most of the other seventh-grade girls” and worrying that her best friend is drifting away. When Mom starts coming home late and acting erratically, Kyra doesn’t want to think about why or even share her worries at the support group for children of alcoholics that she attends weekly.

Eventually, though, she’s forced to confront both her mother’s behavior and the effect it’s had over the years. Informative and validating, this story is all the more powerful for Kyra’s first-person narration, which underscores her love for her mother and her desire to take care of her, as well as her confusion as she confronts feelings of guilt, resentment, and anger. For anyone affected by an alcoholic family member, this story will resonate with searing truth. Most characters read white.

Authentic and heartbreaking but hopeful. (author’s note) (Fiction. 9-13) JANUARY 1, 2024

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>>>

FRESH READS FOR THE NEW YEAR JANUARY IS OFF to a great

start, with new releases that will draw in teen readers.

Without being formulaic, they contain popular elements that make them sure bets.

School Statue Showdown, by David Starr (James Lorimer, Jan. 1): British Columbia high school principal Starr’s latest deals with big themes in an accessible way. This short novel helps fill the need for books for teens who welcome complexity but are intimidated by huge tomes. The book follows a conflict in a Canadian

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logging town, where First Nations activists want acknowledgment of the ongoing impact of past injustices and a white boy faces his family’s personal history of complicity. Starr realistically models ways that communities can work through the process of truth and reconciliation.

Ghost Roast, by Shawnelle Gibbs and Shawneé Gibbs, illustrated by Emily Cannon (Versify/HarperCollins, Jan. 2): The Gibbs Sisters, a writing duo with plenty of Hollywood experience, join debut artist Cannon to

present a vibrant, appealing graphic novel combining romance and paranormal adventure with an exploration of U.S. history. Chelsea is a Black New Orleans teen whose father runs a ghostremoval service. Working with him over summer break, she’s shocked to learn that she can communicate with the ghosts at a plantation house. Her entanglement with one of them, a young man named Oliver, leads her to research local history and uncover buried secrets.

Diary of a Confused Feminist,

by Kate Weston (Simon & Schuster, Jan. 2): Middlegrade readers have lots of humorous books to choose from. Teens are unfortunately not so lucky, but British stand-up comedian turned author Weston is doing something about that.

Fifteen-year-old Kat wrestles with being a feminist in funny, stream-of-consciousness diary entries relating her escapades.

When their irate principal punishes Kat and friends for spray-painting graffiti on the playground, she muses, “You can’t go at feminist activism half-heartedly. When you think about it, a detention isn’t quite as bad as what the suffragettes went through.”

The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee, by Ellen Oh (Crown, Jan. 23): This duology opener, the latest from Oh,

LAURA SIMEON

a founding member and the president and CEO of We Need Diverse Books, builds on the continued popularity of webcomics. Korean American Mina’s emotional journey of self-discovery and self-affirmation is enlivened with a love triangle and fantasy elements. While trying to persuade her father to support her passion for art—something that inextricably connects her to her late mother, an artist—Mina launches a new action-packed webcomic. But she didn’t count on getting pulled into its world and having to save the day.

Wander in the Dark, by Jumata Emill (Delacorte, Jan. 30): Journalist Emill offers readers a page-turner filled with timely social commentary. Amir and Marcel, two half brothers with very different home lives, attend an exclusive private school where there are few other Black students. When a party turns tragic and Amir is arrested, relatively privileged Marcel confronts some ugly truths. As Amir says, “Only guilty men run, the police will say. Nah, Black dudes who wake up in a white girl’s house and find her dead run. And we run ’cause we don’t get the benefit of the doubt.”

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

Young Adult

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EDITOR’S PICK A queer art thief stealthily steps into a love story.

Seventeen-year-old Icarus Gallagher, who has black hair and brown eyes, leads a double life. Mostly, he’s busy being a high school senior. But also, he’s an art thief, trained by his widowed father, Angus, a professional art restorer.

Due to the nature of their side hustle, Icarus has to abide by his father’s strict rules: He’s not allowed to get close to people, go to parties, or invite anyone over. Icarus is so deprived of emotional attachments that even being touched accidentally is distressing.

Since he’s allowed to have

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

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acquaintances, resentful Icarus, clever boy that he is, has created a workaround to his dad’s edict: He simply gets to know one person in every class he’s in. These siloed friends provide him with the bare minimum of human connection. Until one night, when Icarus does another routine break-in at the notoriously violent Stuart Black’s mansion and meets Black’s son, Helios, a beautiful, red-haired, ankle monitor–wearing dancer.

What unfolds is a narrative filled with suspense, romance, and heartbreak with secrets unraveling at a breakneck speed once

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By K. Ancrum

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Ariel Crashes a Train

By Olivia A. Cole

Icarus Ancrum, K. | HarperTeen | 400 pp. | $19.99 March 26, 2024 | 9780063285781

Helios and Icarus breach the rules their controlling fathers have imposed upon them. The sparse prose in this unconventional, mustread of a trauma-infused

borderline thriller is packed with emotional breadth.

A slow-burn mystery fueled by a few broken people and a heavy dose of caring ones.

(Thriller. 14-18)

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Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams

By Shari Green

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49 Days

By Agnes Lee

To see our best 100 YA books of 2023, visit Kirkus online.

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The Bad Ones Albert, Melissa | Flatiron Books (400 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781250894892

A teen girl follows cryptic clues left by her best friend, who disappeared into the night.

On a cold winter’s night, four people in a small Illinois town vanished into thin air. One of them was Nora’s best friend, Becca, whom she hadn’t spoken to in the three months since their falling out. Although they had been close since childhood, Nora and Becca’s relationship was marked by codependency—until the night when everything changed. But ever since a mysterious night the previous summer when Becca went alone into the woods for a few hours, Nora had sensed that her friend was growing distant.

Following Becca’s disappearance, Nora discovered a series of messages she left pointing to their childhood goddess games, based on an urban legend. The game shifted when then-12-year-old Becca was grieving the death of her mother and seeking vengeance against the hit-and-run driver. The first part of the story is slow to get going; eventually, Nora begins to suspect that the key to the mystery lies in uncovering the origins of the goddess game.

Albert slowly teases out the supernatural element, but the details remain shrouded in murkiness. What’s more interesting is the dynamic between the two friends; the story is mainly told from Nora’s perspective, as she’s the one left behind to pick up the pieces and figure out how to stand on her own. Main characters read white.

For more books

by Melissa Albert, visit Kirkus online.

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A revelatory, razor-sharp, and powerfully honest depiction of living with OCD. ARIEL CRASHES A TRAIN

A deliberately paced tale for those who appreciate an eerie, character-driven mystery laced with supernatural horror.

(Fantasy. 14-18)

The Poisons We Drink Baptiste, Bethany | Sourcebooks Fire (496 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781728251950

Eighteen-year-old Venus Stoneheart is a witcher with a pain-filled past and an uncertain future.

In an alternate version of the greater Washington, D.C., metro area, Venus’ mother, the formidable Clarissa Stoneheart, used to be the Love Witcher. She broke her pledge to only brew love potions, lost her magic as a consequence, and then turned her attention to teaching Venus, the new Love Witcher, “her 3-B philosophy…

Get your bag, brew, and bounce.” When Clarissa is murdered, Venus is tested to her limits as she fights external forces by using her calling (her magical ability to brew) for political gain while also struggling to quiet the deviation (or trauma-inflicted corruption of her calling) that infects her. The deviation, which she calls It, can give Venus access to immense power, but she’s still haunted, in more ways than she realizes, by the first time it was uncaged, when she was 15. The buildup to action takes some time, and the plot can be confusing to follow, given the digressions to explain the worldbuilding. Characters are alternately centered, pushed to the periphery, and then brought into focus again, seemingly in service of filling plot gaps but

without necessarily moving the story forward. Patient readers will eventually encounter unexpected twists and turns that provide an exciting and satisfying ending. Recipes for potions readers can brew themselves deepen the pull into this witchery world.

An interesting premise unevenly executed. (content warning, author’s note, glossary) (Fantasy. 15-18)

Dear Younger Me: What 35 Trailblazing Women Wish They’d Known as Girls Boxer, Elisa | Rowman & Littlefield (176 pp.) $28.00 | March 5, 2024 | 9781538175514

Interview- and research-based profiles of prominent contemporary women of different backgrounds who share some life lessons with readers.

Each clearly written brief biography opens with a black-and-white portrait photograph, includes several pages in which the subject’s impressive achievements are recounted, and concludes with a few lines of advice and reassurance by the interviewee to her younger self. Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman who defied the law against women drivers, helped bring about a change in legislation, and wrote a bestselling book, writes, “Question the system, never yourself.”

Harvard-trained psychoneuroimmunologist Joan Borysenko, who’s done groundbreaking work in integrative medicine, urges her younger self to be kind, grateful, and curious. Journalist and author Boxer pushes back against the societal emphasis on “doing rather than being” and reminds readers to be KIRKUS REVIEWS

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themselves, “authentically and unapologetically.” The profiles highlight the subjects’ admirable values and display a multitude of visions of success across a variety of fields, including neuroscience, entrepreneurship, climate-change activism, health care, disability rights, racial justice, and wildlife conservation.

Some of the subjects are famous—like Temple Grandin, S.E. Hinton, Gabby Giffords, Nancy Pelosi, and Sheryl Sandberg—but most will be new to readers and are worth learning about. There is some diversity in race, nationality, physical ability, and sexual orientation among the subjects.

Presents many inspiring, resilient role models along with encouraging advice to take away. (resources, endnotes, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Royal Scandal Carter, Aimée | Delacorte (416 pp.) | $19.99 March 26, 2024 | 9780593485934 Series: Royal Blood, 2

A messy royal family faces yet more challenges— some of them life-threatening.

Readers first met American 18-year-old Evangeline Bright in 2023’s Royal Blood, in which she cleared her name after being framed for murder. In the five months since then, she’s remained in England, trying to find her place in the royal family and build relationships with King Alexander (her father) and Maisie (her half sister, who’s heir to the throne). Life among the royals is not smooth sailing, however. The press seems to have a lot of inside knowledge about the family, and Evan can’t shake off tabloid attention, especially from the Regal Record, which maintains a sharp focus on her. Worse, Benedict, Evan’s cousin who framed her for murder and was sent away to Kenya, is back, and he’s behaving in a menacing way. The royal family is also contending with the rise of an anti-monarchist group, the Army of the British Republic. Things get even KIRKUS REVIEWS

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rockier when assassination attempts threaten her father’s life; it’s impossible to tell whether the danger comes from inside or outside the family—or both.

The characterization remains at the surface level, making this a plot-driven story with sordid intrigues and danger lurking around every corner. The pace moves at a fast clip, and the story races to a cliffhanger ending as Evan tries to uncover the truth. Central characters read white.

Soapy, scandalous, and escapist fun.

(Mystery. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

Ariel Crashes a Train Cole, Olivia A. | Labyrinth Road (464 pp.) $19.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9780593644669

Vulnerability and openness may hold the key to survival for a teenager struggling with violent, intrusive thoughts.

Without best friend Leah there, Ariel’s usual summer job at Wildwood carnival just feels scary and unfamiliar. To make matters worse, Ariel’s sister, Mandy, is away at college, leaving Ariel to bear the full brunt of their parents’ disappointments and her own violent, aggressive thoughts, which continue to escalate. Though she tries to mask her internal struggles to cope with her heightened ritualistic behaviors, things reach a fever pitch—until Mandy shares information about intrusive thoughts and OCD, and Ariel, a white lesbian, begins to suspect that’s what she’s suffering from. Having parents who aren’t supportive of therapy means she’s left to find ways to manage until she can seek out treatment on her own, but Mandy, along with new Wildwood friends Ruth (who’s Black) and Rex (who’s trans and reads white), prove to be lifelines. Immersive dialogue and realistic emotions lend a sense of intimacy to the narrative; as Ariel begins to accept that her thoughts do not make her a monster, she also begins

to accept her tall, muscular frame and non-feminine gender presentation, too.

The verse format provides readers with the space that Ariel desperately craves from her uncontrollable thoughts, balancing out the density and weight of the subject matter.

A revelatory, razor-sharp, and powerfully honest depiction of the reality of living with OCD. (Verse fiction. 14-18)

I Will Follow Corrigan, Eireann | Scholastic (272 pp.) | $13.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781339002880

Making TikTok videos has never been more dangerous.

Nora Monahan is an introspective teen living in her father’s bunker in rural Washington state, following his strict rules as he prepares for “a new apocalypse.” Nora’s only solace is Shea Davison’s TikTok channel; along with over 900,000 other followers, Nora watches Shea dance and share videos about her life. But Shea, who radiates positivity online, faces challenges that she doesn’t post to TikTok, including trying to salvage a rocky relationship with best friend turned future stepsibling Delancey Renard, who uses they/them pronouns. Nora’s obvious obsession with Shea’s channel escalates, and when she learns that Shea will be making an appearance at the Washington State Fair, she hatches a plan that culminates in a kidnapping, which Nora frames as a “partnership” that will help her “learn from an expert—my idol” while offering the influencer “something fresh” for her channel. The only person able to save Shea is the one she’s been most afraid of losing. Delancey, with help from Shea’s dance friends, will need to convince the authorities that Shea’s life is really at stake. This suspenseful pageturner is narrated in turns by Nora, Shea, and Delancey, who are minimally described and racially ambiguous.

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twisty plot. Some use of ableist terms hints at possible mental illness that is not explored in the story.

A high-stakes thriller exploring the dark depths of online obsession.

(Thriller. 14-18)

Born a Girl: It Takes Courage Dussutour, Alice | Trans. by David Warriner Orca (176 pp.) | $29.95 | March 12, 2024 9781459838987

I n this translated import from France, profiles of five fictional girls describe struggles with societal norms and introduce critical gender-related issues.

In a village in Nepal, menstrual taboos exile Kaneila to a distant, doorless hut during her period, leaving her vulnerable to wild animals and sexual assault and banning her from attending school. Even as she questions these superstitions, a biology student from a village that’s discarded this custom comes to educate her class about female physiology, inspiring Kaneila to want to empower other girls.

Dussutour then explains how “periods are political,” describing initiatives and challenges worldwide. In France, Jade is fat-shamed by her mother, doctor, classmates, and strangers. She’s humiliated and confused by media messages, but support from her sister and a friend who’s experienced racism help her focus on her body’s strength and share her feelings with her family.

The author covers body positivity, the negative toll of diet culture, the prevalence of eating disorders, and related topics. Other chapters talk about Afghanistan (Mahnoosh dresses as a boy so she can have freedom of movement), Kenya (Makena flees female genital mutilation to live in a matriarchal community with her sister), and Mexico (Luisa copes with sexual harassment in public and at school, and her sister becomes a victim of domestic violence). Saturated, 152

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vibrantly colored illustrations highlight the girls and symbolic items in their lives. The book celebrates those who are working for change from within their cultures.

Celebrates girls’ resilience, courage, and initiative. (resources, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

Clarion Call Fay, Cayla | Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781665905329 Series: Ravensong, 2

This sequel to Ravensong (2023), which picks up where its predecessor left off, concludes the Irish mythology– inspired duology.

Neve and her girlfriend, Alexandria, have made it back to Newgrange Harbor, Massachusetts, after traveling through the Gate that Neve has spent her life protecting from the monsters that try to pass through it. But Aodh, her antagonistic cousin, has followed her—and even worse, her sisters are stuck on the other side. Neve isn’t supposed to get back any memories of her previous lives until she turns 18, but they’ve started trickling in anyway, making her more confused than ever about whom to trust and why the Gate was created in the first place. The highly original worldbuilding that stood out in the first book is present here, but this story is lacking in tension and significant character growth. For most of the novel, the major conflict centers on Neve’s confused memories, an element that quickly becomes repetitive and frustrating. Many chapters smartly

end with mini cliffhangers, which entice readers to keep going, but they wind up feeling like false alarms as the story continues to meander without much development all the way to the underwhelming ending. There is some delightfully gross imagery throughout and a few cute moments between Neve and Alexandria, who are cued white, but there is little, plot-wise, for readers to invest in.

A disappointing finish to what started off as a promising series. (Fantasy.

13-18)

Meet Me in the Fourth Dimension Feinstein, Rita | Page Street (320 pp.) $18.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781645678380

Eighteen-year-old Crosby, with her prematurely white hair, embraces her witchy side and struggles with loss and the possibly impending cataclysmic end of the world.

As the Oregon summer transitions into the first year of college, besties Crosby and Shannon drift apart. For financial reasons, Crosby has enrolled at “the state school with the least stupid mascot,” while Shannon shakes off the notion that they’re witches and heads to college in Tucson.

Unanswered texts and Shannon’s happy photos on social media increase Crosby’s unease and loneliness, despite the efforts of her outgoing roommate, Teagan, to expand her social circle. News of dwarf planet Malachite, which is possibly on a collision course with Earth, sets a road trip in motion, bringing Teagan and

Skillfully composed illustrations show the impact of medical assault and racism.

THE REZ DOCTOR

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her friends, Crosby, Shannon, and the potentially disastrous Malachite into one another’s orbits. Crosby is convinced that if she and her loved ones can learn to vibrate at a higher frequency, they will survive the impact and be reunited elsewhere. The lyrical descriptions and verse format are a good match for the novel’s lightly developed speculative fiction elements.

Runes, tarot readings, and psychic advice from an enigmatic homeopath play with the notion of what is real; the sense of unreality is enhanced by the effects of the characters’ casual use of weed, shrooms, and alcohol. The cast is predominantly white; cultural appropriation is briefly raised and dismissed without interrogation.

An ultimately hopeful swirl of prognostication, conspiracy theory, and angst.

(Verse fiction. 14-18)

The Revenant Games Fuston, Margie | McElderry (416 pp.) $19.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9781665934411

Bly’s world is filled with vampires, witches, and humans like herself.

Vampires and witches live under an uneasy peace, but for two weeks each year, they play the Revenant Games.

During this time, humans can choose a side, try to capture a member of the opposing faction, and claim a reward: The witches will raise someone from the dead, while the vampires will grant you immortality. Bly enters in hopes of winning her sister Elise’s resurrection.

During preparations for the Games, however, Emerson, her best friend and crush, receives a death curse from a witch that can only be cured if he attains immortality. The two team up, playing for both sides in an attempt to save both Emerson and Elise. But when they capture a vampire called Kerrigan, and Bly’s feelings for him get complicated, she faces difficult decisions.

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themselves mostly feel like walks through the woods punctuated by occasional battles, and the explanation for the witches’ and vampires’ incentives to risk their lives is unconvincing, making the overall setup feel contrived. Fans of traditional vampires will enjoy the book’s portrayal of these velvet-wearing creatures, however. The abrupt ending sets things up to be continued in a possible sequel. Bly is cued white; Emerson has dark brown skin, and supporting characters bring diversity in skin color and sexual orientation.

Come for the forbidden romance and interpersonal machinations rather than the titular Games. (Fantasy. 14-18)

The Rez Doctor Crazyboy, Gitz | illus. by Veronika Barinova Colors by Azby Whitecalf | HighWater Press (64 pp.) | $22.95 paper | March 12, 2024 9781553799245

When white doctors neglect the Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot) community’s needs, a young man discovers his calling to be a doctor, but the path is not always

straightforward.

As a child in 1990s Alberta, Ryan Fox visited the medical clinic in Cardston, where he and his mother were treated dismissively. Growing up on the rez, Ryan attended school in a nearby majority-white town, where Indigenous people experienced pervasive racism. Fortunately, Ryan’s family’s pride in him and his connection to his community had a profound impact. A ceremony he attended with his father, in which a man who’d formerly abused alcohol received a headdress from elders in recognition that he had begun “to heal himself, and now he has duties, responsibilities, and obligations to help the community heal too,” serves as both warning and foretelling of Ryan’s life journey.

Away at college in Lethbridge, Ryan experiences peer pressure to drink and party—but he falls in love with a

young woman who’s a serious student.

Along with Ryan’s loving, incarcerated uncle, she helps him recommit to his goals, despite his despair over his falling grades. With guidance from the Creator, Ryan returns to his path, eventually becoming a doctor and working to support First Nations communities. The accessible text consists primarily of dialogue and is complemented by skillfully composed, thought-provoking illustrations that show the impact of painful topics like substance abuse, medical assault, and racism against Indigenous peoples.

An empowering telling of a journey to healing. (Graphic fiction. 14-18)

The Perfect Guy Doesn’t Exist Gonzales, Sophie | Wednesday Books (304 pp.) | $20.00 | March 26, 2024 9781250819185

Ivy is obsessed with the television show Hot, Magical, and Deadly, and she has a huge crush on Mackenzie, who, due to a recent argument, is unfortunately now her ex–best friend.

After she became captain of the volleyball team, Mack no longer seemed to have time for Ivy; now, she has absolutely zero patience for Ivy’s obsession with the H-MAD fandom.

But when Ivy’s home alone during a thunderstorm, she manages to magically manifest Weston Razorbrook, the dreamy main character from the show, directly into her bed. She’s forced to team up with Mack and Henry, a new fandom friend, to figure out what to do next. The trio soon learns that this version of Weston is directly taken from Ivy’s self-insert romantic fanfictions, tropes included. Unfortunately for Ivy, the tropes she loves in her stories are a lot less romantic in real life. Despite Weston’s volatile nature, Ivy wants to keep him in her life, against Mack’s constant insistence otherwise. This nerdy love story with queer protagonists is enjoyable, >>> JANUARY 1, 2024

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THE KIRKUS Q&A: MASON DEAVER Talking romance—and big teen feelings—with the author of Okay, Cupid.

BY D. ARTHUR

Your previous novels are more straightforwardly realistic. What inspired the more magical approach in this novel?

I’ve had the idea for Okay, Cupid for a few years now, and it’s always been this soft contemporary fantasy. It was a problem for me early on: I’ve just never felt that pull toward writing fantasy, and the idea of creating my own world, my own magic, my own rules, terrified me. It was only through talking to other contemporary authors who’ve done the same kind 154

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of fantasy-lite writing that I gave myself permission to be looser, to keep some of the rules secret and never reveal them to the reader. I was able to take the pressure off myself, which was so freeing.

Writing romance is kind of like playing Cupid. How did your experience as a romance writer influence the world- and character-building for the Cupids?

The Cupids love love—it’s their nature; it’s what they’re raised to do. [Their behav-

ior] helped me to recognize the familiar tropes of the genre, those beloved rules that guide readers to exactly what they’re looking for in a story. Even tropes that don’t appear in the actual narrative get a shoutout through the stories that Jude, Leah, and Cal have to tell.

Were there any elements of Cupid lore that didn’t make the final book?

A ton. There were times early on where I tried to tie the Cupids to real-world Roman and Greek stories. I even tried to write a retelling at one point, involving a lot more magic. In one draft, each spell had a rhyming convention. But none of that fit to me, so I cut it back and decided to keep the magic much simpler, making my job that much easier and that much more fun. Not having rules, getting to hint at things I never explain,

gave me a lot of room to play around.

Jude’s big human indulgence is rom-com movies, and the budding romance between Jude and Huy feels very cinematic. What’s the special sauce that makes a rom-com a classic?

I’d say sincerity. Many writers want to unpack the tropes, or they believe that they’re above them while trying to subvert them at the same time. But without taking the work to understand or appreciate the tropes, there’s no way you can unpack them in an authentic or even fun way that would make the journey enjoyable to the reader. Sincerity is amazing—it shows that you care where the genre came from, and how you can help it to move forward.

You have a really solid ear for dialogue, especially the

Courtesy of the author

FOR THEIR FOURTH novel, Okay, Cupid (PUSH/Scholastic, Jan. 2), Mason Deaver wanted to try something different.

After releasing several realistic contemporary novels for young adults, their latest is a “soft contemporary fantasy” that was years in the making. The result? A story about an agender Cupid, Jude, that Kirkus describes as “a well-crafted slow-burn romance with plenty of depth.” Jude and their fellow Cupids spend their time on Earth nudging humans toward their happily-ever-afters. But when Jude falls in love with a human boy while on assignment, they’re dispatched to help Vietnamese American teen Huy Trinh and his former best friend, Alice Tran, rekindle their romance. Along the way, they navigate high school, delicious baked goods across San Francisco neighborhoods, forbidden feelings of love, and what it means to be human. While Jude and their community of Cupids—Leah, Cal, and Richard—may know a lot about love and very little about the complicated experience of being a human teenager, the same can’t be said for Deaver, whose work deftly illustrates both. The author, who lives in San Francisco, answered our questions by email; the following exchange has been edited for length and clarity.

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flirting between Jude and Huy. What’s your strategy for writing good banter?

I don’t like saying that it comes naturally to me, but in a lot of ways it does. I adore writing dialogue. I love establishing the rapport between two characters, and more than that, I love flirting. There’s so much said and unsaid at the same time, the palpable tension between characters that the reader is just itching to see explode. I adore those moments, and I love getting to write them.

Even with an increase in representation of trans and gender-nonconforming characters in young adult literature, T4T [trans for trans] romances are still somewhat rare. What drove you to write about a T4T romance between an agender Cupid and a trans boy?

Recently, I’ve been asked a lot about trans representation and the strides we’ve

made. And while I think trans authors are doing amazing work, publishing seems to still be miles behind. With my third book, The Feeling of Falling in Love, the decision to make the two leads a T4T couple didn’t come naturally. The love interest, Wyatt, came out to me slowly over the course of writing their story.

With Jude and Huy, it was intentional from the first draft. It always bothers me in fantasy when authors invent vivid worlds with different races of people, some with magic, all with different cultures, and yet they still subscribe to Western ideals of gender. While the Cupids adapt to human presentation in an effort to blend in, gender isn’t something they subscribe to. Jude’s coming out was much more about understanding how they felt and how they wanted to present rather than the reactions of the people around them. With Huy, I wanted to write about the

human side of the same expectations that were placed on Jude. I wanted to give [readers] a person who could understand what Jude was going through without actually understanding their role or powers. The two of them rhyme to me, at least in that sense, and that was a part of the decision.

Both Jude and Huy are trans and out. Why is it important to you to write queer stories that aren’t just about coming out?

I don’t think the importance of the coming-out story can be overstated. As authors and readers, we should make space for all these stories. But for me, I think it’s so important to fill the shelf with stories about what life can look like after someone’s come out. We should be showing readers the highs and the lows—the excitement of discovering and reinventing yourself, the first crushes and the heartbreaks that follow, how

relationships change and evolve, and what it feels like to live authentically. Coming out is a big moment, yes, but there’s so much life that follows.

Your books are fun, but they take the experiences and emotions of young people really seriously.

How do you balance both the joy and the heaviness of being a young person in your writing?

I think the heaviness is a part of the fun! Being a teenager means experiencing every emotion all at once, and everything feels cranked up to 11. Writing romance means writing about emotions. It means capturing those feelings of falling in love, but it also means capturing those moments of heartbreak, yearning, understanding. It’s honestly a relief to be able to get those feelings out.

D. Arthur is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Being a teenager means experiencing every emotion all at once.

Okay, Cupid Deaver, Mason

PUSH/Scholastic | 320 pp. | $19.99 Jan. 2, 2024 | 9781338777697

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although at times it feels superficial: The plot-driven story would have benefitted from further development of the characters and setting. Ivy’s reactions to the manifestation of a turbulent man from her fanfictions doesn’t always seem believable. Ivy is cued white; Mack reads Black.

A cute, if lightly developed, queer friends-to-enemies-to-lovers romance.

(Romance. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams Green, Shari | Andrews McMeel Publishing (256 pp.) | $16.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9781524881122

I n the German Democratic Republic during the latter months of 1989, a 16-year-old girl faces the realities of her government’s violent control of its people.

Helena’s life in Leipzig revolves around music. An avid pianist, she imagines someday becoming a conductor and using the power of music “to stir people / to dreams. Imagining / the possibility lets loose / butterflies within me.” Constraints about people’s life choices in the GDR, and her mother’s practical concerns over her future, leave her career plans uncertain. For Helena, music is her path to freedom and a form of release from the oppression surrounding her. But after her best friend escapes to Austria during a rush on the border, Helena joins her father in protesting the intolerable conditions in which they live. Under constant observation by the Stasi and with new travel restrictions in place, citizens are unable to leave the country, and their expressions of dissent are violently shut down. Helena’s narrative is a moving piece of historical fiction that is detailed, well researched, and remarkable in its ability to transport readers into another era. Written in 156

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The depth of emotion will resonate with any reader who has experienced loss.

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verse, this lyrical novel skillfully tackles the complicated issues of political oppression, police brutality, and nonviolent acts of resistance. The poems vary in length and style, emphasizing major themes and important moments with delicate artistry.

Emotionally resonant and masterfully crafted. (author’s note, glossary, selected sources) (Verse historical fiction. 13-18)

What Monstrous Gods Hodge, Rosamund | Balzer + Bray/ HarperCollins (368 pp.) | $19.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780062869135

Five hundred years ago, the heretic Ruven imprisoned Runakhia’s royal family inside magical briar, silencing the gods they serve; in breaking the spell, a 17-year-old learns a fateful lesson: Be careful what you wish for.

After she lost her family to the plague, Lia Kurinava was raised by nuns who worship Nin-Anna, one of eight deities who formerly blessed Runakhia. A rare commoner born with the Royal Gift that permits the royal family to enter the gods’ realm, Lia uses her gift to breach the briar and kill Ruven. She awakens the royal family from their enchanted sleep to seek the gods’ help in defeating the plague and Runakhia’s enemies. The chillingly indifferent deities whom Runakhians worship work their magic through human saints whose miracles eventually cause the saints’ horrific deaths. They’re more demonic than saintly, according to Ruven, who’s now

a tormenting but charismatic ghost upon whom Lia increasingly depends as she’s ordered to help the royals re-enter modern life, restore the gods to Runakhia, and marry Prince Araunn.

Ruven may be her worst enemy—or her only hope—in her quest to ensure the gods are worthy of their powers.

Sedate pacing and high-fantasy psychic distance lend heft to an original tale unfolding from an unsettling premise.

Beyond the charmingly disembodied love story, the question of whether humans might outgrow their gods offers intriguing food for thought.

Major characters are cued white.

A sharply original blend of romance and dark fantasy. (the gods and their shrines) (Fantasy romance. 13-18)

The Summer She Went Missing Ichaso, Chelsea | Sourcebooks Fire (384 pp.) | $11.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9781728251097

A story of friendship and resilience in the darkest of times.

Every summer, Paige Redmond, her parents, and her younger sister stay with the family of her best friend, Audrey Covington, at their luxurious vacation home in Clearwater Ridge. Fun, leisurely days filled with sunshine and rafting await. And Paige is eager to finally get sparks flying with Dylan, Audrey’s handsome, competitive swimmer older brother. At Dylan’s friend Tripp Shaw’s annual Summer Kickoff party, Audrey becomes preoccupied with a previous fling, leaving Paige and Dylan KIRKUS REVIEWS

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to finally connect. Over the course of the summer, 16-year-old Audrey grows distant—and one night in early August, she never comes home, and her family reports her missing. The following summer, Paige’s family decides to continue the tradition and join the Covingtons.

Audrey’s case has gone cold, and Paige and Dylan’s relationship has become awkward and strained, but the hidden cell phone Paige finds brings the two back together, and they start investigating what really happened to Audrey that night. The narrative is filled with a few too many red herrings and an overabundance of twists and turns, but Paige’s nonstop determination to find the truth and her underlying need to absolve her and Dylan’s guilty consciences over not preventing what happened to Audrey keep the story flowing. Dylan and Paige’s sweet relationship brings a much-needed reprieve to the story’s darker aspects. Characters are cued white.

An immersive atmosphere and fearless protagonist outweigh the somewhat overstuffed mystery. (Mystery. 14-18)

Kirkus Star

49 Days Lee, Agnes | Levine Querido (352 pp.) $18.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9781646143757

A young woman embarks on a journey to an unknown destination in this debut about grief and life after loss.

“There’s some weird shit happening out here,” Kit thinks as she finds herself alive after experiencing yet another seemingly fatal accident.

Each morning, Kit checks her watch and her map and walks, until something—a rushing tide, slippery boulders, a falling branch—halts her progress. She wakes up unharmed the following day, and the routine repeats itself. Kit’s happy-go-lucky demeanor matches the pleasant childhood memories that punctuate her days, but KIRKUS REVIEWS

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as time passes, her frustration grows, and the memories increasingly become tinged with regret. In a concurrent storyline, grieving family members surrounded by reminders of the one they lost try to resume normal life.

Readers will piece together the clues before Kit realizes what’s happening, but that knowledge won’t diminish the impact of the reveal, which is dramatic in its visual simplicity. Throughout the book, Lee’s unfussy artwork—bold, black line art paired with monochromatic shading—effortlessly conveys movement and emotion, while page turns and two-page spreads are used to great effect in creating mood and suspense. The depth of emotion portrayed here will resonate with any reader who has experienced loss. The characters are cued as Korean American. An author’s note explains the Buddhist concept of bardo, a temporary state between life and rebirth, from which the book takes inspiration.

A moving portrayal of mortality and its aftermath, shown from both sides.

(Graphic fiction. 13-adult)

Clever Creatures of the Night Mabry, Samantha | Algonquin (240 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781616208974

A missing friend and her strange roommates send a recent high school graduate on a quest for answers.

Case Lopez’s family moved from tiny Millsap, Texas, to Fort Worth, leaving behind Andrea, Case’s close childhood friend. The girls had dreamed of the wider world—and Case is excited to be heading to the University of Oregon on scholarship. But after Drea invites her to visit the remote Texas town where she’s been living with a group of mostly white friends, Case arrives to find Drea missing.

She questions the pretense of Drea’s evasive roommates’ supposedly utopian rural lifestyle, wondering what they’re hiding and what extremes they might

be capable of. The chapters count down the 24 hours of Case’s visit, and the tension mounts as she tries to discern where her feelings of mistrust end and the real threats begin. Case’s search to uncover what happened to Drea leads to some self-doubt: In this slow-building study of paranoia and persistence, she wonders whether she’s being gaslit or if she can trust her perceptions. Case’s internal narrative frames the story, which also includes Drea’s journal entries and letters, each adding clues to what the residents of the eerie house are concealing. Case’s and Drea’s Latine identities and the racism they face heighten strains with the silent, hostile roommates. The pace sometimes wavers, but this tale delivers an emotional intensity that will appeal to fans of atmospheric thrillers and character-driven psychological suspense.

A chilling character study. (Horror.

14-18)

Conditions of a Heart Mangle, Bethany | McElderry (352 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781665937634

A high schooler’s nondisabled persona threatens to unravel when she’s suspended from school.

After ableism destroyed a childhood friendship, Brynn Kwan has ensured that nobody at Pineland Prep knows she has Ehlers– Danlos syndrome, a degenerative genetic disorder that causes frequent joint dislocations. She’s perfected her Pretend Brynn persona, hiding her pain and fatigue. Brynn’s even ghosted her (now-ex) boyfriend, Oliver De Luca, rather than reveal an upcoming surgery.

But when she’s unjustly suspended and banned from senior-year activities (including serving as class president) after intervening in a fight, she feels lost without her busy social facade.

Worse, a life skills class project forces her and Oliver to be hypothetical future roommates, juggling budgets and careers. Brynn’s future, given her JANUARY 1, 2024

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uncertain prognosis, is unpredictable.

Attending college—or even finishing high school—seems pointless when EDS has destroyed her dream of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. But as her feelings for Oliver resurface, pretense and reality blur. Could Oliver love the real Brynn? Mangle, who has EDS herself, vividly portrays the unpredictability of chronic illness in a disorienting postCovid world where illness is no longer normalized. Wry internal banter with various body parts leavens Brynn’s anxious, discouraged narration. Though some secondary characters feel two-dimensional, the tension between Brynn and her overprotective younger sister is uncomfortably realistic, and Brynn’s bond with her Korean American dad, who also has EDS, is heartwarming (Brynn’s mom is white). Oliver reads white; there’s ethnic and racial diversity among secondary characters.

Poignant and insightful. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)

Promchanted Matson, Morgan | Disney-Hyperion (384 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781368095570

Once upon a time, two teens walked through a magical door at Disneyland.

Stella Griffin’s plans for a perfect prom night were ruined when her boyfriend publicly dumped her at a restaurant three weeks before the big event, resulting in an embarrassing—and messy—mishap involving their dishy waiter, Mauricio.

Embittered about love but determined to make the most of the special night, the Type A junior, who reads white, is ready for her long-dreamed-about pre-prom Disneyland visit with best friend Nisha, who’s cued South Asian.

But things take an awkward turn when Stella, decked out in her prom dress, discovers that Nisha’s girlfriend has invited along her new neighbor from Connecticut, hoodie-and-jeans-clad Mauricio “Reece” Suarez, who’s implied 158

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Latine. The two get off to a frosty start, but since it’s Reece’s first time at Disneyland, and his little sister loves the movie Sleeping Beauty, they tour the iconic castle, where they stumble upon a secret door that transports them into the Disney princess’ universe. Reece cautions Stella—who can’t remember any details of the movie—that they shouldn’t interfere with the storyline, although their arrival is a disruption in itself. Matson seamlessly weaves a modern-day opposites-attract story together with a familiar tale, adding more depth to the Disney characters and allowing the two contemporary teens to grow both individually and together. Despite running a bit longer than necessary, this is a fun and breezy read.

A charming twist on a Disney romance.

(Romance. 12-18)

Mortal Queens McCombs, Victoria | Enclave Escape (320 pp.) | $24.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 9798886050905 | Series: The Fae Dynasty, 1

A teenage girl made high queen of the fae flails against time to save herself from the death sentenced imposed on every Mortal Queen.

Each year, ambassadors from the mysterious fae realm come to the five islands to select a human girl to serve as their queen.

Bronze-skinned Althea, who’s in her final year of eligibility, is shocked when her name is drawn. Sad to leave her twin, Cal, and younger brother, Malcom, but eager for the adventures and luxuries that await, Thea arrives at the fae court unprepared for the dangers ahead. Upon discovering that her fate is to live only two more years, Thea is determined to survive by tricking the six fae kings into granting her favors.

With the help of newfound fae friends Talen and Odette, Thea attempts to outmaneuver the wily fae, uncover the truth about her missing mother, and escape before her time is up. Without substantial worldbuilding, McCombs’

efforts to create drama through court intrigue and alliances fall flat, with conflicts arising and quickly being resolved without furthering the plot.

The uneven and at times baffling narrative pacing results in a slow slog for readers. A lukewarm insta-romance with Bastian, a fae king who’s supposedly “incapable of love,” does little to heat up the story. Human and fae characters are diverse in appearance.

An underdeveloped high fantasy that fails to deliver. (power structure chart) (Fantasy. 13-18)

Four Letter Word McNeil, Gretchen | Disney-Hyperion (320 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781368097437

Izzy Bell might not know much Italian or understand why the handsome Jake Vargas has stopped texting her, but she does know how to help her mother, who

has bipolar disorder.

All Izzy must do is master Italian and move to Italy to study art history, fulfilling the dreams her mom never got to fulfill (instead, her mom, Elizabeth Bell, got pregnant with Izzy’s oldest brother). To help improve Izzy’s mastery of the language, the summer before her senior year, the Bell family welcomes college-aged exchange student Alberto Bianchi to their Eureka, California, home. Only hot, flirty Alberto might be too good to be true, and truecrime podcast aficionado Izzy begins to question his real identity—and his real intentions. With a serial killer on the loose and a potentially disastrous storm approaching, Izzy’s primary focus is on survival. McNeil ratchets up the tension in her thrill-filled tale set in a vividly rendered small coastal city as “the Storm of the Century” approaches.

Izzy is an engaging and fully developed protagonist who balances a confusing romance, rocky family dynamics, worries about the future—and, oh yeah, she potentially faces a serial KIRKUS REVIEWS

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Alarming and scary elements build expertly toward a thrilling climax.

O N E L A S T B R E AT H

killer. Following a slower first half, the pacing revs up as the story races to the action-packed finale in this crisply described, cinematic read that fans of Karen McManus will appreciate. Most characters read white.

Readers will root for the multidimensional hero of this twisty whodunit with heart that’s sure to surprise and scare. (Thriller. 12-18)

Last One To Die Murphy, Cynthia | Delacorte (288 pp.) | $12.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9780593705544

Supernatural terror is unleashed in London.

Niamh leaves her hometown in Ireland for the London Academy of Dramatic Arts summer course she’s worked hard to afford. But focusing on classes and her work placement at the Victorian Street Museum, where she plays Jane, the daughter of a mill owner, proves difficult. Classmates Sara and Tasha, both of whom have long, dark hair and freckles like Niamh, are victims of brutal attacks.

Niamh has her own creepy encounters with a mysterious entity. Niamh finds some distraction at the museum, where handsome volunteer Tommy stares at her intensely. Is it because, in costume, Niamh is the mirror image of freckled, dark-haired Jane, who died tragically? Or is romance brewing between them? Haunting, gothic overtones appear as new friend Jess helps Niamh research attacks similar to the ones on her friends—some of which took place in Victorian times.

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In an eerie twist, Niamh begins to feel as though Jane is trying to communicate something to her. There are red herrings throughout, and the reveals are deliciously paced. Readers will be on edge trying to determine the link between the historic attacks and the current-day events and how Tommy fits into everything. Niamh may read as swoony, but at critical moments she proves quite capable of saving herself.

The cast is primarily white; Jess has brown skin and “tight curls.”

Tightly plotted and thrilling, this book will grab readers by the throat.

(Thriller. 13-18)

The God of High School: Volume Two Park, Yongje | WEBTOON Unscrolled (256 pp.) | $18.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9781990778933 | Series: The God of High School, 2

An engaging addition to a high school fighting competition series set in South Korea.

In this exciting second series entry, the God of High School tournament continues in Seoul with the disqualification of Mori Jin, who leaves the ring amid cheers. Fighting for the first-place position and a chance to have any wish granted by the executive committee, Mira Yoo and Daewi Han both have new matches. Mira fights a professional wrestler who has her eye on the committee members (“Aren’t they so cool? They’re all my type”), and Daewi fights an academic genius who wields a baseball bat. Meanwhile, readers learn

more about the commissioners, the institution behind them, and Mori’s and his grandfather’s connections to it. Readers learn that Mori can rejoin the competition—if he can beat one of the commissioners by himself. As the stakes continue to rise, dark secrets behind the tournament start emerging, shedding light on political elements that were hinted at before. With expressive and colorful art that adds humor at the right times, this volume showcases myriad types of combat.

Mori is an absolutely delightful lead at the center of a cast of lovable and three-dimensional characters. The story flows smoothly, and readers will be sure to devour the book in one sitting.

An intriguing and action-filled story populated with immensely appealing characters. (Graphic adventure. 13-18)

One Last Breath Sain, Ginny Myers | Razorbill/Penguin (384 pp.) | $19.99 | March 5, 2024 9780593625453

Trulee and Rio, who’s new to town, find themselves engrossed in unraveling a pair of unsolved 20-year-old murders.

It’s late May in sweltering Mount Orange, Florida, and recent high school grad Trulee plans on spending the summer with her boyfriend, East, working her summer job at the local newspaper, and free diving at Hidden Glen Springs.

While she’s diving one day, Tru meets Rio, and the two girls feel an instant connection and simmering spark.

Both skilled divers, they’re drawn to the water’s depths—and the missing evidence that could be hiding there from the gruesome murders of Bailey and Celeste, two teen girls who were attacked while camping in the area decades prior. Tru and Rio are obsessively focused on solving the crime when they slowly realize they could be the killer’s next targets. The page-turning mystery sustains readers’ interest, JANUARY 1, 2024

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and amid red herrings galore, they’ll be desperate to solve the whodunit.

Suspense drips from every scene, and the alarming and scary elements build expertly toward a thrilling climax that will surprise even devoted fans of the genre, although some may find the resolution slightly too convenient. The well-rounded characters are carefully crafted and believably express a range of emotions. A natural queer sexual awakening unfolds that’s full of spine-tingling pining, lust, and love.

All main characters read white.

pervasive distrust risks destroying her home and hospital friendships alike.

Though the secondary characters feel somewhat two-dimensional, and Ellie’s development comes late in the story, Schreiber, who has VACTERLs herself, portrays myriad challenges of chronic illness, including post-traumatic stress from surgery, with often brutal frankness. Ellie’s relationship with her mother is gut-wrenching and nuanced, exploring issues of privacy, sacrifice, guilt, and love. Ellie and Caitlin read white; Ryan is cued Korean American.

have different goals, ambitions, and dreams. She clearly captures each of the characters’ confusion and fear as they are arrested. Facing pressure from family members and lawyers, the young people must decide whether they want to fight for their collective freedom and innocence or frame one another. Tensions run high as the trial proceeds, and readers will be surprised by a twist toward the end. This story of post-9/11 America clearly depicts how lives can change overnight when those in power control the narrative.

Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

Six Truths and a Lie

Hamlet Is Not OK

Shukairy, Ream | Little, Brown (400 pp.) $18.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9780316564595

Spratt, R.A. | Penguin Random House Australia/Trafalgar (240 pp.) | $15.99 paper March 12, 2024 | 9780143779278

Fast paced and thrilling. (Mystery. 14-18)

Schreiber, Gretchen | Wednesday Books (304 pp.) | $20.00 | March 5, 2024 9781250892164

A teen with a rare illness struggles to bridge her hospital and school relationships.

Ellie Haycock insists that her high school friends—especially her boyfriend, Jack—never know how thoroughly VACTERLs affects her life.

If they knew, surely they’d abandon her, just as her elementary friends did.

The genetic disease has left Ellie with heart, kidney, spine, and limb issues.

She’s had over 40 surgeries, and now she and Mom are staying in hospital lodging while Ellie’s doctors investigate a troubling new lung issue. Worse, Mom not only decides on Ellie’s medical treatments but publicly blogs about Ellie’s experiences and the stress of raising a disabled child. Luckily, Caitlin Barrie, Ellie’s “best hospital friend,” is a fellow VACTERLs veteran, ready to dispense support and no-nonsense advice. New hospital friends provide further distraction—especially Ryan Kim. Though Ryan’s insistence that Ellie should trust doctors who can’t fix her is as frustrating as Caitlin’s urging her to trust her friends, his tough love begins to feel unnervingly like romantic love. But Ellie’s 160

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Honest and illuminating. (author’s note) (Fiction. 13-18)

Muslim high school students in Los Angeles are accused of a terrorist attack on the Fourth of July.

When a fatal explosion causes tremendous damage at Monarch Beach, six Muslim teenagers become suspects.

The story unfolds in chapters that alternate between the viewpoints of Nasreen Choudhry, who attends a private Catholic school where she’s the only Pakistani American in her classes; Palestinian Arab American Qays Sharif, a soccer player with a 4.4 GPA and a Stanford scholarship; Lebanese and Syrian American social media influencer Samia Al-Samra; Zamzam Thompson, who’s Black and an aspiring doctor; Afghan immigrant Muzhda Ahmad, whose family has a secret; and Sudani American Abdullahi Talib, an EMT in training. Each of them have something to hide from their families as well as complicated family relationships and expectations.

Two white investigators, federal agent Kandi Favreau and Detective Micky Pennella, seem determined to use the teens’ Muslim identities and ethnicities to frame them. In her sophomore novel, Shukairy writes leads who

A powerful and timely read. (Fiction.

13-18)

A reimagined Hamlet with a modern twist.

Selby, like many 16-year-olds, struggles with reading Shakespeare, and her marks in English class show it. A quirky Australian girl from a small town, she has a penchant for taking off her shoes in class. Whenever Selby, who’s cued white, reads, it’s a “word scramble” (a learning disability is hinted at, but that element isn’t developed in the book). While 18-year-old Dan, a bookish Black friend of her brother’s, is tutoring her, Selby’s reading of Hamlet transports them both into the world of the play, and they witness the tragic storyline unfolding firsthand.

The novel uses snippets of the original Shakespearean language alongside explanatory dialogue to make the text accessible, with explanations from Dan and Selby’s English teacher uncomfortably intruding upon the narrative at times. Early on, Spratt introduces a motif about the power of imagination, which invites readers to suspend their disbelief when Selby’s voice somehow creates a magical portal into earlymodern Denmark. The work uses farcical humor and casual contemporary KIRKUS REVIEWS

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language, and the author makes a worthy attempt to balance both the adult and teen voices, creating an educational alternative to easy-to-read Shakespearean adaptations. Despite some inconsistent characterization and dialogue that leans into telling rather than showing, the book presents a convincing argument for Shakespeare’s value in modern-day classrooms, even for struggling readers.

A time-travel story designed to bring Shakespeare to life that educators may find useful. (Speculative fiction. 12-16)

Last Girl Breathing Stevens, Court | Thomas Nelson (400 pp.) $19.99 | Nov. 7, 2023 | 9780840707109

LaRue is a beautiful state-run recreational area in Kentucky, perfect for hunting, fishing— and covering up crimes.

Lucy Michaels lost Clay, her younger brother, to the floodwaters when the LaRue Dam broke nine years ago. Now 18, Lucy splits time between school and the shooting range, where she practices hitting targets with her air rifle. But tragedy continues to haunt her: Martin Carlin, Lucy’s stepbrother, and police officer Deuce Uri, a family friend, are found murdered in the same area where Clay died. The evidence ties their deaths to Neil Clark, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, whose younger sister, Astrid, is mysteriously missing. Lucy doesn’t believe Neil killed her stepbrother—she thinks others may have had a motive. After all, Martin suspected that the LaRue Dam disaster wasn’t an accident. Could he have been right? The story unfolds through Lucy’s perspective, her tense narration effectively portraying a teenage girl who’s been forced to grow up too fast. An honest but weary narrator, she intersperses the present-day timeline with flashbacks to the flood.

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hinder Lucy’s sleuthing. The setting is richly developed; rural Kentucky permeates Stevens’ atmospheric prose.

Most characters are cued white.

A twisty thriller following a young woman caught in the crosshairs as tragedies compound. (discussion questions) (Thriller. 14-18)

These Bodies Between Us Van Name, Sarah | Delacorte (336 pp.) $19.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9780593646175

Four girls reckon with the costs and benefits of disappearing from their lives.

Callie kicks off the summer before senior year by welcoming her close friend Cleo back to her small, touristy town of Little Beach, North Carolina. Cleo’s a gay girl from Washington, D.C., who comes to the area every year to visit her grandparents; Callie and her best friend, Talia, met Cleo while playing on the beach as children. Joining Cleo this summer is Polly, a quiet girl whom Callie initially perceives as having “no presence whatsoever.” Soon, however, the four of them become fast friends. The three old friends are looking forward to working their usual summer jobs at the roller-skating rink as well as pursuing a group summer project, a long-standing tradition; last year, they learned to make ice cream. This summer, Cleo proposes something radical: learning how to disappear. She produces evidence from YouTube of girls who have successfully become invisible. Interspersed throughout the girls’ dogged disappearing efforts are the complications of teenage life; Talia is battling a toxic boyfriend, and bisexual Callie’s falling for sweet Adam Liu, her first boyfriend. The topics of disordered eating and race (Callie, Talia, and Polly read white, while Cleo is Black) are touched upon but would have benefitted from further interrogation. Nonetheless, the strength of the girls’ bonds makes this an original and worthwhile journey.

Ominous, strategic foreshadowing creates anticipation, building eventually to a shocking, well-earned climax.

A suspenseful story of friendship and magic. (playlist) (Fiction. 14-18)

Sign Me Up Williams, C.H. | West 44 Books (200 pp.) $25.80 | Feb. 16, 2024 | 9781978597174 Series: West 44 YA Verse

A new kid in town finds friends—and herself—through roller derby.

When Alyssa Jackson moves from rural Alaska to California, she knows she’s going to miss ice-skating, but she soon makes friends with girls who do roller derby. The transition from blades to wheels isn’t a smooth one for Alyssa, however: The noise at the rink is often overwhelming, and she struggles with wanting to quit. But Saffy, a new friend who may be becoming more than a friend, helps her practice, and Alyssa’s loving parents provide support and understanding of her needs as an introvert. Alyssa communicates in sign language with her deaf mom, who notices that the roller derby referees frequently use hand signals. Inspired, Alyssa then suggests that the team members use gestures during matches, granting them an advantage over their competitors, and she realizes that she has a lot to offer the team just the way she is. This accessible novel in verse covers a lot of ground in relatively few pages, with Alyssa moving quickly from feeling bad about her introversion and sensory issues to appreciating the unique perspective they give her. The girls’ burgeoning queer relationship is integrated naturally and is affirmed by friends and family. This work is a natural fit for readers who enjoy sports-themed titles. Main characters read white.

A reluctant reader story that both validates differences and contains plenty of roller rink action. (Verse fiction. 12-18)

>>>

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Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix

Book to Screen

Leigh Bardugo “Heartbroken” Over End of Streaming Series Shadow and Bone, based on Bardugo’s bestselling YA series, has been canceled by Netflix.

Leigh Bardugo said that she is “heartbroken” over the cancelation of Shadow and Bone, the Netflix series

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based on her Grishaverse fantasy novels.

The series, which starred Jessie Mei Li, Archie Renaux, and Freddy Carter and aired for two seasons, was canceled in November. Variety reports that the decision was due to the impacts of the writers’ and actors’ strikes that brought Hollywood to a virtual standstill last year.

Additionally, a planned spinoff of the show, Six of Crows, will not be moving forward.

Shadow and Bone received largely positive reviews and earned an Emmy nomination. Kirkus’ David Rapp called Season 1 of the show “truly impressive in its scope,” naming it one of

his favorite book-to-screen adaptations of 2021.

Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, which include Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising, follow Alina Starkov (played

by Li in the Netflix series), an orphan who discovers that she has a special gift that allows her to control light.

In a post on Instagram, Bardugo wrote, “The news hit me hard. I’m heartbroken and deeply disappointed, but I’m also trying to hold on to

To read our review of Season 1 of Shadow and Bone, visit Kirkus online.

my very real gratitude. Most authors never get to see their work adapted. Many who do end up regretting the experience.…Now, I’m going to go have a cry, and maybe a drink, and then see where the story takes us next.”—M.S.

Bardugo shared the news with followers on Instagram.

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1

2

4

For more great YA series, visit Kirkus online.

3

5

5 Books From Series We Never Want To End 1 The Ruined

By Renée Ahdieh

A big, bold, highcost end to a lush quartet.

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2 This Cursed Light

By Emily Thiede

A rewarding, passionate, and beautifully characterized duology closer.

3 Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White

By Amélie Wen Zhao

An action-filled tale of love, magic, and demons.

4 Beasts of War

5 The Summer Queen

By Ayana Gray

By Rochelle Hassan

A thrilling end to a lively saga.

A dark, atmospheric, and complex fantasy that leans into all the feels.

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Indie

BY INDIELAND’S LIGHTS,

things have changed quite a bit in the infernal realm since Dante charted the terrain in the 14th century.

Today’s Hell is a much more corporate affair, largely run by harried demonic functionaries struggling to hit their quotas and maintain some kind of bureaucratic order—the eternal lake of fire depicted in these titles resembles nothing so much as a DMV office, with moodier lighting and a slightly less hostile staff. These indie jaunts are characterized by inventiveness, offbeat humor, and memorable characters just doing their best in a tough situation.

As we start a new year and the world teeters on the brink, there’s something comforting about this slightly less hostile Hell— we’re all in this together.

Allen Isom’s 2023 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, begins with the professional humiliation of a demon given the ignominious task of breaching the mortal plane…to retrieve a cat.

It’s hard out here for an imp. The Dark Lord’s lackey snatches the wrong feline, one belonging to 166

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tough-as-nails Delilah Jones, a former Las Vegas cop. She doesn’t take kindly to the theft of her beloved companion, and when she follows the inept kidnapper (catnapper?) back to the underworld, there’s hell to pay. She encounters a friendly demon named Larry, who helps her navigate the cursed realm, with its braying vendors shouting “Come get your souls!” It’s a living, so to speak. Our reviewer notes that Isom “steeps this fast-paced tale in rollicking humor” and highlights his “unforgettable” descriptions of such sights as “six-legged Abominations with multiple heads sporting ‘needle toothed smiles.’” (Andy Cohen smells a franchise.)

Eliza and the Alchemist (2023), by Carlos Lacámara, follows the titular maladjusted college student as she struggles to repair a rift in the universe that allows Hell-spawned demonic incursions into our world.

Among the invading hordes are skeletal zombies, a giant scorpion, and an earthworm-eating homunculus (no, that’s not from Elon Musk’s Tinder bio).

Luckily, Eliza happens to

possess amazing alchemical abilities—you really do learn so much about yourself at college—that may be sufficient to seal the breach and save the world. Our starred review praises the yarn as a “delightfully bizarre and rollicking supernatural comedy with colorful humans and ghastly monsters.”

Yeah, that’s college.

A Divine Invite, a 2023 fantasy novel by Maggie Havoc, features police station clerk Ellie O’Neill, a woman struggling with low self-esteem who receives a surprising vote of confidence from Above when her heroic nature and prudence make her eligible for “the Divine.” Her final test to establish her worthiness

requires her to “refuse the Devil,” which sounds like a euphemism for declining that last shot of Fireball at closing time. Ellie’s path puts her on a collision course with working schlub Johnny Knight, a debtcollector in Old Scratch’s employ who becomes fascinated by the plucky mortal; Ellie, it seems, has no soul.

So why does she heedlessly rush into burning buildings to save lives rather than, say, lobby for big pharma?

Our reviewer warns that “the final act elevates the tension and delivers an ending that makes reading the next installment in the series a virtual necessity.”

Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

GO TO HELL

ARTHUR SMITH

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INDIE

EDITOR’S PICK Lawton chronicles the plight of Kevin Barry Artt, falsely convicted of murdering a prison official for the Irish Republican Army, in this nonfiction work.

Kevin Barry Artt grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, a period during which tensions between the British and those Irish who longed for independence reached their violent heights, a turbulence vividly depicted by the author.

Kevin was raised a Catholic, and was accustomed to the social sanctions that religious affiliation brought—he was beaten up for being Catholic as a child, and his father’s business was bombed (“Afterward, no one was charged in the incident. John rebuilt the garage and went back to work”).

The young man did his best to avoid confrontation,

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

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but that became impossible when he started working as a driver for Ace Taxi in 1976; the Royal Ulster Constabulary assumed all the company’s drivers were IRA-affiliated men and therefore hated them, while Loyalists distrusted them as well. Kevin was harassed incessantly and assassination attempts were made on his life. When Albert Miles, a high-ranking prison official, was murdered by the IRA in 1978, Kevin was arrested for the killing, apparently on the strength of an identification made by an informant. Under extraordinary coercion, he confessed to the crime, and, despite his subsequent retraction of his confession, he was found guilty on 184 criminal counts and sentenced to life in prison.

Miraculously, he was pulled

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By Kenneth Evren

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Blessed Hands

By Frume Halpern; trans. by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

Above the Ground: A True Story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland Lawton, Dan | WildBlue Press | 506 pp. $24.99 | Aug. 5, 2023 | 9781960332264

into an IRA-orchestrated prison break in 1983 and made his way to San Francisco, only to be apprehended and tried yet again.

The author, who served as part of Kevin’s legal team in California, paints a dramatically stunning tableau of his cinematic plight and of the grim tumult in Northern Ireland at the time. The

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The Deseret Reckoning

By Matthew L. Huffman Above the Ground

By Dan Lawton

rigor and expansiveness of Lawton’s research is simply astonishing, and his journalistic prose is exacting and powerful.

This is by turns a terrifying and heartbreaking story, conveyed with impressive skill and moral clarity.

An enthralling work of history told with intelligence and urgency.

Mystery Force

By Ted Neill; illus.

by Suzi Spooner Liar, Alleged

By David Vass

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Futureproof Albrecht, Stephen | Hybrid Global Publishing (394 pp.) | $18.99 paper June 15, 2023 | 9781957013794

In 2050s Denver, a successful lawyer suddenly finds himself out of work as artificial intelligence dictates business and public policy in this novel of the future.

Albrecht’s impressive SF debut takes place in the mid-21st century and features elements of the “cli-fi” subgenre, including rising sea levels and superstorms devastating coastal communities worldwide. This circumstance has been a boon to inland Denver, where rehousing migrants is a profitable business. At the same time, society has widely adopted specialized, analytical AIs called “ex-brains” (with “ex” signifying “external”). In uncertain times, these supercomputers forecast outcomes with unnerving accuracy and are essential for coordinating everything from traffic patterns to police investigations. Joe Watson is a successful Denver lawyer who specializes in managing his firm’s ex-brain to predict litigation results. Expecting to make partner, he’s shocked to be among 400 people laid off due to the ex-brain’s recommendation. Joe’s other job prospects mysteriously evaporate, except for one that would require him to uproot his family and join Nova D, a utopian city-state of shadowy origins under construction in Nepal: “It was 100 percent planned, starting from a blank canvas and designing everything for efficiency and sustainability.”

Joe’s wife, Evie, a Denver health department specialist working with traumatized refugees, opposes the move—but then her own career experiences a downturn. Most genre readers will be a step ahead of the characters in realizing the presence of a massive conspiracy of staggering proportions.

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of pervasive paranoia and suspense creeps into the quotidian, affluent setting, making one think of Ira Levin’s work—particularly his downbeat blockbusters Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972), but also his lesser-known dystopian novel This Perfect Day (1970). Albrecht’s friendly, pop-up-style chapter-end footnotes (labeled “Ex-Brains Q&A”) are a nice touch. An open ending may or may not portend a sequel; perhaps an ex-brain will decide.

A shuddery, slow-burn, speculative thriller.

The Street Between The Pines: A Southern New England Horror Alo, J.J. | Self (386 pp.) | $24.78 $15.99 paper | March 24, 2023 9781088097984 | 9798218165369 paper

A Gulf War veteran struggles to keep his family together—and his sanity intact— when faced with multiple crises in Alo’s horror novel.

Curtis Reynolds is not a happy man. An overworked third-shift laborer who spends weeks, sometimes months, away from his wife and child, Reynolds is summoned home when a hurricane traveling up the East Coast is predicted to travel dangerously near his family’s Connecticut house, which is located on a river. He dreads returning to an estranged wife and a crumbling marriage, a child with special needs, a pile of bills, a flooded basement, and a house that’s in the process of being lost to eminent domain due to a mysterious project funded by the government. Suffering from past war trauma (“The surrounding men, including himself, lay speckled in shrapnel, surrounded by a smoldering blur of twisted metal”) as well as nightmares associated with a woman he killed while driving drunk years earlier, Reynolds is not prepared for what he discovers on his

street, already being battered by the storm: brutally murdered neighbors, destroyed houses, roaming colonies of feral cats, and a nightmarish beast stuck in his basement that simply can’t be real. With his sanity possibly slipping, Reynolds investigates and finds revelations in an abandoned neighborhood across the river.

There’s a lot to like here: Alo’s writing is focused and fluid, creating a fast-paced and action-packed narrative that never flags. His adept ability to intertwine multiple threads of tension—the raging storm, PTSD– induced hallucinations, nightmarish creatures, marital conflict, and secret government installations—keeps the intensity impressively high throughout, weaving a thick tapestry of terror. One quibble: The overuse of description in places sometimes slows the narrative momentum. Still, the jaw-dropping plot twists will keep readers on the edges of their seats.

A page-turning horror exploring (and adding to) New England folklore and myth.

Anti-Hero’s Journey: The Zero With a Thousand Faces Askins, Ben “Doc” | Self (152 pp.) $34.99 paper | May 12, 2023 9798393806040

Askins’ slim volume of musings—part memoir, part work of philosophy—dismantles the idea of the “self” even as it encourages readers to live more fully and fearlessly.

Turning Joseph Campbell’s famous “hero’s journey” arc (departure, initiation, return) on its head, the author invites readers to embark on his “Anti-Hero’s Journey,” in which he sets out to prove that all of humanity is, literally, nothing. The “Zeromyth” is an adults-only take on a fairy-tale idea of “self”: “Children die on this journey. All of them. By definition. There are no survivors, but KIRKUS REVIEWS

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A suspenseful adventure that will engage readers to the final page.

THE LAST REFUGE

you knew that already. Actually, the Zero doesn’t have any faces and about a thousand of them are yours right now. There is no call, no separation, no initiation, no return.” Askins tackles a range of topics, from the mathematical argument over zero’s status as a natural number and the three fundamental laws of logic to therapy using psychedelic drugs and humanity’s greatest fear. It’s this last point that really provides the basis for the viewpoint articulated here: The author argues that everyone’s greatest fear isn’t actually death, but the belief that they are nothing: “I am no one.

Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Zip. Without.

Nought. Naught. Empty. Worthless.

Not a hero. Not a sidekick. Not a villain. Not a victim. Not a bystander.

Not even the background. Not even the ground behind and beneath the background. Nothing.” Askins then sets out to prove that we are, indeed, nothing—but notes that “once you realize you’re nothing, then you can do anything.” This Buddhist-adjacent philosophy informs his sometimes disjointed discussions of his wife and kids, his time in the military, and his overview of life in general.

Anyone familiar with the idea of “no-self” in Buddhism will likely see some parallels between it and Askins’ philosophy, but for the uninitiated the book may prove rather bleak at first read. The author’s actual journey toward “zero” is told with plenty of sarcasm and self-deprecating wit (“I have a Master of Divinity degree. God, what a cocky title. Who comes up with this shit?”). Askins pivots between subjects seemingly at random, bouncing from his role in providing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to imprecatory prayers without hesitation, giving readers KIRKUS REVIEWS

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the off-kilter feeling one might have while engaging in increasingly deranged late-night discussions over drinks. While the author can certainly be entertaining and insightful, there are occasional typos that distract. A short story by Andy Weir is republished in full, which provides the basis for some more discussion from Askins—but it fills precious space in what is already a very brief book. The text includes the questionable comment that “some might say rape is their greatest fear, death being preferable to dishonor.” The inclusion of this out-of-date idiom is unfortunate, as contemporary readers will likely take issue with the idea that being raped somehow causes the victim “dishonor.” Still, Askins gives his readers a lot to think about in a small, sometimes unnerving package.

Readers who enjoy thought exercises and existentialist philosophy will likely find much to ponder here.

A somewhat uneven collection of rambling insights both amusing and thought-provoking.

The Last Refuge Bacilieri, Christina | Crescent Ink Publishing (312 pp.) | $24.99 | $14.99 paper Nov. 14, 2023 | 9798988661818 9798988661801 paper

Bacilieri presents a coming-of-age YA fantasy series starter about the transformative power of love.

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Vandyer’s mother endured years of poverty and despotism to keep her daughter safe, but when the young woman

takes a bold risk to improve her family’s position, she invites dangerous magic into their lives. In exchange for a diamond bracelet that she could use to buy a stable home, Kiera escorts six wealthy classmates to Etabon—a once-uninhabited land into which all the world’s magic was banished 150 years ago. Now, Etabon’s borders are open to those with enough wealth to access the decadent spectacle of an annual festival that includes violent tournaments. Notably, most attendees are magically transformed into animals when they enter Etabon’s gates, and Kiera discovers that her magical form is a rare, extraordinary lynx. So unique is the magic that courses through Keira that her arrival attracts the attention of Eugene Hallowfeld, a corrupt wizard known as the Ascendant One. He uses threats to force her to fight in the tournaments. When her courage and mercy become a rallying cry for revolution, Hallowfeld raises the stakes, employing deceit and dark magic to threaten all Kiera loves. Bacilieri’s novel is fast-paced and wildly imaginative, which results in a consistently compelling read. Kiera is a fresh, modern hero who grows into her new role as a shapeshifter. Coming to terms with her new physical strength, Kiera learns to balance defense with compassion, discovering great power in the process. She also begins to understand the fluidity of her own emotions as well as her emerging romantic love for Attalin, a mermaid trapped by Hallowfeld’s plans. Readers will find themselves swept along to a cliffhanger conclusion as Kiera heads toward a destiny that may save the dying planet.

A suspenseful adventure that will engage readers to the final page.

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The Brothers Dragon: Beyond Land’s End Baker, J.F. | Foxburg & Stern Books (226 pp.) | $9.99 paper | Nov. 1, 2023 9798218258436

In Baker’s middle-grade debut, two young brothers discover their half-dragon heritage and defend their new home from attack.

During the Blitz of 1940, 11-year-old Luke and his bespectacled 7-year-old brother, Nick, are evacuated from London and sent to Land’s End, their uncle’s manor house at the westernmost point of England.

The boys are given one clear rule to follow: They must stay out of the woods near the house. Naturally, they disobey; within the woods they discover a passageway that magically transports them to Draksmore, the magical island where their father grew up. Here they meet Baltis, an uncle they knew nothing about, as well as their Aunt Larsa and 12-year-old cousin, Finn. More startlingly, they learn that they are descended from a line of half-dragons. Once Luke turns 12 (in three days’ time), he can swear the Oath of the Brothers Dragon and unlock his ability to transform—but first he must conquer his greatest fear.

Luke’s greatest fear is that something terrible might happen to his brother— a concern that is manifested when the Draksmorians’ longtime enemies, the piratical Moordocks, kidnap Nick, seeking dragon blood with which to effect their own transformations. Can Luke rescue Nick and, with him, save the island? The author relates Luke’s and Nick’s stories through assured prose and age-appropriate dialogue.

The boys both make for relatable protagonists—Luke is more active and headstrong, prone to getting himself into trouble, while Nick is reticent yet brave when he needs to be (“Luke’s two loves were swimming and games, especially riddles. Nick, who was four years younger, loved reading”). The 170

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adult characters are memorable and varied without being too over-the-top, but the relative lack of female characters feels like a missed opportunity.

The world of Draksmore is instantly appealing with its magical history, dragon transformations, and endless opportunities for adventure. While at times the characters’ motivations can feel contrived, for the most part the story unfolds naturally. Once the threat is revealed, events roll along with an urgency that will have young readers clawing at the pages.

Fast, fun, and fiery—a rousing comingof-age fantasy.

This Thing of Darkness Batchelder, Allan | Macabre Ink (224 pp.) | $11.99 paper | May 3, 2022 9781637898277

In Batchelder’s novel, William Shakespeare fakes his death and settles in Jamestown among hostile neighbors and a night-prowling beast.

Bored with retired, domestic life in Stratford, William Shakespeare decides to fake his own death and set out for the New World under a new name. Accompanying the newly minted William Kemp is his Black illegitimate son, Xander, who was entrusted to William’s care by his dying mother. While at sea, William befriends Margaret, a man living as a woman. The unlikely trio move into a house on the outskirts of Jamestown; they discover the house was left vacant after the previous owners were killed by a mysterious beast. The locals prove to be unfriendly, prejudiced against Margaret and Xander, and unwilling to help hunt down the mysterious creature, even as it claims more victims. Left to his own devices, William finds that he’s willing to go to any lengths to protect his newfound family. Lovers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries will find plenty of Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the story (readers are given about half the

book to piece together clues about Will Kemp’s original identity before the name Shakespeare is thrown out haphazardly in a flashback scene).

What seems like a setup for a rollicking adventure is ultimately revealed to be a melancholy rumination on family, society, outcasts, and the things worth valuing in life. Glimpses of Shakespeare’s trademark wit, along with a satisfying ending, keep the story from getting too grim. Any fictional depiction of Shakespeare faces the challenge of living up to the original’s facility with words. This story succeeds at the task without trying too hard to be clever: “‘I have a magnificent beast.

But you have not, and a searching party can only travel at the speed of its slowest member.’ ‘Marry, sir, I know not which is worse, that you do think me slow, or worse, a ‘member.’’”

A dark but entertaining novel for Shakespeare diehards and casual fans alike.

Reasonable Carlisle, K.T. | Self (505 pp.) | $24.99 Oct. 31, 2023 | 9798864108949

An interior designer becomes embroiled in the murder of her former best friend in Carlisle’s mystery novel.

The story begins with the murder of Elaine Reid by means of a six-inch butcher’s blade. Inebriated and confused, Reid’s former longtime best friend and interior design business partner, Catheryn “Cat” Clark, is found at the scene, covered in blood. Detectives zero in on the rock-solid motive: Elaine’s vicious betrayal of Cat involved an illicit affair with Cat’s husband, Tim. Elaine brought hotel receipts to Catheryn’s house on the night of the murder to arrogantly throw the evidence in Cat’s face. The burning question of Cat’s guilt looms over the remainder of the novel as Elaine’s ghost appears in Cat’s jail cell to tell her she isn’t responsible, despite her KIRKUS REVIEWS

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faulty memory and the circumstances of the killing damning her in the eyes of the law. Flashbacks detail Cat and Elaine’s friendship throughout college at North Carolina’s Green Valley University. Their group included the pushy, manipulative Elaine and her boyfriend, Evan, Cat and her partner, Tim, and Mia Davis, whose life was cut short by a shocking suicide. Questions linger about Mia’s demise even decades later—local police detective Rachel McGowen, who was also Mia’s classmate, reexamines the cold case, unconvinced it was a suicide as the jailed Cat recalls “how our entire group dynamic seemed to shift” after the tragedy. The scenes involving the longtime group of friends demonstrate Carlisle’s grasp of character development, which is key to keeping this mystery simmering.

Complex and satisfying, the narrative features plenty of crisp detective spadework, unanswered questions, interpersonal melodrama, more dead bodies, and enough surprises to keep even seasoned mystery fans on their toes. As this is Carlisle’s first entry in a three-book series, readers will hotly anticipate where the author takes her characters next.

A serpentine, suspenseful mystery that will keep readers guessing right to the final pages.

Found: Adopted Friends Search for Their Birth Families Diggins, Trish & Sherri Craig-Evans Marcinson Press (200 pp.) | $12.99 paper April 21, 2023 | 9781946932174

Two adoptees offer a joint memoir of looking for their birth parents.

Teacher, musician, and photographer Craig-Evans always wanted to know her origins, and her friend Diggins, a designer and writer, wondered about the health history of her biological family. Both were KIRKUS REVIEWS

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curious if they’d ever met their relatives as strangers, without knowing it. In 2015, when they were both in their 40s, they decided to team up to investigate these questions, and they share their adventure in the pages of this book. The pair started with DNA tests and online searching but ended up sometimes relying on friends and volunteer “search angels”—people with experience at finding birth relatives. Because each set of parents didn’t get married, the authors located two distinct biological families for each of them. Once they’d obtained names and contact information, they proceeded slowly, afraid of the reaction they might receive. Craig-Evans found a mother who was eager to connect and a father who did not want his family to know that he had another daughter. Diggins discovered that her father had lived a short, tragic life, and that her mother was reluctant to tell her own family about this fact of her past. After detailing the searches, the authors include four annual updates on their families, as well as the experiences of six other people who set out to find their own biological parents. Overall, these stories make for a dramatic reading experience, and they’ll be informative for other adoptees who may be considering investigating their own origins. Craig-Evans and Diggins engagingly reflect on many adoptionrelated issues, such as what creates a sense of connection, or why people choose to accept or reject a biological bond. The alternating points of view of the two authors render some of the material repetitive, but, on the whole, their book effectively shows the rewards and risks of the process.

An intriguing account of a search for biological kin.

The Girl With Three Birthdays: An Adopted Daughter’s Memoir of Tiaras, Tough Truths, and Tall Tales Eddington, Patti | She Writes Press (240 pp.) | $17.95 paper | May 7, 2024 9781647426507

Eddington, a journalist and dance instructor, offers a memoir of being an adoptee.

In her debut, the author presents a highly readable personal account that’s full of twists and turns. The book initially alternates between Eddington’s childhood in Morrice, Michigan, and the adulthood it shaped, beginning with conflicting accounts of how and why her birth mother put her up for adoption. The author also addresses her own parental choices, including her decision to have a single child.

The book’s second half focuses on her discovery of her birth family with the help of genetic testing and divulges other secrets about her background, which led her to find multiple relatives, living and dead, including full siblings; she also discovered her birth name, Mary Ann Lopez, and a birthdate that was roughly a month earlier than two other birthdays she’d celebrated as a child. This same section notes her discovery of her Mexican heritage, and her speculations on how her background may or may not have affected her white adoptive parents’ feelings toward her. Eddington’s book starts somewhat slowly and gets a bit bogged down in details of her early years, although it quickly picks up

A personal work that effectively addresses issues surrounding adoption in America.

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and becomes a consistently engaging read. In some ways, the memoir is typical of many adoptee stories, as in Eddington’s conclusion that people’s true parents are the ones who raised them. But it’s also a bracingly honest look at the author’s feelings about the birth family she discovered; Eddington highlights the initial uncertainty of her adoption due to her adoptive mother’s health crisis. The adoption narrative is closely interwoven with a more general personal memoir of growing up in Morrice, and it works best as a story of a woman connecting with her origins and discovering who she really is.

A personal work that effectively addresses issues surrounding adoption in America.

Kirkus Star

A Body of Fates Evren, Kenneth | FriesenPress (252 pp.) $37.99| $21.99 paper | Sept. 12, 2023 9781738938018 | 9781738938001 paper

In Evren’s debut speculative novel, a man at the end of his life struggles to reconcile his family history and his own misguided decisions.

Budding astrophysicist David Becker’s life changed when, as a cosmology student at the University of British Columbia, he met and fell in love with political science major Deb Glasscock. After marrying her and raising two sons, Becker, “the offspring of addiction and abuse, the progeny of hypocrisy, the downstream of an ancestral shitstorm,” is troubled by the idea that, somehow, his seemingly perfect life will be destroyed by the flaws and transgressions of his ancestors that lurk in his DNA. After discovering that his wife has multiple sclerosis (and subsequently having an affair with a much younger woman), Becker realizes his concerns may be coming to fruition. His examination of his 172

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An eventful and wellillustrated historical fantasy for young readers.

T H E C AT S ’ M U S E U M

family’s trauma-filled past over four generations is intensified when he meets his own personal Fate, whom he envisions as a crone called Mrs. Bleatwobble, “a wicked old harpy, sitting in the corner, glasses perched on the slope of her nose, calm and patient, knitting the future in soft, colourful prison stripes.” Whether real or hallucination, his Fate attempts to help him understand and come to grips with his own inescapable destiny.

Although the nonlinear storyline takes some lengthy tangents—like the story of Deb’s great-grandfather, Albert, who fought for Canada in WWI—the deep existential introspection and the highly intelligent, probing nature of the writing more than overcome the erratic storyline. Inspired by tragedies in the author’s own life, the text is replete with profound and thought-provoking lines like: “You’re a finite self-aware creature with an infinite mind imprisoned in a doomed body alive in only a tiny raindrop of spacetime.”

A powerful look at love, loss, and what it means to be human.

The Cats’ Museum: This Might Be a True Story Falleti, Viviana | Illus. by Victoria Fomina Little Feather Press | Feb. 2, 2024 9798988469209

A fanciful children’s tale about felines inhabiting the famed Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In 1729, Catherine the Great hears mice in the basement of her beloved Hermitage Museum, which holds a vast art collection. The next day, she

finds three “interesting-looking cats” outside. She lures them into the museum’s basement, where they chase away the rodents. Eventually, the building’s cat population grows to 74, all enjoying “royal food, plenty of fresh water, a good brushing once a week, and…a health check” by a veterinarian each month. Yearly, Catherine would make sure the hardworking cats received a “grand feast,” including caviar, fish, milk, and Camembert cheese.

Afterward, the cats sneak into the gallery (where they’re not allowed to go) for their own personal celebration.

Later, the other cats watch as felines Anastasia and Bertrand perform an “intricate pas de deux” while dressed in finery. Other cats dance the troika and the kazachok, described as “the Russian Squat-and-Kick Dance.” The following morning, the museum’s cleaning lady finds a “tiny costume” and puzzles over its origins. Falleti directly speaks to her young readers with her narration, which makes the story interactive: “But we know the secret, don’t we? Let’s not tell.” An informative final sidebar shares facts about the “Day of the Hermitage Cats” celebration, which began in 2005. Fomina’s full-color, painterly illustrations will delight young readers with their sometimes-anthropomorphic cats that are by turns full of whimsy, cleverness, and elegance.

The images all support the events of Falleti’s text beautifully. Overall, the book is sure to delight youngsters and For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

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inspire them to learn more about the Hermitage cats.

An eventful and well-illustrated historical fantasy for young readers.

AnnaGrey and the Constellation Flanagan, Lindsay | Young Dragons (304 pp.) | $12.38 paper | Aug. 29, 2023 9781633738492

In Flanagan’s YA series starter, a young teen enters a fantastical realm and discovers the mystery behind her own existence.

All 14-yearold AnnaGrey England wants is to get through a school day without being bullied for being different.

It isn’t because of her red hair and “pale-as-dawn” skin—it’s her glowin-the-dark green eyes with black pupils shaped like half-moons. Her mother’s explanation that it’s a genetic condition rings false, and her father, who lives elsewhere, tells AnnaGrey what seem like fairy tales.

(At least her parents’ unusually long canine teeth skipped a generation, she thinks.) In this thoroughly enjoyable, well-crafted, first-person fantasy, AnnaGrey’s journey toward self-discovery and self-acceptance begins after her nemesis, a boy named Cross Silverstone, dubs her “Freakenstein.”

After she retreats into the forbidden Wildwood, she discovers Iris—a gentle, horselike creature with a rainbow mane, golden hooves, impressive antlers, and eyes like stars—and a secret gate to a realm of beings called aeobanachs who can shift between human and animal form. AnnaGrey soon finds herself in the company of a furred, feathered, and antlered rebel faction seeking to unseat the usurper on the realm’s Constellation throne. Can this have anything to do with her own strange eyes, her secretive parents, and the “constellation” of freckles on her arms? Just when it seems obvious where the narrative is going, the author defies KIRKUS REVIEWS

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expectations by taking readers in a different direction. Flanagan enriches the mix with additional colorful characters and a plot that explains the significance of antlers, feathers, and fairy tales and features betrayals, lost loves, and noble sacrifices. (The selfless actions of two characters are genuinely moving, as is a surprising act of faith taken by AnnaGrey’s only school friend.) AnnaGrey’s internal struggle with new truths feels authentic, as does her difficulty in finding confidence when “I can’t even stand up to my own parents or the mean boy at school.” The welcome open ending sends a clear signal that AnnaGrey’s saga will continue.

A tale with deft plot turns, a relatable young protagonist, and well-drawn secondary fantasy characters.

What if We Had a Dinosaur?: An Interactive Children’s Fantasy Story Flaugher, Janet | Illus. by Charles Luna Archway Pub (44 pp.) | $28.99 $14.99 paper | Sept. 28, 2023 9781665749701 | 9781665749695 paper

Two children imagine the fun they’d have with a triceratops pet in Flaugher’s picture book.

From the first page of this picture book, a large, green, red-eyed triceratops dominates Luna’s brightly painted illustrations.

The creature is accompanied by two fair-skinned children, one with short blond hair and the other with short brown hair. They imagine keeping the triceratops in an enclosure under their treehouse, riding it to school, and playing with their pet in the park.

They would take it for walks, polish its horns, and feed it plenty of leafy greens. But imagine if “our mother found out. What would she say?” In addition to the main text, interactive pages offer facts about the triceratops, an opportunity to name a fantastically illustrated invented dinosaur, and dinosaur drawing activities. Flaugher uses a simple sentence fragment

on each page beginning with the word and, each addressing the initial question of what would happen if the children had a dinosaur; most of the vocabulary is simple enough for early-emergent readers, encouraging independent reading. The activity pages have more challenging words, which may make these elements better for an adult helper to introduce.

The activities themselves are perfect for preschool and early-elementary students, especially those who can never get enough dinosaurs.

A simple, friendly dinosaur book for early readers.

Dirt Songs Gunter-Seymour, Kari | Eastover Press (88 pp.) | $19.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781958094358

Ohio Poet Laureate GunterSeymour tells a decades-spanning, lyrical story of Appalachia in which the personal is both political and generational.

Appalachia stretches over 2,000 miles between Mississippi and the southern edge of New York state.

Despite this, the region and its people are often described as forgotten, due in part to widespread poverty and opioid addiction. For the last decade or so, Appalachian artists and writers— including Scott McClanahan in The Sarah Book (2015) and Barbara Kingsolver in Demon Copperhead (2022)—have been chipping away at stereotypes associated with their homeland and placing it firmly into the collective American consciousness. Gunter-Seymour adds to the canon with this collection informed by her upbringing in Appalachian Ohio, which she dedicates to “all the invisible girls.” The poet, whose previous work is similarly site-specific, allows her speaker to witness her own becoming in a place haunted by history and the women who came before her: “I was the silk gown my mother / would never own, JANUARY 1, 2024

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the black dust / of coal-fraught mountains, the face / of my grandmothers” (“Because My Ancestors”). Later, in “Golden Hour,” the speaker watches “palsied hands / make a gesture, as if / letting go a bird.” These folk-song rhythms, loaded enjambments, and hard words frequently give way to soft imagery, such as that of bush beans in a simmering pot (“Reincarnation”). Although the speaker appears subtly transformed by the third and final section, the author’s stylistic consistency can’t help but expose the fixedness that surrounds her in a land that’s “ripe with possibility” but seems destined to repeat itself over and over, while leaving grooves in the dirt.

A noteworthy and insightful poetic portrait.

Karmic Selling: Earning Business by Earning Trust Gwizdak, Stan | Advantage Media Group (176 pp.) | $27.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 9781642258608

Gwizdak, a management consultant, details his approach of listening to and helping potential clients in lieu of giving them the hard sell in this business strategy guide.

“Before the crash, I was sometimes your stereotypical corporate jerk,” writes the author, a former operations leader at GE, Honeywell, and other companies, describing how a 2004 car accident acted as a wake-up call to change his life and form his own management consultancy. In this book, Gwizdak outlines his way of doing business, which is a “non-sales” approach guided by two maxims: “I can succeed by being authentic and kind” and “Success begins with asking the question, ‘How can I help you?’”

He emphasizes doing research on potential clients (he typically does three hours of research prep for a one-hour meeting) and showcases his notes template, in which he records 174

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key information in categories that he terms the three Ps—preparation, professional, and personal—to aid in the critical first meeting, as well as follow-ups. The book includes case studies detailing how the author made “business friend” connections with clients by leaning into his helping-first attitude and by asking and responding to questions. He also discusses the process of getting past the “crossed arms” of resistant clients to eventually book significant business with them. Gwizdak is an engaging writer, admitting to his own issues (“I was pushing forty before I realized that the f— you chip and the asshole approach wasn’t fulfilling for me”) and offering up colorful and powerful anecdotes about how he went the distance for clients, including assisting one client with selling her husband’s Jeep. His inclusion of client and colleague testimonials and thoughtful quotes, from Keanu Reeves reflecting on karma to Maya Angelou to Zig Ziglar, are enjoyable additions to his argument and narrative.

Practical and inspiring tips to forge rewarding “business friend” relationships.

Kirkus Star

Blessed Hands: Stories Halpern, Frume | Trans. by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub | Frayed Edge Press (328 pp.) | $25.00 paper | Oct. 17, 2023 9781642510492

Halpern offers a soulful collection of short stories, translated from the Yiddish.

The narrator of the story “Blessed Hands” uses her hands as a masseuse, bringing healing to those who need it, but also as a means of making money (“God wanted these same hands to draw their livelihood from touching the human body”). Her mother had to sell her breast milk, leaving none for her children. This story showcases the

themes that will propel the stories that follow: healing, spirituality, family, and persevering through poverty.

A butcher does not want his son to take on the family business, fearing he’ll be trapped in an identity framed by poverty and hard labor (“Hello, Butch”). In “The Last Breakfast,” a mother sends her son away to grow, change, and learn to be a man, but he meets a grisly fate. In both stories, a parent believes they must send their child away to have a better future, an idea they ultimately realize was wrong in one way or another. A girl who can’t walk without braces and crutches enjoys winter as a time when she can throw snowballs at other kids and finally play with them (“Snowballs”).

A woman who has been trapped in a tomb of loneliness finds community and warmth at a leftist political meeting in “Comrade Bashe.” These two stories effectively convey the yearning of the characters for human connection. In other slice-of-life narratives, a shoemaker spends his days laboring away for minimal reward to keep his family fed and happy and is told a story by a religious scholar about the power of hard work (“Munye the Shoemaker and Baruch Spinoza”), and young women wait for news of their husbands away at war while they work and exchange letters to keep their spirits up (“Faces”). With these stories of ordinary people, Halpern demonstrates a sincere understanding of her characters. The pieces collected here were translated from Yiddish by Taub, who contributes a well-thought-out and researched afterword illuminating Halpern’s life and literary artistry, giving readers a fuller experience of her work.

A fascinating short story collection offering glimpses into the lives of those usually unobserved.

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A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.

PA S S I N G T H R O U G H V E I L S

Passing Through Veils Harrison, John | Wordfire Press (244 pp.) | $22.99 | $14.99 paper Aug. 15, 2023 | 9781680574258 9781680574234 paper

In Harrison’s latest horror novel, a woman with a history of mental illness is haunted by a crime committed in her new house.

Kathryn Fields has just bought a run-down Victorian town house in Washington, D.C.’s, Georgetown neighborhood in the hopes of fixing it up. Her wealthy mother thinks Kathryn has made a rash decision purchasing the property, which has ties to a 35-year-old murder from 1984.

Kathryn, however, hopes the house will anchor her following a psychotic break she experienced several months ago. “The things it must have seen and heard in its hundred plus years,” she thinks on her first night in her new home, “the intrigues and passions that must have seeped into these walls, embalmed beneath successive coats of paint and varnish, recorded in the scars on the flooring, preserved in the smells of its woodwork.”

The house contains more than just abstractions, she soon learns; it turns out there’s a secret dressing area with a marble-topped vanity hidden behind the wall of her bedroom. Why would someone do such a thing? Perhaps it has something to do with the antique box Kathryn finds there, containing a torn photograph of a beautiful woman—and a loaded handgun. Soon she’s seeing and hearing things that seem related to the unsolved murder of KIRKUS REVIEWS

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someone who once lived in the house.

But are these things real, or evidence that Kathryn’s psychosis has returned?

Harrison is adept at creating a sense of true creepiness, as when Kathryn discovers that someone’s rearranged her possessions and has an unexpected reaction: “All the furniture had been moved. The whole house had been rearranged. And yet as Kathryn stood there stunned and disbelieving, the place looked right. Everything exactly where it should have been in the first place.” Several elements of the story will be familiar to horror fans, since they’re relatively common trappings of the haunted house subgenre. In Harrison’s hands, however, they feel like a fresh homage rather than a rerun.

Many readers will find it a perfect book for a spooky late-night read.

A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.

Exploring Wine Regions— The Central Coast of California Higgins, Michael | International Exploration Society (436 pp.) | $44.95 paper Oct. 3, 2023 | 9780996966047

Higgins takes readers on a tour through the winemaking culture of central California.

The author, a photojournalist, wine connoisseur, and writer (Exploring Wine Regions—Bordeaux France: Discover Wine, Food, Castles, and the French Way of Life, 2020), guides readers through the vineyards of the Central Coast region of California, focusing on the counties of Monterey, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara. The region, which boasts over 600 wineries,

is divided into American Viticultural Areas (AVAs), grape-growing territories with common environmental characteristics. Higgins organizes his exploration of each county by AVA, identifying which grapes flourish in each area. Rather than choosing wines based on the type of grapes used, Higgins advocates for the consideration of terroir—the environmental and human factors that shape a particular wine’s flavor. The concept of terroir is the primary theme of the guide: “The more precise and specific we can be about terroir, and the grapes that are growing in that terroir, the better chance we are going to be drinking more exceptional wines.” Higgins begins each section with a general overview of the county, cataloging its largest cities, notable attractions, and transportation options before narrowing the focus to specific AVAs. Helpful charts list the wineries within each county, indicating the availability of different types of wines, restaurants, lodgings, tours, and other amenities. More in-depth profiles of Higgins’ favorite wineries provide information about each winery’s history, owners, noteworthy innovations, and specialty wines.

Higgins also recommends restaurants and attractions in each area, supplying contact information, price guidelines, and photos of sample dishes. The descriptions are the standard stuff of travel guides (“As you enter the building, the design of the walkways and the entrances sets you in the mood of quality”), with a tendency toward repetition; Higgins’ photographs are the real highlight, vividly capturing vineyards, wines, and accompanying cuisine with rich colors and skillful use of light. Wine enthusiasts are unlikely to find a more informative resource for exploring Central Coast vineyards.

A useful and attractive travel guide for oenophiles.

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Kirkus Star

The Deseret Reckoning Huffman, Matthew L. | Self (298 pp.) $17.95 paper | Nov. 19, 2023 9798988861300

In Huffman’s novel, a young man unwittingly endangers himself and his friends as they retrace a relative’s journey through Utah taken the previous century.

The novel explores two moments in a family’s history, taking place 112 years apart, both concluding in violence. Their convergence point is a young man named Tom Sullivan, who, in the early 1980s, works at a sporting goods store in Golden, Colorado, and hangs out with a salesman and Vietnam veteran named Jack Elmore, drinking in Jack’s garage. Jack has another friend he looks in on, the more opaque and laconic Frank, also a Vietnam vet. The men are paid a visit

by Susan Kingsley, an acquisitions assistant specialist at the Smithsonian Museum, and by her ex-husband, Andrew Harrison, an unfaithful and ill-tempered junior FBI agent jealous that Susan’s career’s star might ascend before his. Susan’s on the trail of some letters that might shed light on how Mormons and Native Americans procured the rifles that were used in a massacre of over 100 emigrant travelers journeying through Mormon country in 1879. Those original letters have just been sent to their rightful heir: Tom. As Tom, Jack, and Frank head off on a fishing trip in which they also seek the homestead of William Mitchell, the writer of the letters, Susan follows in their wake, in search of history.

And Andrew follows her, in search of revenge for the pall their divorce has cast over his job. In the retelling of William Mitchell’s covered wagon journey to Utah, frontier violence is a way of life; in the late 20th century, the violence is personal. The closing third of the novel ramps up the suspense in 176

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A speculative work that’s sure to thrill hard-SF fans.

SYM M ETRY

both timelines, conveyed in gorgeous prose and featuring rich character development. Both stories’ conclusions are emotionally affecting and unexpected. This irresistible novel manages the curious trick of making the reader want to stand up and cheer when a woman rides up on horseback in the middle of nowhere and says, “Afternoon, gentlemen. I’m Susan Kingsley with the Smithsonian Museum.”

A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.

Ethos of Cain James, Seth W. | Self (338 pp.) $22.99 | $14.99 paper | Sept. 1, 2023 9798851178450 | 9798851178290 paper

A hard-edged gun for hire finds love and a new direction in James’ thriller series starter.

Cain—one name only, so you know he means business— is an elite soldier of fortune at the top of his game. The only reprieve from his dangerous profession is his relationship with Francesca Pieralisi, the mayor of Venice, who was once his client; he protected her from mob boss Vincenzo da Avolo and helped bring him down. She’s also the lead advocate for the European Union’s sea wall project, meant to protect its nations from rising water levels caused by climate change. The lovers meet up between his scores, but Francesca, terrified by Cain’s risky job, reaches a breaking point and they split up—for a month. Later, while Cain is away on a complicated assignment, Francesca becomes da Avolo’s target after the

mobster escapes prison. Cain, with help from his wealthy friend, known only as Lester, must hunt down the mastermind, who has a horrific vision for the world. In this first book in his new series, James, the author of Shadow Over Odiome (2014), offers a winning combination in Cain and Francesca. As Cain’s backstory unfolds, it becomes easy to understand how he became the rare hired gun with principles. However, Francesca is revealed to have a strength of will that some readers may find refreshing in a public servant, and she develops into a skilled agent who’s nearly Cain’s equal. Entrepreneur Lester, who has often used Cain’s services, adds an element of snark (“compliments don’t feed the bulldog”) that skillfully cuts the tension at times. Despite the story’s being set in the future, with elements such as Mars colonization, James keeps it timely, referencing the dangers of climate-fueled chaos and white nationalism. He barely scratches the surface of his series’ potential in this initial volume; hopefully, Cain and Francesca still have many actionpacked adventures awaiting them.

A gripping, thought-provoking caper that successfully introduces a different kind of merc.

Symmetry Lamp, Dimm | Self (445 pp.) | Aug. 22, 2023

In this futuristic SF novel, the appearance of a strange object in space could doom humanity.

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the galaxy. While studying the stars, some astronomers discovered a bizarre phenomenon beyond the solar system; at first, they’re unsure if it’s natural or if it’s alien technology. Two months later, Seven Oceans, a spaceship orbiting Mars, gets an update about a new mission: The crew is to travel to what’s now being called the “Big Marble” and study it. They’re joined by scientists who’ve been puzzling over the object for months. Just in case they need to destroy what they find, the Seven Oceans is also fitted with different types of bombs. The closer they get to the Big Marble, and the more information they gain, the less it all makes sense.

As the ship approaches the object, the crew receives an outside voice transmission from one of their own crew members, Auria Sadler, saying Seven Oceans has been destroyed and she’s the sole survivor. The most confusing part? Auria is standing on the bridge of Seven Oceans when the message comes in. It seems the Big Marble is actually “a crack” between two identical universes. As soon as the crew of the Seven Oceans learns about its mirror version’s fate—and communicate with people on it—they discover just how powerful, and deadly, the effects of the Big Marble really are. Lamp presents readers with a futuristic tale that’s heavy on the science and theoretical physics, as when characters ponder the implications of an object that has only one dimension; the book even features occasional diagrams and photos.

But Lamp also tells a story that’s a roller-coaster ride, particularly for two major characters with a unique bond; they risk not only their own lives but those of the rest of humanity as well.

The author’s take on the concept of symmetry between two universes is often captivating.

A speculative work that’s sure to thrill hard-SF fans.

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Project Agosha Lynx, MT | 3MCStudios (312 pp.) $20.99 paper | Oct. 18, 2023 9798988390800

In Lynx’s fantasy novel, an insecure knight finds himself charged with saving the realm and the world beyond.

In the fantasy realm of Ynys Gybi, Maddau was chosen to die: Of all the knights, he was selected to be the Captain of the Knights of the Light’s Virtue and to sacrifice his life to ensure the queen, Abertha, Brehines o Caer y Twr, the last of her line, survives to save the world. When the castle walls are breached by the forces of darkness, Abertha must make a choice. In the aftermath, Maddau is confused and shocked, his life changed forever. He must journey with his fellow Knights of Koteli to bring an ancient relic to the temple on a jagged coastal stretch called the Dragon’s Teeth. Here, Maddau, the Knights, and the sages will protect the relic—and the world.

Along the way, they will battle the Cotheda, the Chevaliers of Darkness.

Maddau is unsure he is up to the task, and he believes that his friend, First Knight Twyll, is the better man for the quest (Twyll is calm, collected, confident, and clever, whereas Maddau questions himself and doubts his abilities). Maddau and his party traverse strange places, meet dark foes, and face dangers that may cost them their lives. But secrets abound, and the worst foe they’ll face may be closer than they would ever suspect.

The author has crafted an excellent fantasy adventure with memorable characters; Maddau and Twyll stand out as perfect foils for one another.

Their friendship is at the heart of the story and grounds the quest in a sense of realism against the backdrop of fantastical elements. Lynx’s prose provides vivid characterizations: “Yet Twyll had easily anticipated concerns far beyond the immediate. Of course

he had. He always did. And in doing so, he reminded Maddau again how ill-equipped he himself was for the job of being captain of the Koteli.” Any fan of epic fantasy will enjoy this book and its bittersweet ending.

A sincere and heartfelt adventure, worthy of myth and legend.

Chasing Ashes McLaughlin, Joanne | Celestial Echo Press (308 pp.) | $16.99 paper | Nov. 1, 2023 9781951967864

In McLaughlin’s novel, an intrepid reporter won’t rest until she uncovers the truth about her best friend’s disappearance.

In 1992, a Pennsylvania university makes headlines when a fire ravages the on-campus halfway house known as The Challenge, apparently killing 12 people—including Andrew Michaels, The Challenge’s charismatic leader. That same night, student reporter Kate McDonald vanished without a trace while looking into The Challenge and its possible connection to a recent murder; 24 years later, Kate’s best friend, Laura Cunningham, is still seeking answers.

Now a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, she’s published Bloodstrains, a book about The Challenge, Kate’s disappearance, and the flawed investigation that followed. After Laura’s book galvanizes a new generation of student journalists to reexamine the case, new details emerge that could finally lead to a breakthrough.

Teaming up with her ex-husband, Nick Fabrizzio, a detective who worked on the original investigation, Laura unravels a decades-old mystery, navigates her own family strife, and confronts old demons and new danger as she continues in her quest to learn what happened to Kate—and maybe even find her. Told through the perspectives of Laura and Nick, McLaughlin’s narrative jumps back and forth between 1992 and 2016, JANUARY 1, 2024

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weaving a thrilling tale of crime and detective work with rapidly increasing stakes. Laura is a sympathetic protagonist whose mission for the truth is not only compelling but also echoes real-life cases of people seeking justice for loved ones and solving cold cases.

Nick is a detective who refreshingly leans into compassion and shows an eagerness to correct his past mistakes.

The missing-person plot provides an intriguing portrayal of investigative journalism that doesn’t shy away from the less exciting aspects of the job, such as the tediousness of going through public records. Despite occasional choppy dialogue and a few moments that will challenge readers’ suspension of disbelief, those who enjoy mysteries with a side of relationship drama will tear through this novel.

An often engaging investigativejournalist mystery.

Prelude to Murder: A Julia Kogan Opera Mystery Miner, Erica | Level Best Books (266 pp.) | $16.95 paper | Sept. 19, 2023 9781685124427

An opera becomes the scene of reallife murder in Miner’s musical mystery sequel.

Young violinist Julia Kogan is thrilled when she’s offered the position of concertmaster at the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Alban Berg’s dramatic opera Lulu. The violin solos are notoriously difficult, but she’s happy to take a break from her regular job at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, where she recently helped solve the murder of her beloved mentor and conductor, Abel Trudeau (in 2022’s Aria for Murder). Accompanied by her boyfriend, New York City police officer Larry Somers, she’s enthralled by the beauty of New Mexico and intrigued by Native American artifacts. However, she finds the opera company to be full 178

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of petty jealousies, and she becomes anxious about a shadowy, elusive figure whom some of her fellow musicians believe is the ghost of the opera’s founder, John O’Hea Crosby. The violent themes of Berg’s opera overlap with real life when the volatile and high-strung Italian diva Emilia Tosti is discovered stabbed to death backstage—and Julia’s friend Marin Crane is found holding the knife. Now the whole company—singers, orchestra members, stagehands, and directors—come under suspicion as Santa Fe police detective Stella Peregrine sorts through their tangled relationships and the complex history of the opera company. Julia and Larry must prove Marin’s innocence and find the real culprit. Miner, who is a former longtime violinist for the Metropolitan Opera, presents an insider’s knowledge of operas and opera companies that enhances this delightful mystery. It features a compelling plot and intriguing characters, and readers are certain to appreciate the book’s beautiful evocation of Santa Fe’s haunted landscape (“the mountains glowing in the distance, the iridescent sunset, and the crescent moon floating among the stars when the sky turned inky black”). They’re also likely to enjoy the author’s clever combination of the opera Lulu with the events of the mystery.

A skillfully written whodunit of operatic proportions.

Seven Tears in the Sea Moore, Adrienne | Aquarian Answers (379 pp.) | $16.95 paper | April 5, 2023 9798988075592

Moore’s fantasy novel offers a multigenerational tale of love and destiny interwoven with selkie folklore.

In 1969 New Jersey, an orphaned 14-year-old boy named Silas discovers he is a selkie, capable of shapeshifting between human

and seal forms; he disappears into the ocean, embracing oblivion and hoping to evade the grief over his mother’s recent death. But the human world keeps calling to Silas, and a few years later, he comes ashore and fathers a girl named Alise. In 1993 North Carolina, Alise is a young, morose camp counselor with an affinity for the sea and a yearning for something she can’t name (“Being by the sea was simply a relief from the faint but persistent sense of wrongness that she felt everywhere else”). When Alise finds a sealskin (secretly left by Silas in a place she can find it), she intuitively knows it to be hers and begins to study selkie lore to understand herself better.

Unbeknownst to Alise, her friend, Elliot, suspects her true nature and uses this knowledge to manipulate her into a romantic relationship.

When she is finally able to break free, Alise finds true love and gives birth to a daughter named Ellie. But Elliot’s obsession does not dim with time, leading to tragic consequences.

Ellie grows up not knowing she is a selkie until she meets a distant relative in Scotland in 2014 who tells her a sobering truth: Ellie has a death sentence hanging above her head. Moore has crafted a sweeping narrative that delves into the lives of three generations of selkies, exploring themes of identity, love, and loss. The characters’ struggles to navigate their different selves—from Silas’ conflict between the human world and his life as a seal to Alise’s trials as she faces a dangerous stalker to Ellie’s race to become whole—culminate in an emotionally charged, beautifully told, and ultimately fulfilling tale.

An engrossing novel that seamlessly weaves together elements of romance and folklore.

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Kirkus Star

Mystery Force: Volume Two Neill, Ted | Illus. by Suzi Spooner | Self (374 pp.) | $19.95 paper | Aug. 26, 2023 9798857615645

Three kids with disabilities investigate crimes and bring villains to justice in Neill’s second omnibus of middle-grade adventures.

Rasheed comes from a home that honors Christian and Muslim traditions, and he gets around in a motorized wheelchair. His best friends are Jonathan, who uses a cane, and Jojo, who lives with anxiety and depression and has a feathered serpent companion named Quetzy, disguised as a scarf. The three friends live in a society where humans and magical creatures coexist. In three previous adventures, aided by magical animal companions Dan (a rhinoceroslike karkadan) and Max (a flying firefox), they’ve built a reputation as skilled mystery solvers. The present volume commences with “The Case of the Peryton Thief,” in which they investigate a costumed superhero who’s stealing medicine and a pharmaceutical company with its own nefarious scheme. In “Framed!,” Rasheed is unjustly arrested for committing bank robberies—including one that occurs while he’s in jail. Jonathan and Jojo must track down the real culprit.

In “Cahoots!,” the team investigates mysterious thefts committed by golems; while doing so, they lock horns again with archvillains Dr. Evilina Dorisova (given to expressions such as “Oh fiddlesticks”) and Golden Pomp, a real estate mogul. Neill offers straightforward stories that will engage young readers. Each adventure offers a fast-moving blend of imperilment, investigation, everyday bravery, and superheroic action. The chapters are bite-sized and easily digestible, and Rasheed, Jonathan, and Jojo KIRKUS REVIEWS

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are relatable protagonists—proactive, intelligent, and fiercely loyal. The adult characters fall into two categories: They’re either good-natured and supportive, or villainous without much nuance (“But give up now?

When my plan is nearly complete?

You children must think I’m a fool”).

Their portrayals might have benefited from more shades of gray, although one character is overtly acknowledged as being a victim of stereotyping. Each story is more or less self-contained, although some characters and plot elements recur from past installments without elucidation. Spooner’s cartoon-style, grayscale illustrations help paper over any confusion, adding pep to the plots and exemplifying the magical and inclusive nature of this fictional world.

Dynamic, upbeat, and seriously enjoyable tales.

“Oh, Maya!”: Maya Meets Her Forever Family Peterson, George A. | Illus. by Tony Midi Xulon Press (40 pp.) | $20.99 $15.99 paper | Nov. 7, 2023 9781662887024 | 9781662885518 paper

A puppy learns that new experiences can be scary but also exciting in Peterson’s picture book.

Maya Grace is a 3-year-old, silvery-brown canine. Sometimes, she narrates, she has strong feelings, such as fear and nervousness, which she doesn’t know how to manage. However, she has a strong family support system (and plenty of treats). Maya was born in a small town in the mountains. One day, her adoptive human dad traveled by car to pick her up. However, his GPS took him to the wrong location, and then he endured a surprise rainstorm, but he finally made it to the farm where Maya lived. When she was taken out of the barn to be adopted, away from other puppies, she became anxious, but she took some helpful deep breaths. At Maya’s new home,

the family’s young son, Georgie, excitedly greeted her. The story is told in consistent, ABCB quatrains, and youngsters will find the bold, red text easy to read; a practical breathing exercise for readers is included at the end. One line notes that Dad “praised God for his Grace,” but there are no other religious elements. Midi’s brightly colored illustrations are relatively realistic in style and fill each page. Maya’s family is depicted with pale skin; the farmer is portrayed with a brown skin tone.

An accessible tale for youngsters about managing anxiety.

Looks Like We’re Running: An Amateur’s Companion to Becoming a Marathoner Riedesel, Dustin | Self (172 pp.) | $28.00 Nov. 14, 2023 | 9781732125513

Riedesel chases readers from the couch to the finish line in just 20 weeks in this fitness primer.

Distance running is one of the simplest activities known to humankind, one that our bodies have evolved to be good at. Early in this book, the author jokes that this volume contains, fully within it, a second book called The Self-Actualized Runner’s Step-by-Step Guidebook for Living, which reads, in its entirety, “Step One: Start running.

Step Two: You’ve already taken it. Step Three: Repeat steps one and two until you understand exactly who you are and why you do what you do.” Even so, for most people, distance running is more aspiration than reality. How can something so simple be so difficult?

According to Riedesel, running really is that easy, but becoming a person who runs regularly can be incredibly hard, as millions of health-minded would-be runners discover each year. It’s a pursuit that requires determination, time management, and a fair amount of psychological work, especially during those first runs, when the practice has not yet become a habit. With this book, the JANUARY 1, 2024

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author coaches his readers through the steps toward becoming a runner—specifically a marathon runner, since Riedesel uses his own experiences training for the Disney Marathon to structure the guide. Beginning 20 weeks out from marathon day, the book dedicates one chapter to each week, assuming that the reader is more or less starting from scratch; topics include building a training plan, selecting the necessary gear, food, sleep, and even what to listen to while running. Riedesel’s voice is both conversational and refreshingly direct, avoiding motivation-speak in favor of everyday language: “Do not let the simple, important thing fade into the under-appreciated background like it’s the air or the sun. This is true for anything you wish to prioritize, and it’s true for running. Here’s the simple and important idea: Get out the door.” The author’s humor and matter-of-fact tone make this the perfect primer for anyone who really wants to run but just needs that little extra push to get going.

A refreshingly frank book about the marathon trainer’s mindset.

Please Write: A Novel in Letters Rousuck, J. Wynn | Bancroft Press (252 pp.) $20.77 | Nov. 7, 2023 | 9781610886031

Charming typewritten letters connect a wise grandmother and two dogs with distinct, endearing personalities in Rousuck’s novel.

Winslow, a “very formal” Boston terrier, first strikes up a written correspondence with his grandma Vivienne after his owners rescue a mixed-breed puppy from beneath a pretzel cart. It’s 1990, and the married pet owners, Pamela and Frank, are going through rough patches: His dependence on alcohol is increasing, and she’s grieving her recently deceased father. The rambunctious puppy, Zippy, is initially resistant to “Puppy Kindergarten” training and is a persistent irritant to Winslow, who 180

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doesn’t hesitate to express his humorous annoyance in letters to Grandma Vivienne. Soon, however, Zippy matures into the family’s nurturer; this growth is cleverly mirrored by Zippy’s evolving letter-writing skills, which move from mashed keys to sporadically capitalized simple sentences, follow-up questions, and reflections.

Midway, the narrative settles into a slower, somewhat monotonous cadence as Winslow’s owners face mounting adversity and the dogs are dispatched to kennels they despise. But it’s in these moments that Grandma Vivienne’s heartfelt letters, filled with gentle optimism and warmth, are revealed as the novel’s emotional core.

She’s going through some difficult times herself but focuses on lifting the dogs’ spirits and affirming their indispensable roles in the family. As she tells Zippy in a particularly moving passage, “There are times in life when sad things happen for no apparent reason. It can be especially helpful to have a dog like you around at these times.” Humorous interludes—such as Zippy’s excited attempt to develop a correspondence with Millie, President George H.W. Bush’s dog, and his disappointment when President Bill Clinton brings a cat to the White House—help to lighten the mood as the novel moves toward an affecting ending.

A witty and poignant exploration of the connections between dogs and their humans.

8 Days: A Dee Rommel Mystery Selbo, Jule | Pandamoon Publishing (312 pp.) | $29.99 | $18.99 paper Nov. 14, 2023 | 9781950627707 9781950627684 paper

In Selbo’s third Dee Rommel mystery, grisly murders reveal a sex-trafficking ring in placid Portland, Maine.

The third installment of Selbo’s Dee

Rommel series finds the 20-something private eye and former Portland police officer, who lost half of her left leg in the line of duty, investigating the murder of Hannah Wall, a driver for local ride-hailing app WheelieMaine. The young woman was found with her throat cut in her car, which crashed and burned.

Dee is drawn into the case when her assistant, Abshir Jama, asks her help for his friend Yuusuf Farax, a high school senior and fellow Somali immigrant, who witnessed the crash and then had his backpack stolen by a possible perp at the scene. The next morning, he found the word “Silence” spray-painted on his house. Dee calls on her cyber-sleuth friend, Jade, for help; she recognizes Hannah as a volunteer at a teen crisis hotline who was a victim of sex-trafficking. Jade connects Dee with the organization’s director, Nancy Camsion; however, when Dee goes to meet her, she finds Nancy’s apartment door bashed in and Nancy dead in the bathroom with a slashed throat. Yuusuf reluctantly reveals that he knew Hannah personally, and that she’d formed a support group for teens who’d participated in parties where they were offered drugs and money to have sex with anonymous strangers. Along the way, Dee compares notes with Portland police detective and longtime flame Robbie Donato, who urges her to steer clear of Hannah’s case.

Over the course of this mystery, Selbo paints an atmospheric portrait of a lived-in Portland that’s quaint on the outside but rotten on the inside. She populates it with decent people and sharp operators, hardworking immigrants, and local lowlifes redolent of “the smell of beer, pot and unwashed armpits.”

Her writing is shrewd, canny, and subtle, and it’s always alive to small gradations of behavior that have serious import: “Part of my job is recognizing lies. There are lots of tells: Slight hesitation. A swallowing of words. False bravado. Not engaging in eye contact. A change in vocal tone. That’s what I’ve just heard.” In Selbo’s evocative, punchy KIRKUS REVIEWS

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prose, Dee comes across as a compelling and complex hero—one who’s painfully aware of her vulnerabilities but accepts them with hardboiled aplomb: “It’s the slash on her throat…that brings up the bile. My diaphragm convulses, I frantically push myself up—fast—and turn to the wall just as the yellow-ish waste projectiles from my throat and hits the tile. Shit. Now I’ve contaminated the scene.” Dee also ably discovers more puzzle pieces and persons of interest as the investigation proceeds, including Tip Flack, a squirrelly hacker and WheelieMaine’s CEO; Steph Byrne, her high school classmate who runs a high-fashion resale shop that employs troubled teens; and Steph’s slick developer boyfriend, Xavier Toomey, who immediately hits on Dee. Along the way, readers will root for her as she heads gamely toward the truth.

A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.

A History of the United States for Newcomers: Expand Your Knowledge, Boost Your Confidence, and Thrive in the USA Serocold, Charles | Self (542 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sept. 20, 2023 9798891092044

A debut author offers foreignborn residents an introduction to United States history in this nonfiction work.

With more than 50 million foreign-born residents, the United States remains a

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central destination for immigrants from around the globe. Among them are the author, a British lawyer who moved to the United States in 2009 and now lives in New York City. Speaking from his own experience, as well as conversations with fellow immigrants, the author notes that beyond the “culture shock” of living in a new country, many foreign-born residents are puzzled by the convoluted nature of American electoral politics, income taxes, housing patterns, and policies on reproductive rights and guns.

“The roots of those problems,” the book notes, “can be traced back to the history of the United States.”

Written explicitly for those born outside the country, Serocold offers readers a survey of the country’s past that he hopes will make them more confident by contextualizing current society. The book moves quickly but effectively, chronologically moving from Indigenous and colonial history through major sociopolitical events that shaped the area from the 1700s to the 2000s. At just over 500 pages, the book is significantly shorter than most textbooks that cover the same half-millennium and is written in an accessible style. Although the book is relatively concise, given the topic’s enormity, it does an admirable job of balancing America’s rhetorical commitment to democratic principles with its failures to live up to its ideals. Serocold, who’s written other resources for foreign-born residents, presents an engaging reference book that’s informed by a solid understanding of contemporary historiography and boasts a bibliography of more than 40 pages. Its robust appendices include important primary source documents, demographic information about American cities and states, an overview of federal holidays, and other “information about the practical and logistical aspects of living here.” Its emphasis on engagement is enhanced by its robust inclusion of maps, color photos, and other images.

An impressive survey of American history and a useful guidebook for newcomers.

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Privacy Pandemic: How Cybercriminals Determine Targets, Attack Identities, and Violate Privacy—And How Consumers, Companies, and Policymakers Can Fight Back Smith, Christopher A. | Amplify Publishing (304 pp.) | $30.00 | Nov. 7, 2023 9781645433934

Tech entrepreneur and author Smith considers the growing threat of cybercrime and offers ways to respond to it, personally and politically.

In 2018, the author was targeted by what he calls a “relentless band of identity thieves” who wreaked years of havoc on his financial life. Fortunately, as a tech-firm professional, he had the knowledge and resources to fight back against them, but it still took five years of effort, and exacted an emotional toll. As online connectivity becomes a principal feature of modern life, the author says, people are increasingly vulnerable to identify theft, and the problem is only worsened by the negligence of the “profit-obsessed corporations” that have become the “custodians of our private lives.”

Identity theft scams are on the rise; in 2020, Smith notes, they collectively led to $56 billion in losses for consumers.

He astutely recommends a diverse anti-cybercrime approach that includes legislation that protects consumer data more robustly, the elimination of Social Security numbers, and wider adoption of secure blockchain technology. However, the crux of the problem, he says, is a general lack of personal vigilance: “Cybercriminals, specifically hackers, play on our very human weakness, carelessness, or trust to take advantage of us. Because they know they’re running a scam and we don’t, that information asymmetry gives them the advantage.” This book is remarkably thorough, and Smith JANUARY 1, 2024

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devotes most of it to equipping readers with methods to protect their data and respond to breaches that will almost inevitably occur, no matter how vigilant they are. He covers a wide range of ways to avoid the “self-sabotage” upon which criminals rely, and he conveys it all in clear language that will be accessible even to those who aren’t tech-savvy. Sometimes he resorts to the sort of incendiary language that one associates with infomercials (“You can’t fight a war if you don’t know your enemy, and make no mistake, we’re all at war”), and the book does indeed conclude with the author advocating his own data-protection firm, DFend. Nonetheless, this is an impressively helpful guide.

A comprehensive resource for those looking to protect themselves from identity theft.

The Canvas Stone, Lane | Level Best Books (250 pp.) | $16.95 paper Nov. 21, 2023 | 9781685125400

The second volume in Stone’s Big Picture thriller trilogy finds murder and skullduggery in the high-priced world of fine art.

Emma Kelly, who runs an art recovery agency and is an adjunct professor of art history (with a special interest in the artistic portrayal of biblical women), is at the National Museum for Women in the Arts to meet the world-famous artist Julia Belvedere Jones. With Emma is her husband, Elliot Baldwin, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York field office. The museum has acquired a new work by Julia, but the artist says she did not paint it. The subjects in the painting are David, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite. Emma and Elliot are stunned when they see their own visages staring back at them from the canvas.

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husband, Jason, who was murdered three years earlier while on assignment for his FBI superior, Elliot.

Emma is secretly living a double life that takes her back and forth to her “other” home in England—as the story unspools, Emma, who becomes the target of a deranged killer, is set on a path that brings her two worlds dangerously close to a head-on collision. The personal drama is only one part of Stone’s complex mystery—the novel also pulls back the curtain to reveal the grimy backstage machinations and duplicities behind the gloss of the fashionable galleries and auction houses that unwittingly, and sometimes knowingly, serve as money launderers for an assortment of bad actors. Stone also offers a detailed primer on the investigative and testing processes used to authenticate antique works of art (“Private firms use AI to compare artwork to works by the same artist…It’ll take a few weeks to get the heat map that highlights the areas of primary concern for human connoisseurs to investigate further”). Although the lengthy discussions of art history (and liberal indulgences in art-world name dropping) occasionally slow the action, there is sufficient tension and mayhem to keep the pages turning.

Fun and illuminating, with a few threads left dangling for the next installment.

Scions of Icarus: A Work of Inspired Fiction Stranger, Walker Lane | Old Curmudgeon Media (402 pp.) | Nov. 30, 2023

Estranged sons of a long-dead professional daredevil clash in Stranger’s farcical novel.

Neurotic 30-something Marcus Speed exists in perpetual fear of entropy. He’s also a germaphobe who abhors others’ constant “fumbling” of the English language. Unsurprisingly, he has no

friends—save his mother, Minerva, with whom he still lives in Nashville.

Marcus is in for a shock when he meets his half brother, Ace Junior, an Alabama native with “bushy Elvis sideburns” who uses the word them as an adjective (“you said your mother moved over with them Arabs”). Their father, Ace Speed, a traveling-circus daredevil, died performing a stunt, driving a car strapped with a jet-assisted take-off unit. Junior and his brash mother, Bernice Crabtree, bring chaos when they stay with Minerva and Marcus, but when Ace’s band of sideshow-performer friends shows up, it may be too much for Marcus to handle. Many in this motley cast have their own troubles; there’s bad blood between Junior and his ex, who kicked him, their daughter, and his mother out of her trailer. Stranger’s story was inspired by an urban legend in which a rocket-powered Chevy Impala supposedly disintegrated its driver. It’s the colorful characters, however, who drive this novel; Marcus’ mother comes with a fascinating backstory (and a trust fund), and scenes with Marcus’ psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Clinger, introduce patients just as eccentric as the protagonist.

The author shines a bright light on the notion of “freaks” (who, in this case, seem to be the so-called normal people), who lead the most entertainingly tumultuous lives. While the novel’s abundant dialogue teems with amusing banter, the story also hits a few lulls, as in a prolonged discussion of sideshow performers that only has a minor connection to the plot. Still, engaging mysteries abound, especially surrounding the late Ace Speed’s extended family.

A measured but gleefully absurd tale with a simply wonderful cast of assorted characters.

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Two Weeks of Summer Tirado-Ryen, Katherine | Self (224 pp.) $19.99 | $13.99 paper | July 10, 2023 9798851754739 | 9781500155704 paper

A woman babysits her niece and learns some important lessons in TiradoRyen’s novel.

It’s 2005 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and 26-year-old Kim Kincaid has been tasked with babysitting her 6-year-old niece, Summer, while Kim’s older sister, Dena Nordstrom, is on vacation with her husband at a ski resort for two weeks.

Kim is ill-equipped to take care of a child—pretty much the only sustenance in her house at the moment is leftover Chinese takeout and vodka—but she resents the fact that her sister thinks she’d be bad at it. The novel jumps around a bit, presenting flashbacks of Kim’s relationships with her family members, but most of the story follows Kim as she adjusts to taking care of a young child. She struggles at first, but she and Summer do eventually bond, and Kim learns that she can be a responsible adult when she tries. Readers also meet her best friend, Jillian Martin, who has a big personality; she’s having an affair with her married boss. Kim’s also starting to have doubts about Jared McKenzie, her boyfriend of two years, who comes off as a jerk; he’s so awful, in fact, that readers may find it hard to muster much sympathy as Kim decides whether to break up with him. This is a layered story, with complicated relationships between Kim and her late mother, between Kim and Dena, and between Kim and her friends and boyfriend; the siblings’ parents consider Dena to be the family’s golden child, and Kim struggles to get out of her shadow, which increases her insecurity in other areas of her life. Some flashbacks feel a bit unnecessary, revealing little that readers can’t gather from the main storyline; for example, in 2005, Kim has an encounter with a woman KIRKUS REVIEWS

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who bullied her in high school, and readers can easily infer how mean that woman is, but the author includes a flashback of her bullying Kim in the past, anyway. Overall, though, this is a pleasing story of a young woman deciding what she wants.

A slightly uneven but often sweet coming-of-age tale.

The Academy of Smoke and Mirrors: A Boarding School on the Brink Troy, Alexander & Jim Parry | Lion of Judah Press (356 pp.) | $16.99 paper Oct. 17, 2023 | 9798988235804

The headmaster of a heavily indebted Jewish boarding school tries to save it from financial collapse in Troy and Parry’s novel.

Jeff Taylor puts out fires (both academic and financial) as headmaster of the Hampton Acres Hebrew Academy, or HAHA for short. He has written his resignation letter but hasn’t yet given it to Samantha Kleinman, the founder’s daughter and CEO. The school was built with unnecessary luxury, and it costs over $1 million a month to stay afloat; Taylor needs $50 million to pay debts and $20 million to keep the school open for two more years. The challenges are vast: HAHA is located in rural Georgia next to a hog farm, and the school is receiving bomb threats worded as song lyrics.

The calls are hoaxes, and the students have dubbed the perpetrator “the hiphop bomber.” But parents are worried, and Samantha (called Sammy) travels the world looking for potential students (“I’m doing it with smoke and mirrors,” she tells Jeff). With Sammy off in Kazakhstan, the school receives another bomb threat, but Jeff gets good news: Air Force One is being kept at an airport nearby, which means HAHA and the hog farm are under Secret Service protection. The school doesn’t have enough cash to make it to the end of the year, though,

and Jeff needs some way to raise $3 million to last until graduation day.

Troy and Parry’s lighthearted comic take on a boarding school gone wrong features zany characters with ridiculous human foibles, making the novel an enjoyable read. Inside the closed world of the school, which is global in scope but concerned only with itself, the authors deftly detail what the kids find hilarious and how the adults drive each other insane. Jeff has many variables to manage, and the way he moves from crisis to crisis is entertaining. Some of the supporting characters are underdeveloped, including Jeff’s girlfriend, Barbara, but the novel largely succeeds in balancing its large cast of characters.

A fun and lighthearted novel about a luxurious boarding school heading for disaster.

Kirkus Star

Liar, Alleged: A Tell-All: Celebrities, Sex and All the Rest Vass, David | American Real (279 pp.) $16.99 | $11.99 paper | Sept. 16, 2023 9798989074518 | 9798989074501 paper

A gay man looks back on innumerable sexual romps and a career as the sound and lighting director for A-list musical acts in this raucous memoir.

Vass begins with his boyhood growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s and ’60s in a family where his gay sexuality barely registered amid many other colorful dysfunctions. (To get him over his teenage romantic awkwardness, his older sister bullied her husband into teaching him to French kiss.) But the squalor of his environment proved edifying when, in high school, the author got jobs as a sound and lighting technician at Mafia-run strip joints, where he learned how to make the women’s stripteases look and sound good. Upon graduation in 1968, he moved to New York JANUARY 1, 2024

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City, where he basked in the blithe promiscuity of the pre-AIDS gay scene.

(He claims to have had two to three thousand sex partners.) After several detours, including a stint in prison for draft evasion that was “filled with great sex and life lessons,” he began a career as a lighting and music director for singers at Manhattan nightclubs and on tour. Much of the book features vignettes about the stars he worked with. These include a number of torch singers such as Anita O’Day, who was like a mother to him; a nasty, drunken Frank Sinatra, whom he told to “kiss my gay ass!”; and an imperious Bette Davis. (“She looked at me and said, ‘Shut up,’ with that voice only she had.”) The story concludes in the ’80s, when the author lost many friends to the AIDS epidemic and settled down with his future husband.

Vass’ reminiscences are in part an exuberant sexual picaresque conveyed in cheerfully lewd prose. (“‘I’m a bottom, is that OK with you?’ he asked. I almost laughed—he had the butt of my dreams so I replied, ‘Perfect, I’m a top and I can’t wait to plow you until you’re sore!’”) It’s also an absorbing account of the art of lighting and sound mixing in stage acts, with many vivid details and acerbic commentary: Peggy Lee’s “face was very shiny; that kind of makeup reflects facial lighting, which makes a performer’s face look like a death mask…She wore a gauzy white muumuu with an empire waist, which she must have thought would hide her weight issues, but I knew that she would look like a billboard in search of an ad once onstage.” Vass’ writing is full of brilliantly revealing, nuanced profiles of celebrities, informed by his years of raptly studying their flaws so as to soften them with artifice. (He told Ella Fitzgerald “the second night that she looked very handsome onstage. I didn’t use the word pretty because I knew she was not that, and she was a very smart cookie….She would look to the floor when I said things like that—it was sweet, but it came from insecurity, not from being demure. Ella told me that when she was getting 184

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started, a famous big-band leader said to her manager, ‘You’re not puttin’ that on my bandstand.’ That was at the beginning of her career and she still remembered it.”) The result is a perceptive examination of the truth lying beneath the entertainment industry’s surface fakery.

An engrossing show-biz account, deftly mixing sexual energy with poignant character sketches.

The Corpse Bloom Wiggins, Bryan | Self (339 pp.)

Dec. 16, 2023

In Wiggins’ novel, a renowned doctor in legal and professional trouble takes a job that calls his notions of bioethics and inheritance into question.

Dr. Bradley Baker is a highly successful Boston surgeon specializing in kidney transplants. His team has developed a game-changing medical advancement—a drug they’re confident will extend the usefulness of a cadaverous kidney for transplant so that it’s equivalent to one from a living donor.

Life has consisted of one success after another for Dr. Baker, and when Sam Kirby, a friend from his past, comes back into his life in need of a gifted kidney surgeon, Brad is all too happy to perform the operation. These procedures are a breeze for Brad—and for the reader, too, as the operating-room scenes are tense and authentic, and informative without being dry: “Time, space, and even Brad’s sense of self disappeared when he was in sync with his work and team….” After Sam’s new kidney begins to “pink up,” Brad leaves the less-demanding post-op work to his junior colleagues. While he’s away from the hospital, Sam suddenly dies from a heart attack.

Brad is despondent and his confidence is shaken. Then Sam’s wife, Faye Kirby, sues the hospital, and Brad’s career is thrown into jeopardy. When his boss insists Brad take some time

off, the prospect of a year without any salary—while his daughter starts at an expensive university and his wife expects a healthy donation to her charitable work—makes him reconsider a mysterious job offer he’s just received during a conference in Mexico.

He’s been specially recruited to lead a team of surgeons working at a state-of-the-art transplant center deep in the heart of the Mexican jungle. It’s a mysterious proposition: The center’s inner workings are secretive, run by a well-dressed man with astoundingly deep pockets, and the accommodations—as well as the compensation—seem too good to be true. As the screws tighten on his professional life back home, Brad capitulates and takes the offer. The new job is exciting at first—readers get to luxuriate, along with the doctor, in his sleek new surroundings, and his custom greenhouse filled with exotic, rare flora—but it soon becomes clear just who Dr. Baker has mixed himself up with, and why the center’s workings have been kept hidden.

From there, the narrative becomes even more compelling, and readers will enjoy finding out who does what to whom. Even before this point, though, the work has much to offer. Dr. Baker is a complicated figure, and the delicacy with which he navigates choppy waters both at his old hospital in Boston and his new posting in Mexico helps elevate the novel from run-of-the-mill thriller to something more thoughtful and, in the end, more satisfying. Some characters are types whom readers may recognize—the wealthy, golden-hearted mystery man whose wealth, it turns out, comes from shady dealings, or the no-nonsense cool-under-pressure nurse—but they are drawn so deftly as to feel real.

A taut, nuanced medical thriller.

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