February 1, 2024: Volume XCII, No. 3

FEBRUARY 1, 2024 | VOL. XCII NO. 3

FEATURING 334 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children’s, and YA Books

CASEY MCQUISTON IS PASSIONATE ABOUT ROMANCE Plus 12 more romance writers who are making space in the genre

020124 COVER FEB 1- Issue_print.indd 1

1/8/24 5:32 PM

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

IS ANY GENRE more slandered with wrongheaded stereotypes than romance?

Let’s put to rest all those bare-chested, long-maned he-men (news flash: Fabio hasn’t been on a book cover in two decades) and retire, once and for all, the cringey term “bodice ripper” (unless you’re a fabulous Los Angeles/Brooklyn bookstore and you use it with a wink).

I could go on, but if such old saws inform your understanding of romance fiction, then I invite you to explore this issue closely. Prepare to have your misconceptions dispelled and your literary world expanded.

Yes, this issue celebrates all things romance, a genre that is now indisputably on the rise. According to figures from NPD BookScan, 2022 saw a 52.4%

increase in sales of romance books, dwarfing all other genres. But beyond the sales figures, we’re also seeing an explosion of new stories, new characters, and new settings; the only thing that remains immutable is the happily-ever-after (or at least the happy-for-now) ending. If you aren’t crying tears of joy at the end, you haven’t been reading a romance novel.

No one represents the dramatic expansion of the genre better than author Casey McQuiston, whose portrait on our cover was drawn by artist Virginie Garnier. McQuiston burst onto the scene in 2019 with Red, White & Royal Blue, a lively enemies-to-lovers tale featuring the bisexual son of a U.S. president and a gay British prince who spar

Frequently Asked Questions: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/faq Fully Booked Podcast: www.kirkusreviews.com/podcast/ Advertising Opportunities: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-marketing Submission Guidelines: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/publisher-submission-guidelines Subscriptions: www.kirkusreviews.com/magazine/subscription Newsletters: www.kirkusreviews.com For customer service or subscription questions, please call 1-800-316-9361

their way into a steamy love affair; our starred review called it a “clever, romantic, sexy love story.” (A widely viewed film adaptation of the novel dropped on Prime Video last August.) This bestselling queer nonbinary author put out another adult novel and a YA romance, too; later this year will bring their hotly anticipated new book, The Pairing.

They speak with editor at large Megan Labrise (see page 10) about their work and their totally endearing love of romance: “Romance is a refuge for people like me,” they told us.

For a more panoramic view of the romantic landscape, we turned to writer Jennifer Prokop, co-host of the essential Fated Mates podcast and a regular Kirkus reviewer. We asked Prokop to identify the most exciting trends in romance, and she came back with the special feature “13 Romance Authors Who Are Making Space in the Genre” (page 18), celebrating writers such as Emily Henry, Camryn

Garrett, Jeannie Chin, Ruby Dixon, and Kosoko Jackson—writers who are finding new ways to tell love stories without sacrificing what readers have long sought in romance fiction: powerful emotions.

Elsewhere in the issue, we revisit a very special episode of our Fully Booked podcast (page 27), which found guest host Sarah MacLean (bestselling author of the Bareknuckle Bastards and Hell’s Belles series) in conversation with rising romance star Adriana Herrera, whose novels A Caribbean Heiress in Paris and An Island Princess Starts a Scandal bring her Latine heroines to the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and let the sparks fly.

And on page 142, young readers’ editor Laura Simeon surveys the field of young adult romance, finding six new novels that showcase the diversity of offerings for teens. Love is in the air, and we’re giddy with it.

TOM BEER

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

A GOLDEN AGE OF ROMANCE

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_FOB_RD3.indd 2

1/8/24 5:49 PM

Contents CHILDREN ’ S

FICT ION 4

Editor’s Note

5

Reviews & News

10

On the Cover: Casey McQuiston

18

27

39

Special Feature: 13 Romance Authors Making Space in the Genre On the Podcast: Sarah MacLean & Adriana Herrera Booklist: Enticing Romances for Valentine’s Day

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

OUR FRESH PICK A truth universally acknowledged comes to a Chinese restaurant in California.

Read the review on p. 5.

PURCHASE BOOKS ONLINE AT KIRKUS .COM

98

Editor’s Note

99

Reviews & News

108

Q&A: Hena Khan

119

Booklist: Picture Books for Valentine’s Day YOUNG ADULT

142

Editor’s Note

143

Reviews & News

148

Q&A: Walela Nehanda

161

Booklist: Reads To Banish the Winter Doldrums

NONFICT ION 54

Editor’s Note

55

Reviews & News

60

Q&A: Bianca Bosker

73

On the Podcast: Ilyon Woo

85

Booklist: Books for Movie Buffs

INDIE 162

Editor’s Note

163

Reviews

ON THE COVER: Casey McQuiston; illustration by Virginie Garnier, based on a photo by Sylvie Rosokoff.

Background illustration by VectaRay on iStock.

Interested in reprints, permissions, licensing, or a framed review? Please contact The YGS Group at 800.290.5460 or email Kirkus@theygsgroup.com.

KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948-7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 2600 Via Fortuna, Suite 130, Austin, TX 78746.

Subscription prices are: Print and digital subscription (U.S.) 3-month ($49), 12-month ($179) | International subscriptions are $79 quarterly and $229 annually.

All other rates on request. Periodicals Postage Paid at Austin, TX 78710 and at additional mailing offices.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_FOB_RD3.indd 1

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

1

1/8/24 5:45 PM

020124_KR_FOB_RD3.indd 2

1/8/24 6:10 PM

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 Kirkus Editorial Production Editor ASHLEY LITTLE alittle@kirkus.com Copy Editors ELIZABETH J. ASBORNO BILL SIEVER Magazine Compositor DOLLY MEIERAN

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

Indie Editorial Assistant DAN NOLAN dnolan@kirkus.com Indie Editorial Assistant SASHA CARNEY scarney@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Writers GREGORY MCNAMEE MICHAEL SCHAUB

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_FOB_RD3.indd 3

Contributors

Alana Abbott, Nada Abdelrahim, Colleen Abel, Reina Luz Alegre, Jeffrey Alford, Autumn Allen, Stephanie Anderson, Kent Armstrong, Mark Athitakis, Colette Bancroft, Sally Battle, Robert Beauregard, Heather Berg, Elizabeth Bird, Sarah Blackman, Amy Boaz, Jessie Bond, Elissa Bongiorno, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Jessica Hoptay Brown, Cliff Burke, Jeffrey Burke, Catherine Cardno, Tobias Carroll, Charles Cassady, Ann Childs, Alec B. Chunn, Amanda Chuong, Tamar Cimenian, K.W. Colyard, Rachael Conrad, Emma Corngold, Jeannie Coutant, Perry Crowe, Michael Deagler, Dave DeChristopher, Elise DeGuiseppi, Amanda Diehl, Steve Donoghue, Anna Drake, Jacob Edwards, Gina Elbert, Lisa Elliott, Lily Emerick, Chelsea Ennen, Gillian Esquivia-Cohen, Katie Flanagan, Cynthia Fox, Mia Franz, Jenna Friebel, Robbin Friedman, Roberto Friedman, Nivair H. Gabriel, Omar Gallaga, Laurel Gardner, Jean Gazis, Carol Goldman, Amy Goldschlager, Danielle Galván Gomez, Melinda Greenblatt, Michael Griffith, Ana Grilo, Vicky Gudelot, Tobi Haberstroh, Geoff Hamilton, Silvia Lin Hanick, Peter Heck, Natalia Holtzman, Abigail Hsu, Julie Hubble, Kathleen T. Isaacs, Darlene Ivy, Jessica Jernigan, Danielle Jones, Betsy Judkins, Mikayla Kaber, Jayashree Kamblé, Deborah Kaplan, Tracy Kelly, Ivan Kenneally, Colleen King, Stephanie Klose, Lyneea Kmail, Maggie Knapp, Andrea Kreidler, Christopher Lassen, Tom Lavoie, Judith Leitch, Maureen Liebenson, Coeur de Lion, Melissa Locker, Barbara London, Patricia Lothrop, Wendy Lukehart, Kyle Lukoff, Leanne Ly, Michael Magras, Joan Malewitz, Mandy Malone, Collin Marchiando, Michelle H Martin, Matthew May, J. Alejandro Mazariegos, Dale McGarrigle, J. Elizabeth Mills, Clayton Moore, Karen Montgomery Moore, Lisa Moore, Rebecca Moore, Andrea Moran, Sarah Morgan, Molly Muldoon, Jennifer Nabers, Christopher Navratil, Liza Nelson, Mike Newirth, Therese Purcell Nielsen, Sarah Norris, Katrina Nye, Connie Ogle, Mike Oppenheim, Emilia Packard, Derek Parker, Sarah Parker-Lee, Marguerite Penick-Parks, John Edward Peters, Jim Piechota, Vicki Pietrus, William E. Pike, Judy Quinn, Kristy Raffensberger, Kristen Rasmussen, Stephanie Reents, Nancy Thalia Reynolds, Amy Robinson, Lizzie Rogers, Gia Ruiz, Lloyd Sachs, Bob Sanchez, Caitlin Savage, Meredith Schorr, Maia Siegel, Linda Simon, Jennifer Smith, Wendy Smith, Margot E. Spangenberg, Allie Stevens, Mathangi Subramanian, Desiree Thomas, Renee Ting, Amanda Toth, Katie Vermilyea, Christina Vortia, Francesca Vultaggio, Elliott Walcroft, Natalie Wexler, Sam Wilcox, Angela Wiley, Amelia Williams, Vanessa Willoughby, Marion Winik, Jenny Zbrizher

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

3

1/8/24 5:45 PM

A VISIT TO ROMANCELANDIA JUST WHEN IT feels like winter will never end, Valentine’s Day arrives—and the surest way to inject romance into your life is to take a trip to Romancelandia, that magical place where endings are happy and dukes are a dime a dozen. I’ve spent the recent dark days traveling Lorraine Heath’s London, which stretches from the privileged ballrooms of Mayfair to the pubs and brothels of the East End. Across several series, Heath follows the members of the

4

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 4

Trewlove family, men and women brought up by a “baby farmer” who took in illegitimate children of the nobility and loved them like her own. Their lives intersect with a widowed duchess who needs to produce an heir, a duke who’s been left at the altar, and the children of a traitorous duke who plotted to assassinate Queen Victoria, among others. One of Heath’s hallmarks is how much her characters enjoy spending time with their families—allowing the reader

to catch up with beloved couples over the course of many books.

Last year, Heath published two entries in the Chessmen series, about a group of upper-class men whose lives intersect with the Trewloves. First came The Counterfeit Scoundrel (Avon), in which David Blackwood— known as Bishop—helps women get out of unhappy marriages by pretending to have affairs with them, since adultery is the only grounds for divorce. Marguerite “Daisy” Townsend is a private investigator working for one of those husbands, posing as a maid in Bishop’s house. Sparks fly.

Then came The Notorious Lord Knightly (Avon), in which an anonymous book called My Secret Desires, A Memoir sets tongues wagging throughout the ton. Many suspect the book’s seductive Lord K is based on Bishop’s friend the Earl of Knightly, so Knight embarks on a fake relationship with Regina Leyland, the woman he left at the altar five years earlier but still loves, so no one will think she wrote the book, even though she did. Trust me, it makes sense. Our starred review says that “among Heath’s impressive oeuvre, this one is a standout.”

The last book in the series, In Want of a Viscount (Avon, Feb. 20), introduces Viscount Wyeth, known by his friends as Rook—and by Heath fans as the legitimate son of Aiden Trewlove’s birth parents. This is a classic wallflower romance in which Rook falls for American Leonora Garrison, who’s come to London to find investors for her late father’s business—and who’s never been kissed. Our review (on page 51) calls it “a delightful fantasy for awkward, intrepid women.”

When you’re finished exploring Heath’s world, there are plenty of other great romances out this month. Two suggestions: Tia Williams’ A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (Grand Central, Feb. 6) is a time-warping story that finds a contemporary woman falling in love with a musician from the Harlem Renaissance.

And in Amy Lea’s The Catch (Berkley, Feb. 13), a fashion influencer gets stranded in a Nova Scotia village where the attractions include, of course, a hot fisherman. A fake engagement ensues, and Lea’s “expert knack for comedy makes this story a standout,” according to our starred review.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

LAURIE MUCHNICK

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 7:06 PM

FICTION

EDITOR’S PICK doing damage control online. Since she has to take a break from working at the restaurant, she’s roped into becoming her younger sister’s official chaperone for regional swim meets, a massive time commitment that unexpectedly brings her back into contact with Preston, who’s a volunteer for USA Swimming. She’d like to hate Preston, that “arrogant, brilliant swim star,” but the more their lives intersect, the more she realizes she might have misjudged him, though he’s difficult to read (and readers never enter his perspective, either). Stunned when he confesses his attraction and asks her out, she turns him down; by the time she realizes she’s made a mistake, she fears it’s too late to say

A truth universally acknowledged comes to a Chinese restaurant in California.

Lissie Cheng is doing her best, but she’s balancing a lot for a college student. She and her sisters, orphaned young, are now cared for by their aunt and uncle, so she and her older sister, Jenny, work in their family’s restaurant to help out, even though Lissie’s Mandarin isn’t great and she’s struggling to keep up with her schoolwork. Unfortunately, she accidentally serves a pork dish with a teaspoon of shrimp paste to a customer with a seafood allergy, making her life even more complicated. When Preston Lin, the customer’s friend, writes a nasty article about the restaurant for the Stanford Daily, she starts

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

6

Huddud’s House

By Fadi Azzam; trans. by Ghada Alatrash

7

Henry Henry

By Allen Bratton

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 5

yes, and fans of the Bennets can probably guess where it goes from there. In a world with so many Pride & Prejudice adaptations, a new one has to be truly special to stand out, and this one is. Dudley’s contemporary debut is faithful to its source material but finds clever ways to make it work

Real Americans

By Rachel Khong

23

Glorious Exploits

By Ferdia Lennon

24

Victory Parade

By Leela Corman

15

24

The Alternatives

By Caoilinn Hughes

Dudley, Christina Hwang | Third State Books 320 pp. | $17.95 paper | March 19, 2024 9798890130044

15

Change By Édouard Louis; trans. by John Lambert

9

Pride and Preston Lin

The Morningside

By Téa Obreht

31

Never Been Better

By Leanne Toshiko Simpson

32

in a modern setting, while also adding an authentic Chinese American perspective on the beloved story.

A warm, sweet story with all the witticisms Austen fans savor.

A contemporary spin on Jane Austen that combines the charm of the original with a new perspective.

33

49

34

5

The New Couple in 5B

By Lisa Unger

Perris, California

By Rachel Stark

The Father She Went To Find

By Carter Wilson

33

48

The Sleepwalkers

By Scarlett Thomas

Your Utopia

By Bora Chung; trans. by Anton Hur

A Flame in the North

By Lilith Saintcrow Pride and Preston Lin

By Christina Hwang Dudley

51

The Partner Plot

By Kristina Forest

52

Maya’s Laws of Love

By Alina Khawaja

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

5

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

2054 Ackerman, Elliot & James Stavridis Penguin Press (304 pp.) | $28.00 March 12, 2024 | 9780593489864

The Singularity may become the new ultimate weapon in the aftermath of a nuclear debacle.

If the page-anda-half prologue doesn’t stop the reader cold, nothing will. It begins: “If a beam of light / energy / open + / close— / reopen == / repeat / stop...” Stop, indeed.

This will prompt only the geekiest among us to move on to Chapter 1. But do turn the page. In 2054, the U.S. is in turmoil. Two decades earlier, China nuked San Diego and Galveston while the U.S. inflicted the same on Shanghai and Shenzhen.

In the aftermath, the two countries no longer dominate the world, and traditional U.S. political parties are no more. The current action begins when the physically fit President Ángel Castro collapses while giving a speech, prompting “malicious rumors that the president had suffered some sort of health crisis.” He had, and he dies. Of course, there are profound suspicions over his sudden demise. Was the president’s aorta inflamed by a sequence of computer code, à la the prologue?

Is he a victim of “remote gene editing” by an unknown entity? Hence the inklings of the 21st century’s new existential threat, a race to achieve the Singularity, where—to oversimplify— technology and humanity become one. The cast includes some holdovers from the authors’ last book, 2034, including Dr. Sandy Chowdhury and Julia Hunt, a woman born in China with allegiance to the U.S. But key is the elusive (and nonfictional) Dr. Ray Kurzweil, thought to be living in Brazil. Meanwhile, American society threatens to explode into civil war between Dreamers and Truthers. But if the ultimate threat to humanity is the Singularity, it doesn’t come through convincingly on these pages.

6

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 6

In 2034, the stakes were brutally clear, with millions of lives on the line. Two decades hence, they’re mushier—serious to be sure, but tougher to wrap up into a thriller. With apologies to T. S. Eliot: This is the way the book ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

A game effort at a tough theme.

Kirkus Star

Huddud’s House Azzam, Fadi | Trans. by Ghada Alatrash Interlink (320 pp.) | $18.00 paper March 19, 2024 | 9781623711153

An enigmatic novel of resistance by the prizewinning Syrian writer in exile.

Huddud’s house is a real place in Azzam’s elegantly unfolding story, a ramshackle maze containing 170,000 Arabic books and 12,000 manuscripts.

“Every room in this house has a story and an era,” Dr. Anees Alaghwani reads in one of those books; he has inherited the place and returned to Damascus from England in order to sell it. Alas, the era of Anees’ story is 2011, the dawn of the Syrian revolution and civil war, and powerful forces are conspiring to thwart his quest for profit. Some are shadowy, some have better intentions. Says a woman named Samia, who will come to figure prominently in Anees’ story, “What you need to keep in mind is that we will resist the sale of this house with everything we have.” She speaks, it seems, for the house as a repository of Damascene and Arabic culture, for all its contested meanings. Its name, though, scarcely conceals the Arabic word hudud, sins enumerated in Sharia law, and there are plenty of them: A central character, Fidel Al-Abdullah, raised by a Communist father and a devout mother, drinks and drugs and commits adultery until a switch flips and he to all appearances becomes an Islamist; other figures in the book indulge in

similar peccadillos. All fall afoul of Syria’s dictatorial Assad regime, about which Fidel’s married lover, Layl, has this sharp observation: “Those loyal to Damascus’s dictator were wealthy, phony, lowly opportunists....She never met anyone with morals or a noble character who defended the Syrian regime.” Sympathies of this sort can get a person killed, and so they do.

Given the subversive themes that punctuate a narrative that, at its best, is reminiscent of García Márquez, it’s small wonder that its author has fled Syria for the safety of Britain.

A landmark work of contemporary Arabic literature, at once allusive and defiant.

The Hollow Beast Bernard, Christophe | Trans. by Lazer Lederhendler | Biblioasis (600 pp.) | $18.95 paper | April 2, 2024 | 9781771965552

From rural Quebec, a sprawling, antic, alcohol-soaked family saga centered on a feud with the postman.

In the early 20th century, the final of a hockey tournament is tied in the waning moments when Billy Joe Pictou bears down on goalie Honoré Bouge (known to all as Monti). Monti stops the shot with his face—his teeth, actually—but Pictou, tripped, slides into the crease and knocks the goalie (and the puck clamped between his teeth) across the line and into the net. The referee, a local named Victor Bradley, signals that the goal counts, an injustice that will spur Monti through life and shape his family for generations. Soon the town’s new postman—Bradley, his hand mangled by a bear trap sent by a politician he ridiculed—shows up at the tavern where Monti is helping out to slake his lunchtime thirst. Monti begins a campaign of harassment, first by ordering various heavy items (a set of encyclopedias, to start) to be delivered to his remote cabin, and later with more KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

diabolical measures (he moves—hides— the cabin; he constructs a mailbox 30 feet high; he tricks Bradley out of his horse). The novel also follows Monti’s grandson, François, a graduate student in Montreal whose work of towering genius (he says), a family history, is foundering on the rocks of chronic alcoholism. He takes a harrowing taxicab ride back home and—pursued by the beast of the title—tries to make sense of the family “curse” of drink, which he thinks must owe to some dark deed of Monti’s. Bernard’s novel is a shambling, shaggy-dog picaresque, full of slapstick and fresh, lively language and outlandishness.

Less a book than a blitzkrieg—the reader gets routed. But it’s rollicking, inventive fun.

Three-Inch Teeth Box, C.J. | Putnam (384 pp.) | $21.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593331347

A bear is hunting prey in Wyoming’s Bighorns. And not just any bear.

It’s bad enough that Clay Hutmacher, who manages the Double Diamond Ranch, has lost his son, Clay Jr., to a vicious attack by a grizzly bear. What’s much worse is that Clay Jr.—who’d been about to pop the question to game warden Joe Pickett’s daughter, Sheridan—is only the first of the victims over an exceptionally broad geographical area.

Marshal Marvin Bertignolli is clawed and bitten to death over in Hanna. Sgt. Ryan Winner is found bleeding out north of Rawlins. Former Twelve Sleep County prosecutor Dulcie Schalk, one of two survivors of an ambush, doesn’t survive her final encounter. The four experts chosen to kill the grizzly rope Joe into their expedition, but since their quarry keeps turning up far from the last sighting, the most meaningful confrontation the Predator Attack Team has is with a pair of Mama Bears, animal rights activists who demand KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 7

A bear is hunting prey in Wyoming’s Bighorns.

And not just any bear.

THREE-INCH TEETH

due process for Tisiphone, as they’ve dubbed the presumed killer. Box, who’s far too canny to leave Tisiphone alone on center stage, follows Joe’s old antagonist Dallas Cates as the ex–rodeo star is released from prison and embarks on his revenge tour, which takes him to Lee Ogburn-Russell, an inventor whose life Dallas saved, and Axel Soledad, a correspondent who shares so many enemies with Dallas that he suggests they go after them together. Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer.

A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.

Kirkus Star

Henry Henry Bratton, Allen | Unnamed Press (288 pp.) $28.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781961884021

The complex life of an affluent young man.

There are a few things you’ll notice early on in Bratton’s novel, beginning with the fact that its protagonist goes

by Hal and that he’s the “son and heir” of a wealthy titled man named Henry. By the time you get to Hal’s sporadic liaisons with an aging actor named Jack Falstaff, you’ll have a better sense of the Henry IV of it all. But there’s more here than an updating of a classic literary work. Set in the years just before the Brexit vote, the novel follows Hal as he traverses London and consumes various drugs—especially

booze and cocaine. There’s a worldweary tone to the narration, including one memorable taxonomy of vomit and other evocative passages: “His own stink hovered about him: skunky weed, spilt Pimm’s and gin, cigarettes smoked in a flat that had had a lot of cigarettes smoked in it before, the vile mix of sweat and deodorant that had congealed under his armpits and was soaking through his pale blue Oxford shirt.” Hal begins a relationship with a fellow child of privilege, Henry Percy (at one point, Bratton describes Percy’s kissing as akin to “an anteater probing into a promising mound of dirt”). Hal also learns of his father’s impending marriage, which fuels much of what comes next. An encounter between father and son early in the novel suggests something is very wrong; gradually, Bratton reveals the extent of Henry’s abuse of his son—which casts both Hal’s own self-abnegating behavior and Henry’s devout Catholicism in a new light. At times witty and at others harrowing, Bratton’s book memorably explores the unexpected depths of its protagonist.

This novel revisits classic literature but never feels beholden to it.

Bad Animals Braunstein, Sarah | Norton (320 pp.) $27.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9781324051046

A small-town Maine librarian gets into a peck of trouble.

Plot #1: Maeve Cosgrove is called to her supervisor’s office, where a woman from the Office of FEBRUARY 1, 2024

7

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Family and Child Services has come to talk to her. One of the library’s regular visitors, a teen named Libby, has filed a complaint: Maeve has been watching her have sex with a boy in one of the library’s bathroom stalls.

The girl is in foster care, and the boy is developmentally delayed, and Maeve insists it didn’t happen, but eventually it seems it more or less did, sort of. Maeve might be let off the hook, but if she wasn’t obsessed with the girl before, she certainly is now, and then she loses her job anyway, supposedly due to budget cuts.

Welcome to Plot #2: Maeve has been writing letters to Harrison Riddles, a famous author who summers in Maine. She’s told him all about her beloved library and co-workers. Now, it turns out, he’s going to write a book based on the life of Willie, a Sudanese refugee who’s the boyfriend of Maeve’s fellow librarian Katrina.

Since Maeve’s husband is perennially out of town on business and her daughter has flown the nest, Maeve, now jobless, is available to get very tangled up in this other situation.

It takes a while to sink in that she is not an easy person to root for, but once it does, it complicates an already overcomplicated book, which touches on everything from abuse and empathy to literary appropriation, ventriloquizing, and the idea of the Magical Negro. A few chapters are narrated in first person by the characters, and toward the end the book floats the idea that it’s been authored by a real-life Maeve, hiding her secrets “in plain sight,” and then a strange last chapter suggests—well, you’ll have to figure it out.

Full of ideas, plot, verve, interesting scenes, and good writing, but just a little too full. A writer to watch.

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers Burr, Samuel | Doubleday (336 pp.) | $29.00 April 9, 2024 | 9780593470091

Abandoned at birth and left in a hatbox on the doorstep of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, Clayton Stumper is tasked with solving a puzzle his foster mother designed before her death to help him discover where he came from.

Now 25, Clay was lovingly raised

by Fellowship founder Pippa Allsbrook, “pioneering cruciverbalist” and British queen of crosswords. The novel alternates between his pained efforts to complete her puzzle, which leads him, step by step, to significant people and places, and Pippa’s account of becoming Clay’s caregiver at 67 while running the Fellowship. Her challenges include overcoming the opposition of eccentric members shaken by the very idea of having a baby among them and turning a run-down hotel in Bedfordshire that was once her ancestral home into the group’s headquarters. As it turns out, this diverse community of “enigmatologists,” who attend seminars on topics like “the history of lipograms and univocalics,” helps raise Clay. So does Nancy Stone, a female cabbie who’s into TV game shows (she was a contestant on Brain of Britain) and becomes Pippa’s best friend and ally.

Burr’s first novel doesn’t get much deeper than “it’s never too late…to find the missing pieces that make you feel complete” and “love is all that matters.” Pithier wisdom is provided

A novel about female friendships against a backdrop of political upheaval.

VILLAGE WEAVERS

8

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 8

by Nancy, who says that puzzling is “good for the old noggin” and “stops you going doolally when you’re old.” But the book’s sweet-tempered storytelling and game-playing element are appealing and its characters good company even when not much is happening.

A nice novel best enjoyed by crossword fans.

Village Weavers Chancy, Myriam J.A. | Tin House (300 pp.) $27.95 | April 2, 2024 | 9781959030379

In 1940s Port-auPrince, two girls from different economic classes strike up a friendship—until a secret separates them.

In her last novel, What Storm, What Thunder (2021), Chancy used a large cast of characters to examine the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed hundreds of thousands and left more than a million people homeless. In her moving new novel, the Haitian Canadian American writer probes Haiti’s history and culture through a narrower lens. Sisi and Gertie become friends quickly, despite the differences in their circumstances.

Sisi exists in a small, warm world of women—her mother, sister, and grandmother—who work hard for what little they have, while Gertie is part of a large, wealthy clan, with haughty older siblings, an often-absent father, and a society-obsessed mother who frets over the darkness of Gertie’s skin. Sisi and Gertie navigate these divides until a tragedy reveals family secrets that drive them apart. Chancy follows their paths as they grow up and eventually flee an increasingly unrecognizable and dangerous Haiti. The author touches on Haiti’s collapsing political system and the violence and horror that follow with a palpable sense of sorrow.

But though she shines a light on colorism, racism, and abuses of power, this remains primarily a personal story, KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

with beautifully fleshed out characters and a bone-deep understanding of the inexorable pull of the past and how regret can all too easily overwhelm our lives. As adults, Sisi and Gertie wonder if they can renew their ties, now with husbands, children, and everyday obstacles in the mix. Doing so will be a challenge, but Chancy holds out the possibility of hope: Some bonds simply can’t be broken, she writes, if only we are willing to nurture them.

A powerful novel about lifelong female friendships against a backdrop of political upheaval and family secrets.

Green Frog: And Other Stories Chung, Gina | Vintage (240 pp.) | $17.00 paper | March 12, 2024 | 9780593469361

Familial obligations knit together these quiet, beautifully expressed stories about Korean Americans.

What do we owe the people related to us through blood or marriage? What do we owe ourselves? These are the questions Chung addresses in her first collection of stories, following the novel Sea Change (2023). On the third anniversary of her mother’s death from cancer, the narrator of “Green Frog,” who dropped out of art school to care for her mother and help run the family restaurant, wonders whether it’s time for a change: “I am here, I remind myself. And maybe it’s time I did something about it.” In “After the Party,” a woman whose husband asks her to put up with one of his lecherous colleagues for the sake of his tenure case vows to protect her own professional dreams, even if her path forward isn’t as clear as her husband’s. Some of the most moving stories consider what women inherit from their mothers and grandmothers.

The second-person narrator in the pleasingly zingy “The Arrow” gradually comes to appreciate her difficult KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 9

mother when she finds herself single and pregnant, just as her mother once was: “Your mother, no matter how you feel about her, is a reminder that what you want—to have this baby and raise it on your own—is possible.”

In “You’ll Never Know How Much I Loved You,” a grandmother urges her young granddaughter to value herself and be her “own prize,” and yet the rest of the piece is a devastating account of the difficulty of this task and the granddaughter’s failure to use her beautiful singing voice. A handful of magical and fabulist stories aren’t nearly as successful as the realistic work. Instead, Chung’s gift is patiently unraveling ordinary moments in ordinary lives and conveying their significance in translucent prose.

Lovely, emotionally resonant stories.

Kirkus Star

Victory Parade Corman, Leela | Schocken (176 pp.) | $29.00 April 2, 2024 | 9780805243444

The latest from graphic novelist Corman is a macabre meditation on cruelty and camaraderie, cycling through a cast of mostly Jewish characters amid the horrors of World War II in New York City, Berlin, and a liberated concentration camp.

Rose Arensberg works in the shipyards of 1943 Brooklyn, helping the war effort (and enduring sexual harassment) alongside other women as their husbands fight overseas. She has begun an affair with George, a veteran who lost part of his leg in the war; despite their passion, both know they are on borrowed time until Sam, the husband Rose never intended to marry, returns from the European front. Living with Rose, Sam, and their daughter is a young woman named Ruth, who fled Germany during the Nazis’ extermination of Jews in that country—Rose and Sam took Ruth in because of their shared heritage. Ruth nurses

a bloodlust borne of enduring her family’s annihilation back in Germany (her mother’s restless spirit visits sometimes). Birnbaum, an enterprising fellow survivor of antisemitic pogroms, steers rageful Ruth into work as a professional wrestler he dubs “the Killer Kraut” to rile up his American crowd. Doom pervades the book, with characters falling into grotesque nightmares of dismemberment or drowning, engaging in physical combat, or meeting sudden deaths.

Even after death, characters continue on, meeting loved ones or friends or spirit beings, the dead experiencing the freedom and communion and vengeance denied them in life. It is a brutal catharsis in a bloody, desperate, and haunted world. Corman’s figures are striking, with angular bodies and faces, the latter punctuated by downturned lips and enormous eyes ringed by darkness. Vivid watercolors enhance the uncanny atmosphere, hues spilling and pooling into visceral shapes and strata.

Savage and soulful.

The Obscene Bird of Night Donoso, José | Trans. by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades & Megan McDowell New Directions (464 pp.) | $21.95 paper April 2, 2024 | 9780811232227

A newly revised translation of Chilean novelist Donoso’s daring, deeply surreal exploration of self, isolation, and Latin American mysticism, including 20 pages of text that was cut from an earlier edition.

A squiggly but unbroken line runs from Kafka’s Metamorphosis through Camus’ The Stranger to this 1970s cult classic and beyond to modern relations like Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night (2023) and Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio (2023).

Set in a haunted nunnery overstuffed with grotesqueries, decaying >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

9

1/8/24 5:29 PM

ON THE COVER

CASEY McQUISTON

BY MEGAN LABRISE TO CASEY MCQUISTON , romance contains multitudes.

“Romance is some of the most honest art you can make,” McQuiston says. “It is heart. It is feelings. It is desire and passion and messiness. All the things that make us exist, that make us human, are poured directly into romance.”

The No. 1 New York Times–bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue, One Last Stop, and the YA romance I Kissed Shara Wheeler recently joined Kirkus via Zoom for an expansive discussion of all things romance—including a taste of their hotly anticipated novel The Pairing (Aug. 6), a heady blend of food, wine, European travel, and a friendly hookup competition between formerly estranged exes. It is McQuiston’s fourth bisexual romance, and their first to feature a trans protagonist.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Romance is a refuge for people like me: I am corny.

I am earnest.

I care so much about things, and I put my entire heart into what I’m doing.

10

What do you love about romance?

Romance is a refuge for people like me: I am corny. I am earnest. I care so much about things, and I put my entire heart into what I’m doing. What I love about romance is I don’t have to mute any of that, and I don’t have to be self-conscious about it.

Romance happens in the same musical key as my thoughts and feelings.

It is a purely emotional craft, and I don’t mean that in a belittling way—I think that’s the highest compliment you can pay. Doing art with feelings as your media is really hard. We’re not using metaphors to get across feelings; we’re using feelings to get

The author’s fourth novel comes out in August.

Sylvie Rosokoff

The bestselling novelist gets emotional about romance—and offers a preview of their upcoming novel.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 10

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

having sex with other people, perhaps even witnessing each other having sex with other people or hooking up with other people, is going to reignite a lot of things for them and force them to confront a lot of unresolved stuff.

That is the love story, but it’s also very much about food, it’s about wine.

It’s about Europe, history, art, architecture—all of this in a very horny way.

across feelings. That is so raw and beautiful, it makes my heart sing. It always has.

I don’t want to try to get you in trouble with this one, but I want to ask: Do you believe the HEA (happily-ever-after) or the HFN (happy-for-now) will always be essential to the genre?

That’s quite the hot-button topic. In the classical sense of the word—like shelved-in-the-romance-section romance—yes, and I am a defender of that. However, I tend to see more things as romance than most people do. Very often I will be reading something that’s not exactly a romance at all but I feel very romantic about, and I’m like, I’m sorry, this is a romance now. When I am reading outside of the romance shelf like that—when I’m there for the love story but it’s a different genre—I love a painful ending. I love to suffer. I love to be agonized and feel anguish and long for a better resolution, because that’s also delicious.

I will say, if we’re talking about fantasy that has a strong romance element—or even sometimes romantasy, which I know is a new word we’re still figuring out how to use—I welcome pain. But if I’m reading a historical romance and one [protagonist] does not run off from the estate he has to manage for his inheritance to marry the other [protagonist], and that is not resolved happily at the end, I’m upset.

I’m upset! I’m like, Why did I do this?

How does the future of romance look to you?

As somebody who is in this market and writing books, I’m always looking [at what gets published], and seeing the exponential growth each year is heartening. We’re making leaps and bounds in terms of the number of books that are coming out, but I would love to see it more diversified. I am eager to see FF romance, specifically, diversify. Anytime somebody asks me about the future of romance, I’m like, more transfeminine authors and characters, please! I do think the future is bright, and I cannot wait to see what happens in the next five years.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 11

Your books have great taglines: “Sometimes love stops you in your tracks” ((One One Last Stop Stop). “True love isn’t always diplomatic” ((Red, White & Royal Blue). ). Are you able to share this one?

The tagline is, “Some things taste better together.”

Speaking of the future, The Pairing drops August 6. We’re eight months out, and all I’ve got is this teaser: “Two exes accidentally book the same European food and wine tour and challenge each other to a hookup competition.” Is there more about the story that you can share?

Yes! Oh my god, I would love to tell you everything about it: [Theo and Kit were a couple in their early 20s.] Theo is a spirits person; they’re really into wine and cocktails. Kit is into baking.

They had this dream of opening a restaurant together. As research, they booked a dream European food and wine tour. Then they got in a fight on the way to Europe, broke up in the airport, and went their separate ways.

That tour was nonrefundable. They both have a voucher that’s good for 48 months after the original date, and it’s about to expire. So they individually are like, well, let’s do this, without realizing the other guy has the same idea. They get on the same bus, and they are stuck together for three weeks to live this trip that they never got to do together.

The hookup competition is something that they kind of scrabble toward for anything else to direct their energy at, other than each other. Of course, competing with each other to hook up with other people, talking about

Very nice!

Thank you! That one was me; I did come up with that.

The Pairing sounds like a ton of fun to read. How much fun was it to write?

I think this is the most I have enjoyed writing a book since before I was being paid to do it. The last time I had this much fun was writing Red, White & Royal Blue—before I ever had a book deal, when I was doing it as a hobby, just for fun, just to see if I could do it. [After Red, White & Royal Blue was published,] I feel like I had a couple years of loving what I was doing but also being anxious and worried whether I could meet the next expectation, if I could meet the next deadline, if I could write something that would sell enough copies to make everybody feel like their investment was worth it. I felt like that was complicating my creative process. This time around, I was like, Fuck it, I’m going to write like no one’s going to read this.

I’m going to write what I want to write, and what I want to read, and have a lot of fun doing it. And that’s what I did.

The result is the smuttiest book I’ve ever written, some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing, and something I’m really proud of. It’s my favorite book I’ve written.

Editor at large Megan Labrise hosts the Fully Booked podcast.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

11

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

memories, and nightmares both real and imagined, this labyrinthine novel is confounding to understand even as its disturbing imagery and universal dread linger. Combined with a narrator who is so unreliable that his very identity is an enigma, the fragmented narrative heightens the sense of dread and disorientation.

In a decidedly nonlinear fashion, we eventually ferret out that the narrator is Humberto Peñaloza, a writer of little means who’s in over his head. He’s been hired by Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía, a wealthy and influential aristocrat being groomed for political office, to write about his family legacy. By the time the story begins, the future senator is obsessed with producing an heir, which his wife, Inés, cannot. Meanwhile, the narrator has somehow become “Mudito”—a supposedly deaf-mute giant banished to one of the Don Jerónimo family’s dilapidated estates, which is now housing 40 outcast women, five orphans, and three nuns.

The whole domestic scene doesn’t get any less weird when one deformed child is introduced and the narrator is ordered to hire a menagerie of “first-class monsters,” educators with similar deformities, to look after the offspring, called only “Boy.” With shades of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Don Jerónimo tries alternately to hide and cure his progeny while Humberto/Mudito becomes deeply entwined in the child’s life. Having either fully captured or utterly dismayed his audience by now, Donoso lets his story disintegrate into a surreal mélange of madness, cryptic rituals, and the proverbial abyss staring back. Your mileage may vary.

A welcome, disturbing reminder of the power of magical realism to distort and reveal by turns.

For more by Nell Freudenberger, visit Kirkus online.

12

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 12

The Limits Freudenberger, Nell | Knopf (368 pp.) $29.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9780593448885

In Tahiti and New York, a white family splintered by divorce and geography confronts problems during the pandemic.

Freudenberger’s fourth novel opens underwater in Polynesia on the last day of 2020, where French marine biologist Nathalie is scuba diving when she is called to shore to take a phone call. It’s her ex-husband’s second wife phoning from New York to say they have lost track of 15-yearold Pia, who hasn’t been seen for several days. This particular plotline, which unfolds over the course of a day, is one among several in this complex novel with five point-of-view characters: Nathalie; her ex, Stephen, a physician in the intensive care unit of a New York hospital; their daughter, Pia; Stephen’s pregnant second wife, Kate, a high school teacher; and Athyna, one of Kate’s students, a Black girl who cares for her toddler nephew. The apparent threat and suspense generated by the missing-teenager story attenuates fairly quickly, and this slackening is echoed in so many other threads that it almost seems a motif. There’s a secret email correspondence, a snarky hidden notebook, an age-inappropriate infatuation, a car accident on a Long Island expressway, a character who walks into a chainsaw blade; there’s the politics of colonialism, nuclear testing, and coral mining; and of course, there’s the Covid-era ICU and the pregnancy. It would be a lot to worry about, but after a while, you realize you don’t need to worry. “I have the balls,” says one character, explaining why one of the bad things has been called off, “not the stomach.” As in Freudenberger’s previous work, scientific points are well integrated and explained, and the intelligent, precise narration is a

pleasure, with graceful depiction of the characters’ inner lives.

Too much and not enough.

The Split Frick, Kit | Emily Bestler/Atria (288 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781668022474

In a taut thriller with two timelines, both are packed with clever twists.

Jane and Esme Connor are sisters, but it’s been years since they were close.

When they were teenagers, Esme was seriously injured in a car crash with Jane at the wheel, and things have never been the same. Now they’re in their 20s; Jane has a lucrative job at a financial firm, while Esme has married into a wealthy, socially prominent family. The sisters have recently moved their mother, Marjorie, into a memory care facility, and Jane, the dutiful one, is living in the family home in Connecticut to help care for her. (Marjorie and the girls’ father, Ivy League professor Carl, divorced acrimoniously years ago.) Self-involved Esme, an aspiring writer who never seems to write, is living her busy social life in Manhattan. Then one night she calls Jane, distraught. She’s left her husband and wants Jane to come pick her up at a Midtown bar. That’s the point at which this thriller divides into two timelines: one in which Jane drives through a storm and brings her sister home, and one in which Jane, tired of being used by Esme, tells her no—and Esme vanishes. Jane narrates both timelines, which track clearly in alternating chapters. In both plots, Jane is dealing with a recent breakup with her doctor boyfriend, Jamie, and rekindling a relationship with her teenage crush, Dylan, but with very different results. Esme’s disappearance leads Jane into a desperate search for her sister, but in the other timeline, Jane’s rescue of Esme results in a different set of complications and perils.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

A poet’s first novel tackles the member of your family you never really know.

ABOUT UNCLE

Frick skillfully builds details into one plot that morph into something shockingly different in the other.

The prose is streamlined, the pace headlong, and the surprises satisfying on both sides of reality.

The Mystery Writer Gentill, Sulari | Poisoned Pen (400 pp.) $16.99 paper | March 19, 2024 9781728285184

The killing of a famous author turns a faithful protégé into a fanatic sleuth.

Australian college student Theodosia Benton has abruptly left her university in Sydney and moved to the United States with the intention of becoming a writer. When she shows up unannounced on the doorstep of her older brother, Gus, in Lawrence, Kansas, she interrupts a romantic moment he’s having with a half-dressed woman named Pam, who beats a hasty retreat.

Such rashness leads to the kind of sibling spats and banter that propel this story and make for a compellingly unpredictable protagonist. When she meets writer Dan Murdoch at a restaurant, Theo quickly manages to become his friend and avid writing student.

Then Dan is murdered, and his agent, Veronica, hires Theo to find his killer, who also apparently snatched the manuscript of Dan’s latest novel. The tale presents two intertwined mysteries.

First, who slew the renowned author?

Second, who are all those people with quirky screen names who comment on the murder at the beginning of most chapters? This latter thread is KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 13

introduced through Caleb, someone who vaguely touts the rise of something called The Shield and the revolutionary plans of its leader, Primus. Caleb’s quest to discover the identity of Primus proceeds in tandem with Theo’s. He comes to believe that Dan was Primus, but was he? Primus is just the tip of an identity iceberg that includes Space Monkey, Frodo 14, Patriot Warrior, and others. Fans will rejoice that the prolific Gentill, author of the Rowland Sinclair mysteries, maintains her record of packing standalone novels with devilish twists on genre conventions.

A fizzy whodunit with pace, panache, and surprises galore.

About Uncle Gisler, Rebecca | Trans. by Jordan Stump Two Lines Press (148 pp.) | $16.95 paper Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781949641554

A poet’s first novel tackles the member of your family you never really know.

Swiss author Gisler’s first novel, translated from the French

by Stump, is a case study of “Uncle,” the odd brother of the narrator’s mother.

He’s an antisocial veteran turned vegetable peeler in the kitchen of the local nunnery. He has a scarecrow effigy of his dead father and carries a pendulum everywhere he goes. He has no friends and no involvement with any other people—until the narrator and her brother come to stay at his house by the sea and get swept up into his domestic rhythms. What they observe defies easy explanation—for

one thing, he can disappear into the plumbing. Gisler’s long, winding sentences depict the delicate dance between a peculiar man and the young adults who are forced to handle him: “My brother was sick of finding the toilet covered in shit every morning, and he told Uncle You’re not a dog, right, and Uncle didn’t answer, he was standing in ballerina position in the yard.” Indeed, Uncle straddles the line between human and animal, which becomes abundantly clear when he gets sick and must be taken to a hospital that treats animals and, well, uncles. His hospitalization is just the beginning of a series of alarming discoveries through which Gisler asks if we can ever really know the people in our families. Perhaps acceptance doesn’t require understanding—when Uncle gets in the mud, we pull up our pants legs and join him.

Gisler uses the domestic scene to capture a family member turning feral.

Black Wolf Gómez-Jurado, Juan | Trans. by Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia | Minotaur (368 pp.) $28.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9781250853691

The middle entry in a trilogy of thrillers set in Spain, following Red Queen (2023).

In Madrid, Antonia Scott and her partner, Jon Gutiérrez, are key players in the EU’s Red Queen project, designed to root out the very worst criminals. They pull a decomposed body from the banks of the Manzanares river. Then white-slave trafficker Yuri Voronin is murdered by the Russian mafia, and his pregnant wife, Lola Moreno, goes on the run.

The chapters focusing on Lola’s viewpoint tend to begin with a onceupon-a-time quality: “There was once a little girl who grew up in a sad, loveless home where the food tasted of ashes and the future was black.” It had taken marriage to a Russian mobster to find wealth and happiness—until death did FEBRUARY 1, 2024

13

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

them part, anyway. Aslan Orlov, aka the Beast, wants to find and kill Lola, so he calls in “Chernaya Volchista,” the Black Wolf. (Hmm. Seems like if Spain wants big-league sleaze, they have to import it.) Scott and Gutiérrez want her, too, because “everything centers on finding Lola Moreno.” The bad guys are suitably frightening, and Scott and Gutiérrez are sympathetic protagonists.

He’s smart, strong, brave, and gay.

She’s the most intelligent person on the planet, and one of the quirkier protagonists in crime fiction. She’s afraid of almost nothing, hates to be touched, and relaxes for three minutes a day by imagining how she could kill herself. As with Red Queen, the action is intense, with blood flowing and dead bodies galore: Police find eight dead women who’d been locked in a shipping container—perhaps they once had been beautiful, but you couldn’t tell anymore. Just when it looks like all is done and dusted, something happens that screams for a sequel. One of several great lines: “a two-seater couch so close to the TV you could change channels with your eyelashes.”

Thriller aficionados will enjoy this one.

The Husbands Gramazio, Holly | Doubleday (352 pp.) $29.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9780385550611

“Love the one you’re with” is the song’s advice, but is that really still the best approach?

When Lauren, a single woman in London, returns home a little tipsy after a friend’s hen party, she encounters a strange man in her flat. He sounds like he knows her and, despite her concerns, doesn’t seem to represent a threat. It takes some time for Lauren to figure out that he’s actually the husband she’s somehow acquired in another life. It takes her more time to figure out that the attic over her flat, courtesy of an electrical malfunction, will be sending her an apparently endless 14

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 14

Given the infinite variety of people in the world, how can you know “the one”?

THE HUSBANDS

stream of husbands once she sends each previous one back upstairs—this is not a novel about bigamy. Lauren finds her own circumstances (job, hairstyle, decorating scheme) changed with each subsequent spouse, and she eventually realizes this is not a “time loop” she’s in; time is advancing as she works her way through her possible spouses.

Some of the husbands are tolerable, some attractive, some complete “no’s” (who wants to spend a lifetime with someone who likes to nestle the tip of their nose in the corner of your closed eye?). Gramazio’s often comedic fantasy rom-com proceeds from an unlikely premise, but the plot allows the author to explore current attitudes and approaches to dating and mating from a fresh perspective: Given the infinite variety of people in the world, how can you know “the one” when there may be a better one just around the corner (or descending the attic staircase)?

Lauren’s madcap romp with the parade of spouses takes a few serious turns, particularly when one is reluctant to climb back upstairs, but the makings of a comic miniseries are all here.

A fun take on a big question.

Never Come Back Hart, Joe | Thomas & Mercer (285 pp.) $16.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9781662515316

A pair of very unequal domestic cases await Oregon forensic investigator Nora McTavish.

Gayle and Joel Pearson may have intellectual disabilities, but

they’ve made a great home for Ivy, their 3-year-old daughter—until Gayle’s grandmother, Arlene Jones, snatches Ivy away and demands custody of her, leading the Pearsons to plead with Nora, of Sanctuary Family Advocacy, to help them win her back. While she’s waiting for the wheels of justice to turn, Nora gets an unofficial case whose stakes are much higher. Prof.

Neil Grayson, the husband of her childhood friend Tess Hannover, was first arrested for killing his student Allie Prentiss, then released because a review of the evidence at the murder scene suggested that it may have been tainted. Now that Tess has filed for divorce—assuming, along with everyone else, that her husband is guilty—Neil is suing for joint custody of Kendra, their 9-year-old, whom Tess is intent on keeping away from him. Nora, whose abusive father turned into a mass shooter, has a heartbreaking interview with Kendra, who asks her: “Do you think my dad did something bad because yours did?”

The case is complicated even further by two discoveries: Devon Wilson, the police detective who was suspended on suspicion of tampering with the evidence, is found shot to death, and he turns out to have been Tess’ lover.

One of these cases looks a lot more interesting than the other, and that’s pretty much how they work out.

A strong leading plot carries an affecting half-plot across the finish line.

For more by Joe Hart, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Love and Hot Chicken: A Delicious Southern Novel Hartong, Mary Liza | Morrow/HarperCollins (272 pp.) | $30.00 | Feb. 20, 2024 9780063304796

An uproarious and understated story of family, friendship, and romance set in the neon-lit haze of a Southern chicken shack.

When PJ Spoon’s father dies unexpectedly, she leaves her Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt University to return to her tiny hometown of Pennywhistle, the “pesky pebble wedged into the shoe of Tennessee.” Unable to afford (or unwilling to buy) an urn, she and her mother stow his ashes in a Mr. Potato Head, toting him to important events. Unmoored by grief, PJ stays in town, abandoning her studies for a job as a cook at a hot chicken franchise, the Chickie Shak. When the owner shows up and informs the employees that the company is throwing a beauty pageant and participation is mandatory, PJ has no choice but to compete. Plus, the $1 million prize money and promise of free Chickie Shak for life could convince even the most unwilling participant to take a shot at this “boot scootin’ opportunity.” With the help of her determined mother, her best friend Lee Ray, and a Kirstie Alley Sparkle ’n’ Shine 3,000 rhinestone gun, PJ is ready for the spotlight. However, all the change inspired by the contest and the arrival of a new co-worker pushes PJ to grapple with life after her father’s death.

Would he even recognize her as a “Hot Chicken contestant shimmying into a bathing suit and rubbing Vaseline on [her] thighs”? A mystery, a romance, and a whole lot of fried food help PJ find her footing in a world without her daddy. By turns hilarious, sad, and introspective, this cross between Steel Magnolias and Gilmore Girls will appeal to anyone who has searched for answers about life and how to live it in a plate of fried chicken.

A clever, heartfelt meditation on grief.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 15

Kirkus Star

The Alternatives Hughes, Caoilinn | Riverhead (352 pp.) $28.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9780593545003

When a woman goes off the grid, her younger sisters’ search for her reopens old wounds and brings new insights.

The first chapter shows Olwen Flattery to be a dedicated professor of geology at the University of Galway, as nurturing of her students as she is of her partner Jasper’s two young sons.

Yet when the scene shifts to her sister Maeve, a culinary star in London, Olwen has disappeared without a word to anyone. Irish author Hughes delicately establishes the characters and concerns of all four siblings before she sends them to hunt for Olwen. Maeve tangles with wealthy catering clients and her publisher over her desire to make gourmet cooking sustainable. Rhona, a high-powered political science professor at Trinity College Dublin, uses her government connections to advocate for citizens’ assemblies to end polarization and stalemate. Nell, scraping together a living from multiple adjunct positions at American colleges, can’t get tenure because she refuses to give her work “universal appeal,” focusing instead on teaching philosophy as a tool for living with more meaningful goals than success and money. Each sister is trying in her own field to halt humanity’s senseless rush toward political and ecological catastrophe; the words “alternatives” (to our wasteful ways) and “care” (for our planet and our polity) are used frequently. So when her sisters find Olwen tinkering with solar panels on a farmhouse near the Northern Ireland border, it seems her motives for leaving may be linked to their mutual concern for the planet’s future. Hughes slowly reveals the shared childhood trauma that forged the Flattery sisters’ convictions, and

their resentments toward each other.

Her moving, richly detailed portraits of their personal struggles give emotional depth to Hughes’ underlying theme: when we stop caring—for ourselves, each other, and the world— disaster will surely follow.

Intelligent, impassioned, and wholly satisfying.

Kirkus Star

Real Americans Khong, Rachel | Knopf (416 pp.) | $29.00 April 30, 2024 | 9780593537251

A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family.

Khong’s follow-up to her sweet, slim debut— Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)—is again about parents and children but on a more ambitious scale, portraying three generations in what feel like three linked novellas, or somehow also like three connected gardens. The first begins in 1999 New York City, where Lily Chen stands next to a man at an office party who wins a big-screen TV in the raffle.

He insists she take it; he is Matthew Maier, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and has all the TVs he needs.

On their first date, they go to Paris after dinner, and as this section ends, they’ve had their first child. The second part of the book moves to 2021 on an island off the coast of Washington state. It’s narrated by Lily’s now-15-year-old son, Nick; his father is nowhere in sight, at least for now. The closing section unfolds in 2030 in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s told by Lily’s now elderly mother, May, with an extended flashback to her youth in China during the Cultural Revolution and her first years in the U.S. As a budding scientist, May was fascinated by genetics. Of the lotus flowers she studied at university, she >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

15

1/8/24 5:29 PM

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

David Wroblewski To Release First Book in 15 Years Familiaris is a follow-up to his bestselling 2008 debut.

David Wroblewski will release the long-awaited follow-up to his debut novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, this year.

Blackstone will publish Familiaris in the spring, the press announced in a news release.

Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, published in 2008 by Ecco, was a reimagining of Hamlet. It followed the title character, a mute

For a review of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, visit Kirkus online.

16

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 16

boy living in Wisconsin who flees into the woods with three dogs after the death of his father.

The novel became a bestseller and was a pick for Oprah Winfrey’s popular book club. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction.

Familiaris, which is set about 50 years earlier than The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, also features the family he introduced in his debut. It tells the story of newlyweds John and Mary Sawtelle, who, along with their friends and dogs, travel to northern Wisconsin to start new lives.

“By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, mysterious and enchanting, Familiaris takes readers on an unforgettable journey…examining the dynamics of love and friendship, the vexing nature of families, the universal desire to create something lasting and beautiful, and of course, the species-long partnership between Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris,” Blackstone says of the book.

Familiaris is scheduled for publication on June 4, 2024.—MICHAEL SCHAUB

Bob Carmichael

SEEN AND HEARD

David Wroblewski

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

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

AWARDS The Booker Prize Reveals Its 2024 Judges Edmund de Waal will chair the judging panel for the prestigious U.K. fiction award.

The Booker Prize, the prestigious U.K. literary award for fiction, has announced its 2024 judges.

Edmund de Waal will chair the judging panel for this year’s award.

The acclaimed author and ceramic artist is known for nonfiction books including The Hare With Amber Eyes, The White Road, and Letters to Camondo.

Two other authors will join de Waal on the panel: Sara Collins, author of the novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton, and Yiyun Li, whose books include A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Where Reasons End, and Wednesday’s Child.

The panel is rounded out by Justine Jordan, the fiction editor of the Guardian, and Nitin Sawhney, the composer, musician, and DJ. “The great ambition of the Booker Prize is to

explore contemporary fiction without preconceptions, and I am so privileged to be sharing my year of reading with such a gloriously distinguished and vigorous group of fellow explorers,” de Waal said in a statement. “I am looking forward to being part of the best book club ever.”

Gaby Wood, CEO of the Booker Prize Foundation, praised the judges as “perceptive readers, creative thinkers, seasoned collaborators.

“If the purpose of literature is, in part, to bridge a gap—to allow us to see the world from another point of view and to draw people together—then the 2024 panel couldn’t be better equipped to recommend works to readers that will get them thinking and talking,” Wood added.

The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize will be released in July; a shortlist will follow in September. The winner of the award will be announced at a ceremony in November.—M.S.

Fulvio Marcello Orsenigo

Edmund de Waal

For more about the Booker Prize, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 17

1/8/24 5:29 PM

13 ROMANCE AUTHORS MAKING SPACE IN THE GENRE Romance readership is exploding, and these diverse writers are leading the way.

BY JENNIFER PROKOP DESPITE ITS POPULARITY, romance is still a largely—perhaps willfully—misunderstood genre. But determining whether a book is a romance is simpler than the Bechdel test, with only one question: Does this story end happily? If the answer is yes—as in Pride and Prejudice, the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn, or pretty much any book you saw on TikTok with a hockey player on the cover—then welcome to

the club. In the nomenclature of the genre, that happy ending is referred to as either the HEA (happily-ever-after) or the HFN (happy-for-now). The Fault in Our Stars, The Notebook, and Me Before You are great novels, but they are not genre romance.

Romance fiction has changed dramatically in recent years, but readers tend to get a little twitchy at talk of “transforming the genre.” These

words are usually spoken by people who want to eliminate the HEA, the part of romance that we like the best.

What’s your next bright idea—taking yellow out of the rainbow and Barbie out of her Dreamhouse? No thanks.

Rather than transformation, expansion might be a better word to describe the growth of the genre. If we think of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet as our Big Bang, with tons of romance energy packed into a tiny kernel of a story, romance has proven to be a constantly expanding universe in the intervening 200 years. Just as human hearts have an infinite capacity for love, so too

Henry: Devyn Glista-St. Blanc Studios; Garrett: Louisa Wells; McQuiston: Sylvie Rosokoff;

F I C T I O N // F O C U S O N R O M A N C E

From left to right: Emily Henry, Camryn Garrett, Casey McQuiston, Cathy Yardley, KJ Charles, Angelina M. Lopez

18

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 18

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

Lopez: Angelina M. Lopez

F O C U S O N R O M A N C E // F I C T I O N

is there an infinite capacity for the romance genre to tell those stories.

One of the best ways to expand the genre is to bring new readers to the fold, and Emily Henry might be the most powerful crossover author that romance has ever produced. In Beach Read, literary author Augustus and romance author January are both struggling with writer’s block. They make a deal: Each will try writing in the other’s genre, but in the process, of course, they fall in love. The book was published in May 2020, just a few months into the pandemic, when Americans were taking Zoom calls in their basements and canceling their summer vacations. The novel perfectly captured the zeitgeist of pandemic life, as millions of readers realized they, like Augustus, could recharge themselves with a romance. Henry has been a hitmaker ever since, her books successful both critically and commercially. People We Meet on Vacation and Happy Place continued to play with the juxtaposition of joy and loss, powerful themes that speak to modern readers.

There’s always been inherent tension between the portrayal of teenage romance as written (and often read) by adults and the actual lived experience of teens themselves. The end result is that YA romance sometimes just feels off: the plots strangely sanitized, the

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 19

characters suspiciously mature, and the relationships laughably low stakes.

Author Camryn Garrett realizes there is nothing low stakes about the first time you fall in love, maybe because she published her remarkable debut when she was still a teenager herself. In Full Disclosure, Simone Garcia-Hampton thinks her interest in Miles might be reciprocated, but escalating their relationship means she’ll have to reveal her secret: She’s HIV-positive.

Simone has loving dads and a supportive friend community, and her medical diagnosis isn’t a tragedy; it’s just a fact. Garrett’s follow-ups are equally assured, including Friday I’m in Love, about a girl who decides that instead of a Sweet Sixteen she’d rather have a coming-out party. Garrett isn’t writing teen characters as adults wish they would be; they’re real people, grappling with the fear and joy of falling in love for the first time.

For years, there seemed to be a gap that romance readers had to cross: age out of YA and hurtle straight into adult romance, likely featuring characters in their late 20s or early 30s. Although the term “new adult” existed, it didn’t seem to get much traction until the arrival of Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue.

The book featured a romance between the son of the American president

and a British royal prince, and readers couldn’t get enough. McQuiston lit the torch, and BookTok picked it up and ran with it. Now, many of the genre’s bestselling books feature characters in their early 20s. On the other end of the spectrum are romance readers clamoring for “seasoned” characters in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. Falling in love isn’t only for young people, and authors such as Cathy Yardley are eager to answer the call. In Role Playing, Maggie is a 48-year-old woman challenged to be more social by her college-age son. She joins a gaming guild and falls in love with 50-year-old Aiden, who games to relieve the stress of caring for his aging mother.

One of the greatest expansions currently underway is the wholesale embrace of queer identity across subgenres. Vincent Virga’s 1980 gothic, Gaywyck, is widely regarded as the first gay historical romance, and it was revolutionary at the time for two men to live happily ever after on the page. Although queer love stories continued to be supported by small indie presses such as Bold Strokes Books, traditional publishing went back to ignoring queer romance for decades. For many readers, the rise of self-published e-books made queer romance easier to discover and obtain.

Largely self-published by choice, KJ Charles has been making space for queer characters in historical romances for the past decade. And what dazzling characters they are, running the gamut from Regency aristocrats in Band Sinister to a Victorian taxidermist in An Unseen Attraction and a postWWI archaeologist in Spectred Isle. A hallmark of her work is characters who thrive on the margins of society, often making fools of the same people who have sidelined and silenced them.

In other words, Charles has never met a con man she doesn’t like, and her con men are the best in the genre. The most recent series, starting with The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, serves up the brilliant, incisive writing and complex characters readers expect when they pick up a book by Charles.

Angelina M. Lopez has written an entire pantheon of women who FEBRUARY 1, 2024

19

1/8/24 5:29 PM

refuse to be pigeonholed by society’s expectations—the type of character who challenges romance readers’ patriarchal notions of worth and likability.

Like society itself, romance readers can be remarkably forgiving of the flaws in male characters while criticizing the smallest imperfections in female characters: On the “there be” scale, it’s unlikable heroines right after dragons.

Lopez’s debut, Lush Money, presents a thorny, difficult heroine who is firmly in the power position of the relationship, a billionaire who hires a prince to father her child. In her latest series, Lopez levels up once again. She writes deep, complex women who have been pulled back home, but with interesting dilemmas and nuanced conflicts rather than the commonplace and cliched Hallmark movie–style homecoming.

In Full Moon Over Freedom, Gillian Armstead-Bancroft chooses assimilation and social mobility over Freedom, Kansas. Everything seems perfect, she’s the “pride of the East side,” but it’s all a lie. Gillian is a bruja, desperately trying to fix the curse that’s ruined her life. Lopez effortlessly tackles the realities of life in a small town while unpacking Latine stereotypes and exploring the failures and triumphs of the misunderstood heroine.

There is no more idealized and valorized setting in romance than the small town. But sharp-eyed readers will also critique the typical portrayal, where everyone is white, straight, and magically able to keep competing cupcake shops afloat. Jeannie Chin’s Blue Cedar Falls series shows three Chinese American sisters engaging with both the joys and hardships of small-town life. Readers are introduced to the Wu sisters in The Inn on Sweetbriar Lane. June, the eldest, is struggling to keep the family’s bed and breakfast financially solvent. She has dreams of starting a fall festival, but Clay Hawthorne, the new bar owner, isn’t interested in trying to lure cutesy tourists. In the books that follow, middle sister May returns home after years away, traumatized by the painful racist bullying she experienced in high school, and reconnects with the sweetheart she left behind. Chin’s character 20

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 20

work is masterful; each sister has a distinctive way of seeing Blue Cedar Falls and her place in it. Chin’s series proves that small towns don’t have to be boring, whitewashed utopias; they are as thorny and complex as the people who live there.

Netflix’s Bridgerton may have been a success onscreen, but historical romance has nevertheless been forced to reenvision itself, finding new ways to excite and surprise readers jaded

by Mayfair ballrooms and tired of prim, straight, white, virginal heroines.

Adriana Herrera, known for her sexy contemporary romances, is making a glorious detour into the historical space with her Las Leonas series, which takes place during the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. She adds her voice to the small group of writers (Beverly Jenkins, KJ Charles, Cat Sebastian) who have long worked to extend the boundaries of historical romance. The deeply researched series places three Latine heiresses and best friends on-site in Paris: Luz Alana Heith-Banzan, a Dominican rum heiress looking to expand the family business; Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, a Mexican artist determined to have one last summer of freedom before entering an arranged marriage; and Aurora Montalban Wright, a Dominican Mexican physician trying to protect her secrets. The three women take Paris by storm, as Herrera playfully deploys and reimagines

historical romance’s most beloved tropes and archetypes.

Romance is no stranger to the influence of fanfiction. The first great wave of fic writers emerged from the Twilight fandom and spun off several romance powerhouses, among them E.L. James, Rebekah Weatherspoon, Christina Lauren, and Sally Thorne.

At the time, it was Fight Club rules: The first rule of traditional publishing is never talk about fanfiction. Now, a second massive wave of fic writers is once again changing the romance landscape. Led by Ali Hazelwood, most of these writers originated in the Reylo fandom—Star Wars fans rooting for a romance between Rey (Daisy Ridley in the films) and Kylo Ren/ Ben Solo (Adam Driver). Hazelwood’s breakout debut, The Love Hypothesis, transplants the Rey and Kylo Ren archetypes to academia. Hazelwood and her brethren are laser focused on character, and they excel at writing snappy dialogue and crackling sexual tension. A rash of Reylo fics have made it onto year-end “best of” lists, while Hazelwood herself is switching it up: Her next book, Bride, matches Vampyre and Were, a classic romance pairing that never goes out of style.

For the past few years, all you heard about were rom-coms, but publishing has now focused its efforts on “romantasy.” Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are currently at the top of the romantasy pileup (and the

Herrera: Adriana Herrera; Hazelwood: Justin Murphy, Out of the Attic Photography

F I C T I O N // F O C U S O N R O M A N C E

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

F O C U S O N R O M A N C E // F I C T I O N

Dixon: Ruby Dixon; Jackson: Sara Nicole Lemon; Ryan: Kennedy Ryan; Williams: Francesco Ferendeles

From left to right: Jeannie Chin, Adriana Herrera, Ali Hazelwood, Ruby Dixon, Kosoko Jackson, Kennedy Ryan, Tia Williams

bestseller lists), but it’s Ruby Dixon and her Ice Planet Barbarians who opened the door. Dixon started the series in 2015; it was well regarded by romance readers and even spawned a read-along podcast called Ice Planet Pod. Dixon’s self-published books could only be read via Kindle Unlimited, but when BookTok discovered the Barbarians in 2021, the series went from solid performer to juggernaut.

Dixon sold the print rights to Berkley, creating a model where Amazon’s KU superstars use traditional publishers as their print distributors. The most innovative, interesting work in the genre is being written by self-published authors, and traditional publishing is taking note.

Men have always been readers and writers of romance, but until recently men who wrote romance hid their identity, either by using female pseudonyms or writing with a partner.

Fortunately, male authors such as Kosoko Jackson can now publish romance novels under names that reflect their gender identity. Jackson is a crossover author who also writes YA, but his two adult romances are well regarded for their frank, funny, and fresh descriptions of gay relationships in the Black community.

A Dash of Salt and Pepper features two chefs in a small town, allowing Jackson to use classic romance tropes to his advantage. I’m So Not Over You adds class disparity, often a difficult KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 21

topic for romance readers, to the mix. The fantasy of a wealthy lover seems appealing, but journalist Kian Andrews can’t help but feel like an outsider when he’s with Hudson Rivers’ wealthy family; when Hudson asks Kian to be his plus-one at a family wedding, Kian feels terribly out of place at the huge society function.

Jackson’s bold choice to tell the story only from Kian’s point of view might have frustrated some readers, but it highlights Jackson’s theme that “the everyman” possesses an important voice all on his own.

Shouldn’t writing that honors the full scope of human relationships be just as big and bold as the feelings it’s meant to elicit?

Romance readers want the feelings dialed up to 11, and no one delivers the angst and drama of falling in love better than Kennedy Ryan. Her novels are grandly epic in scale—Reel is a Hollywood saga that spans decades; Long Shot, an exploration of abuse and recovery—yet minutely tender in their execution. Ryan is carefully attentive to gesture—the small ways people signal their feelings for each other, the weighted glance that hides a maelstrom of emotions, the small touch that portends a change of heart.

Before I Let Go expands the definition of where a romance should start by opening not with a marriage in trouble but a marriage that is over, yet still masterfully delivering a hard-won and heartfelt happily-ever-after.

The cheapest shots aimed at romance are usually about the quality of the writing itself. Romance readers respond by pointing out that we’re the only genre judged not by our most beautiful and incisive prose stylists— Laura Kinsale, Sherry Thomas, Kate Clayborn, or Meredith Duran—but by our worst. Romance refuses to apologize for its flowery language or perceived excess; shouldn’t writing that honors the full scope of human relationships be just as big and bold as the feelings it’s meant to elicit?

Tia Williams is one such writer, effortlessly capturing the humor and heartbreak of falling in love. Her most recent novels, Seven Days in June and the forthcoming A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, luxuriate in language, with main characters who are writers, artists, and musicians. In Seven Days, Eva and Shane are both famous authors—Eva for her popular paranormal romance series, Shane for his literary fiction.

Hyperaware of the unfair standard that elevates his work while downplaying hers, Eva finally decides to stop worrying about other people and declares, “It’s about me. Occupying all the space I need to. Standing tall in exactly who the hell I am.” Which is really, when you think about it, a pretty good mantra for romance readers as well.

Jennifer Prokop co-hosts the romance podcast Fated Mates.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

21

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

observes, “Raindrop-shaped buds held petals that crept closer, each day, to unfurling. As humans we were made of the same stuff, but their nucleotides were coded such that they grew round, green leaves instead of our human organs, our beating hearts.” This concern for how and why we turn out the way we do animates the book on every level, and along with science, social constructs like race and class play major roles. Every character is dear, and every one of them makes big mistakes, causing a ripple effect of anger and estrangement that we watch with dismay, and hope.

Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.

Leave No Trace Landau, A.J. | Minotaur (352 pp.) | $28.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781250877338

The bombing of Liberty Island is only the beginning.

As the Logan family heads into the Statue of Liberty, teenage son Danny breaks away from the entrance line to shoot some phone video of an obsolete boat, an M1-44 sitting incongruously in the harbor.

Suddenly there’s an explosion behind him, and Danny sees “a landscape of bodies.” Michael Walker, of the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, is called up from his post at Shenandoah National Park and teamed with New York–based FBI Special Agent Gina Delgado to investigate. As an observant eyewitness with a camera, Danny becomes a target, but Michael shepherds him to safety after winning a shootout with a would-be assassin. At the center of the nefarious plot is supervillain Abel Rathman, presumed dead in a helicopter crash two years ago but captured very much alive on Danny’s video recording.

While Mike and Gina are assembling 22

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 22

the puzzle pieces surrounding the explosion, terrorist threats spring up like weeds all across the country, from Independence Hall to Mount Rainier to more than half a dozen states in between. Frequent jumps of location in super-short chapters amp up the excitement in Landau’s hyperkinetic, if sometimes hyperbolic, thriller.

Each of the 98 chapters in this first entry in the National Parks Thriller series opens with an interesting tidbit relevant to the given chapter, often about the parks. Did you know that Utah’s Zion National Park spreads over three counties?

A lively, if generic, terrorism thriller with a trivia bonus.

Days of Wonder Leavitt, Caroline | Algonquin (320 pp.) $29.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9781643751283

Can we ever live down our past mistakes? Does it depend on how many there are?

“QUEENS KILLER-CUTIE’S ATTEMPTED MURDER. BOYFRIEND’S DAD FED TOXIC TEA. REDHEAD CAUGHT RED-HANDED.” The tabloid scandals start early and never stop in Leavitt’s latest, with a Tilta-Whirl plot encompassing Endless Love–type teenage passion with a side of attempted murder, homegrown poison plants, a jailhouse pregnancy, a long-ago rape in Central Park, stalking, domestic violence, and a life destroyed when a character’s mother gets drunk and spills her secrets to a guy in a bar who turns out to be a journalist. (Wait, didn’t she see the fedora?) The story opens in upstate New York in April 2018, when Ella Levy is released from prison after having served only six years of the 25-year sentence she began at age 15. An investigative reporter has revealed both that her confession was forced and that the judge who sentenced her was taking kickbacks from the prison. But

her conviction has not actually been overturned, and it’s not going to be easy to find work as a young convicted felon—good thing there’s a little newspaper in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that needs an advice columnist. The media certainly plays many roles in this story, which has a kind of naïve and fearless narrative energy that will be familiar to readers of Leavitt’s earlier novels, including With or Without You (2020) and Cruel Beautiful World (2016).

Each of the troubled central characters—Ella; her mother, Helen; her old boyfriend, Jude Stein—gets a nice, vanilla love interest to withhold their secrets from...UNTIL IT’S ALMOST TOO LATE! One complaint: Doesn’t the horrible villain deserve a bit more comeuppance than they get?

If you love old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, this may be just your cup of foxglove tea.

The Book of Fire Lefteri, Christy | Ballantine (336 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 2, 2024 | 9780593497272

A family in a Greek village struggles to recover after an enormous wildfire.

This novel revolves around a massive fire that incinerates hundreds of thousands of acres in rural Greece, forcing many residents to run into the sea to escape. Its narrator, Irini, is a musician; her husband, Tasso, is an artist; and they have a precocious young daughter, Chara. Before the fire their life was idyllic, but afterward they’re deeply traumatized—they have lost their home, Tasso’s father is missing, and Tasso and Chara have serious burns.

Chapters narrated in the first person tell the family’s story several months after the fire; other chapters told in the third person are an account Irini is writing of the disaster itself, including the desperate hours she and Chara spent in the water, awaiting KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

A lightly historical novel about two friends and a quixotic theatrical project.

drama. Those with that appetite today are fortunate to have Madeline Miller, Emily Wilson, Pat Barker, and recently James Hynes’ Sparrow. And Lennon.

An entertaining and impressive debut.

GLORIOUS EXPLOITS

Hollywood Hustle Lindstrom, Jon | Crooked Lane (256 pp.) $29.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781639106295

rescue and not knowing whether Tasso survived. In the story’s present day, the narrator goes for a walk through the ruined forest with her dog and finds a dying man, who turns out to be the developer who “stole the world” when he set what he intended as a small fire to clear land for a resort. The manner of his death adds a mystery element to the plot and leaves the narrator questioning herself as she battles to hold her family together. The novel’s strengths include its terrifying descriptions of the fire and its explanation of how drought brought about by climate change contributed to the blaze’s ferocity. But the book is marred by some improbable events, one-dimensional characters, and often stilted dialogue—long passages sound far more like lectures than conversation.

A sometimes compelling story of disaster is diluted by unrealistic details.

Kirkus Star

Glorious Exploits Lennon, Ferdia | Henry Holt (304 pp.) $26.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781250893697

A lightly historical novel about two friends and a quixotic theatrical project.

Lampo is 30, unemployed, living with his mom, hanging with his best friend, Gelon, and frequently torn between self-pity and self-indulgence.

He’d work well in a buddy film, except that Lampo lives in the town KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 23

of Syracuse on the island of Sicily some 400 years before the dawn of the Christian Era. For his debut, Dublin-born Lennon taps a few lines from The History of the Peloponnesian War, in which Thucydides writes of how defeated Athenian soldiers were imprisoned in Syracuse’s quarries. As Lampo narrates the tale, Gelon, who’s “mad for Euripides,” proposes to stage his Medea in one of the quarries, using the prisoners as actors. The obstacles aren’t small. The Athenians are purposely underfed and close to starvation. Lampo and Gelon are low on drachmae for costumes and backdrops, not to mention food and drink to keep their cast from that final exit. And attendance is doubtful since most Syracusans hate the invaders from Athens. Lennon initially dwells on the humor in these production struggles (Lampo’s squandering of food money on clothes, coiffure, and general showing off is a delightful episode). He traces Lampo’s growth in self-awareness while moving what seems at first to be a frivolous tale into ever darker waters. He’s economical with period detail and doesn’t shy from anachronisms, like “wreck the buzz.” His subplots bring pointed complications, including Lampo’s love for a barmaid and the usefulness of a wealthy trader. Exploring themes of friendship, loyalty, and the toll of war, Lennon evokes a time when it was common to relish and revere the art of Homer’s poetry and Euripides’ For more fiction reviews, visit Kirkus online.

A Hollywood action star finds he can’t just shoot his way out of the situation when his daughter is kidnapped.

Winston Greene is usually delighted to see his 6-year-old granddaughter, Amy. Not this morning. He’s sound asleep when the kid pokes him awake. He barely has time to wonder how she got to his house before she says, “He told me to get you.” He turns out to be a skinny young stranger leaning on a muscle car in Win’s driveway, and his message is that Clare, Win’s daughter and Amy’s mom, has been kidnapped. Win, an actor who’s built a career on playing tough guys, knows his urge to beat up or shoot someone won’t solve anything in real life. It’s his fame—he’s not top of the box office, but solid, especially for an actor who’s almost 60—that has drawn the kidnappers. In exchange for Clare, they want all his Hollywood money.

Problem is, he doesn’t have it anymore.

His relationship with Clare has long been fraught: Through much of her childhood, he was an alcoholic, and after his beloved wife died, he got worse—but then better. By that time, however, Clare had grown up, become an addict herself, and married another one. Win’s objections to the squalid conditions in which they’re raising Amy have no bearing on his desperate desire to recover his daughter. Since the kidnappers warned him not to go to the cops, he turns to two close friends: Teddy Beauregard, a disgraced LA cop turned private eye, and Grover Washington, a legendary stuntman. As they race to protect Amy, find out who has Clare, and scrape together FEBRUARY 1, 2024

23

1/8/24 5:29 PM

>>>

FICTION

Obreht uses folklore as a tool for navigating war and displacement.

THE MORNINGSIDE

enough cash to free her, bodies pile up.

The pacing lags occasionally, and the plot is fairly predictable. But Win is a likable protagonist, self-deprecating and funny, and Lindstrom, who’s had a long career as an actor, brings authenticity to the novel.

You can probably guess the Hollywood ending, but an engaging protagonist makes this thriller a fun ride.

Kirkus Star

Change Louis, Édouard | Trans. by John Lambert Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) | $27.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780374606800

A child of rural poverty recalls his rise to literary fame and the intellectual class.

In his 2017 autofiction, The End of Eddy—a bestseller in his home country— Louis recalled a youth in northern France defined by poverty, racism, and violence. In this bracing sequel, Louis chronicles his escape from the upbringing he was so determined to leave behind. A bright but self-loathing gay adolescent, he’s quick to attach himself to anyone who praises him, so he bonds tightly with Elena, a classmate with well-read parents and respect for his intellect. With her encouragement, he leverages his gift for acting to find work in a theater and makes plans to head for Paris. There, with the help of a philosopher, Didier, he begins to gain entry to the city’s intelligentsia and crams to enter an elite school. Édouard (he’s rejected his birth name, Eddy) 24

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 24

is stubbornly determined to make his name as a writer, but his achievements only rarely feel like triumphs; rather, he’s anxious at every turn about whether he’s smart enough to measure up, stalked by imposter syndrome, and aware that his lovers’ generosity has limits. (For a time he makes ends meet as a sex worker.) Nor can he shake off his family’s judgment of him as a snob-in-training. “If you make it in you’re saved,” he tells himself about his efforts to enter the school, but his acceptance is a Pyrrhic victory. Even as he begins hobnobbing with wealthy men and begins his successful career as a writer, it’s clear that his craving for acceptance and approval, literally beaten into him as a child, has yet to be entirely overcome. Louis’ storytelling, in Lambert’s deft translation, is clear and intellectually robust but captures a tone of fear and anxiety; what he often calls “revenge,” even on a family that might deserve it, is a corrosive feeling.

A sharp chronicle of status climbing and its consequences.

into the Morningside with her mother.

This apartment building is barely clinging to its former grandeur, but Sil and her mother count themselves lucky to be the beneficiaries of a program designed to repopulate a once-great metropolis that has been devastated by floods. Sil’s aunt Ena is the superintendent of the Morningside, and Ena not only tells Sil more than her mother wants her to know about their family’s past, but she also says just enough about the mysterious resident of the building’s penthouse to make Sil suspect that this woman is a Vila—a powerful, often vengeful, nature spirit from their homeland. As she did in her first novel, Obreht uses folklore as a tool for navigating war and displacement. Sil knows how the heroine in a fairy tale should behave but, when she suspects that she might be a fairy tale heroine, she does not want to be that girl. Sil is, as it turns out, an excellent guide to a world in which old rules don’t make sense. She’s skeptical and credulous and reticent by turns, but she also has instincts for self-preservation that maybe only the most vulnerable among us can understand. Obreht is offering a cautionary vision of what our future might look like, but she’s also asking questions that are as old as storytelling. What do we want to tell ourselves about ourselves? What do we try to hide from ourselves? And what’s the cost of our lives?

A captivating blend of science fiction and magical realism with a wonderfully engaging protagonist.

Kirkus Star

The Morningside Obreht, Téa | Random House (304 pp.) $29.00 | March 19, 2024 | 9781984855503

The author of Inland (2019) and The Tiger’s Wife (2011) takes a glimpse into the future.

Looking back on her life, a narrator called Silvia remembers emigrating to an island city (that might once have been New York) and moving

Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge Pook, Lizzie | Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 | 9781982180546

In 1850, after learning about her younger sister’s mysterious death aboard a British expedition vessel, Maude Horton takes it upon herself to track down the killer and exact her revenge.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Though they were attached at the hip as young girls, Maude and Constance Horton could not have been more different. While Maude was scientifically minded and seemed content to spend the rest of her days working in their grandfather’s apothecary, Constance was a romantic at heart and yearned to see the world beyond the grimy streets of London. In an act of rebellion, Constance disguised herself as a young man and stowed away on the Makepeace, a ship destined for the desolate sea lane known as the Northwest Passage. It was a risky move, to say the least, and the journey eventually led to her death. When Maude receives her sister’s effects two years later, she can’t shake the feeling that the truth is being kept from her, especially when she reads Constance’s increasingly alarming diary entries.

With evidence pointing toward Edison Stowe, the ship’s scientist, having murdered Constance, Maude decides to join him on his latest grisly business venture: a rail tour of public hangings in England. In a novel packed with fascinating characters with a wide array of motivations, Maude takes a back seat to both Constance and Edison. Though the narrator is charming and clever, readers will find themselves wanting to spend more time sailing on the Makepeace with Constance or following Edison through smog-choked streets. Pook’s writing really shines in her descriptions of London. People’s obsession with murder was at an alltime high there, and huge profits were being made from public hangings, amid other grotesque trivializations of death. Pook paints a macabre image of a time when death was often more valuable than life itself.

A spellbinding novel set in the frozen Arctic and in London during the height of murder mania.

For more by Lizzie Pook, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 25

In 2030, a Black woman seeks emancipation from the white official who owns her.

THE BLUEPRINT

The Blueprint Rashad, Rae Giana | Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) | $30.00 | Feb. 13, 2024 9780063330092

In 2030, a Black woman seeks emancipation from the white government official who owns her.

Solenne Bonet is a DoS (Descendent of Slavery) who, when she was 15, was delivered to the white man the algorithm had assigned her to until it was time for her to be married to a Black man and have children. But her fate is derailed when Bastien Martin, the president’s son, spots Solenne and claims her for his own, beginning a five-year relationship during which he refuses to set her free. This novel imagines a second Civil War beginning in 1954, after which the country established military rule, reinstated slavery for Black women, forced Black men to be in the military, and outlawed reproductive choice. Solenne has been raised to be a concubine, but she grows up hearing the tales of her ancestor Henriette, a Fulani girl brought to this country on a slave ship, who repeatedly tried to escape the master who forced her to bear multiple children; eventually, Solenne begins to compose a book about Henriette to trace her own lineage and map out how she too might seek freedom. Solenne hopes to escape Bastien by fleeing to Louisiana, the last remaining free state, only to be subject to his political influence and technological monitoring.

Solenne grapples with the tensions and manipulations involved when Bastien

says he’s devoted to her while working politically and privately to further restrict her freedom. Rashad’s fantastic debut evokes familiar history, such as Sally Hemings’ forced relationship with Thomas Jefferson, yet is also wholly new, weaving together vividly imagined characters in Solenne and Henriette and deftly moving through multiple time periods while capturing Solenne’s haunted yet strong voice: “I was the storm. That’s what [the president] said when I was sixteen.

Now I was the uprooted tree the storm sent careening through windows. I would wreck everything.”

Horrifying, captivating, and full of urgency.

Take Two, Birdie Maxwell Scotch, Allison Winn | Berkley (368 pp.) $18.00 paper | March 5, 2024 9780593546550

After dressing down a director and being canceled by the public, America’s (now former) rom-com sweetheart goes on a road trip to discover which of her exes wrote her an anonymous love letter.

Thirty-four-year-old Birdie Robinson, from Medford, Oregon, is movie royalty. Except she’s really Birdie Maxwell from Barton, California, and she’s been caught in an epic downward spiral after having a tantrum on the set of her latest movie. The fact that she was really calling out the director for being handsy with extras and day actors is swept under the rug. Her >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

25

1/8/24 5:29 PM

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 26

1/8/24 5:29 PM

P O D C A S T // F I C T I O N

Fully Booked

Guest host Sarah MacLean interviewed Adriana Herrera on this all-star romance-themed episode. BY MEGAN LABRISE

EPISODE 329: ADRIANA HERRERA

EDITORS’ PICKS:

Wolfpack by Amelia Brunskill (Little, Brown) Big by Vashti Harrison (Little, Brown) Cutting Teeth by Chandler Baker (Flatiron Books) ALSO MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE:

Yellowjackets (TV series) Beauty Queens by Libba Bray Beautifully Me by Nabela Noor, illus. by Nabi H. Ali Whisper Network by Chandler Baker We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Beneath Caaqi’s Wings by Rich Shapero

Adriana Herrera

Fully Booked is produced

by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.

To listen to the episode, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 27

For this issue’s special romance focus, we’re revisiting a Takeover episode of the Fully Booked podcast with guest host Sarah MacLean, a bestselling author, Washington Post columnist, and Fated Mates podcast co-host. Her latest novel, Knockout (Avon/HarperCollins, 2023), is the third installment in her Hell’s Belles series. Kirkus called it simply “sensational” (starred review). On Takeover episodes, a regular feature at the podcast that was introduced last year, a beloved bestselling author invites a colleague whose work they admire for an in-depth conversation—writer to writer. The questions they ask and the subjects they explore are all up to them.

Here, MacLean was in conversation with bestselling author Adriana Herrera, whose novel made waves: An Island Princess Starts a Scandal (Canary Street Press, 2023) is a vibrant, queer, belle epoque romance Kirkus called “empowering and exhilarating.”

Here’s a bit more from Kirkus’ starred review: “Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan would like to be thoroughly debauched before returning to Venezuela and entering into a loveless marriage for the benefit of her family’s finances. After she bonds with the enticing Duchess of Sundridge, Cora Kempf Bristol, over their mutual appreciation for art, the women come to an agreement.

Business-minded Cora wants to buy land owned by Manuela to complete a railroad, and Manuela agrees to sell in exchange for Cora’s introducing her to the parts of Paris where women who like women gather throughout the remainder of her trip. Cora was once involved in a scandal and has no desire to be part of another, so she tries to push aside her desire for vivacious Manuela, but their attraction proves irresistible.

As Manuela’s sojourn approaches its end, though, the women realize they

An Island Princess Starts a Scandal Herrera, Adriana

Canary Street Press | 368 pp. | $30.00 May 30, 2023 | 9781335006349

don’t want a future without each other.

Herrera delivers another sumptuous and historically rich romance, following A Caribbean Heiress in Paris (2022). The queer and Latine characters are lively and bold, and they get to embrace a full, earned happily-ever-after….The big emotions, exciting drama, and toe-curling sensuality make for an engrossing tale, but what stands out is the sense of community.

This is a riveting story of finding one’s person, but equally important, it’s about finding one’s people—the friends who understand, accept, embrace, and encourage. It’s with that support that these characters are able to…open themselves up to love and be loved.”

Then editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, and Laurie Muchnick shared their top picks in books for the week.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

27

1/8/24 7:19 PM

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 28

1/8/24 5:29 PM

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

Book to Screen

Cian Oba-Smith/Prime Video

Amazon Renews Good Omens for Final Season The series is based on Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 comic fantasy novel.

The series adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens is returning for another

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 29

season, its third and last, Variety reports.

The series, produced by Amazon and the BBC, is based on the 1990 comic fantasy novel about Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, who work to prevent the end of the world. Starring Michael Sheen, David Tennant, and Jon Hamm, it premiered in 2019 and has received mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers. Its second season was released in July 2023.

In a statement, Gaiman said, “Terry was determined that if we made Good Omens for television, we could take the story all the way to the end. Season One was all

about averting Armageddon, dangerous prophecies, and the End of the World. Season Two was sweet David Tennant and gentle, and Michael Sheen although it may in Season 2 of have ended less Good Omens. joyfully than a certain Angel and that our global customers Demon might have hoped. have come to enjoy.”

Now in Season Three, we There’s no release date for will deal once more with the the third season.—M.S. end of the world. The plans for Armageddon are going wrong. Only Crowley and Aziraphale working together can hope to put it right.

And they aren’t talking.”

Vernon Sanders of Amazon MGM Studios told Variety, “The final season For a review of the is sure to be packed with novel Good Omens, the same dynamic energy visit Kirkus online.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

29

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

attempt at an apology video is a failure, and the public has turned very much against her, so she finds herself retreating to her childhood home in the middle of California, an origin story she’s kept entirely secret during the rise of her acting career. While she’s going through boxes of old papers, she finds an anonymous love letter she’d never seen before—no date, no signature—and decides, for better or worse, that what she needs to rehabilitate her image is a rom-com of her own making in which she tracks down all her exes to ask if they wrote the letter. Along for the ride is Elliot O’Brien, her best friend Mona’s twin brother. She’s known Mona, now a dive bar owner, and Elliot, now a renowned reporter, since the twins moved to town when they were all 12. The story follows the arc of Birdie’s quest in a rickety RV to find the handful of exes who could have written the letter and Elliott’s reporting of the effort. Alternating between Birdie’s and Elliot’s viewpoints, the straightforward story is bolstered by the significant amount of space each main character spends thinking about the crush they’ve had on the other since they were kids and regretting the awkward end to a one-night stand they had seven years earlier.

A drawn-out story of two complicated people scared to tell each other their true feelings, even after more than 20 years.

The Truth About the Devlins Scottoline, Lisa | Putnam (384 pp.) | $26.96 March 26, 2024 | 9780525539704

The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.

The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one 30

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 30

What would you do if you always knew your romantic destiny?

E X P I R AT I O N D AT E S

disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier— until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ. As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.

For more by Lisa Scottoline, visit Kirkus online.

Expiration Dates Serle, Rebecca | Atria (272 pp.) | $27.00 March 19, 2024 | 9781982166823

What would you do if you knew your romantic destiny?

When Daphne Bell receives a card that says the word “Jake” and nothing else, she’s pretty sure she’s about to meet the man she will spend the rest of her life with. In many ways Daphne is your average 30-something, with a middling career as a producer’s assistant in Hollywood and a loving family and friends. But Daphne has received a little extra-special gift (mandate?) from the universe: Near the beginning of romantic relationships, she somehow receives a note bearing the name of a man and the exact amount of time they will date. This began in the fifth grade with a postcard saying, “Seth, eight days.” Since Jake’s card lacks a duration, Daphne jumps to the only logical conclusion: He must be “the one.” When Daphne finally meets Jake Green, he turns out to be sweet and sexy and has the delightful quirk of jotting down in a notebook every time he sees someone wearing Doc Martens, so she decides to put her faith in fate and go all in. But, of course, it can’t be so simple. First, Daphne is hiding significant secrets from Jake. And second, there is Hugo (3 months), Daphne’s ex-boyfriend and current best friend. Although Hugo is always dating some woman or other, when he and Jake meet, the awkward encounter makes it clear that not everyone is okay with Daphne and Hugo’s universe-sanctioned breakup.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Ultimately, it’s up to Daphne to decide how much she’s willing to risk to take control of her future. Nothing groundbreaking here, but Serle provides an interesting conceit and a healthy dose of wit that readers will appreciate.

An entertaining love story with moments of depth.

Nowhere Like Home Shepard, Sara | Dutton (336 pp.) | $18.00 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780593186961

Lenna Schmidt arrives with her baby, Jacob, at a “mommune” outside Tucson, where she’s trying to reconnect with an old friend.

Little does she suspect that someone pulled strings to get her there.

Two years ago, out of the blue, Lenna struck up a deep friendship with Rhiannon Cook, whom she met at an H&M store in Los Angeles. Mourning the loss of her mother, with whom she was incredibly close, Lenna hasn’t had many friends in her life. Rhiannon can be judgmental, particularly toward Gillian, a woman who hangs around the building where they all work, and Frederick, a co-worker on whom Lenna has a crush. But it turns out her life hasn’t always been easy; she tells Lenna that when she was young, her mother drove off a bridge with both her and her brother in the car, and her brother died. One day, Rhiannon skips town, leaving Lenna high and dry; in the radio silence that follows, Lenna begins to be friendly with Gillian, who has some pretty choice things to say about Rhiannon and, really, everyone else, including her roommate, Sadie. Now, two years later, Lenna has a secret—plus a husband, and a new baby—so when Rhiannon reaches out to see if she might want to visit the all-woman commune where she lives, Lenna agrees, hoping they might be able to clear the air. But what is supposed to be a sanctuary hides a malevolent presence from the past—someone hellbent on KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 31

revenge. Lenna has to summon stores of courage and protective mother energy if she’s going to survive. Plenty of twists and turns, as well as some staggered narration—different voices, different time periods—keep the mystery moving. The payoff is okay.

The thrills are fine. The deepest insight Shepard has to offer comes at the end: “All these missed chances, all these mistakes. It’s amazing people invest in friendship at all.”

Fans of Shepard’s other books will be pleased.

Mania Shriver, Lionel | Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.) | $30.00 | April 9, 2024 9780063345393

America is overtaken by an idiocracy in Shriver’s latest satire/anti-PC screed.

In this tale of alternative recent history, circa 2010 the word stupid has become verboten, thanks to the rise of a “Mental Parity” movement that insists nobody is smarter than anyone else. Narrating this lamentable turn of events is Pearson Converse, a college English teacher, mother of three, and fierce critic of the campaign against “smartism” and the “brain-vain” that strictly prohibits all variations of the S-word. (She’s nearly fired when she cheekily assigns her class Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.) In the years that follow, Shriver chronicles the intensifying catastrophe of this anti-intellectual effort: The crossword is canceled, the Mars rover crashes, Osama bin Laden gets away, gay marriage remains illegal, China tramples the U.S. on the world stage. On the home front, Pearson’s two very gifted children grow slack in the absence of academic rigor, while her third, less-bright child turns informant on her mom. Pearson’s partner, a tree surgeon, suffers for lack of competent assistance; her journalist best friend, once as exasperated with “cognitive

justice” as Pearson, turns into its vocal supporter, a move Shriver depicts as vile Vichy collaborationism. Practically every Shriver book in the past decade has been a critique of liberal hobbyhorses; imagining a made-in-theU.S.A. Cultural Revolution, for her, is business as usual. But without a clear sense of what kind of tyranny of the (lib) commons Shriver fears—DEI? the language police? socialism? virtue signaling? grade inflation?—the conceit is a better fit for a tart short story than an extended narrative. And given that today’s most robust anti-intellectual initiatives come from right-wing quarters—book bans, shutdowns of college liberal arts departments, efforts to drain public school funds—Shriver’s process for picking a target seems, let’s say, cognitively subpar.

A peculiar novel driven more by bogeymen than brains.

Kirkus Star

Never Been Better Simpson, Leanne Toshiko | Putnam (288 pp.) | $18.00 paper | March 5, 2024 9780593714782

A bipolar woman travels to Turks and Caicos to break up the wedding of her best friends.

“You can’t just joke about these types of things,” a horrified mother says in Simpson’s invigoratingly comic debut novel, which proves this statement wrong in all the right ways. Full of sharp, pithy dialogue and farcical scenes that will put a grin on your face, this story about love, friendship, and family also offers hard-won wisdom about mental health and the myths that surround it. The novel follows the flailing attempts of Dee Foster, who’s bipolar, to derail the nuptials of her two best friends, Matt Costigan and Misa Nagasaka, during a destination wedding in Turks and Caicos. The three legs FEBRUARY 1, 2024

31

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

of this romantic triangle met in a Canadian psych ward, which Dee was kicked out of for breaking the rules.

Secretly in love with Matt, she falls apart when she receives her friends’ wedding invitation and decides she must tell Matt the truth about her feelings. Tagging along to supervise is her wild sister, Tilley, whose passion for booze and casual sex are almost as all-consuming as her desire to protect Dee. On the island, though, Dee finds chaos already brewing. Matt has gone off his meds and Misa is hiding her illness from her wealthy parents, who don’t even know she was in the hospital. Her calm exterior frustrates Dee, who laments that she wants Misa to “be messy in her illness, like I was in mine.” Dee copes through near-constant jokes, but her self-destructive shame and panic are never far from erupting. Navigating the contrast between humor and pain can be tricky, but Simpson makes it look easy in her first novel.

A funny, refreshing, and generous story full of wisdom on mental health.

Kirkus Star

Perris, California Stark, Rachel | Penguin Press (368 pp.) $29.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9780593656204

Tessa is 27 years old and pregnant with her third child when she runs into her first love, a woman named Mel, and begins to question the life she has built.

Living in a trailer with her husband, Henry, and their children, Preston and Ruby, Tessa feels increasingly smothered by her mother-in-law, Angie, on whose land they reside. Mel’s return prompts Tessa to revisit her youth; graphic flashbacks reveal her mother’s abandonment and the harrowing abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and stepbrother. (Stark’s depiction of those abuses never strays 32

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 32

into trauma porn.) The respite Mel’s love offered teenage Tessa was cruelly taken away when Mel left suddenly and Tessa was forced to draw on previously unknown strength to survive. This indirectly leads her into the lives of Henry and Angie and a future filled with love. Adult Tessa’s emotional withdrawal from family life exemplifies how trauma can trigger self-sabotage, secrecy, the turning away from those who love us, and the fight-or-flight instinct. The theme of motherhood underpins the novel, specifically the synchronous fragility and resilience of mothers and the hurts done to and by mothers. Caregiving is represented as at once claustrophobic and a source of deep joy: “Honey, tired ain’t something women like you and me get to be. Looking after is what I was built for.” In Tessa and Angie’s relationship, Stark captures female solidarity, a shared maternal understanding, and the sacredness of keeping each other’s secrets. As Mel’s presence forces Tessa to confront the vast kaleidoscope of her own personhood, the many selves she has inhabited throughout her life, Tessa accepts that she must make peace with what might have been. This agonizingly sad novel nevertheless rejoices in small acts of loving. When Angie observes that “each other is the whole of what we’ve got,” Stark offers up a balm to soothe not only Tessa’s hurt, but the reader’s.

An extraordinary debut that insists that we can—and must—mend each other.

Ghost Pains Stevens, Jessi Jezewska | And Other Stories (304 pp.) | $19.95 paper | March 5, 2024 9781913505844

Eleven stories of desire that traipse across their landscapes, rearranging the reader’s expectations as they go.

In Berlin, an American expatriate organizes a party, rescinds the invitations, and then

finds the party thrown anyway with consequences that belie the devil-maycare attitude of the guests. In Krakow, a woman in tech with a questionable romantic past, and an even more questionable nipple piercing, runs into an old flame with a pressing problem of inheritance, atrocity, and identity that he’d love for her to help him solve. On Virginia’s Jefferson Davis Highway, a woman and her husband—a newly minted citizen—travel through the legacies of American history to visit her estranged Korean War veteran uncle who’s trapped by his own bitter legacies. Populated by fey expats, ardent psychiatrists, arch historians, and impossible friends who spin in and out of proximity to their narrators as they travel their enchanted orbits, Stevens’ stories echo with a kind of urbane fairy-tale self-assertion that encourages the reader to stop and gaze in reverie at the articulation of the scenes, even as the stories’ main characters go whirling off into their chaotic nights. Characters overlap in many of the stories. Rob the Ex in the punchy “Weimar Whore” is another character’s “kinky historian” in “Ghost Pains.” Sylvia who “lights up a room in her light-blue dress” in “The Party” is also Sylvia the hostile hostess in the final story of the collection, “A New Book of Grotesques.” Yet, even the stories that do not share this revolving cast of acquaintances or have a gridwork of city streets in common are united by Stevens’ impeccable artistry, which manages to overlay the gauzy romance of the stranger in a strange land atop the grim economic and interpersonal realities that so often accompany relative youth, relative freedom, and relative love.

Erudite, eloquent, and bittersweet— these stories are like chewing on the orange rind for a last bitter taste of the drink.

For more by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Kirkus Star

The Sleepwalkers Thomas, Scarlett | Simon & Schuster (224 pp.) | $26.00 | April 9, 2024 9781668032985

The author of Oligarchy (2020) and The Seed Collectors (2016) writes something like a thriller.

The epistolary novel is kind of a tough sell these days. Writing a narrative in letters might have given Samuel Richardson license to let his characters speak in candid, informal ways that were otherwise inaccessible, but his innovations are so much a part of Anglophone literature now that his runaway bestsellers Pamela and Clarissa mostly persist as punishment for English majors. That said, Thomas is nothing if not adventurous. In her latest novel, she dares to ask the reader for willing suspension of disbelief as she composes a novel from lengthy confessions written by a husband and a wife—with a few other documents tossed into the mix.

Evelyn and Richard are honeymooning at a Greek resort that is famous both for its exclusivity and for the fact that it was the last stop for a couple that drowned together in the sea—the sleepwalkers of the title. The narrative begins in a letter Evelyn is writing to Richard, and two things are immediately clear: She and her new husband lightly despise each other, and isolated Villa Rosa is a strange and possibly dangerous place.

Fans of Gothic literature are likely to settle in comfortably right away. For other readers, Evelyn’s voice should be compelling enough to let them forget that they’re reading a letter—a very long letter, crafted by hand, during one night—and immerse themselves in the story that Evelyn is telling. Thomas also lets Richard have his say, his account serving as a counterpoint to Evelyn’s.

This is a novel about secrets, family curses, and the past erupting into the present: all gothic tropes. But Thomas’ concerns extend beyond her main KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 33

characters; refugees, sex workers, and victims of human trafficking exist in the background and sometimes emerge as full characters.

Another difficult-to-classify novel from a seemingly fearless writer.

Kirkus Star

The New Couple in 5B Unger, Lisa | Park Row Books (384 pp.) $26.09 | March 5, 2024 | 9780778333340

Although a surprise inheritance sounds like good luck, it turns out to be anything but in a tense, twisty thriller.

New Yorkers Rosie and Chad Lowan have spent most of the first year of their marriage caring for his dying uncle Ivan. Rosie, the novel’s engaging narrator, expects Ivan’s long-estranged daughter, Dana, to inherit his dreamy Park Avenue apartment, so she’s shocked to discover after his death that he’s left it to her and Chad. It’s a huge boon—Chad is an aspiring actor, and Rosie has published one bestselling true-crime book but is struggling to start a second, so money is always tight.

The apartment in the elegant, centuryold Windermere is not just a place to live but a multi-million-dollar asset.

Dana, however, is not just surprised to be cut out of Ivan’s will but furious.

The couple’s joy is marred not only by her rage but by odd goings-on in the building. At the behest of her editor and BFF, Max, Rosie focuses her next book on the Windermere’s grisly history of residents who died in

murders, suicides, and bizarre accidents. Does the building bear some sort of curse—and if so, is it all in the past?

As first one person in Rosie’s orbit and then another die, she becomes suspicious of people like the Windermere’s longtime doorman, Abi, and the kindly old couple across the hall, Charles and Ella Aldridge, who have lived there for decades and take much interest in Rosie’s efforts to get pregnant. And is Chad, a golden-haired charmer, as perfect as he seems? If all this reminds you of Rosemary’s Baby, it’s meant to—the book is salted with references to that classic melding of mystery and horror, and it vibrates with the same sense of escalating dread. But Unger builds her own fast-moving, creepy combination of thriller and horror in one of her best books yet.

This propulsive, haunted thriller proves that competition for New York City real estate really can be deadly.

Like Happiness Villarreal-Moura, Ursula | Celadon Books (304 pp.) | $28.00 | March 26, 2024 9781250882837

A woman recalls her friendship with a man caught in the grip of the #MeToo movement.

In Santiago in 2015, Tatum Vega lives with her girlfriend, settled into her life as a museum employee far from her working-class roots in San Antonio, Texas. She’s contacted by a journalist from the New York Times who wants to know about her relationship with the writer M.

Another difficult-to-classify novel from a seemingly fearless writer.

THE SLEEPWALKERS

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

33

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Dominguez, who has been accused of sexual improprieties. Initially reluctant to discuss her friendship with M., whom she knows as Mateo, and cautioning the journalist that she was never sexually mistreated by him, Tatum finally agrees to a series of conversations; eventually, this onslaught of memories causes her to chronicle her time with M. Addressing Mateo in the second person, Tatum recounts her past as a transplanted Tejana at Williams College in Massachusetts, a place she picked so she could be close to the history of literary heroes like Sylvia Plath. Her desire to exist merely as a “pulsating mind” leaves her lonely and largely friendless; her status as Latina in the white-dominated worlds of the arts and humanities leads her to reach out to the Latino author of the short story collection Happiness, her favorite book. The fan letter she writes kickstarts a decade of a (mostly) platonic relationship in which Tatum and Mateo endure failed romances, Mateo struggles to write a novel, and Tatum gradually comes to understand her sexuality. As the chronicle barrels toward the moment when the relationship implodes, Tatum realizes there are many different kinds of violation.

Though Villarreal-Moura’s writing style is a bit buttoned-up, her emotionally astute novel offers a moving perspective on the different kinds of victims abusers leave in their wake.

Memorable and incisive, this debut grapples elegantly with the complexity of betrayal.

I’m F*cking Amazing Warden, Anoushka | Doubleday (352 pp.) $29.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9780385549820

A young Londoner comes to grips with her sexual and emotional needs in a tale full of cheeky British humor.

While navigating two major relationships, the unnamed narrator 34

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 34

Underneath jokes and racy limericks beats a strong if conflicted heart.

I’M F*CKING AMAZING

tries to answer the question of how to be fully oneself while in love. Her life is centered on eating, shopping, and sex—there are graphic discussions of how her “fanny” operates—and initially it seems full of familiar if extreme romantic hijinks. (Think Carrie Bradshaw meets Bridget Jones on cocaine.)

A successful office administrator, she offsets her frequent emotional disarray by getting organized with the lists and manifestos that sprinkle the narration.

By her mid-20s, she had slept with 24 and a half men, whom she rates on her Top Humps list by averaging her attraction to them via her fanny and brain. Then she meets “Three,” her third “proper boyfriend,” who rates a 9 out of 10 on both scales. They share affectionate emails, mouthwatering meals, and for a while great sex. Then she begins to find intercourse physically painful and develops questionable coping tools, including coke and dodgy flirtations to mask her sexual discomfort/uninterest. She even lets him talk her into marrying him, but, inevitably, the relationship collapses. In the messy aftermath, she faces the fact that she’s broken two of the three life rules she’s always clung to: no marriage, no children, no cheating. She also divulges a major secret that she’s been hiding from readers, thus beginning a pattern of delayed revelation that gives the novel a sharper, darker edge. The issue becomes not whether she is to be believed in any given moment, but whether she is more troubled than she lets on. As she describes her next love affair, with the appealing man she calls “X,” it’s painful to witness her attempt to be a more mature lover by sticking to new lists of impossible rules. Since X brings his own baggage, she ends up confronting increasingly painful truths, his and hers. An ambiguous ending

leaves room for speculation about her romantic future, or maybe a sequel.

Underneath jokes and racy limericks beats a strong if conflicted heart that creates a surprisingly affecting novel.

Kirkus Star

The Father She Went To Find Wilson, Carter | Poisoned Pen (448 pp.) | $16.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9781728293479

A savant who’s spent most of her life under study in an institution leaves on the spur of the moment to go in search of her father, and all hell breaks loose.

Penny Bly has an IQ of 198. She has hyperthymesia, an eidetic memory, the ability to produce fast and startlingly accurate drawings, and an involuntary association of numbers with colors.

Unfortunately, all these gifts stemmed from the day her alcoholic mother, Linda, threw her down a staircase when she was 7, leading to the swift departure of her father, Jack, while Penny was still in a coma and her mother’s loss of custody. Every year Jack Bly sends a birthday card to his daughter at Eau Claire’s Willow Brook Institute for the For more by Carter Wilson, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

FICTION

Brain, but when his greeting on her 21st birthday announces that this will be his last attempt to contact her, she bolts with no warning to her longtime therapist, precious few clues as to her father’s whereabouts, and none of the skills that would allow her to negotiate the world outside. Within days, she’s attracted the attention of 19-year-old Travis Shepard, witnessed two murders, killed a third victim herself, and added a new item to her to-do list: warning Fia, the Nicaraguan immigrant who runs the Out to Lunch diner in Willmar, Minnesota, that the murderers she saw are coming after Fia too. Wilson punches up Penny’s anything-can-happen adventures with a deadpan first-person narrative that pares its cast of characters to the absolute minimum and relies on sentences and paragraphs and chapters as short, and about as reassuring, as hiccups.

Fasten your seat belt. This is one wild ride.

These Letters End in Tears Xaviere, Musih Tedji | Catapult (240 pp.) $27.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9781646221868

A West African woman contends with her sexuality, her past, and the confines of her home.

Xaviere’s debut begins more than a decade after the primary trauma of her protagonist’s life: Bessem, a queer woman from “a part of Cameroon where nothing and no one ever gets out,” was arrested alongside her first love, Fatima, after Fatima’s bigoted brother found the two women kissing.

After the arrest, Fatima disappeared, and vague rumors indicate her possible whereabouts: Maybe she was killed, or married off to a man, or ran away.

Bessem has spent the years longing for Fatima: “Everyone else is just a way to pass the time until you come back,” she says. At first, Xaviere’s chapters are framed as unmailed letters Bessem has written to Fatima, a narrative device KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 35

that feels unnecessary and that, in any case, Xaviere seems to lose track of as the novel progresses. Still, this is a minor complaint of a smart, finely detailed book that contends with not only sexuality, homophobia, and traditional gender roles, but also the legacy of colonialism in West Africa.

Bessem is caught in an impossible double bind: Now a university professor, she is painstaking in her efforts to hide her sexuality from her colleagues.

At the same time, though, Bessem is determined to find out what happened to Fatima—a quest that may put her at risk of outing herself. Unfortunately, Fatima, around whom this story spins, is never fully fleshed out in Xaviere’s telling: She is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and despite Bessem’s relentless passion for her, it’s difficult for the reader to fully make out Fatima’s form. Despite the fine storytelling, Fatima’s character remains blurry and unfinished.

Xaviere’s vivid and moving first novel is a resounding success despite a few flaws.

Sylvia’s Second Act Yablon, Hillary | Pamela Dorman/Viking (352 pp.) | $29.00 | March 12, 2024 9780593493618

Bye-bye, Florida retirement community— hello, Manhattan!

“Because I am an avid fan of Sex and the City (I’ve seen it from start to finish six times), I know that Belinda is in reverse cowgirl position.” When Sylvia walks in on

her husband, Louis, with the “roving whore of Boca Beach Gables” and learns in the aftermath that he has lost all their money through a bad investment, she feels mainly relief. She finally has a good reason to leave him, which she’s wanted to do for a long time. She heads over to her friend Evie’s, who suggests they start drinking immediately and the next day puts Sylvia in an Uber to the airport. Her initial plan—to stay with her daughter, Isabel, and help with the twins—is foiled by Isabel, who has no faith in her mother’s ability to make it on her own and is determined to get her parents back together. Rather than cave in to pressure, Sylvia decides to do the one thing she “really, truly” wants: move to Manhattan and restart her wedding-planning business. Though she would also like to “remember what it’s like to enjoy sex,” there’s no marriage plot here: Sylvia’s game plan is far more Sex and the City than Golden Bachelor. She persuades Evie to fly up to join her, and the roomies plunge into city living together in an Airbnb in Harlem, with Sylvia pawning her jewelry for seed money and going for a job interview with a rival wedding planner who did her dirty long ago.

Yablon’s debut is mostly gentle screwball comedy, with a bit of gravitas added by Evie’s plotline—she lost her son to a drug overdose, and his widow has cut her off from her grandchild.

So along with a messy affair, a penitent husband, and an angry daughter, Sylvia’s got that to worry about, too. But for a 63-year-old lady, she’s not much of a worrier. What Yablon (who’s much younger than her protagonists) gets right is that Sylvia cares less about finding true love than about work and friendship.

A little sex, a lotta laughs in the city.

A West African woman contends with her sexuality and her past.

THESE LETTERS END IN TEARS

>>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

35

1/8/24 5:29 PM

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

Lauren Groff To Open a Bookstore in Florida The novelist and her husband will open The Lynx in Gainesville this spring.

Lauren Groff is adding bookstore owner to her résumé.

The critically acclaimed author will open The Lynx, a bookshop in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, Clay Kallman, this spring, Shelf Awareness reports.

Groff is known for novels including Fates and Furies, Florida, and, most recently, The Vaster Wilds, published in September by Riverhead. She has been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize twice and for the National Book Award three times, and former President Barack Obama is among her fans.

The Lynx, Groff told Shelf Awareness, will highlight writers from Florida and

authors whose books have been challenged or banned in the state, which leads the nation in book bans.

“We have such a rich and varied literary history that no one knows about,” Groff said, adding that writers with Florida ties who would be celebrated at the store will include Laura van den Berg, Karen Russell, and Edwidge Danticat.

The store will be located in Gainesville’s Porters Community neighborhood, part of a new development that will feature an outdoor space where author readings can be held.

Groff shared news of the store on Instagram, saying that the physical location won’t be ready for a few months, but that customers can already order books through its page on Bookshop.org.—M.S.

For more about author-run bookstores, visit Kirkus online.

Eli Sinkus

SEEN AND HEARD

Lauren Groff 36

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 36

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:29 PM

I N T H E N E W S // F I C T I O N

IN THE NEWS Russia Adds Boris Akunin to List of Terrorists The country also opened a charge against the detective novelist known for his anti-war views.

David Levenson/Getty Images

The Russian government has added novelist, essayist, and translator Boris Akunin to its list of terrorists and opened a criminal case against him, the Associated Press reports.

Akunin, whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvil, is charged with “discrediting the army” of Russia and is now on the register of “extremists” maintained

by Rosfinmonitoring, the country’s federal financial intelligence service.

Akunin was born and raised in Russia and now lives in London. He is the author of more than 25 historical mystery novels, many featuring Erast Fandorin, a Russian detective in the late 19th century, and Nicholas Fandorin, Erast’s grandson. Akunin’s books include Murder on the Leviathan, The Death of Achilles, and The State Counsellor, all translated by Andrew Bromfield.

He has been a frequent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 37

Boris Akunin

against Ukraine. Earlier this month, the large Russian publisher AST announced that because of his opposition to the war it would no longer print or sell his books.

Akunin posted his reaction to the charge on his website: “A seemingly minor event, the banning of books, the declaration of some writer as a terrorist, is actually an important milestone. Books have not been banned in Russia since Soviet times.

Writers have not been accused of terrorism since the Great Terror.

This is not a bad dream, this is happening to Russia in reality.”—M.S.

For more on Boris Akunin’s mysteries, visit Kirkus online.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

37

1/8/24 5:29 PM

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 38

1/8/24 5:29 PM

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

6 Enticing Romances for Valentine’s Day 2

For more great romance novels, visit Kirkus online.

1 Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend

4

1

By Emma R. Alban

A stunning Sapphic Victorian romance from an author to watch.

2 A Dish Best Served Hot

By Natalie Caña

A vibrant second-chance love story about repairing community and romantic connection.

3 Her Adventures in Temptation

By Megan Frampton

A strong historical romance for fans of bluestocking love stories.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 39

4 Red String Theory

By Lauren Kung Jessen

A lighthearted slow burn that’s full of hope and heart.

5 Game On

6

3

By Seressia Glass

A modern love story that any true gamer will enjoy.

6 Last Call at the Local

By Sarah Grunder Ruiz

Compassionate and completely charming.

5

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

39

1/8/24 5:30 PM

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

Death Comes Too Late Ardai, Charles | Hard Case Crime (400 pp.) | $15.95 paper | March 12, 2024 9781803366265

Ardai celebrates the 20th anniversary of his publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, by reprinting 20 of his own noir tales from 1990 to 2023.

Any collection this big is bound to be a mixed bag, but even the lesser stories here illuminate the formulas they depart from. “The Investigation of Things,” in which two Chinese brothers compete to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk, shows that Ardai’s gifts aren’t best suited to whodunits.

The cancellation of a boy’s promised trip to see the circus in “The Day After Tomorrow” pushes Ardai’s ability to plot a short-short story to the limit. And “Nobody Wins,” which chronicles the gratuitously calamitous effects of a private eye’s search for his missing fiancee, has a title that would have been perfect for this whole volume. Ardai’s best stories walk a tightrope between noir fatalism and surprising invention.

Some of them boast unsettlingly original premises. A fed pursues a doomed relationship with the grieving mother of a boy he arrested and got killed in “The Home Front”; “Game Over” follows a roll of quarters intended as a birthday gift; “My Husband’s Wife” showcases the coolly amoral voice of a conference attendee’s wife as she commits an escalating series of infractions. Other stories present endings bound to startle the most hard-bitten fans.

“The Case” follows the adventures of a suitcase bomb that hasn’t (yet) exploded; a bodyguard’s search for a lubricious charge who’s disappeared from under his nose leads to a bloodbath in “Jonas and the Frail”; the man who hires a trio of contract killers in “Masks” turns out to have a shocking motive; and the ending 40

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 40

of “A Free Man,” neatly balancing disillusionment and sentiment, provides a fitting close to the volume.

Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.

Murder at La Villette Black, Cara | Soho Crime (288 pp.) | $27.95 March 5, 2024 | 9781641294478

A detective’s struggle to raise her daughter in Paris meets an unexpectedly grim obstacle.

Despite the dangers and demands of life as a private investigator, Aimée Leduc has always been attentive to the needs of her 3-year-old daughter, Chloé.

Reliable child care and the help of her friends have allowed Aimée to resist the attempts of Chloé’s father, police detective Jérome Melac, to remove the child to his farm in rural Brittany. But now Aimée’s desire to have Melac out of her life for good has succeeded in the worst possible way. His body is found beneath an arched bridge that spans a canal in La Villette, and Aimée is found on the scene with his blood all over her hands. With the help of her godfather, Commissaire Morbier, she’s released from custody, but she knows that her chances of keeping her daughter, as well as her freedom, rest with her ability to find Melac’s killer. It had been a voicemail from Melac that brought Aimée to the scene of his death—”Aimée...I’ve just seen a ghost”—and now she

begins searching for whomever, or whatever, he’d been talking about.

Like many of her investigations, Aimée’s search leads back to an older crime, this time the serial murders committed by le Balafré, a shadowy figure who terrorized La Villette in the 1980s and ’90s. Her investigation features the requisite host of colorful characters who spill out of the biker bars and tattoo parlors of the 19th arrondissement, a bevy of chic disguises, and a few slick car chases.

But as usual, the star of the show is the city Aimée loves.

Vintage Black for fans of women’s empowerment and life in Paris.

In Sunshine or in Shadow Bowen, Rhys & Clare Broyles | Minotaur (304 pp.) | $28.00 | March 12, 2024 9781250890788

A 1908 visit to the Catskills is spoiled by murder.

Because New York City is suffering an outbreak of typhoid, Police Captain Daniel Sullivan encourages his pregnant wife, Molly, to remove their household to his mother’s home in Westchester. Family ties also take Molly’s best friends,

For more by Rhys Bowen & Clare Broyles, visit Kirkus online.

A detective’s struggle to raise her daughter in Paris meets a grim obstacle.

M U R D E R AT L A V I L L E T T E

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:30 PM

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

free-spirted feminists Sid and Gus, to the Catskills when a letter arrives asking Sid to come see her elderly Bubbe and Zayde. Her grandparents, who disapprove of her lifestyle, live quietly on a farm that they’re laboriously converting to a bungalow colony for Jews who are unwelcome elsewhere. Molly, who’s bored at her mother-in-law’s, visits her friends, who are staying at an artists’ retreat near Sid’s relatives. Sid’s grandfather’s alleged ill health was just an excuse to get her to the farm, where a matchmaker has brought possible mates for both Sid and her cousin Mira. Mira’s match, Mr. Simon Levin, is a flashy, conceited young man with plans to build a hotel on disputed state land; he’s already fighting with the owners of a nearby bluestone quarry over the noise they make with dynamite.

Sid’s match is a college professor she finds interesting but has no intention of wedding. While they’re all out walking in the woods, Levin is shot with his own rifle, and the local police fasten on Mira, who’s been acting bad ever since she realized she was tricked by her grandparents, as his killer. When her friends beg Molly to help Mira, she unearths other motives for his murder, but it will take a visit from Daniel to get Mira exonerated.

Despite a few satisfying surprises, the fascinating historical information on the early Catskill resorts overwhelms the mystery.

Miss Austen Investigates: The Hapless Milliner Bull, Jessica | Union Square & Co. (368 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Feb. 27, 2024 9781454951803

Murder rattles the close-knit Austen family.

The winter before she turns 20 seems promising for young Jane Austen. Her flirtation with Irish law student KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 41

Mackinac Island continues to be beautiful, touristy, and full of murderers.

TH R E E F U D G E S AN D A BABY

Tom Lefroy has grown more serious, and she hopes the announcement of Jonathan Harcourt’s betrothal to Sophy Rivers, which she anticipates hearing at the Harcourts’ ball, will prompt young Tom to ask for her hand. But the festivities end abruptly when a chambermaid finds the body of a young woman stashed in a laundry closet. The late Madame Renault, a merchant from overseas who sold hats in the Basingstoke market, was clearly killed by a blow to the head. But it’s much less clear who wielded the heavy metal pan.

At Lord Harcourt’s urging, Magistrate Richard Craven first blames vagabonds living on the Harcourt estate. When no vagrants are found, Craven’s eyes shift toward George Austen, Jane’s intellectually disabled older brother. Georgy’s come into possession of a gold and seed pearl chain belonging to Madame Renault, and even though Craven knows that the nonverbal young man is an unlikely killer, he charges him with grand larceny, a capital crime.

The Austens can’t decide which fate would be worst for Georgy: allowing him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, a plea that would consign him to an asylum for the rest of his life; throwing him on the mercy of the court in hope that he’d be transported to Australia, where he would certainly be unable to care for himself; or allowing him to be hanged. If Jane can identify the real killer, however, the court will have to release her brother, and Madame Renault will receive the justice she deserves.

Paints a lively picture of Austen-family dynamics that offers little insight into the writer Jane will become.

Three Fudges and a Baby Coco, Nancy | Kensington (352 pp.) | $8.99 paper | March 26, 2024 | 9781496743701

Mackinac Island continues to be beautiful, touristy, and chock-full of murderers.

Most of the ups and downs in Allie McMurphy’s romance with police officer Rex Manning can be traced to Allie’s inability to stay out of homicide investigations. Just as she’s congratulating herself on two years of running the historic McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shop, her best friend Jenn Carpenter’s doula, Hannah Riversbend, plunges her into another murder case. Allie, Jenn, and Mal the Bichonpoo are out for a walk when they find Hannah holding a gun near the dead body of her boyfriend, park ranger Matthew Jones. After Hannah’s obligatory denial that she’s killed Matthew, Jenn goes into a meltdown at seeing her doula arrested for murder. So Allie naturally agrees to do everything she can to make the doula available for Jenn’s imminent delivery. On top of all that, Allie’s mom arrives on the island with Allie’s wealthy high school sweetheart, Brett Summers, hoping Allie will dump Rex for him. When the ambitious new district attorney persuades the judge to set a high bail for Hannah, Allie gets Brett to loan her the money in exchange for helping him secure permits for a flashy new resort. Hannah’s released in time for Jenn’s delivery, but if she’s to remain free, Allie and her friends need to come up with more motives for Matthew’s murder. The strain puts FEBRUARY 1, 2024

41

1/8/24 5:30 PM

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

The sister of the Wright brothers becomes a reluctant sleuth.

do with her investigation into Sage’s mother, Saffron Jones, an infamous con artist who’s missing, presumed dead. Rose gets two cups of coffee from Ground Rules and starts interviewing Bianca about selling breakfast foods.

When Bianca collapses and dies, Sage is one of several candidates suspected of poisoning her coffee. Although Bianca’s abrasive personality made her a lot of enemies and video footage seems to indicate that Sage had nothing to do with her death, the coffee-shop owner still feels the need to clear her name. Meanwhile, Rose has uncovered quite a few people whose lives were ruined by Saffron, who used Sage in her schemes as a child but dumped her when she began to understand more about her mother’s lifestyle. When Rose begins to investigate Bianca’s death and her twisted relationships, it’s only natural for Sage to wonder whether the murder is somehow connected to Saffron’s cons.

Katharine, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, is proud of Wilbur and Orville and thrilled when a telegram arrives announcing their first flight. Soon afterward, she has words with lazy student Benny Shaw, the handsome, entitled son of a wealthy family who gets by on charisma. Although Katharine has no interest in attending the Shaws’ Christmas party, to which she’s been invited, her best friend, Agnes, whose ambition is to marry well, begs her to come for support. The Wright brothers, who are home for Christmas, have spurned help from the Shaws, preferring to control their own work, but Orville reluctantly agrees to attend the party. Once he’s there, Herman Wheeler, an old schoolmate of the Wrights who seems to hold sway over Mr. Shaw, baits Orville to participate in charades, and he ends up getting mocked. But that’s not the worst, as Orville realizes when he discovers that the drawings and notes for the flying machine have vanished from his jacket, which turns up in the billiard room along with Herman’s bloody body, stabbed with an initialed screwdriver that had also been in Orville’s coat pocket. Orville would be the obvious suspect if it wasn’t for Benny being in the billiard room covered in blood. Believing her student when he says he didn’t kill Herman, Katharine sets out to prove it.

To Slip the Bonds of Earth

Peril in Pink

Flower, Amanda | Kensington (304 pp.) $27.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9781496747662

Leigh, Sydney | Crooked Lane (304 pp.) $29.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9781639106394

The sister of the Wright brothers becomes a reluctant sleuth.

Since graduating from Oberlin College, Katharine Wright has taught high school Latin and Greek, but she’s restricted to teaching underclassmen because she’s a woman.

Murder threatens the opening weekend at an upstate New York bed and breakfast.

Jess Byrne and her business partner, Kat Miller, have every reason to be optimistic about the future of Pearl, their pink-themed B&B in

TO SLIP THE BONDS OF EARTH

pressure on her relationship with Rex, and she realizes it won’t be easy to find a happy ending to either challenge.

Suspects are ultimately uncovered and problems solved in a delightful cozy larded with appetizing fudge recipes.

Death Unfiltered Duncan, Emmeline | Kensington (288 pp.) | $16.95 paper | March 26, 2024 9781496744890

A long-anticipated grand opening doesn’t go quite as planned.

Sage Caplin and her partner, Harley, own Ground Rules Roastery in Portland, Oregon.

They’re ready to upgrade from their two coffee carts to a brick-and-mortar store in a brand-new building owned by Sage’s uncle and filled with small shops, some run by people who aren’t fans of Sage, like her former boss Mark Jeffries and breakfast burrito queen Bianca Moore. Between hiring help and marking the approaching debut of a video game created by her fiance, Bax, Sage has been leading a frantic life. On opening day for the building, a local podcaster, Rose, walks around doing interviews. Although Sage likes Rose, she wants nothing to

For more by Emmeline Duncan, visit Kirkus online.

42

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 42

Believable situations, a complicated cast of characters, and plenty of odd (really odd) occurrences.

Fascinating period detail and little-known historical facts add up to an enjoyable read.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:30 PM

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

Fletcher Lake. Ever since they were featured in the New York Times’ list of up-and-coming Hudson Valley hot spots, they’ve been booked solid for the entire season. But disaster strikes quickly. On their second morning, Jess’ sister-in-law finds a body in the lake, threatening the chill vibe that had been building from the inn’s free-flowing rosé and a successful set from guitarist George Havers, a last-minute replacement for Jess’ ex-boyfriend Lars Armstrong. Lars’ now-late manager, Bob Strapp, was so universally despised that Jess can think of nearly a dozen suspects.

There are so many characters, in fact, that Leigh sometimes seems to lose track of what they’re up to. Some of them comment on events they’ve never been told about, as when Kat taunts Lars about his financial woes, which he’s revealed only to Jess. Jess decides that her mother’s aid will be pivotal to solving Bob’s murder, then drops Mom for a dozen chapters.

Leigh can forget what she’s written earlier in the very same scene. When Jess and Detective James Holloway interview Havers in his room, the musician is “using a towel to shield his lower half.” A page later, he sweeps up his paramour in his arms and carries her to the bed, still in front of Jess and James.

What happened to that towel? After interviewing a suspect, Jess sits in her van and confesses herself “now more

Undersea investigators probe the disappearance of an amateur diver with a turbulent lifestyle.

DARK DIVE

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 43

confused than ever.” She’s not the only one.

Pearl survives its debut, but Leigh needs better expository strategies if she’s planning a follow-up.

Dark Dive Mayne, Andrew | Thomas & Mercer (299 pp.) | $16.99 paper | March 12, 2024 9781662506451

Undersea investigators probe the disappearance of an amateur diver with a turbulent lifestyle.

A strange prologue, set in what’s now Central Florida in the year 11,867 BCE, finds a woman named Niqua running for her life from an unnamed pursuer. In the present, diving sleuth Sloan McPherson of Florida’s Underwater Investigative Unit is summoned by her boss, George Solar, after the coroner’s van, with two corpses aboard, gets stuck in an alligator breeding ground. Recovering submerged bodies is all in a day’s work for Sloan, but rarely under such dangerous conditions. In the middle of the operation, Sloan’s light goes out and she’s attacked not by an apex predator but by a drifting pump.

After a brief hospital stay, Sloan’s attempts to shake her skittishness are supported by her partner, Run, and her daughter, Jackie. Fortunately, her next case unfolds primarily on land.

With sidekicks Hughes and Gwen, she follows up on a missing person report on Fred Stafford, who dives regularly with the Dive Rats but has an otherwise unstable lifestyle. The short, titled chapters and Sloan’s first-person narration maintain a brisk pace as Sloan visits Stafford’s home, where there’s evidence of a break-in; a casino he frequents; and a forest that may have been the site of his last dive.

Mayne’s character portraits are crisp, adding tropes from traditional private eye novels and enlarging the world

he’s created over four previous UIU mysteries. Of course, Sloan inevitably needs to dive again in order to close the case, conquer her fear, and explain Niqua’s flight.

A solid mystery with an underwater backdrop.

Death and Fromage Moore, Ian | Poisoned Pen (320 pp.) | $16.99 paper | March 5, 2024 | 9781728270586

Darkly comic doings in rustic France.

Proving that Paris doesn’t have a monopoly on great French cuisine, tiny Saint-Sauver in the Loire Valley boasts not one but two Michelin-starred chefs. Guy Garçon is the future, explains food critic Auguste Tatillon. Tonight, however, belongs to three-starred Sébastien Grosmallard, owner of Les Gens Qui Mangent, who’s celebrating his return to his hometown by hosting a tasting menu soirée. Although Tatillon believes Grosmallard’s day has passed, patrons look forward eagerly to his signature dessert, parfait de fromage de chèvre de Grosmallard.

But when the dish arrives, disaster!

Grosmallard’s son, Antonin, has made the fabled confection with vegan goat cheese! Grosmallard is livid, Tatillon pans the event, and the next day cheesemaker Fabrice Ménard is found dead is his own fermentation tank.

Normally, Richard Ainsworth would simply shake his head and sigh at the passions these events ignite among his French neighbors. Richard, who owns a bed and breakfast, is known in Saint-Sauver for his quiet demeanor, his love of American cinema, and his passing resemblance to Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham. Egged on by his adventurous dinner partner, lovely Valérie d’Orçay, he decides that there’s something suspicious about Ménard’s death and agrees to help her investigate. Before their inquiry is complete, FEBRUARY 1, 2024

43

1/8/24 5:30 PM

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

he’ll be joined by his estranged wife, his daughter, her husband, three laying hens, the chief of police (who’s Valérie’s ex-husband), the Liebowitz brothers (three Jewish movers from New Jersey), and Passepartout, Valérie’s omnipresent chihuahua. More corpses turn up en route to a labyrinthine solution, but Richard’s diffidence in the face of Valérie’s kineticism is the force that powers this madcap farce.

A movie-buff hero replays the Marx Brothers.

The Murder of Mr. Ma Nee, John Shen Yen & S.J. Rozan Soho Crime (312 pp.) | $25.95 | April 2, 2024 9781641295499

Nee and Rozan unfold a tale in which Mr. Ma is only the first of many casualties in 1924 London.

Shortly after the philosopher Bertrand Russell introduces Judge Dee Ren Jie to University of London lecturer Lao She, who is to become the judge’s Watson, Ma Ze Ren, who survived the Great War as part of the Chinese Labour Corps and then opened a London shop selling Chinese antiquities, is fatally stabbed with a butterfly sword. Judge Dee swings decorously into action, questioning first Ma’s longtime customer Colonel Livingstone Moore and then American poet Ezra Pound and his equally disdainful English friend, Viscount Whytecliff, and turning young pickpocket Jim Finney, aka Jimmy Fingers, into an informant. But his investigation comes too late to save dockworker Ching Pan Lu, another veteran of the Chinese Labour Corps, who’s found dead of a similar wound.

Any suspicions of coincidence are laid to rest by a third murder, then a fourth. Judge Dee, though fighting his addiction to opium, manages to come up with a plausible reason why so many members of the battalion have met sudden deaths and to excel 44

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 44

in the bouts of martial arts in which so many scenes of conflict end. Lao She, no slouch in these ritual battles, proves an able amanuensis except for the many times he apologetically interrupts himself to allow the story to shift back to Judge Dee’s perspective. The effects are unsettling, but not nearly as much as all those fisticuffs among gentlemen who really ought to know better.

First of a series that’s acutely attuned to British racism between the two world wars.

Secrets of a Scottish Isle Neubauer, Erica Ruth | Kensington (304 pp.) $27.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9781496741189

A wild 1927 adventure on a Scottish island includes a mysterious cult and a murder.

American private investigator Jane Wunderly and Redvers, her English fiance, have shared many dangerous undertakings. So a trip to the isle of Iona to vet Robert Nightingale, a cult leader who’s proposed himself to the British government as a possible agent, seems relatively easy. Posing as a new initiate to the Order of the Golden Dawn, Jane soon decides that Nightingale would make a terrible spy. Instead, she takes more time to investigate the cult and its followers, which include several women and the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

Given the limited housing on the island, Jane’s sharing a rented room with Netta Fornario at the McCrary cottage; Redvers, who must keep out of Nightingale’s sight, meets her at a ruined chapel and a deserted beach for reports. Netta’s been acting very oddly, and when Jane finds her dead under mysterious circumstances, an investigation is clearly in order. Two wills turn up, one leaving Netta’s considerable estate to Golden Dawn, the other leaving

A 1927 adventure on a Scottish island includes a mysterious cult and a murder.

SECRETS OF A SCOTTISH ISLE

it to her estranged father. Together they seem to provide at least two parties with a motive for murder.

Now that Golden Dawn has split into two rival factions, the wife of the original leader, who’s staying on the nearby Isle of Mull, may be able to provide Jane with help. Despite a thorny thicket of clues, the truth is finally revealed.

Some historical tidbits and a starkly beautiful landscape add interest to a middling mystery.

A Midnight Puzzle Pandian, Gigi | Minotaur (352 pp.) | $28.00 March 19, 2024 | 9781250880208

A magic-filled family seeks change to avoid a curse that seems unwilling to leave them alone.

Classic stage illusionist Nicodemus the Necromancer has always been something like a second father, or at least a mentor, to Tempest Raj. As his retirement tour begins, Nicodemus realizes that he finds it hard to say farewell to his persona and become just Gareth Nicodemus again.

Tempest sympathizes with him but can’t relate to his anxiety. She’s been glad to leave the world of stage magic behind and transition to her role as an employee of her actual dad’s company, Secret Staircase Construction, where KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:30 PM

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

she hones her skills crafting well-designed illusory works of architectural art. It’s not just her love of the work that brings Tempest relief. She’s all too aware of the curse that’s haunted her father’s family for years: “The eldest child dies by magic.” In previous books in the series, Tempest has seen the curse devastate her relatives.

Though construction work is meant to be less dangerous than magic, there are issues with Tempest’s latest project for the difficult Julian Rhodes, and things get a lot more difficult when her client mysteriously winds up dead—though whether it’s by a misfiring booby trap or something more supernatural remains to be seen. Tempest has to prove that Secret Staircase isn’t responsible for what happened to Julian, all while finally unraveling the threads that connect his death to her family’s curse.

Now that this series is wrapping its multibook mystery, it may have a chance to really take off.

A Grave Robbery Raybourn, Deanna | Berkley (336 pp.) $28.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9780593545959

Two intrepid sleuths encounter murders, wild adventures, and other Victorian oddities.

Veronica Speedwell and Stoker Templeton-Vane live on the estate of the Earl of Rosemorran, whose vast collection of objects they catalogue and repair. Rosemorran has recently purchased a life-size wax figure in a glass casket, resembling Sleeping Beauty, as a birthday gift

For more by Deanna Raybourn, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 45

A puzzling mystery bolstered by an exploration of bizarre Victorian mores.

A G R AVE RO B B E RY

for his daughter, and he asks Stoker to add a mechanism that will make the figure appear to be breathing.

When Stoker cuts into it, though, he’s horrified to realize that it was once an actual woman, somehow made to look like the kind of waxwork that appears at Madame Tussaud’s. The sleuths want to know where the body came from, who the lady was, and how she died. A close study suggests she was a housemaid who was pregnant and drowned, either by accident, suicide, or murder. Veronica and Stoker question Lord Rosemorran, who sets them on the trail of a most peculiar and dangerous case. Their first stop for information is the circus, where they learn that someone named Lord Ambrose Despard had purchased a waxwork they remember from their former adventures. A visit to Despard reveals an eccentric collector who has something to hide. With some help from a journalist friend and an ambitious Scotland Yard detective, the sleuths follow a trail that will eventually reveal all, though not in time to prevent more deaths.

A puzzling mystery bolstered by an exploration of bizarre Victorian mores.

Murder Marks the Page Smith, Karen Rose | Kensington (272 pp.) $27.00 | March 26, 2024 | 9781496747037

The adopted daughter of an accomplished sleuth follows in her mother’s footsteps.

Jazzi Swanson moved from Pennsylvania to open a shop with

her best friend, Dawn Fernsby, in the New York resort town of Belltower Landing. Although Tomes & Tea isn’t living up to the expectations of Dawn’s parents, who want her to sell her share, the partners think more publicity would improve business.

Jazzi has recently found her birth parents, and she thinks Dawn’s parents blame her for the fact that Dawn wants to search for her own birth parents. Meanwhile, Jazzi’s friend Delaney has asked her to help Brie Frazier, another adoptee, decide what to do about connecting with her birth family. Brie’s birth father is a wealthy man with a second wife and two stepchildren, none of whom is eager to welcome her into the fold.

When Delaney drops in on Brie to see how she’s doing, she finds her friend dead. Jazzi is interviewed by a detective who knows all about the sleuthing adventures of her mother, Daisy Swanson, in Willow Creek, Pennsylvania, and is not averse to a little help. Motives for the killing aren’t hard to find. Not only did Brie have problems with her new family, but she’d been using a dating app and had recently gone out with a bunch of guys, and her phone and laptop, loaded with potential leads, are missing. Jazzi, who’s still not over a bad breakup with a longtime boyfriend, has turned down a lot of interesting men who want to date her, but they’re still a good source of information, and some of them even pitch in to improve Tomes & Tea’s social media presence. Much as Jazzi’s nosiness annoys a lot of people and puts her in jeopardy, she refuses to give up.

This delightful spinoff from the Daisy Tea Garden Mysteries should garner many fans of its own. >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

45

1/8/24 5:30 PM

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 46

1/8/24 5:30 PM

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 47

1/8/24 5:30 PM

F I C T I O N // S C I E N C E F I C T I O N & F A N TA S Y

The Tainted Cup Bennett, Robert Jackson | Del Rey (432 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 978-1-9848-2070-9

Sherlock Holmes meets Game of Thrones.

Call Bennett’s latest a drawing-room mystery, albeit the drawing room is the size of a small otherworldly kingdom.

It begins, natch, with a corpse. “You were informed that the nature of his death was an alteration, yes, sir?” So asks a military officer of young Signum Dinios Kol, a.k.a. Din, who’s noted that a tree has torn the unfortunate victim apart. Din works for an oddball private detective, Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, a.k.a. Ana, who combines the wiles of Irene Adler with the eccentricities of Sherlock Holmes, including his penchant for narcotics. Din suspects that members of the Haza clan, corrupt 1 percenters, are mixed up in the nastiness, for they’re in the way of acquiring some real estate in the area, and the victim was an impediment. The whole business is complicated by the fact that someone has been undermining the walls of the empire so that leviathans can slither in from the ocean and add their mischief to the evil doings of errant titans abroad in the land. Ana has a fierce temper and is more loquacious than the subdued but sometimes lethal Din: “I do so admire,” she tells him, “how you can be a flippant shit with a mere handful of syllables. Quite a talent.” Bennett borrows from his own Foundryside series for a detail: Where those books involved a strange art called “scriving,” here Din is an Imperial engraver, “altered to remember everything I experienced, always and forever,” handy when it comes to memorizing safe combinations and the exact wording of past conversations. With plenty of red herrings—beg pardon, red leviathans—and neatly imagined plot twists to work through, the reader fond of faux medieval neologisms and occasional grownup moments (“a 48

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 48

glimpse of her body, and a winking tuft of pubic thatch”) will enjoy solving the mystery with our heroes.

A rousing adventure for alt-fantasy fans.

Fathomfolk Chan, Eliza | Orbit (448 pp.) | $19.99 paper Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780316564922

Chan’s debut submerges readers in a fantasy world where all manner of mythical water creatures live among humans.

The partially flooded city of Tiankawi is supposedly a symbol of how well humanity and fathomfolk can coexist.

The fathomfolk—beings inspired by mythical water creatures from mermaids to kappas to kelpies—are able to take human form and live either on land or underwater. But prejudice and discrimination from the richer, more powerful humans keep them in poverty, swimming in polluted waters while humans live in luxury high above the sea. Mira, half-human and half-siren, is the first fathomfolk promoted to the rank of captain in the border guard and hopes to bring about change from within the system.

Her partner, Kai, a water dragon from one of the few privileged fathomfolk families, is united with Mira to fight for reforms in Tiankawi’s human-controlled government. When Kai’s little sister, Nami, is sent to stay with them, she rejects their methods as slow and ineffectual. Nami is young and naïve, too passionate to play by the rules. She falls in with a group of fathomfolk radicals, enchanted by their energy and promise to enact real change. But when the annual Tiankawi boat race is mysteriously sabotaged and humans are drowned, tensions rise and the government cracks down even further on fathomfolk rights. When Nami’s extremist friends reveal even more dramatic plans, she and Mira have to find a way to unite humans and fathomfolk before the whole city falls

apart. Chan floats beautifully between multiple point-of-view characters, and also between different facets of Tiankawi life, from the poor to the privileged. From Nami’s well-meaning immaturity to Mira’s complicated feelings about her dual identity, all the characters have fully realized perspectives and goals that clash with each other in both clever political plots and exciting action scenes.

The first installment in what will hopefully be a long series of undersea adventures.

Kirkus Star

Your Utopia Chung, Bora | Trans. by Anton Hur Algonquin (256 pp.) | $18.99 paper Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781643756219

Science fiction blends with pointed social critique in these short stories from South Korea.

In 2022, Chung’s first collection to appear in English, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. These eight stories pick up where that book left off, using darkly speculative premises—with surprising flashes of wry humor—to explore social ills. Where Chung’s debut skewed toward fairy tale–infused horror, these stories are full of SF staples: spaceships, robots, futuristic technologies. In the opener, “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee at the eponymous facility has to pull off a “ninety-eighth anniversary celebration.” When things go awry, the worker is hit by the hard truth of their employer’s mission. In “The End of the Voyage,” a Department of Defense linguist on a space mission designed to outrun a cannibalistic virus on Earth discovers she has the world’s worst co-workers. The title story is narrated by a piece of “inorganic intelligence,” a solar-powered “autobody” whose human occupant KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:30 PM

S C I E N C E F I C T I O N & F A N TA S Y // F I C T I O N

has perished (along with the rest of his species) in a cataclysmic virus—viruses pop up numerous times in these tales; no surprise, given the book originally appeared in Korea in 2021—and who now faces a series of obstacles for its own survival. In the poignant “Maria, Gratia Plena,” a worker scanning a comatose criminal’s brain for memories discovers, instead of clues to her crimes, a haunting past. In an author’s note, Chung says that “loss and trauma are the only common elements of human life,” which explains the book’s melancholy. But she also notes that the acts of imagining a utopia and mourning when it falls short are the first steps toward creating a better world. A big job for fiction; Chung’s up to the task.

The imagined worlds here may not be utopian—but the reading experience is.

Kirkus Star

A Flame in the North Saintcrow, Lilith | Orbit (448 pp.) | $19.99 paper | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780316440332

An epic fantasy with echoes of Tolkien and Norse myth.

Young Solveig is a weirdling, and a rare one born with enough elemental magic to work with all of the elements and even summon flame from nothing. On the night of the Long Dark festival, the only worry on her mind is whether she’ll succeed in relighting the bonfire, since it’s her first year doing it alone as a fully trained volva. But even before her long night’s vigil is over, Solveig gets the grim news that her brother has killed a visitor from a great House in the north. Worse, the price the Northerners demand is a child for a child—and they want her to travel north with them as weregild for a year and a day. Accompanied only by her trusted shieldmaid, Arneoir, Solveig rides north. But they seem to travel KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 49

An epic fantasy with echoes of Tolkien and Norse myth.

A FLAME IN THE NORTH

faster than they should; one of their party has an uncanniness about him; and her companions speak as if the Great Enemy still lived and plotted in the north. Slowly, Solveig will learn the true purpose of her journey, and she and Arn will both be tested as they are drawn deeper and deeper into the Northerners’ great war against evil. This is a compelling world of quasi-Vikings, near-immortal Elders, and misshapen, evil orukhar. Tolkien fans will enjoy the many echoes of his work, including the orc-like orukhar and the great spiders of Mistwood.

But this is more than just a remix of familiar epic fantasy tropes—it’s a fresh and compelling quest story in its own right, suffused with the bitter cold of a winter journey and the fear and wonder of stepping into a legend and doubting you can hold your own.

A thoroughly satisfying tale for fantasy fans to sink their teeth into.

The Trials of Empire Swan, Richard | Orbit (496 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780316361989

In the conclusion to a trilogy that began with The Justice of Kings (2022) and The Tyranny of Faith (2023), Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt and his clerk, Helena Sedanka, prepare for a final confrontation with the zealot Bartholomew Claver.

Declared traitors to the Sovan Empire, Sir Konrad and Helena (our narrator) are both on the run and in search of an army to destroy Claver, who is bent on Imperial rule; the demonic entity who grants him dark magicks has more ambitious designs

on the entire mortal plane. Somehow, Helena is the key to halting these wider plans, which marks her out for special attention from demonic and angelic beings. Meanwhile, Sir Konrad, whom Helena had previously revered (and loved) as a paragon of the law, does more and more legally and ethically dubious things to save his Empire from Claver, Claver’s fanatic followers, and his demonic allies/puppeteers, including deposing the Emperor and taking up forbidden magicks. How many principles will these two have to compromise to defeat this overwhelming evil? It’s interesting to see how this trilogy, while consistently maintaining a grimdark tone, has slowly shifted subgenres over the three volumes.

The first book was primarily a fantasy mystery, the second a political fantasy, and the third more of an epic fantasy featuring an ultimate battle between the forces of good and evil. Overall, the series is an intriguing chronicle of one woman’s struggle to develop agency, despite the overpowering influence of her mentor’s strong personality, vast political and religious currents, and, ultimately, gods and demons from other planes of existence. We know that Helena survives these (mis)adventures, since she narrates the entire saga as an old woman looking back; the unrelenting onslaught of terrible things that happen to her before the thankfully cathartic climax may either grind the reader down or cause the reader to disengage from her plight(s), aware that despite her many, many brushes with death and multiple turning points where she believes she chose poorly, she will ultimately prevail.

Surprisingly hopeful at the last, but despite careful worldbuilding and tense plotting, the book barely escapes being a slog.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

49

1/8/24 5:30 PM

F I C T I O N // R O M A N C E

The Rule Book Adams, Sarah | Dell (368 pp.) | $18.00 paper | April 2, 2024 | 9780593723678

A sports agent’s first official client is the man she dumped years ago in college.

After two years of hard work as an underling, Nora Mackenzie is finally being promoted to full-time sports agent.

She’s worked hard, kept quiet, and allowed men in the office to call her Mac—a nickname she hates—all to show she’s a team player and “one of the guys.” Unfortunately, her boss instructs her to sign Derek Pender, a football player coming off an injury, who happens to be the man she heartlessly dumped in their senior year of college. Derek signs with her for revenge, seeing it as his opportunity to pay Nora back for callously breaking his heart eight years earlier. He insists she be at his beck and call: answering his emails, running his errands, cooking dinner for his dates. He also refuses to let her explain why she broke up with him without warning or explanation.

Nora feels she has no choice but to acquiesce to Derek’s humiliating

An event planner and an astronaut fake a relationship for the holiday season in this debut.

THE KISS COUNTDOWN

50

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 50

demands, since she’s worked too hard to let him ruin her dream job. She hopes he’ll thaw and they might become friends, but Derek’s bad behavior is designed to hide the fact that he’s still in love with her.

Nora’s characterization is uneven, veering between anger at how she’s treated in the male-dominated field to immature bickering and bantering with Derek. Although Adams likely meant for Derek and Nora’s interactions to have an enemies-to-lovers vibe, the characters instead seem juvenile and stuck in the past. The novel is fueled by a string of tropes— second chance romance! married in Vegas! only one bed!—each randomly deployed to keep the book going despite thin characterization and wan plotting.

Haphazard and undemanding.

The Kiss Countdown Easton, Etta | Berkley (336 pp.) | $18.00 paper | April 9, 2024 | 9780593640227

An event planner and an astronaut fake a relationship for the holiday season in this romance debut.

Amerie Price has a lot on her plate. Her relationship recently ended, she was let go from her job, and she’s trying not to let her worries about her parents’ health overwhelm her. To add even more stress, Amerie is trying to get her own event-planning business off the ground and is desperately searching for her first client. Vincent Rogers is an astronaut, which in Houston feels almost like a pickup line, but he’s genuine...except for the fact that he’s been lying for months to his family about having a girlfriend. Vincent and Amerie first meet at a coffee shop when she spills caramel latte all over him. Then, luckily, he turns up at the coffee shop again just in time to help her save face. Her ex is there with his new girlfriend, so

Amerie, thinking quickly, introduces Vincent as her new boyfriend. Then Vincent’s sister shows up, and when he introduces Amerie as the girlfriend he’s mentioned, Amerie impulsively says she’d be happy to attend the family’s black-tie New Year’s Eve party. Amerie has no intention of going, but Vincent offers to make it worth her while by letting her live rent-free in his extra bedroom for a few months so she can save up money for her new business. Vincent’s contacts could also prove useful to Amerie in building a roster of clients. All she has to do is play the part of his doting girlfriend until the new year.

Amerie is snarky and acerbic in the best way, softening up in the face of Vincent’s more cheerful, golden retriever–like energy. Amerie and Vinent’s romance is quite a slow burn, and sometimes their communication styles and personalities feel disconnected. The space industry in Houston is a fun setting, though, leading to delightful space puns and general nerdery.

A lively debut with a charming community setting and a slightly drawn-out slow-burn romance.

The Love Remedy Everett, Elizabeth | Berkley (352 pp.) $18.00 paper | March 19, 2024 9780593550465

A Victorian apothecary finds chemistry with the investigator she hired to retrieve her stolen medical formula.

In the first installment of Everett’s Damsels of Discovery series, private inquiry agent Jonathan Thorne meets Lucinda Peterson as she’s asking his colleague to murder her former lover. Having inherited a small London apothecary, Lucy is shouldering the family business, with its working-class clientele, while being hounded by a moralist group KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:30 PM

R O M A N C E // F I C T I O N

An American woman who’s not to everyone’s taste finds love with a viscount.

IN WANT OF A VISCOUNT

that denounces nontraditional gender roles. To make matters worse, her ex, the son of a rival, decamped with the sore throat remedies she created.

Though he had promised that their sexual relationship was a prelude to marriage, he dumped her as soon as he got her formula, even claiming that her enthusiastic sexuality made her unsuitable for marriage. When she hires Thorne—really to get back the formula, not kill her former lover—she doesn’t know that he’s the son of a baron, a once-dissolute boxer who turned his back on his aristocratic family to raise his biracial child with his late mistress.

Devoted to his daughter, he now lives rigidly to guard against his alcoholism and venal tendencies. Meeting Lucy rouses his fierce passions as well as his wariness about beautiful women.

Though he is discomfited by her stance on contraception and abortion, her devotion to her patients and her family forces him to question his dogmas about “good” women and examine the behavior of men. Lucy, in turn, has to decide if loving Jonathan is worth the risk to her heart and body. Scenes of their charged sexual interactions featuring light kink are interspersed with fraught conversations on bodily autonomy and balanced out by warm Dickensian family episodes.

Melancholy and sexy in turns, a neo-Victorian love story that puts reproductive rights at the heart of a romance.

For more by Elizabeth Everett, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 51

Kirkus Star

The Partner Plot Forest, Kristina | Berkley (416 pp.) | $17.00 paper | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593546451

Two high school sweethearts reconnect in Vegas, where their relationship goes from nonexistent to newlyweds.

When Violet Greene and Xavier Wright met on their first day of 11th grade, they knew they’d found their person for life. Through the ups and downs of cafeteria arguments, prom, and late-night rendezvous, the two always found their way back to each other, vowing to stay together through the long-distance college years and beyond. But Xavier’s NBA dreams were sidelined after he tore his Achilles tendon, and, not wanting to hold back Violet, who was on the fast track to becoming a stylist for the stars, he ended things, and they haven’t seen each other since. Now, nine years later, Violet dresses A-listers from New York to Los Angeles, while Xavier has settled down as an English teacher and assistant basketball coach at their former New Jersey high school. Neither of them has been able to hold a steady partner, and when they run into each other at a club in Las Vegas, they somehow end up at a pretend wedding chapel and wake the next morning with rings on their fingers and no memory of how they got there. They each chalk it up to liquor and old feelings, and Violet hopes to leave their reunion in the past...until she impulsively tells

a magazine interviewer that she just got married. Word travels fast, so to save further embarrassment, Violet and Xavier agree to keep up the ruse for a month, which means living together and being, well, married. As they reconnect, they begin to realize that maybe their relationship is more real than fake, but they have to decide whether they’re willing to reopen old wounds. Forest’s novel is a sweet portrayal of first love and second chances. Violet and Xavier are memorable, real, and vulnerable as they struggle with career sacrifices and the fear of more heartbreak. Yet they were destined from the start—and Forest’s romance never misses a shot.

A second-chance slam-dunk.

In Want of a Viscount Heath, Lorraine | Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) | $9.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 9780063114715

An American woman who’s not to everyone’s taste finds love with an upstanding British viscount.

Leonora Garrison has come to London with her friendly brother and crass, social-climbing mother to find investors for their manufacturing business, which has been foundering since the death of her beloved father.

Her curiosity extends not only to the workings of mechanical items—including the newfangled “writing machine” she’s trying to get off the ground—but also to matters more personal, so she sneaks out of her hotel for a visit to the Elysium, a club where it’s rumored women can have their fantasies fulfilled. When John Castleton, Viscount Wyeth, stops by the same night, the club’s owner, his half-brother Aiden Trewlove, asks a favor: Since they’re short staffed, would Rook, as he’s known, mind educating a spinster who desires her first kiss? Rook has spent his life suppressing his passion, not wanting to be associated with FEBRUARY 1, 2024

51

1/8/24 5:30 PM

F I C T I O N // R O M A N C E

the reckless way his father produced unwanted children (including Aiden) with a string of mistresses. But he agrees to help, and when he meets Leonora in a dark room, their kiss leads to unexpectedly seismic feelings for both of them. After they meet again, at a dinner party for nobles who might invest in Leonora’s company, they tumble into a series of further sensual encounters—Heath can spend pages deliciously describing the way they each long for another kiss—but when they’re caught in a compromising position, they have to decide whether a compelled marriage is what they want. This final book in Heath’s Chessman series, like the others, features a brainy woman who wouldn’t make a traditional bride for a nobleman, and it’s a pleasure to watch Rook appreciate the very qualities in Leonora that many men find odd.

Heath fans will enjoy spending time with the Chessmen and the Trewlove family, catching glimpses of previous couples, but Leonora’s mother could have served her purpose in the story without being so stridently awful.

A delightful fantasy for awkward, intrepid women.

Old Flames and New Fortunes Hogle, Sarah | Putnam (384 pp.) | $18.00 paper | April 2, 2024 | 9780593715055

A witchy florist is reunited with her high school love in this lightly magical second-chance rom-com.

In Moonville, Ohio, a town steeped in lore about magic and love, Romina Tempest and her sisters run The Magick Happens—a shop with flowers, candles, and books. Romina calls herself a “flora fortunist” and uses the language of flowers to help her clientele with their romantic woes. Her own love life has been nothing but heartbreak, so when she unexpectedly encounters 52

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 52

A woman questions what she wants when the trip to her wedding takes a detour.

M AYA ’ S L A W S O F L O V E

her first real love, Alex King, whom she hasn’t seen in 11 years, old feelings resurface. The two of them antagonize each other, but their flirtation comes naturally. Too bad Romina is fake-dating her friend Trevor Yoon—who also happens to be Alex’s soon-to-be stepbrother—as she tries to secure Trevor’s father as an investor in the shop. Lies and secrets will eventually be revealed, and Romina will have to decide whether she’s willing to risk her heart once more. The magical elements add a nice touch of whimsy to this humorous tale, while Romina’s damaging former relationships and desire to be a mother add realistic dramatic heft. The story feels like it’s trying to do too much at once, however—too many side plots and tropes—which makes it feel messy and meandering. Some readers may also be put off by all the secrets Romina and Alex keep from each other initially.

Still, Moonville is an enchanting town many will hope to revisit.

A somewhat muddled yet still charming small-town love story, with magic.

Kirkus Star

Maya’s Laws of Love Khawaja, Alina | Harlequin MIRA (368 pp.) $17.99 paper | March 26, 2024 9780778305248

A woman questions what she really wants when the trip to her wedding takes a detour.

Maya Mirza, a 28-year-old Pakistani Canadian teacher,

has had such a history of bad luck that she thinks she must be cursed, and she’s come up with a series of laws to try to cope with it, beginning with “Maya’s Law #1: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” She’s always had particularly bad luck in love, but things may be changing now that she’s headed to Pakistan for an arranged marriage with a handsome doctor named Imtiaz, whom she’s known for only a few months. Unfortunately, though, Maya’s curse seems to be following her: When she gets on the plane, she finds herself seated next to the jerk who bumped into her in the airport, making her drop her travel documents, and kept walking without even a hint of apology.

When the flight ends up grounded in Switzerland due to a storm, with no help from the airline and only a week to go until her wedding, Maya decides to team up with the only person she knows—the jerk, whose name is Sarfaraz—to try to make it to Pakistan on time. As they travel, though, Maya begins to wonder if the wedding she’s headed to is what she really wants. The story of Maya and Sarfaraz is a refreshing spin on the endearing sunshine-and-grump trope.

Maya means well but always ends up in scrapes; Sarfaraz is reluctant but finds himself opening up to Maya.

The fear at the roots of both their personalities makes them seem real, and their Pakistani Muslim milieu For more romance reviews, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:30 PM

R O M A N C E // F I C T I O N

is evoked in great depth. The reader is pulled along through each stop on Maya and Sarfaraz’s long and ridiculous journey, rooting for not only the happy ending that is clearly coming but also the catharsis that will come with it. Khawaja has written a gem of a first novel.

A heartwarming romp of love and self-discovery.

That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human Lemming, Kimberly | Orbit (336 pp.) | $18.99 paper | March 5, 2024 | 9780316570350

Hijinks abound when a prickly dragon-shifter accidentally claims his fated mate without wooing her first.

Fiery and a little reckless, Cherry Hotpepper has spent the last five years cooped up in an aging dragon-shifter’s island tower. Her captor has never said a word to her, and she isn’t entirely sure why he hasn’t eaten her. Yet every escape attempt ends the same way: with someone forcefully returning her to the dragon’s keep. So when another dragon-shifter shows up and offers to help her get home, Cherry leaps at the chance, but she’s already drugged the newcomer with a powerful hallucinogen. Little does she know that Dante Remnac can barely keep his hands off her—and that was even before he was doped up.

In the aftermath of a monumental war, Dante’s few remaining friends have all found human women to love. Even so, he hasn’t been actively looking for a bride; stumbling upon his fated mate while visiting his father’s old friend Gideon was merely a happy accident. Still riding high on an ayahuasca trip that sees him chastised by a talking banana after his arms crawl away from him, Dante bites Cherry’s neck, sharing his magic with her and jump-starting KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Fiction_RD6.indd 53

their honeymoon...before he’s even learned her last name. Readers in search of character-driven stories will find much to love here, as Cherry, Dante, and a wide cast of secondary characters are all fully realized people. Unwilling to put her family in danger by telling her new husband where they live, Cherry waffles between wanting to escape and yearning for more of Dante’s—literally—electrifying touch. Neither of them realizes her sister is married to his friend, leading to an abundance of miscommunication that never betrays the novel’s overall coziness.

Lemming’s latest is a gleefully flirty romp through a fantasyland tinged with shades of Diana Wynne Jones and Heather Fawcett.

A concentrated burst of monster-loving, enemies-to-lovers fun.

Lady Charlotte Always Gets Her Man Marsh, Violet | Forever (336 pp.) | $16.99 paper | March 5, 2024 | 9781538739693

A lady escapes a dangerous betrothal and discovers a new life elsewhere in London.

Like many women of her time, Lady Charlotte Lovett is informed about her engagement, rather than given a choice in the matter, though it’s unusual that her mother waited to tell her until they’re at the fitting for a gown for her betrothal ball. Upon realizing her

parents have matched her with an unnerving and possibly murderous heir to a dukedom, she runs away, still wearing her gown. In a panic, she turns to the only person she can think of to help her—Hannah Wick, an estranged cousin who owns a coffeehouse—and thus makes the jump from the constrained world of the aristocracy into a much more interesting side of London. Once ensconced in Hannah’s coffeehouse, Charlotte encounters a man she doesn’t expect: Dr. Matthew Talbot, best friend of her beloved twin brother, Alexander, but also the younger brother of her erstwhile fiance. He has been secretly besotted with her for years, though so traumatized by abuse from his family that he believes himself far beneath her. The first in a new series from Marsh will thrill fans of smart, complex historical romances as long as they don’t mind a story liberally speckled with humorous moments, including repeated interludes centering on a rather vulgar parrot. Though Marsh admits, in an author’s note, to taking some liberties with historical details, the story is grounded in the less glamorous elements of the era, including England’s involvement in the slave trade, the role of kidnapping in indentured servitude, and the “beautiful, caged bird” status of privileged women. Though occasionally bogged down by cliche, this is ultimately a well-plotted and enjoyable story that will be in good company on a growing list of historical romances that explore life in London beyond the fancy dresses and masquerade balls.

A promising start to an intriguing new historical romance series.

A prickly dragon-shifter claims his fated mate without wooing her first.

T H AT T I M E I G O T D R U N K A N D S A V E D A H U M A N

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

53

1/8/24 5:30 PM

Nonfiction FEBRUARY IS THE perfect month to hunker down beside the fire with a meaty, intellectually challenging book. Thankfully, two such books arrive this month, collections from legends in the world of narrative nonfiction: longtime New Yorker staff writers Calvin Trillin (b. 1935) and Joan Acocella (1945–2024).

Trillin’s The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press (Random House, Feb. 13) continues in the vein of Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, offering a broad showcase of the author’s talents for observation and storytelling. In a starred review, our critic calls The Lede “an invaluable collection of observations about journalism authored by a beloved American reporter and humorist.” In seven parts—The Trade, Reporters and Reporting, Big Shots, R.I.P., Controversies, Niches, and Closings—Trillin demonstrates his talent for combining rigorous research with humor and pathos. The latter is abundant throughout his tributes to Molly Ivins, Morley Safer, John 54

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 54

Gregory Dunne, and other cultural and political figures.

Perhaps the best piece is his riveting firsthand account of the 1961 Freedom Rides in the Deep South. “This book,” notes our reviewer, “should be savored by admirers, critics, and practitioners of journalism and journalists, as well as anyone who appreciates firstrate writing, humor, and engaging reporting.”

Readers would do well to alternate Trillin’s journalism with essays from Joan Acocella’s latest vibrant assemblage of cultural criticism, The Bloodied Nightgown: And Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 20), an excellent follow-up to Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints.. In a starred review of Nightgown,, our critic notes, “From Gilgamesh and Beowulf to Elmore Leonard and Richard Pryor, a brilliant critic unpacks centuries of artists and their works.” Covering the years 2007 to 2021, these pieces show a critic at the top of her game, a game she has been playing at a high level for decades. Our reviewer

writes that the author’s assessment of “Kahlil Gibran…is worth the price of admission,” but there is plenty more to satisfy culture mavens of all stripes.

Other topics include Agatha Christie, Dracula, the Book of Job, Little Women, Graham Greene, Edward Gorey, and Andy Warhol.

The author’s essay on Warhol is particularly illuminating. “Warhol once tried to give an old friend one of his Marilyn Monroe silk screens,” she writes, “and the man, who disliked Pop, said, ‘Just tell me in your heart of hearts that you know it isn’t art.’ Warhol, imperturbable, answered, ‘Wrap it up in brown paper, put it in the back of a closet—one day it will

be worth a million dollars’.…There was no huger reputation than Warhol’s in the art of the sixties, and in late twentieth-century art there was no more important decade than the sixties.

Much of the art that has followed, in the United States, is unthinkable without him, without his joining of high culture and low, without his love of sizzle and flash, without his combination of tenderness and sarcasm, without the use of photography and silk-screening and advertising.” This is another winner from Acocella, “a top-notch collection full of information, elegance, and humor.”

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

COLLECTIONS FROM TWO NONFICTION MASTERS

ERIC LIEBETRAU

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

EDITOR’S PICK A historical survey of Native America’s political autonomy.

In this impressive history, DuVal, author of Independence Lost and The Native Ground, offers a long-term view of how Indigenous peoples in North America flourished both before and long after the arrival of Europeans, leveraging their power and negotiating their place alongside or within settler culture amid increasing existential threats. The author covers the last 1,000 years, sketching a trajectory of resistance, adaptability, and endurance and countering other historians who emphasize the victimization and steady disappearance of Indigenous peoples.

Focusing on decisive periods involving individual nations, DuVal presents a selection of “examples and

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

trends of Native North American sovereignty, politics, economics, diplomacy, and war.” In doing so, she provides a compelling record of Indigenous agency and provides a rich context for understanding the survival of—and the political challenges still faced by— hundreds of Native nations today. The colonization of the continent, she demonstrates, was neither rapid nor fated, and alternative historical outcomes in which Native America maintained control of large territories are plausible. “Nothing was inevitable,” writes DuVal, “about the rise of the United States.” A highlight of this work is the author’s revision of conventional understandings of the scale of pre-contact Indigenous communities. DuVal points out the sophistication and

vitality of urban centers, which resembled their European counterparts in size and population density a millennium ago, before gradually dissolving in response to climatic and political shifts. Also cogent are the author’s summaries of the collective values and traditions that emerged out of this shift to smaller-scale societies. Throughout,

62

65

59

55

74

Briefly Perfectly Human

By Alua Arthur The Believer

By David Coggins

59

Life After Power

By Jared Cohen Abolition

By Angela Y. Davis

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 55

DuVal, Kathleen | Random House | 752 pp. $35.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9780525511038

56

62

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

Soldiers and Kings

By Jason De León Native Nations

By Kathleen DuVal

63

To Be a Jew Today

By Noah Feldman

Fi

By Alexandra Fuller A History of Women in 101 Objects

By Annabelle Hirsch; trans. By Eleanor Updegraff

74

Feeding Ghosts

By Tessa Hulls

DuVal is clear and cogent, and her foregrounding of Indigenous achievements and careful delineation of ongoing struggles for personal and collective autonomy offer a useful and illuminating corrective to past histories.

A revelatory account of the power and influence of Indigenous peoples in North America.

80

The Other Fab Four

By Mary McGlory & Sylvia Saunders

82

No Judgment

By Lauren Oyler

83

How To Win an Information War

By Peter Pomerantsev

91

The Wide Wide Sea

By Hampton Sides

92

Mortal Secrets

By Frank Tallis

95

Missing Persons

By Clair Wills

95

Dear Black Girls

By A’ja Wilson

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

55

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

American Imam: From Pop Stardom to Prison Abolition Abdur-Rahman, Taymullah | Broadleaf Books (250 pp.) | $26.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 9781506489285

The faith journey of a leader in the American Muslim community.

In this unrestrained memoir, Abdur-Rahman critically examines both himself and the society in which he grew up. “I was raised in Roxbury,” he writes, “a small ghetto section of Boston where drugs and violence had left all of us deeply affected during the 1980s and 1990s.” When he was 13, his life drastically changed.

Then named Tyrone Sutton, he was chosen out of a rap talent show to lead a trio called The Perfect Gentlemen.

Enjoying modest recording successes of their own, the group went on tour with New Kids on the Block. Suddenly, the author was awash in stardom and wealth that he was not emotionally prepared to handle. As the group’s fame faded, he found himself back in Roxbury, dealing again with poverty, crime, and despair.

Recognizing his own failings, however, he underwent a moment of repentance in his mid-20s, which soon led to his official conversion to Islam. But life as a Muslim was also challenging, as the author learned how to control his desires and how to face his preexisting anger and prejudices and confront and grow from his past experiences. Eventually becoming an imam, Abdur-Rahman would go on to be a prison chaplain, as well as a chaplain at Northeastern and Harvard, where he was “the first paid Muslim chaplain.” These roles led to opportunities as a public speaker, media figure, and activist. The author’s urgent tone is occasionally confrontational; race and class figure prominently throughout, and his emotions regarding these subjects are decidedly raw. Though some readers may wish the author had thoroughly fleshed out his thoughts on society’s weaknesses, he has many 56

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 56

intriguing things to say about religion and self-discovery.

Thought-provoking, self-effacing, and at times blunt—a life story not yet complete.

Kirkus Star

Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End Arthur, Alua | Mariner Books (272 pp.) $28.99 | April 16, 2024 | 9780063240032

A poetic, inspiring book about how embracing our mortality allows us to find our deepest selves and truly connect with others.

Arthur has answered a unique calling: helping dying people come to terms with their imminent passing. As a “death doula,” she has helped countless people during the end of their lives, and each of them has taught her something. She trained for the role, but it is her natural empathy that has made her exceptionally good at what she does, whether the dying person is facing the end with calm grace or fighting hard against the failing light. In fact, it is in their final hours when many people are at their best, showing the truth of their souls and accepting the failures, successes, secrets, and regrets of their lives.

Arthur also helps bereaved families and friends with both the emotional strain of losing a loved one and the often complex bureaucratic processes of death. Her path to her vocation was not easy, with personal losses, some failed relationships, and a protracted stint of depression along the way.

Arthur suggests that these experiences have made it easier to understand and help others, a view that has the ring of truth to it. There is an undeniable poignancy to her accounts of the passing of her clients, although the sadness is often tinged with courage and strength.

“With the dizzying serendipity that must occur for us to be born, the fact that we live is a miracle….This is what I wish for all of us: a life that feels like the miracle it is and a death that serves as a period on a satisfying sentence,” writes the author. “Because we live, we get to die. That is a gift.”

Arthur’s powerful memoir underlines the value of every life.

Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better Atkin, Polly | Unnamed Press (320 pp.) $28.00 | March 19, 2024 | 9781961884007

A poet and nature writer’s memoir of chronic illness.

“Constant pain changes the relationship of the person to place and to moments in time,” writes Atkin, author of Recovering Dorothy. While anchored in her life experience as a person with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and haemochromatosis, the author’s memoir focuses on the contours of those place/time relationships that her condition necessitates. At the center of her story is a journey from constant injury, pain, and exhaustion, through medical gaslighting and misdiagnoses, to, finally, a correct diagnosis and an emerging sense of how to understand and manage her body and its limitations. Atkin pulls from an expansive variety of sources, including Virginia Woolf, Scottish folklore, and contemporary writers on illness and disability. She also draws heavily from her enchanting surroundings in Grasmere, the setting of William Wordsworth’s famous contemplations—as For more philosophical thoughts on death and dying, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

An amiable journey through an author’s attempts at mastering art.

FINDING A LIKENESS

well as those of his lesser-known sister, and one of Atkin’s favorite muses, Dorothy—and home to the legend of St. Oswald. The author flits quickly among these sources, leaving them to jockey for readers’ sustained attention. Atkin’s lyricism, metaphors, and vulnerability battle with a scientific discussion of iron levels and a variety of medical tests, brief evaluation of England’s National Health Service, and subtle warnings about climate change. The inclusion of so many disparate topics leaves most with only surface treatment, and the connections between them all come off as rather tenuous. Distilling an essential message from the many threads of Atkin’s text is difficult, but beneath the mix of memoir, history, nature writing, and poetry hums a valuable lesson about illnesses and their cures, places and their boundaries, time and its trajectory, and, maybe most significantly, the relationship between nature and health.

An empowered and patient story, at times murky and tedious, but still poignant.

Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art Baker, Nicholson | Penguin Press (352 pp.) | $35.00 paper | April 2, 2024 9781984881397

The celebrated novelist tries his hand at visual art.

In 2019, after Baker finished Baseless, a nonfiction book about “horrible government programs that happened in secret a KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 57

long time ago,” he “was wiped out.

I needed a rehabilitation program.

A less bleak way of looking at the world.” He set out to learn about artists with which he was unfamiliar and “try to master some of their techniques.” This handsome art book, amply illustrated with photos of subjects he drew and reproductions of paintings he copied, is the result. The author begins in a chatty style that emulates a children’s tale: “Hi, this is me. Welcome to my book Finding a Likeness.” From there, he documents the multiyear self-directed course that began in 2019 with Baker watching instructional YouTube videos, buying how-to-paint books, and turning to Pinterest, which was “uncannily good” at helping him discover artists.

The narrative describes in detail the artistic activities that Baker, who lives in Maine, pursued over the next two years, from the four-day plein-air workshop in Camden, where his instructor passed along advice he had received (“Open your damn eyes!”); to his brief obsession with painting clouds, the “puffy, huge, lunglike, breathing, hippopotami of the sky”; and the online courses he took once the pandemic began. The book gets monotonous after a while—Baker tried this technique, then this one, then this one—but he is a witty guide, open about his failures and stumbles.

For example, he says about his attempt to draw former New Yorker editor Harold Ross, “I tried twice and stopped. I’d made him look like a boxing promoter”; about his drawing of James Marcus, former editor of Harper’s, he says he looked “stretched, a little like Beavis in Beavis and Butt-Head.”

An amiable journey through an author’s attempts at mastering art.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom Blakeley, Grace | Atria (384 pp.) | $30.00 March 12, 2024 | 9781982180850

A jeremiad against conventional “free market” wisdom and its reliance on oppressive, covert planning.

British economics writer Blakeley offers a passionate argument that the interconnected crises of our time are “driven by a toxic melding of public and private power,” resulting in profits and impunity for elites and in precarity for others.

She connects these circumstances to the fact that “free market capitalism has never been as unplanned as its advocates have suggested.” The author meticulously unpacks this secret history of planning, noting how principles of competition and innovation have become illusory, meaning “today’s megafirms are barely constrained by the pressures of market competition.” Blakeley connects the metastasizing social immunity of massive corporations with the gradual political triumph of neoliberalism. She then argues for transformative “democratic planning,” citing attempts at alternative communities or reworked corporate structures “based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities,” featuring worker input, which corporate managers abhor. Such plans were countered by politicians like Margret Thatcher to “ruthlessly reassert the power of capital over labor.” Blakely concludes by proposing larger-scale organizing efforts, though she acknowledges that the few examples—e.g., Allende’s Chile—suggest that “any attempt to democratize an economy will encounter massive resistance from capital.” Nonetheless, the author’s tone remains optimistic.

“When we frame our political project in terms of collective empowerment,” she writes, “we show that politics can’t FEBRUARY 1, 2024

57

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

be reduced to elections—it’s something we all do every day.” This is a complex discussion, and Blakeley’s structure alternates among dramatic flashpoints (e.g., the corporate debacles involving Enron and WeWork), narratives about disrupting public-private malfeasance, and arguments about economic theory that engage the views of many significant figures. Though these strands can seem abstract or repetitive, the author writes knowledgeably about the variety of intricacies involved.

Engaging, occasionally unwieldy meditations on the relationship between social governance and late-stage capitalism.

Sing by the Burying Ground: Essays Boruch, Marianne | Northwestern Univ.

(184 pp.) | $20.00 paper | March 15, 2024 9780810146921

A poet reflects on astonishment.

Boruch describes her 31 short essays as thoughts, “triggered by surprise,” that have collected into unexpected pools: “thought becoming thought in spite of what I may have predicted or never wanted really.” She gives much thought to poets such as Frost, Auden, Plath, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seamus Heaney—a list appended to the essays cites many more. Her most lyrical pieces focus on the singularity of particular writers and on poems themselves: how, for example, “a sonnet has some opening jab, heartbeat unto argument, then a turn, a new way to see, a winnowing and an arrival echoed ever since in free verse.”

The author recounts pilgrimages “to pay writerly homage” to Theodore Roethke, Keats, and Thomas Merton.

At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Merton lived, she spent a week in silence. Some pieces reveal moments of epiphany. The 58

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 58

An insightful collection of tight essays.

S I N G BY TH E B U RYI N G G RO U N D

discovery of a souvenir rocking chair inscribed with the initials JFK, for example, elicits the spontaneous interjection “oh,” a sound of “shock, bafflement, heartache, exhaustion, uncertainty, discovery.” At Purdue, where she was teaching, a fellowship in a second discipline allowed her to take a course in life drawing and one in gross human anatomy. There, among dead bodies, she suddenly sensed “the cadaver herself talking to the world,” revealing “her sorrow, her wit, her tenderness, her humility, her steel,” and inspiring Boruch to imagine her in a sequence of poems. She is alert, always, to poems “waiting to be written,” and she quotes George Oppen: “I do not care for systems,” he remarked. “What concerns me is the philosophy of the astonished.” Ruminating about the pandemic, she asks, “Is there a case to be made for poetry in this plague year?” According to these elegant essays, the answer is yes.

An insightful collection of tight essays.

Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession Brescia, Ray | New York Univ. (312 pp.) $39.00 | Feb. 1, 2024 | 9781479823680

A study of how the “cartelization” of the legal field denies most Americans proper “access to justice.”

Since colonial days, the legal profession has been proud of “its role in the founding of the republic, the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, and the defense of democracy and the rule

of law.” Today, however, the profession faces an “an existential crisis” on which “the American democratic experiment hinges,” writes law professor Brescia, author of How Cities Will Save the World.

According to multiple studies, the legal system that helped create what can be called the longest-running democratic republic in modern times is inaccessible to most of its own people: 80% of poor Americans, and 50% of those considered middle-class, cannot afford a lawyer. This is partly due to the fact that the field’s “professionalization” has rendered it both exclusive and expensive, shutting out countless potential high-quality lawyers and law schools and resulting in the “cartelization” of the field. Brescia concedes the field has overcome crises before, describing how it transformed “virtually every aspect of law practice” following the implementation of strict pandemic protocols, going virtual to a degree most thought impossible.

Virtualization made services cheaper and created much-needed access for low-income clients, who sit in the same “tiny square image” as onscreen judges.

However, given recent political upheavals unmistakably enabled by lawyers, Brescia makes a convincing case that the legal profession must take massive strides toward reform now. “A robust professionalism, attuned to the needs and broader values of the American system, empowers the legal profession to fulfill its appropriate role within that system,” he writes. If significant reforms are not implemented in the near future, “democracy itself [is] at risk.” General readers may stumble through some of the legalese, but the author’s arguments are well worth discussion.

A powerful examination of the U.S. legal field.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

It’s Hard for Me To Live With Me: A Memoir Chapman, Rex with Seth Davis Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) | $27.99 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781982197773

A former basketball prodigy’s blunt memoir about stardom, addiction, and American culture.

Chapman, a former NBA player who played 12 years in the league and current analyst and social media figure, chronicles his story with the assistance of sports journalist Davis, author of Wooden and Getting to Us. In this consistently candid text, Chapman lays bare the triumphs and tribulations of growing up as a white high school and college basketball superstar in hoops-mad but socially regressive Kentucky; a largely injury-riddled NBA career that left him addicted to painkillers; and his mental health and gambling problems, public arrest for organized retail theft, and attempts to redeem himself.

Throughout, the author is raw and clearly in thrall of profanity. If the aim of the frenetic pace is to invite readers to experience being in Chapman’s ceaselessly unquiet mind, it succeeds.

As Chapman rapidly darts from the truly significant (the heartache of his relationship with his Black high school and college girlfriend) to the achingly mundane (pranks and hijinks performed by him and his teammates), readers may feel figuratively out of breath or just plain frustrated, as if they were trying to guard Chapman on the court at his peak. The most compelling and focused aspect of the book is Chapman’s frankness about the toll of his battle with painkillers and the hard work required on the long road to recovery. In the hands of a more capable collaborator, this book could have been uniquely substantive among athlete autobiographies, exploring in more depth the exploitative vagaries of big-time college basketball, race, complex family dynamics, and the KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 59

medical and pharmaceutical malpractice that aided and abetted Chapman’s addiction. While the narrative is a cautionary tale from which many can benefit, much of the book feels like a hurried shot off the rim.

A basketball star’s dizzying account of his struggles and comeback.

Kirkus Star

The Believer: A Year in the Fly-Fishing Life Coggins, David | Scribner (224 pp.) $28.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9781668004715

A global fishing trip that hooks more than fish.

There is life, and then there is fly-fishing. Coggins believes that the second of these can provide crucial insights into the first, through the patience required, the unique mixture of simplicity and complexity, the connection to the natural environment, the lessons of failure, and the thrill of success. He covered some of this ground in his 2014 book The Optimist, but this book is more personal and candid and less technical. At the age of 45, which he thought would be the middle of his life, the author embarked on a yearlong tour that included Patagonia, Scotland, Spain, Norway, Belize, and even Cuba, as well as various parts of the U.S. As Coggins recounts, sometimes he landed a good catch, and sometimes he went home empty-handed.

Nonetheless, his excursions were always journeys of self-discovery, and Coggins found the space and time to ask and answer crucial questions about his life and his connections to others. Along the way, he met an assortment of interesting people, an eccentric brotherhood bound by a love of the cast, and developed hard-won wisdom, for which “there’s no short-cut, no self-help book, no retreat, no guru, no mountaintop, no fad diet, no hack, no money-back guarantee.”

Coggins eventually decided that he would remain an enthusiastic amateur,

an occasional caster of the lure. That, he notes, is enough for him, perhaps more than enough. He concludes: “I think I’ve arrived at a better balance, based on something I already knew: you can survive very well with less fishing, or anything else for that matter. You’ll be alright.” That, indeed, is the thought to take away from this meditative, enjoyable book.

An engaging personal journey about finding what you need to find and keeping it in your heart.

Kirkus Star

Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House Cohen, Jared | Simon & Schuster (544 pp.) $32.50 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781982154547

A survey of the rewarding post-term afterlives of seven U.S. presidents.

“Between their last day in office and their last day on earth, former presidents have a finite amount of time to make their marks upon the world,” writes Cohen, an executive at Goldman Sachs.

This follow-up to Accidental Presidents focuses on seven former presidents who made the most of their remaining time. In some cases, their post-term accomplishments far exceeded those made in office, greatly enhancing their legacies. Thomas Jefferson’s years of political service, including two presidential terms, were less satisfying to him than his dream of designing and establishing the University of Virginia.

John Quincy Adams’ second act as a To read our review of Coggins’ The Optimist, visit Kirkus online.

>>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

59

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

THE KIRKUS Q&A: BIANCA BOSKER A journalist infiltrates the art world and interprets for the rest of us.

BY MARION WINIK

After you did the wine book, were you like, OK, now I’ll do the same thing with art?

Not really, no. I was busy living this hyperoptimized life with no time for frivolous things like art or even bathroom breaks. I did a lot of texting from the toilet while listening to podcasts on 2X speed. If I did go to a gallery or museum, I would leave feeling I was a couple of master’s degrees and tattoos away from knowing what was going on, and I figured art wasn’t for me. Then one day I was rummaging through my mom’s base60

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 60

ment and came across this artwork by my grandmother, inspired by her experience as a Holocaust survivor.

The dancing carrots!

Yes, a watercolor of three frisky carrots. They had graceful orange bodies, delicate little black feet, and green, whirling dervish stems. In that hazy period after the war, she had found herself in a displaced persons camp in Austria, where, despite being a trained economist with no children, my grandmother started teaching art classes

to the kids. She scrimped together materials to make costumes for a dance performance—something cheerful but politically innocuous. Carrots it was!

When she finally started making art herself in her 80s, one of the first things she did was paint that memory. To her it symbolized the fact that art isn’t optional, but a necessity—what we turn to when life turns itself inside out.

By the time I thought to ask why, my grandmother was no longer around to answer.

So I explored the question another way.

Your first attempts to infiltrate the art world met with difficulty, though.

Right. I’ve done a lot of reporting in China, which is not an easy place to be a foreign journalist. Yet I had an easier time sniffing out answers in China than

in Chelsea. Partly, the art world wields strategic snobbery to create mystique in a way that I think is unnecessary. We don’t need the velvet ropes and the artspeak to appreciate the magic and power of art. But at the same time, there are a lot of things that go on that might pass for absurd, unethical, criminal, or just preposterous to people who aren’t in the art world. If you haven’t taken a Mafia-like vow of silence, you’re a risk.

Tell us about the people you call Eyes and Heads.

As I began to poke around the art world, people very quickly started warning me that I lacked “visual literacy.”

So I became obsessed with this idea of developing my Eye—a painstakingly cultivated outlook that allows you to see lots of things that don’t immediately meet the

Bianca Bosker

JOURNALIST BIANCA BOSKER’S 2017 debut, Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me To Live for Taste, was acclaimed as one of the most entertaining alcohol-related books in years. Though this could have been a hard act to follow, it now seems she’s outdone herself. Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How To See (Viking, Feb. 6) offers a similar roller-coaster ride through the art world, described by our reviewer as “immersive reporting along the lines of George Plimpton or Barbara Ehrenreich, with her own blend of relentless curiosity, bottomless energy, and a gift for clever formulations that puts her in the bloodline of Oscar Wilde.”

How did she do it? We recently asked Bosker this on a video call; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

eye—like who will be the next Picasso or what’s transcendent about a sculpture of rotten vegetables on a dirty mattress. The people who have it, the Eyes, behave as if they’ve accessed a trapdoor in their brains, as if they are experiencing a different, more expansive world than we are.

To see if I could do that, I handed my life over to the Heads. Whether they are artists, gallerists, curators, or collectors, the Heads are people who’ve signed their souls over to art. They occupy the nerve center of the so-called fine art world.

They play an outsize role in determining the fate of artworks and how they go

from the germ of an idea in an artist’s studio to a masterpiece in a museum.

You say in the book, “a normie philistine can’t just show up at an art gallery and demand a job—especially not in New York City.”

But that’s what you did with Jack Barrett, right?

Jack Barrett is an incredibly savvy gallerist who seemed to genuinely share my concern that I was an ignorant rube. He took me on as a lump of clay to be shaped, and gave me a crash course in not only art but also the rites and rituals of the art world.

The art world fashions itself as this band of non-

conformist iconoclasts. But in fact you have to abide by a certain code of conduct to show that you’re “one of us.”

For me, that involved getting some tough love from Jack about problems with the way I spoke, with the way I dressed—my uncoolness, basically.

You also spent a lot of time with the painter Julie Curtiss. You seem to have fallen in love with her.

Julie changed my life. She taught me that the act of looking can be an adventure, how that spark of surprise that we find in an artwork can exist anywhere. It can happen on a street corner.

It can happen when we’re

We don’t need the velvet ropes and the artspeak to appreciate the magic and power of art.

Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Fanatical Artists and Secretive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How To See Bosker, Bianca

Viking | 384 pp. | $29.00 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780525562207

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 61

looking at a sewage treatment plant. If you lift the filter of expectations that normally helps us compress and interpret what we’re seeing, that beautiful disorienting glitch you get from a painting can happen anywhere.

Also, Julie was an antidote to the code of exclusivity and secrecy. The typical mood in the art world is like, OK, close the door, there’s enough people here already, thank you. Whereas Julie was always, The more the merrier. She constantly lifts people up.

There are so many wonderful episodes in this book, from taking a job as a museum guard at the Guggenheim to going shopping with some collectors from North Dakota you call the Icy Gays. What was the highlight?

There are two that come to mind. One was when I worked the fairs with a Manhattan gallery during Art Basel Miami Beach. The experience of selling a photograph that cost thousands of dollars from the back of an Escalade while people snorted up lines of cocaine around me—that was the moment where I felt like I had, you know, “made it” as an art dealer.

And the other was getting to help paint one of Julie’s pieces. In that moment of putting black paint on her canvas, I felt like I was seeing art with less artifice yet more mystery than I ever had before—what I had embarked on this whole journey to find.

Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

61

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

House Representative provided him with a platform to lead the abolitionist movement. Grover Cleveland became the only president who, after leaving office, would later serve another term.

Lackluster one-term presidents William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover had more success later, as well: Taft served as chief justice of the Supreme Court for a decade, and Hoover’s post–World War II humanitarian efforts eclipsed his notoriously unpopular presidential term during the early years of the Great Depression. Cohen’s recent examples are Jimmy Carter, who “transformed being a former into a platform” in what is the lengthiest post-term period to date, tirelessly attending to altruistic causes throughout the world, and George W. Bush, who chose to remove himself from politics altogether, which increased his approval rating and allowed him to dedicate time to personal pursuits such as painting.

The author packs this expansive sweep of presidential history with enough storytelling verve and grounded research to legitimize these presidents’ underrepresented post-term stories. Cohen effectively proves that, for these seven men, “life doesn’t end with the job that will be the first line of their obituaries.”

An engaging dip into the history of the presidency.

Kirkus Star

Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1 Davis, Angela Y. | Haymarket Books (272 pp.) | $19.95 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781642599640

The first volume of a collection of essays by former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Davis.

“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings,” writes the author in this series of striking pieces outlining the scholar and prison abolitionist’s most 62

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 62

important ideas. The book begins with a history of U.S. prisons, which were established as humanitarian alternatives to corporal punishment—“convict leasing,” a system Davis calls “a new form of slavery,” through which incarceration transformed into a profitable business.

Today, companies like Victoria’s Secret and Chevron pay prison laborers less than minimum wage to make their goods. For much of the book, Davis focuses on women prisoners who, unlike their male counterparts, were historically considered irredeemable and receive little critical attention in the scholarly literature.

“Prevailing attitudes toward women convicts differed from those toward men convicts,” writes the author, “who were assumed to have forfeited rights and liberties that women generally could not claim.” In other words, while male prisoners could lose the right to vote, women prisoners never had this right to begin with, so they were punished differently.

The collection ends with a series of studies Davis co-authored with scholar Kum-Kum Bhavnani about prison conditions overseas. Although these pieces present alternatives to the American prison system, Davis and Bhavnani emphasize that they should be used to develop a “radical abolitionist strategy” rather than to fix the existing system. In a brilliantly observant, profoundly knowledgeable, and unfailingly original text, the author’s passion and eloquence render even the driest facts fascinating. Although many of the pieces in this volume have been published before, even the staunchest Davis devotees are likely to discover new material and new ways to reimagine a more just world.

A must-read essay collection for anyone invested in racial equity.

For more arguments about mass incarceration, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling De León, Jason | Viking (400 pp.) | $32.00 March 19, 2024 | 9780593298589

A harrowing account of the work of human smugglers in bringing aspirational immigrants to America’s southern border.

Anthropology professor De León writes of the men—almost always men—who work as smugglers bringing undocumented immigrants from Central America through Mexico to the U.S. There’s a world of difference between smugglers and traffickers, and while they’re commonly called coyotes, polleros, and the like, at least one of his subjects prefers to call himself a guía, a guide, “a designation with potentially less negative semantic baggage and one that directly reflects the work.” Traveling to Honduras and throughout Mexico over seven years, De León encountered numerous such guides, who have a difficult job requiring a split-second decision on whether to trust someone, especially someone like him who was asking invasive questions. Notes one police officer whose job it is to keep coyotes and would-be immigrants from their homeland, “Many migrants that I’ve interviewed have also told me they would prefer to die en el camino than stay home and wait to die from gang violence or hunger.” Both outcomes are entirely possible in lands riven by internecine gang wars and poverty, as in the case of Honduras, being second only to Haiti as the poorest nation in Latin America. Importantly, De León writes, both outcomes are also the product of late capitalism, as is the very movement of masses of people to places of greater economic opportunity, less violence, and better environmental conditions. Many of the author’s informants die along the way, as do some of their charges, and KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

many others seek to change their lives and do something else. To his credit, so does De León in dispirited moments when he laments “peddling stories of other people’s misery.”

An exemplary ethnography of central importance to any discussion of immigration policy or reform.

If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury DeRuiter, Geraldine | Crown (336 pp.) $27.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9780593444481

Zesty food memories from a James Beard Award–winning blogger.

DeRuiter assembles essays into a funny, irreverent memoir about family, food, cooking, and eating, as well as life in the kitchen and around assorted tables. She recalls her first memory of food (“mint toothpaste, served straight from the tube”), her discovery of New York bagels, and her shameless love of Red Lobster, which began when she was growing up in Florida. Red Lobster “had people who were kind to me, and cheesy biscuits that were served warm, in a little basket. It taught me that life had more to offer.” Women portrayed on TV shows, though, would likely refuse those warm biscuits: Either they wouldn’t eat at all, or when they ate, they’d be chided for being super picky.

It was “a hard thing to learn,” DeRuiter admits, “that we can ask things of other people, that we can order food how we want it. That our bodies deserve to be nourished and loved and fed the way we want them to be.” Equally hard was letting her husband cook for her,

to “fight against the feelings of guilt and obligation and see it for what it is: someone who loves me, making a meal for our family.” Several essays focus on sexism and misogyny in the food industry and on social media.

Chef Mario Batali’s tone-deaf apology about sexual misconduct, for example, inspired her to write an essay that was met with derisive comments, as was a piece she wrote about the worst meal of her life, a 27-course tasting menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Italy. Food and recipes, she’s discovered, attract virulent responses, and even death threats. DeRuiter brings her sharp wit to a range of subjects, including family, marriage, the end of a treasured friendship, and the meaning of comfort food.

A deft, entertaining collection.

Polar Vortex: A Family Memoir Dorrance, Denise | The Experiment (256 pp.) | $19.95 paper | March 5, 2024 9781615199051

A debut graphic memoir about elder care in America by an expat coping with her mother’s dementia.

Dorrance’s upbeat, airy linework packs an unsuspecting emotional wallop as she ruminates not only on her mother’s demise, but on her own life, shaped in part by other rifts and losses. Over gossamer washes of watercolor, Dorrance often eschews the traditional frames of a comic strip to create a hazier story, adrift between real-life scenes and more fluid, sketchier memories. After learning that her mother was in the hospital, the

A delicately drawn, unconventional chronicle of loss.

POLAR VORTEX

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 63

author flew from England back to her childhood home to tend to her. But her proactive attempts were muddled by “the tug of [her] past,” as well as by sibling tension, insurance claims, and care logistics, all of which left little room for her to properly process her impending loss. Dorrance let humor guide her through these difficult days, and the narrative often pushes away the dreadful reality of her mother’s dementia with a high dose of levity. At times, this counterpoint between humor and grief is revelatory. In one scene, Dorrance stubbornly bickers with Death itself, a predictably costumed specter with a black hood and scythe. Moments later, any cartoonish cheekiness is obliterated

by Dorrance’s rendering of her mother, wide-eyed but staring emptily, muttering about her missing purse. Other visual gags are more quirky than powerful. In a tired recurring bit, Dorrance draws herself in a crown and mantle every time someone mentions her British accent. In another scene, she imagines a psychoanalysis session with the ghost of Dr. Ruth. Elsewhere, she pretends she’s a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal as she makes decisions about her mother’s care. These tonal diversions always snap back to reality with a devastating whiplash, which can feel detrimental to the pacing and emotional intensity.

A delicately drawn, unconventional chronicle of loss.

Kirkus Star

To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People Feldman, Noah | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) | $32.00 | March 12, 2024 9780374298340

A multifaceted exploration of Jewish identity in the modern world and the place Israel has come to hold in it.

In this personal, analytical, nonpolemical FEBRUARY 1, 2024

63

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

work, Harvard law professor Feldman, author of The Broken Constitution and Divided by God, walks readers through the different versions of Jewish belief today—including “ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Religious Zionist, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, and Humanist”—and how the state of Israel plays a central role in them all. With an intentional nod to Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, published in 1190, Feldman employs deep scholarship and a nondidactic tone to revisit the essential stories of Jewish struggle and faith. First, he looks at the beliefs of various Jewish sects, regarding them all inclusively, even the atheist. “Even conscious rejection of Jewishness may be meaningfully Jewish,” he writes.

In the second part of the book, the author posits, “the idea of Israel has fundamentally transformed all strands of Jewish belief.” He delves deeply into the early secular Zionist ideal; how the early 1970s brought Israel to the forefront for Diaspora Jews because of renewed Holocaust awareness and the Yom Kippur War; the powerful appeal of messianism; and the debate over how Jews are the “chosen” people. He offers a warning that Israel is exhibiting the sin of excessive pride. Finally, the author examines Jewishness as an embrace of family, community, and God. “A nationalism that tries to take God out of the picture and transmute Jewishness into an expression of pure peoplehood,” he writes, “will not provide access to experiences of transcendent meaning that make life worth living.” Feldman calls this work a map or field guide, and he seems to have in mind young readers who are confused and angry about the raging Israel-Palestine war.

An eloquent, accessible, well-written reflection on the significance of being a Jew. For more on cartel violence, visit Kirkus online.

64

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 64

And How Does That Make You Feel?: Everything You (N)ever Wanted To Know About Therapy Fletcher, Joshua | Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) | $29.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 9780063310124

Intimate stories from behind the therapist’s door.

Fletcher, a UK-based psychotherapist and host of the podcasts Disordered and The Panic Pod, invites readers into the mystery-shrouded world of mental health from a practicing therapist’s perspective. In a pleasing blend of humor and education, Fletcher presents four case studies alongside stories of his own personal experiences with anxiety, offering a fresh perspective on mental health. The multiple storylines reflect the nonlinear journey each patient living with anxiety takes, and the author allows readers to come along for the ride. Fletcher invites a vulnerability that is comparable to being in a therapist’s office. “I include spicy stories of conflict, tragedy and mistakes,” he writes. “I include the stuff that’s happening that few therapists would dare tell you about, as well as some stuff I wonder if I should have included at all. But if even a small part of you, after putting this book down, thinks that therapy seems more appealing or less scary, or that you’re perhaps willing to mention therapy in casual conversation, then my main wish for this book will have been fulfilled.” Indeed, Fletcher creates an empathetic space to reflect on anxiety and depression without judgment or critique, and he shows how different modalities in therapy can achieve varying results and that not all therapists are created equal—“which is why one of the biggest tragedies in the world of mental health, in my opinion, is the assumption that every therapist knows what they’re doing….When it comes to the therapy modality and the therapeutic

relationship, it must be a match.” This practical book will be a match for readers interested in furthering their understanding of the many different avenues for addressing “our global mental health crisis.”

A humorous and encouraging journey into the world of effective therapy.

The Deadly Path: How Operation Fast & Furious and Bad Lawyers Armed Mexican Cartels Forcelli, Peter J. & Keelin MacGregor Knox Press (272 pp.) | $18.99 paper March 5, 2024 | 9798888452646

An ATF whistleblower tells his story.

With firearms strictly controlled in their country, Mexican drug cartels purchase illegal American arms smuggled across the border. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is charged with stopping the flow.

Forcelli, a veteran New York City police detective, transferred to the ATF in 2001, became a supervisor, and then moved to Phoenix in 2007. Much of this memoir, co-written with MacGregor, is an entertaining account of ATF agents at work.

Mostly, gun smugglers patronize legitimate gun dealers in the U.S., and the process of smuggling them into Mexico is relatively easy because Mexican border officials know better than to aggressively search for them. Although gun dealers have a bad reputation, the author emphasizes that almost all are honest.

Many provide the ATF with highly valuable informants, calling whenever a buyer seems suspicious. But soon after arriving at his new job, Forcelli made a jolting discovery. In New York, ATF agents and federal prosecutors work in harmony; on the southern border, his agents would make arrests and present strong cases, only to have the prosecutors reject them for flimsy reasons over and over. Offering cases to the state prosecutor or local police sometimes KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

helped, but the stubborn refusal of the federal prosecution office was demoralizing. Fed up, Forcelli informed his congressional representative and became a whistleblower. Hearings and media attention followed. Since then, matters in Arizona have improved, although many offenders remain in their positions. Whistleblowers are often portrayed as heroes in the media and Hollywood, but, as the author shows, their lives are often ruined. They pay enormous legal fees, usually lose their jobs and many friends, and suffer retaliation that persists indefinitely. More fortunate than most, although Forcelli left Arizona, he remained at the ATF until his retirement a few years later.

A compelling account of a risky border operation and a half-forgotten scandal.

Kirkus Star

Fi: A Memoir of My Son Fuller, Alexandra | Grove (272 pp.) | $28.00 April 9, 2024 | 9780802161048

A parent’s brave memoir about the death of her son at age 21.

The summer before her 50th birthday, Fuller, the author of multiple acclaimed nonfiction books, was not where she expected to be in life: divorced, in a relationship with a younger woman, missing her home country of Zimbabwe, and mourning her father’s death and her mother’s estrangement.

Then, her son, Fi, died suddenly. “I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; it was that dark,” she writes. As she worked through her grief, she also had to care for her two heartbroken daughters. Raised by a mother who descended into all-consuming depression following the unexpected deaths of three of Fuller’s siblings, the author was determined not to abandon her own children in the same way. “I didn’t survive and also…I did,” she writes, movingly. “Fi died, and KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 65

A true marvel of a memoir, simultaneously beautiful and devastating.

FI

everything that I’d believed until then blinked out with him.” In the wake of immense loss, what remains? With clear, luminous prose and courageous insight, Fuller investigates. Whether seeking spirituality in a sheep wagon in the mountains of Wyoming, at a grief retreat in New Mexico, or on the beaches of Hawaii, the author has never ceased yearning, searching, and believing in her family. As much about love as it is about grief, this book is a roadmap for loss. “The way a pilot sees wind in clouds or a sailor reads currents in water,” she writes, “I look unconsciously for stories to remind me where I am, to remind me that whatever I’m going through, millions have been here before, are here now, will be here again.” The writing is so stunning, immediate, and heartfelt that the book is often as difficult to read as it is to put down.

A true marvel of a memoir, simultaneously beautiful and devastating.

Sociopath: A Memoir Gagne, Patric | Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $28.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781668003183

The story of a therapist and grief counselor’s struggle to understand and mitigate a stigmatized disorder.

Since early childhood, Gagne writes, she knew she lacked the empathy, shame, guilt, and fear of consequences typically possessed by others. Her antisocial behavior frequently brought her into conflict with authority figures and confirmed

her sense of difference and, sometimes, despair. In adulthood, after finally receiving a diagnosis of sociopathy, she sought ways to manage it, eventually becoming a psychologist specializing in the disorder. A crucial element in her success, she notes, is her relationship with an exceptionally understanding man who taught her how to love. This memoir is unusual in its presentation of a decidedly unlikable and rather frightening narrator, who describes a lifetime of bad behavior and ongoing struggles with deficits in kindness and common decency. Her seemingly sincere and plausible request, however, is for compassion to flow in the other direction: from the non-sociopathic toward the sociopathic, who are understood as suffering from a medical condition and whose humanity remains intact no matter their moral limitations. Gagne makes a reasonable case for such sympathy and for the possibility that sociopathy may, to some extent, be treatable.

However, the narrative itself, which relies heavily on conventions from the romance and thriller genres, has a markedly fantastical quality, and what emerges often seems to favor vivid storytelling and self-aggrandizement over honest introspection. Descriptions of the author’s uncannily astute contributions to her field of study have a particularly dubious quality. A disclaimer informs readers that “some timelines have been condensed, some dialogue has been reconstructed, and some characters have been presented as composites,” which may put off some readers. Though the book is marketed as a memoir, it reads very much like a work of fiction.

A peculiar, provocative exploration of the limits of social acceptance. >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

65

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

SEEN AND HEARD PEN America Elects a New President Jennifer Finney Boylan succeeds Ayad Akhtar as president of the literary nonprofit.

Jennifer Finney Boylan has been elected the new president of PEN America.

The literary nonprofit, known for its support for free expression, made the announcement in a news release, calling Boylan a “celebrated breakthrough author and LGBTQ rights advocate.”

Boylan is the author of more than a dozen books, including a bestselling memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders; the children’s book Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror; and the novel

Long Black Veil. Her most recent book, Mad Honey, co-written with Jodi Picoult, was published last year by Ballantine.

“Nothing opens hearts and minds as quickly as powerful stories,” Boylan said in a statement.

“And that’s why there are people even now trying to silence voices, by banning books, shouting down opposing viewpoints, legislating what can be taught and studied in classrooms and imposing strictures on who can tell which stories. All these efforts to silence and repress are evidence of the power for change in narrative. I’m most passionate about having everyone’s stories heard, told, and published because that is the way to evolve our culture and allow all people to realize their potential.”—M.S. potential.”

Manny Carabel/WireImage

Jennifer Finney Boylan

For reviews of books by Jennifer Finney Boylan, visit Kirkus online.

66

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 66

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

AWARDS Masha Gessen Receives Prize Despite Controversy The Hannah Arendt Prize was awarded to the author in a scaleddown ceremony.

Author Masha Gessen received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought after original plans for the ceremony were scrapped, the Associated Press reports.

Gessen was scheduled to receive the award for writers “who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions,” at the city hall of Bremen, Germany.

But Bremen’s city senate withdrew from the ceremony, along with the award’s sponsor, the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Both groups decided to cut ties after Gessen published a New Yorker article, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in which they compared the treatment

of Palestinians in Gaza to that of Jews in the Eastern European ghettos under the Nazis.

Gessen, the author of The Future Is History and Surviving Autocracy, is Jewish.

Their grandfather was murdered in the Holocaust.

Gessen reacted to the prize sponsor’s withdrawal in an interview with the Washington Post, saying, “Even people I know in Germany who have been dealing with this on a continuous basis for the past several years continue to be shocked by the craziness of this—people’s speech being shut down, Jews being denounced as antisemitic for criticizing Israeli policies, et cetera.”

Gessen received the prize in a different location with about 50 people in attendance.—M.S.

Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images

Masha Gessen

For reviews of books

by Masha Gessen, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 67

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

67

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia Goldwag, Arthur | Vintage (256 pp.) | $19.00 paper | March 5, 2024 | 9780593467060

QAnon cousins?

Here’s your field guide to their eldritch politics.

“Populist politicians win when enough voters feel like they’re losing,” writes Goldwag, author of The New Hate. Like David Bennett’s Party of Fear, this book traces a right-wing political movement that exploits widespread fears of deep-seated conspiracies and absurd theories of ethnic “replacement.” Such things were once whispered; now they’re shouted, as when Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s governorship against Josh Shapiro, the victor in 2022, pilloried the “privileged, exclusive, elite” Jewish day school Shapiro had attended as a child. Not to be outdone, House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik tweeted the alarmist charge that Biden’s White House “& the usual pedo grifters” were keeping baby formula off the market by sending “pallets of formula to the southern border” to distribute it free to undeserving immigrants. All hokum, of course, but Stefanik and Mastriano worked the Trumpian “I love the poorly educated” trope, race and education being the two things that most sharply divide American voting blocs. Thus, Goldwag writes, uneducated white Americans floated Trump into office, many of them having swallowed whole the “paranoid style of conspiracism” in which a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor was the locus of child sex trafficking and that Jews “promote miscegenation and vice” in order to weaken Christian America.

The result is a spasmodic era of hatred and violence based on “narratives [that] simultaneously frighten and reassure, because they present a world without moral ambiguity.” Unlike other recent students of conspiracy theory, Goldwag 68

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 68

A sharp survey of the political landscape guaranteed to seed nightmares among the sensible.

THE POLITICS OF FEAR

sees little hope that the narrative can be pointed in the direction of truth: Trump may go away, but Trumpism will endure, and “we might not recognize his successor until it is too late.”

A sharp survey of the political landscape guaranteed to seed nightmares among the sensible, educated, and progressive.

But You Don’t Look Arab: And Other Tales of Unbelonging Gorani, Hala | Hachette (336 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780306831645

An Emmy Award–winning journalist reflects on her upbringing and career as the daughter of Syrian immigrants.

“My job as a journalist took me from presidential palaces to the smallest of makeshift shacks in a war zone or in a refugee center,” writes Gorani, who has spent three decades as a correspondent and anchor for CNN and other major news organizations. In addition to chronicling her journalism career, the author examines her life as the blondhaired, blue-eyed daughter of Syrian immigrants. Born in the U.S. but raised primarily in France, Gorani’s sense of self—or what she calls her “assorted patchwork of identities”—is a complex, mercurial, and ever-shifting entity. The author describes her privileged upbringing, path to becoming a journalist, and dissatisfaction with the antiseptic nature of the anchor position. In general, she longed to report from the field, and

she often did, covering the Syrian war, the Arab Spring, the war in Iraq, and many other topics. Gorani organizes the book geographically rather than chronologically—e.g., Cairo, London, Paris, Baghdad, Istanbul. Within each section, she slips back and forth in time, recounting episodes from both her youth and adulthood. The narrative that results is sometimes disjointed and illogical. For example, Gorani’s childhood revelation that she wanted to become a journalist—a revelation you might expect to find early on—arrives three-quarters of the way through the text: In 1981, she writes, “I wanted to tell people what was happening in the world. I wanted to be the first to do so.” Overall, this is a sharp, well-written book that would have benefited from further editing, but it should appeal to aspiring journalists and those from marginalized ethnicities.

Despite a few minor flaws, an engaging account of one journalist’s life and work.

Cargo of Hope: Voyages of the Humanitarian Ship Vega Granger, Shane | Lyons Press (278 pp.) | $24.95 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781493080861

A maritime chronicle of a humanitarian effort to deliver supplies to the needy.

From the helm of their restored 130-year-old sailboat, Vega, author and seasoned seaman Granger personifies the risks and rewards of survival KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

on the open seas. He and his German partner, Meggi Macoun, a graphic designer, found their calling not only in the excitement of risky oceanic adventures, but also in their annual humanitarian mission, which “gives life meaning.” In 2004, the couple had just returned from a monthslong odyssey from South Africa to Malaysia when a massive earthquake underneath the Indian Ocean spurred a deadly tsunami that submerged large areas of coastal Asia. Together with a sturdy crew of volunteers, Granger and Macoun initiated the inaugural Mission of Mercy rescue effort, setting sail for the northern Sumatran island of Pulau Weh with the Vega stocked with 22 tons of donated food and medical supplies. No stranger to long-haul sailing, Granger formerly trekked alone across the Atlantic in an engineless, rudderless brigantine he salvaged from a West African beach. Tapping into this experience, the author vibrantly brings their philanthropic journeys to life with keen details about the remote tropical islands, mountainous villages, and cultural communities they have helped over the years. He also describes numerous challenges, including vicious stormy seas and labor-intensive grunt work performed in congested quarters. The impact of that first altruistic expedition to Sumatra ignited a desire in Granger and Macoun to offer their services to other communities in need. The author also shares lively personal anecdotes about Vega’s mysterious Norwegian origins; information from a great-grandson of the vessel’s original boat builder, an amateur naval historian; and the author’s own notes on how the couple keeps the boat afloat “on a microscopic budget.”

A spirited, awe-inspiring story about people helping people.

For more from Philippa Gregory, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 69

Hell, No, We Didn’t Go!: Firsthand Accounts of Vietnam War Protest and Resistance Greenbaum, Eli | Univ. Press of Kansas (272 pp.) | $34.95 paper | March 18, 2024 9780700636303

A draft resister of yore recounts the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War. “We were the last American generation,” writes Greenbaum, “in which lives and careers were interrupted and placed on hold, redirected, overturned, damaged, or even ended” due to the “whims” of government officials committed to winning a war. Today military service is voluntary, but until 1973, it was luck of the draw. From 1960 to 1973, by the government statisticians’ reckoning, nearly 2.5 million American men joined the military, about three-quarters of them draftees. There were also some 209,000 draft resisters—evaders, runaways, all lumped into the category “draft dodgers,” with another 100,000 deserters added into the mix—of whom only a very small number were ever prosecuted. Greenbaum looked up old friends and queried strangers alike to present stories, many of which were only reluctantly shared. Indeed, as one doctor began to speak, his wife urged him to be silent, fearful to this day that “some nut will be at our door trying to hurt us.” Some stories emphasize the inarguable fact that the war was fought by minorities and the poor, two groups that lacked the student deferments and sometimes-questionable medical exemptions. Most successful conscientious objectors were white, while the most famous of them, Muhammad Ali, was “a significant example of the legal machinations, religious and racial prejudice, and Selective Service bumbling that sincere conscientious objectors had to endure.” Many resisters left the country, never to return, and found that authorities abroad, from French detectives to Canadian customs

officials, were sympathetic to their cause. In the end, Greenbaum notes, while it took courage to fight, it also took courage to “say no to the Vietnam War machine, to a government and its systems that were geared to use you.”

A worthy contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History Gregory, Philippa | HarperOne (688 pp.) $32.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780063304321

The bestselling, prolific historical novelist presents “a huge book about women.”

Gregory brings her extensive knowledge of women in society over the centuries to a vast sociological study of the lives of “regular” women throughout the past 900 years. A tour de force of research, the book chronicles the role of women in British society by era, starting with William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, commissioned in 1086, up until 1994. In each period, the author presents sections on women’s health, marriage, work, crime, punishment, immigration, rape, and “women loving women.” The overall sense reading this dense social history is that “normal” women, in spite of men’s belittling characterizations, made indelible contributions to the British Empire while rarely reaping the benefits. The author keenly delineates the different lives of women by class, such as the arduous life of working women versus aristocratic women, who, though rich in material possessions, were still affected by inadequate diet, constrictive clothing, poor ventilation, and mental strain from severe societal oppression. A familiar, depressing refrain over the centuries is the meager material compensation for women’s work and their deliberate exclusion from “profitable work, from education, from training, from the guilds and trades, and from the professions and from FEBRUARY 1, 2024

69

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

authority.” Particularly enlightening is Gregory’s exploration of Victorian society, from mining strikes, to campaigns for women’s suffrage, to the outrageous hypocrisy of Queen Victoria serving as both a steely emperor and docile wife opposed to women’s rights. Gregory also examines “Sapphism,” “Female Husbands,” and other similar topics suggesting that sexual transitioning was more frequent to women seeking greater roles and autonomy in society than previously regarded by historians.

The author concludes in 1994, when the Church of England finally ordained women as priests.

A highly instructive, exhaustive study that reveals the realities behind “ideal” or “inferior” designations of women.

The Sky Was Falling: A Young Surgeon’s Story of Bravery, Survival, and Hope Griggs, Cornelia | Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) | $28.99 | March 12, 2024 9781982168483

Testimony from the front lines of the pandemic.

Completing a pediatric surgery fellowship at a major New York City hospital, Griggs kept a diary, from February 2020 until her graduation in July, to record her experiences as Covid-19 emerged and surged. The hospital responded by canceling elective surgeries and starting each day with a briefing about the latest guidelines for testing and quarantine, which kept changing. Quickly, workers’ frustration mounted over the severe lack of masks, protective gear, and ventilators. On March 17, Griggs voiced that frustration in “The Sky Is Falling,” an op-ed piece published in the New York Times.

Media attention led to interviews, and throughout the spring, Griggs found herself a spokesperson/whistleblower, sometimes receiving sharp rebukes from other surgeons. “A misstep on Twitter,” 70

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 70

she realized, “could cost me my career.”

The pandemic deeply affected her views on her profession. “Like many healthcare workers,” she writes, “I lost the illusion that my own life and work was paramount to my employer.” Inequity and patient overload caused many to quit. “The worst part about working in healthcare since the start of the pandemic,” she reflects, “has been the mass exodus of so many brilliant, dedicated doctors, nurses, and other professionals from the clinical practice of medicine.”

The author is candid about the stress of motherhood, her desperate desire to protect her children, the isolation she felt when she sent them out of the city to stay with her parents, and her loneliness for her husband, a surgeon in Boston. She hopes her memoir will serve as a warning: “The speed at which we shift from casual concern to full-blown disaster mode is just wild,” she wrote in March. It could happen again.

A sharp critique of the health care system and a valuable record of the early days of the pandemic.

Illiberal America: A History Hahn, Steven | Norton (544 pp.) | $35.00 March 19, 2024 | 9780393635928

A sweeping history of the right wing in American politics.

The protestations of adherents notwithstanding, there’s not much of a live-and-let-live ethos in American conservatism, born of European ideas of “fixed hierarchies (notably of gender, race, and nationality) and cultural homogeneity.” Unfortunately for them,

people of different races and nationalities soon came along to undermine that cultural homogeneity, pressing for their rights—and, Hahn observes, those who have fought most consistently and persistently have always been “those who have been denied them.” Consider one of the author’s examples: The bloody King Philip’s War of 1675 ended with the destruction and enslavement of the Abenaki people, resulting in a Puritan plantation economy that favored the wealthy. Of course, the rich tended to approve of those fixed hierarchies, while the landless battled the perceived collusion among speculators and the colonial government that hindered their ownership of property. Just so, illiberal regimes in both the North and the South before and after the Civil War built economies based on involuntary servitude, whether the forced labor of enslaved people or the forced labor of the incarcerated, whose population grew dramatically following emancipation. “Between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century,” writes Hahn, “Black prison populations from the Carolinas to Texas increased more than tenfold,” and with them the social Darwinist doctrines that presumed the inherent criminality of Black people.

Modern manifestations of illiberal political repression continue this practice, while also battling on fronts familiar to all of us, from the movement to outlaw abortion to efforts to restrict voting rights. Hahn capably ferrets out antecedents, writing, sensibly, “there is no good way to understand how crime, race, and immigration became so effectively weaponized in recent years without recognizing the very deep roots that had been sunk more than a century before.”

A learned, provocative guide to modern authoritarianism masked as conservatism.

A valuable record of the early days of the pandemic.

TH E S KY WAS FAL L I N G

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

Death Row Welcomes You: Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber Hale, Steven | Melville House (288 pp.) $28.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9781612199283

A reporter takes readers inside Tennessee’s system of capital punishment.

In 2018, following a decade-long hiatus, Tennessee resumed killing death row inmates.

As Nashville-based journalist Hale writes, the last time he’d paid much attention to an execution was that of Timothy McVeigh in 2001—though within a decade another 489 people were executed around the country, “and I don’t recall being aware of a single one.” This harrowing book is sufficient penitence for his innocence, as he recounts his journey into the penal system as an authorized witness to death by lethal injection. He opens with a man who, mentally ill and traumatized in childhood, raped and murdered a 7-year-old girl, which prompts Hale to grapple with the conundrum that frames the discussion around capital punishment. The author evenhandedly presents the victim’s side; the little girl’s mother, for instance, voiced her dismay that her daughter’s story was overshadowed by the murderer’s troubled past. On the other hand, if one of his daughters had been the victim, “I would want to light the man on fire myself.” Even so, Hale comes down on the side of ending capital punishment, and for several reasons: Juries are sometimes unaware of extenuating circumstances such as mental illness and substance abuse, wrongful convictions are not uncommon, and judges and juries are fallible. Yet, as another victim’s relative observes, “if they give you a life sentence it means [you serve only] about thirteen years in jail before you’re out.”

Tennessee’s killings came to a temporary halt during the pandemic because vaccines, not lethal drug cocktails, were the order of the day—but this situation has changed again as the pandemic KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 71

wanes, making it possible that “men on the row would start getting dates and the line would start moving again.”

A thoughtful, provocative contribution to the literature on the death penalty.

The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy Hardman, Robert | Pegasus (432 pp.) $32.00 | Jan. 18, 2024 | 9781639365319

A deft mixture of reportage, history, and prediction, this first look at the early days of Charles III’s reign is both an authoritative guide and savory catnip for royal watchers.

Hardman, the well-known chronicler of the House of Windsor (Queen of Our Times, Her Majesty, etc.), predictably opens with a review of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and of the extravagant funeral that followed her death. Then the author moves on to Charles’ early command of the royal household, coronation, and initial acts and decisions. For many readers, the book’s greatest contribution will be what Hardman reveals about the structure, operations, norms, and responsibilities of kingship today. Yes, we learn a great deal about the royal family and its members, but the author also provides inside looks at the kingdom’s Privileged Bodies, the 27 “illustrious institutions” of which the monarch is head, and of the numerous other bureaus, offices, and office-holders many of us may not know. Hardman shows a king impatient with many ancient rituals and, less traditionalist than his mother, already at work to trim them, and he offers a sober forecast about the three principle issues that will require Charles’ attention in the coming years—race relations at home, the future relationship of his overseas realms to the mother country, and anti-monarchism within Britain—all competing for attention with the king’s long personal involvement in environmental issues. The author demonstrates

his unique access to a wide range of people, and he sympathetically portrays Charles as an intelligent, engaged, serious, and well-informed man whose reign, he argues, has already shown him to be “authentic.” Central to the narrative is the author’s sense that Charles, determined to open up the monarchy and reduce its size and cost, will reign with “informal formality.”

A deeply sourced, delightful introduction to the newest British king.

Drive: The Lasting Legacy of Tiger Woods Harig, Bob | St. Martin’s (320 pp.) | $30.00 March 26, 2024 | 9781250288752

There’s perseverance. Then there’s Tiger Woods perseverance.

By Sports Illustrated writer Harig’s account, Woods single-handedly changed the game of golf—a child prodigy who is three major championships behind Jack Nicklaus and tied in the number of PGA titles with Sam Snead, to say nothing of having amassed unprecedented earnings. “Woods transformed the game,” writes the author, “turning golf geeks into keen observers, casual golf fans into ardent followers, and even indifferent sports fans into curiosity mavens.” Moreover, Woods racked up many of his stats while playing through intense pain: a fused disk, multiple bone fractures after his notorious 2021 auto accident, and so forth. Just a year after that near catastrophe, Harig notes, Woods was back at the Masters and the PGA Championship, dropping out only to undergo more surgeries. The psychology behind this drive is complex, but it involves putting aside pain and fear and pushing oneself beyond what would seem to be insurmountable limits. There’s also some grace involved: Whereas Woods was cocky and to some extent aggressive in his youth, by the time he hit his 40s, he was “a more modest, appreciative player who had come to embrace the younger generation >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

71

1/8/24 5:25 PM

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 72

1/8/24 5:25 PM

P O D C A S T // N O N F I C T I O N

EDITORS’ PICKS:

When You Wish Upon a Lantern by Gloria Chao (Viking) Jump In! by Shadra Strickland (Bloomsbury) Acting Naturally: The Magic in Great Performances by David Thomson (Knopf) Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) ALSO MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE:

From Twinkle, With Love

by Sandhya Menon (Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster) The World Belonged to Us

by Jacqueline Woodson, illus. by Leo Espinosa (Nancy Paulsen Books) Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (Harper/ HarperCollins) The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (Knopf) Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius, trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Scribner) THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Never a Cloud by Jo Brunini The Maenad’s God by Karen Michalson Twenty-Three: Two Worlds

by Karl Hiltner

Michael Wilson

Rooted in Decency by Colleen Doyle Bryant Fully Booked is produced

by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 73

Fully Booked Host Megan Labrise revisits one of 2023’s most memorable conversations.

BY MEGAN LABRISE EPISODE 307: ILYON WOO

As 2023 drew to a close, we reflected on another wonderful year of podcasting with deep gratitude. While there were far too many memorable episodes to choose a favorite, one that really stood out was my conversation with Ilyon Woo about Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2023), the amazing true story of an enslaved couple’s mutual emancipation. Her luminous rendering of the lives of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped enslavement in 1848 Georgia by posing as a wealthy ill young man and his devoted slave, was a finalist for the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2023. It’s out now in paperback.

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of Master Slave Husband Wife: “Along their journey from Macon, Georgia, and up through Philadelphia, Boston, and Halifax, [the Crafts] evaded nosy onlookers and determined slave catchers working under the aegis of the Fugitive Slave Act. The Crafts also joined the abolitionist speaking circuit. Speaking to packed halls, they risked being caught and returned to their owners, one of whom was Ellen’s half sister.…Throughout, Woo’s narrative is suspenseful and wonderfully told. A captivating tale that ably captures the determination and courage of a remarkable couple.”

To hear the original episode, visit Kirkus online.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom Woo, Ilyon

Simon & Schuster | 416 pp. | $19.99 paper Jan. 17, 2023 | 9781501191060

Woo and host Megan Labrise talked about the awe Woo experienced when she first heard the Crafts’ story; what Woo calls the Crafts’ “unconventional, consensual, collaborative love”; the external circumstances that led to their escape; infamous White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; how to tell the stories of historical figures largely absented from official records; the Crafts as American heroes; and much more.

Then editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, Eric Liebetrau, and Laurie Muchnick shared their top picks in books that week.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

73

1/8/24 7:32 PM

NONFICTION

of golfers who idolized him when they were growing up.” It’s noteworthy, Harig writes, that Woods returned after so much medical work. Countless golfers have had to endure back surgeries over the years, “but few have had surgery that dealt with the spine and returned to any high level of success.” Woods isn’t immortal or infallible, to be sure, but he’s admirable for playing through one malady after another, from a trick knee that he waited a decade to fix to the microdiscectomy that threatened to ground him for a season.

A solid portrait of an athlete’s lonely progress in battling pain, the yips, aging, and other obstacles.

Kirkus Star

A History of Women in 101 Objects Hirsch, Annabelle | Trans. by Eleanor Updegraff | Crown (432 pp.) | $32.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780593728758

How women have lived, loved, and survived through the ages.

Hirsch makes an engaging book debut with a feminist chronicle of women’s lives from prehistoric times to the present. Focusing on women in the Western Hemisphere, the author presents 101 artifacts, featured in full-page illustrations, about which she offers richly detailed but succinct essays, smoothly translated by Updegraff. All of the objects, Hirsch explains, “have a bearing on women— the body, sex, love, work, art, politics” and “bear witness to the movements women instigated, and to all the myths to which they’ve been forced to conform since time immemorial.” The idiosyncratic compendium begins with a healed femur bone from 30,000 B.C., which has significant anthropological meaning; while other injured animals would die of starvation or be eaten by predators, human healing indicates caring—particularly, Hirsch argues, by 74

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 74

grandmothers, who raised children while their daughters hunted with their sons and who “watched patiently over the injured until their bones had healed.” The author profiles iconoclasts, including novelist George Sand, represented by a replica of her right arm; Sojourner Truth, represented by a coin bearing her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman”; mythological figures Isis and Athena, represented by a statuette owned by Freud; and other famous personalities, such as Greta Garbo, whose ballpoint pen represents “the influence not just of women who acted but also of women scriptwriters”: In the 1930s and ’40s, women on screen “were sassy, strong-willed, brave, sometimes even bad; they were incredibly quick-witted and didn’t take anything lying down.”

Hirsch delves into popular culture (Aretha Franklin, Kim Kardashian), leadership (Golda Meir), philosophy (Hannah Arendt), fashion (perfumed gloves, metal corsets), and various women’s protest movements: suffrage, abolition, labor, and politics, including the iconic pussyhat from 2017.

Filled with illuminating anecdotes, the collection is as entertaining as it is informative.

Kirkus Star

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir Hulls, Tessa | MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (400 pp.) | $40.00 | March 5, 2024 9780374601652

A graphic novelist contends with her maternal family’s complicated history.

When Hulls was growing up, her grandmother was a constant but ill-defined presence “who shuffled around our house in gray Costco sweatpants.” The author knew only three things about her mother’s mother, Sun Yi: She was from China, she had once been a journalist and had written a bestselling memoir, and “long ago, something happened and she lost

her mind.” In her astonishing first book, Hulls sets out to discover not only what happened to her grandmother and how those events shaped her mother’s upbringing, but how all of the above informed her own relationship with her mother and the world around her. She discovered that after years of harassment by the newly empowered Communist party, Sun Yi had fled to Hong Kong with her young daughter—the illegitimate child of a Swiss diplomat—in tow.

There she enrolled her daughter in a prestigious school, wrote her memoir, and suffered a breakdown from which she would never fully recover. Hulls relates all this material in pages as meticulously researched as they are lushly drawn. She analyzes not only the cultural and historical context of her grandmother’s and mother’s lives, but also her own motivations, assumptions, and failures to truly understand and empathize with that maternal line.

In her willingness to examine each troubling detail, the author is painstakingly thorough and relentlessly honest.

“Sometimes I feel so angry at Sun Yi and how her damage stacked the deck against my mom,” Hulls writes. “But I also see flickers of something much harder to stomach, where I use her as an easy target because I don’t know how to feel the anger toward my mom.” From start to finish, this book is a revelation.

A work that glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers.

Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World Humes, Edward | Avery (288 pp.) | $28.00 April 2, 2024 | 9780593543368

Compelling stories of people working successfully to rein in America’s wasteful habits.

Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist Humes, author of Garbology, documents various initiatives to reduce, KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

recycle, and reengineer harmful products, from food containers to gas-fired building furnaces. “We have unwittingly become,” he asserts, “the most wasteful civilization in history,” with the average American responsible for 1.5 tons of garbage each year. Waste occurs when we produce inefficiently and send the excess of what we have purchased to landfills. Humes is particularly concerned with the plastic waste—“400 million tons per year”—attendant to food packaging, disposable bottles, and the synthetics woven into our clothing.

He considers “fashion waste,” food waste, and the energy waste generated by the internal combustion engine.

For each type of waste, the author notes the work of activists who have developed innovative ways to combat our profligacy—e.g., Jamiah Hargins, who started Crop Swap LA to replace resource-intensive and chemical-laden grass lawns with micro-farms; environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck, who made plastic food packaging a public policy issue; and Amory Lovins, who launched a revolution in energy-saving passive house design. Humes highlights the work of universities that have committed to sustainability and Peachtree City, Georgia, where electric carts are a dominant form of transportation.

He discusses how energy-reduction technologies—such as induction cooktops, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and LED lighting—can help readers live less wasteful lives and stop damaging the environment. Humes believes strongly in healthy living, sustainable transportation, and a circular economy that recycles what it produces. His enthusiastic advocacy, attention to personal choices, and supportive data that seem beyond dispute make this a convincing argument and an informative book.

An engrossing, practical guide to living healthier, less improvident lives and benefiting the planet by doing so.

For more from Eric R. Kandel, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 75

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea Hunt-Hendrix, Leah & Astra Taylor Pantheon (432 pp.) | $30.00 March 12, 2024 | 9780593701249

An investigation of the need for forging bonds in activist work.

Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor have been activists for solidarity since they met in 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Hunt-Hendrix, granddaughter of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, co-founded Solidaire, a network of philanthropists who fund progressive movements, and Way to Win, which focuses on policy and electoral strategy.

Taylor co-founded the Debt Collective, a union that organizes debtors to fight for debt cancellation and other reparative social policies. Solidarity, the authors argue persuasively, is essential for confronting deep social, political, and ecological problems.

At a time of increasing polarization, “what can enable us to come together despite entrenched social divisions and the immense power of self-interested elites?” Recognizing that feelings of cohesiveness can create exclusionary groups—such as the solidarity shared by white supremacists—the authors posit “transformative solidarity,” which fosters fellowship across differences, stands against divisive forces, and works toward collective action for the common good. The authors trace the concept of solidarity from ancient Rome, where debt was a collective obligation, to modern movements such as Black Lives Matter. They examine the generation of liberal democratic ideals after the French Revolution and the rise of solidarism from the social disruption caused by the Industrial Revolution.

Solidarists held that interdependence, “a fact of human life and the natural world,” should be the basis of law and policy. However, solidarity is undermined by a market-driven system that encourages people to see each other

as competitors for resources and to spurn solidarity in favor of self-interest.

Philanthropy by billionaires functions as a “fig leaf” to cover up injustices, intensifying the difference between givers and receivers. For lasting change, solidarity, the authors assert, requires the cultivation of justice, commitment, courage, humility—and a conviction that we can remake the world.

An impassioned manifesto for social reform.

Essays on Art and Science Kandel, Eric R. | Columbia Univ. (240 pp.) $26.95 | March 19, 2024 | 9780231212564

A neuroscientist investigates art.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, Kandel (b. 1929) brings his fascination with the intersection of art, psychology, and brain science to essays written over the last 10 years, many in conjunction with museum exhibitions.

Throughout, he underscores the significance of the “beholder’s share,” or “the realization that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer.” Writing about Chaïm Soutine’s use of impasto, Kandel argues that “the use of strong tactile elements in a painting adds an important dimension to the beholder’s response” by translating visual sensation into tactile sensation. Kandel reprises and expands on themes he set forth in The Age of Insight, in which he examined the advent of modernism in Vienna in 1900, “a time and place in which Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, and many other notable artists and intellectuals lived and worked.” The intellectual and artistic ferment of the time led to theories of mind, including the unconscious, and sexuality that nourished the modernist project. In several essays, Kandel considers particular art forms from the perspective of brain science—e.g., portraiture, which requires the brain to FEBRUARY 1, 2024

75

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

form a representation of the face and body. Sculpture, while involving perception, “calls into play more powerful tactile and kinesthetic sensations than paintings do.” Especially challenging to the viewer is cubism “because it dares our visual system to reconstruct an image that is fundamentally different from the kinds of images our brain evolved to reconstruct.” Abstract art forces the viewer “to devise new ways of exploring the painting, to go beyond recognition and create new personal associations.” Artworks and scientific drawings illustrate Kandel’s penetrating examination of the complex processes that make up the eye of the beholder.

A lively, erudite inquiry into the experience of art.

Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters Klaas, Brian | Scribner (336 pp.) | $30.00 Jan. 23, 2024 | 9781668006528

In which the course of life becomes a series of dice rolls, each of no small consequence.

The history of humankind, writes Atlantic contributor Klaas, “is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.”

Furthermore, our actions have consequences that can’t always be foreseen. The author begins with the example of American statesman Henry Stimson, who stayed in a posh hotel in Kyoto, Japan, in the mid-1920s and 20 years later ordered that the city be spared from an atomic bombing, leaving Hiroshima and Nagasaki to take the blow. What might have happened had Stimson not stayed there? The world, he writes, “seems to seesaw between contingency and convergence.” It is an infinite improbability that we are alive today, and yet here we 76

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 76

An intelligently provocative and well-presented look at the world’s most pressing issue.

H IS FOR HOPE

are, thanks to an asteroid impact (and/or volcano eruptions) that incinerated the dinosaurs and ended the age of reptiles. Against all this, one should never be surprised when Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swans come home to roost. “Our lives are frequently disrupted by large social shocks such as financial crises, pandemics, and wars,” Klaas notes, and whenever we try to control the complex systems that drive them, we usually wind up on the losing side of the enterprise. Contingency rules, and, as the author sagely notes, we should congratulate ourselves less heartily for success and kick ourselves less savagely for failure. Yet in a world of chance, we still have an effect: “What you do matters. But it also matters that it’s you, and not somebody else, who’s doing it.” The book can provoke existential unease, but it also helps explain the cockamamie nature of the way things are, and it’s an always-interesting read.

A handy user’s manual to a surprising, improbable, “infinitely complex” world.

H Is for Hope: Climate Change From A to Z Kolbert, Elizabeth | Illus. by Wesley Allsbrook | Ten Speed Press (160 pp.) $24.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781984863522

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist explores the climate crisis in 26 short essays.

In this book, Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe, adapts articles she wrote for the New Yorker and organizes them alphabetically to offer

a brief historical account of climate change. At the beginning, the author tells the story of Svante Arrhenius, the 19th-century Nobel Prize–winning physicist who first deduced that humans were altering the Earth’s climate through carbon-emitting activities. Kolbert then moves to the present day with the letter B, which she uses to reference climate activist Greta Thunberg’s infamous 2021 “blah, blah, blah” speech, which critiqued empty political calls to preserve the planet. The pieces that follow explore many elements of the current global situation and its effects. Scientists all over the world are making strides in the development of green technologies that will “electrify everything” using renewable resources like the wind.

Major contributors such as the U.S. have passed legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, which has authorized more than $350 billion to go to climate initiatives—but not everyone is willing to act. Those who defend corporate interests or are unwilling to end fossil fuel dependence (i.e., Republicans) stand in the way of much-needed progress.

In the meantime, increasing damage to the environment is creating a new class of climate refugees who may increasingly be met with xenophobia from their more fortunately situated counterparts. Illustrated throughout with vivid pen-and-ink-style drawings by graphic artist Allsbrook, the book both informs and disturbs us about the climate uncertainties facing humankind, but never without offering glimmers of hope. Its accessibility, readability, and thoughtfulness will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience. Other entries include “Green Concrete,” “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” and “Quagmire.”

An intelligently provocative and well-presented look at the world’s most pressing issue.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life Kristof, Nicholas D. | Knopf (480 pp.) $32.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780593536568

One of the most consequential journalists of our time recounts his life and storied career, showing how “journalism is an act of hope.”

Among many other honors, longtime New York Times journalist Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes: for International Reporting in 1990, with his wife and colleague Sheryl WuDunn, in recognition of their coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre; and for Commentary in 2006, for bringing global attention to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. He served as New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo; as a senior editor at the Times in charge of the Sunday edition; and as a permanent opinion columnist.

In this engaging memoir, Kristof offers numerous tales of encounters with danger in war zones and narrow escapes from death, including a plane crash in the African wilderness. Throughout his career, the author has never lost his belief in “purpose-driven journalism that exposes injustice.” As part of his mission to get readers to care about human suffering and tragedy, he chronicles his return to his hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, to examine the shocking rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, and other “deaths of despair” in contemporary working-class America. He describes how he inherited his passion for human rights from his father, who escaped from despotic Romania. Kristof’s fabulous career, from Harvard and a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford to the Times, has clearly been guided by a firm moral compass, a belief that truth, information, and ideas can be forces for justice and change in the world. If his 2021 campaign for governor of Oregon came to a premature end, no matter. Kristof has made his mark through his fearless reporting, and this memoir is a worthy record of his life’s work.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 77

A vividly recalled account of a life that has had true global impact.

American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home

as political currency. Kurutz’s wellcrafted story is one of makers defying the odds, as well as lessons in the many harms of throwaway culture.

Guaranteed to be of interest to anyone who appreciates bespoke and wellmade goods, as well as artisan pride.

Kurutz, Steven | Riverhead (240 pp.) $29.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9780593329610

The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir

A New York Times fashion reporter digs into the economics of manufacturing clothing—and why so much of it is trash.

“Clothing is a basic human need,” writes Kurutz of the decline of American clothing manufacturing.

“What did it mean for a nation to lose the ability to make it on any scale?” Textiles had long ago moved to the South from New England to chase cheap labor; now they travel across oceans.

Kurutz, the author of Like a Rolling Stone, surveys that economic history before settling on a few people determined to restore the “Made in America” label, such as an Alabama woman working to remake her hometown as the sock capital of America, as it once was before George W. Bush signed a law allowing “socks made from U.S.-spun yarn [to] be sent to Honduras or another low-cost country to have the toes sewn shut, then shipped back to America duty-free.”

The flannel maker of the title chased after a shirt of the quality he’d worn as a teenager, nursing “a desire for timeless quality in a disposable culture.” Talk about a white whale: That excellent shirt had been offshored, and what came back was guaranteed to fall apart after a few washings, whether it was a big-box house brand or a boutique name. The flannel fan pressed on, founding a product line limited to a few classic items: flannel shirts, sweatshirts, and T-shirts. Labor costs added to the price tag—but so, too, did recovering lost knowledge, and then there was the problem of right-wingers seizing the “Made in the U.S.A.” slogan

A Chinese Vietnamese woman uses performance art to grieve her mother’s death.

When Lieu— playwright and creator of the onewoman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother—was 11, her mother, a successful business owner and Vietnamese refugee, died while getting a “tummy tuck.” In the ensuing years, the author’s family, including her three older siblings, refused to talk about their mother, let alone answer questions about her untimely death. As an adult, Lieu began creating performance art; during an acting class, she unexpectedly found herself exploring the impact of her mother’s story. Later, the author tried to contact the family of the surgeon whose malpractice led to her mother’s death, pore over the depositions from the trial that followed, and traveled to Vietnam to find someone who would finally answer her questions about what her mother was really like.

Lieu’s research uncovered the ways in which her mother’s perfectionism and warped body image—conditions she shared with Lieu—contributed to her decision to undergo the procedure. Most of all, though, the author obsessed about her mother’s death because she wanted to feel less detached from her family.

“I believed that once they validated my experience,” she writes, “I could finally free myself from the haunting journey of going through Má’s death alone.”

Unexpectedly, Lieu got what she always wanted during a “postshow >>>

Lieu, Susan | Celadon Books (320 pp.) $30.00 | March 12, 2024 | 9781250835048

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

77

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter Talks Book With Joy Reid The Roots MC’s memoir was published in November.

Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter discussed his new memoir, The Upcycled Self, on the MSNBC show The ReidOut with host Joy Reid.

Trotter’s memoir, co-written with Jasmine Martin and published last November by One World, tells the story of his childhood in Philadelphia and his career as the MC of the pioneering hip-hop group the Roots. A critic for Kirkus praised the book as “an outstanding read.”

Reid asked what made Trotter open up in his book about his difficult childhood, including the murder of both of his parents.

“I feel like now more than ever, the world

78

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 78

needs those stories,” Trotter responded. “They need real-life accounts of overcoming an obstacle.

There’s so much in my story along the way that I’ve been faced with and I’ve had to overcome. If I’m able to give someone anything to latch on to, then I feel like the book has served its purpose.”

Reid asked Trotter what he wanted people to take from his book.

“I would love for people to walk away from this book with an understanding of the saving grace, the salvation that lies in the arts and arts education,” he replied. “If it’s not art, then anything, providing children, young people, with an outlet, with an opportunity to gaze beyond the block, over the fence, outside of the ’hood. Those little glimpses are what lit the fire within me.”—M.S.

For a review of The Upcycled Self, visit Kirkus online.

Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Museum of Modern Art

SEEN AND HEARD

Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

SEEN AND HEARD New Book by Bill Maher Coming in June What This Comedian Said Will Shock You is based on his onscreen Real Time editorials.

Rich Fury/VF22/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

Bill Maher will release his first book in more than 10 years this spring.

In a news release, Simon & Schuster announced that it will publish the comedian and talk show host’s What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, calling the book “a brilliantly astute and acerbically funny vivisection of American life, politics, and culture.”

Maher was a stand-up comedian and actor before hosting the talk show Politically Incorrect from 1993 to 2002. In 2003, he launched a similar show, Real Time, which features his discussions with guests about current events, as well as his acerbic and often inflammatory commentary.

He is the author of several previous books, including a novel, True Story, and volumes of humor writing, such as New Rules: Polite Musings From a Timid Observer and The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass. His new book, according to Simon & Schuster, is based on the editorials he delivers at the end of each episode of Real Time. “Free speech, cops, drugs, race, religion, the generations, cancel culture, the parties, the media, show biz, romance, health— Maher covers it all,” the publisher says.

What This Comedian Said Will Shock You is slated for publication on June 4, 2024.—M.S.

Bill Maher

ISBN : 979-8-8690-5686-3

For more books

by Bill Maher, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 79

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

79

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

Q&A” where, in front of an audience of 140 people, the author’s siblings finally gave her the answers and validations she spent years seeking. While parts of the first half of the narrative lack focus, the second half—about the author’s investigation of her mother’s death—is fast-paced, vulnerable, humorous, and empathetic. Lieu’s compassionate epiphanies about her family’s reasons for silence are particularly poignant.

An intimate Asian American memoir about family, memory, and grief.

On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America Lustgarten, Abrahm | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) | $30.00 | March 26, 2024 9780374171735

As climate change begins to bite, long-predicted upheavals are underway.

Journalist Lustgarten, author of Run to Failure and China’s Great Train, begins with the usual bad news. Today, less than 1% of the planet is too hot to support civilization. By 2070, it will be 20%. Where will those people go?

Tolerable living conditions in the U.S. “will jump dramatically northward,” with states along the Canadian border suffering the least damage. Sea levels have risen more than nine inches since 1960—and two feet in Louisiana, the worse-affected state, drowning a coastal area bigger than Delaware. Rapid global heating produces hot but also extremely unpredictable weather, and hurricanes, forest fires, and droughts have become routine. Traveling the nation, Lustgarten interviews experts and victims to paint a grim but fact-based picture. Responding to catastrophic losses, insurers who have not gone bankrupt have raised premiums or stopped issuing policies in certain areas. Responding to pleas from property owners, elected officials have exacerbated the problem by introducing subsidized taxpayer-financed insurance.

80

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 80

Lustgarten is not the first to point out that this “sends the wrong message,” encouraging Americans to remain in dangerous areas. Census data show that Americans continue to move toward heat, coastlines, and drought. These trends have burdened state budgets, especially in places like Florida; since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, five million people have moved to coastal counties, assured of cheap insurance. When Ron DeSantis decided to stem the money hemorrhage, angry homeowners quickly changed his mind. Lustgarten finishes with the traditional gloom (“We’ve failed for a generation already”) but adds that aggressive action can still mitigate the damage and even revive neglected regions such as the Rust Belt.

This means building sea walls but also investing in housing, infrastructure, and social programs to accommodate those already on the move.

Global warming on the home front.

The Observable Universe: An Investigation

archive, when paper filing was quickly becoming obsolete and the internet was still new. As a result, only the oldest, most fragile documents were preserved in the digital realm, leaving the ephemera of daily life to memory or imagination. In short vignettes varying widely in topics and tone, McCalden encourages readers to see her book as an album about grief. “Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience,” she writes.

While often captivating, the fragmented style eventually wears thin and often fails to lead to greater insights. The parceling of information is reminiscent of the internet, but, like the internet, the information is diluted from its source.

Some moments are truly translucent in their brilliance—e.g., McCalden’s claim that “observation is a relationship”—but readers may seek more depth. Nonetheless, there’s plenty to appreciate in the strength of the prose and the unexpected connections.

Fans of experimental form will find much to admire here.

McCalden, Heather | Hogarth (304 pp.) $29.00 | March 19, 2024 | 9780593596470

An examination of grief and viruses through the AIDS crisis and the internet age.

In the early 1990s, McCalden, a multidisciplinary artist, lost both her parents to “AIDS-related complications.” Her grandmother, Nivia, raised her, removing her parents’ few belongings from their home. The author’s life has been marked by their absence and what little she knows about them. This book is a reckoning with grief and the unknown, but it’s equally about the virus, which McCalden calls her “closest living relative.” Interspersed with her story and the history of the disease is a fascinating line of research on the early internet era, connected thematically by computer “viruses” and its overlapping timeline with the AIDS crisis. The mid-1990s, writes the author, represent a gap in the

Kirkus Star

The Other Fab Four: The Remarkable True Story of the Liverbirds, Britain’s First Female Rock Band McGlory, Mary & Sylvia Saunders Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) | $30.00 March 12, 2024 | 9781538739969

An autobiography from two members of the Liverbirds, a “girl band” from the same Liverpool background as the Beatles.

Bassist and vocalist McGlory and drummer Saunders grew up in working-class families in the 1950s and ’60s, and, like many of their contemporaries, fell in love with American popular music. Hearing other bands play in local venues, they began practicing and started their own group. After a few early personnel KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

changes, singers/guitarists Val Gell and Pam Birch were the final additions to the band’s lineup. Featuring a repertoire based on tunes by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and other American blues and rock artists, the Liverbirds moved up to perform at the Cavern Club, where the Beatles made their initial impact. They made the acquaintance of the Beatles, Rollings Stones, Kinks, and other stars of the era. Their career took them to Hamburg, Germany, where they became a fixture at the Star-Club, another early Beatles stomping ground. The Liverbirds stayed together, touring Europe and recording in Germany, until Saunders became pregnant and, on doctors’ advice, gave up playing drums. That, except for sporadic reunions, was the end of the group—though McGlory and Saunders remained involved in music and entertainment. The two alternate chapters, recounting their experiences both during the band’s glory days and in the years since; accounts of the other two members demonstrate the strength of the bandmates’ bonds. “We knew we could rely on each other,” writes McGlory. The authors include a discography, and they create a vivid portrait of the ’60s music scene, full of good stories about themselves and a surprising number of other celebrities of the era.

An utterly charming reminiscence by two members of a band that made its own kind of history in the wake of the Beatles.

Four Thousand Paws: Caring for the Dogs of the Iditarod: A Veterinarian’s Story Morgan, Lee | Liveright/Norton (304 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781324091394

A veterinarian narrates his experiences volunteering his services for the Iditarod.

When Morgan applied to help with the sled dogs of the Iditarod—the 1,049-mile Alaskan race KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 81

the author calls “the hardest endurance event in the world”—he wasn’t sure that his experience running a veterinary practice in Washington, D.C., and treating professional animals like seeing-eye dogs and police dogs would be enough to qualify him for the coveted position. To his surprise (and delight), Morgan was chosen, and he set off for his first Iditarod in 2012.

Over the ensuing years, Morgan became a regular volunteer whose empathy and curiosity made him an expert in a variety of trivia, including the evolution of Alaskan huskies, their establishment as the official Iditarod race dogs (which followed one competitor’s disastrous attempt to race with a team of standard poodles), and the personal histories of mushers like Newton Marshall, one of the race’s only Caribbean competitors.

Morgan doesn’t shield readers from the most intense parts of the race.

He describes surviving a tent fire and poignantly remembers the aftermath of a brutal attack on two mushers that killed a sled dog. While the narrative has a few misses—e.g., the author seems overly awed by the participation of a group of incarcerated women charged with caring for injured dogs—he crafts a deeply researched, charmingly narrated, and intensely compassionate behind-thescenes look at one of the most intense human-animal collaborations in modern history. Readers will leave with a huge appreciation for huskies, the landscape that bred them, and the humans who care for them. The author concludes, “Some say…that huskies shouldn’t be allowed to run with abandon through the wilderness…I know thousands of huskies who emphatically disagree.”

A captivating, fast-paced, eclectic memoir about animals and humans cooperating to accomplish extraordinary feats.

Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations Murphy, Mary C. | Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) | $30.00 | March 12, 2024 9781982172749

Strategies for changing one’s mindset.

Social psychologist Murphy brings 10 years of research to her analysis of how best to foster growth and development. She contrasts Cultures of Genius, which pit individuals against one another for recognition and promotion, with Cultures of Growth, where teams collaborate to work through problems, innovate solutions, and allow themselves to take risks. In Cultures of Growth, Murphy explains, talent and ability are honed and enhanced “through good strategies, mentoring, and organizational supports.” In evaluating a job applicant, for example, or conducting a periodic review, growth can be encouraged by looking for evidence of collaborative work, innovative ideas, risk-taking to solve a problem, and resilience when facing obstacles. Cultures of Growth do well to prize “learn-it-alls” over “know-it-alls.” In a workplace, writes the author, “mindset culture has a ripple effect that impacts everything: collaboration and innovation; who is hired, fired, and promoted; ethical (or unethical) behavior; diversity and inclusion; and bottom-line economic success.” Cultures of Growth, moreover, do well to understand the mindset

A captivating, fast-paced, eclectic memoir about animals and humans cooperating.

F O U R T H O U S A N D PA W S

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

81

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

A challenging and often eye-opening nonfiction debut.

NO JUDGMENT

of core customers—how open they are to the prospect of change and growth— to find “the most effective messaging to connect with consumers’ goals.”

Murphy cites various organizations, including Patagonia, Microsoft, and the Good Food Institute, to support her argument about the benefits of Cultures of Growth. Studies reveal that collaborative mindsets promote less cheating among college students and more innovation in research labs and medical teams. In medical teams, for example, Cultures of Growth create an atmosphere of psychological safety in which employees at any level feel comfortable sharing ideas. Murphy offers suggestions for assessing both the mindset of organizations and microcultures and the mindset of the reader regarding evaluative and high-effort situations, critical feedback, and dealing with other people’s success.

A practical, useful guide for personal and organizational success.

Duty Calls: Lessons Learned From an Unexpected Life of Service Novello, Antonia with Jill S. Tietjen Fulcrum (272 pp.) | $21.95 paper March 5, 2024 | 9781682754467

A memoir from the first woman and first Hispanic surgeon general of the U.S. In this chronicle of her achievements and the harrowing physical disability she overcame, Novello, writing with Tietjen, offers conventional inspiration and praise for those who inspired her, 82

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 82

without ignoring those who stood in her way. Born in 1944 in Puerto Rico with “congenital megacolon,” the author suffered from chronic constipation and was often unable to defecate, requiring weekly enemas. A bungled operation made matters worse. Novello’s fiercely ambitious schoolteacher mother made no allowances for her daughter’s disability, and she proceeded to excel in school, college, medical school, and postgraduate training as a pediatrician. While a medical student, a surgery at the Mayo Clinic made her condition manageable. She did not slow down after joining the Public Health Service, in 1990 becoming the first woman and first Hispanic Surgeon General. Although the Surgeon General is a powerful voice for health promotion, the position exerts little authority.

But this was definitely not the case after her 1999 appointment to New York State Health commissioner, where she was responsible for one-third of the state budget, oversaw everything from hospitals to nursing homes to undertakers, and dealt with medical issues from 9/11 to AIDS to abortion. Like many first-time memoirists, Novello writes well about public and technical areas but underestimates the skill required for personal matters. Readers will scratch their heads over details of her lifelong but dysfunctional marriage.

They will be shocked to read that she was fined and sentenced to community service for felonious offenses as New York’s health commissioner; her explanation that she was framed because she had “alienated a number of individuals within the department” cries out for more details. She retired in 2014; her career honors fill a 19-page appendix.

A mostly inspirational memoir from a physician who overcame a litany of barriers.

Kirkus Star

No Judgment: Essays Oyler, Lauren | HarperOne (272 pp.) $28.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9780063235359

Deep thoughts on contemporary life from the author of the novel Fake Accounts.

Oyler’s debut novel was heavy on social commentary, interrogating such phenomena as Instagram and dating apps and the pressure to turn the self into a marketable product. In her second book, she explores similar themes. In “Embarrassment, Panic, Opprobrium, Job Loss, Etc.,” the author reflects on gossip as cultural currency by analyzing examples from her own life, the rise and fall of Gawker, and the #MeToo movement, among other subjects. This essay is not a puff piece; it’s more than 40 pages long, and it’s clearly the product of significant research and careful thought. It’s also absorbing and funny. While reflecting on her mother’s habit of sharing scandalous tidbits about Oyler’s friends when she was a child, the author suggests that her mom was trying to both connect with her daughter and provide cautionary tales. “She was also, of course, parenting unconsciously,” she writes, “setting me up to become, among other things, a woman who is interested (and proficient) enough in gossip that she wants to write a long essay about it.” A resonant piece titled “My Perfect Opinions” begins as a tale of Goodreads and revenge and turns into a wry history of the star rating system. “The story begins in 1792, when pretty much everyone in the English writer Mariana Starke’s family had tuberculosis,” she writes. The title, as Oyler explains in the introduction, is ironic. This is a writer with particular views, and she has plenty of interesting things to say about autofiction, spoilers, and life as an expatriate. Some readers have seen Oyler’s work in Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and the Believer, but all of the essays in this collection are published here for the first time.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

A challenging and often eye-opening nonfiction debut.

Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense Perlmutter, Saul | Little, Brown Spark (304 pp.) | $30.00 | March 26, 2024 9780316438100

A pertinent study about how knowing what questions to ask is the way to cut through confusion and mis­understanding.

This interesting, challenging book is based on a popular “Big Ideas” course at UC Berkeley. Perlmutter, Campbell, and MacCoun—a physicist, philosopher, and psychologist, respectively—aim to help people “learn to think about big problems and make effective decisions in this ‘too much information’ age.”

Media saturation, data overload, fake news, and the proliferation of experts (and pseudo-experts) have combined to make the world seem like a labyrinthine mess. The authors argue that the methodology of science provides a way out, and it can be applied broadly as long as the process is properly understood.

They lay out the questions to ask, the ways to separate facts from opinions, how to distinguish reliable information from background noise, how to think in terms of probabilities instead of absolutes, and how to incorporate personal values. As the authors demonstrate throughout, this approach involves a change of thinking. Get out of the echo chamber of the like-minded, they advise, and make contact with people who have different views. Review your opinions and policies, and admit it if you were wrong. Be aware of your own biases, especially the tendency to believe things simply because they confirm your views.

Perlmutter, Campbell, and MacCoun provide case studies and thought exercises from their respective fields, but they avoid jargon wherever possible.

They admit that the methodology can KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 83

be difficult to use, although it gets easier with practice. This book is not an easy book to read and requires a good deal of attention, but the authors present many useful lessons for making sense of what is happening around us.

Working across disciplines, the authors offer valuable tools for understanding this complex, confusing era.

Escaping Nature: How To Survive Global Climate Change Pilkey, Orrin H. | Duke Univ. (320 pp.) $28.95 paper | March 29, 2024 9781478025443

On the challenge of wrapping our heads around climate change— and actually doing something about it.

Pilkey, an earth scientist at Duke, and his contributors examine nearly every conceivable facet of how climate change is affecting life on Earth, emphasizing that it won’t just be human life that suffers. Yet humans are the chief culprits, and it’s up to humans to act, even as “we are not mentally equipped to prepare for a slow-moving abstraction like climate change that unfolds over decades and centuries.” It hardly helps that all the bad news about it has a numbing effect. Still, the author and his fellow contributors are confident that some positive action will ensue, since “we’ve been handed what is known in chess as a forced move.” There are paradoxical bits of good and bad news along the way: Flammable forest land area has declined by a quarter between 1983 and 2015, but only because so much forest has been swallowed up by farmland, and—bad news indeed—what we saw in the Lahaina conflagration of 2023 is likely to be repeated time and again: “urban firestorms…[that] will increase in scale and frequency, causing more death and destruction.” There are woes aplenty to report in these pages, but Pilkey and company offer ways in which readers can ameliorate them by

taking viable steps such as establishing building codes that “require new houses to be made of fire-resistant materials”; outlawing water-intensive lawns in recognition that “drought and biodiversity loss have rendered the lawn aesthetic, especially as it is practiced in the United States, a hopelessly antiquated custom”; and making behavioral changes in daily life: “Eat more vegetables, drive less, and have fewer children....Stop building in areas at risk from wildfires, floods, sea level rise, storms, and so on.”

An eminently sensible user’s manual for saving the planet.

Kirkus Star

How To Win an Information War: Sefton Delmer, the Genius Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler Pomerantsev, Peter | PublicAffairs (304 pp.) $30.00 | March 5, 2024 | 9781541774728

A striking account of a Germanspeaking Australian working for the British secret service during the era of Nazi aggression.

Pomerantsev, a disinformation expert, is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda. In his latest book, he introduces us to Sefton Delmer (1904-1979), an Australian born in Berlin whose anti-Nazi radio programs in dozens of languages across Europe helped undermine the Nazi war effort. Growing up in Germany’s Weimar Republic (his father was a professor of English literature in Berlin) and often mocked for his British ways, young Delmer desperately wanted to fit in. After a stint in Britain, he returned to Berlin—now on the cusp of Nazi control—as a journalist for the Daily Express, where he witnessed and understood viscerally the power of political propaganda to promote belonging. Hence, in advising the British—who at first did not trust him, as he had interviewed Goebbels, >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

83

1/8/24 5:25 PM

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 84

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

5 Books for Movie Buffs 1 The Path to Paradise

By Sam Wasson

A memorable portrait of an artist who has changed the cinematic landscape and whose work will endure.

2 Opposable Thumbs

By Matt Singer

Readers who recall Siskel and Ebert will be delighted by this opportunity to reminisce.

1

4 Daughter of the Dragon

2

By Yunte Huang

An intimate Hollywood profile perfect for students of film and pop culture.

5 Charlie Chaplin vs.

America

3

By Scott Eyman

A brilliant must-read about the epic and turbulent life and times of a cinematic titan.

3 Oscar Wars

By Michael Schulman

This Oscars history mixes all the expected glitz and glamour with enough industry intrigue to power an award-winning drama.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 85

4

For books on film and the film industry, visit Kirkus online.

5

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

85

1/8/24 5:25 PM

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 86

1/8/24 5:25 PM

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

SEEN AND HEARD Book by Chris Christie Coming in 2024 The former New Jersey governor will invoke a GOP hero.

Chris Christie will invoke the legacy of Ronald Reagan in a new book, the Associated Press reports.

The former New Jersey governor, currently seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency, will release What Would Reagan Do?: Life Lessons From the Last Great President, co-written with Ellis Henican, this month.

Christie, a former Donald Trump ally who is now one of the former president’s most vocal critics, served as a U.S. attorney before becoming New Jersey’s governor in 2010. He served two terms as the state’s leader and sought the presidency unsuccessfully in 2016.

He is the author of two previous books: Let

Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, also co-written with Henican, and Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.

In his new book, publisher Threshold Editions says, Christie “takes a fresh look at President Ronald Reagan’s character-driven political instincts and deeply impactful relationships across party lines—finding plenty of compelling insights for our current national dysfunction.”

The AP reports that in the book’s introduction, Christie writes, “It’s amazing how much Reagan was able to achieve by sticking to his principles and connecting on a human level with those around him.”—M.S.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Chris Christie

For more on Ronald Reagan, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 87

87

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

Hitler, and others—Delmer could convey the psychological power of the Nazi message. It wasn’t enough, he argued, to simply “defend democracy,” a slogan that failed to resonate strongly; you had to “appeal to the groups vulnerable to the propaganda that plays into the desire to submit to strongmen.” Delmer became the head of Special Operations for the Political Warfare Executive, returned to journalism, and published his memoirs in the 1960s, but they have been largely forgotten or discounted.

Historians continue to debate the extent to which anti-Nazi propaganda helped win the war. Delmer believed that it aided in the “corrosion” of German will, and the author demonstrates how crucial Delmer’s work was then—and still is, as Pomerantsev has advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his efforts to counter Russian propaganda and aggression.

A brilliantly inspired study of the power of propaganda to influence geopolitical narratives.

Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl Quin, Rebecca Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $28.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781982157258

A memoir from the Irish wrestler known as The Man. Quin (b. 1987), aka Becky Lynch, a native of Dublin, is a different character from her main role in professional wrestling, the latter being “vulnerable, often foolish, and a whole lot more complex.” She describes herself average “in every aspect of life, average height, average weight, average anxieties, average grades, average upbringing.”

Thanks to wrestling, she’s traveled the world and battled challengers as the longest-reigning women’s champion on the WWE Raw program. Quin started off as a kid without much direction, thanks to a father with none of his own to speak of, always staying a step 88

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 88

ahead of the school authorities and occasionally the police. As a disgruntled teen, Quin discovered wrestling—the real kind, with real rivalries and broken bones—and found her calling. After time on the Irish circuit, she got called up to the big league by Vince McMahon, “our almighty overlord,” a mercurial and volatile fellow who had made televised pro wrestling a huge hit in the U.S. and abroad and who paid attention to every last detail of the script, the arc of which, character by character, was as complex and unshakable as any soap opera. Woe be to the actor who went off-script, as Quin did from time to time, bringing down McMahon’s wrath: “Why the fuck did you no-sell it? You fucked everything up.” Still, McMahon knew to back off once the point was made, and Quin knew to be careful next time out, even if she describes herself as “a firecracker of emotion” inclined to take all the make-believe seriously. Happily, she doesn’t take herself as seriously as the game, and WWE aficionados will enjoy the craic.

A treat for fans of The Man and pro wrestling, with plenty of peeks behind the curtain.

Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality Ramakrishnan, Venki Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) | $32.50 March 19, 2024 | 9780063113275

A Nobel Prize winner in chemistry examines aging and dying.

Ramakrishnan, a molecular biologist and the author of The Gene Machine, writes that biologists don’t consider aging “inevitable.” Progress has diminished human wear and tear over the past century and doubled our longevity without increasing our maximal lifespan. No one has matched Jeanne Calment, who died 25 years ago at 122, though she was feeble, blind, and deaf during her

final years. Ramakrishnan emphasizes that all living things can die, but many, including tiny hydras and some jellyfish, can regenerate completely when certain parts are chopped off. Their likelihood of dying does not increase with age, so they are considered biologically immortal. More familiar animals—giant tortoises, some sharks—age extremely slowly, and we have plenty to learn from these creatures. Ramakrishnan is a fine writer, so readers will enjoy his expert if intensely detailed overview of genetics and evolution as it applies to aging. Those who pay attention will be rewarded by his modestly optimistic conclusion about life extenders, which are familiar to health-conscious readers and heavily promoted by entrepreneurial colleagues. The author includes fascinating studies demonstrating that the front-runners—rapamycin, resveratrol, metformin, curcumin—and calorie restriction extend the lives of animals, including primates. However, having no skin in the game, the author breaks ranks with enthusiasts by recounting failed studies. He holds a low opinion of respectable colleagues who promote the elderly male billionaires who finance their startups, as well as the bizarre but flourishing cryonics industry, which freezes people immediately after death “with the idea of defrosting them when a cure for whatever ailed them has been found.” In the end, Ramakrishnan believes that vast lifespans will happen, but not in the near future.

An illuminating account of the science of life extension with a more critical eye than most.

A treat for fans of The Man and pro wrestling.

B E C K Y LY N C H

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 Into the World’s FastestGrowing Sport Robinson, Joshua & Jonathan Clegg Mariner Books (336 pp.) | $29.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780063318625

An appropriately fast-paced narrative of Formula 1 auto racing, whose popularity is exploding.

Wall Street Journal European sportswriter Robinson and editor Clegg, co-authors of The Club, begin their narrative in Bahrain with a cast of drivers “without normal human fear receptors.” The drivers represent various brands of race cars whose makers are applying space launch–level science (and budgets) to make their cars cut through the air milliseconds faster than the competition, physics and engineering at play in “a competition where the most decisive action of the season can take place not on the track…but in a wind tunnel simulation.” Perhaps improbably, F1 has become a hugely successful sport of late—“improbably” because, compared to, say, soccer, which doesn’t require an operator’s manual, F1 racing appeals to the inner Einstein as well as the inner Andretti in all of us: “The only way to win championships is to land a series of technical moon shots—and then do it all over again.” As Robinson and Clegg note, profiling drivers and deal-makers alike, F1’s success has come as a result of a steadily growing franchise that has taken races worldwide, starting in Europe and then across the oceans to places as large as China and the U.S. and as small as Singapore, all masterminded by genius entrepreneur Bernie Ecclestone. Along with him came sponsors with the shrewdness to recognize that many F1 drivers were “overcaffeinated adrenaline junkies with scant regard for their personal safety” but a solid appreciation for big purses. Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs and players remade KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 89

the sport from an arcane pastime to a species of mass entertainment that, the authors suggest in closing, has become something of “a post-sport sport,” capable of being appreciated without ever watching a single race.

A thrill for fans of F1, and a fine example of fluid sportswriting.

The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins Rollins, Sonny | Ed. by Sam V.H. Reese New York Review Books (172 pp.) | $17.95 paper | March 12, 2024 | 9781681378268

A welcome peek into the mind of the great jazz musician.

Reese, author of Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature and Loneliness, delves into the tenor saxophonist’s substantial archives in the New York Public Library, unearthing these fascinating notebooks.

Divided into four chronological sections covering nearly 50 years, they capture how Rollins’ thinking about a wide range of subjects evolved. With entries starting in 1959, after two incarcerations, kicking his heroin addiction, and the beginning of his years-long practice sessions on the Williamsburg Bridge, these slight, diary-like bits and pieces reveal an incredibly curious and philosophical musician—“What I am is jazz phrasing”—with a strong work ethic. He’s very concerned with physical and breathing exercises, his health, practicing fingering and other technical aspects involved in playing the sax, his “proclivity for impatience,” his belief that “jazz is a free planet where everything is happiness and love,” and a passion for lists. “I must try to desist from lusting after women,” he adds. All of these ideas are in service of making him a better person and musician. Rollins sees himself in harmony with the music, and the sax “can achieve any color within the orchestra.” The entries seem well thought out, as if he hoped they would eventually be read by others, especially music students. He occasionally brings up social matters:

“‘Race’ is synonymous to color! I am of the gold race.” On jazz’s “essence,” creative improvisation, he writes, “This then is man in his finest hour—portraying nature.” Rollins is devoted to yoga and avoids eating bitter candy, which affects his breathing. He consistently praises his instrument—“It is yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in one form—the almighty saxophone”—and he bemoans the “wasteful exploitation of energy resources.” The last entry, from 2010: “No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.”

Heady musical and philosophical stuff.

How To Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir Russell, Cameron | Random House (224 pp.) $28.00 | March 19, 2024 | 9780593595480

A model and activist breaks a self-imposed silence about her professional life to examine the dark underside of the fashion industry.

When Russell began modeling at 16, she was unaware that she was entering a world where a woman’s value was based as much on looks as on a willingness to “do anything” for (male) photographers. Her first experiences rejecting an S&M–style shoot confused her not only because of the photographer’s annoyed response but also because of her inability to make him understand that the pictures might jeopardize a future career in politics. Russell soon realized that if she was going to become a successful model, she would need to let “the photographer feel he control[ed]” her. However, the intimacy she performed as a model often left her open to unwanted advances from photographers and their clients, who treated models as “disposable” sexual commodities. Over time, she became a “good actress” and learned to play the game, scoring lucrative contracts with the likes of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren that allowed her to pay for a college education at Columbia. Unable to ignore FEBRUARY 1, 2024

89

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

the abuses of power she saw in her work, Russell began to speak out, first through a TED Talk about “Whiteness, beauty [and] privilege.” Later, she helped found the Model Mafia, a collective in which models could discuss their experiences within a brutal system that exploits girls and young women who, unlike the (largely white) supermodels celebrated by the media, lived “far from family [and made] less than a livable wage.”

Intimate and thoughtful, Russell’s book offers a disturbing look at the hidden ways women are objectified and degraded in an industry that profits from creating illusions of beauty that feed an endless—and damaging—circle of misogynist desire.

A sharp, provocative memoir about an evergreen topic.

Woman, Life, Freedom Satrapi, Marjane | Trans. by Una Dimitrijević Seven Stories (280 pp.) | $35.95 paper March 19, 2024 | 9781644214053

The author of Persepolis returns with a collection about burgeoning activism in Iran.

In September 2022, the beating and death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian student arrested for not wearing her headscarf properly, incited a solidarity movement among women and men that spread around the world. To publicize and bear witness to this major uprising, Satrapi has gathered stories, cartoons, and essays from more than 20 artists, activists, journalists, and academics. The author has two aims: “to explain what’s going on in Iran, to decipher events in all their complexity and nuance for a non-Iranian readership, and to help you understand them as fully as possible”; and “to remind Iranians that they are not alone.” Setting the movement in context, Iranian American historian Abbas Milani offers an overview of the political upheavals and revolutions that have led to the current misogynist, repressive regime and the “resolute defiance” that has emerged in protest.

90

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 90

An impassioned message of rage and hope.

WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM

As each contributor attests, life under a wrathful dictatorship is consistently frightening and dangerous: “The Islamic Republic ensures its own survival by murdering people. During the successive demonstrations” over Amini’s murder, “several hundred people were killed in an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of protesters. Young people were forced to confess under torture.” Women are especially vulnerable. Since November 2022, young students in schools across Iran have been poisoned by toxic gas as part of an attempt to force girls’ schools to close. Protecting the regime falls to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary organization that answers directly to Khomeini, the Supreme Leader, and for the past four decades has carried out a reign of terror.

This collection pays homage to victims and celebrates the dreams of Iran’s determined activists. Other contributors include Joanne Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Paco Roca, and Mana Neyestani.

An impassioned message of rage and hope.

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter Schiffer, Zoë | Portfolio (352 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780593716601

An egomaniac takes charge.

Drawing on interviews with more than 60 employees, internal documents, court filings, and congressional testimony, journalist Schiffer, managing editor of the investigative tech newsletter Platformer, makes her book debut with a sharp,

gossipy account of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Not a biography of the volatile entrepreneur, Schiffer’s investigation looks at the effect of Musk’s takeover on the social media site itself and on the company’s thousands of employees. As the author recounts, Musk wavered in his decision to buy Twitter, beginning in January 2022, when he began accumulating shares; a few months later, he joined the board and made an offer to purchase the business. Suits and countersuits slowed the process, which finally ended in the fall of that year, when Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Chaos ensued. Intent on cutting costs, Musk instituted massive layoffs, including engineers, content managers, and root password holders. “Without the root password,” Schiffer notes incredulously, “the company didn’t have administrative access to its own machines.” Musk insisted that his demands be fulfilled immediately by a diminished number of full-time and contract employees. His product ideas “weren’t bad,” Schiffer writes, “but they were all over the map.

In addition to relaunching Twitter Blue, he was exploring a payments platform, long-form video, long-form tweets, and encrypted direct messages.” Layoffs weakened morale, and advertising revenue dropped, resulting from racist, antisemitic, and homophobic posts. Schiffer cites tweets from disgruntled employees: “Everything happening on Twitter now,” one remarked, “is a lot easier to understand if you’ve ever had a younger sibling that invented a game and added a new rule every time they started losing.”

“Since he was a child,” Schiffer writes, “Musk had harbored a belief that he was destined to have a great impact on the world.” As this account shows, that impact could be disastrous.

A well-researched report on Twitter’s calamitous year.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

Kirkus Star

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook Sides, Hampton | Doubleday (432 pp.) $35.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9780385544764

An acclaimed historian takes to the sea in this rousing tale of exploration.

Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail and Ghost Soldiers, writes that James Cook’s (1728-1779) voyages “form a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique.” The author seeks to “describe what happened during his consequential, ambitious, and ultimately tragic final voyage,” with 180 people on two ships— the Discovery and the Resolution, captained

by William Bligh—that embarked in July 1776. Along with a wide range of animals, leaving with Cook was Mai, a Tahitian whose “life story offered a poignant allegory of first contact between England and the people of Oceania.”

The plan was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, drop Mai off on an island, claim any new territories, and search for the Northwest Passage. Fortunately, Capt. Charles Clerke, released from debtor’s prison, joined the Discovery in Plymouth. Crew members were noticing changes in Cook’s demeanor. They reached Cape Town in October, rested, and repaired and restocked. After Clerke arrived, they set off in November. In late January, they reached Tasmania and then New Zealand. In August, they arrived at Tahiti, the “place of their wildest desires,” and removed most of the animals the king gave them. When a Native islander stole a goat, Cook began destroying canoes and setting fires on Moorea, “punishing the many for the misdeeds of an individual.” In December, Cook headed north, eventually reaching America’s western coast, Alaska, Asia, and the icy Arctic Circle, making KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 91

contact with many Natives. His voyage ended in Hawaii when he was killed by angry Natives in a grisly fight. Sides draws on numerous contemporaneous sources to create a fascinating, immersive adventure story featuring just the right amount of historical context.

Lusciously detailed and insightful history, masterfully told.

The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century Steil, Benn | Avid Reader Press (704 pp.) $40.00 | Jan. 9, 2024 | 9781982127824

Comprehensive biography of a figure now largely forgotten but central to the history of the World War II–era Roosevelt administration.

Henry Wallace (1888-1965) was sharply intelligent, but “he also had great difficulty with social interactions…and he frequently failed to recognize even elementary cues as to people’s motivations and agendas,” writes Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. The agendas were many when he entered the administration as vice president. At heart a Midwestern farmer, he came to the office in the fraught years of World War II. Although Wallace’s interest was in foreign policy, writes Steil, he viewed it through the lens of agriculture and commerce, and when it was his task to negotiate trade and loan deals with the Soviet Union, a never quite trustworthy ally, he was inclined to generosity. Indeed, notes the author, Wallace was dogged throughout his years in office and afterward with the charge of being a communist, tracked by the FBI. There was some basis for the suspicion, for Wallace was steered into numerous positions by Soviet agents, to the consternation of other allies: “Opposed to the British Empire, and friendly to the Soviet one, Wallace was a constant source of concern in London.”

Considering Wallace a detriment, Roosevelt selected another vice-presidential candidate to run with him in 1944, easing Wallace out. That moment has taken on layers of legend, which Steil deftly sorts through to distinguish truth from fiction. Within the Democratic Party, Steil observes, Wallace became the “unrivaled leader of the party’s liberal wing” and later broke to lead the Progressive Party, running against Harry Truman. Wallace’s politics became less doctrinaire late in life, when he endorsed Eisenhower for president and perhaps even voted for Nixon against Kennedy.

A welcome reconsideration of a much-misunderstood but important figure in American politics.

Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel Norton (352 pp.) | $28.99 | March 19, 2024 9781324074397

A timely collection of informed voices on fascism.

Once upon a time, a flamboyant political novice burst onto the scene. Extolling patriotism and so-called traditional values, he denounced liberalism.

Though few establishment figures took him seriously, suddenly, he was the nation’s leader, and scholars still debate how it happened. That was Benito Mussolini. Many Americans forget that he was a no-nonsense autocrat who sought to make Italy great again. Perhaps his greatest legacy is his Fascist party’s name, embodied by a host of current strongmen leaders, including, of course, Donald Trump. In this collection, scholars and journalists offer highly opinionated essays, curated by Steinmetz-Jenkins, a professor of history and social theory at Wesleyan. The editor begins with an excerpt from Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which satirizes proto-fascist movements in 1930s America. Then he moves on FEBRUARY 1, 2024

91

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

to Reinhold Niebuhr, followed by Leon Trotsky’s 1940 Marxian treatise. Among the more turgid contributions, his analyses of Nazi appeal and capitalist weakness have not been borne out, but he hits the mark in his argument that the absence of a labor party makes revolution unlikely. Novelist Umberto Eco is the most entertaining. In 1942, the young author won a national award for an essay on Mussolini. He explains that, as the first right-wing dictatorship to take over a European country, fascism established the folklore, rhetoric, brutality, and even the fashion. Mussolini himself had no true philosophy (like Trump), but Eco’s wry description of the features of typical “Ur-Fascism” may lead some readers to skip the remaining pieces, which mix academic analysis and polemic and conclude that Trump may be a fascist (or not) and that his followers accept some of its features. Other contributors include Samuel Moyn, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Pankaj Mishra.

Mostly insightful essays that often preach to the choir.

The Trading Game: A Confession Stevenson, Gary | Crown (352 pp.) | $30.00 March 5, 2024 | 9780593727218

A British master of finance shows how the world of investment and trading isn’t so far removed from organized crime.

As a child, writes Stevenson, he would gaze up at the skyscrapers of the financial district, “those gleaming, towering temples of capitalism.” A math whiz, but definitely an outlier in England’s hidebound class system, thrown out of high school for selling a pinch of pot, he excelled in his studies at the London School of Economics and bested the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. “The way I saw it, there was only one path for me into the City—beat all the Arab billionaires and Chinese industrialists 92

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 92

to a top first class degree, and just pray to God that Goldman Sachs noticed,” he recounts. Instead, Citibank came calling when Stevenson trounced other applicants for internship in a trading simulation that he steered through, even when the powers that be rigged it. Before long, he was earning millions of pounds per year. Granted, he notes, some of his earnings came at terrific cost to other people, as when he made millions on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011: “Some people thought the nuclear plant might blow up. That was good for my position. Up three and a half million dollars. Up four and a half million dollars. By a week in I was up six million.”

Along the way to wealth, Stevenson had disregarded a wise warning from a veteran—“Once you get in, you’ll never get out”—and when he decided that the trading game was no longer for him, it was as if he were trying to quit the Mafia or a bike gang, a story he relates with considerable panache.

A warning to would-be Wall Streeters that while the money is good, it can come at the expense of your soul.

Kirkus Star

Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind Tallis, Frank | St. Martin’s (496 pp.) | $31.00 March 26, 2024 | 9781250288950

A significant biography with more than the usual emphasis on the vagaries of the subject’s reputation.

Prolific novelist and clinical psychologist Tallis, whose most recent nonfiction book was The Act of Living, declares that few major thinkers have been more vilified than Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). However, writes the author, “extreme Freud bashing” is offset by equally “unhelpful,” overly reverent followers. An admirer but definitely not a worshipper, Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant,

obsessive, ruthless figure who was “right about some things and wrong about others.” He was also a talented yet “very uneven” writer whose scientific papers are often an exercise in “narrative embellishment and opportunistic misrepresentation.” An ambitious young neurologist in an era when psychological disorders were viewed as brain disease, Freud was not the first to consider them the result of traumatic memories or to employ the “talking cure,” but his charisma, energy, and literary skills produced “a new way of understanding the mind, relationships, history and culture.” Freud’s later writings demonstrate that colleagues were outraged at first and shunned him, but Tallis writes bluntly that this is fiction. Vienna’s late-19th-century Golden Age was open to new ideas in the arts and sciences, and Freud soon attracted a loyal following.

By the time of his 1909 U.S. tour, he was an international celebrity. Since his death, neuroscience and therapeutic advances have not been kind to some of his theories, and some readers may agree with Tallis’ comparison to Karl Marx.

Both revealed genuine insights into the human condition that don’t translate into practical benefits. Marxist economics has a poor record, and psychoanalysis is not “a cure—or, as cures go, not a very good one.” Yet Freud remains a profound influence on modern culture.

Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring—among the best of innumerable Freud bios.

The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization Thomas, Martin | Princeton Univ. (640 pp.) $39.95 | March 19, 2024 | 9780691190921

A global study of decolonization as colonial empires collapse.

The process of decolonization is incomplete, according to British historian Thomas, author of Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

from Empire. “Locating decolonization,” he writes, “means pinpointing when people in a society began thinking and acting toward a future in which imperial formations would no longer be there.” This process began in the early 20th century but accelerated after World War II, when Vietnamese forces defeated the French colonial government in 1954 and 17 sub-Sarahan African nations declared independence in the year 1960 alone. For all the lip service paid to self-determination, however, the former imperial powers—Britain and France, principally, and their successor, the U.S.—retained economic power over much of the former colonial world.

Against this, decolonization as “a process of several moving parts” was necessarily hampered. For instance, writes Thomas, former colonial maps that divided ethnic groups across national lines in order to control them more easily remained intact in independent nations such as Nigeria and Congo, where independence movements by minorities “ended in catastrophic violence and reversal.” Violence emerges as a key theme in the author’s account, and a vicious cycle of violence at that.

Unrest among colonized peoples often leads to violent repression by the colonizers, which leads to a violent response by freedom fighters, which leads to more violence that often continues even when the colonizer finally leaves. In the end, Thomas writes, while some once-colonial states have entered the world community, others remain hobbled, and the “people marginalized by ethnicity, religious affiliation, or income from the narratives of rich-world politics underline that the unmaking of empire did not mean the end of colonialism.” The 290-page notes

and bibliography sections attest to the author’s prodigious research.

A substantial contribution to the literature of imperialism and colonialism.

Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All Tsai, Robert L. | Norton (240 pp.) | $28.49 March 12, 2024 | 9780393867831

A law professor examines four Supreme Court cases won by a trailblazing Kentucky-born lawyer dedicated to seeking just treatment for those condemned

to death.

In this follow-up to Practical Equality, Tsai highlights the courtroom achievements of Stephen Bright, whose commitment to exposing the injustice undergirding the American capital punishment system has made him a leading light in the restorative justice movement. Bright’s work with the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights focused primarily on defending those most vulnerable to the “legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” within a larger system that saw mass incarceration as key to a well-ordered society. In his work as a capital defense attorney, Bright’s approach highlighted “the institutional pathologies in legal representation” caused by “the absence of adequate resources” for poor defendants. The four Supreme Court cases Bright argued—and won—were for individuals he showed had been placed on death row for

It’s not quite Thoreau, but it’s still a pleasure to read Underwood’s account of bringing history to life.

GHOST TOWN LIVING

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 93

reasons that, beyond faulty representation, pertained to race, class, and/or intellectual ability. Three of the cases spotlighted how prosecutors could rig juries to be not only unrepresentative, but also racist. In Snyder v. Louisiana, for example, Bright argued that an all-white jury, created by using peremptory strikes, condemned a Black defendant to death.

The fourth case, McWilliams v. Dunn, called attention to the potential for judicial bias against people with intellectual disabilities, including Bright’s defendant, James McWilliams. At the same time, Bright made a successful case for the value of access to a mental health expert, which the judge presiding over McWilliams’ case refused. Thoughtful and well researched, this hopeful and inspiring book will appeal to those in the legal field seeking to end the legacy of mass incarceration, as well as to anyone with an interest in helping to fix America’s profoundly broken carceral system.

Tsai’s book makes an excellent complement to Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.

Provocative, necessary reading.

Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley Underwood, Brent | Harmony (288 pp.) $28.00 | March 19, 2024 | 9780593578445

Life at 8,000 dusty feet, with a view of Death Valley.

“I am the luckiest man in the world. I am also a prisoner of this place…with one of the most breathtaking views” in the U.S. So writes Underwood, who wandered into the old, long-abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo, California, and for reasons even he can’t quite explain sank his life savings into buying the place. Not for nothing is it called a ghost town. Most people who came there died before they reached 35, of all sorts of causes: alcoholism, mining accidents, gunfights, epidemics, dehydration, and so on. The FEBRUARY 1, 2024

93

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

author writes that buying the town still cost less than a two-bedroom house in Los Angeles, the city that Southern California’s mines made, and calls the purchase “the best money I have ever spent.” Remaking the town, he adds later, has not a little in common with trench warfare, and he took a lesson from the British army’s custom of regularly moving soldiers off the line for a few days of rest—even though he found it difficult to tear himself away from the task of restoring some of the town’s old buildings. And what a task that turned out to be: As he writes in exquisite detail—so vivid and vibrant that readers will think twice about following his lead—one of the great challenges was getting concrete and water up the switchback trail to Cerro Gordo, made just a little easier by the fact that locals at lower elevations became as invested in the project as was Underwood himself.

In the end, he writes, rebuilding the town involved rebuilding himself: “Cerro Gordon takes you as you are, but then it changes you.”

It’s not quite Thoreau, but it’s still a pleasure to read Underwood’s account of bringing history to life.

Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul Wagner, Kurt | Atria (320 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781668017357

A blow-by-blow account of the struggle for Twitter.

Jack Dorsey, writes Bloomberg tech reporter Wagner, was a reluctant capitalist when it came

to his creation. First online in 2006, Twitter took years to grow to scale, and when Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion in 2022, it was still well behind Facebook, valued at a dozen times more, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, worth $1.5 trillion.

“Influence, it turns out,” Wagner writes understatedly, “does not always equate to value.” Dorsey, too late, lamented that Twitter should have been a platform rather than a program, but ironically, one of the engines of its growth was Donald Trump, a master of the (albeit misspelled and ungrammatical) 140-word zinger. The story of Twitter, writes Wagner, “is one of deception, bad decisions, and misguided trust…of hubris and resentment and naïveté,” and a cluster of those bad decisions concerning Trump, who was for a long time cosseted before finally being unplugged for numerous violations of policy. Question one, in Dorsey’s mind, was whether those standards impinged on free speech, on which he was a fundamentalist; when Musk stepped in, he applied some of the same fundamentalism, but mostly by reinstating provocative trolls like Alex Jones, who also “violated Twitter’s policy against inciting people to violence,” and Trump himself. Russian bots seem to have enjoyed free speech, too, for thousands of them scampered through Twitter, seeding disinformation and plugging Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Musk’s own fomenting of conspiracy theories and infantile outbursts and antics “meant that X’s business got crushed.” Twitter is no more, of course, while the X brand is tanking, even as Dorsey muses about creating “something to avoid that ever happening again.”

Solid business and tech journalism about how a public good became a nuisance in the hands of a reckless billionaire.

Entertaining Victorian courtroom fireworks.

S T R O N G PA S S I O N S

94

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 94

Strong Passions: A Scandalous Divorce in Old New York Weisberg, Barbara | Norton (256 pp.) $28.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9780393531527

Narratives about rich people behaving badly captivate readers, and this account of a lurid Civil War–era divorce should satisfy all parties.

Former TV producer Weisberg, author of Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism, has no shortage of material because the events in this story involve members of New York society whose sexual misadventures enraptured the media. After setting the scene, the author introduces her subjects: Peter Strong and Mary Stevens, who married in 1853. An apparently normal family life followed until their 14-month-old daughter died of influenza in 1862. Shortly after the funeral, Mary tearfully confessed that she had been having an affair with Peter’s brother. With divorce “unthinkable” in respectable circles, Peter decided to break off all relations but continue to live under the same roof. To complicate matters, within weeks Mary revealed that she was pregnant. The question of which brother was responsible became irrelevant when Mary lost the baby, either to miscarriage or to an abortion instigated by her husband. (Weisberg believes the latter.) Relations grew increasingly strained, but two years passed before Peter filed for divorce. The author delivers a day-by-day account of the trial, making skillful use of court transcripts, contemporary journalism, letters, and the classic diary of George Templeton Strong (Peter’s cousin). Readers will enjoy the legal repartee and fume at the disgraceful legal subservience of women.

The ending is somewhat anticlimactic: The jury was “deadlocked,” with central questions remaining unanswered, and no official divorce was granted.

Three years later, Peter’s lawyers quietly requested that the court reopen the divorce action; this time, the parties KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:25 PM

NONFICTION

A Black basketball superstar delivers an eloquent and insightful work.

waived their right to a trial and would accept a referee’s decision, provided Mary received custody of the daughter.

The referee found no difficulties; the couple divorced and proceeded to live out conventional lives.

Entertaining Victorian courtroom fireworks.

DEAR BLACK GIRLS

Kirkus Star

Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother’s Secrets Wills, Clair | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) | $27.00 | April 2, 2024 9780374611866

An excavation of a familial cover-up illuminates broader mysteries of 20th-century Ireland.

In her 20s, Wills, a professor of English at Cambridge and the author of Lovers and Strangers and That Neutral Island, learned she had a cousin she didn’t know existed. The book begins with a cast of characters, all of whom are relatives of the author, divided into four temporal categories: the Victorians, which include Wills’ grandmother; the post-revolutionary generation; the postwar generation, which includes the author; and the next generation. “I keep returning to a story of a generation gone wrong in my own family,” she writes, “a mother not married, and a child stifled.” In the 1950s, the author’s uncle fathered a daughter (the aforementioned cousin) with his lover and, with the mother’s knowledge, abandoned both to a “mother-andbaby home.” Between 1922 and 1998, these institutions homed at least 56,000 unwed mothers and even more infants. In 2014, nearly 800 of their bodies were found in sewer chambers, which sparked a massive investigation into the inhumane conditions. “They did not survive, yet they have not gone away,” writes Wills about the mistreated mothers and children. The KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 95

author describes her family’s story within this larger context: “To us, now, it seems pretty much unthinkable, yet the distance between us and the people who believed in the system (or believed enough) is very small.”

Wills explores the specific ways in which inherited past lives on, offering a searing yet nuanced investigation into the lives of complicit relatives, such as her mother, as well as tender portraits of those affected. The author’s prose is stellar; her cadence complements this compelling tale, which grew increasingly complex over years of meticulous research.

Ultimately, she emphasizes that “everything I’ve been describing was not out of the ordinary.”

Fascinatingly, viscerally haunting.

Kirkus Star

Dear Black Girls: How To Be True to You Wilson, A’ja | Flatiron Books (192 pp.) $22.49 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781250290045

A two-time WNBA MVP turns her life experiences into advice.

Before she was a five-time WNBA All-Star, the No. 1 overall draft pick, an Olympic gold medalist, and a national champion with the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, Wilson felt like a misfit. At her predominantly white private school in Columbia, SC, she struggled against not only her

classmates’ racism, but also undiagnosed dyslexia—a learning disability at odds with her dream of becoming an author. Years later, the COVID19 pandemic led to depression and anxiety. Throughout these experiences, Wilson witnessed how her racial and gender identities complicated and compounded her struggles. “Eventually,” she writes, “the world steps in and reminds you: You have a body.

You are Black. You are a woman.

Whether you like it or not, that’s the first thing people see.” She continues later: “Your mission, Black girls, is to accept that reality. Don’t hide from it….But you can accept this reality without letting it steal your joy,” an exhortation that perfectly encapsulates Wilson’s frank but indomitable spirit.

Perhaps the most poignant example of this is Wilson’s reaction to seeing a statue of herself erected outside the arena on the University of South Carolina campus: Her accomplishments were immortalized by the very institution that had prohibited her Black father from playing basketball for them—and which had prohibited her Black grandmother from even setting foot on the grounds. The author’s refusal to “sugar coat” the oppression that Black people feel is matched only by her faith in readers’ abilities to best the centuries-old obstacles America continues to shove in their way. Wilson fills this joyful, profound, and tender book with a slew of stories, most of which are artfully narrated and perfectly pitched.

Most impressive is her narrative voice, which is humorous, conversational, lyrical, and unique.

A Black basketball superstar delivers an eloquent and insightful work.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

95

1/8/24 5:25 PM

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 96

1/8/24 5:25 PM

020124_KR_Nonfiction_RD6.indd 97

1/8/24 5:25 PM

Children's

MAHNAZ DAR

THOSE WE LOVE most

can provoke a wide range of emotions in us; feelings of love often become intertwined with anger, hurt, and disappointment. These warring emotions can result in truly potent works. For tweens, many of whom are starting to see the world not in black-and-white but in shades of gray, these books can be eye-opening. Parents make mistakes—sometimes unforgivable ones. Beloved older siblings let us down.

Conversely, seemingly harsh loved ones are sometimes more open-minded than we realize. Books can help kids grapple with complex feelings; they’re also a powerful mirror for young people feeling insecure that their families don’t look like everyone else’s. These new and forthcoming novels are relatable, reassuring, deeply honest tributes to the ties that bind.

Kita, the protagonist of Sherri Winston’s Shark Teeth (Bloomsbury, Jan. 16), wants to believe that her mother has turned her life around after regaining custody of Kita and her younger siblings. But the 12-year-old

98

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 98

Black girl fears the worst as Mama begins to behave erratically. Winston has drawn a sharply nuanced, empathetic portrait of a family in crisis. Kita is torn between love for her mother and resentment; she yearns for a more carefree existence but also feels obligated to be the strong authority figure her siblings need. Winston imbues her work with hope but never sugarcoats tough realities.

The sibling bond at the heart of Crystal Allen’s Between Two Brothers (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, Jan. 23) feels unshakable. But 13-year-old Isaiah lashes out in rage when his older brother, Seth, skips out on a competition the two had planned to enter together.

After Seth gets into a devastating car accident, Isaiah is riddled with guilt, especially when he learns that Seth may never fully recover. Balancing honesty and tenderness, this is a compelling tale about a young Black teen realizing that his life may have radically changed, but one thing remains the same: his love for his brother.

Parents just don’t understand is the unspoken refrain of Hena Khan’s Drawing Deena (Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster, Feb. 6). Pakistani American Deena’s anxiety manifests in physical ways, from teeth clenching to nausea. Her parents wonder what a girl her age could possibly be worried about, so the seventh grader attempts to keep her troubles to herself, though she frets about her parents’ fights and money issues. This gentle, heartfelt novel sees Deena follow her passion for art and learn to open up; readers will be reassured to see that her parents may not be perfect, but they’re understanding and supportive nonetheless.

(Read an interview with the author on P. 108.)

The protagonist of Sara Zarr’s Kyra, Just for Today (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, March 5) is used to shouldering heavy loads.

When Kyra, 12, begins to suspect that her mother, a recovered alcoholic, has relapsed, she’s hesitant to ask for help. Instead she manages to convince herself that if she does everything right, things will surely get better. Zarr deftly captures Kyra’s turbulent, often conflicting emotions: her joy in spending time with her mother, her anger at being forced to grow up far too soon, and her uncertainty in not knowing what the future will bring for her family.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

IT’S COMPLICATED: FAMILY STORIES

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

EDITOR’S PICK Elio is in love for the first time—and he has no idea what to do about it.

Eighth grader Elio Solis is only 13, but he’s met the girl of his dreams. His feelings for Camelia are so profound that he sees things in ultraviolet: “Whoever heard of having your whole vision / change because you met some girl?” Growing up in East Oakland, California, Elio is trying to navigate social media, friendships, his family’s Mexican culture, and his changing body—all part of his quest to understand what it means to be a good boy who will grow into a

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

good man. What does that look like when your father takes you to cockfights and your mother warns you about toxic masculinity? Most of all, how do you handle the crushing blows of a first heartbreak? Written in Salazar’s stunning and highly accessible verse, with Spanish words contextually woven in and easily understood by non-Spanish speakers, this novel stands out for the thoughtful way it expresses a young boy’s perspective as it discusses topics such as masculinity and consent. Elio and his dad join Brothers Rising, a group started by

103

The Storyteller

By Lindsay Bonilla; illus. by Noar Lee Naggan

104

The Night War

By Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

106 101

Terrible Horses

By Raymond Antrobus; illus. by Ken Wilson-Max

102

Gina Kaminski Saves the Wolf

By Craig BarrGreen; illus. by Francis Martin

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 99

114

The Mochi Makers

By Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

115

Yaya and the Sea

By Karen Good Marable; illus.

by Tonya Engel

Viewfinder

By Christine D.U. Chung & Salwa Majoka

122

112

123

Nen and the Lonely Fisherman

By Ian Eagleton; illus. by James Mayhew

Look! Look!

By Uma Krishnaswami Monkey King and the World of Myths

By Maple Lam

126

Speck

By Margaux Meganck

Ultraviolet Salazar, Aida | Scholastic | 304 pp. $18.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781338775655

Fernando, Elio’s best friend Paco’s dad, which offers them community and a framework for honest conversations about coming of age and

127

132

127

132

South of Somewhere

By Kalena Miller Olivetti

By Allie Millington

129

Spying on Spies

By Marissa Moss

131

Miguel Must Fight!

By Jamie Ofelia; illus. by Sara Palacios

131

The Wrong Way Home

By Kate O’Shaughnessy

masculinity, as well as a beautiful rendering of Indigenous Mexican rituals.

A story that sings to the soul.

(Verse fiction. 10-14)

Pedro’s Yo-Yos

By Rob Peñas; illus.

by Carl Angel Influencers

By Dav Pilkey; colors by Jose Garibaldi & Wes Dzioba

133

The Fastest Drummer

By Dean Robbins; illus. by Susanna Chapman

134

The Walk of the Field Mouse

By Nadine Robert; illus. by Valerio Vidali

99

Ultraviolet

By Aida Salazar

136

Piper Chen Sings

By Phillipa Soo & Maris Pasquale Doran; illus.

by Qin Leng

139

Two Together

By Brendan Wenzel

141

Two Homes, One Heart

By Jessica Young; illus. by Chelsea O’Byrne

141

Shiny Misfits

By Maysoon Zayid; illus. by Shadia Amin; colors

by Elle Pierre FEBRUARY 1, 2024

99

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

Looking for the Eid Moon

Brianosaurus

Abaza, Sahtinay | Illus. by Sandra Eide Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 15, 2024 | 9781534113091

Adamson, Ged | Two Lions (40 pp.) | $17.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781542039376

Sara and her sister eagerly look forward to their family’s Eid festivities.

Sara admires the dress she’ll wear at the upcoming Eid party, while her younger sister, Lulu, peeks out the window looking for the new crescent moon.

The moon signifies major holidays in the Islamic calendar, such as the start of Eid, so Sara decides that she and Lulu will be the first to spot it. “Have fun!”

Mom calls from the festively decorated living room as the sisters head outside with a flashlight, a blanket, and binoculars. The girls wait, scanning the night sky, until Mom calls them in. The moon has been spotted…but by someone else (backmatter explains that committees monitor the night sky in search of the hard-to-find moon).

The girls go inside, disappointed that they didn’t catch the first glimpse.

Sara finds a way to cheer up Lulu by creating a jar of “moon rocks” and coins, with a note from “the Eid Moon.” Drawing inspiration from her own childhood pastime, Abaza weaves a tale about the importance of the lunar calendar. Eide’s softly rounded illustrations capture the warmth of a loving family and a close sisterly bond.

In the author’s note, Abaza states that the lunar calendar influences the timing of holidays and mentions her own Syrian heritage; she wraps up with words of encouragement for children confronting war and injustice. Sara and her family are light-skinned.

Tender and heartwarming. (Picture book. 4-8)

It’s not easy being a Brianosaurus!

Brian, a bright green frog, has just learned that frogs were around when dinosaurs walked the Earth. When his friend Koji says, “That kind of means you’re a dinosaur!” Brian embraces his newfound identity and dubs himself Brianosaurus, complete with added upright plates along his spine. At first, the other forest animals love Brianosaurus and his roar. But the frogs at the pond don’t approve (“Don’t you like being a frog, Brian?”), and soon his forest friends start to put restrictions on what he can and can’t do (“Dinosaurs don’t smell flowers!”

“Dinosaurs don’t read books!”).

Because Brianosaurus can’t please everyone, he opts “to give the forest animals the most dinosaury dinosaur ever” and to “give the frogs the froggiest frog.” But who is he really?

The frogs and forest animals argue.

Brianosaurus finally yells, “NO, I’M ME!” and declares that they are all “ME-osauruses.” He adds, “Nobody can say what a ME-osaurus does, because every ME-osaurus is DIFFERENT.” From then on, Brianosaurus does what he pleases without worrying. Digitally rendered pencil and watercolor illustrations depict vivid pond and forest scenes and likable and well-meaning friends as the story traces a sweetly funny path to self-acceptance.

Will have readers recognizing that they, too, can be their own unique ME-osauruses. (Picture book. 4-7)

Traces a sweetly funny path to self -acceptance.

BRIANOSAURUS

100

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 100

Cactus Queen: Minerva Hoyt Establishes Joshua Tree National Park Alexander, Lori | Illus. by Jenn Ely Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers (40 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781662680212

One woman made a huge difference in keeping an extraordinary environment alive.

After Minerva Hoyt and her husband moved to Southern California in 1897, she became so enraptured by the Mojave Desert and its remarkable Joshua trees that she set out to preserve the desert’s unique, wild beauty and save it from depredation. To accomplish this goal, Minerva decided to bring the desert to the people. She reasoned that if the public could see the desert for themselves, they’d want to protect it, too. Minerva created large-scale, award-winning desert displays featuring native flora and stuffed fauna and brought them to New York, Boston, and London. Viewers were enchanted and agreed that the Mojave and its remarkable Joshua trees had to be protected. Minerva appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other public officials, and, at last, her efforts paid off, and her beloved desert was given national park status. Today, Joshua Tree National Park is a popular American landmark, and its plants and wildlife thrive. This is an admiring, well-written portrait of a woman who worked mightily to overcome indifference and a lack of knowledge and won out to the benefit of all. Quotes from Minerva and others appear throughout. Lively, colorful illustrations, created mostly in Acryla Gouache, as well as in colored pencil and collage, capture Minerva’s enthusiasm and desert scenes teeming with life.

A rousing tale about the rescuer of California’s famed desert. (more about Minerva, wildlife in Joshua Tree National Park, national parks of the USA, author’s note, tips for environmentalist activists, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 6-9)

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

A reminder that everyone the world over needs a funny word or two when memory fails, even elephants.

THE THINGAMAJIG

The Thingamajig Alexander, Rilla | Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $18.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781534493476

Thing-a-ma-jig?

Who-zee-whats-it?

Shis-moo?

Hoo-pull-deepewp?

Words such as these are found throughout this amusing story of a little elephant trying to track down an object lost by a bigger elephant (perhaps its parent).

The grown-up pachyderm gives the child a bottle of water and then starts looking for the bottle cap—except it can’t remember the name of the item: “I can’t find the…thing-a-ma-jig.” The little one runs off to look and asks other animals for help. They haven’t seen a thing-a-ma-jig, though they have lost objects of their own: A bird has misplaced its “hoo-zeewots-it,” and a snail is seeking its “hoo-pulldee-pewp.” Other creatures join in.

Eventually it becomes apparent that they’re all looking for the same thing— the bottle cap! Backmatter explains that the words used throughout are variations on whatchamacallits (terms we use when we can’t remember what we’re trying to say), all in different languages, from Zulu (intazinga) to Japanese (naninani) to Irish English KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 101

(yokemebob). Pronunciations are included. Between the humorous words and the gloriously bold and childlike illustrations created from collaged photographs and hand-cut rubber stamps, this will be a wonderful, infectiously popular read-aloud for young children in group settings or one-on-one.

A reminder that everyone the world over needs a funny word or two when memory fails, even elephants. (Picture book. 3-6)

Waiting in the Wings Andrews, Julie & Emma Walton Hamilton Illus. by E.G. Keller | Little, Brown (40 pp.) $18.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9780316283083

Feathered newcomers make a memorable theater debut in this latest from actor Andrews and her daughter

Hamilton.

Mr. Puddleduck assures his concerned spouse that they’ll find the right place to build a nest for their first clutch of eggs. Exhausted Mrs. P hops into a flower box outside a theater displaying a poster of a performer holding a feathered fan (“That’s a good sign,” says Mr. P). Mrs. P lays her eggs, and Mr. P notes activities inside and outside the building. Peeking in, Mr. P is dazzled by musicians as well as performers wearing glittery costumes: It’s a show! After one rehearsal, Mr. P excitedly quacks and flaps his wings, then feels embarrassed when the performers notice him. He exits but is greeted by Mrs. P’s cacophonous quacking: The newly hatched ducklings, tumbling from the flower box onto the street, must be led to the water, pronto! Mr. P, having learned something about stagecraft, shouts, “Places, everyone!” The ducklings form their own perfect “chorus line,” and the musicians play a marching tune.

Indeed, all the performers, as well as various townsfolk, join the parade as the ducklings follow their parents into the water, to a rousing ovation. Bravo to this sweet, gently humorous tale.

Readers will be captivated by and root for the protagonists and appreciate the theater setting and denouement. The colorful digital illustrations incorporate lively onomatopoeic words. Human characters are diverse.

Adorable, enchanting, and very ducky indeed. (authors’ note) (Picture book.

5-8)

Kirkus Star

Terrible Horses Antrobus, Raymond | Illus. by Ken Wilson-Max | Candlewick (32 pp.) | $18.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781536235487

Older/younger sibling conflicts are faced head-on, thanks to a herd of horses.

A younger sibling has an older—and much cooler—sister. “I want her friends to be my friends. I want her things to be my things,” the child tells us. But “she wants her friends to be her friends.

She wants her things to be her things.”

When the two fight, the younger child retreats and writes “stories of terrible horses.” They say horses are the most difficult thing for an artist to draw, but if that’s the case, then no one told Wilson-Max. His horses careen across the page in magnificent colors, hooves blazing, hair whipping in the wind, always leaving one small pony behind.

After another fight, the child retreats again and writes about the horses, with “their terrible trampling / their ghastly galloping / their nagging neighing.”

Only when the sister sees the book firsthand do the two come to a kind of accord. Antrobus takes a universal conflict and deftly synthesizes it to its most essential parts. Words and pictures work in tandem, expertly speaking volumes with minimal text.

The children are brown-skinned; the younger one uses hearing aids.

Both big and little siblings will see a bit of themselves in this exquisite equine-saturated tale. (Picture book.

3-6) FEBRUARY 1, 2024

101

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

Harriet Tells the Truth Arnold, Elana K. | Illus. by Dung Ho Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins (224 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9780063092181

Lively Harriet Wermer returns for a third congenial mystery on idyllic Marble Island.

As the end of summer nears, Harriet grapples with conflicted feelings about leaving her grandmother Nanu’s bed-andbreakfast and returning to the mainland to be with her parents and new baby brother. But when Nanu’s beloved dog suffers a medical emergency from eating something toxic—closely followed by a similar episode involving 99-year-old neighbor Mabel Marble—Harriet sets her anxieties aside to focus on finding a poisoner. Harriet, who is Jewish and reads white, has relatable flaws, including impetuosity and a tendency toward fibbing. The book’s titular theme of truth-telling gains more nuance after Harriet directs honest but hurtful verbal attacks at a priggish poet who’s staying at Nanu’s B&B; she later understands his prickliness as stemming from loneliness.

Upon absolving the poet, Harriet’s next suspect for the poisoning becomes her best friend, Clarence, who is Black, a development that feels implausible even with a careful trail of red herrings. The book resolves rosily, with the friends teamed up to unravel the mystery, and catastrophe is averted before Mabel’s 100th birthday party. Harriet’s other worries soon vanish with news from her family that neatly resolves many of her concerns. Ho’s cheerful illustrations help bring the setting to life.

A satisfactory installment in a gentle series. (Mystery. 6-9)

For more by Elana K. Arnold, visit Kirkus online.

102

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 102

An introduction to the most important book in the history of theater.

THE BARD AND THE BOOK

Kirkus Star

Gina Kaminski Saves the Wolf Barr-Green, Craig | Illus. by Francis Martin | Kane Miller (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 19, 2024 | 9781684647866

“I am Gina Kaminski. I fix mistakes.”

Gina Kaminski, a plucky, precocious child with an eye for detail, is having a bad day at school, which the youngster maps on an emoji chart. Gina hears “Little Red Riding Hood” read aloud but doesn’t approve of the ending at all; three mistakes were made. Wouldn’t anyone eat the cake instead of carrying it all the way to Grandma’s? Why take a dangerous shortcut in the first place? And is there anything Gina can do to save the wolf? Unbeknownst to the teacher, Gina takes charge and enters the story, determined to find better answers and, in the process, turns a bad day around. Clever, sparkling text full of wit and humor perfectly captures Gina’s voice, while sketchy, humorous pictures with just the right amount of detail extend the story. Young readers and listeners will fall in love with clever, independent Gina, appreciate the tale’s suspense, learn how to disrupt a bad mood, and see classic stories with a new perspective. Upon revisiting the emoji chart, which is handily worked into the endpapers, Gina will likely choose a happier face this time! Gina and other human characters have skin the white of the page.

An exuberant, laugh-out-loud take on fairy tales that flawlessly incorporates social-emotional skills. (Picture book.

3-8)

The Bard and the Book: How the First Folio Saved the Plays of William Shakespeare From Oblivion Bausum, Ann | Illus. by Marta Sevilla Peachtree (112 pp.) | $19.99 | April 2, 2024 9781682634950

An introduction to the most important book in the history of theater.

Bausum focuses on the miracle that so many of Shakespeare’s brilliant plays were preserved and explores how that came to happen. An airy rush of narrative is enlivened with quoted lines, plus photos of contemporary printed pages as well as spot art renditions of actors (one pursued by a bear), a printing press, and theatrical images of various small animals. The author reconstructs the progress of Elizabethan-era play scripts from draft “foul papers” to transcriptions into “rolls” of individual parts (the origin, she writes, of “roles”) and prompt books, and then on to published versions of “bad” quartos, better ones, and finally the authoritative “folio” of 1623 (the first and best of four folio editions in the 17th century).

Along with filling readers in on “catchwords” and other hand-printing terminology, she also notes how typos, a child’s doodles, and other mischances down through the years have individually marked every one of the first folio’s KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

235 (and counting) surviving copies and earned many of them intriguing names like the “Farting Folio” and the “Purple Copy.” And Bausum’s closing account of personal experiences at the Folger Shakespeare Library is rapturous enough to tempt like visits.

A timely and engaging celebration of a literary landmark. (additional citations, source notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)

Exclusion and the Chinese American Story Blackburn, Sarah-SoonLing | Crown (288 pp.) | $8.99 paper | March 26, 2024 9780593567630 | Series: Race to the Truth

An examination of the history of Chinese American experiences.

Blackburn opens with a note to readers about growing up feeling invisible as a multicultural, biracial Chinese American. She notes the tremendous diversity of Chinese American history and writes that this book is a starting point for learning more. The evenly paced narrative starts with the earliest recorded arrival of the Chinese in America in 1834. A teenage girl, whose real name is unknown, arrived in New York Harbor with the Carnes brothers, merchants who imported Chinese goods and put her on display “like an animal in a circus.” The author then examines shifting laws, U.S. and global political and economic climates, and changing societal attitudes.

The book introduces the highlighted people—including Yee Ah Tye, Wong Kim Ark, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Vincent Chen—in relation to lawsuits or other transformative events; they also stand as examples for explaining concepts such as racial hierarchy and the model minority myth. Maps, photos, and documents are interspersed throughout. Chapters close with questions that encourage readers to think critically about systems of oppression, actively engage with the material, and KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 103

draw connections to their own lives.

Although the book covers a wide span of history, from the Gold Rush to the rise in anti-Asian hate during the Covid19 pandemic, it thoroughly explains the various events. Blackburn doesn’t shy away from describing terrible setbacks, but she balances them with examples of solidarity and progress.

Deftly written and informative; a call for vigilance and equality. (resources, bibliography, image credits) (Nonfiction. 10-14)

Born Brave Bomgaars, Megan | Illus. by Quiel Ramos Flowerpot Press (32 pp.) | $12.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781486727865

We are brave from the moment we’re born—we just have to recognize it.

Providing many examples of bravery, a zebra with a rounded snout, two large, protruding teeth, and a curly black mane and tail leads a group of young, cuddly, stylized animals, including a bunny and a squirrel. All the animals wear clothing, stand upright, and use their “hands” with dexterity. The author, a Down syndrome activist, speaks directly to young readers and encourages them to believe in themselves, reminding them that they’ve already displayed courage in many ways, starting with their earliest moments. Just like the hero of this story, they have overcome their fears of taking their first steps (an accompanying illustration shows the zebra as a baby dressed in a onesie, toddling toward a supportive parent) and sleeping alone. They’ve endured dentist and doctor visits, made new friends on the first day of school, and gamely tried new things. The charming, expressive characters enact these adventures in colorful, homey artwork, a combination of vignettes set against sharp white backgrounds and full-page spreads. The tone is thoughtful, never treacly or preachy. Readers will be

emboldened to realize that they are as brave as the young hero.

Loving, comforting, and uplifting.

(Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

The Storyteller Bonilla, Lindsay | Illus. by Noar Lee Naggan Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780593109588

Reality and stories blend in this tale of the bond between a boy and his grandmother.

Griffin’s grandmother—referred to as the Storyteller—nurtures him with “milk, fresh-baked bread and all kinds of stories. Folktales, fairy tales, legends.

And Griffin’s favorite—family lore.”

His grandmother tells him about her best friend, a cat who could talk, and how she confronted bullies who mocked her “because her house looked like a shoe.” Soft, realistic illustrations depict a retro-style house and village, with Griffin looking on at people and animals from famous tales, many tiny and doll-like: Rapunzel peering out of a tower-esque teapot, the protagonist of “Jack and the Beanstalk” scaling a flower. Griffin and his grandmother are always together until the older woman weakens and begins to fade. Griffin must preserve the Storyteller’s vitality.

Following Jack’s lead, he sells his toy cow for magic beans (which resemble jellybeans) and grows an impressive beanstalk. Before his grandmother climbs it—a moving, inspired metaphor for her death—she leaves him with a few words: “Keep the stories alive, my love.”

Griffin, in due course, passes her words on to the next generation, re-creating the powerful cycle of keeping stories alive. Brief but potent text is paired with illustrations that exude a sense of magic and the joy of storytelling.

Griffin and the Storyteller present white; other characters are diverse.

Warmly and tenderly conveys the comfort of sharing the lore of days gone by. (Picture book. 5-8)

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

>>> 103

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

Professor Goose Debunks the Three Little Pigs Bourgeois, Paulette | Illus. by Alex G. Griffiths | Tundra Books (40 pp.) | $18.99 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780735267329 | Series: Professor Goose Debunks Fairy Tales, 2

A famous fairy tale gets a scientific fact check.

Righteously waddling in to correct the supposed errors in this “faulty” classic, Mother Goose’s academically trained greatniece Marie Curious Goose retells a kinder, gentler version of “The Three Little Pigs” in which everyone survives. Along the way, she offers a running critique. Noting that pigs don’t have chins (only humans do, in point of fact) and scoffing at the notion that any wolf would have the lung power to blow down a house, she branches out to explain how the plot could have been more efficiently told by coding its repetitive elements with a looping algorithm. She also discusses how, like all the things that come in threes here, there are patterns to be found in nature, music, and math. She does make a few iffy claims and contradicts herself on the same page about whether straw is, or is not, a good building material, but overall readers will come away more aware of how the story connects, and takes liberties, with the real world.

Bourgeois brings home the bacon with a quick afterword on the history of computer languages, from Ada Lovelace’s contributions to Fortran.

Griffiths’ jovial cartoon illustrations add humor.

A STEM-centric take, well worth wolfing down. (Picture book/folktale.

6-9)

History Channel This Day in History for Kids: 1,001 Remarkable Moments and Fascinating Facts Bova, Dan | Illus. by Russell Shaw Hearst Home Kids (224 pp.) | $25.00 March 5, 2024 | 9781958395790

A day-by-day tally of high-interest events in world affairs, pop culture, science, sports, and more, with some general daffiness thrown in.

Though some of Bova’s entries are speculative (see: April 24,1184 BCE: “The Trojan War… ends.”), there are few if any dull spots in this event-filled browsers’ delight.

Strung along mini-timelines, the two to five or so daily events are described briefly but in enough detail to give them context, with highlighted ledes and occasional wisecracks (December 16, 1707: “Mount Fuji kicks some ash”) to further lighten the textual load. Though the general tone is upbeat, historical controversies and tragedies from the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (“a horrible incident of violent racism”) and the attack on the U.S. Capitol of January 6, 2021 (“the first attempt in American history to prevent a peaceful transfer of power”) do get necessary notice. Often enough, the focus shifts away from North America, Europe, and the past century and a half to serve at least as reminders that interesting and important things have happened in other times and places, too. The layout leaves plenty of space for expanded commentary on special days or other topics, as well as the mix of small photos and

A day-by-day tally of events in world affairs, pop culture, and more.

H I S T O R Y C H A N N E L T H I S D AY I N H I S T O R Y F O R K I D S

104

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 104

Shaw’s cartoon portraits and images that serve as illustrations. A blank ruled page at each month’s end invites readers to fill in highlights from their personal histories.

Equally rewarding for sustained dives or random dips. (index, image credits) (Nonfiction. 9-12)

Kirkus Star

The Night War Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker Dial Books (288 pp.) | $17.99 April 9, 2024 | 9780735228566

A young girl escapes a Nazi roundup and plots to flee occupied France.

The year is 1942. Twelveyear-old Miriam Schrieber and her parents live in Paris, having fled Berlin after Kristallnacht in 1938. But the Nazis invaded France two years later, and Miri remains haunted by the memories of witnessing her neighbor Monsieur Rosenbaum being taken away. Now, the gendarmes are rounding up all the Jews in her neighborhood and putting them on buses bound for the Velodrome d’Hiver, where they’ll await an unknown fate. Miri’s parents are missing when the roundup takes place, and Madame Rosenbaum urges Miri to escape with Nora, her toddler daughter. The girls flee and are saved by a Catholic nun, who arranges to send Miri to a convent school in Chenonceaux. The village fortunately borders Vichy France, offering an escape route to Zurich, where Madame Rosenbaum’s cousin lives. Nora is placed with a Catholic family, and Miri does her best to fit in with the other students. A desperate moment leads Miri to channel her fear into the courage required to help refugees seek safety across the border, while also plotting her own escape with Nora.

This poignant story moves quickly but takes care to consider with sensitivity KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

the excruciating choices Miri must make at every turn as she’s torn between choosing safety and honoring her heritage and her convictions.

A gripping, humane tale that examines what war demands of children and what it costs them. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-14)

Mahogany: A Little Red Riding Hood Tale Brown-Wood, JaNay | Illus. by John Joven Charlesbridge (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 19, 2024 | 9781623543679

In this fairy-tale retelling, a Black, red-cloaked fashionista makes her way through the woods to her grandmother’s house.

Purple-curled Mahogany loves sewing and listening to music. As the book opens, Mahogany shows off the fruits of her labor: a gorgeous red patchwork cape. Momma asks her to take some honey cornbread to G-Ma but warns her to stay alert, and Mahogany sets out… with loud music from her smartphone blaring. As the distracted child stops to pick a bouquet of lavender, a sly wolf, who’s been lurking, introduces himself. Mahogany tells him she’s on her way to G-Ma’s. He asks about the cornbread, and a frightened Mahogany hands it over—before tossing her cape over his head and fleeing. The story generally stays true to the main plot points of the original story, with some clever changes that will satisfy modern sensibilities (no animals are harmed in this retelling). Mahogany eventually uses her wits and her sewing prowess to save the day, while it’s G-Ma who delivers well-known lines such as “What big eyes you’ve got.” This new version is still a morality tale about being aware For more by JaNay Brown-Wood, visit Kirkus online.

of one’s surroundings and not talking to strangers, but with a fun, tech-y twist.

Human characters present Black, and Brown-Wood gently folds an empowering message about brown skin into her text (“sunlight that kissed the melanin deep in [Mahogany’s] dark skin”).

Joven’s cartoonish characters inhabit an enticing, beautifully textured world.

A hip adaptation of a beloved story.

(Picture book/folktale. 4-8)

The Wonderful Wisdom of Ants Bunting, Philip | Crown (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780593567784

An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.

Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces.

Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.

Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.

(Informational picture book. 6-8)

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 105

Force of Nature: A Novel of Rachel Carson Burg, Ann E. | Illus. by Sophie Blackall Scholastic (304 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781338883381

A free-verse, first-person fictional account told from the point of view of Rachel Carson that relates her remarkable life.

From childhood, Carson was encouraged by her mother to appreciate but not meddle with the natural world. Life was never easy in the Carson household, but the future biologist found a way to combine science with her love of writing.

Over time, she would encourage millions of readers to admire and protect our world through several influential and acclaimed books, including her best-known work, Silent Spring (1962), published two years before her death. Burg’s narrative follows the events of Carson’s life closely, but her relationships with her family members receive the most attention. They, as well as Dorothy, the intimate friend and kindred spirit she finally found, share her love for the natural world. (That there may have been more to the women’s relationship than friendship is not explored.) Gracefully written in short, rhythmic lines, the text is pleasing to the eye and ear. Many pages of this beautifully presented celebration are enhanced

by Blackall’s tiny, hand-labeled, grayscale drawings of butterflies, birds, pond-water creatures, and more, reminding readers of Carson’s own sense of wonder. In an appended author’s note, Burg notes her sympathy with her subject and explains her choice to tell her story as fiction, so that she could “capture Rachel’s indomitable spirit.” Her sources are outlined in the acknowledgments.

A convincing and charming portrayal of a woman who made a difference.

(Verse fiction. 8-12) FEBRUARY 1, 2024

105

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

A gentle, generous ref lection on civilization and community life.

VIEWFINDER

Just Like Millie Castillo, Lauren | Candlewick (40 pp.) $17.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781536224818

Getting a rescue dog makes moving easier for an anxious child.

In a new city and a new apartment, a mother and child unpack boxes. Crayons, toys, and books keep the curlyhaired child happily occupied while Mom works from home in the next room. But, outside of this safe, cozy routine, the child (who narrates the story) is reluctant to try to make new friends or even go to storytime at the bookstore. One day, Mom takes the child on a surprise visit to the animal shelter. It’s love at first sniff when the protagonist meets a tan-and-white dog named Millie. Naturally, Mom and the little one bring Millie home.

The new furry roommate helps the child feel braver on walks—and maybe even make a new human friend, too.

Castillo’s signature thick-lined, textured art creates cozy neighborhood settings that beautifully accentuate this gentle story about the power of connection. Mom’s repeated “Okay” responses to the child’s reluctance show warmth and understanding.

With the endpapers acting as establishing shots, the illustrations—mostly double-page spreads with plenty of white space—feel almost cinematic in their slice-of-life perspectives. Careful readers might notice a few easter eggs hidden in the illustrations throughout, including some of Castillo’s other books and the black dog that eventually becomes Millie’s friend. The mother 106

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 106

and child have light-tan skin; neighbors are diverse in skin tone.

A sweet, child-centered tribute to fur babies everywhere. (Picture book. 3-7)

You’re So Amazing!

Catchpole, James & Lucy Catchpole | Illus.

by Karen George | Little, Brown (40 pp.) $18.99 | April 16, 2024 | 9780316506571 Series: What Happened to You?, 2

In this follow-up to What Happened to You? (2023), Joe, who’s missing a leg, contends with scrutiny.

Joe is amazing.

Everybody says so—whether he’s hanging on the monkey bars, eating ice cream, or even scratching his bottom. Joe thinks that speedy, athletic Simone is amazing, but onlookers only ever compliment Joe. Joe tries to be invisible so that everyone will praise Simone’s moves. But the parent of one of the kids at the park mistakes his hiding for self-pity and cajoles him to run and jump. Reluctantly, Joe complies, “because being Amazing Joe [is] better than being Poor Joe”—a bind that disabled readers in particular will recognize. All readers, however, will sympathize with Joe’s discomfort as playground visitors point and stare.

Tired of “The Joe Show,” Joe practices soccer with a pal and experiences something truly amazing: scoring goals after many tries. The authors’ depiction of strangers’ well-meaning yet patronizing behavior, brought to life by George’s expressive cartoon illustrations, is uncomfortably realistic.

The only solution that the book offers, however, is for Joe to surround himself

with friends who accept him for who he is: “just Joe.” While supportive friends are helpful, disabled readers may desire concrete tips for directly addressing awkward interactions; moreover, the book seems to imply that disabled people must simply learn to put up with condescending remarks.

Joe presents white, Simone is brownskinned, and background characters are racially diverse.

A reassuring, if not empowering, exploration of the disability experience. (authors’ note) (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

Viewfinder Chung, Christine D.U. & Salwa Majoka Tundra Books (144 pp.) | $18.99 Feb. 13, 2024 | 9780735268753

In this wordless graphic novel, a young space traveler alights upon a deserted Earth and explores the remnants of our world.

A child points a rocket ship toward an unexplored spot on a map of space.

The destination is none other than our own planet, devoid of humans but replete with artifacts. After landing and uncovering a stereoscopic viewfinder in a schoolyard time capsule, the protagonist discovers a map scribbled on one of the picture discs and sets out to investigate. The child traipses through neighborhood streets, traverses a once-bustling train depot, and silently surveys civilization’s great achievements in a shadowy museum and a gorgeous library. The viewfinder’s images offer clues to Earth’s emptiness: Humans chose to leave the planet following an infestation of bioluminescent fungi that descended from the sky. They also subtly suggest the photographer’s identity and their unique viewpoint on the Anthropocene’s end. Although this tale touches upon a trope that may be familiar to older readers—the KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

eerie beauty of post-apocalyptic decay— it employs a softer lens to ponder the striving, ephemeral nature of existence.

Emphatically cute yet deliberately informative panels in purple, blue, and golden-green hues are inviting and economical. The explorer is tanskinned, the viewfinder photographer is Black, and the people seen in the images are diverse.

Beautiful and precisely depicted, a gentle, generous reflection on civilization and community life. (Graphic fiction. 6-12)

The Reflection in Me Colagiovanni, Marc | Illus. by Peter H. Reynolds | Orchard/Scholastic (32 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781338810486

How to be your own cheering section.

A brownskinned, raven-haired child dressed in white gazes in the mirror and engages in a spirited, meaningful conversation with the image reflected. The dialogue is rendered in different-colored fonts: The child’s voice is set in black type, the mirror’s in purple. The reflection’s comments are effusive, complimentary, and poetic. But the child offers up warm words of praise, too; after all, the face that stares at the child from the glass is—guess whose?

In sum, according to the mirror, this youngster is “perfectly perfect.”

Who’ll argue with that assessment?

This empowering, beautifully written book makes clear that children—all of us, actually—need, at least occasionally, to give ourselves a good pep talk to remind ourselves of our value, talents, integrity, kindness, and goodness… even if we say those things only to ourselves. This book is all about strongly believing in who we are. Plus, the more we remind ourselves of our worth, the more we and others will believe it. That mirror the child in the book looks into? It’s literally and figuratively a reflection of who we are—and the persona we present to KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 107

the world. Starting off dominated by hues of purple, the illustrations grow more colorful as the book proceeds, suggesting that the protagonist’s confidence is growing as the little one ponders and reflects.

Just what all “perfectly perfect” kids need in order to boost their self-esteem every day. (Picture book. 5-8)

The Witch in the Woods Collings, Michaelbrent | Illus. by Brandon Dorman | Shadow Mountain (256 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781639932320 Series: Grimmworld, 1

Ten-year-old twins Willow and Jake Grimm find themselves in a perilous land of tragic fairy tales after their parents move them from Los Angeles to New

Marburg, Idaho.

Upon arriving, the siblings struggle to cope with their malevolent new teacher, Mrs. Houseman, but their academic torture turns to mortal danger when they enter Grimmworld, an alternate universe with elements borrowed from a hodgepodge of mostly European stories and folklore.

Collings’ references range from C. Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio to the mythical Arabian anqa, a fantastical bird, but the author clearly draws the most inspiration from the bleak dangers of tales made popular by the Brothers Grimm. With only an absurd naked mole rat called Chet as their occasional guide, the siblings must work together to save two new friends from a witch and escape back to the real world. Collings brings some freshness to the worldbuilding of this well-worn material, as with the fairies who fashion lacelike wings out of the bones of their prey. In this nightmarish setting, new rules and tricks keep appearing out of nowhere, which is confusing for both the characters and readers. Willow and Jake fall into familiar types: There’s one

For more illustrated work by by Brandon Dorman, visit Kirkus online.

athletic, popular twin and one who’s intellectual and awkward, though their unswerving devotion to and confidence in each other is refreshing. Most human characters read white.

A convoluted fairy-tale mash-up for diehard Grimm fans. (reading guide and discussion questions) (Fantasy.

9-12)

Rocket Ship, Solo Trip Colombi, Chiara | Illus. by Scott Magoon Viking (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Feb. 20, 2024 9780593326930

Even a rocket ship has to learn to be brave when she leaves home.

Rocket Ship is excited and a little nervous about her first solo trip to launch a space satellite that will take pictures of Earth below. She’s prepared, but “so much unknown lies up ahead. / So much at home to leave instead.”

Ground Control sends helpful tips: “Find one small step to lead the way. / Use the countdown as your cue. / You’ll see. You’ll know just what to do.” After a hug from the anthropomorphized Launch Pad, Rocket Ship blasts off and then successfully launches the satellite. Soon pictures of stars and the northern lights will be on their way to Earth. Rocket Ship’s mission complete, it’s time for reentry, and although she’s happy to be going home, she has another case of the jitters. Luckily, she recalls Ground Control’s advice and begins a successful descent with a smile.

Once she’s back on the ground, she’s already wishing for a new launch.

“If only space weren’t quite so far.”

Digitally created illustrations feature a personified rocket ship with an >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

107

1/8/24 5:23 PM

C H I L D R E N ' S // Q & A

THE KIRKUS Q&A: HENA KHAN The children’s author brings a complex middle-grade protagonist to life in Drawing Deena.

BY MATHANGI SUBRAMANIAN

AS A NEURODIVERSE South Asian American reader, I find

This book felt like a kind of continuation of Amina’s Voice and Amina’s Song.

How did writing these earlier books affect your approach to Drawing Deena?

What did their publication make possible for you as a writer?

Writing my earlier books made me a little more confident going in, but also a lot freer to write the story I wanted to tell. Amina’s Voice was my debut novel.

When I wrote it, I was teaching myself how to tell a story 108

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 108

in long form and was more focused on what I wanted the world to see. As a Pakistani American Muslim who never saw herself represented, I was like, OK, here’s a chance for people to get to know a family like Amina’s and to connect with a character like her. Here’s a chance for people to get into an Islamic center and see what happens there.

And when I was writing Amina’s Song, I thought about readers’ reactions to Amina’s Voice—especially

some of the specific things they wanted to know more about Amina.

Initially, I pitched Drawing Deena as a companion to More to the Story. I wanted to live in that universe a bit longer and tell the story of a character in that book who was an artist. When I talked to my editor, she convinced me to try Deena as a stand-alone. That was really freeing. I wasn’t thinking about the audience or limited by what already existed. It was really just me writing about things I was pondering, things I was grappling with in my own life that I thought would be relatable to readers of all ages.

What were some of the things you were pondering?

One thing was the idea of how the pressures of social media and other people’s opinions can influence our own—especially our cre-

ative processes. I wanted my character to grapple with those things because I’m currently thinking about the difference between what’s popular and what’s authentic, and how you stay true to yourself. How do you find mentors and role models and artists whom you admire? What is it about them that speaks to you?

What are they trying to do with what they’re creating?

And is there more there than just being commercial or popular?

Speaking of mentors, one of my favorite characters in the book is a South Asian Muslim artist named Salma who becomes Deena’s mentor. Did you have any Salmas in your life growing up?

I modeled Salma after Sobia Ahmad, an artist whom I interviewed for this book. I saw her working with youth, and I just loved her energy

Havar Espedal

that most of the books I read make me feel split in half: I get to read books either about neurodiverse characters or about South Asian American characters, but rarely characters like me who identify as both. Consequently, I was delighted to discover the middle-grade novel Drawing Deena (Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster, Feb. 6), which features a neurodiverse, Muslim, Pakistani American protagonist and recently received a starred Kirkus review. In Hena Khan’s book, the main character, Deena, discovers her neurodiversity when her attempts to balance the responsibility she feels toward her family with her love of art stretch her coping mechanisms beyond their capacities. Deena’s struggle is poignant, relatable, and—post-pandemic—much more common than we think.

On a recent video call, I spoke to Khan about anxiety, secondary characters, social media, and the art of pacing a complex plot. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

Q & A // C H I L D R E N ' S

and the way the kids responded to her. Sadly, I did not have a Salma growing up. I had older sister figures, like baajis [sisters in South Asian communities]. There were a few that I thought were really cool. They were kind of artsy and alternative, but I definitely didn’t have anyone I would have called a mentor or someone to help me in my creative pursuits. As a more experienced writer, I now have people whom I consider mentors, but I wish I’d had them earlier. But then, I think so much of storytelling is writing what we wish for or what we’ve seen.

Another character I love is Parisa, Deena’s cousin. It seems like she has a much

deeper backstory. When you develop secondary characters like Parisa, do you come up with their personal histories?

Not so much a backstory as a strong sense of who they are, what they look like, what their mannerisms would be, and so on. Sort of their essence as a person.

For Parisa, I had the sense that she was a somewhat superficial, smart, put-together, confident girl who masks a lot of her insecurities through this persona she’s adopted.

She’s a foil to Deena, who’s simple and natural and more of an observer than a performer. I loved Parisa because I felt like both Parisa and Deena have these preconceived notions

Drawing Deena Khan, Hena

Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster | 240 pp. $17.99 | Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781534459915

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 109

of who the other person is.

They both view the other as far more together and confident than themselves.

That’s what leads to clashes but also to this bigger understanding and stronger relationship down the road.

As the oldest child of immigrants, I found Deena’s anxiety relatable but also surprising. I didn’t see the anxiety attack coming, and then when I went back, I could see all the clues you left the reader. How did you pace this so perfectly?

I’m so glad you said that, because I didn’t want her anxiety to beat the reader over the head! I do find some books will tell you the protagonists’ issues over and over as they spell out, I really hope I’ll find a way to solve this problem!

But anxiety isn’t always obvious. It doesn’t have to be these huge anxiety-causing moments that lead to panic attacks. It can be a slow build. That’s why I tried to leave a little string of anxious moments, like her family’s financial stuff, her art struggle, her cousin drama, those types of dynamics. And then, as children of immigrants, we sometimes have to be advocates for ourselves in a way that other kids don’t, just because our parents don’t understand the system. Like, There’s this thing called Back-to-School Night, parents, and you’re supposed to be there!

This reminds me of what you said a little bit earlier about how you want your stories to resonate with people of all ages.

We think writing for kids is for kids and writing for

I think so much of storytelling is writing what we wish for.

adults is for adults. I don’t see it that way. It’s just storytelling. Hopefully people of all ages will relate.

What’s next for you?

I have five books coming out [this] year! I’ve got an anthology called The Door Is Open. It’s got some superstar authors, including Sayantani DasGupta, Veera Hiranandani, Mitali Perkins, Simran Jeet Singh, and Aisha Saeed. I have a picture book, and another co-authored book, and my first graphic novel, We Are Big Time, coming out [in August] as well.

Any chance we’ll eventually get a book starring Parisa?

I don’t know! I mean, you can probably tell from my work that I love creating these worlds and then building out related stories, so it could be really fun.

You’ve got me thinking…

Mathangi Subramanian is the author of A People’s History of Heaven, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

109

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

array of facial expressions that capture a range of emotions, from uncertainty to the satisfaction of a job well done; little ones trying new things will be encouraged. Caregivers and educators should preread the text before storytime to become comfortable with some of the rhythms.

Blends social-emotional learning and STEM with engaging illustrations for a memorable trip into space. (Picture book. 4-8)

My Day With Mom Crawford, Rae | Holiday House (32 pp.) $15.99 | April 16, 2024 | 9780823452644 Series: I Like To Read

A day out at the farmers market.

In this companion title to My Day With Dad (2023), this time the smiley youngster spends the day with Mom, shopping and playing outdoors. On a meandering, relaxed walk to the farmers market, the pair come across a park, an art fair, and a jazz band. The joy of swinging and sliding, plus the excitement of face painting, is tempered with frustration when Mom says no to a sweet treat at the market. But there’s soup waiting to be made at home! The art, which is occasionally presented in panels, breaks the action into manageable bites, and the simple text with varying sentence structures will help new readers become more confident. If kids aren’t familiar with the previous work, they may not realize that this is a two-household family, since there aren’t quite as many context clues.

Dad does appear at dinnertime (which makes for a lovely portrayal of a friendly divorce), but some readers may conclude that he’s simply coming home from work, even with the line “All are welcome!” as he steps through the door. Ultimately, though, this is a delightful look at a family navigating two homes. Mom is brown-skinned, Dad is light-skinned, and the child is tan-skinned.

110

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 110

A routine outing can be so much more when shared with a loved one. (Early reader. 5-7)

The Mystery of Locked Rooms Currie, Lindsay | Sourcebooks Young Readers (256 pp.) | $16.99 | April 2, 2024 9781728259536

“Like three sides of the same triangle, none of us can imagine what life would be like if we weren’t together.”

Sarah, West, and Hannah have been an intrepid trio since they first met. They bring their passion for math and numbers and their perfectly aligned strengths to solving escape rooms. With a foreclosure looming on Sarah’s family home—which would mean moving to live with her grandparents in Michigan—the only solution is to seek out the rumored Triplet Treasure belonging to Hans, Stefan, and Karl Stein.

The treasure is supposedly hidden in a long-abandoned fun house they built in the 1950s. To outmaneuver the triplets’ ingenious riddles and tricks, the friends will need to overcome personal obstacles and unlock the doors within themselves. While the stakes are high, it’s reassuring for readers to know that Sarah’s family has a place to go, even if it’s far away from her friends. Early chapters detail the health challenges faced by Sarah’s father; his chronic illness has placed a strain on the family’s finances. Currie sets up a moving metaphor: Sarah’s enthusiasm for escape rooms becomes a means of tackling the unsolvable puzzle that has left her parent confined to his own inescapable room. This topic is treated with a gentle touch, but Sarah’s emotional depths could have been explored more deeply; West’s and Hannah’s emotional arcs are fulfilling, however. Main characters read white.

Rex Finds an Egg: ReadyTo-Read Level 1 Cushman, Doug | Simon Spotlight (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 16, 2024 | 9781665926515 Series: Rex & Oslo

What might emerge from that strange egg?

Rex, a warthog, and Oslo, a small brown bird, find an egg. They know it must be an egg because, as Rex points out, it is “white and shaped like an egg!” Could the egg belong to a bird? A turtle? A fish? Rex and Oslo consider a whole list of animals that lay eggs. Some are unexpected (“Maybe it is a platypus egg”), some are scary (“I am afraid of crocodiles!”), and others are, hopefully, extinct (“Yikes!” says Oslo on learning that carnivorous dinosaurs laid eggs). With a new guess on each page, there’s plenty of opportunity for readers to think of what else might lay eggs. Simple, cartoonish art is enlivened by mixed-media touches: Rex’s body has a beautiful, touchable-looking gray roughness, the earth beneath their feet is represented by what appears to be photographs of soil, and the dinosaurs imagined by the duo have a lovely, subtle texture. A few of the hypothetical egg-layers are illustrated in a distinct, more realistic style. Some words are likely to be a stretch for beginning readers, but they are funny or interesting—platypus, squishy, extinct—making the difficult vocabulary its own reward. A comic conclusion gives the whole story one more gentle chuckle.

A charming, challenging, humorous early reader that invites participation.

(Early reader. 5-7)

For more by Doug Cushman, visit Kirkus online.

A riddling, sporting adventure and a story of true friendship. (Mystery. 8-12)

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

A well-written and informative novel filled with exciting twists and turns.

EPHEMIA RIMALDI

The Ghost Forest DasGupta, Sayantani | Illus. by Sandara Tang | Scholastic (224 pp.) | $17.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781338766776 Series: Secrets of the Sky, 3

In the third installment of the Secrets of the Sky series, Kiya and Kinjal return to the Kingdom Beyond to solve a ghostly problem.

Mere weeks after their last trip there, the 10-year-old twins, who are preparing for bhoot chathurdoshi, a Bengali holiday, find their pakkhiraj horse friends calling for their aid once again. Bhoot, or ghosts of all sorts, have been frightening the denizens of the Kingdom Beyond, the Sky Kingdom, and Demon Land.

When the twins witness the pakkhiraj reacting aggressively toward these ghostly invaders, Kinjal, especially, feels empathy for the bhoot. The judgment and anger with which others treat them remind him of the ways some people in New Jersey react to his own and other immigrant families.

Putting their heads together, Kiya and Kinjal realize that the groves of trees where the bhoot lived have been cut down, displacing them as well as various animal species. The brother and sister need to find the culprit in order to restore the bhoot to their homes. DasGupta once again tackles important social and environmental issues while lifting the mood of the story with lighthearted jokes and funny sibling banter. This fantasy will delight readers. Tang’s whimsical and imaginative spot art highlights the action-packed magical world. The KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 111

author’s note expands on the Bengali cultural elements and folktales that inspired the work and encourages readers to learn more about environmental issues.

A spooky, fantastical, and inspiring addition to the series. (Fantasy. 8-12)

Ephemia Rimaldi: Circus Performer Extraordinaire DeMeulemeester, Linda | Red Deer Press (248 pp.) | $14.95 paper | March 15, 2024 9780889957299

A spirited young suffragist runs away to join the circus.

Twelve-year-old Ephemia Rimaldi, abandoned by her parents and bounced around among relatives, has been living in Toronto with her stern activist Aunt Ada, who gets her involved with the women’s suffrage movement. After Aunt Ada dies, Effy, seeking to escape the “Rimaldi vultures” who want to claim the trust fund her aunt left her, runs away to find her father’s circus; his legal guardianship will protect the money intended for her education.

Phineas Rimaldi frowns upon her attempts at trapeze and riding a bicycle, but Effy perseveres. Little does she know that a couple of trapeze artists, a bearded lady, a woman tiger tamer, and an elephant handler’s nephew will teach her to prove her worth and confront her own relative privilege of class, race, and nationality. Effy, along with her new acquaintances, must find a missing sapphire whose sale could fund the failing circus and send beloved circus elephant Balally to

retire in a sanctuary in Ceylon. Effy, who reads white, actively seeks ways to promote women’s equality. Her antics realistically reflect the limitations placed on women and girls at the turn of the 20th century, while highlighting the fact that circuses were among the first environments where equal pay was achieved and women’s courage was embraced. The fast pace and pithy chapter headings propel the narrative.

A well-written and informative novel filled with exciting twists and turns. (author’s note, interview with the author) (Historical fiction. 9-13)

Ready To Soar Doerrfeld, Cori | Dial Books (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780593696729

A tot tries to fly a paper airplane but is hampered by unsolicited advice.

After carefully studying the book Flying 101, Riley is ready. Wearing aviator goggles and a scarf, light-skinned Riley prepares to fold a paper airplane and watch it soar. The countdown begins: “3 … 2 … 1…” Suddenly a large eagle appears, shouting, “STOP!” The eagle boastfully explains that Riley’s airplane won’t fly: “I rule the sky because I’m large and in charge. Trust me, it needs to be bigger!” So Riley folds a bigger plane. The countdown begins again. This time, a colorful parrot dives in, interrupting the process once more. “Only the best and brightest can rise above the rest.

Don’t you see? It needs to be fancier!”

So Riley adds vibrant colors. However, more and more birds squawk their suggestions (“faster!” “taller!” “longer!” “smarter!”). Fed up, Riley marches to a quiet spot, meeting one more avian visitor. But this one just might have what is needed for the airplane—and friendship—to soar. Set against large swaths of white space, the realistically depicted but expressive birds swoop in through the frames with their opinions. The repeating countdown refrain and consistent interruptions FEBRUARY 1, 2024

111

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

are surefire crowd pleasers for a readaloud delight.

A feathered cast of flight experts can’t lift one up as high as a friend. (Picture book. 4-7)

The Prickletrims Go Wild Dorléans, Marie | Trans. by Polly Lawson Floris (44 pp.) | $18.95 | April 9, 2024 9781782508830

In this French import, a family’s structured existence is thrown into turmoil when the gardener quits.

Mr. and Mrs. Prickletrim insist on a symmetrical, formal garden.

As Florian the gardener plants and prunes, they follow him with a ruler and a color chart, exerting control over “the height of any new plant, the space between its stems…and the ideal combination of colors.” The green topiaries and lawns and the orderly rows of red and yellow flowers present a noticeable contrast to the colorless house, outdoor furniture, and brick wall, all rendered in pencil on white backgrounds. When Florian flees in a fit of exasperation, the garden grows willy-nilly; long leaves and vibrant blossoms encroach on the home, eventually invading all the rooms, along with various critters. The adults try to fight back, but daughter Suzette shows them how to listen to the birds, romp in the jungle, and enjoy the wonder of it all. Ultimately, they achieve a balance between tame and wild. Dorléans employs longer descriptions in the beginning; she trims the text as the visuals dominate, effectively conveying life at either extreme—the rigidity of micro-management and the overstimulation of chaos (although she seems to prefer the latter!). The characters have pale pink skin, but their black-and-white-patterned clothing harmonizes with the neutral setting.

A clarion call to take time to smell the flowers—and to let yourself and your garden go a little wild. (Picture book.

4-6) 112

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 112

Kirkus Star

Nen and the Lonely Fisherman Eagleton, Ian | Illus. by James Mayhew Little Bee Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781499815931

A fisherman and a merman find love by the sea.

Nen, a merman with a golden fishtail, loves exploring the world of humans. One day, as he swims close to shore, he notices that one of the fishermen seems different from the others. Ernest is gentle and creative, and he rescues sea birds accidentally snared by nets.

Both are lonely, and when they meet one night under the moon, they fall in love. Nen’s father, Pelagios, frustrated at Nen’s insistence on interacting with humans, who are hurting the ocean, creates a storm that pulls Ernest under. But Nen saves him, and Pelagios sees that he was wrong. In the end, Ernest and Nen meet happily at the shore, sitting on the rocks and holding hands. The ending is a pleasant departure from the “Little Mermaid” template; neither man needs to fundamentally change who he is so they can be together. It’s a tender fairy tale with no heavy-handed moral, though the importance of love and of respecting the ocean comes through clearly. The illustrations have a sketchy simplicity to them, but they are sweet and moody, with the warm colors depicting Nen and Ernest standing out against an ocean of blues and grays. There are also plenty of cute sea creatures to spot. Young readers who appreciate fairy tales, love stories, or mermaids will be enchanted. Nen

and Pelagios are brown-skinned and dark-haired, while Ernest has pale skin and red hair.

A moving celebration of love. (Picture book. 4-8)

Matt Sprouts and the Curse of the Ten Broken Toes Eicheldinger, Matthew | Andrews McMeel Publishing (304 pp.) | $12.99 paper March 19, 2024 | 9781524888695 Series: Matt Sprouts, 1

An incident over summer break saddles a Colorado sixth grader with an apparent curse in this debut, which was originally published as a Kickstarter

project in 2021.

Life sometimes throws curveballs, or so Matt’s dad says, but this one’s a doozy. Right after pulling a pretend (but all-too-effective) karate move on his neighbor Jenna and breaking her collarbone, a long series of odd accidents chronically leave Matt with one or more broken toes. This not only earns him unwanted notoriety in middle school as the latest kid to catch the legendary Curse but also threatens his place on the traveling soccer team.

Eicheldinger tucks in daffy cartoon spot art, kits his protagonist out with an exaggeratedly aggressive but steadfastly loyal fake girlfriend, and works hard to make this a lightweight tale about overcoming physical pain and solving problems with the help of pals, but the tale contains some questionable elements. Notably, there’s an episode in

A family’s structured existence is thrown into turmoil when the gardener quits.

THE PRICKLETRIMS GO WILD

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

which Matt and his best friend flood the bedroom of a bully who’s repeated third grade three times. Two older adult characters are presented as figures for mockery: a soccer coach who reads as alcoholic (although this is not acknowledged) and a substitute teacher who’s first introduced as spitting at Matt’s car while behaving erratically in the street.

Notwithstanding happy endings both on and off the soccer field, such sour notes may leave readers with mixed reactions. The cast is cued white.

Mildly entertaining. (Fiction. 10-13)

Bird Girl: Gene StrattonPorter Shares Her Love of Nature With the World Esbaum, Jill | Illus. by Rebecca Gibbon Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers (48 pp.) | $18.99 | March 12, 2024 9781635926866

A portrait of the naturalist as a young woman.

Growing up in 1870s Indiana, young Geneva Grace Stratton loves to roam and explore, watching and wondering.

“Who cares if her apron tears or her face and hands get scratched up?”

She’s especially enamored of the birds she sees on the farm. After nursing an injured hawk, she tends to other hurt birds. She adjusts to a different life when her family moves to town, but she misses the country. As an adult, known as Gene, she marries and, in her new country home, happily reconnects with the birds she loves and writes true stories about her experiences with them. Her dream slips away when an editor demands that her work be illustrated with images of stuffed birds. No way. An incident with her daughter’s parrot inspires her to learn photography, and she’s off to nearby Limberlost Swamp, patiently observing birds and taking photos. After five years, she produces photos that wow the editor of Recreation magazine. Esbaum relies on simply stated language and syntax, emphasizing Gene’s love of birds and KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 113

allowing her determination to shine through. Gibbon’s glowing, detailed acrylic-and-ink illustrations appear in vignettes or in full-page or double-page spreads, matching and enhancing the text. Though greatly respected in her own time, Gene Stratton-Porter is far less well known today; this work rectifies that oversight—this self-taught woman naturalist will come alive for young readers.

Fascinating and inspiring. (author’s note, more about Gene Stratton-Porter, bibliography, photographs, text credits) (Picture-book biography. 7-10)

A Unicorn, a Dinosaur, and a Shark Were Riding a Bicycle Fenske, Jonathan | Penguin Workshop (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 19, 2024 9780593519493

The titular characters walk into another book, with all the snarky attitude from their 2023 debut.

As an off-page narrator pushes for the story advertised by the title, Unicorn, Dinosaur, and Shark wrestle for narrative control, protesting that they were not even talking about riding a bicycle. The speaker insists on action—even just “DREAMING about how much fun it would be to ride a bicycle.” But the trio retort that the unicorn was dreaming about “beautiful rainbows,” and the others were thinking about snacks. The narrator snaps, “That is BORING,” but Unicorn seizes the book and starts telling the story of three friends who want to relax and dream of rainbows and snacks (this last is depicted as an adorable kitten) but keep getting pestered. Although the three characters are quite pleased, the narrator is disgusted (“Ugh”), and so is the kitten, clad in a rainbow T-shirt, who storms over to ride the bicycle.

As the three grin and eye the feline, ready to pounce (the rainbow-loving unicorn’s excited by the kitten’s shirt; the other two view the cat as food), the

kitty skitters off, leaving the bicycle and sarcastically urging the others to “enjoy the rest of your book.” Sherbet colors and Fenske’s zany cartoon style add to the madcap meta-textual fun.

Fans of the trio’s earlier power struggle will find this one equally entertaining.

(Picture book. 4-8)

Solar Bear Ferry, Beth | Illus. by Brendan Wenzel Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) | $19.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780063251731

A polar bear, infused with sunlight, describes its plight to young listeners.

How exactly the “solar” bear came to shine is never explained, but Wenzel’s luminescent beast does indeed glow against midnight blue backgrounds.

Soon the bear is joined by similarly lit (all-white) orcas, chimpanzees, bees, and other creatures, gliding and floating across city streets, to “show you that our paths are linked— / as you expand, we go extinct. // We’ll shine so brightly that you’ll see / that change is a necessity.” At this moment, the scenes shift from night to day, and the illuminated animals blend in more with the light-drenched landscape—an indeterminate biome comprising beaches, forests, and cliffs.

Children who are diverse in terms of skin tone and hairstyle—some of them have been observing the parade of wildlife throughout—are seen planting a garden, each becoming “a solar kid.”

Ferry doesn’t explain how gardening and extinction are related. Wenzel has some eye-catching digital compositions that incorporate sequential panels and a diaphanous, curving blanket of snow at the conclusion, but they aren’t enough to rescue a singsong-y, message-heavy text that doesn’t add much to the topic of climate change.

The shelf on environmental activism is crowded; this one doesn’t stand out. (information on endangered animals, resources, author’s and illustrator’s notes) (Picture book. 4-6) FEBRUARY 1, 2024

113

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

A beautifully photographed, respectful tribute to pollinators.

T H E M I G H T Y P O L L I N AT O R S

The Mighty Pollinators Frost, Helen | Photos by Rick Lieder Candlewick (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781536229103

Collaborators Frost and Lieder reunite for the seventh book in a series based on keenly observed animal life.

Frost’s introductory poem, “Almost Invisible,” describes fine, powdery pollen waiting “for the only thing it needs— / a ride on the wind / or on wing, / fur, / or feather.” Its concluding metaphor hails the parade of pollinators to come and their significance for life on Earth: “small and mighty, / holding the world together.”

The occasionally rhyming verses present eight species whose activities function to move pollen from the flower’s anther to its reproductive parts. Fittingly, Lieder’s ever marvelous photographs cycle from morning to night, while Frost begins with bees, ants, wasps, and flies and ends with bats and fireflies. Two strong poems contrast the “dawn to dusk…realm of the butterfly” with the nighttime domain of moths, whose antennae, “like feather dusters, / sweep pollen from the flowers. / We carry it over the sleeping world— / dusk to dawn is ours.” The collection’s last poem lauds the role of “pollen’s good friend,” the wind. In addition to Lieder’s macro images—extreme close-ups with ethereally blurred backgrounds—small insets, shaped hexagonally like honeycomb cells, provide additional insect-eye views. Backmatter provides creatures’ common names. A concluding section includes information on pollination, a labeled flower diagram, and 114

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 114

suggestions for improving pollinator habitats, such as learning about native plants and avoiding the use of garden pesticides.

A beautifully photographed, respectful tribute to pollinators. (Informational picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Star

The Mochi Makers Fujimoto-Johnson, Sharon | Beach Lane/ Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 19, 2024 | 9781665931540

A Japanese American grandmother and child cook, pound, pat, and munch yummy

mochi!

Endpapers hint at the treat that the child and Obaachan decide to make together, using a long-standing, matrilineal recipe. With Obaachan’s “strong, wrinkled hands” and the child’s “small, quick ones”—and their whole hearts—they prepare the rice (spilling only a few grains!). While it cooks, Obaachan tells the story of how she came to America, and the two play cards and sip green tea.

Soon it’s time to put the rice in a mixer, “which pounds it into a sticky mound,” and pat rice balls into flat cakes. They fill some mochi with sweet red bean paste, coat others in soybean powder, fold strawberries into others, and then prepare boxes to share with friends and family. The child says that mochi is how this family shares love, traditions, and gratitude. Each step of this tasty story glows with joy and kindness, punctuated by rich sensory language. Digital collage illustrations,

dominated by the same pastel pinks as the mochi, use mixed media (including cloth that Fujimoto-Johnson’s own grandmother embroidered) to immerse readers in a warm, cozy home environment. Obaachan and the child remember Ojiichan (Grandpa), who appears to be deceased, and his love of mochi. An author’s note describes the autobiographical aspects of the story and offers background on this Japanese treat and a recipe to make it at home.

A storytelling treat to be savored among family. (Picture book. 4-7)

Evil Spy School the Graphic Novel Gibbs, Stuart | Illus. by Anjan Sarkar Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) | $24.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781665931946 Series: Spy School, 3

Young CIA agent-in-training Benjamin Ripley switches sides—or is he just going undercover?—in this graphic version of the third Spy School caper.

Sticking to the plot of the 2015 original, this episode sees the talented math whiz recruited by nefarious organization SPYDER after being (unjustly, he fumes) kicked out of the CIA’s academy. While training in a hidden school for evildoers with other prospective villains, including Ashley Sparks, a gushy former competitive gymnast with a fondness for portmanteau words (sweet + awesome = swawesome), Ben gets wind of a dastardly scheme to make billions on government construction projects.

Hot if inept pursuit by both rival espionage agencies takes Ben from a secret underground command center to the top of the Statue of Liberty.

But while the action has a rapid flow in the art (Sarkar is good at portraying fights, high-speed chases, and explosions), several characters are drawn with generic features and such KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

a limited range of expressions that even with help from the cast gallery, it’s hard to tell them apart easily. Still, along with coming through in the suspenseful climax—thanks to clever deductions and quick thinking—by the end, Ben has also achieved a longsought breakthrough with Erica Hale (code name “Ice Queen”), a superbly omnicompetent schoolmate who has his heart as well as his back. The cast largely presents white.

Will satisfy fans but could be better.

(Graphic thriller. 8-12)

Daisy the Daydreamer Goldfinger, Jennifer P. | Neal Porter/Holiday House (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 12, 2024 9780823453559

Daisy’s daydreaming always seems to get in the way.

Mrs. Dill announces that the class’s best listener will be the line leader on the field trip to the aquarium. Yearning to be line leader, Daisy tries to concentrate but becomes engrossed in drawing pictures of the lesson’s subject: octopuses. Her inattention results in another student being appointed line leader. But when Daisy shows her drawings to Mrs. Dill, her teacher announces that Daisy will be the class’s official aquarium artist.

Without overtly labeling learning disabilities, Goldfinger offers sensitive yet hilarious reassurance about differences and creativity. The author/illustrator describes Daisy as having her “head in the clouds,” and a series of delightful images bring that statement to life.

Daisy’s head is often obscured by an irregular blue cloud, and clouds gather as she tries to pay attention to For more by Jennifer P. Goldfinger, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 115

Mrs. Dill. Early on, understated text mentions simple activities in Daisy’s life, while the illustrations show her imagination taking flight: As she brushes her teeth, she imagines herself as a rabbit; as she braids her hair, she envisions herself with Rapunzel-esque locks. The cartoonlike, mixed-media art is increasingly funny as it depicts the problems that accompany Daisy’s often scattered comprehension. In one scene, her mother tells her to fold her socks and feed her brother; a distracted Daisy ends up attempting to feed her socks and fold her sibling.

Daisy is light-skinned, Mrs. Dill is brown-skinned, and the class is diverse.

Sweet, funny, and encouraging. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-6)

Kirkus Star

Yaya and the Sea Good Marable, Karen | Illus. by Tonya Engel Denene Millner Books/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) | $18.99 | March 12, 2024 9781534462014

A little girl learns how the important women in her life honor the sea.

Awakening from dreams of being a mermaid, Yaya prepares for a trip through New York City to the sea on the first day of spring. Yaya and her mother bundle up, get breakfast quickly at the bodega, and board the subway. Mama’s close friends Auntie Stefanie, Auntie Renee, and Auntie Dream greet mother and daughter warmly, and they ride the train to the end of the line. They all get quiet as they approach the beach and walk toward the water with reverence and respect. Each woman has brought gifts for Mama Ocean, as they call her: flowers, watermelon slices, shiny dimes, patterned fabrics, a ring, molasses. Yaya waits on the blanket, as Mama has instructed her, and watches while the four women walk into the water to thank the ocean. Engel’s deeply saturated acrylic images convey

a sense of tranquility as the women bond, share an intimate friendship, and bring Yaya into their tradition of leaving markers of the past behind to start afresh with the coming of spring.

Engel also shows the women’s individuality through their expressions, their hairstyles, their attires, and the nature of the gifts they bring. Yaya, her mother, and her aunties present Black.

A beautiful, uniquely told story of gratitude and togetherness. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)

Little Purple Tractor Guendelsberger, Erin | Illus. by Annelouise Mahoney | Sourcebooks Wonderland (40 pp.) | $12.99 | March 5, 2024 9781728278315 | Series: Little Heroes, Big Hearts

A purple tractor discovers his purpose.

“Deep in farm country…Purple Tractor had a comfortable home and loving parents, but he was unhappy.” The other tractors—orange, red, and blue—make fun of him because of his inability to perform farm-related chores. He finds comfort talking with Brown Truck, who’s lived on the farm longer than any other vehicle and tells stories about the old days.

Brown Truck has the perfect job for Purple Tractor: working on a construction site. Purple Tractor heads to a construction site with Brown Truck and enjoys the work. His fellow farm tractors start to feel threatened by his new sense of self, but once he saves the day after a severe weather event, he eventually finds his place in both worlds. Exhaustingly long blocks of text are paired with static illustrations of pastoral and urban scenes. While heavy machinery is often an automatic hit with young children, this one will have a hard time finding an appreciative audience. The story is wordy, with a leaden sentimentality that comes from painstakingly explaining what lessons readers should be taking away. The heroism FEBRUARY 1, 2024

115

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

in this Little Heroes, Big Hearts series leaves a lot to be desired.

Only for kids who really, really want to look at pictures of tractors. (Picture book. 4-7)

Miss MacDonald Has a Farm Gwarjanski, Kalee | Illus. by Elizabet Vukovic | Doubleday (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780593568163

Move over, Old MacDonald: The hardworking Miss MacDonald has a green thumb and plenty of plants.

This tale follows the same cadence as the familiar song but replaces the opening lines with “Miss MacDonald has a farm. / She loves things that grow.” Instead of caring for pastures full of animals, Miss MacDonald grows food, “with a water-water here” and a “drip-drop there.” Once her bounty is ready, the titular farmer harvests her crops and cooks up a feast for her friends.

Caregivers and educators will find the bouncy text fun to sing, but it’s also readable if that’s preferred. Gwarjanski employs rich vocabulary words such as shuck, tubers, and thresh, many of which are defined in an appended glossary. Miss MacDonald has brown skin and wears oversized, orange-tinted sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, tall socks, and gardening clogs. On every page she tirelessly tends to her plants, while the accompanying illustrations feature vibrant, true-to-life depictions of seedlings, vines, and stalks. This is a delightful update that centers a

woman and encourages readers to consider how the foods they love appear on the table. Those who want to follow Miss MacDonald’s worthy example should check out the recipe for a harvest vegetable bake in the backmatter.

This beloved nursery rhyme gets a fresh and meaningful modernization.

(Picture book. 4-6)

Tiny Wonders Han, Sally Soweol | Bloomsbury (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781547614561

A young girl’s search for a dandelion revives an entire community.

April looks out her window.

The world is gray, and everyone seems “too busy to laugh or look up at the sky.” April recalls her grandmother’s favorite flower, a dandelion, which symbolizes happiness. Could a dandelion seed help lift people’s spirits? The simple, evenly paced, uplifting narrative follows April as she asks a gardener, a bus driver, and a shopkeeper their opinions on the flower, only to receive mostly indifferent responses: “Dandelions are a weed!” “They make me sneeze!” “I haven’t seen a dandelion in years…But when I was little, we used to wish on them.”

April wishes for a dandelion seed and is delighted when several float to her doorstep. She carefully plants them one rainy day. As they grow, joy spreads, enveloping the community in an oversized garden of blossoms.

Visions of his uncle Humpty’s fate curtail a cautious young egg’s actions on an outing to the park.

THE EGG INCIDENT

116

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 116

As more dandelion seeds float along, people wish “for more tiny wonders to grow.” Early on, the yellow light from April’s room and her bright red attire offer a stark contrast to the gray-hued town, rendered with simple lines and highlights of red. Later, warm swirls of color blend together to create engaging seasonal backdrops to the endearing cartoons. April is light-skinned and dark-haired; her community is diverse.

Full of hope, warmth, and charm, a reminder that it’s the little things that matter. (guide to flowers and their meanings) (Picture book. 5-8)

The Egg Incident Hanaor, Ziggy | Illus. by Daisy Wynter Cicada Books (72 pp.) | $19.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781800660434

Visions of his uncle Humpty’s fate curtail a cautious young egg’s actions on an outing to the park.

With the warnings of his anxious parents ringing in his ears (“AND NEVER, EVER SIT ON A WALL!”), rotund Humphrey ventures timorously outside, where he falls in with a disheveled, red-haired, lightskinned dynamo named Princess Jean (“call me PJ”) who urges an uncertain Humphrey to join her in climbing trees, playing catch, and like terrifying business. When PJ’s tales of her own misadventures prove so absorbing that neither notices the park closing, the only way to get out is…climbing the high wall. “Just don’t look down!” she warns. Oh, dear. If this were a Jon Klassen story, that would likely be the end, but Hanaor and Wynter have a different idea. Humphrey may be depicted in the loose-lined cartoonish illustrations as a deceptively fragile-looking egg with stubby stick limbs and an anxious expression, but he emerges from his great fall unexpectedly intact, and PJ squires him off to her family’s castle, where he gets an earful from one of the king’s KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

horses about what really happened to his yarn-spinning uncle. His worldview undergoes a transformation. “It’s important to be careful. But if you’re too careful all the time, you miss out on all the fun!” The human cast is diverse.

Lays a liberating message on helicopter parents and their overprotected offspring. (Graphic fiction. 6-10)

Menus for Meerkats: And Other Hungry Animals Hoare, Ben | Illus. by Hui Skipp Kane Miller (48 pp.) | $14.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781684648306

What’s for dinner?

The writer of numerous DK anthologies about the natural world, Hoare knows how to grab readers. Here, he uses the concept of food and feeding habits to introduce 10 animal species and some useful labels, including herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. The book opens with a short introduction pointing out that animals have to eat and usually have preferences and needs—if not literal menus. Hoare covers species from around the world: meerkats, scarlet macaws, grizzly bears, great white sharks, koalas, dung beetles, orangutans, Indian cobras, blue whales, and lions. Two vibrant spreads, adorned with eye-catching borders, are devoted to each animal; a spread labeled the “Menu” is separated into “Main Course,” “Sides,” and “Drinks,” with a tiny globe showing where the species lives. A spread labeled “Dinner With the…” adds noteworthy facts, including length and weight.

The backgrounds are full of colorful illustrations of the animals and their menu items. Most creatures in Skipp’s child-friendly artwork are smiling, even the musk ox being attacked by a lioness. The introduction and the glossary are paired with imagined scenes of animals that, in real life, don’t live together.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 117

Animal facts engagingly presented for middle-grade audiences. (index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

Trim Saves the Day Hopkinson, Deborah | Illus. by Kristy Caldwell | Peachtree (48 pp.) | $14.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781682632932 Series: Adventures of Trim

Trim Helps Out (2023) gave the seafaring kitten a chance for (accidental) heroism, but he still wants a steady role on the ship.

This third book in the series finds Trim again at sea with Captain Flinders (based on British explorer Matthew Flinders, who sailed around Australia with his own cat).

The ever helpful feline wants to lend a hand. But his well-meaning attempts exasperate his fellow animals, as well as the cook, the artist, the gardener, and even the captain. Trim paws the biscuit dough, knocks over the flower that the ship’s artist is sketching, and scatters the gardener’s dirt. And his relentless mewing annoys the ship’s dog, Penny.

Even Princess Bea the rat, napping in the hold, finds Trim’s mews irritating.

But when a discouraged Trim goes off to bathe himself—quietly—he becomes surprisingly awash: A huge water cask has sprung a leak. Now Trim discovers that his screechy cries can be an unexpected asset: Ear-splitting YOWLS bring “all hands on deck.” Trim realizes that purring is his steady job, but yowls are good for an emergency. Cartoon-style line and color illustrations faithfully depict a 19th-century ship and a cat’s hilarious antics. Adorable Trim makes a winning, relatable protagonist as he attempts to find a place for himself on the ship. Human faces are generally not depicted, though Captain Flinders is light-skinned, and the artist is brown-skinned.

Party Rex Idle, Molly | Viking (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780425290149

Learn the ins and outs of birthday party etiquette with two young kids and their prehistoric pack of pals.

Reprising a familiar cast with more sage advice, this time on how to behave politely at a birthday, the story reads charmingly like an old-school advice handbook.

Youngsters who might be anxious about attending a birthday bash will find timeless, clear advice like “thank your host for a wonderful time” to be legitimately helpful. A blond child with an unfailingly positive spirit, whom readers will recognize from previous titles, makes an excellent guide, even when the massive, childlike dinosaurs make a few faux pas. Drawn in glowing Prismacolor pencils, the vintage-inspired, sherbet-colored illustrations have a warmth and effervescence just right for afternoon festivities. Light touches, including a stegosaurus hogging a few too many party hats, are whimsical and cheekily demonstrate what not to do. At points, though, the friendly, oversized dinosaurs are so big that it can be difficult to decipher the action. Many gags, such as Rex trying a little too hard to blow out all the candles, will inspire giggling. An emotionally resonant ending, in which the protagonist’s younger sibling gives Rex a teddy bear, is a Jurassic highlight. Both children are light-skinned.

Warm and silly: a perfectly pleasant party. (Picture book. 4-8)

For more by Molly Idle, visit Kirkus online.

More seaworthy fun with this endearing feline hero. (historical note) (Early chapter book. 7-10)

>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

117

1/8/24 5:23 PM

C H I L D R E N ' S // S E E N A N D H E A R D

SEEN AND HEARD Children’s Book

by Chanel Miller Coming This Spring Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All will be published

by Philomel Books.

Chanel Miller will make her children’s literature debut this spring with an illustrated middle-grade novel, the Associated Press reports.

Philomel Books will publish Miller’s Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All. The Penguin Random House imprint describes the book as “a fun, funny, and poignant story of friendship and community starring Magnolia Wu, a ten-year-old sock detective bent on returning all the lonely only socks left behind in her parents’ NYC laundromat.”

Miller’s first book, Know My Name, was published by Viking in 2019. The memoir tells the story of her sexual

assault by Brock Allen Turner on the Stanford University campus; Turner was convicted of the crime but served only three months in jail.

Miller’s memoir received praise from reviewers. It won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All will feature Miller’s drawings. Her artwork has appeared in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

“I crafted these characters because I was longing to move freely through the world with fearless curiosity, to refocus on life’s funny little miraculous moments,” Miller said. “I was craving joy and they helped me find it.”

Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All is slated for publication on April 23, 2024.—M.S.

Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Chanel Miller

For a review of Know My Name, visit Kirkus online.

118

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 118

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

B O O K L I S T // C H I L D R E N ' S 3

2 4

5

1

For more Valentine’s Day picture books, visit Kirkus online.

5 Picture Books for Valentine’s Day 1 Eleven Words for Love

By Randa AbdelFattah, illus. by Maxine Beneba Clarke

A tender tale of love and remembrance.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 119

2 Valentines for All

By Nancy Churnin, illus. by Monika Róza Wisniewska

A Valentine’s Day gift to ambitious youngsters.

3 I Drew a Heart

4 Cupig

A tender story that feels like a cozy hug.

Sure to steal readers’ hearts.

By Gillian Sze, illus.

by Naoko Stoop

By Claire Tattersfield, illus.

by Rob Sayegh Jr.

5 Flubby Does Not Like Valentine’s Day

By J.E. Morris

A holiday title worthy of even the most reticent feline companion.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

119

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

The Color of Sound Isler, Emily Barth | Carolrhoda (336 pp.) $19.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781728487779

Going on strike gives a synesthetic musical prodigy space in her life to learn the music of her Jewish heritage.

Two things control 12-yearold Rosie’s life: 1.

Her unusual brain, with its full-sensory synesthesia, echoic musical memory, and exceptional violin talent; 2. her imperious stage mother.

After her overpacked schedule causes Rosie to lose her only friend, she stops playing violin. Refusing music camp, she perforce accompanies her frustrated mother to her grandparents’ for the summer—without devices as punishment. Connecticut offers a fresh start. Alongside secretly watching improv classes at the public library and swimming with her grandfather, Rosie learns about her Hungarian Jewish family history.

Most intriguingly, through some timetravel anomaly, she encounters a girl she realizes is her mother. Shanna as a girl is so different from Shoshanna as a grown-up that Rosie wonders how the one became the other—and if she can change that outcome.

Rosie is an appealing, sympathetic character who develops believably in her quest to expand both her life and her music. While the scope of her synesthesia is conveyed in a somewhat confusing way, the descriptions of her sensory perceptions are lyrical and evocative, though at times excessive.

The depiction of generational trauma is poignant and subtle, from Rosie’s Holocaust-survivor great-grandparents, to her dying, Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother, to her mother. However, as a literary device, Rosie’s unexplained time-travel interactions with Shanna feel awkward and unnecessary.

A quiet exploration of synesthesia, music, and family history. (discussion questions, author’s note) (Fiction.

10-13) 120

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 120

A quiet exploration of synesthesia, music, and family history.

THE COLOR OF SOUND

The Pig and the Dumpling Johnstone, Bonnie | Illus. by Veselina Tomova | Running the Goat (40 pp.) | $13.99 paper | March 19, 2024 | 9781998802081

An enthusiastic pig gets more than he can swallow in this folksy cautionary tale.

In a small Newfoundland town, a trio of hardworking fishermen are treated to a hearty meal of stew and dumplings.

A chaotic chain of events ensues when a fisherman tosses a dumpling away.

It’s caught in midair by Ignatius, an opportunistic pig, but the dumpling becomes lodged in his throat. Terrified and in pain, Ignatius escapes his pen, then makes a break for the ocean in the hopes of cooling his burning throat.

The path to relief is not an easy one, and along the way Ignatius encounters many obtrusive townspeople. Pies go flying, laundry is entangled, and a cow and an old lady are nearly toppled, but Ignatius is determined to find relief. Finally, he’s knocked flat after slipping on some kelp, which dislodges the dumpling and saves poor Ignatius.

Though this story is reminiscent of beloved folktale-esque stories such as Tomie dePaola’s Strega Nona (1975), with its emphasis on scenery and townspeople, the illustrations are unsettling. Evocative word choices (“scalding hot lump of gluey dough” and Ignatius’ “soundless terror”), combined with Tomova’s decision to highlight Ignatius’ irritated throat with pops of red, make many pictures appear gruesome and frightening; at times he appears to be bleeding from the mouth. All human characters in the book present white.

Visceral illustrations give an incongruously disturbing feel to an otherwise charming tale. (Picture book. 5-10)

Lightningborn Kagawa, Julie | Disney-Hyperion (336 pp.) $17.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781368090308 Series: Storm Dragons, 1

Two young people’s lives collide as they try to save one baby dragon—and an entire kingdom.

Life on the streets of Cutthroat Wedge, an island in the floating kingdom of Gallecia, is hard for orphaned Remy; he must steal to eat, and his only real company is an old man named Bart, who drinks in the tavern and is full of wild stories of adventure and dragons, a luxury that these days only the ultra-wealthy can afford. Meanwhile, Princess Gem is chafing against her school’s restrictions of her storm mage powers. She’s determined to save Gallecia, which she’s just discovered is rapidly sinking into the Maelstrom, the mysterious magic-giving storm holding the islands aloft. After a strange storm, Remy finds a baby dragon who’s being hunted by the ruthless pirate Jhaeros. Turning to Bart for help sets him on a collision course with Gem’s search for the missing Sir Bartello Axtell, who knows how to find the Ancients that can save their world.

This first series entry evenly balances worldbuilding with action and suspense. The comfortably familiar dragons, pirates, and knights exist in an exciting and physically dangerous KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

airborne environment. Both Gem and Remy are steadfast in their convictions and highly sympathetic despite their differences in background, education, and personality. The emotional hook is set with this volume: Readers will feel compelled to seek out the next installment. Characters are minimally described and racially ambiguous.

Swashbuckling abounds in this funfilled series opener. (Fantasy. 8-12)

My First Earth Day Katz, Karen | Godwin Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9780805078954 Series: My First Holiday

A grandmother and grandchild celebrate Earth Day. The pair spend their day planting seeds and trees, visiting a farmers market, and picking up trash.

Narrated by the child, the story raises questions about the consequences of global warming: What would a world without trees look like? What would happen to sea creatures if our water became too polluted? If northern ice continues to melt, where will the polar bears and seals go? Katz’s characteristic illustrations feature simple, rounded figures. The author/ illustrator relies on bright colors and bold patterns, and animals look cute and anthropomorphized. The narrative is a bit didactic and culminates with the child creating an illustrated list titled “How To Help the Earth!”

(Examples include taking the bus, planting a tree, and using cloth rather than plastic bags.) Climate change is a complex topic that’s difficult even for adults to grasp, and Katz uses simplified, child-friendly explanations, similar to those found in other books on the topic. While it may not be the most original take, the explanations of Earth’s physical changes, as well as the child’s ruminations, provide helpful starters for caregivers or teachers looking for a jumping-off point for meaningful conversations.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 121

Nana and the child are light-skinned; background characters are diverse.

A gentle introduction to get kids thinking about ways to help the planet.

(Picture book. 3-5)

Merdaddy Kirwan, Wednesday | Greenwillow Books (40 pp.) | $19.99 | April 16, 2024 9780063280274

Father and child thalassophiles bond in the ocean blue.

Merdaddy adores the water and shares his joy for the ocean with his merbaby. Whether the two are having a seaweed picnic with the sardines or floating “with the jellyfish / all the way up, / like underwater balloons,” Merdaddy, a burly, bearded creature with a fish’s tail and an anchor tattoo on his arm, expresses his love for his child through various forms of imaginative play. After surfing the waves with turtles and rescuing people lost at sea, Merdaddy notes that his merbaby’s “fingers / look like raisins” and “maybe it’s time to get out.” But Merbaby doesn’t want to leave the water and cries underwater tears that float upward. The scene shifts to a bathroom decorated like the sea and to a human child in a bathtub full of aquatic toys that mirror the animals seen earlier in the story. Merdaddy and Merbaby are father and child taking part in the nighttime ritual of bathtime before bed. Families will recognize an important part of their daily routine as well as the sometimes elaborate paths parents and caregivers need to take to get this task done efficiently. Paper collage illustrations provide texture to a bright, energetic aquatic world and bring to life the loving, playful relationship between father and child. Merdaddy and Merbaby are depicted in pinkish-tan colors; the child is not gendered.

Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted To Be a Kitten Knudsen, Michelle | Illus. by Kevin Hawkes Candlewick (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781536219111

After a spider is mistaken for a kitten, he attempts to keep up the ruse.

“A big, hairy spider” moves into an old house sure to contain appropriately dark nooks.

He weaves a web under a sofa, but homeowner Betty finds him, decides he’s an adorable kitten, and names him Luigi. As Betty plays with the spider and prepares a special bed for him, he warms to the idea of being Luigi the kitten; kittens seem to lead “magical lives.” He starts fearing that Betty will realize her mistake and banish him, so he does his best to be as felinelike as possible. But when the secret’s revealed, Betty reassures Luigi that she knew he was a spider all along and thought he was only having “fun pretending to be a kitten,” and the pair live companionably ever after. While the sentiment—find someone who will “like you for who you really are”—is timeless, the complicated charade, where each character pretends for the other, is convoluted, and the message is somewhat hidden within the protracted text. Perhaps the most polarizing factor will be Luigi himself.

Hawkes has made the spider look really, well, spidery. There’s whimsy when Luigi is mimicking a kitten, but his lightly anthropomorphized form is going to be too creepily arachnid for some. The muted, dusty colors in acrylics and pencil don’t provide much warmth, though they do add spidery ambience.

Betty presents white.

A good-hearted, if slightly unsettling, tale of unlikely pals. (Picture book. 6-10) For more by Michelle Knudsen, visit Kirkus online.

Proof that playtime is fun time whether on land or under the sea. (Picture book.

3-6)

>>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

121

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

Something on the Hill Kohuth, Jane | Illus. by Sonia Sánchez Anne Schwartz/Random (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780593301074

Field Mouse gathers her animal friends for a journey.

After emerging from her nest, Field Mouse senses that something has changed in the air, and it’s calling to her. It appears to be coming from a nearby hill. Making her way through the woods in search of Something on the Hill, she’s joined

by Gray Squirrel, Doe, Turtle, the Mallard Ducks, and the Bears. As they travel, the animals notice changes in the winter forest: The rushing stream is no longer frozen, and there’s cracked ice on the pond. At the top of the hill, the group finds a tiny leafy shoot, a sure sign of spring’s arrival. The captivating illustrations perfectly portray the beginning of winter’s thaw. When Field Mouse first spots the Something on the Hill, the expert use of color suggests that spring is in the air; bright hues loom in the distance, though Field Mouse is surrounded by the ice blues, grays, and dull browns of winter. The art has a brushed effect, ideal for conveying the textures of animal fur, bushy tails, and puffy snow.

The landscapes in particular stand out.

The animals are realistic enough to be believable in the wilderness, though they are somewhat anthropomorphic, which will appeal to little readers.

A simple, engaging appreciation of all things spring. (Picture book. 3-6)

Piano Wants To Play Kong-Savage, Colleen | Page Street (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781645677932

Piano is full of songs; will anyone sit down and help Piano sing?

The first time Amy Lu meets Piano, she begins with a few 122

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 122

experimental pokes on its keys. Piano responds, “Plink plink plink.” Their early relationship is full of stumbles as Amy and Piano figure out how to play together. As the weeks pass, however, they settle into a friendship full of “rippling melodies” and “boogie-woogies.”

Their friendship starts to fade as Amy grows up. Piano still wants to play, of course, but homework, soccer, and new friends keep Amy from sitting down at the bench. Amy’s brother Rupert becomes Piano’s new playmate.

Unfortunately, they are a poor match.

Where Amy’s fingers skipped, Rupert’s smack the keys “like little dead fish.”

After one too many tortured sessions, Rupert abandons Piano, too, and Piano falls silent. Lonely and unwanted, Piano longs for another chance to play. The evocative text and stirring story will win over readers, while the mixed-media collages dazzle throughout; they’re particularly breathtaking on the two-page spread dedicated to Piano and Amy’s joyful reunion. Amy and Rupert are cued Chinese; other characters are diverse, and complexions include realistic shades of beige and brown as well as pink and purple.

A tender invitation to rediscover old friendships and create new melodies.

(Picture book. 4-8)

Ooo...Poo! Kreloff, Elliot | The Collective Book Studio (32 pp.) | $17.95 | March 19, 2024 9781685556372

A pair of friends embark on a lesson in all things poo.

Bespectacled Fox points to a pile of poop; Rabbit inadvertently steps in it. “Whose poo?” A page turn reveals that this was “doggy DOO.” Inside, the friends observe a litter box. “Whose poo?”

“Kitty POOP. Please scoop.” The pals encounter mouse pellets, elephant dung, seabird guano, whale feces, goose droppings, deer stool, bear scat, pig manure, and (who knew?) otter spraint. All the animals are pictured

in the act of nonchalantly producing their specialty. Finally we reach a bathroom and move from “Ew! Baby poo” (an adult disposes of a smelly diaper) through “Yahoo! Potty poo” (a toddler sits on a small potty) to “Ooo …Toilet poo. People poo” (Rabbit and Fox hand toilet paper to an adult on a toilet). A clear, simplified double-page spread shows what happens after the poop is flushed away: Sludge goes to farms, while water, with germs filtered out, goes to rivers. We also learn that poop (from birds) spreads seeds, feeds plants, and more. Finally: What exactly IS poo? The last pages add a half-dozen fascinating facts for older readers and include all the terms for excretion encountered earlier. The information is illuminating and matter-of-factly conveyed. Beautiful layout and clever, colorful collages, more Leo Lionni than Eric Carle, depict diverse humans and make turning the pages an adventure.

A perennially fascinating subject, handled honestly but without disgust.

(Informational picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

Look! Look!

Krishnaswami, Uma | Groundwood (32 pp.) $19.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781773069326

In this companion to Out of the Way! Out of the Way! (2012), an Indian girl discovers an old well hidden beneath a garbage-strewn patch of abandoned land.

The child notices something unusual below the detritus one day.

When she and her friends push away the trash, they uncover a set of stone steps. Word spreads to the adults and neighboring villages, and more and more people join in the effort to clear the land. Their hard work pays off when they discover that the garbage was covering a centuries-old well. When the girl’s grandmother sees it, she says that she remembers KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

her relatives telling her stories about a collection of wells that helped irrigate local crops. Sure enough, the next rain fills not only the well, but also “deep, sleeping springs.” The land bursts back to life, making the villagers wonder if any other hidden treasures might be in their midst. The author’s note clarifies that the story takes place in India and that it explores one possible way to combat the country’s struggle with climate change. The fast-moving and poetic text, punctuated with the refrain “Look! Look!” as characters make unexpected discoveries, perfectly accompanies the detailed and vibrant acrylic, poster color, and watercolor illustrations, which make effective use of color, shading, and white space.

A gorgeous and inspiring imagining of a collective response to climate change. (Picture book. 3-8)

Awake Krovatin, Christopher | Scholastic (240 pp.) | $7.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781339019949

Eleven-year-old Simon Theland is exhausted; his family’s been on the run for a year and a half while fleeing his pyrokinetic oldest sister, Rachael, who set fire to their house and school.

Simon’s rest is regularly disturbed by dreams of his house burning down.

But one night, the nightmare unfolds differently—hands pull him through the open refrigerator door into a whole new world. There, Rachael isn’t the only one with special powers, and Simon meets and becomes friends with Lena Oneiro, a quiet girl from his history class who’s the target of bullies. Soon Simon, Lena, and Aly, the middle Theland sibling, connect in real life and begin talking about their powers. But when Rachael appears with a dangerous crew of teens in tow, Simon, Aly, and Lena must work to keep the flames at bay. This sequel to KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 123

Ablaze (2023) is an entertaining and emotional ride told from Simon’s third-person perspective. Readers will sympathize with his plight as the youngest child. Simon struggles to comprehend and use his superpowers responsibly, reflecting middle school kids’ burgeoning emotions and identities, and those navigating social difficulties will relate to his desire to be understood. The sibling dynamics also shine, and Simon’s parents grapple with seeing who their children really are: a relatable feeling, no matter what your superhero status is. Main characters read white.

A satisfying portrayal of budding superheroes who are grappling to do what’s right. (Paranormal thriller. 9-12)

Kirkus Star

Monkey King and the World of Myths: The Monster and the Maze Lam, Maple | Putnam (240 pp.) | $23.99 April 2, 2024 | 9780593524633 | Series: Monkey King and the World of Myths, 1

East meets West in this mythological adventure.

Monkey King Sun Wukong was destined for greatness from the moment he burst from a rock that was sitting atop Flowers and Fruit Mountain. But what makes him special—his fighting prowess and ability to transform—is also what makes him an outcast. Tired of being misunderstood, Wukong longs to become a god so that he can be worshipped and loved. When a great ancient evil returns to threaten the peace in the three worlds of the gods, humans, and beasts, the gods promise to fulfill his wish if he can track down the monsters and defeat them.

Wukong’s first stop is Greece, where he hears of the man-eating Minotaur, who’s trapped in a labyrinth. But could there be more to this story than meets the eye? This humorous and

heartfelt series opener is packed with exciting action scenes and a whole lot of monkey business unfolding in cute, colorful, and exaggerated illustrations that are reminiscent of manga. Lam seamlessly weaves together threads from Chinese and Greek mythology to great effect, throws in a cast of highly likable characters, and presents a compelling story focused on a quest for friendship, self-acceptance, and belonging. A closing note contains additional information about the characters featured and is sure to spark further interest in the original myths.

A thrilling, wholesome remix of a classic Chinese tale. (author’s note) (Graphic adventure. 8-12)

There Are No Dragons in This Book Lambo-Weidner, Donna | Illus. by Carla Haslbauer | NorthSouth (32 pp.) | $19.95 March 5, 2024 | 9780735845497

Can you spot the friendly dragon?

“There are no dragons in this book,” an unseen narrator tells us repeatedly as kids frolic throughout a rambling house.

But sharp-eyed readers will realize that in fact there is a dragon to be found here. The lurking dragon’s claws are visible beneath a coat hanging in the mudroom, there’s a gaping maw in the fireplace, and what’s that peering out of the toilet?! Kids will shout out

A thrilling, wholesome remix of a classic Chinese tale.

MONKEY KING AND THE WORLD OF MYTHS

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

>>> 123

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

with glee upon catching the creature that’s hidden in plain sight. When the sheepish, bespectacled dragon is finally revealed, it informs readers that there are no dragons here—“There’s only one. ME!” The beast tells us that its friends are hidden in a crack in the wall (the book’s gutter) and notes that the book must be jiggled to release them. This tried-and-true trick for engagement will delight. The art has a colored pencil–esque look, and the house has a messy, cozy feeling that matches the pacing and tone. Grownups appear throughout, though they don’t intervene in the mayhem even when the kids climb steep ladders, which may tickle some while arousing concern in others. Characters are racially diverse.

A sweetly offbeat adventure that will have readers peering into their toilets for a dragon of their own. (Picture book. 4-7)

Why We Need Grandsons Lang, Gregory E. | Illus. by Lisa Alderson Sourcebooks Wonderland (40 pp.) | $10.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781728278254 Series: Why We Need

The Why We Need series expands to include grandsons.

Cutesy animal grandparents, never identified by gender, appear with their grandsons throughout, expounding on the ways their grandsons improve their lives and how they’re looking forward to the future with them. The animals’ species and activities generally aren’t connected to the rhyming text. For example, “That’s the thing about grandkids: They carry things on. / They link past and future, like day follows dawn. / The years that will come, and the years that are gone. / They are all a part of your story.”

In the accompanying illustration, a grandparent humpback whale (none of the species are identified in the text) swims, the grandson tucked under the older whale’s pectoral 124

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 124

A compassionate exploration of living with chronic illness.

GUT REACTION

fin. Like the recent Why We Need Granddaughters (2024), this entry has many of the same flaws of the series, namely the disconnect between the animal stand-ins for children and the text, the banal statements, and the vocabulary and concepts likely to go over young readers’ heads. This one also seems oddly out of order as well; the text talks about the child growing and learning before moving back to talk about the day they were born and their first steps.

Older adults with new grandsons may eat this up, but their grandkids aren’t likely to request rereads.

(Picture book. 4-7)

Gut Reaction Larson, Kirby & Quinn Wyatt | Scholastic (272 pp.) | $18.99 | March 5, 2024 9781338893137

A young baker battles inflammatory bowel disease in this collaboration between debut author Wyatt, who has Crohn’s disease, and her mother, award-winning

author Larson.

Tess Medina, who’s starting eighth grade at a new school, is grieving the loss of her father, who owned a bakery and inspired her: “I am Dad 2.0.” While she finds comfort in the kitchen, her loneliness grows alongside her recent, increasingly severe, gastrointestinal pain, which feels like there’s a woodpecker or porcupine in her abdomen. Fortunately, Tess’ baking skills help her find a new group of quirky friends, helping to soothe

memories of lost friendships from the “before-time.” A scary, mortifying bathroom emergency leads to a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, which Tess cannot bear to reveal to her friends. A few plot threads feel unresolved once the story switches to focus on Tess as she enters a prestigious junior baking competition. As the high-pressure action builds, her urgent trips to the bathroom continue. Though Dad died three years ago, he remains a strong guiding presence in Tess’ life; her mom demonstrates steady concern and support. New friend Elly reminds Tess, “The thing is, everyone has something wonky, right? …You can’t be human without being messed up in some way.” The book’s message is clear: It takes courage to reveal your weaknesses, and it takes kindness to accept them in others. Tess reads white; names cue ethnic diversity in the supporting cast.

A compassionate exploration of living with chronic illness. (authors’ note) (Fiction. 8-12)

Change Is in the Air: Carbon, Climate, Earth, and Us Levy, Debbie | Illus. by Alex Boersma Bloomsbury (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781547612062

Earth and its human inhabitants have the power to remove the excess carbon in the air that leads to climate change.

This premise underlies a hopeful explanation of the climate crisis and possible mitigation tools. Even before KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

the title page, capable readers will find brief definitions of terms such as carbon, carbon dioxide, photosynthesis, fossil fuels, and the greenhouse effect. The pages that follow are designed for younger readers and listeners. Boersma’s digitally colored drawings are attractive and detailed, showcasing city scenes, an underwater kelp forest, a mangrove swamp, a temperate woodland, and more, with a diverse human population. Levy’s poetic text describes the carbon problem and ways to address it. Sea kelp, mangroves, and dirt all trap carbon in different ways. People can help, too, by switching to more environmentally friendly power sources, farming methods, and transportation. This versatile writer’s published titles include picture books, fiction, and biographies for young people. Most have been historically themed; science is a new direction for her. While scientists may find some of Levy’s explanations oversimplified, she takes a positive approach to explaining the causes and challenges of climate change—something encouraged by climate educators. There’s no question that this is a valuable introduction and, with its pleasing repetitions, a satisfying read-aloud.

An attractively simple explanation of a pressing problem. (author’s note, selected sources, information on how people are helping the planet) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Tragedy at Sea: The Sinking of the Titanic Long, David | Illus. by Stefano Tambellini Union Square Kids (96 pp.) | $8.99 paper April 2, 2024 | 9781454954866 Series: Everyone Can Be a Reader

A concise look at the perennially fascinating Titanic disaster.

Providing context for the sinking, Long discusses increasing trans-Atlantic travel and competition between steamship lines.

In a chapter devoted to the Titanic’s construction, comparisons make the KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 125

incredible statistics more intelligible: For example, each propeller weighed as much as six adult elephants. Long also details safety measures and examines the luxuries available to passengers in first class, such as lavish facilities, foods, and decor. The author then succinctly explores the unfolding of the disaster, the Carpathia’s heroic rescue response, and the aftermath of the sinking, which left many with a greater respect for the power of nature. The book omits reference to the theory that an uncontrolled belowdecks fire played a role in the sinking and doesn’t mention the intrepid band members, a last-minute attempt to avert the collision, or the recent implosion of the submersible Titan during an expedition to view the Titanic’s wreckage. But this gripping work clearly conveys major events as well as the improvements in ship safety that followed. An opening graphic explains the parts of a ship.

Many small grayscale vignettes follow, some showing passengers and crew; others, like those of the gantry and the iceberg’s terrible spur, are invaluable in understanding the technical aspects of the Titanic’s construction—and destruction. Dyslexic readers will appreciate the use of the serif font.

Celia Cruz. But Salva’s world turns upside down when her mother, a hardworking nurse, fails to come home one night. Salva is forced to leave behind her school and beloved choir to move in with the long-absent father she barely knows. Papi takes them to live on a campground near a small town where he’s reporting for the Times on the detention and threatened deportation of Marcía Lopez, a mother of three. Papi hopes his reporting will help bring attention to the plight of undocumented immigrants, and Salva bonds with Marcía’s daughter over the trauma of missing their mothers. She also befriends some local kids who have a band, but tension arises between her and the band’s insecure lead singer when the other members increasingly highlight Salva for solos. Her life is upended again when she discovers the truth about what happened to her mother and confronts hateful prejudice. With encouragement from her new friends and inspiration from her hero, Celia Cruz, Salva finds her voice, as well as the strength to survive, thrive, and help others. One unresolved plot point in this heartwarming and compassionate story may leave readers wondering but hopeful.

Sing It Like Celia

Could You Ever Dine With Dinosaurs!?

Dramatic data, engaging illustrations, and a poignant narrative make for an appealing account. (Illustrated nonfiction. 8-12)

Mancillas, Mónica | Penguin Workshop (240 pp.) | $17.99 | April 2, 2024 9780593659304

Reeling from her mother’s sudden, unexplained disappearance, a 12-year-old adapts to living with her investigative journalist father.

Mexican-born Salvadora Sanchez enjoys living in San Diego with her mom and singing and dancing to the music of her favorite salsa singer,

A tender coming-of-age story about kindness, courage, and community.

(Fiction. 9-12)

Markle, Sandra | Illus. by Vanessa Morales Scholastic (32 pp.) | $17.99 | April 2, 2024 9781338858730

Intrepid children share meals with a gallery of dinosaurs, from towering T. Rex to a chicken-sized Shuvuuia.

Blithely blowing past the fact that all the dinosaurs here are carnivores who would probably have regarded their human guests as menu items (except perhaps the small and insectivorous Ambopteryx), Morales FEBRUARY 1, 2024

125

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

incorporates stock images of toothy prehistoric predators into cartoon scenes featuring a diverse cast of young people, including one who uses a wheelchair, ready to chow down on steak, seafood, and more. Markle dishes up platefuls of basic facts about each dinosaur, including sizes and hunting styles, which she spices up with colorful commentary: “Utahraptor was a Super Stabber Raptor!” “Imagine what a BIG mouth full of sharp teeth [Spinosaurus] had!” In keeping with the general predator vs. prey vibe, she also urges readers to enjoy the “beast feast” in active ways…“on the go” with Microraptor, for example, or snatching “fast food” with agile Velociraptor. This prehistoric plat-du-jour is capped with further “Fun Facts!” (scientists think that Carnotaurus waved its tiny arms to attract a mate, for instance) plus a timeline and an explanation of how dinosaur hips differ from reptilian ones; readers will also learn what made carnivorous dinosaurs such successful hunters.

A breezy blast of dino facts. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Metal Baby Martin, Stephen W. | Illus. by Brandon James Scott | McElderry (40 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781665924931

Well-meaning parents contend with a difficult child.

The quiet Mumfords are rearing a “Metal Baby.” He sports white face paint, heavy black eyeliner, and black spiky hair and shrieks nonstop. The Mumfords take their tot on car rides and hayrides. They bring him pacifiers.

But Metal Baby won’t be tamed; he screams, flings teddy bears, and swings from the chandelier. The Mumfords seek out help from a nanny, but rather than curtailing Metal Baby’s naughty behavior, she just plays guitar while the infant serenades an audience of plush toys. The Mumfords are bewildered to learn that their Metal Baby is the 126

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 126

headliner for “Metalpowerpalooza,” an upcoming festival boasting “3 DAYS OF NONSTOP METAL MAYHEM.” As a bevy of metalheads descends on the Mumfords’ front lawn, the exhausted parents embrace the chaos and find a creative solution. While all of this may make adults chuckle, the references to metal and alternative rock will probably be lost on young readers.

Since the main character is a baby, it’s unlikely that children beyond kindergarten will be interested, though they’ll have a better chance at grasping the humor. Still, when the Mumfords (at least temporarily) become metalheads themselves, a lesson about affirming a child’s interests comes through. The Mumfords and Metal Baby have pale skin; the other metal fans are racially diverse.

Like heavy metal, this one won’t please every reader. (Picture book. 4-6)

Kirkus Star

Speck: An Itty-Bitty Epic Meganck, Margaux | Knopf (40 pp.) | $19.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780593301975

The overwhelming and exquisite journey of tiny ocean dwellers.

Meganck tells the story of tiny specks that begin life in a tide pool, make their way through open waters and currents of all kinds, and elude potential predators until they courageously find what they’ve been seeking. These powerful specks grow into barnacles that make their home on a blue whale.

While readers are following these tiny life-forms, Meganck skillfully draws parallels between the human experience and the specks’ fraught yet important adventure: “Where big feels bigger, and small feels smaller.

The safest thing to do is hide. But a hidden speck would miss out on the adventure, the wonder, and the satisfaction of finding exactly what they were looking for.” The stunning, vivid watercolors show the vastness of

the watery world beneath our toes, like the sky full of stars above our heads.

The sea creatures are drawn in vibrant detail, from the suckers on an octopus to a jellyfish’s tentacles. A colorful school of fish swirls and twists its way around the blue whale. The subtle and potent connection between us and these tiny specks makes for a poignant, reflective story that’s every bit as relevant to children as it is to adults. Meganck remarkably finds a way to make our great smallness in the wide world a convincing comfort.

Deeply moving. (Picture book. 3-7)

Survival Melki-Wegner, Skye | Henry Holt (336 pp.) $18.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781250827739 Series: The Deadlands, 3

In this trilogy closer, an unnatural alliance between the predatory Carrion Kingdom and the armored plant eaters of the Prairie Alliance forces the herbivorous residents of the Mountain Kingdom into a desperate last stand.

Recapping the protagonists’ earlier exploits as she goes, Melki-Wegner brings her all-dinosaur cast back together for a furious (if nearly bloodless) climactic battle. Eleri, the gracile Oryctodromeus exile, and the rest of her multispecies Grotto herd reach the beleaguered Mountain Kingdom just in time to face not only a massive army of invaders but also treachery from supposed allies. Though the author is far too dependent on convenient magical gimmickry to keep things moving—inflammable rocks, two kinds of toxic plants—readers willing to roll with the contrivances (and to picture dinosaurs who talk like this: “There’s a whole Army of Beasts about to come chargin’ into this vale, and we ain’t got a plan to stop ’em”) will be rewarded with an engrossing whirl of fights, sallies, ambushes and betrayals, narrow squeaks, and courageous KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

exploits, all leading to a climax that plays out against a massive conflagration and an even more massive flood.

Through it all, the Grotto herd’s steadfast trust in each other provides a steady anchor, and the battle’s decisive outcome ultimately hinges on personal loyalties and steadfast adherence to noble principles.

A tidy resolution achieved through courage and sturdy values. (map, species list) (Adventure. 9-12)

Outdoor Farm, Indoor Farm Metcalf, Lindsay H. | Illus. by Xin Li Astra Young Readers (32 pp.) | $18.99 April 9, 2024 | 9781635925913

Two youngsters compare and contrast two very different farms.

Efrem and Emma are pen pals, each writing about their family farm. Emma lives on a traditional, soil-based farm in the country, while Efrem’s family has an aeroponic farm in the city. The book is organized by seasons, starting with spring. On Emma’s farm, crops are just beginning to be planted, while bushy greens are already growing on Efrem’s farm.

“Outdoor farm, / tractors toil. / Indoor farm, / zero soil.” A large, sprawling landscape is contrasted with an image of trays stacked up high. At first, the differences are more apparent, but on close inspection, it’s clear that there are similarities, too.

For instance, on both farms, light is necessary for crops to grow, but, as noted in the backmatter, indoor farms use LED lighting, often relying only on certain colors, such as red or blue (“Outdoor farm, / sunlight beams.

/ Indoor farm, / color streams”). Readers may suppose that the traditional farm is outdated, but new technology is included here, too, such as drones.

Spare, bouncy rhymes pair with soft, rounded illustrations. The staccato rhythm limits explanations, but a full spread of detailed notes at the end describes why farms are changing and how each type works. Efrem is brownskinned, while Emma presents Asian.

A captivating glimpse into the shifting agricultural landscape. (activities, videos, selected sources, photos) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Star

South of Somewhere Miller, Kalena | Whitman (288 pp.) | $17.99 April 4, 2024 | 9780807577141

A wealthy girl’s life unravels when her mom is accused of embezzlement.

Unlike her two older siblings, 12-year-old Mavis has never questioned her lavish life—full of vacations and shopping trips, not to mention a home in one of Chicago’s richest neighborhoods.

She also doesn’t doubt her position as the most-favored child, her wildly successful mother’s “mini-me.” Then one day, her mother disappears, and the FBI shows up. With their home seized and bank accounts frozen, Mavis’ stayat-home dad is forced to beg for help from the once-close sister he’s ignored for the last 18 years. The shattered family moves into Aunt Melissa’s basement in a small town south of

Precise details and emotional honesty bring these characters to life.

SOUTH OF SOMEWHERE

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 127

For more by Kalena Miller, visit Kirkus online.

Somewhere, Illinois. Resilient Mavis makes a friend and starts a babysitting business. She also starts receiving postcards that lead her and her siblings to track their mother down. Complex, fully defined characters, including Mavis’ genuinely narcissistic mom and well-meaning but initially passive dad, plus a nuanced, realistic portrayal of a family putting itself back together, take what could have been a standard riches-to-rags story and turn it into a thoughtful exploration of class, love, and relationships. As Mavis gradually reframes her memories and expectations, she comes to treasure the rest of her family. Major cast members read white.

Precise, subtle details and complete emotional honesty bring these characters to life from the first page.

(Fiction. 8-13)

Kirkus Star

Olivetti Millington, Allie | Feiwel & Friends (256 pp.) $17.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781250326935

A magical typewriter brings healing, reconnection, and new friends to a hurting family.

Olivetti, a silent but fully conscious typewriter, has been there since the beginning, living with parents Felix and Beatrice and their children, Ezra, Adalyn, Ernest, and Arlo, a “copper-colored family with eyes as rich as ink.” Olivetti, who even took part in Felix’s proposal to Beatrice, watched playfulness and creativity grow as the children arrived, and he faithfully remembers every single word the people have typed. Then, longing FEBRUARY 1, 2024

127

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

An honest and relatable look at the importance of tween friendships.

THE EQUINOX TEST

to communicate, he watched the family suffer through Everything That Happened. Which is exactly what seventh grader Ernest is still trying to forget.

Constantly carrying his dictionary around, Ernest spends most of his time on the roof away from others, scared of getting close to people for fear of losing them. So, when Beatrice suddenly leaves after taking Olivetti to a pawn shop, grief-stricken Ernest seeks him out and confesses that he fears he’s to blame for her departure. Desperate to help, Olivetti takes the unusual action of breaking typewriterly code: He communicates with Ernest in order to help him. But will it be enough? The chapters are told from Olivetti’s and Ernest’s first-person perspectives and frequently contain flashbacks. Debut author Millington skillfully delivers a complex storyline that deals with heavy topics. With plenty of quotable wisdom, richly textured language, and dry humor, this work reads like a classic.

An extraordinary journey that speaks to the “before” and “after” of life-changing events. (Fiction. 10-14)

The Shadow and the Ghost Min, Cat | Levine Querido (48 pp.) | $18.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781646143689

A lonely ghost and shadow look to the stars to find a true connection.

Nocturnal Shinbi, a smudgy white ghost with pink circles for cheeks, is tired of haunting houses and wants to explore the natural world. She settles by a nearby rock.

After spotting a shooting star, she makes “a wish for a friend” and leaves a note on the rock, then disappears.

128

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 128

Greem, a lonely, pink-cheeked dark shadow cast by Shinbi’s rock, emerges the next morning, wishing for “someone to talk to.” Spotting Shinbi’s message, he leaves her a note on a leaf, which she finds that night. A pen pal–like relationship emerges as they draw pictures of themselves and, in a shared creative activity, use pebbles to come up with their own constellations (identified in the text alongside actual star systems, rendered in a different font). When Greem throws a pebble into the sky and makes a wish of his own, a series of shooting stars appear, and the two finally meet, in a burst of golden-speckled sparks that merges into a collective palette of both light and dark. Min’s watercolor, colored pencil, and digital illustrations capture not only the night sky but also the exuberant emotions of the protagonists. The passage of time is conveyed through successive panels in double-page spreads that highlight the wondrous blue, pink, and purple hues of the sky.

A joyful celebration of friendship, the stars, and finding one’s self in this world and beyond. (Picture book. 4-8)

The Equinox Test Montague, Liz | Scholastic (240 pp.) $14.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781338792515 Series: School for Unusual Magic, 1

Three magic school students must let down their guards in order to truly understand their powers.

Rose Vera is a fifth-year student at Brooklyn School of Magic. She wishes she were

better at school, like her best friend, Amethyst Vern. Unfortunately, Rose is easily distracted, and her spell-casting abilities are limited. The school principal meets with Rose and her parents to discuss her academic performance and the possibility of transferring to the nonmagical Rogers Middle School.

Rose is embarrassed at the prospect of not moving up to Middle Magic with everyone else, and she’s certain that passing the Equinox Test would allow her to remain. But instead of planning to study, Rose announces to a shocked Amethyst, “I want to cheat.” She decides she’ll ask Dawn, Amethyst’s valedictorian cousin, who will know what questions are on the test, to help her. Lavender Barros, a classmate who’s originally from an island off the coast of France, is also looking for a way to pass—and their paths collide. Rose’s need to do well on the Equinox Test at all costs damages her friendship with Amethyst, and Lav is forced into an alliance with Rose that he didn’t bargain for. The story’s light magical elements are fun, but magic is primarily a vehicle for exploring complex relationships among the central trio that will resonate with readers.

Rose and Amethyst are cued as girls of color. Final art not seen.

An honest and relatable look at the importance of tween friendships.

(Fantasy. 8-12)

Brave Baby Hummingbird Montgomery, Sy | Illus. by Tiffany Bozic Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $18.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9781665918497

An orphaned hummingbird tells his story.

In this addition to a shelf full of successful invitations to wonder at the natural world, Montgomery presents a hummingbird’s life from the bird’s perspective.

She bases her account on the lives of two real-life Allen’s hummingbirds, raised by an experienced rehabilitator.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

An orphaned nestling describes how a rescuer (“The Voice”) nurtured him and his sister until they were grown. He describes learning to feed himself nectar and catch fruit flies and moving from perching to actual flying—hovering and flying backward and even upside down! “No other bird can do that,” he brags. In the fall, the two birds journey south to Mexico, returning to California in December to raise another generation. Grown hummingbirds, he exults, “rule the sky.” The writer has chosen details that are accurate, appropriate, and appealing for the audience. One moment may be confusing for young readers; soon after hatching, the avian narrator says that “every twenty minutes, we wait for the breeze. Food!” It isn’t clear from the text that the nestlings are reacting to the breeze from the mother’s flapping wings, though on the next spread, we see the shadowy face of the rehabilitator blowing on their basket. While adults may need to add some context, overall, it’s an enticing, enlightening tale, featuring gloriously detailed illustrations.

A charming bird’s-eye view of one bird’s rescue and rehabilitation. (author’s note, hummingbird highlights, helping hummingbirds) (Informational picture book. 4-8)

Puff: All About Air Moon, Emily Kate | Dial Books (32 pp.) $18.99 | March 19, 2024 | 9780593617960

An invitation to appreciate the invisible blanket of gases that protect our planet.

In a similarly whimsical follow-up to Drop: An Adventure Through the Water Cycle (2021), a white puff with a smiley face and a stylish quiff conducts readers through simple explanations of how our atmosphere goes everywhere—even deep into the oceans and beneath the surface of the land—to help keep Earth warm, carry droplets of water, deliver the oxygen KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 129

we require and the carbon dioxide plants need to survive, and spread pollen and seeds. All the smiles, plus neatly drawn flora and fauna floating through blue waters or wafting by under sunny skies, create a beneficent picture undimmed by any mention of hurricanes or jet streams; even the swirling tornado quickly gives way to an assurance that “most of the time, Puff cruises gently” from warmer areas to cooler or vice versa. Sandwiched between summary overviews of our atmosphere’s composition and the ins and outs of forces governing atmospheric circulation, the tour concludes with a cheery “Yay! Breathe it all in!”

Two brown-skinned human children do just that in the illustrations, either sitting mindfully or standing beneath a windswept kite.

Fresh and breezy, if a bit thin. (Informational picture book. 5-7)

The Days Are Long, the Years Are Short Morton, Aya | Little, Brown (40 pp.) | $17.99 March 26, 2024 | 9780316420457

A picture book inspired by a contemporary parental mantra.

Two infinitely patient parents awaken to the rambunctious antics of their preschooler and toddler. “The days are long, / but when I’m with you, / I blink and the years fly by.” This phrase, repeated six times over the course of the book, is accompanied by beautiful woodblock print art layered in digital color.

These illustrations depict the family spending a single day with their little ones, inside and out. They manage to pack in a beach trip, meals, bathtime, gardening, and more. Full of high spirits, the kids keep their parents on their toes, and no matter the mess or shenanigans, rarely do the adults show any emotion beyond a benevolent smile (Mom’s reaction to getting sprayed by the cold water of a garden hose being a rare exception). Morton

creates a paean for parents just trying to cut through the chaos of their everyday lives and remember to enjoy what they have. In the end, though kids will certainly enjoy the children’s capers, the intended audience is undeniably their caregivers, who will more readily take to this somewhat heavyhanded musing on the fleeting nature of time. Characters are light-skinned.

The book is short but the message long-winded in this aspirational tale best suited for parents rather than children. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Star

Spying on Spies: How Elizebeth Smith Friedman Broke the Nazis’ Secret Codes Moss, Marissa | Abrams (224 pp.) | $19.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781419767319

The absorbing story of one of America’s most talented and least appreciated cryptographers and code breakers.

Fresh out of college, Friedman was hired by an eccentric millionaire who was eager to prove that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else.

While poring over them in search of secret messages, she taught herself skills that allowed her to break codes and ciphers for the military during both world wars—and, at some personal risk, to help the Justice Department fight organized crime in between. Much of her work is still classified, and she died in 1980, but Moss layers a nuanced account over the relatively thin bed of documentation, including relevant background about contemporary events. Illustrated tableaux highlight significant incidents and explain various codes. The book offers a sensitive picture of Friedman’s married life with a husband who was likewise a brilliant cryptographer working on secret projects that couldn’t be talked FEBRUARY 1, 2024

129

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

about, even at home, and tallies one thrilling feat of counterespionage after another, culminating in the breakup of an extensive Nazi spy ring in South America. (Friedman and her small team solved multiple Enigma machine codes, just like the thousands of workers at Bletchley Park.) Unsurprisingly, she also faced obstacles ranging from FBI interference to dangerously revealing (and sexist) news profiles. Readers will be suitably impressed and riveted.

A bracing celebration of one gifted woman’s insufficiently heralded achievements in war and peace. (author’s note, guide to codes and ciphers, glossary, timeline, endnotes, bibliography, index) (Biography. 10-13)

Zandi’s Song Ndhlovu, Zandile | Illus. by Katlego Keokgale | Amazon Crossing Kids (32 pp.) $17.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781662520105

South Africa’s first Black female free-diving instructor tells the story of a Black South African girl called to the ocean to become a mermaid.

“Your life is here.” “This is your home.” Whispers rush past Zandi’s window. At first, she’s scared, since she’s not a strong swimmer, but the ocean, personified as an aqua-blue deity named Maya, promises her no harm. Maya gives Zandi the gift of glittering mermaid fins to help her swim and a beaded bracelet to remind her of her heritage and allow her to return home. Zandi’s short Afro transforms into long flowing blue braids that evoke the memory of women in her family. Maya reminds Zandi of her grandmother’s warning not to throw garbage into the river. Maya has chosen Zandi to help protect the water and gives her a tour of the sea and its wonders. She tells Zandi that she must learn to understand the song of the ocean, shows her the impacts of pollution on the sea, and teaches her about the historical relationship 130

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 130

between her people and the whales.

Zandi returns home with a new song to spread throughout her community.

Vibrant illustrations use color nicely.

A close-up of Zandi’s bare feet in the sparkling blue water contrasts effectively with muted scenes depicting the effects of pollution. The encouraging text will empower many children to care for the environment.

A stirring celebration of our connection to—and responsibility for—the natural world. (author’s note, resources for ocean conservation) (Picture book. 4-8)

Uprising Nielsen, Jennifer A. | Scholastic (384 pp.) $17.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781338795080

A fictionalized account of a real-life Polish resistance fighter.

Talented pianist Lidia is just 12 when the Nazis invade Poland, and her whole life is abruptly upended. With their home bombed and then claimed by the Germans and Papa gone to join the Polish army, the Christian Durr family relocates to a crowded apartment adjacent to Warsaw’s Jewish quarter. At the mercy of their occupiers, Lidia helplessly watches family, friends, and strangers suffer cruelty and injustice. Desperate to fight back, she finds ways to rebel, like enrolling in an underground school and sneaking food to people in the ghetto. Her brother, Ryszard, is maddeningly tight-lipped about his mysterious work for the resistance, but Lidia eventually finds her own

path to participating in the uprising.

Once admitted into the circle of those planning Operation Tempest, Lidia—code name Cello—quickly rises in the ranks, thanks to her bravery and willingness to take on the most dangerous assignments. Ferrying everything from messages to grenades across the war-torn city, Lidia hopes for liberation but fears that the world has forgotten Warsaw. Although the true story that inspired this novel is compelling, Nielsen’s characters are one-dimensional, and they populate a landscape that never seems to truly come to life. Furthermore, major tragedies lack sufficient setup and execution to elicit the intended emotional gut punch in readers.

An unremarkable addition to the already crowded field of World War II fiction. (photos, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-13)

The Second Favorite Daughters Club: Sister Sabotage Oakes, Colleen | Pixel+Ink (304 pp.) | $17.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781645952077 | Series: The Second Favorite Daughters Club, 1

Two overlooked middle schoolers hatch plans to get the better of their exasperating families.

Santana Barnes is sick of having to watch her older sister Victoria’s ballet recitals and tired of constantly being beholden to overachieving Victoria’s busy routines. Casey Hammond has just moved to town with her father and younger sister, Sage. She feels like a third

Paced to entertain with humorous, richly developed protagonists TH E S EC O N D FAVO R ITE DAU G HTE R S C LU B

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

wheel, the serious, cautious one filling in for her flighty absentee mom, while her free-spirited father has fun with playful Sage. As the new arrival, she’s in search of meaningful connection. Santana and Casey’s serendipitous meeting and ensuing friendship form the heart of the story, which is narrated in their alternating third-person points of view. The two girls confide in one another about their frustration, loneliness, and wish to be treated differently by their parents.

Santana, however, is also determined to knock her sister down a peg with some elaborate plans—“tiny earthquakes that would jumble and rearrange Victoria’s perfect life.” Cupcake sabotage and purple slime are involved. Charting an appealing middle path between the easy entertainment of madcap humor and lengthy meditations on difficult feelings, this novel contains elements of both but situates its protagonists within loving families and a largely positive social environment, with palpable sadness nonetheless affecting their lives and choices. Main characters are cued white.

Paced to entertain with humorous, richly developed protagonists; a compelling, clever read. (Fiction. 10-14)

Kirkus Star

Miguel Must Fight!

Ofelia, Jamie | Illus. by Sara Palacios Little, Brown (40 pp.) | $18.99 April 30, 2024 | 9780316365093

A young aspiring artist must save his community from the fearsome El Dragón.

Miguel’s familia is dedicated to “the deadly art of sword fighting.” His abuelitos, his mami and papi, and even his hermanita, Zulema, devote their time to swashbuckling. Miguel, however, prefers “a gentler kind of art”—one that moves him to sketch and observe the world around him, despite his familia’s strong objections. “You must focus on fighting and winning! That is the García legacy!”

Even those in town admonish him for KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 131

forgoing his duties to protect his community. But one day, El Dragón arrives with a mighty “ROAAAAR!!!!” Miguel’s familia leaps into battle, but soon enough, each sword fighter crumbles against the formidable creature. To save the day, Miguel steps forward, armed with a pencil and sketchbook. Will El Dragón fight back? Familiar in its core premise but delightful in execution, Ofelia’s picture-book debut crackles with a playful text that wraps a self-affirming message in a thrilling mini-adventure, punctuated with Spanish words and phrases throughout. Palacios’ rich acrylic and gouache artwork splendidly favors earthy tones—a convergence of predominantly yellows, greens, and oranges—to ground Miguel’s heroism, which leads to a joyful finale. Characters are brownskinned and read as Latine.

A maravilloso reminder of being true to oneself. (Spanish glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

The Wrong Way Home O’Shaughnessy, Kate | Knopf (336 pp.) $17.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9780593650738

Life outside a cult seems full of danger to a girl who yearns for the safety of her oppressive but familiar home.

Twelve-year-old Fern’s mother suddenly takes her from the only stable home she’s ever known, the place they settled when she was 6, following years of upheaval.

In the dark of night, the two escape the compound ruled by Dr. Ben, the patriarchal leader of the Ranch, their “sustainable futurist community.”

Driving away from New York, they end up in tiny Driftaway Beach, California.

Fern immediately develops a plan to get back to Dr. Ben, whose messages she’s internalized; after all, he claimed to be preparing them to survive war and climate change. But as she acclimates to life outside the Ranch, Fern begins

to value being able to make her own decisions. Does she even want to follow Dr. Ben’s vision of life? The Spirit of the Sea, a local myth about the ghost of a lighthouse keeper that haunts the cliffs above town, provides a parallel for exploring the psychology of grief and the truths we tell ourselves. Many tweens will relate to feeling controlled, sheltered, and lied to as they seek their independence. O’Shaughnessy succeeds in raising awareness by bringing the abuse of cult communities to light through a gripping storyline and beautifully imperfect supporting characters.

Fern, who’s cued white, matures in her understanding that what and who you choose to believe in is of consequence.

A strong, emotionally intelligent story.

(Fiction. 9-13)

We Built This City Patrick, Cat | Nancy Paulsen Books (272 pp.) | $17.99 | April 2, 2024 9780593462164

A 12-year-old girl learns about friendship and romance during her lip-sync performance group’s 1985 summer tour.

Stephanie “Stevie” Finnegan, an eighth grader from Cheyenne, Wyoming, who’s cued white, is thrilled to be old enough to go on a monthlong tour of 22 cities with Synchronicity for the first time. The group’s premise is that all children deserve to participate in the arts, even if they’re not exceptionally talented. The kids are clearly filled with confidence and enthusiasm, describing their efforts on stage as “rad” and “awesome.” Between performances, Stevie has a plan for the summer: to get famous radio host Casey Kasem to dedicate “Total Eclipse of the Heart”

by Bonnie Tyler to her crush, Joey. Joey is charming, cute, and kind—except when his friends are around. On top of that, Stevie is worried about Brandon, her older brother, whose epilepsy may be getting worse. Even as Stevie faces FEBRUARY 1, 2024

131

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

Controlled hilarity makes the concepts go down easy—another winner.

INFLUENCERS

these personal difficulties, the tone of the book remains gentle and upbeat.

Though she takes a few steps down the dark path of wondering whether it’s her own shortcomings and lack of confidence that make Joey show his unpleasant side, she eventually sees that he’s not the person she thought he was and that she can’t improve him by changing her own behavior. She looks for real friendship instead, finding it among her fellow cast members.

Eighties music, slang, and fashion are woven throughout, placing the novel strongly in its time.

A sweet, exuberant story. (Historical fiction. 10-13)

Kirkus Star

Pedro’s Yo-Yos: How a Filipino Immigrant Came to America and Changed the World of Toys Peñas, Rob | Illus. by Carl Angel Lee & Low Books (40 pp.) | $20.95 April 30, 2024 | 9781620145746

How the toy that taught millions to “walk the dog” and “rock the baby” came to America.

In the wake of the American occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish–American War, Pedro Flores (1896-1963) emigrated at 15 to work as a bellhop. He invented a refined version of what was known in his childhood as a yo-yo—a term that means “come back” in Tagalog—and ended up having to open multiple factories to keep pace with the demand. When he later sold the business to Chicago entrepreneur Donald 132

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 132

Duncan, he stayed on for years and oversaw promotional demonstrations and competitions that sent the popular toy all over the world and even into space. Though, as the author explains in an afterword, the yo-yo (first called a “bandalore” and originally from China) was known in other countries, it was not all that popular until Flores redesigned it with a slip-string to make it more versatile; he also came up with some of the most spectacular yo-yo tricks himself. One illustration of him dramatically showing them off before an astounded crowd may inspire young yo-yo enthusiasts to make use of the helpful leads to print handbooks and websites found at the tail end. Bright smiles on the faces in Angel’s illustrations add even more warmth to Peñas’ insightful and stirring account.

A glowing addition to the stories of immigrants who have made good in this, their new country. (Picture-book biography. 7-9)

All Are Welcome: Wherever You Go Penfold, Alexandra | Illus. by Suzanne Kaufman | Knopf (48 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780593430019

Penfold and Kaufman return to the community introduced in All Are Welcome (2018), this time celebrating a child’s birth and growth.

The focus is on community from the very start—neighbors gather to see the latest arrival, a child with a sprout of dark hair, soon to be seen sporting glasses and a gap-toothed grin. As the pages turn, the child’s parent recounts

wishes for the little one, wonders what the future holds, and describes how the child is “my best adventure,” “my wildest dream.” While the focus is on this particular pair, the child’s two closest friends and their parents are frequently seen; the friends are clearly as close as family. The slim story and rhyming verses are more similar to the creators’ Big Feelings (2021) than their stellar All Are Welcome. The narrative feels geared more toward nostalgic parents than their children, with the adults ultimately watching their kids graduate kindergarten. “I’m proud of you / when you try your best. / And when you know / it’s time to rest.” The accompanying illustrations, rendered in ink, crayon, collage, and acrylic paint, show a lively soccer match, the main child helping a friend who’s fallen into a puddle.

Another image shows a parent driving the sleeping trio home. The main parent and child are brown-skinned; the community is diverse.

Sentimental parents and fans of the earlier book will be charmed. (Picture book. 3-8)

Kirkus Star

Influencers Pilkey, Dav | Colors by Jose Garibaldi & Wes Dzioba | Scholastic (224 pp.) $24.98 | $12.99 paper | Nov. 28, 2023 9781338896503 | 9781338896398 paper Series: Cat Kid Comic Club, 5

The members of the Cat Kid Comic Club learn how to win friends and influence people.

The story opens with the shocking news that “the Cat Kid Comic Club…is no more.” It will surprise none of the club’s loyal readers to learn that “weeks of bitter fights” among the club’s membership of 22 baby frog siblings have led their exasperated father, Flippy the fish, to dissolve the club as punishment. That hasn’t stopped the fighting, though, so Flippy reaches for Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic and gifts it to KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

drama queen Naomi, telling her, “You’re a very smart kid…but your people skills could use some work!” As in previous volumes, Pilkey proffers a deceptively chaotic, devilishly clever exploration of his theme, here the power of influence, and presents the tricky concepts with profound respect for his audience. While Naomi experiments with compliments and gifts to achieve her ends, the froglets share some of their comics, including “I Am Dr. Frederic Wertham,” an entry in their series Irritating People Ruin the World, which is a parody of the Brad Meltzer–Christopher Eliopoulos series Ordinary People Change the World. This comic introduces readers to Wertham, the comic book–hating author of Seduction of the Innocent. A “Chubbs McSpiderbutt” comic presents the notion that “our viewpoints… influence our experience,” and the first drawing lesson after Flippy’s inevitable restoration of the club unpacks the psychology of cuteness in making us “Feel the Feels!!!”

Controlled hilarity makes the concepts go down easy—another winner. (notes, fun facts) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

Extinctopedia: Discover What We Have Lost, What Is at Risk, and How We Can Preserve the Diversity of Our Fragile Planet Quarello, Serenella | Illus. by Alessio Alcini Trans. by Margaret Greenan Red Comet Press (64 pp.) | $22.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781636550725

A wide-angled survey of threatened and recently extinct animals worldwide, originally published in Italian.

In a random jumble of entries more suitable for dipping than systematic reading or research, quick introductions to dozens of rare or vanished creatures mingle with mini-disquisitions on topics from wunderkammer and the official Red List of Threatened Species to examples KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 133

of creatures once but wrongly believed extinct or, conversely, entirely new to scientists. If the narrative sometimes has a tossed-off quality, the art definitely doesn’t. Along with crafting arrays of expertly depicted, naturally posed wildlife portraits in monochrome and pale colors, Alcini tucks in several fanciful or trenchant vignettes, such as a tiny mountain pygmy possum adorably perched on a human thumb, a smuggled pangolin peering out of a suitcase, and the image of a dignified dodo…on a tombstone. There isn’t space for images of all mentioned animals; the illustrator squeezes in only one rare snake for an accompanying commentary that mentions four, one kind of rare tiger next to a tally of eight, and two of four specifically mentioned great apes.

Readers’ eyes may at times glaze over at the cascade of abstract names and Latin binomials. Still, as an unusually broad cross-section of species that are going or gone, as well as a graphic demonstration of the beauty and diversity of what we lose when they die out, this will leave a marked impression on young audiences.

An eloquent, if somewhat disorganized, gallery of rarities. (index, glossary) (Informational picture book.

8-11)

Cece Rios and the Queen of Brujas Rivera, Kaela | Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) | $19.99 | March 12, 2024 9780063213968 | Series: Cece Rios, 3

A 13-year-old girl leads her family, friends, and townspeople into the ultimate supernatural showdown to save the world from her cruel, powerful aunt.

In a fast-paced closer to this trilogy, which incorporates Mexican and Aztec influences, Cece Rios is ambushed by evil forces. She’s physically threatened by the bruja army, which descends upon Tierra del Sol to steal the Sun god’s soul stone for the queen of Devil’s Alley,

Cece’s Tía Catrina. But extraordinarily kind Cece must also fight back emotionally: “How could I trust my heart, when, for the first time, it so badly wanted to hate evil more than it wanted to love what was good?” All she wants is to help everyone be happy, but she’s frustrated by community members who shun her for wielding her ocean curandera powers to try to save them. And she’s deeply resentful of Tía Catrina, who created this mess by hurting anyone who got in the way of her selfish, vicious quest for power. Cece’s frustration grows as her aunt sends brujas and criaturas as her deadly proxies to wound and kill those Cece loves while relentlessly pursuing the three remaining gods’ souls. But, as Cece learns, only light can drive out darkness. Aside from her ability to control water, Cece’s greatest power is her empathetic, probing heart, which enables her to spread her light in even the worst situations. An epilogue rounds out the narrative, offering a charming peek into the characters’ grown-up lives.

A sweet, beautifully written adventure. (glossary) (Fantasy. 8-14)

Kirkus Star

The Fastest Drummer: Clap Your Hands for Viola Smith!

Robbins, Dean | Illus. by Susanna Chapman Candlewick (40 pp.) | $17.99 | March 5, 2024 9781536224863

Robbins and Chapman profile an extraordinary percussionist.

Viola Smith wondered what instrument she could play in the Smith Sisters Orchestra along with her five siblings. She tried drums and For more by Dean Robbins, visit Kirkus online.

>>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

133

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

cymbals and was hooked! After Papa taught her to hold the drumsticks properly, she joined her sisters as they played exuberant jazz tunes in his Wisconsin ballroom; patrons loved dancing to Viola’s spitfire rhythms.

Thirteen-year-old Viola sought other drummers’ advice and drummed faster the more she practiced. In time, Viola’s sisters stopped playing, but she carried on, anxious to play professionally— tough for a woman in the 1930s. To change minds about female musicians’ abilities, Viola formed her own women’s band. The group became renowned, and Viola was dubbed “the fastest girl drummer in the world.” Wanting to help other female musicians, she wrote a magazine article when World War II started, encouraging big-name bands to hire women to replace servicemen. Viola herself performed with world-class bands and drummers. She started a solo act and played with symphony orchestras.

Viola Smith was still drumming at age 100! Pulsing with energy, this lively book shines a much-deserved spotlight on an artist who became renowned playing an instrument most commonly associated with men. Appropriately, onomatopoeic words representing the sounds of drum crashes cavort playfully throughout the eye-popping watercolor, gouache, cut-paper, and digital illustrations.

Bang the drums—loudly—for this arresting account of a gifted virtuoso. (author’s note, musical terms, resources) (Informational picture book.

5-8)

Kirkus Star

The Walk of the Field Mouse Robert, Nadine | Illus. by Valerio Vidali Milky Way (64 pp.) | $20.99 | March 19, 2024 9781990252327

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

A bright blue robin’s egg has fallen to the base of a large, jagged rock, and a field 134

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 134

mouse, a toad, a starling, and a snail gather to inspect it. The field mouse offers to roll the egg back up to its nest but is met with jeers from the others, who believe the mouse too small to do it. Undaunted, the field mouse bravely pushes the egg up the hill, taking “one step, then the next, then the next” until it reaches its goal and basks in its accomplishment. When the wind knocks the egg back down the rock, the other animals scoff (“I knew the field mouse couldn’t do it!”), but the mouse gladly starts the task again, secure in the knowledge that it’s reached its goal once and can do it again. The book opens with Albert Camus’ quote about imagining Sisyphus happy—apt foregrounding for this outstanding look at how persistence can be its own reward, even if one is dismissed and mocked for one’s efforts. Vidali’s digital art uses perspective beautifully to convey the massive effort undertaken by the field mouse as it struggles mightily to achieve its objective. Vibrant, textured blues and purples as well as shadows on the egg capture the passage of time as day turns to night and back to day again.

A powerful, folkloric tale of persistence and quiet dignity. (Picture book. 4-8)

Small Things Mended Robinson, Casey W. | Illus. by Nancy Whitesides | Rocky Pond Books/Penguin (40 pp.) | $18.99 | March 19, 2024 9780593529812

As a man rediscovers the joy of fixing broken objects, he also finds new friendships to mend his own

broken heart.

In the middle of a cartwheel, Lily’s watch flies out of her pocket and lands, For more by Casey W. Robinson, visit Kirkus online.

broken, in her neighbor’s driveway.

Then, her kind neighbor Cecil offers his help. When he later presents the mended watch to Lily, she receives it with enthusiastic gratitude. Soon, word spreads about Cecil’s skill at restoring life to the “trinkets and treasures, doodads and thingamajigs” cherished by his community. One day, a girl brings Cecil a stuffed elephant with a particularly tricky ailment: a broken heart. Cecil tries everything but is stumped. How do you fix a broken heart? Whitesides’ soft, cozy illustrations capture Cecil’s detailed restoration work but also hint at a life shared with a beloved spouse, now gone.

Robinson’s gentle prose guides readers along Cecil’s healing journey. While the text doesn’t explicitly discuss Cecil’s loss, this tender story will still resonate with young readers processing grief of their own. Cecil has tan skin, black hair, and an ocular disability, while Lily is lightskinned and red-haired. His neighbors are diverse in skin tone and physical ability; some residents use wheelchairs and leg braces.

A sweet story about the fixes made possible by generosity and community.

(Picture book. 4-8)

All About Color Rusch, Elizabeth | Illus. by Elizabeth Goss Charlesbridge (32 pp.) | $17.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781623543532

A meditation on the nature of color and some of its meanings.

“Color doesn’t exist,” Rusch writes. “The sky is not blue. The grass is not green. A violet is not even violet.” The point she’s making is that colors are just reflected light and our brains all perceive hues differently, but she doesn’t get around to explaining that, or any of her equally cryptic ensuing pronouncements about colors, until an afterword in small type that few befuddled young readers will be inclined to tackle. In flat, cut-paper illustrations that resemble screen prints, Goss struggles to provide clarifying examples KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

A pointed message about expecting, as well as accepting, differences.

ROY I S N OT A D O G

for terse claims that colors provide signals and warnings, help us to stand out, somehow “make” us see red or feel blue, and can even “color your whole life!” An all-too-close image of a black widow spider’s red marking is the stuff of nightmares, and elsewhere two children who looked angry (depicted in hues of bright red) and then sad (“blue”) on previous spreads unconvincingly “brighten” their day on a page dominated by yellow in which they hug. Depicting a diverse cast of children, the art culminates with several kids gathering to “color” art projects, if not their lives, in a busy studio in which the creators’ likewise confusing All About Nothing (2023) is prominently on display.

Ambitious but underdeveloped and bewildering. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Purple Up!: We Salute Our Friends Scheerger, Sarah Lynn | Illus. by Leah Giles Whitman (32 pp.) | $18.99 | March 7, 2024 9780807566671

Kids whose parents have served in the armed forces are recognized with a day honoring their sacrifices.

When a group of friends witness a camouflage-clad mom saying goodbye to her family before leaving for military service, they wish desperately that they could help. Some research leads them to a website for Purple Up! Day, which is observed on April 15. The kids’ efforts widen from their school to the entire town, until a full celebration KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 135

takes place, including a Hero Wall on which people place posters and photos honoring not just military families, but also first responders and teachers. An author’s note explains the origin of the day, which began in New Hampshire in 2011. Notably, children are never referred to here as “brats,” the traditional term for military kids.

The sentiment is heartfelt, and the collagelike illustrations express love for kids who keep their families going in the absence of a parent. The text isn’t consistent—it can’t decide if it’s a rhyming book or not—and there aren’t any named characters to get to know, but those are small quibbles for a title that laudably spotlights a group of children who don’t always get their due. The military family at the center of this book presents Black, and one of the children uses a wheelchair. The community is diverse.

A solid explanation of a growing movement to recognize military kids.

(Picture book. 4-8)

Cinnamon Bun, I Love You 1 Schwartz, Amy | Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) | $18.99 | April 2, 2024 9781665913119

Let’s count the ordinary yet special moments where love is shared.

Hugs and kisses rank high on the list of ways to show affection, but there are some not-so-obvious ways, too, such as snuggling close and sharing a cinnamon bun or gazing up into the sky and counting the

stars together. Schwartz distills each moment into an uncluttered vignette and a simple line of text on the recto, paired with a large, bold number on the verso, which will help young readers visualize the concept. In a cozy indoor scene, a toddler peers over a wall made from play bricks at an adult playmate who holds two dolls: “Peeka-boo, / I love you two.” In a blustery outdoor setting, a caregiver and a youngster are bundled up, enjoying a skate through the park: “Roller skate, / I love you eight” (eight birds watch from the treetop). On the final page, devoted to the concluding number 10, the tots from each scene unite and sit around a table, munching on heart-shaped cookies together. This is a gentle, rhythmic read for one-on-one snuggles or groups of tiny humans ready to shout out numbers. The characters vary in skin tone.

Sweet, simple, and delicious. (Picture book. 2-5)

Roy Is Not a Dog Shapiro, Esmé & Daniel Newell Kaufman Tundra Books (48 pp.) | $18.99 April 23, 2024 | 9780735265967

A young detective gathers evidence that his reclusive neighbor is “withoutadoubtably a dog!”

A boy named Weasel is sure he knows everything about the neighbors along his paper route—except for the one who lives at the end of Lilypod Lane. Trench coat–clad Roy can read and cook, but, glimpsed behind a row of bushes shaped like fire hydrants, he has floppy ears and a face with a long muzzle. Could he be a dog? When Roy catches a thrown stick and then a raw steak, Weasel’s suspicions are excited.

And when Weasel’s friend Pam Pam walks by with her cat, Roy’s reaction confirms it. OK, admits Roy, “so I’m a DOG! But I’m no less of a person! I read the morning paper. I can fry an egg better than most. I have a driver’s FEBRUARY 1, 2024

135

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

license. And I even do my taxes!”

Ending his declaration of personhood with a resounding “I am proud!” Roy suggests that there may be more to know about the other residents of Lilypod Lane, and indeed, figures that were silhouetted in the earlier views of the leafy, lushly planted neighborhood do reveal surprises in the fully illuminated final spread for attentive viewers to spot. Beneath a tangle of black hair, Weasel has light-brown skin, while Pam Pam, the only other human in the cast, has red hair and slightly lighter skin.

A pointed message about expecting, as well as accepting, differences in others, delivered with a doggy flourish.

(Picture book. 6-8)

Escape to Ponti Slattery, Brian | Illus. by Antonio Javier Caparo | Red Deer Press (314 pp.) | $14.95 paper | March 30, 2024 | 9780889957237

A boy in medieval Italy flees his cruel master and strikes out for freedom.

Faced with being publicly branded by Malaspina, his bad-tempered master, 14-year-old Bec musters his wits, strength, and agility for a daring escape to the forest, planning to make his way south to Ponti.

Bec, whose mother has died and whose father is unknown, counts horses and dogs as his best companions and is prepared to make the perilous journey alone. But a chance encounter with a black-haired boy wearing a gold earring results in the two renegades deciding to travel together. Tien Nu, whose Chinese father came from Samarkand and whose mother came from “Alessandria” in “Africa,” is an entertainer who juggles and tumbles— and he carries a heavy secret. Tien Nu teaches Bec some tricks of his trade as they get lost in mysterious tunnels, perform acrobatics and illusions at a wedding, and stay just a few steps ahead of Malaspina, who’s placed a 136

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 136

Hold on to your tunic and truncheon in this action-filled adventure.

ESCAPE TO PONTI

bounty on Bec’s head. Short chapters keep the story moving, with narrow escapes, a dead body, and several bloody battles along the way, while family mysteries are untangled more gently. The characters speak in a casual, modern style, which occasionally distracts but overall reads well.

Caparo’s beautifully detailed graphite pencil and digital illustrations add to the enjoyment.

Hold on to your tunic and truncheon in this action-filled adventure. (map, author interview) (Fiction. 10-14)

Kirkus Star

Piper Chen Sings Soo, Phillipa & Maris Pasquale Doran Illus. by Qin Leng | Random House Studio (40 pp.) | $19.99 | April 2, 2024 9780593564691

Hamilton star Soo’s debut picture book centers on a young girl confronting stage fright.

Piper Chen twirls through her days with her mouth wide open. When Mr. Harris, her music teacher, asks Piper if she’d like to sing a solo in the Spring Sing, she immediately answers, “Yes!” But later, she finds herself frozen during practice. Later, Piper’s grandmother Nǎi Nai notices that Piper isn’t singing, and Piper explains about the solo and the butterflies in her stomach.

Nǎi Nai understands and explains that she experienced “húdié” (Chinese for butterflies) at her first piano recital.

They also visited whenever something exciting was ahead, like when she

left China for America, when she graduated from music school, and when she became a U.S. citizen.

“Now, when they greet me, I greet them back. ‘Hello, húdié. Nı̌ hǎo.’”

The night of the show, Piper feels the butterflies flapping their wings.

She hums to herself, “Hello, húdié” and sings. Soo and Doran sensitively capture the anxiety of performing and draw parallels with other life changes while giving readers a concrete tool for addressing those butterflies. Leng’s delicate, expressive ink, watercolor, and oil pastel illustrations capture Piper’s enthusiasm and uncertainty as well as Nǎi Nai’s loving warmth, working seamlessly with the text in vignettes and full spreads. Piper Chen and Nǎi Nai are Chinese American; Mr. Harris is brown-skinned.

This book sings. (Picture book. 4-8)

It Watches in the Dark Strand, Jeff | Sourcebooks Young Readers (288 pp.) | $16.99 | April 2, 2024 9781728277592 | Series: Eek!, 1

Kids stumble into a strange, remote community watched over by a huge, ominous scarecrow.

Twins Oliver and Trisha are three days into a five-day canoe trip with their dad to celebrate their 12th birthdays when their father is knocked unconscious in an accident. They’re virtually alone in the remote Missouri wilderness, and there’s no cell phone signal, but the siblings eventually find a dock on the river. From there, they follow a trail to the small town of KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

Escrow, population 999. An enormous scarecrow stands in the town square; locals claim it keeps them all safe. Dad is taken to a strange medical facility and subjected to treatments that don’t seem to make sense for his injuries.

The adults in Escrow behave oddly, getting angry when the twins don’t eat all their ice cream and casually suggesting that their father might die. The witchlike woman who takes them in for the night warns them not to go outside after dark. Meanwhile, both Oliver and Trisha can hear the threatening voice of the scarecrow inside their heads. They resolve to rescue Dad and get out of town, but the townspeople will go to extremes to keep them from leaving, ramping up the tension. The resourcefulness, cooperation, and affection displayed by the twins offset some truly scary moments, and a genuinely surprising ending provides macabre humor.

Main characters read white.

Folk horror for younger folk. (Horror.

10-14)

The Claddagh: The Loyalty of the Leprechauns Street, M.R. | Turtle Cove Press (267 pp.) $16.95 paper | March 17, 2024 9781947536333 | Series: The Claddagh, 1

An Irish journey of friendship, love, and loyalty.

The Leprechauns of the Kelly Clan are traveling across the Irish countryside to meet for their annual festival, during which the clan reunites, games and contests are held, and, this year, the next Keeper of the Clover will be chosen. Dune, For more by M.R. Street, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 137

nearly 16, hopes he might be selected, even though he feels that his dad, the current Keeper, doesn’t respect his potential. The family must travel carefully, using his mother’s rune magic to help them hide, since human hunters could capture them and either force them to work or turn them into gold. On their way, they receive word that another family, the Greenapples, has already been caught. In an effort to prove himself (but also feeling called to this mission), Dune sets out to rescue them, along with Kyna, a transplanted clan member from Appalachia, and on the way meets pony Cairdeen, who’s run away from an abusive farmer. Animals can talk when they’re within faerie rings, and Cairdeen’s chapters are told from her point of view. The Leprechauns are human in appearance, but their magic and what it grants them distinguishes them from ordinary mortals. This series opener tries to set up a lot of elements, but the execution leaves a fair amount to be desired; most of the pieces of the story drop into place like so many clunky bricks.

Lacking in polish. (map, glossary) (Fantasy. 11-16)

Lights Out: A Movement To Help Migrating Birds Stremer, Jessica | Illus. by Bonnie Pang Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $18.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781665931977

The rescue of a disoriented sparrow introduces the problems that city lights pose for migrating birds.

A flock of sparrows sets out, but the glare of streetlights and bright signs prevents them from seeing the stars. They scatter, and one is left behind but is soon rescued by a girl and her father, who take the bird to a rehab center. Over the winter the sparrow heals, while the girl and her schoolmates mount a campaign to encourage people to turn their lights off at night during migration season.

When the sparrows return in the spring, the lights have been turned off, the stars are visible, and they all find their way through the city safely— including the left-behind sparrow, who’s since recovered. The simple, smoothly written text sits directly on a backdrop of digital illustrations featuring stylized city scenes and country landscapes, all of which would show nicely to a group. Readers may be slightly confused at the references to window collision; children may need the help of an adult to understand that reflective window glass and light pollution are two separate problems. (This difference is made clear in the backmatter.) Thoughtfully, the illustrator has shown gloved adult hands picking up the birds. The girl and her father are brown-skinned; the classroom is diverse.

A feel-good story of a successful children’s campaign to make the world safer for birds. (information on light pollution, lights-out campaigns, how to help, and flyways; bibliography) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

I Really Like Mom Su-an Lee | Illus. by So-ra Kim | Trans. by Paige Morris | Abrams (32 pp.) | $15.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781419768248

Young animals celebrate their mothers.

The refrain “I really like Mom” anchors this tender tribute, translated from Korean. “I really like Mom. She reads to me,” shares a young monkey clutching a teddy bear, nestled with Mom in a huge book flying beneath a crescent moon. “I really like Mom. She praises me for playing nicely with my friend,” says a bear cub, lifted in the air by a loving mother. “I really like Mom. She gives me kisses,” says an otter cuddled up with Mom as she floats in the water on her back. The message is sweet and earnest, though it’s similar to those of other books spotlighting the mother-child bond.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

137

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

Some parents might raise an eyebrow at the statement that Mom “feels so happy just to be my mom,” since it seems to imply a one-dimensional perspective of motherhood. Mixed-media illustrations depict smiling animals that have the cuddly look of stuffed animals. Some animals appear in domestic settings, such as a pig mother wearing an apron and serving food, though others can be found in their natural habitats, such as a chipmunks scurrying past predators in a forest and sloths hanging from trees. At the conclusion, a light-skinned human mother and child hug in bed. Little ones will have fun looking for an easy-to-spot ladybug throughout.

Liam’s punishment? With doctors baffled and his other friends picking on him for falling asleep in class, Liam works with Alaina to break his curse before it becomes permanent like hers.

This lightly illustrated dual-perspective tale of two kids navigating chronic illness offers age-appropriate disability representation, but it lacks a solid middle-grade voice. The tweens’ dialogue contains outdated slang and adultlike narration, as well as numerous quotes from other works that become tedious. Liam reads white; contextual clues may point to Alaina’s having some Latine heritage.

Sleeping Spells and Dragon Scales

Comet Chaser: The True Cinderella Story of Caroline Herschel, the First Professional Woman Astronomer

Tender and heartfelt, though it treads familiar ground. (Picture book. 3-5)

Swore, Wendy S. | Shadow Mountain (304 pp.) | $18.99 | April 2, 2024 9781639932313

When Liam falls ill without explanation, his friend becomes convinced they need to break a fairy curse to cure him.

Four years ago, Liam and fairy-obsessed Alaina found a hidden grove covered in mirrors. Alaina was sure the items were fairy treasure, so when they accidentally broke one—and had nothing to leave in payment—Alaina worried the fairies would punish them. Now 12, Alaina and Liam have grown apart, but she still runs to his aid when he collapses and crashes his bike. At urgent care, Liam sees a white fox running into a picture on the wall and a mirror, yet the doctor finds nothing wrong.

After Liam confides in Alaina that he doesn’t know why he sometimes feels extreme fatigue and can’t focus, she admits she’s always wondered whether developing Type 1 diabetes was her fairy curse; what if exhaustion is 138

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 138

Tries to accurately convey the experience of invisible illnesses but is hindered by its pacing and characterization. (Fiction. 8-12)

Turner, Pamela S. | Illus. by Vivien Mildenberger | Chronicle Books (60 pp.) $19.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781452145433

Caroline Herschel’s intellectual curiosity sparkled like the stars that fascinated her.

Born and raised in Hannover, Germany, Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) seemed destined for life as a household drudge; her mother, who cared little about her daughter’s schooling, demanded Caroline do chores, while her four elder brothers were educated by their father. William, Caroline’s favorite brother, eventually moved to England and embarked on a successful music career. He cared deeply about his sister and urged her to come live with him.

Their mother refused until William sent money to hire a servant. Caroline moved, and William taught her English, singing, and mathematics. She transcribed music and performed in his concerts. Star-gazing fascinated them both, and they built several brilliantly

accurate telescopes and mapped star movements. Caroline easily worked out complicated calculations. The pair made major astronomical discoveries, but William Herschel is enshrined in astronomical history as the discoverer of Uranus. Caroline’s star also shone: She discovered a comet, for which George III awarded her a salary. Thus, Caroline Herschel became the world’s first professional female astronomer. (She discovered several more.) This captivating, well-written biographical picture book spotlights a brilliant, persevering woman who found her true calling in the skies; STEM-inclined readers should find her story especially fascinating and uplifting. Numerous quotes from Caroline Herschel appear throughout.

Mildenberger’s paintings are awash in light; dark scenes gleam with stars.

An important historical personality receives deserved attention in this fine account. (more information on Caroline Herschel, glossary and resources, quotations, bibliography) (Picture-book biography. 7-10)

Gorgeously Me! Van Ness, Jonathan | Illus. by Kamala Nair Flamingo Books (40 pp.) | $17.99 April 30, 2024 | 9780593622841

Queer Eye hairstylist Van Ness pens an ode to self-confidence.

A group of young people tackle activities both big and small, such as playing soccer or choosing an outfit for the day, with attentiveness, verve, and loving support for one another, all the while celebrating what makes each and every one of us “perfectly, happily, gorgeously” ourselves. Van Ness’ uplifting, encouraging text is paired with Nair’s exuberant illustrations. Themes of community care, family, and being in touch with one’s feelings are woven throughout as each child overcomes obstacles, from anxiety before a recital to conflict with a friend. Children with a range of skin tones are depicted; one KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:23 PM

CHILDREN'S

light-skinned child uses arm crutches.

In an author’s note, Van Ness discusses the importance of embracing differences and reinforces the book’s message of kindness, love, and understanding.

While this look at positivity and belief in one’s self might not be the most original, fans of the author’s previous picture book, Peanut Goes for the Gold (2020), illustrated by Gillian Reid, or his Queer Eye castmate Karamo Brown’s I Am Perfectly Designed (2019), co-written

by Jason “Rachel” Brown and illustrated by Anoosha Syed, will enjoy his infectious ode to self-expression.

An animated look at celebrating who you are and never letting others dim your light. (Picture book. 4-7)

Outspoken: Paul Robeson, Ahead of His Time: A One-Man Show Weatherford, Carole Boston | Illus. by Eric Velasquez | Candlewick (48 pp.) | $18.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781536212976

Weatherford and Velasquez explore actor Paul Robeson’s remarkable achievements.

Written as a “one-man show” in the first person, this tale in four acts highlights the phases of Robeson’s remarkable life (1898-1976). He adored his father, who was born into slavery and gave Robeson every chance to develop mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Robeson excelled as a scholar and athlete, and in college he developed his skills as a performer. Although he studied law, other opportunities led

him to the stage, where his acting and singing moved crowds both at home and abroad. He took advantage of his fame to speak out against oppression wherever he went. Robeson enjoyed positive experiences in the Soviet Union, where he found that racism didn’t curtail his life as it did in the U.S. When the Red Scare villainized Soviet and Communist sympathizers, Robeson refused to denounce communism; the government took away his U.S. passport, and his life and livelihood became limited. Lengthy verse, presented in double columns and a small typeface, is accompanied by powerful, painterly images, many based on actual photographs, set against a white background. Informative, insightful, and comprehensive, this book will be a valuable addition to reference shelves, classrooms, and anywhere older elementary children are drawn to learning more about legendary American changemakers.

This inspiring volume leaves nothing out. (timeline, source notes, bibliography, copyright acknowledgments) (Picture-book biography. 8-12)

Five Stories Weinstein, Ellen | Holiday House (48 pp.) $18.99 | April 9, 2024 | 9780823451678

Successive generations of children in the same Lower East Side tenement map out a common immigrant experience in New York City.

Using the term stories in both senses of the word, Weinstein opens with

Seeming simplicity yields rich rewards in this sensory-steeped tale of adventure and friendship.

TWO TOGETHER

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 139

a cutaway view of the building that shows one of the five families on each floor. She then introduces Jenny Epstein, her actual grandmother, who in 1914 moved with her Russian Jewish family into the building, where they lived above a pickle store. Four fictive young recent arrivals follow from Italy (1932), the Dominican Republic (1965), Puerto Rico (1989), and China (“Today”). The text offers mere snapshots, too short to include more than a few common concerns or details of daily life (though to link the generations, each child mentions knowing the inhabitant of the floor below). But the illustrations are filled with lavish period details, both of domestic furnishings inside and dress, cars, and changing shop signs outside.

“Hosiery” becomes “Sportswear,” “Latticini” makes way for “Bodega,” Chinese characters appear, and other businesses come and go—except for the pickle place, which remains as a visual anchor while adding mango, okra, and kimchi to its advertised wares by the end. Weinstein also tracks a growing diversity of people as well as food, while in her afterword she properly acknowledges that her five families can only suggest how rich the community’s real racial and cultural mix is.

Tantalizing glimpses of a diverse neighborhood’s cultures and origins, with insight into the commonality that underlies them. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Kirkus Star

Two Together Wenzel, Brendan | Chronicle Books (48 pp.) $18.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9781797202778 Series: Brendan Wenzel

Seeming simplicity yields rich rewards in this sensory-steeped tale of adventure and friendship.

Color-sapped outlines of a wilderness kick off this tale of a dog and cat traveling together. “Two together headed home. / Cat and dog. / Bell and FEBRUARY 1, 2024

139

1/8/24 5:23 PM

>>>

CHILDREN'S

Bone. / For a moment. For a day. // Two together on their way.” After they peek at their reflections in the water, different artistic styles are used in the following pages to depict each animal; the dog is rendered in curved acrylics, the cat in spiky colored pencil. Sometimes the very page splits in two, one side portraying the dog’s perceptions and the other the cat’s. After a toad waylays them, they encounter a bear, a cave, and a rainstorm. As night falls, the colors grow deep and sumptuous, and home appears like a beacon. Inside, the two are now more rendered more realistically and in more detail than ever before. That is, until they go out again to prowl the night. Featuring the singsong nature of some of the best nursery rhymes, the tale reads with an effortless lilting quality, gently rhyming. Yet it’s the art that’s the showstopper here, and one wonders if the two are crispest in the home because we’re seeing them the way their human owner does. What is unquestionable is the friends’ affection for each other, the pair sticking side by side through thick and thin.

A masterful consideration of perception, exploration, and, ultimately, love.

(Picture book. 3-6)

Infinity Blast and the Planet of Mystery Wright, Brad | Reycraft Books (276 pp.) $17.95 | March 12, 2024 | 9781478884040

For a hotshot new trainee and his cohorts, challenges at the space academy include kidnapping and murder attempts.

In the wake of saving both Earth and the arriving galactic ambassadors in the series opener, Infinity Blast and the Space Weapon of Doom (2023), Infinity is thrilled to be accepted into the newly opened In’Te Consortium Earth Academy of Space Science along with his sister, Twilight, and friends Gabe and Lily. However, one of his multispecies classmates turns out to be Tess, daughter of the opener’s archvillain, 140

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 140

Agent Winter. More dauntingly, simulated training battles quickly give way to real ones when supposedly disarmed weapons and bombs turn out to be live—and a short space flight unexpectedly becomes a long one that leaves the students stranded on an unknown planet stocked with dangers galore. Fortunately, thanks to Infinity’s leadership abilities and his squad’s mix of tech and other know-how, getting back to Earth and then exposing their nemesis turns out to be just a matter of learning to work together, hacking a few systems, fueling up a conveniently available alien spaceship, blasting a few attacking robots, and confronting a thinly disguised, easily enraged alien traitor. All in all, an exciting first year.

The cover illustration may cue a racially diverse central cast; Gabe and Infinity each refer to themselves once as dyslexic and neurodivergent, respectively.

A solid space-school tale with some action-packed battle scenes. (image credits) (Science fiction. 9-12)

The Rock in My Throat Yang, Kao Kalia | Illus. by Jiemei Lin Carolrhoda (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 5, 2024 | 9781728445687

Author Yang recounts her experience with selective mutism as a child.

Young Kalia’s Hmong family moved to the United States as refugees. After a cashier treats her mother, who’s still learning English, with disdain, Kalia feels like she has a rock growing in her throat every time she speaks in English (“I don’t want to be like the

many people who speak English,” she thinks). Recess is particularly lonely, but she finds solace in the beauty of the natural world. Yang captures the profound isolation, embarrassment, and exhaustion involved in navigating life as an immigrant in a world that isn’t always empathetic. True to the author’s experiences, the protagonist’s challenges are refreshingly unresolved by the conclusion of the story, despite the book ending on a hopeful note.

Hmong words are used in the book, and English translations can be found in the glossary; incorporating them into the narrative would have made for a slightly better flow. Nevertheless, Yang’s poetic prose sings in perfect unison with Lin’s gorgeously textured illustrations, rendered in earthy tones.

The result is a compelling and heartfelt story that’s bound to resonate with anyone who’s ever struggled to express themselves or be heard. The book is capped with beautiful endpapers that feature repeating symmetrical patterns, reminiscent of those found in traditional Hmong embroidery, each one revealing glimpses of the story inside.

A powerful window into the perspective of a young immigrant. (author’s note) (Picture book. 7-10)

Too Many Golems Yolen, Jane | Illus. by Maya Shleifer Chronicle Books (40 pp.) | $18.99 April 23, 2024 | 9781797212142

A well-meaning troublemaker gets unexpected help.

Abi, the rabbi’s son, may make mischief, but it’s always inadvertent. He once stole a bagel from the deli, but he

Bound to resonate with anyone who’s ever struggled to express themselves.

T H E R O C K I N M Y T H R O AT

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:24 PM

CHILDREN'S

was engrossed in his comic book and forgot to pay. He once said a bad word to his Hebrew teacher—but he didn’t know it was wrong. Abi does intentionally steal an old, tattered scroll from the synagogue basement.

He needs it for Hebrew practice and figures nobody will miss it. Although he doesn’t know the meaning of the words on the scroll, he reads them repeatedly; he doesn’t realize that they summon monsters! When Abi hears house-shaking knocks on the door, he opens and sees…10 golems, the gigantic legendary clay men of Jewish folklore, ready to fight. (Abi knows about golems, but usually only one arrives.) Abi explains that his only battle is with the Hebrew language. So the golems tutor him each week and teach him golem songs and stories. At his bar mitzvah seven years later, Abi’s Hebrew is perfect. The golems attend, dance afterward, and vanish the next day. Featuring an endearing, relatable protagonist, this tongue-incheek story turns a familiar legend on its ear. The lively illustrations, often appearing as vignettes, were created with pastel pencils and wax crayons. Abi is redheaded and bespectacled, with skin the white of the page; the golems are more bloblike than fearsome.

You can never have too many golems when they provide this much entertaining reading fun. (information on Rabbi Loew and his golem) (Picture book. 5-8)

Kirkus Star

Two Homes, One Heart Young, Jessica | Illus. by Chelsea O’Byrne Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) | $19.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780063253971

A separation grows into expanded love.

After a couple— one who has shoulder-length black hair, the other red-haired and bearded—decide to live apart, their child navigates the KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_Childrens_RD5.indd 141

Featuring an endearing protagonist, this tonguein-cheek story turns a familiar legend on its ear.

TOO MANY GOLEMS

ensuing changes. First, the bearded parent sets up a new home with help from the child, but soon the little one says goodbye and returns to the blackhaired parent’s house. Then comes the inevitable question: “Are we still a family?” New experiences and traditions are formed, the new home adds a puppy, and the additional physical space creates room to metaphorically grow into. The child still spends time with both parents, but in different locations now, and later, all three attend a community-wide event.

Through love continually shared, the two homes become more and more connected. Brief, rhyming verse flows well across the pages. Though the text is spare, the characters’ love for one another is palpable. The mixed-media illustrations are homey, populating the pages with long-limbed bodies and many cozy details. The established home and black-haired parent are awash in yellow, while the new home and bearded parent are dominated by shades of blue. The child, at first stuck in between, is an earthy green. But more green elements begin to appear in each house, with other colors seeping in to balance the scenes, and by the end a literal rainbow spans the homes. The family trio has pale skin.

Full of heart. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Star

Shiny Misfits Zayid, Maysoon | Illus. by Shadia Amin Colors by Elle Pierre | Graphix/Scholastic (256 pp.) | $24.99 April 16, 2024 | 9781338752519

In this graphic novel debut by an actor and comedian with cerebral palsy, a girl wants to be recognized for her talent, not her disability.

Bay Ann Musa, who has cerebral palsy, loves tap dancing and hanging out with best friends Michelle and Davey Matt. She shuttles between the homes of her sweet, supportive father and strict, workaholic mother, accompanied

by Lucy, her witty, talking feline companion (and biggest fan). After an incident at the school’s Halloween talent show goes viral, Bay Ann, who’s Muslim and Arab American, decides she must one-up Alyee Maq, her seemingly perfect classmate. After all, he exploited her, presenting himself as the hero who saved the “sick girl” when she fell, thus reducing Bay Ann to being tragic and inspirational.

Bay Ann is far from weak—in fact, her strong will can lead her to be overbearing and mean, even toward those she cares about (she’s also aware that due to others’ stereotypes, she can use “the disability card” to get out of trouble). Gradually, Bay Ann realizes that her pursuit of fame risks alienating those who genuinely care for her, and she must decide what’s truly important. This bright, lively graphic novel shows how the exuberant Bay Ann navigates daily life with cerebral palsy, incorporating humor without being exploitative.

Bay Ann grapples with expressing anger healthily, and the narrative skillfully underscores her personal responsibility, offering valuable lessons on managing one’s feelings.

Comical, nuanced, and visually engaging. (Graphic fiction. 9-13)

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

141

1/8/24 5:24 PM

TEEN ROMANCES TO SWOON OVER READERS UNFAMILIAR

with the romance genre often have wildly inaccurate misconceptions about it.

No, romances are not just predictable tales in which brawny, shirtless men sweep passive women off their feet. As these new teen titles demonstrate, romantic love is central to the lives of many different types of people.

These books—populated by a broad range of characters living in a variety of settings and dealing with myriad

142

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 142

different life circumstances— celebrate this diversity and speak to the inclusivity of the genre today.

Wren Martin Ruins It All by Amanda DeWitt (Peachtree Teen, 2023): Dating in high school is stressful enough, but when you’re asexual, it can be, as student council president Wren Martin puts it, “harrowing.” In this witty and hilarious enemies-to-lovers romance, Wren discovers that Leo Reyes—“student council vice

president and perpetual thorn in my side”—might just be that special someone who sees and fully accepts Wren for who he is.

Cupid’s Revenge by Wibke Brueggemann (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jan. 2): This queer love triangle set within a London amateur dramatics society sparkles with effervescent humor. Best friends Tilly and Teddy don’t care for the arts, but Teddy’s passion for the theatrically inclined Katherine is motivation enough to follow her to an audition—and rope in Tilly for moral support. Tilly, it turns out, is not immune to Katherine’s charms, either.

Arya Khanna’s Bollywood Moment by Arushi Avachat (Wednesday Books, Jan. 9): Readers seeking a sweet and lively story need look no further. Arya’s older sister’s impending wedding—a grand Punjabi affair—is just one of the things that’s causing upheaval during her senior year. Another is Dean, the handsome but irritating boy who beat her by six votes to become student council president. But forced proximity at school eventually leads to a Bollywood-worthy romance.

Dungeons and Drama by Kristy Boyce (Underlined, Jan. 9): Fans of fake-dating scenarios will be delighted by this charming, well-realized story. Musical theater fan Riley puts her thespian

LAURA SIMEON

talents to work pretending that keen Dungeons & Dragons player Nathan is her boyfriend. It’ll show Riley’s ex that she’s moved on and pique the interest of Nathan’s crush. But it seems there’s really something to the idea that “opposites attract.”

Lunar New Year Love Story

by Gene Luen Yang, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (First Second, Jan. 9): What does true love look like—and is it worth risking heartbreak for?

Crushing disappointments lead Valentina Tran to accept a bargain with Saint Valentine: find true love within a year, or give him her heart and live with numbness but no pain. This vibrant graphic romance with light fantasy elements is filled with lion dancing, emotional turmoil, and heartfelt connections.

Just Say Yes by Goldy Moldavsky (Henry Holt, Jan. 30): In this thoughtful romance grounded by astute social commentary, Peruvian American Jimena is shocked to discover she’s undocumented. Suddenly, college applications are the least of her worries. Her quest for a marriage of convenience and a green card turns out to be more complicated than expected, even with—or maybe because of?—the help she gets from her friend Vitaly.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

Young Adult

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

EDITOR’S PICK Two generations before the events of Elatsoe (2020), Shane, a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl, helps her mother, Lorenza, perform volunteer search-and-rescue operations.

Familiar both with tracking to survive in the wilderness and counting change to survive under capitalism, Shane possesses the resourcefulness of an irresistible protagonist.

Her practicality also provides the perfect foil for her extraordinary ability—inherited from her four-great-grandmother—to summon dead creatures, adding texture to her supernatural world. What starts out as Lorenza’s quest to locate two missing children becomes Shane’s journey through Texas,

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 143

Arkansas, Colorado, and the ghostly land Below to find her mother after she disappears. While faeries and vampires inhabit Shane’s surroundings, the heart of her story is her family’s endurance despite various tragedies, including climate devastation and rich settlers’ betrayal and theft. Frequent flashbacks and late-breaking perspective changes add narrative complexity, alongside rich depictions of cultural identity, generational trauma, and community care. A secondary character’s revelatory discovery offers an empowering narrative of reclaiming one’s stolen ancestry.

Shane’s protectiveness toward her younger brother, complex love for

146

The Black Girl Survives in This One: Horror Stories Edited by Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell

Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe Little Badger, Darcie | Illus. by Rovina Cai Levine Querido | 368 pp. | $19.99 April 16, 2024 | 9781646143795

her inconstant grandfather, and sturdy bond with her mathematically minded best friend add further relationship depth. Bug enthusiasts will also find kindred spirits in Shane and new acquaintance Dr.

147

Canto Contigo

By Jonny Garza Villa

147

The Misdirection of Fault Lines

By Anna Gracia

150

The Breakup Lists

By Adib Khorram

143

Richards, an older Black scholar of biology, magic, and comics.

A classic fantasy adventure and a balm for any soul weary of oppression. (note on the title) (Speculative fiction. 12-18)

Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe

By Darcie Little Badger; illus.

by Rovina Cai

158

Just Another Story: A Graphic Migration Account

By Ernesto Saade

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

143

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

Where Sleeping Girls Lie Àbíké-Íyímídé, Faridah | Feiwel & Friends (416 pp.) | $19.99 | March 19, 2024 9781250800848

A mystery upends a London girl’s attempts to heal her grief-stricken life.

Recently orphaned Sade Hussein, a wealthy Nigerian British Muslim 16-year-old, was home-schooled before she entered the Alfred Nobel Academy, an international boarding school.

There she meets Elizabeth Wang, her roommate and “house sibling,” a role describing those assigned to help new students acclimate. Sade soon becomes familiar with the school cliques, including the infamous—and beautiful—Unholy Trinity, comprising Persephone Stuart, Julliette de Silva, and queen bee April Owens (who used to room with Elizabeth). Sade’s new friendship with her roommate is abruptly interrupted when Elizabeth goes missing, and the Unholy Trinity approach Sade, curious about what might have happened. Meanwhile, Sade is investigating with Basil dos Santos, Elizabeth’s best friend, when a music box belonging to the missing girl mysteriously appears on Elizabeth’s bed. When attractive playboy athlete Jude Ripley shows an unwanted interest in Sade, one of her new friendships is negatively affected. Along with dealing with a missing roommate and complicated social dynamics, Sade, who struggles with panic attacks and night terrors, is haunted by a ghost girl, who visits her in regular nightmares and begs her for help. The very large cast, the uneven pacing and characterization, and the presence of several complicated storylines slow down the flow of this ambitious story.

The characters are broadly diverse in ethnicity and nationality.

A boarding school mystery that tackles fresh topics but struggles to knit together multiple complex narratives. (content warning) (Mystery. 14-18) 144

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 144

Strikingly unusual color palettes bring dynamism to more intense sequences.

KING CHEER

Prosecuting War Crimes: Seeking Justice for the Victims of War Allen, John | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 | 9781678207380

An analytical overview of obstacles facing the prosecution of war criminals, with historical background and accounts of famous and

recent tribunals.

Allen opens with introductions to the American Civil War’s 1863 Lieber Code and later the Geneva Conventions as efforts to establish codified rules for war and foundations for an international system of humanitarian law. He then focuses chiefly on four significant theaters where those efforts played out or are still developing— beginning with a claim that the crucial concept of “crimes against humanity” was established during the Nuremberg trials (“the first international war crimes tribunal in history”). Allen goes on to describe judicial actions in the wake of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in 1995, the more recent civil war in Syria, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Though in all the newer cases procedural delays, ideological differences, and political maneuverings (not to mention threats of violence) figured significantly—and many of the worst offenders did or are likely to escape their just deserts—in general, the author seems optimistic that in this area, too, the moral arc will bend toward justice.

He does mention trials in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, but in the sparse illustrations, which include

one viscerally disturbing photo of Buchenwald death camp victims, the defendants, officials, and victims are all European or Middle Eastern.

Current, cogent, and as hopeful as it is horrifying. (picture credits, source notes, further research, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

King Cheer Booth, Molly Horton & Stephanie Kate Strohm | Illus. by Jamie Green Disney-Hyperion (160 pp.) | $24.99 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781368064637 Series: Arden High, 2

In this return to magical Arden High, previously explored in Twelfth Grade Night (2022), the hijinks take place among the jocks.

Leah King is everything a cheer captain should be: confident, hardworking, and totally assured of her own goals. Or, she was before senior year, when, faced with being wait-listed at her dream college, she flounders.

She’s also struggling with queer imposter syndrome after coming out as demisexual. Chaos ensues when Leah resigns her beloved captaincy to Rae and Gabe, ambitious bullies who throw her life, the squad, and her friendship with put-upon best friend Kendall into disarray. Booth and Strohm are just as wholeheartedly committed to goofiness and fun as in the previous outing, with the interpersonal drama inspired

by King Lear playing out against a slightly fantastical backdrop. That play might not seem like the most obvious choice to adapt for this particular setting, but the authors satisfyingly KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

shift the original text while still telling a story that can be enjoyed even by those unfamiliar with the original.

The earnestness sometimes veers a bit toward after-school special territory in tone but is nonetheless charming.

Green’s art is confident and endearing: Strikingly unusual color palettes bring dynamism to more intense sequences, and playful backgrounds highlight the school’s unusual nature. The character designs remain a strong point, utilizing an adorably quirky cast who have diverse body types and express instantly recognizable personalities. Leah reads white; the supporting cast is racially diverse and largely queer.

High-spirited drama. (Graphic fantasy.

12-18)

What Magic Is This?

Bourne, Holly | Union Square & Co. (176 pp.) | $9.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9781454954880 | Series: Everyone Can Be a Reader

Three tween girls dabble in witchcraft but discover the magic of friendship.

Eighth grader Sophia, along with friends Mia and Alexis, attempt to use Mia’s knowledge of witchcraft (gleaned from the internet) to cast spells. Together, they sit in a circle and call upon elemental spirits, each hoping to find a solution to their emotional wounds. Mia struggles with self-harm, Alexis grieves for her deceased dog, and Sophia is heartbroken thanks to feckless ex-boyfriend Aidan’s cheating, prompting her to cast a love spell to get him back. One by one, the spells appear to come true, but Sophia’s friends help her realize that she deserves a more empowering journey toward self-love. The narrative, told from Sophia’s first-person perspective, develops parallels between her absentee father and Aidan, sources of rejection that prompt her recovery. Sophia’s voice is humorously exaggerated and KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 145

obsessive when referring to Aidan.

The confessional style, written with reluctant and struggling readers in mind, features repetitive dialogue with little exposition. The narrative moves disjointedly through time, however, jumping between the present and flashbacks, before leaping two years into the future, which may cause confusion. The secondary characters unfortunately feel typecast rather than like well-rounded people. Mia’s sudden healing, for example, skips over the nuances of self-harm and her need for non-magical solutions. The book’s physical design offers greater accessibility for those with dyslexia. Main characters read white.

An uneven melodrama. (Fiction. 12-14)

Future Tense: How We Made Artificial Intelligence―And How It Will Change Everything Brockenbrough, Martha | Feiwel & Friends (272 pp.) | $22.99 | March 19, 2024 9781250765925

A deep dive into the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence.

The book’s early chapters cover AI’s history—going back to ideas from ancient China, Egypt, and Greece—providing readers with a thorough foundation that summarizes various technological developments, each more advanced than the next. This section is best suited to research papers, as the language tends toward the dense and dry. That said, readers will appreciate the text’s impressive clarity in technical explanations and the author’s obvious respect for young readers’ intelligence. The writing becomes remarkably more engaging once the book progresses to modern applications—the good (some medical uses), the bad (surveillance of daily life, deception by bots), and the problems AI can learn to solve. Brockenbrough is particularly good at finding ways to tie its applications to students’

lives through relatable examples. At the same time, she covers the broader international context (for example, she compares the AI race between China and the U.S. to the Cold War space race). The book documents both the diversity of the humans behind the creation of AI and the racial bias that can be baked into the technology through the flawed data it’s trained on. A careful neutrality, an emphasis on the pros and cons of AI itself, clear ethical judgments regarding certain uses (e.g., privacy violations and manipulation of opinions and emotions), factual accuracy, and rigorous documentation all support authorial credibility and make this an important read.

A valuable resource for classrooms, libraries, and forward-looking teens. (bibliography, endnotes, index) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

Draw Down the Moon Cast, P.C. & Kristin Cast | Wednesday Books (336 pp.) | $20.00 | April 2, 2024 9781250865168 | Series: Moonstruck, 1

After spending her entire life without magick, a teenage girl in Oregon suddenly develops moon powers.

Wren Nightingale has known about magick her whole life. Her deceased parents were Moonstruck, and so are both of her best friends, Lee Young and Samantha Hopp. But Wren, who’s white, wasn’t born under a full moon, and she’s lived her first 17 years as a Mundane. On the night of her 18th birthday, however, she’s hit by “a spear of moonlight, silver and impossibly bright,” and everything changes. Lee, who’s Black, was on his way to Moon Isle to spend the summer studying his powers when he stopped off to give Wren her birthday present. After their night of minor shenanigans ends with Wren being Moonstruck, instead of just one night together, they’ll have the entire summer. But it’s a time of trials, FEBRUARY 1, 2024

145

1/8/24 5:13 PM

>>>

Y O U N G A D U LT

both in their personal lives and in their magickal abilities, because something isn’t right on Moon Isle, and Wren might be in the middle of it. The story is told in Wren’s and Lee’s alternating viewpoints as they navigate the political world of magick, fall in love, and learn that not everything is as it seems. This series opener unfolds at a mostly steady pace, although the drama and action are punctuated by slower sections of exposition and worldbuilding, preparing readers for a much larger story to come.

An easy, entertaining read. (Fantasy.

12-18)

The Gulf de Souza, Adam | Tundra Books (240 pp.) $20.99 | $12.99 paper | March 5, 2024 9781774880739 | 9781774880753 paper

Three Vancouver teens on the cusp of graduation set off to join a community on an island in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands.

The thought of going to The Evergreen has appealed to Olivia ever since she found the commune’s promotional brochure as a child.

Disillusioned with the grind of modern life, Oli and her two best friends, Liam and Milo, agree to run away to live there together. A run-in with a bully on the penultimate day of high school and an initially unexplained conflict with Liam derail Oli’s original plan, however, leaving her without her backpack of supplies—and with Milo and Alvin, Milo’s crush, as her traveling companions. As they make their way across the island, Oli plows through obstacles—sustaining injuries, getting lost in the woods, and accidentally abandoning camping For more horror with Black characters, visit Kirkus online.

146

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 146

gear—with single-minded determination, brushing off the consequences of her impulsivity and conflict avoidance until they suddenly catch up with her. Visual references, including Oli’s flip phone, AOL Instant Messenger, and Milo’s camcorder, establish the 2007 setting.

Oli’s frustration with the demands of capitalist society will resonate with contemporary readers. The portrayal of the teens, who are alternately goofy, angsty, brash, and self-conscious, is convincing, particularly in their banter and bickering. The illustrations use dynamic perspectives to emphasize moments of strong emotion, while monochromatic shading in muted colors conveys different moods. The characters are racially ambiguous; Oli’s mom has a Korean name.

Evocatively captures adolescent earnestness and idealism for living meaningfully. (land acknowledgment) (Graphic fiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

The Black Girl Survives in This One: Horror Stories Ed. by Evans, Desiree S., & Saraciea J. Fennell | Flatiron Books (368 pp.) | $19.99 April 2, 2024 | 9781250871657

A well-crafted horror anthology containing 15 stories that cleverly reimagine familiar tropes and cliches.

In their dedication, editors and contributors Evans and Fennell address “all the Black girls who have been aching to…come out on top as the Final Girl.” Defying the genre’s preference for centering white heroines, this collection features Black girls who are fighters and survivors, breakers of generational curses and slayers of evil. The stories contain deft social commentary, and many investigate the monstrosities of the human condition. Cinematic standouts include Justina Ireland’s “Black Pride,” a radical take on werewolves set during the era

of the Black Panther Party; Brittney Morris’ “Queeniums for Greenium!,” about a reluctant newcomer to a cult disguised as a multilevel marketing group; and Charlotte Nicole Davis’ “Foxhunt,” starring a high schooler who becomes the intended prey for a fatal game based on the brutality of chattel slavery. Other authors delve into paranormal frights shaped by cultural folklore, such as Evans’ “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou,” which follows a college student from rural Louisiana who returns home to confront a maternal inheritance involving a terrifying deal with a demon. This collection provides much-needed representation of Black girls who refuse to be martyrs, sassy sidekicks, or casualties on the path to a white character’s inevitable triumph.

An engaging volume that breathes necessary life into the horror genre, showcasing the best of what goes bump in the night. (contributor biographies) (Horror anthology. 13-18)

No Going Back Flores-Scott, Patrick | Christy Ottaviano Books (352 pp.) | $18.99 | April 2, 2024 9780316407502

Antonio Echeverría Sullivan is just out of juvie, and he really does want to follow all the rules—but will his past let him?

Antonio wants to tell you his story, and he hopes you’ll believe him. He’s a white and Uruguayan teen boy who’s spent the last year and a half at the Zephyr Woods Youth Detention Center in Washington state’s Puget Sound area, taking the fall for a crime he wasn’t primarily responsible for. The conditions of his early release are clear, among them checking in with his parole officer, avoiding all contact with his father, staying sober, attending high school, and following a curfew. Desperate to make amends with his mother and his best friend, Maya, Antonio immediately sets off on a 72-hour journey, trying to KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

outrun his past—and breaking all the rules, which might land him back at the detention center and permanently ruin all the relationships he’s trying to save. This is a taut coming-of-age story told in a combination of prose, with chapter headers that mark the day and time, and poems that flash back to earlier events. Antonio’s journey of self-realization features powerful inner dialogue that allows readers to understand the impulses that lead to his poor choices, and the novel brutally reflects the consequences and trials of addiction, chronic illness, and domestic violence on a family.

The excellent pacing and heart-wrenching exploration of redemption will sweep readers up. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)

Amber’s Way Galloway, Gloria | SelectBooks (304 pp.) | $14.95 paper Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781590795569

“Remission. If the English language had a more beautiful word, Jessica could not name one.”

Just after her fourth birthday, Amber Langston was diagnosed with cancer, specifically a high-risk neuroblastoma. The months of increasingly aggressive treatments ravaged her body but not her bright, curious mind and resilient spirit. With the constant support of close family, a devoted care team, and her loving mother, Jessica, she beat the cancer’s five-year survival rate of 50%. But years later, the cancer returned with a vengeance, leaving Amber, only

13, with just months to live. Unwinding over a span of years, the storyline follows Jessica from her whirlwind romance with an Army combat medic who died in Iraq before getting to meet the baby he cherished to her numb grief and road to healing following Amber’s passing. The story feels, in many ways, like a Hallmark movie: Everyone and everything is just a bit too good to be true. The characters are fairly shallowly developed; there’s a disconnect between the action on the page and the lack of deep emotional context, giving the story a somewhat detached feeling. Despite these shortcomings, however, the depth of love between the characters is palpable, and when the story finally hits its stride (about halfway through), readers may be moved to tears. Main characters are cued white; some references to Native people are culturally insensitive.

Warm and sincere if sentimental and lacking in robust characterization.

(Fiction. 12-18)

Kirkus Star

Canto Contigo Garza Villa, Jonny | Wednesday Books (352 pp.) | $20.00 | April 9, 2024 9781250875754

A queer mariachi musician learns that his star shines brighter when it’s part of a constellation.

Seventeenyear-old Mexican American Rafael Casimiro Álvarez is destined for mariachi greatness. Not only has he won best vocalist two years in a row, but he’s a third-generation

Gracia engages readers from the start with well-developed characters.

T H E M I S D I R E C T I O N O F F A U LT L I N E S

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 147

musician. Rafie’s plan for domination hits a snag when the mariachi director at his new performing arts school decides he’s not ready to be lead vocalist. Being relegated to backup singing would be bad enough—the blow is compounded by the fact that Rey Chávez, the Afro-Latino lead vocalist, is the boy he hooked up with at last year’s Mariachi Extravaganza Nacional. When Rey’s voice cracks during a performance (Rey is transitioning), Rafie seizes the spotlight, earning the dubious honor of becoming co–lead vocalist. Weeks of training together thaw the ice between the boys until Rafie opens up about the pain of losing his abuelo and the stress of his family legacy. He lets himself feel the love he’s suppressed for Rey, but just when they become a happy couple (onstage and off), Rafie’s ambition threatens to destroy it all. The novel is driven by multiple, compounding elements—grief, Rafie’s ambition, the suppressed romance, and the pressures of expectations—ensuring that the tension never dissipates, even once Rey and Rafie get together, much to readers’ satisfaction. Racism, homophobia, and transphobia within the mariachi community are realistically portrayed, complicating that space without rejecting its beauty.

A queer love letter to mariachi music and culture. (author’s note) (Romance.

13-18)

Kirkus Star

The Misdirection of Fault Lines Gracia, Anna | Peachtree Teen (352 pp.) $18.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781682635803

For three teen competitors at the exclusive Bastille Invitational tennis tournament in Florida, there’s more at stake than the winner’s trophy.

Taiwanese American Alice Wu arrives still reeling from the loss of her father, who >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

147

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT // Q & A

THE KIRKUS Q&A: WALELA NEHANDA A performance poet faces mortality in a new cancer memoir for young adults.

NO ONE EXPECTS a cancer diagnosis—especially a 23-yearold. At 23, your life is just beginning. At 23, you think you’ll live forever. But Walela Nehanda was confronted with this stark and brutal reality when their doctor delivered the startling news that they had a white blood cell count of 660,000—“600 percent more than normal”—and it was likely leukemia. Unsure of the word, Walela had to Google leukemia and learned that it was “blood cancer.”

From that moment, the unapologetically honest and vulnerable journey of Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir (Kokila, Feb. 6) begins. Nehanda never saw themselves writing a memoir, but the cultural worker, mental health advocate, and nonbinary writer and poet discovered it helped them to process what “felt impossible to process.” Through poems and short stories, Nehanda relives and relates their diagnosis, treatments, and healing in a way they hope will help other young people with cancer, especially young Black cancer patients, and those wanting to better understand those in their lives who are living with cancer.

Kirkus spoke with Nehanda via Zoom from their home in Los Angeles. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bless the Blood takes the reader on the tumultuous journey from cancer diagnosis to treatment—in this case for leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells.

What did writing the book do for you personally as you underwent this journey?

I was diagnosed when I was 23. And I’m 29 now. Much of writing Bless the Blood was 20 journals’ worth of poems 148

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 148

and snapshots of my life and reconciling the confusion and the rage that comes with having cancer as a young person. I was really trying to just figure out my place in this world, where I was seeing there was none made for me. If that meant taking up that space in a journal, and [discussing] a poem in a writing group, so be it. I also found it to be a

way of archiving that I was here, of saying, This is what I experienced. I knew there were injustices that I was experiencing, especially within the health care system.

You shed light on the experiences of undergoing oral chemotherapies and a stem cell transplant as treatments for leukemia.

What was it like to, in a sense, relive these experiences through the writing of this book, especially as a Black nonbinary person navigating the medical system? And how are you feeling today?

It was really hard on me. I kept telling my agent, “This book is trying to kill me.” It was a form of processing what also felt impossible to process and impossible to wrap my mind around. I wanted a book for younger people because I’d read Audre Lorde’s The Cancer

Journals and A Burst of Light. Audre was 43; I was 23. We got diagnosed exactly 20 years apart. I wanted something for young adults where the rage, the feelings, are just a bit more feral. It’s like reconciling your place in a world and society, and within illness and disability, and how dehumanizing that is, especially with all the intersections within us: nonbinary and Black and queer and fat and all these things. It was really hard to birth this book, but I’m grateful that I did.

I’m honestly incredibly burned out. The selfadvocacy that’s required in the health care system and publishing in life under capitalism—it’s all geared toward burnout. That’s how I’m feeling now. And it’s such a bizarre thing because you get to Mount Everest, to the peak of survivorship where I wrote the book, did the stem

Allegra Messina

BY GINA MURRELL

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Q & A // Y O U N G A D U LT

cell transplant, did all the things. Yet, I don’t necessarily get to enjoy the health of it. I’m obviously incredibly grateful for where I’m at right now, but it’s kind of maintaining this double-edged sword.

While the book is about cancer, it’s also about relationships. What effect did leukemia have on your relationships?

I felt a lot of projections from people on how one should be a cancer patient. There’s no real guidebook on how to navigate cancer while treating everyone involved with dignity—whether it’s family, friends, the person that you’re in a relationship with, or people that you’re in relationships with. Ultimately, I found I was juggling everyone’s expectations, and a lot of them were silent, too. We’re all in this vacuum of assumptions.

I wanted something for young adults where the rage, the feelings, are just a bit more feral.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 149

Cancer ruptures a lot of personal traumas for people about their own relationships with cancer, illness, and disability. Compared to when I was 23, I have a lot more empathy now. That doesn’t mean certain things I experienced were OK. But now I realize no one knows how to handle cancer. No one knows how to handle illness. Even with the ongoing Covid pandemic, which is a mass-disabling event, and the genocides that are happening, we don’t know how to work through the grief that comes with these things. As a society, we need to question how we embrace grief and how we’re told not to.

Bless the Blood goes beyond the traditional format of a memoir, in that it’s composed of poetry and short stories. Why did you decide to write your memoir in this fashion, and how do you feel your story is served through the use of these genres?

To be honest, I just know my strengths and skills. I grew up as a performance poet. I grew up writing short stories. I knew I could do poetry and short-form stories.

When writing about a dense topic like cancer, I wanted to do so in a way that would hold young people’s attention, because this book is geared toward youth. And with poetry and short-form stories, you can pick the book up and put it down. I want young people to be able to do that. I wanted that level of accessibility.

It was never on my bingo card to write a book—never, ever. If you told me at age 19 or 20 that this would be happening, I’d be like,

Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir Nehanda, Walela

Kokila | 400 pp. | $19.99 Feb. 6, 2024 | 9780593529492

What is a performance poet doing publishing a memoir?

But a lot of performance poetry and spoken word doesn’t subscribe to the rules of academia and other literature. I think that freed me in writing this book.

That’s one part of it. The other part is that there’s this elasticity that comes with poetry and short stories because all of these are snapshots of feelings.

What do you hope that cancer survivors and survivors of violence, and those with no experience of cancer

or violence, will get from reading Bless the Blood?

I’m proud that this book confronts emotions, that it confronts reality. It will make you feel something, whether you move through the world looking like me or not. I hope it touches on a deep vulnerability—that someone feels open to that vulnerability within them, especially in the times we’re living in. And I hope there’s some level of change and transformation.

Gina Murrell is a Black queer librarian, writer, and copy editor in New York.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

149

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

was also her coach. Mixed with her grief is the betrayal she feels toward the rest of her family, who hid Baba’s illness so she could have a “normal” life as long as possible. Alice receives another shock when she discovers that she’s rooming with rising tennis star Violetta Masuda, a white-passing social media influencer of Japanese and European descent.

Violetta is bubbly, glamorous, and well connected, but there are cracks beneath the surface. Relentless pressure from her mother, a former professional tennis player, drives Violetta to increasingly seek relief through vaping. It doesn’t help that the dorm’s third occupant is Leylah Lê, Violetta’s former friend.

Leylah holds her partially responsible for the disastrous conclusion to her previous appearance at the Bastille Invitational. Leylah, who has Type 1 diabetes and whose parents are Khmer and Vietnamese, is determined to prove that she belongs in the tennis world without compromising who she is, from her appearance to her brusque demeanor.

Gracia engages readers from the start with well-developed characters whose motivations and secrets are carefully revealed over the course of the tournament. Chapters alternate between Alice’s, Violetta’s, and Leylah’s perspectives and examine trauma, addiction, class, and representation through the passion—and desperation—of elite athletes.

Compelling and memorable. (Fiction.

13-18)

Every Time You Go Away Johnson, Abigail | Inkyard Press (400 pp.) $19.99 | Dec. 5, 2023 | 9781335429155

As a teen navigates his mother’s substance abuse, he comes in and out of the life of a girl who’s dealing with the death of her father.

Ethan and Rebecca met as children the first time Ethan’s mom dropped him off at his grandparents’ house so she could focus on battling addiction. Over the next 150

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 150

few years, Ethan would often stay with his grandparents (Rebecca’s neighbors), and the kids became close friends, sharing their first kiss as 13-year-olds.

But whenever Ethan’s mother showed up and whisked him away, their communication would stop. After four years away, 17-year-old Ethan is back.

During his absence, Rebecca was in an accident that killed her father and left her a paraplegic. She’s carried a burden of guilt over her father’s death and has also felt abandoned by Ethan. Rebecca experiences pressure from her mom to go away to college, which would mean leaving a job she loves making jewelry at a studio where her boss is another wheelchair user. The romantic tension builds as the two renew their trust in each other. The coming-of-age milestones feel earned as Ethan has to let go of the idea that he can be his mother’s savior, and Rebecca must accept that she wasn’t responsible for the accident.

Ethan and Rebecca are coded white.

A heartfelt story of two well-developed characters who are much more than their challenging circumstances. (content note) (Fiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

The Breakup Lists Khorram, Adib | Dial Books (336 pp.) $19.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9780593616390

A stage manager and his sister both develop a crush on the same guy.

Everyone thinks juniors and longtime queer platonic besties Jackson and Bowie should date. But Iranian and white Jackson, who’s deaf, must constantly triage his sister Jasmine’s relationship woes by making breakup lists that extol her exes’ worst qualities. When white, “classically handsome” swimmer Liam auditions for the fall musical, trouble ensues when both Jackson and Jasmine start crushing on him. Jasmine pursues Liam first, making Liam “absolutely,

100 percent off limits.” But Liam keeps tucking in Jackson’s shirt tags. He also starts learning sign language from Bowie, a nonbinary, Black, aromantic, and asexual child of deaf adults. Liam hopes this will help them communicate better, a meaningful action and something Jackson’s family hasn’t put much effort into. What’s a boy to do? This sweet, slow-burn sibling love triangle with an added sprinkling of family drama rivals Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper (2020) in its cuteness and appeal.

Countless references show an insider’s knowledge of—and reverence for—high school theater. The strong first-person narration immerses readers in Jackson’s story, and the use of “somethingsomething” effectively conveys times when Jackson, who wears hearing aids and reads lips, misses dialogue. The supporting characters bring additional diversity in race and queer identity.

Love deserves a standing ovation in this multilayered exploration of what it truly means to feel seen. (Fiction.

14-18)

Brock McGowan, Anthony | Illus. by Staffan Gnosspelius | Union Square & Co. (136 pp.) | $9.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9781454954774 | Series: Everyone Can Be a Reader

A teenager and his intellectually disabled older brother rescue an injured dog and a young badger from a trio of vicious bullies in this first of four interconnected episodes.

In this wrenching, accessibly written tale, their father’s inability to stay employed or sober in the wake of their mother’s departure has thrown Kenny—who was oxygen-deprived at birth—and Nicky, his protective younger brother, into an ongoing struggle just to get by. Sneering older teen Jezbo and twin punks Rich and Rob send Tina, the twins’ Jack Russell terrier, into a badger’s sett, resulting in her being savagely wounded. The boys then beat KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

an old badger to death and abandon Tina. Kenny runs off in shock, but Nicky brings home both the dog and a baby badger left trapped in the bullies’ net. Before setting out to search for the baby’s mother, Nicky cautions his brother that he mustn’t tell anyone, or Jezbo and his gang will return. But Kenny, who has joyfully adopted both animals, proves incapable of keeping the secret, and a confrontation becomes inevitable. The timely arrival of Kenny and Nicky’s father, who’s at last showing signs of recovery, narrowly heads off further violence and allows the story to end on a rising note, which is highlighted by a badger family reunion. Aside from a friend of Kenny’s named Samit, the entire English cast reads as white.

Natural dialogue and short, fast-paced chapters will sustain readers’ interest.

An absorbing read. (Fiction. 13-18)

Pike McGowan, Anthony | Illus. by Staffan Gnosspelius | Union Square & Co. (136 pp.) | $9.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9781454954798 | Series: Everyone Can Be a Reader

Nicky is shocked by something he glimpses in a local pond in this stand-alone follow-up to Brock (2024).

Their dad has a job and a likable new girlfriend, so things are looking up for Kenny, who sustained brain damage at birth, and his fiercely protective younger brother, Nicky. But when the boys go on a fishing expedition to a deep pond near a former meat pie factory, they spot a gold Rolex watch on what looks like an arm floating underwater.

Nicky’s aware of how much the money would help the family if only he could recover and sell it. Unfortunately, he also regularly regales his credulous but delighted brother with gruesomely explicit tales of toothy pike that are capable of snatching certain precious body parts away from unwary skinny-dippers, which makes swimming KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 151

This sweet love triangle rivals Heartstopper in its cuteness and appeal.

THE BREAKUP LISTS

out to investigate sound like a scary proposition even to himself. McGowan adds both a creepy, hooded stranger and a recently vanished local gangster (famous for his flashy Rolex) to the mix and dishes up a pair of wild nocturnal expeditions for the close-knit siblings. Everything culminates in a near-drowning, a successful retrieval of the watch, and (thankfully) a corpsefree explanation for its presence. Better yet, the boys’ father announces that he’s tracked down contact information for their long-departed mother, further lifting the buoyant ending of this engaging, concise, and accessibly written novel. The English cast largely reads white.

Equal parts horror and hilarity in a rousing aquatic escapade. (Fiction.

13-18)

Rook McGowan, Anthony | Union Square & Co. (128 pp.) | $9.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9781454954804 | Series: Everyone Can Be a Reader

Adolescent riptides test bonds of both friendship and kinship in this third of four loosely linked tales, following 2024’s Pike.

Sharing several members of its largely white English cast and a few plot elements with earlier outings (but well able to stand on its own), this simply written episode starts with another animal rescue. Fourteen-year-old Nicky and his intellectually disabled older brother, Kenny, interrupt a sparrow hawk that’s ripping into a rook, and they take the

wounded bird home to nurse. But the story really focuses on Nicky’s suddenly rocky emotional state and his uncontrolled outbursts. The frantic, bloody attack is first relayed from the rook’s point of view, and as a result, Nicky’s narrative inherits a visceral immediacy that it never loses. The story follows the escalating consequences for Nicky of his simmering anger, a too-ready mouth, and a mad crush on classmate Sarah, which include expulsion from school and heavy doses of guilt for offending his friends, his dad, his dad’s terrific lady friend, and even his loyal and loving brother. Eventually, though, Nicky does get a grip on himself and, with the insight that our lives are the stories we tell ourselves and others, he resolutely sets out to mend fences. By the time the rook has nearly healed enough to fly, Nicky even has Sarah laughing with him. This brief, gripping novel will appeal even to reluctant readers.

A heartening message for readers buffeted by gusts of hormonal Sturm und Drang. (Fiction. 13-18)

Lark McGowan, Anthony | Illus. by Nick Hayes Union Square & Co. (120 pp.) | $9.99 paper April 2, 2024 | 9781454954781 Series: Everyone Can Be a Reader

Brothers with a history of rescuing animals need rescuing themselves.

McGowan pulls his quartet of linked episodes together with a final, brilliant twist in this stand-alone series capper that follows Rook (2024). An easy day FEBRUARY 1, 2024

151

1/8/24 5:13 PM

>>>

Y O U N G A D U LT

hike over a deserted Yorkshire moor in search of larks with Tina, their Jack Russell terrier, turns into a life-or-death struggle for Nicky and his developmentally disabled big brother, Kenny, after a sudden snowstorm drives them off the marked path, and Nicky breaks his leg in a fall. As river waters rise and night and the temperature begin to fall, Nicky forces his reluctant brother to set out for help. As in the previous outings, the close, loving bond between the brothers—one fiercely protective, the other kind and loyal to the core—shines out from Nicky’s simply phrased narrative. The boys demonstrate tender attentions to one another and have hilarious exchanges (such as about the consequences of peeing in freezing temperatures), and Nicky shares distracting yarns about a legendary shape-shifting monster of the moors and the time their dad tried to roast a whole, undressed pheasant. The story follows the boys’ agonizing efforts to move to a safer elevation, the onset of hypothermia, and the arrival of rescue workers, and it concludes with a bittersweet epilogue set 40 years later. Teens will be drawn in by the authentic, atmospheric storytelling in this series, designed to be accessible to reluctant and struggling readers. Main characters are cued white.

A strong, funny, wrenching series finish. (Fiction. 13-18)

Censorship: What Is It and How Does It Impact Society?

Mooney, Carla | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 9781678207267

A well-organized, balanced, and up-to-date introduction to a complex topic.

Limiting her book’s scope to the U.S., Mooney explains what is not protected by “the right to free speech” (for example, sedition and incitement to violence). She discusses obscenity, defamation, and symbolic 152

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 152

speech, reminding readers that private entities may restrict speech. A chapter on book bans features cases where increasingly organized conservative censors, targeting content about race, gender expression, and sexual orientation, frame their actions as worries over children’s innocence. She also cites liberal concerns over insensitive content in some classics.

A chapter on classroom controversies describes efforts to limit discussions of divisive issues in federally funded institutions, raises questions about what “age-appropriate” means, and touches on the clash between historical complexity and these laws’ vagueness. The following chapter, “Censoring Online Speech, Misinformation, and Disinformation,” delves into the challenges of moderating content in an online environment, including how difficult it can be to determine what information is false, as attested to by changing expert opinions on the Covid-19 lab-leak theory. The final chapter considers the question of “cancel culture,” framed by some as accountability and by others as censorship; Mooney explores its potential encouragement of self-censorship and related topics. Given the work’s brevity, some important details and context are omitted, but this is an accessible overview, enhanced by photographs and useful text boxes.

Offers no easy answers but plenty of material to begin a discussion. (picture credits, source notes, organizations and websites, further research, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Exploring Goddesses of World Mythology Nardo, Don | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 | 9781678207304

Mythical goddesses, kept alive through storytelling, have long held power and meaning for cultures throughout the world.

Nardo explores the stories of female deities through five specific themes, opening with a

chapter on mother goddesses before introducing goddesses of nature, death, war, and love. The text provides brief, general information about a variety of figures originating from Roman, Greek, Chinese, Hindu, Polynesian, Norse, and Aztec cultures, among others. Colorful illustrations and photos add visual interest to the pages, while descriptive captions provide context for each image.

Informative text boxes throughout provide additional tidbits of knowledge.

Similarly, brief selections relay the tales of goddesses, some of whom aren’t included elsewhere in the book; these selections may prove distracting due to their length and interruption of the main text. The book lacks a concluding chapter to tie everything together. Nardo quotes some experts, such as Edith Hamilton, but other sources and recommended reading are less-than-credible websites. The framing of some content is also questionable: For example, Nardo writes that Medusa “secretly made love” to Poseidon, reframing the story of his rape of her in a troubling way. A critical lens is necessary when sorting through the information provided in the book, making this a poor choice for research.

An overview of goddesses that requires readers to don a critical lens due to the unreliability of some sources and passages. (source notes, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

Exploring Egyptian Mythology Nardo, Don | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 | 9781678207281

A fresh edition of the author’s ever-useful overview of Egyptian myth and legend, rearranged and featuring some new content.

From the “dynamic duo” of Khnum and Amun-Ra to the giant snake Apep and the “dual-gendered fertility god” Hapi, crowds of deities and “creepy monsters” parade through Nardo’s KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

analytical summaries. His insistence in the rewritten introduction and elsewhere that the ancient Egyptians saw the gods and their deeds as historical seems at odds with mentions elsewhere of “symbolic” representations in art and conflicting variations in local creation myths and pantheons.

Still, readers able to weather his short discourses on cosmogonies and zoomorphs will enjoy the relish with which he recounts, for instance, how evil Seth chopped brother Osiris into “bloody morsels,” the awful vengeance cowheaded Hathor wrought on the “mere humans” who “disrespected” her father Ra, and how she rescued blinded Horus after Seth was able to “get the drop on him.” The image chosen to portray the tale of Seth and Osiris unfortunately features Seth as a brutish, black-skinned man and evokes racist caricatures; other images show ancient artifacts and sites.

In this edition, a chapter on Egyptian myths in modern culture has been switched out for one that’s less likely to go stale, thrillingly titled “Serpents, Soul Eaters, and Other Monsters,” and the resource lists at the end have been updated as well.

Serviceable both for introducing the topic and for replacing a lost or worn copy of an earlier version. (source notes, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

Exploring Gods of World Mythology Nardo, Don | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 | 9781678207328

A survey that offers a storytelling rather than instructional approach to timeless figures from many cultures.

Nardo adds another entry to his books on mythology, organizing his subject thematically to cover gods of creation, the sky, nature, war, wisdom, and death. (There is no chapter on love.) The introduction contains a concise and dramatic account KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 153

of the Olympians’ succession struggle.

Since myths are multivalent, there is some overlap: A weather-controlling sky god, like Ukko from Finland, might also be a dispenser of justice. Nardo skillfully selects from the abundant material to present key scenes, typically the liveliest and those with parallels to other narratives around the world. Although Athena makes several appearances, most of the deities here are male, and there is no mention of, for example, Gaia, Shakti, Kali, Freya, or Frigg. Nardo references several theories about the worldwide development of these stories (the word primitive is unfortunately used to describe ancient myth-making societies). A rare misstep is the mangled account of Tyr’s deliberate (not random) sacrifice of his hand, but most information is accurate. Selected Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindu, Celtic, Hittite, Egyptian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Finnish, Norse, Aztec, Igbo, Zulu, Polynesian, and Persian myths are included.

Nardo occasionally supplies relevant bits of ancient hymns. Stock images, many in color, brighten the pages. Some of the references are quite recent.

A wide-ranging starting point that could inspire further acquaintance with these cultural treasures. (source notes, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

If Only I Had Told Her Nowlin, Laura | Sourcebooks Fire (416 pp.) | $12.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024 9781728276229

In this companion novel to 2013’s If He Had Been With Me, three characters tell their sides of the story.

Finn’s narrative starts three days before his death. He explores the progress of his unrequited love for best friend Autumn up until the day he finally expresses his feelings. Finn’s story ends with his tragic death, which leaves his close friends devastated, unmoored, and uncertain

For another YA read that explores grief, visit Kirkus online.

how to go on. Jack’s section follows, offering a heartbreaking look at what it’s like to live with grief. Jack works to overcome the anger he feels toward Sylvie, the girlfriend Finn was breaking up with when he died, and Autumn, the girl he was preparing to build his life around (but whom Jack believed wasn’t good enough for Finn). But when Jack sees how Autumn’s grief matches his own, it changes their understanding of one another. Autumn’s chapters trace her life without Finn as readers follow her struggles with mental health and balancing love and loss. Those who have read the earlier book will better connect with and feel for these characters, particularly since they’ll have a more well-rounded impression of Finn. The pain and anger is well written, and the novel highlights the most troublesome aspects of young adulthood: overconfidence sprinkled with heavy insecurities, fear-fueled decisions, bad communication, and brash judgments. Characters are cued white.

A heavy read about the harsh realities of tragedy and their effects on those left behind. (author’s note, content warning) (Fiction. 14-18)

The Kill Factor Oliver, Ben | Chicken House/Scholastic (368 pp.) | $19.99 | April 16, 2024 9781338891850

Youthful offenders face a deadly reality show in a social media–driven future.

Sixteen-year-old Emerson Ness doesn’t know who lit a match while she carried out a robbery, but she was caught at the scene and faces arson and manslaughter charges. >>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

153

1/8/24 5:13 PM

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 154

1/8/24 5:13 PM

B O O K T O S C R E E N // Y O U N G A D U LT

Book to Screen

Tommy Dorfman Will Direct Laura Dean Film

Dorfman: Bryan Bedder/WWD via Getty Images; Prince-Bythewood: Arnold Turner/Getty Images for Essence

The 13 Reasons Why star is helming an adaptation of Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novel.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is headed to the big screen with Tommy Dorfman on board to direct, Deadline reports.

The film will be based on the graphic novel written

by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. The book, published in 2019 by First Second, tells the story of Freddy, a 17-year-old girl in love with the titular Laura Dean, who is the dictionary defitnition of a bad girlfriend. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a triumphant queer coming-of-age story that will make your heart ache and soar.”

Children of Blood and Bone Film Gets Director Gina Prince-Bythewood will helm the adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s young adult fantasy novel.

The film adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone has found its director.

Gina Prince-Bythewood will helm the film based on the bestselling young adult fantasy novel, Deadline reports.

Adeyemi’s book, published in 2018 by Henry Holt, tells the story of Zélie Adebola, a 17-year-old with magical powers who battles against an evil prince seeking to eradicate magic from the kingdom of Orïsha.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 155

The novel, the first in a projected trilogy, became a New York Times bestseller shortly after its release; in a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called it “powerful, captivating, and raw.” It was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in young readers’ literature.

The second book in the series, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, was released in 2019, with the final installment, Children of Anguish and Anarchy, scheduled for publication this June.

The adaptation, written

by Tamaki, will be helmed

by Dorfman, the actor known for her roles in the series 13 Reasons Why, Jane the Virgin, and American Princess.

Dorfman is also directing a film adaptation of Mason Deaver’s young adult novel I Wish You All the Best.

“Mariko’s script adaptation is just as groundbreaking as her deeply moving graphic novel,” Dorfman said. “This film is like the lovechild of John Hughes and Jamie [Babbit] with a fresh and honest perspective on love and queer chosen family. Reading the script for the first time, I was transported into the layered world she created and I can’t wait to bring this story to life for everybody to enjoy.”—M.S.

Prince-Bythewood is known for helming films including Love & Basketball, The Secret Life of Bees, and, most recently, The Woman King. She confirmed her involvement with the upcoming film on Instagram, writing, “Humbled, grateful and so so

Gina PrinceBythewood

For a review of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, visit Kirkus online.

Tommy Dorfman

excited to play in the incredible world @tomiadeyemi has created. Sincerely appreciate the trust.”

Adeyemi also posted about the film on Instagram, writing, “so many of you have been on this journey with me for so long. believe me when i tell you that we could not be in more talented, dedicated, and masterful hands.”—M.S.

For a review of Children of Blood and Bone, visit Kirkus online.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

155

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

She’s offered a spot on a reality game show promising fame and freedom to the winner—and life in solitary for everyone else. Desperate to provide for her younger brother, Kester, a deaf tech prodigy, Emerson caves and accepts. In this future world, class is literally stratified: The poor, like the Nesses, live in the Burrows beneath the elite Topsiders’ homes, and riches are awarded based on one’s social media follower count. The game show, Retribution Island, hinges not just on challenges but on popularity; Emerson knows her only hope is competing well enough to avoid public votes, especially since some of her fellow competitors are polished Topsiders, rather than Burrowers who committed crimes of desperation driven by inequalities in the system. The social commentary, openly discussed and integral to the plot, never gets in the way of the action or the story’s flow. Once the show’s true nature is revealed, the brutal action hits in viscerally grotesque sequences.

Even the less sympathetic competitors are humanized, with the book highlighting traumas. Emerson reads white; names signal some ethnic diversity in the supporting cast, and a fat character is portrayed in a body-positive way. The ending screams for a sequel.

Compulsively readable; stands out among other works with similar premises. (Dystopian. 12-18)

The No-Girlfriend Rule Randall, Christen | Atheneum (336 pp.) $19.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781665939812

Radical statement: Girls like nerdy things, too.

Covington, Kentucky, high school senior Hollis Beckwith wants to join her boyfriend Chris’ weekly Secrets & Sorcery tabletop gaming sessions.

But the group has a hard-and-fast No-Girlfriend Rule. Frustrated, Hollis finds another S&S group via a flyer at the local game shop, one specifically 156

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 156

billed as a “girl-friendly, LGBTQIA+ friendly campaign.” Even though her anxiety disorder makes it hard for her to step out of her well-established comfort zone, the first in-person session goes well, and Hollis comes away with a new character and a new perspective on the game. What began as a desire to have something more in common with Chris becomes an outlet through which Hollis finds valuable things she hasn’t had before—confidence, artistic inspiration, and relationships that are more honest and open. Though Randall sometimes casually switches into game play scenes, the focus in this fun story that steadily blooms is very much on the players themselves. The narrative shows a variety of different types of gamers, and it calls out some of the toxic assumptions and gatekeeping associated with the community. Hollis and Chris are white.

Hollis is fat and feels good about her body; members of her all-girls’ campaign party include a trans Black girl, two Colombian American sisters, and a lesbian with South Asian heritage.

are central to democracy. Readers are also introduced to ways that voting has been disrupted: for example, through voter suppression directed at Black Southerners that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The closing chapter emphasizes how young people can be actively involved in saving American democracy by becoming involved, informed, media-literate citizens who work to expand voter turnout and speak up for what they believe in.

Using personal stories, well-placed and timely photos, and statistics that highlight the full political spectrum, this text explores how preserving American democracy, including the principles of the “freedom to vote and express political opinions,” depends on people working together “for the good of society.” Rockler takes a challenging time in American history and through a professionally researched publication challenges youths: “Do not give up.”

Many readers will feel seen in these pages. (Fiction. 14-18)

An excellent starting point for teens to learn about a critical issue. (source notes, organizations and websites, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

American Democracy in Crisis

The Facts About Election and Voter Fraud

Rockler, Naomi | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 9781678207229

Rockler, Naomi | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 9781678207342

An overview of polarization in American political life.

The necessity of a peaceful transition of power, the personal impact of living in a polarized nation, the rapid spread of misinformation, and the threat of extremist violence are among the topics explored in this informational book about issues that have placed U.S. democracy in a state of crisis. Through a carefully scaffolded design, the author explains how the actions of rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, represent “a threat to democracy” grounded in an erosion of norms that

As Rockler asserts, “Many Americans—including legislators—overestimate how common voter and election fraud are”; she then uses careful documentation to prove her point.

After a brief description of a 2021 case of voter fraud in Georgia—in which a man forged someone’s signature on a misdelivered ballot and was sentenced to prison for voting twice—the author describes the Heritage Foundation’s documentation of voter fraud cases.

But the think tank’s own statistics show how extremely rare it is. This concise overview opens by covering the KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

distinction between voter fraud, which involves individuals defying electoral law, versus election fraud, which includes destroying or miscounting ballots, tampering with voting machines, or paying people to vote for a specific candidate. One memorably humorous example involves a Montana man who registered to vote as Miguel Raton—or Mickey Mouse. The chapters that follow contain an abundance of information, including quotations from election experts, discussions in some states about tightening anti-fraud measures, the disproportionate impact of voter ID laws on Black citizens, the history of voting machines, safeguards against fraud, cybersecurity concerns regarding online voting, and more. A text box describes Dominion Voting Systems’ successful defamation lawsuit in the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The text is accessibly written, and the book’s layout is appealing, making this a strong choice for teens wishing to learn about this important topic.

Highly recommended. (source notes, organizations and websites, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Move: How Physical Activity Helps Maintain Mental Health Roland, James | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $32.95 | Jan. 1, 2024 9781678207366

Using an encouraging coaching tone, Roland urges readers to bolster their health through exercise.

As the writer reminds us from the start, the connection between exercise and better health—mental as well as physical—is well established.

Endorsing both individual and team activities for their different benefits, Roland backs the title’s imperative: Just move. Numerous quotations from specialists and also from young people offer expert and peer support. Colorful KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 157

blocks of text explain key terms, such as mental health, and sidebars highlight meaningful quotes. When scientific language is used, the meaning is clear in context. The author also stresses connections between diet, sleep, and exercise, but his main focus is on how moving can help alleviate, or avoid, suffering from depression, stress, and anxiety (though Roland takes care to note that depression can afflict even professional athletes, and that serious depression requires treatment). Practical suggestions for actually getting exercise occupy almost half the book. Many color photos of active, smiling, racially diverse young people help to sell the idea that exercising is cool and fun.

There are no photos of anyone with a visible disability or who’s fat exercising, though obesity is mentioned in the text, as is volunteering with Special Olympics and exercising with disabilities.

A sensible, clear, evidence-backed overview of how and why to exercise. (source notes, organizations and websites, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

We Are Mayhem Rourke-Mooney, Beck | Feiwel & Friends (320 pp.) | $19.99 | March 19, 2024 9781250836595

Wrestling, taxidermy, and gender all are woven into one storyline about fitting in after relocating.

Thanks to Mom’s “mid-life crisis,” Birdie

For another fun queer sports story, visit Kirkus online.

and her family have moved to the mountains in upstate New York where Dad grew up, leaving behind New Jersey, where Birdie was an intensely competitive gymnast. But her coach had informed her that her body was growing too big for elite gymnastics, so now Birdie’s contemplating joining cheerleading with summer best friend Lexie. After a late-night prank at Mostly Bones, the local taxidermy shop, goes wrong, Birdie is forced to work off her debt to the shop owner, famous wrestling legend Mad Mabel, the Mother of Mayhem. Meanwhile, she befriends Abigail Rose, Mabel’s granddaughter, whose passion for reviving a feminist version of Mabel’s brand convinces Birdie to join all-female wrestling squad the Future of Mayhem. The wrestling worldbuilding is robust but can be clunky and hard to follow at times.

The short chapters feature visceral, detailed language and laugh-out-loudfunny dialogue. Charming tropes and captivating characters enhance the solid pacing, though a feud between two factions ends with an unbelievably easy resolution. Birdie’s coming out as nonbinary (she/they) is sweet, is lovingly received by friends and family, and provides an important reflection for teens everywhere who are struggling with big questions around gender identity. Major characters read white; the supporting cast includes racial diversity.

A wild, weird, and fun romp. (playlist, suggested reading) (Fiction. 14-18)

Hollis finds confidence, artistic inspiration, and relationships that are more honest and open.

THE NO-GIRLFRIEND RULE

>>> FEBRUARY 1, 2024

157

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

Kirkus Star

Just Another Story: A Graphic Migration Account Saade, Ernesto | Graphic Universe (216 pp.) | $17.99 paper | April 2, 2024 9798765623367

Ten years after arriving in America, a man tells the author, his cousin, the story of his perilous journey out of El Salvador.

Overworked, struggling to make ends meet, and unable to see a future for her son in El Salvador, in 2006, Carlos’ mother made the desperate decision to use coyotes to help her reach America.

Fearing what might happen to her on the way, teenage Carlos decided to go, too. Despite their fears and grief over leaving loved ones behind, mother and son embarked on the long, dangerous trek. The narrative alternates between Carlos’ vivid and sometimes harrowing recollections and serene images of him narrating his experiences to Saade. The story offers remarkable insights into Carlos’ inner life and gives him agency over how his story is told; Saade is enthralled, even though Carlos comments, “Nobody would want to read about this. It’s just another story…”

Powerful vignettes weave the epic odyssey of one family’s migration while highlighting the risks and sacrifices undertaken daily by migrants searching for the American dream. The striking illustrations deftly convey complex emotions and poignant symbolism.

The skillful use of color highlights important moments and distinguishes past and present; defying typical genre conventions, the past is rendered in a vibrant spectrum of colors, while the present-day conversations with Saade use a minimal and muted palette, underscoring how Carlos’ memories haven’t faded with time.

Memorably elucidates real experiences in graphic detail through empathetic text and visuals. (family tree) (Graphic nonfiction. 13-18) 158

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 158

The striking illustrations deftly convey complex emotions.

J U ST AN OTH E R STO RY

To a Darker Shore Schwartz, Leanne | Page Street (400 pp.) $18.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9781645678403

A fat, autistic teen risks her life to save her kingdom and the boy she loves.

In Soladisa, young people are sacrificed to the monster Teras to protect the citizens from its wrath for another season. When shepherdess Alesta’s best friend, Kyrian, the presumed heir to the throne, is sacrificed, she longs for revenge. She sets off for the island of Orroccio, where Teras dwells, to kill the beast and end the sacrifices once and for all—a feat others have attempted in vain. There, Alesta is surprised to learn that Kyr lives, albeit in a new and monstrous form, and as the two travel deeper into the monster’s domain, they discover unexpected truths about their world. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, the story offers a fresh take on monster tales, neatly demonstrating the ways monstrousness and humanity are two sides of the same coin. Equally fascinating is the fantastical world the characters occupy, which has clear parallels to our own world and where reality and the official truth do not always align. Alesta and Kyr, who present as autistic, are easy heroes to root for, well drawn and compelling in their matching stubbornness and authentic care for each other. Alesta’s journey, from internalizing hateful comments about her body to accepting it as it is, is nuanced and affirming. Alesta and Kyr have tan skin;

queer love stories play important roles in the narrative.

Rich worldbuilding and lovable characters make this trip to hell worthwhile. (content warnings) (Fantasy. 14-18)

Rebel Skies Sei Lin, Ann | Tundra Books (360 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 13, 2024 | 9781774883983 Series: Rebel Skies, 1

Kitchen helper Kurara, who works in the floating castle Midori and has memories she can’t unlock, finds herself on a quest to restore her best friend’s body following a disaster.

In this Japanese-inspired fantasy, the sky-dwelling Sorabito people and the groundlings (who form the middle strata of society) live under the rule of the Emperor, whose throne is being fought over by Prince Ugetsu and Princess Tsukimi. The princess is obsessed with Crafters, those who can control shikigami, or sentient animal beings made of folded paper; some Crafters serve the imperial family. Kurara’s world is shattered when, shortly before the Midori is destroyed, a stranger named Himura tells her she’s a Crafter just like him.

Following the crash, Haru, Kurara’s best friend, is revealed to be a rare human shikigami. Although most of Haru burns up, Himura saves his core, informing Kurara that if she impresses the princess, she’ll be able to access records available only to the royal family that will allow her to rebuild Haru’s body. Kurara trains with Himura aboard the Sorabito ship the Orihime. Working with her challenges Himura’s ingrained belief that shikigami exist merely to serve Crafters. Engrossing revelations are interspersed throughout this debut, which deftly toggles between multiple viewpoints, exploring Kurara’s position as she’s caught between a Sorabito rebellion, an assassination plot, and a predatory princess, all while trying to decipher her own fragmented memories.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:13 PM

Y O U N G A D U LT

A deliciously edgy plot and lingering mysteries will leave readers eager for the sequel. (map, glossary) (Fantasy.

12-17)

Lady Sunflower: stories, songs, and poems from the desk of kill.gertrude Shuck-Sparer, Sierra | Illus. by Chloe Tyler Flowerpot Press (172 pp.) | $15.99 paper March 12, 2024 | 9781486729869

A young Knoxville, Tennessee, woman chronicles living with the life-threatening brain cancer she names Gertrude.

In 2018, bright, ambitious Shuck-Sparer, then 15 and a competitive swimmer and ice skater, was diagnosed with high-risk medulloblastoma, a brain cancer that required grueling surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy. After initially undergoing surgery and seven months of chemotherapy in Memphis, Sierra relapsed, endured another round of treatment during her senior year of high school, graduated on time, and then headed to Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech. When the Covid-19 pandemic sank her original dream of visiting Japan on a trip sponsored by the Make-a-Wish Foundation, she pivoted to using her wish to create this memoir of life with Gertrude, which she’d been chronicling on her Instagram account, kill.gertrude. This work is enlivened by wry comments on treatment protocols and practical tips for surviving them, along with Tyler’s black-and-white illustrations. Rants and laments, rhymed and studded with bitter humor, give way to plangent sorrow for a lost future, like the fallen hair on her pillow, which Shuck-Sparer captures with a lint roller: “It comes right off, as if it is dust. // Somedays I feel like I am dust, / Fighting against the wind to stay where I am.” By turns passionate, wistful, furious, heartbroken, and courageous, the author has a message for readers: “I want to put enough of myself into KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 159

the world so that when I’m gone, you’ll remember me.” Mission accomplished.

Haunting. (Verse memoir. 12-18)

Rules for Rule Breaking Tucker, Talia | Kokila (304 pp.) | $18.99 March 19, 2024 | 9780593624753

When two teen rivals reluctantly take a road trip together, all the rules are broken.

Sixteen-yearold Winter Park and 17-year-old Bobby Bae are not friends. Their parents might have become close, bonding as the only Koreans in their North Carolina town, and they might have similar high-achieving goals, but given the choice, Winter would have nothing to do with Bobby. The nemeses even have established rules of engagement to ensure minimal interaction. So, when the parental Parks and Baes set the condition that their kids are only allowed to head north for college visits this summer if they travel as a pair, they’re met with immense displeasure and protest. Winter’s halmeoni encourages them to take the unsupervised trip as an opportunity to actually be kids: “You are already the best. Try to be something else.” So, the normally uptight pair agree on a truce—naturally with some ground rules to cover their (occasionally illegal) shenanigans.

Forced to actually spend time together, Winter and Bobby realize that although they know a lot about each other, they don’t actually know one another.

Tucker’s debut is full of fun, slow-burn, romantic comedy Hallmark moments.

While their budding romance is at the center of the story, they also work on mending relationships with friends and family. Through her protagonists, Tucker thoughtfully explores various facets of Korean American teenagers’ lives. The secondary cast includes additional racial diversity.

A thoughtful coming-of-age story filled with rom-com cuteness. (Fiction.

12-17)

Chronically Dolores Van Wagenen, Maya | Dutton (320 pp.) $18.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9780525426820

During the summer before high school, a nominally Catholic teen finds that she can relate to martyred saints.

Dolores Mendoza’s family is struggling financially, and her parents’ marriage is imploding.

A year ago, she was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis after a bladder accident made her a pariah. Then Mexican American Dolores meets Terpsichore Berkenbosch-Jones, who is autistic and reads white.

Terpsichore wants to fake a friendship to prove to her helicopter mom that she’s capable of attending public school and can stop home schooling. The answer to their problems seems clear: Dolores will win back her former best friend, and Terpsichore will win her independence. What could go wrong?

Dolores’ chronic illness frequently causes trouble for herself, and a vein of wry humor and dramatics runs through her everyday interactions.

Her creative first-person narration includes transcripts from her confessional conversations with a priest, mock telenovela scripts (complete with scene directions), and her reviews of local bathrooms.

Dolores is in an ongoing standoff with her illness and comes to no pat resolutions about her body, instead approaching her illness in a way that feels true to her character and to being 14. Self-actualized and incisive Terpsichore’s journey and the girls’ increasingly non-fake friendship feel earned, and the affectionately combative dynamics between the Mendoza family, in particular between Dolores and her Tía Vera and older brother Mateo, are strong.

An insightful, funny, and realistic coming-of-age story. (author’s note) (Fiction. 12-18) FEBRUARY 1, 2024

>>> 159

1/8/24 5:13 PM

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 160

1/8/24 5:13 PM

B O O K L I S T // Y O U N G A D U LT

6 Reads To Banish the Winter Doldrums

1

2

3

4

1 The Immortal Games

5

By Annaliese Avery

A fun, fast-paced tale set in the perennially popular world of Greek mythology.

2 So Let Them Burn

By Kamilah Cole

An engaging new voice and a Caribbean-inspired fantasy to savor.

3 A Place for Vanishing

By Ann Fraistat

A compelling, darkly creative, and intensely haunting examination of the masks we wear.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124_KR_YA_RD5.indd 161

6

4 Sky’s End

By Marc J. Gregson

A thrilling and brilliantly realized series opener; readers will clamor for the next installment.

5 A Drop of Venom

By Sajni Patel

A gripping, magical tale of sisterhood and strength.

6 The Invocations

By Krystal Sutherland

For more YA books to liven up your reading list, visit Kirkus online.

A thrilling and exquisitely grotesque showcase of young women taking charge.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

161

1/8/24 5:14 PM

Indie CONSIDERING THAT

water makes up the majority of our bodies and our planet, we don’t usually give it much thought until we have too much or too little of it. But one way or another, water—whether we’re talking about the melting polar ice caps, rising seas and flooding, shifting ocean currents, water rights and the right to water, or hurricanes—will be taking center stage for the foreseeable future. In these three starred titles, indie authors have written eloquently about water, including protecting the Colorado River system, swimming for 700-plus kilometers off the coast of Ireland, and making a variety of fluid connections.

In Living River, conservationist and photographer Dave Showalter explains why the Colorado River system needs our protection.

The Colorado not only provides water for more than 40 million people, says Showalter, but it also irrigates the farms that grow nearly all of the United States’ winter produce.

162

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 162

But the legal rights to the river are more than a century old and need revision. “With climate change driving the worst drought in 1,200 years and population growth exacerbating an unsustainable demand for its water, the Colorado is shrinking fast, and the reservoirs behind its dams are at historic lows. If the river and its tributaries dry up, the consequences for the people and wildlife that rely on the watershed will be catastrophic,” says our reviewer. The book, which depicts the beauty of the river and also proposes solutions for saving it, is “an informative examination and celebration of the beautiful and endangered Colorado

River and its importance for people and wildlife.”

Alan Corcoran’s memoir Unsinkable: Cancer, Five Boats, and My 500 710-Kilometre Sea Swim charts his charity swim around the coast of Ireland in memory of his father.

Swimming the gelid, rough Irish coast took months of tolerance training; lap swimming in an indoor pool wasn’t nearly enough to prepare him for the “one hundred metres of icy blackness [that] tflowed beneath me.” Our reviewer notes that Corcoran is a fine writer, especially when describing the sea’s numerous challenges, including powerful rip currents and “sharp spears of rain [puncturing] the water like bullets.” Our reviewer says, “The memoir not only details the athleticism necessary to accomplish his ambitious goals, but also defines Corcoran’s endeavors as affecting, determined

efforts to work through grief and to channel his anger and negativity surrounding the loss of his father into a physical challenge.”

In the poetry collection Waves, PJ Thomas explores literal and metaphorical connections to waves and water: “I need fluidity, / so the waves can pass through me; / waves of the moon rays / glinting from the bay, / the song in the poplars, / and the silvery wind / playing across the wheat tops.” Thomas also writes about the flora and fauna along Ontario’s Otonabee River, not far from the author’s home (“Crickets sing through the dusk / that comes so much earlier now”). Our reviewer calls the work a “sublime poetry collection with a simple message: Embrace the ebb and flow of existence.”

Chaya Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

IMMERSIVE WORKS ABOUT WATER

CHAYA SCHECHNER

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:04 PM

INDIE

EDITOR’S PICK A new volume of Nin’s prolific diaries reveals the last obsession of her life: her public image.

Despite dying nearly 47 years ago, the erotic writer and archetypal diarist Anaïs Nin still has more to say.

Her seminal diaries were not published until 1966, a decade before her death from cervical cancer, and started from 1931, so readers have always come to her story in media res. This final volume, edited by Herron, recounts her life post-diaries publication, transformed by both fame and illness.

As noted in the book’s introduction, “No later than the 1930s Nin believed that the record of her life as presented in the journal merited publication,” but “these texts raise questions they do not answer.” Here Herron provides, if not answers, some scaffolding

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 163

upon which to hang an assessment of an interiority tailored and revised for public consumption. These are not the ribald chronicles of her earlier works; rather, readers see Nin contending with how the wider world receives her work, and thus her. The text includes letters between Nin and her agent, Gunther Stuhlmann, over payments and scheduling and tender exchanges with her first husband, Hugh Guiler, as well as missives from various literary admirers from across the globe.

June and Henry Miller make appearances, but the most engrossing sections deal with Nin’s conception of herself as both public figure and product: “Everyone wants to see me…they need to know I am real—that I am my work.

When I tell them it is all in the work they do not quite accept that; I think I am

168

The Teenage Guide to Success

By Colton Fidelman

A Joyous Transformation: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966-1977 Nin, Anaïs; edited by Paul Herron Sky Blue Press | 375 pp. $29.95 | $22.95 paper | Oct. 15, 2023 9781735745985 | 9781735745954 paper

withdrawing from public life because it focuses entirely on an idealized Anaïs.” Nin obscures her worsening health—her cancer, glibly announced with “Kaiser gives diagnosis of cancer,” was detected in 1970 but remains largely unaddressed until the final years of her

168

The House on Sun Street

By Mojgan Ghazirad

170

Burned Out to Lit Up

By Cara E. Houser

163

A Joyous Transformation

By Anaïs Nin; edited by Paul Herron

life. Nin’s greatest fear was to be parted from all the love she had accumulated—if only readers of today, decades removed, could reassure her that, to them, she remains very much alive.

A shrewd examination of fame, fortune, and love by a literary giant.

178

Step by Step!

By Debbie Rigaud & Carlotta Penn; illus. by Nysha Lilly

178

179

Cooperative Co-Parenting for Secure Kids

By Aurisha Smolarski

Drowning in the Desert

By Bernard Schopen

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

163

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

Willow’s Run Bockstael, Robert | Pender Lake Press (404 pp.) | $24.99 | $15.99 paper May 10, 2022 | 9781778011214 9781778011207 paper

A woman fleeing from her cruel husband lands in a place that’s no stranger to violence.

In Bockstael’s debut novel, Alcima “the Willow” Willoughby is on the run in the “Excited States” after stealing her abusive dot-com millionaire husband’s beloved luxury RV. She plans a Thelma & Louise–style ending for the camper after quickly exiting the motorhome. But the 6-foot, 6-inch former Olympic volleyball star’s plans are thwarted when Fall River Police Sgt. Terry Gansworth finds her in violation of “a whole stack of local and state ordinances.”

While she’s following the officer’s car to an overnight rest stop, her RV becomes unbalanced and overturns, and Alcima finds herself stuck temporarily in Fall River. While she’s in the small town, the local police promise to keep her husband, Reg White, from finding her. He’s a monster, and Fall River is home to something far more terrifying that scuttles with the multitude of rats below the town’s quaint movie theater, bank, and Carnegie library. The theater’s owner, Don Anderson, disappears. A light goes on in the library after it’s been locked for the night. The librarian, widower Booker Thompson, is on alert when he hears thumps on the stairs after hours, and someone rifles through the Local History Room. But Booker balances trepidation with romance after he falls hard for Alcima. There’s a lot to unpack in this story, which might have benefited from jettisoning the Reg subplot and concentrating on the mysterious, malevolent events in Fall River. A sadistic serial killer/ voyeur—one who enjoys the thought of poisoned “rats twitching and bleeding and dying of thirst”—will 164

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 164

hold the audience’s attention. Other characters are well drawn, too. Cases in point: Alcima is strong, cocky, and sexy; Booker is scarred and sad, and for good reason. An example of smart dialogue: “‘She’s a bit desperate. Does me favors from time to time.’ ‘Define desperate.’ ‘Poor.’” The descriptions of the workings of a former performing arts theater, now a cinema, are particularly well crafted.

A suspenseful page-turner about the evil lurking in a small town.

Grasshopper Dreams Boyd, K. Lucius | Fulton Books (98 pp.) | $14.95 paper | Sept. 27, 2023 9798887315782

A collection of poetry offers a journey through the heart of the American South.

Amid the South’s lush landscape lies a world of stark contradictions— gentility and oppression, violence and faith. The South’s culture, with dialects and traditions that enrich daily life, leaves its imprint on all who call the region home. Through 39 poems, Boyd explores the mysteries of darkness and light that shaped his Southern relatives, who settled in Virginia in the 1600s and fled to Florida in the 1860s with the fall of their plantation. Grouping his poetry under the themes of “Southern Life,” “Wild Life,” and “Spirit Life,” the author reveals these elements to be deeply connected, representing the threads of his own odyssey. Opening with a glimpse at the travesty of slavery, Boyd examines the joys and sufferings of his family, childhood innocence, modern social values, troubled hearts, and the hope for salvation. But while unique facets of Southern life are spotlighted in the work, there is universal wisdom at its core, with verses in “A Proverb for Companionship” and “21 Beatitudes for the 21st Century” (“Treasured are the refugees, for they will be accepted into lands where their

families can find freedom, safety, and nourishment”) that remind readers of their shared human experiences and blessings. Page after page, Boyd offers a compilation of evocative and graceful poetry. Drawing on various structures and lengths, the author’s free verse is easy to follow and filled with relatable messages for a modern audience. Even readers without a Southern connection will enjoy poems like “If I Had My Druthers”—a tribute to the region’s slang and the colloquialisms of Boyd’s beloved mother (“Sometimes, I declare, if things were crooked, they were just catawampus”). This love of close family ties is evident throughout his poetry, with the author’s grandmother and grandfather prominently featured (“Grandpa Roy smoked a pipe with a cloudy sigh of sweetness / Pipe smoke still kindles my fragrant memories of his mellow heart”). And while this affection is commingled with the struggle of accepting the world’s darkness, the work’s overall tone is hopeful. Concluding with a section on people’s relationships with God, Boyd stresses the everlasting light that guides individuals through confusion to the promise of unity.

A beautifully crafted ode to the South and the redemptive power of faith.

Five Doors of Success: How To Build a Future Without Luck, Money, or Friends in High Places Candamo, Joshua | Self (259 pp.) $22.93 | $15.72 paper | Sept. 18, 2023 9798989067817 | 9798989067800 paper

Clear-eyed self-awareness, steadily honed expertise, sterling morals, and reliability are among the qualities necessary to succeed, according to Candamo’s self-help book.

In these pages, the author, an insurance company executive and entrepreneur, offers five key elements KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

A sleek, gripping thriller that raises important questions about truth and justice.

THE OTHER MURDER

for career success. They include solving “the mystery of you,” or taking a searching inventory of one’s personality traits to formulate realistic goals, and becoming a “jack of all trades, master of one,” amassing job skills and experience and then mastering specific expertise once one’s career path becomes clearer. Candamo also recommends realizing that “outside is inside”—a poetic phrase that suggests that one must balance external pressures to conform with one’s moral core. Managers should follow a “balanced” management style, he says, by setting clear expectations, coaching employees, and treating everyone fairly, and one should confirm that “your word is your bond” by delivering on promises.

Candamo offers practical advice on how to implement these precepts, such as cultivating self-awareness by making lists of strengths and weaknesses and then asking co-workers for feedback on their accuracy. He also notes that managers should beware of the “Ringelmann effect,” aka “social loafing,” in which hiring more employees to complete a task leads to employees working less hard. Candamo illustrates his ideas with anecdotes from his own eclectic career, which has included corporate management stints, ownership of a pet-management software startup, and leadership of a cigar manufacturer where he innovated by aging the product in charred whiskey barrels. Candamo’s limpid prose veers between crisp aphorisms (“Give people a license to hurt your feelings” when offering self-improvement feedback, he writes) and straightforward, homespun wisdom: “It wasn’t glamorous,” he recalls of his first job at Blockbuster Video in Florida after immigrating from Venezuela in 1998. “It was a KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 165

minimum-wage job. But it was a job nonetheless, and I was grateful for it.” Candamo’s focus on systematic self-improvement, shrewd analysis of social relationships, and exhortations toward upright behavior will make his book applicable to many readers’ lives.

A useful and thoughtful guide to laying the foundation of a fulfilling career.

Straitjackets and Lunch Money: A 10-Year-Old in a Psychosomatic Ward Cengel, Katya | Woodhall Press (340 pp.) | $19.95 paper | Sept. 5, 202 9781954907683

A journalist explores children’s mental health in this memoir.

In 1986, after a few years of being shuttled between her separated parents’ homes, Cengel was 10 years old and desperate to fix her father’s unhappiness. Her solution was to save the dollars she was given for lunch money, which resulted in her feeling pride for her sacrifice as she consistently refused to eat. By September 1986, the author was dangerously underweight and admitted to the Roth Psychosomatic Unit at the Children’s Hospital at Stanford University. Cengel examines the four months she spent in the unit in close detail, recounting being force-fed, making friends with other patients, and, perhaps most importantly, interacting with the staff.

The volume is not only concerned with those experiences, but also covers her life in recent years, switching back and forth. The author interviewed the

unit’s staff members and volunteered in youth-mentoring programs. Particularly intriguing are her conversations with Dr. Hans Steiner, who helped create Roth in the late ’70s in order to bring together medicine and psychiatry for children. Cengel writes with both distance and emotion when working through her story and investigating provisions for kids’ mental and social care, resulting in an absorbing account that makes compelling points about listening closely to children. While some of the gritty details, particularly about her own time at Roth, are quite difficult to read, they’re a stark reminder of the important people working in this field as well as a troubling lack of advancement. The memoir masterfully renders a personal story that casts a light on a neglected area of public health. Cengel successfully uses her journalistic skills to revisit this part of her life: “Now I can ask the questions I couldn’t as a child.”

A harrowing but engrossing examination of pediatric care for readers interested in psychology and health.

The Other Murder Chapman, Kevin G. | First Legacy Publishing (342 pp.) | $26.99 Sept. 26, 2023 | 9781958339190

In this novel, two reporters join forces when their respective murder cases—one of which is followed closely by the media—appear to have a troubling connection.

This fast-paced thriller centers on two reporters following vastly different murder cases. Hannah Hawthorne, desperate to redeem herself after a botched news report, is elated to be covering the fatal shooting of Angelica Monroe—a young white woman whose case instantly garners sympathy and outrage. Meanwhile, Paulo Richardson is stuck in a rut at a small local newspaper when he picks up the case of Javier Estrada—a Latine teenager shot on the same night and in the same park as Angelica, but whose FEBRUARY 1, 2024

165

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

past gang ties and skin color guarantee that his murder is all but ignored. When their investigations lead to some compelling evidence that the cases are linked and the victims are not quite who they appear to be, Hannah and Paulo must use all their resources to try to discover the truth—a truth that many would like to ignore. With intelligent characters and believable dialogue, Chapman has managed to create a riveting whodunit that also speaks volumes about social issues plaguing the justice system. The novel acknowledges early on that the two shooting victims are greeted with different levels of sympathy within the community: “Only one thing was absolutely certain, Paulo thought. The dead woman in the park was White.

The TV reporter hadn’t said so, but the attention level for this story was way too high for the victim to be a person of color.” The social issues are skillfully woven into the narrative, making readers seriously consider these problems even when they’re immersed in conversations with possible snitches and the chaos of climactic shooting scenes.

A sleek, gripping thriller that raises important questions about truth and justice.

GILM!: Everybody’s Saying It! Corley, Brian | Electric Fern (172 pp.) $10.99 paper | Feb. 12, 2024 9798989270811

In this YA novel, a high school teen invokes magic when composing a song to impress a girl and must deal with the unfortunate consequences.

Geoff Smith and his dad have recently relocated from hot, sunny Houston to cold, rainy Portland, Oregon. Not only is the weather difficult to adjust to, but Geoff—a budding guitarist and singer-songwriter—must also cope with the separation from his band mates. The only good thing about the move is his 166

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 166

new history classmate, Corinne Shelby.

When Corinne challenges Geoff to “write me a song that rhymes something with the word ‘film’”—and promises to take him on a date if he succeeds—his heart soars. But no such rhyming word exists. Luckily for Geoff, his dad is a purveyor of arcane objects and books. Geoff uses one of the volumes to conjure an unstoppably catchy tune—one with so relentless an earworm that Corinne won’t care that its rhyming word (GILM!) is invented. The song sweeps through Alder High, turning Geoff into an overnight celebrity. But there are two problems: First, the boy who has been bullying the musician turns out to be Corinne’s brother, Will, and warns Geoff off their date. Second, the GILM! song is subverting people’s vocabularies and replacing words until much of their communication is just monosyllabic variations. With the spell soon set to become irreversible, will Geoff be able to quickly undo the magical damage he’s unleashed? Corley writes from Geoff’s perspective, primarily in the third person, past tense. Geoff is a relatable teen character, given to much self-doubt and overthinking. Indeed, the investigation of his imposter syndrome is one of the book’s strongest features.

Throughout, the prose remains clear and assured. The story moves quickly, and while engaging readers with its overt speculative and YA elements (wish fulfillment and teen romance), it sneaks in some lovely character dynamics.

Geoff’s only-child relationship with his single-parent dad is quite striking, as is the unfolding revelation, through the teen’s eyes, that Corinne is less an unobtainable ideal and more a real person with her own complexities. That Geoff and Corinne’s romantic involvement ultimately proceeds clearly signals that many of life’s complications come

from within. All told, tween and teenage readers should approve.

A short, catchy indie-rock love song of a book with underlying depth.

Wall Street Lessons: Overcoming Fear, Greed, and Being Your Own Worst Enemy Demmert , James E. | New Insights Press (200 pp.) | $30.00 | Sept. 26, 2023 9798986016368

Veteran wealth management expert Demmert outlines investment strategies in this nonfiction guide.

The author opens his book with a declaration some might find surprising coming from a long-time financial advisor: Greed is a destructive emotion that can “ruin your potential to create wealth on Wall Street.” According to Demmert, primitive emotions like fear and greed drive many of the psychological mistakes people make when investing— hence his contention that people can become their own worst enemies if they don’t take common-sense precautions against the “sudden unexpected nosedives” to which, history has shown, investments can be vulnerable. Through stories drawn from his long experience with clients, the author lays out the basic facts of many aspects of finance, from risk management to portfolio diversification, always assessing the risks and possible rewards of any financial actions the reader might be thinking of taking. Demmert also includes many charts and graphs of increasing levels

A detailed, comprehensive guidebook to sensible investing.

WALL STREET LESSONS

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

of complexity and detail, most of them tailored to that same imperative of assessing and mitigating risk. “Today’s world is too unpredictable and volatile to risk any portion of one’s wealth,” he writes. “I see no reason why any investor would want to stand idly by and watch any portion of their investment lose value, based on the assumption that ‘things will rebalance’ soon enough.” That tone of clear, no-nonsense honesty carries through the book, and this straight-shooting more than compensates for Demmert’s weakness for cliches (“Sometimes it is not a light at the end of the tunnel—but an oncoming train!”; “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is”). The sheer amount of carefully explained information and the author’s insights in these pages will doubtless be invaluable to investors at all levels.

A detailed, comprehensive guidebook to sensible investing.

Beatniks, Tupperware, and Chiles en Nogada: A Memoir De Paola, Robert | Mindstir Media (336 pp.) | $5.71 paper | Sept. 15, 2022 9798986295367

De Paola’s memoir recounts early memories of Mexico, travels in 1950s and ’60s California with a hippie mother, and a career in academia.

The author remembers a time on the beach at Ensenada in Baja, Mexico, in 1954, being taken care of as a baby by Maria, his “first mother…Uncle Bob’s wife in Mexico,” and by her mother, whom he called “Abuelita,” before he was sent to live with the adoptive parents of his birth mother, Miki, in Encinitas, California. When he was 6 years old, Miki finally showed up, and his narrative delves into the times in the mid-1950s and early 1960s that he spent with her in California—where they lived both in a car and a commune and KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 167

sold Tupperware—before she eventually returned him permanently to his grandparents. The author only saw her briefly again, with a baby half brother in tow, a decade later. De Paola also discusses his adult experiences, including his career in scientific research, handling his drug-addicted half brother upon Miki’s death, his return to Mexico later in life (where he met his wife, Rosa), and their current life in Texas, where they’re raising her grandchild. “It always seemed like life [with his grandparents] was all frozen up and that I would never have any stories to tell when I grew up,” recalls the author, reflecting on the appeal of traveling with Miki as a child. That freeze-up clearly never occurred—this memoir is full of lively and often pointed observances, not only about the charismatic-yet-flawed Miki but also about his career as an academic and entrepreneur, including a hilarious discussion of the incomprehensibility of a particular science research manuscript.

This wide-ranging and impressionistic memoir does give rise to some questions (including what exactly happened to de Paola’s father), but this skilled storyteller has crafted a compelling depiction of his life’s journey.

Captivating anecdotes of a colorful, expansive life, told through both a child’s and an adult’s perspective.

The Cloisonné Brooch: A Serpent’s Coil Time-Travel Romance Drennan, Kat | KC Publications (426 pp.) $15.99 paper | March 21, 2020 9781734258417

A surprise discovery leads a woman on a quest through time as she seeks a priceless brooch in Drennan’s romance novel.

As a child, Tessa Madigan loved spending time with her Uncle Theo in the home built by her grandfather on Balboa Island, California.

When Theo died, Tessa inherited the

home—and its secrets. While renovating the property with her boyfriend, Phillip Koenig, and best friend, Alexis “Lexi” Hill, she discovers a cache of valuables, including silverware and jewelry, hidden within the walls of the house. Tessa’s fascinated by the jewelry, particularly a serpent bangle that exerts an unusual power over her (“Tess snagged the bracelet, fascinated with its red rhinestone eyes”). As she researches the jewelry’s provenance, Tessa finds herself pulled back in time to 324 C.E., during the reign of Emperor Constantine, where she experiences life through the eyes of Kindra, a slave trained as a craftsperson by a man named Haldor. Tessa is not the only person interested in jewelry: A local shop owner and collector named Karl Johns and his sister-in-law, Valerie, also want the treasure and will stop at nothing to obtain it. When Tessa discovers that another piece—an exquisite cloisonné brooch—is missing, she again dons the bracelet to embark on a trip back through time to find the precious object before it’s lost forever. The narrative offers a satisfying blend of action and romance, with well-developed characters and an irresistible time-travel hook. Tessa Madigan is an amiable protagonist whose life becomes intertwined with that of Kindra, the craftsperson responsible for creating the cloisonné brooch at the heart of the story. The story moves seamlessly between Tessa’s life on Balboa Island in 2019 and Kindra’s life in 324 and her romance with Marcus, one of Emperor Constantine’s guards. Both the mystery of the jewelry’s provenance and the suspenseful search for the brooch are engaging and suspenseful.

An inventive time-travel romance with an appealing mix of action and intrigue.

For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

167

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

Kirkus Star

The Teenage Guide to Success: The TICK TOCK Formula for Life, Relationships and Careers

An absorbing, quietly intense saga of upheaval and war.

THE HOUSE ON SUN STREET

Fidelman, Colton | Archway Publishing (136 pp.) | $33.99 | $15.99 paper Nov. 3, 2023 | 9781665752435 9781665752411 paper

Fidelman’s nonfiction guide offers wideranging advice for teenagers.

The author lodges a social media lure right in the subtitle of his nonfiction debut, but he’s very much not singing the praises of the social media app TikTok, which he views as a pernicious influence in the lives of teens. Rather, when laying out his precepts for his teen readers, he wants them to use the handy acronym “TICK TOCK”: T for “Taming Social Media,” I for “Inspiring Hard Work,” C for “Choosing a Mentor,” K for “Knowing Your Struggles,” T for “Treasure Beyond Money,” O for “Owning Your Passion,” C for “Cultivating Relationships,” and K for “Knowledge Expansion.” Fidelman uses each section of his book to elaborate on these principles, incorporating stories along the way about anonymized teens facing some of the issues he raises (“Joe,” for instance, “sees his friends having fun but also wasting time and wonders if he should be working at all”). The author frequently cites public figures like Patti Stanger, star of The Millionaire Matchmaker television program (“The reason billionaires become billionaires is because they do the things they don’t want to do first,” she’s quoted. “You got to get the crap out of the way so you can do the fun stuff”). Fidelman himself is very much present in the book’s narrative, consistently adopting the friendly, no-nonsense tone of a trusted old brother with lines like, “In the last section, we talked about how money isn’t always the answer, right?”

He strikes a winning note by taking 168

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 168

teen challenges completely seriously, comparing life to riding a dragon that requires careful control at all times.

Adolescents feeling adrift in a world without serious, caring mentoring will find a good deal of moral and practical clarity in these pages—and so will plenty of older readers.

A wise and pragmatic life guide for teens.

Frogs Go Diving Gardella, Tricia | Self (32 pp.) | $19.99 $11.99 paper | March 8, 2023 9781959412250 | 9781959412243 paper

A little frog embarks on a counting adventure in this rhyming picture book that moves to the familiar tune of “Ants Go Marching.”

Frogs go diving in groups of one, two, three—all the way up to 10.

Beginning with one by one, a little frog is ready to have fun. But when the others dive, the little frog wants to try something new. While three amphibians dive, “the little one” climbs a tree.

Soon, he reaches high branches and a beehive, startling all the insects. Rushing down the tree, he finally jumps into the water with the others. In this enjoyable story, Gardella sticks closely to the original inspiration, repeating the first line of every stanza three times, varying the fourth line with a rhyme, and concluding each verse with the same refrain: “As frogs go diving in… to the pond…to get out…of the sun.”

Nielson’s digital cartoon illustrations keep the little hero’s escapades on the left side of the spread while displaying the described number of frogs on the

right. The frogs’ poses deftly capture the action of both graceful dives and belly flops, with limbs splayed across the page or tucked away in the cannonball position. The narrow escape from the bees provides somewhat greater stakes than the original song, but the intensity is never too high, making this an appealing choice for a preschool read-aloud or singalong.

An engaging amphibian revision of an insect march.

Kirkus Star

The House on Sun Street Ghazirad, Mojgan | Blair (320 pp.) | $23.99 Oct. 17, 2023 | 9781958888100

A girl experiences the Iranian Revolution, creeping repression, and war in Ghazirad’s novel.

The author focuses her story on Moji, a 6-yearold girl living in Tehran in 1978; her idyllic existence centers around her grandparents’ Sun Street house, where her grandmother, Azra, cooks succulent meals and her grandfather, Agha Joon, gardens and reads her and her little sister, Mar Mar, tales from One Thousand and One Nights. Life is upended when the shah is overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini establishes the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moji’s father, an army officer who supported the shah, takes his wife and the children to America, where Baba, Maman, and the children endure anti-Iranian prejudice when members of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran are taken hostage. They return home after two KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

years to find Iran profoundly changed: Many books and ideologies are now banned, and the struggle to keep every wisp of hair hidden beneath a headscarf becomes a preoccupation for Moji.

Ensconced in her girls’ school, Moji chafes at Islamic puritanism. She swipes volumes from a hidden cache of banned books and develops a crush on a female teacher, which prompts erotic impulses condemned as sinful in Khomeini’s book of Islamic sex advice. Ghazirad’s novel is a lyrical evocation of Iranian life, full of limpid detail: “Azra emptied the water that had dribbled in the bowl underneath the globe-shaped samovar and blew the blue flame inside its chimney through the gridded opening.

White smoke funneled up the samovar’s chimney and vanished in the air.” The prose develops a searing emotional charge as Moji registers the disasters engulfing Iran. “Uncle Zabih trembled as he called Amir’s name over and over again,” she observes at a funeral for a teenaged cousin killed in battle.

“Tears glistened on his cheeks in the sunshine. Maybe he hoped his son could hear and respond. But Amir was dead silent among the moaning women and stunned men staring at the fast-filling grave.” The result is a heartbreaking coming-of-age novel, luminous but tinged with darkness.

An absorbing, quietly intense saga of upheaval and war as seen through the eyes of a child.

Misfits Harris, Mark Jonathan | Atmosphere Press (240 pp.) | $16.99 paper | Oct. 10, 2023 9781639889891

Harris’ story collection focuses on Los Angeles characters from all walks of life, shaken from their routines by startling chance encounters and unexpected relationships.

The author presents a collection of Los Angeles–centered short stories, typically involving a clash KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 169

of personalities when characters come together (sometimes in a meaningful fashion, other times, well…). The title tale introduces Morris, a restless, middle-aged tax accountant who encounters Sofia, a rebellious teen from a privileged girls’ school, vandalizing luxury cars in retribution for climate change.

Even though she considers him a class enemy, they somehow form a fragile bond (“Watching him leave, Sofia felt a hollow opening up inside her that she couldn’t explain. No other adults would let her speak to them the way she did to Morris”).

Cary, the hard-luck protagonist of “The Cactus,” a washed-up athlete turned washed-up movie stuntman turned insurance man, finally meets his life mate in the person of an accident-case client, Sheila, who is particularly enchanted by an exotic flowering cactus he keeps.

In “Doubles,” a divorced freelance writer and minor true-crime author is asked by a tennis partner for referrals on hoodlum types who can intervene in a sexual blackmail plot.

Harris is not one for tidy endings in neat packages, leaving the reader hanging with tantalizing suggestions of what might happen next, as in “Mute,” in which a film director’s marriage disintegrates under the stress of raising an autistic child, or in “Chicken Soup,” with its battle of wills between an obstinate dowager and the undocumented Latinx woman hired as her caregiver. While the settings occasionally depict a Hollywood milieu of screenwriters, wannabe stars, and other creatives (the author is an established filmmaker), the material is not as arch as work by other chroniclers of Tinseltown, such as Bruce Wagner, Steve Martin, and Peter Lefcourt.

Harris’ stories skew more broadly, For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

recalling Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s vignettes of relatable people yearning for connection.

A bittersweet selection of well-told L.A. stories, spanning gang lockups to movie-director mansions.

Love, Sex, and Other Calamities: Stories & a Poem Hickok, Ralph | Self (316 pp.) | $15.00 paper | July 3, 2023 | 9798359159548

This debut short-story collection paints the wistful life of a newspaper journalist as seen through his sexual and romantic encounters.

Though nominally a volume of tales (and a poem), Hickok’s collection is told in sequence almost exclusively from the perspective of one character—Art Stafford. The prologue sees Art as a jaded adult looking to start his life afresh. It is dreamlike yet sexually explicit, heavy with regret (“He glared at the sullen unshaven face in the mirror. ‘You’ve got to stop living in the past’”). From here, readers are taken on a chronological journey through Art’s early experiences, failed relationships, and middle-aged sexual renewal. The first story, “The Beating Heart,” tells of a seaside vacation where 11-year-old Monnie shows 12-year-old Art her breasts.

It concludes not only with a prescient awareness of how sex will shape Art’s life, but also with an allegorical inkling that he will be forever the fish, not the fisherman. Subsequent tales detail Art’s relationships in high school and college.

Some of these stories contain dialogue sections that verge on the inane, such as “Chosen by Sharon” (young teens speculating about vaginas). Others, such as “Loving Fiona,” hint at more profound insights into death, philosophy, and intellectual attraction. Throughout, Art grows in sexual experience. The closest he comes to happiness is in “Life Is the Dream, Love Is Reality,” where his first truly defining relationship ends in FEBRUARY 1, 2024

169

1/8/24 5:05 PM

>>>

INDIE

his girlfriend’s pregnancy and death.

Subsequent tales, such as “The Singer, Not the Song,” afford more chronological scope, examining Art’s adult relationships across a span of years. By the time readers reach “Life Is a Short Story,” 50-year-old Art has come to terms with his predilection for doomed affairs. Throughout, Hickok writes in an assured style, pulling readers along. The narrow sexual focus results in a distorted picture, yet other aspects of Art’s life emerge at the edges—his intelligence, his career as a journalist, even the sincerity with which he gives in to his male urges and construes sex as love. The collection ends with an epilogue in which Art, now an older man, reflects on the women he has known, most of whom are dead. It is a somber, quite powerful conclusion, rather greater than the sum of the preceding parts.

Subdued yet alluring; a pensive reflection on the male psyche.

The First Gingerbread House Hickson, T.B. | Illus. by Tomasz Pląskowski Three Ridges Press (46 pp.) | $29.99 $14.99 paper | Sept. 24, 2023 9781958913079 | 9781958913093 paper

Hickson presents an illustrated just-so children’s story explaining how gingerbread houses first came to be.

In a land of many kingdoms, nothing’s going right. There’s bad weather affecting the harvest, epidemics spreading diseases, and tyrannical kings making matters worse for their subjects. Hans is the child of a

gingerbread baker in a run-down town where many have turned their backs on the hungry and unhoused and the town’s deteriorating infrastructure.

Hans’ father, known as Herr Baker, likes to use intricate molds carved by his own father to shape the gingerbread dough. He once vowed not to sell them, but as time goes by and nobody buys any gingerbread, he has no choice but to trade the molds for baking supplies when the king demands special gingerbread for his upcoming feast. However, the king’s steward doesn’t approve of the resulting product, which he calls “too plain,” and demands a new batch, despite the fact Herr Baker now lacks sufficient ingredients.

Hans, angered, finds himself unable to sleep that night, but then he looks out the window and sees something that appears to have a magical aspect: “The moonlight showed the beauty of the town as it could be. Hope stirred in Hans. Could this magical light somehow touch the gingerbread cookies too?” The boy creeps downstairs to where the rejected cookies are, and the way the moonlight falls on them sparks an idea that changes the fate of Hans’ entire village. This fairy-tale-like story is Hickson’s second book, after Laker’s World: A Bigfoot Story (2022), and its lesson of ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of adversity gives it a festive twist that makes a welcome addition to the winter holiday bookshelf. Although it seems doubtful that a successful gingerbread feast could fix the systemic issues in Hans’ home kingdom, the narrative’s tone encourages readers to embrace a suspension of disbelief. Pląskowski’s full-color cartoon illustrations are as warm as gingerbread fresh from the oven, filling the page with rich colors

The book is chock-full of helpful, battle-tested advice.

BURNED OUT TO LIT UP

170

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 170

and evocative settings. A gingerbread recipe is included.

An imaginary origin story that youngsters will find perfect for the December holiday season.

Kirkus Star

Burned Out to Lit Up: Ditch the Grind and Reclaim Your Life Houser, Cara E. | Parliament Press (176 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Oct. 24, 2023 9798988925200

Houser discusses burnout and offers remedies for the critically overburdened in this motivational primer.

In this self-help guide, the author, a career strategist and empowerment coach, speaks about her own experience with burnout and details how she found her way to becoming “lit up” instead (“Like many women, especially full-time working parents and care-givers, I slid down the long slippery slope of being everything to everyone—except myself”). The book is chock-full of helpful, battle-tested advice designed to lift readers from the despair of feeling pushed past their limits. The format of the guide echoes its function: The book’s nine chapters are concise and manageable, and not at all overwhelming (Houser recommends reading one chapter a week). The topics range from the impact of technology on our lives to the effect a physical space has on people’s moods. Each chapter contains “questions, ideas or activities” to help “create a multidimensional, badass life that you don’t need to escape from.” The activities, which allow readers to implement the ideas that Houser introduces in their own lives, include reading poems, reflecting on what burnout looks like to them, and tidying a small section of a room. The author’s writing style also contributes to the guide’s effectiveness—instead KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

of brimming with long, winding, and dry stretches of text, Houser’s book features succinct paragraphs that don’t allow their brevity to curtail her message. Despite the book’s concision, Houser includes a wide range of scientific information gleaned from various studies to support and contextualize her anecdotes and justify her post-chapter activity recommendations. The author’s vulnerability in sharing her own story (“Even looking for the resources to help myself out of this hole seemed impossible. I ended up in such a bad place that I needed to take a leave from work for the sake of my physical and mental health”) adds an additional layer of credibility to her advice.

Stressed-out readers looking to make changes in their lives will want to pick up a copy of this book.

The Kelsey Outrage: The “Crime of the Century” Hubbard, Alison Louise | Black Rose Writing (360 pp.) | $24.95 paper | Jan. 25, 2024 9781685133597

Hubbard’s historical novel, loosely based on a true story, transforms a 19th-century scandal into a multifaceted detective story with modern resonances.

Charles Kelsey, a “small, eccentric” poet “with long hair and mismatched clothing,” is an outcast in the community of Huntoria, New York, in 1872. He takes an interest in Lucy Jane Hanson, who’s engaged to a prominent member of the esteemed Royals family, and they have a secret, months-long affair. Lucy Jane, overwhelmed, concocts a malicious (and fictitious) rumor about Charles, which swiftly spreads through town. One night, Charles, while waiting outside of Lucy Jane’s window, is dragged off, tarred, feathered, and made to disappear. The town’s elite, eager to bury the scandal, claim he was merely sent away on a boat to Connecticut.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 171

However, Cathleen, Charles’ resolute sister, suspects a more sinister truth.

Teaming up with the weary and aged local constable, Alexander Ruggles, she embarks on a quest for answers, delving into the murky depths of small-town politics and social stratification. As the investigation deepens, the narrative seamlessly shifts through multiple, third-person perspectives and timelines, each adding depth to the well-crafted cast of characters. The narrative structure skillfully melds the familiarity of a crime procedural with historical insights into a real-life scandal that once shocked the citizens of Huntington, New York.

The stark contrast between the poor Kelsey and rich Royals families not only captures the era’s class dynamics, but also echoes relevant, contemporary themes of social inequality. Although the story’s pace occasionally slows, and reader engagement may fluctuate among the different characters, the steadily unraveling mystery maintains a consistent momentum. As Hubbard fills in more backstory with each chapter, readers will root for Cathleen to finally uncover the truth.

A captivating journey that offers historical intrigue and modern social commentary.

Getting to Yes Hunniecutt, Tim | Welling Up (260 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 5, 2024 | 9798988742012

In Hunniecutt’s nostalgic, debut romance novel, young love blooms during an unforgettable summer.

In the summer of 1978, Chris is back in his hometown of Brandon, Florida, after his first year in college at Florida State University, setting up his summer job at JB’s pizza restaurant. There, he meets Chloe; beautiful and sweet, she immediately dazzles. What follows is a look back at Chris’ previous romantic exploits, beginning with his relationship with Deb, stretching from the end of his

high school days in 1977 through his first year in college and his meeting with Chloe. The narrative weaves through the late teenage years of a young man who is quick to fall in love and to appreciate the women around him but who is not immune to the mistakes that accompany amorous pursuits. Virtually each chapter in the first third of the book is named for a girl Chris has an interest in, which means the storyline can occasionally seem a little formulaic, leaving the reader wondering with some disbelief if there were any girls on campus that Chris did not forge a love connection with during his time in college (even the narrator comments that his “desire for women never rested”).

But Hunniecutt counterbalances this with an exploration of the insecurities of young men as Chris worries about not being the perfect date, lover, or boyfriend, haunted by “that evil word inadequate.” It is refreshing to read a romance novel from the perspective of a young man who is a hopeless romantic, and there is something incredibly likable about Chris as he recounts his quest to find true love. When the narrative returns to Chloe, the story flows better; it’s also imbued with perfect notes of nostalgia, from a concert by the Steve Miller Band, the Little River Band, and Jimmy Buffett to Chris’ 1968 Chevrolet Impala to the single telephone in the dorm Chris lives in.

A coming-of-age story for lovers of sweet romance novels.

Carlos Montoya Jaramillo, John Paul | Twelve Winters Press (316 pp.) | $34.33 | Feb. 1, 2023 9781733194983

A patriarch’s actions have a lasting impact on his family in Jaramillo’s multigenerational saga.

The titular character is a complex man who has been treated badly by life: When the novel opens, broken-down World War FEBRUARY 1, 2024

171

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

I veteran Carlos, working as a lumberman, is being mocked by his younger co-workers (“Lookit what I am making for the old man. Carlos needs his cane to walk”). The one bright spot in Carlos’ life is his decades-younger wife, Felipa.

But she is having an affair with his boss and friend, Pifanio, and becomes pregnant with his child. Felipa isn’t ready to be a mother, and Carlos convinces her to give up the baby, Bruna, to Lena, his daughter with Mara, his late first wife and the love of his life. Later, when Felipa leaves to stalk Lena and Bruna, Carlos stops working and drinks himself into a stupor. Accustomed to being his family’s provider through the years, Carlos struggles to find a new direction in life. As Carlos and Felipa fade into the background, Lena, along with her partner, Jeri, her daughter, Bruna, and Bruna’s son, Manito, take over the book’s narration. It becomes exceedingly clear how the difficult legacy of Carlos has been passed on to his flawed descendants. It takes too long for Carlos to evolve into a sympathetic character—this is because the author uses a flashback-laden structure to illustrate how Carlos and the other primary characters ended up being how they are.

It’s a dizzying experience for the reader, as a character can go from old to young and back again within the same section of the text; a more conventionally chronologically structured narrative would certainly have been more reader friendly. The primary characters (Carlos, Felipa, Lena, and Bruna) are memorable, and eventually become comprehensible.

Supporting cast members appear, barely long enough to register, then disappear, never to be seen again. Still, the impression Carlos made on those around him during his long, colorful life remains vividly evident throughout.

This story of a complicated man makes for compelling, if often frustrating, reading.

For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

172

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 172

Diplomats & Admirals Jenkins, Dale A. | Aubrey Publishing (402 pp.) | $19.50 paper | Nov. 26, 2022 9798986562605

Jenkins offers a meticulous analysis of the diplomatic and strategic blunders that led to hostilities between the United States and Japan at the beginning of

World War II. Most readers familiar with American history are at least broadly aware of the events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and President Roosevelt’s subsequent declaration of war on Japan. Without closer scrutiny of the political details (an assessment scrupulously provided by the author), that outbreak of war can seem as sudden as it was inexorable. Jenkins argues that there was ample opportunity to defuse the antagonism between the two nations, but a series of diplomatic mistakes and strategic errors, combined with grotesque miscommunications, led to catastrophe. The author looks at both sides and painstakingly (though concisely) unpacks each nation’s internecine conflicts. Roosevelt was often stymied by disagreements between the civilian leaders serving on his War Council and his military commanders.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull had drawn up a plan for detente between the United States and Japan, an agreement that likely would have avoided war, but failed to advocate for it due to opposition from China and England. Likewise, Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoe worked hard for peace, but he was constantly opposed by his own foreign minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, and his aggressive military generals. Jenkins paints a detailed picture of the squandered opportunities for peace on both sides, and of the deadly aftermath of Japan’s attack, culminating in the naval battles at Coral Sea and Midway. For all of the book’s rigor and precision, the author appropriately acknowledges the limitations of historical analysis and

the intractability of “imponderables of history.” This text is an astonishingly thorough treatment of the subject, despite its admirable brevity—Jenkins wastes no words, and leaves nothing essential out.

An impressive one-volume history of the events leading up to the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan.

Into the Laughing Gas World Kelly, Rin | Atmosphere Press (134 pp.) $16.99 paper | Nov. 14, 2023 9798891320468

Kelly presents a brief collection of offbeat short stories that span multiple genres.

In this anthology, readers will find eclectic works divided into three sections: “New Fabulism/Slipstream,” “Speculative,” and “Meditations and Benedictions.”

In “Wax Works,” which was previously published in The Fabulist, she offers an offbeat take on the legend of Icarus, with a boy made of wax melting after getting too close to a microwave. In the horror-tinged “Kahlo,” a woman’s insurance coverage runs out during the middle of heart surgery, so instead of sewing the organ back inside her chest, the surgeons leave it outside her body, connected by seeping tubes and bloody bandages. During a war between gods, two deities fall in love, while another is trapped in a sheep’s body in “Sheep Baah Baah Baah.” Several tales feature solitary figures grappling with the wider world in their own unique ways; for instance, in “Upper Management, or GodCo., LLC,” angels test out a “de-lonesoming device,” and one woman questions the contract they’re required to sign. In “The Best-Known Unknown People Who Maybe Drew Breath Upon the Planet,” which appeared in the Kenyon Review, a man writes letters to the editor and op-eds under assumed names (a series KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

A coming-of -age tale with fantastical elements and strong female characters.

recognizable to fans of the genre, the author is an expert at the execution and interplay of these cliches, resulting in a satisfying thriller.

An elegant, if familiar, crime novel.

ANITHIA

Anithia: Ancestry of Creativity: Book One of personas he’s created whom he pits against one another in his imagination and in print); it’s a work that straddles the line between the literary and the fantastic. In “Graceland and Greenland and Disneyland”—a notable example of a story without any fantasy elements, other than one character’s dreams of a better future—a runaway travels to Pittsburgh by train and briefly meets an older woman who had youthful adventures as a Rockette. Sarah B. Mohler, an associate professor of English at Truman State University in Missouri, offers a thoughtful analysis of Kelly’s work at the end of the collection that focuses on the stories’ genre fluidity.

Readers looking for fiction that’s outside the mainstream, no matter what genres they generally prefer, are likely to find much to enjoy here. These are stories with sometimes-hidden depths that may be revealed to readers in moments of quiet consideration.

A wide variety of thought-provoking tales.

Call Me Sonny: A Bryce Chandler Crime Thriller Lazarus, Steve | Boyle & Dalton (376 pp.) $28.99 | $16.99 paper | Oct. 2, 2023 9781633377547 | 9781633377554 paper

A retired FBI officer turned PI and a sinister murder-for-hire organization cross paths in Lazarus’ thriller.

Bryce Chandler is a Florida Keys– based private investigator whose most recent case is as simple as an unfaithful husband.

Bryce’s legacy as an FBI agent has KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 173

been besmirched by alcoholism and divorce, which leads him to taking on these unglamorous assignments.

But his eye for detail and his investigative acumen remain sharp—he sees news of two seemingly disparate murder cases (the victims are a federal prosecutor and a correctional officer) and clocks them as professional hits; upon scrutiny, they connect back to one inmate at a maximum security prison. Further investigation reveals a third, unsuccessful hit; with the help of a close friend, Bryce uncovers the secret doings of a sinister group that calls itself the Network and discovers a fourth hit on the books. Lazarus uses classic tropes of crime thrillers in his novel, but he does so with competence from the beginning—the novel’s opening depicts a corrupt lawyer visiting a prisoner and outlines a string of deaths from the inmate’s past, effectively hooking readers on the mystery surrounding the nefarious Network. Bryce, as the retired FBI agent turned private investigator, adds the cliched yet compelling element of a seasoned, damaged protagonist navigating a dangerous world: “If a career as a criminal investigator had taught him anything, it was that the simplest and most logical answer was usually the correct one.” The dual storylines—one an ostensibly straightforward divorce case and the other an exploration of a dark web murder-for-hire organization—create engaging juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated events that cleverly intertwine as the plot thickens and reaches a crescendo in the well-paced narrative, with violent moments and gradual revelations along the way. As the stakes escalate, the narrative is further enriched by Bryce’s own tumultuous past. While the elements might be

Lehner, Lee | Kinsley Oak (324 pp.) | $17.58 paper | Feb. 6, 2023 | 9780646861708

A headstrong teenager discovers her connection to a secret world of spiritual beings in Lehner’s fantasy novel, the first in a series.

This intriguing fantasy debut is structured as a trio of nested stories.

The first opens in 2010, when a young man, haunted by characters who insist that he tell their stories, reluctantly engages a writing tutor to help him “get out of the way and let the story have its freedom.” He writes the story of Isola Destinn, a beach-loving 1960s Florida teenager who doesn’t share the interests of other girls and rebels against her domineering father. When she meets the handsome Sation, it’s love at first sight—just one look into his mesmerizing baby blues awakens something deep within her. Then, just before her 17th birthday, Isola’s domineering father abruptly relocates the whole family to England. She’s heartbroken and furious, counting the days until she turns 18 and can travel back to Sation. Isola’s mother’s friend, Trealla, hires her to help out in her estate’s extraordinary gardens and becomes a beloved mentor, introducing Isola to esoteric knowledge and supernatural beings. Isola stumbles into a magical library whose curator recounts the third nested story so vividly that it feels to Isola like a real-life experience; it’s about a London herbalist named Annabell Hennington, who bravely travels to America in 1818 to find a rare plant that might heal her critically ill husband. Isola’s comingof-age story emphasizes the value of letting go of rational thinking in favor FEBRUARY 1, 2024

173

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

of intuition, imagination, creativity, and living authentically as one’s true self. Lehner’s writing veers between the clunky—a character “erupts into a fountain” and an ancient forest “exudes a romanticized atmosphere”—and the crisp, as when a character, asked for the time, replies, “I don’t own a ticking prison.” The tantalizing connections among the nested stories will leave readers eager for the rest of the series.

A coming-of-age tale with fantastical elements and strong female characters.

Death Takes a Fall: A Cotswold Crimes Mystery Lynn, Sharon | Level Best Books (348 pp.) | $16.95 paper | Dec. 5, 2023 9781685125264

In Lynn’s series whodunit, an American archeology student interning at the Roman Baths site in England finds a recent corpse bearing an ominous tattoo.

Nineteen-year-old Maddie McGuire is stuck on a ledge, having slipped off the Cotswold trail she was hiking while reaching for a few tempting blackberries.

Standing on the cliff above her is Constable Edward Bailey, a dashing young Scotsman who’s Maddie’s current romantic interest. While Edward runs off to find help, Maddie investigates the foliage on the tiny landing. Then she sees a very strange image: a unicorn’s head with a knife clutched in its jaw, tattooed on the torso of a naked woman’s dead body. In this second volume of Lynn’s Cotswold Crimes series, the resourceful Arizona native once again finds herself involved in a dangerous, twisty murder investigation.

As she tries to impress the director at the dig site where she works as an intern, she struggles to decipher the social codes of Britain’s aristocracy; meanwhile, she becomes the target of a conspiracy to have her either deported or disposed of in a more unsavory fashion. Then there’s the problem of Edward, who appears 174

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 174

to be devoted to her but has his own secret, questionable past. Lynn packs her carefully crafted mystery with enough surprises and potential suspects to keep the pages turning, and the grimness of the crimes increases with each new discovery. There’s a wealth of archeological and cultural trivia along the way, and plenty of light banter to keep readers amused. Maddie shows herself to be a stalwart protagonist, especially when riding a restless horse or escaping danger through a third-story spa window. Her youth, impetuousness, and occasional naïveté, juxtaposed against the criminal enterprise behind the murder, give Lynn’s narrative a versatility that makes it appropriate for both YA and adult readers. The final revelation of the villain is likely to provide readers with a closing chuckle.

An intriguing, well-paced cozy mystery with a light touch and an enjoyable cast.

The Case of the Zombie Ninjas: Dotty Morgan Supernatural Sleuth Book Two Martin, Erik Christopher | In a Bind Books (210 pp.) | $19.99 | $12.99 paper March 15, 2024 | 9781961215900 9781961215917 paper

In Martin’s middle-grade novel, tween sleuth Dotty Morgan’s latest supernatural case is her scariest yet.

Elderton, North Carolina may seem like any old small town, but it’s home to a brilliant supernatural sleuth named Dotty Morgan. The 12-year-old Black girl previously saved her town from the phantom of Waverly Perchance (The Case of the French Fry Phantom [2023]) and is now faced with an even bigger challenge.

Sato Jin, the owner of a corporation who has recently purchased an outpost at Elderton’s Blue Devil Castle, has shown an interest in Dotty’s antique Japanese sword and cup, as well as in her detective business. Dotty has found

that the objects have abnormal levels of ethereal energy and isn’t sure who to trust. Meanwhile, a new family from Japan has moved into town; mysterious daughter Sakura Suzuki stirs up feelings of rivalry and jealousy in Dotty’s girlfriend, Hannah, after the latter loses a duel in kickboxing class. Dotty has to juggle a litany of problems—from bullying to relationships to being attacked in the middle of the night by zombie ninjas—but she handles them all deftly and intelligently. With help from her school’s secretly powerful lunch ladies, Hannah’s brother (Finn), and her own friends, Dotty sets out to right an ancient wrong and discovers there is more to the cup-and-sword puzzle than meets the eye. Martin’s story may sound outlandish, but the action-adventure plot coheres well and keeps readers consistently engaged. The circumstances change by the second, and every decision has very serious implications. The frequent twists and surprise revelations repeatedly leave Dotty and her audience questioning who to trust in a nuanced way that forces readers to confront the complexity of each character’s motives.

This ties in well with the very real consequences of the story’s ending, which Dotty addresses: “I figured no matter how intense things got, it would turn out okay. Now, I know that’s wrong.”

A wild and fantastical mystery adventure that has something for everyone.

Altered Estates Mathison, Chris | Greenleaf Book Group Press (472 pp.) | $33.95 | Jan. 23, 2024 9798886451238

In Mathison’s novel, a man endeavors to secure his inheritance from a mysterious uncle while exploring the old man’s sprawling English estate and questioning the very nature of reality.

Kris Robinson embarks on an epic journey when, in an effort to explore his alternative selves, he consumes KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:05 PM

INDIE

high-tech drugs that cause temporary amnesia. As the voices in his head (which call themselves the “Storytellers” and guide him on his psychedelic journey) say, “Imagine—a sip, a swallow, and voilà! A tabula rasa! ” After this brief glimpse into the perhaps not-toodistant future, the book switches to a second-person perspective, and the rest of the novel takes on a distinct video-game aspect as readers navigate the strange proceedings from Kris’ vantage point. Kris receives a letter from a mysterious uncle, Arthur Hanover, asking him to come to his English estate to claim his inheritance, but readers will feel as though they’re the ones going through the motions: “Standing there is a courier asking you to sign for a packet. What in the world? The packet has come from ‘Allensby, Bixby, Crosby & Sons & Daughters, Barristers and Solicitors’ from a town in England you’ve never heard of.” From there, readers are launched into an intriguing mansion-set mystery as Kris travels to England and meets a cast of colorful characters (including a devious head butler and the housekeeper’s friendly grandson) while trying to uncover the mystery of his long lost “uncle”… and the meaning of existence itself.

The “Storyteller” voices occasionally pop in to hint at solutions for both Kris and readers as the protagonist is repeatedly pulled out of one reality and into another. Mind-bending scenes (such as lavish dinner parties that devolve into intense competitions and an impromptu disco party) ultimately make the narrative feel like the literary version of a Black Mirror TV episode. The novel is based on a DVD adventure game that the author made in the late 1990s, which perhaps accounts for its immersive

feel. Occasionally confusing, always entertaining, and undeniably fun, Mathison’s yarn is a truly unique reading experience.

A trippy tale packed with high-tech inventions and old-school mystery that feels like a wildly captivating video game.

Bottles in the Basement: Surviving an Alcoholic: A Memoir McGloin, Paula Ganzi | Self (215 pp.) $11.99 paper | Oct. 10, 2023 9798218281601

In this memoir, a middle-aged woman’s seemingly perfect life unravels because of her husband’s alcoholism.

Life was wonderful for McGloin and her husband, Robert: extravagant trips to Europe— Lake Como, Elton John’s former home in Umbria, Italy—a charming Tudor-style house, plenty of friends. But when the author started finding empty bottles of scotch in the basement, alarm bells went off. Robert was a functioning alcoholic, or what McGloin cleverly dubs a “low-visibility alcoholic.” He was able to hide his illness from friends and family because of his stealth, not because he was actually functioning very well. This harrowing volume charts their marriage’s rapid decline, from the author’s discovery that Robert had secretly accrued tens of thousands in credit card debt to his increasing withdrawal into the basement, where he drank—but denied his addiction—and had conversations with himself. While she was eventually able

An enthralling portrait of high-wire emergency care.

U R G E N T C A L L S F R O M D I S TA N T P L A C E S

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 175

to convince him to see a therapist and attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, health complications from Robert’s excessive drinking quickly arose. The book is divided into two halves, the first part charting a crumbling marriage and the second section covering what happened after Robert succumbed to the complications of his disease. This is an absorbing memoir, with McGloin’s grief and pain taking center stage.

The author’s writing is welcoming, even as she tackles difficult topics; she constantly shares her emotional journey throughout. She also offers some poetic insights, musing about how “wakes are living collages where worlds collide” after her husband’s death. Still, the book doesn’t cohere perfectly—the veneer of an easygoing life falls apart too quickly in the first half. The second half, describing McGloin learning to move on, doesn’t quite mesh with the first part’s melancholic tone. The account opens with Robert being admitted to a hospital, which the memoir returns to about a third of the way through. Perhaps if the story had opened with his death, the focus on the author’s grief and recovery would have had more impact. Still, this is a moving remembrance with striking details.

An engrossing account about a wife dealing with her alcoholic husband.

Urgent Calls From Distant Places: An Emergency Doctor’s Notes About Life and Death on the Frontiers of East Africa Munk, Marc-David | Creemore Press (378 pp.) | Jan. 30, 2024

An air ambulance doctor revisits his adventures saving lives in Africa in this soulful medical memoir.

Munk, an American emergency medicine physician, recaps his stints from 2008 to 2012 with AMREF Flying Doctors, an NGO that conducts medevac missions out of Nairobi to FEBRUARY 1, 2024

175

1/8/24 5:06 PM

INDIE

African locales as far away as Khartoum.

His episodic chapters recount trips in difficult, dangerous circumstances—landing at tiny rural airstrips after the pilots ascertained that there was no livestock on the runways; on one occasion, braving potential anti-aircraft fire on a flight into Mogadishu—and his efforts to stabilize patients for the long journey to Nairobi in a flying emergency room.

His account pairs engrossing dives into the cases he treated with ruminations on Africa’s travails. Thus, a trip to Congo to collect a priest stricken with heart failure highlights that country’s corruption—airport workers sometimes blocked a plane’s departure until they had received bribes—and the success of a bishop in suppressing it. In Ethiopia, the author encountered a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, left over from the country’s time as a Soviet client state, that forbade him to move a patient in diabetic shock 15 feet to the plane until officials had approved it. A trip to Kampala to rescue two Australian tourists injured in a motor-bike crash prompts a meditation on Africa’s lack of health and road-safety infrastructures that coddle Westerners. And a trip to a Somali refugee camp to pick up a psychotic aid worker reminded Munk of his privilege in flying back out while thousands immured there couldn’t escape. The author’s gripping, evocative prose conveys the adrenalized pressure of emergency care. (“I could hear the beeping heartrate monitor get slower and slower, a truly ominous sign….

Why was the air not entering the boy’s lungs? Only seconds had passed, but they were dire. What was wrong? I felt a familiar sick feeling in my stomach—the one I get when things spin out of control.”) He also captures the plangent ironies of his inability to treat Africa’s manifold dysfunctions. (“I would frequently evacuate patients from one awful hospital in East Africa, provide them American-standard care in the air, and then deposit them at a second awful hospital.”) The result is a true-life medical drama that combines tense heroics with mordant reflections.

An enthralling portrait of high-wire emergency care performed under the most trying circumstances.

176

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 176

The Goat Songs Najarian, James | University of North Texas Press (88 pp.) | $9.34 paper | Feb. 27, 2018 9781574417173

Najarian considers the past in this debut collection of poems.

History—recent and remote—is omnipresent in this Vassar Miller Prize–winning volume of poems.

In the first section, “Armenia, PA,” the poet describes his childhood growing up in an Armenian family in Pennsylvania Dutch country—of visiting the cemetery where several of his relatives are buried, he quips, “We’re / the only Armenians in town, / as usual” (“Family Visit”).

The landscape, with its centuries of use and disuse, habitation and vacancy, provides numerous small moments to contemplate the passage of time, as where the poet describes walking an abandoned railroad: “So skirt a black wall, / follow the shallow creek, and head for the woods— // where no trains have ventured since forty-eight, / and where, under leaves, / anthracite cinders yield fragments of light” (“Taking the Train From Kempton, PA”). The second section, “Kleptomania,” celebrates all things sensuous: bodies, flowers, foreign lands, anything that can be sampled or stolen but never really owned. In “The Hands of an Ex-Lover,” Najarian writes, “I no longer lay claim to them. / I remember hands cool and white, / clumsy at night, // blind fish ripening in a cave: / each finger paler than / its core of bone— // lilies, opening in a dim room.” The final section, “The Devout Life,” weaves together the strands of the previous two, exploring how we learn to exist within the natural world, within civilization’s many artificial forms, and within our personal relationships. The six precisely metered sections of “The Dark Ages” contrast the poet, as a boy, observing his mother’s daily routine with the transition of the Roman Empire to the eponymous era that followed. “For years,” it begins, “my mother shuttled from her garden / to

the stove, from barn to sewing room to sons, / her life like an unopened work of history.” As in so many of these poems, the poet wrestles with whether or not to open that work.

Najarian has a gift for the memorably precise image. Soil in a drought is “translated into dust, / then lint, then ash, and at last / to smoke” (“LongedFor Rain”). The smell of paperwhites is “the odor of honey drizzled on carrion” (“Paperwhites”). The poet often experiments with meter and end rhyme to great effect, drawing power from both the predictability and the variations. Every poem, every image and line, feels wonderfully measured, appropriate for a volume so focused on the ways time passes and the means by which the nub of a thing—a name, a memory—remains. It makes for a rather enthralling perspective, one that feels at once old and young; this is, perhaps, the poet’s preferred way of seeing. Najarian recalls the infectious naïveté of the goats his family raised on their Pennsylvania farm. “In their eyes,” he writes, “everything was ready to be tasted… / They had selves without self-consciousness; / their gestures celebrated their desires… / They broke though fences, scorned electric wires, / obliterated gardens.

When you found them / They rubbed their heads on you for gratitude” (“Goat Song”). These poems taste and break and desire in the same way.

An impeccable collection of tenderly crafted poems.

The Wall at the Sugar Factory Ostroff, Sherry V. | Self (304 pp.) | $16.99 paper | Nov. 28, 2023 | 9798862381344

A Jewish mother and her young daughter escape from the pogroms in Ukraine in Ostroff’s historical novel.

It is August 1919, in the Ukrainian town of Pogrebische. Bullets are flying through the window of the home of Shaindel KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:06 PM

INDIE

and Avrum Pogrebiske; World War I has ended, but the Russian Civil War is in full swing. The Bolsheviks are fighting the White Army (made up of peasants and royalists), and both are fighting the Ukrainian separatists. One thing they have in common is their mutual hatred of Jews. Avrum, a member of the Jewish defense unit, is away at a meeting being held at the wall of the sugar factory with a commander of the Ukrainian National Army. Avrum and Shaindel’s 3-year-old daughter, Elta, is hiding in her bedroom.

It is the beginning of a murderous night of bloody pillaging by the peasant army (“Maria screamed several times until her voice was lost amidst the smashing of dishes. Furniture toppled. A door slammed. Horses’ hooves pounded above our heads”). Shaindel crawls to Elta’s bedroom during a pause in the ransacking of her home and escapes with her daughter through the back door, finding refuge with Avrum’s sister, Bluma Loeb, where she learns of the slaughter that took place at the factory wall. Shaindel’s sister, Chava Robbins, is living in New York’s Lower East Side, and Shaindel realizes that now she and Elta must join Chava in America. From the novel’s riveting opening chapters through Shaindel’s multiyear struggle to reach America, Ostroff captures the texture of Eastern European Jewish life.

Tension is palpable throughout the narrative, and the tale, based upon Ostroff’s family saga, is packed with historical information, highlighting the rampant antisemitic violence and the intricacies of navigating America’s increasingly restrictive immigration requirements.

Beneath the ever present fear and despair is a story of courage, determination, and intense family devotion.

A distressing and compelling tale that carries an implicit warning about contemporary events.

For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 177

A Peek Under the Hood: Heroin, Hope & Operation Tune-Up Pevarnik, Michael | Rootstock Publishing (234 pp.) | $28.99 | $18.99 paper Sept. 26, 2023 | 9781578691494 9781578691487 paper

Retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent Pevarnik highlights a methodical 1990s investigation into drug-related crime in a Massachusetts neighborhood.

The author writes that, in 1994, he was stuck in an office on a weeklong administrative assignment when he took an unusual call: A Royal Canadian Mounted Police corporal had worked with a Vietnamese informant who was willing to help the DEA. The man, who’s called “Lanh” in the text, had been a great help in Ontario until multiple death threats forced him to relocate to Worcester, Massachusetts. His first act for the DEA was arranging an undercover purchase of crack, as well as a handgun, from an auto body shop owner in Worcester’s Main South neighborhood. Lanh developed such a good reputation as a buyer that other dealers (from other auto shops) approached him, and he got other agents involved in what the agency called Operation Tune-Up. The DEA had its sights set on bigger fish, and the investigation expanded to other states, Puerto Rico, and foreign countries. The author’s pithy prose drops readers right at the start of the investigation and draws them in with succinct, informative prose featuring illuminating, playful comparisons; a tiny, bagged sample of Colombian heroin, for instance, is said to be akin to a supermarket’s “toothpick speared” samples, and the sight of spectators swiveling their heads toward a speeding car is likened to a tennis match’s audience. Pevarnik ably describes the apprehension of monitoring wired agents as they interacted with criminals, as well as the tense rivalries

between law enforcement agencies and departments and between dealers.

Lanh, however, is the story’s most riveting figure; his motivation was virtuous, as he was fed up with the destruction that drugs caused, and he skillfully handled exchanges with criminals, although his impulsiveness made Pevarnik nervous. The author’s wrap-up of the case is just as detailed as it is incisive.

An enlightening and exhilarating true-crime book.

The Wicker Man Preservation Society Porteous, David F. | Self (244 pp.) | $6.31 paper | June 15, 2021 | 9798509021831

A character-driven horror novel follows a teenager who lives on an island in the Hebrides.

Eleanor Carlyle is just shy of 16 years old. She lives on a small island in the North Atlantic called Ensay, where she helps her mother run the Ensay House Hotel. There are only 407 people on Ensay and, as Eleanor tells it, she knows all of them. In her free time, Eleanor enjoys painting and focusing on her correspondence courses with a secondary school on the mainland. While she may seem average, she is anything but. For one, she suffers from agoraphobia: She has not been outside the hotel since she was 3. What’s more, her upcoming 16th birthday is very important. The island is home to a secretive group of women who practice a pagan-esque religion and Eleanor is an acolyte.

This means that once she turns 16, she must choose a man with whom to lose her virginity. The male lover will then be burned alive. Eleanor’s mother was also an acolyte. It is an aspect of life on Ensay that the typical visitor never gets to see. Readers follow Eleanor as she goes about her days with her religious-ritual fate approaching. According to the rules, FEBRUARY 1, 2024

177

1/8/24 5:06 PM

INDIE

she must pick the man herself. Enter a boy named Connor Maxwell, who is from Ireland and the nephew of a local resident. Connor takes a liking to Eleanor despite her peculiarities.

Pondering this surprising development, she reflects: “I think he likes me and I’ve never been liked before and I don’t know if I like him or if it’s just the incandescent novelty.” Could she really send Connor to his death? What if everything she thinks she knows about Ensay is wrong?

Porteous’ engaging narrative takes a slow-burn approach to Ensay’s casual horrors. Unlike in a more traditional horror novel, the terror of Eleanor’s religious reality is almost secondary to her daily life in the family hotel. By the time readers start to notice that the eccentric story has a dark side, they are already familiar with some of Ensay’s silly details, including that there are just two cars (only one of which is running) and that “most of the people on the island are quite old and have a pleasant, book-learned sense of humour.” It’s a setup that makes the tale’s spookier aspects (for example, women in black cloaks and the residents’ apparent penchant for burning bodies) all the more troubling. Still, some of the casual details can drone on. At one point, Eleanor explains the differences among full European breakfasts (an English breakfast versus an Irish breakfast versus a Scottish breakfast) and how guests from around the world react to them. As notable as it may be that the English breakfast includes a tomato, there are bigger problems to attend to.

Ultimately, the story’s slow approach turns out to be the book’s greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition creates a singular tale with a uniquely chatty tone. Eleanor is an indelible protagonist in a memorable place. The charming island that sells “semi-Celtic jewellery” to tourists is also one that apparently sends some unlucky men to fiery deaths. Welcome to the outer limits of Scottish hospitality.

This surprisingly quirky and enticing tale delivers dark secrets and a lively protagonist.

178

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 178

Kirkus Star

Step by Step!: How the Lincoln School Marchers Blazed a Trail to Justice Rigaud, Debbie, & Carlotta Penn | Illus. by Nysha Lilly | Daydreamers Press (46 pp.) $22.00 | $15.00 paper | Nov. 7, 2023 9780999661383 | 9780999661390 paper

A girl recounts the struggles she and her friends went through to be admitted to an all-white school in Rigaud and Penn’s nonfiction picture book.

Narrated in the voice of Black student marcher Joyce Clemons, the story opens with Joyce explaining that she and her fellow students had to walk 600 miles to be treated fairly at school. When Joyce was young in the 1950s, even though segregation was against the law, the Hillsboro School Board wouldn’t let Black students attend Webster Elementary, an all-white school, even after a fire had damaged a Hillsboro school Black students attended. Together, Black mothers and students marched to Webster every day, only to be turned away at the door. But they kept going: “We stepped over the box lines on the calendar, across the rows of dates, and down the page, until it flipped and we started at the top again.” They marched for 300 days—two school years—before a judge ruled in their favor. Rigaud and Penn navigate themes of injustice and prejudice from a child’s eye view, making it easy to see that the system wrongly kept Joyce and her friends out. Lilly’s painterly digital illustrations integrate photographs and

news clippings, firmly grounding the story in historical evidence. The book includes portraits of the 19 mothers who marched, and endnotes offer a timeline and further historical details.

A timely book about the importance of persevering in the struggle for equality.

Kirkus Star

Drowning in the Desert: A Nevada Noir Novel Schopen, Bernard | University of Nevada Press (223 pp.) | $21.00 paper Aug. 22, 2023 | 9781647791186

In Schopen’s latest neo-Western, an ex-lawman finds his life upended by the discovery of a missing plane.

Fats Rangle used to be a deputy sheriff in Pinenut County, but those days are behind him. The former cop now operates Cherry Creek Stables and Excursions with his brother on the family’s ranch in the Nevada desert, which offers such activities as horseback riding, camping, and fishing parties. Fats laments the many changes that have come to his native valley, bringing more development, more people, and a lowering water table that’s causing vegetation to dry up. While riding one evening in the nearby mountains, he comes across the wreckage of a small single-engine plane that went missing two years ago. There are two bodies inside, mummified by the elements, but nothing of obvious value: “More interesting to Fats was the track in the snow…that zigzagged up to the

A finely wrought Western mystery by a true master of the form.

DROWNING IN THE DESERT

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:06 PM

INDIE

wreckage. Someone had been here, he guessed a month or so ago. He could also guess who. And why.” Fats purposely tramples over the original tracks, and later, when he reports the crash to his former colleague, Sheriff Dale Zahn, he doesn’t mention that someone else had been there. It turns out that Fats’ cousin Strutter Martin has gone missing, and Fats suspects that his disappearance and the tracks outside the plane are related—especially after he learns of a missing briefcase full of cash that should have been on the plane. Fats launches a private investigation into the whereabouts of Strutter and the briefcase, and he soon stumbles upon a much larger scheme involving political corruption, a Las Vegas dancer, and water rights. The stakes of this game are high, and Fats will have to play his hand carefully if he doesn’t want to end up dead.

Over the course of this novel, Schopen shows himself to be a skilled poet of the Western landscape, and readers will find that his prose is as lean and tough as old leather: “The wind soughed. A jay fussed. Near the corral, a young bay mare cropped the sparse mountain foliage. Beside the water tank stood Fats Rangle, squat, still.” The hinterlands between the desert and the city provide a stark stage for this morality tale, and it’s one in which nature, in all its danger and delicacy, is a force that must always be reckoned with. The novel combines clearly recognizable Western elements with those of hardboiled detective fiction, and the laconic, short-tempered Fats exemplifies the antiheroic archetypes of both genres.

The protagonist’s search for answers quickly becomes a broader exploration of himself and his history—particularly the series of events that caused him to leave the sheriff’s office for good; the story also encompasses the evolving realities of his beloved, but no longer remote, valley homeland. Is there still a place in the West for men such as Fats? Readers will hope so, as long as there are talents like Schopen to write about them.

A finely wrought Western mystery by a true master of the form.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 179

Churn Seim, Chloe Chun | Texas Review Press (185 pp.) | $22.95 paper | Dec. 15, 2023 9781680033496

In Seim’s debut literary novel, two siblings are irrevocably changed by a near-drowning experience.

Jordan and her brother, Chung, live with their parents on a struggling Kansas farm that seems primarily composed of muddy fields and packs of barn cats.

Neglected by their alcoholic father and resentment-filled mother—who often come to blows—the siblings are mostly left to raise themselves. During an ill-fated trip to a lakeside campground that results in their parents’ arrest for fighting, Jordan and Chung swim into the water and are sucked under by a whirlpool. After an otherworldly experience on the lakebed, Jordan manages to pull Chung back to the surface and to shore. They’re sent home with their grandparents and return to school the next day, only to realize that they’re no longer the same kids who went into the lake. Jordan now breathes smoke when she’s angry. Chung, when overwhelmed, drops to the ground and flops around like a fish. With these peculiar new features, the siblings face their parents’ separation, their father’s attempt at recovery, a move to a new apartment in a nearby city, new friends, and, as they grow older, first loves and first big losses. Through their ever whirling grief, Jordan and Chung are always circling one another, discovering themselves in the pain and beauty of the vast American plains. Seim’s lyrical prose is shot through with vibrant images, as here, where Jordan discovers her new ability in the school’s tornado tunnel: “Ashy and resembling burnt wood, a cloud of smoke billowed out of her mouth and nose. At first she couldn’t move, couldn’t stop the thing from filling the entirety of the tunnel with her cinders.” Fragmentary in its structure, the novel is held together by

the tenderness with which Seim constructs her characters’ relationships. The magical realist elements heighten rather than overshadow this wonderfully stark vision of 21st-century Kansas.

An inventive and deeply felt coming-ofage novel following two siblings.

Kirkus Star

Cooperative Co-Parenting for Secure Kids: The Attachment Theory Guide to Raising Kids in Two Homes Smolarski, Aurisha | New Harbinger Publications (200 pp.) | $18.95 paper Jan. 2, 2024 | 9781648481840

Smolarski offers a practical and empathetic guide for separated caregivers to building a co-parenting relationship that helps kids flourish.

Shortly after the author separated from her partner, their 6-year-old daughter told her “I feel all alone in the woods!” That distress signal launched Smolarski, a psychotherapist, mediator, and public policy advocate, on a quest to understand what a “good two-home family” might look like and learn how to create one for her own family. In this guide to creating “a co-parenting relationship that allows your child to thrive,” she outlines three different attachment styles and how they affect family interactions and details key principles newly separated caregivers can follow to prioritize their child’s emotional security during challenging times. The author uses brief fictional scenarios to illustrate different ways divorced or separated parents might interact with each other and with their children, discusses the various emotional factors involved, offers exercises to help readers to identify the factors most important to their personal situation, and revisits the same scenarios to show how they might play out differently when the suggested techniques and FEBRUARY 1, 2024

179

1/8/24 5:06 PM

INDIE

approaches are applied. The chapters cover the nature of the co-parenting relationship, making decisions, dealing with your child’s emotions (and your own), developing shared values and effective communication, resolving conflicts, and maintaining consistency across two homes. Each chapter ends with a helpful “Now What?” question-and-answer section addressing specific concerns parents may have. Throughout the book, Smolarski emphasizes self-compassion and argues persuasively that one parent can improve family dynamics to reach what she terms a “win-win-win” by implementing her suggestions even when the co-parent isn’t fully on board.

Her realistic and relatable examples include diverse family structures, with children of all ages. The explanations of important concepts, such as “hot potato” emotions and the “upstairs and downstairs brain,” are clear and down to earth. Smolarski’s practical tips and ideas are likely to be helpful across a broad range of relationships.

A helpful and reassuring model of how ex-partners can put their child’s happiness first.

Bloom: On Becoming an Artist Later in Life Steeves, Janice Mason | FriesenPress (186 pp.) | $27.99 | $14.99 paper Oct. 12, 2023 | 9781039182363 9781039182356 paper

Canadian artist and art teacher Steeves presents an exploration of art and aging.

Creating art and entering one’s later years are often each portrayed as debilitating struggles. The tortured artist is a common stereotype, and seniors are frequently portrayed in terms of their changing appearance and failing health.

But in her debut book, Steeves upends this narrative, asserting that art and old age, though both challenging, can be very positive experiences. The book counters ageism by portraying the last 180

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 180

phase of life as a time when people are well positioned to become artists because they often have fewer responsibilities and more time to develop patience. They also have a wealth of experience to draw upon from a long life. One of Steeves’ friends, she says, became an author at the age of 100, and again at 102. Surrender and acceptance of imperfection are part of both art and aging, Steeves points out, and she makes a familiar reference to the Japanese art form of kintsugi to illustrate this principle, in which cracked bowls are mended with gold, drawing attention to flaws and making them shine. The author employs a balanced mix of sources that includes her own experiences and those of other artists, including responses of older, unknown artists that she received to a targeted social media post. It’s apparent that a love of art infuses Steeves’ life; before painting, she worked with clay for 15 years. This same love permeates her writing as she effectively notes that creating artworks can renew an elderly person’s sense of openness and play, offer emotional healing and a sense of community, and even lower cortisol levels. Although Steeves also covers obstacles older artists face from within (such as fear and self-doubt) and without (lack of space, negative opinions), her book’s main takeaway is a feeling of wonder and hope.

An inspiring call to creativity for readers of any age.

The Fire King Stitle, Nick | Blazecrest Publishing (568 pp.) | Feb. 8, 2024

A young soldier finds himself hunted by his own king in this second installment of a YA fantasy series.

Castien Varic is a Stormless—a person born without magical abilities. On the continent of Auris, this puts him at a disadvantage: The crystal-wielding Summoners are able to call upon the powers of the

seven Tempests in battle, but Castien is forced to rely on his skills with a bow.

He is in a particularly tricky spot at the moment, since one of his friends, the Summoner Ilyana, turned out to be a spy and assassinated Castien’s liege lord, the king of Arvendon, Avenos Titansworn. Now, Castien is an accessory to murder. For the sake of survival, he’s forced to flee to Celes, a rival kingdom with which Arvendon is now at war. Ilyana, it turns out, is the daughter of the king of Celes, who was also recently assassinated. Avenos ordered the killing, a move that sparked Ilyana’s retribution. Castien can only hope that at some point he will be able to sabotage Celes and redeem himself in the eyes of Arvendon. The new king of Arvendon, Summoner Faelyn Titansworn, is hellbent on tracking down his father’s killers, but will his desire for revenge be his undoing? Meanwhile, the powerful Asteros Silverglade awakens after a long sleep in the Void, ready to learn further secrets from the shadowy creature called the Emissary. What he learns will change his understanding of Auris’ past—and have grim ramifications for the coming conflict. Stitle’s prose is imbued with quiet magic that helps sell this fantasy world: “Ash swirled in the air, twisting and turning through the morning winds. It fell from the sky like rain, a quiet echo of destruction gently floating to the ground. White wisps swirled around, dancing in and out of the billowing smoke.” It’s all standard fare for the epic fantasy genre, but given Stitle’s youth—he’s only 17 years old, according to his author bio—it’s a highly impressive work of storytelling. Fantasy fans will devour this latest installment and look forward to the volumes that lie ahead for this promising writer.

An ambitious, engrossing fantasy epic from a talented young author.

For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

1/8/24 5:06 PM

ISBN: 979-8218176198

A small, anxious dog with big concerns.

Will Willie make it?

“An appealingly illustrated work with an upbeat message about trying new things.”

—Kirkus Reviews For All Inquiries, Please Email antropis7@gmail.com 020124 KR Indie_Rd6.indd 3

1/8/24 5:06 PM

New from beloved graphic novel superstars

★ “A SPARKLING ROMANCE.” —Kirkus Reviews

★ “SURE TO BE A RUNAWAY HIT.” —Booklist

★ “HEARTWARMING.” —Publishers Weekly

★ “BEAUTIFUL.” —School Library Journal

★ “GORGEOUS.” —Horn Book

SCAN TO LEARN MORE! An imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group

Lunar New 020124 KR Year Indie_Rd6.indd Love Story Kirkus 4 Back Cover Final.indd 1

12/19/23 1/8/24 5:06 9:36PM AM