The South Korean author headlines a special issue dedicated to international literature
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that Americans don’t read enough world literature. (We don’t read enough literature period , but that’s the subject for another column.) Although I consider myself well read, and my job at Kirkus certainly keeps me turning pages, I’m the first to admit that I don’t explore what’s being published beyond U.S. borders as often as I’d like. It’s too easy to get caught in the ebb and flow of new releases from contemporary American authors.
That’s one reason I look forward to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each fall. I’m grateful to the Swedish Academy for pointing me toward 2022 laureate Annie Ernaux, for example; I’d heard a lot of buzz about the work of this octogenarian French writer, but the prize
gave me the push I needed to finally read her. As I wrote in this space at the time, her book Happening —a gut-punch account of her unexpected pregnancy and illegal abortion at the age of 23—was a total revelation to me and many other U.S. readers. Her American publisher, Seven Stories Press, reports a 25-fold increase in sales of her titles in the year after the Nobel announcement.
The same year that Ernaux received the Nobel, our cover subject, South Korean writer Bora Chung, made the International Booker Prize shortlist with her slyly twisted story collection Cursed Bunny. (The International Booker, sibling to the prestigious Booker Prize, recognizes “fiction from around the world [that] has been translated into English
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and published in the U.K. and Ireland.”) Now Chung has a second collection published in the United States. In a starred review of Your Utopia (Algonquin, Jan. 30), our critic writes that the “imagined worlds here may not be utopian—but the reading experience certainly is.” (Both collections were translated into English by Anton Hur.) Don’t miss our interview with Chung—who has some international reading recommendations of her own as a translator of Polish and Russian science fiction—on page 12.
Elsewhere in the issue, we talk with Sandra Guzmán (page 50), who edited the groundbreaking literary anthology Daughters of Latin America (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023); Antony Shugaar (page 92), who has been busy translating the children’s picture books of midcentury Italian author Gianni Rodari; and Sámi / Swedish writer Moa Backe Åstot (page 136), whose debut YA novel, Fire From the Sky, was honored by the American Library
Association in its English translation by Eva Apelqvist (Levine Querido, 2023). And don’t miss our editors’ columns, which spotlight outstanding international titles in fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and young adult literature.
In working on this issue, I stumbled upon my own next international read: a mystery novel, the first in a projected series, by Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov. The Silver Bone, translated by Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia, March 5), introduces detective Samson Kolechko, who’s investigating a theft—and then pursuing a murderer— in the bleak city of Kyiv after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1919. Kurkov, like his homeland, has garnered more global attention since the war with Russia, and his books hold the promise of all international literature: to offer a firsthand perspective on life elsewhere on the planet.
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Alana Abbott, Colleen Abel, Jeffrey Alford, Paul Allen, Jenny Arch, Kent Armstrong, Ryan Asmussen, Mark Athitakis, Diego Báez, Colette Bancroft, Elizabeth Bird, Ariel Birdoff, Sarah Blackman, Amy Boaz, Jessie Bond, Rhea Borja, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Susan Breitzer, Melissa Brinn, Jessica Hoptay Brown, Jeffrey Burke, Timothy Capehart, Sandie Angulo Chen, Ann Childs, Alec B. Chunn, Carin Clevidence, Rachael Conrad, Adeisa Cooper, Emma Corngold, Jeannie Coutant, Perry Crowe, Kim Dare, Sara Davis, Maya Davis, Michael Deagler, Cathy DeCampli, Elise DeGuiseppi, Steve Donoghue, Anna Drake, Jacob Edwards, Gina Elbert, Lisa Elliott, Lily Emerick, Joshua Farrington, Brooke Faulkner, Katie Flanagan, Hillary Jo Foreman, Renee Fountain, Cynthia Fox, Mia Franz, Harvey Freedenberg, Jenna Friebel, Roberto Friedman, Robbin Friedman, Nivair H. Gabriel, Glenn Gamboa, Laurel Gardner, Chloé Harper Gold, Carol Goldman, Melinda Greenblatt, Christine Gross-Loh, Tobi Haberstroh, Dakota Hall, Geoff Hamilton, Silvia Lin Hanick, Alec Harvey, Bridey Heing, Katrina Niidas Holm, Yung Hsin, Abigail Hsu, Julie Hubble, Ariana Hussain, Kathleen T. Isaacs, Darlene Ivy, Wesley Jacques, Kerri Jarema, Jessica Jernigan, Danielle Jones, Betsy Judkins, Mikayla Kaber, Deborah Kaplan, Marcelle Karp, Ivan Kenneally, Katherine King, Lyneea Kmail, Maggie Knapp, Megan Dowd Lambert, Christopher Lassen, Tom Lavoie, Judith Leitch, Maya Lekach, Elsbeth Lindner, Coeur de Lion, Corrie Locke-Hardy, Barbara London, Patricia Lothrop, Georgia Lowe, Kyle Lukoff, Isabella Luongo, Leanne Ly, Andrea MacPherson, Joan Malewitz, Mandy Malone, Thomas Maluck, Collin Marchiando, Michelle H Martin, Gabriela Martins, Matthew May, J. Alejandro Mazariegos, Breanna McDaniel, Jeanne McDermott, Dale McGarrigle, Sierra McKenzie, Noelle McManus, Carol Memmott, Tara Mokhtari, Clayton Moore, Jennifer Nabers, Christopher Navratil, Mike Newirth, Randall Nichols, Therese Purcell Nielsen, Sarah Norris, Katrina Nye, Erin O’Brien, Tori Ann Ogawa, Connie Ogle, Mike Oppenheim, Nick Owchar, Emilia Packard, Derek Parker, Hal Patnott, Deb Paulson, John Edward Peters, Justin Pham, Jim Piechota, Vicki Pietrus, Margaret Quamme, Judy Quinn, Kristy Raffensberger, Stephanie Reents, Alyssa Rivera, Lauren Roberts, Amy Robinson, Gia Ruiz, Lloyd Sachs, Bob Sanchez, Caitlin Savage, Liz Scheier, Jerome Shea, Sadaf Siddique, Linda Simon, Laurie Skinner, Jennifer Smith, Wendy Smith, Margot E. Spangenberg, Allie Stevens, Jenn Strattman, Mathangi Subramanian, Jennifer Sweeney, Deborah D. Taylor, Paul Teed, Bill Thompson, Caroline Tien, Renee Ting, Bijal Vachharajani, Jenna Varden, Barbara Ward, Audrey Weinbrecht, Sam Wilcox, Angela Wiley, Vanessa Willoughby, Kerry Winfrey, Marion Winik, Livia Wood, Bean Yogi
READING IS THE BEST WAY to travel without leaving your chair. Sometimes you get so caught up in a far-off country that you want to stay awhile, reading several books in a row. Ever since reading the memoirs of Janet Frame , an innovative (and too-little-known) Kiwi author, I’ve been attracted to books set in New Zealand. English writer Rose Tremain set her 2003 novel, The Colour, during New Zealand’s gold rush—an event I knew nothing about but that blazed to life in Tremain’s telling. But hers was an outsider’s view, of course,
and this year has seen the publication of two excellent novels from an insider’s perspective.
According to our starred review, Tom Baragwanath’s Paper Cage (Knopf, Feb. 13) is “just the kind of dark, disturbing, gritty, and unusual treat thriller lovers are looking for.”
When a boy goes missing in a small New Zealand town called Masterton, tensions among the residents run high.
Lorraine Henry, a file clerk at the police station, is worried about the town’s other children—including her 7-year-old
great-nephew, who will soon disappear too. “Resist the urge to race to the climax and keep Google close at hand to look up Māori words, because fully understanding the relationship between Masterton’s white and Indigenous cultures is central—not just to appreciating the book but to solving the mystery,” says our reviewer.
In Greta & Valdin (Avid Reader Press, Feb. 6), Māori writer Rebecca K. Reilly has created what our starred review calls “your new favorite fictional family.” Queer lovelorn siblings Greta and Valdin Vladisavljevic live together in Auckland. They have a Russian Moldovan father and a Māori mother; their family includes a biologist specializing in sea fungus, a theater director, a TV travel-show host, and a graduate student in literature. “As Greta and Valdin come into their own—helped by, and helping, the many weirdos in their lives—readers can root for only one outcome: If Reilly won’t give us a sequel, then we can at least hope she won’t make us wait too long for her next novel,” our reviewer says.
Moving to Scandinavia: Sámi author Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan
(translated by Saskia Vogel; Knopf, Jan. 9) is an epic poem that follows the Indigenous community in the years after Sweden and Norway became separate countries in 1905, impeding the movement of the reindeer-herding Sámi. Then a young man dies in an accident, and his ghost hovers for decades. Our starred review calls it “a sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival.”
Joining the lineup of outstanding Swedish crime writers is Christoffer Carlsson; he was first published in the U.S. last year with Blaze Me a Sun , and his new novel, Under the Storm (translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles; Hogarth, Feb. 27) follows a character from the earlier book, police detective Vidar Jörgensson, as he becomes obsessed with the case of a young man who killed his girlfriend—or did he? Vidar’s not so sure.
“Boasting the psychological intensity of a Hitchcock film and gloomy atmospheric elements including a ferocious storm, this is a gripping, utterly distinctive mystery,” according to our starred review. Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
LAURIE MUCHNICK Illustration by Eric Scott AndersonInsight into a Frenchwoman’s life from the woman who lived it.
Colombe Schneck, the narrator of each of these three assembled novellas, engages in a careful dissection of various stages of her life. That the book’s author is also named Colombe Schneck provides some clue as to how close to the bone Schneck is cutting here. In Seventeen, she parses the inevitability of biology and the shock of betrayal by one’s own body (and the results of an unplanned teen pregnancy). Friendship explores a lifelong friendship between Colombe and Héloïse, allowing Schneck to examine, in subtle detail, the ethnic, class, and political differences
between bourgeois households during the girls’ formative years in 1970s and ’80s Paris. A different kind of bodily betrayal is visited upon Héloïse in the account. Schneck’s last remembrance, Swimming: A Love Story, recounts an affair Colombe embarks on after a season of romantic disenchantment. Among the other gifts Gabriel bestows upon her during the course of their relationship is an awareness of her body (and the development of a sense of autonomy over it). Repeatedly, the inevitability of life’s unpredictability is made clear to Colombe, but it is only with later-acquired self-awareness that she is able to continue in the face of her doubts and emotional discomfort. Translated from
Schneck, Colombe; trans. by Lauren Elkin & Natasha Lehrer | Penguin Press | 240 pp. $27.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780593655931
French by Elkin and Lehrer, Schneck’s matter-of-fact delivery of all aspects of her lived experiences—from a comparison of the Parisian apartments favored by the bourgeoisie to her panic at uncertainty—lends a universal quality to the narrative; these observations made by one woman are
broadly recognizable. Acknowledging the influence of Annie Erneaux on her thinking and her ability to write about issues intensely personal to women, Schneck carries that frank discussion forward with grace and hard-won knowledge. No pulled punches here, just truth.
6
By JuliaKirkus Star
Alvarez, Julia | Algonquin (256 pp.)
$28.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781643753843
When a novelist decides to retire, she builds a cemetery for the stories she has never finished telling.
Alma Cruz has had a successful career as a novelist and professor. Upon retiring from academia, she vows she’s done with writing as well. She wants most of all to return from the U.S. to her family’s homeland, the Dominican Republic, and live quietly. But what to do with those boxes full of notes and manuscripts for the books she didn’t get around to writing? Alma buys a plot of land in a working-class neighborhood in the Dominican Republic. Before she builds a casita to live in, she builds a cemetery for the stories. She burns the boxes—except for two that won’t catch fire—and inters them all. One of the intact boxes holds notes for a book about Alma’s enigmatic father, Dr. Manuel Cruz; the other is research for a book about Bienvenida Inocencia Ricardo, the forgotten first wife of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, a real-life monster who has haunted much of Alvarez’s fiction. Alma hires a woman who lives nearby to guard and maintain the cemetery until she can move in. But Filomena will become indispensable, not just for her kindness and loyalty but because she can hear the stories Alma has buried. Filomena is illiterate, but when she sits in meditation at the books’ graves, their subjects
begin to speak to her. The novel’s focus shifts away from Alma to the stories of her father and Bienvenida, and of Filomena herself. As those separate plots touch and interweave, a rich and moving saga of Dominican history emerges, embodied in the lives of irresistible characters. Alvarez returns to many of her familiar subjects: family and especially the relationships among sisters, immigrants’ experiences, the empowerment of women. Her gifts for glowing prose and powerful narrative are still strong. Buried stories find their way to the light in this finely crafted novel.
Bailey, Robert | Thomas & Mercer (527 pp.) | $16.99 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781662516634
Now that he’s won two high-profile murder cases, Alabama “billboard lawyer” Jason Rich takes on his most challenging client: himself.
When methamphetamine lord Tyson Cade is gunned down outside a grocery store moments after clerk Marcia “Dooby” Darnell spurned his latest advance, you’d think the woods would be full of suspects, from Matty Dean, the distributor who immediately seizes violent control of the Sand Mountain meth operation in Cade’s absence, to the hard-used Dooby herself. But newly appointed Marshall County Sheriff Hatty Daniels and newly reelected D.A. Aloysius Holloway “Wish” French ignore all the others to concentrate on Jason, whose two earlier brushes with Cade brought him
nothing but grief, who was seen nearby and caught on camera a few minutes later, and whom Cade identified as his killer with his dying breath. Insisting against all advice on defending himself, Jason accepts an inspired suggestion as his advisory counsel: Shay Lankford, the career prosecutor Wish French defeated in the last election. After rooting around endlessly in local secrets and scandals that take a heavy toll on Jason’s allies, profiler Albert Hooper comes up with enough evidence to guarantee a mistrial. But Jason doesn’t want a new trial; he wants to win the trial he’s in, and eventually he does, though not without spending a good deal of time relitigating the painful legacies of his first two murder cases. And although this case seems designed to avoid the very possibility of a surprise ending, Bailey closes by pulling a rabbit as big as a kangaroo from his hat. Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray | Norton (208 pp.)
$15.99 paper | May 21, 2024 | 9781324075943
This set of interconnected stories explores the lives of Indigenous characters—all of whom are tortured in some way by romantic grief or confusion—in a range of settings across Canada.
We encounter a mother who confides to her son about her youthful passion for another girl, a parolee who struggles to orient his need for companionship as a free man, and several artist figures who agonize over their creative and erotic frustrations. The impact of past and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples forms a prominent thematic backdrop here, and the dysfunction plaguing individual characters’ lives is overtly linked to systemic forms of trauma. These stories
are earnestly told, and the author’s concern for drawing attention to marginalized forms of suffering is clear. However, the narrative’s didactic impulse—paired with the adolescent sentimentality that is this collection’s guiding sensibility—produces rather hollow effects that tend to undermine the plausibility of the individuals it presents to us. The author favors direct summations of his characters’ lives and motivations, which often manage to be at once maudlin, portentous, and fuzzy: “He wonders what the world will be without her in it. The truth: it will be nothing and it will be everything.” A reliance on academic jargon sometimes takes the place of any genuine psychological probing, as in this description of a man eavesdropping on his neighbors’ lovemaking: “Their animal sounds remind me that the I is a trick of the light and that the plural is dense and unbearable.” Though the collection aims to confront large themes—most obviously, the impact of colonialism and intergenerational trauma on Indigenous sexuality—it seems, at last, not to illuminate the subjects it would represent, but to evade them.
A sincere collection of stories chronicling love and loss.
Bowen, Sarina | Harper/HarperCollins (432 pp.) | $18.99 paper
May 7, 2024 | 9780063280601
A single mother fights to unravel her lover’s mysterious disappearance and expose a deadly secret. Bowen is best known for her contemporary romance novels, but she takes a confident step into the thriller genre with this engaging debut, which combines a fast pace and an intriguing plot with pointed commentary on the way useful technology can easily create a dangerous privacy nightmare. The story focuses on Ariel Cafferty, a single
mother in Portland, Maine, who works for Chime, the maker of a high-tech video doorbell. The company was created by her uncle and father, but her father’s sudden death left her uncle in charge. Ariel is the office manager—her real passion is the artistic pursuit of blowing glass—but the job is flexible enough to allow her to spend time with her young son, Buzz. Then she gets an alarming text—“There’s trouble. I need to see you”—from a man she was sure was dead: Drew Miller, Buzz’s father, who also worked at Chime and with whom she’d had a passionate affair. Then he vanished, never knowing they had a son. The desperate text sets Ariel on a dangerous course into a deeper investigation of Drew’s disappearance, Chime’s troubling relationship with law enforcement, and maybe even her father’s death. Told largely through dialogue, the novel propels readers swiftly through the story, and Bowen never gets too bogged down in technical details. She adds just enough love and longing into the mix to please her romance-minded fans without scaring off the hardcore thriller addicts. An engaging and fast-paced thriller about the abuse of technology.
Chang, Abraham | Flatiron Books (400 pp.) $29.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781250910783
A college student with a thing for music, movies, and numbers falls in love.
Young Wang, the protagonist of Chang’s debut novel, has a thing for numbers. The New York University student keeps an updated list of them, good and bad: 1, for example, is “the first, the best. GOOD,” while 44 is “SO BAD.
ALWAYS AVOID.” So when his uncle, Su Su, tells him that “we only get seven great loves in life,” he takes it seriously, especially when he meets Erena, a fellow NYU student, at the used CD and
DVD store where he works. (As you may have guessed, this novel is set in the 1990s.) Erena, whose quirk meter is off the charts, introduces herself thusly: “I’m Erena. Erena Ji-Yoon Renee Valentina Yasuda.…It’s a lot, but it accurately conveys the lineage of this petite package of pulchritude—little bit of this, little bit of that. It’s like the whole Axis ran riot over my entire family tree! Hello? Humor? I made a funny?” The novel chronicles the relationship between Young and Erena, interspersed with Young’s remembrances of his previous loves, his relationship with his family and his best friends, and letters from Su Su, a hippie who has embraced a peripatetic lifestyle. Unfortunately, these threads never come together— Young is a depressed cipher, and Erena, who says things like “So, voilà , bingobango,” is such a Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype that she makes Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State look like Nurse Ratched. (Young, himself a cinephile, would get that reference.) The pace of the novel is slow despite the hyper dialogue and Chang’s extremely liberal use of ALL CAPS and italics, and the ending is unsatisfying. Chang has heart, there’s no doubt about that, but this novel is a misfire.
Chang, K-Ming | Coffee House (144 pp.) | $14.95 paper May 21, 2024 | 9781566897075
A chance reunion with a childhood friend sends a young woman reeling through the surreal taxonomy of her life.
Seven is 24 years old, works in the laundry room of a chiropractor’s office, and still lives at home with her mother and grandmother. Her days consist of a monotony measured in repeated sensation: the “pigskin” texture of the thin towels, the “symphonic” sound of the chiropractor’s urine stream in the laundry room
toilet, the jellylike residue of the soap dispenser that “dribbl[es] like a nosebleed” and must be wiped clean every hour. At home, Seven follows similarly long-established rituals, watching television with her mother and her grandmother in the “apartment [they have] been renting since before [she] was born.” Though her mother encourages her to move out on her own someday, there seems to be nothing that could shake Seven from this cycle—which serves to forestall the vision of a girl’s future her grandmother once presented to her: “You’re born. You leave your family before it can eat you. You are eaten by another family and give birth to its children. You make your life a service to others, and in exchange you are never alone with your desires.” Then, while cleaning one of the chiropractor’s treatment rooms, Seven comes face-to-face with Cecilia, a beloved childhood friend and subject of Seven’s most closely guarded fantasies. Cecilia’s reemergence in Seven’s life instigates a flurry of uncontrolled memory wherein the girls’ shared experiments with forbidden sensuality express themselves in Seven’s desire to consume Cecilia’s very being, to enshroud her beloved in the cavities of her body, to become her—if not in this life, then perhaps in the next. An erotic, dissociative exploration of obsession, this slender novella reconfigures desire as a corporeal function as integral as breathing or digestion. While the visceral, disorienting nature of the language sometimes obscures the images themselves, the work of reading this book leaves the reader with the same feeling one has after eating a particularly indulgent meal—satiation, with the knowledge of more hunger to come.
A truly unique voice.
Chen, Wendy | Algonquin (256 pp.)
$28.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781643755151
Four generations of a Chinese and Chinese American family navigate the ties and trials of kinship.
who find in themselves the strength to be more than the times might allow and in their families a sweet solace amid that struggle. A poignant, impressive debut.
For more by K-Ming Chang, visit Kirkus online.
Chen begins her first novel with a fairytale romance in rural pre-communist China. Yunhong, whose name translates as something like Clouds of Happy Red, is from the Zhangs, a family of modest means, and her beau is the son of a local lord. But their marriage in 1927 is short-lived. One of her brothers is among the revolutionaries who ransack the lord’s house and kill her husband. The time shifts to 1967 and Nanjing. Yunhong’s twin granddaughters march off to school carrying Mao’s Little Red Book. Children have names like Leap Forward and Resist America. One twin loses her lover when he’s rusticated, like so many during the Cultural Revolution, and dies. The other, Hongxing, dreams of “joining an art troupe” and falls into a forbidden love. The book’s last big section jumps to the U.S. in the years 2004-2009. While some family members left China for the U.S., one who remained is Hongxing. She enjoyed a successful acting career until her illicit love emerged and she was “erased from public memory by the government.” Feeling utterly alone, she visits her sister in the U.S. and hopes to persuade her to have their ailing mother buried in China. Chen’s narrative is full of poignant family moments set against the larger canvas of history, while singular and recurring images link the fragmented narrative: a birthmark carried by daughters; a silk-lined trunk and its keepsakes handed down across generations; memories that are rendered as bedtime stories with dragons and princes; an old damaged photo restored by computer to startling clarity. Throughout, the author depicts women
Ch’oe Myŏngik | Trans. by Janet Poole Columbia Univ. (304 pp.) | $25.00 paper April 9, 2024 | 9780231202718
A collection of poignant portraits of Korean lives during a tumultuous century.
“When would the day arrive when he didn’t feel like howling in sadness?” That’s the bleak situation facing Sangjin, a writer who’s fled to the Korean countryside to wait out the end of World War II in Ch’oe’s luminous collection of stories. In the war’s final months, Japan’s defeat is expected, but what will happen after Japan’s 35-year-long occupation of Korea is over? Sangjin ponders the future and “could no longer see through the darkness to the next moment even,” Ch’oe writes in “The Barley Hump.” Translated by Poole, this collection’s publication is a major event—Ch’oe’s first appearance in English. It’s stunning to think Anglophone readers have waited some 50 years since his death to read stories of Korean society struggling under the twin traumas of Japan’s occupation and the disastrous Korean War. A longtime resident of Pyongyang, Ch’oe was an incisive chronicler of the overlooked and the marginalized, of characters whose private struggles mirrored the conflicts taking place in their world. In “Walking in the Rain,” which first brought him acclaim in 1936, the friendship between a frustrated office boy with artistic aspirations and a status-obsessed photographer reflects the clash in values between those seeking money and those with more aesthetic pursuits. Elsewhere,
generational and political conflicts erupt in the difficult relationship between a dying man and his intellectual son in “A Man of No Character,” and “Patterns of the Heart” presents a harrowing portrait of a revolutionary who has given up fighting colonial oppression and succumbed to opium addiction. While any historian interested in a glimpse of Korean life would benefit from reading these stories, treating them as mere documentation undervalues Ch’oe’s literary talents. His spare, lean style and ability to capture deep pathos are as evocative as Hemingway and feel strikingly contemporary. Though little is known about him, Poole says Ch’oe enjoyed some favor in the country’s north and south but his life was upended (like everyone’s) with the war’s outbreak in 1950. What we know about his final years is vague and sad. Poole says establishing authoritative versions of the stories was complicated by Cold War censorship, but readers will be grateful for her effort.
A debut by a modernist prose master more than 50 years in the making— and well worth the wait.
To & Fro
Cohen, Leah Hager | Bellevue Literary Press (416 pp.) | $18.99 paper
May 21, 2024 | 9781954276253
In this tale of philosophical and spiritual self-discovery, two girls—one living in a fairy-tale-like world and the other in New York City—share commonalities despite the ways their stories set them apart.
Cohen’s new novel is split into two distinct stories. One follows Ani, who finds her life turned upside down when the Captain, the man who has ostensibly been looking after her, leaves the grounds of his home without any coherent explanation. Determined to find him and bring him back, Ani leaves as well, with only her bicycle and a small, helpless kitten that shouldn’t be away from its mother— and is, on some level, undoubtedly a metaphor for Ani herself—for company. Ani’s journey is a strange and winding odyssey in which she meets a bevy of strange and wise characters and recounts the trauma of her own youth to readers as a story within a story. Meanwhile, in New York City, Annamae Galinsky is dealing with her own trials and tribulations as she navigates young adulthood alongside her mother and older brother, Danny. Deeply lonely despite the companionship she finds in the odd inhabitants of her Manhattan neighborhood, Annamae feels the pull of friendship and a reflection of herself and her struggles, which readers will know to be Ani navigating her own faraway fantasy world. The thing about this novel that will capture the attention and imagination of readers is the original format in which it is told. While Ani and Annamae’s tales can be read in chronological order, it’s noted that the sections can be read in reverse order as well, and the final chapters are printed in columns so that both stories can exist on the same page. It’s a fascinating premise (though better suited to a physical edition of the book), and the result works almost as an artistic Choose Your Own Adventure book.
A slow and muddled coming-of-age tale that relies on its innovative style to carry the day.
Fontaine, Tessa | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) | $28.00 | May 14, 2024 9780374605810
A sudden death unsettles a Northern California community for women.
As the quarterly “reenactment of horror that led to the creation of our sanctuary” tells it, Red Grove was founded in the 19th century by Tamsen Nightingale, the survivor of a trek to California on which her sisters were killed and eaten by their starving husbands. Tamsen escaped, and when her own murderous spouse tracked her to this secluded grove of redwoods, she discovered that no woman could be harmed within its magical space. Sixteen-year-old Luce Shelley—who was brought to Red Grove at age 8 by her mother, Gloria, in 1989 after her beloved Aunt Gem was beaten nearly to death by a boyfriend—believes fiercely in the place as refuge from the violent male world. Its healing atmosphere resuscitated Gem, albeit only to an “everdream” state that Gloria claims makes her a conduit to the dead loved ones, whom paying customers from nearby towns come to Red Grove to contact. As the novel opens, one of these “seekers” has a heart attack during a session and later dies in the hospital. The man’s son, buying into outsiders’ hostile depictions of Red Grove as a coven of witches or a lesbian commune, thinks Gloria willfully let him die and turns up menacingly at her front door; when Gloria disappears shortly thereafter, Luce suspects the son and vows to find her mother. Fontaine first paints a rich portrait of simmering tensions both between Gloria and Red Grove’s leader, Una, and within Gloria’s family, then launches a propulsive narrative of Luce’s quest for her mother, which leads her to the real story of Red Grove’s founding and the uncomfortable knowledge that violence is not exclusively employed by men. An affirmative finale shows Luce
acting on her faith that Red Grove, newly based in truth, can continue to fulfill its mission as a place of peace and healing.
A thoughtful coming-of-age story enfolded inside a cleverly crafted double mystery.
Geni, Abby | Counterpoint (304 pp.) | $27.00 May 7, 2024 | 9781640096264
Geni’s second collection of short stories, following two novels, is perhaps her widest-ranging work yet.
“The Rapture of the Deep,” the first story in this collection, is classic Geni—energized by the animal world, which, to its protagonist, is preferable to the human one. And why wouldn’t it be, when humans do things like succumb to alcoholism (“Starlike”), leave their families (“Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter”), or ensnare other humans in a nefarious web (“A Spell for Disappearing”)?
Though there are fewer animals in the rest of these stories, they are embroidered with threads from the natural, scientific, or mythical worlds, which provide gorgeous specificity to the writing by giving the characters a framework for their experiences. This is useful, because Geni’s stories all teeter on the edge of horror. By revealing, in her incisive prose, the mundane horrors of being human (add to the above list, Alzheimer’s disease, suicide, stalking, and abuse), she opens the door to the possibilities of something more strange, more awful, more uncanny. Occasionally the balance tips. Yet most of these, through the hope and resilience of their protagonists, end with a measured sigh of relief or at least the small comfort of someone having marshaled their better nature in a thorny situation. Except for the last—anyone thinking there might be a noncreepy explanation for a story
titled “The Body Farm” will have their hopes dashed. It’s almost enough to upend the more optimistic conclusions of the rest of the collection. Destabilizing and beautiful. A rich experience.
Golden, S.K. | Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781448313143
A retired art forger is tossed back into peril when the victim of her ex-husband’s latest caper puts out a hit on her and her 10-year-old son. In her day, Beatrice Cardello broke every rule in the book. Recruited as a forger by Thomas Osbourn, her gambling father’s creditor, she traveled the world executing copies of famous paintings, at least one of which hangs in a museum unaware of the switch. But all that’s behind her—until her ex-teammate and ex-lover Adam Gage turns up to warn her of big trouble: Charlie Cardello, Bee’s mobbed-up ex-husband, has not only taken up with Cassie, a 21-year-old, but gone a step further by lifting $37.5 million from Cassie’s kingpin uncle, Theo Alvarez, who’s sworn vengeance on Charlie (no great loss) and his family (even if they’re not legally his family anymore). Calling on Oliver’s improbably resourceful nanny, Malika, for help, Bee hastens into hiding. But all of them are snatched by someone who’s under orders from one of the major players. From that point on, Bee’s minute-byminute life becomes a nonstop attempt to strike acceptable deals with Alvarez,
who wants his money back; with Charlie, who wants to maintain his lifestyle; and with Adam, who wants to resume his affair with Bee. Fans of Golden’s earlier cozies will appreciate the content warning that opens this funhouse: “While Stolen Pieces is a light-hearted story overall, there is a mention of miscarriage/stillbirth, as well as depictions of violence throughout.” You can say that again.
Gangsters, thieves, CIA agents, double-crossing allies, and a foulmouthed forger with a heart of gold. Your move.
Kirkus Star
What Kingdom
Gråbøl, Fine | Trans. by Martin Aitken Archipelago (148 pp.) | $18.00 paper April 16, 2024 | 9781953861849
In her debut novel, Danish writer Gråbøl paints a portrait of a young woman living in state-sponsored housing in Copenhagen struggling with both mental illness and its treatments.
Before the relative independence of the residential facility, our narrator was locked in the psychiatric ward of a hospital and subjected to repeated electroconvulsive therapy. She’s determined never to be sent there again. Now she has her own fifth-floor room along with other young adults, among them Hector, from Peru, where his psychoses were treated with exorcism. Their housing is intended to be temporary, an “impermanent halfway house,” “a practice home.” Together with the support staff, she and Hector and the
Gangsters, thieves, CIA agents, and a foulmouthed forger with a heart of gold.
STOLEN PIECES
others cook communal meals, take excursions, shop at the grocery store. The outside world seems hard to fathom; the world of the facility is deeply familiar: “We know what sort of diagnosis a person’s got even before they’ve mentioned it: boys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive. Eating disorders are easily spotted. The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also a matter of economics….” Our insomniac narrator wants to learn how to sleep; no one can help her with that. Her diagnosis is borderline—“but between what and what? ” Like all of them, she struggles with shame, weight gain, side effects, hopelessness. She self-harms, though never enough to require hospitalization. Gråbøl’s eye is unsparing and convincing, her prose vivid and alive. “Something uncontrollable stirs in me, it rises from my calves, as if I was a bottle and someone poured acid into me….” The narrator doesn’t deny that she needs help. “The days were as signs drawn by hands in the air; depictions of knots or loops.” But at the same time, she has questions: “Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment?...about the relationship between compulsion and compliance?... care and abuse?...between surrender and obliteration?”
A welcome corrective to romanticized notions of mental illness, written with compassion and authenticity.
Kirkus StarWomen and Children First
Grabowski, Alina | SJP Lit/Zando (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781638930785
A debut novel set in Nashquitten, Massachusetts, a fictional seaside town. A teenager named Lucy Anderson dies under mysterious circumstances at a party after a video clip of her having a seizure circulates on social media. Grabowski’s novel traces a constellation of relationships, some intimate
and others incidental, between Lucy and 10 girls and women who narrate the stories of their lives. Jane, who attends the local public high school with Lucy, is having an affair with her math teacher and caring for her mother, who suffers from a mysterious chronic illness. Natalie has managed to escape her hometown but ends up working for the tyrannical founder of a San Francisco startup, a decision she begins to regret when she returns home to care for her sick mother. Mona, Natalie’s best friend and old rival who told her to take the job, crosses paths with two of the girls who witnessed Lucy’s accident. Though Mona knows one of them and can tell they’re both in trouble, she chooses to do nothing. “[This] is the danger of girls,” Mona thinks. “They look like deer when, really, they’re wolves.” This comment could just as easily describe Mona and many of the novel’s female protagonists. Women suffer at the hands of men—besides the lascivious math teacher, there’s also a coach who’s sexually assaulting students—but they also betray each other. That’s the case with Maureen, president of the high school PTA. She’s a do-gooder who is trying to organize a memorial for Lucy, but she also has made a huge moral compromise to protect her daughter, who did something cruel. Each of the book’s first-person sections takes its time, fully immersing us in the dreams of its narrator and how those dreams have been frustrated. Girls and women inflict damage on each other by being too close and not recognizing their own agency and power, and also because disrupting systems of male privilege is difficult. Grabowski’s exploration of all these ideas makes for a brilliant novel.
A smart, propulsive novel attentive to the ways community can fall short.
Hallberg, Garth Risk | Knopf (608 pp.)
$32.00 | May 28, 2024 | 9780593536926
A father and daughter share an epic bond over anxiety and addiction.
more by Garth
Hallberg’s 2015 breakthrough, City on Fire, exemplified Tom Wolfe’s concept of the billion-footed beast, a social novel that strived to capture the world in its fullness. This disappointing follow-up is similarly bulky and rangy (and very New York), but narrows its focus to two lead characters. In 2011, when most of the novel is set, Ethan Aspern is a recovering addict who’s determined to bond with his hyperintelligent 13-yearold daughter, Jolie. But she has her own set of emotional issues, including some ill-advised drinking that leads to a near-miss with a subway train when she hops on the tracks to recover her phone. The novel shifts back and forth in time, chronicling Ethan’s unlikely romance with Sarah Kupferberg, Jolie’s mother (he’s listless, she’s an aspiring academic); his fraught relationship with his father, head of a foundering private school; Jolie’s budding, sketchy friendship with a young man equally interested in Occupy Wall Street and LSD; and Sarah’s parents, judgmental of everybody involved. The core of the novel occurs during a (metaphorically fraught) Thanksgiving weekend, as Ethan attempts to bond with a Jolie who’s determined to give everyone the silent treatment; what ensues includes (among other things) accusations of kidnapping, a bad LSD trip, and anaphylactic shock. Hallberg enlivens this setup by playing with form, modeling sections after an old-school mixtape and shuffling perspectives, but his efforts to show how the parent-child bond both persists and disrupts feels stodgy. Fans of Jonathan Franzen will appreciate Hallberg’s hyperprecise, socially acute observational skill; readers of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels will note a similarly desperate,
BORA CHUNG HAS BEEN BUSY. When we speak a few weeks before the U.S. publication of Your Utopia (Algonquin, Jan. 30), her second story collection to appear in English, she is the center of a whirlwind of activity. In November, she had visited New York to attend the National Book Awards, where she and her translator, Anton Hur, were finalists in the category of translated literature for her previous collection, Cursed Bunny. She returned home to South Korea to “a million deadlines,” she says, related to her own work as a literary translator
from Polish into Korean (she translates from Russian as well).
Chung is also a passionate activist for human rights, which she describes movingly in the author’s note that closes Your Utopia Building a better world, she writes, may be a slow, incremental process, but it’s worth fighting for. And when this world inevitably falls short of our vision of utopia, we can and should take time to mourn those we’ve lost.
When Chung logs on to Zoom for her interview with Kirkus, she’s at a
hotel in Yeosu, a city off the southern coast of South Korea, where she has traveled for a labor union event. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It sounds like your schedule is packed. What have you been working on? I’m translating Polish science fiction right now. It’s a lot of fun. Polish literature found me in Korea. One of my professors taught Korean at Warsaw University, and through him I discovered the beauty of Polish literature. When I went to grad school in America [Chung earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European area studies from Yale and a Ph.D. in Slavic literature from Indiana University], all the programs required a second language, so I naturally decided on Polish. I ended up writing my doctoral thesis on comparisons of images of utopia in the works of one crazy Polish author, Bruno Jasieński, and another crazy Russian author, Andrey Platonov They’re really amazing.
Those images of utopia must be tied
An author is like a drug addict in a way. We’re always looking for ways to score characters and themes and topics.
to your new book. But you did your dissertation quite a while ago, right? How did utopia work its way into your fiction over time?
I did my dissertation in 2009. But your dissertation never leaves you, I think. In terms of the title story of the collection, “Your Utopia,” that came from a 2018 trip to Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Convention, that was held in San Jose, California, that year. One day I went to a Tesla dealership where they were exhibiting dismantled parts of the electric cars—the shaft, the tires, the battery pack, the engine. It was my first time seeing the inside of an electric car. Then I decided that I wanted to have a car as my main character in a story.
During the convention, I also attended a panel on pain management and the opioid epidemic in the United States that was very eye-opening. Drugs are strictly controlled in South Korea, so I’d always thought of drug problems as a kind of crime. But the panel taught me that pain management is very closely related to the medical system and that addiction is a health care problem, not a criminal justice problem.
As part of the same story, I got the idea of a medical robot that [rides around in the back seat of the robot car and] asks you to rate “your utopia” on a scale of 1 to 10 [in a post-apocalyptic landscape where humans have died off]. That detail was inspired by the pain management scale from 1 to 10 that doctors use when treating patients. On the way home, I started writing the first part of the story at the airport by hand on a notepad.
Your stories are wildly creative, but there are these nuggets that are recognizable from everyday life. Some say writing is an act of noticing, that writers are very perceptive of the world around them. Do you relate to that point of view? I would say an author is like a drug addict in a way. A drug addict is always looking for ways to score. We’re always looking for ways to score characters and themes and topics. I’m going to use that in my
Chung, Bora; trans. by Anton Hur Algonquin | 256 pp. | $18.99 paper Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781643756219
story. I’m going to use you in my story. I’m going to put that line in my story. I collect them in my mind.
Talking about drugs reminds me of your story, “Maria, Gratia Plena,” about a government worker scanning the consciousness of a comatose criminal who was involved in the drug trade. Did that story reflect your changing understanding of drugs?
First of all, our brains do not discern the difference between reality and our imaginations. If an image is realistic enough or probable enough, our brain accepts what it’s seeing as a probable reality. If our brain made a structural difference between what’s imagined and what’s not, I wouldn’t be an author, because there would be no such thing as fiction writing.
In that particular story—the title means “Mary, Full of Grace”—you can’t really say definitively whether the comatose patient is a criminal. Maybe she dreamt [her crimes] or imagined it all. She’s considered a criminal because law enforcement says she is.
In reality, I hope that comatose patients’ dreams or memories never become evidence accepted in a court of law. It’s one thing to consciously make a statement in court, but it’s another thing to be unconscious and have someone tap into your brain.
That story was inspired by an article I read about a domestic violence case in France where a police officer killed his family [when they fled his abuse]. The police officer, as a hypocrite and an abuser, should have been killed—that’s what I really wanted to say. What if his daughter had survived and became a great criminal who eventually killed her father? I wanted to defend this character and create confusion about whether the crimes in her consciousness were real or imagined.
In a talk you gave at the New York Public Library in November, you said you write about the things that disturb you; this book includes violence against women, the climate disaster, the end of humanity. Yet there’s hope in these stories, even grace that you offer your characters. How do you go about writing such a complex mix of emotions?
For both this book and Cursed Bunny, I didn’t write stories with the intention of putting them together in a book. I write a lot of stories, and my editor picks which ones go into each book. The stories in Your Utopia are more recent, and it’s possible that I was finding hope while I was writing them. I was teaching science fiction at the time, and I found hope in my students. They were really great undergrads, some from other countries, some who had disabilities, and I learned a lot from them about different ways of exploring the world. It was really fun to find new ways to communicate. I learned more from them than I think they learned from me. I think they will save the future. But I also write about space zombies, so maybe we are all doomed.
Korean American writer Hannah Bae is a journalist, illustrator, and winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
self-deprecating dad in Ethan. But the resulting novel is too overworked to feel as lively and funny as either of those authors.
Whip-smart and ambitious, but tangled in its own web of themes and scenarios.
Huntley, Swan | Zibby Books (256 pp.) $27.99 | May 21, 2024 | 9781958506714
A ghostwriter hired by a charismatic food personality finds herself falling in love.
The well-developed pair of characters at the center of Huntley’s fourth novel are Zara Pines and Jane Bailey, brought together when the recently bereaved, broke, and emotionally drifting Zara is hired to write Jane’s memoir, to be titled I Want You More. The title comes from a signature moment on 30 Bucks Tops, Jane’s cooking show, when she considered the relative merits of two cucumbers—one of many small details of the character (an “edgy cowgirl” in ripped jeans, “like if Debbie Harry used leave-in conditioner”) and her repertoire (“maple bacon carrot avocado toast”) that smartly hit the mark. Zara is flown out to the Hamptons to stay at Jane’s estate for the interviews, showing up with her best friend, Diego, part of Jane’s significant gay-male fan base. Zara herself has never even watched the show and is distracted by her budding romance with a lovely woman named Andie that began right before she left California. This resistance won’t last long, as the force that is Jane sucks Zara into her orbit, and certain details of Jane’s background—she lost her parents in a murder-suicide, her first husband died from a fall in the bathroom—disturb Zara less than they do the reader. The thriller plot that unfolds is relatively predictable and familiar, but the
window-dressing—the paparazzi and the fans, the married couple who take care of Jane and her estate, the social media, food, and exercise—is all just right. You’ll speed through this one in an afternoon or two at the beach. Like cinnamon Red Hots, this of-the-moment domestic thriller keeps you sweetly sucking away till it delivers the punch.
Jean, Emiko | Simon & Schuster (320 pp.)
$27.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781668023938
A detective suspects subterfuge when a kidnapped teen returns home after two years and refuses to talk about her abductor. Missing girls are a common trope in crime fiction, but Jean freshens the genre with an intriguing story about secrets and dysfunctional families. Ellie Black, emaciated and traumatized, is found in a Washington state forest two years after she was taken from a parking lot near her hometown. Who took her and how she escaped confound police detective Chelsey Calhoun because Ellie is evading her questions. The case is an emotional investment for the haunted Chelsey, whose teenage sister Lydia went missing 15 years before. Jean’s novel is told from multiple perspectives, which gives her story emotional heft. The time readers spend with Ellie during her captivity is told with such devastating detail that it borders on a horror story. The toll her disappearance takes on her parents and high school boyfriend is acutely painted with heartbreak and the anguish that comes with not knowing whether Ellie is alive. Chelsey, who is of Japanese heritage, carries a double load of challenges as she fends off sexism and racism on the job and in her community. She’s an intriguing character; more details about her early life and adoption into a white family would have enriched her backstory. Like Jessica Knoll, whose
crime novels also revolve around missing girls, Jean focuses less on sensationalizing predators and more on the tragedy of a “frenzy of missing girls. They do not give answers. They do not speak of what has come to pass. They whisper: Find us. Please.” Jean, who has written young adult fiction and the novel Mika in Real Life (2022), has written an impressive crime novel here.
An unexpected ending and a cadre of heroic female characters make Jean a crime writer to watch.
Jones, Stephen Graham | Saga/ Simon & Schuster (464 pp.) | $28.99 March 26, 2024 | 9781668011669
The ultimate final girl reaches the bloody end of her frayed, traumatized rope. How readers absorb this last volume of Jones’ hyperviolent, gory ode to horror flicks probably depends largely on their appetite for the genre itself. What’s on offer here is a lot, not only in terms of blood ’n’ guts but also a fat stack of backstory and a dizzying cast. Jade Daniels, the reluctant but relentless heroine of the trilogy, has returned to Proofrock, Idaho, after her second prison stint for the events chronicled in My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021) and Don’t Fear the Reaper (2022). Her wealthy best friend, Letha MondragonTompkins, has gotten her a job teaching high school history, but all the meds and therapy available aren’t really cutting it. Before long, tiny threads—a real estate project at the site of the previous massacre at “Camp Blood,” a pair of missing teenagers, and a raging forest fire started by a grieving game warden—have exploded into an infernal nightmare. The writing is still boxing-match ferocious and precise, but while every word is carefully chosen, they’re not all in service of explaining what’s really happening. The plotlines are often steeped in urban
A twist is expected in any Kubica novel, and this one is pretty successful.
SHE'S NOT SORRY
legend, which are gleefully punctuated by Jade’s rat-a-tat-tat horror movie references à la Ready Player One. That’s catnip for horror fans, and the images Jones conjures would give some of the movies a run for their money. Whether it’s Jade’s rapist father back from the dead, a murderous child mutilating the townsfolk, a pack of rampaging bears tearing through the flames, or the titular ghost making the rounds at the local lake, it’s real peek-between-yourfingers stuff—when you can work out what exactly happened. A characteristically violent denouement for a girl given hell by just about everybody.
Kearney, Greg | Arsenal Pulp Press (336 pp.) | $21.95 paper | April 16, 2024 9781551529417
An aging man remembers the ups and downs of his childhood alongside a rock-star-to-be.
Roland Keener has lived in Winnipeg his whole life. Raised by his caring but direct single mother, Margaret, he was a lonely boy until he met Birdy O’Day, a magnetic classmate at a new school. Roland’s home became a safe haven for Birdy, who lived with his alcoholic mother and abusive father. When his own family failed to support his interest in pursuing a music career, it’s Roland and Margaret who had faith in Birdy’s talent. Soon opportunity came knocking, but when Birdy got his break, he left Roland behind. The former best friends’ lives took differing
paths—Birdy became a megastar while Roland became a hairstylist who, at age 69 and living with his ailing boyfriend, struggles to make ends meet. And now, years after swearing he’d never return, Birdy is going to perform in Winnipeg, and perhaps heal the wounds between him and his former friend. Charting the lives of two queer boys in the 1960s, the novel is an interesting examination of the struggles and joys they faced, but the tone is sometimes bleak and the humor often doesn’t land. Readers with an interest in queer history may find this novel engaging, though the wooden dialogue is hard to get past.
An exploration of queer history through a less-common geographic lens.
Koch, Aidan | New York Review Comics
(208 pp.) | $24.95 paper
April 30, 2024 | 9781681378350
Across the main title story and three shorter stories, artist and graphic novelist Koch contemplates nature and relationships via sparse, impressionistic art and laconic narration and dialogue.
In the title story, an unnamed woman visits her friend Lise and Lise’s partner, Yann, at Yann’s ancestral home in the woods; Yann is constructing a lake house near a rough-hewn monolith that dates back millennia. The woman and Lise share a playfully teasing relationship, hinting at a deep familiarity and affection while bantering along the edges of uncomfortable topics like tension between Lise and Yann and the
woman’s plan to begin work at a distant farm in order to reclaim her life after a challenging period. The story flows along atmospherically and languidly, intercutting and contrasting nonfigurative organic imagery (particularly chunky blue curves of flowing water) with rigid lines and grids that imply the structure of human endeavor. White space dominates the pages, the emptiness amplifying bright splashes of watercolor, dabs and slabs of earth tones, and the striking visages of Koch’s characters. Koch gorgeously captures the poignancy of facial expressions (anchored by soulful eyes and wriggled brows) and the poetry of a body’s pose. This keen eye for kinesiology runs through all four stories, most notably in “Man Made Lake,” where a jumble of shapes and collage quickly coalesces into a series of bifurcated pages containing a pair of humanoid silhouettes stretching and moving, seemingly in response to each other, before transforming into fish and water. The interrelation between humanity and nature is central to the work and explained at length in an afterword from editor Nicole Rudick that serves as a museum placard to Koch’s impressionistic work. Boldly meditative and enriching.
Kubica, Mary | Park Row Books (329 pp.)
$27.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9780778308065
In trying to do the right thing, a woman puts herself and her family in danger—and is forced to take extreme action to protect herself. After a long shift at the hospital where she works as an ICU nurse, Meghan Michaels trudges through the cold Chicago evening to attend her divorce support group, where she’s surprised to run into Natalie Cohen, a woman she hasn’t seen since high school. While they were never close friends, Meghan encourages Nat to give the group a chance when she expresses
doubts. She can’t help but notice the ugly bruise on Nat’s temple; having experience with victims of domestic abuse in her line of work, Meghan is concerned. She remembers a previous case when a battered woman came in to the hospital but refused to press charges; she was later murdered by her husband. Speaking of dangerous men, there has been a recent rash of attacks on women by a man who hasn’t been caught, so Meghan is particularly on her guard. She lives with her teenage daughter, Sienna, who’s often home by herself when Meghan is working. One of Meghan’s patients, a woman who purportedly jumped off a bridge and is now in a coma, may have been fleeing the assailant—and either fell or was pushed. These violent storylines converge over the length of a novel in which, of course, not everyone is who they seem. A twist is expected in any Kubica novel, and this one is pretty successful. Meghan is particularly strong and thoughtful, so she makes both an attractive protagonist and a formidable antagonist for those who will threaten her and her family. She has her secrets and will do anything to protect them, but she also has a sense of justice. Ultimately, she wants to make the world a safer place, and the novel encourages us to view that as a worthy goal, whatever the path.
Interrogates and exposes the everyday fears that women face—while still checking all the thriller boxes.
Kirkus Star
Liquid, Fragile, Perishable Kuebler, Carolyn | Melville House (352 pp.) | $19.99 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781685891091
Varying perspectives show the inner workings— and secrets— of a rural Vermont town. The humdrum order of smalltown Glenville, Vermont, is disrupted when a family moves in
from New York. Parents Sarah and Jim Calper seek a better life for their son, Willoughby, while Will just seeks an end to the summer so he can leave for college. But when he meets sheltered, home-schooled Honey Mitchell and falls in love, he unknowingly changes Glenville forever.
Kuebler’s debut novel spans a year in the town through the alternating perspectives of residents whose deepest thoughts betray a tense, insular place buried beneath a peaceful surface. As Honey defies her evangelical parents for Will, other characters go through parallel changes. Honey’s friend Sophie, for instance, deals with jealousy and fracturing friendships, while Nell, an isolated woman living alone in the woods, navigates poverty and disability in the midst of the cruel Vermont seasons. Honey and Will’s relationship, though shown sparingly, is the axis around which the story swings. Their devotion to one another brings about a surprising conclusion, one whose arrival Kuebler sows slowly and carefully. The narrative moves like the river that runs through the town: gentle at first, then harsh and unforgiving. At times dark, at other times beautiful, Kuebler’s debut shines in its precision. It picks apart each character’s thoughts in an unusual clipped stream-of-consciousness narrative. The characters’ points of view fit together like an elaborate quilt, gradually coming together into a satisfying whole. Kuebler’s skillful, minimalist prose carries this small-town story from tranquil beginning to perilous end. Among the residents’ growth, discovery, and tenderly told emotional arcs, only one thing is certain: Glenville will never be the same. An intricate, slow-burning patchwork of a debut novel.
Kirkus Star
Blue Ruin
Kunzru, Hari | Knopf (272 pp.)
$28.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780593801376
A starving artist stumbles into his past—and the ugly side of wealth—in this prickly allegory.
Kunzru’s seventh novel is narrated by Jay, who in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic is in ill health, getting by delivering groceries in upstate New York. His route takes him to an estate that’s coincidentally occupied by Alice, a former flame, and her husband, Rob, Jay’s one-time art school rival. Alice is disinclined to bring him into their pod for fear of infection—or of stoking old drama—so instead hides him in a barn while his health improves. In the weeks that follow, Jay recalls the messiness of their relationships three decades prior: He and Alice were once inseparable, and he and Rob competed in British art school but were also friendly, bonded by ambition and drugs. But as their art world fortunes diverged, Jay’s despair and drug use intensified, prompting Alice to leave him for Rob. Kunzru cannily withholds a few details about this dynamic, but from the start the novel is a study of the complications of art, money, and identity. Is Rob more free as an artist for having access to wealthy patrons? Does Jay have more integrity for sabotaging his art world prospects? And why do muses like Alice absorb so much abuse up on that pedestal? This novel completes a kind of trilogy by Kunzru on contemporary
A starving artist stumbles into his own past in this prickly allegory.
BLUE RUIN
social crises, from systemic racism (White Tears, 2017) to neofascism (Red Pill , 2020) to, here, Gilded Age income inequality, topped off with paranoia and misinformation. The love triangle plot is a bit potted, and tonally and thematically Kunzru is borrowing from Martin Amis’ 1980s work. But it’s a lively, ever-intensifying story as Jay weaves in discussions of race, immigration, work, and what it means to earn a living. It’s a darkly ironic tale of two bubbles—an art world divorced from economic reality and a Covid era that segregated us from society. A dark, smart, provocative tale of the perils of art making.
Exhibit
Kwon, R.O. | Riverhead (224 pp.) | $28.00 May 21, 2024 | 9780593190029
An artist at a crossroads in her career and personal life develops a relationship with a ballet dancer.
Jin Han is a photographer on the edge of 30. She’s had acclaim in the past with a series about religious pilgrims, but she’s afraid the “image has left”—she hasn’t produced any work worth keeping in a long time. She’s under a different kind of pressure from her husband, Philip, who, despite agreeing early in their relationship not to have children, seems to have changed his mind. In Jin’s liminal state, she can’t help but ponder the story passed down through her family about a curse on them originated by a long-ago kisaeng—a girl sold into courtesanship. (The profane kisaeng cuts into the narrative from time to time to tell her own story.) The curse foretells that Jin will steer her life into ruins; it’s just as she’s pondering how this could unfold that she meets Lidija Jung. Korean like Jin, Lidija gave herself that name as a child when she devoted her life to ballet. Immediately, the women are drawn to each other; through Lidija, Jin will learn about
freedom from shame and expectation— and the consequences, both elating and frightening, of that same freedom. As ever, Kwon’s style may divide readers. In a book all about image and presentation, the baroque sentences make conceptual sense. But at the level of plot, the writing is often clipped and elliptical, withholding a great deal when it comes to action. Like overexposed photographs, this strategy is both luminescent and obfuscating: It can be hard to see to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, Kwon’s novel is a muscular and intelligent examination of the layers of Jin’s identity. A bold, tough novel that invites the viewer’s gaze and stares defiantly back.
Landau, Alexis | Pantheon (336 pp.) $29.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593700792
What is the cure for misogyny?
Weaving together contemporary and ancient storylines, Landau addresses a question often asked by women, hardly ever by men: Where did all our power go? Ava Zaretsky, an art historian and mother of two, juggles her life and ambitions along with her primary responsibility for the domestic and parental chores of her marriage. Her husband Kasper’s career as a movie producer requires him to work long hours and travel. Family obligations don’t seem to get in the way of work for him (or even occupy the same amount of brain space they do for Ava). When Kasper relocates from California to Bulgaria for a six-month shoot, Ava examines all aspects of their relationship with a critical eye but travels there for a summertime visit with her kids in an effort to keep the family intact. An encounter in Sofia with a feminist college professor who’d been influential in Ava’s education and thought process results in Ava’s growing involvement with a group of women seeking to reclaim long-lost power and
status through the re-creation of ancient goddess rites and practices. Interspersed throughout Ava’s story are episodes from the life of a Greek mother and her teenage daughter (who was on the cusp of marriage) that have parallels to the contemporary narrative. (Ava’s own daughter is edging toward adolescence, and Ava’s concerns about preparing her for the fraught life of a woman weigh heavily on her.) Landau launches the novel with a prologue that foreshadows the extent of the rage carried by the women participating in the rituals, a culmination of centuries of repression and disempowerment. Ava’s tightrope walk between competing obligations is vividly illustrated in a thoughtful novel utilizing the past to illuminate present-day ills.
An enraging past is the prologue to a provocative present-day narrative.
Thorn Tree
Ludington, Max | St. Martin’s (400 pp.) $29.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9781250288714
Ludington’s lushly descriptive and assured second novel ranges from California’s late-1960s counterculture to the pre-Covid-19 near present. In 2017, two survivors of the ’60s, both veterans of prison stints, coexist uneasily in separate houses willed to them by a mutual friend on an estate in Beverly Hills. Pensive Daniel, 68, is best known for creating—and then blowing up—the elaborate art installation in the desert that gives the novel its title, though more recently, he has been working as a high school English teacher. Enigmatic, alcoholic Jack, 77, is supposed to be caring for his cherubic 6-year-old grandson, Dean, while Dean’s actress mother, Celia, “fresh out of rehab number two,” is off filming a movie, but Jack is so often distracted that the unsupervised Dean frequently wanders off to hang out with Daniel. As the novel fills in their backstories, it becomes clear
that the lives of both men were shaped by visits to a Northern California commune, encounters with a cult leader, experiences with LSD, and a significant Grateful Dead concert, as well as by the death of a woman important to them both. The most affecting chapters deal with Daniel’s slow transformation and his recovery from tragedy through the creation of art, which is described in meticulous detail. But Ludington’s tendency to spend long stretches developing secondary characters—such as Daniel’s artist son or the multiple drug dealers Jack gets to know—only to drop them precipitously, slows the momentum of the novel, as does the grating reiteration of the sense of impending disaster experienced by nearly all the characters: Celia, for example, feels “a monolithic fear located behind her sternum” and “radioactive dread.” A rushed, violent, and confusing ending throws the otherwise meditative novel off-kilter, without resolving the many questions it raises.
A meandering take on the repercussions of life in a fascinating era.
Ma-Kellams, Christine | Atria (224 pp.) $27.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9781668018378
A recently canceled K-Pop band member known by his fans as “the Hot One” bides his time in the McMansion of a Chinese American psychologist he meets in the aisles of H Mart.
At the height of a successful career as the eldest (and best-looking) member of a K-Pop band, Sang Duri finds his life crashing down around him when the lyrics of his latest single stoke the friction among the nations of Korea, China, and Japan. In an attempt to avoid the public eye and spare his bandmates from further scrutiny, Duri convinces a psychologist—the nameless narrator of Ma-Kellams’ novel—to let him stay with her family in their palatial
home. The psychologist, already unhappy in her marriage, is sympathetic to Duri’s plight and agrees to take him in. As they spend more and more time together, the lines of their complicated relationship begin to blur until it is unclear who is actually relying on whom. Little do they know that Duri’s disappearance from the spotlight will result in a shocking act of violence that will rock the music industry to its core. While Ma-Kellam’s novel is a scathing indictment of fandom and the way the industry often turns a blind eye to the mental health of its stars, the book lacks the charm and depth of character necessary to keep readers fully engaged. The use of footnotes—explaining everything from different types of plastic surgery to what the H in H Mart stands for—may be clever, but it feels unnecessary to the story and distracts from the main plot, which struggles to get off the ground.
A satirical examination of the stars and fans of the music industry.
McHugh, Laura | Random House (304 pp.) $29.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9780593448854
Six years after a violent home invasion and the mysterious disappearance of their older cousin, two sisters begin to put together the pieces of what actually happened. No one ever leaves the backwater town of Beaumont, Missouri. Amelia and Kylee Crow’s older cousin, Grace, comes closest to getting out—she was both at the top of her class and the first in their family to get into college—but all that changed the night she vanished while babysitting them. Years have passed since that fateful, bloody evening, and while most of Beaumont’s residents have moved on with their lives, Amelia can’t shake the feeling that the truth of what happened is still out there waiting to be found—and
so is Grace, dead or alive. When the body of a young woman is discovered on a piece of property in town, old questions are dredged up, fingers are pointed, and Amelia and Kylee soon learn that their family might not be the only one with skeletons in the closet. The story is told in alternating sections, starting with chapters narrated by Amelia as she and Kylee search for answers, and then switching to chapters written from Grace’s point of view leading up to the night of her disappearance. Grace’s chapters help readers fill in the pieces that Amelia and Kylee struggle to put together, as well as emphasize the love that exists among all three girls in a world that is extremely unkind and violent toward young women. Where McHugh’s writing truly shines, however, is in her descriptions of the town of Beaumont and its residents. From Amelia and Kylee’s pole-dancer mother—who loves and deeply resents her daughters in equal measure—to the meatpacking plant where everyone works after high school, she deftly captures the hardships of a small and insular community with vivid detail. A suspenseful tale of resilience that will resonate with anyone who has ever yearned for a fresh start.
Meyer, Lily | A Strange Object (270 pp.) $16.95 paper | April 2, 2024 | 9781646053155
Two generations of Jewish Americans find themselves— and discover secrets—among friends and lovers in Latin America. In the months leading up to the 1973 Chilean coup and the death of democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende, teenage American expat Gabriel Lazris meets Caro Ravest at a house party and falls for her immediately. It’s an unlikely match. Jewish and an avowed Communist, Gabriel
attempts to woo Caro, a Chilean national and observant Catholic. A summer of socialist farming and fun in the haystacks yields a pregnancy that manages to surprise the protagonists. Fast forward to 2015 and a generation later: Gabriel and Caro’s daughter, Nina, who was brought up in the U.S., is working on a Ph.D. in communications when she arrives in Buenos Aires to do research for her dissertation. That’s where she discovers Guerra Eterna a mythic underground work of nonfiction that complicates the Lazris family’s understanding of themselves and their history. While Meyer’s plot unfolds slowly, it’s stacked with factual history. Characters casually namedrop major players like Allende, but small details make the difference— Meyer includes minutiae as specific as the murder of Dan Mitrione, an American cop who taught Uruguayan police torture techniques. The novel’s compelling fidelity to history and its resonance with (un)certain current events in the U.S. (an increasingly popular school bully is a racist, xenophobic Holocaust denier—sound familiar?) absolves the intentionally awkward teen sex scenes (“The fabric— should he remove it?”) and occasionally shoehorned political dialectics. A slow burn that absolutely ignites as the author deftly interweaves history, politics, and family.
Mogollon, Melissa | Hogarth (336 pp.) $29.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780593594902
The fortunes and misfortunes of a Colombian American family in South Florida.
Just as she’s about to start her senior year of high school, Luciana finds her life going off track: Hurricane Irma is about to make landfall and her mother insists that they evacuate. Although they plead with her
grandmother to go with them, the strong-willed Emilia absolutely refuses. In Mogollon’s bouncy debut novel, angry, exasperated, melodramatic Luciana is the voluble narrator, recounting the events of her life in phone calls to her older sister, Mari, a student at George Washington University. Luciana sorely misses Mari, envying her freedom, jealous because their mother obviously favors Mari, but needing her love. She shares with Mari predictable teenage angst about her dismal grades, the stress of applying to college, and her mother’s obsession with her weight. She resents, too, her mother’s homophobia. “When I told her that I liked girls,” Luciana says, “…she didn’t go to work for like two weeks.” But after she and her mother return to Florida, Luciana’s calls to Mari become focused less on her own problems and more on a family crisis: Her beloved grandmother—a foxy woman who has had two boob jobs and won’t leave the house without full makeup—is seriously ill. Suddenly, Luciana becomes her mother’s confidante; she gets close to her grandmother’s sister, long estranged, who has come to help out and, she hopes, to be forgiven; and she is privy to dark secrets from her grandmother herself. In call after shocking call, Luciana imparts to Mari a tangled history of their Colombian American family, which began with the murder of a great-grandfather and involves incest, sexual assault, abandonment, blackmail, and betrayal. “This is all basically a Telemundo soap opera,” Luciana tells Mari. Mogollon’s fresh, ebullient narrator is at once irreverent and caring, anxious about the future but eager to embrace adulthood, fearful of loss and filled with love. A sprightly debut.
Moore, Graham | Random House (384 pp.)
$30.00 | May 21, 2024 | 9780593731925
America pits dollars against reichsmarks in this tale of economic warfare.
In August 1939, war has not quite begun. In Minnesota, government employee Ansel Luxford is horrified at the looming Nazi threat. He goes to work for the U.S. Treasury Department with a plan to fight Hitler: Dry up his source of money to purchase war materiel. Then hostilities begin, and if the U.S., which is legally neutral, is going to provide critical goods to France and Great Britain, it must also be willing to sell to Germany. How to get around that? Let the Germans know that they must pay in U.S. dollars and not reichsmarks, and make sure they don’t have those dollars to pay. And then “lend” the U.K. 150 million bullets and lots of military hardware, like tanks. That oversimplifies the plot, but that’s the gist. Using meticulous research, the author recounts a little-known aspect of the fight against the Nazis. All the characters and biographical details are historically accurate but for a few the author acknowledges at the end. The result is a painless tutorial in economic theory, with vigorous debates about the value of the dollar versus sterling. Once America is in the war, talk turns to the future: Could a world bank and an international monetary fund prevent future global conflicts? The story doesn’t show any dramatic pain suffered by the Germans, perhaps because a dollar desert and Nazi battlefield losses are hard to conflate in a scene. The characters are fascinating, such as Harry Dexter White, a senior U.S. Treasury official believed to have been a Soviet spy, and the brilliant and arrogant John Maynard Keynes. The author lifts Luxford from complete obscurity into quiet heroism, apparently well deserved. There’s a mystery about a displaced paper clip and a threat with an
The movie, written by Charlie Kaufman, is based on the novel by Yoko Ogawa.
Lily Gladstone is set to star in a film adaptation of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, according to the Hollywood Reporter Ogawa’s novel was originally published in Japan in 1994; an English-language edition, translated by Stephen Snyder, was released in the U.S. in 2019; it was a finalist for both the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. The novel follows the residents of an island where objects mysteriously disappear and law enforcement officials make sure they are never remembered. One of the residents is a young writer who hides her editor, threatened by the police, under her floorboards.
A critic for Kirkus called the novel “a quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.”
Gladstone is the only cast member of the adaptation to be announced. She made history earlier this year when she became the first Native American to win the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama film, as well as the first Native actor to be nominated for the best actress Oscar, for Killers of the Flower Moon
The adaptation of The Memory Police will be written by Charlie Kaufman, known for screenplays including Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless . Reed Morano (I Think We’re Alone Now, The Rhythm Section) is attached to direct, while Ogawa and Martin Scorsese will serve as executive producers.
—MICHAEL SCHAUB
Sarah Ruhl and Sara Bareilles are adapting Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 novel for the stage.
Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is headed to the stage as a musical, Deadline reports Wolitzer’s novel, published in 2013 by Riverhead, follows a group of adult friends who met one another decades earlier at an arts-themed summer camp in upstate New York. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the novel as “ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.”
The musical’s book will be written by Sarah Ruhl, whose plays have included Eurydice and In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play). The lyrics and music will be
composed by Sara Bareilles, the singersongwriter responsible for the songs from the musical Waitress.
This will be the second adaptation of The Interestings. A pilot episode of a television series based on the novel aired on Amazon in 2016, but the company decided not to move forward with the show.
Wolitzer shared the news of the planned musical on Instagram, writing, “I could not be more honored or excited to have my novel adapted as a musical by these brilliant artists.”
Bareilles also announced the musical on Instagram, writing, “I wrote the first song before I finished the book. I love these characters so much and I can’t wait to share this world with a new audience.”—M.S.
unloaded pistol, but little else titillates the senses. Still, the story flows well and will hold readers’ attention. Fans of historical fiction will like this unusual take on World War II.
Morrison, Diego Gerard
Two Dollar Radio (320 pp.) | $19.95 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781953387400
An alcoholic writer who recently returned to Mexico City grapples with despair in the wake of loss.
Skipping along on many of the same thematic touchstones as Morrison’s debut novel, Myth of Pterygium (2022), this follow-up marinates in its literary navel-gazing while simultaneously amplifying its pedestrian horrors. This weird dissonance can distract from the genuinely moving human suffering. Our narrator (mostly) is Aureliano Más, a 30-something writing student who has come back from New York City at the behest of his Aunt Rose, an influential novelist who has used her influence to secure him a writing fellowship and a mentor. When we meet him, he’s daydreaming about day drinking with his writing pal Chris at their old Brooklyn watering hole, but reality soon sinks in. There are reasons behind Aureliano’s misery, but they’re doled out in such fragments and delivered with such emotional gravitas that their actual impact on the page seems diminished. He claims a deep desire to write the novel that obliterates magical realism from the Mexican canon, but the defining fact of Aureliano’s life is his deepening alcoholism. There’s some humor here—Chris’s cleareyed dissections of his output being one, while Aureliano’s award is named the Under the Volcano Fellowship, nodding to Malcolm Lowry’s mezcal-soaked tragedy. Mostly it comes from a place of terrible pain, though, as Aureliano tries to reconcile the absence of his mother, long since disappeared, with literary
balms. Between blackouts, we also get a large chunk of Rose’s failed novel about her early life with Aureliano’s mother, an unapologetic confession from his father, and the prototypical absence of resolution. One might think that sudden violence, two earthquakes, and the ravages of drink would breathe some much-needed life into the tale, but alas, no. We leave our man in much the same place we found him—searching for answers that never come.
A bleary-eyed ramble through generational grief, inherited hurt, and the collateral damage that nobody expects.
(320 pp.) $28.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781324075011
Intractable dilemmas challenge the very existence of several principal characters in Mukherjee’s new novel. Divided into three connected parts, the book contrasts the consciences of socially aware European professionals with the survival struggles of African refugees and the very poorest of Indian villagers. Part 1 focuses on a London-based gay couple, Ayush and Luke, parents to Masha and Sasha. Luke, the higher earner of the pair, is an economist with the credo: “Economics is life, life is economics.” When not doing the lion’s share of parenting, Ayush works in publishing, editing books on diversity issues. A new author has recently joined his list but refuses to divulge more than the teasing name M.N. Opie. Tortured by capitalism’s distortion of everything, from farming to the climate, Ayush becomes increasingly unhinged. Part 2 features one of Opie’s stories, another clash between literature and economics. Emily, a middle-class English academic, is concussed after her taxi is involved in a hit-and-run. Confused and nauseated, Emily reaches out to the driver, Salim, and finds herself pulled into his world. And finally, Part 3, perhaps the work of one of Luke’s economist colleagues, sees a
shift to India, where an impoverished family struggles to take advantage of the gift of a cow, only to discover this supposed opportunity to improve their finances brings additional, impossible burdens. Mukherjee puts his piercing intelligence and fine technique to the service of urgent issues and gargantuan choices, in a world where simple solutions are rarely available. This novel is more directly confrontational than his earlier books, and a challenge to the reader. A determinedly provocative work of fiction—passionate, graphic, and uncomfortable.
Noyes, Anna | Grove (240 pp.)
$26.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780802162809
Noyes’ Nordic gothic follows two young sisters on a small Swedish island shadowed by witchcraft trials four generations earlier. Berggrund Island in 1825 is a quiet, pious community with a haunting past: In 1675, the village priest coerced two orphans into accusing several women of consorting with the devil in Blockula, the “shadow realm” of an uninhabited nearby island called the Blue Maiden. This kicked off a chain of accusations that culminated in the murders of nearly 30 women. Six-year-old Beata and 10-year-old Ulrika are descendants of the only accused woman spared from death (not by any grace toward her, but because she was pregnant). Their father, Silas, the current priest, is a somber man who dismisses whispers of Blockula as superstition, but Bea and Ulrika become fascinated with witches all the same. This obsession bleeds into the girls’ greatest desire: to connect with their dead mother, Angelique. Both pursuits are forbidden in their father’s home, but, as they grasp at feminine knowledge—rifling through their mother’s things and attempting to cast their
O’Connor’s debut is set in 1938 on a remote island off the coast of Wales.WHALE FALL
own spells—the girls increasingly suspect that Angelique had her share of secrets. It is the arrival of handsome mainlander August that propels the girls into womanhood, a place far less glamorous than they once believed. This debut novel churns with the smell of sea-damp wool, day-old bread, and elderflower-scented smoke. This is a place steeped in tradition, yet, for Bea, who surfaces as the protagonist, “history…is too far removed to feel real. What matters is its lore: Be good, or the witch will take you .” The girls must accept that the hushed stories— the bits of history blotted from the lore—are even more foreboding in their absence. While the narrative is quite fragmentary, Berggrund and its inhabitants are alluring; Noyes’ rich descriptions create a setting that, in all its consuming bleakness, is perfect for a story about the burdens of generational and gendered trauma.
A twisting narrative of the horrors of patriarchal subordination that will appeal to fans of classic gothic novels.
Butcher
Oates, Joyce Carol | Knopf (352 pp.) $30.00 | May 21, 2024 | 9780593537770
New Jersey history meets Oates at her most gothic. Exhibit A: a bumbling fellow, Silas Weir, who can’t quite get anything right, a disappointment to his parents for not making it into Harvard even as a legacy, a man horrified at the thought of women’s private parts (“loathsome in design, function, &
aesthetics”)—which makes his determination to become “the father of gyno-psychiatry” all the odder. “His head was overlarge upon his stooped & spindly shoulders; his stiff-tufted hair of no discernible hue, neither dark nor fair, needed a more expert trimming; his eyes rather deep-set in their sockets, like a rodent’s eyes, damp & quick-shifting.” He cuts not much of a figure himself, but in Oates’ grim yarn, narrated in the stiff Victorian prose of the era, Weir does plenty of cutting: As the director of the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics, he has plenty of captive subjects from whom to remove uteruses and repair fistulae, with which he has a particular fascination. One inmate is a young, deaf-mute Irish woman named Brigit Kinealy, who, in a Stockholm syndrome exercise, becomes Weir’s assistant “before she had fully recovered her physical strength,” a recovery made all the less complete because, Weir realizes, he left a sponge sewn up inside her. Brigit, enslaved in all but name, proves to have inner resources of her own, ways of dealing with the “butcher of girls & women” that Weir, ever more obsessed, becomes, as he’s bent on proving the notion (and thereby winning Papa’s approval at last) that in his campaign advocating “the removal of infected female organs” lay the cure for any psychiatric disorder a woman might endure. It all makes for a creepy, circuitous tale—one based on actual history—made all the more sinister by the putatively good intentions of Weir’s son, an abolitionist and advocate for the freedom of everyone but poor Brigit. Vintage Oates: splendidly written, and a useful warning to choose your doctors wisely.
O’Connor, Elizabeth | Pantheon (224 pp.)
$27.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593700914
O’Connor’s debut novel is set in 1938 on a remote island off the coast of Wales and centers Manod, an 18-year-old who has lived there her entire life.
With her fisherman father, Tad, offbeat younger sister, Llinos, and beloved dog, Elis, Manod battles the elements on the rocky outcrop to survive. Following the untimely death of their mother years prior, she feels responsible for Llinos’ upbringing. O’Connor is careful not to romanticize the island, depicting the harsh living conditions in graphic prose: “The wind makes red meat of us.”
Alongside the news of increased political tension in Europe, a beached whale captivates the small, tightknit community, which is becoming increasingly conscious of its isolation. That so many families have abandoned the island for the mainland, leaving “more empty houses on the island than inhabited ones,” increases that sense of dislocation. When English ethnographers Edward and Joan arrive to document the islanders’ way of life, they enlist Manod to provide her unique insight into the project, and she begins to wonder if an academic career might provide an escape preferable to marriage. This renewed sense of possibility and appreciation for her home—“I had never looked closely at the island. I had never thought it was interesting, or beautiful”—coincides with a sensual awakening. Where her sexuality before the arrival of the scholars might appear modern—she has sex with a local boy without shame—it’s strikingly passive: “saying yes to him, kissing him, other things, made me feel slightly less peculiar than I did.”
Appraising the island and herself through an outsider’s gaze seems to awaken Manod’s senses, making her acutely aware of her body and desire. As the academics set about documenting the traditions, folklores, and lifestyles of
the islanders, Manod’s sense of otherness increases—with the pair exoticizing the islanders to such a degree that their research is utterly compromised. O’Connor prompts us to consider what it is to experience ourselves—and our cultures—through strangers’ eyes.
A beautiful meditation on the profound effects of seeing and being seen.
Godwin
O’Neill, Joseph | Pantheon (288 pp.) $28.00 | June 4, 2024 | 9780593701324
A sports agent’s pursuit of a soccer prodigy stirs up old family resentments.
O’Neill’s breakthrough novel, Netherland (2008), was partly a paean to cricket and tracked one character’s quest to build an arena in Brooklyn. Here the sport is soccer and the holy grail is an elusive young player who’s somewhere in Africa. None of that is evident as the book opens with a chapter narrated by Lakesha Williams, co-founder of a technical-writing cooperative in Pittsburgh, who faces an HR challenge with a fractious colleague named Mark Wolfe. It’s only in the next chapter, narrated by Mark (he and Lakesha alternate), that we learn of his younger half brother, Geoffrey Anibal, who’s begging Mark for help in locating the prodigy—named Godwin, as if to suggest what a prize he could be. Geoff is a fledgling sports agent and a bit of a con man looking to kick-start a career and a fortune. Mark feels their mother not only neglected him but also cheated him out of an inheritance. O’Neill has a gift for finding humor in emotional stress, and it shines in the two men’s confrontations and in the co-op’s increasingly tense office politics. The semi-siblings bring in a third potential ally for their Godwin campaign, a veteran French soccer agent named
A sports agent’s pursuit of a soccer prodigy stirs up old family resentments.
GODWIN
Jean-Luc Lefebvre. The three go through twists and turns, culminating in an African odyssey—rendered by Lefebvre in an astonishing marathon of storytelling—that highlights the avarice of sports recruitment and the legacy of colonialism. Along with these banner themes are the overarching questions: How should we treat each other and how do we deal with mistreatment, on any scale? While the Lakesha and Mark narratives both serve these themes, some readers may struggle with how disparate the story lines remain until a late and surprising convergence. But then good stories often rely on delayed gratification.
Another exceptional entry in the O’Neill corpus.
Preston, Douglas | Forge Books (384 pp.) $29.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9780765317704
Bloody murder spoils folks’ fun while megafauna return from extinction.
What a glorious way to spend a honeymoon: Mark and Olivia Gunnerson go backpacking through the vast Erebus Resort in the mountains of Colorado, where scientists have “de-extincted” species like the woolly mammoth and other Pleistocene megafauna. Just watch the peaceful beasts at their watering holes. Behold the giant armadillos, and the indricothere that make mammoths look like dwarfs. The scientists have removed genes for aggression in these
re-creations, so humans will be safe unless they’re accidentally stepped on. And yet, someone doesn’t want the newlyweds camping there, made evident by their disappearance without a trace, save only a copious amount of blood outside their tent.
Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent in Charge Frankie Cash takes the case. What happened to Mark and Olivia, and why? The park has no predators, so humans must be responsible. But where are the bodies? A doctor suggests that due to the amount of blood found, the victims may have— gasp! —been decapitated. The matter gathers national attention, and things only get worse as more people die. The late groom’s aggrieved billionaire father demands immediate answers, and of course he interferes with the investigation: “You’ll see me now, you son of a bitch, and tell me what the fuck you’re doing to find my son!” And speaking of F-bombs, surely it is possible to write a thriller with fewer—maybe use one or two to establish a character and then move on to more creative language? Anyway, the investigators are doing a lot. The action seldom lets up, and readers will feel the mounting tension and excitement. The setting itself is a scientific wonder, and it must tie into the murders somehow. Meanwhile, Hollywood is filming an action movie in the park, and the pièce de résistance will be the spectacular explosion of a train. But wouldn’t you know, Preston has other plans. Imagine Jurassic Park with the timeline brought forward to the Pleistocene, and you have the Erebus Resort. Science, imagination, storytelling, and action are all here. Fast-moving fun and a highly creative plot.
Reeve, Laura Chow | TriQuarterly/ Northwestern Univ. (184 pp.) | $24.00 paper
March 15, 2024 | 9780810146945
Queer and mixed-race people challenge boundaries and defy expectations by virtue of their very existence in a story collection infused with the sticky, swampy heat of Florida.
In many ways, this debut collection functions as an exploration of radical subversiveness—of race and ethnicity, of gender and sexuality, of models of family and community, even of species. Lines blur, categories coalesce, and hybridity reigns supreme. A member of the West Philly punk scene begins to develop reptilian physical features. Queer Jacksonville residents form a close-knit social circle that endures through incestuous romantic entanglements. Besides the recurring appearance of the Jacksonville friends, the most prominent commonality among the stories is the fact that multiple protagonists share a background as the children of Chinese mothers and white fathers. In practice, this means they are constantly on the receiving end of attempts to dissect their racial identity, familiar with the alienating experience of being constantly othered. A bookish teenager vacationing at a Polynesian-themed resort is repeatedly asked if she is a “native” by other tourists before a tragedy befalls her family. A university employee living in an Orwellian society navigates a state-run dating site that exclusively pairs people of color with white people. A young woman taught how to pickle memories disposes of “the white woman at the grocery store who told me I was prettier because I wasn’t ‘full Chinese’” in this manner. Haunting in its treatment of family legacy and cultural inheritance, that story, “One-Thousand-Year-Old Ghosts,” is one of the strongest here. Not all the stories measure up to the standard it sets, with some being much thinner and
less polished. Nevertheless, the collection highlights the everyday burden of shouldering bias and misconception, but never at the expense of the individuality and humanity of its characters. Stories that explore what it means to buck the status quo amid suspicion of—or hostility toward— anything different.
Reimer, Heidi | Dutton (400 pp.)
$28.00 | April 30, 2024 | 9780593473726
Complicated family dynamics take center stage in this coming-ofage story set in the theater world.
When teenage Jude Jones-Linnen stumbles on a copy of The Mother Act —a play written by her mother, Sadie Jones—Jude’s feelings crystalize: Sadie, who’d abandoned her when she was 2, had never loved her. It would be hard not to jump to this conclusion. The play, which Sadie has performed to critical acclaim, includes such lines as this: “I hate my child and what her existence has done to my relationship, my life, me.” But for Sadie, the situation is not so black and white. In alternating chapters, we get her story, learning how she thought motherhood stripped her of her dreams and sense of self—but that doesn’t mean she hates her child. Jude navigates life as a child actress traveling with her father’s Shakespearean theater troupe while enduring the occasional stressful visit from her mother. As Jude moves into young adulthood and explores the world of film, she must deal with her everstrained relationship with her mother, especially now that Sadie is performing a sequel to The Mother Act. Sadie’s brand of feminism wears thin pretty quickly (we get it—you think Shakespeare is a misogynist), and the story of her life is not nearly as gripping as Jude’s. That being said, readers who are in the acting world will rejoice at Reimer’s hyperspecific theater references (no notes on opening night!), and all readers will get lost in
Reimer’s gift for writing heart-wrenching, multidimensional relationships. An affecting story about love, abandonment, and the murky middle between them.
Robinson, Ishi | HarperCollins (368 pp.) $30.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9780063334878
A Jamaican girl seeks happiness and her place in the world, one baked good at a time.
Pumkin Patterson’s story starts when she’s 11, a bright student and the apple of her Auntie Sophie’s eye. Sophie lives with her half-sister—the resentful Paulette— Pumkin, and Pumkin’s beloved grandmother. Sophie and Paulette have a volatile relationship, impaired by Paulette’s belief that her mother favors the lighter-skinned and status-conscious Sophie. Sophie and Pumkin dream of escaping their deteriorated home in a disadvantaged Kingston neighborhood to live in France. When Sophie eventually goes to France, she promises to send for Pumkin as soon as she establishes herself. Pumkin is left with her neglectful and intermittently violent mother—the death of her grandmother and the reappearance of her repulsively reptilian father don’t help matters. The girl’s chance to move to France and attend school there depends on her ability to pass a French-language proficiency exam, but her efforts to accomplish this are thwarted by Paulette at every opportunity. Pumkin’s talents for entrepreneurship and baking serve her in good stead as she develops a devoted clientele in the neighborhood and at school. Her hard-won confectionary earnings might allow for test prep and registration for the all-important exam as well as a crucial measure of independence. Debut novelist Robinson explores themes of
class rivalry, racism, postcolonial damage, and self-determination…all through the eyes and ears of a teenage baking wizard as the adults who cross Pumkin’s path articulate personal grievances or explanations of the status quo in Pumkin’s corner of Jamaica. This coming-of-age story employs extensive dialogue in Jamaican dialect, a sincere tone, and a young person’s perspective on class differences within a relatively small community (which may appeal to younger readers in search of their own escape plans).
Sympathetic storytelling leavened with humor.
Sahota, Sunjeev | Viking (272 pp.)
$29.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9780593655986
A heated contest for leadership of a contemporary British labor organization drives a novel that confronts difficult issues of race and class in that nation.
When Nayan Olak and his former ally Megha Sharma, both of Indian descent, face off for the chance to serve as the first person of color to be general secretary of their union amid the Covid-19 pandemic, their campaign quickly degenerates into an ugly brawl, marred by allegations of racism and an accusation of a physical assault by one candidate against the other. The events are recounted by Sajjan Dhanoa, a writer who grew up in Nayan’s hometown of Chesterfield, England. There, two decades earlier, a fire killed Nayan’s mother and his young son as they slept in the apartment above the shop his parents owned. That event triggered the breakup of Nayan’s marriage, and he’s haunted by memories of the tragedy, especially as he cares for his father, who survived the fire and now suffers from worsening dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Amid the unrelenting pressure of the campaign, Nayan pursues a
Solvinic provides more questions than answers in a compelling tale.
THE HUNTER'S DAUGHTER
relationship with Helen Fletcher, a white native of Chesterfield who may have some connection to the fatal blaze, and whose son Brandon, an aspiring chef, has had his own disastrous encounter with racial conflict that prefigures the Nayan-Megha battle. Sahota frames the election contest as one pitting Nayan’s “transracial, working-class solidarity” against Megha’s “inclusionary neoliberalism,” which emphasizes racial identity, allowing their face-off to serve as a microcosm of these tensions within the larger British society. For the most part, that conflict emerges organically, save for a somewhat didactic rendering of it in the campaign’s climactic debate. Despite some occasionally awkward foreshadowing, the novel resolves both of its main plot threads in efficient, and satisfyingly surprising, fashion. A thoughtful exploration of race and class tensions in modern-day Britain and of the lingering effects of a long-ago tragedy.
Solvinic, Nicola | Berkley (384 pp.) $28.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780593639726
Or The Killer’s Daughter, since the heroine’s father was executed years ago for strangling 27 women.
That’s a formidable legacy to deal with, and Det. Lt. Anna Koray, of the Midwestern Bayern County Sheriff’s Office, has always struggled to keep her head above water. After her father, Stephen Theron, was identified as the Forest Strangler and arrested and her mother, Sheila Fredericks Theron, put her up for adoption and went into the Witness
Protection Program, Elena Theron took the name of her loving foster parents and continued what turned into years of therapy with psychiatrist Barbara Richardson. The demons she’s kept at bay come roaring back when, called to a scene of domestic abuse, she kills the husband who’s already shot his wife to death and tries to do the same to Anna. The attendant trauma leads to uneasy reunions with Nick Kohler, an ER doctor who’d wanted more than she could give, and with Dr. Richardson, who succeeds in unlocking the vault of Anna’s repressed memories. All this is a prelude to the main event: the discovery of another series of female corpses arranged as ceremoniously as Stephen Theron’s victims. Are these murders the work of a copycat killer, or of Veles, the Forest God? Since the rare DNA variant Theron carried has turned up on the new crime scenes, is it possible that he wasn’t executed after all but escaped? Or could Anna, who’s surely carrying that variant herself, be unwittingly channeling the spirit of her father or of Veles? First-timer Solvinic provides more questions than answers in a messy, compelling tale.
Tenório, Jeferson | Trans. by Bruna Dantas Lobato | Charco Press (150 pp.)
$16.95 paper | Feb. 20, 2024 | 9781913867737
A Black architecture student named Pedro searches for the truth behind his father’s murder while enduring Brazil’s “cordial racism.”
In the act of narratively retracing his family’s winding path of difficult decisions and
dramatic consequences, Pedro must come to grips with the legacy of his father, Henrique, a public school literature teacher in Porto Alegre. In an environment of institutional racism, a disastrously poor education system, and the constant threat of random—or not-so-random—violence, Pedro maintains a life of intelligence and genuine sympathy, but underneath his surface roils an agitation of emotion, a lack of understanding stemming from his—and, as he discovers, his father’s—encounters with white Brazilians who would define his character by the color of his skin. Tenório has crafted a subtle, bluntly percussive novel that reverberates with the punches and kicks of Pedro’s family’s uneasy life, one that focuses on the question of identity. How can Pedro better know himself, know the tragedy that was his father, without painfully running headlong into the bitter facts of his and his country’s history? Amid a variety of torments, leveled occasionally by a passage of poetry or piece of good music, he learns there is no easy way to truth. When walking down the rough roads or passing by, even living inside, the concrete buildings of his hometown, he must experience what his father also lived through, endured: the feeling of loss, the struggle with the uneasy sense of not belonging, of living outside time and place, no matter how desperately he wants to fit in.
A novel that successfully examines the appalling fallacies of racism.
Kirkus StarThorpe, Rufi | Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $28.00 | June 11, 2024 | 9780063356580
A college freshman finds out that everyone was right: Her decision to have her English professor’s baby really does ruin her life. Until it doesn’t.
“I’d learned about the terms first person, third person, and second person in high school, and I’d thought that was all there was to point of view until I met Bodhi’s father in the fall of 2017.” Not for nothing does Margo’s journey into motherhood begin in English class, as she switches back and forth between third and first all the way through the book, using third for distance from her cringier mistakes. The elevator pitch for Thorpe’s fourth novel—as exuberant as the first three—is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with online porn instead of video games. Really! It’s a story of friendship, love, and family set in a different part of the big world of cyber-storytelling. Shortly after Bodhi is born, Margo finds she can’t afford the child care necessary to hold on to her waitressing job. Then two of her three roommates move out in response to infant wailing, and she has to find a source of income fast. She ends up posting pictures on OnlyFans, a subscription-based porn site. “Lonely, hot girl in financial freefall, please help me make rent this month....If you want to find out what Pokémon your dick most resembles and what attacks it might have, send me a $20 tip and I’ll provide a full write-up.” Turns out she is very good at this. Further help with the rent comes when her father, Jinx, a wrestling world icon, comes fresh from rehab to move in and help her with the baby, and then she reaches out to OnlyFans viral stars WangMangler and SucculentRose, who have much to teach. Just as she’s beginning to get it together, the English teacher does a complete 180—instead of wanting nothing to do with Bodhi, he’s now demanding full custody. The title is the only bad thing about this book. Terrific characters, rich worldbuilding, deep thoughts about fiction and morality, a love story, and a happy ending.
See: Loss. See Also: Love.
Tominaga, Yukiko | Scribner (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781668031674
A man’s death is the central event in a patchwork narrative of childhood, motherhood, and continuity as experienced by his wife.
For more by Rufi Thorpe, visit Kirkus online.
An introspective frankness flavors much of this debut, delivered as Kyoko’s first-person account of her life before, during, and after the time she spent with Levi, an American who died in an accident while she and their 18-month-old son, Alex, were visiting her parents in Japan. Levi’s Jewish family, Kyoko’s Japanese heritage, the fabric of her marriage and its afterlife, and Alex’s development over the years are the themes in chapters that loosely and not always chronologically connect events and feelings into a fictional mosaic. Several chapters have been published as short stories. The product of a not especially wealthy family, Kyoko shares various early memories including watching an anime film with graphic scenes of a nuclear bomb’s impact. This wartime trauma connects to time spent under the roof of Levi’s brother, Ben, a man with military connections and a different, more rigorous and responsible outlook than his laid-back sibling. Ben and Levi’s mother, Bubbe, offers a sweeter, more available version of family. Her exploration of dating leads to a riff on loneliness, love, and need. For all Kyoko’s grief, she is unsentimental about her marriage and experiences some satisfaction in parenting independently. Elsewhere, she stresses about money. “You’re cheap, obsessive and sometimes sickly paranoid,” Bubbe tells her as they argue over the cost of banana cream pie. “But it’s not hard to love you.” Love—of family, friends, partner, and child—crops up frequently, sometimes comically, as in a chapter that has Kyoko obsessing about a now-teenage Alex’s sex life. Put together, the
Skilled audiobook narrators enliven fictional characters—and one distinctive city.
BY CONNIE OGLEIF YOU’VE NEVER SPENT time in Miami—the real Miami, not just the beach hotels—you may not understand how vital it is that Jennine Capó Crucet’s hilarious but ultimately poignant Say Hello to My Little Friend (Simon & Schuster Audio, 8 hours and 42 minutes) is narrated by a reader with a believable Miami accent.
The novel—about Ismael “Izzy” Reyes, a Cuban-born failed Pitbull impersonator who decides to reinvent himself as Tony Montana from Scarface —fizzes with the energy and improbability of Miami itself. And like that seductive city on the
wildly imaginative yet shrewdly grounded by Crucet’s innate understanding of place and people.
Izzy, for example, may treat Scarface like a self-help video, but he understands the absurdity of Al Pacino’s dreadful Cuban accent in the film. Narrator Krizia Bajos’ painstakingly accurate performance is the antithesis of Pacino’s cartoonishness,
helping the author’s humor and outrage land with authority.
A Miami native, Bajos also helps Crucet shape the book’s most whimsical twist into amusing but sobering commentary. As Izzy fights his way up the criminal ladder, the Seaquarium’s prized orca, Lolita, is sending him psychic messages from her tiny tank. Are they both doomed, like the sinking city itself? Bajos treats Lolita’s perspective seriously, never exaggerating the orca’s inner voice, and this less-ismore interpretation enhances Crucet’s powerful story.
There are many pleasures in listening to Kiley Reid’s entertaining new campus novel, Come & Get It (Penguin Audio, 12 hours and 52 minutes), but the most surprising is how quickly she ensnares you in the ordinary lives of women whose paths cross at the University of Arkansas.
There’s Millie, a residential assistant working her way through school, whose plan to buy a house gets derailed by her increasingly messy decisions; Agatha, a visiting professor trying to come up with an idea for her next book; and several young women in the dorm that Millie’s monitoring, on whom Agatha and Millie begin to spy in the name of research.
Offering a big assist to the author is narrator Nicole Lewis, who also read Reid’s terrific Such a Fun Age, a debut novel that likewise deftly examined
the relationships between women of different races and economic classes. Here, Lewis has more characters to juggle, including the voices of several young female college students. She differentiates the characters through subtle inflections instead of obvious tricks (only one, for example, has a distinct accent), highlighting Reid’s remarkable talent for creating memorable characters.
Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo narrates her novel-in-verse Bright Red Fruit (Listening Library, 4 hours and 21 minutes) with earnest passion and a palpable innocence. She embodies the spirit of the inexperienced Samira, the teenage poet who longs for freedom but finds herself at odds with her strict Sudanese community and her mother in Washington, D.C.
“I wanted the world,” Samira says. “All of it.” But when she meets an older, predatory poet online, Samira learns that not all of the world can be trusted.
Elhillo invokes the myth of Persephone throughout the novel, which is categorized as a young adult book but is suitable for any reader. Listeners may not realize at first that Bright Red Fruit is a novel-in-verse, but upon hearing Elhillo’s reading, they can’t miss this work’s lyrical beauty.
Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.
scenes, musings, and snapshots evoke a woman struggling with identity and connection in a manner variously arbitrary, quirky, and insightful. A modest, discursive novel offers an unusual psychology, piecemeal.
Travis, Alex | Alcove Press (352 pp.)
$29.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781639106936
An ambitious reporter contends with racism in the newsroom and the reappearance of her ex-boyfriend.
Twenty-fiveyear-old Genevieve Francis has worked at the Sykeswood Tribune for four years and has written just one article—“investigating” a local ice cream shop’s new flavor. Instead, as the only Black person on the paper’s editorial staff, she’s been relegated to copyediting and sensitivity reading, dealing with daily snide c omments and disrespect, and seeing all of her pitches rejected by the editor. So, when she’s asked to conduct an interview at a local CEO’s gala event, Genevieve jumps at the chance. The only issue? The CEO is her ex-boyfriend, Jude Landon. The last time they spoke was when Genevieve rejected Jude’s public marriage proposal at his father’s funeral. Now in control of the family’s business, Jude requests that the paper assign Genevieve to write the first authorized profile of him. This could be her big break, but will their past put Genevieve’s future in jeopardy? Explorations of systemic racism and racial microaggressions are crucial, but the author can be heavy-handed in her approach. Many characters, from Genevieve’s colleagues to Jude’s family, feel like underdeveloped caricatures whose sole personality traits are crassness and bigotry. And while Jude is written more complexly than his counterparts, it’s hard to root
for a rekindled romance when it means Genevieve will forever be forced to engage with people who will never truly accept her. A debut that addresses important issues but could have used more finesse.
Turton, Stuart | Sourcebooks Landmark (368 pp.) | $27.99 | May 21, 2024 9781728254654
It’s doomsday eve on a small Greek island where the last post-apocalyptic community on earth will be destroyed unless a murdered scientist’s secret research can be uncovered.
The rest of the world ended 90 years ago, just as humankind was close to overcoming climate change. Now, a lethal black fog is approaching the island, where 122 villagers live peacefully, albeit with an unreliable female AI voice inside their heads. All but the rebellious woman Emory are content not to question geographical boundaries they are not allowed to cross or mysterious programming that can wipe their memories, make them fall asleep at 8:45 p.m. every night, and die at 60—a bum deal considering the extraordinarily long lives of the three elders, including Niema, the murder victim. A brilliant scientist who in another lifetime was awarded two Nobel Prizes and later devised the barrier blocking the fog, she was 173. Hours after announcing she would reveal hidden truths about the island and the extreme experiments she was conducting to safeguard its future, she was stabbed to death. Solving her murder is key to saving the island.
Turton, who specializes in odd, raging conflicts in closed settings—a London manor in The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018); a cursed 17th-century ship in The Devil and the Dark
Water (2020)—here takes on a bunch of big themes including the nature of existence and the value of life. H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau , without the monsters, comes to mind. Long and talky and light on characterizations, Turton’s latest is a bit mechanical in the telling, perhaps owing to the AI’s role as narrator. But it’s a fresh twist on dystopian fiction with its share of surprises.
“Don’t go in the water” takes on new meaning in Turton’s brainy thriller.
Kirkus Star
Uhart, Hebe | Trans. by Anna Vilner Archipelago (230 pp.) | $22.00 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781953861801
Snapshot portraits of everyday life from an Argentinian maestra of keen observation. Over a career spanning five decades, Uhart (1936-2018) published nearly two dozen stories, novels, travelogues, and tales, all of which exude the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement. This posthumous collection includes 27 crónicas (chronicles) that capture “undervalued stories—local histories, everyday wisdom, ways of expression,” as Mariana Enríquez says in the introduction. More than musings, but shy of full narratives, most entries are only a few pages, with a handful ranging to a dozen or more. In “Animals,” all of two pages, Uhart remarks on a neighbor, down on his luck, who walks his dog and regales the animal with tales of better times, promising to take it away from the “wailing sirens that tell us disaster is on its way.” While Uhart largely abstains from interjecting autobiographical details, two revealing entries bookend the collection. “A Memory From My Personal Life” recounts the author’s first home
purchase, an apartment where she lived with an alcoholic boyfriend and was frequently visited by his drunken poet friends. Uhart teases with nighthawk shenanigans and eventual redemption, but ends instead on a quiet shrug: “He never did sober up, but I at least learned how to buy and sell apartments.” The penultimate crónica, “My Bed Away From Home,” is a surprisingly spry recollection of her last days in the hospital. Even with death impending, Uhart’s humor and wanderlust shine through: “I spent all of my time in the ICU thinking of the bathroom and its whereabouts, as though it were London or Paris.” Vilner’s thoughtful translation does much-deserved justice to Uhart’s cleareyed, boundless curiosity. An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans.
Sipsworth
Van Booy, Simon | Godine (240 pp.)
$26.95 | May 7, 2024 | 9781567927948
It takes a village…to care for an abandoned mouse with breathing issues, and to lure an elderly woman out of isolation.
After six decades spent in Australia, 83-year-old Helen Cartwright, a widowed doctor, has returned to England, to the town of her childhood. “Life for her was finished,” the days now a routine of cups of tea, slices of toast, hot baths, and daytime TV, interspersed with memories of her dead husband and son. “Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle—as though even for
death there is a queue.” Things shift, however, when she chooses to rescue a discarded aquarium from her neighbor’s trash. Hidden inside is a mouse, which she first tries to trap and then decides she will take to an animal shelter. Her feelings of responsibility and care for the rodent swell, and providing food and protection from a cat is just the beginning. Soon the mouse, named Sipsworth for its drinking style, is living in her sink and watching television with her from the safety of a slipper. Its needs force Helen to interact more with the outside world—visiting the library for mouse-care books, the hardware store for a new aquarium, and then the hospital for medical advice when Sipsworth suddenly falls ill. Now the novel switches from enigmatic curiosity to something more parable-esque, as Dr. Jamal from the hospital, Cecil from the hardware store, the town librarian, and others offer time, advice, and practical support to a woman who suddenly reveals a wholly unexpected hinterland. The book’s closing phase comes in a rush, as what began as the intriguing, sometimes philosophical story of an insular woman with “doors she keeps locked” dashes toward predictability and fairy tale. A sympathetic but uneven oddity.
Ware, Ruth | Scout Press/ Simon & Schuster (416 pp.)
$28.99 | May 21, 2024 | 9781668025598
A reality TV paradise becomes a nightmare for the show’s unlucky contestants.
Lyla Santiago and Nico Reese have been dating
The most cinematic Ruth Ware novel so far.
ONE PERFECT COUPLE
for more than two years, and she’s beginning to feel like their relationship may be hitting a wall; she loves him, but his main focus at 28 is on his acting career, while, at 32, scientist Lyla is starting to dream about settling down. When Nico pleads with her to join him on a new reality TV show, One Perfect Couple , Lyla views it as an opportunity to see whether their relationship can go the distance—in reality as well as on TV. They arrive on a remote Indonesian island to find blue waters, white sands, romantic huts, and eight other contestants, all beautiful, glamorous, and clearly committed to bolstering their visibility by competing on the show. The director seems a bit shady; he insists (as their contract demands) that they turn in all electronics, plies them with booze, and then leaves with the crew—and the first ousted contestant. That night, a huge storm sweeps across the island. The next morning reveals a fatality among the wreckage: a hut and its inhabitant have been crushed by a t ree, and the outbuildings have been destroyed. The remaining contestants are cut off from all communication, with the exception of one radio, and there is a very limited supply of food and water. So Love Island becomes Survivor, and one person in particular is set on being the last person standing. Ware offers another take on the lockedroom mystery, but this time, her focus is less on creating a creepy atmosphere of dread, as she did in earlier novels, than on showing the absolute brutality of which some humans are capable. But she still has a good time herself: There’s a funny self-referential line to an earlier novel, plus some female characters MacGyver-ing a battery. The prolific Ware continues to stretch herself, taking on something new in each novel and writing strong—and increasingly kick-ass—female characters. The most cinematic Ruth Ware novel so far.
Warnick, Fiona | Tin House
(128 pp.) | $16.95 paper
May 7, 2024 | 9781959030614
Returning to her hometown after college, Isabel must confront past characters and forge new paths and unexpected attachments to… skunks?
It’s the first summer after graduation; Isabel is housesitting for Jan and Steve, who are hiking part of the Appalachian Trail. She takes a part-time job as a receptionist at a yoga studio; she babysits a spunky 4-year-old named Cecelia; she goes on walks and coffee dates with her childhood friend, Ellie; she watches the three skunks that appear occasionally in Jan and Steve’s backyard. And she tries not to think about boys—namely, she tries not to think about Jan and Steve’s son, Eli, with whom she has a complicated past, and with whom a friendship begins to kindle. The arc of Isabel’s summer is cut by vignettes of the personified skunks, imagined by Isabel as possessors of a near-human interiority, exploring the natural world and the meaning of existence—pondering callings and purposes, self-realization, joy, death. These brief scenes gracefully highlight Isabel’s own existential contemplations: Does she have a calling or purpose? What does it mean for her to discover her own desires and aspirations? Are their discoveries really so different, in the end? Isabel’s postgraduate crises feel acute and authentic: “I was working in a yoga studio, and the people in Philadelphia were working in coffee shops. What made it more acceptable to flounder in a new place than in a place steeped with memories?” At its best, 23-yearold Warnick’s debut novel is strikingly, openly earnest, looking inward with thoughtful reflection and outward with shrewd but impartial consideration. Through Isabel, we see the thrilling scope of youthful possibility:
cities to explore, boys (and girls) to kiss, friends with which to reconnect, skunks to observe.
A thoughtful, tenderhearted bildungsroman.
Wen, Lai | Spiegel & Grau (528 pp.)
$22.00 paper | June 4, 2024 | 9781954118393
Coming-of-age novel meets roman à clef in this pensive tale of life under totalitarian rule.
“In China, you may not be particularly interested in politics. But politics sure has an interest in you.” So writes Wen in a novel so closely intertwined with her life that it’s difficult to separate the fictional from the autobiographical. As a young girl, Lai’s close friend is a bright boy named Gen, who shows her bits of a world that lies behind the curtain of official life: a crematorium, for example, that bears the false title “Beijing Children’s Hospital,” of whose denizens, citing his minor government official father as a source, Gen says, “They will...never get better.” The lie is emblematic of the Politburo’s relationship with the people, something Lai will not learn from her own father, withdrawn after being denounced during the Cultural Revolution, and mother, scornful of anyone who imagines that things will ever change. As Lai grows into young adulthood and enters university, she discovers alcohol, reformist politics, bohemian romance, and much more, all under the disapproving gaze of Gen, who has become a student leader against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989. Proclaims Gen, “The university is not a parent or a politician, and still less a dictator. It is our communal home....And every man should have autonomy in his own home.” It’s a daring statement, much braver than Lai can muster until, even more daringly, she helps stage a
production of Brecht’s Mother Courage before a phalanx of soldiers poised to break up the demonstrations. Surprises abound in Lai’s narrative about what becomes of her, of Gen, of a flamboyant actress called Madam Macaw, and, in an intriguing turn, of the character known to history as Tank Man. Read as history as much as fiction, a revealing addition to the literature of the democracy movement in China.
Woolrich, Cornell & Lawrence Block Hard Case Crime (240 pp.) | $15.95 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781803366999
Hard Case resurrects a dark tale that noir master Woolrich (1903–1968) left unfinished at his death, was completed 20 years afterward by Block, but has been unavailable for more than 35 years.
Driven to the edge of suicide, Madeline Chalmers miraculously finds herself still alive when her late father’s gun, which she’s raised to her head, clicks on an empty chamber—then, jubilant, places it emphatically on a table and hears it fire, killing Starr Bartlett, a neighbor she’s never met who happens to be passing on the city street outside. Consumed with guilt and determined to “live for Starr,” Madeline worms her way into the confidence of Starr’s mother, Charlotte, and learns everything she can about the young woman she killed. She decides to take revenge on singer Adelaide Nelson, who’d told Starr a terrible secret about her husband, Vick Herrick, that had abruptly ended Starr’s marriage after less than two years—and, even more improbably, to track down Vick in order to kill him. The rest of the story, taking its cue from earlier Woolrich novels from The Bride Wore Black to Rendezvous in Black, follows Madeline as she works assiduously to visit doom on Adelaide, the other woman, and Vick himself. Although there’s no editorial apparatus helping
readers determine what Block added to what Woolrich had written, their two voices blend seamlessly in a claustrophobic pulp nightmare until the final sequence, which manages to be both more shocking and more softhearted than the endings of any of Woolrich’s other novels. Readers will have no trouble figuring out why the author had trouble completing this one. Warts and all, this is required reading for fans of vintage noir.
April 9, 2024 | 9780231192033
Nine tales illustrate the absurdities of modern life. Korean author Yun explores themes of anxiety and alienation in this wide-ranging collection. Some entries are a bit woolly and take surreal turns to underscore their messages.
“Hyeonmong Park’s Hall of Dreams,” for example, is about a struggling businessman who finally makes his fortune charging customers to wear their pajamas and dream their dreams, ostensibly to save them time and stress. Meanwhile, “Roadkill,” a Kafkaesque commentary on capitalism, is set during an extended blizzard at a remote, unstaffed motel where vending machines roll through the halls, selling seemingly everything and allowing guests to temporarily revoke their identities in exchange for cash. Other entries rely on a strong, distinct voice and subtle satire to get their points
across. Such is the case with the incisive, empowering title story, wherein a woman tires of being excluded from her co-workers’ lunch plans and enrolls in a three-month course to learn how to comfortably, confidently, dine out alone. “Invader Graphic,” a wryly funny standout, intercuts narration from a young writer who uses a department store powder room as her office with excerpts from her novel-in-progress about a depressed banker who finds joy in guerrilla street art. And the paranoia-fueled “Sweet Escape” sees a man join a travel club in preparation for a European vacation only to develop a pathological fear of bedbugs. Repeated elements appear throughout, amplifying the collection’s resonance. Boldly drawn characters abound, but Yun renders women, in particular, with an empathy and complexity that enrich the entries in which they are the focus. Weirdly wonderful and wonderfully weird.
Zyzak, Magdalena | Riverhead (352 pp.) $28.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593542941
A 21-year-old Polish woman wins the immigration lottery, then keeps getting lucky.
As this unusual caper novel opens, our narrator, Viva—new to Los Angeles after a failed attempt to start her American life in Chicago—picks up a woman hitchhiking in a green cocktail dress on the 101. Bobby
A Polish woman wins the immigration lottery, then keeps getting lucky.
THE LADY WAITING
Sleeper turns out to be from Poland, too, though from a much wealthier and more cosmopolitan background. “At any given moment, half the population of LA is giving therapy to the other half,” Bobby informs Viva when she takes her out to lunch in gratitude for the ride. “Fifty percent of LA is depressed. Only five percent of Bhutan is. You ever been here?…The hamachi salad’s yummy.” Later that day, Viva takes a position as live-in personal assistant to Bobby and her rich, hot husband, Sebastian Sleeper, a retired film director. Along with the couple’s acerbic gay housemate, Lance, the group will engage in the daily custom of “spritzatura”—a Spritz Veneziano in the hot tub at dusk. One of many amusing aspects of Zyzak’s tale is its perspective; though the action occurs in 2018, it’s narrated from 2079, when Viva is 84, allowing for clever asides about how things “used to be” in our current time. Zyzak does an amazing job with Viva’s narration—because her English is not perfect, her understanding of the hyperarticulate Bobby runs a little behind the reader’s, though Viva has some insights she withholds until the very end (and a fine ending it is). The caper that sends the plot into overdrive involves The Lady Waiting, a (fictional) Vermeer painting stolen in a 2009 Berlin museum heist. Two of Bobby’s ex-husbands and Bobby herself have become involved in a scheme to return it for the huge reward, $50,000 of which can be Viva’s if she helps out. With its madcap plot, fantastic central characters, and White Lotus –style wealth porn (the kind where a character eats caviar off the kitchen floor after the jar falls out of the fridge), screenwriter Zyzak’s second novel seems like catnip for Hollywood. Funny, original, worldly, and very cool. A standout.
By Fadi
By Shubnum Khan
By
Addison, Esme | Severn House (288 pp.)
$29.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781448312610
A Black historian on the hunt for an artifact uncovers a sacred sisterhood.
Unceremoniously downsized from her job at the Smithsonian, Sidney Taylor decides that her grandmother is due a visit. Sidney’s family has been entrenched in D.C. society and politics for as long as she can remember, but something about her Grams’ home in Robbinsville, North Carolina, has always felt right to Sidney, who spent happy college years in the small town. Greeted by the smiling face of her Grams, Sidney knows everything will be all right. Meeting handsome Gabe Willoughby, a fellow appreciator of history, doesn’t hurt either, though Sidney’s soon too distracted by her first love to notice him all that much. That first love is history, now wrapped in a mystery. Abner Robbins, owner of the Robbins Early American Living History Museum & Village, wants Sidney’s help locating a lost artifact. President James Madison, working with talented cryptographer Josiah Willoughby, left what amounts to a historical treasure hunt designed to lead players to an item Abner is determined must not be lost forever. Though some of the details seem murky, early successes in the hunt excite Sidney about the case as she learns about the rich history of the Daughters of Hathor and their protection of Scotland’s Queen Scota and her lineage. When things grow dangerous, Sidney isn’t sure whether someone’s trying to get her off the case or there’s just some old-fashioned racism and sexism around town. Never thrown from her path, Sidney uncovers what she can, even if some of it is hard to believe.
Those who buy into the magic will enjoy the mystery; others may be bogged down by all that history.
Allen, Samantha Jayne | Minotaur (336 pp.)
$28.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9781250863836
A man’s search for his birth parents opens a door to dangers arising from the past. Following in her family’s footsteps, Annie McIntyre works as a private investigator in her hometown of Garnett, Texas. She and her boyfriend, Wyatt, attend a party for her cousin Nikki and her fiance, Sonny, thrown by his best man and adopted brother, Clint Marshall, a talented singer poised to make it big in country music. A discussion about nature versus nurture spurs Clint to hire Annie to find his birth parents, opening a nasty can of worms. Clint, who was adopted out of foster care at age 4, has a few faint memories, and a DNA test he’s recently taken turned up a distant cousin. Annie quickly learns that his birth father is Ronald Mott, who’s currently incarcerated for armed bank robbery. His mother is presumably Lorena, Mott’s wife at the time. His adoptive mother, oddly enough, was a teller at the bank Mott robbed. Ignoring the advice of her grandfather Leroy, a former sheriff, to avoid Mott, whom he considers a dangerous sociopath, Annie writes to him in hopes of confirming that his ex-wife was Clint’s mother and also interviews a skittish Mott neighbor whose daughter vanished years ago. Lorena
won’t talk to Annie, but her son, Cody, who’s obviously Clint’s brother, will. Cody’s involved with a dangerous drug dealer, who starts harassing Annie. Clint takes off after Annie reports her findings, leaving her to deal with the fallout. Although she’s done what Clint wanted, Annie can’t let go of the case, which might just be the death of her.
A gritty tale of troublesome family dynamics with a tough and determined protagonist.
Armstrong, Kelley | Minotaur (352 pp.)
$28.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781250321282
A time-traveling detective probes the death of a Victorian Egyptologist.
The evening gathering at the home of Sir Alastair Christie is surely the talk of Edinburgh. But Mallory Atkinson’s interest in the event is more professional than social. Since the 21st-century police detective awoke from a murderous attack to find herself inserted into the body of a 19th-century housemaid working for the Gray family, Mallory has tried ceaselessly to fit into their unconventional Victorian household. Duncan Gray is a doctor who’s prohibited from practicing medicine because of his annoying habit of digging up graves, so he’s currently serving as the city’s undertaker. His oldest sister, Lady
A time-traveling detective probes the death of a Victorian Egyptologist.
Fans of fairies, food, and gardening will find a lot to like, plus recipes.
Annis Leslie, has been invited to the party Sir Alastair is having to show off his latest find—an Egyptian mummy, which he’s planning to unwrap—and she invites Duncan; their sister, Isla; and Mallory to join her. Though, unlike her employers, Mallory knows what’s inside a mummy’s bandages, she can’t pass up the invitation. Alas, the body exposed in the course of unwrapping turns out to be not a long-dead Egyptian, but Sir Alastair himself. It’s up to Detective Hugh McCreadie, Dr. Gray’s best friend, to find out who switched the ancient corpse for a fresher one. Of course, where Gray and McCreadie go, Mallory is sure to follow. Their investigation is plodding along by the book, at least by Victorian standards—instead of fingerprint or DNA evidence, there’s a search for who had access to the mummy and motive to kill Sir Alastair—until the tale takes a sudden turn that puts not only its outcome but Mallory’s entire future in doubt. Even time travel has its rules, and here Armstrong seems to be coloring way outside the lines.
Bannalec, Jean-Luc | Minotaur (336 pp.) $28.00 | April 30, 2024 | 9781250893055
A seminar near Saint-Malo leads Commissaire Georges Dupin of Concarneau into one of the strangest investigations in his Breton police career.
Although Dupin rarely finds seminars helpful in honing his investigative skills, the native Parisian, who’s finally adjusted to life in remote southern Brittany, looks forward to a chance to study the customs—especially the foodways— in the north of his adopted province. The famed Marché de Saint-Servan, with its plentiful stalls of luscious local cheeses, seems like the ideal place to start until a ruckus midmarket reveals one woman stabbed to death and another fleeing from police. The victim, Blanche Trouin, is a celebrated local chef, and the escapee is her sister, Lucille, also a prominent chef and Blanche’s bitter rival. Upon her arrest, Lucille refuses to talk. But while she’s in investigative custody, Blanche’s husband is also murdered. Normally, Commissaire Huppert of Saint-Malo would be charged with investigating Blanche’s death, but a second murder prompts Dupin’s boss, Prefect Locmariaquer, to form a team including Dupin and Dupin’s seminar partner, Commissaire Gaston Nedellec, to handle the complex case. The “Britt Team” will embody what the seminar is designed to promote: cooperation among the different Breton departments. But solving a murder that Lucille Trouin must have committed coupled with a crime she couldn’t possibly have committed is no easy task, and
Dupin must stretch his wits to ensure that Finistère, his home department, holds up its end.
Dazzling detection and equally fine cuisine.
Gerber, Daryl Wood | Kensington (304 pp.) | $17.95 paper
April 23, 2024 | 9781496744937
The owner of a California fairy-garden shop has evidently been either chosen or cursed to solve murders.
For more by Jean-Luc Bannalec, visit Kirkus
Courtney Kelly is well known in Carmel-by-theSea for finding bodies and helping solve murders. Many people she knows are skeptical that fairies exist, but some can see them, and either way, plenty are eager to buy fairy gardens from her shop. Courtney’s own special fairy friend, Fiona, has just returned from visiting her mother, the queen fairy, and has been tasked with teaching her younger sister, Eveleen, the ways of the human world. Meanwhile, Courtney is busy making arrangements for her booth at the upcoming Summer Blooms Festival, which keep bringing her up against Oliver Killian, the man in charge, who’s not her favorite. Courtney’s friend Genevieve Bellerose, a podcaster and influencer, has a wicked sense of humor that can suddenly become nasty, turning friends into enemies. When Genevieve is murdered at the festival, there’s no dearth of suspects. Detective Dylan Summers, an old friend of Courtney’s father, is well aware that she’s helped solve several murders but still doesn’t want her poking around. Since her friends have become suspects, Courtney ignores his warning. With some help from her human and fairy allies, she discovers far too many motives. Although she’s extremely busy creating fairy gardens to sell and giving classes on how to create them, she spends
every moment she can chasing down clues, especially after a second friend is murdered. Dire warnings do not deter her from finding the killer. Fans of fairies, food, and gardening will find a lot to like, including the appended recipes.
Hillerman, Anne | Harper/ HarperCollins (304 pp.) | $30.00
April 23, 2024 | 9780063344785
Legendary Lt. Joe Leaphorn returns to center stage in this tale of sabotage, disappearance, and murder among the Navajo Nation. Retired from the Navajo Nation police to work as a private eye, Leaphorn is no longer a lieutenant, but his renown makes him a natural choice for Stella Brown to consult in her search for her biological family. Adopted many years ago by Stan and Rita Brown, Stella was never able to get them to say anything about her birth parents, and now that she’s 55, she thinks that connection is long overdue. Before Leaphorn has made any progress, another case intrudes when Cecil Bowlegs, the custodian at Eagle Roost school, asks him to look into the disappearance three weeks ago of his wife, singer Bethany Benally Bowlegs. Bowlegs’ early morning phone call is interrupted in turn by an explosion at Eagle Roost that destroys the building housing the custodian’s closet—though not, for the moment, Leaphorn’s latest client, who’d stepped outside to make the call. As if to make sure Leaphorn doesn’t get a moment’s rest and to stir another set of troubles into the pot, Kory Bourbonette, the long-estranged son of Leaphorn’s live-in, Louisa, turns up to announce that he’s dying of cancer. The strongest parts of this tasting menu are those concerning the forced cultural assimilation of the “lost birds,” the Indigenous children adopted by non-Native parents.
But every strand of the story, which also features supporting roles for tribal officer Bernadette Manuelito and her husband, Lt. Jim Chee, is likely to hold the interest of franchise fans who aren’t too fussy about how all those strands will be tied together. Continuously absorbing and sometimes piercing.
McCown, Marjorie | Crooked Lane (368 pp.) $31.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781639106646
Murder and a host of lesser but more time-consuming complications dog the production of costumer Joey Jessop’s latest film project. An unknown woman running from a restaurant is struck and killed by a silver Lexus SUV. It’s a painful moment for everyone involved, but especially for Joey, who’d seen the woman dragged and chased out of the restaurant kitchen minutes earlier by a cook and another menacing man and hadn’t said anything about it. Tyrone Thomas, the head of the studio producing The Golden Age, which is filming nearby, is less interested in encouraging his crew to cooperate with the police than in making sure no whiff of bad publicity touches his stars. And so much intrigue swirls around leading lady Gillian Best—from her quarrel with personal assistant Rita Ranucci to her hush-hush exchange with personal manager Dan Lomax to her unpublicized relationship with personal videographer Armand Dubois—that keeping it all under wraps is likely to be
a full-time job. But not for Joey, whose full-time job, once costume designer Gregory Bentham is called back to England by his husband’s illness and the production’s deal with boutique Italian costume manufacturer Bergati falls through, is arranging for the last-minute design and construction of hundreds of World War I–era costumes for a movie whose story McCown, intent on the worm’s-eye view, never bothers to share. Another violent death will provide a sop to genre fans, but this is really a relentlessly detailed account of the thousands of obstacles to producing a movie.
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.
Patrick, Q. | American Mystery Classics (256 pp.) | $25.95 | May 7, 2024 | 9781613165362
Murder strikes a cruise ship bound from New York to Rio de Janeiro in this reprint from 1933.
Journalist Mary Llewellyn, recovering from an appendectomy, expects the only flaw of her 10 days aboard the S.S. Moderna to be the absence of her colleague and fiance, David Donnelly, to whom she addresses a series of letters that end up telling a much more eventful story. The first night out, which happens to be Friday the 13th, successful businessman Alfred Lambert gets a fatal dose of strychnine, presumably administered by one of the three other people at his bridge table or the three other passengers in the room. The most likely
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.
STAR STRUCK
A midwife puts aside her birthing responsibilities to solve another murder.MURDER IN ROSE HILL
suspect is Robinson, not only because his bridge is utterly incompetent and he doesn’t have a first name, but because he promptly disappears, and there’s no record of anyone named Robinson among the ship’s cast or crew. Mary, an incurable reporter, asks enough questions to raise the hackles of Lambert’s sister-in-law, the widowed Mrs. Clapp, once famous as comedienne Marcia Manners, but not enough questions to prevent a second murder. There follow all the obligatory alarums and excursions you’d expect aboard a Golden Age cruise, creakily but deftly managed by the pseudonymous Patrick, whose actual identity as Richard Wilson Webb and Mary Louise White Aswell in one of four distinct permutations of authors behind the pen name is the biggest reveal of Curtis Evans’ introduction. The solution is surprising, though Mary’s letters never remotely approach Patrick’s promise of “emotion, not recollected in cold tranquillity, but poured on to paper while it was still molten.”
Decorous retro entertainment that would make perfect shipboard reading.
Thompson, Victoria | Berkley (336 pp.)
$28.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9780593639795
An early-20th-century New York midwife puts aside her birthing responsibilities to solve yet another murder.
Socialite Sarah Brandt Malloy and her husband, Frank—who inherited enough money to quit the corrupt police department
and open a detective agency—have solved many mysteries. Sarah, who likes to keep a hand in at a clinic she’s funded where even the poorest women can get care, has just delivered a baby when Louisa Rodgers, a magazine reporter for the New Century, arrives asking for her help in exposing the dangers of patent medicines. Many of them are addictive—not a surprise when most of them have a high alcohol content or contain drugs like opium to make their users feel better. When Louisa’s father shows up a few days later with the news that his daughter has been murdered, he tells Sarah that his daughter was a secretary at the magazine, not a reporter. Since the police think she was a randomly chosen victim, Sarah explains to Louisa’s distraught father that hiring Frank may be the only way to find the killer. Frank learns a good deal from his interviews at the New Century and a good deal more from his secretary, Maeve Smith, when he sends her to work there undercover. Maeve joins Frank’s partner, Gino Donatelli, to take on the people at the boardinghouse where Louisa lived. With suspects ranging from the owner of a local patent medicine factory to Louisa’s family members, it will be no easy task to uncover the real motive for her death. The talented sleuths once again solve a difficult case enhanced by social commentary and historic detail.
Viets, Elaine | Severn House (240 pp.)
$29.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781448311446
For more by Victoria Thompson,
Distractions aplenty complicate Missouri death investigator Angela Richman’s probe of a prominent businessman’s demise. There’s no question that Selwyn Skipton was murdered. The 70-year-old was found wearing nothing but a scarlet cutout of the letter “A” stapled to his chest. And there’s not much mystery about what he was doing shortly before his death, since the room where he died, rented secretly above Maya Richards’ candy shop, was furnished with a king-size bed with black satin sheets and museum-grade prints of famous nudes. But who killed Skipton and why remain unclear. His wealthy widow, Estelle, claims to know nothing about his love nest. His secretary admits she was there once, but only on business. A search of the victim’s computer reveals ties to a service offering companionship to “sugar daddies” willing to pay for it. All these gritty details make Angela’s boss eager to keep the circumstances of Skipton’s death quiet. Hoping for a quick arrest, he allows her to assist the police. And Angela’s happy to have a case to solve while she’s pondering what to do about a marriage proposal from patrol officer Chris Ferretti. But many more problems await her, as a stealth attack puts Chris’ life in danger and more deaths rain down, some connected to the Skipton case, others altogether separate. Before long, the complications become so fast and furious that the original murder, with its intriguing setup, gets lost in the shuffle.
Multiple puzzles keep up the suspense, but the resolution proves a letdown.
Henry, Emily | Berkley (400 pp.)
$29.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9780593441282
A recently dumped librarian finds herself fake dating her polar opposite.
When Daphne Vincent’s fiance, Peter, dumps her, she’s shocked— but the worst part is that he’s leaving her for his gorgeous best friend, Petra Comer, the woman he’d always told Daphne not to worry about. Now Daphne has to move out of Peter’s home and restart her life in the small Michigan town where she’d moved to be with him. Salvation comes in the form of Miles Nowak, Petra’s ex—he has a tiny spare room in his apartment, and he understands what it’s like to wallow in heartbreak. Daphne feels lucky to have her dream job as a children’s librarian, but other than that, she feels adrift and friendless in Waning Bay—and then she and Miles get invitations to Peter and Petra’s wedding. In a momentary lapse of judgment, Daphne not only says she’ll attend the wedding, but tells Peter she’s dating Miles. It would be the perfect way to show Peter and Petra that they’ve moved on…if only it were true. In the grand tradition of fake-dating romances, Daphne and Miles pretend to be in love, getting to know each other while having various adventures and misadventures. Daphne quickly learns that although she’d dismissed Miles as a pothead with a lack of direction, he’s actually a good time—and a loyal friend. But Daphne knows she needs to get out of Waning Bay, so this fake relationship can’t lead anywhere…can it? Reliable bestseller Henry has written another surefire hit that manages to be dramatic, sexy, and fun. Miles and Daphne have chemistry that leaps off the page, and their will-they-or-won’t-they energy propels the story to its satisfying conclusion. Daphne is an immensely likable character, one whose past realistically
informs her current relationships. The world of Waning Bay is charmingly quirky, and Daphne’s co-workers at the library are endearing. As always, Henry’s biggest strength is the sharp, often hilarious dialogue that makes the story a joy to read.
Henry fans, rejoice: This is her best yet.
Holiday, Jenny | Kensington (336 pp.) | $17.95 paper April 23, 2024 | 9781496745071
A trip for three noblemen goes awry when they’re unexpectedly joined by two women. Known for her contemporary romances, Holiday travels back to Regency England for this new series following two earls and a viscount— Archie, an outdoorsy hunter; bookish Simon; and Effie, a sensitive poet—who keep their friendship strong by vacationing together each year. Although they’ve made a rule that he’s not allowed to hunt during the trip, Archibald Fielding-Burton, the Earl of Harcourt, is still looking forward to the respite from his ailing mother. Then, as they’re in a carriage traveling toward Cumbria, they’re overtaken by a messenger carrying a note from an old family friend begging Archie to rescue his daughters from scandal and ruin—the younger one, Olive, is eloping, and the older one, Clementine, is trying to stop her. Suddenly, the Earls Trip has been invaded by women. Clementine Morgan is still the wild, nature-loving girl Archie remembers from years past, but his feelings toward her are different now. Clem has no intention of ever marrying, but her friendship with Archie is so natural that she feels comfortable asking him to teach her about carnal pleasure. Despite their enjoyment of each other, when the trip’s end draws near, Archie and Clem must try to figure out what their future could be. With most of the story taking place in the secluded castle
where the group is staying, the focus is more on interpersonal relationships than historical detail. The examination of friendships, familial bonds, and, of course, romantic relationships drives the tale, and it works because the characters are so charming and complex. There’s plenty of humor sprinkled in, keeping the tone light and fun. A breezy and amusing love story that showcases the importance of friendship.
Jimenez, Abby | Forever (432 pp.)
$17.99 paper | April 2, 2024 | 9781538704431
Two people with bad luck in relationships find each other through a popular Reddit thread. Emma Grant and her best friend, Maddy, are travel nurses, working at hospitals for three-month stints while they see the country. Just a few weeks before they’re set to move to Hawaii, Emma reads a popular “Am I the Asshole” Reddit thread from a Minnesota man who thinks he’s cursed—women he dates find their soulmates after breaking up with him, and the latest one found true love with his best friend! Emma has had a similar experience, which inspires her to DM the man and commiserate. She’s delighted by her witty, lively interactions with software engineer Justin Dahl, and is intrigued when he suggests that if they date each other, maybe they’ll each find their soulmate afterward. Emma upends the Hawaii plan and convinces Maddy to move to Minneapolis for the summer so she can meet Justin in person. The overly complex setup brings Emma and Justin together and the two hit it off, with Justin immediately falling head over heels for Emma. Jimenez then pivots to creating romantic roadblocks and melodramatic subplots centering on each character’s family of origin. Justin’s mother is about to serve six years in
prison for embezzlement, which means Justin must move back home to care for his three much younger siblings. Emma was traumatized by her own mother for much of her childhood, left to fend for herself and eventually abandoned in the foster system. When her mother shows up in Minnesota, Emma must face her traumatic childhood and admit that she has prioritized her mother’s well-being over her own. There is little time devoted to Emma’s painful efforts to heal herself enough to accept Justin’s love, which leaves the novel feeling unsatisfying. A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.
Lauren, Christina | Gallery Books/ Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) | $28.99 May 14, 2024 | 9781668017722
A fake marriage leads to real feelings at a family wedding on a tropical island. When Anna Green married Liam Weston, it wasn’t because they were in love—it was because they both needed access to family housing on campus, and marrying a relative stranger seemed like the best option. They avoided each other until graduation, and then Liam moved out and Anna never saw him again. Until he shows up at her door and tells her they were never actually divorced though he gave her papers to sign—and now he needs her to pretend to be his wife again. Liam is the heir to a giant grocery
company, and the inheritance his grandfather promised him comes with a catch—he has to stay married for five years. Liam thought he could avoid his family until he hit the deadline, but now his sister’s getting married and he needs his wife to be there. He offers Anna money if she goes along with his plan, and Anna desperately needs the cash—she’s a struggling artist who’s just lost her convenience store job, and she’s also responsible for her dad’s medical bills. Anna agrees and suddenly finds herself swept up in a world of unimaginable wealth as she attends the wedding on a private island. She knows she doesn’t fit in, but she has to fake it to get her payout—and to help Liam get his. Because even though she never got to know him when they shared a roof, she now realizes that the man she married is actually a great guy, even if his family is a nightmare. As Anna and Liam project an image of domestic bliss to his skeptical relatives, Liam sees how honestly Anna lives her life, and he has to decide whether staying in his family’s good graces is worth living a lie. Christina Lauren, pen name of the bestselling duo behind countless rom-coms, have crafted another entertaining and lighthearted romance. Artistic Anna and uptight Liam make for a perfect case of opposites attract, and the island setting creates a wonderfully escapist mood. Steamy, fun, full of family drama.
St. George, Harper | Berkley (368 pp.)
$18.00 paper | April 23, 2024
9780593441008 | Series: Doves of New York, 1
St. George’s Doves of New York series, a spinoff of the Gilded Age Heiresses, opens with another tale of an American heiress marrying into London nobility.
Cora Dove and her sisters were raised by their mother, an actress who received only a pitiable allowance from their father, the wealthy Charles Hathaway. His mother wanted to make things right on her deathbed, so she left generous dowries that her illegitimate granddaughters would receive when they married. Mr. Hathaway wants the Dove women nowhere near his family in New York, so Cora proposes they search for husbands in London. Once there, Cora and her sisters are introduced to potential suitors, including Leopold Brendon, Earl of Devonworth. In financial straits due to his brother’s recklessness, Devonworth—who would rather be focusing on his work in Parliament to improve the health of the working class—agrees to Cora’s plan for a marriage of convenience followed by a separation in a few years. As their feelings grow, however, they have to decide whether they want to try in earnest to be together and see if they’ll be able to stand by each other when secrets are revealed. St. George once again delivers a romance with an engrossing and detailed historical setting and characters with progressive ideals, particularly regarding the rights of women and the working class. Although the book gets off to a sluggish start as the groundwork for the series is laid, once Cora and Devonworth find their way to a respectful friendship, the story starts to build. The steamy payoff after their slow-burn relationship is immensely satisfying.
A delightful start to a new series, sure to please St. George’s existing fans and garner new ones.
MOST FOREIGN POLICY experts agree that the U.S. relationship with China is one of today’s most significant geopolitical issues, with ripple effects that influence not just those two nations but the world as a whole. For our International Issue, I would like to highlight four books that will educate readers on China.
Ai Weiwei is arguably China’s most recognizable artist, though his outspoken activism means that he hasn’t been able to live in his home country in nearly a decade. In Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir (Ten Speed Press, Jan. 23), written with Elettra Stamboulis and illustrated by Gianluca Constantini, Ai chronicles a lifetime of repression and resistance. In our starred review, which calls this follow-up to 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows a “welcome introduction to the life and work of an exemplary artist,” Ai’s activist fervor is on full display. As our reviewer notes, “Ai continues to resist the Chinese regime, closing with the pointed observation, ‘Any artist who isn’t an activist is a dead artist.’”
As a famous TV journalist, Chai Jing is also
unafraid of telling it like it is. Her memoir, Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage From China’s Most Influential Television Journalist (Astra House, 2023), translated by Yan Yan, offers what our reviewer calls “poignant and thoughtful considerations of Chinese news stories from behind the scenes.” The author opens windows into the lives and struggles of ordinary Chinese people— stories that are often hidden or suppressed. “Admirably,” our review notes, “Chai includes commentary on her own unease at sharing the intimate details of victims’ lives, and she astutely identifies some of the ethical quandaries that confront anyone tasked with exposing
individual suffering for the public’s ostensible benefit. Ultimately, readers will agree that these are important stories told with insight and sensitivity.”
Xiaolu Guo’s Radical: A Life of My Own (Grove, 2023) is another work from a provocative Chinese-born artist. Guo, whose book Nine Continents won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, is an acclaimed novelist and filmmaker, and Radical is a chronicle of her life journey, narrated via the author’s lifelong pursuit of what she calls “an etymology of myself.” Examining the mind-body connection, sexual joy, and how cultural differences manifest in art, Guo creates “an elegant and unreserved account of a life lived in full recognition of its possibilities.”
Anyone who follows the news is aware of the Chinese
government’s reprehensible treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Waiting To Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide (Penguin Press, 2023) by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a courageous, often shocking account of one family’s experiences under the repressive regime and their efforts to find asylum in the U.S. In a starred review, our critic writes, “The text is lyrical, heartfelt, and perfectly paced; the narrative unfolds with a slow, simmering burn. Never shying away from vulnerability, the author shines a muchneeded light on the complex, contradictory emotions of trading a homeland for a lifetime of both safety and survivor’s guilt.”
Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction editor.
Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson
ERIC LIEBETRAU
A swift-paced exposé of the Northern Irish Troubles and the fraught interactions among British intelligence and the Irish Republican Army.
Hemming, the author of Agent M and Agents of Influence, delivers a true-crime tale narrated with the skills of a whodunit pro. The author opens with the murder of a British agent, his body left beside a country lane. The British agent was also a member of the IRA, with responsibilities that included storing weapons used in the war against Britain. He was killed, Hemming charges, by another IRA member, possibly on the orders of Martin McGuinness, who became a prominent politician in Northern Ireland and was famously
granted an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, an interaction that speaks to the well-worn observation about Northern Irish politics: “If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.” The killing, notes the author, was marked by “savage intimacy,” carefully planned from start to finish; the IRA leadership surely knew about it beforehand, but MI5 may have had an inkling before the fact as well. Hemming writes confidently of matters that the IRA has surely tried to keep silent—not just political murders but also everyday tactics, such as the use of dog and horse transports to move weapons around, those transports being difficult for British
canine sniffers to expose. One extraordinary revelation is that British intelligence had so thoroughly infiltrated the IRA that the organization was brought to an effective standstill, its stalwarts not knowing whom to trust. One British handler reveals that military intelligence wanted to force
the IRA out of the military and into the political arena, against the wishes of the British government—even if Margaret Thatcher, Hemming notes, did authorize secret negotiations to curb the bloodshed.
A riveting tale of bad guys all around, engaging from start to finish. 79 Another Word
By Carvell WallaceAbu Srour, Nasser | Trans. by Luke Leafgren Other Press (320 pp.) | $18.99 paper
May 14, 2024 | 9781635423877
A Palestinian prisoner recalls how he survived a life sentence with the help of his imagination.
In 1993, Abu Srour was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole. While he does not discuss the nature of his alleged crime, the author mentions that his friend died during the arrest. Abu Srour began his imprisonment in the interrogation block. In a scene narrated in the second person, he implies that he was forced to sign a confession that presumably led to his long sentence. During his time in solitary confinement, Abu Srour found relief by conversing with imaginary voices and clinging to the concept of a metaphorical wall. Although he was anxious about his transfer to a new prison, upon arrival, he realized that, compared to solitary, “It was hardly a prison at all.” Abu Srour is candid about how his rich fantasy life—in which, he notes, “I slept with all the women of the tribe and all the neighboring tribes”— helped him survive watching “waves of prisoner releases” that excluded him over and over again. His situation changed when he met a woman named Nanna, a young lawyer who “was creative in her interactions with my madness.” Eventually, he writes, she became “a goddess of confined places and the goddess of me.” Unfortunately, the pressures of Abu Srour’s life sentence challenged their romance from the start. At its best, the narrative is moving and formally inventive, painting a surreal
portrait of a political prisoner’s inner world. However, the extensive use of passive voice, selective lack of details— particularly about Abu Srour’s childhood and arrest—infuse the story with distance and confusion that sometimes make it difficult to read. An intermittently insightful, unevenly paced, selectively lyrical memoir from a Palestinian prisoner.
Aldern, Clayton Page | Dutton (336 pp.) $30.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9780593472743
This is your brain on climate change.
In his second book, neuroscientist and environmental journalist Aldern examines the palpable effects of climate change on our brain chemistry, including not just increased anxiety, stress, and depression, but also detrimental changes in decision-making abilities and judgment.
Paraphrasing a climate advocate in California’s Central Valley, the author writes, “planetary empathy is rooted in pain: the aches and grimaces of a world grieving not just the loss of species and an unspoiled troposphere, but also the loss of the way time once passed and the seasons once progressed. It is the sorrow of glacial ice bearing water for the last time; seas unable to hold their vapors close; the erasure of whole fluvial languages once carved into riverbeds.” As a result of all this loss, notes Aldern, “the shadows of stress loom,” generating in our bodies a torrent of hormonal responses that
A lyrical and scientifically rigorous account.
prompt “relentless cortisol storms” and altering the landscape of our brains— e.g., via the gradual shrinking of the hippocampus. Furthermore, neurotoxins—which can lead to a vast array of serious health concerns, including Alzheimer’s and ALS—are being released in increasing amounts due to the drastic changes in the climate, which include expanding bacterial and algal outgrowths, melting permafrost, and accelerating swarms of virus-bearing mosquitos. The chronic stress we feel as we lose seasons, coastlines, farmlands, and mountaintops is literally changing our brains’ “structure and function, leading to memory problems, mood disorders, and heightened anxiety,” all of which have ripple effects on those around us. As Aldern demonstrates throughout this distressing yet urgently necessary book, climate change is affecting the very duration of our lives. This is a unique—and uniquely disturbing—addition to the literature. A lyrical and scientifically rigorous account of the emotional and physical toll climate change is taking on the human brain.
Arnsdorf, Isaac | Little, Brown (304 pp.)
$29.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9780316497510
MAGA is coming for democracy, but first it’s coming for the GOP.
“Our audience does not hate these people,” said Steve Bannon of Democrats. “But they hate the RINOs.” In his first book, Washington Post politics reporter Arnsdorf notes that, since the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, when Trump-approved candidates lost nationwide, it was Republican boards, commissioners, and judges who fended off challenges. There were Republican governors and operatives in places such as Pennsylvania and Arizona who counted the votes that lost Trump the presidency in 2020. “Even
Trump’s own vice president refused to help him block the official certification in Congress,” writes the author. Consequently, one of MAGA’s chief goals is to take over all those downstream positions so that loyalists can force out moderates and never-Trumpers and fill the ranks with true believers. Never mind that true believers are very much in the minority and that the fringe is broadly unpopular. Never mind, Arnsdorf writes, that they “disconnected from the rest of the country.” In their campaign to capture the GOP, they have been successful, helped along by election deniers and Capitol stormers for whom loyalty to Trump is the only litmus test. Ironically, as one longtime Arizona GOP operative told Arnsdorf, most of the recruits into the far-right movement, as well as candidates for local posts such as precinct commissioner, rarely or never voted before 2020, while local MAGA darling Kari Lake was an Obama supporter before seeing greener pastures in Trumpland. Given MAGA’s remake of the GOP, with no small help from QAnon initiates, it’s small wonder that most of the candidates being fielded at every level are MAGA approved and that the Republican Party is what Bannon calls “a revolutionary vanguard” for the extreme right.
An eye-opening look at how a fringe effected a hostile takeover of a once-mainstream political party.
It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories
Baker, Lisa-Jo | Convergent/Crown (272 pp.) $27.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780525652861
Using her father’s life as a point of departure, the South Africa–born author offers heartfelt, emotionally charged reflections on their apartheid-riven homeland.
Baker, author of Never Unfriended and Surprised by Motherhood, writes that rage
was in her father’s DNA. Born into privilege, he descended from English and Dutch Afrikaner pioneers in Pretoria. Spending summers on the ancestral farm in Middelburg, the author was never sure when her father would explode with anger. “I remember growing up like a teenage munitions expert who traveled unpredictable roads,” she writes, “never sure when her foot would hit an IED planted by my father….I never could quite pin it down. Our house had holes in the walls. I don’t mean metaphorically.” The author recounts other bursts of anger via her father’s memories of her grandfather—e.g., setting the dogs on baboons or punishing a pair of servants caught stealing horses. The death of her mother, when Baker was 18, shook the family deeply, propelling her to seek higher education in the U.S., as her father had two decades before. The author traveled to Boston for her undergraduate degree, Indiana for law school, and Maryland for work, and she married an American. Throughout, Baker seeks to understand the many sins of both her homeland and her adopted land, and she makes a tender effort to forgive her father. “Looking back, I want to pick up shovels, trowels, spades, brushes, sieves, and buckets, the full archaeologist’s toolbox, and hammer at the inside of my mind,” she writes. “I don’t want to be gentle; I want to excavate my own willful ignorance—terrifying as it emerges— fact by fact, from the sediment inside the deep caves of my mind.”
A painful, lyrical, and bracing memoir.
Balukjian, Brad | Hachette (320 pp.) $30.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9780306831553
A journalist’s search for professional wrestling’s 1980s icons. In conceiving this book, Balukjian, the author of The
Wax Pack , committed to profiling six of the men who were on the bill at Madison Square Garden on December 26, 1983. He starts strong with the Iron Sheik—his childhood hero and someone with whom he had an actual relationship—and proceeds from there with varying results. Given that the “six pack” concept is the author’s own, it’s not clear why he sticks with it when that means devoting whole chapters to wrestlers who won’t talk to him rather than exploring the more interesting questions his own research raises. Why waste pages rehashing Hulk Hogan’s Gawker lawsuit when you could be trying to figure out why Bill Eadie—a guy with a steady job as a high school teacher and coach and someone willing to talk about his career—transformed himself into the Masked Superstar and then Demolition Ax? The chapter on Vince McMahon throws this book’s shortcomings into high relief. The man who invented pro wrestling as we know it had no reason to talk to Balukjian and a lot of reasons not to—e.g., allegations of sexual misconduct that came to light in 2022. In response to this news, the author found people willing to talk about the corporate culture at World Wrestling Entertainment, sources who informed him that the real McMahon was a terrible boss, which tracks with McMahon the character—and also, who cares? The world is full of mean bosses. Balukjian could not have known that McMahon would be accused of sex trafficking, but he could have taken the time to ask some women what it was like to work at WWE. This might have produced something more interesting than a trip to Sgt. Slaughter’s hometown. For superfans only.
For more on pro wrestling, visit Kirkus online.
June 4, 2024 | 9780063227408
An articulate, engaging study of the people of color and women who were in the front ranks of America’s explorers. Adventurers and explorers of the American frontier are often thought of as being in the Daniel Boone mold: macho, usually white men conquering the wilderness with loaded rifles and gritted teeth. That is often not the case, writes Bellows, who teaches history at the New School. She provides biographies of 10 people who blazed their own trails but were later written out of history due to their race or gender. The book is divided into two parts, with the beginning of the 20th century as the rough dividing line. In the first section, Bellows recounts the experiences of Sacagawea, a Native American woman who acted as a crucial guide and interpreter for a government-funded expedition called the Corps of Discovery. The author also examines the wide-ranging travels of James Beckwourth, formerly enslaved in Virginia, and the story of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was one of the first homesteaders in the Dakotas region. In the second section, Bellows looks at Americans who traveled out of the country, such as William Sheppard, the first Black missionary to go to Africa. Matthew Henson overturned the myth that Black people were inherently unsuitable for exploration by going to the North Pole, and Harriet Chalmers Adams was the first white woman to trek the Andes and map Incan sites. Finally, Bellows introduces Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. The author obviously has great affection and admiration for her subjects, and she knits together material from a wide
range of primary and secondary sources. A diverse bunch, they were linked by a love of the far horizon, and the U.S. is better for it.
Bellows expands our historical understanding by recovering and retelling colorful, important stories.
Black, R. Derek | Abrams (320 pp.) $30.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9781419764783
A redemption story of rising from the mire of white nationalism.
A native of Florida, Black grew up in a household headed by the founder of Stormfront, an online meeting place of Nazis, the KKK, and other exponents of white nationalism. The elder Black was a man of some nuance: He rejected the term white supremacy, in the apparent belief, according to his son, that the desired establishment of a whites-only nation “removes any possibility of White dominance of other races.” A close confidant of David Duke, he was also “committed to seeing himself as maintaining the higher ground, not seeing himself as cruel, gratuitous, ignorant, or—as the show was trying to paint us by including us in the larger group—hateful.” The numbers in his day may have been small, but the younger Black warns that today “white supremacy is everywhere, and has to some extent touched every household with its insidious implication that White people have somehow earned their spot at the top of the social pecking order. It is the social system that leads to the manifold ways that our society denies rights and resources to people who aren’t White.” It didn’t help that when Trump became president, the supremacists and nationalists came out of the woodwork in droves, pushing the idea that immigrants were part of a concerted
move to “replace” white people in a form of “genocide.” The author’s process of severing their white nationalist ties was slow, aided by their encounters at the New College in Sarasota, a haven of progressivism—now under assault by Florida’s governor—where they made friends with Jewish, Black, Latine, and Asian students. Ultimately, they were able to break away from their father’s bigotry—and in ways that will surprise some readers.
Of interest to students of cults, to say nothing of contemporary politics.
Braxton, Alim & Mark Katz | Univ. of North Carolina (248 pp.) | $23.00 paper
April 2, 2024 | 9781469678702
A raw, contemplative account of a death-row inmate’s journey toward redemption through faith, family, and rap. This unusual memoir, a collaboration between Braxton and Katz, who teaches a course on “Music and Incarceration” at the University of North Carolina, captures wisdom accrued through more than 25 years of incarceration. Braxton contacted Katz in 2019, seeking guidance on how to better record the raps he had been writing. Katz notes that Braxton “accepts his guilt” for three murders he committed as a young man, acknowledging, “I do not want to minimize his crimes or ignore his victims.” He asserts that the detail and originality of Braxton’s writing (many lyrics appear in the book) speak to the potential for personal growth and cultural value despite these crimes, and he casts himself as part of “a self-fashioned ‘Alim team,’ working to share Braxton’s powerful words and music.” Braxton identifies
himself as “a prisoner, a writer, and a rapper on North Carolina’s Death Row,” aspiring to both dramatize his rejection of the nihilistic violence of “street” machismo (“I was nineteen years old and fascinated with the idea of being a gangster”) and call attention to the ugly reality of wrongfully convicted individuals sentenced to death. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen 35 people executed and 7 people exonerated because they were innocent,” he wrote in one of his letters. In percussive, short chapters, Braxton vividly presents his own background, including documentation of bleak decades behind bars and feelings of guilt and torment, which dedication to Islam helped him address. “There’s no getting around the darkness in this book,” writes Katz, but there is also “joy, hope, and love.” Though the narrative structure is sometimes too disjointed, Braxton’s story is worth discussing.
An unvarnished look at a life reclaimed deep within the edifice of mass incarceration.
Cahn, Naomi & June Carbone & Nancy Levit Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) | $27.99 May 1, 2024 | 9781982115128
An account of the search for economic justice for women.
Legal scholars Cahn, Carbone, and Levit argue persuasively that the persistent wage gap between men and women is a result of a “winner take
all” (WTA) economy, in which workplaces offer increased rewards for top executives while pitting employees against each other. Those “calling the shots,” the authors attest, “engineer results that may not be in the collective interests of the workers themselves, the long-term health of the company, or the social order.” In a WTA economy, businesses may welcome women in entry-level positions and promote them, but the women “disappear as they move up the corporate ranks.” They often are marginalized, receive smaller bonuses, and suffer harassment. By examining women’s lawsuits against their employers for sex discrimination or retaliation for whistleblowing, the authors conclude that women are trapped in a “triple bind.” They may not see the invisible rules by which men play; when they try to play by those rules, they are more likely to be fired; and when they see the unscrupulous things they are required to do, they take themselves out of the running. Among the companies the authors discuss are Tesla, Walmart, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Uber. They also consider women’s disadvantages as gig workers, without benefits or protections. The authors see the same toxic environments that blight businesses taking over politics. Calling for a new set of values that prioritize collaboration, inclusion, and productivity rather than competition, amorality, and self-interest, the authors advocate for significant actions, such as mobilizing public outrage, continuing to take legal action, capping the accumulation of power at the top, promoting diversity, providing adequate and affordable child care, raising the minimum wage and instituting income guarantees, and investing in children’s education and communities. Robust evidence for the need for systemic change.
Carroll, Sean | Dutton (304 pp.)
$26.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780593186602
The author’s second volume on the laws that govern the universe.
In 2022, Carroll, professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins, published The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, in which he explained the first fundamental description of nature in physics: classical mechanics, from Newton’s gravity to Einstein’s relativity. In the classical world, the workings of particles of energy are often complicated and even bizarre (general relativity is both), but they make sense. Adding that no one, physicists included, can sensibly explain quantum mechanics—even though it’s “the way the world works”—the author emphasizes that this book follows naturally from its predecessor. Although Carroll maintains that his field contains an enormous amount of material that he will “boil down to its bare essence,” readers may wish that he had kept the pot on longer. Science writers dealing with complex areas—e.g., DNA, immunity, brain function, quantum mechanics—traditionally start with easy material, usually the history, proceed to basic concepts, and slowly add complexity. Carroll, however, is a take-no-prisoners popularizer, and he dispenses with history in a dozen pages. His first equation appears on page 14, and it’s a doozy. Torrents of others follow as he eschews analogies, metaphors, and amusing stories for straightforward explanations of matter, fields, and forces as well as quantum behavior that he argues is less bizarre than other authors claim. That may be true, but most readers will agree that concepts such as entanglement, spin, symmetry, antimatter, and gauge theory are difficult to comprehend. This should not be anyone’s introduction to quantum theory; for that, try Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman. Readers who have forgotten first-year college physics and calculus will
struggle. Those who remember and pay close attention will receive an unvarnished education on how the universe works. Quantum theory for serious readers.
Chivers, Tom | One Signal/Atria (384 pp.)
$30.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781668052600
An instructive look at “how likely something is, given the evidence we have.”
In this compelling account, science writer Chivers, author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy and How To Read Numbers, introduces us to Thomas Bayes, who developed “perhaps the most important single equation in history.” The author explains that life is not a chess game. It’s like poker, where we make decisions based on limited information. “The usual way to explain Bayes’ theorem is with medical testing,” writes the author. For example, does a woman with a positive mammogram have breast cancer? No test is perfect, but it must be nearly 100%, right? Wrong. Readers may be surprised to learn that a test that is 90% accurate (typical of a mammogram) isn’t the same as there being a 90% chance that it’s correct. Bayes predictions require additional information—in this case, the incidence of breast cancer in the population. Chivers may not be exaggerating his subject’s importance, but this is one of the longest of many popular books on Bayes’ theorem. Delving almost too deeply, he delivers a history of scientific prediction as well as the ongoing controversy within the statistics community between pro- and anti-Bayesian factions. He also offers a marginally relevant but jaw-dropping account of the current state of science, where ignorance or deliberate manipulation of statistics by ambitious researchers has produced an epidemic of studies announcing results that often can’t be
reproduced. “Science,” he writes, “is explicitly about making predictions— hypotheses—and testing them….The problem is that in science, we like to think that there is an objective truth out there, and the Bayesian model of perception is explicitly subjective. A probability estimate isn’t some fact about the world, but my best guess of the world, given the information I have.”
An ingenious introduction to the mathematics of rational thinking.
de Bastion, Roxanne | Pegasus (320 pp.) $29.95 | June 4, 2024 | 9781639366873
A somber narrative derived from archival work left by a Holocaust survivor portrays an era in Budapest just before and during early World War II.
Singer-songwriter de Bastion is the granddaughter of the protagonist of this book, Istvan Bastyai von Holtzer (later known as Stephen), a Jewish musician and composer who had a fabulous career as a working pianist across Europe before he was sent to German camps after the Nazis invaded in March 1944. Until that year, Hungary was a German ally, which meant that Jews were mostly protected by the pro-Nazi regime, despite their fate elsewhere in Europe. Through cassette tapes the author discovered in the possession of her recently deceased father, she learned that Stephen had narrated his “war story” rather selectively, but the author was able to fill in many other details while researching the history of the era. Stephen was the eldest of four born to a family of nonreligious Hungarian Jews. His father was a wealthy textile entrepreneur, and the family lived in a penthouse apartment in central Budapest, and one of the home’s main focal points was a Blüthner piano. Stephen disdained business, but he became an accomplished pianist for
hire—in films, nightclubs, etc.—in Budapest and across Europe. As the author relates, he pursued his passion while “blissfully blinkered” regarding political events until October 1942, when he was summoned to provide forced labor for the Russian war front. Although he managed to survive the horrific conditions, when the Russians broke through, he escaped to Budapest to see his family, only to face deportation to Nazi death camps along with 440,000 Hungarian Jews. De Bastion ably pieces together this poignant tale despite Stephen’s silences, offering a memorable account of family and resilience. A painfully moving story of how a family piano served as a cherished reminder of long-lost but not forgotten relationships.
| Liveright/Norton (400 pp.) $29.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781324093084
The bestselling author of Rebels at Sea , A Furious Sky, and Leviathan returns with another adventure at sea.
In his latest maritime narrative, Dolin chronicles an early-19th-century calamity featuring the usual privation and acts of heroism but more than the usual bad behavior. In early 1812, the American brig Nanina sailed for the then-uninhabited Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, where its crew hoped to find an abundant supply of seals. Later that year, the Isabella left New South Wales for Britain carrying a mixture of pardoned convicts, soldiers, and their wives. The ship’s incompetent captain barely avoided early disaster but later hit a reef in the Falklands; the crew managed to escape to a deserted island. When supplies ran low, a few men sailed the 17-foot ship’s boat across 1,000 miles of stormy ocean to Brazil, where a British admiral dispatched a ship that
A striking account of medical malfeasance and the whistleblowers who have fought against it.
THE OCCASIONAL HUMAN SACRIFICE
reached the castaways, as well as the Nanina, which had just discovered them. With the War of 1812 in progress, the British captain announced that the Nanina was a prize of war. He sailed off with both ships, aware that he was abandoning five members of the Nanina crew who were off hunting seals. When they returned, they were mystified to find their base deserted. Though readers already know that they survived, Dolin maintains an interesting narrative of their 18 months alone on the barren subarctic Falklands. Despite the absence of firearms, food was rarely lacking on islands dense with seals, penguins, and feral hogs and the services of a large, aggressive dog. The sailors’ mastery of sewing, carving, and carpentry proved invaluable. Personality clashes instigated much of the drama, with episodes of cooperation and mutual suffering alternating with selfishness, betrayal, and abandonment. Eventually, ships arrived to take them home, after which “most disappeared from the historical record.” An entertaining castaway tale.
Memoir
Elliot-Kugell, Owen | Hachette (304 pp.) $30.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780306830648
The daughter of the late singer aims to set the record straight on a score or two. Though Cass Elliot (1941-1974) died from a heart attack, an urban legend immediately arose that Elliot—well known for her weight and the object of countless fat jokes, some embedded in the lyrics of the Mamas & the Papas—asphyxiated
on a ham sandwich. Elliot-Kugell, the daughter of Elliot and a man who briefly played bass for the group, recounts the short life she knew with her mother and the bereavement that followed. Some of this material comes from other sources, although she was on the scene. One interesting anecdote: She was but six months old gnawing on one of Henry Diltz’s film canisters when Cass engineered the meeting that would produce Crosby, Stills & Nash; their sound “was first imagined by my mom, who instinctively knew what her three friends were capable of creating.” By this account, it’s clear that Elliot was troubled, as was her daughter, packed off to a boarding school that practiced what the denizens called “the Thorazine shuffle.” Much of the narrative is rather by the numbers, and the prose is largely workmanlike: “To millions of her fans, she was known as ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot, the Earth Mother figure of the Los Angeles hippie scene of the late 1960s. But to me, she was just my mom.”
While her quest to discover the source of the ham-sandwich canard takes a surprising turn, to say nothing of her search for her biological father, of greater interest are her devoted efforts to carve out her own career in music, hampered by conglomerate mergers and the industry’s demand for big-ticket stars in place of long-tail artists.
Well intended and of some interest to fans, but a footnote in musical and pop-myth history.
Elliott, Carl | Norton (320 pp.) | $29.99
May 14, 2024 | 9781324065500
A striking account of medical malfeasance and the whistleblowers who have fought against it.
To read our review of White Coat, Black Hat, visit Kirkus online.
Though he graduated from medical school, Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat, never practiced and now teaches philosophy, including a course on scandals in medical research and those who blew the whistle. In Hollywood movies, whistleblowers often struggle courageously before crushing the villain. In reality, they generally lose their jobs, pay their own lawyers’ fees, and, blackballed within their profession, disappear into obscurity. Elliott’s account of a handful of experiments makes for fascinating yet painful reading. In every case, many participants disapproved but kept quiet. The author concentrates on those who spoke up, and it is not a pretty picture. He begins with the infamous Tuskegee study, which began in 1932. “For forty years,” writes Elliott, “the US Public Health Service had deceived and exploited hundreds of poor Black men with syphilis.” From the late 1940s through the 1980s at Willowbrook, the massive Staten Island institution for children with intellectual disabilities, researchers deliberately infected children with hepatitis on the excuse that they would have gotten it anyway. A 1960s Pentagon-financed study at Cincinnati Medical Center aimed to determine how much radiation American soldiers could withstand. All subjects developed radiation sickness, and many died. Perhaps the most grotesque researcher in Elliott’s harrowing narrative was Paolo Macchiarini, a charismatic, possibly psychopathic surgeon who became an international celebrity for
The editor of an anthology of international writing by Latine women reflects on sisterhood across borders.
BY LAURA VILLAREALDAUGHTERS OF LATIN AMERICA : An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzmán (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023), contains works by 141 Latine contributors from 34 countries that span the Americas and the Caribbean, writing in 21 languages, including 17 Indigenous languages. Contributors include well-known writers like Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, and U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, as well as self-published writers whose writing deserves more attention. (One notable inclusion is Mazatec shaman-poet María Sabina, whose chants and spoken poems were transcribed and translated.) On a video call from Exeter, New Hampshire, Guzmán recently spoke to us about curating this trailblazing anthology; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired the creation of Daughters of Latin America?
Oh, I love that question, because I get to talk about the work that’s been done before this work. There are ancestor anthologies that inspired [it]. One of the anthologies that inspired this anthology came out about four years ago—it’s called New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. It’s a beautiful and powerful anthology. This anthology is also inspired by This Bridge Called My Back, the iconic 1980s anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as a wonderful anthology called When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs
Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry edited by Joy Harjo. These are sister anthologies.
Aside from the more typical contents like poems, stories, and essays, your anthology includes oral history, interviews, letters, and other materials that seem like they would be difficult to find. What was your approach to gathering materials for inclusion? When I was curating and doing the research, I felt like the canon needed a little bit more airing out as to what is literature and who gets to decide what great literature is. These
were things that were front of mind and back of mind. For oral histories, I was thinking about someone like María Sabina, who was dismissed during her lifetime, but was a great shaman poet. As I state in my intro, it has to do with the fact that she was a Mazatec Indigenous woman from the Oaxaca region [of Mexico]. She was poor, and she didn’t read or write in her own language [Mazatec]. Her poetry and chants were recorded, transcribed, and later translated. I felt it was really important to lift her voice and story. I was thinking also about women like Gabriela Mistral [the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature]. It’s just so funny—during her lifetime, guys wrote about her as a spinster. She never got married. Then you read her
letters and she’s having the time of her life with all her girlfriends. I thought, Why not dig into her letters? Letters are so intimate and they give us a peek into the writer’s world. Why not get to know her a little bit more deeply? These were the moments where I felt like letters and chants could really be part of the literary experience for us. That’s kind of what I was thinking about: how to redefine the canon on our own terms.
You can look at this anthology like a house. There were four main pillars that hold the house together. One of them was queer women who have been marginalized throughout history. The second group was Indigenous women of the Americas, because many of the First Nations women are marginalized in their own coun -
tries. I wanted to lift their voices and center their voices. The third group was Black Latinas. And the fourth group was Puerto Rican women writers, because I am Puerto Rican and I was born a colonial subject. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, the euphemism for a colony. We work in liminal spaces because we’re not necessarily fully American, even though the paperwork says we are, technically. We are sometimes forgotten in the Latin American literary conversation.
You structured the anthology using the 13 moons of the year and their specific energies according to Mayan tradition for each section. At what point did you realize you were going to organize the anthology in that way?
I remembered a conversation I had with an Indigenous man in Puerto Rico. He said to me, “So you’re coming back home, but do you know the language of the moon?” And I was like, Do I know the language of the moon? No, because in immigration and modern life we have a disconnect with the moon. I started to think about my grandfathers, my uncles, and my cousins; they would never fish or go into the ocean without knowing where the moon was. My mother would never plant a seed without understanding what was happening with the moon. The Zapotec people [of Mexico] believe that when the woman gets her period, the moon descends. I started to think, Oh, of course, the moon. That’s our abuela. That’s our
It was so beautiful to experience the magnanimous way in which women support each other.
ancestral connection. She’s the one that’s been speaking to us for so long. It made perfect sense.
I reached out to some of the Indigenous sisters in the group [of contributors] and asked, “Do you know any elder who can talk to me about the moon?” It opened up all these new portals—not just to the moon, but also the sacred calendars, the ancient calendars that the Maya still live by. The number 13 kept resonating. Anyway, all of those confluences of ancient tradition started to
languages including Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages. I had to commission translators. I mention this statistic in my intro, but every 12 to 14 days an Indigenous language dies around the world. The Maya poet Rosa Chávez said to me, “What you’ve done with this is language justice, because when you center non-English voices in their Indigenous mother tongues, you are saying something really powerful about the importance of these languages and literatures.”
Did anything surprise you as you were curating Daughters of Latin America?
open up within me this deep interest and connection. And it just made sense. It tied us in a way that was so divine.
Speaking of Indigenous writers, you note in your acknowledgments that about half of the pieces were translated from a non-English language. You and other writers translated them. Was commissioning their translation a part of the process?
Yes, about 50% of the women that I reached out to wrote or write in non-English
I guess it’s not a surprise, but an affirmation of the sisterhood that exists in the Latine community, in the women writers of the world. It was so beautiful to experience the magnanimous way in which women support each other. I would reach out to a writer like Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, who’s Puerto Rican from New York—she’s Afro-Boricua—and she says, “But do you know this Haitian sister, Danielle Legros Georges, or do you know this queer writer Caro De Robertis?” I’m not sure if it’s a surprise or, like I said, an affirmation of what happens within these communities of writers. I really hope that this anthology is the beginning of making sure that we know about the women who are writing, as my literary hero Toni Morrison says, “outside the margins.”
Laura Villareal is the author of the poetry collection Girl’s Guide to Leaving .
developing a synthetic trachea that could replace one destroyed by cancer or infections. After years of fruitless whistleblowing, it finally became clear that the replacement trachea was worthless; all patients died after prolonged suffering. Elliott’s whistleblowers have a spotty record; many victories were partial or occurred long after the fact; some failed; none prospered from their efforts. “Whistleblowing is a poor mechanism for institutional reform,” he writes, and “full-blown success” is difficult to find. A disturbingly eye-opening must-read.
Little Avalanches: A Memoir Ellis, Becky | Regalo Press (248 pp.)
$28.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9798888451663
The daughter of a military veteran struggles to understand her father.
With graceful prose, Ellis describes growing up in the shadow of her father, Louis Keith Boswell Jr., a World War II combat veteran who returned home with numerous medals for valor, including a coveted Silver Star. Despite Boswell becoming the beloved “local doctor” in their California town after the war, the family deteriorated. The author’s parents eventually divorced and began volleying accusations of child neglect during custody battles, while Ellis and her brother periodically visited their father and his new, free-spirited girlfriend, who was “half his age but with twice his pizzazz.” The author writes vividly of her father’s tough-love parenting style. He graphically recounted stories about slaughtering Nazis in cold blood, gruffly taught her how to shoot a gun, and approved of her grueling dental treatments without Novocain. Her attempts to compassionately bond with her father proved futile and only exacerbated what would ultimately be uncovered as untreated battlefield PTSD, manifesting in nightmares, flashbacks, and paranoid obsessions with home surveillance.
A rowdy, dirty-pleasure story of how it feels to cater to unsavory people for money and excitement.ALL THE WORST HUMANS
Bisecting the primary narrative is a harrowing epistolary section from Boswell’s perspective, chronicling the sheer brutality of his six-month wintertime stint with the specially trained nighttime combat fighters called Timberwolves. Ellis, now a mother herself, writes eloquently and poignantly about the night she quizzed her father about his past and he became a wellspring of emotional confessions, meticulously depicting the painful episodes of his grueling tour of duty. “One story at a time,” she writes, “he revealed himself to me.” Ellis finally achieved longanticipated clarity and emotional healing at the conclusion of their intensive yearlong father-daughter discussions. Wartime veterans and their children will find this uncommonly strong debut a meaningful reading experience, and general readers will be moved by the story. A moving, melancholy, and ultimately cathartic examination of wartime trauma across generations.
All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons,
Elwood, Phil | Henry Holt (272 pp.) $28.99 | June 25, 2024 | 9781250321572
A breakneck-pace memoir of a career drumming up publicity for some of the worst human beings in the public eye.
The cliche of public relations client horror stories involves trashed hotel rooms and drunken shenanigans, but Elwood—a publicity “arsonist” for publicity firms serving tyrants, war criminals, the government of
Qatar, and a host of wrong-side-of-the-law American politicians—has all of those beat. His debut memoir opens in 2018, as he opens his door to armed FBI agents, wondering which of his many extralegal actions from 20 years in PR had brought them there. Beginning his career as an intern for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a position acquired with a fake ID, he went on to work years in private PR, where he drank heavily, struggled with depression and bipolar disorder, and plunged into debt despite a generous salary. His client list included, among others, a “murderers’ row of foreign dictators”—e.g., Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi’s adult son, whom Elwood babysat through a wild weekend in Las Vegas punctuated with strippers and duffel bags full of cash. In one memorable anecdote, the author writes about “masterminding a trade war between Antigua and the United States” out of vengeance for an old client. Despite the Jason Bourne persona, Elwood reveals himself as a fairly complex character, falling head over heels for the woman who would become his wife and traveling the world hobnobbing with human monsters while secreting an Opus the Penguin plush toy in his luggage for comfort. Exciting and full of bluster, this thrilling tale is hard to look away from—despite the fact that, as the author admits, his misdeeds are “unsettling, like watching someone get mugged in broad daylight and doing nothing to stop it.”
A rowdy, dirty-pleasure story of how it feels to cater to unsavory people for money and excitement.
For more on battlefield PTSD, visit Kirkus
Finchelstein, Federico | Univ. of California (264 pp.) | $24.95
May 14, 2024 | 9780520392496
A historian of fascist movements encourages us to use “the f-word” when describing contemporary far-right populist leaders.
During his career, Finchelstein, author of A Brief History of Fascist Lies, has focused his research on the tendency of right-wing populism to escalate into full-blown fascism. The author’s concern is both personal and professional. He was born in Argentina as that nation descended into “gruesome dictatorship.” In November 2020, he authored a prescient Washington Post op-ed that warned readers about a possible coup attempt in the U.S. With this cautionary perspective, Finchelstein describes a new breed of politician willing to destroy democracy for short-term political gain: the “wannabe fascist.” He makes a strong case that Trumpism is a new chapter in the history of antidemocratic politics, drawing on research and scholarship into the histories of fascism and populism. He zeroes in on a few key elements of fascism, including political violence and the militarization of politics; lies and propaganda; xenophobia; and dictatorship. In his sobering analysis, features of Trumpism seem eerily reminiscent of past fascist history. Trump’s cries of “witch hunt” echo fascist warrior-martyr tropes, and social media outlets provide him with what historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls “a direct channel to the people.” Furthermore, Trump’s comments on the “infection” of immigrants reflect classic fascism’s need for “mortal enemies” and their dehumanization. Similarly, the GOP’s blithe enabling of Trumpism recalls earlier apathetic responses to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. In an epilogue, Finchelstein considers whether the world is on the cusp of a deep shift
into fascism, assessing the global potential for a destruction of democracies from within. He implores readers “to learn from history to gain an understanding of the fascist dangers of the present,” and he provides a cogent user’s manual for making those vital connections. An important book about the most significant threat to global democracy.
Finkelstein, Norman H. | Jewish Publication Society (302 pp.) | $29.95 paper May 1, 2024 | 9780827615236
A survey of the origins and history of antisemitism and how only a vigorous response from the community can stop it.
Finkelstein (1941-2024), a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Awards, begins with the New Testament: “Embedded in its messages of love and compassion is a clear contempt for Jews and Judaism.” The author then concentrates on Jewish settlement in early America and resistance to it, e.g., by New Amsterdam governor Peter Stuyvesant, who called Jews a “deceitful race.” Nevertheless, the Jewish community grew, and many prominent Jews supported the American Revolution, including Haym Solomon, who helped finance it. In response to Jewish nervousness about equal treatment in the new republic, George Washington assured them in a 1790 letter that “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” Finkelstein shows how Jews fervently believed in America’s promise of equality and opportunity, despite efforts to restrict them. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln swiftly countermanded Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s outrageous Order No. 11 expelling all Jews from his military district, which covered parts of three states. In the decades to come, the swelling of Jewish immigration would create a powerful new voting bloc. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank and the
fomenting of anti-Jewish feelings by Henry Ford were counterbalanced by the creation of the Anti-Defamation League and the appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. The author also examines the important relationship between Jews and African Americans during the civil rights struggle. The rise of Israel has been both a boon in public perception of Jews and, in recent years, a negative, as Zionism has been equated with racism. After the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh and other antisemitic violence, Finkelstein emphasizes the importance of education. A brief, even-toned overview of American antisemitism, suitable for all readers.
Franklin, Sarah B. | Atria (320 pp.)
$30.00 | May 28, 2024 | 9781982134341
A deep dive into the life and work of preeminent book editor Judith Jones (1924-2017).
“This book is my attempt to give the editor, the woman, her due,” writes Franklin, a professor of food culture and history at NYU’s Gallatin School. Over months of interviews in 2013, Jones offered reflections and insights—e.g., “the most important quality for an editor, a sensitive editor, is diplomacy”; “You have to get the writer to see what I might think is wrong…and then it comes from them.” Jones started in publishing as a 17-year-old editorial intern in 1942; over her career, she left an indelible mark, by editing a litany of formidable writers, and forged pathways for women. Renowned for fishing The Diary of Anne Frank from the rejection pile at Doubleday (“she told her boss, ‘We have to publish this book,’” who “asked incredulously, ‘What, that book by that kid?’”), Jones also fought for Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, after it had been turned down several times. Even after years at Knopf, she wasn’t invited to acquire on her own
or even included in editorial meetings; for a duration, “everyone’s office had a window except Judith’s.” She told Franklin, “People just perceived me as more of a secretary. That’s the word they would use.” Jones began to build her list with Sylvia Plath and Child, “low-profile authors whose work, in poetry and food, respectively, existed outside the literary mainstream.” Over the course of her tenure, she edited John Updike, Langston Hughes, Anne Tyler, and many others. Of Jones and her cookbook authors, the author writes, “Their collective, alternative approach to womanhood and care work permeated American culture.” Franklin lionizes her subject yet includes Jones’ admission of mistakes—notably, passing on Plath’s The Bell Jar. Sometimes heavy with dry details, but a thorough and humanizing portrait.
Galloway, Scott | Portfolio (304 pp.)
$32.00 | April 30, 2024 | 9780593714027
A business guru’s guide to personal finance. A serial entrepreneur called a “progressive Jordan Peterson” by Fast Company, NYU professor Galloway, host of the Pivot podcast and author of Adrift and Post Corona, presents his “best practices for succeeding” in the “rapacious beast” of capitalism. His advice, he notes, is not for those with mountains of debt, but rather for readers “who have their act together and want to ensure they make the best of their blessings.” The “algebra” of the book’s title is broken down into four components. The first part covers Stoicism, and the author examines a list of ways in which readers can develop a “strong character” that helps their journey to wealth. It’s a salad of suggestions that include exercising, working hard, and marrying “someone who is better at money than you.” The second section,
A powerfully eloquent, concise book.
WE ARE THE LEADERS WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR
“Focus,” features Galloway’s extensive career advice. “Don’t follow your passion,” writes the author, explaining that most people can’t articulate a passion and that “passion careers suck.” For example, “only 2% of professional actors make a living from their craft.” Galloway then moves on to “Time,” which covers spending, budgeting, and saving for the future. The last section, “Diversification,” is the most technical, with Galloway “coaching” readers through “strategies for investing [their] capital.” Throughout the book, the author includes the type of anecdotes that readers have come to expect in this genre of personality-driven finance book: Galloway writes frankly about his childhood growing up “without much money,” how everything changed when his first child was born, and his divorce. The author references many of the current hot ideas in the modern self-help landscape: grit, the flow state, growth mindset, Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, and black swan theory.
An agreeably told but unoriginal entry in the field of financial self-improvement.
Glaude Jr., Eddie S. | Harvard Univ. (160 pp.) $24.95 | April 16, 2024 | 9780674737600
A Princeton professor of African American studies examines “Black democratic perfectionism” and its significance to the ongoing political struggle.
Glaude, the author of Begin Again and Democracy in Black, first presented this work at the
2011 Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series. Though he had initially intended them as musings on how the Obama presidency had affected “the form and content of Black political struggle,” when revisiting the essays a decade later, he realized that the ideas they expressed had become even more germane in the aftermath of the Trump administration, the pandemic, and the concomitant resurgence of racism and xenophobia. His first essay explores “the role of the prophetic and the heroic in African American democratic life,” examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr. within a framework that also includes pragmatist John Dewey. King was no savior, writes the author. Rather, he was a flawed human who followed the stirrings of a powerful moral imagination and acted on ideals that had no guarantee of succeeding in the real world. In the second essay, Glaude turns his attention to Malcolm X. Using the Emersonian idea that society should limit its reliance on heroes, the author suggests that Malcolm X was a “wounded, vulnerable Black man” fighting within a collective for liberation rather than a “shining black prince.” The author concludes with an exploration of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Ella Baker’s beliefs about leadership. Far from being magical or mythical, the power to enact change is a grassroots phenomenon that comes from individuals becoming “problem-solving agents” and acting collectively as servants of justice. Though they speak directly to tendencies within the ongoing Black political struggle, the wisdom these important essays offer about the true nature of democratic action is equally relevant to all Americans seeking to rebuild a ravaged democracy and its broken institutions.
A powerfully eloquent, concise book.
Gleason, Steve with Jeff Duncan Knopf (320 pp.) | $30.00
April 30, 2024 | 9780593536810
A former NFL player chronicles the exhausting challenges of living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Gleason’s bluntly candid memoir opens with his care crew’s grueling one- to two-hour routine to prepare him for the day ahead “because I can no longer move, talk, or breathe.” In 2011, the author was diagnosed with ALS; defying the typical five-year life expectancy, he survives today, despite an emaciated, “withered” physical form and insurmountably “relentless and humiliating” physical limitations. Living in a wheelchair and on a ventilator for a decade, Gleason relies on the collaborative trust processes established within his team, communicating using eye-tracking technology, facial movements, and an ingenious rudimentary letter-board system. The author provides informative, conversational background on his youth in Spokane, Washington, raised by a “single-minded tough guy” father and a “quiet, cerebral” mother. Despite being born with a foot deformity, Gleason drew confidence from athletic success, which his father actively encouraged; the author’s hard work and dedication earned him a scholarship to Washington State to play football and baseball. Flourishing in college, he joined the Indianapolis Colts in 2000 and then the New Orleans Saints. After dramatically depicting his career highlights, Gleason writes frankly about finding motivation now through his children, his faith, and the defiant spirit of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, which “inspires and motivates me every morning.” The author intimately portrays the evolution of his relationship with his wife and capably recounts his tireless efforts raising funds for and awareness of ALS. Though his
post-football life has grown physically and emotionally arduous, Gleason takes nothing for granted and courageously exposes the raw details of his journey, which are persistently grim but also moving and hopeful for others dealing with disabilities.
A sobering, inspirational sports memoir grounded in inner strength and resiliency.
Gopnik, Adam | Liveright/Norton (64 pp.) $17.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9781324094852
The longtime New Yorker writer waxes philosophical in this slim, aphoristic book.
Gopnik, author of The Real Work, offers an extended essay on a positive and pleasing emotion. When he was 12, the author started to play guitar, and he recalls how happy he was when he first learned how to create “the ringing beauty of the G chord.” “The sense of happiness I felt that week remains resonant,” he writes. Next, Gopnik discusses the young Scottish poet Don Paterson’s obsession with Japanese origami. “Genuine happiness,” he writes, “is always rooted in absorption in something outside us, and begins in accomplishment undertaken for its own sake and pursued to its own odd and buzzing ends.” He argues that accomplishment counts for far more than the “tyranny” of achievement because “it’s more compelling than the concreteness, the trophy pressed in your hands.”
Furthermore, “learning to work hard is as important as learning to work well.”
Gopnik loves to cook at home, and chopping onions is “my entry to happiness.” For French painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, playing a violin wasn’t just a hobby; it was a “parallel passion, and it fed the already fully achieved virtuosic technical level of his primary art.”
Thinking back on his guitar practicing, Gopnik writes, “accomplishment is bounded by the eternal truths of
repetition and habituation and exhaustion and renewal.” He posits a “pluralism of pleasures” that extends deeply into our imaginations and practices, and he is a big believer in open societies because they provide more space for accomplishment. Some of the other things that bring the author happiness are the music of the Beatles; walking and biking in Central Park, admiring the work of “one of my personal heroes,” Frederick Law Olmsted; and, of course, the act of writing. Thoughtful contemplations on the pursuit to be happy.
Gore, Robert | Beacon Press (200 pp.)
$27.95 | May 7, 2024 | 9780807020166
How health care workers might address lethal social dysfunction.
The national plague of violence, argues emergency room physician Gore, should be treated as an actual plague—i.e., a public health emergency requiring the intervention of experts from a multitude of disciplines, including those in the medical profession. The author recounts a childhood in Brooklyn marred by actual and potential violence and explains how a desire to make his community safer influenced his decision to become a doctor serving those most in need. He testifies to the carnage he has routinely witnessed over two decades in the ER and notes the strikingly disproportionate toll violence takes on nonwhite and poor people. Gore uses sobering mortality statistics to record the extraordinary human suffering generated by gun violence in the U.S., and he delivers searing descriptions of traumatic hospital scenes, several of which involve his own friends and family members. The credible and timely prescription Gore offers is to augment programs that address, in holistic ways tailored to specific communities, some of the root causes of violence. As he
argues persuasively, a preventive approach holds great potential for the most vulnerable: “Rather than locking people up, containing them in communities with minimal resources and limited support, let’s treat the trauma and provide alternatives and, above all, head off violence before it even happens.” Gore’s account of his work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative, a nonprofit focusing on mentoring at-risk youth and providing much-needed social services, demonstrates how successful such strategies can be, especially if they involve members of the health care community and identify signs of social pathology in their early stages. “America is at war with itself,” the author concludes, and cycles of violence can only be broken with committed, well-informed modes of intervention. A frank, powerful argument for public health initiatives addressing violence.
Hagerman, Margaret A.
New York Univ. | (256 pp.) | $27.95
May 14, 2024 | 9781479815111
An interviewbased sociological study of the Trump administration’s effect on children’s views on racism and democracy.
Between 2017 and 2019, Hagerman, author of White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America, interviewed 45 children in Mississippi and Massachusetts about their views on race during the Trump years. Her sample included children between 10 and 13 “across race and class groupings.” When analyzing her findings, she focused on children’s “racialized emotions,” seeking to find out “how young people feel race,” and noticed a strong undercurrent of fear. For nonwhite children, this fear was often rooted in anxiety about an increase in racial violence or “that their family members would be deported while they
were at school.” While some white children shared these fears, others supported Trump’s policies because of their fear of nonwhite populations including Black, Middle Eastern, and Latine people. The author believes that this fear is rooted in white children’s anxiety about “losing power as a racial group as people of color make further advances in US society.” Put another way, “these kids want to continue to experience the pleasure of feeling superior.” Hagerman ends the book with a series of suggestions to combat “racial apathy,” which she describes as a lack of empathy that she noticed in some pro-Trump white participants. Above all, the author urges adults to address not just “how kids are thinking” but also “how they are feeling.” She believes that this combination is the key to combating racist attitudes in American children. Hagerman’s data is chillingly thorough, and her argument is well supported and convincing. Although the prose is sometimes overly academic, the content is strong enough to render this required reading for antiracist parents, caregivers, and allies. A significant study of children’s “racialized emotions” during the Trump era.
Hanna, Kathleen | Ecco/ HarperCollins | (304 pp.) | $29.99 May 14, 2024 | 9780062825230
The lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill chronicles her life and career.
Before Hanna became a beloved musician and co-founder of the Riot grrrl movement, she was a child trying to survive domestic violence. Her father was a labor union leader whose “untreated alcoholism” led to her parents’ divorce. Hanna left home for Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she majored in photography. There, she met Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox, and they formed Bikini Kill. In the years that followed, the band toured the country, coining famous
phrases like “Girls to the Front,” which doubled as a call for girls to join bands and a way for punk girls to feel safer in the face of harassment from male audience members. The author’s troubled past and the realities she observed at organizations like SafePlace, a domestic violence shelter, highly influenced her lyrics, many of them focused on experiences with gender-based violence and sexual assault. After leaving Bikini Kill, surviving Lyme disease, getting married to Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, adopting a child, and founding the band Le Tigre, Hanna reflects on everything she has learned in her long career. She is particularly circumspect about the Riot grrrl movement and her views on race, both of which she says have evolved considerably, as well as her history surviving violence. “Male violence didn’t create me,” she writes, “it just made it harder to make my art—but I did it anyway.” Hanna’s book is raw, honest, poetic, insightful, and often funny. Her political evolution is particularly gratifying, especially for readers who grew up with Hanna’s self-admittedly imperfect activism. At times, the text is more of a stream-of-consciousness rendering of chronological events than a structured narrative, a style that is mostly charming but occasionally confusing. An impressively perspicacious memoir from one of feminism’s most influential artists.
Basic Books (352 pp.) | $32.00 May 7, 2024 | 9781541673526
Historical survey of civilizations brought to an end by war and conquest.
Civilizations collapse for many reasons, and these days we worry not so much about war but about climate change and natural disasters. However, as classicist and military historian Hanson warns, it’s not
out of the question that a modern enemy (Putin) might attempt to erase an opponent (Ukraine) as surely as Cortés brought down the Aztecs. “The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising,” writes the author, surveying a world in which genocide is no stranger. The first genocide, some historians hold, was that of Carthage, laid low by the Romans in the third of three fierce wars, the first two of which intended to secure Roman victory but not necessarily the erasure of the city. How Rome became bent on the enemy’s destruction engages Hanson as strategist and tactician, but it seems clear from his narrative that Carthage, complying with most of Rome’s demands, was by that point a mostly blameless victim—an analog, that is, to Ukraine. More intransigent was Thebes, perhaps an analog to Taiwan in the face of today’s China, exterminated at the hand of Alexander the Great, who saw in the annihilation a “signal [to] any would-be Macedonian rivals to the throne that Alexander was ruthless, and recklessly and unpredictably so.” Putin again, one might say. Hanson goes deep into military wonkery, but he writes vividly about relevant cases, including Constantinople and Tenochtitlán—cities, he points out, that remain occupied long after their erstwhile owners were dispatched. After all, seizing key real estate makes a strong motivator. A good choice for geopolitics and military history alike, ranging from specific battles to general principles of warfare.
To read our review of Hemingway’s Boat, visit Kirkus online.
Hendrickson, Paul | Knopf (320 pp.) $32.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593321133
An acclaimed author digs into his father’s service in World War II. Like many sons of the Greatest Generation, Hendrickson, author of Plagued by Fire and Hemingway’s Boat, regrets not exploring his father’s story until after his death. He makes up for it in this detailed, vivid narrative, which benefits from intensive archival research and exhaustive interviews. His father, Joe Paul, was the third of nine children of a hardscrabble Kentucky sharecropper, and he was probably the most ambitious. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1937, trained as a mechanic, and quickly rose to crew chief. He yearned to attend flight school, and in 1942, a few months after getting married, he gained entrance. His highly specialized pilot training, which included work with the high-tech, radar-equipped P-61 Black Widow night fighter, required two years, and he and his family crisscrossed the country, often by car, an experience that exhausted his wife and young children. He was finally sent to the Pacific, arriving at Iwo Jima in March 1945, when the brutal land battle was almost over. Hendrickson delivers a lively account of the following six months. Joe Paul and his unit patrolled and attacked other islands but rarely encountered enemy fighters. Despite several scares, he emerged from the war largely unscathed, raised five children, and enjoyed a long career as a commercial airline pilot. Although he was a strict disciplinarian, his children loved him dearly. Aside from a few details about
his family life, the text remains focused on Joe Paul’s wartime experiences. A skilled journalist, Hendrickson tracked down and interviewed the children, grandchildren, and cousins of other members of the unit to deliver biographies of other fliers, many of whom had only vague memories of his father.
An expert account of a father’s WWII experiences that gives his fellow airmen equal attention.
Hoff, A. Ashley | Chicago Review Press (272 pp.) | $19.99 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781641607681
The making of a notorious movie.
Drawing on published sources and personal interviews, Hollywood historian Hoff offers a thorough account of the creation and reception of Mommie Dearest (1981), a critical flop now seen as a classic. Producer Frank Yablans felt certain that Christina Crawford’s memoir of life with her abusive mother would translate well to the screen, and he convinced Christina to sell him film rights by giving her a chance to write the screenplay—a job that ultimately went to Tracy Hotchner. Finding a director and star proved complicated. Christina nixed director Franco Zeffirelli because he was focused on the psychology of a diva rather than child abuse; she finally agreed to Frank Perry. Anne Bancroft was to play Crawford, until she dropped out, and Faye Dunaway—with a reputation for being mercurial—lobbied hard for the role. Hoff tells all: about costumes, wigs, jewels, makeup; scenes cut and scenes kept; the crew’s hostility to Dunaway; the re-creation of Crawford’s palatial house; the three actors cast to play Christina at different ages; and tensions on and off the set. He sees the movie as a milestone in entertainment history, “a
Memoir by Anthony Fauci
The physician was the face of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Anthony S. Fauci, the physician who became the face of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, will tell the story of his life and career in a new memoir.
Viking will publish Fauci’s On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service this spring, the press announced in a news release. The publisher calls the book “an inspiration for readers who admire and are grateful to him and for
those who want to emulate him in public service.”
Fauci, 83, was born and raised in Brooklyn and educated at the College of the Holy Cross and Cornell University’s medical school. He joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 1968 and became its director in 1984, serving in the position for 38 years.
He led the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, although he was often publicly undermined by then-President Donald Trump and other Republican politicians. President Joe Biden appointed Fauci the Chief Medical Advisor to the President in 2021; he retired from the position, and from NIAID, at the end of 2022.
“I hope that this memoir will serve as a personalized document for the reader to understand better the daunting challenges that we have faced in public health over the past forty years,” Fauci said in a statement. “I would also like to inspire younger individuals in particular to consider careers in public health and public service.”
On Call is slated for publication on June 18.—M.S.
The Barefoot Contessa chef’s autobiography was first announced in 2019.
Ina Garten’s long-awaited memoir is apparently coming this fall.
Salon reports that the celebrity chef, known for her Food Network show Barefoot Contessa, updated her Instagram bio with the text “Memoir coming out October 1st 2024.”
Garten, a Brooklyn native who grew up in Connecticut, worked as a White House budget analyst before buying a Long Island specialty grocery store called Barefoot Contessa. She scored a bestseller in 1999 with The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook ; more than a dozen cookbooks followed, including Barefoot Contessa Parties! and Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That?
Her Food Network show, which premiered in 2002, features Garten cooking for friends and for her husband, economist Jeffrey Garten. It has been a
For another culinary memoir, visit Kirkus online.
consistent hit for the network, winning five Daytime Emmy Awards.
Garten’s memoir was first announced by Celadon Books in 2019. In a statement at the time, Garten said, “By finding a way to do what I love for a living—cooking—I’ve been fortunate to build a career that has not only been incredibly rewarding but has brought people together through the power of home cooking.” The New York Times reports that the untitled book will now be published by Crown. M.S.
myth-busting story spilling the beans that Hollywood magic was all smoke and mirrors and diffusion lenses, exposing the ordinary human frailties possessed by movie stars camouflaged by flattering angles and good lighting.” Christina, though, hoped it would have been a milestone for another reason: “the very first film to delve into the problem of family violence from the point of view of a child. It could have explained the complex personal interactions of the mother and daughter, giving insights into the larger problem of child abuse. But it didn’t,” she said, regretfully. “It was a series of hysterical scenes without explanation or relationship development.”
A brisk, gossipy Hollywood story.
Holiday, Ryan | Portfolio (368 pp.)
$28.00 | June 11, 2024 | 9780593191712
Handy tips toward more upstanding social behavior, informed by Stoicism and history. Holiday has developed a cottage industry popularizing Stoicism via a newsletter, store, and books like this, the latest in a series on “Stoic virtues.” Here, the author focuses on justice, with chapters stressing the importance and merits of old-fashioned verities like honesty, forgiveness, social engagement, and more. All respectable ideas, and Holiday has mastered a tone to deliver them that’s firm but compassionate, somewhere between New Age concepts and Jordan Peterson–esque moral scolding. Still, for a book purportedly rooted in the teachings of the ancients, Holiday gives surprisingly little attention to Stoic standard-bearers like Cato the Younger, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Instead, many of his examples come from the annals of the Greatest Generation, particularly President Harry S. Truman, who is presented as an underrated, rock-ribbed ethical figure. (To bolster the point, the
author notes Truman’s deep admiration of Aurelius.) The parade of mid-20thcentury eminences—Martha Graham, Gandhi, Clarence Darrow, Rosa Parks, Albert Schweitzer—is relevant, though it has the curious effect of making all of this justice seeking feel distant from the present moment. Stray examples of contemporary ethical leaders like NBA coach Gregg Popovich or former German chancellor Angela Merkel are exceptions that prove the rule. More interesting in some ways than Holiday’s delivery of unimpeachable examples of good behavior is an afterword about how he has managed hiccups in his business in terms of ethical sourcing, co-workers’ bad behavior, and readers resenting his engagement in politics: “It’s a test we face in a world driven by algorithms— do we tell people what they want to hear? Or do we say and do what we think needs to be done?” Fresher examples might better sell the philosophy as fit for the current moment. Time-honored advice, if not always timely.
Horvilleur, Delphine | Trans. by Lisa Appignanesi | Europa Compass (160 pp.) $24.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781609457952
A collection of essays meditating on the relationship between life and death.
As one of the only female rabbis in France, Horvilleur, the leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France, is accustomed to playing a part in the transition between life and death. “Yet as the years go by,” she writes, “it increasingly seems to me that the profession closest to mine has a name: storyteller.” In the 10 essays that make up her latest book, the author thrives in this role, interweaving biblical stories with those about the lives and deaths of ordinary people, including a woman who planned and attended her own funeral, and public figures such as Simone Veil. Though some of the pieces are fairly
anemic, their loose ends getting lost in the complex combination of stories, they all aim to show how life and death are more closely related than we like to think. “Life makes its presence felt in the very moment that precedes our dying and until the end seems to be saying to death that there is a way of coexisting,” writes Horvilleur, reflecting on the first time she saw a dead body. “Perhaps this cohabitation doesn’t in fact need to wait for death. Throughout our existence, without our being aware of it, life and death continually hold hands and dance.” Drawing from her experiences as a secular rabbi, the author shares significant wisdom, illuminating well-known biblical stories and translating even the most difficult experiences of loss—e.g., the death of a child. “Death escapes words, precisely because it signals the end of speech,” Horvilleur writes. In these thought-provoking, occasionally disjointed essays, she shows how it is possible to find language even for that which seems indescribable.
Horvilleur’s deep reflections on mortality remind us that “in death a place can be left for the living.”
Isserman, Maurice | Basic Books (384 pp.) $35.00 | June 4, 2024 | 9781541620032
This new history of the Communist Party USA reveals a quagmire of contradictions, paradoxes, and disputes. The CPUSA has often seemed like an extended exercise in self-delusion, with a few elements of genuine reform and criminal conspiracy thrown in. The party, writes Isserman, a professor of American history and author of The Winter Army and Continental Divide, was “an advocacy group entitled to normal constitutional guarantees of free speech, and at certain times and places it was also a criminal conspiracy.” The author explains how many people were attracted by its rhetoric of impending victory heralding a brave new world, and
he highlights the gap between the democratic language and the authoritarian reality. The Soviet Union was admired to the point of reverence by members of the Communist Party, which continued even after the waves of Stalinist purges and slaughters were revealed. There was a strong sense of a disconnection from reality, although Isserman points out that during the Depression, the CPUSA, operating through the union movement, won important gains for workers. He does not shy away from the conclusive evidence that there were communists who engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union and that the party was effectively subsidized by the Kremlin. After the 1960s, the party became increasingly marginal, lost in nostalgia and internal squabbles. This is an interesting story of rise and fall, although sometimes Isserman gets bogged down in details. Moreover, there are other areas that he could have explored further, including the impact of the split between the Soviet Union and China, or the real influence of socialist-type ideology on politicians such as Bernie Sanders. Perhaps the author saved some material for a subsequent book. If so, it will be a sequel worth reading.
A comprehensive study of one of the key players in the development of America’s political landscape.
James, Jimmie | Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $28.99 | June 11, 2024 | 9781668005972
A Black golfer sets a goal that brings joy and sorrow. While standing over his first shot at Augusta National, James, a former ExxonMobil executive and a good player, couldn’t help but think back to his difficult youth as the son of a single mother in Jim Crow–era Texas, where poverty was rampant. After the author retired in his late 50s, his wife was able to
secure a tee time for him through a friend. It started him on his audacious quest to play Golf Digest ’s list of America’s 100 best courses in a year, 87 of which were private. With a great deal of help, travel, and money, James accomplished his goal, just barely—90,756 miles, 33 states, 1,800 holes in 8,797 strokes. During his travels, the author discovered a country that was “beautiful and flawed, bighearted and wrong-headed, proud and ashamed.” James presents two stories, one dealing with golf and his extensive travels and his career as a valued executive, and another about his dirt-poor upbringing. Playing the courses, he sometimes felt he was “somehow trespassing.” At Kinloch Golf Club, outside Richmond, James felt some indifference and invisibility. Then, at Flint Hills National in Kansas, he received a warm welcome. Driving in Kansas, he unfortunately experienced a “driving while Black” moment. Wisconsin’s Whistling Straits had his caddie looking for balls in deep grass. Throughout, James describes the courses in interesting detail, focusing on each one’s unique traits. The author recounts the good shots as well as the bad, in addition to famous historical golf moments that occurred on the courses, including the ubiquitous fairway plaques that mark such feats. Given the caliber of courses he played, there are plenty, from Oakmont and Merion to Pine Valley and Canyata and its $750 greens fee.
A delightful read for envious armchair golfers who dream big.
Matrescence: On the Mind/Body/Spirit Transformations of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood
Jones, Lucy | Pantheon (320 pp.) $30.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593317310
combines memoir, reportage, and social critique in a wide-ranging inquiry into the physical, emotional, and intellectual metamorphoses that women experience during pregnancy and early motherhood. Her first pregnancy, she reveals, was nothing like what she expected. Instead of morning sickness, she had constant nausea; her sense of smell became heightened; she craved salty, fatty foods; and her hair “came loose.” Furthermore, being “inhabited by another person” made her feel psychologically destabilized. The birth was also far different from what she imagined. Undergoing more than 41 hours of labor, she admits, was “the most dramatic and frightening experience of my life.” Her exhaustion intensified after her daughter was born. Breastfeeding constantly to meet the infant’s demands, she never slept more than a few hours at a time. She was frustrated because her baby kept losing weight, felt guilty for supplementing breast milk with formula, and was confused by conflicting advice about how to handle a baby’s sleeping and feeding. Alone with her daughter, who often cried inconsolably, she felt isolated; although she had visits from a health worker, she found herself unable to ask for help. Causes for postnatal depression, she discovered, include profound biochemical changes, lack of support networks for new mothers, and a flawed model of intensive motherhood, which overemphasizes a mother’s responsibility for her child’s health and development and leaves mothers feeling “stress, burnout, and guilt.” Now a mother of three, Jones feels that she is emerging from “matrescent angst.” Motherhood, she writes, “tested my empathy to the limit, it challenged me intellectually, it required me to answer and ask questions constantly, to consider metaphysics and the origins of matter.” Complex and “breathtakingly challenging,” it changed her forever.
An intimate, insightful memoir.
A deep dive into the radical transformation of becoming a mother.
British journalist Jones, author of Foxes Unearthed and Losing Eden,
To
Kagan, Robert | Knopf (256 pp.)
$25.00 | April 30, 2024 | 9780593535783
An alarming but useful perspective on antiliberalism. According to this timely, well-informed analysis, there is nothing new in the Trump populist movement, save for Trump himself. Kagan, a neoconservative scholar and author of The Ghost at the Feast and The World America Made, demonstrates that the forces of antiliberalism and white supremacy, which extend from the Revolutionary period to today, have never disappeared. Rather, they merely accepted what they were forced to accept— liberal democratic government as established by the Founders— until political and cultural conditions allowed rebellion to flourish once more. The polarized 2024 political landscape bears a striking resemblance to the years immediately preceding the Civil War, writes Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and foreign policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations. The author warns that the coming election may determine whether liberal democracy will survive the new surge in antiliberalism, its racist underpinnings, and the authoritarian, vengeful impulse demonstrated by Trump. This struggle between liberal democracy and those fundamentally opposed to it also continues to shape international politics. In relating how democratic government cannot endure when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system, Kagan’s survey, not generally given to dire pronouncements, seems overheated at times. Some readers may question his assurance that Trump is a unique, unrepeatable phenomenon or
This thoughtful deep dive into the world of microfinance is both educative and heartbreaking.
WE ARE NOT ABLE TO LIVE IN THE SKY
that Trumpism and the greatest risks to the republic will dissipate with his passing from the scene. Nonetheless, Kagan cogently examines the bright long-term prospects for the Founders’ concept of liberalism, especially with the nation’s rapidly changing demographics—if Trump does not win the election. The author also points out where modern American liberalism is failing, not least in the antiliberal excesses of its progressive wing, and how they fan the antiliberal blaze. A powerful, much-needed political and social analysis that all lovers of democracy should read.
Kardas-Nelson, Mara | Metropolitan/ Henry Holt (384 pp.) | $31.99
June 11, 2024 | 9781250817228
A keen examination of the rise and fall in popularity of the microfinance loan system.
The concept of microfinance— which provides loan and banking services to poor populations that would normally be unable to access such services—was the brainchild of Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. However, as Kardas-Nelson, a journalist focused on international development and inequality, shows, the idea isn’t as win-win as it seems on the surface. While some recipients have benefited, others have ended up drowning in
debt or jailed for failure to repay. In 2019 in Homa Bay, Kenya, two dozen people died by suicide. “Every single one,” writes the author, “had something in common: they had recently defaulted on their microcredit loans.” In her penetrating investigation, Kardas-Nelson follows a handful of loan recipients in West Africa, in addition to the mostly well-meaning executives, policymakers, and investors chasing the dream of changing a country’s destiny by doling out small loans to “the poorest of the poor.” The heartstring-tugging stories of Western advertising firms and banks jumping into the fray looking to make some cash are striking, but the real meat of the book is the absorbing tales of the yogurt seller, jewelry maker, and women living in grinding, exhausting poverty. Most of them, the author argues, would have been better off with a living-wage job, rather than trying to maintain precarious self-employment. Ultimately, the pros and cons of microfinance require further exploration and more long-term data, but Kardas-Nelson offers an evenhanded, instructive account of where things stand today. “Women are terrified of the loans and their consequences,” she notes near the end of the book. “And they are also terrified of life without them.” This thoughtful deep dive into the world of microfinance is both educative and heartbreaking.
For more on microfinance, visit Kirkus online.
Kirkus Star
Kempner, Joanna | Hachette (384 pp.) $32.00 | June 4, 2024 | 9780306828942
A compelling account of the promise of psychedelic drugs to treat crushing pain.
Kempner, a sociology professor at Rutgers University, has a special interest in cluster headaches, an illness so agonizing that some sufferers take their own lives to escape. The author has suffered from it, so when she heard of an underground network that was working toward effective treatment options, she began to investigate. This led her to Clusterbusters, a support group that advocates and organizes the use of psychedelic drugs, especially mushrooms, that give relief to many. However, this is not a stereotypical tale of zoned-out acid trips of New Age wandering. Kempner notes that most of the people in the group “would blend in at any suburban mall. There’s not a hint of spirituality to be found….Not a single namaste.” The author traces how the group began and progressed, held together by online communication but also via annual in-person conventions. Even though “magic mushrooms” are illegal, the authorities often look the other way. Most Clusterbusters members take only small, calibrated amounts, and the success rate has been encouraging. A near-universal complaint is a lack of help with cluster headaches from conventional medical professionals, and the pharmaceutical companies show little interest in undertaking research into the area. The Clusterbusters developed their own protocol to standardize doses and treatment methods, but they realized that more in-depth research is needed. Kempner explains how they garnered support for
clinical tests from academics at Harvard and Yale, but legalization of therapeutic psychedelic drugs is a long way off. She concludes: “The path to heaven from hell starts with hope…. Pain isolates, but knowing you are not alone can make all the difference.”
Kempner tells a convoluted story with sympathy and respect, adding her personal experience to solid research.
Kenny, Glenn | Hanover Square Press (320 pp.)
$32.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781335449627
A deep dive into the over-the-top gangster classic. This meticulous examination of Scarface (1983) is a wildly enjoyable ride, taking readers from the roots of the 1932 original, directed by Howard Hawks, through the intense, arduous filmmaking process and its lasting influence within the hip-hop community. Kenny, best known for his string of movie books, including Made Men, and his work as a film critic for a variety of publications, manages all the various strands of the Scarface legacy masterfully, letting those involved in the movie’s creation drive the narrative. He does whatever he can to explain not just the making of the film, but moviemaking generally. “I have my own obsessions,” director Brian De Palma told the author. “I write and direct my own movies. But I think it’s very important to get out of your own world and just direct someone else’s script, someone else’s world.” Kenny delves into how De Palma’s process allowed Al Pacino an unusual amount of latitude to develop the character of Tony Montana and provided the lavish sets and the distinctive, larger-than-life cinematography to make it memorably come to life on the big screen. De Palma also gave the movie’s screenwriter, Oliver Stone,
plenty of room to create as well, though that eventually caused some friction between the men. “I liked the movie. But you realize at the time, I was working off a more realistic palette because I’d been there,” Stone told Kenny. “And Brian didn’t really have that realism in him. Or interest in it.” All that friction, though, was responsible for the movie’s unique creative spark, which the author retraces step by step and scene by scene, offering context and revelations and the occasional joke— much like the movie itself.
Kenny patiently outlines every moviemaking piece and shows how it fits in the bloody, brilliant Scarface puzzle.
King, Michelle T. | Norton (336 pp.)
$29.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781324021285
A well-researched biography of the woman the New York Times called “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”
Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004) was a chef and an author who taught countless women how to cook, and her soft diplomacy skills helped bolster Taiwan’s global image. In the mid-1950s, she was a young mother struggling to feed her family tasty and nutritious meals with little or no help. The problem was, she didn’t know how to cook. Raised in a wealthy family in China, Fu didn’t enter the kitchen until after her marriage. Using funds from her own dowry, she hired chefs from local restaurants to teach her how to make the cuisine of China’s six diverse regions. More often than not, the chefs—all male—ignored her questions and cooked the complex dishes without a word. Undaunted, Fu took copious notes and tried to make the dishes herself the next day. She shared this hard-won knowledge with other women, and her advice became so popular that she opened a cooking school. In 1962,
Taiwan Television came calling, and her shows stayed on the air for almost 40 years. Her cookbooks, written in both Chinese and English, became reference staples in kitchens around the world.
King adeptly tracks Fu’s career as a cooking pioneer as well as de facto ambassador for Taiwan. “In the context of postwar Taiwan, Fu’s television cooking demonstrations did more than teach women how to cook,” writes the author. “Her comprehensive televisual survey of Chinese regional cuisines united an otherwise fractious and fragile nation, brought together by the universal Chinese appreciation for good food.”
King adds reminiscences by elder relatives and friends of cooking from Fu’s cookbook, and these personal touches freshen the drier narratives of Taiwan’s history.
An appealing story of a determined home cook who taught generations how to prepare authentic Chinese food.
King, Tracy | Liveright/Norton (336 pp.) $28.99 | April 9, 2024 | 9781631498732
A British journalist recalls a childhood in public housing in the countryside outside Birmingham in the 1970s and ’80s.
King’s father died when she was 12. First told that the death was the result of an aneurysm, and then that it was a murder, she only recently delved into the actual events of the death, finding an explanation she wasn’t expecting. Her memoir, rigorous and compelling, falls into two parts: one in which she interrogates her memories, attempting to determine whether she has been deluding herself about what happened in the past, and another in which she researches her father’s death, going back through the paperwork associated with it and interviewing the people who were there. At the center is
an attempt to be fair to all the members of her family: the engineer father who drank heavily and couldn’t hold a job, but who was kind to his wife and children; the agoraphobic mother who eventually freed herself; the sister who refused to go to school; and King herself, outgoing and sociable as a child but plagued by familial trauma. The author evenhandedly explores the influence of religion on the family, which belonged to a fundamentalist church led by a minister who conducted an exorcism on King shortly after her father’s death. For King, the turning point that led her out of a chaotic life was when, after completing university and while working one of many short-lived jobs that followed, she read a book by Carl Sagan and was struck by the line, “but I could be wrong.” Her own internalization of that sentiment led both to a career in science writing and to this memoir, which offers a careful deconstruction of the past. The book is all the more affecting due to King’s determination to keep it low-key. A scrupulous, memorable account.
Lamott, Anne | Riverhead (208 pp.)
$22.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9780593714416
The bestselling author follows the template of the most recent half-dozen of her loosely connected essay collections, this time focused on love.
“What are we even talking about when we talk about love? What is it?” So asks Lamott on the first page of her latest book, and she goes on to answer the question in a similar manner to her many previous books: Love is Jesus, but also each other, and also, sometimes, chocolate. In these varying anecdotes, the author plumbs familiar ground, including family and her church community, the adorable malaprop-prone kids in her Sunday school class, and her unhoused
neighbors near her Bay Area home. Newer topics include her still-recent marriage (her first, in her mid-60s) to the “lovely, steady” Neal and the upheaval caused by her son Sam’s drug addiction and her grandson’s arrival. With age, Lamott’s essays have become less acerbic and more attuned to the natural world; the scent of eucalyptus comes up often, as do the flowers and foliage, the fog and the forests of Northern California. In this book, she focuses less on vengeful thinking for comic effect and more on the joys of smelling the roses. In one essay, she recounts how she taught a reluctant young Cuban woman to swim; in another, she describes how she held a sharpened pencil to her son’s neck and told him not to come home until he was clean. (A month later, he did.) As always, a strong vein of spirituality runs throughout, with Lamott’s characteristic descriptions of an all-loving God who is often flummoxed and saddened by humanity, but hopeful anyway. This all comes across as much less twee than it might be, and the stories make up in warmth what they lack in novelty. Lamott newbies will find this a kind view of loving oneself and others despite our collective imperfections.
Maxwell, Tom | Hachette (320 pp.)
$30.00 | April 9, 2024 | 9780306830587
An insider’s account of the 1990s music scene in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Maxwell, a former member of Squirrel Nut Zippers and a capable writer, came up in a musical milieu kickstarted by R.E.M., from not-so-far-away Athens, Georgia. The ethos wasn’t quite punk, but it was in the neighborhood, and R.E.M. represented “the first significant Southern band who weren’t Lynyrd
Skynyrd or Molly Hatchet.” In no time, Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina, was sprouting bands that crafted literate music you could dance to. Like all scenes, Chapel Hill’s represented a community, which “must have not only its stars but also its own climate of mutual support, including venues of expression and inspiration, lesser known but no less important artistic collaborators, social connectors, affordability, collective identity, permeable social boundaries, and friendly competition.” The college town had all that in spades, with representative groups that included Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and, of course, Maxwell’s Squirrel Nut Zippers. Some of the bands came to national attention: Superchunk went out on the road with Mudhoney, for instance, and the Zippers were a favorite on the college circuit. As for Southern Culture on the Skids, well, leave it to them to cook up an annual festival called Sleazefest. Some bands even hit it big, including Ben Folds Five, before the cultural winds shifted. Where the Chapel Hill scene was supported by local radio, Bill Clinton’s deregulation meant the erasure of regional differences in the place of all-corporate-all-the-time. As industry insider Tom DeSavia notes, “pretty quickly, we got Matchbox Twenty World.” Still, it was a magnificent if evanescent blaze of local glory, and, as Maxwell notes in a where-arethey-now coda, many of the players of that era and beyond still shape local culture today.
A fun treat for fans of 1990s indie rock.
For more titles by Colum McCann, visit Kirkus online.
McCann, Colum with Diane Foley Etruscan Press (256 pp.) | $25.99 March 5, 2024 | 9798985882452
An indelible portrait of a mother’s courage. Award-winning novelist McCann and Foley, mother of murdered journalist James Wright Foley (1973-2014), offer a powerful recounting of the unspeakable tragedy and its aftermath. In August 2014, after being held hostage for two years, Jim was beheaded by Islamic Group terrorists. He had been taken hostage once before, in Libya, but that time was released after 44 days. Undaunted, he went to Syria “determined to bear witness to the horrific bombings and gassings of innocent civilians by the Assad regime.” After he was taken hostage, the Foley family, to their deepening dismay, discovered that the U.S. refused unequivocally to negotiate for hostages’ release, and the Foleys were threatened with prosecution if they tried to raise ransom money on their own. Meanwhile, though, through “an incredibly circuitous route,” several European governments managed to free their own hostages. “They insinuated themselves carefully into the communications system,” the authors write, “got under the umbrella of the emails, and forged their own secret methods that included a network of agents and ambassadors and, yes, even spies.” Foley vents her anger toward the many government officials who claimed they were powerless to help. “The plain fact of the matter is that we don’t care as much
for our aid workers or our volunteer ambulance drivers or our journalists as we do for our military,” the authors assert. Foley and her family founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for the freedom of those taken hostage or detained abroad, and she takes hope from recent legislation, most recently by Biden’s executive order, in support of hostages. Hoping for “answers to help her in the wider work against hostage-taking,” Foley met with one of the terrorists involved in her son’s murder—unsettling encounters that bracket the striking narrative. A harrowing memoir of grief and love.
McClelland, Edward Robert Pegasus (400 pp.) | $32.00
June 4, 2024 | 9781639366378
The complete story of the remarkable rivalry and union of two giants of American politics. McClelland, author of Young Mr. Obama and Nothin’ But Blue Skies, offers detailed and nuanced context to perhaps the most compelling and consequential rivalry in U.S. political history, which culminated in an alliance for a higher purpose. The most striking aspect of the book is the author’s approach to the long, complex personal and political relationship between Lincoln and Douglas in the form of his astute analysis of 19th-century Illinois politics. He examines its significance as a microcosm of the nation, with distinct regions dominated by varied perspectives about slavery, abolitionism, and the role of the federal government as embodied by Lincoln and Douglas,
1
By Martha McPhee3
By Raynor Winn By Douglas Wood By Trish O’Kanethemselves ambitious transplants to the state. McClelland explains Douglas’ vision and work during his political career to make Chicago the great railroad hub that connected U.S. trade coast to coast, which figured in to his championing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and concept of popular sovereignty that drew Lincoln in to the 1858 Senate race. McClelland takes readers on a vivid journey through Illinois and the sites of the monumental series of debates, during which Douglas walked the political tightrope concerning slavery that secured his reelection yet created the opportunity for Lincoln to become a national candidate and defeat him for the presidency two years later. Rather than undermining the man who bested him for the prize he most coveted, Douglas honorably supported Lincoln during the end of that presidential election and subsequent final months of his life in ways unimaginable in contemporary American politics. As McClelland thoroughly demonstrates, Douglas was not merely gracious in defeat, but truly magnanimous. The rendering of this unique political saga and its implications is top-notch and worthy of a wide readership. An excellent combination of history and biography with relevance to today’s political climate.
McCourt Jr., Frank H. with Michael J. Casey Crown (224 pp.) | $28.00
March 12, 2024 | 9780593728512
A business executive in the tech space explores the problem of internet over-centralization and how it can be resolved.
The internet began as a “utopian dream” that promised unfettered access to information and the opportunity for global
An illuminating, provocative, and disturbing analysis of our current digital age.
OUR BIGGEST FIGHT
collaboration. Three decades later, the Silicon Valley giants that dominate it have led to what McCourt calls “digital feudalism.” The “black box” technology of proprietary algorithms has allowed corporations like Facebook and Google to treat users as little more than profit-generating information mines. McCourt, assisted by Money Reimagined podcast host Casey, suggests that this unchecked desire to control data for self-serving ends is at the heart of the dysfunction that now plagues American democracy. Not only has it led to the spread of socially divisive disinformation—as evidenced in the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018—on social media; it has also fostered blindness to such social media ills as cyberbullying, which in turn has given rise to a mental health crisis among younger, more vulnerable users. McCourt believes that the way individuals can reassert control is by using a Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, which offers users the ability to control “different types of information about them and their social connections.” The premise behind the author’s argument—that decentralizing corporate autocratic control over online information will be crucial to mending a broken democratic society—is undeniably important. His arguments are not without flaws, however—e.g., he fails to offer convincing arguments about how DSNP will motivate newly empowered individual users to consistently act in the “constructive, prosocial” ways that larger entities like Facebook and Google have not. Still, McCourt offers much-needed insight into a system that, as central as it has become to human life, poses threats to our freedom and well-being. An illuminating, provocative, and disturbing analysis of our current digital age.
McDonald, Michael with Paul Reiser Dey Street/HarperCollins (336 pp.)
$32.00 | May 21, 2024 | 9780063357563
The veteran singer and keyboardist covers much of the same ground that many of his contemporaries traveled, but his memoir is filled with charming surprises.
A lot of the surprises have to do with his co-writer. Reiser, best known as the star and co-creator of the sitcom Mad About You, gives McDonald’s stories the structure and pacing of a TV show. The resulting chapters—especially those about McDonald’s family and how his love for his father shaped his life as a teenage performer—fly by early on, even though they cover the lesser-known years of the acclaimed musician’s life. McDonald doesn’t offer many salacious details about his split with the Doobie Brothers following the success of the chart-topping hit “What a Fool Believes,” which won record and song of the year honors at the Grammy Awards in 1980. He is gracious about the band’s internal battles and forthcoming about his substance abuse without discussing the drug use of others. “My attitude was: coke should be reserved for a special occasion,” he writes. “But as time went on, I managed to christen more and more occasions as ‘special.’” The emotional heart of the narrative is his exploration of how he realized his addiction made it impossible for him to help his wife, the singer Amy Holland, battle her own problems. McDonald offers insights into the creation of some of
his most famous songs, including “You Belong to Me” with Carly Simon, as well as his worries about tackling the Motown catalog for his career-boosting Motown album series. McDonald writes from a solid, self-aware place, able to joke about his position as one of yacht rock’s most famous voices, alongside Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, and others. Like its namesake song, McDonald’s memoir is refreshingly self-deprecating and, at its core, an underdog’s triumph.
McNab, Ken | Pegasus (400 pp.)
$32.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781639366583
A chronicle of perhaps the most important year in the life of the Fab Four.
The year 1963, by Scottish Daily Mail journalist McNab’s account, opened with the Beatles playing gigs in tiny halls in the Scottish Highlands in a sleety, frozen January. It closed with hit songs and ambitious plans to bring the band to the U.S. In between was an endless flow of music and adolescent screams, punctuated by high-toned and sometimes avaricious business dealings. First, for instance, came the backdoor negotiations over the order of credits for Lennon-McCartney compositions, which left Paul to admit grudgingly, “John had the stronger personality and I think he fixed things with Brian [Epstein] before I got there.” Later, both Lennon and McCartney suffered from a deal cut with a music publisher, Dick James, which delivered fat paychecks to James and Epstein and rather thinner ones to John and Paul. And everybody got worked over when it came to the merchandising wizards. Notes McNab, “During their career, and especially the lucrative touring years, it’s widely estimated that The Beatles lost out on a figure north of $100 million in merchandising fees—the first real
rock’n’roll swindle.” For all those dark moments, though, the year 1963 prepared the Beatles for their massive breakthrough the following year, a breakthrough that, though Ringo was pondering opening a beauty salon and George Harrison some sort of business in the event that it all came crashing down, never really slowed down. The Ed Sullivan Show, with its 73 million viewers on that February night in 1964, was the storied start, but, as the author makes clear in this sometimes labored but detail-packed account, it really began bar by bar, town by town, mile by mile, a success won by endless work. Though covering well-worn ground, a trove for Beatles completists.
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee | Illus. by Fumi Mini Nakamura | Ecco/HarperCollins (224 pp.)
$26.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780063282261
A collection of flavorful memories.
Poet and essayist Nezhukumatathil, award-winning author of World of Wonders, creates a graceful memoir centered on 40 different kinds of food, some exotic, some familiar, all evoking recollections of childhood, family, travels, friendships, and much more. “This book is a bite of personal and natural history,” she writes, “a serving if you will—scooped up with a dollop of the bounty and largesse of the edible world.” With a father from India and a mother from the Philippines, some of the author’s memories center on traditional food such as kaong, the fruit of the sugar palm, prized in Filipino salads; jackfruit, her favorite fruit, which she first tasted during a visit to her grandparents in Kerala; bangus, the national fish of the Philippines, served fried as part of breakfast; and lumpia, a deep-fried Filipino finger food, with a crisp outer skin filled with chicken, ground beef or pork, carrots, and green beans. She takes sides in her parents’
debate over which mangoes are sweetest, those from India or those from the Philippines. For her, it’s Alphonso mangoes, from India, “hands down.” Eating lychees reminds her of her 20s, when she lived in Buffalo and would fly to New York City to meet friends. She’d buy a sackful of lychees, eating them happily on a bench while people-watching. Cherries, figs, and maple syrup are among other foods that elicit the author’s lyrical responses. The taste of apple banana, for example, “becomes a party in your mouth featuring a banana host and a sort of pineapple-strawberry DJ spinning tunes.” Her memoir is not unlike halo-halo, a mixture of unexpected ingredients that make for a delectable dessert. “With halo-halo,” she writes, “you never know what you are going to discover and when.” Savory food writing.
Norton, Hughes & George Peper
Atria (256 pp.) | $28.99
March 26, 2024 | 9781668045268
A blustery but insightful look at the dollars-andcents work of sports agents.
Hired in
1972 by Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, Norton dedicated himself to building a roster of golfers, practitioners of a sport that has grown “from the mom-and-pop operation it was when I began my career to the multibillion-dollar juggernaut it is now.” One of McCormack’s clients helped set the tone: Arnold Palmer, who had signed a promotional contract that was “littered with restrictive clauses” that effectively claimed ownership of Palmer. McCormack quickly disabused them of that notion, establishing an
innovative practice that—for 20% of the cut—had many pros making much more in endorsements than they did in salary or winnings. Norton took up the baton, and years later he brought a young Tiger Woods onto the pro circuit, effectively setting him up financially for life before he took his first swing. “By the time Tiger raised the trophy that Sunday evening in Portland,” writes Norton, “his Nike logo apparel had been sized and tailored, his Nike shoes had been tested for comfort, and a Titleist staff bag emblazoned with his name and filled with a set of custom-fitted clubs was as ready to hit the PGA Tour as he was.” The money was astronomical, and getting at it as Norton did will be the subject of Harvard Business School case studies to come. Part of the job description, seemingly, is to be cocky and abrasive, and the author displays both traits. He’s not ashamed to scorch former clients, either—e.g., Greg Norman (“no individual in the game of golf…has ever been aligned more perfectly with the motives of the Saudis: power, money, and image burnishing”—or to dish wagonloads of gossip with vengeful glee. Essential reading for the future Jerry Maguires in the audience.
The Rulebreaker:
The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
Page, Susan | Simon & Schuster (480 pp.)
$30.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9781982197926
A biography of a woman of rare achievement. Page, Washington bureau chief of USA
Today , biographer of Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, draws on abundant sources and hundreds of interviews to create a brisk, evenhanded biography of Barbara Walters (1929-2022). Beset by an
abiding sense of insecurity, Walters grew up seeing that success could swiftly turn into failure. Her father, a nightclub owner, had been “a mercurial breadwinner.” When he made money, the family lived extravagantly, “but always with the risk that he might gamble it all away.” Walters began her rise in TV news as a researcher and writer on NBC’s Today show. Once she took her place on the air, Page writes, “she honed her ability to ask a hard question in a soft way and to make news, and her increasingly prominent profile made it easier for her to snare big names.” Those big names included celebrities of all stripes; world leaders such as Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat; and even criminals. Page breaks down the elements that made a Walters interview so successful. Getting her subject to cry was a bonus. She attained coveted positions and huge salaries, rarely acknowledging the women who went before her, “as though that might somehow diminish her own achievements.” Women were competitors, rather than allies. Obsessed with her work, her personal life suffered: Three marriages failed; her adopted daughter, neglected by a mother who never was home, struggled with substance abuse. Page recounts Walters’ many affairs, including with Sen. Edward Brooke and Alan Greenspan; her bitter rivalry with Diane Sawyer; and her founding of The View at the age of 67. A former president of ABC News described Walters as “hard-charging and driving and relentless and insatiable and unquenchable and indestructible”—and, as Page reveals, restless, lonely, and only fleetingly happy. A perceptive biography.
Park, R. Jisung | Princeton Univ. (344 pp.)
$29.95 | April 9, 2024 | 9780691221038
An invitation to “view the climate problem through a slightly different lens.”
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Park, an environmental and labor activist and a social policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows us how changing our focus to the deeper-seated implications of climate change for education, health, and the economy brings startling facts to bear. For example, injuries are more common on 90 F days as compared to 60 F days, murders increase, and cognitive performance declines. A warming world, Park observes, accelerates “subtle social disparities” and inequalities. In poor and developing nations along the equator, such as Ghana, heightened temperatures will mean a spike in the mortality rate, nearly double that anticipated for nations in relatively more temperate latitudes. In the U.S. on a hot day, “Black and Hispanic students are two to three times more adversely affected than their White or Asian counterparts,” given the lack of an adequate physical plant in poorer schools. Not that the wealthy are altogether safe; as Park notes, in the summer of 2023, when Canadian wildfires’ smoke blew south, New York “was the most polluted major city in the world,” the Upper East Side as much as Hunts Point. This speaks to the hidden cost to human capital, perhaps the single most important tool in working our way through the crisis. In a useful aside, the author takes on the libertarian let-the-market-fix-it crowd by observing that even Milton Friedman acknowledged that there are problems too large for the market to solve. Though some knowledge of economics is helpful for readers, Park writes clearly and well, making a strong case for immediate action rather than waiting for the costs to compound—which, over
the next couple decades, they are certain to do.
A multifaceted look at the many externalities of a warming world.
Kirkus StarPowers, Ann | Dey Street/ HarperCollins (448 pp.) | $35.00 June 11, 2024 | 9780062463722
A vibrant critical assessment of the eclectic and enigmatic folk/ jazz/pop icon.
Veteran NPR music critic Powers, author of Weird Like Us and Good Booty, clearly admires Mitchell’s creative restlessness, but she also challenges some of the received wisdom about Mitchell’s life and career and calls out her more problematic moves. To avoid retracing Mitchell’s “official portrait,” the author eschewed interviewing the artist herself, but she tracked down friends, lovers, and fellow musicians (the three groups tended to intermingle) like David Crosby and James Taylor to explore her career in depth. A childhood bout with polio was likely less formative, Powers surmises, than Mitchell’s decision in 1965 to give up a child for adoption. She had storied relationships with powerful men in the music industry, but was no pushover; Powers finds correspondence in which she pushed back against sexist marketing campaigns around her. Far from needing her virtuoso collaborators to guide her, she was an accomplished “studio rat” pushing for new ideas on her own behalf. The author writes about these themes thoughtfully and thoroughly, but her appreciation doesn’t cloud her frustration with Mitchell’s missteps—most infamously, her mid-1970s invention of a blackface character, Art Nouveau, and various attempts to appropriate Native
American culture. (Powers invites Miles Grier, a Black scholar, to put Art Nouveau in a musical and cultural context.) The author covers Mitchell’s remarkable comeback from an aneurysm in 2015, and she expands her appreciation beyond Mitchell’s much-lauded comeback (with Brandi Carlisle’s support) to show how her influence extends to jazz, country, pop, and drag performance. Those simply looking for loving commentaries on Mitchell classics like Blue will find them, but Powers offers more than mere hagiography, positioning Mitchell as “an embodiment of freedom and singularity, of sorrow and of play.” A top-notch music critic set loose on a worthy subject.
Rana, Aziz | Univ. of Chicago (784 pp.) $45.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9780226350721
An account of the evolution of the Constitution, from document to cult object and beyond.
Boston College law professor Rana opens his astute yet dense book with a definition of “creedal constitutionalism,” a fundamentalist adherence to a Constitution that allows a president to be elected despite losing the popular vote; a Senate that awards two seats apiece to even the most thinly populated states; and a Supreme Court that can do such things as eliminate the right to abortion, despite overwhelming popular support for it. The Constitution as we find it today, Rana continues, suffers from “three clear institutional pathologies that feed off each other,” among them the blockage of legislative governance unless the majority party achieves a supermajority, and rule by a minority bloc that privileges white, rural communities in national decision-making. So-called originalists hold that this is all just as it should be.
However, Rana argues convincingly that it does not reflect the political or demographic composition of the nation, which is more liberal—and more urban and more ethnically diverse—than its government would suggest. Interestingly, this originalist cult and the de facto worship of the Constitution are relatively modern artifacts, but with widely varying possibilities. During the New Deal era, for example, “for labor groups, commemorating the Bill of Rights became a way of celebrating the freedom of association and freedom of speech guarantees in the First Amendment,” while in the Cold War, it became a kind of litmus test for loyalty. The author closes with the thought that the Constitution must evolve further to “support [the] long-standing effort to build a transformative majority in American society,” one that recognizes how we live and work and redistributes governing authority accordingly. An accessible if overstuffed work of legal and political history that speaks eloquently to democratic reform.
Rodden, Beth | Little A (303 pp.) $28.99 | May 1, 2024 | 9781503903814
A celebrated rock climber retraces the most dangerous trek of her career.
In her candid memoir, Rodden vividly recalls a harrowing monthlong hostage situation in Kyrgyzstan in 2000, when she was just 20. The author effectively interweaves the details of the kidnapping into her descriptions of her early life and the post-ordeal aftermath years. A professional at 18, Rodden writes proudly of embracing her youthful obsession with climbing, chronicling her vigorous training and achievement of accolades for her ever-challenging rock climbing exploits. Early in her career, she attracted the attention of pioneer climbers who introduced her to more demanding free-climbing routes. Filled with heavily
detailed anecdotes and “climber code” discussions about the more treacherous climbs Rodden has performed, the narrative momentum stems from the author’s graphic, riveting depiction of the climbing trip to Kyrgyzstan. Hastily assembled with her then-boyfriend, Tommy, and two others, the adventure, which began as a brisk ascent, soon devolved into a terrorizing nightmare “so far outside anything we’d trained for or understood.” After terrorists seized their campsite and took the group hostage, drastic lethal measures were their only option, and Tommy pushed one of their captors off the mountain edge to his death. She and Tommy returned traumatized. “I couldn’t show him this darkness,” she writes, “could not tell him that I was still braced, every second, for the next threat….I couldn’t think, let alone talk, in a coherent way about ‘what happened.’” Though Rodden’s ambitions became temporarily derailed, she resurfaced, fighting hard against triggering flashbacks to conquer even more impressive feats. Later chapters are equally as frank, offering glimpses into Rodden’s exhilarating climbing culture, emotional vulnerabilities, marital turmoil, and steely personal discipline, which continues to ensure her survival. A dramatic account of an international ordeal that nearly upended the career of a fearless young rock climber.
Rousey, Ronda & Maria Burns Ortiz Grand Central Publishing (288 pp.)
$29.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781538757376
An inspirational memoir by the mixed martial arts legend. Rousey (b. 1987) was touted as an overnight success when she came onto the MMA scene. However, she notes, “‘overnight’ is what they call it when no one has been paying attention to the decades of time and effort you put into perfecting a craft.” That success endured for a few years but came
tumbling down with a fight in 2015, when, owing to what she describes as neurological issues, she was finally defeated. Blending bravado with self-awareness, she writes, “I was perfect. Until I wasn’t.” The defeat haunts Rousey’s narrative, as she writes about how the loss was devastating enough that she contemplated suicide: “Physical pain I could deal with but the entire world I had created for myself crashing around me was too much to bear.” Then came a comeback, of sorts, when she signed with Vince McMahon’s WWE extravaganza and its heavily scripted matches, departures from which McMahon did not tolerate, as when Rousey refused to call herself “the women’s champion,” preferring simply “the champion.”
McMahon’s characteristic response: “Get out of here with that woke bullshit.”
Recent accusations against McMahon have led to his being distanced from his own organization, and Rousey is timely in corroborating many of the allegations.
McMahon emerges as a decidedly unsympathetic character, more so than any scripted in-the-ring villain. Still, Rousey acknowledges that WWE will roll on without much wokeness entering the picture. Knowing that she couldn’t change the organization, she changed her life by walking away—and recognizing that she was fortunate to have the resources and family support to do so while many other fighters are “forced to keep going until their body falls apart.”
Fight fans not shocked by revelations of both malfeasance and artful choreography will take to this well-crafted memoir.
Selvin, Joel | Diversion Books (288 pp.) $28.99 | Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781635768992
A biography of the famed drummer and convicted murderer.
An in-demand session player in Hollywood, Jim Gordon (19452023) was one of
music’s golden players in the 1960s and ’70s; he played on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” John Lennon’s “Power to the People.” Most famously, Gordon was one of the players Eric Clapton assembled for Derek and the Dominoes and the soaring hit “Layla.” “No drummer had a greater career than Jim Gordon,” writes Selvin, author of Altamont and Fare Thee Well . Yet Gordon suffered from severe mental illness, logging time in psychiatric wards until, in a psychotic break, he stabbed his mother to death. It was not his first bout of violence: He savagely beat a former wife, sure that she “was trying to bring evil spirits into their home.” Selvin charts the course of Gordon’s illness, which first began to manifest in the form of voices directing him to harm himself and others. Though a brilliant musician who was “capable of practically superhuman, heroic feats on the drums,” he doubted his abilities and increasingly withdrew into himself. He also began to self-medicate, and it didn’t help that at the “Layla” sessions there were enough drugs to fuel an army of hardcore users, a small matter for someone of Gordon’s “Falstaffian” appetites. The voices in his head eventually merged in the voice of his mother, who, he imagined, directed him to discard his drums, an untenable command. After the murder, Gordon lived the rest of his life in prison, dying 40 years later at the age of 77. Selvin encourages readers to remember Gordon for more than the killing: “Jim Gordon was more than his disease, even though his life and disease were intertwined all along his path.” A capable work of musical biography, with all its tragic consequences.
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Sinha, Manisha | Liveright/Norton (576 pp.) $35.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781631498442
A nuanced history of Reconstruction and the ongoing resistance movements it begat. Reconstruction, roughly the period between 1865 and 1877, is often considered a failure. Insufficiently enforced by the victorious North, it allowed an intransigent “reassertion of the authority of local white elites to act with impunity and defy the rule of law” in the putatively vanquished South. As Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, the cause of Black liberation was halfhearted from the start: Lincoln had not committed himself to a multiracial democracy, but was instead investigating schemes to resettle former slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, places that would become involved in the expansion of the American empire that began nearly the moment that Reconstruction was abandoned. Yet in the dozen years when Reconstruction was attempted, writes Sinha, allied causes formed. Abolitionists became women’s suffragists, Black as well as white, with one activist for Black rights, Anna Dickinson, hailed as having “statesmanship much beyond our twaddling politicians.” Like Lincoln, Ulysses Grant explored the prospect of colonization by the emancipated, with an eye to annexing the Dominican Republic; those abolitionists and suffragists in turn added opposition to annexation as well as taking up the cause of the rights of laborers. All came collapsing down with the rise of armed terrorism in the South in the form of paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts and, of course, the KKK, which Sinha considers a forerunner of the “fascist paramilitary organizations that brought terror and violence to cities in Italy and Germany in the twentieth century.” Reconstruction’s failure ushered in authoritarianism, predatory capitalism,
and an America that was “not a democracy but a racist, authoritarian state comparable to European colonies in Asia and Africa.”
A strong addition to modern studies of Reconstruction, bringing feminist and internationalist elements to the fore.
Small, Zachary | Knopf (368 pp.)
$32.00 | May 21, 2024 | 9780593536759
An in-depth exposé of the recent multibillion-dollar surge and explosive crash in the speculative realms of digital art and crypto finance.
New York Times reporter Small dissects the recent history of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and their significant effect on the investment art community, initiated by the sale of a digital artwork compilation at Christie’s in 2021 for $69.3 million. “It was an outrageous sum for digital art—the kind of world record that raises conspiracy theories about the motives of its buyers and sellers,” writes the author. “Suddenly the art market was on the fulcrum of decentralized finance, splitting its weight between the invading crypto billionaires and the ancien régime of traditional art collectors. But auctioneers tipped the balance in favor of the new money, scrambling to find a historical precedent for their new cash cow.” In this sprawling narrative maze, Small profiles a diverse range of digital artists as well as other influential and often shadowy players across the finance, entertainment, tech, and gaming industries. They also expand the context with forays into pivotal movements in art history, a summary of the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of the crypto economy. Throughout, Small sharply critiques the erosion of art collecting’s prestige by sellers and investors driven by insatiable greed. “The NFT explosion,” writes the author, “had begun with a deadly symmetry exposing
culture’s worst tendencies: toward trustlessness, toward scarcity, toward desperation and sycophancy…criminals took advantage of the zeitgeist and errant entrepreneurs played at expertise.” In their meticulously documented exploration, Small reveals insights hinting at a compelling core story. However, the intricate details and tech-speak will overwhelm many general readers. In the hands of a more seasoned storyteller such as Michael Lewis, the material would resonate with a wider audience. A well-researched but overly dense account of the impact of NFTs on the art market.
Smith, Ken with Will Millard | Hanover Square Press (272 pp.) | $20.99 paper May 28, 2024 | 9781335454966
A Thoreauvian account of solitary life in the Scottish Highlands. A few miles from Scotland’s tallest mountain is a deep fissure called Loch Treig, “the lake of death.” Poke around in the misty, mossy woods around it, and you may come to a hut called Stagge Inn, the “r” having fallen off long ago. Smith, who has lived there for decades, writes, “that sign is no more than a metaphor for the gently sliding state of things.” As he notes in this spry memoir, he’s getting old, living on scraps, far from supplies and medical care. However, that’s just as he wishes. He has a radio to listen to the weather forecast and old symphonies, and he’s adept at the art of home brewing. If his existence is a little hobbitty, at least he hasn’t had to work for anyone but himself. His path to that solitude—it’s not really a hermitage, he reckons, since he doesn’t shun people and the Highlands are a popular spot for tourists—was roundabout, beginning when he signed on as a teenager to plant trees and wound up being what
The former first lady received the prize for her narration of The Light We Carry
Michelle Obama is now a two-time Grammy winner.
The former first lady won the Grammy Award
for best audiobook, narration, and storytelling recording for the narration of her book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times . She previously won in that category in 2020 for the audiobook version of Becoming, her memoir. She was also nominated for the prize in 2013 for American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America
Obama didn’t attend the Grammys ceremony, and singer Patti Austin accepted the award on her behalf, saying, “I have a feeling Michelle is not here. If you want this, Michelle, you’ll have to come and get it.”
The Light We Carry, published in 2022 by Crown, is a self-help book that offers readers advice on topics including relationships and community. A critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “No surprises or reveals but plenty of warmth and encouragement, particularly for young people. A good holiday gift.”
Obama prevailed over four other narrators: Sen. Bernie Sanders for It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism; Rick Rubin for The Creative Act: A Way of Being ; William Shatner for Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,
co-written by Joshua Brandon; and Meryl Streep for Big Tree, written by Brian Selznick. Obama’s husband, former President Barack Obama, previously won two Grammys as well, for his narration of his books Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope —M.S.
he calls “a homeless nomad” for years before talking the laird into letting him build his hut on an old estate. Smith is a quite selective member of society, most of whose trappings he rejects: “I’ll tell you what I think is weird,” he cajoles, “and it ain’t the hermit.” Instead, it’s the world of confinement and consumption and a little time off a year to visit, perhaps, “a place, like where I live, for a week of the happiness I feel every day.”
One envies that, though perhaps not the ice storms, pine martens, slugs, and other tests of spirit.
A delightful manual for would-be back-to-the-landers, if not hermits in training.
St. Clair, Kassia | Liveright/Norton (384 pp.) $29.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781324094913
A transcontinental competition becomes a vehicle to explore a broader story.
Even from the distance of more than a century, the 1907 automobile race from Peking to Paris seems not only eccentric, but positively harebrained. St. Clair, the author of The Golden Thread and The Secret Lives of Color, plunges into the task of narrating the tale with enthusiasm, discovering new primary sources and finding fresh perspectives. The incredible length of the race gives the author the chance to explore the sociopolitical issues of the time, as the Chinese and Russian empires tottered and new technologies gathered pace. Sponsored by the French newspaper Le Matin, the race garnered worldwide attention, thanks largely to the dispatches sent from the race participants. In fact, the route was designed to intersect with telegraph stations. Five vehicles started the race; amazingly, four finished. The fifth, while generously classed as an automobile by the race organizers, was more like a
A
a charged account of the lives of immigrants.
three-wheeled motorcycle; it sputtered out in “the parched vastness” of the Gobi Desert. The roads across China and Russia were primitive or even nonexistent. Supplies of gas and food were pre-positioned at various locations, but some of the participants could not locate them. Sometimes, the racers helped each other through scrapes and breakdowns, and sometimes the spirit of unscrupulous competition prevailed. St. Clair prunes away the mythology and nationalistic propaganda that has grown up around the race, on the basis that the real story does not need embellishment. It is entirely the right approach, and the book will appeal not only to car and sports aficionados, but to general readers interested in how the automobile, global communications, and media marketing combined to become the defining traits of the modern world.
St. Clair is an affectionate, informed narrator, placing personal portraits within the larger context of the era.
We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century: An Oral History Suarez, Ray | Little, Brown (304 pp.) $30.00 | April 23, 2024 | 9780316353762
A broadcaster delivers a charged account of the lives of immigrants.
When Donald Trump snarled to the members of Congress’s progressive “Squad” that they should “go back where they came from,” although three of the four were U.S. born, “it was not a violation but a reminder,” implying that although they were as American as Trump, they were somehow different.
“I heard what he said and immediately knew what he meant,” writes Suarez, author of Latino Americans. “And so did you.” It’s something most immigrants experience at some point, more so if they lack the required paperwork. One of Suarez’s subjects is a first responder whose heroic actions during a Houston hurricane saved many lives; despite this, he is subject to “regular reminders he is not like his neighbors”—at least until his immigration status is settled. The son of Hungarian immigrants recounts that although both parents were experienced doctors, they were denied accreditation until they went through another internship and residency, doubtless a way to keep outsiders out rather than any bulwark for reasons of safety, given the shortage of doctors in the country. In this blend of oral and social history, Suarez turns up a fascinating account of a Sikh who came to the U.S., served in the Army during World War I, and was granted citizenship by a federal court, which was then revoked by the Bureau of Naturalization for reasons of race, with an appellate court asked to rule on the question, “Is a high-caste Hindu of full Indian blood…a white person?” Sadly, such racial divides endure, as strong as ever. The easiest-going of Suarez’s subjects is a blonde New Zealander who admits, “I was very conscious of the difference between me and other undocumented people.”
A provocative work that urges reconsideration of immigration rights in a nation of immigrants.
Suárez-Pajares, Javier & Walter Aaron Clark Norton (496 pp.) | $45.00
April 23, 2024 | 9781324004455
A comprehensive biography of a significant 20th-century composer.
Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999) began composing music as a young man in Valencia, Spain, at a school for the blind, where he learned a complex variety of braille that allowed him to make musical notation before dictating it to his assistant. “Being blind affected every aspect of Rodrigo’s life and brought him closer to music through an acute aural sense,” write Suárez-Pajares and Clark, both professors of musicology. Today, he is best known for his Concierto de Aranjuez , “the key with which Rodrigo opened the door to the history of music and walked through it.” The concerto remains a fixture with orchestras and in pop culture, appearing in places as far-ranging as a 1975 Chrysler car commercial, the 2003 film The School of Rock, and the 2021 superhero movie Suicide Squad 2. The authors diligently chart the trajectory of the artist: years in Paris when Rodrigo allegedly pawned an overcoat for opera tickets, communal housing for the blind in Germany, and a return to his native Spain. Throughout, the text is detailed and fascinating and will appeal both to classical music buffs and neophytes seeking to learn more. The authors offer close examinations of many of their subject’s compositions, veering into the technical as they dissect his use of musical techniques. Among other signature strategies, they examine Rodrigo’s unique use of bitonality, dissonance, and polyphony. Alongside the procedural analysis, they include ample emotional color, such as this evocative description of some of his earlier musical compositions: “When Rodrigo was not praying, he was shouting. One suspects that at times he
could do both simultaneously.” Reading such interesting passages, curious readers will no doubt find themselves seeking out Rodrigo’s full repertoire. The authors include many illustrations and musical examples. A passionate, definitive account of a great artist.
Taffa, Deborah Jackson Harper/ HarperCollins (304 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 27, 2024 | 9780063288515
A woman with both Native American and Spanish bloodlines seeks to understand the identities at her core.
Taffa, a member of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the editor-in-chief of River Styx magazine and director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Like many Native people, she and her family have faced a concerted effort to remove them from the land, customs, and culture that are their inheritance. In the 1970s, the author’s parents made a pointed, if tortured, decision to leave their Quechan family to pursue economic security and some level of assimilation for their children. Spending her childhood and adolescence on the precipice of risk, experiencing anger, resentment, and grief both personal and systemic, Taffa established her claim to her mixed-tribe Native identity. While she asserts that her story is, in ways, as “common as dirt,” her narration is both illuminating and instructive. With Native blood and roots that reach to the Spanish conquistadors, the author’s experience exposes little-known aspects of the Spanish-Indigenous relationship and the complex nature of intertribal competition and collaboration. She carefully incorporates years of diligent research to reveal unknown or underappreciated facts of history—such as the responses of Native Americans during World War II—highlighting the intricacies of both her family
history and the more summarily acknowledged mistreatment of Indigenous groups. Amid such details, the emotional power and cohesion of the author’s own narrative can get lost, but Taffa’s work is a testament to the power of and need for intergenerational storytelling and a reminder that neither the history, identity, nor future of Native Americans is a monolith. She succeeds in creating a memorable celebration of “our survival as a culture, as well as the hope, strength, and grace of my family.”
A searching and perceptive Native memoir.
Trent, J. Dana | Convergent/Crown (256 pp.) $27.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9780593444078
A potent memoir about a young woman’s escape from a toxic childhood.
Trent, author of One Breath at a Time and Dessert First, begins this harrowing account with razor blades. “A Preschooler’s hands are the perfect size for razor blades,” she writes. “I know because I helped my schizophrenic drug-lord father chop, drop, and traffic kilos in kiddie carnival-ride carcasses across flyover country.” The author never shies away from the uncomfortable, but instead leans into her own vulnerability as she analyzes her past while attempting to find peace in the present. Growing up with parents who suffered from paralyzing mental illness meant that Trent’s protection was not a priority. Rather, she was used as a pair of useful hands. Weaving poignant lyricism with deeply personal and dark stories of her attempts to release herself from the chains of her past, Trent brings readers directly into her chaotic, dangerous childhood, describing how she used her nimble fingers to pack marijuana for her father, “a regional manager for a trafficking front,” while shielding herself from her volatile mother. Although Trent was assisting in her father’s illegal pursuits,
eventually, her mother snatched her from her trailer home in Indiana and took her to North Carolina, where she continued to struggle with poverty and her mother’s mental instability. “My father’s mental unsteadiness was obvious and outward,” she writes. “You could look at him and guess how loud the carnival barkers in his head were. But [my mother’s] ups and downs were a crapshoot. As soon as I thought I’d nailed it like a game of gin rummy, she switched strategies.” As the years passed, Trent worked actively to heal and move forward with her life, graduating from Duke Divinity School and becoming a teacher of world religions. A powerfully intimate look into the struggles of American poverty and mental illness.
Tye, Larry | Mariner Books (416 pp.) $32.50 | May 7, 2024 | 9780358380436
An examination of the lives of three kings of jazz and their impact on American society.
Tye, the bestselling author of biographies of Satchel Paige, Joseph McCarthy, and others, embarks on his first voyage into music history. In a single volume, he has essentially produced fairly substantial biographies of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, contemporaries who became three of the most decorated and celebrated musicians in American history. The author capably delineates their struggles with, and impact on, the often harrowing and sometimes violent complexities and shifting dynamics of American race relations during the first half of the 20th century. The most striking aspect of the book is the astonishing amount of research Tye conducted, the sometimes overwhelming yield of which clears up myths that the golden trio themselves often perpetuated regarding their upbringings, their turbulent personal
SMALL ACTS OF COURAGE
lives, and the technical evolution of their music. The author takes a fascinating look at the religious backgrounds and beliefs of Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington, who were the most prominent frontmen of the music that fanatics and public figures long blamed and targeted for societal degradation. Tye also explores the friendly but fierce professional rivalry among the three. The author’s vivid style brings readers front and center into the myriad of clubs and studios where Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington played, as well as the social vibe of the cities and towns where their music left an indelible mark. This thoroughly enjoyable musical journey is succinctly titled, yet the scope of Tye’s research demonstrates why and how Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington transcended jazz and even music itself to establish themselves in American culture forevermore in words that a young Ellington employed to describe himself: “beyond category.” For Ellington, “it wasn’t a contradiction to be an artist as well as a showman.”
A delightful read.
Velshi, Ali | St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $30.00 | May 7, 2024 | 9781250288851
The MSNBC journalist reflects on his family’s history of multinational activism.
Velshi, author of The Trump Indictments, traces his family’s roots back to Chotila, a village in Gujarat, India. The author’s father told him the elders left the area because of a lack of opportunity, a trend Velshi suspects partly arose from the famines that swept the nation in the
mid-1800s. Induced by the exploitation of the British Raj, these famines killed approximately 15 million people. Velshi’s ancestors immigrated to South Africa based on stories about the prosperity it could offer. There, the author’s elders enrolled his great-grandfather in Gandhi’s famous school at Tolstoy Farm, an experience that kicked off several generations of creative resistance. In one example, Velshi chronicles the case of his anti-apartheid uncle, which included being charged with selling yeast to Black families, an activity that was against the law. Under government pressure, the Velshis fled South Africa for Kenya. Later, when anti-Indian sentiment rose in Kenya, they ended up in Canada, where the author’s father would eventually successfully run for office, becoming one of the first immigrant Canadians to do so. During the swearing-in ceremony, he used a Quran, “another first in Ontario political history.” Velshi’s family history doubles as a personal history of the oppressive colonial systems that have forced Indian migration around the world. The author is charmingly aware of some of the narrative’s shortcomings, doing his best to compensate for the lack of women represented in his family’s story and admitting that some of the overly idealistic parts reflect his “glass-half-full” mentality. Despite these weaknesses, this work is essential reading for members of the South Asian diaspora who rarely see their history told in such a compassionate, cleareyed manner.
A journalist’s instructive family memoir provides a crash course in Indian diasporic history.
To read our review of The Trump Indictments, visit Kirkus online.
Vigliotti, Jonathan | One Signal/Atria (304 pp.) $28.00 | April 2, 2024 | 9781668008171
A raw look at the climate disasters wreaking havoc on smalltown America. In four sections—fire, water, air, and Earth—Emmy and Murrow Award–winning CBS News correspondent Vigliotti takes readers on a harrowing journey into a variety of natural disasters across the U.S., which are becoming increasingly frequent and dangerous. The author zooms in on the impact of these disasters on the ordinary Americans living in their paths. From uncontrollable wildfires to massively destructive tornadoes, Vigliotti examines the conditions of each event, as well as the systemic failures of both local and national governments playing catch-up after those life-changing minutes. The author asks a host of relevant questions: What does life mean in a disaster-prone area? Who can afford—both financially and emotionally—to remain in these areas? How can a small town survive the onslaught of storms that often cost more than $1 billion to clean up?
Vigliotti lucidly breaks down his time covering these calamities and shares the stories of those who have been displaced by Mother Nature as recently as the Lahaina wildfire of August 2023. “Yes, Lahaina will rebuild again, just like every other American town lost before it,” he writes. “But unless changes are made, another countdown clock will turn on and it’s anyone’s guess when time will run out. Because before every ‘unprecedented’ explosion in the cities and towns of a nation now under siege from an environment it spent too long taking for granted, there is a history of missed opportunities.” The author also chronicles the important work of notable scientists who have
fought against apathy and misunderstanding in order to ensure that we are better prepared for the inevitable. A powerful story of surviving, adapting, and making the changes needed to save our home before it’s too late.
Wallace, Carvell | MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.)
$28.00 | May 14, 2024 | 9780374237820
The story of a poet and podcaster’s journey to claim the fullness of his identity and power as a queer Black American.
Wallace begins with the year he was 7, when he and his mother spent a year without a home, a time “full of endings and tiny deaths.” From there, he leads readers almost hypnotically through his youth as a theater kid, the tightrope of his addiction and recovery, and becoming a parent. The narrative cadence ebbs and flows, condensing a profession trajectory here, expanding a single morning there, and gently, seamlessly incorporating the memories that infiltrated and shaped the experience of each moment. Wallace’s lyrical eye, sharpened to every detail, lends rhythmic cohesion to a series of events whose context spans from the Los Angeles riots in 1992 to the racial protests in the summer of 2020, and he consistently investigates the collision between the systemic and the personal. In the face of an inheritance of “terror and anger” and the countless indignities conferred on Black men in America, Wallace’s text is defiant in its honoring of beauty, gratitude, and the care he takes to live and tell his story with intention. The author presses against the indoctrinating grip of traditional masculinity, with its insistence on power and control, interrogating its lessons about fear and intimacy to discover “love in a way I had been trained
not to love—a love marked by awe, sensitivity, fragility, and relationships formed in consent and mutual respect. Whether writing about race, sex, climate change, or making bread, Wallace is unabashed about and humbled by the embodied human condition and the human longing for authentic connection, lending richness and vulnerability to the link between a writer and his readers. Ultimately, this is an intricate and exhilarating memoir—heartbreaking, humbling, and hopeful. An exquisite, soulful must-read.
Watroba, Karolina | Pegasus (352 pp.)
$29.95 | June 4, 2024 | 9781639366712
A celebration of Franz Kafka focusing on how his readership and reception have evolved.
The majority of Kafka’s oeuvre was published posthumously, and some important novels were never even finished. His legacy was established after his death by a widening critical readership who found his strange stories pliable enough to become a metaphor for just about anything. Today, we view his work in countless ways: surrealist, existentialist, a critique of totalitarianism, a record of the Jewish experience, even feminist social commentary. Explaining that Kafka’s stories “invite rewritings and afterlives,” Watroba, author of Mann’s Magic Mountain , aims to track their shapeshifting splendor. “As readers,” she explains, “we regularly see a reflection of our own times, our own crises, in the books we particularly value, especially those that seem pregnant with nebulous metaphorical meaning.” Watroba’s studies take the form of a travelogue as she searches for “Kafka’s metamorphoses around the world,” and she strikes a clever balance between contemporary connections
and scholarly research. She combines a visit to Kafka’s manuscripts in Oxford with a discussion of Ian McEwan’s recent Brexit-themed novella The Cockroach. Watroba’s visit to Prague tracks locations from Kafka’s diaries and includes a stop at “The World of Franz Kafka, one of Prague’s lowest-rated attractions on TripAdvisor.” A section on Kafka’s Jewish roots will thrill aficionados, as Watroba translates selections from his yet-to-be-published writings in Hebrew. She ends her journey in Seoul, where she astutely considers Kafka as a “secret agent of the ‘Korean wave’” in literature and film, citing his influence in Park Chan-wook’s film Oldboy , among other works.
Although some readers may lament Watroba’s circumvention of a chronological biography, it’s a pleasure to travel with her as she illuminates the global circuitry of what it means to be Kafkaesque today.
An astute modern take on Kafka’s importance, published on the centenary of his death.
Wood, Lawrence | St. Martin’s (288 pp.)
$33.00 | June 4, 2024 | 9781250333407
An appealing book about a surprisingly difficult task: writing a good cartoon caption.
It is fair to say that the New Yorker caption contest is a genuine cultural phenomenon, attracting thousands of entries every week. Wood, who has won the competition an unmatched eight times (and made it to the final round 15 times), is perfectly situated to examine why a good caption works, as well as explain how the contest operates. The contest is so
Wood has a great time here, mixing the bizarre, the jocular, and the wise into a clever package.
YOUR CAPTION HAS BEEN SELECTED
popular that simply managing the entries, as well as the public vote on a selection of finalists, has become a huge logistical task for the magazine’s editors. There is no prize for the winner, other than bragging rights. In this entertaining book, Wood includes 175 of the best cartoons and captions, aiming to distill the essence of the humor. Some of the captions are droll, some are wryly thoughtful, and some are laugh-out-loud hilarious. Wood believes that it is the limitation of a caption, where everything must fit in one short comment, that is the key to its appeal. He provides a long list of criteria, highlighting the importance of identifying the speaker, telling a story, avoiding vulgarity, connecting to the details of the cartoon, and selecting the best from several options. “If your caption is selected as a finalist,” he writes, “launch an aggressive social media campaign to win the popular vote. Don’t rely solely on email.” Throughout, the author is charmingly eccentric and pleasing. Interestingly, numerous comedians regularly enter the contest but do no better than other people. Wood, for his part, is not professionally humorous; he is a lawyer. Now that’s funny. Bob Mankoff, the former cartoon editor at the New Yorker, provides the foreword. Wood has a great time here, mixing the bizarre, the jocular, and the wise into a clever package.
Wynn-Grant, Rae | Get Lifted Books/ Zando (336 pp.) | $28.00 April 2, 2024 | 9781638930402
A wildlife ecologist takes us on a journey of ambition, discovery, and inner acceptance. From a study-abroad trip in Kenya as an undergraduate, to discovering endangered lemurs in a hidden Madagascar rainforest, to studying carnivores like the mountain lion and black bears in the U.S., Wynn-Grant, author of Tracking the American Black Bear, reveals her academic and personal journey as a Black woman in a field dominated by white men. The author is candid about her hesitation to dive completely into such a field in the early 2000s, when representation was scarce. Thankfully, encouraging mentors throughout her impressive academic career (she has degrees from Emory, Yale, and Columbia) changed this uncertainty and supported the ambitions that would lead to her first up-close experiences with some of the world’s most dangerous carnivores. During her incredible ventures into the wilderness, Wynn-Grant always pays close attention to the impact of human-animal conflict, which has been a focus of her research throughout her career. While this intersection frequently results in the death or displacement of animals, the author also describes the ways in which human involvement is
positive. “Humans are a part of the en vironment. Human life, human dignity, and human livelihoods play a necessary, inseparable role in the health and functioning of ecosystems,” she writes. “While this may seem obvious, it’s a difficult con cept to keep at the top of your mind when your whole career is oriented toward saving nonhuman animals.” While breathtaking moments with dangerous wildlife abound, WynnGrant also examines fraught relationships, mental hardships, and even instances of imposter syndrome that no amount of qualifications can quell. Throughout, we see a dedicated scientist fighting for the life she wants—and achieving it. This isn’t simply a nature book or memoir, but a memorable marriage of the two that will leave readers inspired.
Yamashita, Karen Tei | Coffee House (304 pp.) | $21.95 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781566896870
A mixed-genre approach to geography, blending literature, legend, and history. The core of this collection is a set of stories by avant-garde writer Yamashita, author of Tropic of Orange and I Hotel , who looks at Santa Cruz, California, from its edges: cemeteries, long-gone mom-and-pop grocery stores, parking lots. “Santa Cruz is someone’s paradise”—the paradise of surfer dudes and hippies, of conquistadors and whalers, of those looking for the mythical Amazon queen for whom the Spanish named the mystical land of California. It can be a “dark paradise,” one haunted by dreams, history, failure, and disappointment. In one of her stories, an Easterner heads west to the gold fields with family in tow,
only to die of cholera during the journey, his widow left to watch as other children die of measles and other maladies. Yamashita’s stories embrace actual points on the map, including tire stores, lumberyards, and many other ugly places that foreclose the possibility of paradise. Since even in paradise death can be found, as the Latin tag has it, Yamashita’s stories also embrace lockdown, chemotherapy, and dementia. Accompanying her stories are short works by eight writers, including Sesshu Foster and Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint. In one of the most interesting essays, Brandon Shimoda announces his project of visiting sites of Japanese internment in World War II with a particular eye to “sites in which no trace of the past remains, or in which the past is propagated, at most, by traces, which have to be manifestations of missing—but missing what?” The answers are various, whether concerning the missing Indigenous people of the desert, kept from moving through their homelands through aggressive Border Patrol actions, or places absent from any map but still very real.
A centrifugal, suggestive way of looking at place through the lens of story.
The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn
Young, Josh & Manfred Westphal Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.)
$34.00 | April 16, 2024 | 9781538751428
A breathless exposé of Hollywood’s bad old days, culminating in the presumed murder of Marilyn Monroe.
Young and Westphal’s protagonist is former detective Fred Otash (19221992), a man never shy of publicity,
given to bragging that he was the model for Jack Nicholson’s character Chinatown . As the authors write, Otash “lorded over LA’s scandalous underbelly in the conservative, hush-hush, highly moral climate of the 1950s and ’60s.” He skirted the edges of ethical conduct but was fundamentally committed to serving justice. At the time, there was plenty of justice to be served in Hollywood, too. Studio executives were tied up with organized crime, treating their stars as pawns to be awarded to the highest bidder in a place where “there was a boatload of money to be made if you were smart, savvy, driven, and ruthless.” One such pawn was Monroe, who, though smart and self-aware, became a kind of plaything of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. As a private detective, Otash knew his way around the demimonde of gangsters and starlets, turning up all kinds of salacious material for a gossip sheet called Confidential , once “one of the best-selling publications in the nation”—until it was sued into the ground. There’s lots of gossip afoot in these pages, with Peter Lawford sweeping up any evidence of the Kennedys after Monroe’s demise, Lana Turner stepping out on Johnny Stompanato with a young Sean Connery, mob boss Sam Giancana and Jack Kennedy sharing a mistress, and so forth. It all ends in a tangled, sordid tale that readers will dismiss, doubt, or take as gospel truth as they like—but one that, the authors insist, is still too hot to handle, with one producer turning their account down because “I’m friends with Caroline Kennedy.” Sensationalist and unevenly sourced, but good reading for James Ellroy aficionados.
For more titles by Karen Tei Yamashita, visit Kirkus online.
Keigo Higashino is one of my favorite adult authors; he’s written dozens of novels in Japanese, and each year I eagerly wait for a new one to be translated into English. His books are beautifully crafted and offer insight into a culture not my own: I feel as though I’ve walked through Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district and sat in ramen shops and hostess bars. Young people, too, should know the pleasures of reading without borders; thankfully, they have plenty of options. Here are a few of my favorite recent and forthcoming international novels.
Set against the backdrop of the Syrian war, Haya Saleh’s grim but hopeful Wild Poppies (Levine Querido, 2023), translated from Arabic by Marcia Lynx Qualey, sees two very different brothers attempting to protect their family after losing their home and their father. Fifteen-year-old Omar is dependable, if passive, while 12-year-old Sufyan’s willingness to take risks puts him in the path of a
religious extremist group seeking child soldiers. Saleh writes with empathy for both protagonists as she explores how warfare forces young people to grow up far too quickly.
Recently named a Mildred L. Batchelder Honor Book (an award given by the American Library Association for books in translation), Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The House of the Lost on the Cape (Yonder, 2023), translated from Japanese by Avery Fischer Udagawa and illustrated by Yukiko Saito, centers on an unlikely found family that forms in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake. After moving into a magical house by the sea, an orphan, a woman fleeing abuse, and
an elder must work together to stop an ancient evil. With its superb sense of setting and deft incorporation of Japanese folklore, Kashiwaba’s dreamy, quietly potent work evokes a Hayao Miyazaki film.
Taras and Marjana Prokhasko’s Who Will Make the Snow? (Elsewhere Editions, 2023), translated from Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk and Jennifer Croft, follows a mole family over the course of a year. Homey settings brought to life by Marjana Prokhasko’s striking illustrations result in a cozy chapter book reminiscent of the work of Maurice Sendak or Beatrix Potter. Don’t be fooled by the whimsy, though; amid the sled rides and leisurely strolls, characters confront harsh realities such as death (the title refers to the dead moles who create snow in the afterlife) and child abandonment. Adults
may find the story off-putting—compared with most American kid lit, there’s more bitter mixed in with the sweet—but youngsters will adore it.
When Gen. Ioannis Metaxas assumes power over Greece in 1936, the grown-ups know dark times lie ahead, but for Melia, the protagonist of Alki Zei’s The Wildcat Behind Glass (Yonder, May 7), life seems as idyllic as ever—at least initially. Zei balances Melia’s thoughts about the rise of fascism with her observations of daily life and the stories told by her grandfather and her cousin Nikos. The novel’s publisher was recognized with a Batchelder Award in 1970, when it was first translated from Greek into English; Karen Emmerich’s new translation will ensure that this powerful, relevant work finds a new audience.
Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.
MAHNAZ DAR
Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson
A modern-day fable about taking risks.
A giant emerges from the vast ocean and comes ashore near a small city so quiet that “you can hear the movie theater over the bustle of the cars.” An unseen narrator asks what would happen if the giant entered the city and immersed himself in their society. Would the citizens “welcome him the way they do the first rain”? Would “the old folks” of the town “tell him old stories”? Would he play hide-andseek with the “tiny inhabitants,” or would he gaze at the waves and “wonder why they turn back
before arriving”? Young readers will relate to the emotions felt by both the narrator and the giant as they ponder the potential pros and cons of jumping into a new experience. Intricate, painterly illustrations beautifully capture the potential journey taken by the giant. López plays adeptly with perspective, making the city and its residents appear even smaller while the physical and existential presence of the giant looms larger. Spreads featuring large footprints on the beach and in the surf and giant-shaped holes in the forest canopy are
85
Keep It Like a Secret
By John David Anderson
90
Windsongs
By Douglas Florian
90
Skybound
By Sue GanzSchmitt; illus. by Iacopo Bruno
94
There Was a Shadow
By Bruce Handy; illus. by Lisk Feng
95
Big Bear and Little Bear Go Fishing
By Amy Hest; illus. by Erin Stead
98
With Dad
By Richard Jackson; illus. by Brian Floca
99
Monster Hands
By Karen Kane & Jonaz McMillan; illus. by Dion MBD
105
The Secret Library
By Kekla Magoon; illus. by Brittany Jackson
106
Emergency Quarters
By Carlos Matias; illus. by Gracey Zhang
Ochoa, Alfonso | Illus. by Andrés López
Trans. by Shook | Transit Children’s Editions
32 pp. | $19.95 | April 16, 2024 | 9781945492877
particularly striking, paired with the elegant, spare text, translated from Spanish. The unnamed humans in the city are depicted with various shades of brown and tan skin tones. We see
107
Winnie Nash Is Not Your Sunshine By Nicole Melleby
108
Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All By Chanel Miller
109
Freedom on the Sea
By Michael Boulware Moore; illus. by Bryan Collier
110
Mama’s Library Summers
By Melvina Noel; illus. by Daria Peoples
only glimpses of the giant: a darkened silhouette, a pair of legs.
A glorious look at the potential benefits and vulnerabilities of a new possibility. (Picture book. 5-8)
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Giant on the Shore
By Alfonso Ochoa; illus. by Andrés López; trans. by Shook
118
Any Way You Look
By Maleeha Siddiqui
124
Fake Chinese Sounds
By Jing Jing Tsong
126
Born Naughty
By Jin Wang with Tony Johnston; illus. by Anisi Baigude
126
More Dung! By Frank Weber
127
Flying Through Water
By Mamle Wolo
129
Queens of the Jungle
By Carly Anne York; illus. by Kimberlie Clinthorne-Wong
129
The Wildcat Behind Glass
By Alki Zei; trans. by Karen Emmerich
Abalos, Rachell | Illus. by Gabriela Larios Barefoot Books (32 pp.) | $17.99
Feb. 6, 2024 | 9781646865000
Yelena Mendoza’s family has a very special member: the home they live in.
Yelena and her baby brother, Marco, are awakened by a falling palm tree and a creak from the bamboo floor. She opens the window and sees her father working outside. “Magandang umaga!” Papa, who uses a prosthetic leg, greets her in Tagalog before reminding Yelena to check on the other member of the family: their nipa hut, a traditional Filipino woven house built on stilts. She carefully looks over the house for cracks that require repair, whispering, “I’ll take care of you, and you will take care of us.” Bamboo is falling from the house, so she and Papa gather materials to work on the hut. But a storm is coming. Papa rushes to prepare the hut, and the Mendozas take shelter within. Once the weather clears, they survey the damaged roof and missing shutter. Still the family expresses their gratitude for the hut’s protection: “We take care of family,” Papa says. “And that is why the nipa hut is still standing.” Vivid textures and hues depict the various huts in Yelena’s neighborhood. Onomatopoeia (“CRAAAACCKK!” “CLAP!” “BAM!”) is effectively employed during the storm, interrupting the evenly paced story. Larios anthropomorphizes the expressive hut, which flinches and even appears to weep in the rain. A detailed guide to nipa huts and the effects of global warming follows.
A vibrant tribute to a beloved Filipino home. (overview of the Philippines, map, glossary of Tagalog terms, photo, author’s and illustrator’s notes) (Picture book. 5-8)
When two creatures meet, the language skills of one enhance both their lives.
WHEN CREATURE MET CREATURE
Agard, John | Illus. by Satoshi Kitamura Scallywag Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 May 7, 2024 | 9781915252470
When two creatures meet, the language skills of one enhance both their lives.
Creature-OfNo-Words—a large, orange being—lacks the words to articulate his experiences. But silence isn’t problematic when Creature-Of-NoWords is gazing peacefully out to sea or happily flinging pebbles skyward. Whether eating something yummy or warming himself by a fire, he seems self-sufficient despite his wordlessness. Yet at other times, he becomes deeply despondent. He thumps his chest, emits “a deep-down belly groan,” and cries. On one such day, the smaller CreatureOf-Words happens by. She knows how to name her moods, that something delicious is a “Treat! Treat!”—and that this big, sad creature needs a “Hug! Hug!” Award-winning poet Agard’s pithy triplets are laced with occasional rhymes. Kitamura’s illustrations, filled with all-over patterns for orange fur, tree bark, and greenery, reinforce Agard’s suggestion that Creature-Of-Words introduces not only language, but civilization. “From that day the two of them lived / together in a house where words also lived, / which was all well and good.” The duo are now silhouetted inside a conventional home (not the male’s previous cave), with word bubbles drifting from the chimney like balloons. The pair’s respective companions—birds and small mammals—form harmonious bonds, too. When enough has been said,
all enjoy the “sweet silence” of a “no-words night beside the fire.” Quirky, earnest—and sweet, indeed. (Picture book. 4-7)
Ahn, Angela | Illus. by Julie Kim | Tundra Books (176 pp.) | $12.99 | Feb. 13, 2024
9781774881880 | Series: Julia on the Go!, 1
Will an earache derail Julia’s swimming plans?
Several years ago, Julia’s Korean immigrant parents enrolled her in swimming lessons at the Mountain View Community Centre. It’s right next door to their sushi restaurant, and it’s cheaper than an afterschool program. Nine-year-old Julia’s now the youngest member of the Vipers junior swim team. But one day, while she and her teammates are diving for a swim brick at the deep end, Julia is forced to cut every dive short because of a sharp pain in her ear. The next day, her coach catches on and notifies her family. At the doctor’s office, she learns she has an ear infection that requires medicine. As a precaution, her mother forbids her from swimming for the next 10 days. Julia is disappointed, especially since it means she’ll miss Personal Best Day, when she could qualify for a regional meet. Her doctor’s advice is to keep her ear dry if she goes in the water, so Julia hatches an idea that will allow her to swim—one that unfortunately makes things even worse. After some community problem-solving, Julia still doesn’t know what to do about Personal Best Day, but she comes up with a satisfying solution. Impetuous but thoughtful, Julia’s a spunky
protagonist whom readers will root for. Kim’s spot art breaks up the text, heightening the humor and the chaos of the story’s climax. As charming as its young hero. (Fiction. 7-10)
Anderson, John David | Walden Pond Press/ HarperCollins (320 pp.) | $19.99
May 14, 2024 | 9780063279315
Close-knit siblings in small-town Ohio approach a crossroads when one turns 18. For as long as Morgan, now nearly 13, can remember, he and big sister Claire have been inseparable. He’s been seeing less of her lately, though, since the friction between his restless, defiant sib and their mother has reached the point of screaming arguments and long absences. So, when she appears at his bedroom window one morning, days after a particularly violent fight, he seizes the chance to sneak out in hopes of persuading her to come home. Instead, they embark on a daylong odyssey that includes a trip down memory lane, visits to places that have become important to Claire (including the home of her girlfriend, Sasha), and affirmations of their long-established Sibling Code (which ensures they will keep no secrets, tell no lies, and always have each other’s back). Morgan comes to realize that Claire has been trying to prepare him for something unexpected. But along with winding up the suspense through significant flashbacks and encounters (plus, for comic relief, a long-promised, ill-fated driving lesson), Anderson offers nuanced explorations of a family with wide but perhaps in time healable cracks and of two young people whose distinct differences of outlook and personality are bridged by a powerful, loving bond. The siblings and their
flawed but well-meaning parents are cued white; Sasha has “copper skin.” An intensely felt tale of adolescents desperate for both stability and change. (Fiction. 9-13)
Aradhya, Kerry | Illus. by Kara Kramer Peachtree (32 pp.) | $18.99
May 14, 2024 | 9781682636640
Ernő Rubik grows from a solitary but curious, puzzle-loving child into a determined adult.
Born in Budapest in 1944, Ernő liked to manipulate shapes, playing with “tangrams, pentominoes, and pentacubes”—all depicted in the art. He appreciated nature, too, and as he grew up, he studied architecture and art and became a teacher. While building models to help his students learn about threedimensional shapes, he became intrigued by cubes: “Would it be possible to build a big cube out of smaller cubes that moved around each other and stayed connected?” He started with eight cubes, attaching them with paper clips and rubber bands. That didn’t work, but he persevered and subsequently devised the 26-cube model. But how to hold it together? Ernő was inspired when he observed a rushing river moving around smooth pebbles. Similarly, his small cubes could move around a fixed mechanical center—and finally, he added colors on each side. Ernő was just 29 when he invented the Rubik’s Cube in 1974; more than a billion people would eventually play with his toy. The straightforward narrative ends with backmatter noting that Rubik didn’t intend to create a puzzle, and when he realized what it was, it took him a month to solve it. The bright, naïve collage artwork is quirky and inventive: Rubik’s head is sometimes cubic, and perspective is at times skewed.
A whimsical tribute to the maker of the famous, frustrating, and absorbing puzzle. (author’s note, resources) (Picture-book biography. 4-8)
Blake, Zoë Foster | Illus. by Adam Nickel Penguin Workshop (32 pp.) | $10.99
May 21, 2024 | 9780593753118
Gassy friends save the day in this follow-up to No One Likes a Fart (2019).
BFFs Burp and Fart—clouds rendered, respectively, in hues of purple and brown—float about, offending everyone with their pungent odors. Burp begins to feel bad about that, so she rolls around in flower petals. That doesn’t help; a young couple still turn up their noses when she wafts by. On her way back to Fart, Burp’s smell drives off some bullies who are tormenting a smaller girl. Burp tells Fart about it, and they decide to don capes and become superheroes. When they see a crook (wearing a mask and a black-and-white outfit) stealing a car, they float into the car and stink him out. They continue to do super-stinky good deeds until they find a kindergarten in danger of being crushed by a falling tree in a storm. They try to evacuate the building, but they aren’t stinky enough. (The kids and teachers have smelled far worse.) Fart has a great idea: Get Sewage Gas to help. Sewie, who inexplicably speaks in broken English, gets everyone to leave and saves the day. Blake’s forced, flat fable of flatulence won’t inspire much tittering beyond the first toot. Nickel’s illustrations of humans of varying skin tones resemble Saturday morning cartoons, but the speech bubbles, full of attempted potty humor, add little. Most readers will wish this Australian import had stayed Down Under like the emissions that inspired it. An unnecessary stink-quel. (Picture book. 2-6)
Bradford, Chris | Union Square Kids (136 pp.) | $9.99 paper | April 2, 2024
9781454954767 | Series: Virtual Kombat, 2
A team of gamers undertake a desperate mission to shut down an immersive video game before it kills any more contestants.
Having earned the “Elite Gamer” status in Gamer (2024) and then escaped from the literally deadly world of Virtual Kombat, Scott is well qualified to hook up with the VK Rebellion and lead a squad of hackers back into the virtual arena to plant a destructive virus. The running battle takes the team through various traps, ambushes, and violent displays of martial artistry with old foes and new in scenarios ranging from a “Wild West” setting to a generic “Shinto shrine” before climaxing in a face-off against the game’s evil owner on the “Last Level.” Featuring geometric spot-art images of attack drones and bladed weapons, this all-action U.K. import is written in staccato prose, presented in short, spaced-out sentences and paragraphs. The cast consists of stock types; the villain and his rebellion-leading, wheelchairusing twin brother are the only grown-ups in sight. Like the opener, this episode ends with a twist that will have readers curious about picking up the next volume. Physical descriptions are minimal; characters are cued white.
An uncomplicated beat down, violent if not particularly suspenseful. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Brosgol, Vera | First Second (368 pp.)
$22.99 | $14.99 paper | May 7, 2024 9781250314864 | 9781250314857 paper
After her parents’ sudden death, brown-haired, pale-skinned Jane is threatened with eviction from her family home. Despite her low self-image, based on years of shallow, fatphobic taunts from her parents, Jane suggests a deal to discontented fisherman Peter, who’s thin and has blond hair and blue eyes (as well as being vapid and arrogant). They’ll marry, and then she can inherit her fortune, and he can enjoy the luxurious lifestyle he craves. It seems like a great plan, until Peter is taken captive and imprisoned underwater by a mermaid. The determined Jane seeks magical assistance and heads to the mermaid village at the bottom of the sea to retrieve Peter. Brosgol’s illustrations provide much of Jane’s characterization through her delightfully expressive face, which shines with pleasure and grimaces in disgust; her round eyes are alert to all the charms of the sea. Fortunately, she’s rescued by an acerbic, grumpily appealing seal, who educates her about the sea’s perils. This story is an explicit response to society’s valuing of beauty and contempt for its absence, especially when it comes to girls and women. Pitted against a slender, cruelly vain mermaid who weaponizes her looks, Jane emerges as a thoughtful, tenacious hero who’s learning to
A pride-filled treatise and a charming riff on fairy tales.
PLAIN JANE AND THE MERMAID
appreciate her own value. Brosgol redeems the occasional preachiness with her portrayal of Jane as an individual—funny, flawed, and triumphant.
A pride-filled treatise and a charming riff on fairy tales. (author’s note, beat boards, coloring process) (Graphic fantasy. 10-14)
Brown-Wood, JaNay | Illus. by Olivia Amoah Kids Can (32 pp.) | $21.99 May 7, 2024 | 9781525308307
Two children nurture a thriving ecosystem. In this cumulative tale, two Blackpresenting kids follow the journey of the seeds they’ve planted. They discover that they need sun, water, and the support of helpers such as mushrooms and worms for their seedlings to grow and eventually “GLOW!” The repeated phrasing (“Here are the seeds / that we will sow,” “Here is the earth / that nurtures the seeds / that we have sown”) allows little readers to easily follow along and remember the steps to foster seed growth. A few pages halt the rhythmic pace as the narrator declares, “OH NO!” At these pauses, readers can use the illustrations to determine what is impeding the seeds from growing (parched earth, flooding) and perhaps even predict what the garden needs (more water, mushrooms to help soak up excess water). The children have expressive faces that exhibit a range of emotions: curiosity, concern, surprise, confusion, and joy. Backmatter explains the different elements—soil, plants, bugs, sun—that help a garden survive and thrive. The repetitive text and cumulative storytelling, along with the bright, inviting illustrations, make for a preschooler-friendly spring tale.
An enticing seasonal read-aloud. (Picture book. 3-5)
April 2, 2024 | 9781728492506
Poetic observations from nature’s more nauseating reaches, with gleefully gut-churning explanatory comments.
“Cute koala bear / Baby nuzzles Mama’s butt, / Munches poop. Still cute?” Covering everything from hagfish (“darlings of the slime world”) to Surinam toad hatchlings, which pop “like zits” out of pits in mama toad’s back, these 14 haiku offer examples of nature in rousingly revolting action, along with tasty tidbits of prose commentary. In the latter, while determinedly going for the gross, Brunelle carefully sticks to the facts; she even explains, for example, why honey isn’t really bee barf, “if you want to get technical,” because it’s never in a bee’s stomach. She ends with helpful leads to websites and other books. To the relief of more sensitive human stomachs, Patton tones down the “ew!” factor in her animated illustrations. Yes, the inky cap mushrooms do drip with black slime, and her extreme close-up view of a jawless but far from toothless hagfish mouth is nightmarish (“So, enjoy that,” the author writes), but Patton renders anatomical details with reasonable fidelity, and in general the art is more likely to elicit giggles than gags. Better yet, this STEAM-y mix closes with an invitation for readers to try their hands at “ haiku-ew ” of their own that they’ll find hard to resist.
Offers a crowd-pleasing angle on both nature and poetry. (Informational picture book/poetry. 7-9)
Clark, Karla | Illus. by Debby Rahmalia Feiwel & Friends (32 pp.) | $18.99 May 14, 2024 | 9781250814371 | Series: You Be
In this rhyming story, a grandfather and his grandson switch roles, at least for a while.
Grandpa and his grandson have had a busy day. They’ve painted, gardened, taken care of the farm animals, picked flowers for Grandma, walked the dog, waged thumb wars, played hide-and-seek, and more. Grandpa even tried skateboarding. (He “took it real slow.”) He says he’s “too tired to be Grandpa tonight” and declares that tomorrow, “If you want to go fishing, / You better do what Grandpa is wishing!” So the grandson steps up. He gives Grandpa a kiss as the old man curls up in their makeshift tent and even pats Grandpa’s back to help get him to sleep—but not before they jump on the bed (“I know it’s not right,” Grandpa admits), have a pillow fight, and pretend to be pirates far out at sea. But in the end, the tired grandson needs his grandfather to take on the role of caregiver and help him drift off to sleep. The story ends with the grandfather’s loving promise: “For you’ll always be my pride and joy, / ’Cause I’m your grandpa and you’re my boy!” Striking digital illustrations in rich colors capture the details of the pair’s busy life. Both Grandpa and his grandson have tan skin; Grandpa has salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache, while the grandson’s hair is dark brown. A wonderful bedtime story radiating with intergenerational love and companionship. (Picture book. 3-7)
Daniel, Danielle | Illus. by Jackie Traverse Groundwood (32 pp.) | $19.99
April 2, 2024 | 9781773066981
Series: Sometimes I Feel Like, 3
Musings on emotions, through a Native lens.
“Sometimes I feel like a maple,” a young child notes, “full and most generous. / I share my flowing sap / as winter turns toward spring.” Alongside acrylic and gouache images from Traverse (Ojibway), the narrative’s gentle formula continues: Children identify their moods and characteristics and compare themselves to different trees, including a redwood, a cedar, and an aspen. On the full-bleed spreads, youngsters who vary in skin tone play, read, and quietly gaze at the trees, expressing a wide range of emotions both positive and negative. “Sometimes I feel like a willow, / shivery, sensitive and sad.” But “sometimes I feel like a tamarack, / resilient, striking, robust.” Backmatter lists the name of each tree, alongside a portrait and an associated emotion; readers are asked to reflect on what they “see and feel in the trees around” them. In an author’s note, Daniel connects her Algonquin ancestry to her understanding of trees as “sentient beings with spirits who can feel things.” Both the people and the land come to life in Traverse’s vibrant illustrations, which convey the majesty and evocative nature of trees. This simple story will invite children to relate to trees as teachers and healers, ones whom we might greet “as we would a person—worthy of kindness, respect, protection and love.”
Tender and thought provoking. (Picture book. 4-7)
For more by Danielle Daniel, visit Kirkus online.
Dickinson, Emily | Illus. by Tatyana Feeney Cameron Kids (24 pp.) | $15.99
March 19, 2024 | 9781951836948
Series: Petite Poems
Hope is what we all desire.
In the first stanza of this poem, Dickinson calls hope “the thing with feathers”; she extends the metaphor by referring to hope perching and describes it singing “the tune without the words.” The second stanza leaves no doubt of the poet’s intent; here, she refers to hope as “the little bird.” Children who read or listen to the poem will understand that referent; whether they’ll comprehend the overall poem isn’t clear. Depicting birds and birdhouses, the illustrations won’t leave young readers’ interpretations to chance. Many young people appreciate Dickinson’s poetry, though some readers may find her work abstruse or ethereal. What are we to make of this book? The airy illustrations, created with various printmaking techniques, with added colored pencils later combined digitally, are charming; children viewing them would enjoy frolicking with these kids and birds. The art’s as delicate as Dickinson’s verse, although words such as abash and extremity and phrases such as “sweetest in the gale is heard” and “sore must be the storm” may not be as lucid or meaningful to children as they are to adults. The poem is reprinted in full at book’s end. Characters have skin the white of the page.
Visually appealing but, without adult intervention, likely to leave little ones perplexed. (Picture book. 5-9)
Imparts a solid message: Try your best and be your fin-tastic self.
THE WORRY-WORRY WHALE AND THE CLASSROOM JITTERS
Diesen, Deborah | Illus. by Dan Hanna Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) | $18.99
May 7, 2024 | 9780374391522
Series: Worry-Worry Whale Adventure
For more by illustrator Tatyana Feeney, visit Kirkus online.
In this new series—a spinoff from the Pout-Pout Fish books—Willa has a whale of a problem. Willa the whale’s a worrywart. She feels timid about raising her fin in class: What if she takes too long to answer or, worse, gets it wrong? When her teacher calls on her encouragingly, Willa remains silent. Whew! That worked; she’s saved. But Willa begins to reflect on the teacher’s comment to the class: “It isn’t always easy / To share the things we know, / But ideas, thoughts, and questions / Are the way we learn and grow.” At home, Willa’s parents let her know that she’s not alone in her fears. They do some role-playing, with Willa pretending to be the teacher. Willa learns about pausing before answering and, if necessary, giving a partial answer, then asking for help in finding more information. Willa repeatedly reminds her “students” of her teacher’s mantra. The next day, Willa feels confident about answering in class and realizes it’s OK to answer incorrectly. Guess who raises her fin now? This cute, jauntily rhyming tale may allay some kids’ concerns, though real-life worries aren’t overcome quite so easily. Still, it’s a tale sure to buoy young readers, and Willa’s parents are reassuringly lovely. The colorfully cartoony illustrations are sweet
and expressive; Willa’s varied marine-life classmates are adorable. Imparts a solid message: Try your best and be your fin-tastic self. (Picture book. 5-8)
Ellis, Elina | Kids Can (32 pp.)
$19.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781525306747
Series: Alex’s Field Guides
How tough could it be to find an elephant?
“Elephant journal” in hand, Alex, our tan-skinned young narrator, is determined to track down a pachyderm. Alex quizzes a giraffe and some meerkats but, while questioning a tree-twining boa, fails to notice a long, gray, fruit-plucking trunk below. As Alex talks to a rhino, the hindquarters of another pachyderm can be glimpsed disappearing into the underbrush. Crouching in a nest amid huge eggs, our oblivious narrator interrogates a cranky-looking vulture; later, Alex queries an irate lion, missing many elephants off in the distance. The next page reveals Alex inside the lion’s belly, consulting a zebra who’s also been eaten by the big cat (both are intact), while five elephants walk by outside, unseen. In a crocodile-infested river, Alex straddles an open jaw, overlooking the elephant group on the far shore (as well as the croc chomping on the narrator’s backpack). Perched on an enormous termite mound, Alex again misses out on the elephants. Finally, concluding that “elephants are so hard to find,” Alex pulls out a “Tiger Journal,” beginning a new quest by
querying…an elephant! Delightful watercolorlike illustrations in earthy tones are engaging and will have kids eagerly pointing out everything that Alex misses—make room for this one at storytime. Three spreads feature pages from Alex’s journal, with facts on elephant families, intelligence, diet, and more.
Enlightening, interactive animal fun. (how to make your own journal, resources) (Picture book. 4-8)
Erb, Calyssa | Annick Press (240 pp.) $19.99 | March 5, 2024 | 9781773218502
At the theater camp of her dreams, an autistic 11-yearold is determined to be the star. Maya can’t believe she’s going to attend musical theater day camp with “THE Irene Brown, legendary theater director.” And this summer, the camp will be putting on a performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, which is only Maya’s “favorite play of all time.” Obviously, Irene Brown will see that Maya is perfect for the starring role: She knows all the songs and everything about the show, and she even has a homemade shirt with The Drowsy Chaperone written on it. So why does Maya’s mother keep telling her not to take the starring role for granted? This is obviously just another one of her mother’s autism rules, like “Don’t chew on your hair” and “Don’t talk too much about musicals.” Maya’s even making new friends, but they get mad at her for no reason—she’s just trying to be helpful when she corrects their mistakes. She doesn’t want to always pretend to be “Maya in Public,” her most well-rehearsed role, but she does want to have friends. Can she be happily, obsessively perfectionist about theater and still be liked? Nuances and the messiness of growing up enrich Maya’s satisfying
journey: Painfully, ultimately joyfully, she navigates the weirdness of friendships with neurotypical kids. Maya is white; Irene Brown is Black, and there’s racial diversity among the supporting characters. A celebratory story of acceptance and creative expression. (Fiction. 8-12)
Estrela, Joana | Trans. by Daniel Hahn Orca (32 pp.) | $21.95 March 12, 2024 | 9781459837522
In this Portuguese import, an exasperated child writes a decidedly unsentimental— and amusing— letter to her little sister.
The narrator is sure that her younger sibling must have come from outer space, rejected as too annoying by her fellow aliens. Big sis views her sibling as an overly talkative, ungrateful, destructive vandal, prone to putting stickers everywhere—even on the family cat. The letter writer does have some tender memories, such as getting to name her sister and giving her hand-me-downs. But when provoked, she swears she’ll never speak to her sibling again. “But later I forgot.” Although their interactions are sometimes violent (once costing the little sister a tooth), the narrator eventually realizes that she and her sister are more like each other than not, and she finally understands that sisters are not the same as friends: “It’s not better or worse…just different.” Estrela captures the intricacies of the sibling bond: Whether they’re fighting or playing, these two are there for each other. The illustrations make the letter format feel genuine; the bold outlines are several steps up from stick figures, but not out of the realm of child art. And though the occasional drawing feels a bit more sophisticated, several pages look authentically adorned with the scribbles supposedly left by the sibling. Characters have skin the color of the page.
Readers with a sibling will laugh, ruefully; those without will feel both regret and relief at what they’re missing. (Picture book. 4-8)
Fipps, Lisa | Nancy Paulsen Books (260 pp.)
$17.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593406328
How do you cope with the unexpected moments that change everything in your world?
Until what he calls “the Mess with Mom,” sixth grader Joseph Oak and his widowed English grandmother were doing okay. Between the house Grandmum owned, the money she made cleaning houses and offices, their food stamp benefits, and Joe’s free school meals, they were getting by. But about a year ago, when Joe’s mostly absent mother got arrested, Grandmum put the house up for bail money. (Joe knows nothing about his dad.) Then Mom fled, and “BOOM!”—they were living in their car: “I felt like we were goldfish in a fishbowl.” Grandmum and Joe find an old mobile home to rent, but then, “BOOM!”—Grandmum dies, and Joe’s left on his own. Fortunately, he has two best friends who always have his back: Nick, whose mother struggles with depression and who’s been in foster care, and Francophile Hakeem, who pays for Joe’s convenience store treats. The verse format, combined with Joe’s comic book and superhero metaphors, works exceptionally well at conveying honest emotion while maintaining a sense of humor and hope. Fipps doesn’t sugarcoat poverty, nor does she romanticize it or treat it as a moral failing; instead, she provides critical representation to the many schoolchildren who are living in poverty. Joe’s courage and individuality shine on every page. Most main characters read white; Hakeem is cued African American. A big, bold, engaging, and important story. (Verse novel. 9-13)
Fitzgerald, Brian | Red Comet Press (36 pp.) $18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781636551012
A rabbit’s search for peace and quiet is ruined by an unexpected neighbor.
Bunny can’t wait to start her vacation. Craving solitude, she drives her camper to a secluded spot by the sea. But when she wakes up in the morning, she sees Bob, a purple, scraggly monster with a green striped nose and a wide, toothy smile, waving at her. He has “set up camp…RIGHT! NEXT DOOR!”
Bunny can’t believe it. Though Bob keeps to himself, she finds his activities distracting, whether he’s surfing, meditating (“I know he’s just pretending ”), barbecuing, or stargazing. When a storm blows in that night, Bunny is relieved. Bob’s tiny tent is no match for the wind; he’ll have to leave. Deep down, however, Bunny can’t bear to watch him struggle. She invites him in, and the two start spending time together. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? The big, bulbous Bob is a heightened contrast to squat, rectangular, petite Bunny. Fitzgerald playfully combines dusky, muted landscapes with bright pops of color—most notably, Bob’s purple body. Eagle-eyed readers will also delight in spotting Bob’s various rainbow accessories. A sweet tale of an unlikely friendship and a reminder that being open to change can bring surprising results. (Picture book. 4-7)
Flies high and definitely rises to the occasion.
Kirkus Star
Florian, Douglas | Beach Lane/ Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) | $18.99 May 28, 2024 | 9781665937726
In 20 expertly crafted poems, Florian illuminates the origins, types, and effects of weather.
Beginning with scene-setters about weather and our atmosphere and ending with a sober look at climate change, the veteran poet-illustrator riffs, often gleefully, on elements from rain and hail to frost and drought. He frequently uses personification, alliteration, and repetition, encapsulating solid information in economical rhymes and deft wordplay. “Cloud” narrates its own delight in “wrecking” the reader’s fun: “I rain cascades / on your parades. /…To nip your nap / I thunderclap.”
Maintaining that “fog is just / a cloud that’s lost,” Florian describes how “it drifted down, / close to the ground, / then napped beside a hill. / And gave the day / ten shades of gray, / each un-fog-gettable.” Poems often take concrete forms, spiraling in “Hurricane” and assuming the shape of a funnel for “Tornado.” The text appears on pages of saturated color, opposite playful illustrations executed in gouache, colored pencil, and rubber stamps on primed paper bags. Humans vary in skin tone and cavort (and contort) in service of Florian’s visual jokes. For “Hurricane,” an umbrella-wielding person’s yellow slicker spirals round and round, echoing that poem’s shape. A “never ever wrong” meteorologist stands before a weather map, staring in shock at the barrage of hailstones despoiling a sunny forecast. In an image accompanying the
last poem, three people—wearing caps that warn against damaging greenhouse pollutants—hold up our sea-blue planet. Appealing information in a delightfully sunny package. (glossary, weather websites, selected sources and further reading) (Picture book/poetry. 5-9)
Ganz-Schmitt, Sue | Illus. by Iacopo Bruno Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers (48 pp.) | $18.99 | April 16, 2024 | 9781635928150
A daring woman soared into history. From childhood, Mary Myers (nee Hawley, 1850-1932) dreamed of flying, something women of her era weren’t supposed to contemplate, let alone accomplish. In adulthood, she found a way to escape her earthly bonds: ballooning, a new fad “that sailed in from France and captivated America.” At age 21, Mary married photographer, inventor, engineer, and scientist Carl Myers, a ballooning enthusiast himself. Carl was interested in researching weather conditions in the skies; Mary read up on meteorology and aeronautics. Together, they designed and built better balloons. What they needed was someone to record scientific/weather data while flying and to dazzle crowds who paid to witness flying exhibitions. Mary volunteered and adopted “Carlotta” as her stage name. It rained the day of her first solo flight—July 5, 1880. Carlotta had promised to take her balloon one mile up and stay aloft for five miles or 30 minutes. She received 10 minutes of
training to learn how to avoid crashing into tall standing objects, to land safely, and to make her balloon rise or fall, as necessary. The event was a rousing success: Carlotta recorded abundant weather statistics and flew higher, farther, and longer than expected. Loaded with information, this meticulously researched tale about one high-flying woman’s exploits will captivate readers; quotes from Mary/ Carlotta are incorporated. The crisp ink illustrations are superb, beautifully capturing period details and settings; note some eye-popping typesetting creativity. This fascinating book flies high and definitely rises to the occasion. (more information about Carlotta, timeline, bibliography, picture credits) (Informational picture book. 7-10)
Welcome to the Woofmore
Gephart, Donna & Lori Haskins Houran Illus. by Josh Cleland | Amulet/Abrams (80 pp.) | $14.99 | May 21, 2024
9781419767623 | Series: The Woofmore, 1
A swanky new hotel welcomes its first VIP (Very Important Pooch). With a large hat, big sunglasses, and a recognizable voice, movie star Greta Garbark attracts attention everywhere she goes. Much like her real-life Hollywood counterpart, however, the retriever wants to be left alone, and Rufus, general hotel factotum at the Woofmore, is determined to make her happy at the behest of his boss, a brown Chihuahua named Ms. Coco. Rufus—a large, hairy canine with floppy ears, a bow tie, and a striped jacket—immediately thinks of a suitable disguise for Ms. Garbark. She’s treated to a new “ fur style” and a “Pupster Purple” dye job at the Sudsy Spa. Now if she just stays quiet, no one will know it’s her. Keeping the “ pup arazzi” at bay is easy enough, but soon Rufus notices the other guests scratching themselves. Could the hotel
have a flea infestation? Luckily, Ms. Garbark may have the “paw fect” solution. Kids will be amused by earnest, endearing Rufus and his habit of passing gas when he’s nervous (a joke that gets a bit strained over time). With puns galore and retro, caricaturelike illustrations depicting many dog breeds, including a “poodle in pearls” and a “husky in a hat,” this funny early chapter book will easily find an audience, though adults may have to explain the references to Greta Garbo. A waggish new series tailor-made made for dog lovers. (Chapter book. 6-8)
Gharehbaghi, Masoud | Clavis (32 pp.) $19.95 | May 28, 2024 | 9781605379920
When a little polar bear’s ice floe melts, he must find his way home.
A warming ecosystem causes the bear’s ice floe to break off and float away while he naps. When he wakes, he is all alone in the vast sea. His floe is getting smaller and smaller. Luckily, he lands in what he knows to be “the human place.” Big ships crowd the harbor, and everyone bustles to and fro. No one notices the tiny cub. He plods along, bewildered, on a teeming street, blending into the swarm. But then, a small, tan-skinned human sees him. She’s eating an ice cream cone and offers him some. This cold treat is delicious! Instinctively, the tot knows the cub needs help getting home. More and more kids come, each bringing ice cream—all the ice cream in the world, in fact! They pile it together, creating a tasty iceberg so the bear can float back to his mother. This Dutch import is a gentle introduction to global warming. A vague note in the beginning offers some context (“It will take more than all the ice cream in the world to keep the icebergs from melting”), though readers are mostly left on their own to fill in the gaps. But a glimmer of optimism shines as children are reminded that they can
unite to change the world. The youngsters are racially diverse. A warmhearted look at a chilling topic. (Picture book. 4-7)
Gill, David Macinnis | Greenwillow Books (288 pp.) | $18.99 | April 23, 2024 9780063116511
Kids survive the zombie apocalypse on a train to nowhere. Nearly a year ago, a parasite turned all the grown-ups into zombies. Twelveyear-old brakeman Wyatt is leading his riders on an endless loop “from Colorado to Wyoming to Utah and back,” hoping that they can find a cure. In the caboose, the nurse experiments on patients with a blood serum, but the passengers struggle with the knowledge of how they’ll inevitably end up: 14 is the age when people become susceptible to the parasite’s effects. Wyatt and the crew hope to find Nirvana, a military medical facility that may hold the cure. Along the way, Wyatt grows closer to Ryle, a girl who’s survived the harsh conditions of the wasteland. Meanwhile, mutiny threatens the train as narcissistic crew member Diesel uses others to try to seize power after Wyatt is made conductor. Diesel isn’t the only threat, however, with feral children planning coordinated attacks on the train. The characters are diverse in physical appearance, background, personalities, and skills. Appropriately disgusting descriptions and puns establish the dark humor that pervades the work, and natural-sounding tween dialogue and a fully developed dystopian world are strengths. The novel feels overly long, however, and the action sequences become repetitive; the storyline surrounding the search for the cure moves very slowly. The abrupt ending may point to a sequel. Jam-packed and unevenly paced. (Adventure. 9-13)
Gianni Rodari’s translator discusses the playful children’s books of this midcentury Italian writer.
BY MARK CHIUSANOITALIAN CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR Giovanni Francesco “Gianni” Rodari (1920-1980) loved humorous wordplay on the page, but he led a serious life in the real world, where he worked as a journalist and educator with a role in the Resistance in Fascist Italy as well as in the Communist Party. In the late 1950s, his two lives converged in his column for the newspaper L’Unità, where he answered the earnest questions of Italy’s kids. Rodari did so with facts, proverbs, jokes, and enchanting lyricism. A selection of those responses are now collected in The Book of Whys (Enchanted Lion Books, Jan. 23), whimsically illustrated by JooHee Yoon and translated by Rodari expert Antony Shugaar. Kirkus spoke with Shugaar by phone about the moral center and the sense of humor of this master, the only Italian to win the vaunted Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature, and an author whose belief in the power of critical thinking and freedom is particularly timely today. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was Rodari’s experience in Mussolini’s Italy?
He was born in 1920, in northern Italy, which means that sometime before he turned 10, Italy had gone Fascist. So that’s a fairly important point to set the table. He was strongly anti-Fascist and was actually a partisan for some time.
How did his work in the Resistance translate into his children’s writing?
The core of Gianni Rodari’s work with children is how to
free the imagination. So you can see where the intersection on that Venn diagram is: It’s the freedom of imagination, the ability to teach people to be decent and considerate of others. His idea for children is to play with language and concepts in a way that allows freedom rather than indoctrination and mindless rule following.
You’ve translated multiple Rodari books. What speaks to you in his work, broadly?
I would make a comparison to Lewis Carroll. I would make a comparison to Roald Dahl. And I would make a comparison to Italo Calvino, who was born a little later but died just a couple of years after Rodari, in the mid-1980s. All of these people are about a kind of pyrotechnics of the imagination. All of these people are about better living through nonsense.
You’ve seen the changes in kids’ literature over the years, right? Do you have kids?
I do. My kid is 23.
OK, so, it’s been a minute since you’ve read kids’ books, probably. It has been a minute—and, happily, it all turned out great.
If you go to the kids’ shelves now, there are sounds and electronics
and flaps on the books. Rodari didn’t have that, right? How does he keep a child’s interest today without that?
There was a period, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when people were saying, “This is the first time anybody’s done anything like this.” And it depends on what you mean by like, because people have [long] been doing things just like it without, you know, electronics. Take an example: In Telephone Tales, Rodari describes a town where they took a building, and they made it a building for breaking [things]. And they invited the kids in and said, “This is a building where you can just destroy anything you want. You can draw on the walls, you can shatter things, you can break things, you can just go wild.” Now, there’s no electronics in there. But if you tell a little kid that story, their
eyes light up. I mean, all the synapses are snapping.
Which of the write-in questions from this book have stuck with you?
There’s a really nice one in here—the question that a kid sends in is “Why, when a car drives through dry leaves, do the leaves rush after it?”
I love that one. It’s a beautiful illustration, too. [Another] of my favorites: He’s answering a question about Manhattan: “Why are the buildings so tall in New York?” And he answers it by saying, “Well, it was a very small island, and the island has a foundation of granite, [which is] a perfect platform to build skyscrapers on. The buildings grew tall because the land is expensive,” and so on. But then he has a little poem. He says:
When it comes to skyscrapers
There’s no denying that I’d rather lay out five acres And enjoy them lying flat. That way each floor
Is next-door neighbor to the next,
And even the poor
Can afford a duplex. [It’s] the idea of skyscrapers where the highest suite is the most expensive, and so on down toward the ground. And he’s like, Just lay it on its side, and you have a community.
This idea of kids asking questions of a newspaper is sort of a pre-Google artifact, isn’t it? I’m curious about the benefits of the old form, what we get from a child querying a newspaper rather than the internet. So this was like getting published in the newspaper,
and you’re 6 years old. You have your name in there, or you even just have your question in there. And you can show it [to people]. So that’s one thing, and also I think it gave children agency and a sense of adulthood that they were interacting with the newspaper.
Is there something very Italian about Rodari’s writing?
The Italians love to include children in their society. If you’ve ever seen Italians out on a Sunday—going to get an espresso or taking their walk or getting a box of pastries to take to the grandparents’ house for
Sunday lunch—the kids are so central to this whole endeavor. The family is there to circle around the kids. And Rodari, I think, was about building a new generation after what was universally agreed to have been a catastrophic mistake. Not just World War II. Mussolini was in charge for almost a quarter-century. So there was a real feeling of freedom and “We need to train the next generation.”
What do you think is the right age for this book?
Do you know the C.S. Lewis line, “A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story”? So, you know, it
depends. It seems to me like this is the kind of book that would be perfectly fine to read to any school-aged child, I’d say from kindergarten up.
What did Rodari think was the purpose of children’s literature? I think it was to make better people. But I mean, that makes him sound like he’s somebody with a program. He did have a program, but he also just loved children.
Mark Chiusano is the author of The Fabulist , a biography of George Santos, and Marine Park, a story collection.
The core of Gianni Rodari’s work with children is how to free the imagination.
$19.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780358683445
In this rhyming ode to imagination, a young child moves through the house envisioning fantastical purposes for ordinary objects.
After returning home during a rainstorm, an energetic, brownskinned child conquers boredom by imagining a series of thrilling scenarios, from teleporting to a planet of robots and cavorting with jungle animals to taking the stage as a musical phenom. By the time the rain has passed, the child has invented a new sport and begins drawing colossal battles with sidewalk chalk (Vikings vs. Martians, anyone?). Artwork created with cut paper and paint sometimes differentiates the imaginative play from reality, as with the transparent, steamy animals that emerge from the child’s bath. At other times, the flights of fancy appear as real as the typical household objects, such as when the kid tumbles across the couch like a professional wrestler defeating a robot opponent. The text also slips back and forth between real and unreal to celebrate all kinds of inventiveness, equating the child’s fantasies with the creative endeavors of the grown-ups, including dancing, painting, and writing. Slant rhymes and trips in the scansion will frustrate some readers; those who commit to the text with the same cheerful abandon as the protagonist will enjoy the reading experience anyway.
An exuberant paean to creativity. (Picture book. 4-8)
Greenwald, Lisa | Katherine Tegen/ HarperCollins (240 pp.) | $19.99
May 7, 2024 | 9780063255852
Big changes nearly sever the friendships between three besties, but magical paper fortune tellers just might reunite them.
Even though their families are different in many ways, Nora, Bea, and Millie have been close since kindergarten at Shire, their “hippie” school in Manhattan. One memorable day in third grade, they discovered a brand of markers called Write Your Destiny at a stationery store and used them to make fortune tellers. But they got older, and eventually Nora decided that fortune tellers were babyish. Further cracks appeared when Nora attended wealthy Quinn’s birthday party— even though Quinn had publicly snubbed Bea and Millie. Angrily, the girls threw away their fortune tellers. These cracks turn into canyons when the Covid-19 pandemic brings remote schooling, and the girls’ families move away before their differences can be resolved. With seventh grade starting soon, the girls mysteriously start finding fortune tellers with messages pointing the way forward— and back to one another. The third-person narration rotates through each girl’s confusion and longing for old friends; the book also contains flashbacks to pivotal moments in their history. Greenwald sensitively captures the social dynamics of middle school, where
popularity can take precedence over friendship. Readers will embrace the light magical element, but an appreciation of the real work needed to salvage the girls’ bonds won’t be lost on them, either. Main characters are cued white; Millie and Nora are Jewish. Tears and cheers abound in this endearing take on friendship. (Fiction. 8-12)
Kirkus Star
There Was a Shadow
Handy, Bruce | Illus. by Lisk Feng Enchanted Lion Books (52 pp.)$18.95 | April 16, 2024 | 9781592704064
The absence of light inspires its own unique story in this scintillating, kid-centered view of shadow play. A day from dawn to darkness is seen entirely through the lens of shadows. “There was a shadow. / It was a new shadow, / but also the last hint of night. / It was a morning shadow.” Handy records various types of shadow, from sunrise to sunset. In the morning, children note the wide shadow of a hill, the minuscule shadow of a bug, and their own dancing, friendly shadows. As the sun climbs higher in the sky, the shadows become shorter and morph into shade. Youngsters of different skin tones wonder if “a faint, rippling shadow” is “even really a shadow?” And then there are the shadows of worry to consider. The sun starts to go down, lengthening the shadows until they turn to dusk. That leaves room for comforting indoor shadows and, finally,
Quiet contentment is the name of the game in this gentle tale of fish and scones.
BIG BEAR AND LITTLE BEAR GO FISHING
mysterious shadows cast by moonlight. Handy picks apart this day-to-day darkness while preserving its magic and wonder. Meanwhile, Feng’s art depicts the natural existence of shadows, outdoor and in, with an evocative sense of wonder. The world on these pages is rendered realistically, its innate magic still held intact. With kids’ fears banished, these shadows are no less enigmatic for being observed so closely in this lyrical, loving ode. (Picture book. 3-6)
Heider, Mary Winn | Illus. by Chad Sell Knopf (304 pp.) | $14.99
May 7, 2024 | 9780593427330
Series: The Stupendous Switcheroo, 2
A high-stakes heist requires training, trust, and unpredictable talents.
In this second series entry, the Stupendous Switcheroo appears on the TV news, accused of attacking public icon Vin Valor. But Switcheroo has friends on his side, including brilliant inventor Tana, Mr. Meatballs the cat, and doting robot Al. Switcheroo pitches a plan to his friends, hoping to rescue his mom and the other parents Valor has jailed, but Tana isn’t sure the others will trust her. After all, she helped put their parents away in the first place, before she figured out what was wrong at Valor Tech. The group’s jailbreak brainstorming helps readers catch up on everyone’s powers, and single-page profiles provide greater detail about the cast. Switcheroo still gains a new power each day, from bunny ears with super-hearing to passing through solid objects, all the while becoming a little more intuitive about how they work. Cooking together helps the group de-stress and celebrate small victories on the way to the big showdown with Valor’s forces. Splashes of green on the monochrome pages highlight elements
of each character, as well as the protagonists’ tailored costumes (“Do you know how few clothes have tail-holes???”). The cast members’ learning to trust one another and express their stress without surrendering to negativity feels like a superpower in its own right, though the many creative superpowers are fun to behold, too.
Equal parts heartfelt and actionpacked. (process note, alternate covers, character art) (Graphic adventure. 8-12)
Amy | Illus. by
Erin Stead Neal Porter/Holiday House (40pp.) $18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780823449750
Quiet contentment is the name of the game in this gentle tale of fish and scones.
Big Bear wants to go fishing, and so does Little Bear. They dress for the occasion, but are they ready? “Almost.” They need poles (“Almost”), then snacks (“Almost”), then a big green book of stories. Ready at last, they get into their rowboat and wait, but nothing’s biting. Scones are noshed. Stories are read. And at last, one big fish does swim around them for a while before leaving. Then it’s time to go home and nap together on the big hammock. With prodigious skill, Hest employs the quiet repetitions that make reading a book aloud a joy. “Poles , says Big Bear. Fishermen need poles . Oh yes , says Little Bear. Poles .” “Scones , says Big Bear. Fishermen need nice, warm blueberry scones Oh yes , says Little Bear. Scones .” Stead, meanwhile, makes great use of vast white spaces, filling them with bees, clouds, and two bears with great affection for one another. Their love is evident as Big Bear holds Little Bear closely after
the cub takes a flying leap into the boat. This tale has all the hallmarks of a family classic.
A loving look at failing at fishing in the best possible way. (Picture book. 3-6)
Higgins, Ryan T. | Disney-Hyperion (32 pp.) | $9.99 | May 7, 2024
9781368090247 | Series: Little Bruce
Bruce the bear shepherds his family of geese and mice on a trip to the seaside.
It’s hot—too hot—and everyone is feeling it. Everyone but Bruce, who, unbothered, appears to be taking a page from his book The Joys of Doing Nothing. Not ones to languish long, the mice propose turning the house into a beach resort; when Bruce shoots that idea down, they suggest going to the beach. The geese agree and enthusiastically run ahead, leaving Bruce to carry the gear. The mice and geese have fun in the sun while the long-suffering Bruce wrestles with their umbrella and floaties. A rollicking time is had by all, except, of course, poor Bruce. Finally settled, with a relaxed “Ahhhh,” Bruce is once again reunited with his book. Unsurprisingly, the respite is short-lived, and the sky almost immediately fills with clouds, then torrential rain. The beachgoers run for home, leaving Bruce once again to clean up. Disappointed, the mice and geese look to Bruce for a solution. Of course, in typical grump-with-aheart-of-gold fashion, he finds a way to put things right. As in previous entries, Higgins’ signature illustrations, with their deft use of line and shading, are a delight. Young readers will enjoy the antics of the expressive mice and geese, and adults will recognize (and sympathize with) Bruce’s tireless schlepping and entertaining. Hilarious proof that a caregiver’s work is never done. (Picture book. 2-6)
Hirahara, Naomi | Illus. by Sarah Demonteverde Black Dog & Leventhal | (96 pp.)
$21.99 | April 9, 2024 | 9780762483969
Series: A Child’s Introduction to...
A guide to Asian American history.
Hirahara starts by discussing how college students
Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee
coined the term Asian American in 1968; she also defines the phrase Pacific Islanders but notes that the book doesn’t cover those with Central and Western Asian heritage. She goes on to explore various identities within the AAPI communities, as well as U.S. cities with large populations of each group, such as Springdale, Arkansas, home to half of the U.S.’s Marshallese population. From there, the author examines AAPI history, with topics such as the wayfinding explorations of the people of Oceania, the role of Asian Americans in both world wars, and discriminatory laws including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Frequently, the focus shifts to remarkable people in various fields, among them sports, science and medicine, and activism. The author also notes Asian influences in pop culture—General Tso’s chicken, a 1960s Korean music group known as the Kim Sisters—and lists cultural celebrations and sites. Hirahara’s straightforward writing evokes the feel of a reference work, enlivened by dynamic graphics. The cartoon illustrations are bursting with bold, contrasting colors and textures, and maps, timelines, and sidebars throughout aid in understanding. East Asian people and cultures feature prominently, and the book has notable coverage of Pacific Islanders and Filipinos, with some inclusion of other Southeast identities and South Asians.
A feel-good tale of pals bonding as they grapple with grief.
OTIS & PEANUT FOREVER AND EVER
A vibrant and enlightening history. (list of AAPI museums and places of interest, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Holt, Bob | Kids Can (64 pp.) | $14.99 May 7, 2024 | 9781525306594
Does anyone have worse luck than Quin?
As the various scenarios depicted in the three stories within this graphic novel demonstrate, things tend to go from bad to worse for the curly-haired young boy. Despite his best intentions and a kind heart, somehow even a day at the beach goes south after he offers a fry to a seagull; word of his generosity spreads, and he’s soon surrounded by hungry gulls. In the second story, Quin’s sister’s elaborate attempts to help him yank out a loose tooth result in mayhem. In the final entry, Quin has a painful encounter with hornets during a fishing trip. Quin’s laugh-out-loud exclamations add to the hilarity—“Holy Fowl Breath!” “Holy Buttered Yum!” “Holy Head Yank!”—as do the frequent sight gags and gross-out humor. Digital cartoon panels relate Quin’s mishaps with aplomb, adding to the kid appeal, while his orange cat Kitty’s spot-on observations heighten the amusement. Though the situations are over-the-top, Quin’s bad luck will resonate with young people—after all, who among us hasn’t had a run of bad
luck? Readers will appreciate that Quin’s family always has his back and even seems to anticipate his unluckiness. Quin and his family are brown-skinned. Featuring wacky humor and a relatable protagonist, this one’s sure to fly off shelves. (Graphic fiction. 6-9)
Holyoke, Polly | Viking (304 pp.)
$8.99 paper | May 7, 2024
9780593464465 | Series: Skyriders, 2
Humans and skysteeds work together against the Foul Ones in this sequel to Skyriders (2023). The Skyforce prevailed in the Battle of a Thousand Chimerae but at a terrible cost. Now the Emperor asks Kie and N’Rah to travel to the Makar Mountains to locate the Sky King and ask him to renew the Great Alliance, which allows wild skysteeds to bind with humans to replenish the Skyforce and fight the chimerae that continue to menace Prekalt. Prince Shayn and Princess Halla, courier Topar, Capt. Nerone, and cadet Ruden—familiar characters to those who’ve read the previous book—join the secret mission. The stakes are high: If they cannot save the Home Herd from the carnivorous desert birds called vultiren and convince the Sky King to allow their species to join forces, Prekalt is likely doomed. Without sacrificing any excitement, this entry, which will best be appreciated
by returning fans who are familiar with this world, goes into more depth of feeling than the previous book. Kie learns to process her grief over previous losses and to accept her role as the Nexara (the one who can communicate with all skysteeds), and the skysteeds themselves, especially N’Rah, come to the forefront with their own individual stories. Ultimately, after a tremendous battle against the vultiren, the story sets up for a third book. Human characters are diverse in appearance.
An action-packed, superbly paced second book that raises the stakes and shows the cost of loss. (cast of characters) (Fantasy. 9-13)
$22.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781419771323
An ode to what can be seen when you slow down and enjoy the journey, whether by foot, bicycle, boat, or train. Each section begins with a world map showing the locations of a different trip readers can take. The author devotes just a single spread to each experience, so the facts and attractions he presents are necessarily brief and rather perfunctory, though fascinating and intriguing. There’s something for everyone, from nature- and animal lovers to city explorers, aspiring historians, and athletes. These journeys are not for folks with a shortage of either funds or time. The vast majority require world travel (only four are in the lower 48), guides, tickets, rentals, etc., and many cannot be completed in a day or even a week, though they can still be enjoyed in smaller sections. (The EuroVelo 10 bike route is 5,725 miles through eight countries, and the
Inca Trail in Peru involves some difficult walking.) Still, this is wonderful fodder for dreamers and world travelers. The scratchy-textured artwork focuses on the sights mentioned in the text and features a different family or friend grouping on each spread. While cute enough, the illustrations don’t do justice to the marvels mentioned in the text, and readers will long for photos. People depicted are diverse. A feast for world traveler wannabes. (12 ways to travel “slow,” further reading) (Nonfiction. 8-14)
Hrab, Naseem | Illus. by Kelly Collier Owlkids Books (80 pp.) | $18.95 April 16, 2024 | 9781771474979
Series: Otis & Peanut, 2
Friends make room for joy in the wake of sadness. Peanut, a naked mole rat, delivers a cake to his friend Otis, a guinea pig, only for Otis to put it under glass to save for a special occasion. Peanut freezes in surprise, but in true “have your cake and eat it, too” fashion, Peanut brings a second cake that the two are free to eat for no reason but to enjoy it. The book subtly explores grief, with Peanut using his absent sister Pearl’s recipe, though readers aren’t told what happened to her. Her loss is felt more keenly in the next story, in which Peanut plants seeds Pearl left behind and wishes he could play in the yard with her until a sign from above—a rainbow—suggests that the two siblings are still connected. The third story, which sees Peanut and Otis musing about how to preserve treasured memories, rounds out this trio of bittersweet yet ultimately uplifting tales. Some readers may miss the full meaning of the stories at first glance, but visual cues such as framed photos of Pearl with Peanut and Otis make it clearer that the duo are working
through loss. Collier’s cartoonish art, dominated by a yellow, teal, and magenta color scheme, effectively conveys a wide range of emotions. A feel-good tale of pals bonding as they grapple with grief. (tips for storing memories) (Graphic fiction. 6-8)
Humphrey, Anna | Illus. by Irma Kniivila Tundra Books (176 pp.) | $13.99
May 21, 2024 | 9781774881262
Series: Fluffle Bunnies, 1
Rapscallion rabbit siblings take over their neighborhood park.
In Canada, a group of baby bunnies is known as a fluffle. The phenomenal fluffle in this graphic novel consists of a trio—Biggie, Boingy, and Flop—whose mother hops off as soon as they’re weaned. She heads to Brazil to train as a bunny jujitsu master, and the young rabbits must forge their own way in the world, or at the very least within the bounds of their local park. They have many rivals to contend with, including cheeky chipmunks, sharptoothed dogs, and a resourceful crew of raccoons. Adorable though they might be, the threesome decide that they’ll have to toughen up to get ahead in life, and so their “reign of endearing evil begins.” In a bid to usurp park power from the raccoons, the bunnies hatch a devious—and hilarious—plan. A folksy, fedora-clad moth who witnessed the fluffle’s rise to power narrates with aplomb. The rabbits’ wacky wiles and high-energy humor are reminiscent of Aaron Blabey’s snarky, silly Bad Guys series, but the real-world environs of city park life (overflowing trash cans and dingy, shadowy restrooms) offer a uniquely delightful locale in which to encounter these affable antiheroes. The characters’ energetic, simplified facial expressions and fast-paced physical comedy amplify the wacky narrative to a charming degree.
Absurd animal antics in a familiarly funny setting. (Graphic fiction. 6-9)
Iman, Ashley | Illus. by Gladys Jose Kokila (40 pp.) | $18.99
May 14, 2024 | 9780593618899
A story of hope for incessant talkers.
Ruby René, a dark-skinned Black girl with big curly hair, loves to talk. She listens to informative podcasts, adores science, and collects interesting facts that she’s eager to share—often. In class, Mrs. Hansen gets exasperated with Ruby’s talking and calls her parents. Knowing she’s in trouble, Ruby frets and decides to learn Morse code to communicate. Ruby’s concerned and empathetic dad gives her a purple journal so she can write her thoughts down in class instead of speaking them aloud. This quiets Ruby, but she gets so wrapped up with writing in the book that she hears little of Mrs. Hansen’s lessons. In gym class, Ruby can’t contain herself and shares a dodgeball fact with a classmate, and a ball clocks her on the head. While in the office nursing her noggin, Ruby encounters Principal Gale, who suggests something that changes everything. This story emphasizes creative solutions to loquaciousness that don’t squelch a child’s spirit. Ruby is surrounded by caring Black adults (including Mrs. Hansen and Ms. Gale) who encourage her inquisitiveness but help her channel it into positive avenues. Speech and thought bubbles give readers a view into Ruby’s perspective, and Jose’s whimsical, colorful digital illustrations depict a diverse classroom. A wonderful tale certain to inspire youngsters to find creative outlets for their curiosity. (Picture book. 4-7)
Jackson, Richard | Illus. by Brian Floca Neal Porter/Holiday House (40 pp.)
$18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780823444953
A child draws on memories of the past to pull strength for the present and future.
Tim and his father travel along the “upper South Branch / of the Au Sable River…in Michigan country” for a summertime camping trip. After driving over tough terrain to the campsite, they pitch a tent, dig a fire pit, and head to the river for a day of fishing. Dad teaches Tim important skills such as how to prepare his catch and properly cook it while the two gather by a nighttime campfire. When the hoot of an owl awakens them in the middle of the night, father and son further bond over the day’s events as they have a few laughs. The book ends on a wintry day, with Tim and his mother looking at pictures of his father. Dad is now fighting in an unnamed “far-away war,” but Tim’s memories of that day linger. By turns verbose and spare, the late Jackson’s text works well with Floca’s illustrations, which are rendered in a soft palette to showcase the natural world’s elegant beauty. Floca’s signature pen, ink, and watercolor art captures the spirit of memories, showing that they can be both immediate and cloudy. Young readers will readily relate to the universal experience of thinking about positive times when missing a loved one. Characters present white. A powerful celebration of the parent-child bond and the moments that make an impact. (illustrator’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)
Jägerfeld, Jenny | Trans. by B.J. Woodstein
Arctis Books (150 pp.) | $16.00
Feb. 27, 2024 | 9781646900404
Marcus makes a best friend who doesn’t know that Marcus is trans.
Eleven-year-old Marcus is visiting Malmö, Sweden, with his mom for the summer. Away from his home in Stockholm, Marcus can be himself, without telling anyone that he’s transgender. He meets Mikkel, a rowdy boy a little older than him, and they quickly become close friends. But when Mikkel sees Marcus’ pre-transition passport photo, he feels lied to and betrayed. The basic plot is recognizable from decades-old trans media but transposed onto tween boys, luckily with a happy ending. Narrating in a frank, breathlessly fast manner, Marcus is a likable protagonist, though his voice doesn’t always feel realistically adolescent. While the book attempts to present a message of acceptance toward trans people (as well as a lesson about not judging people with other dialects, a holdover from the original Swedish that will fly over most young American readers’ heads), the storyline is cliched and inadvertently implies that Marcus did something wrong by not initially sharing that he’s trans. Several insensitive moments crop up, such as Marcus referring to his soft-spoken babysitter, who apparently has obsessive-compulsive disorder, as a “crazy, half-mute person.” The story of the boys’ developing friendship does shine out from underneath, but it’s not worth digging to find it.
Too much chaff, not enough wheat. (Fiction. 10-13)
A thrilling tale of bravery, friendship, and the power of signing.
MONSTER HANDS
John, Jory | Illus. by Pete Oswald | Harper/ HarperCollins (32 pp.) | $17.99
March 26, 2024 | 9780063329560
Series: I Can Read!
The cool beans again step up to do a timorous fellow legume a fava…this time at the pool. Will a rash decision to tackle the multistory super-slide lead to another embarrassing watery fail for our shy protagonist? Nope, for up the stairs right behind comes a trio of cool beans, each a different type and color, all clad in nothing but dark shades. They make an offer: “It’s not as scary if you go with friends!” As the knobby nerd explains once the thrilling ride down is done, “They all realized that I just needed some encouragement and support.” Just to make sure that both cool and uncool readers get the message, the narrator lets us know that “there are plenty of kind folks who have my back. They’re always there when I need them.” The beany bonhomie doesn’t end at the bottom of the slide, with all gliding down to the shallow end of the pool (“3 INCHES. NO DIVING”) for a splashy finale. This latest early reader starring characters from John and Oswald’s immensely popular Food Group series will be a hit with fans. Fun accessories, such as a bean who rocks pink cat-eye frames, add some pizzazz to the chromatically and somatotypically varied cast. Another quirky take on the series theme that it’s cool to be kind. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Kane, Karen & Jonaz McMillan | Illus. by Dion MBD | Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593532294
Two friends use American Sign Language to ward off a monster.
After reading a frightening story, Milo worries that there’s a monster under his bed.
Luckily, Milo’s best friend Mel’s bedroom window faces his, and both children use ASL to communicate. Mel helps Milo use “monster hands”— fingers spread and bent into claws—to cast shadows on the wall that will scare away anything lurking beneath the bed. With Mel’s help, Milo learns to be a little bit braver, but not at the expense of his gentle nature. Many of the signs that the characters use in the dialogue are captured in the illustrations; readers who don’t already sign will come away knowing the ASL signs for roar, chomp, laugh, and hug, each of which is clearly depicted. Children will eagerly sign or shout along with the most exciting moments. MBD uses color, light, and perspective to create cute yet dramatic illustrations. The shadowy monsters that Milo imagines are a bit creepy but never too terrifying. This is an excellent read for any child fretting about things that go bump in the night, as well as an effortless celebration of ASL. Milo has straight brown hair and light skin, while Mel has straight black hair and brown skin.
A thrilling tale of bravery, friendship, and the power of signing. (Picture book. 3-7)
Karim, Violet Chan | Random House Graphic (240 pp.) | $21.99
May 14, 2024 | 9780593425237
A human girl accidentally ends up at a summer camp for vampires. Maya has had a rough seventh grade year, with no friends and only her passion for cooking to occupy her. On the last day of school, she learns of two surprises: Her dad’s girlfriend is going to move in with them (which is big and scary), and she gets to go to a culinary camp (which is a dream come true). When Maya’s dad leaves her at the drop-off point, she accidentally gets on the wrong bus. She soon learns that she’s on the one headed to Camp Dracula, not Camp Umami. Fortunately, the vampires aren’t as scary as they’re portrayed to be in human movies— they have sharp teeth, but they eat regular food and only drink animal blood from juice boxes—and Maya’s cabinmates are mostly pretty nice. Maya tries to hide the fact that she’s a human, but she slowly learns to advocate for herself and make friends, and she even gets to practice some cooking. This well-executed graphic novel explores the valuable theme of finding people who will welcome, support, and stand up for us despite our differences. One of Maya’s vampire cabinmates also learns how to notice the impact of her words on others. The mix of humor and tween awkwardness makes for a sincere story. Karim’s colorful art is bold and animated. Maya and her father have brown skin and hair; there’s racial diversity among the supporting cast members. Delightful. (Graphic paranormal. 8-12)
For another great paranormal summer camp novel, visit Kirkus online.
Katzman, Rebecca | Illus. by Ellen Duda Scholastic (112 pp.) | $21.99
May 7, 2024 | 9781339046501
A succinct, snappy look at U.S. presidents, their duties, and voters’ crucial responsibilities in electing them.
Packed with facts, this primer is notable for its clear, coherent font choice and its colorful, clean images that make it stand out among similar titles. Small callout boxes along the way clarify points for anyone newer to the ins and outs of American government, while persuasive, age-appropriate writing effectively makes clear why the book’s contents are so significant. Katzman also lays out the differences between the Democrat and Republican Parties (and looks at several independent parties), explores primaries and caucuses, and discusses campaigning. The book also doesn’t have a recency bias, since the author includes facts about a variety of presidents, such as George Washington and William Henry Harrison (who gave the longest inauguration speech in history and was the first president to die while in office). This history is balanced well with more recent leaders, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump, which will resonate with young people hearing and reading the news today. Children reading quickly might be tripped up by a slightly confusing timeline, but the text’s exploration of fairness in politics, including well-written and thorough explanations of gerrymandering and voter suppression, makes this a highly recommended addition. An accurate, necessary read for young voters-in-training. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 7-10)
An accurate, necessary read for young voters-in-training.
YOUR VOTE MATTERS
King, Thomas | Illus. by Yong Ling Kang Tundra Books (40 pp.) | $18.99 May 28, 2024 | 9780735269361
After Nana’s funeral, Xavier and his mother clean out her attic. Afraid of monsters or dragons, Xavier dons his bicycle helmet and grabs a wooden spoon before he, his mother, and his cat, Comet, head upstairs. They don’t find anything scary—just unusual old objects. To dispel Xavier’s sadness over Nana’s death, his mother tells him, “We’ll make sure to keep her in our stories.” As they open boxes, Xavier learns about Nana and his mother. When they find paintbrushes, his mother says that Nana was an artist. Xavier says, “I’m an artist, too.” After his mother shows him a tiny pair of shoes, he’s surprised to learn that she was once a child. Xavier finds a cloth that his mother calls a “green baby swing.” Though it may not look like a swing, Xavier’s mother sings quietly: “It isn’t a swing like a swing in the park. / It’s made out of tenderness, knotted and dark.” The full song, repeated several times, describes its “swaying motion” as it was used to lull babies to sleep, including his mom and Xavier. Children will soon be singing along and demanding a baby swing of their own. Featuring soft, muted watercolor and pencil illustrations, this gentle, understated tale about a grandparent’s passing may inspire families to share their own memories. Xavier and his mother are brown-skinned. A tender tale that pulls generations together. (Picture book. 3-7)
Lamb, Susan | Illus. by Sean Lewis
Flying Eye Books (80 pp.) | $20.99
April 2, 2024 | 9781838741600
Series: Earth’s Incredible Places
An introduction to multiple aspects of the park, from foundational rock to overarching sky. This title’s content parallels Jason Chin’s 2017 Caldecott Honor–winning book Grand Canyon (which adds a narrative thread), but unlike Chin’s romantic watercolors, Lewis’ information-rich designs evoke stylish WPA posters, dominated by rust red and indigo. Following a map and an introduction citing the canyon’s jaw-dropping statistics (length, width, depth, area), Lamb explains its formation, providing some basic geological facts along the way. One chapter covers the people who have lived in the canyon from ancient times to the present day, including the Cohonina, Havasupai, and Navajo peoples; some of their legends are featured. The author notes past management mistakes and discusses the people who explored the canyon and helped preserve it for future generations, such as naturalist John Muir. Lamb also covers the contributions of various women, including architect Mary Jane Colter and botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter. The abundant and unique wildlife earn the most extensive coverage: Lamb analyzes ecosystems at various elevations and the habitats they offer. The in-depth pages feature characteristic animals (monarch butterflies, peregrine falcons) and plants (cacti, ponderosa trees), explaining their adaptation and potential challenges from climate
change. History, biology, botany, ecology, geology, and human appreciation for beauty, security, and adventure—it’s all here; readers will want to snap up this one.
A fact-filled tribute to this national natural treasure. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 7-11)
LaMotte, Lily | Illus. by Ann Xu & Sunmi HarperAlley (208 pp.) | $24.99 April 23, 2024 | 9780062973900
Two sisters rekindle their relationship as they immerse themselves in their culture at a Taiwanese American summer camp.
Middle schoolers Michelle and Claire were once two peas in a pod, but as they grew older, the sisters drifted apart. While Claire proudly embraces their Taiwanese heritage, Michelle wants nothing more than to fit in at their predominantly white school. To her older sister’s disapproval, Michelle does everything that she can to impress Jess, the white-presenting leader of a popular clique, even at the cost of her own comfort. In the hopes of giving them some quality bonding time, their parents send them both to summer camp, where they meet new friends and learn about Taiwanese culture. Despite some early skepticism, the two begin to reconnect and see each other in a different light. After forging genuine friendships and gaining a newfound appreciation for her cultural background, Michelle rethinks her relationship with Jess. Although the dialogue is a little clunky at times, the sisters’ bond feels realistic; with nuance and care, this graphic novel captures the struggles and frustrations of those caught between cultures. Michelle’s awkwardness at camp and her anxiety while overthinking interactions with Jess will also feel relatable to anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider. The artwork has an appealingly
exaggerated, mangalike flair, vividly bringing to life the sisters’ emotions. A solid tale of sisterhood, friendship, and finding comfort and pride in one’s cultural identity. (sheet music) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)
Adapt. by Law, Jessica | Illus. by Brian Fitzgerald Barefoot Books (24 pp.) | $16.99 | April 2, 2024 9798888590706 | Series: Barefoot Singalongs
A rousin’, shantylike ditty, slightly shortened and enthusiastically illustrated. This traditional Irish song is a cumulative rhyme (like “The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly”) that encourages readers to join in. The stanzas tell a story that comes full circle. We’re introduced to a “rattlin’ bog,” which is in the valley (naturally). In the bog, there’s a tree; on the tree, there’s a branch; on the branch, there’s a nest; in the nest, there’s an egg; in the egg, there’s a bird; in the bird, there’s a seed; and in the seed, there’s a tree. Backmatter provides information on Irish bogs and their ecological importance, especially in light of climate change, as well as how an egg becomes a bird and a seed a tree. A host of colorful, stylized insects, birds, and plants fill the pages. The Irish hare, common lizard, dragonfly, and a few examples of vegetation are detailed in the backmatter (which, alas, also conflates climate and weather), but many more creatures and plants appear in the vibrant illustrations, although none are labeled. Unobtrusive identification could have enriched the science component here, especially for older audiences. Still, the jaunty verse is sure to have readers chanting along, and the visuals are eye-catching. The central bird is artistically designed, its egg flaunting a dynamic motif. Music and lyrics are appended, along with a QR code to an audio version performed by the Speks. Sure to spur a raucous singalong. (Picture book. 3-7)
Leung, Flo | Owlkids Books (32 pp.)
$18.95 | March 12, 2024 | 9781771474634
Max’s birthday is coming up—will he be able to enjoy the foods he loves?
Max, a young boy of Chinese descent, is adept at reading cues from the kitchen. Tonight he smells garlic, basil, and melting cheese and knows that the family will be having spaghetti and meatballs, his favorite. The next night, Max sets the table with blue-and-white bowls and smells ginger and sesame, all of which means his relatives will be coming, and they’ll probably be eating congee, “not-toosweet” desserts, sizzling stir-fry, and dumplings. While he appreciates these Cantonese dishes, Max “can’t help thinking about other foods he likes,” such as tacos and pizza. On Max’s birthday, he wishes he could go to an Italian restaurant and eat cake with vanilla frosting and sprinkles, but the family’s plan for dinner at his grandparents’ place likely means they’ll be having Chinese food. Surrounded by loved ones, Max is pleasantly surprised by the meal his cousins have prepared: a fusion of Italian and Chinese cuisine, with a birthday mango cake complete with vanilla frosting and sprinkles— all served from the blue-and-white dishes his grandparents brought with them when they emigrated from Hong Kong. The straightforward narrative—a loving example of how young people can make room for multiple cultures—is accompanied by large textured blocks of colors layered with simple lines and shapes that add to the overall charm of the tale.
A heartwarming story of love and food. (Picture book. 5-8)
For more by Flo Leung, visit Kirkus online.
The actor’s You Can Be a Good Friend (No Matter What!) is slated for publication in June.
Taraji P. Henson will make her children’s literature debut later this year.
Zonderkidz will publish the actor’s You Can Be a Good Friend (No Matter What!), illustrated by Paul Kellam, this spring. The press says the book will be “a conversation starter about mental wellness, an important lesson in friendship and handling tough social situations, and a testament to the importance
of standing proud in one’s own uniqueness.”
Henson is known for her work in films including Hustle & Flow, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Hidden Figures, and in the series Person of Interest and Empire. She is the author of a previous book, the autobiography Around the Way Girl
Her children’s book will follow a young girl named Lil TJ, who is eager to make friends on the first day of school. She encounters a bully at school but learns to stay true to herself despite his mockery.
Henson announced her book in a video on Instagram, saying, “Mental health struggles can start even in childhood, and oftentimes it starts with being bullied. This book isn’t just about being bullied, though. It’s about how children all have something different about them, and being different is what makes them so special. So this book is for the kids who feel different. This book is for the parents who want their kids to accept differences.”
You Can Be a Good Friend (No Matter What!) is scheduled for publication on June 18. —M.S.
AWARDS // CHILDREN'S
The author is known for her fantasy books for young readers, including The Dark Is Rising Sequence.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announced that Susan Cooper has been named a Damon Knight Grand Master, a lifetime achievement award given to an author of science fiction or fantasy literature.
Cooper was born and raised in England and educated at the University of Oxford. She worked as a journalist before making her literary debut in 1964 with the science fiction novel Mandrake.
One year later, she published Over Sea, Under Stone, a fantasy novel for young readers
For reviews of Susan Cooper’s books, visit Kirkus online.
that would become the first installment in The Dark Is Rising Sequence, which also includes The Dark Is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree The Grey King won the prestigious John Newbery Medal for children’s literature. She is also the author of several picture books for children, including Frog, illustrated by Jane Browne; The Word Pirates, illustrated by Steven Kellogg; and The Shortest Day, illustrated by Carson Ellis.
In a statement, Jeffe Kennedy, the SFWA president, said, “Susan Cooper possesses the rare gift of being able to write for young people with a resonance that endures all through their adult lives. I feel as if The Dark Is Rising books have always been a part of my life. I memorized poems and passages from those books, which I can still recite today.”
The Grand Master Award was first given to Robert A. Heinlein in 1975. Other recipients include Andrew Norton, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Mercedes Lackey.—M.S.
Susan Cooper
| Illus. by
Erika Meza Roaring Brook Press (40 pp.)$19.99 | May 21, 2024 | 9781250861221
A young boy must adjust to a new home after a recent move.
It isn’t clear why Juno and his mother “lost their home,” but it’s obvious that the little boy is feeling overwhelmed. When they arrive at their new house, they are welcomed by the song of mourning doves, but Juno isn’t impressed. Big changes mean lots of worries: His new room doesn’t feel like his, the grocery store doesn’t stock his favorite cereal, and the kids at his new school don’t talk to him. Finally home again, Juno lets out his frustration: “This is a terrible place!” His yelling startles the neighboring mourning doves from their poorly placed nest atop the gate. The following day, movers accidentally dislodge the nest. Juno tries his best to rebuild it and bring the mourning doves back. They return but stay away from the nest. As time passes, Juno begins to settle into his new home. Then one day, he spots a bird in the nest and, with some help from his new friends, works hard to keep them safe. Created with charcoal, pencil, and Adobe Photoshop, the realistic illustrations work in harmony with the straightforward text. The art makes effective use of texture and angles to amplify Juno’s emotions. This steadily paced story will reassure young readers that change is scary—but not always bad. Juno and his mom are brown-skinned. A feel-good ode to resilience.
(Picture book. 4-8)
Llenas, Anna | Trans. by Ana Izquierdo
Little, Brown (56 pp.) | $18.99 | May 7, 2024 9780316574525 | Series: The Color Monster, 3
When you’re down, who ya gonna call? Dr. Color Monster!
A young girl named Nuna, who has paper-white skin and dark pigtails, is feeling strange, so she visits Dr. Color Monster, a green, snaggle-toothed, horned monster who “helps heal emotions.” She tells him that yesterday she did something she didn’t want to do (readers don’t find out what). His examination reveals that Nuna’s discomfort level is high. Out comes the emotions toolkit, filled with self-soothing marvels such as a soft blanket, a stuffed toy, a hug, photos of loved ones, and more. Dr. Color Monster and Nuna take deep, relaxing breaths together. He advises a few remedies: squeezing clay, drawing a picture of her discomfort, blowing bubbles, dancing, and saying words, free association–style. Nuna concludes the visit with a big hug, which happily cures her. Before she leaves, the doctor gives her the “no” syrup—something to take in case she needs to steel her resolve and say no to people in the future. Originally published in Spain and translated from Catalan, this wise and gently humorous tale from art therapist Llenas will reassure readers that they, too, can find relief when they feel overwhelming or scary emotions; at least some of the soothing ideas in the toolkit are readily obtainable. The colorfully scrawled illustrations are appealingly childlike. This is one doctor kids will be happy to visit. (create your own emotions toolkit, message to families and educators) (Picture book. 4-7)
Lowe, Hayley | Orca (32 pp.) | $21.95
May 14, 2024 | 9781459838079
A mutual love of pie seals an affectionate relationship.
Noor and Granddad are separated by an ocean (though their locations are unspecified). Still, they share a common passion—pie—which they eat together every summer, when Noor and Mom travel by plane to visit Granddad and Nana. Then Noor and her grandfather bake up a storm. The most special—albeit bittersweet—one is the “time-to-saygoodbye pie,” the signal that it’s time for Noor and Mom to leave. But Noor and Granddad still meet virtually for their Friday “pie reports,” where they discuss what’s going on in their lives. Just before Noor leaves this summer, she learns that Granddad’s health is declining; his “arm [has] been shaking more than usual.” Granddad calls these incidents “blue days.” As Granddad’s symptoms increase, he skips their pie reports, so Noor writes her reports and reads them aloud at their next visit. When necessary, Granddad rests; sometimes, he’s better. At story’s end, Noor gives Granddad a hopeful card that reads “For when you need to find your way out of the blue” and tells him he’s stronger than he knows. This upbeat, warmhearted tale bubbles with sweetness; children will appreciate the protagonists’ intergenerational bond as well as the food theme. The delightful illustrations were created with pencil and graphite sticks on paper, then digitally colored; kids will savor those pastries. Noor and Mom have light-brown skin. Granddad is lighterskinned, and Nana is brown-skinned. A cozy read to share, especially with beloved older relatives. (Picture book. 5-8)
For
A cozy read to share, especially with beloved older relatives. THE PIE REPORTS
Tree. Table. Book.
Lowry, Lois | Clarion/HarperCollins (208 pp.) $18.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9780063299504
In the Newberywinning author’s latest, a girl grapples with a beloved elder’s dementia.
Eleven-year-old Sophia (who goes by Sophie) Henry Winslow’s best friend is Sophie Gershowitz, her 88-year-old neighbor. Sophie Gershowitz’s adult son is concerned with her cognitive decline and thinks it may be time for her to move to an assisted living facility. The younger Sophie decides to prepare her friend for the cognitive tests so she’ll pass them and be able to stay. When Sophie Gershowitz struggles to recall three words— tree, table, book —Sophie Winslow invites her to recall related childhood stories in the hopes that it will help. Sophie Gershowitz shares slice-of-life tales from her girlhood in Poland before revealing how everything changed when World War II began. Sophie Winslow reflects: “I had never really got it, never understood history, how things fit together, because I needed someone to tell me the stories…of how things are lost, and what that means and how it hurts.” While the explanation of historical events is age-appropriate and at times compelling, the book feels more geared toward an adult sensibility than a child’s. The pacing is slow, and young Sophie’s storyline seems like an overly padded, self-conscious framing device. The protagonist is a quirk-filled bundle of idiosyncrasies; Lowry aims for precocious but sometimes stumbles into pretentious and judgmental, particularly with young Sophie’s
attitudes toward her friend Ralphie’s love of junk food. Physical descriptions of characters are minimal. A tale of intergenerational bonding that may resonate with adult readers but will leave youngsters cold.
(Fiction. 8-12)
Ludwig, Sidura | Illus. by Sophia Vincent Guy Candlewick (40 pp.) | $18.99 | May 14, 2024
9781536225495
A meditative look at Shabbat preparations. A pregnant mother—referred to as Ima—and a child, both with light skin and voluminous black hair, wake early to begin making challah dough before sitting down to enjoy Shabbat dinner with the rest of the family. Carefully laying out each step of the baking process, from mixing ingredients to braiding the loaves, the book evokes Shabbat itself, conveying the beauty of taking time to rest and appreciate loved ones. The text highlights minutiae of the characters’ day—steam rising from morning tea, sun shining through the kitchen window, the slow expansion of the proofing dough— encouraging readers to notice the small details in their own lives. Though the figures’ faces are too simple to carry much expression, the mixed-media illustrations depict a precisely curated home with a luxuriant garden, another subtle reminder of the importance of devoting time and attention to the things we love. Line breaks in the text suggest a slow, lyrical reading tempo, congruent with the ruminative content. After the close of Shabbat, the book gestures toward the future and implies the passing of time; as the book ends, a new day begins, with the
family ready to make more challah and Ima holding the new baby. Intertwining the tactile rituals of baking with the religious and cultural heft of Shabbat, a contemplative paean to challah. (author’s note, recipe for challah, Hebrew glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)
Magoon, Kekla | Illus. by Brittany Jackson Candlewick (384 pp.) | $18.99
May 7, 2024 | 9781536230888
A restless, adventure-seeking tween finds herself in a special library. Eleven-year-old Delilah “Dally” Peteharrington is struggling with the death of her grandfather and the loss of the love, acceptance, and excitement he brought to her life. Her mother grieves by becoming more rigid, insisting on lessons to prepare Dally to take over the family business. After her mother refuses to allow her to join an afterschool club, Dally steals an envelope Grandpa left her, which her mom has insisted on locking away until she’s come of age. Inside, she finds a mysterious map that leads her to a library full of books that are portals to the past. From them, Dally learns things her mother refuses to talk about and has adventures she never could have imagined, including going on a pirate ship. Dally is biracial; her mom is white, but Dally knows little about her deceased Black father, and the more she learns about both sides of her family, the more intrigued she becomes. It becomes clear that her destiny is greater than simply assuming the place her mother is preparing her for. Multiple award-winner Magoon has crafted an engrossing story that skillfully combines a coming-of-age story with fantasy and historical fiction. Dally is an irresistible protagonist, full
of curiosity and longing for the joy she experienced with her grandfather. The lively, well-written narrative contains many surprises, pulling readers into Dally’s life and the incredible choices she must make.
A deeply satisfying, page-turning, genre-defying read. (Time-travel fantasy. 8-12)
Mardini, Samir
& Marissa SuchytaIllus. by Violet Tobacco | Mayo Clinic Press (40 pp.) | $17.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9798887700113
Strategies to help kids with facial differences navigate others’ reactions.
“No one’s face is ordinary,” the authors, both medical doctors, declare, but “sometimes when you’re extraordinary, it isn’t easy to fit in.” Sometimes people stare, whisper, or ask questions “because there is no one else exactly like you.” To mitigate such challenges, the authors walk kids through a breathing exercise: blowing a huge bubble of “ love and care and kindness” that stares can’t penetrate. Children are then invited to name three things they’re proud of; illustrated examples include playing sports, baking, and singing. Should anyone try to burst their bubbles, kids can exit an uncomfortable conversation and find a friend: “Your bubble will always follow.” As youngsters talk to trusted people, their confidence bubble “grows…and grows…and grows! ” Racially diverse children with conditions including vitiligo and cleft palate demonstrate these strategies in bright cartoon illustrations. Questions such as “What is a mean comment that someone has said to you before? What would you say to them from inside your bubble?” invite readers to practice handling difficult interactions. Mardini and Suchyta matter-of-factly acknowledge tough feelings such as loneliness while
portraying differences in a positive light: “Your face is one part of the amazing person you are.” The book’s reminder to readers that they are unique, powerful, and entitled to ignore rude comments emphasizes children’s agency—all crucial ingredients for confidence. An authors’ note offers tips for caregivers. Practical and empowering. (Informational picture book. 4-8)
Matias, Carlos | Illus. by Gracey Zhang Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (40 pp.)
$19.99 | May 28, 2024 | 9780063271456
A young boy learns the value of a quarter in Matias and Zhang’s beguiling picture book.
It’s Monday and the first day of school. Ready to become a “niño grande,” Ernesto prepares for the walk to school—this time without his parents to accompany him! With his lucky sneakers and favorite Mets cap on, he goes to the door, “feelin’ freshhhh!” But wait! His mom cuts him off, handing him a shiny new quarter for a pay phone in case of an emergency. A kiss goodbye, and Ernesto heads out with his friends. The group stops at Señor José’s bodega, where baseball cards tempt Ernesto. But he refuses to use his quarter. For the entire school week, Ernesto receives an emergency quarter from his mamá each morning and each day refuses sweet temptations such as jugos de frutas and tamales with steadfast determination. “These quarters are for emergencies.” Fittingly, the story ends on an unexpected and delightful note. In his picture-book debut, Matias serves up a playful slice-of-life tale that bubbles with heart and gentle humor. A palpable portrait of community emerges through each named character and local tiendita introduced, guiding readers through Ernesto’s neighborhood. Likewise, Zhang’s gouache,
watercolor, and ink artwork is richly dense, with lush colors, angled and wide perspectives, and expressionistic details that conjure a bustling city. Ernesto and his family are Dominican, while the surrounding community demonstrates racial diversity. A vibrant, bighearted account of a child’s first forays into independence. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)
McCormick, Patricia & Mevan Babakar
Illus. by Yas Imamura | Balzer + Bray/ HarperCollins (40 pp.) | $19.99 | May 7, 2024 9780063056992
Co-author and former child refugee Babakar remembers a special joy from her harrowing journey.
Young Mevan adores “lush and hilly” Kurdistan, where her family has lived for generations. Surrounded by loving relatives and community members, the budding poet feels “ten feet tall.” That all changes when Iraqi soldiers push her family out of their home. Depicting the soldiers with uniforms but no guns, the art works with the text to soften the desperation of the situation without glossing over it—a tricky yet essential needle to thread. As Mevan and her parents make an arduous voyage from Kurdistan to Turkey to Azerbaijan to Russia, she feels increasingly small. The art’s muted, earthy palette adeptly captures their alienation while also highlighting the nature (or lack thereof) in their surroundings. After two years in Russia, the family goes to the “green and bright” Netherlands, where a kind handyman named Egbert gives Mevan a bicycle. A wordless spread shows Mevan riding playfully around the neighborhood while her parents and Egbert look on—enjoying a carefree experience at last. Eventually the family finds a permanent home in another country,
A vibrant, bighearted account of a child’s first forays into independence.
EMERGENCY QUARTERS
but they aren’t able to say goodbye to Egbert. Mevan never forgets his kindness, but it’s a bittersweet ending. Relegated to the backmatter is an astonishing revelation: a photo of Babakar and Egbert, along with an epilogue and author’s note stating that they reunited years later.
An important, stirring tale—just be sure to read the backmatter.
(Picture-book memoir. 5-9)
McCullough, Joy | Illus. by Shane Cluskey Atheneum (288 pp.) | $17.99
May 21, 2024 | 9781665944236
Siblings Basil and Dahlia, orphaned and concerned about their futures, go from the frying pan into the fire. While aboard a train to Philadelphia, Basil, 12, and Dahlia, 11, learn that their social worker plans to separate them and place them in different homes. Determined to stay together, Dahlia jumps off the moving train, followed by a hesitant Basil. From there, they have a wild series of adventures before arriving in New York City, where, hungry and tired, they cross paths with celebrity baker Laurel Fox, who takes them home and feeds them. It should be a sweet ending, but Ms. Fox has truly nefarious plans. This twist on “Hansel and Gretel” is relayed by a comically arch third-person narrator: “It had been a blissful childhood thus far, but the blissful phase was over and a distinctly less blissful phase was poised to begin.” The narrator
addresses readers directly, cautioning them and coaxing them through some of the more uncomfortable issues, such as the guilt each sibling carries over the death of their parents. Laurel Fox is a pleasingly over-the-top villain surrounded by ridiculously self-serving sycophants. The cast, which primarily reads white, is captured in edgy, stylish, black-and-white illustrations that have a retro feeling and enhance the drama. A deliciously satisfying romp. (Fiction. 8-12)
McGrath, Robyn | Illus. by Liz Wong Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 28, 2024 | 9781665917933
A picture-book biography introduces mystery writer Agatha Christie to young readers.
Sheaves of papers and pictures of characters and plot elements swirl around the protagonist as she struggles to translate the stories in her head into a publishable manuscript. These scenes of artistic creation follow depictions of the young girl, then woman, in lateVictorian interiors rendered in sunny pastel hues. Visual easter eggs from Christie’s mystery novels appear here and there, but they will likely be lost on young readers who have not yet encountered the legendary author. Likewise, the plot—curious, observant child grows into determined writer— may also prove less than engaging to youngsters. McGrath’s spare, present-tense text emphasizes her subject’s love of stories and curiosity as a child,
then her struggles to bring her observations and ideas into a coherent plot. The techniques she uses—taking notes, exploring characters’ voices, tightening and pacing plots—make for solid advice for budding writers but thin gruel for children hoping for a story. A plot requires conflict, and though young Christie suffered the early loss of her father and discouragement from teachers, McGrath is unable or unwilling to lean into these experiences to deepen her characterization. A two-page biographical note written for an older audience than the primary text provides a fuller picture, underscoring the inadequacy of the effort as a whole. A fundamental mismatch between book and audience. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, glossary) (Picture-book biography. 5-8)
Melleby, Nicole | Algonquin (256 pp.) $16.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781643753133
A gay tween struggles to go back into the closet while temporarily living with her grandma. Between her dad’s new job and her mom’s post-miscarriage pregnancy, Winnie’s family has a lot going on. They send Winnie to stay with her grandma for a “summer at the shore” in New Jersey. Winnie’s angry. With a name like Winnifred Maude Nash, the 12-year-old fits right in at her grandma’s book club for seniors. The problem: She can’t quite be her true self, because her parents asked her not to tell her grandma she’s gay. Winnie eventually makes friends her own age—Pippa Lai and Lucía Delgado—who let her be her authentic self. But what she really needs is to feel “held” by going to Pride in New York City. Trouble is, Pride is the same day as Pippa’s annual family party, which
Winnie agreed to go to. What’s a girl to do? Melleby’s latest expertly captures the tumultuousness of tween emotions through its dialogue and third-person narration. While many in Winnie’s generation are so confident in their queerness, the story importantly touches on how it’s not always safe to be out. Multiple queer characters—peers, adults, and elders alike—contribute to an exceptional sense of community that shows the many ways support can manifest. Winnie and her family read white; Pippa’s surname cues Chinese ancestry, and Lucía is implied Latine. A powerful, emotional look at queerness, pride, and what it truly means to feel held. (Fiction. 9-12)
Melvin, Alice & William Snow
llus. by Alice Melvin | Thames & Hudson (32 pp.)
$19.95 | May 14, 2024 | 9780500653289
Series: Mouse’s Adventures
Mouse embarks on a leisurely boating expedition through the countryside.
Mouse’s Wood (2022) depicted the small rodent at home over the course of a year. Now Mouse decides to visit a seaside friend. He boards a small red rowboat and, waved off by several anthropomorphic animal pals (one wears a dress; Mouse and other friends sport trousers), sets out from the wood, down the lazy river on a sunny summer day. A map tracing Mouse’s journey can be found on the frontispiece. As in the earlier book, the action is minimal; the appeal is in the minutely detailed objects on the winding shores: boating equipment, homes, plants, and animals. Movable flaps allow readers a glimpse at the well-stocked interiors of a boathouse studio, a houseboat, stores, and other places as Mouse drifts by. Mouse and the other small critters are cut from the same cloth as the characters in Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series; Melvin’s sketchier style makes them
scruffier cousins of Beatrix Potter’s creations. Modest quatrains rock readers along as gently as the river. Multiple reads will be necessary to spot the dozens of items found throughout and inventoried on the final page (“What Mouse Packed”), let alone the many more that aren’t labeled but that will nevertheless lure an attentive eye. Happy hours ahead on this river!
(Picture book. 4-8)
Merritt, Jonathan | Illus. by Joanna Carillo Running Press Kids (32 pp.)
$18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9780762485611
A boy’s spirits are lifted by a visit from his guncle. Henry doesn’t really fit in at school. The other kids think he’s weird. Luckily, his beloved guncle (presumably short for “gay uncle,” though the word gay is never used in the text) is here and is ready to help Henry learn to be himself. The “fabulous” guncle wears colorful clothes and a neckerchief, drives a yellow convertible, and has a French bulldog named Jimmy Chew. Bucking stereotypes, he is also a devout Christian and a football fan. The guncle is a fairy godmother–esque figure who appears, nameless, to whisk Henry off on a series of brief adventures—eating waffles, listening to show tunes, visiting the library and the zoo—and to impart an important lesson about self-acceptance before vanishing again. The friendly illustrations capture the guncle’s personality and depict a racially diverse community setting, with occasional fun background moments from the guncle’s dog and Henry’s cat and baby sibling. The message to love and be true to yourself is evergreen, and
the story may appeal to children, whether gay or not, who don’t fit in. The meter of the text is clunky at times, however, and it feels repetitive by the end. The plot has no significant rise and fall, suspense, or exciting page turns to hold young readers’ attention. Henry, the guncle, and their family present white. Goodhearted but less than engaging. (Picture book. 4-8)
Miller, Chanel | Philomel (160 pp.)
$17.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9780593624524
Miller, author of the awardwinning memoir Know My Name (2019), makes her middle-grade debut with the story of a Chinese American girl working to reunite the lost socks of New York City with their owners.
Inventive but lonely Magnolia Wu, 10, is resigned to a summer stuck at her parents’ laundromat, but her fortunes change when she meets Iris Lam, a Vietnamese American girl who’s just moved to New York. In Iris, Magnolia finds a kindred spirit who’s game to share lychee Popsicles, play at making cocoons out of sheets, and give cockroaches silly names to make them less scary. It’s Iris who notices the collection of partnerless socks in the laundromat and decides that the two of them should track down their rightful owners. Each sock mystery takes them somewhere new as they meet the queen of crossword puzzles, a girl who stars in ice cream
No public-domain tomfoolery here; this adaptation is an act of love.
WINNIE-THE-POOH
commercials, and a pancake chef with a passion for knitting. Thoughtful, creative, and compassionate, Magnolia and Iris are an enchanting pair. Miller’s pitch-perfect narrative voice balances humor and whimsy with harsher realities. While both girls struggle when they and their immigrant parents encounter racism, they’re buoyed by a cast of kind supporting characters as they process their emotions. Magnolia isn’t insulated from negative feelings; rather, her world is one where strength can be quiet, empathy can be learned, and community is critical. Final art not seen. Wildly funny, charming, and deeply heartfelt. (author’s note) (Fiction. 7-11)
Miller, Kelly Leigh | Atheneum (160 pp.) | $12.99 | May 28, 2024
9781665932127 | Series: Cloud Puppy
A fluffy pup and her teddy bear best friend experience the thrills of a comic book convention. Part cloud, part puppy, Cloud Puppy is all excitement when she picks up the newest volume of Dragonetta, a comic and TV series about a warrior princess, created by Kit Starlight. When Cloud Puppy learns that Kit Starlight will be attending a local comic convention, she takes off, trailing rainbows behind her, to tell her pal and fellow fan Berry Rose, a teddy bear with a horn and fairy wings. The friends decide to attend in costume (their first cosplay!) but don’t confirm their character choices with each other. When they realize they both want to be Dragonetta, they soon find themselves feuding: “But I’m the one who introduced you to the series!” “Yeah, but dressing up [was] MY idea!”
Along the way, Cloud Puppy and Berry Rose learn important lessons in friendship. Ebullient, utterly adorable cartoons convey the particulars of con prep and the rhythms and rules of the
event itself. The book reads like nothing less than an invitation to fandom more broadly: Come join us—we’re wild, wacky, and exhaustively creative over here! A secondary storyline in which Cloud Puppy, Berry Rose, and their friends Mossquatch and Jack draw comics together is further compelling enticement to budding young artists. A joyful celebration of fandom and friendship for curious young readers. (Graphic fiction. 6-10)
Milne, A.A. | Adapt. by Travis Dandro Illus. by Travis Dandro | Drawn & Quarterly (220 pp.) | $29.95 | April 16, 2024 9781770466968
No public-domain tomfoolery here; this adaptation is an act of love. An innocent, shirtless bear wanders through a forest. His blank, dot-eyed face is as aimless as his gait, although he is not without purpose: the location and consumption of honey. Woodland friends Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Kanga, Roo, and Rabbit all have encounters with this silly bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, often to lend each other a hand in friendship or in pursuit of a Woozle or Heffalump. The mixture of personalities balances the sugar-sweetness of the genteel adventures, from the morose Eeyore to the verbose Owl. Rabbit has mean intentions for Kanga and her baby Roo, but they never escalate beyond playful mischief. Christopher Robin, who’s drawn with paper-white skin, is the comparably capable human who cheerfully gets along with the many anthropomorphic animals. Dandro’s black-and-white artwork skillfully renders the forests, fields, and streams of the outdoor setting while amplifying the playful dialogue with precisely timed pauses. The inventive use of layouts and paneling makes this an adept
adaptation of Milne’s text to the graphic format. That silly old bear has learned some new tricks, and they may inspire a new generation of readers to discover the delights of Milne and Ernest H. Shepard’s original volumes.
Pull this out whenever you or someone nearby could use some joy and clever comics. (Graphic fiction. 7-10)
Moore, Michael Boulware | Illus. by Bryan Collier | Godwin Books (32 pp.)
$19.99 | May 28, 2024 | 9781250818355
Moore pays tribute to his great-great-grandfather’s courage and determination to be free.
When Robert Smalls was 12, he moved 70 miles from Beaufort to Charleston, South Carolina. America’s richest city at the time, Charleston built its wealth on the backs of enslaved people. Still enslaved but living semi-independently, Robert took advantage of the locale to learn to sail. When the Civil War began in 1861, Robert, now in his early 20s, married a woman named Hannah and had two children, Robert Jr. and Elizabeth. Hannah and the children belonged to slave master Samuel Kingman. When Robert asked Kingman if he could buy his family, Kingman agreed, and Robert put down a $100 deposit against the $800 total. Afterward, Robert had a better idea. With the help of other Black sailors, he commandeered a Confederate steamer while the white crew were ashore. With several other enslaved people and his family, he escaped to freedom. In an author’s note, Moore explains that Smalls later served in Congress; Moore is now seeking the same seat his ancestor held. He deftly
retells this historical story, heightening the suspense and emphasizing Smalls’ tenacity, while Collier’s rich collage illustrations set the scene. Images of silhouetted faces in the sky make clear that the next generations of Black children are watching and waiting; freedom will make their existence possible.
A moving tale of triumph that brings the past to life. (Picture-book biography. 8-10)
Moreira, Naila | Walker US/ Candlewick (320 pp.) | $18.99
May 14, 2024 | 9781536218305
Two children discover that a love of nature can change lives. Inherently a loner with a scientific bent of mind and a gift for writing, 11-year-old Sammie loves to explore the Field, a vacant plot of land near her New England home. Although she promised her working mother she wouldn’t go there alone, she does anyway, bringing her journal (whose pages are included effectively in the story) to record and draw the flora and fauna. One day, she encounters Bram, a boy about her age, standing in the Field with a camera. Protective, Sammie demands to know what he’s doing there, and she’s skeptical and defensive when he says he goes there every day, too, and asks about her notebook. After this rocky start, the two team up to explore Winghaven, the name they decide to give the land. They meet graduate student Pete, who’s doing an insect study, and he encourages them to participate in an Audubon Society science symposium. The new friends decide to present the project they’ve been working on—counting monarch butterfly caterpillars. This story contains genuine tension (a threat to Winghaven’s existence), as well as accurate scientific information about the plants, birds, and insects of a New England landscape; it also includes nuanced characterization
Two children discover that a love of nature can change lives.
THE MONARCHS OF WINGHAVEN
and relatable themes, such as a storyline about a school bully. Perhaps most importantly, though, the ending is immensely satisfying and encouraging for readers. Characters read white. Empowering. (map, notes for young naturalists) (Fiction. 8-12)
Noel, Melvina | Illus. by Daria Peoples Cameron Kids (32 pp.) | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9781949480238
Young bibliophiles delight in their library visits. Two African American siblings dressed in blue shorts and striped shirts go to the library each week in the summer to pick 10 books. “Only books about Black people…no repeats,” Mama says, and “No more than three books on the same subject!” the white librarian says. After painstakingly choosing, the children haul their huge piles to the car where Mama waits, hot but too shy to enter. At home, everyone grabs a book and settles down: the narrator on the bed, the younger sister on the floor, and Mama in her chair. Absorbing Black history, the protagonist is transported: escaping slavery with Harriet Tubman, protesting at the March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., and reciting poetry alongside Paul Laurence Dunbar. The exquisite collage work by Peoples brims with highly saturated colors and rich textures and demonstrates the immersive power of literature. Book review competitions between the siblings follow; the winner earns “an extra slice
of Mama’s homemade sweet potato pie.” Archival images of Black heroes appear throughout the book—some well known, others that will beckon readers to learn more. In the backmatter, Noel and Peoples share stories of how they became passionate readers. A sumptuous story of summertime Black joy, and a master class in fostering family literacy. (Picture book. 4-7)
Moo Hoo
Perrott, Audrey | Illus. by Ross Burach Scholastic (40 pp.) | $18.99
April 16, 2024 | 9781338888881
Cowabunga! A bull can’t control the waterworks. Milton’s life is great. He loves the pasture where he lives, and he enjoys an endless supply of ice cream. But Milton cries nonstop, earning himself the nickname Moo Hoo. He cries when he’s sad and when he’s happy. He cries when he’s nervous, when he’s frustrated, and when his favorite music swells to emotional heights. Milton cries when he’s embarrassed, and then when that happens, he cries even more. Eventually, he decides to toughen up and become a bully. That doesn’t work: His new persona makes him sad, which causes more waterworks. His next strategy? Deplete his tears. He watches happy movies, listens to sad songs, and admires moving sights until all his tears are gone. Or are they? An encounter with a sympathetic, similarly overemotional sheep, nicknamed Waa Waa, turns Milton’s life around. They share sob stories, bawl together, and forge a
bond. Milton realizes that all he needed was a pal who likes him for who he is. This thin, somewhat silly story is intended to reassure readers that it’s OK to be exactly who they are. It’s a touch idealistic, though many emotional youngsters will likely feel buoyed. The amusing, lively illustrations were created with pencil, crayon, acrylic, and digital coloring.
Kids may learn to laugh at themselves a little—and accept themselves, too. (Picture book. 4-7)
Peterson, Ellie | Roaring Brook Press (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781250845689
Sand castles don’t last long, but true friendship does. Every day is a beach day for Cora and Shelly, two besties who live on the shore. After school, they suit up and head to the beach to build elaborate sand castles. Their constructions require “the right tools…loads of patience, and a good sense of humor.” Oh, and readiness to rebuild. But friendships, like sands, shift. One day, Shelly excitedly announces that she’s moving to the city to live with her mom. To Cora, it sounds like Shelly won’t miss anything—not even Cora. Over the next few days, Cora declines Shelly’s invitations to meet. Cora confides in supportive Mama, who explains that friendships resemble sand castles: “With the right tools—and some rebuilding—who’s to say they can’t last forever? The pals reassert their powerful bond and, even when they’re eventually separated, discover they have “the right tools” (stationery), “loads of patience” as they wait for the mail, and a “good sense of humor.” The best tool? They’re willing to rebuild. Kids should understand the sand castle–friendship metaphor in this sweet story. They’ll root for these pals and feel heartened at their ability to forge a lasting bond. The colorful digital illustrations are lively, and readers will
admire the sand castles. Dark-haired Cora appears to be East Asian, while blond Shelley presents white. Building friendships takes time and effort, but it’s fun and worth it. So is this book. (Picture book. 4-7)
Pilutti, Deb | Putnam (32 pp.) | $18.99 May 21, 2024 | 9780593620588
A dinosaur and a curious young child make a connection over millions of years.
The author of 2020’s clever and engaging Old Rock (Is Not Boring) tackles the theme of geologic time from another angle. “I used to live here,” says her toothy theropod narrator, recalling lush and leafy prehistoric forests and encounters with other dinosaurs (“most were delicious”). But “a lot has changed,” beginning with a certain falling meteor and continuing through successive ages of oceans, mountain building, and ice to, at last, a rustic yard where a child plays, burbles with questions about nature, and finds a fossil footprint and a large tooth. “I will wait,” the patient predator concludes, “for my story to become part of your story.” And indeed, those discoveries spark further questions and sustained interest, until the child returns to the site just a little later (relatively speaking) as a grown-up paleontologist to dig out the skeleton buried beneath. In a final scene, the paleontologist presents it fully reassembled to a diverse and fascinated group of museum visitors. In Pilutti’s sweet and serene illustrations, the tan-skinned child appears to be biracial (one parent is brown-skinned, while the other is light-skinned). A closing note about fossils and the scientists who find them ends with an enticing invitation to join in dinosaur research and study—beginning, of course, with birds. An engaging suggestion that hints of the past are there for the finding, if we will but look. (Picture book. 6-8)
| $24.99 May 14, 2024 | 9781684493883
A hefty helping of need-to-know information, from gross nature facts to how tardigrades, tortoises, and toilets function in space. A stable of science writers and illustrators set the tone by leading with pithy introductions to the blood-squirting horned lizard and the aptly named eastern skunk cabbage. The barrage of artfully selected, must-share revelations that follow will keep even casual browsers riveted. Though the book dishes up lots of customary morsels—yes, wombat poop is shaped like a cube, people are taller in the morning, and Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive—it has plenty of lesser-known tidbits to tuck away, from how to un boil an egg to observations that the Earth’s mantle is green, Martian sunsets are blue, and the mountains in China’s Zhangye Danxia Geopark have rainbow stripes. The authors offer some historical insights as well, informing readers that Abe Lincoln was a licensed bartender, that “Roland the Farter” was a minstrel in the court of England’s Henry II, and that a corps of warrior women guarded the ancient kings of Dahomey (modern-day Benin). The cartoon art, done by different hands but in a consistent style, includes a racially diverse cast in current or period dress. Disarming title; crowd-pleasing content. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)
For more great middle-grade nonfiction, visit Kirkus online.
In her new picture book, Jennifer P. Goldfinger captures the experience of a talented young artist whose mind wanders.
BY MICHAEL SCHAUBTHE PROTAGONIST of Jennifer P. Goldfinger’s Daisy the Daydreamer (Neal Porter/Holiday House, March 12) has her head in the clouds—literally.
In Goldfinger’s latest picture book, the young girl is depicted with a cloud obscuring her face as she walks her dog, brushes her hair, and plays on the school’s playground swingset. Daisy tries to swat the clouds away as Mrs. Dill, her teacher, lectures the class on octopuses. She decides she wants to be line leader on an upcoming aquarium field trip, an honor given to the best listener.
Alas, Daisy can’t keep her mind from wandering, and she loses the coveted position. But after Mrs. Dill sees Daisy’s drawings, she gives her an even better honor: the official class artist for their aquarium visit.
Goldfinger really relates to Daisy. “I learned that I had ADHD a couple of years ago,” she says via Zoom from her studio in Portland, Maine. “I very much knew what it felt like to be Daisy, to feel
especially kids who are like me, who lose confidence because they’re just not getting it, and they do feel like they’re not as smart. But I think that the kids can see that there are so many different ways to learn, and we all have our special skills and our superpowers.”
Goldfinger’s school experiences weren’t all bad. Her parents eventually sent her and her sister to Kent State University’s laboratory school in Ohio, where she says that she thrived.
one point I had written something, and I was really into it, and my teacher said, ‘Have you ever thought of being a writer?’ And I was like, No, but I like that you’re thinking that way.”
Goldfinger would indeed become a writer, but first came a career in illustration, which started while she was dating children’s book author and illustrator Michael Emberley, son of Caldecott Medal–winning artist Ed Emberley.
like, I want to hear what you’re saying, but I spaced out somewhere. One thing I like about Daisy is that she’s her own self-advocate. She’s like, Wait a minute, maybe I didn’t listen the way everybody else did, but here’s a lot of information that I got.”
Goldfinger’s own experiences as a young student were marked with difficulty, not only because of her ADHD but because she and her family moved frequently. She was born in Pennsylvania and spent six years living on a farm with more than 100 animals. In those six years, she went to three different schools.
“It was really, really tough,” she recalls. “It was traumatizing. I remember every time going to a new school and just being so upset and so freaked out. Teachers didn’t get to know me, so I didn’t have somebody who [saw] me well enough to know what my abilities were.”
Goldfinger still remembers the times that she, like Daisy, got encouraging words from a teacher.
“Hearing those words is a boost to one’s confidence,
“It was a really amazing school,” she says. “There were only 11 kids in our class, and some of the teachers were professors at the university. I was writing music, I was playing the piano. It was a really, really great place to make me feel confident in the arts. At
“Michael was illustrating a book written by Robert L. May called Rudolph’s Second Christmas ,” she says. “He broke his wrist mountain biking in the middle of working on it, but the publisher wanted to keep going. Michael had done a bunch of the sketches, and they were asking illustrators to see if
Kids can see that there are so many different ways to learn, and we all have our special skills and our superpowers.
Goldfinger, Jennifer P.
Neal Porter/Holiday House | 32 pp. | $18.99 March 12, 2024 | 9780823453559
they could imitate his style. He was away for a weekend, and I was like, I’m going to do this myself.”
The publisher ended up asking her to finish the book, and the experience proved positive. She found herself deeply absorbed by the work of illustration. “Time would go by, and I had no idea how long,” she says. “I’d forget to eat. I was just having so much fun with it.”
Goldfinger had found a calling. After sending numerous postcards and art samples to publishers, she eventually scored a meeting, which led to several books. Goldfinger illustrated I Need Glasses , written by Charlie Thomas, and The King’s Chorus ,
written by Linda Hayward. She also wrote and illustrated the books A Fish Named Spot , My Dog Lyle, and Hello, My Name Is Tiger
She knew what kind of look she wanted for the illustrations in Daisy the Daydreamer, which she crafted using colored paper and a brayer before scanning them onto her iPad and using the Procreate app—what she calls a “digital collage.”
“The challenge I made myself for doing this book was that I didn’t want to have any lines outside of the figures,” she says. “I wanted it to just be blocks of color. I know I felt like, Should I be putting backgrounds here or more
and purge the inner conflicts that still present themselves. And in sharing this with the world I’m connecting to those adults and children who are familiar with that emotion and therefore I hope resonate with my work.”
Her art has appeared in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Portland’s Greenhut Gallery, and was showcased in the 2015 book Encaustic Art in the 21st Century. And she’s not slowing down: She has two shows coming up this year, which she’s in the midst of preparing pieces for.
color? It’s such a complicated and simple book at the same time. It’s complicated in that there are two things going on, so you’re given the opportunity to see inside of her brain in a sense, with the clouds. And I was wondering, if I did all this background stuff, would [the reader] be like, Where do my eyes go? ”
Her illustration employs different techniques than what she uses in her second career as a fine artist, crafting trompe l’oeil murals and other works, frequently using antique images that she manipulates with wax, oil sticks, and various tools. She writes in her artist’s statement , “I use my art to try to embrace
Goldfinger isn’t leaving the book world behind, though, with many different types of manuscripts currently in the works. “And I’m actually working on a novel about my time living on the farm. I think that’s a little of my ADHD again,” she says with a hearty laugh. “But I get a lot done because I get very excited about all of it.”
It’s an excitement that Daisy shares, too. On the last page of Daisy the Daydreamer, the little girl is seen beaming as she displays her artwork for her impressed classmates.
“It would have been really helpful to me if I’d had a book like this when I was younger,” Goldfinger says. “ADHD can be frustrating, and it can make your brain go to all different places, but when you dive in, it’s just amazing how many people who are incredibly successful have it. It’s just that they have to get there in other ways.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
Quigley, Emma | Little Island (224 pp.)
$9.99 paper | May 7, 2024 | 9781910411971
School friends in an Irish village set up their own bank to make a profit but earn a heap of trouble.
Although their “other grand schemes” have “failed miserably over the years,” Luke Morrissey agrees to join Finn Fitzpatrick, Gabe O’Rourke, Pablo Silva, Koby Kowalski, and Emily Clarke, all 14, in setting up a bank to lend money to classmates, charging interest and late fees. They agree to stay small and only lend to people they know, but their scheme quickly spirals out of control—a possibility Luke was well aware of—as they invest in a dating app and otherwise further expand well beyond the original plan. Luke ignores his uneasy feelings, partly so he can contribute money to the household to help his parents. Emily’s and Koby’s good sense doesn’t prevail over Finn’s overconfidence and Gabe’s unpredictability, and a series of madcap mix-ups and trouble follows. By the time Finn wonders aloud if things could get any worse, readers will know the answer is most definitely, yes, they can, and they do, in a farcical way. Toward the end, Luke reflects that they lost control, but at least they escaped “relatively unharmed.” Have they learned from their experience? Not likely. The snappy dialogue and colloquialisms do much to bring the setting to life. The story works both as a zany romp and an entertaining introduction to the global banking crisis and is likely to appeal to fans of Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s work.
Breathless, high-stakes hijinks. (Fiction. 10-14)
Joyfully captures an all-consuming passion for an intriguing niche interest.
LUCKY SCRAMBLE
Raymundo, Peter | Dial Books (192 pp.) $20.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9780593531907
Puzzle cubes
challenge a cast of determined contenders in a tense national competition. Twelve-year-old Tyler Gooden loves solving his Rubik’s Cube. After his dad died three years ago, he felt adrift until he found this gift from his father, set aside years before. The mental aerobics and motor dexterity that cube-solving required gave him a sense of focus. So begins the story of Tyler’s determined journey to the national championship, sponsored by Cube-Mania. He can’t afford to attend, but Cube-Mania founder and CEO Victor Chen recognizes his “remarkable ability” and offers a surprise sponsorship. As the competition begins, Tyler meets a crew of fellow cubers, including “cubing prodigy” Eli Newton and his overbearing dad, twin sensations Lizzy and Izzy Peterson, world record holder Dirk Speedman, and the elderly Miles Wizzinski, the first great cuber of the 1980s, whose efforts have resulted in carpal tunnel syndrome. The story’s slightly stilted present-tense language will make readers feel as though they’re reading the novelization of a competition documentary (think The Speed Cubers or the Scrabble-focused Word Wars). Gamers’ backstories combine with play-by-play scenes of puzzles being solved, shocking twists, and some well-earned victories. Colorful graphic novel panel interludes bring to life the drama of gameplay—it’s hard to look away from this delightfully hyperfocused tale. Most characters present white; Tyler
is of Filipino descent, the Peterson twins are Black, and Victor Chen is cued Asian. Joyfully captures an all-consuming passion for an intriguing niche interest. (Fiction/graphic hybrid. 8-12)
Reynolds, Justin A. | Scholastic (304 pp.) $18.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781338815160
Five Black tweens try to unravel a major mystery in this sequel to It’s the End of the World and I’m in My Bathing Suit (2022). The book opens with Eddie Holloway reminding readers that in the previous adventure, none of the citizens of Carterville, Ohio, returned following the annual summer Beach Bash. Now, the little group of kids who were left behind are banding together, but when every attempt they make to get to the beach and search for answers is ruined, the story turns toward their individual efforts to cope with the catastrophe. Xavier is concerned that there are people in need of help, Sonia turns to stockpiling supplies in case another disaster strikes, Trey focuses on keeping his athletic regimen in place, and Sage plots ways to reach the beach. After they’re rattled by ghostly radio messages, the tone of the story turns more reflective. Readers hear more from the other characters via the Carterville Keep It Reels, short video confessionals from each kid. Although the mood is humorous and light throughout most of the book,
uneasiness rises to the surface every time the kids stop and look around at the emptiness of their neighborhood or observe how unnaturally quiet everything is without other people. This element pulls in readers, who become invested in the characters’ well-being, hoping that with every page turned, they’ll be closer to solving the mystery and being OK. A reflective, well-paced follow-up. (Fiction. 8-12)
Rim, Sujean | Caitlyn Dlouhy/ Atheneum | (40 pp.) | $18.99 May 7, 2024 | 9781665949163
How does nature love you? Let us count the ways. The comforting refrain at the top of each page turn reads, “You are loved”—by the sun, by the grass, by the wind, by the ocean, and by the stars—each providing a gift to the book’s protagonist. The flowers bring a “bouquet of color,” while the birds invite the child to dance. Through just a simple, single sentence per page, Rim conveys a child’s joy at experiencing nature’s bounty. The thickly outlined protagonist (a child wearing bunny ears? Or a childlike bunny?) has paper-white skin and wears a striped blue-and-black shirt. The little one smells bright and colorful wildflowers and splashes in the rain. One captivating image depicts the child staring up at clouds shaped like dragons and other creatures, while another shows the little one gazing at a huge moon, the night sky awash in blurred blacks, purples, and blues. Caregivers will be especially delighted to read the final two pages aloud: “But most of all, you
are loved…by me.” The concise text, repetitive format, and appealing illustrations make this a fitting book for growing families with young toddlers. Brimming with pure love and appreciation for the natural world and the children who will become its stewards. (Picture book. 2-5)
Rivera, Matthew | Neal Porter/Holiday House (32 pp.) | $18.99
May 21, 2024 | 9780823454990
A gardener’s son discovers that having a plant of his own is a big responsibility.
Little Manny delights in following his father from yard to yard as he tends to flower gardens. Dad “has a gift for growing jungles in the smallest spaces”—even the apartment they share with Nana. Visiting a garden center one day, Manny asks for a plant of his own and comes home with one bigger than he is—one that wilts and shows signs of distress no matter how much he fusses over it. Time for a trip to the public library, where he reads up on finding the best spot for his plant indoors and proper ways to water and fertilize it. Soon his room is filled with luxuriant foliage. “Mijo,” exclaims his father, “let’s share your gift and take cuttings of your amigo to our neighbors.” The size difference between the brown-skinned, bright-eyed child and his leafy amigo in Rivera’s lush, sunny scenes will amuse young readers, and his success may tempt some to see just how green their thumbs might be. The joy Manny, “the youngest gardener in a long line of gardeners,” feels caring for his plant is infectious, especially once he shares his gift with the racially diverse residents of his Nana’s suddenly lush apartment
Celebrates the pleasure of cultivating, and sharing, new skills.
THE PLANT RESCUER
complex. Manny and his family are cued Latine.
Celebrates family roots as well as the pleasure of cultivating, and sharing, new skills. (Picture book. 5-7)
Rylant, Cynthia | Illus. by Arthur Howard Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (48 pp.)
$18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781665924832 Series: The Hornbeam Books
Hornbeam the moose is back with Eureka the gander, Cuddy the bull, and Adorabelle the skunk.
Broken into three brief stories, this latest installment invites new readers to enjoy the day-to-day activities of a close-knit friend group. While the anthropomorphic animals are decidedly adult in their characterization, with nary a parental figure or plotline tilting them toward childhood, Howard’s playful illustrations ramp up the appeal for children. In the first story, Hornbeam worries that a blueberry bush won’t withstand the gusty March winds, but Eureka helps him protect the vulnerable bush, along with other things in his yard. The second tale finds Hornbeam and Cuddy humorously struggling to resist a cupcake display while grocery shopping; giving in to temptation leaves them too lazy and full of food to complete their chore. The final story brings all the friends together for an evening of board games, including their favorite, Dream Trip, in which everyone gets to “travel to an unusual place on the game board.” (Some may find unusual a potentially othering word to describe locales such as Africa, Madagascar, Hawaii, and Egypt, though it’s a small point.) Overall, the warm, jovial atmosphere comes through, thanks in large part to Howard’s attention to clever details in both characterization and setting. Good early reader fodder to get it done. (Early reader. 6-8)
Salt, Rachel | Firefly (64 pp.) | $29.95
March 1, 2024 | 9780228104636
A set of regional case studies explore the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events.
A dramatic opening view of 2018’s Hurricane Florence as observed from the International Space Station sets the tone, and Salt goes on to make sure that young “climate champions” understand how extreme weather and the climate change it heralds are affecting much of the world right now. Following introductory notes on the differences between the two and how scientists can track long-term changes in climate, the author surveys ominous events in seven regions—from 122 degree F temperatures in British Columbia in June of 2021, followed by massive floods and landslides the following November, to Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20, in which an estimated three billion animals were killed in wildfires. Salt reports on the current “megadrought” in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, which has resulted in water shortages and forced changes in immigration patterns, and examines how ice melt at the “Third Pole” (the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain ranges) led in 2022 to devastating floods and public health emergencies that affected millions in Pakistan. Inset profiles of active “champions,” diverse in terms of race and culture, and remedial initiatives, many of them Indigenous-led activities, inject at least a few flickers of optimism, but the telling photos of dry lake beds, burned-out woodlands, flooded streets, and flattened buildings only underscore the message that we are in trouble…right now.
Merits attention for its unusual angle and compelling sense of urgency.
(glossary, index, resource list)
(Nonfiction. 10-13)
A story that will encourage readers to spread their wings.
Sax, Sarah | Knopf (288 pp.) | $21.99 May 7, 2024 | 9780593306925
Series: The Brinkley Yearbooks, 2
Characters from Sax’s Picture Day (2023) try out something new.
Thirteen-yearold Alexandra Olsen has played rec league baseball for years. Now, as a seventh grader at Brinkley Middle School, she tries out for boys’ baseball. The new coach welcomes her, and Al is skilled enough to make the team, along with Julian Veras, her nonbinary friend from rec league. Meanwhile, classmate Milo Castillo finds the courage to join the art club, something that’s outside his comfort zone, and extroverted Viv Sullivan revives the Brinkley Beak, an old school mascot. When Al is interviewed on local TV for being the first girl ballplayer at Brinkley, it leads to dissent among her teammates; she copes by becoming overly demanding, which causes further friction. Sax does well at depicting a wide range of young people and validating a variety of interests and talents. Al is a fully realized character, and the issue of girls’ equity in sports will be inviting to readers who enjoy graphic novels such as Misty Wilson and David Wilson’s Play Like a Girl (2022) and Matt Tavares’ Hoops (2023). In a subplot, the Brinkley girls’ basketball team’s undefeated season is overlooked in the hubbub over Al’s presence on the boys’ baseball team. The art is very well done, especially the sports scenes shown from multiple points of view. Al is white; there’s racial diversity among the supporting cast. A story that will encourage readers to spread their wings. (character sketches, author’s note, resources) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)
Schaefer, Lola M. | Illus. by Kirk Parrish Simon Spotlight (32 pp.) | $17.99 | May 7, 2024 9781665951708 | Series: Ready-To-Read
On your mark… get set…zoom!
As this early reader opens, four vehicles are lining up for a big race. Our hero, Blue, has high hopes, but the others—a convertible named Green, a monster truck named Red, and a taxicab named Yellow—zip right past, leaving Blue in the dust. But Blue won’t give up, and when a spinout and crash incapacitate the others, Blue comes to the rescue. Young readers needn’t be racing fans to love this book. The story opens with a helpful list of all the words used; some are grouped as word families ( place , ace), some as sight words (all , and ), and some as bonus words (slow, stops , wants). Simple reading comprehension questions are appended, including an extension activity that notes that grin , in , and spin are rhyming words and asks readers to think of other words in that rhyming family. Bright, multicolored illustrations capture nail-biting action and emotions and often show sparks shooting out from the wheels of the speeding cars. Most pages have just a few short sentences in large, clear type, with plenty of exclamation points and a few carefully selected onomatopoeic words adding to the fast pace and excitement.
Rev up reading skills with this tale of competition and cooperation. (Early reader. 4-7)
Schaub, Michelle | Illus. by Blanca Gómez Norton Young Readers (32 pp.)
$18.99 | March 12, 2024 | 9781324052357
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly.
(Picture book. 5-7)
Schill, Jeff | Charlesbridge Moves (240 pp.) $17.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781623543648
Four young orphans go to great lengths to keep their family’s farm and stay under the radar in Destiny, Colorado, in 1881.
Fourteen-yearold Henry Upton’s father has died and is buried next to Mama. Now Henry and his three younger brothers are all alone. Determined to keep them all safe and together, he makes a deal with the local sheriff, who agrees to keep quiet until a caretaker can move in and serve as guardian so the family won’t be split up. Knowing there may be some bad actors who would take advantage of four kids living alone on a prime piece of land, Henry decides to deter them by writing stories about The Kid, a juvenile lawman who can beat even the wickedest of criminals. The stories, which are set in Destiny, are published in Gunslinger Magazine, and The Kid’s reputation takes on legendary status. But the plan to keep villains at bay backfires when Snake-Eye Sam wants to claim his share of the fame by killing The Kid—and he escapes from the Arkansas State Penitentiary to do just that. Despite the brothers’ desperate situation and the high stakes, the humorous, folksy language supports the worldbuilding, which leans into archetypes of the American West. Henry’s The Kid stories are interspersed between chapters that jump around in time and location and can at times be hard to track. Most characters read white.
A swashbuckling adventure.
(Historical fiction. 8-12)
Tips for budding writers from a veteran Canadian novelist.
Scrimger, Richard | Illus. by D. McFadzean
Tundra Books (190 pp.) | $16.99
May 21, 2024 | 9781770498426
Tips and exercises for budding writers from a veteran Canadian novelist.
Aside from opening with an ungracious comment that studying how stories work is “more fun than the other things you learn about in school,” Scrimger presents plenty of spot-on suggestions and insights for crafting effective beginnings, middles, ends, and revisions. “My hack,” he writes, “is to look inside yourself for something you truly care about. It’s harder to be boring when you care.”
Along with this and other essential basic principles, he infuses his discourse with pop quizzes, writing exercises, and occasional recaps that culminate in a closing section of summary takeaways. His claim to an approach that will produce not only better writers but better readers, TV watchers, and gamers may be a bit of a reach, but like all good storytelling manuals, this one provides both warm encouragement and a selection of time-tested tools for hesitant wordsmiths. Given that Scrimger draws heavily on school talks and workshops, the tone does occasionally wax didactic, but the book’s mood is lifted by the many amusing examples and anecdotes, plus McFadzean’s broadly comical spot art and cartoon caricatures. People depicted in the illustrations are racially diverse. A bit lecture-y, but engaging and useful nonetheless. (bibliography)
(Nonfiction. 10-14)
For more by Richard Scrimger, visit Kirkus online.
Seabolt, Tricia | Illus. by Lucy Rogers
Lantana (224 pp.) | $18.99 | May 7, 2024
9781915244727 | Series: One Extra Sparkle, 1
A girl with Down syndrome fears that her older brother is getting married.
Ten-year-old Ellie Anderson loves hanging with her brother, 15-year-old Ben. But lately, he’s been too busy with work and soccer to pay her much attention. He becomes even more preoccupied when he starts hanging out with new neighbor Sara and inviting her to outings that should be special just for Ben and Ellie, like their nature hike and the upcoming Ability Center dance. Worse, Ellie’s best friend, Ling, informs her that Ben and Sara are getting married: Ling’s marriage list says so. The list names six steps toward marriage, including hand-holding and kissing—and Ben and Sara are working their way through those steps. Ellie and Ling hatch a scheme to stop Ben from reaching step six: marrying Sara and moving to Hawaii. But the plan only causes hurt feelings, just when Ellie and Ben need to band together to save Ellie’s beloved backyard willow from being cut down by their parents so their magician dad will have room to build a workshop. Artistic, mischievous, and empathetic, Ellie is delightfully nuanced; Rogers’ illustrations readily convey her many emotions. Seabolt matter-of-factly portrays Ellie’s challenges, such as speech difficulties and “spaghetti noodle” muscles, and readers will root for her as she discovers her strengths and faces her fears. Ellie’s supportive family is heartening. Most characters read white; Ling is Chinese American.
A warm tale of family and friendship. (Down syndrome facts) (Fiction. 7-10)
Engaging and hugely relevant: an empowering gem.
ANY WAY YOU LOOK
Siddiqui, Maleeha | Scholastic (256 pp.) $18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781339010267
Ainy’s dreams for the summer don’t turn out how she expected in this nuanced comingof-age story.
Pakistani American Quratulain “Ainy” Zain loves fashion. What she wants most is to be allowed to help her mom with her custom clothing boutique over summer break, and she might get her chance since Kulsoom, her older sister and role model, took a second job to help their family and is less available. She also envisions endless fun with bestie Safiya, and maybe even starting to wear the hijab. Learning the ropes at the boutique requires a lot more time than Ainy thought it would, however, which leaves Safiya feeling slighted. Even worse, her sister suddenly stops wearing her hijab without explanation, Ainy develops a creative block just as her mom entrusts her with an important job designing bridesmaids’ dresses, and unwanted attention from irreligious classmate Yasir makes Ainy feel compelled to wear a hijab to thwart his advances—all to no avail. Ainy is overwhelmed! Siddiqui’s latest presents authentic characters who are inspirational, not only to Muslim girls who might be facing their own difficulties with religious judgmentalism or sexual harassment, but anyone looking for a
story about staying true to oneself in the face of adversity, especially with the help of strong women like those who surround Ainy. Important insights into Islamic religion and South Asian culture add to this book’s value.
Engaging and hugely relevant: an empowering gem. (author’s note, glossary) (Fiction. 9-13)
Simmons, Steven J. & Clifford R. Simmons Illus. by Ruth E. Harper | Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.99 | April 16, 2024 | 9781623542979
An answer to the titular question— and then some. “When it is time for these animals to rest / where do they go to sleep their best?” The authors offer very brief bits of information on various sea creatures, among them stingrays, walruses, clownfish, bottlenose dolphins, sea otters, and great white sharks. In addition to sleeping habits, we also learn other facts, such as what seahorses eat and how the parrotfish got its name. The book opens with images of racially diverse children playing at the beach; it closes with a child cuddled up in bed. A brief authors’ note stresses the importance of sleep for children. Contradicting the title, not all creatures here are diurnal. The statement that “the octopus can sleep by day or night” is misleading, given that most species are nocturnal. Many fascinating facts are overlooked; we learn that sea turtles have hard shells and live to be 80 years old and that they rest under
rocks or coral but not that they hold their breath for hours while sleeping. Though watercolor illustrations in various shades of blue offer sweetly expressive depictions of the animals, the verse format adds little to the text; uncertain meter foreshadows weak rhythm and rhyme. Visually attractive but doesn’t dive very deep. (Informational picture book. 3-6)
Smith Jr., Charles R. | Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | April 16, 2024 | 9781536225341 Series: Sports Royalty
Thirteen WNBA stars of the present get fast-break tributes in this follow-up to 2003’s Hoop Queens
Going for speed with short lines and staccato rhythms—“See / Courtney off the curl. / See / Courtney catch and shoot. / Must-see CV: / see / Courtney Vandersloot!”—Smith offers jargony takes on each player’s distinctive feats or style of play paired with monochrome action shots that have been processed so that only the balls and each subject’s uniform (and, when visible, shoes) are tinted. The cast runs to veterans, from Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi (“Power her up / start her up / DT3, Scoring Machine ”) to sisters Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike to A’ja Wilson: “Dribble drive smooth like / a fresh donut’s glaze. / Making it look easy / in so many ways, / A’ja got smoooooth / game for days.” The elder Ogwumike’s ragged acrostic entry—“Nigeria / Sta n ford / mother is great / bloc k party / a nd 1”—isn’t the only example of the author growing a bit too fond of his literary conceits, but he does provide befuddled readers with explanatory notes at the end that shed light on everything from Brittney Griner’s multifaceted abilities on the court to Australian player Liz Cambage, who has scored
more points in a WNBA game than anyone else.
A surefire fan pleaser. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)
Solot, Dorian & Marshall Miller
Illus. by Tyler Feder | Henry Holt (32 pp.) $18.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9781250852588
Candid insights about bodies.
“Lots of people have penises!” Solot and Miller cheerfully explain. “Maybe you’re curious to learn more about penises.” What follows is a fairly straightforward text about anatomy, with a sprinkling of social and emotional learning. A helpful diagram differentiates between the base, the shaft, the head, and the urethra, while illustrations depict both circumcised and uncircumcised penises (an entire paragraph in the robust “Additional Information for Parents and Caregivers” section at the end is dedicated to “taking care of penises that have foreskins”). Readers will learn about how the scrotum pulls closer to the body when it’s colder and hangs lower during hotter temperatures; the authors also offer a bit of information about the penis’s role in reproduction. Language is gender-neutral throughout, though the text doesn’t discuss gender identity. Two brief pages address unwanted touch, and the appended note includes more information about intersex bodies, masturbation, and “how to be an askable parent.” Backmatter also explores consent in more depth. Characters in Feder’s thickly outlined artwork are racially diverse.
A simple beginning guide that will probably lead to lots of giggles and a little learning. (a note for parents and caregivers) (Informational picture book. 4-7)
Solot, Dorian & Marshall Miller
Illus. by Tyler Feder | Henry Holt (32 pp.)
$18.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9781250852571
“Lots of people have vulvas!”
“Maybe you’re curious to learn more about vulvas and vaginas,” the authors of this upbeat text note. They go on to offer direct explanations about anatomy, with some information about topics such as bodily autonomy. Multiple pages of diagrams point out different parts, such as the inner and outer labia, the clitoris, and the vagina. Childbirth is briefly examined, with a somewhat manic use of exclamation points: “When a grown-up has a baby, most of the time the baby is born through their vagina! Some babies are born other ways, and that’s fine too!” A caregiver’s note at the end explores vaginal and cesarean births in more detail. Solot and Miller employ gender-neutral language throughout, though they don’t cover gender identity. They briefly address unwanted touch, letting readers know that genitals are private parts (“If you aren’t sure about someone touching you or you feel mixed-up, you may decide to talk to a grown-up you trust”). The note at the end for adults discusses preventing sexual abuse, as well as intersex bodies, masturbation, and “How to be an askable parent,” while a note at the beginning stresses the importance of providing accurate, age-appropriate info on genitals.
Feder’s bright, cartoonish illustrations depict racially diverse characters. A concise, no-nonsense primer on bodies. (Informational picture book. 4-7)
For more by illustrator Tyler Feder, visit Kirkus online.
Sosa, Daniela | Paula Wiseman/ Simon & Schuster (40 pp.)
$18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781665911498
A summer vacation turns from dull to exciting. A young tot with rosy cheeks and a scribble of brown hair is visiting Grandma and Grandpa one summer. The days are long, and the routine never seems to change. The youngster wishes for a mystery to solve to break up the monotony. With help from a feline friend, the child finds an old suitcase in the dusty attic. Inside are strange and ancient relics: photographs of an unknown but adventurous couple, ticket stubs, mementos, and the most mysterious item of all—a small rectangular piece of plastic labeled “Pink Floyd” (“not sure what this is… some sort of spying equipment?”). “Could Grandma and Grandpa know anything about this suitcase?” The curious narrator decides to do some investigating. But close inspection of the duo over the next few days doesn’t reveal anything—or does it? Eagleeyed readers will spot clues that the distracted narrator misses. Still, not all kids have yet come to the realization that the elders they love once lived very different lives; the big reveal just might be a surprise to many. Sepia tones and other deep colorings lend warmth and comfort to this familial tale, which will have readers eagerly scouring old photo albums and delving deep into their own family histories. The characters have lightly tanned skin. A heartwarming bridge between young and old. (Picture book. 4-7)
A tremendous example of collective efforts in the wake of disaster.
THE DAY DANCER FLEW
Sriram, Meera | Illus. by Sandhya Prabhat Knopf (40 pp.) | $19.99 April 16, 2024 | 9780593427132
Stecher, Leah | Bloomsbury (288 pp.) $17.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781547613021
For more by Daniela Sosa, visit Kirkus online.
A family spice box unites three generations of South Asian chefs. Rishi’s grandmother—whom he calls Paati—is arriving from India today. So Rishi asks his father if they can make potato curry together to welcome her. Dad’s busy, so Rishi grabs the family spice box, which holds great significance for the family. Paati, the original owner of the box, used the spices inside to achieve her dream of becoming a renowned chef in the big city, an unusual achievement for a woman at the time. She gave the box to Rishi’s father before he left for a new country. Rishi’s dad was nervous about the move, thinking he might stick out as a recent immigrant. Happily, he arrived in a welcoming, diverse community, where, after a few mistakes and a lot of trial and error, he, too, learned to use the spice box to make delicious meals. When Rishi now lifts the box up high, disaster strikes. With a broken box, will Rishi ever earn the family title of “Master of Spice”? This gorgeous, tenderly told story uses a beloved spice box—something many South Asian and, specifically, Tamil families, will recognize—to tell an intergenerational story about adventure, love, and inheritance. With swirls of vibrant colors and effective use of repetition, the book depicts a family supporting its youngest member even through mistakes.
A warm tale of family bursting with color and love. (Picture book. 3-8)
A Southern California tween finds a way to skip ahead in time, sparing herself discomfort but also costing her valuable moments.
J.P. sometimes seeks solace in her neighbor’s treehouse, and one day when she’s there, she notices a gold doorknob in the wall where there wasn’t one before. After she turns it, a door opens, and she passes through, finding herself instantly transported three days into the future. She has no memory of what happened during the time she missed. Seventh grade isn’t easy: J.P. has run-ins with mean girl Miranda, who shames her for her body size. Her beloved Pop Pop’s cancer has come back. It’s tempting to use the treehouse door to escape, and she even gets Kevin involved in brainstorming variables to see if they can manipulate the time skips. Although Stecher never explains the magic involved, by walking through the door, J.P. can avoid memories of unpleasant experiences and feelings, but in the process, she also doesn’t remember precious time spent with Pop Pop and Kevin. Debut author Stecher’s characters feel natural, lovable, and whole; the tensions that arise between J.P. and her mom and J.P. and Kevin are believable and relatable. Readers will come away understanding the hard-won lesson that life is best experienced in its entirety. J.P. and her family are Jewish and cued white; Kevin is Japanese American and gay.
A powerful story about the joy and pain of growing up. (Fiction. 9-12)
Stone, Tiffany | Illus. by Brittany Lane | Orca (32 pp.) | $21.95 | May 14, 2024 | 9781459837393
A community rallies to rescue a horse from a flood, led by a child.
At first, the nameless protagonist is afraid to ride the horse, named Dancer (“because of how he moves his hooves”). But the two quickly bond. Every day, they joyfully “fly” through the fields—until the day Dancer warns the child and Mom that there’s danger ahead. It’s been raining for days, and the valley where they live is about to flood. Mom and the young narrator must leave Dancer behind as they evacuate by helicopter. The child is determined to help Dancer “fly” to safety. The protagonist imagines Dancer soaring with wings, and the next day, Mom and the child ask a policeman for help. He refers them to a woman who helps horses, who in turn finds a helicopter pilot and a veterinarian. “If we can make a horse fly, we can do anything,” the young narrator reflects. Readers will be moved by how the protagonist’s flights of fancy turn into concrete solutions. The story is a much-needed reminder about the importance of community; it also offers a crucial takeaway: Even in the face of natural disaster and trauma, we must never stop attempting the seemingly impossible. Lane’s impressionistic illustrations ramp up the drama but never get too scary. The author notes that she was inspired by actual events in 2021, in the Pacific Northwest. Mom and the child are brown-skinned; the community is diverse. A tremendous example of collective efforts in the wake of disaster. (Picture book. 4-8)
Stowell, Louie | Walker US/Candlewick (240 pp.) | $15.99 | May 7, 2024
9781536226317 | Series: Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good, 3
A magic ring threatens to derail the efforts of the god of mischief to mend his ways and so be allowed to return to Asgard.
Exiled to Midgard (Earth) in the guise of a human middle schooler by (as he puts it with characteristic maturity) “smelly bum-bum Odin,” Loki finds his progress grinding to a halt in this third series entry. He steals a ring that turns out to bear a legendary curse that feeds on his vanity and lingering resentment, bespelling his nascent conscience and egging him on to kill Thor, who’s come along for the quest in the role of pesky older brother. In the ramp-up to the climax, the laughable boasts and comeuppances of this most unreliable of narrators give way to some scary moments as the two disguised gods confront one another as hero and villain in a school play. Thanks to some timely onstage intervention by Loki’s human friends Valerie and Georgina—and with his own better judgment making a tardy but welcome entrance—violence is narrowly averted. By the end, Loki has a lot of apologizing to do, but he’s at least inched closer to making good on his highly aspirational claim to be a “Good God ™ now.” Ample illustrations and a varied visual layout add to the humor and reader appeal. Central characters present white; Georgina is Black. More hilarious mythological tweaks and narrow squeaks. (Graphic adventure. 9-12)
A detailed, thought-provoking account of the work of scientists.
THE LOST FOREST
Swanson, Jennifer | Millbrook/ Lerner (56 pp.) | $33.32 PLB
April 2, 2024 | 9781728493015
Explore a most unusual cypress forest.
Swanson chronicles a team of marine scientists’ efforts to explore a newly exposed underwater forest in the Gulf of Mexico. The forest was flooded and submerged 60,000 years ago during an ice age. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan’s winds uncovered the forest, leaving a rich new environment for underwater creatures. Locals who fished the area were the first to notice the particularly productive spot. Scientists from the Marine Science Center at Northeastern University and the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, supported by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab team, dove using scuba gear and also relied on underwater robots; they collected data and retrieved cypress wood samples to learn more about the sea creatures there, especially shipworms. Descriptive accounts of dives make clear the challenges: the pressure exerted by the deep water, the lack of visibility, and the delays caused by Covid-19 shutdowns. Swanson alternates between dives and lab work, breaking up the illuminating text with occasional sidebars. She concludes with ongoing research questions and efforts toward protection of this remarkable ecosystem. The book’s lively design features wavelike patterns, photos, QR codes leading to videos on the publisher’s website, and drawings that help explain gene sequencing and core sampling. Most of the team of 13 present as white in group photos and action shots.
A detailed, thought-provoking account of the work of scientists. (author’s note, information on cellulose and submerged wood, grow your own underwater plants, glossary, source notes, bibliography, further reading, websites, videos, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
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$18.99 | May 21, 2024 | 9780374391188
A bear’s seemingly terrifying actions aren’t quite what they appear.
“Don’t look at me and think that I’m ferocious,” a large, lumpy grizzly implores readers. “I am not. I am friendly. I’ve been thoughtful my whole life.” Kind eyes and a tentative raised paw seal the deal. But it’s tough to be seen as considerate when you’re so imposing. Noticing a yellow-bellied marmot who’s running low on snacks, the bear lumbers forward, arms raised, to alert the marmot to the best spot for grass. Of course, the marmot immediately runs in the other direction, and the bear has to give chase. And when a rabbit is about to leap into its burrow, the bear plucks it from midair: “Careful, rabbit. You don’t want to fall into that deep hole.” (Yes, that is exactly what it wants to do!) Oblivious to the bunny’s terror, our ursine hero scoops it up and promises to find it a carrot. The fundamental disconnect between the well-meaning bear and the frightened wildlife will keep readers giggling. With guidance from adults, this one may spark discussions of motivation, intent, and self-perception vs. reality. Kraan relies on cheery greens and yellows to bring to life the woodland meadow, while the animals are cartoonish, with hilariously over-the-top reactions.
Perfectly silly. (Picture book. 4-7)
A heartfelt examination of queer identity through the lens of one lovable kid.MURRAY OUT OF WATER
Tracy, Taylor | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (400 pp.) | $19.99 May 21, 2024 | 9780063326811
A magical preteen explores her identity in the wake of a lifechanging storm.
Twelve-year-old Murray feels a deep connection to the ocean, which manifests as the ability to control small amounts of water: “It swirls / around my ankles, / moving in circular currents / that match the / twirl / of / my hand.” After a hurricane hits her New Jersey town, badly damaging her beachfront home, Murray and her older sister go to live with their aunt and uncle in upstate New York. There, Murray feels her “ocean magic” slip away. On the bright side, she bonds with Blake, her cousin who uses they /them pronouns; Patrick, her formerly estranged older brother; and Dylan, a new friend who’s bullied at school for being gay. Through books, roller skating, and drag, Murray starts to realize that she might like girls and be nonbinary and that family can be chosen, all while trying to get her magic back. This lovely, moving novel in verse combines beautiful language (“Sometimes, when I’m swimming, / I don’t know where Murray ends / and Ocean begins”) with emotional honesty to create a resonant story of identity and growing up. With everything Murray and her family are juggling, the magical element almost feels superfluous, although it does create some charming scenes between Murray and Dylan,
who has powers of his own. Major characters read white. A heartfelt examination of queer identity through the lens of one lovable kid. (author’s note) (Verse fiction. 9-12)
Tsong, Jing Jing | Kokila (208 pp.)
$23.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9780525553427
A Taiwanese American fifth grader confronts racist bullying.
Most of the time, Měi Yīng feels no different from her friends. She loves playing soccer, eating macaroni and cheese, and searching for frogs. Other times, she feels alone: when strangers make fun of her mother’s accent, when a bully mocks her lunch, and when others watch these things happen and do nothing. Commiserating with friends from Chinese school about the racism they’ve all experienced, Měi Yīng says, “I am just SO tired of being the nice one. Why do we always have to be the nice ones?” Her conflict is ultimately resolved in an age-appropriate and satisfying way. While Měi Yīng’s bully is humanized, it’s clear that he has much work to do before he can be forgiven. For readers who share Měi Yīng’s background, this story will feel painfully accurate; for others, it will be an accessible introduction to racial microaggressions and the harm they inflict. From a calm tai chi session in the garden with Měi Yīng’s visiting
grandmother to a rage-filled confrontation, Tsong’s bold, textured illustrations—rendered in grayscale with pops of red and yellow—communicate the emotional complexity of Měi Yīng’s life. Dialogue in English is expressed with white speech bubbles, while dialogue in Mandarin appears in yellow—a particularly effective device for capturing how this community switches between and mixes the two languages in their conversations. Earnest, engaging, and relatable. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)
Vachharajani, Bijal | Illus. by Aindri C. | Blackstone (214 pp.) | $15.99 paper May 14, 2024 | 9798212631280
When a cloud of pollution casts a haze over Mumbai, it takes a group of kids to figure out what to do.
The enormous cloud appears one morning, blocking the sun and floating like “a turbulent toxic ocean.” The news covers the phenomenon nonstop, dubbing it Bhura (or brown) Cloudus. Scientists, including identical twin climatologist sisters Drs. Vidisha and Bidisha Mehta, try to figure out what’s going on. The government responds with a stunt (which fails spectacularly) in which a Bollywood star tries out the SUK-UP9, a giant vacuumlike device, on Bhura Cloudus. Chapter headings chart rising temperatures and deteriorating air quality as, amid these shenanigans, a diverse group of 13-year-old friends—Amara “Amni” Kumar, Tamanna “Tammy” D., Mithil Shah, and Andrew Thomas— each struggle in their own ways. Tammy, who’s Dalit, lives without air conditioning. Chapati, Mithil’s beloved dog, grows sicker. Amni’s parents talk of moving to Canada. Andrew’s in denial, focusing on
studying and Minecraft. The tweens are alternately curious and despairing. Finally, frustrated by the adults’ endless talking and determined to do something, they establish a campaign, uncover a dastardly plot, gain inspiration from real-life heroes, and prove that “All small things count.” Vachharajani’s grown-up villains are deliciously over-the-top yet all too recognizable, just like the effects of climate change described in the story. Young people will resonate with the critical issues, but the seriousness is made bearable by the comic absurdity, clever wordplay, and whimsical graphics. Clever, sobering, yet ultimately hopeful. (author’s note) (Fiction. 9-13)
Vernon, Katie | Abrams (40 pp.)
$18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781419770586
How do you throw a dinner party? Young Lana has some ideas.
“Lemon, are you excited to host our first dinner party?
Lemon? Lemon, where are you?” Lana sits on a bed in a bedroom filled with toys. Lemon the dog, however, hides under a pile of clothes and blankets. Lana reassures the pup that hosting a party is nothing to be afraid of and suggests ways to make every guest feel welcome. Lana and Lemon will have a blanket ready for Gramps, who’s been known to fall asleep during dinner. The pair will be sure to introduce guests who have things in common: the astronaut and the Viking; Bigfoot and the ghost. Lana and Lemon will even provide eight napkins for the octopus and extra-long straws for the giraffe and the T. rex! Throughout the planning, the party itself, and the cleanup, Lana offers basic tips on party etiquette (take guests’ coats and hats, thank anyone who’s brought a gift). Childlike, mixed-media illustrations
are brimming with clever details; many of the toys in the first spread will eventually be life-sized guests in the child’s vivid imagination, and the endpapers feature handwritten invitations and thank-you notes. Lana has pinkish-tan skin; Gramps is brown-skinned and has a hearing aid, while his partner, Paw Paw, is lighterskinned. Human guests are diverse. Whimsical warmth. (Picture book. 4-6)
Wade, Cleo | Feiwel & Friends (40 pp.)
$18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781250873958
Wade urges readers toward bright and loving futures with an extended benediction. Pairing sonorous lines printed in big block letters with spare, delicate watercolor, pen, and ink images of flowers, clouds, balloons, stars, foods, and other generic images, the author of What the Road Said (2021), illustrated by Lucie de Moyencourt, encourages youngsters to follow worthy paths. “May you live in awe / of this amazing planet / spinning in space.” “May your body / be your best friend.” “May you know fear / but not be driven by it. / May you know joy and follow it / everywhere.” If some of the lyrical flights (“May you learn / from the freedom / of wildflowers, / and know beauty that is / born from bravery”) may be a bit too lofty, most of Wade’s guidelines are clear enough: Be willing to try new things; embrace weirdness (“your superpower”), see and respect others; and, most importantly, “Never give up on love.” Aside from a racially and culturally diverse gallery of adult(ish) faces on one spread, human presence in the art is minimal.
Just the ticket for graduating seniors and other nest leavers: lyrical and intense, if occasionally a little vague. (Picture book. 6-8)
Wang, Jin with Tony Johnston | Illus. by Anisi Baigude | Anne Schwartz/Random (112 pp.)
$16.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593563618
Wang looks back on her childhood in Inner Mongolia.
Eight-year-old Jin lives in a one-room mud house in a village of 18 homes with her parents and two younger brothers. “In this small space, we ran into each other all the time,” she says. Life isn’t easy: Water is scarce, hunger is constant, and windstorms whip in from the desert. Offering a child’s-eye view, the adult Wang explains it all in a charmingly matter-of-fact voice. She writes with humor and fondness for her childhood home, employing an understated style that conveys entire essays’ worth of insight in just a few words. About her habit of climbing trees, she says that her mother “was afraid I would fall and break my head open, like a melon. Also she worried that I would rip the pants that had taken her so long to stitch. I am not sure which worry was worse.” Each chapter describes a seemingly mundane episode that nevertheless feels fascinating: traveling with her father to fetch water, speculating about—and looking for—the wolves in the nearby hills, enduring a big storm, foraging for mushrooms, awaiting visits from the popcorn man, having a family portrait taken, and more. Readers will be drawn in by Jin’s delightful voice and will become invested in her stories. The text is broken up by warm, black-and-white spot art, rendered in ink and pencil. Rich with affection, wit, and joy, a captivating peek into Chinese village life. (authors’ and illustrator’s notes) (Memoir. 7-9)
Watkins, Steve | Bloomsbury (272 pp.)
$19.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781547612185
In 1920, a group of West Virginia coal miners, previously fired for being union members, faced off against ruthless enforcers and mine guards.
In the battle that followed against the Stone Mountain Coal Company, several men were killed. This was not the first incident in what was a decadeslong struggle spearheaded by the United Mine Workers of America to unionize the state’s coal fields. The mine owners and operators had complete control of every aspect of miners’ lives; they had no regard for job safety and used unscrupulous practices to cheat the miners at every turn. The miners were paid in scrip that they could only use at company stores, and rent for company housing was deducted from their pay. They faced poverty, brutality, and political corruption. In this meticulously researched treatise, Watkins compellingly details the struggles for union recognition—as well as violent battles, courtroom dramas, near-victories, and devastating losses—while providing clear, detailed information about people on both sides and using photos, newspaper articles, and quotes to great advantage. The exploration of relationships between white, Black, and European immigrant miners is fascinating; mine owners hoped to “divide and conquer,” but the men who worked together eventually “became friends aboveground,” finding a common cause. Watkins calls out politicians and mining companies for deliberately quashing mention of this history in school curricula and even presenting a false narrative in a book that remains on classroom and library shelves in West Virginia to this day.
Fascinating and powerful. (map, sources, photo credits, endnotes, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Kirkus Star
Weber, Frank | Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.)
$18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781368100083
A sly morality tale featuring a dung beetle and a lot of his favorite stuff.
Usually the beetle is grateful for the sun, the sky, and whatever he receives from the elephants towering high overhead—“SPLAT!” But then a leopard’s remark about a distant farm “with more dung than any beetle could dream of” leads him to a cow barn where the fragrant deposits are so thrillingly massive that he must hire other beetles to help. They gather the dung into a tall, teetering, jealously guarded mountain that’s far too large to roll anywhere. Alas, such untrammeled greed can have but one catastrophic result, but rather than becoming a fecal fatality, the beetle emerges from the climactic monumental dungslide a chastened insect. With a renewed appreciation for what he had, he returns to the river bank to take joy in the warm sun, the boundless forest, and, of course, his fair and sufficient share of SPLAT. Kitted out with wide eyes and, when he’s swimming in the fresh gloop, a winningly goofy grin, the six-legged scarab, roughly the size of the toenails on the enormous elephantine feet behind him, stands in the ground-level scenes with limbs raised joyously to the sky in supplication. Weber brushes atmospheric views of moonlit grasses and cranes flying across a red sun into art that, along with the tale’s terse, formal language, lends a properly folkloric tone to the drollery.
Drops dollops of wisdom into a sure storytime hit. (Picture book. 4-8)
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A powerful look at human suffering and the will to survive.
$19.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9781960571007
A celebration of the life and legacy of a Japanese American Civil Rights activist. Rather than directly urge readers to adopt her forebear Yuri Kochiyama as a role model, the author simply relates select experiences in her great-grandmother’s life that turned her into an activist and that portray her in action. Born in California and imprisoned in an Arkansas incarceration camp during World War II, Yuri formed a group of correspondents to write letters of support to Japanese American soldiers. Facing racial discrimination after the war as well, she then leveraged that organizing experience while quietly working her way into the inner circles of the Civil Rights Movement—she was close enough to Malcolm X to cradle his head in her lap moments after he was shot—and going on to be a freedom fighter, building bridges connecting many social causes. “For Yuri,” the author writes in her afterword, “solidarity was not an ideal but an embodied, necessary practice.” Images of her—a slight figure in owlish eyeglasses, raising a defiant fist, facing a New York shop window with signs reading “No Japs” and “Colored entrance in rear,” waving protest banners, hosting meetings and open houses in her Harlem apartment, and standing here with fellow activists and there alone at her ironing board
writing letters—serve to underscore her lifelong energy and dedication. Eloquent and inspiring. (Picture-book biography. 7-9)
Windness, Kaz | Illus. by Heather Brockman Lee Flamingo Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 May 21, 2024 | 9780593623220
A spirited ode to the ways books affect us all. A group of racially diverse children celebrate the many journeys reading can take us on. From board books (“a strong, sturdy friend who won’t mind if you chew”) and pop-up books to titles for older kids (“When you grow bigger, your books grow big, too”), there’s something for everyone. References to classic kid lit such as Where the Wild Things Are (“A book is a Wild One whose supper’s still hot”), Strega Nona , and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! abound, though these works aren’t explicitly named and may go over many kids’ heads. Toward the end of the narrative, an adult reads a story out loud to a group of children; the book’s cover depicts those very same children—a reference to Rudine Sims Bishop’s seminal essay “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors” (“With a book as a friend, you will always feel heard. / There’s someone like you looking back from each word”). Bright illustrations make use of collage, incorporating the pages of a book into trees, children’s clothing, and wallpaper. While the intentions are noble, and voracious readers might be able to catch some of the references, this story feels as though it’s preaching to the
choir and appears geared toward adults in need of a gift for a young person. A lofty effort that might leave kids wanting to read the stories referenced instead. (Picture book. 5-8)
Wolo, Mamle | Little, Brown (288 pp.)
$16.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9780316703963
A Ghanaian boy finds himself at the mercy of human traffickers.
Junior high student Sena lives with his mother, grandfather, and two younger siblings; Ma left Sena’s abusive father behind in the town of Sogakope, settling her family in the village of Tovime. Sena loves spending time with his grandfather and hearing tales about his life. As the oldest child, Sena feels obligated to help with farmwork every morning and make sacrifices for the sake of his family. When a flashy, well-dressed man known as Jack of Diamonds visits the village, many of the boys agree to go with him, lured by the promise of wealth in exchange for work. Sena is hesitant at first, but after more difficulties arise, he also agrees to go. He ends up living in wretched conditions on a small island in a lake. The cruel master he works for uses violence to keep the children he’s purchased for his fishing business in line. Sena realizes he’ll perish if he doesn’t escape. During his journey to freedom, he has run-ins with a mysterious water creature. Wolo skillfully sheds light on the horrific practice of the trafficking of children, and the grim situations many are forced to live and work in—but she also tells a story of hope and perseverance. The vividly described settings include imagery that paints the scenes for readers as the story unfolds. A powerful look at human suffering and the will to survive. (map, author’s note) (Fiction. 10-14)
Yang, Gene Luen | Illus. by Kendall Goode & Alison Acton | First Second (144 pp.)
$25.99 | $17.99 paper | May 28, 2024
9781250816290 | 9781250816306 paper
Series: The Books of Clash, 3
The Jazzypickleton Cucumbers’ inarticulate golem struggles to express his dislike for his new nickname in this third series entry.
Being a sensitive soul, for all his massive, rocky, pink-andgray body, Sonny the Golem doesn’t care for being called “Launchpad”—not to mention having wizard Zeke jumping off his head to fall on hapless rival teams. But he’s reluctant to voice a complaint since the team is doing so well. But that willingness to “go along to get along” comes home to roost when an enemy cannonball cracks Sonny into diminutive twin Golemites, one peaceable and the other vengefully set on dealing Zeke a memorable beat down (as Zeke insensitively puts it, “Ha ha! Well, what do you know?! Two Launchpads are better than one!”). Cue the quest, which takes the Cucumbers from the lair of Granny Pocus to the electrified village of Zappermore in search of a spell that will reknit his split personality—and even perhaps give Sonny a way to express his feelings clearly but nonviolently. The art features the usual cast of racially diverse character types and heavy doses of cartoon violence; the backmatter includes both art samples and tips for gamers from two Most Valuable Players of Clash of the Clans and Clash Royale. A third round of prodigious pounding and personal problem-solving. (map) (Graphic fantasy. 10-15)
Offers deep emotional insight into the refugee experience. CAGED
Yang, Kao Kalia | Illus. by Khou Vue Kokila (40 pp.) | $18.99
May 28, 2024 | 9781984816368
A 6-year-old Hmong child grows up in a refugee camp, unaware of the outside world.
“I live in a cage but I don’t know it,” states the unnamed protagonist, who was born here. The child’s deftly paced narration describes surroundings—“bald hills and dry fields of flying dirt”—shared with “grandmothers with no teeth” and “mothers with babies on their backs.” Armed guards patrol the area smoking cigarettes at night, “moving like fireflies around the edges of our world.” Despite the bleak environment, children still use their imaginations to travel beyond their borders “to a place far from here!” These moments of joy break up harsh realities such as arduous living conditions and people fleeing war. Vue’s simple cartoons are textured with splatters of colors and lines set against largely white backdrops; with honesty and sensitivity, the artwork portrays the protagonist’s struggle to understand the concept of war while observing the pain endured by adults in the camp. Moments of lightness temper the heaviness, especially when an auntie insists that the young narrator isn’t “a child of poverty, war or despair”; the child is “hope being born.” When the family finally leaves the camp, the auntie whispers, “Your wings have arrived.” In an author’s note, Yang discusses how, after fleeing Laos, her own family lived in Thailand’s Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, where she was born.
Offers deep emotional insight into the refugee experience. (Picture book. 5-8)
Ylvisaker, Anne | Marble Press (264 pp.) $17.99 | May 6, 2024 | 9781958325124
A novel in verse about the months before a city girl starts middle school.
It’s the summer before Phoebe, 11, enters Southside Middle. Everyone says they’ll “eat her alive” when she gets there. On Phee’s street there’s an alley where the neighborhood kids hang out—and a house with a “killer dog” named Bull. She thinks some of the kids are too babyish, while others have in turn outgrown her. With palpable angst, Phee wrestles hard with wanting to break free of the alley and see more of the world, yet she fears the unknown. When cool and prickly Mercy arrives to visit her dad, Phee’s eager to befriend her, excited about the chance to try out her skateboard, and she turns away from lifelong buddy Henny. The poetry skips across the page: Phee is a deeply relatable wordsmith, thinking in rhythms that capture the patterns of hopscotch and skipping rope, and expressing raw, conflicting emotions. Words flow across the page, punctuated by repetition, movement, empty space, and run-on words. The poems transform the alley into a character, showing both its smallness and the new experiences it offers as Phee journals about it in her treetop hideaway. The voices of the characters, brief though they may be, jump off the page with clarity as Ylvisaker captures the alchemy of ordinary youthful times filled with friends and fears. The characters have minimal physical descriptions; the cover art depicts Phee and Mercy as white. Transporting. (Verse fiction. 8-12)
Squid/ Macmillan (128 pp.) | $19.99
May 7, 2024 | 9781684493746
A biologist presents a gallery of her favorite females, “the wonder women of the animal kingdom.”
“It’s all about girl power,” York writes—referring to elephant families, but really applying the notion to dozens of animals as she highlights a wide array of female-led group dynamics, reproductive practices, and parental behaviors. For many creatures that hang out in family or social groups, from wild horses, ring-tailed lemurs, and spotted hyenas to orcas, bonobos, and honeybees, females are in charge. Also, for the much tinier male orchid mantis and black widow spider, there’s often “no second date,” as the author puts it. She ventures into more intriguing territory by introducing multiple species that change genders as they go. She also describes female Amazon mollies and mole salamanders (which clone themselves, but only in the presence of sperm they don’t actually use) as well as water fleas, marbled crayfish, and New Mexico whiptail lizards, which produce offspring without having to bother with males at all. If that’s not enough to leave readers agog, she offers several examples of extreme maternal sacrifice such as that of the desert spider, which liquifies her own insides to feed her young. Humans don’t make the cut, but ClinthorneWong slips occasional mildly anthropomorphic expressions or nurturing postures into her vibrantly hued close-up portraits of wild mothers and children.
Revelatory reading for audiences of every gender. (glossary, index)
(Nonfiction. 8-12)
Zei, Alki | Trans. by Karen Emmerich Yonder (240 pp.) | $18.00 | May 7, 2024 9781632063649
A fresh translation of an acclaimed 1963 novel about the rise of fascism in pre–World War II Greece.
Zei’s tale sensitively chronicles both rising political tensions and general patterns of life on a Greek island in the mid-1930s, when the country was under the dictatorship of Gen. Ioannis Metaxas, as seen through the eyes of 7-year-old Melia. The plot begins with summer idylls in a fishing village and stories about the stuffed wildcat in Aunt Despina’s parlor and goes on to include book burnings, searches and seizures by constables, and a wild emotional meltdown when Myrto, Melia’s naïve big sister, learns that the phalanx of “our dictator’s youth organization” that she proudly joined at school is just a gang of miscreants. There’s something genuinely childlike about the way Melia goes from initially caring far more about the pleasures of rambling along the rocky shoreline with friends than the half-heard conversations of worried grown-ups to a sharp awareness of the growing, pervasive tensions in her world and its ideological causes. Her journey invites modern young readers to see potential parallels in their own times. The book’s original U.S. release won a Mildred L. Batchelder Award for its publisher in 1970; this edition, translated by a Princeton University professor of comparative literature, invites readers in through its conversational tone and vivid details. At once evocative of times past and more cogent than ever. (translator’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-13)
Zhao, Katie | Random House (288 pp.)
$17.99 | April 30, 2024
9780593426654 | Series: Winnie Zeng, 3
Shaman-in-training Winnie is excited to go to camp in the spiritual realm and have a chance to become a champion, just like her grandmother.
Following the events of Winnie Zeng Vanquishes a King (2023), Chinese American Winnie is informed by Lao Lao, her overspirit grandmother, of an upcoming 10-day winter break shaman camp. It includes a tournament where shamans battle for the coveted title of Shaman Youth Champion. (“Grand prize: A sparring lesson with a legendary spirit of your choosing. Runner-up: A surprise shaman goody bag.”) While Winnie struggles with mastering advanced skills, such as True Flight, and finding confidence in her magic, trouble is stirring. She overhears Spirit Council members talking about evil spirits, foul play, and shamans who don’t seem quite themselves. And then the tournament reveals more abnormalities. Winnie’s friend remarks on an opponent’s sudden surge in speed and power, and then Winnie battles shamans whose eyes strangely glow red. The well-structured narrative quickly picks up in pace as the evil spirits unveil their wicked endgame and plans for domination that reference Chinese mythology. Winnie and her friends attempt to hold them at bay, mustering all the skills in their possession and attempting not to be completely overwhelmed in the process. While the buildup to the climax is full of suspense, the neat resolution is comparatively brisk, but readers will be having too much fun to mind. One enjoyable action-packed ride. (recipes) (Fantasy. 8-12)
SO FAR, 2024 has offered plenty of good news for fans of international YA literature. In January, the Youth Media Award winners were announced at the American Library Association’s LibLearnX conference. The Mildred L. Batchelder Award honors U.S. publishers of translated works for young people through age 14. Given the heavy preponderance of picture books among the eligible titles, it was refreshing to see YA represented: Abrams won for Houses With a Story by Seiji Yoshida, translated from Japanese by Jan Mitsuko Cash, and Levine Querido received an honor for Pardalita , a graphic novel from Portugal by Joana Estrela, translated by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. Meanwhile, the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature honored a translated title for only the second time in its history: Fire From the Sky by Moa Backe Åstot, translated from Swedish by Eva Apelqvist. (Read an interview with Åstot on page 136.) In other news, early 2024 release
Snowglobe, a dystopian thriller from South Korean author Soyoung Park, translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort, is making a big splash, with a screen adaptation in the works. Here are some other 2024 titles in translation that are not to be missed.
The Book of Denial by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, illustrated by Alejandro Magallanes, translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel (Unruly, Jan. 30): Groundbreaking writer Chávez Castañeda and award-winning illustrator and graphic designer Magallanes, both from Mexico, are the forces behind this explosive, visually engaging work. The bold design and the dramatic, limited palette lend additional impact to the story of a boy attempting to make sense of a world in which children are the victims of horrific adult cruelty.
The Djinn’s Apple by Djamila Morani, translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain (Neem Tree Press, May 7): Morani, an Algerian literature professor, sets this historical thriller during the
8th-century golden age of Baghdad, when it was a multicultural hub of scholarship. Muslim teen Nardeen’s family members are murdered, but she manages to escape. Desperate for answers—and revenge—she’s helped by a Jewish doctor in her quest for the truth.
The Boy From Clearwater: Book 2 by Pei-yun Yu, illustrated by Jian-xin Zhou, translated from Taiwanese Hoklo, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese by Lin King (Levine Querido, May 7): Readers met former political prisoner Tsai Kun-lin in the first volume of this two-part graphic biography from Taiwan. The riveting story of this heroic activist concludes here, unfolding in exquisitely illustrated panels that trace his adult life
following his arrest, torture, and 10-year prison sentence as a teen who came of age under martial law.
We Go to the Park by Sara Stridsberg, illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna, translated from Swedish by B.J. Woodstein (Unruly, May 14): This remarkable collaboration between two acclaimed creators—a Swedish novelist/playwright and an Italian artist—invites teens and adults to reminisce about and reconsider simple trips to the park through a surprising lens. The pairing of otherworldly paintings with brief, deceptively simple lines of text turns ordinary playgrounds, fields, and woods into landscapes of endless possibility.
Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.
LAURA SIMEON Illustration by Eric Scott AndersonA New Zealand boy reckons with his past and his present.
Eddy Smallbone is mourning the loss of his beloved Labrador, Marley. Her death occurred right around the two-year anniversary of the Christchurch earthquake and his grandmother’s passing. An orphan, he’s been raised by the uncle he calls Brain, a research librarian who’s surrounded Eddy with a coterie of caring adults, including godmother Bridgie, cousin Ginge, and “the Modern Priest.”
Eddy’s best friend, Thomas “Toss” Moore, whom he’s in choir and assorted bands with, is recovering from
salmonella poisoning. The 19-year-old Eddy has dealt with numerous changes; he dropped out of school just before the first quake, and his internal world has been turbulent ever since, with long stretches of quiet punctuated by sudden bursts of noise.
Still, Eddy is processing Marley’s death with action: He takes on new jobs (such as pet sitting and, inadvertently, child care), in addition to working his regular checkout gig at the supermarket. While on a pet-sitting assignment with a nun’s cursing parrot, he bumps into his ex, Boo O’Brien, who injects further complications into his
already cluttered world. What follows is an often sweet and sometimes humorous exploration of love, mental health, family, faith, grief, and the past. This sophisticated story weaves in and out of the present day, allowing for a
full perspective on Eddy— with occasional commentary from Boo herself—as he juggles reality, responsibility, and hope. Main characters read white.
A soulfully layered story told with wit and care. (Fiction. 14-adult)
Acker, James | Inkyard Press (384 pp.)
$19.99 | April 9, 2024 | 9781335009968
Former friends reunite for a revenge plot—and rediscover that their differences may be why they love each other.
At New Jersey’s Moorestown High, Jackson Pasternak is the golden boy from the town’s most affluent neighborhood. Phil Reyno is the antagonistic punk living with his “very fun alcoholic” mother in a dingy apartment. They have nothing in common, but they were best friends until a few years ago. When Phil’s boyfriend, the milquetoast yet strangely conniving Cameron Ellis, publicly outs him at the school dance, Jackson knows something is up. Now an internet-famous, picture-perfect gay icon, Cameron unceremoniously dumps Phil but makes him out to be the villain on his popular vlog. So Phil decides to get even by taking down Cameron and the Skwad, his frustratingly woke friend group. Throw in Ronny DiSario (Cameron’s jilted ex-girlfriend) plus Jackson (the respectable boy no one would expect to be involved), and the revenge is on. As they hatch their plans, Jackson’s and Phil’s latent feelings for one another bubble up into a steamy and touching romance. With just enough plot twists to maintain interest without becoming disjointed, this enjoyable novel places readers in the minds and contemporary world of its protagonists while exploring the tempestuous nature of teen identity. Many central characters are white or racially ambiguous; Jackson is Jewish. A sexy, irreverently witty, gay romance that takes teen issues seriously. (Fiction. 14-18)
A smart, poignant meditation on losing someone you love.
Ahmed, Samira | Little, Brown (384 pp.) $18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780316547840
Reeling from her father’s sudden abandonment of their family, Noor’s mother moves her family to a small Illinois town far away from their life in Chicago. Noor hopes to lie low and finish out the last quarter of her senior year, but she and her younger sister, Amal, are noticeably among the few Indian American and Muslim students at school. Once Noor learns that the school district has removed over 500 challenged books from the library shelves and slated them for committee review—mostly ones by marginalized writers—she feels compelled to act. She and her like-minded new friends protest by reading aloud from these books in public spaces. They also put up a “fREADom Library” (or Little Free Library for censored books), spreading the word on social media and encouraging others to join in. Their activism angers school administrators, students, and the local community. Along with their personal trauma, Noor’s family must also deal with veiled threats, racist and Islamophobic slurs, and physical violence. The story centers on the hot-button issues of book banning and freedom of speech, while also exploring family dynamics, forging friendships, and a budding love triangle. Although the pacing is at times weighed down by the content, Ahmed inventively uses different formats—social media comments, news articles, transcripts of television broadcasts—to examine the
racist ideologies and talking points behind censorship efforts. A timely story about silence as complicity, defending freedom, and the courage to fight against hate. (author’s note, resources, bibliography) (Fiction. 12-18)
Anderson, Ferin Davis with Stephanie Sammartino McPherson | Twenty-First Century/Lerner (144 pp.) | $38.65 PLB April 2, 2024 | 9781728424002
Advocacy for Indigenous fire-management practices, a thorough account of wildfire science, information on firefighting—and a blazing blackand-orange color scheme—make this book a hot ticket.
Anderson, a scientist and enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and prolific nonfiction author McPherson provide a balanced, well-written analysis of conflagrations. Paradoxically, fire causes damage but also has benefits, even as human land use competes with essential ecosystem regeneration. The authors contrast the natural role of wildfire in maintaining healthy ecosystems with horrific blazes that are worsened by mismanagement and climate change.
Case studies highlight First Nations communities and individuals from around the world and show how scientists are increasingly considering Indigenous practices, sparking change. Scientists have come to accept what “for millennia, Indigenous peoples across the globe have understood,” that “by burning layers of dead vegetation that could otherwise become fuel, carefully
tended fires lessened the chance of a disastrous wildfire.” These practices are also about “livelihood, traditions, beliefs, values, and spirituality.” The authors explain what fire is and describe fire suppression and prescribed burns in the U.S., conveying a lot of science in a palatable form. Climate change is at the heart of the story—and of this book. The text defines terms in context, contains helpful text boxes with additional information, and is supported by color photos. Skillfully introduces the complex story of wildfires, Indigenous knowledge, and climate change. (timeline, glossary, source notes, selected bibliography, further information, index, photo acknowledgments) (Nonfiction. 13-18)
Bakolias, Katerina | James Lorimer (168 pp.) | $14.99 paper | Feb. 6, 2024
9781459418059 | Series: Lorimer Real Love
A lovely story of learning to chart your own course. Mina is excited about starting work as a sales associate at Luscious Lingerie, but she soon discovers that her overly excitable boss is putting her through “a trial by fire.” Maybe Mina will do better in a different department? Another thing that makes the merchandising team much better than the sales department for bisexual Mina is the presence of her co-worker Lexie Hayes, a beautiful, popular girl she went to school with who gives her butterflies. Mina’s relationship with Lexie evolves as they flirt and get to know each other; it turns out Lexie is bi as well. If only Mina’s life could just revolve around Lexie! Alas, while she’s trying to find her own path, her family pressures her about both her future and her body. Between her Greek immigrant relatives talking about finding her a husband (or wife) from the village in the old country and a guy from work hitting on her at a party, things are complicated. And just when she thinks she’s got it all
figured out, Lexie starts calling in sick at work right after meeting Mina’s parents. Mina is a body-positive fat girl who’s considering whether she might actually be pansexual. She’s a delightful main character, exploring all facets of growing up and becoming one’s own person. A fast-paced story for reluctant readers with an endearing protagonist to root for. (Fiction. 13-18)
Bliss, Bryan | Greenwillow Books (288 pp.) $19.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780062962270
The complicated nature of grief and an unusual path to understanding life through the lens of pro wrestling mania are explored in this novel about a St. Paul, Minnesota, teen whose father died three years ago.
Eighteen-year-old Julie and her mom have escaped the emotional fog that overtook them when their beloved dad and husband died unexpectedly, but the gaping hole he left is still a constant in their lives. Julie struggles to like the new guy her mom is seeing, even though she truly wants her to be happy. In addition, she still leans heavily on the conversations she has in her head with the Masked Man, a professional wrestler she and her dad followed as part of their dedication to the sport (her mom found it all a bit embarrassing). This emotionally honest, touching work of contemporary fiction is grounded in the details of Julie’s life, such as the world of professional wrestling, the Mall of America, and her obsession with Orange Julius (where her earnest, wildly endearing best friend, Max, works). Julie’s wryly funny, selfdeprecating, and authentic narrative voice, the wide cast of eccentric but realistically drawn characters whom she begins to let in as the story progresses, and the beautiful, unshowy writing will keep readers going all the way to the
auspicious end. Major characters are cued white.
A smart, poignant meditation on losing someone you love and living with the loss. (Fiction. 13-18)
Con Morse, Catherine | Crown (320 pp.)
$19.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9780593711385
A 16-year-old classical pianist receives mysterious notes warning her not to idolize her school’s new music teacher.
Inspired by the author’s experiences at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, this coming-of-age story is set at a prestigious public boarding school full of talented musicians, dancers, artists, actors, and writers. In the fall of her junior year, Chinese American Claire Wu is immediately awed when glamorous and accomplished Taiwanese pianist Dr. Tina Li joins the faculty. Claire has never had an Asian teacher before, and she’s determined to impress the demanding, Juilliard-trained Dr. Li, who believes piano should be the students’ sole focus. Soon, Claire begins to receive handwritten notes encouraging her not to fall under Li’s spell, a sentiment with which her best friend, Jenny Stone, and crush, Rocky Wong, both fellow pianists, agree. The notes, while nonthreatening, are invasive and borderline stalkerish. When she’s not consumed with the mystery of the unwanted notes, Claire dedicates herself to perfecting her piano repertoire and falling for the brilliant and rebellious Rocky, a senior and a member of the exclusive Asian Student Society, which she hopes to join. Debut author Con Morse sensitively captures the emotional, physical, and mental health challenges of elite young artists, particularly classical musicians, as well as the complexities of being among the few Asians in a predominantly white space.
A compelling exploration of art, identity, and falling in love. (content note, playlist) (Fiction. 12-18)
Cooke, Stephanie | Illus. by Mel Valentine Vargas | HarperAlley (304 pp.) | $26.99
April 30, 2024 | 9780358525721
Grace Mendes isn’t comfortable in her own skin, but her pillow-fightin’ alter ego, Cinderhella, sure is. Grace is a Toronto college student with a history of low self-esteem brought on by years of bullying and a complicated relationship with her stepmother. She lives with her childhood (and only) friend, Callie, who valiantly tries to pull Grace out of her shell by dragging her to a Pillow Fight Federation competition. With nods to the puntastic names seen in roller derby, the sport features bouts between players like Kat Atonic and Rapunchel. Grace quickly falls in love and decides to try it out herself, a decision that sends her on a journey that brings out the powerful person she is but also forces her to reckon with her insecurities when she faces a slew of social media comments. Even as the characters deal with homework, hangovers, and money anxieties outside the ring, this graphic novel with a notably bold color palette introduces readers to the lesser-known world of competitive pillow fighting and the ways it subverts traditional stereotypes around women in sports. Some plot points feel rushed—like Callie’s explorations of her sexuality and the single parenthood of one of the pillow fighters—but overall, this is a delightful, inclusive, feminist, coming-of-age sports story. Diversity in sexuality, gender, and race is represented in primary and secondary characters; Grace has brown skin, and Callie reads white. Will win readers’ hearts. (Graphic fiction. 14-18)
Ellickson, Ana | Amulet/Abrams (368 pp.) $19.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9781419764226
An 18-year-old Filipino American teen enters a life of magical crime to pay back her father’s debts.
Life has never been perfect for Ruby Santos and her father, Balboa, but things are truly desperate now. It’s been two years since her mother died of cancer, and between repaying hospital bills, supporting relatives in the Philippines, and trying to get by in expensive San Francisco, Ruby and Balboa are stretched to their limits. Amid this hardship, Ruby discovers Balboa’s big secret: He works for a crime family that uses magic portals within the BART public transit system to smuggle illegal goods. But Balboa’s declining health and alcoholism have been getting him into trouble at work. Ruby’s called in to answer for his debts—Balboa put their house up for collateral—and winds up offering to take over his position. This decision thrusts her into the dark underworld of the Bartholomew, “i.e., BART,” criminal family, most of whom are white. She comes into the orbit of (and, despite her qualms about his work, starts falling for) handsome, aquamarineeyed Montgomery Bartholomew, who’s heir to the throne. A slow start may have readers wondering where this train is headed, but it sets up threads that pay off once Ruby’s talent for magic and her growing closeness to Montgomery draw heat from those inside and outside the organization. The story wraps up neatly but leaves room for a sequel.
An urban fantasy with an original premise. (Fantasy. 14-18)
Ellis, Sami | Amulet/Abrams (368 pp.)
$19.99 | March 26, 2024 | 9781419766763
A Virginia high school student awakens relentless evil when she uncovers the truth about her gruesome family legacy.
Sixteen-year-old Temple Baker is on a mission. Her father, a convicted serial killer, has admitted to murdering Temple’s mother and burying her body on their farmland. Refusing to believe her father’s death row confession, Temple decides to revisit the scene of his bloody crime. The only problem? The family homestead is being used as a sleepaway camp for Black LGBTQ+ teens who are interested in horror.
Temple, a Black lesbian, swallows her distaste for forced camaraderie and earns a spot as a camp counselor. Shortly after her arrival, someone is found dead in the woods—and the appearance of the first body just marks the beginning of a terrifying weekend. As Temple and her fellow campers fight for their lives, Temple realizes that her father’s secrets eclipse even her worst nightmares. Narrated in the third person, Ellis’ debut novel combines the ghoulish delight of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead franchise with the gore of an ’80s slasher film. The lore constructed around Temple’s violent family history is intriguing and creepy, but anchoring details about her parents’ pasts and their psychological motivations would have benefitted from more clarity and nuance. An atmospheric bloodbath that effectively disrupts the expected prototype of the Final Girl. (content warning) (Horror. 14-18)
Gonzalez, Elvira K. | Roaring Brook Press (320 pp.) | $21.99 | May 28, 2024
9781250847850
An athlete shares her journey from her childhood barrio in Texas to the collegiate track.
Fourteen-yearold Elvira Kristelle “Kristy” Gonzalez had 24 hours to raise $40,000 to rescue her mother from the kidnappers across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, who had abducted her following a wedding. Caught in the middle of drug-fueled violence, Kristy’s life took a shocking turn. Instead of racing boys to help her friends win bets, she had to race the clock to save her mother’s life. When Ma returned, utterly traumatized by the experience, Kristy was deeply affected, too—“I try looking into her eyes, but every time I do, they haunt me.” Kristy became suicidal but had to deal with her own severe trauma alone. She decided to seek a path to higher education by getting a hurdling scholarship. But she faced trial after trial—from landing in juvie at 16 following constant fighting with Ma to being groomed and abused by a coach. Kristy found herself continually jumping over hurdles, both figuratively and literally. In this perceptive narrative, moments of joy, confidence, and light contrast with the depths of confusion, hurt, and darkness, highlighting the struggles that many vulnerable young athletes from underrepresented backgrounds face. The author pays homage to her Tejana heritage throughout, often using Spanish phrases that are explained in English in context.
An unfiltered and honest account of perseverance, resilience, and defying the odds. (afterword, bibliography, recommended reading, resources) (Memoir. 14-18)
Grabo, Markelle | Page Street (320 pp.)
$18.99 | April 2, 2024 | 9798890039705
In this retelling of “Snow White and Rose Red,” a 15-year-old girl is drawn into a faerie conflict that will change her life forever. The villagers of Sugar Maple Village stay away from the western wood, which is rumored to be full of vengeful faeries. Quiet Ro, who prefers trees to people, has never believed in those stories. She spends her days foraging in the forest to supplement her family’s sparse pantry, avoiding everyone but her bookish sister, Eirwyn. Besides, her visits to the square are full of unwelcome questions. Folks ask, “Do you fancy Lucy Mackenzie’s boy, or is it the older sister who draws your eye?” Ro wonders, why must it “be one or the other”? Then, one night, her solitude is broken. In order to save a beautiful fox, Ro throws herself in front of a bear. Just before the bear strikes a killing blow, Eirwyn shoots him with an arrow. When the bear transforms into a human boy who doesn’t have any memories, Ro and her sister are pulled, against their will, into a high-stakes faerie intrigue. Incorporating beats from the original tale into intriguing new worldbuilding, this novel will satisfy fans of the genre even as it veers from convention. Ro and
Moments of joy and light contrast with the confusion and darkness.
Eirwyn have pale skin and auburn and blond hair, respectively; supporting characters are diverse in appearance. An enchanting adventure anchored by a queer romance; this is a welcome spin on a familiar story. (Fantasy. 13-18)
Gratton, Tessa & Justina Ireland
Razorbill/Penguin (352 pp.) | $19.99 May 14, 2024 | 9780593353356
Talon struggles to follow his brother’s goal of bringing peace to Pyrlanum in this duology closer following 2023’s Chaos & Flame
After Caspian, regent of House Dragon, declared an end to the Dragons’ imperialistic war, he transformed himself and Darling into an empyreal dragon and phoenix, respectively. Talon, Caspian’s brother, is left to keep the unstable peace, while the Dragons refuse to return their captured lands and the newly released magical boons cause chaos across Pyrlanum. When his aunt Aurora and her cursed blood magic threaten the newly awakened empyreal regents, Talon races to stop her. Darling, reeling from both brothers’ betrayal, struggles to keep hold of herself against the powerful pull of the phoenix that forces her on its own unknown quest. The ongoing storyline about ending the war is well developed, and it depicts the difficulties of handling reparations, demilitarization, and establishing diplomatic relations in the wake of bloodshed. The positioning of empyreals as blood heirs and guardians of Chaos is intriguing and creates an original and deep magic system. Likewise, the mystique surrounding the phoenix provides shocking twists. While the side characters are interesting, they lack development; still, Darling’s and Talon’s stories are gripping and inspire empathy, especially with their explorations of self and grief. Darling’s gradual change in emotions is understandable, >>>
In this debut novel from Sweden, a Sámi writer embraces complexity.
BY MATHANGI SUBRAMANIAN“DO HOMOSEXUAL REINDEER HERDERS EXIST?” So begins Moa Backe Åstot’s tender, poignant debut novel, Fire From the Sky (Levine Querido, 2023), the story of an Indigenous teenage reindeer herder coming to terms with his sexuality in northwestern Sweden. (The book was translated from Swedish by Eva Apelqvist and received a Michael L. Printz Honor from the American Library Association.) The main character, Ánte, is Sámi, and his ancestors have lived in Scandinavia for tens of thousands of years. Ánte loves his culture, but he’s also in love with his best friend, Erik, whose covert touches make Ánte wonder if the feeling is mutual. Although he longs to address their relationship with Erik, revealing his queerness wouldn’t just cost Ánte his best friend: It could cost him his community, his family, and his home.
On a recent video call, I spoke to the talented, optimistic, and perspicacious Åstot—who herself is Sámi—about technology, indigeneity, and the concept of home. Our conversation, conducted in English, has been edited for length and clarity.
mention one of these ancient stories. The book’s title also comes from that story.
Why did you decide to write this story as a young adult novel?
I was actually 15 years old when I started writing about Ánte. Since I was just a teenager myself, it made sense to me to write about other teenagers. I continued writing it [when I was older] because the story really mattered to me. So, it wasn’t really a choice—it kind of just happened.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to read fiction about other Sámi teenagers. But
there aren’t a lot of Sámi young adult writers—there’s not really any tradition of writing for young adults where I come from—so I just found a few books. I started writing what I wanted to read. That’s why this book was important to me.
How do you think your Sámi background influences your craft?
I used a little bit of Sámi mythology. There’s one scene where Ánte and Erik are watching the stars, and I
Although some parts of the book are obviously [drawn] from my heritage, there are some things that I did not see myself but others did. For example, nature is very present [in the book], which is not something that I was intentional about, but readers said nature is almost like a character in the story. That’s something that I was not aware of when I was writing it, but in almost any Sámi art form, nature is very, very present.
Another thing I discovered was that I write in dialect. I thought that I was just writing regular Swedish, but apparently I was not! My editor, who’s from Stockholm, made a long, long list of words and phrases that were dialect.
She didn’t want me to change them; she just wanted to point them out. I kept a lot of those words and phrases because I wanted the book to feel like it’s from this region.
You often use symbolism in such sophisticated ways. How do you think of these symbols, and how do you decide where to place them in the plot?
It sort of happens when I’m writing. I never plan what I’m going to write, so I don’t know exactly where the story is going, and then these images pop up. A lot of times I don’t know where they come from. It’s part of what’s so exciting to me about creating and writing.
Another theme in this book is the impact of Swedish colonization. In many countries, colonizers
erased existing Indigenous queer traditions. Did this happen with the Sámi?
We don’t really know about queerness before colonization in the Sámi community.
But I think the hate that Sámi people show Ánte [in the book] is actually fear, and that fear definitely comes from colonization.
Because the Sámi people have been violated for such a long time by the Swedish government and the church, if one Sámi person stands out in any way that doesn’t suit the Swedish perspective—like with queerness, because there’s this stereotype of how family should be—the whole community gets scared. And that is not something that we Sámi have made up. It comes from the outside: that you have to work with reindeer, you have to speak the Sámi language, and so on.
Although a lot of Sámi readers from the younger generation have been very happy about this book and feel it’s important to talk about these things, some of the older people might not like it as much. Because to them, I guess, it’s a little bit scary to talk about these things.
The omnipresence of technology in this story— and, specifically, social media—was such a wonderful contrast to the stereotypes you mention. Why did you include so much social media in the plot?
A lot of conversations happen through texts and social media because the story is about teenagers who use their phones all the time. It wasn’t that long ago that I was a teenager, and I used Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat,
I wanted to tell a story about someone who thinks that his home is very important, and who loves his culture and his heritage.
so that part just came naturally.
But I also thought about how, when you’re a Sámi teenager today, [you live with] a lot of contrasts. We have these ancient traditions, and then we’re l iving in this modern world like everyone else and using social media. I wanted to show that tension for Ánte, who really, really cares about these old traditions but also wants to move forward.
I loved that Ánte rejects the idea that leaving his home is a viable solution. He wants to be himself, but he also wants to stay. We have a lot of books here in Sweden where the main character wants to get away, to move to a larger city. And we also have specifically Sámi books about young people
who want to move to Stockholm and don’t want to keep herding reindeer. So that story’s already been told. I wanted to tell a story about someone who wants to stay—someone who thinks that his home is very important, and who loves his culture and his heritage.
Sámi people should be able to read about someone who shows that you don’t have to want to get away from here. You don’t have to leave to live a modern life. That story has not been written here in Sweden, at least.
You mentioned that you still live in your traditional home and work with reindeer?
Yes, I do. Home is very important to me. [Herding] is not what I do for a living, but my family owns reindeer.
Some people don’t want to do this—they were born into a Sámi family, but they don’t really care. And that’s fine as well, of course. But I think for a lot of teenagers, home is important. They want to stay, but [doing that becomes] harder because they can’t just leave everything they are and be someone else. They want to be who they are. With Ánte, he can have his queerness and his love for his best friend and he can be Sámi. I wanted to show that it’s possible for these contrasts to coexist. You can do everything and be everything that you want at the same time.
Mathangi Subramanian is a novelist, essayist, and founder of Moon Rabbit Writing Studio .
resulting in a realistic slow-burn romance; readers may feel Talon comes across as too steadfast. The characters are varied in physical appearance. A nuanced story with a cast readers will cheer for. (Fantasy. 14-18)
Graziadei, A.L. | Godwin Books (320 pp.) $19.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781250777133
A queer college freshman struggles with trauma.
Nathaniel Conti starts his second semester as a Hartland University freshman determined not to repeat his first, when he isolated himself from campus life. Now, he wants to be seen. He’s hard to miss: His hair is dyed à la Cruella de Vil. When he meets fellow students Celeste Hernandez and Tasha Seo, who are Mexican American and lesbian and Korean American and nonbinary, respectively, he feels they’re “queerplatonic soulmates.” Plus, his new friends are on the women’s lacrosse team, the sport he’d excelled at in high school. Nathaniel is up front about some—but not all—of his troubles, like how he got kicked off his lacrosse team and earned his criminal record. He’s also in crisis, experiencing dissociative states and insomnia. And then he bumps into Max Palazzola from high school, formerly his best friend, lacrosse teammate, and partner in crime. The two white boys haven’t spoken since they were both in handcuffs, and Nathaniel is riddled with conflicting emotions; it’s possible he’s missed Max even more than he’s missed playing lacrosse. Nathaniel hides in bed, avoiding everything, but Max is persistent in his efforts at reconciling. The deep bond between them is portrayed with patience, care, and empathy. The sharp, fluid prose propels readers further into Nathaniel’s complex frame of mind as the story is uplifted by its touching characters.
A thoughtful rumination on the power of friendship, trauma, and healing. (Fiction. 14-18)
Kirkus Star
Thirsty
Hammonds, Jas | Roaring Brook Press | (336 pp.) | $19.99
May 14, 2024 | 9781250816597
An incoming college student in Virginia experiences a life-altering summer.
Blake Brenner, who has a Black dad and a white mom, wants to be seen, celebrated, and respected—and to overcome her humble beginnings, anxiety, and childhood bullying. She’s off to a great start, having landed a beautiful girlfriend, Black and Filipina Ella Spencer, whose money and social status open any door. Ella’s influence helps them score an invitation to pledge the Serena Society, a secret sisterhood “for powerful, badass women of color” at Jameswell University, where Blake, Ella, and Blake’s best friend, Annetta Jones, who’s Black, are going in the fall. The three girls are determined to join the elite ranks of Serena, no matter the cost. Desperately looking to please everyone, even at a cost to herself, Blake depends heavily on alcohol. Surely, if drinking makes her loved by her girlfriend and the life of the party, it can’t be that bad? Blake’s chaotic summer after high school graduation ultimately comes to a hopeful end, with her taking stock of her life. In their sophomore novel, award-winner Hammonds impressively uses flashbacks and their profound command of language to animate Blake’s narrative, powerfully illustrating alcohol’s effects on her mental state. Readers will be gripped from the very beginning by the author’s thrilling storytelling, which presents thought-provoking conversations about alcohol consumption, identity, and elitism. A gut-wrenching story that honestly explores the normalization of alcoholism. (content warning, author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)
He, Cindy R.X. | Sourcebooks Fire (336 pp.) | $11.99 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781728293394
When Sierton High’s cheer captain, Ella Moore, is found dead after a party, all eyes turn to the other seniors who were with her that night.
Each one had a reason to want the white-blond Ella, a vicious bully, to disappear. Her boyfriend, Scott Russell, recently discovered that Ella was cheating on him. Lucy Aguilar resented Ella for stealing Scott from her. Naomi Chen was being blackmailed by Ella over information that could have destroyed Naomi’s reputation. Then there’s brooding outcast Isaac Caldwell, whose sister was driven by Ella’s bullying to the point of attempting suicide a few years prior. Newcomer Dawn Foster, who just moved to Wisconsin, was also at the party but left before anything seemed amiss. As rumors spread, Dawn starts digging into her classmates’ secrets for clues that could lead her to the murderer. In alternating chapters set three years in the past, shy, self-conscious freshman Hannah Smith joins the Sierton cheerleading team and immediately becomes the target of relentless mockery led by who else but Ella. The story begins as a typical murder mystery, but a chilling twist in the third act will make readers rethink everything they’ve read up to that point. Until then, it’s up to Dawn’s investigation and the tension between the past and present storylines to keep readers going, since most characters lack the depth to garner much interest. Central characters are white; Lucy is Latina, and Naomi is white and Asian.
A dark and vindictive tale. (content warning, author’s note) (Thriller. 14-18)
Hesse, Monica | Little, Brown (336 pp.)
$18.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9780316045650
A World War I story that shines a light on a littleknown group of heroic young women is the latest from noted historical fiction author Hesse.
It’s 1918, and 18-year-old Edda St. James works the overnight shift as an operator at Bell System’s Washington, D.C., Central switchboard. The hours suit her: She can sleep the day away, trying to escape memories of her months in France. Flashbacks to her experiences near the front lines gradually disclose details of how those months shaped her. Edda shocked her Baltimore socialite parents when she applied to be a Hello Girl for the American Expeditionary Forces. She proved to be a natural in memorizing codes, connecting calls, and conversing in French. But her confidence in her abilities was swept away in a single night when, unable to remember the code, she could not put a connection through— and 34 American soldiers died. Back in the States, Edda blames herself—and when a voice on the other end of the switchboard line demands she tell the truth, she realizes that someone knows about her deadly mistake. Edda takes Theo, a fellow tenant at her aunt’s boardinghouse, into her confidence, and together they try to determine what the anonymous voice wants. The large cast of characters, who are cued white, are fully developed, and the short chapters and engaging writing will have readers racing to discover the secret. A well-researched work that stands out for its explorations of guilt and trauma. (author’s note) (Historical mystery. 14-18)
Hicks, Josh | Graphic Universe (144 pp.) | $16.99 paper
May 7, 2024 | 9798765623350
An interstellar intern fights aliens, giant robots, and social inequality. In this insightful extraterrestrial graphic novel, the Earth has been stripped of its resources, leaving humans to live among the stars on corporate colonies run by a company called Apatus. Eighteen-year-old Anna Greene is an unpaid intern at Hotelitor, a luxury hotel housed within a giant robot in the Apatus Colony 4CX. The guests live in plush accommodations with a spa, pool, and generously stocked bar, while the staff occupy different levels within Hotelitor. When a dazzling pink-and-purple wormhole opens in space-time, and an imposingly large purple creature bursts through it, Hotelitor falls under attack. As the hierarchical constructs of staff and guests dissolve and re-form amid the chaos, Anna must step up to save Hotelitor and its humans. As the cause of the attack becomes clearer, Anna also contends with something she never imagined: the fact that Apatus Corporation itself is a foe. Using cinematic action scenes rendered in a dazzlingly hued palette, Hicks blends space opera with clever commentary on wealth and social inequality. Despite its slim page count, this work is jampacked with big robot fights, an alien cult, an evil corporation, and the trials and tribulations of working in the hospitality industry, making for an utterly intriguing genre mashup that’s sure to stay with readers. Anna is
white; there’s racial diversity among secondary characters.
A razor-sharp and action-packed science fiction romp that tackles social issues with aplomb. (Graphic science fiction. 12-18)
Hur, June | Feiwel & Friends (368 pp.)
$19.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9781250858092
An immersive tale of unlikely allies coming together for a common enemy.
In Joseon dynasty Korea in 1506, 17-year-old Iseul has one goal: to find her older sister, Suyeon, and bring her home. Although they didn’t have the best relationship after the trauma of their parents’ execution by royal soldiers, Iseul bravely travels through forbidden territory. Her enemy is King Yeonsan, a vile man who abducts women, but after hearing of a serial killer—and the king’s obsession with finding him—Iseul decides that capturing the murderer could be the way to get her sister back. She’s not alone in her hatred for the king; his half brother, Prince Daehyun, is secretly plotting treason to stop Yeonsan’s reign of terror. Calling Daehyun his favorite brother, the king demands he carry out increasingly extreme acts of cruelty in order to prove his loyalty, but the prince is determined to not become a monster himself. After a fateful encounter with Daehyun, Iseul is left with even more disgust for the crown, but she doesn’t yet know the full story behind Daehyun’s intentions. With such a powerful shared enemy, the pair might find that becoming allies is the smartest way to achieve their objectives. Award-winner Hur’s latest historical intrigue is well researched and doesn’t shy away from depicting elements of this real king’s brutal history, and the resulting tale is immersive, intense, and engaging. A page-turner. (author’s note with content warning, historical note) (Historical thriller. 14-18)
Jiménez, Joe | MTV Books/ Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) | $19.99 May 7, 2024 | 9781665932059
A blossoming group of gay friends feel the heat in San Antonio.
On the last day of junior year, 17-year-old Mac and his classmates are reading aloud the persuasive letters they wrote to notable people for their AP Language and Composition class. When Flor hesitates, Mikey gives him the encouragement he needs by singing a refrain from Ariana Grande’s song “breathin.” Mac and best friend Cam join in, Flor’s letter to a RuPaul’s Drag Race competitor earns rousing applause, and a new friend group is born. Dubbing themselves the Fierce Bitches Club, the four plan the summer of a lifetime. Rule No. 1: “Ariana Grande is everything.” Although stan culture can be joyful and validating, the author fails to convey fandom as a means of real connection; the scenes in which Grande’s music and iconography embolden the teens’ relationships come across as contrived and performative. Beyond the celebrity worship lies a story of family and friendship: Mac is figuring out how to come out to his hot-tempered dad, and temperatures rise as Mac and Mikey get close, while Cam (whose emotional drama wears on the group) competes in a drag showdown with Flor and is ostracized by the others. This overly long work reads like a social media saga, complete with group chat transcripts, hashtags, and gay slang. A heartfelt Pride
celebration and the concert of their dreams are sunny spots, however. The cast is predominantly Mexican; Mikey is Filipino. A tribute act that falters. (Fiction. 14-18)
Kanter, Marisa | Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $19.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9781665926072
Ava “Fitz” Fitzgerald is in love with her perfect girl. Fitz has had a crush on Danica Martinez for forever, and over the past six months, she’s tried to be the perfect girlfriend to her. Now, all Fitz has to do is tell Dani that she loves her. The location is perfect, the time is right, but when the moment comes, it’s a monumental failure. Fitz is completely shocked by Dani’s angry accusations, and she spirals into despair, which leads her to take a sudden hiatus from her popular Instagram fashion account, If the Shoe Fitz. A stressed-out Fitz subsequently bombs her first assignment at her prestigious summer program at the Fashion Institute of Technology, possibly ruining her future career prospects. She seeks solace from her sisters but, as the youngest, often feels left out. When Levi Berkowitz, Fitz’s long-lost childhood best friend, recognizes her on the subway and then again at Pride in a coincidental re-meetcute, Fitz hatches a fake-dating plan to make their exes jealous and in the process help him win back his girlfriend and reunite with Dani. This tangled romance filled with convenient plot points follows Fitz as she navigates various relationships in her life. While her egocentric personality is at times
This twisty mystery will keep readers in suspense until the very end.
KILL HER TWICE
difficult to empathize with, her earnest growth into a more self-aware and compassionate person is ultimately fun to follow. Levi and Fitz are Jewish, bisexual, and white.
An entertaining queer New York love story. (Romance. 14-18)
Kawooya, Eddie | James Lorimer (160 pp.) $27.99 | March 1, 2024 | 9781459417519
A young immigrant from Uganda struggles to find his place in Canada.
Patrick “Ace” Katumba isn’t sure how to fit in with his new grade eight classmates in Toronto. Back home in Kampala, Ace had good friends, like soccer teammates Rodney and Ronan, to help him keep up his spirits, especially after his father passed away from cancer. Without those two by his side, school is much harder. There’s a popular boy, Jamie, who isn’t always friendly and makes ignorant, taunting statements about Africa, but he might be the key to Ace’s blending in, just like in the American movies he’s seen. Potential friends Dwayne, Lutti, and Ericksen warn Ace about Jamie, but Ace doubts that the popular kid could be that bad. Meanwhile, his mother and older sister, Olive, worry that Ace focuses too much on socializing rather than studying. With pressures mounting at home and at school, Ace worries that he’ll never be good enough for anyone. Kawooya’s debut novel flows smoothly and is full of charming personalities. The banter between Rodney and Ronan mirrors the playful teasing between Dwayne and Lutti. Many different characters among the multiracial cast offer Ace bits of wisdom that he benefits from. Although his mother sometimes seems like a one-note character, her story adds depth and realism that reflect the plight of many immigrants today. A heartwarming journey. (author’s note) (Fiction. 12-15)
Lapointe, Stéphanie | Illus. by Marianne Ferrer | Trans. by Ann Marie Boulanger
Arctis Books (425 pp.) | $18.00 paper
April 23, 2024 | 9781646900251
Series: Franny Cloutier, 2
In this diary-style, illustrated novel translated from French, a Québecois 15-year-old moves to Japan to be with her father, who’s doing research there, while also navigating friendship troubles and heartbreak.
Just when things have settled down from the events of The Year My Life Turned Upside Down (2023), Franny Cloutier encounters both culture shock and her father’s Japanese girlfriend, Yoko, when she lands in Tokyo. Not handling the changes well, she falls into old habits of self-sabotage and chaotic behavior, followed by remorse. The attractive illustrations evoking Franny’s emotional ups and downs embellish each diary entry and text thread, creating an alluring appeal. By contrast, the pervasive use of ableist language and inaccurate, exoticizing portrayals of Japanese culture and people weaken this work. Eventually, Franny gets distracted by Sam, the gorgeous son of her father’s Parisian boss. His reciprocal interest gets her entangled with Capucine, Sam’s ex, at the French school they attend. Conflict with Franny’s best friend back home, Leona, adds even more stress. Franny has poetic moments of introspection (“What if forgiveness had the power to change us for the better?”) that eventually lead to her opening up emotionally. Plenty of loose ends and lingering questions leave room for a sequel. Most of the main characters are cued white. A visually engaging and unpredictable romp marred by issues with language and representation. (Fiction. 12-16)
Lee, Stacey | Putnam (400 pp.)
$19.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9780593532041
Sisters investigate the murder of rising film star Lulu Wong in this story set in L.A.’s Chinatown during the golden age of Hollywood. After their father left home to undergo treatment for tuberculosis, 19-year-old May Chow and her 18-year-old sister, Gemma, took over his flower-selling business in order to support their family, which also includes 12-yearold Peony and Ma, who’s expecting a fourth child. With the country still gripped by economic depression, money is tight, and the girls’ meager earnings barely make ends meet. Making matters worse is news of a proposed train station in Chinatown that would effectively destroy the community. Thanks to prejudice and discrimination against Chinese Americans, influenced in part by negative media portrayals, the city council largely ignores residents’ concerns and opposition to the station. When May and Gemma stumble across Lulu’s body in an abandoned lot in Chinatown, the scandal fuels even more negative feelings toward the neighborhood. Aware that prejudice and police corruption might allow Lulu’s murderer to escape justice, Gemma decides to conduct her own investigation with help from Peony, a mystery novel aficionado, and May, whose sense of familial duty competes with her desire to honor her dear childhood friend Lulu. This twisty mystery, brought to life by a vibrant cast and abundant historical details, will keep readers in suspense until the very end. Themes of community, representation, and sisterhood add an emotionally satisfying element to the narrative. Riveting. (author’s note) (Historical mystery. 13-18)
Lin, Judy I. | Feiwel & Friends (400 pp.)
$20.99 | April 23, 2024 | 9781250871619
A young woman must use her musical talents to uncover lost memories and Celestial secrets to save the Six Realms. With her loving uncle away traveling, orphaned Xue joined an entertainment house to hone her musical talents in playing the qín. Now, following years of service and learning, the 17-year-old has become an apprentice, and her uncle gifts her a new qín. Shortly after, he’s killed by bandits, leaving her lonelier than ever. Throwing herself into her music, Xue captures the attention of handsome young nobleman Meng Jinglang, who offers to pay off her indenture contract in return for her playing music at his manor for one year. The offer grows more enticing when he reveals that he knew her uncle and needs her help completing an unfinished task of his. But as she spends time with Jinglang at Meng Manor, she uncovers many secrets. It turns out that Jinglang is the Celestial Realm’s Duke of Dreams, and that the Six Realms are on the verge of ruin. Together, they must figure out the answers, which are somehow connected to her qín. Although this fantastical hero’s journey has a slow start, it’s full of magic, mystery, music, poetry, and intrigue. The detailed and impressive worldbuilding incorporates Chinese culture, food, lore, and poetry. A breakdown of the structure and order of the Six Realms, an author’s note, and a glossary of Chinese characters, pronunciation, and definitions offer helpful context and background. A beautiful, engaging fant asy. (Fantasy. 13-18)
For another fantasy inspired by Chinese culture, visit Kirkus online.
Lucier, Makiia | Clarion/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $19.99 | April 9, 2024 | 9780358272106
Given the opportunity to right a grave wrong from her past, a teen faces dangerous seadragon hunters in order to find the rare dragonfruit.
“In the old tales, it is written that the egg of seadragon, dragonfruit, holds within it the power to undo a person’s greatest sorrow.” However, “Every wish demands a price.” As a young girl, Lady Hanaleiarihi was the beloved descendant of a distinguished bloodline and a page to Princess Oliana of Tamarind—but her father stole a dragonfruit meant for the ailing princess in order to save Hanalei’s life, and he died soon after. Now 18, she lives in exile, researching seadragons in the Nominomi Sea. After she warns some seadragons of dragoner hunters, the ruthless Capt. Bragadin captures Hanalei and forces her to help his crew find the dragonfruit. After escaping, she ends up back home on Tamarind with a chance to make things right, and she searches for a dragonfruit with childhood friend Prince Samahtitamahenele, Oliana’s son. But she knows they face more than just the dangers of the sea and dragoners: The dragonfruit once cost her everything, and she’ll do whatever it takes to save the ailing princess and help Sam. Inspired by the lore of the Pacific Islands, this enthralling fantasy has action, adventure, mythical creatures, and magic. The worldbuilding is wonderfully crafted, including the beautiful island of Tamarind, its matriarchal society, and the community members’ deep connections to one another and their ancestors, gods, and traditions. A mesmerizing, captivating Pacific Islands–inspired fantasy. (Fantasy. 13-18)
Lynn, Andrea | CamCat Books (272 pp.)
$19.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780744308464
Three sisters face hardships amid frequent dust storms in 1934 Kansas. The Fischer girls’ mother died, their father left for Wichita in search of work, and their aunt has turned their home into a boarding house. Middle sister Stella dreams of Hollywood and tries to make that dream a reality by delivering moonshine. That side hustle introduces her to Lloyd McCormick, a handsome vagabond who begins doing odd jobs around the house. While the sisters and Lloyd are scavenging lumber from a dilapidated cider mill, a ghost appears, guiding them to a portal. On the other side, they find mill owner Archie Bright trapped in an alternate world where the air is clear and everything broken is healed. Archie conjures up lavish parties from his memories, and they dance the night away. The others are able to leave, and they promise Archie they’ll try to set him free. But despite experiencing the glamour Stella has craved, the sisters feel the toll of their regular visits to this newfound paradise, leaving them depleted in the mornings and fracturing their relationships. And it soon becomes clear that there’s more to Archie’s story than he’s told them. The author makes the most of every page in this short novel, bringing to life characters who are worth supporting. The compelling narrative seamlessly blends genres as it unfolds against the harsh, dusty
backdrop. The characters are cued white; the Fischer sisters had a Romani grandmother. A captivating story filled with suspense and magic. (Paranormal historical fiction. 14-18)
Mather, Janice Lynn | Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) | $19.99 | April 30, 2024 | 9781665903950
A high school senior in Nassau, Bahamas, struggles to readjust to life after a tragedy. Seventeen-yearold Karmen Wallace can’t stop thinking about her older brother, Julian. Six weeks before the start of the school year, Julian died by suicide. No one in her family can make sense of his passing: Why would Julian—a smart college student bursting with potential—end his life? How long had he been carrying so much pain? Karmen feels like she’s the only person in her family who wants to understand Julian’s death. Her father stubbornly advocates for routine; her mother is a husk of her former self. Karmen’s sure that if she investigates Julian’s past, she can fix her broken family. But when a fellow student makes a thoughtless comment about death, Karmen “snaps,” hurling a ball and accidentally smashing the school chemistry lab’s window. As a consequence, the principal places her on a mandatory three-week leave in order “to heal.” During this time at home, Karmen digs deeper into Julian’s final days, only to discover more questions. In her third novel for young adults, Mather poignantly explores the delicate bonds of sibling relationships. She writes about
depression and anxiety without judgment, and her depiction of Karmen’s survivor’s guilt—a potent mixture of emotions that form a heavy cloud of grief—is handled with considerable nuance and empathy.
A moving look at a sister’s flawed, heartfelt attempts to heal in the wake of emotional devastation. (trigger warning, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)
McLemore, Anna-Marie Feiwel & Friends (288 pp.) | $20.99 May 28, 2024 | 9781250869630
Isla and Renata Soler, outcasts in high society, attempt to polish their reputations at finishing school, but the cost of perfection might be too much.
Seventeen-yearold Isla and 20-year-old Renata were raised by their abuela to be fierce and independent. In their era, which evokes the early 20th century, girls wearing trousers are frowned upon and being from new money brings sneers. Abuela believes that world-renowned Alarie House will give her brown-skinned granddaughters the social clout they need. Their first night at the finishing school, Isla sees something deeply unsettling and, wounded by Renata’s skeptical response, flees for home. When Renata returns from Alarie, she’s eerily changed, like “a girl written for the stage instead of real life,” alarmingly vacant but with terrifying glimpses of rage beneath the artificial veneer. Then Renata vanishes, and Isla embarks on a quest to discover what happened to her sister. This novel, which has a strongly gothic mood, gets off to a strong start. Soon after Isla returns to Alarie in search of answers, the novel makes an abrupt shift in tone into surrealism, with worldbuilding that sophisticated readers will understand offers overarching metaphors for femininity. The book also has excellent representation of an intersex character, an element that
further interrogates “what it means to be a girl, much less the right kind of girl.” A chaotic fever dream that will evoke strong responses from readers. (author’s note) (Horror. 14-adult)
Miller-Lachmann, Lyn Carolrhoda Lab (352 pp.) | $19.99 May 7, 2024 | 9798765610114
Sónia Dias faces many challenges under António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorial rule in mid-1960s Portugal.
Though Pai prayed he’d have sons, Sónia is one of five sisters. She’s smart and has the heart of a poet but is lackadaisical about school. She covers shifts at her family’s fado restaurant and sneaks time with 16-year-old José Miguel Machado, a newly promoted journeyman printer. Zé Miguel is a Communist and artist, and he helps create contraband books to “make a better world.” After he’s arrested and the family restaurant is shut down for hiring a banned fado musician to perform, Sónia wonders who to blame for informing the secret police. The Dias family squeezes into smaller quarters, and Sónia’s pai sends her to work at a hotel laundry alongside her mother. Sónia’s no stranger to beatings, which she both metes out and receives at home, but she’s unprepared for the exhausting work and dangerous conditions. Fellow worker Zuleika, who’s 16, like Sónia, warns her about the owner’s flirtatious son, but Sónia ignores her. The verse format allows Sónia’s poetic voice to shine, drawing readers into the stark reality she’s dealing with. Although her head can be clouded by wine and soft kisses, she knows her own mind and speaks up: “I am a daughter of Eve / who / thinks / questions / dreams.”
Conveys harshness, beauty—and lingering hope. (author’s note, discussion questions, glossary, further reading) (Verse historical fiction. 14-18)
Morani, Djamila | Trans. by Sawad Hussain Neem Tree Press (140 pp.) | $12.95 paper May 7, 2024 | 9781911107859
In the Arab Abbasid caliphate of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, 14-year-old Nardeen Baramika seeks revenge on the man responsible for her family’s deaths in this novel from Algeria, translated from Arabic. Having fallen out of favor, the once-powerful noble Baramika family, who are Muslims of Persian origin, are being hunted down and executed by al-Rashid. But when the caliph’s men discover the family’s new home, Nardeen’s nonpolitical father—a physician and transcriber of medical texts—sends a confused Nardeen outside to safety, promising to follow with the rest of the family. After returning to find Baba, Mama, and her three siblings murdered and branded as Zoroastrian apostates implicated in poisoning the caliph’s cousin, Nardeen is beaten unconscious by a servant of Al-Aasefi, a family friend turned accuser, who’s seeking a manuscript Nardeen saw in Baba’s library. After she comes to in the Bimaristan medical school, Nardeen learns she’s slated to be sold into slavery, but she impresses Muallim Ishaq, a respected and renowned Jewish medical professor, with her strong memory and medical knowledge. The professor, who respected Nardeen’s father and feels sorry for her plight, buys her and helps her prepare to seek vengeance. But as Nardeen grows in knowledge and cunning, she finds herself running out of time to untangle the complicated truth. Morani weaves a compact and compelling tale of revenge, intrigue, and moral ambiguity with a fascinating historical setting.
An engrossing mystery with a haunting and convincing conclusion. (map, glossary, historical notes) (Historical mystery. 13-18)
By
Kirkus Star
Plozza, Shivaun | Holiday House (320 pp.) $19.99 | May 14, 2024 | 9780823456345
Now that she’s dead, a queer 16-year-old girl must pass a major test to get into heaven.
Tegan Masters is dead. She wakes up in what could possibly be the most depressing motel in all of New Jersey: Wildwood’s Marybelle Motor Lodge. It’s where Dad took Tegan and little sister Quinn in the wake of their mother’s leaving two years earlier. According to Zelda, the teenage angel behind the motel desk, they’re standing in heaven—“an exact replica of your happiest memory on Earth.” But according to Tegan, it’s actually her worst. And so, Tegan has gone to Upper Management to complain. If heaven is supposed to represent happiness, why is she here? Upper Management, having already had some issues with Zelda’s methodology, poses a challenge. If Tegan is right, and there’s a better representation of happiness from her life, then Zelda will be terminated—but if Zelda is right, and she chose Tegan’s happiest memory, Tegan will be sent to purgatory. So begins an emotional and epic this-is-your-life trip, with Zelda trying to prove her case. What neither girl expects is the sweetness of catching feelings for the other. A fresh take on a possible afterlife, this narrative is filled with depth and wit, despite its dark tone. Its realistic depiction of a girl’s reservoir of coping mechanisms for
dealing with those who have let her down is exceptionally well written. Major characters are cued white. A worthy read about a short life brimming with possibility.
(Paranormal romance. 14-18)
Quinlan, Skye | Page Street (368 pp.)
$18.99 | May 28, 2024 | 9798890039507
An anxious teen comes into her own through the art of drag. Briar is leaving Texas to spend the summer in New York City with her brother, Beau, aka drag queen Bow Regard. At a show, she meets—and clashes with—Selene, Beau’s infuriatingly attractive but arrogant friend, who performs as drag king Spencer Read. Briar decides to try to beat Spencer in an upcoming competition, and so begins her own drag journey. Along the way, she’ll flirt with Spencer, befriend fellow drag king Achilles, bicker with her brother, and ultimately gain muchneeded confidence both on and off the stage. Briar’s mental health journey is at the core of the story, which accurately and unflinchingly depicts her experiences with anxiety and depression. Neither drag nor her flirtation with Spencer is able to magically cure her, but the community she finds in New York leads her to agree to pursue therapy and medication, offering hope for her future. The endearing Briar is realistically drawn, and the supporting characters are all lovable in their own ways, from cosplaying Achilles and sassy but sincere Beau to Briar’s compassionate and down-to-earth mentor, Jacklynn Hyde. A host of queer identities are depicted;
Briar is bisexual, and her found family includes a nonbinary person and a trans woman. Main characters present white. A joyful celebration of identity and community. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)
Reintgen, Scott | McElderry
(416 pp.) | $19.99 | April 23, 2024
9781665930468 | Series: Waxways, 2
A brilliant magician who seeks to destroy the system of inequality propping up her world is aided by new allies and feels the complications of romance in this middle entry in the Waxways trilogy.
As expected, Landwin Brood doesn’t appreciate Theo’s new bond to Ren Monroe; despite her brilliance and magical prowess, Landwin won’t look past her Lower Quarter origins. Although Landwin attempts to separate them, Ren maintains her single-minded focus on revenge. Unbeknownst to Thugar, the eldest Brood, Dahvid and Nevelyn Tin’Vori, who are in hiding, are also out for vengeance as descendants of another family who fell victim to the Broods. Their alliance with Ren and Theo (if he can be trusted) will be the key to bringing down House Brood, but success hangs delicately on an intricate plan that could go wrong in deadly ways. While this sequel to A Door in the Dark (2023) has less breakneck action and high-octane adventure than the first volume, it more than compensates with a slow-building and intensely suspenseful plot that plays to Reintgen’s strength in creating well-defined, emotionally convincing characters. The novel is narrated in multiple third-person points of view, and Ren and Theo’s romance keeps pace, developing slowly but skillfully into something undeniable and sparkling. Themes of loyalty, familial expectations, and personal choice are woven into a world that makes space for
sharp-edged girls, tender-hearted boys, and everyone in between. Central cast members are cued white.
Substantial and satisfying: Readers will look forward to being reunited with these characters. (map) (Fantasy. 14-18)
Romero, R.M. | Peachtree Teen (400 pp.) $19.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781682636916
“We were a fractured pair / when we were meant to be / a trio”: Two teens descend into the underworld to rescue their lost love.
Andres Santos, from São Paulo, Brazil, once “wore two faces…the jaguar and the prince.” Furious and cruel, he took whatever he wanted—until the Tietê River nearly took his life. Face to face with Death, terrified that he had wasted his life, Andres made a desperate bargain: something he hates (his anger) in exchange for something he loves (a debt that Death will one day come to collect). Armed with a new guitar, Andres starts fresh in Miami, where he’s swept away from the tempestuous relationship of his Cuban mami and Brazilian papi by Liora Rose (who’s cued white and Jewish) and “rubyhaired” Renee Delgado (who’s Cuban American). Neither Liora nor Renee knows of the shadow that Andres left in the underworld, but they have secrets of their own. Their fairy-tale bliss comes to an abrupt end with a car crash. Andres and Renee have one chance to save Liora, but to do so, they must brave the abyss. Joined by a boy named Virgil, the characters in this reimagining of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice confront their regrets, insecurities, feelings for one another, and dreams for the future. Spun with allusions to mythology and literature, Romero’s novel in verse ensnares hearts and imaginations through vivid and
memorable poetic craft that captures the ache and complexity of love. An alluring and lyrical journey.
(Verse fiction. 14-18)
Ross, Rebecca | Wednesday Books (432 pp.) | $20.00 | Dec. 26, 2023
9781250857453 | Series: Letters of Enchantment, 2
Even a war driven by gods can’t sever communication between journalist lovers Iris and Roman in this steampunkadjacent romantic adventure.
A prologue sets the scene: Dacre, a god strummed to sleep by magic in Divine Rivals (2023), will not slumber forever. His willingness to wage war to acquire more powerful magic leads him to lay waste to entire towns, and Inkridden Tribune journalist Iris Winnow and war correspondent Roman Kitt can no longer be assured the other is safe—or even still alive. In Iris’ world of cigarette smoke, copper pipes, and driving goggles, colleagues affectionately call each other by their last names, watch each other’s backs, and face danger on the front lines.
Though Underling Correspondent Roman is traveling with Dacre’s army, he questions why he was healed of his grievous wounds, while at the same time, he gradually recovers memories of Iris and recall s that she was special to him. Their magically connected typewriters allow for the rediscovery of their love and for communicating potentially deadly information about the invasion of Hawk Shire. The story primarily unfolds from Iris’ and Roman’s viewpoints, and while the prose occasionally uses well-worn phrases, Anglophiles will particularly enjoy the worldbuilding, and returning readers will welcome appearances from Capt. Keegan Torres; her wife, Marisol; and Dacre’s
archnemesis—and wife—the goddess Enva. Main characters present white. The well-paced romantic tension is a highlight of this enjoyable duology closer. (Fantasy. 14-18)
Sharma, Nisha | Skyscape (240 pp.)
$28.99 | May 1, 2024 | 9781662500732
Two worlds and timelines intersect in this story centering on South Asian American college students in New Jersey.
The story opens with “Dear Jaan,” the first line of a letter from 1972 that’s a beckoning to romance—a romance that rumor says ended in flames in Hartceller University’s Davidson Tower. Cut to the present day: Jessie Ahuja is at Hartceller, studying hard to become an engineer. She refuses to be distracted by the extremely rich and attractive Ravi Kumar, who insists on walking her home and battling over study room reservations. Jessie’s worked hard to get good grades and stay steadfastly committed to her career track; to her, tech industry heir Ravi is the ultimate nepo baby. Fate, however, has other plans: When Jessie and Ravi discover a bunch of letters from the two fabled lovers, they feel compelled to team up to solve the mystery of Davidson Tower’s haunted history. As they unravel the real story, they find themselves on a similar will-they-won’t-they trajectory. This pleasant romance underscores the challenges of immigration, both historically and currently. The pressures of South Asian parents and their aspirations and the contrasting hopes of their children are beautifully developed, alongside the mixing of different languages in the narrative. Disappointingly, the historic love letters feel a bit insipid, even though they stitch the narrative together. But this is truly Jessie’s story, and she’s interesting, complex, and driven.
An easy, effortlessly enjoyable read. (Romance. 16-adult)
Stoeve, Ray | Amulet/Abrams (288 pp.)
$18.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781419764967
A plan to get over a crush is more successful than expected in this romance set in Seattle.
Childhood best friends Hayley and Talia, both white, do everything together. They share a birthday, they have the same favorite ice cream flavor, and they’re prone to saying the same thing at the same time. The main difference between them is that Hayley seems to have a new unrequited crush every week, and Talia has only ever had crushes on two people. Hayley is also a lesbian who struggles with panic attacks, while autistic Talia is trans as well as demiromantic and demisexual. After Hayley’s latest heartbreak involving a straight girl from basketball, Talia suggests they spend the summer trying to manufacture meet-cutes as a way to jump-start both their love lives. With the help of their endearingly supportive friend group, Hayley and Talia go to the beach, attend Pride, rock out at a MUNA concert, and more. But when their plan starts to work, and Talia meets charismatic nonbinary Rose, Hayley can’t ignore the fact that she feels jealous. Hayley and Talia’s story has all the butterfly-worthy moments of first love. Hayley’s voice is well executed: She’s an overthinker who doesn’t take herself too seriously, which leads to some funny one-liners and internal monologues. Readers will appreciate that neurodivergence is normalized and represented positively in the novel: In addition to Talia, two other members of their friend group are autistic. A charming friends-to-lovers summer romance. (Romance. 13-18)
Stridsberg, Sara | Illus. by Beatrice Alemagna Trans. by B.J. Woodstein | Unruly (68 pp.) $24.95 | May 14, 2024 | 9781592704071
Two globally acclaimed creators—author Stridsberg and illustrator Alemagna—join forces in this boundary-pushing picture book for older readers translated from Swedish.
Positioning the park as a liminal space, the spare, poetic text and beautifully unsettling art explore its endless possibilities as children play and wander: “It is the land beyond. / In the park, anything can happen.” The paintings, many of them two-page spreads showing trees, fields, and playgrounds, are arresting and reminiscent of Fauvism. Many evoke a raked theater stage, with the background appearing to rise in elevation. The flatness of the human figures and the absence of detailed facial features are characteristics that feel intentionally childlike, standing in juxtaposition with the sophisticated color palette and unusual perspectives: Readers often view scenes from some height and distance or, at times, very close up, with headless torsos dominating the foreground. The art is free-flowing, with many of the images lacking black outlines. As readers explore these surreal, dreamlike landscapes that contain both rich dark colors and bright, intense ones, they become immersed in text that can be interpreted as a meditation on childhood’s fleeting and changeable nature: “The trees have stood here for a thousand years / and they plan to stand here longer still. // We are like the trees: we don’t want to leave either.” Contemplative teens on the cusp of independence and adult readers nostalgic for the
mysteries and wonders of their early years will linger and ponder. Wondrously strange and wonderfully evocative. (Picture book. 14-adult)
Weaver, Jessie | Melissa de la Cruz Studio (256 pp.) | $18.99 | May 7, 2024 9781368078412 | Series: Like Me Block You, 1
A Los Angeles teen whose sister has just been found not guilty of murder becomes embroiled in another mystery in this follow-up to Live Your Best Lie (2023).
Amanda’s life has been a mess with all that’s happened with her sister, not least because Amanda started posting anonymously on TikTok about it—and now that Cora’s been exonerated, Amanda worries she’ll find out she’s behind the account. Amanda has struggled in Los Angeles, missing longtime friends Mallory, Cole, and Vince, who are in Colorado. Trying to escape the glare of media attention, Amanda flees to the Colorado mountains to stay with her aunt, who works at Mallory’s family’s hotel. But her friends have also had a rough few years. Vince’s mother is in jail, charged with the murder of Lillia Das’ grandfather. (Lillia’s a peer on the fringe of their group, and someone with whom Amanda shares a secret bond.) Readers will easily sympathize with Amanda’s earnest third-person voice. Many more secrets twist their way through this story involving several families in an insular tourist town, a true-crime documentary producer wanting to feature the Das case, and a ghost story connected to the hotel. Weaver packs a lot into this pageturner, interspersing flashbacks and online speculations about the various cases and leaving readers guessing throughout. Amanda, Mallory, and Cole are cued white; Vince is Latino, and Lillia is from Kolkata. An engrossing, sprawling whodunit. (Mystery. 13-18)
Williams, LaDarrion | Labyrinth Road (432 pp.)
$20.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9780593711927
Series: Blood at the Root, 1
Black diaspora magic manifests in a boy on the worst day of his life—but later, things only get more complicated.
When Malik Baron was 7, his mother vanished in the explosive moment his powers manifested while he defended them from mysterious cloaked figures. Ten years (and many foster homes later), the shorttempered Malik isn’t much better at controlling his powers, but he’s ready to leave Helena, Alabama, and start over with Taye, his foster brother. Reuniting with Mama Aya, the maternal grandmother in New Orleans he never knew, wasn’t part of the plan, but fate draws Malik to her—and into a secret world of magic. He discovers Caiman University—a sort of magical historically Black college—which may be where he’ll find answers to what happened to his mother. Narrator Malik, who uses colorful language, is fully aware of the Black Harry Potter subtext of his story, and he’s thoughtfully focused on protecting Taye, proving his mother is still alive, and surviving in a world that has never made things easy, even before supernatural threats emerged. The extensive worldbuilding incorporates West African, Caribbean, and Black American history and cultures to explain a magical reality hidden from view and relevant to the Black diaspora and Malik’s family history. When Malik bumps into an old friend and potential love interest on campus, everything is in place for him to grow into his powers, uncover the truth, and face new heartbreak. A well-thought-out magical world that provocatively centers Black experiences. (Fantasy. 13-18)
Kirkus Star
Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, and a City on Fire
Yoo, Paula | Norton Young Readers (400 pp.) $19.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781324030904
An account of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, focusing particularly on the stories of Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, and Eddie Lee.
Protests erupted in Los Angeles County in April 1992, following the shocking acquittal of four police officers accused of using excessive force in brutally beating King, an unarmed Black man, during a traffic arrest in March 1991. Latasha, a 15-year-old Black girl, also died in March 1991, after being fatally shot from behind by South Korean immigrant store owner Soon Ja Du following a dispute over a bottle of orange juice. Readers get to know King as a loving father, Latasha as a poet and honor student, and Du as a wife and mother working 14-hour days without respite. With tensions already high due to Du’s incredibly lenient sentencing in November 1991, violence exploded hours after the acquittal of King’s attackers a few months later. Eddie Lee, an 18-year-old Korean American college student, went with friends—against his mother’s wishes—to help protect Koreatown shops that were going up in flames and was shot to death, caught in the crossfire between demonstrators and store owners and becoming a symbol of the tragedy. Using scores of interviews, direct quotes, news reports, and archival photographs to sculpt this thoroughly researched history, Yoo vividly and movingly conveys the broader historical context and the many lives that were affected, shedding light on systemic challenges that continue today.
A nuanced and necessary narrative. (maps, author’s note, in memoriam list, endnotes, bibliography, credits, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)
Yu, Pei-yun | Illus. by Jian-xin Zhou
Trans. by Lin King | Levine Querido (356 pp.)
$25.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781646143726
The continuation of a true-life story translated from Taiwanese Hoklo, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese revisits Taiwan’s contemporary history and evolution as a civil society.
The first half of this volume summarizes Taiwan’s cultural and socioeconomic development amid the geopolitical landscape of the 1960s, with Tshua Khun-lim (1930-2023) emerging from a decade of political imprisonment on Green Island and confronting new existential challenges, especially in finding and retaining employment. His reunion with childhood sweetheart Kimiko leads to marriage and a lifelong partnership that sustains him through multiple careers, including startups in publishing for young readers. He also faces censorship and persistent harassment, bankruptcy, and other disasters—setbacks to his successes that threaten to push him over the precipice of despair. Sketched in a manhua (or comic) style with beige backgrounds for the first half and rosy tones for the second half, the detailed and meticulous artwork enriches the narrative, and the color-coded text conveys the original work’s intentional layering of different languages in various settings. The outline of Taiwan’s relationship with China and the rest of the world feels particularly relevant today; the author’s appearance as a character showing her interviews with Tshua for this book is an embedded documentation of his spirited dedication and unrelenting work toward transitional justice. A translator’s note and detailed timeline provide additional context and resources. An accessible, timely account of Taiwan’s struggles for democracy and human rights as experienced through a personal lens.
(Graphic biography. 13-18)
HISTORY CAN SOMETIMES seem a bit…dry. The strange names, the unfathomable stretch of years between then and now, and the musty textbook smell of it all can make engaging with the subject difficult when so many bright, shiny new things are competing for our attention. But a date is nothing but a number— surely there were ur-Kardashians running around Sumer looking fabulous and stirring up trouble, and the Real Housewives of Assyria must have flipped over some stone tables and called each other concubine when the wineskins were drained. Some recent Indie titles have found irresistibly juicy intrigue in the far-flung past in far-flung places, capitalizing on the strangeness (and dimlyremembered-from-school familiarity) of bygone eras to give their stories of sex, crime, and politics added dimension and texture. Bonus: You look cultured when reading them!
The Year of Five Emperors (2022) by Robert Eckert, set in the Roman Empire in the
year 193 C.E., opens with a bang: Laetus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, kills the wretched Commodus when the depraved emperor attempts to assault his betrothed. The intensity doesn’t let up as rival factions stop at nothing— up to and including blood sacrifices—to gain control of the empire in a bloody political drama our starred review calls “a captivating page-turner” that’s “full of engrossing period detail.”
Miriam Herin’s 2022 novel, The Basilisk, recasts the legendary medieval love story of Abelard and Heloise as a murder mystery. Abelard’s rival, Bernard, a monk who’s charged Abelard with heresy for his rational analyses of Catholic theology, may be linked to a string of killings. An investigation uncovers all manner of sensational secrets, from mysterious societies operating in the shadows to psychedelic rites practiced in the Holy Land. Fans of conspiracy thrillers and the occult will find much to relish in this “richly textured medieval tale told with gripping suspense,
keen intelligence, and aching emotion,” per our starred review.
Rose Girl , a 2023 novel by Holly Lynn Payne, features the great 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, who, in this story, encounters Damascena, a mysterious girl with a startling destiny. The novel details Damascena’s brutal upbringing—she suffers under the domination of a malevolent friar eager to exploit her seemingly supernatural affinity for roses. Our starred review describes the prose as “beautifully uplifting” and calls the book “disarmingly powerful,” lauding the novel as a “a nuanced story of female resilience that reaches across the ages.”
Kat Drennan’s The Cloisonné Brooch (2020) incorporates a time-travel twist that sends a
contemporary woman, Tess Madigan, back to the year 324 C.E., during the reign of Constantine. Tess experiences the era in the body of an enslaved girl, Kindra, who crafts exquisite jewelry. Where there are gems, thieves are sure to follow, and Tess/Kindra embarks on a time-hopping scramble to prevent malefactors from gaining possession of the titular piece of bling. Our review describes the novel as “a satisfying blend of action and romance, with welldeveloped characters and an irresistible time-travel hook.” The romance comes in when Kindra makes time with one of Constantine’s handsome guards—happily, some things never change.
Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.
ARTHUR SMITH
In Francisco’s debut novel, a teenager is tasked with mediating an interstellar conflict.
Sixteen-year-old Valeria “Val” Vega lives with her mother; her brothers, Miguel and Timoteo; and her uncle, Umberto Olmeda, a diplomat who’s often away traveling. When Umberto dies unexpectedly and mysteriously, Val and her family are plunged into grief. Then, Umberto’s colleagues Johnny, Wasala, and Pash-Ti drop another bombshell. Umberto wasn’t an ordinary diplomat, they explain—he was Earth’s ambassador in an intergalactic council—and before he died, he’d named Val as his successor. Val soon finds herself in the middle of a centuries-old power struggle over the planet Hosh, involving three alien civilizations: the Levintis,
the Etoscans, and the resident Hoshians. Val must act as a mediator in the new peace treaty discussions. However, the more Val learns about the conflict, the more she finds out about each party’s nefarious motives and tactics. She also learns that Umberto’s death was actually an assassination. Val desperately wants to help bring peace to the planets and solve her uncle’s murder—but she wonders if she’s capable of doing so.
Francisco presents a thrilling coming-of-age SF story that not only explores the precariousness of colonialism and sectarian conflict, but also the complexities of identity and relationships. Val is a smart, resourceful, and highly empathic protagonist, and her arc as an intergalactic diplomat is compelling. However, it’s her
scenes on Earth that make her so easy to root for, as when she acts as an Englishto-Spanish translator for her mother while planning her uncle’s funeral and when she and her friend Des make up after a fight. Readers will enjoy the author’s sharp prose style and quippy dialogue, as well as the book’s vast, imaginative worldbuilding, including high-tech gadgets and
intricate extraterrestrial biology. The cast of human characters is also realistically diverse: Val and her family are Puerto Rican and speak Spanish at home; she identifies as “more sapiosexual than anything”; her crush, Will, is nonbinary; and Umberto is gay. A captivating, heartfelt tale about family, diplomacy, and finding one’s place in the universe.
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A young princess fights to claim her throne and unite her realm in Arama’s sweeping historical fantasy.
On her 10th birthday, Princess Andrada of Kerta is ordered by the father she’s never met to begin a traditional boy’s education—her late mother’s wish. King Cothelas intends for his daughter to be his heir, but when she fails the King’s Challenge, she’s forced into an arranged marriage with King Nicetas of Valdavia. Nicetas is a cold and bitter man, haunted by an attempt on his life by Scorilus, the King of Steppewynd, and he leaves Andrada alone for months on end while he lives with his lover, the medicine woman Una. The kingdoms of Kerta, Valdavia, and Steppewynd, neighbors abutting the Black Sea, were once the single realm of Dhawosia; they now narrowly maintain their independence from the Roman Empire as they fret and squabble amongst themselves (King Cothelas demands King Nicetas’ first-born son by Andrada; King Scorilus dreamed of being an explorer, not a ruler). When tragedy strikes, Nicetas accuses Andrada of murder, and the three kingdoms go to war. In the chaos, Andrada must find her resolve and courage to try to unite her divided people. This well-crafted novel features intricate worldbuilding that’s expertly woven into the story with elegant prose: “The Old Temple of Sehul had been built by the founders of Sehuldava to capture the light of the sun on a high holy day. The light would enter the temple through a small window and reach the inner chamber.” The supporting characters often feel two-dimensional, however, with singular motivations that make their actions (and a good portion of the plot) predictable. But all the various
A story that follows a remarkable trajectory from loneliness and heartbreak to lasting love.
ALMOST FAMILY
threads come together neatly in the story’s final act for a rousing finish, and the ending provides a tidy setup for the upcoming sequel.
Readers of historical fantasy will love the battles, intrigue, and imagination in this sprawling tale.
Bancroft, Ann | She Writes Press (296 pp.) | $17.95 paper
May 28, 2024 | 9781647426668
Bancroft’s novel follows a middleaged woman as she receives a cancer diagnosis, grows close to members of a support group, and learns about herself.
In Oakland, California, in 2008, after marketing executive Liz Millanova leaves her alcoholic husband, she’s free to pursue a new relationship with her married boyfriend, Lyle. However, her new world is soon shattered when she receives a stage 1 breast cancer diagnosis that requires immediate surgery and treatment. Later, Lyle breaks up with her, and before long, she receives a stage 4 diagnosis of cancer that has spread to her bones. She finds a way to tell the terrible news to her estranged daughter, Marisa, and in her cancer support group, she connects with two other survivors, Rhonda and Dave. The trio become their own personal support group, which they call “the Oakland Mets.” After attending a baseball game, where they begin to truly bond, the three explore various parks, Alcatraz Island, and local clubs. As her relationship with her new friends deepens, Liz
reflects on her own life and learns to love in a way she has never has before. Over the course of this accomplished novel, Bancroft, a cancer survivor herself, presents a realistic picture of multiple patients’ physical and emotional experiences. The work is also a fine story of platonic love, which is a relatively rare subject in fiction; the unfolding friendships are realistic and emotionally honest throughout, even when their excursions occasionally become lengthy. The main story is told from Liz’s perspective, but Bancroft presents a heartbreaking but beautiful afterword in the third person. It’s a story that follows a remarkable trajectory from loneliness and heartbreak to lasting love.
An often resonant narrative of adversity and friendship.
Black, Paul | Novel Instincts (462 pp.) | $25.00 paper Dec. 1, 2023 | 9780972600712
Black’s masterfully constructed SF novel begins as a quirky story about a man dating an extraterrestrial and expands into a grand-scale narrative of alien invasion and intergalactic war.
Dallas web designer Cameron
Harrison’s dating experiences after the death of his beloved wife haven’t exactly been promising. Close to giving up on the dating scene entirely, he tries one last (“verging on
desperate”) move by joining an online dating site. His first date with Toni Morgan seems to be going well until she offhandedly remarks, “It’s just weird being on another planet.” She informs Harrison that she’s from the planet Cala and that she’s vacationing on Earth in a cloned human body that she calls her “ride” (“‘When one of your people dies, we use the DNA from the body to build,’ she gestured to herself, ‘one of these. We only use people who have chosen to be burned’”). Evidently, Calaians have been coming to Earth for centuries to experience the human condition in all its glory—the impressive range of emotions and the sensory experiences, including the “provocative” sex. Harrison finds himself falling in love with the seductive alien, but on a trip to Rome, the couple is attacked and almost killed. Harrison begins to realize that Morgan’s story about being on vacation is just the beginning of a much more complex personal history: Morgan’s family is prominent on her home world and involved in some sort of contentious social and political upheaval. Her father was murdered because of his beliefs, and now a group of radicals have followed Morgan to Earth and are attempting to kill her as well. Matters become even more complicated when Harrison’s body and mind are essentially upgraded with highly advanced alien tech (“I’m fricking Superman!”) and he discovers that the Calaians aren’t the only visitors on the planet.
Many praiseworthy literary elements power this story—including deep character development, a great initial hook, relentless pacing, and an intricate plot—but it’s the witty narrative voice that makes the novel so readable: “Just two weeks ago I was a nobody web designer, making a decent living doing sites for start-ups. My biggest concern had been where to have dinner. Now, I was up to my ass in an intergalactic political war with alien tech shoehorned into my skull.” Additionally, the utilization of humor—especially when focusing on the language barrier between Harrison and Morgan—is laugh-out-loud funny
in places. When Harrison tells Morgan that he thinks she’s hot, she feels her forehead and replies, “I am? I don’t feel warm.” The prose is fluid and clean, making for an undeniable page-turner of a read. Black’s subtle use of imagery makes a simple description memorable: “A silver cocktail dress hugged her athletic body like foil on a chocolate bar.” The thematic resonances are profound, with the fascinating dynamic between a human and an alien connecting on a deeper level exemplifying the values of love (compassion, forgiveness, kindness), regardless of corporeal form. A wildly entertaining SF adventure about the life-changing (and worldaltering) power of love.
Butterfield, Catherine | BookBaby (316 pp.) | $19.99 paper Feb. 19, 2024 | 9798350928013
Butterfield presents a historical novel set during the infrequently portrayed French Wars of Religion. Readers learn about the era’s tense political situation through diary entries written by Marguerite, Princess of France, beginning in 1581. Her mother, Catherine de Medici, is in a rage, beating Marguerite for a perceived attempt to flirt with a man from what Catherine sees as an unsuitable family. This results in Marguerite grudgingly entering into an arranged marriage with Prince Henri of Navarre, a Huguenot, to bring religious peace to France, where Protestants and Catholics have been warring. She’s prepared to fulfill her familial obligation on behalf of France, and even finds herself enamored with the prince. However, after the queen of Navarre voices her expectation
that Marguerite convert to Protestantism, and a violent anti-Huguenot uprising occurs in Paris, the impending nuptials become more complicated. Soon, the couple are separated by violence; Henri flees and Marguerite is detained in Paris as a political prisoner before she seeks refuge with Flemish nobility. Things are going well until she receives a letter from her brother Alençon informing her that their sibling, Charles, the king, sees her attempted peacekeeping as sympathy for the Huguenots—a traitorous act he considers worthy of death. Over the course of this novel, Butterfield employs a diarylike style from Marguerite’s perspective that makes for a brisk read, and Marguerite, despite her royal background, comes off as approachable and very human throughout; for example, late in the novel, she has a powerful experience that brings her a sense of fulfillment that she’d never encountered in her strictly proscribed life. The author, for the most part, sticks closely to the events of the historical timeline, but takes some creative liberties, as when she notes in an afterword that the idea that one key character “was Marguerite’s One Great Love is cause for speculation; and so, I did.” A sweeping but intimate story that highlights the author’s clear attention to detail.
Cacoyannis, Panayotis
Self (266 pp.) | Feb. 29, 2024
In Cacoyannis’ novel, set in present-day London, a public relations exec struggles to find peace after the death of his beloved wife and finds some solace in his friends.
Just as Ollie Bridge is about to commit suicide by taking an overdose of pills with vodka, his friends cajole him into attending a poetry performance titled “They Them.” There, he meets the
poet, a woman named Alex, but it turns out that the meeting is a setup—an attempt by his pals to bring him back from the brink and return him to life, as it were. It appears to work—not only for Ollie, but for Alex, as well. Her husband, Sam, actually did commit suicide, leaving her as bereft as Ollie, whose own spouse, Eden, died of cancer. “They Them” features Alex and a life-size puppet that represents Sam; Alex is a ventriloquist, and as she trades quips onstage with the avatar of her dead husband, a pervasive creepiness takes hold. Claudia Ellis, known to her friends as “Claw,” is a physician who treated both Sam and Eden, who was her true friend, and she has a casual attitude when it comes to prescribing pills. Rounding out the cast is Sigismund, Claw’s first husband, a historian who left her for one of his students, and Patrick, who becomes Claw’s second husband. Readers learn that Patrick and Sigismund once had a fling, as did Claw and Ollie; it’s clear that this is a group of friends with benefits.
Cacoyannis writes very well on a small canvas. His previous works have had elements of satire, though it may be a stretch to see this latest as having such; these characters appear, at least, to be very serious as the author puts them through their paces—perhaps too serious. But maybe that is the point: They’re all navel-gazers, well meaning most of the time, but self-absorbed nonetheless. They demonstrate a panoply of sexual variety, and bed-hopping is a recurring motif, with so-and-so being unfaithful with what’s-his/her-name with abandon. But to offset this, they all seem to be compulsive confessors; in fact, transgression followed by confession is shown to be a social tactic among this group, a strategy for leverage. Still, this is Ollie’s story and, true to the title, readers get such soliloquies as this: “Broken by the addition, I have now become one minus two: a subtraction—in amongst the blackened silhouettes, a hollow displacement of matter.” It’s no wonder his friends thought it prudent to get him a girlfriend. The preceding quote is just the first of many arithmetical maunderings. Still, readers will come to like Ollie and care about the outcome of his new
love with Alex, which holds real promise. The story closes with Ollie and Claw in a kind of autumnal mood as old, genuine friends lob insights to one another like players in a slow-motion tennis match. A rather strange but skillfully written study of a group of friends doing their best to get by.
Cino, Cortney | Illus. by Marina Saumell Whimspire Books (32 pp.) | $12.99 paper Jan. 9, 2024 | 9798988925101
Encouraging words help young readers value their own inner lights in this beautifully painted, selfesteem-bolstering picture book.
Electric lights turn on and off, but two lights remain constant: the sun and each person’s own inner light. “It beams out through your grin and is uniquely yours,” the narrator explains, celebrating qualities such as intelligence, determination, and curiosity that make that light shine. Just as the sun sometimes goes behind a cloud, inner lights also change; they can foster community, encourage bravery, offer fortitude in the face of a struggle, or support determination in spite of failure. Sometimes, the light is seen in a reflection in others. Despite struggles and trials, it always flickers back to life. Cino’s scientific description of the sun sets a tone for the concept of inner value to be treated as fact, bolstering the messages of self- acceptance and appreciation with an aura of authority. But the text also has a comforting cadence, couched in poetic descriptions with vocabulary-stretching words (such as emits and persistent) well
placed for easy understanding. Saumell’s beautiful paintings feature well-lit backgrounds with clear, textured brush strokes. The images seem to follow one main child with fair skin and brown hair, growing from young to older into the adult years and grandparenthood. The bright colors are captivating, and lap readers will pore over the book’s pages. A gorgeously rendered affirmation fueled by powerful metaphors to bolster self-love.
Evans, Richard E. | Verity Books
(234 pp.) | $16.99 paper
Oct. 23, 2023 | 9781736173336
Evans examines the root causes of male violence in this nonfiction work. In these pages, the author explores the deep reasons why warfare and other kinds of violence seem so endemic to human society, and he quickly isolates one key culprit: men. The general history of wars and violent interpersonal conflict, Evans contends, indicates that men have a propensity for violence, a proposition he expands upon along evolutionary grounds: “In our distant past, a man had to assert himself to join a hunting party, then assert himself to get his fair share of the kill,” he writes. “Those who did that survived, reproduced, and passed their DNA on to the next generation.” Over the millennia, the author posits, this situation has led to a tendency among men—especially male leaders—to assert their dominance through war. Evans also breaks down
A thought-provoking consideration of the plague of violence in human society.
the biological side of his theory, noting all the bodily chemicals, such as dopamine and testosterone, that are constantly being pumped into the male body. The broad range of scientific grounding that Evans brings to his speculations makes for a very compelling reading experience. For the most part, the author’s explanations of the science underlying his central ideas are intriguing and cogent. The book’s central theory—that cultural and inherent biological factors make men disposed to violence—naturally gives rise to a suite of proposed measures to counter the scourge, most of which involve empowering more women, who aren’t subject to such factors (“Women had to be assertive to get a fair share of food and comfortable living space, but they could not do it physically; the men were bigger, stronger, and more violent. So women had to achieve their goals by debate and negotiation—useful abilities when strategizing how to avoid a war”). Evans presents all his proposals with an appealing lack of demagoguery—this is a serious case, soberly made. A thought-provoking consideration of the plague of violence in human society.
Gallagher, Kaia | Atterberry Press (286 pp.) | $15.99 paper March 12, 2024 | 9798989203604
Retired consultant Gallagher’s memoir explores her family history on her mother’s side, focusing on experiences in Estonia during World War II. The author traces Estonia’s political and social struggles, which led to the country’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940 and later occupation by German troops in 1941; it was then taken over by the Soviets again at war’s end. The focus of the memoir then turns to Gallagher’s relative, attorney Bruno Kull, who
became a spy for Estonia and a fighter for his country’s independence, which made him an enemy of the Soviets, the Germans, and his own neighbors, the latter of whom were unsure of his allegiance. It becomes the story of an unlikely hero who gave his life for his beliefs. Gallagher holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and a doctorate in sociology from Brown University, which puts her in a unique space to tell a story of historical significance that’s also a deeply personal remembrance. In many ways, the memoir itself is a documentation of occupation, examining the ways that one’s home becomes a profound part of one’s identity. The result is an exceedingly well-researched work, allowing for glimpses into everyday life in Estonia as well as its sociopolitical climate. Gallagher’s immediate family managed to escape the country during the war, but their history and attachment to their home remained strongly in their collective memory—exile allowed them to survive, but they left a part of themselves behind. Loss is a common theme in the memoir, both in terms of the physical and the emotional. A remembrance that effectively explores how fortitude and a sense of home shape people’s lives.
Grant, Robert Edward & Michael Ashley Fast Company Press (224 pp.) | $26.95 July 25, 2023 | 9781639080342
Citizens battle an oppressive technological state in Grant and Ashley’s alarming SF stories.
The authors (Grant is the founder of technology company Crown Sterling Limited; Ashley is a columnist for Forbes magazine) imagine a near-future America seamlessly woven from virtual reality, social media, online payments, self-driving cars, surveillance cameras,
and social credit ratings, all merged into a convenient but suffocating corporate/ governmental entity. Their uneasy protagonists include a woman whose digital accounts are hacked and obliterated by a spurned ex-boyfriend; an eighth grader who sees his town’s racist past expunged in his school’s VR history lessons; a private eye who gets targets canceled by obtaining video of them committing fat-phobic microaggressions and other thought crimes; and Civil Rights–era icon Rosa Parks, who sees her cash vanish into thin air during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott (a fantastical metaphor for the de-banking of today’s social media dissidents). Other stories spotlight characters who fight back with their own digital technology, like a singer-songwriter who ditches her exploitative record label and goes indie using nonfungible tokens; a content creator who gets de-platformed for criticizing a creeping world government and its digital central-bank currency; and a man fed up with Friday lockdowns (imposed to reduce greenhouse emissions) who recites the Declaration of Independence to his TikTok followers and runs for city council. The authors append nonfiction commentaries to their stories, tracing their inspirations in sinister real-life developments, from the Department of Homeland Security’s proposal for a Disinformation Governance Board to World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab’s touting of brain implants. Grant and Ashley probe resonant, timely themes here, exploring both the seductions of immersive technology and its despotic potential. Their populist sentiments are blunt, but their techno-dystopian sketches are intriguing and scarily believable. The prose is vivid and punchy: “I peer out the window at the six lanes of traffic. Ninety percent of the vehicles don’t even have windshields. They’ve converted theirs to vidscreens so the occupants can watch Netflix while cruising. Although I suspect some are watching porn.” The result is an engrossing exploration of high-tech society and its discontents.
An entertaining, thought-provoking vision of the peril and promise of ubiquitous digital gadgetry.
Gruen, Judy | Koehler Books (208 pp.) | $17.95 paper
Feb. 20, 2024 | 9798888242407
Gruen reflects on the challenges of being a professional writer, especially as an Orthodox Jew inhabiting a largely secular, liberal profession.
The author grew up a secular Jew in the San Fernando Valley, uninterested in connecting with Judaism in a profoundly spiritual way. Nevertheless, it deeply informed her sense of self, and much of her early writing— she was the editor-in-chief of a Jewish newspaper, Ha’Etgar, while attending U.C. Berkeley—was focused on specifically Jewish issues (“Judaism was my identity, emotionally and culturally”). Then she met Jeff, the man who would eventually become her husband; though he was also raised a secular Jew, he’d become intensely drawn to Orthodoxy. Initially both curious about and resistant to the possibility of following the path of an observant Jew, she eventually began to realize that the profound theological questions Jeff raised spoke to her deeply, particularly as a Jewish woman. This new identity wasn’t easy to maintain in the world of professional writers, a milieu dominated by secular liberalism; with impressive candor and thoughtfulness, Gruen chronicles feeling like an outsider as a “Shabbat-observant Jewish woman who supported Israel” and a political conservative deeply troubled by the global rise of antisemitism (“I used to wear my liberal identity as a badge of honor, a statement of my moral virtue and sophistication”). The author details her accomplished career as a writer, one that began modestly—her first real writing job was at a trade journal,
Hospital Gift Shop Management —but flourished later on. She also laments the fashionable tendency of some to write “Orthodox-shaming” memoirs that present a “skewed, prejudiced, and condescending vision of Torah life.”
Gruen’s remembrance revolves around two intersecting stories: her life as a writer and as a conservative Jew among secular liberals. The latter narrative is the more absorbing one; she limns her spiritual and political metamorphosis with impressive nuance, and without any strident grandstanding. As she observes, Judaism extols the “value of discretion,” emphasizing painstaking care with public communication, a virtue she admirably displays throughout her recollection. But one can’t help but question whether Gruen’s writing and editing career, while not without its laudable accomplishments, is really the stuff of which compelling memoirs are made. Additionally, her account of writing itself often seems rehearsed, the stale presentation of a conventional piety rendered in equally conventional language: “I believed that a good writer nurtures her love and respect for the written word and understands the ingredients of prose that flows logically and at times, lyrically. A good writer is committed to the practice of writing as an art and a craft.” For a writer who insists on the meticulous choice of the most precise word, it’s disappointing when she refers to her “achy-breaky heart” while discussing a romantic disappointment, or calls a difficult colleague the “Mean Girl editor.” Nevertheless, Gruen’s memoir is both insightful and courageous, and well worth reading for anyone, writer or not, interested in the trials of navigating a politically and religiously inhospitable environment. A perceptive memoir, written with both boldness and restraint.
Kirkus Star
The J.E.D.I. Leader’s Playbook: The Insider’s Guide to Eradicating Injustices, Eliminating Inequities, Expanding Diversity, and Enhancing Inclusion
Harris, Omar L. | Self (306 pp.) | $23.99 paper Dec. 14, 2023 | 9798862054576
Harris presents a handbook that outlines the hows and whys of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In his introduction, the author speaks plainly about the wave of DEI efforts that have proliferated following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Regardless of the good intentions of the professionals who soon emerged to spearhead initiatives, many of the resulting programs were “restricted to the box of delivering rah-rah speeches, training on unconscious biases, and forming and facilitating employee resource groups.” Harris’ point is that DEI programs are useless unless leaders are serious about creating real change, and that begins with an honest commitment to justice. “Justice is having and adhering to a disciplinary matrix that applies to everyone operating in the system in a measure proportionate to their potential violations,” he writes. “Justice maintains order and trust in the operation as a whole; it’s what solidifies and makes all the lofty values talk concrete.” The case the author makes isn’t just an ethical one—it’s also an economic one. Companies that fail to adapt to the evolving demands of a diverse workforce will be left behind, Harris asserts. The author’s writing is clear and accessible, both impassioned and pragmatic, and the text as a whole is well organized. He offers a “framework for action,” beginning by asking leaders to define why they’re embarking on this work, then leading them step by step through the process of creating a clear and coherent plan for creating a just
organizational culture. The book includes worksheets, exercises, and questions for contemplation, and the author supports his assertions with data and relevant anecdotes. He also cites the work of other authors, but it’s really his own commitment to employee wellbeing and principled business practices that makes this book so compelling. A timely guide inspired by justice and rooted in practical action.
Jackson, C.T. | Self (200 pp.) | $13.99 paper Dec. 14, 2023 | 9798218310257
Jackson presents a satirical guidebook for prospective oligarchs on how to exploit politicians, capitalism, and the American public.
“Money is how we, as a species, determine our worth,” the author writes in the opening pages of this manual for the aspiring oligarch. “We are not measured by the strength of our character, our integrity, or our altruism.” The author blends humorous insights on 21st-century capitalism with a tongue-in-cheek history of economic exploitation from Crassus of Rome (who created his own private army) to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, whose interests in space exploration, the author asserts, stem from their desire to “escape the hellscape they created.” Another oligarch, Mali’s Mansa Musa, gave so much of his
wealth away in the 14th century, Jackson writes, that it devalued the price of gold, teaching future oligarchs a key lesson “to never give away anything you own.” Readers learn how Henry J. Heinz used his influence with President Teddy Roosevelt to pass food regulations that eliminated competition, and how Sanford Dole convinced President Grover Cleveland to annex Hawaii by military force. While informative, the book’s strength lies in its humor and biting satirical commentary. In a particularly effective joke, a chapter ends abruptly with a pop-up ad (“Want to keep reading? ”) that offers readers the rest of the book for a discounted price if they “SUBSCRIBE NOW.” Other hilarious gags include missing citations that have been sold off to corporate advertisers (endnote 2, for example, was sold to “Starkist Brand Tuna: Overfish’d ’til it’s delisch’ ”) and a who’s who–styled appendix of “The Great Exploiters of Earth.” The author’s engaging, wickedly smart writing style is accompanied by a wealth of visual aids, from photographs with humorous captions to original political cartoons, such as one drawing of the “Welcome” gate at a McMansion replete with barbed wire, cameras, guard dogs, and prison towers. This follow-up volume to Jackson’s previous publication, So You Want To Be a Dictator (2022), will leave readers longing for more guidebooks in the series. A nihilistically hilarious commentary on the corporate world.
Joseph, David | Portal 6 Press (193 pp.)
$9.99 paper | Jan. 11, 2024 | 9781735919164
For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.
Joseph presents a book of short stories looking at the human condition from many perspectives. In this captivating anthology of 16 short stories, the author introduces a number of compelling characters at various stages of life. Each of the stories is told from a first-person perspective, narrated by characters both male and female, young and old, chronicling the innocence of youth, the wisdom of old age, and everything in between. The subjects (some funny, some sad) run the gamut of human experience. “Parking Cars” examines the strains of friendship as a young man finds out more than he’d like about his good friend as they work as valets at a high-end country club, testing their bonds of loyalty and trust. Family dynamics are front and center in “So Far From Town When Everyone Else Lived Close,” in which a Fourth of July gathering ends with a confrontation and changes a family forever. Family themes are also explored in “Home for Thanksgiving,” in which a young man thinks he’s deftly dodging questions about his love life from inquisitive relatives. “Crazy Eddie” is a look at the relationship that two youngsters have with an eccentric and largely shunned character in town. Other stories involve small-town living, true love, lost love, and other topics that will be relatable to many readers. The topics are all accessible—the real strength of this collection is Joseph’s simple but effective writing. There are no dramatic plot twists here, just recognizable characters and situations animating simply told but powerful stories. Joseph doesn’t hit the reader over the head with his theme, though he identifies it in an author’s note as age, in its many different forms: “Age of our bodies. Age of our minds. Age of
our hearts. Age of our souls.” Joseph covers all of that and more in this lovely collection, a deceptively profound book that will appeal to anyone who appreciates the power of good storytelling. A lovely and moving collection that will resonate with many readers.
Kaplan, Jerry | Oxford University Press (240 pp.) | $18.00 paper Feb. 19, 2024 | 9780197773543
Kaplan presents a comprehensive overview of artificial intelligence, discussing its promise and potential dangers.
The author, an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, believes that artificial intelligence technology is poised to usher in a “new Renaissance” and catalyze a transformation as revolutionary as those that followed “the wheel, the printing press, the light bulb, and penicillin.” In splendidly accessible language, Kaplan focuses his attention on the future ramifications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), which can respond to questions in plain language by drawing from massive pools of data to make remarkably fast and precise analytical judgments. According to the author, over time, GAI will not only learn and compute faster and more autonomously; it will also be able to learn directly from actual experience. As the technology inevitably improves, Kaplan posits, AI will remake entire industries. For example, GAI tools will be able to generate legal documents and contracts without a lawyer’s assistance and will find legal precedents with astonishing speed. Kaplan observes that, ironically, the profession largely responsible for the birth of GAI, software engineering, will be a victim of its own progeny. “I’ll telegraph this short and sweet: software engineering, as it’s practiced today, is dead. In the
An engrossing collection grounded by complex emotional dynamics.
HOMEFRONT
future, everyone will be a programmer. Computer programs, already ubiquitous, will drop in cost to almost zero, and proliferate dramatically.” The scope of Kaplan’s study, especially given its brevity, is impressively expansive—he discusses not only the implications of GAI for employment in several industries, but also the legal and philosophical disputes that will necessarily arise. The philosophical discussions are the weakest aspect of the book; in these instances, Kaplan’s penchant for abridgment is a vice (at one point, discussing the complexities of free will, he enthusiastically refers readers to Wikipedia). However, this remains a wonderfully edifying overview, one that includes a remarkably clear explanation of the technology itself and the manner in which GAI can be said to engage in “thinking.”
An excellent single-volume synopsis of an important and technically formidable subject.
Kelly, Victoria | University of Nevada Press (172 pp.) | $22.00 paper Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781647791445
Kelly presents an anthology of stories reflecting the effects of war on home and family. Drawing on her experiences as the wife of a fighter pilot during her husband’s three wartime deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the author, a novelist and poet, collects here 14 tales inspired by the lives of women affected by military service and war. Kelly observes that the stress and sadness that come with
the death of a loved one can often become catalysts for personal change, as evidenced in the opening story, “Finding the Good Light,” in which Diane, emotionally exhausted after attending eight military funerals and divorcing her Navy husband, finds renewal by becoming a Hollywood actress. One of the author’s most obvious storytelling strengths is her credible, acute portrayal of interpersonal tensions, as demonstrated in the memorable “Prayers of an American Wife,” when one Navy wife discovers another, who happens to be her neighbor, enjoying an illicit extramarital affair. While noticing a strange male visitor entering her neighbor’s house through the side door one day, the faithful observing wife finds herself “savagely heartbroken,” nervously clutching her Pomeranian, who’s blissfully “unaware of the betrayal happening just across the lawn.” This knack is evident even in the collection’s shortest tale, “The Strangers of Dubai,” in which a soldier on leave with his wife visits an Afghan gold market with questionable bargaining tactics. The affecting coming-of-age evolution of a military brat in “Rachel’s Story” profiles a girl as she rapidly learns about big-city life, friendship, love, and the precious commodity of time. Kelly clearly channeled her own emotions, confusion, loneliness, sacrifice, and love into these stories illuminating the struggle of family members who may not be fighting wars on the battlefield but are keeping the home fires burning. These themes provide richly resonant material for these well-written short stories about the wartime experience told from the perspectives of those waiting patiently (and impatiently) at home.
An engrossing collection grounded by the complex emotional dynamics between soldiers and their families.
Lamar, Lindsey | Experiment 42 (378 pp.) | $16.99 paper Feb. 27, 2024 | 9798218323851
In Lamar’s formally playful mystery novel, the reader is the private investigator in a case of attempted murder. This thriller combines a murder mystery with a puzzle game, positioning the reader as the investigator. Provided with multiple case files presented in a specific order, readers are called to solve the mystery as they sift through the evidence. These case files take the form of diagrams, letters, diary entries, and police interviews, each filled with potential clues as to the culprit and motives behind the mysteries presented in the novel. The primary mystery, set in 2023, concerns the disappearance of Sillian Parks. Much of this evidence is relayed by Jane Parks, Sillian’s twin sister. Jane takes the narrative reins for this portion of the novel, though she proves to not be the most reliable of narrators. This is one of the novel’s triumphs: Simple obfuscation owing to the narrative’s point of view works wonders in keeping the mystery alive, even as clues are not-so-subtly revealed. The book is divided into 10 “Case Files,” which are further divided into smaller pieces of evidence. Most of the files conclude with hints for the reader to consider about the clues provided throughout, and the head detective delivers larger updates at some crucial points. Apart from Jane’s portions of the narrative, the most plentiful evidence comes from the diary of Mary Sophomore, who famously disappeared, along with her twin sister and their husbands, in the 1940s. This thread provides a parallel narrative to the twins in the present day, and their connection becomes integral to solving the mystery. The historical account is the most engaging element of the novel, as Lamar’s prose displays delightful wit in
these passages (“next to the abandoned body that the ants had already found, I turned to face her and speak in a hushed tone. ‘I’m forever in debt. Thank you.’ She placed her hand on the car’s door handle. ‘Yes, you are’”). All the characters read as white, but there is some diversity in sexual orientation. A gamified reading experience that effectively pulls the reader into the story.
Lawson, Tracy | Illus. by Larissa Coriell Gray Lion Books (60 pp.) | $5.95 paper Aug. 31, 2023 | 9798987612316
Series: The Liberty Belles, 2
Lawson’s illustrated book for young readers tells the story of a true unsung figure of the American Revolution. In this short historical-fiction novel, 7-year-old Annie Perkins and her mother walk to Grandma Sarah’s house in Medford, Massachusetts, for a visit in 1834. There, Sarah tells Annie the story of the Boston Tea Party and how she helped the cause with her husband, John Fulton, who was one of the Sons of Liberty. During the war, when British troops attempted to steal firewood from Sarah’s home, she ran after them, took one of their oxen by the horns, and turned it back around—all the while hoping that the soldiers wouldn’t shoot a woman. After this success, Maj. John Brooks tasked Sarah with sending a message across enemy lines to Gen. George Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she did so, alone in the dark of night, after rowing a boat across the river. As an author’s note points out, the women who were instrumental in the Revolution, such as Sarah Bradlee Fulton, whose life inspired this book, often had their stories preserved through oral histories. This book’s plot effectively demonstrates the importance of these by having Annie listening intently to her Grandma Sarah’s adventures, asking pertinent
questions, and making connections to her personal experience. Finally, Annie learns that her older brother, Nathan, has never heard these stories, and she promises to ensure that future generations of her family will hear of her grandmother’s heroism. Coriell’s detailed, half-page black-and-white sketches decorate some pages, showing Sarah’s exploits, the clothing of the different eras, and both the Patriots and British troops. Sarah also introduces Annie to several complex political concepts in engaging, easy-to-understand language. The narrative itself offers both exciting action and discussions of important issues. The inclusion of figures such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock will encourage young readers to further explore American history.
An inspiring true history of one of the daring Daughters of Liberty.
Lonczak, Heather S. | Self (446 pp.)
$36.00 | $20.00 paper | March 2, 2024 9798989648108 | 9781735362595 paper
In this novel, a young woman enjoys a perfect life—a wonderful husband, an intriguing job, a new home—but things threaten to fall apart after she starts to suffer psychotic episodes.
Everything’s looking up for Joshua Fitzpatrick and Sylvia “Sunny” Zielinski. The two, who hit it off in college, get married the summer after graduation. They’re absolutely smitten, whispering loving thoughts into each other’s ears on the day of their wedding, ready to build a new life together. But the lively wedding ends in disaster when, after a sudden flight of rage, Sunny throws cake at the crowd and flees the party. The next day, her new husband swiftly forgives her wedding-night tantrum,
optimistically looking to the great things ahead: Sunny’s new job in publishing, a pet cat, and a home in San Diego. But when Sunny’s grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, succumb to a stroke and old age, she falls into a grief-stricken depression that ends in a sudden break with reality. Sunny believes that she’s being chased by the Gestapo and thinks her boss is a secret Nazi. Lonczak breaks the novel up into nonlinear chapters— narrated by Sunny, her father (Peter), and Joshua—in order to flesh out the protagonist’s backstory. Early on, Joshua lovingly describes Sunny: “She was like a vibrant sunrise peeking through a cloudy sky. She was warmth, light, comfort, and dazzling beauty.” The tale reveals a history of intergenerational family trauma, with both Sunny’s mom and maternal grandmother experiencing similar psychotic episodes. The book is not an easy read. At several points, Sunny makes perilous choices, starving herself and going on the run. She even seems to endanger her half siblings. But the story delivers a sharply written and startling account of a woman and a family put to the test by mental illness—and how they learn to cope and become resilient. The novel’s one flaw involves its pacing: Much of the first 50 pages deals with the rather mundane lead-up to Sunny and Joshua’s wedding, which could have been woven into the tale as flashbacks after the ominous wedding night. But once the harrowing book picks up speed, readers will find it impossible to put down.
A searing portrait of mental illness and a family trying to stay together.
Masser, Ryan | Self (274 pp.) | $12.99 paper Oct. 8, 2023 | 9798892174978
Series: A Chronicle of Shadows, 1
A young boy plagued by visions grows into his magical powers in Masser’s fantasy novel.
At age 7, Rain, the son of an indifferent farmer
father and a timid mother, finds himself incapacitated by images that he doesn’t comprehend. But on the way home after a psychic onslaught, he discovers what he hopes could be the solution to his problem: a monastery run by the Pratyan monks, a charitable order that treats the sick and houses orphans. Rain overcomes his mother’s concerns and persuades his father to allow him to join the monastery, which becomes his home away from home as he matures. It is there that he meets the amber-eyed boy with no name who becomes his best friend. He also attracts the attention of Preceptor Chaya, a mysterious monk. Chaya gives Rain private lessons in shadowcraft (“That first month we focused mostly on stealth and pickpocketing”). During his decade at the monastery, Rain gains other abilities, including telepathy and healing, and develops hyper-acute senses. Rain and his friend reach the status of Shaktar (ascension) simultaneously and are renamed Parjan and Aikyam, respectively. Rain’s reputation grows after he rescues a young noblewoman from bandits. Actions taken by Rain’s mentor, Chaya, herald profound changes at the monastery while Rain readies for a mission that promises intrigue and danger. Masser’s debut novel is frustratingly long on potential but short on payoffs. It reads as the first volume of a series, with much of the narrative taken up by establishing the world in which the Pratyan operate. While the author does an admirable job of evoking the Kingdom of Ephram, aside from a couple of maps, the book has precious little reference material to orient readers in the elaborate world; a fuller explanation of the kingdom’s political situation would be most welcome, for example. Fortunately, Masser has built his story around a likable character in Rain. This fantastical tale succeeds thanks to an engaging protagonist.
Matthews, Marjorie Nelson
Rootstock Publishing (258 pp.) | $18.99 paper March 26, 2024 | 9781578691623
Matthews’ novel tells the stories of two lives, mostly running in parallel but intersecting at key points.
Paul Rideau and Amy Barnes first connect briefly on a fall day in 1960 in Lisbon, Vermont, when he’s 9 and she’s 7. The Barnes family, from Hawaii, is visiting friends in the area. Then their lives diverge; he grows up on his family’s farm in Lisbon, while Amy, aside from a year in Connecticut, grows up in the Aloha State. In alternating sections following a nonlinear timeline spanning decades from 1960 to 2002, Matthews slowly reveals each character’s story. Paul marries his high school sweetheart, Sarah, and takes over the family farm, and theirs is a happy, busy life—with little room for Paul’s artistic interests. Amy is swept off her feet by Martin Whaley, a poet and faculty member at New Hampshire’s Stafford College; however, her creative writing is sublimated during their marriage, which is troubled. Throughout, Paul’s and Amy’s lives come close to connecting in various locations, including Chicago and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Both experience milestones and painful events as their relationships with family members and friends develop and mature, and Paul’s and Amy’s love of artistic endeavors ends up changing both their lives. Overall, Matthews’ character-driven narrative sparkles with well-drawn protagonists and believable situations as Paul and Amy absorb society’s narrow expectations for men and women in the early ’60s. For example. Paul has an interest in art and color, but his father makes his opinion clear when his 9-year-old son is decorating Christmas cookies: “Coloring cookies when he could be out sledding? Seems pretty girly to me.” Tween Amy’s teacher tells her to cover
up her body as much as possible in public: “You’ll be telling the boys you’re not the kind of girl who welcomes crude remarks and inappropriate attention.” In the end, this rewarding story successfully weaves disparate perspectives into a rich braid. A satisfying story of love, family, and creativity.
Mell, Sue | She Writes Press | Sept. 3, 2024
Mell’s story collection spotlights women navigating careers and relationships in New York City.
In the opening tale, “Serendipity,” Rachel still pines for Richard years after he was a visiting painter during her senior year at NYU. What will the two of them do if there’s still a spark, especially now that neither one is single? The author groups this book’s 13 stories into three parts, focusing on three women: Rachel, Emma, and Nina. Rachel’s relationships, sadly, don’t tend to fare well; for example, she struggles to forge an emotional connection with the former artist and “cokehead” Paul in “Decorative Arts.” Aspiring actor Emma makes ends meet waiting tables. She certainly doesn’t need her life complicated (as it is in the story “House-Sitting”) when her boyfriend leaves her without a place to stay and robbers single out the restaurant where she works. Nina’s career doesn’t improve much after her tenure as a “lackey” at Bloomingdale’s department store in the mid-1980s, and the antidepressants she takes only seem to exacerbate her mental
anguish. Mell’s characterizations are superlative, starting with the trio of protagonists. They’re sympathetic people often at the mercy (or lack thereof) of outside forces, but when their professional and/or personal lives hit snags or outright fail, they stand firm. Many among the supporting cast are equally compelling, such as Rachel’s friend Lily, who periodically takes the narrative reins; waitress Tina, who harbors a romantic interest in Emma; and photographers Mick and Rob, each of whom shares a gleefully curious history with Nina. The author’s colorful descriptions animate numerous sights in Brooklyn and Manhattan: “Tomato soup red and yolky yellow, dense pistachio and limey greens, royal and cerulean blues, everything tinged with a dark undertone like forties newspaper comics.” Endlessly fascinating characters propel these wonderfully ardent stories.
Mnyandu, Thembani & Desaray WilsonMnyandu | Illus. by Shayna Renee Olivier Zulunomics (42 pp.) | $18.95 $10.95 paper | Dec. 9, 2023 9781736525289 | 9781736525272 paper Mnyandu and Wilson-Mnyandu’s picture book gives a vibrant new setting to an old classic.
Sindi, a young Black woman living in Zulu Land, enjoys her blissful life with her father, called Baba, taking care of their home, but unfortunately the happiness isn’t fated to last. When Baba gets a job as a tour bus
Mnyandu and Wilson-Mnyandu’s picture book gives a vibrant new setting to an old classic.
SINDI: A ZULU CINDERELLA
driver, he invites his sister, Busi, and her two daughters, Mbali and Thuli, to stay with Sindi during the long stretches while he is away from home. Sindi’s cousins take advantage of her father’s absence to order her about and mock her: “That’s what you’re wearing to the Reed Dance? It seems more suited for a goat herder than a maiden.” Sindi is heartbroken and runs to her gogo (grandmother), who helps her prepare for the dance nonetheless. Once there, Sindi has a fabulous time meeting the prince of the Zulu royal family, but she must return home before her cousins, and in her rush she leaves behind her ucu necklace. This adaptation of Cinderella is innovative in its seamless insertion of Zulu cultural elements, which elevate the oft-told story with the twists they introduce into the plot and their explicit rejection of magic. Oliver’s vibrant watercolor illustrations reflect the energy and passion to be found in Zulu Land. A creative, refreshing twist on Cinderella that educates readers about Zulu culture.
Neill, Ted | Self (185 pp.) | $10.95 paper Nov. 18, 2023 | 9798867829995
A group of nerdy teenage misfits battles gods and social injustices in this fourth installment of a YA supernatural series.
Liam Reilly and his friends at Grand Old Republic University are much more than normal students, as evidenced by their adventures fighting demons and zombies in previous volumes. But as this entry opens, it’s Tater Tot Tuesday at the cafeteria and Liam’s biggest issue is trying to figure out a way to ask his crush, Jeanie Winskell, out without making a fool of himself. Things quickly become complicated when Liam finds a mysterious virtual-reality headset in a package with his name on it and no
return address and, imprudently, activates the gear. He’s immediately transported to a mythical version of the American dream, specifically the Manifest Destiny—replete with a Wild West landscape and gunslinging cowboys as well as characters like Darth Maul, Slender Man, and Krampus. Realizing that he is trapped in the twisted dreamscape, Liam must use his wits to understand the purpose of the “game.” When his friend Esmeralda Gichuru, a “dreamwalker,” shows up to help, they discover that everything revolves around a god who needs to find a missing part of herself in order to become whole again. Powered by nonstop action and relentless pacing, Neill’s tale follows Liam and company as they uncover profound revelations about the country they live in, which is suffering from a sickness of the soul: “America was natural beauty cheek to jowl with a gaudy, tacky, profit-seeking spirit. Commerce attempting to subdue everything in its path like a steamroller making way for a parking lot.” Complementing the deep thematic exploration (racism, discrimination, greed) are numerous pop-culture references, many of which are laugh-out-loud funny— like a nod to the Kelis song “Milkshake” in a particularly intense sequence. Subtle but powerful social commentary that’s skillfully mixed with pop-culture irreverence.
Paisley, Pip | Self (229 pp.) | $9.99 paper Jan. 3, 2024 | 9798989277018
The Grim Reaper’s daughter must save her friend from eternal damnation in Paisley’s comic debut novel.
Trixie D’Vita’s mother is death—literally. As in, the Grim Reaper. “She was a red-headed, black-corseted, stilettowearing force of nature,” Trixie reports with a mix of awe and annoyance. “And she casually moved through time and
space.” Trixie, who was raised primarily by her “uncle,” former drag queen Aunt Harry, isn’t interested in joining the family business. Instead, the 22-year-old works as a waitress at Aunt Harry’s popular Seattle bar, Quandors, where witches, zombies, vampires, and the tourists who want to mingle with monsters enjoy all manner of alcoholand blood-based cocktails. When agents from the Angel Investigative Bureau show up asking for her mother’s whereabouts, Trixie finds herself caught up in a scandal involving a potentially rigged game show. To the Wheel features newly departed souls winning desirable next lives…or being cast into the pits of Hell. Trixie doesn’t want to get involved—her relationship with her mother is complex—until her best friend, Zuzi Gonzales, dies suddenly and ends up as a contestant on the show. Can Trixie save her friend from a horrible afterlife, even if it means descending into Hell itself…and, even worse, teaming up with her mother? Paisley brings a great deal of humor and invention to her premise. Here, a demon Trixie meets in Hell describes how torture has been revolutionized through Applied Health Sciences: “We’re all about creative, personalized Hellscapes. Our goal is producing well-rounded, rehabbed souls able to move on to their next lifetimes. By finding each soul’s unique triggers, we break them down and open them up so they can get back on the Wheel of Life.” Paisley takes her characters seriously, even when she places them in screwball situations, which makes for an unexpectedly moving reading experience. The mixture of surreal comedy, mythology, and memorable characters makes for a winning combination that will surely have fans eagerly awaiting a sequel. An imaginative and entertaining novel about life, death, and mother-daughter relationships.
Parihar, Vikas | Self (33 pp.) | $5.75 paper Nov. 23, 2023 | 9798869719966
Parihar presents a brief collection of poetry on the anxieties of time, creativity, and authenticity.
This book of 13 poems opens with an empath’s lament. “The Tragedy of a Sensitive Heart” illustrates the burden of being “sad in anyone’s sorrow and happy in anyone’s joy.” This sets the conscious, sensitive tone of the rest of the collection, with its deep ruminations on time and its inevitable passing, and on how what’s behind us often distracts from what’s to come. In “A Preoccupied Man,” readers meet a man who’s “never available / He desired to live in the moment,” but “Moments passed as they always do, / There wasn’t much he can do.” However, in “The Past,” another man is willing to kick down a door and face the past, present, and future for a temporal do-over. The poems broadly address loss, often pondering existential questions instead of telling specific stories, yet several note the regrets of a creative person striving for motivation. “A Poem of Instructions” combines these themes: “How to pass the test of time? / ….one needs to…find new inspirations.” Other poems lament spending energy on the inauthentic and the accumulation of worldly things. Parihar’s stanzas make heavy use of repetition, driving home each entry’s point with little ambiguity. Combined with the book’s overall pithiness, these encores in verse make the already sparse collection feel light, approachable, and easy to revisit. The poems’ order is subtly impressive; although nearly all share the theme of time passing, there are smaller
A thoughtful compilation of works about inspiration and growing older.
connections, as well: “Anxieties” and “The Autumn Leaves,” for instance, share a preoccupation with nature—in the former, it’s distracting; in the latter, it’s decaying. This approach keeps any single entry from feeling like a non sequitur. The lone exception to this, though, is stylistic, not thematic: The book’s finale, “Deep down in my heart,” abandons the free verse that dominates the collection for a lyrical, sprinting composition—a stark contrast to the poet’s more meditative approach. A thoughtful compilation of works about inspiration and growing older.
Parihar, Vikas | Self (80 pp.) | $8.99 paper Nov. 27, 2023 | 9798870020105
Parihar explores the lives of modern men in this short story collection.
In “The Face,” one of five stories in this collection, a beautiful man is so enthralled by his own reflection that he forgets to eat or drink. In “The Host,” guests arrive for a party and destroy a house without realizing the host isn’t even there. In “A Pianist,” a piano player struggles with his identity after the Nazis cut off his fingers at Auschwitz. In “The Daughter of Comradeji,” the longest and most complex story in this volume, a woman named Seema contemplates how life might have been different if her late nephew, Timu, were still alive. Timu’s untimely death upset the balance of power in the family: Seema is in an unhappy arranged marriage and has come to resent her powerful father-inlaw, who plans to pass his fortune on to her husband’s cruel older brother. This narrative is a little hard to follow and is less successful than the others in the collection—it might have worked better if expanded into a longer story. In “The Modern Man,” a man contemplates what, exactly, makes a modern man as he goes through the motions of a fairly mundane day. Most of the pieces touch
on nature and natural beauty, providing contrast to the grind of contemporary life—the theme is a little underexplored, but it pops up as a motif in several of the stories (“The butterfly which came last night died on the Guava tree”). The florid and evocative prose is striking, but it veers into the purple in spots. Some passages are also difficult to read (especially the scenes that take place at Auschwitz in “A Pianist,” described in great detail), and the language is often quite vulgar. Ultimately, each of the stories is a morality tale, working economically (except for “The Daughter of Comradeji”) to deliver a punch, as good short stories should do. A fascinating selection of short fiction.
Partovi, Susan | BookBaby (232 pp.)
$19.99 paper | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781667891613
A doctor specializes in treating people experiencing homelessness in Partovi’s memoir.
The author, a physician and the medical director for Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, brings readers a narrative that begins as an immigrant success story and grows into a chronicle of treating people who live on the streets. Throughout the book, Partovi notably uses the term PEH (people experiencing homelessness) rather than referring to “the homeless,” emphasizing the humanity of the people she deals with as a doctor. When discussing the issues that both contribute to and are exacerbated by homelessness, the author emphasizes the roles of drug addiction and mental illness, detailing the ways that living unhoused complicates many medical conditions. Throughout this memoir, Partovi offers a sobering and disturbing (but also hopeful) look at the challenges of treating the unhoused, including many individual anecdotes about the people living on the streets—their struggles, tragedies, and, occasionally, their
successes in dealing with homelessness and the medical problems that beset them. The author passionately argues against the current limitations on the involuntary commitment of people with mental illness; in her view, such limitations result in too many people with serious psychological issues ending up in jail or on the street instead of in treatment: “Would you let your five-year-old child decide if he or she needed to be hospitalized, or whether to take life-saving medication? The severely mentally ill or demented are often only capable of problem-solving at that developmental level.” The book offers a thoughtful exploration of why some people are noncompliant with medical treatment, but it noticeably excludes race as a factor in distrust of the medical system. Still, Partovi’s compassion for her patients shines through, even when she expresses frustration with them and with the systems that keep them from getting the help they need. The book provides an important perspective on treating an unusually vulnerable population in American society. A riveting and sometimes radical look at the medical ramifications of homelessness.
Patt, Beverly | Owl Hollow Press (332 pp.) | $14.95 paper Aug. 29, 2023 | 9781958109380
Patt presents a twist on the enduring real-life mystery surrounding suspected murderer Lizzie Borden in this historical YA novel.
It’s 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, where 16-year-old Victoria Robbins cares for her gravely ill mother with the help of Irish domestic worker Penelope; meanwhile, her absent father spends weeks on the family’s distant farm. The teenager finds solace and companionship with her 33-year-old neighbor and former Sunday school teacher, Lizzie Borden. When Lizzie’s father and stepmother are
violently murdered and Lizzie arrested for the crimes, Victoria decides to use the principles of evidence and detection found in her beloved Sherlock Holmes stories to try to exonerate her friend. During her investigations, however, the teen discovers some unsettling similarities between herself and the accused murderer. For example, despite their middle-class backgrounds, both women are driven almost irresistibly to commit acts of petty thievery. In a Victorian world where one form of immorality is believed to lead inevitably to others, the girl can’t help but wonder if she’s capable of murder—or if her belief in Lizzie’s innocence stems from some darker link between them: “What if they really were alike in good ways—and bad?” she asks herself. The novel does a solid job with its late-19th-century New England setting, where class prejudices and bigotry toward Irish Catholics are rampant. Later, for instance, when Victoria finds an unlikely ally in young Irish police detective apprentice Declan Dempsey, she’s torn between her growing attraction to him and her father’s angry insistence that pursuing a relationship with him would bring disgrace upon her family. Meanwhile, she struggles to find evidence that could prevent Lizzie from going to the gallows, and to retain her own faith in her innocence. As the story reaches its dramatic conclusion, readers will be rooting for her to do both. An engaging drama with an appealing protagonist.
Pia, Lally | She Writes Press (368 pp.)
$17.95 paper | April 30, 2024 | 9781647427115
Pia recalls her journey from a childhood in Sri Lanka to a career as a doctor in the United States— fulfilling the prediction of a Hindu priest—in this memoir.
The author, her parents’ first child, was born in Sri Lanka in 1961, a time
A beautifully designed, poetic historical picture book.DR. KING GOES TO INDIA!
when the island was undergoing political turmoil and violent persecution of the Tamil minority. When she was three months old, her father traveled to attend a gathering welcoming a renowned Hindu priest. Looking into her father’s eyes, the priest spoke the words her father would repeat throughout the subsequent years: “Take good care of her. Your daughter will become a doctor of doctors.” Three months later, she and her parents moved to Kumasi, Ghana, to escape the increasing Sinhalese violence. Life in Ghana was good: Her father was an architect, her mother was a teacher, and the country was experiencing prosperity—until a series of revolutions began. Pia was 22 in 1983 when her family, which now included three younger siblings, received their green cards to enter the United States. She had two months left at her university, where she would complete her pre-med undergraduate degree. Then the medical school closed indefinitely, and the U.S. State Department discovered it had made an error that invalidated the author’s green card. She was adrift, without family, home, or country. In a compelling, albeit occasionally repetitious, memoir that reads more like a novel, Pia meticulously leads readers through an immigrant journey filled with twists. A riveting opening introduces us to the author in 1994, when she was the 33-year-old director of the Donated Body Program at the University of California, Davis, removing the head from a female corpse. The skillfully penned narrative, packed with vivid images of adventure, betrayal, and triumph, has an intimacy that will leave readers sighing during the long years of her painfully abusive marriage and cheering when she strikes out for independence. An intriguing, emotionally powerful, and culturally informative read.
Reese, Cara | Bea and Jo Press (34 pp.)
$19.99 | Jan. 25, 2024 | 9798218968786
Reese chronicles a little-known trip that Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King took to India in this children’s picture book.
In 1959, the Kings traveled from Montgomery, Alabama, to India. King had long been inspired by the teachings of Gandhi and the nonviolent movement he led: “Gandhi’s teachings took root in Martin’s heart, blooming strong and bright like royal sunflowers!” For more than a month, the Kings traveled through India, hoping to learn more as they toured the land where Gandhi had made such a difference; they did not expect to be greeted with cheers and treated like celebrities. Prime Minister Nehru thanked them for their freedom fighting, and college students gathered to learn about their activism. Reese’s poetic text guides readers through the wonders of the journey. The digital illustrations are based on photographs, stylizing the images to soften the edges and give them a somewhat abstract feel. The result makes the journey seem almost fantastical, a moment of magical connection. While many of the original photographs are in black and white, Reese’s design work floods the pages with colors and patterns, always complementing the text without overpowering it. Quotes from Gandhi’s teachings are peppered throughout. This historic moment of joy and celebration offers
Kirkus Staran uplifting look at two nations striving for a better future.
A beautifully designed, poetic historical picture book.
Saigal, Monica | Bodes Well Publishing (236 pp.) | $19.99 paper
Jan. 1, 2024 | 9780997662498
A woman’s desire to reconnect with her past leads to an unexpected new beginning in this romance.
Sharmila Solanki, an artist from Washington, D.C., has high hopes for her trip to Srinagar, Kashmir. Her daughter, Alina, is engaged to Emilio, an aspiring lawyer. Sharmila wants the couple to marry in Srinagar, the hometown of Alina’s father, Vikram Pandit. It is a place Sharmila knows only through the stories Vikram told her before they were tragically separated. In 1995, love flourished between Vikram, an artist teaching in Jaipur, India, and Sharmila, a gifted painter descended from Rajasthani royalty. Shortly after Vikram learned Sharmila was pregnant, he was shot (and presumed dead) during an act of political violence. More than 25 years after the loss of Vikram, Sharmila views Alina’s wedding as an opportunity to discover his birthplace and find members of his family so they can meet his daughter. During Sharmila and Alina’s travels, they meet tour guide Wajid Malik and his brother-in-law, George Tomson, a retired professor with a passion for Indian art. As mother and daughter explore Srinagar, an attraction develops between George and Sharmila. But when Sharmila receives surprising news about Vikram, she wonders if her future belongs with Alina’s father or the man who offers a second chance at love. Saigal’s novel is an engaging second-chance romance bolstered by appealing characters and well-honed prose. Sharmila is a deeply
nuanced protagonist whose personal and romantic journey forms the core of the narrative. While Vikram’s story is the centerpiece of the prologue, he remains a vital force throughout the novel as Sharmila and Alina discover the Srinagar he knew and loved. The strong supporting characters include Rami Sarkar, a wedding planner, and George, a widower who fears he may never find love again. In addition, Saigal’s lush prose is replete with subtle poetic passages (“The fragrance of the wildflowers mingled with the scent of nostalgia as tears became the language of the moment”).
A tender and finely observed romance.
Scattergood, Emma | Thorpe-Bowker (276 pp.) $13.99 paper | Jan. 12, 2024 | 9798892174978
Scattergood’s memoir chronicles her battle with breast cancer.
In 2022, the author had a biopsy on her breast; the procedure revealed invasive lobular breast cancer. The diagnosis sent Scattergood on an arduous journey that would come to include two mastectomies, chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and a host of side effects. The author encountered a lot of self-help material regarding breast cancer, but nothing that “simply tells what happens when someone gets diagnosed.” The book details MRIs, discusses the potential benefits of lymphatic drainage massage, and provides practical advice for those on their own cancer journeys (such as being sure to see a dentist before beginning chemotherapy). In the second portion of the book, Scattergood interviews others who have gone through experiences with breast
cancer. Such survivors include Michelle, who was diagnosed with a ductal carcinoma and elected to follow a largely alternative route for treatment following a double mastectomy. By contrast, Julie, a 20-year cancer survivor, unlike many others in the book, decided not to make any major changes to her diet or lifestyle after her ordeal with the disease. The work tackles this difficult topic in a head-on manner. The rapid movement from the author’s diagnosis to surgery and beyond shows just how quickly one’s life can be completely and permanently transformed by the malady—poignantly, the author observes how “breast cancer survivors live in fear that their cancer will return.” Although some of the advice on offer seems basic (such as a recommendation for those diagnosed with breast cancer to check out certain Facebook groups), Scattergood’s no-nonsense attitude makes the book work. While descriptions of diarrhea brought on by medication and oozing wounds from a mastectomy may not be inspirational, they bring to light the harsh realities of the disease. In the end, an entreaty to carpe diem caps off the material—while this is not a revolutionary message, its wisdom has been hard-won.
A tough and honest account of fighting a devastating disease.
Schnall, Susie Orman | SparkPress (344 pp.) | $17.95 paper
June 4, 2024 | 9781684632527
A New York City journalist investigates the duplicitous founder of a Silicon Valley biotech startup on the eve of its initial public offering in this contemporary novel. At a conference in Manhattan, 28-year-old BusinessBerry journalist Jamie Roman alerts speaker Anna Bright, the
34-year-old founder of BrightLife—a California company developing BrightSpot, an intraocular biosensor lens with robust capabilities—that she has a hot mic after leaving the stage. Appreciative, Anna asks Jamie to do the BusinessBerry interview that Jamie’s boss was set to do and invites her on her private flight back to the West Coast. Anna, suffering from a headache, sleeps through the trip, but she reschedules the interview for after the weekend, allowing Jamie to spend time with Anna’s attractive assistant, Ian, and overhear gossip that BrightSpot isn’t ready for market. The narrative alternates between the women’s third-person perspectives as both handle challenges: Jamie, in addition to her reporting, competes with a male colleague for a promotion and deals with her estranged Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist father, and Anna keeps the truth from her board of directors and pushes employees to fix issues ahead of BrightLife’s looming IPO. As Jamie pursues a new investigative piece on BrightLife, her boss and, surprisingly, her father warn her to back off. Fans of the Hulu streaming miniseries The Dropout, about the scandal involving biotech company Theranos, will enjoy this page-turner by Schnall, who often concludes her characters’ sections with provocative cliffhanger teasers (“I don’t want to be the whistleblower— not because I don’t want to help you but because I know someone who knows way more than I do”). The author infuses a lot of fun and flavor into the narrative, as when griping employees call BrightSpot “BS,” and she gives Anna sympathetic shadings, despite her behind-the-scenes actions. Jamie, too, is a well-developed character beyond her reporting on BrightLife. An entertaining suspense yarn about complicated, success-driven women.
Sederer, Lloyd I. | Greenleaf Book Group Press (208 pp.) | $26.95 | Jan. 9, 2024 9798886451290
Sederer recalls his fight to save a foundering mental hospital in this searching memoir.
The author, a former New York City mental health commissioner, recollects his 11-year stint, starting in 1989, as chief medical officer of McLean Hospital, Harvard University’s psychiatric teaching hospital and an institution storied for treating celebrities and poets. The hospital was hemorrhaging money; McLean’s model of monthslong inpatient stays, centered on psychoanalytic talk therapy, was too expensive—and medically ineffective, the author contends—to survive. Sederer introduced a radically different acute-care model based on two-week stays, during which doctors stabilized patients with the help of psychiatric drugs before discharging them for long-term outpatient care. The shift enraged the hospital’s more entrenched attending physicians; they were further miffed, the author asserts, by initiatives to expand the hospital’s services and bring in more patients, all of which meant more work for them.
Much of the book is an intricate study of managerial change, with Sederer describing how he built his executive team, cultivated his board, and eased out opponents. He also recaps colorful psychiatric cases, including that of a doctor who eloped with a manicdepressive patient, necessitating a police manhunt. The author offers a biting critique of corporate medicine’s fixation on profits over patients while advocating for a more streamlined, cheaper, more pharmacological, and less Freudian psychiatric paradigm. He also attacks what he considers bad practice: Sederer opposes psychoanalysis for psychotic patients (he says it can destabilize them), calls for simplifying
complicated drug regimens, and frowns on restraining and sedating patients. The author’s lucid, plainspoken prose makes medical issues accessible to laypeople while conveying the drama of McLean’s bitter office politics. (One attending physician “sat at his rather empty, big old oak desk, squarely facing me. He said I would fail, that I would be out of McLean in disgrace in short order, too. I said nothing in response. It was a brief meeting.”) Doctors and casual readers alike will find interesting food for thought here.
An absorbing insider’s view of upheavals in mental health care that explores the human impact of cold economics.
Taggart, William M. | Emerald Books (412 pp.) | Jan. 30, 2024 | 9781954779877
An engineer surveys America’s political landscape in this debut nonfiction book. “We are in a time when people take positions on subjects and defend them as part of their ‘tribe,’” writes Taggart, who argues that hyper-partisanship not only excludes more than one-third of Americans who consider themselves independents, but also threatens democracy itself, as the election denialism of 2020 demonstrates. With more than three decades of experience as an engineer for corporate industries, the author hopes to offer a nonpartisan, “factual, data-driven approach” to America’s pressing political issues, from education and the economy to prescription drugs and energy. While admitting that “hard data” can be misinterpreted, he contends that ultimately “hard data won’t lie to you.” For instance, no amount of political spin can change the quantitative link between poverty and gun violence, a correlation that, to Taggart, offers alternative strategies to combat this phenomenon that don’t involve unattainable policies such as “disarming America.” Similarly, according to the book, the undeniable
statistical data that African American men are more likely “to be killed by law enforcement, even when unarmed,” points to the continued legacy of systemic racism. Given the volume’s expressed “hope for moderation,” its centrist solutions to hot-button issues may not satisfy those on the two ideological poles. On dealing with systemic racism, for instance, the author rejects the possibility of reparations as unfeasible, and instead offers more tepid alternatives, such as a national database that shares information about police employment history and incidents. Alternately, the author’s belief that America needs “solutions to be simple” may not satisfy the more revolutionary aspirations of the left or the right. But those looking for evidencebased, centrist positions on polarizing issues will find a well-argued book that eschews ad hominem attacks and hot takes generated to maximize emotional engagement. Even if readers disagree with all of the author’s conclusions, he provides more than a dozen tables and charts as well as over 100 endnotes for the audience to explore the evidence. For full transparency, the work’s data is provided to readers via the author’s website in the form of Excel spreadsheets.
A timely, levelheaded analysis of America’s most polarizing political issues.
Thomas, Marian L. | L.B. Publishing (294 pp.) | $15.99 paper April 16, 2024 | 9781732488083
In Thomas’ novel, a prominent author struggling with profound loss and heartbreak strives to rediscover herself.
In the 2010s, novelist Raine Reynolds has a successful writing career, a best friend from childhood as her publicist, a loving husband of 15 years, and a beautiful Atlanta home. She endures some emotional hardships, including the tragic loss of her father and infant
A resonant tale of resilience, bravery, and the power of forgiveness.
SAVING RAINE
daughter, her husband’s extended unemployment, and other challenges, but she perseveres. Then she receives life-altering news during a book tour that changes everything: Her husband has been murdered by his lover. Feeling unmoored, Raine seeks solace in Paris, which she’s visited before and sees as a sanctuary: “In Paris, I felt like I found my being. It felt so right to be there. I hated to come back. To be honest, I just wish I could have stayed. Maybe I should go back there.” Now, five years later, as a senior vice president for an advertising agency, Raine finds herself back in Atlanta to open a new office. When an old acquaintance comes back into her life, she’s forced to reconcile with the past and determine if she can indeed go home again. Thomas, the author of Someone Like Me (2021), delivers smooth, evocative storytelling, portraying the raw realities of challenging experiences while also capturing the healing power of love. Raine is a relatable character as she deals with real-world problems; her reactions, choices, and decisions feel genuine and rational, but not conservatively so. Although her five-year emotional recovery in Paris takes place off-page, its results are seamlessly woven into the later narrative. Some elements of this emotional novel feel familiar at times, but readers will feel moved and inspired to root for the protagonist’s success. A resonant tale of resilience, bravery, and the power of forgiveness.
Wilson, Jim | Willow Bay Media (264 pp.) $18.95 paper | April 2, 2024 | 9798989538416
Wilson’s memoir chronicles an aspiring artist’s life in the music industry. The author grew up in Amarillo, Texas, in the 1960s. He got involved in some youthful hijinks, like stealing beer with friends, but he had long set his heart on making music. He eventually settled in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, but how would he survive in such an expensive city overflowing with talented people chasing similar dreams? The answer: piano tuning. Prior to his time in L.A., he attended a six-month program in Cleveland learning piano tuning, and the training paid off—with diligence, he obtained a reputation in L.A. as a dependable technician. When MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology came around, he established himself as an installation expert. This work, along with the tuning gigs, brought him into the orbit of mega-stars such as Carole King, Elton John, and Paul McCartney (the book includes photos of the author posing with various musical heavyweights). Despite the success of his efforts, the author still wanted to pursue his own musical career; he put together an album of music described as “folk-meets-Celtic-meets-classicalmeets-whatever” and began the meticulous task of building a name for
himself. This memoir shines a light on the figure of the entertainment industry technician. Even celebrities need their pianos tuned, and, when something goes wrong, it can be disastrous—Wilson recounts an Elton John performance in which, due to some complications with a MIDI device, Elton was ready to leave the show early. While many of the stories concern famous names (rest assured, McCartney is a “great dude”), the book is at its best in grittier moments; even with the author’s connections, his career as an artist started very much at the bottom, performing and selling CDs in shopping malls. Such hardships help make the book an endearing, well-rounded reflection. An inviting mix of star-studded encounters and an affirmation of a persevering artistic spirit.
Zadeik, Anastasia | She Writes Press (344 pp.) | $17.95 paper
May 28, 2024 | 9781647426682
Zadeik’s novel offers an unflinching account of mental illness from multiple perspectives. After Julia Reeves loses her father to cancer, she becomes despondent. She distances herself from her friends, her family, and, most of all, her mother, Laura. She then endures a clinical depression in which she uses drugs, disassociates, self-harms, and eventually attempts suicide to cover up a truth she’s hiding about her father’s death. Upon meeting with yet another therapist who fails to understand her, Julia recognizes that she must commit to hospitalization to save herself. (“Time and space had gone wonky lately; weaving in and out of weeks, an hour could feel like a year, while a day went by in a blur. The world couldn’t be counted upon to keep its form and shape.”) Julia checks in to a facility called Brookfield, where she meets Sam Lorenzo, another
patient. As the two connect over aesthetic and literary interests, they fall in love. Not unlike the trajectory of mental illness, however, the narrative then takes an unexpected turn: Sam asks Julia to leave with him, and Julia follows. Laura receives a call from Brookfield reporting that Julia has disappeared; the institution can do little because Julia is over the age 18 and not a threat to herself or anyone else. Laura, joined by Sam’s mother, Arabella, crosses the country piecing together where Julia and Sam could be located in a seemingly hopeless search. The author offers an authentic-feeling depiction of mental illness and its impact on the sufferer’s loved ones. Zadeik deftly evokes the dark days of clinical depression and the rapid cycling of a mood disorder while exploring societal attitudes toward mental illness over generations. The author also beautifully depicts the unfolding and emotionally charged love story between two young people invested in philosophy, literature, and art, and she captures the heartbreaking spiral that can happen when things go awry. Alternating between the perspectives of Julia, Laura, and Arabella, this beautifully rendered narrative offers striking environmental details that mirror the characters’ perspectives while maintaining a tight plot structure. A stunning story of mental illness and its challenges.
Zimm, Alan | Self (330 pp.) | $24.99 $14.99 paper | Oct. 18, 2023 9798864793107 | 9798864782071 paper Series: The Misplaced Humanity Chronicles, 1
Zimm’s debut SF novel sees two well-meaning men and an organic computer struggling to survive in a future dystopia predicated on corrupt dynastic and corporate oligarchies.
Though nominally controlled by the Federated Government, the galaxy
is effectively in the hands of 35 powerful Families and 50 Great Corporations. The planet Misplaced-4, owned by the Tevil Corporation, is a hotbed of unemployment and corruption. Mike, an experienced Vakker, or spaceflight crewmember, has bought a crashed cargo shuttle there and is trying to run it as a bar and grill. Union and bureaucratic interference make this all but impossible until Mike partners up with the shuttle’s sentient organic computer, LaMancha, whose personality has been heavily influenced by OldEarth motion pictures from the 20th century. In the meantime, their 17-year-old friend Ghost, a technology whiz and possibly the product of a covert genetic splicing project, has been arrested for evading the oxygen tax and forced to join the Federated Space Forces. Like the militaries of several 19th-century OldEarth countries, the Space Force is hamstrung by an officer class largely promoted due to family privilege, rather than merit. After Ghost takes charge during an emergency, will he survive the repercussions of defying an entitled captain? Zimm structures the novel around multiple third-person viewpoints in polished prose, and he immerses readers in a well-realized SF setting that draws on real-life sociopolitical trends. However, not everyone will appreciate the repetitive communications protocol that has LaMancha and other characters continually identifying themselves and the people to whom they’re speaking. There are also sub-narratives (such as cargo-ship captain Tarak’s ordeal at the hands of aliens) that seem extraneous but are presumably included to sow seeds for future volumes. Still, Mike, LaMancha, and Ghost are enormously appealing main characters, as are some secondary players, such as Citizen Professor Ella Braun. The story takes some time to build up speed but will pull readers in with its fast-talking humor, satirical worldbuilding, and rebellious David-versus-Goliath tone. A tragicomic space opera with real heart.
By Aurisha Smolarski
By Colton
By Allie
1 The Goldie Standard
A hilarious saga of family renewal and last-chance romance that plucks the heartstrings.
2
Daughter of a Promise
Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg
A sagacious and graceful modern-day retelling of a biblical love story.
3
Managing the Unmanageable
Jonathan Cagan & Peter Boatwright; illus. by Kurt Hess
An engaging collection of useful ideas for leading teams to tackle the unique challenges of innovation.
4 Cooperative Co-Parenting for Secure Kids
A helpful and reassuring model of how ex-partners can put their child’s happiness first.
5
The Teenage Guide to Success
Fidelman
A wise and pragmatic life guide for teens.
6 Dame Alice Hits Hollywood
Mahoney
“Eight-year-old Olu visits her mother’s family in Ijebu, Nigeria, as they observe Eid al-Adha . . . A loving embrace of faith and family and a wonderful window into Nigerian culture.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A Black nonbinary child finds ways to navigate their sensory sensitivities during Pride . . . Joyfully affirming.”
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
HARDCOVER 9798888590744
PAPERBACK 9798888590751
Stranded!
Written by Ævar Þór Benediktsson and illustrated by Anne Wilson
HARDCOVER 9781646869916
PAPERBACK 9781646869923
Old Clothes for Dinner
HARDCOVER 9798888590683
PAPERBACK 9798888590690
“A hilarious mistranslation has a young girl fearing she’ll have to eat something unsavory . . . A portrait of a loving Cuban American immigrant family and their traditions.” Kirkus Reviews,
Written by Mariana Llanos and illustrated by Cocoretto
SPANISH HARDCOVER 9798888590591
SPANISH PAPERBACK 9798888590416
ENGLISH HARDCOVER 9798888590027
ENGLISH PAPERBACK 9798888590034
