DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK
FEB 2024
MADNESS Antonia Hylton’s unsparing reckoning with history
THE WOMEN Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale, takes on a new era
IN HONOR OF
HARLEM
Tia Williams’ latest romance is also a love letter to the iconic neighborhood.
New books to love from camcat books LEARN MORE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG! NEW SCI-FI AND PARANORMAL BOOKS
NEW FANTASY BOOKS
SCI-FI AND FANTASY TO GET LOST IN
NEW ROMANCE AND ROMANTASY
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FEBRUARY 2024
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reviews
feature | noirs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Pour yourself a stiff drink. You’ll need it for these two dark crime novels.
feature | fake relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Whether it’s to fool the paparazzi or the gossips of the ton, there’s nothing quite as delicious as a romance that isn’t real—until it is.
cover story | tia williams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
fiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 nonfiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 young adult . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 children’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
columns
In her magical follow-up to Seven Days in June, Tia Williams proves she has the range.
feature | black history month . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 February offers fresh looks at freedom fighters John Lewis, Harriet Tubman and Medgar and Myrlie Evers.
interview | antonia hylton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Antonia Hylton’s Madness at last treats the Black patients of a notorious mental hospital
whodunit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 sci-fi & fantasy. . . . . . . . . . . . 6 lifestyles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 audio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
with humanity.
interview | kacen callender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Having conquered several other genres, acclaimed author Kacen Callender discusses their
the hold list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 romance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
young adult fantasy debut, Infinity Alchemist.
interview | ben guterson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
book clubs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Ben Guterson’s love for department stores comes to life with magic and mandalas in The World-Famous Nine, the first book in his new middle grade series.
feature | meet the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Meet Shawn Harris, the author-illustrator of The Teeny-Weeny Unicorn.
Correction: The review of Gwen & Art Are Not in Love in the December 2023 issue used incorrect pronouns for author Lex Croucher. Lex Croucher uses they/them pronouns. Cover photo of Tia Williams © Pauline St. Denis.
PRESIDENT Elizabeth Grace Herbert CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy MARKETING MANAGER Mary Claire Zibart
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whodunit
by bruce tierney The Clinic
The Busy Body
Celebrities in rehab: Newsworthy, if not especially It is, I think, not the easiest thing for a man to write surprising. Celebrities dying in rehab: front page, a story from the perspective of a woman. That said, above the fold for at least a day, maybe even a week. author Kemper Donovan has done that so well in But what about celebrities murdered in rehab? That’s his fun and entertaining mystery The Busy Body the “what if” at the center of Cate Quinn’s deft new (John Scognamiglio, $27, 9781496744531) that thriller, The Clinic (Sourcebooks Landmark, $27.99, I was totally convinced he was a woman until I 9781464216213). Let’s start with The Clinic itself, read his bio. (I get it that as a male reviewer, I am which is easily the creepiest setting for a suspense not the definitive authority on the accuracy of his novel since the Overlook portrayal, so I will simply Hotel in Stephen King’s Edith Wharton is on the case say that I never questioned The Shining. The luxurious it. Not even once.) The in Mariah Fredericks’ new rehab center is set atop story begins with Dorothy a remote oceanside cliff Gibson, a former senator historical mystery. somewhere along the who mounted a failed Oregon coast, awash in salt mist and mystery. When independent campaign for the presidency. Having pop star Haley Banks dies of a heroin overdose at the retreated from the public eye, Dorothy has arranged facility, her sister, Meg, doesn’t believe the official for a ghostwriter to pen her autobiography. While story. Meg is a casino cop of sorts and, after some they are together at Dorothy’s home in Maine, a soul-searching, decides to launch an investigation neighbor dies under mysterious circumstances, and of her sister’s death by posing as a patient seeking the politician and her ghostwriter (who is an engaging treatment. This will not be much of a stretch for Meg, and offbeat character, even though she is never given a as she is addicted to both alcohol and Oxycontin. If name) launch an amateur investigation into the death. she is wrong about Haley’s death, she may get clean; There are overtones of Agatha Christie and Knives if she is right, she may get killed. The story is told in Out, both in the unlikeliness of the mystery and the the first-person perspectives of two different narrators: cleverness of its solution. This is, I guess, no surprise the aforementioned Meg and Cara, the manager of as Donovan hosts the podcast “All About Agatha.” The Clinic. As they alternate chapters, Quinn tightly ratchets up the suspense. And the big reveal? I never The Ghost Orchid saw it coming. Psychologist Alex Delaware is back, along with his sidekick, Los Angeles homicide lieutenant Milo The Wharton Plot Sturgis. Their arrangement is somewhat odd in that Before starting Mariah Fredericks’ The Wharton Plot it is exactly the opposite of the typical setup in which (Minotaur, $28, 9781250827425), I decided to read up a cop is the central character and a specialist serves a bit on Edith Wharton. I knew she had been the first as foil for the heroics. But boy, does it ever work. woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, for her 1920 novel The Author Jonathan Kellerman has created one of the Age of Innocence. Still, I had essentially written her most enduring and acclaimed series in suspense off as the poor man’s Dorothy Parker, sharp of tongue fiction, the latest installment of which is The Ghost but lacking in humor. The Wharton Plot showed me Orchid (Ballantine, $30, 9780593497678). The how very wrong I was. Fredericks’ mystery reads like tony LA enclave of Bel Air provides the setting a story from an earlier time, as it should. It conjures for the story, which begins with the murder of Gio up the ghosts of American aristocracy in much the Aggiunta, a wealthy Italian high-society ne’er-dosame manner as an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Nathanael well, and Meagin March, his older—and married— West novel, and is filled with historical figures such mistress. Both have been shot, and the police cannot as Cornelius Vanderbilt and his extended family, and determine whether one was the primary target, or if muckraking writer David Graham Phillips, whose it was just a burglary gone wrong. Nothing seems real-life murder is investigated by Edith in the novel. to be missing, so initially they fixate on March’s While Edith only met the man once (and didn’t really husband, a multimillionaire investor, because hey, take to him all that much), her sister puts her on the it’s always the husband, right? But as it turns out, hunt after she informs Edith of Phillips’ scandalous Gio has been the “correspondent” in several affairs upcoming novel. Supposedly, the book was set to with married women, which raises the question: If it reveal secrets that the robber barons and old money is the husband, which husband? Kellerman’s prose scions of Gilded Age America prefer to keep to is fast-paced without being in any way hurried or themselves. It may take a chapter or two to settle into abrupt, and Delaware and Sturgis play off one another the narrative, which is written a la one of Wharton’s exceptionally well. The characters are as comfortable own novels, but once that hurdle is cleared, the book as old slippers, fictional friends whose company and is simply unputdownable. And as with a healthy meal, adventures readers have enjoyed for decades. The at the end you feel a sense of accomplishment, as you Ghost Orchid is another excellent addition to a series have done something good for yourself. full of excellent editions. Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.
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feature | noirs
Sagas of the mean streets Grab your trenchcoat and a stiff drink—you’ll need it. My Favorite Scar
By the time she was 12, Ámbar Mondragón knew how to treat bullet wounds. When she turned 13, her father, Víctor, gave her a sawed-off shotgun. And as Nicolás F e r r a r o ’s My Favorite Scar (Soho Crime, $27.95, 9781641295154) opens, 15-year-old Ámbar is tending to her father’s latest injury: He’s returned from a night out with a bullet hole in his upper chest and his murdered friend Giovanni’s body in the passenger seat of his car. Now, Ámbar has to tag along as Dad embarks on a singularly vicious road trip, determined to exact bloody revenge on those who betrayed him and Giovanni. My Favorite Scar is a nihilistic road novel of unrelenting bleakness that takes readers on a hair-raising tour of Argentina’s criminal underworld. The duo stop at bars, burial sites and hideout shacks where Dad delivers interrogations, warnings and beatings as Ámbar plays lookout or getaway driver, often with sawed-off shotgun in hand. As in Cruz, his first novel translated into English, Ferraro explores the effects of criminals’ choices on children who become unwitting or unwilling accomplices. His deftly created suspense builds with every mile driven, every fake ID used, every drop of blood spilled. My Favorite Scar is a pitch-black coming-of-age tale that reverberates with oft-poetically expressed pain and sadness—and maybe, just maybe, a hint of hope. —Linda M. Castellitto
ENEWSLETTER PERSONALIZE YOUR TBR
H Cahokia Jazz
Suppose, just for a moment, that the European colonizers of America hadn’t brought a whole host of diseases that wiped out a majority of the Indigenous population, and that Natives had thrived, rather than been decimated. In the alt-universe police procedural mystery Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford takes this premise and runs with it. It’s as if Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle met up with Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers in a 1922 speakeasy. Apart from the setting—the state of Cahokia, carved out of eastern Missouri and surrounding states—the story starts off in familiar, if somewhat gruesome, territory. Two detectives, Joe Barrow and Phineas Drummond, are investigating a murder in which the victim has had his heart cut out. On his face, the word bashli (from Anopa, the city’s Native lingua franca, meaning hit or cut) has been scrawled in blood. The book’s debt to the likes of Raymond Chandler is evident throughout, as Detective Barrow steps into the hallowed role of the untarnished, unvarnished romantic who makes his way doggedly down these mean streets. And on occasion, Spufford’s language equals that of noir masters of yore. Spufford weaves Cahokia’s language and culture through the intricately plotted narrative, propelling the Jazz Age action to a climax that is at once unanticipated and seemingly inevitable. —Thane Tierney
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sci-fi & fantasy
by chris pickens
lifestyles
by susannah felts
Exordia S e t h D i c k i n s o n ’s E x o r d i a (Tordotcom, $29.99, 9781250233011) is an energetic, suspenseful melange of alien invasion and military action, Anna Sinjari, a Kurd living in New York City, sees an alien in Central Park. Ssrin—the alien—needs her help, having been shot by another faction of beings. Anna feels drawn to Ssrin, which is something the alien calls surendure: two souls existing as one. Exordia’s first act is its most successful. Anna and Ssrin’s initial interactions are hilarious and thought-provoking. Once the broader storyline kicks in, however, it can be a struggle to keep up. While some may wish it spent as much time with its characters as it does exploring its many fascinating ideas, Exordia is undoubtedly impressive.
The Serpent & the Wings of the Night The first entry in Carissa Broadbent’s Crowns of Nyaxia duology, The Serpent & the Wings of the Night (Bramble, $29.99, 9781250343178) grants more nuance than usual to vampires, casting them as something closer to the elves of high fantasy. The only human in a court of vampires, Oraya yearns for the day she can shed her humanity. A chance to do just that arrives in the form of the Kejari, an ancient tournament where the winner can request anything from the goddess Nyaxia. Raihn, a new vampire to the court, offers her an alliance, but can he be trusted? Oraya’s first-person perspective fills the pages with her suspicion, ruthlessness and loneliness. Broadbent wisely allows Oraya’s walls to come down one brick at a time, especially when it comes to her interactions with Raihn. Fans of The Hunger Games or Red Rising will enjoy this bloody twist on the tournament trope, and just about any reader will love Oraya and Raihn’s relationship.
The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird
H Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts “I am the keeper of the stories, the writer, the one who has carried the stories in my apron for so many years,” writes Crystal Wilkinson in her culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, $30, 9780593236512). Wilkinson shares the recipes and memories of her Black Appalachian forebears. “I am always reaching back,” she writes, recalling her grandmother’s jam cake or imagining the life of a distant ancestor. Cooking a mess of dandelion greens, Wilkinson reflects on the lean times her family encountered during the scarcity of winter. She finds delight and abundance in recipes for blackberry cobbler, sweet sorghum cookies and cornbread. “I’ve always felt a power larger than myself while cooking,” Wilkinson reflects. We’re lucky that she’s sharing the power with us through this tender and important book.
House Cat Imagine the ultimate swanky home tour—but with cats on display in every abode. Such are the joys of House Cat: Inspirational Interiors and the Elegant Felines Who Call Them Home (Thames & Hudson, $34.95, 9781760764036), Paul Barbera’s fur-ray into feline-featuring interiors. The homes are diverse in style—from a Connecticut saltbox to a modern Miami apartment to a glass palace in the Santa Monica hills—but it’s the cats, and the care shown to capturing their distinctive selves and backstories, that really tugs at my heart. The arthritic Lady Penelope relies on her “obedient human elevators” to navigate her New York City penthouse. Evita Gaton, a 12-year-old lynx point Siamese, is an independent and sometimes demanding presence in her 18th-century home. Or how about the nine cat buddies shacked up in a Beverly Hills hacienda? There’s even a Q&A for each cat. (Diva or devoted friend? Lap cat or not? And so on.)
Breathe
Self-isolated on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest in 1977, Dr. Beatrice Bird misses the life she left behind in San Francisco. But Beatrice’s solitude keeps the ghosts at bay. She sees them whenever she encounters another person: Their fears, pains and shames orbit grimly around them where only Beatrice can see. When a young woman named Anne Iredale arrives on the island to escape her own past, Beatrice slowly uncovers Anne’s story. Can she and Anne heal enough to banish the ghosts once and for all? The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird (Redhook, $30, 9780316628808) has a healer’s heart, revolving around author Louisa Morgan’s inquisitive, sensitive and measured look at trauma. She knows how to let a conversation develop slowly, and Beatrice and Anne’s friendship blooms at the same natural pace.
Most of us breathe poorly, and it’s a real problem. An excellent, easy-to-browse resource to get your breathing back on track is Jean Hall’s Breathe: Simple Breathing Techniques for a Calmer, Happier Life (Quadrille, $21.99, 9781837830718). The breathing exercises offered here, many of which are adapted from yogic philosophy, are designed “to return the breath to its natural optimum pattern of slow, soft, steady spaciousness,” Hall writes. The outcome? Better mental and physical health. Some breath patterns are designed to enable sleep, others to energize or focus the mind, some to prep for meditation. If a class-based yoga practice isn’t the right fit for you, this book offers some of the basic teachings in a clear, succinct format.
Chris Pickens is a Nashville-based fantasy and sci-fi superfan who loves channeling his enthusiasm into reviews of the best new books the genre has to offer.
Susannah Felts is a Nashville-based writer and co-founder of The Porch, a literary arts organization. She writes a weekly Substack called FIELD TRIP.
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audio
H The Reformatory Robbie Stephens Jr. is sent to Gracetown School for Boys after protecting Gloria, his older sister, from a wealthy white boy. At the reformatory, where boys are punished for their “crimes,” students are going missing—and with his ability to see ghosts, Robbie can uncover the truth behind these disappearances. Dark and terrifying, The Reformatory (Simon & Schuster Audio, 21 hours) paints a haunting picture of the Jim Crow South, based partially on author Tananarive Due’s family history. Through both intensely difficult subject matter and resonant emotional scenes, Joniece Abbott-Pratt’s deft navigation between different moods will keep you listening closely. —Tami Orendain
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Blackouts In a dialogue between an unnamed young gay man and an older, dying man named Juan Gay, National Book Awardwinner Blackouts (Macmillan Audio, 7 hours) explores the suppression of queer history. Interspersed throughout the book are poems constructed by blacking out words from pages of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, an actual book by queer sex researcher Jan Gay. Its production, and the eventual removal of Gay’s name from the book, form the basis for much of the story. Torian Brackett and Ozzie Rodriguez are convincing narrators as the two main characters, and the end of their story is particularly moving. Author Justin Torres himself reads the erasure poems in a quiet and almost whispery voice, affectingly reminding the listener of the act of redaction that is at the heart of Blackouts. —Deborah Mason
The Wonderful World of James Herriot The Wonderful World of James Herriot (Macmillan Audio, 12 hours) collects James Herriot’s classic tales into a warm, welcoming audiobook. Based on his work as a veterinarian for farming communities, Herriot’s writing captures a humor and a gentleness that
makes for a delightful listen. The introduction is read by Herriot’s daughter, Rosie Page, and the stories by narrators Anna Madeley and Nicholas Ralph, who also star in “All Creatures Great and Small,” the TV show based on Herriot’s work. This collection gives listeners a peek into Herriot’s life, tracing parallels between his time on rural homesteads and his well-loved tales, and inviting listeners to sit back, relax and reminisce about more peaceful times. —Tami Orendain
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the hold list
How much a heart can hold Valentine’s Day draws our attention to romance, but these four tales of friendship, connection and the parent-child bond affirm that platonic love is just as beautiful and impactful as romantic love—if not more. My Brilliant Friend
What if we considered our lives as marked not by romantic entanglements but by the big friendships that nourish and thwart us? The first of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend depicts the early lives of narrator Lenù and her best friend, Lila, who come of age, dramatically, by the book’s end. Their impoverished Naples neighborhood is rife with violence: Early in the novel, Lila’s father throws her out a window, and the girls routinely witness neighbors being beaten in the street by the local mafia. As idolatrous as they are envious of each other, Lila and Lenù are cutthroat competitive, but they find that their friendship creates space for imagination, creativity and envisioning a future outside of their neighborhood. Then that space abruptly closes, and Lila sees that her future will be one of mere survival. Few narratives capture the euphoric, gutting fluctuations of friendship so specifically. You will see yourself in both characters, and you will be drawn to the darkness. —Erica, Associate Editor
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Growing up, I was utterly obsessed with the ocean, and I wanted to be a marine biologist. Though I eventually learned that marine biology was more science and less dolphin whispering, I still get excited when I come across a story that recognizes the magic of the marine world. The premise of Remarkably Bright Creatures immediately caught my eye: a giant Pacific octopus befriends an elderly woman and helps her solve the mystery of her son’s death. Tova, our protagonist, earns the adoration of Marcellus the octopus as she works the night shift cleaning his aquarium. Marcellus has an agenda of his own—yes, we get to hear the octopus’s thoughts—but he balances it with compassion for Tova and for the human race that people, honestly, could learn from. Tova and Marcellus each have a heart as big as the deep blue sea, and their unique bond reminds us what we stand to gain from offering love, empathy and generosity to the remarkably bright creatures around us. —Jessica, Editorial Intern
First Test
In First Test, Tamora Pierce takes readers back to the enchanting and beloved realm of Tortall, first introduced in her acclaimed young adult fantasy series the Song of the Lioness. Although it has been 10 years since it was decreed legal for women to become knights, Keladry of Mindelan (Kel) is the first girl brave enough to openly train for knighthood. Facing extreme scrutiny, an unfair probationary year and a training master hellbent on her failure, it seems like Kel might never achieve her dream. Enter Nealean of Queenscove (Neal), who is also considered an oddity as the oldest of the first-year pages. Neal takes Kel under his wing and becomes her biggest champion in her uphill battle to prove herself. As they bond over being set apart due to their unusual circumstances, their friendship allows them to overcome every obstacle thrown in their way, from hazing taken way too far to being thrust into the middle of a very real battle. Together, best friends Kel and Neal prove that they are exactly where they are meant to be. —Meagan, Production
BookPage staff share special reading lists—our personal favorites, old and new.
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an unusual love letter, written by a son to his mother, even though she cannot read. As a child in Vietnam, she saw her school destroyed by American napalm. In contrast, her son, called Little Dog, grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, after she immigrated there with him, and became a writer. In this letter, he is putting into words the physical language of harm and care that forms their intricate bond. He describes the impact of her PTSD from the Vietnam War, combined with the isolation and vulnerability of being unable to speak English in Hartford: When he tells her he was attacked by bullies at school, her response is to hit him, then admonish him to defend himself with the English he’s learned, because she cannot. In a way, his journey into writing is an act of love towards her, the fulfillment of her wish, even as it takes him further from her. Ocean Vuong tells this story with arresting beauty and intensity, following Little Dog into his adulthood. —Phoebe, Associate Editor
feature | fake relationships
Passion plays There’s nothing quite as delicious as a romance that isn’t real—until it is. To Woo and to Wed
Life as a widow isn’t half-bad for Lady Sophie Bridewell. But then her sister Alexandra, who is also a widow, shares that she is being courted but doesn’t want to get married and leave Sophie alone. A decade ago, Sophie rejected her own true love, the Marquess of Weston, rather than jeopardize her sisters’ potential betrothals, and she refuses to let that sacrifice be for nothing. Instead, Sophie approaches West with a proposition: They’ll fake an engagement until Alexandra is married. This actually works out quite well for West, whose malevolent, meddling father has begun pushing him to marry. But as their “fake” feelings get more and more real, Sophie and West must work to leave the past behind and look towards the future. In To Woo and to Wed (Atria, $17.99, 9781668007921), author Martha Waters twists the norms of the Regency to suit her own purposes and creates characters that feel shockingly contemporary. Sophie and West are some of her most endearing leads. Both are so deeply invested in being a noble martyr that, at a certain point, you just want to force them to sit down and talk instead of continuing to assume what’s best for each other. Destiny is waiting for these two, if they can just get out of their own way. —Katie Garaby
When Grumpy Met Sunshine Charlotte Stein’s When Grumpy Met Sunshine (Griffin, $18, 9781250867933) opens with an epic meet-ugly. Alfie Harding meets Mabel Willicker when she’s introduced as the ghostwriter for his memoir. Alfie is a superstar Premier League footballer who bears an unmistakable resemblance to “Ted Lasso” ’s Roy Kent. Mabel, meanwhile, is in a pastel pink dress, with a plate of fairy cakes she baked for the occasion. Needless to say, the first meeting does not go well. But when
they finally get to talking, they realize that they understand each other almost eerily well. One wishes Stein allowed herself to linger longer on this part of the story, given how deeply enjoyable it is to watch her develop these characters. But the rom must com, so when the paparazzi spot Alfie with Mabel, they soon end up in a fake relationship. The tropes give the story its structure, but Stein adds heart and creativity that elevate it into something genuinely delightful. Mabel’s wry, funny voice is charming from the very start. And readers will absolutely adore Alfie who, behind his bristle, is as genuinely kind, genuinely chivalrous and genuinely, passionately devoted as any hero in recent memory. —Elizabeth Mazer
H Her Adventures in
Temptation
Megan Frampton’s refreshing voice gives the popular fake-relationship trope new wings in Her Adventures in Temptation (Avon, $9.99, 9780063224292). Lady Myrtle Allen is a wellto-do and confident woman with a head for numbers. She intends to make her way to London to establish a home away from her interfering, controlling family, and she pays artist Simeon Jones to journey with her while posing as her husband. Frampton’s writing is as smart as her characters. Simeon and Myrtle volley information at each other with precision and speed, their different communication styles filling in the blanks for their other half: Myrtle is frank and practical, telling the truth when nobody else will; Simeon protects his soft heart with studied, elegant courtesy. As Simeon and Myrtle fall in love, they realize that they can not only have love and their careers, but also the joy of respecting and elevating their partner’s work. It’s so easy to pull for them both, because they so clearly pull for each other. —Dolly R. Sickles
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cover story | tia williams
In full bloom
In her magical follow-up to Seven Days in June, Tia Williams proves she has the range. If you asked romance author Tia Williams what her favorite genre A Love Song for Ricki Wilde allowed Williams to explore and is, you might be surprised to learn it is horror. In fact, she once took research not just pop music but also flowers and fragrance, voodoo a yearlong class on Dracula, taking an interest in the mythology of practices and spirituality, many of which are interests the author already immortality and the fearsome, seductive enjoyed. Ezra’s devotion to art and culture title character. Williams chuckles as she “Readers have to feel safe and was inspired by Williams’ own love of says, “I’d love to write [a horror novel], music: She once owned a Billboard book on that’s something I think about popular songs and would go page by page, but it always comes out as a romance when I sit down.” learning everything she could about each hit with every sentence.” A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is and how it was made. Ricki’s tender care for Williams’ fourth contemporary romance, and while it’s filled with her delicate plants and appreciation of their exotic, complex fragrances her trademark balance of sexy love story and emotional moments echoes Williams’ former career as a beauty editor and writer. “I rememboth beautiful and tragic, there’s something new here: a full-bodied ber discovering all these different kinds of flowers and their scents,” embrace of the fantastical and the serendipitous. Williams describes she says. “I had no idea night-blooming jasmine existed and what that A Love Song for Ricki Wilde as a “modern fairytale,” one that smelled like.” However, her biggest research focus was 1920s Harlem. adheres to Williams’ own prefer“I love the 1920s era: Hollywood, ences as a fantasy fan who focuses the Lost Generation in Paris, Zora more on characters than rules; Ricki Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes,” she Wilde never gets bogged down into says, and Williams includes flashbacks the hows and whys of world buildto this fascinating time in Harlem’s hising. “I like ‘Game of Thrones’ tory alongside the present-day scenes. because despite the dragons, it feels These additions create a rich sense of very much like The Godfather,” she place, filled with Williams’ admiration explains. She notes one of her other for not only Harlem’s community and major inspirations is Jude Deveraux’s cultural renaissance but also the ways iconic 1989 time-travel romance, A art and activism provide solace and Knight in Shining Armor, where a fuel resistance in the wake of devastatheartbroken woman ends up centuing waves of racial violence. In Ricki ries back in time. Wilde, Williams writes, “What you The titular character doesn’t fit in haven’t reckoned with, you’re doomed with the rest of her family, an Atlanta to repeat. America was a ghost story clan that runs a string of successful with no end.” Shifting back and forth funeral homes. “Death bums Ricki between the past and present, Williams out,” Williams says. Ricki has no shows the violence that’s been perpetdesire to step into the family busiuated against Black people and their ness and feels universes away from communities. “American history and her socialite siblings. So she instead its causes do not exist in a vacuum and chooses to strike out on her own, there’s a lot of generational trauma,” move to Harlem and open up a floral she says, but notes that even in the boutique, adorably and aptly named midst of hopelessness, there is love. It’s Wilde Things. As Ricki puts down a dichotomy echoed in the book’s balroots, a cast of fascinating characters ance between life and death. Because orbits around her. There is Ms. Della, Ricki’s been surrounded by death for an elegant nonagenarian who offers most of her life, she seeks to offset it Ricki a place to rent in her brownby tending to and nurturing her plants. stone; Tuesday, a tenacious former Meanwhile, Ms. Della possesses both child star who becomes Ricki’s new the satisfaction of a life well-lived and friend; and Ezra, Ricki’s love interthe spirit to keep going. est, a mysterious and sensitive man That complexity, that sense of the H A Love Song for Ricki Wilde with a gift for music. When asked fullness of life is also present in Ezra Grand Central, $29, 9781538726709 what would serve as the soundtrack and Ricki’s relationship, which begins for this book, Williams says with a with a magnetic attraction but deepens CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE smile, “A lot of Prince. Specifically as they, in Willliams’ words, get “lost ‘God,’ which is mainly an instrumental.” Coincidentally—or perhaps in the soft, beautiful things”; their love grows through creating and not—a framed image of Prince and Vanity’s 1983 Rolling Stone cover experiencing art. Williams’ own work has already inspired adaptations, hangs on the wall above her head as we speak. with The Perfect Find being made into a Netflix film last year starring
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cover story | tia williams get there, but there will be a HEA. Readers have to feel safe and that’s something I think about with every sentence,” she says. There’s a lovely moment in the book where Tuesday is desperately trying to figure out who she is outside of her past life as an actor. She thinks writing a memoir might be her next career move, but it’s not quite igniting her passions. “Maybe you were a memoirist,” Ezra says. “But identity changes all the time, I’ve found. There’s a few more ‘yous’ you haven’t met yet.” Growth and change are central to Ricki Wilde, whether it’s the passing of time or the courage to pursue a dream. And in talking with Williams, it’s clear there are many “hers”—the Prince fan, the history buff, the beauty writer, the fantasy reader—that overlap and intersect, contributing to the fertile soil from which A Love Song for Ricki Wilde was able to blossom. But what about the other versions of Tia Williams that readers haven’t met yet? The heightened, magical world of Ricki Wilde is a brave and exciting step toward something new. Maybe horror novelist is next. Or perhaps just, as she suggests, “damn good storyteller.” —Amanda Diehl © FRANCESCO FERENDELES
Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers. Should Ricki Wilde get an opportunity to make the leap from book to screen, Williams thinks that KiKi Layne would make a good Ricki, especially given her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. Actress Zazie Beetz is also a contender, as Williams says her more bohemian style would help bring Ricki to life. As for an on-screen Ezra, it’s no contest: The quiet, commanding presence of John David Washington is Williams’ pick. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde has more twists than a well-versed romance reader might expect. Both the shift in genre and the obstacles Ricki and Ezra face (which we refuse to spoil) require a lot of faith in Williams. Readers may at first think they’ve mistakenly picked up a historical fiction novel, not a contemporary romance, and they may wonder how Williams is going to pull off that coveted happily ever after. One thing, however, is for certain: Tears will be shed, whether from Williams’ evocative, emotional writing or how Ricki and Ezra realize they’ve found the person who truly understands them all the way down to their bones. Williams hopes people will trust her all the way to the end. “There’s a genre rule when it comes to romance. Of course, readers might not know how an author is going to
review | H a love song for ricki wilde Bestselling author of Seven Days of June Tia Williams returns with A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, a modern fairy tale that follows a woman as she finally takes the leap to pursue her dreams and finds magic and wonder along the way. The titular character hails from Atlanta, where she’s the odd daughter out among her socialite sisters. Ricki has no desire to partake in the family dynasty, a highly successful chain of funeral homes. Instead, she hopes to do some sort of work nurturing plants and flowers. In need of a change and longing to escape the shadow of her family’s accomplishments and well-known name, she moves to the famed neighborhood of Harlem in New York City. There, Ricki opens up a small floral boutique, aptly named Wilde Things, and rents a downstairs apartment in a brownstone owned by spirited nonagenarian Ms. Della. It doesn’t take long before Ricki begins to build a heartwarming and truly
tender found family around herself, making friends with former child star Tuesday and taking in the advice of Ms. Della. And then she meets a mysterious, musicloving man named Ezra. They instantly form a connection, reveling in their shared appreciation of art and design. Ezra is sensitive and private, and he recognizes a fellow old soul in Ricki. But no romance is without obstacles, and there are such substantial hurdles to a satisfying happily ever after that readers may wonder whether Ricki and Ezra can clear them. The answer is unequivocally yes. Williams wouldn’t introduce a perfectly suited pair like this without giving them the fairy-tale ending they deserve. Ricky is particularly winning: earnest and genuine, opening her heart to others even though she’s never felt fully accepted by her family. Readers will fall in love with her as she easily agrees to Ms. Della’s offer to move in, sincerely chats
with Tuesday and gently accepts Ezra’s complicated circumstances. There’s a glamorous quality to Ricki Wilde that suits the headiness of its love story. Williams often switches between present-day and 1920s Harlem, giving readers a lively picture into the aesthetic glories of the Harlem Renaissance and its lasting contributions to media and culture. No matter the era, romance hangs in the air, much like Ricki’s beloved nightblooming jasmine. Williams’ previous novels have been expertly written, full of longing emotion, but there’s a surprising new ingredient this time: a sense of enchantment around every corner. Tissues are recommended, even if simply for the beauty of Williams’ writing. Once you’ve finished A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, you’ll undoubtedly be jealous of those who get to experience it for the first time. —Amanda Diehl
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romance
by christie ridgway
Love conquers all No matter how daunting the obstacle, happily ever after awaits in this year’s best Valentine’s Day reads.
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workplace, she follows him to his private island. Things Jenny Holiday’s Canadian Boyfriend (Forever, $16.99, only get more madcap from there in this hilarious spin on 9781538724927) is a true romance gem. When one of Bringing Up Baby. Wei writes well-drawn, one-of-a-kind Aurora “Rory” Evans’ students, Olivia, returns to class characters that will elicit readers’ sympathy and laughafter losing her mother, Rory ter as they spur each other to Ali Hazelwood goes is especially attentive to her grow and change. Put together and Mike Martin, Olivia’s pro paranormal, plus wonderful new the aforementioned sexual hockey-playing dad. Rory and chemistry, a big cat (heard but Mike connect immediately, takes on ‘Sense and Sensibility’ not seen) and geese (both seen and after Rory moves in to and heard, eliciting an approand ‘Bringing Up Baby.’ work as a nanny, they become priate amount of terror, if one intimate friends . . . and then lovers. Standing in the way of knows geese) and the result is a vibrant, fast-paced and something more permanent is his grief, her people-pleasing highly entertaining romance. ways—and the fact that when Rory was in high school, she told everyone that Mike was her boyfriend, seeing as Fangirl Down he conveniently lived in Canada. Still, the bond between Tessa Bailey sets fire to the pages in Fangirl Down them won’t disappear, no matter what they tell themselves. (Avon, $18.99, 9780063308367). When bad-boy golfer Told in alternating first-person perspectives that are full Wells Whitaker quits the sport in frustration, he stands of both revealing introspection and engaging banter, the up Josephine Doyle, his biggest fan, who recently won heart-wrenching journey of Rory and Mike is tender, pain- a lunch with him. Wells’ conscience nags him about the ful, joyful and, most of all, honest. This is everything a missed meal and he seeks Josephine out, only to find romance novel should be: a story of two people who learn her golf shop in shambles from a hurricane. Wells hits from each other and are better together than apart. upon an idea to help that will also get him back on his game: She’ll be his new caddy, and they’ll split the Bride prize money. It’s delicious to watch the grouchy golfer A Were and a Vampyre wed to broker an alliance between find he has a heart after all as he falls for the sunny their two species in Bride (Berkley, $19, 9780593550403), Josephine. Bailey is known for her witty repartee and an impressive change of pace for rom-com queen Ali Wells and Josephine don’t miss a beat, in addition to Hazelwood. Reminding herself that their union will only having some off-the-charts love scenes. Josephine’s last a year, Misery Lark steels herself to live with Alpha endeavors to manage her diabetes without insurance werewolf Lowe Moreland. His people view her with open add some gravitas to this delightful, laugh-out-loud hostility and dislike, but Lowe himself is harder to read. love story. While he’s at first studiously detached, he begins to connect with Misery over his irrepressible little sister and Sex, Lies and Sensibility then aids in Misery’s search for her missing best friend. Nikki Payne offers an engrossing tale that is part family Danger and power struggles continually surround the drama, part romance and all deep emotion in Sex, Lies pair, but Lowe and Misery offer each other a respite from and Sensibility (Berkley, $18, 9780593440964). After all that. Told primarily in Misery’s snarky and amusing their father dies, sisters Nora and Yanne Dash are left first-person voice, there is plenty of action, stirring love with nothing but a dilapidated inn on an island in Maine. scenes and intriguing world building that will leave readers Their first glimpse of the environs doesn’t improve their wanting more. Snippets from Lowe’s point of view offer moods, especially given that they’re the only two Black insight into the tender interior beneath his tough exterior. people around. And while Abenaki eco-tour guide Ennis Paranormal romance fans will swoon over this one. “Bear” Freeman may be gorgeous, Nora doesn’t need a man. She has good reason not to trust them and she also Wild Life notices that Bear is reticent to talk about his past. But Two lonely people find their way to each other and new as their businesses begin to work together, the attraction lives in Wild Life (Harlequin, $18.99, 9781335475954) can’t be denied. Nora and Bear’s past mistakes keep them by Opal Wei. Both Zoey Fong and Davy Hsieh have wary, even as familial and outside forces work against big plans, and neither of them expects or welcomes an their possible happiness together. Payne will grab readers attraction that goes from a smolder to full-on flames in a by the heartstrings even as they fall in love with noble, heartbeat. But after former boy band star Davy acciden- ambitious Nora and Bear and the eclectic cast of this tally absconds with a crucial slide from scientist Zoey’s compassionate novel.
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Christie Ridgway is a lifelong romance reader and a published romance novelist of over 60 books.
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feature | black history month
Lift every voice February offers fresh looks at freedom fighters John Lewis, Harriet Tubman and Medgar and Myrlie Evers.
H John Lewis
Like his mentor Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis had a dream. Amid the turmoil and violence of a segregated South and a nation embroiled in the struggle for racial reconciliation, Lewis envisioned and championed what he called a “Beloved Community” in America, “a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being.” In his captivating John Lewis: In Search of Beloved Community (Yale University, $35, 9780300253757), Raymond Arsenault narrates the mesmerizing story of Lewis’ evolution from a Civil Rights activist to an eminent congressman who never lost sight of his vision for a just and equitable society. Drawing on archival materials and interviews with Lewis and his friends, family and associates, Arsenault traces Lewis from his childhood in Troy, Alabama, where he daily witnessed the indignities and violence of racial segregation. Inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he entered American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and began his storied activism in earnest. Lewis and his contemporaries incorporated the principles of rightness and righteousness with methods of nonviolent resistance. Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986 with a commitment to carry on the spirit, goals and principles of nonviolence and social action. In a 2020 speech, Lewis uttered the remarks that cemented his legacy: “We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. . . . Go out there, speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Arsenault offers the first comprehensive biography of the icon, an inspiring portrait of a man whose vision and moral courage propelled him to share his belief in the Beloved Community and inspire generations. —Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.
Combee Edda L. Fields-Black’s extraordinary Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University, $39.99, 978019752797) will not be for every reader. It is long and very detailed. Reading it is sometimes like watching the slow, painstaking process of an archaeological dig—but readers who stick with the book will come away satisfied by Fields-Black’s patient unearthing. The event at the center of her excavation is the June 20, 1863, Combahee River Raid, when 300 Black Union soldiers torched seven South Carolina rice plantations along a 15-mile stretch of the river, causing millions of dollars of damage to crops and property and striking “fear into the heart of the rebellion.” Their guide was Harriet Tubman—today known around the world for her work in the Underground Railroad, but less so for her courageous military history. With Tubman acting as intermediary, 746 people fled to the river’s edge and boarded the Union boats to escape slavery. The raid served notice that Black men—both formerly enslaved and free—could become effective, disciplined Union soldiers.
These events are narrated with a passion for factual depth and precision. Combee is often revelatory. Fields-Black conveys that the South Carolina rice economy was essential to the Confederacy and involved remarkable feats of technology and engineering, much of them performed by enslaved people taken from rice growing regions of Africa. Fields-Black’s approach also provides insight into the remarkable abilities of Tubman to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers and to move stealthily through the South unnoticed. Prior to this account, many of these freedom seekers had been lost to history. Most, like Tubman, were illiterate and did not record their experiences; plantation records were destroyed in the raid. Through herculean research and cross-referencing of land, bank, U.S. Army pension and slavery transaction records, Fields-Black is able to name names and offer readers a sense of who these people were and what their lives were like. Combee holds many additional revelatory threads and insights, but this act of resurrection alone makes the book profoundly important. —Alden Mudge
H Medgar and Myrlie Civil rights activist and World War II veteran Medgar Evers met the love of his life, 17-year-old Myrlie Louise Beasley, in 1950. They married a year later, forming a bond that is the heart of Joy-Ann Reid’s moving biography, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America (Mariner, $30, 9780063068797). The passionate voice of Reid, the host of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” guides this love story; it’s also, she writes, about Medgar’s “deep and unfaltering love for Mississippi,” as well as “the higher love it took for Black Americans to love America and to fight for it, even in a state that butchered more Black bodies via lynching than any other.” Reid argues that Medgar’s accomplishments have been overshadowed by the many events and assassinations that took place after he was gunned down in 1963, leaving the quiet, formidable Myrlie to raise their three children and carry on her husband’s legacy. Readers will long remember Medgar’s courage and Myrlie’s devotion and bravery, especially since the couple knew Medgar was likely to be the victim of an assassination attempt. Their house had no front door because that might have left them too vulnerable, and the children regularly practiced shooting drills, preparing for the horrors that soon arrived on their doorstep. Reid draws on a variety of sources, including her own recent interviews with Myrlie, who never stopped fighting to see her husband’s killer prosecuted. It took 30 years for Klansman Byron De La Beckwith to be convicted of homicide and sentenced to life in prison; without Myrlie, justice would never have prevailed. Page by page, Medgar and Myrlie paints unforgettable portraits of two American heroes who faced racism with unimaginable courage. —Alice Cary
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interview | antonia hylton
“They’ve been waiting for us” Antonia Hylton’s Madness at last treats the Black patients of a notorious mental hospital with humanity. As a 19-year-old undergraduate, Antonia Hylton read an aca- she works as a correspondent on stories at the intersection of politics, demic paper that mentioned Crownsville State Hospital, known at education and civil rights. its founding as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. That reference Beginning in 2014, she spent long hours in the Maryland State triggered an obsession with the hospital’s bleak history that has car- Archives combing through Crownsville’s files, woefully incomplete ried her through the 10 years it took to produce Madness: Race and thanks to shoddy record keeping and the destruction of decades of Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. documents by the state. The paucity Hylton brings both her journalistic of documents would have been far talent and a deep, personal engageworse had it not been for the efforts ment to something she unabashedly of Paul Lurz, a longtime Crownsville describes as a “passion project.” In staff member who served as an unoffiit, she recounts the 93-year life of cial preservationist. Hylton acknowlCrownsville, tying that painful hisedges feeling “really angry” that “no tory to the story of the treatment of one had thought to dignify or track mental illness in the United States, this information in the first place.” especially in communities of color, Hylton follows the history of the and to her own family’s experiences hospital from its inception in 1911, with mental health. when 12 Black men were transported Speaking via video from a conferto rural Maryland to begin constructence room at NBC headquarters in ing the facility that eventually would New York City, Hylton brims with house them as its patients, to its closure energy and enthusiasm. “If I could in 2004. It’s a story of an institution understand everything there was to where treatment was often crude and know about Crownsville,” she says, callous, though there were, at times, “I would understand my family and some who tried to treat their patients my country better.” In her mind, with humanity. Most notable among “doing this would be cathartic; it the latter was Jacob Morgenstern, would help me have conversations a Holocaust survivor who became or fill in blanks that I was struggling Crownsville’s superintendent in 1947, to fill in otherwise.” and who recruited a group of fellow Hylton calls her book a “tribute survivors to serve as staff. to oral history,” and the more than It’s hard not to read Madness 40 interviews she conducted with without a mingled sense of anger former staff and patients—some of and sadness, as Hylton patiently them in their 80s or older—and her chronicles the decades when Black own family members deeply enrich patients received substandard care in the story. “This book came to life an overcrowded, understaffed hosbecause of the stories people shared pital that deemed them less worthy with me,” she says. of quality treatment than Maryland’s One of the greatest challenges in white mentally ill, even using some collecting those stories was gainpatients as subjects in scientific studH Madness ing access to the patients, many of ies without their consent. The hospital Legacy Lit, $30, 9781538723692 them who were deeply traumatized was not desegregated until 1963, but by their experiences at Crownsville. in the ’60s and ’70s, as the approach HISTORY “To find patients who were ready to to treating mental illness focused on go on the record comfortably was an incredible challenge,” Hylton shifting patients from large institutions like Crownsville to commusays, “and it took a lot of trust-building and community outreach. I nity mental health centers, its former patients were released into the really had to accept that it was going to be a one-person-at-a-time population without access to the resources they needed to make that kind of thing.” transition successfully. Thankfully, there are few people better prepared for this specific Hylton says that what kept driving her to tell Crownsville’s anguished kind of work than Hylton. In less than a decade following her grad- history was the door it opened into her own family’s painful past. She uation from Harvard University, Hylton has already accumulated an twines an institutional story with a deeply personal one, unearthing the impressive set of professional credentials and honors, including Emmy stories of her cousin Maynard and great-grandfather Clarence, whose and Peabody awards. After several years as a correspondent and pro- lives were tragically impacted by mental illness and then largely writducer for VICE Media, she joined NBC News and MSNBC, where ten out of her family’s history. “I’m going to resurrect Maynard and
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© MARK CLENNON
book clubs
“This book came to life because of the stories people shared with me.” Clarence,” she says. “I’m going to give their lives some dignity. I’m going to give their struggles some context that wasn’t there decades ago.” Indeed, Hylton reveals, excavating these stories encouraged some family members to seek therapy to heal their own psychological wounds. The Maryland legislature has appropriated an initial $30 million for Anne Arundel County to turn the hospital grounds into a memorial, park and museum. Local historian and community organizer Janice Hayes-Williams has created an annual service she calls “Say My Name” at the site, to recall the some 1,700 patients buried there. Hylton brings Madness to a moving climax with a scene she says “just poured out of me,” describing the 2022 commemoration at the on-site cemetery. On an April morning, she followed in the steps of community elders, clutching multicolored rose petals and a piece of paper bearing the name of Frances Clayton, a woman from Baltimore who died at Crownsville in 1924 at age 41. Kneeling down to place the petals on the ground, Hylton pressed her palm to the ground “to feel the pulse of the earth.” She writes that at that moment, she thought, “They’ve been waiting for us.” “If I can inspire even just one family to have some of the conversations my family has been able to have as a result of this reporting, that’s what I want,” she says. The responses of some of her early readers “have already made me feel very whole, even with a story that is heartbreaking. In addition to putting years of reporting on the page, I put my heart out there.” —Harvey Freedenberg Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Madness.
by julie hale
Four odes to freedom Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Simon & Schuster, $19.99, 9781501191060) tells the story of Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved husband and wife who fled Georgia in 1848. Ellen disguised herself as a white enslaver, while William pretended to be her captive, and they traveled to the Northern free states. News of their escape made them famous even as they faced new obstacles. Thoroughly researched and beautifully executed, Woo’s narrative explores themes of loyalty, courage and identity, making it a rewarding pick for book clubs. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (Norton, $16.95, 9780393352191) by Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner traces the development of the antislavery movement in the early 1800s, which gave rise to the underground Commemorate Black railroad—the secret sysHistory Month with these tem that allowed scores of stirring true stories of how enslaved people to escape the South prior to the people escaped slavery. Civil War. Foner writes with authority and an eye for detail as he documents the efforts of underground railroad agents, courageous abolitionists and determined freedom seekers to provide a revelatory look at a seminal chapter in American history. In Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero (Picador, $19, 9781250183897), journalist Cate Lineberry chronicles the extraordinary achievements of Robert Smalls. In 1862, Smalls, an enslaved man in South Carolina, took over a Confederate ship in Charleston Harbor, secretly brought his family members aboard and delivered the boat to Union forces, thereby securing their release from slavery. Smalls later participated in naval actions and went on to serve in the House of Representatives. Lineberry pays tribute to a remarkable leader in this meticulous account of Smalls’ life. In The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin, $18, 9780735224131), Andrew Delbanco assesses the rise of slavery and the rift it caused across the nation, demonstrating that freedom seekers were instrumental in bringing attention to the horrors of the institution. Delbanco looks at watershed moments, like the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, offering fresh perspectives on how they affected the country. Reading groups can dig into rich discussion topics like the notion of justice and slavery’s lasting impact on society. A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale recommends the best paperback books to spark discussion in your reading group.
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reviews | fiction
H Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar LITERARY FICTION Cyrus Shams is, in his own words, “another death-obsessed Iranian man,” fixated on death—but more than that, on martyrdom. He needs his death to matter, for the act of his dying to have a purpose. Cyrus’ family inheritance is one of pointless death. His mother died when her plane was shot down by American forces over the Persian Gulf; she was traveling to visit her brother, a man decimated by his experiences fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Cyrus’ father died soon after Cyrus left for college. Uneasily sober after years of chasing addiction, Cyrus decides to write a book on martyrs. To help himself get started, he seeks out an artist in New York City, an older Iranian woman named Orkideh, who, in a Marina Abramović-style performance, has made herself publicly accessible while she dies of cancer by spending the end of her life in the Brooklyn Museum. Over several days, Cyrus and Orkideh speak on death, art, nation, victimhood, gratitude
The Fox Wife
By Yangsze Choo HISTORICAL FICTION
To l d in two voices, Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife (Holt, $27.99, 9781250266019) is a fitting follow-up to Choo’s previous novels, The Ghost Bride and The Night Tiger. Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife plays with Chinese myths about the fox gods: foxes with the ability to transform into beguiling, beautiful and tormented men and women. Legend has it that the fox gods sometimes live among people, causing trouble through their trickery and slippery relationship with the truth. Bao is a detective on a mission to figure out what happened to a woman found frozen to death on the doorstep of a restaurant. His chapters—told from a third-person perspective— enthrall with keen observations about the gods, his own past and the people around him. Snow is on her own quest to understand the death of her only child. She begins working for a family who has been cursed: Their sons die young. Her first-person chapters are particularly intriguing,
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and family. In between scenes of their easy connection, we read poems from Cyrus’ book and witness flashbacks to Cyrus’ mother’s, father’s and uncle’s stories. There are also chapters recounting supernatural conversations from Cyrus’ dreams, between his mother and Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and the American president of 2017, his father and the poet Rumi, and an imaginary brother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Martyr! (Knopf, $28, 9780593537619) has a certain loudness, between the echo of a weighted Iranian history, the roar of Cyrus’ broken family legacy and his intense internal warfare. Even the book’s title can be taken as a shout, its exclamation point signifying an accusation or revelation. That which quiets the noise is simple enough, delivered in sublime prose
from Iranian American poet and debut novelist Kaveh Akbar: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it,” he writes late in the novel. Akbar has previously published two collections of poetry (Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Pilgrim Bell), and his writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing. Throughout Martyr!, language is a saving grace, if imperfectly so. “I get frustrated this way so often,” Cyrus’ mother says in a flashback. “A photograph can say ‘This is what it was.’ Language can only say ‘This is what it was like.’” Similarly, although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice. —Cat Acree
with a strong voice and sharp turns of phrase. Who is Snow? And what will her journey allow her to discover? As the story alternates between Snow’s and Bao’s perspectives, the pull to solve these mysteries builds momentum. The voices are compelling; the secrets are rich. When the two tales begin to overlap and the gaps fill in, the surprise is worth the wait. Layers of meaning accrue, bringing together the past and the present, mythology and personal ambition, actions and reactions, control and fate, into a fascinating tale of foxes, foes and friends. —Freya Sachs
Millie, a woman whose college years were interrupted by helping an ill parent, has returned to the University of Arkansas as a 24-year-old senior, working as a resident assistant in her dorm. Mature and responsible, she fantasizes about Josh, her hunky supervisor, and is diligently saving to purchase a house. Agatha is a visiting faculty member in her late 30s, recently separated from a younger professional dancer who married her for health insurance. At the beginning of the semester, Agatha asks Millie to organize a small group of students for Agatha to interview as part of her research for a potential book on wedding traditions. What starts as an innocent gathering of information becomes a more complicated entanglement when Agatha begins paying Millie for access to the dorm to spy on the students’ personal conversations, which she then writes up as a series of demi-comic pieces for Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, a prank dreamed up by Tyler, the mean girl of the dorm, sparks a vengeful retaliation which threatens both Agatha and Millie’s livelihoods. This reader’s advice is to follow the money, as much of Come and Get It is embedded in the details of ostensibly insignificant transactions. Reid prefers to serve her themes amid a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, but
Come and Get It By Kiley Reid
LITERARY FICTION
Kiley Reid’s sophomore effort Come and Get It (Putnam, $28, 978059332820) is a compelling novel about consumption, desire and class set at a state university in 2017. Readers who enjoyed the themes and details of Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, will find themselves in welcome territory.
reviews | fiction underneath it all, her eye is firmly fixed on obsessive consumerism and intersecting issues of race and class. Though no crimes are committed, there are enough errors of judgment, blurred ethical lines and microaggressions to permanently alter the life trajectories of her characters. Yet Reid writes with enormous compassion, showing us flawed humans caught in systems outside of their control who are, mostly, doing the best they can. —Lauren Bufferd
H City of Laughter By Temim Fruchter
FAMILY SAGA
The protagonist of Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel, a queer grad student studying Jewish folklore, describes her work as collecting scraps. In the wake of her father’s death, 30-year-old Shiva decides to get her master’s, hoping to unravel the family mysteries her mother has kept hidden from her all her life. Shiva eventually travels to Warsaw, where a series of experiences, from a night in a queer bar to a performance of a famous Jewish play, lead her to a deeper understanding of herself, her mother and her ancestral heritage. This novel, like Shiva’s work, is a collection of beautiful scraps—folktales and memory, hidden family histories, love letters, accounts of strange happenings in the past and present—all tangled together and rewoven into a whole that’s strange, lush, imaginative and pulsing with life. Fruchter draws on folklore remembered from her own childhood, as well as a whimsical (and sometimes dark) universe of invented tales to create something entirely new.
This is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder and storytelling that reshapes worlds. The narrative refuses to sit still, jumping between points of view, decades and countries as Fruchter traces four generations of Jewish women from a tiny Polish shtetl in the early 20th century to contemporary New York. Fruchter’s rich and unwavering
exploration of queer lineages, alongside matrilineal and Jewish ones, is extraordinary. As Shiva becomes more deeply immersed in the lives of her foremothers, those foremothers become more vibrant and detailed, in prose that moves from shimmering and dreamlike to sharply funny to wonderfully contemplative. Readers looking for easy explanations will not find them in City of Laughter (Grove, $27, 9780802161284). Readers looking for questions—and the spaces they open—will find them in abundance. This is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history, and storytelling that reshapes worlds. It’s a story about the work it takes to look into a rupture—in yourself, in your family, in history—and, through looking, begin to transform it. —Laura Sackton
Greta & Valdin
By Rebecca K. Reilly POPULAR FICTION
One of the first things I assumed when I started reading Rebecca K. Reilly’s sad, hilarious novel Greta & Valdin (Avid Reader, $28, 9781668028049) was that the titular Māori and Russian New Zealander siblings must be teenagers. They are certainly adolescently self-absorbed and lovelorn, Valdin overcome with heartache over his ex-boyfriend and Greta harboring a puppy-dog crush on her tutor. It’s a mild shock to learn that Valdin is about 30 years old and a former physicist turned comedian, while Greta is five years younger, working on a useless master’s thesis and perpetually broke. Greta and Valdin live together, and though they won’t acknowledge it, depend on one another. She’s hurt when he flies off to Buenos Aires and neglects to stay in touch with her. When Valdin comes back, he wonders what sort of flowers to buy along with a bag of limes to soothe Greta’s feelings. Their family members—Russian father Linsh, Māori mother Beatrice and older brother Casper (not his real name, but a name bestowed at birth because he was so pale)—take the siblings’ loopiness in stride. After all, they’re a fairly loopy bunch themselves. Reilly writes with a dry, sly humor and great love for her characters. She brilliantly builds the world of the siblings bit by bit, like
a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s a mention of a popular drink, a song, a snippet of another language or dialect, the names of local shops and bars, the specific clothing people wear: All combine not just to make the world feel real and lived in, but also to explain why Greta and Valdin are the way they are. Everyone in their circle acts like they’re 16. Why shouldn’t Greta and Valdin follow suit? Ultimately joyous and life-affirming, Greta & Valdin is Reilly’s first novel. This reviewer is eager to see what she does next. —Arlene McKanic
Dixon Descending By Karen Outen
LITERARY FICTION
In Karen Outen’s adroit first novel, Dixon Descending (Dutton, $28, 9780593473450), Dixon Bryant carries a lot of baggage up Mount Everest. And even more coming down. Part of that baggage involves his relationship with his brother, Nate. Sixteen months older than Dixon and now approaching 50, Nate, the long-awaited first son, has always been the “gift” to their parents. Charismatic, irrepressible and sometimes irresponsible, Nate is a bright balloon floating high in the air. Dixon, the wise, soulful, solid brother, holds the string. It is Nate who proposes that the brothers become the first Black American men to summit Everest. Everest and the people who climb it form a world all their own. Outen, whose endnotes describe her passion for the mountain, writes breathtaking passages about the brothers’ experiences there: the competitive companionability of other climbers; the smell and sounds of the ever-shifting mountain; and, of course, the gut-wrenching dangers of the ascent. Nate and Dixon and their climbing team have lighter moments in camp, but as the brothers climb higher, things get deadly serious. In the rarefied air near the summit, slowed by the long line of climbers and barely able to breathe, the brothers have to make impossible choices about their ambitions, responsibilities and love for one another. After the ascent, Dixon has even more to contend with. Family and friends, for one. But more pressing is a matter at the middle school where he works as a beloved school psychologist. He has taken a bullied boy, Marcus, under his wing. When Marcus is
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reviews | fiction viciously beaten, Dixon, in an uncharacteristic moment, violently confronts the tormentor, an irreparably damaged soul named Shiloh. As a result, Dixon goes on leave and follows an unexpected path to self-discovery and expatiation. That Outen can rather seamlessly meld these two fraught strands of story is a marker of her flowering skill as a writer. An additional gift of the novel is how much it has to reveal about love and friendship among Black men. That alone makes Dixon Descending a worthy read. —Alden Mudge
Hard by a Great Forest By Leo Vardiashvili
LITERARY FICTION
For author Leo Vardiashvili, home was Tbilisi, Georgia, until post-Soviet civil unrest forced him and his family to flee to England in the 1990s. Almost two decades would pass before Vardiashvili returned to Tbilisi, finding a pulsing city filled with mere remnants of his childhood memories, places and faces. Born of this loss and transformation, Vardiashvili’s debut novel, Hard by a Great Forest (Riverhead, $29, 9780593545034), tells the story of Saba Sulidze-Donauri, who has returned to his native city from London under difficult circumstances. Months ago, first his father, Irakli, and then his older brother, Sandro, had been drawn to Tbilisi by the pull of the past, then suddenly dropped out of contact and disappeared. It is now up to Saba to decipher the cryptic clues they left behind and locate his father and brother without arousing suspicion from the Georgian authorities. Along with the shock of this awful situation, Saba faces the anxiety of returning “home” to find everything unfamiliar and overwhelming. Helping him navigate the streets as well as his emotions is a gregarious taxi driver named Nodar who drives an ancient Volga. Nodar carries his own stories of loss through this city that has moved on without him. Like young children possessed by an adventurous spirit, Nodar and Saba soldier on, determined to unravel the mystery of the disappearances. Although some brutal moments are hard to bear, Vardiashvili keeps readers invested with the grit and generous
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spirit of his characters, including Nodar, his resourceful wife, Keti, and many long-dead relatives that live on as voices in Saba’s head. At its simplest, Hard by a Great Forest appeals as a thrilling story of good guys trying to beat the bad ones. It is a great read full of history, mystery and chance reunions that asks the reader to examine how we can move forward when we’re followed by the ghosts of the past. —Chika Gujarathi
H Wolves of Winter By Dan Jones
HISTORICAL FICTION
With his debut novel, Essex Dogs, popular historian Dan Jones proved that he could take his expertise in medieval history and translate it into compelling, immensely readable fiction. Now, with Wolves of Winter (Viking, $30, 9780593653791) Jones manages to do it again—and then some.
Just as in ‘Essex Dogs,’ the depth never gets in the way of the swashbuckling, epic action of the battles. A direct sequel to Essex Dogs, Wolves of Winter picks up on the adventures of a band of soldiers and friends serving in the army of King Edward III in the midst of the Hundred Years War. In the wake of the English victory at the battle of Crecy, the Essex Dogs are convinced they’re going home soon, with pockets full of whatever plunder they’ve managed to scrape together. But the king and his noble allies have other plans. For reasons no one in the army’s rank and file can quite grasp, the English are preparing to lay siege to Calais, a small French port town surrounded by treacherous marshes. So, instead of going home, the Dogs continue on to Calais, even as a man they thought they left in the past creeps up behind them. Throughout the action, Jones maintains a clear, confident grasp on the historical details, from the weapons the Dogs use to the surprising way that pirates factor into the Calais story. And just as in Essex Dogs, none of that detail ever distracts from the narrative, character development or emotional stakes.
Jones’ themes have also matured and deepened, as the mysteries of the siege of Calais offer plenty of new opportunities to explore the futility of war from the Dogs’ perspective. Crecy was such a triumph that to keep fighting feels like an exercise in foolish bravado. As the Essex Dogs descend into the literal quagmire around Calais, they begin pondering the steps that led them to this point, considering whether control over their destinies is possible in a world ruled by those richer and more influential. It’s a study in maturation for an author who was already working at a high level; the added depth never gets in the way of the swashbuckling, epic action of the battles. Wolves of Winter is another rollicking success for Dan Jones, cementing him as a master of historical fiction and leaving us counting the days until we can read what the Essex Dogs do next. —Matthew Jackson
Behind You Is the Sea By Susan Muaddi Darraj
FAMILY DRAMA
Behind You Is the Sea (HarperVia, $26, 9780063324237), Susan Muaddi Darraj’s debut novel, brings readers into the lives of three Palestinian families in and around Baltimore: the Salamehs, the Baladis and the Ammars. Generational disputes form the core of the novel’s action, which unfolds through weddings, graduations, unplanned pregnancies and funerals. Women’s issues are at the fore as each of the novel’s chapters, which function as linked stories, reveal families both divided and united by class, gender and traditional values. In the opening chapter, “A Child of Air,” teenage Reema Baladi resolves to keep her baby, while refusing to marry her Puerto Rican boyfriend. In “Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at the Wedding,” Walid, patriarch of the wealthy Ammar family, despairs at the lack of Arab traditions at his oldest son’s wedding to an American. “Ride Along” focuses on a police officer, Marcus Salameh, and the rift between his father and his sister, Amal, over Amal’s perceived dishonor, a rupture which grows deeper after the death of their mother. Darraj deftly explores class tensions in the titular chapter: When the Ammars employ young Maysoon Baladi as a housekeeper, she is shocked by the couple’s indolence and
reviews | fiction their spoiled teenage kids, but flirts openly with father and husband, Demetri. In a later chapter, Demetri’s daughter Hiba moves in with her grandparents after an embarrassing incident in college and an unspoken but deeply felt lack of support from her parents. The final chapter, “Escorting the Body,” the only chapter not set in the United States, sees Marcus fulfilling his father’s wish to be buried in his Palestinian village, a visit which reveals dramatic secrets about the life he left behind. Behind You Is the Sea draws a composite portrait of Palestinian American families with sensitivity and humor, its linked stories breaking down stereotypes and embracing complexity. —Lauren Bufferd
Interesting Facts About Space By Emily Austin
COMING OF AGE
As with her first novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin’s Interesting Facts About Space (Atria, $27.99, 9781668014233) features a quirky main character in Enid, who loves listening to true-crime podcasts to calm down. “I hate being startled,” she notes. “I like my podcasts, horror movies, and ghost stories that I can pause and rewind. I handle fear sort of like a workhorse. I could charge bravely into a planned battle, take in the sights of bombs and corpses, but I would still be spooked by an unanticipated barn rat.” When we first meet her, Enid is listening to a particularly grisly podcast while baking a gender reveal cake for her pregnant half sister Edna. Into this moment comes a stranger who’s furious at Enid, and the exchange unfolds in such an unexpected way that I laughed out loud more than once.
Enid loves listening to truecrime podcasts. She’s also pretty sure that she’s a terrible person. Enid is half-deaf, neurodivergent and gay. She’s also pretty sure that she’s a terrible person. In short vignettes, Enid narrates her attempts to navigate an uncomfortable new
relationship with her half sisters and keep tabs on her depressed mom. With the help of her best friend, Vin, Enid also tries to figure out what’s causing her panic attacks, and why someone seems to be stalking her. Enid and Vin work at the Space Agency managing information, from which Enid’s gathered a vast array of random facts about outer space, which she shares with her mother in attempts at connection. The novel’s comic scenes of misunderstandings and non sequiturs are interspersed with Enid’s musings about herself, her highschool years and her parents. Enid may be in her 20s, but Interesting Facts About Space is a coming-of-age story. Balancing the comic and the dark, the novel slowly reveals the essential sadness in Enid’s past that she can’t let herself see, and though occasionally the novel’s first-person, present-tense voice can feel a little claustrophobic, that’s a small quibble. In a lesser writer’s hands, Enid’s quirky traits could feel constructed, but Austin makes Enid’s vulnerable voice and deep thoughts feel brave, heartbreaking and true. —Sarah McCraw Crow
H The Bullet Swallower By Elizabeth Gonzalez James WESTERN
The Old Testament book of Ezekiel states that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” In theory, while wealth may be passed along from generation to generation, debts— even those of the karmic nature—aren’t. Try telling that to any of the Sonoro clan, the family at the center of Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline, magical realist tour de force, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster, $26.99, 9781668009321). Beginning with patriarch Alferez Antonio in the 1800s, the Sonoros have committed all manner of sins in the name of ambition, from running a gold mine with slave labor to robbing a train at the turn of the 20th century. When the latter goes sideways, Antonio Sonoro and his henchman brother are shot by the Texas Rangers and left for dead in the desert. His brother is killed, but Antonio survives and swears a blood oath for revenge—rechristening himself as El Tragabalas, the Bullet Swallower. A century later, in 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s number one box-office draw,
a much-beloved movie star and performer known as El Gallo (The Rooster). While relaxing at home after a grueling tour, he’s visited by someone whom he believes to be a fan, bearing a strange gift: an ancient volume entitled The Ignominious History of the Sonoro Family From Antiquity to the Present Day. Ping-ponging back and forth across the decades, Gonzalez James constructs a dynastic legacy that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger. When Jaime tries to pry some of the family’s more recent history out of his tight-lipped father, the old man replies, “Did you ever think that the reason I never said anything about them is because it’s too painful?” And when a shadowy figure named Remedio inserts himself unexpectedly into Jaime’s household, the story takes on an element of the supernatural. All this would be remarkable enough, but it’s made even more so by the fact that The Bullet Swallower is based, albeit loosely, on Gonzalez James’ own family history. As she puts it in the author’s note, “Everything in this book is true except for the stuff I made up.” So while the son—or in this case the great-granddaughter—may not bear the iniquity of the father, it seems she does wind up bearing witness to it. —Thane Tierney
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility By Isabel Waidner
SATIRE
“Cartoonish” is typically a pejorative label. Overexaggerated, outlandish, silly—when a piece of art provokes these descriptions, we expect to be met with sticks of dynamite and eye roll-worthy puns. But the recent elevation of cartoons, from the existentialism of “BoJack Horseman” to the tender lessons of “Adventure Time,” should make us reconsider how we view cartoonishness. Isabel Waidner’s new novella, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (Graywolf, $16, 9781644452691), is cartoonish on every conceivable level: The story of Corey Fah is a comedic romp through a queer, absurdist world. Fit with an adorably passive-aggressive deer-spider hybrid, a wormhole-hunting playwright turned talk show host, and biting social commentary about social commentary,
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reviews | fiction Waidner’s novel is a thoroughly enjoyable, envelope-pushing head-scratcher. Corey lives with their partner Drew Szumski in a capital city loosely resembling London. After winning the Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils, Corey is tasked with retrieving their trophy, but it’s not so simple as picking it up from the prize committee. The trophy is a neon-beige flying saucer that has a mind of its own, teleporting away from Corey and Drew as they repeatedly try to claim it. On this wild goose chase, the pair meet Bambi Pavok, the aforementioned fawn-spider creature who teleported from an alternate dimension. Still sans trophy and under pressure from the prize committee to do publicity, Corey takes Bambi Pavok onto a cultish talk show where the dimensional layers of this strange world start to fold in on themselves and the story takes a turn from weird to utterly bizarre. I can say with certainty that Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is the wildest book I have ever reviewed for BookPage. The plot toes the line of ridiculousness in a truly masterful way, never ceasing to surprise, and Waidner’s ultramodern language, a mix of the Queen’s English and Tumblr-speak, results in some strangely beautiful sentences. All the while, the characters are developed in subtle, touching ways. For example, in a socially awkward, quintessentially millennial moment of tenderness, Corey expresses that they would be utterly lost without Drew, who has stood by them throughout their flailing career as a writer. Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a flashy, punchy whirlwind: Waidner has caught lightning in a bottle. —Eric A. Ponce
Acts of Forgiveness By Maura Cheeks
LITERARY FICTION
The concept of reparations has been a component of conflict resolutions since the days of ancient Carthage. In America today, the issue most often comes up in reference to offering restitution to Black Americans for the ills of slavery. That topic, and the backlash from those against monetary redress, is the animating force in Acts of Forgiveness (Ballantine, $28, 9780593598290), Maura Cheeks’ debut novel. When Senator Elizabeth Johnson ran for president, a pillar of her campaign was her
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championing of the Forgiveness Act, which would provide $175,000 to every Black citizen over 18 who could prove they had an enslaved ancestor. Now, as America’s first woman president, she announces her intention to carry out that promise. This is hopeful news for Black Philadelphia native Willie Revel, the 33-yearold single mother of a gifted daughter. Willie once dreamed of becoming a journalist. But after her father, who owns a construction company, had a heart attack, Willie abandoned her dreams and returned to Philly to take over the business. Cheeks does a nice job of dramatizing Willie’s conflict and is equally adept at demonstrating not only the need for financial restitution but also its specific importance to Willie’s family. Willie could use the money for the construction business, which struggles to stay afloat. Her father insists on keeping a contract with Soteria, a company that hired them to build a recycling complex. Willie is revolted by working with Soteria because the owner, like a lot of conservatives, vehemently opposes the Forgiveness Act. That’s just some of many issues Willie contends with as she researches her family history to prove their eligibility for reparations. Others include her lack of career fulfillment and her daughter’s difficulties at school and attempts to write a play—an ambition that resembles the one Willie had to give up. Cheeks doesn’t fully demonstrate the skill of distinguishing necessary information from superfluous detail, but Acts of Forgiveness movingly highlights a litany of injustices, from casual racism to the pressure on women to sacrifice their ambitions. Willie’s mother tells her that “sometimes you have to go where you’re not wanted in order to change people’s minds.” This novel highlights the soundness of that advice, as well as the perils of being brave enough to follow it. —Michael Magras
The Women
By Kristin Hannah HISTORICAL FICTION
“Some women had worn love beads in the sixties; others had worn dog tags,” Kristin Hannah writes in The Women (St. Martin’s, $30, 9781250178633), her salute to American women who were nurses in the Vietnam War. It’s a book she has long wanted to write—since 1997—but
didn’t feel ready to tackle until now. As she’s done before in runaway bestsellers like The Nightingale, The Great Alone and The Four Winds, Hannah demonstrates her knack for blending broad sweeps of history with page-turning plots to immediately engross legions of readers in even the most difficult of subjects. The story covers more than 20 years, beginning in 1966 when 21-year-old Frankie McGrath impetuously joins the Army Nurse Corps, hoping to follow her beloved brother, Finley, to Vietnam. Her well-to-do parents live on Coronado Island in California and are very much concerned with keeping up appearances. Frankie’s father keeps a “Wall of Heroes” in his office filled with portraits of their family’s military veterans, even though he, to his shame, was declared ineligible to serve. Frankie’s life changes when one of her brother’s friends tells her, “Women can be heroes.” Frankie arrives in Vietnam as a clueless, newly minted nurse, but she rises to the horrific circumstances and ends up finding her calling in life, sparking a turbulent romance as well along the way. She slowly grows into a highly skilled surgical combat nurse, and the scenes of her in the field and in the hospital training and performing surgery are particularly gripping and immersive, revealing to readers the traumatic experiences that soldiers, nurses and doctors experienced on a daily basis. Over 265,000 women served during the Vietnam era, including about 10,000 American military women stationed in Vietnam during the war, most of them nurses. And yet, after the war, these women were met with remarks like “There were no women in Vietnam.” That’s the reaction Frankie gets when she returns home, and the last half of the book deals with her struggle with Americans who have little idea of or respect for what she’s been through. Her parents compound her feelings of shame and confusion when they reveal that they explained her absence to their friends by pretending that Frankie had been studying abroad. Amid so much painful misunderstanding, she relies on the support of two lifelong nursing friends as she deals with post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and depression. Frankie eventually finds her way through “the healing power of words” and creates her own Heroes Wall. In true Hannah fashion, The Women delivers a compelling read as well as a new understanding of the Vietnam era. —Alice Cary
reviews | nonfiction
H The Cancer Factory
By Jim Morris SOCIAL SCIENCE More than 50 years since the founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, it would be reasonable to assume that modern U.S. factories are safe places to work. Surely, workplace-caused mesothelioma, silicosis and cancers are things of the past, suffered only in the bad old days before safety regulations forced employers to take care of their employees’ health. But Jim Morris, veteran journalist and author of The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers (Beacon, $29.95, 9780807059142), knows better. Morris focuses on Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant, which manufactured anti-cracking agents for tires using ortho-toluidine, a
The Survivors of the Clotilda By Hannah Durkin
AMERICAN HISTORY
Almost from the moment it docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, much has been written about the Clotilda, the schooner that brought 110 captive Africans to the U.S. in 1860, more than five decades after the slave trade had been outlawed. The illegal voyage was conducted with stealth, but the arrival of the ship was an open secret that drew international headlines, though no punishment for the wealthy enslavers responsible. Interest in “the last slave ship” gradually waned until the late 2010s, when the search for (and eventual discovery of) the ship’s wreckage spurred a new cycle of research and media interest. Historian Hannah Durkin’s considerable scholarship draws on these sources and others in The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade (Amistad, $29.99, 9780063072992). She cuts through the myths around this notorious story while keeping a tight focus on the 103 surviving young adults and children, whose lives were
powerful carcinogen that’s been known to be linked to bladder cancer since 1895. The Cancer Factory traces how this chemical destroyed the health, happiness and lives of the men who worked with it—and were sometimes even submerged in it—on a daily basis, without any safety equipment or knowledge of the dangers they were facing, even into the 21st century. Morris interviewed many families for the book, but none illustrates the matter more clearly than the family of Ray Kline, a Goodyear employee who worked for decades with some of the most carcinogenic chemicals at the plant with no protection. His clothes were drenched with the chemicals, and his wife, Dottie, who laundered them, eventually gave birth to two children with fatal birth defects.
Their surviving daughter, Diane, grew up and married Harry Weist, another Goodyear factory worker. Ray and Harry both developed aggressive bladder cancer, enduring years of chemo, surgeries and epic misery. Morris makes the case that the Goodyear bladder cancer cluster is emblematic of a much larger problem. He argues that corporate greed, broken regulatory agencies and hamstrung unions ensure that exposure to dioxins, asbestos, silica and hundreds of other hazards are not distant memories of our industrial past, but the lived reality of millions of workers today. Heartbreaking and infuriating, Morris’ storytelling jars the reader out of complacency. With luck, The Cancer Factory can also be an instrument for change. —Deborah Mason
forever changed by displacement, family separation and enslavement. Durkin has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and has long focused on the history of transatlantic slavery. In 2020, her research revealed that the last living survivor was not Kossula Lewis, as previously thought, but Matilda McCrear, who was just 2 years old when she, her mother and five siblings were kidnapped from their West African village. Matilda, her mother and sisters ended up on the Clotilda; she never saw her two brothers again. That is just one of many painful moments for the survivors, who endured five years of enslavement. After the Civil War, they requested repatriation to Benin, to no avail. Though they mourned their homeland, they found ways to carry on their language and traditions. Some founded Africatown, a community on the outskirts of Mobile that became a thriving all-Black enclave. Others ended up elsewhere in the Black Belt, including Gee’s Bend, a famous wellspring of quilting art that draws heavily from West African influences. Because it tells the stories of so many people in so much detail, The Survivors of the Clotilda is dense and can lack a clear narrative thread. Yet this multitude of stories allows readers to see a variety of reactions to and experiences of enslavement, turning the Clotilda survivors into a microcosm of the nearly 13 million Africans who were
kidnapped during the transatlantic slave trade. This authoritative work will be appreciated by anyone looking for a comprehensive account of one of history’s most infamous moments. —Trisha Ping
Secrets of the Sun By Mako Yoshikawa
MEMOIR
Intense and kaleidoscopic, Secrets of the Sun (Mad Creek, $19.95, 9780814258934) tells the story of author Mako Yoshikawa’s physicist father, Shoichi Yoshikawa. A brilliant researcher into nuclear fusion, a man with bipolar disorder, and a violently abusive father and husband, he does not have a story that can be approached linearly. His daughter’s choice to structure this book as a memoir in essays reflects her fragmentary knowledge of him, as well as her emotionally complex mission to understand the forces that shaped him. In the decades after Mako’s mother, an accomplished artist and author, “packed us up and fled his house under police protection,” Shoichi’s adult daughters negotiated partial estrangements from him. Mako learned of
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reviews | nonfiction his death from natural causes the night before her wedding, to which Shoichi had not been invited. This memoir is particularly brilliant at capturing the grief, guilt and fear that adults who experienced childhood abuse face when deciding how or whether to maintain a relationship with their abusive parent. The love beneath these more difficult emotions animated Mako’s pursuit of her father’s mysterious inner world. The many facets of Shoichi’s personality emerge through these essays: his genius as a Princeton University physicist, his early optimism that he would be able to channel the power of the sun into usable energy here on Earth, his arrogance and resentment as funding for fusion research dried up, his love for cross-dressing, his experiences with racism as a Japanese immigrant living in 1960s Princeton, New Jersey, and his dangerous manic episodes. After his death, his former colleagues praised his brilliance and mourned the mental illness that destroyed his career. “My Father’s Women,” Yoshikawa’s award-winning 2012 essay published in The Missouri Review, forms the foundation of Secrets of the Sun. Unwinding her father’s relationships with women is one way that Yoshikawa seeks to understand him. “He’d been adored by wives, lovers, and girlfriends,” she writes. “Had my father ever loved anyone? I doubted it, but the truth was I didn’t know.” Perhaps the most important of these women is Mako herself, whose memoir seeks to understand, with love, a father devoted only to the stars. —Catherine Hollis
H The Bishop and the
Butterfly
By Michael Wolraich TRUE CRIME
A roadside discovery of the body of a beautiful, would-be starlet; an investigation into a city’s underbelly to find her killer; a cat-andmouse game between detectives and criminals reminiscent of an early 20th-century detective noir. For many, this may call to mind the 1947 case of the Black Dahlia, a gruesome Los Angeles murder that lives on in the popular imagination. The crime at the center of Michael Wolraich’s The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age (Union Square, $29.99, 9781454948025) occurred 16 years
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earlier, across the country amid the freewheeling glamour of 1931 New York City, and held the public just as in thrall. Prohibition helped to nurture corruption throughout the government of New York, with the political machine of the Democratic Party, Tammany Hall, holding crucial positions in its fist. As America was pivoting from the glitter and excess of the Jazz Age to the scarcity of the Great Depression, the organization increasingly demanded loyalty, including from one Franklin D. Roosevelt, a young, charismatic politician with aspirations to the governorship of New York. With a concise voice schooled by years of reporting, Wolraich describes how the Tammany Hall empire of power began to teeter when Vivian Gordon was found strangled by the side of the road in Van Cortlandt Park. As police sought to learn more about the victim, details emerged: She was a smalltime starlet, she had gangster ties, she made a living by blackmailing the wealthy men who hired her for sex work—and she had been days away from delivering damning information about the police, the courts and politicians to Samuel Seabury, a former judge charged with investigating corruption in the city. So straight-laced and impervious to corruption himself that he was nicknamed “The Bishop,” Seabury posed the first legitimate threat to Tammany Hall. Gordon’s murder became the catalyst for a series of events that would change the face of New York City forever. In this meticulously drawn account of the crusade against unscrupulous characters deeply embedded in the halls of power, The Bishop and the Butterfly shares a glimpse into a fight for decency and fairness that continues to this day. —Anna Spydell
A Map of Future Ruins By Lauren Markham
SOCIAL SCIENCE
The popular conception of America’s origins as a nation forged by hardworking immigrants contrasts sharply with the indifferent and sometimes cruel policies that hinder many migrants and refugees today. In A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead, $28, 9780593545577), author and journalist Lauren Markham explores this chasm in the American consciousness,
asking why some migrants are heroized and others demonized. Markham made several trips to Greece during the “still-roiling wake of the debt crisis” with two purposes: reflecting on her Greek heritage and reporting on the population of undocumented migrants at refugee camps. She intertwines these two threads with the specificity of a journalist and the fluidity of a storyteller. In 2015, she writes, “hundreds of thousands and then millions of people from Africa and Asia and the Middle East fled their own homes in search of safety in Europe, washing up waterlogged and desperate and sometimes dead on Greece’s shores.” At Moria, a camp on the island of Lesbos, she meets Ali, an Afghan teenager who left his country to earn more money for his impoverished family. She follows his experience as he is wrongfully accused of setting fire to Moria and thrust into a cruel legal system. At the same time, Markham investigates the limits of what visiting her ancestral homeland can reveal about her family, herself and the very nature of how white Americans conceive of ethnicity. Markham argues that what we consider “the West” is more of a recently constructed, apocryphal origin story for white identity than it is a historically cohesive set of peoples and places. Markham’s unfussy yet detailed style provides an engaging read as she moves from research to reporting to memoir. A Map of Future Ruins is more of a meditation on a theme than an exhaustive dive into a topic. While it may not be the best fit for someone seeking a deep investigation into immigration, the book is uniquely suited to nudge readers into considering where their ideas of national identity originated, and whom these notions disenfranchise today. —Annie Harvieux
Come Together By Emily Nagoski
SELF-HELP
Emily Nagoski’s third book, Come To g e t h e r : The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections (Ballantine, $30, 9780593500828), like her second, Come as You Are, focuses on better sex. But where Come as You Are was aimed at women, Come Together is for couples in long-term relationships. To be clear, Come Together isn’t a book filled with sex
reviews | nonfiction tips or techniques; it’s a book about relationships, communication and methods to frame and understand emotions. Nagoski, a sex educator who trained at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute, sets out to debunk popular beliefs, primarily one that “puts desire at the center of our definition of sexual well-being.” She argues that when we focus too much on desire—a “spark, a spontaneous, giddy craving for sexual intimacy”—our worry about losing that spark “hits the breaks and puts sex further out of reach.” Instead, Nagoski argues that partners should center pleasure, writing that “great sex over the long term is not about how much you want sex, it’s about how much you like the sex you’re having.” Nagoski offers tools to increase pleasure, such as an “emotional floorplan,” a map of the brain’s different emotional states, some which are pleasure-favorable (lust, play, seeking), and some pleasure-adverse (fear, grief, rage).” Happily, Nagoski does not exclusively focus her attention on heterosexual sex. Through the dozens of interviews conveyed in the book, Nagoski includes LGBTQ+ couples, as well as those in polyamorous relationships, kink and BDSM communities, and more. Nagoski reminds readers that the key to great sex over the long term isn’t frequency, novelty or special skills. Instead, it’s trusting and admiring your partner, prioritizing one other and prioritizing sex. She shares research findings, the ongoing stories of three very different couples, and pieces of her own story. For readers with shorter attention spans, Nagoski closes each chapter with a TL;DR summary and questions to consider. Well-researched but accessible, Come Together is an inclusive, good-humored and reassuring book that offers something for every couple in a long-term relationship. —Sarah McCraw Crow
H Alphabetical Diaries By Sheila Heti
MEMOIR
Sheila Heti writes books that explode the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction. Alphabetical Diaries (FSG, $27, 9780374610784) is a compellingly weird new experiment, this time in diary-keeping. Creating a nonlinear timeline, Heti organizes the sentences of 10 years of her journals alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.
Given the constraints of the alphabetical form, the book nonetheless forms a coherent narrative with recurring themes: writing, money, sex, clothes and conversations with friends. Heti’s ambition and intelligence weave through many of these entries as she balances a desire for the peace necessary for writing with the restlessness of her desire for sex, love and travel. Just because her diary entries are nonlinear doesn’t mean they don’t tell a profoundly personal story about a glamorous young writer. Knowing this going in, the reader can relax and enjoy the ride. Daring and revealing, Alphabetical Diaries, which was first published in part in the New York Times, will appeal to anyone who has ever kept a diary and wondered “Why am I writing about the same things, again and again?” Each of Heti’s relationships, for example, repeats the patterns of the past. Her lovers and friends appear and reappear, as the reader gradually pieces together Heti’s intense relationships. Lots of writers’ diaries are fascinating because they reveal the underside of the published books: the work and doubt and insecurity the writer faces from conception to publication. Alphabetical Diaries has put a glorious twist on the genre, highlighting a more circular and repetitive logic to diaristic writing. Only Heti could have written this book, the latest in an oeuvre that is marked by increasingly profound experiments in language and storytelling. Personal and profane, quietly and radically subversive, this unusual version of a writer’s diary offers readers an often-comic glimpse into experiments in prose. —Catherine Hollis
Churchill’s American Network By Cita Stelzer
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BIOGRAPHY
Winston Churchill’s close ties with the United States began with his mother, Jennie Jerome, who at age 20 married Lord Randolph Churchill. As an author and prominent public figure, Winston developed an extraordinary relationship with the U.S. Politically, he believed it was in Britain’s national interest for the two countries, with their shared purposes and similar concerns, to stay close. Personally, he lived extravagantly and was always looking for ways to expand his resources. His books were published and reviewed in the U.S. and he was paid well for his lectures and magazine and newspaper work. Like his mother, who had
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reviews | nonfiction used her influence to advance his early career, he became a world-class networker himself as he met American leaders. How this developed is the subject of Cita Stelzer’s fascinating Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship (Pegasus, $29.95, 9781639364855). In Churchill’s age, the public got the news from newspapers and magazines. Stelzer’s research largely is sourced from “rich and relatively underutilized” local and national press reports of Churchill’s U.S. visits—ranging from where he went and with whom, to local responses at his public lectures, his humorous quips, what he ate for lunch and how he rated his accommodations. Stelzer brings to life a cast of characters Churchill brought into his network, among them media giant William Randolph Hearst, actor and director Charlie Chaplin, journalist Edward R. Murrow, steel magnate Charles M. Schwab and socialite and suffragist Daisy Harriman. While Stelzer does not claim Churchill single-handedly influenced Roosevelt’s decision to come to Britain’s aid during World War II, she makes clear that Churchill’s network “reenforced the favorable view of Britain.” He “enlisted others in support of his view that the Anglo-American alliance . . . was key to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world.” Stelzer’s scholarship on Churchill has been highly praised: 2019’s Working With Winston explores the world of Churchill’s secretaries, and 2013’s Dinner With Churchill focuses on the prime minister’s dinner table diplomacy. Churchill’s American Network is another enlightening look at the statesman, one with an even broader scope. –Roger Bishop
H The Gardener of
Lashkar Gah
By Larisa Brown HISTORY
After 20 years of trying and failing to rebuild Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, NATO allies pulled out of the country, promising sanctuary in the United Kingdom to the hundreds of Afghan interpreters, base workers and their families. In The Gardener of Lashkar Gah: The Afghans Who Risked Everything to Fight the Taliban (Bloomsbury, $30, 9781399411028), award-winning British journalist Larisa Brown uses her considerable reporting skills, astute insights and conflict
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zone experience to uncover the stories of those left behind. Shaista Gul’s beautiful garden at the British base in the southwestern Afghanistan city of Lashkar Gah served as a place of comfort and respite for Afghan base workers and military personnel, for whom “life outside was an incongruous contrast to the patch of garden paradise inside.” Gul’s earnest teenage son Jamal became an interpreter for the British soldiers there and soon found himself on the front lines. His translating skills often made the difference between life and death for the troops as they moved across roads embedded with bombs, and into villages where he had to discern if people were farmers or insurgents ready to kill. Jamal barely made it out alive, only to return home to death threats from people intent on killing those who cooperated with the Allies. As NATO forces began their 2021 pullout, Afghan workers were hopeful that they’d be resettled in the U.K., instead of being left behind at the mercy of the Taliban as they reclaimed the country with brutal force. NATO broke its promise, and the final days at the Kabul Airport were a living nightmare marked by chaos and despair. Thousands were left behind and still wait to be rescued. Brown relies on specificity and detail in her storytelling: the terrifying knock on the door when the Taliban came looking for a man accused of working for British troops; the rocky mountain paths where the very old and very young slept while attempting to flee to Pakistan; an entitled British commander who prioritized the escape of his pets over hundreds of Afghans desperate to be rescued. This forthright, unsparing account lays bare the failures of British and American leaders to keep their many promises, and succeeds in honoring the tenacity and courage of Afghans like Shaista Gul and Jamal. —Priscilla Kipp
H The Other Significant Others By Rhaina Cohen
SOCIAL SCIENCE
If you’ve ever watched TV shows like “The Golden Girls” and “Kate & Allie” or considered super-close friendduos like J.D. and Turk or Abbi and Ilana and thought, “What a great way to live!” then The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the
Center (St. Martin’s, $29, 9781250280916) is for you. Like her pop-culture compatriots before her, debut author Rhaina Cohen understands the preciousness of a deep and abiding platonic relationship—no romance necessary. That’s not to say Cohen is anti-romance: The NPR producer of hit podcasts like “Embedded,” “Hidden Brain” and “Invisibilia” is a happily married proponent of wedded bliss. But when it comes to relationships that are considered valued and important, she’s not in support of treasuring only wedded bliss. Instead, she urges readers to cultivate and celebrate “devoted, life-defining friendships.” Cohen’s fervor for the topic was ignited by her own life-altering bond with a woman named Em, who “stretched my understanding of the role a friendship could play in my life” and “made the world pulse with more possibilities for intimacy and support than before, and I wanted others to feel those possibilities for themselves.”
Cohen understands the preciousness of a deep and abiding platonic relationship, no romance necessary. Over years of research, Cohen conducted 70 in-depth interviews with proponents of platonic life partnerships. And in eight chapters written with empathy, curiosity and a clear knack for storytelling, she shares the fascinating and heartwarming tales of several of those duos. They vary by gender, age, religion and sexuality but share a willingness to defy convention. Readers will meet youth pastors Andrew and Toly, whose platonic life partnership has confounded potential romantic partners; Inez and Barb, coworkers who became helpmeets in retirement; Lynda and Natasha, who went from colleagues to coparents; and more. Cohen notes that due to societal factors including increased housing costs, decreased birth rates, evolving views on marriage and a growing willingness to home-share later in life, non-marital partnerships are more common, while not yet commonplace. The Other Significant Others offers readers an insightful and intimate look at what life could be like if we broaden our horizons beyond “compulsory coupledom” and welcome the idea that “romantic relationships are not the only unions that can shape our lives.” —Linda M. Castellitto
reviews | young adult
H Into the Sunken City
By Dinesh Thiru SCIENCE FICTION The rain never stops and most of the world is underwater, but Jin Halder refuses to dive again after her father’s fatal accident. All she wants to do is keep her 14-year-old sister, Thara, alive and ensure their family’s inn stays afloat. But when a drifter named Bhili visits their inn and promises a share of treasure submerged in a now-sunken Las Vegas, Jin can’t help but be interested—especially when Thara is determined to go. Into the Sunken City (HarperTeen, $19.99, 9780063310513) paints a harrowing but beautiful picture of a rain-soaked apocalyptic world. Cities named “Phoenix-Below” and “VegasDrowned” add to the eerie feeling that this world is an uncanny reflection of what our world could be in the aftermath of a mysterious natural disaster. Humans have adapted to
This Day Changes Everything By Edward Underhill
ROMANTIC COMEDY
Abby Akerman believes in the Universe. Leo Brewer believes the Universe hates him. The only thing the two have in common, other than being queer 16-yearolds from small towns, is that their respective marching bands are in New York to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Abby plans to come out to her best friend, Kat, and confess her love for her with a grand romantic gesture. Leo can’t focus on anything other than the broadcast of the parade, which, along with a local news segment, will out him as a trans boy to his extended Southern family. But NYC—or maybe the Universe—has other ideas: Abby and Leo accidentally step into the same train, which leads them away from their bands and toward an epic love story neither of them could have imagined. This Day Changes Everything (Wednesday, $20, 9781250835222) is Edward Underhill’s heartfelt and delightful sophomore novel about two band kids trying to find their rhythm outside the marching formations. Spanning less than 48 hours, the whirlwind plot takes Abby
this world, putting sailing and diving at the forefront of survival, yet nature constantly reminds them of its power: Dangerous creatures fill the deep; rough waters threaten to overturn boats; and torrential, nonstop rain impacts all human life on the surface. Jin is sarcastic and practical, yet intensely devoted to her family. Her sister, Thara, is a gentle gardener and culinary extraordinaire who’s interested in adventure. The mysterious drifter, Bhili, tells Jin about the sunken gold, but not much else about her past. And despite Jin’s mistrust of him after he secretly joined the Coast Guard, Jin’s recent ex, Taim, also joins their crew. Into the Sunken City creates compelling dynamics among these diverse and lively characters: Jin, for example, is torn between being Thara’s guardian and her sister, forced to
balance the nuances of raising a teenager while being a teenager herself. Jin is wary of both Bhili and Taim, while Thara seems more open towards others. In a world where survival isn’t guaranteed, it’s no surprise that Jin struggles with trust. She wrestles with nightmares about her father’s death and has a blazing determination to keep Thara, her only remaining family member, safe. Ultimately, Into the Sunken City is about learning what it means to stay hopeful—and learning how to keep going when that hope is broken. Charming characters and multilayered mysteries will keep readers hooked from beginning to end in this well-developed eco-thriller with a lot of heart. —Tami Orendain
and Leo on a quest that challenges them to both celebrate queer joy and explore the challenges of being queer youth. Underhill excels at balancing out his first dual narrative: Both Abby and Leo are complex, passionate and engaging. The pair’s friends make up an intersectional cast whose extreme charm makes it easy to suspend disbelief at some of the comical ways they trick their chaperones into thinking Abby and Leo are still with the groups. Arguably, NYC itself is a bustling side character, and Underhill succeeds at capturing the wild nature of the city. Fans of rom-coms will love how This Day Changes Everything operates within familiar tropes while putting Underhill’s queer spin on them. —Emily Koch
to compete in. They communicate mainly via taunting, eye-rolling and impatient sighs. But despite frequently feeling intense animosity toward Julius, Sadie hardly ever talks about it or any of her other frustrations. Instead, she vents in email drafts addressed to Julius and also people like Rosie, who won last year’s science fair with work she stole from Sadie, and Ms. Johnson, a teacher who refused to round up an 89.5 to a 90. The secret emails have helped Sadie maintain her amicable persona, but everything changes when the drafts are somehow sent out all at once in the middle of a school day. After years of avoiding conflict, Sadie’s suddenly faced with a situation she might not be able to fix. What is she going to do? She’s mortified about the people now mad at her for being mad at them—and shocked when it turns out that not only is her fabulous BFF Abigail on her side, but Julius just might be, too. Fans of rivals-to-lovers romances will delight in I Hope This Doesn’t Find You (Scholastic, $19.99, 9781338827156) and its protagonists’ attempts to find common ground in heady will-they-won’t-they scenes that deftly capture the two overachievers’ struggles with vulnerability. They’ll root for Sadie to consider what she wants rather than devoting her life to being the best people-pleaser ever. Chinese Australian author Ann Liang’s engaging novel is steeped in humor and empathy, encouraging readers to consider that relentlessly striving for
I Hope This Doesn’t Find You By Ann Liang
ROMANCE
For 10 years, Julius Gong has lived rentfree in 17-year-old Sadie Wen’s head. He’s her school co-captain at Woodvale Academy and “the most prominent source of pain in my life.” The two compete in academics, athletics and anything else possible
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reviews | young adult success might not be the best path to a truly rewarding life. —Linda M. Castellitto
H Poemhood
Edited by Amber McBride, Taylor Byas and Erica Martin POETRY
In their introduction to Poemhood: Our Black Revival (HarperTeen, $19.99, 9780063225282), editors Amber McBride, Taylor Byas and Erica Martin describe the anthology as “a celebration—a homage to the beauty and musicality of Black poetry, folklore, and history.” As the editors themselves reflect, Black culture and art has for too long been subject to an “exclusivity of story,” presented beyond Black communities only in revised forms or erased from classrooms and canons entirely. Poemhood represents a vital corrective to such exclusion. McBride, Byas and Martin pull no punches in their curation of over 30 writers. Literary icons such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde populate these pages along with contemporary poets including Nikki Giovanni, Danez Smith and the editors themselves. The contents are not organized chronologically “because, in Black culture, ancestors are ever present—their strength and legacy guide us long after they are gone.” Poemhood takes its structural cues from mixtapes: The poems, listed as numbered “tracks,” are organized into loosely thematic sections called “volumes.” Each track is followed by an “outro,” a short annotation that encourages readers to reflect on their own interpretations, embodying one of the anthology’s goals: to “speak to the eclectic Black experience and emphasize how it is not a monolithic culture.” For example, in the chilling 1973 poem, “A Fable,” Etheridge Knight (who released his debut collection in 1968 after an eight-year prison sentence) depicts seven incarcerated Black men and women arguing about the true path to freedom. The poem ends with the prisoners “still arguing; and to this day they are still in their prison cells, their stomachs / trembling with fear.” In stark contrast, editor Martin’s “(un)chained” defiantly declares hope in the face of mass incarceration. “trap our bodies / in shackles,” Martin writes, “as if you could lock up / our will to survive.” What makes Poemhood such a triumphant work is its uncompromising celebration of
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Black life, in spite of pain. By shuffling classic and contemporary poets together, the editors show how this tension plays out across time, but magic, restoration and joy always prevail. In the final poem, Nikki Giovanni writes, “We learn to negotiate / The space between / Imagination and possibility / Reality and probability.” The poets in this anthology negotiate the terms of celebration across time and experience, and the result is extraordinary. —Mariel Fechik
Wander in the Dark By Jumata Emil
MYSTERY
“Our privilege don’t work like theirs,” says a young Black man in Jumata Emil’s Wander in the Dark (Delacorte, $19.99, 9780593651858). He’s one character of many trying to navigate a system that sets Black men up to fail. In this riveting mystery, Emil uses his pen like a jagged knife, cutting open painful truths about how racism seeps through class and politics, before sewing up the wounds with the healing power of community. All Marcel wants to do is make things right with his half brother, Amir, even though their parents don’t get along and their lives are worlds apart. He’s shocked when Amir shows up to his swanky birthday party and even more shocked when Amir leaves with Marcel’s best friend, Chloe, a popular white girl with a penchant for making trouble. When Amir wakes up the next morning on Chloe’s sofa and finds her blood-soaked body in her bedroom, he panics. He knows what happens to young Black men in situations like this. Through chapters that alternate between the brothers’ perspectives, Emil slowly unmasks not only a killer but also a community built on lies. Emil’s tinderbox of a murder mystery is at its best when exploring the fractured family Marcel and Amir share. The gulf between the brothers—from their skin tones to their financial statuses—and how they attempt to bridge that divide composes the bedrock of the novel. Queer readers will also appreciate how Marcel’s sexuality is explored matter-of-factly. Shocking acts of racism appear about halfway through, but in Emil’s hands, the resulting pain and anger is also expertly excised by both love and justice to create a satisfying story. Truthful and twisted at the same time, Wander in the Dark is both a thrill and a delight. —Luis G. Rendon
How the Boogeyman Became a Poet By Tony Keith Jr.
MEMOIR
Tony Keith Jr. has been writing poems since age 13, and by his senior year of high school in 1999, he’s a well-liked kid with a beautiful girlfriend, a poet voted Prom King and the first in his family to go to college. But Keith’s perfect life is an illusion: His family is struggling financially after his mother split from his father; his grades aren’t high enough to get into college without effort; and he’s haunted by the Boogeyman, an unsettling alter ego born from the warping effect of his attempts to hide his Blackness and his gayness. As high school ends, Keith needs to figure out who he is and if he can embrace what he has tried so hard to reject. Now a spoken word poet and a hiphop educational leader, Keith explores his adolescence in How the Boogeyman Became a Poet (Katherine Tegen, $19.99, 9780063296008), a memoir-in-verse that includes poems he wrote in high school as well as photos of himself as a teenager. Keith’s love of poetry and language—and the power of wielding both—radiates from the pages. Beginning in his teen years, he rejects the notion that he must write like the white authors his English teacher loves and embraces the African American vernacular he speaks, refusing to compromise on its validity. Ultimately, it is his poetry that wards off the Boogeyman and empowers him to embrace his personal truths. Keith builds a strong personal community—“him: me: us: we”— even as he moves between friend groups in college, giving him people he can return to and fight for. Though details—putting CD-ROMs in a shared family computer and sneakily paying for a subscription for AOL Instant Messenger—firmly place the memoir in the ’90s, the things Keith endures will resonate with contemporary teenagers. The challenges of college, the struggles of understanding sexual identity, and the pressure to conform as a gay and Black person in a world that centers heterosexuality and whiteness are still relevant. Teens will find solace in his survival and flourishing as well as obtaining a glimpse of a fascinating time gone by. —Nicole Brinkley
interview | kacen callender © BELLA PORTER
The alchemy of empathy Having conquered several other genres, acclaimed author Kacen Callender discusses their young adult fantasy debut. Kacen Callender dedicates their first foray the tension that creates, Callender says, “For into young adult fantasy, Infinity Alchemist, me, it was always important that there not to “the younger me who always wanted to write be a Chosen One, to include the idea that a YA fantasy.” While everyone is powerful this might make one “That’s where a character and everyone is imagine a teenage magical, and everyone is built: inside the idea that is Chosen in the eyes Callender dreaming of a future as an author, we all have these wounds of the Source or the Callender explains it Creator or what have that we either inherited or you. I wanted to is actually in reference to their early days of explain how power experienced.” their career, when they is internal; power is struggled to write fantasy. “It was very difficult realizing that you are worthy without being at that time, for whatever reason, to get the story gaslit by the idea of societal power.” But out,” they say. “Infinity Alchemist had been Callender adds: “You can feel power for percolating for a lot of years, so it felt like a yourself and feel that self-worth, but there are massive triumph for me to finally write it.” still other people who have the power to decide What made this book such a challenge? that you aren’t worthy. I wanted those different Callender points to their struggle to pull versions of power to be in conversation.” together all the many threads of this narrative Callender has a history of telling the into a cohesive storyline: “I didn’t quite stories of characters whose identities aren’t understand plotting yet. often represented in media, Now, hopefully, I do.” and Infinity Alchemist Some readers might view continues that work with this focus on plot and action as its diverse cast. Ash meets a departure from Callender’s a 19-year-old apprentice previous books, which are named Ramsay Thorne, who character-driven and move is genderfluid, and the book at a slower tempo, titles that seamlessly shifts pronouns might be deemed “quiet.” In throughout the character’s Infinity Alchemist, “there’s arc. “Ramsay comes to life a lot of fighting scenes, a lot in that way because it is of explosive battles, a lot of going to be different for every excitement, alongside the reader, depending on where emotional depth,” Callender they last left the character. says. Yet with its theme of For example, I’m writing learning about one’s selfthe sequel now, so for me worth, Infinity Alchemist the last I saw Ramsay, he still has a characteristic was using he/him pronouns. Callender feeling to it. But for you, having just read Infinity Alchemist “With all of my books, I Infinity Alchemist, she was Tor, $19.99, 9781250890252 tend to focus on a theme, using she/her pronouns.” FANTASY some sort of internal healing Whether through the use and a message that I hope will resonate with of shifting pronouns or depicting a trusting readers,” they say. polyamorous relationship, Callender’s work One of the guiding principles of the fantasy makes more visible the lived realities of world of Infinity Alchemist is that everyone countless people, and Infinity Alchemist is has equal access to alchemy, but people still flooded with empathy and compassion. “That’s experience different degrees of success in one of the great beauties of being able to write learning alchemy, often due to the deliberate about these identities,” Callender says, as they manipulation of the system by those in power. explain how the imaginative act of reading Protagonist Ash Woods is unusually gifted, but allows anyone to “become” a character. he has been denied access to the training that “Even though you as a reader might not ever would make his power legitimate. Regarding understand all the ways an identity can work,
Visit BookPage.com to read our review of Infinity Alchemist.
you can for a moment become that queer Black trans kid, and you’re understanding all of their wounds and their traumas and their grief and their healing.” Callender expands on this idea: “Regardless of identity, that’s where a character is built: inside the idea that we all have these wounds that we either inherited or experienced. From my perspective, life is the story arc of healing those wounds.” That wisdom comes through in every page of Infinity Alchemist. In the book, as Ash and Ramsay are coming to trust each other, Ramsay lists some of Ash’s more frustrating qualities, claiming him to be “selfish . . . and hot-tempered, and irrational, and you act without thinking.” Then Ramsay pivots to Ash’s kindness and curiosity, explaining, “It’s lazy to put a multifaceted human being, created from the alchemy of the universe, into a box of good or bad. No one is only one of the two.” When I ask Callender about the apt specificity of “lazy” here, they laugh and agree that it’s the perfect word. “It’s easy to decide that someone is good or bad instead of wanting to do the work. It’s a lot of work to look at a person and consider their traumas and wounds and all that has built them to be the person who they are today.” We closed our time by discussing the relationships depicted in Infinity Alchemist and the way “polyamory reflects the concept of healing in the book, where everyone is worthy of love, and the idea that love cannot be limited.” Callender says, “I understand that some readers might ask why polyamory, or might not understand what it is as an identity. But it’s my hope that as there are more books with the topic of polyamory, it will be more accepted.” Acceptance, self-worth, healing, love. “What’s better than that?” I ask, to which Callender replies, “Exactly.” —Sara Beth West
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An artful adventure Ben Guterson’s love for department stores comes to life with magic and mandalas in a new middle grade series.
© HARVEY PHOTOGRAPHY
interview | ben guterson
Some of Ben Guterson’s most treasured childhood memories center around two now-defunct grand old department stores in downtown Seattle: Frederick & Nelson and The Bon Marché. They “were absolutely places of magic for me,” the author reminisces in a call from his home in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. “At Christmastime, I would go to the second floor and take the escalator down to the first floor. . . . [A]ll the decorations, the trees, the glitter, the tinsel, the displays, the lights, the color, everything slowly revealed itself to me and I’d think I was descending into the heart of winter wonderland,” he says. “I fell in love with departVisit BookPage.com to read our ment stores because of that.” review of The World-Famous Nine. Guterson’s appreciation of those bygone commerce centers and cultural touchstones wonderful illustrations immerse readers in the is on marvelously magical display in The dazzling world and unique denizens of The World-Famous Nine (Christy Ottaviano, Nine, and Guterson’s impressively detailed $16.99, 9780316484442), his inventive, excitmandalas grace the book’s pages as well. “I ing middle grade mystery-adventure novel set highly recommend it,” Guterson says about in the storied Number Nine Plaza department drawing mandalas. “It’s a really cool, crestore (aka “The Nine”). ative and relaxing thing to do. I don’t want The Nine is a blend of cleverly cultivated to sound too new-agey here, but . . . to engage experiences and artfully arranged merchanin a creative act that’s not verbal or word-oridise all under one roof. Unlike other departented in any way, I have found that to be ment stores, that roof is 19 stories in the air extremely helpful.” and has an enormous Ferris wheel on top While the mandalas will be new to of it. The luxurious floors below contain a Guterson’s fans, The World-Famous Nine’s monorail, a display with a real iceberg and plethora of puzzles and wordplay will feel real penguins, an art gallery, rotating restauhappily familiar to readers who delighted rants and more. in the code-cracking, riddle-solving aspects On the very first page of The Worldof his previous books: the Winterhouse trilFamous Nine, 11-year-old Zander Olinga ogy (Winterhouse, the first in the series and rides an escalator down to the store’s main floor and into an astonishing Guterson’s debut, was an Edgar Award and Agatha Award finalist) and new chapter of his life. What’s meant to be a fun five-week visit with The Einsteins of Vista Point. his glamorous grandmother Zina Winebee, who owns The Nine, while Although the author now has multiple mysteries under his writerly belt, his professor parents go on a research trip, soon turns into something he still finds it challenging to strike just the right balance: “You don’t much more thrilling and dangerous. Zander must undertake an urgent want to make the mystery or the solving of clues so easy that kids can quest to unravel long-held family secrets by solving peculiar puzzles spot it right away and then get frustrated with your hero, like, ‘Why is that main character so dumb when I figured and tracking down a lost object that will protect The Nine and everyone in it from “I think when you’re that age and it out already?’ ” But, he says, “You also a terrible fate. don’t want to make it so hard that, when you discover a book or an author it’s revealed, someone says, ‘No one ever That’s a tall order for a kid, to say the least, but Zander’s new friend Natasha that you love, it can just completely really could’ve figured that out!’ ” Novikov is confident the two of them Guterson has found that his true satsolidify a love of reading.” can figure things out. He’s afraid of isfaction and joy is writing for middle heights but great at solving puzzles, and grade readers. In fact, he’s got even more she knows the store inside and out. Besides, one of Zander’s hobbies is books on the way: The World-Famous Nine is the first in a series, creating mandalas, which are vital to their mission, if the ten-foot-tall with its sequel, The Hidden Workshop of Javier Preston forthcoming. sandstone boulder with “carved elaborate circular patterns” that has After all, he says, “I think when you’re that age and you discover a pride of place in The Nine is any indication. (Hint: it is.) book or an author that you love, it can just completely solidify a love Guterson’s own affinity for mandalas—he draws them daily—not of reading. I find it really exciting to think that maybe my books . . . only inspired key elements of the complex mystery in The World- could do for a kid what the books I love did for me when I was that age.” Famous Nine but also the artwork that appears within. Kristina Kister’s —Linda M. Castellitto
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reviews | children’s
H Amil and the After By Veera Hiranandani MIDDLE GRADE What happens to a family after a dangerous, life-changing and historic journey? That’s the focus of Veera Hiranandani’s wonderful Amil and the After (Kokila, $17.99, 9780525555063), which follows 12-year-old Amil and his family, who, during the Partition of India in 1948, have just migrated to Bombay from what would become Pakistan. It’s a worthy companion novel to Hiranandani’s Newbery Honoree The Night Diary, which tells the story of that journey through the perspective of Amil’s twin sister, Nisha. Amil and Nisha’s Hindu father tells them, “Everything is broken. Pakistan and the new India are like two eggs sitting on a ledge, having no idea what they’re going to grow up to be.” Similarly, his children are also in a precarious state before transformation. While Nisha flourishes in schoolwork and
The Book of Whys
By Gianni Rodari Illustrated by JooHee Yoon Translated by Antony Shugaar POETRY
From 1955 to 1958, Italian author Gianni Rodari wrote two newspaper columns for children: “The Mailbox of Whys” and “The Book of Whys.” With delightful illustrations by JooHee Yoon, The Book of Whys (Enchanted Lion, $27.95, 9781592703647) revisits Rodari’s whimsical responses to questions sent in by children throughout Italy. The collection begins with a question sure to captivate young readers: “Why are grownups always right?” Rodari’s endearing rhymed verse response concludes with a confirmation “that ‘grownups’ are always right / Except for when they’re wrong.” This willingness to engage with uncertainty is a hallmark of Rodari’s style, as is the way he moves from science to ancient history to silly digressions. Rodari plays with proverbs, often to challenge them. When responding to the question “Why is gold so precious?” he refers to the “silence is golden” proverb, noting how it isn’t always true, especially when addressing injustice:
writing, Amil is dyslexic and loves to draw. Amil begins making a series of drawings about their new life as a way of honoring their Muslim mother, who died in childbirth. “I thought we were over the bad stuff here in Bombay,” Amil confesses. “We’re safe and getting back to a normal life, I guess, but I’m still sad a lot of the time.” Everyone is trying to find their way, from their father to their homesick grandmother and Kazi, their beloved Muslim cook. Nisha is slowly emerging from selective mutism, and both Amil and Nisha help each other through occasional panic attacks stemming from their harrowing escape. Hiranandani depicts the twins’ relationship exceptionally well, deeply developing her characters as they bounce their
thoughts and fears off of each other. This is an excellent work of historical fiction, seamlessly and sensitively integrating the personal and the political. A particularly empathetic young man, Amil wonders why he and his family managed to survive their migration while others perished or ended up in refugee camps instead of a comfortable apartment. After befriending Vishal, who is homeless and without family, Amil wonders why his new friend is “a boy exactly like he was, just unlucky instead of lucky.” With Amil and the After, Veera Hiranandani masterfully presents a powerful, unvarnished examination of difficult subject matter while paving the way forward with hope and love. —Alice Cary
“Those in the wrong just keep on going if those in the right have nothing to say.” In this way, Rodari invites his readers to engage with larger questions, including ethical ones. Yoon’s straightforward colored pencil drawings evoke a childlike feel. Each piece provides a splash of color as well as a distinct design element, with some illustrations filling a whole page, others occupying only a small corner. Together, art and text combine for a unique, wonder-driven work. —Sara Beth West
for lunch, and eating it leads his peers to give him a new nickname: “Egg Boy.” Alterations (Union Square, $24.99, 9781454945840) is Ray Xu’s debut graphic novel, but he is well-versed in drawing funny stories, with experience as a storyboard artist for films such as Captain Underpants. Kevin’s story is hilarious and heartfelt, with semi-autobiographical elements from Xu’s childhood in Toronto in the ’90s. Alterations is like the century egg Kevin eats. On the outside, it looks like one thing: a story about school drama, but once you bite in, you realize the family dynamics are an unexpected umami flavor you can’t ignore. The graphic elements are lively and entertaining. An embedded narrative of a fanfiction comic that Kevin is creating for a series called Star Odysseys adds a layer that will keep readers engaged, even if it does occasionally result in abrupt transitions. Background colors pop with cartoon-like onomatopoeias. The colors of the narration boxes helpfully change throughout: yellow for Kevin’s story, blue for the fanfiction comics, and pink for Popo’s folktales. Semi-autobiographical graphic novels for middle grade readers are booming, and rightfully so. A tad more fantastical than Dan Santat’s A First Time for Everything and a bit more realistic than Yehudi Mercado’s Chunky, Alterations will certainly appeal to fans of both. —Emily Koch
Alterations By Ray Xu
MIDDLE GRADE
Kevin Lee just wants space and time to draw comics. At home, if he’s not bickering with his sister, Betty, he needs to help their single mom at her alteration shop. Plus, his grandmother has been staying with them for the last six months. Though Kevin loves Popo, he also finds her incredibly embarrassing. School isn’t much better, as Kevin stands out as one of the only three Asian Canadian students. Things go from bad to worse when Popo sends Kevin to school with a century egg
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reviews | children’s What’s New, Daniel? By Micha Archer
PICTURE BOOK
Micha Archer’s spectacularly colorful collages in What’s New, Daniel? (Nancy Paulsen, $18.99, 9780593461303) tell the story of a young boy’s day in the park. Daniel runs to meet his grandfather, who asks, “What’s new?” Daniel responds literally: “Um, I don’t know yet.” Daniel heads deeper into the park to retrieve some answers. What’s new with his favorite rock? What’s new with the redwing blackbirds, Mother Duck, Polliwog, Snake and other budding life in the lush park that the boy and grandfather visit? With abundant curiosity, Daniel explores every nook of what is clearly one of his favorite places in the city. Archer presents a verdant park teeming with life, a pocket in a big and bustling city. Her vivid palette showcases nearly every shade of green—the true star of this show—but also warm yellows (the flowers Butterfly lands on), rich rust colors (the oak tree in which Squirrel builds her nest), and the gleaming blues and teals of the sky and water. As in her previous books featuring Daniel (Daniel’s Good Day and Daniel Finds a Poem), Archer achieves impressive textures and details in the illustrations, creating artwork to pore over. What’s New, Daniel? not only captures an intergenerational bond but also celebrates the joy with which children take in the natural world. Daniel revels in the shimmering water of the pond, the cattails sending seeds into the wind, the unfurling leaves on the fern, and the delicate wings of a butterfly, not to mention his own growing body. As Daniel puts it, with unbridled cheer, “So many things are new!” —Julie Danielson
H Harriet’s Reflections By Marion Kadi
PICTURE BOOK
A lion dies, and his lonely, bored reflection goes in search of something new to represent. Such is the unusual premise of Marion Kadi’s fanciful Harriet’s Reflections (Eerdmans, $18.99, 9780802856210), which
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follows a girl who learns valuable lessons about herself in the process of becoming attached to this strange alter ego. Kadi’s spare, humorous text gives momentum to this fun, surprising romp. After the lion’s reflection scouts around— nixing the idea of reflecting a flower or a duck—he spots Harriet and leaves behind a trail of puddles (a lovely detail) as he makes his way to peer in her window. The next morning, as Harriet heads to school, the beastly reflection is waiting and pounces with wild abandon into Harriet’s reflection in a water puddle. Kadi’s boldly colorful, swirling art is outstanding, lending energy to each scene and adding oodles of personality to the lonely, soul-seeking lion as well as to Harriet, who at the start of the tale sports a big frown. Each page bursts with vibrantly contrasting oranges, blues, greens and yellows; Kadi’s style is reminiscent of Matisse in both style and color, and the lion’s swirling mane and adorable, mischievous expressions are endearing. Harriet initially finds that her fierce new reflection makes her happier at school. However, problems soon arise, as she and her reflection begin romping “around the schoolyard like wild beasts.” Harriet comes to yearn for her own reflection and devises a clever way to reclaim it. Harriet’s Reflections is a creative tale about trying on new personalities as well as finding one’s true self. Young readers will enjoy every humorous step of Harriet and her lion alter ego’s search for a balanced coexistence. —Alice Cary
This Little Kitty in the Garden By Karen Obuhanych
PICTURE BOOK
Spring is here, so it’s time to garden! This follow-up to This Little Kitty follows the same mischievous cats outside where they discover all the garden has to offer. Karen Obuhanych’s This Little Kitty in the Garden (Knopf, $21.99, 9780593435175) is a bright celebration of spring. Pairing rhythmic, rhyming text that begs to be read aloud with bold, playful illustrations, Obuhanych captures each kitten’s personality on every page. Whether they are finding the best nap spot, chewing a stray weed, splishing and splashing in the watering can or digging the perfect hole for a little seed, these feisty pets find
excitement in their garden. Readers will enjoy searching the spreads for all of the sneaky cats. Even if they cannot be found, they are sure to have left dirty paw prints behind! Use this charming story to introduce young readers to gardening, or even the joys and woes of pet ownership. While This Little Kitty in the Garden is sure to attract cat lovers and gardeners alike, one only needs a sense of humor to enjoy this lovely spring romp. Don’t be surprised if young readers ask for This Little Kitty in the Garden over and over again! —Callie Ann Starkey
H The Last Stand
By Antwan Eady Illustrated by Jarrett Pumphrey, Jerome Pumphrey PICTURE BOOK
A once-thriving farmers market seems to be in decline, but its people are not defeated, and its community is not without hope. The Last Stand (Knopf, $18.99, 9780593480571) tells the story of a grandfather-grandson duo who keep their vegetable stand going for the neighbors who rely on them. Moving and gently passionate, this picture book by Antwan Eady (Nigel and the Moon), with illustrations from Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey, explores determination, tradition, community and love. A note of appreciation for the clever title: Papa’s stall is indeed the last stand remaining at the market, but the title is also a declaration of resolve. Through precise, poetic observations from the grandson’s point of view, Eady thoughtfully narrates the way Papa moves, looks and sounds. Outwardly straightforward and childlike, these descriptions are layered with meaning and wisdom. Eady’s well-chosen words build a subtle sense of pride and determination. Readers will feel the love Eady has for his rural South Carolina background, which inspired this warm book. Fans of the Pumphrey brothers’ The Old Truck will be charmed anew by their handcrafted stamp artwork. Colorful and cheerful, The Last Stand radiates compassion and purpose; this is artwork that feels alive. A strong sense of place permeates each scene, and small details make this world feel lived-in— slightly worn and tired perhaps, but resolute. The Pumphreys fill the pages with people with whom you feel an instant connection, making the book welcoming and homey. A revealing and poignant author’s note adds yet another layer to this heartfelt story through
feature | meet the author
A Flicker of Hope
By Cynthia Harmony Illustrated by Devon Holzwarth PICTURE BOOK
Every year, Lucía looks forward to watching the northern migration of the monarch butterflies —but this year, her Papá is leaving with them, in order to find seasonal farm work to support his family. Lucía spends the warm months without him or her beloved monarcas, strumming on his guitarra when she gets lonely. As autumn returns, Lucía counts down the days until those she loves return to her. Author Cynthia Harmony and illustrator Devon Holzwarth have crafted a beautiful story about a migrant farmer’s family in A Flicker of Hope: A Story of Migration (Viking, $18.99, 9780593525760). Though Lucía and Papá’s desire to see each other again is bittersweet and moving, the real standout is Holzwarth’s colorful illustration work. Monarch butterflies alight on nearly every page and morph into what Lucía and Papá need them to be: the music strummed from a guitar, a path the car takes to work, Día de los Muertos skulls. Back matter gives information about the monarch reserve in Mexico and elaborates on the connection between indigenous Mazahua culture and the butterfly, particularly its connection to Día de los Muertos. Readers desiring more extensive ecological and political details about seasonal work will need to find them elsewhere, as the back matter limits itself to discussing the metaphor of the book and only briefly touches upon the hardships posed by seasonal harvesting in America, and how this is the only choice for many Michoacán workers. For those who love butterflies or those looking for picture books that explore an aspect of the immigrant experience, A Flicker of Hope will be a meaningful, beautifully illustrated addition to their shelves. —Nicole Brinkley
meet Shawn Harris
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hawn Harris’ authorial debut, Have You Ever Seen a Flower?, received a Caldecott Honor. Harris has also illustrated a number of other books, including Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers and A Polar Bear in the Snow by Mac Barnett, for which Harris’ cut-paper art received the 2021 Bull-Bransom Award. The protagonist of The Teeny-Weeny Unicorn (Knopf, $18.99, 9780593571880) lives in a world made for his much larger brethren—until one day he runs away, and meets an even tinier gnome, who reframes his idea of “the right size.”
© LAUREN HARRIS
an educational tribute to the historic—and ongoing—struggles of Indigenous and Black farmers. Papa and his grandson may be the only ones still selling at the market, but they aren’t truly alone: Every inch of The Last Stand is a declaration of solidarity, perseverance and an intent to make a stand. —Jill Lorenzini
How would you describe your book?
Who has been the biggest influence on your work?
Who was your childhood hero?
What books did you enjoy as a child?
What one thing would you like to learn to do?
What message would you like to send to young readers?
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