January 2023 BookPage

2023 MOST anticipated DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

JAN 2023

Looking ahead to a year of new books from TOM HANKS, S.A. COSBY, JENNY ODELL, KJ CHARLES, MARTHA WELLS and BRIAN SELZNICK

ALSO INSIDE: Life-affirming lessons • Novelists get personal • Wintry picture books

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JANUARY 2023

features

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feature | manga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Not sure where to start with manga? Pick a series based on your favorite literary genre

q&a | jessica johns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 A visceral horror debut exhumes the ghosts that grief leaves behind

interview | de’shawn charles winslow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 young adult. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 children’s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

Return to the community of West Mills, now the setting of a terrible crime

cover story | 2023 preview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The editors of BookPage share their most anticipated books of the new year

feature | self-help. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Start the year right with life-affirming lessons

interview | john hendrickson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The author of Life on Delay steps up to the mic—stutter and all

feature | grief memoirs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Transforming personal tragedies into moving tales of beauty, loss and love

q&a | rachel hawkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The author’s latest thriller is Frankenstein meets Fleetwood Mac

feature | bestseller watch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

columns lifestyles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 book clubs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 romance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 audio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 whodunit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 cozies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Discover four new books from chart-topping writers

q&a | maureen johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The bestselling author’s beloved teen sleuth takes a case in jolly old England

q&a | claire swinarski. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 An inspiring middle grade mystery explores the cost of telling the truth

feature | picture books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Find magic during the coldest season of the year

feature | meet the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Meet author-illustrator Cori Doerrfeld and read a review of her picture book, Beneath

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feature | manga

Meet your manga match Sales of manga—Japanese comics and graphic novels—have skyrocketed in the U.S., with a record-setting 160% growth between 2020 and 2021. Part of the appeal is the format’s wide range of genres, but this can also make it difficult to decide where to start. If you’re looking to dip your toes into manga, here are some series to try based on your favorite genre.

If you like romance, try:

Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku

By Fujita

Kodansha, 9781632367044

This irresistible series isn’t afraid of a trope: Friends-to-lovers, relationship of convenience and workplace romance appear in the first volume alone! The sixth and final volume was released in 2022.

If you like horror, try:

Uzumaki

By Junji Ito

Viz Media, 9781421561325

A triple Eisner Award winner, Ito is one of Japan’s most beloved contemporary horror writers, and this three-volume series is especially popular.

It’s about a creepy Japanese coastal town that is haunted by “the hypnotic secret shape of the world.” (Listen, don’t pick up Japanese horror if you’re not ready to get weird.)

If you like science fiction, try:

Dinosaur Sanctuary

By Itaru Kinoshita In this series, “dinosaur reserves” exist thanks to the 1946 discovery of a remote island where the beasts still roamed. But now dinosaurs are endangered again, and newbie zookeeper Suma Suzume wants to change that. If you’re looking for a cuter, kinder version of Jurassic Park, this Seven Seas, 9781685793241 could be it.

If you like mystery, try:

Moriarty the Patriot

By Ryosuke Takeuchi

Viz Media, 9781974717156

4

Class conflict meets Arthur Conan Doyle in this riff on the backstory of Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Moriarty, who teams up with his two adopted brothers to get justice for the proletariat. Ten volumes are currently available, with at least two more to come.

lifestyles

by susannah felts

H Slow Birding Despite filling feeders and growing native plants, I continue to be disappointed by the birds that frequent our yard. Cardinals, sparrows, chickadees­—but where are the goldfinches, if not the bluebirds? Joan E. Strassmann’s Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard (TarcherPerigee, $27, 9780593329924) challenges me to remember that there’s much to observe and learn about even our most quotidian avian neighbors. In a corrective to bird-watching as tally-driven competitive hunt, here’s an invitation to appreciate the magic of the ordinary creatures with whom you cohabitate, rather than rush all over tarnation chasing glimpses of rare or elusive ones. Strassmann’s exploration is personal and hyperlocal: In lively, conversational prose, she explores birds that populate a close radius around her own home in St. Louis, Missouri, such as robins, mockingbirds, blue jays and even the oft-maligned European starling.

Women Holding Things I’ve been in the unofficial fan club of author and illustrator Maira Kalman for years, so I can’t pass up the opportunity to applaud her latest work, Women Holding Things (Harper Design, $32.50, 9780062846679), which combines original paintings with both free verse and prose. Women, Kalman notes in this tender and revealing book, must hold a lot, from “the children and the food” to “the sorrows / and the triumphs.” In her paintings, women hold things real and intangible: a can of worms, opinions about modern art. Sometimes she features a famous woman, such as Gertrude Stein, “holding true to herself / writing things very few people / liked or even read.” Sometimes she tells deeply personal stories about the paintings, and I love those parts best. Despite the title, there aren’t just women featured here but also a few men—and even things, holding other things. “It is hard work / to hold everything,” she writes, “and it never ends.”

How to Study Magic If you’ve ever set foot in an occult shop, you’ve probably experienced the wooziness of information overload: What is all this stuff, and where do I start? There is no shortage of books on spellwork, tarot, astrology, witchcraft, Wicca, herbalism and more, but we all know it’s hard to drink from a firehose. Enter Sarah Lyons, a Brooklyn-based witch and activist who has created the accessible, neatly designed overview any magic rookie needs. How to Study Magic (Running Press, $20, 9780762479207) lays out the basics in a straight-talking manner, complemented by duotone illustrations and line drawings by Tobias Göbel. Ceremonial magic, chaos magic, paganism: All are different things, and this book explains their differences. It won’t answer every question, but it will establish familiarity and point you in the direction of the best further reading. I’m not sure the subject of magic can really be demystified, but this book comes mighty close.

Susannah Felts is a Nashville-based writer and co-founder of The Porch, a literary arts organization. She enjoys anything paper- or plant-related.

book clubs

by julie hale

Stranger than fiction Jami Attenberg (All This Could Be Yours) looks back on her years as a roaming artist in I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (Ecco, $17.99, 9780063039803). Attenberg has lived an uncompromising life as a writer, and she muses about her choices in this forthright memoir.

Frequently crossing the country to promote her books, Attenberg is most at home when she’s on the move. The nature of the creative process and the human need for connection are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.

In I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Vintage, $17, 9780525436058), Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet) recalls the harrowing moments that have shaped her as a woman and mother. From an illness that almost claimed her life Your favorite novelists as a child to a dangerous dive off a cliff in Scotland, O’Farrell details get personal in these her many near-death experiences.

Over the course of 17 chapters, revealing memoirs. she considers life’s impermanence and the ways in which our bodies betray us. The result is an extraordinary narrative full of poetry and courage.

Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty) delivers a compelling account of their artistic growth and search for identity in Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (Riverhead, $16, 9780593329207). Composed of letters the author writes to friends and colleagues, the narrative is a captivating chronicle of personal transformation.

Emezi, who hails from Nigeria, put down roots in New Orleans and has experienced literary success, even as they continued to seek a more authentic existence. Uncertainty and longing animate their correspondence, and Emezi uses the epistolary form to great effect as they question long-held notions of identity, gender and family.

Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) reflects on the costs of structural racism in Men We Reaped: A Memoir (Bloomsbury, $17, 9781608197651).

The death of her brother and a number of male friends inspired Ward to explore mortality and how loss impacts the living. In this searing memoir, she remembers her Mississippi upbringing and the ways in which economic inequality, drugs and societal stressors create an environment where Black men are needlessly sacrificed. Ward writes with sensitivity about mourning and moving forward, and themes of race, grief and gender will inspire meaningful dialogue among readers.

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A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale recommends the best paperback books to spark discussion in your reading group.

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by christie ridgway

H A Love by Design Elizabeth Everett’s praiseworthy Secret Scientists of London series returns with A Love by Design (Berkley, $17, 9780593200667). Engineer Margaret Gault has recently returned to London from Paris and is intent on opening her own firm, despite all the struggles that await a businesswoman in Victorian England. Maggie quickly finds a promising commission, but she cannot avoid George Willis, the Earl Grantham, who broke her heart years ago. Unfortunately, George has grown into an extraordinarily handsome man with extraordinary goals—including educating children, regardless of gender. But Maggie can’t allow her feelings for him to get in the way of her dreams. It’s easy to sympathize with brainy Maggie and her quest for independence, and George proves to be a hero worthy of her. The fight for women’s rights is front and center, giving heft to this otherwise lighthearted romance.

Lunar Love As Lauren Kung Jessen’s Lunar Love (Forever, $15.99, 9781538710258) begins, Olivia Huang Christenson has just assumed responsibility for the titular matchmaking business, which is based on the Chinese zodiac. Her grandmother built Lunar Love from the ground up, and Olivia is determined to put its success above everything else, including her heart. But both are at risk when she has a meet cute with charming startup advisor Bennett O’Brien. Lunar Love relies on personal touches like dating coaching, and Olivia thinks Bennett’s app takes all the humanity out of romance.

To prove whose method works best, they make a very public bet to find matches for each other. Along the way, they bond over their multiracial heritages (she’s Chinese, Norwegian and Scottish; he’s Chinese and Irish) while enjoying some absolutely mouthwatering dates, like Chinese baking classes and a dumpling and beer festival. Told in Olivia’s fresh first-person voice, this story will have readers rooting for her to realize that Bennett is her perfect match.

The Heretic Royal A princess struggles to find her place in her family in G.A. Aiken’s latest entry in the Scarred Earth Saga, The Heretic Royal (Kensington, $16.95, 9781496735089). Ainsley Farmerson has been overshadowed by her older sisters all her life—two are now queens (one is, unfortunately, extremely evil), and a third is a ruthless war monk—so Ainsley decides to step up. At her side is rugged centaur Gruffyn, and as they face down dragons, demons and her evil sister’s machinations, Ainsley and Gruffyn forge an unbreakable bond. This tale of magic and mayhem is told from multiple perspectives, and readers will need to keep their wits about them as the action speeds along and the dialogue pings among sarcastic dragons, earnest fathers and obnoxious siblings.

Christie Ridgway is a lifelong romance reader and a published romance novelist of over 60 books.

audio

H Coraline Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (Quill Tree, 3.5 hours) is a near-perfect horror story, pitting brave but misunderstood Coraline against a narcissistic monster in a battle for her soul. This treasure of a middle grade novel, beloved by readers of all ages, is now available in a new audiobook, performed by a full cast for the first time. All 11 actors contribute to an excellent re-creation of Gaiman’s creepy world, but three performers deserve special mention. Julian Rhind-Tutt is excellent as the narrator, Julian Clary is totally convincing as a smug but surprisingly helpful cat, and teenage actor Pixie Davies conveys all of Coraline’s complexity—her courage and loyalty, as well as her whininess and selfishness—with skill and confidence.

—Deborah Mason

Nerd As a New York Times critic-at-large, Maya Phillips has one of the more unusual (and to many, most enviable) beats: writing about comics, superheroes, anime and fan culture.

Phillips’ Nerd (Simon & Schuster Audio, 9.5 hours) collects nine essays on everything from New York City as a superhero haven to the evolution of Saturday morning cartoons. Phillips, who narrates her book, conveys not only her clear fondness for these characters and worlds but also her appreciation for the growing acceptance of so-called “nerd” culture.

—Norah Piehl

New Year

NEW AUDIOBOOKS READ BY SCOTT BRICK

READ BY A FULL CAST

READ BY KARISSA VACKER

READ BY HEATHER AGYEPONG

READ BY ANGELA DAWE

READ BY CASSANDRA CAMPBELL

READ BY MICHAEL DAVID AXTELL & LAUREN FORTGANG

READ BY STEPHEN SHANAHAN

Rest Is Resistance Rest Is Resistance (Hachette Audio, 5.5 hours) is a powerful reminder to prioritize mental health and overall well-being. To listeners who are smothered and exhausted by “grind culture,” author and narrator Tricia Hersey offers a fierce clarion call.

—G. Robert Frazier

Our Missing Hearts Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Audio, 10 hours) is set in a dystopian near-future in which the United States exists under a mandate that claims to uphold patriotism by banning books, relocating children and condemning anything “un-American.”

Actor Lucy Liu’s voice is calm and steady but also follows the book’s highs and lows, matching Ng’s lyrical prose to bring out the story’s emotion, mystery and heartbreak.

—Tami Orendain

Have I Told You This Already?

In Have I Told You This Already? (Random House Audio, 4.5 hours), beloved actor Lauren Graham offers conversational, witty essays about everything from changing trends in undergarments to the process of coming to terms with aging. Longtime fans will likely feel a little “Gilmore Girls” nostalgia while listening to her deliver these frank, honest anecdotes.

—Norah Piehl

macmillan audio 7

whodunit

by bruce tierney

Better the Blood

Blaze Me a Sun

Māori screenwriter and director Michael Bennett’s first novel, Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly, $27, 9780802160607), begins with a flashback to 1863, the early days of New Zealand’s colonization, as a daguerreotype, an early type of photograph, is being taken. The picture has a chilling subject: a small group of British soldiers posed alongside the hanged body of a Māori chief.

Flash forward to modern times, when the descendants of the soldiers in the daguerreotype begin to die violently. The case is assigned to Auckland police investigator Hana Westerman.

Few investigators are better suited to the job: Hana possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of her Māori culture and history. As she gets closer and closer to identifying the perpetrator, she begins to see that the crimes are not so much a type of revenge as they are a flawed attempt to restore balance to a world gone awry. She is able to identify a couple of the potential targets, but the killer is always one step ahead. Then the unthinkable happens: Hana’s family is targeted, including her teenage daughter.

With plenty of suspense, sympathetically drawn characters and crisp dialogue, Better the Blood promises to be the start of a long and rewarding literary career for Bennett.

On the same February night that Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme is assassinated in Stockholm in 1986, a woman is raped and murdered in the small town of Halland. Police receive an ominous phone call in which the anonymous killer says, “I’m going to do it again.” The investigation goes largely unnoticed by the media, as the attention of the nation is on the Palme assassination. For the rest of his career, and indeed for the rest of his life, police officer Sven Jörgensson is plagued by his failure to solve the crimes.

In a parallel plot in the present day, a recently divorced writer whom the book refers to only by his nickname, “Moth,” has moved back to Halland, his childhood home. Somewhat at loose ends, he decides to interview some of the people who were central to the unsolved crime and possibly reanimate his muse in the process.

Blaze Me a Sun (Hogarth, $28, 9780593449356), the American debut of author Christoffer Carlsson, is part police procedural, part modern inquiry into a very cold case and part sociological study of the evolution of Swedish society in the post-Palme years. The latest in a long streak of Swedish-language bestsellers for Carlsson, Blaze Me a Sun is further proof that he is a worthy heir to titans such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and Håkan Nesser.

H The Motion Picture Teller In 1996 Bangkok, Supot Yongjaiyut is a mail carrier who is “somewhat economical when it [comes] to facial expressions. . . . He had feelings as deep as any, but they rarely inconvenienced his face.”

His best friend, Ali, runs a video store, which allows the two to pursue their obsession with cinema, a love so profound that they watch movies without subtitles and guess at plot and dialogue. When Ali buys a new box of VHS tapes, neither suspects that one of the films will turn out to be an obscure masterpiece, Bangkok 2010.

Colin Cotterill’s The Motion Picture Teller (Soho Crime, $27.95, 9781641294355) follows Supot and Ali’s efforts to unearth the film’s history, creators and especially the identity of its lissome female lead.

There is no real crime to be solved, per se, but that doesn’t stop the pair of intrepid investigators from pursuing leads, interviewing persons of interest and trying to answer the burning question of why Bangkok 2010 was never released publicly.

Supot ventures to Thailand’s far north, and when he is relieved of his only remaining copy of the film, he becomes a reluctant raconteur, capturing the film in narrative. A motion picture teller, if you will.

By turns witty, warm, charming and poignant, The Motion Picture Teller is perhaps Cotterill’s finest novel thus far.

H Everybody Knows Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows (Mulholland, $28, 9780316457910) bounces between two protagonists. The first is Mae Pruett, known in Los Angeles as a “black bag publicist.” Rather than keep people in the limelight, she keeps them out of public view, especially when they are in hot water of some sort. The second is ex-cop Chris Tamburro, whose current job title is “fist.” It could scarcely be more apropos: He roughs up whomever the rich deem deserving, getting assignments through a web of proxy firms and shady lawyers.

When Mae’s boss is shot and killed outside of the Beverly Hills Hotel, ostensibly by a gangbanger, she suspects something much more complex, but the reality will be even worse. As she investigates, she uncovers a network of powerful Southern California elites pulling all the strings and pushing all the buttons in their pursuit of power. A missing pregnant teen holds the key to a conspiracy with tentacles reaching into the entertainment industry, the political arena and pretty much every law enforcement agency working the greater Los Angeles area.

Fans of neo-noir will find a lot to like here, as Harper displays an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and Hollywood history as he spins a tale that isn’t just ripped from the headlines—it’s probably predicting them.

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.

8

q&a | jessica johns © MADISON KERR

What dreams may come In her visceral debut, Jessica Johns exhumes the ghosts that grief leaves behind.

Mackenzie, a young Cree woman in Vancouver, British Columbia, is being haunted by her dreams. She returns night after night to the place where her sister, Sabrina, died, and her nightmares are beginning to reach into reality. Desperate for answers and relief, she returns to her hometown of High Prairie, Alberta, to ask her family for help—but once there, her dreams only grow stronger. We talked to Nehiyaw author Jessica Johns, a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta, about the lingering nature of loss, Bad Cree’s journey from short story to novel, and what makes a great dive bar.

or “right” and “wrong” ways I’ve tried to learn, the mistakes I’ve made, the shame I’ve felt in not knowing, when that shame doesn’t belong to me but to the people and powers who forced this separation in the first place. So I wanted to write characters who go through those same things. Characters who don’t always “do the right thing”—whatever that means—who stumble and struggle and are still loved.

Grief is a major element of Mackenzie’s arc.

Did you find yourself tapping into your own experiences when writing?

I think losing people we love is one of the most horrific things someone can experiBad Cree first took form ence, so it makes sense that as a short story. Why did it’s often an element of horyou choose to turn it into ror. I’ve lost many friends and a novel? family members, including In an interview about their most recently my papa, Don poetry collection, Everything Smith (my dad’s dad), who Is a Deathly Flower, the brilpassed away as I was writing liant writer Maneo Mohale Bad Cree. I think I’ve been said, “I wrote this book in a perpetual state of grief because I wanted to sleep. for many years. And I think, Because there were dogs in many ways, I have been at my door, and they were grappling with the same awful,” and nothing has ever things Mackenzie is: trying to resonated with me more. make sense of losses that feel I wrote the short story verimpossible to make sense of; Bad Cree sion of Bad Cree, and that trying to continue a life that Doubleday, $27, ​​9780385548694 story haunted me. The dogs feels absolutely empty when at my door were the characsomeone you love leaves it.

Horror ters, barking. They had more I learned a lot more about life to live, more places to go, than the short death from a Cree worldview as I was working on the novel, thanks to teachings from Jo-Ann story allowed. So I knew I had to keep writing and expand the story. Like Mohale, I just wanted Saddleback and Jerry Saddleback, such as where to sleep again. our ancestors go once they leave this earth and how we can still honor and connect with them One of the themes you explore in Bad Cree is while we’re here. That helped me see my own the impact of separation from place, people, losses in a new way, and those teachings helped traditions, what’s “right” and so on. What inform the comfort Mackenzie eventually feels with her losses as well. drew you to this topic?

But there are other layers to the grief in this I think about the generational trauma and effects of the intentional separation of Indigenous peonovel that go unreconciled: ecological grief as ples from their communities, languages, trathe land continues to undergo extraction and ditions and families by the Canadian state all abandonment, for example. I think this is also the time. I think about it because I don’t have fertile ground for horror because it’s a reflection a choice not to. of real life. It’s a horror we’re currently living.

I also think about the ways in which I, along with many Indigenous peoples separated from Horror protagonists are often isolated, but the teachings and knowledges that are our Mackenzie is surrounded by a female supinherent rights to know, have tried to connect port system. Why was it important to you to to that again. I think about the “good” and “bad” create this network of women? What did this

Visit BookPage.com to read our review of Bad Cree.

element of the story open up for you?

It was important for me to show how Indigenous women and queer Indigenous people always show up for one another. I’ve never seen a fiercer kind of love and protection than when an aunty goes to bat for someone she loves. It’s terrifying and beautiful.

Mackenzie is surrounded by women and femmes who love her deeply, but it’s a love she’s not willing to accept because she doesn’t think she deserves it. In addition to grief, she feels a lot of guilt for some past choices she’s made. So a big aspect of this novel is seeing if Mackenzie will be accountable to those mistakes and let herself be loved again by people who never stopped.

I could almost smell the stale beer when I was reading the scenes set at the Duster, the local dive bar. What do you think are the essential elements of a good dive, and did you base the Duster on a real-life spot?

Yes! The Stardust (the Duster) is a real-life dive bar my mom used to go to when she lived in High Level, Alberta. I visited High Level a few years ago, when I was around the same age my mom would have been when she lived there. I went out to the Stardust one night, and I loved thinking about the fact that I was walking around a bar that she had spent time in 20 years earlier, that we’d have different memories of the same place. It’s its own kind of ghost story.

The truth is, I LOVE a good dive bar. I always write them into my stories as places of significance. I think that bars, with the people who frequent them and the stories that live in the walls, are incredibly interesting spaces. As for what makes a good dive: comfy booths, karaoke and at least one working pool table.

—Chris Pickens

9

interview | de’shawn charles winslow

NOWHERE HAS SECRETS QUITE LIKE A SMALL TOWN Return to the community of West Mills, now the setting of a terrible crime.

A triple murder is at the center of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s superb death. Before Winslow was born to his father’s second wife, his father had second novel about the sleepy fictional town of West Mills, North Carolina, five children by age 24 with his first wife. His father also spent some time where rumors run rampant and famin prison for house burglaries but ily histories trace back through time refused to discuss it. Of course, some like vines of wisteria. questions can never be answered, so Winslow began writing fiction about Decent People, set in 1976, is quite different from Winslow’s debut novel, his father instead—and then eventuIn West Mills, a multigenerational ally about West Mills. saga spanning the 1940s through the The seed for Decent People ’80s that won the Center for Fiction emerged at a family gathering, when First Novel Prize in 2019. But both Winslow’s aunt asked his mother if she recalled the tragic deaths of books are character-driven treasures, three older women from decades and while no major characters are the same, fans will recognize crossover earlier. The women always drove to figures and family names. church together, and presumably Winslow says he always planned due to some sort of vehicle mishap, to write more about West Mills, and they drove into the town’s canal creating Decent People was in some and drowned. ways more straightforward than his Winslow started writing the story first book. “A murder mystery isn’t with gusto, assuming that the accigoing to go on for 20 years,” he says. dental drownings would lead to rev“Keeping the scope short made elations about the characters who things easier for me.” The author knew the deceased. However, he speaks from his home in Atlanta, quickly found himself bored with his Georgia, where he and his partner plot. “I had all this social commentary (both native Southerners) moved a down about homophobia and drugs,” year ago after giving in to “city burnhe recalls, “but it needed something out” in New York City. else. And that’s when I turned it into three people who were murdered.”

With a population of about a thousand, West Mills is based on Decent People opens as 60-yearWinslow’s mother’s hometown of old Jo Wright retires from Harlem to South Mills, North Carolina. He her childhood home of West Mills. changed the town’s name after feelShe has barely gotten out of her car ing bogged down by his quest for when she learns that three people historical accuracy. (A canal runs have just been murdered: the town’s through both places, for instance, prominent Black doctor, Dr. Marian but in Winslow’s creation, the water Harmon, and her two adult siblings. divides the racially segregated Jo’s fiancé, Lymp Seymore, is suscommunity.) pected of shooting the trio, who are Therein lies a foundational truth of his half siblings.

Jo is calm, smart and a bit glamorWinslow’s writing life: Nonfiction can H Decent People bring inspiration, but fiction allows ous, an amateur investigator whose Bloomsbury, $28, 9781635575323 him “to be free to create worlds [by] nearly 6-foot height catches people’s using true information as the seed.” attention. “If she was based on anyHistorical Fiction He can trace this inclination back to one at all, it would be Jessica Fletcher the earliest days of his career. from ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ ” Winslow says. I suggest that she could also be “I didn’t come from a bookish family at all,” Winslow says. “I do vaguely perfectly portrayed by Emmy Award-winning actor Sheryl Lee Ralph of remember some Dr. Suess books, but no one was really reading them to ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.” “Now that you’ve put that in my brain,” he me,” so he used them as coloring books instead. After discovering Toni says, laughing, “I’m going to envision her as Jo!” Morrison’s Beloved in college, he decided to try his hand at writing. The As Jo begins investigating the murders, she acknowledges the history of hope was to write his father’s story to better understand him after his Black people doing “their own legwork and [gathering] information the

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© JULIE R. KERESZTES

cozies

by jamie orsini

Just Murdered Peregrine Fisher is down on her luck, but a letter from the Adventuresses’ Club of the Antipodes with a mention of an inheritance piques her interest.

The Adventuresses are a group of exceptional women, and Peregrine is the niece of Phryne Fisher, a brave private investigator. When another member is accused of murder, Peregrine sets out to live up to her aunt’s reputation and earn her spot in the club.

Just Murdered (Poisoned Pen, $16.99, 9781728260136) is the novelization of the first episode of “Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries,” a spinoff of the TV show based on Kerry Greenwood’s popular Phryne Fisher mysteries. Peregrine takes up the investigator’s mantle in the ’60s, and author Katherine Kovacic does an excellent job placing readers in the swinging decade with references to music, fashion, cars and more. A fun, fast-paced read, Just Murdered also has a great heroine. Peregrine is intelligent and independent, and her jack-of-all-trades background allows her to cleverly unspool the threads of the mystery.

Frozen Detective

police hadn’t even tried to find,” she says in the book. “Cases reopened, police chiefs proven lazy, racist. Or both.” She quickly discovers that several people have possible motives for the crime, and from there, Winslow leads readers through a story told by a large cast of characters, many of whom draw on memories from their pasts.

“If [Jo] was based on anyone at all, it would be Jessica Fletcher from ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ ” One of the novel’s central figures is a young gay boy, whose storyline is one of the notable differences between Decent People and In West Mills. “When I was writing In West Mills, the topic of homophobia wasn’t really on my mind,” Winslow says. “I was thinking of the town in a far more loving way. But with this book, I had to think about all of the disadvantages that a town like that can pose to a queer person, especially a young queer person.”

The result is a wonderfully jampacked saga that flows well yet feels much denser than its 272 pages. Winslow admits that he loves the plots and characters of Charles Dickens’ novels but doesn’t like to read—much less write—long books. He credits novelist Ethan Canin for teaching him how to keep his own prose spare through the concept of “scene hygiene,” which means “once the point of the scene is made, move on.”

For his next book, Winslow is toying with a few ideas for stories set in West Mills, possibly inspired by his mother and sisters. He’s also contemplating something autobiographical, although he feels his own life story lacks a central conflict. “I don’t want it to be ‘young gay Black male moves to New York and works a bunch of jobs, goes to college, has some boyfriends and breakups, and at the end of the book he’s 43.’ ” Though honestly, if Winslow is writing it, I’d read that, too.

—Alice Cary Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Decent People.

Darby Piper and Tate Porter are still getting used to working together as PIs when they agree to take on a case brought to them by Tate’s ex-girlfriend, Cecily. Cecily’s husband, a wealthy dermatologist, has received several threatening anonymous notes. She wants Darby and Tate to investigate the threats during a conference that her husband is hosting at Garden Peak Lodge, a luxury ski resort. When the doctor is found dead on the ski slopes, Darby and Tate’s harassment case becomes a murder investigation. Frozen Detective (Hallmark, $15.99, 9781952210549) by Amanda Flower plunges straight into the action, and both Darby and Tate are likable protagonists whose chemistry and shared sense of humor shine through.

Dead and Gondola Ann Claire’s deeply enjoyable Dead and Gondola (Bantam, $17, 9780593496343) transports readers to the fictional mountain village of Last Word, Colorado, where Ellie Christie has just moved back home to help her older sister, Meg, run their family bookshop. After a mysterious man visits their store and leaves behind a rare edition of an Agatha Christie novel, he soon turns up dead on a gondola.

Even though the sisters aren’t related to the famed Christie, they grew up reading her novels and are determined to put their sleuthing knowledge to good use by figuring out who the man was, who killed him and why. Dead and Gondola is a lighthearted, fast-paced cozy mystery with an awfully appealing setting: Who wouldn’t want to ride a glass-domed gondola to a historic bookshop and cozy up by the fire with a good read?

Jamie Orsini is an award-winning journalist and writer who enjoys cozy mysteries and iced coffee.

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cover story | 2023 preview

OUR MOST anticipated

BOOKS OF 2023 Oh, the possibilities that await in a new reading year! For readers who like to plan ahead, the editors of BookPage spotlight some of the books they’re most looking forward to this year.

Exiles by Jane Harper

Once Upon a Book

Flatiron | January 31

by Grace Lin and Kate Messner

After two standalone mysteries, Jane Harper returns to Aaron Falk, the sleuth who starred in her first two books. Aaron is searching for a woman who disappeared one summer night, leaving her baby tucked safely inside a pram, and his investigation may reveal terrible truths about his best friend and his best friend’s family.

A Spell of Good Things

by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ Knopf | February 7 Nigerian author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáy ọ̀ ’s award-winning debut novel, Stay With Me, has continued to be a book club favorite since its publication in 2017. For her follow-up, Adébáyọ̀ takes us back to Nigeria for a story of two families divided, the two young people who connect them and the power structures of the political system that surround them.

Victory City

by Salman Rushdie Random House | February 7 The next novel from literary icon Salman Rushdie comes bittersweetly, as a horrifying attack on the author’s life last autumn undoubtedly casts a shadow over the publication. Victory City is nevertheless a welcome return to the realm of the fantastical (like in Midnight’s Children and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights) after Rushdie’s dabbling in contemporary satire for his last few works. Styled after classic Sanskrit epics, it tells the story of a woman who, with help from a goddess, calls forth the existence of Bisnaga—literally “victory city.”

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Little, Brown | February 7 It’s difficult to imagine an author-illustrator dream team more thrilling than Kate Messner and Grace Lin, as both have proven their authorial expertise in picture books and novels. Their collaboration is an ode to imagination and the sheer joy of reading as only they could dream up together.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

by Shannon Chakraborty Harper Voyager | March 7 Shannon Chakraborty’s Daevabad series is one of the best fantasy trilogies of recent years (and a well-deserved BookTok favorite). She returns with what sounds like a rollicking good time: a fantasy adventure following the titular pirate who comes out of retirement to rescue a former crewmember’s kidnapped daughter.

Saving Time

by Jenny Odell Random House | March 7 Since the release of her 2019 book, How to Do Nothing, the cult of Jenny Odell has spread far and wide. Her call to resist the efficiency-obsessed and technology-­ dependent constraints of modern life resonated with thousands of people limping through latestage capitalism. Odell’s next book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, drills even deeper to question the cultural construction of time itself. If you visibly recoil when you hear the phrase “time is money,” this book promises to be a liberating, stimulating, challenging delight.

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen

by KJ Charles Sourcebooks Casablanca | March 7 A highly prolific, critically adored self-publishing phenomenon, KJ Charles writes gay historical romances that vary in tone, genre and era, but all display her signature wit and cunningly constructed characters. Her first novel with a major publisher in several years is, therefore, a cause for celebration in itself. Add a plot described as “Bridgerton” meets “Poldark,” and we might just be looking at the next romance phenomenon.

Lone Women

by Victor LaValle One World | March 21 The idiosyncratic author of The Changeling goes west with the frightening story of Adelaide Henry, a woman in turn-of-the-century America who flees to the frontier to hide a terrible secret. As with all of Victor LaValle’s novels, the less you know going in, the better.

Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond Crown | March 21 Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Matthew Desmond builds on the groundbreaking story he began in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Poverty, by America zooms out from Evicted’s focus on housing insecurity to encompass the full scope of issues contributing to America’s poverty epidemic, such as low wages and wealth inequality. Ultimately, Poverty, by America tackles the question: Why

cover story | 2023 preview Yours Truly

does the richest nation on Earth have more poverty than any other advanced democracy? It’s an unwieldy question, but Desmond is just the man to answer it.

The White Lady

by Jacqueline Winspear Harper | March 21 After 17 acclaimed historical mysteries starring British sleuth Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear is introducing a new character for her fans to fall in love with. The White Lady follows Elinor White, a 41-year-old former spy living in a small English village in 1947. When her neighbors are threatened by a powerful gang, Elinor will have to call on all her training to protect her new life.

A Living Remedy

by Nicole Chung Ecco | April 4 In her bestselling 2018 memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Korean American author Nicole Chung grappled with the ways she benefited from and was wounded by growing up in a white adoptive family. In her second memoir, A Living Remedy, Chung digs deeper into the dynamics of family, class and how guilt mixes with gratitude when one generation does better than the last. When her father died from kidney disease at age 67, Chung had to face the wealth and health care inequalities—ones she and her children would not face—that hastened his death. We’re expecting a tender personal story with powerful social and political ramifications.

Big Tree

by Brian Selznick Scholastic | April 4 Brian Selznick’s bestknown books are also his biggest, and we mean that literally. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the longest book ever to win the Caldecott Medal, clocks in at 544 pages. Add in Wonderstruck and The Marvels and you’re at a stunning 1,824 pages, many of which are illustrated in his signature soft graphite. But young readers don’t love Selznick because he writes big books. They love him because of how he dives, seemingly without fear, into big ideas.

Big Tree sees Selznick take on a whopper even by his own standards: It’s an entire novel told from the point of view of a sycamore tree seed whose name is, naturally, Louise.

by Abby Jimenez Forever | April 11 The marvelous Abby Jimenez writes romances that strike a seemingly impossible balance between sweet comedy and emotional angst. Her latest follows two doctors who overcome a truly terrible first impression to become workplace besties and maybe something more.

Netflix. This year, Boulley returns with another thriller, Warrior Girl Unearthed, which she has described as starring “an Indigenous Lara Croft” named Perry Firekeeper-Birch. It also features a gorgeous cover illustration by Caldecott Medalist Michaela Goade.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

by Tom Hanks Knopf | May 9

The Wager

by David Grann Doubleday | April 18 The bestselling author of​​ Killers of the Flower Moon— the film adaptation of which, directed by Martin Scorsese, will be released this year—returns with another gripping narrative history. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder tells the story of a British ship that washed up on Brazilian shores in 1742 after months of being marooned off the coast of Patagonia. The crew was welcomed and celebrated—until another ship washed ashore in Chile six months later, accusing the first group of being not heroes but mutineers. If you’ve ever wondered how Lord of the Flies might play out in real life, David Grann has the shocking answer.

Happy Place

by Emily Henry Berkley | April 25 What is there to say about Emily Henry that hasn’t already been said? Her marvelously written, achingly sexy romances live up to the hype and then some, and even that feels like an understatement. This spring brings her first second-chance romance, between a married couple who haven’t told their close-knit friend group that they’ve broken up and must now endure one last summer vacation to Maine while trying to keep their secret under wraps.

Warrior Girl Unearthed

by Angeline Boulley Holt | May 2 Angeline B o u l l e y ’s Firekeeper’s Daughter was one of the most exciting debut YA novels of 2021. Readers loved the gripping, twisty mystery and breathless prose, and the novel was optioned by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company at

Sure, Tom Hanks is an Academy Award-winning actor and the best 1990s rom-com hero, but more importantly, he’s also the bestselling author of the short story collection Uncommon Type. Hanks’ first novel, the ambitiously titled The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, moves from 1947 to 1970 to the present day as it follows the process of transforming a little comic book into a “star-studded, multi­ million-dollar superhero action film.” The novel will include three eight-page comic books, all written by Hanks and illustrated by Robert Sikoryak.

Witch King

by Martha Wells Tordotcom | May 30 Martha Wells, the gleeful genius behind beloved sci-fi series the Murderbot Diaries, pivots to fantasy for the first time in years with the story of Kai-Enna, a powerful mage who gets murdered, gets his soul trapped in a magical prison, gets resurrected and is then faced with a world that has changed a lot while he’s been gone.

All the Sinners Bleed

by S.A. Cosby Flatiron | June 6 S.A. Cosby never shies away from the darkest corners of crime fiction, exploring morally gray characters and challenging situations with a humane, clear-eyed intelligence. His next book will be no different: All the Sinners Bleed follows Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff in a small Southern town, who must reckon with all the contradictions of his position when his deputies kill a young Black man, which leads Titus to uncover a tangle of corruption and secrets.

Visit BookPage.com to see the full list of our most anticipated books of 2023.

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feature | self-help

You’ll get by with a little help from these books Start the year off right with life-affirming lessons from five insightful self-help books.

The Fun Habit When was the last time you truly had fun? If you’re like most adults, it’s probably been longer than you care to admit. In the lighthearted and entertaining The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life (Atria, $27.99, 9781982159054), psychologist Mike Rucker suggests that fun is as important to human welfare as relationships and exercise—and therefore that we should all take fun a little more seriously.

Rucker argues that we are not experiencing nearly enough fun in our lives due to modern hindrances such as social media addiction, overwork and negative societal views about leisure (always be hustling). According to Rucker, the importance of fun cannot be overstated because it is not only good for us but also one of the most fundamental ways we interact with the world. However, as we age, we forget to make time for playtime, and this is having a detrimental effect on our collective well-being, resulting in widespread worker burnout.

As we age, we forget to make time for playtime, and this is having a detrimental effect on our collective well-being, resulting in widespread worker burnout.

Fun, to be clear, can be anything from dancing to helping others to learning a new language to rock climbing: essentially, any activity that sustains engagement and leaves you feeling like you’ve experienced something positive. But this isn’t a book that promotes “toxic positivity”—the sort of relentless positivity that drives people to ignore the actual problems in their lives. Rucker’s main concern is teaching us to examine how we spend our time so we can be more deliberate in our choices instead of living on autopilot.

Rucker provides a scientific approach to incorporating more fun, satisfaction and spontaneity into daily life, including practical ideas and strategies. For example, he suggests that people schedule fun into their day ahead of time, and that they take photos while they’re having fun so they can be reminded often of a fun moment. Rucker also recommends that, when possible, people prioritize their time over money. After all, time is a resource you can’t get back.

With expertise and a personal, intimate understanding of the subject matter, Rucker backs up his suggestions with scientific research regarding happiness, fun and, most interestingly, how our brains interpret stimuli.

This well-researched and impressive guide to finding more meaning in your day-to-day life will offer readers endless rewards.

—Sarojini Seupersad

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The Sugar Jar There’s only so much of the sweet stuff to go around, and in The Sugar Jar: Create Boundaries, Embrace Self-Healing, and Enjoy the Sweet Things in Life (HarperOne, $24.99, 9780063162365), wellness expert Yasmine Cheyenne helps readers consider their own sugar reserves.

Sugar is “all the sweet parts of you— your time, your energy, your attention, your money, your expertise/ education, and every single part of you that can be given or exchanged.”

Paying attention to one’s own sugar jar entails thinking carefully about where the sugar is going—and how you might better guard it in order to enjoy life.

Cheyenne’s guiding metaphor, the sugar jar, is immediately understandable. Some jars might have cracks. Other jars might not have lids and are therefore susceptible to anyone helping themselves. Cheyenne shows how a lack of boundaries may be holding readers back from understanding and pursuing what really matters to them, and she offers many questions to transform idle observations into deeper reflection and action.

Cheyenne also devotes several chapters to how aspects of identity—such as race, class and family structure—impact our sugar jars. In the chapter “Black Healing,” Cheyenne offers insights specifically for Black readers, noting that the wellness field is often not a welcoming space for people of color. In “Healing as the Parent and as the Child,” Cheyenne acknowledges that parents are, in a sense, continually monitoring the sugar jars of their kids, which can be a unique and draining job. Throughout the book, Cheyenne offers personal stories to bring principles to life and connect with the reader. In all, The Sugar Jar is an accessible and thoughtful discussion of boundaries from a wellness advocate who has both talked the talk and walked the walk.

—Kelly Blewett

The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control What if perfectionism isn’t a curse or a character flaw but rather a common state of being that can be harnessed for good? In her eye-­ opening book, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power (Portfolio, $29, 9780593329528), psychotherapist and former on-site Google therapist Katherine Morgan Schafler posits that perfectionists can live a life of joy rather than feeling perpetually disappointed by imperfection.

Schafler begins by describing the five types of perfectionists, including the classic (not spontaneous, a planner, always ready with a backup plan)

feature | self-help and the intense (expresses anger when feeling overwhelmed, imposes standards on those around them). Indeed, this book is like a mirror for anyone who has struggled with perfectionism in any form. This reviewer identified a little uncomfortably closely with the Parisian perfectionist (wants to be liked, hides their deepest ambitions).

A willingness to consider new perspectives is proven to protect our physical and mental health.

Schafler has treated hundreds of perfectionists in her private practice and recognizes that for many, perfectionism is rooted in a childhood of abuse, neglect or conditional love. It’s not as simple as just advising someone to lighten up. “Managing perfectionism by telling perfectionists to stop being perfectionists is like managing anger by telling people to ‘calm down,’ ” she writes. But the good news, according to Schafler, is that we can make perfectionism a tool in our lives by easing up on self-­punishment, which she defines as hurting or denying yourself. We may think we are punishing ourselves to learn or grow, but we are actually just creating more fear and demoralization.

Schafler offers workable strategies to help perfectionists stop overthinking and overdoing and move to a joyful place. She also weaves research and suggestions with insightful vignettes from her clients’ experiences.

All of it exudes warmth and empathy. “Until you can meet yourself with some compassion, you’ll reject the good in your life,” she advises.

In addition to being a fascinating look at the many influences that make a perfectionist, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control is a welcome antidote that will help readers reframe and refocus.

—Amy Scribner

The Good Life If the viewer count for Robert Waldinger’s TED Talk “What Makes a Good Life” is any indication, a lot of us (43 million and counting) are interested in finding out how to live meaningful and happy lives. In The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (Simon & Schuster, $28.99, 9781982166694), Waldinger and co-­author Mark Schulz help readers do just that by sharing with enthusiasm and warm encouragement what they’ve learned as stewards of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, “the longest in-depth longitudinal study of human life ever done.”

The study, which began in 1938 with 724 men and has since grown to include three generations of the original participants’ families, has obtained blood and DNA samples, brain imaging, et al., from its subjects, who have also answered countless questions over the decades. Waldinger is currently the study’s fourth director and Schulz its associate director. In 10 illuminating and wide-ranging chapters, they assert that a truly good life is well within reach if we will acknowledge one straightforward yet profound conclusion: “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”

Chapters like “The Person Beside You” and “Family Matters” explore how romantic and familial connections shape and strengthen us. In “The Good Life at Work,” survey participant Loren exemplifies the benefits of

developing office allies: Her stress level lowered and her interactions at home improved thanks to a newly boosted sense of belonging. And “All Friends Have Benefits” argues that we shouldn’t underestimate casual friendships. After all, even if someone isn’t a ride-or-die friend, positive-­ yet-fleeting interactions still “provide us with jolts of good feeling or energy.” What’s not to like about that?

Those looking for concrete how-tos will appreciate the authors’ W.I.S.E.R. (Watch, Interpret, Select, Engage, Reflect) model for breaking out of confounding relationship patterns. Self-assessment questions such as “Was I willing to acknowledge my role in the situation?” will help readers assess and improve on their roles in interpersonal conflicts.

To do that requires flexibility, of course, and that’s another key lesson of The Good Life: A willingness to consider new perspectives is proven to protect our physical and mental health. So, too, will remembering the authors’ uplifting discovery that “it doesn’t matter how old you are . . . everyone can make positive turns in their life.”

—Linda M. Castellitto

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry After a decade of analyzing the internet’s worst apologies on their blog, SorryWatch, Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy have written the definitive book on how to apologize with Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (Gallery, $28.99, 9781982163495).

The message of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry is a simple one: Accept responsibility for your actions, listen to the grievances of those involved and try to offer recompense based on their needs. However, if following these steps were easy, good apologies would be fairly common, right? Yet they remain elusive. Humans are highly intelligent creatures, smart enough to know that it’s easier to shift blame, procrastinate and politic than to face the consequences of our misdeeds. In fact, most of the book is devoted to examining the ways in which people—from celebrities to politicians to children—often maneuver around the core of an issue and how this avoidance causes more harm than good.

For example, in Chapter 6, Ingall and McCarthy consider the ways that doctors apologize—or, more commonly, the ways they slyly avoid doing so. Ingall recounts the time she went to a doctor’s appointment and had to wait over three hours to be seen. Every time Ingall pursued the issue, both in person and through email correspondence afterward, the doctor and his staff would essentially remix a “that’s just how it is” excuse. She is not alone in this experience, and people who have experienced more serious mishaps than an inconvenient wait have received little more than a pitiless “We regret . . .” statement from a medical professional in response. On the other hand, Ingall also demonstrates the ways that a good apology can prevent many of the legal repercussions that motivate doctors to dodge apologies in the first place. It turns out that when you earnestly take responsibility for your actions, people tend to respect you more than when you avoid the problem.

Good apologies are becoming rarer as disingenuous sorrys become the norm of internet discourse, like a kind of form to fill out after breaking unwritten rules. To avoid falling into this trap in your private or public life, read Sorry, Sorry, Sorry. The writing style is distinctive, if sometimes taxing, with parenthetical statements making up entire paragraphs and more references than your average “Family Guy” episode. That said, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry remains a very well-researched, insightful and useful book.

—Anthony E. Jones

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interview | john hendrickson

© MATTHEW BERNUCCA

from diverse backgrounds. “My personal story is mine, and it contains certain elements that are universal. But there are so many other people, so many other stories and other perspectives out there that are very different from the life that I’ve lived, even if we’ve both lived with a stutter,” Hendrickson explains. “Those different perspectives really broadened my understanding. I can only convey my own way of living, but that wouldn’t be a full enough picture. I wanted to make sure I was offering the reader a true variety of perspectives on navigating this disorder.”

Those other perspectives include a guitarist named Lyle who sells self-referential T-shirts about his stutter; a nurse practitioner named Roísín who became the co-leader of a stuttering support group, where she eventually met her spouse, Stavros, who also stutters; and a “multitalented artist” who has “reclaimed the power of his stutter like no one I’ve ever met,” Hendrickson writes, by rendering his first name, Jerome, with a preferred spelling of “JJJJJerome,” further cementing the connection between his identity and his speech.

Alongside these compelling conversations, Hendrickson provides the most up-to-date medical and scientific research on stuttering. He describes therapy practices that emphasize self-acceptance The author of Life on Delay stopped over more traditional regarding his stutter as an obstacle and techniques, like fluency shaping, that approach started viewing it as a fact. stuttering as a problem to John Hendrickson begins his memoir, Life in saying words. It’s about be solved or eliminated.

H Life on Delay “It was very important on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, at avoidance and coping.

Knopf, $29, 9780593319130 to me to highlight the It’s about trying to find the point when most people first encountered most c u t t i n g - e d g e, his byline: during an interview in 2019 with self-confidence. It’s about Memoir modern and progressive then-presidential candidate Joe Biden for The stigmatization. There are Atlantic, where Hendrickson is a senior editor. so many layers to it that are deeper and more approaches to therapy, in which they’re giving Although he is a person who stutters, the viral complicated than the mechanics of saying clients the primary message of: ‘Communicate words, and that was the first time I had ever article, titled “What Joe Biden Can’t Bring confidently,’ ” Hendrickson says. “ ‘It’s OK to Himself to Say,” was Hendrickson’s first piece addressed any of that in a meaningful way.” stutter, and we want to work with you to make about stuttering that was written for “public Like Biden and Hendrickson during their you feel empowered to speak in any situation. If consumption,” he tells me by phone from his interview, Hendrickson and I share a common you’re disfluent or fluent, it doesn’t matter. What home in New York City. experience: We stutter. We spend the first few matters is that you’re talking at all. What matters At the time of our conversation, near the end minutes of our phone call exchanging mutual is that you’re living a full life with your stutter.’” of 2022, Biden is almost halfway through his first relief that there’s no pressure to hide our stutter There’s an interesting sense of disconnection presidential term. Hendrickson, meanwhile, during introductions, and no apprehension when writing about a stutter, which can has spent the intervening years writing a be physically transcribed on the page—by about how the person on the other end might repeating certain letters or sounds, or using memoir about stuttering and his journey of selfreact to the repetitions, prolongations, blocks acceptance, prompted by his highly acclaimed or other auditory elements of our stutters. ellipses and white space on the page to mimic blocks and pauses—but can’t be fully realized article on Biden’s lifelong stutter. “Writing the That sense of camaraderie is one Hendrickson article was the first time I had really reckoned highlights in his book as well, which not only until it’s spoken out loud. Even so, there are with the layers of being a person who stutters,” covers his firsthand experience with stuttering scenes in Life on Delay that capture the strain, he says. “[Stuttering] goes well beyond difficulty but also incorporates interviews with stutterers pressure and anxiety of daily interactions as a

John Hendrickson

steps up to the mic

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feature | grief memoirs person who stutters. “This is the tension that stutterers live with: Is it better for me to speak and potentially embarrass myself or to shut down and say nothing at all?” Hendrickson writes in an early chapter. “Neither approach yields happiness.” In the first half of the book, there’s a sense of melancholy, isolation and anger toward his speech that Hendrickson captures beautifully: “I understand that my stutter may make you cringe, laugh, recoil. I know my stutter can feel like a waste of time— of yours, of mine—and that it has the power to embarrass both of us. And I’ve begun to realize that the only way to understand its power is to talk about it.” Hendrickson shares that part of his motivation for writing Life on Delay, for addressing those feelings of shame and isolation head-on, was to “write a book that my teenage self wanted to read.”

“The underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”

As Hendrickson reflects on his own childhood, interacts with more people who stutter and conducts interviews that foster open and authentic communication over the course of Life on Delay, a sense of acceptance for his own speech begins to emerge. “I’ve changed,” Hendrickson says succinctly. “I’ve undergone a change with my relationship to my stutter.

Five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I would have never expected to be writing a book about stuttering, or giving interviews, or doing anything remotely resembling public speaking.

So the underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”

Hendrickson says the change he experienced was a result of finally accepting his speech and regarding it as a fact of his lived experience, rather than an obstacle to be altered or avoided.

“The subtitle of the book is ‘Making Peace With a Stutter’ because that was really my goal. It’s possible to reach a place of peace with it, and that is a really profound feeling, because it’s different from liking something or hating something,” he says. “There are so many things in our lives we likely wish were different or, if we had a do-over, that we would change. It’s harder and it takes longer to reach a place of acceptance—to really undergo this change in perspective and make peace with the fact that things aren’t perfect.

When you’re able to internalize a message like that and apply it to other parts of life, it does give you a sense of peace.”

—Rachel Hoge Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Life on Delay.

Take your broken heart and turn it into art Two memoirs transform personal tragedies into moving tales of beauty, loss and love.

Authors Rick Louis and Rob Delaney bare their souls as they describe the heartbreak of losing a child.

Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars In Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars (Abrams ComicArts, $24.99, 9781419751080), author Rick Louis tells the story of losing his baby son to a rare neurological illness in 2013. “This is not a story about grief,” Louis writes. “It is just the story of a little boy who was only here for a short while and what he meant to us.”

It spoils nothing to tell readers that Ronan dies; this is revealed at the book’s beginning by showing present-day Louis next to a baby-size vacant space, populated by twinkling stars. The book then moves backward in time, starting with the day Ronan was born and the joy Louis and his wife, Emily, took in him. (Emily published a bestselling memoir about Ronan in 2013 called The Still Point of the Turning World.)

However, Ronan’s parents soon began to notice some health concerns, such as Ronan’s difficulty focusing his eyes. An ophthalmologist revealed that Ronan had signs of TaySachs disease, a lethal condition that prevents the breakdown of lipids in the brain and nerves.

When the diagnosis was confirmed, Louis and Emily had to confront their child’s mortality as they did everything in their power to enrich his life. As Ronan began to have seizures and breathing difficulties, his parents’ relationship deteriorated from the strain and uncertainty.

This is the first book for both Louis and illustrator Lara Antal, and they make good use of the graphic memoir form by pairing a cinematic, moving tale of family and loss with expressively drawn faces. Viewing the pain in Louis’ and Emily’s faces as they contemplate their child’s death is almost as haunting as watching the life drain from Ronan’s eyes as his disease progresses. All the while, Louis holds true to telling the story of his time with Ronan with profound reverence, honesty and even humor.

In a culture where grief is treated as something to avoid at all costs and dispose of quickly, this book provides a valuable counterpoint. For those who have known profound grief, or those willing to expand their understanding of its nuances, Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars will be a valuable read.

—Annie Harvieux

H A Heart That Works “Having your child die is so brutally humbling I struggle to describe it,” writes comedian and “Catastrophe” actor Rob Delaney. And yet he does manage to describe it, and does it well, in his unspeakably admirable memoir A Heart That Works (Spiegel & Grau, $25, 9781954118317).

Life seemed practically perfect for Delaney and his beloved wife, Leah, with their “beautiful little clump of boys”—three under the age of 5. However, Henry became ill at 11 months from an apple-size tumor right next to his brainstem. Instantly, their lives were thrust into another dimension as Henry faced surgery, chemo and 14 months of hospitalization, only for his cancer to eventually return. Delaney recounts the ordeal in searingly honest terms, conveying the intricate cobweb of emotions he experienced, often simultaneously: grief, rage, gratitude, grace and, most of all, love for Henry, their family and the many people who supported them during this time.

Despite the tsunami of tragedies, there is humor, often black humor, throughout Delaney’s account. “If you can’t have fun dressed as a family of skeletons in a pediatric cancer ward,” he writes, “I don’t know what to tell you.” There are parcels of advice amid his frank, razor-sharp writing as well. Delaney digs deep on every page, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the worst moments of his life. His is truly a heart that works.

—Alice Cary

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Frankenstein meets Fleetwood Mac

© JOHN HAWKINS

q&a | rachel hawkins

In Rachel Hawkins’ The Villa, an infamous murder spawns a novel, an album and perhaps even greater horrors.

In the 1970s, a beautiful mansion in Orvieto, Italy, was the site of a brutal killing. Rock megastar Noel Gordon invited musician Pierce Sheldon, plus Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara, for a summer of creativity, love and fun. But Pierce ended up dead, earning the villa a sinister reputation and the vacationers a complicated legacy. In the present, longtime yet somewhat estranged friends Emily and Chess go to the very same villa to catch up and hopefully kick off some new projects.

Will Emily learn something new about the decades-old crime? Or will her sudden obsession distract her from the danger still lurking?

those ways is this very thing: We’ve come really far, and yet so much domestic stuff still falls on women. I hear from women asking things like, “How do I get my partner to take my writing seriously?” or, “How do you balance being a mom and a writer?” So questions of Who Gets To Art, basically, are very much on my mind.

Since The Villa is a book about women and art, it felt natural to explore that idea on a couple of levels. Mari and Emily are both characters who shouldn’t necessarily find themselves in that situation—Mari because she’s living this bohemian lifestyle, Emily because we’re supposed to be past all that in 2023—and yet, they are both hemmed in by the men in their lives in these frustrating but unfortunately familiar ways.

Visit BookPage.com to read our review of The Villa and an extended version of this Q&A.

Chess is a self-help influencer, and Emily is a mix of impressed, envious and skeptical.

Are you a bit of a self-help skeptic yourself?

There are great self-help books and writers out there who genuinely help people, and I’ve been helped myself by some of them. So not a full skeptic, no! But in the past few years, the sort of girlbossification of mental health has definitely raised my eyebrows a bit, and Chess is a reflection of that. For Chess, it’s not so much about helping people—even though she does buy into her own hype at times—but presenting this kind of aspirational lifestyle in which mental health is just another thing on the checklist next to “BMW” and “Nancy Meyers Movie Kitchen.”

That kind of career path requires a certain kind of ruthlessness but also a lot of intelligence and an innate understanding of people. Emily sees all of that in Chess, but she’s also the kind of woman who’s a part of Chess’s ideal audience, which is why her feelings about Chess’ whole thing are a really complicated mix.

In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley took a trip to Lake Geneva, Switzerland, that inspired Mary’s groundbreakWhy do you think ing Frankenstein. Will unhealthy friendships are you share with us how that so common and can be so difficult to navigate? weekend in turn inspired you as you wrote The Villa?

I’ve joked that this book is apparently my way of I think it’s one of those The Villa exploring my personal things that is just natuSt. Martin’s, $28.99, 9781250280015 rally appealing to writers: nightmares because I have a bunch of artists holed so many wonderful and Thriller supportive women in my up in this gorgeous house, life, so of course I wrote a book where those bizarre weather outside (1816 being the famous “Year Without a Summer”), all these completely kinds of relationships are toxic and awful! But wild interpersonal things happening among five the idea of the “frenemy” is so strong, and I very young people—Byron was the oldest of all think it’s because it exposes the flip side of that of them, and he was only 28!—and at the end of saying about how “friends are the family you “Houses remember” is an important line in your book. What does that phrase it, one of the most famous books ever written is choose.” They are, but that also makes it more created by an 18-year-old girl. complicated to untangle yourself from a friendmean to you?

To be completely honest, at first I just thought That was the seed for me, this idea of how art ship that goes bad—because you did choose and life intersect, how great art can get made in that person, and there were a million reasons, it was a really cool—and yes, spooky—way to open a book! But the middle of chaos and the way artists inspire big and little, why you “This book is apparently the more I wrote, the and also possibly derail one another. did. I feel like society more that line kept prioritizes family and my way of exploring my popping up until it At one point Mari thinks, “It was hard for two romantic relationships people to be artists when . . . food needed to over friendships, even was basically a theme. personal nightmares.” be purchased, dishes washed. And somehow, though friendship is, in It means various things those things kept falling on her.” What did you a lot of ways, a really complicated mix of those to the characters, but for me, it’s about the way want to convey with these lines? two things—shared history and the magic of a place can sometimes seem to hold not just I’m always interested in talking about women finding a stranger who feels like a part of you— the memories but the energy of the people who stepping into their power and the ways society so of course when that sours, it can be proonce stayed there.

—Linda M. Castellitto can hold them back from doing that. And one of foundly hurtful and really tricky to untangle.

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reviews | fiction

H Shubeik Lubeik

By Deena Mohamed

Graphic Novel Shubeik lubeik translates from the Arabic to “your wish is my command,” an iconic fairy-tale phrase that’s also the title of a brilliantly original graphic novel from Egyptian comics creator Deena Mohamed. Her richly detailed drawings imbue contemporary Cairo—and its all-too-­ familiar atmosphere of bureaucracy, rigid laws and class-based bias—with the magic of wishes, dragons, flying cars and talking donkeys.

Originally self-published, Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, $35, 9781524748418) won the grand prize at the Cairo Comix Festival in 2017; by the end of the year, Mohamed had signed on with the agent who discovered Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. For the book’s highly anticipated American publication, Mohamed translated Shubeik Lubeik into English herself and requested that the book be printed like Arabic books, to be read from right to left.

H Hell Bent

By Leigh Bardugo

Fantasy Rejoice, Leigh Bardugo fans and dark academia lovers: You’ll get much more of the spooky stuff you crave in the extraordinary sequel to Ninth House, Hell Bent (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250313102).

After her first brush with the dark underworld of Yale University—in this world, the school’s infamous secret societies are called houses, and their members are practitioners of magic—Alex Stern deserves a sabbatical. But as firmly established in Bardugo’s excellent Ninth House, Alex isn’t built for rest, especially when there’s still work to do. Alex is a member of Lethe, the ninth house, which monitors the other houses to make sure they don’t go too far. She’s capable and cantankerous, but in Hell Bent she’s also desperate. Darlington, the wunderkind of Lethe, Alex’s mentor and maybe something more, is gone, presumed dead after the events of Ninth House. Alex vows to bring him back to the world of the living, but things are never that simple in New Haven, Connecticut.

Without Darlington to guide her and back

Mohamed’s novel introduces a world where wishes are real and sold in three tiers.

First-class wishes are the most expensive and last the longest, while thirdclass wishes are the budget option, carrying a higher risk of things going wrong. The story begins at a modest kiosk where three first-class wishes are for sale. The first is purchased by Aziza, a struggling widow whose economic status makes it difficult for her to own— let alone use—her wish.

The second wish goes to Nour, a privileged college student who is conflicted about wishing away her severe depression. Finally, Shokry, owner of the kiosk and thus the remaining wish, struggles with the morality of using his wish to improve the health of a dear friend.

her up, Alex is overwhelmed and vulnerable, which makes each new challenge she faces even more riveting for the reader. She’s already investigating of a series of strange murders of faculty members, and to make matters worse, Alex and her friend Dawes make a horrific discovery in Darlington’s family home: a demonic presence, restrained by magic—for now. Together, they must find a way to bring Darlington back while keeping whatever’s in his house from being unleashed on the world.

Once again, Bardugo shows she’s one of the best world builders in the business. Her version of Yale and its people is so richly rendered, it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s imagined. Not a page goes by without a line from Yeats or a fact about the architectural history of New Haven or a bit of biblical allusion. And yet, the book whizzes along, marvelously balancing these details with The Da Vinci Code-esque clue-hunting, demonic rituals and lectures from a particularly uptight school administrator.

Gut-wrenching and deeply human, this book will tug at your heartstrings even as it chills you to the bone. In spite of all of its magic, world building and shenanigans, Hell Bent stays true to its characters, never compromising them for the sake of genre thrills or expectations. Standing head and shoulders above the already impressive Ninth House, Hell Bent is one of the best fantasy novels of the year.

—Chris Pickens

Mohamed’s bold, expressive illustrations split the difference between cartoon and realism, with brightly colored details contrasting against the monochromatic tedium of government documents.

Records of wish laws, facts and trivia are as dense as any legal text, but they also offer a sly nod to such real-life social issues as mental health, poverty and sexism. The rendering of Nour’s depression via graphs, charts and maps is particularly effective.

These characters’ struggles and successes are equally heartbreaking and uplifting, creating a wholly satisfying reading experience. Our wish is Mohamed’s command.

—Lauren Bufferd

The Book of Everlasting Things

By Aanchal Malhotra

Family Saga As Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel opens, it’s 1938 in the old walled city of Lahore, Hindustan (now Pakistan), and Samir Vij has just turned 10. He’s about to join the family perfume business as an apprentice; like his uncle Vivek, Samir has an unusually perceptive nose. On the other side of the walled city, 8-year-old Firdaus Khan is the only girl studying in her father’s calligraphy studio. Soon after, Samir and Firdaus encounter each other for the first time when Firdaus and her parents come to the Vij perfume shop for rose oil to add to a special manuscript that Firdaus’ father is illuminating. Samir, a Hindu boy, and Firdaus, a Muslim girl, feel an instant connection, one that’s deepened when Samir too begins to study calligraphy.

The novel follows Samir and Firdaus as their friendship turns to love over the next 10 years. But after World War II, local demands for independence from the British Empire grow louder. Seemingly overnight, the ancient, multicultural city of Lahore, where Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs live in peaceable proximity

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reviews | fiction and friendship, descends into violence and chaos. The price of independence turns out to be Partition, which divides Hindustan into India and Pakistan. Hindu families in Lahore flee over the new border into India, and Muslims flee into the new Pakistan. Samir and Firdaus are driven far apart, their destinies seeming to diverge.

In The Book of Everlasting Things (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250802026), Malhotra balances the larger canvas (the devastation of two world wars and Partition) with the smaller (Samir and Khan’s love story), weaving in additional family stories to reveal how past actions affect the two lovers over the decades.

Malhotra is a visual artist and the author of two nonfiction books on Partition, and her prose is often gorgeous and evocative. The novel shines in its sensory details, particularly in regard to smells, showing how perfumers take in the world. It’s also strong in its sense of place, with memorable images of pre-Partition Lahore, a place lost to war and the passage of time, as well as of post-World War II Paris and Grasse, France. Samir, the character at the novel’s heart, is more developed than Firdaus, but both characters share a vivid sense of longing.

Some readers may quibble that The Book of Everlasting Things moves slowly, but this is a long, meaty story with an old-fashioned pace.

It’s a novel to sink into as Malhotra spins a bittersweet family saga of love, loss and connection.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

H Brotherless Night

By V.V. Ganeshananthan

Literary Fiction We like our politics to be binary. It is comforting to hear that we are on the good side and other people are on the bad. But life, obviously, is not binary, and neither are our politics. In V.V. Ganeshananthan’s second novel, readers are carried to a reckoning with this fact.

Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, in the early years of that nation’s decadeslong civil war, Brotherless Night (Random House, $28, 9780812997156) follows Sashi, a 16-year-old girl who dreams of becoming a doctor. As she grows up, she watches the Tamil minority fight against the oppressive Sinhalese, with her own brothers and friends buying into violent ideologies, and she begins to reconsider what healing and care really mean.

The novel begins by immediately challenging our assumptions and vocabularies. The brief prologue is written from Sashi’s perspective in

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2009 as she tries to contact “a terrorist I used to know.” She continues by pressing the importance of that word, terrorist. In American culture, to which Ganeshananthan and Sashi are knowingly communicating, terrorist is akin to a slur; there are, by this definition, no good terrorists.

Foregrounding this challenge prepares the reader for what is to come: a story about “terrorists” that destroys the very sense of that word.

The first chapter begins, “I met the first terrorist I knew when he was deciding to become one.” As the reader and Sashi follow the community’s young men in their indoctrination, Ganeshananthan forces the reader to discard a binary description of the world in favor of a more complex, human one.

But language is not the only thing that Ganeshananthan grapples with here. Violence, too, is front and center in the novel. As the civil war erupts, Sashi begins to consider conflict and war on a large scale, and it becomes impossible for her to ignore that healing is more than a physical practice. Abandoning her medical aspirations, Sashi’s new mission becomes documenting human rights violations, and she describes the disasters of war in a vital, sharp way. Although this work allows Sashi and others to better understand the impact violence has on their society, it also proves to be a life-threatening business.

Through this moving story, Ganeshananthan traces the human aspects of war—the physical losses and tragedies as well as the conflicts of values that are often the true battlefields. Rather than justifying or lamenting the horrors of a civil war that ended a little over a decade ago, she shows that by focusing on all of the people involved, both “good” and “bad,” we can learn how and why humans fight—and why it’s so important to stop the cycle.

—Eric Ponce

The Thing in the Snow

By Sean Adams

Satire Few conditions feel more dystopian than toiling away at a deadend job. But imagine performing menial chores in a massive, vacant research facility so remote that a helicopter is required to get there. Plus, outdoor conditions are so fierce that anyone who steps outside is likely to develop a mysterious “snow sickness.” This is the situation accepted by three people in Sean Adams’ new novel.

Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but

that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow (William Morrow, $27.99, 9780063257757). The Northern Institute has lost its funding, and its original purpose has been withheld from its new caretakers: supervisor Hart and assistants Gibbs and Cline. All they know, as Adams describes in engagingly cryptic passages, is that something happened, and authorities concluded it was cheaper to keep the facility open than to shut it down.

Hart takes his supervisory duties seriously.

In dry prose reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s unreliable narrators, Hart relates his quotidian tasks: sharing “coffee and light socialization” with his subordinates and assigning the week’s trivial chores, which include testing the stability of the chairs, checking out the doors and so on. In his off hours, Hart reads novels about Jack French, a man who finds himself in dire situations “demanding the kind of exceptional leadership only he can provide.”

The Institute and its surrounding tundra have many eerie qualities, among them an object buried deep in the snow, “something dark [that] glints in the little light that makes it through.”

Other distractions are equally perplexing, such as lights that flicker as if in a pattern. Hart feels “a slight static tingle in [his] beard” that “aligns itself with the pulse of the light.” Then one of the chairs shatters.

Adding to the strange ambience is the Institute’s last remaining researcher, the “condescending, pretentious, and often outright batty” Gilroy. All he’ll say about his research is that it can “predict the future of cold,” but Hart suspects Gilroy is holding secrets he won’t share.

The Thing in the Snow gets repetitive at times, but Adams succeeds at building tension while exploring the lengths to which people will go to retain power, the narcissism often embodied by those in leadership positions and the effect of monotony on a person’s memory. Inexplicable phenomena can be devastating to the mind, but as this perceptive novel and any undervalued employee can attest, tedium is just as destructive.

—Michael Magras

The Dream Builders

By Oindrila Mukherjee

Literary Fiction In her kaleidoscopic debut novel, Oindrila Mukherjee brings the fictional Indian city of Hrishipur to vivid life. Located in northern India, Hrishipur is a young city, home to migrants looking for work, elite professionals dazzled by the glittering nightlife and

feature | bestseller watch ultrawealthy business owners searching for the next big deal. With luxury malls, exclusive apartment complexes and crowded streets, it is a place of dizzying extremes.

The Dream Builders (Tin House, $17.95, 9781953534637) unfolds over the course of one hot, dry summer. Maneka Roy, a university professor who’s been living in the U.S. since college, returns home to visit her father after her mother’s sudden death. Her parents moved to Hrishipur from their native Kolkata, investing in one of many new construction projects that never materialized. Now her retired father is struggling to make ends meet, and Maneka is confronted with a city that’s as foreign to her as the American Midwest once was.

But Maneka and her father are just two of the 10 characters whose lives and stories intersect in The Dream Builders. There’s also Ramona, Maneka’s wealthy childhood friend, who has just bought a flat in the biggest new construction in Hrishipur: Trump Towers. There’s Jessica, a single mother with an adopted daughter, and Gopal, an electrician fueled by gritty determination. In other chapters, a husband longs to reconnect with his wife, a spa worker worries about her family’s financial situation, and a photographer dreams of his big break.

Mukherjee moves easily from one point of view to the next, highlighting the cultural, class and gender diversity of the city.

Oindrila Mukherjee’s elegant, intimate novel follows 10 people adrift in a chaotic city and a rapidly changing world.

All of these characters are hiding from themselves, each other, their pasts and futures. They may be neighbors, friends, lovers, employers and employees, but their dreams, desires and wounds are not immediately apparent to one another. They only ever see other people in bits and pieces, which often leads to misguided assumptions about the relative ease or hardship of another person’s life. This dissonance gives the novel its richness and propulsive motion. Although Mukherjee lingers in each perspective for only a chapter, her characters are so specific, so immediately human, that they remain resolutely present long after the narrative has moved on.

The Dream Builders is an elegant, intimate story about people adrift in a chaotic city, an unpredictable economy and a rapidly changing world. They long for home, belonging, stability and comfort, struggling to root themselves even as the ground shifts beneath them. In the spaces between their stories, Mukherjee invites

readers to unknot the deeper echoes and connections that make this beautifully structured novel such a strong debut.

—Laura Sackton

In the Upper Country

By Kai Thomas

BIG RELEASES FOR JANUARY Discover four new books from chart-topping writers.

Sleep No More

Historical Fiction To remember is not just to recall a thing. Remembering can be a way of putting things back together, in the way that dis-­membering is to take them apart.

Kai Thomas’ stellar novel, In the Upper Country (Viking, $28, 9780593489505), is all about this sort of re-­ membering. It’s inspired by the true stories of formerly enslaved and freeborn people (Black, Indigenous and some white folks) who built havens in Canada in the years just before the American Civil War. In a place where people have actual autonomy, what is remembered are not just memories but also the workings of relationships—the practice of hewing and maintaining bonds with family, friends and nature itself.

The story’s narrator is Lensinda Martin, a freeborn Black woman and one of the few people in the town of Dunmore who can read and write well enough to publish articles in the abolitionist newspaper. She’s also a healer, so one evening in July 1859, she’s called to assist a man who’s been shot on a farm. He’s dead by the time she gets there, and it turns out he was a slave hunter from the United States.

Emboldened by the atrocious Fugitive Slave Act, he traveled all the way to Canada to kidnap a formerly enslaved woman named Cash and return her to captivity in Kentucky. Instead, the old woman shot him.

Much of the rest of the book follows a series of exchanges between Lensinda and the now-­ imprisoned Cash, who agrees to tell her tale only if Lensinda reads aloud the stories from other former slaves that were transcribed by abolitionists—a quid pro quo a la The Silence of the Lambs.

Cash hopes her story will make it clear that she acted in self-defense and convince the powers that be that she has earned her freedom.

What makes Thomas’ sprawling novel stand out is his focus on the alliances that formed between Indigenous and Black communities as far back as the French and Indian War, as there was much to be learned in their mutual striving to protect themselves and keep their land from being stolen by white colonizers. As Lensinda reads tales that involve Cash’s husband, an Indigenous man, and other loved ones

By Jayne Ann Krentz Berkley, $28 9780593337820 Krentz kicks off the Lost Night Files, a new paranormal series about three women who stayed at the Lucent Springs Hotel but have no memory of how it was destroyed during their time there.

All the Dangerous Things

By Stacy Willingham Minotaur, $27.99 9781250803856 The author of A Flicker in the Dark returns with another haunting thriller, this time following a woman who hasn’t slept since her young son was kidnapped over a year ago.

The Nazi Conspiracy

By Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch Flatiron, $29.99 9781250777263 The bestselling authors explore the true story of a Nazi plot to kill President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill at the height of World War II.

Spare

By Prince Harry Random House, $36 9780593593806 This memoir from Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, promises an irresistibly honest assessment of life under the microscope as a member of the British royal family.

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reviews | fiction who were torn from her, Cash is made whole again. Whatever the court decides, this very old woman can die in peace.

Written with great power and a beautifully heightened eloquence that calls to mind the exhortations of the old abolitionists, In the Upper Country is, incredibly, Thomas’ first novel. What an auspicious debut it is.

—Arlene McKanic

Ghost Music

By An Yu

Literary Fiction “Solitude is tolerable, even enjoyable at times. But when you realise that you’ve given your life to someone, yet you know nothing but his name? That kind of solitude is loneliness.

That’s what kills you.”

In An Yu’s ethereal Ghost Music (Grove, $26, 9780802159625), a woman’s grip on her suffocating life loosens as she is drawn into a surreal world of secrets and ghostly experiences where her deep yearnings can finally resurface and transform her.

Thirty-year-old Song Yan has devoted the past three years to her husband, Bowen. She has also made room in her life for his disgruntled mother, who is recently widowed and now lives with them in their Beijing apartment.

Although Song Yan traded her career as a concert pianist to be a dutiful wife, Bowen is more interested in his job as a BMW executive than in having children.

The disquiet between Song Yan and her mother-in-law is temporarily quelled by the mysterious weekly delivery of prized mushrooms, which the women cook together.

However, Song Yan becomes increasingly frustrated with and disconnected from Bowen after she learns some information about his past. She turns her attention toward investigating who sent the mushrooms, which leads her down the proverbial rabbit hole to Bai Yu, a famous pianist who vanished a decade earlier. In the process, Song Yan rediscovers an aspect of herself that was also on the verge of disappearing.

Ghost Music, like Yu’s first novel, Braised Pork, is beautifully metaphoric and insightful.

Song Yan’s first-person narrative reveals the full richness of her mind and senses, which have been stifled by her fear of shame and the disregard of her husband and mother-in-law.

Throughout this haunting social commentary, Yu’s lyrical language and atmospheric descriptions bring out the contrast between Song Yan’s oppressive, superficial reality and the hypnotic

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world where she converses with fungi. Fans of literary novels with a supernatural edge, such as Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, take note.

—Maya Fleischmann

H Age of Vice

By Deepti Kapoor

and redemption. At 500-plus pages, you may find Age of Vice difficult to pick up, but it’s also impossible to put down.

—Thane Tierney

The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre

By Natasha Lester

Crime Fiction Pick your city: New York. London. Hong Kong. Jakarta. Athens.

New Delhi. They are, all of them, studies in sharp contrasts, places where the über-rich glide along gilded paths, cheekby-jowl with the destitute, the desperate and the deadly. For the people who occupy the space between these extremes, it’s possible to ignore or be oblivious to both worlds, save for an occasional glimpse on the evening news or in a novel, as we wistfully aspire to cash in like a Kardashian or batten our hatches against financial ruin.

In her riveting second novel, Age of Vice (Riverhead, $30, 9780593328798), journalist Deepti Kapoor plays Virgil to our Dante, skillfully guiding us through contemporary India’s political, social, economic and criminal circles.

The book opens in the immediate aftermath of a horrific car crash in which several people have been killed. The alleged perp, Ajay, is arrested, booked and subjected to a variety of indignities in prison. Then it is discovered that Ajay is a “Wadia man,” a term of mysterious significance that affords him much better treatment than his fellow detainees.

Readers are then transported back to Ajay’s youth, where, after a family tragedy, he is sent to work on a farm as a sort of indentured servant. After a few years, circumstances thrust him into the orbit of a rich playboy named Sunny Wadia, and the two strike up something akin to a friendship, albeit between unequals.

Sunny seems to have it all, with the exception of self-discipline, a sense of boundaries and the respect of his father, which he desperately craves. But he does have a plan, or rather, a series of them, which he tries to set into motion with the loyal Ajay at his side. In the midst of all this, Sunny meets and falls in love with a journalist named Neda Kapur, who has the power to further Sunny’s agenda or crush it.

The story bounces back and forth between the three main characters’ narratives and across five consequential years that will alter all of their futures irrevocably. Along the way, Kapoor paints a mesmerizing picture of violence and decadence, of struggle and hope, of corruption

Historical Fiction Historical fiction presents a certain narrative highwire act in and of itself, and each author confronts the challenge of weaving fictional stories into real historical events differently. No matter the approach, though, the balance of verisimilitude and invention is paramount. With The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre (Forever, $28, 9781538706930), Natasha Lester takes on that challenge and more, producing a remarkable novel that walks in multiple worlds during a pivotal moment in time.

The title character, an American orphan who attended a Swiss boarding school on a scholarship, grows into a woman determined to prove herself in any theater in which she’s asked to do battle. Over the course of Lester’s novel, which jumps from France to Switzerland to Italy and beyond during the 1940s, we see Alix join the staff of Harper’s Bazaar, secretly work for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and, in postwar Paris, take up a position at a new fashion house run

by Christian Dior. But even as her high-­fashion dreams seem to be coming true, Alix realizes that the ghosts of war are not done with her yet.

Lester’s ambitious premise, placing her protagonist at the center of both covert work during World War II and the founding of one of the most recognizable fashion brands in the world, is both daring and compelling. It’s easy to imagine that her novel could have shifted too far into espionage and therefore dimmed the light on the world of haute couture, or that the fashion might have outshined the world of spies and code names. But readers can put such worries to rest, thanks to Lester’s command of her narrative and deep grasp of her protagonist.

Through tight, page-turning prose and a richly developed view of 1940s Europe, Lester weaves a spellbinding portrait of a woman who knows how to survive—and how to win.

Alix is such a strong central character that the rest of the narrative shapes itself to her like a well-tailored gown, making The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre a wonderfully human and utterly gripping work of historical fiction.

—Matthew Jackson

reviews | nonfiction

H The Half Known Life

By Pico Iyer

Religion & Spirituality In many religious traditions, paradise names an otherworldly realm overflowing with lush greenery, luscious fruits, honeyed scents and cascading waterfalls. In others, paradise can be attained in this world, even in the midst of the clattering cacophony surrounding us.

Bestselling travel writer Pico Iyer shares his own search for paradise in The Half Known Life (Riverhead, $26, 9780593420256), traversing the world’s vibrant religious traditions to uncover paradise’s contours, its purported locations and the role it plays in earthly conflicts.

With vivid imagery and sterling prose, Iyer documents his wanderings from town to temple. In Tehran, Iran, for example, he learned that Rumi counseled readers to find a heaven within themselves because paradise is not some

A Guest at the Feast

By Colm Tóibín

Essays Lovers of Colm Tóibín’s novels (among them Brooklyn, The Master and The Magician) might not know that the Irish author is also a longtime essayist. A Guest at the Feast (Scribner, $28, 9781476785202) gathers recent essays that show his full range.

A Guest at the Feast is divided into three sections: personal essays, essays examining the power of the Irish Catholic church and the papacy, and literary essays. The collection’s first essay, “Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall,” opens without fanfare: “It all started with my balls.” Detailing his bout with testicular cancer, Tóibín turns a close eye to its vicissitudes—what he cooked when he couldn’t taste anything, the tedium of chemotherapy, the complications he endured—making the subject funny, fresh and moving.

Part two draws on Tóibín’s youth in a repressive 1960s Ireland, attending a boarding school led by priests later convicted of sexual abuse.

His reported essay “The Bergoglio Smile: Pope Francis” offers a more complicated view of the pope and his failures to oppose Argentina’s authoritarian military regime when Francis

idyllic place that transcends this world. Rumi’s poetry created a “paradise of words,” Iyer found, amid the unceasing strife of the country’s various Islamic branches. In the Kashmir region of India, which some claim was the location of the Garden of Eden, Iyer embraced a paradisiacal moment as he floated in a houseboat in the middle of a lake. In Sri Lanka, he visited Adam’s Peak, a forest outcropping that Buddhists, Christians and Hindus all claim as sacred ground. In Jerusalem, Israel, he wondered where a “nonaffiliated soul” could find sanctuary and “make peace among all the competing chants.” He tried his luck at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles till one was left with the sorrow of six different

was a young Jesuit leader. Part three includes an essay on novelist Marilynne Robinson and the way her novels encounter religious belief. “How do you create a religious or a non­secular protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book?” he asks, leading the reader through a quick parade of modernist efforts (T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, among others) before settling into Robinson’s novels Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack. This essay, in particular, is a marvel.

But the title essay, “A Guest at the Feast,” is the book’s highlight. This long personal essay (or short memoir) roams through the small Irish town of Enniscorthy, where Tóibín grew up, offering anecdotes about the townspeople and his family, including two about his mother, who was unafraid to confront one of her son’s bullying teachers and who read banned Irish novels in the 1960s. By turns conversational and poetic, the essay also shows the first glimmers of Tóibín becoming a writer. Describing a train journey between Enniscorthy and Wexford, he writes, “In that silvery still afternoon light, for several miles you see no roads and hardly any buildings, just trees and the calm strong river.”

A Guest at the Feast is a collection that will remind readers of Tóibín’s power as a writer of more than just memorable fiction. His cleareyed, considered critiques of powerful people and vivid personal essays can make readers long for a place they’ve never seen.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

Christian orders sharing the same space, and lashing out at one another with brooms.” At the end of his quest, Iyer woke to a “thick pall of mist” in Varanasi, India. It was so difficult to see through that it “made every figure look even more like a visitor from another world.”

Observing them, he writes, “it was easy to believe we were all caught up in the same spell, creatures in some celestial dream, ferried silently across the river and back again.”

Part travelogue, part theological meditation and part memoir, The Half Known Life shimmers with wisdom gleaned from exploring the nooks and crannies of the human soul and the world’s urban and rural, secular and religious, landscapes.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Myth America

Edited by Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer

American History As George Orwell observed, “Who controls the past controls the future.” In Myth America (Basic, $32, 9781541601390), prominent historians offer keenly insightful essays that reveal the true and often complex history of America.

Edited by Princeton University historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, the book’s chapters range from “American Exceptionalism” and “Vanishing Indians” to “Confederate Monuments” and “Voter Fraud.”

Contributor David A. Bell points out that “the stories that nations tell themselves . . . change over time, and America has had a bewildering and contradictory plethora of them.” For example, Erika Lee discusses the complex realities and deep roots of the “they keep coming” immigration myth, which asserts that the federal government won’t stop the supposed millions of people who enter the country without documentation.

Sarah Churchwell shows how “America First has never been—and was never intended to be—a simple statement of patriotic self-­interest.”

Glenda Gilmore challenges the myth that the

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reviews | nonfiction civil rights demonstrations from 1955 to 1968 were significantly different from those that took place during the 1890s through the 1950s.

Michael Kazin relates the 1825 visit of Robert Owen, a rich manufacturer from Wales, who delivered two addresses to joint sessions of Congress. Owen proposed the establishment of a system of society based on justice and kindness.

He condemned America’s economic system as selfish and inhumane, and he and his ideas were treated with great respect. Owen called his proposal “socialism.” As Kazin writes, “Their curiosity was a sign that the market system, for all its promise of plenty, was not yet a settled reality defended by all men of wealth and standing.”

The book’s editors are aware that they haven’t covered every myth in U.S. history, but these essays still succeed in bringing important facts to our current historical debates. Myth America is an important step toward a better understanding of our history.

—Roger Bishop

Koala

By Danielle Clode

Animals Australia has perhaps the most unusual (and dangerous) wildlife of any continent, a product of its unique status as a vast island that broke off from other landmasses millions of years ago.

Due to this isolation, plants and animals specifically adapted to its climate, independent of what was evolving in the rest of the world. Among Australia’s unique fauna is the adorable marsupial known as the koala, which is only now being studied with more scrutiny as its numbers dwindle.

In Koala (Norton, $27.95, 9781324036838), biologist and author Danielle Clode (Voyages to the South Seas) provides a thorough and descriptive backstory of the koala, including topics such as mating, sleeping habits and anatomical anomalies. With her scientific yet accessible writing style, Clode digs deep into koalas’ evolution, giving examples from fossil findings that show that koalas’ ancestors were likely much larger than their contemporary descendants.

The facts Clode shares are fascinating, such as the reality that, like humans, koalas are “phylogenetically sterile” (lacking in close relatives).

We can at least count apes and monkeys as distant cousins, but “ecologically, as well as evolutionarily, koalas really do sit alone on their tree.”

She also explains just how integral a koala’s diet is to their survival. Koalas only eat the fibrous, toxic leaves of the eucalyptus gum tree. As a

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result, their digestive system has evolved in a specialized way, with enzyme-laced saliva and a supercharged liver to remove toxins.

Clode also discusses human encroachment on koala territory, particularly following the colonization of Australia by Great Britain. Diseases that killed the continent’s Indigenous people also wreaked havoc on animals like the koala, which is now considered an endangered species by the Australian government.

Leaving no stone unturned, Koala makes great strides to advance our knowledge of this largely misunderstood animal.

—Becky Libourel Diamond

H Rough Sleepers

By Tracy Kidder

Medicine “Rough sleepers” are homeless people who mostly choose to sleep on the streets rather than in indoor shelters. Their death rates are staggering, their health needs endless, their fates often in the hands of people who struggle to know what to do with them. However, there are some people whose mission is to care for rough sleepers, doing work that is both lifesaving and extremely frustrating.

With a straightforward scrutiny that describes without judging, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder offers a long, hard look at the lives of people without housing in Rough Sleepers (Random House, $30, 9781984801432).

As a writer, Kidder is intensely immersive. In Rough Sleepers, he documents the three years he spent with the team that cares for Boston’s homeless population, making rounds with Dr. Jim O’Connell in his van late into the night. They treated people on the street or got them into hospitals and clinics to receive care. They offered blankets and food. They listened. Kidder was given deep access to their world—to the shelters, clinics, emergency rooms, hidden hangouts— and to the life of the man leading these efforts, fondly known by his many patients as Dr. Jim. Readers also meet some of the people who live without homes in Boston in Rough Sleepers.

There’s Tony Colombo, who spends his days at a respite house helping residents and staff and his nights on the street getting into trouble. Tony’s friend BJ, having lost both legs, needs constant help keeping upright in his wheelchair. Joanne Guarino is maintaining her sobriety after 30 years on the street and remains a regular guest speaker at Harvard Medical School, where she compels students to treat homeless people with compassion.

Dr. Jim and his team are the inspiring center of Kidder’s book. Now in his 70s, the Harvardtrained physician is still the city’s “street doctor,” sustaining and nurturing relationships with society’s most marginalized and vulnerable people. He and his team see themselves as merely necessary, not heroic. In Rough Sleepers, Kidder begs to differ.

—Priscilla Kipp

Windfall

By Erika Bolstad

Memoir The word windfall conjures images of unanticipated abundance: sweet apples fallen from the tree, ripe for the taking; money unexpectedly found in a coat pocket; or a surprise inheritance of wealth.

Erika Bolstad, journalist and former investigative reporter for Climatewire, offers these kinds of unexpected riches in Windfall (Sourcebooks, $26.99, 9781728246932), a personal family story wrapped in a history of mineral rights, the oil and gas industry, the hard realities for women homesteading in the early 20th century and the American myths of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.

This heartfelt, meticulously researched memoir hinges on the author’s great-­grandmother Anna Josephine Sletvold, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants who set up a homestead in North Dakota in the early 1900s. In 1907, according to family lore, Anna disappeared.

More than 100 years later, Bolstad’s mother received a surprise $2,400 check from an oil company—a payment for leasing the mineral rights beneath the surface of the lands where Anna’s homestead once was. She was jubilant.

“We could be rich” had been whispered throughout their family history, starting in the early 1950s when North Dakota began its quest for oil, and when Bolstad’s grandparents entered into a lease agreement for royalties on mineral rights.

A short time later, Bolstad’s mother died, leaving behind a mystery that sparked the author’s investigative bent: What exactly had happened to Anna? And was the possibility of riches from oil-related wealth a reality or a chimera?

Into the personal fabric of this memoir, in which Bolstad recounts her search for how Anna was “lost,” the author weaves a robust history of the Homestead Act; the rise and fall of the North Dakota oil fields; the often nefarious practices companies employed to make huge profits at the expense of lands, workers and the public; and the political, economic and

reviews | nonfiction environmental implications of America’s never-­ ending quest for energy—and wealth.

With so much urgent concern over climate change and the impacts—environmental, political, economic and social—we humans have on our planet, Windfall is a timely, insightful and important read.

—Alison Hood

H How to Stand Up to a Dictator

By Maria Ressa

Memoir In How to Stand Up to a Dictator (Harper, $29.99, 9780063257511), journalist Maria Ressa, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, gives readers a riveting inside view of what it’s like to be a dissident fighting authoritarianism. This engrossing book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.

Since the 1980s, Ressa has been a journalist who speaks truth to power, but her path to success unfolded almost by accident. Born in the Philippines, Ressa was brought at age 10 to the United States, where she was raised by her mother and stepfather. When she first arrived, she felt like a confused outsider but quickly realized she felt comfortable at school and could thrive there if she followed these rules for herself: Always choose to learn, embrace your fear, and stand up to bullies.

Upon returning to the Philippines as an adult, Ressa worked for CNN and then ABSCBN, where she was head of the news division while the political climate in the Philippines was becoming more and more volatile. She later co-founded her own news service, Rappler, with the intention of integrating social media, citizen journalism and data into old-fashioned journalism. However, she increasingly found that social media, Facebook in particular, and corrupt politicians made for very dangerous bedfellows. In fact, social media was helping to fuel fascism in the Philippines. Disinformation spread quickly and widely because people tended to share information (even lies) when strong emotions were attached to the content.

With the help of these disinformation campaigns, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines in 2016. He won in a landslide based on false promises of fighting crime and corruption. In reality, he was shutting down press freedoms, ordering gruesome

extra-judicial killings and handing out government positions to loyalists and corrupt officials.

The exceptional details in this memoir are both tactile and persistent. Her ability to recount the finer details of some of the scariest moments of her life (such as witnessing a military coup) is nothing short of breathtaking.

Highly researched yet accessible, How to Stand Up to a Dictator is a plea to the world: The best way to maintain a democracy is a strong press, free from corruption and disinformation.

—Sarojini Seupersad

H How Far the Light Reaches

By Sabrina Imbler

Essays Science journalist Sabrina Imbler dives deep into the waters of human and marine life in their luminous essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches (Little, Brown, $27, 9780316540537).

In the book’s 10 essays, Imbler cannily observes the lives of sea creatures, drawing out lessons about resilience, survival and wildness and tying those insights to their own experiences as a biracial, queer writer.

For example, goldfish that survive being thrown from a tiny fishbowl into a larger pond revert to a feral state. When Imbler encountered these wild fish, they saw “something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone.” Imbler compares a female octopus who starves herself in order to nourish and protect her eggs to their own efforts at dieting to please their mother. Imbler eventually started to feel good in their body, learning to “revel in queer bodies and the endless and inventive ways we crease into ourselves.” In the deep rivers of China, sturgeon forage for food to survive in the murky waters, just as Imbler’s grandmother foraged for food to survive after fleeing Japanese-occupied Shanghai during wartime. In perhaps the most brilliant chapter of the book, Imbler alternates the necropsy of a whale with the necropsy of a relationship. Like the carcass of a whale, the threads of a dead relationship—“once so staggeringly alive”—float through space and time with no sense of what is to come.

How Far the Light Reaches meditates radiantly on the ragged ways we adapt to the world around us, probing the lives of marine animals for strategies for our own survival. Imbler’s first-rate science writing glistens with the same sheen as the best of Oliver Sacks’ essays.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Weightless

By Evette Dionne

Essays Evette Dionne’s bracing essay collection tackles the dangers of fatphobia and her personal resistance to its claims. The former editor-in-chief of Bitch magazine braids the personal with the political in Weightless (Ecco, $26.99, 9780063076365), breaking down society’s deep-seated beliefs about fat people and setting new standards that allow her to thrive as she is.

Dionne takes up a variety of interconnected themes, such as the meaningful representation of fat women in media and equitable access to spaces that are meant for all of us. She writes about her first experiences of ostracization as she struggled with agoraphobia as an adolescent. Despite her parents’ support, Dionne was met by doctors with indifference and even hostility, a pattern that reached its nadir when a doctor failed to promptly diagnose her heart failure, pointing instead to her size as the issue.

These personal encounters with fatphobia are part of a continuum of discrimination that Dionne locates in pop culture, as well—from people’s obsession with celebrities’ weight to the preoccupation with policing fat bodies in shows like “My 600-Lb. Life.”

Dionne incorporates extensive research into Weightless, from the economic underpinnings of Reagan-era reductions to well-balanced free lunch programs and medical professionals’ widely held biases. All of these topics point to one sobering fact: Profound disgust toward fat people in American society circumscribes their lives in potentially lethal ways. However, despite these grave threats, Dionne is not hopeless. In fact, Weightless is a testament to resilience and an offering of realistic optimism. In the essay “I Want a Love Like Khadijah James,” Dionne remembers the first time she saw a woman whose body looked like hers on television: Queen Latifah as Khadijah James on “Living Single.” This feeling of being recognized lit Dionne’s world with the bright glow of possibility, and it has continued to transform her understanding of what her life could look like if she settles for nothing less than what she deserves.

Dionne writes, “I never thought I could do better because I rarely saw a fat Black woman modeling that reality for me.” With Weightless, Dionne is the model she so desperately needed, and one that other fat girls and women deserve.

—Claire Fallon

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© ANGELA ALTUS

q&a | maureen johnson

What’s the story, Stevie Bell?

Maureen Johnson’s beloved detective is on the case of a double murder in the English countryside.

After solving two notorious cold cases, Stevie Bell and her friends from Ellingham Academy are off to jolly old England to uncover the truth about a double murder that took place in the woodshed of a wealthy country estate in 1995. Meanwhile, they’re also dealing with college applications, academic pressures, romantic entanglements and more. In Nine Liars, bestselling author Maureen Johnson offers another satisfying standalone mystery while giving us more time with characters we’ve grown to love.

All of your books about Stevie balance page­-turning mysteries with real emotional stakes. Did you begin Nine Liars by asking, “What crime do I want Stevie to solve this time?” or “What’s happening in Stevie’s life now?”

It’s the first one, though I’m always thinking about what happens in the second. Stevie’s life—that’s an organic process. The murder mystery is a machine I build piece by piece and assemble carefully.

Stevie’s life grows around it, like a flowering vine, she said, writerly.

Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this Q&A and our starred review of Nine Liars.

our rent in change, but we could go see Riverdance every night if we wanted to.

We lived in a flat that had three doors that were impossible to open, so we usually climbed over the trash cans in front of our room and went in through the window, so it was very secure. It was a hot, trashy summer. It was great.

Stevie tells her head of school that she’s going to In Nine Liars, Stevie investigates a country house England to explore why reading about murder can be comforting. What are your thoughts on that? murder. What was appealing to you about this subH Nine Liars genre? What classic aspects were you excited about It’s a strange one, right? Much is made about the Katherine Tegen, $19.99 including—or even putting your own spin on? fact that what’s called the golden age of mystery was 9780063032651 between and during World War I and II. Books writThe country house murder is a classic puzzle from the golden age of mystery for a reason: You have a set ten during that time have a constant background of Young Adult cast of suspects and a contained staging area for the war. Agatha Christie was doing a lot of writing when puzzle to play out. Country houses are small enough in the grand scope England was being bombed. She wrote the final stories for Poirot, a war refof things to give the problem limits, but big enough and weird enough to ugee from Belgium, and Miss Marple in case she didn’t survive. She wanted have lots of hidey-holes and passages and things like that. to be the one to finish her characters. These books, Curtain and Sleeping There’s also an air of unreality to them. They feel like a backdrop, not Murder, respectively, were locked in a bank vault until her death in 1976. a place people would really live. That’s part of the appeal of this kind of In puzzle mysteries like Christie’s, the world can be made right. There mystery novel; it’s not meant to feel like a real crime, like people are being are solutions and often consequences. They serve as a psychological steam hurt. It’s Clue. It’s a revolving cast of professors and butlers and strange valve. Think about the world right now. Nine Liars is coming out into a relatives who want to know about the will. world of YA readers who have undergone major trauma and confusion.

In Nine Liars, I wanted to play with that a little. It’s a group of actors, it’s I think there’s a very good reason everyone’s going back to the classic a game, it’s a murder in the woodshed. But then the story continues to the puzzle mystery. present. The clues are still scattered around. The events in the woodshed had a real impact. And to solve it, Stevie must go back to the stage where What was the most challenging part of writing Nine Liars? What aspect this all went down. of it are you most proud of?

I work quite hard on the puzzle and making sure I’ve checked everything.

We’ve seen Stevie solve cases from the 1930s and the 1970s, but in Nine By the end, I feel like I am doing embroidery and using tweezers, placing Liars, she investigates a crime from 1995. How did this more recent each little detail—the necessary clues, the fakeouts. I love watching it setting impact the research you did for this novel? work. It’s like I’ve built a monster out of spare body parts and then it gets off the slab!

I was in London for the summer of 1995. I lived there with my friend Kate.

I was a waitress during the day and a bartender at night; she worked in What do you love about coming back to the character of Stevie? the office of a theater. We never had any money and mostly subsisted on I’ve been writing Stevie for several years now. She’s good company. She Honey Nut Cheerios and whatever was left over from my work. never moves my stuff.

Kate worked in the theater where Riverdance was playing. It was the big—Stephanie Appell gest show of the year. We had no money to do anything and sometimes paid

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reviews | young adult

The Stolen Heir

By Holly Black

Fantasy Author Holly Black returns to the world of Faerie with this highly anticipated spinoff from her bestselling Folk of the Air trilogy. The Stolen Heir (Little, Brown, $20.99, 9780316592703) follows Wren, the exiled queen of the Court of Teeth, and Prince Oak, the heir to Elfhame and Wren’s former betrothed.

Wren grew up a changeling, a faerie left in the care of a mortal family when she was just a toddler. She spent a blissful childhood among humans until her vicious faerie parents, Lord Jarel and Lady Nore, stole her away to the Ice Needle Citadel in the Court of Teeth. There, she endured years of humiliation and abuse before finally making her escape. She’s lived in isolation in the woods ever since, hiding from humans and faeries alike.

A charismatic and beguiling young man, Oak has spent much of his adolescence in the cutthroat Faerie court learning to combat the many assassination attempts on his life. While

Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute

By Talia Hibbert

Romance Bradley Graeme and Celine Bangura used to be best friends. Then Brad joined the popular football c ro w d , leaving Celine to lean into nerd culture and her TikTok account.

Though Celine has no shortage of self-confidence, she’s always resented Brad for choosing popularity over loyalty. Their friendship fallout feels especially painful since Celine and Brad are among the few Black students at their school. Shouldn’t they be supporting each other?

But the former besties still have plenty in common. They both aspire to get accepted into Oxford or Cambridge and pursue careers in law, so it’s not surprising that they both find themselves in a competitive program run by one of the U.K.’s most prominent Black lawyers, a woman who is Celine’s personal hero. At stake is a university scholarship—if the participants can survive a series of leadership and team-­ building challenges in the forests of England and Scotland. Brad and Celine will have to

his sister, Jude, and her husband (the central couple of Black’s previous trilogy) rule Elfhame, Oak has been trying to put a stop to Lady Nore’s growing power and the threat it poses. He has hatched a dangerous plan that involves infiltrating the Court of Teeth. To carry it out successfully, however, he needs Wren’s insider knowledge of the citadel.

Wren crosses paths with Oak when he rescues her from a kidnapping attempt, then conscripts her into joining his plans. The Court of Teeth—her former prison—is the last place Wren wants to return to, but if she’s ever going to stop living on the run, she must confront her past and embrace her power, no matter how monstrous it makes her feel.

Black centers The Stolen Heir, the first book in a planned duology, on the scars of childhood trauma. Wren is the rightful claimant to a throne she is too frightened to command.

Although she longs to return to her human family, her pale blue skin and sharply pointed teeth are constant reminders that she can never rejoin the mortal world. Oak’s unworldly allure—his golden curls and amber, foxlike eyes— makes her doubt the sincerity of his affection. As in all of Black’s books about the world of Faerie, beauty and cruelty exist side by side, and neither is ever completely what it seems.

Readers awaiting cameos from Jude and Cardan may feel slightly disappointed that Black keeps them in the background here. The Stolen Heir belongs wholly to Wren and Oak, but their story is just as satisfying as readers could hope for, deliciously wrought with mistrust and longing.

Meanwhile, newcomers to Black’s Faerie books will be enticed to gobble up everything she has ever penned.

—Kimberly Giarratano

overcome their differences and get along, but their reconciliation might be more complicated—and more romantic—than either of them expect.

Author Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy won over adult romance readers with her blend of witty dialogue, self-discovery and true love.

She makes her YA debut with Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute (Joy Revolution, $19.99, 9780593482339), and the result is sheer delight.

and thanks to a hilarious glossary, U.S. readers can learn a great deal about U.K. secondary school and youth culture. Hibbert’s book launches Joy Revolution, a new imprint curated

by YA authors Nicola and David Yoon and dedicated to YA romances by and about people of color. Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute will leave readers eager to discover what else Joy Revolution will publish.

—Norah Piehl

In bestselling romance author Talia Hibbert’s first YA book, two teens find the courage to be honest about what they want.

In her previous books, Hibbert has skillfully explored complicated family dynamics as well as themes of disability and mental health, and she does so here as well. Brad speaks candidly about having obsessive-compulsive disorder and the strategies he’s learned to manage it.

Celine gradually realizes that she could benefit from therapy, especially once she recognizes that she might have selected her career goals for the wrong reasons. Along the way, both teens find the courage to be honest—with others and with themselves—about their desires.

The novel’s dialogue is fast-paced and funny,

H For Lamb

By Lesa Cline-Ransome

Historical Fiction Coretta Scott King Honor author Lesa Cline-Ransome has earned a reputation as an excellent chronicler of American history in more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction.

In For Lamb (Holiday House, $18.99, 9780823450152), she powerfully captures the events that lead to a fictitious lynching in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1940.

Cline-Ransome was inspired to write For Lamb after visiting the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where she became

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reviews | young adult interested in the untold stories of Black women who were victims of lynching. Within the novel, Cline-Ransome names a number of characters after these women, including the titular protagonist, whose namesake, Lamb Whittle, was lynched in Louisiana in 1907.

As the novel opens, 16-year-old Lamb Clark (who was “quiet as a lamb” when she was born) is a naive girl, sheltered by her protective mother, Marion, and older brother, Simeon, an enterprising student determined to attend college and leave the South behind. After an encounter between Simeon and a bigoted white optometrist, the doctor’s daughter decides to befriend Lamb. Their friendship sets off a series of developments and leads to a horrifying, expertly plotted climax with unimaginable consequences.

Cline-Ransome skillfully conveys Lamb’s transformation into a young woman determined to chart her own course in life despite the obstacles and horrors of the Jim Crow South, including a sexual assault and the lynching of a member of her family. Lamb comes to a new understanding of Marion’s romantic relationship with a woman and forms a new connection with her father, who has been largely absent for many years.

Cline-Ransome depicts injustice and violence with an expert balance between brutality and sensitivity. She particularly excels at portraying the nuances of relationships and character motivations, which are often at odds among the members of Lamb’s family. Simeon, for instance, longs to be free from the need to act submissive around white people, while Marion believes this behavior can be key to survival, and readers gain deep understandings of both characters’ perspectives.

For Lamb is a heartbreaking novel that will leave readers with a visceral understanding of history.

—Alice Cary

H Unraveller

By Frances Hardinge

Fantasy The people of Raddith are used to living with magic. The country bustles with business, bureaucracy and other hallmarks of humanity, but around its edges are whispers of curses—dangerous magic spawned from intense negative emotion. Kellen, an unraveller with the rare ability to undo these curses, and Nettle, his stoic companion with a hidden past, make a meager living catching cursers

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and helping those they’ve cursed. After an old enemy threatens revenge against Kellen for unraveling her curse and leading to her imprisonment, Kellen and Nettle stumble into a mystery that challenges everything they know about Raddith, magic and their friendship.

In Unraveller (Amulet, $19.99, 9781419759314), acclaimed author Frances Hardinge creates two settings that both feel fantastical and yet also familiar: Raddith, the land of humans, and the Wilds, the marshy woods where magic thrives. The novel features otherworldly creatures such as spell-weaving Little Brothers, which are “not spiders, however much they look like them,” terrifying bog spirits and more, but Hardinge also depicts how humans coexist with such creatures. The humans in Raddith see them as a source of power, while people in the Wilds treat them with respect, even reverence. The novel’s unique magic system reflects this intertwining of the mundane and the marvelous as well: Strange, unpredictable curses that transform people into animals or steal their shadows stem from pent-up human emotions like resentment, anger and hatred.

Unraveller poses a difficult but necessary question: What does it mean to truly heal and be healed?

This emotion-fueled magic system places character development at the forefront of Unraveller. Nettle seems calm and collected, but she actually struggles to express how she feels, while Kellen understands the importance of communication but flees as soon as a curse is lifted, not realizing that true healing takes time.

Their personalities clash and complement each other throughout the book, demonstrating how growth and friendship aren’t linear—but are rewarding.

Hardinge isn’t afraid to challenge her readers to rethink their perceptions of hatred and healing, and she does so by venturing into some of the darkest aspects of human guilt, shame and anger. Almost every member of the novel’s large cast must learn to deal with complicated emotions, whether they’re cursers or cursed, from minor villagers to Kellen and Nettle’s most trusted allies. Some characters fall prey to their feelings, while others open up, forgive and change their ways.

Unraveller is a multilayered, challenging and unflinching read, with occasional depictions of gore and body horror that may unsettle some readers. It poses a difficult but deeply necessary question: What does it mean to truly heal and be healed?

—Tami Orendain

We Are All So Good at Smiling

By Amber McBride

Fiction In her second novel in verse, National Book Award finalist Amber McBride blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.

Eighteen-year-old Whimsy has been hospitalized for the 11th time in 10 years.

Although her grandmother taught the young conjurer that “Fairy Tales are real, / magic is real,” she also offered a warning: “Careful, Whimsy, / sometimes your own mind will unroot you.” When a green-haired boy named Faerry is admitted to the hospital, Whimsy instantly identifies him as Fae. After the two are released from the hospital, Whimsy discovers that Faerry’s family recently moved to her neighborhood. As Whimsy and Faerry are drawn both to each other and to the forest at the end of their street, they discover that their lives have intertwined before, and they embark on a journey to a haunted garden where the embodiment of Sorrow has trapped a number of fairy tale characters. To free them and return home, Whimsy and Faerry must face a truth they’ve spent years running from.

In a lengthy dedication at the beginning of We Are All So Good at Smiling (Feiwel & Friends, $19.99, 9781250780386), McBride explains that the novel “borrows from my personal experiences with clinical/major depression” and that she wrote it to remind herself and readers “that whenever you find yourself in Sorrow’s Garden—you have tools & you can find a way out.” The book’s significant back matter includes mental health resources, as well as a playlist, a glossary and more.

McBride conveys Whimsy’s struggle with depression through striking language, text alignment and structure. Words and phrases frequently appear in parentheses, mimicking intrusive thoughts. When Whimsy speaks, the text is aligned on the right side of the page, separating her speech from the rest of the text and reflecting the way her depression alienates her from herself. McBride often establishes and then changes structural patterns, mirroring the disorientating nature of recovery.

We Are All So Good at Smiling elevates everything that made McBride’s debut novel, Me (Moth), such a success. Readers who loved Ibi Zoboi’s American Street or Anna-Marie McLemore’s Blanca & Roja will especially enjoy its blend of magic and emotion.

—Emily Koch

q&a | claire swinarski

feature | picture books

Winter wonders

In Claire Swinarski’s mystery, the new girl uncovers a troubling secret hiding in the halls of eighth grade.

Two books capture the magic to be found during the coldest season of the year.

When Anna Hunt moves to a new school, she notices that once-popular Rachel Riley is now shunned by everyone. An aspiring investigative journalist, Anna wonders, What Happened to Rachel Riley? (Quill Tree, $16.99, 9780063213098). Peer pressure, sexual harassment and the struggle to do the right thing collide in Claire Swinarski’s inspiring middle grade novel.

Beneath the veneer of school spirit lies a dark secret. What drew you to explore this subject for middle grade readers?

I remember being a middle schooler and desperately wanting to come across as laid-back. You were supposed to laugh everything off—mean jokes, bullying and sexual harassment. If you took anything seriously, you were labeled uptight or a drama queen. It was better to be literally anything else.

Why is that particular age group so obsessed with not making waves in social settings?

In our current time, we see a lot of middle schoolers getting passionate about political topics. They want to be activists, and if they’re fighting for good causes, that’s fantastic. But sometimes the best way to change the world is to change the hallway. Shedding that fear of being seen as dramatic, especially for girls, can be step one.

What would you say to an adult who thinks that children’s books shouldn’t include the experiences depicted in this novel?

As a mom, I completely understand wanting your kids to be surrounded by books that are good and hopeful. At the same time, we can’t understate how important it is for kids to be surrounded by

© MARY CLARE LOCOCO PHOTOGRAPHY

Drama queens and truth tellers

books that represent a true depiction of the world they live in.

Yo u r middle schooler is more than likely going to witness, perform or experience sexual harassment. How are they prepared to handle that?

Stories can be a safe space to work out those conversations together.

Wouldn’t you rather be the person talking about that with them, versus whatever they’re going to pick up from friends or TikTok? I know I would be.

Anna realizes that speaking out might give her classmates the courage to do the same. What do you hope young readers might take away from her story?

Telling the truth is a brave act.

But it’s also about how we tell the truth. Anna’s goal isn’t to ruin anyone’s life or to shame anyone.

I hope young readers walk away from What Happened to Rachel Riley? knowing that it isn’t enough to want things to change without taking any action.

You have to make the change in a way that’s positive and kind and truthful, and then you have to stay hopeful when there are bumps in the road. That staying-hopeful part can often be the trickiest bit.

But it’s essential.

—Linda M. Castellitto

Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this Q&A and our starred review of What Happened to Rachel Riley?

So Much Snow Author Kristen Schroeder and illustrator Sarah Jacoby take readers through the days of the week by exploring a snowfall in the woods in So Much Snow (Random House Studio, $18.99, 9780593308202).

“On Monday, it starts to snow,” the book opens as a mouse watches flakes fall to the grass. “How high will it go?” More snow falls on Tuesday, and a rabbit pops up from behind a log to delight in the promise of winter weather. Again, the text asks: “How high will it go?”

Schroeder repeats this phrase as the snow falls until Sunday.

Schroeder fills the book with punchy, alliterative sentences starring vivid verbs. Flakes float, hilltops hide, drifts dance and more. Jacoby depicts foxes, wolves and deer leaping, jumping and sniffing the air as the color palette becomes progressively whiter. By the book’s climax, Jacoby’s compositions become wonders of line and movement.

In the book’s second half, it’s a new week and the animals reappear: “On Monday, the sun starts to show.” Schroeder’s text encourages readers to greet the creatures (“Look, it’s Moose. Hello!”).”

Rabbit even waves directly at readers while venturing out in the melting snow.

This cozy adventure closes with a delightful twist. So Much Snow is so much joy.

The Winter Bird As The Winter Bird (Candlewick, $18.99, 9781536215687) opens, author Kate Banks describes the

change in seasons. “It was the time of year when the sun went to bed early,” she writes, “and the birds prepared to fly south.” But a nightingale, a spring bird, remains on the ground with a broken wing. “What will happen to me?” it sings. A nearby barn owl tells the nightingale that it will have to stay behind and learn the ways of winter.

Over the months that follow, the nightingale sees snow for the first time, a rabbit invites the bird to take shelter in its burrow, and squirrels share their food with the bird. It even survives a blizzard with the other creatures, breaking the storm’s “eerie hush” with a song of “summer’s sweetness” and then an ode to “winter’s wonders.”

Banks’ prose is filled with figurative language. Cold creeps “in on icy feet,” and the blizzard covers “the world in a shimmering blanket.” In full-bleed spreads, illustrator Suzie Mason brings winter to the page. Her color palette grows dark as the season sets in. In two spreads, she places readers in the burrow behind the rabbit and nightingale, looking out at the falling snow along with the wide-eyed creatures. As spring arrives, Mason punctuates snowy spreads with vivid greens, and by the final spread, green sings from every inch of the pages.

The Winter Bird is an earnest anthropomorphized tale. Its creatures support and encourage one another, forming a kind and tightknit community that transforms the nightingale. As Banks reflects, “It was a spring bird, but it had become a winter bird, too.”

—Julie Danielson

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reviews | children’s

Figure It Out, Henri Weldon

By Tanita S. Davis

Middle Grade When Henrietta Weldon’s parents decide that she should switch from private to public school for seventh grade, Henri is excited—and determined to hide her nerves. Between her messy bedroom and her struggles with math, Henri’s family of competitive overachievers treat her like “a problem to be solved.” Her older sister, Kat, refuses to answer Henri’s questions about Alterra Junior/Senior High School, instead insisting that Henri needs to “figure things out for herself,” so Henri is eager to prove them all wrong.

With help from a kind teacher and the right tutor, Henri’s trouble with math turns out to be manageable, no matter how many times her brain tries to flip numbers around. It’s the rest of seventh grade that proves to be the real challenge. Between forgetting important deadlines,

Nubby

By Dan Richards Illustrated by Shanda McCloskey

Picture Book Poor Nubby. The plush toy rabbit has been “carried, buried, dropped, dragged, torn, worn, chewed on, sat on, and even used as a nose wipe.

Repeatedly.” No wonder Nubby heads off in search of a place he’ll be more appreciated than he is at home.

First, Nubby tries befriending the real rabbits in the yard, but they ignore him. Next, he joins a neighbor child’s magic show in the hope of achieving stardom, but that doesn’t work out either. Finally, Nubby decides that wealth must be the answer, but he soon discovers that there is no greater treasure than being truly loved.

Nubby (Knopf, $18.99, 9780593381090) is filled with hilarious illustrations and prose that begs to be read aloud. Illustrator Shanda McCloskey excels at creating emotions from simple lines and shapes. Nubby exudes dour displeasure as he’s picked and pulled at, his angry unibrow a single thick squiggle. Despite the many injustices Nubby endures, there’s also buoyant joy in McCloskey’s illustrations, from the dog who is all too happy to run around the neighborhood with Nubby in his mouth to the

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trying to convince her parents to let her join the soccer team and making new friends Kat instantly dislikes, Henri must solve the seemingly impossible problem of balancing everything she wants to do while keeping everyone else happy.

Coretta Scott King Honor author Tanita S. Davis’ two previous middle grade novels, Serena Says and Partly Cloudy, depict young people carving out identities and creating supportive spaces for themselves, and Davis explores similar themes in Figure It Out, Henri Weldon (Katherine Tegen, $17.99, 9780063143579). As Henri confronts situations that range from remembering to read a friend’s short story to caring for her sick pet, Wil Snakespeare, she stays motivated to persevere, whether out of love for her friends or sheer spiteful desire to defy her family’s expectations.

As Henri gets to know her friends’ close-knit foster family, their supportive bonds contrast starkly with Henri’s own family, enabling her to recognize how harshly they often behave toward one another. Eventually, Henri realizes there isn’t necessarily a wrong way to love, as long as you’re trying.

The novel’s large cast of characters, along with Davis’ honest depiction of the sometimes antagonistic relationships between siblings, is authentically developed and relatable. Short excerpts from Henri’s journal open each chapter, grounding the book in a realistic sense of optimism that makes it easy to cheer her on. Figure It Out, Henri Weldon will encourage young readers to take a breath and keep trying, even when the odds—or their families—don’t always seem in their favor.

—Nicole Brinkley

gratitude of the boy who hugs Nubby tightly upon his return and, yes, still sometimes uses our hero as a hankie.

Author Dan Richards gives the story a dramatic flair that might go over the heads of the youngest of readers, who may also be troubled by an image of tattered Nubby, surrounded by white stuffing and accompanied by text that describes how “the pain in his chest cut deep, deeper than torn cloth and strewn stuffing.” Yet the story’s wit and dramatic tension are sure to make it a crowd pleaser among a slightly older and more worldly readership.

Nubby is a worthy tribute to all the beleaguered, beloved toys who serve as constant, comforting companions through childhood.

—Lisa Bubert

barely scrape by on their farm at the edge of a marsh with their mean-spirited father. Everyone assumes that the sisters are doomed because of a rhyme called “The Curse of the Six Daughters,” which predicts the fate of any family with six daughters. Despite such dismal conditions, Willa and her sisters find small joys with help from their Grammy, who taught them to read the books she hid away, many of which she and the girls’ late mother wrote, even though such things are strictly forbidden for women.

The delicate balance of the sisters’ existence crumples, however, when their father trades his oldest daughter, Grace, to an older man, Silas Kirby, in exchange for a horse. Before the deal can be finalized, Grace disappears.

Willa often feels “like the ugly duckling,” caught between her “taller, fairer” older sisters and her younger sisters. But Willa was named for her strong will, so she steals her father’s fine new steed and sets off across the marsh, a place full of mesmerizing magic and atmospheric suspense. Willa’s epic adventure becomes all the more urgent when she discovers that Grace may have fallen prey to a mythical figure from their mother’s stories.

Strange is a gifted storyteller who balances good and evil, dreariness and hope. Honest and riveting, Sisters of the Lost Marsh is a tale of girls boldly taking charge of their own fates, flying fearlessly in the face of a community trying to scare them into submission and ignorance.

These six sisters, “side by side like a row of paper dolls,” turn out to be as strong as steel.

—Alice Cary

Sisters of the Lost Marsh

By Lucy Strange

Middle Grade Lucy Strange transports readers to a thrilling, mysterious world in Sisters of the Lost Marsh (Chicken House, $18.99, 9781338686463), a gothic fairy tale fueled by female empowerment.

Twelve-year-old Willa and her five sisters

feature | meet the author

C

ori Doerrfeld is the author-illustrator of the bestselling picture book The Rabbit Listened, as well as Good Dog, Wild Baby and Goodbye, Friend! Hello, Friend! She has also illustrated books written by Steve Jenkins (The True Adventures of Esther the Wonder Pig) and Ame Dyckman (That’s Life!), among others.

In Beneath, Doerrfeld pays tribute to the beauty and wonder of nature, as well as to her grand­ father and father, to whom the book is dedicated.

A graduate of St. Olaf College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Doerrfeld lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and children and their rescue dog, Jinx.

© TYLER PAGE

meet CORI DOERRFELD

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?

H Beneath

By Cori Doerrfeld

“Finn was in a horrible mood. Grandpa wanted to talk about it. Finn did not.” So begins author-illustrator Cori Doerrfeld’s picture book that captures what we truly need when we’re not ready to talk about what is happening underneath the surface.

When we first see Finn, the child is sitting on a bed, covered by a patchwork quilt. To the left of the bed is a sewing machine, and hanging on the wall above is a wedding portrait of Grandpa and Grandma. Instead of pushing Finn to talk, Grandpa suggests a walk, and Finn reluctantly agrees. The two set off with Finn still wrapped tightly in the quilt, their nose peeking out from its folds.

As the pair walk into a dense forest that teems with life, Grandpa notes the many things happening that can’t be seen: root systems of trees growing underground, fish swimming under the surface of the water, eggs staying warm in a nest beneath a bird and more. In each spread, Finn emerges a little bit more from beneath the quilt. First we see Finn’s face, then a puff of reddish hair, then the sleeves of a blue sweater.

Doerrfeld’s rich, detailed illustrations feature her signature soft, crayonlike textures. Scenes that reveal secrets hidden within hollow trees and underground burrows feel cozy and safe, evoking the way Finn must feel under the quilt. Especially moving is a scene in which Grandpa and Finn encounter other people: an older person with a dog, an adult and a crying child, and a person using a wheelchair sharing headphones with a companion.

Doerrfeld’s X-ray vision artwork shows each person’s emotions, a testimony to how varying our experiences can be even amid a shared moment.

Beneath (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316312264) is a rare picture book that truly meets both young readers and adults where they are. Children will relate to Finn’s initial conviction that some things feel too hard for anyone else to understand, as well as the deeper longing to have such feelings validated. Meanwhile, Grandpa’s desire to offer Finn comfort will resonate with adults.

As Grandpa seeks to care for Finn, he also creates an opportunity for Finn to care for him, and it’s this depiction of mutual care that makes Beneath so extraordinary. Witnessing the love between these two characters gives readers of all ages a beautiful model of how we can truly support one another when we need it most.

—Brittany Sky

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