BookPage August 2023

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

FALL’S MOST ANTICIPATED The season of big book releases is upon us! Discover the 14 books we’re most excited to read

DEBUT FICTION Elizabeth Acevedo’s first book for adult readers + 5 more first-time novelists

PATTI HARTIGAN TIGAN Her accomplished biography of August Wilson takes full measure of the playwright’s career and life

COLSON WHITEHEAD The Pulitzer Prize winner takes us back to Harlem in his latest masterpiece, Crook Manifesto.

Manifesto

AUG 2023

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AUGUST 2023

features

reviews

feature | fall preview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

fiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

The 14 most exciting books coming this fall

nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

interview | patti hartigan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

young adult. . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

The first biography to give the great August Wilson his due

children’s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

feature | retellings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The messiness of Greek mythology gets messier and Cinderella gets genderswapped

q&a | lauren beukes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

columns

The author of The Shining Girls returns with the trippy thriller Bridge

cover story | colson whitehead. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

book clubs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 whodunit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 romance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Crook Manifesto heightens the dangers for the Harlem Shuffle hero

q&a | elizabeth acevedo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The depths and delights of her first novel for adult readers

feature | first fiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Five debut novels that have captured our attention

sci-fi & fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . 11 lifestyles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 audio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

q&a | andrew leland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 On losing his sight and embracing his eventual blind identity

feature | back to school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Five books help to transform jitters into joy—whether you’re a parent or a student

Cover photo of Colson Whitehead © Chris Close.

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feature | fall preview

THE MOST ANTICIPATED Our list of the 14 most exciting releases coming this fall includes historical fiction and long-awaited sophomore

The Fraud

By Zadie Smith

Penguin Press | September 5 We haven’t had a novel from Zadie Smith since her 2016 bestseller, Swing Time, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize. With The Fraud, Smith takes us to 1873 for the story of a Scottish housekeeper, a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica and the ways their lives intersect via the real-life “Tichborne Trial,” in which an Australian butcher claims to be the heir of a sizable estate.

The Vaster Wilds

By Lauren Groff

Riverhead | September 12 Calling all devotees of fungus and fans of wilderness fiction: The Vaster Wilds, the next novel by Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies, Matrix), is a Colonialera adventure story following a girl who leaves her village in Jamestown, Virginia, to live in the woods. Groff is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, so all we’re saying is, it’s about time she won it.

The Unsettled

By Ayana Mathis

Knopf | September 26 Ayana Mathis kicked in the door with her bestselling first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012), which earned her comparisons to Toni Morrison.

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Bonds between mothers and daughters are at the heart of her follow-up, but part of the story is inspired by real history involving a group that split off from the Black Panthers and the 1985 bombing of Philadelphia’s Cobbs Creek neighborhood.

How to Say Babylon

By Safiya Sinclair

Simon & Schuster | October 3 Throughout Safiya Sinclair’s childhood in Jamaica, her father was a strict Rastafarian who imposed harsh constraints on his daughters. As Sinclair read the books her mother gave her and began to find her voice as a poet, she likewise found a way to get out from underneath her father’s thumb. In her debut memoir, How to Say Babylon, Sinclair reckons with colonialism, patriarchy and obedience in expressive, melodic prose.

A Man of Two Faces

By Viet Thanh Nguyen Grove | October 3 The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (soon to be an HBO limited series) turns to memoir for the first time. Viet Thanh Nguyen left Vietnam at age 4 and came to the U.S. as a refugee, but after escaping danger in their home country, his family was separated, targeted and harmed in America. This book becomes much more than a memoir as Nguyen conjures

stirring insights into memory, migration and identity.

Starling House

By Alix E. Harrow Tor | October 3

Alix E. Harrow’s third novel, Starling House, appears to be a dark echo of her debut, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Opal is another young woman in a mysterious house, but she’s not trying to escape like January Scaller. Rather, Opal is determined to make a home in Starling House, no matter what dark and terrifying forces lurk within it.

The Bell in the Fog

By Lev AC Rosen

Forge | October 10 Lev AC Rosen’s first Andy Mills mystery, Lavender House, was one of the best mysteries of 2022, and we can’t wait to see where he takes the cop-turned-PI next. The Bell in the Fog will further explore the gay underground of 1950s San Francisco as Andy hunts down a blackmailer targeting one of his old flames from the Navy.

Sword Catcher

By Cassandra Clare Del Rey | October 10

Author of the iconic, megabestselling Shadowhunter Chronicles Cassandra Clare is making the leap to adult fiction

feature | fall preview

BOOKS OF FALL 2023 Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nonfiction debut, Zadie Smith’s leap into novels from Justin Torres and Ayana Mathis. after 16 years as one of the reigning queens of YA. Sword Catcher will follow Kel, a nobleman’s body double, and Lin, a physician with magical abilities, as they uncover a conspiracy at the very heart of the powerful city-state of Castellane.

Blackouts

By Justin Torres

FSG | October 10 Twelve years after his bestselling coming-of-age debut, We the Animals (adapted for film in 2018), Justin Torres is back with a second novel, in which a young man cares for an important figure who, from their deathbed, has much to share. Torres was inspired by the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, the first all-Black production of Macbeth (known as “Voodoo Macbeth”), the film Pedro Páramo and the 20th-century book Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, the latter of which factors into the novel in a major way.

10 Things That Never Happened

By Alexis Hall

Sourcebooks Casablanca | October 17 With his London Calling and Winner Bakes All series, Alexis Hall has established himself as the romance connoisseur’s go-to pick for witty, sexy romcoms. 10 Things That Never Happened

will thrill fans of Hall’s London Calling novels, as it’s set in the same universe, while also presenting an intriguing challenge for the talented author: Can he make a character who lies about having amnesia sympathetic?

The Sisterhood

By Liza Mundy

Crown | October 17 The author of the 2017 bestseller Code Girls returns with The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, a history of the women who have played key roles in the CIA since World War II. Women spies, archivists, analysts and operatives have been underestimated and overlooked through the years. Liza Mundy spins a gripping tale of how they used those slights to their advantage as they captured state secrets and spotted threats that the men working alongside them had missed.

America Fantastica

By Tim O’Brien

Mariner | October 24 The author of The Things They Carried (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) hasn’t published a new novel in 20 years, though he’s dabbled in nonfiction in the interim. Tim O’Brien makes his grand return to fiction with America Fantastica, which sounds like a classic dark-descent road trip novel. A disgraced journalist’s bank robbery leads

to a cross-country saga that explores an American landscape amid the Trump administration of 2019.

Hunt on Dark Waters

By Katee Robert

Berkley | November 7 Katee Robert, of Greek myth-­ reimaginings and monster romance fame, has turned her attention to a once wildly popular but now sadly neglected corner of the genre: the pirate romance.

Never afraid of bucking tradition, Robert has added a fantasy spin by sparking romance between a witch on the run and a telekinetic pirate captain.

My Name Is Barbra

By Barbra Streisand Viking | November 7

If there is one book that truly captures the spirit of “most anticipated,” it has to be screen and stage legend Barbra Streisand’s memoir. Fans have been looking forward to reading the full saga of Streisand’s life and unparalleled career for years—and this fall, they will finally get the chance. At 1,024 pages long, My Name Is Barbra is unlikely to skip over any of the juicy details.

Publication dates are subject to change.

Visit BookPage.com to see more of our most anticipated books of fall 2023.

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© MARISA IH

interview | patti hartigan

Pulling back the curtain on August Wilson Theater critic Patti Hartigan is the first biographer to give the great American playwright his due.

Patti Hartigan was a self-described “baby into his childhood and ancestry to unearth a theater critic” when she met August Wilson family history that Wilson himself did not fully in 1987. The two were chatting at the National know. Hartigan would even climb a mountain Critics Institute at the famed O’Neill National in Spear, North Carolina, where generations Playwrights Conference, and Wilson asked if of Wilson’s strong-willed ancestors were born.

Hartigan had seen his play Fences, which was Wilson himself never undertook that journey, then the talk of Broadway. “Being green and saying that he wrote from “the blood’s memory” subsisting on a freelancer’s rather than research. Yet again and again, Hartigan pitiful wages,” she recalls found spine-tingling simiin August Wilson: A Life, “I blurted out, ‘My mother larities between the stories saw it, but I can’t afford a he created and his actual ticket.’ The minute I said it, I family’s past. wished I could take it back.”

Wilson is largely assoBut the next day, Hartigan ciated with Pittsburgh, received a note that two Pennsylvania, specifically tickets would be waiting for its Hill District, where her at the box office. he set all but one of his This act of generosity plays. The Hill is where his was emblematic of Wilson, mother, Daisy, and others Hartigan would discover. in the family settled during After landing at the Boston the Great Migration, and it’s where Wilson, born Globe as theater critic and arts reporter, she built a in 1945, grew up. His sinrapport with Wilson over gular intelligence was apparent from an early the years, talking with him whenever he opened a play age, and he was educated at the city’s Huntington in the best schools. But Theatre. Then in January his intelligence could not H August Wilson 2005, with Wilson poised to shelter him from endemic Simon & Schuster, $32.50 complete his monumental racism, and after being 9781501180668 belittled and underval10-play Pittsburgh Cycle— one play about Black life in ued at school, he dropped Biography America set in every decade out at 15. (Years later, the of the 20th century—Hartigan flew to Seattle to Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh awarded the interview him for a celebratory piece. Neither she autodidact a high school diploma, an honor nor Wilson yet knew that a fast-spreading cancer he cherished alongside his two Pulitzer Prizes and other awards.) would lead to his death just a few months later.

He managed to complete the final play, Radio Wilson first aspired to be a poet, which Hartigan says is hardly surprising given the Golf, under great physical and mental strain, soaring poetry of his and when he died in m o n o l o g u e -­d r i v e n October 2005, the world “In carving out room in plays. His move into mourned the loss of a voice that had changed American theater for Black theater was both acciAmer­ican theater. and serendipplaywrights . . . he paved dental But “time passed itous, coinciding with the politically fueled and there was no biogthe way.” raphy,” Hartigan says Black literary movement in a video call. “I decided someone has to do of the 1970s. Wilson was driven, and when he this, and because I knew him, I decided to jump learned about the O’Neill Conference—arguably in.” The first-time biographer spent five years the preeminent play development opportunity researching and writing August Wilson: A Life, available at the time—he began submitting a play an accomplished work that not only takes full each year. He was met with rejection after rejecmeasure of the playwright’s career but also delves tion until 1982, when he received the coveted

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Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of August Wilson.

telegram from artistic director Lloyd Richards.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom had been selected.

Richards was perhaps the most influential Black theater maker of the age—he was the first African American to direct a play on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun—and “a presence like no other,” says Hartigan. He took Wilson under his wing and played a major role in the playwright’s progress. When asked if she thought there would have been an August Wilson without a Lloyd Richards, Hartigan admits there is no way of knowing, but probably not. “The two of them fed each other. August would come with a play that was four and a half hours long, and Lloyd could cut it down and streamline it,” she says. “The relationship was key for both men. Lloyd’s career had a resurgence when he began working with August.” Their professional falling-out, which Hartigan thoughtfully chronicles, was painful. “Both were right and both were wrong, and it’s a tragedy. Yet you can praise the relationship that was.”

Hartigan, clearly a great admirer of Wilson and his work, is nonetheless forthright in her appraisal of both. She does not shy away from portraying the playwright’s flaws as a man, a husband, a father. And she addresses the frequent observation that, with a few notable exceptions, Wilson’s female characters are weak. “I think the criticism is warranted,” she says. “Yet I’ve seen later productions where the women are painted in by just the direction [of the play]. So I think there might be a little more to the women [in Wilson’s plays] than we initially thought.”

The August Wilson Estate declined to grant permission to Hartigan to quote from his intimate letters or from some of his early writings, a decision she regrets because “paraphrasing just can’t do him justice.” Yet she manages to capture Wilson’s voice well. “He didn’t want to be exceptionalized,” she says. “But certainly, in carving out room in American theater for Black playwrights—and the subject matter that he was able to bring to the stage—he paved the way.”

—Robert Weibezahl

book clubs

by julie hale

Modern media studies Lynn Melnick’s I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton (Spiegel & Grau, $18, 9781954118478) is an extraordinary homage to one of country music’s leading ladies. Melnick’s early life was marked by abuse and trauma, and she fell in love with Parton’s music at age 14. Mixing her personal history with reflections on the singer’s significance as a cultural figure, Melnick creates a moving narrative of female endurance. Parton’s popular tunes, including “Jolene” and “Islands in the Stream,” serve as springboards for the chapters of this inspiring book.

In Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate (Sourcebooks, $16.99, 9781728274744), Anna Bogutskaya explores how our perception of what makes a “likable” woman has changed as more complex female characFour smart, accessible ters have become prevalent in media. Bogutskaya uses tropes books provide fresh such as “the mean girl” and “the shrew” as reference points and perspectives on celebrates how those misogynist terms have been, in some cases, popular culture. reclaimed. Bogutskaya’s analysis of gender, sexuality and the power of the media will get book clubs talking as she explores famous figures such as Cardi B and Hillary Clinton.

Emily Nussbaum delivers a shrewd overview of the modern TV landscape with her dazzling collection of essays, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution (Random House, $18, 9780525508984).

Over the course of the collection, Nussbaum—an unabashed fan of the tube—provides engaging analyses of audience viewing habits and storytelling trends and traditions. She also interviews showrunners and considers the significance of watershed series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

N u s s b a u m’s lively writing style and gifts as a critic are on full display in this eye-opening collection.

Nerd: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria, $17.99, 9781982165789), Maya Phillips’ smart, incisive essay collection, investigates the growth of nerd culture and its influence on modern media. Reading groups will appreciate Phillips’ wide-reaching yet personal critiques of cultural touchstones such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and Marvel comics and how they inspire feelings of belonging among fans. Phillips also delves into the complications of her own experiences as a Black woman engaging in fandoms that lack diverse characters. The evolution of pop culture, hero worship and the impact of fan bases are but a few of the rich themes in this intriguing book.

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

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whodunit

by bruce tierney

Sun Damage

Fatal Legacy

An Honest Man

The Lady From Burma

If you reveled in the shenanigans of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, you’re the target audience for British author Sabine Durrant’s Sun Damage (Harper Paperbacks, $18.99, 9780063277687). A caper novel set in the sun-drenched south of France, Sun Damage begins by introducing us to a con man named Sean who plays Svengali to his acolyte, Ali. The pair are just beginning to set up an elaborate scheme to relieve a young British socialite of her fortune. It all goes sour when said socialite is killed in a boating accident that is perhaps not as much an “accident” as it appears. Ali realizes that she is at risk of taking the fall for the death, so she does what any good con artist would do: exits stage left. With any luck, that would have left Sean holding the bag, but of course, Ali’s plan soon goes remarkably awry. Durrant ratchets up the suspense as Ali does her level best to stay at least one step ahead of Sean, who is in hot pursuit, while also trying to elude the authorities. Or perhaps that is not what is really going on after all, because if there is one thing that Durrant is exceptional at, it is misdirection. Already a hit in the U.K., this book practically demands to be read on a float in a swimming pool, or better yet, on a Mediterranean beach somewhere.

But keep an eye on your valuables.

Flavia Albia is a private informer, an ancient Roman precursor to the contemporary private investigator that conveniently utilizes the same abbreviation: PI. Flavia returns for her 11th case in Lindsey Davis’ intricate and entertaining historical mystery Fatal Legacy (Minotaur, $28, 9781250799906).

The book starts out simply enough, with Flavia in pursuit of a pair of deadbeats who skipped out on their bill at her family’s restaurant. But after she deals with this infraction, the family of said deadbeats hires her for a much more complicated task involving a legacy that may not be entirely legal and a surprising number of folks eager to obscure the truth for their own advantage. The debtors belong to the Tranquilla family, who were once enslaved but then freed by their former master’s will.

But there isn’t any documentation asserting the freedom of one of them, Postuminus, and if Flavia can’t prove his status, his daughter’s impending marriage will be in jeopardy. Flavia is a witty observer of Roman family life and the low-grade skulduggery that was seemingly omnipresent in the ancient metropolis; it will be the rare reader indeed who does not get at least one unexpected chuckle per chapter. For my part, I will be seeking out Davis’ back catalog and paying regular visits to antiquity with Flavia.

Crime fiction icon Michael Connelly referred to Michael Koryta as “one of the best of the best, plain and simple,” and Koryta’s most recent offering, An Honest Man (Mulholland, $29, 9780316535946), supports that statement and then some. The titular honest man also happens to be a killer, and An Honest Man explores that dichotomy via two plots that dovetail nicely over the course of the narrative.

The first follows Israel Pike, who was convicted for the murder of his father and is now a prime suspect in the murder of seven wealthy and powerful men on an expensive yacht off the coast of Salvation Point Island, Maine.

Israel’s accuser and nemesis is his uncle, the island’s police deputy Sterling Pike. The second storyline, which also takes place on Salvation Point, is about 12-yearold Lyman Rankin, who stumbles upon an injured, hatchet-wielding young woman who threatens his life if he should tell anyone she is hiding in an abandoned house on the island. Before Israel’s and Lyman’s stories resolve, there will be violence galore and the reveal of a seamy criminal underbelly, whose powers-that-be will stop at nothing to avoid prosecution.

Koryta is a force to be reckoned with in modern suspense, and An Honest Man is one of his finest achievements to date.

Allison Montclair’s author biography mentions that she devoured hand-me-down Agatha Christie paperbacks while growing up. Just as in Christie’s novels, murders abound in Montclair’s work, often in the most innocent of locales. Her sleuths, Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn “Gwen” Bainbridge, run the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, a matchmaking service in post-World War II London. The two are an unlikely pair: Gwen is a sophisticated, high-society widow trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her husband, and Iris is a former British intelligence operative readjusting to a far more sedate peacetime life.

Their fifth adventure, The Lady From Burma (Minotaur, $28, 9781250854193), opens with a visit from the aforementioned lady from Burma, Mrs. Adela Remagen, who has a strange request for the duo: find a suitable wife for her husband. Adela is dying and wants to ensure that her husband, Potiphar, has someone to care for him after she is gone. An eccentric entomologist with an affection for tropical insects, Potiphar is perhaps not the easiest client for Iris and Gwen’s small agency to match. And then Adela gets herself murdered. If you are in the mood for a modern-day rendering of Dame Christie, look no further.

The Lady From Burma will be right up your alley.

Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.

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romance

feature | retellings

by christie ridgway

H The Blonde Identity Ally Carter will keep readers laughing with The Blonde Identity (Avon, $24.99, 9780063276642). A woman awakens in Paris, unable to remember her name or why she’s there. Soon she encounters a mysterious hot guy who claims she’s an operative named “Alex” being pursued by international spies. When bullets start flying, it seems he’s right, and as they make a run for it, they learn a thing or two about each other. Her name is actually Zoe, she must be Alex’s identical twin and the hot guy, Jake Sawyer, is a spy in his own right. The pace never lets up and neither does the fun in this sexy fluff of a story.

To truly enjoy it, readers will need to suspend disbelief and a few of the laws of physics, but who cares when the characters are so charming, the antics so entertaining and the plot so cinematic? Known for her young adult titles, Carter seamlessly makes her adult debut with this highly enjoyable romantic suspense novel. Don’t miss it!

Give the Devil His Duke Wrongs are righted, arrogance is humbled and good deeds are rewarded in Anna Bradley’s Give the Devil His Duke (Zebra, $8.99, 9781420155396). Penniless Lady Francesca “Franny” Stanhope has worked up the courage to confront her greedy uncle in hopes of securing financial help for her ailing mother. But at her uncle’s home, Franny encounters Giles Drew, the Duke of Basingstoke and her cousin’s new fiancé. Franny distrusts Giles—his father caused her own family’s ruin—but he’s undeniably handsome and more than a little suave. As they encounter each other at society events, Giles can’t help his preoccupation with his bride-to-be’s relative, which does not go unnoticed by the ton’s gossips. Then scandal forces Giles to go all out to save his reputation and hers—by marrying Franny. Balls, gowns and friends destined for their own installments in this new series contribute to the charming ambiance of this sweet and sexy Regency romance.

Someone Just Like You Childhood frenemies unite for their parents’ joint anniversary party in Meredith Schorr’s Someone Just Like You (Forever, $16.99, 9781538754801), set amid New York City’s vibrant restaurant and bar scene. Molly Blum grew up hating and pranking Jude Stark, who gave as good as he got. But surely they can team up to organize a celebration without reverting to old ways.

Except . . . no. Jude is more irritating than ever.

Family and friends point out that every woman he dates looks just like Molly, and she’s been dating a series of guys who look just like Jude. Can they settle past grievances and figure out why the sparks between them now seem sexy rather than angry? The first-person narration hums with Molly’s energy and honesty in this pitch-perfect enemies-to-lovers rom-com.

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

Tales as old as time The messy relationships of Greek mythology get messier, and Cinderella gets genderswapped.

Cruel Seduction

Marry Me by Midnight

Think you know your Greek myths? Think again. In Katee Robert’s Cruel Seduction (Sourcebooks Casablanca, $16.99, 9781728262765), the modern city of Olympus is ruled by the Thirteen, who are headed by Zeus, but that’s not actually his name; it’s his title. All names of the Thirteen are titles, and some of them were won fairly recently. The new Hephaestus, Theseus Vitalis, won his title by taking advantage of an obscure rule and killing his predecessor. The rest of the Thirteen have agreed not to end his life in retaliation, but only if he marries Aphrodite so they can gain some control over him.

Hephaestus and Aphrodite try to use sex to one-up and control each other, and things get heated in a hurry, especially when extra players join the game. Aphrodite seduces Hephaestus’ foster sister, Pandora, a calculated move that leads to a startlingly genuine connection. Meanwhile, Hephaestus is stunned to find himself bonding with—and falling for—Aphrodite’s ex, Adonis. The four characters come together in sensual detail in many permutations, and Robert contrasts the growing tenderness between them with the building chaos outside the bedroom.

Dark Olympus is a lot: a lot of varied, explicit sex, often with light BDSM elements; a lot of tense, violent conflict; and a whole lot of story to keep up with. But for those looking to experience something heated and dangerous, Cruel Seduction will be just right.

Felicia Grossman’s Marry Me

by Midnight (Forever, $8.99, 9781538722541) is a genderswapped, Jewish Cinderella set in 1832 London.

Our “prince” is Isabelle Lira, a Jewish heiress who must marry to maintain her position at her late father’s surety company. So Isabelle holds a series of three festivals and invites all the eligible Jewish men in the community. She also decides to dig up some dirt on her potential suitors and hires Aaron Ellenberg to assist. A poor orphan, Aaron works as a custodian at the synagogue, leading a quiet life until Isabelle sweeps in and changes everything.

It’s remarkable how genderswapping a story can totally shift the balance of power.

Isabelle is as elite as any fairytale prince; yet simply because she’s a woman, her husband hunt takes on a new and far more urgent tone. Likewise, Aaron has much more agency than your typical Cinderella. Meanwhile, Grossman’s choice to set Aaron and Isabelle’s romance at a particularly delicate time for the Jewish community in the U.K.—when legislation was being debated that would eventually guarantee Jewish men the same rights as all English men—adds a special poignancy. In this troubled atmosphere, Aaron and Isabelle’s decision to choose love, courage and kindness over everything else resonates that much louder and feels that much sweeter.

—Elizabeth Mazer

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© PETER KINDERSLEY

q&a | lauren beukes

Lauren Beukes embraces the multiverse The author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters returns with Bridge, a thriller that’s trippy in more ways than one.

When 24-year-old Bridge arrives in Portland, What was that research process for this Oregon, to sort through her mother’s belongbook like?

The research is the best part of writing for me! ings after her untimely death, she discovers a magical artifact in the back of the freezer. The Any excuse to hang out with interesting peo“dreamworm,” as her ple and pick their brains “We already live in mother, Jo, referred to and have them geek out it, is the key to traveling about their specialties. I different dimensions to did pick up excellent facts, between alternate realities, and Jo’s seemingly but my favorite thing to each other.” delusional quest to find come out of this was a it defined Bridge’s chaotic childhood. After physical memento. eating the dreamworm, Bridge embarks on a After spending half a day with Dr. Hayley Tomes looking at slices of rat brain and universe-hopping journey to understand what really happened to her mother. We talked to mushed-up tapeworm larva under the confocal microscope, she asked me if I wanted a piece of author Lauren Beukes about the allure of the multiverse and what she’s learned about herself rat brain to take home. I said, “Obviously!” I keep since publishing The Shining Girls. it in my 1930s medical cabinet with other writing mementos like the vintage My Little Pony from I love the idea of the dreamworm. How did The Shining Girls, the Zoo City-inspired sloth you come up with the idea? scarf I wore to the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Oh god, it’s the last decade(s) of turmoil in cheap “satanic” jewelry I was gifted by Detective the world, the realization that we all live in “Auntie Ghostbuster” from South Africa’s Occult completely separate and Crimes Unit. My rat brain conflicting realities that slice looks like a tiny piece feel true to us. I’ve been of dried snot on a glass slide in a plastic case. Naturally, I horrified by the tip towards named it Pinky. fascism and far right politics of hate, anti-vaxxers and anti-trans legislation, D i d y o u h av e a ny core inspirations for the reversal of abortion rights, shareholders’ profBridge and Jo? its-over-all, climate-change Bridge is a departure from deniers. So, we already live most of my protagonists, in different dimensions to because she’s so uncertain, each other. so adrift in her life. Part of that is in reaction to growing What about it appealed to up with Jo and Jo’s obsesyou as a writer? sion with a reality-switchIt’s the appeal of the road ing artifact, partly it’s being not taken, all the mightyoung in the 2020s in a have-beens in your life world that feels very chaotic and the choices you didn’t and scary right now. She’s make. How useful would trying to come to terms with that be, to be able to audiher mother’s death, that the Bridge tion other versions of you, weirdness of her childhood Mulholland, $29, 9780316267885 correct your mistakes, learn was maybe real, not one of from your successes?

Jo’s delusions, and who the Science Fiction This is a (mostly) plausihell she’s supposed to be. ble alternate reality story in that all the universes She’s always been paralyzed by choice, but the situation she’s catapulted into is going to force are compatible with ours, similar enough that her to make some really big ones. it’s easy to slip between the other lives and other versions of you. There are no Spider-Hams or Jo was easier to write because she’s dead sausage fingers, for example, to shout out those set on what she wants, but that single-mindother two perfect multiverse stories of late. edness exploring other realities has cost her a

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Visit BookPage.com to read our review of Bridge.

lot in this one, including her relationship with her daughter.

It’s been 10 years since you wrote The Shining Girls. What have you learned about your writing along the way?

In the last year, I got my adult ADHD diagnosis! Which explains why I’m probably never going to write a sequel (because it’s not shiny and new), the magpie nature of my novels, the weird places my research takes me and how it all comes together—and also why there were five years between Broken Monsters and Afterland.

Post-divorce in 2014, I was, like Bridge, lost, thrashing around, unable to settle on one thing, paralyzed by choices: wheel-spinning in the parking lot on the motorcycle of doubt. To be fair, I was also rebuilding my life from scratch, and I wrote two graphic novels and put together a short story collection in that time. But it turns out big life changes like divorce can throw people who have coped with their ADHD all their lives.

Since I’ve started medication and all the good lifestyle things around sleep and exercise and eating well, my depression and anxiety are basically gone and writing is a joy again. Still tricky, still sometimes like wading knee-deep through taffy swamplands, but doable. I think a lot of that experience is reflected in who Bridge is as a character, just as the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once have talked about it as an ADHD allegory.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything new about writing. Rather, I’ve come back to something I always knew: the most important thing is to finish the work and allow yourself to be messy and rough in the first draft. Stop wheel-spinning, stop doubling back, stop wondering if you should have taken the other exit. There’s a profane South Africanism that works here.

Vokvoert. Literally fuck-forward, but really, fuck it, do it, go.

—Ralph Harris

sci-fi & fantasy

by chris pickens

The Deep Sky The Earth is about to die. A single ship will travel to a hospitable planet far beyond our solar system where the 80 original crew members and their children will begin a new chapter for the human race.

But in Yume Kitasei’s smart and exhilarating The Deep Sky (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250875334), those plans go horribly wrong. After a massive explosion tears through the ship, blowing the Phoenix dangerously off course, crew member Asuka attempts to uncover the truth about the explosion . . . even if it implicates someone on board. It’s a pitch-perfect setup for a space thriller, and the stakes could not be any higher: The fate of the human species relies on the Phoenix’s ability to make it to the new Earth. As interested in where we came from as where we’re going, The Deep Sky is a study in belonging and how Asuka’s intersecting identities (Japanese-American, crew member, classmate, friend, daughter and woman) buttress her during the most important moments in her life.

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H Night’s Edge Vampire tales often center on passed-down trauma, and Liz Kerin’s gruesome, tense and heartfelt Night’s Edge (Tor Nightfire, $26.99, 9781250835673) takes this concept to its very limit. Mia’s mother, Izzy, has Saratov’s syndrome, which makes her stronger than a normal human, sensitive to light and reliant on human blood.

She and Mia eventually settle in Tucson, Arizona, where Izzy runs a bar (she only goes in at night) and drinks only the now 20-something Mia’s blood. But when Mia meets a girl she really likes, she finds herself at a crossroads. Kerin is a master at building memorable moments, and whenever she gets a chance, she cranks up the excitement. The perpetual dread and cleareyed insight of Night’s Edge will be haunting readers for years to come.

The Blighted Stars Megan E. O’Keefe’s The Blighted Stars (Orbit, $18.99, 9780316290791) delivers futuristic technology, a sprinkle of the macabre and a compelling, complicated relationship between its two leads. Tarquin Mercator’s family mines lush and unspoiled worlds for resources. Naira Sharp is a member of a resistance group that tries to save these cradle worlds through sabotage and guerrilla warfare. Their worlds collide when Naira uploads herself into a 3-D print of Tarquin’s bodyguard. In this world, people routinely place their consciousnesses into new bodies. The complex and engrossing relationship between Tarquin and Naira holds everything together; the fresh world building and interstellar intrigue wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying if not for the believable relationship at the book’s core.

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Chris Pickens is a Nashville-based fantasy and sci-fi superfan who loves channeling his enthusiasm into reviews of the best new books the genre has to offer.

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by susannah felts

H How to Say Goodbye Death is a process—a challenge for both the dying and their loved ones, and a journey of wide-ranging emotional shifts, yet rarely are we encouraged to fully experience it as such. The illustrated approach of Wendy MacNaughton’s How to Say Goodbye (Bloomsbury, $19.99, 9781639730858) is a quietly powerful gesture in the right direction. As an artist-in-residence at a San Francisco hospice, McNaughton closely observed the dying and their caregivers, absorbing wisdom and appreciating small moments—a plate of fruit, flowers, hands held. “Drawing is a way we can look closely at something we might otherwise be afraid to look at,” she reflects. Her gentle pictures are followed by a deep well of resources for the dying and those who love and care for them. In his foreword, palliative care physician BJ Miller, MD, sets the tone: “​​Presence, after all, is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a corporeal surrender. Attuning, if you like. . . . What does your soul know about the one playing at the edge of existence right in front of you? Can you stop trying to figure it out and just be it?”

Pomegranates and Artichokes Saghar Setareh was 22 when she moved from Iran to Italy. After almost a decade in her new home, she writes, “I found my lantern, my mirror, and my passion in food, lighting up not only my path to understanding Italy but also illuminating the reflection of my own Iranian culinary heritage. Like many immigrants before me, I came to know—and cherish—my homeland, by comparison with the new country.” In a stunning new cookbook, Pomegranates and Artichokes (Interlink, $35, 9781623717407), she invites us on a “culinary road trip” from the Middle East to the Mediterranean, from porridge with rosewater and a saffron omelet, to Turkish eggplant in tomato sauce and creamy eggplant and tahini dip, to aperitivo cocktails and pork roast with pears and chestnuts, and so much in between. This winding road is a food lover’s fantasy.

Land Art U.K. artist James Brunt “works with what nature gives”: only what is found on the ground, in natural settings like beaches and woodlands. Imagine great spirals, mandalas, grids and other patterns composed of rocks, twigs, seeds, fern fronds, petals or leaves upon sand or forest floor. In Land Art (Schiffer Craft, $26.99, 9780764366055), Brunt familiarizes us with his creative terrain—also famously explored by land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson (“Spiral Jetty”)—and invites us, too, to “get outside and play.” He provides exercises that first coax us into engagement with our natural surroundings and then into the act of art-making. For starters, find 10 of anything, such as pine cones or other seeds; then arrange them in a pattern of your liking.

Brunt’s work, presented with infectious enthusiasm through full-color photographs, is gorgeous and mesmerizing.

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

audio

H Raw Dog There’s a conversational charm to Jamie Loftus’ narration of her book, Raw Dog (Macmillan Audio, 9.5 hours), in which she shares the results of her travels around the United States, one hot dog at a time. Loftus gives advance warning about the book’s discussion of slaughterhouses and how hot dogs are made, but even with such unsavory topics, there’s something terribly irresistible about her narration, which is often incredibly funny. In addition to offering a unique glimpse at the hot dog’s impact on Americana, Loftus provides much food for thought about the people and places that have contributed to its ability to transcend socioeconomic levels, as its appeal ranges from affordable meal to gourmet delicacy.

—Maya Fleischmann

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Quietly Hostile Humorist Samantha Irby’s fourth collection of essays, Quietly Hostile (Random House Audio, 9.5 hours), delivers a winning blend of hilarious observations and emotional insights. In 17 short essays, Irby addresses topics that range from her unapologetic love for the Cheesecake Factory to her misadventures in pandemic pet adoption. Regardless of the mood of each piece, Irby’s narration, with matter-of-fact delivery and flawless comic timing, amps up the intended effect, making the listener feel like they’re just having a nice long hang with their funniest friend.

—Norah Piehl

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H This Isn’t Going to End Well Daniel Wallace (Big Fish) idolized his brother-inlaw, William Nealy—an artist, author, outdoorsman and renegade—until the day he died by a meticulously planned suicide in July 2001. In This Isn’t Going to End Well (Hachette Audio, 6.5 hours), Wallace paints a double portrait of his friend: the heroic mask he presented to the world, and the traumatized, troubled man behind it. Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with his beloved friend.

—Deborah Mason

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece Tom Hanks’ first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (Random House Audio, 16 hours), is an appropriately starstudded audiobook. Hanks narrates most of the story, with additional narration provided by actors Rita Wilson, Holland Taylor, Ego Nwodim, Nasim Pedrad and more. The novel tells the story of the troubled presentday production of a new superhero film, going back to the 1970s comics that inspired the movie, and then further back to the World War II-era source material that led to the comics.

—Anna Zeitlin

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cover story | colson whitehead

THE WHITEHEAD MANIFESTO As his celebrated Ray Carney series steps into the 1970s, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead continues to explore history through propulsive heist narratives that go far beyond crimes and cover-ups. © CHRIS CLOSE

T

he Ray Carney saga is Colson Whitehead’s first series, and just like his heist movies. “The character of the fence is always a travesty,” he says. readers, he feels passionately about the man at its center: a respect“The team does all the work, and half the crew’s dead—they’re crawling or bloody, the cops are after them. And then some random guy you havable, upwardly mobile furniture salesman by day, and fence of stolen en’t even seen before in the whole movie is like ‘10 cents on the dollar.’ ” goods by night. “I love him too. He’s been a great source of pleasure and inspiration,” says the author. But that affection Whitehead was incensed by the patterns “I hated the fence so much doesn’t stop Whitehead from mercilessly puthe observed on-screen, but that ire gave way ting Ray through the wringer. to curiosity: “I hated the fence so much that I that I started thinking, who is Picking up four years after the close of started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?”

Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto heightens And from this interrogation came the driving that? Who is that guy?” the dangers and stakes for the prosperous force of the Ray Carney trilogy: “the psychology Harlem merchant and former hustler, and Ray soon gets sucked back of the fence. . . . Having a front business and having your illegal stuff in the into life on the seamier side. After all, as Whitehead writes, “crooked stays back provided the divided nature of Ray Carney.” crooked and bent hates straight.”

Although Whitehead kept his cards close to the vest, he knew almost In truth, the author may love Ray now, but the character was born out from the start that he had a series on his hands. While the initial instinct was “to do a heist book and just have fun with that genre,” once started, of a kind of hate—the distaste Whitehead felt for a ubiquitous trope in

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cover story | colson whitehead

the ideas kept flowing. There was just too much material, and he was In 1971, the year Crook Manifesto kicks off, Ray’s sabbatical from crime having too much fun to stop at one book. “I was halfway through [Harlem ends abruptly in an almost ironic way, considering the innocence of the Shuffle], and I was coming up with more capers that obviously would not inciting incident in comparison to the refuse he must wade through after. fit,” he says.

Ray calls on an old contact to get tickets to a sold-out (and history-­making) Doing the math, he figured: six adventures, two books. But also, “if you Jackson 5 concert for his 15-year-old daughter—although as Whitehead do two, might as well do three. You points out, this fatherly duty is a know, I’m definitely a rule-of-three cover to give in to an itch that’s been nagging at him for years. guy.” Still, he proceeded cautiously in terms of commitment. He didn’t The world around Ray is also evolving. In Harlem Shuffle, want to be held to a third book, just Whitehead allowed the pull of in case he got bored—but that never crucial—­though not necessarily happened. Now he’s deep in the widely remembered—events in writing of Ray’s third and presumably final set of adventures.

New York City history to guide him Along with the series being a trilin shaping Ray’s story. In pursuit of ogy, each individual book has a threekey moments to “exploit,” he arrived act structure. Harlem Shuffle tells of upon the anti-police Harlem riots in three separate misadventures for Ray 1943 and 1964. Whitehead decided at three pivotal moments during the that Invisible Man had portrayed the 1960s, and this structure continues former in such an iconic, indelible in Crook Manifesto, which evokes manner that “I’ll let Ralph [Ellison] the ’70s down to the sight, feel and keep the 1940s one. I haven’t read a lot of stuff about the 1960s one. So it smell of a crumbling New York City. was open territory.”

In the first book, Ray is in his 30s; second book, 40s; third book, 50s.

The tension between the public Ray’s experiences with aging and all and the police escalates to a palpaits attendant challenges are essential ble and deadly fever pitch in Crook to the series, and it also means that Manifesto. The New York Police initially, “his kids are babies; in the Department wages war against Black second book, they’re teenagers of power activists, and a police corrupvarying degrees of annoyingness; and tion scandal widens, putting cops in in the third book, they’ll be in college the hot seat. And yet, in a way that and out of the house.” matches the dualism of the novel’s Three decades is, as Whitehead leading man, Ray’s story also shows says, “a long stretch of time.” But how normal life goes on alongside in addition to the capers and missuch events. adventures that flow from the heist In keeping with that, the movienarrative, he found something comand music-obsessed author takes the pelling about the mystery surroundopportunity to throw his love of pop ing the fence, and with great finesse culture history into the mix, somehe explores the dichotomy between thing that gives him great pleasure.

Ray’s straight-and-narrow life and “I was very taken with that idea that “the call of the street.” We witness I could get my pop culture fixation Ray’s wrestling with his crimiand bring Ray along,” he says. So in H Crook Manifesto nal nature—“bending toward it, addition to the Jackson 5 concert, Doubleday, $29, 9780385545150 which provides a soundtrack and embracing it, rejecting it,” Whitehead says—and by shifting our focus to momentum for Crook Manifesto’s Historical Fiction this internal tug of war, we are invited first movement, the second secto think beyond the usual markers of time and success. tion weaves in the rise of Blaxploitation cinema. It’s a heady and rivetIn the four-year interregnum between Harlem Shuffle and Crook ing mashup of politics, culture, family life and crime that only a talent of Whitehead’s stature could so seamlessly blend.

Manifesto, Ray has kept his nose clean, built a prosperous business and —Carole V. Bell bought both a commercial building for his store and a home for his family, moving uptown to the much storied if fraying Strivers’ Row. It’s a laudVisit BookPage.com to read our starred review of able, remarkable rise for the son of a failed career criminal, and yet it’s Crook Manifesto. not enough.

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q&a | elizabeth acevedo

‘I write what haunts me.’

With Family Lore, a magical saga centered on a family of Dominican American women, Elizabeth Acevedo takes greater narrative risks and finds an expansive new register for her astonishing storytelling.

Your first book, The Poet X, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. What did that accolade mean to you as a writer, and how did it change your career?

I’ve always wanted my next work to be better than my last, but it’s hard to hold every future book to the success of my debut. My debut achieved accolades I may never see again. That’s just the truth of it. But I still have a lot of stories to tell. I’ve had to put in effort to be unswayed by external validation as it pertains to any projects since. What I’m currently making doesn’t grow under the shadow of what my first book did, and it’s been critical I don’t make comparisons. I will forever be grateful to the judges of the National Book Award and the merit they saw in The Poet X. It’s not hyperbole to say that award changed the course of my life because of the doors it opened.

© DENZEL GOLATT

National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo discusses the depths and delights of her first novel for adult readers.

Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Family Lore.

jumps, long asides that break up the narrative, six characters in close third-­person, a first-person point-of-view narrator, poetry, historical research. While I like to challenge my younger readers, I’m mindful of still being welcoming. I know I’m requiring adults to do a lot of work in Family Lore, and I’m less concerned with them finding it too hard. The book won’t be easily consumed by folks who don’t do the work.

You’re known not only for your YA novels but also for your poetry. What do you feel you’re able to achieve H Family Lore with poetry that you can’t with fiction? What does Ecco, $30, 9780063207264 The topic of family dynamics, particularly between the format of a novel allow you that poetry doesn’t?

Ah! I love this question. I think poetry is interesting for sisters and mothers and daughters, is one that you’ve Family Saga me because it’s my most patient kind of writing. I don’t explored in several of your novels, including Family believe in rushing a poem. It can arrive over long lengths of time, one line Lore. What is it about female family relationships that fascinates on one day, an image on another. Poems are a way of thinking, and I don’t you so much? have to turn to paper right away for them to begin composition. Poems are I write what haunts me. The family I come from and the families I grew like cats. They are independent, OK being alone for a while. Maybe they want up around—including extended family—practiced a good amount of to be in the same room as you, but they’re fine in the corner by themselves, enmeshment. In trying to piece apart my self-identity and self-worth, I had and when they eventually want attention, they’ll piss on your bed and let to undo threads that bound me to others. It was—and is—garbage dumpyou know. Poems are great containers for an urgent and visceral moment ster work. It’s sifting through so much junk I carry that doesn’t innately and emotion. I need to shift how I see the world to give language to a poem. belong to me. It’s reconsidering what it means to be a part of a community The novel, however, requires me to sit with the character and actions for yourself, not how perfectly you can perform yourself. I still don’t recognize sometimes how I’m thinking of every single person in my life and daily. To catch the rhythm of the story, I have to show up again and again, whether or not they’ll approve. So my novels agitate these webs because or I lose the thread. The novel doesn’t tolerate being ghosted. I need to pet it daily or it’ll run away. I like that novels allow for ensemble truth-telling. my mind agitates those webs. I think what Family Lore does that’s special I think that’s what I most often chase in a story—the many versions of is it reaches farther back than any of my other books to show historically how these dynamics of dysfunction were created within a family and are honesty and humanity that can exist in one specific world, in one specific being undone or at least questioned. moment in time.

What was your first experience writing a novel meant for adults like?

Are there any ways in which writing for adults versus teenagers posed new challenges or afforded new opportunities?

I like to think of my writing as having different registers. I don’t think the note where my writing is located has changed; I write family stories about messy parents and children and the aspirations of immigrant and first-gen folks to find purpose and self-love. At least I think I do. But the register for the adult novel climbed a bit higher. It let me be spicier in terms of how I discuss sexuality and sexual experiences.

On a formal level, there are ambitions in how Family Lore is constructed that I think would have been a huge ask for young adult readers: time

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You’ve revealed that Family Lore is perhaps your bravest novel. In what ways did writing this novel require exceptional courage from you?

I touch on a lot of taboo and sacrilegious subjects in the novel. And while the novel intentionally meanders structurally, I’m very direct in how things like porn addiction, infidelity, emotional abuse and sex are approached.

I think this book is demonstrative of my being less concerned with being liked, or with earning love, and more of my groundedness in what needs to be said in this particular moment. To say that which only I can say, even if it offends someone or causes them to see me as less than perfect.

So yes, maybe it’s the book I’ve written most bravely.

—Stephenie Harrison

feature | first fiction

Novel inventions Discover five debuts that have captured our attention with their sharp, fresh stories and bold truths.

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky Family Drama

The unnamed protagonist of All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, $27, 9781646221509) is a teenage girl just out of high school who’s swept up in the life and adventures of her older sister, Debbie. When their clash of personalities turns bloody, Debbie disappears, but this is only the beginning of the narrator’s search for meaning and understanding. With her sister gone, the narrator turns to Sasha, a charming and spellbinding woman who offers spiritual and psychic guidance—an appealing offer for the narrator, whose life has become a wormhole of pills, bad decisions and confusion about her sister’s disappearance. Together Sasha and the narrator embark on a sexual, psychological and emotional awakening. Madievsky displays tremendous storytelling range, capturing all that is bitter and hilarious, heartbreaking and enlightening, wise and foolish within the well-developed mind of a single central character.

—Matthew Jackson

H Bellies by Nicola Dinan Coming of Age

Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is the best kind of queer love story: not a dramatic tragedy but an expansive exploration of intimacy, desire and queer family-making. Tom is a white Brit whose good-natured cheerfulness masks his insecurity.

Ming is an aspiring playwright who has come to England from Malaysia; her mother died when she was a teenager, and she’s still looking for a place or a group of people that feel like home. Tom and Ming fall in love easily, but their relationship is thrown into turmoil when Ming decides to transition.

The narrative switches between their two perspectives as they navigate their changing relationships to each other and to themselves. This is a vulnerable, moving, riotously funny and deeply honest book about trans life, first love, art-­making, friendship, grief and the hard, slow process of building a home—in a new country, with another person and inside yourself. Bellies (Hanover Square, $30, 9781335490889) celebrates a hundred different kinds of transformation and, like the very best novels, has the power to transform its readers in unexpected ways.

—Laura Sackton

H Medusa’s Sisters by Lauren J.A. Bear Historical Fantasy

Medusa’s Sisters (Ace, $28, 9780593547762), Lauren J.A. Bear’s retelling of the tale of the immortal Stheno and Euryale and their very famous mortal sister, focuses mainly on their youth, spent exploring the contradictions of humankind, and their lives after Medusa’s decapitation. Many works, from Dan Simmons’ Ilium to Madeline Miller’s Circe to William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, have depicted the gods of Homer and Hesiod as pompous assholes. But Bear throws

a few wrenches in the gears. Her novel is not as bleak as those aforementioned works; rather, it is a celebration of love in all its complex, contradictory guises. The affection among sisters bound by blood, choice or circumstance often takes center stage, as does maternal compassion, whether embodied by the gracious Leto, mother of twin gods Apollo and Artemis, or the monstrous sea-dragon Echidna.

Medusa’s Sisters, like the eponymous immortals themselves, is many things. It is a retelling of an old, old story, but one that conjures an unexpected ending from its familiar source materials. It is gorgeously crafted, with an uncommon lyricism and attention to detail. But most of all, it is simply an exceptional story of the many faces love can wear.

—Noah Fram

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck Speculative Fiction

Idealistic Lewis is an aspiring actor turned teacher, and careful Wren, born to a teenage single mother, works in finance for stability and security. In due course, Wren and Lewis get married, but the “normal” trajectory of their relationship is interrupted by a startling diagnosis: A Carcharodon carcharias mutation has befallen Lewis, causing him to transform into a great white shark before their first anniversary. The knowledge of their imminent separation forces decisions and conversations they didn’t plan to tackle so early in their marriage. As Shark Heart (Marysue Rucci, $28, 9781668006498) winds through both their pasts, poignant and meaningful moments abound as they search their memories and experiences to help them navigate an uncertain future. Debut novelist Emily Habeck has crafted a story that is surprisingly moving, oddly heartwarming and deeply contemplative beyond its tragicomic premise.

—Melissa Brown

The Sea Elephants by Shastri Akella Coming of Age

The Sea Elephants (Flatiron, $28.99, 9781250867056) documents a life on the run, as a 16-year-old boy in 1990s India seeks to discover himself and be free from the delineations of gender and caste. As the novel opens, Shagun is mourning the recent death of his twin sisters when his unaccepting father suddenly returns home, bringing impossible standards along with him. In an attempt to escape his father, Shagun applies to a distant boarding school. When a traveling theater troupe visits the school and performs one of the myths that Shagun and his sisters loved when they were children, he decides that the best way to liberate himself from society and his father’s expectations is to live a bohemian life on the road, leading his story down a winding and wondrous path. Author Shastri Akella uses myth as the framework for The Sea Elephants, which allows Shagun’s story to feel ancient and sacred.

—Eric A. Ponce

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reviews | fiction

H The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

By James McBride

Historical Fiction In 1972, digging commences on a new development in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and unearths the desiccated skeletal remains of an unidentified man. This shocking discovery kicks off National Book Award winner James McBride’s riveting sixth novel, but while the man’s identity and how he ended up dead in a farmer’s well are essential mysteries, they aren’t the heart of this gorgeous historical tale. That belongs to the lifesaving relationships between the novel’s diverse groups of people.

Following his acclaimed, blockbuster crime novel, Deacon King Kong, McBride takes a softer turn while expanding beautifully on the themes of race, religion and belonging from his groundbreaking memoir, The Color of Water. Alongside the decadeslong mystery of the man’s remains, there are all kinds of love in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead, $28, 9780593422946), from love for a child to the platonic love of friends, co-workers and neighbors. There’s also a beautifully rendered romantic love story between two of the leads.

In 1930s Pottstown, the multiracial and pluralistic working-class neighborhood of

H Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett

Literary Fiction Ann Patchett once again proves herself a master of the family narrative in Tom Lake (Harper, $30, 9780063327528), which, like her previous novels The Dutch House and Commonwealth, spans decades yet still feels intimate, offering well-drawn characters and finely paced revelations.

The novel opens in the middle of things: “That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability.” We soon learn that we’re at the beginning of a story told by narrator Lara Nelson—or more precisely, her

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Chicken Hill is witness to care and cooperation as well as conflict among its disparate inhabitants, leading to both redemption and the kind of danger that leaves an anonymous corpse more than six feet under. Chicken Hill is “a tiny area of ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town’s blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn’t afford any better lived.” Moshe Ludlow, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who “could talk the horns off the devil’s head,” manages a theater. When he meets Chona Flohr, the brilliant daughter of the local rabbi (who also owns the titular grocery store), he knows that she is the gift that will transform his life for the better.

While Moshe is struck by Chona’s beauty, it’s her fierce intelligence, fearlessness and “eyes that [shine] with gaiety and mirth” that capture his heart. Despite restrictions on women’s religious participation, Chona is a self-taught biblical scholar. Her body bears the lasting effects of polio; with one leg shorter than the other, she limps and wears a boot with a sole four inches thick. After they marry, with Chona’s help, Moshe becomes a wildly successful theater owner who defies tradition to host Jewish and Black performers together on the stage, attracting crowds from miles around: “The reform snobs from Philadelphia were there in button-­ down shirts, standing next to ironworkers from

Pittsburgh, who crowded against socialist railroad men from Reading wearing caps bearing the Pennsylvania Railroad logo, who stood shoulder to shoulder with coal miners with darkened faces from Uniontown and Spring City.”

Chona also continues to run the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and when so many other Jewish families are finding a way out of Chicken Hill, Chona and Moshe dig in. This inclusive, expansive and defiant love leads Moshe and Chona to embrace an orphaned Black boy, their friends’ ward, who’s targeted by a predatory local Klan leader who’s also the leading doctor in the neighborhood. These actions set off a series of unfortunate and heartbreaking events.

McBride is a lyricist and musician, and there’s a rhythmic quality to this unique novel, which began as an ode to a beloved figure in McBride’s life: Sy Friend, the director of a camp for disabled children where the author worked for four years in his youth. These origins are visible in the novel’s nuanced portrayals of disability and race, and in the heroic figure of Chona and the myriad other fantastically imperfect humans who populate the polyglot neighborhood of immigrants, Jews and Black people in this heart-rending and hopeful tale of cross-cultural solidarity, love and redemption.

—Carole V. Bell

backstory, which takes place in early 1980s New Hampshire.

Tom Lake is a dual-timeline novel, moving seamlessly between the pivotal summer of 1984 and present-day scenes set amid the late spring of 2020, the first COVID-19 pandemic spring, when Lara and husband Joe’s three 20-­something daughters have come home to the family cherry orchard in northern Michigan. Seasonal workers can’t get to the farm, so while Lara and daughters Emily, Maisie and Nell spend long days picking cherries, Lara agrees to recount her long-ago romance with movie star Peter Duke. In 1984, 24-year-old Lara is cast as Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at a summer-­ stock theater in Tom Lake, Michigan, and she finds herself deep in a whirlwind romance with charismatic fellow cast member Peter. He goes on to become a famous actor, while Lara goes on to become a farmer, wife and mom.

Lara tells her story episodically, keeping her daughters (and us) waiting for more. The novel’s evocation of a mid-’80s summer-stock theater, its big and small dramas, feels both well inhabited and fresh, seen through the perspectives

of both the younger Lara, who’s propelled into ingenue roles through some lucky breaks, and the older Lara, who keeps some details to herself. Through Lara’s give-and-take with her daughters, we get to know characters both present and past, and through Lara’s interiority and commentary, we also take in the Nelson family’s dynamics and the pleasures of a long marriage, as well as the regrets and might-have-beens.

The two timelines converge beautifully, and the revelations, when they come, feel both surprising and inevitable. Sometimes elegiac in tone, the novel threads the themes of Our Town and, to a lesser degree, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard throughout: the passage of time, the inevitability of loss and death, and the beauty of an ordinary family and an ordinary life, wondrous and too brief. And as with Our Town’s community of Grover’s Corners, Tom Lake’s main settings of northern Michigan and New Hampshire feel timeless and archetypal, even a little fairy tale-ish. (If you’re an Our Town fan, you’ll also enjoy the novel’s references to other productions of the play, some of them nonfictional.) Tom Lake is a gorgeously

reviews | fiction layered novel, a meditation on love, family and the choices we make.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

Time’s Mouth

By Edan Lepucki

Family Drama Time travel narratives are so ubiquitous in our culture that we all must have, at some point, considered what it would be like to go back in time.

Not just to remember, but to actually go back—to observe our parents when they were young, to take fresh note of textures and colors and shapes and situations and emotions we didn’t notice or understand when we were children. In Edan Lepucki’s novel Time’s Mouth (Counterpoint, $28, 9781640095724), a grandmother and granddaughter share this ability, which is as much an affliction as it is a blessing.

Born in 1938, Sharon begins to “transport” when she’s a teenager, shortly after the death of her despised, abusive father. She leaves home, takes on the name Ursa and moves into a creaky mansion hidden away in a redwood forest.

There she comes to govern a weird hippie commune populated by broken women, each given the honorific of “mama,” and their children.

The children’s lives swing between a sort of indentured servitude and a not-so-benign neglect. With the exception of Ursa’s son, Ray, none of the children are allowed to go to school or see a doctor, lest their existence be discovered. But Ray’s privilege is Ursa’s mistake. His knowledge of the outside world lets him see how twisted this village of mamas is. He and his secret girlfriend, Cherry, escape, but Cherry leaves him when their daughter, Opal, is just a baby. Inevitably, Opal, who inherits her grandmother’s fantastic gift, wants to know why.

This gift is tangled up with each woman’s experiences of motherhood and daughterhood, going back generations. Ursa leaves behind her own mother who refused to protect her, then later transports to reclaim Ray, and Opal uses her powers to learn more about her own absent mother. But even mothers who are present aren’t necessarily good enough, as is seen in the commune’s derelict mamas.

Ursa is Latin for “bear,” and mama bears are famous for being fiercely protective of their cubs. But Lepucki’s Ursa is more fierce than protective. She is, to be blunt, a psychopath. She has no use for the nonservile; her love is conditional, if not transactional; and if she’s thwarted, she reacts with mind-bending violence.

The bestselling author of Woman No. 17 and California, Lepucki displays a real talent for giving readers a new perspective—whether on the passions of motherhood in particular, or on the nature of parenthood in general—and emphasizes the power of real love (and a bit of New Agey therapy) to heal.

—Arlene McKanic

every page. Whether they are describing the brilliant whites produced on old film or the visage of a ghostly apparition, her sentences deliver tidy packages of imagery like motes of light in the darkness, their beauty so great that sometimes you forget—just for a moment— about the things that go bump in the night.

—Laura Hubbard

H Silver Nitrate

H Witness

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Horror Montserrat grew up gorging herself on classic horror films with her best friend, Tristán, reveling in the craft of suspense, blood and terror. Now a sound editor whose projects are parceled out each week by her misogynistic boss, Montserrat still loves film and her role in creating it. But more and more, her boss is assigning the work to younger editors who can be paid less to do the same job.

Tristán’s lot is no better: Once a rising soap opera actor, his life and career were derailed 10 years ago in a tragic accident that left his superstar girlfriend dead. So when Tristán’s neighbor, the legendary horror director Abel Urueta, asks them to help him finish a film that was supposedly imbued with a magical spell by a Nazi defector, the two figure that they have little to lose. But as Tristán begins to see gruesome visions of his dead girlfriend and Montserrat is stalked by a mysterious, shadowy figure, they begin to suspect that there was more danger to Urueta’s crackpot scheme than he let on.

After bringing new life to the haunted house (Mexican Gothic) and the evil scientific genius (The Daughter of Doctor Moreau) tropes, author Silvia Moreno-Garcia puts a new spin on Nazi occultists and eldritch rituals in this love letter to classic horror cinema. Much like the horror films to which it pays homage, Silver Nitrate (Del Rey, $28, 9780593355367) has deliberate pacing and deep character development, but these elements don’t hinder its capacity for utter terror, as it summons the fear of what’s hiding at the edge of your vision, just out of sight in the dark.

Moreno-Garcia plays in this space well, recognizing that when the inexplicable happens, the subsequent doubting of your own sanity can be just as frightening as the initial event. After all, as Montserrat points out, the fear of being cursed can be much more powerful than the curse itself.

While the horror is effective and then some, the sentence-by-sentence craft of Silver Nitrate is not to be overlooked. Moreno-Garcia’s prose is enchanting, full of perfect phrases that dot

By Jamel Brinkley

Short Stories New York City gentrification and structural racism undergird the 10 stories in Jamel Brinkley’s exceptional second collection, Witness (FSG, $27, 9780374607036), in which a range of characters—from children to adult siblings to ghosts—observe, take responsibility for and occasionally speak out against the moral ambiguity they see around them.

A group of high school friends in “Blessed Deliverance” takes interest in a new pet store in Brooklyn, but they are upset when they see how management treats an employee from their own Bed-Stuy neighborhood. “Comfort” tells the story of a woman spending her days and nights drinking and drugging after her brother’s murder by a police officer. Compassion from a male visitor she calls “Bamboo” helps to numb the pain of her loss, even as he takes advantage of her addiction.

In “Bartow Station,” the narrator’s job with UPS leads to a relationship with a florist on his route, but the courtship unravels when he confides to her about his cousin’s tragic death, leaving him lonelier than he was at the start.

The two strongest stories in the collection explore the impact of systemic trauma on memory and family. In “The Happiest House on Union Street,” Beverly recalls a past October so warm that the Halloween pumpkins rotted before the holiday; in her memory, the decaying gourds are connected to a domestic disagreement that she witnessed between her father and uncle, and the resulting loss of the family’s beloved Brooklyn brownstone. In the title story, Silas has moved in with his sister, Bernice, in Crown Heights while he looks for work. Bernice forms a romantic attachment to an indigent DJ she meets on the street, but at the same time she begins to experience debilitating headaches.

When Bernice’s illness worsens, their mother comes to stay, and her rage against the inadequate care that Bernice receives is infectious, growing daily with devastating results.

Witness covers much of the same ground as Brinkley’s award-winning debut, A Lucky Man,

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reviews | fiction a collection of stories in which Black men and boys are tested by incarceration, generational trauma and sexual violence. However, this new collection displays how Brinkley’s already superb craftsmanship and subtle plotting have grown.

Though his stories don’t range beyond New York City, they journey deep into the human heart with precise language and a generous spirit.

—Lauren Bufferd

Mobility

By Lydia Kiesling

Literary Fiction Most lives contain their fair share of contradictions, but nowhere is this more striking than among people who work in politics or the oil industry, where compromises and rationalizations are standard practice. And few conflicts in contemporary literature are as stark as those competing for dominance within Bunny Glenn, the protagonist of Mobility (Zando/Crooked Media, $28, 9781638930563), Lydia Kiesling’s smart, complex follow-up to her 2018 debut, The Golden State.

To see contradictions play out to their fullest, one needs to view a life over many years. Kiesling does a generous service to Bunny by dramatizing her event-filled life over more than five decades, from the late days of the Clinton administration to a cautionary epilogue set in 2051.

In 1998, Bunny—her real name is Elizabeth— is a well-traveled 15-year-old living in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where her father, Ted, is a diplomat in the foreign service. This could be an exciting experience for a teenager, but Bunny’s an old hand after her father’s previous postings in Yerevan, Armenia, and Athens, Greece. She’s more interested in reading Cosmopolitan, drinking vodka and performing “ministrations to her face and teeth that would increase her odds of driving a man, any man, a particular man, wild.”

Bunny gradually figures out her place in a complex world, from her relationship to her Texas family, including mother Maryellen, who gave up her flight attendant career; to her interactions with classmates at her prestigious boarding school; to finally her own career, which begins in 2009 with a temp job at an engineering firm and progresses to more substantial positions at a consultancy dedicated to investing in clean forms of energy—decisions that have professional as well as personal ramifications.

At times, Kiesling is more interested in verisimilitude than narrative momentum, with long passages on the politics of the day. But readers in the market for a present-day mix of droll political

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insight reminiscent of the British sitcom “Yes Minister” or Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels will warm to the book’s style. And Kiesling does a nice job of highlighting rationalizations that sometimes define American life, such as for people who work for oil companies despite their conflicted feelings because they need the health insurance, or environmentalists who vacation by flying in airplanes that burn leaded fuel. Mobility is a forward-thinking book about old-fashioned themes of money, politics and family. And that’s no contradiction.

—Michael Magras

The Weaver and the Witch Queen

By Genevieve Gornichec

Historical Fantasy In their youth, sisters Signy and Oddny and their friend Gunnhild were linked by a prophecy portending great sacrifice and sorrow—but also the potential for great power. The three girls swore themselves to one another after hearing the prophecy, promising to always be there for one another. But their paths diverged after the seer ferried Gunnhild away to train as a witch, allowing her to escape her mother’s constant abuse. Years later, Signy and Oddny’s homestead is attacked and Signy is stolen away by raiders led by a mysterious and vindictive witch, forcing Gunnhild to return to the home she fled so many years ago. From the future king of Norway to one of the very raiders who stole Signy away, Gunnhild and Oddny must befriend unlikely allies in their quest to save their bonded sister and, in the process, confront the prophecy that linked them all those years ago.

Gornichec’s debut novel, The Witch’s Heart, was lyrical and dreamlike, but The Weaver and the Witch Queen (Ace, $27, 9780593438244) is as precise as a needle, weaving a vivid tapestry of the joys and terrors of 10th-century Viking life under the reign of King Harald Fairhair.

Gornichec obviously revels in historical accuracy. From frank depictions of the lot of Viking thralls (people enslaved during raids) to the threat of being married off for political alliances, she never sugarcoats what it meant to live in medieval Northern Europe. But despite the lessthan-savory elements, Gornichec’s joy in sharing this world with readers is palpable, suffusing her prose with a wonder befitting a story dripping in ancient magic.

While The Weaver and the Witch Queen includes legendary male figures from Norwegian

history such as Harald Fairhair and Eirik Bloodaxe, it also focuses on the struggles of women. Eirik and his ilk are certainly interesting characters, but theirs are stories that have largely been told. Gornichec’s novel, rather, is about women in conflict, whether that conflict is with their own mothers, rival witches or between two best friends. Gornichec exults the cleverness of these women and their power to thrive through their communities and their own strength of will.

It’s a saga of blood and magic and hardship that explores what we owe to those we love—and what it costs to actually pay that debt.

—Laura Hubbard

The Bookbinder

By Pip Williams

Historical Fiction Pip Williams strikes again after her bestselling debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, with a touching follow-up about twin sisters in their early 20s, navigating life as bookbinders in Oxford, England, in the early 1900s. The Bookbinder (Ballantine, $28, 9780593600443) is a rich account of class relations during a tumultuous era in history that also displays deep love and appreciation for literature and its wardens.

Peggy and Maude Jones fold books at Clarendon Press. As she binds the pages, Peggy sneaks illicit glances at the words, but this is pitiful consolation for an avid reader who dreams of studying English literature at Somerville College, one of Oxford’s women’s colleges, which is directly across the street. But Peggy and Maude, who live together in a docked boat, are not wealthy enough to pay for tutors or forgo their incomes for schooling.

Peggy feels responsible for Maude, who primarily communicates by repeating other people’s words. As Peggy describes, “Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light. . . . My sister had a simplicity that unnerved people, an honesty that made them uncomfortable. It suited most to think that her words were nothing more than sounds bouncing off the walls of an empty room. It suited them to think she was feeble-minded.” (In the novel’s acknowledgments, Williams mentions autism and echolalia, the term for Maude’s repetitive form of speech.)

When the Great War hits Belgium, refugees arrive in Oxford, and the corners of the town’s social hierarchy begin to fold in on themselves.

Peggy starts volunteering at the local military hospital, where she meets both Bastiaan, a wounded Belgian officer, and Grace, a spunky

reviews | fiction and empathetic Somerville student who serves as Peggy’s volunteer partner. Joined by the Jones sisters’ neighbors, colleagues, librarians and friends, Bastiaan and Grace help to form a makeshift family for Peggy and become her uplifting, memorable cheerleaders.

Williams imbues Peggy with admirable authenticity, and her struggles are achingly real.

Deciding how much to risk—how hard to push herself out of her comfort zone—is a constant battle, but it is the path toward growth. Williams’ commitment to optimism and courage is unmistakable, making The Bookbinder immensely heartwarming despite its weighty content. She proves yet again that while luck can only take you so far, determination will pave the rest of the way.

—Sydney Hankin

gang and muses on what it means to be a Black immigrant in modern-day England. He tentatively expresses his love for Del and extends an olive branch to his father.

The book’s action, such that there is, unfolds slowly, and when we take our leave of Stephen at the story’s end, he’s still a work in progress. But even small worlds take time to build, and Nelson leaves us with the impression that this one will be bountiful—with a dance floor at its center.

—Thane Tierney

Small Worlds

Ren Hopper, the protagonist of Peter Heller’s The Last Ranger (Knopf, $27, 9780593535110), is a park enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park. He’s also a man often overwhelmed with righteous anger. We witness this first in the novel’s prologue, when he reacts with satisfying harshness to a couple whose careless speeding has resulted in the fatal injury of a bull bison.

Through backstories we learn that Ren’s rage and anguish have something to do with his guilt about the death of his young wife, Lea, and his broken relationship with his mother, whose life was destroyed when she was accused of precipitating a mercy killing.

Even more alienated from human society is Hilly, Ren’s neighbor in the park employees’ cabins and his closest friend and possible love interest. Hilly, a researcher studying the park’s wolf population, loves wolves far more than people and spends most of her time in far ranges of the park, observing pack behaviors.

Throughout the 20th century, wolves were eliminated from the park and much of the American West but were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. Now, poachers have begun to target the wolves for the value of their fur. Hilly and Ren suspect a surly local trapper named Les Ingraham. Hilly, an excellent marksman, regards Les with murderous intent, especially after she has a near-death encounter with a leg trap. Les, of course, has his own backstory, which helps to explain the novel’s surprising end.

Peter Heller (The River) was an outdoor adventure writer before he became a novelist, and he displays a keen sensitivity to wild places. When describing wildlife and landscapes, he deploys the precision and cadence of Ernest Hemingway.

Breaking through the pervasive thread of ranger routines—mundane encounters over coffee, directing traffic on overcrowded park roads—are

By Caleb Azumah Nelson

Coming of Age It’s a strange and fraught time, that space between the end of high school and the rest of your life. You’re caught on the border between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal agency. In Small Worlds (Grove, $27, 9780802161963), Caleb Azumah Nelson’s follow-­up to his award-winning debut novel, Open Water, musician Stephen is right on the cusp of adulthood, but he is also straddling two cultures: London, his home; and Ghana, from which his family emigrated.

At the novel’s outset, Stephen has feelings for longtime gal pal Del, but he can’t find the words to express his love. He dances around his emotions, quite literally. Whether in a spontaneous two-step with his brother, swaying in the pews at church or feeling the rhythm in Peckham dance halls blaring Rick James, J Dilla and D’Angelo, Stephen sees dancing as an escape, a safety net and salvation.

His father doesn’t exactly share the sentiment and is concerned that his son is adrift. Pops encourages Stephen to drop the idea of pursuing a music degree and study business instead, which Stephen does, to little success. And when he drops out of college and returns home, a rift opens between father and prodigal son that seems irreparable. Harsh words are exchanged, and Stephen departs for a new phase of his life.

Over the next few years, Stephen takes tentative steps toward being his own man, explores his Ghanaian roots and discovers the joys of sharing food with others. He bonds with a friend who has suffered a beat-down at the hands of a racist

The Last Ranger

By Peter Heller

Literary Fiction

dramatic encounters between privileged or naive tourists and wild animals, like the parents who position their daughter near an agitated moose for a photo op, seeming to think they are in a petting zoo. In a subplot, Heller also dramatizes another threat to our national parks: militias and business interests who want to turn public land into private holdings.

Heller’s swift environmental thriller reminds us that humans are the most successful predators—but not the only predators.

—Alden Mudge

How Can I Help You

By Laura Sims

Suspense Libraries are seen as havens, full of community resources, endless stacks of books and peace and quiet, with librarians as the keepers of the flame. However, Laura Sims’ How Can I Help You (Putnam, $27, 9780593543702) defies this image, especially the “peace and quiet” part, as a disgraced nurse and an aspiring novelist go head-to-head in the small-town library where they both work.

Margo relishes her job as a librarian in Carlyle, Indiana, especially the opportunity to help others—­even if that means keeping a close eye on “Friday guy,” a patron who uses the library internet to watch porn. It’s a far cry from Margo’s former career under her real name: As a nurse, Margo’s unrelenting love and attention left several patients dead and forced her to go on the run. When Chicago transplant Patricia begins her tenure as reference librarian, she finds her discarded creative writing dreams reignited, with Margo as an unaware muse. But after Margo comes across Patricia’s novel-in-progress, the two women face a reckoning like no other.

An award-winning poet and novelist, Sims also works as a reference librarian, and she adds vivid color to this thriller by detailing the ins and outs of the profession, from tedious calls from patrons wanting to know when their favorite show is on TV to the librarians’ breathless appreciation of classically spooky authors like Shirley Jackson. Sims skillfully alternates between the perspectives of Margo, whose rosehued memories of nursing slowly but surely grow dark, and Patricia, whose self-flagellation for “failing” as a novelist gives way to relentless, and risky, ambition. How Can I Help You perfectly blends suspense and satire and will inspire any library patron to look over their shoulder the next time they check out.

—Lauren Emily Whalen

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q&a | andrew leland

Preparing for a life without vision A writer shares what it’s like to lose his sight and embraces his eventual blind identity in this thoughtful memoir.

Writer, editor and podcaster Andrew Leland was diagnosed with an incurable degenerative retinal disease in childhood. As he approached middle age and his retinitis pigmentosa (RP) advanced, Leland found himself in a liminal state: not yet blind, but experiencing enough visual impairment to understand what a future without sight would look like. In his thought-provoking memoir, The Country of the Blind, Leland explores how the transition from sighted to blind is affecting his life, his view of himself and his relationships while diving deep into the history, politics and rich culture of blindness.

just finding the cup like I always have, albeit in a different style. If I’m in a frame of mind where I’m mourning the loss of my vision, this can feel like a diminishment, knocked a few rungs down the ladder of the senses.

But my day-to-day experience, on the whole, underscores the fact that vision doesn’t really deserve its elevated status. The brain is plastic, and can settle into other modalities quite comfortably.

You write, “I’ll never be native to blindness.” Can you elaborate on how your experience of losing something you once had differs from being native to blindness?

You write quite a bit about the realities, both physical and emotional, I think there are advantages and disadvantages to being congeniof RP. What was the effect of expressing these tally blind (from birth) versus adventitiously experiences while writing your book? blind (a phrase that always makes me think of It was powerfully, unmistakably therapeutic. a blind adventurer). The congenitally blind—if I began the book awash in a sea of misconcepthey’re lucky enough to have early access to tions, generalizations, assumptions and confugood blindness training—have the cognitive sions; what an immense gift it was to be given advantage of wiring their brains nonvisually the opportunity to spend three years rigorously from the start. They’ll read Braille faster than I ever will: It’s like being a native speaker. But interrogating, investigating, elucidating and defusing them! One side effect of that extended these sorts of generalizations only go so far. introspection, however, was that if I was So much depends on the environment one self-conscious about blindness before, now I’m grows up in, and there are many congenitally profoundly, professionally self-aware in ways blind adults who have to work through the that don’t always feel especially healthy. A lot of damage of childhoods spent sheltered from people with RP say they don’t notice any gradual the world, with loving families who have abyschanges in their vision, but instead complain of mally low expectations for their independence sudden, cataclysmic transition points every few and abilities.

The adventitiously blind have the advantage years. Why did they experience sudden declines, whereas I felt a more or less constant awareness of having grown up with an intuitive underof the gradual changes in my vision? My doctor standing of the shared but largely unspoken gently suggested that as a writer immersed in a grammar of the visual world. This includes project like mine, I may be more attuned to the everything from the semiotics of color (how microlevel changes in vision. to explain why red is angry, or blue calm?)

It was useful to study these changes while to the infinite stream of gestures, shapes and writing the book, but there are days when it objects (USPS mail-carrier sacks; Day of the feels like a burden and a distraction to be so Dead decorations; elephant skin) that are rarely persistently obsessed with how much vision I described. I ran across an account of a blind have, how much I’ve lost and what it all means. person saying that they had no idea how people I’m looking forward to letting go of some of that held their arms when they’re being sworn in by acute sensitivity to my own experience, though court clerks. What does “raise your right arm” The Country of the Blind mean? Is it an angled, “Sieg Heil”-style salute?

I suspect that might be a lost cause at this point.

Penguin Press, $29, 9781984881427 Or does it go straight up, like a grade schooler waiting to be called on?

You question whether vision deserves its spot Memoir at the top of the hierarchy of senses. As your What would you say to people who instinctively think of blindness as RP has progressed, how have your thoughts changed regarding the sad or tragic? degrees of importance people assign to different senses?

It’s a harmful but understandable mistake. In one sense, they’re not Our brains are wonderfully multimodal. What we might experience as a purely visual activity—looking for a cup of coffee on the table, for wrong. The experience of losing vision after living with sight is unavoidinstance—actually contains a great deal of information beyond sight. ably painful. But that pain is, ideally, temporary: One mourns the loss of We’re gathering tactile cues (fingers brushing the table as they move sight, and perhaps there will always be occasional twinges of remorse toward the hot cup), auditory signals (the clink of a fingernail as it conor frustration, but there are very few blind people who live their lives nects with the ceramic mug), even olfactory indicators (the steam rising carrying around the constant feeling of aggrieved sadness and tragedy. off the coffee). I’ve had to turn up these nonvisual channels as my vision I think it comes down to a kind of emotional neuroplasticity. In addihas gradually turned down. Looking for a cup with my fingers might strike tion to the sensory adjustments (learning to navigate traffic by ear, or an onlooker as a fumbling way of going about things, but one quickly knowing when chicken is done by the way it feels when you slice it), we can also learn to process difficult feelings, so that something that once grows accustomed to it. It’s not a magical blind tactile adventure; I’m

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q&a | andrew leland but also by immersing myself in the history, culture and communities of blindness, is one of the biggest gifts that writing the book gave me.

Can you tell us your definition of what you call “the blind sense of humor”?

I was surprised by how much I read and thought about Samuel Beckett while writing this book, but I think it’s because his sensibility feels connected to the blind sense of humor: the ability to look at an impossible experience and find a kind of transcendent absurdity in it. Pouring sugar and sunshine into darkness and pain feels artificial and to me only exacerbates and underscores the intractability of the problem. But comedy that accepts the difficulty and finds humor within it—that’s the good stuff.

Jim Knipfel’s Slackjaw and Ryan Knighton’s Cockeyed, two memoirs by writers with RP, helped me see blindness as a kind of Beckettian slapstick. No matter how skillful you are as a blind person, there are inevitable moments of apologizing to lampposts, sinks that turn out to be urinals or (as one blind blogger put it) “jalapeños in the oatmeal.” © GREGORY HALPERN

felt tragic and insurmountable eventually becomes benign, normal.

This is an idea that I’ve found many intelligent, compassionate sighted people have an incredibly difficult time accepting. The received sense of blindness as a tragedy runs very deeply and stubbornly through the culture. Nearly every blind person I’ve met has had the experience of casually going about their day—shopping, traveling, whatever—and having their good mood shattered by the noxious, unsolicited sympathy of strangers (or family, for that matter): Bless you. I’m so sorry.

Artificial intelligence has received quite a bit of play in the press lately. What are your feelings about the possible uses of this technology for blind people?

Like the disabled community more broadly, blind people don’t just benefit from advances in technology, they often drive them. Blind people were early adopters and often collaborators on the development of some of the technological tools that underpin today’s AI revolution, from synthetic speech (think Siri or Alexa) to the origins of “machine vision,” e.g., advances in scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that first automated the Do you think a cure will be found for RP? process of making printed books accessible Visit BookPage.com to read our review of to blind readers.

Retinal specialists have been telling me The Country of the Blind.

There’s a great app called Be My Eyes, that a breakthrough is just around the corwhich connects blind people with sighted volunteers who temporarily ner since I was diagnosed nearly 25 years ago. There has been real scienaccess the camera on the blind user’s phone, allowing them to read the tific progress, but there’s still nothing to stop the ongoing degeneration of my retinas. My attitude in general about cures is: Keep up the good recipe on a box of brownies or answer queries like “Does this shirt match work, science, and give me a call if there’s something definitive you can these pants?” Be My Eyes recently released a feature called “virtual voldo to help. In the meantime, I’m going to work on figuring out how to unteer,” in which OpenAI’s GPT-4 image-to-text technology will replace lead a fulfilling life as a blind person. those human volunteers for a wide range of tasks.

But just as there are tasks for which a Be My Eyes user might prefer a Looking back at the process of writing this book, was there anything human volunteer (in the case of a more subjective judgment, perhaps, you would have done differently? like describing a photo of a loved one), technology will never replace Early in the reporting process, one of my sources—a sighted historian— the human interdependence that’s as much a hallmark of the disabled experience as our reliance on (and obsession with) tech. asked me who else I was talking to. I rattled off the names of blind MacArthur geniuses and Guggenheim fellows I’d already booked interviews with. He While discussing the stigma attached to blind people’s use of canes to praised me for assembling such an impressive coterie, but then he admonget around, you said that you sometimes felt like an impostor while ished me to make sure I also spoke with blind people at the margins, who using one. Has that feeling were far more representative of fraudulence changed of blind life in the U.S. “One mourns the loss of sight, and perhaps there over time?

I took his advice, and did will always be occasional twinges of remorse or The feeling of fraudulence talk to blind people workwas at its worst when I first ing in shelter workshops or tentatively brought the cane frustration, but there are very few blind people who refilling vending machines out in public, when I really live their lives carrying around the constant feeling or who were unemployed, sometimes houseless and felt like a sighted person carof aggrieved sadness and tragedy.” surviving on government rying a cane like an affectation. Since then, I’ve continassistance. But in the end, I ued to lose vision, and the cane feels more immediately necessary. Now still ended up focusing more on the blind people who I aspired to emuthat I know (from painful experience) the kind of mayhem I can cause for late as I entered the world of blindness. The book is, in part, my attempt myself and others if I try to travel without it, and how much more quickly to rehabilitate the image of blindness for myself (and my readers), and at least superficially, it’s easier to make that case by profiling successful and confidently I move with it, I don’t have nearly as much ambivalence.

I still feel fraudulence around blindness more broadly, though. I someblind artists, writers, entrepreneurs and scientists—all of whom face tretimes feel reluctant to call myself blind when I still have enough residual mendous barriers of their own. But if I had another three years to write the book, or another 300 pages, I would have done more reporting on vision to recognize faces and read large print. This is shifting, too, but slowly. I’m consciously working to accept the blind parts of myself as blindness, poverty and unemployment. I plan on continuing to write sufficiently blind for me to embrace the identity as my own. That feelabout disability, so I’ll hopefully get that chance soon. ing of acceptance, which I’m arriving at not only by losing more vision —Christy Lynch

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reviews | nonfiction

H Valiant Women

By Lena Andrews

History Few of the myriad books about World War II have ever attempted to provide a comprehensive history of its 350,000 American servicewomen. Out of the dwindling female veterans alive today, many have never even been asked to provide their first-person accounts. While compiling Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II (Mariner, $32.99, 9780063088337), Lena Andrews found that female veterans had often been led to feel their experiences were not worth preserving, as their service wasn’t “real war work.” After a vivid recounting of her work distributing supplies to men headed to the front, Merle Caples, 98, remarks, “Oh my god, there are people out there who still care about me?” In a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record, Valiant Women convincingly demonstrates that “American women who

The Many Lives of Mama Love

By Lara Love Hardin

Memoir In her memoir, Lara Love Hardin puts a human face on painfully personal crimes—like the 32 counts of identity theft she commits in order to fund her drug addiction. The Many Lives of Mama Love (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781982197667) grips you as suddenly as any psychological thriller, as Love Hardin evades the consequences of her crimes until, eventually, there’s nowhere left to run. During her yearlong incarceration, the women Love Hardin meets in cell block G are vastly different from her—a former upper-class soccer mom with a successful business—yet she finds common ground with her fellow inmates in her struggle with sobriety. The title itself is perfectly apt, encompassing Love Hardin’s status as a devoted mother who fights to remain in her children’s lives as well as the stability and understanding she provided to younger inmates, who nicknamed her “Mama Love.”

With its behind-the-scenes look into incarceration, The Many Lives of Mama Love provides a largely unknown perspective that is absolutely crucial to understanding our country’s prison

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donned military uniforms in World War II were . . . at the center of the Allied strategy for fighting and winning the war.”

Andrews, a CIA military analyst, searched for living veterans by perusing local newspapers for mentions of servicewomen honored at events such as centennial birthday celebrations.

In addition to these moving survivor interviews, she takes a thorough look at the history of and skepticism toward women’s service programs. After the Army and Navy established programs, the Coast Guard and Marine Corps followed, but the commander of the Marine Corps, Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb, was suspicious of the whole idea and “entirely lacked the foresight to recognize the value in expanding the Corps to include nonwhite men and women.” Andrews also details

the struggle led by two rival pilots Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love to establish a women’s flying corps in the US Army Air Forces.

Possessing a clear narrative style and subject mastery, Andrews gives valuable context and meaning to these profiles of remarkable women, including Charity Adams, commander of the first Black WAC unit to serve abroad, and Dorothy Still, a Navy nurse in the Philippines, who spent three years as a prisoner of war with over 60 other women after the Japanese defeated American and Filipino forces on Bataan.

Valiant Women provides a vital, authoritative account of an almost-forgotten history, reminding us of all the stories it is past time to remember.

—Deborah Hopkinson

system. As she relates her grueling firsthand experiences behind bars, Love Hardin folds in commentary on prison reform that is compelling, persuasive and timely. Her journey through the most tumultuous years of her life—from her time locked away to her release; from the desperate attempts to maintain her freedom and parental rights to her rise as a successful ghostwriter— is the embodiment of endurance and fortitude.

The vulnerability and authenticity of her story is only rivaled by her portrayal of the hard-fought self-awareness that comes from finally facing oneself. Readers will experience the lows and highs of addiction, incarceration and rehabilitation as Love Hardin assembles the pieces of her shattered life into something beautiful again in this inspiring chronicle.

—Rachel Hoge

history of Eastern Europe that spans 2,000 years in under 400 pages.

Eastern Europe is indeed divided. Numerous migrations, invasions and empires have led to hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnic groups living cheek by jowl across the lands between Western Europe and Russia. Their languages, religions and customs have co-existed, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. Over the centuries, their countries have merged and broken apart. The resulting complex and haunting history is frequently tragic. During the early 20th century alone, wars smashed through Eastern Europe, leaving millions dead or displaced while setting the stage for Soviet domination.

Telling this story within the confines of just one volume is daunting. It would be tempting to glide over details in the interest of brevity or to rely too heavily on statistics, allowing numbers to tell the story. Instead, Mikanowski deliberately frames his book as an intimate history— because it is also the story of his family. Polish princes, Lithuanian merchants and Jewish scholars are among his ancestors, and their lives were shaped, and often shortened, by history.

This very personal perspective gives depth and humanity to Goodbye, Eastern Europe, along with urgency. Mikanowski reminds us that differences can lead to resentment and violence in our increasingly divided world. But he also points out that embracing these differences makes countries and their people stronger. Goodbye, Eastern Europe is both cautionary tale and signpost.

—Deborah Mason

H Goodbye, Eastern Europe

By Jacob Mikanowski

European History In Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (Panthe on, $30, 9781524748500), journalist and historian Jacob Mikanowski manages to pull off the nearly impossible: An accessible and detailed

reviews | nonfiction The Marriage Question

By Clare Carlisle

Biography “Marriage is so unlike anything else,” writes George Eliot in Middlemarch. “There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” By the time that novel was published in 1871, Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, was 17 years into her partnership with George Lewes, himself an author and member of the intelligentsia. Lewes was already married when he met Eliot but had long been estranged from his wife, who by that time had given birth to multiple children with another man. Eliot and Lewes determined to form their own sort of marriage despite being unable to marry legally; they even set off on a honey­moon to Germany. Their lifelong union became the scandal of Eliot’s life, making her “unfit” for drawing room visits and causing her family to shun her, even as she penned wildly successful novels.

It’s impressive how King’s College London professor Clare Carlisle (Philosopher of the Heart) finds her way inside this deeply intimate partnership in The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (FSG, $30, 9780374600457).

Lewes was exuberant and extroverted, but Eliot guarded her private life closely. She had a deep desire for acceptance and love, which possibly led her to gloss over uncomfortable problems in their partnership.

In many ways, Eliot’s relationship was thoroughly modern: an unsanctified union with a female breadwinner who struggled to balance the demands of parenting with finding the time and space she needed to work. Although Lewes was Eliot’s first cheerleader, encouraging her through her professional endeavors and proudly promoting her work in the literary sphere, he could be difficult in ways that were typical for a Victorian husband. For example, the immense earnings from Eliot’s work were deposited into Lewes’ bank account, and he availed himself of them freely. He could also sometimes be controlling, according to Carlisle’s narrative, basking a little too much in Eliot’s reflected glory.

Carlisle demonstrates that Eliot’s thoughts on marriage were reflected in her work as she picked through romantic joys and frustrations, ruminating over the what-could-have-beens that haunt every long partnership. There are no neat answers here to Eliot’s marriage questions—“whether to marry, whom to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married,” as Carlisle summarizes it. Instead,

The Marriage Question is a deep examination of long partnership—how it affects us, how it is negotiated—through Eliot’s deliciously thoughtful prose and reflective journal entries.

Carlisle has written a book that seems to tell a story about others but instead deeply informs us about ourselves.

—Anna Spydell

The Rye Bread Marriage

By Michaele Weissman

Memoir

Fo r Michaele Weissman, the attraction to John MeIngailis was instantaneous: Pulling the Chariot of “He was tall and slender, with blond hair the Sun and a shaggy musBy Shane McCrae tache. His face was angular. Nordic. With Memoir slate-blue eyes. He When a w a r d -­ spoke English with a barely discernible accent. winning poet Shane I thought he was gorgeous.”

McCrae was born to Weissman and MeIngailis are quite different, a white mother and a or so she thinks: She’s eight years older than Black father in Oregon he is, Jewish, American and a journalist, while in 1975, his maternal MeIngailis, who fled Latvia as a child during World War II, is an MIT scientist, ardently grandmother desigattached to Latvian folklore and his refugee nated him “white” on his birth certificommunity. His devotion to Latvian rye bread cate, claiming it was (a dark, chewy, sourdough) perplexes her.

“You wake up married to a rye-bread-loving because she wanted him to have “all the advantages.” However, when she and her husband kidstranger, and slowly you realize that your husband doesn’t want to be like you . . . in fact he napped him from his parents and brought him to Texas three years later, the 13 years McCrae wants you to be like him!” she writes in an early spent with them were filled with anything but. chapter. “From this nexus of unresolvable differPulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of ence the decades-long battle is engaged.” a Kidnapping (Scribner, $27, 9781668021743) The Rye Bread Marriage: How I Found Happiness With a Partner I’ll Never is more than the memoir of an abduction: It is a story about how racial identity is shaped by both Understand (Algonquin, $27, 9781643752693) presence and absence in a child’s life. McCrae offers multiple stories: of Weissman’s growth explores memory itself and what happens when as she seeks to understand MeIngailis’ eccenviolence and deception warp the brain’s abiltricities and her own; of their marriage, parentity to maintain clear distinctions between fact hood and stepparenthood; and of Latvian rye and fantasy. bread and its singular place in Latvian history In chapters that read more like vignettes and culture. This voicey, often funny memoir than chronological narratives, McCrae traces is comprised of 125 chapters of varying length, his journey from the Pacific Northwest to the some just a page, some even shorter. Here’s Southwest and back again; narrates the comthe entirety of chapter 41, “Marriage: Second plicated relationships between his mother and Definition”: “Marriage: An intimate relationship her parents; and mourns the absence of a father existing on a continuum between love and hate, whom his grandparents attempted to erase with partners perpetually suspended between from his life in every way possible. Throughout, the two.” Some of the chapters form short, lyrical McCrae undertakes in prose the age-old bard’s essays; some are more journalistic. The memoir task: to lend a voice to—and by extension, really shines when Weissman recounts research make sense of—the inconceivable, even as the visits to Latvia and Germany (where MeIngailis’ admitted gaps in his own memory work against family took refuge at the end of the war) that led meaning, resolution and wholeness. her to a deeper understanding of the trauma of war and exile.

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun wrestles with the brain’s unreliability in the wake of trauma, The Rye Bread Marriage brings to mind two other quirky, memorable memoirs: Julie as well as the reality that, regardless of who Klam’s The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters, raised us, few of the stories we inherit about ourselves are accurate. McCrae’s work becomes less and Amy Kraus Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. “How I Found Happiness with a about arriving at any irrefutable conclusion and Partner I’ll Never Understand” may be its subrather about reaching a point where we are willing to concede the impossibility of truth, even title, but by the time we reach the book’s lovely, as we continue to reconstruct all we know in an life-affirming ending, it is clear that both partners do understand one another. attempt to get as close as we can.

—Sarah McCraw Crow —Destiny O. Birdsong

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reviews | nonfiction

H The Great White Bard

By Farah Karim-Cooper

Arts & Culture Ev e n though Shakespeare refers to the great Egyptian queen as both “tawny” and “black” and his English contemporaries understood Egyptians to be dark-skinned, why did a major British production of Antony and Cleopatra not cast a Black Cleopatra until Doña Croll in 1991?

Because too many of the Bard’s admirers have failed to address, or even notice, race in his plays.

Farah Karim-Cooper, a Pakistani American professor of literature and Shakespeare studies at King’s College London, challenges that willful ignorance in The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (Viking, $32, 9780593489376). Karim-Cooper, who also serves as Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, argues that the bad alternatives to an honest conversation about race in Shakespeare are either to dismiss his work or stubbornly cling to the stale tradition of brushing aside race—both of which oppose her desire for the plays to speak to a wider public.

Aiming to include non-academic readers in her audience, Karim-Cooper takes a close look at characters who are clearly people of color: Othello, Aaron the Moor and the Prince of Morocco. She considers more ambiguous cases, like Cleopatra and Caliban, and also ranges farther afield to depictions of otherness such as the witches in Macbeth, noting how Shakespeare routinely relies upon racialized imagery and dehumanizing language: white/fair equals good; dark equals bad and ugly.

Like his contemporaries, Shakespeare employs racist and antisemitic tropes in his characters, yet he also writes them as multifaceted individuals. “Shakespeare often challenges us to hold two contradictory views simultaneously,” Karim-Cooper states. Indeed, Othello is brave and forthright as well as lethally jealous; we hear Caliban’s side of the story as well as Prospero’s. The existence of Black people and interracial marriage in Tudor England introduces the possibility of Shakespeare having actually encountered people of color.

And Karim-Cooper’s analysis of The Merchant of Venice might make one wonder whether Shakespeare knew any Jews passing as Christians for safety.

Our perception of Shakespeare’s work is ever-evolving: It wasn’t until the 18th century that he was even glamorized as “the Bard” by theater star David Garrick. Karim-Cooper’s candid

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discussion of more nuanced and informed approaches to interpreting Shakespeare can only help his work endure.

—Anne Bartlett

Thomas will keep you laughing, but underneath his mirth lies a wealth of thoughtful observations.

—Alice Cary

Congratulations, the Best Is Over!

H The Underworld

By R. Eric Thomas

Essays R. Eric Thomas is a big personality, and he owns it: “I’m a lot without reason or provocation.” He likes exclamation points, and he’s fun, funny, vulnerable and one hell of a storyteller.

Readers will find him a hoot to hang out with in his second book of essays, Congratulations, the Best is Over!

(Ballantine, $27, 9780593496268). It’s an excellent follow-up to Here for It, which recounted his coming-of-age in Baltimore, education at Columbia and early career writing for Elle. Now a multitalented pop-culture guru, Thomas has since published a YA novel and written for the TV shows “Better Things” and “Dickinson.”

These latest essays chronicle his courtship and marriage to David Norse Thomas, a white Presbyterian minister who was raised in Oregon. Their dissimilar backgrounds provide tender comedy, as seen in the account of their engagement on top of an Oregon peak at sunset: By the end of the expedition, he’s shivering uncontrollably, saying, “David, I think nature is trying to kill me!”

In the first half of the book, “Homecoming,” the couple move from Philadelphia back to Baltimore, which is problematic for Eric, since Baltimore “was where all the ghosts of the unhappy person I used to be still lived.” Eric’s discussions of his depression are frank and charismatic: “I feel like I’m talking about the inner workings of a stranger. The sadness is real and it is always around and it is not who I am.”

Engaging stories about neighbors, landscaping and a horde of very loud frogs ensue in the second half of the book, “Homegoing.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hits, Eric and his husband buy a house set on a half acre of land— which Eric poignantly connects to the failed promise of 40 acres and a mule to formerly enslaved Black people in 1865—in northern Baltimore County. As Eric explains, “Apparently the key to getting me to consider the appeal of the suburbs is locking me in my city apartment for fifty-two days. On day fifty-three, suddenly I’m like, ‘You know what really rings my bells?

A Nest camera, a cul-de-sac, and an HOA handbook full of microaggressions.’ ”

By Susan Casey

Science The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (Doubleday, $32, 9780385545570) zips as enthrallingly along as the stateof-the-art submersibles in which journalist Susan Casey deep-sea dives. The 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 over the Indian Ocean ignited Casey’s curiosity about what lay deeper within the marine worlds she had previously covered in her bestselling The Wave, The Devil’s Teeth and Voices in the Ocean. As Casey writes, the ensuing high-tech search for the plane using robots and sonar revealed a “symphony of extremes, a playlist of geology’s greatest hits,” including mountainous volcanoes, deep crevasses, towering cliffs and “a riot of unique species” never seen before.

Casey provides a thorough historical run-up of how the deep ocean has intrigued cartographers and explorers for centuries. From Olaus Magnus’ 1539 illustrated map, the Carta Marina, which inspired the popular belief that monsters filled the deep, to today’s OceanX, a nonprofit initiative whose mission is “to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world,” Casey colorfully explains how far our understanding of the ocean has come, and how the habitat is being threatened by deep-sea mining.

The Underworld begins in January 2021, with Casey equally thrilled and terrified as she prepares to take her first dive in a submersible.

Starting from the epipelagic (or sunlight) zone, she will drop through several regions to reach the hadal zone—fittingly named after Hades, Greek god of the underworld—which starts at 20,000 feet and extends beneath the seafloor into trenches and troughs. In the hadal zone, a submersible faces 16,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, and any mechanical flaw is likely to be fatal. She describes the sea’s inhabitants flitting past the viewport: supergiant squids and transparent creatures with glass skeletons, three hearts, eight legs or “eyes that could swivel in any direction.”

The Underworld is Casey’s dazzling answer to the age-old, tantalizing question about the ocean’s abyss: “What’s down there?”

—Priscilla Kipp

reviews | young adult

Damned if You Do

By Alex Brown

Young Adult Between the busy tech week leading up to the school musical’s opening night and her overwhelming crush on her best friend, Cordelia Scott thinks she’s at her limit—until a demon named Fred appears and tells her she’s accidentally sold him part of her soul. To escape the fires of hell, she must help Fred defeat an even more powerful demonic entity that’s been plaguing their community for nearly 100 years and the supernatural creatures under its command. But how hard could it be to put on a great show, hide her feelings from Veronica and destroy a demon?

Alex Brown’s Damned if You Do (Page Street, $18.99, 9781645679998) feels both modern and mythical. Brown’s characters are regular teenagers who do things like suffer through pop quizzes,

Give Me a Sign

By Anna Sortino

Young Adult Finding the right words can be a challenge for anyone. Lilah, the deaf protagonist in Give Me a Sign (Putnam, $18.99, 9780593533796), is struggling not only with what to say but also how to say it. A sweet and thoughtful romp, Anna Sortino’s debut novel navigates the intricacies of Deaf culture and how one girl finds her place in it.

Consumed by doubts that she’s not “deaf enough” and irked by her hearing parents who are preoccupied with making sure she can pass as hearing, Lilah minimizes herself and what accommodations she needs. Her friends “forget” she can’t hear as well as them, inadvertently leaving her out of conversations or taking her to inaccessible activities.

At the end of her junior year, all Lilah wants is to feel understood like she did when she was at Camp Gray Wolf, a summer camp for blind, deaf and hard-of-hearing kids. Nervous about her rusty American Sign Language but excited to connect more with her Deaf identity, Lilah applies to become a counselor.

What ensues is a summer in the woods with cute boys, late-night shenanigans and more lessons about herself than she ever could have imagined. With lots of summer-ready fun,

gather in a cozy coffee shop, visit churches that may be hiding dark secrets and fight monsters such as the aswang, a creature from Filipino folklore. They also deal with horrifying, somber realities, such as the physical and emotional abuse Cordelia received from her father, which she recounts in as much vivid detail as she does her visions of hell.

But Damned if You Do doesn’t leave readers solely in darkness, and its weightier problems are balanced out with plenty of dry and witty humor. Readers will enjoy scenes of Cordelia bantering with Fred, sharing tender moments with Veronica and thriving in her role as stage manager.

Ultimately, this book is about healing and the immense work it takes. Cordelia and her friends

must decide: Do we allow others to define who we are, or can we take control of who we’re becoming? Whether it’s dealing with abandonment, abuse or exploitation, Damned if You Do asks us to take a hard look at how our experiences shape how we see ourselves—and how we can take back our own power and agency.

Brown strikes a delicate balance between light and dark, showing readers that the grimmest parts of ourselves are worth accepting. Damned if You Do is mature and complex while making plenty of space for humor, friendship and love, affirming the power of relationships to help us grow in ways that feel impossible on our own.

—Tami Orendain

Give Me a Sign thoughtfully tackles a myriad of coming-of-age tropes through the lens of deaf characters. Sortino’s writing shines the brightest when the story takes a turn toward the harsh realities and traumas that deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals often endure through misunderstandings with the hearing world. Sortino doesn’t shy away from examining cruelty, but her narrative also remains informative, kind and steady. Give Me a Sign is not only a point of representation for folks looking for themselves in a fun read but also a reminder that just because someone can’t hear or speak doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice.

—Luis G. Rendon

Zelda starts to suspect that she’s actually inhabiting a dream, even more so once she reencounters that mysterious boy, Langston. But whose dream is she in? And what if the dreamer wakes up? Will they all just cease to exist?

To find out, Zelda, Langston and Patches head toward the limits of the known dream world.

What they discover includes a robot house, an ice cream vendor who speaks in rhymes and the four gym teachers of the apocalypse, all of which are depicted in black-and-white illustrations by author Adam Rex. If this sounds kind of silly, it is. Those familiar with Rex’s books for younger readers will recognize his zany humor here as well, but even as the absurdity is pushed to extremes, A Little Like Waking (Roaring Brook, $20.99, 9781250621917) maintains a level of seriousness as well.

The dreamscape is influenced by personal history and often tinged with tragedy. At every turn, the characters consider big questions: “Do you want to grow up? Do you want a life that’s easy or a life that’s real?” Zelda must confront the fact that if she’s not the dreamer, she’s not the star she once assumed. As she puts it, “Growing up is realizing you’re not the main character. Or everyone else is, too.”

A Little Like Waking is sneaky like that, planting nuggets of philosophical and moral truths alongside carnival rides that sprout from the earth like giant vegetation. It’s also romantic and a little sad, with moments of quiet, bittersweet loveliness that stand out in high relief from the near-constant backdrop of hilarity. Rex’s quest narrative is like none other, sure to leave readers marveling at the wonder of dreams and the power of imagination.

—Norah Piehl

A Little Like Waking

By Adam Rex

Young Adult Zelda lives in the kind of quaint, upbeat town worthy of a montage. People greet her by name, wish her good luck on her geography test and loan her a bike when she’s running late. But after a close call on that bike with a car and a disappearing boy, Zelda starts to question her perfect town.

Why does that geography test—which she’s pretty sure she also took yesterday—make no sense? Why does the town laundromat sport its own creepy clown? And why has her dead cat, Patches, shown up . . . talking?

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feature | back to school

Embracing those back-to-school blues

Whether you’re a child or a parent, that first day of the school year is always monumental, for better or worse. These books help transform those jitters into joy.

H Giant-Sized Butterflies on

My First Day of School

In the marvelous Giant-Sized Butterflies on My First Day of School (Putnam, $18.99, 9780525516439), Justin Roberts provides an invaluable life lesson for anyone fearful of approaching something new: Lean into those nerves.

Roberts borrows a page from fellow musician and author Bill Harley (Sitting Down to Eat) by turning one of his own most popular hits into a picture book. During a drive to school, a girl’s mother explains that those butterfly feelings are normal and happen to everyone. Even Mom and the girl’s dad felt them when the girl first arrived as a baby. “Don’t hold them in,” her mother says. “Just let them fly.”

Paola Escobar’s art visualizes the child’s fears with colorful, delicate swirls of butterflies that follow her as she gets up and heads to school, reinforcing the message that these nerves are actually a lovely, useful force.

With its reassuring text and cheerful illustrations, Giant-Sized Butterflies on My First Day of School provides a simple yet powerful message about harnessing one’s fears: “Those butterflies made me realize that the flutters inside are wings opening wide . . . guiding me through my first day.”

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H Bitsy Bat, School Star It’s Bitsy Bat’s first night at her new school, Crittercrawl Elementary, in Kaz Windness’ inventive and informative Bitsy Bat, School Star (Paula Wiseman, $18.99, 9781665905053). Adorable, irrepressible Bitsy soon discovers that her classmates aren’t at all like her. There’s a mouse, a rabbit and a raccoon who uses a wheelchair, making Bitsy the only “toe-hanger.” Windness, who describes herself as “proudly autistic,” beautifully describes Bitsy’s reaction: “Maybe it was the awful feeling that she would never, ever fit in. Whatever it was, Bitsy Bat had a FIVE-STAR meltdown.”

Every young reader, autistic or not, will likely identify with many of Bitsy’s feelings, and the resourceful bat soon comes up with excellent solutions to her problems while reaching out to her classmates so they can all better understand everyone’s unique abilities.

Windness’ dusk-toned art plays up Bitsy’s batlike behavior in clever ways, and the authorillustrator’s personal note, as well as a footnote containing additional facts about autism, make Bitsy Bat, School Star a particularly helpful resource for all kids.

feature | back to school

On the Night Before Kindergarten Rosemary Wells has been entertaining children with her sly, sweet characters and stories for decades, and she does so once again with On the Night Before Kindergarten (Paula Wiseman, $18.99, 9781665924894).

Milo’s parents are excited for Milo’s first day, but Milo, a young kitten, is plagued by bad dreams about what might happen: showing up wearing only his red rubber boots (causing everyone to laugh), forgetting how to count to six or getting stuck on the school bus as it zips past his house.

Young readers will love watching Milo’s parents fret incessantly about his dreams while Milo goes on to enjoy a fantastic first day. Wells has a way of reaching into young readers’ souls and reassuring them about their fears—while making them laugh in the process. She bathes Milo’s dream scenes in a starry blue background, a motif she later repeats in small spot illustrations to indicate what his parents are worrying about. A fine, funny joke on Milo’s father nicely ties the story’s end to its beginning. On the Night Before Kindergarten is an excellent choice for any young child about to face a new situation.

How to Get Your Octopus to School How to Get Your Octopus to School (Flamingo, $18.99, 9780593205228) cleverly addresses school hesitancy by making an octopus the student whose young female human owner is in charge of coaxing him there. In the process, readers learn a lot about octopuses: They are great at hiding, they have strong suction cups for holding onto things, and they squirt ink when nervous. Becky

Scharnhorst’s lighthearted text emulates these characteristics, overlaying certain words with a pattern resembling octopus ink, such as when the book concludes, “When you finally arrive at school, you’ll probably be exhausted, but your octopus will be . . . EXCITED!” Jaclyn Sinquett’s illustrations portray an energetic yet friendly struggle between octopus and human. This anthropomorphized creature is an adorable little fellow who will get laughs from readers as he considers an endless number of first-day outfits, settling on a jaunty blue and gold ensemble. How to Get Your Octopus to School reassures readers that a happy ending awaits on that big first day.

H Yenebi’s Drive to School A daily trip to school is a monumental journey for the narrator of Yenebi’s Drive to School (Chronicle, $17.99, 9781797216294). Yenebi, her younger sister, Melanie, and her mother, Mami, rise at 4 a.m. to cross the border from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego by 7 a.m. Yenebi doesn’t mind the hours of waiting in la linea—the lines of cars awaiting inspection

by U.S. authorities—noting that her mother’s wakeup call “makes my ears happier than an alarm clock ever could.” Along the way, she sees a festival of sights, sounds and smells, as vendors tempt car passengers with tacos al vapor, burritos and pan dulce.

Author-illustrator Sendy Santamaria notes that this story arose from her own childhood spent on both sides of the border: “It often felt like home was always around me but never somewhere tangible. . . . It was the moments of waiting, of being in between both countries, that felt like home.” She seamlessly weaves Spanish phrases and dialogue into her crisp text, and her art is an explosion of vibrant color, adding to the book’s multisensory celebration. Yenebi’s Drive to School demonstrates excellently that there are many ways to get to school and that the lessons and rewards of education are worth striving for.

—Alice Cary

Illustrations from How to Get Your Octopus to School © 2023 written by Becky Scharnhorst and illustrated by Jaclyn Sinquett. Reproduced with permission by Flamingo.

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reviews | children’s

H Ghost Book

By Remy Lai

Middle Grade When Hungry Ghost Month arrives, the veil to the underworld lifts to allow bug-eyed, starving ghosts into the world of the living, where they feast on food left out by thoughtful mortals . . . and hunt for the delicious souls of the newly deceased. July Chen’s dad insists these ghosts aren’t real, so she ignores them—even though she alone can see them.

Other than her dad, no one that July meets ever seems to remember her, so she slips through life unnoticed—until she runs into the wandering soul of the wandering soul of William, a still-­living boy. William has experienced countless near-death experiences since birth, and the latest freak accident has landed him in a coma. July promises to help William return to his body, but soon starving spirits descend upon them and William’s tether to the real world begins to fray, forcing July to look

Two Tribes

By Emily Bowen Cohen

Middle Grade Mia is of two tribes: Her mom is Jewish, and her dad is Muscogee. Mia’s dad and his new family live in Oklahoma, far away from California, where Mia lives with her mom and stepdad, Roger. Since marrying Roger, Mia’s mom has begun to take participation in Judaism much more seriously.

Exhausted by her experiences at Jewish day school and frustrated with her mother’s refusal to speak about her dad, Mia works out a secret plan to visit her dad in Oklahoma and learn more about her Muscogee heritage. While Mia initially feels like an outsider there, it doesn’t take her long to bond with an older cousin and feel at home with new traditions. But Mia’s mom quickly realizes that Mia’s not on the school trip she claimed to be and comes to get her. Will this incident be the final fracture in Mia’s family, or will it create a bridge between tribes?

Inspired by author and cartoonist Emily Bowen Cohen’s real-life experiences growing up Jewish and Muscogee, graphic novel Two Tribes (Heartdrum, $15.99, 9780062983589) examines the complex tensions and beautiful facets of a childhood between cultures and in a

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at the truth of her own life: why people forget her, why she possesses special yinyang eyes that allow her to see ghosts and how far she is willing to go to rescue her new friend.

Author-illustrator Remy Lai, known for her award-­ winning graphic novels Pie in the Sky and Pawcasso, brings her trademark colorful style to a darker yet equally charming palette in her new folkloric contemporary fantasy, Ghost Book (Holt, $22.99, 9781250810410). Not a single panel is wasted, and readers who pay close attention to the art will be deeply rewarded by neatly placed clues that foreshadow the story’s final twists.

Lai explores grief and other hard topics with a careful hand, avoiding a descent into overwhelming sadness. Serious topics—the loss of a parent, the fear of dying and the pain of betrayal— are juxtaposed neatly with the presence of an

blended family. Cohen supports the story with a vibrant but realistic illustration style peppered with the occasional abstract image.

Where Two Tribes shines is in its portrayal of Mia as a self-possessed 12-year-old who is attuned to the importance of embracing differences rather than pretending they don’t exist.

Cohen provides a nuanced picture of how Mia has in some ways come to resent her Jewish heritage because of the way it’s been placed in opposition to her dad’s Indigenous culture.

The story is somewhat unbalanced by Mia’s Jewish family and rabbi, who are portrayed more antagonistically than the other characters.

For example, when Mia’s school rabbi makes a racist joke about Native Americans at dinner with Roger and Mia’s mom, it’s brushed off by all the adults as a simple mistake rather than a genuinely problematic remark. However, Mia’s family and her rabbi eventually begin to understand how they have failed Mia in certain aspects.

With its incredibly complex subject of personal identity, Two Tribes might have benefited from the additional space given by a traditional novel form to explore its themes more deeply rather than coming to a picture-perfect resolution. That said, perhaps the increased accessibility of the graphic novel format serves this book well. For children just coming into adolescence, a biracial background—especially involving two marginalized groups—can make for a tangled web of difficulties. By seeing their stories represented, things might start to make sense.

—Mariel Fechik

adorable ghost named Floof and jokes about how passionately ghosts love dumplings. Prevailing above all is the power of friendship, and July’s and William’s attempts to save each other’s lives will thrill readers.

Lai limits her human cast to a handful of characters, but the myriad spirits she pulls from Chinese mythology will inspire readers to learn more about the real Hungry Ghost Festival. Kids who like to mimic the art styles of graphic novels will be equally inspired by both the hungry ghosts, drawn in detail with gaunt faces and hideous boils, and the simpler forms of Floof and the friendlier background ghosts. For kids who eat up graphic novels like Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol, Pilu of the Woods by Mai K. Nguyen and Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier, Ghost Book will make a perfect addition to their shelves.

—Nicole Brinkley

Every Night at Midnight

By Peter Cheong

Picture Book In the daytime world, Felix struggles to fit in with his classmates at school. But in the nighttime landscape, he runs free as a wolf. Felix tells himself he is perfectly OK with this dichotomy.

But maybe, deep down, a part of him wishes for more than just OK. Inviting and creative, Peter Cheong’s first book as author and illustrator is both a tale of nighttime adventures and a heartwarming metaphor for finding one’s place in the world.

Every Night at Midnight (Atheneum, $18.99, 9781665917384) bounces between day and night, contrasting Felix’s two worlds and identities. Daytime is open and bright, with delightful school chaos that feels homey and inviting.

His classmates are cheerful, their faces kind.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that school is not a safe place for Felix; the white space that surrounds these illustrations highlights his loneliness and separation from his classmates. Meanwhile, at night, the catawampus houses, streets and sky collide in a pseudo-gothic mashup in deep blues and grays. Lights shine from windows while Felix, in wolf form, roams the roofs and balconies and empty streets, encapsulating

reviews | children’s the freedom of escape—just like a dream in which you’re flying. Cheong’s style is consistently appealing, but his nighttime scenes are especially engaging.

Felix’s narration balances a somewhat somber tone with earnestness, conveying his cool bravado as well as his underlying hesitation and longing. Every Night at Midnight has plenty of company on bookshelves alongside other children’s stories about fitting in, but Felix’s wolf-transformation is as unique in detail as it is universal. We all know the feeling of pretending to be confident in solitude while wishing we could join the group. We’ve all had moments of rejoicing in our uniqueness while yearning to share it with someone who understands.

Felix has a big imagination and splendid ideas, but his wolf life also represents the things that hold us back—things that, while making us exceptional and inimitable, also separate us from others. Whether you read it as an allegory or simply a story about flying dreams, Every Night at Midnight resonates with beauty and heart.

—Jill Lorenzini

highlight the characters’ actions in realistic detail against simple backgrounds. The muted, pastel colors do not detract from the story’s vibrancy. Several full-spread illustrations are especially lovely, such as when the challah dough is being braided, or when children jump across larger-than-life bags of sugar, salt and flour.

After the story is finished, back matter not only offers a recipe for “Challah for a Crowd” but also provides context and information about challah and its surrounding traditions.

In addition to highlighting the different ways that challah can be made, Offsay also shows readers various ways that Jewish people come together to celebrate. Challah Day! is simple, but its warmth and joy are palpable. By the end, your mouth will be watering.

—Mariel Fechik

Challah Day!

In the follow-­up to her playful and witty I Cannot Draw a Horse, Charise Mericle Harper returns with another humorous, metafictional picture book about creativity. Harper’s clever illustrations and text contain multiple layers and connections, ensuring that children will enjoy I Cannot Draw a Bicycle (Union Square, $18.99, 9781454945956) for years.

The story begins simply, with words set against a graph-paper background. An unnamed narrator explains, “This is my shape,” indicating a rounded gray lump that resembles a gumdrop or a gravestone. That lump, however, can be transformed by the narrator into a lot of things, including a cat, a skateboard and a horse. The cat seems happy atop the skateboard, but the horse is harder to please, because this equine wants a bicycle. However, the narrator isn’t able to comply: “A bicycle is hard to draw. I cannot draw a bicycle.”

So shenanigans begin, as the cat, horse and narrator interact with one another through easy-to-read speech bubbles. While the cat might be fine with a “cool” substitute such as an icicle, the horse (with mulelike stubbornness) stays firm. Things are stuck at an impasse until the horse asks a most logical question: “Why is a bicycle so hard to draw?”

The answer, sure to draw peals of laughter from readers, makes clear that no one in this book is fully prepared to draw a bicycle.

Nevertheless, everyone tries, harnessing creativity, showcasing collaboration and coming up with a giggle-inducing, unexpected

By Charlotte Offsay Illustrated by Jason Kirschner

Picture Book Join a family of four as they make challah, a braided Jewish bread used for many holiday meals. It’s Friday evening, which means Shabbat is here. An excitable child narrator guides Mom, Dad and Baby through the recipe as they prepare for dinner with Grandma and Grandpa. Written by Charlotte Offsay and illustrated by Jason Kirschner, Challah Day! (Holiday House, $18.99, 9780823454112) is a scrumptious celebration of family traditions.

Starting at sundown on Friday, Shabbat dinner marks the beginning of the Jewish day of rest. Although we witness the family as they light the Shabbat candles and sit down for the traditional dinner, the book stays focused on making challah, making Challah Day! a sweetly straightforward and celebratory read for Jewish families as well as those wanting to learn more about Jewish culture. Offsay’s jaunty and quick-paced rhyming couplets are perfect for reading aloud and pair well with other picture books about cooking with family, like Linda Sue Park and Hoe Baek Lee’s Bee-Bim Bop! or Lisa J. Amstutz and Talitha Shipman’s Applesauce Day. Matching the bouncy tone of Offsay’s writing, Kirschner’s charmingly dynamic illustrations

I Cannot Draw a Bicycle

By Charise Mericle Harper

Picture Book

resolution that seems destined to launch these characters into a future adventure.

Harper taps straight into the preschool funny bone, making I Cannot Draw a Bicycle an excellent choice for read-aloud storytime.

With its spare text and clean, inviting design, this book also functions well for early readers.

And by fostering shape recognition and an understanding of geometry, I Cannot Draw a Bicycle provides an excellent base for encouraging young artists to draw their own cat, horse or—who knows—maybe even a bicycle!

—Deborah Hopkinson

When Rubin Plays

By Gracey Zhang

Picture Book Rubin lives in a tiny town next to a large forest, and at school, he likes to listen to the orchestra, including his sister and her cello. He leans through an open window, resting his arms and head on the sill, listening reverently and wishing he could join. Rubin is thrilled when the maestro hands him a violin and suggests he learn to play. Although Rubin can only produce screeches, the maestro assures him that he’ll soon play at a concert.

Eventually, Rubin heads into the forest to practice, where a crowd of cats gathers around him to hear him play. Zhang writes with verve about the cats and their impassioned singing: “Miiaaoooo,” goes the feline crowd in a “thicket of cacophonous sound,” their howls “a leaping crescendo.”

When at last Rubin performs with the school orchestra at their concert, the pace quickens and the mischief ramps up as a group of waltzing cats appears. Delightful depictions of cats crowd the pages—sometimes nearly every inch—with their leaping, dancing and singing, and soon everyone gets “caught in the whirlwind of Rubin’s sound, flying.”

Ezra Jack Keats Award winner Gracey Zhang (Lala’s Words) fills the illustrations of When Rubin Plays (Orchard, $18.99, 9781338648263) with vivid colors: plenty of scarlets, blues and greens, as well as backgrounds of vibrant yellow and orange. There is an infectious energy to Zhang’s loose lines, particularly the hand-­ lettered “eeeeiiii” sounds of Rubin’s violin.

Zhang states in her author’s note that she was inspired to set her story in Santa Ana de Velasco, Bolivia, after learning about the rich tradition of baroque classical music in the Chiquitos Province and its former mission towns. As a tale about the joys of creating music, When Rubin Plays lands a triumphant ending.

—Julie Danielson

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Your Next Great Read

AUGUST 2023 #1

PICK

Tom Lake: A Novel

By Ann Patchett

(Harper, 9780063327528, $30, Aug. 1, Fiction)

“This is a story of love for family, of past passions and people once loved, and their continuing influence on the present. With Ann Patchett’s wit and wryness finely tuned, Tom Lake is the perfect book for a summer weekend read.”

—Jenny Stroyeck, The Homer Bookstore, Homer, AK

None of This Is True: A Novel

By Lisa Jewell

(Atria Books, 9781982179007, $28, Aug. 8, Thriller)

“I love every Lisa Jewell book I read; None of This Is True is no exception.

I spent every page questioning who was telling the truth, who was lying, and what in the world was going on? Jewell will continue to be one of my favorite authors!”

—Kristin Prout, Gathering Volumes, Perrysburg, OH

Thornhedge

By T. Kingfisher

(Tor Books, 9781250244093, $19.99, Aug. 15, Fantasy)

“A rare, precious, perfect book. A retelling that understands the meaning of the word retelling, that twists and turns so new facets get to shine. I love Toadling with my whole heart — this might be my very favorite Sleeping Beauty ever.”

—Nicole Szmyd, Old Firehouse Books, Fort Collins, CO

Shark Heart: A Love Story

By Emily Habeck

(Simon Element/Marysue Rucci Books, 9781668006498, $28, Aug. 8, Fiction)

“Shark Heart is fascinating. The premise — some people genetically mutate into wild animal species — is told through stunning, poetic prose. Wholly original, heartbreaking yet hopeful, it explores how one woman meets loss with love.”

—Alana Haley, Schuler Books, Grand Rapids, MI

Crook Manifesto: A Novel

Looking Glass Sound: A Novel

(Doubleday, 9780385545150, $29, Jul. 18, Fiction)

(Tor Nightfire, 9781250860026, $27.99, Aug. 8, Thriller)

By Colson Whitehead

“Colson Whitehead has given us all the gift of Ray Carney’s Harlem. Crook Manifesto is one of 2023’s finest crime novels, not to mention one of the best overall novels of the year. Colson, we cannot wait for what’s next!”

—Berkley McDaniel, Shelf Life Bookstore, Richmond, VA

The Invisible Hour: A Novel

By Alice Hoffman

(Atria Books, 9781982175375, $27.99, Aug. 15, Fiction)

“Alice Hoffman has outdone herself with this book. It’s a love letter to readers and book lovers everywhere. I wanted to race though this book because the story is so compelling, but I made myself savor every word. This one has my heart.”

—Karen Schwettman, FoxTale Book Shoppe, Woodstock, GA

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

By James McBride

(Riverhead Books, 9780593422946, $28, Aug. 8, Fiction)

“McBride’s latest is full of hope, grace, and humor. With a propulsive plot about power, race, and belonging in 1920s America, it’s the characters you’ll remember most: caretakers, troublemakers, soothsayers.

I miss them already.”

—Nick Pauley, Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA

By Catriona Ward

“A mind-bending plot mixed with overall unease, with secrets that will keep you guessing until the very end. Looking Glass Sound is no exception to what we have come to expect of a Catriona Ward thriller — simply excellent.”

—Kirsten Benjamin, Browseabout Books, Rehoboth Beach, DE

The Great Transition: A Novel

By Nick Fuller Googins

(Atria Books, 9781668010754, $27.99, Aug. 15, Fiction)

“A beautiful story about rebuilding and sacrifice, in the name of love and in the face of disaster. This hopeful rendition of climate fiction will tug at heartstrings you didn’t even know you had.”

—Alden Zeff, Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, NH

Immortal Longings: A Novel

By Chloe Gong

(Gallery/Saga Press, 9781668000229, $28.99, Jul. 18, Fantasy)

“In Immortal Longings, Chloe Gong takes inspiration from Shakespeare and builds a fully imagined and detailed world. Her ability to create place, characters, and intrigue is astonishing. This story will leave you breathless.”

—Calvin Crosby, The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, UT

To purchase and find more recommendations visit your local independent bookstores or IndieBound.org.

Copyright 2023 American Booksellers Association