November 2022 BookPage

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

NOV 2022

Lev AC Rosen breaks new ground for noir in Lavender House, a compelling queer mystery set in 1950s San Francisco.

Secret histories of World War II

Native American Heritage Month

Untold stories of the epic conflict’s heroes and villains

Celebrate with book club picks and stunning picture books

GIFTS FOR THE HOLIDAYS pgs 4–11

Give the Gift of a New Read T H I S H O L I D AY S E A S O N

Join the men of the Special Forces A-Team and the women they love as they defend freedom and face danger around the world.

Cuddle up with this cozy story of giving and forgiving—and a little bit of romance.

Impulsive and unreserved, Lydie Stoltzfus has always felt like a disappointment. Leaving Stoney Ridge is her best move—even if it means leaving Nathan Yoder behind.

Get ready for triple the thrills with three heartstopping stories that offer excitement, intrigue, and romance—and hit the bullseye every time.

P

Based on a true story, a sweeping tale of hospitality, destiny, and the bonds of family.

Available Wherever Books and eBooks Are Sold

A lyrical look into the nature of women’s independence and artistic expression during the Victorian era—and now.

Nora Fenton inherits a struggling horse farm and a dangerous secret from her father—one that a new horse trainer threatens to uncover.

A gripping tale of secrets revealed and romance sparked from the queen of inspirational romantic suspense.

Reporter Aidyn Kelley begrudgingly agrees to help a hospice patient prepare her obituary. But old Clara Kip has incredible stories—and some surprises up her sleeve.

BookPage

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NOVEMBER 2022

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gifts | comfort food. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Tuck in with four soothing cookbooks

A WARD S

fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

happy

nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

feature | readalikes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 What to read next: TikTok edition

gifts | kids. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Under-the-radar picks for young readers

q&a | claudia lux. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Finding humanity in infernal bureaucracy

cover story | lev ac rosen. . . . . . . . . . . 17

young adult. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 children’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

columns

inform ed

romance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 book clubs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 sci-fi & fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Unlock the secrets of 1950s San Francisco

feature | history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

audio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 whodunit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Discover untold stories of World War II

gifts | poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Spread glad tidings this holiday season

ed inspir

lifestyles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 well read. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

interview | ross gay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

the hold list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Essays on joy, sadness and rage

behind the book | lynn steger strong. . 22 The artists who sparked her third novel

q&a | maya prasad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 A romance for every season of the year

feature | picture books . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

empow ered

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE Suggestions for every reader on your list in 2022 pages 4–11

Vibrant and vital Indigenous voices

d amuse

Cover and page 17 include art from Lavender House © 2022 by Lev AC Rosen. Art by Colin Verdi. Design by Katie Klimowcz. Reproduced with permission of Forge.

PRESIDENT & FOUNDER Michael A. Zibart VP & ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Elizabeth Grace Herbert CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy MARKETING MANAGER Mary Claire Zibart SUBSCRIPTIONS Katherine Klockenkemper Phoebe Farrell-Sherman CONTRIBUTOR Roger Bishop

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NONFICTION Explore the world with Lonely Planet Pack your bags and hit the open road! These great books offer the gift of travel this holiday season. $24.99–$40 | Lonely Planet

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Celebrate Black voices this holiday From travel to football to social justice, these books will make a lasting impression. $26.99–$35 National Geographic, Andscape Books

Mesozoic Art Steve White & Darren Naish This stunning illustrated book is perfect for dino-loving kids, art enthusiasts and Jurassic Park fans. $40 Bloomsbury Wildlife

The world’s favorite adventurer shares the tips he has used to overcome fears and achieve superhuman feats. They’ll help you face whatever life throws your way. $24.99 | Hodder Faith

The LEGO Story

Anthony Barboza

Jens Andersen

Explore the celebrated photographer’s first monograph. Publishers Weekly calls it a “gorgeous addition to the shelf.”

This extraordinary inside story of LEGO is based on unprecedented access to company archives and rare interviews with the founding family.

$40

$32.50 Mariner Books

Unique gifts from National Geographic!

Looking for advice on birds or eating for longevity? Want to excite kids about the wonders of our world? National Geographic has exactly what you need. $24.99–$30 | National Geographic, National Geographic Kids

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Bear Grylls

Eye Dreaming

J. Paul Getty Museum

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Mind Fuel

NONFICTION

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Perfect picks for everyone on your list Uncover the story behind the most popular songs since 1964, or dive into a riveting history of the most important WWII generals. $27–$30 | Atlantic Monthly Press, Grove Press

The West Wing and Beyond Pete Souza Go behind the scenes of the West Wing with former presidential photographer Souza.

Make the holidays delicious Every chef will savor these books. $28.99–$35 | Gallery

Give the gift of inspiration This holiday season, give a book that inspires. From memoirs to self-help, cookbooks to health and wellness titles, check out the latest releases from Harper Horizon. $29.99–$34.99 | Harper Horizon

$50 | Voracious

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams Stacy Schiff Gripping and revelatory, this book from a Pulitzer Prize winner illuminates an overlooked chapter of the American Revolution. $35 | Little, Brown

Gifts for every fandom Give the gift of pop culture with Insight Editions! We dive deep to deliver behindthe-scenes access to your favorite shows, films and more. $29.99–$39.99 | Insight Editions

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5

gifts | comfort food

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Tuck in These cookbooks are full of comforting creations to eat while you’re snug as a dormouse, watching the leaves turn.

It’s time to head to the kitchen and cook, bake and sauté up a variety of delicious, warming meals and treats to be eaten as the early dark creeps in.

If a person wishes to enter into the cozy state of mind, an episode of “The Great British Baking Show” will get them there. In Bliss on Toast (Bloomsbury, $26, 9781639730711), Prue Leith, a beloved judge on the show, tackles variations on that master­ piece of culinary perfection: toast. If you’re looking for something creamy and warm, you might decide on a duck egg, rainbow chard and Dijon butter on multigrain toast. Vegetarians and vegans will delight in roasted red pepper hummus, avocado and zhoug (a simple-to-make Yemeni sauce) on rye. Apricots, almonds and Devonshire clotted cream on an English muffin will take you through dessert. With each recipe, there is just enough cooking to make you feel you are making something special, but never enough to complicate the simplicity of warm, crusty toast.

Soup, schnitzel, latkes and shakshuka: No matter your heritage, Jewish fare is always warming, filling and as nourishing to the heart as to the body.

In Shannon Sarna’s Modern Jewish Comfort Food (Countryman, $30, 9781682686980), she breaks down the notion of Jewish cuisine as a monolith, with updates to well-loved dishes that fully embody the wide variety of cultural influences on Jewish cuisine. Sarna’s clear instructions and helpful tips for each recipe give you the ability to whip up previously intimidating but oh, so mouthwatering dishes such as

sweet potato and sage butter knishes or lamb meatballs.

Becca Rea-Tucker’s Baking by Feel (Harper Wave, $35, 9780063160040) is a therapy session masquerading as a cookbook. The recipes are organized by which feeling might be driving you to bake or eat: A sunny lemon cake with poppyseed cream cheese frosting suggests itself to the cheerful; peach bourbon cake supports the heart­ broken; black pepper snowballs conspire with the vengeful. Next to each recipe is a paragraph or two about the specific emotion associated with that food, and Rea-Tucker encourages her bakers to sit with their feelings. I have tried the buttermilk pie for stress, and I can confirm that the sugar and cream do their comforting work while her advice helps parse out exactly what is going on with you.

But sometimes, nothing is going on except that the familiar urge has hit: It’s 3:00 in the afternoon, you need something gooey and sweet, and you need it right now. Enter Jessie Sheehan’s Snackable Bakes (Countryman, $28, 9781682687376).

None of the 100 recipes takes more than 20 minutes to assemble.

Moreover, there is no creaming of butter and minimal need of tools (oven included), and use of the microwave is absolutely allowed.

Blackberry lemon yogurt loaf cake and strawberry basil crumb bars taste like they were made during a lackadaisical Sunday afternoon, not whipped up in 15 minutes. We all need to take a little time for ourselves, after all.

—Anna Spydell

Give the gift of fun!

In this beautifully designed full-color book, New York Times bestselling author Downs invites you to 100 delightful days of discovering fun right where you are. $18.99 | Revell

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Inspiring books for everyone on your list Give the gift of positivity! These family- and faith-filled books make perfect stocking stuffers or Secret Santa surprises. $19.95–$26.95 | K-LOVE Books

Chicken Soup for the Soul for everyone Comfort, hope and inspiration. Holiday miracles and magic. Ten keys to happiness.

These gifts have something for all ages, and will be opened again and again. $14.95 | Chicken Soup for the Soul

BOLD STORIES

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Books that make readers wonder, dream, imagine and strive for change make great gifts! $17–$28 | Astra House

See reviews and more at astrahouse.com

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7

FICTION

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Unwrap, read, love, repeat!

Book of Night Holly Black Holly Black’s instant New York Times bestseller is a modern dark fantasy of betrayals, secret societies and a dissolute thief of shadows.

From heartwarming to heart pounding, these novels make great gifts. $17.99–$28.99 | Gallery

$27.99 | Tor Books

From the bestselling author of Sold on a Monday comes a sweeping WWII tale of an illusionist who is recruited by British intelligence. $27.99 | Landmark

Novels for everyone!

The Memory Man. Kay Scarpetta. Verity.

From favorite characters to a #BookTok sensation, these novels will thrill any reader on your holiday gift list.

From an exhilarating military thriller to a sparkling Western romance to a gripping WWII novel, these are books to savor and enjoy.

Perfect picks for everyone on your gift list Discover a propulsive story of corruption and murder or a gripping thriller that races through Motor City. $27 | Atlantic Monthly Press

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Kristina McMorris

Blockbuster thrillers

$29 | Grand Central

8

The Ways We Hide

$16.99–$27.99 | Tyndale House

feature | readalikes

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Six heartfelt fiction reads to gift this Christmas From a dramatic Regency family saga to an atmospheric thriller to a sweeping royal romance, give the readers in your life stories that will captivate them this Christmas season. $16.99–$17.99 | Bethany House

#ReadsForYou Did one of TikTok’s favorite books rock your world?

Here’s what to pick up next.

If you loved It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, read

Hate to Want You

By Alisha Rai If your ideal romance is all angst, all the time, Hate to Want You (Avon, $8.99, 9780062566737) will be right up your alley. Livvy Kane’s and Nicholas Chandler’s families are in a heated feud—but Nicholas and Livvy once had a longstanding and equally heated yearly hookup. When Livvy returns to town after years away, the renewed passion between them threatens to upend not only their lives but also the lives of everyone around them.

If you loved They Both Die at the End

by Adam Silvera, read

Darius the Great Is Not Okay

By Adib Khorram One of the first BookTok success stories, Adam Silvera’s thoughtful, emotional 2017 YA novel has a predetermined but still surprising resolution, much like Adib Khorram’s award-­ winning debut YA novel. Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Penguin, $10.99, 9780525552970) unfolds over the course of the life-changing summer that Darius Kellner spends with his grandparents in Iran. There, he forges a deep, complex connection with a neighborhood boy, Sohrab.

If you loved Circe by Madeline Miller, read

Wrath Goddess Sing

By Maya Deane Maya Deane’s beautifully written debut novel, Wrath Goddess Sing (William Morrow, $27.99, 9780063161184), is perfect for fans of lush reimaginings of Greek mythology (and would make a great companion read for Madeline Miller’s other beloved title, The Song of Achilles). In Deane’s version of the story, Achilles is a trans woman, and before she leaves to fight at Troy, Athena grants her the body she’s always wanted.

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9

MANGA, YA & KIDS

gifts | kids

Delight young bookworms Your pint-size bibliophile knows what they like.

Help them discover new favorites by pairing one of these fun, under-the-radar reads with the popular books at the top of their wish lists!

The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza

By Mac Barnett Illustrated by Shawn Harris Katherine Tegen, $15.99 9780063084087 A cat must save the moon from being eaten by intergalactic rats in this graphic novel from author Mac Barnett and Caldecott Honor illustrator Shawn Harris. Its madcap silliness and accessible artwork will appeal to the legions of loyal fans eager for more of the laugh-out-loud humor and cartoon-style art in Jeff Kinney’s new Wimpy Kid book, Diper Överlöde.

Wildoak

By C.C. Harrington

or Most Wished F from

DEMON SLAYER: KIMETSU NO YAIBA—THE FLOWER OF HAPPINESS (Novel)

By Aya Yajima, from an idea by Koyohara Gotouge $10.99

Endlessly Ever After

By Laurel Snyder Illustrated by Dan Santat

KAIU SHIRAI × POSUKA DEMIZU: BEYOND THE PROMISED NEVERLAND Story by Kaiu Shirai, Art by Posuka Demizu $9.99

THUS SPOKE ROHAN KISHIBE Vol. 1 Story and Art by Hirohiko Araki $17.99

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Holly Jackson In a bold new thriller from the #1 bestselling author, Red and her friends are on a road trip.

But someone wants them dead. Will they all survive the night? $19.99 Delacorte Press

Skandar and the Unicorn Thief Soar into a breath­ taking world of heroes and unicorns in this fantastical debut that’s perfect for fans of Percy Jackson! $18.99 | Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Keeper of the Lost Cities: Stellarlune Shannon Messenger In the ninth book in the bestselling series, Sophie and her friends discover the true meaning of power—and evil. $21.99 | Aladdin

BLACK PARADOX Story and Art by Junji Ito $19.99

Chronicle, $18.99 9781452144825 This illustrated choose-your-own-adventure journey through fractured fairy tales from Laurel Snyder and Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat is deliciously meta, which is why it’s the perfect choice to pair with the boundary-­ pushing graphics and nested metanarratives that await young readers in Cat Kid Comic Club: Collaborations, the newest release from Captain Underpants creator Dav Pilkey.

—Stephanie Appell

Five Survive

A.F. Steadman

Scholastic, $18.99 9781338803860 It is a truth universally acknowledged that most young readers can’t resist a good animal story.

Readers hoping to receive Newbery Medalist Katherine Applegate’s Odder this holiday season are sure to enjoy debut author C.C. Harrington’s touching tale of a girl and a snow leopard who find each other when they are both most in need.

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

KIMETSU NO YAIBA SHIAWASE NO HANA © 2019 by Koyoharu Gotouge, Aya Yajima/SHUEISHA Inc. SHIRAI KAIU×DEMIZU POSUKA TANPENSY © 2021 by Kaiu Shirai, Posuka Demizu/SHUEISHA Inc. KISHIBE ROHAN WA UGOKANAI © 2013 by LUCKY LAND COMMUNICATIONS/SHUEISHA Inc. BLACK PARADOX © 2009 JI Inc./SHOGAKUKAN

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The Shonen Jump Guide to Making Manga The makers of the world’s most popular manga share their secrets! Use them to sharpen your skills, whether you’re just starting or a veteran. $16.99 | Shonen Jump

YA & KIDS

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Bethlehem Barn

Moo, Baa, Fa La La La La!

Debra Westgate-Silva Illustrated by Marcin Piwowarski

Sandra Boynton This new Christmas board book from the beloved Boynton will have everyone singing.

Share the Christmas spirit with this retelling of the nativity story from the animals’ perspectives.

$6.99 | Boynton Bookworks

$19.95 | Stillwater River Publications

Standing in the Need of Prayer

The Frustrating Book!

Carole Boston Weatherford

Mo Willems

Illustrated by Frank Morrison

Based on a spiritual hymn, this deeply moving picture book is a timeless keepsake. $18.99 | Crown Books for Young Readers

A nighttime adventure. An epic saga. A winning finale.

Discover new favorite reads for book lovers of all ages! $17.99–$18.99 | Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Special delivery for young readers!

This holiday season, discover the perfect books for the kids in your life. Astra Books for Young Readers has titles for explorers, performers and dreamers. Deliver the gift of imagination to your budding bookworm! $17.99–$18.99 | Hippo Park, mineditionUS, Calkins Creek, Astra Books for Young Readers

Zoom Squirrel wants to feel brand new emotions in the fifth book in the Unlimited Squirrels series by bestselling author and illustrator Willems. $12.99 | Hyperion Books for Children

Giftable, helpful nonfiction for middle schoolers These books offer what kids need to have fun, navigate middle school with confidence and be the amazing humans they already are. $16.99 | Magination Press

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11

romance

DOESN’T STOP HERE.

Divided We Stand H.W. Brands In Our First Civil War, historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist during illuminates the intensely personal convictions of the Patriots and Loyalists the American Revolution.

by christie ridgway

H Never Rescue a Rogue Virginia Heath’s Never Rescue a Rogue (Griffin, $16.99, 9781250787781) is a sophisticated Regency gem. World-weary nobleman Giles Sinclair battles ennui by trading barbs with journalist Diana Merriwell, his best friend’s sister. Though their charming family and friends think they would make a perfect pair, they are both firmly entrenched in their singleness. But when Giles becomes a duke, a discomfiting lack of information on his real parentage could spell disaster.

There’s no one better at uncovering the truth than Diana, so Giles enlists her help—and subsequently loses his heart. Giles introduces the jaded Diana to passion, and she overcomes her fear of losing her independence as their slow-burn attraction blooms into steamy love scenes. The dialogue is delightful, and the well-developed and heart-tugging backstories of both leads give this romance an authentic heft.

Better Than Fiction

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In Better Than Fiction (Berkley, $17, 9780593337226) by Alexa Martin, Drew Young’s self-deprecating, humorous, first-person narration lets readers know unequivocally how she feels about her late grandmother (admiration and loyalty, which explains Drew’s determination to keep open the bookstore her grandmother left her) and about love (doesn’t trust it an inch, thanks to her deadbeat dad who left Drew and her mom for another family). When successful and sexy romance author Jasper Williams arrives at the bookstore, Drew is sure he’s too good to be true.

Martin revels in the requisite rom-com scenes, including the delicious fan favorite that is “There’s just one bed.” Romance readers will feel vindicated

by Drew’s growing appreciation of feel-good fiction, and will root for her and Jasper to get a happy ending equal to those in his novels.

Some Dukes Have All the Luck

Get more ideas for your TBR list, in all your favorite genres: Audiobooks Biography/Memoir Children’s Books Cooking/Food/Drink Historical Fiction

12

Mystery/Suspense Popular Fiction Romance Young Adult and more!

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@bookpage

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bit.ly/readbookpage

Some Dukes Have All the Luck (Forever, $8.99, 9781538710401), the first entry in Christina Britton’s Synneful Spinsters series, stars a most unlikely pair. Ash Hawkins, Duke of Buckley, travels to the Isle of Synne to reclaim his wayward young wards after they flee London. Once there, he offers a marriage of convenience to naturalist Bronwyn Pickering, promising she can continue her scientific studies, which is something her domineering parents have tried to prevent her from doing. Of course, the marriage is soon complicated by feelings, Ash’s recalcitrant wards and a roaring sexual attraction. Bronwyn is easy to admire, especially as she overcomes her social awkwardness to care for the three girls entrusted to her. Ash is a classic “I’m not good enough for anyone” hero; it’s always gratifying when they’re proved wrong. With its bookish heroine, brooding hero and smoking love scenes, Some Dukes Have All the Luck is sigh-worthy fare.

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

book clubs

by julie hale

Indigenous stories Kliph Nesteroff ’s We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy (Simon & Schuster, $18.99, 9781982103057) is an intriguing look at how Native Americans have influenced the world of comedy. Starting with the Wild West shows of the 1800s, Nesteroff chronicles the presence and impact of Native comedic performers through the decades. His lively narrative draws on in-depth research and interviews with today’s up-and-coming comedians.

Entertainment stereotypes and representation in media are but a few of the book’s rich discussion topics.

Set in Nashville in the 1920s, Margaret Verble’s novel When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky (Mariner, $17.99, 9780063269101) tells the story of a Cherokee woman Celebrate Native named Two Feathers who performs as a horse-diver American Heritage Month at the Glendale Park Zoo. After an accident occurs with your book club. while Two is performing, strange events take place at the zoo, including sightings of ghosts. Two finds a friend in Clive the zookeeper, and together they try to make sense of the odd goings-on at Glendale Park. An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Verble paints an extraordinary portrait of connection in defiance of racism in this moving novel.

In Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (Liveright, $20, 9781324092162), Nicole Eustace builds a fascinating narrative around a historical incident: the killing of a Seneca hunter by white fur traders in 1722 Pennsylvania. The murder occurred right before a summit between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee and the English colonists, and it heightened tensions between the two sides at a fragile moment.

Eustace brings the era and its seminal events to vivid life as she examines Native attitudes toward retribution and reparation.

Cree Canadian author Michelle Good’s novel Five Little Indians (Harper Perennial, $18.50, 9781443459181) follows a group of First Nation youngsters who must find their way in the world after growing up during the 1960s in a Canadian residential school, a boarding school for First Nation children designed to isolate them from their culture. As adults in Vancouver, British Columbia, Lucy, Howie, Clara, Maisie and Kenny struggle to make lives for themselves and escape painful memories of the past. Clara joins the American Indian Movement, while Lucy dreams of building a future with Kenny. Good explores the repercussions of Canada’s horrific residential school system through the divergent yet unified stories of her characters, crafting a multilayered novel filled with yearning and hope.

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

BOOK CLUB READ S F OR RING F ORSPFAL L ONE WOMAN’S WAR

by Christine Wells “Forget James Bond. Say hello to the real-life Miss Moneypenny, whose life was as replete with spycraft, adventure and daring as any true hero’s.”

—NATASHA LESTER New York Times bestselling author of The Riviera House

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

by Katherine St. John “ The Vicious Circle mixes greed, danger, and warped family dynamics in a claustrophobic and unnerving thriller that will keep you guessing and on edge until the very end.”

—DARBY KANE #1 international bestselling author of The Replacement Wife

ANYWHERE YOU RUN

by Wanda M. Morris “A stunning thriller and a stunning work of historical fiction. Anywhere You Run is riveting, touching and terrifying.”

—GILLY MACMILLAN New York Times bestselling author of The Long Weekend

EYES TURNED SKYWARD

by Alena Dillon “A powerful examination of the cost—emotional, familial, generational—when women are denied their right to soar. Alena Dillon’s complex characters will linger long after the last page is turned!”

— KATE QUINN New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye

t @Morrow_PB

t @bookclubgirl

f William Morrow I BookClubGirl

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Corporate hell—literally

© SARAH MOORE

q&a | claudia lux

In Claudia Lux’s Sign Here, Hell is just another day at the office.

Peyote Trip is an office drone on the Fifth Floor of Hell, which resembles a soul-crushing corporation. But a promotion is within Peyote’s grasp, and all he has to do is snag a fifth soul from the wealthy Harrison family.

We talked to d e b u t au t h o r Claudia Lux about finding humanity in an infernal bureaucracy.

whole jam. Silas Harrison’s childhood bedroom in New Hampshire is verbatim my high school friend’s bedroom, down to the Playboy poster and the hidden pot. (Sorry, Mom!) But that’s all. The rest of Silas, and everyone else— H Sign Here as scary as it is to Berkley, $27, 9780593545768 admit—is just me and my wacky, Fantasy disturbingly curiWhat were your inspirations for ous imagination.

Hell-as-bureaucracy?

I’ve worked in the social work verWhat excites you about digging sion of a corporate environment, into a character’s psyche? which is like a normal corporate Part of my work as a therapist, environment with less money my profession before writing full and loftier aspirations. The coffee time, was designing and facilitatmachine never worked and peoing group therapy programs. At first, I was super intimidated by ple hoarded plastic silverware like we were preparing (poorly) for the the concept. But I was completely apocalypse. won over by its therapeutic power: But the first kernel of the idea the realization that there is nothstarted when I was streaming TV ing we’ve experienced that no one shows on a work trip and the same else could understand. If a writer insurance commercial started for makes a character real enough, the millionth time. Without thinkreading can provide the same realing, I yelled, “THIS IS HELL.” Of ization. That’s what excites me the course, it was not. It was a nice most about developing a charachotel room. But I started noticing ter’s psyche. The possibility that it more: How quick we are to comsomeone who didn’t yet know that pare our momentary discomfort feeling seen was possible might to eternal damnation; how low feel seen by a character I write. the colloquial bar has gone for suffering.

If you could pick one author from the past or present to have tea with, who would it be?

Your characters have such realistic (and realistically uncomfortHonestly, my dad, Thomas Lux. I would give anything to able) tendencies and thoughts. have tea (well, not tea. Coffee?

Were any of them based on real people?

Screwdrivers?) with him again.

—Ralph Harris Realistically uncomfortable is my Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this Q&A and our starred review of Sign Here.

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sci-fi & fantasy

H Even Though I Knew the End It’s the late 1930s in grimy Chicago.

Helen Brandt, a brilliant wizard who was exiled by her order and now works as a detective, has a terrible secret: She offered her soul to a demon to save her family from a car crash. But if Helen tracks down a notorious serial killer, she could achieve salvation and a chance to live a full life with her lover, Edith. Even Though I Knew the End (Tordotcom, $19.99, 9781250849458) rockets along from the very first page, with the details of author C.L. Polk’s alternate Chicago revealing themselves exactly when required. Helen and Edith’s tender relationship is immediately compelling, and, as befits a noir, Edith’s importance to the story grows as Helen’s investigation deepens. To be without Edith would be hell on Earth, but is there a price too high to be with the one you love?

—Chris Pickens

Legends & Lattes After a lifetime as an archetypal fantasy hero—embarking on quests, slaying monsters, collecting loot, etc.—Viv the orc is ready to settle down. Inspired by a revolutionary gnome creation called coffee, all she wants is to open a cafe in the bustling city of Thune. Starting a brand-new business, however, is a lot harder than it looks. A mafia-esque group is looking for a “monthly involuntary donation” from every business on the block, figures from Viv’s past life as a warrior keep popping up, and worst of all, students are taking up the seating without even buying a cup of coffee.

In Legends & Lattes (Tor, $17.99, 9781250886088), a cozy slice-of-life adventure that’s Stardew Valley meets Dungeons and Dragons, author Travis Baldree casts a light on the everyday citizens and commonplace happenings of a fantasy world. Some readers may find Viv’s adventures a little too low stakes and the plot predictable, but that’s part of Legends & Lattes’ atmospheric allure.

—Mya Alexice

H Babel A standalone fantasy that takes its cues from The Secret History and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, R.F. Kuang’s Babel (Harper Voyager, $27.99, 9780063021426) is a methodical, unforgiving examination of imperialism.

In an alternate Oxford, England, in 1828, Chinese orphan Robin Swift hopes to learn the mysteries of silver-working, a magical process that has helped the British Empire maintain its dominance for decades. But Robin is also drawn to the Hermes Society, a secret organization that steals silver and sabotages the expansion of the empire’s power from within. British colonialism perpetrated destruction on every civilization it encountered. Babel provides a long overdue reckoning, cast in silver and doused in blood.

—Chris Pickens

audio

H How to Read Now Author Elaine Castillo proposes an open-minded and inclusive approach to literature and film in her radical, refreshing book on critical thinking, How to Read Now (Penguin Audio, 9 hours).

Castillo urges writers and readers to understand that nonwhite characters don’t exist for the sole purpose of teaching empathy to white people, and that the excuse “it was a different time” holds no water for stories that perpetuate colonialist worldviews. Read by the author, this is an audiobook for readers ready to shake things up, to open their eyes and ears, and to grow as lovers of stories.

—Anna Zeitlin

macmillan audio

THE

AUDIOBOOKS

EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT

The Door of No Return Kwame Alexander’s Ghana-set historical middle grade verse novel, The Door of No Return (Hachette Audio, 3.5 hours), unfolds from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy named Kofi. Ghanaian British actor Kobna Holdbrook-Smith brings spellbinding intensity and strong, authentic accents to his narration, breathing life into both the young narrator and his storytelling grandfather.

—Autumn Allen

READ BY BARRIE KREINIK

READ BY ROBERT BATHURST

READ BY THE AUTHOR

READ BY REBECCA LOWMAN & EUAN MORTON

Rogues Patrick Radden Keefe’s specialty is the “write around,” in which a journalist constructs a profile of an individual, even if that person doesn’t want to be interviewed. In Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (Random House Audio, 15.5 hours), Keefe compiles 12 such essays, originally published in The New Yorker. The author reads his own work with care and conviction, and each chapter is about an hour long, which makes this audiobook a good choice for fans of true crime podcasts.

—Norah Piehl

Stories From the Tenants Downstairs In Sidik Fofana’s debut story collection, Stories From the Tenants Downstairs (Simon & Schuster Audio, 6 hours), the residents of a Harlem high-rise are marvelous to behold, brought to memorable life by a talented cast. Fofana, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Nile Bullock, Dominic Hoffman, DePre Owens, André Santana, Bahni Turpin and Jade Wheeler voice the tenants’ deeply personal tales.

—G. Robert Frazier

READ BY MICHAEL KRAMER

READ BY GEORGIA MAGUIRE

READ BY GEORGE NEWBERN

READ BY ADAM LAZARRE-WHITE

H Under the Skin In Under the Skin (Random House Audio, 10 hours), journalist Linda Villarosa looks at how systemic racism contributes to health inequities for Black Americans. Narrator Karen Chilton’s serious yet approachable tone strikes just the right balance, making this essential listening for anyone hoping to understand the roots of health care injustice in America.

—Norah Piehl

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whodunit

by bruce tierney

Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six If I had to sum up Lisa Unger’s Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six (Park Row, $27.99, 9780778333234) in 10 words, I would say “Cast of ‘Friends,’ dark and stormy night, soundtrack by Disturbed.” This friend group is much more disturbed than Ross, Chandler, Monica, et al., but there are parallels: a sister/brother pair; a female friend from the past; some canoodling that is, shall we say, detrimental to the group dynamic. Siblings Hannah and Mako are celebrating Christmas at their parents’ house when their father finds an unusual gift under the tree: DNA genealogy kits for the whole family, from an anonymous Santa. A few months later, when Hannah, Mako, their respective spouses and another couple head up to a remote cabin to unplug, the other shoe drops. Some of them did the kit and were unexpectedly proven to be the progeny of the same man, and they are not happy to know who (and what) their biological father was. Secrets abound in this psychological thriller; even the cabin itself harbors a hidden history, giving off unnerving vibes to renters and readers alike.

At 400 pages, it’s a long book for a one-sitting read, but you’ll be sorely tempted.

1989 1989 (Atlantic Monthly, $27, 9780802160102) is Val McDermid’s second installment of a trilogy (which this reviewer hopes will become a quadrilogy or even a quintology) featuring Scottish investigative reporter Allie Burns.

The series began with 1979, and in the sequel, readers are mired with Allie in the late ’80s, when mobile phones were the size of lunchboxes, when AIDS was ravaging the U.K., when a jetliner was bombed out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, and when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. All in all, not a time to be nostalgic for, and true to form, McDermid spins the tale without a whiff of sentimentality. Allie works for media mogul Ace Lockhart, who bears more than a passing resemblance to newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine, of Jeffrey Epstein-associate infamy): flamboyant, bullying and destined for disgrace.

Lockhart, who has a number of business ventures based in the Eastern bloc, senses the upcoming upheaval and sends his daughter to secure his interests in the changing political landscape. When she is kidnapped in East Berlin, Lockhart sends Allie Burns on a rescue mission, and in short order, things careen out of control. You don’t need to read 1979 to hit the ground running with 1989, but you will want to have Wikipedia open to look up all the fascinating historical and cultural moments McDermid references along the way.

Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man Emily J. Edwards’ Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man (Crooked Lane, $28.99, 9781639101825) is, hands down, this month’s most entertaining mystery. Set in 1950 New York City, it chronicles the adventures of a plucky Pennsylvania country girl, the titular Viviana Valentine. Upon arriving penniless in the Big Apple, Viviana sweet-talks her way into a girl Friday job for Tommy Fortuna, a Philip Marlowe-esque private investigator who calls her dollface. But after Tommy goes MIA and a dead body is found on his office floor, Viviana is forced to take the helm of the agency, clear Tommy’s name and crack the case he was working on. Whatever she lacks in experience, Viviana more than makes up for with her in-yourface attitude, wicked sense of humor and snappy one-liners. Her friends and acquaintances include high society debutantes, models, mobsters, cops both arrow-straight and morally flexible and a host of other ’50s types that would slot neatly into a black-and-white detective film. Edwards nails the tone, with dialogue and milieu evocative of classic noir, and presents the era warts and all: conversations that are a bit politically incorrect; men behaving toward women in ways that are borderline or flat-out predatory; and a towering amount of smoking and drinking.

H The Devil’s Blaze In the same fashion that Sean Connery is the quintessential James Bond, Basil Rathbone is widely regarded as the definitive silver screen Sherlock Holmes, even though the most famous films in which he took on the role are not set in the original Victorian and Edwardian eras but smack in the middle of World War II. Author Robert J. Harris expands upon those midcentury films with his Sherlock Holmes in WWII series, the second of which is The Devil’s Blaze (Pegasus, $26, 9781639362486). The Germans have developed a truly insidious weapon to use against their English adversaries, a death machine of some sort that causes people to spontaneously erupt into flames. As usual, there are only two people in England clever enough (or devious enough, depending on your point of view) to approach a mystery of this magnitude: Sherlock Holmes (natch) and his longtime archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty. The pair forge an uneasy alliance to try and save England from this terrifying new weapon. Harris never lets readers forget that this is a Sherlock Holmes novel, such that only an experienced fishmonger would be able to sort through all the red herrings. Holmes is as cerebral and arrogant as die-hard fans would expect, and Watson hews closely to actor Nigel Bruce’s portrayal in the Rathbone films: thoughtful, taciturn and usually a step behind his mentor. And Moriarty, well, he should be giving TED Talks on the subject of villainy.

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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Out of the shadows

© RACHAEL SHANE

cover story | lev ac rosen

Lev AC Rosen explores how far people will go to keep their secrets in his historical mystery, Lavender House.

It’s 1952 in San Francisco, and homosexuStonewall, but that even though our lives were noir—in the sense that we ality is illegal and largely frowned upon by soci- “Queer history is always were sort of trapped and all the time—we ety—except at Lavender hidden and rewritten.” stalked House. The home of soap still thrived in community. manufacturing magnate Irene Lamontaine has We found each other. We found love. And in become a refuge for her extended queer famthat, we found a bit of hope. ily. But when Irene falls over a staircase railing to her death, her widow (in all but name) What was the biggest challenge this book hires recently fired gay police detective Evander presented?

“Andy” Mills to discern if there is a killer in The research. So much research. And their midst. because queer history is always hidden and rewritten, the research often took The tone of this book is similar to the pulpy, me down many paths and led to several hard-boiled style of answers. There’s your sci-fi mystery, one sentence in Depth. Was there anyLavender House about a woman in thing different about a suit that’s changed so your approach this time many times based on around?

It’s funny. With Depth I what I’ve learned about was trying to bring the cross-dressing laws at the flavor of old-school noir time at the national, state to a futuristic world. With and city levels—and I’m Lavender House, the still not sure it’s accurate! old-school noir is easier because of the setting.

You explored the idea But because we’re talking of a sanctuary for memqueer history, which is bers of the LGBTQ+ so often erased, there community in your was a lot more research young adult rom-com, involved and, weirdly, an Camp. Why do you keep emphasis on making sure returning to this theme? everything felt believPart of that is just that I like writing about a able. When talking about a history that keeps being bunch of queer people: I erased, it’s about proving think just one or two feels it—proving we existed. unrealistic, because we As for the tone itself, tend to find one another.

H Lavender House I always go back to I think it’s interesting the Forge, $26.99, 9781250834225 Raymond Chandler. I way we can sort of form have his complete works, our own community and Historical Mystery and I’ve read them sevdeal with our own proberal times. There’s just something about the way lems when we don’t have to worry about the he cuts a sentence. And, of course, the movoutside world. Camp was about figuring out ies: I was raised on noir of the 1930s, ’40s and what sort of internal prejudices we bring into ’50s. The vibe of those movies is what lives that sanctuary, because we all come from a in my head when I’m writing, even more world that tells us to hate ourselves or so than the books, because the movies to only be one kind of gay. But Lavender sometimes had a bit of hope to them House is about dealing with the fear of (Laura, The Big Sleep). They’re not the outside knowing about us at all. happy endings exactly, but there’s a chance That’s partially because of the historfor a bright future at the end of them, and I knew ical element, of course, but I think it’s I wanted that for this book. I wanted to show something we still see today: How much do we let other people in? How dangerous is it? that not only did us queer folk exist before

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

Do you see any parts of yourself in Andy?

Sure. I see parts of myself in every character I write. I think you have to. As writers, you have to understand their outlook. With Andy specifically, I think there’s a coming-out element to his story.

He’s out, but he doesn’t love his queerness much, and over the course of the novel, he learns to do that. He learns to reconcile with what it means to be queer in 1952, and while that might be very, very hard, there’s a lot of benefit to it, too. I think that’s something every queer person should figure out. You can be out and proud but still not quite know how to love your queerness and the queerness of others. I don’t mean you need to want to clack a fan and wear heels, but you have to love that other guys do in order to really love what queerness is. Once you’ve done that, the world just becomes so much brighter.

What do you hope readers take away from this novel?

I believe first and foremost my job is to entertain.

If I can make people think or see things in a new light, that’s even better. For Lavender House, I hope they take away a stronger understanding of queer history—not just the idea that we’ve always been here but also the idea that we’re still dealing with a lot of the same problems.

Across the country, people are trying to ban books about queer teens—and often succeeding. They’re trying to prevent kids from coming out, and they’re firing queer teachers or making it illegal for them to talk about their queerness, even casually. I hope people see those parallels and understand that there’s still so much work to do if we want to say we’ve moved on.

—G. Robert Frazier

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lifestyles

by susannah felts

H From Harvest to Home Let me be a voice in passionate support of relishing all things fall: Pile those pumpkins! Bust out the mums! Go big on apples and cinnamon! With From Harvest to Home (Chronicle, $24.95, 9781797214344), lifestyle blogger Alicia Tenise Chew speaks right to the deepest autumnal cravings with recipes, low-key crafts and lists of scary movies and top Thanksgiving TV episodes. Nachos get a fall twist with sweet potatoes, French 75 cocktails go goth with the addition of activated charcoal, and there’s a pumpkin gnocchi with cinnamon sage brown butter sauce that I most certainly will be requesting of my home-cook husband. Chew provides checklists of activities you might enjoy during each of the three fall months, as well as self-care tips for the return of short days and cold weather. You don’t have to do all the fall things, of course. But you can more deeply delight in a few faves with the help of this book.

well read

by robert weibezahl

Novelist as a Vocation

In high school, I was often told that I was weird.

I took it as a point of pride, and still do. Weird is a thing to strive for in my book, as it is in Eric G. Wilson’s How to Be Weird (Penguin, $17, 9780143136576), which amounts to an Rx for the rote life, an antidote to crushing mundanity. The small actions and thought experiments compiled here, 99 in total, are intended to disrupt dull thinking, to help us see our world and ourselves in fresh ways. They could be applied usefully in many settings, from classroom to cocktail party to corporate retreat. And as the veteran English professor he is, Wilson connects many of the actions to history, philosophy, literature, the sciences and so on. If you don’t end up weirder in the best ways from sniffing books or inventing new curse words, you’ll at least have gleaned some solid knowledge along the way.

Using the well-worn adjectives elusive and idiosyncratic to describe Haruki Murakami may be clichéd, but if ever a writer embodied these sobriquets, it is certainly the internationally beloved Japanese author. His fiction can be hard to classify— is it science fiction? dystopian? satire?—so it stands to reason that a nonfiction work wherein he shares his thoughts on writing would be equally hard to categorize. Novelist as a Vocation (Knopf, $28, 9780451494641), part memoir and part informal advice guide, offers a glimpse into a personal life Murakami has long kept guarded.

Originally published in Japanese in 2015, it has now been translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen into straightforward English prose that captures Murakami’s unadorned, conversational style and self-deprecating wit.

Murakami declares up front that he should be viewed as a regular man who happens to write hugely popular novels. “If I do say so myself, I’m the type of ordinary guy you’ll find anywhere,” he writes. “Not the type to stand out when I Haruki Murakami’s collection stroll around town, the type who’s always of essays about his life and shown to the worst writing provides a tantalizing tables at restaurants.

I doubt that if I didn’t peek into the famously write novels, anyone would ever have secretive writer’s world. noticed me.” In his telling, his path to writing was accidental. While in his late 20s, working long days and nights running a jazz club, he went to a baseball game one day (jazz, baseball and running, we learn, are his three great passions) where he spontaneously decided to write a novel. In six months he produced Hear the Wind Sing, which went on to win a prestigious Japanese prize, launching his literary career.

Such fairy-tale serendipity, sadly, does not supply the magic formula aspiring writers might be seeking, but it does underscore the unpredictability of success. Murakami makes many good points, especially as he praises the welcoming embrace of the writing community, where novices can take up a pen or laptop and call themselves a writer without much resentment from established practitioners. But he is quick to emphasize that long-term durability as a writer is more challenging than that initial success, requiring not only discipline and luck but also continuing inspiration and originality.

Is Murakami’s claim at ordinariness genuine? Certainly, the everyday details he reveals in Novelist as a Vocation seem pretty conventional.

Meanwhile, the advice he doles out to acolytes is—here’s that word again—idiosyncratic and highly personal, methods that work for him but probably won’t for everyone (which he would be the first to admit).

But you don’t become an international literary superstar by being ordinary, no matter how “mundane” your daily life is. A deeper dive into Murakami’s singular mind would be devoured by his millions of readers, but one senses he is not willing to fully breach the wall of privacy he has carefully erected. Still, fans will come away from Novelist as a Vocation with a clearer idea of what makes this elusive writer tick.

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

Robert Weibezahl is a publishing industry veteran, playwright and novelist.

Each month, he takes an in-depth look at a recent book of literary significance.

An American in Provence Perhaps you’ve heard this story: Highly successful urban professional departs the rat race, decamps to the countryside and achieves a slower, simpler, even more beautiful life. But you’ve never seen rustic expatriation evoked quite so lusciously as it is in An American in Provence (Simon Element, $40, 9781982186951), artist Jamie Beck’s pictorial memoir. Beck is a photographer, and alongside romantic self-portraits, still lifes, sweeping landscapes and tablescapes, she shares generously of her expertise. There are tips for photographing children, getting the most out of your smartphone camera and working with natural lighting. Along the way Beck writes of settling in the small French town of Apt, giving birth to her daughter and leaning into the seasonal rhythms of the region. Recipes are sprinkled throughout like herbes de Provence: a violet sorbet, daube Provençale, wild thyme grilled lamb. In total, the effect is bewitching and immersive.

How to Be Weird

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feature | history

Untold World War II stories Five nonfiction books reveal new truths about the war’s heroes and villains.

Even the most devoted history buffs will discover fresh perspectives among the fall’s best World War II reads.

The Escape Artist The Escape Artist (Harper, $28.99, 9780063112339) opens with an Auschwitz prisoner in the middle of an escape attempt. “For the teenage Walter Rosenberg, it was an exhilarating feeling—but not a wholly new one,” author Jonathan Freedland writes. “Because this was not his first escape. And it would not be his last.”

In the late 1930s, leaders in Slovakia seized Jews’ assets and steadily banned them from public life. As deportation approached, Rosenberg (who later changed his name to Rudolf Vrba) tried to escape to England but landed in a transit camp. He escaped the camp, got captured again and was eventually sent to Auschwitz. The Nazis had convinced the deported Jews that they were merely being resettled, but once inside Auschwitz, Vrba began to understand the truth: The Nazis were methodically killing millions of Jewish people.

The brutality and inhumanity of the Nazis can make for difficult reading. At the same time, Freedland’s depth of research gives a more complete picture of Auschwitz, and Vrba’s ultimate escape from the camp and his efforts to tell the world the truth about its horrors make for a gripping narrative.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

The Island of Extraordinary Captives Simon Parkin brings to light a shameful chapter of English history in The Island of Extraordinary Captives (Scribner, $30, 9781982178529). In 1938, Jewish teenager Peter Fleischmann escaped Berlin via the legendary Kindertransport train and landed in England. Then, in 1940, he was arrested as British fears about refugees intensified. Thousands of “enemy aliens” like Fleischmann were deported or imprisoned in camps, such as Hutchinson camp on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. In Hutchinson camp, the arts were encouraged as an antidote to anxiety and despair, enabling imprisoned painters, composers, journalists, scholars, poets, sculptors and musicians to create “Hutchinson University.” There, Fleischmann flourished. He and many others—such as his mentor, Dadaist pioneer Kurt Schwitters—would later excel in their fields.

Justice seekers kept pressure on the government to end the misbegotten idea of mass internment, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill defended it as a necessary wartime protection. This is a cautionary tale, one that bears remembering.

—Priscilla Kipp

H Mussolini’s Daughter Caroline Moorehead brings her prodigious research and storytelling talents to her study of Edda Mussolini, the eldest and favorite child of Benito Mussolini. By the time Edda was 11, her father was “the leader of a quickly growing political movement.” In 1922, he became prime minister of Italy and set about consolidating power to become dictator.

Moorehead spends ample time on the ways World War II determined the fates of the two men closest to Edda: her father and her husband, who was the son of one of the founders of the Fascist Party. Despite her efforts to save him, he was executed for treason in January of 1944—an outcome Mussolini did little to prevent. Though for a time she professed to hate Mussolini, Edda later commented to an interviewer that her father “was the only man I ever really loved.”

Moorehead’s clear, compelling prose and sure-handed grasp of historical events combine to make Mussolini’s Daughter (Harper, $32.50, 9780062967251) read like a page-turning thriller.

—Deborah Hopkinson

H Our Man in Tokyo From 1932 to 1942, Joseph C. Grew served as the United States ambassador to Japan, where he was devoted to cultivating peace between the two countries. Despite his extraordinary efforts, he left the post in 1942 following six months of internment in the Tokyo embassy after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Author Steve Kemper recounts Grew’s role in the lead-up to America’s involvement in World War II in Our Man in Tokyo (Mariner, $29.99, 9780358064749).

Grew tried to alert America’s leaders to the challenges of Japan’s increasing militarism and fervent nationalism. On January 27, 1941, long before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the ambassador first heard the rumor that if the Japanese government broke with the United States, it would plan a surprise mass attack. He passed that word along to the U.S. State Department—however, the Navy had already studied the possibility of a Pearl Harbor attack and considered it unlikely.

Grew’s tireless efforts to avert war with Japan demonstrate both the value and the limitations of any one person in international power politics.

—Roger Bishop

H Half American World War II is remembered as a conflict between democratic and fascist countries. But during the 1940s, nearly 10% of the residents of the world’s largest democracy were considered second-class citizens because of their race. The irony of this was not lost on African Americans, who were acutely aware of the consequences of segregation. Adopting a “Double Victory” strategy, Black Americans treated the war as a means of defeating foreign fascism and domestic racism.

Half American (Viking, $30, 9781984880390) by Matthew F. Delmont recounts the history of this struggle.

In addition to official records, Delmont used archives, oral histories and contemporary coverage from the Black press to document his work. As a result, Half American gives voice not only to prominent African American leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but also to Black soldiers, factory workers and other everyday people who contributed to the war effort—people who are rarely mentioned in history books, even though they created history.

—Deborah Mason

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gifts | poetry

Poetry is the best present For a fresh way to spread glad tidings this holiday season, we suggest a collection of poetry.

These six outstanding volumes of verse will remind readers of the magic of language and the marvels to be found in everyday moments.

Woman Without Shame A gift to celebrate growing older Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Without Shame (Knopf, $27, 9780593534823) is an inspiring celebration of the self. The book’s 50-plus pieces are alive with wit and wordplay, as Cisneros takes stock of the past, reflects on her Mexican American identity and ruminates on the experience of growing older. “I am Venetian, decaying splendidly. / Am magnificent beyond measure,” she writes in “At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor.”

Despite the passing years, Cisneros, now 67, displays an attitude of proud defiance. In “Canto for Women of a Certain Llanto,” she bemoans the humdrum undergarments designed for older women: “Rage, rage. Do not go into that good night / wearing sensible white or beige.” Ignited by flashes of humor, the poems in this buoyant collection find Cisneros accentuating the positive, living without regret and setting an example for us all.

And Yet A gift to provide comfort and encouragement Kate Baer shares dispatches from the domestic front in her accessible, inviting collection And Yet (Harper Perennial, $17, 9780063115552). In poems that explore gender dynamics and the day-to-day grind of family life, Baer’s voice is that of an intimate, confiding friend. Across the collection, she takes her own measure as a parent and a wife, toggling between self-­ acceptance and self-loathing, triumphs and trials. She rounds up snippets from horrifying headlines in “Daily Planet”: “Return to school deemed not safe for / Un-vaccinated protests rise as / Hospital beds at capacity in these seven.” To flustered mothers, the internet-weary and anyone bewildered by contemporary life, Baer’s collection will be a balm.

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light A gift to illuminate the poetry-writing process Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (Norton, $25, 9781324036487) is a splendid survey of the career of three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Harjo draws from a rich well of family stories and myths in poems that explore the Native American experience and emphasize the importance of place.

In many of her poems, the landscape emits a kind of language, such as in “Are You Still There?”: “hello / is a gentle motion of a western wind / cradling tiny purple flowers.” In “Somewhere,” she writes, “Our roads aren’t nice lines with numbers; they wind like bloodlines / through gossip and stories of the holy in the winds.” Notes on the genesis of each poem can be found at the end of the book. For Harjo, “history

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is / everywhere,” and the past is always present. Her vision and versatility are on full display in this majestic retrospective.

Golden Ax A gift to spark new ways of looking at our pasts The poems in Rio Cortez’s bold Golden Ax (Penguin, $18, 9780143137139) center on a foundational concept—what the author calls “Afropioneerism” or “Afrofrontierism,” in reference to her ancestral connections to Utah and the ways in which Black people have shaped and were shaped by the region.

Throughout this ambitious collection, Cortez tangles with themes of genealogy and religion while evoking the otherworldly landscape of the American West. In “Covered Wagon as Spaceship,” she wonders “whether it’s aliens / that brought Black folks to the canyons . . . how do you come / to be where there are no others, except / science fiction?” Through poems that probe the often painful connections between past and present, Cortez finds new ways of moving forward.

H The World Keeps Ending, and the

World Goes On A gift to stoke a fire

A marked attentiveness to craftsmanship and the niceties of language enlivens the poems in Franny Choi’s urgent, stirring The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, $25.99, 9780063240087). A fearless shifter of form, Choi switches moods and modes to tackle such topics as social unrest, climate change and her Korean heritage. In “Toward Grace,” she laments the digital landscape: “Online, blondes chirp tips, spin fidgets, get follows. / Old story: unequal distribution of grace.” Formidable themes like the nature of tragedy and the human capacity for renewal lend a timelessness to her work.

Choi’s collection will awaken and inspire readers. “I want a storm I can dance in. / I want an excuse to change my life,” she writes, and her attitude is contagious.

Balladz A gift to transform darkness into light “Who says the forms of art require joy?” Sharon Olds asks in Balladz (Knopf, $20, 9781524711610). While joy does feature prominently in these poems, Olds’ mood is one of unease and ire as she explores national upheaval, life during quarantine and the need for intimacy. As the collection’s title implies, the ballad is her favored form, a vessel for contemplating the past and celebrating everyday pleasures.

“Amherst Ballad 6” shows the precision of her poetic vision: “The Sill Imbued with Dust - Gave Up / A Maple Wing - of Brussels Lace.” In “Grandmother, with Parakeet,” elderly women have hair “fixed in / small breaking combers, battleship / curls like works of art.” Again and again, Olds surveys the world and, through the filter of her poems, renews it for the reader. Filled with sustaining moments of recognition, Balladz is revelatory.

—Julie Hale

Joy, sadness and everything in between

© NATASHA KOMODA

interview | ross gay

Bestselling poet Ross Gay’s second essay collection is proof that he can write about more than just delight.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with Ross inhospitable places, such as the author’s father’s Gay and not think of a moniker he’s picked up hospital room as the elder Gay was dying from over the years: “the happiest poet around.” Gay untreatable liver cancer; on the makeshift is relaxed, genial and clearly excited about his skating ramps of his youth, where skaters were second essay collection (and sixth book overexpected to share tools and protect one another all), Inciting Joy. With its 14 chapters, or “incitefrom the wrath of cops and property owners; ments,” covering subjects as disparate as death and most surprisingly, in the football locker and losing one’s phone, Gay hopes his new room, where off-color jokes were plentiful but book is proof that he can write—and in fact has so, too, was tenderness. Players often shaved always written—about suband administered balms to Visit BookPage.com to read our jects other than delight. “I broken (and broken-out) starred review of Inciting Joy. feel like this book could also bodies, even as they hurled insults and sexually violent be called The Book of Rage,” as “discrete essays.” He says he understands if he explains over our Zoom threats to their opponents folks are reluctant to read them, but he insists call. “Connection and holdand to one another. In the that readers will miss quite a bit of informaing each other through each longest and perhaps most tion if they choose not to. In fact, he likens the moving chapter, “Grief other’s sorrow, to me, feels footnotes to pauses in conversations between Suite (Falling Apart: The like an inciting force.” This friends, where one person stops the other to ask Thirteenth Incitement),” is the premise of Gay’s powfor more information, or where the storyteller erful book, which begins Gay explores both the brupauses to offer information they feel is crucial with an imagined party for tality and the brotherhood to understanding what’s being said. In other words, the marginalia of Inciting Joy share people and their sorrows, made possible in such then segues into an explospaces, and he doesn’t shy communal knowledge by offering the bounty of ration of sites where joy and away from his own comthe backstory, much in the way gardeners might solidarity defiantly abound. plicity in toxic masculinity share seeds or skateboarders might share bolts In many ways, Inciting as a young man. from their personal buckets of spare parts. “The Joy feels emblematic of These transparencies, footnote is like, I’m serious about this,” says Gay. Gay’s most pivotal works says Gay, are not only par “I want us to know something about each other.” in both poetry and prose, for the course but sit at the Perhaps the highest praise I can offer for highlighting the beauty of heart of what he hopes to Inciting Joy is that, for Gay and for me, it sparked achieve in Inciting Joy. It everyday experiences such a delightful conversation about the wealth of H Inciting Joy as communal gardenwas only a few years before stories, characters, memories and subjects the Algonquin, $27, 9781643753041 ing and enjoying music the publication of his first book undertakes, building upon one another to collection of essays, The and the arts. For instance, create such a rich biodiversity on the page that Essays Book of Delights, that Gay I often found myself reading passages multiple Luther Vandross’ cover of realized prose writing could be pleasurable Dionne Warwick’s “A House Is Not a Home” times just to make sure I’d absorbed every detail. gets some well-deserved space, as does the for him—as long as it wasn’t about showcasWe chatted about everything from my anxietcomedic genius of Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor ing some sort of absolute wisdom. “Instead, it ies about teaching and house hunting in a new and Gay’s late father, Gilbert, affectionately could be about leaving an artifact of my thinkcity to the generosity of Mr. Lau, the father of known as “Poochie.” Meanwhile, other chaping and making one of Gay’s child“How do we decide at this ters explore equally familiar subjects but in surthat as beautiful as hood friends who is prising ways. For example, in “Insurgent Hoop possible,” he says. briefly mentioned moment, this group of people, in the book and “But ultimately, (Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement),” Gay [I wanted to see] how we’re gonna be together?” whose donation of discusses the necessarily anti-capitalist nature if there was some of the neighborhood court, which can only be clippings from his reserved for one game at a time and where you way to make the residue of my thinking availbackyard garden in Pennsylvania now live as might find yourself on the same team as someable . . . the residue of my thinking also being fully grown fig trees in Bloomington, Indiana, one you beat only moments before. “There’s the evidence of my changing.” where Gay lives and teaches.

As a poet, Gay has always been keen on taknever a spot or a time or a reason to have a fixed As we end our call, Gay admits that he’s curienemy,” he tells me. “We’re just here together ing the reader on an ever-evolving journey of ous about how Inciting Joy will be received, but for now. How do we decide at this moment, this thoughts and images, and this feat is promhis hope for it is a generous one. “Books that I group of people, how we’re gonna be together?” inently displayed in the footnotes that poplove make me feel regarded,” he says with a grin.

This question serves as a throughline for the ulate Inciting Joy. Some of them are so care“If anyone feels that way, I would be very happy.” book, manifesting itself in some of the most fully written that Gay himself describes them —Destiny O. Birdsong

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behind the book | lynn steger strong

SOMETHING GOOD AND SOLID How do the fragments of an author’s life coalesce into a book? Lynn Steger Strong reveals the real-life artists and sharp twists of emotion that helped to spark her third novel, Flight. © NINA SUBIN

In the first few days of January 2019, I was teaching at a residency on an island off the coast of Connecticut. My husband, our two kids and I had driven from Florida to New York on Christmas Day for me to make the gig. Both my husband’s and my families are from Florida, and until recently, my relationship to the holiday has always been beach and warmth and early morning swims. I was both relieved and very sad to be back up north after a week in Florida.

It was freezing on the island, and I was staying in a monastery with faulty heating, small rooms with lumpy beds, crosses on the walls and a shared bathroom down the hall. I went for long pre-dawn runs and taught most of the day. I love Visit BookPage.com to read our review teaching but find it draining—the very necessary of Flight. task of consistently showing up for students, trying to make the workshop space engaging and Want, a novel shot through with the fury that had rigorous, nurturing and safe. been building in me for a long time. But by the I had taught at this residency before, and I’d time I read about those women, I was beginning to see the limits to the power of my anger. At first, always needed long stretches alone in my room at night, so in November I’d bought myself Ninth it had felt so much more active than the sadness I Street Women by Mary Gabriel as a birthday gift. had felt before that, but actually, I realized, it had come to feel just as ineffectual.

For those who haven’t read it (and you should, immediately), it’s the story of abstract expressionIt’s difficult to pinpoint how and where novist painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace els start, what we pull from our lives and pasts Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, and interests as we build them. I had also, the brilliant artists all, living and working in New York past few years, been telling stories to my kids on our walks to and from their school. I often asked at a thrilling, complicated time (before, during them to help me start the story, to carry the plot and after World War II), being ground down by poverty during the Great Depression and through when I lost steam. Their most consistent Flight then later, for some, achieving unfathomable bit of advice: kill the mom, because it immediately Mariner, $27.99, 9780063135147 wealth and fame. makes the book more dangerous. (I tried not to I’d become obsessed with going to see visual take this personally.)

Family Drama art a few years prior, not least because I felt comI’d been thinking about broken systems, too, pletely ill-equipped to understand it. I loved the feeling of walking through not just the social safety net, our broken politics, but also the way I felt a museum and letting the art pull me toward it. Often, I’d go with a friend constantly, embarrassingly, like I was looking around for someone to tell who also writes, and we’d walk a long time after, talking about what we’d me how to be, what to do to make things better, but there was no one there, just seen, about what and how it had acted on us. no rituals or practices or authority figures that I believed in anymore. In Going home to Florida always leaves me sad and anxious for all the ways this same vein, I’d been thinking about art and what it was worth, how I have failed to love or show up for my family, for all the parts of that place often I was late for pickup or missed a work email because I was standing there, transfixed by a piece of art, for reasons I could never quite explain. that I love and hate and miss. Ninth Street Women was solace in the face How broke artists (and I) always were. of that—intimacy, much needed company. Gabriel refers to each woman From all of this thinking and living emerged the main components of by her first name, and their lives constantly intermingle and overlap. It felt Flight: the holiday, the utility (or not) of art, talk of money, the search for gossipy and thrilling, the texture of competition, sex, money, art, ambition, another side to anger, a dead mom creating new pressures and a sense of class disparities and marital spats. I came to crave it, sitting at dinner with my colleagues and my students, FaceTiming with my kids and pretending no one knowing what to do. And from the women in Ninth Street Women, the connection had gone out. I thought and dreamt about these women, a sense of overlapping and conflicting wants and needs, a deep and deswas both inside of them and watching them—a voyeur, constantly shifting perate desire to do good, underpinned with the terror that you don’t my investments and alliances, thrilled and angry and sad on their behalfs. know how.

Also from Ninth Street Women: I wanted to make a book that felt as it Once I left the island, I went back to New York in search of their work, and a new layer was added to this experience: I couldn’t find a good amount had to me that week on that freezing island, up all night in that lumpy bed: of it. I got angry, and so sad, thinking of all that work, which the various lush and immersive, gossipy and deeply felt. The way it gave me something museums owned but mostly kept warehoused instead of on display. good and solid felt like sustenance, pleasure, relief.

That same trip, I’d been thinking about anger. I’d just finished writing —Lynn Steger Strong

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the hold list

You’ve got a friend in me As the days grow shorter and the nights grow colder, we turn to all things cozy—and we can think of nothing more heartwarming than an unexpected friendship. Here are the platonic pairings that made us feel all snuggly inside.

The Secret Place In Tana French’s The Secret Place, Detective Stephen Moran receives new evidence concerning a murder that took place at an exclusive boarding school.

Stephen joins the investigation alongside Antoinette Conway, the original detective assigned to the case.

Their first interactions are anything but promising.

Stephen masks his ambition behind a friendly, unassuming persona, but Antoinette, who is biracial, has long since given up on playing nice with people determined to hate her due to her gender, racial background or both. Yet over the course of one long day, a tentative respect begins to grow between them, thanks to their mutual intellect and their common experience of clawing their way up the ranks from working-­ class backgrounds. French makes readers as invested in Stephen and Antoinette’s burgeoning friendship as they are in the mystery’s solution.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Frank and the Bad Surprise The titular character in Martha Brockenbrough and Jon Lau’s illustrated chapter book, Frank and the Bad Surprise, is a cat who lives a good life with his humans, and the bad surprise is a new puppy. The puppy interrupts Frank’s naps, has gross puppy breath and eats Frank’s food, so Frank decides it’s time to move on. “Good luck with that puppy,” he writes in a note to his humans. “You will need it.”

Brockenbrough’s wry prose perfectly captures Frank’s feline perspective, and in several of Lau’s paintings, you’ll swear you can almost hear Frank purring.

But the best part is the way Brockenbrough engineers a moving reconciliation between the two former enemies, neatly sidestepping schlock and sentiment and going straight for understated emotional truth. It’s positively the cat’s pajamas.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Lolly Willowes In Sylvia Tow nsend Warner’s 1926 novel, an aging woman breaks away from her grating London family and has a go at independent life in the countryside. Laura Willowes feels liberated in Buckinghamshire—finally free to take long walks in nature and enjoy her own company. Until her nephew visits. Suddenly reduced to her old Aunt Lolly self again, she calls out for help. Luckily Satan answers, and the novel transforms into a fantastical tale of Lolly’s burgeoning talents as a witch. Along the way, the devil turns out to be a chummy pal: giving Lolly the power to hex her nephew, listening to her complaints about society’s treatment of women.

(Satan, as it turns out, is a compassionate and attentive listener.) It’s a darkly humorous novel of a middle-­aged woman who is so desperate for autonomy that she’s willing to make a deal—or at least make friends—with the devil.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Lincoln in the Bardo In George Saunders’ first (and so far, only) novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a group of ghosts works together to save Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, from a place between life and death. The ghosts know all of one another’s quirks and faults and dreams and regrets. They’ve come to love one another, and as a reader, I found it easy to love them too. The most unlikely friendship in the bardo is between middle-aged, carnally frustrated Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, a heartbroken young man who took his own life and now bursts involuntarily into poetry about the beauty of the world he left behind.

Saunders can make even unpleasant characters deeply befriendable, and he fantastically spins a moment in American history into a philosophical exploration of how grief can either isolate or unite us.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Subscriptions

The Kindest Lie One of the key superpowers of the “unlikely friendship” trope is how it can bridge polarized experiences to discover where people actually overlap, where one person’s hand fits snugly into another’s. Nancy Johnson’s debut, The Kindest Lie, encompasses both the political optimism of 2008 and the insidious racial divisions that were worsened by the economic stress of the Great Recession. Johnson’s protagonist, Ruth, is a Black chemical engineer who returns to her Rust Belt hometown to seek out the child she placed for adoption when she was 17. Ruth bonds with Midnight, an 11-year-old white boy who is mostly being raised by his grandmother but still hopes for connection with his bigoted father. Ruth’s and Midnight’s experiences of race, class and privilege are very different, but they’re both lonely, lost and understandably flawed people, and together they find something akin to belonging in a heartbreaking world.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Each month, BookPage staff share special reading lists—our personal favorites, old and new.

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reviews | fiction

H The Consequences

By Manuel Muñoz

Short Stories Latinx writers and other artists of color have proven and continue to prove that race is not just a means of adding verisimilitude to a work but rather a vital part of any story told within our racialized society. Since his debut collection, Zigzagger, was published in 2003, Manuel Muñoz’s work has been recognized as prime proof of this fact, captivating and moving readers with tales of Latinx tribulation and triumph. In The Consequences (Graywolf, $16, 9781644452066), Muñoz adds even more depth and dimension to his writing, delivering a collection of stories that probe deep into the heart of Latinx experiences.

Muñoz sets his stories in 1980s California, seeking contemporary truths through the past and reflecting on where the Latinx community has been and where it’s going. His main concern

H Demon Copperhead

By Barbara Kingsolver

Coming of Age Barbara Kingsolver brings a notably different energy from her previous work to Demon Copperhead (Harper, $32.50, 9780063251922), a novel that dwells in the challenges of impoverished southern Appalachian communities and honors the ways in which our landscapes shape us.

She does this through a tremendous narrative voice, one so sharp and fresh as to overwhelm the reader’s senses.

In many ways, Demon Copperhead is a novel of survival—of finding one’s way through the mess of it all and living with dignity. Demon is born into poverty with only his teenage mother to call family. He faces such challenges as the foster system, child labor and his own desire to find success and a meaning for his life. At each turn, he finds ways to make things work. He’s willing to take risks, he cares about his people and community, and he often looks for the best in a moment, even if he doesn’t fully understand what he’s facing. With each choice, Demon’s spirit comes through, and it is haunting. It’s the reason the pages keep turning, as it’s imperative

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is love—how we are able to connect with, tolerate and help one another in a world that seeks to alienate us from our communities and ourselves.

In the opening story, “Anyone Can Do It,” Delfina, a headstrong mother whose husband has gone missing with other immigrant workers, ponders the risks of trusting her new neighbors.

When she is betrayed, however, she doesn’t shut herself off from her community but rather learns how to create a new identity for herself and her son out of the struggle they must endure. Muñoz never lets his characters off easy, and in the process, he problematizes and expands upon centuries-old archetypes.

Throughout the collection, Muñoz’s use of quotation marks has deep significance. In the second story, “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA,” the only quotation marks appear around a sentence spoken in English, as if all of the

Spanish (translated by the author into English) is not said aloud but rather communicated nonverbally. Food, on the other hand, appears frequently throughout the book, not just as a cultural signifier but also to show the impossibility of affection. In the same story, a woman offers the protagonist her cold tacos, trying to gain her trust while on their perilous journey to retrieve their partners from deportation. In these ways, Muñoz shows that the two things Latinx culture is most known for (language and cuisine) are far more complicated than they appear to white readers. Through such textual and symbolic details, Muñoz forges a new Latinx narrative, wherein all aspects of Latinx life are displayed with richness and complexity.

Muñoz brings the reader into a Latinx world rife with meaning, showing what some of us have known all along.

—Eric Ponce

for the reader to find out how he’s going to get out of the latest mess or scrape, how he’s going to find his family and his own story.

Demon’s story—a tale of growth, challenges, sorrow and surprises—is both a retelling of and in conversation with David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ novel about an orphan surviving in Victorian England, which was inspired by the author’s early life. Similarly, Kingsolver’s Demon is spunky and full of life as he navigates a complex, uneasy world. But Kingsolver has made this story her own, and what a joy it is to slip into this world and inhabit it, even with all its challenges.

—Freya Sachs

Saunders has a fondness for challenging readers by dropping them into an alien environment and then patiently revealing details that bring a hazy picture into sharp focus, gradually making it all feel uncomfortably familiar. That’s true of the novella-length title story, in which a group of characters is programmed to deliver reenactments of historical events—in this case a graphic rendering of Custer’s “last stand” at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In “Ghoul,” another unfortunate coterie serves as actors in an underground amusement park, slowly discovering the truth of their plight. And in “Elliot Spencer,” the damaged titular character finds himself manipulated by an unscrupulous group of political activists.

Not all of Saunders’ stories qualify as material for an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” “A Thing at Work” is a nightmarish version of “The Office,” shifting seamlessly among the perspectives of four characters in a chess game of escalating retribution. “Love Letter” is a moving and at times chilling letter, written by a grandfather to grandson, that serves as both an apologia and a warning. The volume concludes with the small gem “My House,” a haunting tribute to the persistence of desire and human folly, whose seven pages are a gorgeous example of Saunders’ ability to evoke heightened emotion with the most economical prose.

Describing the work of his Russian subjects in Swim, Saunders wrote that they “seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool.” In Liberation Day, Saunders is actuated by similar concerns,

H Liberation Day

By George Saunders

Short Stories In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders turned to Russian literary giants like Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy to provide the source material for a stimulating master class on the craft of the short story. With Liberation Day (Random House, $28, 9780525509592), Saunders offers up nine of his own inimitable stories, each serving to enhance his status as a contemporary master of the form.

reviews | fiction focusing his attention on how, for better or worse, we weigh the moral choices we’re called upon to make and how we live with the consequences.

—Harvey Freedenberg

H The Furrows

By Namwali Serpell

Literary Fiction Two words occupy the central focus of Cee Williams’ existence: “Where’s Wayne?” While seeking the answer to this question, readers of The Furrows: An Elegy (Hogarth, $27, 9780593448915), Namwali Serpell’s mesmerizing and endlessly thought-provoking second novel, should keep the book’s opening lines in mind: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.”

Narrator Cee describes how her 7-year-old brother, Wayne, drowned in her care while at the beach when she was 12. His body was never recovered. As an adult looking back, Cee admits that her initial account of the tragedy “must have been incoherent, inconsistent, perhaps self-­contradictory.” That statement becomes an understatement as the novel progresses.

True to the subtitle, this elegy laments not only Wayne’s death but also the end of Cee’s life as she knew it, and ultimately the dissolution of her family. Cee’s mother, who remains convinced that Wayne is alive despite Cee’s insistence that he is dead, starts a nonprofit for missing children called Vigil. Eventually, Cee’s father moves away to start a new family.

As Cee speaks with different therapists, the details of her story begin to vary: Wayne was hit by a car; no, he fell off a carousel. “I’ve been trained my whole life to tell stories to strangers,” Cee reveals, describing how she rearranges her “abacus beads of memories.” She believes she encounters an adult Wayne more than once, and she even has a sizzling affair with a mysterious man who calls himself Wayne. Despite the story’s blurred but precisely chiseled layers of reality, The Furrows remains focused, even when, midway through, this new Wayne suddenly takes over as narrator.

Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting second novel will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent. ​​True to her opening lines, Serpell lets readers know exactly how Cee feels as she mourns, as grief “tugs [her] back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless

grooves. This is the incomplete, repeated shape of it: sail into the brim of life, sink back into the cave of death, again and again.” Turbulent, poetic and haunting, The Furrows is a stellar achievement.

—Alice Cary

H Now Is Not the Time to

Panic

By Kevin Wilson

Coming of Age In Now Is Not the Time to Panic ( Ec c o, $27.99, 9780062913500), Kevin Wilson once again deploys his customary humorous, off-center storytelling to artfully delve into deeper matters. Where his previous bestsellers The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here focused directly on weird family dynamics, his latest novel explores issues of adolescent angst, art and even societal madness.

The story is set in the out-of-the-way town of Coalfield, Tennessee, in the blazing hot summer of 1996. Frances Eleanor Budge, “Frankie” as her single mother and triplet older brothers call her, is the teller of this tale. At the beginning of the novel, she is an alienated 16-year-old and aspiring writer. She avidly reads “badass women southern writers” like Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker and Carson McCullers, but in the summer of ’96, Frankie aspires to write a darker version of a Nancy Drew mystery novel—emblematic of the childhood-adult divide she is about to cross.

During a hot day at the town pool, Frankie meets Zeke, another teenage outsider and a talented graphic artist. Zeke’s wealthy parents have sent him to live with his grandmother while they work out their divorce back in Memphis.

Frankie and Zeke become inseparable, tentatively exploring a relationship and more assertively collaborating on nerdy artistic projects.

One project involves a starkly illustrated poster that contains the mysteriously evocative message “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Swearing eternal secrecy about their prank, Frankie and Zeke staple copies of the poster everywhere. The impact is explosive.

Fanned by rumors and paranoia, it creates a national stir, resulting in what will later be called the Coalfield Panic of 1996.

For Frankie, the experience is both scary and liberating. She is proud of her work and upset when outsiders claim authorship of her words.

Zeke, however, is troubled by the unexpected community response, and he is relieved when others claim the poster as their own. Alarmed by

events, Zeke’s parents whisk him away, and for more than two decades, Zeke and Frankie have no contact. Their eventual reunion speaks forcefully about the qualities of loyalty and friendship.

In the end, Wilson’s deceptively transparent prose, with a touch of humor, a dash of satire and a good bit of insight, carries the reader to a humane and satisfying conclusion.

—Alden Mudge

H The Lemon

By S.E. Boyd

Satire First off, let’s address the elephant—or perhaps in this case, the elephant garlic—in the room: The Lemon (Viking, $27, 9780593490440) is not “The Anthony Bourdain Story.” Yes, it opens with a chef/food writer/TV host’s on-location death by suicide, which is discovered by his longtime best friend (also a famous chef). But The Lemon reads more like a bawdy Judd-Apatow-meets-Carl-Hiaasen romp than a roman à clef.

Nothing in The Lemon is quite as it seems, starting with the author. S.E. Boyd is the nom de plume of a trio that includes James Beard Awardwinning food writer Kevin Alexander, journalist Joe Keohane and book editor Alessandra Lusardi. It’s evident that they are comfortable moving about in high-end foodie and media circles, given their facility with dropping reallife names into the mix, from The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik to author Malcolm Gladwell. Even Bourdain himself makes a cameo, as if to ensure he is not mistaken for the deceased fictional chef, John Doe. The four most significant names to note are Nia Greene, John’s longtime producing partner and agent; Paolo Cabrini, John’s aforementioned celebrity chef pal; Katie Horatio, aspiring journalist; and Charlie McCree, a cross between the Lucky Charms leprechaun and the demon spawn of Chucky. They, and their supporting cast, wrestle among themselves to control the narrative surrounding John’s death, because there’s a potential payoff in the post-Doe media tableau.

The dialogue crackles, the zip line plot slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted. Like a perfectly seared slice of foie gras with a dollop of lingonberry jam on an artisanal toast point, The Lemon simply cannot be put down, and when you’ve finished it, you’ll want more.

—Thane Tierney

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reviews | nonfiction

H The Song of the Cell

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Science In 2010, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies provided a stunning history of cancer and medical scientists’ ongoing research into ways to overcome it. In 2016, he delivered a similarly breathtaking treatment of genetic biology in The Gene. Now, in The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner, $32.50, 9781982117351), Mukherjee tells the compelling story of cell biology and the ways that cellular engineering can help us rethink what it means to be human.

Drawing on case studies, interviews, visits with patients, scientific papers and historical archives, Mukherjee tries to understand life in terms of its smallest unit: the cell. As he puts it, he’s listening to a cell’s “music” when he observes its anatomy and the way it interacts with surrounding

H The Grimkes

By Kerri K. Greenidge

American History Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah were the white daughters of South Carolina slaveholder John Faucheraud Grimke and his cruel wife, Polly. When the sisters fled the South and, as Quakers, sought redemption for their family’s racist ways, they became celebrated 19th-century abolitionists and women’s rights activists, blazing a trail through the turbulent antebellum Northeast with speeches, writings and protests against America’s “original sin” of slavery. This story looms large in the popular American imagination, but in The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, $32.50, 9781324090847), Tufts University historian Kerri K. Greenidge reveals a counternarrative—one of a complex, conflicted Black and white Grimke family that was often at odds with their country, their own progeny and themselves.

Following the Civil War, white mobs in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York City torched Black homes and churches, lynching people with impunity as they fought to keep

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cells. For example, the genes, proteins and pathways used by healthy cells are “appropriated” or “commandeered” by cancer cells. “Cancer, in short, is cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror,” Mukherjee writes.

Such knowledge allows medical researchers and doctors to imagine how cellular therapy could modify a patient’s cellular structure to treat their disease or medical disorder. In one case, a girl named Emily Whitehead, who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, received CAR T-cell therapy: Her own T-cells were extracted, modified to target her disease and infused back into her body. Although there was an initial setback because of an infection, the cellular therapy succeeded. Mukherjee includes other stories like Whitehead’s, as well as those of heroes such as Rudolf Virchow, who discovered that “it isn’t sufficient to locate a disease in an organ; it’s necessary to understand which cells

of the organ are responsible”; John Snow, the founder of germ theory; and Frederick Banting and Charles Best, who discovered insulin.

According to Mukherjee, the cell sings of a new human who is “rebuilt anew with modified cells [and] who looks and feels (mostly) like you and me.” Using cellular engineering, he writes, “we’ve altered these humans to alleviate suffering, using a science that had to be handcrafted and carved with unfathomable labor and love, and technologies so ingenious that they stretch credulity: such as fusing a cancer cell with an immune cell to produce an immortal cell to cure cancer.” Captivating and provocative, The Song of the Cell encourages us to rethink historical approaches to medical science and imagine how cellular biology can reshape medicine and public health.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

the institution of slavery alive. Greenidge unflinchingly relays the horrors that Black Americans endured before the Civil War and during the days of Reconstruction. She also reveals that, during this latter period, the Grimke sisters overlooked their own Black nephews until the boys’ mother, Nancy, who was enslaved by the Grimkes’ brother, begged for help.

The stories of Nancy’s sons—Archie, Frank and John—and their entanglements with their famous white aunts in the postbellum North are rich with ironies. The aunts’ often ambivalent support helped Archie through Harvard Law School and Frank at Princeton Theological Seminary, but there were odd strings attached. For example, the young men had to abstain from wearing flashy clothes and avoid any familiarity with the “negro masses” struggling beneath them. Later, as part of the “colored elite” of the Gilded Age, ​​Archie mingled with Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. But these relationships did little to influence Archie’s work as consul to the Dominican Republic and his racist treatment of Black workers there.

Greenidge bookends this history with moments from the life of another Angelina Grimke in the 20th century: Archie’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who was abandoned by her white mother. Family members despaired over her immodest dress and, later, her impassioned voice as a celebrated playwright

and poet. Her stories, as well as her ancestors’, belong in the wider Grimke history. Now, thanks to Greenidge’s provocative and wellwritten account, they are.

—Priscilla Kipp

H Conversations With Birds

By Priyanka Kumar

Nature Just as immersion in nature inspires a mix of profound awe and renewed curiosity about this Earth we call home, so, too, does filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar’s mesmerizing essay collection, Conversations With Birds (Milkweed, $28, 9781571313997)—rendered in finely wrought prose, steeped in memory and thrumming with endless curiosity.

Kumar reflects on her childhood in northern India, formative years during which she enjoyed lush nature every day. As a young adult studying film at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she realized that she had become alienated from the natural realm that once brought her such joy. An impromptu bird walk and fortuitous encounter with a longbilled curlew reshaped the way Kumar has

reviews | nonfiction experienced the world ever since: “My hunger to know more about the bird was like a bridge that would one day lead me back to nature’s elusive womb.”

In the years since, Kumar has embarked on journeys far and near to commune with birds (cranes, owls, tanagers, eagles) and other creatures that inhabit the American Southwest.

She chronicles her encounters thoughtfully and with passion, dotting her work with references to Orpheus, Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar and more.

But travel isn’t necessary for engaging with nature; just looking up at a tree that you walk by daily could reveal new wonders. Kumar and her family have only to sit by the large round window that looks out on their Santa Fe backyard, where they might observe a passing bobcat or the beheaded remains of flowers that were eaten by deer.

However, birds remain Kumar’s truest loves.

“How is it that we can love birds . . . and not be attentive to how bird habitats all around us are being fragmented or overgrazed or paved over with concrete?” she writes. It’s a question that circles through Conversations With Birds from beginning to end as Kumar celebrates the creatures that live among us and urges us to consider our role in protecting our collective future. After all, she knows from experience that “the seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.”

—Linda M. Castellitto

The White Mosque

By Sofia Samatar

Memoir The Mennonite community is at once an evangelizing religious group and a “tribe.” As novelist Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria) explains, the tribe consists of the white descendants of its Swiss, German and Dutch founders, but the religion is growing fastest in Africa. Samatar embodies that duality: Her white American mother met her Black Somali father on a church mission. They raised their family in the United States, where Samatar went to Mennonite schools.

So how does Samatar make sense of her identity? To answer this question, she set out to explore how Mennonites have interacted with other cultures and chose an extreme example: The 1880–84 trek of a small, sturdy group of “Volga” German Mennonites led by minister

Claas Epp Jr. Inspired in part by an 18th-century German novel, he thought Jesus would return to Central Asia in 1889. The trekkers landed in what is now Uzbekistan, and while the world didn’t end the way Epp expected it to, the Soviets did eventually force his community out of the country.

The White Mosque (Catapult, $27, 9781646220977) is Samatar’s thoughtful, gorgeously written account of a tour she took retracing the trekkers’ challenging path to their new settlement, where they lived for some 50 years. But her pleasantly digressive book encompasses much more: Central Asian culture, the memoirs of teen trekkers, Mennonite martyrs, doomsday beliefs, her father’s disillusionment, her own searching adolescence at a Mennonite boarding school.

She even includes a beautiful reverie on how the settlers must have felt on the day that Jesus did not return. (Epp just kept moving the date until he suffered a mental collapse.)

Samatar’s trip culminates in what remains of “White Mosque” village, where current Muslim residents have established a museum commemorating their odd but fondly remembered Mennonite former neighbors.

Back in 1935 when the Soviets rounded up the Mennonites for exile, their distraught local employees wept.

Understandably, when Samatar embarked on her pilgrimage, she was seeking a kind of selfunderstanding as a brown girl in a Germanic tradition. Instead, she learned to love the trekkers’ “wrongness.” After all, fragmentation can make a lovely mosaic.

—Anne Bartlett

H The Revolutionary:

Samuel Adams

By Stacy Schiff

Biography In 1778, when future U.S. president John Adams arrived in Paris to solicit aid for America’s revolutionary cause, most Frenchmen were disappointed that they wouldn’t be meeting with John’s older cousin Samuel, the renowned theorist and provocateur of American revolution. In spite of this past fame, the man some have called the most essential Founding Father is now more closely associated with a Boston beer than American independence.

In her terrific new biography, Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Stacy Schiff (The Witches, Cleopatra) presents readers with a vivid sense

of this complicated man and how, using “sideways, looping, secretive” tactics, Samuel Adams steered Massachusetts and the vastly divided colonies toward asserting their rights and separating from Britain.

Adams was born in September of 1722, a privileged son of a prosperous malt maker (hence his association with the contemporary beer company). However, he ran the family business into the ground and spent most of his life in penury. “Alone among America’s founders,” Schiff writes, “his is a riches-to-rags story.” But what he lacked in monetary wealth, he made up for in both intellectual and moral capital.

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams is electrifying, and Stacy Schiff writes with keen insight and wit throughout.

Adams was shaped by his abstemious Puritan background; unlike his boastful, selfpromoting colleague John Hancock, Adams’ signature on the Declaration of Independence was self-effacingly small. But the impact of his eloquent arguments for American rights was huge, galvanizing the citizenry and causing some British officials to call for him to be hanged for treason. In fact, the British troops who sallied forth toward Lexington and Concord in April 1775 were likely seeking not just hidden stores of weapons but Adams himself. He was considered such a lightning rod that many who later gathered in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress mistrusted him. For the sake of unity, he took a tactical back seat during the deliberations, allowing others their moments of glory. This may be one reason his essential contributions to the cause have been minimized or forgotten over the years.

Schiff’s biography focuses on the 1760s and 1770s, the period when Adams’ revolutionary activity was unparalleled. Her dense early chapters especially require a reader’s undivided attention, since she tells the history prospectively rather than retrospectively. We read through a confusing, riotous moment of conflict, for example, that we later realize is what we would now call the Boston Tea Party.

The effect is electrifying, and Schiff writes with keen insight and wit throughout. By the end of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (Little, Brown, $35, 9780316441117), attentive readers will vibrate with questions about the parallels between Adams’ political era and our own.

—Alden Mudge

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reviews | young adult

The Luminaries

By Susan Dennard

Fantasy When the sun sets in the forests of Hemlock Falls, a heavy mist rises, bringing with it a host of horrifying creatures. From banshees to werebeasts, these living nightmares exist to wreak terror and destruction and must be killed or contained within the boundaries of the forest. If they were to escape, they would destroy the world.

Winnie Wednesday desperately wants to become a Hunter for the Luminaries, the international order whose seven clans keep humanity safe. Each clan is named for a day of the week, and each has its own motto. The Wednesday clan’s motto is “loyalty through and through,” which Winnie’s family happily embodied until her dad was revealed to be a traitor and disappeared from their lives. Winnie and her family have been shunned and scorned by the other Luminaries in the four years since.

We Are All We Have

By Marina Budhos

Fiction Author Marina Budhos explored the exp er iences of immigrants, particularly Muslim teens after 9/11, in two acclaimed YA novels.

We Are All We Have (Wendy Lamb, $17.99, 9780593120200) is set in 2019, after the U.S. Department of Justice implemented a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal immigration. The novel follows 17-yearold Rania, whose late father was a political journalist in Pakistan. Rania lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her mother and younger brother, Kamal, who was born in the U.S. As the novel opens, Rania is looking forward to spending the summer with her friends before starting college.

But Rania’s world is shattered when her mother is arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sent to a detention facility.

Rania and Kamal’s legal situation becomes even more complicated when the neighbor who agreed to serve as their guardian changes her mind. Before Rania can track down an estranged uncle who may be able to help, she and Kamal are reported for living without a guardian and taken to an understaffed shelter in Manhattan.

At the shelter, Rania meets Carlos, an artist

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But as her 16th birthday approaches, Winnie is ready to restore her family to its rightful place by passing the grueling Hunter trials.

It won’t be easy, since she hasn’t spent the past four years training with the other Wednesdays. She reluctantly realizes that there is one person she could ask for help: her ex-best friend, Jay Friday, who is now one of the best—and most handsome— Hunters in Hemlock Falls.

In The Luminaries ( To r Te e n , $18.99, 9781250194046), bestselling author Susan Dennard kicks off a darkly magical, actionpacked new series and introduces a mysterious world filled with monsters. Readers will urge Winnie on as she gains confidence, strength and lots of bruises while training with the capable yet secretive Jay. Dennard builds tension as what seemed impossible comes tantalizingly

within Winnie’s reach. But Winnie’s doubts grow, too.

Does she really want to become part of a group that shunned her and her family?

Plenty of gasp-inducing thrills, monstrous gore and empathetic soul-searching— plus a little tentative flirting—bring The Luminaries to a satisfying conclusion.

Dennard resolves important questions and tees up some well-placed cliffhangers for the next installment. In the meantime, readers should check out the author’s acknowledgments, in which she thanks the fans who helped get the book started via a wonderful 2019 choose-your-own-story Twitter thread that still lives online. LumiNerds, arise!

—Linda M. Castellitto

from Mexico. Carlos, Rania and Kamal escape the shelter and attend Rania’s graduation—then keep running. During her summer on the road, Rania uncovers secrets about her mother and the circumstances of her own birth. Eventually, Carlos and Rania realize the only way to redeem their futures is to face the present.

We Are All We Have is compelling and vivid, filled with drama, family secrets and romance.

Budhos conducted extensive research for the book, which included meeting with immigration law experts. Her conversations revealed that “though we consider ourselves an immigrant nation, our bedrock ideal rests on a capricious and ever-changing set of laws and policies.”

Budhos’ fully realized characters and urgent prose bring these laws into focus for teen readers.

—Deborah Hopkinson

where no shop had been a few days before.

Twain has also found his way to the emporium. He recently discovered a strand of starlight, a rare substance that was once crafted into magical lace that granted power and prestige to those rich enough to afford it.

The pair meet on the emporium’s doorstep, and after a chance encounter with the Casorina, the ruler of Severon, Twain and Quinta agree to make her a dress of starlight in time for the Scholar’s Ball. This puts the teens in a Rumpelstiltskin-esque quandary: They have just the one strand of starlight, and the secrets of harvesting and crafting with it have been lost for generations.

The day of the ball occurs halfway through The Vermilion Emporium (Peachtree Teen, $18.99, 9781682634882), author Jamie Pacton’s first fantasy novel. From there, Pacton pulls together threads from earlier in the story to weave a tale of grief and healing, enchanted rooms and family history, politics and ambition, and how far someone will go for the sake of love.

Pacton’s novel will be enjoyed by readers who appreciated Laini Taylor’s exploration of who benefits from magic and who pays its costs in her Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, and by those entranced by the world of Elizabeth C. Bunce’s A Curse Dark as Gold, set in a society on the verge of exchanging magic for science.

Come for the steampunk vibes and Pacton’s lavish imagery, but stay for her thoughtful commentary on social class, technology and power.

—Jill Ratzan

The Vermilion Emporium

By Jamie Pacton

Fantasy With her last breath, Quinta’s mother gave her a vial of moonshadow and told Quinta that she would find its purpose at the Vermilion Emporium. Quinta has tried to find the magical shop for years, only to stumble upon it around a corner

Visit BookPage.com to read our Q&A with Susan Dennard.

q&a | maya prasad © JAMILAH NEWCOMER

Seasons of love Maya Prasad offers a charming ode to romance, sisterhood and the Pacific Northwest.

In Drizzle, Dreams and Lovestruck Things (Disney-Hyperion, $17.99, 9781368075800), author Maya Prasad follows the four Singh sisters through a life-changing year as they find love, healing, adventure and more.

Their story unfolds against the idyllic backdrop of the Songbird Inn, their family’s home and business on Orcas Island, nestled on the coast of Washington state.

Can you give us a quick introduction to your book and the Singh sisters?

This is my debut YA novel, and it’s the story of the four Singh sisters over four seasons as they navigate new passions, breathtaking kisses and the bustle of their father’s cozy cliffside inn.

Fall begins with Nidhi, the eldest practical sister. She thinks she has her life planned out. Winter moves on to Avani, who can’t sit still. If she does, her grief for Pop, their dad’s late husband, will overwhelm her. In spring, we come to Sirisha, who has always felt more comfortable hiding behind the lens of her camera than actually speaking to people—especially pretty girls. Summer is when hopeless romantic Rani finds that her Bollywood fantasies might finally be coming true!

Gulf Islands. I knew I wanted the inn to be set on a cliffside with panoramic views, and that it should be south facing to allow the sisters to enjoy both sunsets and sunrises over the water. The details were inspired

by Pacific Northwest architecture: Craftsman-style elegance with bay windows and coffered ceilings and cozy fireplaces, and large decks where it feels like you’re peering off the edge of the world.

The wonderful thrum of family hums in the background of your novel, and by the end of the book, you’ve widened the lens of what a love story can mean to encompass the Singh family’s love for each other. Why was that important for you to do here?

I think it’s vital for teens to know that while romantic love is wonderful, there are so many ways to find joy in this world. This novel is a celebration of the love the sisters have for each other, for their father, for their community, for the home they’ve built and—most importantly—for themselves.

—Stephanie Appell Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this Q&A and our review of Drizzle, Dreams, and Lovestruck Things.

How did you decide which sister’s story would unfold in which season?

Each sister’s story has a thematic connection to the season: letting go like an autumn leaf, dealing with the bitter cold of loss, allowing new love to blossom like a springtime bud and celebrating dreams finally coming into fruition.

I really love how your prose shifts during each sister’s section to reflect her perspective. How did you arrive at that approach?

It was both a pleasure and a challenge to be able to create four different voices. For each sister, I used a different device related to their personalities: Nidhi’s lists, Avani’s verse, Sirisha’s contrasts between what she wants to say and what she actually says, and the screenplay bits that represent Rani’s forays into Bollywood fantasies.

But creating unique voices involved more than that; I also differentiated each sister’s sentence structures and tics. Introspective Nidhi’s voice feels the most classic and traditional to me, with some lyrical descriptions to represent her dreamy side. Avani has a lot of parenthetical asides to represent how she often gets distracted. Short fragments in Sirisha’s section are like the snapshots she’s always taking; they also represent how she has trouble articulating herself. Finally, Rani’s voice is imbued with a lot of humor and has a mix of colloquial language and hyperbolic grandeur.

In the end, voice is about creating a unique worldview. Since I was writing Indian American characters, I hoped to show that we are not a monolith, and that each sister is an individual with their own dreams and ambitions and relationships to their identity.

The Songbird Inn exists only in your imagination . . . right? What were your inspirations for this utterly delightful setting?

The Songbird Inn is definitely fictional but it was inspired by gorgeous vacation rentals I’ve stayed in while visiting the San Juans and the Canadian

@SimonTeen

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feature | picture books

Celebrate Native creatives Three picture books showcase vibrant and vital Indigenous perspectives.

These picture books, written and illustrated by Indigenous North Americans, offer thoughtful and heartfelt glimpses into enduring cultural practices, history and heritage.

H Berry Song A reverent and joyful celebration of berry picking, Berry Song (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316494175) is the stunning authorial debut of Caldecott Medalist Michaela Goade, an enrolled member of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

As a girl and her grandmother pick berries in the Tongass National Forest, located not far from the author-illustrator’s home in Sitka, Alaska, Goade poetically describes nature’s many bounties and conveys the need for humans to be Earth’s stewards. All the while, she never loses sight of those yummy berries! Choral litanies of berry names (“Salmonberry, Cloudberry, Blueberry, Nagoonberry. / Huckleberry, Soapberry, Strawberry, Crowberry.”) keep the tone light and playful.

Once the pair return home, they transform their harvest into treats such as huckleberry pie and nagoonberry jam. The book ends by depicting how its wisdom continues to pass from generation to generation as the narrator, now an adult, leads her younger sister into the forest. “I have so much to show you,” she says.

Goade’s energetic artwork imbues the book’s natural setting with an enchanting, otherworldly beauty. The poster-worthy first spread welcomes readers with a spirit of adventure as the young narrator, arms outstretched in the wind, rides with her grandmother in a motorboat over a “wide, wild sea” toward the forest. Bright blue and red berries “glowing like little jewels” provide a striking contrast to the deep and verdant woods that teem with wildlife. In several illustrations, human and flora appear to merge, with leaves sprouting from hair or tree limbs extending from arms or hands, reflecting a call and response exchange between the girl and her grandmother: “ ‘We are a part of the land . . .’ ‘As the land is a part of us.’ ” Excellent backmatter includes photos of some of the berries mentioned in the book, information about the role that berries play in the lives and culture of the Tlingit people and Goade’s personal reflections on some of the book’s key concepts including gunalchéesh, a Tlingit word spoken to express gratitude.

Keepunumuk A modern-day Wampanoag grandmother tells her grandchildren the story of the first Thanksgiving from a new perspective in Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story (Charlesbridge, $16.99, 9781623542900). “Here’s what really happened,” she says.

Co-authors Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten set the stage effectively through two sections of text, titled “Before you begin” and “Important words to know,” placed between the book’s title page and the beginning of the narrative. They explain that the Wampanoag people lived in their ancestral homeland for 12,000 years, which is why they are referred to as “the First Peoples” throughout the book.

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The grandmother narrates the story of the Three Sisters (Beans, Squash and Weeâchumun, or Corn), whom illustrator Garry Meeches Sr. portrays as spectral elders. When Seagull announces that newcomers have arrived, Weeâchumun asks Fox to watch them and report back. Fox relays that the starving newcomers have found corn seeds but don’t know what to do with them, so the sisters converse with Deer, Rabbit and Turkey about the best course of action. “We will send the First Peoples to help the newcomers,” Weeâchumun concludes.

After a Wampanoag man named Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, teaches the newcomers how to grow crops, they invite the First Peoples to celebrate Keepunumuk, the harvest. “That meal changed both our lives and theirs forever,” the grandmother explains to her young listeners.

“Many Americans call it a day of thanksgiving. Many of our people call it a day of mourning.” “That’s different from what we learn in school,” one of the children replies.

Meeches’ illustrations incorporate familiar images of the Wampanoag people’s early encounters with the Plymouth settlers but stay focused on the First Peoples, their beliefs and the land itself. Many scenes unfold against deep blue skies and natural landscapes, and when the Three Sisters appear, they’re often accompanied by lovely curling, twining tendrils. A somber page that depicts the silhouettes of the First Peoples who were “taken by sickness” is particularly striking.

With a skillful balance of detail and simplicity that’s just right for young readers, Keepunumuk offers a vital viewpoint on the national Thanksgiving holiday.

Still This Love Goes On To create Still This Love Goes On (Greystone Kids, $18.95, 9781771648073), acclaimed Cree Métis artist Julie Flett faced an unusual challenge: to illustrate a song from Canadian American musician Buffy Sainte-Marie’s 2009 album, Running for the Drum.

In an author’s note, Sainte-Marie explains that the images she describes in her song’s lyrics were “like taking photos with my heart of all that I see on the reserve.” As she wrote, she wanted to express her love “for it all, day after day, year after year—especially the people and our Cree ways, precious like the fragrance of sweetgrass.” The book’s backmatter includes complete lyrics and sheet music.

Flett’s vibrant presentation celebrates the power of family and the immense beauty of open spaces. In the first spread, a mother and child sit together, surrounded by a vast expanse of ice tinged with blue and pink, and watch “the winter grow.” Subsequent spreads evoke changing seasons and the passage of time amid wonderful vistas: A woman and child gaze at the ocean as a whale breaches the surface of the water; a child runs through a mountain meadow filled with yellow flowers; a herd of buffalo gallops toward a distant rainbow. A series of images that depict a drum circle, two jingle dancers and a girl singing and playing her guitar are almost audible as they echo both Sainte-Marie’s lyrics and the feelings evoked by her music.

Still This Love Goes On transforms a memorable song into a moving and heartfelt visual poem. A worthy homage to Cree people, lands and traditions, it’s a reassuring read-aloud that will encourage young readers to reflect on the places and people they love.

—Alice Cary

reviews | children’s

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

By Mac Barnett Illustrated by Jon Klassen

Picture Book Mac Barnett and Caldecott Medalist Jon Klassen take on the classic Norwegian fairy tale of comeuppance in The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Orchard, $18.99, 9781338673845). Their rendition spends a notable amount of time with the tale’s villain, a remarkably creepy troll with spindly legs and pointy, fanglike teeth that protrude from his lower jaw. A skull dangles from the bridge that serves as his shelter, and he holds a fork and spoon, ready to dine.

Barnett renders much of the troll’s dialogue in rhyme, particularly when the creature describes his appetite: “I am a troll. I live to eat. / I love the sound of hooves and feet / and paws and claws on cobblestones. / For that’s the sound of meat and bones!” Young readers will delight

H The Tryout

By Christina Soontornvat Illustrated by Joanna Cacao

Middle Grade Christina lives in Grangeview, Texas, where she’s one of the only Asian American students.

As The Tr yout (Graphix, $24.99, 9781338741308) opens, Christina feels ready to take on middle school, but she doesn’t have any classes with her Iranian American best friend, Megan. So when Megan asks Christina to try out for the cheerleading squad, Christina agrees enthusiastically. Beneath The Tryout’s seemingly simple surface lies a compassionate exploration of identity, what it means to be a good friend and the pull of popularity.

The Tryout is two-time 2021 Newbery Honor author Christina Soontornvat’s first graphic novel as well as her first book with auto­biographical elements. As a narrator, her fictional self sees through social norms but still longs to be perceived positively by her peers.

When Megan explains the Texas homecoming custom of enormous corsages called mums, Christina says that it’s “such a weird tradition,” but a thought bubble reveals that she’s also thinking, “I totally want one.”

in the antagonist’s grossness, like when he uses a dirty fingernail to scrape a ball of hairy wax from his ears, because all he’s had to eat recently is “a leather boot and some goop he’d found in his belly button.”

This troll might be creepy, but he’s also devilishly funny. He compliments himself on outwitting the smallest goat, who has promised that his brothers are coming: “I’m so smart! And fun and handsome.” When he meets the largest of the three brothers, who is so tall that at first readers see only his furry shins, the troll is awestruck. In the wordless spread that follows, Klassen plays effectively with scale, depicting this final goat head-butting the troll, who flies off the verso, his fork trailing through the air behind him.

The troll’s punishment involves a hilarious waterfall descent, but to say more would spoil the surprise. Until that point, the entire story unfolds at the bridge. A less-skilled illustrator might have hurt the story’s pace, but Klassen consistently adds visual interest through design choices, framing and details in the setting, such as the items scattered around the troll’s abode.

This wickedly funny take will leave children clamoring for more. Fortunately, it’s the first in a planned series in which Barnett will retell classic fairy tales. If the volumes that follow are this stellar, readers are in good hands.

—Julie Danielson

Debut illustrator Joanna Cacao thoroughly captures the capricious side of middle school, and her dynamic panels convey Christina’s constantly shifting moods. Darkly colored patterns surround Christina when she is feeling self-conscious, creating an effective contrast to the light, glittery backgrounds of the ethereal cheerleading squad. In an especially impactful touch, similar sparkles appear behind Christina when she’s feeling confident..

In her author’s note, Soontornvat explains that she never thought she would share the story of The Tryout, until she realized that “talking to one another and sharing our stories is how we make change.” The result is a book that balances loving where you’re from and still wanting to see it improve.

—Emily Koch

Walter’s best friend is Xavier, a yellow duck-like creature whose feet and flat beak are green. The two friends do everything together. They hike, float in a rowboat and just enjoy sitting quietly.

Their friendship changes, however, when a hedgehog named Penelope appears.

Gradually, Walter’s world is transformed as Xavier gravitates toward Penelope. Especially evocative is a scene in which Penelope and Xavier have invited Walter to a ballgame. It rains, and the new friends share an umbrella while Walter sits apart from them, wet and miserable.

Illustrator Sergio Ruzzier movingly depicts the impact of Walter’s loss. For instance, we learn that Walter is quiet, “but it was a sad quiet.

Not best friend quiet.” Ruzzier shows Walter sitting alone on a dock; a dangling rope nearby suggests that the rowboat has been launched without him. He has lost not only his friend but also the pleasures they enjoyed together.

Just as Walter loses his friendship with Xavier slowly, his recovery is also slow. But he misses the activities he used to do with Xavier, and one bright day, he just can’t resist the urge to go on a hike. Instead of taking the old trail, he strikes out on a new one—and discovers the promise of a new friendship along the way.

The book’s gentle pace, engaging artwork and lyrical yet straightforward text make this a comforting, reassuring read for young readers experiencing transitions at school or with friends. Walter Had a Best Friend (Beach Lane, $18.99, 9781534477001) is a gem.

—Deborah Hopkinson

Walter Had a Best Friend

By Deborah Underwood Illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier

Picture Book This deceptively spare picture book explores the emotions we feel when friendships end. Deborah Underwood’s story focuses on Walter, a rodent-ish fellow with white fur, round ears and a long pink tail.

Visit BookPage.com to read our Q&A with Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen.

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Your Next Great Read

NOVEMBER 2022 #1

PICK

We Are the Light: A Novel

By Matthew Quick

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 9781668005422, $27.99, Nov. 1, Fiction)

“Matthew Quick scores a perfect 10 in this deeply stirring, gorgeously hopeful novel that shines a brilliant beam on the path out of grief and toward healing. May we all learn the way to be such lights from this remarkable guide.”

—Beth Stroh, Viewpoint Books, Columbus, IN

Now Is Not the Time to Panic: A Novel

The Cloisters: A Novel

Gilded Mountain: A Novel

(Ecco, 9780062913500, $27.99, Nov. 8, Fiction)

(Atria Books, 9781668004401, $28, Nov. 1, Thriller)

(Scribner, 9781982160944, $28, Nov. 1, Historical Fiction)

By Kevin Wilson

“Now is Not the Time to Panic is a tender coming-of-age novel on the power of art, the short-lived innocence of adolescence, and the nostalgia of first loves. Wilson’s beautiful, funny, sad novel is one that I’ll recommend again and again.”

—Alex Brubaker, Midtown Scholar Bookstore, Harrisburg, PA

Signal Fires: A Novel

By Dani Shapiro

(Knopf, 9780593534724, $28, Oct. 18, Fiction)

“This book will most likely be my favorite of the year! Dani Shapiro weaves together two families’ lives, telling their stories and secrets in nonlinear time. Between the gorgeous writing and perfect plotting, I didn’t want this to end.”

—Sue Kowalski, The Bookstore of Glen Ellyn, Glen Ellyn, IL

Demon Copperhead: A Novel

By Barbara Kingsolver

(Harper, 9780063251922, $32.50, Oct. 18, Fiction)

“Come for Kingsolver’s classic mastery of language and descriptions that leave you overwhelmed in the most soulful way. Stay for a heart-wrenching and compassionate story of survival that will go down as one of her best works of all time.”

—Libby Monaghan, Twice Told Tales, McPherson, KS

By Katy Hays

“An atmospheric masterpiece! Ann Stillwell becomes increasingly obsessed with the occult after discovering a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards at The Cloisters. Hays creates a world so sinister that it is a character in itself.”

—Sharon Davis, Book Bound Bookstore, Blairsville, GA

Inciting Joy: Essays

By Ross Gay

(Algonquin Books, 9781643753041, $27, Oct. 25, Essays)

“The Book of Delights author returns with a new essay collection — a meditation on the ways ordinary life, and particularly a life of community and compassion, can spark joy. The writing is free-flowing and spontaneous — just as joy can be.”

—Barbara de Wilde, Frenchtown Bookshop, Frenchtown, NJ

Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes

By Travis Baldree

(Tor Books, 9781250886088, $17.99, paperback, Nov. 8, Fantasy)

“Legends & Lattes is the perfect low stakes, found family cozy fantasy. Viv, Cal, Tandri, and ESPECIALLY Thimble are such lovable characters. Who doesn’t want a latte from an Orc barista and a hot cinnamon bun from an adorable ratkin?!”

—Hannah Cloutier, The Bookery Manchester, Manchester, NH

By Kate Manning

“An epic tale! Sylvie Pelletier is the daughter of a mine worker in early 1900’s Colorado. She glimpses at how the wealthy owners live and is changed forever. A full-bodied historical novel relatable to today’s issues of wage inequality.”

—Paula Frank, The Toadstool Bookshop, Nashua, NH

Trespasses: A Novel

By Louise Kennedy (Riverhead Books, 9780593540893, $27, Nov. 1, Fiction)

“When Catholic teacher Cushla Lavery & Protestant barrister Michael Agnew meet, the spark is immediate.

Set in 1970s Belfast, Louise Kennedy captures a time of fierce loyalties, suspicion, and bigotry that smolders from the first page.”

—Diana Van Vleck, Bloomsbury Books, Ashland, OR

Liberation Day: Stories

By George Saunders

(Random House, 9780525509592, $28, Oct. 18, Short Stories)

“When I read this collection, I knew I was looking at one of the finest, most complete, most skillfully-created literary works I have ever experienced. A masterwork that will surely become one of the most noteworthy books of the decade.”

—Sophia Hardin, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA

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

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