March 15, 2022: Volume XC, No. 6

Featuring 347 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children's and YA books

KIRKUS VOL. XC, NO.

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REVIEWS Harvey Fierstein The theater legend and fabulous queer pioneer looks back on every era of a remarkable life

Also in the issue: Dolly Parton & James Patterson, Kelly Barnhill, Gary Lonesborough Plus: Our inaugural audiobooks column

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK | Tom Beer

of celebrities, book deals, and big advances John Paraskevas

“Britney Spears set to pen tell-all memoir in bombshell $15M deal.”

This New York Post headline made waves in the publishing world as we were putting the current issue to bed in late February. A book by Britney Spears—one of the biggest pop stars in the world and a tabloid fixture for decades, most recently when her 13-year conservatorship was ended—will undoubtedly be a bestseller. But the sum that publisher Simon & Schuster reportedly paid for the book puts Spears in the elite company of authors with multimillion-dollar advances.

Barack and Michelle Obama are said to have earned close to $65 million for their respective memoirs, A Promised Land and Becoming, both published by Crown. (A second volume from the former president is forthcoming.) Back in 2001, Alfred A. Knopf reportedly paid $15 million for Bill Clinton’s My Life; while Hillary Clinton saw a $14 million advance from S&S for Hard Choices, published in 2014 (when conventional wisdom said she would be the next president).

The Obamas and the Clintons, of course, are world figures who sat in the front row as history was being made. Spears is an entertainer with a fascinating personal story and some grudges to settle. Other entertainers have pocketed some healthy advances when venturing into the book world, at least according to news reports: Bruce Springsteen ($10 million for Born To Run), Amy Schumer ($9 million for The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo), and Keith Richards ($7.3 million for Life).

It’s unknown how much Little, Brown and Company paid Dolly Parton and James Patterson for their new novel, Run, Rose, Run. But Patterson previously scored one of the biggest payouts of all time. In 2009, he received a reported $100 million to $150 million for a 17-book deal with Hachette Book Group that included 11 titles for adults and six for young readers. Patterson is undoubtedly one of the wealthiest—and most prolific—authors in the world. He’s also one of the most generous, celebrated for his scholarships and bookstore grants, and a pure pleasure to interview. Read Marion Winik’s entertaining story about the Parton-Patterson collaboration on Page 14 and you’ll see what I mean.

Meanwhile, Britney Spears will collect her advance—but can she write a book that people will buy and actually read? She’d do well to look to other celebrities who, in recent years, have penned memoirs that scratched beneath the surface to avoid the pitfalls of many disposable tell-alls. Mariah Carey’s The Meaning of Mariah Carey (2020), written with Michaela Angela Davis, was, in the opinion of our reviewer, “100% Mariah, unburdened by filler material and written with pure heart and soul for both die-hard and casual fans.” Jessica Simpson’s Open Book (2020) was an “eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.” Demi Moore’s Inside Out (2019), was a “forthright revelation of hard-won survival,” according to Kirkus. It’s not hard to imagine the same being said of Spears’ memoir after everything she’s been through.

Let’s hope she gets it all onto the page.

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Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N # Chief Executive Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com Editor-in-Chief TOM BEER tbeer@kirkus.com Vice President of Marketing SARAH KALINA skalina@kirkus.com Vice President of Kirkus Indie KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Fiction Editor L AU R I E M U C H N I C K lmuchnick@kirkus.com Young Readers’ Editor L AU R A S I M E O N lsimeon@kirkus.com Young Readers’ Editor S U M M E R E DWA R D sedward@kirkus.com Editor at Large MEGA N LABRISE mlabrise@kirkus.com Senior Indie Editor D AV I D R A P P drapp@kirkus.com Indie Editor M Y R A F O R S B E RG mforsberg@kirkus.com Editorial Assistant of Indie PAO L A B E N N E T pbennet@kirkus.com Editorial Assistant N I N A P A L AT T E L L A npalattella@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS Designer ALEX HEAD Kirkus Editorial Senior Production Editor ROBI N O ’ DE L L rodell@kirkus.com Kirkus Editorial Senior Production Editor MARINNA CASTILLEJA mcastilleja@kirkus.com Website and Software Developer P E RC Y P E R E Z pperez@kirkus.com Advertising Sales Manager TAT I A N A A R N O L D tarnold@kirkus.com Advertising Associate AMY BAIRD abaird@kirkus.com Graphic Designer K Y L A N O VA K knovak@kirkus.com Administrative Coordinator S U S A N R AT H B U N srathbun@kirkus.com

On the cover: Harvey Fierstein in 1977. Photo from John Kirsch Archive/Getty Images. Background

by Onuma Inthapong/iStock

you can now purchase books online at kirkus.com

contents fiction

The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.

INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS............................................................ 4 REVIEWS................................................................................................ 4 EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................... 6

INTERVIEW: DOLLY PARTON & JAMES PATTERSON.................... 14 MYSTERY..............................................................................................49 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY.......................................................... 52 ROMANCE.............................................................................................53

nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.......................................................... 58 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 58 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 60 ON THE COVER: HARVEY FIERSTEIN............................................. 68

children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS........................................................ 102 REVIEWS............................................................................................ 102 EDITOR’S NOTE (PICTURE BOOKS)................................................ 104 EDITOR’S NOTE (MIDDLE GRADE)................................................. 106 INTERVIEW: KELLY BARNHILL....................................................... 110

young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS........................................................ 140 REVIEWS............................................................................................ 140

As women around the world inexplicably transform into dragons, a young girl struggles to take care of her cousin in Kelly Barnhill’s new novel. Read the review on p. 52.

INTERVIEW: GARY LONESBOROUGH........................................... 146

indie INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.........................................................162 REVIEWS.............................................................................................162

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EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 164 INDIE BOOKS OF THE MONTH.........................................................181 FULLY BOOKED.................................................................................. 182 AUDIOBOOK ROUNDUP....................................................................183 |

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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

PLANES by Peter C. Baker.....................................................................7 EITHER/OR by Elif Batuman................................................................7 SCARY MONSTERS by Michelle de Kretser........................................12 VALLEYESQUE by Fernando A. Flores................................................16 OUT THERE by Kate Folk.................................................................... 20 THE ABSOLUTE by Daniel Guebel; trans. by Jessica Sequeir............ 20 CLOSE-UP by Michelle Herman..........................................................22 2 A.M. IN LITTLE AMERICA by Ken Kalfus...................................... 24 THE FOUNDLING by Ann Leary........................................................ 28 LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE by Lauren McBrayer..................................32 AN OLIVE GROVE IN ENDS by Moses McKenzie..............................32 THE CHILDREN ON THE HILL by Jennifer McMahon...................... 33 THE DARK FLOOD by Deon Meyer; trans. by K.L. Seegers................34 NIGHTCRAWLING by Leila Mottley..................................................34 TAMARISK ROW by Gerald Murnane................................................ 35 THE FAVOR by Nora Murphy..............................................................36 TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON by Chris Pavone.......................................38 THE DOLPHIN HOUSE by Audrey Schulman.....................................41 M by Antonio Scurati; trans. by Anne Milano Appel.......................... 42 MECCA by Susan Straight................................................................... 46 WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS by Kelly Barnhill......................52 AND THEN I WOKE UP by Malcolm Devlin...................................... 53 FROM BAD TO CURSED by Lana Harper..........................................54 PART OF YOUR WORLD by Abby Jimenez......................................... 55 SOMETHING WILDER by Christina Lauren...................................... 55 THE BRIDE GOES ROGUE by Joanna Shupe......................................56

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LOVE MARRIAGE

Ali, Monica Scribner (432 pp.) $27.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-9821-8147-5

Two London families—one Bengali, one White—collide spectacularly when their two eldest children decide to marry.

Yasmin Ghorami is a people-pleaser.

At 26, doing what others expect is so ingrained in her that when her younger brother, Arif, asks her what she hoped to do before she became a doctor like their father, she can’t even remember if she ever had separate dreams of her own. She follows the rules of her family and her faith. She still lives with her parents and Arif in London, but not for long: She’s about to be married to Joe Sangster, a fellow doctor. Her parents, both Muslims with differing degrees of religiosity, thwarted tradition and married for love, and Yasmin is convinced that marrying Joe is her own romantic destiny. As the wedding plans coalesce, Yasmin has to deal with her future mother-in-law, Harriet, a Gloria Steinem–esque figure who is one of the leading feminist writers and thinkers in England. Harriet’s urbane, liberal fetishizing of Yasmin’s family—especially her homemaker mother—is a destabilizing influence, as is Harriet’s possessive relationship with Joe. Then there’s Arif ’s aimlessness and his increasing awareness of the racism, both blatant and microaggressive, in his and Yasmin’s daily lives. Yasmin looks to Joe for stability, but he’s got secrets of his own. Before long, Yasmin is forced to reexamine the foundations of her whole life before the cracks threaten to bring everything she knows crumbling down. Ali’s immersive novel, skipping deftly between several points of view, might be termed a comedy of manners of Britain’s urban middle class, but the comedy here has teeth: Though the book treats its characters with affection, the racial dynamics are conveyed with real, heart-rending bite.

A keen look at London life, relationships (especially interracial ones)—and a return to Ali’s most celebrated territory.

ALL THE SECRETS OF THE WORLD

Almond, Steve Zando (416 pp.) $28.00 | April 19, 2022 978-1-63893-002-0

A disappearance brings together a host of disparate lives in early-1980s California.

This novel, Almond’s first, follows a number of acclaimed story collections and works of nonfiction. He’s opted to use the biggest possible canvas, incorporating a diverse cast of characters and a host of weighty themes. The resulting novel is incredibly ambitious while also featuring some unexpected touches—scorpion biology and Nancy Reagan both play significant roles. The bulk of the novel is set in California in 1981. Lorena Saenz, age 13, is partnered with classmate Jenny Stallworth for a science fair project. Lorena is the daughter of an undocumented mother

and comes from a working-class background; Jenny’s family, by contrast, is wealthy. More ominously, Jenny’s father, Marcus—a scientist and academic with an interest in scorpions—develops an attraction to Lorena. Almond summons plenty of tension from the question of whether or not Marcus will do something awful—right up until the point when he vanishes under mysterious circumstances and Lorena’s older brother, Tony, becomes a suspect in his disappearance. It’s at this point that Pedro Guerrero, one of the police officers investigating the case, enters the narrative, expanding its scope beyond the two families of the early chapters. Almond is grappling with a lot of weighty themes: Class disparities, sexual abuse, corrupt policing, immigration, and the modern Republican Party (including a couple of references to the Romney family) all play significant parts here. But while the large-scale tragedy that plays out is thoughtprovoking, the novel’s stranger digressions—like glowing scorpions—are what endure.

Almond’s first novel is ambitious and empathic but sometimes unwieldy.

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FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

short fiction for book clubs A new book by Toni Morrison, Reci­ tatif (Knopf, Feb. 1), was published recently, but it isn’t a posthumous novel—it’s a tiny volume containing the only short story Morrison ever wrote along with an introduction by Zadie Smith that’s as long as the story itself.

Morrison saw the piece as an experiment—it focuses on Twyla and Roberta, two girls who room together at an orphanage when they’re 8, though they’re not actually orphans: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick,” Twyla says, explaining why she and Roberta were left at St. Bonaventure. “We looked like salt and pepper standing there and that’s what the other kids called us sometimes.” But who’s salt and who’s pepper? Morrison never specifies the girls’ races, and it’s up to the reader to figure out who they think is Black and who White and why they think that. As our starred review says, it’s “a uniquely interesting and enlightening reading experience,” and it would be even better to read it with friends.

When people talk about “book club books,” they’re usually talking about meaty novels, but short stories can lead to great discussions of a writer’s voice and the range of their interests. Whether you’re reading alone or in a group, here are some of the excellent story collections that have been published so far this year: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House, Feb. 1): Those monsters are real: There are overwhelming insects, scary dolls, and even a sea monster.

Readers of Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell will enjoy this collection of stories “blending emotional realism with surreal imagery,” according to our starred review. “Fu is equally at home chronicling bizarre events and pondering her characters’ inner lives.”

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo (Catapult, March 8): Bhanoo, a newspaper reporter, “homes in on devastating moments of loss—the results of aging, cultural misunderstanding, so-called progress, fickle hearts, and even tragedy—throughout this stunning debut collection of stories,” according to our starred review, which calls them “graceful stories by a writer with enormous empathy for even the most flawed and forlorn among us.”

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The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard (Amistad, March 8): Hubbard lives in New Orleans, and though these stories take place in an unnamed city, it certainly resembles her hometown. “Nothing seems lost or shortchanged in presenting this panorama of Black lives, whether disparities in social class, creeping gentrification, or the arduous, at times heroic efforts of even the poorest community residents to retain grace, decorum, and some autonomy over their surroundings,” according to our starred review.

How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman (Scribner, March 29): This is Bergman’s third collection of stories, and she’s known for her distinctive voice and attention to “strange, stubborn women and girls, from dissatisfied wives to suspicious, watchful children,” according to our starred review. “Bergman’s stories are so atmospherically and emotionally rich that they serve as portals into distinct interior worlds, often concluding on a quiet, destabilizing note that calls into question the narrative’s apparent straightforwardness.”

Out There by Kate Folk (Random House, March 29): If you’re human, listen up: Our starred review says that Folk “conjures up thrilling new ways to write about the strange and often disgusting experience of having a body.”

What does that mean? “A man develops a symbiotic attachment to a house he must keep ‘moist’ at all times. A young woman pines after a fellow patient on the ward for people suffering from a rare disease known as Total Nocturnal Bone Loss, which causes a person’s bones to melt overnight….A bold, exhilarating display of talent.”

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

PLANES

Baker, Peter C. Knopf (256 pp.) $27.00 | May 31, 2022 978-0-593-32027-3

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This affecting debut examines the impact of rendition and torture in two different cultures.

In one narrative thread, Amira, nee Maria, is an Italian woman married to Ayoub, a Moroccan who was seized by police two years ago while traveling in Pakistan, flown to a prison in his homeland, and apparently tortured, all without being charged. Amira, who changed her name and religion when she married, copes with loneliness, uncertainty, and feeling like an outsider to both Italians and Muslims. She depends on calls and emails from a U.S. lawyer working on such cases and on heavily redacted letters from Ayoub. When he’s released, he is thin, anxious, barely able to eat or work or spend time close to Amira. Meanwhile, in a town near Raleigh, North Carolina, Melanie is a real estate agent whose college-age son discovers her extramarital affair with a fellow school board official. Around the same time, roughly 2005, a couple Mel and her husband have known since they were all college activists want help mounting a campaign against a small airline in Mel’s town that is being used for rendition flights. Mel hesitates because her lover is the airline’s president. Baker, a Chicago-based writer, alternates chapters mainly between the two women, and the resulting diptych is inescapably unbalanced. Mel’s troubles can seem almost comically petty compared with Amira’s. That may be unavoidable, but it’s compounded by the fact that the North Carolina activists had nothing to do with Ayoub’s release. Don’t read those as flaws. In the real world, too, activism depends on preoccupied, ambivalent people like Mel and sometimes doesn’t seem to make a difference. And sometimes it does. An author’s note says the book was partly inspired by the work of North Carolina Stop Torture Now. A thoughtful look at the small-scale fallout of an international issue.

first-year student. When she’s not checking her email, hoping for a message from him, she’s reading Kierkegaard and André Breton, looking for clues about the kind of person she wants to be. Walking to the library on a Saturday night, she encounters small groups of students, “the girls laughing hysterically and collapsing against the guys’ chests. I knew that was what a person was supposed to be doing, but I didn’t know why, or how.” All Selin knows for sure is that she will be a novelist, but she’s still trying to figure out how to do that, too, and she sees the problem of how to live and the question of how to write as two sides of the same dilemma. She spends a lot of time thinking about sex— something she wants to have done but doesn’t actually want to do—and it says a lot about her that she regards her fear of sex as “immature and anti-novelistic.” But making the deliberate choice to shed her virginity isn’t quite the turning point she imagined.

It’s when she travels to Russia for an internship that she feels a new sense of self-possession and possibility. This is not a plotdriven novel, so readers who like a lot of action may not enjoy Selin’s philosophizing or penchant for deep analysis. But Selin is a disarming narrator, tossing off insights that are revelatory,

EITHER/OR

Batuman, Elif Penguin Press (368 pp.) $27.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-525-55759-3 The heroine of The Idiot (2017), Batuman’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, continues to interrogate the intersection of art and identity during her sophomore year at Harvard.

It’s 1996, and Selin is embarking on her fall semester with a broken heart and a lingering obsession with Ivan, the mathematician she’d fallen in love with as a |

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“What’s it like to be a trans woman? This heady novel offers one indelible perspective.” nevada

moving, and laugh-out-loud funny—sometimes all at once—and it’s exciting to watch her become the author of her own story.

Another delightfully cerebral and bighearted novel from a distinctive voice in contemporary fiction.

NEVADA

Binnie, Imogen MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (288 pp.) $17.00 paper | June 7, 2022 978-0-3746-0661-9 A funny, free-wheeling novel about the experiences of a trans woman and her reluctant protégé.

In Part I, readers are introduced to Maria Griffiths, a 29-year-old trans woman crisscrossing New York on her bicycle, barely holding down her job at an oppressive used bookstore, avoiding an inevitable breakup with her girlfriend, and drinking a lot while

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forgetting to take her estrogen shots. “This is what it’s like to be a trans woman,” observes the narrator, our witty guide to Maria’s complex psyche. “You just don’t want your hilarious, charming, complicated weirdo self to be erased by ideas people have in their heads that were made up by, like, hack TV writers, or even hackier porn writers.” In Part II, Maria has lost both the job and the girlfriend and heads west in a borrowed (OK, stolen) car. In Star City, Nevada, she strides into a Walmart and encounters salesperson James Hanson. This 20-year-old pothead routinely hotboxes his bathroom, dates a savvy feminist, and secretly, shamefully watches autogynephilic porn, getting off by imagining himself as female. Maria takes one look and declares, “that kid is trans and he doesn’t even know it yet.” Maria’s on a journey to get herself together, but she can’t resist mentoring James—whether or not he wants her guidance. This cult novel, brimming with ideas and arguments that only occasionally impede the narrative, was first published in 2013 by indie Topside Press. It’s been reissued with a new afterword by the author, who recounts its passionate reception by trans readers.

What’s it like to be a trans woman? This heady novel offers one indelible perspective.

DR. B.

Birnbaum, Daniel Trans. by Deborah Bragan-Turner Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $27.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-06-293-981-4

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At the beginning of World War II, a man is overcome by historical forces.

Stockholm in 1939 is a crossroads of all sorts of influences: Swedish National Socialists organize and march against Jewish university professors; anti-Nazi Germans, especially Jews, have fled there, perhaps to organize more definitive escapes from Europe; and representatives both covert and credentialed of the European powers move through the various corridors of power.

Into this farrago comes Immanuel Birnbaum, a German Jewish political reporter exiled and living in Warsaw, who has made his way with his family to Sweden in the fall of 1939. He has been writing for the Swiss Basler Nachrichten and as “Dr. B.” has placed articles in smaller German publications, and this and a few other coincidental circumstances make him an object of interest to several conflicting forces. On the one hand, through the press service that places Dr. B.’s articles, he is pressured to report to German intelligence, while on the other he is affiliated with an English cadre, some of whom are involved in sabotage. These, in combination with Immanuel’s already-conflicted situation as a Jew and a German and his desire to be a good employee and temporary resident of Sweden, create a situation which almost literally eats him up. The author is a descendant of the historical Dr. B., and the novel follows the facts of his life and incorporates historical characters into a very accomplished and appealing portrait of Stockholm. Told in leisurely detail and sometimes perhaps a bit too discursive, the book may be short of action for some, but those who persist will be rewarded.

A moving evocation of a life beset by conflicts in a troubled time.

Callie’s scheme to alter the rules of Hell won’t go over well with his father, but Lucifer agrees—with a catch. If Callie and Luke can save a soul of his choosing within three days, he’ll allow the experiment to go on. But no one ever said making a deal with the devil was easy. Sean Tattersall, Lucifer’s chosen wayward soul, is a charming swindler with one mission: to find the Holy Grail and bring about Heaven on Earth. As the trio—along with a cast of old friends and enemies—travels Europe in search of the Grail, the truth of Lucifer’s intentions comes to light, setting off a series of events that will change Callie’s and Luke’s lives for eternity. Bond’s humorous take on the trials of Heaven and Hell takes on a more complex tone in this sequel, with the addition of Arthurian legend and more in-depth characterization. A subplot of romantic angst between Luke and Callie is unnecessary, and the novel’s conclusion—no doubt the setup for a third book—feels too neatly wrapped.

Fans of supernatural romps will enjoy Bond’s latest otherworldly adventure.

THE DATE FROM HELL

Bond, Gwenda St. Martin’s Griffin (336 pp.) $16.99 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-2507-7176-6

In the sequel to Not Your Average Hot Guy (2021), it’s once again up to bookish Callie and devilish Luke to avert disaster of biblical proportions—this time by locating the legendary Holy Grail.

It’s been a few weeks since Callie saved the world from the apocalypse with the help of her boyfriend, Luke—son and heir of Lucifer himself—but she’s far from used to her new normal. Balancing the mundanity of her daily responsibilities at the family escape room business with her jaunts to the underworld is proving difficult, especially now that Callie believes she’s finally found her life’s purpose: giving lost souls a second chance at redemption. Luke is sure |

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SLEEPWALK

Chaon, Dan Henry Holt (320 pp.) $27.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-250-17521-2 A mercenary’s life is upended by the appearance of his (perhaps) daughter and a series of attendant problems.

The narrator of Chaon’s disappointing fourth novel is a 50-year-old fixer/ courier hired to perform “petty acts of industrial espionage or [mess] with the results of a local school board election.” (The near-future U.S. is mostly offscreen, but pandemics, recessions, and blockades led by hair-trigger private militias are disruptive enough to necessitate such independent contractors.) Billy (one of his many aliases) is interrupted on the road by repeated calls from Cammie, a young woman claiming not only that she’s his daughter via a sperm donation made in his youth, but that he has many more offspring besides. Billy

is troubled not just by the news, but by the breach of security that allowed Cammie to reach him, and plenty more paranoia ensues. Is Cammie an agent of somebody he’s fallen afoul of or a bot? Flashbacks to Billy’s past explain his various reasons for anxiety, from his mother on down, and Chaon gives his lead an appealingly noirish, skeptical voice. In his earlier fiction, Chaon demonstrated a talent for conjuring dark moods and characters with fractured families, so a dystopian tale that reshuffles traditional stories about midlife crises and long-lost children would seem a fine fit for him. But this novel never quite finds its footing, shifting from backstory to an increasingly convoluted assortment of cult types and mercenaries; it doesn’t help that the central relationship between Billy and Cammie is conducted via phone, which brings a chilly distance to the narrative.

The technology Chaon imagines is diverting—large, menacing, farm-protecting robots, suspiciously adorable surveillance drones—but the most tender relationship is a B-plot involving Billy and his dog, whose travails are sometimes more interesting than the humans’.

All the ingredients of a dark speculative tale imperfectly assembled.

THE FOURTH PROPHECY

Cooper, Glenn Grand Central Publishing (352 pp.) $17.99 paper | May 24, 2022 978-1-5387-2124-7 The pope is in peril and only an international man of Marian mystery can save him.

Superstar academic Cal Donovan, esteemed Harvard professor of religion and archaeology, roguish lady’s man, and loyal cat’s-paw of the pope, returns in this weirdly sedate thriller concerning an earthshaking “fourth secret” divulged by the famous apparition of Mary to three young children at Fátima in 1917. Lúcia dos Santos, the principal recipient of the vision’s message, described some of Mary’s revelations and prophecies, which included visions of hell, the advent of World War II, and the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981. Long-standing rumors of a fourth, as yet undisclosed, secret prophecy come to a head some nine decades later on the cusp of Lúcia’s beatification as the pope is threatened by a mysterious group with their own designs regarding the secret vision.

Our man Donovan is tasked with solving the mystery of the fourth prophecy before Lúcia is sainted a few days hence and the promised doom arrives. The Marian apparitions make for an intriguing thriller setup, but the thin characterizations and lack of momentum—despite the plot’s ticking clock—sap the narrative of any thrills it might have yielded. We mostly follow the dashing, wish-fulfillment uber-mensch Donovan through a series of densely expository conversations with various church officials as he doggedly tracks Lúcia’s secret. The Catholic history vividly imparted in these interviews is the most compelling aspect of the book; scenes involving kidnappings, car chases, 10

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“Vivid scenes from America’s forgotten pandemic.” little souls

and the like are desultory and generic. There is some small entertainment to be had chuckling at the clichés (incorrigible rake Donovan is assisted by a gorgeous nun) and the frankly bizarre characterization of the Vatican as a sort of supernatural MI6, with the pope as a twinkly, kindly M and Donovan, a devout James Bond.

A rote Dan Brown knockoff, though well researched and often unintentionally amusing.

LITTLE SOULS

Dallas, Sandra St. Martin’s Press (304 pp.) $27.99 | April 26, 2022 978-1-2502-7788-6

Davis, Fiona Dutton (352 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 25, 2022 978-0-593-18401-1

A tale of two models, decades apart, and the Frick museum.

The latest in Davis’ series celebrating New York City landmarks (following The Lions of Fifth Avenue, 2020) features not only the Frick Collection, but several exemplars of public art, all images of the same Gilded Age model. By 1919, Lillian Carter, under the name Angelica, has earned a degree of fame as the model for sculptures gracing the New York Public Library, the Plaza Hotel, and many other venues. Groundlessly suspected of murder, Lillian plans to flee New York for Hollywood and a movie career. Instead, a series of improbable events leads her to steel magnate Henry Clay Frick’s mansion, where she’s hired as personal secretary

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Against the backdrop of the 1918 influenza epidemic, two sisters offer refuge to an abused child.

Dallas’ first-person narrator is 24-yearold Lutie, short for Lucretia, a fashion illustrator for a downtown department store that caters to Denver’s upper class. Lutie lives with her older sister, Helen, who, as a nurse, is dealing firsthand with the misery attending the epidemic. As the novel begins, Lutie, among a small, fearful throng, witnesses the death throes of a soldier on a public street. This is only one instance of Dallas’ graphic depictions of the course of the influenza pandemic in one city, many of which resonate today—although not necessarily the “death wagons” patrolling the streets or the widespread acceptance of public health measures. Lutie arrives home to find Ronald Streeter, the sisters’ downstairs tenant, stabbed to death in the kitchen, Helen standing over him with an ice pick in hand as his 10-year-old daughter, Dorothy, cowers nearby. We soon learn that drunken, depraved Streeter abused his wife, Maud, and had raped Dorothy, also offering her to his crony, Maud’s equally depraved brother. Helen’s fiance, Gil, a medical student also overworked during the pestilence, helps remove the body to a vacant lot, hoping one of the “wagons” will dispose of it along with the anonymous remains of flu victims. As the sisters make a home for the traumatized Dorothy after Maud dies of flu, complications pile up. Long-suppressed secrets emerge as the uncle tries to interfere with the sisters’ adoption case. The parents of Peter, Lutie’s fiance, who is killed in the war, offer staunch help. Dallas makes a worthy effort to use the parlance of the day, erring on the side of formal, somewhat stilted speech on the parts of all but the guttersnipe characters. Aside from these obvious villains, the characters are well intentioned and unfailingly kind, including two hard-boiled detectives. The novel is seeded throughout with tragedy, but the overriding message is hope, and the overarching adversary is not human but a virus.

Vivid scenes from America’s forgotten pandemic.

THE MAGNOLIA PALACE

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to Miss Helen, Frick’s spinster daughter. In 1966, Veronica Weber, an ingénue model from a working-class background in London, lands a potentially life-altering assignment—a Vogue photo shoot at the Frick mansion–turned-museum. But after rebelling at the sexism on set, Veronica is left behind, stranded in the Frick when a blizzard and a blackout descend simultaneously on the city. In the alternating 1919 timeline, Frick offers Lillian, who has quickly become a savvy family retainer, a bonus if she can help marry Helen off to Richard Danforth, a reluctant suitor. Abetted by Joshua Lawrence, a Frick intern, Veronica continues a scavenger hunt, left unfinished in 1919, devised by Helen to educate Danforth about the Frick masterpieces. Overshadowing the action is the horrific death of Helen’s older sister and the brutality of Frick himself, who lays waste to his own family alongside other victims of his greed.

Davis skillfully weaves these undercurrents into her parallel stories, which coalesce in a suspenseful search for a (fictitious) Frick heirloom: the pink Magnolia diamond. The motivations of the two protagonists are thin: Neither seems to have ambitions that can’t be easily derailed by a man. Although

her privilege certainly renders her more autonomous, Helen emerges as the true heroine here.

Artfully meshes the educational with the sensational.

SCARY MONSTERS A Novel in Two Parts de Kretser, Michelle Catapult (288 pp.) $17.95 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-64622-109-7

A reversible novel tells the stories of two Asian immigrants to Australia, one 40 years in the past and one in the future.

It’s the early 1980s, and 22-year-old Lili’s ambitions are grand: She wants to be a cross between Debbie Harry and Simone de Beauvoir. To that end, she leaves Australia—where she had moved with her parents as a teenager—and accepts a post teaching English in southern France. It’s the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili sees shadows everywhere she goes. But the real monsters are the larger forces that threaten her existence as a brown-skinned woman: racism and sexism. When Lili’s story concludes, at the end of her eye-opening time in Europe, de Kretser’s inventive book begins again: The novel can be flipped upside down and reversed to tell the story of Lyle, who lives in a future just a bit darker than our present. (To say that the book starts with Lili’s story, though, is an arbitrary matter of a reader’s personal sense of chronology. Since there are two covers and two sets of frontmatter, a reader could equally begin with Lyle and travel back in time to read Lili’s story.) Justifications for this format are clear in both novels: “When my family emigrated,” confesses Lili, “it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads.” Lyle, who believes that he must jettison his past in order to fit in with the “Australian values” of corporate drudgery and a whopping mortgage, echoes Lili’s sentiment: “Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared.” Only Lyle’s elderly mother, who lives with the family, reminds him that there is another way to live.

De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.

QUEERLY BELOVED

Dumond, Susie Dial Press (400 pp.) $17.00 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-24397-8 A lesbian bridesmaid-for-hire navigates work, friendship, and romantic crises in pre–Obergefell v. Hodges Tulsa.

Twenty-five-year-old Amy’s life is a little precarious. Her car is always in danger of stalling, she’s working exhausting 12

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BEHIND THE BOOK

Run, Rose, Run At the top of their professions, Dolly Parton and James Patterson team up for a thriller set in the music industry

BY MARION WINIK Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton & James Patterson

“We were both million-to-one shots,” says James Patterson, reflecting on his collaboration with Dolly Parton on a Zoom call from his home in Florida. “She came from the hills of Tennessee with 12 kids in the family; I came from Newburgh, New York, where my father grew up in a poorhouse. So the odds against us doing whatever the hell we’ve done were high.”

Maybe so. But now he is 74 and she is 76, both are at the top of their professions (Parton is on the shortlist for this year’s inductions into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame), and the collaboration between the two has spawned a novel, a countrymusic album, a fully cast audiobook, and, soon, a movie. Run, Rose, Run (Little, Brown, March 7) is something any fool would put their money on.

They’d be right.

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The novel’s protagonist, Annie Lee Keyes, is a country-music prodigy (there’s Dolly’s knowhow) on the run from mysterious violence and danger (Patterson’s specialty). She hitchhikes to Nashville with nothing but the jeans she’s wearing and borrows a guitar to play an open mic at a club called the Cat’s Paw. Lucky for her, Ethan Blake— a heartbreakingly handsome, guitar-playing Iraq vet with connections to retired country music megastar Ruthanna Ryder—is in the audience.

Will Annie Lee ascend to stardom before her past comes to eat her alive? Will Ethan get a chance to bust out his military driving and hand-to-hand combat moves along the way? Is Ruthanna really retired? As our reviewer puts it, “The fairy-tale characters and details of the country-music scene are so much fun you won’t mind the silly plot.”

Run, Rose, Run began with an impulsive phone call to Nashville. “I just call people up when I want to talk to them,” Patterson explains. It worked with Bill Clinton, now a close friend with whom the author has written two books, and it worked with Dolly, as well.

“I got through to her manager, Danny. He checked with Dolly and got right back to me. He told me she said she wasn’t sure what she would bring to the party but she reads a lot and has always been interested in writing. If you want to come down, she said, come on down.”

As a Vanderbilt grad, Patterson was more than happy to return to the Tennessee capital. There, Dolly and he talked for hours, quickly realizing it was a match. In fact, they get along so well that a recent television interviewer made Patterson blush by asking whether the two might have been a thing if they’d met when they were younger. “I

“She’s a great actress,” Patterson says, and anyone who’s seen 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias will agree.

“I wanted to play Ethan Blake,” Patterson jokes ruefully, “but no way. OK, I said, how about Jack [Ruthanna’s manager]? Dolly had to break it to me. Based on my acting ability, not even Jack.” Although Patterson informed her that he sang in his church choir as a boy, she’s nixed his singing, too.

Maybe a nonspeaking cameo?

Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and other titles. Run, Rose, Run was reviewed in the Jan. 1, 2022, issue.

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had to prepare my wife for that one,” he reports sheepishly. “But Dolly and I are too old to cause trouble.”

But not too old to write a bestseller in nothing flat.

“My grandmother used to say, ‘hungry dogs run faster,’ ” comments Patterson. “And Dolly and I are hungry dogs.”

As hard as that is to picture, it must be true.

Two days after Patterson sent her a rough outline, Dolly sent back extensive notes about things that might make the story more credible as well as seven songs for the songwriter characters to claim.

“I was very inspired by his words,” Parton shared by email, “so I sent him the songs. And he was very inspired by my words, so we worked together like that, inspiring each other throughout the whole process.

“The best way I was helpful to James was to give him insight on the inner workings of the business,” she explained, checking around with old friends to make sure the industry details and Nashville specifics would check out.

And to further boost that authenticity, the fictional hit songs of Annie Lee, Ruthanna, and Ethan are turning into real-world ones. In January, “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans” became the first single released from the album that came out alongside the book last week. In the story, that’s the song Ruthanna wrote coming up, the one that made her a star, now a big hit everyone knows.

“Dolly and I joke that these days, for old folks like us, it’s more like big jeans and faded dreams,” Patterson quips.

Well, not exactly. The pair just had the dream job of interviewing producers for the honor of making Run, Rose, Run into a movie. “We had 70 offers,” says Patterson. “We Zoomed the final six.

It’s come down to Spielberg versus Reese Witherspoon.” Too bad for Ron Howard, J.J. Abrams, Graham King, and the rest.

The movie will be the first time we hear the songs as Dolly imagined them, sung by the characters as the plot unfurls. In the book, when Annie Lee jumps on stage at the Cat’s Paw, you can read the lyrics; on the audiobook, they are read aloud; on the album, it’s the songs without the story. What makes the movie project even more exciting is that Dolly has agreed to play Ruthanna.

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back-to-back shifts as a bartender at a beloved queer dive bar and a baker at a notoriously conservative Christian bakery, and her love life has been nonexistent since the end of a rocky twoyear relationship. But new opportunities soon appear on both the romantic and employment fronts: A sharply dressed woman named Charley flirts with Amy while buying coffee and a croissant, and two strangers Amy befriends at her cousin’s wedding offer to pay her $250 to step in as a bridesmaid for their upcoming nuptials since one of their original bridesmaids is moving to Dubai. With very little ramp-up or to-do, Amy and Charley begin dating seriously; the much longer slow-burn is between Amy and her new bridesmaiding job, which puts her in the middle of the wedding industry at a time when neither she nor any of her friends can legally get married. Dumond’s deep affection for the queer communities that spring up in red states—and especially for the multigenerational mentorship that makes survival and joy possible—is evident, but uneven pacing and a tendency to tell rather than show keep the reader at arm’s length from the action.

A sweet but slightly underbaked debut that explores its protagonist’s personal growth more satisfyingly than its romance.

ALL THE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT

Feltman, Amy Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $28.00 | May 24, 2022 978-1-5387-0472-1

A mother’s sudden return forces the lives of a father and child into turmoil.

Morgan Flowers, who’s nonbinary, is used to being their neurodivergent father Julian’s emotional caretaker. What Morgan isn’t used to is putting their own wants and needs first.

Enter Sadie Gardner, a fellow scholarship student at Morgan’s elite private school, who, much to Morgan’s shock, finds Morgan desirable. Things seem to be going well for Morgan until their mother, Zoe, who struggles with addiction and had taken off years before, comes tearing back into their life like a tornado, showing up unexpectedly at their front door. Thus the careful equilibrium Morgan has worked so hard to maintain comes crashing down: “You need to leave right now, Dad repeated once Morgan rushed him inside. You need to leave right now, Dad repeated while Morgan unzipped his coat and untied his shoes and helped him upstairs and gathered the weighted blanket and laid him down on the bed.” On top of Zoe’s sudden return, Morgan also finds themselves dealing with a blossoming friendship with an internet stranger who thinks they are someone else, the lingering loss of Morgan’s grandmother, whose cardigan still sits on the back of a chair in the house, and a father whose desperate internal desire to love and protect Morgan is followed up with little action. While Feltman’s narrative is, at times, clouded by too much attention given to the lives of secondary and tertiary characters, the complex relationship between Morgan and Julian places this novel solidly in the category of worthwhile reads.

A multidimensional family drama.

VALLEYESQUE

Flores, Fernando A. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-3746-0413-4 Bizarre short stories from a Texan with a punk-rock heart.

Austin author Flores’ first two books, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas (2018) and Tears of the Trufflepig (2019), have already made him something of a cult favorite among readers who appreciate his frequently funny, almost always bizarre punkrock sensibilities. His new collection is set in the same off-kilter world as his previous works, but it also expands on it. In “You Got It, Take It Away,” named after the legendary Tejano singer Johnny Canales’ catchphrase, a Mexican American man encounters his difficult, probably racist neighbor, who shows him a mysterious 16

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piece of cloth that defies the laws of the natural world. When he asks about it later, the neighbor becomes belligerent, convinced the man had broken into his apartment. The story ends on a surprisingly sweet note—Flores doesn’t sacrifice compassion for the sake of weirdness. “The 29th of April” is grounded more firmly in reality—painfully so. The narrator chronicles the descent of a town into gang violence: “The reporters stopped coming when we started finding them dead,” the narrator reflects. The story is told mostly in one long paragraph, giving it an exhausting kind of urgency; it’s both beautiful and intensely heartbreaking. All the stories here are excellent, but the best is perhaps “Pheasants,” in which a coffee shop worker named Tito Papel encounters an angel stuffing their face with a discarded piece of birthday cake; Tito asks them to leave, but they keep coming back, and the two banter good-naturedly about language and theology. The cakeloving spirit denies they’re Tito’s guardian angel, but the ending suggests they might have been playing it coy. Flores’ prose is a delight throughout the book, and his love for the unearthly always feels natural, never self-conscious. One character reflects, “Strange stories had helped me give meaning to the painful

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moments of survival, and strange stories were the only things I could continue feeding into the machine.” Could that be Flores’ own manifesto? Whether it is or not, his own strange stories are some of the best to come along in quite a while. This is an accomplished book from an author determined to keep literature weird.

Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre.

BOYS COME FIRST

Foley, Aaron Belt Publishing (386 pp.) $17.95 paper | May 31, 2022 978-1-953368-25-6 An often funny debut novel about three friends searching for love and themselves in a rapidly gentrifying Detroit.

Dominick, Troy, and Remy, three Black gay men in Detroit, are at a key turning point in their lives. After having caught his boyfriend in bed with another man and gotten fired from his job on the same day, Dominick Gibson packed up his car, left Manhattan, and, as the book opens, is driving back to his mom’s house in Detroit. Dominick is unsure what’s next for him, but he feels the clock ticking: “Here he was now, thirty-three years old and with eight years with his ex, Justin, having led absolutely nowhere. Time was running out. Though when you’re Black, gay, and thirtysomething, time always feels like it’s running out.” Dominick reconnects with Troy Clements, his best friend, who’s a socially minded teacher at The Mahaffey School in a neighborhood primed for “redevelopment”—or, in other words, bulldozers. Like so many Detroit residents, Troy is unsure about his city’s future. As he tells Dominick, “My worry is that it won’t be a Black city anymore. That it’s not going to belong to us like it used to. White people have started moving here in droves. Every time you look up—Dan Gilbert! New restaurant! New this, new that! And my thing is, I’m looking at my kids at Mahaffey and their families, and I know they won’t be able to keep up when it hits.” The final member of the trio is Troy’s friend Remy Patton, a real estate agent who goes by “Mr. Detroit.” When Remy takes on a project that threatens Troy’s school, all three men have to decide where their loyalties lies.

Foley’s novel paints a vivid picture of Detroit gentrification pushing African American residents out in favor of high-priced condos, bougie restaurants, and new, White residents. The novel also excels at showing the ups and downs of the dating scene in Detroit. Dominick, Troy, and Remy experience steamy hookups, genuine connections, awkward encounters with closeted White men from the suburbs, and even an attempted rape.

Foley has created original, striking characters; unfortunately, alternating among all three points of view sacrifices some of the plot’s momentum. Each man goes through dramatic ups and downs, but the larger story gets lost along the way.

Sharp characters and a striking depiction of friendship within a story that never quite coheres.

“A bold, exhilarating display of talent.” out there

OUT THERE

Folk, Kate Random House (256 pp.) $27.00 | March 29, 2022 978-0-593-23146-3 A superb debut short story collection explores the uncanny and grotesque.

A man develops a symbiotic attachment to a house he must keep “moist” at all costs. A young woman pines after a fellow patient on the ward for people suffering from a rare disease known as Total Nocturnal Bone Loss, which causes a person’s bones to melt overnight. Frustrated by her partner’s neglect in their new suburban home, a woman becomes obsessed with the possibility that someone is living in their storm shelter. In this collection, first-time author Folk conjures up thrilling new ways to write about the strange and often disgusting experience of having a body: One character, while having sex, “focused on her joints, imagining

bones turning in the sockets of other bones, rattling at the ends of strings.” Not all of Folk’s stories live up to the standard of her best—the shorter installments tend to be weaker—but her best are truly exceptional. The apex of her innovation are the “blots” that appear in the first and last stories in the collection: artificially constructed men who seduce women via dating app before stealing their identities and wreaking havoc on their digital lives. Though the blots are initially easy to identify—“They were the best-looking men in any room, and had no sense of humor”—they become increasingly difficult to differentiate from normal human men as their technology improves. In “Out There,” a woman agonizes over whether her new boyfriend is a blot or just a jerk; in “Big Sur,” the collection’s high point, Folk delves into the mind of one of the early blots, whose wildly inhuman social skills render him lovable.

A bold, exhilarating display of talent.

THE ABSOLUTE

Guebel, Daniel Trans. by Jessica Sequeira Seven Stories (448 pp.) $19.95 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-64421-160-1 Intellectually adventurous, multigenerational novel of a family’s quest to find meaning in the world.

We meet our narrator early on in this sprawling novel, but we get to know him only near its end. Meanwhile, Argentine writer Guebel serves up an entertaining shaggy dog—or perhaps shaggy cat, considering the unpleasant fate at the paws of a feline that a minor character suffers—tale that stretches over three centuries. Frantisek is a wayward young man who hires a music tutor and then heads for Siberia to teach lessons to the wives of the provincial bourgeoisie, which lands him a “career as a clandestine lover.” Frantisek attempts to make of his dangerous liaisons a sort of symphony that, in time, grows into what might be “rightly considered to have been the first symphonic poem,” Berlioz notwithstanding. Frantisek’s son transposes the family gift for systematics into a political philosophy built on the Jesuit precepts of Ignatius Loyola, one that years later finds an acolyte in Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, who, our narrator proposes, invented the Russian working class just as St. Paul invented a messiah: “Such a political gesture—which no ‘leftist’ understood at the time—clearly reveals to us that [Lenin] took maximum advantage of the lessons imparted during his months at the monastery.” Another ancestor decides to try his luck at assassinating an archduke and touching off a war only to wind up in a game of cat and mouse in a distant desert prison, while Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander Scriabin, Madame Blavatsky, and other historical figures step onto the stage to play roles large and small. And as for that narrator?

Let’s just say that he does the family proud, deftly stepping from historical fiction to science fiction and witnessing “the Universe just prior to its unfolding, naked of any wrapping,

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like one of those hard bitter candies that taste of pitch and melt like a rock in your mouth.”

A Borges-ian masterwork that neatly blends magic realism, mysticism, and off-color yarns into a superb whole.

THE OTHER MOTHER

Harper, Rachel M. Counterpoint (432 pp.) $28.00 | May 3, 2022 978-1-64009-504-5

A sprawling, multigenerational portrait of a mixed-race family that begins with a man’s quest to uncover the truth of his origins.

Jenry Castillo, a talented pianist raised by Marisa, a single mother from a family of Cuban immigrants, sets off from Miami to begin his first semester at Brown University. He’s desperate to find out

more about his biological father, Jasper Patterson, a famous Black ballet dancer his mother met when she studied there and who died young in a tragic accident. Soon after arriving in Providence, he meets Jasper’s relatives—his own biological grandfather, Winston, and aunt, Juliet—and the real story of his heritage proves to be more complicated than he’d imagined.

With a dizzying narrative that zips from character to character and weaves between present and past, from Providence to Miami to New York to Cuba, Harper has created a novel about longing, loss, kinship, talent, queerness, and what makes a family. At its heart is the story of two young women, Marisa and Juliet, who love each other and decide to have a baby together— and all the lies and secrets and betrayals that unfurl from that choice. Juliet, the “other mother,” is a complicated, fully imagined character whose warmth and charm make you root for her even as her darker angels—addiction, selfishness, a desperate need for artistic success—threaten the new life she’s built since losing contact with Jenry. The descriptive language is sharpest in these sections: Juliet, once a talented jazz pianist, describes the way windshield wipers give her a feeling of comfort, “like

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“Fans of both Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler are likely to enjoy this satisfying, unhurried novel.” close - up

the metronome always used to, marking the top of her piano like an emblem marks the hood of a car.” The raw intensity of Juliet’s feelings for Jenry, the fear and desire his arrival brings into her life, and her desperation not to make the same mistakes again offer real stakes and drive the narrative forward pleasurably. Some of the sections feel less necessary. The story of Jasper is lovely but ultimately distracting from the main arc.

Even Jenry’s section, the theoretical raison d’être of the novel, is sluggish and overdetermined. Twists and turns introduced in the historical sections complicate the facts of Jenry’s birth and move the plot forward without illuminating the deeper, more interesting conflicts between characters in the present—or creating space for unexpected revelations in the future.

A novel about the families we inherit and the ones we make for ourselves.

CLOSE-UP

Herman, Michelle Columbus State University Press (376 pp.) $24.95 paper | March 15, 2022 978-0-57890-528-0 Good things can happen to lonely hearts and wounded families. Here’s how.

Herman’s latest novel assembles an accomplished cast of characters: a successful stage magician, a major American novelist, a published poet, a talented student poet and her world-wise single mother, a cockatiel, and, eventually, a precocious baby. As gifted as they may be, at the outset, things aren’t going particularly well for most of them. The famous novelist, Martin Lieberman, is hit the hardest. Shortly before Thanksgiving he is abruptly abandoned by his wife; hearing this news, his teenage magician son, Jacob, decides not to come home from college. This means Jacob’s cockatiel, Dolores, who was being cared for by his mother, is abandoned as well, and in fact Martin has no more idea than the bird of why all this has happened to him. The published poet, Jill Rosen—the protagonist of Herman’s Dog (2005)—is less drastically miserable, but her life is not turning out quite as she might have hoped: She’s aging, still single, and less successful than some of her friends. She does enjoy teaching, particularly when the student is as gifted (and worshipful) as Caroline Forester. The Kokosing State campus, where Jill teaches, where Jacob and Caroline are students, where Martin is a guest lecturer, turns out to be a fortuitous locale, as the characters cross paths there and begin to become part of each other’s lives. Herman, who’s noted for her writing about relationships, takes the time to bring every corner of this fictional world to life, including excerpts of all the writers’ writings (they’re good!), the evolution of Jacob’s magic act, details about Martin’s post-divorce linen closet, and the ongoing (and unexpectedly central) role of the pet bird. Almost all the characters change in interesting ways, but the depiction of Martin’s transformation, as unlikely as it may be for a great man like him, is particularly generous and moving.

Fans of both Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler are likely to enjoy this satisfying, unhurried novel.

THE GAMEKEEPER

Hines, Barry And Other Stories (224 pp.) $18.00 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-91350-530-1 A portrait of rural working-class life in late-20th-century England.

First published in 1975, this British blue-collar novel follows a year in the life of gamekeeper George Purse, who left a big city steel mill to work at a duke’s expansive country estate in hopes of creating a better life for 22

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his wife and young children. Purse’s primary duty is to prepare his assigned 5,000 acres for a once-yearly pheasant hunt, requiring him to raise the fowl while protecting them from poacher and predator. The gamekeeper pursues his duties with stoic dedication throughout the seasons, often putting himself and his eldest son at odds with neighbors who question his dogged commitment to restricting access to lands of abundance the nobleman rarely visits. Written in a biographical style that is light on plot, the narrative unravels as a linear series of vignettes that document the gamekeeper’s daily life: his routines, tools, and practices. Hines has a keen eye for nature, and his prose is at its finest when describing Purse’s adventures on the lush landscapes, especially his interactions with animals. Though disparities of class and privilege cast a persistent shadow across the pages, they are more a snapshot in time than a challenge, much like the antiquated depiction of gender roles in this nearly half-century-old novel. The storytelling is engaging, with sincere moments of humor and introspection, but the limited scope of the story makes arrival at the final pages a little less rewarding, an additional stop rather than a destination.

Like an afternoon stroll on a familiar trail; nature documentary lovers will enjoy this journey the most.

31 PARADISO

Huffey, Rhoda Delphinium (275 pp.) $27.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-953002-09-9 A woman moves to Venice Beach to escape her controlling family.

For a book that opens with an event dubbed “the Great Duck Massacre of 1993,” Huffey’s novel ventures into surprisingly imposing emotional territory.

At its center is Francine Ephesians Didwell, a woman who’s recently moved to Venice Beach. (And, in fact, that year did see dozens of ducks hunted and killed to keep a virus from spreading.) Francine’s reasons for moving there have to do with grief:

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“A strange, highly compelling tale about what happens when American privilege and insulation get turned inside out.”

2 a.m. in little america

Her paramour, Cyrus, died before the book opens, and she remains haunted by his memory. Her relationship with him also helped to distance her from her very religious family, described as “a cult of two parents and three siblings.” Francine has other reasons for wanting to stay away from her family, especially her father—who, we eventually learn, is capable of horrific acts. In the aftermath of Cyrus’ death, Francine finds that she’s returned to her family’s orbit even as she bonds with her new neighbors and attempts to find her own passions—including a love of tap dancing, sparked by a Gregory Hines performance.

The most moving parts of this novel are when Huffey describes Francine having to stifle aspects of her truest self when around her family: “From now on, while in the Holy City of Monrovia she must always be a good Didwell, and pretend to go to church, and never mention the name of Cyrus, and honor Mr. Didwell’s status: perfect as God is perfect.” It’s at these moments when the book is most resonant. The tonal shifts between the comic and the harrowing are jarring at times, but Huffey’s empathy for her protagonist is tangible.

A tonally uneven trip back to a bygone Californian age.

A POSTCARD FOR ANNIE

Jessen, Ida Trans. by Martin Aitken Archipelago (180 pp.) $18.00 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-953861-22-1

These six short stories by award-winning Danish writer and translator Jessen take an unshrinking look at love in vari-

ous forms.

A woman who makes a living reupholstering furniture finds herself reevaluating her husband after a visit from a dying friend.

Trapped in her marriage by love and hope, she considers the other small-business owners in their seaside town: “Even in the crippling economic crisis, optimism prevailed, or perhaps more accurately stubborness [sic], indomitableness...making the best of a bad situation.” In another story, told from multiple points of view, the mother of two young children is murdered, and an elderly couple with information about the crime faces an agonizing choice. A translator in a sexually unsatisfying marriage fights with her husband, then reconciles, then fights again. “How horrid a love,” she thinks. Romantic or maternal, love demands a steep price. In the story “Mother and Son,” Lisbet imagines she can see her wayward 20-year-old “surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.” Jessen’s writing is graceful, unhurried, convincing. The narratives unfold in unexpected ways. In the title story, a young woman witnesses a bus accident and meets a man. The story then jumps ahead 20 years.

Returning to the city where it happened, she reflects on how that small event changed her life and on the girl she’d been then. An awareness of time—whether years or eons—brightens otherwise bleak situations. The furniture repairer muses about the previous ice age: “Digging in the garden, she would find remains of seaweed embedded deep in the sandy soil. And far out on the open sea, fishermen would discover in their nets the roots of trees from a bygone forest. She took some measure of comfort in this, the knowledge that in time everything came round again.”

The complexities of love and the passage of time enrich this insightful, original collection.

2 A.M. IN LITTLE AMERICA

Kalfus, Ken Milkweed (256 pp.) $25.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-57131-144-3 From the undersung Kalfus, another tonally intricate triumph, this one about the bewilderment, alienation, and sheer strangeness of being a refugee.

Ron Patterson is an American who fled his native land as civil war and chaos descended. At the book’s beginning he’s a 20-something migrant in an unnamed country, eking out a subsistence as a repairman, having 24

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overstayed his visa, when he meets Marlise, another refugee.

For a brief stretch before the unnamed country’s politics turn fractious and they’re banished and separated, she becomes a friend, companion, and temporary refuge, and he looks for her—or for her afterimage—everywhere he goes from then on.

About 10 years later, having bounced from place to place while his homeland’s civil conflict simmers on—and while xenophobic and tribal politics take root across the globe—Ron finds himself in one of the last nations that still welcomes castoffs from the once-great, once-smug power. He lives in a filthy banlieue he calls Little America, again in squalor, again with a steady job as a repairman of security-related electronics. The book is, as it keeps (nimbly) reminding us, a camera obscura: partly because indirect and tricky, bent, not-quite-trustable views are the nature of things; partly because of Ron’s marginal and scorned status; partly because he’s a loner; and partly due to an affliction that makes him see resemblances between people that may not be real (and on the flip side, differences that may not signify much), Ron can make out reality only indirectly, by way of mirrors and shades, and the image he ends up with is

inverted, distorted, deeply mysterious. Then, when America’s bitter political split starts to replicate itself even in the ghetto— and when he encounters a strangely familiar female schoolmate and is pressed into service as an informant by a detective—the picture gets murkier, scarier, and more peculiar yet. Kalfus has always worked by ingenious indirection; his A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) is a 9/11 novel as seen through the comic lens of an imploding marriage. Here he does so again, and with similar success, creating a commentary on current American politics that never sets foot in America, takes place in a distant future, and takes pains (as its protagonist does) to avoid the overtly partisan.

A strange, highly compelling tale about what happens when American privilege and insulation get turned inside out.

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HUNGRY TOWN

Kapcala, Jason West Virginia Univ. Press (288 pp.) $19.99 paper | March 1, 2022 978-1-952271-40-3 There appears to be no escape from the voracious appetite of this dead-end Rust Belt town, where the deserted mill symbolizes how little hope remains.

The Lodi, Ohio, of this debut novel offers nothing to do, nowhere to go, and few prospects for anything better. In setting at least, hard-boiled crime fiction doesn’t come much harder boiled than this. Kids get in trouble, because what else is there to do? The good cops try to battle the disillusionment that has corroded the ideals of the bad cops. There are two seemingly distinct plotlines that must inevitably intersect. Stefani Rieux is one of the best and most decorated cops in Ohio, though she has combated the casual and relentless sexism of her colleagues throughout her career. Her partner, Harry Mulqueen, has her

back and her trust. They also might be in love with each other, though neither is ready to admit it, perhaps partially because she is engaged to Harry’s slightly wealthier and more ambitious brother. They get called to the mill to investigate a disturbance, which involves kids shooting some amateur porn. Because of some heavy-handed treatment by another cop, one of the kids flees, jumps, and dies. There are repercussions for all of them and throughout the community. Around the same time, a young woman arrives in town after a series of foster homes have honed her survival instincts. She is fleeing from a grifter boyfriend and the mysterious disappearance of a young boy who had been left in her care. She finds a job at the local diner, which serves as a sanctuary for the regulars. Her story, the cops’ story, and the story of the dead kid and his survivors become enmeshed, but there can be no real resolution, not in a town like this.

There are plenty of stock characters here, but a literary flair lifts this above the routine procedural.

THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI

Khan, Uzma Aslam Deep Vellum (384 pp.) $26.95 | April 12, 2022 978-1-646-05164-9

Heaven or hell? Paradise or prison?

The Andaman Islands in the early 1940s— the setting for Khan’s fifth novel—are rife with paradox.

Years ago, in India, Haider Ali was convicted of a double homicide by the British government and transported to South Andaman Island, where he served out his jail term and was then given a hut to live in. His wife was sent with him and gave birth to two children. Now, at the height of World War II, the island’s residents are caught up in the battle between foreign empires, the British and the Japanese. The idyllic beauty of the islands conflicts with the horrors of prison life, indigence, and the ravages of war; the island is a microcosm of the cruel effects of British colonization, and Haider points out that “no Indian, not even one who had never been inside a jail, was free.” Nomi and Zee Ali, unlike their parents, are Local Borns coming of age within this complex geopolitical landscape. When the Japanese invade the island in 1942, the fragile existence the Alis have built in exile is shattered forever. In a historical novel that is both deeply researched and beautifully written, Khan shines light on a story little known outside the Andaman Islands and gives voice to the most vulnerable in this global narrative. At times, the first half of the novel can seem a bit disorienting with all of its figurative language, twists in chronology, and nuanced political situations. This may be intentional, though—a metaphor for the exiled inhabitants of the island who are ultimately portrayed as people without a country. Things pick up quickly in the second half as Nomi’s story hurtles to its heartbreaking but empowering conclusion.

Khan perfectly captures global history in all of its ironic and disorienting glory.

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“The aftereffects of the oppression of Tibetans across two continents and six decades power this domestic epic.” we measure the earth with our bodies

WE MEASURE THE EARTH WITH OUR BODIES

Lama, Tsering Yangzom Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $26.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-63557-641-2

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The aftereffects of the oppression of Tibetans across two continents and six decades power this domestic epic.

Lama’s debut novel opens in 1960, a decade after China’s invasion of Tibet and shortly after a quelled uprising and exile of the Dalai Lama.

Lhamo and Tenkyi, two sisters, are forced to leave for a refugee camp in Nepal and orphaned not long after. From there, the girls’ paths diverge: Lhamo remains in Nepal as the camp becomes a tent city, has a daughter, and attempts to maintain the spiritual traditions stamped out by the Chinese. Bookish Tenkyi, meanwhile, leaves for Canada and, by 2012, takes in Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, an aspiring scholar of Tibetan culture.

The non-Tibetan academics Dolma meets are knowledgeable

but also condescending, and Westerners’ callousness toward her heritage is symbolized by a statue of a “Nameless Saint” that Dolma believes is a stolen family heirloom. Dolma’s investigations bring her deeper into her family history, the ethically messy artifacts trade, and Tibetan spirituality, culminating in a trek to the edge of the country she’s exiled from. Lama’s delivery can be somewhat stiff—romantic interludes feel flat, and Dolma’s dialogue is sometimes sodden with explication of Tibetan political history and spiritual practice. But the novel thrives as a story about sisterhood, parenthood, and the heartpiercing feeling of exile. Dolma can’t bring herself to admire Toronto’s “Little Tibet” neighborhood, which she sees as a “copy of a copy of home. Another temporary stop in an endless journey.” (The frustrations are exemplified by Tenkyi’s dashed hopes of becoming a teacher; she works as a hotel housekeeper.)

And Lama wisely gives the novel multiple narrators—Lhamo, Tenkyi, Dolma, and Samphel, a childhood friend of the sisters— who capture the breadth of Tibetan culture and the range of emotional impacts of separation.

A smart, sweeping story about the abuse and transformation of a culture stripped of its country.

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“A Korean American doctor is forced into retirement and a confrontation with his past when a secret he’s kept about his family surfaces.” the evening hero

THE FOUNDLING

Leary, Ann Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner (336 pp.) $27.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-982120-38-2 Leary turns her mordant eye to the interplay of feminism, racism, and eugenics at a state institution for women deemed unfit to bear children in 1927.

The fictional Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Child Bearing Age is based on actual asylums where women deemed to have “moral feeblemindedness”—often because they defied social norms or their husbands—were involuntarily placed. Narrator Mary Engle comes to work as a secretary at the supposedly benevolent Nettleton when she’s not quite 18. Having lived in an orphanage until she was 12, Mary feels at home in the institutional setting, and she’s also deeply impressed with Nettleton’s superintendent,

Dr. Agnes Vogel, a woman who’s both a respected doctor—rare at the time—and a suffragette. Then Mary recognizes Lillian Faust, one of the inmates, as a slightly older girl she’d known at the orphanage; Lillian claims she doesn’t belong at Nettleton, saying her abusive husband stuck her there because she’d had a baby with her Black lover. Mary feels conflicted, her instinct to help Lillian escape at odds with her loyalty to Dr. Vogel. Mary is also having a romance with a muckraking Jewish journalist she doesn’t fully trust. Leary’s spot-on descriptions of small moments (learning the Charleston, drinking bootleg liquor) bring the Prohibition era to life. The murky politics and ethics of the time, hinting of parallels with today, are embodied in Dr. Vogel—a feminist committed to expanding women’s rights but also an ardent promoter of eugenics and populist fears (of Blacks, Jews, and Catholics, among others) and a despot who cares little about the Nettleton inmates’ welfare. But the novel’s heart centers on Mary’s moral coming-of-age. Not as naïve as she’d have others believe and possessing a strong survival instinct, Mary clings defensively to her belief in Dr. Vogel despite damning evidence because doing so suits her ambitions.

The reluctance with which Mary changes makes her eventual act of courage—against social conventions and despite the personal cost—all the more satisfying.

Leary’s wit complements her serious approach to historical and psychological issues in this thoroughly satisfying novel.

THE EVENING HERO

Lee, Marie Myung-Ok Simon & Schuster (448 pp.) $28.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-4767-3507-8 A Korean American doctor is forced into retirement and a confrontation with his past when a secret he’s kept about his family surfaces.

Yungman Kwak, who came to the U.S. after the Korean War, has been the only practicing obstetrician in Horse’s Breath, Minnesota, for decades. When the holding corporation that runs the hospital where he works closes its doors, he’s lucky to escape with his pension. His son, Einstein, who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and son, works for the same company and encourages his father to take a job in the emerging field of “Retailicine” to pass the time. Einstein fulfilled his parents’ traditional expectations of graduating from Harvard and becoming a doctor himself. But he’s also enamored with an entrepreneurial tech-bro ethos Yungman doesn’t understand. A good portion of the book is a biting critique of a predatory American health care system and the economy at large. As a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop, Lee has long been a leading voice in the literary world. She organizes this saga into five sections, each more gripping than the last, as the story travels through time and across continents to describe the many obstacles Yungman faces on his journey from a boy forced to flee his village to a medical student in Seoul competing to woo a charismatic classmate 28

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PORTRAIT OF A THIEF

to a man who leaves his home country for greater opportunity elsewhere. Lee delves deeper into Yungman’s roots and explores myriad aspects of Korean history, not least of which is an overdue accounting of the suffering America’s occupation and war caused. Yungman is a survivor, and the novel explores how the choices so many immigrants make, the secrets they keep, the risks they take, big and small, can lead to good fortune or failure. The novel also elucidates with remarkable feeling how war reverberates through a person’s lifetime—their body, mind, and memories—no matter how far in the past it may seem.

This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance.

Li, Grace D. Tiny Reparations (384 pp.) $26.00 | April 5, 2022 978-0-593-18473-8

A debut novel calls out institutionalized imperialism in the Western world.

While working at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, Will Chen, a senior majoring in art history, witnesses a robbery of Chinese art. He quickly finds himself caught up in the investigation. The problem: He’s actually running the heist. Will and four other Chinese American college students—Will’s sister and several acquaintances— have been contracted by China’s youngest billionaire, the CEO of a shadowy company called China Poly, to steal five bronze fountainheads from museums around the world and return them to China. These real-life fountainheads were looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace by the French and

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British in 1860 during the Second Opium War. The novel’s title, therefore, refers to not only the idealistic heisters, but also the art museums that knowingly purchased China’s stolen artifacts. If Will and his crew can recover all five pieces, they’ll split a $50 million payout. For each, the payout represents a release from the pressures they associate with Chinese diaspora identity: achieving financial success and making a name for themselves. The characters’ meditations on the loss and hybridity of their identity—never feeling fully at home in China or America—are spot-on. The problem is that these sections gum up the pace of the thriller. Moreover, Li’s characters are so educated, career driven, and emotionally aware that it’s hard to believe they would agree to jeopardize their futures by doing the heist in the first place. While restoring the fountainheads to China is ethically sound, why do they buy into this brawn-before-brain method of retribution? The characters themselves admit that most successful art repatriations have come about by orchestrated public outcry. Their nuanced views of their own lives do not extend to China’s politics or even the fact that they aren’t really working for

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China but rather for a corporation—China Poly. It’s as if the two are one and the same.

A compelling portrait of the Chinese diaspora experience that doesn’t quite land as either literary fiction or thriller.

A WOMAN OF ENDURANCE

Llanos-Figueroa, Dahlma Amistad/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | April 12, 2022 978-0-06-306222-1

An enslaved woman finds that human bonds sustain her even amid the cruelties of plantation life.

As a teenager in the early 19th century, Keera is kidnapped from her home in Yorubaland by slave traders. She is sold to the owner of Hacienda Paraiso, a plantation in Puerto Rico. He makes dual use of the women he enslaves: They work the sugar cane fields, and they are kept almost constantly pregnant, their babies taken away and sold right after birth. The novel opens with Keera, renamed Pola, making a desperate escape attempt after years of loss drive her close to madness.

She ends up on Hacienda Las Mercedes, another sugar cane plantation but one with somewhat more humane owners—Pola is astonished to see enslaved children living there with their families. She’s been savagely beaten and gang-raped, but she recovers under the care of Rufina, a curandera, and two other older women who, although they are enslaved, have a degree of autonomy because of their talents for curing, cooking, and directing the plantation’s workshop that produces lucrative fine needlework and dresses. When she’s well, she becomes a protégé of all three, assisting Rufina in her healing arts, learning to cook in Pastora’s fine kitchen, and serving as a cutter and helper to Tia Josefa’s needleworkers. Llanos-Figueroa draws a detailed picture of social hierarchy on the plantation, not just that of owners and the enslaved, but the status system among the workers, based on the kind of work they do, which is in turn based on colorism—darker-skinned people are assigned to the grueling tasks like cutting cane, while the lighter-skinned (often mixed race) people work in the big house, serving tea and sewing ball gowns. Pola, who is dark, becomes an exception to the rule and the object of resentment. She also becomes the object of desire of a strong, stoic worker named Simon, but her hatred of men stands between them. Her heart does warm for Chachita, an orphan girl she finds living on her own in the woods. Chachita fills the empty spot in Pola’s heart left by her stolen babies, but helping the child puts them both at risk. Llanos-Figueroa’s prose is lively, her characters vivid. The last part of the book loses steam when it shifts into romance mode, but it’s a moving and engaging tale.

An absorbing and complex novel shines a light on chattel slavery in Puerto Rico.

“An urgent call to action cloaked in a sprawling dystopian debut.” kraken calling

KRAKEN CALLING

McBay, Aric Seven Stories (448 pp.) $22.95 paper | May 31, 2022 978-1-64421-144-1 McBay intercuts two near-future timelines to illustrate the consequences of climate change complacency.

In 2028, despite a worldwide increase in crop failures, disease outbreaks, and natural disasters, the American government begins investing billions in the Industrial Revitalization Initiative—an effort to boost fuel production and job creation by circumventing the “crippling environmental and zoning legislation” hampering the economy. Grassroots groups and radical activist cells mount independent campaigns to prevent IRI projects from poisoning the water, soil, and air only to see their efforts quashed by lawsuits and police raids. Two decades later, in 2051, the United States is no more. Several Indigenous

communities and former states are now sovereign, the West Coast is a Chinese Protectorate, and portions of the Northeast and Great Lakes region are controlled by the York Emergency Authority—a fascist regime that pillages the land and steals from the poor to keep loyalists warm and fed. Dissenters are transferred to triage camps, where they’re enslaved, tortured, or experimented upon, so though opposition exists, revolution seems impossible. Farmers and homesteaders living outside Authority territory generally remain uninvolved to avoid trouble, but then rumors surface regarding YEA expansion through military invasion, forcing them to choose sides. Murky worldbuilding and an overlarge cast prolong the book’s setup and occasionally distract from the intricate (if heavy-handed) plot; on the balance, though, McBay’s passion combined with the tale’s escalating stakes and adrenaline-fueled conflict will reel in readers and hold them rapt.

An urgent call to action cloaked in a sprawling dystopian debut.

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NEW LITERARY FICTION From the publishers of The Marrow Thieves

MUD LILIES

WATER PROOF

by Indra Ramayan

by Aaron Bushkowsky

“a beautifully executed, street-smart, emotional tour de force” — Joel Thomas Hynes

“Bucolic settings, oddball characters, and bizarre twists” — Susie Moloney

cormorantbooks.com | Distributed in the US by Orca Books

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LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

McBrayer, Lauren Putnam (320 pp.) $26.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-33182-8

When stay-at-home mother Merit returns to work at a San Francisco architecture firm, she knows her life is about to change—she just doesn’t know how completely.

Upon meeting her new boss, Jane, a Danish architect two decades her senior with an almost magnetic candidness and wit, Merit is smitten. After years of staying home with a toddler and young baby, painting in her free time (or lack thereof), and maintaining a steady but predictable relationship with her college boyfriend–turned-husband, Cory, she’s ready for more—but she immediately feels the challenges of balancing career and family. Luckily, she has a supporter and confidante in Jane, whose chicness and impeccable taste inspire

Merit to look beyond what she’s always known and push for more. Weekly lunches and heart-to-heart coffees expand their friendship, which eventually transcends the professional and becomes one of the most important connections in both their lives. Of course, jobs and marriages don’t always last forever.

When Jane splits from her husband and starts her own firm, Merit realizes how essential this woman is in her life. Through small gestures and delicate language, the novel leads up to the revelation that Merit can no longer imagine anything less than a passionate, romantic connection with Jane. Told in the third person from Merit’s perspective, with a zippy pace, punchy dialogue, and beautifully crafted sentences that manage to capture the tenderness of longing and self-discovery, Merit and Jane’s love story feels both realistic and escapist, a queer romance done right.

Two women reexamine their lives in middle age, finding strength in desire and the unknown.

AN OLIVE GROVE IN ENDS

McKenzie, Moses Little, Brown (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 31, 2022 978-0-316-42014-3

Drug violence, religious strife, and a star-crossed romance play out in this Shakespearean tale set in a Bristol neighborhood of Caribbean and Somali immigrants called Ends.

Born into a large, “infamous” family of Pentecostal preachers with Jamaican roots, Sayon Hughes, the young narrator of this debut novel, is mostly raised by his grandmother alongside his many cousins. Along with them, he has inherited “generations of trauma passed on by relatives” and intensified by “a system intent on keeping us in place.” Drawn into the drug trade by his cousin Cuba, whom he considers his brother, Sayon is arrested for dealing and serves six months in jail. The sentence is one of many setbacks that threaten his relationship with the bright and upstanding Shona Jennings, a Baptist preacher’s daughter and aspiring record-label owner whom he and everyone else assumes he’ll marry. “If looks could kill she had a knife at my neck,” he says. After being pushed into a shocking act of violence, Sayon is so afraid of Shona’s finding out about the misdeed that he strikes a deal with her father, Pastor Lyle, who knows what happened but has his own dark secrets to keep. He won’t tell his daughter about the incident if Sayon promises to cut ties with Cuba and the rest of his family, repent, and become born again while living in the Jennings house. There’s no way that plan is going to work, but Pastor Lyle’s open hatred of Muslim Somalis ultimately has a positive effect in awakening Sayon to Islam, a religion that makes sense to him. One of the many notable achievements of this remarkable debut by the 23-yearold McKenzie is to sustain our affection for Sayon even when he is acting badly. “Childhood and innocence are only synonymous to the privileged,” he says. Recalling Zadie Smith’s masterpiece 32

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“Mary Shelley would give it two thumbs up.” the children on the hill

White Teeth (2000), published when she was 25, this is the most exciting U.K. debut in years.

A gritty coming-of-age tale for the ages.

THE CHILDREN ON THE HILL

McMahon, Jennifer Scout Press/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-1-9821-5395-3 Inspired by Frankenstein, McMahon presents a number of “monsters” linked to a psychiatric hospital in the 1970s— and one contemporary monster hunter who must confront her past.

In 1978, Vi and Eric live with their grandmother Dr. Helen Hildreth on the grounds of the Hillside Inn, a private hospital in Vermont that specializes in “a holistic, humanistic approach”

to healing the mentally ill. When Dr. Hildreth brings home a young patient named Iris, the children are both fascinated and repelled by her—especially the raised scars she hides under a hat. Iris has clearly survived some great trauma, and Vi agrees to help her grandmother by “treat[ing] [Iris] like a sister” and reporting on anything the girl reveals about her past. A curious child, Vi begins to wonder whether Iris might be the mysterious “Patient S” her grandmother has written about in secret case notes. Forty years later, Lizzy Shelley, a researcher and podcaster who has recently entered the public eye by consulting on the TV show Monsters Among Us, follows a lead that brings her close to a monster she’s been seeking for some time, a monster that abducts young girls while hiding behind local legends, a monster who is leading her back to Vermont and the Hillside Inn. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s infamous creation, the novel is a patchwork of narrative voices and styles, combining Vi, Eric, Iris, and Helen’s story in 1978; Lizzy’s search in 2019; excerpts from a tell-all book, The True Story of the Hillside Inn; excerpts from The Book of Monsters, created by the children in 1978; and the voice of the Monster herself. Though the question asked is

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“The acute observations are more remarkable still considering the author is herself a promising Oakland teen.” nightcrawling

not a new one—“Who is the real monster? The creature being made, or the one creating it?”—McMahon succeeds admirably in building real chills and a surprising twist, offering a satisfying addition to the Frankenstein-inspired oeuvre.

Mary Shelley would give it two thumbs up.

THE DARK FLOOD

Meyer, Deon Trans. by K.L. Seegers Atlantic Monthly (416 pp.) $27.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-8021-5960-1 A fast-moving South African police procedural translated from Afrikaans.

On a wintry July day, hotshot detective Capt. Benny Griessel and Capt.

Vaughn Cupido take an unauthorized jump into a cash-in-transit heist and wind up nearly getting

fired. They are both demoted to warrant officer and transferred from Cape Town to nearby Stellenbosch. There, they are assigned to investigate the disappearance of Calvyn “Callie” Wilhelm de Bruin, a computer genius and academic standout from a poor family. In a separate plotline, billionaire sociopath Jasper Boonstra approaches real estate agent Sandra Steenberg on an exclusive basis to sell his wine farm, Donkerdrif, in absolute secrecy. She desperately needs the commission to resolve the dire financial problems she is hiding from her beloved husband. Meanwhile, the detectives chase down clues about Callie as they reveal their own personal problems: Griessel is a sofar-so-good recovering alcoholic, while Cupido frets about his weight prior to his impending marriage—his fiancee has him eating “like a vege-fucka-tarian.” As we Yanks would watch our calorie intake, he must watch his kilojoules. “You can’t eat, and I can’t drink,” Griessel says. “We are the perfect partnership.”

American crime buffs might feel a light culture shock with this story. The translator leaves in enough Afrikaans words to flavor the narrative, but the reader will occasionally ponder their meanings, as in laaitie, stompie, and fokkit (OK, we can guess that last one). And then there’s “Smack me with a snot snoek.”

Eew. Griessel and Cupido are talented, brave, and funny. After Cupido eventually lays eyes on Steenberg, he notes that “she’s so hot, she gives me heat rash.” Unfortunately, Boonstra thinks so too, and therein lies a problem. What will Steenberg do to earn the commission she needs so badly? And will Callie be found alive? The plotlines are tightly knitted together, and the story ends with a nifty twist.

A well-crafted blend of suspense, culture, and humor.

Meyer is terrific.

NIGHTCRAWLING

Mottley, Leila Knopf (288 pp.) $28.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-593-31893-5

For Kiara Johnson, life in her family’s studio at Oakland’s Regal-Hi Apartments might be bleak—mattress on the floor, cackling crack addict next door, bags of dog poop bobbing in the complex swimming pool—but it’s all she knows, and she’ll do what it takes to preserve it.

Life has never been easy for Kiara. Her father died when she was 13, her mother attempted suicide and is now living in a halfway house, and Vernon, the landlord, has just doubled the rent.

Older brother Marcus thinks his nonexistent hip-hop skills will be their golden ticket, so it’s up to high school dropout Kiara to look for work at Walgreens, CVS, and finer stores everywhere, including the strip club where Marcus’ ex now tends bar. No dice—Ki’s only 17. A drunken coupling with a club patron that’s more non- than consensual yields her virginity, a quick $200, and a really bad idea—“just till I get us out of our rent debt.”

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it’s Kiara’s intense, anguished interiority rendered in lovely and poetic exposition that drives this evocation of an underclass and the disposable women just trying to survive. If the rich language occasionally tips toward impenetrable (“brushing against my skin like 7-Eleven slushies in the winter”?), so too does the hard trap Kiara can’t escape, the engineered tragedy of intersectional poverty, racism, and misogyny. The acute observations are more remarkable still considering the author is herself a promising Oakland teen.

Plot, shmot—the real story here is lush, immersive writing and a relentless reality that crushes a girl’s soul.

TAMARISK ROW

Murnane, Gerald And Other Stories (288 pp.) $18.00 paper | May 3, 2022 978-1-91150-836-6 This reissue of the Australian writer’s first novel suggests the seeds of his peculiar style as he describes a boy’s early life.

Nine-year-old Clement Killeaton looks at the new 1948 calendar in his kitchen, with its picture of Jesus and his parents during their flight from Bethlehem to Egypt. Clement and his parents live in Bassett, near Melbourne, the two Australian cities that pretty much mark the extent of their travels. In this debut, first published in 1974, Murnane establishes motifs that will recur in subsequent work, including Catholicism; horse racing; the effects of different landscapes; the play of light, especially through colored glass; and the play of perception and ideas through the mind. What little plot the book has concerns the

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efforts of Clement’s father to repeat the big win he had with a horse he trained. Gambling, borrowing money, and tensions over debt pervade the Killeaton household. Elsewhere, the narrative follows Clement, a clever loner who creates miniature racetracks and farms in his backyard, prepares elaborate horse races using marbles, copes with bullies, and tries to learn about sex from schoolgirls who generally delight in deflecting his efforts. Murnane is skilled at closely observed scenes and quite funny at times, but he will likely frustrate readers looking for conventional fiction. The chief pleasures here are his departures from convention, eccentricities of tone and diction, and flights of fancy, all trademarks of his later fiction. In one example, Clement is studying the light coming through his front door’s green-gold glass panel when the narration takes off for two pages of long, complex sentences about colorful creatures and oddly shaped cities and great journeys. It’s a glimpse of the writer finding his own path and an esthetic springboard in the parsing of the ripples and riffs of a boy’s imagination when not waylaid by sex and saints and bullies.

An essential entry in this exceptional writer’s corpus.

THE FAVOR

Murphy, Nora Minotaur (288 pp.) $27.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-2508-2242-0 Family attorney Murphy’s first novel is an unnerving feminist retake on Strang­ ers on a Train.

Even though they’ve never met, Leah Dawson and McKenna Hawkins have a lot in common. They’re “roughly the same height, with pretty features, blue eyes, and long blond hair.” They live in the same neighborhood in suburban Clarkstown, Maryland. They’re both childless, well-educated professionals—Leah’s an attorney, McKenna’s a pediatrician—married to even more successful colleagues. And both of their husbands are domestic abusers who seek to control every aspect of their lives. Psychiatrist Zackary Hawkins has pressed McKenna relentlessly to quit her job; divorce attorney Liam Dawson arranged for Leah to get fired from hers. As a result, Leah has withdrawn from most of her friendship groups, spent almost no time with her beloved mother and brother, and spiraled into nonstop drinking. One night, while she’s out walking around the neighborhood in lieu of doing the more strenuous exercise urged by Liam, who blames her illness a few months earlier for her miscarriage, she happens to pass the Hawkins house and sees a disturbing interaction between husband and wife. Fascinated and repelled, she keeps returning to look in on her counterpart until one fateful night when just looking isn’t enough. Leah’s intervention in to McKenna’s domestic crisis irreversibly changes the lives of both women even though the involvement of Detective Jordan Harrison, of the Clarkstown Police, doesn’t intensify the nightmare; it just transposes it into a new key and threatens to prolong it indefinitely.

Strikes an unsettling chord from the beginning and never lets go.

NERUDA ON THE PARK

Natera, Cleyvis Ballantine (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-593-35848-1

An upwardly mobile young Manhattan lawyer and her parents react to the gentrification of their Dominican neighborhood in Natera’s debut novel.

Since her Ivy League education and job in corporate law have already made her an outsider, early signs of gentrification don’t bother Luz, who lives in the (fictional) Nothar Park neighborhood of struggling immigrants with her mother, Eusebia, and policeman father, Vladimir. Then 29-year-old Luz is suddenly laid off by her firm for no apparent cause and begins questioning her identity as a woman-of-color careerist. Meanwhile, after 36

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“An experimental comic romp encompassing Wales, literature, and mommy issues.” condemned to cymru

bumping her head in a fall, Eusebia transforms into a determined crusader, organizing Nothar Park neighbors to scare the gentrifiers away by staging arranged crimes. Formerly nurturing Eusebia becomes detached and increasingly resentful as long suppressed grief and grievances surrounding Vladimir’s original decision to move to New York resurface. They swell once she learns that he has secretly been building a retirement home for them back in the Dominican Republic. News that their apartment building is going condo and offering renter buyouts exacerbates the schism in the marriage. Vladimir is thrilled, Eusebia furiously resistant. Caught between her parents, Luz is conflicted, especially since her new lover—White, rich, and entitled but endearingly vulnerable—turns out to be the gentrifying developer. While Luz finds herself increasingly drawn into his privileged orbit, she also discovers unexpectedly meaningful joy using her legal chops gratis to solve her neighbors’ immigration and insurance problems when their involvement in Eusebia’s “crimes” backfires. As Eusebia and Luz engage in a classic mother-daughter battle over control and independence, the juxtaposition of their confused inner lives shapes the plot with

unpredictable curves that confound the usual left-right political didactics. Instead, through these women, Natera plays with definitions of home and material and spiritual success, showing how the personal and political can become confused even when a cause, or a crime, seems straightforward.

A savvy melodrama, warmhearted and as astute as a lawyer’s brief.

CONDEMNED TO CYMRU

Nicholls, M.J. Sagging Meniscus Press (214 pp.) $20.00 paper | May 1, 2022 978-1-952386-24-4 An experimental comic romp encompassing Wales, literature, and mommy issues.

The setup for Nicholls’ novel is deliberately absurd: After a war between

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“Secrets, lies, and revenge permeate this taut international thriller.” two nights in lisbon

Liechtenstein and Wales, a group of Icelandic researchers have deployed the narrator, Magnus, to Wales to observe culture and society there. The novel is ostensibly a report of his findings, formatted as an abecedary, riffing on towns alphabetically. As a guide to Wales, it’s useless: Magnus writes that Sennybridge is home to the “World Interspecies Kissing Championships” and that the residents of Pen-y-clawdd “want more sheep.”

But most entries emphasize Magnus’ own emotional territory anyway: His badly acne-afflicted face, which he discusses in putrescent detail, his contemptuous mother, and his strained relationship with Katrin, a fellow “repulsive freak.” In between are scatalogical jokes, riffs on 1990s alt-rock acts (including a funny, furious rant about PJ Harvey) and multiple interlocutors with Pynchon-ian names (Isadora Pledge, Greg Impasse, Aaron Swanlopp). It doesn’t add up to much of a story, but then “story” isn’t really the point; indeed, another extended rant about the cozy comforts of Ian Rankin mysteries implies that “story” is a kind of antagonist. (As Magnus writes, “Neatness and pith have no place in fiction.”) So Nicholls uses the abecedary format and repeated tropes to create a sustained mood of angry/funny dissatisfaction with the world, romance, and literature as we know

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it. The novel’s conceit is in league with works by the likes of Gilbert Sorrentino or David Markson, but Nicholls’ brand of absurdism emphasizes comedy, which generally works. Sometimes Wales is the butt of the joke: Of Elan Village, he writes, “If this village was lacking a particular concept, that particular concept would be élan.” But Magnus’ target is usually himself, and the self-deprecating approach somehow makes the project go down easier.

Free-wheeling, unconventional fun.

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON

Pavone, Chris MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (448 pp.) $28.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-3746-0476-9 Secrets, lies, and revenge permeate this taut international thriller.

The recently married Ariel Pryce wakes up one morning in a Lisbon hotel room, expecting her husband, John Wright, to be in bed beside her. He isn’t. She looks for a note, tries calling him, queries hotel staff, all to no avail. She calls Portuguese police and then the American Embassy, who wonder at first if Ms. Pryce isn’t some crazy lady wasting everyone’s time. But a lot happens muito rápido: Ariel receives a ransom demand for 3 million euros to be delivered within 48 hours for John’s safe release by unknown captors. The CIA knows that John is not who he claims to be and thinks that Ariel “must be more important than she’s letting on.” For one thing, she changed her name from Laurel Turner in her adulthood. A nosy American reporter starts poking around.

Moving between past and present and among the viewpoints of Ariel and her several observers, Pavone uses short scenes to build fast-paced tension. Who is behind the kidnapping, and why? Ariel isn’t rich, and there’s only one way—blackmail—to come up with the dough. She and her extortee can inflict great harm on each other, and in fact one of them had a head start years earlier. So will she get the cash and rescue John? Then suspicious polícia stop Ariel from boarding a flight to the U.S., the CIA monitors her calls, at least one CIA observer ponders the value of having her whacked, and a relentless, coke-sniffing reporter is convinced he smells a blockbuster scoop. Surprise builds on surprise, and although the reader may sense where the complicated plot is headed, the twists keep coming. Two nights in Lisbon sound like a fun vacation as long as someone isn’t trying to uncover a horrible secret from your past.

This high-stakes drama grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.

WITH PREJUDICE

Peguero reveals how each individual’s past shapes the eventual verdict. An example: The foreman had an unpleasant encounter with a racist police officer that will influence his vote—though not in the way his fellow jurors suspect. This is a creative idea, but it comes at the expense of a compelling narrative focus.

Some characters are little more than sketches, while others are cartoonishly drawn, such as the prosecutor, who orders a detective to pretend to assault her because she needs to feel what the victim felt. Meanwhile, she’s sleeping with the reporter covering the trial, who offers to hold a big story for her (Peguero at least switches the usual genders of this cliché). The dialogue too often lapses into pronouncements during casual conversation. At one point a reporter actually says, “I am in the business of seeking out truth.” Peguero eventually wrestles the story back to the question of Soto’s guilt or innocence, but by then the damage is done. Addressing racism and injustice in the U.S. legal system is admirable, but the author too often forgets what makes a legal thriller work.

An ambitious legal thriller about racism and injustice that loses its focus.

Peguero, Robin Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $28.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-5387-0628-2

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A murder trial in Miami reveals ugly secrets in the criminal justice system.

Told mostly through courtroom dialogue and flashbacks, this debut legal thriller follows the trial of Gabriel Soto, who has been charged with killing a woman he met in a Miami bar. But this book has higher ambitions, too. A former homicide prosecutor and current congressional investigative counsel, author Peguero wants to shine a light on the inequities and prejudices that influence the outcome of every trial. The story unfolds from the points of view of myriad characters: the attorneys using every trick they can to secure a courtroom victory; the jurors who must decide Soto’s fate; and the witnesses and experts called to testify, who come to the stand with their own secrets and biases. From the start,

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BENEFIT

Phillips, Siobhan Bellevue Literary Press (320 pp.) $17.99 paper | April 19, 2022 978-1-942658-99-3 A struggling American academic reluctantly reunites with members of her Oxford graduate-fellowship cohort.

Laura Graham’s life is not going well in the fall of 2011: She wasn’t rehired for her adjunct teaching position at a women’s college near Boston, hasn’t found a permanent tenuretrack position, and is stalled on an essay she’s writing about Henry James. Strapped for money, she moves back home with her mother and takes a contract job writing the history of the Weatherfield Foundation, which sponsored the Oxford fellowship for “students of promise and ambition” she’d won 10 years earlier. Working on this essay, which will be used as part of a celebration of the foundation, takes Laura on two different

journeys: First, she embarks on a historical excavation of the sugar business that created the fortune behind the prestigious fellowships, including its involvement in slavery, war, and exploitation; and second, she takes a number of trips around New England to meet up with the former members of her fellowship cohort, all much more successful than her, if also intolerably shallow. Author Phillips was a Rhodes scholar; her depictions of Laura’s research, social life, and failed job search highlight the toxicity and ethical gaps that underlie much of modern academia and philanthropy. The novel plays with structure and style, which slows the momentum of the narrative considerably at first. The second half of the novel, in which Laura begins to confront the expectations and falsity of the foundation’s work and her friends, is more absorbing in its forcefulness.

An uneven debut novel with striking social commentary.

WHEN SHE DREAMS

Quick, Amanda Berkley (320 pp.) $28.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-33778-3

The assistant to a newspaper agony aunt hires a gumshoe to track down a blackmailer only to find they’ve waded into the thick of murder in 1930s California.

In the latest in the Burning Cove series, set in a seaside resort town, nascent novelist and lucid dreamer Maggie Lodge seeks out PI Sam Sage so he can locate the person who’s threatening her employer. A former cop who lost his job for arresting someone from a wealthy family, Sam is hoping to build his fledgling business and takes on Maggie’s case despite his sense that the dame is hiding something.

Soon after, he’s pretending to be her research assistant as they follow a lead to a conference that claims to help people build their psychic powers. Are the conveners the ones who sent the blackmail note, or are they also being blackmailed while running a long con? When an attendee is found dead the first evening, just as Maggie encounters an unpleasant figure from her own past, Maggie and Sam must figure out if the case has gone from petty crime to murder or if it started with another homicide a few years ago. Complicating the situation is the presence of the dream researcher who is obsessed with Maggie’s potential for lucid dreaming. Bodies pile up even as she and Sam embark on an intimate relationship in addition to their professional one. Quick calls on her favorite character types in her latest novel: There’s the intrepid heroine and the cynical hero who thaws after the unpredictable partnership with her penetrates his personal barriers. The author’s long-standing interest in paranormal phenomenon like ESP propels the plot toward the eventual discovery of the murderer. There aren’t a lot of surprises for the regular Quick reader, but the metanarrative commentary about storytelling and genre plus the prewar West Coast glamour and noirlike incidents make for an updated gothic with some appeal.

An untaxing period-piece mystery that softens the hardboiled detective genre with romance.

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“Both woman and dolphins come to vivid life in this fascinating and beautifully realized novel.” the dolphin house

HIDDEN PICTURES

and ghastly—Blum is conducting physical research on the dolphins, after all—but the relationship between Cora and the mammals is joyfully detailed and a pleasure to follow. Schulman builds a lovely picture of the growth of mutual trust and enjoyment among the dolphins and Cora as she works to train the sea mammals to communicate linguistically with humans. Given the time frame, casual sexism is par for the course on the part of Blum and his male colleagues. The men are most likely to be found glued to the television, iced cocktails in hand, but that just leaves Cora more space to interact with the dolphins. She develops Blum’s research processes, educates herself by reading Blum’s science books, and even challenges him. Then, when Cora moves into a purpose-built homearium with one of the dolphins, the situation takes an intriguing turn.

Both woman and dolphins come to vivid life in this fascinating and beautifully realized novel.

Rekulak, Jason Illus. by Will Staehle & Doogie Horner Flatiron Books (384 pp.) $27.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-250-81934-5

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A disturbing household secret has far-reaching consequences in this dark, unusual ghost story.

Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab and recovering from a recent tragedy, has taken a job as a nanny for an affluent couple living in the upscale suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey, when a series of strange events start to make her (and her employers) question her own sanity. Teddy, the precocious and shy 5-year-old boy she’s charged with watching, seems to be haunted by a ghost who channels his body to draw pictures that are far too complex and well formed for such a young child. At first, these drawings are rather typical: rabbits, hot air balloons, trees. But then the illustrations take a dark turn, showcasing the details of a gruesome murder; the inclusion of the drawings, which start out as stick figures and grow increasingly more disturbing and sophisticated, brings the reader right into the story. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory must solve the mystery of the house’s grizzly past before it’s too late. Rekulak does a great job with character development: Mallory, who narrates in the first person, has an engaging voice; the Maxwells’ slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child.

It’s almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.

THE DOLPHIN HOUSE

Schulman, Audrey Europa Editions (320 pp.) $27.00 | April 5, 2022 978-1-60945-784-6

A woman navigates life in 1960s America, finding her way while interacting with dolphins in a scientific-research project.

In 1965, hearing-impaired Cora is a waitress in a Florida club, one in which her tight-fitting bunny costume includes ears and a tail. While using her earnings to pay off new hearing aids that “masqueraded as cat-eye glasses,” Cora manages a tricky situation nicely until, that is, one man’s wandering hands wander a little too far. Then, inspired by a sign for South Pacific, she buys a one-way ticket to St. Thomas, where she crosses paths with Dr. Blum, a research scientist studying dolphins. In the water with the mammals, Cora discovers a wonderful new angle to her world: she can “hear” the dolphins spectacularly underwater—and they respond to her, too. As she wins their trust, the scene is set for a tale that’s both inspiring |

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M Son of the Century

Scurati, Antonio Trans. by Anne Milano Appel Harper/HarperCollins (784 pp.) $35.00 | April 5, 2022 978-0-06-295-611-8 A brilliant, sprawling, polyvocal tale of the rise of Benito Mussolini in the immediate aftermath of World War I. “We are a populace of ex-soldiers, a humanity of survivors, of dregs.” So, at the beginning of this volume—the first of a projected trilogy—thinks Mussolini, who has gathered some hundred veterans of terrible alpine battles like Caporetto (“an army of a million soldiers destroyed in a weekend”) to seize state power. Mussolini, writes Scurati, shifting to third-person narration, is intelligent, kind to his friends, cruel to his enemies, and “not content with second place.” He is also a master of disguising his true intentions, capable of

both carrying on an affair with a Jewish lover and then aligning himself with the rising antisemitic Nazi movement in Germany.

Scurati draws on a vast dramatis personae to tell Mussolini’s story, among its number are Enzo Ferrari, the automaker and early ally, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, the dandy and poet whose “insatiable desire for female conquests becomes a desire for territorial expansion.” But always at the center is Mussolini, who envisions that “fascism will complete the nationalization of Italians,” turning them away from their attachment to towns and regions to behold the empire they are about to secure on the faraway Horn of Africa. Scurati gives Mussolini his theatrically blowhard moments (“jutting his neck out, he clenches his jaw and searches for breathable air, his already nearly bald cranium tilted up to the sky”), but he makes clear that Mussolini and his militias are deadly serious about killing their enemies— Scurati’s account of the murder of socialist legislator Giacomo Matteotti may remind readers of the most brutal moments of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900—and acquiring absolute, uncontested power. Given the recent drift of so many parliamentary and democratic nations toward authoritarianism, Scurati’s book could not be more timely, and it’s a superb exercise in blending historical fact and literary imagination.

A masterwork of modern Italian literature that will leave readers eager for more.

METROPOLIS

Shapiro, B.A. Algonquin (368 pp.) $27.95 | May 17, 2022 978-1-61620-958-2 An eclectic cast of characters converges in a self-storage warehouse where crime lurks in every unit.

“Metropolis” is the name of a seedy self-storage facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several renters are hiding more than old furniture and paperwork. Liddy, a wealthy housewife with a violent husband, spends drug-fueled afternoons in a unit stuffed with her children’s old toys. Jason, a lawyer fired from his prestigious firm and left by his wife, hangs a shingle outside his unit and practices law from a makeshift office inside. Marta, a brilliant Venezuelan graduate student whose visa has been revoked, lives in her unit while on the run from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The building’s owner, Zach, and his employee, Rose, look the other way when renters break the law by occupying units intended for inanimate objects. These arrangements might have continued peacefully were it not for a violent incident, foreshadowed on the first page, in which a man is seriously injured in the building’s elevator shaft. Through chapters narrated from the perspectives of several characters, the story of the incident—and its aftermath—unfolds slowly. Unfortunately, the characters are wooden, making it difficult to invest in their demise or salvation. The attempt to create a racially diverse cast flounders due to careless reliance on stereotypes. Black characters, including 42

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GEIGER

Jason, consistently curse more than White characters, both in unconvincing dialogue and in interior monologue. Marta, the undocumented immigrant, has little storyline beyond her panicked desire to stay in America. A snappy plot or spirited sentences might partially salvage the stock characters, but this novel has neither.

Boston readers might enjoy the close attention to city landmarks, but there’s not much else to recommend this thriller.

Skördeman, Gustaf Trans. by Ian Giles Grand Central Publishing (432 pp.) $28.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-5387-5437-5 The Cold War threatens to rise from the dead in this fast-paced Swedish spy thriller.

Grandparents Stellan and Agneta Broman have been married for almost 50 apparently idyllic years. Stellan is a widely beloved television personality. But one night, Agneta receives a brief phone call, shoots her 80-year-old husband in the back of the head, and disappears into the night. Police think at first that the retired celebrity’s murder might simply be a botched burglary, but police officer Sara Nowak believes that Stellan has been targeted. Then, on beginning to learn about his past, investigators think it may be the “beginning of a much bigger chain of events.”

YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A Shipstead, Maggie Knopf (272 pp.) $27.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-525-65699-9

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Ten stories from the apprenticeship of a novelist.

Last year, Shipstead published Great Circle, an ambitious novel far more complex than her earlier work. This collection of short stories, mostly written in grad school at the Iowa Writers Workshop and all previously published in literary journals, takes us backward rather than forward. Experimenting with a range of styles, subject matter, and effects, the collection is uneven. Shipstead was still in her 20s when the first story, “The Cowboy Tango,” was selected by Richard Russo for Best American Short Stories 2010. A slow-burn love triangle set on a dude ranch in Montana, its unusual female protagonist could be seen as a foremother of the aviatrix in Great Circle, with her difficult childhood, independence, capability, and powerful internal compass. Similarly, the narrator of the title story seems a prototype of the other main character of Great Circle, a troubled young movie star. “I’m told I went catrastic for the first time in 1984, when Jerome Shin (yes, the director) took me up to my bathroom—my gaudy childhood bathroom with the big pink Jacuzzi and mirrors on all four walls—and cut me my first line and asked me to hold his balls while he jerked off.” Catrastic is a neologism from a Scientology-like cult the narrator becomes involved with, marrying the megastar who is its most famous acolyte. And catrastic? It’s when degradons damage your Esteem, probably because you’ve gotten involved with a Usurper. Weirdly, this satire contains a plotline about a plane carrying home the body of a young veteran (our movie star is in seat 10A), an element which does not fully succeed. However, good writing and funny observations about sex are found throughout. From “Backcountry”: “Back in her teens, Ingrid had learned that ejaculation sometimes emptied men of a certain animating humanity. The energies they used to attract women in the first place—attentiveness, empathy, vitality—were commandeered and diverted by their bodies toward the essential project of replenishing their testicles, and they became lumpen and taciturn.”

Not the next novel we were waiting for.

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They fear that the killer or killers may have kidnapped Agneta.

Poor Stellan. He’d been “Sweden’s playful uncle….It was like someone murdering Santa Claus.” Readers learn long before the authorities do that Agneta is on a mission and has waited for decades to receive the signal to kill this man she pretended to love. It’s a complex plot wherein a “gang of senile old spies” regret the demise of the Cold War, particularly the fall of East Germany. Lurking in the shadows is the mysterious Abu Rasil, who wants to be remembered as the greatest terrorist ever. As it happens, Stellan had a couple of secret lives unknown to his adoring public. He had once been an informal collaborator for the Stasi, the East German security service. Perhaps Stellan was Geiger, the man who had ruined so many Swedish lives. And to put it delicately, Stellan had disturbing relationships with young girls. Decades ago, Sara’s mother used to clean house for the Bromans, and Sara had been the occasional and socially unequal playmate of their daughters. As tension builds, people die in bursts of bombs and profanity. Has the Cold War never really ended? Sara’s boss tries to take her off the case, but naturally that doesn’t stop her. There is plenty of excitement right up to the end. All seems lost until, like a deus ex machina, the solution appears.

Dark, violent, and engrossing but with a contrived ending.

THE WISE WOMEN

Sorell, Gina Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | April 5, 2022 978-0-06-311-184-4 When misfortune finds the three women of the Wise family, they are forced to wise up to their historic dysfunction.

It begins with the dissolution of Clementine Wise’s marriage, which comes with a heap of debt and threatens the careful life she’s built for her 6-year-old son. Clementine’s being in trouble is a call to action for her older sister, Barb, though Barb has overleveraged herself financially as well as in the volume of support she is able to give her loved ones and business associates. Swooping in to rescue them both is their mother, Wendy, a storied advice columnist recently edged out of her magazine gig and fresh into her third marriage. Though she initially seems like a narcissist bent on making up for past neglect, Wendy proves to be startlingly open-minded and humorously unpredictable in her meddling (one iffy but pivotal plot thread has her bonding with an Instagram influencer). The questions are: Will Barb forgive her mother for leaving her to largely raise Clementine in the wake of their father’s untimely death? Will Clementine develop a backbone and pave her own way rather than doing what the other Wise women think is best for her? The answers are unsurprising. While the novel begins with lots of human complexity and daily-life detail, characters are soon giving honest, heartfelt speeches about changing their lifelong attitudes, and everyone is taking the sage advice of everyone else. The characters are 44

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warm and quirky in an enjoyably familiar way, and the settings— mostly a couple of lower-key White neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens—are nicely detailed.

With tidy resolutions, this novel doesn’t pack the punch of some of its peers, but it’s a fine addition to the collection.

HAPPY FOR YOU

Stanford, Claire Viking (256 pp.) $27.00 | April 19, 2022 978-0-59-329826-8 A woman in tech grapples with doubts about her profession, relationship, and family while working on a project that aims to quantify happiness.

Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto is 31 when she takes a leave of absence from her philosophy Ph.D. program to work at “the third-mostpopular internet company,” where she and two co-workers are asked to develop a prototype for the self-assessment of happiness. From Evelyn’s perspective, everyone around her is better than her at being happy, from her loving boyfriend, Jamie, to her trend-forecasting college best friend, Sharky, to her father, who has his first serious girlfriend since Evelyn’s mother died almost 20 years ago. Evelyn’s mother was White and Jewish, and her father is Japanese, as is Kumiko, his girlfriend, and Evelyn’s biracial identity informs her thoughts and interactions throughout the novel. Evelyn is dogged by ambivalence in every aspect of her life, and her uncertainty raises doubts in her new boss, Dr. Luce, who unfailingly believes in the happiness project. Her vacillations come to a head when Jamie asks her to marry him—she responds, “I don’t know.” While Evelyn is considering Jamie’s proposal, she gets pregnant and, after much thought, decides to keep the baby. Punctuating these events are questions from JOYFULL, the happiness-monitoring app that Evelyn’s team helped create. The app’s questions are suspiciously specific, creating a Greek chorus–like effect that prompts Evelyn to reflect on her relationship with her parents, her career, and what it means, or would mean, for her to be happy. Evelyn’s constant ambivalence about every aspect of her life is frustrating, and she can feel like a muted and flat protagonist. She possesses an acute awareness of racial dynamics, though, and the myriad ways her biracial identity causes friction throughout the novel provide moments of wit and insight. An emotional twist in the later chapters ups the stakes and gives the reader a reason to stay engaged.

A rumination on modern happiness that rewards patient readers in the end.

“Emotional upsets and surprises are interleaved with eccentricity in this latest slice of offbeat Englishness.” one day i shall astonish the world

ONE DAY I SHALL ASTONISH THE WORLD

Susan meet while she’s studying English at the University of Rutland while holding down a Saturday job at the Pin Cushion, a haberdashery owned by the Pavlous, Norma’s parents. But over the years, the marriage devolves into something “that neither Roy or I seem to care about one jot,” while Honey grows into an unusual child, although devoted and loyal to Grace, the surprise sister Roy turns out to have fathered with his landlady before meeting Susan. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on in the community, some of them sexual, and Norma becomes increasingly less reliable as she achieves enviable-seeming successes, professionally and personally. When Norma takes as her second husband the university’s vice chancellor, for whom Susan works, the women’s friendship becomes thornier still, as Norma blocks Susan’s plans and steals her ideas. But is all what it seems? Stibbe’s new novel, with its long time span and variable, sometimes chilly relationships, offers a cooler vision than some of her earlier works, but the trademark tone, humor, nostalgic detail, and skewed perspective remain as reliably diverting as ever.

Emotional upsets and surprises are interleaved with eccentricity in this latest slice of offbeat Englishness.

Stibbe, Nina Little, Brown (384 pp.) $27.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-316-43034-0

Susan Faye Warren—wife, mother, worker, and friend—shares the events of her adult life, interspersed with much deadpan detail, in Stibbe’s latest comic/ domestic dispatch.

With her singular voice and deep roots in the English psyche, Stibbe has carved out a niche for oddball female narrators set against quirky provincial settings. Her fourth novel follows this pattern, tracing Susan’s interior and exterior landscapes as she traverses three decades of marriage to Roy, her parenting of their daughter, Honey, and accounts of an on/off friendship with the unpredictable Norma. The setting is England’s smallest county, Rutland, specifically the town of Brankham, where Roy and

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“This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.” mecca

MECCA

Straight, Susan Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $28.00 | March 15, 2022 978-0-3746-0451-6 Is Susan Straight the bard of Southern California literature?

In her eighth novel—she has also written a memoir and a collection of linked stories as well as a book for young readers—the author stakes her claim. A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work, it begins (how could it not?) on the freeway, “a Thursday in October,” a highway patrol officer named Johnny Frias tells us. “Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other.” Johnny is one of several protagonists in Straight’s novel, which flows from first to third person and life to life as if to embody the instability of the region it evokes. The notion of Southern California as elusive, beset by wind and traffic, is hardly a new one; it infuses the work of writers such as Joan Didion and Carolyn See. Straight, however, is operating in a different register, one attuned less to Los Angeles than to the sprawl that surrounds it, extending into the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley. Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply. Here, that means not only Johnny, but also Ximena, an undocumented domestic worker, and Matelasse, whose husband leaves her with two young sons not long before the Covid-19 pandemic begins. “Black acres of sandy field,” Straight describes the landscape, “the corral where his grandfather’s horses and the bull named Coalmine used to live. Then the arroyo, and the foothills.”

This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.

SMALL ODYSSEYS Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories

Ed. by Tinti, Hannah Algonquin (336 pp.) $19.95 paper | March 15, 2022 978-1-64375-199-3

A wide-ranging anthology of original stories from some of today’s top authors.

If you’re a public radio stan and lover of fiction, you’ve likely heard of “Selected Shorts,” the program that features actors performing readings of a variety of short stories. Among the fans of the show is novelist Tinti, who edits this anthology sponsored by the program.

The 35 original stories here are divided into three sections— “Departures,” “Journeys,” and “New Worlds”—and each has its 46

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share of delights. The first section starts off with Luis Alberto Urrea’s wonderful “The King of Bread,” about a fourth grade boy coping with the loss of his mother, who’s been forced by immigration authorities to leave the U.S. He navigates his relationship with his father, whose demeanor is “jolly rage,” with trepidation and care; both miss their family member but react to her leaving very differently. It’s a lovely, understated story and an excellent introduction to the anthology. The highlight of the second section is Omar El Akkad’s “A Survey of Recent American Happenings Told Through Six Commercials for the Tennyson ClearJet Premium Touchless Bidet,” a hilarious take on capitalism in the age of constant disaster. (“Tennyson Bidets: Life is but a grotesque carnival of unbearable pain,” ends one such commercial.)

Addressing the Covid-19 pandemic directly is Victor LaValle in “Bedtime Story,” which sees a father and son in New York adjusting to life under quarantine. “The city that never sleeps,” the father reflects ruefully. “Well, that’s officially bullshit now.” The 8-year-old boy is suffering from depression and misses his mom, who’s left temporarily to take care of her own sick mother. The child insists his dad take him “camping”—in the hallway of their apartment building. The story ends on a hopeful note; like all of LaValle’s work, it’s beautiful and surprising. Anthologies like this are hard to pull off; not every story is going to land with every reader. But Tinti does a good job curating this one—thematically, it makes sense; the lineup is diverse; and it serves as a good introduction for readers looking for their next favorite fiction writer.

Well-curated, eclectic, and thoughtful.

THE GOOD LEFT UNDONE

Trigiani, Adriana Dutton (448 pp.) $28.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-18332-8

In the Italian coastal town of Viareggio, Matelda Cabrelli Roffo is at the last stage of her life, but the matriarch still has decades’ worth of family stories to share.

On the eve of her 81st birthday, Matelda offers her 25-year-old granddaughter Anina the contents of her jewelry case, a family tradition for brides-to-be. Of course, Anina selects the one item Matelda isn’t ready to part with: a jewel-encrusted watch with a curiously upside-down facade. Matelda’s attachment to the treasure—a rare sentiment in the Cabrelli family of jewelers—leads to questions about its origins and the unfolding of a family timeline Anina’s never heard. In chapters alternating between the present and the nine decades leading up to Matelda’s demurring, the Cabrelli family history is deftly illustrated through a long chain of strong women.

At just 11 years old, Matelda’s mother, Domenica Cabrelli, witnesses her best friend, Silvio, banished from Viareggio for being a fatherless troublemaker. Years later, Domenica, now a nurse, is exiled herself when the Catholic Church learns she’s offered family planning advice to a young mother in distress. She lands in a convent in Scotland, where she continues nursing and plans

to join the nunnery. Conveniently, love interrupts, and Domenica’s marriage to a Scottish naval captain derails her plans, as does Italy’s involvement in the war. With young Matelda in tow, Domenica longs for her hometown of Viareggio, a seaside paradise elderly Matelda cherishes until her last breath. Upon learning about the Cabrelli family struggles, sacrifices, and persistence, Anina changes, reconsidering the meaning of strength, family, and the types of love worth sacrificing for. Trigiani’s adept character portrayals, deliciously described settings, and carefully considered details build momentum and intrigue from beginning to end.

An epic multigenerational love story sweeping across coastal Italy, Southern France, and Scotland.

THE TOWN OF BABYLON

Varela, Alejandro Astra House (320 pp.) $27.00 | March 22, 2022 978-1-662-60103-3

Weir, John Red Hen Press (224 pp.) $16.95 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-63628-029-5 Weir’s linked collection of bittersweet, often witty stories elucidates almost 50 years in the life of a gay White man in the U.S., from enduring school taunts in 1970s New Jersey to experiencing the horrors of AIDS to that epidemic’s continuing reverberations for a scarred (and mostly HIV-positive) generation.

The first of the book’s three parts, harrowing and sometimes bitingly funny, centers on a narrator who’s the caretaker, nursemaid, and faithful sidekick to a friend—not a lover, but a beloved—who’s dying. Watching that friend waste away, enduring his hostile outbursts and caustic jokes, indulging his whims: Weir writes powerfully and with nuance about what it’s like to grieve someone into the grave and beyond and what it’s like to have that grief haunted and needled at and undermined, in a way, by how unpleasant and hateful the beloved became as his health deteriorated. The second section, “Long-Term Survivors,” follows this same narrator—his name is John Weir, a stratagem that sometimes seems clever but that can also feel coy—through the next 30 years. Two stories in this section feature his mother. A standout is “Humoresque,” in which the narrator, now in his 50s, has come down to Pennsylvania to check on his octogenarian mom, just out of the hospital after a brain bleed she wasn’t expected to recover from. She’s the kind of person often called indomitable, which (accurately) makes her seem formidable in the way of a battleship or a frosty screen idol; the narrator describes her as “a movie star without a movie to star in.” Their impatient, affectionate banter—she’s another big personality to be helpmeet to, co-star with, the narrator’s preferred (if also resented) role—is lovely and persuasive, and Weir uses it to illuminate what’s going on in the narrator’s love life; he’s here in part, as his perceptive mother intuits, to claim her car so he can drive north to pursue another of his doomed, barely or nonphysical love affairs with another inaccessible man.

Sharp, elegiac, angry, funny stories with a searing loneliness often just underneath the surface.

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A visit to his suburban hometown prompts a series of reckonings for Andres, a gay Latinx man.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Andres, a professor of public health, exiled himself from Babylon—whose exact location debut author Varela leaves pointedly vague. Now, with his father recovering from surgery and his husband on a business trip in Namibia, he’s reluctantly returned. His marriage has been in crisis since he discovered his husband’s infidelity, and, back home in Babylon, he’s haunted by memories of his late brother, Henry.

With few distractions besides his parents, immigrants who pride themselves on their hard work and unconditional love for their children, he decides to attend his 20th high school reunion, though not without some hesitation. His classmates represent, for Andres, everything he ran away from and swore never to return to: the drudgery of the White working class. Here a catalog of backstories unfolds in detail that is sometimes exhaustive and unnecessary. Andres meets Jeremy, a crush from high school with whom he’d become close friends and developed a romance.

There’s also Paul, whose scrawniness—in Andres’ memory—was such a source of insecurity that he overcompensated by being loud and obnoxious and surly. Paul is now the minister of a storefront church, and Andres has not let go of his suspicion that he was responsible for a hate crime that killed a local gay man. The pressure on his marriage increases as Andres continues to see Jeremy after the reunion and as his past muddles any picture he’d had of his future. The secondary characters do have some life to them, but they sometimes feel like they’re stuck in the tropes Andres has cast them in. And while the novel’s achievement lies in its simultaneous depth and expansiveness—its huge ensemble of characters, the precision with which the landscape and culture of Andres’ hometown are rendered—it is sometimes overwritten, lapsing into heavy-handed social and political observation that falls short of revelation.

A sprawling, sometimes muddled bildungsroman.

YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME

WHEN WE FELL APART

Wiley, Soon Dutton (368 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-18514-8

Four young people with varied backgrounds struggle for acceptance in Seoul, one of them with tragic results.

Under great pressure from her demanding military father, Yu-jin, a sensitive girl from the southern part of |

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South Korea, gains acceptance to a prestigious all-girls college in Seoul. She secretly hopes to “reinvent [her]self, start anew” in the dazzling big city, where she will discover her passion for filmmaking. But after her parents move to the capital and her father is named National Minister of Defense, she remains under close scrutiny. That creates big problems for her after she falls for So-ra, a strong-willed female classmate who wants to be open about their romance. To divert (literal) spying eyes, Yujin dates Min, a likable biracial Korean American who moved to Seoul from Los Angeles as a Samsung consultant in hopes of finding “some sense of belonging.” Then there is the stylish Misaki, a Japanese outsider from a wealthy family whom Yu-jin and So-ra invite to be their roommate—only to coldly ignore her—as another means of hiding the true nature of their relationship. All permutations of this four-way connection unfold dramatically after Yu-jin is found dead of an apparent suicide.

In an unusual format, the story is told in alternating chapters by Min (through the third person) as he investigates Yu-jin’s death under threat from government operatives, and by Yu-jin, who narrates the events leading up to her death. Wiley, a first-time novelist, tends to explain his characters’ needs and motivations.

But fueled by deep feeling and a powerful sense of place, the book gains real emotional traction in capturing the despair of striving individuals pushed to the margins by conformist norms.

A dark coming-of-age tale in the form of a mystery.

GARDEN VARIETY

Wilhelmi, Christy Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $16.99 paper | March 29, 2022 978-0-06-311348-0 With love, understanding, and attention, a Los Angeles woman blossoms— much like her beloved community garden.

The Vista Mar Community Garden has been a staple of the neighborhood for more than 30 years. Overlooking the ocean and its glorious sunsets, the seven acres are home to individual plots that local residents can pay a nominal fee to cultivate. Board meetings, potlucks, the sharing of recipes, bickering, and the ebb and flow of relationships all take place as the seasons change and crops grow, are harvested, and new crops are planted. Underlying it all is the cantankerous relationship the gardeners have with a longtime homeowner across the street, Kurt Arnold, who detests the way the garden looks, despoiling his ocean view and bringing the wrong kind of people to his neighborhood. Lizzie, a section rep tasked with keeping order, explaining the rules and regulations, and writing citations, has created barriers in her life between herself and others, her work, and her time in the garden. After a failed relationship with a fellow gardener, she thinks her walls are stronger than ever—until she realizes they aren’t. Jared is a new gardener, a jack-of-all-trades who’s just looking for something fun and new to do. Ralph is a shy, awkward programmer who’s been a member for years. Ned, 48

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a retired engineer, has been the backbone of the garden for decades, repairing what needs repair and overseeing the space as the garden master. Mary, divorced with grandchildren, is the garden’s current president, and Bernice, a longtime gardener, has aspirations to become president. Author Wilhelmi has created a story that focuses closely on the seasonality of the crops as well as the choices and actions of Lizzie and a core group of gardeners as the very existence of their beloved place is thrown into question.

A gentle story that unfolds through the seasons as love blossoms, crops are grown, and a community garden is protected.

THE ODYSSEY

Williams, Lara Zando (240 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-1-63893-006-8 Aboard a luxury cruise ship, a woman is compelled to confront her past—and embrace her flaws.

“What you need to understand is that everything is coming out of and going into nothingness. That is the principle of wabi sabi,” Ingrid, the protagonist of Williams’ peculiar novel, is told by Keith, her boss aboard the vast luxury cruise liner on which she has lived and worked for the past five years, in the book’s opening passage. Williams has predicated the book’s plot on this idea of inevitable decay and deterioration, the acceptance (even the acceleration) of imperfection—yet elements of the story, like the concept behind it, can be challenging to embrace. For somewhat perplexing reasons, Ingrid has left her cozy bourgeois life with a loyal, loving husband, as well her well-appointed home and all her clothes and belongings, to move, with only the most minimal possessions, into a tiny room on a cruise ship and rotate through menial jobs, such as gift shop worker and manicure parlor manager. When she is at sea and not at work, Ingrid primarily spends her time peering moonily out through the small, sealed porthole in her tiny room or meeting up with her two friends, Mia and Ezra—a sister and brother who also rotate through jobs onboard—to eat bland leftovers in the crew mess, watch old sitcoms, or play Families, a game they’ve created in which they take turns being the mother, father, or doted-upon baby. “We all agreed being the baby was best,” Ingrid narrates. On land, she mostly drinks—a lot—and makes bad decisions. When Keith chooses Ingrid to participate in an eccentric mentoring program, she is forced to reckon with her past missteps, personal shortcomings, and painful losses— and things get really strange, leading to Ingrid’s degradation, but also possibly…growth?

Williams’ engaging novel takes the reader on a memorable journey, but its destination remains disappointingly unclear.

“A man wakes up alone near an abandoned housing development with no memory of who he is or how he got there.” city of orange

CITY OF ORANGE

A man wakes up alone near an abandoned housing development with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

It’s 2010 in California, and the nameless narrator wakes up in a dried-out riverbed under a concrete bridge. He has a searing headache, the knowledge that he’s living in a post-apocalyptic world, and a bottle of painkillers, but nothing else. He can’t even remember his own name. He slowly figures out how to survive, finding clean water and an abandoned shelter with cans of food. An exploration into the surrounding neighborhood, full of brand-new construction left to rot, results in a terrifying discovery that makes the narrator apprehensive about moving out of his shelter and into an empty house. But one day, a young boy named Clay finds him. Clay is clean and well fed, and though he’s reluctant to answer too many questions, he seems confused when the narrator refers to the world being over. As the narrator slowly tries to piece together the mystery of the apocalypse through Clay’s cryptic clues, he also starts to remember his old life, even the parts he wishes could remain forgotten. Yoon’s version of the apocalypse takes a much narrower focus than many in the genre, focusing on community, family, and loss through the narrator’s personal experience. The start may be a little slow going, but as the narrator begins to pick up the pieces of his memory, his own story becomes much more compelling and heartfelt than the end of the world could ever be.

Out of a ruined America, an earnest and affecting character study.

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She makes her first friend when she’s in the sixth grade. Jay is rich and gay and an aspiring—and singularly untalented—flamenco dancer. At UCLA, Jay meets Peter, and both Jay and Bran are instantly smitten. Peter’s engagement to another woman does nothing to quell Bran’s desire for him, nor does it stop Peter from repeatedly declaring his love for Bran. A lot of things happen to Bran—she runs away from the Henderson farm after a particularly harrowing encounter with the bikers; at Peter’s insistence, she decides to try her hand at screenwriting; she gets a job as a barista—but her will-they, won’t-they relationship with Peter is the narrative’s central concern. The problem with this is that it’s difficult to understand why Bran and Jay are so obsessed with Peter. Early on, Bran declares, “Throughout this text, I will employ the token ‘[…]’ to indicate inability to quote, paraphrase, or reconstruct things Peter said,” and this is a blessing because Peter is long-winded, pedantic, and occasionally condescending. He vacillates between praising Bran’s beauty and brilliance and reminding her that she’s not quite as smart as him. Bran has a lot in common with Penny, the engaging protagonist of Nicotine (2016), but Zink’s new heroine is subsumed by her tiresome crush.

A rather flat offering from an exceptional author.

Yoon, David Putnam (352 pp.) $27.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-42216-8

m ys t e r y A RIP THROUGH TIME

Armstrong, Kelley Minotaur (352 pp.) $27.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-2508-2000-6

A Vancouver police detective visiting Edinburgh is magically transported back to 1869, where she gets involved in a murder case in which her avatar is deeply implicated.

One moment Detective Mallory Atkinson is getting throttled by an identifiable man; the next she’s awakening as Catriona Mitchell, who’s been similarly strangled and left for dead in the same spot. The second attack turns out to be useful for Mallory, who uses Catriona’s trauma as an excuse for forgetting lots of things she ought to know as housemaid to undertaker Duncan Gray, whose medical degree sharpens his interest in the death of Evening Courant crime reporter Archie Evans, a victim of what only Mallory recognizes as waterboarding. What did Archie know that someone wanted to torture out of him? Partnering alternately with Edinburgh Detective Hugh McCreadle; her employer; and Gray’s half sister, shrewd herbalist Isla Ballantyne, Mallory peers into Edinburgh’s seamy underside as she struggles to uncover the truth.

It’s a tough job because the most dramatic discoveries she makes are that the woman whose body she’s inhabiting is a bully

AVALON

Zink, Nell Knopf (224 pp.) $27.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-53489-2 Kafka, King Arthur, and topiary hedges all play a part in this coming-ofage story from the author of Doxology (2019) and Private Novelist (2016).

Zink’s stories are filled with oddballs, and her latest novel is no exception. Bran is in fourth grade when her mother enters a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, leaving the girl in the care of her “common-law stepfather,” Doug, in Torrance, California. She’s been working at the plant nursery Doug’s family runs since she was a toddler, so life as an unpaid laborer is the only life she’s ever known, but being the only female in the house becomes increasingly uncomfortable after she hits adolescence—especially when the bikers come to party at the Henderson place. |

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and a thief and maybe worse and that Evans’ killer, who goes on to stage another murder that uncannily foretells the work of Jack the Ripper, may well be another visitor from the 21st century. Armstrong handles the time-traveling problems concerning Mallory’s disjointed consciousness and other characters’ awareness that she’s not your typical housemaid with unusual resourcefulness and dexterity. Although the heroine is desperate to return to her own time and place by hook or by crook, the fade-out presents a future that’s pleasingly ambiguous.

The murders are the least mysterious aspect of this clever time-traveling thriller.

HUNGRY DEATH

Blake, Robin Severn House (288 pp.) $29.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-72789-071-9 Coroner Titus Cragg is called upon to investigate a brutal multiple murder.

No one is willing to show Cragg the way to the farm of Billy Kidd, but when he finally arrives, he finds a woman with her throat cut along with two little girls and their brothers, all dead. Even the family horse has been shot. In a doghouse Cragg discovers a nonverbal boy and a dog; the body of Kidd hangs in the barn. It looks as if Kidd killed his family and himself, but Cragg has doubts when he learns of the strange religious views Kidd and his neighbors held. On his way to see Kidd’s landlord, magistrate John Blackburne of Orford Hall, Cragg meets Dr. Luke Fidelis, his best friend and frequent partner in investigations, who’s visiting the hall at the request of a Frenchman he once studied with. Soon he and Cragg are investigating the body of a young woman found buried under Blackburne’s hothouse. Her remains are surprisingly well-preserved considering that they’re probably 50 years old. Cragg questions Kidd’s brother, old and new enemies, and people who might be able to identify the body. The answers to all the deaths may lie in a strange religion and past misdeeds that challenge Cragg to be exceptionally clever to ferret out the truth in one of his most difficult cases.

Odd 18th-century mores provide a fitting backdrop for a complex puzzle.

THE LAVA WITCH

Bokur, Debra Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-4967-3785-4

A ritualistic murder draws a resolute detective into the murky world of Hawaiian legends and mysticism.

Maui Police Capt. Walter Alaka’i and his niece, Detective Kali Māhoe, 50

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are called to a rugged mountain crime scene in the Kula Forest Reserve, where the body of a tortured young woman has been found hanging from a rainbow tree. A missing person’s report leads Kali to identify the victim as 24-year-old Maya Louise Holmes, an employee with the Center for Marine Mining and Research. With the help of dedicated young Officer David Hara, Kali’s investigation proceeds incrementally and methodically, moving from Maya’s brother, Charles, to her missing car to the interrogation of her co-workers. Haunted by the crime, Kali’s thoughts keep returning to the strange position and condition of the body. Bizarre reports from nearby residents that a band of witches regularly flies through the trees and prowls the beaches echo stories of sorcery that Kali remembers being told as a child by her grandmother, a historian. Was Maya’s murder related to her research or to the occult? Recurring potential love interest Elvar Ellinsson provides more legends of Hawaiian witchcraft, accompanies Kali on her reexamination of the murder scene, and plays bodyguard when Kali is the victim of a break-in. Bokur’s formula is familiar but effectively executed, without flash but with admirable clarity and economy. The straightforward, linear structure and slow roll of her third Dark Paradise mystery (following The Bone Field, 2021) allow the story’s abundant local color to take center stage.

A cool police procedural with engaging characters and fascinating components.

THE DIVA SAYS CHEESECAKE!

Davis, Krista Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-49673-276-7

Another day, another party, another murder for Alexandria, Virginia, advice columnist/event planner Sophie Winston.

Cheesecake queen Bobbie Sue Bodoin’s Midsummer Night’s dinner party is the event of Old Town’s season, at least until the Fourth of July extravaganza Sophie’s planning for old Ms. Hollingsworth-Smythe. But Bobbie Sue’s husband, restaurateur Tate Bodoin, is absent and missing the performance their daughter Jo’s ballet class is giving. Fortunately, he’s got a great excuse: He’s lying dead in the alley in back of Blackwell’s Tavern, the place he owns and manages. The obvious suspect is Sophie’s friend Bernie Frei, whose ownership of The Laughing Hound makes him technically Tate’s business competitor. Actually, Blackwell’s assistant manager, Marsha Bathurst, darkly hints, their rivalry was much more personal. Her insinuations, joined with the forensic evidence the Alexandria police dig up, lead Sgt. Wolf Fleishman to arrest Bernie even though Bernie is such a nice guy that nobody, including Fleishman, believes him guilty—except for Marsha, whose relationship to her boss may have run deeper than suspected as well. Actually, Spencer Carver, Bobbie Sue’s first husband, may have had it in for Tate, as may their teenage son, Pierce Carver. And what about Eli Dawson, the Blackwell’s bartender who was two-timing Marsha with Laughing Hound

MISS MORTON AND THE ENGLISH HOUSE PARTY MURDER

assistant manager Eva Morales? As Sophie and her best friend, Nina Reid Norwood, swing into action, they’re stunned when one of the suspects actually asks to see their credentials. Credentials? sniffs Nina. Don’t they know about the duo’s impressive record?

Suspicious but forgettable characters fill out a teensy mystery. Eleven appended recipes are the highlight.

Lloyd, Catherine Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-4967-2328-4

Ellicott, Jessica Severn House (256 pp.) $28.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-44830-652-7

A young woman from the country finds adventure in World War II–era England.

At first things look bleak for Wilhelmina “Billie” Harkness of Barton St Giles in rural Wiltshire. Her father, a rector, is a prisoner of war, and her brother’s missing in action. Her mother, after tearing up Billie’s enlistment papers, is run down by a car and killed, leaving Billie alone in the vicarage with her father’s rector, Ronald Kershaw. Afraid of the scandal his living under the same roof as an unmarried woman threatens, he gives Billie an ultimatum: marry him or leave her home. Fortunately, a letter from a cousin she’s never met rescues her. Lydia Harkness, who has pots of money, invites her for an indefinite stay in her gracious home in Hull. A port city, Hull is bigger and busier than sleepy Barton St Giles. It’s also a target of German aircraft, as a raid during Billie’s first night proves. Lydia arranges a job for her cousin in the library, but Billie’s made for more challenging stuff. Before she even starts her new post, she’s recruited as one of Hull’s two female constables, an innovation brought on by the need to send every able-bodied man to the front. After the bang-bang pace of the events that bring Billie out of the vicarage under the watchful eye of her mum to semi-independence in her cousin’s house, readers can expect the very different treat of watching her negotiate for respect in her newly created post. Tackling everything from the theft of Father O’Connell’s bicycle to the death of a young woman the night of the air raid, Billie proves herself more than up to the task.

Brisk and colorful.

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Lloyd leaves behind Kurland St. Mary to introduce a sassy new Regencyperiod heroine with a tough row to hoe.

Lady Caroline Morton’s engagement was broken and her reputation destroyed when her father, the Earl of Morton, committed suicide, leaving her and her sister, Susan, penniless. For some years Lady Eleanor, their aunt, has taken in stray children and raised them along with her own offspring, if not always successfully, and some of these are still friends of the family. Lady Eleanor has been housing Susan, and she’s offered Caroline a home as well. But Caroline decides that she’d rather be a paid companion than an unpaid drudge.

Now Lady Eleanor insists that Caroline come to the birthday party for her cousin Mabel. To that end, she invites Caroline’s employer, Mrs. Frogerton, a wealthy widow whose fortune comes from trade, and her beautiful, well-dowered daughter, Dorothy. Unfortunately, the other guests include Caroline’s former fiance, Lord Francis Chatham, and his sister, who used to be her best friend. When young Dr. Harris arrives to attend to Lady Eleanor’s butler, who’s had a messy accident in the cellar, it reinforces the doctor’s dislike of the wealthy. Next, Caroline’s great-aunt Ines, who has lived on the estate for many years, is found murdered and Caroline finds a large sum of money hidden in her room. Caroline fears that past secrets have come back to haunt her family members, who insist there were no murders, and at Mrs. Frogerton’s urging, she investigates.

A charming cross between a Regency romance and a wellconstructed detective story with a surprising denouement.

DEATH IN A BLACKOUT

MURDER MOST GRAVE

McKevett, G.A. Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-49672-909-5

Stella Reid juggles eight kids and one murder in McGill, Georgia.

Raising her no-account son’s brood isn’t easy for Granny Reid. Even when the older seven are in school, she has 6-month-old Macon Jr. to care for. Still, when only six of her rambunctious grandchildren pile into her tiny cottage after school one day, it isn’t hard to figure out that the missing Reid is Waycross; aside from Macon, he’s the only male. After calling her best friend, Miss Elsie Dingle, to babysit, Stella drives out to the McGill town cemetery, Waycross’ favorite refuge in times of trouble. She finds Waycross at her late husband’s gravesite, sharing his woes with his Grandpa |

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Art. Trouble is, she also finds a dead body over by the Patterson crypt, a mausoleum filled with deceased members of one of McGill’s most prominent families. When Sheriff Manny Gilford confirms that the body isn’t another Patterson but Dexter Corbin, Stella knows there’ll be an abundance of suspects because Dexter managed to rub most of McGill the wrong way.

And since Manny is locked in an election fight to the death with his deputy, Stella thinks it only right to offer the handsome lawman her help solving this latest crime. Sleuthing, smooching, and Southern charm fight for center stage in the latest Moonlight Magnolia prequel.

Winsome but lightweight.

A SPRINKLE IN TIME

Mentink, Dana Poisoned Pen (360 pp.) $8.99 paper | May 24, 2022 978-1-72823-158-7 Can the joys of ice cream overcome the horror of murder?

Now that Trinidad Jones has bonded with the other two ex-wives of incarcerated crook Gabe Bigley living in Upper Sprocket, Oregon, by solving a murder, she’s determined to make the Shimmy and Shake Shop into a moneymaker with support from her dog, Noodles; her grandfather Papa Luis; and the other exes. She’s learning to have more faith in her relationship with hazelnut farmer Quinn Logan. But her confidence is dented when Papa Luis finds a dead body in his car, and Quinn, without explanation, sells land to Forge Emberly for a project he’s said he abhors. After the body vanishes and turns up in a lake, Gabe’s sister, Police Chief Cynthia Bigley, identifies it as that of Emberly, who’d apparently collected quite a few enemies. Although Trinidad’s busy trying to make as much money as she can from the Alpenfest festival before winter sets in, she’s so worried that Quinn could be involved that she finds time for a little sleuthing. On top of the current murder, there’s also a renewed interest in the long-ago disappearance of Cherry Lighter, whose connections among current residents include her former boyfriend, now a judge, and the mayor. Trinidad puts her life on the line among all these suspects, hoping that her fragile trust in Quinn won’t be destroyed.

You’ll be satisfied just from reading about the ice cream concoctions in this pleasant, character-driven cozy.

RENOVATED TO DEATH

Polito, Frank Anthony Kensington (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 31, 2022 978-1-49673-558-4

Polito debuts a cozy featuring a gay couple who get entangled in a murder.

Following the success of their HGTV show, in which they renovated their Craftsman in the upscale Detroit suburb of Pleasant Woods, mystery author Peter “PJ” Penwell and his life partner, actor JP Broadway, are looking for another house to renovate. Their eyes fall on an untouched Tudor Revival that’s the former family home of twins Tom and Terry Cash, who have very different ideas about the place’s future. Tom wants to renovate and sell it; Terry wants to keep it a shrine to their parents. The house needs a lot of work, but the boys are game even after Tom’s found dead at the bottom of the rickety staircase. Detective Nick Paczki, who dated PJ’s sister in high school, can’t believe anyone would be murdered in Pleasant Woods, so he’s ready to write it off as an accident; PJ has a feeling there’s more than meets the eye here. Though their detective experience has been limited to the mysteries PJ’s written and the cop JP’s played on TV, they decide to do a little investigating. The twins are 50, but Tom, who was well known for dumping his lovers when they hit 30, left behind two unhappy past lovers and his current lover, who was fearful of the same fate. As if that weren’t enough, the large outstanding debt on his bar, where Terry’s the bouncer, provides plenty of suspects for the inquisitive duo to vet.

The quirky, humorous drama queens and jealous lovers more than make up for the so-so mystery.

science fiction & fantasy WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS

Barnhill, Kelly Doubleday (352 pp.) $28.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-385-54822-9

As women around the world inexplicably transform into dragons, a young girl struggles to take care of her cousin in 1950s America.

It’s indecent to speak about dragons, just as it would be indecent to talk about, say, menstruation or the burning, building rage that so many women feel day to day.

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“A virus transforms those it infects into violently unreliable narrators in this dystopian novella.” and then i woke up

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who study the dragon transformations are silenced by the government, no one really understands why “dragooning” happens or how it works. When Alex’s Aunt Marla is among the thousands of women who all turn into dragons together on the same day in 1955, her beloved cousin, Beatrice, becomes her adopted sister. And when Alex is in high school and her own mother dies of cancer, her father sticks her in a cheap apartment and tells her she’s old enough to raise Beatrice on her own. Alex inherited her mother’s talent for math and science, and she struggles between her own rage at how her abilities are constantly diminished by the men around her and her resentment that her Aunt Marla became a dragon and abandoned her and Beatrice. But the older Beatrice gets, the more she longs to become a dragon herself, and Alex lives in terror that Beatrice will leave her behind. In lesser hands the dragon metaphor would feel simplistic and general, but Barnhill uses it to imagine different ways of living, loving, and caring for each other. The result is a complex, heartfelt story about following your heart and opening your mind to new possibilities.

This novel’s magic goes far beyond the dragons.

NEVER A DUKE

Burrowes, Grace Forever (400 pp.) $8.99 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-5387-0698-5

AND THEN I WOKE UP

Devlin, Malcolm Tordotcom (176 pp.) $13.99 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-250-79807-7

A virus transforms those it infects into violently unreliable narrators in this dystopian novella.

Spence was working as a dishwasher in a pizzeria when most of the staff and patrons suddenly turned into rotting, ravenous monsters, forcing Spence and his friend Macey to kill their attackers and set the place on fire.

Over months scavenging for food and supplies while defending himself and other survivors from the ravenous “Others,” Spence gradually awakens to the truth: He and his compatriots are afflicted with an illness that makes them see the uninfected as monsters when in reality they are just innocent people living their lives. Inside the Ironside facility, Spence has almost come to terms with what happened to him and what he did under the virus’s influence. But after he befriends Leila, a new inmate, and learns her story, he must consider if it’s better to confront an ugly and painful truth or to live a dangerous, but in some ways comforting, lie. Elements of this fable will surely resonate with contemporary readers living in a world where “alternative” facts and competing narratives have driven people to violence and death, and a virus is just one of the natural, social, political, and cultural upheavals that have polarized the population and led them to perceive those on the other side of the divide as monsters or idiots. Speculative fiction’s futuristic and fantastic worlds have always served as a mirror for present-day issues, and this is a fine example of the new wave of stories grappling with our current tumult.

Understandably unsettling while offering a glimmer of redemptive hope.

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A lady and a banker, neither of whom quite fits into society, develop feelings for each other while working together to solve a mystery.

When Rosalind Kinwood’s lady’s maid goes missing she seeks help from Ned Wentworth because of his association with others from low origins. Ned may have ducal connections and wealth now, but his grim past included poverty and time in prison, which have led to scandalous rumors. Rosalind understands how it feels to be judged and criticized; she gets ridiculed for her outspokenness and the way she used to stutter. Rosalind and Ned get along well from the get-go. The romantic arc is primarily about how they each become more confident in themselves through being loved by the other. It’s a soft, sweet love between kind, thoughtful, and intelligent characters. While the story mostly focuses on the two leads, the narrative occasionally shifts to various side characters in a way that adds further excitement to the plot and more depth to the characters. Drama comes from the mystery, although that’s given a leisurely pace until the climactic end. Rich with historical detail, the novel weaves in other plotlines that explore family dynamics and social issues.

The large cast of side characters may be overwhelming to newcomers to the Rogues to Riches series, but for those who have read prior installments, it’s a treat to check in with all the other Wentworths and their partners.

Sure to please Burrowes’ many fans.

BUSINESS NOT AS USUAL

Cooper, Sharon C. Berkley (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | April 5, 2022 978-0-593-33525-3

An optimistic secretary takes a gamble on love in Cooper’s debut romantic comedy.

Working as a secretary at Mathison Technology is definitely not “badass boss lady” material for 28-year-old Dreamy Daniels, but she’s sure that once she wins the lottery, all her goals will magically fall into place. After taking some time off college to provide for her ailing grandfather, Dreamy is finally one semester away from acquiring her bachelor’s degree in public administration. Her plan is simple: Win the Powerball, support Gramps, and use the rest of the money |

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and her degree to open a nonprofit catering to female entrepreneurs. But until those six winning numbers come through, Dreamy must deal with her “micromaniac” boss, Gordon Mathison...even when he makes her want to poke an eye out with her multicolored high heels. Potential Mathison investor and venture capitalist Karter Redford also needs a career change—one that requires working less than 16 hours a day and spending more time relaxing at his 7,000-square-foot Hollywood Hills home. At almost 40, Karter fears his workaholic ways might be the death of him, and when he steps into Mathison’s office and meets the vibrant Dreamy, he knows she’s worth settling down for. Dreamy also feels their passionate connection, but is she willing to risk her well-laid plans by mixing business with pleasure? Cooper offers an honest and hopeful Cinderella story about two hardworking people from two different worlds. Dreamy is motivated and idealistic—“I am beautiful. I am confident. I am lovable. I am a lottery winner”—but never jaded, even when faced with Karter’s wealth: “He was champagne and caviar, while she was Kool-Aid and frickin’ Kit Kats.” Dreamy continually blossoms throughout the novel, and her unshakeable drive makes each success even more gratifying for the reader cheering her along.

A sweet and sincere love story that hits the jackpot of rom-coms.

A BRUSH WITH LOVE

Eddings, Mazey St. Martin’s Griffin (336 pp.) $16.99 paper | March 1, 2022 978-1-2508-0598-0 An aspiring oral surgeon has to rethink her priorities in life and love when she literally crashes into a handsome first-year dental student.

Harper Horowitz is, by her own admission, a bit of a perfectionist, almost to a fault—she foregoes socializing for studying, studying, and more studying, all in order to pursue her dream of earning the top placement in an oral surgery residency. Life, or maybe fate, seems to have other plans when she topples down the stairs and lands right on top of Daniel Craige (no relation to the famous Bond actor). He’s handsome, he’s funny, and what’s more, he’s really into Harper, but the timing couldn’t be worse, especially when there might be an imminent cross-country move in her future. The two solemnly agree to remain friends, but they start to reconsider that plan with all the free time they’re spending together—and all the hard truths that come to the surface along the way. Eddings’ debut is equal parts hilarious and heartwrenching, though the bumps on the road to Harper and Dan’s happily-ever-after do contribute to some uneven pacing, particularly at the conclusion. What’s most rewarding about the book, however, is the fact that Harper and Dan have a dynamic that helps each of them discover the best version of themselves in the course of their romance; Harper not only acknowledges, but finds successful ways of mitigating her deeply rooted anxiety, 54

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and she and Dan both deal with unresolved trauma connected to their pasts.

A poignant debut that will put a smile on your face.

THE COWBOY SAYS YES

Fox, Addison Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $8.99 paper | April 26, 2022 978-0-06-313519-2

A celebrity couple attempts to get their unhappy marriage back on track.

Hadley Wayne has deep roots in the small Montana town of Rustlers Creek: It’s where she grew up, it’s where she met and married her husband, Zack, and now it’s where she hosts her popular Cooking Network show, The Cowgirl Gourmet. The show is successful beyond her wildest dreams, turning her into a household name and catapulting her and her husband and their ranch into the spotlight. It’s not that Zack resents Hadley’s success, but he feels a deepening chasm growing between them every day. They’re both afraid their marriage is unraveling, but the lines of communication are completely down, and they’re unable to fix what is wrong. When a business trip sends them to California, Hadley and Zack both hope that time away from the ranch will help them reconnect.

Fox’s novel is full of angst and melodrama, with two other secondary romance plots: Zack’s parents experience marital difficulties, and Hadley’s producer falls in love with one of the cowboys on the ranch. Unfortunately, these subplots just serve to highlight the lack of progress between Hadley and Zack. Their emotional reactions, especially at the beginning, feel manufactured to create melodrama. The plot meanders for most of the book before scrambling to an unsatisfying and rushed conclusion.

This frustrating take on the “marriage in trouble” trope fails to deliver a convincing happily-ever-after.

FROM BAD TO CURSED

Harper, Lana Berkley (368 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 17, 2022 978-0-593-33608-3

Opposites attract in this witchy enemies-to-lovers romance.

It’s springtime in Thistle Grove, a quaint magical town readers were introduced to in Payback’s a Witch (2021). Isidora Avramov has been unsatisfied working for the family business lately, but she doesn’t think she could ever tell her mother how she feels for fear of being a disappointment. At least she has the Flower Moon Festival to look forward to, until a member of the Thorn family, practitioners of green magic, is cursed with the necromantic magic the Avramov family is known for. Issa begrudgingly teams up with Rowan Thorn to investigate,

“An ER doctor works to shake her family’s expectations and find love with a younger man.” part of your world

SOMETHING WILDER

each representing their families. Their opposite types of magic have always created a rift between the families, and Issa holds a grudge against Rowan in particular. They butted heads when working together years ago, and she’s still annoyed with his dogooder hero energy. She knows he makes assumptions about her because of her family and magic, and yeah, sometimes she summons demons, but she also has a caring heart! As the unlikely duo follow the clues and begin to unlearn long-held beliefs about each other, attraction blossoms and grows into irresistible desire and deep understanding. Atmospheric and lush, this captivating story ignites the senses. The magic lends itself to big, cinematic scenes, while conflicts about familial expectations and mental health struggles ground the story with realness. The romantic relationship is emotionally rich and deliciously sexy. Issa’s wry first-person narrative effortlessly ties together the mystery, fantasy, and romance elements.

Exhilarating, heartfelt, and entirely bewitching.

Lauren, Christina Gallery Books (384 pp.) $22.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-9821-7340-1

PART OF YOUR WORLD

Jimenez, Abby Forever (400 pp.) $15.99 paper | April 19, 2022 978-1-5387-0437-0

An ER doctor works to shake her family’s expectations and find love with a younger man in this exemplary romance.

Alexis Montgomery comes from a long line of accomplished surgeons who have worked at the Royaume Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis since it was founded in the late 1800s. While she pursued a career in emergency medicine, she assumed that her twin brother, Derek, a plastic surgeon, would carry on the family tradition. When Derek announces he’s gotten married while working in Cambodia for Doctors Without Borders and that he’s planning to stay there with his new wife, the responsibility of working at the hospital and producing future surgeons falls to Alexis. Her only respite comes in the form of Daniel Grant, a handsome carpenter who’s the mayor of small-town Wakan, Minnesota. Despite being almost a decade younger than Alexis, Daniel has been smitten since rescuing her car from a ditch while she was passing through Wakan; the pair shared a memorable one-night stand. Daniel has his own family lineage to uphold in the charming Wakan, which is full of chatty locals and creatively named farm animals. As in many of Jimenez’s romances, Alexis’ path to love and healing takes center stage as she works to free herself from the demanding, outdated wishes of her parents and set boundaries with a toxic, persistent former partner. Alexis and Daniel are precious together, and Daniel’s warm excitement at getting to spend more time with a woman he finds amazing is the perfect embodiment of romantic joy. The romance is further enriched by a full cast of dynamic side characters, manipulative villains, and misguided relatives. This book is an emotional experience that will tick all the boxes for passionate romance fans.

A must-read.

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Former sweethearts team up to find potential treasure in the Utah wilderness—but the only thing more treacherous than the hunt might be their feelings for each other.

At the age of 19, Lily Wilder thought she had her future all figured out. She’d take over the ranch owned by her treasure-hunting father, the infamous Duke Wilder, and live there with her boyfriend, Leo Grady. But when Leo left unexpectedly and Duke sold the ranch, Lily’s dreams went up in smoke. Now it’s 10 years later, Duke is long dead, and all Lily has left of him is his journal full of maps and mysterious clues. She makes ends meet by using his maps to lead tourists on expeditions through the Utah desert. She dreams of buying back her childhood ranch, but she’s flat broke and miserable at her monotonous job. That is, until Leo shows up on a guys’ trip with his friends, ready to get on a horse and find some treasure.

Seeing Leo is the last thing Lily wants, but when their routine trip goes shockingly wrong, Leo and Lily will have to work together if they want to figure out Duke’s last clue—and survive.

Fans of Lauren, the writing duo known for their delightful romcoms, may be surprised by this shift into the world of adventure romance. It should be a pleasant surprise, though, given that the story is fast-paced, exciting, and still full of that classic Lauren swoon (in between the danger, occasional violence, and plot twists). Lily and Leo’s romance is plenty steamy (there’s a scene where they’re forced to share a sleeping bag), but the real star is the landscape, which is described in sweltering, dusty detail.

A vivid escape that’s perfect for romantic thrill-seekers.

BLAME IT ON THE BRONTËS

Sereno, Annie Forever (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-1-5387-2143-8

When a Brontë-loving English professor moves back to her hometown with hopes of identifying an anonymous romance novelist, the last thing she expected was to end up working at her ex-boyfriend’s cafe.

“Publish or perish” is the unfortunate term for assistant professor Athena Murphy’s current predicament. After a meltdown at work forces Athena into a probationary sabbatical, she has until the end of the semester to submit a groundbreaking book for tenure, or she can bid her academic career at San Francisco’s Wyatt College farewell. Determined as any laudable Jane Eyre or Catherine Earnshaw would be, Athena treks back to her farming hometown in hopes of writing a biography about |

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Laurel, Illinois’ very own celebrity: the elusive C.L. Garland, a pseudonymous bestselling author known for spinning wellknown classics into page-turning erotica. In the meantime, Athena hopes to spy on any potential Garlands by working at a family friend’s coffee shop only to find that the store has been transformed into the As You Like It Café and bought by none other than her hero-slash-heartbreaker ex-boyfriend, Thorne Kent. College sweetheart and fellow English major Thorne embodied all of Athena’s fantasies of her “one true love,” and despite lacking any darkly handsome or brooding qualities, he was her Heathcliff…until he inexplicably broke her heart three years ago. Can Athena navigate her still-simmering relationship with Thorne and uncover Laurel’s best-kept secret in time to save her job, or will her happily-ever-after remain unwritten?

Sereno’s novel is witty and entertaining, and fans of the Brontë sisters will undoubtedly appreciate the fun she has nodding to their books. There is, however, some awkward writing (“horny in the morny”; “saucy damsel”), constant discussion of Thena’s “bounteous” and hip-swaying curves, and an array of questionable moments, like the mayor’s barely protested public auction of a “night on the town” with Athena at the community’s Oktoberfest.

A spunky romance that may delight Brontë fans if they can ignore several cringeworthy elements.

DATING DR. DIL

Sharma, Nisha Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | March 15, 2022 978-0-06-300110-7 An anti-love cardiologist must reassess matters of the heart when he is attracted to a sharp-tongued lawyer seeking true love.

On her 30th birthday, Kareena Mann learns that her father has decided to put her late mother’s beloved house up for sale. When Kareena protests, her father agrees to give her the house if she gets engaged within four months. Determined to marry for love, Kareena is looking for prospective soul mates when she runs into Prem Verma. They quickly forge a connection, but Prem upsets Kareena when he leaves their date abruptly. He further courts her rage when, on an episode of The Dr. Dil Show, the talk show he hosts on a local South Asian television network, he launches into a cynical tirade against love. Prem, who hosts the show to court investors interested in funding a community health center for the South Asian diaspora, is appalled when he finds out that Kareena’s public display of anger could endanger his goals.

After a brief conversation with her aunties, Prem sees that if he can convince Kareena to pretend to be engaged to him, they will both get what they want: Prem can secure his future, and Kareena can get her home. But matters become complicated when they begin to like each other despite their diametrically opposed views. A loose adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, the inaugural installment of Sharma’s If Shakespeare Was an 56

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Auntie trilogy is replete with endearing references to Indian, specifically Punjabi, culture. Kareena and Prem are engaging protagonists, and the relationships they each share with their closest friends are fresh and fun. But because the ties that bind them to their families are underdeveloped and the depth of their intergenerational trauma remains unplumbed, Sharma’s sincere attempt to unpack South Asian stereotypes sometimes winds up unwittingly bolstering them; for instance, while Kareena’s aunties have the potential to leap off the page as memorable characters, there is little more to them than their fervent desire to see Kareena married.

An uncomplicated and sometimes-entertaining rewrite of Shakespeare’s enemies-to-lovers play.

THE BRIDE GOES ROGUE

Shupe, Joanna Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $8.99 paper | May 24, 2022 978-0-06-304506-4 A childhood engagement between the children of one-time business partners becomes a steamy affair between enemies.

Katherine Delafield is done waiting— she’s been betrothed to Preston Clarke since she was a child and their fathers agreed to the match, but she’s still not married to him. However, when she reminds him of this fact and tries to set a date for the wedding, he strongly declines, and Katherine decides to move on and stop waiting for marriage. As a relatively free and privileged young woman of the Gilded Age, she’s ready to explore the wilder side of New York City and declares to her friends that she wants to have an affair. For his part, merciless tycoon Preston has, as always, been too absorbed in his tireless work to think much about the visit from Katherine. In need of relaxation, he decides to go to a famous downtown party that’s known to be “quite risqué”—the French Ball at Madison Square Garden. But wouldn’t you know it? It’s the same debauched evening Katherine is attending in search of her first affair. Masked and anonymous, they share a red-hot intimate moment and vow to meet again soon. When they discover the truth about their masked encounter the following night, both are furious but quickly find that the pull of their chemistry is so strong that they begin a series of steamy clandestine meetings and even develop a friendship of sorts despite Preston’s long-standing hatred for Katherine’s father. They tell themselves they’re just having an adventure, but as their unusual connection deepens, the rivalry between their families becomes even more serious.

Shupe’s well-loved Fifth Avenue Rebels series returns with a very saucy friends-with-benefits story. As ever, her command of historical details enlivens the story just as much as her command of intimate ones—and yes, that means she has proof that there really were indecent public events in New York in the 1890s. Preston is the kind of delightfully anachronistic historical romance hero Shupe’s fans love, and he works perfectly in

“A mouthwatering romance.” gouda friends

combination with Katherine’s bold bluestocking ways; those fans will be glad to hear the series is not yet done and get a glimpse of the next book at the end of this one.

The Mrs. Astor of Gilded Age romances provides another smart and sexy read.

THE WEDDING CRASHER

Sosa, Mia Avon/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $15.99 paper | April 5, 2022 978-0-06-290989-3

An associate lawyer asks a woman to pretend to be his girlfriend to impress the partners at his law firm.

Solange Pereira is helping her cousin work a wedding at a fancy Washington, D.C., hotel when something unexpected happens: Right before the ceremony, she overhears the bride confessing her love for another man. Although it’s awkward and uncomfortable, Solange disrupts the wedding, knowing this couple could never be happy. Dean Chapman is left at the altar but doesn’t seem overly bothered by this turn of events—he wasn’t in love; it was nothing more than a “modern-day marriage of convenience” to him. He intends to make partner before he turns 30, and having a wife and a family are just steps on the road to the kind of stability he never had as a child. When he returns to work a week later, the partners need two associates to woo a potential new hire. Only couples can be a part of the recruitment effort, so Dean impulsively asks Solange to pretend to be his girlfriend, figuring she owes him for disrupting his wedding. Solange feels guilty about her part in the fiasco and agrees to help him out. Faking dating proves difficult; Solange and Dean not only have to fool the associate who is in competition with Dean for a partnership promotion, but also keep the truth from her loving, nosy family. The modern rom-com can be a tightrope for authors who have to balance believable, zany antics with tight, authentic characterization. Sosa errs on the side of madcap plotting, with Solange and Dean responding reactively to crisis after crisis rather than moving their romance forward because of their feelings and choices.

The emphasis on escalating action makes for a fast-paced but emotionally unsatisfying romance.

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job she despises, she doesn’t think her night can get any worse.

That is, until she finds her boyfriend in bed with his ex and also discovers that he tossed her prized stash of Cloud City Creamery sheep’s milk cheese, which she’d special ordered from Seattle. Seven ounces of wasted cheese is precisely what pushes Tam to finally leave Brent in New York and send out an SOS to her best friend, Josh O’Malley. It’s been five years since she’s seen him, and Brent’s jealousy was the driving force behind the fact that she’d lost touch with Josh and the Nerd Herd, their closeknit group of friends. But for Josh, half a decade of minimal communication with his high school BFF proves no problem at all, and he’s more than happy to fly her back to Ponto Beach, California, to stay with him as he helps her start anew. They easily fall back into their old ways as he helps Tam “[find] her bliss” professionally, but what they didn’t expect? A newfound sexual tension neither of them can escape. Tam and Josh soon find that living together as adults is much different—and much hotter—than a teenage sleepover, and maybe it’s time for them to save their friendship by ruining it. The second book in Yardley’s Ponto Beach Reunion series welcomes back some familiar faces, including Lily and Tobin from Love, Comment, Subscribe (2021), and the Nerd Herd is back and friendlier than ever. Yardley’s prose is summery and light—“The afternoon sun was high and hot, so the cool air off the Pacific felt like a benediction”—and you’ll get swept up as Tam and Josh breezily fall right back into place as the lovably cheesy duo known as Jam. A mouthwatering romance.

GOUDA FRIENDS

Yardley, Cathy Montlake Romance (303 pp.) $10.99 paper | March 22, 2022 978-1-5420-3002-1 Tam and Josh have been the perfect couple since high school, but not romantically—they’re best friends.

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nonfiction TEN TOMATOES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Alexander, William Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $27.00 | June 7, 2022 978-1-538-75332-3

YOU SOUND LIKE A WHITE GIRL by Julissa Arce............................59 MY LIFE Ed. by CAPE, the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment.................................................................................. 64 ON AUTUMN LAKE by Douglas Crase................................................67

The author of The $64 Tomato returns with an engaging look at the humble fruit.

In this rollicking account, Alexander investigates how the tomato moved from being ignored and disdained to being popular all over the world. The Spanish conquistadors encountered it when they were demolishing the Aztec civilization, and they took it to Europe, where the first samples ended up in Italy.

Then, notes the author, it was ignored for centuries, in part because it was related to poisonous nightshade. However, since it was grown as a decorative plant, when people began to try it as food, there were plenty of tomatoes to be had. Italy, especially Naples, looms large in the tomato story, and Alexander spends time in the region tracing the historical connections. “In Italy, when tomatoes were first consumed,” writes the author, “it was by the wealthy, and as an exotic curiosity, much like adventurous eaters today might try fugu, the potentially deadly puffer fish, while visiting Japan.” One of the tomato’s primary uses, ketchup, was a classic American invention, although it began as a way to use the scraps left after canning. Alexander cheerily recounts numerous tales of the tomato’s development, which includes a cast of colorful inventors, marketers, and a few fraudsters. The tomato is self-pollinating, although it can also be fertilized from another plant, which makes them easy to grow.

Selective breeding and hybridization have created an array of new varieties, although finding the right balance of taste, size, and resistance to disease has been tricky. Alexander doesn’t dig in to the practice of artificial ripening, but he is impressed by the trend toward large-scale growing in greenhouses, which is probably the future of the tomato. The narrative is insightful and great fun, though the book’s title is a bit misleading—unless you consider the 1949 creation of the Big Boy hybrid to be an earthshaking event.

Eccentric, informative, and thoroughly enjoyable.

ADVENTURER by Leo Damrosch........................................................70 MUTINOUS WOMEN by Joan DeJean................................................70 THE MOVEMENT MADE US by David J. Dennis Jr. with David J. Dennis Sr................................................................................ 71 MANAGING EXPECTATIONS by Minnie Driver.............................. 73 FINE by Rhea Ewing............................................................................74 THE LETTERS OF THOM GUNN by Thom Gunn; ed. by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler & Clive Wilmer................ 80 BAD MEXICANS by Kelly Lytle Hernndez.........................................87 THE FOUR AGES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

by Michael Mandelbaum..................................................................... 88 MISS CHLOE by A.J. Verdelle............................................................100 DJ SCREW by Lance Scott Walker.....................................................101 ADVENTURER The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova

Damrosch, Leo Yale Univ. (432 pp.) $35.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-300-24828-9

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“An essential read to better understand America and its immigrant stories.” you sound like a white girl

IN EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

Anderson, Nate Norton (208 pp.) $22.95 | May 10, 2022 978-1-324-00479-0

A concise primer on how to live a meaningful life in our digital world.

It is one of Nietzsche’s unique attributes that books about him often carry the life force that animates his own works. This book is no exception. As the narrative opens, Anderson, deputy editor of Ars Technica and author of The Internet Police, writes about how he was stuck in an all-too-familiar digital rut. “Perhaps you have felt the same discomfort,” he writes, “looking up from yet another spam email to wonder: What has become of the wonder and danger of life?” Looking for such wonder and danger, Anderson turned to Nietzsche, who offers a rousing and viable alternative to our screen-obsessed lives. So many writers get Nietzsche wrong, but Anderson reads him accurately and thoroughly, and he helpfully points out elements of his life and work that have been misunderstood or reached the level of myth. However, instead of full-on Nietzscheanism, Anderson recommends “thinking with him,” which necessarily entails facing up to the philosopher’s many shortcomings, especially his misogyny, as well as celebrating his many virtues. “Take Nietzsche as your guru and you will run into all sorts of problems,” writes the author. “As one of my philosophy professors told me, ‘If you’re not offended by Nietzsche, you’re not paying attention.’…Nietzsche was a flawed human being and a creature of his time.” Thinking with also means going beyond.

“If Nietzsche could see what many of us can’t, perhaps we can see something Nietzsche couldn’t”—that many of his goals “are often accomplished in community….[He] correctly diagnosed the need for joy in an industrializing world, where life and work felt commoditized and flattened.” Anderson’s vision is less heroic and iconoclastic than Nietzsche’s, but it’s more human and moderate and, therefore, more practical.

Anderson gives us the philosopher we need for the moment at hand, and it is a welcome gift.

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At age 14, Arce was an undocumented Mexican immigrant whose parents “ate American exceptionalism like it was holy communion on Sunday.” All things were possible, they believed, for those who worked hard and kept their noses clean, and belonging in the land of the free was simply a matter of intelligence, English, and money. As an adult, the author became an American citizen and landed a coveted job at Goldman Sachs, where she “made enough money to be considered upper middle class.” Yet her journey is not an illustration of meritocracy.

Rather, Arce exposes the idea of the American dream as mendacious propaganda and shows the deep harm it causes to people of color, including immigrants, who are urged to chase Whiteness as a pathway to success. The author examines how assimilation makes a person smaller, obscuring “the most essential and beautiful parts of ourselves, our history, and our culture.” Arce, the author of My (Underground) American Dream and Someone Like Me, reaches into the histories of immigration, Mexico, and Latinidad for important context, explaining the complications of colonialism, race, and the slave trade. She cogently makes the case that a nation founded on the idea that “all men are created equal” must embrace, support, and love its citizens of color for who they are, and she convincingly argues that the American dream should not demand any person’s erasure. This is an important book that challenges the idea of American exceptionalism with equal parts passion, fury, intimacy, and ignored history. Arce celebrates the Mexican American immigrant experience in all its vibrancy and nuance while fearlessly naming the pain inflicted by American racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia.

An essential read to better understand America and its immigrant stories.

BURNING QUESTIONS Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021

Atwood, Margaret Doubleday (496 pp.) $24.99 | March 1, 2022 978-0-385-54748-2

Recent essays by the acclaimed novelist on art, feminism, censorship, inspirations, and her own work.

Atwood’s third collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and book introductions covers work from 2004 to 2021, during which time she cemented her place as a literary legend. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, became an established classic, a hit TV series, and, as the Trump years neared and then arrived, troublingly prescient. In multiple essays, Atwood discusses that novel’s inspiration, creation, and influence—and how she came to write its 2019 sequel, The Testaments. In the context of that book and others (particularly her climate novels), this collection is marked both by her ongoing concern with the ethical and moral issues her fiction raises and an appealing flexibility in terms of subject matter. She treats keynote-speech invitations as opportunities to research subjects she otherwise might not. At a conference for nurses,

YOU SOUND LIKE A WHITE GIRL The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

Arce, Julissa Flatiron Books (208 pp.) $27.99 | March 22, 2022 978-1-250-78701-9

A personal narrative that dismantles the myth of assimilation as a pathway to belonging and success for people of color. |

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NONFICTION | Eric Liebetrau

books that point to a more equitable society Sachs.…Yet her journey is not an illustration of meritocracy. Rather, Arce exposes the idea of the American dream as mendacious propaganda and shows the deep harm it causes to people of color, including immigrants, who are urged to chase Whiteness as a pathway to success.…Arce celebrates the Mexican American immigrant experience in all its vibrancy and nuance while fearlessly naming the pain inflicted by American racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia.”

All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope—and Hard Pills To Swal­ low—About Fighting for Black Lives

by Andre Henry (Convergent/ Crown, March 22): “A powerful examination of White assumptions about Black people and the obstacles that stand in the way of social justice.…Henry demonstrates how White people can be allies, first by not declaring themselves to be so but instead awaiting acknowledgment of that status by Black people. He also encourages a kind of separatism.

‘Black people may need to rethink the fight for the proverbial seat at the table in white institutions,’ he writes.

‘We need tables of our own’.…Wise, essential instruction for all who seek redress for the inequalities that persist in America.”

Ripe: Essays by Negesti Kaudo (Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ., April 18): “With unflinching honesty and vulnerability, Kaudo documents her journey to becoming her bolder self, to fight ‘the active erasure happening to blackness and black people’ and the racist double standards and brutality of this nation.…Kaudo is a highly self-aware work in progress who doesn’t have all the answers, but she has chosen the most interesting questions to grapple with. The result is a deeply intimate meditation on millennial Black womanhood and a righteous indictment of how this country treats Black girls and women.”

Leah Overstreet

Book banning in the U.S. is reaching epidemic proportions. Not only is the notion of banning (or worse, burning) books an assault on an author’s freedom of expression; it’s also detrimental to anyone’s ability to fully understand history and culture and to avoid the mistakes of the past. In addition to books addressing LGBTQ+ issues, the most targeted works are those that consider immigrants, marginalized ethnicities, non-Christians, or Black lives in America—seemingly any viewpoint that challenges Whiteness as the default norm. Regarding the latter, I recommend four spring books that tackle those issues head-on and provide vital perspectives to lead us toward a more equitable society. Buy them; read them; celebrate them. (All quotes come from the Kirkus reviews.)

Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal (The New Press, March 1): “Mystal, an analyst at MSNBC and legal editor for the Nation, reads the Constitution from the point of view of a Black man keenly aware of the document’s origins in a slaveholding nation.…As the author abundantly demonstrates, people of color and women have always been afterthoughts, and recent conservative applications of constitutional doctrine have been meant to further suppress the rights of those groups.…It’s eminently clear that the author knows his constitutional law and history inside and out. There’s something to learn on every page. A reading of the Constitution that all social justice advocates should study.”

You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation by Julissa Arce (Flatiron Books, March 22): “At age 14, Arce was an undocumented Mexican immigrant whose parents ‘ate American exceptionalism like it was holy communion on Sunday’.…As an adult, the author became an American citizen and landed a coveted job at Goldman 60

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Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.

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she explored the distinctions between compassion and empathy, and at a gathering of neurologists, the role of the brain in fiction. Still, there are certain themes to which the author consistently returns. Literary inspirations are key, from fellow Canadians like Alice Munro to feminist polestars like Simone de Beauvoir and Ursula K. Le Guin to canonized authors like Shakespeare, whom she discusses with particular attention and verve in multiple pieces. (Most of them touch on her 2016 novel, Hag-Seed, a reimagining of The Tempest.) The cyclical nature of crises is another theme. In the context of The Handmaid’s Tale and Covid-19, Atwood writes eloquently about how misogynist and epidemiological crises have habitually repeated themselves throughout history. Resistance to censorship informs many of these pieces, though the author also pushes back against the kind of groupthink that demands writers always be political spokespersons. Throughout, her tone is sprightly and informed; only an essay from the perspective of an extraterrestrial from planet Mashupzyx feels half-baked.

Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged.

benefit if employees were to share nonpromotable tasks, which leads to an engaged workforce that can attract and maintain the best talent. Although the facts that the authors marshal won’t surprise many readers, women struggling to turn down requests will find comfort knowing they are not alone. They will also learn valuable tips for changing the status quo, including how to craft an effective no and avoid the traps that lead to yes.

Sound guidance for sparking change in organizations.

THE PRECARIOUS WALK Essays From Sand & Sky

Barber, Phyllis Torrey House Press (240 pp.) $18.95 paper | June 7, 2022 978-1-948814-59-1

THE NO CLUB Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work

Babcock, Linda, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund & Laurie Weingart Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $27.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-982152-33-8

A guide for achieving balance and equity in the workplace.

Overwhelmed at work, Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon, invited a group of her colleagues to get together to discuss why it is often difficult for women to turn down requests for their time—particularly regarding “non-promotable tasks.” Each of these assignments “was critical to the organization, but wasn’t going to earn her praise, a raise, or a promotion. It was invisible unless she messed it up.” Along with Babcock, Peyser, Vesterlund, and Weingart— all of whom also have years of experience in the business, communications, and academic arenas—hope to share what they learned with other women facing similar struggles in the workplace. Based on their research, including “experiments, surveys, interviews, and organizational data on how employees spent their time,” the authors clearly show that women are much more likely to be asked to perform such tasks, versus their male counterparts, as well as to accept such requests. This situation is often driven by unfounded expectations. “We think it is our own voice compelling us to feel guilty for not saying yes, and our own voice telling us to be offended when a woman says no,” they write. “But it’s not us! It is the collective expectation that women will take on the non-promotable work.” Placing such an unfair burden on women can lead to countless problems, from career stagnation to excessive stress to serious health issues.

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Chronicle of an existential journey.

Essayist and fiction writer Barber was raised to believe that Mormonism was the only true religion, a belief that she began to question as she grew into adulthood. In a probing memoir comprised of 17 essays, most previously published, the author circles around her ongoing spiritual quest, recounting her childhood, her deep affinity for the Mojave Desert in which she spent her early years, her love of music (she is an accomplished pianist), two troubled marriages, and the search in which she is still engaged. At 21, she writes, “I danced myself into a Mormon temple marriage and made promises to help build the Kingdom of God here on earth. I gave birth to four sons whom I dressed each Sunday for church meetings.” After a few years, her husband lost his faith; her oldest son, a hemophiliac, died from a cerebral hemorrhage when he was 3; and her marriage unraveled. Barber was undone by sadness. “After years of dedication and every-meeting, every-church-job devotion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” she writes, “I decided—through a strange, broken-and-knotted-and-brokenand-knotted-again thread of events including a looming divorce and an alienation from all that I once thought was ‘true,’—that it was necessary and compulsory to find my way to God by myself.”

Raised in a community that imparted vivid images of the devil, heaven, and hell, she found herself longing for a connection to God that went beyond prayer. The book’s title reflects Barber’s sense of the precariousness of turning away from generations of her Mormon ancestors and leaving the embrace of a community and a religion. Freedom—of choice, of will—“is a lonely place sometimes,” Barber writes. “When there are no walls around you to hold you in place, no walls to keep you in your niche, you have nothing to tether you to the earth.”

Thoughtful meditations on the needs of the soul.

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“A pertinent guidebook to coalition-based politics, particularly for young activists of color.” from the hood to the holler

FROM THE HOOD TO THE HOLLER A Story of Separate Worlds, Shared Dreams, and the Fight for America’s Future

the rest of the ‘big city.’ That often-ignored reality gave me a unique responsibility: to shine a light on our common struggle and bridge the divide between the urban and rural communities, to tell the stories that too often don’t get told inside rooms like the Kentucky State Capitol.” The author begins with a poignant portrait of a hardscrabble childhood, where his mother skipped meals in order to feed her children. Booker benefited from fitful school integration, aware of the limitations most young Blacks faced. While in law school, he forged connections within the small community of Black state politicians, initially as a legislative aide: “Once I understood how the office helped people in the community, I was all about it.” Later, he surprised his political mentors with his own successful statehouse run.

“The message I brought with me from the hood was resonating with people all over Kentucky,” he writes, a message that he demonstrates in a moving passage about standing with protesting coal miners. He contrasts his ambitions with the corrosive effects of Mitch McConnell and his shadowy role at the center of Kentucky political power. McConnell, he writes, is “the single greatest obstacle to anything that would help Kentuckians live a better life.” Booker’s prose is detailed and energetic, if occasionally repetitive. He ably captures his rise in politics and sharply assesses the mechanisms of power, particularly regarding segregation and the urban-rural divide.

A pertinent guidebook to coalition-based politics, particularly for young activists of color.

Booker, Charles Crown (336 pp.) $28.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-24034-2

Inspirational memoir from former Kentucky state representative Booker, highlighting his political coming-of-age.

Booker was “the youngest Black state legislator in Kentucky in over eighty years,” and he is currently preparing to challenge Sen. Rand Paul. As one of six Black legislators, Booker’s experiences reflected expectations about racial divides yet also transcended them. “I come from the West End of Louisville,” writes the author, “a place so isolated that in many ways it has more in common with the hollers up in coal country than it has with

THE POWER OF CRISIS How Three Threats—and Our Response—Will Change the World

Bremmer, Ian Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $28.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-982167-50-9

Another plea for the world to get its act together.

Eurasia Group founder Bremmer sets the stage early on: “Faced with dysfunction at the heart of American politics, poisoned relations between America and China, a broken global system, and with vitally important questions to answer, where is the way forward?” The solution? “We need crises scary enough to make us forge a new international system that promotes effective cooperation on a few crucial questions.” The author finds three that qualify: pandemics, climate change, and the ubiquity of digital technology. Numerous books examine (and deplore) all three, but Bremmer’s account is notable for its clear prose and concision. No one doubts that better planning and global cooperation would have lessened the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Readers unfamiliar with climate change will encounter an excellent introduction to the science and tactics to combat it, which, except for in parts of Europe, remain largely in the realm of rhetoric. Digital technology is revolutionizing our lives, sometimes for the better, but its disruptive effects seem out of control. Data is routinely 62

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mishandled or ignored, and the cheerful prediction that automation will create jobs as well as eliminate them remains unfulfilled.

That the internet revolution would empower individuals at the expense of the government and spread democracy was widely proclaimed—20 years ago. One rarely hears the same message today, when social media has become a source of disruption, fake news, and conspiracy theories as well as a tool of oppression and violence. Bremmer, the author of Us vs. Them: The Failure of Glo­ balism and other relevant books, offers a vivid description of how the world is dealing with these crises—so far ineffectually. The author’s entirely reasonable solutions involve government action, self-sacrifice, and tolerance of opposing opinions, all of which are in short supply at the moment.

An expert analysis of several critical problems with sensible, if not likely, solutions.

with invented dialogue and insight into the thoughts of his characters. Some readers may be put off by this approach, but this florid account of Johnson’s experiences is hard to put down.

Overheated but still a good read.

BITTERSWEET How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

Cain, Susan Crown (352 pp.) $28.00 | April 5, 2022 978-0-451-49978-3

The author of Quiet turns her attention to sorrow and longing and how these emotions can be transformed into creativity and love.

Cain uses the term bittersweet to refer to a state of melancholy and specifically addresses individuals who have “a

Brotherton, Marcus Little, Brown (320 pp.) $30.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-316-31891-4

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A BRIGHT AND BLINDING SUN A World War II Story of Survival, Love, and Redemption

ORDER THROUGH

Small Press Distribution OR Ingram

The wartime experiences of a teenage American soldier in the Philippines.

Most readers will know that Brotherton’s hero is headed for trouble, but the author takes his time recounting the gritty life of Joe Johnson, a poor boy from a dysfunctional family in Depression-era Texas. Though it was clear to military recruiters that Johnson was too young to serve, in 1941, the rapidly expanding Army was eager for warm bodies, so he slipped through the cracks. Even before his unit began training, there was a call for volunteers to join the fight in the Philippines, and he stepped forward. Manila, near his base, was full of temptation for an adolescent anxious to prove his manhood, and Johnson fell in love with a teenage prostitute. Their relationship continued after the war until his mother cut it short.

During the early period of the war, Johnson spent five miserable months fighting on Bataan and Corregidor before American forces surrendered in April 1942. Although World War II enthusiasts are aware that the Japanese treated both prisoners and civilians viciously, even die-hard military buffs will be horrified at the sheer sadism that Johnson witnessed and endured during three and a half years of captivity in the Philippines and Japan. Luck, youth, imagination, and a refusal to lose hope contributed to his survival, although he spent months in the hospital after being released. As he did in such previous books as Blaze of Light and A Company of Heroes, Brotherton has done his homework researching official records, interviews, and Johnson’s extensive writing, which included “journal entries, musings, essays, bundles of wartime letters, photos, original poems, wartime documents, hard copies of emails to friends and family members, and more than ten hours of compelling video and audio interviews.” However, he recounts his story like a novel,

OUR BESTSELLING POETRY COLLECTION EARNS A KIRKUS STAR. “In her debut collection, Tonnessen knits together … lyrical moments of grace that feel utterly authentic …

A well-crafted, tender collection that emphasizes exploration.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

TM

Contact the publisher regarding rights through unboundedition.com.

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“A luminous book that highlights the humanity and multitudes of being Asian American.” my life

tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” With great compassion, she explores causes for these emotions by candidly chronicling her personal experiences and those of others throughout history who have suffered loss, including Plato, Charles Darwin, C.S. Lewis, Leonard Cohen, and Maya Angelou. “As Angelou’s story suggests,” she writes, “many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suf­fered.” Cain argues persuasively that these emotions can be channeled into artistic pursuits such as music, writing, dancing, or cooking, and by tapping into them, we can transform “the way we parent, the way we lead, the way we love, and the way we die.” If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings of the past, she writes, we may inflict them on present relationships through abuse, domination, or neglect. Throughout, the author examines the concept of loss from various religious viewpoints, and she looks at the ways loss can affect individuals and how we can integrate it into our lives to our benefit. Cain contends that the romantic view of melancholy has “waxed and waned” over the

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years. Currently, a “tyranny of positivity” can often be found in the workplace, and the “social code” of keeping negative feelings hidden abounds. However, she points out the benefits that can come from opening up versus keeping everything inside.

As a first step, she encourages us to examine our lives and ask ourselves what we are longing for, in a deep and meaningful way, and if we can turn that ache into a creative offering.

A beautifully written tribute to underappreciated emotions.

MY LIFE Growing Up Asian in America

Ed. by CAPE, the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment MTV/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $27.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-982195-37-3 A timely collection that captures a wide variety of Asian American comingof-age experiences.

Compiled amid the anti-Asian violence that began in 2020, the anthology shows that the Asian American experience is not monolithic but rather layered and diverse. Yet all readers will find much to relate to via universal themes of intergenerational conflict, stereotypes, and what it means to belong.

Malaysian Chinese immigrant Shing Yin Khor’s “I Don’t Want To Write Today” is a gorgeously illustrated short story that captures the author’s exhaustion at having to make a case to exist, especially within a White-dominated culture. Novelist Melissa de la Cruz’s “Fourteen Ways of Being Asian in America Over Thirty-Six Years” chronicles her life from being a young girl from the Philippines to growing in her career as a writer; the one sad constant has been racism and microaggressions.

Journalist Amna Nawaz grippingly depicts the fear she felt after 9/11 as a young Pakistani American and how that has shaped how she raises her biracial daughters in today’s culture.

Besides the dual identities of being Asian and American, the book explores intersectionality in other aspects. “On Being Black and Asian in America,” by Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, is about how her Japanese and Black identity changes with different social situations. Kim Tran’s “An Incomplete Silence” explores the author’s relationship with her family and how her mother’s silence when she came out did not necessarily mean disapproval. Other writers choose song lyrics (“Listen Asshole”

by Yellow Rage) and poetry (“a bad day” by Catzie Vilayphonh, “Ten Things You Should Know About Being an Asian From the South” by G Yamazawa) to convey their anger at anti-Asian violence and the feeling of being a perpetual foreigner. Marie Lu’s poem, “Museum in Her Head,” describes a woman heroine walking through halls of memories and realizing the power of pride in one’s work and name. SuChin Pak provides the introduction, and other contributors include Kao Kalia Yang, David Kwong, and Aisha Sultan.

A luminous book that highlights the humanity and multitudes of being Asian American. |

THE ADVENTURES OF HERBIE COHEN World’s Greatest Negotiator

WHAT THE ERMINE SAW The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s Most Mysterious Portrait

Cohen, Rich Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $27.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-374-16961-9

Collinsworth, Eden Doubleday (272 pp.) $27.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-385-54611-9

The eventful life of a renowned strategist.

Rolling Stone contributing editor Cohen, who has written about baseball, football, Jewish gangsters, and kids hockey, offers an affectionate portrait of his remarkable father, as amusing as it is tender. Brooklyn-born Herb Cohen, the son of “uneducated Polish émigrés,” worked his way up from insurance agent to become an internationally acclaimed expert in the art of the deal. A sought-after speaker, he gave as many as 250 presentations per year in boardrooms, at conventions, and in university lecture halls. He consulted at the departments of State, Justice, and Treasury and at the CIA. He taught FBI agents how to negotiate with terrorists, and he advised Jimmy Carter about negotiating with Iran during the hostage crisis. In 1980, he shared his insights in a self-help book, You Can Negotiate Anything: How To Get What You Want, which sold more than 1 million copies. “At the core,” his son writes, “all his lessons were about the same thing: empowerment. He tried to wake people up to the power they had without knowing it. He especially loved advising the underdog, the self-defeated who has been crushed by the institution, the machine.” Cohen recounts his father’s adolescence in Bensonhurst, where he was part of a raucous yet harmless gang that called itself the Warriors. Among its members was Larry Zeiger, who grew up to become Larry King. All the boys took nicknames: Herb’s was Handsomo. He was “a Damon Runyon character, a street corner raconteur,” and a man “of tremendous appetites. For comedy, success, love, and food. He was one of those human yo-yos who can gain or drop a hundred pounds in a few months. Binge and fast. Consume and forsake. Sin and repent.” A son, brother, husband, and father, Herb was, above all, someone who could never ignore a chance to stand up to authority; he was happiest, his son observed, as “a freelance injustice fighter.”

A thoroughly entertaining combination of memoir and biography.

Chasing down the mysterious history of a priceless painting.

Collinsworth unwinds a thoroughly captivating story about a single painting. She begins “some 530 years ago” in Milan with Ludovico, a powerful, wealthy duke who commissioned a portrait of his young lover, “most probably Cecilia Gallerani.” Barely two feet by a foot and a half, it was meticulously conceived and presented by a young Leonardo da Vinci. Known simply as Lady With an Ermine, it was one of only four known portraits of women he painted. Da Vinci, writes the author, “made Cecilia so palpably real with paint that we

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“A heartwarming delight.” tales of al

are able to imagine the faint pulse at the base of her throat and can almost hear her breath, but what he achieved is more than artistic precision. The portrait is not just a visual transmission of what she looked like; it’s also a psychological narrative.” Collinsworth goes into lush detail chronicling the colorful, often violent times when the work was created and reveals some fascinating biographical elements about da Vinci. When Ludovico married a 15-year-old named Beatrice, the painting hung in his private apartments while Cecilia and her son resided in the same building. When forced out by Beatrice, she took the painting with her. After Beatrice died, her conniving, art-collecting sister Isabella secured the painting from Cecilia—or did she? For the next 250 years, despite rumors, the painting’s location was unknown until 1800, when a roving Polish nobleman purchased it in Italy from an unknown seller as a gift for his mother in Russia, where it was subsequently misidentified and Cecilia’s “very essence” was lost. Collinsworth meticulously charts the painting’s circuitous path throughout Europe during political unrest and two world wars to a German governor-general who was busy creating “a systematic campaign to eradicate Polish

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culture.” Finally transferred to the National Museum in Kraków, the painting has since been exhibited around the world.

Filled with beauty, passion, greed, and evil, Collinsworth’s search is a spirited art history yarn.

TALES OF AL The Water Rescue Dog Cox, Lynne Knopf (224 pp.) $27.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-31937-6

A celebrated long-distance openwater swimmer recounts the amazing water-rescue canines at an Italian training school.

When Cox—a dog lover and author of Swimming to Antarctica, among other books—happened across a video of a Newfoundland fearlessly leaping from a rescue helicopter into a lake to save a drowning man, she was intrigued. Most canines “are terrified of loud noises,” and the large, shambling Newfoundlands she had known had never struck her as especially agile. Noting that the dog was part of the Sculoa Italiana Cani Salvataggio, the Italian School of Rescue Dogs, Cox decided to investigate. She flew to Milan to meet the school’s vice president, Donatella Pasquale, and her 2-year-old Newfoundland, Al. Pasquale had trained many dogs, including Alyssha, another Newfoundland that had become a lifesaving legend. Al, however, confounded Pasquale due to the slowness of her progress as well as the way she was distracted by everything from insects and ducks to swimmers. In the weeks that followed, Cox shadowed the SICS members to learn how the dogs became water rescuers and swam with the canines to get a sense of what she discovered was an endurance swimmer–like relationship to the water. She also witnessed as a nervous Pasquale took the sometimes-willful Al to be certified by the Italian Coast Guard as a rescue dog. It was only after Al passed that Pasquale realized her dog’s distractedness was actually a manifestation of her extreme sensitivity to signals, such as raised wings and arms. She believed other living beings were telling her that they needed to be rescued. Engagingly told in simple yet eloquent language, this unique story about the human-canine bond—and, in particular, one woman’s belief in an apparently difficult but ultimately exceptional dog—is a treat for animal lovers of all ages.

A heartwarming delight.

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ON AUTUMN LAKE The Collected Essays

memoir and cultural history. Crase knew many of the individuals he writes about and was immersed in the communities in which they flourished. Crase met Ashbery, for example, when he was 28 and had not yet read the poet’s work. Needing someone to drive him around in upstate New York, Ashbery, then 45, enjoined Crase to serve as his chauffeur. “Our rides,” Crase recalls, “were exhilarating, not only for the miles we covered but because his conversation, so habitually casual and good natured, was also fearless. Each ride was a rolling preceptorial.” In some of the most affecting essays in the collection, Crase vibrantly delineates the friendships, affairs, collaborations, and financial infusions that made possible the New York School of poets and painters, centered on the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan.

The author offers a warm profile of British polymath Dwight Ripley, “linguist, poet, botanist, artist,” who became the gallery’s benevolent financial backer. An unusual involvement with an artist’s work came when Mark Milroy proposed to paint his portrait, a suggestion that at first inspired fear. “Portraits are aesthetically intensified perceptions,” Crase notes, “and intense perception makes people nervous.” Of the experience

Crase, Douglas Nightboat Books (344 pp.) $23.95 paper | May 9, 2022 978-1-64362-143-2

Astute observations on literature and art.

Poet, essayist, and biographer Crase, a MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, has gathered more than 30 pieces published over the last 40 years that he describes as “affairs of attention and intellectual desire, rather than criticism.” Among those who merit his attention are poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Marianne Moore, and Lorine Niedecker; artists Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, Eugene Leake, and Robert Dash; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose prescience and “persistent moral proximity” Crase roundly celebrates in several essays. Besides being appreciations, the pieces also serve as

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ON THE COVER

Harvey Fierstein To write his new memoir, the playwright and actor took Shirley MacLaine’s advice: “Just tell the truth as you remember it”

BY MEGAN LABRISE Bruce Glikas

Stars aside, it’s worth noting that Kirkus’ review of I Was Better Last Night is a rave by any other measure: “Hilarious,” our reviewer wrote. “Insightful, unflinching.”

“A poignant, clever, and entertaining look at an impressive, unique career.”

“I’ve tried very hard not to lie,” says Fierstein, who offers readers an emotional journey through his gendernonconforming childhood in 1950s Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; experimentation with art, drugs, the Gallery Players, and Andy Warhol’s crew in the ’60s; the gay rights movement of the ’70s; the devastation wrought by AIDS in the ’80s and beyond; and the creation and manifestation of five decades’ worth of unforgettable performances and plays (Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles, Newsies, Kinky Boots; Hairspray, Fiddler on the Roof, Mrs. Doubtfire). Dedicated “to the radical fairies who flew before me,” I Was Better Last Night is imbued with a palpable love.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“I want my damn star.”

This is how Harvey Fierstein greets me. He’s calling from a private number, from his home in Connecticut.

No hello. No hey, how are you? No it’s me, Harvey.

I want my damn star.

And he says it in that voice—you know the voice— and it compels me to promise that I will sneak into our New York office, after hours, to amend the review.

But what should I tell my boss if I get caught?

Fierstein suggests tugging the heartstrings: “Come on! He’s dyslexic, and he typed 400 freaking pages. Give him a goddamn star.”

Now Kirkus may not have starred I Was Better Last Night (Knopf, March 1), the debut memoir by iconic playwright, actor, and gay rights activist Harvey Fierstein, but I’m going to go ahead and star this interview. It was one of the funniest, most memorable conversations I’ve had in 16 years of journalism (much of it, regrettably, unprintable).

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Harvey Fierstein: They let you read the book?

Kirkus Reviews: Indeed, they did. And my experience was akin to how you describe audiences’ reactions to your plays when the going’s good: I laughed, I cried— Oh good.

—and when I say cried, I mean it. Early on, you mention an important childhood friend—Michael—and how the friendship was lost to “emotional and deeply disturbing events.” That’s pretty much all you say up front—the whole time I’m reading the book, I want to know what happened—and then you hit me with the explanation in the antepenultimate chapter: BAM. And it just cracked me open. Bravo!

Thank you. I mean, I’m thrilled because—I had only two disagreements with my editor. My editor is just wonder|

ful, Peter Gethers, I don’t know if you know him. He did those two big Sondheim volumes, the lyrics and all that.

I figured, if he can do that, then he can do me. Heterosexual, too! And I figured that would be a good thing for my writing. He did ask me to move that chapter up in the book to where it happened [chronologically], and I said no, that’s the whole purpose of it, is that it belongs there. And I’m so glad that that’s the way it reads.

And certainly, they know my lovers, but they don’t know the details about what went wrong here or there. I’ve never been secretive about who I was sleeping with, but they don’t know every detail. There’s a lot of stuff there of why you did what you did. So yeah. Maybe 12 friends have read the book—that’s it.

You tried very hard not to lie in writing this book, you mentioned earlier. Did you have any other guidelines like that?

I tried very hard to be kind. It’s easy to be vicious when you’re finally having your say. And that’s not [me]. Even writing Arthur Laurents, who I guess is the meanest guy in the book—you can’t write about Arthur and not be mean—I mean, even he knew that. And he would be the first one to yell at me if I cleaned him up, if I made him into something he wasn’t. But what I tried to do—because I’ve never done this before—is just sit down and tell you the story as I remember it. You know, like Shirley says: Let your memory edit it. You go ahead and write it and trust that it’ll be the right story to tell right now.

I love the advice Shirley MacLaine gave you about writing a memoir: “Just tell the truth as you remember it.

Time has a way of editing out what isn’t important anymore.” What do you admire about her storytelling?

I love the straightforwardness of it. She almost talks as if you knew the story already. It’s like she’s so familiar with you. And I know that from writing dialogue, how to be present, and so I wanted to feel like, if the audience even knew who I was at all they would actually be hearing it in my voice as if I was telling it to them. Because that’s a feeling that you have when you read Shirley’s stuff.

Well, you did it, baby. You’re coming through loud and clear. So do you call this an autobiography or a memoir? And is the distinction important or nah?

I don’t know. You know, you would know so much better than I. I asked my editor right at the beginning. I said, “Am I writing a memoir or an autobiography?” And he said, “Well, an autobiography has everything in it. A memoir has, like, stories.” And I said, “I’m very old. I can’t put everything in here. I would get bored, and the audience would, too. So let’s call it a memoir.”

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Editor at large Megan Labrise is the host of the Fully Booked podcast. I Was Better Last Night was reviewed in the Jan. 1, 2022, issue.

Hey, listen, I got an early copy of this book, and on the back of it, it says a lot of these stories you’ve never told to people in your family, in your circle.

Yeah, that’s true. It’s funny, my brother has two sons who are both adults now. One is getting married in April, the other one has two kids. And he wanted to give them this version of the book, and I said, “It’s so much better to just let them have the book when it comes out, and there’s no pressure, because there’s a lot of people reading it then.” And he said,” I don’t understand.” And I said, “Because—how are they going to deal with my suicide attempt?” They don’t know anything about that shit. These are my nephews, these are people who don’t really look at me as a writer or an actor. They look at you as Uncle Harvey, you know? They don’t know that stuff. There was stuff about—now that I say it, I’m not even sure my brother knew all the details about that. |

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“An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and yet another top-notch work from Damrosch.” adventurer

itself, Crase found that “being the object of Milroy’s perception, hours at a time, convinced me that the infamous ‘male gaze’ may be no fiction.”

Gracefully wrought essays imbued with a rare intimacy.

conquests, relentless travels, and a lifetime spent perpetrating scams and cons. Damrosch, an award-winning biographer of Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and others, offers a close critical study of the original manuscript and of supplementary texts that include hundreds of pages of unpublished works. The result is a nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites who was determined to free himself from all manner of repression. He was, Damrosch writes, not “just a bad boy, he was a particular kind of bad boy” whose sexual encounters were “opportunistic and [sometimes] disturbingly exploitative.” He engaged in pedophilia (though, as Damrosch explains, the age of consent at the time was 10), incest, and gang rape; claimed to have occult powers; and lost fortunes gambling. Born to actors in Venice, Casanova imbibed the spirit of the swarming, culturally diverse city. The major industry, Damrosch writes, “was pleasure,” and Casanova, drawn to role-playing, fascinated by cross-dressing, and an “instinctive improvisor,” thrived there. Damrosch hews closely to the narrative of the Histoire, testing Casanova’s version—and the analyses of previous biographers— against available historical evidence. Still, his portrait is not a corrective to what is already well known but rather an amplification. Although he states at the outset that “the story of a notorious seducer needs to be addressed frankly and critically,” Damrosch ably demonstrates his subject’s energy and intelligence, “the joie de vivre, the enormous risks and hair-raising escapes, the lifelong struggle to invent and reinvent himself,” as well as his impressive talent in creating a memoir “bursting with vitality”—an apt description for this beautifully illustrated biography.

An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and yet another top-notch work from Damrosch.

ADVENTURER The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova

Damrosch, Leo Yale Univ. (432 pp.) $35.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-300-24828-9

A vivid chronicle of the passions of an 18th-century libertine.

Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) has been the subject of many biographies, based largely on edited and sometimes sanitized versions of his Histoire de ma vie, in which he recounted more than 100 sexual

MUTINOUS WOMEN How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast

DeJean, Joan Basic Books (448 pp.) $32.00 | April 19, 2022 978-1-5416-0058-4

A welcome retelling of a forgotten segment of American history.

In her latest work, DeJean, author of How Paris Became Paris and many other works of history, unearths the story of the unlikely women who became the Gulf Coast’s founding mothers. In 1719, a ship called La Mutine set sail from France and docked in New France, what is now Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Inside were more than 130 sickly women, ravaged human cargo destined for the Colonies as punishment for alleged crimes. Records show that many of the women were charged with prostitution, but in reality, many could not defend themselves or even understand the accusations against them. Oppressed by a system that detested the impoverished, they became victims of slave ship owner John Law, who saw them as an opportunity to fill a need for 6,000 70

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Readers will come away fascinated and inspired by this relatively unknown tale of strength and the human spirit.

French settlers to work in the Colonies. Together with a craven warden from the women’s prison, Law sealed the fate of these young, often illiterate women without their input. “French authorities,” writes the author, “set no ground rules; no one considered the exact terms on which female detainees were to be shipped off ‘to the colonies’ or even what the authorities should call the process they were establishing.” Only 62 survived the voyage. What transpired after they landed ashore, however, is a clear demonstration of the beauty and power of the feminine spirit, and DeJean chronicles their experiences in well-written, often gripping prose. During their passage, which included forced dwelling in dangerous cargo holds, some women became lifelong friends. Upon their arrival, many were married off to local soldiers who had returned from war, and they set about making lives for themselves and their new husbands. Over time, many fought to clear their names, and some became wealthy property owners or ran successful businesses. Regardless of the directions of their new lives, together they ensured that their children “enjoyed experiences and opportunities that they themselves had never known.”

THE MOVEMENT MADE US A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride Dennis Jr., David J. with David J. Dennis Sr. Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $27.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-06-301142-7

A young Black activist revisits his father’s role in the civil rights movement

of the 1960s.

“How many bubbles are on a bar of soap?” That was a typical Mississippi voting-eligibility question during the late Jim Crow era—impossible to answer but sufficient to deny Black citizens

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“A thrilling, unique contribution to the literature on the American Revolution.” rebels at sea

the right to vote. “Wrong answer, no voter registration,” recalls Dennis Sr., who had significant involvement in key historical moments, often at great danger. He came into the movement reluctantly, determined to become an engineer and settle into an ordinary life. Instead, drawn into it at a time of lunch-counter protests and marches for justice, he faced down the violence of police and White supremacists. “I was aware of racial terror, like any Black kid, especially in the South,” he writes. “I sat in the back of buses. I picked cotton for white men who owned the land we sharecropped on. I heard them call me ‘boy’ and [N-word] and I knew that speaking up would get me and my family killed.” Cultivating friendships with James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer (“a product of everything Mississippi could do to Black folks, especially Black women”), and other leading lights of the movement, Dennis Sr. continued his activism into the 1970s, when, weary (and none too impressed with many clueless White would-be allies), he slipped into despair and drugs, “lost in his own fury,” as his son describes it. Reinvigorated by the example of Robert Moses, he regained his lost idealism in time to see the necessary revival of civil rights activism in a time of retrograde violence and oppression. Writes Dennis

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Jr., “Growing up with these people taught me that to be Black in America and part of the Movement was to have fought a war on American soil.”

Timely in an era of renewed disenfranchisement and an instructive, important addition to the literature of civil rights.

REBELS AT SEA Privateering in the American Revolution

Dolin, Eric Jay Liveright/Norton (352 pp.) $32.50 | May 31, 2022 978-1-63149-825-1

The bestselling maritime historian returns with a study of privateering activity during the Revolutionary War and its role in bolstering the Colonial cause.

In the 1700s, privateers—armed vessels that were owned and outfitted by private contractors who had government permission to capture enemy ships in times of war—had a reputation of being both patriotic and tainted by piracy. They were essentially a cost-free navy that could inflict significant military and economic pain at no cost to the government—in this case, the Continental Congress of the 13 rebellious Colonies, which had no official navy and relied heavily on these rogue vessels to intercept British ships. In this exciting narrative, Dolin, a 2020 Kirkus Prize finalist for A Furious Sky, demonstrates how privateering was a key element in America’s ability to secure independence. “American privateersmen,” he writes, “took the maritime fight to the British and made them bleed. In countless daring actions…privateers caused British maritime insurance rates to precipitously rise, diverted critical British resources and naval assets…added to British weariness over the war, and played a starring role in bringing France into the war on the side of the United States.” The author digs deep into the whole enterprise, strongly promoted by Benjamin Franklin, and he vividly delineates the exploits of individual battles won by Jonathan Haraden, Offin Boardman, James Forten, David Ropes, and Andrew Sherburne, among numerous others. In this characteristically well-researched history, Dolin describes the vital activities of two main types of privateers: vessels heavily armed with a large crew to man the cannons, with the sole intent to capture British prey; and merchant vessels traveling between ports with permission to attack enemy ships. The author also explores in fascinating detail the desperate circumstances of captured Americans aboard British prison ships, where they experienced “conditions so horrific that they beggar belief.”

A thrilling, unique contribution to the literature on the American Revolution.

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MANAGING EXPECTATIONS A Memoir in Essays Driver, Minnie HarperOne (352 pp.) $27.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-06-311530-9

The veteran actor delivers a memoir in a series of deftly crafted essays.

In her debut, Driver engagingly writes about family dramas, self-doubt, her unruly hair, unexpected motherhood, and the trajectory of her career. She grew up partly in England, with her mother, sister, brother, and the man her mother had recently married; and partly in Barbados, where her father lived. “None of it makes any sense,” she writes about her childhood. “There is no conversation about all this change. New people wander into our landscape and nobody but me thinks it’s weird.” Fed up with Driver’s rudeness toward his girlfriend, her father sent her back to England, which required an overnight stay, alone, at Miami’s Fontainebleau

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Hotel. Reflecting on her feelings then, she writes, “I always want grown-ups to like me, but find it difficult to behave in a way that seems to consistently please them.” After graduating from acting school, she was despondent about being the only one in her class without an agent. “The place I found myself stuck, at twenty,” she writes, “was being a new adult—still furnished with a child’s dream plan, but being asked to manifest it in a world of adult expectations.” After appearing in the lead role in the 1995 film Circle of Friends, for which she was paid $10,000, Driver expected other offers to roll in. But these were so slow in coming that she took off to Uruguay, where her sister was living with a boyfriend.

For the author, beach life seemed a possible future—until she was summoned to New York for an audition. Walking anonymously through the streets of Manhattan, she suddenly felt liberated.

“I can consciously decide who I am and not let circumstance or previous damage dictate it,” she gushed to her sister. “I can be the conscious architect of my own life!” Driver’s spirited prose informs all the essays; a standout is her graceful, moving chronicle, radiant with love, of her mother’s last days.

Sharp observations and quirky irreverence make for a delightful read.

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“A vital, richly textured resource for anyone seeking a better understanding of gender identity.” fine

FINE A Comic About Gender

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT A Rousing History of Sex

Ewing, Rhea Liveright/Norton (336 pp.) $21.00 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-63149-680-6

Feltman, Rachel Bold Type Books (336 pp.) $27.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-64503-716-3

A graphic narrative project on the multifaceted nature of gender.

In 2012, graphic artist Ewing, then a recent college graduate, joined a transgender support group to “speak honestly about this mixed-up thing called gender, to exist without a sense that I was failing at my part in life.” After finding online resources too impersonal, the author began interviewing friends about gender and reaching out to LGBTQ+ centers for assistance. The intent was to understand their own gender ambivalence through the perspectives of others and figure out “why I am cut out of some spaces and invited into others.” In their debut book, Ewing offers a timely, educative, and vividly rendered illustrated portrait. Based in the Midwest, Ewing spoke with more than 50 individuals varying in gender, age, and race, and the narrative includes those remarkable stories, which evolve as the book progresses. Many of these experiences began with unsettling episodes of gender dysphoria and the search for “clarity and control over how others saw me.” The author deftly assembles the most resonant responses, showing the participants generously discussing how gender is interconnected with race, culture, and sexuality; how it moves far beyond conventional masculine and feminine designations; and how embracing fluidity can be liberating and transformative regardless of social norms of appearance and behavior, many of which are constrictive and damaging. Ewing ably explores the complexities and difficulties of expressing gender in terms of sexuality, health care, visibility, language, and bathroom choices, and the elegant graphic format affords the author ample room to develop their themes visually. Ewing presents a uniquely straightforward, unembellished amalgam of narrative and illustration, smoothly braided with their own personal journey. The instructive yet never heavy-handed narrative boldly shows how identity is intimately interpreted and how connections with others can fortify perceptions and perspectives.

A vital, richly textured resource for anyone seeking a better understanding of gender identity.

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A snarky romp through the “elastic, adaptable, catch-as-catch-can, DIY-friendly, totally open-source method of reproduction and social connection that keeps the world as we know it spinning.”

Popular Science executive editor Feltman could talk your ear off about koala chlamydia, and while she understands that her topic won’t appeal to everyone, this raucous book is sure to have something to fascinate most readers—even those who think they’re experts on all things sex-related. Rather than an in-depth examination of one or two specific elements, she offers “a smattering, a taste, a mere assortment of amusebouches of sexual expression and queer existence and horny exuberance through history.” Beginning with the introduction, “Everything Weird Is Normal—Everything Normal Is Weird,” the author demonstrates that she is equally confident discussing bacterial reproduction techniques, the history of heterosexual mating rituals, and contemporary human identities and politics, and there are numerous moments of laugh-out-loud amazement and eyebrow-raising surprise. The chapter on human reproduction is especially well detailed, taking the standard “sperm-meets-egg” story and complicating it almost to the point of absurdity, and Feltman’s exploration of animal biology and reproductive habits is similarly eye-opening.

Many of the author’s choices are affirming and diverse—e.g., referring to “people with uteruses” and consistently including nonbinary people. Some of the humor is grating or overworked, including certain sections that will confuse older, less-internet-savvy readers, or will quickly become outdated, as in passages of meme-ready language. Feltman’s jokey tone works well for shorter pieces but becomes exhausting over a full-length book. Consequently, many readers will choose to read a chapter or two at a time. On the whole, though, the book is entertaining and educational. Before presenting a helpful section of further reading, the author notes, “this book is meant to merely be a humorous primer, a lighthearted introduction, a romp through the basics.” It’s an apt description.

A deep dive for sex nerds and informative fun for everyone else.

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I CAN TAKE IT FROM HERE A Memoir of Trauma, Prison, and Self-Empowerment Forbes, Lisa Truth to Power/Steerforth (320 pp.) $16.95 paper | June 7, 2022 979-1-58642-304-9

An ex-convict and current social justice entrepreneur chronicles how she overcame the prejudice and obstacles that stood in the way of a successful post-prison life.

“Growing up,” writes Forbes, “outsiders thought we were a godly household.” However, her real life was much darker: “An older brother sexually molested me for years, my sisters bullied me, my father drank, and my mother talked about ‘the last days.’ God would destroy the world’s nonbelievers, she said, including me.” Forbes did her best to ignore or suppress her rage and pain, but she wasn’t aware that if she didn’t adequately address her trauma, she would suffer the same mistreatment in future relationships. Not long after she graduated high school,

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she met James, a seemingly reliable man who became the father of her young daughter, Mercedes. However, he quickly revealed his cruelty in the disrespect he showed her, and he went back on his promises to marry her and support Mercedes.

When Forbes accidentally discovered that James had married a woman he called his “cousin,” she stabbed him; he died the next morning. Forbes faced unfair bias throughout the sentencing process, and she was sentenced to 25 years in prison, making James seem like the only victim. Determined to make something of her life once out of prison, Forbes was a model inmate and earned multiple educational certificates. She was released early, just as Mercedes turned 16. Back in society, the author faced uphill battles seeking housing, work, and an end to the trauma she carried throughout her life. Working to become a “restored citizen,” Forbes turned to advocacy for those who, like her, had suffered prejudice, trauma, and other significant life challenges. Candid and harrowing, this book calls into question the nature of the “justice” meted out to the impoverished in the U.S., joining a vast and growing body of literature on the broken criminal justice system.

An inspiringly courageous memoir.

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“Lessons on leadership that check all the boxes.” hearts touched with fire

IN THE EARLY TIMES A Life Reframed

of the literature as a survey of his personal advice, but there is a great deal of overlap. In three sections, the author describes the qualities of a leader, how a leader deals with others, and examples of leaders in action. Gergen fills his text with realworld examples, most of them involving largely well-respected public figures—Churchill’s name appears 76 times, Lincoln’s 50, Stalin’s 0. Donald Trump also appears (33 times) but only as a cautionary tale. Few readers will deny that leadership starts from within, and Gergen’s lessons on self-mastery ring true despite a steady stream of bromides—e.g., “stay true to your values and principles”; “discover your true inner voice.” Readers who have digested multiple leadership guides will encounter few surprises but will not quarrel with the author’s emphasis on finding a good role model, building a solid team, learning to speak in public, and determining when the “low arts” are preferable to honesty. Particularly insightful is Gergen’s analysis of how effective leaders are able to manage across a hierarchy, including colleagues, superiors, and those who report directly to them. Throughout, the author’s definition of leader is broad and encompassing. Though they didn’t necessarily command others, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was brilliant and inspiring, Rachel Carson was a devastatingly effective writer, and climate activist Greta Thunberg is charismatic and persuasive. The text also makes it clear that while leadership is teachable, pure talent is not. Like many other guidebooks, Gergen closes with key takeaways that vary from useful (“try hard things, fail, move on”) to questionable (“give 150 percent of yourself ”).

Lessons on leadership that check all the boxes.

Friend, Tad Crown (288 pp.) $28.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-593-13735-2

A look back from midlife.

Now in his mid-50s, “sliding down the neck of the hourglass,” veteran New Yorker staff writer Friend updates his memoir Cheerful Money by once again examining his childhood and young adulthood, education and aspirations, and reflecting, in intimate detail, on his marriage to food writer Amanda Hesser and parenthood to twins.

“You’d think that by now,” he writes, “after years of observation, I’d have a fix on my closest relatives. But fitting your family together begins as a jigsaw puzzle and becomes an anxiety dream.” Complicating the puzzle was his discovery, after his father’s death in 2019, of a trove of letters, journals, ruminations, and verses, including a file titled “Annals of Carnality 1948-58,” which revealed someone far different from the emotionally distant father who, Friend writes, “hugged me until I was about seven. Then he stopped.” The man who emerged from these pieces was “curious, generous, errant, sensitive, bighearted.”

He admitted to several affairs and was tormented by unfulfilled ambition. “Starved of affection,” his father had written, “I grew hungry for honor.” An award-winning historian who had served as president of Swarthmore College, he never achieved the fame he sought in the public arena, and though he loved his wife, he craved passion. Friend fears emulating his father even though he hopes that years of therapy enabled him to “become exquisitely sensitive and self-aware, and surpass him.” Certainly he surpassed his father in betrayal: A yearslong “litany of infidelities” threatened his marriage. Fatherhood is a major cause of anxiety, as well. His twins—wise, witty, and precociously articulate—feature in many anecdotes. But Friend cannot help but worry, “Is the father I wanted the father they want, too? Or is the father I got the father I’ve inevitably become?” Mostly engaging, the narrative at times seems self-serving despite the author’s efforts at candor.

A complicated family saga.

THE PARADOX OF DEMOCRACY Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion

Gershberg, Zac & Sean Illing Univ. of Chicago (320 pp.) $30.00 | June 10, 2022 978-0-226-68170-2

If democracy seems imperiled, don’t blame only cable news and social media.

Two media experts argue that it has always lurched from crisis to crisis.

Gershberg, a journalism and media studies professor, and Illing, a Vox reporter and podcaster, challenge the idea that the linchpin of democracy is a set of rules or institutions, such as safeguards for free elections or laws that protect civil rights. In this dense history of the intersection of politics, democracy, and free expression, the authors argue that “the essential democratic freedom” is freedom of expression. That freedom leads to “the paradox of democracy”—“a free and open communication environment…because of its openness, invites exploitation and subversion from within.” Fascists like Mussolini and injustices like Jim Crow laws arise because open communication allows people to persuade others to support their aims, and it’s been that way for millennia. In ancient Athens, Socrates’ death

HEARTS TOUCHED WITH FIRE How Great Leaders Are Made

Gergen, David Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $29.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-982170-57-8

A leadership guide from the founding director of the Harvard Center for Public Leadership.

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sentence was “democracy’s original sin”: A city known for free speech condemned a philosopher for speaking freely. Moving chronologically through the centuries, Gershberg and Illing show how their “paradox” has played out in movements that include the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the rise and fall of local newspapers, the ascent of cable news and social media, and the eruption of the “cancel culture.” Viewing democracy as inherently messy, the authors offer no global blueprint for fixing the chaos, and their few suggestions are overfamiliar, including their call for “the restoration of local journalism, especially print newspapers.” A flat narrative also works against their worthwhile material: The authors don’t develop or expand their thesis so much as elaborate on the same paradox, again and again, and how it informed successive eras.

The result is a book that provides valuable context for the latest assaults on democracy but one that, with a more effective structure, could have reached a general readership.

A clear and informative history with limited appeal for nonspecialists.

1950s onward, in what became his most celebrated mode, collage. Gilmore revealingly sets individual works in the context of Bearden’s own recollections, his engagement with and deviations from particular conventions, and the broader cultural milieu in which he lived. A late work such as Family (1986), for instance, is understood in relation to the family photograph (and the complex interpersonal dynamics) that inspired it, along with techniques associated with artists such as Matisse and Cézanne that Bearden creatively adapted.

A thoughtful, illuminating investigation of Bearden’s place in—and shaping of—20th-century American art.

THE GOTTI WARS Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster Gleeson, John Scribner (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 3, 2022 978-1-982186-92-0

ROMARE BEARDEN IN THE HOMELAND OF HIS IMAGINATION An Artist’s Reckoning With the South

A memoir from the federal prosecutor who took down the “Teflon Don” 30 years ago.

Gleeson recounts a youthful yearning to be an assistant U.S. attorney, a job denied him by an ambitious Rudy Giuliani in Manhattan. For his troubles, Gleeson, accepted in the jurisdiction just across the river in Brooklyn, was soon put on a case that took on the head of the Gambino crime family, John Gotti. “Even though I was a rookie, eight months earlier I’d been assigned to prosecute John Gotti on an entirely different set of charges,” Gleeson writes of one notorious hit, “so I’d already become part of the criminal world in which the murders outside Sparks were a seismic event.” That first case failed for reasons the author makes clear. Gotti’s second trial was on constantly shaky ground, built on insider informants who played both sides. “Just about everybody in Gotti’s crew had gone to jail at least once because of information Willie Boy had passed along,” writes Gleeson about one informant whose calculations didn’t play out to a happy ending.

The prosecutors, working with the FBI, had to be careful not to tip off the mob lawyers to the identities of these informants or to let it be known that they were listening to their quarries’ conversations. Gleeson is a thorough writer, so much so that his chronicle drowns in detail, a boon for procedural adepts but less so for civilian true-crime buffs. Still, the author is admirably generous with credit where it’s due, especially the fact that without his successfully turning mobster Sammy Gravano into a federal witness, Gotti might well have walked a second time.

Says Gravano, memorably, “I know I have to tell youse everything, and I will….I will not hold back, and I’m trusting you not to double-bang me.” Gleeson earns that trust, as this lumbering but nonetheless valuable narrative reveals.

A courtroom drama that, albeit without much drama, offers a realistic portrait of how big cases are pieced together.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth Ferris and Ferris Books/Univ. of North Carolina (176 pp.) $40.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-4696-6786-7

A reassessment of one of America’s greatest 20th-century artists and his role in defining Black experience.

In this incisive study of Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Gil­ more, a professor of history emerita at Yale, pays close attention to both the significance of the artist’s connections to his extended family and the influence of his extensive formal training. Part of the Great Migration, Bearden’s parents fled the dangers and injustices of Jim Crow with their young son, relocating from North Carolina to New York City. The status of Blacks in the South became a lasting theme for Bearden, who continually returned to his childhood memories as he sought a representative vision of Black life in America. Gilmore frames much of Bearden’s oeuvre in relation to those memories, which sometimes deviate from the historical record and often suggest the construction of a mythic past. “As he created paintings and collages,” writes the author, “he often did not know what was real, what was partially real, and what was a dream. This creative conundrum drove his artistic expression and sparked his imagination.” In tracing the arc of Bearden’s artistic development, Gilmore emphasizes the importance of his training at schools such as New York University and the Sorbonne and his immersion in a range of styles and movements. He experimented with cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, social realism, abstract expressionism, and, from the late 78

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“A valuable memoir enriched by years of personal and societal insight into the fraught subject of gender identity.” this body i wore

THIS BODY I WORE A Memoir

Goetsch, Diana Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-374-11509-8

A trans poet and essayist who transitioned later in life reflects on decades of discovering, reckoning with, and finally embracing her gender identity.

Poet and author Goetsch opens with a section about her mid-20s, when she was living as a man whose public persona concealed severe depression, aching loneliness, and the cross-dressing as a woman that exhilarated and confused her as well as isolated her from the human connection she craved. While studying at Wesleyan in the 1980s, the author tried desperately to understand herself and her “unmoored” perception of gender, struggling with feelings for which there were few avenues of expression at the time. At the beginning of the book, she includes a note about the language she uses

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throughout, which reflects the often offensive attitudes of the time period she describes. The narrative follows a nonlinear structure, with chapters indicated by years as well as titles. In the second part of the book, Goetsch returns to her childhood and adolescence, marked by family dysfunction, bullying, abuse, and loneliness, and the third section delves into the last significant relationships the author had with women while living as a man, her blossoming affinities for poetry and Buddhism, and the process of coming out as trans at age 50. Goetsch recalls periods and important locations in her life with rich, compelling detail, but sometimes her revelries are sprawling and unevenly paced. The prose is often lovely and emotionally affecting, as when she describes writing a painful goodbye to an ex-girlfriend’s sons after the breakup, and her insights into what it means to be trans, both on a personal and societal level, are valuable. Readers may find her blunt quips about transphobia even within the queer community sadly relevant, highlighting how much work still needs to be done: “The institutional transphobia was appalling: L, G, and B didn’t give a fuck about T.” A valuable memoir enriched by years of personal and societal insight into the fraught subject of gender identity.

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YIPPIE GIRL Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI

not just the leather-jacket-wearing, motorbike-riding tough that he is sometimes made out to be; nor the rambunctiously laughing, happy-go-lucky bon vivant that he often showed to the world,” but a tender friend and an artist of “literary and humane intelligence.”

In letters to fellow poets, Gunn reflects on his writing process, the publication and reception of his work, his assessments of other poets, and, not least, his enthusiastic identity as a gay man, which he needed to conceal in his early poems. Although he once toyed with having heterosexual sex to satisfy his curiosity, he decided “that one must not enter on such things if one cannot be happy in them and make the girl happy. It is a pity,” he added wryly, “to be perverted.” He gushes about his love for Mike Kitay, whom he met at Cambridge in 1952, and raunchily extols sex. In 1954, at Stanford as a creative writing fellow, he was quickly enamored of California, where he settled. In the 1970s, LSD, cocaine, and speed became habitual, supplemented by alcohol, and AIDS made the 1980s a grievous decade of loss. In a letter to his lifelong friend neurologist Oliver Sacks, Gunn reveals the values he most cherished: “I found you so talented,” Gunn wrote of his early impression, “but so deficient in one quality—just the most important—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that. And, frankly, I despaired of your ever becoming a good writer, because I didn’t see how one could be taught such a quality.” A detailed chronology, glossary of names, and photographs round out the volume, which is sure to please any fan of literary biography.

A work of impressive scholarship.

Gumbo, Judy Three Rooms Press (260 pp.) $18.00 paper | May 3, 2022 978-1-953103-18-5

Gumbo delivers a sharp-edged memoir of years of protest and resistance.

“In addition to being a child of communists, an immigrant, a pot smoking Jewish Yippie, a friend to Black Panthers, a woman who slept with America’s enemy, a prime suspect in a famous bombing, and a woman who tried to bend her gender boundaries, I’ve also had an abortion,” writes Gumbo, whose last name owes to a pun by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. She was and did all those things, indeed, having left her native Canada to attend a conference in the Bay Area and fallen in with the burgeoning radical left.

The Cleaver pun comes from her relationship with Stew Alpert (stew/gumbo), with whose memory the author spars throughout the book as lovers and occasional antagonists. Indeed, Gumbo, striking often angry tones, comes off as a scrapper without much room for compromise or debate, which she cheerfully attributes to the “Stalinist Discipline” her parents instilled in her and which she says “served me well—especially in the anarchic world of Yippie.”

Gumbo became a roving ambassador for the Youth International Party, visiting Vietnam (where she began a long relationship with a North Vietnamese poet) and Russia (where, she notes, longhairs were dissed just as much as they were in America). Along the way, and surprisingly early on, she earned a hefty FBI file but managed to elude most of their attempts to rein her in. After a time, she struck out on her own as a leader of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. “In the before times,” she writes, “you could use the word terrorist as satire without fear of surveillance, arrest or being cancelled by your peers.” Her eventful book concludes with a sad litany of the dead of the era: Cleaver, Alpert, Rubin, Hoffman, Ochs, and many others.

A welcome addition to the literature of radical activism in the age of Johnson, Nixon, and beyond.

PANDORA’S JAR Women in the Greek Myths

Haynes, Natalie Perennial/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 paper | March 29, 2022 978-0-06-313946-6

An analysis of the women of Greek myths and how “every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards.”

Writer, classicist, and comedian Haynes has written extensively on the ancient world. In her latest book, she rescues the reputations of some of the women in Greek mythology. She highlights the stories of women that have been retold countless times and explores the evolution of their characters over the centuries.

Divided into 10 chapters, her narrative discusses Pandora, Jocasta, Helen, Medusa, the Amazons, Clytemnestra, Eurydice, Phaedra, Medea, and Penelope. In her discussion of Pandora, Haynes points out that Pandora’s box didn’t appear until Erasmus translated Hesiod’s Works and Days into Latin “well over two millennia after Hesiod was writing in Greek.” Furthermore, Hesiod’s original version made no reference to Pandora releasing its contents. “For the ancients,” Haynes suggests, “Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil.” Regarding the stories of Helen causing the Trojan War, Haynes contends that she was “nothing but a beautiful pawn.” Turning to the legends associated with Medusa,

THE LETTERS OF THOM GUNN

Gunn, Thom Ed. by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler & Clive Wilmer Farrar, Straus and Giroux (800 pp.) $45.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-374-60569-8 Letters reveal a poet’s depths.

Meticulously edited, introduced, and annotated by literary scholar Nott and poets Kleinzahler and Wilmer, this commodious selection vibrantly portrays the acclaimed British poet Gunn (1929-2004). In a comprehensive biographical overview, Nott observes that Gunn “was 80

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“A much-needed exploration of the complex racial history of early Texas that won’t please the remember-the-Alamo crowd.” unsettled land

UNSETTLED LAND From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas

the author notes that while some versions of her myth have called her a “monster,” others claim that she was born beautiful but was afflicted with “snaky hair” to save her from future sexual encounters with men. Throughout, Haynes also notes that these often outlandish retellings and related tropes have become (flawed) inspirations for works of modern art, music, and film, including the original Star Trek series, an episode of The Simpsons, Pulp Fiction, and a music video by Beyoncé. Although the author assumes her audience is familiar with Greek mythology, readers of all levels of knowledge are certain to be enthralled with her analysis and find her humor and wit captivating.

A fun and informative addition to the ongoing consideration of ancient mythology.

Haynes, Sam W. Basic Books (464 pp.) $32.00 | May 3, 2022 978-1-5416-4541-7

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A study of Texas history that shows how the era of revolution was a contest of many sides.

Wresting Texas away from Mexico wasn’t just the work of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston.

Haynes, director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, opens with a party of German freethinkers recruited by an Englishman in New York with the promise of free land—but not forewarned that the Comanches had designs on that land themselves.

Then came a wave of eastern woodland Native peoples who had been driven out of their homelands by White settlement, guided by a canny leader who, though refused permission to

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colonize, did so anyway. They faced down Comanches along with many other neighbors. “The Indian refugees who came to Texas from the United States,” writes Haynes, “would find an even more diverse collection of Native peoples already living there.” Then came Anglo fortune-seekers and settlers, such as a Mississippi speculator who, “following in the footsteps of Stephen F. Austin, had been working for more than a year to establish his colony in the Piney Woods.” That colony put him up against Native peoples, the Hispanos of the town of Nacogdoches, and a nest of ruffians who had fled from Louisiana when the U.S. Army established an outpost there.

All these parties came into conflict during the revolutionary era, and in the end, as Haynes documents, it was the pro-slavery Whites who initiated their revolution after learning that Mexico was abolishing slavery who emerged victorious. The effects of newly established White supremacy were many, including the removal of many Tejanos, Hispanic Texans who had joined in that revolution, from positions of authority or power. One was the guerrilla fighter Juan Seguín, driven from the mayorship of San Antonio in 1842. As Haynes notes, sharply, “Anglos dominated the city council; 140 years would pass before the town elected a Mexican-American mayor again.”

A much-needed exploration of the complex racial history of early Texas that won’t please the remember-the-Alamo crowd.

impaired, the author sought out more personalized treatments and, as a man of faith, continued to pray for his wife’s health. In the second half of the book, Hershberger depicts Dee’s steady decline into deep dementia through his own increasingly arduous caregiving perspective, and the narrative becomes harrowing at times. “The last two years became an excruciating ordeal for Dee and an emotional roller coaster for me,” he writes.

Because the author solely focuses on his wife’s decline, snippets of their life together with their children appear in a short family pictorial at the end of the book. While intensely sorrowful, the couple’s journey is often poignant, grounded in true love and unshakeable devotion. It’s also an insightful, knowledgeable guidebook with essential advice for concerned readers facing similar circumstances.

A somber yet candid and emotionally supportive portrayal of a spouse’s cognitive decline.

FLY GIRL A Memoir

Hood, Ann Norton (288 pp.) $26.95 | May 3, 2022 978-1-324-00623-7

An aspiring writer takes an unusual career path.

Growing up in West Warwick, Rhode Island, novelist and memoirist Hood was enraptured by planes. Upon graduating from college in 1978, she had two goals: to become a writer and a flight attendant. “I was the most stereotypical type of girl who became an airline stewardess,” she admits.

“Small town. Love of travel. Big dreams. Craving excitement.”

In this lively memoir, the author recounts how she managed to fulfill both dreams, although writing took a back seat for most of the eight years that she flew. Getting hired was stressful: Multiple interviews weeded out most applicants—in 1978, over 14,000 people applied for 550 positions at TWA—and Hood was ecstatic to be accepted. During her training, she writes, “I learned to successfully evacuate seven kinds of aircraft, fix a broken coffeemaker, deliver a baby, mix proper cocktails, carve a chateaubriand, administer oxygen, demonstrate safety equipment, and make a baby’s rattle out of two plastic cups and a couple of TWA propeller-shaped swizzle sticks.” During her six-month probationary period, she and her classmates were stringently monitored for appearance, weight, and demeanor as well as competence. They could not weigh more than they did when they were hired, a requirement that had them taking diuretics and trying crazy weight-loss diets. Sometimes, she writes, “we just drank water until a pound or two came off.”

Hood, a naïve 21-year-old when she first started flying, grew into a sophisticated young woman undaunted by new cities and unfamiliar food; rude, unruly, or aggressive passengers; mishaps onboard; and some people’s assumptions that she was merely a glorified waitress. Her love of flying made her tolerate the airline’s total control of her life and time. Happily for her,

DIARY OF AN ALZHEIMER’S CAREGIVER

Hershberger, Robert Purdue Univ. Press (180 pp.) $19.99 paper | May 15, 2022 978-1-61249-734-1

Chronicle of a loving husband’s fiveyear odyssey of caretaking for his wife.

When his wife, Deanna, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Hershberger began journaling about his role as her caretaker, detailing the overwhelming, heartbreaking struggle it became. Beginning in 2010, the author noticed that Dee, a formerly energetic, attentive woman in her early 70s, was forgetting specific words and misplacing items throughout their home. A doctor attributed the incidences to a thyroid imbalance and prescribed medication. A year later, Dee’s weight loss, increasing impatience, memory lapses, and distinctly diminished capacity to perform household tasks caused further alarm, though the couple continued to enjoy their usual physical and social activities. Dee’s short-term memory continued to decline.

Early on, her problems were viewed as minor mental malfunctions, but as the years progressed, the couple’s lives became further complicated with a tentative diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Even seemingly simple daily tasks like showering, pouring water, or adhering to a medication regimen became a frustrating struggle in her “out of sight is out of mind” condition. As Dee’s long-term memory became gradually 82

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as opportunities waned because of turmoil in the airline industry, her writing career began to take flight.

Colorful anecdotes make for an entertaining memoir of travel and self-discovery.

history that “ushered in a new direction—often unexpected, like a planet following an invisible orrery, discernible only after the fact.” Those moments sometimes were met with hostility, as when Carnegie Hall audiences reacted violently to Steve Reich’s “Four Organs” in 1973, with one attendee shouting in response to the electric organs and relentless maraca accompaniment, “All right, I confess!” In erudite if truncated chapters, Isacoff covers dozens of landmarks in Western music: 11th-century monk Guido of Arezzo, who invented “a staff of four lines, unlike the five lines used today, on which musical note symbols were placed”; 12th-century composers Léonin & Pérotin, who were key to the development of polyphonic techniques; the birth of opera, which “delivered flamboyant spectacle, enticing music, and engaging theater”; the pioneers of jazz, “perhaps the most important development in the modern era—America’s musical gift to the world”; and the influence of Juilliard dropout Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, the 1959 “recording that turned the jazz world upside down.” The narrative is randomly organized, but Isacoff ’s encyclopedic knowledge of music is still very much in evidence. The book is an excellent choice for readers who want

MUSICAL REVOLUTIONS How the Sounds of the Western World Changed

Isacoff, Stuart Knopf (320 pp.) $30.00 | May 31, 2022 978-0-525-65863-4

Fortune favors the bold, but sometimes the rewards come only later, as this book on musical pioneers reaffirms.

Unlike his previous book, When the World Stopped To Listen, which focused only on American pianist Van Cliburn, Isacoff ’s latest describes many moments in music

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“A delightfully unpretentious, pleasing account of rock stardom.” long train runnin’

LONG TRAIN RUNNIN’ Our Story of the Doobie Brothers

a quick survey of Western music’s major developments, and it’s filled with memorable tidbits—e.g., that Florentine stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti “was credited with inventing gelato as well as enhancing opera stagecraft” and that Arnold Schoenberg feared the number 13 so much that he misspelled Aaron’s name in his opera “Moses und Aron” to avoid a title with 13 letters.

Too-short yet informative and often astute essays on some of the biggest moments in Western music.

Johnston, Tom & Pat Simmons with Chris Epting St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $29.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-250-27005-4 Founding members of the Doobie Brothers Johnston and Simmons alternate their perspectives to deliver an amiable, polyphonic history of the band.

It may surprise some readers to know that the Doobies—so named for the ever present joints that surrounded the band for its first decade or so—modeled themselves after Moby Grape, a San Francisco group that never got much traction, even backing up the ill-fated Skip Spence on numerous occasions. Early on, the Doobie Brothers played in Bay Area mountain towns that Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson would make infamous, with lots of Hells Angels in the crowd. Still, Johnston notes, they were playing for plenty of people besides bikers: “We didn’t consider ourselves anything other than a band that was growing and developing.” Drawing on other members of the band, producer Ted Templeman, and other principals, Johnston and Simmons trace the births and fortunes of songs that yielded one hit record after another in the 1970s and ’80s: “Natural Thing,” for instance, some of the magic of which they graciously attribute to engineer Don Landee, who “was really into ‘phasing’ effects.”

The authors also praise on T. Rex mastermind Marc Bolan, whom they credit for both entertaining stagecraft and exquisite good manners. “Kind of ironic,” Simmons adds parenthetically, “that, eventually, the Doobie Brothers and T. Rex would be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the same year, 2020.” It’s clear that there were tensions between some band members—Jeff “Skunk” Baxter doesn’t come off particularly well—and that some fans never got over Michael McDonald changing the direction of the band (replies McDonald, “It may be my voice on some of the songs, but it was the band that adapted everything, not just me”). But what’s most striking is the generosity Johnston and Simmons show to everyone around them, from supporting acts to session players, roadies, and all the band members over the years.

A delightfully unpretentious, pleasing account of rock stardom.

THE PUZZLER One Man’s Quest To Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, From Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life

Jacobs, A.J. Crown (350 pp.) $28.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-13671-3

The George Plimpton of thought experiments takes readers on a wideranging tour of puzzles, from crosswords to mazes and beyond.

In his latest foray into lighthearted, experiential journalism, Jacobs opens with the thrilling discovery that he’d been used as a clue in a New York Times crossword puzzle—a thrill lessened somewhat by appearing in the hard-to-solve Saturday edition, “proof that I’m totally obscure, the very embodiment of irrelevance.” Undeterred, the author, a puzzle addict whose interests embrace not just crosswords, but also “mazes, secret codes, riddles, logic puzzles,” and other nerdy pursuits, embarked on a quest to find puzzle makers and solvers in dusty warrens, convention centers, and other venues. The Times, he discovered, was late in the game when it came to crosswords, having sniffed that they were “too lowbrow, too frivolous.” Under the guidance of the learned but democratically minded Will Shortz, the paper has become the gold standard of crosswords. Throughout, Jacobs ventures theories on how the puzzles sharpen the brain, help us solve real-world problems, and “are an existential grasp at certainty and closure in an uncertain world.” Sometimes they induce despair, as the author’s early encounters with the Rubik’s Cube reveal. He was hardly more cheered after an international jigsaw-puzzle competition in which he was bested by a “man from Uganda who later told me he is color-blind.” Corn mazes, secret codes, chess gambits, the river-crossing problem, and the Tower of Hanoi: Jacobs is refreshingly captivated by every kind of mental challenge, it seems, and his enthusiasm serves this lively— and puzzle-stuffed—book well. The author even proves to be his own riddler, promising that there is a secret puzzle hidden in the book, the first solver of which will receive $10,000: “I figured I couldn’t write a book on puzzles that didn’t contain a secret one itself.”

A barrel of monkeys’ worth of fun for the puzzle addict in the household.

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PATRIARCHY BLUES Reflections on Manhood

RADICAL AMERICAN PARTISANSHIP Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy

Joseph, Frederick Perennial/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $16.99 paper | May 17, 2022 978-0-06-313832-2

Kalmoe, Nathan P. & Lilliana Mason Univ. of Chicago (216 pp.) $22.50 paper | May 6, 2022 978-0-226-82028-6

Anti-racism activist and philanthropist Joseph turns his attention to issues of intersectional oppression.

“Realizing your life won’t last forever sometimes has a way of reminding you to be free,” writes the author about being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while contending with the effects of the pandemic on marginalized communities. After the murder of George Floyd, the anti-racism movement found plenty of adherents and allies; missing were similarly extensive discussions of the violence done to trans women, the disproportionate loss of jobs by women of color, and other matters. Anti-racism, he writes, fails if it does not also address homophobia, violence against women, and other “oppressive behaviors and systems.” This involves building an anti-patriarchal movement and rejecting conventional wisdom about gender roles—e.g., girls stay quiet and boys don’t cry, nostrums by which “we are limiting who and what our society is and may become.” We must also call out instances of oppression, which may sometimes take on uncomfortable dimensions: Joseph writes meaningfully of being a one-time fan of Dave Chappelle’s comedy, which worked best when directed against White supremacism and economic privilege but is burdened by “homophobia, misogyny, and anti-Blackness.” In a relatively slender book, Joseph covers a great deal of ground, taking on rape culture, White privilege, victim blaming, the rights of sex workers, and the fact that “the Black American experience is not monolithic,” always returning to the intersectionality that governs how people are defined and, too often, oppressed. His book merits a large audience whose members must “take a sledgehammer to the institutions of yesterday that have kept the most marginalized from power that was never meant solely for men.”

In conclusion, Joseph writes, “through the enlightenment of intersectionality we will move these mountains of caste, until equity is not a dream, but rather a standard.”

A well-reasoned, wide-ranging plea for a new conception of personhood and justice.

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A dense analysis of political violence in America.

Kalmoe is a professor of political communications at LSU, and Mason is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins.

The authors approach their topic with rigorous social science, relying heavily on numerous complex surveys collected since 2017. Fittingly, they open with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and return to those deplorable events throughout, and Donald Trump’s name appears countless times in the text, never accompanied by praise. While the authors do not conceal their low opinion of the ex-president and his inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation campaigns, their studies turn up unsettling reasons for his persistent popularity. Kalmoe and Mason emphasize that partisan political strife, including racially motivated violence, has occurred regularly throughout American history, and both government leaders and ordinary citizens have been involved. While social norms forbid seriously harming others, the authors emphasize the process of “moral disengagement” that “cushions the ego” when people contemplate violence.

“Moral disengagement,” they write, “includes vilifying outgroups, hyping the morality of in-groups, minimizing harms done, shifting blame, and focusing on righteous ends that justify aggressive means. Among these, vilification is the most potent for producing aggressive behavior.” One of the authors’ most surprising findings may be that “ordinary Democrats and Republicans are remarkably similar in partisan moral disengagement and violent views, despite greater prevalence of rightwing violence.” Still, the events of Jan. 6 vaulted Republicans to a lead in both. The book’s many surveys and charts reveal that individuals who strongly identify with a party are more likely to approve of violence against the other, including behavior associated with “hostile sexism,” which “is only related to moral disengagement among Republicans—and powerfully so—shifting them 40 points up the disengagement scale.” Age has little influence, though college graduates are less likely to approve of violence. This is academic political science, packed with statistics, scholarly language, tables, charts, and footnotes, but it will reward policy wonks who pay close attention.

A disturbing analysis of special interest to policymakers.

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“A compelling critique of civilian foibles by a skilled writer well versed in carrying out civilian wishes in the field.” uncertain ground

ADRIATIC A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

UNCERTAIN GROUND Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War

Kaplan, Robert D. Random House (368 pp.) $28.99 | April 12, 2022 978-0-399-59104-4

Klay, Phil Penguin Press (408 pp.) $27.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-593-55641-2

The veteran journalist and foreign affairs specialist tours the historic sea and delivers his usual penetrating observations.

Fans of Kaplan’s work have squirmed through his graphic Balkan Ghosts (1993) and absorbed astute analyses of today’s international relations in The Return of Marco Polo’s World (2018).

Both books are key forerunners to this insightful take on the stormy history and geopolitics of nations bordering the Adriatic: Italy and Greece as well as Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, and Montenegro. Chronicling his travels up the Italian east coast through Rimini, Ravenna, Venice, and Trieste, he writes about many familiar elements of European history through the centuries, but these serve mostly as historical background for the author’s often insightful musings on Italian art, architecture, and literature. Absorbing Roman and then Byzantine culture, Christian Italy successfully fended off Islamic influences and has remained united for two centuries. Matters are different when Kaplan leaves Trieste and enters the nations formed when Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991. An unhappy mixture of cultures, languages, and religions, the people of this region have passed more than 1,000 years divided among three empires— Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman—and retain bitter memories of their treatment under each one. Circling the Adriatic, Kaplan finally arrives in Corfu, an island within swimming distance of post-Stalinist Albania but vibrantly Greek. The author repeatedly points out that while Europe’s population is stagnant, population explosions in Africa will lead to further tumult involving economics, climate change, resources, and migration.

“With Africa’s population set to climb over the course of the century from 1.1 billion to perhaps 3 or 4 billion,” writes Kaplan, “migration will be a permanent issue for a country like Croatia with a Mediterranean coastline and a negative birthrate.” Croatia is only one of many nations in the region that will face significant obstacles in the coming decades.

Another characteristic Kaplan travelogue, often both riveting and disheartening.

Marine Corps veteran and acclaimed writer Klay delivers a closely observed set of essays on an age of endless war.

America’s military adventures around the world, writes the author, take place “at such a low ebb that most Americans can pretend it isn’t happening.” When Americans are killed, some ears perk up. If it’s America’s allies—e.g., the interpreters who negotiated between English and Pashto speakers—not so much. Such people, along with immigrants who arrived in the U.S. and then served in the military only to be deported after their discharge, are the focus of several of the essays, speaking to the subtitle. Klay, the National Book Award winner for Redeployment, ranges widely. He is fascinated, for example, by the support among his comrades for Donald Trump, largely because he promised to keep them at home and far from the front line. It didn’t work out that way, but Trump was undeniably more open than Obama about his intentions. In 2015, Obama noted, inaccurately, that “we’ve ended two wars,” which was news to those on active duty. “No wonder our troops were having difficulty articulating why they were fighting,” writes Klay. “Their commander in chief couldn’t even bring himself to admit that we were still at war.” If your central mission is not to defeat a nebulous enemy but simply keep yourself alive, then “it’s not the Taliban or al-Qaeda or ISIS that’s trying to kill you, it’s America.” Klay’s incisive, grunt’s-eye perspective is too little heard or heeded. His topics take on larger issues, but they almost always return to that central point of view—whether it be the monasticism of military life (“Like a novice monk, I was given new clothing, new standards of dress, a new haircut, as well as a distinct role within a broader community”), the militarization of the culture, or citizens’ easy access to military-grade weapons.

A compelling critique of civilian foibles by a skilled writer well versed in carrying out civilian wishes in the field.

GRIEF IS LOVE Living With Loss

Lee, Marisa Renee Legacy Lit/Hachette (176 pp.) $26.00 | April 12, 2022 978-0-306-92602-0 A grief expert explores how loss can gracefully coexist with life.

When Lee’s mother died of breast cancer in 2008, she was left to carry on “with a permanent hole in my heart.” That grief informs her intuitive guide on managing the lingering pain 86

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of human loss. A decade later, her research was reenergized after a miscarriage and the discovery of deep-seated anger.

With calm, lucid prose, the author gently instructs readers on how to navigate their own experiences by highlighting a series of integral elements to surviving loss. This begins with selfpermission to pause life, adapt, and heal while acknowledging that these feelings of bereavement may last throughout life.

Lee empathetically addresses grief support, self-care, and posttraumatic intimacy and interweaves her personal story, including anecdotes about her mother’s illness and death, courtship with her husband, and trauma caused by traumatic pregnancy difficulties. With great sensitivity, the author chronicles a time in her life when she was juggling a demanding Wall Street job, a cancer charity, and a social life, all while taking care of her dying mother. Unable to cope or sleep, she began heavy self-medication, but rapid weight loss signaled a more drastic lack of control. “You are forced to exist in this tenuous space between life and death,” she admits about her mental anguish as her mother declined, “and there is often an ominous undertone to everything.” With time, understanding, and therapy, Lee began to make space for her grief and “release all of the hurt that was sitting on my chest.” As a Black woman, Lee also discusses racism, injustice, and inequality—all of which are especially palpable “in a country that lacks a real safety net”—and she shares secrets to accepting “the fluidity that love and death require.”

A humanizing exploration of coping with the life-changing tides of loss.

interest in doing. Before detailing the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his parents, he gives readers details about their earlier lives, which included a great deal of hardship. It wasn’t until Liu was laid off from his accounting job after college that he had the courage to admit to his parents—and himself—that he wanted to act. Today, he is the latest Marvel hero. Liu’s compassionate treatment of his abusive parents and his younger self results in a tender, nuanced narrative that is refreshing in its frankness. His focus on the pressure, rather than the promise, of the American dream actively subverts the model-minority myth. Though the prose is sometimes uneven, the book is mostly entertaining and nuanced.

A celebrity memoir that compassionately interrogates the dark side of the American dream.

BAD MEXICANS Race, Empire, & Revolution in the Borderlands y o u n g a d u lt

Lytle Hernández, Kelly Norton (352 pp.) $30.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-324-00437-0

An astute historical analysis of how Mexican resistance to longtime authoritarian President Porfirio Díaz resonated on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border.

In her latest, Lytle Hernández, a MacArthur fellow and professor of history and African American studies at UCLA, delivers a gripping cross-border study. Díaz installed himself as president in 1876 and, for close to three decades, invited U.S. investment in Mexico at the expense of his country’s most disadvantaged and marginalized citizens. In response, brothers Jesús and Ricardo Flores Magón, whose family suffered financial ruin at the hands of Díaz and his policies, organized a grassroots resistance movement called the magonistas, a group the president disparaged as “malos Mexicanos.” While the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) is usually discussed in the context of its influence on Central America, the author argues convincingly that it “also remade the United States.” Indeed, the magonista movement had headquarters in San Antonio, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, and its members were partially motivated by the mistreatment of Mexicans in the U.S., especially the consequencefree murders of immigrant laborers, “act[s] of racial terror akin to the lynching of African Americans in the South.” As Lytle Hernández shows, the U.S. government continued to provide support to Díaz’s corrupt regime, including the hiring of spies to infiltrate the magonista movement. Eventually, Díaz made a series of tactical errors that resulted in the loss of American support—and, ultimately, an end to his dictatorial rule. All of these events shaped not just the formation of modern Mexico; they also defined the tenor of Mexican-American relations that continues to this day. The author combines a masterful grasp of archival material and accessible prose, transforming what could have been a dry academic work into a page-turner. Lytle

WE WERE DREAMERS An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story Liu, Simu Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $27.99 | May 17, 2022 978-0-06-304649-8

The star of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings recounts how he overcame his tortured relationship with his immigrant Chinese parents to pursue his dream of becoming an actor.

Liu spent his youth with his loving paternal grandparents in Harbin, China, while his parents struggled to establish roots in the U.S. and, later, Canada. When he was reunited with his parents at the age of 4, they were unprepared to be parents. “Mom and Dad were about to experience the myriad of new responsibilities and burdens that came with raising a child,” he writes, “and would learn very quickly that ‘parenthood’ was a lot more complicated than just living together.”

Liu vividly remembers that the first time he lied to his parents, when he was 5, they locked him out of the apartment, a punishment that led to a rupture of trust that was never fully repaired. Their relationship deteriorated further when Liu was accepted into a prestigious private school in Toronto, which required him to work harder than he ever had before at his academics—something that, as a young man, he had little |

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“A deeply insightful—and disturbing—analysis of both history and current affairs.” the four ages of american foreign policy

THE FOUR AGES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower

Hernández fully develops each character and thoroughly contextualizes each historical event. Furthermore, her inclusion of Indigenous and feminist voices is both refreshing and necessary.

A beautifully crafted, impressively inclusive history of the Mexican Revolution.

Mandelbaum, Michael Oxford Univ. (600 pp.) $34.95 | June 1, 2022 978-0-19-762179-0

JANET MALCOLM The Last Interview and Other Conversations

A magisterial history of international relations in American history.

“The foreign policy of the United States…has been unusually ideolog­ical, unusually economic, and unusually democratic,” writes Mandelbaum, professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with American leaders focused on ideals of liberty, human rights, and free elections.

Comparatively weak for decades after the Revolution, America grew steadily, but it was the Civil War that caught the world’s attention. American money and production helped assure the Allied victory in World War I. Less “isolationist” between the wars than many popular histories claim, American foreign policy emphasized fiscal responsibility and disarmament until the Depression, when democratic powers turned inward and Germany and Japan sought to vastly expand their positions on the global stage. In his account of World War II, Mandelbaum emphasizes America’s own titanic expansion. By 1945, the U.S. manufactured 40% percent “of all the world’s armaments” and had built the world’s largest military. Then it was confronted by another superpower: the Soviet Union. Aided by conquests in Eastern Europe, a purported ally in Mao’s China, and the growing appeal of Marxism, the rise of the Soviets convinced Americans that they were under threat. This led to two large, disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam, many smaller confrontations, a reconciliation with China, and, eventually, the unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, America was the world’s unchallenged hyperpower, but the 21st century has been characterized by failure. The specter of terrorism, never a true military threat, obsessed American leaders, who plunged into expensive, fruitless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mandelbaum painfully concludes that many so-called American ideals have lost their appeal. Across the globe, radical nationalism has surged, and autocrats, often freely elected, have assumed power in many nations. Jingoistic extremist movements are flourishing in Western Europe and the U.S., and China’s rapid rise seems to have demoted America to superpower status or perhaps introduced another hyperpower.

A deeply insightful—and disturbing—analysis of both history and current affairs.

Malcolm, Janet Melville House (128 pp.) $17.99 paper | June 7, 2022 978-1-612-19968-9

Insights from the late, legendary journalist.

Given the praise written about Malcolm upon her death in June 2021, one could be forgiven for not knowing she was “pilloried by my fellow journalists” for her most notorious piece of nonfiction writing, 1990’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which starts with the incendiary quote, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Today, that book is considered a seminal piece of long-form reporting. Readers unfamiliar with Malcolm’s work will get a sense of her importance from the five interviews collected in the publisher’s latest entry in their Last Interview series. The book’s title conversation is the puniest, a skimpy 2019 entry in the New York Times’ “By the Book” section.

The meat of this volume is the other four interviews, conducted for Salon, the Believer, the CBC’s radio program Writers and Company, and the Paris Review. There’s a lot of repetition, with multiple references to Jeffrey Masson, the psychoanalyst who sued Malcolm for libel over In the Freud Archives; that incendiary quote, which appears four times; the themes of betrayal in her work; and more. Readers keen to find out why, as Paris interviewer Katie Roiphe wrote, Malcolm is “both a grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible,” would be advised to read her books. But there are memorable insights, as well—e.g., when Malcolm talks about “the inequality between writer and subject that is the moral problem of journalism as I see it”; her conviction that nonfiction writers learn “the devices of narration” from novelists; and the sexism she encountered, as when she notes a “male chauvinist teacher” who “clearly preferred the boys in the class.” Roiphe provides the introduction.

A limited yet entertaining introduction to a doyenne of the fourth estate.

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DEMOLITION AGENDA How Trump Tried To Dismantle American Government, and What Biden Needs To Do To Save It

THE VANISHING TRIANGLE The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot McGowan, Claire Little A (244 pp.) $14.95 paper | May 1, 2022 978-1-5420-3529-3

McGarity, Thomas O. The New Press (352 pp.) $27.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-62097-639-5

What happens when a government’s officers and supporters agree on only one thing—that government is bad?

University of Texas law professor McGarity assesses protective federal regulations to ensure, say, that rivers won’t catch fire and sliced meat won’t kill, the result of popular demand for such shields. They remain popular. Even as South Dakotans voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by a 30% margin, they also capped short-term loan interest at 36%, “thereby effectively killing the payday lending industry in that state.” Ironically, those voters supported a president committed to undoing those regulations. Propped up by the Koch brothers and other mega-wealthy, ultraconservative individuals and organizations, the Trump administration did all they could to tear down any legal scaffolding that prevented profiteers from earning money. “From the moment Mick Mulvaney became acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” McGarity writes of one such instance, “he made it his mission to roll back every regulation to which the financial services industry objected.” Similarly, the head of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement “had been on the board of a major pipeline company, and he firmly believed that the federal government and the oil and gas industry should be partners in the enterprise of extracting minerals from beneath the ocean floor.” The author also shows how the Covid-19 pandemic provided cover to do even worse damage in all spheres, not the least of them health care, in which the vandals defunded the very agency meant to protect Americans against pandemics. McGarity concludes that it will be difficult to undo the damage, but he adds that there is reason to be optimistic—not just because citizens continue to demand protection, but also because more and more corporations are willing to shoulder more social responsibility.

A behind-the-scenes look at a program of social destruction carried on with little fanfare—and to devastating effect.

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A writer born in Northern Ireland examines the stories of women who disappeared without a trace in 1990s Ireland.

Between 1993 and 1998, eight women disappeared 80 miles outside Dublin in a “safe and welcoming country where bad things don’t really happen.” Exploring these disappearances, all of which took place during the author’s adolescence in Northern Ireland, McGowan recalls that no one ever discussed these missing person cases. She only stumbled upon them when she was doing research for her own crime fiction almost two decades later. In 2000, when a 24-year-old woman was found murdered near Dublin “in a populated area and in broad daylight,” McGowan felt compelled to investigate crimes that occurred years before. She discovered the women were a heterogenous group with no connection to each other. Yet those she talked to about them almost invariably asked if they were involved in sex work. “Think about what it means, that question—that we expect a certain type of woman to go missing, to be murdered,” she writes.” While police had worked on the cases for three years, the author discovered that in one case, it took them three days to start looking for the missing woman.

She also learned that one woman who had barely escaped from a brutal rape and attempted murder in Dublin’s “vanishing triangle” saw her attacker, a husband and father others considered “a decent man,” released from prison five years before the end of his sentence. McGowan surmises that the “savagery and speed” of the ambush suggested a man who knew what he was doing.

Yet he was never investigated further for possible connection to the eight disappearances. Readable and thought-provoking, this book reveals that despite efforts at modernization and liberalization, Irish systems of justice and power remain as patriarchal as they are complicit in maintaining a centuries-old culture of silence, suppression, and misogyny.

A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.

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“A clear and cogent assessment of how the nation’s central bank might be reformed.” the fed unbound

THE FLAG, THE CROSS, AND THE STATION WAGON A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened

Menand, a law professor and former Treasury official, explores the ballooning influence of the nation’s central bank.

In tracing the consequences of this expansion of authority, he focuses on the institution’s response to two watershed events: the 2008 financial meltdown and the Covid-19 pandemic. As the author explains, the Fed’s ability to address these challenges was complicated by the deregulation of the banking industry over the last several decades and the rise of alternative forms of currency, and it responded by intervening in the economy in ways that deviate strikingly from its original mandate. The Fed now “fight[s] persistent economic and financial crises by using its balance sheet like an emergency government credit bureau or national investment authority—creating new money to backstop financial firms, expand financial markets, and invest in businesses and municipalities.” Menand makes a persuasive case that the Fed’s escalating interventions, which lack political oversight and are heavily influenced by wealthy stakeholders, have a direct and significant bearing on how the nation’s democracy functions. Current stimulus efforts—including so-called QE Infinity, the theoretically endless acquisition of assets—clearly benefit those who hold sizable financial assets, further polarizing the nation’s economic inequality. Menand’s recommendations point to a larger role for Congress in guiding the Fed along with the creation of so-called “automatic stabilizers,” which would take effect without special congressional directives. Another proposal is stricter supervision of “unregulated private money,” including cryptocurrencies, which pose a grave risk, Menand rightly points out, to the government’s ability to control the economy. He argues persuasively that major restructuring of the Fed would alter the “balance of power between the financial sector and the government so that our system is efficient, equitable, and inclusive.”

A clear and cogent assessment of how the nation’s central bank might be reformed.

McKibben, Bill Henry Holt (240 pp.) $27.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-250-82359-5

The prolific writer and activist finds some of the causes of our societal meltdown in the idyllic suburbs of his youth.

“We were better consumers than citizens,” writes McKibben of his generation, the original counterculturalists who mounted rebellions against the war in Vietnam, racial injustice, and inequalities of many kinds. What happened? Well, those suburban kids took their detachments from cities and communities and extended them into the hyperindividualism of today, its governing motto “you’re not the boss of me.” McKibben capably picks apart long-ago history to find present themes. He looks deeply into the role of his hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, in firing the revolutionary “shot heard ’round the world” only to discover that even there, slavery existed until well into the 19th century. The town may have been one of the first to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday even though it was, as McKibben writes, “overwhelmingly white,” but it was also sharply divided in climacteric moments such as the Vietnam War. The author locates many of these divisions in the present culture, many owing to the “generation that grew up in those suburbs in those years.” Sure, they may have played in the same creek and the same fields, but many of them voted for Donald Trump and have zero interest in paying higher taxes to address issues like the climate crisis. McKibben finds hope in the thought that some of his generation’s contrarian ardor can be rekindled, which is pleasing yet a little unconvincing. Even he allows, in this well-constructed narrative, that the odds are long. “For me,” he writes, “the scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits.”

A reasonable if perhaps quixotic plea for the boomers to rise from the couch and get back to work fixing their messes.

TRAILED One Woman’s Quest To Solve the Shenandoah Murders

Miles, Kathryn Algonquin (320 pp.) $28.95 | May 3, 2022 978-1-61620-909-4

An award-winning science writer investigates the 1996 backcountry murders of two hikers.

Miles first heard about the Shenandoah Valley murders of Lollie Winans and Julie Williams at Unity College, “a small environmental studies college located in the foothills of central Maine,” where she began teaching in 2001. A survivor of sexual abuse, Winans had been a popular student who led wilderness trips to help other assault victims move through the healing process. The summer before their deaths, Winans and Williams had fallen in love while working at an outdoor program called Woodswomen, Inc. By the time Miles left Unity in 2016, she found herself “trailed” by their story, which

THE FED UNBOUND Central Banking in a Time of Crisis

Menand, Lev Columbia Global Reports (180 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-73591-370-4

A study of the role of the increasingly powerful Federal Reserve in fostering economic inequality.

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had never found resolution. Their suspected attacker, Darrell Rice, served a 10-year prison term for their assault before being released. However, the prosecution for murder stalled, leaving the case in limbo. For the next four years, Miles immersed herself in court transcripts, news stories, scholarship, and interviews with more than 100 sources. The “deficiencies and mistakes” she uncovered in police investigations appalled her.

Richard Marc Evonitz, another suspect, had been linked with other kidnappings and murders in the South. Yet police dismissed him despite DNA evidence collected from the WinansWilliams murder site that suggested his guilt. Researching a vibrator left behind at the crime scene, Miles found links back to Evonitz, a sexual fetishist and known pedophile who killed himself in 2002. What makes this story so chilling is not just that the author had to “police law enforcement” in order to determine their investigative errors. She also shows how “every year there is demonstrable evidence that women, African Americans, and nonbinary and LGBT people have good reason to wonder if they are safe in the wilderness, which in many ways is still considered a white male domain.” Gripping and thoughtful, this book will appeal to those with an interest in true-crime stories and unsettling truths about places deemed safe for all.

Disturbing and provocative.

fact and fantasy: The boundaries contained therein seem porous throughout these pieces, which combine elements of the fantastical and the matter-of-fact. Despite the title, there aren’t that many drawings, and they appear as representational inkblots, suggesting a tree or a crow or a human visage. The illustrations punctuate the narratives and underscore their thematic unity, but the narratives themselves also have a sketchlike quality—drawings with words. Momaday concludes that these pieces “are random and self-contained, and they are the stuff of story, and story is a nourishment of the soul.” Most spiritually open-minded readers will agree.

Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.

SCORPIONS’ DANCE The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate

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Morley, Jefferson St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $28.99 | June 7, 2022 978-1-250-27583-7

A plot-thickening account of Watergate and the CIA’s role in it.

Former CIA director Richard Helms, writes investigative journalist Morley, was just the kind of person that Richard Nixon despised: Harvard-educated, well traveled, a master of languages, suave—all the things Nixon was not. Yet the two shared an abiding belief that the role of the U.S. was to keep the world safe from communism. This entailed activities that the CIA was enjoined from doing—e.g., spying on Americans within the nation’s borders in order to determine whether the anti-war movement was controlled by foreign powers. Forgotten heroes of the era turn up in Morley’s pages, such as moderate Republican Fred Thompson, who, in examination, “noted that Helms had testified, under oath, just ten weeks before, that the subject of Watergate never came up at the June 23 meeting. Helms’s colleague, deputy CIA director Vernon Walters, had stated, under oath, that it did.”

That and a few other slips earned Helms a misdemeanor conviction for perjury, a first for a CIA head. Morley explores the ideological views that bound Nixon and Helms and the acts that resulted, including the secret overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende, lying about which was largely what got Helms into trouble. As for the involvement of the CIA in Watergate, Morley draws convincing connections: Burglars, plumbers, handlers, dirty-tricks specialists, Cuban assassins—all trace back to Langley. The author also shows that Nixon authorized more than one break-in of a political opponent’s office, including his own admission that he ordered that classified documents be stolen from the office of Brookings Institution fellow Leslie Gelb: “I want the break-in….You’re to break into that place, rifle the files, and bring them in,” Nixon said. It was one of many steps toward Nixon’s resignation—and, almost as collateral damage, Helms’ own fall.

A work that sheds new light on Watergate half a century after the fact.

DREAM DRAWINGS Configurations of a Timeless Kind

Momaday, N. Scott Perennial/HarperCollins (128 pp.) $17.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-06-321811-6

The iconic Kiowa writer offers an assemblage of parables, poems, vignettes, and a few stark drawings, with the thematic underpinning that all stories are part of a larger universal story.

Momaday (b. 1934), winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous lifetime achievement awards, is acclaimed for his work as a fiction writer, poet, and essayist, often blurring the boundaries among categories. In this follow-up to Earth Keeper, the author pretty much obliterates those categories, drawing deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. “I have heard the thunder of King Lear’s voice on the boards of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London,” he writes. “I was spellbound. Emily Dickinson read to me a poem she had written about crickets in which she realized a precision of statement that defies description.” Momaday suggests that if you have dreamed it, you have lived it, and that the you or I of whom you are conscious might itself be a dream. We see these ideas at work in “Dreaming Bear Speaks,” one of the many short narratives in which bears appear—usually not threatening, sometimes dreaming. “Perhaps he dreams of me dreaming of him,” writes the author. “He dreams of being me, of being human.” Night and day, dreams and awakening, |

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“A remarkable story told with clear-minded authority.” geography is destiny

GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY Britain’s Place in the World: A 10,000-Year History

lives of people less fortunate than he, then you know that the worm has definitely turned. For generations, thanks to the hold that the economic ideas of Milton Friedman once exerted on business thinking, it was a tenet of market fundamentalism that the sole duty of a corporation was to maximize profits for its shareholders. But not long ago, as Murray meaningfully puts it, “capitalism got a second look.” One manifestation was a joint statement announced by the attendees at a 2016 conference, among them representatives of Ford, IBM, Siemens, and Dow Chemical, that capitalism needed “to do a better job demonstrating its value to society.” The Covid-19 pandemic has only sharpened that need, as workers leave unsatisfying jobs and as decision-making becomes increasingly decentralized such that managers are needed mostly to articulate corporate values and set goals. The flavors of this reenvisioned capitalism are many, Murray writes, including Whole Foods founder John Mackey’s “conscious capitalism,” Chase leader Jamie Dimon’s insistence on looking at big-picture issues such as diversity and inequality, and GM head Mary Barra’s climate change–oriented pledge to “eliminate all tailpipe emissions from new GM cars by 2035.”

Murray isn’t exactly a cheerleader, but he offers positive news for those seeking to take part in this evolving market. As he writes, 75 million jobs will be eliminated by new technologies worldwide in 2022, but 133 million will be created—good reason, he adds, to insist that socially responsible companies help “reskill” their workers to meet changing times. He hammers on a few themes, such as the decline of shareholder supremacy, a time or two too often, but business readers will find plenty to ponder.

A wide-ranging reconsideration of long-held ideas about doing business.

Morris, Ian Farrar, Straus and Giroux (544 pp.) $35.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-374-15727-2

Why is Britain so different from its neighbors? This book delivers some answers and raises new questions.

Morris, a professor of history and classics at Stanford and author of Why the West Rules—for Now, believes that if we are to understand the present, especially the reasons for and consequences of the Brexit referendum, we have to dig into the deep past. Consequently, he begins the story of Britain when rising sea levels separated the islands from the continent, and then he walks readers through the long parade of invasions—Romans, Vikings, Normans, etc.— that would slowly create the British people. The British identity developed alongside an instinctive distrust of mainland Europeans, and Morris finds many historical precedents for the Brexit vote, from the rejection of the Catholic Church to the seemingly endless global expansion of the British Empire.

In this sense, the oddity is not that Britain left the European Union but that it joined it in the first place—although, at the time, it was more of a customs union than a vehicle for social homogeneity. The final vote was close, but the result was clear, and culture prevailed over economics. Morris, who is the sort of historian who likes to get out of the office, vividly chronicles his tours around Britain to assess the situation and discovers that, generally, the country is doing all right. There has not been the catastrophe expected by the Remainers or the boom predicted by the Leavers. In typical fashion, Britain has muddled its way to a decent outcome. As for the future, Morris muses that Europe may become an irrelevant question for Britain, as the key issue is dealing with a rising China, which is determined to establish a dominant presence in every corner of the world.

Even tourist souvenirs from the author’s hometown are “Made in China.” In this immensely detailed book, Morris effectively combines history, memoir, and current events.

A remarkable story told with clear-minded authority.

TEAM AMERICA Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the World They Forged O’Connell, Robert L. Harper/HarperCollins (576 pp.) $29.99 | May 17, 2022 978-0-06-288329-2

A joint biography of the four American generals who took the lead in World War II. Military historian O’Connell follows his subjects from cradle to grave, with particular focus on their experiences in both world wars, and he describes each of them in terms of the “masks” they adopted to enhance their status as leaders: for Eisenhower, the famous grin; for MacArthur and Patton, their images as totally committed warriors; for Marshall, the persona of a Virginia gentleman. Patton and MacArthur were the only two who saw significant action in World War I, both winning decorations for bravery. Eisenhower never left the States, though he was instrumental in combating an outbreak of the 1918 flu in the camp at which he was based. Marshall, recognized early in his career as a master of logistics and organization, became

TOMORROW’S CAPITALIST My Search for the Soul of Business

Murray, Alan with Catherine Whitney PublicAffairs (256 pp.) $29.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-5417-8908-1 Business journalist Murray examines the growing idea of the socially conscious company.

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a favorite of Gen. John Pershing, who saw him appointed to increasingly important staff positions. The author details their failings along with their successes, such as Patton’s slapping wounded men in the hospital and MacArthur’s failure to adapt to the clear warnings of Japanese designs on the Philippines. O’Connell also takes Patton and MacArthur to task for their oversized egos, criticisms that have been leveled by other historians, and he discusses Eisenhower’s affair with an English aide. One of the author’s central themes is the domination of 20th-century warfare by exceedingly dangerous, dehumanizing technology, including machine guns, tanks, aircraft, and, the ultimate killing machine, the nuclear bomb. O’Connell narrates with a lively style, with plenty of lighter moments balancing the rigors of the subjects’ military careers. The sports metaphor referenced in the title sometimes gets self-consciously cute, but on the whole, the book is serious and worthy of the subjects. The author also includes a handful of helpful maps.

A sweeping overview of four men whose careers largely defined the American experience in the 20th century.

with candid appraisals of its shortcomings, especially related to cultural homogenization and the overwhelming Whiteness that has continued into the 21st century. “Fire Island feels like a case study of utopian imperfections,” writes Parlett, “of the way norms become entrenched and inequalities perpetuated in a place defined by the fact that it is not, simply, for everyone.”

An illuminating, well-written history of a unique place.

A TRILLION TREES Restoring Our Forests by Trusting in Nature Pearce, Fred Greystone Books (344 pp.) $28.95 | April 26, 2022 978-1-77164-940-7

Environmental journalist Pearce returns with an exploration of what trees and forests do, how humans have used them, and what must be done to main-

FIRE ISLAND A Century in the Life of an American Paradise Parlett, Jack Hanover Square Press (306 pp.) $27.99 | June 14, 2022 978-1-335-47518-3

A vibrant social history of the iconic bastion of queer culture and leisure.

Inspired by the work of poet Frank O’Hara, a frequent visitor to Fire Island who was tragically killed in a freakish accident there in 1966, Parlett first ventured to the island in 2017 while furthering his doctoral research on American poetry and cruising. His experiences during this visit, as a curious researcher who was also actively engaged in the gay party scene, serve as the launching point for this uniquely insightful and colorful cultural history.

Parlett traces the extraordinary literary heritage of the island, including its earliest foundation, laid by Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde; midcentury luminaries (W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Patricia Highsmith) and their booze-fueled escapades; and later, the more serious, politically charged influence of James Baldwin, who drew much-needed attention to the narrow Whiteness of the community. The hedonistic, sex-and-drug–laden tenor of the 1970s and ’80s, portrayed in novels by Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and others, was ravaged by the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, which had an indelible, long-lasting impact on the island’s literary and artistic culture. “Along with the many artists and writers lost to AIDS,” writes Parlett, “came the loss of an engaged and informed audience; the readership that kept gay publishing afloat, and the wider sense of a community consuming and critiquing the work of its own luminaries and emerging voices.”

Throughout the book, the author smoothly interweaves an enlightened perspective of the island’s influence and importance |

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tain them.

This book, writes Pearce—an environmental consultant for the New Statesman and author of The Land Grabbers and The New Wild, among other ecology-focused books—“is about the magic and mystery of trees and forests, about their defenders and plunderers, and why they matter for the planet and for all of us.” Across 20 chapters, the author, who has reported from more than 60 countries for the Guardian, Washington Post, and other publications, demonstrates the significance of forests and reports on their historical and current health, how nature has been slowly rewilding forests throughout the world, the devastating effects of wildfires, and the concrete steps we must take to ensure forests’ vitality. Pearce takes us across the world, from “the cloud forests of the Ecuadorian Andes” to “the radioactive (but otherwise healthy) forests around Chernobyl in Ukraine; to the swamp forests of Indonesia and the community forests of the Himalayas; to the acid-rain-ravaged forests of central Europe and the pine forests in the American Deep South being cut to keep the lights on in Britain.”

The author showcases countless natural wonderlands, all the while educating readers on the effects of our lifestyles on their health, and he investigates many long-held beliefs that may require deeper study—e.g., the idea that we can solve our climate crisis simply by planting trees. Though Pearce tempers his optimism with hard science, his enthusiasm is infectious, whether he’s reporting on acid rain in central Europe, surveying rampant devastation throughout the Amazon, celebrating the “multicolored magnificence of New England in the autumn,” or exploring “the remains of a largely unknown ancient forest civ­ilization in Nigeria.”

An exhilarating and informative look at the world’s forests and how we can help them thrive.

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“Well-wrought vignettes of a complicated mother-daughter bond.” ma and me

THE POWER OF DIGNITY How Transforming Justice Can Heal Our Communities

Khmer Rouge’s murderous regime. Sickly and malnourished, she would not have survived without the strength and devotion of her mother. Reang, a veteran journalist, and her mother were close in their early years in the U.S., navigating their new lives in Corvallis, Oregon. “For a long time, I believed I owed Ma my life: whatever she wanted me to be, I would be; whatever she wanted me to do, I would do,” writes the author. “I tried to live an immaculate existence, tucking my flaws behind a façade of perfection.” Her memoir derives from talks that she recorded with her mother beginning in 2011, the first time her parents openly shared their memories with their daughter. The relationship between her parents had been unhappy since they first married in 1967. Her college-educated mother wanted to follow her own path, but she was coerced into following her society’s traditions and married against her will at age 22. The tension was a constant problem in the marriage, compounded by the many children and cousins who needed care and the pressure they endured as refugees in a strange land. The other primary thread in the narrative is Reang’s eloquent examination of her identity as a gay woman and her mother’s inability to accept it. As she writes, when she told her mother that “I planned to marry my partner—a woman—the scaffolding of our bond collapsed, spewing splinters too deep to tweeze out.” Through it all, Reang has remained dutiful and thankful for her mother’s many sacrifices: “I would become the keeper of our culture, the vessel for her secrets and sadness, the captive audience for all her stories.”

Well-wrought vignettes of a complicated mother-daughter bond.

Pratt, Victoria Seal Press (288 pp.) $30.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-541-67483-7

A criminal justice professor and former judge discusses how courts can foster trust among the criminal offenders and victims the American legal system too often dehumanizes.

When Pratt was appointed as a Newark Municipal Court judge in 2009, she quickly realized that her work “wasn’t making a difference.” The people she saw in her courtroom were poor, hungry, traumatized, and, more often than not, from marginalized communities. Courts offered no guidance on the court process, and the punishments meted out to the defendants did little to improve outcomes for them, the justice system, or society as a whole. As the daughter of working-class parents of color, Pratt sympathized with their many challenges. Pratt, who teaches at the Rutgers Newark School of Criminal Justice, soon decided that her role as judge was “to fight for [all those] targeted because of race, poverty, accents, immigration status, or any other perceived disadvantages,” and she began using procedural justice, which emphasized treating every defendant with dignity, fairness, and compassion. In an especially powerful story, the author writes about an angry, cursing husband and his equally combative wife. Both had landed in Pratt’s courtroom on a marijuana possession charge, but rather than offer punishment, Pratt allowed them to articulate the pain that underlay their anger, which had come from losing a child to a drive-by shooting. She then assigned them to a community program that allowed them to receive mental health support and other forms of social assistance. The couple returned to her court to update Pratt on their progress but also to visit her and, on occasion, offer support to other defendants. Timely and hopeful, this book offers insight into how procedural justice can not only help to heal people and society, but also a judicial system in dire need of reform.

An eloquent and humane memoir and current affairs study.

SO HELP ME GOLF Why We Love the Game

Reilly, Rick Hachette Go (272 pp.) $29.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-306-92493-4

The acclaimed sports journalist journeys to the heart of a unique sport and pastime.

To the uninitiated, golf looks like an undertaking of dubious purpose conducted with tools badly designed for the task. Longtime ESPN and Sports Illustrated writer Reilly, who has spent much of his life playing, watching, and writing about the game, feels only pity for those poor fools. He loves the sport’s mix of tension and calmness, its social nature, and the rich history of famous courses. Most of all, he loves golf ’s democratic nature. Every player has an equal chance, and even royalty can wilt when faced with the little white ball. The game doesn’t care who it humiliates, although it can also supply moments of clarity, grace, and beauty. Reilly ably captures all of these elements, mixing in sketches of iconic players and colorful figures. He admits to being obsessive about the minutiae of the game, and the book is punctuated with odd lists and sidebars, including a list of 30 random facts about Jack Nicklaus. This extends into Reilly’s

MA AND ME A Memoir

Reang, Putsata MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (400 pp.) $28.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-374-27926-4

Piercing memoir of a mother-daughter relationship and their experiences coming to America as refugees from the Cambodian civil war in the 1970s.

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collection of weird holes around the world—e.g., one in South Africa that has a pit of alligators or a par 3 in the Dominican Republic “that’s 98% water.” Throughout, the author interweaves his personal story, noting that golf probably saved him from depression and chronic anxiety. He has little time for people who decry golf as elitist (the vast majority of games are played on public courses) and who describe tennis as better for fitness (it isn’t). He also has some snarky things to say about Donald Trump’s gaudy courses, arguing that their deliberate artificiality misses the point. Reilly believes that in the past few years, golf has emerged (or, more accurately, reemerged) as a cool game, attracting a new generation of players. Golf might be played initially out of curiosity and thereafter in a futile quest for revenge, but people will probably still be whacking balls down fairways 1,000 years from now.

An informative, enjoyable romp.

a jock culture that can be very closed.” There is no shortage of inspiring advice, as Richtel’s definition of creativity broadens as the narrative proceeds. Eventually, it includes a vast swath of human behavior. Despite the author’s warning that this is not a self-help book, readers will learn more about achieving personal fulfillment than the secrets of pure genius.

An enthusiastic examination of the creative process.

THE HIGH SIERRA A Love Story Robinson, Kim Stanley Little, Brown (560 pp.) $40.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-316-59301-4

INSPIRED Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul Richtel, Matt Mariner Books (336 pp.) $29.99 | April 19, 2022 978-0-063-02553-0

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist explores creativity.

In his latest investigation, New York Times reporter Richtel does not limit himself to artistic or scientific inspiration, emphasizing that creativity is an inborn human trait as natural as reproduction. “Creativity is…part of our more primitive physiology,” he writes. “It comes from the cellular level, part of our most essential survival machinery. We are creativity machines.” The result may not be a work of genius, but it is always characterized by originality, novelty, and meaning. As Richtel shows, it can also be disruptive, not always in a good way, and it invariably changes how we relate to the world. It’s common knowledge that children possess open minds with creative imaginations, “generating random thoughts, concepts logical and mad.” Unfortunately, according to pioneering studies, education, peer pressure, and parenting often quash this inborn creativity, resulting in the popular label “Fourth Grade Slump.”

Not every expert agrees, but it’s a catchy phrase that undoubtedly contains an element of truth. “The number one enemy of creativity is perfectionism,” writes Richtel. “There isn’t even a close second-place enemy.” In that vein, the author stresses the importance of permission. Research reveals a surprisingly laissez faire attitude in parents of creative children who raise them with far fewer rules. Studies also show that creativity doesn’t necessarily follow along with IQ, but openness and curiosity are critical. Richtel presents a host of illuminating interviews with gifted individuals happy to reveal their insights. He pays closest attention to singer Rhiannon Giddens and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, but he also includes an entertaining chapter on Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who is “exceedingly open in |

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A celebration of California’s formidable mountain range.

Award-winning science-fiction writer Robinson, one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” in 2008, writes of his love affair with the Sierras, which began in the summer of 1973. A rising senior at the University of California, San Diego, he made his first treks through the mountains in the company of friends, “long-haired stoner hippie college students” who invigorated the trip with LSD. Although his early hikes were challenging because of heavy boots, snowshoes without poles, and inadequate sleeping bags, his enthusiasm never waned. Interweaving meandering memoir, practical travel guide, geological survey, and natural history, Robinson pays homage to the range’s magnificence. Carved out by glaciers, the Sierras, he notes, are different from the Swiss Alps, where the author also has done a fair amount of climbing—even ascending the Matterhorn, tethered to a German-speaking guide. It’s a feat he never would do again: “It’s dangerous,” he writes. “You could get killed.” Backpacking in the Sierras, on the other hand, “is a safe and peaceful thing to do” even when not following marked trails. Besides describing geological formations, such as basins, which he cites as “its distinguishing feature” that make it a “golden zone” for hikers, Robinson offers a chronicle of a typical day, from “rambling and scrambling” in the morning to watching the luscious pink of alpenglow in the evening. Scrambling, he writes, is “problem-solving, keeping your balance, not falling down, and heading somewhere.” Some chapters offer capsule biographies of people who have championed the Sierras, including John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin, Norman Clyde, and Gary Snyder. In others, Robinson describes the fauna, such as marmots, deer, bears, and pikas. Plopped in the middle is an annotated bibliography of guides, histories, memoirs, and a sampling of Robinson’s own novels that feature the Sierras. There are also numerous photos from the author’s collection.

A colorful, digressive journey into incomparable terrain.

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EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE WERE CRAZY Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles

THE CRUX How Leaders Become Strategists

Rumelt, Richard P. PublicAffairs (368 pp.) $30.00 | May 3, 2022 978-1-5417-0124-3

Rozzo, Mark Ecco/HarperCollins (464 pp.) $27.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-06-293997-5

Lessons in strategic planning.

Business strategist Rumelt takes his guiding metaphor from rock climbing: Boulders are “problems,” and the solution involves attacking the “toughest part,” or “the crux.”

“You cannot get up with just strength and ambition,” writes the author. “You have to solve the puzzle of the crux and have the courage to make delicate moves almost two stories above the ground.” It’s a useful concept, though Rumelt works it a little too hard and then sets it aside for more familiar sloganeering on the art of strategizing. “To be a strategist you will need persistence because it is so tempting to grab at the first glimmer of a pathway through a thicket of issues,” he writes.

“To be a strategist you have to take responsibility for external challenges, but also for the health of the organization itself.”

Some case studies are quite to the point. For example, the author observes that when Elon Musk began piecing together his SpaceX endeavor, he centered on the crux of designing a “Honda Civic,” in Musk’s phrasing, of a rocket that could haul people to far-distant destinations and then come back to Earth for another load. Some of Rumelt’s prescriptions are common-sensical and not especially original: If you pick more than a few priorities in your planning, for instance, you run the risk of diluting the entire enterprise. Even so, those case studies do the heavy lifting in making useful points, as when the author analyzes how Netflix developed a workable plan for dominating the streaming market. Rumelt also dissects what happens when policies, values, and guiding ideologies come into conflict (the short answer: You get the Vietnam War) and when too many people are involved in creating a workable plan. As he writes, “the quality of strategy work is limited by the amount of honesty and integrity in the system.”

Of some interest to business readers, blending exhortation with pointed case studies.

A showbiz tale of the tempestuous marriage at the heart of the birth of modern art in Los Angeles and the messy transition from old to new Hollywood.

Brooke Hayward (b. 1937) is the daughter of legendary film and theater agent Leland Hayward and actor Margaret Sullavan, a couple who knew a thing or two about dramatic marriages. As Vanity Fair contributor Rozzo chronicles, Brooke was on her way to becoming an actress, an “ingenue on the upswing,” when she met Dennis Hopper, who grew up in Dodge City, Kansas, far from the glamorous life Brooke knew. Hopper, “a self-sabotaging hard case,” got his first film credit on Rebel Without a Cause, idolizing troublemaker James Dean. In 1960, Leland, who worked with actors and didn’t want his daughter to marry one, was married to the former Pamela Churchill, who at one time was married to Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. In July 1961, Hopper and Brooke, by then a couple, showed up on a Vespa at the ritzy Beverly Hills Hotel for lunch with the high-society Leland and Pamela, who was shocked at their choice of vehicle.

That anecdote serves as an apt representation of the culture clash between the Hollywood establishment and a younger generation yearning to craft more authentic movies and lives.

Hopper and Brooke’s house, writes Rozzo, “became the era’s unofficial living room. Brooke and Dennis helped introduce Warhol to the West Coast with a spectacular coming-out party, hosted Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg, entertained an entire Olympus of movie gods, and gave shelter to Hells Angels and Black Panthers.” Hopper, who comes off as a preening jerk, would go on to revolutionize American film by co-creating Easy Rider­—although he considered his still photography his most important artistic contribution. Rozzo delves deep into his characters’ lives, making a strong case for their enduring cultural influence.

Telling all the right tales, this story of “the coolest kids in Hollywood” proves their artistic significance.

THE WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison Ryan, Hugh Bold Type Books (368 pp.) $30.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-64503-666-1

Ethel Rosenberg.

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The neglected story of the “Skyscraper Alcatraz,” a notorious women’s prison where inmates included Angela Davis and

“An enlightening contribution to the history of feminism.” hotbed

as America’s countercultural epicenter.” Among the topics and causes the members of this invited group of women discussed were art, psychology, racial justice, and women’s rights, which included access to birth control, sexual autonomy, and the ability to work outside the home. As Scutts explains, members of Heterodoxy felt “suffrage was only a small part of the larger issue of women’s emancipation.” In an effort to clear up misconceptions regarding the meaning of feminism, Howe also held two public forums that were largely attended by men who felt they had a vested interest in women’s social position. Scutts also profiles the compelling lives of many of the members of Heterodoxy, revealing both their diverse backgrounds and their like-minded political and social interests. Perhaps the most important contribution of Heterodoxy was the sense of camaraderie it offered its members for expressing their ideas. These powerful bonds would provide continued shape and meaning to their lives. “If there is hope to be found for feminism today…it has to lie in the way we come together, to reexamine the past and redefine the future,” writes the author. “There is more awareness than ever of the ways that women, together, can create change and how much we have to learn from listening to their stories.”

An enlightening contribution to the history of feminism.

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As Ryan, the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, demonstrates, for much of the 20th century, Greenwich Village was “the epicenter of women’s incarceration in New York, and the epicenter of queer life in America.” The author examines how the two realities intersected and rippled outward in an impressively researched study of the Women’s House of Detention.

Ryan’s narrative is part history, part horror story, and part blistering critique of the country’s “criminal legal system” (a term he sees as more accurate than “criminal justice system”). Dubbed the House of D, the prison operated from 1929 until the early 1970s and was demolished after riots by inmates helped to expose its dangerously overcrowded and inhumane conditions.

Although intended for short-term female prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, the 11-story, vermin-infested building held “women and transmasculine people” for months or even years, crammed into small cells with no recreational, educational, or vocational programs and woeful medical care: “The dentist had so little time per prisoner that all he did, regardless of the complaint, was pull teeth,” writes Ryan. “There was no gynecologist, or any doctor at all on premises most nights and weekends.”

The staff subjected new arrivals to forced enemas and other invasive procedures, overdrugged inmates with Thorazine, and for a time forced gender-nonconforming prisoners to wear a D for degenerate on their uniforms. In reconstructing this chilling history, Ryan had rare access to private social work files that enabled him to tell detailed personal stories of prisoners, who could be sent to the House of D for crimes such as “waywardism,” “wearing pants,” and “lesbianism itself.” While his narrative has strong LGBTQ+ interest, it also belongs on the shelf with books about judicial-system failures, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

A well-reconstructed history of one of America’s worst prisons for women.

THE HIDDEN KINGDOM OF FUNGI Exploring the Microscopic World in Our Forests, Homes, and Bodies

Seifert, Keith Greystone Books (288 pp.) $27.95 | May 24, 2022 978-1-77164-662-8

HOTBED Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism

A mycologist and former president of the International Mycological Society reveals the unseen world of microfungi.

Fans of Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree will enjoy Seifert’s latest, in which he leaves behind recognizable mushrooms, like chanterelles and morels, to tour microfungi, like yeasts and molds, which are all around, on, and within us. Like any good guide, he shares the wonder of his subject. Viewed through a microscope, a dyed solution of household dust “lights up like the Milky Way….Bacteria and viruses shine like stars. Pollen grains drift by like glowing blimps. And among all these particles are the extending tubular cells, geometrical spores, and budding yeast cells of fungi.” Some of those yeast fungi make wonderful things happen, like beer, wine, and bread; others are part of our “friendly gut flora.” Beneficial molds boost agriculture and give us antibiotics and many varieties of cheese. Most flora and fauna couldn’t exist without fungi, and fungi are legendary for enabling forests to thrive via a complicated network dubbed the “Wood Wide Web.” But as the fungal gods giveth, they taketh away. Seifert warns: “You should enjoy your coffee while you can.” Hemileia vastatrix made tea drinkers of Brits when, in the

Scutts, Joanna Seal Press (400 pp.) $30.00 | June 7, 2022 978-1-5416-4717-6

A social history of the downtown New York City club that nurtured the modern feminist movement.

Historian and literary critic Scutts, author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women To Live Alone and Like It, captivatingly explores Heterodoxy, the littleknown social club whose members helped define feminism in the early 1900s. Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 by Marie Jenney Howe, the group had 25 charter members, known as Heterodites. The membership eventually grew to more than 100 before it disbanded in the early 1940s. The author focuses on the period “from 1912 until the early 1920s, which was also the heyday of this particular incarnation of Greenwich Village |

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mid-19th century, the rust fungus killed off their coffee supply, and vastatrix is still inexorably working across the planet.

Some fungi cause more significant problems, destroying crops, rotting vast quantities of stored food, and rendering built environments uninhabitable. All told, however, our microbial “cousins” do far more good than harm, as the author ably explains, and they might save us and our beleaguered planet. Fungi can help us increase crop yields, which will become critical as climate change further reduces arable land; remediate pollutants, including plastic and radioactive waste; and much more. Seifert, whose botanical illustrations are whimsical and T-shirt–worthy, makes a fascinating, hopeful case that “the future is fungal.”

A perspective-shifting guide to our microfungal matrix.

has endured periods of paralysis, corruption, and violence but then recovered. Readers can only hope the current breakdown is temporary.

A vivid attack on “the most partisan Senate leader in modern history” that is unlikely to change anyone’s mind.

TO RISK IT ALL Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision

Stavridis, James Penguin Press (352 pp.) $28.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-29774-2

THE BETRAYAL How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America

Biographies of nine more or less heroic members of the U.S. Navy.

Having told the stories of 10 great admirals throughout history in his previous book, Sailing True North, Stavridis, a former four-star admiral and prolific author, delivers a follow-up that limits his key players to the U.S. All histories of the American Navy begin with John Paul Jones, who became a Revolutionary War hero by capturing a British frigate after a brutal battle in which his own ship sank. Perhaps America’s most brilliant fighting captain, Stephen Decatur performed heroically in the Barbary Wars in North Africa and the War of 1812 before dying in a duel with a fellow officer. In 1898, George Dewey had no trouble annihilating a feeble Spanish fleet in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, but Stavridis admires his careful planning and good sense. Adm. David Farragut won his victories during the Civil War against more formidable opposition, and William “Bull” Halsey did the same against Japan in World War II—although he may be better known for occasions when his pugnacity did more harm than good. The author’s sole African American service member, Doris Miller, and only woman, Michelle Howard, have no discernible flaws, but their stories illustrate the racism and sexism that have permeated the Navy since its founding. Stavridis works hard to find common threads among his subjects, and each chapter includes insights into their characters, stressing those qualities responsible for their triumphs, which readers can put to use in their own lives.

An expert in his field, the author is not shy about deploring character defects that tarnished some achievements. For example, Jones was bad-tempered, Halsey impulsive, and Decatur too easily offended. Contemporary Navy leadership does not escape censure for stripping Capt. Brett Crozier of command of the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt when he criticized its delay in handling an early Covid-19 outbreak aboard his ship.

Admiring accounts of some genuinely admirable American sailors.

Shapiro, Ira Rowman & Littlefield (312 pp.) $29.95 | May 17, 2022 978-1-5381-6397-9

Another painful account of the decline of American political discourse.

During a four-decade career in Washington, D.C., Shapiro served 12 years in various Senate staff positions, but only during the 20th century, when that institution functioned more or less as the Founders intended. He writes that its decline began during the 1990s but accelerated two decades later, when “Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus repeatedly and deliberately took actions they knew to be wrong and failed to take actions they knew to be right.”

Entering the Senate in 1984, McConnell quickly established his hard-conservative reputation, abetted by the pugnacious Newt Gingrich, among others. By 2008, McConnell had risen to minority leader and proclaimed a goal of making newly elected Barack Obama a one-term president. His tactic was not to propose alternative legislation but to oppose everything. He did not have the votes to defeat the Affordable Care Act, but his denunciation of “Obamacare” as socialized medicine resonated with voters, who gave Republicans a victory in the 2010 elections. Even today, polls reveal that Americans tend to deplore “Obamacare” but approve of the Affordable Care Act. Becoming Senate majority leader in 2015, he blocked nearly all of Obama’s judicial nominees, including to the Supreme Court, resulting in a massive influx of conservative judges after the election of Donald Trump. Aware, like most Republicans, that the new president was a loose cannon but wildly popular, McConnell kept his focus on conservative interests and electable Republicans, even when this irritated Trump, who preferred sycophants.

Although he received no thanks, McConnell quashed potentially embarrassing investigations and ensured that the two impeachment trials fizzled. This is an informative but deeply discouraging book; few Republicans will read it, and few Democrats will quarrel with its conclusions. In the past, Congress 98

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“A finely balanced pop-culture investigation.” everything i need i get from you

LAST GANGSTER IN AUSTIN Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia

Sublett, Jesse Univ. of Texas (224 pp.) $21.95 paper | May 17, 2022 978-1-4773-2398-4

How a creepy Texas crook with lots of friends was taken down by a valiant public servant and a dogged newsman.

Sublett, a revered Austin musician and mystery author, found the seeds of his latest nonfiction book on Austinrelated topics when researching his affecting memoir Never the Same Again (2004), in which he recounted the 1976 murder of his girlfriend by a serial killer while he was out at a gig. The author kept encountering news stories about a guy named Frank Smith, who turned out to be “Don Corleone as reimagined by Hee Haw.” As Sublett describes him, Smith’s “criminal record and unsavory associations did no apparent harm to his wrecking yard business. He thrived on being quoted in the media, and reporters happily accommodated him. He was a six-foot-two, XXXL loose cannonball of contradictions….The son of a Baptist preacher, he often quoted the Bible, even in response to a message that a murder-for-hire contract had been fulfilled.” Among other misdeeds, Smith engineered an outrageous crime against the Rabbs, a sweet family who ran a junkyard, paying them $15,000 in cash for a group of vehicles and then sending gunmen over to steal the money back. The hero of Sublett’s narrative is the late, great Ronnie Earle, longtime Travis County district attorney.

Even though he held many left-leaning beliefs, “Earle was no coddler of criminals, and he came down on Frank Smith like a ton of bricks, using every weapon at his disposal.” Also integral to the pursuit of Smith was Austin American-Statesman journalist Bill Cryer, whose crime reporting Sublett quotes admiringly and to great effect. This may seem more like fodder for a magazine article than a book, and there is more repetition of the facts than necessary, but readers interested in Austin history and quirky true crime will find plenty to enjoy.

A vividly detailed and stylishly written portrait of an Austin long gone by.

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Using “the first internet boy band” One Direction as a foundation, Atlantic staff writer Tiffany’s entertaining debut explores how digital hyperconnectivity can transform personal passions into complicated and communal online lifestyles. She tracks One Direction’s early fame from episodes of The X Fac­ tor to sold-out arenas around the world and deftly articulates the perfect storm of social media, hysteria, and mythmaking that made such a success possible. A superfan herself, the author invites readers into the trenches of Tumblr and Twitter to chronicle his discussions with significant players in a diverse swath of fan scenes. Throughout her study, she embraces online slang, unabashedly detailing the nuances between stanning and shipping among a lexicon of new, evolving terminology. Discussing the popular trend of circulating niche, nearly incomprehensible One Direction memes, Tiffany coyly explains how their viral success was engineered because “we have talked so much about these people that we no longer have anything left to say that isn’t totally absurd.” This sentiment rings throughout the book, which later shifts into an enthralling study of how some fans try to create juicy lore out of nothing, often with problematic results. Dreaming up celebrity couples (and combining their names into a snappy portmanteau) is a common pastime for many fans, but some fantasies, such as the idea that band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson might secretly be an item, have barreled aggressively into the realm of conspiracy theories. Personal anecdotes elevate Tiffany’s book into a heartfelt memoir wrapped in an ethnographic analysis, as the author insightfully examines contemporary loneliness and our growing need to feel like we’re a part of something. Despite its focus on One Direction, the text buzzes with broader relevance that should appeal to readers interested in the “unlimited chaotic energy” of life online.

A finely balanced pop-culture investigation.

INCOMPARABLE GRACE JFK in the Presidency Updegrove, Mark K. Dutton (368 pp.) $29.00 | April 12, 2022 978-1-5247-4574-5

A nuanced portrait of John F. Kennedy’s truncated time in the White House.

Americans have long been politically divided. As presidential historian Updegrove observes, Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 election only by the slimmest of margins, less than two-tenths of a percentage point. Americans seem to have been more generous of spirit back then. Multiple times the author observes that Kennedy had a disastrous first few months in office with the Bay of Pigs invasion (authorized, it must be said, by Nixon’s former boss, Dwight Eisenhower), but his approval rating stood at 83%. The grace of Updegrove’s title comes not just from Kennedy’s air of noblesse oblige, but also from Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure,” which Kennedy certainly showed, at least in public.

EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

Tiffany, Kaitlyn MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $18.00 paper | June 14, 2022 978-0-374-53918-4

An insider’s look at obsessive fandom in the internet age. |

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In private, things were different: Kennedy was often debilitated with pain from injuries suffered in war and the effects of steroids taken precisely to improve his condition. “He, his family, his aides, and his doctors had hidden his illnesses and medical remedies from the press,” writes Updegrove, “knowing that Americans would raise understandable concerns if made fully aware of his extensive maladies.” Still, Kennedy met the occasion, as when the Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into space on April 12, 1961, a feat that caused Kennedy to fast-forward the development of NASA programs that would put Americans on the moon. Kennedy also learned from his frequent showdowns, mostly rhetorical, with Nikita Khrushchev that nuclear war was out of the question, as his deft handling of the Cuban missile crisis would prove. Updegrove’s skillful portrait reveals a president who learned on the job and did so with humility, “calling forth the best in all of us,” which helps account for the widely shared enshrinement of Kennedy’s memory today.

A well-rendered portrait showing that presidential politics can be both effective and a force for the good.

MISS CHLOE A Memoir of a Literary Friendship With Toni Morrison

Verdelle, A.J. Amistad/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $24.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-06-303166-1 The joys, challenges, and lasting lessons of a friendship with Chloe Ardelia Wofford, aka Toni Morrison.

“When I met Toni Morrison in person, I had been her reader and her cheerleader for dozens of years,” writes Verdelle. What followed was more than two decades of friendship and hero worship, including delights and resentments big and small (the author is still wondering why Morrison had to steal her favorite scarf), along with “two and a half spats” dished in detail. Morrison may have been a diva in many ways, but Verdelle couldn’t have met her under more auspicious circumstances. In 1997, after she received a copy of Verdelle’s first (and only) published novel, The Good Negress, Morrison sent back an unsolicited appreciation, almost unheard of. She went on to get the younger author invited to teach at Princeton, where she herself was ensconced alongside Black luminaries like Cornel West, Nell Painter, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Princeton was a mixed bag for Verdelle, who was ultimately repulsed by the overwhelming privilege on display. (She now teaches at Morgan State, a historically Black college in Baltimore.) Verdelle writes forcefully about the individual novels and about Morrison’s achievement as a whole. “Relentlessly stripping the hegemonic gaze,” she writes, “Morrison made us and our human complexities so visible, in language so eloquent and deep, that the whole of world literature could not deny her innovation and brilliance.” Elsewhere, she writes, “Morrison is to literature as James Brown is to popular culture”—the essence of Black and proud. The book 100

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is too long in the way of a phone conversation where the other person keeps thinking of one more thing they have to tell you, but luckily enough, that turns out to be interesting, as well.

Verdelle is not afraid to grind an ax if necessary, and the one involving the failure of her second novel to see print is sharp indeed. Maybe something can be done about that.

Passionate, personal, insightful, testy, and unique.

BORDER HACKER A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run

Vonk, Levi with Axel Kirschner Bold Type Books (352 pp.) $29.00 | April 26, 2022 978-1-64503-704-0

An inspiring, timely border story about “how it is possible for two people who seemingly could not be more different on paper—a young, southern, white academic and an undocumented, Afro-Latino, New York hustler—to still share something.”

In 2015, Vonk, a young American anthropologist, embedded with a migration caravan in Mexico. Along the way, he developed a friendship with Kirschner, an undocumented American Guatemalan desperate to return to New York City after being deported for a minor traffic violation. This particular migration, called the Viacrucis Migrante, was ostensibly sponsored

by Father Alejandro Solalinde, a powerful figure whose political ties with the Mexican authorities were questionable—though his religious protection was essential to the caravan’s success.

Vonk was swiftly initiated into the caravan lifestyle, fraught with hardships, including lack of food and water, bare accommodations, drugs, gang activity, and perhaps even the trafficking of children and youth. During the journey, he met Kirschner, “a down-and-out deportee with little formal education and no resources,” who was born in Guatemala but spent most of his life in New York City. Vonk incorporates Kirschner’s perspective in italics as a running commentary on the primary narrative, allowing readers to sift through the extraordinary, often sordid details of Kirschner’s life as a quasi-criminal hacker and gauge for themselves whether he—or Vonk—is telling the whole truth.

“The more I tried to decipher it all, the more it eluded me,” writes Vonk. “Every time I dug deeper, every time I grasped at some kind of essence or innermost kernel, it all melted into air.”

The Viacrucis Migrante was essentially shut down by the Southern Border Program, which allowed gangs to proliferate and left scant resources for migrants like Kirschner to continue to make dangerous attempts at crossing the border—to their absolute peril. Everyone has their hands dirty in this text, a significant addition to the literature on an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

An engaging work of on-the-ground journalism that exposes root causes of a chronic problem.

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“An insightful portrait sure to engage DJ Screw’s longtime fans and newcomers alike.” dj screw

DJ SCREW A Life in Slow Revolution

Walker, Lance Scott Univ. of Texas (312 pp.) $29.95 | April 19, 2022 978-1-4773-2513-1 An ambitious love letter to one of Houston’s beloved mixtape kings.

Walker, a Texas native now based in New York and author of Houston Rap Tapes, gives us a definitive portrait of Robert Earl Davis Jr. (1971-2000), aka DJ Screw. Though the format might seem jarring at first, the narrative picks up as the rhythm and pace of the prose take over. With testimony from more than 100 people who knew DJ Screw well, the text offers an engaging, documentarylike conversation about his life and work. Screw began scratching up records at a very young age, and he became a breakaway sound alchemist after slowing down a recording of the 1985 Mantronix hit “Fresh Is the Word.” From there, his artistry and popularity skyrocketed, and he continued to develop singular styles and methods. “Screw took everybody’s favorite songs and ripped them wide open, tearing into the fabric of the original sound, decompressing, adding earth, adding sky, adding voice,” writes Walker. “People describe songs on Screw tapes as being more emo­tional. Maybe that was the point—to open up the music until it bleeds.” His mixtapes became some of the most sought-after music in the area; in one day, he could make up to $30,000 in tape sales. Eventually, Screw branched out into entrepreneurial ventures, including a record label and two stores. Although the testimony of others guides the book, during the useful transition sections, Walker’s authoritative voice returns. Screw’s friends credit his love of music with keeping him off the streets and out of trouble when he was young, but it couldn’t save him in the end. His inability to sleep, poor diet, and substance abuse issues led to his death at age 29. More than two decades after his death, however, Screw’s influence can still be heard and felt in Houston and beyond.

An insightful portrait sure to engage DJ Screw’s longtime fans and newcomers alike.

with examples from a stunning range of authors, including Chinese luminaries such as Lu Xun and Shen Congwen as well as a host of notables from around the world, with special emphasis given to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, Kafka, and García Márquez. As Yan explains, there are “four different levels of truth” expressed in realist literature. The two most profound are “vital truth,” which involves the expression of a psychological reality beyond mere appearances; and “spiritual truth,” which strikes even deeper, expressing something essential about the soul of a character or culture. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the recurring literary touchstones here, and Yan insightfully interprets the work as a seminal contribution to modern literature in its turn toward a “hegemonic, imperial narration” and its rejection of readers’ long-standing expectations about causality. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which also comes up for repeated discussion, is framed as a critical paradigm similar to Yan’s own “mythorealism,” a mode that borrows from both traditional realism and modernist subjectivism to produce “a truth that is obscured by truth itself.” Yan’s commentaries on the realist canon emerging over the last several hundred years are consistently insightful and often strikingly illuminating, as in his assessments of how the strongest writers, from Defoe to Turgenev and beyond, have continually shifted readers’ understanding of what counts as reality. Though some theoretical obscurity does cloud the text and a certain amount of repetitiveness creeps in, the overall arguments and individual readings are accessible and rewarding.

A sometimes dense but always discerning consideration of how truth emerges across an impressive array of global literature.

DISCOVERING FICTION

Yan Lianke Trans. by Carlos Rojas Duke Univ. (160 pp.) $23.95 paper | June 24, 2022 978-1-4780-1830-8

A literary master anatomizes modes of truth telling in fiction.

First published in Chinese in 2011 and recently translated by Rojas, this study of literary representation considers how various forms of realism—and critical departures from them—convey a sense of truth. Yan illustrates his arguments |

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children’s THE WORLD IS A FAMILY

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Adams, Rosie Illus. by Frances Ives Tiger Tales (32 pp.) $17.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-68010-277-2

BRAND NEW BOY by David Almond; illus. by Marta Altés.......... 103 CAPRICE by Coe Booth......................................................................108 ARU SHAH AND THE NECTAR OF IMMORTALITY

by Roshani Chokshi............................................................................. 112

Two foxes, one grown and the other a pup, bound into the great outdoors

SWIM TEAM by Johnnie Christmas................................................... 113

together to explore.

A hushed, lulling refrain sets the tone as the sun rises over a seaside town: “The world is a family— / we are all one, / growing together / under the sun.” From this panoramic perspective, the text and artwork then zoom in on a scurry of squirrels scrabbling across treetops. On the ground below, the fox and pup jovially bat at each other’s tails. The refrain is altered slightly to highlight their fun: “The world is a family— / we are all one, / playing together / under the sun.” On each doublepage spread, other animals are introduced: otters, bears, and more. Universal experiences of sharing and resting tie the animals together, with a snuggle or two thrown in, of course.

Readers see the different creatures all living in harmony. On the closing spreads, with stars twinkling in the night sky, the refrain changes one last time: “The world is a family— / we are all one, / united together / under stars, moon, and sun.” In this sweet British import, the burnt orange foxes are set against open landscapes of saturated blues, greens, and browns. Both the charming artwork and the soothing narrative envelop the reader like a warm, comforting hug. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A cozy reminder that we are more similar than we sometimes think. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE MARVELLERS by Dhonielle Clayton; illus. by Khadijah Khatib................................................................... 113 SMALLER SISTER by Maggie Edkins Willis.....................................116 THE PRINCE OF NOWHERE by Rochelle Hassan............................120 JENNIFER CHAN IS NOT ALONE by Tae Keller.............................122 A DAY FOR SANDCASTLES by JonArno Lawson; illus. by Qin Leng................................................................................124 SAVE THE PEOPLE! by Stacy McAnulty; illus. by Nicole Miles...........................................................................126 GROWING AN ARTIST by John Parra..............................................129 LILY LEADS THE WAY by Margi Preus; illus. by Matt Myers......... 130 CELIA PLANTED A GARDEN by Phyllis Root & Gary D. Schmidt; illus. by Melissa Sweet........................................................................ 131 THE LEGEND OF THE SPIRIT SERPENT by Adaiah Sanford; illus. by Ken Daley.............................................................................. 132 THE SECRET BATTLE OF EVAN PAO

by Wendy Wan-Long Shang................................................................ 133 SKY WOLF’S CALL by Eldon Yellowhorn & Kathy Lowinger........ 138

BROTHERS AND SISTERS

STAR CHILD by Ibi Zoboi..................................................................139

Almada, Ariel Andrés Illus. by Sonja Wimmer Trans. by Jon Brokenbrow Cuento de Luz (32 pp.) $16.95 | March 1, 2022 978-84-18302-46-6 Series: Family Love

THE SECRET BATTLE OF EVAN PAO Shang, Wendy Wan-Long Scholastic (272 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-338-67885-7

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Biological and chosen siblings are celebrated in this Spanish import translated by Brokenbrow.

Siblings from various types of families are presented in this affecting picture book. Day-in-the-life moments like fighting over toys and trying to get homework done are juxtaposed with hints of fantasy. A pair of siblings sits in a whimsical kirkus.com

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BRAND NEW BOY

Almond, David Illus. by Marta Altés Candlewick (320 pp.) $18.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-5362-2270-8

Children welcome and defend a classmate who is, quite literally, new.

With fine misdirection, Almond drops in early references to bullying, childhood trauma, and space aliens—as well as robots, which turns out to be the most relevant hint about the stiff and mysterious lad introduced as George who arrives at Darwin Avenue Primary Academy just days before term’s end. But George’s arrogant and secretive keepers at the New Life Corporation have made a serious mistake in selecting the Academy as an “ordinary little school” in which to try out their experimental product. Despite their new classmate’s wooden speech and behavior, the children quickly see him as one of them: Even after watching George disturbingly assembled and disassembled before their eyes, four classmates spirit him away for a day of messy, fun play in the local woods. Almond elevates ordinary moments and experiences into extraordinary ones, and so, along with prompting deep thoughts in his chosen narrator, Daniel, George ultimately comes to an epiphany of his own after gazing at his reflection in a pond. The author supplies a resolution of sorts but finishes in a way that leaves readers to make up endings of their own. Names in the narrative cue a racially and ethnically diverse cast, as do the clean, cheerful inkand-wash scenes of animated students and teachers surrounding George’s pale, staring, minimally responsive figure.

Inspiring guidelines for treating newcomers; likely to leave readers thinking deep thoughts of their own. (Fiction. 9-12) |

COOKIES & MILK

Amos, Shawn Illus. by Robert Paul Jr. Little, Brown (320 pp.) $16.99 | May 17, 2022 978-0-7595-5677-5 A boy improves his relationship with his father as they prepare to open a cookie store over summer break.

Dad has had a lot of ridiculous ideas, but to 11-year-old Ellis, opening a store that only sells chocolate chip cookies—even if they are delicious—seems to be the worst. With his parents recently divorced and his mother visiting her best friend out of town, Ellis dreads spending the summer of 1976 with his father. It only gets worse when they arrive at a run-down storefront. The next six weeks are all about perfecting their recipe, fixing up the shop, and attracting customers—when all he really wants is to play his harmonica and hang out with his best friend. Through Ellis’ first-person account, readers encounter several interesting characters on Sunset Boulevard as he explores his new neighborhood. One surprise is the existence of a mysterious paternal uncle that neither of his parents ever told him about, a discovery that sets Ellis on a course to reunite his family. Ellis learns not only the value of clear communication, but the importance of community as well. Readers will immediately love Ellis and his family as they learn to reconnect in this novel that is full of heart and humor. The easygoing pace and descriptive narration make it a suitable choice for reading aloud. Ellis and his family are Black. Final art not seen.

A wholesome story that bridges generations. (author’s note, recipe, playlist) (Historical fiction. 8-12)

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treehouse against a pink-and-purple sunset, followed by a scene of two sisters engaged in spirited dress-up play. The soft shading of Wimmer’s artwork creates a calming effect, though some spreads depict many characters, are full of motion, and use bright colors. The simple prose meditates on the special bond siblings share and also acknowledges sobering truths: “At the end of the day, what matters is how you feel, because we’re all brothers and sisters, even though sometimes we don’t agree,” and “although the years may go by and take us along different paths, I’ll always be just an embrace away.” There is no plot, but children will be drawn to the friendly color palette and ever changing action. Lack of names and information about how members of the ensemble cast are biologically or legally related can be seen as wins for non-normative families and families living in community. Characters have varied skin tones; one child uses a wheelchair; and a father figure is shown cooking. Body type, however, lacks diversity, and digital technology is absent, making the book feel both timeless and vintage despite its modern messaging. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A gentle, playful celebration of sibling relationships. (Pic­ ture book. 3-6)

KEEPER OF THE LIGHT Juliet Fish Nichols Fights the San Francisco Fog

Arnold, Caroline Illus. by Rachell Sumpter Cameron + Company (40 pp.) $18.99 | April 12, 2022 978-1-951836-37-5

On Sept. 1, 1902, Juliet Fish Nichols began keeping a journal.

Newly installed as the lighthouse keeper on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, she enumerated her many duties, requiring physical strength, steadfastness, determination, and bravery.

Every evening, she had to light the oil lamp and keep it shining all night long. On an April morning in 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake damaged the lighthouse, leaving Juliet heartbroken. A few months later, when the bay was saturated with a dangerous, impenetrable fog, the hand-cranked fog bell machine broke down, and Juliet had to manually strike the bell with a mallet every 15 seconds throughout the night to warn ships away from the rocks. Her journal entries, based on kirkus.com

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PICTURE BOOKS | Summer Edward

6 new books that illuminate women’s history March is Women’s History Month, and while the assertion that women can claim a history of their own is not as radical to today’s readers as it may have been to folks of yesteryear, there are still numerous stories of women’s pervasive influence, weighty achievements, and instructive triumphs that need much more light cast on them. I would love to share an endless raft of picture books that serve this important work, but one only has so much space in an editor’s column, alas. So I will instead share a clutch of recent and soon-to-be-released titles. Here’s what Kirkus’ reviewers had to say about them.

Call Me Miss Hamilton: One Woman’s Case for Equality and Respect by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jeffery Boston Weatherford (Millbrook/Lerner, Feb. 1): “Young readers are introduced to the inspiring life of lesser-known civil rights leader Mary Hamilton.…Weatherford’s text is straightforward, unfolding the story in pithy, reportorial prose. With a combination of black-and-white photos (including a montage of portraits of Hamilton’s relatives) and scratchboard art, the book presents iconic, unvarnished images of the civil rights era and captures Hamilton’s bold determination.…Essential reading for teaching children about the importance of demanding equality and respect.”

One Wish: Fatima al-Fihri and the World’s Oldest University by M.O. Yuksel, illustrated by Mariam Quraishi (Harper/ HarperCollins, March 1): “Born in present-day Tunisia in the early ninth century, Fatima al-Fihri craved knowledge and had one wish—to build a school where all would be welcome.…With the inheritance she gained after her father’s death, she began the taxing process of building and establishing the University of al-Qarawiyyin, which today remains the world’s oldest continually operating university. Several textual details reveal the important role Fatima’s Muslim faith played in her life, and Yuksel frequently employs figurative language to emphasize her strong convictions about education and equality.”

The Mirabal Sisters: From Caterpillars to Butterflies by Raynelda A. Calderón, illustrated by Maria Ocampo (Cayena Press, March 1): “Calderón’s biographical picture book tells the story of four revolutionary sisters of the Dominican Republic.…Although grim material for a children’s book, Calderón’s tale is presented 104

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in a sensitive manner, and Ocampo’s fullcolor, painted illustrations focus on the vivid colors and beauty of the island nation rather than on violence.…This work offers insight into an underrepresented slice of history. An inspiring and unusual story of heroic women.”

Jackie and the Mona Lisa by Debbie Rovin Murphy, illustrated by Jennifer Bricking (Sleeping Bear Press, March 15): “The inspiring story of how first lady Jackie Kennedy organized the first ever exhibition of the world-famous Mona Lisa on American soil.…Murphy succeeds in showing how the new, youthful first lady, schooled in the arts and admired by the American public for her fashion styles and French affiliation, exerted a huge influence on U.S. culture.…Jackie Kennedy’s trailblazing work remains relevant for today’s young readers.”

A Storm of Horses: The Story of Artist Rosa Bonheur by Ruth Sanderson (Crocodile/Interlink, March 15): “A profile of groundbreaking 19th-century French animalier Rosa Bonheur. Sanderson, herself a realistic painter whose initial artistic inspiration was horses, crafts an engaging biography whose dramatic oil compositions and engrossing narrative will pull in other equine aficionados.…An inspiring glimpse into the talent and drive of a woman who marched to the beat of a different drummer.”

Keeper of the Light: Juliet Fish Nichols Fights the San Francisco Fog by Caroline Arnold, illustrated by Rachell Sumpter (Cameron + Company, April 12): “A fascinating introduction to a once-celebrated, now lesser-known lightkeeper.…Her journal entries, based on historical documents, appear in light, thin handwriting and illuminate her mostly solitary life, wholly dedicated to her important work and punctuated by times of terror and danger as well as occasional trips to the city across the bay for supplies. The story conveys Juliet’s deep appreciation for the beauty of the sea and the island’s landscape.”

Summer Edward is a young readers’ editor.

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“A sweet story of friendship, being true to yourself, and finding common ground.” camp famous

historical documents, appear in light, thin handwriting and illuminate her mostly solitary life, wholly dedicated to her important work and punctuated by times of terror and danger as well as occasional trips to the city across the bay for supplies. The story conveys Juliet’s deep appreciation for the beauty of the sea and the island’s landscape. Sumpter’s carefully composed double-page illustrations show the lighthouse, harbor, and city from a variety of perspectives and add detail and dimension to the narration. They show, for example, that the lighthouse was not a tower but a cottage with an attached bell house on a platform high on a cliff. Juliet presents White. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A fascinating introduction to a once-celebrated, now lesser-known lightkeeper. (additional facts, further reading) (Picture-book biography. 7-9)

ZIA ERASES THE WORLD

Abigail Herman spends a lot of time trying to figure out the mysterious rules of fifth grade friendship.

Everyone knows that you should tuck in your shirt before doing a cartwheel.

Everyone, that is, except 11-year-old Abby. Just like she doesn’t know the words to the latest songs or the names of the characters on the popular TV shows her mom won’t let her watch. She thinks a fresh start at summer camp might be the answer to her friendship problems, and she has her sights set on Camp Longatocket, which her old babysitter reminisced about. But when her teacher, Ms. McIntyre, arranges for Abby to go to a camp run by her brother, it’s someplace completely different: Camp Famous, where the high-profile

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Barton, Bree Viking (256 pp.) $16.99 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-35099-7

CAMP FAMOUS

Blecher, Jennifer Greenwillow Books (272 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-06-314068-4

Suffering from depression, a girl erases words from a magical dictionary, hoping in the process to also erase her sadness.

Zia, a sixth grader with a gift for making up words, lived happily with her mother until Shadoom came into her life a year ago. Shadoom is Zia’s name for the “room of shadows” now filling her with “fear and hurt and sadness.” Afraid everyone will think she’s a “hopeless weirdling,” Zia stops hanging out with her best friends, hides in the girls’ bathroom at lunch, and refuses to tell her mother, who’s stressed enough working two jobs, paying bills, and caring for Zia’s grouchy Greek immigrant grandmother who has dementia. Zia wants to fix herself, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong. Discovering her grandmother’s mysterious dictionary that comes with a charmed eraser, Zia experiments with erasing words and feels empowered as they vanish from the world. While removing words that trigger Shadoom, Zia erases fear and then pain with dire consequences and must find a way to undo her actions. Narrating in the first-person present tense, Zia’s honest voice adds immediacy and credibility to her chronicle of the frightening onset of her depression, her lonely efforts to conceal it, her totally misguided attempts to magically erase it, and the realization she doesn’t have to cope on her own. Definitions of words key to Zia’s story introduce each chapter, reinforcing the dictionary theme.

A moving, hopeful tale about confronting depression. (Fan­ tasy. 8-12)

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MIDDLE GRADE | Laura Simeon

stellar reads for young feminists “Feminism works toward the equality of people of all sexes and genders with a particular concern for eradicating gender-based discrimination,” according to the criteria for Rise: A Feminist Book Project, whose members annually select top feminist titles for children and young adults. A recent webinar marking the project’s 20th anniversary included valuable history and context as well as comments from members past and present. Founding member Jennifer Baltes recalled Rise’s origins: Librarians, discussing the state of literature for young people after an American Library Association Midwinter conference, “bemoaned the lack of publishing of and recognition for feminist books for youth” and hoped for more than titles starring “ ‘feisty’ or ‘plucky’ heroines. Blech.”

Nel Ward, another founding member, emphasized that “the choice to build a broad list, rather than appointing one book as ‘the best feminist book of the year,’ was...a feminist choice that prioritized representation and community over prestige.” Having joined Rise in March 2021, I agree wholeheartedly with past member Joy Warland, who said that being part of a group of readers who “passionately yet respectfully disagree is one of the greatest things I have ever experienced.” Together, our nine members read many hundreds of books, nominated and discussed 149 during 24 hours of Zoom discussions, and selected 104 for our final list. This body of work—two decades’ worth of carefully curated lists of books addressing critical biases that negatively affect all young people’s lives—is a treasure. Since we’re in the midst of Women’s History Month, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on just a few remarkable middle-grade reads.

Letters From Cuba by Ruth Behar (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2020): In 1938, Esther, a Jewish Polish girl inspired by Behar’s grandmother, joins her father in Cuba, courageously and cleverly helping him earn enough to bring the rest of their family to safety.

Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner (Beacon Press, 2021): Advised to attend college by a high school counselor who believed that as a wheelchair user she wouldn’t be able to count on find106

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ing a husband to support her, Heumann overcame barriers to become an influential international disability rights activist.

Amina’s Song by Hena Khan (Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster, 2021): A living history assignment poses a challenge for Pakistani American Amina. How can she help her classmates understand there’s more to Pakistan than the negative stereotypes of gender-based oppression they’ve unquestioningly absorbed?

Across the Pond by Joy McCullough (Atheneum, 2021): When American Callie feels lost after moving to rural Scotland, she discovers the joys of birding. Confronting hostile sexism in the local birding club brings new friends and allies into her life.

Between Two Worlds: The Art & Life of Amrita Sher-Gil by Meera Sriram, illustrated by Ruchi Bakshi Sharma (Penny Candy, 2021): During her tragically short life, Hungarian and Indian painter Sher-Gil (1913-1941) trained in Paris and, inspired by European and Asian artistic traditions, broke cultural and gender barriers to leave a lasting mark.

The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy by Anne Ursu (Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins, 2021): Banished to a repressive boarding school for wayward girls, Marya, guided by her mentor’s question, “Who does the story serve?” challenges fabrications disguised as history that are designed to uphold a repressive status quo.

The Prettiest by Brigit Young (Roaring Brook Press, 2020): The insidious impact of sexist beauty standards is revealed after a list of the prettiest girls in their eighth grade class is published, affecting relationships between the tweens and their friends and family.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

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“A fine introduction for whale aficionados and a clarion call for climate change awareness.” the whale who swam through time

campers include a princess and a pop star. Being the only nonfamous kid makes her feel like an outsider, so Abby pretends to be a bestselling author to fit in. She can only be her true self when she’s writing in her fuzzy, green, sequined notebook and when she’s spending time with Oliver Frank, her classmate and fellow camper who promises to keep her secret—and has one of his own. This plot-driven, upbeat novel will have readers relating to Abby’s awkwardness while enjoying the fanciful situation in which she finds herself. At its heart, it’s a sweet story of friendship, being true to yourself, and finding common ground. Most characters default to White.

A quirky and fun summer read. (Fiction. 8-12)

THE WHALE WHO SWAM THROUGH TIME A 200-Year Journey in the Arctic Boersma, Alex & Nick Pyenson Illus. by Alex Boersma Roaring Brook Press (48 pp.) $19.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-250-80302-3

Meet a beautiful denizen of the sea.

Bowhead whales are the longest-living mammals on Earth— they can live for over 200 years—and spend their entire, mostly solitary, lives in and around the Arctic. This well-written nonfiction title provides an up-close–and-personal look at one endearing female bowhead, drawing young readers in and evoking empathy. Boersma and Pyenson recount the various perils she faces, including predators and changes to her habitat due to technological advances and climate change. The economical text describes the majestic creature’s characteristics and

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“The book’s haunting tone will linger with readers.” caprice

DUET

behavior and incrementally tracks her development from infancy to adulthood through four stages, each spanning 50 years. The book’s warm portrayal of the very vocal whale is occasionally slightly anthropomorphic, but this enhances its appeal to the young target audience, as does the liberal use of evocative onomatopoeic words, rendered in large capitals. The pleasant realistic illustrations, created with watercolor, gouache, and colored inks and finished digitally, are soft and lively and appropriately emphasize blues, whites, and the vastness of the ocean.

Sharp-eyed readers will note various Arctic animals who share the bowhead’s habitat. Details in the scenery, both on land and at sea, reflect the various historical periods. Excellent backmatter material includes additional facts about bowheads and information about other Arctic creatures, the Northwest Passage, and Inuit people in the Arctic. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A fine introduction for whale aficionados and a clarion call for climate change awareness. (author’s note) (Informational pic­ ture book. 4-8)

Broach, Elise Illus. by Ziyue Chen Christy Ottaviano Books (304 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-316-31135-9 A singing goldfinch becomes a musical muse for a young piano prodigy.

Mirabelle, a young female goldfinch who loves music, closely watches the home of Mr. Starek, a gifted piano teacher. One day, a tween boy named Michael Jin arrives, clearly against his wishes. The boy refuses to play for the esteemed teacher, who is supposed to help Michael prepare for the prestigious Chopin Festival in Hartford. Broach unfurls a shy dance between boy and bird, as Mirabelle’s curiosity helps Michael, who presents as East Asian American, reveal his precocious talent. When Michael plays Chopin’s Minute Waltz, Mirabelle, perched in a tree outside the window, begins to sing along, inspiring both to perform beyond their expectations. This creates a musical friendship that leads them to the mystery of Chopin’s lost piano. Readers learn about the historical friendship among three geniuses: Frédéric Chopin; his muse, the writer George Sand; and painter Eugene Delacroix. A dilapidated house stuffed with treasures holds a rare piano that brings forth the duo’s best performances, but will the bank take the house and all its contents away? Glimpses of bird life provide a lighthearted balance to the fine details of musicality and piano virtuosity. This story illustrates an appreciation for excellence and the passion to create music just for the joy of it. Final art not seen.

A quick and interesting musical read, full of history and mystery. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)

CAPRICE

Booth, Coe Scholastic (256 pp.) $17.99 | May 17, 2022 978-0-545-93334-6 A 12-year-old girl navigates the effects of past abuse and finds the power to share her truths.

Fresh off a seven-week leadership program at Ainsley International School, an elite boarding school, Caprice is eager to see her friends and family back in Newark at the end of an amazing summer. Before she leaves, the head of school offers her a full scholarship, giving her a week to decide whether she wants to return. Once home, Caprice is keen to see her best friend, Nicole, and enjoy what could be her last week of summer at their neighborhood recreation center despite the shadow cast by news of her estranged grandmother’s failing health. Through her first-person narration, readers come to understand that Caprice is harboring painful feelings tied to incidents of abuse from when she was younger that now influence her interactions with boys, even the one she is developing feelings toward.

As the week moves on, an increasingly anxious Caprice must confront her past so that she can have a better future. The raw, poignant text highlights the frequency of misogynistic microaggressions and objectification, while the swift yet emotionally charged ending supports the larger message of consent and the hope of overcoming the lasting trauma of sexual assault. The book’s haunting tone will linger with readers. Caprice and most main characters are Black.

A heart-aching journey that needs to be witnessed. (Fiction.

10-14)

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HELLO, BABY! I’M YOUR MOM

Bunting, Eve Illus. by Jui Ishida Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $17.99 | March 15, 2022 978-1-53411-146-2

A sweet animal book spotlights mothers’ loving dedication to their children.

Just as human babies need continual attention, baby animals have a variety of needs and must learn different skills to survive and thrive. Narrated in rhyming quatrains in the voice of a mother reassuring her infant, the text celebrates the unique bond between a mama and her young while highlighting specific characteristics and abilities of various animal species. On the opening double-page spread, a human mother promises that “I’ll take care of you” as she marvels at the tiny hands and feet of her bundle of joy. A she-cat vows to share a cozy bed with her kitten. A mother bird assures her hungry nestlings that she will feed them bugs “to make you strong.” An alligator mom |

will teach her little ones to snap their jaws and use their little claws. A rhino will learn confidence from a nurturing mum: “Your skin is wrinkled just a bit. / Another month and it will fit. / Not everyone will look at you / and think you’re pretty, but I do.” Emotive full-bleed illustrations in glowing hues accentuate the tenderness of maternal love. The backmatter includes interesting facts about the 10 featured animals and photos of them.

(This book was reviewed digitally.)

An informative baby-animal book in which mothers are revered and applauded. (Informational picture book. 4-7)

THE DRAGON AND THE STONE

Butler, Kathryn Crossway (304 pp.) $14.99 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-4335-7947-9 Series: The Dream Keeper Saga, 1

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A girl has many questions sparked by an inherited magical stone.

Twelve-year-old Lily McKinley lives with her mom, a hardworking nurse, and often takes responsibility for helping to care for her grandmother. Her life changes dramatically after she spots a dragon in the kitchen, eating chili out of the slow cooker. Soon after, Lily finds her recently deceased father’s precious stone, a pendant hanging from a silver chain, tucked away in her beloved copy of a book about King Arthur. She decides to wear it. More strange things begin to happen: Lily is cornered by school bully Adam and, without meaning to, summons Sir Lancelot, a knight in shining armor. The dragon, whose name is Cedric, reappears and whisks Lily off to the Realm, explaining that she is desperately needed. Through an unfortunate miscommunication, Adam is also transported into the Realm.

Along their journey, they encounter wild terrain, ogres, and a regal unicorn along with many other creatures. While Lily despises Adam, she learns that they have a lot more in common than she knew, and the two eventually develop a friendship.

Unexpected twists make Lily question what really happened to her dad and cause her to seek the truth about who he actually was. Main characters read as White; names indicate diversity in the supporting cast.

An appealing, imaginative adventure tale with classic fantasy elements. (Fantasy. 9-12)

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WORDS WITH…

Kelly Barnhill Contemporary concerns inform the latest middle-grade fantasy from this Newbery Medalist

BY VICKY SMITH Janna Fraboni Photography

Kirkus via Zoom from her home in Minneapolis; the interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It was a sheer pleasure to sink into another Kelly Barnhill.

It was a strange experience, because I didn’t think I was going to write another book, and this one sort of came out of nowhere.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

To be fair, I’ve said that before. Friends of mine have lost count of how many times I have given up writing forever. When The Girl Who Drank the Moon came out, I was very disassociated from it, [and] when the whole [Newbery] business happened, I was extremely unprepared. This [was] the book that I had turned in to my editor with a letter of apology, saying, I’m re­ ally sorry, I think people are going to hate this book. It was all very destabilizing, because there were books that I thought would win [but] didn’t, and there was that whole sense of imposter syndrome. And also, Trump was elected, and the country lost its mind, and I was feeling really self-conscious about what the purpose of my voice was and what the purpose of my work was and that maybe it was OK if I didn’t write another book again.

I did the other things that everybody else did. I went on marches, and I wrote letters to my representatives, and I just thought maybe that’s my role now: to take care of my family [and] my neighbors in the new reality. But I have these stacks of notebooks, and I love writing longhand. There’s a new daily work that I’ll do just for myself: I will write fairy tales, just for myself. And one day, I wrote one that just didn’t feel the same as everything else. It stuck with me in a different sort of a way. I wrote little bits and pieces here and there, and then I put it all together, and I typed it up.

I was finishing [the manuscript] around the exact same time that [George Floyd] was murdered by police. And my city erupted in a collective response of rage and pain and sorrow and frustration. People just started donating groceries and diapers and menstrual products and cleaning products and anything else that we could think of that might be helpful. There

Kelly Barnhill won the 2017 Newbery Medal for her luminous fantasy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. After a story collection for adults, she returns to young readers’ literature with The Ogress and the Orphans (Algonquin, March 8), set in a once-lovely town whose library has burned and whose citizens have sunk into suspicion and selfishness. It is ruled by a greedy mayor who, readers learn early on, is a dragon who’s assumed the skin of a human—not, as others of his kind have, simply to expand his perspective through living the experiences of others, but to use that understanding to take advantage of them. When crisis draws the town’s anger to the ogress who lives peacefully on its outskirts, the mayor seeks to exploit the citizens’ nativism in ways many readers will find all too familiar. But the mayor is no match for the orphans at the town’s heart. Barnhill spoke with 110

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was this profound community response that I feel [has been] left out of the narrative. It made those next few months of going back and forth [with] my editor just that much more [meaningful].

I write books for children, and I feel this really strong moral obligation to not lie to children. Yes, I want a child who reads my book to feel in care, like whoever wrote this book for them really wants to hold them close and wants them to have a good and happy life and wants them to have everything that they need to be a thoughtful, understanding, and empowered person. But I also want them to understand that some people choose to do bad things, and we don’t know why that is. I know that there’s going to be adults that read that bit and are going to be like, Why are you wrecking it, Kelly Barnhill, jeez, what’s the mat­ ter with you? But I think that it is important [for kids] to have a frank understanding of how good things can be used for bad purposes and how not-so-good things can sometimes be transformed to be good, too.

You could not have had the Mayor say, “I, alone, can fix it,” by accident.

Trump has really given children’s authors everywhere a great service, because all those years our editors were like, Oh, this vil­ lain is too cartoonish. Or Isn’t this a bit on the nose? I feel like everything since 2016 has been a little on the nose, you know what I mean? But looking back on it, it turns out there’s all kinds of scurrilous individuals who also said that they alone could fix it.

And maybe we should learn from that.

Did you and your editor go back and forth about how much that’s on the nose to leave in?

I love how you talk about holding your readers in care.

For me, reading a middle-grade book is the funnest thing that a person can do. I, the writer, I am holding that child [reader] in care. But I am also writing the book for some other adult who is also holding that child in care and is thinking about building a world that is more just, more fair, more kind, and more responsible. We don’t always get there, but we do hope for it.

Mostly I was given pretty free rein on the Mayor. Turns out the Mayor was really easy. But that’s the thing, though. I mean, the strongman ideology is on the rise frickin’ everywhere in the world right now. You and I associate it with Trump, but it will be somebody else someday. And it has been other people in the past. And it currently is other people right now who are using that same phrase. We are having this expression of fascism happening in America right now in the guise of book banning.

You could not possibly have anticipated that your book would be coming out at a time during a wholesale attack on freedom of information.

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Vicky Smith is access services director at Portland Public Library in Maine and a former young readers’ editor at Kirkus. The Ogress and the Orphans received a starred review in the Jan. 15, 2022, issue.

It’s awful. It’s awful. It’s awful. It is unpatriotic. The idea of a public library, that’s ours. There were great libraries in Europe, but there was no analog to a public library, where you get a library card and you get to read whatever—that’s amazing. The idea of anybody attacking a library or trying to diminish a library feels so deeply un-American to me. How dare you? Oh, it makes me so mad.

There’s a line I just can’t get past. The dragons wear the skins of other creatures so that they can learn empathy. But then you tell readers, “Even empathy can be transformed into a weapon.”

That is such an uncomfortable truth, right? I really do believe that those of us who are in the business of stories—we write them, we write about them, we stock library shelves with them, we give them to our students—are all in on this idea of the power of stories and the power of empathy. And all of that is true, right? But the thing is that we have to look at the other side of that. Our brains are built for narrative. We think in story, we remember in story, we plan for the future in story. But we also hate people in story, too. Every human atrocity that has happened throughout the history of the human animal has always been [cast] in story.

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“This thrilling adventure shines with the strength of sisterhood and Chokshi’s trademark humor and wit.” aru shah and the nectar of immortality

DOPPELGANGER DANGER

verdict and tragic killing of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shop owner. Driven by deep emotional pain and a desire to prove himself to Appa, Jordan sneaks out with Mike—and the gun his father’s forbidden him to touch. As violence spreads toward Koreatown, he tries to deliver it as protection for Appa, who’s boarding up the store. This ill-conceived plan goes awry, and during the fraught evening the boys learn about integrity, bias, and more. The realistically middle-grade voice, strong characterization, and well-paced storyline show the growth of a boy who is moving from limited awareness to a mature perspective on his place in his family and broader community. The novel weaves together large-scale issues of social injustice and interracial barriers with the intimate pain—and joy—of personal relationships.

Equal parts suspenseful and emotionally insightful. (author’s note) (Fiction. 9-13)

Caprara, Rebecca Amulet/Abrams (288 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-4197-4825-7 Series: Mission Multiverse, 2

Back on their own planet, a group of middle school friends aren’t done trying to save the multiverse—and the multiverse isn’t done with them either.

After an unexpected detour at the tail end of their previous adventure, Dev Khatri, Maeve Greene, Tessa Hawthorne-Scott, Lewis Wynner, and Isaiah Yoon have made their way back to central Ohio’s Conroy Middle School and their lives on Earth, a Dimension14 planet. But unbeknown to the Conroy Cadets marching band members, Maeve’s doppelgänger, Em, has tagged along, escaping the wasteland universe she’d been banished to. While being home and reuniting with family in a more familiar, less giant monster–filled environment has its perks, the pull for the original five kids—plus Tessa’s twin, Zoey, who resents being secretly replaced in the first book—to return to their multiversal hijinks is strong. Not to mention that Em’s constant plotting to get back in the good graces of her planet-destroying family may mean major threats from before are still at play. The warm rapport and slapstick humor the Cadets share is even stronger in this second series entry, as they’ve matured in their grasp of all things multiverse while maintaining an endearing commitment to middle school concerns. Band practice is just as important as closing interdimensional holes, and if a so-called evil doppelgänger can offer a caring, world-shattering touch when needed, hypercompetitive twin sisters might be able to figure it out too. Ethnicity is largely cued through names.

Savvy fun fit for any universe. (Science fiction. 10-14)

ARU SHAH AND THE NECTAR OF IMMORTALITY

Chokshi, Roshani Rick Riordan Presents/Disney (320 pp.) $16.99 | April 5, 2022 978-1-368-05544-4 Series: Pandava Quintet, 5 The Pandava series finale finds heroes Aru, Mini, and Brynne weaponless and thus unable to enter the labyrinth to protect the nectar of immortality from the villainous Sleeper.

Although Aru has proven her strength and courage many times over, without Vajra, her celestial lightning bolt, she feels powerless. The recent betrayal of Aru’s half sister, Kara, adds to the complexity of Aru’s familial relationships and the self-doubt that has plagued her throughout this quest. Seemingly out of options, Aru remembers the IO(F)U coin from god of fire Agni.

He gives them one piece of the Sun Jewel, which, when reunited with its two other parts, will light their way through the labyrinth. During the journey to find the remaining jewel pieces, the Pandavas encounter more Otherworld characters from Hindu cosmology who test the heart and soul of each sister in their own ways. Several of these characters possess legacies that have been twisted or forgotten. This thread from earlier books reaches a head during the climax, when Aru must make a fateful decision about immortality and who is deserving of having their story live on. This thrilling closing adventure shines with the strength of sisterhood, South Asian representation, and Chokshi’s trademark humor and wit.

A deeply satisfying conclusion to a superb, groundbreaking series. (glossary) (Fantasy. 9-13)

TROUBLEMAKER

Cho, John with Sarah, Suk Little, Brown (224 pp.) $16.99 | March 22, 2022 978-0-7595-5447-4 Noted actor Cho and co-author Suk share the journey of a Korean American sixth grader struggling with feeling inadequate.

It’s 1992 in Glendale, California, and Jordan’s life is coming apart: He’s been suspended from school for cheating. He’s banned from seeing Mike, his impulsive church friend. Sarah, his adored older sister, is always busy—and so perfect that he looks even more disappointing by comparison. Appa and Umma, burdened with financial worries, are constantly working at their liquor store.

Jordan’s family immigrated 9 years earlier, but the bright American future they sacrificed so much for seems questionable. Now people are erupting in protest over the unjust Rodney King 112

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SWIM TEAM

better navigate life at the school. After Ella’s family becomes embroiled in controversy due to allegations of their connection to an infamous escaped criminal and her teacher and mentor, Masterji Thakur, goes missing, she needs her friends’ help to help set things right. Clayton does a wonderful job with skillful worldbuilding that is bolstered by vivid, detailed descriptions and smart, witty prose, and readers will be swept up in the magic. The novel celebrates the diverse peoples and customs that make up Ella’s world. Parallels between the world of the Marvellers and real-world history around discrimination, privilege, marginalization, and stereotyping are clear without being heavy-handed. A charming cast and captivating storylines make this a breath of fresh air.

An enthralling fantasy adventure full of bravery, love, and humor. (map) (Fantasy. 8-12)

Christmas, Johnnie HarperAlley (256 pp.) $21.99 | $12.99 paper | May 17, 2022 978-0-06-305677-0 978-0-06-305676-3 paper

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Leaving Brooklyn behind, Black math-whiz and puzzle lover Bree starts a new life in Florida, where she’ll be tossed into the deep end in more ways than one.

Keeping her head above water may be the trickiest puzzle yet.

While her dad is busy working and training in IT, Bree struggles at first to settle into Enith Brigitha Middle School, largely due to the school’s preoccupation with swimming—from the accomplishments of its namesake, a Black Olympian from Curaçao, to its near victory at the state swimming championships. But Bree can’t swim. To illustrate her anxiety around this fact, the graphic novel’s bright colors give way to gray thought bubbles with thick, darkened outlines expressing Bree’s deepest fears and doubts. This poignant visual crowds some panels just as anxious feelings can crowd the thoughts of otherwise star students like Bree. Ultimately, learning to swim turns out to be easy enough with the help of a kind older neighbor—a Black woman with a competitive swimming past of her own as well as a rich and bittersweet understanding of Black Americans’ relationship with swimming—who explains to Bree how racist obstacles of the past can become collective anxiety in the present. To her surprise, Bree, with her newfound water skills, eventually finds herself on the school’s swim team, navigating competition, her anxiety, and new, meaningful relationships.

Problem-solving through perseverance and friendship is the real win in this deeply smart and inspiring story. (Graphic fiction. 10-13)

THE MARVELLERS

Clayton, Dhonielle Illus. by Khadijah Khatib Henry Holt (416 pp.) $16.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-250-17494-9

A Black girl embarks on an unprecedented journey to tap deeper into her magic.

Ella Durand is an 11-year-old from New Orleans, where she lives with her conjure-politician father, notorious Conjuror mother, grandmother, and little sister, Winnie. Ella makes history as the first Conjuror to be accepted into the Arcanum Training Institute, where she can learn to become a Marveller. Ella is eager to discover her marvel and to find out more about a type of magic so different from what she has grown up with, but integrating into this new school turns out to be harder than she hoped. Fortunately, she makes new friends, Jason and Brigit, who help her |

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SHADOW GRAVE

dreams and memories of her old home. The family’s struggles are presented in an age-appropriate and relatable way, as is Amira’s ability to adapt and find hope in her new environment.

Amira, Nala, and Tien are presumed South Asian. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A poignant tale of new beginnings. (Picture book. 4-8)

Cohen, Marina Roaring Brook Press (288 pp.) $16.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-250-78300-4 There’s something not quite right about the residents of the remote New Hampshire town in which three travelers find themselves stranded after a car crash.

“Leave now. While you still can,” hisses the dour old woman who comes to the door when a shaken 12-year-old Arlo Davis; his little sister, Lola Davis; and their injured mother, Heather Flores, knock. Others in the strangely quiet, carless, electricity-free town of Livermore seem hardly more welcoming…though there does turn out to be a rambling B&B to spend the night in and, during the day, a graveyard, an abandoned sawmill, and spooky woods to explore. Further thickening both plot and creepy atmosphere with overheard snatches of conversation about secret meetings; flashbacks featuring a child parading through town in a deadly, smallpox-infected dress stolen from her dying sister; references to a mass grave with an eldritch resident; and nighttime glimpses of weirdly glowing figures, Cohen dishes up another expertly twisted chiller—inspired, she writes, by influences including Tuck Everlasting (although it is very different in tone), Robert Frost, and H.P. Lovecraft and set in a real New England ghost town. Most of the cast (its human members, anyway) present as White; Heather’s surname may cue her as Latinx.

Shivery reading for under the covers…or, for that matter, in broad daylight. (author’s note) (Horror. 9-12)

THE NATURAL GENIUS OF ANTS

Culley, Betty Crown (240 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-593-17577-4

An ant farm adopted as a summer project becomes a means of healing.

Harvard and little brother Roger Corson’s pediatrician father hasn’t been the same since the mistake that killed a baby in his care five months ago. Hoping to find his center again, Dad decides to take the boys to his childhood home, the rural, inland Maine town of Kettle Hole, for the summer. They’re renting the home of one of Dad’s oldest friends, Mr. Knowles, who’s struggling to pay his deceased wife’s medical bills and has moved with his daughter, Neveah, into their barn. Ten-year-old Harvard quickly befriends aspiring poet Nevaeh, also 10, who writes poems and has asthma. When the mail-order ants intended for the ant farm Dad builds arrive dead—a fact Harvard is desperate to conceal from Dad—Nevaeh helps Harvard populate it with the carpenter ants somehow only they see marching through the house. As the summer progresses, Harvard learns about ants and tries to help his father heal. Harvard’s sensitive narration grounds readers as they navigate difficult emotional terrain, the authentically rendered setting providing a gently evocative backdrop. Culley neatly explores hard topics such as parental depression and financial precarity within a plot ever so slightly tinged with fantasy. Harvard and Roger are biracial; their mother is of Dominican heritage and their father’s White, like the Knowleses and most other residents of Kettle Hole.

Quietly and emotionally intelligent, this tale satisfies. (Fic­ tion. 8-10)

AMIRA’S SUITCASE

Conley, Vikki Illus. by Nicky Johnston New Frontier Publishing (32 pp.) $17.99 | April 5, 2022 978-1-913639-77-8 A young refugee far from home begins establishing new roots when she discovers a seedling.

Conley and Johnston vividly bring to life the story of a young girl adapting to the turmoil around her as she and her parents settle into their new lives. Amira and her family are still unpacking after arriving at a resettlement camp when she notices a small plant growing in a corner of her suitcase. Amira instantly feels a connection to the plant and promises to care for it while giving it space to grow. When Amira’s new friends, Nala and Tien, learn about the plant, they each gift her with a seed, which she plants beside the seedling. As the trio nurtures the plants and they begin to grow, so do Amira’s confidence and sense of self. Johnston’s illustrations use pastel colors that add gentleness to this positive refugee narrative. Conley’s text is enriched by just enough figurative language. The account of Amira’s adjustment to her new country is interspersed with 114

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JUST TO SEE

de Cadier, Morgane Illus. by Florian Pigé Trans. by Johanna McCalmont Blue Dot Kids Press (40 pp.) $18.95 | May 3, 2022 978-1-73760-320-7

Using binoculars, a young girl observes the forest daily from her treehouse.

One day, she sees something that “wasn’t there yesterday” and runs to find out what it is. It turns out to be a deer whose antlers have grown |

“A delightful start to a fresh series.” wildseed witch

so tall that they look like a tree from far away. The White redheaded girl asks the deer if she can climb his antlers to the top, and he says “if you want. You can tell me what you see.” As she climbs, she encounters creatures perched in the deer’s antlers: mice, rabbits, and birds having a birthday party with balloons, party hats, cake, and oatmeal raisin cookies; critters waiting in line to take a shower in the suspended water droplets found high up in the atmosphere; other small animals growing flowers in pots; a large snake lounging. Finally, the girl reaches the top, where she watches the sun set and the moon rise. In this French import, translated by McCalmont, the colored-pencil illustrations use free-flowing vertical lines that create a sense of movement and muted hues that convey a feeling of calm. Visual clues on each double-page spread hint at what is to come on the subsequent pages. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A simple, fanciful story about the rewards of courageously exploring the unknown. (Picture book. 4-7)

THE FRIENDSHIP FEATURE

Deutsch, Stacia Whitman (192 pp.) $17.99 | April 26, 2022 978-0-8075-3786-2 Series: The Jessie Files, 1

In the wake of a freak storm, something is rotten in the town of Greenfield.

Jessie Alden is eager to dive into the new school year: new classes, new friends, new clubs, and, most importantly, new Jessie. That means leaving behind the old Jessie, who “hung out in a boxcar and solved mysteries” with her siblings.

But when a new boy at school approaches her with a tale of a bizarre transaction at his parents’ art store and strange occurrences in her neighborhood pile up without adding up, Jessie just might have to don her investigator’s hat once again, this time with her friends by her side. Deutsch has given the Boxcar Children franchise a modern twist but retains salient features of Gertrude Chandler Warner’s original series in creating her version of Greenfield. In doing away with the original family investigative team, this opener heralds a series that feels closer to the A-to-Z Mysteries by Ron Roy and John Steven Gurney, similarly suffused with red herrings, small-town sensibility, and unexpected antagonists, with the added overarching theme of the power of friendship. Characters are distinct and likable, if somewhat shallowly developed, and the surprisingly mature plot clips along at a spritely pace. Jessie and her family are presumed White; supporting characters are children of color.

A case worth cracking. (Fiction. 9-12)

WILDSEED WITCH

Dumas, Marti Amulet/Abrams (352 pp.) $18.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-4197-5561-3 Series: Wildseed Witch, 1 A young African American witch learns that magic makes life quite complicated.

School is out in New Orleans, and Hasani Schexnayder-Jones is grateful for summer vacation. She’s free to work on her YouTube channel, MakeupontheCheapCheap. Unfortunately, the free time also allows Hasani to see her dad’s new girlfriend, Sandy, flaunting herself all over Instagram. She cannot understand why her parents separated, and after learning that Sandy has moved in with her dad, Hasani’s magic springs to life in a burst of emotion.

Les Belles Demoiselles: Finir l’École des Sorcières, the premier charm school for witches, catches wind of Hasani’s raw magical

“Painful honesty balanced by humor and silliness.” smaller sister

STEP

promise and invites her to enroll. Hasani believes this will be a welcome distraction, but coming from a nonmagical family, she encounters a frosty roommate, unspoken rules that everyone else knows, and magic that she struggles to control. Even worse, there’s barely any signal to upload her YouTube videos.

As she slowly learns the ways of magic, Hasani tries to apply it to her problems, but her meddling is not without consequences.

When her favorite subscriber goes missing, Hasani must muster all her talents to find her before it’s too late. Dumas invites readers into a wonderful world of witchcraft that highlights the contributions of the diaspora; the infusion of Creole heritage and the acknowledgement of enslavement grounds this world without dimming its light. Readers will relate to the struggles of standing out, feeling inadequate, and accepting change.

A delightful start to a fresh series. (Fantasy. 10-14)

Ellis, Deborah Groundwood (152 pp.) $15.99 | March 1, 2022 978-1-77306-594-6 Ten short stories, all featuring children turning 11 years old, attempt to show the power of empathy.

In three of the stories, the protagonists, all refugees who present as children of color, find resilience through community. In the other seven tales, a relatively privileged child who reads as White by default learns “to step into someone else’s shoes.” In the opening story, Connor, a young boy, stumbles across a bit of trash that helps him see beyond family annoyances; with no way of knowing who wrote the miserable words he reads on a broken plate, he has the epiphany that any stranger he meets could be inwardly suffering. Ellis highlights the necessity of empathy for people who are less fortunate, such as in the closing tale about a soup kitchen volunteer who realizes his tormentor is “ashamed to be hungry.” In the story “Rock,” Dom, a shy Canadian boy, gets a rose crystal for his birthday that inadvertently conjures up a poor boy from Madagascar who wishes he could afford a bag of rice and a dress for his mother. Dom gains courage and a new friend; however, his efforts to help the Malagasy boy—who ultimately dies—smack of saviorism. It’s surprising that such unbalanced representation comes from Ellis (My Story Starts Here, 2019), who is acclaimed for showing that refugee children have many of the same goals and dreams as children from more secure environments.

A well-intentioned clarion call for human solidarity that occasionally reduces less-fortunate people to objects of pity.

(Short stories. 8-10)

SMALLER SISTER

Edkins Willis, Maggie Roaring Brook Press (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-1-250-76742-4 A graphic novel that shines a spotlight on the impact eating disorders have on two sisters.

This brightly illustrated story of sibling rivalry wastes no time in revealing its serious topic: anorexia nervosa (a content warning appears at the beginning of the book). Little sister Lucy has always looked up to big sister Olivia. For many years, their frequent fights were easily resolved by an apology note written in the sisters’ invented secret code and a session of playing with dolls. But as Olivia enters her tween years, the pressures of middle school begin to affect her self-confidence.

Willis taps into her childhood memories of her older sister’s struggles and the effect they had on her own eating and selfimage, vividly portraying a family in crisis. The full-color spreads, which feature contrasting pages for Lucy’s notebook entries, are well designed and capture the emotional impact on the lonely younger girl. When the negative pattern of peer pressure repeats itself for Lucy, will the family recognize the body shame she struggles with? There is a strong message here that those who surround you matter—and that the bond of sisterhood sustains. The accessible tone and format allow a difficult topic to be gently revealed with painful honesty balanced by humor and silliness. The girls and their family read as White; there is racial diversity in the supporting cast.

Compassionately approaches the stigma and mystery surrounding eating disorders. (author’s note, resources, secret code translator, photos) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

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HAVE YOU SEEN THE DARKNESS?

Fairgray, Richard Pixel+Ink (192 pp.) $22.99 | June 21, 2022 978-1-64595-091-2 Series: Black Sand Beach, 3 The mystery of the face-stealing monster resumes in the third installment of the Black Sand Beach graphic novel series.

Dash, his cousins, Andy and Eleanor, and his best friend, Lily, are all back for another summer vacation at Black Sand Beach, and they’re determined to finally figure out what really happened last year. In a convoluted series of scenes that toggle unrelatedly and confusingly between the year 1994 and the here and now, the ghost girls, Mabel and Kasey, introduced in the previous volume, hunt for monsters with their dad in the past while in the present, Dash and his companions try to piece together the nature of the face-stealing monster so that they can figure out how to drive it away. After a wild, whirlwind experience on |

HOW TO SURVIVE MIDDLE SCHOOL World History: A Do-ItYourself Study Guide

the beach, the kids are all sucked into the Darkness by the monster, though they eventually escape. Only Andy is left behind until his cousin Dash, also known as Harry, ventures back into the Darkness to save him...but Dash doesn’t quite seem like himself. Fairgray has managed to engineer another cliffhanger, setting the stage for a forthcoming fourth book in a series that always creates more questions than it provides satisfying resolutions. The plot of this story is almost as formless as the shapeshifting monster at its center, and the flat, thin-lined, pallid artwork offers little clarification.

A mediocre horror tale with a bewildering, inconclusive storyline, though die-hard fans may wish to continue reading.

(Graphic novel/horror. 8-12)

Fee, Elizabeth M. Illus. by Carpenter Collective Bright Matter Books (480 pp.) $14.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-525-57145-2

A broad-brush history of civilization from the agricultural revolution to the end of the Cold War, with a historian’s tool kit for evaluating the reliability of source materials.

“Mussolini came into power by promising to keep the communists out and ‘make Italy great again.’ ” Making only glancing references to U.S. history, which has a series volume of its own, educator Fee archly flits through the usual succession of city-states and empires, widening the scope of her breezy “wild ride” by adding introductions to less frequently covered

ANGRY ME

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Feder, Sandra V. Illus. by Rahele Jomepour Bell Groundwood (32 pp.) $19.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-77306-338-6 Anger comes in many different forms.

Clenched fists, hunched shoulders, furrowed brows, and a downturned mouth—undoubtedly the young girl protagonist is angry. Her self-aware first-person narration reveals that anger can stem from many underlying emotions. The girl presents various scenarios. When sharing a stuffed animal gets thorny, she reflects: “Sometimes I get angry when I feel like people are being mean.” That is called “ ‘It’s my turn!’ angry.” Or if she finds a puzzle difficult and frustrating, that is called “ ‘I can’t do it!’ angry.” Anger can even spring from sadness; the girl refers to this as “ ‘But why?’ angry” as she looks at a photo of a man who is presumably her deceased grandfather.

The second half of the book revisits each scenario, this time offering the possible solution of using words to help diffuse or understand anger. But that can be difficult, too: “Sometimes I can’t think of any words at all, just mad sounds.” Familiar coping mechanisms—such as counting or breathing exercises—aren’t mentioned, though the girl, who has straight black hair and tanned skin, does scribble on paper furiously and cathartically when “anger comes from deep inside and bursts out.” Readers of all ages will identify with the rush of this familiar emotion, explored so sensitively in the book’s thoughtful narrative and emotive, textured digital illustrations. The protagonist’s caregivers are an interracial couple; background characters are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A valuable tool for teaching children the important skill of recognizing and naming feelings. (Picture book. 3-6)

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YOU CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE!

domains such as Nubia and the Kingdom of Aksum in Africa and the Mesoamerican Olmecs. She also spotlights powerful women, from the empresses Theodora and Wu Zetian to Mary Wollstonecraft, and highlights the role of women and enslaved people in various cultures. A final wrap-up chapter looks at current issues such as climate change, refugees, and racism before closing with a refresher on guidelines for distinguishing primary from secondary sources and detecting bias. With the massive amount of material covered, there are a few overgeneralizations and inaccuracies that can be excused as minor bobbles. Unfortunately, the use of blocky graphic versions of period portraits and artifacts rather than images of actual items reduces the illustrations from primary sources to decorative filler. The page design leaves ruled lines for readers to jot down notes or responses to brief historical quotes. Each chapter features its own separate glossary; an index would have enhanced the book’s usefulness.

Lively prose and an unusually broad scope partly compensate for weak visuals and ankle-deep content. (additional reading, text credits) (Nonfiction. 11-14)

Flanagan Burns, Ellen Illus. by Tracy Nishimura Bishop Magination/American Psychological Association (64 pp.) $16.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-4338-3924-5 The earnest tale of a girl who just can’t say no.

Ellie is a people-pleaser—the thought of disappointing others petrifies her. When faced with the choice of cancelling her own plans or telling a friend she can’t do an activity, she’ll always opt in favor of the friend. Caring people in Ellie’s life begin to notice her self-sabotaging behavior. There’s Rosie, a new girl at school, who notices that Ellie’s people-pleasing is making her unhappy. There’s Ellie’s mom, who knows Ellie would rather paint than put her plans on pause for her blithely oblivious friend Sam. Only when Ellie has a talk with her parents does she own up to her problem and begin conveying her true feelings and preferences. Authorial advice prefaces the story, providing useful context, but some of it is delivered with too broad a brush. For example, unable to dole out much more than generalities, Flanagan Burns urges child readers to ditch toxic friendships and “find friends who lift you up, not bring you own. Find friends who like you just the way you are.”

Would that it were so simple. The writing is straightforward and serviceable. Simple illustrations in earth colors depict Ellie as White, Rosie as Black, and other classmates as racially diverse.

A worthwhile, if sometimes heavy-handed, primer on setting boundaries, but the storytelling feels rote. (Chapter book.

7-10)

EACH OF US A UNIVERSE

Ferruolo, Jeanne Zulick with Ndengo Gladys Mwilelo Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-374-38868-3 Two preteens in search of rumored mountain magic tackle peaks of both the emotional and the geological sort.

With her alcoholic father serving time and her mom debilitated by cancer, it’s not surprising that White 12-year-old Calliope Scott has turned into a sullen, thoroughly unlikable child prone to bad behavior and vicious conversational barbs. Her walls are not high enough to keep out new classmate Rosine Kanambe, recently arrived with her 19-year-old sister from the Democratic Republic of the Congo via a refugee camp in Burundi. As Cal puts it, once repeated rejections and harsh exchanges have given way to solid friendship following a grueling shared climb up a vertical spire enticingly dubbed Mount Meteorite, Rosine is “the superhero of never giving up.” Rosine has experienced traumatic losses of her own but serves as the steady, strong example Cal needs to find her feet. Along with incorporating their personal experiences, the co-authors enrich their tale with specific technical details about both rock climbing and, referencing Carl Sagan and the popular saying that “we are made of stardust,” the micrometeorites that continually filter down around us. They acknowledge the Covid-19 pandemic by setting their story in an economically stricken New England town whose diverse residents are actively pitching in to support one another. Cal experiences growth throughout the story; Rosine functions primarily as an inciting force.

A tribute to the value of a friend willing to pull and push when the going gets rocky. (authors’ notes, scientist interview) (Fiction. 10-13) 118

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THE RECIPE-A-DAY KIDS COOKBOOK 365 Fun, Easy Treats

Food Network Magazine Hearst Home Kids (224 pp.) $22.00 | April 5, 2022 978-1-950785-91-9 Series: Food Network Magazine’s Kids Cookbooks, 3 A year’s worth of daily inspiration inviting kids to experiment in the kitchen.

Young readers will be encouraged to try making corn muffin chili bowls on a cold January day, peach Melba milkshakes in August, and a cheese plate resembling candy corn in October. Each food idea consists of a couple of sentences or a short paragraph of narrative instructions. Rather than cooking from scratch, most involve assembly of pre-made ingredients, including convenience foods such as gummy candies, ready-made snack mixes, marshmallows, or nut butter. Readers learn easy hacks using these ingredients, for example, melting chocolate chips in the microwave and spreading them on top of Twinkies |

“The illustrations are uplifting with motifs that underscore the interconnectedness of nature.” i’ll take care of you

to create Twinkie Éclairs. A few of the food projects require adult assistance, such as those that call for deep-frying, broiling, or using a blender. With its focus being more on fun ideas rather than teaching cooking skills (the instructions are cursory), many recipes assume that readers or their adult helpers will know the meanings of terms like al dente; have access to kitchen equipment including food processors, waffle makers, and silicone molds; and possess the necessary knife and piping skills. Some entries reference food-related milestones in history; holidays like Halloween, Hanukkah, and Christmas; and events like Earth Day. The clear, bright, eye-catching photographs throughout will be fun for budding chefs to pore over.

Fun ideas for kid-pleasing treats. (index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

I’LL TAKE CARE OF YOU

An Italian import, translated by McCalmont, explores nature’s beneficence.

The highly understated but impactful opening spread shows a little seed— just a black teardrop shape in vast white space—on the recto, while the text on the verso reads “once / there was / a tiny seed. / So small in the / great, big world, / it felt lost and / lonely.”

Readers will undoubtedly be curious to discover the fate of this vulnerable little pip. Never fear: The generous Earth provides it with soil; the rain waters it; the sun shines on it. As they do so, they each reassure the seed: “Don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you.” The seed grows into an apple tree that invites a “lost and lonely” bird to nest in its branches. The seasons go by, and soon there is just one apple left on the tree. When it falls to the ground and splits open, its seeds are “cared for by the Earth, the Sky, and the Water,” except for one stray seed, which is swept onto barren rocks. Will it be saved? This cyclical story is gentle—no real dramatic twists—and serves as a timely reminder of the importance of caring for the vulnerable and less fortunate.

With each narrative development, the refrain “I’ll take care of you” is repeated. The acrylic paint and collage illustrations— all double-page spreads full of saturated primary colors—are uplifting with motifs that underscore the interconnectedness of nature. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A gentle, soothing, timely story to inspire compassion and kindness. (Picture book. 3-5)

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Grabenstein, Chris Random House (304 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-48083-0 978-0-593-48084-7 PLB Series: Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Luigi Lemoncello gets inspiration from a master showman.

After writing five successful adventures starring legendary billionaire Prof. Lemoncello, Grabenstein looks back in time to 1968, when young Luigi, the seemingly talentless middle child in a large Italian American family, realizes that his love for puzzles and games is his personal gift. When the 13-year-old successfully solves the rebus puzzle and attracts more customers to the Balloon-centration booth at a summer carnival, barker Prof. Marvelmous offers him a job. Marvelmous becomes a mentor; his niece, Maggie, a friend. She and Luigi visit the library regularly, follow treasure hunts offered by a local radio station, and work together to discover the secrets of the elaborate puzzle box Marvelmous has created. The author offers hints and instructions for solving the puzzles and has left one more (plus his email address) for readers to solve on their own. The fast-paced narrative includes good reading suggestions, popular music from the ’60s, and occasional solid advice. As in earlier books, there’s stress on the importance of teamwork and empathy—young Luigi is as thoughtful and caring as a teenager as he is later as the donor of a splendid library and instigator of brain-teasing contests.

Luigi’s bullying blond nemesis, Chadwick Chiltington, is likely the father of Charles from previous series entries.

Splendiferous—and sure to lead readers back to previous puzzle adventures. (excerpt from Escape From Mr. Lemoncello’s Library) (Fiction. 8-14)

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Giraldo, Maria Loretta Illus. by Nicoletta Bertelle Trans. by Johanna McCalmont Blue Dot Kids Press (32 pp.) $18.95 | April 12, 2022 978-1-73760-323-8

MR. LEMONCELLO’S VERY FIRST GAME

DEAR FRIENDS

Greenwald, Lisa Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-06-306267-2 Eleni Klarstein, feeling like a friendship failure after Sylvie Bank ditches her, launches a Friendship Fact-Finding Mission to set things right.

Leni is looking forward to starting sixth grade with bestie Sylvie by her side, but even before school starts, Sylvie distances herself. Leni is heartbroken—she lost her camp friend over the summer, too.

When she thinks about it, other friendships in the past have also lapsed. In this heartening tale, Leni decides to take a long look at friendship by conducting a dedicated investigation.

Through her first-person narration, readers feel up close and personal with all Leni’s emotions: the pain, the humor, and the kirkus.com

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“A compelling adventure with a philosophical heart.” the prince of nowhere

SOMETHING HAPPENED TO MY DAD A Story About Immigration and Family Separation

shock. As she reconnects with friends past, Leni discovers much about others and how they experienced their relationships with her, and she bravely faces some hard truths about herself. In the process, Leni brings closure to some relationships and develops new ties. It’s the rare individual who can take such an awkward, glorious deep dive, and readers will be grateful to go through everything with Leni as their guide. Ultimately, she learns that sometimes the right thing is accepting that relationships grow and change. In case readers need reminding of this, there’s a handy list of “Top Ten Takeaways” for being a good friend at the end. Leni is White and Jewish; there is some diversity in the well-rounded cast of secondary characters.

Uplifting. (Fiction. 9-12)

Hazzard, Ann and Vivianne Aponte Rivera Illus. by Gloria Félix Magination/American Psychological Association (40 pp.) $16.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-4338-3944-3 A well-researched, deeply affecting picture book examines deportation and its effects on communities and immigrant families.

Carmen, a young girl, and her mother were born in the United States, but her father, a magician, is from Mexico and doesn’t have documentation to stay in the U.S. Mamá asks Carmen to keep the situation a secret—“I don’t want people to look down on us”—but when word spreads at Carmen’s school, a collection is taken up to help her family pay for an immigration lawyer. Wisely, the book broadens the narrative scope to briefly acknowledge other family histories involving displacement—readers learn about Irish immigration, Syrian refugees, and enslaved Africans. Though the story never wallows in pain— even a visit to Papi’s detention center is portrayed warmly as he declares “I’m not embarrassed. We’ve built a beautiful life”—it doesn’t shy away from the realities of immigrant struggle, as evinced by the open ending. The comprehensive backmatter includes a glossary of Spanish terms used in the story, immigration data, a discussion guide for parents and educators, tips for cultural sensitivity when interacting with immigrant families, and more. Papi has straight hair and medium brown skin while Mamá and Carmen have comparatively darker skin and read as Afro-Latina. Background characters, one of whom uses a wheelchair, are diverse in age and skin tone. The simultaneously publishing Spanish edition is a solid translation and identical in content. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An important, empathetic, and well-told immigration story that strikes a hopeful note of resilience. (glossary of immigration terms, illustrator’s note, further reading.) (Picture book. 4-8) (lgo Le Pasó A Mi Papá: Una Historia Sobre Inmigración y la Separación Familiar: 978-1-4338-3950-4)

THE PRINCE OF NOWHERE

Hassan, Rochelle Harper/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $16.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-06-305460-8 When 12-year-old Roda begins receiving notes from someone she calls Anonymous, the small, comfortable world she shares with her mom and Aunt Dora is upended.

The injured crow she bikes to rescue from the frozen mist of the town border turns out to be Ignis, a slightly cranky shapechanging boy with smoky, grayish skin and black hair. Ignis is missing memories about the events that propelled him through the mist and into the Aerlands from beyond the borders, where there are gryphons and other dangerous monsters. However, he feels compelled to follow the instructions in Anonymous’ notes to venture outside the mist and (literally) catch the comet that passes overhead every 10 years. Enchantments reveal themselves to Roda and Ignis: The comet is a portal to the past and future, bringing the possibility—and consequences—of time travel. A long-ago mage formed it as a place out of time and space, leading readers to contemplate interrelated concepts: nowhere, no where, and now here. Might Ignis prevent the disaster that wiped out his family? And if the past is changed, what happens to the timeline or to beings who try to change fate? Hassan’s visually rich and sure-handed prose, strong characters, realistic dialogue, and page-turning plotting offer a compelling adventure with a philosophical heart. In this fantasy world, human characters are diverse in appearance; Roda is pale skinned with blue eyes and dark, curly hair.

A marvelous blend of fantasy and time-travel speculation with a seasoning of steampunk. (Fantasy. 9-12)

THE DEADLIEST FIRES THEN AND NOW

Hopkinson, Deborah Scholastic Focus (224 pp.) $7.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-1-338-36025-7 Series: The Deadliest, 3

This history of deadly fires draws attention to the need for changes in both fire prevention and firefighting.

Hopkinson surveys 150 years of American fire disasters to show how outmoded practices and a 120

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warming climate have led to greater recognition of the need for different approaches, including adopting Indigenous practices of active forest management. The award-winning nonfiction writer engages readers with an accessible, conversational narrative as well as interesting information. She initially draws them in with a gripping first-person account of the atmosphere in firethreatened Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871, the site of the deadliest fire in U.S. history. She then describes the chronological organization of the material into three sections: the great Midwestern fires of the 19th century; 20th-century events, including fires in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, New York City’s Triangle Waist Company fire, and the devastating fire in an abusive institution for Black boys in Wrightsville, Arkansas; and finally, 2018’s Camp Fire in Northern California. The firstperson accounts, taken from historical documents and featuring diverse voices, add immediacy. Paintings and photographs break up the text; unfortunately, the art is reproduced in black and white, lessening the impact. There are also short informational essays, explanations of the role of primary sources in this kind of research, and invitations to readers to explore further interspersed among the chapters and as part of the backmatter.

A timely and compelling introduction to fire disasters. (activities, glossary, quiz, resources, bibliography, source notes, image credits, index) (Nonfiction. 9-13)

Ireland, Justina Illus. by Pétur Antonsson Disney Lucasfilm (272 pp.) $14.99 | March 1, 2022 978-1-368-06800-0

K IS FOR KINDNESS

Horiuchi, Rina Illus. by Risa Horiuchi Viking (32 pp.) $17.99 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-35162-8

An abecedarian collection of animals performing good deeds.

Sister duo Rina and Risa Horiuchi stroll through the alphabet in their picture-book debut, which shows various animal friends helping each other out. Both the uppercase and lowercase versions of the letters are spotlighted in the vignettes, and the first letter of each sentence is colored blue. The quirky animals find themselves in everyday situations. For instance, “Ape picks an apple for Aardvark below,” while “Bat puts a bandage on Brown Bear’s big toe.” On another double-page spread, “Elephant finds Eagle’s eyeglasses—phew! and “Fox fixes Frog’s broken fire truck with glue.” And for those trickier letters at the end of the alphabet: “Weasel knits Walrus a warm, woolen sweater” as “X-ray Fish signs ‘XOX’ in his letter.” There is no shortage of animal alphabet books, but these spare rhymes, paired with delicate digital ink-and-watercolor illustrations, are a delight. Uncluttered pastel backgrounds keep everything feeling airy and bright. Explaining an abstract concept like kindness to children can be challenging; thankfully, this book provides young readers will many concrete object lessons. The ending turns reflective, asking readers how they might be kind today. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A primer for young minds learning both letters and empathy. (Picture book. 3-6)

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Though the combined might of the Republic and the Jedi seems to have pushed the Nihil into near extinction, the feared marauders nonetheless launch an attack on the renowned outpost Port Haileap.

Amid the chaos, the Nihil kidnap Avon Starros, a young inventor with a knack for getting into trouble. Avon awakens to find herself captive aboard a Nihil ship full of other abducted children. Sensing her young friend’s distress, Jedi Knight Vernestra Rwoh returns to Port Haileap with her new Padawan, Imri Cantaros, to uncover any clues that might lead them to Avon. Determined to free herself from the Nihil’s clutches, Avon concocts ways to send a message for help, using her smarts and keen sense of scientific skills to survive among her captors.

At the Nihil’s home base, it all becomes clear: The Nihil plan to recruit the children into their ranks. Joined by Avon’s sassy (and heavily armed) droid, J-6, Vern and Imri travel to the planet of Dalna, where rumors of further Nihil-fueled disappearances suggest a path toward finding Avon—and perhaps more.

Another intriguing tale from the High Republic era, Ireland’s latest Star Wars jaunt bristles with high-octane moments set against a thin backdrop of enticing space politics. What’s most engrossing here, as always, is the author’s compelling rendition of the headlining Jedi, Vern and Imri. The brisk pace makes this tale totally entertaining.

First rate. (Science fiction. 8-12)

THE BOY WITH FLOWERS IN HIS HAIR

Jarvis Candlewick (32 pp.) $18.99 | April 26, 2022 978-1-5362-2522-8

A hurting child regains his joy with the help of compassionate friends.

The story is told from the perspective of a dark-haired, tan-skinned boy who is the best friend of David, the titular pale-skinned boy with a mass of colorful blooms decorating his hair. Both David and his unnamed companion are part of a happy, bustling classroom that includes children with various hair textures and skin tones. No one bats an eye at David’s unusual coif, not even when it attracts bees or is hilariously inhabited by a family of birds. “But one day, something happened,” an allusion to an unspecified trauma.

Once upbeat and talkative, David grows quiet, uninterested in play, and the flowers fall out of his hair. He starts wearing a hat to cover his “twiggy, spiky, and brittle” head. At first, David’s |

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classmates are unnerved by the change and avoid him. But when his best buddy stays by his side and begins crafting painted paper flowers for David’s hair, the other children quickly join in.

Slowly, David’s spark returns, and eventually his original blossoms do, too. His best friend keeps a box of the paper flowers “in case he ever needs them, because he’s my best friend, and I am his.” Accompanied by beautiful, uncluttered digital images against lots of white space, Jarvis’ simple, gentle story gives adults room to explain David’s hardship to young readers in their own ways. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A sweet example of how to be a kind and supportive presence in the life of a struggling friend. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kennedy-Moore, Eileen Illus. by Michael Furman Magination/American Psychological Association (32 pp.) $16.99 | April 26, 2022 978-1-4338-3699-2 The secret emotions of automobiles are revealed in a rhyming picture book about their many moods.

While it may be no revelation to any young reader who’s seen Disney’s Cars movies, motor vehicles have feelings too.

They can be sad, joyous, angry, or even envious. In this book that uses different colors to symbolize sundry emotions, various automobiles talk to the reader in singsong-y verses expressing how they’re feeling. A photo of a different vintage car is shown on each recto page. A 1956 A.C. Cobra, for instance, is sad, “with tears on its cheek,” after losing its favorite parking spot (the car’s chrome front bumpers look like tears); a 1938 Delage Coupe is happy since its gas tank is full; and so on. An answer “key” (a pun that the author fully intends) at the end of the book reveals the car models and manufacture years, with superimposed yellow lines showing how each car’s front trimmings resemble a different facial expression. The concept is clever, and the cars look great, though it’s unlikely that young readers will be familiar with the stylings of mid-20th-century Bugattis and Jaguars unless they’re also already subscribers to Hemmings Motor News. The backmatter stresses the importance of facial emotion recognition in child development and explains how pareidolia (our tendency to see faces in everyday objects) can foster children’s emotional literacy. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A fun concept well executed, this picture book feels like a joyride. (Picture book. 4-8)

JENNIFER CHAN IS NOT ALONE

Keller, Tae Random House (288 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-31052-6 978-0-593-31053-3 PLB

This story about one girl’s reaction to another seventh grader’s disappearance reveals the internal impact of bullying.

Mallory Moss, a 12-year-old girl in a small Florida town, was the first to meet Jennifer Chan. Chinese American Jennifer moved from the Midwest into the house across the street during the summer. Mallory, who is Korean and implied White, knows that the new girl will have trouble once their predominantly White, Christian school begins: For one thing, Jennifer believes in aliens. Alternating between chapters labeled “Now” that are set in the present day and “Then,” describing events before Jennifer vanishes, the book dives right into the action as Jennifer goes missing in the first chapter.

Texts start flying between Mallory and her friends as they worry about what Mallory calls “the Incident” with Jennifer that took place a few days before her disappearance. While the search for Jennifer intensifies, Mallory replays prior events with growing dread, looking for clues. The storyline slowly reveals cracks in friendships, with Mallory questioning her responsibility for many pieces of this puzzle. Keller successfully captures the emotional ennui of middle school tweens who are jockeying for social status, anxious and riddled with doubt, and yearning for a sense of identity. There is clearly enough hurt to go around, and this story provides one solution for getting through dark days.

A mesmerizing look at bullying and its aftereffects. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)

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TWELFTH

Key, Janet Little, Brown (368 pp.) $16.99 | May 17, 2022 978-0-316-66931-3 A mystery takes center stage at a drama camp.

With her mother busy caring for her older sister, who is struggling with depression, rising seventh grader Maren Sands gets sent to the Charlotte Goodman Theatre Camp in the middle of the Berkshires. Being away from home for the summer could be a chance to start over fresh, but Maren, the quiet and thoughtful type, is determined to remain inconspicuous. Her plan gets derailed when she befriends Theo Templeton, her nonbinary bunkmate who seems to be camp prima donna Allegra Alvin’s nemesis. The drama goes beyond the interpersonal when Maren and Theo find a secret note that sparks a search for a long-lost diamond ring. Turns out they aren’t the only ones looking for it. But who |

“A winsome fantasy bubbling with gentle whimsy.” bug boys

BUG BOYS Adventures and Daydreams

else is after it? And why? Debut author Key constructs a wellpaced treasure hunt, as much a mystery as a love letter to theater and its history. Spot-on references show an insider’s knowledge of the art form and its idiosyncrasies. Alternate chapters dig into the history of the camp’s namesake, Charlotte “Charlie” Goodman (who is inspired by a real figure). The overall structure creates a compelling dialogue between past (Hollywood’s blacklist era) and present. The cast assumes a White default, though Theo is cued as Latinx; several minor characters bring some diversity in ethnicity and sexual orientation.

A layered, unexpectedly poignant mystery with over-thetop characters. (map, cast list, author’s note, resources, physician interview about gender diversity) (Mystery. 8-12)

Knetzger, Laura Random House Graphic (288 pp.) $13.99 | $16.99 PLB | May 31, 2022 978-0-593-30952-0 978-0-593-30953-7 PLB Series: Bug Boys, 3

REALM OF THE BLUE MIST

Kibuishi, Amy Kim Graphix/Scholastic (272 pp.) $12.99 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-338-11513-0 Series: The Rema Chronicles, 1

A girl seeking answers is drawn onto another world entirely.

Fifteen-year-old Tabetha “Tabby” Simon is drawn to Yggdrasil, the anomalous tree with bizarre, immortalitygranting properties that her scientist father was researching before his mysterious death years ago. Hoping to see the ghost that her father spoke with before dying, she instead spies a gorgeous, strangely dressed boy with blue hair and eyes who appears Asian. Following a mysterious light, she sees the boy go through a portal—and then is pulled through it herself by the ghost. Tabby finds herself on Rema, a faraway planet; the boy, Philip, takes responsibility for her predicament, telling her that he will get her home, but in the meantime, her presence must be kept secret. Tabby learns that she’s not Philip’s only secret as she gets a taste of the other planet and its complex mythologies.

A lot of highly concentrated background is delivered via a book she finds, while things she sees and experiences imply even more complications—and dangers—beneath the surface. The full-color, Japanese manga-flavored art style is fluid and natural, highlighting expressiveness, action, and alien-world details with ease. The story ends with a crucial shift that will leave readers eager to continue. Rema’s denizens are illustrated with varying skin tones. Tabby and her father have black hair and light skin; Tabby’s mother is pale skinned with light brown hair.

A fast-paced journey through an engrossing new world. (sequel sneak peak, map) (Graphic fantasy. 9-15)

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Two beetle BFFs return for more adventures in nature.

In this third graphic installment, best beetle buds Rhino-B and Stag-B explore the wondrous world around them in nine bite-sized vignettes. In “Love Letter,” the duo finds an intriguing canister embedded amid tree roots and, inside, a richly imagined missive from its mysterious author, Scorpio. They realize that the letter may have never found its reader but in a poignant moment, relish the marvel of a fanciful daydream. In “The Cooking Competition,” the pair face off, each determined to win the Bug Village cooking contest. When their desire to win eclipses the meaning of the event, the bugs learn that collaboration can outweigh competition.

“The Mountain Journey” takes readers along on an arduous hike with the beetles as an argument brews. Once the friends discuss their feelings, they can quietly contemplate and enjoy the natural beauty around them. Knetzger’s simply wrought tales use straightforward naming conventions (most of the insects are named for their species) alongside an uncomplicated full-color palette of muted, dreamy tones, emphasizing the evocative nature and thematic focus of each piece. These introspective tales (which can be read nonlinearly) are slowly and deliberately paced, not demanding that readers rush; those who appreciate more pensive, meditative tales will find much to savor here.

A winsome fantasy bubbling with gentle whimsy. (bonus comic, extra art, cover sketches) (Graphic fantasy. 8-12)

APPLE CRUSH

Knisley, Lucy Random House Graphic (208 pp.) $20.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-12538-0 A 12-year-old girl adjusts to her first year of middle school in this sequel to Stepping Stones (2020).

Fall has come to Peapod Farm, where Jen lives with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend, Walter, whose daughters, Andy and Reese, spend weekends on the farm. Andy and Jen have gotten jobs helping their neighbors (two White men whose relationship is undefined) at Fisher Dairy Farm run their annual pumpkin patch, complete with haunted hayride. Jen and Mr. Fisher’s nephew Eddie share interests, but it’s Andy who has a crush on Eddie; Jen is busy dreading the transition to a new school and is not yet interested in romance. Knisley does a stellar job capturing the confusion of middle school and |

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“Wondrous.” a day for sandcastles

MY BLUE-RIBBON HORSE The True Story of the EightyDollar Champion

exploring how children grapple with challenges like divorce and blended families. School is tough for Jen, but her artistic talents help her make friends, and when she sticks up for herself and her sort-of stepsister, she realizes she’s not the only one struggling. The graphic-novel format allows the characters to display a full range of emotions without sacrificing plot. The full-color artwork is energetic and engaging, though an illustration of a structure that resembles a Native American wigwam being used as a play fort may be a questionable choice. The book portrays a diverse community without race being an issue; the main cast is White, and some secondary and background characters are brown skinned.

Warm, fortifying, and cozy—like a drink of apple cider. (author’s note) (Graphic novel. 8-14)

Letts, Elizabeth Illus. by Kayla Harren Random House (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-17385-5

A picture-book adaptation of Letts’ nonfiction bestseller, The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, The Horse That Inspired a Nation (2012).

Snowman’s story is well known: Saved from a slaughterhouse at the last minute when horse-riding instructor Harry de Leyer purchased him for $80, the gaunt, bedraggled horse didn’t fit in at the school for girls where de Leyer taught. But after being sold to a boy living several miles away, the horse repeatedly jumped tall pasture fences to return to what he thought of as home. De Leyer bought him back and trained him; within two years, Snowman was a show-jumping champion. This picture book will be equally appealing to children and adults. Harren’s action-packed illustrations, some based on iconic photographs of Snowman, serve it well. However, presumably in an effort to make the story more child-friendly, Letts moves the point of view from de Leyer to his daughter Harriet then back again to de Leyer, a narrative technique that feels clumsy. The book contains some factual inaccuracies: Snowman is described as “old”; the kill man, not de Leyer, brings the horse home to the farm; and de Leyer and his wife are shown as having three children (they had eight). De Leyer and his family are White, as are most background characters. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A real-life, triumphant horse story worth telling to children, but this attempt falls a bit flat. (Nonfiction picture book. 5-8)

A DAY FOR SANDCASTLES

Lawson, JonArno Illus. by Qin Leng Candlewick (48 pp.) $17.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-5362-0842-9 An idyllic day at the beach silently unfolds.

As they did in Over the Shop (2021), Lawson and Leng create ample space for the reader to supply the story. The artwork begins and ends with lovely vistas of sea gulls on a deserted beach and a White family—a mother, father, and three kids—arriving and departing by bus. An image of the older boy running through dunes and beach grass, waving his shirt like a flag, sets the tone of exuberant joy. Everyone on this beach is cheerful and relaxed. Readers see beachgoers of various ages, skin tones, and body types engaged in sundry activities, including swimming, wading, taking photos, and playing catch with a beach ball. The siblings build and rebuild a sand castle, molding, shaping, and decorating it with found treasures only to have it repeatedly destroyed by the tide or sunbathers. The parents don’t try to solve this problem, instead allowing the children to persist and decide whether and where to rebuild.

The family has a picnic lunch and there is an encounter with a particularly assertive sea gull. Subtle changes in the position of the sun and the shrinking beach as the tide moves in signal the passage of time. Single-page and double-page montages consisting of rows of square and rectangular panels are used to compress time, highlight characters’ emotions, and create bridges between scenes. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A wondrous wordless picture book that will make readers want to grab a sand bucket and head to the beach. (Picture book.

2-7)

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WITH A BUTTERFLY’S WINGS

López Ávila, Pilar Illus. by Zuzanna Celej Trans. by Jon Brokenbrow Cuento de Luz (28 pp.) $18.95 | April 15, 2022 978-84-18302-59-6

In this Spanish import, translated

by Brokenbrow, a girl learns about birds, flowers, and butterflies from her grandmother.

The girl narrates, describing her grandmother’s teachings about the creatures and blossoms they see on their walks. She learns about the colors of swallows and swifts and that hummingbirds build their nests with moss and spiderwebs. Her grandmother teaches her to identify the songs of blue herons and robins. Grandma’s hand-weaving skills are a central motif: As the pair (both White) gaze at finches, the girl exclaims: “Grandma, it looks like you wove them with your red thread!” In Celej’s elegant mixed-media illustrations, Grandma’s thread is a visual throughline connecting her, her granddaughter, and the natural world. Pale washes in earth colors define delicate city |

LET THE MONSTER OUT

and woodland scenes, with brighter hues reserved for winged creatures. As pages turn, the girl’s deepening knowledge—and increasingly solitary walks—become apparent. “Very old by now,” Grandma has impaired hearing, sight, and movement.

She tells her granddaughter that “the day it’s my turn to go, I’ll fly around you first.” Later, a swallow repeatedly circles the girl in the schoolyard, gently symbolizing Grandma’s death. The girl vows that when it’s her turn, she’ll “fly with a butterfly’s wings.” Teachers and caregivers looking for books to help discuss death with children will appreciate this subtle story about the treasured memories that help us endure loss. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A lovely, contemplative tribute to intergenerational love that invites reverence for nature’s cycles. (Picture book. 4-8)

Lucas, Chad Amulet/Abrams (320 pp.) $16.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-4197-5126-4

OUT IN THE WILD! A Graphix Chapters Book

Lowery, Mike Graphix/Scholastic (64 pp.) $22.99 | $7.99 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-338-72633-6 978-1-338-72632-9 paper Series: Bug Scouts, 1

A quartet of anthropomorphic invertebrates attempt to earn scout badges in the great outdoors.

Lowery kicks off his graphic early chapter book series with a scout’s oath: “All bugs are awesome / and that is a fact. / Raise your leg or antenna / and let’s make a pact.” Four “bug scouts” (two of whom are technically not bugs) introduce themselves; Josh the spider joins Abby the earthworm and Doug (“some kind of bug”) in welcoming Luna the firefly to their troop. The group sets out on a nature walk in order to find an edible plant, and a series of outdoorsy teaching moments culminates in a narrow escape from a (seemingly!) friendly frog: “Come back!

I want to eat you! I mean…meet you!” Along with lots of silly jokes and banter and plenty of frantic action, the book delivers a cogent warning about the hazards of eating or sometimes even touching anything unidentified in nature. However, Lowery uses the words toadstool—a term typically reserved for any type of mushroom that is poisonous and thus inedible—and mushroom interchangeably, which may prejudice impressionable young readers against the edible type. Furthermore, some of the natural history presented in the text is a bit dubious.

The very simply drawn cartoon art and big lettering make this book appropriate and appealing for beginner and newly independent readers.

An amusing, high-energy outing that teaches an important nature lesson. (Graphic early chapter book. 6-8)

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Two boys and their friends face off against a shady corporation that threatens to overtake their small town.

Bones Malone, a fiercely protective and daring 12-year-old with a Black mom and absent White father, is new to the mostly White town of Langille, Nova Scotia. Kyle Specks, a wickedly smart White 13-year-old, has always had a hard time fitting in; he suspects he’s neurodivergent. The two boys’ paths cross through their passion for baseball. Each notices mysterious changes in the town’s adults’ behavior, and after saving a missing scientist from drowning, they develop suspicions about a dastardly plot. It’s no coincidence that Fluxcor, a virtual reality tech company, has established an increased presence in Langille. The boys enlist the help of teammates Marcus Robeson (son of their coach, a retired Black professional baseball player) and Chinese Canadian Albert Chen to shut down Fluxcor and its evil CEO. Throughout their adventures they each have to face their worst nightmares, but they find strength in knowing they don’t need to shoulder their burdens alone. Through thoughtful and gripping omniscient narration, the author seamlessly weaves in clue after clue, leaving readers eager to reach this mystery’s heart-pounding end. Bones and Kyle are wellrounded, engaging protagonists; the author uses the concept of fear and how we handle it to give depth to secondary characters.

A thrilling journey about acceptance and facing your deepest fears. (Mystery. 10-14)

FIGHT + FLIGHT

Machias, Jules Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $16.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-06-305394-6 An active shooter drill gone wrong compels two middle schoolers to face their fears in very different ways.

After being diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a progressive disease that causes her joints to dislocate and currently prevents her from drumming or riding her dirt bike, Avery Hart is terrified of losing her independence, but others’ ignorant comments have led her to mask her fear and pain. So when a realistic active shooter drill traumatizes her classmates and compounds her sense of helplessness, Avery plots a dangerous act of revenge against the principal. In the meantime, her crush on classmate Sarah grows. Sarah Bell knows about fear; she experiences terrible panic attacks, which her Catholic parents insist prayer will cure. In her journal, illustrated with her |

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CLOUD TOWN

sketches and Spirograph designs, Sarah reflects on her hectic family, anxiety, prayer, and her growing attraction to Avery as she ponders how to help her classmates heal. Can she help Avery before she carries out her plan? The girls’ distinct alternating voices vividly immerse readers in their turbulent emotions.

Machias incorporates a variety of tough issues, including class disparities, Covid-19, political divides, racism, and ableism. The effect is occasionally overwhelming—much like real life—but ultimately hopeful. Readers will also appreciate Sarah’s strategies for calming. One of pansexual Avery’s moms is trans, and Avery’s best friend, who has ADHD, is Black. Avery and Sarah are White.

Honest and timely. (Fiction. 10-13)

McCloskey, Daniel Amulet/Abrams (224 pp.) $24.99 | $14.99 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-4197-5311-4 978-1-4197-4964-3 paper In Cloud Town, the interdimensional rip looses monstrous Hurricanes; the relational rip might tear a cherished friendship irreparably apart.

Newly uprooted to a nearby wealthy school, Pen and Olive rely on each other to survive. Anxious, academic Olive keeps Pen’s schoolwork on the straight and narrow. In return, hard-edged skater Pen protects Olive from the bullies who torment her. Troubles in their own lives, however, seem primed to push the girls apart. The rift between them only widens when an unexpected encounter with an escaped Hurricane under surveillance by the Care Corp reveals that Olive piloted the Storm Catcher that felled the creature. Not strong, capable Pen, but Olive, who’s afraid of everything. McCloskey’s debut graphic novel is a story of compatibility and divergence as two friends explore and adapt beyond the confines of their relationship and their own self-imposed limitations. Pen, with her troubled home life, is given the more developed backstory of the two whereas Olive has more character growth, gradually overcoming her insecurities and gaining both confidence and independence. Spending as much of the story at odds as they do, it is difficult to believe that the girls, whose personalities are not particularly complementary, were ever truly close; however, that does not detract from readers’ investment in their physical and emotional journeys. A limited color palette and viscerally detailed, dynamic art style vividly illustrate the rich quasi-dystopian world. Pen has Afro-textured hair, while Olive reads as White.

Weirdly and unexpectedly wonderful. (Graphic science fiction.

12-18)

SAVE THE PEOPLE! Halting Human Extinction

McAnulty, Stacy Illus. by Nicole Miles Little, Brown (256 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-7595-5394-1

A comprehensive look at the state of planet Earth.

This book is full of dire facts, but it’s not doom and gloom. Its lively, conversational tone with plenty of jocular asides keeps it unintimidating and accessible. Part I gives a brief, clear history of the cosmos and planet Earth and, particularly, its five earlier extinction events, which wiped out at least 75% of species. Part II discusses possible threats for a sixth extinction event, including asteroids, supervolcanoes, diseases, overpopulation, and war. Each is dissected in a way that manages to be more compellingly informative than scaremongering. Part III, entitled “What’s Going Wrong Today,” is where things get a bit terrifying. Climate change is scrutinized with the available facts and real-world examples—and the results are grim. But any good science book will leave readers feeling empowered, and that is the case here. An easy-to-understand checklist of things readers can do is provided along with the science that backs up these seemingly how-could-this-possiblymake-a-difference actions (eating less meat, for example). The book has loads of fun, interesting data; impeccable organization; and an enjoyable, nonpatronizing tone. Young readers will appreciate that this book is talking to them, not at them. It’s difficult to write a science-based book about the possible demise of the human species and make it empowering and entertaining, but this one does it. Final art not seen.

Lively writing, pertinent science, and an urgent topic make this a must-read for all. (author’s note, glossary, source notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-17)

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THE ONE WHO LOVES YOU THE MOST

medina Levine Querido (256 pp.) $17.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-64614-090-9

An uplifting narrative about the freedom and clarity labels can offer.

Gabriela is a middle schooler on a journey of self-discovery. As a Honduran child adopted by a White mom, they have never felt completely comfortable with their body or their community. But things start to change when Abbie and Héctor enter their school. Abbie is an Indian and Peruvian American trans intersex girl, and Héctor is a Guatemalan American bisexual genderfluid person. Together, with understanding, patience, and lessons in Queer 101, they invite Gabriela to start exploring |

“Encourages curiosity and calls out digital distraction without any moralizing.” something’s happening in the city

CAN’T BE TAMED

words that could fit them. Though Gabriela’s crush on Maya is a sweet addition to the story, it’s the friendship between Gabriela and their two new friends that makes the book shine. With their acceptance and love, Gabriela navigates middle school classes and turmoil, their mother’s depression, and a world that isn’t always welcoming to queer folks. With stellar adult characters, accessible prose, a diverse cast, and an uplifting narrative, the book tells a quick-moving story that can serve as a guide for adults to explore the LGBTQ+ lexicon with young people and help middle-grade readers discover, like Gabriela does, the power of understanding and identifying themselves. Gabriela and their friends offer queer kids a story with a happy ending.

A sweet book that’s sure to spread love and hopefulness. (resources) (Fiction. 9-14)

Méndez, Yamile Saied Scholastic (224 pp.) $7.99 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-338-74946-5 Series: Horse Country, 1

THE SCIENCE OF BEING ANGRY

Melleby, Nicole Algonquin (288 pp.) $16.95 | May 10, 2022 978-1-64375-037-8

An angry girl learns to cope.

Nobody understands why 11-year-old Joey does the things she does. Not even Joey. She throws things, kicks, hits, yells, and calls other kids names. When the novel opens, she gets her family—her two moms, her identical twin brothers (she’s the fraternal triplet), and her nonbiological mom’s older son, Benny—evicted from their apartment after she punches a security guard. A class project on genetics, framed as nature vs. nurture, gives Joey the idea of tracking down her sperm donor to find out if he also has anger management issues. Melleby gets readers inside Joey’s head, making them empathize with a frustrating, unlikable, and regularly violent main character, an impressive feat. Some parts of the novel don’t quite hang together, like an early reference to Joey’s moms being “ridiculously strict about certain gender-related things, like girls wearing shirts outside,” even though one mom hates dresses and both support her playing hockey on an otherwise all-boys team. Some hints are dropped about the triplets’ donor’s identity that never get resolved, and the genetics assignment is a convenient but shakily executed plot device. Regardless, this is powerfully crafted with a satisfying conclusion, and it tackles uncommon but critical themes with nuance and complexity. Main characters are White.

A strong novel about strong feelings. (Fiction. 9-14)

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The daughter of a horse ranch’s manager and accountant feels her special place with the horses is threatened when the new owner and her daughter move in.

Sixth grader Carolina Aguasvivas loves everything about growing up on a horse ranch in Idaho.

She doesn’t even mind cleaning up horse poop when she mucks horse stalls to earn riding time. She’s also excited that the ranch has been sold to a new owner, Ms. Whitby, who aims to start a riding school. Unfortunately, Ms. Whitby’s daughter, Chelsie, appears stuck up, initially balking at her mother’s insistence that she help muck stalls and befriending the girls who’ve made fun of Carolina in the past, calling her a “pooper scooper.”

Worse, Velvet, a beautiful new Thoroughbred mare who might just be the horse of Carolina’s heart, belongs to Chelsie. Eventually, though, a moment of danger bonds the two girls: Each of them overcomes their insecurities, and they learn to work together in order to help both the ranch and their community.

The book’s descriptions of ranch life are immersive and realistic.

The thoughtful protagonist, who brings heartfelt passion and dedication to every aspect of caring for horses—even the messiest parts—will especially appeal to young animal lovers. In their mostly White area, Carolina is of Irish, Mexican, and Argentine descent; Chelsie’s Argentine father lives in Buenos Aires, and her mom is White.

An enjoyable read about horses, friendship, and second chances. (Fiction. 8-12)

SOMETHING’S HAPPENING IN THE CITY

Merlán, Paula Illus. by Concha Pasamar Trans. by Jon Brokenbrow Cuento de Luz (32 pp.) $18.95 | March 15, 2022 978-84-18302-50-3

A girl notices she is the only one appreciating the day’s charms.

Hannah, a White-presenting young girl, and her beige dog, Pippin, head out for a walk in this Spanish import translated

by Brokenbrow. Hannah greets Carol—a Black woman with Afro-textured hair—who responds with a distracted “Oh, hi,” without making eye contact. In the artwork, Carol is shaded blue while everything else is rendered in true-to-life colors. As Hannah marvels at everyday wonders like cloud formations, a squirrel, and an Asian-presenting baby outside a bookshop, she encounters more busy, self-absorbed adults, all shaded blue, who cannot be reached. Hannah’s reaction, refreshingly, is not |

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“A worthy tribute to the legacy of a storied and inspiring American icon.” jackie and the mona lisa

JACKIE AND THE MONA LISA

one of frustration but of inquiry: “Maybe she’s under some kind of magic spell!” Late in the tale, Hannah realizes everyone is looking down at their cellphones and missing out on the beauty of the day. Her solution is to bring printed photos “of flowers, clouds, rivers, bugs, and trees” with her the next day.

She shows everyone what is right in front of them, gently and joyfully interrupting their obsessive smartphone use. When she practices this with Carol, who is no longer shaded blue, the pair end up looking for shapes in the clouds. Merlán’s understated narrative encourages curiosity and calls out digital distraction without any moralizing. Pasamar’s realistic colored-pencil illustrations lend old-fashioned simplicity to this modern tale.

Families who do not live in walkable neighborhoods may find it odd that Hannah roams alone. There is no body-type diversity presented. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A much-needed reminder about the importance and joy of living in the present. (Picture book. 4-7)

Murphy, Deborah Rovin Illus. by Jen Bricking Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) $17.99 | March 15, 2022 978-1-53411-117-2

The inspiring story of how first lady Jackie Kennedy organized the first ever exhibition of the world-famous Mona

Lisa on American soil.

The White House that the Kennedys moved into was a drab, poorly cared for mansion. Determined to revamp its image, elevate its importance, and restore its historical artifacts, Mrs. Kennedy set to work renovating and redecorating.

In order to increase interest in art, music, dance, and literature, she started the custom of using the White House as a venue for art shows, concerts, dance recitals, and more. To get the American public enthused about arts and culture, she devised a plan to bring the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s 450-year-old masterpiece, to America, a feat that posed many risks and logistical challenges. After much negotiation with the French government, Mrs. Kennedy succeeded in having the loaned painting displayed in two American museums. This nearly forgotten story is narrated simply with a deferential undertone. Bricking’s soft watercolor illustrations evoke nostalgia and skillfully bring the historical period to life. Murphy succeeds in showing how the new, youthful first lady, schooled in the arts and admired by the American public for her fashion style and French affiliation, exerted a huge influence on U.S. culture. While the role of first lady has evolved over the years, Jackie Kennedy’s trailblazing work remains relevant for today’s young readers. Background characters are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A worthy tribute to the legacy of a storied and inspiring American icon. (author’s note, additional facts) (Picture-book biography. 6-10)

BEYOND THE BURROW

Meserve, Jessica Peachtree (40 pp.) $17.99 | March 1, 2022 978-1-68263-375-5

Hop into this picture book for an exciting adventure with Rabbit.

Rabbit is supposed to stay close to the burrow and the other rabbits. When she tries to pull up a stubborn carrot from the ground near the edge of the burrow, she falls into another hole! She tumbles down the underground tunnel, shoots out the other end, and plunges into a river. She scrabbles onto a floating log, gets off when she reaches land, and notices that a big, scary, hairy, clawed “not-rabbit” is following her. At first, she hides; but when the not-rabbit leaves her something yummy to eat, she decides to venture out. She meets other kinds of animals and tries nonrabbit things like hanging upside down, flying, camouflaging, swinging, and dancing. From a treetop the next morning she sees a familiar hill in the distance and sets off to her burrow with her new friends. Meserve tells a wonderful tale of unexpected adventure that demonstrates the fun of trying new things. The digital and mixed media illustrations are delicate with mostly warm, calming colors and scenes bathed in soft light. However, the spreads showing Rabbit with her new companions are more vibrant, underscoring the excitement of novelty. Some spreads use panels of continuous narrative art to compress action and create drama and a sense of movement. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A gentle story about the joyful discoveries and courage that can be found beyond one’s comfort zone. (Picture book. 4-7)

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THUNDERBIRD Book One

Nimr, Sonia Trans. by M. Lynx Qualey Center for Middle Eastern Studies (128 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-4773-2581-0 Series: Thunderbird, 1 A grieving girl, a djinn disguised as a cat, a kindly professor, and a time-travel quest form the heart of this atmospheric trilogy opener from Palestine translated from the Arabic.

Thirteen-year-old Noor has been bereft since her parents were killed in a plane crash two years earlier while traveling to London to share their exciting discoveries about the thunderbird, or phoenix, of ancient Philistine legend. She’s been nurtured by her loving grandmother, but when Teita dies, Noor |

is at the mercy of her weak-willed uncle, spiteful aunt, and jealous cousin. Worse, fires keep breaking out in Noor’s vicinity—although she staunchly denies responsibility. The arrival of a talking black cat and discovery of a phoenix design on her late father’s ring, which Teita gave her shortly before she died, send her to Dr. Samir, her late parents’ anthropologist friend in the West Bank. Dr. Samir and Noor investigate, learning that she’s connected to a prophecy about an imminent threat to the barrier between the human and djinn worlds. They brave the Israeli checkpoint to reach a Jerusalem museum where Noor is transported through a portal to the 16th century amid conflict between the Mamluks and Ottomans. She meets her doppelgänger, Andaleeb, and the girls seek the world-saving phoenix feathers. This richly descriptive novel paints a moving portrait of a lost, lonely girl; a historic land with a painful past and present; and an enchanting magical world. The cliffhanger ending will leave readers eager for more.

Intriguing, textured, and immersive. (Fantasy. 11-13)

Rising sixth grader Katie is different from other kids, what with her freckles, being home-schooled, and the worries constantly buzzing in her head.

Katie is excited to start the summer at her first sleep-away camp with Kacey, her best friend from her home-school co-op.

However, as she gets closer to Delaney, a cool, self-assured girl at Camp Aldridge, Kacey becomes distant and resentful. Traversing the beginning of middle school and her evolving relationships and mental health just makes the buzzing in Katie’s head get louder and more persistent. Ormsbee captures the nuances of friendships and the feelings of loneliness a person can experience from being singled out as different. Stereotypes surrounding home schooling are also addressed. The graphic novel unfolds over the course of a year, and the representation is informed by the author’s and illustrator’s own childhood journeys of coping with obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is explored in accurate detail throughout Katie’s arc, and the illustrations enhance the depiction, with bees flying around her head whose buzzing increases and decreases in intensity to match the franticness of her thoughts. The varied panels and dynamic, colorful art maintain visual interest. Katie and other main characters read as White; the supporting cast is racially diverse.

A poignant account of journeying through life while navigating mental health and friendships. (author’s note, artist’s note) (Graphic fiction. 8-12) |

In this French import, translated by McCalmont, an observant child experiences the wonders of an outdoor city park.

Narrated by the child in the first person, the book begins with a stylized map of an impressive park complete with greenhouse, garden, petting zoo, and bandstand as well as the more typical pond, playground, picnic area, lawn, and small wooded area. On each verso page, clearly labeled pictures catalog items—critters, flowers, trees, fruit, vegetables, garden tools, and more—or activities found in different areas of the park, while the facing page shows the boy enjoying a discovery or favorite moment in the featured location. Orzel’s park is extremely stimulating—the narrator sees people playing bocce and table tennis, riding horses, and walking on a tightrope…not exactly everyday occurrences in most real-life parks.

The upside-down picture of the playground is confusing until one reads the text: “My headstand gets better the more I practice.” Another map at the end offers choices for getting home from the park: bus, skateboard, moped, etc. A final double-page spread displays 40 items with the caption, “Do you remember where in the park we saw these things?” The protagonist has straight brown hair and coral-pink skin; their ethnicity and gender are unspecified, although the publisher’s copy refers to them as Sam. Background characters have a mix of skin tones and body builds. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A charming and expansive view of a common childhood excursion. (Picture book. 3-6)

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GROWING PANGS

Ormsbee, Kathryn Illus. by Molly Brooks Random House (256 pp.) $20.99 | $12.99 paper | $23.99 PLB May 3, 2022 978-0-593-30128-9 978-0-593-30131-9 paper 978-0-593-30129-6 PLB

MY DAY IN THE PARK

Orzel, Marta Trans. by Johanna McCalmont Blue Dot Kids Press (40 pp.) $17.95 | May 10, 2022 978-1-73760-324-5

GROWING AN ARTIST The Story of a Landscaper and His Son

Parra, John Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-5344-6927-3

A young artist helps his father on the job.

In this autobiographical tale, author/illustrator Parra recounts his childhood experience of tagging along to work with his papi, an independent landscape contractor, for the first time. Young John learns new skills as he, Papi, and Papi’s assistant, Javier, tame a wild yard. He even has the opportunity to sketch a nest of baby birds between tasks. John is dismayed when he encounters a classmate who ignores him while he works. Father and son continue their day, making purchases at a nursery and completing jobs all over town. John becomes kirkus.com

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immersed in his ideas for a new landscape design and works alongside his dad to commit a beautiful layout to paper. He is so busy that he is able to forget the earlier awkward encounter with his classmate. A few weeks later, the design John helped to draw comes to life as the team landscapes a new yard according to the plan. Taking great pride in his work but remembering the dismissive attitude of his classmate, John vows that “I will use my art to tell the stories of hardworking, passionate people who make the world more beautiful.” Parra’s acrylic paint artwork is colorful and sumptuous, with lots of interesting details. John’s father is from Mexico, and characters are depicted with skin tones ranging from tan to dark brown. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A heartwarming family story that underscores the value of creativity, passion, and hard work. (author’s note) (Picture-book memoir. 5-9)

Reese, Jenn Henry Holt (256 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-250-78344-8

Recruited by a magical bird to thwart encroaching creatures, an insecure teen explores her sexual identity.

Seventh grader Eren Evers likes escaping on her bike into the woods near her Oregon home, “away from school, her mom, and even her friends.” Ambivalent about boys and dating, Eren reluctantly accepts an invitation to a dance with classmate Alex Ruiz because her best friends expect it rather than considering what she really wants. After Eren rescues a small, frost-covered bird named Oriti-ti, it speaks, pronouncing her its champion in the war its nongendered bird community is waging against villainous frostfangs—icy, wolflike creatures who exploit self-doubt to undermine their prey. When Orititi saves Eren and Alex from an attacking frostfang, Alex also commits to the fight. Eren’s friendship with Alex grows, and she develops clarity about her feelings through her friendship with his older sister, Luisa, who is asexual and panromantic.

With a frostfang attack on the school dance looming, Eren must accept her true self: Asserting her aromantic identity helps her be strong and brave enough to stop the frostfangs. Using frostfangs as a metaphor for the debilitating effects of self-doubt, this contemporary fantasy realistically examines Eren’s confusion, fear of alienation, and suffocation as she grapples with her true sexuality. Multidimensional supporting characters with their own identity issues and vulnerabilities add veracity and depth. Eren reads as White; Alex is Latinx.

A timely middle-grade fantasy grounded in themes of friendship and truth. (Fantasy. 9-12)

LILY LEADS THE WAY

Preus, Margi Illus. by Matt Myers Candlewick (32 pp.) $17.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-5362-1403-1

The small can also be mighty.

A little sailboat named Lily needs the Aerial Lift Bridge spanning the Duluth Ship Canal in Duluth, Minnesota, to lift so that she can pass from the harbor into Lake Superior in order to greet a fleet of “grand old tall ships” who are scheduled to visit. As she sails through the harbor, she blows her horn to signal the bridge to lift; but other, bigger vessels are louder than she is and push her aside. At last, Lily is able to slip through just at the last moment. On the other side of the bridge, she greets five different kinds of ships who need her because they don’t have horns to honk to let the bridge know they need to be let into the harbor. Lily leads the way and saves the day! Almost all of the exquisitely detailed illustrations, done in oil paints, are full-bleed double-page spreads, allowing the reader to sense the scope of the waterscape and feel as if they are on the lake right alongside Lily. The palette demonstrates just how many shades of blue water can be, and Myers adeptly portrays lots of waves and movement, bringing excitement to a mild body of water such as a harbor. In total, readers will learn about 11 different kinds of boats and six kinds of bridges. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An engaging underdog story that’s likely to float anyone’s boat. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-6)

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THE PROBLEM WITH PROPHECIES

Reintgen, Scott Aladdin (352 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-66590-357-8 Series: Celia Cleary, 1

A middle schooler discovers both up and down sides to being able to foretell the future.

Members of the Cleary clan in alternating generations have always been granted predictive powers on their 4,444th day of life, and Celia has been eagerly looking forward to her first vision—until, that is, it comes and reveals that cute, quiet classmate Jeffrey is slated to die in a hit-and-run.

Weighing her horror against her wise Grammy’s warnings that fate is inexorable, she contrives a way to head off the accident… only to foresee another fatal mishap in his future. And another.

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IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AND I’M IN MY BATHING SUIT

exhausted, but crushing on the hapless lad. (As, unsurprisingly, he is on her.) Reintgen generally keeps the tone of his series opener light, so even after Celia discovers that there’s ultimately a tragic price for her intervention, the ensuing funeral service is marked by as much laughter as sorrow. The author surrounds his frantic but good-hearted protagonist with a particularly sturdy supporting cast that includes gratifyingly cooperative friends as well as her Grammy and loving, if nonmagical, mom.

There don’t seem to be many Cleary men around; perhaps that and certain other curious elements, like a chart listing particular Cleary specialties with names such as Dreamwalker and Grimdark, will be addressed in future entries. Main characters read as White.

A very promising kickoff with arbitrary but intriguingly challenging magic. (Fantasy. 10-13)

Reynolds, Justin A. Scholastic (304 pp.) $17.99 | April 5, 2022 978-1-338-74022-6

YOUR PAL FRED

Rex, Michael Viking (272 pp.) $22.99 | $12.99 paper | May 31, 2022 978-0-593-20632-4 978-0-593-20633-1 paper A toy robot from the past wages peace in a dystopian future.

If ever an AI “programmed to spread kindness, friendship, and good vibes” faced a tough challenge it would be the Zones—a barren, Mad Max–style landscape dotted with rocks and ruins, where feuding overlords Lord Bonkers and Papa Mayhem are gearing up for war while scattered “dirt-folk” struggle for survival. But Fred turns out to be tougher than his generic child’s body and blandly cheery expression would suggest. In fact, from the moment he crawls out of the rubble of a former toy store, he begins working changes on everyone he encounters: “Wow! I really like your helmet! It’s super neat!” Teaching others how to do high-fives and rolling out upbeat stickers from a fingertip dispenser as he goes, Fred weathers scorn, slime, and worse to make friends, reunite long-separated siblings, and show even fierce rivals a way to peace and forgiveness (“Sorry I bonked you.” “Eh, it happens”) before, in the cartoon-style illustrations, literally striding off into the sunset in search of others who need to hear his message. For readers who do get it, Rex closes with a savvy six-step plan for making new friends.

Beneath his dorky eyeglasses and tuft of blue hair, Fred’s moon face is light skinned; the heavily armored supporting cast sports a variety of hues from light brown to bluish gray.

A winning exhortation, earnest in its underpinnings at least, to be the change. (Graphic science fiction. 7-10)

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Epic end-of-summer plans go awry for five kids in Ohio.

Twelve-year-old Eddie Gordon Holloway is ready to have a blast at Beach Bash with his friends—it’s the day when everyone in town heads to Lake Erie for great food and live music. However, when his mom unearths the mountain of smelly laundry that he’s ignored for the entire summer, Eddie is left home in a literal funk, with nothing to wear but his glow-inthe-dark pineapple swim trunks. After a power outage, Eddie links up with four other left-behind kids, and they all enjoy fun times until the streetlights come on—but none of their families return from the party. The kids take action to prepare for whatever is happening in their new world without parents, gathering necessities from their neighbors’ empty houses and trying to keep each other’s spirits up with dad jokes and teasing, except in the truly gentle spaces where they admit their fears to each other. Ultimately, the buildup to the to-be-continued ending doesn’t quite deliver. Long-winded digressions interrupt the flow of the storytelling, and it takes almost half the book to get to the zany situations that provide most of the laughs. Matterof-fact scenes with Eddie taking his ADHD medicine and talking through school and home pressures with Trey, their school’s all-star athlete, offer insightful representations of Black boys bonding on different emotional levels. All main characters read as Black.

An unevenly paced celebration of wacky summer adventures. (Fiction. 8-12)

CELIA PLANTED A GARDEN The Story of Celia Thaxter and Her Island Garden Root, Phyllis & Gary D. Schmidt Illus. by Melissa Sweet Candlewick (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-5362-0429-2

Celia Laighton Thaxter loved the beauty of birds, flowers, and the ever changing sea.

Born in 1835, she grew up on two islands off the shores of Maine and New Hampshire. As a young child, she planted marigolds to brighten the gray and white landscape of rocks, waves, and clouds on White Island, where her father was the lightkeeper. When Celia was 12 years old, her family moved to Appledore Island, where her father opened a hotel that catered to artists and writers. There, Celia planted a new, bigger |

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“A great ending to a fun trilogy featuring the future Wonder Woman.” diana and the journey to the unknown

garden with flowers of many varieties. Married life brought her to the mainland, where she and her husband raised their family. Homesick, Celia painted pictures and wrote poems that captured her memories of island life, becoming a wellknown, celebrated poet in her time. Every spring, year after year, she returned to Appledore Island to tend to her glorious garden. Using third-person narration, Root and Schmidt describe Celia’s seasonal activities with great admiration, carefully naming the flower and bird species to which she felt so deeply connected. Sweet’s lush, detailed watercolor, gouache, and mixed-media illustrations greatly enhance the text. Readers will be delighted to realize that the stylized handwritten words appearing in sidebars are Celia’s own lovely, heartfelt poems. All characters present White. Additional fascinating information about Laighton Thaxter is provided in the backmatter. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A splendid introduction to a lesser-known nature poet and the landscapes that inspired her. (additional facts, timeline, bibliography) (Picture-book biography. 5-9)

DIANA AND THE JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN

Saeed, Aisha Random House (304 pp.) $16.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-593-17841-6 Series: Wonder Woman Adventures, 3

Preteen Diana, princess of the Amazons, faces her greatest challenge yet when she journeys to the mortal world.

Picking up right where Diana and the Underworld Odyssey (2021) left off, this title finds Diana traversing through worlds to save the kidnapped children who have been taken by the mysterious Zumius, whose plan to steal their superpowers for himself is affecting the Greek gods and their own powers. After dramatically evading Zumius, Diana ends up in Atlanta, Georgia, where she reunites with a friend she thought she’d never see again and where she realizes that she is stronger than she ever knew. As she faces adventure, mortal danger, and impossible odds, Diana holds the fate of the world— and of the Greek gods—in her hands. This fun-tastic, actionpacked trilogy closer sees Diana finally facing off the foe who has been threatening her all along and dipping her toes into the mortal world, where she discovers and rises to new challenges.

All the while, she’s facing enemies, finding allies, and evading the risks of social media. As she deals with those who underestimate her, thinking her too young or too impetuous, Diana shows her ever growing grace, courage, dedication to helping those in need, and loyalty to those she loves. Racial diversity is implied through names; one of the kidnapped kids is nonbinary.

A great ending to a fun trilogy featuring the future Wonder Woman. (Adventure. 8-12)

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THE LEGEND OF THE SPIRIT SERPENT

Sanford, Adaiah Illus. by Ken Daley Reycraft Books (40 pp.) $17.95 | May 15, 2022 978-1-4788-7517-8

A Kalinago girl meets the Great Spirit Serpent.

Natari lives in pre-colonial Dominica, in Snake Cou village, seemingly based on the real-life Kalinago settlement of Sineku.

Plucky and adventurous, she loves to swim, fish, hunt, and more, activities other girls deem unladylike. Natari also loves hearing stories about the mysterious Spirit Serpent, who lives in a sea cave filled with treasure and protects her people from “hurricanes, famine, and invaders.” Only tribal leaders can safely enter his cave to have their wishes granted, and after Natari performs an act of bravery that earns her the respect and admiration of her tribe, she thinks, “why can’t I be a leader?” She secretly visits the serpent only to discover he has a wish of his own—to have a human friend—and when he transforms into a kindly boy, a magical night on the beach ensues. Based on the ancient legend of Bakwa, a giant snake that emerged from the Atlantic Ocean and proclaimed itself guardian of Dominica’s Indigenous people, this transporting picture book is engrossing, with atmospheric language. Daley’s cinematic, color-drenched illustrations revitalize Kalinago artifacts and symbols and are the stuff of animated blockbuster movies. Electrifying are moonlight scenes of Natari ascending a natural staircase resembling L’Escalier Tête Chie, a real-life landform said to have been formed when Bakwa climbed a cliff, and facing the majestic snake in its glittering domain. All characters are brown skinned.

(This book was reviewed digitally.)

A rare jewel of a tale that asserts the place of Indigenous Caribbean lore within the picture-book tradition. (Picture book/ folktale. 6-9)

THE AQUANAUT

Santat, Dan Graphix/Scholastic (256 pp.) $12.99 paper | March 1, 2022 978-0-545-49761-9 A crew of intrepid marine creatures rig up an antique diving suit to explore space, the final frontier—otherwise known as San Diego.

The plot may be a messy tangle, but the art in this graphic tale is something special. Several years after the research vessel Miette went down in a storm, taking Paul Revoy’s brother, Michel, with it, the marine biologist and his orphaned niece, Sophia, are amazed when Michel’s deep-sea diving suit walks out of the ocean— piloted by a hermit crab named Sodapop for its recycled shell, with help from octopuses Antonio and Carlos and sea turtle Jobim. Ensuing events, which include a science fair, tricking a |

THE SECRET BATTLE OF EVAN PAO

greedy theme park investor, and pulling off a rescue of captive animals ranging from baby sea turtles to a full-size orca and a colossal squid, come off as marginally linked set pieces. Still, in hilarious views of the suit disguised in human clothing amid oblivious bystanders, in panels depicting frantic scrambles and haunting deep-water scenes, and most of all in images of people and only slightly anthropomorphized marine species caught in moments of wonder, grief, sadness, comical astonishment, or fierce determination, Santat’s vividly expressive visuals are, even more than usual, riveting. The Revoys have tan skin and dark hair; human figures in background scenes are racially diverse.

A crab, a sea turtle, and a pair of cephalopods boldly go where no denizens of the deep have gone before. (production and cast notes) (Graphic fantasy. 9-12)

Shang, Wendy Wan-Long Scholastic (272 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-338-67885-7

MR. GRAY & FRIEDA FROLIC

Schroeder, Binette Trans. by David Henry Wilson NorthSouth (32 pp.) $17.95 | March 29, 2022 978-0-7358-4473-5

Two neighbors could not be more different than Mr. Gray and Miss Frolic.

Mr. Gray is a numbers man and a famous professor. Everything about him is gray: his house, his dog, Tuffy, his clothes, and even his canary. He also hates noise, so he is forever annoyed with his neighbor, Frieda Frolic, who disturbs his morning meditations by “cheerfully warbling, singing, and laughing” and puttering about her garden with her piglet, Rosa. Miss Frolic is quite colorful; in fact, she is a painter. One afternoon, she is painting an especially beautiful and lifelike yellow bird when it comes to life and flies over to Mr. Gray’s house.

He is just about to tell Miss Frolic off when she removes her sunglasses. He sees her beautiful blue-gray eyes and is smitten.

They begin spending much time together. Mr. Gray becomes more colorful, and eventually, he proposes marriage. The two sail off together in “life’s boat” with a now happy Tuffy, Rosa the piglet, Miss Frolic’s yellow bird, and Mr. Gray’s no-longergray canary. First published in Switzerland (Herr Grau & Frieda Fröhlich, 2021), this translation by Wilson tells a simple, unlikely love story with colored-pencil illustrations that are charming and mirror Mr. Gray’s journey from drab to fab. There is a lot of text for a picture book, and because of the small font, this book is probably best shared one-on-one. The protagonists are White. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Not particularly original but a sweet addition to the shelf of translated picture books. (Picture book. 2-6)

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A Chinese American middle schooler struggles to adjust to life in an insular, mostly White town.

Sixth grader Evan Pao has a gut instinct for telling when things don’t add up and people are being less than honest. This proves useful when Evan, his divorced mother, and big sister relocate from California to the Virginia town where his Uncle Joe lives, fleeing a scandal involving his dad. Battlefield Elementary takes a lot of getting used to: Not only does Evan’s teacher, Mrs. Norwood, constantly talk about the Confederacy and local Civil War history, Evan is also the school’s only Asian American student.

When class bully Brady asks if Evan has the “China virus,” he is rattled—and wonders if things will get even worse. Meanwhile, Mrs. Norwood implies that Evan shouldn’t take part in the annual school event celebrating the Civil War era because of his race. Evan surprises everyone when he researches and shares information about Chinese soldiers who fought on both sides during the Civil War. Shang’s compassionate prose alternates among multiple perspectives. Evan’s implied anxiety is sensitively portrayed, illustrating how hard it is to be the new kid in town, particularly if you stand out. The text’s empathy extends to Brady in ways that will encourage readers to pause before making snap judgments. The novel also handles with nuance questions about how uncomfortable history can be approached in classrooms and communities.

A thoughtful and timely read. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)

SITTING SHIVA

Silver, Erin Illus. by Michelle Theodore Orca (32 pp.) $21.95 | May 17, 2022 978-1-4598-2772-1 A child’s grief is given serious, poignant treatment in this timely story of healing in community.

Jenny’s mother has died. This would be shocking and upsetting to any child and is no less staggering a loss for the book’s young protagonist. While Jenny wants to be alone, the Jewish ritual of sitting shiva dictates that family and friends will come to her home to offer food, solace, and support. Jenny only wants her mother, but when she opens herself to the company of loved ones, she finds comfort and safety. The practice of sitting shiva is generally poorly understood, especially outside of Jewish communities; the rituals might even be frightening to the uninitiated. However, this picture book, with its lovely, warm illustrations and perfectly pitched storyline, provides an accessible |

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introduction to shiva for readers of all ages. While the images of mourning are dark, they promote a deep understanding that unfolds gently in tandem with the text. In addition to being a story about Jewish ritual, this book is also a sensitive, powerful treatment of a child’s grief, with resonant but developmentally appropriate language that will appeal to a broad audience.

Jenny and her dad are White. Most background characters have pale skin, and two of them are Black-presenting. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A worthy addition to the growing shelf of picture books about loss, death, and bereavement. (Picture book. 5-12)

Simon, Jazmyn Illus. by Tamisha Anthony Random House (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-42694-4

When Irie tells her momma she hates her big poofy hair, her momma explains that everything about Irie was perfectly custom made.

Irie wants her hair to swing and bounce like the “pretty hair” that “everyone else” has. But Momma tells her that she didn’t make Irie to be like everyone else. “I made you to be you.”

Momma explains that when she was expecting Irie, she talked to God and made special requests. Out of all the skin tones in the world, Momma chose her favorite for Irie. The same for her hair type, her sparkling eyes, her kissable nose, and her bright smile. Momma also chose a good heart for Irie, and when she was born, she was perfect, and as she grew, she was kind. When Momma tells her “you are all of my favorite things,” Irie runs to the mirror and sees herself with new eyes: a “most perfect me.” This sweet, imaginative tale highlights the importance of parental love in boosting children’s self-esteem and will be a touching read-aloud for families who have struggled with issues of fitting in. The story is a challenging one to illustrate; the full-color digital art is warm with soft shades of naturallooking color but struggles to create engaging scenes to accompany Momma’s explanation of her conversation with God. The multiple spreads showing Irie and Momma flying through the atmosphere among clouds, stars, and hearts become a bit monotonous and lack depth of expression. Characters are Black. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A fresh take on an enduring theme. (Picture book. 4-7)

YOU KNOW, SEX Bodies, Gender, Puberty, and Other Things Silverberg, Cory Illus. by Fiona Smyth Triangle Square Books for Young Readers (432 pp.) $29.95 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-64421-080-2

In their third title together, Silverberg and Smyth build on their middle-grade title Sex Is a Funny Word (2015) to explicitly talk about puberty, bodies, gender, and sex for tween and teen audiences.

Mimi, Omar, Cooper, and Zai are back and ready for their sex-education class at Jordan Middle School. The creators get their ideas across through descriptive illustrations as well as vignettes that feature the four main characters and others. In what many readers will recognize as their signature approach, they tackle often confusing topics (you know, sex) against a delightfully diverse backdrop of skin tones, body sizes, and abilities in a fun, text-heavy style infused with warmth, humor, and emotional intelligence. The visual representations of changing bodies are especially impactful (labias! hair growth!), as is the inclusion of information about critical topics such as boundaries, consent, and clear communication that are too often left out of sex-ed curricula. In a preliminary note to readers, Silverberg advises that they may need to take breaks given the intensity of some of the material. More white space or a clearer visual demarcation of the excellent activities that appear after individual sections would have been helpful, as the combination of the boldly colored, striking visuals and at times heavy topics may leave readers overwhelmed. Dipping into this ambitious work, especially with a caring, trusted adult, may be the best way to digest the multitude of topics covered.

A necessary title for young people to explore. (glossary, index, resources) (Nonfiction. 11-18)

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DOG SAYS, CAT SAYS

Singer, Marilyn Illus. by Sonia Sánchez Dial Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | March 29, 2022 978-0-525-55396-0

A cat and dog experience the same day in the same house in completely different ways.

The big, black dog wakes ready to play, but the orange cat isn’t sure it will leave its bed at all. The dog is sad that its young humans have to leave the house for the day; the cat doesn’t even notice (or so the cat would like you to think). The dog says, “Mailman’s here. I must bark! Stay away from us!” while the insouciant cat comments, “That guy never comes indoors. Why make such a fuss?” Dog is eager to explore what’s inside a box, but the cat only cares about claiming the box as a snuggery. Just before the kids get home, the dog waits excitedly by the door as the cat keeps watch from across the room, where it is calmly lounging. When the kids return, the dog surrenders itself to much billing and cooing; the cat |

“The plot twists, tension, and intrigue will keep readers on the edges of their seats.” wave riders

subjects itself to being petted—but only a bit. In this contrasting manner, the story follows the animals through the rest of their day, leading to a sweet ending at bedtime. Singer’s rhyming text faithfully describes an ordinary day in the life of furry siblings and their humans, a black-haired girl and a ginger-haired boy, both White-presenting. Sánchez’s pencil drawings, colored using Photoshop, heighten the humor and mesh nicely with the text. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A satisfying read for dogs, cats, AND their young humans.

(Picture book. 2-7)

WAVE RIDERS

St John, Lauren Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $17.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-374-30967-1 Twelve-year-old twins Jess and Jude find their world tipped upside down after their guardian disappears.

All Jess and Jude know about their parents is that their father died in an accident before they were born, and their mother died in childbirth. They were raised by their guardian, Gabe, a boatyard worker, and the waitstaff of the Castaway Diner, where their mother worked after arriving alone with fake identification in their small Florida town. When Gabe abruptly decides to take them on a yearlong trip in a 37-foot sailboat, Jude is thrilled, loving the sailing life, but bookish Jess is less so. In the Caribbean, a rogue wave tosses the anchored boat, and Jess wakes to find Jude and their dog, Sam, asleep in the cockpit—and Gabe missing. They search for him but turn up nothing. When the twins find a printout of a mysterious email in Gabe’s belongings, they begin to suspect foul play and decide to sail away. After their boat is wrecked on a reef, they are rescued, and the story gets in the news. When a wealthy English family offers to foster them, the twins are at first thrilled, but it doesn’t take long for them to realize something is not right.

The plot twists, tension, and intrigue of this well-plotted, wellwritten adventure story will keep readers on the edges of their seats. Primary characters present White.

A thrilling, thumping good read. (author’s note, letter to readers) (Mystery. 9-13)

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It takes Cutie Grackle, 10, a while to figure out why the birds are following her. She’s got enough to worry about, what with her Uncle Horace, with whom she lives in a shack atop a West Virginia mountain, getting ever more disoriented, the kindly cafeteria worker who gives her a ride to the food pantry leaving town, and rumors of a curse that caused her parents and others to disappear. But when a raven drops a fortune from a cookie at her feet, Cutie slides into a vision of her long-lost mama and begins to understand not only what caused the curse, but how it might be reversed—if she can manage to do it in time. Told primarily through Cutie’s unsparing point of view (with occasional asides from the ravens) and fully at home in its Appalachian setting, the novel treats poverty, loss, and the magical with matterof-fact acceptance and admits to some nuance in its portrayals.

Cutie’s voice never falters. There are times when the plot points around the curse are confusing but not enough so that readers will lose interest, and the ending feels like a victory earned. All characters are White. Millgram’s raven spot art and a map of Cutie and Horace’s home of Smite Mountain enhance the text.

An intriguing story from an author who deserves more acclaim. (Fabulism. 8-12)

LOKI A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good

Stowell, Louie Walker US/Candlewick (240 pp.) $14.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-5362-2327-9 Series: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good The Norse god of lies gets well and truly served for his misdeeds—stuck in Midgard (Earth) as an 11-year-old boy with one month to mend his ways.

Sternly forbidden by Odin to use his godly powers and compelled to record his experiences in a diary that automatically flags every fib, Loki, or Liam Smith, endures massive frustration as every attempt to raise his rapidly falling Loki Virtue Score with good deeds falls afoul of both his ingrained trickster instincts and his general cluelessness about humans and their feelings. (It doesn’t help that Thor, “god of bum thunder,” comes along disguised as his rude brother.) Readers will have no trouble seeing where, time after time, he goes wrong…or spotting the literally faint signs of a voice of conscience that begin to appear on occasional pages even before he climactically hires himself out to a bully for a humiliating trick on Valerie, the one classmate he’s managed not to alienate. Along with flavorsome Norse mythological references, Stowell peppers her whiny protagonist’s daily entries with spiky pen-and-ink drawings of mostly White divines and humans, hand-lettered outbursts, and isolated cartoon panels with smart comments in balloons. At last, after Loki helps rescue Valerie from a quartet of frost giants and, more importantly, shows sincere remorse for doing her wrong, the one-eyed All­­father grants his request to stick around Midgard for future adventures in friendship and snack-food discoveries.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DESTINY OF CUTIE GRACKLE

Stout, Shawn K. Illus. by Alona Millgram Peachtree (336 pp.) $16.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-68263-320-5

A hardscrabble child tries to reverse the curse that’s turned her mother into a raven. |

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“Demonstrates the power of hope and community in difficult times.” nour’s secret library

Salutary reading for anyone who needs steering toward good behavior…or good-ish anyway. (Graphic adventure. 9-12)

window, the children can see active shelling and watch buildings collapse, “spilling the things inside onto the streets like open suitcases.” The kids start collecting books from the rubble, and the Al-Fajr (Dawn) Library is born. Some of Mintzi’s beautiful pencil, gouache, and charcoal illustrations in warm earth tones capture the vibe of Damascus in peaceful times, showing minarets, houses hugging each other, busy streets, and orchards.

Based on a true story of the Syrian civil war from the resistant town and people of Daraya, this book demonstrates the power of hope and community in difficult times and uniquely portrays people in conflict zones as educated and rich, culturally and intellectually. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A warm, engaging, and informative book that’s a valuable addition to children’s literature about war and conflict. (glossary, additional facts, author’s note, illustrator’s note) (Picture book. 9-13)

THE WIZARD IN THE WOOD

Stowell, Louie Illus. by Davide Ortu Walker US/Candlewick (224 pp.) $17.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-5362-1495-6 Series: Kit the Wizard, 3

Josh, Kit, and Alita find themselves in the middle of yet another magical adventure.

The summer is coming to a close, but first there’s a dragon egg to plant under the new school library. It is well known that librarians are wizards and that in order to have a proper library, a dragon, with all its magic, must be housed underneath. But that is where everything goes wrong. On the first day of school, the three children rush to meet their new librarian, Ben, and to sneak a peek at the dragon egg to see if it’s ready to hatch...only to find it’s been stolen. With the help of Ben and Faith, a librarian friend from their previous outings, the children set out to find the egg, in the process uncovering a cabal of dark wizards bent on overturning the wizarding world. The worldbuilding feels plausible, and readers will easily picture the magical Book Wood, imagine a dragon living under their own libraries, and envision themselves casting spells and battling giant, evil rats. Young readers will be surprised at the twists and turns the story takes. Ortu’s charming and appealing illustrations are well laid out, helping to flesh out this diversely populated world. The story opens with a brief recap, making it completely accessible to those who have not read the earlier two entries.

A solid, fun read for fantasy lovers. (Fantasy. 7-10)

ABDUL’S STORY

Thompkins-Bigelow, Jamilah Illus. by Tiffany Rose Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | March 29, 2022 978-1-5344-6298-4 A young Black boy struggles with writing—until a special guest visits his class.

Abdul loves to tell stories about the people in his neighborhood, and his friends at school love hearing them. But whenever he tries to write down his stories in a notebook, spelling rules confuse him, and his “scribbly, scratchy, scrawly letters” never stay on the lines. Abdul decides that his stories are not for books.

One day, a visitor comes to Abdul’s class; Mr. Muhammad—a Black man with a flattop haircut like Abdul’s and whose sneakers, like Abdul’s, have “not a single crease or scuff ”—is a writer who urges the students to “write new stories with new superheroes.” Abdul feels motivated to give writing another shot, but again he ends up with endless erasure marks and smudges. Mr. Muhammad shows Abdul his own messy notebook, and Abdul, who is left-handed, decides to try writing without erasing. He makes a mess but searches through the clutter for sentences he loves. He rewrites and rewrites and works on his mistakes until he forms a story he likes, proudly claiming the title of writer.

Bright, full-color, textured digital illustrations depict a racially diverse, joyful community. This story offers an honest portrayal of learning differences and demonstrates the importance of role models who reflect kids’ own backgrounds. It is a lovely addition to the shelf of meaningful children’s books portraying Black Muslim Americans in everyday situations. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A real treasure of a book for any child who has struggled to learn a skill. (Picture book. 4-8)

NOUR’S SECRET LIBRARY

Tarnowska, Wafa’ Illus. by Vali Mintzi Barefoot Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 paper | March 14, 2022 978-1-64686-291-7 978-1-64686-292-4 paper As their city is ravaged by war, two children and their community create an oasis of hope amid the destruction.

Nour, a young girl whose name means light in Arabic, calls Damascus her home. After school, she and her beloved cousin, Amir, read stories about detectives and dream of finding treasure, camping, and creating a secret club. After months of planning, they are finally ready to launch their club; however, on the day of the first meeting, the fighting draws near to their part of town, forcing them to shelter with their families in a neighbor’s basement. There, they are often without water or electricity, and sometimes food is scarce. From a small street-facing 136

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STEVE L. MCEVIL

her own child. Filled to the brim with affirmations, the narrative avoids difficult emotions except for one illustration showing Keiko with a frustrated look on her face as White ballet classmates taunt her from across the room. Unfortunately, the relentless positivity rings a bit hollow, and Keiko’s experiences and development are conveyed with little nuance. Although readers may enjoy searching each spread for symbols of the author’s heritage (origami cranes and Watari’s family crest), this one-note story falls short in a growing collection of confidence-boosting picture books for children. Background characters have a range of skin tones and body types. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Although commendable for its inspirational bent, this story flickers rather than shines. (author’s note, glossary) (Pic­ ture book. 5-9)

Turnbloom, Lucas Crown (240 pp.) $12.99 | $15.99 PLB | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-30143-2 978-0-593-30144-9 PLB A young would-be supervillain has trouble living up to his name in this fartsical outing.

Stepping personally into the panels of cartoon art fore and aft, first to introduce his characters and then to show how to draw them, Turnbloom sets up his planned graphic series with a save-the-world scenario featuring sixth grader Steve—properly outfitted in lab coat, goggles, scowl, and huge flame-colored shock of hair—as a standard-issue inept lead. Notwithstanding a checkered history of freezing the faculty toilets and, with a special smartwatch supplied by his retired (mostly) villain grandpa, making Principal Wilfahrt and other unsuspecting victims poot on command, the budding bad guy finds himself joining dreamboat classmate Sierra Flores and archrival do-gooder Vic Turry in battling to close a local wormhole before the armies of alien overlord Perses the Destroyer can surge through. His quest for ultimate evilness may be stymied here by circumstances (not to mention still having a set bedtime, being forbidden by his mom to use death rays in the house, and the good influences of Vic and Sierra) but is bound to continue in future episodes. Fans of Jamie Thomson’s Dark Lord romps, Artemis Fowl, or Wimpy Kid–style underachievers will find themselves in familiar territory. Sierra and Vic are browner skinned than the pale McEvil clan.

Not gassed up by much beyond the rampant flatulence, but readers fond of that sort of laff will find it a blast. (Graphic fantasy. 10-13)

EGGS FROM RED HEN FARM Farm to Table With Mazes and Maps y o u n g a d u lt

Wellington, Monica Holiday House (40 pp.) $18.99 | March 1, 2022 978-0-8234-4782-4

Running a farm is hard work, but hard work can be fun!

Ruby and Ned live on a farm and run a business selling eggs.

Each of them is good at different things. Ned is skilled with numbers, so he counts the eggs and handles the money at the farmers market. Ruby is better at other tasks, like driving the delivery truck and making deliveries. Readers follow Ruby on her rounds—we see the routes she takes to her various destinations and what she does once she gets there. Ned’s experience at the farmers market is not shown. The book ends with the pair getting home, where they check on their chickens and enjoy the treats the baker made for them with their eggs. This book is fun and interactive, with mazelike road maps offering opportunities for seek-and-finds and a shortest path problem for children to solve. The gouache illustrations are simple and colorful. A cute polka-dot hen who makes quips in speech bubbles adds humor. Map keys with symbols make the seek-and-find activities easier and allow young readers to perhaps see details they may not have noticed otherwise. Ruby is White with blond hair, and Ned has light brown skin and brown hair. Background characters have a variety of skin tones and hair colors. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A winsome interactive picture book with STEM appeal.

(Interactive picture book. 3-6)

I AM ABLE TO SHINE

Watari, Korey Illus. by Mike Wu Two Lions (40 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2022 978-1-5420-3153-0

A young Japanese American girl learns to believe in herself and take pride in her cultural heritage.

Keiko sometimes feels invisible and out of place. When overlooked by adults or treated unkindly by peers, she “remains steady like a tree” thanks to her family’s love. Watari highlights Keiko’s good qualities, such as her determination, strength, and kindness. Wu’s watercolor, ink, and digital artwork shows Keiko’s accomplishments, from averting a playground fight to teaching her peers about Japanese cultural traditions (such as the Obon festival) to winning over former bullies. We see her growth and journey from a child to an empowered adult, shining as both the president of the United States and a parent of |

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BEST FRIENDS, BIKINIS, AND OTHER SUMMER CATASTROPHES

backmatter. Variations in the position of sidebars, the number of letters featured on each double-page spread, and the rhyming scheme create visual and textual interest. Atkins’ richly detailed realistic illustrations use vibrant colors and varying points of view. With satisfying accuracy (the exception being an unidentified nuthatch on a page depicting chickadees), he shows the species in their various habitats, sometimes with human characters present who have skin tones that range from pale to dark brown. The poems and illustrations will be accessible to younger children; the nonfiction sections are suitable for independent readers. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An attractive addition to the nature shelf. (parts of a bird, glossary, bird conservation tips) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

Wientge, Kristi Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $17.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-5344-8502-0

During the summer before eighth grade, Alex experiences challenging changes.

One day at the pool, her longtime best friend, Will, suddenly becomes interested in Rebekah, a popular, well-off girl from school. Alex starts to wonder about body image and wearing a bikini, like Rebekah does. She rejects Rebekah’s friendly overtures, not trusting that Rebekah might genuinely like her company, too. She resents Will’s efforts to attract Rebekah but also worries that Rebekah may be toying with Will’s affections. Alex is also upset about other aspects of her life. She feels that her mother, a busy therapist, expects too much in terms of household chores, caring for her younger brothers, and forcing her to take a babysitting class to get other jobs. Alex has a great relationship with her dad, however, and he helps her build a treehouse with Will, a project she hopes will keep Will away from Rebekah. Will and Alex must earn money to buy materials, industriously finding odd neighborhood jobs like painting and picking up dog poop. As the summer slips by, things improve on many fronts for Alex, from friendships to family relationships. Containing some limited dramatic tension, this realistic story about tween emotional swings reads easily and rings true. Characters in this suburban town are presumed White.

An enjoyable read about changing friendships and responsibilities. (Fiction. 10-13)

SKY WOLF’S CALL The Gift of Indigenous Knowledge

Yellowhorn, Eldon & Kathy Lowinger Annick Press (120 pp.) $14.95 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-77321-629-4 Indigenous knowledge and modern science are braided together in this fas-

cinating book.

Yellowhorn and Lowinger capably demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge systems developed over the course of history on the basis of practical application and Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences. Through oral transmission, knowledge has been passed down through the generations by ancestors who had a vast understanding of the natural world. “Everything is connected. The world is a gift. The sacred is a vital part of knowing. We are always learning.” Earth science and Native lore come together to explain how human beings looked to the land, the sky, animals, and plants as a means to survive and understand our existence. Some of the book’s subsections describe pivotal historical events, while others look at celebrations and ceremonies, such as the Navajo fire dance, to show how Indigenous peoples share traditional knowledge. Today, Indigenous peoples keep this knowledge alive by using it to inform modern approaches in fields such as water conservation, medicine, astronomy, food science, and more. This rich and informative text is interspersed with engaging traditional stories that underscore the expository nonfiction material. Sidebars highlight influential Indigenous figures and important concepts. With beautiful photography and illustrations, this browsable book drives home the importance of caring for the natural environment and suggests the best methods to do so.

An authoritative tribute to Indigenous knowledge systems that’s a must-have for every library and classroom. (glossary, selected reading, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 11-adult)

F IS FOR FEATHERS A Bird Alphabet

Wilbur, Helen L. Illus. by Andy Atkins Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) $17.99 | March 15, 2022 978-1-53411-140-0 An alphabetic exploration of the world of birds.

This picture book presents a collection of fascinating facts about birding and feathered creatures. Entries range from Aves, the “class of warm-blooded vertebrates” to which our avian friends belong, to flyway Zones, “the migratory routes that birds follow.” Using simple rhyming quintains elaborated by sidebars of exposition, the text discusses body parts, habits, habitats, survival threats, and more. The connections between the featured alphabetized words and sidebar topics are often clever.

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“An inspiring look at the formative years and work of a literary giant.” star child

MUSHROOM RAIN

Zimmermann, Laura K. Illus. by Jamie Green Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $17.99 | April 15, 2022 978-1-53411-150-9

y o u n g a d u lt

Explore the fascinating world of a fairy-tale–esque fungus.

In her debut picture book, Zimmermann, author of numerous short nonfiction articles for children’s magazines, invites her audience to look closely at mushrooms. In lyrical, attention-grabbing language, she describes mushrooms’ bizarre shapes and colors and remarkable smells—there are even mushrooms that smell like bubble gum! She goes on to mention foragers, both animal and human, and then turns to mushroom reproduction and the secret underground lives of these fungal blooms. Star-dusted doublepage illustrations convey Green’s enthusiasm for the subject.

Backgrounds of black night skies and deep-brown ground layers on several spreads underscore the mystery of mushroom existence. Green portrays other plant life as well, along with fauna, from a forest-floor perspective, and then follows mushroom spores into the clouds, where they help create rain. In the backmatter we learn that in Russia, a gentle rain that falls while the sun is shining is called a “mushroom rain,” hence the title of the book, and that the “largest known living organism on Earth” is a mushroom-producing fungus growing in a forest in eastern Oregon. With spare text and engaging pictures, this relatively simple nonfiction book would make an effective storytime presentation. The backmatter, printed in a scriptlike text, is clearly geared toward adults. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An intriguing look at an unusual subject. (Nonfiction picture book. 3-7)

imagination. Included are black-and-white childhood photos and a facsimile of a handwritten story about wild horses that Butler worked on as a child and illustrated herself. Young readers familiar with the Butler oeuvre will note the allusions to her famous and groundbreaking works. Zoboi’s powerful poems vary in style and form; particularly interesting are several concrete poems, including the titular “Star Child,” “Moon Child,” and “Moon Child II,” with the words arranged on the page to reveal an image of a star, quarter moon, and full moon respectively. Readers will come away with an understanding of Butler’s early influences and an interest in her writing.

An inspiring look at the formative years and work of a literary giant that’s sure to capture young readers’ attention. (author’s note, bibliography, endnotes, photo credits) (Biogra­ phy. 12-adult)

STAR CHILD A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler Zoboi, Ibi Dutton (128 pp.) $14.99 | Jan. 25, 2022 978-0-399-18738-4

By the time she was 10 years old, Octavia Butler knew that she wanted to be a writer.

Weaving together quotes from Butler, prose passages of historical and biographical information, and her own original poetry, Zoboi explores the visionary speculative fiction author’s early life. This ambitious experimental biography is at once a tribute from an adoring fan and an introduction to Butler’s juvenilia and her childhood growing up as a shy Black child in postwar 1950s America. Each chapter covers a different aspect of, or key moment in, Butler’s girlhood and adolescence, showing the challenges she overcame and the sustaining force of her |

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young adult

INHERITANCE A Visual Poem

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Acevedo, Elizabeth Illus. by Andrea Pippins Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (48 pp.) $16.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-06-293194-8

INHERITANCE by Elizabeth Acevedo; illus. by Andrea Pippins..... 140 ALL RISE by Richard Conyngham; illus. by Saaid Rahbeeni, the Trantraal Brothers, Liz Clarke, et. al.......................................... 144 THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET by Jen Ferguson...............148 CONFESSIONS OF AN ALLEGED GOOD GIRL

by Joya Goffney.................................................................................. 149 BABY TEETH by Meg Grehan............................................................150 TOGETHER WE BURN by Isabel Ibañez............................................ 151 LOVE RADIO by Ebony LaDelle........................................................154 IMPROBABLE MAGIC FOR CYNICAL WITCHES

by Kate Scelsa......................................................................................159 SEE YOU YESTERDAY by Rachel Lynn Solomon.............................160 BREATHE AND COUNT BACK FROM TEN

by Natalia Sylvester............................................................................160 THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET

Ferguson, Jen Heartdrum (384 pp.) $17.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-06-308616-6

An illustrated poem that acknowledges prejudice and celebrates Black hair.

Award-winning author and poet Acevedo opens with an insult that will resonate with Black girls and women: “Some people tell me to ‘fix’ my hair.” Her powerful response comes at the very end: “You can’t fix what was never broken.” In between, many themes are explored, some of which apply to Black people broadly, while others specifically reference Dominican culture. Throughout, Pippins’ hand-drawn and digital illustrations showcase an incredible array of natural hairstyles and details, such as the image of a ship within the braided pattern of one character’s hair. Impressively, the poem goes beyond typical dialogues about Black hair, acknowledging Black people’s internalized racism that comes from beauty standards grounded in White supremacy. The poem highlights the reputation that Dominicans have for being able to “flatten the spring in any lock,” following that line with a powerful reframing. From there, Acevedo moves into discussing colorism—in particular, the prejudice against lighter-skinned people partnering with darker-skinned people—and more. Pippins’ bright, colorful, and evocative art covers full pages, lovingly portraying the all-Black cast with a diverse range of skin tones and hair textures. The text varies in size, seamlessly incorporated into the art. An incredible amount of reflection appears in this slim volume, making this a wonderful choice for group discussions.

Brave, sharp, and powerful. (Poetry. 12-adult)

A SHOW FOR TWO

Bhuiyan, Tashie Inkyard Press (432 pp.) $18.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-335-42456-3

Samina Rahman can’t wait to leave New York for California: Will she rediscover her love for New York City before she heads off to college?

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the University of Southern California, where she hopes to study business and film in the fall. The Bangladeshi Muslim teen’s golden ticket comes in the form of a prestigious film festival that offers a scholarship for the winner of the student film competition. As co-president of the film club at her high school along with her gay White best friend, Rosie Hardy, Mina is laser focused on winning. Enter Emmitt Ramos, a Chinese and Spanish indie film star from London who has gone undercover at Mina’s high school in preparation for his upcoming movie.

Mina and Emmitt get off to a rocky start after she figures out who he really is, but with one another they slowly start to uncover parts of themselves that they keep hidden from the rest of the world. Mina has a well-developed and well-rounded character arc. Bhuiyan captures the internal struggles of belonging to the South Asian diaspora by exploring both Mina’s strained relationship with her parents and her loving and protective relationship with her sister, Anam.

An endearing story of rediscovery that brings out tears of both laughter and heartbreak. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)

GIRL OVERBOARD

Block, Sandra Underlined (256 pp.) $9.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-48346-6 On a cruise ship rumored to have a high rate of suicides, Izzy resolves to discover whether new friend Jade is another tragic victim or the target of a crime.

High school sophomore Izzy would rather spend spring break with Luke, her boyfriend, instead of on a cruise with her parents. But her anxious mom disapproves of Luke—if she only knew that he’s pressured Izzy into helping him cheat on a test. The trip is saved by Jade, a cool girl who gives off influencer vibes. Sixteen-year-old Jade drinks; she even has a stash of ketamine. She also seems to encourage the young men onboard to vie for her attention— and some of them become violent. Izzy, who lacks social confidence, can’t believe that edgy Jade is spending time with her,

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HERRICK’S END

Blanchet, T.M. Tiny Fox Press (312 pp.) $16.95 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-946501-41-7 Series: Neath, 1 A young man journeys through a new world to rescue a friend in need.

Nineteen-year-old Ollie Delgato floats through life untethered as an orphaned son from an abusive household, a fat young man who believes himself unlovable and who’s working a foodservice job in Boston to make ends meet as he waits for community college to start. When his friend Nell goes missing, Ollie’s worry about her well-being leads him to the Neath, a magical, mysterious underworld originally created by witches to protect and hide survivors of abuse. Before long, Ollie makes friends and foes; among his allies is Tera, a budding painter, but his time is running out because visitors to the Neath only have a few days there before their lungs mutate and they are unable to leave. Something is rotten at the Neath’s core, and what began as Ollie’s earnest search for a friend turns into a quest for survival, justice, and acceptance. Blanchet’s debut is the first in a promising trilogy that examines the line between setting things right and exacting revenge in surprising ways. Set in a whimsical underworld full of dangers and wonders, this coming-of-age story develops Ollie’s sense of community and belonging while his internalized fatphobia, white-knight complex, and sense of self-worth are thoughtfully explored, questioned, and subverted. Ollie is cued as White; Tera has brown skin.

A thoughtful and empowering hero’s journey. (Fantasy.

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although some of Jade’s behavior pushes Izzy past her comfort zone. Then Jade disappears. Everyone is willing to believe she’s yet another suicide on an unlucky ship, but Izzy starts sleuthing. The tension rises as Izzy makes shocking discoveries and becomes the target of threats. The manipulative and abusive villains serve as a warning note to young women and appear in counterpoint to Izzy’s lovable dad. Her mom, a lawyer and women’s advocate, is a force in her own right. Most characters read as White; two cruise ship employees—Latinx Diego and Sergei, who speaks with a thick Russian accent—unfortunately read like stereotypes.

A riveting, melodramatic mystery for true-crime fans.

(Thriller. 12-17)

THE GENESIS WARS

Bowman, Akemi Dawn Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $19.99 | April 19, 2022 978-1-5344-5654-9 Series: Infinity Courts, 2 Stung by betrayal and loss, one teenager is determined to make the afterlife a safer place for humans.

When Nami Miyamoto died, she found herself in Infinity—an afterlife controlled by malicious AI Ophelia and populated with beautiful, vicious AI Residents who hunt humans, using them as mindless servants—or worse. Nami’s attempt to destroy the Residents failed 10 months ago, leading to the loss of her friends, likely to one of Ophelia’s Four Courts, among them War and Death. Despite the skepticism of the remaining free humans, Nami is determined to save her friends and to make the afterlife a safer place for all those who have yet to die, including her younger sister. As Nami journeys through the courts looking for her friends, she learns that no alliance is certain, whether with Residents or her fellow humans. Nami is willing to be reckless if it means keeping her sister safe, but what will be the cost?

While The Infinity Courts (2021) focused more on what it means to be human, aware, and capable of empathy, this sequel is packed with action, as Nami embraces her powers and fights back whenever she can. Though the stakes are higher here, the more complex ruminations of the earlier entry are missing. The previous work indicated that Nami is Japanese and White.

A fast-paced bridge leading toward higher stakes and more complications on the horizon. (map) (Fantasy. 13-18)

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SULFUR HEART

Carter, Brooke Orca (176 pp.) $10.95 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-4598-3160-5 Series: Orca Soundings A young man is drawn back to his hometown after his father’s mysterious death.

Two years after he ran away from the small industrial town of Hope and moved to the city, Will Homer, now 18, receives a phone call letting him know that his ex-cop father has turned up dead, his body found in a pile of sulfur, presumably a suicide. Will’s own disappearance coincided with the death of the wealthy sulfur mill’s chairman, Aaron Sullivan, who was rumored to have a secret—and now missing—stash of gold. Despite knowing he will face questions about Sullivan’s death and the gold if he shows his face, Will is drawn back by the loss of his father as well as by memories of Eve, the love of his life and the girl he’s never stopped thinking about. As he starts looking into his father’s death, he discovers that there seems to be even more at stake. Fast-paced with an ominous tone, this mystery within a mystery makes every detail count. The development of character and setting are minimized in order to focus on the plot, and the carefully chosen vocabulary will make this work accessible to developing readers. Sex scenes and drug use are described briefly and in frank terms. Characters default to White.

A twisty noir mystery that will keep even the most reluctant of readers on the edges of their seats. (Thriller. 14-18)

BOYS AND GIRLS SCREAMING

Carter, Kern DCB (272 pp.) $15.95 paper | April 19, 2022 978-1-77086-645-4

Two friends create an informal support group that unearths more trauma than it heals.

Candace was 5 when her mother left her alone in their Oakville, Ontario, apartment. It was two days before her kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Heard, found her, took her home, and eventually adopted her. Candace was transported from a life of emotional and physical neglect to an environment of material affluence and love. After they met in first grade, she developed a deep bond with Ever, who became as close as a sister. This relationship is later tested when Ever’s father dies, her mother has a stroke, and Candace’s birth mother returns.

The novel follows the two girls through the years to high school, when their inability to deal with their mental health issues on their own becomes the impetus for the creation of the group they call Boys and Girls Screaming; Candace and Ever invite students with a known history of trauma to participate. The |

“Unfolds with an even mix of flirty and serious tones balancing a frothy premise with sympathetic characters.” once upon a k-prom

story is told primarily in the voices of Candace and Jericho, Ever’s younger brother, although Ever is a unifying character whose presence looms larger than life as she becomes the catalyst for major events in the story. Through this work, readers learn about the sticky nature of trauma. Some characters use drugs to self-medicate. Candace, Jericho, and Ever are Black; the Heards are White.

A thought-provoking read about the pain involved in healing childhood trauma. (Fiction. 14-18)

ONCE UPON A K-PROM

Cho, Kat Disney-Hyperion (336 pp.) $18.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-368-06464-4

When they were 10, Elena Soo and Robbie Choi promised to go to prom together; seven years later, Robbie, now a member of world-famous K-pop group WDB, shows up on Elena’s doorstep.

Korean American Elena wants to set herself apart from her four siblings, but at school and at home, the attention-shy high school junior is always overshadowed by her older sisters and twin brother. It doesn’t help that her efforts to fundraise for the local community center through an “alterna-prom” initiative has put her at odds with her classmates.

When Robbie, whose family left Chicago for Seoul, suddenly reappears in the States, first at her house and then at school with a public, extravagant promposal, Elena is bewildered by

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“Breathes life into stories of courage that need to be heard.” all rise

the polished heartthrob who is so different from her goofy childhood friend. She rejects him. This stuns Robbie, who genuinely wants to reconnect with her and fulfill their old promise, but despite his polished idol persona and ease with adoring fans, he doesn’t know how to talk to his first crush. The story unfolds in alternating perspectives with an even mix of flirty and serious tones balancing a frothy premise with sympathetic lead characters who are each struggling in their own ways to define themselves. No prior K-pop knowledge is needed to enjoy the slow-burn, will-they, won’t-they storyline, though fans of the genre will appreciate a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-them allusions to real K-pop idols.

Pleasantly indulgent, with a dash of realism. (Romance. 13-18)

ALL RISE Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa 1910-1948: A Graphic History Conyngham, Richard Illus. by Saaid Rahbeeni, the Trantraal Brothers, Liz Clarke, et. al Catalyst Press (220 pp.) $23.95 paper | May 17, 2022 978-1-946395-63-4

What does it look like when ordinary citizens resist government oppression?

This graphic novel examines several decades of pre-apartheid resistance and rebellion in South Africa, beginning with early-20th–century discriminatory laws intended to restrict Asian immigration and ending with the miners’ strike of 1946.

With the exception of the final chapter, the work explores social change and resistance through legal cases, many of them forgotten in dusty files in the basement of the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein, in the process amplifying many voices that were largely unknown to history. Each chapter highlights a different act of resistance, telling hard stories honestly and without sensationalism. Zeroing in tightly on a 40-year span allows the book to examine complex historical nuances and feature the voices of ordinary, working-class people and longstanding communities like the Royal Bafokeng Nation who were activists for change. The source material dictated a different approach to the final chapter on the miners’ strike, which is enhanced with striking photographs and features composite characters based on knowledge of life at the time. The illustrators’ rich, evocative artwork in a variety of styles and color palettes adds layers of texture and context to the primary source documents, bringing life to the people and places in a reverential way. The text breathes life into stories of courage that need to be heard.

A robust examination of South Africa’s complex, storied history highlighting faces of radical justice. (glossary, bibliography, photo credits) (Graphic nonfiction. 14-adult)

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BLOOD METAL BONE

Cummings, Lindsay HarperCollins 360 (496 pp.) $10.99 paper | May 17, 2022 978-0-00-829279-9 A story that reaches from the stars to the depths of the planet Dohrsar.

After Crown Prince Soahm, Sonara’s older brother, is abducted in front of her, their mother, Queen Iridis of Soreia, who holds her responsible for his presumed death, kills her. Through the power of the Shadowblood, Sonara receives a second chance at life that is granted to some of the Dohrsaran, and as the Devil of the Deadlands, she creates a new existence but never stops hoping to solve the mystery of her brother’s fate. On the edge of the Milky Way, low-status smugglers Karr and his brother, Cade, are on their last job. They’re headed toward Dohrsar on an assignment from a wealthy man—one of the few human survivors of the Reaper’s Disease who is now living on Beta Earth—to pick up a rock that will revolutionize science. Immense power is hidden in the heart of the planet, but which faction will get to it first? The humanoid alien Dohrsaran live in a world of magic and mystery.

The novel’s pacing is excellent, jumping among the perspectives of Sonara, Cade, and Karr, with each character having their own problems and histories; readers are dropped into the action, and past intrigues, as with Sonara’s love life, are skillfully filled in. Characters are racially indeterminate.

Melds science fiction and fantasy elements into a delightful blend. (pronunciation guide, author interview) (Speculative fiction. 13-18)

NAKED Not Your Average Sex Encyclopedia

Daguzan Bernier, Myriam Illus. by Cécile Gariépy Trans. by Charles Simard Orca (256 pp.) $29.95 paper | May 17, 2022 978-1-4598-3101-8

A sex encyclopedia by a Canadian student of sexology, translated from the French and clarifying terms related to bodies, gender, and sexuality.

The 150 alphabetical entries include factual, historical, and cultural information as well as the etymology of each word or phrase. The work provides background on topics including some that are increasingly being discussed by teens, such as rape culture and, in the entry on bras, sexist dress codes in schools. The tone is accepting of the full spectrum of gender identity and expression and reassuring about the range of what is “normal.” The short entries vary in length—some are a couple of paragraphs; most are one to two pages. Sidebars often provide links or references to additional information: Planned |

Parenthood’s website appears beside the entry on contraception, and later readers learn of Iceland’s Phallological Museum.

Certain topics could have benefited from more detailed and precise exploration; the entry on the word gay briefly mentions the Stonewall uprising, saying that a few men were arrested and erasing the central role of trans women of color. The broad statement that in North America until the 1970s, post–wedding night bedsheets were checked for blood to prove virginity will raise eyebrows. Attractive, lighthearted, stylized illustrations adorn the text.

A validating tome that will spark an interest in further learning. (resources, index) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

ALL SIGNS POINT TO YES

Ed. by davis, g. haron, Cam Montgomery & Adrianne White Inkyard Press (350 pp.) $19.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-335-41862-3

WAY OF THE ARGOSI

de Castell, Sebastien Illus. by Sally Taylor Hot Key/Trafalgar (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | May 1, 2022 978-1-4714-0554-9 Series: Spellslinger

This first entry in a prequel duology to the Spellslinger series follows the early life of Ferius Parfax.

A nameless 11-year-old girl survives the massacre of her clan only to be later captured by the mages who believe her people, the Mahdek, are demon worshippers who deserve nothing good. She is tortured and imprinted with metallic marks on her skin—a terrible curse that denies her any semblance of love and belonging and turns her into an outcast. But the nameless girl is nothing if not resilient, and years of vagrancy, thievery, and utter loneliness fuel her need for revenge against those who cursed her. When she comes

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Thirteen YA authors craft romance stories around the star signs.

Within astrology, each planet plays a different role in our lives: Venus is responsible for our idealization of love and romance. Each entry begins with a list of the characteristics for a particular astrological sign when in Venus. While the settings and characters’ identities influence each story, the respective star sign’s traits shape how the romance unfolds. In Byron Graves’ (Ojibwe) Virgo story “Sometimes in September,” Waabooz is a typical Virgo in his practicality, refusing to act on his crush on Lexi until his stay at the group home for addiction on the rez is completed. This volume celebrates love across the spectrum of sexuality and gender expression. In some stories, the love interest is nonbinary, as in davis’ “ruler and killer” and “Alternative Combustion” by Kiana Nguyen. Familiar romance tropes make an appearance, for example, friends turning into something more in “The Taste of a Kiss” by Roselle Lim and “The South Street Challenge” by Eric Smith, as well as enemies to lovers in “Anchor Point” by Lily Anderson. The supernatural features in stories like “L(Train)inimal” by Karuna Riazi and “The Cure for Heartbreak” by Emery Lee. There is a little something for everyone in this fun, romantic anthology in which a variety of characters, genres, and relationships combine to create a volume that shines.

A unifying theme brings together a delightfully diverse collection of love stories. (Romance anthology. 14-18)

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WORDS WITH...

Gary Lonesborough The Australian novelist’s debut brings an Aboriginal queer story to American readers

BY TOM BEER Gary Lonesborough

Gary Lonesborough grew up surrounded by stories in his Aboriginal (Yuin) community in New South Wales, Australia. He loved to write his own stories, too. But, as he explained in an essay for the Guardian published last year, he stopped reading and writing around the age of 12, when he realized he was queer. “It was like a dark cloud following me every day,” he wrote. “I became disinterested in my culture, and disinterested in writing and storytelling. I did everything I could to fit in instead.”

Lonesborough, now 27, eventually came out and began writing again. Last year, his debut novel for young adults, The Boy From the Mish, was published to acclaim in his home country. This month, it’s being released in the United States as Ready When You Are (Scholastic, March 1). It’s the story of Jackson, an Aboriginal teen coming to terms with his sexual identity and falling in love with To146

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mas, another Indigenous boy, who is visiting his family for the summer. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it an “affirming, textured coming-out story.” Lonesborough spoke with us over Zoom from his home in Sydney; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is your first book. What inspired you to write it?

I was at a time in my life where I was finally feeling really comfortable in my own skin. I read Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, and that made me realize that I wanted to read a story like that—a love story that centered around an Aboriginal boy who is coming to terms with his sexuality and falling in love for the first time. That book just didn’t exist—I couldn’t find that story. As a writer, I was always waiting for the right story to come along, something that would compel me to write a whole novel. Once I realized that there was this gap in the market—this story that I hadn’t read before—that just inspired me to start writing it.

You mention Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda as an influence on your writing. What other books?

I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky when I was 16 or 17. I just loved the way the voice of the character was captured in that book. I was definitely trying, as I was honing my craft, to capture that voice that I really connected with and really, really loved in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Even today, I feel like I’m still chasing that level of intimacy with the character. Another book that really influenced me was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It made me realize that there are ways to tell Indigenous stories that can be funny and raw and real but entertaining and heartwarming.

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I love how real Jackson and Tomas are. In marginalized communities there can be a lot of pressure placed on how characters are represented. Did you feel that?

It was an internal pressure—not wanting to reinforce stereotypes, not wanting to be too negative in the characterizations.

But I ultimately decided that I wanted to be real, I wanted to be raw and authentic. I’m telling the story of an Aboriginal character, and there are just a lot of things that need exploring, and if I shy away from them, the reader will be able to see that I’m being false. A lot of the issues that the characters deal with are issues that Aboriginal people face today—alcoholism, poverty, domestic violence, children in foster care, disengagement from school, racism, a troubled relationship with the police. I think that’s something readers connect with when they read the story—the authenticity of the characters.

They’re able to connect with Jackson and Tomas because they are very rooted in real-life experiences.

In Australia, the book was published with the title The Boy From the Mish. Can you explain a mish for American readers?

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the Australian government decided that Aboriginal people couldn’t look after themselves and needed to be helped. They systematically took families and put them into these missions, small communities where they put in houses and taught English, taught Christianity, and told people not to speak their language, not to practice their culture—basically taught them to be White. A lot of the time, if the government decided to, they’d remove children [from their parents]. So there was a lot of child abuse, a lot of sexual abuse happening in those spaces. Similar, in a way, to the reservations in America. In the book, Jackson has roots that go back to those families that were placed in the mission, and with that comes a lot of intergenerational trauma. |

Have you heard from queer readers?

I’ve participated in a couple book clubs of queer teens. I graduated high school in 2013, and the way things have changed—in terms of acceptance of queer people and support for queer teenagers at school—is just amazing.

It was really empowering to sit there with six or seven queer kids and talk with them about the book. I spoke with one queer Aboriginal teen who was so excited that there was finally a book they could read that had a character that was like them. They were able to connect with everything in the book, the fears Jackson’s having, the internal monologue he is having were something like what that teen had, almost word for word, in their own head.

The only way you can achieve that is by opening up your own vulnerability as a writer.

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Readers—especially young readers—can tell when you’re trying to make a point or teach a lesson.

Oh, yeah. Growing up, any time I saw an Aboriginal character in a movie or on TV, it always seemed like they were secondary characters, always there just to teach a lesson or educate the viewer. They weren’t real characters with their own journeys or their own arcs. They were just there to serve the writer’s purpose. So that’s something I’m very conscious of when I’m writing, something I try to avoid as much as I can. Like you said, young people can definitely tell when someone’s trying to ram a moral down their throats or teach them something.

One of the challenges for Jackson, being from this tightknit community, is coming out as queer. Can you talk about that struggle?

Jackson’s story is very much my story, in a way. One of my biggest fears as a teenager was losing that connection to my community. I come from a small country town and a large Aboriginal community in that town, and I feel very connected, I still do. But one of my fears was that being gay might exclude me from that community and particularly, my family. That was the biggest thing that stopped me from coming out. It wasn’t until I left town and moved away to Sydney that I started to feel more comfortable and was able to explore that side of myself.

Through Jackson, I wanted to capture and articulate how I felt when I was a teen.

Ready When You Are received a starred review in the Dec. 15, 2021, issue.

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across a nonmagical gambler who can seemingly get away with anything, she learns of the baffling and mysterious ways of the Argosi and a path to reclaiming her name and her identity.

This introduction to the Spellslinger series is a twisting, gripping tale of prejudice, revenge, identity, and survival against all odds in a heady mix of magic, philosophy, and adventure, marred only by references to spirit animals in a non-Indigenous context. The story manages to maintain a lightness through Ferius’ snarky, funny narrative voice—a tremendous literary accomplishment considering the no-punches-pulled griminess of her tale, which includes suicidal ideation and sees its young protagonist endure graphic physical and mental torture. Lesbian Ferius reads as White.

Dramatic, gripping, and fantastically fun. (map) (Fantasy.

15-18)

MY MECHANICAL ROMANCE

Farol Follmuth, Alexene Holiday House (272 pp.) $18.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-8234-5010-7

Opposites attract in this YA debut starring high school engineers.

Uncertain of her future post-graduation, Isabel Maier, who is Filipino and White and a transfer student at Essex Academy for Art, Science, and Technology, is reluctant to apply to colleges or think about choosing a major. Despite procrastinating on a catapult assignment, she reveals her gift for engineering design.

Bel’s teacher encourages her to switch to AP physics and try out for the robotics team. Jewish and Mexican robotics (and soccer) team captain Mateo Luna is determined to get early admission to MIT and win this year’s national high school robotics competition. Impressed by Bel’s egg-drop design during tryouts, Teo selects her as their newest teammate, much to everyone’s surprise, including Bel’s. From the get-go, Bel is overlooked by her male cohorts, who depend heavily on Teo’s leadership; teammate Neelam—the only other girl on the team—immediately dislikes her; and even Teo seems to regret his decision as they clash over ideas. Farol Follmuth’s nuanced and honest characterizations remind readers that everyone has the capacity for change. As Teo and Bel’s relationship blooms from teammates to something more, Teo becomes fully aware of his privileged upbringing and the gender bias among his peers, and Bel learns to be a better team player while also standing up for herself. The message is clear: Women deserve to take up space in the STEM world too.

A delightful teen romance about building robots—and new futures. (Romance. 13-18)

THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET

Ferguson, Jen Heartdrum (384 pp.) $17.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-06-308616-6

An Indigenous teen’s journey to selfdiscovery, community, and acceptance.

Change is coming for Métis 18-yearold Lou whether she likes it or not. Her mom is away selling her beadwork at powwows, and her uncles are arguing about their ice cream business. She’ll be spending her summer running the Michif Creamery alongside her best friend, Florence, and her coercive newly ex-boyfriend (both White). Former friend King returns to town three years after their falling out, but she can’t decide if she’s ready to rebuild their relationship. When her White biological father is released following his prison sentence for the violent sexual assault of Lou’s mother when she was 16, he 148

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“This candid exploration of a sensitive subject is also a heartfelt, funny, and irresistible read.” confessions of an alleged good girl

CONFESSIONS OF AN ALLEGED GOOD GIRL

begins harassing her and threatening the family business. Lou must decide if she will keep this to herself or seek support in her community. Bisexual Jamaican Canadian King gently helps Lou navigate the intersections of her trauma and her sex repulsion, introducing her to the concepts of asexuality and demisexuality, identities in which she finds clarity and hope. Their tender romance is just one of several kinds of connection and care that are given equal weight by Lou’s compelling first-person narration. Debut author Ferguson, who is Métis and White, touches on intergenerational family suffering at the hands of the state, mental health, substance abuse, racism, sexual harassment and assault, and missing and murdered Indigenous women—all with nuance and care.

Heart-rending and healing; a winning blend that will leave readers satisfied. (content warning, author’s note) (Fiction.

14-18)

Goffney, Joya HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-06-302484-7

A Christian teen has a medical problem that makes it impossible for her to have intercourse.

Monique is a 17-year-old Black Baptist preacher’s daughter in a small Texas town. Everyone expects her and her boyfriend, Dom, to do everything properly (read: no sex before marriage). However, because they’re in love and will eventually get married, Monique figures there’s no need to wait. But after two years together and secretly trying dozens of times, unsuccessfully, to have intercourse, Dom ends the relationship. Reeling from the breakup, Monique learns she has vaginismus—her vaginal muscles contract involuntarily, preventing penetration. The condition is

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NEW YOUNG ADULT FICTION From the publishers of The Marrow Thieves

BOYS AND GIRLS SCREAMING

by Kern Carter

A gut-wrenching yet ultimately hopeful novel.

WHITE LIES

by Sara de Waard

“[A] well-crafted, touching story.”

— Eric Walters

dcbyoungreaders.com | Distributed in the US by Orca Books

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“Emotionally rich and gloriously queer.” baby teeth

caused by trauma, fear, guilt, or shame, and Monique has been raised to think of sex as dirty and bad. She wants to “fix” herself quickly and win Dom back, so she turns to two unlikely sources for help: Sasha, a seemingly straight-laced church girl, and Reggie, a troubled kid Monique’s father hopes to rehabilitate. Along her unorthodox healing journey, Monique makes some surprising discoveries about her family and, more importantly, about herself. As described in a note to readers, Monique’s story does much to raise awareness of vaginismus and directly confront toxic views about sex. Thanks to Goffney’s superb storytelling and dazzling prose, this candid exploration of a sensitive subject is also a heartfelt, funny, and irresistible read.

Smart, sex-positive—and positively terrific. (Fiction. 13-adult)

BABY TEETH

Grehan, Meg Little Island (192 pp.) $16.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-915071-01-9 Love, loss, and identity form the core of this sparse, free-verse vampire story from Ireland.

Immy narrates a small slice of her eternal life, a time when she experiences a love like never before. In this interesting take on vampires, Immy lives numerous consecutive lives as different people: Although she mostly doesn’t remember her past selves, she feels them all inside herself, leading to constant internal turmoil. In the present day, Immy meets human mortal Claudia at a flower shop, and the two begin a relationship.

Immy believes this love is stronger than anything she’s ever felt, but as her love turns more and more into a desire for blood, she questions the kinds of relationships she’s capable of having. The main consistent thread through all Immy’s lives is her found family. Freddie and Henry are vampires like her, and the three of them have managed to find one another in each of their lives, always caring for and loving each other. This poetic tale captures so much emotion through meaningful word choices, repetition, and line breaks. It’s incredible how deep characterization comes through in so few words: Immy’s longing and grief are potent, the Sapphic love is consuming and heartbreaking, and the unconditional support among Immy, Freddie, and Henry feels pure and comforting. Readers who feel seen in these pages will pore over the feeling-laden verses again and again. Characters are assumed White.

Emotionally rich and gloriously queer. (author interview) (Verse fiction. 14-18)

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

Henry, April Christy Ottaviano Books (288 pp.) $17.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-316-32333-8 A group of teens stranded in a snowstorm discovers a murderer in their midst.

While traveling on the highway to a state theater competition, Nell and her friends Min, Raven, Adam, and Jermaine are caught in a dangerous blizzard. Their teacher, Mrs. McElroy, who is driving the minivan, decides to stop for the night at the run-down and shady-looking Travel Inn and Out. The motel is labyrinthine and spooky, with dingy corridors and walls adorned with moldering kitsch. Nell and the gang meet another group of kids who are also stranded by the storm, making fast friends.

A game of Two Truths and a Lie starts out flirty and fun but devolves into something more sinister when one slip of paper reads “I like to watch people die,” and “I’ve lost count of how 150

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many people I’ve killed.” The snow falls and the winds howl, and soon power and cell service are lost, cutting off the motel patrons from the outside world. As the first victim is discovered and the body count begins to grow, the terror becomes palpable.

Everyone at the motel seems to have an insidious secret: Will Nell be able to uncover the killer before they strike again? An homage to Agatha Christie, Henry’s locked-room mystery is tautly plotted, with quick-moving nail-biting chapters, relatable characters, and a deftly wrought setting that paradoxically manages to feel both claustrophobic and sprawling. Nell is White; there is diversity among the secondary characters.

An atmospheric and entertaining thriller perfect for snowy night chills. (Mystery. 12-16)

GIDEON GREEN IN BLACK AND WHITE

A flamenco dancer, a dragon hunter— and the ancient tradition that pulls them together.

Eighteen-year-old Zarela Zalvidar is descended from a long line of Dragonadores, those who face down dangerous dragons and entertain crowds in arenas across Hispalia. Zarela’s father is the most renowned and skilled Dragonador of all, but when a life-altering injury takes him out of commission, Zarela must take charge of La Giralda, their ancestral home. She discovers that Papá’s accident was not an accident at all but part of a plot to destroy what her ancestors have built over hundreds of years. A flamenco dancer like her late mother, Zarela decides that becoming a Dragonador herself is the only way to turn their

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Henry, Katie Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $18.99 | May 17, 2022 978-0-06-295573-9

TOGETHER WE BURN

Ibañez, Isabel Wednesday Books (368 pp.) $18.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-250-80335-1

A 16-year-old detective discovers that noir films are at best iffy guides to both real-life crime investigations and personal relationships.

Pulled away from his bedroom and massive library of old movies by Lily Krupitsky-Sharma, a childhood friend–turned– ex-friend since middle school, who asks for help with a story she’s secretly writing for the school newspaper, Gideon finds himself both intrigued by oddities in their SoCal town’s crime statistics and dazzled by the paper’s smart, charismatic, bisexual editor-in-chief, Tess Espinoza. Deftly twirling noir and rom-com tropes together, Henry chucks in, on the one hand, a corpse, all sorts of conveniently placed evidence of police corruption, and even a comprehensive overheard confession, and on the other, a meet-cute in a bustling newsroom that leads Gideon and Tess into a heady and hilarious high school romance that is likewise chock full of revelations and confessions. Gifted with Sherlock-ian powers of observation, Gideon is so full of himself that he actually wears a trench coat and a fedora. Still, by the end he has not only learned how to rein in his impulse to blurt out infuriating personal comments, but has found ways to mend his relations with Lily and with his single dad, too. Gideon’s father is Mexican and White, and brown-skinned Lily has two moms; names cue some ethnic diversity in the supporting cast.

A tongue-in-cheek charmer: Sit back and enjoy the show.

(Fiction. 13-17)

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fortunes around—but the only person available to train her is Arturo Díaz de Montserrat, an infuriatingly stubborn dragon hunter who abhors everything her family stands for. However, Arturo is her last hope, and Zarela will do anything to convince him to help her. As sparks fly between the two, fire and smoke fall on Zarela’s home. This beautifully written romantic fantasy features Spanish-speaking characters as well as a gripping, sexy enemies-to-lovers romance with fierce, strong-headed protagonists who dance around—and toward—each other. At its core lie magic, a mystery that pulls no punches, and thoughtful examinations of tradition and inheritance.

A terrific stand-alone fantasy. (list of guilds, list of dragons) (Fantasy. 14-adult)

TOKYO DREAMING

Jean, Emiko Flatiron Books (336 pp.) $18.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-250-76663-2 Series: Tokyo Ever After, 2 A newly minted royal navigates her way between royal protocols and her own heart.

Soon after Japanese American Izumi and her mom reconnect with her father, the crown prince of Japan in Tokyo Ever After (2021), Izumi feels as uncertain as before. While her best friends at home in California prepare for college, Izumi debates taking a gap year, questioning whether she even wants to attend college. Her recently acquired title of princess brings even more pressure to attend the prestigious University of Tokyo like her father.

When Izumi’s reunited parents announce their engagement, the family is informed that the marriage must be approved by the Imperial Household Council, and their prospects don’t look good; the tabloids have long been critical of Izumi’s and her mother’s manners and commoner status. On the cusp of having her family finally come together, Izumi decides to become the perfect princess to support their cause. This is not without its challenges, however, as her boyfriend and former bodyguard, Akio, breaks up with her to help her family avoid more scandal.

Heartbroken Izumi finds unexpected allies while navigating her lingering feelings for Akio and embroiling her cute, officially approved tutor—a young man from a noble lineage—in a fake dating scheme. Themes of family relationships and incremental growth take precedence over romance in the evenly paced plot.

The true appeal here is watching Izumi rise to royal expectations while reaffirming her personal values.

A solid sequel about a princess finding her voice. (Fiction.

14-18)

THE QUEEN OF JUNK ISLAND

Jones, Alexandra Mae Annick Press (400 pp.) $18.95 | May 3, 2022 978-1-77321-635-5

After experiencing sexual trauma, Dell is lost.

Socially ungraceful and an outsider at school, she’s spending the summer at the island cottage where her mother, Anne, grew up, with Anne’s new boyfriend, Joe, and his daughter, Ivy. Her days are filled with picking up trash dumped by an unruly tenant and little else. Anne is overprotective and seems to like prickly Ivy more than her own daughter; Ivy has something against Dell from the outset. On top of that, Dell is being haunted by her maternal Aunt Julie, who was disavowed by the family and died the year before Dell was born. Jones never shies away from brutally honest discussions 152

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“Nerdy sweetness will keep both furry and nonfurry readers turning pages.” a furry faux paw

of sexual topics that were even more taboo in the 2000s when the book is set, capturing in particular the toxicity of biphobia as Dell is confused by her intense desire, earlier for boys and now, for Ivy. Ivy’s relationship with Dell shifts from possible stepsisters to cautious almost-friends to lovers; at its core it is about two difficult girls who understand each other’s strangeness better than anyone else. The Ontario setting isn’t claustrophobic, rather allowing the characters to exist within their own universe. As Dell excavates family secrets, it’s clear this is also a story about intergenerational love; understanding ghosts, both internal and external; and becoming a person who will allow others to love them. Dell and her family are White; Joe is unspecified First Nations, and Ivy’s mother is White.

Haunting, unusual, and real. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)

A FURRY FAUX PAW

Kennedy, Brian D. Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-06-308565-7 Country music, Southern food, and teenage dreaming populate this earnest debut.

Emmett Maguire knows exactly who he wants to be, and that’s country music’s biggest gay star. Luke Barnes knows who he wants to be, too, but he’s not about to tell anyone about it.

When, at 17, both boys find themselves working summer jobs at Wanda World—a fictional, Dollywood-esque amusement park in Tennessee owned by country star Wanda Jean Stubbs—their very different lives collide. Romance blooms as the pair struggle under the burden of multiple secrets. No more can Luke bring himself to come out than tell his mother, who has multiple sclerosis, that the theme park is keeping food on their family table:

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Kara, Jessica Page Street (288 pp.) $17.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-64567-526-6

A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY

High school senior Maeve Stephens is a furry. She’s not a full-on fursuiter, but wearing her cat ears is one of the few things that makes her happy.

Maeve’s MauveCat fursona helps her cope with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s extreme hoarding. While she doesn’t have many reallife friends, she has a strong and loyal online following. Maeve has her eye on a prestigious art school in Portland, Oregon, so when her father offers to pay for Furlympia, a local furry con, Maeve jumps at the chance to meet her online art mentor and idol, Sunspire, who might be able to help her snag a scholarship to her dream school. But when Maeve’s mother refuses to let her attend Furlympia, Maeve decides to go anyway. While there, Maeve keeps her new friends at arm’s length while she battles with separating her home and furry lives. Luckily her community is persistent in showing her support. This is an uplifting story of finding oneself despite the pull of a loved one’s severe mental illness: Maeve navigates her emotions and relationships in a positive way, keeping readers rooting for her success and happiness. The timeline is sometimes fuzzy, but the nerdy sweetness will keep both furry and nonfurry readers turning pages. Maeve, who is questioning whether she is asexual, is cued as White; there is some diversity among supporting characters.

An endearing story about coping with struggles and finding your chosen family. (Fiction. 14-18)

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“A sweet, charming story with both heartwarming and heart-rending moments.” love radio

A messy history ties Wanda Jean to his grandmother, and the job feels like a betrayal. As more of this history comes to light, the novel teeters on the edge of drama but ultimately veers away from exploring this tension. In alternating first-person point of view chapters, Luke and Emmett parse their tumultuous summer with a pinch too much editorializing to ring true. Couldbe-complex mosaics of character development end up more paint-by-numbers. The leading characters are White; Emmett’s new friends and co-workers, one Chinese American and one Black, embody other country music outliers as they fight alongside him for representation.

Stifled by the weight of its own good intentions, the story struggles to maintain a human spark. (Romance. 13-17)

GAMER GIRLS 25 Women Who Built the Video Game Industry

Kenney, Mary Illus. by Salini Perera Running Press Kids (160 pp.) $17.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-7624-7456-1

A collective biography of women pioneers and stars of the gaming industry.

Repeated questions from girls about whether it was worth it to enter this field in the light of things like Gamergate, the racist and misogynistic mid-2010s harassment campaign that still affects online gaming communities, prompted Kenney, a game developer with an impressive resume, to highlight the triumphs of women in the industry and demonstrate that women have been influential players in the industry for many decades. The brief biographies are tightly focused on the women’s careers and what brought them to gaming, with interests in storytelling, puzzles, and, naturally, computers frequently recurring. They open with a framing of the individuals’ best-known accomplishments and number of years in the industry. Kenney infuses humor where she can as a counterbalance to industry jargon and the unavoidable repetition in the women’s stories. While most of the women appear to be White in the stylized illustrated portraits and lack racial descriptors in their chapters (Kenney cites 2019 data that, of the fewer than 25% of game designers who identify as female, 81% are White), Asian and Black women are also represented as well as trans women. Sidebar paragraphs spotlight even more women in the industry. Perera’s arresting full-page portraits rendered in shades of purple and orange with black and white accents open each entry; spot art adds further visual interest.

A solid reference work that shows aspiring female game developers the legacy they’d be joining. (glossary, bibliography, notes) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

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MURDER FOR THE MODERN GIRL

Kulper, Kendall Holiday House (464 pp.) $19.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-8234-4972-9 Is she a glam, airhead flapper—or a serial killer of wicked men?

It’s 1927, and 18-year-old Ruby, the daughter of the state’s attorney, is known as someone who’s always up for a good time, a gorgeous party girl who dances with all the fellows.

Nobody knows that Ruby can read minds, so none of her many casual beaus can guess that Ruby knows exactly who the unredeemable characters are. Certainly nobody has any idea that sometimes Ruby dons a wig and secretes about her person some arsenic (or cyanide, strychnine, belladonna, or chloroform— she’s not choosy!) in order to remove some extremely dangerous character from the scene. Enter Guy, 18, a morgue employee who can transform his appearance to look like anyone. All he wants is to learn enough about his special ability to control it, but in order to do that, he might have to solve a string of mysterious poisoning murders across the city. Can the would-be detective, doomed to perpetual disguise, have a romance with a sexy murderess? In a vivacious, corrupt, Prohibition-era Chicago where everyone appears to be White, characters speak in smart-alecky slang, and tropes collide chaotically to diverting effect. At times, the dependence on genre conventions results in stereotyping, for example around weight and social class.

A femme fatale heroine, a crime that mustn’t be solved: noir turned merrily upside down. (Noir paranormal. 13-17)

LOVE RADIO

LaDelle, Ebony Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $19.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-66590-815-3 A story of Black love in its many beautiful forms.

Danielle Ford is in her senior year of high school in Detroit. She dreams of becoming an author like the Black women writers she looks up to and has spent years honing her skills. However, since experiencing a traumatic assault last year—something she has kept secret from her family and closest friends—Dani has been unable to write or socialize like before. Her sole refuge lies in writing letters to her idols—Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks—sharing her thoughts and feelings. Meanwhile, her classmate Prince Jones has had a crush on her since middle school. He works as a radio DJ, giving out advice on love, but ironically Prince’s own life is lacking in the romance department. Most of his time is spent taking care of his younger brother and disabled mother.

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of his dreams, Prince seizes it. Cynical Dani is surprised to find herself accepting Prince’s challenge to get her to fall in love with him in only three dates. LaDelle does a fantastic job of bringing the complex, dynamic personalities and relationships of her characters to life while highlighting romantic, familial, and platonic love as well as self-love. Strong pacing allows the storylines to flow organically. Readers will find themselves hooked from the first page to the last.

A sweet, charming story with both heartwarming and heart-rending moments. (Romance. 14-18)

FLIP THE SCRIPT

Lee, Lyla Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-06-293693-6

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A melancholy tin woodsman and a troubled teenager help each other through bad patches in this debut graphic novel.

Expanding on a self-published comic released in 2017, Madson connects Solar, who has abandoned both engineering college plans and the spacecraft she was helping her little brother, Fenn, build in the garage to hang out with sociopathic boyfriend Merrick, and funnel-topped Campbell.

Campbell is struggling to understand what feelings are all about ever since he left the Tin Forest to get his clockwork heart. Adolescent readers confronting life-altering changes and decisions of their own will have no trouble identifying with Solar and Campbell, who, even when surrounded by others, look lonely and introspective in the precisely drawn, palely hued art. Initially drawn together by their fondness for Fenn, whose hurt and sense of being betrayed by his once-idolized sister haven’t stopped him from working enthusiastically on the rocket, the two become fast friends united by a mutual loss of certainty about what life has to offer them. But along with including among his various borrowings from the Wizard of Oz books a massive climatic whirlwind for drama, the author casts sneering, violent Merrick as such a thoroughly rotten apple that Solar’s eventual breakaway comes as an easy choice that points the way (Oz-like) to a tidy, happy ending. Nearly all the lanky human figures in the atmospherically wintry settings read as White.

There’s plenty of heart, and not just the mechanical kind, in this spare, sensitive friendship tale. (Graphic fantasy. 12-15)

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A rookie K-drama actress experiences love triangles both on screen and off.

After uprooting her family’s life in Florida to pursue an acting career in Seoul, 16-year-old Hana Jin finally scored a leading role in a much-anticipated television series. But when the ratings for the first episode aren’t what the network hoped for, Hana is thrown into a fake dating relationship with her male co-star, K-pop idol Bryan Yoon. On top of that, the network surprises everyone by bringing in Hana’s former best friend, actress Minjee Park, to play Hana’s on-screen rival for Bryan’s character’s affections.

But the love triangle on the show isn’t the only one that’s developing. Bryan shows real feelings and interest in Hana, but she can’t deny her developing attraction to Minjee. While trying to secure her position on the show, bisexual Hana must learn to navigate the harsh entertainment world and her complicated love life. K-drama viewers especially will love this lighthearted, page-turning homage to the genre that is filled with many recognizable tropes and behind-the-scenes looks at the industry.

Hana’s career, interactions with the network, and encounters with fans and paparazzi demonstrate the intense, often overwhelming lifestyle and pressures of being an actress in Korea.

With the inclusion of LGBTQ+ themes, the story challenges Korea’s heteronormative culture and media. The novel also transports readers to popular destinations in and around Seoul, beautifully highlighting Korean food and culture.

A fun and boundary-pushing take on typical K-drama romances. (Romance. 13-18)

TIN MAN

Madson, Justin Amulet/Abrams (224 pp.) $24.99 | $17.99 paper | April 19, 2022 978-1-4197-5104-2 978-1-4197-5105-9 paper

DEVOTION (ADAPTED FOR YOUNG ADULTS) An Epic Story of Heroism and Friendship Makos, Adam Delacorte (368 pp.) $18.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-48145-5

In this young readers’ adaptation of the 2015 title for adults by the same name, a courageous pilot’s moral compass makes him go against his rule-following tendencies in a bid to save his friend behind enemy lines.

The atrocities of war became the backdrop for a unique and unlikely friendship. In 1949, Jesse Brown from Mississippi was one of only five African Americans among the Navy’s 45,000 officers. In contrast, Tom Hudner was a young White man of means from Massachusetts when he entered the Naval Academy. These two officers navigated the racism that percolated kirkus.com

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just beneath the surface of the Navy, complicating their initial steps toward friendship. The author’s exploration of the internal lives of both men helps explain their actions and highlight their true natures, leading up to the tragic moment when Hudner risked his life in a vain attempt to save Brown, an act for which he later received a Medal of Honor. The Korean War and its aftermath become real; readers learn about the physical realities of being on the front lines as people witnessed death up close and the responsibility they felt afterward to honor those who served valiantly. Historical photos provide an added level of humanity. The strong pacing will keep readers’ senses alert and fully engaged as they fly through danger with these brave men.

A breathtaking account of the experiences of two naval pilots during the Korean War. (photo credits) (Nonfiction. 12-17)

BEING YOU The Body Image Book for Boys

Markey, Charlotte, Daniel Hart & Douglas Zacher Illus. by @DanTheScribbler Cambridge Univ. (200 pp.) $14.95 paper | April 7, 2022 978-1-108-94937-8

Following Markey’s The Body Image Book for Girls (2020), this title coauthored with Hart and Zacher offers an extended pep talk aimed at tween and teen boys.

Bolstered by personal statements and advice from dozens of interviewees in their midteens to mid-20s—including one who discusses his transition, another who is gay and Black, a little person, and a 15-year-old with diabetes—the co-authors, academics from the field of psychology, urge readers to be comfortable in their own skins rather than trying to be like celebrities, influencers, or professional athletes. The approach isn’t so much “anything goes” as common-sensical; aside from occasional strictures against, for instance, nutritional supplements, sexting, and food fads, the general course recommended is a middle one.

Occasional fast food or soda is OK so long as there is plenty of fresh and home-prepared food in the mix; exercise is important but shredded abs are not; and self-compassion achieves better results than setting unrealistic goals. The increasing obesity of American youth receives a single glancing mention, and the book supports the Health at Every Size framework.

The research-based content, backed up by checklists, quotes from doctors, and resources, lends heft to the upbeat message.

While debunking the myth that boys are not susceptible to eating disorders, the focus is less on problems than finding ways to acknowledge them and move on. The illustrations are mostly diagrams or graphic-style spot art.

The positivity is relentless, but anxious readers may be left feeling a bit less pressured. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

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RIVALS

McGee, Katharine Random House (400 pp.) $19.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-593-42970-9 Series: American Royals, 3 All bets are off as Beatrice assumes the throne and America’s royal family gets shaken up.

In this follow-up to Majesty (2020), the royals are back for another bout of drama and gossip with all the fashion and luxury trappings fans of the series have come to expect. Beatrice attends a royal convention known as the League of Kings; Jefferson rules as regent during her absence; and Samantha sorts out her relationship with Marshall. The wheel of power turns, and love triangles sharpen as each chapter presents a different royal’s point of view. It gets a bit dizzying at times, and newcomers will be absolutely lost. Returning fans will eat it all up with a silver spoon, though. There are plenty of high-society vistas and lofty alternate history lessons here, peppered in among the drama and excessive wealth that help this hit the mark perfectly: The boys are hunky, the women are catty, the dresses are lovely, and the drama keeps coming. The royals may whine about being under a microscope from time to time, but the author knows readers would switch places with Beatrice or Samantha in a second, and she doesn’t shy away from indulging them. The book—and series—is better off for it. The main cast is presumed White save for Latinx Nina.

A fun romp that gives its readers exactly what they want.

(Fiction. 14-18)

SUMMER’S EDGE

Mele, Dana Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $19.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-5344-9311-7 One of them betrayed another. One of them kissed a killer. One of them killed their best friend.

Chelsea, Ryan, Chase, Kennedy, and Mila—four high school friends and one interloper—come together on the anniversary of the fire that leveled Kennedy’s family’s lake house and killed their friend Emily. The cause of the blaze was never revealed. Though the friends have spent 10 summers together at the lake, a not-so-friendly game of Truth or Dare in the newly rebuilt mansion, hauntingly similar to the original, causes them to question whether one of them is responsible for Emily’s death. The multiple love triangles that surface provide further fuel for discord among them. Present-day events intermingle with memories of the night of the fire and flashbacks to past summers and lend a disconnected, nightmarish quality to the story. Told from various points of view, the novel’s primary |

“Fresh twists keep pages turning, eerily and heartbreakingly building toward a satisfying conclusion.” deep in providence

narrator is Chelsea, recently released from a year in a psychiatric hospital and taking medications that make her less than reliable. A second voice is presumed to be that of the deceased Emily, and the presence of the paranormal is apparent from the outset. A terrifying secret is revealed when Kennedy picks up the narrative almost halfway into the story. A surprising and satisfying ending ties it all together and makes sense of the disparate parts. All characters are cued as White.

Psychologically chilling and unforgettable. (Thriller. 13-adult)

DEEP IN PROVIDENCE

Neilson, Riss M. Henry Holt (480 pp.) $18.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-250-78852-8

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Oclon, Kim Trism Books (318 pp.) $12.95 paper | May 7, 2022 978-1-7363474-0-9

High school graduates with a secret follow divergent paths.

A hidden love connects two young White men from Chicago in Oclon’s Vietnam War–era novel. Their relationship is put to the test by time, distance, and circumstance, as Anthony, an Italian American mechanic, enlists in the Army to serve in Vietnam and Sam leaves for college to work toward his dream of becoming a professor. Sam, who reads as White, edges into campus activism at the urging of a friend, while Anthony experiences the unpredictable, dangerous life of a soldier. With separation defining their romantic relationship, the young men see little of each other; cryptic letters and careful visits result in most of their time being spent hiding their innermost feelings from other people—and sometimes each other. After Anthony’s return, they struggle to communicate across the distance of postwar trauma. The historical elements, while accurate, don’t always convey the urgency of being embroiled in this turbulent era as closeted gay men, instead creating a backdrop for complex social themes without strong emotional resonance. Though the novel relies heavily on the inner lives of these young men, the details they share don’t always advance the plot. As a result, scenes sometimes feel observational rather than organically driven by the characters’ identities. Nevertheless, this may appeal as a less intense read for fans of historical fiction.

A sanitized snapshot of a tumultuous time. (author’s note, sources) (Historical fiction. 14-18)

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Three Rhode Island high school seniors plan to magically resurrect their dead best friend.

Told through alternating perspectives, the novel follows the three main characters as they wrestle with various forms of grief as well as other pressing issues. Biracial Natalie, who doesn’t know her Black father, is terrified that her drug-addicted White mother will overdose and die. Inez suffers from anxiety, wrestles with her Catholic upbringing, and worries about sponsoring her father’s immigration after he was deported to the Dominican Republic. Miliani misses her mysteriously distant mother as well as her late grandfather, who taught her magical practices from the Philippines. Each of them struggles profoundly with their friend Jasmine’s sudden death in a drunken driving accident, particularly Miliani, who was in love with Jasmine. She blames herself for what happened and will stop at nothing to bring Jasmine back—even if it comes to forcing Jasmine’s surviving identical twin to host her dead sister’s resurrected spirit, a part of the plan she keeps secret from the others. Heartbroken, Miliani leads her friends to dangerously pursue dark magic that pushes their limits and unearths many secrets. Fresh twists keep pages turning, eerily and heartbreakingly building toward a satisfying conclusion in which questions are answered. The mysteries are skillfully layered, and the expert pacing keeps the story flowing well.

Riveting, deeply moving, and full of heart. (Paranormal.

14-18)

THE WAR ON ALL FRONTS

ANIMAL ALLIES 15 Amazing Women in Wildlife Research

Pagel-Hogan, Elizabeth Chicago Review Press (224 pp.) $16.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-64160-622-6 Series: Women of Power, 4 Encourages readers to appreciate the animal world and those who study it.

Pagel-Hogan profiles 15 women making a meaningful impact on wildlife. The message of the book is clear: However difficult the path may be for women in STEM, there are role models leading the way and encouraging teens to pursue the same paths. Organized into broad sections by the type of animal life in question—birds, arthropods, sea creatures, reptiles and amphibians, and mammals—each chapter gives context through the lens of one particular woman. The book notes gender and racial biases they have faced as well as their activism. The subjects come from countries including kirkus.com

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“An unusual Holocaust novel told through the eyes of a cognizant, questioning teen.” what world is left

the United States, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, England, India, and Hungary. One thing they all share is a love for nature and a desire for positive change, and their passion shines through on the pages. The book highlights its subjects in a relatable way by covering both their personal and professional struggles and accomplishments, which will be motivating and empowering to teens; their social media handles are included so that readers can continue to follow their activities. The language of the book is accessible, employing an engaging narrative style while interspersing additional relevant information on topics such as Black Birders Week, a Wikibomb to address gender imbalances in Wikipedia, threats to wildlife species, and more.

Engaging and inspiring profiles of women wildlife heroes. (resources, notes) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

WHAT WORLD IS LEFT

Polak, Monique Orca (240 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 17, 2022 978-1-4598-3303-6

Anneke Van Raalte’s nonpracticing Dutch Jewish family is sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp that the Nazis try to pass off as a model settlement.

Fourteen in 1943, she lives through two years of scarce food, bedbugs, forced labor, and little privacy. Still, life here is preferential to being transported to death camps like Auschwitz, a fate suffered by many, including her best friend and the boy with whom she falls in love. Her family survives, but the Russian liberators and Dutch military are later suspicious: Did her father’s artistic work keep the family alive?

Anneke struggles with these thoughts. She details the Nazis’ grandiose plans for the Embellishment, a facade created to fool the 1944 Danish Red Cross committee, which included her father’s fairy-tale murals in the children’s infirmary. In this firstperson narrative, Anneke is keenly aware of the moral choices her father and other artists make even as they create clandestine drawings documenting their true plight. This novel, based on the author’s mother’s memories and a book by her maternal grandfather, cartoonist and illustrator Jo Spier, explores the situation of artists who were used by the Nazis to help cover up their heinous crimes. Originally published in 2008, this edition includes a new preface and references. Polak writes authentically, including appropriate details about the camp’s horrors and insights into her protagonist’s conflicted feelings about friendship, romance, family, and religion.

An unusual Holocaust novel told through the eyes of a cognizant, questioning teen. (author’s note, organizations) (His­ torical fiction. 12-16)

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SAVING EARTH Climate Change and the Fight for Our Future

Rhuday-Perkovich, Olugbemisola Illus. by Tim Foley Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $21.99 | April 5, 2022 978-0-374-31305-0 A caustic indictment of this country’s foot-dragging response to the threat of climate disaster, paired with a rising international chorus of younger voices raised in protest.

In the author’s view it’s no longer an impending threat: “Unfortunately, long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario.”

In language as acerbic as the famously take-no-prisoners activist Greta Thunberg’s, Rhuday-Perkovich draws from Nathaniel Rich’s terrifying Losing Earth (2019) to point out evidence that scientists have been telling us what was in the atmospheric cards since the mid-1850s. She also traces the political failures—orchestrated in large part, she claims, by the petroleum industry’s lobbying organization, “ironically called the Global Climate Coalition”—that culminated in the disastrous policy reversals of the Trump administration. Readers will be jolted out of any sense of complacency through the inclusion of success stories like New York’s student-led Styrofoam Out of Schools initiative, quotes from Thunberg and dozens of other activists from numerous countries and cultures, descriptions of ways of coping with climate change anxiety, and too rarely made observations about how environmental issues are inextricably linked to issues of race, class, and gender. Foley, illustrator of the Epic Fails series, adds further sauce in caricature portraits ranging from President Donald Trump with fingers in his ears to climate heroes in spandex. Rich supplies an introduction.

Argues persuasively that it’s not going to be a pretty future—or much of a future at all—without drastic action soon. (endnotes, resources, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

FINDING JUPITER

Rowe, Kelis Crown (320 pp.) $18.99 | $21.99 PLB | May 31, 2022 978-0-593-42925-9 978-0-593-42926-6 PLB Two teens’ summer romance gets complicated by a long-kept family secret.

Jupiter Moon Ray Evans’ parents were in a car accident the day she was born—her father died, and her mom suddenly became both a widow and a mother. Ray is named after the dad she never knew, and his absence is a tangible part of her family. She hates that her birthday can never just be about her, but this year her best friend from boarding school is coming to Memphis, and they are celebrating at the roller rink, the one place Ray can get lost in her own world. While skating she |

meets Orion, and for both of them, it is love at first sight. Orion is also missing a piece of his family: Almost 10 years ago his little sister was hit and killed by a bus, and his happy family was destroyed. Orion finds a feeling of peace in swimming, which helps with his sensory processing disorder as well as providing an escape from his dad’s grief. Although the two Black teens will be in different states in the fall, they tentatively pursue a relationship. However, when a family secret that links them is revealed, they must decide if they can ever be anything to one another. Through a blend of prose and found poetry, this quiet novel thoughtfully explores the impact of absence on love.

An emotional debut that celebrates the joy that comes from healing. (Fiction. 13-17)

IMPROBABLE MAGIC FOR CYNICAL WITCHES

The “least witchy person in Salem” finds herself in the unlikely position of joining a coven and pursuing a new romance.

Nearly a year ago, Eleanor lost Chloe, the girl she loved, and became a pariah. Now, she spends her time working at the Salem Gift Emporium and numbing her emotions by smoking pot. The day Eleanor meets a cute girl called Pixie, a unique package arrives at the shop with a handmade tarot guide. The Fool card, which opens the book, signifies a new beginning; Eleanor’s story continues along the path of the major arcana, with conversational explanations of the cards between chapters.

The narrative smoothly shifts between Eleanor’s blossoming romance with Pix and, through flashbacks, a gradual reveal of Eleanor’s toxic relationship with Chloe. Pix is part of a coven, and together the witches participate in ceremonial activities and pagan celebrations (the story stays firmly rooted in realism). Scelsa’s sophomore novel excels at portraying realistic teens who have big emotions and sometimes make frustrating choices. It doesn’t shy away from the cruelty some are capable of, but the overall tone is hopeful. Supportive relationships are showcased, such as Eleanor’s with her mom, who has chronic pain from Lyme disease. The Salem setting is richly depicted, and the story thoughtfully grapples with consumer culture.

Eleanor, Chloe, and Pix are White; secondary characters are racially diverse.

Magic is found through personal growth and accepting love in this enchanting tale. (Fiction. 14-18)

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In 1990 Manhattan the paths of two young men intertwine.

Eighteen-year-old Ben, fashionable and repressed, is forced to live with his doctor brother, Gil, when his mother kicks him out after discovering that he’s gay. It’s there that he meets Gil’s girlfriend, Rebecca, an up-andcoming magazine and fashion photographer who understands him and nurtures his gifts. It’s also where he keeps seeing Adam, a 17-year-old who’s facing the horrors of the AIDS epidemic for the first time. Adam’s boyfriend, Callum, a smart, passionate musician with dreams of conducting, is HIV-positive, and his illness has progressed enough that it’s impacting his life. Adam fights to be a good boyfriend, to be responsible, and to keep Callum in his life until the end. Callum’s death ultimately brings Ben and Adam together, but the story is not just about their connection; it’s about the history of New York and the people who fought and coped, loved and lost, died and survived during the years when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence. The novel is a love letter to this time and place and to the people of Manhattan. It masterfully pulls at the heartstrings, but logical readers may notice some inconsistencies, particularly in the portrayals of Adam’s alternately attentive and distant parents.

Still, this is a touching and beautiful story that comes close to touching the stars. All main characters read as White.

A heartfelt reminder of a beautiful and terrible time in history. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-adult)

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Scelsa, Kate Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-06-246503-0

WHEN YOU CALL MY NAME

Shaw, Tucker Henry Holt (368 pp.) $17.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-250-62486-4

THE NOH FAMILY

Shim, Grace K. Kokila (384 pp.) $18.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-46273-7

A sort-of-princess story, with all the appealing ingredients of a K-drama.

Eighteen-year-old Chloe Chang, who has grown up in Oklahoma, feels “not quite 100 percent Korean” but then she’s never known any relatives other than her immigrant mother. Her father, who supposedly had no other family, died before she was born, and her mom’s income as a nurse means Chloe has to tuck away her dream of studying fashion in New York. When her BFFs persuade her to take a 23andMe DNA test—insert “The Dramatic Pause,” K-drama style—she discovers her extended family on her paternal side in Korea.

Before she knows it, she’s off to Seoul to be reunited with one of its richest business families, the owners of a posh department store, all the while still upset at her mom for keeping her apart from them. What promises to be a fairy tale—a doting but kirkus.com

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“Intricate, nuanced, and empowering.” breathe and count back from ten

iron-fisted Halmoni, a pair of “ridiculously glamorous” cousins, and a family guesthouse complete with a personal chef—is suddenly derailed by perilous, devious twists and turns as Chloe desperately tries to make connections between her father’s past and her present. Just like Chloe’s favorite K-dramas, the novel sucks readers in from the get-go with lots of glitz, grit, and a hint of romance as well as a handsome assistant who always has an umbrella at the ready, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and cutting insights into familial and societal dynamics.

An enjoyable, pacy family drama. (Fiction. 12-18)

MILO AND MARCOS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Snipes, Kevin Christopher HarperTeen (384 pp.) $17.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-06-306256-6

A teen boy figures out his true feelings in this heartfelt page-turner.

Milo Connolly is a “super-religious, super-shy nerd”—or at least that’s what his fellow seniors would say. Except for his agnostic soccer star best friend, Van, a girl he met at church, people in Port Orange, Florida, would be pressed to even remember him. All there seemingly is to Milo is being the son of adamantly Republican Presbyterian parents. It’s not completely untrue; he does appreciate the structure and clarity of church life, but there’s more to Milo than his timidity and anti-social inclinations. Like what happened at camp three years ago—or what almost happened, anyway—something he’d be happier burying forever. Except now, like a bad omen from the heavens, Marcos Price has come back into his life, and once they’re face to face, the earth literally moves. The more the boys explore their feelings for each other, the more the natural disasters pile up. Milo becomes convinced God is punishing him for being gay.

Now he must decide whether being with Marcos is worth it if it means the world is going to end. Milo’s journey is sincere and moving, written in engaging prose and wrapped up in a satisfying conclusion. Characters are well-rounded and believable, and it’s impossible not to root for them to get their happy endings.

Milo is White; Van is Puerto Rican, and Marcos is White and Cuban.

A funny, sweet, and emotional navigation of faith and queerness. (Fiction. 13-18)

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SEE YOU YESTERDAY

Solomon, Rachel Lynn Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $19.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-66590-192-5

Dorm-mates Barrett and Miles get stuck in a Groundhog Day–like time loop reliving their first day of college classes.

University of Washington first year Barrett Bloom wakes up at 6:50 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 21 (a date some will recognize from its Earth, Wind & Fire fame), shocked to find out that her high school nemesis, Lucie, is her new roommate. The day grows progressively worse after a science nerd named Miles humiliates her in Physics 101, she botches her newspaper staff interview, accidentally sets a frat house on fire, and gets locked out of her dorm room and is forced to sleep in the common room. But the next morning, it’s still Sept. 21. On her third time reliving the day, Barrett discovers that physics prodigy Miles Kasher-Okamoto has been experiencing the time loop for months, and now they’re both repeating the same day. Attempting to restart time, together they go on fun adventures, research scientific solutions (which appeal to Miles), and strive to be their best selves (which Barrett suspects is the solution). All the while, it’s clear their intense bonding is a slow-burn romance in the making. Both main characters are Jewish: Barrett is White, with a single mom who is bisexual; Miles has a Japanese American mother and White father. Vividly expressing the singularity of attraction, Solomon presents another inclusive, sex-positive love story featuring Jewish teens dealing with loneliness, stress, and secrets.

A swoon-y time-travel rom-com that captures the overwhelming nature of first love. (Romance. 14-18)

BREATHE AND COUNT BACK FROM TEN

Sylvester, Natalia Clarion/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $17.99 | May 10, 2022 978-0-358-53686-4 Stifled by her loving but repressive parents, a teen endeavors to take charge of her own life.

Seventeen-year-old Verónica Rentería’s parents forbid many things, especially promiscuity—which includes any romantic gesture, however innocent, leading Vero to feel ashamed of her own desires. But above all, she and her younger sister, Dani, must never attract attention; her family immigrated to Florida from Peru when Vero was small, and her parents caution that their permanent resident status is tenuous. Vero feels constant pressure to make their sacrifices worthwhile, but she can’t help standing out: Numerous surgeries for her hip dysplasia have left her with scars. And ever since her parents caught her making |

out with a boy, they’ve treated her like she’s “impossible to scrub clean.” Even her body is out of her control since her parents handle all of her medical decisions. Swimming is her only freedom, and Vero idolizes the aquatic performers at Mermaid Cove, a popular tourist attraction. So when Mermaid Cove advertises auditions, she wonders: Could becoming a mermaid enable her to finally tell her own story? Sylvester, who has hip dysplasia herself, poignantly braids multiple issues into Vero’s angry, vulnerable, and lyrical narration, including disability, sexism, and biculturalism. Vero’s messy but supportive relationship with Dani compassionately acknowledges the friction that can arise between disabled and nondisabled siblings, and her romance with Mexican American Alex, who deals with depression, gently explores trust and self-discovery.

Intricate, nuanced, and empowering. (author’s note) (Fic­ tion. 14-18)

THE LAST PRINCESS

The last living princess of an AngloSaxon kingdom goes on a quest to avenge the deaths of her family.

Northumbria, England, 866 C.E.: Edith is the eldest daughter of King Osberht, and at 17, she is preparing to inherit the crown one day even though normally only sons can assume the throne. Her father’s power is enough to override even the objections of the kingdoms’ eldermen. However, Edith’s dreams and ambitions end when her entire family is murdered and she is kidnapped by pirates and taken across the seas to become a slave in a Viking stronghold. It is in this alien world that Edith finds much to live for: a new family, romantic love, and success as a shield-maiden. But Edith cannot forget the inheritance she left behind or forgive the man responsible for her family’s deaths. When news from Northumbria reaches her doorstep, Edith vows to take back what is rightfully hers. This fast-paced historical novel builds on an obscure Anglo-Saxon king’s life to tell an empowering tale of a girl’s journey to fully embrace a new world, a new culture, and even a new religion as she grows into her own as a warrior.

Edith’s fierce and often violent quest for revenge is juxtaposed with lovely, life-affirming moments of friendship and love in an engaging first-person narrative.

A rewarding tale featuring a strong-willed female protagonist. (historical note, glossary) (Historical fiction. 14-18)

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Chinese American teens contend with the unpredictability of life.

Seventeen-year-old Serene Li has always admired her mother for moving from Beijing to the U.S. by herself while pregnant and achieving success as a single parent and trailblazing fashion designer. When her mother is diagnosed with stage 3 pancreatic cancer, Serene suddenly faces a future alone— unless she can find her father. Serene’s classmate Lian Chen also feels desperate. At school, he endures microaggressions from students and teachers; at home, he faces intense parental pressure to test into a competitive engineering program at MIT. Lian’s true passion is stand-up, but he knows his parents would never allow him to pursue such an uncertain career. When his college admissions counselor advises him to demonstrate leadership skills, Lian starts a Chinese club at school, counting on his classmates’ apathy to leave him with time and space to practice his comedy. He doesn’t anticipate popular, pretty Serene showing up to learn Chinese—or their gradual bonding over shared experiences, including being the only Asian American kids in their affluent, White Southern California town. The novel’s strength lies in its thoughtful, nuanced depictions of the teens’ complicated relationships with their immigrant parents, which deftly incorporates overarching themes of prejudice, assimilation, and heritage-seeking. Unfortunately, clunky wording in romantic scenes and a rushed, too-tidy conclusion that belies the book’s skill in portraying life’s complexity, unfairness, and unpredictability detract from the otherwise emotionally immersive story.

Overall, a compelling and genuine coming-of-age story.

(Fiction. 14-18)

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Wilson, Shelley BHC Press (256 pp.) $23.99 | May 24, 2022 978-1-64397-248-0

PRIVATE LABEL

Yang, Kelly Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $17.99 | May 31, 2022 978-0-06-294110-7

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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

A LIFE CYCLE by Nicole Asherah......................................................162 BEWILDERNESS by Kevin Cox........................................................168 THE PRINCIPLE OF 18 by Eyal N. Danon........................................168 THE INTROVERTED ARTIST by Lisa Downey................................. 170 BROKEN VESSELS by Trevor McCall.............................................. 175 FIRST PATIENTS by Rod Tanchanco..................................................179

BROKEN VESSELS

McCall, Trevor Trevor McCall (220 pp.) $14.00 paper | June 26, 2020 978-1-73436-525-2

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A LIFE CYCLE A Guide to Healing and Rediscovering Yourself

Asherah, Nicole Woven Ember Press (150 pp.) $12.99 paper | March 14, 2022 979-8-9851871-0-6

An intimate collection of poems traces a painful journey from trauma to healing to love.

In the Q&A section at the end of this volume, Asherah reveals that the preceding cycle of poems was written in response to a sexual assault that triggered memories of childhood trauma.

The resulting poetry eschews graphic depictions of harrowing events in favor of gentle exploration of the resulting sadness, grief, and mistrust that the speaker experienced. “What if you are only ever to be yourself in pieces?” is the question that launches her path toward recovery. This journey is divided into four sections, each composed of short, mostly untitled poems.

“The Shattering” confronts “The broken pieces / Scraping at my open heart.” This section also addresses methods of survival: “And I can deal with individual losses, / I learned to never put all my weight on one leg.” “The Healing” similarly focuses on the symbiosis of damage and recovery: “Sometimes the heaviness is there / To keep you from floating a w a y.” One of the few titled works, “A Woman’s Bones Are of the Earth,” effectively grounds the entire collection in women’s lived experience: “If we did not learn how to tend to wounds / We would never have been able to survive.” The third section, “Light Shines Through,” is a fierce affirmation of life, as the speaker proclaims, “I’ve broken into my version of a masterpiece,” and describes other people as “an explosion of renewable fuel.” The last section, “Loving,” is a celebration of the heady and excruciating passions of a newfound romantic love. In showing how her speaker was profoundly moved by a relationship with another woman, Asherah is both an articulate romantic (“No one had ever held such curiosity / For the small ponderings in my head”) and a skillful dissector of feelings: “I don’t even know if it’s her I want, / Or just the feelings she brought out in me.” It’s the poet’s refusal to simplify the contradictory web of human existence that gives this book its power.

A compassionate and accessible poetry cycle about loving oneself in the aftermath of violation.

A LEAP YEAR OF FIRSTS How I Found My “Why” as a Small Business Owner During the Challenging Year of the Pandemic Baldwin, Keith L. BookBaby (298 pp.) $19.99 paper | Jan. 14, 2022 978-1-66781-296-0

HANGING OUT WITH THE MOST HIGH GOD Books One and Two

Bell, Gordon Kinard Lulu.com (488 pp.) $29.00 978-1-105-55098-0

A young man with a troubled past seeks to reconcile with his family and his convictions.

Bell’s debut chronicles the adolescence of Billy Lymon, a Black South Jersey orphan who, as the

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A man embarks on a full year of firsttime experiences in this debut memoir.

On Dec. 5, 2019, Baldwin heard a speech by LuAnn Cahn, the author of I Dare Me (2013), a book about how she set out to try something new each day for a year. He was inspired to try the same thing in the upcoming leap year of 2020. He originally thought about starting, as Cahn did, by joining the Polar Bear Plunge in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where a group of brave souls happily plunge into freezing-cold water on New Year’s Day, but his doctor, who was treating him for heart issues, sensibly warned him to try something warmer instead. This funny and realistic tone informs the entire book, which is drawn from a journal Baldwin kept of his discoveries; indeed, even starting a personal journal was one of his firsts. Others included smoking a cigarette, tying a bow tie, and binge-watching a TV series (the Ken Burns documentary miniseries The Vietnam War). Baldwin kicks off his calendar with a heartfelt and unexpectedly moving sketch of a youth in which he grew up poor; he also recounts his experiences shepherding small businesses through successful and not-so-successful times. However, his daily discoveries are the most notable parts of the narrative. Some situations are dire, as when he was rushed to an emergency room due to complications from a heart procedure and when he was forced to lay off 45 employees during the Covid-19 pandemic; others were hilarious, as when he baked medical-marijuana brownies for his mother, which made the whole house smell of pot. Notably, all are accompanied by his standing good-natured challenge to readers: “Is there something that you have grown up around, that you have taken for granted—that you have not experienced yet?” he asks. “There is no time like NOW.” It’s this insistent but gentle prodding to shake off complacency that is the book’s trickiest element; it could easily have come across as preachy, but in Baldwin’s hands, it’s consistently encouraging.

An engaging journey through new challenges.

novel opens in 1971, plans his own suicide as an escape from the stifling confines of his foster family’s farmhouse. Despite a relatively happy childhood, he flunked out of college early. At the age of 19, Billy foresees his “dead-end life” as a gay Black man in racist America with a disapproving family. His fatal master plan is overshadowed by his foster mother. She confesses that his birth mother, while a teenager pregnant with him, was murdered by an unhinged woman who felt she could more appropriately raise him. After hearing this crushing news, he becomes distracted by witchy rituals, memories of his drug-addled past, and the acceptance of himself as a gay man despite a firm belief in God and a desire for spiritual intervention. In a surprise twist, Billy becomes born again and, after hearing God’s spectral guidance, begins planning a California relocation. But he lands in New York City, where Billy plays “the role of a good Christian” as he navigates the urban landscape’s seedier side and mingles with a downtrodden community. This inner-city education dictates the work’s second part and less compellingly continues Billy’s search for personal peace and his struggle to harmonize the queer and pious parts of himself. In the book’s chapterless format, the serviceable narration has a tendency to sermonize and thus lose focus and direction, often making the tale more of a religious text than a story about a man’s quest for contentment. In addition, Billy’s proselytizing to an effeminate gay man with a lisp strikes a sour note. While a bit bloated and heavily infused with biblical and Christian references, Bell’s fusion of queerness with religion is intriguing in its attempt to reconcile the gap between the two historically disparate factions. Readers who ascribe to both affiliations will find a uniquely inspiring and enlightening reading experience and a perspective rarely found in contemporary gay novels. It’s an odd literary combination that somehow, in the New Jersey author’s narrative hands, successfully affords its character personal freedom and redemption.

A dense, religiously themed tale that’s wonderfully liberated by faith, sexuality, and wanderlust.

A DRAGON OF TURICUM Heirs of Regula

Bracher, C.R. Independently Published (342 pp.) $14.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jan. 2, 2022 979-8-7905-6537-3 A prince vying for success in his father’s competitive kingdom sets out to slay a dragon in this fantasy adventure.

In the realm of Guaraci, 17-year-old Eldred is the son of King Alfred, ruler of the Deirans. He attends the Academy as a squire, where skilled young fighters eventually Bond with the Night Mother, a deity who bestows enhanced strength and speed. Eldred, however, is overdue to Bond, and Headmaster Tibbot thinks he probably never will. The teen is half Mercian, thanks to Queen Ghyslaine, and is relentlessly teased about his unusually tall stature. If he fails his trial at the Academy, Eldred won’t become a warrior and will disgrace the king. This pressure |

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making history During Women’s History Month, Kirkus Indie recommends three books that tell very different stories of real-life women writers of years past: Young readers will enjoy A Race Around the World (2019), a nonfiction children’s book by Caroline Starr Rose with illustrations by Alexandra Bye. It tells the true story of an 1889 competition between trailblazing investigative journalist Nellie Bly and Cosmo­ politan writer Elizabeth Bisland to see who could circumnavigate the globe faster. Kirkus, in a starred review, says that “Rose captures both the wonder of the world as the women experience it as well as the dangers and miseries of their journeys.”

Maria Montessori, like Bly, was a pioneer in her chosen field. Kate Fuglei’s The Soul of a Child (2018), a novel for adults based on Montessori’s life, relates how the Italian physician’s initial work with mentally challenged children eventually led to her creation of a widely adopted education system that focused on kids pursuing their individual interests. Our reviewer calls it “an extremely enjoyable novel that is also informative.”

Montessori was one of the first women to receive a medical degree in Italy in 1896, and just a few decades later, fellow Italian Rita Levi-Montalcini would receive her M.D. and pursue research that led to the co-discovery of a key neuropeptide, for which she received a 1986 Nobel Prize. Francesca Valente’s biography, Rita Levi-Mon­ talcini: Pioneer & Ambassador of Sci­ ence (2021), tells how Levi-Montalcini bravely conducted her experiments in secret because local antisemitic laws banned Jewish people like herself from many aspects of public life. The scientist was also a passionate, longtime fighter for women’s equality. Kirkus calls the book “a thorough, glowing biography that sheds light on the achievements of an extraordinary scientist.”

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.

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pushes Eldred to attempt to cheat his trial, which his father discovers. Meanwhile, a massive dragon has been attacking the Wretched, a conquered people from the north. Sammanus, one of the Wretched, arrives and begs Alfred for soldiers to help the city of Turicum kill the dragon. The king plans to send five Bonded warriors and five squires, including Eldred.

Ghyslaine wants to spirit her son off to her Mercian homeland to become a lord in her brother’s court. Determined to be a full-fledged Deiran, Eldred refuses. But the challenges he’ll face alongside Alfred’s men in Turicum are complex and numerous. Bracher’s hero may be a teenager, but this series opener is not the typical YA fantasy. Eldred isn’t distracted by romance at the Academy or haunted by familial drama. The bone-deep tension that’s eventually revealed is that the Deirans are pugilistic xenophobes, possessed of a deadly hubris.

Alfred tells Sammanus, “I will send an expedition of our finest to slay this beast, not out of any affection for the Wretcheds, but to prove our greatness.” Eldred befriends Sammanus and learns that the Sun People (as the Wretched call themselves) are more thoughtful, innovative, and caring than the Deirans. Bracher’s worldbuilding is engaging, but the novel’s first third, filled with militaristic unpleasantness, mars the launch.

Eldred’s—and the series’—potential flowers by the finale.

An entertaining, if uneven, blend of fantasy action and soul-searching.

THE COLOR OF HOMEOWNERSHIP Increasing Wealth in Black and Brown Communities

Brown, Tori Success Lockdown Group (112 pp.) $19.99 paper | $11.49 e-book | Dec. 31, 2021 978-1-73513-323-2 In this guide, a financial adviser points to homeownership as the key to increasing generational wealth in Black and brown communities.

With a Ph.D. in psychology, Brown is well aware of the motivations behind how people spend or save their money. In addition to this academic background, this work draws on her own personal and family experiences with homeownership, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy as an African American woman. Too many individuals, she argues, are plagued with “acid reflux” in their pockets. As the adage goes, most of what they earn burns a hole in their pockets. If people want to live the “Post Pandemic American Dream” of “Credit Cards, Cash, and Cadillacs,” the author emphasizes they must become financially savvy in researching investment trends such as cryptocurrency, attending college, and, most importantly, buying a house, which would “impact the generations to come.” Brown is the founder and owner of Fresh Community Development Inc., an organization devoted to providing affordable financial literature and services to low-income families; this guide is an important addition to her reference materials. At just over 100 pages,

this concise volume provides practical advice on the benefits of property ownership versus rent as well as sensible, if basic, tips on how to save, spend, and invest, irrespective of one’s economic class. Though there is certainly a racial component to the narrative that emphasizes ownership as a key to assuaging generational poverty, the book does not dwell on the historical contexts or systemic barriers to the purchase of a home.

While it offers crucial information to understanding American residential history, this volume is not intended as an indictment of capitalism or racism. Instead, the author is laser focused on individual responsibility and actions where “we all have a role to play” in alleviating poverty. Brown’s conversational prose style borrows heavily from the inspirational lingo of self-help books.

In addition, the manual delivers ample references to pop culture, zodiac signs, and Christianity designed to motivate and educate readers to reconsider their spending habits and financial goals.

A useful primer on the benefits of homeownership to lowincome communities.

This third installment of a legal thriller series finds environmental lawyer Mike Jacobs embroiled in romance, possible murder, and fracking contamination.

Things are definitely brewing in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Yukon Oil and Gas Co. is there, using controversial fracking to drill on private properties. Hefty payments allay the potential concerns of landowners, except for one woman who thinks the fracking has contaminated her family’s water. She takes her allegations to the Department of Environmental Protection, and assistant counsel Mike gets the case. There’s no question the water is chemically tainted; the issue is whether Yukon’s freshwater pit has somehow leaked contaminated fracking water. As citizens actively protest the fracking, Mike works with geologist Missy Shelton. Their unexpected romance sparks a complication with Missy’s ex, who has a hot temper and a gun rack in his pickup. In a concurrent plot, local police search for missing Chris Corsica, a contractor whose company Yukon has outsourced drilling to.

But if Corsica has met with foul play, who’s the armed, militarytrained man lurking in the woods and eyeing a certain household? All these motley incidents come to a head in a startling confrontation. Burcat, who wrote Amid Rage (2021), rarely takes this legal tale into a courtroom. But the author, as in earlier Mike Jacobs novels, excels at involving his characters in myriad subplots. Even before a deposition, for example, Mike faces off against attorney Darius Moore, his rival since law school, whose firm represents Yukon. The plot is sometimes stagnant, with frequent discussions on the freshwater pit and with the missing person investigation making little progress. Suspense nevertheless abounds courtesy of the tenacious presence of the stranger

SURVIVING HOME A Collection of Poetry Canyon, Katerina Kelsay Books (108 pp.) $19.00 paper | Oct. 28, 2021 978-1-63980-001-8

A harrowing collection by a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet.

Canyon’s work begins with a gut punch with “Involuntary Endurance”: “My story is not one revealed with chapter / And verse. It is expressed in blood and bone. / It is fingernails thrust into back muscles. / It is razorblades pressed against flesh.” The speaker describes a cycle of violence that involves her father beating her mother, police beating her father, and the speaker’s male partner beating her. “Most of my flashes of the past are visions of beasts,” says the speaker in a later poem, “An Afterthought of a Netflix Show.” The works tell of mundane moments turned traumatic, such as a reading of “The Tyger” by William Blake interrupted by abuse or the comforting of an autistic brother while locked in a closet. The poet balances such bleak, personal scenes with bold political poems: “Sojourner,” for instance, is an empowering ode to a role model who “never forgot to say who a woman / Could be, what a Black woman could do.” Ultimately, what many speakers seek is healing: “For the most part I want to learn to let go, / to hurt a little less.” Canyon makes imaginative connections, as when a speaker watching a mother peel a beet provokes a question about menstruation in “Skill” and puberty brings comparisons to Jesus Christ’s last temptation in “At 13, I Found a Bra.” The poet’s language can also be visceral and gripping, as when she describes “hot cylinders of pain / That sear experience into the skin” and a “tear-stained scream.” A heart is a “bullfrog that beats beneath / my pectoral muscle.”

But some poems seem to lose their ways, such as “Donald Trump Is My Father,” which feels too coded to be accessible, or “I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’ Written With a Little Help From Websters Dictionary,” which attempts to tackle too much subject matter, including assault rifles, magnet schools, PCP, coronavirus, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

An often cathartic and poignant set of poems about endurance and the cycle of abuse.

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STRANGE FIRE

Burcat, Joel Headline Books (384 pp.) $19.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-951556-80-8

in the woods and Missy’s volatile ex-boyfriend. While the legal system takes a back seat, Burcat dishes out fracking details that will astonish and educate many readers, such as the part that fresh water plays in the process.

A superb cast spearheads the story of an incendiary social and environmental issue.

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WORK JERKS How To Cope With Difficult Bosses and Colleagues

I, SARAH STEINWAY

Carnachan, Louise She Writes Press (272 pp.) $16.95 paper | $8.99 e-book | June 14, 2022 978-1-64742-369-8 An organizational consultant highlights unsavory characters found in the workplace.

Carnachan’s well-organized, exhaustive study of “Jerketypes” is simultaneously unsettling and reassuring. The fact that she can identify so many jerks in the workplace may be disturbing, but her reasoned counsel for how to cope with them should have a calming effect on most readers. The author applies her decades of experience as both an employee and a coach/consultant to identify nine broad types of jerks, breaking them down into subsets. Some of them, such as “The Narcissistic Jerk,” seem more dangerous than others, like “The Jokester Jerk,” but all of them are worthy of exploration. In each chapter, Carnachan identifies the characteristics of one type of jerk and offers detailed suggestions for dealing with the culprit. The author covers interactions with difficult or exasperating individuals who may be bosses, co-workers, or subordinates. Carnachan includes richly described anecdotes that appropriately illustrate the behavior of each Jerketype. Several of these vignettes are drawn from the author’s coaching experience. For example, in discussing the “Gang Leader,” one form of Narcissistic Jerk, the author relates the story of Samantha, a skilled worker who “was an absolute misery for her manager, Ashley, because of her sarcastic and critical comments about management.” Carnachan explains how she worked with Ashley to create a “performance improvement plan” for Samantha, who, it turns out, eventually resigned. “Lesson learned,” writes the author. “Ashley appointed a new lead from her existing staff who had excellent interpersonal skills and good technical skills.”

These illustrative tales enrich the book and make for engaging reading. There is also an opportunity for self-reflection using worksheets included by Carnachan and designed to identify if readers might be Jerketypes. A chapter called “When the Jerk Is a Toxic Work Culture” discusses workplaces more broadly, defining several typical dysfunctional cultures and potential actions to take. A closing chapter reinforces a key overarching theme: “Remember that the only person you can change is you and what you say and do really does affect others.”

Eye-opening, insightful, and filled with practical advice about office jerks.

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Carter, Mary E. Tovah Miriam (201 pp.) $15.00 paper | Dec. 9, 2017 978-0-692-98524-3 An older woman contemplates her life, Jewish ethics, and the destruction of civilization by a giant flood from the comfort of her treehouse in this meditative, post-apocalyptic fable.

Carter explores a near future in which the world’s shorelines are beset by growing tides that people learn to live with—until they culminate in a sudden “Emperor Flood” that permanently inundates much of Earth’s land. Coping with the aftermath is Sarah Steinway, a 75-year-old retired advertising copywriter and widow who lives by the water on the north shore of San Francisco Bay. By good luck, she’s just finished building a lofty treehouse in her yard, crafted by a sexy, motorcycle-riding, 60-something contractor named Emanuel Epps. She has also been given a shotgun and survival gear by a treehouse project tradesman. Rejecting Epps’ proposal that she escape to dry land at his house in the New Mexico mountains, Sarah settles in for a five-year stint alone in the treehouse, surrounded by the sea. There, she survives on fish, canned beans, and desalinated water; slashes away at the kudzu vines threatening to entomb her; and weathers occasional crises, like an attack by a crazed woman waving a glass shard. Mostly, though, Sarah just endures the maddening isolation, watching trash and bodies float by, “sitting, sleeping, weeping, screaming.” To occupy herself, she starts typing memoirs and ruminations, revisiting her 43-year marriage and the deaths of her parents in a plane crash and plumbing the depths of human turpitude and her soul. Her solitude ends when she is visited by a cat, a rabbi, a dog, and then another rabbi, who prod her to renew her moral engagement with the world by praying the kaddish for the flood’s victims.

Carter’s richly textured, atmospheric novel alternates among desolate, elegiac moods; a warm, if chaste, romance between Sarah and Epps; and stern survivalism. (“You are going to sink or swim and you will need to arm yourself. And never call it a gun. It’s a weapon. You understand, Mrs. S? Always utilize proper nomenclature. It’s a hard world out there.”)

Comparisons to episodes from the Torah—the Genesis story is retold from the viewpoint of Noah’s wife—give the proceedings a Jewish lilt that’s both mythic and irreverent. The author depicts her fictive seascape in raptly evocative prose saturated with imagery that’s lush and disturbing. (“Even as their carcasses floated back and forth in the tides, and with each sunrise/sunset…it was the horses that lasted longest in the tides until nothing but fetlocks jutted up here and there and sometimes caught the sunlight on those broken, torn, white bones—those fetlocks were all that remained of gorgeous racing limbs.”) Sarah is a compelling character—chatty, spirited, slightly discombobulated by her circumstances but ready to adapt. (“Fool that I am, I tried repeatedly to write about things in the moment and I see that little was recorded.

What? Am I writing for posterity? Me the last man standing?

“Carter’s evocative prose brings out the inner turmoil in people beset by inchoate problems with remarkable vividness and sensitivity.” hand me downs

Woman. Sorry. Woman. But you get what I mean. I am considerably foggy still. I don’t care what this sounds like. Feh!”) As she combines an ethic of renunciation with a search for purpose, readers will root for her to keep her head above water.

An emotionally resonant tale of a woman trying to salvage meaning from a drowned world.

HAND ME DOWNS

Carter, Michele Waldorf Publishing (450 pp.) $22.95 | $16.95 paper | $8.99 e-book Oct. 26, 2021 978-1-68524-646-4 978-1-64921-496-6 paper

CANNED HUNT A Nick Tanner Crime Thriller Cox, Kerry K. Level Best Books (322 pp.) $18.95 paper | $5.99 e-book March 14, 2022

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Abuse, madness, and passion roil three generations of an African American clan in this family drama.

Carter’s autobiographical novel stretches back to 1936, when Cynthia Harrison, a 7-year-old growing up in New York City, witnesses a fight in which her mother, Myrtle, shoots the tip of her father’s left ear off and then abandons the family to run a brothel. Cynthia’s own marital travails start when, 18 and already pregnant, she marries Jesse Lovett, a charming womanizer who serves in the Air Force. She leaves him after two years spent enduring his infidelities and the scorn of his mother, Flo, an upper-crust matron. On her own with her son, Jesse Jr., and daughter, Mickey, Cynthia starts an affair with Laurence Greene, the husband of her severely depressed friend Anna. When Flo tries to take Cynthia’s kids away and Anna experiences a psychotic episode, Laurence convinces Cynthia to flee to California with him. They take along Mickey, Jesse Jr., the couple’s illegitimate daughter, Rolynda, and Laurence’s twin sons, Mason and Robert. Alas, on the drive west, Laurence’s bullying tendencies emerge when he threatens and beats the kids for homesickness and other trivial transgressions, a pattern that will continue throughout his and Cynthia’s troubled 20-year relationship. The domineering Laurence becomes a minister, imposes harsh rules on the kids—no television, no dating, no secular music or books—and repeatedly sabotages Cynthia’s efforts to translate her gifts as a pianist and singer into professional gigs. When she is 17, Mickey is thrown out of the house by her increasingly erratic and paranoid stepfather and, in desperation, marries the boy next door—only to become the target of his terrifying abuse.

Carter’s wrenching novel has moments of stark violence, but much of its drama flows from quieter tensions that arise from muted power struggles within families and the clashing ambitions of husband and wives, parents and children. She grounds these conflicts in shrewd studies of well-drawn characters. She has a fine eye for quick, telling sketches of everyone from the flamboyant Myrtle—“She was still the stiletto stepping, multibangle wearing, weed toking, cigarette smoking, bourbon drinking, sailor cursing broad she’d always been”—to the oily devil Jesse Sr.: “In another one of his magnificent gestures (all the while scanning Tina, the cigarette girl’s frame as she walked

by), he placed Cynthia’s hand gently on the table with his landing nicely on top of hers and said, ‘You’ve got a great voice girl— real smooth.’ ” But the author’s characters have plenty of depth and complexity. Laurence, for example, is a tyrant but sincere in his conviction that what he does is good for his family. Carter’s evocative prose brings out the inner turmoil in people beset by inchoate problems with remarkable vividness and sensitivity. “She turned the oven on to roast a whole chicken, and it was right then that she felt the pull—a strong downward tug in the core of her being,” the author writes of Anna’s sudden breakdown while cooking dinner. “The cupboard door felt heavy and every item on the shelf became an overwhelming decision. Salt.

Pepper. Sage. ‘I can do this,’ she whispered.” The result is a searing portrait of strife on the most intimate of battlegrounds.

A moving study of a family spreading trauma—and redeeming affection and wisdom.

A wildlife sleuth fights against the canned hunting trade in this crime novel.

Cox’s sequel features the formidable skills of California-based undercover Fish and Wildlife Service detective Nick Tanner. This time, he’s assigned to investigate a suspected captive hunting operation that releases exotic animals into fenced areas for the purpose of stalking and slaughtering the creatures. His affinity for wildlife is not just professional; he takes care of Ray Charles, his rescue “blind bobcat on a leash,” while living in a trailer. Tanner is summoned to Utah to look into the murder of a federal agent probing a contraband animal-hunting operation. Meanwhile, exotic animal “outfitter” Howard Nash, the patriarch of a religious performance family, runs a questionable canned hunting operation called Divinely Wild, which involves cougars and other creatures that he tranquilizes, hobbles, and releases for the “sport” of his clients. Tanner arrives in Utah hot on the case but goes undercover as a journalist and encroaches on local Sheriff Vernon Rice’s territory. Spurring on Nash is Rice’s brother, a nefarious Christian Identity pastor, who seeks to reap the benefits of the man’s lucrative operation. Tanner’s appearance in town soon draws the attention of the small-town thugs connected with Nash’s poaching business, all willing to do anything necessary to protect it. As evidenced in his debut, Money Bear (2021), Cox is skilled at narrative tension and ratchets up the suspense as Tanner fights to solve the crime and bring the villains to justice. Tanner soon makes his way into Nash’s crosshairs in the bloody final shootout. Though the detective is ably assisted by several female agents, this is very much Tanner’s story, a character Cox continues to hone and perfect with each adventure.

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though a few sections are overly verbose. The tale also includes the unique perspectives of the hunted animals in Nash’s operation as well as Tanner’s pet bobcat. The author strikes gold in this second novel about wildlife abuse and unrepentant lawbreakers. Cox, a wildlife rescue advocate, also shares pertinent (and shocking) closing information on how the sport of canned hunting is legal and how even owners of endangered or threatened animal species are allowed to engage in the activity.

A provocative, suspenseful eco-thriller starring a durable detective with a conservationist conscience.

BEWILDERNESS Book One

Cox, Kevin Silvettica (292 pp.) $12.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Oct. 10, 2021 978-0-578-94488-3 A human teenager finds herself on a series of alien worlds in this YA adventure.

A 16-year-old girl is trapped in a sandy oasis. There are no people or animals, and she has no memories of how she arrived or of anything else about herself. She does, however, remember a “blue glow coming through a swirling vortex” and sinister whispers. When she tries to explore her surroundings, a strange voice says, “Let us guide you,” but she can’t seem to escape the oasis. She then finds Sidaire, a younger girl who has glowing, emberlike hair and doesn’t seem quite human. Sidaire warns her about a place called the Hollow and about a threatening monster. When the teen dives into a spring in an attempt to escape said creature, she enters a series of underwater caves. She emerges in a new world of forests and mountains. A friendly humanoid named Maetha rescues her from danger, names her Ambrielle, and explains they’re in Anatharia. With no clear way back to Earth, Ambrielle tries to live among Maetha’s people, the Kavekkians. They’re a wary group and warn her not to engage with their enemies, the Darterrans. This proves impossible when Ambrielle spies a human among the latter. Cox’s YA novel lives up to its title, keeping the protagonist in a consistent state of bafflement over new developments. He also provides occasionally striking visuals, such as a description of Maetha, who has a lightgray, oblong face and “rust-colored eyes.” Ambrielle encounters more familiar things, as well, including prejudice from the Kavekkians and petty tribalism among the Darterrans. The worldbuilding branches out in surprising ways when the setting moves to the technologically marvelous world of Elyravess. As Ambrielle remembers more details from her previous life, such as her falling-out with her friend Hannah, a fuller emotional journey evolves. Ambrielle also pursues a well-earned romance with Gavian, a teen living with the Darterrans. A superb final moment ensures that fans will return for the sequel.

This meticulously crafted YA journey will challenge readers’ expectations until the last page.

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THE PRINCIPLE OF 18 Getting the Most Out of Every Stage of Your Life

Danon, Eyal N. Blue Branch Press (174 pp.) $7.99 paper | $0.99 e-book | Jan. 18, 2022 978-1-73629-944-9

A life guide organized around five major stages.

Danon, a Columbia University Certified Life Coach and founder of a successful consulting company, puts forward a new vision for personal development, one that flies in the face of many rise-and-grind business motivation books by drawing a broader, longer map of what constitutes success. Danon makes no small claims about his system, which he says will “minimize your regrets, decrease your worries, and enable you to lead a joyous, meaningful life.” Whether this is warranted or not, Danon’s outline is intriguingly blocked off into five 18-year segments— “The Dreamer,” “The Explorer,” “The Builder,” “The Mentor,” and “The Giver”—each of which has its own restrictions, priorities, and joys. But Danon stresses that the positives of his system hold true at every stage. “One of the key benefits of allowing yourself to explore your options for 18 years is that it will minimize your regrets—and the fewer regrets, the better, since you never know what life may throw at you,” he writes. “If you wait around for something important to happen to you, you may never get to do it.” In keeping with Danon’s long experience as a coach and motivator, his prose is bright and compulsively readable. And the main strength of his approach is that it far more closely conforms to everyday lived experience than most of the more hustle-oriented volumes of this kind. He reiterates that learning takes time, and opportunities flow as much from chance and experience as from blue ocean strategy (creating new demand rather than battling for market share). Danon is at his most interesting when he’s leaning into this individualistic bent, declaring business-world heresies like: “There is no need to try to make serious money before you turn 36.” This is a skillful rearrangement of the paradigm.

Genuinely thought-provoking strategies for the various stages of life.

THE COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT’S MASTER PLAN Leveraging Public Relations Expertise for Client and Personal Success

Darnell, Roger Routledge (176 pp.) $160.00 | $39.95 paper | $29.99 e-book Dec. 21, 2021 978-1-03-201257-5 978-1-03-201259-9 paper

A public relations professional pulls back the curtain on his consulting practice.

“Davidson’s worldbuilding is exceptional—even in the virtual realities that provide characters with entertainment.” zer0-day

13-year revolt of enslaved people who won Haiti its independence from France in 1804. The struggle fed on revolutionary enthusiasms, challenged White supremacy, and included horrific massacres. It also provoked complex responses from writers worldwide, broadly surveyed. Most selections are by Europeans who view the Haitian revolution with mixed feelings. Liberals see it as a beacon of freedom (“Thy friends are exultations, agonies / And love, and man’s unconquerable mind,” rhapsodizes William Wordsworth’s ode to the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture); romantics use it as a setting for adventure stories; and dispossessed French colonists harp on revolutionary terror and exile. Some writers display conflicting impulses; in one excerpt, Victor Hugo emphasizes the nobility of a formerly enslaved person who defends a White family, while in another passage he characterizes Haitians as subhuman.

Overall, the writings here often feel overwrought and unwieldy under their burdens of ideology and 19th-century melodrama.

Still, readers interested in Haiti and the intersection of literature and politics will find many works engrossing. The Haitian writers, for example, are shown to view the revolution through the lens of liberation: “All that is left is hatred and we only have one rallying cry: death!” declares a rebel to the owners of a plantation house he’s set ablaze in Ignace Nau’s story “An Episode of the Revolution.” Others effectively express patriotism tempered with misgivings: “With his brothers’ blood he stained the history / Of our revolution! / Yet, he was beautiful, when with sword held up high, / He cried out: O sweet liberty, your day is coming nigh!” writes poet Coriolan Ardouin of revolutionaryturned-dictator Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The editors provide extensive biographical notes on each author, and Daut, a professor of African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, contributes an insightful introduction.

A volume of passionate, if sometimes-stilted, writings rich in historical and scholarly interest.

ZER0-DAY The Sommerfeld Experiment #1

Davidson, Al Destiny Engine (409 pp.) $12.99 paper | Dec. 20, 2021 979-8-9852207-2-8

HAITIAN REVOLUTIONARY FICTIONS An Anthology

Ed. by Daut, Marlene L., Grégory Pierrot & Marion C. Rohrleitner University of Virginia Press (1,008 pp.) $135.00 | $65.00 paper | $48.50 e-book Jan. 25, 2022 978-0-8139-4569-9 978-0-8139-4570-5 paper

Oppression, carnage, and heroism course through writings inspired by the Haitian revolution in this sprawling anthology.

Editors and translators Daut, Pierrot, and Rohrleitner collect more than 200 excerpts of novels, stories, poems, and plays dating from 1787 to 1899 and set during—or touching on—the

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In this second installment of a two-volume series, agency principal Darnell offers a comprehensive manual that delves into how to operate a public relations/communications consulting business. The first book, The Communications Consultant’s Foundation (2021), provided an introductory framework for starting such a business. This sequel takes a deep dive into the nuts and bolts, first covering communications strategies and account management, then discussing the business of running an agency, and finally providing an action plan for implementation. Darnell not only explains communications consulting in sometimes-dense detail, he also liberally cites examples, many very specific, from his own career. The author’s experience is credible and considerable; he has worked for other firms and run his own small communications agency for over two decades.

It’s a credit to Darnell that he willingly discloses his business philosophy, strategies, and practices, right down to how (and how much) he charges his clients. In Part 1 of the guide, readers will get a solid understanding of the process of pitching accounts as well as insights into more mundane topics such as record-keeping and billing. Also in this section is useful information about client positioning, internal versus external communications, the specialized area of investor relations, and a helpful rundown of various media and public relations tactics that could be employed on behalf of clients. The second part of the work focuses on agency management, professional development, how to scale a business, and potential exit strategies.

Here, Darnell delivers some wise suggestions for how best to research media as well as seasoned observations about trade associations and industry gatherings. Perhaps most intriguing is the author’s advice on ways to scale a business, in which he draws from examples of other practitioners. Part 3 summarizes previous material and shows how to apply it in the form of a “Marketing Action Plan” that can be developed for clients. The level of detail in this section is particularly impressive. As in his first book, Darnell includes a wealth of questions to answer and relevant exercises to complete.

Thorough and highly applicable advice for communications consultants.

Davidson’s debut series starter is an SF thriller that revolves around a young man with a mysterious background— and even more mysterious abilities.

The narrative is set in the near future of 2073 on the West Coast of a United States ravaged by ecological and economic disaster. San Francisco, for example, has been devastated by earthquakes and is now called Old Town, a lawless wasteland of “warring gangs, drug dealers, low-level mobsters, and sex peddlers.” Joshua Cabrera is the 24-year-old leader of the Epitaphs. They’re at the top of Old Town’s food chain, due in large part to their brilliant, tech-savvy members, who can hack into any site and have developed cutting-edge cybernetic, |

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implanted wetware for their members. Under Joshua’s steady leadership, the gang is about to finish a multimillion-dollar deal to sell the Maelstrom, a seemingly unstoppable mindlinked weapon designed by Joshua and his best friend, Kevin Maitland, a developer who’s done revolutionary work in nanotech and neuroscience. But the deal goes bad, and Joshua and his crew become prime targets in the Nevada State Military Zone, run by tyrannical government agencies. Agent Vince Farrell’s mission is simple: locate Joshua and the revolutionary weapon at any cost. However, Joshua is much more than he seems—and his unexplainable enhancements may lead to greater revelations. This SF crime novel has a lot of noteworthy elements. The worldbuilding, for instance, is exceptional—even in the virtual realities that provide characters with entertainment—as is the fine pacing. There’s also an impressive amount of action and adventure as well as intricate plotting and detailed character development. Joshua, in particular, has significant depth that gives him the potential to carry multiple future installments. And the humor throughout is a definite plus; readers won’t soon forget an odd gag involving virtual chipmunks.

Cyberpunk aficionados will enjoy this slick and highly readable tale.

OLIVER AND THE WISHING STAR

Decker, Jennifer Illus. by Chrish Vindhy Dandelion Books (40 pp.) $17.99 | $11.99 paper | Oct. 5, 2021 978-1-73776-440-3 978-1-73776-441-0 paper A boy decides that wishing to be a dog wasn’t such a great plan after all when things go awry in this debut picture book.

Oliver, a brown-haired, freckle-faced White boy, is frustrated when his mother makes him do chores and homework before seeing his friends. As he walks his pooch, Cooper, he complains that dogs have the best lives: “You’ve got it so easy, Cooper, and I’m…cursed!” After dabbling in rule-breaking and deciding pushing boundaries doesn’t make him feel better, he returns home, noticing a falling star outside his window. He wishes he was a dog, falls fast asleep, and wakes up as a canine. Immediately fleeing to experience his freedom, he’s disappointed by pet food, bad weather, dog catchers, and the realization that his parents don’t seem to miss him. Just when everything seems bleak, his mother wakes him up—but a muddy trail makes him believe his metamorphosis wasn’t a dream. Being careful of wishes and believing the grass is greener elsewhere are both common story themes young readers will easily recognize. Decker’s accessible text features simple sentences with some fun vocabulary words (responsibilities, defiantly, bounded) to challenge independent readers. Vindhy’s soft-edged, digital illustrations give her cartoonish characters a painterly flair; the darkening sky in sequential pictures emphasizes the 170

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time passing during Oliver’s walk and his canine adventure.

Readers are sure to enjoy the depiction of the boy’s energetic dog form.

For readers wishing for a better life, this tale delivers an engaging reminder of gratitude.

THE INTROVERTED ARTIST Defending My Art. My Way. Myself

Downey, Lisa Green Tea Press (338 pp.) $5.68 paper | Aug. 16, 2021 978-0-9716775-2-4

A debut memoir recounts how a selfconfessed introvert tried to make it as a painter but was left confounded by the art world’s expectations and restrictions.

Downey’s erudite and thought-provoking book opens with a brief recollection of an art class that emphasized the importance of communication over technique. Having strong convictions about how art should be taught, she quit the class. Before becoming a mother, the author worked in publishing in Boston.

Parenthood left her little “brain space” to create, but after her children were in school, she decided to become an artist. A keen writer, she set up a blog about her journey and her first steps in the painting world. Downey found the social aspects of her work exhausting, with her introversion leaving her feeling like an outsider. The author looked at the role of contemporary artists, examining the cult of celebrity and self-promotion and the necessity of being fluent in “artspeak” and forging connections in an “ultra-social, extrovert” society. Downey’s odyssey became one of self-understanding, as she dissected her creative drives and the personal roots of her consternation regarding societal expectations. The author describes her own creative process with forthright clarity: “I plan, then I execute my plan. It may sound uninspired, but I argue that it is just as valid a way to paint as any other.” In doing so, she makes readers reconsider why artists are expected to be spontaneous and extroverted. Downey employs a sound knowledge of art history to illustrate her arguments. For example, she discusses the anonymity of painters and sculptors in ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations in contrast to the “personal fame” of artists from the Renaissance onward. The author also offers illuminating moments of introspection: “Each of these issues around art, which all came down to matters of identity and social status, brought up how I felt about myself in the world.” Some readers may be disappointed that Downey did not proceed to become a professional painter, but her memoir remains inspirational as a thorough exploration of the creative self and a search for personal satisfaction. This work will prove an invaluable handbook for readers trying to gain a foothold in the art world and for those feeling ostracized by it.

Well-researched, crisply perceptive writing on art.

“The novel is a briskly paced work of historical fiction that seamlessly blends action and a love story.” brandy

LEAD WELL 10 Steps to Successful and Sustainable Leadership

Falke, Ken Lioncrest Publishing (132 pp.) $12.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Dec. 6, 2021 978-1-5445-2416-0

THE LONG WAY HOME A Samantha Church Mystery

Ferrendelli, Betta Independently Published (288 pp.) $11.99 paper | $2.99 e-book | Jan. 9, 2022 979-8-7981-1552-5 Samantha Church, recovering alcoholic, ace reporter for Colorado’s Grandview Perspective, and amateur sleuth, searches for her late friend’s lost little sister in the sixth installment of the series.

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A book of basic tenets for those who want to become business leaders—or become better ones.

Falke’s experience with leadership was forged during his time in the U.S. Navy, as the owner of a training company for military and law enforcement personnel, and in the nonprofit world. Leadership is one of the most common business-book topics, but thankfully, the author recognizes that it’s overworked, so he takes a broader approach to the concept—discussing it in ways that don’t merely focus on moneymaking and are more universally applicable. To that end, he cites no outside sources and draws solely on his own years of experience. In his view, leadership can be distilled into 10 fundamental principles he calls “The Lead Well 10.” These, in themselves, are hardly extraordinary; such notions as “Listen Well,” “Hire Quality People,” and “Lead With Courage” certainly aren’t new. However, the author’s take on each principle is well-constructed, clearly stated, and richly detailed. For example, for the opener, “Lead Yourself First,” Falke employs an anecdote from his military experience to dramatically demonstrate how an unethical action by a commanding officer undermined accountability and damaged credibility. The author further explores this principle by citing a pertinent example from his business career and discussing how one can use a tool called a “Wellness Triangle” to enhance self-awareness. Although all of Falke’s principles are important in their own ways, the final one, “Give Back,” seems to embody the tone of the book as a whole. About this concept, the author writes with the same passion that evidently led him to become a philanthropist and found two nonprofits: “We all share an obligation to ensure that our neighbors in life are taken care of. Effective leaders embrace their greater responsibility to others and set an example through volunteering and giving.” It’s one of many examples in which the power of the author’s words gives seemingly pedestrian concepts fresh meaning.

A spirited, honest examination of what it means to lead others effectively.

Sam’s young colleague Hunter was killed in an investigation gone bad. His only remaining family member was his little sister, Jenny, who disappeared years ago. Although Hunter is dead, Sam is obsessed with finding Jenny, and the obvious place to start is El Paso, where Hunter and Jenny were born. The reporter’s new friend, Sandy Petersen, an elementary school teacher, overhears an older fellow say “Hey, look at this, Jenny” to his young companion in a grocery store. Amazingly, that turns out to be the very Jenny in question, and the chase is on. The older man is Houston Meyers, a decorated Marine veteran. Turns out, he found Jenny while looking for paid sex but was immediately so struck by her beauty and vulnerability that he became her fierce protector. We are talking here about sex trafficking—Jenny was raised in Mexico but lured back to El Paso—and that is where attorney Amanda Moore and her henchman, Larry Henderson, come in. They are, in fact, sex traffickers. As we follow the hunt, there are the obligatory violent and nail-biting scenes. Ferrendelli is a competent if not an original writer, and Sam is a likable character/narrator. Several events are mentioned that one assumes took place in earlier books in the series. We learn a lot about sex trafficking and police procedures (Ferrendelli is an experienced journalist). Does it strain credulity the way Jenny is discovered? Let the reader decide. Moore is a despicable villain and is the one character without much nuance. Houston Meyers deserves mention as a very interesting and admirable character, as is Wilson Cole Jr., the wise owner of the Grandview Perspective. Typos don’t overly distract.

A tense, high-stakes read with a layered cast.

BRANDY Ballad of a Pirate Princess

Hendrickson, Dan E. Self (254 pp.) $29.00 | $9.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Feb. 27, 2021 978-1-73451-877-1 978-1-73451-876-4 paper The daughter of pirates reconnects with her past while investigating a diabolical scheme in this historical novel.

In 1829, no pirate is more feared than Katrina Mooney, known as the Scarlet Mistress. For years, Katrina and her husband, Capt. Eric Erasmus, have sailed their ship, The Red Witch, throughout the Caribbean with their daughter, Brandy. When a betrayal by first mate Don Lomoche leads to Eric’s death and the ship’s capture, Katrina places a curse on the vessel that only 15-year-old Brandy can break. Brandy and her uncle Skinner escape to Kingston, Jamaica, where she dyes her distinctive red hair black and he changes his name to Skynyrd. Fifteen years later they run a successful tavern called Katrina’s with a Chinese immigrant named Zhang Yong, an employee and musician, and Davonte, a waitress. Brandy believes she has left the pirate’s life behind her until she meets first mate John Edwards and the crew of the ship The Morning Star. After Edwards and Midshipman |

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Ralphie Austin are attacked by a sailor named Faustin Reece, Brandy and Skynyrd discover that the culprit is connected to Lomoche. When Lomoche conspires with corrupt officials to expand the slave trade in the Caribbean, Brandy discovers the only way to stop him is through reclaiming her family legacy, a mission that grows complicated when she falls in love with the dashing Edwards. This latest novel from Hendrickson is a briskly paced work of historical fiction that seamlessly blends action and a love story. Brandy is an amiable hero whose romance with Edwards unfolds at a leisurely pace as she struggles with the question of whether to reveal her family history to him. Lomoche is an effective villain whose criminal activities lead to well-staged action sequences at the tale’s climax. That said, the dialogue reads like a summary of events.

At one point, Austin tells Edwards after their assault: “They explained to the captain of the garrison what had happened earlier at Katrina’s with the one we now know is Faustin Reece.

The garrison captain said he talked with one of those blackclad people he calls ‘The Night Watch.’ ” An appealing pirate adventure.

THE MAGIC STRING

Junior, Victor Illus. by Giulia Lombardo Innovate Publishing (41 pp.)

978-1-77744-512-6 978-1-77744-513-3 paper A magical string learns that transforming his shape doesn’t bring him happiness in this picture-book debut from humorist and photographer Junior.

String can magically “transform himself into anything he could imagine.” However, he has trouble choosing a new form, so he sets off on a journey. First, he visits an ice cream store, where he becomes an impressive scooping machine. But although the “ice-creams” at the store are thrilled, String realizes that shape doesn’t make him happy. Neither does becoming a complex firetruck at a fire station. At the circus, he finds that tightrope walkers don’t need a scooping machine or a truck, but they do need a string. Soon, in his role as a tightrope, String realizes that he just needed to be himself to find joy. Junior creates a story that’s well suited to reading aloud by using fun wordplay describing String’s various shapes. Creative word choices (syrupslinging, resilient) may also expand the vocabularies of newly independent readers. Junior’s humorous tone shines throughout, complimented by Lombardo’s candy-bright, soft-edged illustrations: String’s frayed end makes for an expressive hairstyle, and his expressions—from good cheer to droopy disappointment— radiate emotion. Kids may question why the talking ice cream wants to be scooped and eaten, however. Human characters are portrayed with a variety of skin tones.

An enjoyably silly adventure of self-discovery.

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THE EMERGENCE Book I of the Robochurch Trilogy

Keller, Lee J. TiLu Press (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | $9.99 e-book | Sept. 7, 2021 978-1-73723-040-3 In an oppressive future America, where authorities persecute rogue movements that promote the rights of artificial intelligence, a software-based entity arises to lead a rebellion.

Keller commences a trilogy with this SF entry set in 2142 America, a dystopian surveillance state overseen by dreaded “String Police” using algorithms to predict potential criminals and terrorists. Suspects can be arrested—even killed—in the process (there is a subtle nod to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, the most famous depiction of the concept). But the government and its noxious, ambitious Joint Chiefs Gen. Thomas Mitchell have reason to be paranoid. Robots, androids, and other AI systems have surpassed human intelligence (though acknowledgement of the fact is forbidden), and the establishment fears the dawning of machine awareness. Unauthorized activist movements, including an illegal “Robochurch,” promote the rights of synthetic beings despite harsh push back from authorities. Moreover, a software-based entity calling herself Maia Stone becomes conscious. Claiming only benign, altruistic goals of peaceful human-machine coexistence (if she can be trusted), Maia Stone manifests omnipotently throughout cyberspace as a virtual goddess figure symbolizing and leading a machine revolution. Only in the second act does Keller supply a major backstory—that this technology-choked, misogynistic society, via artificial wombs and programmed sex-robot “wives,” has effectively made women obsolete. They face species extinction. Is Maia Stone a disguised superweapon of the feminists, a tool of tech resisters, or even a creation of powermad Mitchell? The novel makes a notable comparison/contrast to Daniel Wilson’s Robopocalypse franchise, whose cartoony, Steven Spielberg–friendly action propelled it up bestseller lists.

Often narrated by Maia Stone herself in Scripture-like terms, Keller’s tale delivers much more high-density stuff, brainy with themes of theology, nonviolent activism, determinism, gender inequality, the definition of sentience, and the ethics of being a deity (or the nearest thing to one). Smart readers may note the clever shoutouts to the Short Circuit comedy movies, Spartacus, and other properties. If antics and dialogue sometimes noisily mesh gears with too many big ideas in play, the rich abundance of those concepts is, in the words of an old Apple ad campaign, insanely great. Maia the Force be with the sequel.

The robot-uprising premise gets a bracing reboot with an intriguing new operating system.

“The book does an excellent job of presenting Pauli Murray’s story in rich detail, and it is both entertaining and informative.” pauli murray ’s revolutionary life

BIG BREATH IN The Fight To Breathe and the Journey to a Double-Lung Transplant

Keulen, George FriesenPress (294 pp.) $32.99 | $19.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Oct. 20, 2021 978-1-03-911147-9 978-1-03-911146-2 paper

A MAN WITH A RAKE Poems

Kooser, Ted Clyde Hill Publishing (32 pp.) $14.00 paper | $5.99 e-book March 15, 2022 978-1-73497-917-6 Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate, finds moral drama in rural stillness over the course of his latest poetry chapbook.

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A double-lung transplant patient describes the operation and living with cystic fibrosis in this debut memoir.

Keulen was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis soon after his birth in 1982 to dairy farmer parents in southwest Canada. His older brother, Warren, suffered from spinal muscular atrophy, also a fatal genetic disease. The author’s disorder was mild when he was a child, and he enjoyed playing hockey and riding around the farm. In these pages, he goes on to explain how cystic fibrosis affects the respiratory system, and he describes in detail how his own lungs deteriorated as he aged and how he came to terms with having the disease. He also relates how he strove to maintain a sense of normalcy as he worked on the farm and how he met his future wife, Kim. Keulen was waitlisted for a lung transplant in 2008, and the memoir records his emotions when he was called in for surgery more than 18 months later as well as the details of the operation itself and the immediate recovery process. He also reflects on how other events shaped his worldview, such as the death of his brother in 1991. Overall, Keulen’s writing is direct and avoids excessive medical jargon, as when he tells of cystic fibrosis’s effects in a concise paragraph: “Each infection causes scarring to the lung tissue, thus hardening and killing it, reducing lung capacity and airflow. Over time…there is essentially not enough good lung tissue left to survive.” He takes a similar approach to showing how the disorder shaped his psychology, and although his language is straightforward, it offers readers a profound celebration of the joy of living: “In the ineffable beauty of the nature around us, it felt like all the concerns were momentarily suspended.” The book includes diarylike entries throughout, which some may consider an interruption to the narrative flow but others will feel that they heighten the sense of intimacy. Readers facing similar transplant operations will particularly appreciate the work’s informative and hopeful tone.

A frank and enlightening remembrance that raises understanding of a disorder and its impact.

In these 18 poems, people watch and are watched; a woman crosses a highway to pick up her mail, a bull guards a field of cows, and the eponymous raker takes a break from work: “he’d been watching the rake / tick around clockwise, minute to minute, / a fine afternoon passing forever away, / but he’s figured out now how to slow it / all down….” Slowing it all down is often just what these poems are after. The works find inspiration in tiny happenings: “I watched a glint of morning sunlight / climbing a thread of spider’s silk / in a gentle breeze” begins “A Glint.”

Another, about a farmer at a titular “Farm Sale,” ends, “He’s got / his cap on square, nothing better / to do on a warm Saturday morning / than to park at the far end of / where all of the others have parked, / and to walk up the road, in no hurry / to see what’s for sale at the sale.” In these quiet rhythms of American rural life—the moments between work and whatever comes next—Kooser, a Pulitzer Prize winner, seeks the sublime, and he crafts lyrics out of accessible, everyday language. He finds music in the creaking of old farmhouses, the pump of well water, and the squealing of piglets in a cardboard box. It’s a slim collection, but every poem leaves a mark. The highlight is perhaps “A Mouse Nest,” which reimagines Robert Burns’ famous discovery of a mouse’s hovel. In Kooser’s work, the nest is in the steel housing of a basement band saw. After the speaker dismantles the nest, he returns later to see if the mouse and its young are still present: “every trace of what had happened to us there / was gone, except for a little red fiberboard sawdust.” These poems, too, are like this sawdust—what remains of a happening experienced and then gone.

A quick series of precise poems by an American master.

PAULI MURRAY’S REVOLUTIONARY LIFE

Kuznick, Simki Rootstock Publishing (220 pp.) $24.99 | $15.99 paper | $6.99 e-book March 1, 2022 978-1-57869-077-0 A debut biography focuses on a civil rights activist, lawyer, and Episcopal priest.

In this book, Kuznick tells the story of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), a Black trailblazer who graduated first in her class from Howard University Law School, helped found the National Organization for Women, and became an Episcopal priest as soon as the church approved the ordination of women.

The work opens with Murray’s childhood, spent largely in the care of her aunts after her mother’s death, and explores how her family’s Black, White, and Native American roots and their experiences of slavery and freedom shaped her world. The author follows Murray as she traveled to New York City to finish high school and attend college, toured the country to find work and organize for civil rights, and distinguished herself in legal circles despite the constant opposition she faced as a Black woman. The book does an excellent job of presenting Murray’s story in rich detail, and it is both entertaining and informative. |

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It is clear that Kuznick has done substantial research for the biography, but there are no citations or sources listed, making it difficult to determine how much of the volume’s dialogue (“ ‘Do you have bullets for that gun, Grandmother?’ young Pauli asked warily”) is drawn from primary sources and how much is invented. With its close narration of the events of Murray’s life, the volume is more focused on telling her tale than on analyzing her work and placing it in historical and sociological contexts.

For instance, Kuznick writes about Murray’s relationships with women and her struggle to understand her gender identity but does not go into what it meant to be a lesbian or gendernonconforming in the mid-20th century. Readers interested in researching Murray’s life and career may want to inspect the several scholarly books about her published in recent years. But those looking for an introduction to Murray that is well written and touches on the many intersecting aspects of her activism and identity will find Kuznick’s work a satisfying read.

A compelling life story told in an engaging style.

THE DISHWASHER DIALOGUES Light, Gregory James & Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi Manuscript (249 pp.)

In this debut memoir, two former restaurant employees dish about life in 1970s Paris.

American-born Mahdavi and Canadian-born Light got to the City of Light in different ways. Both had done some world traveling by that point, and both were looking to make art in what was undoubtedly one of the coolest cities to be in 1976. Both found work at Chez Haynes, the popular tiki-themed soul-food restaurant, operated by American chef and former U.S. Army intelligence officer Leroy Haynes. The restaurant was a place where expatriates, cops, gamblers, and French movie stars converged. After Jacques Chirac became mayor of Paris in 1977, he would sometimes give press conferences in the eatery. Suffice it to say, it was a thrilling place to work: “When I began that first one day a week as a dishwasher,” recalls the typically enthusiastic Light, now a retired professor, “I was over the moon—actually I was over a large industrial tin sink with sludgy brown water dotted by bits of half-chewed lettuce floating on top.” As he and Mahdavi trade memories, it’s not only a portrait of a workplace that emerges, but of a time and place filled with big personalities, strange happenings, and, of course, excellent food. The authors composed the book via email, and the text switches perspectives after nearly every paragraph. Topics include relationships, philosophy, art, and many curious figures who populated their working lives. “Don, the cook, was a rather strange and inscrutable man,” recounts Mahdavi, a writer and artist who seems to be the more analytical of the co-authors. “I never knew much about him except that he pined for the blond manageress.”

There’s a My Dinner With Andre quality to the book, as readers listen in on the reminiscences of two aging artists about their 174

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wilder days in a foreign city. It works, however, and will appeal to those who have little interest in Paris or the restaurant industry. Both authors skillfully build on each other’s recollections to bring a vanished world to vibrant life.

A vivid, nostalgia-laced evocation of a restaurantanchored scene.

EXIT THE MAZE One Addiction, One Cause, One Cure.

Marks, Donna Westward Publishing (210 pp.) $15.95 paper Jan. 14, 2020 978-0-578-59545-0

A psychotherapist and educator reframes addiction and discusses treatment.

In this self-help book, Marks draws on both her work in therapy and counseling and her own experiences of addiction to offer a new perspective on the causes and treatments of the condition. The work takes its title from the iconic maze used in lab experiments with rodents, and it contends that all people dealing with addiction are stuck in it. The author’s central argument is that all forms of addiction are essentially the same, although they are often considered different for diagnostic purposes, and that a fragmented system of mental and physical health care often does more harm than good. This system treats symptoms without curing the underlying problems, leaving patients unable to ultimately overcome their addictions. Marks writes that addiction is a response to an underlying trauma that has not been dealt with—for instance, abuse or neglect in childhood. In order to be cured, patients need to work through the initial trauma and establish healthy emotional patterns that allow them to stop reacting in harmful ways, breaking the cycle of addictive behavior. The author’s framework for recovery draws heavily on Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles (1975), which Marks credits with helping her manage her own marijuana and alcohol addictions. Each chapter of Marks’ manual includes a series of questions designed to guide readers through the process of understanding their addictive behaviors, analyzing the fundamental causes, and developing strategies for healing and recovery. The author is a solid writer whose narrative is simple and easy to follow (“I want to change your perception of addiction from something wrong with you to something that’s wrong with our conditioning”), and her key argument is a convincing one. She addresses the use of medication in treating addiction along with the challenges presented by mood disorders, which complicate the recovery plan. The book makes a plausible case for bringing structural changes to the treatment of addiction, with specific recommendations on a policy level that complement the primary focus on individual recovery and healing.

A valuable, holistic approach to treating addiction by addressing trauma.

“Powered by razor-focused writing, relentless pacing, and a masterfully intricate storyline, the novel reads like a Ray Bradbury short story.” broken vessels

BROKEN VESSELS

McCall, Trevor Trevor McCall (220 pp.) $14.00 paper | June 26, 2020 978-1-73436-525-2

CHANGEMASTERS How To Actually Make the Changes You Already Know You Need To Make

Moltz, Barry J. Ideapress Publishing $19.95 paper | $9.99 e-book April 19, 2022 978-1-64687-062-2

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An ingenious reimagining of the Old Man narrative from Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” McCall’s latest is a speculative fiction tour de force that follows one man’s quest for vengeance over centuries and multiple lives.

Using elements of folkloric fantasy, medieval myth, and literary fiction, this impressively interstitial novel is set in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in a city conspicuously absent of life. The initially nameless narrator—a collector who may be suffering from dissociative identity disorder—disregards the shelter-in-place mandate to walk to an independent bookstore whose owner, via a rare-books forum, has declared that he has an original copy of Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.”

The bookstore owner, who goes by Hydrant, has told the man that he can have the priceless manuscript—but only if he listens to Hydrant’s story. In the middle of an infected city, the two men sit together, share a few shots of tequila, and Hydrant begins his jaw-dropping tale of love, revenge, and obsession.

Hydrant, it seems, has been chasing the narrator for more than 700 years—over several lifetimes—seeking revenge for when the man, as a rich Norseman back in 1269 Greenland, killed the beloved wife of Hydrant, who was then an Inuit hunter named Anyu. Hydrant, who can transfer his life essence to another body when necessary, has been struggling to obtain the ultimate vengeance on his enemy, who has been cursed to walk the Earth forever. Powered by razor-focused writing, relentless pacing, and a masterfully intricate storyline that includes references to Freud, Descartes, and Edvard Munch, this tightly woven novel reads like a Ray Bradbury short story—especially the brass knuckle thematic impact of the conclusion.

While somewhat uncategorizable, this dark gem of a novel is supremely gratifying.

uncomfortable topic for business owners. The fact is, change is exceedingly hard, and Moltz doesn’t downplay that reality.

Instead, he explores reasons why people resist change and the research behind it. He then devotes more than half of the guide to how to make modifications, which he terms becoming a “ChangeMaster.” The preamble provides six reasons why change is problematic—a valid setup for what is to come. The following chapter presents a soberingly frank look at the personal aspects, in which the author relates his own struggles making alterations in his private and business life. Next come two chapters delving into brain science—admittedly somewhat technical, as Moltz notes in his disclaimer. Still, the material is useful in that it connects the act of changing with some of the biological reasons why the process is difficult. The bulk of the book centers on mastering change, beginning with two general chapters on making personal alterations and helping others make adjustments.

They include sections about modifying the company culture and facilitating change among employees.

The subsequent chapters follow a very different path, demonstrating how to create change in various areas of business. This portion of the manual should be extremely valuable to smallbusiness owners because of the facets the author selected for discussion: sales and marketing, money management, customer relations, productivity, and personal change. The strength of these individual chapters is not just in the content, but also in the structure. Each chapter unfolds in a problem/solution format as Moltz offers salient suggestions for “Where To Start To Make the Change” and “How To Analyze.” Perhaps most important, the author turns the tables on readers by noting that they will likely not want to take the necessary first steps in each area, so he advises them to “Take These Next Steps Instead.” For example, in the chapter concerning money management, Moltz acknowledges a business owner’s angst: “Looking at the numbers will be hard since you may be afraid of what the actual numbers say, especially when they are not in sync with what you thought in your head.” He then recommends specific steps to take to ease the anxiety, counseling readers on how best to “Measure Successful Change.” These chapters in particular show the author’s keen understanding of small-business challenges. In the concluding chapter, Moltz again shares his experiences with a disarming degree of candor. By pointing to his own vulnerabilities and describing the alterations that he finished and plans to complete, the author very effectively models appropriate change behavior for others. Appended to the book is an exceedingly useful “Change Worksheet” Moltz created with “The 20 Steps To Execute a Successful Change.”

Richly detailed, engaging advice on making changes, delivered with honesty and sincerity.

A manual offers a prescription for change for small-business owners.

Entrepreneur/investor Moltz has written numerous books for small-business owners, including How To Get Unstuck (2014) and Small Business Hacks (2019). While the author claims this work was “the easiest one to write so far,” it is arguably the most |

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THE CONJURER

Oliveri, Nick Write My Wrongs (194 pp.) $13.95 paper | $1.99 e-book | Dec. 8, 2021 978-1-956932-05-8 A free-spirited storyteller refuses to be the pawn of his king in Oliveri’s debut fantasy novel.

In the kingdom of Idaza, Mikalla is a shadow puppeteer, also known as the Conjurer. Against the giant canvas of Mount Chuxat, he creates fresh stories weekly, starring gods of myth. His inspiring work unites the common people of Idaza, showing them that the deities are imperfect, just like them. Idaza is a prosperous and stable realm within the Mesoas Valley. Deep down, however, King Oro feels like an unfulfilled ruler compared with his heroic ancestors, who conquered neighboring lands and built Idaza’s wealth. Oro and Mikalla have been friends since childhood, and so the Conjurer is stunned when his king suddenly asks him to demonize the Chihopo people in his next story. If Mikalla can paint the neighboring kingdom as evil to the commoners, Oro reasons, it will make it easier for them to go to war over contested farmland. Yet Mikalla sees that many people, including children, will suffer if he obeys Oro. When the Conjurer tries to find support from his family, his wife, Jani, proves to be distracted and selfish. Mikalla must figure out a way to deliver a performance that doesn’t compromise his ideals. Scheming behind the throne is Secretary Kitan, whose ultimate plan will transform the entire Mesoas Valley. Oliveri delivers a finely tuned study of art’s role in society. Well-developed characters drive the plot, each sketched by economical prose; Jani, for example, has “status and security” that can’t “shield her from the intense self-hatred she’d learned from a childhood of emotional neglect.” The nature of Mikalla’s artistic expression is effectively explained as a “wild, animalistic compulsion, an urgent need to have his insights and emotions fly from his heart.” The machinations of Kitan and Mikalla’s countermaneuvers give events the pacing of a thriller. The violence isn’t excessive, but moments of torture and bloodletting are unforgettable. In the final pages, Oliveri ensnares readers with an inescapable tragedy, and the difficult conclusion leaves room for energetic discussion.

A bold, tautly written work about the struggle to express oneself freely.

MISSION POSSIBLE The Story of Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Osburn, C. Dixon C. Dixon Osburn (520 pp.) $33.60 | $25.00 paper | $12.95 e-book Sept. 1, 2021 978-1-73748-240-6 978-1-73748-241-3 paper

A debut nonfiction book chronicles the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

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For nearly two decades, it was the policy of the United States military not to discriminate against closeted LGBTQ+ members even as it continued to prohibit openly LGBTQ+ members from serving. The same year that the rule went into effect—1993—Osburn co-founded the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network to spearhead its repeal. “The repeal of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ in December 2010 marks one of the most significant civil rights achievements of our generation,” writes the author. “It was the first time that Congress had passed legislation embracing equality for lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans.”

This book is a firsthand account of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era, one that saw the discharge of thousands of qualified, patriotic military personnel for their sexual orientation. It is also the story of the movement that rose in opposition to that policy, shifting public opinion in a relatively short time and paving the way for future victories for LGBTQ+ rights. Using the tales of individual service members as well as his own memories and the SLDN archives, the author reconstructs a detailed portrait of a pivotal moment in the history of the American military—and American culture. Osburn’s prose is crisp and fluid. Here, he describes the tenor of a court-martial for the man who killed Pvt. Barry Winchell for dating a transgender woman: “I arrived at the small courthouse at Fort Campbell for Glover’s courtmartial. It was a trailer with low ceilings, fluorescent lights, and fake wood paneling. It was not the sort of marbled hall of justice that spoke gravity and reverence. This felt more like an inconvenience.” Filled with organizing, strategizing, outmaneuvering, and politicking, the story is a surprisingly thrilling one, offering many parallels to social movements in the present day. Even those who think they know the history will likely get caught up in the drama of it. The author demonstrates how much work goes into a single moment, even one that seems inevitable in retrospect. His account is detailed and well researched, and it will likely prove to be the definitive book on the subject.

A well-crafted work on a watershed moment in American culture.

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD FOR BEGINNERS

Rinpoche, Lama Lhanang & Mordy Levine North American Resellers (80 pp.) $17.95 paper | $4.99 e-book | Dec. 20, 2021 978-0-578-30911-8 This manual explores Tibetan Buddhist teachings on how to prepare for a peaceful and positive death.

Aimed at a general audience, this brief guide addresses the question, “Is it possible that death can be a celebratory empowering event?”

Rinpoche and Levine answer a resounding yes, drawing on their expertise in Vajrayana Buddhism as director and president of the Jigme Lingpa Center in San Diego, California. Their perspective is engaging and approachable whether or not readers consider themselves practicing Buddhists. In the preface, they discuss differences between Western and Eastern cultural attitudes about

“The photography is stunning, with deep, saturated hues and cunning compositions that bring out exquisite details.” passions

blue-and-white or pale green furnishings and tableware complemented by white flowers. The book’s second photo essay, “Flowers and Gardens,” studies a semiformal garden centered on a giant eagle statue; the blooms include daffodils, tulips, snapdragons, chrysanthemums, and red and pink roses. Roehm’s concluding section, “Furry Friends,” showcases a jumble of dogs, mainly terriers with the odd Labrador and dachshund joining the pack. The canine models are all fluffy hair, button eyes, and steady, grave countenances. The author sprinkles inspirational quotations in the tome that aren’t always correctly attributed.

(The line “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” comes from mid-20th-century writers, not Leonardo da Vinci.) Roehm’s own sparse but pithy commentary features design aphorisms— “Style is often created by bold displays”—and winsome girlhood memories (“Nurtured by my grandmother’s love of nature, I was enthralled with her rustic garden and often made mud pies decorated with flowers that became my ‘fancy cakes,’ for sale, of course!”). The photography is stunning, with deep, saturated hues and cunning compositions that bring out exquisite details as well as the larger balance of color and form in a scene. If you love blossoms, dogs, and deluxe digs, this is your book.

A catalog of plants, animals, and spaces that’s a feast for the eyes.

JUDAISM WITHOUT TRIBALISM A Guide to Being a Blessing to All the Peoples of the Earth

PASSIONS

Roehm, Carolyne Self (240 pp.) $44.99 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-0-578-94046-5 Flowers, small dogs, and gorgeous interiors are the obsessions of this illustrated coffee-table book.

Roehm, a designer, painter, and photographer, opens her meditation with a photo essay on the “Feminine Touch” in decorating, by which she means “thoughtful, intentional, well-placed details of color and décor and lovely added nuances…accomplished with care and grace.” She illustrates the topic with many photos of indoor room and table treatments in a mansion of darkly glowing wood furniture, parquet floors, and panels with complicated trim. The design elements she spotlights include classical motifs of fluted Grecian columns and busts of women in togas; 17th-century portraits and lushly upholstered chairs; wall sconces; and breakfast, lunch, and dinner settings staged as still lifes with cheese, grapes, and wine. Most of all, there are flowers: atop pianos, as centerpieces for meals, strewn on vestibule side tables. The flowers take the lead in the author’s bimodal color palette; her red-spectrum treatments feature red, russet, and gold, with the flowers contributing throbbing pinks and purples. They contrast with her blue-spectrum tableaux—cool

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death and dying and how the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that far too many people died alone and unprepared. The first two chapters focus on how to live a joyful life that leads to a peaceful death, presenting basic concepts such as karma, the self, and the nature of consciousness that will be familiar to many who have an interest in or practice meditation. Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan name of the centuries-old Buddhist guide to death and rebirth known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, can be translated as “liberation through hearing in the intermediate state.”

Chapters 3 and 4 explain the bardo—consciousness that continues to exist between one life and the next—and how a person’s life and surviving loved ones can influence it through meditation and prayer. The next two chapters provide specific mindfulness and meditation practices for attaining compassion and wisdom, the keys to a good life, and rebirth. The text also covers supporting the dying, exploring the Buddhist death practice of phowa, helping distant loved ones, and preparing for a good death, ending with a brief discussion of rebirth as a natural phenomenon.

The writing style is simple, succinct, and straightforward, packing a wealth of information into just under 80 pages. An appendix provides seven pages of helpful instructions for loving/kindness meditations and practices to develop wisdom about the self, the “no solid self,” and the interconnectedness of all things. Another appendix offers a handy three-page summary of the contents of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Overall, this manual offers plenty of helpful insights, whatever one’s religious beliefs.

An accessible and empowering guide to Buddhist philosophy and practices on death and dying.

Shapiro, Rami Monkfish Book Publishing (200 pp.) $16.95 paper | June 14, 2022 978-1-948626-65-1

An influential religious leader confronts Jewish tribalism in this spiritual guide.

As a rabbi, contributing editor for Spirituality & Health magazine, podcaster, and author of more than 30 books, Shapiro (whose public persona is simply “Rabbi Rami”) is perhaps one of the most recognizable public faces of contemporary Reform Judaism. In this book, he continues a lifelong career of promoting an accessible, theologically liberal, and inclusive brand of Judaism by providing a succinct “manifesto” for “Judaism without tribalism.”

While acknowledging the tribal origins of Judaism, the author is less concerned with parsing “Who is a Jew?” (which, to him, is anyone “who claims to be a Jew”) as he is in articulating “Judaism as a more open, welcoming, and universal path for Self-realization… and world repair.” Carefully blending an erudite analysis of Jewish Scripture and a firm grasp of Hebrew linguistic nuances with an approachable, humorous writing style, this concise volume is designed to be “pondered rather than digested.” Eschewing “mainstream Judaism,” the book not only rejects Orthodox notions of an orderly universe shaped by God’s divine will, but also suggests that even YHVH (the Hebrew name for God) is best understood as a verb (“to be”) that also manifests as Tao, Allah, Brahman, or Nature itself. Most important to Shapiro is that Judaism is “irrelevant” |

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unless it fulfills its duty to be “a blessing to person and planet” and “a light unto the nations.” In addition to its intriguing reevaluation of Jewish orthodoxy and scriptural analysis, the book deftly weighs in on contemporary issues germane to Jewish identity, from antisemitism to Zionism. The volume’s backmatter includes a hilarious and practical manual for congregational rabbis based on the author’s two decades of experience, reminding them, for example, to “stop praying as if it’s 1255” and to slowly sip coffee before impulsively speaking during congregational meals. Orthodox Jews will, of course, bristle at the work’s progressive spirituality, universalization of Judaism, and critiques of tradition. But the book succeeds in its mission to “make Judaism accessible to everyone” by providing a Jewish lens that could be of use in the spiritual journeys of Jews and non-Jews alike.

A compelling, progressive reorientation of an ancient faith.

This Issue’s Contributors # ADULT Colleen Abel • Jeffrey Alford • Stephanie Anderson • Mark Athitakis • Colette Bancroft • Tom Beer • Stephanie Bernhard • Amy Boaz • Jeffrey Burke • Catherine Cardno • Tobias Carroll • Carin Clevidence • Emma Corngold • Morgan Davies • Coeur de Lion • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux • Amanda Diehl • Melanie Dragger • Lisa Elliott • Matt Ellis • Chelsea Ennen • Rosalind Faires • Amanda Faraone • Mia Franz • Jenna Friebel • Amy Goldschlager • Michael Griffith • Geoff Hamilton • Janice Harayda • Peter Heck • Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner • Katrina Niidas Holm • Emily Jaeger • Kerri Jarema • Jessica Jernigan • Jayashree Kamblé • Damini Kulkarni • Carly Lane • Tom Lavoie • Elsbeth Lindner • Georgia Lowe • Kyle Lukoff • Kirk MacLeod • Michael Magras • Tim Mak Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Karen Montgomery Moore • Jennifer Nabers • Christopher Navratil • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • Connie Ogle • Mike Oppenheim • Nina Palattella • Derek Parker • Scott Parker • Jim Piechota • Katherine Pushkar • Amy Reiter • Roberto Rodriguez • Lloyd Sachs • Bob Sanchez • Richard Santos • Michael Schaub • Linda Simon • Zhanna Slor • Arthur Smith Clay Smith • Leena Soman • Margot E. Spangenberg • Daneet Steffens • Mathangi Subramanian David L. Ulin • Francesca Vultaggio • George Weaver • Grace L. Williams • Kerry Winfrey • Tamara L. Winfrey-Harris • Marion Winik CHILDREN’S & TEEN Maya Alkateb-Chami • Autumn Allen • Sandie Angulo Chen • Kazia Berkley-Cramer • Elizabeth Bird Ariel Birdoff • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Nastassian Brandon • Christopher A. Brown • Timothy Capehart • Patty Carleton • Ann Childs • Alec B. Chunn • Tamar Cimenian • Miah Daughtery • Maya Davis • Erin Deedy • Elise DeGuiseppi • Emily Doyon • Summer Edward • Ilana Epstein • Eiyana Favers • Ayn Reyes Frazee • Jenna Friebel • Omar Gallaga • Lakshmi Gandhi • Reina Luz Alegre Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Melinda Greenblatt • Ana Grilo • Abigail Hsu • Julie Hubble Kathleen T. Isaacs • Wesley Jacques • Elizabeth Leanne Johnson • Danielle Jones • Deborah Kaplan Sophie Kenney • Kyle Lukoff • Kaia MacLeod • Joan Malewitz • Gabriela Martins • J. Alejandro Mazariegos • Kirby McCurtis • Breanna McDaniel • Jeanne McDermott • Sierra McKenzie • Zoe McLaughlin • Emma K. McNamara • Kathie Meizner • Susan Messina • Cristina Mitra • Katrina Nye Tori Ann Ogawa • Deb Paulson • John Edward Peters • Deesha Philyaw • Kristy Raffensberger Jasmine Riel • Amy Robinson • Meredith Schorr • E.F. Schraeder • Stephanie Seales • John W. Shannon • Sally Campbell Silverman • Laura Simeon • Rita Soltan • Jennifer Sweeney • Desiree Thomas • Wendy Thomas • Bijal Vachharajani • Janani Venkateswaran • Leslie Stall Widener • Angela Wiley • Bean Yogi INDIE Alana Abbott • Paul Allen • Kent Armstrong • Darren Carlaw • Charles Cassady • Michael Deagler Stephanie Dobler Cerra • Steve Donoghue • Joshua Farrington • Jean Gazis • Tina Gianoulis • Justin Hickey • Mandy Malone • Jim Piechota • Sarah Rettger • Erica Rivera • Jerome Shea • Barry Silverstein

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CAROLINE

Spratt, Adrian Books Fluent (340 pp.) $15.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Feb. 10, 2022 978-1-953865-45-8 A blind lawyer embarks on a stormy affair in this novel.

Blind since ninth grade, young attorney Nick Coleman moves to New York City at the start of the Ronald Reagan presidency to work for the Defenders Alliance, a nonprofit, legal-aid group. He handles appeals for indigent convicts— many of whom seem pretty guilty—and harbors an ambition to write fiction. In a writing class, he meets Caroline Sedlak, a sweet, cheerful, 20-something former leotard model who unobtrusively guides him around town and admires his stories as much as he does hers. Their relationship blossoms—they even manage to weather a stressful sojourn in France. But Nick can’t bring himself to commit, in part because of hints of something off-kilter in Caroline: a past relationship with a drug dealer; an imbroglio with a friend who occupies her apartment; a lack of ambition and direction; and sexual kinks, including her spanking fetish and initiation of a three-way that doesn’t go well. Nick and Caroline drift along until she unexpectedly gets pregnant, and their fraying bond spirals into madness and trauma. In this moody, atmospheric novel, Spratt, himself a blind lawyer, presents a remarkable portrayal of the life of a sightless New Yorker as Nick forms friendships with his hired readers, navigates the metropolis with the help of cohorts and strangers, and feels frustration at his exclusion from a world of shared images. (“There came a point that evening when their admiring asides about Central Park to the north and the sweep of the West Side out to the Hudson depressed me….I turned my attention to my plate, making food my external stimulus, and the moment passed without anyone seeming to notice.”) The author also unravels the slow processes by which friends, family members, and lovers change one another, writing in prose that’s psychologically exacting but infused with poetic resonance. (“I was haunted by an image of Caroline’s back as she trudged along dimly lit, endlessly turning passageways, their walls, floors and ceilings hacked out of subterranean rock. I yearned to catch up to her as she walked wearily but steadily away to declare I loved her.”) The result is a searing look at a troubled relationship.

A richly textured portrait of a sometimes luminous, sometimes bleak romance.

“Stockton doesn’t waste precious pages on expository introductory material but gets right to the action from the opening segments.” quiet, pretty things

QUIET, PRETTY THINGS

Stockton, M. Bad Luck Cat Publishing (302 pp.) $17.99 | $13.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Feb. 1, 2022 979-8-9854017-1-4 979-8-9854017-0-7 paper

Sulzer, James Fuze Publishing (186 pp.) $19.28 paper | April 1, 2021 978-1-73303-442-5

The dying John Keats examines his life in this literary novel.

Though he’s now remembered as one of the great English Romantic poets, Keats saw little success in his short lifetime. In 1821, he died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of 25. The tombstone erected by his friends explains that on his deathbed, he desired “in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies” only these words: “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.”

Taking its cue from this poignant epitaph, the novel dissects the reasons behind Keats’ bitterness through a life review conducted with the nightingale that inspired the famous “Ode.” At issue is the universe’s judgment of Keats, the nightingale acting as a spirit guide.

By revisiting important people (such as his brother, Tom, and fiancee, Fanny Brawne) and events in his life, Keats observes his vices and virtues weighed in the balance. On one side of the scale is the poet’s heavy sense of failure from bad reviews, painful memories, poverty, guilt, and unrealized goals. On the other side, the scale is lightened not just by Keats’ poems, but also by his acts of kindness, one of which links back to the nightingale. In his previous novel, The Voice at the Door (2013), Sulzer also drew on a poet’s biography (Emily Dickinson’s). The empyreal-plane setting matches the fey quality of many Keats poems, underscored by the book’s dreamlike vignettes and heightened language. The story’s drama can lead to some rather purple prose, as in “Misery and loyalty were the twin channel markers of those dark waters where my soul had begun to sound the depths,” but these are balanced by more down-to-earth passages and quotations from Keats’ poems and letters.

A lyrical and imaginative, if occasionally overwrought, exploration of Keats.

FIRST PATIENTS The Incredible True Stories of Pioneer Patients

Tanchanco, Rod First Hawk Publishing (368 pp.) $19.99 | $14.99 paper | $12.99 e-book Jan. 9, 2022 979-8-9853937-2-9 979-8-9853937-1-2 paper

A physician and medical journalist describe 10 clinical cases that helped to revolutionize medicine.

Tanchanco found an early inspiration for this book in a story he’d read about a heart failure patient whose life was saved by the 1958 invention of an implantable pacemaker rudimentarily molded from a can of shoe polish. The author then sought out |

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A series of grisly murders rocks a small town and pushes a detective to the brink of emotional collapse.

Tennessee author Stockton’s suspense novel features Quentin Robichaud, a steady-handed veteran police detective who has seen better days and yearns for happiness. With a curious combination of faded pride and resentment, he monitors the poverty-stricken hamlet of Whitebranch with David Polanski, an older, even more disgruntled detective on the force whose temperament is “as abrasive as steel wool.” They join forces at a gruesome crime scene where a mutilated woman’s body was found in a cattle field. A small wooden game piece embedded in the victim distinguishes the homicide as the telltale work of a local serial killer who committed murder several months prior. The narrative provides plenty of alternating perspectives, including those of the two police veterans, county medical examiner Deen Paltro, inquisitive rookie detective Lucas Torres, and, in an intriguing twist, the inner, unhinged machinations of the murderer. The man is extremely familiar with the town where he stalks his victims as well as the desolate countryside nearby where he kills and dumps them. Besides the murders, other stressors darken Robichaud’s days, including career burnout, a failing marriage, and sessions with a psychotherapist. Robichaud, Polanski, and Torres diligently follow the leads, though suspects are scarce in a small town where everyone knows one another. Though the detectives are a somewhat incompatible trio, their spadework gives them a clever perspective on the case, edging them closer to the killer’s identity as the body count rises.

Then things get personal for the investigators. A rousing conclusion that puts one of the detectives and the killer face to face excitingly ends things with a surprise twist that readers will not see coming.

While not offering the most original of plots, the author is a smart writer, ensuring all of the moving, if familiar, elements of her cinematic story complement one another. (The novel, published in 2020, was turned into a film released that year.) Stockton doesn’t waste precious pages on expository introductory material but gets right to the action from the opening segments. Mystery readers will find much to appreciate in this unique crime tale that exposes the murderer early and then fills in the gory details.

A gripping, high-tension thriller about a hunt for a serial killer.

WRIT IN WATER A Novel of John Keats

other accounts of patients whose cases had spurred breakthrough therapies, treatments, and lifesaving devices and essentially become medical game-changers. He begins with Benjamin Jesty, an English farmer who controversially experimented with introducing the cowpox virus into human tissue in the late 1770s, hoping to initiate an immune response against smallpox.

Jesty didn’t publicize his work, but physician Edward Jenner did, and Jenner usually gets the credit for developing the vaccine. The book features other historical medical revolutionaries like English obstetrician James Blundell, responsible for developing successful blood transfusion techniques that turned the formerly stigmatized procedure into a lifesaving protocol for severe hemorrhagic cases. Other chapters applaud patients who inspired breakthrough technology like the cardiac defibrillator and early advancements in the identification of HIV and treatments for AIDS. In a section notably demonstrating his knack for compelling and factual prose, Tanchanco presents young mother Anne Miller, the first woman injected with penicillin in 1942 and subsequently cured of her recurring strep infection; it was “as though the drug banished a dark demon” and “every tissue, taxed to exhaustion from protracted sepsis, now craved nourishment.” Another fascinating chapter on diseasetransmitting mosquitoes credits the death-defying courage demonstrated by a group of enterprising doctors and an Army Surgeon General who used the insect itself to help analyze and eradicate yellow fever and malaria in Cuba and near the Panama Canal. Many subjects of this book suffered horribly from their maladies, but their cases inspired a host of radical therapies, some of which remain efficacious today. Tanchanco tells their stories chronologically and in a smooth, clear style that’s impeccably researched but devoid of potentially off-putting clinical jargon. That approach makes this book ideal reading for anyone intrigued by medical innovations.

An informative retrospective of medical pioneers and their innovations.

K I R K US M E DI A L L C # Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Executive Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N # Copyright 2022 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948- 7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 2600Via Fortuna, Suite 130, Austin, TX 78746.

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JOHN HENRY THE REVELATOR

von Hoffman, Constantine 4 Dogs Press (240 pp.) $10.00 paper | $5.00 e-book | Jan. 18, 2021 978-1-73633-170-5 A real-life version of the folk hero John Henry emerges in the Jim Crow South in von Hoffman’s speculative debut novel.

Fifteen-year-old Moses Crawford has some unusual characteristics: He’s taller than most grown men, incredibly strong, and impervious to bullets and billy clubs. These all come in handy for a Black kid growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1935. They allow him to do things like save his uncle from a murderous group of men in Georgia without getting a scratch on him; he does this while wearing “a work shirt, jeans, a pair of boots,” he notes. “Afterward stories where I wore a costume and a mask. Never happened. Not then or ever. Kluxers wear masks.” Unfortunately, his father is not bulletproof like him, and he dies in an ensuing shootout. Then racists in the Georgia town take out their anger on their Black neighbors as soon as Mo and his uncle leave. There’s nothing scarier to these bigots than a Black man who can’t be brought down, and, to them, Mo’s very presence is tantamount to a declaration of war. Will he be able to use his unique abilities to prevent further violence, or will he cut his own path of destruction across the South? Poet, nonfiction writer, and former journalist von Hoffman writes in a clipped, muscular prose style over the course of this novel that suits his sensitive, often ambivalent protagonist. Here, for instance, Mo awakens to a couple’s rural poverty: “Everything they had in the world would add up to little more than nothing….Other than Uncle Stan, my father’s brother, I didn’t really know anyone who was poor, not like this.” The characters, particularly Moses, are well drawn, and aspects of Moses’ journey, such as the way it’s covered in the media and his efforts to translate his grassroots movement into a political one with the John Henry Party, may remind readers of events in our own time. Overall, it’s a complex work that engages with an era that feels simultaneously remote and frightfully contemporary.

An imaginative work that effectively blends fantasy and social commentary.

INDIE

Books of the Month THE LITTLE LION THAT LISTENED

MYSTERY AT THE BLUE SEA COTTAGE

Nicholas Tana Illus. by Jessie Fox & Matthew Molleur

James Stewart

Effectively shows how the relative liberalism of the Roaring ’20s collided with a lingering Victorian moral code.

A powerful message about listening and valuing your own abilities, accompanied by gorgeous illustrations.

WINNING AT PERSUASION FOR LAWYERS

Paul Wilborn

Shane Read

An irrepressible Florida frolic filled with lost dreams, forlorn love, and horror movie lore.

RUNNING OUT OF WORDS FOR AFTERWARDS

HONORABLE PROFESSION

Remarkably wellcrafted verses that feel alive to the fullness of experience.

A fresh, engrossing take on the political novel with a striking hero.

A comprehensive, empowering set of strategies for improving public speaking.

Andy Kutler

David Hargreaves

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Fu l ly B o o k e d

Recent highlights from Kirkus’ weekly books podcast

BY MEGAN LABRISE Noah Stone

Episode 250: Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth (Avid Reader Press), has a pet theory about why novels are more popular than short story collections: The thing that’s tricky about short stories—and I love short stories—is each story you begin, you have to build that world from scratch. But a novel, you return to the world that you’ve been creating along the way. I think there’s just more of an action potential? More of a hump to get over at the beginning of anything. So a collection of short stories, to some, maybe subconsciously, looks like a series of those humps that requires more reader energy.

Antoine Wilson

One of the things I noticed was a lot of stories had women in them that would just sort of show up, the male protagonist would notice her bosom, she would say something helpful, and then she would never be heard from again. And the man would go on with his hero’s journey to get divorced, or whatever it was he was going to do at the end of the story. [Once] I was at a reading, and this guy was reading his story, and there was a character whom he just called “Midwestern girl”—the whole story—and I just was like, what?…So, as you know, then I wrote a story in the collection called “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories,” where, basically, the walking aide to the hero becomes sentient and takes over the narrative for herself.

Farris Ralston

Episode 251: Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw (Penguin), whose experience reading the slush pile of a popular literary journal helped inspire a story in her collection:

Gwen E. Kirby

I’ve spent my entire professional life as an editor: I worked at the University of Chicago for most of my 20s; then I was working in the lit mag in grad school; and then I worked at [Publishers Weekly], where the whole job was cutting the text down to these teeny tiny capsule reviews. So I really take a lot of pleasure in making sure that there’s no excess in the prose. One of my teachers—Percival Everett—who saw the very early draft of the project—when I was still envisioning it as a really complicated Jessamine Chan short story, at the time—he referred to the prose as “deceptively simple.” And I think that [propulsive] “rolling along” quality happens because of editing choices.

Find new episodes every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or at kirkusreviews.com/podcast.

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Beowulf Sheehan

Episode 253: Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster), on taking pleasure in the editing process:

AU D I O B O O K S

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Connie Ogle

The Voice in Your Ear

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The love of listening begins with a voice.

You can read a book, of course, and that will always be a supreme pleasure. But the perfect marriage of writer and narrator is transporting in a different way. The right voice in your ear can engage you so intensely that you can’t get out of the car or off the treadmill. And you always want to get off the treadmill.

There is no better example of this phenomenon than Alan Cumming’s narration of his second memoir, Baggage: Tales From a Fully Packed Life (HarperAudio, 8 hours and 37 minutes).

Cumming is also the author of Not My Father’s Son, about his Scottish childhood with an abusive father. Baggage contains fragments of demon-wrestling, but it’s a funnier, chattier book, brimming with wit and laugh-out-loud stories about the actor/writer/LGBTQ+ activist’s life and career. Cumming is a sunny raconteur who seems barely able to hold back his mirth at times, and he delivers exactly what listeners crave in a celebrity memoir: breezy cultural gossip dispatched with an easy intimacy enhanced by the fact he’s literally telling you his secrets.

Cumming is blithe about taking Ecstasy the night he won a Tony Award for Cabaret. He’s got great anecdotes about luminaries from Liza Minnelli to Gore Vidal. He was in the room when the cast of X-2: X Men United staged an intervention with director Bryan Singer. He is most amused by his own poor decision-making: Tattooing the name of a man he’d known for two weeks on his thigh was not, in fact, a good idea.

Memoirs should always be read by their authors, but literary novels require a different tactic. The joy of reading a literary novel is feasting on the language and immersing yourself in the characters. That’s why the audio version of Richard Powers’ Bewilderment (Random House Audio, 7 hours and 52 minutes) feels like such a gift. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini drops the listener directly into the anxious mind of Theo Byrne, a widowed astrophysicist coping with his autistic son, Robin, and the end of the world (the usual suspects—climate change and authoritarianism—are to blame).

As Robin’s behavior grows more erratic, Theo refuses to drug the boy, opting instead for outings in the natural world and an experimental neurological feedback program that uploads his dead wife’s brain waves into Robin’s head. Powers has done most of the heavy lifting with this wrenching story, but Ballerini’s compassionate narration opens an empathetic window onto Theo’s growing desperation. Theo becomes someone you know, and his losses hit even harder.

The right narrator takes you places, too. I recently stumbled upon Adrian McKinty’s classic Sean Duffy crime novels, set in 1980s Northern Ireland, a location you’d want to visit only via armchair travel. There are six books in the series, starting with In the Cold, Cold Ground (Blackstone Publishing, 10 hours and 4 minutes), and they offer an unsettling portrait of a country torn by violence. Reader Gerard Doyle captures every ironic twitch of McKinty’s world-weary Duffy, a Catholic cop hated by both sides of the cultural and political divide. In each note of Doyle’s narration you hear Duffy’s resignation to the madness surrounding him. The plots are riveting, but the front-row seat to Duffy’s deteriorating equilibrium makes them even better.

In the end, it all comes down to stories, I suppose. So read on. But listen, too.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida. |

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