September 1, 2020: Volume LXXXVIII, No 17

Featuring 376 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children's and YA books

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXVIII, NO.

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REVIEWS

Special Issue | VISIONS OF AMERICA

from the editor’s desk:

Conversations About America B Y T O M

Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N

B EER

President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N

John Paraskevas

Optimism has been a scarce commodity this year. The Covid-19 pandemic spread relentlessly throughout the United States, the economy shuddered, and our federal government fumbled its response. Police killings of Black citizens seized national attention, and protesters calling for change were met, in many cases, with violence. The presidential election was already uncovering the ugliest tendencies in American politics.

It was difficult to feel hopeful about our future.

Then we began editing this, our first-ever Visions of America issue. The issue was conceived well before the dispiriting events of 2020, with the understanding that the November election would, in any event, be a fateTom Beer ful one for the nation. Now, the context is dramatically altered, the stakes heightened. And I found, as I read through the features we had commissioned, something that had been in short supply (for me, anyway): inspiration and optimism.

One unexpected theme that runs through the issue is conversation. Conversation is the focus of Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, Sept. 8), in which poet and essayist Claudia Rankine explores how Americans talk to one another about race and racial privilege. As she said to me in our interview, “In order to achieve systemic change inside the various institutions and systems that we have, we’re going to have to start one to one. We’re going to have to start speaking to each other with a shared vocabulary, a shared understanding, a shared recognition of American history.” As Rankine found when she began talking about race with both friends and strangers, these conversations are challenging for many of us. But in committing to them—and keeping them real—we begin to create social change.

Conversation likewise came up in Eric Liebetrau’s interview with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf, April 7). Mockett traveled throughout the Great Plains of the United States with itinerant contract or “custom” harvesters, talking with them about their work, their lives, and their values. She sees these conversations as a way forward out of what feels like a national impasse: “Listen to other people’s stories and recognize their stories as real,” she tells Kirkus. “Conversation does not necessarily yield instant gratification, but it can lead to systemic and structural changes.”

This issue reflects the extraordinary diversity of Americans and American experiences. There is no grand master narrative but countless individual stories reflecting people’s histories and hopes.

We speak with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar, whose new novel, Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown, Sept. 15), reflects on what it means to be Muslim American in the 21st century, to feel responsible for what America is today and yet feel like an outsider. Darcie Little Badger, author of the YA novel Elatsoe (Levin Querido, Aug. 25), talks about putting Indigenous characters into contemporary fiction and envisioning an America where “my people, the Lipan Apache, could once again flourish on our homeland.” Author and teacher Ernesto Cisneros discusses his middle-grade novel, Efrén Divided (Harper/HarperCollins, March 31), and the stories that his Mexican American middle school students in Santa Ana, California, have shared about the experience of having a parent deported.

We hope that these authors and their books—these Visions of America—will inspire in you some of the optimism that we felt in working on the issue. Keep reading, and keep the conversation going.

Print indexes: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/print-indexes Kirkus Blog: www.kirkusreviews.com/blog Advertising Opportunities: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/advertising opportunities

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contents visions of america 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: AYAD AKHTAR.............................................................. 14 MYSTERY...............................................................................................35 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY..........................................................46 ROMANCE............................................................................................46

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INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS..........................................................48 REVIEWS..............................................................................................48 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 50 INTERVIEW: CLAUDIA RANKINE.....................................................56 INTERVIEW: MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT........................................ 62

children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.......................................................... 91 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 91 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 92 INTERVIEW: ERNESTO CISNEROS.................................................. 98 WINTER HOLIDAY PICTURE BOOKS..............................................140

young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.........................................................151 REVIEWS.............................................................................................151

Christina Soontornvat tells the story of the boys’ soccer team trapped for 18 days in a flooded cave in Thailand, keeping even readers who know the end on the edges of their seats.

Read the review on p.134.

EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................152 INTERVIEW: DARCIE LITTLE BADGER...........................................156 INTERVIEW: KATE SCHATZ & MIRIAM KLEIN STAHL..................160

indie INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.........................................................175 REVIEWS.............................................................................................175 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 176

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SEEN & HEARD..................................................................................198 APPRECIATIONS: BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE.......... 199

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fiction DAUGHTER OF BLACK LAKE

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Buchanan, Cathy Marie Riverhead (320 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-7352-1616-7

APHASIA by Mauro Javier Cardenas...................................................5 THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante; trans. by Ann Goldstein...........................................................................8

Coming-of-age in Roman-occupied Britain.

Thirteen-year-old Hobble lives with her parents in a small, isolated community at the edge of a bog. Far from the eastern coast, their lives are largely untouched by Emperor Claudius’ desire to claim all of Britannia for Rome. But Hobble knows that this is about to change, because the young seer has had a vision of Romans coming to Black Lake. Her mother, Devout, has bitter recollections of an earlier incursion—and her experiences during that time will have a profound effect on Hobble’s fate. The stories of both daughter and mother unfold in alternating chapters. Buchanan devotes many, many pages to worldbuilding, at the expense of advancing the narrative. Nevertheless, Black Lake and the broader first-century Britain around it never feel like more than a stage set. The characters are mostly flat as well. Devout’s first love, Arc, is representative in that he fits a type but lacks specificity. He is, like Devout, a member of their community’s lowest caste but he is, apparently, singular because he knows “the industry of bees and the magnificence of the nighttime sky.”

Contemporary clichés like this don’t do much to help a reader find their way back into an imagined past. The book succeeds best at recalling other books, most particularly Manda Scott’s Dreaming the Serpent Spear. Both authors use Lindow Man—a body uncovered by peat diggers in Northwest England in 1984— in strikingly similar ways. The most distinctive element of Buchanan’s novel is the druid Fox. Historical fiction set in preChristian Britain often depicts druids as fonts of ancestral wisdom, as spiritual savants attuned to nature. Fox is not that. He is, instead, a greedy, power-hungry zealot who murders puppies and, ultimately, demands human sacrifice. Beyond this unpleasant character, this novel is unremarkable.

A slog through the bog.

THE NOSE AND OTHER STORIES by Nikolai Gogol; trans. by Susanne Fusso.........................................................................10 NIGHTS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENED by Simon Han....................12 THE ORCHARD by David Hopen........................................................18 THE EXILES by Christina Baker Kline............................................... 26 THEY’RE GONE by E.A. Barres.......................................................... 35 AFTER ALL I’VE DONE by Mina Hardy.............................................41 A LADY COMPROMISED by Darcie Wilde.........................................45 THE SEVENTH PERFECTION by Daniel Polansky............................ 46

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS

Ferrante, Elena Trans. by Goldstein, Ann Europa Editions (336 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-60945-591-0 4

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APHASIA

PANTHERS AND THE MUSEUM OF FIRE

Cárdenas, Mauro Javier Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-374-25786-6

Craig, Jen Zerogram Press (128 pp.) $13.95 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1557-1344-448-6

When her childhood friend dies, leaving behind a manuscript she is both reluctant and compelled to read, Jen Craig experiences the literary breakthrough she has waited for her entire life.

The main character in this novella of interiors shares a name with the book’s author. She also shares a city—Sydney, Australia—and an impassioned compulsion to write. In these ways, this unusual book has a relationship with autofiction along the lines of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series or Teju Cole’s Open City, sharing a thematic focus on the sources of writerly inspiration, ultimately seeming to propose that all subjects are really reflections of our selves. Jenny, the character, lives in

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In Ecuadorian Cárdenas’ second novel—after The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016)—a once-reluctant father tries to balance family with an awareness of lost possibilities while his sister’s life unravels.

Antonio Jose Jiménez immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia to fulfill his dream of an Ivy League education. Now a divorced database analyst, he lives in a small apartment connected through a purgatorial laundry room to the apartment he once shared with his wife and two young daughters. Struggling to write in his spare time, he avoids thinking about his sister or his own failed marriage by remembering former girlfriends (one of whom chose “László Krasznahorkai” for their safe word) and having sex with college students he meets on a site called Your Sugar Arrangements. He studies fathers in fiction and movies. “To learn how to be a father from a movie might sound ridiculous…but how else do men learn to be fathers different from their own monstrous fathers?—holotropic breathwork?”

Divided into five sections of short chapters, the story unfolds in a fragmented, fractured style, the long, breathless sentences dizzying and richly packed with memories, connections, and literary references. Cárdenas undercuts the idea of a single, stable identity and suggests the self as a many-layered work in progress. On the YSA site, Antonio calls himself Arturo. At work, consumed by thoughts of “the other lives he could have lived if he’d left his former wife when he was planning to, three weeks before conceiving Ada,” he imagines different versions of himself, including Antonio I (soccer player), Antonio VIII (writer), and Antonio V (database analyst), who “creates a spreadsheet to tabulate the other Antonios.” Meanwhile Antonio’s sister has a schizophrenic break brought on in part by their traumatic childhood with an abusive father. Confronted with discomfort, Antonio’s brain “activates its emergency erasure mechanisms.”

A person, he thinks, is “an accretion of misfortunes,” aphasia “a metaphor for expressive paralysis.” Fans of the author’s inventive, ambitious debut novel will find the same sardonic intelligence, paired here with a deep humanity. Despite erasure mechanisms and paralysis, Antonio works to be a better brother, a better parent to his girls. “Everywhere we went I saw grandmothers looking at us and marveling at a world where fathers and daughters held hands.”

Original, richly felt, deftly written. Highly recommended.

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finding freedom housing project in 1969. A boozy old man known as Sportcoat takes a shot at the local drug dealer and then doesn’t remember a thing about it, setting off a chain of events that bring in members of the Baptist church where Sportcoat is a deacon, beat cops and undercover detectives, an Italian mobster and his mother, an Irish bagel-store owner from the Bronx, and a glorious array of neighborhood characters. There’s even a mysteriously regular cheese delivery and a vividly described colony of ants that made their way to Brooklyn from Colombia. McBride delights in pushing the boundaries of his overstuffed tale, and the whole thing is told with such warmth and generosity that you feel he could do anything: the very definition of literary freedom.

In N.K. Jemisin’s fantastical The City We Became (Orbit, March 24), each of the five boroughs of New York creates an avatar designed to help the city come to life.

As our review describes them, “Manhattan is a multiracial grad student new to the city with a secret violent past that he can no longer quite remember; Brooklyn is an African American rap star–turned–lawyer and city councilwoman; Queens is an Indian math whiz here on a visa; the Bronx is a tough Lenape woman who runs a nonprofit art center; and Staten Island is a frightened and insular Irish American woman who wants nothing to do with the other four.” They must fight an Enemy known as the Woman in White, who uses racism and gentrification in her quest to destroy them. Jemisin deploys the racist White Staten Islander and the shadowy, extradimensional Enemy the way Morrison describes White American writers using Black characters and tropes: as foils that throw their own freedom into stark relief.

Almost 30 years ago, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imag­ ination, Toni Morrison uncovered the ways American literature—that is, literature by White Americans, based as it is on ideas of freedom and the American dream—depends for its power on the presence of Black people. “The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum,” she wrote.

“Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery….What rose out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.”

From Poe to Cather to Melville to Hemingway, “Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

Today, a brilliant group of Black writers is claiming freedom for themselves. This isn’t a new story, of course, but rereading Morrison’s essay recently made me think of Raven Leilani’s exhilarating first novel, Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 4), in which a young Black woman tries to live on her own terms. Edie is having an affair with a White man named Eric who’s in an open marriage—then she proceeds to move in with Eric and his wife, breaking all the rules, giving herself the freedom to make mistakes and grow into her ambition as a painter. As our review said, “Leilani’s characters act in ways that often defy explanation, and that is part of what makes them so alive and so mesmerizing: Whose behavior, in real life, can be reduced to simple cause and effect?”

Or what about James McBride’s Deacon King Kong (Riverhead, March 3), set in and around a Brooklyn 6

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Glebe, a suburb of Sydney. One Monday morning, she leaves her apartment to walk to a cafe on Crown Street in Surry Hills, some two and a half miles away. The goal of this trip is to meet Pamela—the older sister of Jen’s recently deceased childhood friend, Sarah—in order to return Sarah’s unpublished manuscript, titled Panthers and The Museum of Fire, which Pamela gave to Jen at her sister’s wake and then requested back, unread.

As Jen walks, she thinks. As she thinks, she carries the reader through the intervening years, from her childhood friendship with Sarah to Jen’s own anorexia to a religious conversion instigated by Pamela; from her “one real friendship” with her college friend Raf to her father’s consuming failure to write the “one great work that everyone continues to ridicule him about” while he slowly succumbs to cancer; from her own sense of her grandiosity and potential to a lingering dread that even the closest people in her life ridicule and shun her. The distinct scenes of this book—the “house party” at which Jen finds religion in her youth, a date with Raf some years earlier, Sarah’s wake two days prior, and a dinner with Raf only the night before—weave in and out of Jen’s progress across the meticulously rendered

landscape of the city proper as her thoughts spiral, double-back, wallow, and soar. Sarah’s book, which is named for a road sign on the outskirts of Sydney, is simultaneously “nothing at all” and the instigating event for Jen’s own literary awakening—a book that gets to the “quick” of things and is, in fact, nothing but quick. It frees Jen from her own foundering attempts to write and shows her a new way forward. The result is the book the reader now holds in their hands four years after the day that Jen, the character, first set off on her book-length walk.

A dense, sometimes claustrophobic novel that flirts with the boundary between memory and invention.

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A girl, a city, an inhospitable society: Ferrante’s formula works again! the lying life of adults

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS

Giovanna seeks out her father’s sister and develops a fraught relationship with the troubled woman. The process of untangling generations of internecine deceit and rivalry—including the provenance of a peripatetic heirloom bracelet—leads Giovanna to truths about the conventional lies told by her parents and to decisions about how she wishes to conduct her own, not-yet-adult, life. (The bracelet appears to have mutable properties and serves as either charm or handcuff, just another thing to ask the enigmatic author about over coffee.) Ferrante revisits previously explored themes—violence against women, female friendships, the corrosive effects of class disparities—albeit in a more rarified sector of Naples (the privileged “upper” neighborhood of Rione Alto) than in her earlier Neapolitan Quartet. Giovanna’s nascent sexuality is more frankly explored than that of previous Ferrante protagonists, permitting the author to highlight two sides of teen sexuality: agency and abuse. Goldstein’s fluid translation once again allows readers into the head of a young woman recalling with precision and emotion a series of events which lead to a point of confession. Ferrante’s legion of devoted readers will be encouraged

Ferrante, Elena Trans. by Goldstein, Ann Europa Editions (336 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-60945-591-0 An overheard remark prompts an adolescent girl to uncover the truth about her relatives (and herself) in Ferrante’s precise dissection of one family’s

life in Naples.

Upon hearing her father refer to her, disparagingly, as having the same face as a despised and estranged relative, 12-yearold Giovanna, previously a good student and affectionate daughter, embarks on an odyssey of detection and discovery through areas of Naples from which her educated and progressive parents have shielded her. Desperate to determine whether she, indeed, resembles the abhorred Aunt Vittoria,

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THE BUTCHERS’ BLESSING

by another equivocal ending, permitting the hope of further exploration of Giovanna’s journey in future volumes.

A girl, a city, an inhospitable society: Ferrante’s formula works again!

Gilligan, Ruth Tin House (312 pp.) $25.95 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-947793-78-1

FREEMAN’S Love

A contemplative coming-of-age thriller set against a modernizing Ireland.

Gilligan’s latest opens with the description of a photo: It’s a dead man strung up by his feet like a cow. The photographer has never shown the image until now, although he believes it to be his finest work: “The Butcher,” is how he imagines it would be labeled. “County Monaghan, 1996.” The subject had belonged to a group of ritual cattle slaughters, eight men who’d roamed the countryside on foot, keeping the old customs alive for those who still believed.

Then the novel skips backward in time, to 1996 and the circumstances that led to that one arresting image. It is a classic mystery format—start with the ending, then trace how we got

Ed. by Freeman, John Grove (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-8021-5783-6

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The seventh volume of Freeman’s eponymous literary journal “celebrates” love, which the former Granta editor calls “the biggest and most complex emotion.”

For many readers today, love is also scarce, since, as Freeman notes in his introduction, “It’s a hard time to believe in love.” Several of these 21 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are indeed worth celebrating, especially short stories by Olga Tokarczuk and Gunnhild Øyehaug, whose “Apples,” which charts a woman’s changing loves via a nifty nested narrative, is the volume’s best piece. Nearly half the works eschew romance in favor of either an amorphous love, such as Louise Erdrich’s poem “Stone Love,” about a rock that has “spent a star age...

Waiting for you,” or familial love, including Tommy Orange’s brief tour de force, “Guangzhou,” and Daisy Johnson’s standout short story, “The Snowman,” in which a 14-year-old crafts a muddy Christmas golem for her dying sister. “Heaven,” an enthralling excerpt from Mieko Kawakami’s forthcoming novel, captures that same childhood mystique that Johnson channels so well but buries the dread deeper. The anthology’s main shortcoming, and a puzzling one given its theme, is the near total absence of writing about LGBTQ+ love. Fully threequarters of the volume concerns love between a cisgender man and woman. There are just two entries—totaling eight pages— about nonheterosexual relationships: Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on how insomnia takes him places his lovers can never follow and Andrew McMillan’s spectacular poem “swan,” about grappling with his sexuality. Also conspicuous is the lack of any Black male authors, an omission exacerbated by the inclusion of stale stories from Richard Russo and Haruki Murakami, neither of whom is crafting terribly original fiction or wanting for an audience at this point in their lengthy careers.

Some wonderful writing props up a volume that fails to convey modern love’s scope or diversity.

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THE NOSE AND OTHER STORIES

here—but the novel is hardly a classic mystery. What unfolds instead is an understated family saga pulsing with quiet foreboding. There is a low hum of violence in the background, and the mounting threat of mad cow disease is never far away. At the story’s heart is 12-year-old Úna; the daughter of a Butcher, she yearns to carry on the tradition herself despite the supposed limitations of her gender. But there is also Úna’s mother, Grá, beautiful and lonely, haunted by the loss of her estranged sister, who left the family for the modern world. There is Fionn, a desperate dairy farmer with a dying wife trying to make good, and Fionn’s bookish son, Davey, whose penchant for the classics is his ticket out. And yet the strength here is not the richness of the characters—Úna, especially, feels generically free-spirited, a standard-issue tween literary heroine—but the richness of the world. It’s an atmospheric portrait of a country at a crossroads, moving away from the traditional ways and toward a slick new millennial future. Thoroughly lovely.

Cattle have never been so riveting.

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Gogol, Nikolai Trans. by Fusso, Susanne Columbia Univ. (368 pp.) $17.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2020 978-0-231-19069-5 A new translation of nine Gogol stories, some of them among his best known.

Gogol is indisputably, as translator Fusso notes, “one of the greatest writers in the Russian language,” and, because of his rich, sometimes arcane vocabulary, one of the most untranslatable. She acquits herself admirably in this collection, which brings out Gogol’s playfulness and eccentricity. One of the stories, for instance, is “Viy,” one of his Mirgorod cycle, populated by Cossack characters—to say nothing of a witch who, beaten to death by a seminarian, exacts a terrible vengeance that might have been scripted in a 1950s vampire film: “He turned his eyes away and

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Come for the missing person mystery, stay for the existential ennui. before the ruins

then turned toward the coffin in horror. She got up…she was walking around the church with her eyes closed, constantly stretching out her arms as if trying to catch someone.” “The Overcoat,” a sardonic masterpiece, addresses the travails of a bureaucrat so badly paid that he can’t afford the titular garment and is robbed of it when he does finally manage to buy it, catching his death of the St. Petersburg winter cold but then going on to exact vengeance of his own. That story is less bizarre than the one that gives this collection its name: A barber finds a nose that belongs to one of his customers, depriving its erstwhile owner of his sense of smell: “The room that was accommodating this whole company was small, and the air in it was extremely dense, but Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov could not catch the scent, because he had covered himself with a kerchief and because his nose itself was located in God knows what locality.” Compared to the errant nose, Mikhail Bulgakov’s gun-toting cat is as normal as Russian snow. An added virtue of this first-rate collection is the inclusion of “Rome,” a long story not often anthologized, in which the plot is thin but the imagery extraordinary, whether describing the beautiful Annunziata—“Everything about her recalls those ancient times when marble came to life and sculptors’ chisels gleamed”—or a sunset over the Alban Hills.

Admirers of Gogol and his odd sensibilities will devour this excellent gathering.

of us spend our lives searching for. The ending doesn’t quite satisfy, and a few of the passages on contemporary culture fall flat—for example, saying that Tinder is superficial is not much of an observation at this point. But Andy’s search for her friend works well as a scaffolding for some lovely passages, like Andy’s thoughts on the online trend of “unboxing” videos: “And every time, when the moment finally came, I wondered if the hundreds of thousands of other people who watched these videos felt the same as I did, the same anticipation, the same surprise, and ultimately the same disappointment—that what was inside the box was just a thing.”

Come for the missing person mystery, stay for the existential ennui.

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BEFORE THE RUINS

Gosling, Victoria Henry Holt (288 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-250-75915-3

When her friend Peter goes missing, Andy digs up long-buried secrets from their teenage years to find him.

The year was 1996, and Andy’s neglectful mother was sure the apocalypse was nigh. Andy; her boyfriend, Marcus; her best friend, Peter; and their other friend, Em, decide to break into an abandoned manor and pretend that the world really is ending and that they can therefore do whatever they want without consequence. At the manor they meet David, a mysterious boy about their age whose enigmatic presence pits Peter and Andy against each other, vying for David’s attention.

When they hear a story about a diamond necklace supposedly hidden somewhere on the property, Em buys a fake necklace that they take turns hiding and searching for, a ritual they simply call “the game.” Twenty years later, Andy hears from Peter’s mother that Peter has gone missing. Andy goes digging back into their past in an attempt to find some clue that might lead her to Peter, but she finds more mysteries than she bargained for. Though it’s Peter’s disappearance that sets off the events that lead Andy to unpack her youth, this book isn’t exactly a thriller. The elements of mystery serve to provide narrative tension, but the real point here is Gosling’s examination of the disappointment of modern living, the emptiness of adulthood, and the notion of the fake diamond necklace so many |

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An astutely realized portrait of the collateral damage wrought by the pursuit of the American dream. nights when nothing happened

NIGHTS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENED

Patty, Jack’s mother, had emigrated first, and Liang, her photographer husband, followed shortly after. Patty’s dreams of higher education were aborted when research funding ran out and she was forced to take up work for Texas Semiconductor. After a few years, the couple saved enough money to bring Jack over.

In the meantime, Annabel was born. Jack’s 6-year-old sister is a firecracker who exerts her will to ruinous effect at Plano Star Care. Lacking his wife’s pluck, Liang too has challenges to overcome: his insecurities about hailing from peasant stock and an anemic photography business. Han expertly shifts the ground under the narrative, constantly shaking the snow globe to nudge the reader’s perspective away from the familiar. The restrained prose is all the more effective as it releases a Molotov cocktail during a singular moment when Jack’s desire to establish a place in his family clashes with his father’s shaky societal standing. Han’s characters are authentic, vulnerable, and utterly convincing, delivering one dynamite novel.

An astutely realized portrait of the collateral damage wrought by the pursuit of the American dream.

Han, Simon Riverhead (272 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-0-593-08605-6

In Han’s remarkable debut, a misunderstanding gathers enough velocity to almost shatter the nucleus of a Chinese immigrant family in 2003 Texas.

With its motion sensors and automatic sprinklers, the Dallas suburb of Plano seems like a highresolution version of the all-American town. Scratch the veneer, though, and you’ll see turmoil beneath the gloss. The newly arrived Chengs are a barely functional family unit. They’re not just strangers in a new land—they’re practically strangers to each other. Eleven-year-old Jack is just coming to know his family after having spent his formative years with his grandparents in Tianjin, China. Looking to pursue a doctorate in physics,

THE MUSEUM OF FORGOTTEN MEMORIES

Harris, Anstey Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $16.99 paper | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-9821-2689-6 An eccentric museum in a neglected, stately English home becomes a heartopening site of revelation, renewal, and second chances for a widow and her son.

A broken heart, a guilty conscience, a special needs child, homelessness, and joblessness are just the starting points for Harris’ busily plotted second novel, which draws inspiration from a real Victorian curiosity of a museum in southern England, where the author grew up. Enjoyably readable but overloaded, the narrative puts 54-year-old Cate Morris, still missing her husband, Richard, who died four years earlier by suicide, through the emotional wringer. Forced to relocate from London with Leo, her 19-year-old son, who has Down syndrome, Cate turns up at Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World, where Richard’s long-dead grandfather, Colonel Hugo, assembled an extraordinary collection of stuffed animals and other artifacts harvested on trips to Africa and Asia. The museum is under threat, and Cate will try to save it, but her efforts are complicated by skeptical trustees, animal rights activists, a fire, and the inscrutable activities of an old retainer with links to the colonel. Cate’s emotional roller coaster swoops through bursts of introspection and self-recrimination interspersed with happier episodes with Leo and also Patch, a local artist and surprisingly ardent new lover. These mood swings, from grief and regret to rebirth and fairy tale—like the whistle-while-you-work team of locals that arrives to restore Hatters to order after the fire or Leo’s heroic speech to the nasty trustees—generate an unpredictability of tone, but Harris’ tale-spinning is good enough to 12

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keep the forward momentum going, often at breakneck speed.

That a conclusion will be reached and that it will be satisfying are never in doubt.

The clouds of a formulaic setup disperse to reveal a charmingly clear blue sky.

Vengeance Weapon Two. The V2 rockets are notoriously unreliable, though. Although they’re aimed at Charing Cross Station in the heart of London, any strike within five miles is considered a success. Many hit English neighborhoods, killing dozens of civilians, while others explode at launch or veer off into the sea. Chapters of the novel alternate between the two sides, specifically between German engineers and British intelligence.

Twenty-four-year-old intelligence analyst Kay Caton-Walsh is in a married man’s bed and survives a direct hit as floors of the building collapse around her. A half dozen people are killed and almost 300 injured. Meanwhile, German engineers work furiously to prepare missiles for launch from Belgium. Despite severe technical problems, they are under great pressure to produce the weapons in the thousands and rush them into service.

The story has plenty of interesting details—for example, the bulk of Germany’s potato crop that year had been requisitioned to be distilled into alcohol for use as rocket fuel. British radar can spot the V2s in flight, but “where exactly were they coming from? That was the mystery.” If only the Brits could look at a rocket’s parabola and calculate its point of origin....Caton-Walsh

V2

Harris, Robert Knopf (384 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-0-525-65671-5 A veteran historical novelist homes in on one of Hitler’s last desperate hopes.

In 1944, the Nazis know they’re losing the war. They’d developed the V1, a pilotless drone bomb its targets could hear coming, and now its successor, which strikes without warning. The Nazis call it Vergeltungswaffen Zwei,

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Ayad Akhtar

IN HOMELAND ELEGIES, THE AUTHOR CONSIDERS THE STATE OF THE NATION—AND HIS PLACE IN IT

By Tom Beer Vincent Tullo

political and economic changes that are altering the nation.

In a starred review, Kirkus calls it a “profound and provocative inquiry into an artist’s complex American identity.”

Akhtar is the author of a previous novel, American Dervish, and his play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He recently spoke with Kirkus by Zoom from upstate New York; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The book reads almost like a memoir—the main character is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright with your name who grew up in Wisconsin. Why did you decide to present it as fiction?

It was clear what I [was writing] was substantially true and substantially concocted at the same time—that I was taking things that had happened [to me] and pointing them just a little bit further to sharpen the edge, so that the idea was clear. That meant rearranging the familial relationships just a little bit and reshifting some of the allegiances.

It happened organically in the Overture, where on the one hand the father is this character who loves America and the mother is this character who has some real problems with America. And in between is that space [that] runs the gamut of Osama bin Laden to Donald Trump— the gray middle of late-20th-century and early-21st-century social politics.

Ayad Akhtar was a writer in residence at the Academy in Rome when he read “To Italy,” in which the early-19thcentury poet Giacomo Leopardi addressed the Italian people. Donald Trump had been in office for a year, and Akhtar was, he says, “getting some perspective on what had been happening in America.” Could he—a 21st-century playwright and novelist, born in the United States to Pakistani immigrants—similarly address the American people? “I woke up the next morning, and the first lines of ‘Overture: To America’ were already roiling around in my head,” he says. “And so I wrote that out.”

Akhtar is referring to the incantatory opening passage of his new novel, Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown, Sept. 15).

In the novel, a character named Ayad Akhtar reflects on his immigrant family history, his contradictory position in American society as an intellectual and a Muslim full of reservations about the faith he was born into, and the vast 14

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Would you call it autofiction?

To me it’s not autofiction, because autofiction has a kind of inherent distance that the narrator has with the reader.

There’s a kind of reserve. Here the book is trying to close that gap and ensnare the reader in this seduction, if you will. And that’s a lot closer to reality TV. It’s a kind of a literary version of a reality serial.

Appropriately for a book in which Donald Trump appears as a character. The father, who is a famous cardiologist, is called in to examine Trump in the early ’90s. Although their association is brief, he maintains |

an affection for—nearly an obsession with—Trump over the years. You liken it to an addiction—which might describe America’s own bizarre enthrallment with Trump.

One of the things that I’ve thought a lot about, having written the book, is what was guiding me—the intuitive thing that I was responding to. I would say it has something to do with a cognitive shift around [our] devices, on the one hand—the kind of neoreptilian, ever present now that’s moving from thing to thing every second but without a clear object, just a kind of sensation-seeking thrill— and on the other hand, the dominant mode of discourse and political representation, [which] is the self. It’s the story of, What am I? What’s in it for me? What do I deserve?

Are people listening to me? I think that Trump is the embodiment of that phenomenon for us on a larger cultural level, both the self-staging and also the kind of pandering to the basest, most neoreptilian parts of us.

me at the heart of the book. If I was going to address the nation, I couldn’t say, “Fellow citizens, this is your country.

This is what you do to me.” That’s not the address I was looking for. I was looking for, “Look at what we have done to our country. What have we become?”

While the father character loves America and Trump, the mother is nostalgic for Pakistan—even though, as a child, she had witnessed the horrors of the India-Pakistan partition, when thousands were killed.

If I were drawing some conclusions from my own mother to create this mother, you know, my mother didn’t like the focus Americans had on trying to be happy. History was hard. I remember having a conversation with [a Jewish friend]. Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and there was a similar sense of keeping alive the suffering and not being too happy because of what had happened. And there is that parallel; one of the chapters talks about how the mother would get taciturn when Auschwitz came up. She felt a kinship but also felt alienated by the fact that everybody knew about [the Holocaust], but they didn’t know about what she’d been through.

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Money is a theme that runs through the novel—first the father’s ruinous foray into real estate investing in the 1980s, and then the narrator’s financial success, enabled by a Muslim hedge fund manager named Riaz Rind.

Riaz was a way to mirror and distill something about the experience of success and the particular embodiment of American success that seems to have the most lure, which is being rich—that’s really the essence of American accomplishment. I knew that in a book about debt—which is perhaps one of the two or three central themes of the book—I would need to immerse the reader in the specifics of the processes of debt and and how debt has transformed the society. I needed to set up some of those ideas in a way that was going to have resonance with the Trump story— Trump, the self-proclaimed king of debt. In a way, Trump’s advent is impossible to imagine without a society that has fully accepted the illusions of debt’s largesse. And we as a society did not accept that until the ’80s. The ’80s is what fundamentally changed our relationship with money in that respect. And we’re still living in that world.

Homeland Elegies received a starred review in the July 15, 2020, issue.

An entire section, “Scranton Memoirs,” details an episode where the narrator’s car breaks down on the Pennsylvania interstate, leading to a series of fraught encounters with the local populace. Why did this relatively brief episode warrant an extended treatment?

That section is ultimately about the legacy of being a Muslim in America, in a Christian country. The four characters that [the narrator] meets are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All this subliminal Christian imagery is playing throughout as a commentary on how he is separated from the American experience, but that is happening against the backdrop of something we all know: the impoverishment of the Rust Belt, or Middle America, or really, America itself. The narrator’s epiphany is that he is Other in this country, not just because he is [made to feel] Other. He has chosen to identify as Other. Both things are working in tandem. That kind of self-questioning was so essential for |

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PUSHCART PRIZE XLV Best of the Small Presses 2021

volunteers to help find out: “I’m good at maths. I know how to use a slide rule.” She joins a team of women working on the problem. Readers may recognize Germany’s main rocket engineer, Wernher von Braun. Though he shows necessary fealty to the Nazi cause, his secret dream is to send a rocket to the moon.

And if he has to do that from America, that’s another story.

A short, enjoyable thriller with plenty of well-researched historical nuggets.

Ed. by Henderson, Bill Pushcart (600 pp.) $35.00 | Dec. 7, 2020 978-0-9600977-0-8

The venerable prize volume adds another year without getting crusty.

Nominations for the Pushcart Prize are open to small, independent literary presses—magazines and book publishers now online as well as print—anywhere in the world. That said, several journals are near constants, such as McSweeney’s, with a standout contribution in Luis Alberto Urrea’s short story “The Night Drinker.” It begins as a piece of near-future apocalypticism, with the world engulfed by rising seawater (“in that tide came garbage and dead creatures and black waves”), that takes a near-idyllic turn as Mexico City returns to its erstwhile, pre-Columbian role as one of the world’s great metropolises, and that then ends on a note of horror (with Urrea nodding at H.P. Lovecraft, “that old racist”). No less foreboding, though without the ghastly resolution, is Elizabeth McCracken’s “It’s Not You,” from Zoetrope: All-Story, in which a hotel-room assignation goes awry in a fog of alcohol and miscalculation: “It is the fear of judgment that keeps me behaving, most of the time, like the religious,” says her narrator. “Not of God, but of strangers.” One such stranger is the “radio shrink” who observes of the narrator’s day drinking, “Hair of the dog,” to which she replies, “Hair of the werewolf.” Jane Hirshfield, a familiar presence in Pushcart, turns in a lovely but pensive poem that comes from a culinary anthology but centers on the darkness of living on “an earth where loss // is so all present / that we drink it without thinking / blue-white in its early morning glass.”

Yet another standout is a story by Austin Smith, better known as a poet, about an Amish man who works out his grief for the loss of two children by making a break for the world of the English (“He was weeping, but there was no beard to catch his tears”)—a Rumspringa from which he won’t return. Or will he?

Forty-five years on, the Pushcart annual is as strong and wide-ranging as ever.

www.sizezero.org

MAGIC LESSONS

Hoffman, Alice Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-982108-84-7 Set in late-17th-century England and America, the pre-prequel to Hoffman’s Practical Magic (1995) and The Rules of Magic (2017) covers the earliest generations of magically empowered Owens women and the legacy they created.

In 1664, Hannah Owens, practitioner of “the Nameless Art” sometimes called witchcraft, finds baby Maria abandoned

"A somber, disturbing mystery fused with a scathing look at the fashion industry." - Kirkus Reviews

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A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel. the orchard

near her isolated cottage in Essex County, England. She lovingly teaches ancient healing methods to Maria, whose star birthmark indicates inherent magical powers; and since Hannah considers ink and paper the most powerful magic, she also teaches Maria reading and writing. After vengeful men murder Hannah in 1674, Maria escapes first to her unmotherly birth mother, a troubled practitioner of dark, self-serving magic, then to Curaçao as an indentured servant. At 15 she is seduced by 37-year-old American businessman John Hathorne (his name an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote about mistreatment of marked women). Enchanted by the island, Puritan Hathorne loses his rigidity long enough to impregnate Maria before returning to Salem, Massachusetts, without saying goodbye. Maria, with new daughter Faith, whose birthmark is a halfmoon, follows him. The ship on which she travels is captained by a Sephardic Jew who gives her passage in return for treating his son’s dengue fever, an excuse for Hoffman to link two long-standing unfair persecutions—of smart women as witches and Jews as, well, Jews. That Maria will find a truer love with warmhearted Jewish sailor Sam than with icy Hathorne makes

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sense in terms of later Owens women’s stories. For the earlier books to work, Maria must found her female dynasty in Salem, but first she and Faith face betrayals, mistakes, and moral challenges. Maria uses her powers to help others but often misreads her own future with devastating results; separated from Maria during her childhood, emotionally damaged Faith is tempted to use her grandmother’s selfish “left-handed” magic.

Master storyteller Hoffman’s tale pours like cream but is too thick with plot redundancies and long-winded history lessons.

THE ORCHARD

Hopen, David Ecco/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-0-06-297474-7 In Hopen’s ambitious debut, an Orthodox Jewish high school student finds his world transformed when his family moves to South Florida.

When protagonist Ari Eden leaves his bland life in Brooklyn—where he never felt deeply rooted—for a glitzy, competitive Modern Orthodox day school in the Miami suburbs, both readers and Ari himself are primed to expect a fish-out-of-water narrative. And indeed, Ari finds that his new classmates, though also traditionally observant by many standards, enjoy a lifestyle that is far more permissive than his own (a shade of Orthodoxy that is known as “yeshiva”). Suddenly Ari’s modest, pious world is replaced with a Technicolor whirlwind that includes rowdy parties, casual sex, drinking, drugs, and far more liberal interpretations of Jewish law than he has ever known. With its representation of multiple kinds of traditional Judaism, Hopen’s novel is a refreshing corrective to the popular tendency to erase the nuanced variations that exist under the umbrella of “Orthodoxy.” It also stands out for its stereotype-defying portrayal of Ari and his friends as teenagers with typical teenage concerns. But this is not just a novel about reorienting oneself socially or even religiously; though Ari’s level of observance certainly shifts, this is also not a simple “off the derech” (Jewish secularization) narrative. Ari’s new friend group, particularly its charismatic, enigmatic leader, Evan—a sort of foil for Ari—pushes him to consider new philosophical and existential norms as well as social, academic, and religious ones. The result is an entirely surprising tale, rich with literary allusions and Talmudic connections, about the powerful allure of belonging. This novel will likely elicit comparisons to the work of Chaim Potok: Like Potok’s protagonists, Ari is a religious Jew with a deep passion for literature, Jewish texts, and intellectual inquiry, and as in Potok’s fiction, his horizons are broadened when he encounters other forms of Orthodoxy.

But Hopen’s debut may actually have more in common with campus novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Tobias Wolff ’s Old School; its narrator’s involvement in an intense intellectual community leads him down an unexpected path that profoundly alters his worldview. The novel suffers due to its |

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ISLAND ZOMBIE Iceland Writings

lamentably one-dimensional, archetypal female characters: the tortured-artist love interest, the ditsy blond, the girl next door.

Hopen’s prose, and the scale of his project, occasionally feels overindulgent, but in that sense, form and content converge: This stylistic expansiveness is actually perfectly in tune with the world of the novel. Overall, Hopen’s debut signals a promising new literary talent; in vivid prose, the novel thoughtfully explores cultural particularity while telling a story with universal resonances.

A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.

Horn, Roni Princeton Univ. (256 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-691-20814-5 An American visual artist collects her writing from four decades of sojourns to Iceland.

Horn first traveled to Iceland in 1975 at age 19, and she has been drawn to the island ever since, as reflected in this combination of poetry, short essays, oral histories, architectural reviews, and environmental jeremiads. In the book’s first section, featuring pieces published in the 1990s, the author writes about what has kept her coming back: wild weather, uninterrupted horizons, and solitude—a holiday from “the friction of seeing and knowing.”

Traveling by motorcycle, she camped in outbuildings and lighthouses, and she notes how Iceland’s lack of violence, reptiles, and large mammals was liberating for a traveling single woman.

“Relief from fear is freedom,” she writes. Horn trains her artist’s eye on the country’s fantastic volcanic landscapes, black beaches and white surf, and hot springs found in every corner of the island. Sensually arresting, these passages are solitary meditations in an empty landscape; at times, readers long for someone else to show up. In the second section, the author offers a series of oral histories about the weather. These short installments, three pages at the most, are eloquent descriptions from ordinary people, testaments to the intricate dance between the islanders and their wild weather conditions: obliterating blizzards, relentless wind, and even incidents of freezing and drowning. A government commissioner calmly reports seeing spirits on his long walks through the lava fields, and older citizens express a generalized unease about climate change.

The final sections feel padded: reprints of Horn’s environmental opinion pieces and meditations on specific island locations accompanied by images of previously published photographs that fail to illuminate the place. The first sections of the book will stoke the desire for a more in-depth study of Iceland; the others will interest veteran Iceland-watchers.

A sometimes vivid yet uneven portrait of an artist’s many years traveling to and observing Iceland.

THE HARPY

Hunter, Megan Grove (208 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-8021-4816-2 When a young British mother discovers her husband’s infidelity, she is transformed by rage.

“They were colleagues, then friends, and at first I suspected nothing. There were long emails, glimpses appearing 20

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on his phone, apparitions. The virgin blue of his notification light in the darkness.” Hunter’s second novel after a successful debut with similar mythical and maternal preoccupations (The End We Start From, 2017) is narrated by Lucy Stevenson, who receives a voicemail from the husband of a woman her husband, Jake, works with in academia informing her that the spouses are sleeping together. The other couple is about a decade older, which drives the knife even deeper. With no further ado or psychological development, Lucy goes right off her rocker, spurred by a lifelong obsession with the mythological figure of the harpy, a vengeful bird with a woman’s face, developed in brief, portentous interludes. “I asked my mother what a harpy was, and she told me: they punish men for the things they do.” This aspect of the book recalls the work of Angela Carter but lacks her black humor and stringency. Rather quickly, Lucy and Jake settle on a plan to even the score—she will hurt him three times. So she does. Then something happens at the end, but it’s not quite clear what. Hunter’s taut, intentional prose is strong on physical descriptions—“toddlers scooting fatly past me on balance bikes,” droopy daffodils resembling “grumpy children dressed

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by their mothers”—but she studs her narrative with philosophical assertions that are perplexing at best: “Marriage and motherhood are like death in this way, and others too: no one comes back unchanged.” “A children’s party, like a death, is never real until it is happening.”

A shimmery prose style cannot save this slim, simplistic, and pretentious tale.

MISS BENSON’S BEETLE

Joyce, Rachel Dial Press (352 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-0-593-23095-4

In 1914, when Margery Benson was 10 years old, her father showed her a book of magical creatures, none more fantastic than the golden beetle of New Caledonia. Thirty-six years later, jobless and alone, she’s determined to have the adventure of her life and find that beetle.

After stealing a co-worker’s new boots in a fit of despair, and consequently losing her job as a teacher of domestic science, Margery finds herself eager to get out of England before the police catch up to her. In addition to packing up her apartment and collecting an impressive array of bug-hunting equipment, she places an advertisement in the newspaper for a Frenchspeaking assistant, an ad to which only four people apply. After a series of curious events, she finds herself aboard the RMS Orion with one Enid Pretty, a shockingly blond woman in a pink suit who never seems to stop talking, much to Margery’s dismay. But once Margery succumbs to weeks of seasickness, Enid turns out to be the best friend Margery never knew she needed.

Thus, two women too often discounted, one as an old maid and the other as a floozy, begin a very funny journey, indeed. But Margery and Enid are being followed by two shadows: Enid’s mysterious, possibly criminal past and Mr. Mundic, a man Margery rejected as her assistant. A survivor of the Second World War POW camps in Burma, Mr. Mundic is frequently waylaid on his mission to reunite with Margery by bouts of beriberi and violent, hallucinatory memories. Once in the northern wilds of New Caledonia, Margery, Enid, Mr. Mundic, and the golden beetle are set on a collision course teeming with screwball comedic scenes deftly choreographed by Joyce.

A hilarious jaunt into the wilderness of women’s friendship and the triumph of outrageous dreams.

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THE DOLL A Portrait of My Mother

that had harmed the Doll in life became useful to me in my art,” he writes. Among those things was a healthy skepticism, as Kadare’s success as a writer ran up against a Communist regime in Albania that seized his manuscripts. But just as he conquers those issues and his reputation improves, his mother develops peculiar ideas about his work. Does success mean he’ll have to disown her? She inexplicably suggests he marry a “semiprostitute” and asks if his going to France makes him a Frenchman. His father is disengaged from this peculiar behavior, more interested in news reports Kadare can share from beyond the Iron Curtain. Is this a portrait of mental illness, failed parenting, totalitarian oppression, or something else? Kadare describes these incidents in prose so bare-bones that they almost defy any particular emotional resonance, which makes it hard to get a grip on the story either as “auto” or “fiction.” What lingers is an almost abstract feeling of mournfulness about birth and death, “the darkness from which we all emerge. Or the other one, the darkness to which we are all going.”

A slight, slippery, mordant elegy for an emotionally distant mother.

Kadare, Ismail Trans. by Hodgson, John Counterpoint (208 pp.) $16.95 paper | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-64009-422-2

The Albanian novelist/poet and perpetual Nobel candidate considers his complex relationship with his mother.

This brief, brittle autofiction novella

by Kadare intimately explores the ways his mother influenced both his personality and art. It’s not exactly a loving tribute: She was a difficult and idiosyncratic woman, well-off where his father’s side of the family was poor, uncomfortable in a home that is “eating me up,” and at odds with her in-laws. Her stiffness, combined with her taste in white makeup, earned her the nickname of the book’s title. But Kadare also sees in her emotional austerity a wellspring of artistic inspiration: “Everything

KHALIL

Khadra, Yasmina Nan A. Talese (240 pp.) $26.95 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-385-54591-4 After his suicide mission in Paris as part of the terrorist attacks of 2015 goes awry, a young Belgian named Kahlil suffers through dark nights of the soul back home.

On assignment from an Islamic State group affiliate, Khalil and a childhood friend were to have taken part in a massacre at the Stade de France. But while the friend blew himself up outside the French stadium, Khalil’s vest failed to ignite, forcing him to return to his poor Brussels neighborhood, where neither his Moroccan-rooted family nor most of his friends know of his extremist bent. His emir, with whom he “grew up in the same gutter,” acknowledges that Khalil was mistakenly given a defective suicide vest. But even after he’s given another bombing mission, the increasingly paranoid Khalil is punished by the feeling that his cohorts think he lost his nerve the first time. Overcome by anger, guilt, and then grief over the shocking death of the only family member he cares about, he becomes physically ill. You wouldn’t expect to care about a character whose life’s purpose is to murder a large number of people. But Khalil, who tells his story with a mixture of punkish attitude and intellectual snobbery, is so utterly without meaningful human connection that it’s hard not to feel a measure of sympathy. Khadra, an Algerian author based in France who writes under his wife’s name (he adopted it while in the Algerian army to avoid military censorship), skillfully shows how someone like Khalil can be turned into a terrorist from a young age. With Khalil’s fate—and those of countless potential victims—perpetually hanging in the balance, the book becomes 24

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Subtle, intelligent, and thrillingly melodramatic. the exiles

a gripping existential inquiry that earns the author comparisons with Camus.

An exciting work of fiction rooted in docu-like reality.

dignitary Lady Franklin, who fancies training one of the “savages.” A necklace of shells made by her mother and a pet possum named Waluka are all Mathinna can take from the life she knew. Across the ocean, 21-year-old Evangeline, also recently orphaned, is fired from her job in London and sent to Newgate Prison when a family treasure is found in her room—and this is not the only problematic gift she has received from the family’s eldest son, now conveniently traveling in Venice. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, half-starved 16-year-old urchin Hazel Ferguson is caught stealing a silver spoon. Evangeline and Hazel become acquainted on the Medea, a former slaving ship bound for the prison colony where the now obviously pregnant Evangeline is to serve a sentence of 14 years. Kline takes her time with this epic story, creating each of her nightmarish and uniquely malodorous settings in detail, from the harrowing months at sea with the randy and violent sailors to the strange new world that awaits Evangeline and Hazel in the convict colony. Once back on land, the narrative loops in poor lonely Mathinna, whose life now consists mainly of being dragged out at tea parties to be pawed and humiliated, then clicks into high gear when Hazel gets a work-release assignment as a maid in Lady Franklin’s household. This episode in history gets a top-notch treatment

by Kline, one of our foremost historical novelists.

This fascinating 19th-century take on Orange Is the New Black is subtle, intelligent, and thrillingly melodramatic.

THE EXILES

Kline, Christina Baker Custom House/Morrow (384 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 25, 2020 978-0-06-235634-5 A London governess and a Scottish midwife’s neglected daughter are sent to a penal colony in Australia, where an Aboriginal girl is in another sort of captivity.

Kline’s monumental eighth novel opens in 1840 on Flinders Island, Australia, where an 8-year-old orphan named Mathinna is whisked away from her tribe at the whimsy of visiting

KRAFT

Lüscher, Jonas Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-374-18214-4 After entering an essay contest with a $1 million prize, one man wrestles with memories of women, boats, and David Hasselhoff.

In his first book, Barbarian Spring (2015), the Swiss writer satirized capitalism and conspicuous consumption. Here he takes wry shots at academia, technology, and venture capitalists via a self-centered German professor with money woes and unsettling memories.

Richard Kraft’s current marriage is collapsing and his finances are in tatters from a previous one. He travels to California, where judges will choose the winner of the essay competition, which requires the writer to defend Alexander Pope’s proposition “Whatever is, is right” in relation to technology. After a week, though, Kraft has produced nothing. Mostly his mind wanders. He recalls Ruth, a lover who rarely appears without a reference to the size of her breasts and/or hips, and Johanna, another, who ended their four-year affair inexplicably and left for San Francisco. He remembers watching the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, starring Hasselhoff and a talking car, and climbing the Berlin Wall, where he is reunited with Ruth and a son he was unaware of as Hasselhoff sings about “looking for freedom” from a crane basket. Elsewhere in essay-avoidance, Kraft goes rowing in the San Francisco Bay and loses his bearings, his boat, 26

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A MILLION AUNTIES

and his clothes before getting rescued and charged $8,000 for the lost boat and oars. He goes searching for Johanna and learns why she left him. And he has high-end macaroni and cheese with the contest’s wealthy sponsor, who is also backing a floating-island project that would fit right in on Swift’s Laputa. As with Robert Menasse’s in The Capital, Lüscher’s satire requires some knowledge of recent European history and politics. It’s also diffuse, but Kraft’s seriocomic fumblings and failings help to hold it together.

An uneven but often entertaining book.

McKenzie, Alecia Akashic (160 pp.) $15.95 paper | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-61775-892-8 A chorus of voices from the Jamaican diaspora tries to define the meaning of community.

As a New York City–based artist, Chris can’t shake the burden of his father’s expectations. Their relationship becomes increasingly strained after the death of Chris’ wife, Lidia. Looking for a fresh start, Chris travels to Jamaica, his mother’s homeland. Chris’ agent, Stephen, who also has roots in that country, has set him up at his Auntie Della’s home. For a few days, Chris is at peace, learning to draw flowers, creating art, tucking into Auntie Della’s delicious meals, and being fawned over by the locals. But upon learning that his father is severely ill, Chris has to rush back to the U.S. Separate threads

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ONE OF US Stories

detail Stephen’s own visit to Jamaica when Miss Pretty, another “auntie,” who has had a difficult life, begins to view Stephen as her own son. In yet another plotline, Chris’ father, who grew up in the South, narrates the story of his marriage to Eileen, who’s Jamaican. Miss Vera, another auntie, talks about her daily life in Jamaica, reminiscing about her daughter who immigrated to Miami. These various characters drop in and out of the narrative, their reasons for doing so barely apparent. McKenzie tries to create a vibrant community of people who are tied together by love for their motherland, but the characters are so paperthin, their motivations so cloudy, that the entire story begins to turn to mush. At first blush it appears that the mystery behind Lidia’s sudden death might serve to anchor the novel, but that arc too eventually disappears into thin air.

A drive-by snapshot of characters’ lives.

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Nadelson, Scott BkMk/Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City (260 pp.) $16.95 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-943491-25-4 Centering on self-absorbed Jewish Generation Xers as they mature (or don’t) in 1980s and ’90s New Jersey, many of these 18 stories have an autobiographical ring, but counterbalancing gravity comes from the smattering of tales about an earlier generation of Jews, real and fictional, facing concrete issues of survival.

Nadelson establishes the book’s fundamental tone of ambivalence, doubt, and guilty regret in the opener, a sly, almost impersonal snapshot in which an upwardly mobile narrator identifies with the squatter who has invaded his former home. The narrator, or someone very like him, returns in the

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last story, “Going to Ground,” recalling the moment in his 20s when he was torn between a lover who felt too familiar and the risky adventure of travel. With the exception of a few tough, troubled women, like the high school outcast who gets revenge in “The Depths” or the failed actress who suffers humiliation in “Cut Loose,” Nadelson’s stories are dominated by boys and young men. The still innocent 14-year-old in “Sweet Ride” is fascinated by his neighbor, a high school nerd–turned–college dropout. On a spree through Europe, an imprudent recent college graduate spirals into ethical purgatory while avoiding the visit to Auschwitz he’d promised his mother. The men in “Safe and Sorry” and “Last Bus Home” both face their inability to protect endangered women because “the world was far more complicated than most people wanted.” Proof of that complexity comes through historic anecdotes—anti-Semitic author LouisFerdinand Céline’s romantic pursuit of Jewish sculptor Louise Nevelson (“Liberté”); Zero Mostel’s heroic blacklisting that led him to paint instead of act (“Butterfly at Rest”)—and semifictions about Jews in Depression-era Brooklyn (“The Payout”), Communist Russia (“The Cake”), and 1944 Berlin (“Caught”).

Strikingly, the title story concerns Jews rejecting Jews. After her synagogue snubs her publicly disgraced family, a woman shrieks, “This is how you treat one of your own.”

A carefully curated volume on themes of personal and group identity—inclusion, rejection, escape.

absorbing family drama. Instead it occupies an awkward middle ground that turns out to be less satisfying than it should be.

A story of three brothers and a murder that lacks tension and well-defined characters.

LIKE A BIRD

Róisín, Fariha Unnamed Press (288 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-951213-09-1 In her debut novel, poet Roísín takes aim at the model minority myth as 20-something narrator Taylia Chatterjee navigates racism, family problems, and sexual violence.

As the story begins, Taylia is home in Manhattan, having taken a break from college while mourning the death of her older sister, Alyssa, who died two years earlier.

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LITTLE CRUELTIES

Nugent, Liz Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-5011-8968-5 Three Irish brothers spend their lives battling each other and competing for their mother’s attention—and then one ends up dead.

At the start of Irish novelist Nugent’s latest book, the three Drumm brothers are attending a funeral.

But while two are standing with the mourners, one of them is lying in the coffin—and the other two have helped him land there. Which brother is dead? Is it the oldest, William, an arrogant, womanizing film producer who’s his mother’s favorite despite his misogyny? Is it hapless, awkward Brian, the middle son, who can’t quite keep up a successful career or romance? Or is it fragile Luke, the emotionally unstable youngest, who finds success as a pop star but pays a huge personal price? Nugent travels to the past to reveal her answer, winding back through the Drumms’ troubled childhoods and their fraught relationships with each other and their mother, an actress and singer whose careless attention they competed for their entire lives.

Each brother takes a turn at narration to justify his perspective, but their voices aren’t distinct in any way, and the flat similarity of the characters makes it hard to stay invested in who survives and who doesn’t. The book doesn’t raise enough tension to be a thriller, and its lack of depth prevents it from becoming an |

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A young woman’s struggles will resonate with many readers despite the novel’s pat resolution.

Taylia is suffering from depression and low self-esteem, believing Alyssa was more beloved by their parents. In addition, her Indian father and White Jewish mother couldn’t address the microaggressions and cultural disconnect Taylia and Alyssa navigated while growing up. Despite her family’s affluent lifestyle, Taylia has suffered various deprivations that money and education cannot overcome. Only her summer spent in India with her paternal grandmother, dadi-ma, was any balm. After Taylia is gang-raped by the son of family friends and his acquaintances at a party, the man takes her home and tells her parents she got drunk and threw herself at him; her parents disown her, and Taylia is expelled from her family’s Upper West Side apartment.

Fortunately, Taylia has a small inheritance from her beloved dadi-ma and is able to build a new life, step by step, after finding a job at a cafe. The queer feminist owner, Kat, takes Taylia under her care. The novel has many plot threads and characters, not all of whom are equally developed. In particular, Taylia’s parents are seriously underwritten, especially given the important role they play. Long conversations and coincidences drive much of the action, especially in the last third of the novel.

IN SECURITY

Schwarzschild, Edward State University of New York Press (233 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-43848-091-6 The personal and professional lives of a Transportation Security Administration employee converge in Schwarzschild’s novel.

Narrator Gary Waldman is well versed in grief and contemplation. When the novel opens, he’s a relatively recent widower and is doing his best to raise his 6-year-old son, Ben, on his own. He’s spent the last seven years working for the TSA at Albany International Airport in upstate New York. Through flashbacks, Schwarzschild reveals moments from Gary’s history, including the harrowing deaths of his father, mother, and wife. Gary, who had previously worked as a tennis coach, has mixed feelings about his job— but soon draws the attention of his co-workers and a powerful local family when he helps save the life of a wealthy man who collapsed in an airport bathroom. Gary is drawn to the man’s stepdaughter, Diane, even as the anniversary of his wife’s death looms. The arrival in town of Gary’s FBI agent brother-in-law, Hank, creates wrinkles both personal and professional, as Hank has reports of a possible terror plot. The two disparate threads found within this novel—a middle-aged man learning to reengage with the world and the threat of a very different form of trauma—coexist neatly for much of the book. The novel’s climax manages to incorporate Gary’s personal and professional crises and dovetails with the book’s themes of parental legacies and frayed parent-child bonds. It’s not a perfect ending, but the lived-in details of Gary’s life—and Schwarzschild’s work in making a fundamentally decent character dramatically compelling—make for an absorbing read.

Schwarzschild delivers a subdued look at one man’s life, punctuated by earned moments of tension.

THE WITCH HUNTER

Seeck, Max Berkley (400 pp.) $17.00 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-593199-66-4 A desperate hunt for what may be a gang of serial killers flushes out a policewoman’s haunting past in Finnish author Seeck’s first English translation.

The body of a famous author’s wife is discovered in what appears to be a deliberately staged pose, dressed in a black gown with black painted 30

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The heroine’s personal problems provide a fascinating counterpoint to a disturbing tale of murder and madness.

nails and a ghastly grin. Another almost identical woman is found under the ice of a nearby lake. The author, Roger Koponen, is out of town at a book signing, where an audience member asks some odd questions. While a police officer is driving him back to Helsinki, communications are lost, and two bodies are soon found burned in the woods. The police realize that the deaths are re-created scenes from Koponen’s popular Witch Hunt trilogy and fear that more may follow. Sgt. Jessica Niemi’s dying boss, Erne Mikson, the only person on the Helsinki police force who knows she’s a very wealthy woman, puts her in charge of the case. Mikson, long Jessica’s father figure, knows her disturbingly dysfunctional background, which is slowly revealed as she’s personally drawn into the mystifying case by her striking resemblance to several of the victims. Jessica’s team works tirelessly to uncover suspects and motives as more gruesome murders related to witches occur until Mikson fears that Jessica herself may be a target. The apparent resurrection of Koponen’s cellphone and his image caught on surveillance cameras only make the case more confusing for the officers, who have very different thoughts about who’s involved.

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UNSEEN CITY

Shearn, Amy Red Hen Press (272 pp.) $17.95 paper | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-59709-367-5 A ghost story that focuses not on a single spirit but on an entire city whose layered history haunts its occupants.

“Meg had the unsettling sense that she was seeing all the layers of the city transposed over one another, like scrims in a play going haywire.” Meg Rhys proudly carries her “Spinster Librarian card” and does not believe in love, thank you very much. Instead she believes in ghosts, and in New York City there is no shortage of phantasmal company. Haunted by (accompanied by?) the ghost of her sister, who died at 25, Meg armors herself with the weapons that might otherwise be used to attack her: She’s 40 and single, she’s a librarian, and she has a cat named Virginia Wolf (a misspelling only Meg finds funny as well as a wink toward Shearn’s fondness for multi-comma’d sentences). When handsome Ellis Williams approaches Meg at her Brooklyn library to help him uncover the truth about a rental property his father owns in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the circumstances seem ripe for a traditional romantic comedy—that is if their trauma and grief weren’t compounded by the occult. The two of them undertake an obsessive research project as they peel back the layers of the house, and the city itself. Largely focused on Meg, the omniscient narrator occasionally switches to the perspective of a young Black girl whose story is slowly revealed. At times Shearn’s exploration of topics as weighty as gentrification, police brutality, and Black trauma comes off oversimplified and overfiltered by the White heroine. That said, it is clear that Shearn has done her research—and details about the free Black settlement Weeksville in particular are treated with sensitivity and knowledge. Ultimately, the novel is as much a haunting by the geography of New York as it is the story of a few souls who live—or have lived—there.

Like the ghosts who inhabit its pages, the novel lingers long after you’ve put it down.

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EVERY LAST SECRET

door to the Winthorpe’s baronial estate in untouchable Atherton, Neena’s determined to seduce William because she wants to trade up on husbands or, failing that, get a seven-figure payoff to go away—and because she’s taken a particular dislike to Cat, who represents all the women Neena’s fought over the years and who’s begging to be taken down a peg or 10. The rules of engagement are flexible—open flirting, barefaced lying, charity committee blackballing, and criminal conspiracy are all perfectly acceptable—but a prologue makes it clear that the rivalry will eventually end up under the purview of the Atherton Police Department. Torre raises the heat on the plotting and counterplotting with such delicate mastery that even readers who can see perfectly well where this is all going will race to watch it get there.

Deliciously, sublimely nasty: Mean Girls for grown-ups.

Torre, A.R. Thomas & Mercer (302 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2020 978-1-5420-2019-0 The blow-by-blow battle between two Silicon Valley wives over one of their husbands and a whole lot more.

In this corner is Catherine Winthorpe, effortlessly beautiful wife to sexy, rugged, demanding, fabulously wealthy William Winthorpe, who treats the high-salaried employees he’s pushing to perfect and market a breakthrough new medical device like serfs and his wife like a queen. In this corner is Neena Ryder, Winthorpe Technologies’ new director of motivation, who loses no opportunity to correct everyone who calls her Mrs. Ryder that it’s Dr. Ryder. Though her own amiable mate, demolition contractor Matthew Ryder, loves her to pieces and makes just enough to have bought the place next

WINTER COUNTS

Weiden, David Heska Wanbli Ecco/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 25, 2020 978-0-06-296894-4 When his troubled 14-year-old nephew, Nathan, is endangered by a new heroin operation on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, hired muscle Virgil Wounded Horse must rely on more than his fists to save him.

Narrator Virgil, a member of the Lakota Nations, is a vigilante-style bruiser whom victims and their families turn to when, thanks to an indifferent federal justice system and a toothless tribal court, sexual assaults and other violent crimes aren’t prosecuted. Falsely busted after pills are planted in his school locker, forced to make drug buys while wearing a wire and then mishandled by agents, Nathan is the latest victim of systemic malfeasance. Virgil, his nephew’s guardian since the rap-loving boy’s mother (Virgil’s sister) was killed in a car accident, finds himself in way over his head with the bad guys. His unlikely ally is his combative ex-girlfriend, Marie Short Bear, an ardent believer in the Native rituals for which he has no use: “I didn’t do ceremonies.” She’s also the daughter of a shady councilman running for tribal president. Like its protagonist, the novel is rough around the edges. Key characters have a way of fading from view, and things get talky just when the action is picking up. And at one point, Weiden makes rather odd use of cartoonlike action words including “BANG!” and “Missed!”

Weiden is at his best allowing Native culture to curl naturally around the mystery plot. A ceremonial scene in which Virgil has a harrowing vision of being present at the massacre at Wounded Knee is a bit heavy-handed but affecting nonetheless.

A solid if inconsistent crime novel.

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Smartly plotted, violent, and utterly absorbing. they ’re gone

m ys t e r y

that the husband who’d beaten her for years is finally gone. Their paths begin an exquisitely slow convergence when Cessy is visited by two lowlifes who inform her that Hector had owed their boss $15,000, a debt that’s now passed to her, and FBI agent Levi Price tells Deb that Grant had dallied with a series of prostitutes, one of whom had milked him and his estate dry. As Cessy scrambles to find some way to deal with the collectors who won’t take no for an answer, Deb seeks her own answers by meeting with Maria Vasquez, the D.C. hooker who’d replaced her in her husband’s sex life and bank account. When Cessy’s resources prove inadequate to fend off the intensifying threats, her brother, Chris, rides to the rescue from Phoenix, his background as a contract killer guaranteeing fireworks even before the two women collide with each other. Barres stands out from the pack with his unusually sensitive handling of racial and sexual identities—Cessy’s mother was Panamanian, Deb was born in Vietnam, and Deb’s daughter, Kim, has a girlfriend—and his ruthless efficiency in sweeping supporting characters from the board the minute they’ve lost their ability to support anyone.

Smartly plotted, violent, and utterly absorbing.

THEY’RE GONE

Barres, E.A. Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-64385-555-4 The murders of two men who couldn’t be less like each other entangle their widows in a web of prostitution, blackmail, murder, and eventually each other.

Grant Thomas was a successful professional in the Beltway suburb of Vienna, Virginia; Hector Ramirez was a hit man who plied his secret trade around Baltimore. After they’re gunned down in separate incidents on the same night, freelance writer Deb Linh Thomas goes into dazed mourning while bartender Cessy Castillo celebrates

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THE CASE OF THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS

on the filming and comment on its accuracy to the Sacred Writings. But when Maureen sees Worth shot to death, the Irregulars are instantly transformed from authorities to suspects. Things get stranger when the corpse vanishes, and stranger still when each of the invited guests—Federhut, Dr. Rufus Bottomley, professor Drew Furness, Sirrah editor Harrison Ridgly III, and Jonadab Evans, who as John O’Dab created the deathless detective Derring Drew—recounts an intricately detailed backstory larded with improbable incidents, coded messages, Holmes-ian allusions, and broad implications of each other’s guilt. The characters are no more than types, but their different voices are perfectly suited for the wild tales they tell, and fans who approach this 80-year-old pastiche through either Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings or any of the dozens of Holmes’ posthumous adventures by other hands will be challenged, piqued, and delighted right down to the final revelation by a most unexpected sleuth.

Inventive, ingenious, rollicking fun.

Boucher, Anthony American Mystery Classics (312 pp.) $25.95 | $15.95 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-61316-181-4 978-1-61316-182-1 paper “SHERLOCK HOLMES RIDES AGAIN!” announces a newspaper headline covering a mysterious murder in this ebullient 1940 reprint by the multitalented Boucher (1911–1968), and it’s all true except for the Sherlock Holmes part.

When the Baker Street Irregulars protest producer F.X. Weinberg’s decision to sign heterodox mystery novelist Stephen Worth to script The Adventure of the Speckled Band, Metropolis Pictures publicity agent Maureen O’Breen comes up with a clever way to buy them off: Invite four Irregulars veterans and their latest initiate, German émigré Otto Federhut, to consult

ANONYMOUS

Breck, Elizabeth Crooked Lane (320 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-64385-564-6 A freelance San Diego insurance investigator thinking of expanding her practice sees her wish fulfilled when she’s stalked by a sex killer.

“Stop investigating me or I will hunt you down and kill you. BITCH. No police,” reads the note pinned to Madison Kelly’s front door.

The threat is not only unsettling, but inaccurate, since Maddie’s between jobs and isn’t investigating anybody. But then she recalls that she’s been poking around informally in a case recently profiled on the podcast Crawlspace: the disappearances of Samantha Erickson after she left a bar in the Gaslamp District four years ago and of Elissa Alvarez after she left another bar two years later. Despite, or maybe because of, the message, Maddie doubles down in her efforts and soon finds Elissa’s cellphone near the parking lot where she was last seen—quite a coup considering that her friend Detective Thomas Clark, of San Diego Homicide, hasn’t found it himself during the past two years. As Maddie identifies suitably unsuitable men who might have done away with Samantha and Elissa, first-timer Breck, herself an insurance investigator, multiplies the suspicious men in Maddie’s own orbit who just might be her stalker: her downstairs neighbor Ryan, a surfer in graduate school; her friend Dave Rich, who’s been her lover but never her boyfriend; Tom’s drinking buddy Ken Larrabee, who’s clearly interested in her; and Tom himself, who’s never enjoyed Maddie’s sexual favors even though his wife is convinced that he has.

Beneath all the expository passages beats a brave heart that deserves a sequel showing sharper sleuthing chops.

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With its delightful detective duo, Bryndza’s refreshing, twisty thriller stays upbeat even in dark moments. shadow sands

A GALWAY EPIPHANY

assistant. Things are rocky on the homefront for Tristan, who’s constantly at odds with his sister/roommate, Sarah, and her fiance, Gary, and he’s eager to log some hours away. The local paper suggests that Simon drowned; the medical examiner finds a puncture wound. Kate gets a very different picture of Lyn when she interviews Simon’s close friend Geraint, who was camping with him the night he died. Putting the pieces together, Kate finds something wonky in the timeline. Who can be trusted? Meanwhile, another mystery unfolds. Visiting professor Magdalena Rossi, who had an earlier flirtatious encounter with Tristan, is accosted while doing research at the reservoir and then goes missing. When Kate and Tristan begin researching the history of Shadow Sands, what they discover is truly shocking.

With its delightful detective duo, Bryndza’s refreshing, twisty thriller stays upbeat even in dark moments.

Bruen, Ken Mysterious Press (256 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-8021-5703-4

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Galway private eye Jack Taylor finds himself awash in miracles, and not the good kind.

The whole city is abuzz with the news of “the miracle”—the spotting of a young girl bathed in an unearthly blue light that evokes Lourdes and Fatima. Jack is the beneficiary of a miracle of his own, a close encounter with a Mack truck that spared him but brought him into close contact with the miracle girl, Sara, who was trying to rob him as he regained consciousness. Jack emerges from the hospital to a raft of cases. Renee Garvey begs him to stop the husband who beats her and has now started beating their daughter. Stephen Morgan wants him to identify the online troll who drove his daughter to suicide. And Monsignor Rael, an investigator called in from Rome, wants him to find and quiet Sara because “the Church does not wish a miracle at this time.” Jack, more interested in a rash of fires set by wealthy forensic accountant Benjamin J. Cullen, asks his farmer/biker/falconer friend Keefer McDonald to help him whittle down the caseload. In shockingly fast succession, the docket is indeed diminished—not by the efforts of Jack and Keefer but by jolts of violence that claim a remarkable number of the very characters who seem to be driving the story. Eventually Jack, emerging from a lost weekend that extends to five or six days (naturally, he can’t remember), grabs the reins and takes control. Or does he?

Another heady Irish stew spiked with wayward epigrams, one-word paragraphs, and lots and lots of Jamesons. Sláinte.

SHADOW SANDS

Bryndza, Robert Thomas & Mercer (316 pp.) $24.95 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-5420-2336-8 A criminologist uncovers several shocking secrets at a remote reservoir.

While swimming in Devon’s Shadow Sands reservoir, 18-year-old Simon Kendal notices a man loading a body into a boat. Soon, Simon’s being pursued himself. Days later, Kate Marshall, a lecturer in criminology at the local university, finds Simon’s submerged body, fully clothed, while she’s scuba-diving with Jake, her teenage son. When she reports her discovery, she’s annoyed by the officious manner of new DCI Henry Ko. After speaking with Simon’s grieving mother, Lyn, Kate, who’s already discovered the Nine Elms cannibal serial killer, feels compelled to investigate further. Simon, a competitive swimmer, would never have gone into the water fully clothed. Kate enlists eager student Tristan Harper as an |

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HAVE YOURSELF A FUDGY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

until her own place is ready. When someone leaves a mysterious note on the door, she follows the directions to a designated meeting place, where her dog, Mal, discovers someone buried in a snowbank. Kayla Cramdon, a newcomer to the island, later dies in the hospital of probable poisoning—with Frances’ name on her lips. Allie, who has plenty of sleuthing experience, is not about to let her friend face a murder charge, and, encouraged by the series regulars, she starts digging for clues. Frances stubbornly refuses to say anything until Kayla’s mother, Sally Cramdon, accuses Frances not only of murder, but also of being her own birth mother who gave her up for adoption. When Allie’s neighbor dies in similar circumstances, she looks for the connections that will solve a perplexing case.

Two nasty murders, charming surviving characters, plenty of Christmas cheer, and enough fudge recipes for a major sugar rush.

Coco, Nancy Kensington (352 pp.) $8.99 paper | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-4967-2758-9

A Mackinac Island hotelier and fudge maker’s Christmas spirit is challenged by a series of calamities.

Even before discovering the corpse, Allie McMurphy is already dealing with serious problems. The roof of the McMurphy Hotel has caved in, and she can only hope that the renovation will be completed by Christmas. After she turns down wealthy bachelor Trent Jessop’s offer to go to Chicago for the winter to make fudge in a commercial kitchen, Rex Manning, the police officer who invited her to share his house, is suddenly reclaimed by the wife who left him. So Allie uses retired hotel employee Frances Devaney’s surplus apartment

ON DEADLY TIDES

Duncan, Elizabeth J. Crooked Lane (288 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-64385-468-7

A chance meeting with a journalist plunges an amateur detective into another case of murder.

Businesswoman/artist/sleuth Penny Brannigan and her friend Alwynne are staying at a hotel on the Welsh island of Anglesey for a painting weekend organized by sleazy former actor Bill Ward. In the hotel bar Penny shares a table with a fellow Canadian, wildlife photographer Colin Campbell, and Jessica Graham, a young New Zealander who’s digging into the disappearance of a wealthy compatriot seven years ago.

The next morning Penny discovers Jessica’s body on the beach, apparently fallen from a steep cliff. Her old friend DI Bethan Morgan investigates, and although the autopsy is inconclusive, both of them sense that something isn’t right. Penny feels the urge to sleuth while pursuing a budding romance with Colin, who’s flitting back and forth between assignments. Penny invites Jessica’s distraught mother to stay with her in her cottage in Llanelen, North Wales. When someone breaks in, she knows her hunch about murder was on point. She and Colin fall for an apartment in Anglesey, a stunning Georgian terrace that Ward’s selling now that his lover, hotel assistant manager Sarah Spencer, has agreed to move out. Little do they know that the apartment may contain a crucial clue to the murder—and indeed play a major role in their own future as a couple.

Fans of this long-running series will delight in both the mystery and the romance that bids to change the heroine’s life.

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A maverick agent battles duplicity on all sides in a personal rescue mission. time to hunt

THE DIABOLICAL BONES

is alive, held by a group called the Maroon Berets, who accuse him of trying to kill the president of Turkey. Triggs declares the rescue of Henican too sensitive for Hunt’s renegade style and, in a meeting at Langley, convinces him to instead accompany veteran agent Harriet Jacobs on a mission to take out Venezuelan strongman Jorge Ramirez, who’ll be in Switzerland. Ramirez, meanwhile, is eager to align himself with the Maroon Berets and supplies them with intel on Venezuela’s new president, Col. Arteaga, whom the CIA has dubbed “Queen Bee.” Ramirez is surprised to learn that he’s to meet CIA operative Aram Diljen, a possible mole. Concealed at the meeting, Hunt and Jacobs receive an order at the last minute to kill Diljen instead. Who can the righteous Hunt trust?

Despite some plot holes and cardboard characters, an action-packed thrill ride with plot twists around nearly every curve.

Ellis, Bella Berkley (336 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-593099-15-5

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Skeletal remains attract the sympathy and scrutiny of a not-yet-famous trio of Victorian-era sisters.

The faithful housekeeper of the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—disturbs a quiet afternoon in December 1845 with dreadful news. Clifton Bradshaw, the owner of Top Withens Hall, has uncovered a bundle of child’s bones in the chimney niche in his late wife’s rooms, shut up since her death 13 years earlier. The sisters, daughters of a parson, are concerned with the soul of the child and the reason the bones were hidden away. Emily is particularly impatient because their last case as detectors, in which they styled themselves Bell Brothers and Company, was just a search for a missing cow. The three women and their brother, Branwell, brave the winter snows and the wrath of Bradshaw, who’s violent, abusive, and more often than not drunk since the death of his wife.

Although he refuses to surrender the bones for Christian burial, his son smuggles them out to the sisters, whose careful notes about them help a female friend with medical training speculate that the deceased was a malnourished child laborer. Moved by the pitiful tale, the sisters uncover a sensational mix of old and new religions, a ghostly woman in black, a local visionary who knows dark magic, and orphans terrified of a monstrous figure who steals children—and then starts stalking the Brontës themselves.

Ellis takes gothic over the top in the second fictional adventure of her real-life characters.

TIME TO HUNT

Gervais, Simon Thomas & Mercer (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-5420-2082-4 A maverick agent battles duplicity on all sides in a personal rescue mission.

In Istanbul, American Charlie Henican is seized by half a dozen men who call him an assassin. Twelve hours later, CIA deputy director Dorothy Triggs strategizes in the Bahamas with Max Oswald, her son and “right-hand man” about ways to convince Pierce Hunt to rescue Henican, his close friend. Hunt is vacationing there with his lover, Anna Garcia, who has shut down the Garcia crime syndicate, to which she’s the heiress. Though Hunt now works for the Drug Enforcement Administration, Triggs is confident that his history with Henican in Gaza will secure his involvement. Her attempt to convince Hunt goes badly, and later Triggs and Max are ambushed and nearly killed. A video confirms that Henican |

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ABSENCE OF MERCY

offer, mostly to escape, taking along Paisley, his manservant. He arrives just in time to examine the corpse of Alard Janssen, the man who arranged his employment. Janssen’s successor, Capt.

Owen Davies, openly ridicules Jasper and changes his assignment to investigating the murders of Janssen and two other men, Dunbarton and Wilbur Sealy, killed under similar circumstances in the seedy Five Points neighborhood. To assist him, Jasper perversely picks Hieronymus “Hy” Law, an ex-detective who worked the case before he was locked up in the Tomb for unspecified reasons. Law rebuffs the offer but has second thoughts after engineering an escape. When Jasper calls on Janssen’s widow, Zuza, he’s amazed to see one of the other victims’ widows in attendance as well. The crosscurrents of local politics and an elegant bordello figure prominently in the investigation, which gains traction when Hy joins the team.

Goodwin’s series kickoff offers a colorful, panoramic view of old New York and introduces a provocative sleuthing team.

Goodwin, S.M. Crooked Lane (320 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-64385-521-9

In pre–Civil War New York City, a British Detective Inspector teams up with a disgraced American detective to catch a cunning serial killer and save the American’s career.

April 1857. After a drunken carouse, foppish Felix Dunbarton is murdered on the street. Meanwhile, in London, DI Jasper Lightner is summoned unexpectedly from a bloody murder scene by the police commissioner. Jasper is surprised to see the Duke of Kersey, his cruel, overbearing father, at the meeting and even more surprised at home secretary Sir George Grey’s offer to send Jasper to New York to help the police department there. The Duke’s constant abuse has triggered a pronounced stutter in his son, who accepts the

ONE OF OUR OWN

Haddam, Jane Minotaur (272 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-25-077049-3

Gregor Demarkian’s last case.

Marta Warkowski has lived all her 72 years in a three-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia’s Alder Arms despite the best efforts of Miguel Hernandez, the building’s super, to cajole her to leave or evict her. She knows all the dodges: Bring your rent check directly to Cary Alder’s office; make sure to get a receipt every month; and don’t let the bastards think they can get away with bullying you. About the only thing that will get her to move is death. Even when her body, stuffed into a plastic garbage bag, is tossed from a van onto the street, she’s not quite dead, only comatose. It’s Hernandez who’s dead, lying on the floor of her coveted apartment. Father Tibor Kasparian and 14-year-old Tommy Moradanyan, who are on the scene, are already preoccupied with their own problems, which range from the imprisonment of Tommy’s father, attorney Russ Donahue, to Tibor’s recent placement of Javier, an abandoned child, in foster care.

Since Russ Donahue’s crimes include shooting Gregor Demarkian, who’s also agreed with his wife, Bennis Hannaford, to take in Javier, it’s only natural that the Philadelphia Police Department comes calling on Gregor for help. This time, though, the interest in the Armenian American Poirot’s sleuthing is outpaced by Haddam’s exposition of an all-too-plausibly widespread plot to smuggle undocumented people into the country and exploit them in every possible way. The result is a fitting sunset vehicle for Haddam, a pseudonym for Orania Papazoglou, who died in 2019 and is memorialized in a brief, glowing afterword.

One last testament to the importance of community in maintaining the values that make America great, or at least human.

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One of those rare thrillers whose answers are even more scarifying than its mysteries. after all i’ ve done

AFTER ALL I’VE DONE

in Angola, and his partner, charming Christianne Beaucarne.

No sooner has Enora bonded with Christianne than her new friend disappears, leaving behind a note that strongly indicates that she plans to do away with herself—and no wonder, since she’s been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which would have killed her shortly and painfully anyway. Enora shares her belief that Christianne has committed suicide every chance she gets, and she gets plenty of chances, because DI Frank Bullivant, determined to close this case his way before he retires, arrests Andy, and then, after releasing him, Enora herself. If only the actress can survive his suspicions, her future seems assured, since her feckless son, Malo, throws in his lot with Sylvester Penny, the son of neighboring ex-diplomat Sir William Penny, to promote the Twilight Fund, which proposes to sell spaces in deluxe underground silos (think high-rises in reverse) to superrich clients who want to be able to shelter against war, disease, and famine until natural death claims them.

Brisk, confident, and clearly aimed at readers who already share its heroine’s assumptions about life and lifestyles.

Hardy, Mina Crooked Lane (310 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-64385-470-0

A middle-aged woman sidelined by a horrific accident finds even sharper pains waiting on the other side of her recuperation in this expert nightmare

by Hardy, familiar to many readers as Megan Hart, author of All the Secrets We

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Keep (2017), etc.

Five months ago, while she was on her way to the hospital with an ailing gallbladder, Diana Sparrow’s car hit a deer on a rural Pennsylvania road. When she awoke, she was minus her gallbladder, two working collarbones (and therefore two functioning arms), and her memory. During a recovery that would’ve been impossible without the constant ministrations of Harriett Richmond, the mother-in-law who’s the real reason Diana married her husband, Jonathan, Diana’s discovered that Jonathan has been cheating on her with her childhood friend Valerie Delagatti. Divorce is out of the question: Diana’s grown used to the pampered lifestyle the prenup she’d signed would snatch away from her. Every day is filled with torments. She slips and falls in a pool of wine on her kitchen floor she’s sure she didn’t spill herself. At the emergency room, her credit card and debit card are declined. She feels that she hates oppressively solicitous Harriett but has no idea why. Her sessions with her psychiatrist fail to heal her rage at her adoptive mother, an addict who abandoned her then returned only to disappear again and die an ugly death.

Even worse, her attempts to recover her lost memory lead to an excruciatingly paced series of revelations. Val says Diana asked her to seduce Jonathan. Diana realizes that Cole, a fellow student in her watercolor class, isn’t the stranger she’d thought he was. Where can this maze of deceptions possibly end?

One of those rare thrillers whose answers are even more scarifying than its mysteries.

LIMELIGHT

Hurley, Graham Severn House (272 pp.) $29.99 | Dec. 1, 2020 978-0-7278-8980-5 Actress Enora Andressen finds herself in the spotlight for all the worst reasons when a friend who’s so new some might not count her as a friend vanishes from a “post-aspirational” seaside town in East Devon.

Following the death of her recent lover, screenwriter Pavel Sieger, Enora’s turned her back on the public to visit her friend Evelyn Warlock, a gifted editor, in quietly upscale Budleigh Salterton. It’s there that she meets Evelyn’s neighbor: shorttempered Andy McFaul, who lost a leg disarming land mines |

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BENDING THE PAW

in Medora posing as photographers, Rose and Thomas find a dying town and a coterie of crude and dangerous men. Outfitted with new horses, weapons, and trousers for Rose, they settle in to investigate. Rose, Thomas, Roosevelt, and many of their friends are “lucky”—that is, they all have some sort of paranormal ability. Rose can see spirits, but when the ghost of the dead miner appears to her, she’s terrified. She must deal with both otherworldly dangers and her mutual real-world attraction to Thomas that the superbly characterized pair constantly push aside, knowing it would ruin them both in New York society.

Based on historical characters and filled with high adventure, romance, and scares, Rose’s newest adventure is a winner.

Kelly, Diane St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $7.99 paper | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-250-19739-9 A police officer and her canine partner search for a body missing from a gruesome crime scene.

A slasher has executed a St. Valentine’s Day massacre of his own in Fort Worth. A call from Detective Audrey Jackson summons Officer Megan Luz and Brigit, her K-9 teammate, to the scene, a suburban kitchen covered in blood. It’s not the way Megan pictured spending the night of her engagement to Seth, her firefighter boyfriend, but Seth has a dog of his own, and he understands the importance of K-9 teams. When Megan gets to the scene, poor homeowner Shelby Olsen is distraught by the gruesome mess but even more upset that Greg, her loving husband, is missing. She asks Audrey and Megan where Greg could be. The two don’t know how to tell her that, given the blood volume they see, it really doesn’t matter where Greg is any more. Eager to impress her mentor and prove that she’s fit to fill her shoes one day, Megan digs into the case of the apparent murder and the missing body. But all the obvious leads go nowhere, and Megan isn’t sure what’s next.

Interspersed chapters adopt the perspectives of the slasher, who’s mainly keeping a low profile at a hotel, and Brigit, who’s equally concerned with tracking the killer and scoring some liver treats. At length Megan’s investigation leads her to the one and only possible conclusion.

The procedural emphasis continues to set this series apart from other dog mysteries.

MURDER IN OLD BOMBAY

March, Nev Minotaur (400 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-25-026954-6

In colonial India, a fledgling sleuth probes the inexplicable deaths of two young women.

While recuperating in hospital from battle injuries in 1892 Poona, Capt. James Agnihotri, of the 14th Light Cavalry Regiment, becomes interested in the case of two young women who fell to their deaths from a university clock tower. A lifelong fan of Sherlock Holmes, Jim is moved by a letter published in the local newspaper from Adi Framji, the husband of one victim and brother of the other, pleading for justice. Maneck Fitter stood accused of causing the deaths, but the young man was released for lack of evidence. Leaving the army behind, Jim gets a job as a reporter for The Chronicle of India and soon finds Adi, who quickly becomes Watson to his Holmes. The eldest of six children, Adi lost his unworldly wife, Bacha, and secretive sister, Pilloo, to the killer. The investigative duo becomes a trio with the arrival from Liverpool of Adi’s sister, Diana, who adds feminine insight and a romantic interest for Jim. The investigation begins at the library near the tower, where the librarian verifies the story of Maneck arguing loudly with two black-clad men shortly before the tragedy. Like the last page of the medical examiner’s report on the victims, garments found under a library table have mysteriously disappeared. A pair of attacks convinces Jim that he’s closing in on the killer. When Jim finally talks to Maneck, who stayed mute during his trial, he expresses fears for his own safety and suggests that Jim dig deeper into the Framji family.

Based on true events, March’s crisply written debut combines fascinating historic details with a clever puzzle.

THE SILVER SHOOTER

Lindsey, Erin Minotaur (320 pp.) $17.99 paper | Sep. 22, 2020 978-1-25-062344-7

Pinkerton agents who specialize in the paranormal have a rousing adventure in the Wild West of the 1880s.

Rose Gallagher has been transformed from a poor Irish maid to a valued Pinkerton agent. She and her former employer, society dandy Thomas Wiltshire, are used to the mean streets of New York. When Theodore Roosevelt hires them to travel to the Dakota Territory to investigate some outré occurrences, they feel out of their depth. Tempers are running high near Roosevelt’s ranch, where a brutal winter that killed thousands of cattle has been followed by the slaughter of animals and people by what is described as a monster. A miner has vanished, and many are searching for the fortune in gold he reportedly left hidden. The ranchers blame the Indians, who in turn accuse the ranchers of stealing their horses. Arriving 42

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CHRISTMAS CARD MURDER

the first part of the collection, focus on innocents, mostly children, forced all too early in life to confront the ghosts of the past. A boy struggles to deal with the sudden absence of his mother in “Coming in on Time.” The title character of “Echo” is defined by his uncanny bond to the sister who died before he was born. “London Safe” tracks a grown man’s ill-fated reunion with the father who left him as a child. In the second part, “Old Friends,” the focus shifts to the ghosts themselves, dead-eyed souls like IRA hard case Gerry Fegan (last seen in The Ghosts of Belfast, 2009) and aging killer Albert Ryan (from Ratlines, 2013), who can’t forget the violent roles they’ve taken in the Troubles.

Child and ghost collide most memorably in The Traveller, the concluding novella, in which Ellen McKenna, the daughter of pensioned cop Jack Lennon (from The Final Silence, 2014), is caught in the crossfire between her father and the nameless assassin, long presumed dead, who’s targeted him for a client who, like everyone else in Neville’s remorseless world, just can’t let the past go.

Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter.

Meier, Leslie & Hollis, Lee & Ehrhart, Peggy Kensington (320 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-4967-2822-7

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Three Christmas greetings bring clues to murder.

Meier’s title story presents Lucy Stone on the verge of realizing a lifelong dream. Since three of their four children are grown and living on their own, she wants her carpenter husband, Bill, to knock out the wall between their cramped bedroom and an adjacent room to create a luxurious master suite. As Bill bangs away at the lath and plaster, Lucy finds an antique Christmas card with a nasty message hidden in the baseboard. Lucy’s search for the sender circles back to the long-ago murder of a high school student.

Although her inquiry has moments of high drama, including a blizzard that shuts down the town, the solution is a letdown.

The miserable missive in Hollis’ Death of a Christmas Carol is sent by Carol Waterman to three friends: Hayley Powell, food writer for the Island Times; Rosana Moretti, wife of the Times’ publisher; and Hayley’s friend Mona Barnes, a lobsterwoman.

Borrowing from the classic film A Letter to Three Wives, Carol’s card reveals her plans to run off with the husband of one of the friends, plans that are foiled by her death. Neither the solving of the mystery nor the unmasking of the errant spouse offers any holiday cheer. Ehrhart’s Death of a Christmas Card Crafter tells the sad tale of popular high school art teacher Karma Karling, whom readers never meet before her body is found in a local Christmas tree lot. She leaves behind the last of a TwelveDays-of-Christmas–themed series of cards featuring not 12 but 13 drummers drumming. Neighbors Pamela Paterson and Bettina Fraser use that extra image to track down Karma’s killer—a solution that comes so far out of left field it could have been sent there by Willie Mays.

Three tepid treats for the holiday season.

THE TRAVELLER AND OTHER STORIES

Neville, Stuart Soho Crime (336 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-641-29203-0

Life in contemporary Ireland is bracketed in these 12 tales—all but one of them reprints—by the experiences of young people who’ve scarcely tasted it and veterans who wish they hadn’t.

Neville’s foreword notes the pleasure he takes in writing stories that provide a break from the long-haul commitments of his novels. But that break is severely limited by both the stories’ thematic consistency and their recycling of characters and plotlines from the novels. The six stories in “New Monsters,” |

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JANE DARROWFIELD AND THE MADWOMAN NEXT DOOR

drugs designed not so much to control as to torment her. The initial focus of Miller and Carrigan’s inquiries on the Milgram, the youth hostel where Anna and Madison both lived, is sharpened once they connect Anna’s murder to the disappearance of Milgram resident Katrina Eliot after she left a bowling alley the year before. Following the slender leads they unearth slowly and methodically, they examine the victims’ links to a temporary employment agency, a murder years ago on a beach in Bali, and, most chillingly, their online activity. Both of the victims, along with hundreds of others, have been subjected to spying by someone who’s hacked their computers, taken control of their cameras and databases, and turned their private lives into commodities for sale to other like-minded voyeurs. As Miller and Carrigan’s pursuit gathers momentum, each new lead falls short of explaining everything but pulls them onward inexorably to the next.

A paranoid, deeply unsettling page-turner best read on a digital device capable of tracking every eye movement.

Ross, Barbara Kensington (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-4967-3075-6

One and perhaps a quarter new assignments for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, problem-solver who debuted in the aptly titled Jane Darrowfield, Profes­ sional Busybody (2019).

Megan Larsen doesn’t think she’s crazy, but she sure has been acting strange. She’s been waking up in the middle of the night convinced she’s seen a bright light only to find her house in darkness and losing both sleep and self-confidence in the process. All of this makes it hard for her to focus on her work as a lawyer—a particular problem now that her review for a possible partnership is coming up. Megan wants Jane, her next-door neighbor, to determine whether or not she’s sane. No sooner has Jane suggested a few commonsense steps to help answer Megan’s question and identified a possible biological cause of her troubles and three men in her life who might be gaslighting her—an old friend and colleague, an ex-boyfriend, and a disastrous online date—than Megan vanishes. Her father, high-powered attorney Edwin Larsen, is unconcerned (some father!), but Jane presses on, counting on the fact that she’s on much better terms with Detective Tony Alvarez than with Megan’s father, realtor, or security provider.

She even finds time to take on a tiny second case brought to her

by Ralph Pilchner, another neighbor, who claims that Gordon and Pam Marshall have alienated the affections of Ralph’s cat, Roo, by feeding her themselves.

The heroine is soothing, sturdy company, but neither the main case nor the minicase leads to much of a solution.

DEATH, DIAMONDS, AND DECEPTION

Simpson, Rosemary Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-1-4967-2212-6

A chance observation at a fancy ball exposes embezzlement, scandal, and murder.

Prudence MacKenzie has little interest in the social prominence that is hers by birth. But she reckons without her redoubtable aunt, the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, an American “dollar princess” who exchanged family money for a title. Lady Rotherton insists on stuffing Prudence into a Worth gown and dragging her to the first Assembly Ball of the New York season, but Prudence goes only on the condition that her business partner, ex–Confederate officer and ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter, escort her.

At the ball, Lady Rotherton spots paste fakes among real diamonds once intended for Marie Antoinette and now in a necklace adorning the neck of Lena De Vries, the wife of a wealthy financier. William De Vries hires the two-person firm of Hunter and Mackenzie, Investigative Law, to inquire discreetly about the missing gems. A network of street urchins, dedicated servants, and former Pinks point Prudence and Geoffrey toward a gem cutter whom they find dead in his jewelry store. A second murder and a suicide later, the search for the missing diamonds makes a suspect of Lena’s son, a gambler and drunkard whose sorry misadventures lead to tragedy, a desperate escape attempt, and an emotional cliffhanger deferred until at least the next installment.

Simpson takes her unconventional duo from the upper crust to the lowest dregs of New York society in the Gilded Age.

THE INTRUSIONS

Sherez, Stav World Noir (272 pp.) $14.95 paper | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-60945-620-7 Think the life you live online is secret and secure? Think again.

Still facing awkward questions and possible legal action from internal affairs over their handling of their last case in Eleven Days (2013), DI Geneva Miller and DI Jack Carrigan, of London’s Metropolitan Police, face another aborning nightmare when Madison Carter reports that someone drugged both her and her German-born housemate, Anna Becker, an aspiring actress, at The Last Good Kiss, a nightclub they both frequented, and kidnapped Anna. Pulled off the missing person case to investigate a murder, Miller realizes that the victim is Anna Becker, her throat surgically punctured and her body carefully posed after she was pumped full of 44

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Complex social networks spark an equally complex puzzle. a lady compromised

MURDER BY MILK BOTTLE

No one knows why Corbyn would have challenged his friend to a duel, how he came to be killed before the two contestants even met, or what happened to his second, Bartolemew Vaughn, who was supposed to protect him. And Rosalind’s not in the country to solve mysteries but to celebrate Louisa’s wedding and reexamine her relationship with Louisa’s brother Devon, who became Duke of Casselmaine after the death of their older brother, Hugh. Is her warm friendship with Devon enough to sustain a marriage that would take her out of London, away from her friends, and thrust her into a social world where every glance, every smile, every unguarded look would be held up to the scrutiny of vultures like poisonous Lady Pennyworth and social-climbing Mrs. Vaughn? Would the pleasures of Devon’s company and the luxuries of life in Cassel House compensate for the moods of mercurial Catherine Winterbourne, Devon’s mother? As Rosalind struggles with her own questions, she becomes increasingly compelled by Helen’s, and her inquiries lead to revelations that leave no family unscathed.

Complex social networks spark an equally complex puzzle.

Truss, Lynne Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $17.00 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-63557-597-2

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Truss’ third stroll down Memory Lane offers firm evidence that 1957 Brighton is packed with homicides.

In the space of one eventful evening, three locals—Barbara Ashley, the runner-up in the local Milk Board’s Lactic Lovelies beauty contest; Andrew Inman of the Automobile Association; and Cedric Carbody, a celebrity contestant on the BBC radio show What’s Your Game?—are bashed and sliced to death with milk bottles. Sgt. Jim Brunswick, who’d looked forward to dating Barbara that very evening, is properly outraged; Inspector Geoffrey Steine, now that he’s finished his own brief stint on What’s Your Game? is mostly focused on the ice-cream sundae competition he’ll be judging; and Palmeira Groynes, the police station’s observant and efficient charlady, is preoccupied with the summit meeting of crime lords she’s arranging for her ex-lover Terence Chambers. So it falls mainly to Constable Peregrine Twitten to figure out what the victims had in common that would make someone attack them with such a bizarrely unlikely weapon. Guided partly by the very different clues he picks up from Mrs. Groynes, who nobody else believes is a master criminal, and Milk Girl Pandora Holden, who had eyes for him years ago, and partly by his cocksure sense of his own abilities, but never by any sense of decorum that would lead him to filter his monstrously tactless remarks to others, Twitten presses on as the body count rises to impossible heights before he finally identifies a killer who’s both unguessable and, well, unnoticeable.

Truss faithfully re-creates both the ingenious appeal and the formulaic limitations of golden-age puzzlers.

ON BORROWED CRIME

Young, Kate Crooked Lane (320 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-64385-462-5

A wannabe Georgia detective gets closer than she’d like to a murder.

Much to the dismay of her mother, who’d rather she be thinking of marriage than murder, Lyla Moody’s been working for her uncle Calvin, a private detective in peaceful Sweet Mountain. Lyla, a member of the Jane Doe book club, whose members enjoy delving into crime, spots club member Carol Timms sitting in a car with an unidentifiable person and looking desperate. Carol had thought she knew the identity of one of many dead women found along the I-85 corridor and wanted the club to investigate. Now she’s missed her chance, for all too soon after her husband, Judge David Timms, calls Calvin to find his missing wife, her body turns up stuffed in a suitcase left at Lyla’s door. The local police focus on Lyla’s ex-boyfriend Kevin, who’s just moved in across the street from Lyla with her disagreeable cousin, Ellen, whom he’s now involved with. Carol had been squabbling with Kevin, who was her former stepbrother, over the disposition of an inheritance from a relative. But she also was arguing with her husband and getting psychological help from Lyla’s father. The club members investigate until they turn up enough dirt to earn Lyla threatening notes from a possible serial killer. She works with both the police chief, another former boyfriend, and the investigator of the I-85 cold cases and is not deterred when they both warn her of the dangers.

A fine outing for a spunky heroine whose job and other activities provide plenty of grist for future investigations.

A LADY COMPROMISED

Wilde, Darcie Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-1-4967-2087-0

Rosalind Thorne continues her battle to negotiate the intricate world of the British haut ton.

Although, as the daughter of a baronet, Rosalind owns a place among England’s elite, her father, a forger, and her sister, a courtesan, have abandoned her. She survives by making herself useful to others in her social set and living on the small change they offer for solving their problems. But some problems are too weighty even for Rosalind. Her friend Louisa Winterbourne begs her to discover the truth behind the death of William Corbyn, killed on his way to a duel with Peter Mirabeau, his sister Helen’s fiance. The circumstances are murky. |

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The stars align in this charming queer rom-com. written in the stars

THE SEVENTH PERFECTION

science fiction and fantasy

Polansky, Daniel Tor (176 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 22, 2020 978-1-250-76756-1

THE FACTORY WITCHES OF LOWELL

In this stand-alone fantasy, a highranking subject of a theocracy built on the embers of a revolution threatens to upend the social order again in her quest for answers.

Years ago, the artist Laqip, the student Amata, and the soldier Kiri led a revolution all the way up the Spire, where Kiri toppled the Divine Empress and took her place as the God King Ba‘l Melqart; his beloved companions never returned. Today, a young woman named Manet serves the God King as an Amanuensis, having successfully achieved the seven perfections of body and mind. When someone sends her a locket bearing the image of an unknown woman, Manet puts all her considerable skills to bear in pursuit of the woman’s identity, aggressively questioning a variety of people at all levels of society, from brothel guard to fortuneteller to religious authority, leaving a trail of blood (her own and others’) behind her as she learns new truths about Kiri, Amata, and Laqip… and herself. The use of second person seems to have become a more popular choice for SF/fantasy writers in recent years, and Polansky wields it expertly here, with all the different characters addressing themselves directly to Manet. Since we never hear Manet’s thoughts or what she says (except in one section), we are forced to figure out who she is and what her goals are based on what the other characters say and how they respond to her. She is a protagonist-shaped point of focus around which the story forms, an open window through which readers can observe every conversation and monologue, accreting knowledge as they are directed to a seemingly inevitable conclusion.

A fascinating concoction of metropolitan fantasy, mystery, puzzle, character study, and oblique fable.

Malerich, C.S. Tor (128 pp.) $13.99 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-250-75656-5

Sisterhood, love, and magic blossom in this timely tale of protest based on a historical incident.

In mid-19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts, the “mill girls” spin the thread and weave the cloth in the textile factories, all to the profit of the “Boston gentlemen” who own the mills where they work and the boardinghouses where they live.

But when those very same gentlemen decide to raise the young women’s rent by a quarter a week, the women decide it’s time they had a say in their living and working conditions. Fierce Judith Whittier organizes the workers into a union and ensures their loyalty to the cause—and specifically, to their planned strike at the mills—with the help of her friend Hannah Pickering, a gentle and sickly Seer who bends her untrained magic into a spell that uses a lock of every woman’s hair to literally weave all of them into solidarity. Now the union members are magically compelled to maintain the strike, but what will they do when the mill owners’ agent, the hardhearted Mr. Boott, brings in new and more desperate workers to take the strikers’ places at the factories? As Judith and Hannah seek a magical solution to their cause, they both gradually realize that what they feel for one another is more than mere friendship. A feel-good message of a marginalized community battling amoral, exploitative capitalists might seem a bit obvious, but it also feels empowering during these uncertain times, when so many are still effectively disenfranchised. If the story has a flaw, it’s that it might’ve been richer with a higher page count and more development.

The battle between the union and the establishment could have spawned additional twists and turns, more magic spells. Some more character development would also have been welcome; we learn a certain amount of Hannah’s history, but we learn very little about Judith’s backstory and even less about the other mill girls’.

Slender but still well-crafted and satisfying.

r om a n c e WRITTEN IN THE STARS

Bellefleur, Alexandria Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-06-300080-3

Two wildly different women fall in love while fake dating.

Elle Jones is on her way to a blind date with Darcy Lowell, and disaster seems imminent. Not only is this the latest in a string of dating disappointments, 46

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but she’s running late and wearing a pair of sexy undies so uncomfortable she can “practically taste her spring-fresh laundry detergent.” Despite Elle’s best intentions, the evening is, in fact, horrible. Where free-spirited astrologer Elle is endearingly optimistic, straight-laced actuary Darcy is harshly realistic. Elle loves cheap boxed wine; Darcy orders a $56 glass of Chardonnay.

Elle believes in soul mates and is determined to find her own; Darcy had her heart broken by her ex-fiancee and is no longer interested in falling in love. Elle writes the night off as another loss, but Darcy has different plans. Tired of having her brother, Brandon—who’s the creator of a dating app that’s collaborating with Elle’s astrology business, Oh My Stars—meddling in her love life, she lies and says the two hit it off. When Darcy asks her to go along with the lie, it turns out that Elle has her own reasons to take part in a fake dating scheme: Her family finds her lifestyle unstable and unsuitable, and she thinks presenting herself in a solid relationship might take some of the pressure off. The plot doesn’t deviate much from other fake-dating favorites—awkward first dates lead to passionate first kisses and time spent together reveals there is more to both women than meets the eye. But the plot’s predictability doesn’t detract from its two compelling leading ladies, and there are interesting conversations around nontraditional career paths and breaking away from familial expectations. Fans of pop culture–inspired astrology sites will love the effortless and entertaining way the author weaves zodiac memes throughout the text.

The stars align in this charming queer rom-com.

of black leather outfits and the notion that fate has selected a one true love. While it’s refreshing to see a vampire heroine, the excitement quickly fades once Ildaria’s previous sexual trauma is revealed and italicized Spanish words start being sprinkled in.

If readers are expecting a nuanced representation of a woman of color–turned–vampiric superhero, they won’t find it here.

Her characterization is hollow enough to hear an echo. Readers who have stuck with the 30-plus books of the Argeneau series will find this to be a passable addition even if the cast is getting rather large. New readers: Don’t bother, as you’ll either be lost, annoyed, or infuriated.

Ultimately skippable.

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IMMORTAL ANGEL

Sands, Lynsay Avon/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 29, 2020 978-0-06-295630-9 A secretive club owner might just break his greatest rule: Don’t fall in love with an Immortal.

Ildaria Garcia left the Dominican Republic 200 years ago after having survived a vampire attack that left her an Immortal and in constant fear of retribution from the man who attacked her. Moving from place to place, she does her best to keep her past hidden while acting as a vigilante. However, social media has proved to be more of a bane than a boon, forcing Ildaria to lie low after her crime-fighting exploits go viral. The Night Club (yes, that’s the name) is run by Joshua James Simpson Guiscard, known as G.G. Though the venue caters to a supernatural clientele, G.G. is all human. A traumatizing event has made him both fearful of and fascinated

by Ildaria and her kind. While Ildaria is physically running from her past, G.G.’s avoidance is more the emotional sort. When the possibility of Ildaria and G.G. being mates is brought up, due to their immense attraction, both of them must grapple with their prior baggage. Can G.G. ever love an immortal vampire?

Can Ildaria live with endangering a man she’s come to care for?

There’s nothing terribly new in this paranormal romance—lots |

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nonfiction HIS VERY BEST Jimmy Carter, a Life

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Alter, Jonathan Simon & Schuster (800 pp.) $37.50 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-5011-2548-5

HIS VERY BEST by Jonathan Alter..................................................... 48 THE LOOK OF THE BOOK by David J. Alworth & Peter Mendelsund................................................................................. 49 ROME IS BURNING by Anthony A. Barrett.......................................52 AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS by Stephen Bates............................52 GLORY by Kahran Bethencourt & Regis Bethencourt.........................58 THE LAST AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT by David S. Brown...............61 FRIDAY NIGHT LIVES by Robert Clark............................................. 68 SYLLABUS by William Germano & Kit Nicholls...............................72 REVOLUTION OR DEATH by Justin Gifford......................................72 BLOOD AND OIL by Bradley Hope & Justin Scheck...........................74 GHOSTWAYS by Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards........................................................................................78 HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON by Jon Meacham..............................79 ELEANOR by David Michaelis........................................................... 80 VOICES OF A MASSACRE Ed. by Nasser Mohajer........................... 80 THE HARDEST PLACE by Wesley Morgan..........................................81 JOHN BERRYMAN AND ROBERT GIROUX by Patrick Samway.....83 REPORTS FROM HELL by Chas Smith................................................85 HUMANS by Brandon Stanton.............................................................85 TRUE CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS by Jeffrey Toobin................ 86 THE WAR OF THE POOR by Éric Vuillard; trans. by Mark Polizzotti......................................................................87 MAX JACOB by Rosanna Warren....................................................... 88 THE PEOPLE ON THE BEACH by Rosie Whitehouse........................ 89 AMERICAN CONTAGIONS by John Fabian Witt............................. 90

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Presidential historian Alter delivers the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Jimmy Carter.

James Earl Carter Jr. (b. 1924), the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, can be “brisk—sometimes peevish—in private, with a biting wit beneath the patented smile.” So writes Alter, observing that Carter, who cooperated with the author, was not always the nice guy of his public image. What irritates him most, it seems, is the widespread, almost canonical perception that he was weak. “I made many bold decisions,” Carter insists, “almost all of which were difficult to implement and not especially popular.” Alter demonstrates as much, meticulously unfolding proof of Carter’s many accomplishments while just as carefully showing his missteps. High on the list of the latter was a managerial style that left Cabinet members to operate pretty much as they wished, leading to incoherence at times. However, his achievements, both during his presidency and after, are significant, as Alter capably demonstrates. The former naval officer (the title comes from a stern interview Carter endured with Hyman Rickover) tried not just to be a good man, but also to do his best every day.

As Alter notes, one bit of evidence for this was that Carter never lied, unlike the current occupant of the White House. He also made significant advances in civil rights as governor of Georgia. Even though “some reporters were already thinking of him as a fluke,” when he edged out Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, he corralled a big-tent Democratic Congress and plenty of Republicans as well with a governing style that revealed “no distinct political ideology.” Other achievements were further opening China after Richard Nixon first cracked the door and bringing Israel and Egypt together, if uneasily, for the Camp David Accords. Even the Panama Canal treaty, used

by Ronald Reagan as a wedge issue, was successful, and though Carter faltered with respect to Iran’s Islamic Revolution, he can be credited for broadening democracy around the world—for which he deserves greater appreciation.

Students of recent presidential and world history will find Alter’s anecdotally rich narrative immensely rewarding.

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A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection. the look of the book

THE LOOK OF THE BOOK Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature

Alworth, David J. & Mendelsund, Peter Ten Speed Press (292 pp.) $50.00 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-399-58102-1

FRIENDS & ENEMIES A Life in Vogue, Prison, & Park Avenue

Amiel, Barbara Pegasus (400 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-64313-560-1

More enemies than friends take center stage in Amiel’s fiery recollections of her eventful life.

The conservative newspaper columnist grew up in England during World War II and then moved |

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A lively compendium that proves that, at least in some respects, you can indeed judge a book by its cover.

The cover or dust jacket of a book does many jobs, write literary scholar Alworth and designer Mendelsund, creative director at the Atlantic: It’s meant to sell the book, of course, but it’s also ideally a work of art. The latter requires explanation, “since art is usually understood to have no commercial purpose whatever, and there’s no getting around the fact that book covers are advertisements.” In the most memorable instances, there’s no question of the art aspect: Think of the cover of The Great Gatsby, with its all-seeing female eyes, an image that figures at several points in this book. The challenge of doing double duty as art and ad grows greater with the increased digitization of the book, whether as an e-book or as a physical object sold online, in either instance requiring the cover to be “as effective at 1 1/2 inches tall, which is the size of an Amazon thumbnail image, as they are at 9 inches tall, displayed in the window of the brickand-mortar bookstore.” Alworth and Mendelsund range widely in their examples, from pulp fiction to the most elevated literature—Ulysses, for example, whose cover made highly effective use of the then-new Futura typeface. Some covers are accidental, as when the designer of A Clockwork Orange, in its movie tiein edition, failed to come through, requiring an all-night session from the art director. “Every time I see that image,” he says, “all I see are the mistakes.” Mistakes or no, the design is brilliant, as are the covers of Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman (its single drop of blood signals the genre) and Lee Clay Johnson’s Nitro Mountain, whose designer notes that the photo of “a deer alerted to footsteps” connects to “The premise in film that fear builds in the anticipation, rather than in the thing itself.”

A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection.

with her family to Canada as a teenager after the suicide of her father. In the first half of her observant and unforgiving account of a life that “has always been a precarious mix of gutter and ballroom, of intense work and absolutely unhealthy play,” Amiel discusses her unhappy childhood, a series of career moves, a “backroom” abortion, years of clinical depression, and four marriages, the last one to former newspaper magnate Conrad Black, to whom Amiel has remained ferociously loyal. This half is packed with enough memorable characters, household moves, dinner parties, and jewelry shopping excursions to fill at least three typical memoirs. The second half, a tough slog, is devoted almost entirely to Black’s legal problems, which culminated in a 2007 trial and incarceration in a federal prison in Florida.

“Knowing profoundly that my husband was innocent and being relentlessly persecuted for crimes that hadn’t taken place”— and noting to readers who may find the subject less compelling than she does that “this is my book and my game”—the author proceeds to excoriate at length the “slithering creatures rising from the regulatory swamp” who brought her husband to trial, the lawyers (on both sides) “indifferent to anything but their own success and greed,” the jurors she feels weren’t up to the task of evaluating her husband’s guilt or innocence, and the society “friends” who slipped away upon Black’s imprisonment. Even Amiel’s most enthusiastic admirers will grow weary of the massive amount of attention devoted to this relentless onslaught. “This book,” she writes, “is simply an account of a woman’s life that…ran into a late autumn storm that continued with droughts and predators to this, the very last flight.”

A celebrity memoir with an uncompromising kick that could stand to shed at least 200 pages.

THE WOMAN WHO STOLE VERMEER The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist

Amore, Anthony M. Pegasus (272 pp.) $27.95 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-64313-529-8

A rollicking biography of a female art thief.

In his lively third book about art and crime, Amore, the director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tells the story of a “fiery, bold, and brash” Englishwoman who stole for nationalistic reasons. Bridget Rose Dugdale (b. 1941) is a “true outlier and major figure in the annals of criminal history.”

Born into a wealthy family, she studied philosophy, politics, and economics at several colleges. A position at the Ministry of Overseas Development was “crucial” to her becoming an activist, as was her reading of Marx’s Das Kapital, with its discussion of British imperialism in Ireland. Dugdale was invigorated by seeing Cuba’s revolution in person, attending protests in Manchester, and visiting Northern Ireland. The Bloody Sunday protests were “responsible for her foray into Irish politics,” as she

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necessary visions for america’s future Today, the United States is arguably less “united” than at any other period of time since the Civil War, and the 2020 presidential election is sure to add abundant fuel to a fire that continues to spread into nearly every aspect of American society. In this issue, you will find interviews with and features about authors who are addressing many of the nation’s biggest problems, whether it’s political divisiveness, White supremacy, or economic inequality. Here what our reviewers said about five important books that demand the attention of anyone worried about the future of the U.S. The Great Demographic Illusion by Richard Alba (Princeton Univ., Sept. 1): “A sociologist offers an optimistic, densely argued text about why ethnoracial assimilation will continue to be a part of the American future—and why it’s beneficial and important for the nation… for all Alba’s optimism, he knows that the process of assimilation now under way won’t be completed until equality and inclusion increase. To that end, he proposes clear social policies that he believes will hasten the process, most of them focusing on directly addressing racism, economic inequality, and educational opportunity….A heartening, wise, and profoundly important counternarrative to hysteria.”

Won’t Lose This Dream by Andrew Gumbel (The New Press, Aug. 25): “An urban university strikes a determined path to improve the academic performance and graduation rates of minority students—and does much more in the bargain….Georgia State University is scattered across several campuses in Atlanta, long a choice of Black and Latino students who lacked the means to go to schools farther from home. It barely ranked among institutions of higher learning until, during the last financial crisis, the university’s president made it a priority to improve conditions….Required reading for education reformers seeking to broaden community connections and benefit minority constituencies.”

Leah Overstreet

The End of White Politics by Zerlina Maxwell (Hachette, July 7): “An insider’s analysis of what the Democratic Party must do to win as White voters become the minority in the U.S. in the next 25 years….With a style that is as infectious as it is cogent and accessible, the author outlines and defends her recommendations and strategies so thoroughly that the only possible dissent is a willful disregard for the future of not just the Democratic Party, but the future of all but the most privileged Americans.”

Stakes Is High by Mychal Denzel Smith (Bold Type Books, Sept. 15): “A young Black man surveys the landscape and finds America a poisonous, broken place—but perhaps not irretrievably so….Anyone who has followed the headlines recently knows that life for African Americans is fraught with peril, the American dream ever more distant….An urgent and provocative work that deserves the broadest possible audience.”

The American Crisis by the writers of the Atlantic (Simon & Schuster, Sep. 15): “In keeping with the Atlantic’s goal of ‘debating and illuminating America’s meaning and purpose,’ editor at large [Cullen] Murphy gathers 40 incisive essays from an impressive roster of contributors….The essays are grouped into four sections: The first looks at ‘underlying conditions of society as a whole that have been deteriorating for decades.’ The second examines the failure of politics; the third covers the disastrous Trump presidency; and the last focuses on the possibility for the nation’s reinvention....Among many unsettling pieces are profiles of Newt Gingrich, Paul Manafort, Ivanka Trump, and, most disturbingly, conspiracy theorists enraptured with QAnon. Other top-notch contributors include Anne Applebaum, George Packer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Yuval Noah Harari.”

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RECLAIMING HER TIME The Power of Maxine Waters

Andrews-Dyer, Helena & Thomas, R. Eric Illus. by Dorsainvil, Sabrina Dey Street/HarperCollins (240 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-06-299203-1

An homage to a political powerhouse.

In a book conveyed in the same breezy tone as Brenda Jones and Krishan Trotman’s Queens of the Resistance: Maxine Waters, Washington Post reporter AndrewsDyer and Thomas, a senior staff writer at elle.com, offer an admiring biography of the prominent legislator, illustrated by Dorsainvil and including many photographs. The authors draw on abundant media coverage of Waters’ life and career, her legislative record, interviews with friends and colleagues, and Thomas’ interview with Waters in 2017 to recount her rise from “humble beginnings as a Head Start teacher in the projects to meetings with Nelson Mandela and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.” The book’s title comes from Waters’ testy exchange with Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, in July 2017, where she repeatedly insisted that he answer her questions, interrupting his calculated digressions by invoking the parliamentary rule of “Reclaiming my time.” The much-publicized anecdote testifies to Waters’ outspoken, take-no-prisoners style and refusal to be intimidated, earning her the epithet “Kerosene Maxine.” One of 13 children, Waters struggled to claim her time at home and at school, working hard for recognition. Married at 18, a mother at 20, she and her husband moved to California, where she worked at the telephone company until a friend told her about an opening at Head Start. “Head Start changed my life,” Waters said in an interview. “Through Head Start I discovered me.” She learned how to organize parents and community |

volunteers, raise funds, and marshal grassroots power. Those skills served her well as she moved into more public positions, winning an election to the California State Assembly in 1976 and to the U.S. Congress in 1990. The authors report the many causes that Waters has championed, trace her rise to increasing visibility and power, and even include a gushing chapter on her fashion choices.

A lively pop history of an impressive career.

OUR LAST SEASON A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship

Araton, Harvey Penguin Press (256 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-984877-98-7

A sportswriter pays tribute to one of professional basketball’s most passionate fans.

New York Times scribe Araton, who has written multiple books about the NBA, was relatively new to sportswriting the day he met Michelle Musler, a New York Knicks fan 16 years his senior, when she “crashed an evening gathering of media regulars” at the 1981 All-Star Game. Musler was a Knicks season-ticket holder from the early 1970s to the mid-2010s, most of those years at courtside. She died in 2018 at age 81. In this affectionate memoir, the author describes his decadeslong friendship with this mother of five who divorced her cheating husband when she was in her 30s and started a global executive-training business that often took her away from her kids. Much of the book focuses on Araton’s career and Knicks history. Curiously, Musler is in the background for long passages, a bench player rather than a starter. A lot of the basketball talk—who got traded for whom and so on—is strictly for fans, and some readers may be discomfited by the privilege on display. Not every passionate fan can contact a Knicks source to get tickets to championship road games or have a friend at the Times who “straddled or crossed a fine professional line” by publishing her obituary in a paper that reserves that recognition for more famous figures. At its best, the book shows Musler and Araton addressing universal questions—whether they lived honorable lives, made lasting contributions, or spent enough time with family. Former Knicks coach Pat Riley said a season can end only in winning or misery. For Musler, “her love of the journey was what defined her as a fan.” That’s the message of this book: Between birth and the misery of death, find the happiness in between.

A wise if occasionally rarefied look at the forms that love can take.

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transitioned from “intellectual activist to militant operative.”

Englishman Walter Heaton, a married “revolutionary socialist,” became her comrade in arms and, later, her lover. Dugdale’s aggressive activism earned her the nickname “Angel of Tottenham.” In 1973, she broke into one of her family’s estates and stole eight valuable paintings to fence for the Irish Republican Army, a crime for which she received a suspended sentence.

With two “local toughs,” she hijacked a helicopter in a botched aerial bombing of a British police station in Northern Ireland.

As Amore writes, Dugdale had “elevated her status from gunrunner and rabble-rouser to bona fide terrorist.” In 1974, Vermeer’s painting The Guitar Player was stolen from England’s Kenwood House. Amore believes Dugdale was the thief, but it was never proven. Then came the “biggest theft in the world,” as Amore extravagantly describes it: Dugdale and her IRA cronies brazenly stole 19 paintings from Ireland’s Russborough House, including Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter With Her Maid. She only stood trial for the bombing and was sentenced to nine years. Released in 1980, Dugdale has become “something of an icon in Ireland.”

A captivating, detail-rich biography of a “criminal legend.”

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A well-constructed, timely study, clearly relevant to current debates. an aristocracy of critics

ROME IS BURNING Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty

Barrett, Anthony A. Princeton Univ. (352 pp.) $29.95 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-691-17231-6

A thorough, high-quality work on Emperor Nero and the fire that destroyed Rome in 64 C.E. A noted biographer of such ancient figures as Caligula and Livia, Barrett focuses on one of the turning points in the history of the Eternal City, one that proved a “human tragedy” of panic, mayhem, horror, death, and loss.

Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, writing with practiced skepticism, challenging the accounts of ancient chroniclers, and showing his deep learning, the author sorts out and dismisses many of the myths surrounding the fire, which raged for nine days and destroyed two-thirds of the city. Nero

didn’t fiddle while the city burned, and no one, including the suspected, martyred Christians, set the fire, whose precise origins remain undetermined. Yet for all that didn’t happen, the conflagration did effectively destroy the Roman economy and Nero’s reputation (although Barrett succeeds in saving what can be saved of the emperor’s name) and led to his leadership’s collapse and the end of the imperial line that began with Julius Caesar. The city’s reconstruction, to which the author devotes much attention, led to architectural innovations like octagonal structures, domes, and the use of concrete vaulting. While context-setting is necessary, there’s excess information about the history of fires, and a couple of the book’s chapters, especially those on the archaeological evidence of the fire’s extent and the city’s rebuilding, may be a test for general readers—but will interest students of the period. On the whole, the book is briskly written in a colloquial voice and succeeds in bringing burning Rome vividly alive. Barrett ends with a distinctive survey of the places of Nero and the fire in a variety of artistic disciplines, including literature, film, and opera. An unusual number of maps and photos add greatly to the reading experience.

Sure to be the most enduring treatment of this major historical event for some time.

AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press

Bates, Stephen Yale Univ. (336 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-0-300-11189-7

In the 1940s, the news media became the focus of a notorious investigation.

In 1944, Henry Luce, the overbearing, self-aggrandizing publisher of Time, Fortune, and Life, enjoined Robert Hutchins, the “imperious” president of the University of Chicago, to lead a Commission on Freedom of the Press. In a fascinating, prodigiously researched intellectual history, media scholar Bates offers a penetrating examination of the commission, which resulted—after 17 meetings, 58 witnesses, 225 staff interviews, and a hefty financial investment—in a controversial report, A Free and Responsible Press. Both maligned and praised when it was published in 1947, the report, Bates writes, illuminates the problems of democracy and the media that continue to vex the U.S. At a time when the public deeply distrusted journalists, Luce directed his commission to investigate newsroom bias, “foreign and domestic propaganda, corporate domination of political discourse, a fragmenting and polarized electorate, hate speech, and demagoguery, as well as what we now call echo chambers, trolls, deplatforming, and post-truth politics.”

The commission’s egotistical, opinionated members, writes the author, “were not necessarily suited to committee work.” However, they agreed that the media exerted a powerful force in 52

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TWO VOLUMES February 2020, 774pp, 7x10 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-6084-3, $204.00

July 2020, 156pp, 6 1/8x9 1/4 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-7661-5, $40.00

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TWO VOLUMES August 2020, 635pp, 7x10 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-5467-5, $204.00

TWO VOLUMES August 2020, 857pp, 7x10 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-3734-0, $222.00

September 2020, 171pp, 6 1/8x9 1/4 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-6689-0, $39.00

TWO VOLUMES November 2020, 800pp, 7x10 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-5984-7, $204.00

Save 20%

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January 2020, 297pp, 7x10 Hardcover: 978-1-4408-4970-1, $97.00

Valid on all orders placed through abc-clio.com with promo code Q32020 through 12/31/20.*

* Discount applies to above titles only. Offer is valid on U.S. direct purchases made via abc-clio.com for print products only, and purchases are non-returnable. Standard shipping charges apply. This offer is not available through distributors. Cannot be combined with any other discount offers.

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shaping public opinion, even when experts told them that most people read only what they already believe and only about 20% care about public affairs. Bates fashions shrewd, deft characterizations of individual members: among them, “jaunty mystic” philosopher William Ernest Hocking; pessimistic theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; long-winded propaganda expert Harold Laswell; outspoken poet Archibald MacLeish. On the whole, the commission embraced “the democratic hypothesis” that “if people have access to the facts and arguments, they will govern themselves more wisely than anyone can govern them.” But they mounted no evidence, preferring instead “to meander in vague philosophical generalities rather than do the dirty hard work of digging for facts.” Nevertheless, Bates argues persuasively, the report remains influential as a seminal examination of the media.

A well-constructed, timely study, clearly relevant to current debates.

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THE AMERICAN JEWISH PHILANTHROPIC COMPLEX The History of a MultibillionDollar Institution Berman, Lila Corwin Princeton Univ. (272 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-691-17073-2

The history, organization, and influence of American Jewish philanthropy.

Berman, the chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, delves into a little-studied area of American finance and culture: the “complex” behind Jewish philanthropy. While admitting that defining Jewish philanthropy is not always a simple task, the author navigates a sizable body of research—more than a century of giving and investing by and for the Jewish community, involving many billions of dollars. Berman should be commended for creating a coherent, concise study of such a diffuse and sprawling subject.

As the American Jewish population grew in the 19th century, so did its level of philanthropic sophistication. Organized mainly around geographically centered “federations,” these clearinghouses for giving sustained the growing immigrant community while also undergirding existing Jewish community needs.

The early to mid-20th century brought a change in emphasis from “philanthropic distribution to philanthropic accumulation.” During these decades, federations and their donors shifted from the practice of immediate spending to a culture of endowment. This shift took on greater meaning following the Holocaust, as capital growth became a symbol of the survival and continuance of the Jewish community and culture as a whole. A second great shift took place in the last decades of the century, as the role of federations changed again from centralized sources for asset accumulation to providers of financial services for individual donors. Throughout this century of philanthropic evolution, Berman identifies a dizzying array of market trends, political entanglements, special interests, and regulatory changes, most of which also affected American philanthropy in a more general sense. Hence, this study of Jewish philanthropy in America is both a cultural history in its own right as well as an expression of the fuller story of giving across a wide swath of American society.

A meaningful addition to the fields of Jewish studies and philanthropy.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Claudia Rankine

IN JUST US, THE POET AND ESSAYIST EXPLORES WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE TRUTHFUL CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE IN AMERICA

By Tom Beer John Lucas

Claudia Rankine’s new book is titled Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, Sept. 8). As the subtitle suggests, the theme of conversation runs throughout this complex, multifarious work incorporating poetry, essays, and artwork, plus pages of notes on sources and “fact checks.” How do we talk with one another—Black and White—about race? What gets left unsaid? Why is the conversation so challenging, especially for White 56

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Americans? In a starred review, Kirkus calls Just Us a “work that should move, challenge, and transform every reader who encounters it.”

Rankine, 57, is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric—winner of numerous awards, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize—and other works of poetry, essays, and plays. She teaches at Yale, is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and is a founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute, an interdisciplinary collective that explores the role of race in our lives. Her latest play, Help, had just begun performances at The Shed in New York when theaters went dark in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in March.

Rankine and I recently had our own conversation on the subject of race—and her work—on Kirkus’ Fully Booked podcast; she joined me from New Haven, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, photographer and filmmaker John Lucas, a frequent collaborator.

I asked her why the idea of conversation was central to the book and what she wanted to explore through it.

“You come to conversations, usually—like our conversation now—to learn from each other, to build something,” Rankine explained. “Not to be wrong or right but to really construct a world in which I tell you something, you tell me something, and we move forward from that.

And that kind of building and mutual interest that governs other conversations seemed to be stalled in talking about race in this country.”

She elaborated: “We have seen that when race is on the table, when we’re talking about White supremacy—notions around White supremacy, racism, inequities—everybody clamps up. And at first I thought it was a kind of belligerence. But I have come to believe that we have such different experiences that when a White person says to me, ‘What do you mean this happens? I can’t believe this happens,’ what they’re really saying to me is, ‘This has never happened to me. And so I find it hard to believe you.’ ”

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of what it allows. And I thought for this book, it would be really amazing if I could bring all my worlds into the one book—so that Claudia the researcher, the person interested in archival documents, the person who writes poetry, the person who wrote essays could meet inside this inquiry….And it did feel like a big enough subject that it needed everything I knew….I was going to throw the kitchen sink at it.”

We ended our conversation by acknowledging that Just Us—written before the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the summer’s mass protests against police brutality—is being published as a different sort of national conversation about race is beginning to take form. “I think that we are in an extraordinary moment,” Rankine said. “What we’ve seen in Portland, what we’ve seen during the protests across the country, is that for the first time people are saying, ‘We’re ready to take on the world in front of us.’ And in order to achieve systemic change inside the various institutions and systems that we have, we’re going to have to start one to one. We’re going to have to start speaking to each other with a shared vocabulary, a shared understanding, a shared recognition of American history. And so I cannot think of a better time to begin to think about having conversations.”

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The book’s opening essay, “liminal spaces i,” is a case in point. The piece is adapted from a New York Times Magazine article in which she described talking about privilege with a number of White men—all of them strangers—whom she encountered in airports and on planes. As you might imagine, the conversations were sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes humorous, and almost always illuminating. Rankine told me that when the piece ran in the Times, she received some 200 letters and more than 2,100 online comments, many from men who thought she “got it wrong.”

“That’s when I made the realization and really understood that when I say White privilege, White men often hear economic privilege,” Rankine explained. “And I’m actually just talking about the privilege to be able to live your life. To have an encounter with the police…or to go to a store and to be able to just go down an aisle, pick something up, pay for it, and leave without somebody following me….Now I’m very careful, and I often say when I use White privilege: I’m talking about the ability to live—just live life.”

If misunderstanding is one obstacle to the conversation about race, civility is another. “Civility is the thing that we have seen used to cover over the portal into real conversations about reality,” as Rankine put it to me. In one of the book’s essays, “social contract,” she recounts a dinner party where the subject of the 2016 presidential election came up, and one guest—who was writing a book on it—said Trump had won because of economics, not racism. When Rankine challenged him, another guest abruptly changed the subject by commenting on dessert. Rankine writes, “It’s so blatant a redirect, I can’t help but ask aloud the most obvious question: Am I being silenced?”

“The ramification of that is that I have never been invited to that house again,” Rankine said with a laugh.

Had she perhaps pushed the point too far? “I think that when he insisted on the fact that it was all economics, that that was a moment when the violence that’s being done against Black people in the society was being erased,” she said. “I wanted to say, ‘You can’t erase a reality that is very dangerous for immigrants, for Black people, for women, that over 60% of White men voted into power’….I think we have to stop feeling like good manners are better than recognizing the inequities and inhumanity that is being brought to huge segments of the society.”

I asked Rankine about the form of Just Us, which, like so much of her work, refuses to adhere to strict genre boundaries or conventions. “I’m a poet by training,” she said, “but I also write essays, and I have written plays.

And each genre gives you something different in terms

Just Us received a starred review in the May 15, 2020, issue.

The full conversation with Claudia Rankine can be heard on the Fully Booked podcast.

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An exquisite pictorial love letter to Black children around the world. glory

GLORY Magical Visions of Black Beauty

Bethencourt, Kahran & Bethencourt, Regis Photos by the authors St. Martin’s (256 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-250-20456-1 A photographic celebration of the beauty and versatility of Black children and their hair.

The acclaimed husband-and-wife child photography team transforms what began as the arresting AfroArt series on Instagram into a beautiful, inspiring photography book. As the Bethencourts write, “we didn’t just want to question traditional beauty standards—we wanted to shatter them. We wanted to create images that flew in the face of the established spectrum of acceptable standards of beauty.” The result is a showcase of the “talent, drive, determination, and ingenuity in our [Black] youth across the diaspora.” Some of the children featured hail

from across the U.S., London, and Paris. Others are adorned in brilliantly colored fabrics and accessories from the countries where they live or have familial roots, including Ethiopia, South Africa, Kenya, and Senegal. All of the models are meticulously styled in bold, ornate fashions, with equally bold, creative hairstyles. Their ensembles and accoutrements honor Black people’s majestic ancestral past, rich present, and dauntlessly imagined futures. Whether clad in white cotton Sunday morning dresses with saddle shoes or intricate metal and beaded jewelry, this “next generation of free thinkers and cultural innovators” displays their power. Some images are accompanied by notes on the children’s interests and the adversities they face. There’s the contemplative gaze of 10-year-old, science-and-math–loving Celai, the “youngest professional runway model to walk in an all-adult lineup in New York Fashion Week”; the pure joy of a trio of little girls wearing roller skates; and 9-year-old Darryl, whose family had a hard time finding a school in Nairobi that allows dreadlocks. There are activists and aspiring astronauts; friends Pokuaa and Sarah, who excel at academics and sports but can’t go to school every day because they also work to support their farming families; and a 13-year-old CEO who founded her own clothing line to fight racism and colorism.

An exquisite pictorial love letter to Black children around the world.

A DEMON-HAUNTED LAND Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post–World War II Germany

Black, Monica Metropolitan/Henry Holt (352 pp.) $29.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-250-22567-2

Of witch trials, quack medicine, and millenarian terrors in the ashes of the Third Reich.

Given the fiery end of Hitler’s regime and the firebombing of Dresden and other cities, it’s understandable that ordinary Germans might have been apocalypse-minded in 1945. That was still true in 1949, writes history professor Black in this sometimes circuitous but well-paced account, four years after the Allied occupation and the division of the country into East and West Germany. In the wave of denazification that immediately followed surrender, old grudges surfaced in accusations of witchcraft and conspiracy theories. At the time, writes the author, German newspapers and kaffeeklatsches alike were also rife with rumors of the end of the world—not so far-fetched given the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War—and with revisitations of the old Norse stories of Ragnarok. Against this backdrop came one of Black’s principal subjects, a Danziger who changed his name from a Polish antecedent to the German Gröning—and who signed up for the Nazi Party years before the annexation, suggesting that he was looking forward to a comfortable life under Hitler. Instead, he grifted his way across the postwar landscape, engaging in a form of faith healing that 58

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yielded a string of faux miracles—but also a negligent homicide or two. (One of Gröning’s tools, not surprisingly, was tin foil.)

The German courts eventually restrained “Gröning the Wunderdoktor” from practicing medicine without a license along about the time he died and he and his victims were forgotten.

Other memorable figures Black examines include a crusader who “had a way of popping up almost anywhere that witchcraft accusations surfaced” in a country where pharmacies still sold magical potions with names such as “devil’s dung” until legally ordered to use “ordinary German names.”

Though of specialized interest, an eye-opening look into a corner of postwar history that seems more medieval than modern.

SONATA

Bowden, Charles Univ. of Texas (152 pp.) $24.95 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-4773-2223-9

BLOOD RUNS COAL The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America Bradley, Mark A. Norton (336 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-393-65253-6

Cat-and-mouse account of the murder of a union activist battling corruption in the coal fields.

Attorney and former CIA officer Bradley recounts the 1969 murder of Joseph Yablonski, who rose through the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America to become a lieutenant of John L. Lewis, a champion of miners’ rights. Yablonski, writes the author, was “stunned” when Lewis selected an empty suit named Tony Boyle to become his vice president. While Lewis took his union members out on a long strike and denounced coal companies for ignoring worker safety, Boyle was an accommodationist

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A trademark hallucinatory tour of the Southwestern borderlands by its chief literary interpreter.

The work of Bowden (1945-2014) falls into two rough categories: meditations on the psychotic world of the drug cartels and its supporting players south of the border and the wanton destruction of desert places by capitalist predators to the north of it. In this posthumous work—one of numerous books that he left behind in various states of completeness—he writes of a beleaguered Border Patrol agent attempting to keep illegal crossers from coming across the line even as a coyote tells him, tauntingly, “I’m crossing fifty Brazilians tomorrow, right along this stretch and you can’t stop me.” Naturally, he made good on his promise. Two leitmotifs play prominently in Bowden’s book: sandhill cranes, intermediaries between the human and spirit world; and madness, whether enacted by institutionalized patients in a Mexican jail or by the renowned painter Vincent Van Gogh. (It’s Bowden’s love for Beethoven, who makes an appearance, that gives the book its title.) Bowden has two rhetorical modes as well: swiftly moving run-on sentences that take up whole pages (“…you are the illegals coming north, or climbing out of a container in a port and here is what is wrong with you, you didn’t pick the right parents and this will not be forgiven, and this is true of the Mexican or the Chinaman or the zone-tailed hawk or the lion padding softly down the creek in the night, eyes huge with hunger for the fresh blood of the deer”) and portentous, short, fragmentary paragraphs (“I drift off, people tell me I vanish before their eyes. A ghost in my own life”). The former category is dominant, and if the author is incantatory, one sometimes wishes he’d reach for a period. Earlier works such as Blue Desert and Killing the Hidden Waters are more disciplined in this regard.

Not Bowden at his best, but even middling Bowden is better than most contemporary authors at their peaks.

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who, after a terrible mine accident, went out of his way to absolve the owner of responsibility and “reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living.” Clearly Boyle wasn’t the right man for the job, but when Yablonski mounted a campaign to replace him as union president, Boyle arranged for his murder. When hired killers infiltrated Yablonski’s home, they killed his wife and daughter as well. It took years of courtroom tedium, coordinated by prosecutor Richard Aurel Sprague, to arrive at the facts of the killing. Readers may feel that justice was not fully served when they learn that a couple of the principals, including a manipulative woman who betrayed her own father, were allowed to slip away into the witness protection program. Still, like Sprague, who had a remarkable winning record (“He had sought first-degree murder convictions in sixty-four cases and got what he asked for in sixty-three”), Bradley sets forth a methodical, step-by-step account of the vicious murders and Boyle’s fall from power and life imprisonment. Yablonski loyalists were able to effect some of the reforms he’d argued for, including a more effective pension plan and overall stronger union.

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A well-paced, thorough investigation of a half-century-old crime whose effects are still felt in the Appalachian coal fields.

150 GLIMPSES OF THE BEATLES

Brown, Craig Farrar, Straus and Giroux (592 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-374-10931-8 An overstuffed gathering of Beatlemania, an evergreen subject.

Who knew that Paul McCartney wrote “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” after watching “a couple of monkeys copulating en plein air” in Rishikesh? Or that John Lennon hesitated to let Paul join his band since Paul could play and might jeopardize his leadership? Brown, whose last book was an award-wining biography of Princess Margaret, serves up 150 episodes, most running just a few pages, concerning the lives and work of the Beatles, with poor Ringo, as ever, mostly an afterthought. (The author quotes American writer Carolyn See to deem the drummer “patron saint of fuckups the world over.”)

Brown is not an uncritical worshipper, but when he does criticize, it’s seldom fresh. He observes, as have so many, that John and Paul needed each other as creative foils and competitors and that when they separated, their solo work suffered, “with John falling back on self-pity and Paul giving in to whimsy.” Still, there are some little-known moments here, as when Kingsley Amis railed, “Oh fuck the Beatles” in a bitter letter to Philip Larkin, attaching a nasty racist epithet to Yoko Ono in passing. Another example is when Brown describes the Maharishi’s retreat in India, which, thanks to the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, was “far from spartan,” though conducive enough to feelings of spiritual exaltation that John was reduced to writing “hippy-dippy lyrics” that later resolved into such selfdoubting tunes as “Jealous Guy.” Collectors of all things Beatles will relish Brown’s description of their first time getting high, courtesy of Bob Dylan, who is “an enthusiast for visiting sites associated with rock stars,” touring John’s boyhood home after the National Trust acquired it. The author sometimes secondguesses, as when he decries the cover of Abbey Road, the quartet “generally looking as if they couldn’t be arsed,” but allows that it has since become iconic and often imitated, like the Beatles themselves.

Light on brand-new news but a pleasure for Fab Four completists.

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A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history. the last american aristocrat

THE LAST AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

THE NEW CHARDONNAY The Unlikely Story of How Marijuana Went Mainstream Cabot, Heather Currency (320 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 11, 2020 978-1-984826-24-4

Brown, David S. Scribner (464 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-982128-23-4

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A fresh, top-notch biography of Henry Adams (1838-1918).

Noted historian Brown once again trains his perceptive eye on a major American thinker. As a member of a powerful political family, Adams possessed the strengths and prejudices of his class, and his work both chronicled and reflected the decline of the Boston-centered gentry. Elevating self-pity—what Brown calls his “sense of displacement”—into a unique sensibility and generalizing from it, Adams made irony into a distinctive, signature style. His principal historical works—those about the Jefferson and Madison administrations and Gothic culture—are unrivaled masterpieces. Yet despite a backward-looking mind, Brown notes that Adams also evinced traits of a modern man who, despite his often suffocating emotionlessness, responded to new experiences and historical developments with an open mind—but always critically. Unfortunately, like most members of his class and circle, he was also deeply anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, anti-labor, and racist. “I believe,” writes Brown, “that to understand much of America’s history, and more specifically its movement in the late nineteenth century toward an imperial, industrial identity, one both increasingly beholden to technology and concerned with the fate of the white race, is to understand Henry Adams.” The author presents his “critical profile” of Adams, a man of “fluidity of identity,” with the acuity that marks his earlier works. Few write so confidently of the American historical writings produced by both academic and freelance writers. When Brown leaves American precincts, as he must to write about Adams’ late-life masterpiece, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he is less sure-footed, but that weakness only modestly mars the book’s many strengths. It takes up easy company with related works on Adams by Ernest Samuels, Garry Wills, and Edward Chalfant. In deftly capturing a man of enormous scholarly achievement, near-tragic limitations, and symbolic significance in American history, Brown gives us another fine biographical study.

A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history.

The complicated story of how marijuana went from back alleys to a multibillion-dollar American industry.

In Geek Girl Rising (2017), former ABC news correspondent Cabot spotlighted successful professional women in the male-dominated tech industry. Here, she applies the same investigative reporting skills to the nowmushrooming cannabis industry, producing an intriguing, character-driven narrative about “a complicated and controversial topic.” Wisely, the author focuses on primary figures who have not only profited from this new enterprise, but changed the culture around the substance as well—e.g., Beth

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Marie Mutsuki Mockett FOR AMERICAN HARVEST, THE AUTHOR SPOKE WITH THE GREAT PLAINS FARMERS WHO PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES

By Eric Liebetrau Sylvie Rosokoff

the thing; with it, some stereotypes shade away or at least become more complicated.” It’s a fitting, educative book for our divisive times. I spoke with Mockett via Zoom; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the impetus for this journey?

I was on the farm with my father and thought that nobody really knows anything about this world. I believed it would be fun to write about it, but I was working on fiction at the time. Then the tsunami happened in 2011, and I wrote an op-ed that propelled me into writing a book about Japan. For that project, I did so much international travel and had to learn a lot of vocabulary words about Buddhism. It was really difficult, so I thought that I would like my next project to keep me domestic and to just involve the English language.

In American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf, April 7), which our reviewer called “a revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables,” Marie Mutsuki Mockett chronicles her journey with wheat harvesters across the Great Plains. The author spent summers on her family farm in Nebraska (and a small part of Colorado), and her portrayals of the land and its people are not just lyrical, but culturally and spiritually illuminating. Through her travels, “Mockett analyzes the divides between rural and urban, religious and apathetic or atheistic, conservative and liberal.…Refreshingly, the author finds that conversation is just 62

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You write about America’s “big cultural difference as being Christian farmers versus atheist knowledge workers.” Your book offers viable avenues to bridge that divide. Can you discuss that in more detail?

I learned this term “knowledge worker” maybe 20 years ago, and I’ve thought about it ever since. With my education, that’s kind of the group of people that I belong to, but I also didn’t grow up that way. So there’s probably a degree to which I’ve always been trying to bridge that difference, before I even knew that I was. I wanted to go visit the farm and the people who work there, to see if there was a way to look at them again, outside of the way I was encouraged to do when I was living in [New York City], where I was surrounded by people who had purely knowledge worker backgrounds—unless they go to a B&B in Vermont and meet a farmer.

Talk about Eric, the lead wheat harvester and the book’s primary character. I was impressed by the depth of his thought and willingness to engage in sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

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People ask me all the time, is Eric really unusual? He is a particularly thoughtful person, and I am extraordinarily fortunate to know him and his son, who is also interesting. Some of their blood relatives don’t necessarily think things through with the same sort of care that those two men do. So they are unusual, but I don’t think that they’re so unusual, either. I’ve gotten letters from people who have read this book, mostly White guys who feel seen and then want to tell me about it, and many are alarmed

by Trump and what has happened to our country.

What does the future of American farming look like to you?

We have an aging population when it comes to farming, and there is not an inexhaustible source of soil. When I talk to young farmers, they tell me that we will see more Latino farmers and more people of color. The U.S. is one of the few countries that is able to produce enough food to feed its own population, but there are a lot of questions that have to do with the growing population and climate change. We don’t have an inexhaustible supply. We can’t just continue to go to Whole Foods and pay a little bit more. We have to make food that can be disseminated everywhere.

We live in fraught times. How can we all be better?

Listen to other people’s stories and recognize their stories as real. I believe that activism is so important in our country, but I also think that there’s room for conversation, which is what this book is about. It’s really important that activists speak the truth and are not negotiating on what they have to say, but we also have to speak to each other. My friend recently said that anyone who voted for Trump is a racist. I understand the satisfaction that comes in saying something like that, but I also really want our country to be better. I believe it can be, and through conversation, sometimes that can happen—although I do also see that it has to be paired with activism.

I agree—actual civil conversation, not just yelling at each other.

Conversation does not necessarily yield instant gratification, but it can lead to systemic and structural changes. I hope the book can inspire some people to engage in that process even though it’s not immediately gratifying and sometimes difficult. But it’s more rewarding in the end.

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Your descriptions of the mechanics of the farming process are particularly eye-opening to a neophyte like me.

Is it beneficial for everyone to understand the process better—and not just in a vague philosophical sense?

I think so. I had a conversation with a colleague who was born in the Midwest. He said, “I’ve left that world behind. I live in the city now.” I told him that’s completely fine, but your food does not come from the city—and that is true for all of us. We’re getting our food from a different part of the country, and it’s probably being raised and transported by people who, if we just handed them a questionnaire, on paper would look very different than we do and hold different beliefs. But our system is interdependent.

trying to understand what that actually is. At the end of the book, Eric demonstrates ways in which he’s trying to be authentically better. This is a farmer who’s not on Facebook, just virtue signaling. He’s actually asking himself, how can I live my life differently? He called me recently and told me that he and his relatives and colleagues were having conversations about Black Lives Matters, and that’s not something they would have done before.

American Harvest was reviewed in the Feb. 1, 2020, issue.

Christian faith is strong within the community you portray. Can you discuss that dimension of your story?

In a posthumous op-ed, John Lewis wrote, “The truth does not change.” I was greatly struck by this line and understood it more deeply than I would have a decade ago. As this book makes clear, there are Christians who see that Jesus was all about social justice for everybody around the world. I think sometimes in intellectual circles, people have a great deal of discomfort with that idea—and yet it’s a powerful concept and one that was significant in the civil rights movement. I take seriously that people have a spiritual dimension, and I am always |

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Just the thing for students of civics—which, these days, should include the entire polity. a user’s guide to democracy

Stavola, a Jersey Shore mother who attained wealth in the Arizona medical marijuana business; Wanda James, the first Black entrepreneur to own a business license in the cannabis industry; Bruce Linton, the founder of the first marijuana company to trade publicly; and Mel MacDonald, “former U.S. Attorney appointed by President Ronald Reagan, fifth-generation Mormon, elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and unexpected supporter of legalizing medical marijuana.” Perhaps the most interesting figure is Jeff Danzer, a home cook who has sought to match the various flavors and aromas of cannabis to a wide variety of dishes as well as distilling the plant down its purest, most delectable essences. Danzer created cuisine so delightful that Kate Hudson served up his treats at her star-studded birthday party, and he eventually earned the nickname “Julia Child of Weed.” Another prominent figure is Ted Chung, a Wharton alum who leads Snoop Dogg’s cannabis investment strategy. On stage in 2019, Snoop noted, “I love the fact that I used to be a bad guy known for smoking weed like you used to read about me….Now it’s all love and it’s all peace and all understanding.” Indeed—and

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Cabot covers much of the relevant territory, from entrepreneurship to women’s health to social justice.

An entertaining story of the curious arc that brought the cannabis industry out of the shadows.

A USER’S GUIDE TO DEMOCRACY How America Works

Capodice, Nick & McCarthy, Hannah Illus. by Toro, Tom Celadon Books (240 pp.) $16.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-250-75184-3 An easily digestible, illustrated guidebook to the agencies and institutions that make up the federal government.

Fans of the old Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m Just a Bill” (“and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill”) will appreciate the straightforward approach that Civics 101 podcast co-hosts Capodice and McCarthy bring to the job of describing “how America works.”

At the top of their discussion is the doctrine that each of the three branches of government is coequal, enshrining a system of checks and balances that emerged from James Madison’s Fed­ eralist essay urging that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” If that system is more observed in the breach than the act these days, it’s because the legislature has not asserted itself sufficiently. That said, the authors write, “the House can be a wild and crazy place,” subject to political movements like the tea party that shake things up periodically, while the Senate is less exuberant and more aloof, its members protected by sixyear terms that were put in place, one supposes, to keep them above the fray. The Senate, write Capodice and McCarthy, was “created for debate,” with Senators able to talk for as long as they wish about any given bill—“or any other matter.” Both sides of Congress are inefficient, but that’s a feature and not a bug, meant to keep laws from spilling out of the Capitol dome too haphazardly. There are scarcely any qualifications for becoming president, either, apart from age and citizenship. The authors try for nonpartisanship, but it’s clear enough that they’re unimpressed with the current occupant of the White House: “There are a whole lotta firsts in the Trump administration,” they write, “but here’s the one we’re going with: He is the first president since Polk to not have a pet.”

Just the thing for students of civics—which, these days, should include the entire polity.

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UNSUSTAINABLE INEQUALITIES Social Justice and the Environment

Chancel, Lucas Trans. by DeBevoise, Malcolm Belknap/Harvard Univ. (184 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-674-98465-3 A cogent argument that “unless economic inequality is reduced, it will be extremely difficult to attain the other goals of sustainable development.”

Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics, draws on peer-reviewed research to show how continued economic inequality stands in the way of “democratic vitality, social well-being, economic efficiency, and ecological stability.” One of the galling consequences of the current situation is that “the biggest polluters are typically the ones

who are least affected by the damages they cause,” and myopic, often selfish political decisions have resulted in the “weakening of the social state and the intensification of financial and trade globalization.” In a clear, balanced voice—particularly impressive in the face of such maddening social conditions—Chancel outlines five areas in which environmental inequality is most visible: access to resources, risk exposure, responsibility for degradation, exposure to the toxic effects of misguided policies, and having a voice when it comes to decisions involving natural resource use. Although the author readily admits that he doesn’t have all the answers and that significant research is ongoing, he does submit a number of policy initiatives that could lead to crucial steps forward, including investment in environmentally impactful infrastructure, taxation based on ecological impact, and public transparency in the measurement and accounting of progress. Chancel also suggests immediate changes in progressive taxation, retooled public services, communal water management, improved public transportation, and ramping up energy efficiency requirements for housing and workspaces.

Many of these efforts will require strong citizen participation

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An Ins i d e r’s O u ts i d e r Vi e w o f Am e r i c a

Raised in Sweden, the biracial child of American parents, author and hip-hop artist Jason Diakité has a unique lens on the U.S. [Sponsored]

By Megan Labrise Afsoneh Khorram

Although it was written in Swedish, the memoir of world-famous hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité could rightly be called an American tale. A poetic and profound exploration of inheritance and identity, En droppe midnatt sold more than 100,000 copies in the author’s native country and was adapted into a stage performance in 2017. Now, in an English translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles, with an epilogue added in 2019, A Drop of Midnight is ready for American readers. Kirkus calls it a “vibrant, thoughtful memoir reflecting contemporary Black cultural concerns.”

“It is very much an American story,” says Diakité, who was born in Lund, Sweden, in 1975 to a White mother from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a Black father from Harlem, New York. “I say that I’m of the United States, but I’m not from the United States. It gives me an insider’s outsider view of a story that has been told many 66

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times—of race and identity, and the roots and legacy of slavery, that are as visible today as they’ve ever been.”

Growing up biracial in a small Scandinavian country, Diakité “wished for white skin, a people, an origin, a collective narrative, and a history,” he writes in A Drop of Midnight (Amazon Crossing, March 1). Even after becoming one of Sweden’s most successful musicians, he still struggled to find a sense of belonging.

“Where was I supposed to start?” he writes. “As I created my identity, it became a patchwork quilt, a mosaic of irregular shards and pieces I meticulously tried to meld together into Jason Michael Bosak Diakité. I was never American, never Swedish, never White but never Black either. I was a no-man’s-land in the world.”

An invitation to travel to South Carolina in 2015 provided a potential point of departure.

The occasion was the 100th birthday party of Cousin Willie, a first cousin of his late grandfather Silas. He asked his father, Madubuko, to join him on the trip, to show him where their family came from.

“My father refused,” Diakité says. “And I kept nagging at him, and asking him, and he refused.

We had several discussions about this. In the end, after about two months, we found out that, first of all, we missed the birthday party. That came and went. Then Cousin Willie passed. He celebrated his 100th and then he moved on. And I just felt this deep sadness of the disappearing of a part of our history. Of our family history but also a firsthand account of Jim Crow South Carolina in the ’20s and ’30s. So that was really painful for me.”

He decided to make the trip without his father later that year. (A documentary filmmaker friend

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“I’d say A Drop of Midnight is a coming-of-identity story,” says Diakité, who plans to one day relocate to the United States. “It’s asking questions of belonging. And it’s not just my story, it’s my family’s story. It’s an unknotting of all these threads that make up who we are and where we come from and trying to find some answers in that.”

Megan Labrise is the editor at large. Listen to her inter­ view with Jason Diakité on the Fully Booked podcast.

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joined instead.) In the style of Paul Theroux, with an insider’s outsider view, he motored through the countryside with new friends, gaining insights about Southern culture, customs, labor, and landscape. Certain local vistas stirred deep feelings within him, a recognition so powerful it led him to reassess his father’s reluctance to return.

“One of the paradoxes that was revealed to me while writing this book is that I’m the son of migrants but I’m not a migrant myself,” Diakité says. “And there’s a divide in our experiences, my mom’s and my dad’s and my own, as to what ‘home’ is….Even though the places that my mom and dad come from physically exist, somehow what those places were to them and who they were in those places, Harlem and Scranton, have disappeared like tracks blown over in the sand.

“I know that there’s a pain in that,” he says.

“I’ve seen it in my father’s eyes. And when I came to South Carolina, I realized that I could afford to be a kind of tourist in our roots, in the places from which we come, in the poverty from which we come, because of the fact that I was born in Sweden, never having known it.

I was protected from the pain of seeing it and experiencing it again.”

Diakité continued his pilgrimage through Baltimore, Alabama, New Orleans, and New York City, where he’d briefly lived as a young man.

Complemented by additional conversations with his parents, the excavation of childhood memories, and the exploration of long-buried family correspondence, he emerged from his journey of self-discovery with a fresh perspective. He is the sum of his identities and then some—not “half” but “double,” he writes—multicultural, multitudinous, and expansive.

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A book that belongs in every football fan’s collection. friday night lives

and a “joint commitment to the common good.” While this may be a tough sell given current societal trends, Chancel is a firm believer in getting priorities straight, and he forcefully argues for the importance of “subordinating commercial objectives to the larger purpose of bringing about a far-reaching and durable ecological and social transition.”

A concise, useful work of public policy.

THE VIRGINIA DYNASTY Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation

Cheney, Lynne Viking (576 pp.) $36.00 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-101-98004-0

An edifying introduction to the lives of four presidents of the U.S.

On Christmas night in 1776, George Washington and his Continental Army scored a much-needed victory over Hessian mercenaries, a triumph captured by German American artist Emanuel Leutze in his 1851 painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. It depicts 12 men in Washington’s boat, including an 18-year-old lieutenant named James Monroe. This dramatic moment, suggests Cheney, foreshadowed the “Virginia Dynasty” (1789-1825), during which four of the first five presidents of the U.S. hailed from the Old Dominion. According to the author, the four men—Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Monroe—who composed the Dynasty were all “children of the Enlightenment” who valued individual rights as well as slaveholders who “sensed the coming of a great conflict” over that wicked institution and thus “feared for the Union.” Yet they were different. Washington was the prototypical leader, Jefferson and Madison the “life-long students” and wordsmiths, and Monroe the diligent type who lacked the “intellectual agility” of his two immediate predecessors in office. At times they clashed: Madison and Monroe ran against each other in a congressional election, and Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe opposed the policies of Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s first secretary of the treasury. Cheney capably shows that despite these differences and disputes, the quartet helped lead to “the creation of the American nation,” and general readers will learn plenty from the text. However, the author breaks no new ground for those already familiar with the history of her principals, and her account suffers from supposition (too many instances of the phrase “may have”; “Jefferson and Madison surely took up the topic” of their health when they roomed together; “Madison, an uncommonly serious student, might have earlier been acquainted with such ideas”) and odd repetition (“at age twentynine, less than three months after his arrest, [Benjamin Franklin Bache] died of yellow fever at age twenty-nine”).

A flawed yet informative history of the early years of the Republic.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIVES Photos From the Town, the Team, and After

Clark, Robert Photos by the author Univ. of Texas (192 pp.) $45.00 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-4773-2119-5

A return, 30 years later, to Permian High, the celebrated Texas football powerhouse highlighted in Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights.

Clark, then a contract photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, recounts that he “was hungry, with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and fighting every day for the chance to prove my worth on the staff of this great newspaper.” When he learned that Bissinger, then an investigative reporter at the paper, was planning to write a book about the place that Texas high school football fans called “the Mojo of Odessa,” he made a pitch to shoot photos for it. In this outstanding portfolio, 68

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have nothing more to learn.” They shouldn’t be afraid of fallow periods, which can serve “as preparatory to the fertile ones”; nor of panic, which the author has found energizing. As for asking for help, Cleese writes that he always shows his work to others, alert to their responses, but not necessarily adopting their advice for how to fix something: “you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.” While many of Cleese’s observations and suggestions may seem obvious, his candor is endearing.

An upbeat guide to the creative process.

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Clark gathers outtakes and reprints freshly scanned from 137 rolls of film that he hadn’t looked at for decades. “The players were frozen in my negatives and my mind as beautiful, strong athletes,” he writes, “but upon reexamination of the work I see macho warriors, as well as kids on the verge of adulthood.”

It’s true: The players are very young, and for all the posturing of the big-men-on-campus jocks, there’s often a vulnerability to them, particularly on those infrequent nights when Permian was losing. Clark has also photographed the players and principals of that winning season in the years since, and his captions sometimes tell stories that come not from the lives of the teenagers but instead from those of middle-aged men.

One young man had a remarkable 1,300-yard rushing season and was heavily recruited by major colleges only to injure his knee during what Clark calls “a meaningless scrimmage,” losing his ticket out of a poverty-stricken childhood. Other players married and divorced their Permian sweethearts, went to prison, grappled with addiction, and worked the tough jobs of the hinterlands. Still, as one Permian gridiron vet recalls proudly, “I always say our fifteen minutes of fame have lasted thirty years.” Hanif Abdurraqib provides the foreword.

A book that belongs in every football fan’s collection.

CREATIVITY A Short and Cheerful Guide Cleese, John Illus. by Rowson, Martin Crown (112 pp.) $14.00 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-0-385-34827-0

A versatile entertainer shares encouraging advice.

Actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer Cleese, co-founder of Monty Python and co-writer and star of the British TV comedy Fawlty Towers—among many other achievements—draws on his long, accomplished career to offer a slim compendium of random musings on creativity. He is convinced, he writes, that “you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative.” Contrasting “quick, purposeful thinking” with ruminating, based on Guy Glaxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Cleese admits he was surprised to discover the power of the unconscious in creative processes. The unconscious is “like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings, it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.” Although, like many people, he was taught to privilege analysis and critical thinking, he came to believe that creativity flourishes in “an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.” Creative people, he has found, “are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.” Among many pages of helpful hints, Cleese suggests that people are most likely to be creative doing something they know and care about, but they should avoid complacency. When they are sure they know what they are doing, “creativity plummets. This is because they think they |

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A worthy defense of a maligned generation, both passionate and policy-wonkish. ok boomer, let’s talk

SURROUNDED BY PSYCHOPATHS How To Protect Yourself From Being Manipulated and Exploited in Business (and in Life)

Erikson, Thomas Trans. by Bradbury, Rod St. Martin’s Essentials (272 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-250-76388-4

A guidebook for deflecting psychological manipulators.

In Surrounded by Idiots (2019), communication expert Erikson assessed (and color-coded) the most popular types of personalities. Here, the author uses a similar narrative structure and focuses on tactics to help readers avoid “play[ing] into the hands of an evil-minded psychopath.” As he shows, honing one’s recognition of these personalities is especially important because they exist in such a wide variety of settings, from ordinary, daily situations to corporate boardrooms and government offices. To some, the moniker “psychopath” may seem harsh, but Erikson is consistent in his warning that the term is fitting and that they are determined to exploit another’s weaknesses to exact harm. His text reintegrates the four-color personality model from his previous book, and Erikson educates readers on key psychopathic characteristics (superficiality, remorselessness, cunning, etc.), basic defense mechanisms against them, and how to recognize them (partners, co-workers, superiors) and diffuse deviant behavioral patterns. The author shows how to see through the deceptive fog of dangerously controlling behaviors and provides methods to rid one’s life of those whose intent is to “drag many people down with them.” Throughout, Erikson uses reality-based scenarios as examples, allowing readers to properly arm themselves against manipulative tactics by acknowledging the systematic series of common controlling techniques employed by psychopathic personalities—e.g., obfuscation or gaslighting. He also examines this conundrum through the perspective of the observer (the victim) to promote analysis of certain enabling behaviors that may make them attractive bait for hostile manipulators. Ultimately, the author settles on one key countermeasure on which to focus: self-awareness. While some readers may find that the narrative is alarmist, those fascinated by multifaceted behavior will heed Erikson’s warning about diabolically manipulative people and their presence in every corner of contemporary society.

Bluntly cautionary and applicable advice on the importance of vigilance.

OK BOOMER, LET’S TALK A Millennial Defense of Our Generation Filipovic, Jill One Signal/Atria (208 pp.) $17.00 paper | Aug. 11, 2020 978-1-982153-76-2

A sharp retort to critics of millennials and the clichés of laziness and narcissism that cling to them.

In her second book, journalist and lawyer Filipovic speaks directly to those who feel stung by the insult “OK, Boomer,” delivered by millennials and GenY-ers weary of smug elders’ lectures about gumption and hard work.

Younger generations do work hard, she explains; indeed, they’ve been forced to be always-on and take on multiple gigs in a time when the inequality gap has only widened in the past 50 years.

They earn less than boomers did at their age, carry much more student-loan debt, are more likely to delay marriage and children longer for economic reasons, have a harder time buying a home, and feel more socially isolated (“our health is trending in the wrong direction”). The author places much of the blame for this predicament at the feet of boomers, particularly the Reagan-era privatization schemes that economically hamstrung many younger people. In a section on the problem of mass incarceration, the author explores how people of color have been disproportionately affected by the situation. As Filipovic notes, even progressive boomers shouldn’t crow too much: Much of the hard work of the civil rights movement, she notes, was done by people born before the boomers. Ultimately, the book is less of a pile-on than a data dump: If there’s a statistic showing the disparities in wealth and achievement between boomers and millennials, she’s found it. That sometimes gives the prose a dutiful, white-paper feel, a problem alleviated by interviews with people who express their anxieties about work, parenting, climate change, and other topics. By the end, readers will understand that Filipovic seeks to strike a conciliatory tone, asking that boomers avoid tarring younger generations and advocate for the return of the kind of work and family policies that benefitted them.

A worthy defense of a maligned generation, both passionate and policy-wonkish.

A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING The Curious History of Alphabetical Order Flanders, Judith Basic (368 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-5416-7507-0

The centurieslong history of the evolution of the alphabet as we know it.

In her latest, social historian and novelist Flanders tackles the curious history 70

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poverty-stricken miners in neighboring communities who did the same. Deeper interrogation forced Franklin to realize that his situation was temporary while the coal miners’ situation was not. Ultimately, he was as equally deluded about the “relative ease of social mobility” as he was clueless about “the challenges of systemic poverty.” Later in the book, Franklin probes how the continued existence of color lines in America means that he will always see young Black men like Trayvon Martin as different from his sons and that this difference will always preclude the “shared vulnerabilities” that make empathy possible. The best he can do is teach his sons to “embrace the humility and compassion necessary to get to know boys like Trayvon Martin.”

Wise and humane, Franklin’s book offers a timely, socially relevant portrait of the struggles facing thoughtful citizens seeking to create a more just society for every American.

Intelligent reading well suited to this moment.

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of alphabetical order. The author creates a fitting structure for the book, proceeding from “A Is for Antiquity” to “Y Is for Y2K” (not every letter gets its own chapter). Flanders moves from a discussion of language in the classical world all the way to the 21st century, with hypertext and other breakthroughs in language acquisition and absorption. It might seem like a relatively dull subject, but the author’s prose is consistently engaging. “Writing is powerful because it transcends time,” she writes, “and because it creates an artificial memory, or store of knowledge, a memory that can be located physically, be it on clay tablets, on walls, on stone, on bronze, papyrus, parchment or paper.” Flanders introduces the Benedictine monks and their influential work in their monasteries, and after spending several chapters on the Middle Ages, she introduces the birth of printing as well as movable type and the first card catalogs. Flanders admits that while many history buffs think that alphabetization “followed hard on the heels of printing…the reality was less tidy, as reality usually is.” Fascinating character sketches further the story, among them vibrant portraits of Samuel Pepys, John Locke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but we should all hail librarians (“the institutional memory of their libraries”) as the unsung heroes of this history. Flanders often points out that many of the advances in the organizing principles of the alphabet have been the result of constant experimentation rather than lightning-strike breakthroughs. For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly curious, it’s accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way.

A rich cultural and linguistic history.

DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR American Essays Franklin, Joey Univ. of Nebraska (216 pp.) $19.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2020 978-1-4962-1210-8

A writer and English professor explores the “uncomfortable truths” of what it means to be a White, middleclass man in 21st-century America.

Speaking from the perspective of middle age, Franklin boldly confronts the “delusional thinking” he views as “killing us softly, one narcissistic fairy tale at a time.” He does so through 12 essays that muse on the many self-deceptions in which he and countless Americans have engaged. The author begins by examining his role as a father through the game of toy soldiers he sometimes plays with his three sons. The game appears to be a harmless bonding activity, but as Franklin suggests, it also speaks to the way “masculinity and mayhem” are inextricably intertwined in American culture.

The author observes that the same ready acceptance of surface truth has also characterized his view of class issues. While he was a poor graduate student in southeastern Ohio, he donated plasma for money and saw a connection between himself and the |

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An illuminating study of a complex, memorable historical figure. revolution or death

SYLLABUS The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything Germano, William & Nicholls, Kit Princeton Univ. (224 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-691-19220-8

An inspiring exhortation to make the standard college syllabus work harder

and better.

Germano and Nicholls, who teach at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, argue that the syllabus, “that almost invisible bureaucratic document,” must become something more than the purposes it normally serves: as something of a contract between teacher and student (if you do X and Y, you will get an A) and as a repository of university policies on such things as unexcused absences, plagiarism, and accommodation for special needs that the teacher almost certainly did not write. Both those functions are necessary, but the syllabus can be more useful. The authors encourage teachers to keep a “secret syllabus” that is a teaching diary, reflecting on successes and failures in presenting material and eliciting students’ responses. Moreover, the authors hit hard and repeatedly on the thought that the best teaching turns on notions of “student-centered pedagogy,” which relies on collaborative projects. “So when we craft a syllabus,” they write, “let’s choose to think actively about the plan we’re making for students to know together and how to know together.” Over the course of this short book, the subject subtly transforms from the Rousseauvian pedagogical contract to the act of teaching itself, with some useful pointers toward unwonted practices, such as the teacher’s holding discourse back and insisting that the students talk, as well as promoting the thought that if the course contains readings, students must be actively committed to that work. “Because we sometimes fail to fully imagine our students in that act of reading,” write the authors, “our syllabi sometimes fail to create the right conditions for students to read well.” Overburdened teachers will cheer the authors’ suggestion that they mark only categorical errors on written work—but perhaps will groan at the thought of reading “a fully corrected redraft.”

A thoughtful, provocative collection of well-tested teaching strategies and philosophies that work across the curriculum.

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REVOLUTION OR DEATH The Life of Eldridge Cleaver

Gifford, Justin Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review (368 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-61373-911-2

A searching biography of the Black Panther leader who “was a man of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions.”

As literary scholar and biographer Gifford clearly shows in this excellent account, which makes use of a trove of documents and interviews unavailable to other writers, the trajectory of Eldridge Cleaver’s life (1935-1998) is confounding. He graduated from minor infractions to violent crimes as a young man and spent a decade in prison, where he became a voracious reader who “created vast bibliographies with dozens of titles” and absorbed great bodies of knowledge. His prison memoir, Soul on Ice (1968), remains a classic, a defiant assertion of independence from behind bars. He was also adept at self-sabotage: abusive, narcissistic, capable of turning on allies without second thought. Cleaver achieved fame in the 1960s as a leader of the Black Panthers, advocating an increasingly militant Black nationalism. Fleeing federal charges after a shootout with police, he spent years in exile in places like North Korea, where he made speeches that “implored freedom fighters to kidnap ambassadors, blow up buildings and pipelines, and shoot anyone who stood in their way,” Cuba, and Algeria, where, as he often did, he alienated his protectors. He finally returned to the U.S. and disavowed his revolutionary past to become, as he wrote to a confidant, “a big Patriotic Shit,” a path that took increasingly unlikely turns: devotee of the Unification Church, momentary darling of the religious right (he “hoped to capitalize on America’s obsession with born-again Christianity”), designer of ill-fated codpiece-equipped trousers, anti-communist crusader, and, as his fortunes wound ever downward, tree trimmer.

Cleaver even advocated for “identification cards to control illegal immigration.” In the end, though, he was also addicted to crack cocaine and was diagnosed with prostate cancer, leading to his early death. One of the author’s early remarks is a fitting epitaph: “a troubled man who survived by any means necessary.”

An illuminating study of a complex, memorable historical figure.

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THE DOMESTIC REVOLUTION How the Introduction of Coal Into Victorian Homes Changed Everything

Goodman, Ruth Liveright/Norton (352 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-63149-763-6

METEORITE How Stones From Outer Space Made Our World

Gregory, Tim Basic (320 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-5416-4761-9

A thorough guide to rocks that fall from space.

Meteorites don’t exist in space, explains British geologist Gregory in his |

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British social historian Goodman, whose previous books brought Tudor and Victorian societies to life, now turns to the advent of coal use.

Beginning in the 1500s, the increasing use of coal transformed heating, cooking, architecture, road-building, and, not least, London’s air. Although coal was adopted early by lime burners (who produced mortar for building) and blacksmiths, the greatest use was in homes. “The early rise of coal,” writes the author, “is not a story about industry; it is a tale of domestic needs and comforts, of individual, private choices.” After a brisk overview of other forms of fuel—wood, peat, dung—Goodman offers a detailed, abundantly illustrated picture of the ways coal changed daily life for all classes throughout Great Britain, drawing from a prodigious number of sources, including property inventories, house expenditures, town records, housekeeping manuals, and recipe books. In addition, she recounts her own experiences in facsimile houses, cooking and heating with different kinds of fuel and confronting the “nonstop cleaning” of the filth resulting from burning coal. “Coal meant more smoke within the living area,” she notes, “and it meant smoke that stung the eyes and affected breathing.” Nevertheless, coal became increasingly popular because it burned with a “small and uniform” flame and was plentiful, leaving more land for agriculture. Within a few decades, houses had chimneys, kitchens had grates, and cooks had new recipes. The “cuisine of coal” included “boiled or steamed puddings both sweet and savoury, roast meats which are in fact baked meats served with ‘roast’ potatoes and all the trimmings, Victoria sponge cakes and hot buttered toast with jam.” For several centuries, coal served as the predominant fuel for homes and industry. While in continental Europe and the U.S., “domestic coal-burning barely lasted a century,” Londoners “cooked on coal for over 350 years.”

An engaging history of social transformation.

first book; that term is what scientists call the object once it hits the ground. In space, it’s a meteoroid. Streaking across the sky at night, it’s a meteor or shooting star. Readers who assume the author is describing an exotic phenomenon will quickly learn their error. Roughly 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material fall to Earth every year. Most is “cosmic dust” that rains down unseen, but about 60,000 “finds” have been discovered and moved to museums and private collections, and a small army of scientists and entrepreneurs is scouring the planet for more. Most originate from the innumerable small bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the result of collisions.

The fragments drift through space for between 100,000 and 30 million years before arriving on Earth. Sometimes a piece is large enough to produce a spectacular show and considerable damage. A fragment perhaps 20 km. in diameter that struck 66 million years ago decimated entire ecosystems and wiped out the dinosaurs. Most consist of stone or a mixture of stone and iron; a few are almost pure iron. So far, none have contained materials unknown to science, and they are sources of priceless knowledge. Many asteroid stones remain unchanged since whirling clouds of dust formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago—and it was from these stones that scientists determined the age of the Earth. As the molten Earth cooled, iron and other heavy metals mostly sunk to its core out of reach, but iron meteorites provide a sample. Along with long descriptions of hard science, Gregory also explores the inevitable pop-science questions. Stories of humans killed by a falling meteor are unconvincing. Evidence for animals killed is weak, but meteors have definitely struck houses and bruised their occupants.

A solid education that is so detailed it will appeal mostly to amateur astronomers and geologists.

WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD

Halpern, Jake Illus. by Sloan, Michael Metropolitan/Henry Holt (192 pp.) $21.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-250-30559-6 Immersion journalism in the form of a graphic narrative following a Syrian family on their immigration to America.

Originally published as a 22-part series in the New York Times that garnered a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, the story of the Aldabaan family—first in exile in Jordan and then in New Haven, Connecticut—holds together well as a full-length book.

Halpern and Sloan, who spent more than three years with the Aldabaans, movingly explore the family’s significant obstacles, paying special attention to teenage son Naji, whose desire for the ideal of the American dream was the strongest. While not minimizing the harshness of the repression that led them to journey to the U.S.—or the challenges they encountered after they arrived—the focus on the day-by-day adjustment of a typical teenager makes the narrative refreshingly tangible and free of political polemic. Still, the family arrived at New York’s

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An excellent work of impressive research on a dangerous world leader. blood and oil

JFK airport during extraordinarily political times: Nov. 8, 2016, the day that Donald Trump was elected. The plan had been for the entire extended family to move, but some had traveled while others awaited approval, a process that was hampered by Trump’s travel ban. The Aldabaans encountered the daunting odds that many immigrants face: find shelter and employment, become self-sustaining quickly, learn English, and adjust to a new culture and climate (Naji learned to shovel snow, which he had never seen). They also received anonymous death threats, and Naji wanted to buy a gun for protection. He asked himself, “Was this the great future you were talking about back in Jordan?” Yet with the assistance of selfless volunteers and a community of fellow immigrants, the Aldabaans persevered. The epilogue provides explanatory context and where-are-they-now accounts, and Sloan’s streamlined, uncluttered illustrations nicely complement the text, consistently emphasizing the humanity of each person.

An accessible, informative journey through complex issues during turbulent times.

BLOOD AND OIL Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power

Hope, Bradley & Scheck, Justin Hachette (368 pp.) $29.00 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-0-306-84666-3

A thorough delineation of the rapacious, ambitious new economic plan for Saudi Arabia by the heir apparent to the throne, Mohammed bin Salman.

Like Ben Hubbard in his recent scathing assessment, MBS, dogged Wall Street Journal reporters Hope and Scheck diligently chart the rapid rise—and recent faltering—of MBS (as he is known colloquially), though this book focuses less on biography and more on his determination to remake the Saudi economy. With the accession of his father to the Saudi Arabian throne in 2015, his seventh son was already expertly positioned at his father’s side to succeed and to carry out a sweeping set of reforms. King Salman, who was the governor of Riyadh for nearly 50 years (until 2011), has been known as the enforcer and disciplinarian in the corrupt, far-flung family. Beginning in 2015, MBS served as defense minister and moved swiftly over the ensuing four years to consolidate his power by squeezing out relatives. Among many other initiatives, he waged war on Yemen; set out to enrich his family in stock trading and other ways, which his father had been loath to do; instigated a staggering economic reform for the country called Vision 2030, which he has consistently touted internationally; courted Donald Trump, “treating him like a king” during his first foreign visit; shook down the richest men in his country by holding them hostage at the Ritz-Carlton until they shelled out; moved ahead with the public listing of the state oil company, Aramco; and, most brazenly, continued to ruthlessly silence his critics—e.g., 74

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the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. The last murder nearly derailed him, as the authors point out in their meticulous, highly relevant narrative, and while the international community has grown wary of this lethal upstart, it is too early to tell if MBS will fulfill his bloody-minded vision. The cast of characters and Al Saud family tree are especially helpful.

An excellent work of impressive research on a dangerous world leader.

AIR MAIL Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place

Houston, Pam & Irvine, Amy Illus. by Taylor, Claire Torrey House Press (176 pp.) $15.95 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-948814-38-6

From the wilderness of Colorado, two writers share their anxieties and hopes.

In late March, Houston and Irvine began writing to each other from their homes on opposite sides of the San Juan Mountains. What started as a contribution to Orion magazine’s online pandemic series continued, resulting in a collection, gracefully illustrated by Taylor, that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times. Both women are “intensely aware” that they write from a place of privilege: “two healthy white women in respectful, loving relationships who have the enormous privilege of doing meaningful work from home, with plenty of food socked away and some of the most beautiful and accessible wildlands all around.” Yet despite their good fortune, they reveal past wounds and present challenges.

For example, both had abusive fathers and mothers who said they regretted having them; both have scar tissue in their lungs from pneumonia and high altitudes, making them particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. Irvine has a daughter who suffers from epilepsy and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder. “What I know for sure,” she writes, “is that privilege doesn’t spare you from trauma, although it can lessen the blow, and the aftermath.”

Motherhood, womanhood, work, and nature recur as themes, as does frustration with Donald Trump and with neighbors who vehemently refuse to wear masks. “I watch this administration attack and destroy every single thing that brings me joy,” Houston writes, “air and water, sure, trees and animals, every slice of wildness we have left, but also the arts, education, diversity itself, Amtrak, solar power, the post office.” They wonder if post-pandemic life will be different. “Battling for a better world is the only occupation now,” notes Houston, “and it is women’s turn to lead the charge, maybe with a few good men in tow.”

An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.

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MONOPOLIES SUCK 7 Ways Big Corporations Rule Your Life and How To Take Back Control

TRIAL BY FIRE A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-year Search for Truth

Hubbard, Sally Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-982149-70-3

James, Scott Dunne/St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $29.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-250-13126-3

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Exposition of a tangled tragedy about which it took “years before anyone knew what really happened—and who

was truly to blame.”

It all happened in 90 seconds: a 2003 conflagration in a Rhode Island nightclub that killed 100 people and badly injured many more and that stands today, James notes, as “the nation’s deadliest rock concert.” Name a cause, though, and you enter Rashomon territory, with many contributing factors, ranging from a local culture in which “it was a badge of honor to figure out how to manipulate the system to one’s advantage” to the installation of improper building materials and perhaps willful violations of building codes. Two brothers owned The Station nightclub but were preparing to sell it when the band Great White played there. When the band’s road manager set off a pyrotechnic display, a foam-clad wall caught fire, and within that short span of time, nearly everyone who had been inside had died or been severely injured. The author’s account is minutely detailed, its technical discussions punctuated by human-interest-story portraits of the victims; it is often repetitive, sometimes to emphasize a point, sometimes seemingly carelessly. What emerges from the story is a blend of cascading effects and unintended consequences: The flammable foam had been installed in an effort to deal with neighbors’ complaints about noise, for instance, and the nightclub had no sprinkler system—though sprinklers weren’t required by code and the “deadly danger was never noticed” during multiple fire inspections. Considering James’ exhaustive examination of the facts and the back-and-forth argumentation regarding fault, it is surprising that the legal consequences were not more severe—the fire inspector, for example, received a raise from the town and then retired early on disability—or more broadly distributed.

An unsettling history of horrific events whose memory is still fresh.

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The title says it all: The major corporations are milking us dry, and the problem is getting worse as they flout “the rules that democracies create to protect their citizens.”

How do monopolies suck? Let Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, count the ways: They’re anti-democratic, they crush competition and hamper innovation, they’re destroying the planet, and so forth. “We blame the economy for our financial struggles,” she writes, “but the economy is doing just fine. The problem is that the ultrarich are hoarding its spoils.” The game is rigged from the start, though those spoils have been increasingly rolling into the vaults of the mega-wealthy ever since the Reagan years, when the interests of the middle class were jettisoned in favor of the predatory capitalism of today. Hubbard clearly shows how monopolies are established in numerous ways. For instance, in the matter of internet access, very few consumers have a choice between more than two providers, “meaning broadband providers can charge monopoly prices in most of America.” Where municipalities have provided broadband, as in the case of Chattanooga, lobbyists have pressed to quash this “unfair” competition legally. In another instance, four leading poultry producers conspired to fix prices, costing families an average of $330 extra per year—and that’s just poultry. Monopolistic corporations gather consumer data (see: Amazon, Google, Facebook), parasitize the economy (“Walmart employees make up the single largest group of food stamp recipients in many states”), and promote inequality and “inequities in our society, like structural racism and patriarchy.” Hubbard’s argument is convincing without being overbearing. Usefully, she also makes the case that monopolies have been broken before in American history (think Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting) and that there are anti-monopolistic tools already available to federal enforcers—if only they would use them.

A provocative call to restore economic competition by dismantling the ruling plutocracy.

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THE WOMEN I THINK ABOUT AT NIGHT Traveling the Paths of My Heroes Kankimäki, Mia Trans. by Robinson, Douglas Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-982129-19-4

A middle-aged writer sifts through history for other women whose lives matched her wanderlust.

“I’m forty-two. I have no husband, no children, no job,” Finnish author Kankimäki writes early in this hybrid of history, memoir, and feminist essay. She feels a sense of liberation in that status but also a pang of isolation that draws her to “night women” who blazed their own paths. First and most prominent among them is Karen Blixen, author of the 1937 classic Out of Africa. As part of her research into Blixen’s life, Kankimäki chronicles her journey in her footsteps in present-day Tanzania.

Both strip away the author’s sense of romanticism; the presentday country is malarial, poverty-stricken, and overrun with tourists while Blixen suffered from sexism along with the case of syphilis her husband gave her. Still, Blixen’s stubbornness is inspiring. Kankimäki also writes pocket biographies of globetrotters like Nellie Bly and Isabella Bird, who “seems like my doppelgänger: a fortyish, depressed spinster who suffers from headaches and insomnia, but who is fed up with the narrow confines in which her society has trapped her”; Alexandra DavidNeel, who infiltrated the sacred Buddhist city of Lhasa; painters like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, who navigated the masculine world of 16th-century Italian art; and avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who committed herself to a mental institution. Though the book has a clear organizing principle, its execution feels aimless. The livelier travelogues of Tanzania and Japan clang against the more studious essays on Bird and Bly, and the author’s explanations of her subjects’ difficulties make her concluding “night women’s advice” feel thin or cloying (“be buoyant as hell”). Kankimäki’s repeated despairing that she’s unsure where she’s going with the book emphasizes the sense of disorder. However, the author engagingly maps her frustrations against those of her heroes, the “illnesses, self-doubts, weak moments…ordinary human reality” that echo her own.

An enlightening if dense and patchwork study of the many hurdles women artists faced—and still face.

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THIS THING CALLED LIFE Prince’s Odyssey, On and Off the Record

Karlen, Neal St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $29.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-250-13524-7

A journalist acquaintance of Prince’s riffs on the musician’s Sphinx-like persona, heartbreaks, and basketball skills.

In this peculiar, intermittently intriguing blend of biography and memoir, Karlen makes clear that he didn’t know Prince (1958-2016) especially well. But, as he suggests, who did? They hung out in the same Minneapolis neighborhood as children, which helped Karlen gain Prince’s trust for three Rolling Stone features. Later, Karlen was recruited to script a movie, 3 Chains o’ Gold, that stitched together some of Prince’s early-1990s videos. More provocatively, the author notes that he wrote a document to accompany Prince’s as-yet-undiscovered will, which he claims is inexplicably buried somewhere at Paisley Park, Prince’s compound outside Minneapolis. Over the years, they’d intermittently meet and connect via letters and late-night phone calls, but that’s not much to build a book around—especially since Karlen shares no details about the alleged will’s contents. Still, the author did a little reporting to supplement his files, connecting with Prince’s high school music teacher and Purple Rain–era band mates like André Cymone. Karlen also chronicles Prince’s deep-seated resentment of his high school basketball coach, who refused to play the infamously short budding musician despite his outstanding athletic talent. Prince could be peculiar and protective about his family history, concealing his father’s abuse and the death of his infant son from a genetic disorder while allowing slanderous rumors about his mother to perpetuate. That along with his numerous other idiosyncrasies, Karlen argues, were part of Prince’s “kayfabe,” a professional wrestling term for selling the sport’s fakeness as real. The author is a lyrical writer on these points, but ultimately, the narrative is an exercise in armchair psychology that has too many historical gaps to qualify as biography, and the author is too distant from his subject to deliver an intimate portrait.

An earnest vamp on Prince’s life that leaves its subject no less mysterious.

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SAVING STALIN Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Cost of Allied Victory in Europe

DISTRACTED Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It

Kelly, John Hachette (384 pp.) $28.49 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-306-90277-2

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A lucid discussion of attention and how to persuade students to pay it.

A professor of English and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, Lang is addressing teachers, but he delivers advice with universal applications. Though modern technology usually receives the blame for restless, distracted students, it’s a problem as old as history. Socrates considered writing a malignant invention, a crutch that destroyed the ability to remember. “The telegraph, the radio, the television, the computer… brought with them critics who argued that they were destroying our attention spans,” writes the author, “turning us into distractible creatures who could no longer focus on our work, our prayers, our study, or one another.” Lang quickly shoots down the idea that modern students can effectively multitask. They can’t, except when one task is trivial, such as folding clothes while watching TV. Studies show that people who believe they are multitasking are actually switching back and forth between two tasks. You can’t text and drive; you either text or drive. Even when not life-threatening, the result is inefficient.

Research has demonstrated that it leads to lower grades, including for students sitting near the multitasker. No Luddite, Lang advises against banning devices in favor of limiting their role, and he devotes an appendix to his personal “device policy.” He urges teachers to “make a fundamental shift in our thinking: away from preventing distraction and toward cultivating attention.”

Humans are relentlessly curious, so a teacher who follows this approach has a decent chance of pulling student attention away from Instagram. We are built to pay attention to others, and a successful classroom is a community. The author shares many educational thinkers’ low opinion of grading, but he insists on some form of assessment, an irresistible strategy that focuses a student’s attention.

Although aimed at educators, the book offers good lessons in psychology for the average reader.

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1 september 2020

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Historical account of the relations between the three Allied leaders during World War II. Kelly begins on June 22, 1941. Having dismissed repeated warnings from Britain, his spies, and Red Army units along the border, Stalin remained stubbornly loyal to his friendship treaty with Hitler, so that day’s massive German invasion caught the Soviet Union unprepared. After the opening, the author alternates between the fighting and Stalin’s subjects as they tried to get along and manage the various campaigns. Although certainly as evil as Hitler, Stalin may have been less of a megalomaniac.

Both micromanaged their armies with terrible consequences, but a year of disaster persuaded Stalin to step back; thereafter, he often took his generals’ advice. Although it was Stalin’s own fault, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the violence and casualties, and he never let Churchill and Roosevelt forget it. Many Russian historians have argued that the Allies deliberately held back their armies, only jumping in once the Wehrmacht was in full retreat in 1944. The conventional portrait of Roosevelt and Churchill as a harmonious team was only accurate early in the war. By 1943, with America the dominant partner and exasperated at Churchill’s reluctance to support a cross-channel invasion, Roosevelt began calling the shots. A gifted politician, he believed he could deal with Stalin better than the conservative Churchill, and historians give him low marks for the results. In his defense, Kelly points out that ruthlessness is a poor substitute for intellect. With the Red Army on the spot, Stalin had no trouble installing puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe. His goal—protection from a resurgent Germany— proved unnecessary, and the satellites produced only trouble and expense for his already dysfunctional economy. The author relies mostly on secondary sources, but he chooses them well.

As a result, this is high-quality history that will disturb only readers who learn about WWII from the History Channel.

A well-rendered popular history describing war and great men.

Lang, James M. Basic (304 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-5416-9980-9

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A lovely evocation of some “spectral and unreal” elements of the British landscape. ghostways

GHOSTWAYS Two Journeys in Unquiet Places

Macfarlane, Robert & Donwood, Stanley & Richards, Dan Norton (176 pp.) $15.95 paper | Nov. 24, 2020 978-1-324-01582-6

Travels in spectral places whose names are barely on the map of England—and so much the better.

Writing with Donwood and Richards, Macfarlane, perhaps the foremost British nature writer at work today, extends his fascination with little-known geographies—see his last book, the outstanding Underland (2019)—by visiting two beyondthe-ken English districts. The first is the “untrue island” of Orford Ness off East Anglia, both wild and bearing a heavy human footprint. Half a century ago, it was used by the government for nuclear tests; now, “brown hares big as deer lope across expanses of shingle cratered by explosions, and the wind sings in the wires of abandoned perimeter fences.” Macfarlane walks the sandy, grassy landscape, delivering a portrait that blends poetry, prose poem, dialogue, and essay, peppered with sightings of the ghostly and uncanny. As is his wont, the author sprinkles long-forgotten landscape terms throughout his pages (“drongs, sarns, snickets, bostles”). One of them is the subject of the second part of the book, the “holloway”—the hollow way, an ancient avenue of humans and animals worn in the soft rock of Exeter, some thousands of years old. “A sunken path, a deep & shady lane,” writes Macfarlane. “A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll & rain-run have harrowed into the land,” kin to a hedgerow but wilder still, since few holloways are used by modern travelers: “They have thrown up their own defences and disguises: nettles & briars guard their entrances, trees to either side bend over them & lace their topmost branches to form a tunnel or roof.” The writing is idiosyncratic and elegant, the story inviting enough that, for all its eldritch elements, one might wish to wake up covered in dew and join Macfarlane, Richards, and Donwood (perhaps best known for his Radiohead album covers) in a meal of damson gin and teabread—and maybe see a few ghosts along the way.

A lovely evocation of some “spectral and unreal” elements of the British landscape.

BLACK DIAMOND QUEENS African American Women and Rock and Roll Mahon, Maureen Duke Univ. (392 pp.) $30.95 paper | Oct. 30, 2020 978-1-4780-1122-4

Snapshots of some of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest Black female performers, underappreciated in rock’s broader history.

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NYU music professor Mahon argues convincingly that Black women have been pivotal to rock music’s evolution.

Think of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” repurposed by Elvis Presley, or Tina Turner’s skill at bridging R&B, rock, and pop. But their influence, notes the author, has been stifled in a variety of complicated ways. They’ve often been hired as background singers to lend “authenticity” to White rock performers yet exiled from the genre when they took center stage. Patti LaBelle, for instance, came up all but anonymously in a 1960s girl group and as part of the ’70s trio Labelle, considered outliers or a one-hit disco act on the basis of their song “Lady Marmalade.” Mahon argues that women rockers had to cultivate “betwixt and between” genres to find a footing, even while that strategy made success fleeting for the likes of Labelle, LaVern Baker, and the Shirelles—a shame because artists like Claudia Lennear and Betty Davis made indelible, path-breaking albums.

Allowing these women to be more than window dressing or provide more than a dash of vocal “blackness” was a perceived threat. The band Humble Pie got push back when it made its Black female backing singers equal partners. In one excellent chapter, Mahon explores the stereotypes exemplified by the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” through three women connected to Mick Jagger. Mahon’s book lacks the sweep of a fully fleshed history, effectively ending the story with Turner, though she makes mention of recent artists like Santigold and Alabama Shakes. But if the narrative arc is brief and the prose occasionally burdened by academic stiffness, Mahon has done plenty to expose how Black women rockers have been marginalized by musicians, audiences, historians, and critics.

A well-researched, sociologically savvy effort to expand the rock canon.

THE HUMAN COSMOS Civilization and the Stars

Marchant, Jo Dutton (352 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-0-593-18301-4

A tour of the heavens that centers not so much on outer space as what it does to our inner beings.

For generations, prehistorians have considered the animals painted in ocher and charcoal on the ceilings of caves such as Lascaux to be ritual objects of a kind. But what if they’re really star charts?

One scholar calculated the ephemera of 20,000 years ago and then mapped it onto a work of rock art called Bull No. 18. As science journalist Marchant writes, “he found that when the bull was created, the Pleiades were slightly higher above the bull’s back and that Aldebaran (the bull’s eye) was more clearly framed by the Hyades—an even closer match to the painting than they are today.” There’s nothing overly New Age–y about the thought that “Lascaux Cave is as much about cosmology as it is about biology.” Chronicling the history of the Hill of Tara (present-day Ireland), built long before the Great Pyramids,

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Marchant, who has a doctorate in genetics and medical microbiology, notes the work of a scientist who tried to work out how the ancient monument was oriented toward the sky.

Readers will share his sense of wonder at a direct landing of sunlight “right in the tomb’s heart…until the chamber was so bright he could walk around without a lamp, and see the roof twenty feet above.” It’s a short hop from archaeoastronomy to current teleological notions of the “meaning” of the universe.

As Marchant writes, “science is based on the idea of studying a purely physical, material reality. Subjective experience is stripped out so we can seek what’s really out there rather than in our imaginations. That has led inexorably to a worldview in which the physical universe is all that exists.” But is there more? That chapter has yet to be written.

Readers interested in the cognitive aspects of cosmology will enjoy Marchant’s explorations.

Markoe, Merrill Illus. by the author Algonquin (288 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-61620-903-2

An Emmy-winning comedy writer’s graphic memoir about her odyssey into diaries she kept as a young girl growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.

When Markoe began looking through her girlhood journals, she writes, “I was amazed at how much it felt like I was reading about a stranger.” She discovered long-forgotten—and sometimes painfully embarrassing—entries detailing the minutiae of her daily life, such as a weight-loss recommendation from her doctor that sent her “spiraling into a lifetime of obsessive dieting.” More significantly, she encountered the outlines of her developing self: a girl “steeped in pop culture” who considered the TV her “best friend” and routinely fought her one-time “relentless adversary,” her brother. With a mixture of mortification and amusement, Markoe observes how her younger self faithfully recorded such events such as the Cuban missile crisis alongside those involving a string of unrequited loves that began in the fourth grade. During one especially hilarious romantic mishap, Markoe interpreted a Nazi salute a crush gave her as a sign of his undying affection. “On the cusp of 15,” she left Florida for San Francisco with her family. As the new girl, she quickly developed survival strategies that “put me at war with my parents.” Teenage angst eventually drove her to seek refuge in art, her diary, and humor, which she used to combat tensions with her parents that she did not escape until she went to the University of California at Berkeley. Markoe’s bold, sometimes absurdist drawings and the often chiding conversations she imagines between her mature and adolescent selves enhance the comedy at the heart of this thought-provoking story about what happens when the wisdom of age confronts the follies and foibles of youth. “I wish I could say I became smarter about |

HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON John Lewis and the Power of Hope Meacham, Jon Random House (368 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 25, 2020 978-1-984855-02-2

The story of the late congressman and activist’s massive contributions to the civil rights movement.

Pulitzer Prize winner Meacham, a Time contributing editor and professor at Vanderbilt, has written about many significant figures in American history. In this timely biography, the author narrates the incredible life of John Lewis (1940-2020), one of the civil rights movement’s most prominent leaders. Meacham concisely chronicles his subject’s highs and lows and, most importantly, his personal sacrifices—not least of them being severely beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965 while leading a protest march. Given his remarkable accomplishments, Lewis is that rare historical figure who deserves his lionization.

Refreshingly, Meacham offers a distinctly human portrait of a man who struggled with anxieties, fears, and occasionally despair, a leader who dug deep to find the courage to keep going in the face of nearly insurmountable cultural resistance. From his humble beginnings to his recent death, the author clearly demonstrates Lewis’ bravery and survivor’s instinct, whether he was penetrating segregated stores in Nashville in 1960, organizing the Freedom Riders a year later, or becoming the go-to young organizer who had the ear of everyone from John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King Jr. Throughout the book, Meacham not only shows Lewis’ obvious talent as an organizer and an instigator of what he called “good trouble”; what also emerges is the story of a preacher, the calling that a young Lewis yearned for and never really gave up. As always, the author is a fluid writer, and the book benefits from his inclusion of commentary from such contemporaries as Harry Belafonte. An added bonus is a heartfelt epilogue by Lewis himself. “The civil rights movement,” he writes, “brought about a nonviolent revolution—a revolution in values, a rev­olution in ideas. The soul force of this movement enabled America to find its moral compass.”

An elegant, moving portrait of a giant of post-1950 American history.

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WE SAW SCENERY The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe

handling love relationships,” she writes near the end, “but a lifetime consumption of books and movies had taught me some very bad ideas about how it was all supposed to work.”

A memoir that is both relatable and subversive.

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A well-documented and enlightened portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt for our times. eleanor

ELEANOR A Life

VOICES OF A MASSACRE Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988

Michaelis, David Simon & Schuster (704 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-4391-9201-6

A comprehensive exploration of one of the most influential women of the last century.

The accomplishments of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) were widespread and substantial, and her trailblazing actions in support of social justice and global peace resonate powerfully in our current moment. Her remarkable life has been extensively documented in a host of acclaimed biographies, including Blanche Wiesen Cook’s excellent three-volume life. Eleanor was also a highly prolific writer in her own right; through memoirs, essays, and letters, she continuously documented experiences and advancing ideas. In the most expansive one-volume portrait to date, Michaelis offers a fresh perspective on some well-worn territory—e.g., Eleanor’s unconventional marriage to Franklin and her progressively charged relationships with men and women, including her intimacy with newspaper reporter Lorena Hickok.

The author paints a compelling portrait of Eleanor’s life as an evolving journey of transformation, lingering on the significant episodes to shed nuance on her circumstances and the players involved. Eleanor’s privileged yet dysfunctional childhood was marked by the erratic behavior and early deaths of her flighty, alcoholic father and socially absorbed mother, and she was left to shuttle among equally neglectful relatives. During her young adulthood, her instinctual need to be useful and do good work attracted the attention of notable mentors, each serving to boost her confidence and fine-tune her political and social convictions, shaping her expanding consciousness. As in his acclaimed biography of Charles Schulz, Michaelis displays his nimble storytelling skills, smoothly tracking Eleanor’s ascension from wife and mother to her powerfully influential and controversial role as first lady and continued leadership and activist efforts beyond. Throughout, the author lucidly illuminates the essence of her thinking and objectives. “As Eleanor’s activism evolved,” writes Michaelis, “she did not see herself reaching to solve social problems so much as engaging with individuals to unravel discontinuities between the old order and modernity.”

A well-documented and enlightened portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt for our times.

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Ed. by Mohajer, Nasser Oneworld Publications (480 pp.) $40.00 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-78607-777-6 Powerfully moving testimonies from prisoners who survived the brutal crackdowns in Tehran in 1988 by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

After eight years of destructive war with Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran finally submitted to the cease-fire codified by a U.N. Security Council resolution in 1988. A few days later, Khomeini appeared on TV and, as he put it, drank this “chalice of poison.” Indeed, it was a bitter blow to the IRI, which already had prisons full of dissenters from 1981 onward; some had survived previous waves of executions. At the border with Iraq, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran tried to rise up and were brutally suppressed; many were captured and sent to Evin and Gohardasht prisons. Thus the vengeance against these so-called Monafeqin, or hypocrites, began, carried out by paramilitary gangs in the streets and elsewhere. Most prisoners were interrogated multiple times, and any Mojahedin-branded prisoner who would not “repent,” even those who had served their original sentences, were marked for execution. For several weeks in July and August, the victims were terrorized with blindfolds, forced confessions, torture, and often death (4,500 to 5,000 victims). At the time, little information about the atrocities was available—only what prisoners could glean from each other and the guards. According to Mohajer, who offers a solid introduction, the same scenario played out in other prisons across Iran. The massacre eliminated a large population of Mojahedin and successfully destroyed the Iranian leftist movement for decades to come. Those who remained were deeply scarred, but some escaped. This heartbreaking but necessary text also includes interviews with mothers of the disappeared, a group called the Movement of the Mothers of Khavaran, “who may be likened to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo of Argentina.”

The book also features a foreword by Angela Davis, a timeline, and an immensely helpful 17-page glossary.

A wrenching, important work of historical scholarship demanding justice for the victims.

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THE HARDEST PLACE The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley

NO REFUGE Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis

Parekh, Sarena Oxford Univ. (280 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 1, 2020 978-0-19-750799-5

Morgan, Wesley Random House (672 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-8129-9506-0

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A philosophy professor warns that the international system for aiding refugees is broken, and Western democracies have an ethical obligation to help fix it.

In a quietly potent response to not-in-my-backyarders, Parekh, who directs the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program at Northeastern University, sounds an alarm about a global humanitarian crisis. Amid rising anti-immigrant sentiments worldwide, only 2% of refugees are able to settle in a new country or voluntarily return home; the rest often remain for years in squalid, dangerous refugee camps or urban slums.

During the Cold War, both capitalist and communist nations could score political points by taking in refugees from other systems of government—witness the American embrace of victims of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Vietnam War in 1975—but the appeal of that tactic has faded, and “resettlement countries are taking in relatively few refugees.” Parekh shows the catastrophic results through statistics, personal stories of refugees, and clear explanations of philosophical lenses through which readers might view the crisis—among them Kantian, utilitarian, and religious frameworks, such as the good Samaritan principle or other traditions of helping strangers in Abrahamic faiths. The author also refutes myths that cast refugees as insufficiently vetted or “terrorists in disguise.” In the U.S., for example, the 2- to 5-year screening process involves eight federal agencies and up to nine interviews that have included questions such as, “Can you remember how many stars were on the jacket of the military officer that raped you?” Parekh ends with worthy ideas on how Western democracies might meet their moral responsibility to ease the nightmare that, partly through flawed policies, they helped to create. If the West fails to act, she suggests, its task will grow more complex with a new group of asylum-seekers on the horizon—the so-called climate refugees fleeing perils such as rising seas and food scarcity.

The moral case for helping the world’s refugees, solidly grounded in facts.

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A searching history of the U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida in a remote district of Afghanistan.

The Pech Valley, writes journalist Morgan in his impressive debut, is a mountainous region that drew the attention of the U.S. military shortly after 9/11, with soldiers “on the trail of Osama bin Laden.” Establishing a series of forward operating bases, American troops attempted to bring something like order to the region. However, with villages isolated by steep mountains and almost no passable roads, movement was difficult—it could take an entire day for a small unit to move a couple of miles, even without opposition. Insurgents who learned their tactics from the fight against the Soviet army in the 1980s now turned against the U.S. forces, using improvised explosive devices and well-coordinated ambushes. The locals who seemed to be cooperative to U.S. soldiers were clearly working with the insurgents—their family members and neighbors—when the Americans inevitably went away. While large assaults into the narrow side valleys and high mountain clearings could lead to significant enemy casualties, they too often led to unacceptable civilian deaths, further alienating the population. Furthermore, as Morgan vividly shows, the enemy proved skillful in overcoming the Americans’ apparent technological superiority, downing helicopters and overrunning small bases on several occasions. Ultimately, the U.S. turned over its outposts to the Afghan military, providing a few advisers who rarely accompanied the locals into combat.

By 2015, the U.S. was conducting operations with drones and the occasional crewed aircraft. The author, who spent a good deal of time in the region, interviewed many of the soldiers who served in the Pech as well as a number of Afghan locals.

The result is a sobering look at how the same mistakes were repeated by subsequent deployments, with predictable results.

Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the war in Afghanistan.

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An entertaining diversion for fans until the curtains rise again. singular sensation

THE LONE STAR SPEAKS Untold Texas Stories About the JFK Assassination

Peterson, Sara & Zachry, K.W. Bancroft Press (448 pp.) $32.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-61088-192-0

Another entry in the who-killed-JFK genre.

When it comes to the Kennedy assassination, you can take one of two paths: a single shooter theory or, to complicate the matter, a cabal.

Peterson and Zachry, who both work at Midland College in Texas, take the second course, in the manner of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, condemning the “politicians and bureaucrats who helped” in the assassination. “Even if they had nothing to do with his assassination, they altered, ignored, and hid evidence so that one man was assigned all the blame for the death of a president.” The authors then recount Kennedy’s alleged attempted rape of a friend and the idea that his reputation as a war hero was overblown. By their account, JFK and his father also had a knack for making powerful political enemies. So, naturally, lots of people would want the young president dead, including Lyndon Johnson, who was bound up with all sorts of bad actors—e.g., Billie Sol Estes and H.L. Hunt—and who, Estes allegedly was prepared to testify, left a long trail of bodies behind him. Said Johnson to Estes just before that fateful hour in Dallas, “The next time you see me, I’ll be on Air Force 1,” according to an unnamed intermediary. Ask Johnson, and he’d tell you that it was the Mafia—both the Italian American and the Dixie flavors. Ask Dixie Mafia hit man George McGann, and he’d tell you that “he strongly suspected that the FBI, the CIA, and even the Dallas police chief were involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy.” And Lee Harvey Oswald? It depends on which one you’re talking about—the “patsy” or the guy who was Jack Ruby’s lover, Ruby being bound up with the CIA and the Mafia alike. Whodunit? Take your pick, as the authors move from one stab to the next, topped off with their closing assertion that JFK, their insinuations notwithstanding, “changed the future for the better!”

A scattershot effort that may interest JFK conspiracy theorists.

THE NIGHT IN GETHSEMANE On Solitude and Betrayal

Recalcati, Massimo Trans. by Goldstein, Ann Europa Compass (80 pp.) $16.00 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-60945-622-1

A psychoanalyst puts Jesus and his apostles on the couch regarding the pivotal moment between the Last Supper and the crucifixion.

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Recalcati is a prominent Italian psychotherapist; his translator, Goldstein, is a prominent literary translator, most notably of Elena Ferrante’s novels. So in terms of both the contents and provenance, this brief but insightful book evokes the religious-literary secular writings of Marilynne Robinson or Geraldine Brooks. Recalcati argues that the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed by both Judas and Peter, is central to a story not just about the Messiah, but the nature of man: “his frailty, his lack, his torments.” Because the setting provides a backdrop to Jesus’ anticipated death, it is a window into suffering, and because the ways Judas and Peter betrayed him are divergent, the Gethsemane story reveals the different ways mankind is consumed by fear. Recalcati notes that Judas’ betrayal was stoked, ironically enough, by a sense of righteousness; he thought it was wasteful for Jesus to allow himself to be anointed with costly oil in Bethany. Judas’ decision to reveal Jesus to the Romans was motivated not solely by money, but the woundedness of “a man in love with his teacher” who resented that his love was not returned. Peter’s three betrayals, by contrast, reveal the fragility of that love, how “we are not always consistent with our desire.” As the author writes, God’s silence in this particular moment underscores the anxiety and humility of the human condition, leaving all three of the scene’s central players—and by extension, humanity—forced to reckon with an inherent isolation and uncertainty. Neither homily nor academic study but inspired by both, the narrative thoughtfully explores how we tangle with faith, fear, and suffering.

An elegant, provocative meditation on one of the Gospels’ most emotionally complex moments.

SINGULAR SENSATION The Triumph of Broadway

Riedel, Michael Avid Reader Press (304 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-5011-6663-1

Broadway stages a comeback.

As the 1990s began, the Broadway neighborhood hit the skids. Off to see London-imported hits such as The Phan­ tom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, and Cats, New York theatergoers sidestepped crack vials and prostitutes.

However, Broadway was ripe for a resurrection, which longtime New York Post theater columnist Riedel follows in his brisk, insightful, and deliciously detailed take on the decade. For sure, the author serves up great dish: For example, appearing in a hit revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, Elaine Stritch, clad only in bra and panties, darts into the crowded theater lobby just before curtain time to check on her house seats. But Riedel is after more than tales of outrageous antics. He chronicles the plays and musicals that brought great American theater back to a spiffed-up Times Square. A poignant and suspenseful chapter follows Jonathan Larson, waiting tables in a lower Manhattan diner while determined to stage a modern-day La Bohème as transported to New York’s Lower East Side and called Rent. The

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brilliant Larson died at 35 from a rare illness, just as his musical became a megahit that garnered the Pulitzer Prize. At the same time, Riedel chronicles an infamous rivalry on 42nd Street.

Fresh from his failure as head of Cineplex Odeon, the brutally aggressive Garth Drabinsky restored a derelict theater to house the musical Ragtime. Across the street, Disney returned to grandeur the New Amsterdam, eventually to house The Lion King. Riedel’s account of this show’s artists at work, particularly director Julie Taymor, is fascinating. Later, playwright Tony Kushner’s Angels in America became a landmark chronicle of the AIDS epidemic. Finally, Mel Brooks caps this vivid chronicle with his musical The Producers. Riedel, keenly knowledgeable of the business of show, rounds out his history covering the deals— and swindles—brought off by a colorful cast of producers.

An entertaining diversion for fans until the curtains rise again.

Samway, Patrick Univ. of Notre Dame (298 pp.) $45.00 | Oct. 31, 2020 978-0-268-10841-0

An important friendship helped to sustain a poet’s work.

Samway, a priest and literary scholar whose previous books focused on Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton, offers an intimate portrait of the relationship between editor Robert Giroux (1914-2008), who was a close friend of Samway’s, and poet John Berryman (1914-1972), whose work Giroux edited, promoted, and encouraged. The two met at Columbia University in 1932, where both were students of the famed professor and poet Mark Van Doren. Samway recounts each man’s career moves: Giroux, first at CBS, then as junior editor at Harcourt, and finally editor at Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, where he became chair; Berryman, studying at Cambridge, then taking shortterm teaching stints at various colleges, delivering lectures, and achieving the fame that resulted in accolades, grants, and awards. Their personalities could not have been more different. Berryman described himself as “a disagreeable compound of arrogance, selfishness and impatience, scarcely relieved by some dashes of courtesy and honesty and a certain amount of industry.” Giroux was patient, steady, and, as his letters to Berryman attest, kind. Berryman was a womanizer and alcoholic, “plagued by incandescent outbursts and perilous bouts of depression,” which led to repeated hospitalizations and treatment with a hefty “cocktail of drugs.” He married three times, subjecting each wife to what one called the “nightmare” of living with him. Giroux, though briefly married, lived quietly with a man he had known since they were teenagers. Berryman was tormented by his father’s death, ruled an apparent suicide. “I feel I am a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn,” he wrote shortly before he jumped from a bridge at the |

NEVER ALONE Prison, Politics, and My People

Sharansky, Natan & Troy, Gil PublicAffairs (480 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-5417-4242-0

The noted Soviet dissident and Israeli activist recounts a long history of “living life backward.”

Trained as a physicist, Sharansky (b.

1948), who co-authored this memoir with historian Troy, spent nine years in Soviet prisons for supposed anti-Soviet crimes.

The rest of the time he was either alone—“I always found solitary comfortable, if I could read or write there, if it was warm, and if there was food to eat”—or with a bunkmate or two whom he suspected of being KGB informants. Meeting with Nelson Mandela long afterward, the two political prisoners compared notes: Mandela’s sentence was three times longer, but at least he had visitors. Finally, Sharansky was released and immigrated to Israel, where he immediately began agitating for the acceptance of 400,000 of his fellow Soviet Jews. They arrived, a flood of outstanding scientists, artists, and scholars who had followed the guideline that in order to survive they had to excel, and “almost overnight, the number of Israel’s doctors, engineers, musicians, and chess players doubled.” Sharansky allied for a time with Benjamin Netanyahu, opposing the Oslo Accords and other treaties with Palestine on the grounds that they elevated “Yasser Arafat’s terrorist dictatorship on the Palestinians, instead of cultivating the more grassroots democratic leadership that was sprouting in the 1990s.” For this, he was pegged a rightist, although as the years passed, he became a sort-of-liberal critic of Netanyahu and his party—and he doesn’t have much good to say about Donald Trump, either. Charmingly, he describes his backward approach to life events: He celebrated his bar mitzvah at 65, which allowed him to “appreciate my Torah portion’s relevance and explain it to everyone without having my rabbi write my speech for me.” Since he was imprisoned immediately after his wedding and didn’t see his wife for years, he has since worked to make his marriage a happily-ever-after story.

Admirers of Sharansky will appreciate this insider’s account of Israeli politics and his independent-minded life.

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JOHN BERRYMAN AND ROBERT GIROUX A Publishing Friendship

age of 57. His anguished life dominates Samway’s cleareyed literary history, populated by a large cast of characters including Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, and T.S. Eliot.

A perceptive, empathetic look at a confluence of artistic lives.

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SKY SONGS Meditations on Loving a Broken World

I MARCHED WITH PATTON A Firsthand Account of World War II Alongside One of the U.S. Army’s Greatest Generals

Sinor, Jennifer Univ. of Nebraska (204 pp.) $19.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2020 978-1-4962-2264-0

An English professor and nonfiction writer reflects on the inseparability of beauty and brokenness in human life.

Between 1922 and 1931, photographer Alfred Stieglitz shot hundreds of cloud images that Sinor sees as “sky songs” “meant to pull the viewer into a vortex of light, merging the immediate and the transcendent.” In this book, the author follows Stieglitz’s artistic lead by taking “snapshots” of different parts of her life and probing them for meaning. In “Headwaters,” she grapples with an extraordinary synchronicity of events: On the day a beloved uncle died on an Alaskan river boat trip, her first son was conceived. Life and death, Sinor writes, joined in a way that was at once tragic and miraculous. In another essay, the author muses on the parallels between two unrelated but intertwined episodes. At Utah State, where she teaches creative writing, painful stories by a closeted gay student and a lesbian who “prayed daily to God to make her straight” made her uncomfortably aware of “the unchallenged homophobia” espoused by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “theocracy” in which she lived.

When LDS missionaries visited her home in an attempt to convert her, Sinor openly expressed disgust for their bigotry only to realize later that her anger came from the same place as the homophobia she excoriates. The author then explores her evolving relationship to religion. Once a fervent believer in a God, she eventually became an atheist. But marriage to a poet who believed that clouds were “proof enough…of the Divine” and a deepening of her practice of yoga during a threemonth visit to India moved her away from “the sterile shore of atheism” and toward belief in “the existence of a force beyond what [she could] name.” Sinor’s skills in interweaving different stories within the essays and finding the hidden connections between them are evident throughout. Together, they work to create a tapestry that is both searching and insightful.

A lyrically profound collection.

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Sisson, Frank with Wise, Robert L. Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-06-301947-8

A 94-year-old World War II veteran tells his story.

Raised in Depression-era rural Oklahoma, Sisson enlisted in 1943 at age 18, sailed to Europe in 1944, served through the final, freezing winter, and fought into Germany. His unit finished the war in Munich, where he witnessed the horrors of the nearby concentration camp at Dachau: “Death hung in the air like a maleficent fog. We stopped, and the men got out. We could see barracks and buildings. Barbed wire lined the perimeters. On the far side of the camp stood a blackened brick chimney. The crematorium, I realized with horror.” After Germany’s surrender, the Army transferred him to the military police, where he served in the occupation of Berlin for nearly a year, which included a long, apparently platonic relationship with his female interpreter before returning home to enjoy a long and prosperous life. This is not the first as-toldto memoir from an elderly veteran by the prolific Wise. Like 82 Days on Okinawa, which Wise wrote with veteran Art Shaw, he produces an unashamedly novelistic narrative with plenty of action and long stretches of “reconstructed” dialogue that resemble an old Hollywood film and—like the movies—get some details wrong. Most readers of World War II memoirs know something of the war’s history, but Wise takes nothing for granted, so he portrays Sisson as an omniscient observer, privy to the thoughts of the higher command and actions of other armies. At times in the text he encounters another soldier who helpfully proceeds to describe the current state of the fighting, including events on the Russian front and politics at home. In his defense, it’s unlikely that Sisson’s recollections from 75 years ago could fill out an entire 300-page book.

What survives is a convincing story of an innocent young man who experienced a vicious war and then a year of adventures in postwar Berlin.

Some parts require grains of salt, but this is a believable portrait of a soldier present at the defeat of the Reich.

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Gonzo meets Hezbollah in this unlikely— and delightful—work of journalism. reports from hell

SHE COME BY IT NATURAL Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

Smarsh, Sarah Scribner (208 pp.) $22.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-982157-28-9

REPORTS FROM HELL

Smith, Chas Rare Bird Books (192 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 11, 2020 978-1-64428-075-1

Gonzo meets Hezbollah in this unlikely—and delightful—work of journalism.

What to do when al-Qaida strikes and the twin towers fall? Grab a surfboard and make for the Middle East, of course, the strategy followed by Smith and companions Nate, “who happens to look exactly like Steve McQueen playing Frank |

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A journalist and bestselling author pays tribute to country music legend Dolly Parton (b. 1946).

Before her recent elevation to the status of universally beloved icon,” writes Smarsh, Parton “was best known by many people as the punch line of a boob joke.”

This book, based on essays the author wrote for No Depression magazine in 2017, explores Parton’s musical and cultural contributions. It also tells stories about the women so often at the heart of Parton’s songs. Bent on becoming a star, she left for Nashville after high school. But she faced many challenges as an attractive woman working her way to the top. Parton’s breakthrough song, “Dumb Blonde,” released in 1967, foretold the attitude a largely sexist country music industry took toward the singer, especially in the early part of her career. Her first industry mentor, Porter Wagoner, for example, recognized Parton’s musical talent, but he tried to use it to serve his own “thunderous ego.” The quick-witted grit that helped her endure would later come out in the characters she played in hit Hollywood films like 9 to 5 (1980). Smarsh argues that this “humorous bravado” arises not just from Parton herself, but from the “culture of working-class women” she represents. The singer’s savvy is also as much sexual as entrepreneurial. The author shows how Parton used both to reach success—and not just in music: She has said that Dollywood is “the most lucrative investment she ever made.” Her influence is now so pervasive that she has become a cross-genre inspiration to young artists like hip-hop star Nicki Minaj. Though not a self-identified feminist, Parton exemplifies the “unsurpassed wisdom about how gender works in the world” that Smarsh believes is part of the working-class female experience.

A highly readable treat for music and feminist scholars as well as Parton’s legion of fans.

Bullitt if Frank Bullitt wore a bleached fauxhawk,” and Josh, given to sage analyses of current events: “This is the way history works, bro. Convulsions and spasms. To imagine any different, to imagine that we are somehow removed from the long bend, is ludicrous.” Smith opens with a howlingly funny interview he conducted with David Petraeus, who delivered “easily digestible, easy-to-understand drips of Middle Eastern insight that I imagine rack-rate conference-goers crave.” During that encounter, Smith had been prattling on about a car that is as central a piece of equipment in this narrative as the suitcase full of pharmaceuticals in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, very much a kindred book. So are just the right T-shirt, the right board, and the right amount of sangfroid when, in Lebanon, the loopy journalists were kidnapped by actual terrorists, just as they’d feared, occasioning another Jeff Spicoli–ish remark from Josh: “These Hezbollah bros are something we know. We can figure this out.”

Underneath all the goofiness is utterly serious intent: In addition to seeking to better understand the radicals’ point of view, the author is committed to providing plenty of shades of gray in a world that “had never been more black and white or more polarized.” (Readers will hope he covers the U.S. in the same spirit.) Funny and sharp, Smith is also a master of the tossedoff phrase that is just right for the job: “Early-2000 Dubai felt like Blade Runner might if written and directed by trust-funded Saudi Arabian boys who loved robot porn.”

A lively and entertaining—and illuminating—journey into dangerous territory.

HUMANS

Stanton, Brandon St. Martin’s (448 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-250-11429-7 The creator of the hit internet series Humans of New York takes it global, chasing down a panoply of interesting stories.

In 1955, Edward Steichen staged a show called “The Family of Man,” a gathering of photographs that emphasized the commonality of humankind. Stanton’s project seemingly has much the same ambition. “You’ve created this magic little corner of the Web where people feel safe sharing their stories—without being ridiculed, or bullied, or judged,” he writes. “These stories are only honestly shared because they have a long history of being warmly received.” The ask is the hard part: approaching a total stranger and asking him or her to tell their stories.

And what stories they are. A young Frenchwoman, tearful, recounts being able to see things from the spirit world that no one else can see. “And it’s been a very lonely existence since then,” she says. A sensible teenager in St. Petersburg, Russia, relates that her friends are trying to be grown-up, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, whereas she wants to remain a child close to her parents: “I’d like these times to last as long as possible.” A few stories are obnoxious, as with a Dutch incel who has converted himself into a pickup artist and outright

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cad: “Of course it’s manipulation, but why should I care? I’ve been manipulated so many times in my life.” A great many stories, some going for several pages but most taking up just a paragraph or two, are regretful, speaking to dashed dreams and roads not taken. A surprising number recount mental illness, depression, and addiction; “I’d give anything to have a tribe,” says a beleaguered mother in Barcelona. Some are hopeful, though, such as that of an Iranian woman: “I’ve fallen in love with literature. I try to read for one or two hours every day. I only have one life to live. But in books I can live one thousand lives.”

A lovely, sometimes challenging testament to the universality of human nature.

VOICES FROM THE VALLEY Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—and How They Do It Ed. by Tarnoff, Ben & Weigel, Moira Farrar, Straus and Giroux (160 pp.) $14.99 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-374-53867-5

The state of Silicon Valley captured in uneasy conversations with technology workers.

Logic magazine co-founders Tarnoff and Weigel use crisp, knowing interviews to address the labor and class ferment percolating beneath the tech industry’s sleek exterior. They argue that industry secretiveness contributes to internal stress and public misunderstandings. “To obscure the human work involved in training an algorithm or moderating a social media feed,” they write, “is both a sales pitch and an evasion.” The interviews capture seven archetypes, including “The Founder,” “The Engineer,” and “The Massage Therapist.” The editors begin with a developer whose floundering startup earned a lucrative buyout, apparently to quash competition: “the inherent value in a talent acquisition comes from acknowledging that most projects in software fail.” This pervasive sense of high-stakes absurdity provides a tense, neurotic undertone throughout the book. A technical writer addresses the industry’s notorious “gendered exclusions,” showing “what it’s like to be a woman in tech perceived to be less technical.” A chef whose union activism has since aided a more equitable workplace remembers his first posting at a wealthy startup: “I ain’t gonna be mad at them, but they were snobby as hell. You saw the Benzes, the Lamborghinis, the Porsches, the Ferraris, the Bentleys popping all up in the parking lot.” The editors also acknowledge the importance of the contributions of “tech’s blue-collar workers”—e.g., security guards, custodians, cafeteria staff: “Their labor is often invisible but completely indispensable. If they don’t do their job, nobody else can do theirs.” Viewing Google as an industry bellwether, Tarnoff and Weigel also interviewed an engineer who noted, “I have a friend whose opinion is that Google strongly believes in doing the right thing—so long as it doesn’t cost Google money.” While indicting a business culture of privilege 86

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and profit-minded willful blindness, the interviews also showcase thoughtful and socially engaged—if wonky—personalities.

Relevant augury for technology’s future during a techdependent, dysfunctional historical moment.

TRUE CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS The Investigation of Donald Trump Toobin, Jeffrey Doubleday (496 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 4, 2020 978-0-385-53673-8

Has Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses? Yes—and then some, as New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst Toobin chronicles in this catalog of crime.

Robert Mueller concluded his investigation of the president’s misdoings by grouping them into two broad categories.

One, examining Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, was inconclusive even though Mueller “had uncovered a genuinely massive conspiracy in Russia, stretching from the military to the private sector, to interfere in the most solid rite of our democracy”—namely, the 2016 presidential election. The other was Trump’s flagrant obstruction of justice in acts committed before, during, and after the investigation, as when he fired FBI director James Comey soon after entering office. Trump has never bothered to even give the impression that he is not corrupt; when the impeachment proceedings began in 2019, he reacted by threatening and blustering while taking care not to leave a paper trail. That has always been his way, as his former attorney Michael Cohen has documented, and “Mueller’s report, if read carefully, establishes that Trump committed several acts of criminal obstruction of justice.” Toobin delivers a painstakingly constructed record of Trump’s crimes, never mincing words: For example, were it not for Rudolph Giuliani’s ineptitude as an attorney, “Donald Trump would not have been impeached.” In the months since his impeachment, Trump has bungled everything he’s touched. For one, writes Toobin, “Trump addressed the coronavirus the same way that he confronted his Russia and Ukraine scandals—with bluster, blame shifting, vindictiveness, and lies.” It’s a depressing record, and Toobin’s careful narrative yields mostly despair for the fate of the republic. As he concludes, “For Trump, his presidency was more about him that what he could accomplish,” and what Trump has accomplished is mostly destruction.

Think of it as a user-friendly—and utterly damning— explication of the Mueller Report. Read it. Then vote.

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A slim book in which every word is important, one that deserves to be read multiple times. the war of the poor

HOW TO WRITE ONE SONG Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back

Tweedy, Jeff Dutton (176 pp.) $23.00 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-593-18352-6

LOVE, KURT The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945

Vonnegut, Kurt Ed. by Edith Vonnegut Random House (240 pp) $35.00 | Dec. 1, 2020 978-0-593-13301-9

Kurt Vonnegut’s letters to his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, written in the crucibles of war and young literary ambition.

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The Wilco frontman delivers a songwriting guide emphasizing routine and process rather than merely waiting for a flash of inspiration.

This book should have a potential readership beyond fledgling songwriters. Of course, that audience includes devoted Wilco fans who want more insight into the songs, but anyone involved in a creative endeavor can benefit from Tweedy’s advice.

Much of the information echoes other how-to guides: Allow yourself room to fail, learn from your mistakes, don’t allow your inner critic or editor to enter the process too early. What’s most helpful is the specific and personal—how Tweedy does it. He provides a daily schedule of his routine, including the naps and long walks he considers integral to the process. He offers transcripts of conversations, including one with his wife, and shows how these have inspired lyrics, and he provides examples of mixand-match and cut-and-paste word exercises to suggest how one might find meaning and even music in what might initially appear to be nonsense. Tweedy even suggests stealing, though he shows how one can take chord progressions or words from someone else and turn them into music that is totally your own. Many of the chapters are bite-sized, and the shorter ones could have been richer with more personal experiences woven in. The author advises listening to other people’s music and learning how to play those songs, but readers may wish he had gone deeper into the music that informed his own, what he tried to copy, and how it progressed into something original. Though Tweedy does his best to demystify the process, he does allow that “I truly think I do a lot of my best work while I’m asleep.” While the text contains plenty of solid tips for writing one song, the author allows for a wider resonance, showing how “songs help us love and cope, and they teach us how to be human.”

A concise look at how to listen and appreciate.

childhood home. Smartly photographed rather than transcribed, the letters offer an engrossing portrait of the artist as a young man. Many of the future novelist’s hallmarks can be seen in embryotic form: the plainspoken wit and candor (“Sex is peachy. Why bury it with things low and vulgar”), the clever doodles (one letter includes a credible stegosaurus), and, in wartime, a heartsickness over humanity in turmoil. In 1941, Vonnegut and Cox were high school sweethearts at separate colleges: Cox at Swarthmore, studying English, Vonnegut at Cornell, ill-advisedly studying chemistry and spending most of his time writing for the student paper. His early letters to “Woofy” are giddy and flirty (“the interior of a tan sedan / cannot be part of nature’s plan,” goes one bit of doggerel) and not a little pleading, hinting at marriage and a touch passive-aggressive about her dating others. World War II distanced them further and inevitably changed him: His mother died, he was captured as a POW and witnessed the bombing of Dresden (which famously inspired Slaughterhouse-Five), and grew more desperate for her attention. After they married in 1945, his letters (as he awaited official release from the Army) become more practical, as he plots a literary career. But his sense of humor and ingeniousness never waver. Two examples of Cox’s letters show that she was deeply supportive, even gushing about his literary potential, and one senses Vonnegut needed every encouragement. The two split in 1971; here, though, Vonnegut’s ardor is undiluted and a pleasure to snoop in on.

A charming set of Vonnegutiana that will appeal to fans of his writing—and love letters in general.

THE WAR OF THE POOR

Vuillard, Éric Trans. by Polizzotti, Mark Other Press (96 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-63542-008-1

A slender, vivid history of a 16th-century populist revolt that holds relevance for current times.

In his latest, Vuillard, the winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt for The Order of the Day, follows Thomas Münzter (c. 1489-1525), a zealous German preacher “who rejected the debates among learned theologians; esotericism made him sick. He appealed to public opinion.” Throughout this brief but powerful, moving book, the author clearly and poetically demonstrates Münzter’s passion for reform. “He is enraged,” writes Vuillard. “He wants the rulers’ skins, he wants to sweep away the church, he wants to gut all those bastards….He wants to put an end to all that pomp and miserable circumstance. Vice and wealth devastate him; their conjunction devastates him.” As the narrative progresses, the initial feeling of disjointedness morphs into a delightful thread of connection as the author pinballs around the 16thcentury landscape. He chronicles the plight of the repressed serfs in Leipzig, Prague, Rome, and Avignon. Like most fanatics, Münzter could occasionally come across as a raving lunatic,

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leading the poor to raise the wrath of God against the godless rulers who suppressed them. The availability of the Bible in the vernacular encouraged Münzter to receive God’s direct message through visions and dreams. People flocked to hear him conduct services in German. He rejected Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine in favor of Erasmus and Raymond Lully, though he eventually dismissed all theologians. In addition to his Prague Manifesto, Münzter also wrote Protestation, which argued that “the crucial experience of humanity was suffering,” the only way that one “could receive the word of God.” Summoned to justify his work to the Elector of Saxony and the crown prince, he foretold the rise of the silent flocks who would destroy them.

A slim book in which every word is important, one that deserves to be read multiple times.

MAX JACOB A Life in Art and Letters

Warren, Rosanna Norton (736 pp.) $45.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-393-07885-5 Thoroughgoing biography of a nowlittle-known French artist, writer, and collector of consequential friendships.

Overstuffed without being claustrophobic—in the manner of Roger Shattuck’s kindred study The Banquet Years—poet Warren’s book will introduce most readers to Max Jacob (1876-1944), someone, she writes, “I had never heard of.” Jacob was Breton, Jewish, gay, and Pablo Picasso’s first friend in Paris, and he served as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists. He was a writer and painter himself, almost always broke, but he was generous with his money and time. To read this book is to confront a catalog of important writers, artists, and thinkers of the period, all of whom, it seems, Jacob knew: Modigliani, Éluard, Cocteau, Queneau, Leiris, Chagall, Braque…the list goes on. His homosexuality, which in those days could occasion scandal and imprisonment, was sometimes an issue, inasmuch as young men took advantage of his generosity and helped themselves to his money and social connections. He converted to Catholicism in an effort, it seems, to “cleanse his soul and ensure his salvation” while also clearing the slate for further erotic encounters: “As long as you don’t sin, you’re saved,” he wrote. “If you sin, you go to confession, you’re still saved.” The conversion, and his long residence in the monastic community of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, did not help when Vichy France and the occupying Nazis imposed racial laws on France that would have sent Jacob to Auschwitz had he not died of pneumonia before he could be transported there. Warren shows that, while not a giant like so many of his friends, Jacob was more central to France’s early-20th-century artistic and literary history than he has been given credit for. He was also a wonderful storyteller who, for one thing, composed a “mythic genealogy” linking a storied pistol of Picasso’s to Alfred Jarry when in fact the two never met.

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An exemplary work of biography and intellectual history; essential reading for students of literary and artistic modernism.

THE KIDNAPPING CLUB Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War

Wells, Jonathan Daniel Bold Type Books (368 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-56858-752-3

A tale of money and enslavement on the streets of New York.

In the early 19th century, writes historian Wells, New York was the Northern city most closely aligned with the slave states and the institution of slavery, “due in large part to the lucrative trade between Manhattan banks and insurance companies and the slaveholders of the cotton South.”

Where many Northerners refused to follow the demands of the Fugitive Slave Act, it was big business for a group that abolitionist David Ruggles called the New York Kidnapping Club, “a powerful and far-reaching collection of police officers, political authorities, judges, lawyers, and slave traders who terrorized the city’s black residents throughout the early nineteenth century.”

Members of the club thought nothing of dispatching freeborn Black New Yorkers to the South to be impressed into slavery.

Black children in particular often disappeared from the streets only to turn up on plantations in the South—and later in Cuba and other international slave markets. The work of the kidnappers was made easier by a corrupt police department—and at one point two corrupt and competing police forces—and the fact that both sides of Manhattan were lined with wharves filled with ships that came and went. The author populates his pages with characters who are little known to history, such as the city’s recorder, Richard Riker, who “for nearly thirty years on behalf of southern slaveholding claimants sent untold numbers of people into bondage.” Small wonder that when he died, the newspapers of Charleston and New Orleans published obituaries. Ruggles should also be better known. The narrative suffers from a certain sluggishness and needless rhetorical flourishes— “As the train gained momentum on its tracks, Ruggles took his seat, hopeful that the momentum to end slavery was finally gaining steam among the hectic citizens of the northeast”—but it’s a story that deserves to be told.

A convincing demonstration of the close links between capitalism and the unconscionable trade in human beings.

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A lively survey by an eminence in the field. a world beneath the sands

THE PEOPLE ON THE BEACH Journeys to Freedom After the Holocaust

A WORLD BENEATH THE SANDS The Golden Age of Egyptology

Whitehouse, Rosie Hurst Publishers (416 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 15, 2020 978-1-78738-377-7

Wilkinson, Toby Norton (528 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-324-00689-3

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A history of the relatively short period during which Egyptology “emerged from its antiquarian origins to emerge as a proper scientific discipline.”

More compressed than Jason Thompson’s recent multivolume history on the subject, Wilkinson’s latest spotlights the great French, English, and German scientists and adventurers who managed to crack many of the mysteries of ancient Egypt— notably, Jean-François Champollion’s “decipherment” of hieroglyphics in 1822. His achievement, writes the author, “allowed ancient Egyptian culture to emerge out of the fog of Classical myth and esoteric legend into the spotlight of serious scientific enquiry.” After Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) and the ensuing era of Muhammad Ali’s brutal modernization of the country (until 1848), an “orgy of destruction” followed, as treasure seekers and some archaeologists were driven by “a desire to record and preserve Egypt’s ancient patrimony before it was lost forever.” In the 1830s, Prussian archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius “took Egyptian philology to the next level, enabling, for the first time, the translation of running hieroglyphic texts as opposed to mere names and epithets.” In 1850, French scholar Auguste Mariette discovered the Serapeum monument under the sands of Saqqara, the most celebrated discovery since the Rosetta Stone; in 1858, Mariette was appointed director of the newly formed Egyptian Department of Antiquities. The momentous early 1880s, writes Wilkinson, saw the convergence of European discovery of Egypt and “Egypt’s discovery of itself.”

Earlier, in 1874, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York “acquired its first Egyptian objects.” When Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon started their excavation of the Valley of the Kings, ancient Egypt had assumed the status of “a complex and vibrant civilization.” Refreshingly, Wilkinson dedicates a chapter to two women: Lucie Duff Gordon and Amelia Edwards, whose A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877) was published to great acclaim. The author also includes images, maps, and a timeline.

A lively survey by an eminence in the field.

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A painstakingly researched account of the seaborne refugee operations to deliver Jewish survivors of the Third Reich to what would become Israel.

Whitehouse, a journalist and historical adviser at Viennabased Centropa, “an interactive database of Jewish memory,” impressively documents a moment in history when more than 1,000 Holocaust survivors gathered on a Ligurian beach and clambered aboard a rickety ship that was stuffed far beyond its capacity, sailing to the British Mandate of Palestine on a thankfully uneventful eight-day journey across the Mediterranean.

The survivors braved Italian authorities, a British naval blockade, and an oddly hostile reception by those who reflexively believed that “they must have done some wrong in order to still be alive.” In order to effectively chronicle this and other tales of rescue, Whitehouse traveled to such critical sites as Berdychiv, where the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman “was shocked to discover the major role that his former Ukrainian neighbors had played in the murder of his mother, his relatives and the thousands who lost their lives”; tourist-packed Auschwitz, where “cars and coaches fill the carparks and locals quick to make a few zlotys try to divert day-trippers from the free parking to their private paying lots”; and Dachau, “not a place that lends much help to the road-trip historian.” During her journey interviewing survivors, relatives, archivists, and historians, Whitehouse learned about stories not often recounted elsewhere, including the work of avenging former prisoners who poisoned their interned erstwhile SS guards with arsenic-laced bread; of the Jewish Brigade of the British army, “a unit of soldiers who had effectively gone AWOL” to help Holocaust survivors escape to Palestine; and of Italian partisans and ordinary townspeople in helping overcrowded refugee ships sail, a story commemorated in Leon Uris’ novel Exodus.

An illuminating, welcome addition to the literature of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

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IS EINSTEIN STILL RIGHT? Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and the Quest To Verify Einstein’s Greatest Creation

Will, Clifford M. & Yunes, Nicolás Oxford Univ. (256 pp.) $22.95 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-19-884212-5

The answer is yes, but plenty of work remains to confirm his predictions and

fill in the gaps.

Will, a professor of physics at the University of Florida, and Yunes, physics professor at the University of Illinois and founding director of the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe, write that Einstein became a scientific superstar in 1919 when experiments showed that the sun’s gravity bent a star’s light when it passed nearby. The authors add that, unlike many other superstars, he deserved the acclaim because his discoveries—mostly relativity, but there were others—mark him as one of the most significant geniuses in human history.

Besides his brilliant if unsettling descriptions of time and space, relativity predicts phenomena so bizarre that Einstein himself doubted their existence. Most scientists agreed until the 1960s, when they began turning up. Confronted with neutron stars, pulsars, quasars, gravitational lenses, cosmic background radiation, and black holes, relativists suddenly found themselves in great demand. By this time, other theories proposed to explain matters, but so far relativity enjoys a perfect record. “Experiment seems to really like Einstein’s theory in spite of how crazy and wacky it seems,” writes Yunes at the conclusion. The culmination was the 2015 detection of almost impossibly faint gravity waves, “the most important scientific discovery of the twentyfirst century (at least so far).” Many books explain Einstein for a lay audience, and readers would be advised to consult one— perhaps Will’s Was Einstein Right? (1986)—before tackling this challenging entry in the field. Justifiably excited by the past 50 years of astronomical spectaculars, the authors hurry past Einstein’s basics (curvature of space, relativity of time), concentrating on his more complex predictions. They succeed superbly in describing the history and personalities behind them and work diligently, sometimes successfully, to explain the science.

Solid insights into Einstein’s dazzling discoveries, but not for the faint of heart.

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AMERICAN CONTAGIONS Epidemics and the Law From Smallpox to COVID-19

Witt, John Fabian Yale Univ. (180 pp.) $20.00 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-0-300-25727-4

Don’t want to wear a virus-blocking mask? Well, neither did some people a century ago—and the law caught up with them, too.

In a book that’s both timely, considering the pandemic, and remarkably speedy, considering that it began as a spring 2020 Yale Law School class, Bancroft Prize winner Witt looks at the sometimes contending, sometimes cooperating forces of public interest and private liberty in times of epidemic disease. “New germs help make new laws and institutions,” he writes, “yet old ways of doing things shape the course of epidemics and the ways in which we respond to them.” In the earliest years of the republic as now, he observes, there have been two major branches of disease control: the sanitarian and the quarantinist.

Then as now, the sanitarian—wear a mask, practice social distancing—has been reserved for the better off, while quarantines have been brought to bear on immigrant and minority populations. So it is that the White House argues with increased urgency for a wall to block putatively disease-bearing border crossers, and so it is that the earliest colonial inhabitants of the Hamptons ordered that “no Indian shall come to towne…until they be free of the small poxe.” Whether Chinese worker, Jewish immigrant, or Irish tenement dweller, quarantinist measures of control applied to the Other, who often could not obey laws imposed by the landed majority, such as having dining and toilet facilities far apart. Witt documents how the federal government has consistently punted health regulations to the states, with results ranging from Michigan’s banning anyone with a venereal disease from marrying to “Typhoid Mary” Mallon’s serving 23 years in involuntary isolation, “never having been convicted of or even charged with a crime.” No matter which regime is followed, writes the author, the current pandemic violates the doctrine that public health is paramount.

Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt’s legal survey a fascinating resource.

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children’s AKISSI Even More Tales of Mischief

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: AKISSI by Marguerite Abouet; illus. by Mathieu Sapin; trans. by Marie Bédrune.......................................................................91

Abouet, Marguerite Illus. by Sapin, Mathieu Trans. by Bédrune, Marie Flying Eye Books (144 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-912497-41-6 Series: Akissi, 3

CINDERS & SPARROWS by Stefan Bachmann................................. 94 NORTHBOUND by Michael S. Bandy & Eric Stein; illus. by James E. Ransome...................................................................95 THE SUMMONER by Victoria Bond..................................................100 LEMON BUTTERFLY by Cao Wenxuan; illus. by Roger Mello..........106 MEXIQUE by Mara José Ferrada; illus. by Ana Penyas; trans. by Elisa Amado......................................................................... 112 THE LAST MIRROR ON THE LEFT by Lamar Giles; illus. by Dapo Adeola..........................................................................114 MODERN ART EXPLORER by Alice Harman; illus. by Serge Bloch............................................................................. 115 THE STRAY AND THE STRANGERS by Steven Heighton; illus. by Melissa Iwai..........................................................................116 TWINS by Varian Johnson; illus. by Shannon Wright....................... 118 THE BOY AND THE GORILLA by Jackie Aza Kramer; illus. by Cindy Derby.......................................................................... 118 THE GREAT BUNK BED BATTLE by Tina Kügler............................ 118 NO VOICE TOO SMALL ed. by Lindsay H. Metcalf, Keila V. Dawson & Jeanette Bradley; illus. by Jeanette Bradley...................................122 A LONG ROAD ON A SHORT DAY by Gary D. Schmidt & Elizabeth Stickney; illus. by Eugene Yelchin...................................... 131 WILD GIRL by Helen Skelton; illus. by Liz Kay................................ 133 ALL THIRTEEN by Christina Soontornvat........................................134 ONCE UPON A WINTER DAY by Liza Woodruff............................. 138

More comic strips by Abouet and Sapin make it across the Atlantic, delivering big laughs about a rambunctious Black girl making joy and making life in the day to day of an Ivory Coast village.

In 2013, the debut volume introduced North American readers to the larger-than-life character of Akissi, a bold, crafty, adventurous Black girl who sees the neighborhood as her playground. In this set of stories, readers see her wrestle with an impending nightmare: She’s to be shipped off with her uncle to the freezing-cold, wolf-infested streets of Paris, a world away from the village streets and neighbors she has come to know so well. Imagine that, a story about an African child that doesn’t hinge on escape or opportunity elsewhere but rather centers itself in the bountiful abundance and beauty of life among her people. In her introduction, Abouet writes about reclaiming her happy memories of being an Ivorian girl in her homeland in order to provide “a different view of Africa than the one we are usually shown. An Africa full of life, rather than sorrow.” Full of laughs and a heartwarming embrace for friendship, the episodes draw on real-life experiences in order to deliver a narrative unlike any other. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last we see of Akissi, Fofana, Spectreman, and more.

Big heart. Big laughs. Get this collection and all the rest, too. (maps, maze, bonus activity) (Graphic fiction. 7-adult)

DANDAN’S DREAM by Xiaowen Zhu; illus. by Gong Yanling........139

TANI’S NEW HOME A Refugee Finds Hope and Kindness in America

FELÍZ NEW YEAR, AVA GABRIELA! by Alexandra Alessandri; illus. by Addy Rivera Sonda.............................................................. 140

Adewumi, Tanitoluwa with Lord, Michelle Illus. by Dawson, Courtney Thomas Nelson (32 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-1-4002-1828-8

JACK AND SANTA by Mac Barnett; illus. by Greg Pizzoli............ 140 THE CHRISTMAS FEAST by Nathalie Dargent; illus. by Magali Le Huche...................................................................142 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS illus. by Lara Hawthorne...................... 144 THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS by Clement C. Moore; illus. by Loren Long.............................................................................147

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ABC ANIMALS by Christopher Evans............................................... 111

After his family is forced to flee Nigeria and adjust to the United States while living in a homeless shelter, Tani wins a chess championship. kirkus.com

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some books worth voting for Leah Overstreet

Even though presidential elections roll around every four years in the United States, it’s an occasion that doesn’t inspire many children’s books; usually we can count on seeing a scant handful. Not in 2020. This year, we’ve seen a veritable boomlet of picture books that in some way address the electoral process. With just a couple of months before Election Day, we thought we’d corral some of the best that address this complicated, critical civic undertaking.

In V Is for Voting (Henry Holt, July 21), Kate Farrell and Caitlin Kuhwald use the superficially simple structure of an alphabet book to deliver a bracing, even thrilling paean to activist democracy. With entries such as “H is for homelands that we’ve occupied” and “N is for never forgetting what was,” readers come away really feeling that “M is for matter—and every vote does.”

Jonathan London and Frank Remkiewicz’s irrepressible Froggy has gotten dressed, learned to swim, gone to the doctor, and engaged in 28 other activities. Now it’s Froggy for President! (Viking, May 12), and the accidentprone amphibian finds himself pitted against Frogilina in the election for class president. There’s more slapstick than substance, but for series fans, it’s an introduction to political campaigning at the elementary school level.

On the serious side, Mark Shulman and Serge Bloch also use a classroom election—for class pet—as a way to introduce readers to the process in I Voted (Neal Porter/Holiday House, Jan. 21). Author and illustrator emphasize the importance of making an informed choice—and that choosing not to vote has its own consequences.

The multiracial, multicultural student body of Stanton Elementary School shows child readers that even though they cannot yet legally vote, they can still make a difference in Margaret McNamara and Micah Player’s Vote for Our Future! (Schwartz & Wade/Random, Feb. 18). These children engage in an energetic, upbeat get-out-the-vote campaign in their neighborhood, finding ways to inspire 92

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even the most disengaged voters so that “the future began to change.”

It’s important to remember that democracy takes place outside of the United States, too, and two of the best of this year’s crop come from South America.

In A Small History of a Disagreement (Aldana Libros/ Greystone Kids), Chilean creators Claudio Fuentes S. and Gabriela Lyon depict a conflict within a school, when a new science building threatens a venerable tree in the schoolyard. In Elisa Amado’s translation, the history teacher turns the conflict into “an exercise in civics”—but it’s not an empty one. This group of students demonstrates that disagreement can lead to fruitful collaboration. (Maybe it should be distributed in Congress.)

Lion has always been the undisputed King of the Jungle, but his imperial ways lead the animals to decide they’d prefer to be a democracy. Under rules such as “candidates cannot trade gifts for votes” and “candidates cannot eat their opponents,” Monkey, Snake, Sloth, and, yes, Lion vie to become The President of the Jungle (Nancy Paulsen Books, Jan. 7). Via Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s translation, Brazilian creators André Rodrigues, Larissa Ribeiro, Paula Desgualdo, and Pedro Markun deliver a funny story that doubles as an informative primer.

Finally, though not a book about the electoral process as such, The World’s Poorest President Speaks Out (Enchanted Lion Books, Aug. 18) nevertheless stands as a tribute to the ideals of democratic government. Adapted from Uruguayan President José Mujica’s speech to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development by editor Yoshimi Kusaba for the original Japanese edition, illustrated by Gaku Nakagawa, and translated by Andrew Wong, the book brings Mujica’s message to U.S. readers. His insistence to world leaders that “shared human happiness is the greatest treasure of all” is one we all need to keep in our minds as we head off to the ballot box.

Vicky Smith is a young readers’ editor.

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Wood engravings beautifully capture both the forested seasonal landscapes and the characters’ expressive body language. the bear and the duck

A PARADE FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON

Adler, David A. Illus. by O’Brien, John Holiday House (32 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-8234-4252-2

A celebration for America’s first president.

Straightforward, lighthearted text and intricate, colorful illustrations tell the story of President-elect George Washington’s travels from his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, to New York City, where he was sworn in as the first chief executive of the United States. Exuberant parades and joyous festivities were held in abundance, though the unassuming Washington would seemingly have preferred to make his journey quickly and quietly. The future president’s serious personality and nononsense attitude are clearly expressed, the jubilation of the crowds that met him is readily apparent, and the trek is portrayed succinctly yet includes specifics, outlining differences between then and now by implication. What’s here is pleasant and interesting, and young readers and listeners will enjoy the details in the accessible text and the humorous, deftly drawn illustrations. What is missing is the presence of brown faces among the White ones throughout the story; such omissions, intentional or not, are deeply questionable given the dearth of children’s books on Washington that address the fact that he owned people who were slaves—a fact that is missing here even in the backmatter. Simultaneously a celebration of America’s beginnings and a lost opportunity to present a complete depiction of history, this selection may nevertheless be useful given the approaching election and inauguration. |

An energetic but sadly incomplete account of Washington’s march to the presidency. (timeline, source notes, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 4-8)

THE BEAR AND THE DUCK

Angeli, May Illus. by the author Eerdmans (32 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-8028-5555-8

Bear and Duck’s friendship begins with a threat and an act of kindness.

When an injured duck caught in a tangle of branches and a bear taking a stroll after winter hibernation meet, Duck makes the first move, shouting a warning to stay away or the bear will lose his head. Bear finds the fear behind that threat amusing, considering his advanced age and lack of teeth. Instead Bear brings Duck home to care for him in his den. As Duck recuperates, the two take walks, with Duck riding on Bear’s back.

While Bear bathes in the water, Duck splashes about and tells wonderful stories of his adventures. But soon Duck knows he must join the other birds and fly away. Bear is lonely and fears that he will never see Duck again. He sleeps through another winter, and the next spring Duck returns for a happy reunion.

It is a gentle tale, told with tenderness and humor. Duck seems to be the dominant personality while Bear is patient, gentle, and admiring. They are both male and of wildly different species, but these details are less a factor in their friendship than acceptance and warmth. Illustrations in full- and partial-page wood engravings beautifully capture both the forested seasonal landscapes and the characters’ expressive body language.

A loving, nonjudgmental tale of a long and lasting friendship. (Picture book. 4-8)

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Tani lived “in a home that felt as secure as a castle, in a fine neighborhood in Nigeria.” But one day, his father, who owns a print shop, sneaks away from members of the terrorist group Boko Haram after they ask him to make posters, and the whole family, now in danger, must flee. They move to a home six hours away, but Boko Haram members find them. They must leave Nigeria quickly. They land in New York City and move into a homeless shelter, where Tani and his brother must sleep on a separate floor from their parents. At school, Tani joins the chess club and practices with his brother in their room at the shelter. In his first tournament, he scores the lowest of all players, but he studies and practices and keeps competing, and a year later, he wins the New York State championship. Headlines bring his story to readers around the world, who respond with encouragement and large donations to his family. Tani’s story is narrated in a lovely childlike voice that retains the wonder of learning new things. The turn of events that can cause happy families to need asylum will enlighten young readers and open minds. The generous view of the United States feels optimistic but genuine. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8.8-by-21-inch double-page spreads viewed at 65.1% of actual size.)

A valuable story of family, community, new beginnings, and perseverance. (afterword) (Picture book/biography. 4-9)

THE INVASION

Applegate, K.A. & Grant, Michael Illus. by Grine, Chris Graphix/Scholastic (240 pp.) $24.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-338-22648-5 Series: Animorphs Graphix, 1 After a night at the mall, a group of kids encounters an alien, forever changing their lives.

Jake, Marco, Tobias, Cassie, and Rachel cut through a construction site to make it home before curfew when a spaceship heading straight for them lights up the sky. They approach the ship and meet a dying Andalite who has just fled a Yeerk ambush. The Andalite, an alien with the power to morph, tells of the invasion the sluglike, parasitic Yeerks have planned for Earth. Other Andalites will come to help— but not for some time. Before his gruesome death, the Andalite bestows the children with the power to temporarily turn

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The castle is rich with enough ghosts and enchanted staircases to satisfy any fantasy lover. cinders & sparrows

into any animal they wish, as long as they have first acquired its DNA via touch. Following their bizarre night, the group—with Jake as their reluctant leader—must decide whether or not to battle the Yeerks. The decision is made when they realize Jake’s brother has been taken over by a Yeerk. Determined to save their town, the group embraces their abilities and fights back.

This text-heavy graphic novel is full of action-packed panels and detailed, realistic illustrations. The narrative is engaging and may encourage readers to learn about animals. However, the intensity of the murderous undertones may scare younger readers. Cassie and Marco are brown; the rest of the main cast is White.

A dark, bracing series opener. (Science fiction. 8-13)

WHAT A LUCKY DAY!

Awan, Jashar Illus. by the author Norton Young Readers (48 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-324-01552-9 A picture-book debut that looks at common superstitions and misconceptions.

A stork is going fishing. “If I’m lucky, I’ll have fish for dinner,” the long-legged bird says hopefully. But suddenly, a black cat crosses the path. “OH NO! BAD LUCK!… / I won’t catch anything today!” The black cat is also going fishing. “If I’m lucky, I’ll have fish for dinner,” the feline purrs. But: “OH NO! A RACCOON! That masked bandit will steal my fish!” Coincidentally, the raccoon is also going fishing. The refrain repeats.

Four animals, all hoping for a fish dinner, suddenly crowd the dock, each looking warily at the others, afraid of all the mistaken beliefs they’ve previously heard. The raccoon fears catching warts from the frog; the frog hopes the stork doesn’t deliver any inconvenient babies. Each eyes the others suspiciously. But what luck! They each catch a fish! Each superstition or myth is unraveled as the animals apologize to one another. Stork is particularly perplexed: “Wait. What? Why would I deliver babies?”

Awan’s illustrations use contrast effectively; the bold, simply shaped animals stand out starkly against the light sky. The text also pops in dark, blocky typeface. Appended backmatter further explains the origins of the misconceptions associated with each animal. The question of the fishes’ luck goes unaddressed, however.

A clever way to approach a conversation on assumptions.

(Picture book. 4-7)

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CINDERS & SPARROWS

Bachmann, Stefan Greenwillow Books (368 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-06-228995-7

Although a 12-year-old servant girl doesn’t recall the time before she was an orphan, she remembers her secret, powerful name: Zita Brydgeborn.

When she’s summoned to Blackbird Castle, which is ruled over by the unpleasant Mrs. Cantanker, to take her rightful place as the last of a family of powerful witches, it seems almost like a dream come true. But there is much to learn and no one she can fully rely upon, not even Minnifer, the maid, and Bram, the cook, both of whom are friendly toward her. There’s also the scary matter of her family, bewitched and moldering in the dining room. Mrs. Cantanker gradually reveals herself to be a dark force to be reckoned with. When she trusts to her own resourcefulness—which is ample—Zita is able to begin gathering tools of power: a loyal crow, magical scissors, and, finally, her Anchor. She’ll need them all as the depth of Cantanker’s evil scheme is finally exposed and Zita must fight the battle of her life to save her family and protect the world from a dead witch of undeniable power. Bachmann’s worldbuilding is delightful. The castle is rich with enough ghosts and enchanted staircases to satisfy any fantasy lover, and the cast of characters, all seemingly White, is well developed and engaging, especially intrepid narrator Zita.

A suspenseful entertaining romp through an entertainingly witchy world. (Fantasy. 9-14)

A PIG IN THE PALACE

Bahrampour, Ali Illus. by the author Abrams (32 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-4197-4571-3

An invitation to the palace causes a piggy pickle.

Bobo the warthog is happily rolling in the mud floor of his hollow tree home when he gets a surprise: an invitation to dinner with the new queen. Certain it’s a mistake—he’s usually covered with mud and fleas—he lies awake all night worrying he won’t fit in. In the limo the palace provides the next day, he learns no one’s ever seen the queen; this will be her big reveal. When he arrives at the palace, the other guests (humans all, diverse in both race and gender) are wearing fancy clothes. Bobo thinks about covering up, but the tablecloth he uses makes a mess…then his fleas start acting up. Soon the guards are after him, trying to throw him out. The ensuing chase wrecks the palace. “Who made this mess?” shouts the queen from her palanquin. Shamefacedly, Bobo confesses. With a squeal of delight, the queen (also a warthog) shouts “WELL DONE!” Suddenly everyone is free to have fun and be as messy |

as they like, even the stuffy palace guards. Bahrampour’s text and watercolor cartoons are neatly in sync, Bobo’s bewilderment yielding to a determination to stay for dinner as the foolishness proceeds. The hoggy hijinks of the chase through the palace and the messy finish will appeal to little listeners, who will hope for an invite to the queen and Bobo’s next party. The cartoon illustrations show a (human) cast of many hues. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-22-inch double-page spreads viewed at 61.2% of actual size.)

A pleasing porcine parable. (Picture book. 2-7)

NORTHBOUND A Train Ride Out of Segregation

Bandy, Michael S. & Stein, Eric Illus. by Ransome, James E. Candlewick (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-7636-9650-4

LIFE IN A FROZEN WORLD Wildlife of Antarctica

Batten, Mary Illus. by Gonzalez, Thomas Peachtree (40 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 1, 2020 978-1-68263-151-5

Although the southernmost continent is covered with ice all year round, wildlife still thrives in Antarctica—but the ecosystem there is threatened.

Batten worked with the Cousteau Society campaign against mineral exploitation in Antarctica in 1990. Her continued fascination with this relatively mysterious world, which has no permanent human population, is evident in her depiction of the life that does thrive there. Her descriptions are clear, concise, and interesting, whether she’s discussing forests of kelp, pastures of phytoplankton, and swarms of krill; the fish, whales, penguins, and seals at the top of the food chain; or the underwater invertebrates who live long and often grow to gigantic proportions.

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A friendship blossoms despite the segregation that would keep two young boys apart.

Trains often interrupt Michael and Granddaddy’s farm work, and Michael dreams of riding on one of them. He gets his wish when Grandma decides to take him from Alabama to Ohio to visit cousins. They board the “colored only” car, and Michael marvels at the landscape and towns whizzing by. He sees a boy his age in the White section of the train as he explores, but he knows not to enter. When the train leaves Atlanta, however, the signs labeling the cars come down, and Michael befriends Bobby Ray. Together they explore both the White and Black sections of the train and the amazing dining car and sleeping berths. They discover a mutual love of drawing, playing with little green army men, and trains. But when the train reaches Chattanooga and the segregation signs return, their play comes to an abrupt halt. In these lushly illustrated watercolor and collage images, Ransome effectively captures the boys’ kinship amid the senseless, racist Jim Crow laws that separate them.

The bucolic landscape outside the train’s windows sharply conflicts with the train conductor’s removal of Michael from the White car. Backmatter addresses the laws that created this unjust travel condition, beginning in 1887 with the Interstate Commerce Act. Painful history portrayed honestly and beautifully to help children understand the very personal impact of racism.

(Picture book. 5-8)

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Her text is relatively substantial for a picture book, and it’s set against a backdrop of gorgeous Antarctic scenes created

by Gonzalez using pastel, colored pencils, and airbrush. The animals are recognizable; the scenery is magnificent. After presenting the resident wildlife, the author introduces humans— scientists taking advantage of Antarctica’s protected status and sunlit summers for research of all kinds, including studying the effects of Earth’s changing climate. She describes the changes on the plant and animal life and the loss of sea ice, which also threatens the rest of the world. “Scientists estimate the melting of Antarctica’s land ice will lead to a rise in sea level of between 3 and 16 inches…by 2100.”

Sobering news in a handsome package. (map, further facts, author’s note, glossary, acknowledgments, selected bibliography) (Nonfiction. 7-10)

SELMA

Bauer, Jutta Illus. by the author Gecko Press (56 pp.) $9.99 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-776572-12-0 From Germany, a low-key story about a contented sheep.

“When I just couldn’t take it any more, I went to the wise ram,” begins this well-designed, unusually small book. It doesn’t seem to be a book aimed at young readers. The opening illustration shows a discontented, possibly depressed brown dog nursing a glass of red wine, and while the overall theme of the fablelike story—happiness is being content with what you have—may be valuable in some contexts, its exploration here is puzzling. A wise ram tells the dog the story of Selma, a sheep. Selma has a daily routine that consists of eating some grass, playing with her children, exercising, more eating, chatting with a vulture neighbor, and then sleeping. Asked by the press (shown as a paleskinned human arm holding a microphone) what she would do if she had more time, her answers are the same, with tiny variations in narrative construction but not meaning. When Selma is asked what she would do if she won a million dollars…well, here, readers may be expecting a twist, and those readers will be disappointed. The illustrations are wholly engaging; they are full-page bleeds on the recto, executed in a saturated palette in comforting earth tones with engaging shadow details that give dimension to the landscapes. Selma is an appealing-looking sheep who exudes placidity, contentment, and a little humor.

The dog who opens the story never returns.

Lovely illustrations; but the fable falls flat. (Picture book.

5-8)

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ONE GIRL

Beaty, Andrea Illus. by Phumiruk, Dow Abrams (40 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-4197-1905-9 While sitting outside her home one night, a forlorn little girl is surprised by a book that falls from the sky.

Glowing like a shooting star, the book lands at her feet.

When she opens it, the pages transport her to a whimsical, imaginary land full of possibility. The girl is so enamored with the book that she takes it to school and shares it with her classmates. Inspired by what she’s read, the girl begins to write her own, original story. Swept up in the magic she has created, the girl’s classmates start reading—and, in one case, writing—books of their own. Eventually the first girl’s words take flight, shimmering as they circle the Earth and land at the homes of other children who, presumably, will be inspired to find their voices.

Beaty’s rhyming text is charmingly sparse: each word is carefully chosen, and the language glimmers with precision. Much of the story is told by Phumiruk’s gorgeous illustrations, which not only feature a protagonist who appears to be Asian, but also children with diverse skin tones and hair textures; all the children appear to be wearing school uniforms. While the words and pictures work in synchrony, creating a lyrical call to action encouraging children to find their voices and, simultaneously, their inner strength, the plot itself is abstract and widely open to interpretation, such that the book reads more like a poem than a traditional story. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 60.6% of actual size.)

A charming, rhyming picture book designed to inspire.

(Picture book. 3-7)

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SOFIA VALDEZ AND THE VANISHING VOTE

Beaty, Andrea Illus. by Roberts, David Amulet/Abrams (160 pp.) $12.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-4197-4350-4 Series: Questioneers

The Questioneers are back for a new early chapter book, this one featuring Sofia Valdez, of Sofia Valdez, Future Prez

(2019) fame.

Sofia and her friends from Miss Greer’s second grade class are back for another adventure. This time around, an election to select the new class pet offers lots of what Miss Greer likes to call Learning Experiences. Young civic activist Sofia is put in charge of managing the election, which pits candidates backed by two of her best friends against one another. Meanwhile, her cousin Marisella grapples with a pet problem of her own. Between friends and family, the election pulls Sofia in all |

BE BOLD, BE BRAVE, y o u n g a d u lt

DREAM BIG!

Who’s your favourite See what’s new person in the in the Little People, BIG DREAMS series? www.littlepeoplebigdreams.com |

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@QuartoKids #LittlePeopleBigDreams

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Ernesto Cisneros

A YOUNG MEXICAN AMERICAN FACES HIS MOTHER’S DEPORTATION IN CISNEROS’ NOVEL OF RESILIENCE

By Vicky Smith Andre Martinez

In Efrén Divided you look at a lot of what is wrong about the United States, but you also see hope. How did you strike this balance?

I started writing this during the elections of 2016. It was really difficult not being political. There were so many things I wanted to say, but that wasn’t what the book was for. I wanted to always just remain true to the characters. There were times when the politics seeped in.

Like when Jennifer talks about Americans’ attention to chickens in cages and their inattention to children in cages. So yes, politics seeped in—beautifully.

In Ernesto Cisneros’ moving debut, Efrén Divided (Harper/HarperCollins, March 31), Mexican American 12-year-old Efrén Nava tries to be a loyal best friend to David Warren, a White boy who’s running for student-body president as a goof—but secretly Efrén’s rooting for Jennifer Huerta. Jennifer’s mother— like Efrén’s—“no tiene papeles,” and Jennifer sees the position as a way to create change—in attitudes if not policies. Then Efrén’s Amá is suddenly deported, and now he must care for his two little siblings while Apá, also undocumented, works extra overtime in hopes of hiring a coyote. Thanks to his U.S. citizenship, it’s up to Efrén to cross into Tijuana to take Amá the money, a journey that proves transformative. We caught up with Cisneros, a middle school teacher, via Zoom from his home in Santa Ana, California. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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[That] was one of the moments that I allowed myself a little bit of liberty.

I just wanted to open the front door. I just kept thinking, you know what, it’s a lot easier to hate people you don’t know. And I bet you a lot of people haven’t met a Latino family before, an immigrant family. So I just wrote about my family and things around me.

I had three students in 2016 who had a parent taken away. I have this blue box in my classroom [so kids can] let me know something’s going on. If a kid hasn’t turned in any homework for a week and something’s going on at home, I don’t want to be giving [them] detentions. [One boy] told me his father had been taken away over the weekend, and I didn’t know what to say. So for all the kids that are going through the same thing, I wanted to write a book to help them. And Efrén was the perfect name. I thought it was kind of like a friend, to help them. [Now] I have a better response: that they’re not alone. And that they do have a community of allies and supporters.

The trip to Tijuana had to be tough to write.

Yes, yes, I was so terribly worried about that. There’s so little representation of Mexico in the U.S. that I wanted to make sure that I showed the beauty of it as well. Because it is beautiful. We used to go there when I was a kid all the time. And we’d see the beaches, and I’d think, man, I wouldn’t mind liv-

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ing here. But then we’d go to the downtown, and there’d be the little children selling you things, and it was heartbreaking. I did go back [to Tijuana] to scout. The people who are staring at [Efrén] were the ones staring at me. I didn’t really make anything up.

Reading Efrén, you want so badly for Amá to make it back. Did you imagine an ending where she did?

No, no. I [knew] from Page 1: She can’t come back. Maybe 10 years ago, but right now, the way things are, you cannot do it. I had three students who were brave enough to let me know what’s going on. Imagine how many didn’t feel comfortable enough to share? I wanted to remain truthful. But I didn’t know how I was going to possibly end a middle-grade book like that. Jennifer saved the day for me. So many young people right now are already becoming activists, and I wanted Jennifer to reflect that.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Efrén Divided received a starred review in the Dec. 1, 2019, issue.

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YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD The Kids’ Guide to a Better Planet

Bell, Lucy Illus. by Hicks, Astred Andrews McMeel Publishing (224 pp.) $19.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5248-6092-9

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[We talk] about the depiction of people of color and how we don’t see ourselves, I think it’s true. But if you look at Front Desk [by Kelly Yang (Levine/Scholastic, 2018)], I swear to God, you could take my family and you could replace it with hers. I think there’s a universal reality. The goal is for people to realize that we’re a lot more similar than we are different. And I [also] want the book to be a reminder for teachers. So the message is to the kids, that they’re not alone, and for teachers, that sometimes we see kids a certain way, and there’s a lot more to them.

directions, and she realizes that overseeing a fair election that runs smoothly proves to be a real challenge. Fortunately, she has sage advice from Abuelo and help from the local library to guide her. The short chapters and ample illustrations make for an accessible and entertaining early chapter book, full of fun and, yes, learning experiences. Extensive backmatter includes information on the importance of a free press, the true historical events behind Abuelo’s stories, and more information on how the voting process in the United States works. Sofia and her family have brown skin and are of Mexican heritage; her friends are diverse; and Miss Greer presents White. Marisella uses a wheelchair.

Questioneers fans will not be disappointed; new fans will find this outing a timely introduction to the series. (Fic­ tion. 6-9)

A well-designed collection of environmentally focused activism ideas that are scalable and accessible to children.

Today’s children are already on the forefront of environmental activism, increasingly aware of the dangers to planet Earth—but the problems seem so large, and they are so very small. This resource is a smartly designed catalog of ideas to make it easier for individuals to put into practice actions that can help save the planet. Divided into categories addressing topics such as plastics, clothing, food, energy, and animals, each section is filled with information and activities to help readers become more aware of wastefulness and environmental impacts. Readers will find a recipe for toothpaste, tips for a plastic-free birthday party, and instructions for starting an outdoor garden. These suggestions provide tangible ways to change mindsets about consumption. Engaging factoids lead readers to inspirational stories of children from around the world who have made a difference in areas they care about.

Full-color illustrations throughout are colorful and engaging with a friendly, modern look. The book concludes with a fitting chapter on kindness, making donations, and raising awareness, making it quite possible to raise a generation of children capable of changing the world. Backmatter contains a list of the children mentioned in the book, along with contact information, as well as additional resources and organizations.

A strong reference addition to any library. (Nonfiction.

8-12)

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Bond does the real-life Zora Neale Hurston proud. the summoner

WISHES AND WELLINGTONS

Berry, Julie Sourcebooks (368 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-7282-2325-4

A magical sardine can brings a Victorian girl the promise of three wishes.

Stuck at Miss Salamanca’s School for Upright Young Ladies, Maeve Merritt, prone to foul language and fisticuffs, wants a life of her own making filled with travel and cricket, not the stultifying life dictated by family and society. But an unopened sardine can found in a rubbish pile brings the unexpected arrival of Mermeros, an ancient djinni. Will Maeve lose her integrity to greed like all the previous djinni masters? Soon Maeve, her roommate Alice, and local orphan Tom are in the midst of more adventure, blackmail, and danger than they ever imagined possible. Maeve’s first-person narrative moves swiftly, peppered by her droll observations and witty dialogue. Small details weave together to create an engaging tapestry that becomes more complex and compelling with every page turn.

Maeve is highly possessive of her good fortune, but an altruistic eleventh-hour choice leads to happy endings for all after she wrestles with her conscience and ponders the gap between rich and poor. When Maeve and Tommy raid the sarcophagus of a long-ago Persian king, Alice pushes back against the theft.

Human characters are cued as White; the cover shows Maeve with brown skin and black hair, but her appearance and ethnicity are not described in the text. (This review has been updated to reflect a change between the advance reader copy and final edition.)

A nostalgic Dickens and Nesbit mashup. (Historical fantasy.

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THE SUMMONER

Bond, Victoria Candlewick (256 pp.) $17.99 | $7.99 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-7636-4299-0 978-1-5362-1667-7 paper Series: Zora & Me, 3 Zombies, grave robbers, and grief feature in this trilogy finale fictionalizing author Zora Neale Hurston’s early years.

In 1905, 14-year-old Carrie and her best friend, Zora, begin eighth grade, their final year of primary school in their hometown of Eatonville, Florida, the nation’s first incorporated Black-run town. When a violent White lynch mob arrives hunting a Black fugitive and terrorizing Zora, Carrie, and their families and neighbors, the future seems uncertain. A grave robbery and talk of hoodoo and zombieism heighten tensions within the community. In the midst of the turmoil, Zora’s self-important father decides to run for mayor against the town’s founder as Zora’s mother’s health worsens.

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traditions, especially those that limit opportunities for girls and women, even as she navigates uncertainty and loss. Bond does the real-life storyteller Hurston proud, weaving an absorbing tale of the everyday horrors Black people faced in the South at the turn of the 20th century, even within the bounds of communities such as Eatonville. Both fans of and newcomers to the award-winning Zora & Me series will thoroughly enjoy this thrilling conclusion.

A sweet, lyrical, finely crafted mystery and a testament to the deep bonds of friendship. (biography, timeline, bibliography, adaptations of Hurston’s work for children) (Historical fiction. 10-14)

5-MINUTE REALLY TRUE STORIES FOR BEDTIME

Britannica Books Britannica Books (192 pp.) $12.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-912920-65-5

Nonfiction alternatives to made-up bedtime stories.

What better way to induce drowsiness in young pillow plumpers than short, fascinating introductions to the bedding-down behavior of creatures from hibernating “frogsicles” to grizzly bears, not to mention the “terrifyingly terrific tarantula!” and the “jawsome” great white shark? Or perhaps tallies of record-breaking beds, styles of beds used around the world, and beds found in King Tut’s tomb? Or sleep’s stages, purposes, and body positions?

Combining the work of four authors and 10 illustrators, this compendium of night-related knowledge ranges well beyond the bedroom as well as Eurocentric confines—touching on constellations known to Indigenous South African and Australian cultures and moon legends from Inca and West African Batammaliba traditions before closing with lullabies in five languages.

Despite being the work of many hands, the painted illustrations on every page are consistent in their bright hues and simple cartoon style. Human figures are diverse in dress and racial presentation, and nearly everyone (animals included) smiles. Though pre–Covid-19 scenes of unmasked night workers in a hospital are a bit jarring and a claim for the antiquity of the West African lungfish that is off by at least a hundredfold slips past a team of Britannica fact checkers, these otherwise solid excursions through the natural world and human culture offer unusual routes to dreamland.

Nourishing nighttime snacks when the pigeon, the bunny, or the kid in the wolf suit pall. (glossary, source list, index) (Nonfiction. 5-9)

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ONE REAL AMERICAN The Life of Ely S. Parker, Seneca Sachem and Civil War General

Bruchac, Joseph Abrams (248 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-4197-4657-4

Ely S. Parker, Seneca Grand Sachem and secretary to Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, is a fascinating biographi-

cal subject.

Raised by a prominent family of Seneca orators, Parker (1828-1895) went from a humble Iroquois childhood to the halls of Washington, D.C., where he juggled leadership roles in two clashing nations. Educated by Baptist missionaries, Parker’s early life echoed that of Fredrick Douglass as he became aware of the need for literacy through hurtful public encounters. He studied law, then worked as an engineer, diplomat, cultural informant, and commissioned officer in the Union Army. As a member of Grant’s entourage, he saved him from capture and became the first Native American to run a governmental office.

By the time Parker was ousted as Commissioner of Indian Affairs due to racism, the trade-offs he made in his lifetime came into question. To leave his homeland only to be forgotten by a friend who became president was a poignant turn of events. Unfortunately, the author only scratches the surface of Parker’s complex interiority. Parker’s tribal traditions, histories, and mythologies are covered in a condensed manner. Archival photos and maps add to the expertly researched material. The most heartfelt aspects of the book are the direct quotes from Parker’s autobiography; readers will delight in his eloquent statements.

A Civil War tale about perhaps the most accomplished yet little-known Native in U.S. history. (timeline, endnotes, bibliography, image credits) (Biography. 10-14)

WOLF CUB’S SONG

Bruchac, Joseph Illus. by Bear Don’t Walk, Carlin Reycraft Books (24 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 30, 2020 978-1-4788-6964-1 A wolf cub’s mother reminds her to find belonging and purpose as a member of her pack.

An expression of encouragement to small children who feel lonely and frightened as they tuck into bed, this vibrantly illustrated picture book begins with Wolf Cub curled up in her den. It’s dark outside, and she misses her friend the sun. She cries out in loneliness until Mother Wolf arrives to coax her into the starry night. A fuchsia-tinged aurora greets the mother and cub as they take their place on a hill with the rest of their pack and begin singing to Grandmother Moon. The illustrations in this gentle reminder of the importance of extended family are 102

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colorful and energetic; beginning with close-ups of the protagonist and her mother (including a particularly poignant picture of Wolf Cub crying with loneliness), the book ends with aerial and long-distance shots of the howling clan. One striking spread shows the silhouetted pack waiting for mother and cub to join them. Another page shows the wolves numerous as the stars, a tribute to the strength they can find in their numbers. Opening with occasional rhymes, the text may have readers looking for consistent meter and rhyme, but they will do so in vain. Overall, the illustrations in this book steal the show. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 24.8% of actual size.)

Celebrate this cub as she finds even young members have roles to perform with their pack! (Picture book. 3-7)

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MYRTLE

Bunce, Elizabeth C. Algonquin (352 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-61620-919-3 Series: Myrtle Hardcastle Mystery, 2 Morbid Myrtle, plucky aspiring investigator, must solve a dastardly railroad murder in late Victorian England.

Poor Myrtle. Father thinks she should have a holiday, because a 12-year-old girl needs some time away from solving murders. Horrors! He’s sending her off for “Family Amusements” at the seaside with Aunt Helena. Myrtle’s governess, Miss Judson, usually supportive of Myrtle’s unconventional interests, is a willing collaborator in the effort to keep Myrtle away from crime. When their train to the seaside is robbed, Myrtle is thrilled by the mentoring of a wonderful lady investigator. But the investigator herself is murdered, leaving Myrtle to find both the murderer and the jewel thief without assistance.

In the forbidding, unwelcoming coastal town, Myrtle uncovers myriad disquieting mysteries. Each new revelation builds upon the prior discovery until the tense, wonderfully eerie climax on a ramshackle amusement pier. The sleuthing is heartwarming and funny, featuring strong women and girls, packed with characters who genuinely care about each other. Myrtle’s story would be an undiluted treat, if only there weren’t plot points hinging upon insidious stereotypes about how disabled people’s bodies function and others’ right to know details about their abilities. Myrtle and most characters are White; Miss Judson is a Black woman from French Guiana; and a local teen photographer who befriends Myrtle is brown-skinned.

A delightful heroine and an exciting mystery mostly manage to outshine tired, harmful disability tropes. (historical note) (Historical mystery. 10-12)

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Readers will immediately draw parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic, but they’ll also find a well-constructed and enjoyable adventure. cleo porter and the body electric

FLOODED Requiem for Johnstown

Burg, Ann E. Scholastic (336 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-338-54069-7

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In first-person free verse, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, residents comment on their lives and dreams before and after the catastrophic flood of 1889.

The six main voices in the cast are younger than those in Jame Richards’ similarly versified account, Three Rivers Rising (2010)—at least until the aftermath, when Andrew Carnegie and other members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, two survivors who unsuccessfully sued them for damages, Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and, most poignantly, unidentified (but perhaps previously met) victims chime in. Burg invents some characters, but everyone given a first and last name is historical, and she takes such pains to describe the flood’s direct causes and actual events in the poems that her appended note seems superfluous. The expressed feelings and words are all her own, though, and if most of the speakers sound more like mouthpieces than distinct individuals, both the intensity of the tragedy and a sense of outrage that the negligent parties escaped punishment come through clearly. Except for the personified river’s contributions, which are nature notes cast into solemn, italicized streams of one- to three-word lines, everyone’s mildly elevated language and cadence sound so much alike that without the identifying labels it’s hard to tell one from another. Still, readers will come away with a clear idea of the flood’s causes, perpetrators, and shocking toll. An absence of descriptors points to a White default.

Moving, though more about the disaster itself than its human cost. (Verse historical fiction. 11-13)

out of her apartment to try to locate and save the life of the medicine’s rightful recipient. Accompanied by her electronic instruction tablet, Ms. VAIN, and a small observation drone, Cleo learns more about her world—inside the apartment and out—than she expected. Current readers will immediately draw parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic, but they’ll also find a well-constructed and enjoyable adventure. The theme of storytelling, particularly the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood,” is interwoven expertly. While the resolution may be wrapped a little too neatly for some readers, the thought-provoking material generated by questions of isolation, community, and privilege may make up for this. This novel would work especially well as an extended read-aloud, a choice for classroom discussion, or a book club selection.

A topical read that’s worth the attention. (Science fiction.

10-12)

CLEO PORTER AND THE BODY ELECTRIC

Burt, Jake Feiwel & Friends (288 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-250-23655-5

A mission to save a life pushes a young girl to discover the world around her.

In the not-too-distant future, the world goes into permanent self-isolation, with families living in massive tower blocks, sealed in separate apartments. Their only access to the outside is through drone-delivered supplies that arrive via tubes in their kitchens. While studying for her first test in the surgical candidate track, 12-year-old Cleo, who is White, receives a package with the right address, but the wrong name. Opening it and finding much-needed medical supplies, the young doctor-to-be breaks |

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The naïve pictures have an animated cartoon look that suits the quirky story. the abba tree

THE ABBA TREE

Busheri, Devora Illus. by Shkedi, Gal Kar-Ben (24 pp.) $17.99 | $7.99 paper | Dec. 1, 2020 978-1-5415-3466-7 978-1-5415-3475-9 paper What is the titular Abba Tree?

The flyleaf explains that Abba is the Hebrew word for father, but most kids will intuit the meaning, as little, bespectacled Hannah tries to communicate with her tall, lanky dad while he grabs a nap under his favorite carob tree. The carob has a special relation to the Jewish observance Tu B’Shevat, and Abba planted this particular tree for Hannah the year she was born.

Hannah wants to climb a tree, but she knows that this carob is young and weak. She finds others nearby: first the eucalyptus, whose “trunk [is] slippery,” then the pine, whose “bark [is] rough and scratchy,” and finally, the olive, with pollen that “tickle[s] Hannah’s nose.” Not finding any of these satisfactory,

she goes to wake Abba. When faced with her request, he wittily suggests: “Plant an Abba Tree.” Hannah positions her father upright with his feet as roots and his strong arms out straight, holding branches bearing an upside-down bat and a right-sideup owl. This Israeli import, translated from the Hebrew, is quietly amusing, but with no real explanation of the holiday’s meaning, it assumes a knowledgeable readership. The naïve pictures, created with a palette of simple greens, blues, and browns, have an animated cartoon look that suits the quirky story. Hannah and Abba both have dark hair and pink skin. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 25% of actual size.)

A sweet father-daughter tale well suited for homes familiar with Tu B’Shevat. (Picture book. 4-6)

THE DRUID AND THE DRAGON

Butcher, Kristin Crwth Press (232 pp.) $9.95 paper | Oct. 15, 2020 978-1-989724-03-3

A young girl must find the bravery within to save the kingdom.

Maeve has often gotten in trouble for being a daydreamer. Images go through her head of castles, kings, warriors, and dragons, but she never knew where these thoughts came from. The villagers in her small community think she is a simpleton except for Declan, the young Druid bard she meets at the market when she goes to sell eggs. When Declan introduces Maeve to Bradan, a seer who perceives Maeve’s daydreams more as visions, Bradan wants to help her develop her skills and reassures her that she is not foolish. Maeve is resistant until she meets Riasc Tiarna, a dragon that can communicate with Maeve through her thoughts and who lets her know that she is destined for a task that is extremely important—and she is the only one who can accomplish it. Maeve is stubborn and ornery at times, and her parents are abusive and mean, but insufficient characterization makes these traits feel foundationless. Unfortunately, the worldbuilding also lacks depth. The development of the chosen one trope doesn’t bring anything new to the genre but could be intriguing to young readers encountering it for the first time as the story comes to a satisfying end. All characters are cued as White.

A middling fantasy. (Fantasy. 8-11)

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OTTO P. NUDD

Butler, Emily Crown (240 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-5247-1775-9

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Animals and humans learn to work together and help each other.

Otto and Lucille are newlyweds who are expecting their first child. In almost every respect, they lead the life of a conventional middle-class couple, except… they are a pair of ravens, and Lucille is busy hatching an egg.

Otto is a clever but verbose and arrogant bird who reads Popular Science and spends much of his time assisting Bartleby Doyle, an elderly inventor who is building a flying machine in his workshop. Otto has a special relationship with 10-year-old Pippa Sinclair, with whom he trades treasures. When Doyle takes a nasty tumble while trying out the flying machine inside his workshop, Otto rushes to get help, setting in motion an extraordinary chain of events involving a whole neighborhood of characterful speaking animals and birds and even a few humans. In trying to rescue his human mentor, Otto is taught a few life lessons about respect and humility. Lucille tells Otto that to get what he wants, he will need to make amends to all the animals to whom he has been unkind. Readers will be drawn into the unstoppable excitement of the chase and may learn a few lessons in social behavior as well as a little science along the way. Most human characters are assumed White.

An original offering; part quirky and rambunctious animal adventure, part physics lesson, part friendly morality tale. (Fiction. 8-12)

Readers new to these works will get a good idea of the major issues and events of fifth, sixth, and seventh grades through each speaker’s memories, and all will be left with yet another set of lessons about the importance of forgiveness. These Vermonters are probably all White.

A satisfying culmination of a middle school chronicle.

(Fiction. 9-13)

GOODBYE, MR. TERUPT

Buyea, Rob Delacorte (416 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-525-64798-0

Eighth graders Peter, Jessica, Danielle, Anna, Jeffrey, Luke, and Alexia celebrate their final year with Mr. Terupt, who is still in their lives as their adviser.

The fourth book in the series follows 2015’s Saving Mr. Terupt. Mr. Terupt’s fans will be happy to see their favorite characters return with a bucket list of epic projects. Health issues—diabetes and cancer—become the focus of two successful projects; Luke researches the cows on Danielle’s farm; Jeffrey tries to make wrestling weight by starving himself; family relationships grow and change, and so do their own. There’s even a chaste kiss. All of them, but especially brokenhearted Peter, struggle to adjust to the idea of a future without Mr. Terupt’s support. Buyea follows the narrative pattern of his previous books, chronicling the school year month by month in short chapters with alternating first-person narratives that reflect the speakers’ personalities. |

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LEMON BUTTERFLY

Cao Wenxuan Illus. by Mello, Roger Reycraft Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 30, 2020 978-1-4788-6975-7

A solitary journey in pursuit of an idyllic vision transforms the life of a butterfly.

From the outset, this read-aloud presents dynamic textillustration interplay that defies a singular or straightforward narrative. As the words introduce the protagonist’s “vivid colors,” the picture shows only the lemon butterfly’s silhouette, cut out in paper white against a vermilion background. The use of negative space continues throughout the book, suggesting other dimensions—perhaps expansive, possibly emotive—into which viewers have a peek. Wildly divergent illustrations tantalize: A feast of colors, shapes, styles, abstractions, and perspectives invites viewers to linger over each double-page spread as a unique composition and ponder the visual narrative belying the printed text. What compels the protagonist to leave lush, verdant surroundings and the company of other butterflies for some other “field of flowers”? Does the lemon butterfly feel a pang of regret when encountering the “barren wilds,” depicted as powerful, interlocking black lines angled against a stark white background? Why are hints of human presence visible in the absence of textual reference to people? Is the white horse significant beyond its role as messenger and guide? What is the message? This edition is translated from a Chinese text, and the twist at the end of this tale appears added for the English version, satisfying Western story-arc conventions through a creative reinterpretation and altogether surprising conclusion.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 11.375-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

One of a kind—an intriguing, sophisticated study in contrasts that reimagines the potential of picture-book art. (Pic­ ture book. 4-9)

THE UNEXPLAINABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF MARS PATEL

Chari, Sheela Walker US/Candlewick (304 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5362-0956-3 Based on the serialized mystery podcast of the same name, this novel follows the adventures of 11-year-old Manu “Mars” Patel and his buddies as they attempt to find Aurora Gershowitz and Jonas Hopkins, two of their missing friends.

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pals (and fellow delinquents)—the strong JP McGowan, the extremely smart Randall “Toothpick” Lee, and the psychic Caddie Pratchett—realize that they’re the only ones who are willing to admit that children in the Puget Sound area are going missing. As they pursue the mystery, the friends figure out that children have actually been going missing from around the world, and they begin to suspect brilliant billionaire Oliver Pruitt (who is vaguely reminiscent of Elon Musk) is the culprit. Transcripts from Pruitt’s podcast are interspersed throughout the text, offering clues to ardent listener Mars. Better-developed characters and a tighter narrative—especially in the first half of the novel—would have made for a more memorable and gripping read, especially given the intriguing plot points. The cliffhanger ending might result in fans anxiously awaiting what comes next.

Some characters’ identities bring diversity to the cast—Mars is Indian; nonbinary JP uses the pronouns they/them.

Despite the exciting premise, an unexceptional SF mystery. (Science fiction. 10-13)

HAPPY NARWHALIDAYS

Clanton, Ben Illus. by the author Tundra (72 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-0-7352-6251-5 Series: Narwhal and Jelly, 5

The holidays have come for Narwhal and his friends.

In this fifth installment of the Narwhal and Jelly series, the eponymous pals are looking forward to cold waters, songs, and the arrival of the Merry Mermicorn, a “part mermaid and part unicorn and completely mer-aculous” being who “spreads sheer cheer and pure awesomeness wherever she goes!” Narwhal and Jelly exchange gifts and enjoy undersea snows, all the while dropping their trademark facts about ocean life (this time taking a slant toward all things chilly). This slim volume houses six different vignettes, among them “The Perfect Present,” in which Jelly agonizes over finding Narwhal the right gift, and “The Mean Green Jelly Bean,” a story the friends write and illustrate about an unappealing sentient jelly bean who is flavored like “picklescum snail-slime puree.” Clanton’s art is instantly recognizable, with its simply wrought characters and cool blue palette punctuated with splashes of contrasting color. Full of “sheer cheer” itself and with an emphasis on kindness and friendship, this volume doesn’t miss a beat alongside its predecessors. Although it’s never explicitly stated, most young readers will discern that Narwhal’s holiday is a thinly veiled riff on Christmas traditions, with its central visiting figure who’s akin to Santa, Narwhal’s peppermint-stick–striped horn, and carols like “Jingle Shells” and “We Fish You a Merry Mermicorn.”

A holiday treat for fans. (Graphic fantasy. 6-10)

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Generous use of wordless panels and close-up, exaggerated reaction shots lends both speedy pacing and cinematic flair. the witches

DENY ALL CHARGES

Colfer, Eoin Disney-Hyperion (336 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-368-04504-9 Series: The Fowl Twins, 2

A scheme to inveigle Artemis Fowl’s younger sibs into helping steal a huge trove of gold doesn’t go at all well for the schemers.

Introduced in Fowl Twins (2019), 12-year-olds Myles and Beckett kick off their second round of exploits, dealing in midair with a guided missile to which their hybrid pixie-elf chaperone Lazuli Heitz has been strapped, then go through a series of equally ridiculous captures and rescues to several showdowns with bad guys, saving not only tons of gold, but thousands of Irish teens at a flash convention from the vengeance of a maddened, human-hating warrior dwarf. How, you ask? By employing a unique skein of complementary abilities: Myles, as dapper and at least as egotistic as his older brother, brings the mental wattage, and Beckett supplies the clever hands, unexcelled martial prowess, and a gift of tongues that extends to animals and plants. Along an improbably daft plotline that even the seldom-reflective Beckett finds “fart-centric,” Colfer also strings dazzling displays of high tech, heartwarming peeks at the family dynamics of the closely knit if decidedly eccentric Fowl clan, dolphin-back rides, huge blobs of slime (some of it explosive), and a climactic exhibition of prejudice gone off the rails that is intense enough to leave readers queasy.

As a teaser for future adventures, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, arch archvillain from the previous volume, pops up for a cameo at the close. The human cast presents as White.

More high-octane Fowl play. (Fantasy. 10-12)

THE WITCHES The Graphic Novel

Dahl, Roald Illus. by Bagieu, Pénélope Scholastic (304 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-338-67743-0

Even being transformed into a mouse doesn’t keep an 8-year-old orphan boy from turning the tables on a convention of child-hating witches in this graphic makeover of the classic novel from 1983.

Generous use of wordless panels and close-up, exaggerated reaction shots lends both speedy pacing and cinematic flair to this version—though so deliciously terrifying is the Grand High Witch once she takes off her disguise that viewers may be compelled to linger over every hideous detail. The disgusting witchly potion concocted to turn all of Britain’s children into mice, plus blood-splashed scenes of the unnamed young hero getting his tail chopped off and the Grand High 108

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Witch—herself transformed into a (fantastically feral-looking) mouse and smashed to smithereens—are showstoppers too.

The plot remains unchanged overall except that Bruno Jenkins, the unsuspecting lad the witches use as their test subject, is switched for an unnamed and more competent girl and the protagonist’s cigar-smoking, purple-haired Grandmamma has both her thumbs. But unlike the 1990 film, here our protagonist remains a mouse as he and his new mouse friend charge off at the end to serve just deserts to all the witches of the world.

The boy and his elderly caregiver are brown-skinned, and the witches are ethnically diverse.

A helter-skelter take on Dahl’s gleefully gross rodentine ruckus. (Graphic fantasy. 7-10)

THE WHO’S WHO OF GROWN-UPS Jobs, Hobbies and the Tools It Takes Davey, Owen Illus. by the author Little Gestalten (96 pp.) $24.95 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-3-89955-149-5

Learn (some of) the tools of (some of) the trade(s).

Bold posterlike illustrations work in tandem across each oversized double-page spread to define a selection of tools used by a variety of professions and hobbies, both real and fantastical. The verso page highlights from three to eight items commonly used by each profession while the recto page presents a practitioner accoutered with the depicted items and accessories. The people represent a range of skin tones, ages, and sizes, and the jobs and hobbies are equally diverse, ranging from astronaut to superhero. The professions are not arranged in any apparent order, which makes each page turn a bit of a surprise.

Equally surprising are the tools selected for each profession: The skater’s (actually a skateboarder, a light-skinned woman) do not include a helmet but do include other safety gear while the fisherman (a White, bearded old salt) is depicted with no actual tools at all. It certainly is visually interesting, but it’s disappointingly reliant on stereotype and will probably do little to encourage creative thought. Although there is gender and racial diversity on display, Davey disrupts too few preconceived roles: The pilot looks like a White man, as do the scientist and the conductor; the boxer is a hulking Black man. The only Black character approaching a STEM trade is the “nerd” hunched over a laptop and carrying a bag of comic books.

More style than substance. (Informational picture book. 6-10)

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THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN COMICS

de Panafieu, Jean-Baptiste Illus. by Barman, Adrienne Holiday House (80 pp.) $22.99 | $12.99 paper | Dec. 1, 2020 978-0-8234-4578-3 978-0-8234-4583-7 paper

A visual history of our planet’s long career as a nursery for living things.

A brown-skinned paleontologist in a lab coat patiently guides three chattering listeners through the ages from Earth’s fiery formation through climate and other geophysical changes to the present day’s “sixth period of mass extinction.” As she goes, she rolls out polysyllabic terms and nomenclature at a rate that may leave casual readers struggling to keep up but will undoubtedly elevate the pulses of devoted young STEM-winders. Side comments from her audience add common-language context (“The Carboniferous is the age of coal…” one says, while the other concludes, “…and also the age of roaches!”). Though blocks of narrative crowd Barman’s panels, her cartoon portraits of alien-looking sea life evolving first into extinct, popeyed plant eaters and toothy, slavering predators, then finally familiar creatures such as us, flesh out the fossil story in lighthearted but reasonably accurate detail. (“Lighthearted” except for one scene of a poached rhino with its horn bloodily removed, that is.) Animals hog the spotlight, and a specious claim that all stars have planets mars the closing vision of new kinds of life arising both on our own world and elsewhere. Still, this French import offers an overview as coherent as it is chronologically broad…particularly for readers not intimidated by encounters with plesiadapiforms, perissodactyls, Gomphoteria, and like sesquipedalia. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.5-by-15.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 77% of actual size.)

Readers with a less-than-burning interest may struggle… or find that interest kindled by the end. (partial glossary, index) (Informational picture book. 10-12)

ELVIS PUFFS OUT A Breaking Cat News Adventure

Dunn, Georgia Illus. by the author Andrews McMeel Publishing (176 pp.) $11.99 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5248-5819-3 A compilation of comic shorts about quirky cats putting on a newscast.

Lupin, Elvis, and Puck are the reporters at CN News, reporting on all the goings-on in the house of The Man, The Woman, The Toddler, and The Baby (all are White). The family and their three cats (the inspiration for creator Dunn’s webcomic-turned–graphic novel series) experience what would, to nonfeline viewers, be an unexciting world. But 110

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through the eyes of the newscaster kitties, everyday events— a snowstorm, making a salad, getting a new bathmat—become newsworthy. The episodes highlight the absurdities familiar to those who live with cats: A kitten has an important reason for almost knocking a plant off a shelf; the cats all competitively climb the clean laundry; they bop one another in the head in competition for a favorite perch. Alas, none of the artistic possibilities of the comics form are present here. Lettering is unexciting, crammed into overstuffed speech bubbles, and the artwork shifts scale and sometimes floats in a formless setting.

The lack of section or chapter markers between the unconnected and usually brief (two to three pages) stories makes following the action confusing, as many of the scenes don’t have a clear punchline or conclusion. But the antics of the feline narrators are charming, especially for animal lovers.

Sweet and appealing, but there’s no shortage of better crafted, more dynamic, and funnier cat comics. (activities, paper dolls) (Graphic fantasy. 8-11)

QUILL SOUP A Stone Soup Story Durant, Alan Illus. by Blankenaar, Dale Charlesbridge (40 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-62354-147-7

From South African, an animal retelling of the “Stone Soup” folktale.

The stranger in this version is Noko, a porcupine. Having traveled without food “through the Valley of a Thousand Hills,” he arrives in a village hungry. When the villagers refuse him food, he creates a “thick and rich” soup with nothing but hot water and three of his own quills—and, of course, all the other ingredients that the villagers contribute. Impressed by Noko’s claim to have fed this soup to the king, they fork over carrots, mealies, beans, spinach, and more. The king, not present but imagined, is a lion; the villagers are Meerkat, Warthog, Rabbit, and bunches of others. The setting, called a village, is both bustling and ambiguous—an amalgam of village, forest, and jungle.

The scenes are intensely crowded and bursting with energy; both animals and backgrounds are styled in two dimensions, so everything overlaps on one plane. These animals aren’t living in a specific static location so much as a world of bright red, yellow, blue, green, black, and white shapes and patterns. Occasionally an element seems industrial, such as small rounded rooms connected by ladders and tunnels that evoke factory pipes, but it’s not definite. Flap copy says that illustrator Blankenaar took inspiration from African sources ranging from broad to specific: “Tanzanian artwork, the wood sculpture of Western Africa, and the costumes and masks of the Bwa people of Burkina Faso.”

Visually dynamic. (Picture book. 3-7)

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Evans’ depictions are sharply delineated, deeply textured digital woodcuts, almost three-dimensional and touchable. abc animals

ABC ANIMALS

Evans, Christopher Illus. by the author Peter Pauper Press (52 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2020 978-1-4413-3463-3 A plethora of mammals, reptiles, birds, and more fills this striking alpha-

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There’s a cat, an elephant, a robin, and others that are instantly recognizable, along with several that are slightly familiar, like a badger, an iguana, and a lemur. A nautilus, a xenopus, and a urial are exotic and possibly completely unknown to many child readers. Each animal is presented in a double-page spread.

Upper- and lowercase letters in a serif typeface and a modified cursive appear at the top of the verso page, within faint lines that might be seen on a school handwriting chart or practice exercise. A large uppercase letter fills the center of the page, with a design and color that mimics the illustration of the animal. Somewhere on the page is a silhouette of the animal, most often in light beige. The animal’s name is printed in a thin sansserif at the bottom of the page. There is no other text. Evans’ depictions of each animal on the recto page go far beyond simple illustration. They are sharply delineated, deeply textured digital woodcuts, almost three-dimensional and touchable. The creatures’ eyes are incredibly expressive, gazing directly at readers as if offering their souls for inspection. The zebra on the book’s jacket is an exact duplicate of the one on the last page, with the addition of slightly raised texture that cries out for a reader’s delicate touch.

Wonderful. A stunning, breathtaking achievement. (illustrator’s note) (Picture book. 4-10)

to achieve her dream of earning a scholarship and attending school for the first time, the two strike up a friendship greater than the differences in class and nationality that divide them.

Together, they weather Mimi’s family secrets, Sakina’s pursuit of her dreams, and the sometimes-violent lead-up to an upcoming election. Faruqi’s descriptions of modern Karachi are rich with sensory detail, and her exploration of Mimi’s complicated feelings about her father make for a beautifully layered character arc. Sakina, however, feels defined almost entirely by her poverty, flattening her story and making her character’s development less satisfying.

A thoughtful portrait of friendship across class lines in modern Pakistan. (Fiction. 9-14)

A THOUSAND QUESTIONS

Faruqi, Saadia Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-06-294320-0

When 11-year-old Houston native Mimi Scotts lands with her mother in Karachi, Pakistan, for summer vacation, she’s not sure what to expect—especially from her Pakistani grandparents, whom she is meeting for the first time.

Mimi’s mother grows increasingly distracted and distant as she navigates the fallout of her failed marriage to Mimi’s White father. Mimi grounds herself by writing to her estranged father in her journal. Although most servants in Mimi’s grandparents’ enormous house are excited about the American arrivals, Sakina Ejaz, a girl Mimi’s age who works as an assistant to her head cook father, couldn’t care less. Between her family’s poverty and her father’s diabetes, she has enough to worry about.

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By focusing on the children and their feelings, the story of their journey becomes the sad, universal one of so many refugee children past and present. mexique

MEXIQUE A Refugee Story From the Spanish Civil War

Ferrada, María José Illus. by Penyas, Ana Trans. by Amado, Elisa Eerdmans (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-0-8028-5545-9

On May 27, 1937, 456 children were evacuated from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. This book depicts their transAtlantic voyage to Mexico.

Text and illustrations work hand in hand to tell their story.

Adults carrying bundles and escorting children arrive at the port where the children are to embark. As the children board, the adults hug them tight. Through the voice of one of the children, readers learn of their fears and expectations. They see the older ones reassuring the younger ones, especially at night.

They observe their songs and games, sad re-creations of the war scenes they have witnessed. They experience the voyage, which never seems to end. And finally the children arrive: “We move forward. We think that the war stayed behind. But it’s not true— we bring the war in our suitcases.” By focusing on the children (all depicted as White) and their feelings, the story of their journey becomes the sad, universal one of so many refugee children past and present. Sepia-toned images with the occasional touch of muted reds convey the grimness of the experience. The afterword informs readers the children arrived in Mexico with the expectation their stay would be short and they would soon reunite with their families back home. Little did they know this would be a permanent exile, and most of them would never see their families again.

Specific yet universal in its narration, this makes the refugee experience accessible to young readers. (Picture book. 6-10)

WE BELIEVE IN YOU

Ferry, Beth Illus. by Idle, Molly Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-250-31200-6

A poem celebrates family philosophies and affection for the young.

Eight four-line stanzas accompanied by stylized illustrations of animal parents and babies make up this hortatory collection of happy thoughts. At the opening, a bighorn ram, ewe, and lamb ascend a steep incline (“We believe in climbing higher”), a mole and baby kiss (“We believe in digging deep”), bright yellow flowers bloom (“We believe in drinking sunshine”), and a sloth snuggles with its baby (“We believe in beauty sleep”). The “we” voice of encouragement and cheerleading continues throughout. From tadpoles to lions, Idle’s big-eyed, pretty animals are all recognizable in warm pastel colors and rounded forms.

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multihued collection of bunnies. Even the jellyfish has babies (“We believe in shining light”). Some lines are more opaque than others: A family of brown bears eating honey that drips, improbably, from a paper-wasp nest illustrates the lines “We believe that groups are smart / We believe in smacks of sweetness.” A family of dotted rays swims across the double-page spread that follows: “We believe we’re works of art.” A monarch caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly appear in the last few pages (“We believe that life’s a journey”) before readers see that the bighorn sheep family has reached the summit: “We believe in you.” (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch doublepage spreads viewed at 30.3% of actual size.)

Something light for a new-baby gift or child embarking on a journey. (Picture book. 2-7)

VEG PATCH PARTY

Foges, Clare Illus. by Murphy, Al Faber & Faber (32 pp.) $15.95 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-5713-5285-2

When the cows go to sleep, the veggies rock!

As the sun goes down on the farm, all of the animals close their eyes; it is time for bed. But not for the vegetables! They peer cautiously from their planted rows: “All clear?” a cauliflower head asks. “Yup!” another replies. “The vegetables start waking up. / They stretch and rise and shine. / They drag out lots of stages / Cos it’s VEGGIE PARTY TIME!” An Elvisinspired potato is the first performer, fronting The Chips. Then comes the pumpkin, who gets the crowd going wild. Parsnips, turnips, peas, and carrots; everyone is dancing! The rollicking refrain is hard to resist: “SO conga like a carrot, / Party like a pea, / Rock out like a radish, YEAH! / And boogie like a bean! / It’s called the veg patch party. / It’s muddy, loud and fun… / So get your veggie wiggle on / And rock out EVERYONE!” A thunderstorm comes, but even that doesn’t stop them. The veggies are in their element: rain and soil! Murphy’s bright, boldly outlined vegetables jump (and jive) off the page. The veggies are anthropomorphized with googly eyes, grins, and rubbery arms and legs—readers may not want to eat these veggies, but they may feel more inclined to munch on regular ones after a couple readings. Sneaky nods to bands give adult readers a chance to chuckle as well.

Fun for storytime; inspirational for the dinner plate too.

(Picture book. 3-6)

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WHERE IS OUR LIBRARY? A Story of Patience and Fortitude Funk, Josh Illus. by Lewis, Stevie Henry Holt (40 pp.) $13.39 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-250-24140-5

MAX MEOW Cat Crusader

Gallagher, John Illus. by the author Random House (240 pp.) $12.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-593-12105-4 Series: Max Meow, 1 Meow-za! There’s a superhero in the city of Kittyopolis known as the Cat Crusader—but who is he really?

Max Meow, an orange-and-white cat who dons clothes and a bow tie, is visiting his scientist friend, Mindy Microbe, a curly haired human with brown skin, when he eats a bite of a meatball that Mindy found in outer space. All of the sudden he has superstrength, an electric tail, and the power to fly! With his new skills, he might as well become a superhero. Agent M, an evil mouse, and Big Boss, a shadowy creature, want the meatball for their own nefarious purposes, so they send Robot Reggie to retrieve it. Meanwhile, Max and Mindy have an argument and stop speaking. Just as everything seems at its most dire, Max realizes it’ll take more than superpowers to save the day. Full |

THE THREE BROTHERS

Gay, Marie-Louise Illus. by the author Groundwood (40 pp.) $19.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-77306-377-5

Young brothers Finn, Leo, and Ooley set off to find wild animals in the woods near their farmhouse.

The art—involving pencils, watercolor, wax crayons, and white ink—immediately draws readers in. Three Muppet-like boys with dark hair and beige skin comfortably share a pale-green sofa and a stack of books while birds fly above them and ghostly images of nonthreatening wild mammals surround them. Pastels and muted primary colors form a pleasing palette that continues throughout. “Every night, Finn reads a story to his brothers.” The text goes on to say that the boys enjoy stories with adventures and wild animals; middle child Leo suggests that tomorrow, the boys should go exploring for wild animals. By this time, little Ooley is already asleep, setting the stage for more toddler behaviors that will charm young readers. The text is simple, suitable for independent, transitional readers and for reading aloud. As the boys trudge through deep snow—with Ooley in his bear suit always lagging behind— readers, but not the boys, see ghostly animals in and around tree trunks. While the older brothers have a brief discussion that hints of the effects of climate change on animal populations, readers—but not Finn and Leo—will see Ooley happily sliding away down a hill. Other than brief mentions of Grandpa, no adults clutter this tale of siblings who are resourceful, creative, and kind. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.5-by-16-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Gentle, humorous, and fun. (Picture book. 4-8)

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The New York Public Library’s iconic lions go in search of their vanished Children’s Center.

Following on Lost in the Library (2018), bibliobeasts Patience and Fortitude, stunned to find the shelves in their beloved children’s library on 42nd Street empty, set out on a rhymed, nocturnal hunt that takes them past a number of Manhattan literary landmarks and into several library branches before ending (spoiler alert) at the entrance to the Center’s new location across the street. Whether or not the Covid-19 pandemic throws the timing of this blatant bit of marketing for a loop (the opening has already been delayed once), the tour is rich in pleasures for children’s-lit fans—not only for its glimpses of library buildings and interiors both historic and up to date (Manhattan ones anyway, with one quick trip to the Bronx…Staten Island, as usual, gets the brushoff), but for the visual references to new and older classics that Lewis packs into many scenes. A formal announcement of the move at the end includes a key to books and branches included in the art. There are no human figures in sight until a final, thinly but diversely populated, daylight view of the old and the newly renovated libraries facing each other on Fifth Avenue. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 75% of actual size.)

Part valentine, part press release. (Picture book. 6-8)

of humor and action, this new series opener will be catnip for fans of Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man. Bold, bright colors are used in busy, cartoon-filled pages. The layout is crisp and easy to follow, and short, quickly consumable chapters end with questions that entice readers to continue. Although the plot is a bit overly drawn out near the end, the pace remains zippy. The ending includes a big reveal, and an epilogue sets up intrigue for the next book.

A superhero cat and an intrepid girl scientist: What’s not to like? (drawing instructions) (Graphic fantasy. 7-10)

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THE LAST MIRROR ON THE LEFT

Giles, Lamar Illus. by Adeola, Dapo Versify/HMH (272 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-358-12941-7 Series: Legendary Alston Boys, 2 The Legendary Alston Boys of Logan County are back in a new multiverse adventure.

In the series opener, readers were introduced to the detective team of cousins Sheed and Otto Alston when they went toe-to-toe with the time-stopping Mr. Flux. A mirror “borrowed” from the Rorrim Mirror Emporium in downtown Fry to resolve that showdown sets off the journey of this sequel, as the boys are magically reminded by Missus Nedraw that the Emporium is no ordinary house of mirrors. Yes, behind the mirrors lie whole new worlds where Missus Nedraw and the menacing-looking Judge reign over the Multiverse Justice System. The word is that they need Otto and Sheed to recapture an extraordinarily dangerous criminal who has escaped, but something seems not quite right about this setup—something more insidious than the reality-bending rules of this dimension they’ve entered, including a gang of spiders who call themselves the ArachnoBRObia. Even more complicated, Otto worries that Sheed is in need of a checkup but knows he will refuse to self-advocate for a doctor’s visit. Otto can’t just let his detective partner lapse into what might be an even more serious health condition. This heartwarming adventure centers on the caring relationship between two Black boys while driving home a lesson about what justice might truly be.

A fantastic second addition to an already-acclaimed series. (Science fiction. 8-12)

FANTASTIC TALES OF NOTHING

Green, Alejandra & Rodriguez, Fanny Illus. by the authors Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $12.99 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-06-283947-3 On Nothing, a decadelong truce binds a tenuous peace between the Human Empire and the Volken Court—but now humans and volken alike are disappearing as the encroaching Darkness spreads across the lands.

Nathan Cadwell, a charismatic gambler, miraculously magics himself out of the clutches of ferocious debt collectors.

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Fae that comes to his rescue. Naming his savior Haven, Nathan and his newfound friend escape to a nearby town, where mercenaries kidnap the pair. The mercenaries—a volken and a traitorous half volken/half human—escort Nathan and Haven to the Empire’s capital, where Prince Naoki and his entrusted guard, Ren, enlist the group to uncover the truths behind the Darkness; the goddesses’ child, Lerina; and the mysterious source of Nathan’s magic. Loaded with humor and thrilling magical combat, this spin on the chosen one trope wrings out a lot of fun despite some oddball pacing. A few meta-jokes draw needless attention to the formulaic narrative, but strong characters and intriguing worldbuilding make for a gratifying hero’s journey. Featuring text in in-universe Ancient (actually Esperanto) and Common (English) languages, as well as a racially diverse cast, this webcomic-turned–graphic novel ends on a promise of a sequel.

It may be Nothing, but this adventure’s really something.

(Graphic fantasy. 8-12)

THE WAY PAST WINTER

Hargrave, Kiran Millwood Chronicle (284 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-4521-8155-4

A young heroine sets off into an endless winter to rescue her brother from a mythic bear.

This Scandinavian-inspired fairy tale starts off strong with a mesmerizing legend of the bear Eldbjørn, who protects the forest. Three siblings—Sanna, the oldest girl; brother Oskar; and the youngest, Mila—learn of the destruction of the woods and the heart-tree to which the bear is drawn. The story then jumps forward many years—Mama died after Pípa, their fourth sibling, was born, and Papa left five years back, never to return.

It is endless winter, and the children are hungry and cold and abandoned. The morning after an enormous stranger with golden eyes accompanied by a group of men arrives at their door, 17-year-old Mila discovers 16-year-old Oskar missing. The chase—in a sleigh pulled by dogs—to find and save him begins.

The edgy atmosphere of the closed-in cabin is rapidly replaced by adventure as Mila’s drive to locate her brother brings to life stories Mama told them about the Bear. Imagine Narnia’s Lucy rescuing brother Peter from Philip Pullman’s armored bears.

The focused plot contains Brothers Grimm–like scenes of horror and death. The book is quite violent for younger readers, but the spare storyline and simple characters may feel too young for older ones. Still, there are those who will embrace this frozen fantasy. Characters are White.

An atmospheric tale for older readers wanting an actionfocused fairy tale. (Fantasy. 10-15)

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A lively tour conducted by a knowledgeable curator. modern art explorer

MODERN ART EXPLORER Discover the Stories Behind Famous Artworks

Harman, Alice Illus. by Bloch, Serge Thames & Hudson (96 pp.) $19.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-500-65220-6

MISS MINGO AND THE 100TH DAY OF SCHOOL

Harper, Jamie Illus. by the author Candlewick (40 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-5362-0491-9 Series: Miss Mingo

Miss Mingo and her kindergarten class of animals are back, this time celebrating both the 100th day of school and one another’s amazing capabilities.

In mid-February, it’s time to look at the students’ 100th Day projects, and they are as varied as the students themselves.

Hippo’s mom has brought his born-yesterday sister, who weighs 100 pounds; Octopus has brought 10 groups of 10 shells each from his octopus’s garden; Koala shares their teddy bear collection, which is ironic because Koala is not a true bear but a |

ATLAS OF RECORD-BREAKING ADVENTURES A Collection of the Biggest, Fastest, Longest, Toughest, Tallest and Most Deadly Things From Around the World

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Illuminating descriptions of 30 artworks from the Centre Pompidou accompany strong reproductions.

The introduction delineates modern art (1860s to the late 1960s) from contemporary art—“everything after that”—but informs readers that the museum does not include any works before 1905 and that the book includes a few works from the late 20th and 21st centuries. A number of female artists are included as well as a commendable range of artists of color, several non-Western. Sections ranging from two to four pages feature a large reproduction, enhanced by Bloch’s amusing cartoons that pick out themes from the artworks and sometimes include caricatures of the artists. The unusual selection of artists working in different styles, media that vary from paint to bottle caps, and sassy commentary makes this volume stand out from others. With contemporary language, humorous titles, some stories about the artists’ love lives (comments about Pablo Picasso’s misogyny and relationships are especially pointed), and perspectives that encourage readers to consider these works on their own terms, the book becomes a lively tour conducted by a knowledgeable curator. In describing Slave Auction, 1982, by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Harman explains that the artist studied symbols and embedded them in his work. Noting some of those symbols, she asks: “Can you see how these signs and ideas might relate to slavery, and how black Americans might still experience danger today?”

Revealing, sometimes snarky, always lively. (timeline, glossary, list of artworks, index) (Nonfiction. 11-16)

marsupial. As in the previous titles, Harper shares fascinating factoids about each species in a small font: “House centipedes can travel 15 inches (38 centimeters) per second. That’s like a person running 58 feet (18 meters) in a second!” As the presentations continue, Alligator, stressed out, asks to go next and shares 100 seconds of deep breathing to relax everyone. Harper’s cartoon illustrations highlight the class’s enthusiasm and emotions. Though many pages group items to facilitate counting, not every 100 is countable: Centipede’s legs aren’t all in the frame, and Pelican’s project is the fact that this bird dives “into the ocean from 100 feet in the air.”

The 100th day of school has never looked this diverse.

(Picture book. 4-7)

Hawkins, Emily Illus. by Letherland, Lucy Wide Eyed Editions (96 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-7112-5565-4 Series: Atlas of . . .

Readers will gain a record-breaking knowledge of trivia.

Take a trip across all seven continents with explorers as they discover factoids galore. The explorers, one who presents White and the other with light-brown skin, travel the world, often accompanied by a local guide, gleaning information along the way. The pages depict surreal landscapes and maps featuring slightly anthropomorphized animals, such as a bindle-carrying bird and pirate hat–wearing caiman. Each double-page spread concentrates on one area and is splattered with tiny text that provides uneven levels of information. For example, in one box readers learn that cheetahs “accelerate from zero to 55 miles per hour in just three seconds” and that ostriches are “the fastest creature on two legs.” Great! But how fast are ostriches?

The same page notes that a cheetah can “reach a top speed of over 60 miles per hour.” Wait! Isn’t it 55 mph? Other facts are equally vague. Readers learn that the Greenland shark is “the world’s oldest vertebrate,” but does this mean longest-living vertebrate or the vertebrate that has been around the longest?

They are also instructed to hold their breath with a Cuvier’s beaked whale, “nature’s best air-breathing diver,” but aren’t told how long these whales can go between breaths. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.8-by-15.2-inch double-page spreads viewed at 84% of actual size.)

Readers after records should stick with Guinness. (seekand-find game, index) (Nonfiction. 10-12)

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The simple narration drives home for young middle graders how far kindness and compassion can go in making newcomers feel welcome. the stray and the strangers

THE STRAY AND THE STRANGERS

Heighton, Steven Illus. by Iwai, Melissa Groundwood (96 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-77306-381-2

Told from the perspective of a stray dog, the story of refugee migration from the Middle East through Turkey and across the tumultuous waters of the Mediterranean Sea to the island of Lesvos in Greece.

Kanella is a lonely stray, distrustful of both dogs and humans as she fends for herself. But when refugees begin to arrive, shivering, tattered, and afraid, Kanella finds new purpose and new companionship. Soon a makeshift camp is built to house the refugees before they embark on the next stage of their perilous journey. Kanella slowly grows accustomed to the camp community, befriending a worker who offers her water, food, and warmth. Most of the new strangers leave within a few days, but one little boy does not. His parents are missing. Like Kanella, he, too, is alone. The two share food and become playmates, and when the boy has nightmares, Kanella comforts him, snuggling close to him throughout the night. When officials visit for inspections, the futures of both Kanella and the little boy are called into question. An afterword both provides historical context and reveals that the story is based in fact. The simple, third-person, past-tense narration is tightly focused on Kanella’s perceptions and experiences, a strategy that drives home for young middle graders how far kindness and compassion can go in making newcomers feel welcome.

Based on a true story, a poignant, heartwarming introduction to the lives of refugees. (Historical fiction. 7-10)

SNOW IS FUN

Henry, Steve Illus. by the author Holiday House (32 pp.) $15.99 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-8234-4600-1 Series: I Like To Read Some woodland friends explore and enjoy the snow.

This entry in the I Like To Read series uses short sentences, one per spread, with repetitive vocabulary and at most one stretch word. The setup uses cinematic strategies. “Snow falls” shows a tan rabbit near its hole in the base of a tree, two gray mice sharing a hole above it, as flakes fall all around. “Snow is white” pulls back the view to show a third hole, a squirrel just peeking out. “Snow is quiet” sees the rabbit and the mice taking a nap amid the falling snow. Gradually, an owl in a fourth hole and a small bird on a branch are introduced as the snow “blows,” “falls and falls,” and “is heavy.” Finally, on the seventh spread, a rather slim story begins as the weight of the snow breaks the 116

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bird’s branch and sends it plummeting. The concerned friends try to help, but the bird rescues itself by flying, and the animals play together: “Snow is fun with friends.” Henry’s illustrations are cartoon-cute, but the picture clues may not be enough for readers to guess unfamiliar words—the “quiet” and “heavy” pages may be especially opaque. Literacy practice wins out over entertainment value in this early reader; children aren’t likely to reach for it again.

Fulfills a need but without a solid story. (Early reader. 4-6)

CLOSER TO NOWHERE

Hopkins, Ellen Putnam (416 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-593-10861-1

Sixth grade cousins learn to navigate complicated family dynamics.

Cal came to live with Hannah and her parents nearly 15 months ago. The two share a mean-spirited, alcoholic grandmother; their Italian heritage; and red hair. Hannah, a gymnast and dancer, has enjoyed stability, attention, and affection from her parents. Cal’s life has been filled with the loss of his mother at age 9 followed by a period of abuse and neglect by his now-imprisoned father. Cal suffers from PTSD and a defensive kind of vigilance while Hannah resents that Cal’s peculiar behavior makes him a target at school.

Brief chapters in the first-person voices of Cal and Hannah reveal their divergent personalities. Imaginative Cal describes the world in terms of “Fact or Fiction,” his statements and answers offering sometimes wryly ambiguous observations of his experience. Practical and more certain of herself, Hannah’s poems with the header “Definition” are a jumping-off point for sharing glimpses into a more physically and emotionally privileged childhood. Hopkins’ use of free verse provides a canvas for sure-handed, brush-stroke development of the backstory and plot and emotional investment and identification with the characters. A school lockdown and shooting at the climax of the story allow Cal to demonstrate his new ability to connect with others and to see the ways that kindness can come back around.

Compassionate and compelling. (author’s note) (Verse fic­ tion. 10-14)

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SPIRITS AMONG US

Howard, Sherry Reycraft Books (240 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 22, 2020 978-1-4788-7027-2

WELCOME TO THE WORLD

James, Helen Foster Illus. by Brown, Petra Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-53411-012-0

A family of red squirrels introduces a new baby to the waiting world in James and Brown’s latest collaboration.

A single day of games and exploring stands also for a baby’s first year of discovery and family. The day begins with yawns, sunshine, toys, and smiles. From there, the squirrel kit ventures outside to sing songs, dance, and play hide-and-seek.

Back inside for bathtime bubbles, a snuggly story, and finally sleepy goodnights. A quiet, parental voice narrates, addressing the baby directly, and the sparse text carries readers through a day of welcoming “hellos” ranging from pet names (“Hello, sunshine”; “Hello, cutie”) to words that capture the moment (“Hello, wiggles”; “Hello, cuddles”). In typical fashion, Brown’s illustrations capture the sprawling fun of outdoor games as deftly as they do the quiet intimacy of a bedtime routine. Rich, |

TINY MONSTERS The Strange Creatures That Live on Us, in Us, and Around Us Jenkins, Steve & Page, Robin Illus. by Jenkins, Steve HMH Books (40 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-0-358-30711-2

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An aspiring ghost hunter who uses a motorized wheelchair becomes a sleuth when a robber strikes her Kentucky hometown.

Twelve-year-old Scooter, a selfdescribed “sensitive,” is fascinated by ghosts; she and her best friend, Harlan, chronicle their ghost-hunting vigils on their YouTube channel, “Spirits Among Us.” But the spirit she really longs to meet is her Momma, who died in the car accident that injured Scooter’s spinal cord a year ago. When Scooter attempts to record the ghost of her great-great-great-grandfather, a repentant former slave owner, she captures something else: a clue to the robberies plaguing her family’s holler, Chamber’s Corner. Can she and Harlan—and her trusty Labrador, Max—identify the culprit before her family’s paintball business is hit? Heavy foreshadowing weakens the mystery, but Scooter’s conversational narration and a dash of suspense keep the pages turning. A tender exploration of family and loss forms the story’s heart. Scooter’s close-knit extended family is warmly supportive despite her Marine dad’s stern exterior, and the ending is sweet if somewhat pat. Howard—who relearned how to walk as a child—portrays Scooter’s disability realistically, including her hopes of recovery and insecurity about the appearance of her legs. Most characters default to White, though a description of Harlan’s tightly curled black hair may lead readers to imagine him as Black.

A cozy, mildly suspenseful read. (Mystery. 8-12)

warm tones of sunshine and ruddy fur invite readers to cozy up, whether in a lap or under covers or snuggled next to a new sibling. Despite the predictably traditional family setup (clothing and accessories suggest an opposite-sex set of two parents), what could easily tumble into saccharine, shower-gift banality manages instead to convey the immediacy and timelessness of a delightful day with loving caregivers. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 80.7% of actual size.)

A single day, a first year—a lovely addition to little ones’ shelves. (Picture book. 0-4)

Illustrations based on microscope images reveal a world of fantastic, sometimes frightening-looking creatures who share our world.

Jenkins’ familiar collage illustrations, set on stark backgrounds, seem ideally suited for display of the monsters in miniature described in this latest offering. From the alien-appearing thistle mantis to the roly-poly tardigrade, he gives readers multiple views of faces, feelers, teeth, and claws, all highly enlarged; the creature’s overall appearance; and its original size. There are worms that live inside us, mites that live on our outsides, insects that bite us, and intriguing creatures whose lives have nothing obvious to do with ours, including a marine scale worm that lives at a volcanic vent deep in the Pacific Ocean. Each is introduced with a lighthearted headline (“It’s a Sleepover!” for the house dust mites that live in pillows and bed linens). Most creatures get a single page; a few get a full double-page spread.

The extent of enlargement is always noted; some actual sizes are too small to see. An illustrator’s note explains that the electron microscope images are black and white; the illustrator used color “to highlight the forms and details” of the microscopic creatures; but the dragon springtail’s blue body and orange spines are accurate. Alas, the book has no page numbers, but the thumbnail images accompanying further information on each critter in the backmatter correspond to the order in which the animals appear.

Another impressive outing by a popular pair. (Informa­ tional picture book. 4-10)

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TWINS

Johnson, Varian Illus. by Wright, Shannon Graphix/Scholastic (256 pp.) $16.66 | $12.99 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-338-23617-0 978-1-338-23613-2 paper Series: Twins, 1 Sixth grade presents new challenges for the Carter twins.

It’s the first day of school, and African American identical twins Maureen and Francine Carter are having mixed feelings. Maureen is nervous about middle school: She has a new confusing schedule, cadet corps, and, worst of all, classes without Francine. She worries that middle school will swallow her alive. Francine, however, is looking forward to everything sixth grade can offer. She can’t wait to be in new surroundings, try new classes, and grab new opportunities to shine, like joining the student council race. Outgoing Francine is all set to start campaigning, but when Maureen decides to run as well, it threatens to tear the two apart. As Francine pushes to stand out, Maureen yearns to fit in, and neither sees eye to eye. Johnson, in his first graphic novel, encapsulates the rocky transition from the comfort of elementary school to the new and sometimes-scary world of middle school. The sibling bond is palpable and precious as each conflict and triumph pushes them apart or pulls them together. Wright’s illustrations fill the pages with vibrancy and emotion. The diverse student body, careful touches in the Carter home, and background elements in the mall scenes stand out for their warmth, humor, and realism. The small details that differentiate Maureen and Francine, while maintaining their mirrored features, are delightful.

A touching, relatable story of identity, sisterhood, and friendship. (Graphic fiction. 10-14)

THE BOY AND THE GORILLA

Kramer, Jackie Azúa Illus. by Derby, Cindy Candlewick (49 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-7636-9832-4 In the wake of Mom’s death, a gorilla helps a child process grief and open up to Dad so they may heal and find hope again together.

As shadows grow long at the funeral and attendees cross a gray-green field, a gorilla looks on. During the reception, the ape’s heavy mass quietly fills the living room where the child sits. But once outside, in Mom’s garden, the child talks with the gorilla. The unnamed child asks about death and dying, and where Mom went, and if she’ll ever come back. The gorilla’s honest yet reassuring responses offer the child relief in the quest to understand. Feelings of hurt, confusion, isolation, and even resentment are acknowledged, but the gorilla’s gentle 118

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presence and wise responses help to recenter the soul. Through dialogue, the child begins to understand how Mom’s love continues to live on. When the child bravely reaches out to Dad, the two begin to find comfort and solace in their love for Mom and each other. The artwork, full of expressive brush strokes and washes of color, offers a poeticism that perfectly matches the text. The gorilla’s large purple shape serves as a visual metaphor for the emotional weight of the child’s sadness. Derby’s flowing application of paint conjures a sea of emotions, and the paintings appear as if viewed through a wall of tears. Wellplaced pops of bright color are both striking and uplifting. As father and child (both present White) hug, talk, and walk hand in hand under a sweeping sky, the gorilla fades into the distance.

Luminous. (Picture book. 4-8)

THE GREAT BUNK BED BATTLE

Kügler, Tina Illus. by the author Scholastic (48 pp.) $4.99 paper | $23.99 PLB | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-338-56167-8 paper 978-1-338-56168-5 PLB Series: Fox Tails, 1 Two fox kits aren’t ready for bed yet in this early reader by a Geisel Medal honoree.

Gray fox Fritz and red fox Franny are enthusiastic playmates: eager to build, to explore—and to avoid bedtime. Their story is divided into three parts, and while each could be read alone, they flow well as one narrative. In “Ready for Bed,” Fritz and Franny rambunctiously prepare for bedtime (“I can brush my teeth faster than you!” Franny boasts as water, toothpaste, and foam spill everywhere) and have a “good-night dance party” despite their caregivers’ best efforts to settle them down. In “My Bunk Is Better,” Fritz and Franny compare and contrast their top and bottom bunk beds while pretending the furniture is a treehouse and cave, a ship, a submarine, and so on. In “Let’s Trade?” the duo swap beds as each tries to prove that their respective bunk is better. Kügler seamlessly weaves repeated words and phrases into the story, so as readers enjoy Fritz and Franny’s antics, they will expand their vocabularies and build reading confidence without feeling as though they are practicing. Kügler expertly uses character-associated colors and a vertical page layout to foster visual literacy and provide visual clues for readers. The majority of the text is in speech balloons.

A rollicking romp for new readers. (Graphic early reader. 4-6)

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The brisk pace, poignant descriptions of a changing friendship, and realistic handling of the protagonist’s growing self-awareness will keep readers riveted. distress signal

DISTRESS SIGNAL

Lambert, Mary E. Scholastic (272 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-338-60744-4

SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS A Tale of Music and Math LaRocca, Rajani Illus. by Sreenivasan, Archana Lee & Low Books (40 pp.) $19.95 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-88500-897-8

Once upon a time there lived a rajah who, despite his good nature, lacked the mathematical ability to properly govern his kingdom….

As a result, his people suffer. One such is Bhagat, a nimblethinking and hardworking but impoverished young man who lives with his mother in a distant village. Bhagat is a passionate singer, so when he hears that the king is holding auditions for the royal troupe, he travels to the palace to audition. Due to his family’s poverty, Bhagat is able to carry only 1 rupee and seven links from his mother’s wedding chain. When he arrives at his destination, the innkeepers demand a ring in advance for every night that Bhagat stays, but the goldsmith charges 1 rupee per link to break it. How can Bhagat make the necklace last without wasting a single link? With some clever reasoning and base two math, Bhagat makes his resources stretch long enough to get |

ELIZABETH WEBSTER AND THE PORTAL OF DOOM

Lashner, William Little, Brown (336 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-368-06289-3 Series: Elizabeth Webster, 2

Seventh grader Elizabeth Webster handles another legal matter.

After defeating the demon Redwing in a court of law, young Elizabeth expected her life to settle down for a little bit, but the law never sleeps! Balancing homework, friends, and her job at her father’s legal firm, Webster & Spawn: Attorneys for the Damned, is tricky enough even before a ghostly mother wails for Elizabeth to protect her long-lost son, Keir McGoogan. The case should be simple enough: Free Keir from his supernatural pact and reunite mother and son. But while Keir’s case gets held up in the courts, Keir must stay with Elizabeth and attend middle school with her. Will Keir’s peculiar behavior expose Elizabeth’s double life? Will Elizabeth be able to successfully argue Keir’s case?

Will Elizabeth’s father learn to see her as more than just a legal assistant? This sequel provides a spirited romp through a world of ghosts and goblins with the effortlessly charming Elizabeth at the front of it all. It brings back the exciting mix of legal and paranormal activities that made the first entry such a charmer, but the emotional arc doesn’t hit the same sweet spot as the first.

Readers thrilled to return to this world will find plenty to enjoy, but others will find this entry a bit ho-hum. Main characters are White; there’s a bit of diversity among Elizabeth’s friends.

A sturdy case. (Mystery. 10-14)

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A class trip turns into a fight for survival when four sixth graders are lost in the Arizona wilderness.

Lavender Blue-Morris has been looking forward to the wilderness science camp since kindergarten. For an astronomy and ham radio buff like Lavender, three days in the wild feel like a dream come true. When Lavender’s best friend, Marisol, gets angry with her and pairs up with Rachelle, the class queen bee, for the bus ride instead of Lavender, who has to sit with John, it begins to look like this won’t be the amazing trip she’d hoped for after all. Things go from bad to worse when a prank goes wrong and Lavender is responsible for getting herself, Marisol, Rachelle, and John hopelessly separated from the rest of the group. The unforgiving Arizona bush presents treacherous obstacles like a flash flood, wild animals, and dehydration.

Hardest of all, the conflict between Lavender and Marisol—and struggles among the rest of the group—threatens to tear them apart when they need each other the most. The brisk pace, poignant descriptions of a changing friendship, and realistic handling of Lavender’s growing self-awareness will keep readers riveted. Marisol is bilingual in English and Spanish, hinting at some diversity in the class, but physical descriptions are minimal, and most characters are assumed White.

Perilous desert survival action and relatable BFF conflict combine for a fast-paced disaster read. (Thriller. 9-13)

an audience with the rajah—and a new, unexpected opportunity. This heartwarming rags-to-riches story is accompanied by vivid illustrations that pulse with detail, movement, and color.

However, the middle of the story consists mostly of expository text detailing different ways to divide the set of seven rings into multiple parts, an abstract diversion that brings the plot to a grinding halt. An author’s note discusses base 10 and binary systems. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-22-inch doublepage spreads viewed at 36.1% of actual size.)

A cleverly imagined story with a delightful premise but uneven plot. (Picture book. 5-8)

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The illustrations reflect a reverence for the majestic Chinese landscape. the musician

THE MUSICIAN

Liu, Xuefeng Illus. by Grassholz, Gunter & Wan, Yuxi Reycraft Books (32 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 22, 2020 978-1-4788-6978-8 Series: Lofty Mountains and Flowing Water Imported from China, a visually captivating retelling of a classic Chinese

folk story.

This sincere and ancient tale depicts the legendary friendship of Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi. Both share a true understanding of music and bond when they meet by chance through their deep appreciation of the guqin, a traditional Chinese string instrument. Boya tells Ziqi how he was introduced to the guqin as a young boy and quickly mastered the technique needed to play proficiently. Though he was skilled, however, his music failed to connect to his audiences. Boya was sent to Penglai Island, fabled home of the immortals, to await a new teacher only to realize that it is nature that will inspire him to create his greatest compositions. Ziqi is moved by Boya’s ability to capture the essential beauty of nature, and Boya in turn is grateful to have found a companion who truly understands his music. Like Boya’s masterpieces, the illustrations reflect a reverence for the majestic Chinese landscape. Towering mountains that disappear into an endless mist and verdant river valleys are lushly portrayed with vibrant colors in a style emulating traditional Chinese brush art. There is a lovely balance between the bold landscapes and detailed, close-up images that allow readers to connect to the strong emotional resonance of the story.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 11.375-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 32.7% of actual size.)

Elegant and evocative, this culturally authentic folktale beautifully conveys the powerful bonds of music and friendship. (Picture book. 5-9)

WHO IS THE BUCKS BANDIT?

Loveless, Gina Illus. by Bell, Andrea Andrews McMeel Publishing (192 pp.) $13.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-5248-6089-9 Series: Diary of a 5th Grade Outlaw, 3

Could the new fifth grader be a thief?

In this third installment in the Diary of a 5th Grade Outlaw series (loosely based on the Robin Hood mythos), green-hoodie–clad Robin Loxley decides that she will befriend Wilu Johnson, the new student at Nottingham Elementary, no matter what. Robin’s friends, the Merry Misfits, try to welcome him in, but he is standoffish and aloof, proclaiming he is a “solo kid.” At Nottingham, good behavior and grades are incentivized with Bonus Bucks; when Wilu’s arrival coincides with the 120

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mysterious disappearance of Bonus Bucks, he is immediately suspected as the perpetrator. Robin is sure he is innocent, but will she be able to prove it? Loveless’ newest installment follows its predecessors’ format, with short, bustling chapters punctuated with distinctive crayonlike full-color illustrations and comics panels. Despite the breezy pacing, Robin’s friendship journey with Wilu feels tedious and heavy-handed, lessons like “mean nicknames are a bad call” plopping into readers’ laps.

In addition to the forced cheer and morality, series conventions, such as the rapping twins and Robin’s references to foods, feel contrived and formulaic instead of like comforting touchstones.

Robin is White while the rest of the Merry Misfits are diverse.

Wilu has brown skin, and the fact that suspicion immediately falls on him, a kid of color, is not interrogated.

Doesn’t come close to the bull’s-eye. (author’s note) (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 7-10)

THE MASK THAT LOVED TO COUNT

Luo Xi Illus. by the author Trans. by Wang, Helen Cardinal Media (32 pp.) $9.99 paper | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-64074-118-8

An N95 mask with counting ability (!) discovers how “special” it is.

Narrating, it speaks directly to readers/listeners, exhorting them to be aware of how important face gear and other personal protective equipment are in these critical times. The mask counts how many people are buying masks at a pharmacy, how long it takes for the doctor who buys it to get to his hospital, how many boxes of donated medical supplies are headed to “the center of the epidemic, “and how many intravenous drops help a hospitalized young virus patient feel better; this mask does plenty of reckoning. The mask isn’t actually worn by anyone, but then the child, recovered and homeward bound, donates the mask to a different doctor. The mask now realizes its purpose: “to give people hope and to help save lives.” This volume, a Chinese import, is one in a new series of hopeful, nonfrightening books aimed at helping youngsters understand the corona emergency. Whether they’ll buy the “counting mask” premise is another, er, story, but the narrative calmly conveys the ideas that there’s a “dangerous new virus” (never named) around and that all masks are protective. Busy, lively illustrations effectively show frontline medical personnel in full protective gear. Both primary characters have dark, straight hair and pale skin; others are racially diverse.

Should help children understand the crisis and the need to undertake currently recommended wellness measures.

(Picture book. 4-7)

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THE EXCEPTIONAL MAGGIE CHOWDER

Lute, Renee Beauregard Illus. by Valentine, Luna Whitman (256 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 1, 2020 978-0-8075-3678-0

THE RUNAWAY SHIRT

MacMillan, Kathy Illus. by Castaño, Julia Familius (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-64170-251-5

As a mother does the laundry, she takes a break to play a pretend game with her young child.

When she starts folding the laundry the child can be seen climbing into the laundry basket behind her. She folds a few items and then reaches over to fold a shirt. Only this is a special shirt—the child is inside it, but she pretends to pay this detail no mind. “First one sleeve, then the other. Then I fold it in half,” she says, folding the child’s knees up over crossed arms. “But the shirt [does] not stay folded.” When she repeats the operation and places the shirt alongside the rest of the folded clothes on the bed, “the shirt [does] not stay on the bed.” And so the game proceeds, with the mother trying to put the shirt into a drawer and then trying to drape it on a hanger. When at last she decides to wear it instead, the game |

THE PRINCE AND THE GOBLIN

Madge, Rory & Huff, Bryan Illus. by the authors Tantrum (213 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-951710-37-8 Series: Goblin Trilogy, 1

A goblin seeking adventure gets his wish and more.

In the lush Kingdom of Yore below the Gobble Downs hills lives Hob, a goblin like no other. While other goblins are smelly, ill-mannered, and unreliable, Hob is clean, loves reading, and dreams of big adventures inspired by his books. Hob’s life is forever changed when he crosses paths with a prince and dwarf who are taken as prisoners during an ambush. Hoping to start a new life and lured by the possibility of a quest, Hob helps them escape and embarks on an adventure of a lifetime filled with danger, secrets, and the hunt for the Lost City. Intricate worldbuilding and descriptive passages of the landscapes and inhabitants of Yore will transport readers to a fantasy land featuring goblins, gnomes, a three-headed troll, and a witty apprentice with magical abilities. Though the pace starts out slowly, most characters, both human and otherwise, are well rounded. The focus on Hob, the sidekick of the story, is a refreshing take on the heroic adventure quest genre. Scattered throughout are simple, cartoonlike, grayscale illustrations that complement the text.

The prince is blond and White; the apprentice and the main antagonist are brown-skinned.

An enjoyable adventure. (map) (Fantasy. 8-13)

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Twelve-year-old Maggie Chowder had been looking forward to a promising summer in Renton, Washington.

However, things get progressively worse after her father loses his job and takes an unpaid role in a web series to pursue his dream of acting. Several changes that Maggie is not ready for quickly follow: Her mother starts a stressful new job at a grocery store; the family moves from Maggie’s beloved home to a small two-bedroom apartment, where she has to share a room with her 4-year-old brother, Aaron, who has autism; and to make matters worse, Maggie’s comic-book–hating Grandma Barrel comes to visit and her parents cannot afford to send her to Junior Forest Ranger Camp although she desperately wants to become a ranger and protect the wilderness like her favorite comic-book character, Eagirl.

Maggie finds that she is increasingly embarrassed about her family’s situation, especially since her best friend, LaTanya Richards, moves into a fancy new house and gets a puppy after her father gets a job coaching the Seahawks football team. But with time Maggie learns the value of family and friends. Lute’s well-rounded characters capture the difficulties of change, and Valentine’s black-and-white comic strips featuring Eagirl mirror Maggie’s feelings about her life. Maggie and her family seem to be White by default; LaTanya’s ethnicity is not specified.

Empathetic, realistic, and very enjoyable. (Fiction. 9-12)

is up. Mother and child tumble over in an embrace, laundry scattering all over. “ ‘I love you, shirt,’ she whispered. ‘I love you, Mommy,’ said the shirt.” Many a young reader will giggle in recognition of similarly enacted pretend games of their own. The illustrations, unfortunately, are a little stiff, and their faces and body language do not reflect as much emotion as the game would suggest. Mother and child are depicted with brown hair and olive skin.

Sweet, if a little bland. (Picture book. 3-5)

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BOLD TALES OF BRAVEHEARTED BOYS

McFarlane, Susannah Illus. by McKenna, Brenton; Howe, Simon; Huynh, Matt & Joyce, Louie Aladdin (128 pp.) $19.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-5344-7359-1 Four reimagined fairy tales each provide a different example of what it means to be brave.

Gentle Jack the giant lives a peaceful life with his beloved mother until a diminutive thief, also named Jack, from another land breaks into his home. Puzzle-loving Hansel and his daring sister face the dangers of the dark woods together when their aunt and uncle abandon them. Christian, a former shepherd boy, risks his life to tell the truth when swindlers take advantage of the emperor’s vanity. Despite doubts about his destiny, Prince Leo Charming battles an evil fairy to break a curse. As the verse preface suggests, each of the boy protagonists displays internal strengths unrelated to their size or physical prowess to overcome a trial. Every hero earns a happily-ever-after by learning an undisguised lesson. Some of the tales make an effort to challenge gender stereotypes by including girls with physical strength and athletic abilities, but they never expand beyond a binary depiction of gender. The last story, a new version of “Sleeping Beauty,” removes the kiss between the prince and the princess. Instead, Aurora’s mother models consent by asking Prince Leo if she may kiss him in thanks for saving their whole kingdom. Illustrations in a green palette accompany the text.

Apart from in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which the illustrations seem to depict an Asian setting, all of the characters seem to be White.

Overwhelming sweetness with underwhelming diversity.

(Fantasy. 6-10)

NO VOICE TOO SMALL Fourteen Young Americans Making History

Ed. by Metcalf, Lindsay H.; Dawson, Keila V. & Bradley, Jeanette Illus. by Bradley, Jeanette Charlesbridge (40 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 22, 2020 978-1-62354-131-6

Tributes in prose and poetry to children and teens of today who have spoken out to support a cause or protest injustice.

Budding activists in search of child role models beyond the high-profile likes of Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg may well draw inspiration from this less-intimidating—but no less brave and worthy—lineup. For each, a poem by one of 14 poets and a laudatory paragraph flank an engaging, soft-focus portrait

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a poet who relates to an aspect of the activist’s identity.” New Yorker Charles Waters, for instance, gives a shoutout to 6-yearold Samirah “DJ Annie Red” Horton, “proudly / representing the People’s Republic of Brooklyn” with her anti-bullying rap; Zach Wahls, founder of Scouts for Equality, poses with his two moms next to a triolet from Lesléa Newman. Other contributors, including Carole Boston Weatherford, Janet Wong, and Joseph Bruchac, honor young people making good trouble in areas of contention as varied as climate change, gender identity, immigration law, safe drinking water, and gun violence. The contributors are as diverse of identity as their young subjects, and as a sidelight, the poems are cast in a variety of identified forms from free verse to reverso, cinquain, and tanka.

Never too soon to start stirring things up: “We may be small / but / we / can / ROAR!” (contributor bios, notes on poetic forms) (Informational picture book/poetry. 6-12)

LUCY LOPEZ, CODING STAR

Mills, Claudia Illus. by Zong, Grace Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House (128 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-8234-4628-5 Series: After-School Superstars, 3

Everyone in third grader Lucy Lopez’s family has a “special thing”: Her mom practices salsa dancing, her dad loves gardening, and her older sister, Elena, is obsessed with computer coding.

Lucy’s not sure what her “thing” is yet, but the sisters have a club in which they try their hands at different skills to earn selfawarded merit badges, and Lucy can’t wait to find out what her “thing” will turn out to be! Lately, however, it seems as though all Elena wants to do is sit in front of a computer and work on her coding projects. Looking to connect, Lucy enrolls in an after-school coding camp with kids readers will recognize from other installments in the After-School Superstars series. Lucy is introduced to basic computer coding terms and concepts like algorithms, loops, and conditional statements. She is surprised when, instead of being excited about another activity to do together, Elena is mad that her little sister is copying her newfound hobby. Lucy is torn between excitement about her knack for coding and her sister’s irritation. Can Lucy code a game for the end-of-camp Coding Expo that will change her sister’s feelings about having two coders in the family? Chapter-book readers will enjoy watching Lucy navigate the exciting world of computer coding and the complexities of having an older sister.

Illustrations depict characters of color, and Lucy and her family are coded Latinx, though ethnicities are not specifically named in the text.

Explore sister dynamics in this gentle read. (coding resources) (Fiction. 7-9)

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The shiny, cartoon illustrations are bright and engaging, easy to see from the back of the room. thanks a ton!

KINGSTON AND THE MAGICIAN’S LOST AND FOUND

Moses, Rucker & Gangi, Theo Putnam (288 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-0-525-51686-6

THANKS A TON!

Moyle, Sabrina Illus. by Moyle, Eunice abramsappleseed (34 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-4197-4334-4 Series: Hello!Lucky Finding the right way to say “Thank you” can be difficult (and zany).

A young elephant in a pink-and-white–striped shirt and blue overalls wonders how to thank various friends for their help with various small tasks but struggles with the right words. As the elephant considers the concept of gratitude, rhyming couplets describe what the little pachyderm may offer in thanks: “You hugged me when my day was hard, / so you deserve this SAINT BERNARD!” With each imagined token of thanks, the elephant’s small pink wagon is seen to house more and more creatures and items, culminating in a final kitchen-sink gag at the end of the book. The logic of the gifts is nonsensical, dependent on the rhyme scheme rather than any sense of commensurate reciprocity, but the comedic effect will be an immediate |

THE NAME I CALL MYSELF

Namir, Hasan Illus. by John, Cathryn Arsenal Pulp Press (40 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-55152-809-0

An isolated child struggles with self-esteem as they discover their identity diverges from familial and societal expectations.

Ari’s parents call them a name that does not fit, a name for old snoring kings. They “idolize” their mom, a good listener who lets them try on dresses, but they fear coming out to their dad, who insists boys act and present themselves in a certain way. Year by year, from ages 6 to 18, Ari documents their life experiences and the distressing changes of puberty as they explore their gender and their attraction to boys. The first-person narrator introduces themself in the opening by the name their parents gave them. Right after this, they explain, “But I call myself something else.” This true name remains a mystery until the final page of text, when they introduce themself again as Ari. The layout follows a predictable pattern, with text on the left side of each spread and an accompanying illustration on the right side. Illustrations depict Ari and their family with light brown skin, but the narration gives no indication of ethnicity or racial identity. Troublingly, Ari has no trustworthy friends, and their mom is their only apparent support, though a passive one at best. While the narrative resolves on a note of hopeful self-identification, this coming-of-age story largely focuses on struggle, waylaying happiness until the character is 17.

Sadly, a typically harrowing representation of a young transgender person without supportive community. (Picture book. 5-8)

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A 12-year-old boy goes on a wild journey across realms to save his long-lost father.

Kingston James and his Ma left Echo City, Brooklyn, four years ago when his magician father, King Preston the Great, disappeared into a magic mirror during a duel at the Mercury Theater. Now they’re back to save their brownstone from imminent foreclosure. King takes a break from packing up the family’s magic shop and—along with his cousin Veronica and friend Too Tall—discovers several cryptic messages at the Mercury. Using a secret cipher his father taught him, he decrypts them, working under the assumption that his father is guiding him. He finds a mysterious, carved, wooden box—the Lost and Found—setting him on an adventure to unlock secrets of the Realm. Soon King finds out that he has accidentally opened a portal into the Realm, triggering a countdown before his father fades away into nothing. Time is quickly running out, and blinded by hopes of rescuing his father, King puts his loved ones in jeopardy; now he’s the only one that can save them. This brisk, first-person narrative will appeal especially to readers who like puzzles and illusions. The engaging plot and history of Black magicians make up for the stilted dialogue. King and the majority of other characters are Black.

A likable, otherworldly adventure with a bit of a mystery. (map) (Fantasy. 8-12)

crowd pleaser at storytimes. Savvy educators and caregivers will use these rhymes as a chance to introduce new vocabulary words to youngsters. The shiny, cartoon illustrations are bright and engaging, easy to see from the back of the room. A double gatefold as the second-to-last rhyme reintroduces the titular phrase and will provide an unexpected explosion of color and characters. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.5-by-19-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Thanks for this! (Picture book. 5-8)

KITS, CUBS, AND CALVES An Arctic Summer Napayok-Short, Suzie Illus. by Campeau, Tamara Inhabit Media (32 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-77227-274-1

A curious girl named Akuluk visits her family in Nunavut to learn the language and life ways of her ancestors.

When Akuluk arrives at her aunt and uncle’s on a solo trip to visit her northern relatives, she also meets her aunt’s new

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The sparse, lyrical text lends the book a cozy, poetic quality that is both soothing and whimsical. night walk

puppies, a litter destined to become sled dogs in the Arctic. She goes to bed, eager for morning, when she will head out into the Arctic Ocean on her uncle’s boat. Bouncing across the waves toward her family’s old campground, she and her relatives see an orphaned beluga taken in by a nearby pod. At every turn, Akuluk learns about the natural world by listening to oral histories, making observations about different species, and using modern technology. Her uncle teaches her about the relationship between polar bears and foxes, and when she returns home, she is surprised by a souvenir on her bed. While the plot feels a bit buried by a great deal of cultural and environmental information, the book will appeal to children who are interested in earth sciences. The story’s pacing is meandering and dense, but the illustrations help by capturing the dynamic northern world with realistic colors and excellent details. An Inuktitut dictionary and pronunciation guide round out this book for older children. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 38.2% of actual size.)

An information-rich tale of reciprocity between Arctic families and the natural world. (Picture book. 5-8)

IN A FLASH

Napoli, Donna Jo Wendy Lamb/Random (400 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-101-93413-5 Two Italian sisters try to survive in Japan during World War II. In the summer of 1940, not long after their mother’s death, 8-year-old Simona and her 5-year-old sister, Carolina, move with their father to Tokyo, Japan, where he will begin a job as the chef at the Italian embassy. Over the next few years, the girls master the Japanese language and learn Japanese customs in order to fit in with peers who believe they are living in luxury even though they are servants within embassy walls. Being a Westerner in wartime Japan soon becomes difficult. In 1943, following Italy’s surrender to the Allies, all Italians are forced into internment camps, and the sisters are separated from their father. Escaping, they set off on a long and treacherous journey to stay alive in a country that now sees them as the enemy. Through the voice of Simona, this novel offers an unusual perspective on the World War II years in Japan. The girls’ journey is constantly challenging, as they often face sudden, unexpected risks. Because the story spans multiple years, there is a lot of information about Japan’s homefront experience during the 1940s, including patriotism, propaganda, underground anti-war efforts, depletion of resources, and bombings. Topics of xenophobia, identity, assimilation, loss, friendship, and family are intertwined through the perspective of a young person navigating tumultuous events.

A new, interesting perspective on a history rarely told. (map, postscript, notes on research, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 8-12)

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YOU AND ME AND EVERYBODY ELSE Niebius, Maria-Elisabeth Illus. by Farina, Marcos Little Gestalten (32 pp.) $19.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-3-89955-855-5

This German import reminds children that feelings, as well as some physical impulses, are universal.

The illustrations, which appear screen-printed, depict individualized children of various ethnicities and racial presentations in different settings. Their varied skin tones are rendered in deeply saturated colors and include realistic shades, such as beige and brown, but also stylized ones, such as blue, orange, mossy green, and literal black. The verso of each spread begins with “Everybody,” the remainder of the text exploring various feelings and physical states of being. Everybody feels happiness, fear, ennui, loneliness, anger, and more. Everybody plays, eats, sleeps, “gets hurt sometimes,” and dreams. In one spread, readers observe that “everybody pees,” some while standing and some while sitting down, and the book doesn’t shy from depicting children relieving themselves in various positions.

The spread about sorrow verges on reductive. It states: “Just remember that the sadness will pass and you will be happy again,” even if it’s not always that simple for children, or perhaps some adults in their lives, suffering from severe depression. That aside, the book is an inclusive and generous reminder to children that everyone experiences intense feelings, which may help some readers feel less isolated or even, in some cases, reduce their anxiety. Unfortunately, there’s a glaring grammar error toward the book’s close (“The thought of some treats can make some mouth’s water”).

A welcome, if slightly uneven, addition to the growing canon of children’s books about emotional literacy. (Picture book. 4-10)

NIGHT WALK

O’Leary, Sara Illus. by Arscott, Ellie Groundwood (32 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-55498-796-2 When a child struggles to fall asleep, a night walk with Dad around the neighborhood proves transformative.

Through the lit windows of the houses in her neighborhood—and in what appears to be a nearby, more urban area— the narrator gets a look at a shopkeeper who is grumpy by day but joyful by night and a Muslim family with hijabi female members having a cozy, late dinner. The unnamed protagonist marvels at how much happens all around town after bedtime.

The child’s father recounts that when he was younger, he lived in a rural area where he could walk through the dark for miles

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without encountering anyone else. His observation makes the child reflect on the home they share and how everything that’s known and unknown about it—the day and the night, the friends and the strangers—contributes to a sense of belonging.

The sparse, lyrical text lends the book a cozy, poetic quality that is both soothing and whimsical. The illustrations incorporate diverse body types, skin tones, and faith markers, and they represent a variety of homes ranging from two-story houses to apartment buildings. The book’s only flaw is that the text, while well written, meanders such that the story’s ending feels more like a surprise than a conclusion to the plot arc. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-16.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 65.1% of actual size.)

A sweet rumination on family, home, and belonging. (Pic­ ture book. 2-6)

THE EFFICIENT, INVENTIVE (OFTEN ANNOYING) MELVIL DEWEY

A panegyric for modern library science’s most renowned and despicable founder.

Leaving all reference to Dewey’s long history of sexual harassment and open racism and anti-Semitism confined to two sentences in the small-type afterword, O’Neill presents him as a man on a mission—obsessed with efficiency, determined “to make the biggest difference in the world in the least amount of time,” and fired up with the notion that success for this country’s immigrants hinged on free public libraries that were professionally staffed (by women, because they were capable but, wink wink, cheaper than men) and filled with materials that could actually be found. In a staccato narrative replete with boldface words in ALL-CAPS and exclamation points (“Hardworking!

Determined! Visionary!” “Controlling! Demanding! Manipulative!”), the author tallies many of his achievements, from the Dewey Decimal System (given only quick mention here) and the first library school to professional associations and specialized library furniture. She also tacks on a complimentary quote from him about women…as if that would somehow make his behavior excusable. Fotheringham captures his manic sense of purpose by twice depicting a locomotive smashing through books and points to his actions’ common result by surrounding Dewey elsewhere with much smaller, uniformly White colleagues and contemporaries looking, mostly, bemused or outright peeved. “A pretty good legacy,” the author concludes, “don’t you think?” “Checkered” might be a better description.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 75% of actual size.)

As disingenuous a profile as ever was. (timeline, source list, photos) (Picture book/biography. 7-10)

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A cat is excruciatingly bored.

Doodle Cat, drawn as a red, cat-shaped silhouette with frantic eyes and sharp whiskers its only markings, sits on a blank white page. “I AM BORED,” says Doodle Cat. The next two pages have plain, matte-black backgrounds, and Doodle Cat stands (upright like a human) in a yellow spotlight. “EXCUSE ME EVERYONE I AM BORED! / HALLO?” This is no lowenergy boredom; it’s desperate, bug-eyed, shrieking boredom.

Suddenly, a crayon appears on the floor. Doodle Cat squints in suspicion, tries to eat soup with it, dances with it, and hears the crayon say, “I’m for doodling.” Aha! Doodle Cat, ever selffocused, nabs credit for that revelation (though if the concept of doodling is so new, why did the character self-identify as “Doodle Cat” all along?) and has a brain explosion that Farrell illustrates in a full-bleed spread of chunky psychedelic designs.

The arc is now about drawing (it’s called doodling, but much of it is more deliberate than that). The breathless pace and forced brashness—two separate, explicitly bum-focused pages (“Here’s my bum”) plus Doodle Cat “surfing through time and space on a wave of farts with Wizard Susan,” an unexplained White human who never appears before or after—make every page seem like a new bid for readers’ attention.

There’s not much substance or cohesion here, but it may work to corral—briefly—little ones who won’t stop running around. (Picture book. 2-5)

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O’Neill, Alexis Illus. by Fotheringham, Edwin Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills (40 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-68437-198-3

DOODLE CAT IS BORED

Patrick, Kat Illus. by Farrell, Lauren Scribble (32 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-950354-34-4 Series: Doodle Cat

HOWL

Patrick, Kat Illus. by Barrow, Evie Scribble (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-950354-45-0 A rotten day can be fixed in the middle of the night.

Maggie’s opening litany of woes calls back to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: “the sun was the wrong shape, in a sky that was too blue. / Then, Maggie’s shoes would not go on properly. Her socks were even worse. / … / Finally, the spaghetti was too long.” At night, bright moonlight streams in, and nobody wants to go to bed. After Maggie and her mom each “almost explode,” Maggie bursts outdoors and rages herself into a wolf, evoking Where the Wild Things Are. Here, however, Maggie needs help expressing her feelings, and Mom joins her outside. Together they howl, prowl, and “dance…wildly under the moon.” Their newly lupine bodies—Maggie’s fangs; Maggie’s and Mom’s “long tails with bristling fur”—are only textual, never shown; however, their

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shadows look exactly like wolves. Maggie wears overalls and then red-striped pajamas. Illustrations are bright and sketchy, with a loose, windblown feeling and colored-pencil lines going everywhere in all directions; this matches Maggie’s frustration and then her freedom, though the visual mood doesn’t appreciably calm down when Maggie’s mood does. Maggie’s and Mom’s skin is the flat white of the background paper. Pair with Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault’s brilliant Virginia Wolf (2012).

This can’t match its classic ancestors, but it can play with them. (Picture book. 3-6)

BENNY’S TRUE COLORS

Paulson, Norene Illus. by Passchier, Anne Imprint (40 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-1-250-20771-5

A winged friend experiences crossspecies transition.

Benny, a pug-nosed, ruffed, flying creature, “looks like all the other little brown bats in the park—he has a brown, furry body, webbed wings, and pointed ears.” But “Benny isn’t a bat”: he’s diurnal, hates eating bugs, and “dreams about a silky, soft body; fluttering, patterned, colorful wings; and long, curling antennae.” You see, Benny is “really…a BUTTERFLY.” His butterfly friends are all extremely supportive of his identity, and his mother’s only lines are variations on “I love you.” Even though the butterflies don’t think Benny needs to change his body, some caterpillars wrap him in a cocoon (instead of extruding a chrysalis for him) and he emerges more typically butterfly-assigned. While it’s nice that this story, dedicated by Passchier to “all the trans and gender-nonconforming kids out there,” departs from the traditional bullying narrative, it’s still an uncomfortable stand-in for transgender identities, implying that gender differences are akin to those between insects and mammals rather than fluid social constructions. Even without the strained metaphor the story is positively treacly; in penning a supportive tale, the author deprives the plot of conflict to fuel it. The bright, chipper art, matching the tone, is unsubtle but appealing. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 18.1% of actual size.)

Choose stories about real trans children over this clumsy attempt. (Picture book. 4-7)

I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL!

Pellai, Alberto & Tamborini, Barbara Illus. by Paganelli, Elisa Magination/American Psychological Association (24 pp.) $14.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-4338-3244-4 Series: Big Little Talks A kid starting school is underwhelmed.

Unsurprisingly, the reluctant scholar expresses grievances: Teachers are mean, it might snow, and the classroom’s always cold. A wise, reassuring parent or caregiver in the background offers counterarguments: School’s warm (in more ways than one) and fun, teachers are kind, and new friends and activities await. What about the protagonist’s (and many children’s) biggest complaint—missing their favorite grown-up? Wouldn’t the adult prefer staying with the child and not being alone either?

The caregiver quietly explains they must work but also missed parents when a schoolchild. The best part? “I will be waiting for you.” This is a gentle take on a common experience. The gripes are typical ones; the adult’s rejoinders, sensible and sensitive. The White protagonist is more quickly convinced by the adult that school’s great than actual children might be, but this will assure readers/listeners facing the identical experience. The voices of the child and mostly unseen grown-up are differentiated by type: The child “speaks” in orange capitals; the adult, in a conventional, black serif type. The sweet, appealing illustrations are inventive; one classmate has brown skin. A reader’s note includes tips for adults to help children beginning school.

The same creative team also produced companion titles I Want Everything (2020), about tantrums, and Oh Brother! (2020), about welcoming a new baby in the family.

A calming, helpful title about a childhood rite of passage. (Picture book. 3-6) (I Want Everything!: 978-1-4338-3242-0; Oh Brother!: 978-1-4338-3243-7)

THE LITTLE MERMAID

Pinkney, Jerry Illus. by the author Little, Brown (48 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-316-44031-8

The classic fairy tale is reimagined as a story of friendship, family, and inner strength.

Melody, the youngest princess in the realm of the merfolk, is curious about the world above the ocean surface. She collects objects from sunken ships and asks questions no one will answer. One day, she follows her guardian turtle to the surface and sees a human girl on shore, who waves to her. Melody wants a friend, and when the Sea Witch, a monstrous red creature, offers her legs in exchange for her beautiful voice, she is fairly easily led astray despite the long-standing 126

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The novel treats its young audience with respect, assuming they can grapple with broad themes of war, violence, and danger without graphically depicting them. jonesy flux and the gray legion

warnings of the merfolk about the Sea Witch. Melody makes it to shore and makes a fast and deep friendship with Zion, but when she discovers that her voice has empowered the Sea Witch to attack the Sea King’s realm, she must return, regain her power, and restore order for her family and her merpeople.

The replacement of the original love story with a friendship story is a warm and welcome touch for children, and Melody’s agency throughout makes her an admirable heroine even if her quickness to leave her family seems rash. Pinkney’s lush watercolor scenes draw readers in with rich detail and vibrant hues.

The merfolk and Zion are brown-skinned with curls, and the meticulous rendering of the merfolks’ fins and shells brings the mythical creatures within reach of realistic imagination.

Another modern classic from one of our finest illustrators. (author’s note) (Picturebook. 5-9)

STICKS AND STONES

Veteran picture-book creator Polacco tells another story from her childhood that celebrates the importance of staying true to one’s own interests and values.

After years of spending summers with her father and grandmother, narrator Trisha is excited to be spending the school year in Michigan with them. Unexpectedly abandoned by her summertime friends, Trisha quickly connects with fellow outsiders Thom and Ravanne, who may be familiar to readers from Polacco’s The Junkyard Wonders (2010). Throughout the school year, the three enjoy activities together and do their best to avoid school bully Billy. While a physical confrontation between Thom (aka “Sissy Boy”) and Billy does come, so does an opportunity for Thom to defy convention and share his talent with the community. Loosely sketched watercolor illustrations place the story in the middle of the last century, with somewhat oldfashioned clothing and an apparently all-White community. Trisha and her classmates appear to be what today would be called middle schoolers; a reference to something Trisha and her mom did when she was “only eight” suggests that several years have passed since that time. As usual, the lengthy first-person narrative is cozily conversational but includes some challenging vocabulary (textiles, lackeys, foretold). The author’s note provides a brief update about her friends’ careers and encourages readers to embrace their own differences. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Deliberately inspirational and tinged with nostalgia, this will please fans but may strike others as overly idealistic. (Pic­ ture book. 7-10)

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Pray, James Sterling (416 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-4549-3835-4 Series: Jonesy Flux, 1

In this love letter to the space opera genre, a daring young girl embarks on a quest to save those she loves.

In the distant future, in a distant solar system, 11-year-old Jonesy Archer has been eking out a life after surviving a pirate attack on her space station three years prior. She and the rest of the survivors, (all children of varying ages) scavenge what they can from the remnants of Canary Station while waiting for rescue. But when Jonesy accidentally discovers she has a strange power, the Gray Legion—a malevolent entity seeking to rid the galaxy of such powers—arrives at the station, taking her friends captive and leaving Jonesy stranded.

This catapults Jonesy into an adventure across the galaxy, where she searches for answers, develops her abilities, and reunites with those she has lost. The novel treats its young audience with respect, assuming they can grapple with broad themes of war, violence, and danger without graphically depicting them on the page. Though the middle third of the book loses some steam in terms of pacing, Jonesy’s odyssey is mostly packed with action and fun, offering some solid and unpredictable twists along the way. Jonesy and her family are White. There is some racial diversity among her supporting cast of characters.

A classic space adventure that rewards readers with a rousing journey through the cosmos. (discussion questions) (Science fiction. 8-12)

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Polacco, Patricia Illus. by the author Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5344-2622-1

JONESY FLUX AND THE GRAY LEGION

THE SILVER BOX

Preus, Margi Univ. of Minnesota (200 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5179-0968-0 Series: Enchantment Lake, 3 Plucky 17-year-old investigator Francie is back for the concluding episode of a trilogy set in Minnesota.

Francie has discovered a small silver box that is somehow connected to her mother’s mysterious disappearance 13 years earlier. The additional discovery of a mysterious abandoned cabin in the woods awakens vague memories of when her mother went away, all clues to opening the tricky puzzle box and locating a vital (but forgetful) elderly woman in a nursing home. Aided by her pal Raven and Jay, another classmate, Francie follows clues she hopes will lead to her mother. Although a few red herrings add uncertainty, the villains remain largely hidden from readers, leaving the mystery mostly unsolvable even to clever armchair sleuths until the evildoers eventually reveal themselves. Brief

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Uncommon elements give this time-travel novel a charming spin. the girl from the attic

environmental messages crop up frequently and are only mildly didactic. Although the mystery and its resolution rely on sometimes improbably convenient happenstance, Francie’s plausibly intrepid nature (and remarkable lack of reliance on adults) keeps the plot moving at an engaging pace, and the wintry Northwoods setting provides an appealing backdrop. Although the mostly White characters are only sparingly depicted, Raven talks about biased treatment and double standards she experiences as an Ojibwe person.

A modern Nancy Drew replacement grounded in current technology but largely reliant on brain power and courage.

(Mystery. 11-16)

THE GIRL FROM THE ATTIC

Prins, Marie Illus. by Hagedorn, Edward Common Deer Press (222 pp.) $12.99 paper | Oct. 1, 2020 978-1-988761-51-0

After moving to a new house, a girl finds a portal to its previous residents from a century ago.

Not only has Maddy’s mom remarried and gotten pregnant, but Dan, her new, annoying stepdad, has moved them from Toronto to an old octagonal house in the countryside. On the mend from a bad bout of bronchitis and still tackling her asthma, the tween begins exploring her unusual house. A black cat helps her discover a door in the woodshed’s loft, and once opened, it becomes a portal from her present in 2001 to the house’s previous residents, nearly 100 years earlier. Through numerous trips back and forth between these time periods, Maddy observes Eva, a girl with consumption, and meets Eva’s brother, Clarence, who goes by Clare. In this quiet and evenly paced blend of fantasy and historical fiction, Maddy notes the similarities between Eva’s and her own health conditions and becomes determined to work with Clare to save Eva. A soap-making scheme introduces readers to farm life at the beginning of the 20th century.

But as problems also mount in her own time, Maddy realizes that she’s been neglecting the real people who need her most.

Although never didactic, this gentle narration, enhanced with quaint black-line drawings, emphasizes building family relationships and accepting responsibility for one’s actions. Characters follow a White default.

Uncommon elements give this time-travel novel a charming spin. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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RESPECT

Redding, Otis Illus. by Moss, Rachel Akashic (24 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-61775-844-7 Series: LyricPop The text of Redding’s famous song (made more so by Aretha Franklin) is laid out against illustrations of diverse families.

In this volume of the LyricPop series, the lyrics of “Respect” are printed in lines of alternating colors, with backup (“just a little bit,” “Ooh,” “re re re re...,” etc.) printed in speech bubbles.

The top half of each spread depicts adults enacting various careers, such as education, military, science, construction, and medicine, while the bottom half pictures children playing at the same career seen above. The same Black family is featured on each page while diverse characters fill in extra roles. The illustrations carry enough interest to sustain attention through the end of the book, though it will take some practice—or dedication to sharing the song—for caregivers and children to pace the reading/singing with the page turns. Three other series entries publish simultaneously: Move the Crowd (by Eric Barrier and William Griffin and illustrated by Kirk Parrish), with rap lyrics poetic enough to be read aloud without the awkward decision whether to sing or speak; These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ (by Lee Hazelwood and illustrated by Rachel Moss), in which a cat gets jealous when her human gets a dog; and We Got the Beat (by Charlotte Caffey and illustrated by Kaitlyn Shea O’Connor), in which a couple kids and some flamingos romp to bubble-gum backgrounds. Average families may not know how to enjoy these titles, but musical families will.

Best for the biggest fans. (discussion questions) (Picture book. 3-6) (Move the Crowd: 978-1-61775-849-2; These Boots Are Made for Walkin’: 978-1-61775-875-1; We Got the Beat 978-1-61775-836-2)

I PROMISE YOU

Richmond, Marianne Illus. by the author Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (40 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-7282-2902-7 All children deserve a lifetime of loving, empowering assurances from their parents.

A series of parents muse on all the things they have promised their little ones right from the start. There are, of course, love, concern, and nurturing of body and mind, but also vows to teach their children moral principles; to impart a sense of belonging in the world; to devote time and attention; to impose limits; to offer guidance, choices, and help; to show acceptance; and many other life-altering, -affirming, and -strengthening gifts children need from parents so they will grow into happy, productive adults. One of the most generous, loving promises of all is truth—that the children have “infinite worth, / built-in and

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boundless” and that life isn’t always “easy or perfect or fair”— but when their offspring feel down, the parents promise to listen. Of course, parental reassurances don’t end with childhood and children’s leaving “the nest.” The certainty of home awaits.

Each promise in the book’s hushed, softly worded verse is set apart in display type. Muted watercolor and delicate ink-line illustrations done in Richmond’s trademark childlike fashion suit the gentle parental promises. Skin tones and hairstyles and colors of parents and children are diverse throughout, and there is gender diversity among the parents depicted.

Sweet and comforting; a nice gift for new parents-to-be.

(Picture book. 3-6)

FOLLOW YOUR BREATH! A First Book of Mindfulness

Five friends from Ritchie’s informational series Exploring Our Community learn about mindfulness.

Pedro is nervous about moving. His mom, a martial arts instructor, teaches him and his friends about mindfulness to try to relieve his anxiety. She talks them through various tips and tricks. First they learn how to stretch and focus on their bodies.

(A sidebar gives readers a stretch to try on their own.) Then they take a mindful walk through a park and into a garden, noticing the sights and smells. A sudden rainstorm brings up a discussion about emotions. “Like the weather, feelings change and are often beyond our control.” The pals head back to Pedro’s house for a sleepover, where they learn how to do a body scan before bed. Bold headings announce each topic (“Be Wise—Visualize!”) while the main narrative follows the friends. A subnarrative in smaller font gives more in-depth facts. Ritchie’s inked, comics-inspired illustrations are bright enough to appeal but also subdued enough to complement the calming subject matter. Examples of mindful games are appended along with a glossary. Pedro and his friend group make up a diverse, mixed bunch.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 10.3-by-17.8-inch double-page spreads viewed at 35.2% of actual size.)

A reminder to pause, breathe, and notice the moment.

(Informational picture book. 4-8)

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Roberts, Tomos Illus. by Nomoco Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.09 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-0-06-306636-6

Lyrical reassurance in the face of illness or pandemic, spun off from a viral video: “Well, sometimes you get sick, my boy, / before you start / feeling better.”

With similarly daft logic—not to mention frequent disregard for regular meter and rhyme—Roberts tells a favorite bedtime story to two children. Back in 2020, the text relates, corporate greed (“our leaders taught us why / it’s best to not / upset the lobbies— / more convenient to die”) and feelings of loneliness brought about by our addiction to screens and social media were transformed into a healthier “work-life balance” while hiding away from the virus. “We started clapping to say thank you / and calling up our moms. / And while the car keys gathered dust / we would look forward to our runs.” Emerging from this rather radically simplistic isolation scenario to a fresher, less-plasticized world led to the titular epiphany, the exact nature of which readers are left to figure out. Along with Americanized spelling and a few unnecessary changes in line order and wording, this version of the poem comes with restrained, sparely brushed watercolor illustrations of, mostly, stylized human figures rendered in a range of hues from paper white (the narrator and children) to shades of brown and pale blue or green.

Readers may be affected by the optimistic tone, but the words sound darker, even disturbing, themes. (Picture book.

6-8)

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Ritchie, Scot Illus. by the author Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5253-0336-4 Series: Exploring Our Community

THE GREAT REALIZATION

WERE I NOT A GIRL The Inspiring and True Story of Dr. James Barry Robinson, Lisa Illus. by Berke, Lauren Simkin Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-9848-4905-2 978-1-9848-4906-9 PLB

A children’s biography of a complex figure.

The much-interpreted facts, not to mention meaning, of Dr. James Barry’s life are squarely presented in this quiet picture book. After opening with “Imagine living at a time when you couldn’t be the person you felt you were inside,” the story provides some scant information about Dr. Barry’s early life: his female-assigned birth and feminine name in 18th-century Ireland, the restrictive roles for women in that time and place, and Barry’s decision to pass as a man in order to enroll in medical school. At this point the story shifts from she/her pronouns to he/ him, as the story dutifully but calmly follows Barry on his travels as a military doctor. The illustrations are subdued and oldfashioned, with background scenes often depicted in smudged

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black and gray scribbles and the White protagonist surrounded by an almost all-White cast. An early question asks, “Why did Margaret become James? She never said. Nor did he.” Despite the interesting character at its center, this story comes across as somewhat dull, the subject matter proving much more lively than the telling. It ends with the claim that “James was living his truth” without making clear what truth, precisely, Barry was living. An author’s note tries to clarify a position that isn’t as clear in the text, with final notes fleshing out Barry’s biography and discussing gender-neutral pronouns and nonbinary identities.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 19.1% of actual size.)

Both timely and historical. (Picture book/biography. 6-10)

DEAR BABY, A Love Letter to Little Ones Rosenthal, Paris Illus. by Hatam, Holly Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-0-06-301272-1

A love letter to the first five years of life.

Rosenthal previously partnered with her mother, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, to pen Dear Girl, (2017), her father, Jason Rosenthal, for Dear Boy, (2019), and now ventures out as a solo author in an ode to babies everywhere. The same epistolary format applies; here, the words of encouragement, advice, and just plain silliness are directed toward the tiniest of tots. Rosenthal encourages tenacity: “Dear Baby, / It’s okay to make mistakes. / Get back up and make your mark!” (A line of paint-smeared handprints connects spilled paint cans to a youngster happily creating art on the wall and some paper.) Rosenthal also encourages curiosity: Quite literally, the mandate “BE CURIOUS” stretches across the double-page spread, but the sentiment is also clear in a spread that depicts babies watching animals, playing with flowers, and chasing floating bubbles. “Dear Baby, / Explore, / explore, / explore. / There’s always more.” At times, the text hovers close to saccharine (“I hope your dreams come true. / Mine did when I met you”), but since the work is catering to doting caregivers, a little schmaltz is to be expected. Happily, Hatam’s stark-white skin tones from the previous books have warmed, and most babies throughout are painted in a variety of shades. Hatam also includes various adult caregivers to showcase many ages of loved ones. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 60.2% of actual size.)

One for the baby-shower lists. (Picture book. 2-5)

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JOURNEYMAN The Story of NHL Right Winger Jamie Leach

Rosner, Anna Yellow Dog (104 pp.) $11.95 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-77337-054-5

Following extensive interviews with her subject and his family, Rosner relays in the first person the story of Ojibwe ice hockey player Jamie Leach from childhood through professional success.

Leach, the son of renowned hockey player Reggie Leach, started skating almost as soon as he could walk. As the son of a professional athlete, he was familiar with a lifestyle of traveling for games, being close with teammates, and moving after being traded. At some point, he realized his father was famous, something that affected the family’s privacy. Jamie’s first step toward his own career in professional hockey came at the age of 16 when he joined a junior team in Vancouver. This work pieces together his memories, his passionate pursuit of a spot in the National Hockey League, and the sometimes random changes that took him between leagues, teams, and towns. This brief overview is written in a personal, open, and conversational tone that invests readers in Leach’s story whether they are already fans of his or not. Cultural aspects of his Ojibwe heritage, integral to his experience, are casually woven into his story with clear explanations. Reggie and Jamie Leach are the only Indigenous father and son to have both won the Stanley Cup. Photos throughout each chapter enhance the work. The depth of Leach’s relationships with his supportive family members and the friends he made through hockey come through in the simplicity of the descriptions and anecdotes.

Recommended for hockey fans and nonfans alike. (Memoir.

10-14)

ELEANOR, ALICE, AND THE ROOSEVELT GHOSTS

Salerni, Dianne K. Holiday House (240 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-8234-4697-1

The Roosevelt family is haunted by a treacherous spirit.

In an alternate 1898, ghosts are a common occurrence. Some are unaware of their own spectral status, most are harmless, but a few are a bit vengeful. When a peculiar spirit awakens in the old Roosevelt family house in New York City, cousins Eleanor and Alice must strive to overcome their differences and figure out just what this spirit wants. The ghost authorities claim the spirit is harmless, but the little tricks the presence pulls become more and more dangerous as time goes on. Meanwhile, another dark force has emerged in the house

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As the snow intensifies and the serial trading progresses, the momentum and suspense build gradually. a long road on a short day

where Alice was born and her mother died. Are the two ghosts connected? The Roosevelt family secrets hold all the answers, and the two teen girls discover them one by one. This mix of history and fantasy creates a nifty setting for a middle-grade mystery, but there’s one big problem: The Roosevelts all sound the same. Alice and Eleanor are described as total opposites, but their spoken patterns are nearly identical, making the complex relationships all the harder to decipher, even with the aid of the family tree that is provided. The constant muttering of “Wait, which one is talking this time?” kills the narrative’s flow, destroying the pacing that’s so crucial to a mystery’s success.

A poorly characterized mystery. (author’s note) (Mystery.

10-14)

NIGHT NIGHT, CURIOSITY

A child with eyes on the skies fits an envisioned trip to Mars into the bedtime routine.

After Mom has gone off to work a night shift at (as a later video call reveals) Mission Control, Dad flies the space-mad young narrator upstairs to wash up, snuggle down, and all the while imagine traveling with the Curiosity rover through space to land on Mars. In his russet-toned illustrations, O’Rourke bucks a common trend in the recent spate of entry-level tributes by not anthropomorphizing the durable rover. Consequently, the episode is animated less by artificial, fanciful elements than by the child’s native interest in space. The child’s astronomical enthusiasm is underscored in the pictures as the scene switches back and forth from Mars to good-night hugs and kisses in a bedroom festooned with space-themed furnishings and decorations. If Sayres’ verses aren’t exactly star quality (“We cuddle with my bedtime book… / We’re racing toward the sand. / Our parachute helps slow us down. / It’s time for us to land”) and the illustrator varies the child’s size from scene to scene, still the premise has a certain glow to it…and both rhymed part and prose afterword shed glimmers of background information about the rover’s mission. Child and parents appear to be White, but there are figures with darker skin in a crowd scene.

It’s nice to see a vivid imagination at work even though this plods where it should soar. (Picture book. 6-8)

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Schmidt, Gary D. & Stickney, Elizabeth Illus. by Yelchin, Eugene Clarion (64 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-544-88836-4 A boy and his father embark on a special mission.

When Samuel’s mother wishes for “a brown-eyed cow to give us milk for the baby,” Papa takes his best knife and invites Samuel to join him on a search for a cow. Leaving their farm early on a white January morning, Papa reminds Samuel to “keep up” because “it’s a long road and a short day,” a refrain he repeats throughout their journey. At neighbor Snow’s house, Papa trades his knife for two tin lanterns. At the Perrys’ house, he trades the lanterns for a book of poetry. He trades the book for a pitcher at Widow Mitchell’s, and the pitcher for a sheep when they encounter Dr. Fulton. This pattern continues as Papa trades the sheep for a gold pocket watch and the watch for a pony and cart that Samuel would dearly love to keep. Daylight is fading, snow is collecting, Samuel’s cold, and he has kept up with Papa, but will Papa trade the pony and cart for a cow? As the snow intensifies and the serial trading progresses, the momentum and suspense build gradually until father and son reach journey’s end, where Samuel receives a well-deserved reward. Full-page, realistic color illustrations introduce each chapter, tracing their journey from beginning to end in a snowy, rural, largely unmechanized environment evoking a simpler time and place.

Quiet, gentle, satisfying tale of father-son bonding. (Fic­ tion. 8-10)

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Sayres, Brianna Caplan Illus. by O’Rourke, Ryan Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-58089-893-5

A LONG ROAD ON A SHORT DAY

NO ORDINARY THING The Tale of the Traveling Snow Globe Schmidt, G.Z. Holiday House (240 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-8234-4422-9

A magical New York journey through time and the grieving process.

In 1999, 12-year-old orphaned Adam lives with his kindly Uncle Henry. Despite financial hardship, they love each other and Henry’s struggling bakery, although Adam is bullied at school and longs for his parents. When a strange man points him to a magical snow globe, Adam finds himself hopping through time, encountering various points in the lives of three other children—Jack, Daisy, and Francine—whose stories intersect in various ways. The arch, omniscient narrator also shares the connected story of Elbert, a magician and the son of Irish immigrants in the early 20th century, and his search for three pieces of time. Heavy

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This beautifully contemplative portrait is notable for its depiction of a capable elder, dwelling not amid illness, regret, or grief, but in the moment. the old woman

material—Adam, Francine, and Jack have traumatic backstories while Daisy’s family magically controls their underpaid and overworked factory employees, leading to tragedy—is handled (too) lightly, with ultimate messages of acceptance and the beauty of living life in the present made explicit. This sweet, short debut has a few glaring issues with problematic tokenism: Two sage elders, one Black who fills the Magical Negro role and one who is homeless, disabled, and perpetually cheerful, exist only to support biracial (Chinese/White) Adam. The novel has a loose sense of place (this New York City is a sanitized pastiche), but the book still manages to evoke emotional closure.

Imperfect but not without appeal. (Fantasy. 8-12)

TWO TOUGH TRUCKS GET LOST!

Schwartz, Corey Rosen & Gomez, Rebecca J. Illus. by Leung, Hilary Orchard/Scholastic (40 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-338-23655-2 Nothing’s spookier than getting lost without your best friend by your side.

Once so different, the buddies of Two Tough Trucks (2019) are now as alike as peas in a pod. Mack and Rig spend their days “racing and chasing and zipping ’round bends.” Warned by their folks to be back before dark, the two tear off into the saguarostudded landscape, failing to notice with their headlight-eyes shut that when the road forks they take different paths. Upon discovering that they are not only lost, but separated, the two look high and low as the sun sets in the west. It’s Rig who thinks to light a flare and Mac who gets to the high ground, where he spots it. Reunited, they retrace their tracks, back to parents and home. This rhyming sequel, while peppy, downplays the trucks’ previously established personalities, rendering them nearly identical. It is nice to see them manage their mutual rescue, though the ending lands a bit flat. Blocky, cartoon art keeps things artful and peppy, rendering every little emotion a lost truck might feel in quick succession. Quick-eyed spotters will note the roadrunner and tortoise that secretly accompany our two heroes as they search for one another (even on the endpapers). (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.9-by-19-inch doublepage spreads viewed at 18.5% of actual size.)

This sequel may not be wholly necessary, but little truck lovers will appreciate the light at the end of the tunnel. (Pic­ ture book. 4-6)

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THE OLD WOMAN

Schwartz, Joanne Illus. by Kazemi, Nahid Groundwood (36 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-77306-211-2

An old woman transits through an autumn day, evening, and overnight to dawn, unhurriedly observing nature’s cues.

She and her dog live in a simply furnished old house. Most days, the dog chases squirrels, then dozes indoors on an old rug.

On a walk in the hills, they observe a crow, and the woman marvels at what it would be like to fly. The woman throws sticks for the dog to fetch and finds a stout walking stick for herself. They rest at a familiar boulder “with its perfect seat.” Whirling fall leaves trigger a memory of playing outside for hours. Kazemi draws the woman in her younger form, hair now dark against her pale skin, dancing among the leaves. The artist’s lovely illustrations blend chalky graphite-gray with pastel and rusty autumnal accents. The full harvest moon rises, and the woman thinks of words to describe it: “huge, looming, warm, gentle, enormous, dreamy, peaceful, autumnal—magnificent.” Next morning, stiff and achy from the long walk, she goes outside to watch the sun rise. “There was a chill in the air. Soon it would be cold. It always comes like this, thought the old woman, and yet no one day is the same as another.” This beautifully contemplative portrait is notable for its depiction of a capable elder, dwelling not amid illness, regret, or grief, but in the moment, relishing each day’s unique beauty. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by16.2-inch double-page spreads viewed at 91.5% of actual size.)

Calming, serene, respectful. (Picture book. 3-7)

CHESTNUT

Shotz, Jennifer Li HMH Books (320 pp.) $12.99 | $7.99 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-358-10870-2 978-0-358-10874-0 paper Series: American Dog, 3 A young girl living on a struggling farm desperately wants a dog.

Twelve-year-old Meg Briggs lives on her family’s Christmas tree farm in North Carolina. Her family constantly worries about money and their farm’s financial solvency, leaving Meg acutely aware of this unease. One cold morning, Meg finds a beautiful brindled Plott hound, which she names Chestnut, on a remote corner of their property and decides to keep him—even if it means lying to everyone she loves. Meg schemes to make and sell ornaments for money to keep Chestnut and help the farm. Soon she is overwhelmed by her own fibs and punishing schedule. When her family’s farm is in further jeopardy, will Meg be able to both keep the dog she loves and help her family retain their ancestral

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home? Meg is a complex character who makes understandable missteps; while she is cognizant of her family’s troubles, she often relies on manipulation. Shotz’s canine confection has rapid pacing and short chapters fueled by high drama and emotional tension. For readers who enjoy the thrill of a “willthey-or-won’t-they” tale, this should keep pages flying as Meg and Chestnut endure an unrelenting cavalcade of challenges.

Although teeming with melodrama, Shotz’s cloying prose can be stilted and overly formulaic, appealing perhaps most to those who appreciate familiar tropes or to established fans of this series. Characters are presumed White.

Best suited for the most ardent dog or Christmas fans. (dog facts) (Fiction. 7-10)

WILD GIRL How To Have Incredible Outdoor Adventures

Skelton describes daring adventures she has had around the world and suggests ways for young people to challenge themselves.

Biking to the South Pole, with kite skiing as a change of pace. Three marathons in 24 hours—in the desert. Solo kayaking 2,000 miles of the Amazon River in under 2 months. Walking a high wire between two abandoned city buildings. These are some of the truly wild adventures Skelton regales readers with in this tantalizing nonfiction title organized by environment. Skelton shares every detail of each trip: her physical, emotional, and mental preparation (or, occasionally, lack thereof); required gear; dangers; and the shocking and sometimes nasty things she had to endure to complete the challenges.

Each chapter ends with “best parts” and “worst parts” of the adventure, two spreads full of related wild adventures for readers to try (with adult supervision), and a spread introducing fairly diverse accomplished women who have made history with their own adventures—with space for the reader to add her own photo. Readers will be on the edges of their seats as they follow each incredible story; Skelton’s honesty about the roles of motivation, confidence, mentorship, and teamwork makes for an impressive lesson in the mechanics of mind over matter. The colorful spreads are well designed, with layouts that are easy to browse or read, stylized illustrations of diverse girls being active, and the occasional photograph of Skelton (who presents White) in action.

Positively thrilling. (Nonfiction. 8-13)

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Skovron, Jon Scholastic (224 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-338-63398-6 When a global techno-apocalypse looms, can three savvy kids save the world?

Ada is the daughter of Remy Genet, a notorious hacker, thief, and current inmate at a Supermax prison. Ada attends the Springfield Military Reform School with her friend Jace Winslow, a tech whiz, and multilingual frenemy Cody Francesco. Ada learns that a horrible cyberweapon called the Hacker’s Key has been stolen, and in its place was left a message for her father. Ada, Jace, and Cody are soon whisked into an international whirlwind of danger, espionage, and criminals, leading them from America to Iceland, Ireland, and the Czech Republic. The trio must carefully follow clues and discern whom to trust, even within their own group. Skovron’s spy thriller reads at a breakneck pace, imbued with tech know-how, covert ops, and heart-pounding action scenes. Alongside the thrills, there is a hearty dose of pop-culture references from the ’80s and beyond, including retro Nintendo games and classic science-fiction mentions. Perceptive readers should be able to easily suss out the identity of the supervillain, but that doesn’t render this any less gripping. Ada is White, with a French father and American mother; Jace is Black; and Cody is Chilean. Secondary characters are diverse in ethnicity and nationality.

Reads like Alex Rider meets Ready Player One. (author’s note) (Thriller. 8-12)

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Skelton, Helen Illus. by Kay, Liz Candlewick (144 pp.) $19.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5362-1286-0

THE HACKER’S KEY

BYE-BYE, BLUE CREEK

Smith, Andrew Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-5344-1958-2 Series: Sam Abernathy, 2

Twelve-year-old Sam Abernathy is prepared to say goodbye to Blue Creek, the small Texas town he’s endured his entire life.

And goodbye to being known as the boy who got stuck in a well all those years ago. But Blue Creek isn’t ready to say goodbye to Sam: Instead of spending the last few weeks before he departs for boarding school in Oregon chilling with his best friend, Karim, and Karim’s cousin Bahar (a girl whom Sam insists he does not have a crush on), Sam must reckon with the supernatural family of monsters that has moved into Blue Creek’s haunted manse, the Purdy House. After all, Sam can’t just leave his home behind knowing it might be in danger. The sequel to The Size of the Truth (2019) improves upon its predecessor in nearly every way: The plotting is tighter, the jokes are funnier, the characters are sharper, and the messaging is on point. Sam’s put-upon nature and the sharp-witted barbs

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ALL THIRTEEN The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team

slung between him and Karim make the novel into a crackling two-hander, creating a fun read. The novel’s tertiary characters have just enough shading to make the cast feel lived in save for one notable exception: Bahar is a promising character who isn’t given nearly enough page time to make the impact readers will want from her. Blue Creek is a mostly White community, but Bahar and Karim may be Persian; Karim is bisexual.

A much-improved sequel. (Mystery. 10-14)

Soontornvat, Christina Candlewick (288 pp.) $24.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-5362-0945-7

An in-depth account of a harrowing real-life mission that succeeds against

BLACK HEROES OF THE WILD WEST

Smith, James Otis Illus. by the author TOON Books & Graphics (56 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-943145-51-5 The racial and cultural diversity of the Old West gets the comic-book treatment in Smith’s exploration of the lives and adventures of three Black historical figures.

The presence and contributions of Black people in the steady progression of the Western frontier have long been overlooked. Mary Fields was born enslaved and became a renaissance woman, working on steamboats, building a mission, driving a mail coach, and opening her own restaurant and laundry in Montana. Bass Reeves escaped enslavement and was recruited as the first Black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi, boldly pursuing and outsmarting over 3,000 outlaws in his career. Bob Lemmons, also born enslaved, was a living legend for his unmatched skill and unique method for safely capturing whole herds of wild horses. The somewhat romanticized stories of these three remarkable figures are balanced by rich backmatter providing timelines, photographs, and historical information that situate each one in the context of an entire generation of non-White settlers. Smith is also intentional about the inclusion of Native Americans in stories otherwise centering Black frontier folk. Nevertheless, brief cameos of unspecified Native peoples and factual though unexplored mentions of unceded land, displacement, and cultural violence peppering the narratives and backmatter are not quite enough to provide necessary nuance—namely that we can reclaim Black heroes of the Old West while also acknowledging their roles in a devastating frontier expansion.

It’s about time. (timelines, references, further information) (Graphic nonfiction. 8-12)

all odds.

This book logs the 18 days that elapsed in the summer of 2018 as 12 boys—all members of the Wild Boars soccer team— and their coach were trapped inside Tham Luang Nang Non, or the Cave of the Sleeping Lady, after it flooded in northern Thailand. The world watched as a daring rescue ensued.

Instructive on many levels, the present-tense narration re-creates the hair-raising suspense and tension, rendering details of the extreme dangers of dive rescues and the seemingly insurmountable logistical challenges created by the landscape and heavy rainfall. The text recounts the events, techniques, and diverse individuals involved in this struggle while retaining an urgency that propels page turns with bated breath despite the foreknowledge that the trapped team will survive, but one retired Thai Navy SEAL sacrifices his life. Color photos abound, and interspersed text boxes, diagrams, and maps pace the flow of information with salient data, distilling contextual background on related topics including cave formations, makeshift hydraulic engineering, Buddhism and spirituality, local geography, and the plight of Thailand’s stateless people, which included the coach and several players. Masterful storytelling fleshes out the complex human emotions behind key decisions, illuminates diplomatic and political negotiations, and underscores an unwavering faith—in maintaining hope and in harnessing powers of the mind.

Thoughtfully researched, expertly crafted. (author’s note, source notes, bibliography, image credits, index) (Non­ fiction. 10-15)

ARITHMECHICKS TAKE AWAY A Math Story Stephens, Ann Marie Illus. by Liu, Jia Boyds Mills (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-62979-808-0

Arithmechicks discover that (as Stephens puts it) “bedtime – chicks = later bedtime!”

Together with the new mouse friend they met in Arith­ mechicks Add Up (2019), 10 diversely hued and patterned chicks respond to Mama’s “Time to hit the hay!” with a wild scramble to hide—first one, which leaves nine to go, then three more, leaving six, and so on in unpredictable groups until there are “0 chicks” (nor any mouse) to be seen. Then, just to change things 134

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Casting a loving, sympathetic pet as the protagonist makes the story accessible, comprehensible, and upbeat. levin the cat

up, no sooner does Mama find her chicks than a cry of “Again!

Again!” touches off a second round of disappearances in different groupings. Each successive subtraction comes with an openended line, as in “10 chicks minus 1 chick equals…,” with the answer not immediately adjacent but visible on the facing page.

To help readers arrive at solutions, Liu tucks into her cartoon pictures various strategies, including a traditional arithmetical equation, a “ten frame,” a number line, or even fingers (feathers); these are all summarized in small type in a closing section.

Stephens uses alliteration and internal rhymes to set up a cozy rhythm, and she brings the brouhaha to an end with a final henhouse snuggle (Mouse gets a sleeping bag): “All found and winding down / with cuddles and bedtime books. / Stretching starts, yawns are next, / dreams are coming soon.” (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 75% of actual size.)

Feathery fun for the newly numerate. Take it away, Arithmechicks! (Informational picture book. 3-5)

Swerts, An Illus. by van Lindenhuizen, Eline Clavis (48 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-60537-579-3 Lucy was once a happy and cheerful girl, but shortly after she started school, she often found herself worrying…a lot.

Lucy’s new withdrawn behavior concerns her grandmother.

Lucy and Nonna talk to her teacher, who assures Lucy that everyone makes mistakes. Later, Nonna recommends that Lucy help her father, a chef, in the kitchen. With best friend Evan’s help, Lucy becomes quite a good helper. When a food critic comes to her father’s restaurant and a nervous Lucy drops his lemon tart, her father and Evan marvel at the artistic beauty of the broken tart on the miraculously intact plate. (The critic judges it “highly original.”) The illustrations are charming and particularly creative in an early spread in which the children go from standing beside a swimming pool to a page two-thirds the normal size on which Lucy stands, uninterested and apart from the other children, who swim and dive into the pool. Puzzlingly, this clever design does not carry on throughout. Perhaps it’s the translation from the Dutch, but this section reads awkwardly.

When the instructor asks, “Who wants to jump off the diving board?” the students cheer, “Yippee!” It’s an odd response and one that children will likely point out. A concluding poem from Nonna to Lucy about making mistakes feels unnecessary. Lucy, Nonna, and Lucy’s father present White; Evan is a child of color.

Though wonky in places, this book makes important points about mitigating anxiety in young children. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

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These are the times that try everyone’s souls—even a cat’s.

Levin, a rambunctious feline, lives with Jane, a nurse. The Covid-19 pandemic is raging, and Jane, like other medical professionals, works at her hospital for long hours and isn’t at home much. Levin misses her. Then Daniel, Jane’s friend and another community first responder, tells Levin that Jane’s assigned to the isolation unit and won’t be home at all for a while. Daniel cares for Levin and helps him “visit” Jane via phone conferencing. Eventually, Levin moves elsewhere and makes new animal and human friends and enemies. He also willingly becomes something of a community helper himself, knowing that everyone must pull together in a crisis. This gently told, hopeful, nonfrightening tale, translated from Chinese and obviously set in the present moment, isn’t so much a story as it is purposedriven: It aims to help youngsters easily understand what the current emergency is about and what it demands of everyone.

Casting a loving, sympathetic pet as the protagonist makes the story accessible, comprehensible, and upbeat. Children who know frontline workers will find support here. Illustrations are sweet and lively; Levin is spunky, energetic, and personable.

Common-sense recommended guidelines about social distancing and mask wearing are incorporated into a spread; the passage of weeks is depicted with digital clocks. Jane and Daniel both have pale skin and straight, brown hair; background characters are diverse.

A useful narrative that, one fervently hopes, will become obsolete before too long. (Picture book. 4-7)

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OOPS, I DROPPED THE LEMON TART

LEVIN THE CAT

Tao Jiu Illus. by Yang Shanshan Trans. by Wang, Helen Cardinal Media (32 pp.) $9.99 paper | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-64074-119-5

NOAH GREEN SAVES THE WORLD

Toffler-Corrie, Laura Illus. by Pamintuan, Macky Kar-Ben (280 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2020 978-1-5415-6036-9

Jewish summer camp adventures get a little too goofy.

Budding director Noah is certain he’s on his way to film camp—after all, he’s been nagging his parents about it nonstop. But instead, he and his sister are shipped off to Camp Challah, where the socially awkward tween is not confident about making friends. Just before going away, Pops, Noah’s grandfather, tells him he needs Noah’s help saving the world. But the alter kocker is known for his bombastic pronouncements, so not even Noah takes him seriously until a carrier pigeon arrives with a note from Pops.

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An appealing, quick read and an engaging introduction to a formidable literary tradition. the scroll quest

Whatever anyone else expects—or doesn’t expect—of Noah, his real plan is to do what Pops says. Somehow he ends up making friends who go along for the ride, nonsensical and unclear though it is. The first half of the book takes a more realistic tone, with typical camp activities, and it’s not until halfway through that Pops reappears in the flesh to take Noah along.

Not only is the pacing off, but it’s odd when the antagonist threatening the world turns out to be an asteroid—not what readers might expect from a grandfather who regularly claims to have been a secret agent during World War II. A supporting character described as part Navajo makes wartime Code Talkers less the undersung heroes they are and more another goofball plot addition.

Uncomfortably frenetic for something so devoid of plot.

(Mystery/adventure. 7-10)

ATTACKED AT SEA A True World War II Story of a Family’s Fight for Survival Tougias, Michael J. & O’Leary, Alison Henry Holt (224 pp.) $19.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-250-12806-5 Series: True Rescue

The true story of a family caught in a U-boat attack in U.S. waters.

In May 1942, the White American Downs family—8-year-old Sonny, 11-year-old Lucille, and their parents—boarded a nonmilitary freighter for a one-week journey from Costa Rica to New Orleans. However, just hours before reaching Louisiana, their ship was attacked by German U-boat commander Erich Würdemann and his dedicated crew in the Gulf of Mexico. Part of Operation Drumbeat, their goal was to sink as much seafaring tonnage, military or civilian, as possible. When the family was separated during the U-boat attack, it took all of their courage, hope, and luck to survive.

A stand-alone book in the True Rescue series, this title is the young reader’s edition of So Close to Home (2016). A prologue establishing characters and settings is followed by three parts: before the attack, during and immediately following the attack, and the aftermath. Filled with details from primary sources, including letters, interviews, newspapers, war diaries, and more, the third-person narrative swiftly switches, highlighting different members of the Downs’ family and two U-boat commanders. The Downs family’s upright wholesomeness and their complete belief in the American dream bypasses many opportunities for authentic emotional exploration. Although the tone feels academic at times, quotes from letters and diaries evoke the historical era.

A well-researched account of one American family during a little-known episode of World War II. (authors’ note, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 11-16)

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THE SCROLL QUEST

Tsai, Luther & Vittachi, Nury Reycraft Books (128 pp.) $12.95 | Sep. 30, 2020 978-1-4788-6930-6 Series: Magic Mirror, 5 Two siblings search for an ancient figure in this fifth entry in The Magic Mirror series.

As the book opens, Marko and Mira are being investigated for their vastly improved academic attainment, which has affected the whole school’s grades. The kids tell the truth about the magic mirror that enables them to travel through time to the era they are studying, but authorities do not believe them. Meanwhile Marko and Mira receive a new assignment from Ye Ye, their paternal grandfather, in the form of an old scroll encased in an intriguing container. When Mira becomes distracted by social events, Marko attempts to engage her by researching the assignment. It turns out that the scroll is tied to The Journey to the West, a seventh-century novel that is well known in East Asian cultures. The pair must restore the scroll to explorer Xuanzang, who is said to be at the Nalanda University in India and will become the protagonist of The Journey to the West. The quickly evolving narrative explains how the siblings find themselves transported to the middle of a vast wilderness, meeting the scholar/explorer as he heads toward the university and accompanying him on his adventures. The fast-paced combination of time travel, history, and action makes for an appealing, quick read and an engaging introduction to a formidable literary tradition. Aside from Ye Ye, the children’s Chinese heritage is downplayed in this installment.

An enthralling romp that touches on the origins of legends. (author’s note) (Fantasy. 8-11)

DRAGON MOUNTAIN

Tsang, Katie & Tsang, Kevin Sterling (240 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-4549-3596-4 Series: Dragon Realm, 1

A group of friends find themselves in the middle of a war threatening both Dragon and Human Realms.

Instead of surfing waves at home in San Francisco, Billy Chan’s parents have sent him to a summer language camp in China, led by an elderly man nicknamed Old Gold. Billy’s dad is from Hong Kong and his mother is White and American, and his Mandarin skills are limited. He quickly makes friends with campmates Dylan from Ireland, Southern belle (and martial artist) Charlotte— both of whom are White—and Ling-Fei, a local Chinese girl.

Before long Billy notices some paranormal activity around the camp. The plot quickly progresses as the group experiences an

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earthquake—apparently the children inadvertently opened a mountain populated by four dragons who tell them that they are their matches. If the kids agree to bond with them, their combined powers can defeat the evil Dragon of Death, who threatens to conquer both Dragon and Human Realms. The kids agree, with varying levels of trepidation, but upon entering the Dragon Realm, they encounter seemingly impossible obstacles. The Dragon Realm features magical elements drawn from Chinese and European folktales, including winged dragons and rock trolls. While the story contains enough excitement to maintain readers’ attention, solutions sometimes seem to present themselves too conveniently along the way. A sequel is promised with a cliffhanger ending.

A high-interest read. (Fantasy. 9-12)

TEATIME AROUND THE WORLD

The leaves are only the beginning in this world tour of teas and tisanes.

Readers whose definition of “tea” begins and ends with a bag and boiling water are in for a horizon-broadening read.

Between serving up Moroccan mint tea (green tea, mint, and sugar) and Jamaican sorrel (roselle hibiscus buds, ginger, cloves, and sugar), Waissbluth pauses to savor masala chai (cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cardamom, pepper, milk) in India, po cha (milk, yak-milk butter, salt) in Tibet, pink chai (pistachios, almonds, salt, milk, spices, baking soda) in Pakistan, and bubble tea (powdered milk, syrup, tapioca balls) in Taiwan. She also peeks in to tea ceremonies in Japan and China as well as a Britishstyle formal tea and marvels at tea brewed in a samovar (Russia), served in bags (Thailand), and sipped from hollow gourds (South American maté). In a closing note about her travels and research she writes that tea is nearly everywhere “a symbol of hospitality,” and O’Byrne echoes that theme by posing her tea drinkers—all bearing a broad range of skin tones, facial features, and regionally distinct casual or ceremonial dress—in pairs or groups. The author provides ingredients but not recipes, and her claim that “Indigenous cultures in North America prepare tea from berries, plants, and roots” is unwontedly vague. Still, this wide-ranging tally of teas and methods of serving it may offer a strong temptation to look beyond the soda can.

A refreshing cuppa conviviality, brewed and served many ways. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

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Schoolyard animals take on a bully—with lemons.

While the other animal “boys and girls” like their classmate Max (a rabbit), Big Jim (a warthog) does not. He relentlessly steals Max’s “good lunch,” making Max cry. Max’s friends encourage multiple tactics to deal with this bully. First, Max simply avoids Big Jim. The bully still takes his lunch. Next, Max buys Big Jim a lemon ice as a peace offering. The bully dumps the beverage over Max’s head (he doesn’t like lemons). Outraged, Max rushes to fight Big Jim. The scuffle is short-lived— and lands Max in the branches of a lemon tree. But Max gets a sneaky idea. The next day, Big Jim steals Max’s lunch as always, but his teeth crunch on a big, citrusy surprise (“Yuck!!!!!!!!!!”).

The victory has Max coining a new adage: “A lemon a day keeps the bully away.” But what about Big Jim? With a vocabulary of around 90 words and at most five lines of text per page (eight words per line), the text maintains accessibility to beginning readers. Wilhem’s cartoony watercolors are soft against the white backgrounds, adding a friendly quality even to the tense scenes. A scripted scenario about how to deal with a real-life bully in the backmatter expands upon the story’s lessons. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 62% of actual size.)

A solid (if a bit basic) primer. (Early reader. 4-7)

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Waissbluth, Denyse Illus. by O’Byrne, Chelsea Greystone Kids (48 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-77164-601-7

LUNCH BOX BULLY

Wilhelm, Hans Illus. by the author Holiday House (32 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-8234-3933-1 Series: I Like To Read

I WANT TO SLEEP UNDER THE STARS!

Willems, Mo Illus. by the author Hyperion (96 pp.) $12.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-368-05335-8 Series: Unlimited Squirrels

A star-themed bedtime story—and so much more!

The Unlimited Squirrels’ third series entry offers a “BIG Story!” along with a smorgasbord of squirrelly miscellany (jokes, a quiz, and facts). In the “BIG Story,” Zoom Squirrel dreams of sleeping under the stars for the first time. So, Zip Squirrel summons five other pals to help make it happen. At first the squirrels are uncertain how to help, but one suggests they all offer encouragement since Zoom Squirrel is trying something new (“Being encouraged gives me courage!”).

The friends form a squirrel pyramid and chant “GO, ZOOMY!” and “YOU CAN DO IT!” But their encouragement doesn’t quite land. Zoom Squirrel wants “PEACE and QUIET,” not encouragement. The friends assume they’re simply using the wrong cheer so they split up into teams to shout “PEACE!” and

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whisper “Quiet!” By the time Zoom Squirrel corrects them again, it’s morning and the stars are gone! Having established the series formula, Willems is now free to explore it, and the installments get better and better. The smart design and layout uses color-coding and “emote-acorns” to help emerging readers decipher not only words and textual features, but feelings. The fact-based sections playfully combine photographs with Willems’ cartoon illustrations. In lieu of a bibliography to support the informational content, Willems thanks experts—a nod at citation but one that, unfortunately, doesn’t help readers who want to investigate further. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-13-inch double-page spreads viewed at 76% of actual size.)

Go, Unlimited Squirrels! Go, readers! (Early reader. 5-8)

LIGHTS, CAMERA, DANGER!

Winkler, Henry & Oliver, Lin Amulet/Abrams (256 pp.) $14.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-4197-4099-2 Series: Alien Superstar, 2

The alien superstar returns.

Now that he’s traded life on an oppressive planet for the glitz and glamour of celebrity, Buddy Berger is excited to spend his time acting on the hit series Oddball Academy and learning more about his new home: Hollywood. There’s nothing Buddy can’t accomplish with his friends by his side and hope in his heart. But everything Buddy holds dear is threatened when Citizen Cruel, the ruthless enforcer from the evil Squadron, arrives on Earth to bring Buddy back to his home planet by any means necessary. Can Buddy fend off this villainous pursuit and keep his secret? The breathless pace that made the previous installment such a charmer wears out its welcome here: Buddy bounces from mishap to mishap, the momentum allowing for plenty of jokes but no characterization for any of the players beneath the surface. Plenty of things happen but it doesn’t really amount to anything other than a clothesline the authors are able to hang gags on. The result is a mixed bag for readers: a fun time that won’t inspire any deep attraction beyond the book’s end. Readers will find this entry’s ending much more satisfactory than its predecessor’s, however; there’s a solid conclusion with a tease for what’s coming next.

Buddy presents himself as a White teen when he isn’t in his natural blue skin while previous titles indicate diversity among his friends.

A mixed bag of a sequel. (Science fiction. 9-12)

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ONCE UPON A WINTER DAY

Woodruff, Liza Illus. by the author Holiday House (40 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-0-8234-4099-3 When a child’s mother is too busy for stories, he follows some tracks in the snow and makes up his own.

Milo’s angry face as he stomps out the door speaks volumes about his disappointment. But it isn’t long before he spies a mouse’s tracks under the birdfeeder and begins a journey of discovery. At the winterberry bush, Milo observes that all the red berries are gone and finds a single feather; “What had happened here?” A page turn allows readers time to guess: A flock of cedar waxwings (identified on the endpapers along with tracks and a few animals that readers will have to look very closely to find) flies over the tiny mouse, a single red berry falling to the ground.

This pattern repeats, with Milo finding fallen hemlock branches (porcupines), clods of dirt (grazing deer), a smooth trail to the creek (otters), and wing prints in the snow (a narrow miss with a red-tailed hawk). The call of “Dinner time!” has Milo following the trail back to a hole in the snow by his house; a cutaway view shows a second mouse waiting under the woodpile. As Milo lays his treasures—a feather, an acorn, a hemlock branch, and a fish skeleton—on the table, he declines his mother’s offer of stories: He’s got one to tell instead. Both have pale skin and straight, dark hair. Pair with some children’s nature guidebooks to ignite imaginations. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.5-by19-inch double-page spreads viewed at 30.1% of actual size.)

Nature tells good stories if we only get outside and look around. (Picture book. 4-8)

DEAR MOON

Wunderli, Stephen Illus. by Di Gravio, Maria Luisa Familius (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-64170-269-0 The moon moves through the night sky, and another day inevitably arrives.

Max and Ely need to stop that from happening so Ely won’t have to leave.

They build a rocket that will lasso the moon and hold it in place.

The scheme doesn’t work, but Max refuses to give up. His anger at the moon intensifies with each setback. But morning arrives anyway, and Ely must go to the hospital. Max promises never to give up “not ’til the end of the end of the very end of the world.” Finally he begs Moon to watch over the friend he misses so much. When Ely comes home, he and Max build a new and better rocket, and they take off for the moon. But only Ely stays.

Max returns sadly to Earth and tearfully sends a message telling Moon he’ll always be watching. Max’s sadness and confusion

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are treated with gentle compassion. Wunderli withholds a great deal, only gradually hinting at the seriousness of Ely’s illness, which is not named, and the word death is never used.

Di Gravio’s illustrations provide more information. Max has brown skin, and Ely presents White. Ely is seen in a wheelchair from the beginning. He is hairless when he comes home, and he appears weak and tired. Young children are literal, and this presentation of death and loss may be too subtle for many. The work definitely calls for young readers to have an adult at their side for reassurance and explanations as they read together.

Tender, loving, and sad. (Picture book. 6-10)

EVERYTHING NAOMI LOVED

Yamasaki, Katie & Lendler, Ian Illus. by Yamasaki, Katie Norton Young Readers (48 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-324-00491-2

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Yolen, Jane Illus. by Teague, Mark Blue Sky/Scholastic (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-338-36334-0 Series: How Do Dinosaurs…?

A guide to better behavior—at home, on the playground, in class, and in the

library.

Serving as a sort of overview for the series’ 12 previous exercises in behavior modeling, this latest outing opens with a set of badly behaving dinos, identified in an endpaper key and also inconspicuously in situ. Per series formula, these are paired to leading questions like “Does she spit out her broccoli onto the floor? / Does he shout ‘I hate meat loaf!’ while slamming the door?” (Choruses of “NO!” from young audiences are welcome.)

Midway through, the tone changes (“No, dinosaurs don’t”), and good examples follow to the tune of positive declarative sentences: “They wipe up the tables and vacuum the floors. / They share all the books and they never slam doors,” etc. Teague’s customary, humongous prehistoric crew, all depicted in exact detail and with wildly flashy coloration, fill both their spreads and their human-scale scenes as their human parents—no same-sex couples but some are racially mixed, and in one the man’s the cook—join a similarly diverse set of sibs and other children in either disapprobation or approving smiles. All in all, it’s a well-tested mix of oblique and prescriptive approaches to proper behavior as well as a lighthearted way to play up the use of “please,” “thank you,” and even “I’ll help when you’re hurt.”

Formulaic but not stale…even if it does mine previous topical material rather than expand it. (Picture book. 6-8)

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A community archive is preserved in a unique mural.

Community sits at the heart of Naomi’s life—evidenced by the city panorama on the title spread. Naomi, a beige-skinned young girl with straight brown hair and a big smile, pokes her head out the window to see her world, full of bustle and life. Cars, bicycles, and buses rush by, past the hair salon, the mechanic, the pizzeria. A ribbon of musical notes swirls around Naomi and her busy block, denoting the noisy joy of urban life. With her best friend, Ada, a Black girl, Naomi climbs a tree, rides scooters along the block, and draws pictures in sidewalk chalk.

At dusk, Naomi and her family say goodnight to the lively neighborhood. All seems well until Naomi’s world begins to change.

The tree is cut down, Ada moves away, and stores begin to shut— falling victim to gentrification and urban renewal. With help from her shopkeeper friend Mr. Ray, a Black man, Naomi paints what she loves most about her neighborhood in a mural on her building. Little by little, though her world has altered, her mural grows until at last her community is preserved in vivid colors.

Yamasaki and Lendler’s straightforward yet poignant text nicely complements Yamasaki’s whimsical yet grounded illustrations that depict this portrait of urban connection. Her bright, bold palette is eye-catching, with carefully portrayed diverse neighbors, young and old.

Naomi’s home—its sights, smells, sounds, and interactions—is forever a place of love. (Picture book. 4-8)

HOW DO DINOSAURS SHOW GOOD MANNERS?

DANDAN’S DREAM

Zhu, Xiaowen Illus. by Gong Yanling Reycraft Books (40 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 30, 2020 978-1-4788-6853-8

When the post office announces that children can now be mailed, Dandan is excited to finally visit her father at the

South Pole.

On huge, colorful spreads filled with surreal details and bold brush strokes, Dandan embarks on a dreamy journey by affixing winged stamps to her clothing and taking off on the back of a magical blue horse. The Chinese girl with a bowl haircut flies exuberantly over landscapes dotted with whimsical details (such as clothed animals doing jobs and a cage full of colorful birds several times larger than the houses) until she spots trouble. A whale has trapped a ship against an island! Fantastical sea creatures ogle the disaster from below. Discarding stamps like petals, Dandan descends to rescue the boat and its crew but

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Seamless inclusion of Spanish idioms and phrases lets Spanishspeaking readers hear themselves on the pages. felíz new year, ava gabriela!

then realizes she has no more stamps for flying. Of course, she finds a very creative solution, and the delightful sight of a little man in his green parka waving from an iceberg will not fail to bring a smile to any reader’s face. Gong’s artwork is a riot of colors and odd juxtapositions and compositions, a cross between Elisa Kleven’s and Maira Kalman’s work. Every page includes charming details scattered across dynamic and bold compositions, especially delightful when paired with Zhu’s absurd plot conveyed through expressive font sizes, shapes, and colors.

(This book was reviewed digitally with 11.4-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 60% of actual size.)

Pure fantasy in the best sense. (Picture book. 4-8)

winter holiday picture books FELÍZ NEW YEAR, AVA GABRIELA!

Alessandri, Alexandra Illus. by Sonda, Addy Rivera Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 1, 2020 978-0-8075-0450-5 It’s New Year’s Eve at Abuelita’s finca, and Ava struggles to overcome her shyness.

Ava is excited to cook and play with her cousins and to join in family fun on the farm during her visit. Every time she wants to speak up, though, she finds that it’s much harder than she thinks it should be. Ava’s mamá reassures her that “There’s nothing wrong with being shy. When you’re ready, your voice will come out and play,” which gives Ava the confidence she needs to slowly come out of her shell. Colombian New Year’s traditions, such as eating 12 grapes at midnight for 12 months of good luck, are woven into the story for an added holiday experience.

Delicious Colombian foods are depicted in joyful illustrations that add even more cultural details. The story’s seamless incorporation of Spanish idioms and phrases lets Spanish-speaking readers hear themselves on the pages and provides support for those interested in learning more. Shyness isn’t portrayed as a negative trait, and Ava is given the space by her family members to find her voice on her own terms. Ava and her family are depicted with shades of brown skin and hair.

This gentle family story lets readers know that shyness is nothing to worry about. (author’s note, glossary) (Picture book. 3-8)

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JACK AND SANTA Barnett, Mac Illus. by Pizzoli, Greg Viking (80 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-593-11398-1 Series: Jack Book, 7

Jack is back, and he’s on Santa’s “BAD list.”

Barnett and Pizzoli’s rascally rabbit Jack returns in a seventh title in their earlyreader series. This time, readers discover that while the Lady and Rex the dog (with whom Jack lives) are on the nice list, Jack is on Santa’s naughty list. (In deference to emergent readers’ skills, the text labels these the “GOOD” and “BAD” lists.) There’s also another list in this story—Jack’s wish list, which spills over from one page onto the next two. “Oh boy. That’s a long list,” reads the wry text, which then goes on to speculate as to whether Jack will receive anything but coal. The story that ensues is well paced and accessible to new readers, its brief chapters cleverly interrogating the very premise that anyone might be wholly good or bad.

Barnett’s textual restraint allows Pizzoli to ramp up the humor as pictures highlight just how bad Jack has been—and how good.

The result is a humane and humorous secular Christmas story that offers the gift of supporting readers’ burgeoning decoding abilities with a well-developed, comical story. Both the Lady and Santa present White. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by13-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

You better watch out for this excellent early reader. (Early reader. 5-8)

COMET THE UNSTOPPABLE REINDEER

Benton, Jim Illus. by the author Two Lions (40 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-5420-4347-2

An intrepid member of Santa’s team saves Christmas.

When weary elves get into a fight just before Christmas Eve, Comet the reindeer steps in to break up the fisticuffs and is injured. The rhyming text describes how the doctor tells him he needs to rest and can’t help pull Santa’s sleigh that night, and then it reads, “Comet watched Santa get ready. / (His spot had been filled by / a rookie named Freddy.)” The singsong cadence and goofy phrasing of these lines is representative of the text as a whole, which goes on to reveal that Santa forgets to bring his bag filled with toys on the journey. No one notices this oversight since Freddy keeps them all entertained with silly songs.

Injured Comet decides he must deliver the toys himself, and a comical sequence shows him struggling to lift an enormous bag onto his shoulders before giving up. Then he reads a tear-jerker of a letter to Santa from a selfless child, which inspires him to persist. He

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flies around the world in search of this child’s home, delivering toys until he finally finds the house he’s searching for in Oahu. At this point Santa calls “full of thanks-yous and praise, / so quick-thinking Comet / mentioned getting a raise,” an attempt at wit that both undercuts the message of selflessness and aims over the heads of most child readers. Santa presents White, and his elf employees are diverse.

Not one to stop for despite the appeal of the cartoony art style. (Picture book. 4-7)

ONE CHRISTMAS WISH

Butler, M. Christina Illus. by Macnaughton, Tina Tiger Tales (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-68010-212-3 Series: Little Hedgehog

couple of baby mice.

The friends are all at Little Hedgehog’s enjoying some preChristmas cheer when the mice observe falling snow through the window. Their hopes of making snow mice on a white Christmas are dashed, however, when it melts the next day.

Little Hedgehog points out that there is still a little bit of snow, and they decide to find what they can and carry it home in Little Hedgehog’s stocking cap, rendered in red flocking on every page to add a tactile element to the reading. They pack the hat full, but on their way home the baby mice give some to Grandpa Squirrel to decorate his tree and some to the Beavers for a snowball fight. The remainder—along with the hat—is put to use as a cold compress when Fox sprains an ankle. The ending is as predictable as it is sentimental: The baby mice are praised for their selflessness, and Little Hedgehog works hard to make Christmas “magical” for the baby mice with sparkly decorations. (The snow-mice ambition is elided.) Macnaughton’s outdoor scenes feature bare branches and snowy mountains in the background, but the spring-green grass looks distinctly unseasonal, and the pattern of snowmelt will strike many as unrealistic.

A weak holiday entry for Butler and Macnaughton’s prickly pal. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE CHRISTMAS BARN

Churchman, John & Churchman, Jennifer Illus. by the authors Little Bee (48 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-4998-1019-6 Photo-collaged illustrations help tell a Christmas story set on a farm.

When a tree falls in the woods, Farmer John of Moonrise Farm decides to use it to “make a special Christmas gift for the animals.” He and his wife, Farmer Jennifer, “dr[a]w up the plans,” |

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THE LITTLE BELL THAT WOULDN’T RING A Christmas Story

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Little Hedgehog and his friends return to realize the Christmas wish of a

and then he starts working with the wood as dogs Laddie and Maisie, cat Mo, sheep Finn and Sweet Pea, and other animals look on. The sometimes-clumsily photo-collaged scenes show the seasons changing from fall to winter as Farmer John cuts the wood, makes measurements, hammers and uses other tools, and ultimately raises a new barn for the animals, just in time for the season’s first snowfall. A neighbor helps along the way, and the barn is painted a cheery red, which nicely offsets the evergreen boughs Farmer John uses to decorate it. Then, on Christmas Eve, another neighbor (who, like all of the other people, appears White) arrives with baskets of provender for the animals, a veritable Santa Claus delivering gifts. When alpaca Joy gives birth to a new cria that night, Farmer John names her Hope. Backmatter explains the true backstory behind the book, inspired by the creators’ life on a farm in Vermont. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 25% of actual size.)

A homemade, homey Christmas story for animal lovers.

(Picture book. 2-6)

Conradi, Heike Illus. by Dusíková, Maja Trans. by Wilson, David Henry NorthSouth (32 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-7358-4386-8

A Swiss import with a Christmastime message for the whole world.

A church with a bell tower stands in a cozy town square, and in that tower are four bells that “were very, very old. Except for the smallest one, which was new.” The old bells ring out their songs, but as anticipated by the title, the little bell won’t ring.

A dove named Felidia wants to encourage the bell to ring, and a wise old crow tells her that “nice words always help.” But which nice words will move the little bell to ring? Felidia and other birds chirp, “Morning sun” and “Cake crumbs!” and even try “Christmas pudding, fairy tale, chocolate, snowflake,” but none of these nice words provoke chiming. Birds fly around the world learning to say “Merry Christmas” in different European languages, but this doesn’t work; nor do the names of various cheeses listed by a group of mice, nor the words “I love you,” learned from a young couple who appear White (as do all other depicted people). On Christmas Eve, stillness descends, and text describes “a tiny light…crossing the sky.” Unfortunately, the art doesn’t clearly show this “light from Bethlehem [that] goes all around the world with a message of peace.” (Also unfortunate is the low-contrast placement of black text on eveningblue sky.) Nevertheless, this message of peace finally inspires the bell to ring, delivering a satisfying conclusion to the tale.

Nice words, indeed. (Picture book. 3-7)

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MOUSE’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

feast for the four of them. A sly twist offered in the cartoon art at the final page turn provides readers with a final treat to savor.

Deliciously funny. (Picture book. 4-8)

Corderoy, Tracey Illus. by Massini, Sarah Nosy Crow/Candlewick (32 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-5362-1440-6

CHRISTMAS IS JOY

What if a mouse was stirring on Christmas Eve? Corderoy’s text opens with lines from “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” but it quickly shifts to tell quite a different tale: “On that night before Christmas, / dear reader, you see, / there was one little mouse / as awake as could be.” Sadly, this stirring Mouse is lonesome on Christmas Eve, so he makes a wish on the star at the top of a Christmas tree for a friend. No sooner does he do so than “a clatter” arises outside. There, Mouse finds Santa calling his reindeer by name to make sure they’re all accounted for after his sleigh is grounded by a storm. Santa and his team are lost, so Mouse offers to help guide them through the neighborhood to make sure all of the children receive their presents. Massini’s art makes terrific use of rich, black, nighttime skies in contrast with the white snowfall, rooftops, and landscape below, and Santa’s sleigh itself seems made of starlight as it sails through the air. Mouse’s wish is granted at the book’s end, with Santa gifting him not one but two pairs of skates—the second pair for a new friend who shared the very same wish Mouse made earlier.

If you give a mouse a friend, you get a happy ending to a new take on an old Christmas favorite. (Picture book. 3-7)

THE CHRISTMAS FEAST

Dargent, Nathalie Illus. by Le Huche, Magali Eerdmans (32 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 11, 2020 978-0-8028-5537-4

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A reindeer introduces its calf to the meaning of Christmas.

The reindeer and calf depicted on the book’s cover move through a winter wonderland of snowy mountains and forests. Certain elements of the illustrations (the reindeers’ hides, snowy ground, and fir-tree branches and bark) have a soft visual texture while others (the distant mountains, the changing sky, the sun and stars) have a flat smoothness to them. These contrasting visual effects combine to create a sense of peaceful balance and perspective in the scenes. The accompanying rhyming verse can be read as the voice of the adult reindeer telling its calf about Christmastime, focusing on emotions and atmosphere rather than religious or secular traditions associated with the holiday. For example, there are no references to the Nativity, and Santa never makes an appearance. One verse does mention gift giving—“Christmas is giving / gifts under the tree / and time spent together, / just you and me”—but the illustration that goes along with it doesn’t anthropomorphize the reindeer to show them exchanging presents. Instead, they’re depicted nuzzling noses in a forest of snow-covered fir trees.

Calm and bright. (Picture book. 1-4)

HAPPY LLAMAKKAH!

This turkey is no turkey.

When Fox absconds with a turkey for his Christmas feast with his wolf and weasel pals, he gets more than he bargained for. Although the turkey is alarmed when she’s snatched away from the farm, she’s more than pulled herself together by the next double-page spread. In this picture, Le Huche depicts her perched atop a chair in Fox’s disorderly home, berating him for the mess. By the time Wolf and Weasel arrive, everything is tidied up, and Turkey sets her sights on bossing them around, too. Appalled that they’d even consider turning her into pâté before fattening her up, Turkey sends the befuddled trio out to gather food. She then cooks up a delicious “frog and sprout stew” for dinner, further solidifying her unexpectedly empowered position in the household. By the time Christmas Eve rolls around, Turkey has fully incorporated herself into the group, and Wolf, Weasel, and Fox are dismayed when she asks them “how would they cook her?” True to the dry humor of this trickster tale, she continues, “‘I would like to be flambéed.” Needless to say, this does not come to pass, and Turkey instead cooks up a 142

Dodd, Emma Illus. by the author Templar/Candlewick (24 pp.) $14.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-5362-1545-8 Series: Emma Dodd’s Love You Books

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Gehl, Laura Illus. by Nichols, Lydia abramsappleseed (24 pp.) $14.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-4197-4314-6

Members of the camelid family celebrate Hanukkah.

In a cozy house, llamas and alpacas perform all the standard holiday activities, including lighting candles, spinning dreidels, frying latkes, and wrapping presents. The action is written in tercets, with three rhymed lines: “Latkes to fry. / Ribbons to tie. / Friends stopping by.” The title of the book is the oft-repeated refrain, with llama and Hanukkah combining for an amusing portmanteau. Unfortunately, the innate appeal and soft, wooly hugginess of llamas and alpacas are lost in the spare, stylized digital illustrations. Even those characters who are presented with a bit of extra fleece don’t look particularly fluffy. One scene of a menorah on the windowsill depicts the candles placed left to right, instead of the traditional right to left. All in all, there’s not enough substance built around the refrain to fill out even

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A thoughtful take on Chinese American history that goes beyond the usual fare. ming’s christmas wish

this slim book. A two-page author’s note describes the Hanukkah miracle and then provides further information on the various Hanukkah traditions lighted on in the book. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8-by-16-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Not a must-buy. (Picture book. 2-5)

MING’S CHRISTMAS WISH

Gong, Susan L. Illus. by Tateishi, Masahiro Shadow Mountain (48 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-62972-779-0

LITTLE RED SLEIGH

Guendelsberger, Erin Illus. by Tretyakova, Elizaveta Sourcebooks Wonderland (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2020 978-1-72822-355-1 A little red sleigh has big Christmas dreams.

Although the detailed, full-color art doesn’t anthropomorphize the protagonist (which readers will likely identify as a sled and not a sleigh), a close third-person text affords the object thoughts and feelings while assigning feminine pronouns. “She longed to become Santa’s big red sleigh,” reads an early line establishing the sleigh’s motivation to |

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PEPPERMINT POST

Hale, Bruce Illus. by Laberis, Stephanie Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-0-06-284717-1

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Ming wants a Christmas tree, but her mother refuses, telling her, “Christmas trees are not Chinese.”

Accompanied by golden- and sepia-toned depictions of early-20th-century life, Gong’s text gives readers a glimpse into the lives of families who arrived in the United States during the gold rush. Little Ming feels like an outsider, ostracized at school for being Chinese yet wanting to take part in American traditions. Why does Mama so vehemently refuse to participate?

Then Pop takes her to visit some old friends of his father’s, and she listens to them tell stories about panning for gold, traveling the West, and surviving the San Francisco earthquake, always recovering from setbacks with resilience and strength. Afterward, Ming and Pop visit a sequoia grove where many immigrants before them escaped their troubles and connected with nature. Pop also has a compromise for Ming and her mother, a new Christmas tradition that does not forsake Mama’s Chinese roots. Most illustrations depict beautiful landscapes and settings illustrated with intricate details and glowing warmth, but human figures are inconsistent, the faces at times either too bland or a bit frightening. And while the plot is simple and Mama’s motivations are unclear, it is Gong’s depiction of the long arc of a bittersweet history in the context of the strength of human character that readers will remember.

A thoughtful take on Chinese American history that goes beyond the usual fare. (Picture book. 4-8)

leave her Christmas-shop home for the North Pole. Other toys discourage her, but she perseveres despite creeping self-doubt.

A train and truck help the sleigh along, and when she wishes she were big, fast, and powerful like them, they offer encouragement and counsel patience. When a storm descends after the sleigh strikes out on her own, an unnamed girl playing in the snow brings her to a group of children who all take turns riding the sleigh down a hill. When the girl brings her home, the sleigh is crestfallen she didn’t reach the North Pole. A convoluted happily-ever-after ending shows a note from Santa that thanks the sleigh for giving children joy and invites her to the North Pole next year. “At last she understood what she was meant to do. She would build her life up spreading joy, one child at a time.” Will she leave the girl’s house to be gifted to other children? Will she stay and somehow also reach ever more children? Readers will be left wondering. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 31.8% of actual size.)

Sadly, the storytelling runs aground. (Picture book. 3-6)

How do children’s letters to Santa reach their destination? Via Peppermint

Post, of course!

Buck, an anthropomorphic polar bear, is postmaster of the Peppermint Post, which means he’s in charge of ensuring that Santa receives all the letters children send him. His job is especially demanding during the Christmas rush, and luckily, he has a team of penguins to assist him (the text eventually acknowledges that these birds “belong at the South Pole, not the North!”). Alas, just when Buck thinks all the mail has been handled and Santa departs for his Christmas Eve trip, he finds an errant letter. Buck scrambles to right this wrong, enlisting the penguins to pull him in a backup sleigh to go off in pursuit of Santa and his reindeer (the text also acknowledges that penguins are flightless birds). Hijinks ensue in the chase, with Laberis’ cartoony art working overtime to augment the humor of “a hairy shortcut” through a train tunnel, among other mishaps. Buck and his team eventually catch up with St. Nick at the house of the child who wrote the misplaced letter. More slapstick scenes arise in this setting, though readers may close the book scratching their heads rather than laughing as Santa, the reindeer, the penguins, and Buck all depart the house together, without any indication of what’s become of the backup sleigh.

Funny—but not funny enough. (Picture book. 3-6)

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Readers are invited to play an I spy sort of game with the pages.

12 days of christmas

I LOVE YOU MORE THAN CHRISTMAS

Hattie, Ellie Illus. by Warnes, Tim Tiger Tales (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-68010-208-6

Little Bear loves everything about Christmas, but there’s one thing he loves

even more.

The Bear household is busily getting ready for Christmas. Mommy Bear wraps and bakes; Daddy Bear brings home a humongous tree; Little Bear exults in it all. With each new Christmas tradition that’s introduced, from opening Christmas cards to receiving carolers, Little Bear sings a song that celebrates it. “I love ornaments, and garland, and lights on a string, / candy canes, stockings—and all of the things / that make Christmas perfect—oh, yes, I do! / But the thing that I love more than Christmas is—” But before Little Bear can complete his rhyme, each time he is interrupted by a new element of Christmas to celebrate. Since that terminal rhyme is always set up with one that ends with an “oo” sound, readers will not be surprised in the least when Mommy and Daddy interrupt him one last time with an emphatic “YOU!” It’s all so uber-idealized readers may find themselves gagging on the syrup—it even seems to get at Hattie: Daddy Bear’s smug “What an exceedingly talented family we are” has a whiff of irony to it. Warnes’ cartoon bears inhabit a cozy, middle-class home; while the carolers are clothed, the Bear family is not, but readers may notice a white marking on Mommy Bear’s chest where a string of pearls might rest.

Like marshmallow on top of caramel. (Picture book. 3-5)

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

Illus. by Hawthorne, Lara Frances Lincoln (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-7112-4540-2

A veritable holiday feast for the eyes.

Hawthorne’s illustrations have a busy, folk-art style that will invite readers to pore over pages to find the animals, items, and people named in this old Christmas carol.

Foil detailing on the cover art adds festive flair to the book’s design, but readers who associate Christmastime with wintry scenes will not find snowy landscapes here. An abundant use of light green in the grounds around the country house where the action unfolds lends a fresh feel to the picture book, perhaps offering a reminder that people in warm climes and in the Southern Hemisphere celebrate Christmas, too. Also welcome is the artist’s inclusion of a multiracial cast of people in later verses. Readers are invited to play an I spy sort of game with the pages, seeking out everything from the single partridge in a pear tree to the 12 drummers drumming at the book’s end.

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presentation, though a marvelously spare double-page spread illustrating “five gold rings” eschews the finely detailed, moredistant scenes to instead present a close-up view of hands holding those rings laid out on small cloth decorated in red, green, and blue. This visual pause evokes the slower pace of that line in the song, clearly demonstrating the thoughtfulness with which Hawthorne approached her illustration.

Encore! (full lyrics, author’s note, game) (Picture book. 2-12)

CLARIS Holiday Heist

Hess, Megan Illus. by the author Hardie Grant Books/Trafalgar (48 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-76050-495-3 Series: Claris Collection The fourth title in the Claris Collection features a Christmastime crime.

Claris the Parisian mouse is delighted to be in New York City with her feline pal, Monsieur, and their human family— though the child in the family is called “the Brat” and she lives up to the name. While this moniker may be off-putting, the rhymed verse peppered with French phrases largely focuses on Claris and her escapades in the big city. The rather cloying tone seems aimed more at adult fashionistas than child readers, as designer name-dropping abounds, and Hess uses her background in fashion illustration to depict Claris getting all gussied up to go shopping. While she and the family await their driver, the très chic rodent spies homeless mice shivering in the cold and begging for food. Their plight weighs on Claris as she heads to Cartier, but her attention soon shifts to the titular holiday heist: While in the glamorous shop, she and Monsieur see another pet, this one in a carrying case, swipe a ruby ring.

They pursue the thief and reclaim the jewelry before the person who brought it to the shop notices it’s missing. The book ends with Claris giving aid to the homeless mice, though this subplot seems forced and superfluous to the rest of the book. Claris and Monsieur’s human family presents White; there are some characters of color in the background.

Not one to hurry to swipe off the shelf. (Picture book. 4-7)

SANTA.COM

Hicks, Russell & Cubberly, Matt Illus. by Garcia, Ryley Familius (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-64170-289-8 Upgrades at the North Pole go awry in this Christmas story.

This poorly written story with dimly lit, subpar cartoon illustrations is both difficult to follow and oblique in its messaging. The opening pages reveal that an overwhelmed Santa

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MISTLETOE

Hills, Tad Illus. by the author Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Sep. 29, 2020 978-0-593-17442-5 978-0-593-17443-2 PLB A friendship story for under the tree.

“Finally it feels like Christmas,” Mistletoe the mouse thinks to herself as she walks through the snow to her friend Norwell the elephant’s house. But Norwell doesn’t like the cold and won’t come outside to join her. Instead, Mistletoe visits him inside his cozy house for tea before heading home. Eager to encourage her friend to experience the peaceful beauty of a wintertime snowfall, Mistletoe devises a plan to help him be more comfortable outside. That plan involves lots of yarn and lots of knitting. In fact, Hills devotes several spreads to the process of knitting and buying more colorful yarn before Mistletoe finally completes her friend’s gift on Christmas Eve. When she awakens on Christmas morning, Mistletoe finds that Santa has visited, but instead of opening her gifts, she hurries out the door with her enormous present tied up with a bow to deliver to Norwell. He, too, has made something for her: a painting he based on seeing her enjoying the snowfall. But readers’ favorite picture will likely be the one that reveals Norwell all dressed up in the enormous, colorful knitted bodysuit that Mistletoe made for him. Though his outfit is striped, not checkered, some readers may liken Norwell’s appearance to David McKee’s Elmer the Patchwork Elephant; all readers will be delighted to finally see him outside with his friend.

Warming through and through. (Picture book. 3-6)

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THE WHEELS ON THE BUS AT CHRISTMAS

Illus. by Kieley, Sarah Doubleday (24 pp.) $10.99 | $13.99 PLB | Sep. 22, 2020 978-0-593-17485-2 978-0-593-17486-9 PLB A familiar children’s song gets a Christmas-carol reboot.

A title-page map highlights various locations in a North Pole village, including Santa’s house and a toy workshop. The ensuing pages, however, focus less on locale than they do on the passengers on a Christmassy bus driven by St. Nick himself.

“Let’s ride the bus on Christmas Eve, / Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve. / Let’s ride the bus on Christmas Eve— / who will we find inside?” Each verse features a different group of passengers with accompanying illustrations showing them riding this bus. First elves (pleasingly depicted with a range of racial presentations) go “Let’s make toys!” then reindeer go “Jingle!

Jingle! Jingle!” snowmen go “Brr! Brr! Brr!” and so on. (In a particularly silly touch, sentient cookies with tiny arms and legs go, “Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!”) The busy, serviceable cartoon scenes don’t show riders getting on and off, and the bus’s interior seems magically cavernous as compared to illustrations of its exterior. The book concludes with a magical scene of the bus taking flight, the reindeer no longer passengers but harnessed to its front bumper and pulling it upward through the stars.

Where are they going? “NEXT STOP: YOUR HOUSE!” reads knockout type against the dark blue sky.

Yuletide fun for the youngest ones. (Picture book. 2-5)

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“made a BIG mistake” and decides he needs to modernize North Pole operations. The accompanying illustration is made to look like a book within this book, and it shows a little White girl sadly looking at a gift labeled “SUZIE.” It turns out that this book is being read to an elf named Yo-Yo by his grandfather.

Directly after, Yo-Yo goes to the workshop for his first day on the job only to discover that their ultra–high-tech operations have been hacked and Christmas is imperiled. Plot points fail to connect as Yo-Yo travels around the world trying to find Santa, who apparently is taking a break after his big mistake (which, readers eventually learn, was giving Suzie the wrong gift). Lo and behold, Suzie is now an adult, and she’s behind the hack because she’s held a grudge all these years. Other details are too bizarre and haphazard to mention, and the illustrations suggest that Santa hires Suzie to take over operations in the end.

“Christmas isn’t about deadlines or shiny production lines. It’s about the Christmas spirit and giving with love,” opines Santa, which explains exactly nothing. Santa and Yo-Yo both present White, and the elf workforce is diverse.

Not nice, not naughty—not good, either, alas. (Picture book.

4-7)

THE EIGHT KNIGHTS OF HANUKKAH

Kimmelman, Leslie Illus. by Bernstein, Galia Holiday House (48 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-0-8234-3958-4

A mix of medieval derring-do and Hanukkah preparation and celebration.

A map of a castle and its environs opens the tale. The eight knights, diverse in gender and race, are siblings, the children of Lady Sadie. She sends them forth on great steeds to foil the “dastardly dragon named Dreadful,” which is wreaking havoc with the realm’s Hanukkah celebrations. Their weapons are “awesome kindness and stupendous bravery.” Sir Alex carves a replacement for a charred dreidel. Sir Gabriel helps prepare latkes. Sir Margaret assists with making applesauce. Others perform the “mitzvah of bringing chicken soup to the hungry,” fry doughnuts, and clean the castle. The last two—Sir Isabella and Sir Rugelach—prepare to do battle with the dragon until they discover that it is just a “baby dragon” named Rosie. And so their Round Table is filled with tasty treats and a menorah while guests and brave deed-doers fill the seats. And readers will not be surprised to see who lights the candles. The narrative is

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laced with medievalesque wordage as in “Hark! Methinks” and “Worryeth not.” Colorful cartoon illustrations portray happy encounters between the knights and the ordinary folk, interspersed with hints to the dragon’s whereabouts.

For those on a quest for a different take on a holiday tail— oops!—tale. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)

THE TWELVE UNICORNS OF CHRISTMAS

Knapman, Timothy Illus. by Grey, Ada Aladdin (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-5344-8019-3

If you give a kid a unicorn, Christmas chaos ensues.

Although clearly inspired by the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the text largely eschews the song’s cadence, not to mention any real attempt at cumulative structure. The result is a merry mess of a picture book without much to recommend it to anyone except the most die-hard unicorn fan. The text is ostensibly written in the voice of a child narrator: “On the first day of Christmas, / my parents gave to me… / 1 sparkling Christmas tree! / And a real-life UNICORN!” The text proceeds to count up through the 12 days of Christmas to list various things and people who make appearances, often interacting with the unicorn. There is no obvious rhyme or reason to the order, and at the book’s end Santa brings another 11 unicorns to make the solitary one who showed up on the first day feel better.

(It had sneezed glitter on the 10th day, which apparently was a symptom of loneliness for its kind?) The cartoony art is perhaps stronger than the haphazard text, but it doesn’t succeed in magically transforming the book into one worth gifting. The narrator and most other people, including Santa, appear White in the illustrations. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.8-by19.2-inch double-page spreads viewed at 27.7% of actual size.)

Don’t bother putting this one under the tree. (Picture book.

3-5)

KAYLA AND KUGEL’S HAPPY HANUKKAH

Koffsky, Ann D. Illus. by the author Apples & Honey Press (24 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68115-560-9 A little girl and her puppy celebrate the holiday.

Pigtailed Kayla and her dog, Kugel, are preparing for Hanukkah by busily searching through boxes for the menorahs and dreidels. Kugel jumps ahead on the calendar, though, and starts rooting through a box labeled “Purim.”

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story of the holiday with the dog. Kugel, in his enthusiasm to light the holiday lights, holds out a Shabbat candlestick. “Put that away. Please?” Kayla pleads. Kugel keeps up his frolicsome ways until Kayla concludes her retelling with the word “miracle!”

In a colorful double-page spread, Kayla, her mother, and her father (who is holding a baby sibling) light the first candle with Kugel watching attentively. He then reverts to his lively self by spinning around like a dreidel. Young listeners who learned about Shabbat from Kayla and Kugel (2015) and Passover from Kayla and Kugel’s Almost-Perfect Passover (2016) will enjoy this spirited offering with its colorful and lively illustrations. The pages retelling the story of Hanukkah are depicted in sepia tones. The family presents as White, and the father wears a kippah.

A very happy Hanukkah for little listeners, candle lighters, and dreidel spinners. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-5)

THE HANUKKAH MAGIC OF NATE GADOL

Levine, Arthur A. Illus. by Hawkes, Kevin Candlewick (40 pp.) $19.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-0-7636-9741-9

A mysterious gift-giver brings holiday cheer in the form of presents for all.

With a nod to the late-19th-century immigration of Jews to America, Levine creates a pourquoi tale for the exchange of gifts on Hanukkah. The larger-than-life titular character floats above and around the action wearing a smartly styled blue overcoat and ornate leather boots with a matching leather satchel.

His name is taken from the acronym for the four letters on a dreidel, Nes Gadol Hayah and Sham, which translates to “A Great Miracle Happened There” and is the very essence of the great Nate. “He made things last as long as they needed to.” His powers were evident a long time ago, “like that little amount of oil,” and continue as he makes a small amount of chocolate become more than enough for Mrs. Glaser and her children, a Jewish family in steerage, bound for America. Nate helps her son help their Irish neighbors, the O’Malleys, during the terrible winter of 1881. He also helps his old friend Santa in a rooftop encounter. Now, both the O’Malleys and the Glasers have piles of presents for their holiday celebrations, a tradition for the former and something new for the latter. Hawkes uses richly textured acrylic paints and eye-popping swirls of gold to create illustrations that are at once grounded and otherworldly. All characters have pale skin, Nate’s a tad more olive than the others’.

A new, entertaining, and thoughtful addition to the Hanukkah canon. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

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It’s refreshing to see artistic acknowledgement of Christmastime outside of snowy, rural, Rockwellian settings. the night before christmas

’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS ON THE FARM Manning, Craig Illus. by Collina, Sumi Sourcebooks Wonderland (40 pp.) $10.99 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-7282-0625-7

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Moore, Clement C. Illus. by Long, Loren Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-0-06-286946-3 A visual treatment of an old poem that’s both nostalgic and fresh.

The cover art focuses on St. Nick driving his airborne sleigh against the full moon. Flying reindeer pulling the sleigh break the cover’s right edge, leading into the book. The illustrations’ soft style establishes an old-fashioned look. Long’s central artistic conceit is revealed at the bottom of the picture, where he establishes four settings that Santa visits: a cityscape, a farm, a trailer park, and a palm-tree–dotted neighborhood. It’s refreshing to see artistic acknowledgement of Christmastime outside of snowy, rural, Rockwellian settings, and the endpapers show characters to be as diverse as their homes: an interracial sibling pair decorates a tree; a child who appears Black drafts a letter to Santa; two brown-skinned children draw a large fireplace scene; and three White-appearing children, one using a wheelchair, make cookies.

The “right jolly old elf ” himself is decidedly elfin, with a diminutive stature, and presents White with a ruddy complexion. In |

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THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Moore, Clement C. Illus. by Wuerbs, Kai Arctis Books (48 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-64690-005-3

A newly illustrated version of an old Christmas poem.

The striking cover art for this reimagining of Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (sometimes attributed to Henry Livingston) eschews typical visions of Santa and his reindeer silhouetted against the night sky. Instead, Wuerbs depicts a snowy landscape with sleigh-runner tracks leading from the bottom of the picture over a low hilltop, at which point a redclad figure disappears at the slope. While this picture provokes curiosity and invites readers into the book, Wuerbs’ art sometimes seems better suited to gallery walls than a picture book, as it resists making narrative contributions or supporting characterization to instead present studies of details from the verses. For example, the opening lines evoking the stillness of Christmas Eve are juxtaposed with a dark, close-up of a lit candle in a holder, with nothing else depicted—not even a mouse. If this art seems too far removed from the text, the next page with stockings “hung by the chimney with care” seems utterly redundant. Artistic decisions of the former ilk might provoke a mysterious air, but they may also stymie readers who find the results unfinished rather than engaging. Still, a later close-up of Santa (who presents White) is visually arresting, and a closing image, paint streaking to show Santa’s quick departure from the scene, is breathtaking in its simplicity.

At turns beautiful and frustratingly opaque. (Picture book.

4-8)

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A visit from St. Nicholas with a trip to the barnyard, too.

In their cadence, rhyme scheme, and word choices, Manning’s adapted verses borrow liberally from the original poem credited to Clement C. Moore (and sometimes to Henry Livingston). Occasional word choices can read like missteps rather than innovations, however; the original poem’s “wondering eyes” are recast as “wandering eyes,” for example. Instead of using the poem’s original first-person narrator, this version employs the omniscient third to introduce a little lamb who awakens and observes Santa Claus’ sleigh landing on the farmhouse roof. No one joins her in her observations, but readers are invited to do so as she tries to figure out what’s happening in the full-bleed, rather flat art that seems like something from an animation studio. Eventually, it’s not what the lamb sees but what she hears that moves her from befuddlement to understanding, when Santa (who appears White) laughs “Ho, ho, ho.” As she watches him place presents under the tree in the house, she hopes he’ll have gifts for her, too. He does, of course, and the illustrations show the fruits, veggies, and other animal-friendly treats he puts into their stockings before leaving the little lamb to settle in again to sleep away the rest of Christmas Eve. It’s all sweet but hardly novel.

This revisitation of familiar holiday fare doesn’t stand out. (Picture book. 2-5)

keeping with other versions, parents are depicted as the “I” of the text, and Long maintains his commitment to inclusion and diversity in their characterization as he switches among settings to show them encountering Santa. These shifts don’t follow a rigid sequence, and seasonal details in décor (several crèche scenes, stockings, trees, and even a menorah on the mantelpiece in the evidently bicultural urban home) offer additional visual interest.

Bring this one ho-ho-home. (Picture book. 2-7)

LITTLE MOLE’S CHRISTMAS GIFT

Nellist, Glenys Illus. by Garland, Sally Beaming Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5064-4875-6 Series: Little Mole Little Mole has a great big heart.

Little Mole has found an enormous mushroom in the woods and decided to give it to his beloved Mama for Christmas. After

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This pleasant tale will be as useful on a community-helper shelf as in the holiday collection. the ninth night of hanukkah

he works hard to pick it, he encounters several woodland creatures in need as he carries the large, red-and-white mushroom home to his mother. Bit by bit, he gives away parts of the stem to hungry Little Squirrel and to tired Little Mouse, who needs somewhere soft to rest his head. Then he gives the cap to Little Chipmunk to use as an umbrella. By the time he reaches his mother, Little Mole has only a tiny piece of the mushroom left for her. She is nonetheless pleased and says she will make them soup for their Christmas dinner. Her gratitude only increases when Little Mole sadly tells her what happened to the rest of the big mushroom. A proud Mama says, “your kindness is the biggest, most perfect Christmas gift I have ever received,” which provides Little Mole with affirmation, reassurance, and a holiday lesson about the importance of generosity. The softly textured illustrations reinforce the gentle coziness of the story. The animals are anthropomorphic, though only Little Mole and Mama are fully dressed; most of the animals Little Mole encounters wear nothing, underscoring their relative neediness next to the moles’ evident prosperity. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.3-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 39.1% of actual size.)

A warm wintertime read with a message for any time of year. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE LITTLEST CANDLE A Hanukkah Story Olitzky, Kerry & Olitzky, Jesse Illus. by Kostman, Jen Kalaniot Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-0-998-8527-5-1

Which candle will have the place of honor on the menorah?

Nine anthropomorphic candles are at first overjoyed to welcome Hanukkah but then face a crisis. Who is to be the shamash, or helper candle, who glows the highest? As Waxy the wise candle tells the story of the holiday, the others, all primped and groomed, noisily push themselves forward. All except Little Flicker, that is, who has a big heart and a solid work ethic. Even Sparky and Sparkle, the Shabbat candles, put forth their fitness for the position. (One sports a pink bow in its wick and the other a blue bow tie.) Then Ms. Wicks, the Havdalah candle lit at the conclusion of Shabbat, presents her qualifications. Little Flicker softly reminds them that the number of candles lit increases nightly so “the light in the world should only grow brighter.” All the others now know that pious, modest Flicker should be selected. The Hanukkah candles are depicted in the cartoon illustrations in different colors and with variably expressive faces. What is certain to confuse observant readers is that a box of Hanukkah candles actually contains 44, because after they are lit the candles burn down completely each night. Problematically for readers who are shomer Shabbat, the text states that Shabbat candles are lit “exactly at sunset” when in fact care should be taken that they be lit several minutes earlier. The tale ends with a family scene of gluttony-filled latke and jelly-doughnut consumption.

Alas, there is no holiday illumination here. (authors’ note) (Picture book. 4-7) 148

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MILO’S CHRISTMAS PARADE

Palmer, Jennie Illus. by the author Abrams (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-4197-4499-0

An opossum with a love for Christmas hoopla realizes a lifelong dream.

Milo’s family likes the Christmas parade for all the goodies spectators drop: popcorn, nuts, candy. Milo loves the parade for its spectacle. It just so happens that Milo and his passel live near the building where the balloons and floats for the parade are designed and built. Inexplicably (to Milo), every year he is overlooked for inclusion in the parade, so finally he decides to make his dream come true himself. With a little help from his passel, he works all year long to design and build a float with a giant skiing opossum on it, to be drawn by loyal members of his passel. When the float collides with a balloon handler’s rope and is destroyed, Milo is devastated—but his passel comes through to jury-rig a new float. Racing to catch up with the parade, they come across Santa’s float, which has encountered problems of its own, and Santa and Milo ride to triumph together on Milo’s float. This quirky story features a decidedly unusual protagonist, but it meanders. Palmer’s line-and-color cartoons are frequently hard to parse, unable to fully shoulder the narrative load left by openings in the sparse, wry text. Occasional footnotes offer some explanation but not enough to carry readers seamlessly through the story. Santa presents White; other parade workers and participants are diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8.5-by21-inch double-page spreads viewed at 68.6% of actual size.)

Doesn’t quite make it despite an abundance of enthusiasm. (Picture book. 5-8)

THE NINTH NIGHT OF HANUKKAH

Perl, Erica S. Illus. by Kober, Shahar Sterling (40 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-4549-4088-3

Hanukkah is celebrated with some differences and an addition.

With boxes strewn about from their recent move to a new apartment house and the one labeled for Hanukkah missing, a family adjusts their holiday routines. When Mom can’t find the menorah and candles, siblings Rachel and Max make a menorah, and a new neighbor supplies candles. When Dad can’t find his “lucky latke pan,” the super shares his French fries. When the children can’t find their dreidel, the twins upstairs share a hula hoop. A package of chocolate chips replaces the gelt, and newspaper becomes wrapping paper for gifts. No jelly doughnuts? Have a peanut-butter–and-jelly sandwich offered by still another neighbor. Happy with the make-do results, the children determine to have a thank-you party for their new friends and dedicate it to the ninth candle on the menorah, the

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shamash, or helper candle. The arrival of their own Hanukkah box is a plus. The family presents as White while the neighbors are a multiracial assemblage. Children will enjoy watching the family’s cat reacting to the various goings-on and seeing the furnishings gradually replacing boxes over the course of the story. Instructions for a DIY “Shamash Night” close the book. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 69.8% of actual size.)

This pleasant tale will be as useful on a communityhelper shelf as in the holiday collection. (author’s note) (Pic­ ture book. 4-7)

THE THREE WISHES A Christmas Story

Snow, Alan Illus. by the author Pavilion Children’s (48 pp.) $19.95 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-84365-386-8

SANTA BABY

Stutzman, Jonathan Illus. by Fox, Heather Henry Holt (48 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-1-250-25561-7 A babe in toyland spells trouble for Christmas.

Poor Santa is struggling with major burnout at the beginning of this laughout-loud Christmas book. Stutzman’s skillful, witty turns of |

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An unusual origin story for Santa Claus.

“Long, long ago in the very north a group of people lived with the reindeer.” Snow never states that the nomadic people in his story are Sami, but he does nothing to keep readers from making the association. The story relates how, one winter solstice, the main character, an unnamed boy, discovers the family’s precious reindeer are missing. He goes out into the snow to find them, following them into a cave that leads deep underground to a magical land of Summer.

It’s guarded by three creatures who tell the boy he may never return to his home but who grant him three wishes. He asks for freedom, happiness, and time—experiencing them once each year when he is permitted to return to his family and their clan, who lie in suspended animation during his visit. Each year he leaves gifts, even decorating the inside of their lodge. One year, a guardian of Summer gives him a feather that will enable his reindeer to fly, and on another, anticipating his visit, his family leaves him a red suit trimmed in white. It’s all very clever, but in borrowing the traditional habits of the Sami and failing to clarify that his mythmaking is original, Snow risks clouding many readers’ understanding of a real, extant, and marginalized culture. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.5-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 68.6% of actual size.)

A lump of coal for this one. (Picture book. 5-8)

phrase and Fox’s uproarious comic illustrations depict a decidedly old St. Nick. The opening pages are so strong and funny it’s a shame to see a textual misstep when, just before Christmas, a weary Santa who seems ready to throw in the towel frets that “all the children in the entire world were counting on him.” Most children reading this book will undoubtedly be among those who celebrate Christmas; but it does neither them nor others any good to reinforce Christmas as universally celebrated. Such textual erasure of non-Christian children may undermine the story’s playful tone for some readers when Santa summons Christmas magic to make him young again. His wish comes true to an extreme degree, and the North Pole is left in the tiny hands of his transformed, titular Santa Baby self. Seeing his ineptitude (he can’t even say “Ho Ho Ho!”), the elves initially fear Christmas will be cancelled, but they rally around Santa Baby, who also gets help from a bighearted child in one of the homes they eventually visit.

By the book’s end Santa is restored to his status as jolly old elf, and Christmas is saved. Santa presents White, and the elves are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 30.5% of actual size.)

Funny and fun with a fundamental, if not fatal, flaw. (Pic­ ture book. 3-7)

ALL THE COLORS OF CHRISTMAS

Turner, Matthew Paul Illus. by Gamble, Gillian Convergent/Random House (40 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 8, 2020 978-0-525-65414-8 Rhyming verse describes various Christmas symbols and events, grouped by color, as four children celebrate the season.

The dominant color in Gamble’s palette shifts accordingly from red through green, gold, blue, and white to brown before concluding pages shift from hues to “you.” The children, two White kids who may be preschoolers or early-elementary children, one Asian child about the same age, and another Asian child who is a young toddler, decorate the tree, go to a Christmas fair, go ice-skating, and participate in a Nativity play, among other activities. The children’s caregivers are largely absent, leaving readers to parse the children’s relationships as they will: They could be siblings, two sets of cousins, or good friends. Other children of varied racial presentation appear in the background. Turner’s verse makes some odd twists and turns, with forced rhymes and/or scansion in more than one or two spots. “Christmas is GOLD. / It’s bright ribbon unrolled. / It’s jingling bells / and warm, yummy smells. / It’s heirlooms YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO HOLD. / It’s dancers all tapping among holiday trappings. / It’s nutcracker crowns / and Christmas Eve gowns. / It’s glittery gift wrapping.” Like the verse, the illustrations are also sometimes awkward, the children sometimes seeming as if they are pasted onto a space rather than painted into it. A little mouse in a snowsuit appears in many spreads. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8.5-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 92.3% of actual size.)

Like so many books commemorating the season, sweet but unremarkable. (Picture book. 4-8)

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THE MOUSE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Turner, Tracey Illus. by Løvlie, Jenny Sunbird Books (40 pp.) $10.99 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-5037-5495-9

A murine version of the classic Christmas poem. “ ’Twas the night before Christmas, / when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring / …except for one mouse.” A little white mouse clad in a fur-trimmed red suit winks at readers and holds a shushing paw to its mouth. Turner goes on to give “A Visit From St. Nicholas” a mouse-themed spin, casting the reindeer as red and green stag beetles and sending her Santa “through / a crack in the wall” rather than down the chimney.

Although she supplies the stag beetles with appropriate names (“On Scatter and Skitter!” urges Santa), curiously, she omits the narrator character from the tale, which gives the proceedings an incomplete air. Readers may be so busy looking at the details in Løvlie’s illustrations they may not feel the absence.

She depicts snoozing mouse children in a tiny shoe, a matchbox, and a flour scoop; gives the stag beetles pink cheeks, black button noses, and smiles; and festoons the mouse hole with papermouse chains and dried fruit rounds. It’s all extremely cozy but kept from being cloyingly so with a limited palette of muted (rather than forest) green, red, and dark blue; the swooshes of snow Santa leaves in his wake give a bracing, fresh feeling.

For mouse-loving children and families looking for an alternative to the well-known poem. (Picture book. 4-7)

A VERY QUACKY CHRISTMAS

Watts, Frances Illus. by James, Ann Doubleday (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Sep. 29, 2020 978-0-593-17377-0 978-0-593-17378-7 PLB

A determined duck sets out to prove that Christmas is for animals, too.

Samantha Duck is unmoved when Sebastian the turtle repeatedly tells her that “Christmas is not for animals.” Despite his repeated attempts to discourage her, she persists in decorating for the holiday and saying, “We wish you a quacky Christmas.” Soon she enlists the help of other animals in making presents for “animals all over the world,” even persuading a doubtful Sebastian to help her. Throughout, loose linework reminiscent of Jules Feiffer’s or James Stevenson’s lends vitality to the animal characters; they are not fully anthropomorphic, but their human postures, particularly loyal friend Sebastian’s, are winning. The scenes are warm and sunny, perhaps indicating a Southern Hemisphere setting familiar to the Australian author and illustrator. A generous donkey agrees to share his cart, and then Samantha and Sebastian fill it with gifts and 150

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try to make it take off and fly so they can deliver the presents around the world. Alas, Sebastian’s doubts are fulfilled, and the cart stays firmly on the ground. Ultimately, it’s Sebastian’s urging that they try one more time to make the cart fly that sparks the Christmas magic to fulfill Samantha’s vision. They fly around the world delivering gifts to animals, and the book closes with a scene of them opening presents, too. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-22-inch double-page spreads viewed at 10.6% of actual size.)

Joy to the animal world, too. (Picture book. 2-5)

THERE WAS A YOUNG RABBI A Hanukkah Tale

Wolfe, Suzanne M. Illus. by Ebbeler, Jeffrey Kar-Ben (24 pp.) $17.99 | $7.99 paper | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-5415-7607-0 978-1-5415-7608-7 paper

A rabbi and her family enjoy a food- and fun-filled holiday.

“There was a young rabbi / who read from the Torah. / She read from the Torah / and lit the menorah. / She lit the menorah, / as we all know, / to remember a miracle / from a long time ago.”

To the rhythm of the familiar cumulative rhyme “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,” the rabbi then makes herself busy in the kitchen frying latkes. These are “latkes so yummy” that “filled up her tummy.” She also makes applesauce for the latkes and a “nice brisket” that is “kosher, of course.”

Dessert comes in the shape of chocolate gelt that is “so sweet and so tasty, / in her mouth it did melt.” Along with eating all the requisite food (Ashkenazic style), the family lights the candles on the menorah, spins the dreidel, and exchanges gifts. The long, repetitive text invites participation. The family presents as White, and colorful illustrations convey a busy home and cheerful folk. With the exception of one scene of the miracle in the Temple and a set of elderly visitors, human characters, both male- and female-presenting, all seem to wear kippot. However, aside from this and the rabbi’s feminine pronouns, the book does not meaningfully question gender norms: The rabbi’s male-presenting partner helps with none of the cooking. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8.875-by-21.25-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Hanukkah happiness for the very young. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-5)

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young adult THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Allen, John ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-901-1

CITY OF THE UNCOMMON THIEF by Lynne Bertrand...................154 MY HEART UNDERWATER by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo................. 163 ODESSA by Jonathan Hill; illus. by Jonathan Hill & Xan Drake.. 164 LONG WAY DOWN by Jason Reynolds; illus. by Danica Novgorodoff.............................................................. 172

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A matter-of-fact account of the impeachment’s proximate causes, course, and outcome.

Making a try for evenhanded language, Allen describes how an “alleged quid pro quo” in a July 2019 phone conversation between Donald Trump, “one of the most polarizing presidents ever,” and Ukraine’s newly elected leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, sparked a whistleblower complaint that, along with the White House’s subsequent stonewalling, led to a congressional scrimmage and, after much sound and fury, a 2020 Senate trial with a “foregone conclusion.” Arguing that said conclusion was based not on principle but party, the author notes and quotes many more logical and impassioned arguments for the impeachment than against it, so leaving the “anti” side relatively silent. Nor, beyond a few passing references, does he give readers willing to make their own judgments about the merits of the case much legal or historical background to work with. Still, by diligently wrestling an array of published documents and news reports into a coherent narrative and closing with several pages of resources, he does give report-driven students a leg up in their research.

Color photos add interest, and text boxes provide additional context and quotes from experts and key individuals.

Straight-up assignment fodder, staid but steady, stronger on reportage than analysis. (source notes, key figures, further reading, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 12-15)

THE FUTURE OF FOOD New Ideas About Eating

Allman, Toney ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-927-1

MY HEART UNDERWATER

Fantauzzo, Laurel Flores Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-06-297228-6

What adjustments in attitudes, practices, and technology might end world hunger and slow climate change?

The introduction begins with a strong quotation from members of the World Economic Forum, warning of the challenge of providing enough nutritious food to a burgeoning world population |

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american dreams and realities There can be no doubt that the United States is currently at a pivotal stage of its history. People across the country are discussing like never before what American ideals are— and what they should look like in practice. What does it mean to be American and to have access to full participation in American society?

Who truly feels a sense of belonging in a country that has long prided itself on welcoming those in need? How can the nation come to terms with centuries of inequitable treatment of some, including the members of hundreds of Native nations whose forebears were here long before there was a United States?

The often discussed global society we inhabit, one that brings shared benefits as well as risks, requires a very different set of skills from young people than was expected of their parents or grandparents. The well-documented benefits of cross-cultural experiences and diverse groups— among them, enhanced creativity—can seem sadly at odds with the less inclusive realities young people encounter in their daily lives.

It’s no wonder that many works of YA literature published this year wrestle with these questions of identity and inclusion in ways that strike at the heart of our visions for America. Each of the following recent releases is a richly rewarding read that is engaging in its own right and ideal for prompting discussion.

In Search of Safety: Voices of Refugees by Susan Kuklin (Candlewick, May 12): Discussions about asylum policies often focus on generalities or are framed in terms of current residents’ perceptions of the impact on their own lives. What is frequently lost is an understanding of all that refugees themselves have experienced and hope for.

This remarkable work looks at the personal histories of five refugees from around the world, now settled in Nebraska. They share their stories with dignity, putting an indelible, unforgettable human face on a subject that is often depersonalized.

Imaginary Borders by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez with Russell Mendell (Penguin Workshop, June 2): A young Indigenous (Mexica) environmental activist speaks up in this powerful work. Martinez’s frequent visits to his father’s 152

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hometown near Mexico City and experiences at home in Colorado have provided him with insights into the interconnectedness of our lives and our impact on the planet. While we may create political and social borders between people, he persuasively and urgently argues that we must transcend them in order to mitigate the climate crisis.

Call Me American (Adapted for Young Adults): The Extraordinary True Story of a Young Somali Immigrant by Abdi Nor Iftin with Max Alexander (Delacorte, June 16): Like many works by immigrants, this memoir is fascinating both for the remarkable tale Somali-born Iftin relates as well as for his observations about America upon his arrival. From expectations based on pop culture (he learned English by watching movies) to settling in and experiencing both great hospitality and the harsh realities of American racism, his keen observations and broad perspective hold up an invaluable mirror we can all learn from.

Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From

by Jennifer De Leon (Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum, Aug. 18): This probing work of realistic fiction follows Liliana, a high school student who is the daughter of immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador. This bright teenager is offered the opportunity to attend a mostly White school in the suburbs outside Boston. There she encounters the stark realities of the very different educational opportunities American students receive—along with the emotional stress of her father’s undocumented status.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

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Lilting prose carries along the story as characters seek to return balance to a broken world. soulswift

QUIET NO MORE

Barthelmess, Nikki Flux (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-63583-063-7 Series: The Quiet You Carry, 2 The sequel to The Quiet You Carry (2019) explores what happens to now– college freshman Victoria after she told the truth about her father’s sexual abuse.

Victoria’s father is in jail awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty, and she has aged out of foster care, tentatively reconnected with her stepmother and stepsister, gotten her own apartment, and enrolled in community college. There, Victoria joins Students Against Sexual Assault and Harassment and begins to make new friends. Disturbing revelations and a request from an aunt she never previously knew existed force Victoria to agonize anew over her victim impact statement. Her many drafts reveal how challenging this

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without destroying the planet. After defining food security and positing that world food production must double by 2050 to meet dietary needs and tastes, the text assures readers that people and practices will very likely meet the challenges successfully, aided by the scientific community. Similar banal statements show up in the five short chapters, which contain quotations from a variety of people who have some professional connection with food. The result is an uneven read leading more to glazed eyes than whetted appetites—and a downplayed urgency around real concerns that is more fit for younger readers.

However, browsers can find many topics for further research, including aquaculture, vegetarian burgers, cricket chips, and the emerging science of nutrigenomics. The choice of which topics to emphasize seems arbitrary: A full sidebar highlights an unsupported claim that Asian fish farmers fed feces to tilapia.

The final chapter is reminiscent of futuristic claims from the 1950s—and ignores lifestyle and income disparity—as it asserts that an upcoming, better way of life will include kitchen robots, 3-D food printers, and smartphones that signal if meat has spoiled. A variety of full-color photographs elevate the work.

Barely digestible. (source notes, further reading, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

SOULSWIFT

Bannen, Megan Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 17, 2020 978-0-06-267418-0 An examination of faith, doubt, and trust wrapped inside a stirring fantasy plot.

Gelya is meant to serve the Father, an all-powerful deity, until she dies. When she does pass away, she will transform into a soulswift, an immortal bird tasked with carrying worthy souls to the afterlife. These beliefs have been instilled in her at the patriarchal Ovinist convent ever since leader Goodson Anskar rescued her as a child from her supposedly uncivilized place of birth. But when pale-skinned Gelya witnesses a knight of the faith murder her mentor in cold blood to cover up an ugly truth, she must run from the religion she holds most dear. Through her escape, she unwittingly becomes a vessel of an entity she’s been made to believe is a wrathful, apocalyptic demon. Now, she must team up with Tavik, a light-brown–skinned enemy soldier (and, in her world, a heathen), in order to survive. During Gelya and Tavik’s journey to find answers, a touching romance blossoms. Lilting prose carries along the story as both main characters examine the biases, truths, and complications present in their respective faiths and seek to return balance to a broken world. Though a little heavy on exposition in the beginning, thrilling plot developments quickly speed up the pace until the story reaches a heart-rending conclusion.

This deeply moving and thought-provoking adventure enthralls on multiple levels. (map) (Fantasy. 14-18)

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A macabre marvel of a tale. city of the uncommon thief

statement is for her to write. Victoria faces other dilemmas as well. Is she still in love with her high school boyfriend? What should SASAH do about the student government leader who wants to shut them down? This volume stands on its own, and Victoria’s first-person voice remains as strong and appealing as it was in the previous book. Occasionally the characters’ dialogue can feel stilted as they talk about sexual assault statistics and the emotional impact of abuse. But the plot moves quickly— and believably—as Victoria sorts through her options and acts with the help of friends old and new. Except for two relatively prominent secondary characters, all characters are White.

A sensitive and satisfying story of surviving sexual abuse. (resources) (Fiction. 12-18)

CITY OF THE UNCOMMON THIEF

Bertrand, Lynne Dutton (400 pp.) $19.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-525-55532-2

In this dark fantasy, a malevolent power lurks in the bowels of a nameless, placeless, timeless city.

Runner Errol Thebes is handsome, heroic, talented, and charismatic; outcast Jamila Foundling is clever, fearless, selfless, and uncanny; bard Odd Thebes is brilliant, lazy, witty, and selfish. A mysterious pair of iron needles draws the three teenagers into a twisty web of magic and intrigue. This trio (and dozens of supporting characters) may be compelling, but the true protagonist is the city: Bounded by massive walls and 1,000 high towers tied together by an intricate net of fly-lines and rooftop runners, it’s a city where no one enters or leaves. The rich, dense prose is studded with lists of names, products, artifacts, even smells, constructing a mosaic world from fragments of languages, a kaleidoscopic narrative from legends and myths, which dazzles, confuses, and exhausts—until suddenly the pattern shifts and coheres into a macabre marvel of a tale. Odd’s sarcastic voice threads seductively throughout the labyrinthine structure, though he’d be the first to admit that he’s a mess, consumed by jealousy, self-pity, and spite. The city’s polyglot culture suggests ethnic diversity, but physical descriptions defy specific identification. While the society lacks racial or gender bias, there is an oppressive class system in addition to life under a brutal quarantine.

Requires extraordinary patience and attention but pays off with an immersive reading experience that will linger. (maps; elements of clock and calendar; guild towers of Gallia district) (Fantasy. 15-adult)

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HOW THE KING OF ELFHAME LEARNED TO HATE STORIES

Black, Holly Illus. by Cai, Rovina Little, Brown (200 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-0-316-54088-9 Series: Folk of the Air, 3.5

Once upon a time....

In Faerie, a cruel prince met his match in Jude, a human raised in his world. An entire trilogy tells their tale from her perspective; now the prince gets center stage. This lavishly illustrated tome, more a series of vignettes than a complete novel, shows critical moments in Cardan’s life, including moments previously seen through Jude’s perspective. The entirety is framed within a moment that takes place after the end of The Queen of Noth­ ing (2019), providing a glimpse into the maturing relationships between Jude and Cardan and between Cardan and his responsibilities as High King of Elfhame, a land whose multihued, multiformed denizens cannot lie. Woven throughout are three iterations of a story, initially told to a young Cardan, each version different in specifics and moral but all centered on a boy with a heart of stone and a monstrous, cursed bride. Readers familiar with Cardan and Jude’s tumultuous and sometimes troubling love will recognize notes within this repeated tale, but each telling also stands alone as a complete tale, one that feels both inevitable and fresh. Black continues to build an ever expanding mythos with her Faerie stories, and while this volume requires prior knowledge of The Folk of the Air trilogy, it offers new delights along with familiar moments retold.

Fan-service? Yes—and fans will rejoice in every dark, luscious moment. (map) (Fantasy. 14-18)

INTO THE REAL

Brewer, Z Harper/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-06-269138-5 Fractured among three worlds, a genderqueer teen faces monsters as they struggle to solve a paradox.

Seventeen-year-old Quinn exists in three alternate realities. Each provides distinct traumatic trials—flesh-eating monsters, conversion therapy, and civil war. In all of the realities, Quinn grapples with defining their gender identity and rejection due to their queerness while longing for Lia, a cisgender girl. In one life, Lia is viciously transphobic while proclaiming support for other queer identities. As Quinn awakens to the connection among the realities, they must decide which one they want to inhabit. The human characters default to White; although Quinn’s resistance army claims to fight White supremacists, no people of color play a role. The fighters

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espouse blatantly sexist and homophobic views, and as their hero, Quinn champions a peaceful compromise with fascist enemies and wrestles with internal discomfort over not speaking up against their soldiers’ blatant bias. In one reality, the sacred Indigenous practice of burning sage is carried out by White characters for protection from monsters. Despite the fast-paced action, explicit violence, and suspenseful appeal of the premise, the novel feels flat, with long expository passages disrupting the flow. Perhaps because the characters play different roles in Quinn’s life in each reality, they feel distant and underdeveloped, lowering the emotional stakes.

An ambitious undertaking weakened by its execution.

(Fantasy. 14-18)

FINDING A WAY HOME Mildred and Richard Loving and the Fight for Marriage Equality

An overview of the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia that legalized interracial marriage in the United States.

Richard and Mildred Loving didn’t set out to change marriage laws. Richard was White and Mildred was Black and Native American, and the young couple only wanted to live together as husband and wife. Married in Washington, D.C., in 1958, the newlyweds couldn’t cohabitate in their home state of Virginia because interracial marriage was still illegal there. What followed was almost a decade of arrests, legal battles, and separation until their case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. Brimner presents the facts in no-nonsense prose while providing context for the couple’s plight: The history of segregation, the impact of the civil rights movement, and background on the judicial system are woven throughout. Brimner presents the debate about whether Mildred was multiracial or only Native American without drawing a definite conclusion.

The concluding chapters show how the Loving case had a direct impact on the legalization of same-sex marriage, bringing home the lasting effect of this historic Supreme Court decision. This thoroughly researched, attractively designed work is rich with primary sources, making history tangible. The placement and size of the photos, including intimate family shots, increase the narrative’s appeal and add momentum to every page turn.

Brimner adds another strong text to his growing oeuvre of social justice–themed informational texts. (author’s note, bibliography, source notes, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction.

12-18)

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Carey, Anna Quirk Books (304 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-68369-197-6 Series: This Is Not the Jess Show, 1

A teenager uncovers a secret that alters her entire reality.

It’s March 1998. Jess Flynn is thinking of college and longing to leave the confines of her small town. Her mother is overprotective; her sister, Sara, is receiving palliative care for an incurable disease; and Jess is falling for her best friend, Tyler, whom she’s been close to for 6 years. Every year the month of March brings Jess anxiety that something major is going to happen: Three years earlier, Sara received her diagnosis; the next year there was a tornado; and one year ago, Jess’ family’s home was burglarized. Now Jess is hyperaware of her surroundings, and she notices many things too strange to be ignored: far-off voices chanting outside, a mysterious flu spreading around town, and her closest friends keeping secrets. The strangest of all? Jess discovers that her dog has been replaced with a look-alike and her parents have no explanation. Jess decides to investigate, but she must tread cautiously because someone is watching her every move. Pop-culture references from the ’90s are paramount to the story’s façade, and the final plot twist packs a punch. This is a fun stand-alone, but the ending leaves room for readers to explore more of Jess’ world in the next series entry.

The main cast is assumed White except for Jess’ friend Amber, who is cued as Black.

A thrilling and thought-provoking ride. (Speculative fiction.

12-18)

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Brimner, Larry Dane Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills (112 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-62979-751-9

THIS IS NOT THE JESS SHOW

RENT A BOYFRIEND

Chao, Gloria Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-5344-6245-8 Chloe hires the perfect Chinese boyfriend to thwart—and appease—her parents.

College sophomore Chloe Wang is horrified by her parents’ latest misguided endeavor: relentlessly pushing her to accept a proposal from the insanely well-off—and deeply sexist—golden boy of their Palo Alto Chinese community, Hongbo Kuo. So, Chloe enlists the help of Rent for Your ’Rents, a “Match.com on steroids” providing fake boyfriends who pass even the most traditional Asian parents’ standards.

But even with his perfect Taipei-accented Mandarin and premed major, it’s an uphill battle for Andrew Huang to earn enough “mooncake points” to win over the Wangs. Masquerading as Andrew, 21-year-old Drew Chan’s operative training as a winsome boyfriend is severely tested. Over the course

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Darcie Little Badger

A LIPAN APACHE TEEN AND HER LOYAL GHOST DOG GO ON AN OTHERWORLDLY QUEST IN ELATSOE

By Laura Simeon bee and is helped by her friends, her family, and her ghost dog companion—because Ellie has the power to wake the ghosts of animals.

After writing short stories, what made you turn to a YA novel?

I actually found the exact moment when I decided to go young adult on Twitter. On Dec. 30, 2016, I tweeted, “Uuuuuuhhhhh whyyyyy. Realized that the main character in this book of mine needs to be in high school, so I’m rewriting the whole thing.” I think I’d written about 30,000 words, and it just wasn’t working—and it’s because the story needed the protagonist to be a teenager. I was going with the angle where she was already investigating stuff, but as soon as I made that switch, where she was in high school and she was still with her family and she had this ghost dog companion, everything just fell into place.

Elatsoe (Levine Querido, Aug. 25) is a highly original, atmospheric work of speculative fiction. Darcie Little Badger’s resourceful and courageous protagonist, an aspiring paranormal investigator, encounters vampires and is assisted by her best friend, who travels via fairy rings. Ellie, short for Elatsoe (hummingbird in Lipan), has a close-knit, supportive family and feels a strong bond with Six-GreatGrandmother, whose feats are legendary. Little Badger (Lipan Apache) is currently in Connecticut; we chatted over Zoom about her debut novel. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book is wonderfully difficult to categorize.

I usually describe Elatsoe as a fantasy/mystery genre mash that’s about a teenager named Ellie whose cousin is killed under mysterious circumstances. The authorities think it’s an accident; she knows it isn’t, so she investigates his death in this really creepy Southern town named Willow-

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Elatsoe has such a rich grounding in a very specific setting—both its present geography and its past.

It’s set in South Texas, where a lot of my family lives. It’s the homeland of my ancestors, too. My mother was born and raised there, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my great-great-grandmother. We moved a lot when I was a child, but always South Texas would be this focal point, especially my grandmother’s 14 acres of land where the family could gather. So, thinking of Elatsoe, a lot of these sensory descriptions [are] based on that land in McAllen, Texas.

There are still far too few books featuring Indigenous characters outside of historical fiction.

I was a voracious reader growing up, but despite reading hundreds of books, I never read about a Lipan Apache protagonist. That’s never. After a while it gets a little bit discouraging. This was especially alarming when I went to high school in Texas, because we are the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and yet I never read about us, and I certainly never learned about us in history class. It’s complete erasure. Reading a book like Elatsoe would have meant something to me. The most wonderful email I’ve received [came from] a Native mother [who] gave an ear-

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ly copy to her daughter, [who] loved it and read it into the night. There’s no feedback that could be better.

Asexual characters are also rare.

I thought it would be cool to have a young adult book where the protagonist is asexual, but that’s not a focus of the plot. I’m asexual, and I’m engaged to another asexual Native. My fiance and I met [through] an undergraduate organization, Native Americans at Princeton. There were five people there, and we two happened to meet. It’s got to be fate! [But] I was once told by somebody that if I was going to have a book without romance, then I should go middle grade. That didn’t seem right to me, because young adults love to read about all sorts of people so it’s not really a barrier, [and] it does provide that mirror to other asexual people who don’t see themselves very often.

What do you hope young readers will take away from Elatsoe?

Something that the book returns to a couple of times is the story of Icarus. I sometimes find this sort of story [is] almost weaponized against young adults who want to accomplish great things. So, one thing that I hope that Elatsoe conveys is that it is possible to do great things, even when people tell you that you can’t or you shouldn’t. It’s possible to defy corrupt institutions or individuals with power or wealth or positions of authority. That does relate to current events; it’s also something that is timeless.

Elatsoe was reviewed in the June 15, 2020, issue.

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I loved the way science was woven into the story.

I’m a geoscientist with a focus in oceanography, so that’s one reason why this ocean of the underworld plays a part in the book; there is this merging of all the creatures from millions of years ago to the present day—whales and trilobites in this ghostly ocean. I find in my fantasy and science fiction, my scientific background leaks in in interesting ways. I was an intern studying the spread of invasive plants across the United States as an undergraduate, and in the book there are these scarecrow monsters that act like invasive plants, spreading across the U.S., displacing the endemic monsters.

der when she was a child. There have been historically a lot of conflicts in that area, but [the border is] also something that traditionally didn’t exist.

What was it like working with Rovina Cai? Her illustrations add so much.

She didn’t just do the cover; every chapter of the book has an illustration, and they actually tell a story within a story of Ellie’s Six-Great-Grandmother that eventually connects to the main plot. I first provided her with a script—it was in a format similar to a comic strip. And then she provided sketches, and there was a lot of consultation about the outfits of the characters, because even though it’s a fantasy alternate universe, I did want the historical clothing to be what Lipan people would have worn. I [also] provided pictures of living Lipan people as references. The art is so beautiful—I’m so grateful for her.

So much of the book is relevant to present-day debates over the stories we tell about this country.

One of the core themes of the book is: How does a young adult like Ellie seek justice in a world that is often stacked against her? I really hope that America becomes a place that is equitable for people of all races, all sexualities, all genders. What I want it to become is a land where my people, the Lipan Apache, could once again flourish on our homeland. That’s something that people are fighting for now and have been fighting for for a while. That’s the future I want to see, and I will continue to fight for it personally. We live in that area around the Rio Grande, and I just learned from my mom a couple weeks ago [that] my grandmother didn’t know there was a [U.S.–Mexico] bor|

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Even in a world with magic, quick fixes come with a cost. spell starter

of several holiday dates, it becomes progressively harder for both Chloe and Drew to follow the playbook: “Always know the line between the job and reality.” And it turns out, they aren’t the only ones keeping up a charade. Through alternating points of view, Chao keeps up the romantic and dramatic tension, and her characters bring welcome layers to the fake dating trope. Both children of Taiwanese immigrants, Chloe and Drew come from tight-knit communities, and Chao presents the diversity within the diaspora. Frustrating familial tensions and miscommunication abound, and the reconciliation is realistically complicated but also optimistic. Most of the cast of characters are Chinese American.

Entertaining and nuanced. (glossary) (Romantic comedy.

14-18)

SPELL STARTER

Chapman, Elsie Scholastic (320 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-338-58951-1 Series: Caster, 2 Even in a world with magic, quick fixes come with a cost.

In this sequel to Caster (2019), Aza Wu is again thrust into dangerous tournaments. These are backed not by the Guild but by the ambitious Saint Willow, the Lotusland gang leader. This time, however, Aza does not revel in the freedom of full magic casting; rather, she fears her uncertain control over her new, ill-gotten power and the risk of endangering herself, other fighters, and the world around her. Reluctantly working as Saint Willow’s squeezer and forced to compete nightly in these deadly games, Aza is desperate to find a way out of this predicament that will also keep her parents safe and the family business intact. Though it continues to be strong in action, this second offering spends more time exploring familial obligation, moral choices, and compromise as well as human-made (or magicmade) ecological disasters. Aza’s parents, still ignorant of their daughter’s real job, play a greater role here and are supportive of her, from her work to being interested in whatever sexuality or relationship she may lean toward. There is some diversity in characters, but the book mostly highlights Chinese culture, from Aza’s family’s tea business to the strategic and thoughtful use of romanized Cantonese phrases scattered throughout.

Amped-up action scenes and a thoughtful look at people’s breaking points make this sequel a stronger read. (Dystopian fantasy. 13-17)

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BAND NERDS Poetry From the 13th Chair Trombone Player Corchin, DJ Illus. by Dougherty, Dan Sourcebooks eXplore (144 pp.) $12.99 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-72821-982-0

A book of rhyming poetry for concert and marching band nerds.

This illustrated collection presents a lighthearted love of all things band—from jokes about different instruments (arrogant trumpet players come up several times and there’s a saxophonist who has four extra fingers) to silly rhymes. An introduction titled “Stereotypes” explains how stereotypes can be harmful and concludes that “we can choose to let them shape us, or we can choose to write a silly poem book about them and laugh it off.” However, this push back against stereotypes, such as that band nerds are awkward and undatable, would all play better if so many poems didn’t fall flat. Additionally, unkind comments about people’s appearances (including pictures that caricature someone with an overbite and a woman whose too-tight top pops open) and the reliance on gender norms (the band director is always depicted as a man) strike a wrong note. A longer poem about a group of boys and their male band director on a trip who spy on strangers being intimate in a hot tub—“we all remember ‘hot tub’ night / As the night we all grew up”—feels out of place for the mostly child-friendly tone of the collection. The black-and-white line illustrations add context and additional humor to the poems. Most characters appear White, but there is some ethnic diversity throughout.

A reasonably amusing gift for band students but not one they’ll want to revisit. (Poetry. 13-18)

THE MARCHING BAND NERDS HANDBOOK Rules From the 13th Chair Trombone Player Corchin, DJ Illus. by Dougherty, Dan Sourcebooks eXplore (128 pp.) $12.99 paper | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-72821-976-9

Marching band humor is on parade in this short illustrated book.

Band students share their own special type of inside jokes, as shown in Corchin’s collection of poetry, Band Nerds (2020), being published simultaneously. This handbook of “rules” contains one-liners that capture elements of the marching band experience and includes both practical advice and funny, pithy sayings (“It’s a salute, not interpretive dance”; “Trombone slides are not lightsabers”). The book opens with a paragraph titled “Fun,” which explains how important fun is: “If more people were having fun, there would be no reason for hate or discrimination

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Kate Schatz & Miriam Klein Stahl A BESTSELLING AUTHOR-ILLUSTRATOR TEAM PUTS CONTEMPORARY ACTIVISM INTO FASCINATING CONTEXT

By Laura Simeon Casey Orr

Kate Schatz & Miriam Klein Stahl

Rad American History A-Z: Movements and Moments That Demonstrate the Power of the People by Kate Schatz and illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl (Ten Speed Press, March 3) is a bold, beautifully illustrated, highly readable work that pays tribute—in alphabetical order—to visionaries who have had a profound impact on America over the centuries. Contemporary teens will gain an understanding of how they fit into the American democratic tradition of people working to improve society, as well as finding inspiration for their own activism. The author and illustrator chatted over Zoom from California; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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The book takes such an inclusive approach to history.

Miriam Klein Stahl: It’s about making unheard, unknown stories visible through Kate’s writing and my art, for both readers and nonreaders.

Kate Schatz: We wanted to show that change doesn’t happen because of one heroic individual, to give this broader historical context to the work for social justice that we’ve been talking about in our other books.

One of our goals is to make history cool—I say this as a writer, as a passionate reader. For a lot of people, looking at a 400-page history book that’s just dense text is really intimidating. We wanted to take these serious, deep, thoroughly researched histories but make [the book] look like something you’d want to pick up.

One of the best pieces of feedback that we’ve gotten [came from] a Zoom visit to a friend’s class in Richmond, California, of mostly low-income students of color.

A teenage boy said “You know, this book was really cool. I actually wanted to read it.” And then a young woman said, “I love this book because I’d never really thought about my family and people like me being part of history.”

MKS: Our best hope for accessibility is that people see themselves and see their stories.

KS: And, on the flip side, that White students—the young people who are used to seeing their stories always reflected in books—see that other people are not just a footnote or a sidebar in the history books, but actually a main part of the story.

It must have been incredibly hard to decide which topics to include.

KS: We really leaned on a lot of other people—a virtual focus group with about 90 historians, high school teachers, and college students. Once Miriam and I narrowed down our list for each letter, we shared with this group to get feedback. We wanted to make sure that we were covering a wide swath of history, but it also really came down to compelling stories.

MKS: The most fraught letter for us was B because there were so many that we felt passionate about. Do we do Black Panthers or Black Lives Matter? I love the Biotic

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Baking Brigade, the people that throw pies in people’s faces. That was hard to give up because I love that kind of agitprop theater and activists being creative and funny.

KS: In the end, the Black Lives Matter story [is the one] I feel most proud of, both for your art, Miriam, and also that at this particular moment we have the story in there.

[We have] R is for Riot Grrrl, which I really love, but I do kind of wish that R had been for Reconstruction. I talk about Reconstruction in the voting rights story, but I feel that’s one of the most misunderstood and compelling time periods in American history.

Rad American History A-Z was reviewed in the Feb. 1, 2020, issue.

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The history of activism is rarely taught, meaning teens may not be aware of some of the continuities.

MKS: The Black Lives Matter illustration is based on that whole idea. When Kate interviewed Alicia Garza, she was adamant about saying they didn’t start a movement, they’re part of a movement. She, as an activist, has really consulted with her elders on the movement and sees herself as an extension of work that’s been done.

That was important for us—to acknowledge the people that have come before.

KS: I think that youthful push back and rejection of the old ways are essential. Every generation has done that.

This book is our way of offering younger activists historical context without doing the finger wagging of “Well, you think you invented it all!” I love that we have Y is for Youth Climate Movement, but E is for Earth First! It’s quite possible that a lot of young climate activists would have no idea who Judi Bari was and would not know about radical environmental activism in the ’60s and ’70s movement.

KS: Every story in the book is about people who had a particular vision for America. When you have a vision, it’s an ideal, right? It’s something that we dream. I feel very inspired both as a writer but also as an activist in listening to people like Alicia Garza, whom we write about in the Black Lives Matter story, whose focus is very much on envisioning the radical future that we want. This book is about American history, but it’s also very rooted in how we need to know those histories so that we can have those visions for the future that we want.

MKS: It’s very much standing on the shoulders of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which is the kind of book we wanted to make for a younger group of people. Kate and I were both really inspired by that book. That is what America is about for us and the communities that we come from: It’s about people getting together to make change, and it’s a real counternarrative to what is being told to us by the federal government right now.

The art is so striking and shows a diverse range of people without resorting to the visual shorthand of stereotypes we unfortunately too often see.

KS: I wanted women’s history to be visually exciting and the illustrations to reflect these powerful women. I didn’t want them to be whimsical or children’s book–y.

MKS: Kate and I have talked about not always showing feminists as serious and angry. To try to capture the expressive quality of people and their personalities means sometimes I have to watch a lot of videos. I also try to capture subcultural elements that make up a person, like how they choose to dress and present themselves, so they’re not just one-dimensional. I’m very much drawn to high-contrast imagery. I like to see that contrast and then simplify it by using [cut] paper. There’s only so much detail that you can get, so you have to pull out the things that are most important. I got tired of just adding in the digital color that we did in the other books, so [for this one] I wanted to try to create my own color. That was a big stretch, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

This book is about the past, but really it’s about the present teen readers inhabit and the futures they would like to live in.

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or any other evil….Grab a cupcake and chill out. The world’s lost a bit of its will to have fun.” Despite that simplistic intro— evoking the rebuke that people who object to bias don’t have a sense of humor—this book will prompt some good laughs and reflection on the camaraderie of band. Simple black-and-white line illustrations emphasize the silly humor. A closing poem offers inspiration about working together and overcoming selfdoubt. The illustrations show ethnically diverse characters, but there is some humor at the expense of fat people, and one cartoon shows band members vomiting after eating sushi.

An amusing, if flawed, tribute to marching band. (Humor.

12-18)

WINTER, WHITE AND WICKED

Dittemore, Shannon Amulet/Abrams (384 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-4197-4023-7

A motley crew takes a dangerous road trip.

Winter—a sentient and sometimes spiteful force first used by the Kerce refugees against the native half-rock, half-flesh Shiv and their god, Begynd, three centuries ago—rules Layce. White-haired, sylver-eyed 17-year-old Sylvi Quine considers Winter a friend, not a foe, talking to the sentient season and relying on the frozen roads to haul goods with her big ice rig, the Sylver Dragon. When her friend Lenore runs away, Sylvi pursues her with a mysterious cargo in tow and three unwanted guests riding along: the smuggler and magician Mars; noble Paradyian warrior-woman Hyla; and friendly Shiv mechanic Kyndel. En route to the rebel camp, Sylvi faces hostile Shiv, reanimated monsters, wrathful Winter, and the omnipresent but dangerous magical kol that taints the air and waters. Dittemore succeeds more at the cinematic science-fiction dystopian elements than the intermittent and somewhat trite fantasy subplot. At times, the Kerce’s oppression of the Shiv reads as an extended rumination on colonialism, though without a conclusive critique or remedy. With Sylvi at the wheel, more concerned with mechanics and money than revolution, this reads as Ice Road Truckers meets generic chosen one coming-of-age. Relentless action sequences propel the tale through plot-heavy patches, but an abrupt cliffhanger ending necessitates a sequel. Some characters read as White; the cast’s various skin tones are less of a factor than their magical abilities or mythical origins.

Both mystical and mundane, a typical tale via unusual transportation. (map) (Fantasy. 12-18)

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RUINSONG

Ember, Julia Farrar, Straus and Giroux (368 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-0-374-31335-7 Two young women shift from childhood friends to enemies to lovers.

In Cavalia, cruel Queen Elene has complete control of her population.

Cadence is a corporeal mage; weaving spells through song, she can manipulate others’ bodies for healing, pleasure, or pain. This is Cadence’s first year as the Principal in the Performing, an annual event during which sadistic Elene forces singers to torture the kingdom’s nobles. Noble Remi is Cadence’s estranged childhood friend, attending the Performing in place of her chronically ill mother. Through a series of chance encounters, the teens reconnect. When Elene discovers their relationship, she forces Remi to become a prisoner/companion to Cadence to manipulate them both. As their fates become more intertwined, both Cadence and Remi must decide how far their feelings for each other go and what they’re willing to sacrifice to unseat the powerful queen. Both girls’ alternating first-person narrations often read like exposition, and occasionally repetitive background information feels underutilized. The setting—which evokes 19th-century Europe—sometimes clashes with more contemporary vocabulary. Uneven pacing slowly builds before racing to the finish. Descriptions of violence committed by corporeal mages are graphic but not gratuitous. Cadence, Remi, and Elene are White; diversity is woven into the text through Black background characters, Remi’s body positivity, Cadence’s dyslexia, and sign language.

Despite uneven craft, readers looking for inclusive Sapphic fantasy will be pleased to find this. (Historical fantasy. 14-18)

HOW TO PACK FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Falkoff, Michelle HarperTeen (320 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-06-268026-6

Teens prepare themselves for catastrophes.

High school sophomore Amina, halfIsraeli and all Jewish, has had nightmares ever since someone threw a Molotov cocktail through her synagogue’s window. Now a scholarship student at an upscale boarding school, Amina finds solace in a new group of friends and the Eucalyptus Society, a club in which they take turns creating competitive challenges focused on building knowledge and skills that will help them survive when the world inevitably ends. This unbalanced novel offers great potential: a minor mystery, budding romance, complicated friendships, and the all-too-believable premise that today’s

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Will resonate with anyone who cannot live any longer without questioning norms. my heart underwater

teens have fears about the future that extend far beyond college and career choices. But the way Amina’s first-person narration unfolds makes events feel recapped, diluting their impact for readers. Frequent overt exposition and more attention to academic, financial, and social stresses than to the plot-driving challenges result in a pace much like that of a pre–climate change glacier. The final chapters, which include more focus on the mystery, bring a sense of genuine emotional investment for Amina as well as readers and give some dimension to Amina’s somewhat diverse friend group, whose complex familial situations often stand in for character development. Timely to a fault, the veiled but obvious references to current politics may age badly.

Squandered potential. (Fiction. 12-16)

MY HEART UNDERWATER

Corazon “Cory” Tagubio is a Southern Californian FilAm caught between her duty toward her hardworking immigrant parents and her sexual awakening.

When her mother catches 17-year-old Cory kissing Ms. Holden, her 25-year-old White Catholic school history teacher, she sends Cory to the Philippines to live with Kuya Jun, an older half brother whom she has only met through Skype. Cory arrives in the Philippines heartbroken twice over: Her beloved father is in a coma, and, separated from Ms. Holden, Cory feels untethered and deeply alone. In her YA debut, Fantauzzo’s gorgeous writing presents an emotionally wrought American-born teenager on a journey to define her present as well as understand her family’s past. The unethical relationship with Ms. Holden is effectively used as a device for Cory’s journey of selfinquiry and growing understanding of real love, bolstered by her cousin’s and friends’ more developed ethical and political consciousnesses. One of a cast of splendidly drawn characters, Cory faces hidden truths about familial separation and lasting bonds that provide a layered backdrop for her own catharsis. In tight sentences, Fantauzzo packs a punch, describing Cory’s fraught emotional tightrope as she negotiates Catholic dogma of right and wrong, repression, and rage in ways that will surely resonate with anyone who simply cannot live any longer without questioning norms. Tagalog and Taglish are interlaced throughout, adding an atmospheric texture that refreshingly lends rarely depicted insights into authentic Filipino humor, conflict, and expressions of love.

A (home)coming out story that rides a deep undercurrent of love. (Fiction. 14-18)

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A ruthless young noblewoman seeks greatness by rescuing her city from drought.

In the veiled city of Occhia, anyone with an omen—a red mark that appears on the body—must surrender themselves to the ancient watercrea, who takes and transforms their blood into Occhia’s carefully rationed water. Seventeen-yearold Emanuela Ragno is imprisoned in the watercrea’s tower on her wedding day after her omen is revealed at the ceremony, but she escapes and kills the watercrea, unaware that Occhia’s underground well is almost empty. Without the watercrea, the city is doomed. When the hunt for Emanuela commences, she flees into Occhia’s catacombs with Alessandro, her meek and bookish fiance. The two emerge in an unfamiliar city where a mysterious young woman called the Heart provides the citizens with abundant—and bloodless—access to water. Emanuela is intrigued: If she discovers the source of the woman’s magic, she can return to Occhia as its savior. Cunning and ambitious, Emanuela pushes the narrative forward with confidence in her own judgment and ability, paying no heed to Ale’s words of caution. Her eagerness to gain power, paired with a sense of self-righteousness, propels her toward a path of violence and revenge. Flashbacks offer further insight into the characters.

Emanuela and Ale express same-sex attraction and have a platonic relationship. Characters are White by default.

A fast-paced debut that reaches spectacularly bloody heights, with an ending that teases a sequel. (Fantasy. 14-18)

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Fantauzzo, Laurel Flores Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-06-297228-6

BEYOND THE RUBY VEIL

Fitzgerald, Mara Little, Brown (288 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-368-05213-9

BEAUTIFUL WILD

Godbersen, Anna HarperTeen (368 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-0-06-267985-7

Romance blooms on a desert island.

Vidalia Hazzard has it all planned out: The teen socialite is determined to win the heart of wealthy adventurer Fitzhugh Farrar aboard the Princess of the Pacific as it sails across the seas from San Francisco to Australia. Vida’s plan doesn’t account for Fitzhugh’s friend Sal getting under her skin, nor for the luxury liner to disastrously sink, leaving Vida, Sal, Fitzhugh, and several other survivors stranded on a small desert island. As adventure and romance unfold away from the repressive social norms of the early 20th century, Vida discovers not just her true love, but for the first time, a true sense of self. The narrative travels in bodice-ripper trappings but smartly sidesteps the saucier elements of the genre in favor of an internal investigation of Vida.

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A gritty, raw page-turner. odessa

Sal and Fitzhugh are less defined, but the book knows it isn’t about them but rather what they represent. Readers (particularly those susceptible to romance and adventure) will be turning pages well into the night. The only problem is that shortly before the novel’s end many will have figured out how this is all going to shake out, and the narrative doesn’t do anything to surprise. Before this point there are a few well-plotted twists and turns, making the last chunk feel a bit like a story gliding on autopilot. The cast is White.

A sweeping page-turner. (Romance. 12-16)

FROM DARKNESS

Hall, Kate Hazel Duet (324 pp.) $17.99 paper | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-945053-98-6 Afterlife mythology meets romantic fantasy in this Australian debut.

Seven years after a tragic accident, grief-stricken Ari continues to blame herself for the loss of her best friend. If she hadn’t dared Alex to swim across the channel, Alex would still be alive. Although Alex’s body was never found, she’s presumed dead. Only child Ari longs for a sibling and is overjoyed when her mother and stepfather announce they will be having a baby. When her mother goes into preterm labor, a distressed Ari runs outside barefoot, receiving a venomous snake bite. A beautiful stranger brings her back from the edge of death—but this is no stranger: It’s Alex. Alex went to the underworld after her death, where she was raised to be a Summoner, one who leads the newly dead to their final resting place. In saving Ari’s life, Alex breaks Summoner law, knocking nature off balance and unleashing terrible events on their sleepy coastal town. Ari, who still seeks redemption for Alex’s death, will have to travel through the unlit realm to face the evil Lord Acheron to make things right. The book’s greatest strength is its sense of place; the pine plantation and terrifying sinkholes come vividly to life. The third-person narration places distance between readers and Ari, and she does not stand out as a memorable character. Queer Ari is wrestling with her sexuality and attraction to Alex. Most characters are White.

An atmospheric read. (Fantasy. 12-16)

THE SPREAD OF HATE AND EXTREMISM

Henderson, Robert M. ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-933-2 A measured, journalistic approach to a critical topic that affects our society.

Henderson explores a variety of extremist groups, their origins, how 164

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they recruit, and the ways they communicate. He also describes individuals who have turned away from their involvement with hate groups and puts forth ideas on how to respond to the dangerous elements. Along the way, readers learn how polarization contributes to an environment of hateful speech and division. Early examples of extremist groups such as the KKK as well as changes among more recent counterparts are examined. The rationales extremists give for their actions are analyzed, including their opposition to increased rights for women and LGBTQ+ people, the election of President Barack Obama, economic insecurity, and distrust of the media and government. The internet, especially the dark web, is examined for how it is used to spread hostility. The personal stories of those who turned away from their involvement in hate groups are compelling, giving insight into what attracted and then repelled them. Finally, suggestions for how to monitor, respond to, and confront groups and individuals are provided. This valuable narrative is enhanced by photographs and information sidebars. The book is well-sourced, providing an overall look at the topic while pointing to additional resources for more in-depth study.

A strong introduction that sheds light on grim topics often in the news. (source notes, organizations and websites, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

ODESSA

Hill, Jonathan Illus. by the author & Drake, Xan Oni Press (328 pp.) $19.99 paper | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-62010-789-8 Series: Odessa, 1 A bloody story of resilience and redemption in the middle of a post-apocalyptic gang war.

Eight years ago the earthquakes of the Great Disaster hadn’t yet reduced the world to rubble and Ginny’s mom, Odessa, hadn’t left their family. Now 17 and sick of holding her family together, Ginny sees the arrival of a mysterious package from Odessa as a sign that it’s time to leave home and find her mom. Ginny means to go solo, but her two squabbling younger brothers tag along. When the trio reaches their maternal uncle in San Francisco, pursued by a pissed-off motorcycle gang, they find a menacing, corrupt city rocked by a gang war. As Ginny searches, she’s caught in a web of murder and betrayal. Rendered in a deceptively innocent combination of black and bubble-gum pink, panels are expertly placed to use linework and sequencing to strengthen the emotion and humor of the story. Subtle and exaggerated facial expressions add nuance to the intricate plot that unwinds with each new, surprising piece of the puzzle. Snarky humor, mostly from the more cartoonishly rendered younger brothers, provides a counterpoint to the action-packed graphic violence and gore. This title leaves a pile of bloody bodies and unanswered questions as the siblings continue east looking for answers and safety. Ginny

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and her brothers are cued as biracial (Vietnamese and White); there is ethnic diversity in the supporting cast.

A gritty, raw page-turner. (Graphic dystopian. 14-18)

A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS, A LOCK IN THE DOOR

Hörnig, Haiko Illus. by Pawlitza, Marius Trans. by the author Lerner (120 pp.) $9.99 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-72841-287-0 Series: A House Divided, 2

THE GIRL WHO WASN’T THERE

Joelson, Penny Sourcebooks Fire (304 pp.) $10.99 paper | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-4926-9885-2

Housebound due to chronic fatigue, a teen witnesses a terrifying event.

Since contracting myalgic encephalomyelitis eight months ago, 15-year-old Kasia Novak has spent most of her time in her bedroom. The slightest exertion exhausts her, and she’s terrified she’ll never get better. When she witnesses a possible abduction from her window, she wonders if the girl she |

MASTER OF ONE

Jones, Jaida & Bennett, Dani HarperTeen (544 pp.) $18.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-0-06-294144-2

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A ragtag crew heads back into a magical house in this follow-up to The Accursed Inheritance of Henrietta Achilles (2020).

After being flushed out of a skyscraperlike tower due to a burst pipe, Henrietta leads a group of bandits and soldiers back inside to fix the pipes, save the village from the flood, and continue their hunt for the hidden treasure. It’s not all fun and games though, as Henrietta faces moments of doubt; she’s unsure how to properly wield the keys she inherited as the wizard’s heir. While the group splits up and experiences various attacks and mishaps, Henrietta forges ahead and finds a boy made of candle wax who promises to help her—but danger lurks around every corner. The striking illustrations are both clear and whimsical, bringing to life the wondrous creatures and imaginative magical elements that fill the story. Rife with humorous moments, this graphic novel is overall a delight.

However, the presence of a dozen or so major characters makes it hard for them all to shine, and the clunky introduction of some characters’ backstories during the war years ago muddies the otherwise tight, action-packed plot. For those interested in unravelling the additional secrets introduced in this installment, a cliffhanger ending fortunately promises more to come.

The cast appears mainly White and mostly male.

The action and wonder never stop in this intriguing sequel. (Graphic fantasy. 12-18)

glimpsed in the opposite window saw it too—but everyone says the girl doesn’t exist. While balancing good days and relapses as she investigates the girl and copes with family tension, Kasia rapidly befriends Navin, the perpetually solicitous grandson of her Indian neighbor. Interspersed with Kasia’s narration, Reema, the mysterious girl, describes her own increasingly desperate circumstances in italicized bursts. Author Joelson, who has struggled with ME herself, sensitively portrays Kasia’s frustration and determination as well as ME’s toll on Kasia’s family.

However, this nod to Rear Window ultimately falls flat. Emotions are often stated rather than shown, and underdeveloped secondary characters contribute to an abrupt, lackluster ending. Reema is more a plot device for Kasia’s emotional benefit than a fully realized person, which is particularly unfortunate given her troubling story. Kasia and her family are White Polish immigrants to England. Reema may be South Asian.

An unfortunately shallow take on a serious issue. (author’s note) (Suspense. 13-16)

Teenage heroes uncover fae secrets and fight the forces of evil.

Rags is a skilled thief chosen to break into an elaborately guarded fae ruin.

Inside, he awakens a handsome, tattooed fae warrior who vows to protect him, and Rags is thrust unwittingly into adventure. Soon the cast expands to an ensemble of six heroes and a diverse supporting cast of friends and foes. The team seeks to assemble the pieces of an ancient fae weapon that look like giant silver animals. They also have to outsmart the evil sorcerer Morien, aid the Resistance against the queen, and discover the terrible secret at the heart of the court. Meanwhile, Rags is trying to figure out his own feelings toward the fae warrior Shining Talon. Jones and Bennett play the hits—magical companion animals, ethereal magic warriors, an evil queen—yet do so with skill, excitement, and a unique aesthetic. This world of court intrigue and immortal fae with skin covered in black tattoos feels at once comfortably familiar and intriguingly new. By the end, readers will be itching for more. Of the heroes, four are White, one is brown-skinned, and one is a fantasy race with golden skin and black hair. One has a disability, not handled with great sensitivity—he is “familiar with curses, having been born one to his mother,” readers are told, and his arm and leg are repeatedly described as “withered”; another is transgender.

A captivating and satisfying queer fantasy. (pronunciation guide) (Fantasy. 14-18)

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SOCIAL MEDIA’S STAR POWER The New Celebrities and Influencers Kallen, Stuart A. ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-931-8

An introductory look at the world of social media influencing.

The life of a social media star may seem glamorous and easy to attain and maintain, but Kallen pulls back the veil to reveal the real work that goes into building and sustaining a profitable brand or channel, especially in today’s saturated and competitive online spaces. Despite the odds against most individuals being able to succeed enough to capitalize financially on social media fame, becoming an internet star is one of the top aspirational jobs for young people according to a recent Harris poll. As a major source of information—often dangerously inaccurate—social media’s impact needs to be scrutinized by young viewers as its place in society becomes cemented. From burnout to serious mental health risks to risky diet fads, the downsides of being a social media influencer are also discussed, with multiple examples of former and current online powerhouses used as cautionary tales. Ending with a chapter on those who profit from spreading misinformation, the content in this book is not groundbreaking but rather offers a succinct overview of the power of social media influencers and the potential benefits and harm of social media. For readers looking to understand social media influencing 101, this is a solid starting point.

A helpful introduction to the basics of social media. (source notes, further research, index, picture credits) (Non­ fiction. 12-18)

TEEN GUIDE TO VOLUNTEERING

Kallen, Stuart A. ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-937-0 Packed with volunteer ideas, from small acts of kindness to large-scale efforts.

Divided into five chapters, this wellorganized book outlines and explains a broad range of experiences and levels of volunteering. There are ideas to inspire readers across the spectrum of volunteering possibilities, from one-time and long-term options with long-established, nationwide nonprofits and youth-run organizations to ideas for ways to create their own grassroots opportunities. In addition to highlighting specific organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity and YouthLine, individual teens are spotlighted for their volunteer contributions. Short quotes from change-makers, including Anne Frank, the Dalai Lama, and Dr. 166

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Martin Luther King Jr., provide another layer of motivation.

The font and layout are attractive and easy to navigate, and the stock color photographs feature a diverse range of people. The tone is primarily inspirational, and the book also highlights the social and emotional benefits volunteers receive from giving to others. Volunteering during the Covid-19 pandemic is specifically covered, although these sections are written in a way that makes it seem like the virus is a thing of the past. This work will be helpful to those already interested in being volunteers as well as students with service hour requirements.

A helpful resource for youth. (source notes, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

FOLDING TECH Using Origami and Nature To Revolutionize Technology

Kenney, Karen Latchana Twenty-First Century/Lerner (104 pp.) $37.32 | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-5415-3304-2

An exploration of various modern technologies inspired by origami, the Japanese art of paper folding.

The simple act of folding a piece of paper can become complex quickly. Even readers who have made a paper crane before will be surprised to learn that origami techniques have also helped to create NASA’s newest and biggest telescope, a fast-moving robotic gripper, and an innovative Swiss chapel. Peppered with illuminating photographs and diagrams, the straightforward text moves from the ancient history of origami, through bug wings and mathematics, to solar-powered spacecraft. The common theme, both intriguing and well expressed, is the power and complexity of folding.

Included are illustrated instructions for a few hands-on projects that require paper and typical household or classroom items like scissors and a pencil. Interviews with two origami experts, both appearing to be White men, offer down-to-earth advice about following nontraditional career paths like theirs. Also featured is the work of several Asian and/or female researchers.

It’s unlikely that readers will retain an understanding of every engineering concept the book describes, but they will gain an appreciation of the interplay between art and science and will be inspired to learn more.

Effectively showcases the contemporary brilliance that can come from ancient principles. (timeline, glossary, source notes, bibliography, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 13-16)

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Conjures an eccentric and original world that leaves readers wide-eyed in wonder. the girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly

THE GIRL WHO WAS CONVINCED BEYOND ALL REASON THAT SHE COULD FLY

Lamb, Sybil Illus. by the author Arsenal Pulp Press (80 pp.) $16.95 paper | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-55152-817-5

ADDICTION A Problem of Epidemic Proportions Lundquist-Arora, Stephanie ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-921-9

The causes and consequences of addictive behavior are factually presented.

This text covers both addiction to substances, such as opioids and methamphetamine, and addictive behaviors, like gambling and social media, in a balanced fashion. It begins with the nature of addiction, discussing the ways it is a disease, and stresses that addiction is not limited to people of certain backgrounds. It then moves on to the causes of addictive behavior, from genetic predisposition to the design of technology. Devastating consequences receive their due page count, including health issues, relationship stress, and homelessness. The text then moves on to crime, from acts like shoplifting which are addictive in themselves to those perpetrated to obtain money to supply the |

KINGDOM OF THE WICKED

Maniscalco, Kerri Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown (448 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-0-316-42846-0 Series: Kingdom of the Wicked, 1

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A perpetually airborne girl catapults into a hot dog vendor’s life.

Eggs is not a bird but might as well be. She observes an unnamed metropolis from various perches on high, hopping around the city and occasionally “borrowing” clothes for warmth. One day Eggs (nicknamed because of her public service announcement T-shirt, reminding people to eat two servings a day) catches the eye of Grackle McCart, who runs a wildly popular food cart selling 100 varieties of hot dog. Soon, the two become close: Eggs swoops into Grackle’s life when it suits her, and he provides her with all the hot dogs she can eat. Both Grackle and Splendid Fairy Wren, an aging punk hippie who prefers her own company, are captivated by Eggs’ scattered and winsome charm and build their new friend a nest for cold weather, but a dangerous encounter proves Eggs can never be contained. Author and illustrator Lamb conjures an eccentric and original world of $5 punk hotels and multigenerational hot dog–business families and writes with a fantastical style that leaves readers perpetually wide-eyed in wonder. Characters are illustrated in vivid shades of red, blue, and green amid mostly black-and-white backdrops. Eggs and Wren are White; Grackle is Black.

A vivid parable reminiscent of Francesca Lia Block.

(Graphic fantasy. 14-adult)

addiction. The book discusses the high presence of addicts in prisons and argues for the necessity of granting treatment to inmates. Racial bias in sentencing and the disproportionate impact on Black Americans of the war on drugs are not mentioned. The last chapter focuses on recovery methods and ends on the optimistic note that change is possible. In a neutral, presentational tone, this text presents up-to-date evidence, featuring numerous quotes from field experts as well as anecdotal accounts from recovering addicts. The mostly stock photos, about half of which feature White people, break up the text.

Text boxes present more details about particular issues, such as vaping or in utero exposure.

A no-nonsense approach of use to report writers. (source notes, resources, further reading, index, photo credits) (Non­ fiction. 12-18)

A vengeful Sicilian witch forges an unlikely alliance resulting in epic, supernatural consequences.

Eighteen-year-old Emilia di Carlo and her twin sister, Vittoria, have a secret: They are streghe, trained from a young age to use magic.

Emilia is as introverted and romantic as her sister is bold and irreverent, but they share a love of good food and a disregard for their grandmother’s warnings about the devil and his brothers. Known as the Malvagi or Wicked, the seven princes of Hell have not been seen in years until tragedy strikes and a foray into forbidden magic accidentally summons the Prince of Wrath: Three witches—including Vittoria—are dead, and Emilia is desperate to avenge her sister and stop the killings. An uneasy truce with Wrath soon blossoms into a tantalizing, dangerous attraction with an uneven power dynamic. Rich worldbuilding constructs a post-unification Kingdom of Italy in which witches, demons, and shape-shifters live—and battle—among oblivious humans in a society strongly influenced by the Catholic brotherhood in its midst. Several significant plot points unfold in a Capuchin monastery and its eerie catacombs, and the brotherhood’s conflation of witchcraft with the devil is emphasized throughout. Most characters are cued as White—Emilia and her sister have brown eyes and hair and olive skin—while the dark-haired Wicked have golden skin.

An intoxicating, tightly plotted feast for the senses with a dramatic cliffhanger. (map) (Historical fantasy. 12-18)

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Informative and well-sourced. greta thunberg

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC The World Turned Upside Down Marcovitz, Hal ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-6782-0018-3

Looks at the spread, U.S. government response, and impact on daily life of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Near the end of 2019, a highly contagious novel coronavirus strain was believed to have jumped from a bat or a pangolin to a human in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, leading to a worldwide pandemic. Written in the past tense just a few months into the crisis, the book uses information available through May 2020, making it a record of the early effects of this quickly changing situation. Anecdotes about the cancellation of major life events such as proms and baseball games and the difficulties of online schooling demonstrate the day-to-day effects on individuals, but important context—such as emerging scientific understanding of how the virus is spread—is often missing. There is no mention of anti-mask agitators or those who believe the virus is a hoax or political ploy. Quoting mainly voices from the U.S., even when discussing the situation abroad, the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on Black, Indigenous, and communities of color is not mentioned. The cover image shows a woman of East Asian descent with a stethoscope dressed in personal protective equipment, but the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes is never discussed. Wet markets, which exist worldwide, including in the U.S., are presented as an Asian phenomenon.

Incomplete and written too soon to be useful. (source notes, resources, further reading, index, photo credits) (Non­ fiction. 12-15)

GRETA THUNBERG Climate Activist

Marcovitz, Hal ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-923-3 In 2018, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg’s personal campaign against climate change moved beyond her family and led to student demonstrations around the world.

Former journalist Marcovitz ably introduces the Swedish teen who became Time magazine’s youngest ever Person of the Year in 2019. Strongly moved by a climate change video at age 11, Thunberg became totally focused on its devastating effects and seriously depressed. A diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome explained her hyperfocus, and she used this trait to challenge first the Swedish government and then world leaders. What began as her personal “School Strike for the Climate” became an 168

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international crusade as she was invited to address world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos and United Nations meetings in Katowice, Poland, and New York. The book chronicles her activism—spurred in part by the post-Parkland antigun protests in the U.S. and her parents’ own advocacy—as well as the sometimes personal public criticism she has faced, to which she once replied, “If they are attacking me, then that means they have no argument to speak of and their debate only involves attacking me. That means we’ve already won.” Marcovitz concludes with various examples of “the Greta Effect.” The straightforward, accessibly written text includes short pullout sections on a variety of topics and occasional photographs.

Informative and well-sourced, this holds appeal for young activists. (source notes, timeline, further reading, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

McDowell, Kara Scholastic (336 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-338-65454-7

One choice leads to two possible fates, each involving romance at Christmas.

Arizonian Paige Collins struggles with making decisions because the voice in her head always thinks of the worstcase scenario. With Christmas just around the corner, she has to choose between a snowy mountain cabin getaway with her best friend, Fitz, or a trip to New York City with her mom. Paige is in love with Fitz, but she’s also an aspiring travel writer, making each option enticing and terrifying. Just after using a magic eight ball app to make the decision for her, a slippery fall leads to split timelines exploring both options, taking a cue from Sliding Doors. Rom-com–loving, grand-gesture–making Fitz is single for once, so at the cabin Paige finally has the opportunity to share her feelings. In New York, she develops a crush on surly, philosophy-quoting Harrison. However, in both situations, her untreated anxiety threatens to ruin any chance of romance and a happy holiday. Paige’s narration is endearing and authentic, negative thoughts and all. Her descriptions of anxiety and panic are spot-on, and she often uses grounding techniques to help her. Cliffhanger chapter endings maintain a brisk pace between each timeline all the way to the uplifting, hopeful ending. Both settings are filled with enchanting, romantic Christmas-related activities. Main characters are assumed White.

An engaging combination of delightfully over-the-top Christmas swoons and realistic anxiety representation.

(Romance. 12-18)

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MIDNIGHT SUN

Meyer, Stephenie Little, Brown (672 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 4, 2020 978-0-316-70704-6 Series: Twilight, 5

A LIFE, FORWARD

Meyer, Tracy Hewitt BHC Press (216 pp.) $21.95 | Nov. 5, 2020 978-1-64397-150-6 Series: Rowan Slone, 2

In this sequel to A Life, Redefined (2020), Appalachian teen Rowan Slone is back and starting her senior year of high school.

She has big dreams for her future after overcoming the mess her dysfunctional family made of her junior year. Will Rowan make it to college amid the hurricane that is her life? Rowan finally feels like she has gotten things together: living with her boyfriend’s parents, the Andersons; doing well at her job at the animal shelter; and hoping to get financial aid for college. However, Rowan’s carefully rebuilt life looks like it will come crashing down when her abusive father returns and her sister, Trina, pushes for them to be one big |

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

Montgomery, L.M. & Chan, Crystal Illus. by Chan, Kuma Manga Classics (308 pp.) $19.99 paper | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-947808-18-8 Series: Manga Classics

A miscommunication leaves Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert responsible for a plucky, effusive orphan girl instead of the boy they’d expected to help main-

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A long-awaited Twilight (2005) companion novel told from vampire Edward’s point of view.

Edward Cullen, a 104-year-old vampire (and eternal 17-year-old), finds his world turned upside down when new girl Bella Swan’s addictive scent drives a primal hunger, launching the classic story of vampire-meets-girl, vampire-wants-to-eat-girl, vampire-falls-inlove-with-girl. Edward’s broody inner monologue allows readers to follow every beat of his falling in love. The glacial pace and already familiar plot points mean that instead of surprise twists, characterization reigns. Meyer doesn’t shy away from making Edward far less sympathetic than Bella’s view of him (and his mind reading confirms that Bella’s view of him isn’t universal).

Bella benefits from being seen without the curtain of self-deprecation from the original book, as Edward analyzes her every action for clues to her personality. The deeper, richer characterization of the leads comes at the expense of the secondary cast, who (with a few exceptions) alternate primarily along gender lines, between dimwitted buffoons and jealous mean girls. Once the vampiric threat from James’ storyline kicks off, vampire maneuvering and strategizing show off the interplay of the Cullens’ powers in a fresh way. After the action of the climax starts in earnest, though, it leans more into summary and monologue to get to the well-known ending. Aside from the Quileutes and the occasional background character, the cast defaults to White.

A love letter to fans who will forgive (and even revel in) its excesses and indulgences. (Paranormal romance. 12-adult)

happy family. Already feeling like a burden to the Andersons and missing her boyfriend, Mike, who used to be her support system but is now in college five hours away, Rowan starts to spiral. The author explores the obsessive thoughts that accompany self-harm and elements of mental illness sensitively and explicitly. Rowan has a well-developed, strong character arc, and the secondary characters are better developed than in the previous volume. Readers unfamiliar with Rowan’s story will find this novel accessible but will gain more from having read the first book. Main characters are presumed to be White.

A piercing and heartwarming sequel. (Fiction. 14-18)

tain their farm.

Retold in traditional manga format, with right-to-left panel orientation and detailed black-and-white linework, this adaptation is delightfully faithful to the source text. Larger panels establish the idyllic country landscape while subtle text boxes identify the setting—Prince Edward Island, Canada, in the 1870s. The book follows redheaded Anne Shirley from her arrival at Green Gables at 11 to her achievement of a college scholarship. In the intervening years, Anne finds stability, friendship, personal growth, and ambition in Avonlea and in the strict but well-intentioned Cuthbert siblings’ household. The familiar story is enhanced by the exciting new format and lush illustrations. A variety of panel layouts provides visual freshness, maintaining reader interest. Backmatter includes the floor plan of the Green Gables house, as well as interior and exterior views, and notes about research on the actual location. A description of the process of adapting the novel to this visual format indicates the care that was taken to highlight particular elements of the story as well as to remain faithful to the smallest details.

Readers who find the original text challenging will welcome this as an aid to comprehension, and Anne’s existing fans will savor a fresh perspective on their beloved story. All characters appear to be White.

A charming adaptation. (Graphic fiction. 12-14)

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VICTOR AND NORA A Gotham Love Story

Myracle, Lauren Illus. by Goodhart, Isaac & Peter, Cris & Wands, Steve DC (208 pp.) $16.99 paper | Nov. 3, 2020 978-1-4012-9639-1 At a young age, teens Victor and Nora became all too familiar with death.

Several years ago, Victor lost his brother and Nora her mother. Now, Victor interns at a lab where he is working on a technology to freeze and reanimate living things, work that has led his colleagues to call him a genius.

Nora, on the other hand, is battling a degenerative neurological disease that will result in her untimely death. Determined to enjoy what is left of her life and to die on her own terms, Nora decides to take her life on her 17th birthday, before the disease makes her unrecognizable to herself and her loved ones. But then she and Victor fall in love, and Victor proposes an experimental strategy that could give them extra time together—or could ruin their relationship forever. While the book’s dialogue and characterization are compelling, the plot leans on predictable romantic tropes—most notably a quirky Manic Pixie Dream Girl pulling an awkward, brooding scientist out of his shell—leaving little room for surprises. The book’s illustrations are stunning, brilliantly moving between sepia- and blue-toned palettes to heighten the story’s mood. Victor appears White.

Nora, her father, and brother have brown skin and wavy, black hair; her late mother’s name was Sulani Faria, but there are no clues to the family’s cultural or ethnic identities.

An entertaining romance that leans into tired tropes.

(Graphic romance. 14-18)

THE MEDICAL REVOLUTION How Technology Is Changing Health Care

Nardo, Don ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-929-5

A brief survey of emerging medical technologies.

The introduction examines applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence in diagnostics, patient analysis, and treatment plans.

The first chapter compares 2020’s scramble for a Covid-19 vaccine to a 1964 rubella outbreak then catalogs genetic technologies including vaccination, gene therapy, genomic sequencing, and personalized medicine. The book then takes a macroscopic look at nanotechnologies, zooming in on applications for improving diagnostic outcomes, specialized medication delivery, and highly targeted treatments. Other topics covered include robotics, including microbots (microscopic metal 170

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devices guided through a patient’s body by an external magnetic field); uncanny “super mannequins” (anthropoid training tools that approximate the bodies and reactions of human patients); surgical assistants (that allow for minimally invasive procedures that reduce blood loss, recovery time, instances of infection, and even scar size); and 3-D printers that can generate custom pharmaceutical dosages, low-cost prostheses, and surgical tools. The book concludes with an exploration of telemedicine, especially in field hospitals and psychiatry. A major oversight is the failure to address ethical concerns about R&D and patient privacy as well as issues of racial and gender bias that are built into technology and medical care. While this is an accessible starting point for report writers, the rapidly changing nature of the subject limits its usefulness. However, the subject matter is intriguing, and the writing is clear and readable.

All right but already aging. (source notes, further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

A HOPEFUL HEART Louisa May Alcott Before Little Women

Noyes, Deborah Schwartz & Wade/Random (304 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-0-525-64623-5 From birth to fame, a versatile writer’s growth, education, travels, and early influences.

Louisa May Alcott led a copiously well-documented life—her own journals, begun at age 8, were preceded by her father Bronson’s record of his young daughters’ antics that ultimately ran to 2,500 pages. Here Noyes falls victim to that weight of available detail, embedding valuable insights into Bronson’s pedagogical methods (well ahead of their time), Alcott’s independent spirit, and the Alcott family’s connections with leading intellectual lights of the day in tedious references to neighbors, boarders, debts and payments, travel arrangements, and quotidian comings and goings. The generally penniless Alcotts changed addresses over 30 times in Alcott’s first 20-some years, for example, and if the author doesn’t mention each and every move, readers will still feel as if she has. She also, disappointingly, shows more interest in detailing what Alcott was paid for her potboilers than in describing what they were about and takes at best cursory notice of the themes or plotlines of her early novels The Inheritance and Moods. On the other hand, Alcott’s experiences nursing dying Civil War soldiers in a Washington hospital make a vivid and heart-rending lead-up to a climactic account of the genesis of Little Women, and readers who have fallen under that novel’s spell will at least come away with a clear picture of its author’s maverick nature.

A perceptive character study afflicted with excess and inconsequential detail. (bibliography, endnotes) (Biography.

12-15)

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A master class in short stories. foreshadow

REBEL SISTERS

Onyebuchi, Tochi Razorbill/Penguin (304 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-984835-06-2 Series: War Girls, 2

FORESHADOW Stories To Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA

Ed. by Pan, Emily X.R. & Suma, Nova Ren Algonquin (352 pp.) $16.95 paper | Oct. 20, 2020 978-1-64375-079-8 An ingenious collection of 13 short stories that will especially be enjoyed by aspiring writers.

Stemming from the digitally published serial anthology of the same name founded by YA authors Pan and Suma, this print collection features contributions by some of the new voices who were featured in the monthly online issues. Each entry is prefaced with an explanation from the well-known author for teens, including writers such as Laurie Halse Anderson and Sabaa Tahir, who selected that short story for publication. Commentary by Suma or Pan follows each one, highlighting a particular writing element on display. Topics such as imagery, voice, and emotional resonance are discussed in these accompanying essays on craft. |

YOU WERE NEVER HERE Peacock, Kathleen HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 20, 2020 978-0-06-300251-7

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Ify and Uzo are connected by more than sharing an oppressive, war-torn country; they cross paths when Ify returns on a vital mission in this sequel to War Girls (2019).

It has been five years since the Biafran War ended, and Ify— in the Alabast Space Colony—isn’t eager to look back. She has climbed her way to the top and, at only 19, is set to become a doctor and assistant director, overseeing care for incoming refugees. When synths—humanoid machines that are given human memories—and cyberized refugee children suddenly lapse into comas after receiving deportation orders, Ify desperately wants answers. Tasked with returning to Nigeria, Ify must now confront the past she longed to leave behind. Uzo, a 15-year-old synth who yearns to belong, has been helping Enyemaka and Xifeng acquire and preserve memories of a war that the government wants to erase. Their paths collide, forcing Uzo and Ify to work together. Told in alternating viewpoints, the story examines the effects of trauma in a postwar society, colonization, immigration, and government distrust through the lens of two girls searching for answers. Third-person chapters that follow Ify are juxtaposed with Uzo’s logical and precise first-person narration; both are replete with descriptions of Nigerian culture. Ify and Uzo are Black; Xifeng is Han Chinese.

A thought-provoking, action-packed addition to the series. (Science fiction. 14-adult)

These passages are a real treat, as readers and aspiring writers are given an opportunity to learn from established authors and editors. There are a variety of genres featured in the collection, although most lean toward the speculative. The crop of writers and their protagonists are diverse—Adriana Marachlian’s “Monsters” centers around recent Venezuelan immigrant Milagros, who sees monsters in the New York City subway, and Nora Elghazzawi’s “Solace” follows Laila, a Midwestern Muslim girl still grieving her younger brother’s death. Each of these selections displays great talent, and readers will hope to see future works by these up-and-coming creators. Extensive aftermatter provides enriching background information.

Ranging from deliciously creepy to glowingly hopeful, this collection offers a master class in short stories. (Anthol­ ogy. 12-18)

A teen with an unusual gift is enmeshed in a small-town mystery.

Mary Catherine “Cat” Montgomery is spending her summer in exile after a disastrous incident with her closest friend, Lacey, leaves her isolated and humiliated. The 17-year-old New Yorker will stay with her Aunt Jet in Montgomery Falls, a tiny Canadian town where her family once owned a successful mill, while her screenwriter father is in California. Cat hasn’t been here in five years, after she and her childhood best friend, Riley, discovered the dead body of a young woman—as well as Cat’s ability to sense things about others she couldn’t know otherwise just by touching their skin.

When Cat arrives in Montgomery Falls, she learns that Riley— whom she hasn’t spoken to since that long-ago summer—is now missing. Cat quickly falls in with Jet’s charismatic 18-year-old boarder, Aidan, and his group of cinephile friends, but when Riley’s disappearance is followed by another teen’s near death, Cat must call upon the psychic skill that has thus far complicated her life. Peacock crafts a multilayered story chock-full of conflicts with family and friends that many teens will relate to and a chilling mystery that will keep readers guessing. Most characters are assumed White.

A page-turner of a thriller with a smart, compelling heroine. (Thriller. 12-18)

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Some original dialogue and narration remain, edited to keep the story emotion-packed and the pace as swift as the elevator ride. long way down: the graphic novel

IN THE STUDY WITH THE WRENCH

Peterfreund, Diana Amulet/Abrams (304 pp.) $14.95 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-4197-3976-7 Series: Clue Mystery, 2

With the headmaster’s killer behind bars, college prep is top priority at Blackbrook Academy—until another body makes an unwelcome appearance.

Plum is dismayed that Headmaster Boddy’s temporary replacement, a school board member from a pharmaceutical company with long-standing ties to Blackbrook, has boarded up the secret passages in Tudor House, preventing him from recovering his highly extracurricular project. Evading Rosa, a sharp-eyed new student, Plum solicits Scarlett’s help. But after school custodian Rusty Nayler’s body falls on them, their illicit activities are exposed. Already anxious about her practicetest scores, Scarlett learns that her escapades will carry consequences. Future tennis pro Peacock, also anxious, relies on a new life coach whose diet and meditation instructions are proffered in soothing messages. Ethnically diverse, the students are wealthy with the exception of scholarship student and townie Vaughn, who’s kept his connection to Blackbrook secret. Orchid’s mostly relieved that Vaughn knows her secret; despite his strange moods, their mutual attraction grows. For Mustard, conflicted, and Plum, perplexingly free of doubt, romance is more complicated. An attempt on a student’s life heightens the tension. The six narrators—hobbled by missteps and self-inflicted mistakes—find themselves sharing long-held secrets; even master manipulators Scarlett and Plum must trust one another. These flawed but occasionally endearing characters grow on readers. As the sly plot untwists, questions are answered and new ones posed until the cliffhanger ending.

Witty, wicked fun. (Mystery. 14-18)

MAGIC DARK AND STRANGE

Powell, Kelly McElderry (240 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-1-5344-6608-1

Catherine Daly is able to raise the dead, but her magic comes at a cost.

By day, 17-year-old Miss Daly works at a print shop in the city of Invercarn.

By night, her employer, Mr. Ainsworth, tasks her and her roommate, Bridget, with providing a farewell service for people in the town. Catherine uses small amounts of blood magic to raise the recently deceased just long enough for mourners to say a brief, final goodbye. When Mr. Ainsworth asks her to dig up the contents of a mysterious unmarked grave in search of a magical timepiece, Catherine enlists the help of 18-year-old Guy Nolan, son 172

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of a local watchmaker. Together, they manage to not only dig up the grave in question, they also inadvertently raise the boy who was entombed there. The three of them work together to solve the mysteries surrounding the boy’s death—Owen, as the boy chooses to call himself, has little memory of his previous existence. As their investigations proceed, Catherine and Guy develop a romantic relationship. Simple language and light character development make this book, set in a world that evokes Victorian Britain, a quick and somewhat flat read. The plot, while straightforward, is enjoyable and will appeal to teen readers. All characters are White.

A lukewarm gothic fantasy with a slight touch of romance.

(Fantasy. 12-18)

LONG WAY DOWN The Graphic Novel

Reynolds, Jason Illus. by Novgorodoff, Danica Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum (208 pp.) $19.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-1-5344-4495-9

After Will’s older brother, Shawn, is shot and killed, Will knows he has to follow the rules: Don’t cry, don’t snitch, get revenge.

The rules are so old it’s hard to know where they came from, but Will knows they are not meant to be broken. He gets Shawn’s gun and heads downstairs in the elevator to shoot Riggs, his brother’s former friend, who he is convinced is responsible.

As the elevator door opens on each floor, Will is confronted by people from his past who were also victims of gun violence.

They question Will’s plan and motivation, and although Will was certain it was Riggs when he first got into the elevator, at some point he isn’t so sure. The ghosts, their truths, and the fact that he has never held a gun before make the decision to enact revenge that much more frightening. Based on Reynolds’ 2017 award-winning verse novel of the same name, this fullcolor graphic adaptation will pull in both old and new readers.

Novgorodoff ’s ink-and-watercolor images bring a softness to the text that contrasts with the violent deaths and the stark choice Will faces. Reynolds’ fans will be pleased to see some of the original dialogue and narration remain, though edited to keep the story emotion-packed and the pace as swift as the elevator ride. Characters are Black.

A moving rendition that stands on its own. (Graphic fiction.12-18)

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MONSTERS AMONG US

Rodden, Monica Crown (400 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 27, 2020 978-0-593-12586-1

THE RULE OF ALL

Saunders, Ashley & Saunders, Leslie Skyscape (348 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 6, 2020 978-1-5420-0829-7 Series: The Rule of One, 3 Twin sisters Saunders and Saunders conclude the Rule of One trilogy with a cinematic finale.

Evading the Rule of One, which makes having more than one child a crime, 18-year-old identical twins Ava and Mira Goodwin lived as one person until they were outed by the villainous Roth family, whose scion, Texas governor Howard S. Roth, presided over his surveillance state with brutal focus. The twins’ very existence sparked a rebellion long in the making. Now it’s been 21 days since the fall of the Texas government, and their home city of Dallas—along with the rest of the state—is unofficial Common territory. The Family Planning Center is reuniting families with their second- (and third-, fourth-, etc.) born children instead of cruelly ripping them apart. However, the Common’s |

THE SHADOW WAR

Smith, Lindsay Philomel (416 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-593-11647-0

Teens rip open the universe in an attempt to defeat the Nazis in this queer World War II fantasy.

It’s September 1942. Eighteen-yearold Liam, a gay, White academic prodigy who recently graduated from Princeton, has traveled to Germany (by commercial airline, one of the few historical missteps) in search of a medieval manuscript he hopes will help him understand and refine his mysterious powers. Liam has learned to access a parallel universe full of dark energy that he hopes will defeat the Nazis. Unfortunately, the Nazis know how to reach it, too. Liam is soon joined by Jewish siblings Daniel and Rebeka—out for revenge after they were sent to the Łódź ghetto and the rest of their family was murdered—and two members of the resistance—Simone, an Algerian-born Muslim lesbian, and Phillip, a Black American from the U.S. Army whose secret mission is never fully explained.

Slimy monsters cross into our universe; the protagonists react with violence—and romance—while fighting for justice. Nonstop action, consistent worldbuilding, and a large cast of sympathetic characters, all of them marginalized in some way, create an engaging story.

A coherent and ultimately hopeful alternate reality. (His­ torical fantasy. 12-18)

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A college student tries to solve the murder in the wake of her own sexual assault.

Catherine, a first semester freshman, comes home reeling from a sexual assault that took place at a college party just before winter break. Shortly after her return, someone close to her is murdered in her Washington hometown. As the police investigation into the murder gets underway, Catherine becomes determined to do her own sleuthing, desperate for answers and an outlet for her trauma. She is helped by Henry, an old friend, and Andrew, a young man who shows up at her house one day to return the coat she left behind in her assailant’s room the night of her assault. The circumstances of Andrew’s untimely arrival on the scene provoke suspicions— was he involved in Catherine’s rape or even the murder? Yet Catherine seems implausibly quick to dismiss these suspicions out of a desire to bring Andrew into the fold due to his close connection to the local police department and thus, clues. The trio’s amateur detective work leaves much to be desired as far as plotting is concerned, jumping from hunch to hunch on minimal evidence, with the bulk of their investigation focusing on abuses of power within a local church. The sexual assault narrative is largely sidelined for the sake of a plodding mystery. All major characters are White.

Ostensibly a thriller, this debut misses its mark. (Mystery.

15-18)

biggest prize, Gov. Roth, has eluded capture. Ava and Mira will go to any lengths to find him, but it won’t be easy, and they’ll need each other more than ever to win this most dangerous game. High stakes and alternating narratives between the twins and others keep the pace brisk, and Ava and Mira continue to explore their individuality, and their newfound power, while leading a revolution in a risky bid to affect change for good. The twins are White, and there is diversity among the supporting cast.

An action-packed wrap-up with a timely message at its core. (Science fiction. 13-17)

ESPORTS AND THE NEW GAMING CULTURE

Steffens, Bradley ReferencePoint Press (80 pp.) $30.95 | Sep. 1, 2020 978-1-68282-925-7

A brief survey of professional video gaming.

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A welcome workbook for teens wishing to get a handle on their anger issues. zero to 60

runs from the first amateur tournaments to the professionalized present. The introduction pairs an anecdote from an e-sports tournament with commentary on competitive gaming’s allure to investors and educators. Chapter 1 defines eight professional gaming genres. Though the main focus is cutthroat, typically team-based e-sports, Chapter 2 also considers lifestyle gaming—personality-based, commentary-driven broadcasts often pursued by those who eschew the precarious nature of competitive gaming. The text largely ignores the astronomical odds against success in favor of starry-eyed preoccupation with elite players’ skills, status, and incomes. However, this section admirably highlights professional gamers of varied identities, including “Myth,” a male lifestyle gamer of Syrian and African American descent, and “Brolylegs,” a male Street Fighter grandmaster with arthrogryposis. In addition, the book addresses sexism in the portrayal of female game characters and hostile environments for women gamers. Chapter 3 examines the upsides and challenges of building e-sports teams and leagues and gaming’s fusion of athletics and traditional entertainment.

Chapter 4 lays out common defenses of gaming (for example, players learn life lessons), provides practical advice on starting a sanctioned school-level e-sports program, and addresses college-level e-sports. Text boxes mostly consisting of quotes do little to enhance the text, and the stock photos feel stagnant.

A jumping-off point for interested readers. (source notes, further research, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

BRIGHT SHINING WORLD

Swiller, Josh Knopf (304 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 24, 2020 978-0-593-11957-0

An itinerant teen faces down a megacorporation’s metaphysical machinations.

Swiller’s YA debut opens with acerbic narrator Wallace Cole en route from Kentucky to upstate New York. Since his mother died, his father’s job has taken them to 22 states, and he’s bounced through 14 high schools.

Never mind that Wallace isn’t exactly sure what his father does—apparently he’s some sort of plant fixer for Jackduke, the country’s second largest energy company. Wallace arrives in the Finger Lakes town of North Homer, where high school students are succumbing to bouts of contagious hysteria. All the same, stakes escalate quickly and unevenly. Clichés abound: He meshes with misfits and beefs with a reactionary meathead.

Wallace also falls for the brainy, gorgeous, high-achieving, inexplicably receptive homecoming queen, a turn of events that feels unearned. Mumbled explanations and illogical leaps hamstring the plot as Wallace suddenly discovers a grand conspiracy to destroy—well, call it what you will—the soul, spirit, human essence. The resulting text—too dense for a thriller and too anemic for science fiction—seems unsure of itself. Syntactical rollicks between utter despair and ostensible sincerity prevent tone from aligning with diction. Is this a sweeping social satire?

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Analogy for a generation’s righteous angst? Derivative bildungsroman? Amid a world on fire reduced to a smolder, who’s to say? All characters are assumed White.

A high concept shakily executed. (Thriller. 14-18)

ZERO TO 60 A Teen’s Guide to Manage Frustration, Anger, and Everyday Irritations

Tompkins, Michael A. Illus. by Douglass, Chloe Magination/American Psychological Association (288 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 10, 2020 978-1-4338-3247-5 Adolescence can be fraught with competing desires and expectations, often leading to anger; this book aims to provide the necessary tools to cope.

Firmly rooted in principals of cognitive behavioral therapy and written by an expert in the field, this book functions as a CBT workbook that can be used on its own or incorporated into a formal therapy plan. Beginning with helping readers identify how their anger is expressed and what some common triggers are, progressive chapters scaffold learning and skills to rein in angry thoughts and actions. Subsequent chapters address ways to reframe thinking, halt rumination, and improve communication, among other useful tools. Each chapter includes worksheets to help with skills practice along with a brief “In a Nutshell” summary of the key points. Throughout the book, ethnically diverse cartoon characters, seemingly based on actual teens, share their first-person experiences with uncontrolled anger, its consequences, and how the book’s tools have helped.

While this is the sort of book that many teens are unlikely to pick up on their own, if trusted adults recommend it, they will find the content worthwhile. Though the homework vibe of some of the worksheets might put some readers off, the content and skills are excellent and accessible. The clean layout, with chunks of prose broken up by clear headers, lists, and text boxes, enhances the reading experience.

A welcome workbook for teens wishing to get a handle on their anger issues. (suggested reading, resources, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

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indie RUNNING FROM MOLOKA’I

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Anderson, Jill P. Manuscript

RUNNING FROM MOLOKA’I by Jill P. Anderson............................. 175 ANARCHY OF THE MICE by Jeff Bond............................................. 177 BEAUTY by Christina Chiu................................................................179 THE SUBSTANCE OF ALL THINGS by Sam Harris.........................186 JOURNEY OF THE SELF by Ruth Poniarski.....................................191 ALL THAT LINGERS by Irene Wittig.................................................197

BEAUTY

Chiu, Christina Santa Fe Writer’s Project (278 pp.) $15.95 paper | $0.99 e-book May 1, 2020 978-1-73377-775-9 |

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In this coming-of-age historical novel, a girl learns of a horrific leper colony on Moloka’i in Hawaii.

In the late 19th century, Mele Bennett is a hapa-haole (mixed-race) girl.

Her White father is Dr. Reed Bennett, who is with the Board of Health; her mother, Nahoa, is a Native Hawaiian. Their marriage is tested by the policy of forced resettlement to the colony on Moloka’i for all who are diagnosed with leprosy, and it is the Natives, the kanaka, who are almost exclusively susceptible. For those sent to the colony, it is a lonely life: They will never return to their homes, and they will never see their loved ones again. Moreover, conditions are barely humane. Reed is very pained by this policy, but the science of the day dictates that such isolation is the only safeguard against an epidemic. He has to follow his conscience.

Meanwhile, Mele’s childhood love, Keahi, finds a suspicious rash on his chest. Like many others, he escapes into the bush, where tracking him is almost impossible. This is when Mele discovers that her father is more than she thought and she begins to reconcile her White and brown halves, something that was tearing her apart. Anderson writes beautifully. The opening paragraph about Mele’s childhood house reveals a major theme of the book in just a few brush strokes of color. The scene in which young Jacob Maila is torn from his screaming mother by the authorities is truly heart-rending. And the arrogance of the powers that be (haole—White—of course) is infuriating. The author gives Mele, the first-person narrator, uncommon poetic gifts, as in streetlights “winking like stories wanting to be told” or when her father’s “voice crawled out of his throat” in an agonized reply. Almost every page offers such a treat. Readers will fervently hope that Anderson has more novels in her because this one is a winner.

A moving, lyrical tale of a strong young hero dealing with a terrifying disease.

american soul RELENTLESS VISIONARY Alessandro Volta

Judy Juanita, a poet, novelist, and playwright, was the editor-in-chief of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party, and has taught writing at Laney College in Oakland, California, since 1993. Juanita has long chronicled this country’s contradictions in various genres and has come out on the side of hope. Here’s an introduction to her work.

Virgin Soul: In Juanita’s semiautobiographical novel, a young woman joins the Black Panther Party, meets many members of the Black Power movement (Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale), and critiques the movement from a feminist perspective. Our reviewer says, “She runs into one of the movement’s contradictions: that women are seen as less equal than men in the fight for equality, reduced to ‘sexual cannon fodder in the midst of war.’ ” De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland: In this starred essay collection, Juanita recalls a “goody-goody” childhood in 1950s America, “a Jell-O & white bread land of perfection and gleaming surfaces,” and joining the Black Panthers. Our reviewer says, “Her incisive comments on Black life’s contradictions make this essay collection a winner.”

Homage to the Black Arts Movement: This starred multigenre work considers the revolutionary Black artistic and political movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Our reviewer says, “Juanita has created a dense and intriguing tribute to an important literary group whose influence still reverberates in American culture. Her works effectively embrace a wide variety of issues from gender politics to skin-color privilege within the Black community.”

Manhattan My Ass, You’re in Oakland: Our reviewer describes Juanita’s most recent book, published in June, as “unsettling, important, and unforgettable poetry.”

Her poem “Laborers Day, 2016” ends with this hopeful, instructive note: “Let us return To music To art / To dance To sculpture To architecture / To faith in human goodness / To hope To each other / Let’s look up from our mobiles / And return To each other.”

Berick, Michael Barbera Foundation (198 pp.) $14.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Jan. 27, 2020 978-1-947431-30-0

A biography focuses on an often neglected but historically significant Italian scientist.

When Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born in 1745, no one foresaw monumental intellectual achievements in his future—he didn’t start talking until he was 4 years old, and his family considered the possibility that he was “dim-witted.” But, as Berick’s concise book shows, he eventually became an “avid, intense learner” and developed an interest in science, philosophy, and poetry.

At the age of 18, he boldly corresponded with Giovanni Beccaria, a well-known Italian physicist and “acolyte” of Benjamin Franklin, and Jean-Antoine Nollet, a prominent French scientist, marking the beginning of Volta’s promising career. When Volta was about 30—in 1775—he invented an electrophorus, an early version of an electrical induction device, his first big breakthrough. His groundbreaking research thereafter would have a significant impact on electrical science as well as on the still fledgling field of meteorology. Furthermore, Volta’s early version of an electric battery “spawned an explosion of new inventions almost immediately, and has continued to play an essential part of modern life.” At the height of his professional career, he cultivated a “unique patronage relationship” with Napoleon, who not only provided him with material support, but also got him elected to the prestigious French Institute.

This book is part of the Mentoris Project, which focuses on eminent Italians and Italian Americans. Berick, with painstaking meticulousness, chronicles Volta’s indelible scientific legacy, charting both his triumphs and challenges. Volta emerges as an intriguing figure—on the one hand, a “disrupter, an innovator and a visionary,” but on the other, a very cautious man, less a rebel than a “moderate with a rebellious streak,” someone who preferred to keep his unconventional views about religion and politics private. The author’s account can be dry and technical, but for those interested in the unfolding of the Enlightenment and the role of Italian science, this is an informative and absorbing resource.

A thorough and engrossing account of a scientific pioneer and the age that produced him.

Karen Schechner is the vice president of Kirkus Indie.

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KNIGHT BLIND

In this mystery, a struggling private investigator agrees to help an elderly woman find her estranged nephew and runs into identity theft, dysfunctional rental cars, and murder.

Canadian private investigator Jorja Knight is down on her luck. Work’s thin on the ground and the rent’s due, so when the chance to track down a wealthy client’s relative comes up, she grabs it. Zosia Gorwitz last saw her nephew Stanislav Gorwitz in Poland in 1939, just before she and her mother fled the Axis alliance. Zosia’s grandfather and father were sent to Auschwitz, and her brother died in battle. After visiting the Canadian Holocaust Memorial and seeing the name Stanislav Gorwitz in the registry, though, Zosia became convinced that her nephew immigrated to Vancouver. It’s a long shot, but she wants Jorja to find him and reunite them. Stan, it turns out, died in a shooting, but he had a son, Johnnie, who may still be alive. Jorja traces a man who seems to have the right name and credentials, but it soon becomes clear that he’s not the person she’s looking for. Where is Johnnie, and why is someone else using his identity—and is it related to the reason that Calgary’s vagrants seem to keep disappearing? Along the way, an incident involving an overturned watermelon truck leaves Jorja needing a cheap rental car. This first in a planned mystery series offers a very promising introduction to a likable PI of the traditional world-weary, hand-to-mouth type.

Although readers won’t find anything particularly radical here, the novel succeeds through its warmth, its generic familiarity, and its humor. For example, Jorja visits JumpIn Jalopies to get a rental car, where she receives a succession of wrecks whose “special” features include front doors that won’t open, alarms that go off at random times, and a particularly unpleasant smell that threatens to land her in trouble with the police. The mystery itself is tight and well plotted, with enough twists and curveballs to keep most crime fans on their toes.

A fine debut by a talented writer, featuring a well-crafted new PI.

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not a chapbook, as it offers scores of poems on hundreds of pages. The author uses its size to her advantage, however, to produce a powerful, wide-ranging opus that truly covers the waterfront. That being said, Birkhead’s “black mountain” isn’t meant to overwhelm readers; rather, it aims to be a place of rest and respite and a shelter from the storm. She explains the significance of the image in the title poem: “This is my friend the black mountain / No judgment or hatred from anyone else / A safe place where I can gain my strength / Just a way of taking care of myself.” There’s a delightful bait and switch here, as an image of ominous threat is transformed into a symbol of selfcare. Indeed, for the author, it seems that poetry in general is about taking care of oneself, and many of the most effective pieces are about working through the pain and distress. “Borderline,” for example, opens as follows: “When my mind races / I get lost / Incessant worrying / And constant thoughts / Like a tickle inside / The anxiety kills / Focus on breathing / But I feel it still.” “Reaching Out,” too, hits similar notes: “I don’t understand / I don’t see any sores / But I’m in horrible pain / What’s going on Lord.” Pernicious, invisible suffering is one of the volume’s key themes, and Birkhead dedicates her book to “victims” and “survivors.” But in the midst of such pain, she seems to say, poetry can be “cathartic”; accordingly, this book will most appeal to readers who are struggling in the trenches but yearning to emerge onto higher ground.

A healing gift from an ambitious and thoughtful poet.

Bienia, Alice Manuscript

ANARCHY OF THE MICE

Bond, Jeff Self (460 pp.) $16.99 paper | $0.99 e-book May 12, 2020 978-1-73225-527-2 A disgraced politician, a soldier of fortune, and a suburban mom take on a conspiracy to wreck civilization in this series-starting thriller.

Bond’s surprisingly plausible story envisions an America that’s been destabilized by the Blind Mice, a group of hacker anarchists bent on destroying corporations. Battling them on behalf of the American Dynamics conglomerate are security contractors Quaid Rafferty, a former Massachusetts governor who was impeached over a relationship with a sex worker, and his associate Durwood Oak Jones, a straight-arrow ex-Marine from Appalachia. They recruit Molly McGill, a single mom and private eye in New Jersey, to infiltrate the Mice. This requires her to become a celebrated left-leaning blogger and then navigate the collective’s Byzantine security protocols and tattoo rituals. Molly finds their leader Josiah, a young prophet given to long-winded rants against the system, to be a little “Crazy,” and their member Piper Jackson, a hacktivist trying to rescue her brother from an unjust prison sentence, to be idealistic. The Mice’s insurrection darkens when Josiah murders a health-management company executive and Piper unleashes a computer

BLACK MOUNTAIN

Birkhead, Lesli BalboaPress (286 pp.) $35.95 | $18.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Jan. 15, 2020 978-1-982240-96-7 978-1-982240-94-3 paper A collection of verse that speaks about self-care.

There’s something elegant about the format of a poet’s chapbook—a little longer than a pamphlet, capturing a slice of life, a moment in time. Birkhead’s sprawling work is decidedly |

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The unforgettable ending may leave readers reeling. iceapelago

virus that wipes out most of the world’s data. The novel then swerves toward a more gonzo dystopia as chaos erupts, governments crumble, biker gangs set up highway checkpoints, and Fabienne Rivard, a dastardly Frenchwoman with ties to both the Mice and Quaid, positions her own sinister conglomerate to take over the world. Quaid, Durwood, and Molly duly target her Paris headquarters—a cross between a postmodern office park, a cutting-edge tech lab, and a medieval dungeon—where they face not only Fabienne’s minions, but also her organization’s bizarre scientific experiments.

Bond’s yarn, the first in his Third Chance Enterprises series, features crackerjack action scenes as well as a sly parody of the symbiosis between activist movements and the corporatocracy, all in vividly evocative prose: “His bones didn’t seem quite to fit, elbows and knees jangling liquidly,” Molly observes of the oddly charismatic Josiah. “He was impossible to look away from, his gait hypnotic, his kaleidoscopic limbs slashing the space between us.” The characters are colorful but rendered with complex nuance: Quaid, for example, is an obsequious, morally flexible showboat who’s confident that he can talk his way out of almost any situation; Durwood is a laconic technician with moral rectitude that can be too unyielding. Bond’s writing is well observed and engrossing in a range of registers, from tough-guy posturing—“I expect you’re wishing you had what hangs in my right trouser holster: a Webley top-break .455 caliber revolver”—to the perpetual uproar of Molly’s home life: “It started out smoky when I burned an omelet, distracted by the cat’s pre-vomit hacking in the hall. Then Zach and Granny had a pointless argument about when an egg became a chicken.” Even Durwood’s hound dog, Sue-Ann, makes an indelibly wheezy and sad-eyed impression.

Faced with a world coming apart at the seams, Bond’s characters stitch it back together with a DIY verve that readers will likely find captivating.

A raucously entertaining actioner with a sting of social satire.

though she can’t read them, she pores over the stories from The Lives of Saints. Her interest spawns an ambition. “When I grew up and was a teenager,” she thinks, “I was going to be a saint.”

The gift Grace uses the most is her ability to see light coming off people. For instance, in the presence of pubescent teens, she notices: “They had all these oranges and reds streaming out of their privates and yet they still glowed the baby colours around their hearts.” The first of the novel’s four sections collects such family memories as an exciting summer trip to Biscotasing, her father’s hometown. In the second section, Grace attends school; a serious student, she challenges her teacher, disturbing the nun.

In the third section, “Leaving Town,” Grace’s sexual awakening unfortunately coincides with her enrollment in a convent boarding school. The author enumerates the miseries of the school and how most of Grace’s classmates attend against their will, “under duress.” Grace eventually changes schools; at age 16, she becomes a teacher. She experiences her first real romances, including an illfated one. Her powers help her see what’s coming: “Somewhere deep inside was a niggling that it wasn’t going to happen for me the way I would like it to.”

This series opener is a treasure trove of details and vivid characters. Grace certainly has intriguing abilities, but her powers don’t make the book more compelling. If anything, they at times distract from the well-wrought and intricate story of a Canadian family getting by. Bradley has a keen eye for detail.

Grace describes how her Italian grandfather, her mother’s father, “rolled out the large blob of fresh pasta dough with a clean broom handle, and with a huge butcher knife cut it in fine strips.” While miserably hungry at the convent, Grace lists the food she squirrels away: “An ear of cold raw corn from the pantry, the starch making it barely edible; leftover boiled potatoes already turning greyish-black from having been left exposed on a pantry counter.”

The novel’s main achievement is Grace, whose unusual powers mirror her strange temperament. The author skillfully captures the earnestness and innocence of Grace’s divine aspirations.

“Please God, I didn’t mean to laugh at them,” she prays, when a pool hall proprietress falls on top of a priest. “Hope this doesn’t ruin things as I study to be a saint?” Moving through the years, Bradley’s chronicle reveals the youthful impatience to mature and be important but pauses here and there to sketch indelible portraits of human triumph and tragedy.

A rich, evocative tale of growing up in Canada.

BETWEEN THE CRACKS The Life of an Ordinary Woman With Extra Ordinary Gifts Bradley, Sandra Tellwell Talent (308 pp.)

ICEAPELAGO

In this coming-of-age novel, a young woman grapples with faith and unusual powers.

Bradley’s bildungsroman tells the story of Grace MacGregor. A brief prologue informs readers of Grace’s gifts, which include sensing someone’s past and future and even traveling through time. But the prologue is a bit of misdirection; Grace’s first-person narration is a detailed and largely realistic depiction of growing up after the Depression. In the opening chapters, she fondly recalls her childhood in Northwestern Ontario with her resourceful mother and handy father, an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Grace, eager to attend school, is entranced by her older brother Joey’s books. Even 178

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Brennan, Peter Self (328 pp.) $14.99 paper | $4.99 e-book May 19, 2020 978-1-83806-390-0 A debut eco-thriller follows scientists who are researching troubling volcanic activity and meltwater that could prompt global catastrophes.

Over in the Canary Islands, on La Palma, twin brothers Ros and Simon Rodriguez are ready to |

spend their summer at the Pico de la Nieve research center. The two monitor dormant volcanoes, as there haven’t been eruptions on the island for more than 80 years. But they’re soon worried about a recent spike in sulfur emissions. Around the same time, Norwegian climate scientist Lars Brun is eager to use Irishman Sean Pitcher’s invention of trackable golf balls. Lars wants a modified version that floats so that he can monitor meltwater flow at the Greenland Ice Sheet, which he believes is due for a disaster much earlier than most experts anticipate. Meanwhile, a research vessel is set to check salinity levels in the Gulf Stream.

The Irish navy adds technicians—and a submersive—to this planned voyage for a supplemental directive: Find possible evidence of volcanic activity on the Irish Continental Shelf. An increase in activity in any of these three areas could be cataclysmic, including potential tsunamis hitting Ireland’s western coast and Britain. Time, it seems, is running out for everyone. Brennan concentrates more on historical data and sophisticated tech than characters. Accordingly, his smart, well-researched cautionary tale is measured, though it’s undeniably educational. Still, there are a few amiable character moments, such as Lars’ initial meeting with Sean at the Masters Tournament in the United States and Simon’s romance with Maria Marin-Rabella, who does similar work with her sister, Claudine. The pace picks up considerably in later chapters, during which startling “natural events” prove destructive and sometimes fatal. The unforgettable ending may leave readers reeling, even if it’s open to interpretation.

A slow but memorable environmental tale.

BEAUTY

Chiu, Christina Santa Fe Writer’s Project (278 pp.) $15.95 paper | $0.99 e-book May 1, 2020 978-1-73377-775-9

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and ashamed.” Because of a prenup, Amy is forced to find a job after the marriage fails. Forget about making her mark on the industry; now, she just has to find a way to survive in it. Unfortunately for her, continued difficulties with her son, Alex, as well as further complications with the men in her life create even more drama. As she tries to navigate a world rife with subtle racism and flagrant sexism, Amy must also contend with her sexual appetites, her guilty motherhood, and the self-loathing that has always sabotaged her depthless creativity.

The book reads with the ease of a beach novel. Chiu’s prose rolls like fabric and pricks like a pin, piercing the politeness that covers up the deeper ugliness of nearly every social interaction.

Here, Jeff attempts to correct Amy’s vision of him, just as she decides she might want to love him: “ ‘And that night,’ he says.

‘That wasn’t really me.’ I start to laugh. ‘You mean racist?’ ‘I was coked-up, high.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘So you’re not really racist,’ I say. ‘Only the coked-up you is racist?’ ‘Something like that, yes,’ he smirks.” Amy is a memorably intricate character, empathetic even as she is impulsive and sometimes thoughtless. The author deftly evokes the intensity of Amy’s desires—both physical and aesthetic—drawing readers along for every bad idea and moment of rebellion. The fashion world is depicted with luminous specificity—and, as a metaphorical field, it is perfectly selected—but Amy’s story will resonate for those operating in any industry in which the complex layers of race, gender, access, and propriety can complicate a woman’s every action. It’s a coming-of-age story that never stops, revealing how the decisions of youth reverberate and reoccur throughout the decades of a life.

A sexy, unflinching portrait of a woman revolting against the life she makes for herself.

VALADORY

DeRobertis, Richard Manuscript

The brave Rommods help other legendary races battle the fierce hordes of an evil wizard in this debut fantasy.

DeRobertis’ rousing epic begins when Sh’vrilil, envoy of Elamendonath, king of the Elves of the Aldemy Forest, arrives at the court of the Rommod King Genonsendorus. The official bears tidings of huge armies of Goblins from the Deep East commanded by the 1,000-year-old sorcerer Eolgamar. The Rommods, who are divided between squat, short hill-Rommods and skinny, taller forest-Rommods, are known for their warlike valor and agree to send an army to help the Elves. The lanky Sharborough Morganforal, the Rommods’ greatest general and adventurer, sets off on a journey with Sh’vrilil, his buddy Blanchard Windswallow, and a few other disposable Rommods, ostensibly to bring news of the alliance to Elamendonath but really to travel the Middle-Earth–ish land of Valadory and get into scrapes with its sundry denizens. These include gold-crazed Dwarves obsessed with mead-drinking contests; Gnomes; molelike Dugglards,

In this literary novel, an ambitious but conflicted woman navigates the world of fashion while contending with her destructive attraction to sinister men.

When Amy Wong was still in high school, she lost her virginity to a middle-aged shoe salesman in exchange for a pair of $1,250 boots. The event foretold her career as an emerging designer in New York’s competitive fashion industry as well as a love life filled with older, predatory men. At Parsons, her White classmates mutter about affirmative action while the resident design mogul, Jeff Jones, exoticizes Amy’s Chinese heritage.

That doesn’t keep her from sleeping with him, and, in fact, she agrees to marry him shortly after graduation. Everyone assumes she just did it to get ahead, but it isn’t long before she has ceased to be an up-and-coming designer and gets sidelined into being a wife and a mother to Jeff ’s difficult child. Or, at least, she hopes he’s Jeff ’s: “Maybe Jeff sensed it, somehow, or maybe he fell into his old patterns. He started to look elsewhere. He came home reeking of sex and Coco Mademoiselle. Fashion is a small industry. Everyone knew, which made me feel all the more helpless |

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ruled by the one-eyed King Tolgarrilium the Repellent; Trolls; fire-breathing Demons; faeries; ghouls; shadowy amoeboids; various unclassified monsters; and Dorian Pictarian, who, alas, is no Wilde-an dandy but a demonic Elf hunter. Sharborough and company fight, parley, and piece together Eolgamar’s plan to orchestrate the Goblin hosts and bring perpetual winter by summoning the Ice Giant Bergelmer. Complicating things is Blanchard’s discovery of the magic sword Nragnrath, meant to slay the gods during Ragnarok, which can defeat any foe but also brings ruin to all who unsheathe it. The heroes split up, with Blanchard and Sh’vrilil going south to fight Goblins and Sharborough to the northern wastes to confront Eolgamar.

DeRobertis’ yarn sounds many Tolkien-esque motifs—a heroic quest, an apocalyptic war, an all-powerful but all-corrupting talisman, evil as mindless essentialism (Eolgamar never explains why he hates Elves so much when they seem a fairly agreeable lot)—and adds explicit elements of Norse and Greek mythology to the mix. His writing one-ups Tolkien with polysyllabic titles, archaic usages (sometimes muffed: A vassal would never address his liege as “Your liege”), and curlicued trash talk. (“You have come a long way to die. Know your bane is Fandoril!”). The novel’s action is unstinting as the characters fend off hellhounds after Ogres after harpies in fight scenes that are well choreographed and suspenseful, including a confrontation between Sharborough and a giant spider that turns into a white-knuckle chess match played out with soft sounds and slight tremors. The author has a good sense of military strategy and battlefield tactics, which gives the lengthy, set-piece combat sequences an absorbing intellectual dimension to go with their buckets of gore. (“As the fifth turned to face him, hissing with hate, he cut its sword arm off above the elbow. Then, as it screamed, he turned full circle and severed its other arm.”) In quieter passages—“each year when the Ice Giants were beaten back by the end of winter, faeries would awaken with the melting of snow and help usher in spring”—DeRobertis turns his story’s mythic sensibility into beguiling poetry. Sharborough makes an appealing protagonist, brave yet calculating—“It was always important to recognize one’s own mistakes,” he muses, “and equally important to hide them from those who followed”— and resolved to control his own fate.

An entertaining sword-and-sorcery fable with intriguing characters and cosmic gravitas.

asks her to be general counsel at his new tech startup. The only problem is the new job is in San Francisco and it doesn’t start for six months. While she mulls it over, her phone rings, and on the line is Hemingway, who died in 1961. Callie is an enormous fan of The Sun Also Rises and is floored when Hemingway tells her to come find him in Spain. Not questioning the supernatural aspect of this wild occurrence, Callie wrestles her way out of her lease, packs her bags, and heads off to Barcelona. Once there, she meets a geeky American graduate student named Trevor. The two become joined at the hip until Hemingway calls again and they travel to Madrid. There, she meets Claudio, a wealthy Spanish playboy with a passion for partying. He and Callie become lovers, but she still hang outs with Trevor daily.

As the months pass, Callie and her small entourage are drawn to Pamplona, where the running of the bulls may lead her to the answers she is seeking. Dortzbach’s wine-soaked tale of an American living it up in Europe has a wonderful first-person voice that charges through the narrative in an ego-driven but conscientious way that is quite engaging. Callie is not always perfect, and she has serious trust issues, but her love of Spain and devotion to friends, namely the ever lovable Trevor, make the book an enjoyable read. The Hemingway phone calls add a light touch of mystery to a story peppered with Spanish art, culture, and food.

A smart and gratifying tale about an American in Spain trying to enjoy life.

RADIOLAND

Elzey, m.e.

Little House Press (270 pp.) $24.95 | $14.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Jan. 27, 2020 978-1-73405-460-6 978-1-73405-461-3 paper A crusading lawyer attempts to bring down a conservative-radio juggernaut in Elzey’s political novel.

After five decades as a lawyer, Harry Chalberg is about to take on the most important case of his career. The 79-year-old came out of retirement after his son and daughter-in-law were murdered by a White nationalist, and Harry has searched for a way to hold the propagandists that inspired that killer accountable. He finally has the opportunity in Morton v. New Signal News, a lawsuit against the media company that broadcasts programs like the rightwing Cal Brown Show. It’s a long-shot case, but with the help of his longtime assistant, Mariam Katz, Harry hopes to slow the creep of extremism in U.S. politics. However, he’s going up against some powerful people, including the billionaire Austin brothers—who built an international corporate empire out of their father’s Fresno, California–based tractor supply company—and Cal Brown himself, a bombastic radio host who rose from humble origins to the top of the Chicago radio world. He later conquered America with a TV show aimed at people who feel the country’s conservative values are in danger. Can Harry

FINDING HEMINGWAY

Dortzbach, Ken Cloister Inn Publishing (390 pp.) $13.99 paper | $2.99 e-book | Jul. 5, 2020 978-1-73362-470-1 A young lawyer who is between jobs goes to Spain on a journey to find Ernest Hemingway, or at least his ghost, in this debut novel.

Callie McGraw is a hotshot in the legal world in New York, but after a company merger, she finds herself unemployed. Luckily, a friend 180

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Giroux’s prose is intricate and incisive, though always full of warmth and humor. ring on deli

prove that Cal and his backers are contributing to the political violence ripping through America? Elzey’s prose is breezy and smooth, and he proves to be adept at replicating the cadences and arguments of talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh: “Ladies and gentlemen out there in Radioland….Here we go again the snowflakes won’t shut up about socialized medicine and the creation of a Nanny state. Do we want a system like Canada, the UK or France?” The novel effectively manages to dramatize not only the current state of conservative media, but also the ways in which it rose to its current heights of popularity; it does so mainly by relating the backstories of various players. There are elements of the novel that feel a bit too pat, and the characters sometimes come off as stereotypical. Overall, though, the book is a persuasive piece of political fiction.

A readable social novel that effectively examines the consequences of conservative media.

to make you fit into that mold until you succumbed or died.”

Throughout the book, Evans effectively balances moments of humor and self-discovery, resulting in a read that’s appealingly candid and often funny.

A remembrance that offers keen observations about cultural differences while celebrating the power of love.

RING ON DELI

Giroux, Eric New Salem Books (290 pp.) $17.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Aug. 11, 2020 978-1-73422-400-9

NAKED (IN ITALY) A Memoir About the Pitfalls of La Dolce Vita

Evans, M.E. Capybara Media (390 pp.) $26.00 | $16.00 paper | $8.99 e-book Oct. 1, 2019 978-1-73341-550-7 978-0-578-49386-2 paper

Evans’ debut memoir charts her adventures in Italy, first as a graduate student and then as the fiancee of an Italian man with hard-to-please parents.

The American author and her two younger brothers were raised by a single mom, and her father, who was largely absent during the first nine years of her life, only sporadically visited. In 2008, when she was 27, one of her siblings tragically died, plaguing her with feelings of guilt and a need to seize all the possibilities that life might have in store. She arrived in the San Lorenzo area of Florence, Italy, on her birthday the next year to study painting: “I needed catharsis more than oxygen,” she writes, and the vibrancy of Italy seemed to promise that very catharsis.

She eventually found her niche as an artist; she first painted a series of images of vaginas in close-up and then moved on to video work in which she asked women to describe an orgasm on-camera. As Evans hit her creative stride, she began a relationship with a handsome Italian man named Francesco. They fell in love, but their romance was tested when she met his domineering parents, who instantly disliked her—and weren’t afraid to let it be known. Throughout this wittily acerbic memoir, Evans offers dry humor and sharp feminist insights. She notes, for example, how she felt inhibited around Francesco’s mom, as “it was a little hard to open up around someone who appeared to beg God to kill you on a regular basis,” but she wasn’t willing to give in to her demands and assume a traditional role of a wife and daughter-in-law. “I’d never liked the idea of packaged identities,” Evans writes, noting “that being someone’s wife or mom meant specific things to people and that they’d relentlessly try |

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In this debut novel, a pair of brothers weathers the changing fortunes of a failing New England town.

Pennacook, Massachusetts, has seen better days: “What they’d soon call the Great Recession had just unmasked itself to the world, but it seemed to have gotten a head start here.” The depressed mill town’s affordability is why Ray Markham chose to settle there five years ago, after his parents were killed in a car accident and the recent high school graduate became the legal guardian of his younger brother, Patrick. Since then, Ray has worked at the deli counter of the local chain grocery store, Bounty Bag, while Patrick has made his way through the town’s not-so-good public school system. Bounty Bag happens to be the largest employer and the primary landowner in Pennacook.

(The chain may also be partially responsible for the town’s substantial population of wild boars.) Dr. Regina Chong, principal of Patrick’s high school, is supporting a referendum to override the local tax cap to fund a desperately needed new school building, but for her plan to work, she needs to spur voter turnout among the generally disengaged electorate. Her scheme is thrown into jeopardy when a management shake-up at Bounty Bag—and the resulting push for automation—inspires the workers to rise up in protest. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Patrick has been getting into trouble, showing up to track practice drunk, dyeing his hair electric blue, and “running away” to stay in a friend’s basement.

While Ray navigates the changing landscape of Bounty Bag with his colorful co-workers—odd characters like Muscles Carbonara, Toothless Mary, and The Alfredo—Patrick learns a bit of American history from his terminally ill teacher Mr. Grant, who helps him put the instabilities of capitalism and democracy in perspective. Can the Markhams manage to stay afloat, even if Pennacook itself is going down?

Giroux’s prose is reminiscent of Richard Russo’s writing: intricate and incisive, though always full of warmth and humor.

Giroux particularly shines when chronicling the rules and rule breakers of Bounty Bag: “Every law and the Bounty Bag Code were against Toothless Mary’s smoking in Deli, but before the store opened she did it anyway and left her hair unwrapped too.

During business hours, she smoked on the Golden Mile, the long, wide lane out back used for trash and Deliveries. Sometimes she returned from the Golden Mile with little pieces of 181

24 Great Indie B ooks Wo r t h D i s c o v e r i n g [Sponsored] THE VIRUS OF BEAUTY

ENTANGLEMENT

by C.B. Lyall

“Various culprits—linked in numerous ways—become involved in murder and other illicit deeds in this debut literary/crime novel.”

by John K Danenbarger

“Witches are falling victim to a magic-killing virus, and their only hope for a cure is to convince a teenager to accept his wizard heritage.”

Gritty characters solidify an intelligent story and an abstract concept.

An engaging fantasy with creative worldbuilding and authentically conflicted teen characters caught in a magical power struggle.

HARD EASY

WOUNDED ANGELS

by Arthur F. Coombs III

by Chuck Miceli

“A self-improvement theory that eschews instant gratification in favor of long-term comfort and accomplishment.”

“A novel focuses on a grieving widow who finds an unlikely second chance to embrace life.”

A straightforward, engaging tale about finding a meaningful friendship late in life.

Quick, clear anecdotes offer bold encouragement to take the “hardeasy” road to success in life.

THE RIGHTEOUS ONE

by Neil Perry Gordon

FREE AND HOLY WHERE YOU ARE

“This second installment of a religious thriller series stars a humble cobbler.”

“A brief and renovating look at the Catholic faith.”

by Dennis M. Regan

A terrific, welcoming volume about Catholicism.

An entertaining, thought-provoking fantasy in which a plainspoken protagonist is enlisted in a war.

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WHERE WAR ENDS

BITS OF STRING TOO SMALL TO SAVE

by Tom Voss & Rebecca Anne Nguyen

by Ruby Peru Illus. by Harris Philip

“In this memoir, debut author Voss and freelance writer Nguyen (175 Ways To Travel Today, 2014) tell the story of Voss’ epic journey to combat his PTSD.”

“A girl tumbles into a fantastical world imperiled by toxic babies, a shape-shifting disease, suspicious magic, dubious technology, and greedy entrepreneurs.”

An offbeat and inspiring tale of a vet trying to find a way to help himself.

A wildly imaginative, occasionally haunting fantasy anchored by strong, evolving female characters.

by Severo Perez

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DAMNED IF SHE DOES

ODD BIRDS

by Kathleen Kelley Reardon

“A tragic twist of fate leaves a revered artist destitute in Texas in this novel.”

“Siblings Meg and Shamus Doherty return in Reardon’s (They Don’t Get It, Do They?, 2015, etc.) second mystery set in the world of academia.”

An elegantly conceived tale— boasting a culturally and historically astute plot—that demands to be read.

A well-paced, enjoyable whodunit that leaves just enough plot threads dangling for a potential sequel.

BLOSSOM

MILO DOES NOT LIKE MORNINGS

by Anna Carner

by Sasha Graham Illus. by Angelina Valieva

“A debut memoir about the extraordinary relationship between a woman and a deer that she rescued.”

“A boy channels his inner Ninja for courage and motivation in this debut picture book.”

A thought-provoking, poignant, and unusual love story that lingers.

Entertaining writing and appealing illustrations encourage kids to tap into their resources.

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24 Great Indie B ooks Wo r t h D i s c o v e r i n g [Sponsored] THE EMPEROR AND THE COURT MAGICIAN

THE LIGHTHOUSE

by Elaine Kozak “After 10 years away, a 26-yearold woman returns home to confront her past and rediscover her family in Kozak’s (Root Causes, 2013) novel. ”

by Jikun Kathy Sankey “A Chinese empress deals with a troubled son in this debut historical novel.”

A peculiar but engrossing family drama, elevated by truly rich characters.

An inventive tale of royal intrigue with accents of mysticism and magic.

THE BLACK MADONNA AND THE YOUNG SCULPTOR

THE INVISIBLE BOAT

by Eric G. Müller

“In this middle-grade novel, three children journey in a magical boat to help reunite humans with the elemental world.”

by Eric G. Müller

“A woodcarver’s sacred project unites Druids and Christians in artistic communion in this soulful fantasy adventure.”

A delightful, compelling fantasy adventure sure to win fans.

A sometimes turgid, sometimes beguiling fantasy of spiritual awakening through creativity.

UNDER THE COTTONWOOD TREE

THE RIVER NYMPH

by Anne Lovett

by Paul Meyer & Carlos Meyer Illus. by Margaret Hardy

“A runaway farm girl sets out to find her brother in Lovett’s (Saving Miss Lillian, 2017, etc.) latest novel.”

“A debut graphic novel focuses on a zany family adventure in the American Southwest.”

A richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining historical tale.

A fantastical and satisfying romp near the Rio Grande.

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HEY ADMISSIONSMOM

WALKER’S KEY

by Frank B. Haddleton

by Carolyn Allison Caplan

“Haddleton’s debut is a striking, multifaceted take on the familysecret novel.”

“A debut guide offers advice about the college admissions process.”

A one-stop manual for the college admissions world; essential reading for everybody from high school juniors to military veterans.

A well-researched mystery punctuated by thrilling tension and deep emotion.

by Lauren Chelec Cafritz

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SOLDIERS OF FREEDOM

BREATH LOVE

by Samuel Marquis

“A debut manual focuses on personal transformation.”

“A historical novel focuses on the final Allied push to vanquish the Nazis in Germany during World War II.”

A wonderfully inviting guide that reminds readers that calm breathing is the center of life itself.

A granular and engrossing tale about the last months of World War II’s European theater.

COLLECTED WORKS

A SONG FOR THE ROAD

by Deanna Miesch Photos by the author

by Rayne Lacko “A debut YA road novel tells the story of an Oklahoma teen traveling across the West with his father’s guitar.”

“An overview of three decades of art photography, encompassing elegant black-and-white images, multiple-exposure manipulations, and bright, natural landscapes.”

A sweet, twangy tale about a boy finding his future on the way to his past.

A remarkable gathering of experimental scenes from a master photographer.

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Henderson’s poignant narrative is engrossing and optimistic. harley ’s bootstraps

garbage attached to her.” The author ambitiously sets out to say something about the state of the contemporary American town, subject to the whims of corporations, distracted voters, and shortsighted politicians. He manages to achieve that goal without drifting too far into didacticism or oversimplification. The characters are believable even as they are peculiar, and readers will have no trouble sympathizing with their various attempts to stay employed—or simply to remain sane. Patrick is a particularly well-drawn figure. Readers will not regret their time spent in Pennacook and will likely keep an eye out for whatever lighthearted dramas Giroux puts his pen to in the future.

A well-balanced comic tale that deftly grapples with larger contemporary themes.

on a series of therapy sessions. This gamble pays off well, however, as Harris expertly expands on Theo’s character over the course of the book, and he adroitly plays each plotline against the other to create a gripping sense of narrative momentum.

Other characters’ stories also benefit from this gradual unfolding—especially that of Theo’s father, who’s had to live with massive guilt, not only regarding the loss of his wife, but also for a crucial decision regarding Theo’s well-being in the wake of the car crash. The book’s villains, which include childhood bullies and fundamentalist zealots, are somewhat underdeveloped, as is the far more important character of Aunty Li. But the slow, controlled portrayal of adult Theo’s progress toward personal redemption is so commanding that readers will find that such minor flaws fade away as one reads. It all culminates in a series of chapters with hefty emotional impact.

A dramatic and cumulatively powerful tale of one man’s healing.

THE SUBSTANCE OF ALL THINGS

Harris, Sam Self (382 pp.) $13.95 paper | $9.99 e-book | Jul. 1, 2020 978-0-578-66878-9

HARLEY’S BOOTSTRAPS

Henderson, Lois C. FriesenPress (264 pp.) $26.99 | $19.99 paper | $6.99 e-book May 25, 2020 978-1-5255-6874-9 978-1-5255-6875-6 paper

Harris’ new novel tells the remarkable life story of a modern-day miracle worker.

Theodore “Theo” Dalton is a therapist who helps his female clients make sense out of their trauma and find spiritual healing. But as readers learn in alternating chapters, before Theo was a healer of psyches, he was a healer of bodies. In 1961, when he was 6 years old, he was in a car accident that crippled his father, maimed his own hands, and killed his pregnant mother—although his infant sister, Lily, was saved.

Now, in his adulthood, Theo is reluctant to revisit those memories. “The misfortune of that November night in 1961 is safely locked away,” he thinks, “only rarely peering out—in sepia tones.” When he’s 12 and living in Oklahoma under the care of his father and his imperious Aunty Li, a Native American man named Frank Kotori sees Theo heal another boy’s arm by simply touching it. At Frank’s encouragement, Theo goes on to heal an injured bird, which prompts the man to bring the boy to a sick baby in a nearby part of town: “The current splayed to my fingers, tiny jolts of something,” Theo recalls of holding the infant in his hands, “something charged, even voltaic.” When word of his abilities spreads, some of the townspeople consider him an instrument of evil, and after a string of misunderstandings and tragedies, he decides never to use his hands to heal again. Later, however, his relationships with his therapy patients draw him deeper into his own memories.

Harris, the author of the essay collection Ham (2014), handles Theo’s story with a smooth confidence that belies the inherent difficulties of wrangling a narrative split between two different time frames—a strategy that has brought more than a few other authors to grief. His main narrative gamble is to juxtapose the inherently dramatic developments of the storyline set in the past, involving a boy with supernatural powers and the angry residents of a small town, with the intense but relatively quotidian developments of the present-day story, which focuses 186

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Three Canadians, wounded in different ways, begin to form an unlikely family in this novel about loneliness, connection, and survival.

Harley is the youngest of 19 children in an impoverished family in the small town of Brandon, Manitoba. Carelessly named for a motorcycle and born long after her family had given up caring about its new members, Harley is left with the responsibility of raising herself, with the likely outcome of sinking into her clan’s morass of alcohol, drugs, and apathy. But a native astuteness and an improbable drive toward survival allow her to recognize a lifeline when it arrives in the form of Lydia, a Winnipeg doctor who is assigned to be her mentor in a well-meaning volunteer program for at-risk girls. When Harley finds herself in trouble after a drunken night with friends, Lydia offers her a place to live and heal. Against all odds and their own inclinations, Harley and Lydia begin to trust each other, soon looping the physician’s childhood friend Meaghan into their emerging family. With warmth and mutual reliance, the three help one another negotiate abusive and neglectful relationships, disappointments, losses, and brave reimaginings as they begin to rebuild their lives and expand their circle as strong and loving women. Henderson’s poignant narrative is engrossing and optimistic, depicting the inner lives of her characters with savvy precision. Her language is incisively descriptive, as when Harley describes her extended family: “Jail or benders or loss of custody have left a little pile of children growing wild and unchecked, like suckers from a tree.” Or when Lydia characterizes the teenage Harley as “a lady person in purgatory on an uncelebrated journey with no destination.” If Harley’s transformation and Lydia’s acceptance of her into her life seem |

SPORE

quickly accomplished, the results are so heartwarmingly satisfying that few will complain. The themes of healing and forgiveness are expanded to include the redemption of even the most unlikely characters.

A perceptive, tender, and affirmative tale about women repairing old hurts and forging new bonds.

Kristoph, David Self (307 pp.) $14.99 paper | $0.99 e-book Jul. 21, 2020

GUIDING EMILY A Tale of Love, Loss, and Courage

Hinske, Barbara Casa del Northern Publishing (276 pp.) $15.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Jun. 8, 2020 978-1-73492-490-9

Hinske’s emotionally charged novel toggles between the storylines of a successful programmer who has gone blind and an earnest pup determined to ace his training as a guide dog.

The tale begins with first-person narration by Garth, a guide dog who is excited about being introduced to “Emily.

The woman who would become everything to me.” On his way to meet her, something on the carpet distracts him. “Is that a Cheeto? A Crunchy Cheeto?” he thinks. “I love Crunchy Cheetos.”

Flashback to Emily Main, who is in Fiji with her fiance, Connor Harrington III, for their destination wedding. They are a power couple—he’s a top salesman for a large corporation; she’s a lead programmer. Emily suffers from myopic degeneration, which could result in detached retinas, and a fall from horseback causes her to lose her eyesight. Emily, a fiercely independent woman, plummets into a deep depression from which she would not have recovered had it not been for Dhruv, a programmer on her team at work. Dhruv convinces her to attend classes at the Foundation for the Blind, where she confronts her fears, learning skills for living independently. Meanwhile, and separately, Garth undergoes his own rigorous instruction and struggles, including a traumatizing incident in a restaurant where he is attacked by another dog. The two narratives do not converge until the concluding chapters of the novel. Hinske rotates third-person narration of Emily’s story with delightful chapters written in Garth’s voice. Despite the dog’s own anxieties, he provides the novel with comic relief. During a training session on navigating stairs, Garth observes a “two-legged mother” with “a mass of gray curls on top of her head” approaching, and he notes, “I’ve seen four-legged mothers with that hairstyle—they’re called poodles.” While Emily grows into a fully developed character as the story progresses, Connor remains a superficial player. But it is the persistent kindness of secondary character Dhruv that will capture readers’ hearts.

A page-turning, informative read with a tender shoutout to service dogs.

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One man finds being a guinea pig to be a surprisingly dangerous endeavor in Kristoph’s thriller.

John Harmon’s “sleeping problems” include insomnia and night terrors, and they’ve intensified in the last few months. His brother-in-law, Randy Castillo, who works with him in security at a company called NeuroDyne, has secretly acquired some pills from an insomnia study, and John has taken them, but they haven’t helped. John’s situation worsens after he inadvertently sees a pay stub for subjects in a research study; this, along with other innocuous acts, leads his employers to accuse him of corporate espionage and terminate him as they open a formal investigation. A potential lawsuit presents an additional financial burden for John and his wife, Maria, whose young daughter, Annabelle, is undergoing leukemia treatments. So when Randy suggests that John fill in for an applicant who dropped out of a four-week NeuroDyne sleep study, he agrees. Sure, it requires John to use a false name, but the pay is substantial, and it may even cure his sleep issues.

His initial concern at the Skyline facility, located somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is that there’s no way for him to communicate with his family. But a series of endurance and coordination tests, coupled with injections of a glowing blue liquid, initially have positive effects. Then John gets sick, and it’s quickly apparent that the doctors have no intention of letting him go home. Even more alarming is the origin of the blue liquid—and its intended purpose.

Kristoph, the author of Bathed in Light (2016), among other books, aptly establishes John’s home life and growing despair. Maria is understandably frustrated by the family’s monetary woes, but she, as well as Annabelle and her sibling, Gerry, remain endearing throughout. It’s believable when John becomes determined to find a way to contact them from Skyline, especially in light of Annabelle’s upcoming sixth birthday.

The author introduces more characters as the story progresses, starting with fellow study participants Jennifer Swedenborg and Bill Jackson, both of whom are sympathetic. As the story becomes delightfully more complex, Kristoph tells it from the perspectives of various other characters, including neuropsychologist Susan Kendricks. Kristoph’s keen but easygoing prose makes the scientific exposition not only engaging, but also convincingly realistic. As the tension rises for John, readers learn shocking information that he doesn’t know. It all leads to a final act that’s frantic and violent and a sharp, truly unforgettable denouement. The most potent scenes, however, involve John’s adverse reactions to the blue injections, including a seemingly endless migraine; at one point, he repeatedly punches a wall to distract himself from the horrific pain in his head. Likewise, the story’s unsettling atmosphere stems, at least in part, from common dilemmas in research studies; for 187

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example, there’s a distinct possibility that John, who craves a cure for his ills, may simply be part of a control group—and receiving harmless placebos.

A wholly absorbing and often creepy tale of the dark side of scientific research.

turn their attentions to the SF and fantasy genres. Reflecting on the significance of SF film scores in his introduction, Lupton writes: “Star Trek, Back to the Future, The Twilight Zone, Terminator? These are some of the greatest music themes ever written, and for many of us, the soundtrack to our nerdy youths.” The work is divided into nine chapters: epic SF, adult fantasy, dark dystopia, action/adventure, pop, family features, comic book/ superheroes, television, and unidentified objects. Each chapter features a series of color reproductions of key album covers, such as Star Wars and Blade Runner, followed by detailed commentary. Focusing predominantly on the 1970s through the ’90s to maintain an emphasis on vinyl, the period covered ends in 1999, so newer classics such as the Harry Potter films are not included. The volume also provides revealing interviews with luminaries like the composer Christopher Young, who scored Hellraiser. The design of the book is colorful and fittingly retro, and the album covers themselves are a joy to peruse collectively.

The authors offer consistently insightful commentary from a musician’s perspective. Describing the score of the 1979 movie Starcrash by John Barry, they note: “The composer also plays around with some interesting rhythmic techniques, breaking down the 4/4 time signature into more unusual chunks of 3-3-2 (such as the galloping ‘Space War’ cue).” The comprehensive study also delivers thoughtful recommendations that reflect the authors’ depth of knowledge. Regarding Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Supergirl, they tell readers: “To hear the soundtrack presented as it sounds in the film, with the synths, try the 1993 expanded re-release CD…which features music such as Goldsmith’s eerie choral work for the Phantom Zone sequences.”

But the descriptive scope can become limited and repetitive at times: “Sci-fi became sexy again”; “as much a sexy sci-fi flick as it is horror.” This does not largely detract from a painstakingly compiled catalog packed with meticulous details that will prove a fun nostalgia trip for fans of the genres.

An eye-catching, enjoyable, and informative celebration of iconic SF and fantasy movie scores.

GUS BECOMES A BIG BROTHER An Adoption Story

Lonczak, Heather S. Illus. by Varjotie, Claudia Self (44 pp.) $16.00 | $8.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Nov. 1, 2019 978-0-9786093-8-2 978-0-9786093-9-9 paper

When a canine family gets ready to adopt, a young dog learns about being a big brother in this picture book.

Although the Barker family—Buford, Winnie, and 3-yearold Gus—is a happy one, something is missing. Gus would love a puppy to cavort with, and his parents would like an addition to the family. So when Mr. and Mrs. Barker tell Gus they’re adopting, he exults: “I’m going to be a big brother!” As his parents go through the process, they tell Gus what to expect. After his new brother, Pacco, arrives, Gus has more changes to navigate, such as sharing toys and attention. But he loves playing with Pacco.

When others think that Pacco is a friend, Gus replies proudly: “Nope, I’m his big brother!” Lonczak, in her latest children’s book focused on teaching resilience, does an admirable job of helping prepare kids for a family adoption. Adults, too, can benefit from how the work thinks through possible problems and offers effective solutions; for example, while Gus will give some of his toys to Pacco, he can keep his favorite ones. Warmth and affection underlie the story, as when Gus is reassured that “your parents have oodles of love for you. And when we add a new pup to a family…the love just grows even bigger.” Varjotie creates a friendly, relaxed atmosphere with her soft colors, rounded edges, and animals that combine realistic and anthropomorphic features.

Sensitive, thorough, loving guidance that helps smooth the adoption process for siblings-to-be.

THE ALBATROSS Contact

Mackay, Connor FriesenPress (486 pp.) $20.99 paper | Aug. 11, 2020 978-1-5255-6728-5

PLANET WAX Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl

In Mackay’s debut military–SF series starter, an endangered alien race makes contact with Earth and asks its inhabitants for a favor.

In 2020, humanity has their first encounter with intergalactic aliens. Lumenarians are humanoid quasi-reptiles who are quite humanlike in their ways and attitudes, and they generously share their technology with Earth.

However, they also ask humans for a big favor in return. Their ancient race—which has forgotten its history due to computermemory failure—is fighting a war against a mysterious, vicious, armor-plated army called the Forsaken, who are conquering

Lupton, Aaron & Szpirglas, Jeff 1984 Publishing (240 pp.) $34.95 | Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-948221-14-6

A sequel catalogs SF and fantasy film soundtracks on vinyl.

As a follow-up to their previous book, Blood on Black Wax (2019), which spotlighted iconic horror movie soundtracks, Lupton and Szpirglas 188

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and exterminating their distant colonies. The Lumenarians have found that other space-traveling races are mostly peaceful but that technologically primitive humans are a warlike species—so they ask for a volunteer human army to mount an offensive campaign. A group of human veterans and adventure-seekers sign up for the job, and the story’s narration splits between three characters: Will Reach, an alcoholic, physically and psychologically scarred Afghanistan veteran, who’s fitted with cybernetic Lumenarian implants and tactical tech; Sarah Li, an orphaned science genius with command skills who signs up with her brother; and “Arthur,” a prominent Lumenarian who has many secrets. The novel’s scenario isn’t original; John Ringo’s Legacy of the Aldenata series, among other books, has depicted Earth natives serving as military support for embattled extraterrestrials. Mackay takes this premise back to basic training in a big way, however, addressing soldiers’ PTSD and malaise (Joe Haldeman’s classic 1974 novel The Forever War is a stated influence) and their combat strategy (à la Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers). There’s also some hard– SF physics when Sarah takes over narration duties. In addition to plenty of action, Mackay adds the timely notion of a terroristic human-supremacist movement and reveals the existence of a similar group among the Lumenarians. As the Samuel Taylor Coleridge–inspired title might signify, there are also several literary shoutouts—and a few Lucasfilm hat tips, as well.

A stirring adventure tale that adds considerable shock and awe to a familiar setup.

the Auld Alliance deadline expires in less than two months. In this sequel, Macreery crafts a sweet historical fiction tale that emphasizes loyalty and perseverance for middle-grade audiences.

Mercy readily finds feverfew flowers to ease Calum’s headache.

And she easily disproves his assumption that she’s useless in the wilderness (“city born and city lived”). Throughout, the pair’s light bickering contributes to a romance that the author stokes gently, as Calum consistently proves himself the white knight to Mercy (“Exhausted, bleeding...and definitely in pain,” he “handed the canteen to me first”). Scotland’s beauty is noted in lines like “The early rays of the sun danced along the water’s surface making the entire loch glisten like a beautiful jewel.” At the end, Silver isn’t what Mercy expected, and readers are treated to a revelation about the famous Unicorn Tapestries. A bold final decision makes Mercy and Calum’s next trek one to follow.

Readers will be charmed and educated by this lovely historical novel.

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PIPE DREAMS The Dark Secret Behind the Massie Case, Hawaii’s Most Infamous Crime Madinger, John Manuscript

A reimagining of an infamous Depression-era crime set in Honolulu.

Hawaii-based author and retired law enforcement officer Madinger has intensively researched the dark details of the real-life Massie Affair crime of 1931, and he manages to reanimate its events in a unique hybrid of true-crime drama and historical fiction. He begins his spirited version of the events shortly before it all began, introducing Jack Mather, a recent Stanford University graduate who arrived in Honolulu via steamship to work at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. To Jack, the area’s raging opium war is an intriguing opportunity for a new law enforcement officer, but Honolulu still holds the same charm for him that it did when he was a child growing up there. Madinger describes scenic Hawaii fondly, but he’s also mindful of the encroaching Depression that’s already starting to cloud the region. After Jack begins his undercover work, he starts to wonder if his job busting drug peddlers might be too dangerous. A parallel plotline tackles the developing story of Thalia and Thomas Massie. Four years before, at the age of 16, Thalia got married to submariner Thomas, a Navy lieutenant based in Pearl Harbor. Over the next few years, she became restless, mean-spirited, abusive to hired help, and disillusioned with her marriage. She also now has an air of arrogance and superiority, which doesn’t appeal to many of the people she meets in the island’s social circles. By the time Thalia is 20, she’s rejecting her husband’s efforts to get them to socialize with others at all.

However, on a September night in 1931, Thomas insists that she accompany him to the Ala Wai Inn in Honolulu, which Madinger colorfully describes as a “second-rate nightclub perched on the edge of Waikiki and the fringe of respectability.” There, she sulks

A LITTLE NOBLE

Macreery, Janet R. Outskirts Press (200 pp.) $14.95 paper | Jul. 11, 2020 978-1-977228-35-2 This middle-grade adventure features a teen whose destiny connects 17thcentury France with Scotland.

Thirteen-year-old Mercy Laroche left London by carriage a month ago. It’s 1694, and she travels the dangerous Scottish Highlands to locate Kingsnot Silver. Mercy is an orphan and French native who participates in the Auld Alliance, whereby Scotland and France exchange learned young girls with messages as a bond that unites them against England, should that nation ever attack either neighbor. But near Loch Eirahn, the carriage crashes. Mercy wakes and finds no sign of her driver or her chaperone, Mr. Willicks. Thankfully, a lad about her age steps from the wilderness. This is Calum MacDonald, who offers to help Mercy proceed on her journey. He brings her to Red Rob MacGregor, the local clan leader. While MacGregor hasn’t heard of Silver, he believes that a famous seannachie (storyteller) named Henderson may have. Yet Henderson lives in Glencoe, the site of a massacre by redcoats who killed Calum’s family. The lad has vowed never to return, which is why he’s chosen life in the Highlands with an adopted clan. Mercy, who has a club foot and is supremely knowledgeable in herb lore, must find Silver before |

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An absorbing and perceptive tween-age adventure with considerable literary flair.

1 for all

through the evening before she flees into the night to walk home alone. Hours later, she’s found on the roadside—battered, bloodied, and claiming that a carload of four Hawaiian men, including a prizefighting boxer named Joe Kahahawai, raped her. Madinger shows masterful skill as he alternates between Jack’s work busting opium smugglers and the developing story of Thalia’s assault, and he keep both stories moving forward at a brisk pace over the course of the novel. When the rape case finally heads into a courtroom, it eventually results in a hung jury and a mistrial, which further enlivens the story. Later, when Thalia’s mother, Grace Fortescue, and Thomas conspire to have one of the accused men murdered, it results in a frenzy of police investigations, tempestuous trial melodrama, and finally, the truth, along with justice. Madinger effectively draws on his expertise from his own law enforcement past, and he writes with the same vigor that he brought to his previous detective fiction, including the novel Death on Diamond Head (2008). As Jack’s and Thalia’s storylines dovetail, it only intensifies this suspenseful, impressive work, which successfully and cinematically reinvents a notorious criminal case.

A vibrant and riveting fictionalization of real-life crimes and trials in 1930s Hawaii.

side of a pretty English village where malicious gossip and unrealistic expectations can render incredible harm.

An emphasis on mental health care and compassion underlies a charming historical romance.

1 FOR ALL A Basketball Story About the Meaning of Team

McCollum, Sean Illus. by Valentino, Samuel Brattle Publishing Group (150 pp.) $9.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jul. 29, 2020 978-0-9905872-3-1

An eighth grade basketball player tries to turn around a losing season while wrestling with his worst opponent—his own ego—in this novel.

J.J. Pickett, captain and top scorer of the Traverse Middle School Musketeers basketball team, thinks the so-far winless season will go down the drain when the team’s 6-foot-2 center, Mike Belcher, gets an ankle injury and the coach abruptly quits.

These disappointments come on top of other stresses that J.J. faces, including family tensions caused by his dad’s slumping contracting business; competition with his hated rival, Belcher, for the attention of classmate Anita Garcia; and a general, simmering 13-year-old angst. J.J. and his teammates are dubious when Mr. Gumble, the school’s unprepossessing custodian, takes over as coach. But the janitor turns out to be a great mentor who whips the team into shape with grueling line-running drills; teaches the players a scrappy, fast-break game featuring a full-court trap press defense to force adversaries into turnovers; and institutes the corny but stirring rallying cry “All for one, and one for all!” The Musketeers start clawing their way back against bigger teams, but J.J.’s berserk competitiveness, which channels his unhappiness with the world against his opponents, gets him benched, and he’s forced to do so some soul-searching about his attitude. When Mr. Gumble is replaced by Belcher’s jerk of an uncle, J.J. has to figure out a way to restore the team’s order, one that may require him to swallow his pride. McCollum’s energetic tale probes themes of self-awareness and selfrestraint, team spiritedness, and players’ love of the game. The narrative features sharply drawn characters, pungent schoolyard dialogue—“You’ve got all the class of a zit, Belchbreath”— and plenty of vigorous play-by-play to hold young basketball fans’ interest. Meanwhile, the author manages to get inside J.J.’s head with prose that’s Hemingway-esque in its spare but penetrating directness: “J.J. had a face that looked younger than he liked. He wanted a hawk’s face, something sharp and fierce. A hawk’s yellow eyes would be cool, too, he thought. He was too small and looked too harmless for what he wanted to be.” The result is an absorbing and perceptive tween-age adventure with considerable literary flair.

A crackerjack sports yarn that conveys youthful psychology in a way that feels authentic.

FAIR AS A STAR

Matthews, Mimi Perfectly Proper Press (202 pp.) $8.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jul. 15, 2020 978-1-73305-697-7 A young woman’s homecoming sparks secret revelations in this Victorian romance.

Beryl Burnham suffers from clinical depression, or “melancholy,” as it was known at the time. Though she keeps busy to hold the sadness at bay, Beryl can never fully escape it. After an overdose of sleeping powder, she is whisked off to Paris with her aunt to rest and recover. Beryl returns home to her small English village and must face her fiance, Sir Henry Rivenhall, a wealthy man who is ruled by practicality. He has no tolerance for Beryl’s silly “emotions” and believes bearing children will cure her of her selfish sadness. While Beryl struggles to cope with Henry’s accusations and ideas, her one refuge is her friendship with Mark, Henry’s brother and a curate at the local church. Mark sets out to better understand Beryl’s depression and tells her that he has “no expectation of curing” her. He just wants to help Beryl cope and, in modern parlance, give her the necessary tools to succeed. But as the days pass, it becomes apparent that Beryl and Mark have feelings for each other. Beryl accepted Henry’s proposal because it was practical. But she soon realizes that she must find a way to extricate herself from the arrangement and embrace her feelings rather than push them aside. Matthews constructs a romance that is built on empathy and trust, demonstrating that it’s not just brute strength or power that might attract a person. In addition to offering a sweet romance, the author deftly addresses the importance of bringing mental health treatments out of the shadows. And just as she explores the depression that underlies Beryl’s need to stay busy, Matthews exposes the darker 190

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GROWLAND

A Los Angeles teacher leaves her job and her husband and moves with her two daughters to start a new life in Humboldt County in this debut novel.

As she approaches her mid-40s, Celeste feels that her life in Southern California is empty. She has a good career in education, but she is unhappy with her philandering husband, Victor. She decides to leave him and take her daughters north to Humboldt County.

She is thinking of Tom, an old boyfriend from 27 years ago who lives in the area. In Celeste’s memory, he’s still attractive and reliable, but many years have passed, and his appearance has changed.

He’s also in a relationship with Luna, a dreadlocked woman who functions as the emotional pillar of the far-flung community. Tom and Luna generously offer a cabin to stay in, which Celeste gladly accepts even if she is perturbed by the ubiquitous presence of marijuana. Back in LA, Victor has hired a private investigator to find the missing trio, and up in South Humboldt, Celeste’s older daughter has taken a shine to Jonah, Tom and Luna’s son.

Jake, Tom’s son from his first marriage, looks enticing to Celeste despite a sizable age difference. As Celeste begins to love her new home, she unwisely gets into a relationship with Jake while the ever present threat of the authorities looms over the isolated area where marijuana rules all. Moskowitz’s novel is written with the kind of rich details and realistic insights that insiders would know.

She deftly describes this alternate world among the redwood forests as a place of refuge and healing, where the morality is pure but untamed and flirts with criminality. Sometimes, everything seems upside down in this realm (“In SoHum the rivers all flowed north, like the Nile”). Not every choice Celeste makes is stellar, but the tragedies are as integral to her vivid journey as the abundant benefits.

A compelling and candid tale about starting over in a beguiling environment.

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accidentally injures him. The narrative then flashes back to Oyinkan’s childhood, growing up in her grandmother’s house.

When her grandmother dies, Oyinkan is sent to live with her mother’s family, where she is treated as a distant relative because her half siblings have no idea they have a sister. Oyinkan falls in love with Kole and gives birth to Moyo soon after they marry, setting aside her own aspirations to work as a typist to care for her son. As Kole’s construction business grows, the couple’s marital tensions increase. Eventually, Oyinkan leaves him, moving into the house she inherited from her grandmother and starting a construction business of her own. Oyinkan finds her grandmother’s diary and learns about the complexities of the woman who raised her and the woman who gave birth to her, developing a more solid sense of herself in the process. Oyinsan is a strong writer, presenting a well-developed voice and inventive descriptions (“Her colors were the tones of gaiety, of vibrant youth, of laughter and life itself ”). The diary sections, textual interludes in Oyinkan’s tale, are engrossing and effective, adding texture to the novel. The Nigerian setting is well imagined, full of Yoruba dialogue translated in footnotes. While readers may grow frustrated as Oyinkan and Kole’s home life becomes more and more dysfunctional, Oyinsan does a good job of rendering the entire cast as both plausible and sympathetic, delivering an ultimately satisfying resolution to the many conflicts that arise.

A solid, well-written novel of relationships and growth.

Moskowitz, Lelia Humboldt State Univ. Press (313 pp.) $14.95 paper | $4.99 e-book | Aug. 11, 2020 978-1-947112-34-6

JOURNEY OF THE SELF Memoir of an Artist

Poniarski, Ruth Warren Publishing (222 pp.) $15.95 paper | Apr. 28, 2020 978-1-73470-755-7

A young woman struggles to find her place in the world while also grappling with her mental health in this debut memoir.

After Poniarski inadvertently consumed PCP at a college party, she found herself consumed by the notion of an incoherent conspiracy involving socialists and alien craft— which she continued to have after the drug wore off. “My brain fed me lies,” she says of the experience, which caused her parents to put her under the care of a psychiatrist for the first time. Her memoir continues from this moment, recounting her tumultuous 20s during the late 1970s and early ’80s in New York City. Poniarski struggled to finish an architecture degree as she bounced from one program to another, unable to successfully finish courses and fearful that her peers might learn of her “psychotic side.” In a similar manner, she shuttled between her parents’ home on Long Island and apartments in Manhattan, her independence constantly jeopardized by paranoid thoughts and mistrust of roommates and friends. Most poignant, however, is Poniarski’s account of a search for a suitable romantic partner.

As she struggles with shame about her sexual feelings, she finds herself drawn to various lovers who each reject her, which only fuels her desire to break out of a lonely existence. Poniarski

THREE WOMEN

Oyinsan, Bunmi CreateSpace (344 pp.) $14.00 paper | $5.00 e-book May 23, 2020 978-1-4610-0298-7 In this domestic novel set in 20thcentury Nigeria, Oyinsan tells the story of Oyinkan and Kole, their troubled marriage, and Oyinkan’s relationships with the grandmother who raised her and the mother who largely abandoned her.

In the book’s opening chapter, Oyinkan and Kole’s separation ends as they rush their son Moyo to the hospital after Kole |

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tells a story with heavy themes, but her prose remains graceful throughout. As she recounts outrageous thoughts and actions, she does so in a manner that gets across not only her distorted view of reality, but also the very real emotions she felt; at one point, for instance, she tells of slapping a man on an airplane after falsely thinking that he was making fun of her. In her fractured accounts of exchanges with colleagues, friends, and lovers, Poniarski also offers clever insights into sexism, the high expectations of her affluent Jewish community, and changing attitudes toward mental health.

An engrossing and often beautiful portrait of living with mental illness.

insistence on comedy makes the overall story feel glib. Fortunately, Marcel’s character brings the emotional ballast the tale needs to stay steady.

A mostly successful romp featuring Christian lore and a love of animals.

“WOW, MY TEACHER IS A HORSE!” The Strengthening of Executive Functions Through Experiential Learning With Horses

Rutgers, Paulien FriesenPress (216 pp.) $29.99 | $24.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Apr. 20, 2020 978-1-5255-4700-3 978-1-5255-4701-0 paper

LARRY’S POST-RAPTURE PET-SITTING SERVICE

Rice, Ellen King Undergrowth Publishing (472 pp.) $16.30 paper | $0.99 e-book Aug. 8, 2020 978-1-73382-761-4

A guide to using horses in work with neurodiverse children.

Child counselor Rutgers draws on her experience with children on the autism spectrum and with other conditions to explain how working with animals, and particularly horses, can be a useful tool for educators and caregivers. The book breaks down each element of a successful animal-assisted treatment plan, covering the fundamentals of executive functions (“the skills which make it possible to show goal-orientated and independent behaviours”), structure, goal setting, documentation, and other elements. Case studies demonstrate concepts discussed in the text and show how interacting with horses allowed kids to learn to regulate their behavior, anticipate others’ reactions, and focus on challenging schoolwork (“Madelief [a horse] loves to be read to. How many pages from this book can you stand to read to Madelief while sitting on her back?”).

The book also addresses the ethical considerations of working with animals and provides guidelines. Full-color photographs of Rutgers’ work appear throughout the book, usefully illustrating specific ideas and techniques. The book has a solid theoretical basis—the author provides citations throughout as well as a full bibliography—and she does a good job of demonstrating the value of working with horses without treating it as a panacea: “What gives horses an extra dimension compared to perhaps dogs or rodents, is that horses can be used to sit or lie upon.”

The book’s primary audience will be special education professionals, but readers who don’t have deep knowledge of psychology or pedagogy will find it easy to follow, and parents and caregivers of neurodiverse children are sure to find it of use as well. The case studies include information on children’s specific diagnoses, but Rutgers notes that animal-assisted interventions are meant to be used to address specific skills and behaviors as opposed to underlying conditions. She provides guidelines and templates for developing plans and assessing outcomes in appendices, adding to the book’s utility.

A thoughtful and comprehensive introduction to animalassisted therapies.

In this comic novel, a man rescues the pets of vanished owners.

Larry Dinkelman is 34 and living with his mother when the rapture occurs. The virtuous ascend to heaven in “small tornados of whirling feathers,” but others aren’t so lucky: “mean-spirited and hurtful people exploded into flames.” Others remain on Earth who “knew they weren’t angels, and…were currently highly motivated not to be jerks.”

Apparently, all dogs go to heaven, but plenty of other household pets are left behind. Larry and his mother, Marjorie, see an opportunity for a new business: They’ll rescue the pets of vanished owners. Larry mostly saves cats, and he’s scheduled to pick up a yowling Siamese when he meets Marcel Westmoreland, a 15-year-old looking for a job. Marcel’s father is a pastor, but his mother, the assistant pastor, was the one taken up. Larry and Marcel hit it off right away; Larry provides the wisecracks and Marcel, the brainy asides and $10 words.

Meanwhile, Abigail, a televangelist, is trying to soothe her followers, drum up donations, and keep a secret: Her husband, Aaron, vanished in flames. When a friend of Marcel’s miraculously finds a dog, Abigail becomes convinced that the canine can help save her church: “They want a dog and hope for the future,” she says of her followers. The plot rumbles toward a showdown to decide whether Larry or Abigail should care for the world’s only pooch. Rice prioritizes the novel’s comedic tone, but occasional moments of sincerity soften its wry edge.

A large and colorful cast of characters fills the novel, and their experiences and coping mechanisms in the rapture-altered world give the story a welcome variety of perspectives. The book’s moral world is simple—kindergarten teachers go to heaven, for example, and 200 members of Congress go to hell.

Although the moments of humor hit more often than not, the sheer quantity of jokes inevitably leads to some duds. Larry’s jocularity helps hide his fear and unease, but at times, his 192

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This fun story deftly portrays the impact of compassionate neighbors. oy, elephants!

IJEOMA A Mother’s Journey To Save Her Daughters Sacks, Richard Trimark Press (438 pp.) $22.95 paper | $8.99 e-book Mar. 2, 2020 978-1-943401-69-7

In this debut novel, a young Nigerian woman helps her daughters escape the horrors of female genital mutilation.

At the age of 18, Ijeoma Biobaku agrees to marry Ejikeme Madaki, an older man who is a farmer of some means in their Nigerian village of Achi. When Ejikeme discovers that Ijeoma has never undergone the tribal custom of female genital cutting, he insists she have it done or the marriage will be canceled. Ijeoma fears the village will ostracize her so she relents. Her only solace during the gruesome, unsanitary procedure is her loving Auntie B, who hugs her as she cries out in pain. Physically and mentally abusive, Ejikeme is angry that their first child is not a son. Kind Auntie B and Uncle Simon leave for America, but several years later, they help Ijeoma and her family immigrate to New York City. A second daughter has been born, and Ijeoma is determined that her children will never be mutilated as she was. Ejikeme abandons the family, but life in America is hopeful—Ijeoma works as a nanny; her daughters are well adjusted; and she meets a good man. Then one day there is a knock at the door from the immigration authorities, and she is hauled off to jail. This gripping story—based on real-life events—may spur readers into learning more about female genital mutilation. An admirable, heroic protagonist, Ijeoma quietly does what needs to be done; for example, when her second daughter is born, she calmly endures an emergency C-section. Sacks’ fluid prose and seamless scene transitions keep the pages turning. In fact, some scenes are edge-of-the-seat riveting, such as the final day of Ijeoma’s deportation trial, during which she learns shocking information about a family member. But the quieter episodes can also be memorable—when Ijeoma and her girls meet Auntie B and Uncle Simon in America, the encounter is touching.

A compelling tale of maternal strength and determination.

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roommate, Jay, attempts to square this heinous act with the kindhearted person he remembers. The prosecutor in the case, Claire Fields, desperately needs a win after a widely reported ethical lapse, and Henry Somerville, an old-money defense attorney, is trying to come back from a social media scandal. At the time of the accident, Daniel was bored with his life and contemplating an affair with a client; Francine, his wife, takes the incident as a sign that she should abandon a loveless marriage. Charlie Gibbs, Samantha’s boyfriend, is a car dealer who gets caught up in a pyramid scheme, and it’s revealed that Samantha was ready to break up with him when she died. The case goes before Judge Kenneth Rhodes, a pioneering Black jurist in the Southern state.

Sealy’s clever approach is reminiscent of the parable of blind men describing an elephant, as each character brings not only his or her own perspective but also adds crucial details to the chronology of events. The varying viewpoints also serve to flesh out the relationships among the characters and clarify their motivations.

Despite the many players and multiple time shifts, Sealy keeps the narrative running smoothly throughout. His characters are flawed, as is the American justice system as he portrays it. There are no heroes or villains—just ordinary people swept up in a tragic situation; there’s also no uplifting Hollywood ending but rather a truthful conclusion built on compromise.

A thought-provoking volume about how a wrong choice can have huge repercussions.

OY, ELEPHANTS!

Stevenson, Deborah Illus. by Spicer , Morgan Frog Prince Books (38 pp.) $18.95 | $12.95 paper | $5.99 e-book Jun. 22, 2019 978-1-73254-101-6 978-1-73254-102-3 paper This picture book poses a wacky question: What would happen if a pair of circus elephants landed in a retirement home for people?

Young Joel is spending part of his “school break” with his Grandpa Morris and Grandma Gussie. He is excited to see them but concerned that time spent in their retirement community will be boring. He does not fret for long because two new neighbors move in during the second day of his stay—and they’re elephants.

Joel and his grandparents bring a housewarming gift to the new occupants and learn that they are retired circus elephants named Lou and Martha Helfand. Grandma Gussie invites them to go swimming that afternoon; their neighbors seem unhappy with the new residents. Lou makes a huge splash in the pool when he jumps in, but he and his wife are later welcomed when he saves a dog from drowning. This fun story, lovingly illustrated in full color by Spicer, deftly portrays the impact of compassionate neighbors. Stevenson provides useful information about animal rights groups’ concerns surrounding circus elephants as well as facts about the creatures for curious readers.

An amusing tale that shows the importance of being a good neighbor.

THE MERCIFUL

Sealy, Jon Haywire Books (306 pp.) $17.95 paper | Jan. 21, 2021 978-1-950182-07-7 Sealy, the author of The Edge of Amer­ ica (2019), examines a fatal hit-and-run in suburban South Carolina from multiple points of view in this novel.

Samantha James, a college student home for the summer, is struck and killed while riding her bicycle home from her restaurant job in the town of Overlook. Daniel Hayward, a local computer salesman, becomes a person of interest in the crime, and his former college |

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truly intrigued by her on multiple levels, and he soon introduces her to a clandestine group of similarly superpowered men and women. As in the previous volume, Sumner seamlessly blends gaslight-era fantasy and conventional historical romance. She also perfectly incorporates detailed supernatural elements into her well-researched setting. Her two central characters are compelling and believably damaged; each comes from a radically different segment of society, and each finds themselves in a relationship that they weren’t expecting. Finn, in particular, is a highly rewarding fictional creation—a well-drawn combination of roguery and vulnerability. Readers may be initially drawn to the book for its exciting paranormal aspects, but they’ll stay for the electric dialogue between Finn and Victoria, which includes plenty of comic banter. (Those expecting X-Men–style superheroics, though, won’t find it here.) Overall, it’s a sparkling addition to this promising series.

A spirited and compulsively readable paranormalromance series entry.

Sumner, Tracy Self (258 pp.) $8.99 paper | $3.99 e-book May 23, 2020

A fantasy romance featuring two superpowered lovers in Victorian-era England.

This new installment in Sumner’s League of Lords series takes a secondary character from its predecessor, The Lady Is Trouble (2020), and puts him center stage. In 1855, Finn Alexander, the adopted son of a viscount, has the paranormal ability to read people’s minds, and he’s set up a gambling den that’s become wildly popular among the well-to-do. But his special talent comes with a price, as his mind is constantly filled with the background noise of others’ thoughts. This, in part, leads to his deep interest in the engaged Lady Victoria Hamilton, whose own powers allow her to erase people’s short-term memories and block others’ powers from working. He experiences the latter power firsthand, and the experience is a first for him: “Added to the bizarre circumstance of not being able to read her, being close to her obscured his ability to read others, like she’d dimmed the flame on the gaslamp of his mind, leaving only his thoughts to contend with.” Finn finds himself

WANDER NEW YORK Fitz in the City

Traves, Reese Illus. by Traves, Jon Good Avenue Books (36 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Aug. 10, 2020 978-1-73460-210-4 978-1-73460-211-1 paper

This Issue’s Contributors #

A young fox tours New York City in this rhyming picture book.

Fitz is thrilled to visit New York for the first time. The fox and his mom take a taxi and visit landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. On their way to the Central Park Zoo, Fitz worries because they missed their subway stop. Luckily, they make it to the Bronx Zoo in time to feed the penguins. Next, they tour famous places like Times Square. Fitz often describes what he sees (“We’re...walking on a lawn—in a giant park with a lake that has boats to ride on”).

The sightseeing continues as they wander through museums and visit Grand Central Terminal. Though exhausted from his jam-packed excursion, Fitz can’t wait for his next adventure.

This series opener offers a welcoming look at New York. Reese Traves displays clear knowledge of the locales depicted; each page featuring a specific attraction provides “sidebars” with relevant facts. For example, on a page showing the Empire State Building, the supplemental text explains: “This building has 79 elevators…it is one of the most photographed buildings in the world.” This wealth of information makes the book best suited as a kid-friendly travel guide as opposed to a traditional readaloud. The charming, creative illustrations by Jon Traves, the author’s husband, amplify the text. Readers will appreciate the unique interpretations of city life with fun extras like meticulously detailed maps.

An entertaining, educational introduction to New York for readers of all ages.

ADULT Maude Adjarian • Poornima Apte • Mark Athitakis • Gerald Bartell • Sarah Blackman • Amy Boaz • Ed Bradley • Jeffrey Burke • Tobias Carroll • May-lee Chai • Carin Clevidence • Miranda Cooper • Emma Corngold • Dave DeChristopher • Amanda Diehl • Lisa Elliott • Chelsea Ennen • Amy Goldschlager Mary Ann Gwinn • Janice Harayda • Peter Heck • Kerri Jarema • Jessica Jernigan • Tom Lavoie Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Michael Magras • Don McLeese Gregory McNamee • Clayton Moore • Christopher Navratil • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • Therese Purcell Nielsen • Connie Ogle • Cory Oldweiler • Mike Oppenheim • Deesha Philyaw • Jim Piechota William E. Pike • Margaret Quamme • Lloyd Sachs • Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Rosanne Simeone Linda Simon • Margot E. Spangenberg • Rachel Sugar • Marion Winik CHILDREN’S & TEEN Lucia Acosta • Autumn Allen • Alison Anholt-White • Sumaia Awad • Kazia Berkley-Cramer Elizabeth Bird • Ariel Birdoff • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Nastassian Brandon • Christopher A. Brown • Timothy Capehart • Kristin Centorcelli • Ann Childs • Alec B. Chunn • Amanda Chuong Anastasia M. Collins • Jeannie Coutant • Cherrylyn Cruzat • Julie Danielson • Maya Davis • Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Shelley Diaz Vale • Eiyana Favers • Amy Seto Forrester • Ayn Reyes Frazee Jenna Friebel • Nivair H. Gabriel • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Hannah Gomez Melinda Greenblatt • Tobi Haberstroh • Abigail Hsu • Julie Hubble • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Danielle Jones • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • Sophie Kenney • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Angela Leeper • Lori Low • Kyle Lukoff • Meredith Madyda • Joan Malewitz • Michelle H. Martin PhD • J. Alejandro Mazariegos • Kirby McCurtis • Sierra McKenzie • Kathie Meizner Susan Messina • J. Elizabeth Mills • Cristina Mitra • Sabrina Montenigro • Lisa Moore • R. Moore Mya Nunnally • Katrina Nye • Tori Ann Ogawa • Hal Patnott • Deb Paulson • Danni Perreault John Edward Peters • Deesha Philyaw • Susan Pine • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger Amy B. Reyes • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Jasmine Riel • Amy Robinson • Christopher R. Rogers Leslie L. Rounds • John W. Shannon • Karyn N. Silverman • Mathangi Subramanian • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah Taffa • Deborah D. Taylor • Steven Thompson • Renee Ting • Janani Venkateswaran Tharini Viswanath • Yung Hsin • Lauren Emily Whalen • Dorcas Wong • Jenny Zbrizher INDIE Kent Armstrong • Jillian Bietz • Hannah Bonner • Julie Buffaloe-Yoder • Jim Byatt • Darren Carlaw Charles Cassady • Michael Deagler • Stephanie Dobler Cerra • Steve Donoghue • Jacob Edwards Megan Elliott • Tina Gianoulis • Morgana Hartman • Justin Hickey • Ivan Kenneally • Barbara London • Dale McGarrigle • Tara Mcnabb • Rhett Morgan • Joshua T. Pederson • Jim Piechota • Matt Rauscher • Sarah Rettger • Walker Rutter-Bowman • Jerome Shea • Emily Thompson

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ROOTLINES

West, Rikki She Writes Press (280 pp.) $16.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Sep. 22, 2020 978-1-63152-753-1

Wernicke, Marian O’Shea She Writes Press (272 pp.) $16.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Sep. 29, 2020 978-1-63152-759-3

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A woman recalls becoming a stem cell donor for her ailing sister in this debut memoir.

West’s book opens in August 2016 in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a description of the author sparring in a muay thai boxing match. In her early 60s, West recounts how her training “reshaped” her body, offering her a level of fitness that would prove vital for what lay ahead. The morning after the bout, she received an email from her older sister, Linda, revealing that she had developed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Linda had been given the prognosis of “a painful though fairly rapid death” unless a highly suitable stem cell donor could be found. The sisters had not spoken in months, having fallen out over details of their mother’s health care.

Despite their differences and the author’s being two decades over the age limit for donors, West agreed to be tested and was found to be a perfect match. The memoir charts Linda’s journey to recovery and examines the author’s past life, from coming out as a lesbian in the 1970s to confronting alcoholism. West channels the immediacy and energy she gleans from muay thai into her writing. The result is a vibrant, punchy narrative, exemplified by her discussion of her alcoholism: “Drinking came easily, like bullets sliding into a chamber. My drinking was naturally destructive. I blacked out, hid bottles, stole from anyone, lied to friends, cheated on lovers.” Always candidly confessional, the author tempers her prose style by including contrastingly meditative passages: “I find that silence calms me. That lets me sense myself differently….Rather than feeling isolated, as I often do in my thoughts, in silence I connect to a web of friendly energy.”

The narrative is deeply and admirably introspective. One minor criticism is that insufficient effort was made to consider the journey from Linda’s perspective, which would have given the account a valuable extra dimension. As the book now stands, readers never get to know her fully. But this does not detract significantly from a well-written memoir that deftly describes cancer as an opponent that can be faced and beaten.

A remarkable story of hope and determination passionately recounted.

A young nun’s commitment to her vocation is tested in this historical novel set in Peru.

On a June day in 1964, Sister Mary Katherine “Kate” O’Neill slips away from a convent in the Andean mountains. The 25-year-old American nun has fallen hopelessly in love with Tom Lynch, a priest. Troubled by her undeniable attraction to the fiery Irishman and “afraid of her own desire,” she flees in the night, with no money and no destination in mind. Over the next several days, she wanders throughout the South American country, connecting with kind strangers who help her on her journey. As she travels, she reflects on the events that have caused her to consider abandoning her calling. Meanwhile, flashbacks describe her childhood in St. Louis and time as a religious novice. In her novel, Wernicke, a former nun who once worked in Peru, turns what could be a simple tale of forbidden romance into something far more complex. Kate’s struggle isn’t just to reconcile her feelings for Father Tom with her calling to the sisterhood. She also wrestles with her purpose in coming to South America and whether her work is truly helping those she aims to serve.

“Why are you here? Aren’t there problems in your own country?” a Peruvian police officer asks the runaway sister. The author vividly captures both Kate’s difficulty adapting to life in a foreign country where she barely speaks the language and her feelings of dislocation (both physical and spiritual) upon arriving in Peru. When she first meets Father Tom, altitude sickness causes her heart to race and makes it difficult to breathe, a preview of the way her love will eventually cause “a real physical hurt” in her heart. She must also struggle with unfamiliar feelings of doubt and a growing feeling that she may have no choice but to abandon the religious life that she chose as a teen.

Sharply drawn supporting characters and rich descriptions of life in the Peruvian countryside add weight to the story.

A moving, emotionally resonant tale of one woman’s crisis of faith.

The scenes that involve supernatural elements are taut and intense, with visceral descriptions of peril. the alignment

JERSIG

one’s way. Much of this message is conveyed through conversations between the characters—particularly between Q., Jersig, and Jersig’s partner, Cadence. Although the text sometimes feels heavily freighted with gravitas—as when Q. writes down the question, “Is there a place in the world for a man such as me?”—it also helps propel the story and clarify plot points that might have otherwise been murky.

A thoughtful tale that explores a friendship between two men trying to live authentic lives.

Whitehouse, J.B. John Barnabus Whitehouse (112 pp.) $23.99 | 9.99 e-book Jul. 4, 2020 978-0-578-72125-5 In Whitehouse’s debut novel, a man named Quentin “Q.” Yonally Dettweiler meets a mysterious and charismatic man who turns his life upside down—and helps him to discover his true calling.

The story’s protagonist is 26 years old and working as a health care consultant for a firm located near a California beach.

Although nothing seems obviously amiss in his life, he feels unsatisfied. “I was wrapped in the carousel of a monotonous existence,” he reflects early on, “a life being lived incomplete.”

However, an impromptu meeting at a coffee shop with a striking, wealthy man named James Jersig irrevocably changes the course of Q.’s life. Jersig impulsively invites him aboard his yacht for a lavish party, where he winds up hiring Q. as both an assistant and as his own personal scribe: “I’d like you to write for me each week. A piece that draws on the emotions, situations, and events from the week prior.” Working for Jersig provides Q. with a glimpse into a life of luxury, which also involves tense business dealings and potentially illegal associations. However, the major draw for Q. is the fact that Jersig seems to see him for who he is—and that he recognizes the man that he hopes to become: “What you search for is authenticity,” Jersig observes; for far too long, Q. realizes, he’s lived the life he thought he should rather than the one he wanted. Overall, this is a relatively brief book, but Whitehouse maintains a clipped pace throughout the narrative that keeps it moving forward. The story is part mystery, part philosophical musing, and it explores what it means to get a second chance at life and to seize opportunity when it comes

THE ALIGNMENT

Wilson, Douglas L. W & B Printers (392 pp.) $18.99 paper | $3.99 e-book May 15, 2020 978-1-63554-242-4 Two ancient families unite in an epic fight against vampires in this supernatural horror thriller.

The fate of humanity hangs in the balance in the summer of 2012; the Mayan calendar is drawing dangerously close to its end, and sinister forces are at work with deadly plans. Meanwhile, two men from very different backgrounds are about to come together in an unexpected way—and the fate of the world lies upon their shoulders. Sean Dunne is a washed-up American homicide detective in Washington, D.C., with a checkered past, and Gregor Innescu is a 72-year-old Romanian man who’s been studying vampires for years. The pair couldn’t be more different, but when their paths cross during one of Sean’s cases, it becomes clear that they have a lot in common. The two men’s families have a long history as partners in a fight against vampires who seek to wreak havoc on Earth, and the time has come for them to unite once again before it’s too late. The book jumps back and forth between the past and present-day 2012 to give readers a deeper understanding of the main characters’ histories. Gregor’s story is particularly effective at explaining his unwavering determination to track the vampires’ movements, due to his past traumatic experience. The scenes that involve supernatural elements are taut and intense, with visceral descriptions of peril: “Sweat began to abate, along with the mental assault and outright fear that had practically paralyzed him, and he began to realize that these feelings were directly proportional to his distance from the monster.” Equally compelling are the vampires themselves, who have complex desires.

Although they’re the villains of this story, their mysterious and ancient nature is intriguing, as is their connection to the Dunne and Innescu clans.

An absorbing read that will likely leave readers hungry for a sequel.

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 2020 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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ALL THAT LINGERS

Wittig’s decades-spanning historical novel set mostly in Vienna takes us from the 1930s to the 1970s, detailing the fallout from WWII. We start with three women—Emma Huber, Greta Bruckner, and Léonie Salzmann—who have been fast friends since grammar school. Emma’s fiance, Theo, is killed early on in an uprising in Austria, and Emma has a miscarriage and cannot bear more children. Greta marries Otto Bruckner and has a daughter, Sophie. Léonie is married to Josef, a doctor, and their daughter is the lively Valerie. By the late 1940s, only Emma is alive of the three women. For villains, we have Greta’s motherin-law, the grasping Elsa; her sister-in-law, the vain, shallow Marion; and Marion’s husband, Friedrich, Graf von Harzburg.

All of these characters are thrown into the cauldron of Hitler’s rise, the war itself, and the struggle to rebuild their world and come to terms with the evil at the root of it. Novelist Wittig has a gift for character development and for pacing. She takes her time, raising this story to the deserved level of saga. It is Emma who holds the book together, and there are many more characters than mentioned above. Friedrich is an especially fascinating piece of work. All he has in life is his aristocratic lineage (“Graf ” is the equivalent of a count) and the concomitant style and manners. And the Bruckners have money, so it is the ultimate marriage of convenience. He does great damage, not so much because he is immoral but because he is amoral, morally lazy—as he would be the first to admit. The story plumbs deep sadness. At one point, Emma wonders, “Didn’t God ever have enough of death?” There are saving graces, too, including a young British army officer and a kind doctor.

A standout among the many novels set in this worldchanging era.

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struggles to subsist. White South Africans Graham Mason and Lizette Basson live in a gated compound in KwaZulu-Natal.

Graham, a hack journalist stuck in his ways, is looking ever more cynically to hold on to what little he has. His frequent absences give his wife time to reflect on their relative prosperity.

Lizette becomes involved with the Imbali Township Co-op—an impoverished but socially active collective of traditional landowners holding their shantytown against the bulldozers of corporate “gentrification.” As the world reaches its tipping point, can Graham and Lizette’s marriage survive? Arthur Green is a Black American working for the Environmental Protection Agency, Water Division, in California. Art and his colleagues are fighting a losing battle to protect state-controlled water reserves from corporate malpractice. Art’s efforts are all-consuming but hopeless. When one of his co-workers is killed by corporate heavies—the “Men behind the Gold Curtain”—Art is forced into witness protection. Can he survive to testify and, in doing so, reconcile with his estranged wife and daughter?

Wood writes in the first person, past tense, cycling a chapter at a time through Graham’s, Lizette’s, and Art’s stories. Whereas the prose is straightforward, the plot and setting create a dense tangle of characters and ideas. Earth in 2048 evidences some futuristic developments—cerebral implants and emergent artificial intelligences—but for the most part forms a depressing, oppressive endpoint for current-day trends. The SF story unfolds slowly and provides little hope. But the author does propose a way forward. Art represents a Black America that has risen above the prejudices leveled against it. Lizette stands for open-mindedness at any age. Graham is a most unlikable character, but even he is forced to change. Together, they speak to unification beyond borders. The message is an important one, albeit not always pleasant to digest.

Well-considered social SF—an engrossing, foreboding, and uncomfortable offering.

Wittig, Irene Self (409 pp.) $16.00 paper | $8.99 e-book Mar. 20, 2020

WATER MUST FALL

Wood, Nick Newcon Press (284 pp.) $24.25 paper | $5.99 e-book Apr. 15, 2020 978-1-912950-61-4 In this novel, two White South Africans and a Black American must open themselves to change in a near-future dystopia of chronic water shortages and a corporatocracy.

In 2048, life revolves around water. In South Africa and the Federated States of America, the FreeFlow Corporation holds immeasurable power. The wealthy few have enough to drink.

They hoard their privilege while the rest of the population |

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Se e n & He a r d

By Michael Schaub An unlikely pitchman in the Lone Star State is bringing Texas-sized enthusiasm to his library’s curbside pickup service.

“Curbside Larry,” who works for the Harris County Public Library in the Houston area, made his debut on Twitter in a video that’s reminiscent of old-school commercials featuring superexcited salesmen pitching used cars or mattresses.

“Hey, folks, Curbside Larry here at the Barbara Bush Library, and we’re crazy with curbside service!” exclaims Larry in an unmistakable Texas twang. “That’s right, we’ve got shelves and shelves of books, Blu-Rays, and DVDs, and we’d like nothing better than to take care of all your reading, research, and entertainment needs!”

The cowboy-hatted Larry is played by library staffer John Schaffer, Houstonia magazine reports, and it’s hard not to be charmed by the way he delivers lines like “What’s it going to take to put you into a biography or a science fiction today?” and “What’s all this cost?

Just three low payments of zero, zero, zero dollars!”

Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Politicon

HANNITY REMOVES LATIN NONSENSE FROM BOOK COVER

Sean Hannity changed the cover of his new book after a classics student pointed out that a Latin motto printed underneath the book’s title was completus nonsensus, Business Insider reports.

The conservative commentator’s Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink originally featured the phrase “Vivamus vel libero perit Americae,” which Hannity and his publisher thought means “Live free or America dies.”

It does not, as Indiana University student Spencer Alexander McDaniel pointed out in a blog post titled “Sean Hannity Does Not Know Latin.”

“There is a slight problem with this particular motto, though; it’s complete and utter gobbledygook,” wrote McDaniel. “It is clear that whoever came up with this motto does not even know the basic noun cases in Latin or how they work.” Hannity or his publishers, McDaniel speculates, got the faulty translation from Google Translate, which the student says “is comically inept at both Latin and Ancient Greek.”

Hannity’s publisher, Threshold Editions, might have caught wind of McDaniel’s blog post, because they’ve updated the Latin phrase to “Vivamus liberi ne America pereat.”

GOOD MORNING ZOOM BOOK COMING THIS FALL

The classic children’s book Goodnight Moon is getting a pandemic-related remix.

Good Morning Zoom, a self-published parody that focuses on life in the Covid-19 era, has been picked up by Penguin Random House, USA Today reports.

The imprint Philomel Books calls the book “a clever and heartwarming Goodnight Moon parody that offers reassurance and hope in our difficult time.”

“Good Morning Zoom takes the reader on a lyrical journey through our ‘new normal,’ ” the publisher says on a webpage for the book. “From ‘Zoom school,’ to watching doctors and nurses on TV, to building pillow forts and talking to loved ones from a distance, this poignant book reminds us that there are still things to enjoy and be excited about in these unprecedented times.”

The book is written by New York investment banker Lindsay Rechler and illustrated by graphic designer and artist June Park.

Good Morning Zoom is slated for publication on Oct. 6. Rechler plans to donate her proceeds from the book to charities that help people impacted by Covid-19.

Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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TEXAS LIBRARY’S “CURBSIDE LARRY” DELIGHTS INTERNET

Appreciations: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee at 50

B Y G RE G O RY MC NA MEE

Universal History Archive–Getty Images

On the morning of Dec. 29, 1890, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry—a unit reconstituted after being destroyed at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876—surrounded a Sioux Indian encampment in South Dakota. The troops demanded that the Sioux surrender their weapons. One man objected, saying that his rifle had cost him a lot of money. A melee ensued, and cannons and Gatling guns rained down on the mostly unarmed Sioux. Some 300 men, women, and children were killed. After the slaughter, which the Army insisted on calling a battle, 20 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Wounded Knee Massacre ended the Indian Wars, which had

begun less than 30 years earlier. For a long time it also ended any interest in hearing the Indians’ side of the story. Apart from a few considerably embellished as-told-to memoirs by Geronimo and Sitting Bull published in books and magazines, the narrative of the conquest of the West was the province of White writers and historians.

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That changed when a librarian and amateur historian told the story of the conquest of the West from the viewpoint of its Indigenous inhabitants, those who suffered violence at the hands of the White invaders. Indignant, he was determined to tell their story as one of victims of institutional, racist violence, made “relevant” by what was unfolding in the news from Vietnam as well as anti-war demonstrations on the streets and the Nixon government’s violent reaction to them. In 1970, Holt published Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a book that depicted most of the invading Whites as monsters and the Indians they encountered as innocent victims, reversing the moral order of earlier narratives in a history that Brown—who was White, with no Native ancestry—deemed “a morality play of personified abstractions.”

The book was a bestseller, though some critics observed that, after all, real people and not abstractions were the actors in that tragic history. Ursula K. Le Guin might have been thinking of Brown’s book when she wrote, “Writers of a dominant group who assume the right to speak for members of a less powerful one take…risks in complacent ignorance of their existence.”

Brown was not ignorant, though some paternalism shows through in his suggestion at the book’s opening that White readers “may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness coming from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages.” Even so, eminent Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday praised Brown’s book for revealing “a dimension to our national experience that has remained relatively unknown,” calling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee a “narrative of singular integrity and precise continuity.”

Brown’s book was more than that. Along with near-contemporaneous works such as Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins and Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man, it helped open the door to a wealth of narratives—historical and literary, many by Native writers themselves—that brought about a shift in received views of American history and found a wide audience of White readers. That revisionist tradition continues to this day with books such as The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, by the Ojibwe historian and novelist David Treuer, which continues where Brown left off, turning a narrative of victimhood into one of resistance—and of a continued struggle for justice.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor. |

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“A STORY THAT, FOR SOME, WILL BE THE DEFINING BOOK OF THEIR ADOLESCENCE. ” –KIRKUS, STARRED REVIEW

Award-winning author and artist Mike Curato draws on his own experiences in Flamer, his debut young adult graphic novel, telling a difficult story with humor, compassion, and love.

FLAMERBOOK.COM