January 1, 2019: Volume LXXXVII, No 1

Featuring 392 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children's and YA books

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXVII, NO.

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JANUARY

2019

REVIEWS Lili Anolik is the unofficial

champion of Eve Babitz’s literary canon and a crucial element of Babitz’s resurgence.

Her nonfiction debut, Hollywood’s Eve, doesn’t fit the mold of a biography—it’s a bona fide love story. p. 60

from the editor’s desk:

Trends We Hope Disappear in 2019 B Y C LA I B ORNE

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

SM I T H

# Chief Executive Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com

Photo courtesy Michael Thad Carter

All of us at Kirkus are looking forward to the great books that are coming our way in 2019; check out our editors’ columns in each section of this issue to learn which particular books they’re most excited about. But before you do that, let’s say goodbye to 2018 by noting a few publishing trends we hope disappear in 2019. (We know they won’t actually disappear this year, but hope springs eternal.) Happy New Year!

Laura Simeon, Young Adult Editor: I’d like to see tan people go away. I’m all for the kind of diversity where a character’s race is not the entire focus of their lives, not a problem that they grapple with, and not an indirect way of showing what a great, tolerant person the white main character is.

I’m fine with ambiguity—as a biracial person, I appreciate the way racial Claiborne Smith ambiguity forces us to confront our discomfort around blurred boundaries.

I fully support people writing outside their own ethnicity or any other identity; if they don’t do their homework and the portrayal is tone-deaf, I also support people speaking up in response.

That’s how it goes when you write for public consumption. What I don’t like, and have seen far too much of this year, are nominally diverse books that actually reinforce a white default. These are books that maybe, probably, perhaps include diversity….The usual cues that most characters are assumed white are all there (references to blonde hair, blue eyes, etc., although these are not traits confined to people who identify as white), but then there is a mysteriously “tan” character.

Or one who has a possibly “ethnic” name or hair. Or one whose speech patterns and mannerisms evoke common stereotypes of particular ethnic groups. But search though the reader might, there is nothing conclusive to be found. It’s all very puzzling—and, worse, it evokes the damaging color-blind mindset that sees race as the difference that dare not speak its name. Otherwise, why be so coy?

Gregory McNamee, Contributing Editor: Let’s see. There’s an efficiency paradox. A Jewish American paradox. A goodness paradox. An inequality paradox. Somewhere or another, the word “paradox” has come to be an ever so slightly gussied up synonym for “problem” when it really means something that on its face seems absurd but turns out to be true—or, conversely, something that seems on its face to be true but that turns out to be absurd. Here’s one good use, courtesy of the authors of The Mind Club: “Trying to perceive your dead mind is paradoxical, because you have to perceive a state that is incapable of perception—which is impossible while you are currently perceiving.” That’s just so. In 2019, oh writers of book titles, let’s reserve the word “paradox” for the paradoxical, using “problem” for the problematical, “puzzle” for the puzzling, “question” for the questionable, and so forth.

Eric Liebetrau, Nonfiction and Managing Editor: I only have one trend I wish would disappear, and I am well-aware that it is a complete fantasy.

However, I am going to put it to the universe and cross my fingers, knowing that even if it doesn’t disappear entirely, perhaps it can decrease by at least a small percentage: No more books about Trump and his minions. Good, bad, ugly, and otherwise, I simply can’t handle the deluge. From early 2017 until the end of this year, I feel like I lost a chunk of my soul from reading seemingly endless lists, opinions, and analyses that only reiterate what any thoughtful, ethically balanced person knows: Our president is a corrupt, morally bankrupt grifter who is decidedly unfit for office. Go pick up Amy Siskind’s The List (2018) and see if you can make it through without needing a martini or three. Then realize that book chronicles just the first year of No more books about this national nightmare….

Myra Forsberg, Indie Editor: Many readers cherish the daring cats and boisterous dogs who embark on perilous adventures in picture books.

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from the editor’s desk

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Vice President of Marketing SARAH KALINA skalina@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Fiction Editor L AU R I E M U C H N I C K lmuchnick@kirkus.com Children’s Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Young Adult Editor L AU R A S I M E O N lsimeon@kirkus.com Staff Writer MEGAN LABRISE mlabrise@kirkus.com Vice President of Kirkus Indie KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com Senior Indie Editor D AV I D R A P P drapp@kirkus.com Indie Editor M Y R A F O R S B E RG mforsberg@kirkus.com Indie Editorial Assistant K AT E R I N A P A P P A S kpappas@kirkus.com Editorial Assistant CHELSEA ENNEN cennen@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS Designer ALEX HEAD Director of Kirkus Editorial L AU R E N B A I L E Y lbailey@kirkus.com Production Editor C AT H E R I N E B R E S N E R cbresner@kirkus.com Creative Lead A R D E N P I AC E N Z A apiacenza@kirkus.com Website and Software Developer P E RC Y P E R E Z pperez@kirkus.com Advertising Director M O N I Q U E S T E N S RU D mstensrud@kirkus.com Controller MICHELLE GONZALES mgonzales@kirkus.com for customer service or subscription questions, please call 1-800- 316-9361

Trump in 2019, please Continued on p. 4

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Editor -in- Chief CLAIBORNE SMITH csmith@kirkus.com

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contents fiction

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

INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS............................................................ 5 REVIEWS................................................................................................ 5 EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................... 6 CHIGOZIE OBIOMA’S ORIGINAL NEW NOVEL............................... 14 LYNDSAY FAYE’S BOOK IS A PARAGON OF A THRILLER.............. 24 MYSTERY...............................................................................................33 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY.......................................................... 39 ROMANCE............................................................................................40

nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS..........................................................44 REVIEWS..............................................................................................44 EDITOR’S NOTE...................................................................................46 ON THE COVER: LILI ANOLIK........................................................... 60 RENIQUA ALLEN’S REVEALING DREAM.........................................66

children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.......................................................... 81 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 81 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 82 JONAH WINTER MEETS THE KING.................................................. 88 BOARD & BABY BOOKS..................................................................... 99

young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.........................................................139 REVIEWS.............................................................................................139 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 140 MELISSA DE LA CRUZ’S SUREFIRE NEW HIT...............................146

Greek mythology collides with the lives of four mortals swept up in the drama of the two world wars in Julie Berry’s transportive, romantic epic. Read the review on p. 141.

SHELF SPACE: UPSHUR STREET BOOKS.......................................156

indie INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.........................................................157 REVIEWS.............................................................................................157 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 158 INDIE Q&A: CHRISTOPHER GREYSON.......................................... 168

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APPRECIATIONS: KINGSLEY AMIS POURS A DRINK...................183

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While these escapades appeal to pet owners (I certainly love any tale with a gray-and-white feline who resembles my tabby), the genre needs fewer of these familiar stars teaching children worthy lessons. Some of the most striking illustrated works feature wild animals: lions and tigers and bears—and elephants and giraffes—in their natural habitats. Several weave welcome ecological themes into their tapestries. And the uneven Fantastic Beasts books and films have shown audiences the glorious range of mythical and mischievous creatures who can brighten a story. There are more things in heaven and Earth than tales of heroic kitties and pooches.

Laurie Muchnick, Fiction Editor: I would be happy not to see the word “Paris” in the title of any books in 2019. We’ve reviewed 21 Paris books in the past three years, including Paris in the Present Tense, Paris by the Book, and The Paris Librarian, not to mention The Light of Paris, Moonlight over Paris, I’ll See You in Paris, and Goodbye, Paris. (If only!) This year, I’m looking forward to reading a book set in Kamchatka, Russia (The Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips), and hope there will be many other surprises to come.

Vicky Smith, Children’s Editor: As the industry grows ever more conscious of the necessity for inclusion and diversity, picture books have worked hard to keep up. Formerly all- or mostly white classrooms and playgrounds are becoming vibrantly diverse racially, and more feature visibly disabled kids (though fat or even just chubby kids are notably scarce). But indicating specific ethnicity and/or religion is slower to come. Way too few of these ensemble scenes casually feature such items as hijabs, yarmulkes, or topis, articles that kids in the U.S. and around the world often wear. And as in physics, this phenomenon of too little ethnic/religious specificity has a seemingly opposite reaction, and that’s a continued reliance on stereotype to indicate diversity. Want to make sure readers understand this girl is Inuit? Dress her in a fur parka. What about that Polynesian boy? Present him, shirtless, in a lavalava. Yes, it communicates specificity, but only in a hopelessly exoticizing fashion, particularly when juxtaposed with kids in typical casual Western attire. There must be a way to give kids a sense of their global community without resorting to an “It’s a Small World” paradigm. So my resolution on the industry’s behalf is to continue to expand what diversity and inclusion look like—thoughtfully, so it’s just right.

Karen Schechner, Vice President of Kirkus Indie: Broken-record alert, but in 2018, I’ve developed an anaphylactic reaction to fake, scam, maddeningly untrue, lying lies from agenda-pushing, self-serving saboteurs—especially as the lies distract from the dismantling of undersung but critical government agencies (which Michael Lewis outlines in The Fifth Risk). As Elizabeth Graber, an editor at Palgrave Macmillan, put it (much more elegantly and minus the acid bitterness): “I’m never a fan of books that rely solely on suppositions over tangible evidence and data.”

David Rapp, Senior Indie Editor: I started a new column for Kirkus in 2018 called “Screener,” about film and TV adaptations of books. It was a banner year for backlist adaptations, with TV miniseries of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and film versions of quiet chamber pieces (Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger) and blockbuster thrillers (Steve Alten’s Meg). It’s great to see older books get their due—The Little Stranger, for instance, was published nine years ago; Meg, more than two decades ago; and Hill House, more than half a century ago—and it’s a trend I’d love to see continue. However, I’d also love to see movie tie-in cover art go away. I understand why it’s done—if you saw the recent AMC TV adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, for example, you may look for a cover photo of actors Florence Pugh, Michael Shannon, and Alexander Skårsgard at your local bookstore. But I miss the stark typography of the first edition’s art or the enigmatic illustration of a theatergoer on the most recent trade paperback. Cover art is an important part of the whole experience, and I wish publishers weren’t so quick to toss their original visions aside when Hollywood comes calling.

Chelsea Ennen, Editorial Assistant: I grow weary of dystopias! So many of them are beautifully done, and it’s pretty obvious why that trend has been sticking around, but must everything be dour? I’m thinking of contemporary science fiction and fantasy in particular. I always perk up when I come across a novel that tackles the political climate and fantastical worldbuilding without making me feel like I need to watch The Great British Bake Off to soothe myself. Those genres are about social commentary, yes, but that doesn’t need to mean ditching escapism or fun of any kind. Along those same lines, more sci-fi and fantasy with intimate stakes, please. There is a lot of breathing room between “my life is perfect” and “I have to save my country/planet/universe from utter destruction!”

Megan Labrise, Staff Writer: If you are a male novelist who thinks the highest compliment to a female character is to base her on yourself (and add a vagina), I didn’t really like your book. It’s easy to spot an arbitrarily female protagonist by her reckless disregard for personal safety, her inordinate upper body strength, the way she preens in conversation…in fact, she downright banters. (No one banters anymore; we barely speak face to face. Banter moved to Twitter—became something else entirely—try setting your novel in the 1920s.) Bonus demerits if you’re straight and made her queer so she would like women like you do. Ugh. Bro. Really? Anyone who writes outside their lived experience should do a little research.

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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Adam, Claire SJP for Hogarth (304 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 29, 2019 978-0-525-57299-2

HOMELAND by Fernando Aramburu; trans. by Alfred MacAdam.... 6 TRUST EXERCISE by Susan Choi........................................................ 11 NOTES FROM A BLACK WOMAN’S DIARY by Kathleen Collins; ed. by Nina Lorez Collins..................................................................... 13 LOST AND WANTED by Nell Freudenberger......................................16 THE RIVER by Peter Heller.................................................................. 17 THE OTHER AMERICANS by Laila Lalami.......................................21 THE PROMISE OF ELSEWHERE by Brad Leithauser........................21 THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN by Niklas Natt och Dag...........25 THE ALTRUISTS by Andrew Ridker....................................................27 WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews.................................................30 THE BIRD KING by G. Willow Wilson................................................32 AUNTIE POLDI AND THE VINEYARDS OF ETNA

by Mario Giordano; trans. by John Brownjohn.................................. 35 AN UNCONDITIONAL FREEDOM by Alyssa Cole............................ 40 THE ONE YOU FIGHT FOR by Roni Loren........................................ 42

TRUST EXERCISE

Choi, Susan Henry Holt (272 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 2, 2019 978-1-250-30988-4

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MIRACLE CREEK by Angie Kim........................................................ 20

A debut novel about class strife, masculinity, and brotherhood in contemporary Trinidad.

Adam—herself a native of Trinidad— tells the story of Paul and Peter Deyalsingh, twins of Indian descent whose lives rapidly diverge. Paul is socially awkward, a bundle of nervous tics and strange habits, and from a young age he is dubbed unhealthy by his industrious father, Clyde, who works tirelessly doing physical labor at a petroleum plant in order to afford a better life for his children—or, at least, one of them. As he ages, his family becomes convinced that he is “slightly retarded,” and he is marked as doomed in comparison to his precociously intelligent brother, Peter—the “healthy” child. After Peter’s unexpected success on a standardized test, Clyde and his wife, Joy, single him out as gifted while communicating to Paul that his possibilities are far more limited. Joy works hard to keep her children together—“The boys are twins.

They must stay together,” she frequently demands—but Peter’s intellectual gifts create a chasm between him and Paul. Peter is destined to leave the island, while Paul’s horizon never exceeds hard labor, like his father before him. Despite the efforts of Father Kavanagh, a kindly Irish Catholic priest who takes it upon himself to teach Paul, the family is forced to make an irrevocable decision that will determine the boys’ fates. Adam excels at sympathetically depicting the world of economic insecurity, unpredictable violence, limited opportunity, and mutual distrust that forces Clyde and Joy to make their fateful decision. Unfortunately, however, the novel telegraphs its biggest plot twist. One can see the narrative gears turning very early, and as a result Clyde’s decision isn’t harrowing; by the time its necessary consequences unfold, a reader might be less moved than Adam hopes. It doesn’t help that many of the characters are sketchily drawn at best. Clyde, Joy, and Peter are not vividly depicted, and the decision that renders Paul disposable seems to emanate out of a psychological vacuum. In the absence of any emotional stakes, the last third of the novel unfolds like a generic thriller. That’s unfortunate, as Adam has otherwise written an incisive and loving portrait of contemporary Trinidad. Paul is the most fully realized character: Adam movingly depicts his struggle to break free of his family’s conceptions of his abilities. As a result, the novel is most moving when it becomes a heart-rending character study of post-colonial adolescence that recalls V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming.

A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing. |

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what to watch for in 2019 The title of Kristen Roupenian’s upcoming story collection speaks for me at this time of year: You Know You Want This. I want Roupenian’s book, which will include her infamous “Cat Person” story; it will be published on Jan. 15. And there are so many other books to want in 2019!

I’ve been waiting almost 18 years for a new novel by Elizabeth McCracken; Bowlaway comes out on Feb. 5, and our starred review makes it sound fantastic: “Bleak House meets Our Town in a century-spanning novel set in a New England bowling alley.”

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Ar­ chive (Feb. 12) is her first novel since The Story of My Teeth, which was a Kirkus Prize finalist in 2015. Fans of Kate Atkinson’s private-eye series are rejoicing at the announcement of Big Sky (June 25), Jackson Brodie’s first appearance since 2011. I’ve been waiting impatiently for Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to her enchanting debut, The Night Circus; her second novel, The Starless Sea, about a secret subterranean library, will be out on Nov. 5.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Marlon James’ follow-up to his Man Booker–prizewinning A Brief History of Seven Killings would be, as our starred review dubs it, a “swordsand-sorcery epic set in a mythical Africa [that’s] also part detective story, part quest fable, and part inquiry into the nature of truth, belief, and destiny,” but that’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Feb. 5).

Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends was one of the breakout hits of last year; her new novel, Normal Peo­ ple—also about intense young people in Dublin—comes out on April 16. My nightstand is piled with galleys from Laila Lalami (The Other Americans, March 26), Susan Choi (Trust Exercise, April 2), Nell Freudenberger (Lost and Wanted, April 2), and Colson Whitehead (The Nick­ el Boys, July 16). And I’m anxiously awaiting an advance edition of Fleishman Is in Trouble, a debut novel by New York Times Magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner (June 18)—I hope her publicist is listening! —L.M. Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

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HOMELAND

Aramburu, Fernando Trans. by MacAdam, Alfred Pantheon (608 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5247-4712-1 Complex tale of the long-lingering effects of political murder in a Basque town.

“Before what happened with Txato,” writes San Sebastián native Aramburu, “Bittori had been a believer.” What happened with Txato is revealed, bit by bit, over the course of 125 short chapters that focus on the many players involved, but the basic facts emerge early on: A businessman, Txato, has been murdered by a member of the Basque separatist group ETA, who are criminals or freedom fighters depending on one’s point of view.

Bittori, Txato’s widow, knows what side she falls on; she has to be dissuaded from including a denunciation of the movement on Txato’s tombstone, for fear that there will be further trouble.

“They already killed him once,” Bittori replies. “I don’t think they’ll kill him again.” But death and sorrow ensue all the same: Bittori loses both her faith and the friendship of her childhood companion, Miren, even as her own children slip away, unable to face the tragedy; her daughter, Nerea, does not even attend the funeral, perhaps for fear of being targeted herself, while Bittori leaves her village so that she “wouldn’t have to go on suffering the menacing stares of the neighbors—friendly for so many years and then, suddenly, just the opposite.” For her part, Miren undergoes trials of her own: One of her sons has been imprisoned as an ETA terrorist, while her own daughter, Arantxa, has been paralyzed by a stroke. For all their shared tribulations, Miren and Bittori, once the closest of friends, now stand on opposite sides of a vast gulf, and if life goes on, it goes on without them; the novel’s closing words make clear that their wounds will never be healed. Aramburu recounts the lives of ordinary people shattered by events that are ongoing in Spain today even years after ETA has suspended its armed campaign; the reader needs no background in that tangled history to understand that basic, terrible truth.

A humane, memorable work of literature.

MARS

Bakić, Asja Trans. by Zoble, Jennifer Feminist Press (144 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-936932-48-1 A debut short story collection from Bosnian writer Bakić takes an off-kilter look at sexuality, death, and the power of literature.

In “Day Trip to Durmitor,” the first story in Bakić’s mysterious debut, two secretaries of the afterlife greet the dead protagonist. Her task, they explain, is to write a book of stories; if they’re good, the protagonist gets to return to the

PROFESSOR CHANDRA FOLLOWS HIS BLISS

Balasubramanyam, Rajeev Dial Press (368 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-525-51138-0

Once again this year, Cambridge professor P.R. Chandrasekhar has not won the Nobel Prize, and things are going to get worse before they get any better.

“Professor Chandra was the foremost trade economist in the world, could phone any finance minister in any country at any time and have them take his call.” The fourth novel from Balasubramanyam (Starstruck, 2015, etc.) introduces its self-important antihero on the day he not only misses the Nobel, but is called on the carpet and asked to take a sabbatical because he has called a student an imbecile. On the way out, he is hit by a bicyclist and has a heart attack. Ordered to spend two months resting, he lies in bed and watches the entire first season of Friends, “finally understanding the jokes his

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land of the living—as a zombie on the “hunt for the human brain.”

After all, one of the secretaries says, “Literature is...the primary link between life and death.” Indeed, many of Bakić’s stories have writer protagonists who are in deeply strange predicaments. One wants to write an article on a cult living in a cave made of green glowing rock only to discover she has the same supernatural powers as the cult leader (“The Guest”). One is a novelist caught in a web of deception and obsession over the true author of the latest literary smash (“Passions”). Another is, with all other writers, part of a new settlement on Mars after being exiled from Earth when writing was declared “the greatest evil to have befallen humankind” (“Mars”). There is even an Orphan Black–esque narrative in which a writer named Asja has been cloned and must organize with her variants against their creator (“Asja 5.0”). Bakić’s stories are perfectly of the American short-fiction zeitgeist—dark, sometimes indeterminate, sidestepping realism—but as the afterword points out, there are few writers from the Balkans that make use of the speculative or the dystopian in their work, which makes this collection all the more darkly alluring.

The bizarre and often inscrutable worlds here should find fans among lovers of cutting-edge short fiction.

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children had made throughout the nineties.” But Chandra has a great deal more to understand about his children; the simple relationships he had with them when they were small have long since soured. He has been estranged from his older daughter for several years, his son lives in Hong Kong and rarely visits, and his teenage daughter is in Colorado with his ex-wife, Jean, and her new husband, Steve. He goes to visit her in Boulder, but long-simmering resentments result in his punching Steve in the nose shortly after he arrives. In exchange for pretending to Jean that his injury was caused by swimming into the wall of the swimming pool, Steve—a highly evolved being who has spent much time in India—forces Chandra to enroll in a threeday workshop at Esalen, the famous retreat center/hot springs in Big Sur. Here, the professor’s bumpy road to self-awareness begins, with a detailed but not too didactic presentation of exactly what goes on at “Being Yourself in the Summer Solstice.”

Post-Esalen, a crisis befalls the family that gives Chandra the opportunity to rebuild his relationships.

Recovering fuddy-duddy Chandra is a droll creation, and his journey of self-realization feels like the real thing.

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THE SUSPECT

Barton, Fiona Berkley (416 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 22, 2019 978-1-101-99051-3 When two girls traveling in Thailand turn up dead in a suspicious fire, journalist Kate Waters follows the story without disclosing a hidden agenda.

Kate’s son, a former golden boy, dropped out of school and traveled to Thailand two years prior, and he’s been in sporadic touch since.

Coincidentally, it turns out that he was present at the same guesthouse on the night the girls died. Sidelined because of her conflict of interest, Kate continues to investigate, as does DI Bob Sparkes, a compassionate policeman distracted by the impending death of his wife. Which leads one to wonder: When did all thriller writers begin to fashion themselves as psychologists? There’s a dead giveaway to any possible plot twist—a

A heartland novel that evokes the possibility of everyday miracles. little faith

character whose face or eyes is described as “blank.” In Barton’s (The Child, 2017, etc.) book, to be fair, it takes almost 300 pages to reach this moment, and up until that point, she creates quite a bit of narrative interest by giving voice to the victims in addition to the many people involved in the investigation—driven reporters, bereaved parents, and very human policemen. But once the killer is clearly outed, even though it takes another 100 pages for all the pieces to fall into place, the novel quickly loses steam. Even a final moral conundrum that should immediately freeze the blood of any parent seems overly constructed rather than shocking. By that point, it had become tiresome reading about most of the characters and their shifty relationships to the truth. “No one is to be believed ever,” seems to be a major takeaway. Oh, and P.S., don’t let your kids run wild in Thailand.

This has the potential to be a thoughtful thriller with an interesting setting, but Barton is too willing to cater to expectations—short chapters, familiar clues, and stereotypical villains.

LITTLE FAITH

Butler, Nickolas Ecco/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-06-246971-7 A heartland novel that evokes the possibility of everyday miracles.

The third novel by Wisconsin author Butler (Beneath the Bonfire, 2015, etc.) shows that he knows this terrain inside out, in terms of tone and theme as well as geography. Nothing much happens in this small town in western Wisconsin, not far from the river that serves as the border with

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A FRIEND IS A GIFT YOU GIVE YOURSELF

Deploying an inimitable tone that packs sardonic storytelling atop action and adventure, with a side of character development, Boyle’s voice works even when it feels like it shouldn’t. It’s just the right kind of too much.

Boyle, William Pegasus Crime (320 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-64313-058-3

Aided by an obliging grifter, a Brooklyn grandma on the run tries to mend her relationship with her estranged grandchild as the three outrun mob goons in the latest from Boyle (The Lonely Witness,

2018, etc.).

Things haven’t been good for Rena Ruggeiro ever since the death of her husband, Vic, nine years ago and her realization that her daughter, Adrienne, had been running around with Vic’s right-hand man, Richie Schiavano, since high school. In spite of Vic’s connections, Rena’s always kept her nose clean and stuck to her routine in her Bensonhurst community, beginning with Mass and McDonald’s coffee every Sunday. There’s no sense in Rena getting overexcited like Adrienne would. After all, Adrienne hasn’t spoken to Rena ever since Rena said her piece about Richie and his quality as a partner. Now, however, Adrienne has a 15-year-old daughter, Lucia, who doesn’t even know her grandmother. Rena ponders these problems but doesn’t act until her pushy neighbor, Enzio, makes a move and she wallops him with an ashtray that brings him down and maybe kills him. What can she do but grab the keys to his classic Impala and high-tail it to the Bronx in the hopes that Adrienne’s in a charitable mood and can help her sort things out? But Adrienne is much the same, and Rena finds herself trying to figure out her next step as she sits in the living room of Adrienne’s neighbor Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a soft-core porn star–turned–con artist who’s taken a shine to Lucia. All this is prologue to the real drama, a caper-inspired road story of quirky personalities on the run littered with gruesome deaths as the truth about the hit on Vic comes out—along with so much more.

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Minnesota, which attracts some tourism in the summer but otherwise seems to exist outside of time. The seasons change, but any other changes are probably for the worse—local businesses can’t survive the competition of big-box stores, local kids move elsewhere when they grow up, local churches see their congregations dwindle. Sixty-five-year-old Lyle Hovde and his wife, Peg, have lived here all their lives; they were married in the same church where he was baptized and where he’s sure his funeral will be. His friends have been friends since boyhood; he had the same job at an appliance store where he fixed what they sold until the store closed. Then he retired, or semiretired, as he found a new routine as the only employee at an apple orchard, where the aging owners are less concerned with making money than with being good stewards of the Earth. The novel is like a favorite flannel shirt, relaxed and comfortable, well-crafted even as it deals with issues of life and death, faith and doubt that Lyle somehow takes in stride. He and Peg lost their only child when he was just a few months old, a tragedy which shook his faith even as he maintained his rituals. He and Peg subsequently adopted a baby daughter, Shiloh, through what might seem in

retrospect like a miracle (it certainly didn’t seem to involve any of the complications and paperwork that adoptions typically involve). Shiloh was a rebellious child who left as soon as she could and has now returned home with her 5-year-old son, Isaac.

Grandparenting gives Lyle another chance to experience what he missed with his own son, yet drama ensues when Shiloh falls for a charismatic evangelist who might be a cult leader (and he’s a stranger to these parts, so he can’t be much good). Though the plot builds toward a dramatic climax, it ends with more of a quiet epiphany.

The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.

KING OF JOY

Chiem, Richard Soft Skull Press (192 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-59376-309-1 A young woman suffering from grief beyond measure pours her suffering into a job as an adult-film actress.

After cresting the wave between short stories and a novel in his first book, Chiem (You Private Person, 2017) delivers a proper novel here, albeit one that uses shifts in time, hallucinatory wordplay, and a deeply wounded protagonist to strange effect. When we meet the main character, Corvus, she’s at some kind of Burning Man–lite event in the California desert, watching things burn: “What am I doing here? There’s a fucking tree on fire and no one is doing shit.” Her defining character trait is present from the start: “Grief is an out-of-body thing, the worst secret you can have,” Chiem writes. “You live in one terrible place trapped inside your head while your body lives in another terrible place entirely.” The novel takes its time divulging Corvus’ tragedy and in the meantime hooks her up with a pornographer named Tim and a shady studio where she forms a bond with another actress named Amber. When Tim decides to profit from the popularity of sexual-abuse porn, he savagely attacks Amber, who escapes and runs off with Corvus. In the second of three sections, Chiem reveals his main character’s largely stoned but idyllic former life, working in a movie theater and meeting the boyish playwright who would become her husband. Like the song says, the scene ends badly, as you might imagine. Back on the run, Corvus and Amber seek out Tim’s video distributor, a spooky diva who lives in a remote mansion surrounded by, of all things, wild hippos and filled with enough champagne and pharmaceuticals for anyone to reach liftoff.

Chiem can’t stick the landing—his denouement is abrupt, incongruous, and garish—but it’s still a remarkable portrayal of restless youth, made sweeter by the author’s crisp, spare prose and a thoughtful portrayal of a woman who lost her way.

Just another sad chapter in life’s rich tragedy.

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What begins as the story of obsessive first love between drama students twists into something much darker. trust exercise

TRUST EXERCISE

Theatre Arts, who has positioned himself as the central figure in his students’ lives, holding power not only over their professional futures, but their social ones as well: part parent, part guru, part master manipulator. But when Sarah and David return in the fall, their relationship instantly crumbles, and in the wake of their very public dissolution, Sarah finds herself increasingly isolated, dismissed into the shadows of CAPA life. Until, that spring, a British theater troupe comes to campus as part of a cultural exchange, and Sarah, along with her classmate Karen, begin parallel relationships with the English imports: Karen is in love with the director, and Sarah is uncomfortably linked to his protégé, the production’s star. It is, until now, a straightforward story, capturing—with nauseating, addictive accuracy—the particular power dynamics of elite theater training. And then, in the second part of the novel, Pulitzer finalist Choi (My Education, 2013, etc.) upends everything we thought we knew, calling the truth of the original narrative into question. (A short coda, set in 2013, recasts it again.) This could easily be insufferable; in Choi’s hands, it works: an effective interrogation of memory, the impossible gulf between accuracy and the stories we tell. And yet, as rigorous and

Choi, Susan Henry Holt (272 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 2, 2019 978-1-250-30988-4

What begins as the story of obsessive first love between drama students at a competitive performing arts high school in the early 1980s twists into something much darker in Choi’s singular new novel.

The summer between their freshman and sophomore years at the Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts—an elite institution “intended to cream off the most talented at selected pursuits from the regular places all over the [unnamed Southern] city” where they lived—Sarah and David consummate the romance that had been brewing the whole previous year. It is the natural culmination of the “taut, even dangerous energy running between them,” which—while naturally occurring—has been fostered by Mr. Kingsley, the head of

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as clever and as relevant as it is, the second half of the novel never quite reaches the soaring heights of the first. It’s hardly a deal breaker: the writing (exquisite) and the observations (cuttingly accurate) make Choi’s latest both wrenching and one-of-a-kind.

Never sentimental; always thrillingly alive.

turns much darker the day that, following a tip, he sees her playing guitar in Central Park and tries to talk to her. Paige, clearly strung out on drugs, takes off, and the closest Simon comes to catching her is punching her companion, junkie Aaron Corval, in the face. His attack, captured on the phone videos of passers-by, goes viral, and he’s rebuked by millions of strangers.

Three months later, Bronx Homicide Detective Isaac Fagbenle turns up in Simon’s office asking questions about the murder of Aaron, who vanished instead of sticking around to press charges.

Simon and his pediatrician wife, Ingrid, go to visit the crime scene in the hope of picking up Paige’s trail, and moments after one of Aaron’s scuzzball neighbors warns them, “Even if you find her, this story won’t have a happy ending,” bullets fly, sending Ingrid to the hospital in a coma. Meanwhile, Chicago PI Elena Ramirez is hired to find the missing adopted son of wealthy Sebastian Thorpe III, and a mysterious pair named Ash and Dee Dee are executing a laid-off meat packer in Boston and a tattoo artist in suburban New Jersey. Clearly all this mayhem is somehow connected, and readers spoiled by Coben’s long history of triple-barreled thrillers (Don’t Let Go, 2017, etc.) will

RUN AWAY

Coben, Harlan Grand Central Publishing (384 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-5387-4846-6 A Manhattan money manager who once had it all is threatened with losing most of it in Coben’s latest greased-lightning domestic thriller.

Things haven’t been that great for Simon Greene ever since his daughter, Paige, dropped out of college and disappeared. But his world

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A rare pleasure. notes from a black woman’s diary

THE STORY PRIZE

be turning the pages with bated breath. But the broadly hinted connection, a Maine religious commune to which Dee Dee professes undying loyalty, is more cartoonish than compelling, and the alternating chapters recounting the investigations of Simon and Elena dilute the suspense instead of intensifying it. By the time the double-twist payoff arrives, fans will be torn between dissatisfaction and relief.

In seeking to extend his formidable range, Coben overreaches: the far-flung complications feel forced and schematic rather than nightmarish. Wait till next year.

Dark, Larry—Ed. Catapult (400 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-936787-63-0 An anthology marking the 15th anniversary of the annual prize celebrating collections of short stories.

There is not much unity to be found in these pages; as editor Dark writes of the stories in this volume: “Each is distinctive, sometimes jarringly different in tone, scope, and language from the story that precedes or follows it.” All, however, are skillful distillations, sometimes of whole lives—Patrick O’Keeffe’s evocation, for instance, of gloomy rural Ireland and its generations of secrets kept (“You know the way them older people are, can’t say a word or ask them anything ever, excuse me now for saying so, Missus”)—and sometimes of smaller moments, such as Steven Millhauser’s lyrical description of

NOTES FROM A BLACK WOMAN’S DIARY

Collins, Kathleen Collins, Nina Lorez—Ed. Ecco/HarperCollins (464 pp.) $17.99 paper | Feb. 5, 2019 978-0-06-280095-4

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A multigenre collection of Collins’ (Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, 2016) previously unpublished writing— fiction, letters, diary entries, plays, and screenplays—collected here and edited by her daughter, 30 years after the author’s death.

“The greatest marvel of Collins’s writing is that she is a magician in her use of interiority,” writes Danielle Evans (Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, 2010) in the collection’s introduction. “She can just slip underneath a moment of tension barely noticed by those in the world of the story and give us a character’s entire interior life, but she is also a master of the moments when...all pretense drops away and the unsayable is given words and said out loud.” It is, as the works here quickly demonstrate, a mastery that transcends form. The book opens with a trio of short stories, each of them centered around a woman as she is observed, followed by an excerpt from an unfinished novel, Lollie: A Suburban Tale, in which a bohemian husband and wife fight for narrative control of their marriage. It’s a fight that ends prematurely; the immediate tragedy is the excerpt cuts off. The fragments from Collins’ actual life—first the diary entries and then the letters—are as arrestingly clear as the fiction, small and expansive at once. Dated Sept. 9: “They’re selling an old medieval house on Mason’s Road, where the rooms go on endlessly, like a labyrinth. We went there on Saturday and bought five red chairs for the kitchen.” And reflecting on life on an April 11: “Instead of dealing with race I went in search of love... and what I found was a very hungry colored lady.” The bulk of the work here, though, are the scripts, one for her 1982 feature film, Losing Ground—a “comedy drama” about a philosophy professor who finds herself starring in a student film that hews unsettlingly close to her real life—and one for the stage play The Brothers, the story of a striving middle-class black family, told by its grieving women.

Reading Collins work the same themes over again and again across mediums is a rare pleasure—as close as most of us will ever come to her spectacular mind. |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Chigozie Obioma

HIS DEEPLY ORIGINAL NEW NOVEL TELLS A DISTINCTLY NIGERIAN STORY

By Joshunda Sanders The title of the novel is a loose translation of a Nigerian proverb related to a common phenomenon based on the mournful sound that a group of chickens makes when hawks swoop down and take one of their fellow birds. It doesn’t have a precise or neat English equivalent, but Obioma elegantly returns throughout the novel to the sentiment it evokes. The proverb is about what individual power we have and what is beyond our control.

It’s a proverb about destiny, Obioma says. “When something bad happens to us, are we powerless, or is there something we can do to stop it? Usually we say this is something God has done. Someone might say it’s God that gives voice to the little things and to the sound that the chickens make.”

In the novel, the voices of those who would seem inconsequential or little or powerless are centered even as the reader wonders if they will survive their fate. The backdrop to this fateful love story is the story of the old and the new, of keeping tradition and culture in the face of westernization and assimilation.

The use of the ancient chi as narrator allows “a kind of comprehensive account of how Africans saw white people when they first came to Africa,” Obioma says. “The chi describes how we can maintain some of the small particulates of how people used to live at a time when there’s a movement among black people toward the ancestral religion again and a lot of people are trying to understand what the people have lost through colonialism.”

Chigozie Obioma’s epic second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities (Jan. 8), is inspired by a real man named Jay whom Obioma met in his travels to Cyprus and who was swindled out of his money in a scam which led to his demise. The book features Chinonso, an uneducated poultry farmer in rural Nigeria who becomes so enamored of Ndali, whom he saves from jumping from a bridge, that he sacrifices everything— land, dignity, sanity—to have her. Chinonso’s guardian spirit, or his 700-year-old chi, narrates the book.

Chinonso’s love is not enough to overcome the fact that Ndali doesn’t love him back and that her family—which is better educated and wealthier than his—will never accept him.

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At the intersection of these philosophical and structural questions, Obioma knits together African spirituality with traditional Western touches as he channels the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies he grew up reading. In An Orchestra of Minorities, the clearest parallel is The Odyssey. “There’s something about the journey that mirrors Chinonso’s experience, him trying to get his woman back.”

Africans believe, broadly, in the universe of this novel in the supernatural realm, “the reincarnation of events, not just people,” Obioma says. “The arrow of misfortune…these are some of the ideas at the heart of the Igbo belief. Something happens to you, you don’t deserve it, it just comes to you, there’s no explanation for it, really. This is something I’ve always wanted to probe for a long time.”

In An Orchestra of Minorities, Obioma finally gets his chance to probe. The most haunting revelation may turn out to be that destiny is not the most pressing open question of them all. Instead, it may be that each of us is powerless to answer the question of whether we can survive our fate until we are tested.

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a rainstorm that melts away the snowmen the narrator and a clutch of fellow children have made (“Already, it seemed to me, our snowmen were showing evidence of a skill so excessive, an elaboration so painfully and exquisitely minute, that it could scarcely conceal a desperate restlessness”). Most of the writers are well-published and relatively well-known, though not always for short stories: Rick Bass, for instance, though his stories are often anthologized, is thought of first as a novelist, as are Edwige Danticat, George Saunders, and Tobias Wolff. Dark finds room for a few writers who are earlier on in their careers, such as Daniyal Mueenuddin, a Pakistani-American writer who writes of a love affair that takes on complicated dimensions when the young woman finds that she is pregnant: “The old midwife from the village,” Mueenuddin writes ominously, “with filthy hands and a greedy heart, brought the baby into the world, a tiny little boy.” The baby will be fighting against the odds, it appears, but then happiness is not a commodity that flows in abundance in many of these stories, with the possible exception of Mary Gordon’s literal shaggy dog story, a delight to read.

A touch less diverse than the Best American Short Story and Pushcart Prize annuals but still a pleasure for students of the genre.

IF, THEN

Day, Kate Hope Random House (272 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-525-51122-9

Joshunda Sanders is a writer and educator living in New York City.

Possibilities and parallel lives collide in this debut novel about frustrated marriages, hidden desires, and environmental disaster.

When an emergency room pager disrupts Ginny, an ambitious surgeon, from her nighttime routine, she’s surprised to look over and suddenly see her colleague Edith lying in bed—instead of her husband, Mark. “Ginny smells warm skin and damp sheets; she hears her own quickened breath....The woman reaches out, as if to stroke Ginny’s hair. Then, in an instant, she’s gone.” Startled by this vision, Ginny seeks medical answers even as she pursues the desire it revealed. Meanwhile, Mark, an environmental scientist, struggles to gain the respect of his colleagues, who dismiss his obsessive research “on the connection between geothermal activity and animal behavior.” (Perhaps it’s because he gives his research project an unfortunate acronym: DAMN.) Compelled by an impending sense of doom he can’t explain, Mark dives into the “prepper” communities of the Pacific Northwest and begins to build a backyard survival shelter for his family. Woven through the story of Ginny and Mark’s crumbling marriage are the lives of their two neighbors, Samara, a young real estate agent still reeling from her mother’s untimely death, and Cass, a young mother struggling to regain her footing as a philosophy Ph.D. after the birth of her daughter. Broken Mountain, a dormant volcano that “rises...misty green” above the town of Clearing, Oregon, looms over them all—giving off tremors |

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Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos.

that bring on visions of alternate realities. Day’s first novel recalls the philosophical headiness of a TV show like Lost and remixes this sensibility with the chronological playfulness of Cloud Atlas or Atonement. But, until the story really takes off, the emotional stakes of the novel are low—and the prose feels flat and inert, almost like stage directions. There are more affecting moments in the second half of the book, like Samara’s attempt to buy back her mother’s effects from Goodwill: “The mound of miscellaneous things has grown almost as tall as she is. It looks heavy and dark and sad. You don’t really want all that stuff, her mother’s voice says. It was mine, and I didn’t even want it.”

With all the atmospheric mist crowding out its emotional center, this book’s heart is difficult to locate—but the occasional glimpses show promise.

A suburban drama built to leap from page to screen.

GLIDING FLIGHT

Goemans, Anne-Gine Trans. by Forest-Flier, Nancy World Editions (448 pp.) $17.99 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-64286-008-5 A teenage boy trains his pet geese surrounded by a cast of characters even more eccentric than he is.

It’s the present day, more or less, and we’re in the Netherlands. Gieles is almost 15. His mother has been gone for months on yet another vague mission of aid to Africa. Gieles and his father wait at home, with Uncle Fred, next door to an airport runway that has been steadily taking over the neighborhood. Gieles’ father works for the airport, shooing away the flocks of birds that threaten to cause accidents. Gieles’ personal hero is Capt. Sully, who miraculously landed a plane after a number of geese tangled themselves up in its engines. This is Goemans’ second novel, her first to be translated into English. It’s a funny, tenderhearted book reminiscent of Little Miss Sunshine—it has a similar cast of lost, confused, and eccentric characters. Gieles befriends an overweight older neighbor who calls himself Super Waling and who soon starts sharing with Gieles chapters of a story he’s writing. Super Waling’s story concerns his own ancestors but also the larger Dutch history of reclaiming land from water. Gieles, meanwhile, is trying to train his two pet geese to perform a secret feat of heroics so impressive it will convince his wayward mother to stay home. Goemans occasionally skates a little too close to sentimentality, and not all her characters come equally to life (Gieles’ silent, stoic father, for one), but still, the novel is a wonderful mix of humor and gentle melancholy. Gieles is a compassionate boy, and he seems to draw wounded people toward him in the same way that he draws forward his geese. We’d be lucky to have more like him in this world.

A sweet, sympathetic novel with a sense of humor.

LOST AND WANTED

Freudenberger, Nell Knopf (336 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 2, 2019 978-0-385-35268-0

A physicist at MIT receives a text from her dead best friend.

“In the first few months after Charlie died, I began hearing from her much more frequently,” Helen Clapp explains at the outset of Freudenberger’s (The Newlyweds, 2012, etc.) third novel. Charlie Boyce and Helen met freshman year at Harvard. Though they were “an upper-middleclass black girl from Brookline”—Charlie—“and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena”—Helen—their friendship took flight, powered by in-jokes, catchphrases, shared ambitions, and theories about life. After graduation, Charlie moved to LA and became a screenwriter, married a surfer, had a little girl. Helen stayed in Boston and became famous as one of the authors of the Clapp-Jonnal model “for quark gluon plasma as a dual black hole in five-dimensional space-time.” She wrote two bestselling science books and gained an endowed chair at MIT; her 7-year-old son, Jack, whose father was an anonymous sperm donor, became the “love of [her] life.” As the novel begins, Charlie has just died of lupus. Though they hadn’t spoken for over a year, Helen is now receiving texts from Charlie’s cellphone, which her husband hasn’t been able to find since she died. Strangely, they seem like they could only have been written by...Charlie? Meanwhile, said husband and daughter come to stay with Charlie’s parents in Boston; also back in town is Neel Jonnal, Helen’s college boyfriend and collaborator, now with a fiancee. Complications ensue, though not the predictable soap-opera ones you’d imagine. Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships. Each one in the novel, whether between adults, adults and children, or among children, is unique, finely calibrated, and real. The title is a line from a poem by W.H. Auden which doesn’t fully hit until the end of the book, when it takes on heart-rending poignancy.

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WHEN ALL IS SAID

Griffin, Anne Thomas Dunne Books (336 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-250-20058-7 What becomes of the brokenhearted?

That question, asked—and answered equivocally—in the Motown classic, receives a more thorough treatment in Griffin’s debut novel.

Maurice Hannigan, Irish octogenarian and curmudgeon, plans a memorable night at a hotel bar in |

Two college friends’ leisurely river trek becomes an ordeal of fire and human malice. the river

his native County Meath. As the night wears on, Maurice raises a narrative toast to each of five characters—family members all—to be followed by a solitary stay in the honeymoon suite. As Maurice’s sentimental (yet cleareyed) trip down Memory Lane unfolds, his stories recount early difficulties at a rural school as well as later-in-life successes in the business world. Each stage of his life is illustrated with a tale about one of the five, all now deceased but for a devoted, yet distant, son. The lingering presence of Maurice’s dear departed in his daily life is considerable, but it is the paradoxical absence created by the death of his wife, Sadie, that Maurice cannot adapt to and which propels his night of elegiac remembrances and his plans for thereafter.

Small-town rivalries and the lasting repercussions of Maurice’s childhood pocketing of a valuable gold coin recur throughout the five accounts. His soliloquies about these themes and surrounding events lend the novel a playlike structure and feel.

(If Milo O’Shea were still available, the most difficult casting decision could easily be made.) Some supporting characters in Maurice’s life are more vividly drawn than others, and his storytelling tends toward the meandering, but, in his defense, the tone never wavers over the course of five fine whisky-andstout toasts, a credit to the steady thread of melancholy woven throughout.

Griffin’s portrait of an Irish octogenarian provides a stage for the exploration of guilt, regret, and loss, all in the course of one memorable night.

briskly but calmly capturing the scenery in slower moments, then running full-throttle and shifting to barreling prose when danger is imminent. (The fire sounds like “turbines and the sudden shear of a strafing plane, a thousand thumping hooves in cavalcade, the clamor and thud of shields clashing, the swelling applause of multitudes....”) And though the tale is a familiar one of fending off the deadliness of the wilderness and one’s fellow man, Heller has such a solid grasp of nature (both human and the outdoors) that the storytelling feels fresh and affecting. In bringing his characters to the brink of death (and past it), Heller speaks soberly to the random perils of everyday living.

An exhilarating tale delivered with the pace of a thriller and the wisdom of a grizzled nature guide.

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THE RIVER

Heller, Peter Knopf (272 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 6, 2019 978-0-525-52187-7 Two college friends’ leisurely river trek becomes an ordeal of fire and human malice.

For his fourth novel, Heller swaps the post-apocalyptic setting of his previous book, The Dog Stars (2012), for present-day realism—in this case a river in northern Canada where Dartmouth classmates Jack and Wynn have cleared a few weeks for fly-fishing and whitewater canoeing. Jack is the sharp-elbowed scion of a Colorado ranch family, while Wynn is a more easygoing Vermonter—a divide that becomes more stark as the novel progresses—but they share a love of books and the outdoors. They’re so in sync early on that they agree to lose travel time to turn back and warn a couple they’d overheard arguing that a forest fire is fast approaching. It’s a fateful decision: They discover the woman, Maia, near death and badly injured, apparently by her homicidal husband, Pierre. When Wynn unthinkingly radios Pierre that she’s been found alive, Wynn and Jack realize they’re now targets as well. Heller confidently manages a host of tensions—Jack and Wynn becoming suspicious of each other while watching for Pierre, straining to keep Maia alive, and paddling upriver to reach civilization and escape the nearing blaze. And his pacing is masterful as well, |

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BRIDES IN THE SKY

CHEER UP, MR. WIDDICOMBE

Holladay, Cary Swallow Press/Ohio Univ. (216 pp.) $18.95 paper | Jan. 14, 2019 978-0-8040-1204-1

James, Evan Atria (288 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-5011-9961-5

In unsentimental but intimate detail, a collection of stories peels back stereotypes about the lives of women in the past. From the Old West to the 1960s, female lives that might be deemed ordinary are revealed as rich and complex.

Holladay (The Deer in the Mirror, 2013, etc.) focuses in these eight stories and one novella on girls and women trying to find their places in a world that often treats them as insignificant. A few of the stories have contemporary settings, but most take place decades or more than a century in the past. In spare but evocative prose, Holladay skillfully and subtly re-creates those earlier times while making clear their parallels to the present.

The novella, A Thousand Stings, is the story of 8-year-old Shirley, striving to make sense of the impact of the 1967 Summer of Love on her small town, from a hippie minister who upends the family church to the blossoming of her older sister. In “Operator,” set in 1954, a young woman working as a telephone operator and hoping to marry up tells us the surprising tale of what happens when she takes it upon herself to respond to an emergency call about a violent incident. Some of the best of these stories are set in the American West. In the title story, in 1854, young sisters Kate and Olivia sell their parents’ Virginia farm after marrying a pair of brothers who persuade them to join a wagon train headed for Oregon—a harrowing journey with unexpected consequences. “Comanche Queen” is based on the true story of Cynthia Parker, who was captured by Comanches as a child, found 24 years later in 1860, and returned (with one of her children) to her white family. Parker spent the rest of her life trying to get back to the Comanches; Holladay tells her heartbreaking story from the point of view of her wellintentioned but benighted white relatives. “Interview with Etta Place, Sweetheart of the Sundance Kid” is just that, a fictional talk with the mysterious woman who was the companion of outlaw Harry Longabaugh. Holladay paints her at age 92, salty and humorous, recounting a startlingly different version of the deaths of Longabaugh and Robert Parker, aka Butch Cassidy.

In a line that speaks for all the women in these stories, Place beseeches her interviewer, “Write it with me in the middle, not off to the side.”

Women and girls often overlooked by history are given compelling voices in this collection.

The Widdicombes work through a family epidemic of almost life-threatening anomie in their elaborate summer house on Bainbridge Island.

Spend a head-spinning summer with the Widdicombes and their entourage in James’ gleefully over-the-top satiric debut. Carol, the lady of the house, is set on becoming a New Age Mrs. Ramsay, hosting artists and writers in the mansion she is redecorating in a “bohemian Paris meets California cool meets Pacific Northwest Casual” style, angling for a feature in a décor magazine, winning instead comparisons to a “hotel waiting room...in Liberace’s cerebral cortex.” Her design process relies on the principles of her New Age guru and houseguest, Gracie Sloane. “Source Energy requires imagistic fuel to do the daily work of manifesting....It is to this end we pin our hopes and dreams to our Vision Boards.” Gracie is holed up at the Widdicombes’ palazzo to work on The Habit of Wildness, a book that recommends “feral romping” and “whimsical savagery.” The Widdicombe patriarch is a foulmouthed former tennis pro with so little to occupy his time he is nearly suicidal, until he mines his predicament for a self-help book of his own. Son Christopher, home from Rhode Island School of Design for the summer, is suffering even more deeply than his parents as his parody landscapes turn out to be actually gorgeous, and his cruel performance piece, “Son,” results in unprecedented familial closeness. As their personal assistant, Michelle, puts it, “When all the Widdicombes were in one room, united in antic chatter, [it’s] as though they were playing out scenes from an old screwball comedy.” Contributing to this effect are another houseguest, a drunk, pill-popping lout who pretends to be a screenwriter, and their gardener, Marvelous Matthews. The latter is a longtime disciple of Gracie Sloane who is about to see his own Vision Board really come through.

Never a dull moment.

THE ACCIDENTAL FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN

Jonasson, Jonas Trans. by Willson-Broyles, Rachel Morrow/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jan. 15, 2019 978-0-06-283855-1

The hero (of sorts) has aged a year in this wildly implausible sequel to The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Win­ dow and Disappeared (2012).

Reaching age 101 hasn’t slowed Allan Karlsson, who travels from continent to continent with his thieving friend, Julius 18

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Jonsson. A hot air balloon becomes untethered in Indonesia, and the gentlemen are soon afloat in the Indian Ocean. A North Korean bulk carrier rescues them on its way to pick up four illicit kilos of enriched uranium in Madagascar. The ship’s captain takes them back to North Korea, where they meet Kim Jong-un and convince him that Allan is a nuclear weapons expert who invented “hetisostat pressure” and that Julius is an asparagus expert. Allan gives a North Korean engineer a formula for vitamin C and smelling salts, or possibly toothpaste and bleach.

When Kim kicks the Swedes out of the country, Allan picks up a briefcase with the uranium in it—easy to do, since all North Korean briefcases look alike. Allan considers giving the uranium to Donald Trump until they meet and Allan decides that the U.S. president is “awfully close to exploding all on his own” and “should be diagnosed with something.” Then he writes a letter on three napkins to Angela Merkel, who comes across as the sanest person in the book. Early on, Allan obtains a “black tablet” that shows news, music, and naked ladies. Thus he learns more than Trump, who learns all that’s worth knowing from Fox. Allan and Julius meet a grocer/coffin-maker and help

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her sell designer coffins at a travel and tourism trade fair. Allan discovers Twitter and Facebook, Julius plants asparagus with an assist from Merkel, and a bad guy in Africa learns the hard way what lions like to eat.

Delightful nonsense that will lift a lot of spirits.

MIRACLE CREEK

Kim, Angie Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (368 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 16, 2019 978-0-374-15602-2 A Byzantine web of lies surrounds a fatal fire at an unusual treatment facility in this taut legal drama.

Kim, a former trial lawyer who turns 50 the same week her debut novel is published, does not make it easy on the reviewer charged with

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A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning. the other americans

describing her book. This is a complicated and unusual story— though when you are reading it, it will all seem smooth as silk.

The Yoos, an immigrant family from Korea, own a hyperbaric oxygen therapy tank in a town called Miracle Creek, Virginia.

(In a characteristically wry aside, we learn that “Miracle Creek didn’t look like a place where miracles took place, unless you counted the miracle of people living there for years without going insane from boredom.”) HBOT treatment, which involves sitting in a chamber breathing pure, pressurized oxygen, is believed to be effective in remediating autism and male infertility, and those conditions are what define the group of people who are in the “submarine” when a fire, clearly set by an arsonist, causes it to explode. Two people are killed; others survive paralyzed or with amputations. The novel opens as the murder trial of the mother of a boy who died in the fire begins.

As we come to understand the pressures she has been under as the single mother of a special needs child, it does not seem out of the question that she is responsible. But with all the other characters lying so desperately about what they were doing that evening, it can’t be as simple as that. With so many complications and loose ends, one of the miracles of the novel is that the author ties it all together and arrives at a deeply satisfying— though not easy or sentimental—ending.

Intricate plotting and courtroom theatrics, combined with moving insight into parenting special needs children and the psychology of immigrants, make this book both a learning experience and a page-turner. Should be huge.

Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”

A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.

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THE OTHER AMERICANS

Lalami, Laila Pantheon (320 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-5247-4715-2 A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.

In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: “My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the |

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THE PROMISE OF ELSEWHERE

committed Charlotte’s beloved sister, Phoebe, who suffers from what today might be classified as bipolar disorder, to Goldengrove, an asylum for the “curable insane.” What’s a sheltered, finishing school–educated debutante to do? Follow Nelly Bly’s notorious example and infiltrate Goldengrove under an assumed identity, that of a suicidal vagrant, while her parents think she’s off on a six-week sojourn in Newport, Rhode Island.

The novel’s backstory unspools in flashbacks, revealing that Charlotte has a crush on Henry Sidwell, the son of her father’s chief investor and creditor. The present-time action focuses on Charlotte’s search for Phoebe while chronicling life in a mental institution, which, though progressive for 1888, seems to assign treatment regimens according to class. Goldengrove is controlled by the Sidwell family, and the branch least concerned with inmate well-being has been left in charge, with the result that the asylum’s mission morphs from therapies (albeit some very primitive ones) to contracting out the patients as slave labor. Although insights about the limited choices afforded women of all classes, and suitably gothic plot twists, keep us reading, too many improbabilities disrupt the narrative flow.

The Smiths are portrayed as overanxious yet allow Charlotte to embark unchaperoned (and without luggage) on a supposed cross-country journey and make no effort to inquire about Phoebe’s welfare. Since suspense is plentiful there is no need to postpone certain disclosures, such as the identity of Charlotte’s fiance. Withholding information is particularly problematic in the first-person narrative of a protagonist as self-reflective as Charlotte. The denouement, with its concessions to period conventionality, removes any hope that this novel will deliver on its feminist leanings.

A gripping melodrama that may leave readers feeling gaslighted.

Leithauser, Brad Knopf (352 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 29, 2019 978-0-525-65503-9 A Michigan art-history professor sets off on a journey to see the world’s finest architecture and perhaps forget some of life’s trials in this keen-eyed comic work.

Five months ago, Louie Hake’s second marriage collapsed after his wife, a third-grade teacher and amateur actress, was arrested for “gross indecency” with her director in a Honda Odyssey. Three months ago, Louie learned he had an illness that could lead to blindness. So in June 2018, the 43-year-old “untenured fixture” at a third-rate Michigan college embarks on his own odyssey, “the Journey of His Life,” aiming to view great buildings in Italy, Turkey, India, and Japan.

But Louie, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 10 years earlier, is sidetracked in ways small and large, perhaps because he has stopped taking his lithium (while still taking Ativan, Wellbutrin, and trazodone). After Rome, he breaks his itinerary and heads to London, site of his first honeymoon, where he almost sleeps with a woman alone on her first honeymoon after being jilted by her fiance but persuaded by the cad’s mother (a travel agent!) to take the trip. Following London he seeks out cathedrals of ice among Greenland’s glaciers while staying with strange children and their combative father in a dilapidated inn.

Leithauser (The Art Student’s War, 2009, etc.) shifts affectingly from present-day comic encounters and observations to fraught memories (though how reliable sifted through so many meds?), from Louie’s first experience of transcendence at age 9, in the delightful opening, and again in Ely Cathedral, to first love and various brushes with shame and failure. Leithauser, a poet, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow, recalls Stanley Elkin, Wilfrid Sheed, and Richard Ford in this complex anatomy of a midlife crisis and then some.

An exceptional glimpse of the human comedy marked by sometimes-dazzling prose.

INFINITE DETAIL

Maughan, Tim MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-374-17541-2 When a young iconoclast unleashes a destructive algorithm, a group of vagabonds in Bristol struggles to come to terms with the world that follows.

You never know quite what you’re going to get with journalist Maughan’s thoughtful dystopian debut novel, which offers a blush of cyberpunk, a shakerful of Neal Stephenson, and a dash of Cory Doctorow’s speculative fiction. The book’s time frame is split in half, alternating by chapters. In “Before,” our main protagonist is hacker-turnedactivist Rushdi Manaan, who’s built an alternative community in Bristol, England, called the Croft, completely cut off from the internet and outside communication—mostly artists doing their thing. He’s gone to New York to visit his boyfriend, Chris, but he’s also working on an algorithm that could change the world, for better or worse. In “After,” the Croft is barely holding

WOMAN 99

Macallister, Greer Sourcebooks Landmark (360 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4926-6533-5 A young woman sneaks into a California insane asylum to rescue her sister in Macallister’s (Girl in Disguise, 2017, etc.) third novel.

Charlotte Smith, the 20-year-old daughter of a San Francisco shipping magnate, is about to be thrust, for her parents’ convenience, into a marriage she did not choose; the groom’s identity is not immediately revealed. Arguably worse, the Smiths have 22

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A woman seeking solitude finds much more than she bargained for on a windswept Scottish island. while you sleep

together after a group of cyberterrorists unleashes what they call a “reboot,” completely destroying every network, every cellular device, and essentially switching off the internet itself. The occupants of the Croft are a pretty ragtag group by this point, connected to the past only by artist Anika, who bridges the gap between stories. Elsewhere are Grids, who runs the black market, Tyrone, who trades in old music cassettes, and Mary, who sees ghosts through her glasses, although she’s unable to communicate with them. As a backlash against the connected world and an indictment of internet culture, it’s a terrifying scenario rife with terrorist attacks and a movement whose mantra reads in part, “With zero bandwidth opportunity is our only weapon.”

The story is a bit fractured in structure, but the characters are compelling, and it’s worth reaching the end just to find out how Maughan wraps up this Byzantine puzzle box.

An original and engaging work of kitchen-sink dystopia.

named Edward is refreshing, realistic, and very sexy. Merritt certainly knows how to build suspense and dread even if readers of the genre will find a few of the elements familiar.

Oodles of atmosphere largely make up for a bit of predictability in this gothic chiller.

TINY AMERICANS

Murphy, Devin Harper Perennial/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $16.99 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-06-285607-4 A grim portrait of the forces that derail an American family whose members find that forgiveness might take much of a lifetime.

By the time the three Thurber siblings are growing up in western New York state in the late 1970s,

WHILE YOU SLEEP

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Merritt, Stephanie Pegasus (400 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-64313-005-7

A woman seeking solitude finds much more than she bargained for— maybe even a ghost or two—on a windswept Scottish island.

Connecticut artist Zoe Adams, fleeing a failing marriage, has rented the remote, recently renovated 19th-century McBride mansion in Scotland for a month. She’s eager to settle in and paint the beautiful landscape just outside her door. Landlords Mick and Kaye are welcoming, but at the pub they also own, elderly local bookseller Charles—who’s a bit obsessed with McBride lore—tells her that the house has quite a history, one that Mick would prefer was kept on the down low. Her first night is a doozy: After falling into an exhausted sleep, she dreams of a shadow lover that brings her to new heights of passion and glimpses a dark figure on the beach looking up at the house. Then there’s the persistent singing—a haunting, achingly sad rendition of a song Kaye sang at the bar.

Most people would have been out the door and back on a plane home forthwith, but not our intrepid heroine. Zoe blames the strange happenings on fatigue and digs her heels in. Of course, the odd occurrences escalate (do they ever), and she learns from Charles that the McBride history is very strange indeed: It turns out that the man who built the house and his bride, Ailsa, were into the occult, and the circumstances surrounding her death and that of her little boy were suspect. As the danger escalates, it becomes difficult for Zoe to tell the difference between dreams and reality. And, of course, there’s a storm coming. Merritt, who also writes as S.J. Parris (Conspir­acy, 2016, etc.), fully immerses readers in her richly imagined setting and hints that there’s much more to the events leading up to Zoe’s trip. The author’s strenuous attempt to counter the unfortunate trope of the hysterical woman is laudable, and Zoe comes to relate to the misunderstood Ailsa. Zoe’s flirtation with a much younger schoolteacher |

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lyndsay faye’s new thriller “throbs with menace as it hums with wit”

Photo courtesy Anna Ty

In Lyndsay Faye’s arresting new novel, The Paragon Hotel (Jan. 8), a young white gun moll named “Nobody” Alice James speeds from New York on a westbound train, bleeding from a bullet wound. She’s nearing death’s station outside Oregon when a black Pullman porter named Max Burton takes mercy, spiriting her to Portland’s only all-black hotel for care and convalescence.

It’s 1921, and, of course, her presence draws more than medical attention.

Told by Alice in the form of “a love letter” to an unnamed recipient, The Paragon Hotel is a “double helix” of a novel, Faye says, interweaving two harrowing yet hope- Lyndsay Faye ful narratives that vigorously interrogate racial violence and oppression: Alice’s origin story, set against the rise of the Sicilian Mafia in Harlem, and her Oregon story, set against the rise of the KKK. “Part of this will disturb you,” Faye writes. “Whether it’ll be the parts you were a part of, so to speak, or the parts that are new— well, I suppose I’ll just ask after you’re finished reading.”

Fastidiously researched, rollicking, and profound, The Para­ gon Hotel is “a riveting multilevel thriller of race, sex, and mob violence that throbs with menace as it hums with wit,” Kirkus writes.

“I don’t necessarily write crime novels,” says Faye, multiEdgar Award–nominated author of The Gods of Gotham and Jane Steele. “I write novels about self-sacrifice and love and courage,” she says. “What would you do for someone if you were in a position to help them? How much would you give up? And what kind of love does it take for someone to say, I don’t care how dangerous this is for me, I’m going to risk it because you’re more important? All of my novels are about that.” —M.L.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF ABDULLAH THE COSSACK

Naqvi, H.M. Black Cat/Grove (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-8021-2894-2

A larger-than-life character whose musings, history, and adventures animate a rich, complex city.

Overweight and anxious, 70 years old, unmarried, and afflicted with terrible hemorrhoids, Abdullah, known as the Cossack, the middle son of five, has grown from a sensitive child through a wastrel youth into a self-educated, self-styled academic now burdened with a sense of mortality. His home is Currachee, or Karachi, the city in Pakistan, more specifically Sunset Lodge, the sizable house that was his childhood home, now shared with brother Babu, Babu’s wife, and their two children—the Childoos—whom Abdullah adores. Loquacious verging on garrulous, Abdullah narrates this self-mocking, wildly discursive, and often comic narrative dotted inexhaustibly with footnotes and archly grandiose chapter titles, like “On Negotiating Ontological Panic (or Down & Out).” From the welter of observations and digressions on poetry, religion, hotels, morality, metaphysics, digestion, and much more, multiple narrative strands slowly emerge. A jazz trumpeter nicknamed the Caliph of Cool, one of Abdullah’s acquaintances, asks Abdullah to take his grandson,

Megan Labrise is a staff writer and co-host of the Fully Booked podcast. The Paragon Hotel received a starred review in the Oct. 15, 2018, issue.

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the region’s economic woes have bred poverty, toughness, and cruelty. Their parents’ drinking leads to “fights that ripped us clean of our flesh and left only raw notes of nerve ends,” says Jamie, the only daughter. The boys, Lewis and Connor, play a “violent, cruel sort of football.” The mother, Catrin, is an artist whose “sadness haunted her.” Her husband, Terrance, decides the only way he can save himself and the kids from his alcoholism is to leave. In chapters spanning the years 1978 to 2018 and narrated mostly by the siblings, Murphy (The Boat Run­ner, 2017, etc.) takes disconnected snapshots of lives scarred by brutality, broken marriages, loneliness, and misfortune. Lewis goes to sea for years, with the Navy and as a merchant mariner. Connor glimpses domestic normalcy, but birds keep smashing into his picture windows. Jamie’s husband returns from military service badly wounded and then they lose a baby right after her birth.

Terrance falls in love with a woman who is bipolar, and he’s electrocuted while working, one of four nasty accidents that befall family members. He hopes he can use the financial settlement to persuade his children to visit him. There are gaps of several years between chapters and little to link them but brief references to a sibling or parent. The fragmentation is fitting but results in something that can feel more like a short story collection than a novel.

The structure is challenging, and Murphy has a tendency to overwrite in fraught moments, a risk that comes from emotional honesty and trying to make the bleak eloquent.

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THE LIBRARY OF LOST AND FOUND

Bosco, under his wing and build his character. Simultaneously, Abdullah makes a new friend, Jugnu, who, despite her gangsterboss protector, becomes the object of Abdullah’s amorous aspirations. And then there’s the family, several members of whom are in dispute with Abdullah over the future of Sunset Lodge.

A love story, a caper, a family dust-up, a farce—prizewinning Pakistani writer Naqvi’s (Home Boy, 2009) second novel offers all these things, yet they matter less than its lovingly evoked milieu, the uniquely vibrant neighborhoods and characters, culture, history, architecture, and aromas of the city.

Infused with the spirit of Tristram Shandy, a sophisticated shaggy dog story for those happy to take the slow road and its many detours.

Patrick, Phaedra Park Row Books (352 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-7783-6935-6

A mousy, lovelorn librarian uncovers her family’s well-kept secrets, finding herself in the process.

Martha Storm has spent her life in the English coastal town of Sandshift, catering to the needs and whims of others. The library’s denizens, the library manager, even her own sister, Lilian, take shameless advantage of her. In her younger days, Martha, now middle-aged, let the love of her life slip away, choosing to move in with and care for her aging parents. They’re gone now, as is her eccentric grandma Zelda, the only person who ever seemed to understand and protect her. Zelda also encouraged her gift for storytelling, which Martha has long since

THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN

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Natt och Dag, Niklas Atria (384 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5011-9677-5

In his debut novel, Natt och Dag examines the effects of a brutal murder on those who investigate it—and explores the psychological causes for the crime.

Stockholm, 1793: Sweden is still recovering from an unpopular war with Russia; some veterans, like watchman Mickel Cardell, lost limbs in the slaughter, and he was one of the lucky ones. Cardell hardly feels lucky though, nursing a fierce rage that simmers below the surface and finding solace only in drinking to excess. When Cardell is summoned by two children to examine a body they’ve found floating in putrid waters, he can barely be bothered, but the corpse, disturbingly mutilated, haunts him.

Together with lawyer Cecil Winge, who is measuring his life in days since being diagnosed with consumption and trying to stay above the rampant political corruption that is flooding the police department, Cardell doggedly pursues every lead to find the monster at the heart of this case. Along the way, he meets a desperate widow, lately escaped from the cruel fate of a workhouse; learns of a secret society of wealthy men who are offered a place to indulge their perverted desires in return for charitable donations; and picks savage fights to slake his anger at the way the world treats the poor and the downtrodden. Winge brings a certain intellectual precision to the investigation as he, too, struggles to keep his demons at bay. Natt och Dag writes sensory, horror-inducing descriptions of the lives and deaths of the poor inhabitants of Stockholm. At the same time, his characters almost spring off the page, they are so human and so fully realized. Natt och Dag doesn’t apologize for human nature, nor does he excuse our crimes and basest cruelties, but his deep dive into the dark corners of our psyches, as well as this harsh time in history, is both chilling and thought-provoking.

Relentless, well-written, and nearly impossible to put down.

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abandoned. One day, a book turns up with a curious inscription and the unmistakable suggestion that her beloved Nana may still be alive. Though Lilian pooh-poohs the discovery, Martha finds the gumption to get to the bottom of the mystery. Like the author’s previous novels (Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone, 2017, etc.), this one features a timid protagonist who must learn self-assertion. But here, charm is in short supply. Much of the action is predictable, the dialogue stilted: Children don’t sound anything like children, and the library assistant, Suki, is given to unlikely malapropisms. The author juxtaposes scenes from Martha’s childhood with the contemporary narrative, and her controlling, emotionally remote father comes off as a cardboard villain. Everything about this book is old-fashioned, so when the author inserts a couple of contemporary notes—a subplot involving a lesbian couple; a reference to Spotify—it feels jarring. The book also goes on a bit—the eleventh-hour plot turn involving the old fisherman Siegfried could have been condensed or cut.

Though the novel celebrates libraries and storytelling, the story it tells is not very satisfying.

far-fetched conceit. There are also similarities between the thematic preoccupations of the individual works. Pinsker’s characters are often loners dedicated to idiosyncratic artistic pursuits—like fiddling in space or building scale models of murder houses. They are stubborn adherents to codes of authenticity that their worlds have abandoned, and the stories’ plots tend to center around their revolts against conventional (or fantastical) social norms. Populated by anarchists, punks, survivalists, luddites, drifters, and rock-and-roll queers, Pinsker’s stories romp through their conceits with such winning charm that even the less successfully cohesive among them delight with their nuanced detail. In spite of being hampered slightly by a tendency to invest more in the worldbuilding than in the culmination of plot, Pinsker has delivered a sturdy collection in the speculative tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kelly Link but with her own indomitable voice front and center.

An auspicious start to what promises to be one wild ride of a literary career.

DAISY JONES & THE SIX

SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA

Reid, Taylor Jenkins Ballantine (368 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5247-9862-8

Pinsker, Sarah Small Beer Press (304 pp.) $17.00 paper | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-61873-155-5

What ever happened to Daisy Jones and The Six, the iconic 1970s rock band that topped the charts and sold out stadiums? It’s always been a mystery why the musicians suddenly disbanded.

Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, 2017, etc.) takes an unusual approach to dissecting the breakup of the fictional rock band by offering a narrative composed solely of transcribed interviews. At the center of the documentary-style novel is the relationship between lead singer Billy Dunne, recovering addict and aspiring family man, and sexy bad girl Daisy Jones, whose soulful voice and complex lyrics turn out to have been the missing ingredient The Six needed. When Daisy joins the band, the group catapults to fame, but not without cost. She refuses to simply fall in line and let Billy make the artistic decisions. In doing this, not only does she infuriate the band leader, she also sets an example for other members who are only too happy to start voicing their own demands. Over time the tension between Billy and Daisy grows increasingly more complicated, threatening to take its toll on Billy’s home life. He is fiercely loyal to his wife, Camila, while also being fully cognizant of his weaknesses—a torturous combination for Billy. Other band members have their own embroilments, and Daisy’s bestie, disco diva Simone Jackson, enhances the cast, but the crux of the story is about how the addition of Daisy to The Six forever changes the chemistry of the band, for better and worse. There is great buildup around answering the big question of what happened at their final concert together, though the revelation is a letdown. Further, the documentary-style writing detracts from the storytelling; it

In her debut collection, widely lauded author/musician Pinsker zips through road trips, space ships, speculative futures, and parallel presents with stories that are equal parts hard-wired sci-fi theory and hardtraveling rock-and-roll attitude.

The 13 short stories that make up this collection range from near novella length—“Our Lady of the Open Road,” “Wind Will Rove,” and the phenomenal “And Then There Were (N-One)”—to the very brief—“The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced,” which clocks in at a little under three pages. Their subject matter is equally diverse. In “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” the main character’s mangled arm has been replaced with a “Brain-Computer Interface” prosthetic which believes itself to be a road somewhere in Colorado; in “The Low Hum of Her,” a family undertakes an Ellis Island–esque immigration accompanied by an AI mechanical replicate of their departed Bubbe hidden in the steamer trunk. With stories that jump from divergent pasts to possible futures and include main characters of all age ranges, genders, and social backgrounds, it would be easy for the book to become disjointed. However, Pinsker’s undeniable talent for familiarizing characters caught in deeply unfamiliar situations (a treehouse that hides an alien race’s architectural salvation; an 18th-century seaport town beset by sirens; folk musicians on a generational star ship whose destination they will not live to see) brings a uniting element of empathy to even the most 26

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Guatemalan exile Rey Rosa borrows elements from his own life in a short novel of futuristic alienation. chaos, a fable

CHAOS, A FABLE

often feels gimmicky, as though the author is trying too hard for a fresh and clever approach. This is a shame because her past novels, traditionally told, have been far more engaging.

Despite some drawbacks, an insightful story that will appeal to readers nostalgic for the 1970s.

Rey Rosa, Rodrigo Trans. by Gray, Jeffrey AmazonCrossing (200 pp.) $14.95 | Feb. 26, 2019 978-1-5420-9035-3

TOMORROW THERE WILL BE SUN

Reinhardt, Dana Pamela Dorman/Viking (288 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-525-55796-8

A secluded beach, luxurious villa, discreet servants, and bottomless margaritas ought to spell a week of paradise for Jenna Carlson, her family, and friends.

Yet secret phone calls are just the first

sign of trouble.

Vacationing in beautiful Puerto Vallarta to celebrate her husband Peter’s 50th birthday, Jenna is eager to have some time to relax with her teenage daughter, Clementine, and maybe finish her currently stalled YA novel. What with her bout of stage 1 breast cancer and Peter’s intense work masterminding the online ordering app for his startup, Boychick Bagels, it’s been a difficult year. The Carlsons are joined by Peter’s business partner, Solly Solomon, his second wife, Ingrid, their 5-yearold son, Ivan, and Malcolm, Solly’s 17-year-old son from his first marriage to Maureen, who was one of Jenna’s best friends until Solly dumped her. A bit intimidated by Ingrid’s youth and easy glamour, Jenna dreads having to deal with her trendy food obsessions and her weird son. Now that Ingrid has dropped jewelry designing for YA book writing, Jenna’s also afraid she’ll be forced to read Ingrid’s latest draft. When she’s not dodging Ingrid, Jenna is spying on Clementine, hoping to find clues in her texts to her boyfriend, Sean, as to how far their relationship has gone, and Jenna’s suspicions ratchet further up when Malcolm enters the picture. Reinhardt deftly manipulates the villa in paradise into a gothic labyrinth, and Jenna’s curiosity propels her into secrets perhaps best left alone. Why did Malcolm have to switch schools in his senior year? Who is Peter taking mysterious calls from at dinner? Is Solly having another affair? And who is the beautiful woman in the next villa?

A tense mystery driven by maternal and wifely anxieties.

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Guatemalan exile Rey Rosa (Dust on Her Tongue, 1992) borrows elements from his own life in a short novel of futuristic alienation.

On leaving his homeland, Rey Rosa immigrated to the U.S. but then departed for Morocco, where he came into the orbit of Paul Bowles, his first translator. Bowles turns up in this novel as John Field, “the American artist and critic who’d spent the last half of his life in Tangier.” Field has befriended many people in his time, among them a Mexican writer who, many years after Field’s death, is enlisted by old friend Mohammed Zhrouni to help him tell a story he has recorded on the now ancient medium of the cassette—but also to decipher the contents of a memory card. Tapes and card help provide a circumstantial portrait of Field and Mohammed but more of Mohammed’s young son, Abdelkrim, a genius who—a crow tells Mohammed, for this is, after all, a fable—“has a special...destiny in store for him.” Mohammed wonders if the crow said “spatial” instead of “special,” and there’s a reason for that. Abdelkrim, for his part, fulfills both prophecies, though in a way that is perhaps not very realistic—as noted, this is a fable, so that’s to be forgiven—and that also pointedly criticizes the way in which Muslims are perceived in post–9/11 America. “Time does not exist,” Rey Rosa repeatedly says, but yet it passes: Abdelkrim’s dream to become an American and, more than that, an American astronaut is thwarted, but he manages to find his way into space anyway even as Field enters eternity “a week before the Americans brought down Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.” Rey Rosa’s story tackles questions of religion, anomie, and, ultimately, what the authorities would deem terrorism: Asked whether he has become an anarchist, Abdelkrim answers, “Antiarms more than anything else,” for which he has just the remedy.

Allusive and metaphorical, with a nicely unpredictable close that offers a flicker of hope for humankind.

THE ALTRUISTS

Ridker, Andrew Viking (320 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-525-52271-3 A Midwestern family struggles to rewrite its flawed history.

The proverbial road paved with good intentions runs through the quintessentially Middle American city of St. Louis in this acute debut novel. After nearly 20 years on the faculty of wealthy private Danforth University, Arthur Alter remains a disgruntled non–tenure |

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track engineering professor. Two years a widower, at age 65 he’s entangled in a joyless relationship with a colleague, a German history professor young enough to be his daughter. His children, introverted Ethan and generous Maggie, still mourn the passing of their mother, Francine, a family and couples therapist, while they find themselves adrift in their own lives. Ethan’s deep in debt in Brooklyn after having left his consulting job, and Maggie works at an assortment of undemanding odd jobs for her Queens neighbors. With his wife’s income gone and his teaching load slashed, Arthur, notorious for his miserliness, now faces the prospect of losing his heavily mortgaged home in an upscale suburb. His financial bailout scheme involves inviting his children home for a long weekend and inveigling them to part with a portion of their inheritance from Francine, a generous bequest she bestowed on them while intentionally bypassing Arthur. The younger Alters’ return goes anything but the way Arthur plans or the children expect. But amid the tragicomic misadventures that befall each of the family members during that visit, Ridker reveals how the roots of Arthur’s tightfistedness lie in a well-intentioned, three decades–old effort to apply his engineering skills to solving the sanitation problems of rural Zimbabwe. Ridker meticulously peels away the scabs that have grown over the wounds of the surviving Alters, laying bare, with compassion and piercing wit, the long-simmering antagonisms that haunt both father and children. At the same time, he gently hints at a way forward for this decidedly imperfect, but oddly appealing, family.

A painfully honest, but tender, examination of how love goes awry in the places it should flourish.

near summer’s close the swimmers arrive upon a strange shoal far from shore and, while exploring it, Mrs. Abel somehow disappears. Twenty-ish years later, the narrator—now a successful novelist who lives with his wife and two daughters in Oregon— is reconstructing that summer, trying to get closer to who he was, and who Mrs. Abel was, and what happened that night on the water. To do so, he pours over the artifacts left behind by that time—photographs and artworks frequent the text, as do letters to and from his ex-girlfriend. He floats in a sensory deprivation tank, studying “the past, the future, [and] the hypothetical...hidden beneath the surface” of his thoughts. He consults Rilke, Burchfield, and Chekhov, among many others. And, most significantly, he writes—thus creating out of life’s artifacts a new artifact, this book, which serves as keepsake for both Mrs. Abel and the narrator’s youth, referring eyes back upon them across the years.

Part page-turner and part aesthetic treatise, Rock’s (Spells, 2017, etc.) latest is, like the currents of the Great Lakes, subtle and haunted, deeply complex and “quietly... sinister”; his readers, like his swimmers, ought to know “that the currents of the subsurface are likely to be moving.”

CRUCIBLE

Rollins, James Morrow/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $28.99 | Jan. 22, 2019 978-0-06-238178-1 No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Especially when there’s AI involved in the brouhaha.

Blame it on Umberto Eco: For every one, soaring Name of the Rose, there are a dozen books of Da Vinci Code depths, with medieval voodoo tangled up with modern steely-jawed heroes, priests and demons, international espionage, and all the rest. Rollins (The Bone Labyrinth, 2015, etc.) has a corner on part of this market with his Sigma Force franchise, in which steelyjawed Cmdr. Gray Pierce and his sidekicks stalk the world searching for and neutralizing evildoers. Apparently the bad guys who steal his pregnant S.O. (significant other and/or special operative, as you will) didn’t get the memo that Gray is not to be trifled with, but then they’re no slouches: They’re bent on—well, world conquest, maybe, but certainly on getting rid of their enemies, a bunch of witchy women with Ph.D.’s and feminist ideas who hang out in—or under, that is—“the only existing example of a medieval prison in all of Portugal.” Not to be outdone in the subterranean department, the bad guys, who wear priestly collars and veils and all but are still whiz-kid hackers, have a clubhouse underneath Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris (“Of course, the Crucible would pick such a spot”), while Gray and his cohort tootle around on the D.C. Metro and suchlike venues assembling the wherewithal to go kick clerical butt, realtime and virtual. Chopsocky, MRI scans, tumbling helicopters, incunabula, grimoires, USB-C cables—Rollins pulls out all the stops in a tale that hints at not just Eco, but also Stieg Larsson in

THE NIGHT SWIMMERS

Rock, Peter Soho (272 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-64129-000-5

“Part of my pleasure of swimming in open water, especially at night, is that it makes me afraid.”

In the summer of 1994, our unnamed narrator, a 26-year-old aspiring writer, meets Mrs. Abel, the mysterious young widow with whom he voyages by night through the swells and currents of Lake Michigan. To the narrator, and to the summer community on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, Mrs. Abel is an enigma: She’d been married to Mr. Abel, whose name she wears like a keepsake throughout the novel, for less than a month before his death, and the cabin that she’s inherited is so sparsely decorated that everything in it—her husband’s now-scentless clothes, a wooden bird carved by a friend, a painting by Charles E. Burchfield of a forest fire marching toward a cabin—seems to possess, in the narrator’s eyes, the significance of an artifact, of objects kept because they serve as mementos of missing people or missing times. By swimming together at night, Mrs. Abel and the narrator build a secret relationship out of their shared passion—but the relationship ends prematurely when one night 28

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A debut novelist finds that his book has been acquired by Jackie O. the editor

THE EDITOR

making one of its principals a brilliant young woman programmer who is probably better suited to the Castile of El Cid than Capitol Hill but still knows how to use smart machines the right way. Or does she? It depends on which side of the Witch Hammer one falls....

Another mindless entertainment to fill time better spent with Monty Python—or Indiana Jones.

Rowley, Steven Putnam (320 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 2, 2019 978-0-525-53796-0

BABY OF THE FAMILY

Roosevelt, Maura Dutton (464 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5247-4317-8

The great-granddaughter of Eleanor and Franklin writes about members of a fictional elite family struggling to shape their individual identities.

When Roger Whitby Jr. dies, his many children from his first three marriages (family tree provided) discover that he has bequeathed the little left of the Whitby fortune to his fourth wife’s son, Nick, whom he adopted. Although the plot is ostensibly about inheritance, the older, barely fleshed-out nonheirs are remarkably nonchalant about getting nothing; only Shelley, from marriage No. 3, and Brooke, from No. 2, fear losing the family houses where they were raised and still live, though it seems unlikely that Nick, unreachable after having participated in an environmental protest gone awry, will be greedy. The true subject here, developed through memories of childhoods and marriages, is the ambivalent love Nick, Shelley, and Brooke feel for Roger, who abandoned each differently. By the time the 21-yearold Nick eventually shows up at 22-year-old Shelley’s Upper West Side brownstone, she is in a creepy sexual liaison with her new employer, Kamal, a blind Egyptian architect. Nick begins a romance with Kamal’s naïve, intellectual daughter, whom he involves in his Occupy Wall Street–type activity. Meanwhile, in Boston, 37-year-old nurse Brooke wants to keep her Beacon Hill house for the baby she’s conceived sleeping with a nouveau riche Italian-American to avoid acknowledging she might be gay.

Brooke’s disdain for her sex-mate reflects Whitby snobbery and perhaps the author’s—Nick’s pointedly middle-class mother is also portrayed as crassly mercenary compared to Roger’s previous aristocratic wives, while Nick’s lefty friends are beyond the pale. Given the Whitby kids’ claims to shun their privileged advantages, the frequent references to fancy schools and Martha’s Vineyard vacations wear thin. The Whitbys increasingly come across as spoiled, self-absorbed, and ultimately trivial poor rich kids.

Roosevelt knows her terrain, but it remains unclear if she meant this family portrait to be as unflattering as it is.

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A debut novelist finds that his book has been acquired by Jackie O. Rowley (Lily and the Octopus, 2016) likes a shot of fantasy with his fiction— last time it was a malignant sea creature attached to the head of a dachshund, this time it’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her day job. A young gay writer named James Smale is sent by his agent to Doubleday to take a meeting about his book, with no advance warning that the editor who wants to acquire his manuscript is the former first lady. As this novel is already on its way to the screen, one can only hope that the first few scenes come off better on film than they do on paper—here, the brio of the premise is almost buried under the narrator’s disbelief and awkwardness and flatfooted jokes, first in the meeting with Jackie, then when he goes home to share the news with his lover, Daniel. James’ novel, The Quarantine, deals with a troubled mother-son relationship; as Jackie suspects, it has autobiographical roots. But James’ real mother is extremely unhappy with being written about, and the two are all but estranged. Mrs. Onassis insists, in her role as editor, that he go home and deal with this, because he won’t be able to fix the ending of his book until he does. So he does go home, and long-kept family secrets are spilled, and everyone gets very upset. As a result, he apparently fixes The Quarantine, though as much can’t be said for The Editor.

Even if you have Jackie Kennedy—and this is a particularly sensitive and nuanced portrait of her—you still have to have a plot.

WOMEN

Sebastian, Mihail Trans. by Ó Ceallaigh, Philip Other Press (192 pp.) $15.99 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-59051-954-7 A young man’s romantic and sexual exploits are examined from various angles in this novel first published in 1933.

In the first section of Sebastian’s (For Two Thousand Years, 2017) second novel to appear in English, a young Romanian medical student arrives at a guesthouse in the Alps. He has just completed his exams in Paris and has come to take a rest. Instead, he becomes involved with three different women at the guesthouse—romantically and sexually—and, all in all, there’s little rest to be had. His name is Stefan Valeriu. In the novel’s second section, time shifts forward and perspective shifts sideways. Valeriu is now narrating—not his own exploits, this time, but the sad situation of a girl he once knew, with “an impoverished, joyless life.” The novel shifts twice |

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BEFORE SHE KNEW HIM

more after this: First there is a letter to Valeriu from a woman to whom he has apparently proclaimed his love; and, last of all, Valeriu returns to the first person to describe an earlier affair with a former acrobat. Sections are titled after the women they describe: Émilie, Maria, Arabela, and so on. But even though the novel takes as its main subject the romantic entanglements of its main character, there is something else, too, seething beneath this current. The novel was written in the years between the two world wars, and though no explicit reference to politics or history is ever made, the shadows of the wars are felt quite forcefully in each discrete section. Sebastian himself was a Jew from Romania who wrote openly about his experiences. Eventually, his friends abandoned him. He survived the Second World War only to die in a freak accident in 1945. Sebastian’s other, perhaps stronger, work deals more directly with the legacy of the wars, but this novel is no throwaway, either: It’s an edgy account of sexuality, desire, and the strictures of contemporary relationships.

Not quite as dynamic as Sebastian’s more explicitly political work, the novel is still a compelling portrait of desire in its many convoluted manifestations.

Swanson, Peter Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-06-283815-5 The latest thriller from Swanson (All the Beautiful Lies, 2018, etc.) is a twisty, fast-paced tale that depicts picket-fence suburbia’s seamy, murderous underside.

Hen and her husband, Lloyd, have just left Boston for the tranquil burbs, and things are looking up for her. After a psychotic break sparked by the unsolved murder of a neighbor, Hen is on the mend, her bipolar disorder under control, her optimism resurgent, her career as an illustrator of dark YA books taking off. At a meet and greet she and her husband hit it off, or think they should, with their next-door neighbors Matthew and Mira, the only other childless couple nearby. But when they cross the driveway for a barbecue, the potential for neighborly coziness curdles. Hen notices a little fencing trophy on a shelf in Matthew’s office and recognizes it—or wonders if she recognizes it— as one of the mementos the police reported was stolen from the murder scene in the city. When Hen recalls that the man killed was once a student at the prep school where Matthew teaches history, Hen grows suspicious of Matthew—and starts to stalk him. Is this a break in the case or the beginning of another fit of paranoia? And even if it’s the former, who will believe Hen’s suspicions given her earlier obsession with the case and the hospitalization it led to? Swanson is at his best in exploring the kinship—or what some see as the kinship—between artist and killer, one of the themes of Swanson’s great model and forebear, Patricia Highsmith. Swanson isn’t quite up to Highsmith’s lofty mark, and he succumbs toward the end to a soap opera–like plot-twist-too-far...but for the most part, this novel delivers.

A dark, quick-moving, suspenseful story stuffed full of psychological quirk and involution.

GRACE AFTER HENRY

Shortall, Eithne Putnam (384 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-525-53786-1

A young woman in Dublin handles a confusing and surprising gain after a deep and personal loss.

After her partner, Henry, dies in a bike accident, Grace spends nearly three months emotionally and physically shut down. Then, with lots of prodding from her parents and best friend, she attempts the barest requirements of living again: going to her job as chef at a local cafe, visiting Henry’s grave, and furnishing the house the two were buying when he died. She thinks she sees Henry everywhere and has to convince herself it’s just her grieving brain playing tricks on her, until he shows up, on her doorstep, in the flesh. But this isn’t Henry, either. It’s Andy, the twin brother from Down Under no one knew existed. Once the initial shock has dropped to a simmer, Grace allows herself to find comfort in Andy’s similarities to Henry while Andy finds comfort seeing the type of life he might have had if his restless, adoptive single mom hadn’t moved him to Australia. They both dabble in magical thinking, teasing at this soap-opera setup to see if it might go in the most soap-opera direction. But Grace (who narrates the bulk of the book) has a straightforward, often droll tone, and Shortall in general focuses on small, daily details over sweeping, dramatic ones. This is a blessing and a curse; it tempers the high drama of the plot into something sweet and (almost) believable. But in the dance between the two she loses sight of the story of grief, which deserves more attention.

Strongest in its depiction of modern Dublin characters and their entertaining interactions, muddled when it comes to the meat of the story.

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WOMEN TALKING

Toews, Miriam Bloomsbury (240 pp.) $24.00 | Apr. 2, 2019 978-1-63557-258-2

An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture from the author of All My Puny Sorrows (2014).

The Molotschna Colony is a fundamentalist Mennonite community in South America. For a period of years, almost all the women and girls have awakened to find themselves bloodied and bruised, with no memories of what might have happened in the night. At first, they assumed that, in their weakness, they were attracting demons to their beds. Then they learn that, in fact, they have been drugged and raped repeatedly by men of the colony. It’s only when one woman, Salome, |

Vann draws on his own family’s history for this affecting novel of a man grappling with deep depression. halibut on the moon

attacks the accused that outside authorities are called—for the men’s protection. While the rest of the men are away in the city, arranging for bail, a group of women gather to decide how they will live after this monstrous betrayal. The title means what it says: This novel is an account of two days of discussion, and it is riveting and revelatory. The cast of characters is small, confined to two families, but it includes teenage girls and grandmothers and an assortment of women in between. The youngest form an almost indistinguishable dyad, but the others emerge from the formlessness their culture tries to enforce through behavior, dress, and hairstyle as real and vividly compelling characters.

Shocked by the abuse they have endured at the hands of the men to whom they are supposed to entrust not only their bodies, but also their souls, these women embark on a conversation that encompasses all the big questions of Christian theology and Western philosophy—a ladies-only Council of Nicea, Plato’s Symposium with instant coffee instead of wine. This surely is not the first time that these women are thinking for themselves, but it might be the first time they are questioning the male-dominated system that endangered them and their children, and it is clearly the first time they are working through the practical ramifications of what they know and what they truly believe. It’s true that the narrator is a man, but that’s of necessity. These women are illiterate and therefore incapable of recording their thoughts without his sympathetic assistance.

Stunningly original and altogether arresting.

their surname. What endures the most from this novel is the sense of desperation that emerges from its central character—a feeling that’s at once profoundly alienated from everything and everyone around it and heartbreakingly tactile.

A moving portrait of a family dealing with loss before it happens and of the harrowing ways depression can disrupt countless lives.

ABEL AND CAIN

von Rezzori, Gregor Trans. by Dollenmayer, David & Neugroschel, Joachim & Yarbrough, Marshall New York Review Books (882 pp.) $22.95 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-68137-325-6

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Von Rezzori’s vast roman à clef The Death of My Brother Abel, first published in English in 1985, is given extra heft with the addition of a couple of hundred pages of posthumous postscript—pre-

quel, that is.

In the first iteration of his novel, von Rezzori opens with a provocative scene in which a streetwalker tells the secret for dealing with the inevitable what’s-a-nice-girl-like-you question: “I’ve got six different versions in stock,” she says, “all of them very believable.” So it is with all the players in this often perplexing book, to which has been added Cain: The Last Manu­ script, published in German in 2001: The voices shift among the protagonist, the author Aristide Subics, and his editor, Schwab, whose name is similar enough to provoke suspicion; from time to time other characters take over. Subics is working away over a mountain of notes on a story of his own, recalling the challenge of an American agent: “Okay then, tell me a story, if possible in three short sentences.” That’s impossible, of course: Just getting to a short period of Subics’ childhood in a part of Romania later swallowed up by the Soviet Union takes pages to tease out, and then there’s the rise of Hitler, the Anschluss, the war, and all that comes after, from the “denunciations, self-abasement before the victors, begging for cigarettes and chocolate, turning tricks for nylons, and so on” of the Occupation to the economic miracle of the 1960s. Throughout, von Rezzori’s characters are ironic and elusive: if Cain killed Abel, then brother after brother has had no trouble killing in the countless generations since, and for all the usual reasons: “I mean, everyone for his ideals, of course. For the Folk and Fatherland. For his traditions.” Von Rezzori’s book is episodic, with stories sometimes breaking off in the middle, always with an odd poetry (“and I watched the grand spectacle purely through indolently squinting eyes”) that finds beauty even in the most terrible destruction.

A challenging consideration of a murderous history by a knowing witness.

HALIBUT ON THE MOON

Vann, David Grove (272 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-8021-2893-5

Vann draws on his own family’s history for this affecting novel of a man grappling with deep depression.

Jim, the protagonist of this psychologically detailed novel, is a man who’s reached the limits of his life. He’s deeply in debt to the IRS, his marital history is bleak, and he’s contemplating suicide. As the novel opens, he’s traveled from Alaska to California to spend time with his family—notably, his younger brother, Gary, who seems to have succeeded in all of the areas where Jim has come up short. “Jim envies his younger brother, not only his youth and looks and the women but also his simplicity,” Vann writes early on, and this neatly establishes a contrast between the two men. As Jim revisits people who have known him for much of his life, a gradual tension emerges in their interactions. Is he there to seek relief for his depression or to cut ties with those closest to him, pushing them away before the end of his life? Given its subject matter, this is not an easy read. Vann’s portrait of a man convinced that his course of self-destruction is inevitable makes for numerous chilling and unsettling moments. There is also an element of autofiction present here: One of Jim’s children shares the author’s name, and Jim and Gary spend time discussing the origins of |

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THE BIRD KING

THE QUINTLAND SISTERS

Wilson, G. Willow Grove (416 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-8021-2903-1

Wood, Shelley Morrow/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $15.99 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-06-283909-1

After several years writing comic books, the author of World Fantasy Award–winning novel Alif the Unseen (2012) returns to long-form fiction with a lovely fable sent during the final days of the Reconquista.

Restless, angry 17-year-old Fatima has had a relatively cosseted existence as a slave in the Alhambra palace harem, serving the sultan of Granada as his favorite concubine and his mother as her close companion. But as the sultan prepares to surrender his lands to Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of the recently united Spain, all that is thrown into upheaval when Fatima inadvertently betrays her beloved friend Hassan to the Inquisition, which believes him to be a sorcerer. In fact, Hassan is a gay cartographer with a narrow but powerful magic: He can create new shortcuts between places with his maps as well as draw locations he has never seen, including some which don’t become real until he draws them. Fatima and Hassan make a desperate escape, aided by capricious jinn, but the Inquisition seems always to be just behind them. Their only possible refuge might lie in the fragment of an old poem the two companions have pored over since childhood, about the mysterious island of Qaf, hidden refuge of the king of birds. The worldbuilding is wellconstructed but is primarily a support for Wilson’s chief focus on character, specifically on Fatima’s growing understanding of the nature of freedom and responsibility. Wilson also delicately explores the nature of a love outside the physical through the complex and very genuine relationship shared by Fatima and Hassan. And she has some interesting things to imply about the nature of evil, particularly how it’s personified through Luz, the Dominican lay sister who serves as an Inquisitor for the Holy Office. Partway through the story, Luz becomes possessed by a dark creature personified as a mote in her eye; it might be simpler to believe that it’s the mote that goads her toward torment and murder, but she joined the Inquisition and carried with her the implements of torture long before the possession. She has the potential to become a better person, but future deeds can’t really blot out her past ones.

A thoughtful and beautiful balance between the real and the fantastic.

Summoned in May 1934, to help the local midwife deliver a child two months premature, Emma Trimpany, just 17 years old herself, witnesses the remarkable births of five tiny babes: the Dionne Quintuplets.

Wood’s debut novel tells the story of the first recorded successful delivery of quintuplets, to Elzire and Oliva Dionne in rural Canada. Through journal entries, Emma chronicles the girls’ lives from the frightening first days, when the tiny, fragile babies struggled to survive every hour, through their childhoods as well as Emma’s own blossoming into a nurse and young woman. Already raising five children, the Dionnes live on a farm that Dr. Allan Dafoe pronounces unfit for the quints. Initially, Dafoe transforms the Dionne’s kitchen into a sterile space with incubators shipped in from Chicago; eventually, a brand-new hospital is built, devoted exclusively to the quints and their medical team, across the street from the farmhouse. In addition to recording the girls’ developmental progress, Emma traces the comings and goings of various nurses, some of whom leave under shadowy circumstances. Telling the tale through Emma’s perspective enables Wood to capture not only the fiery conflict between the provincial, French-speaking Dionnes and the medical team (with its well-meaning but arrogant emphasis on cleanliness and what’s best technically for the children), but also Emma’s uncomfortable sympathies. The conflict escalates as Oliva Dionne and Dr. Dafoe lock horns in a series of lawsuits, with Dionne trying to assert parental rights and both sides (plus the Canadian government) trying to capitalize upon the quints’ popularity through advertising and movie contracts.

Meanwhile, as Emma herself must decide whether mothering the quints is worth giving up her dreams of art school, she is headed for a cataclysmic change of her own.

A charming and well-researched, if long-winded, tale of love and survival.

THE CLUB

Würger, Takis Trans. by Collins, Charlotte Grove (224 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-8021-2896-6 A young man infiltrates a secret university club and discovers a dangerous secret.

German journalist Würger’s debut novel begins with his protagonist, Hans, describing his idyllic childhood: “When I think back to the earliest years of my life it is always late summer.” A soft and

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A lethal fire sends the French king into a state, forcing the queen once more to seek sleuthing help from a scribe. in the shadow of the enemy

curious boy, Hans lives with his parents in their home in a forest—a happy arrangement that ends quite suddenly. Years later, Hans—who is starved for friendship and family—receives an invitation from his aunt to attend St. John’s College, Cambridge. The offer comes with strings attached: Hans will have to investigate the Pitt Club, one of the oldest institutions on campus. The club is full of rich, privileged young men well-versed in secrets, debauchery, and something far more sinister. Aided by Charlotte, a fellow student, Hans is introduced into the world of the elite. Comprised of many different voices, the novel feels Greek chorus–esque. Some points of view only appear once (i.e., a shopkeeper’s) but others run through the entirety of the novel (i.e, that of Josh, an angry, toxic Pitt Club member who adores Hans). Made up of mostly short, uncomplicated sentences, the writing is also overwhelmingly evocative at times: “I told them how oranges tasted of adventure, and how the soft hair at the nape of girls’ necks sometimes looked like candyfloss.” While the crime at the novel’s center is not surprising, it serves as a catalyst for Würger’s interesting ruminations on class, violence, power, wealth, and masculinity. Many of these themes are also explored through boxing as Hans tries out for the university’s team. Boxing runs through the novel like a heartbeat—revealing the dangers of violent masculine camaraderie with every scene. The novel’s complicated ending touches on the problems of justice and redemption: who gets it, who deserves it, and its human cost.

A sparse, cutting debut in which violence begets violence begets healing.

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close, Casey convinces April to sneak into town to save Kenny’s life. The bigger hurdle is getting April to Rockton without alerting the town council, especially Phil, its hidebound new leader. Rockton is a planned community of residents hiding from outside threats, but the town’s pay-to-play rules mean that some residents are perpetrators of crimes hiding out to avoid paying their debts to society. After April comes to town, Casey and Dalton discover a man camping out in the surrounding woods. Mark Garcia identifies himself as a U.S. Marshal on the hunt for a Rockton resident he won’t identify except to say that the fugitive’s psychopathic tendencies will endanger residents.

Casey and Dalton, uncertain whether it’s riskier to work with Garcia or against him, are unable to wrest the resident’s name from Garcia before he’s shot and killed. Now Casey must work with Dalton to counteract that threat to Rockton as she tries to forge a path to peace with April.

Building on the hidden world she’s built, Armstrong focuses less on the moody atmosphere earlier installments (This Fallen Prey, 2018, etc.) have favored than on the politics and interpersonal dynamics of her metaphorical lions and lambs—though it seems like everyone here is a bit of a lion.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE ENEMY

Bayard, Tania Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-7278-8843-3

A lethal fire sends the French king into a state, forcing the queen once more to seek sleuthing help from a scribe who straddles the royal and everyday worlds.

Though merely a woman and not even a member of the court, Christine de Pizan has long been admitted to the presence of Queen Isabeau, a privilege that was invaluable when Christine discovered the identity of a murderer close to the royals (In the Presence of Evil, 2018).

Inspired by Christine’s success with the previous investigation, Queen Isabeau once again relies on the scribe’s resourcefulness when she calls upon Christine to begin another informal investigation. The king hasn’t been himself since a recent ball, when a torch thrown from the musicians’ area killed four men. The queen, who doesn’t believe the rumors blaming the once-popular Duke of Orléans, wants to learn the true identity of the killer. Much to her mother Francesca’s horror, Christine seeks support from her clever friend Marion, whose excellent connections depend at least partly on her work as a prostitute. But Francesca doesn’t have much social capital with Christine after bringing home a strange woman who appears determined to antagonize Christine’s otherwise well-behaved children. The woman, who Francesca explains is Martin du Bois’ wife, Klara, appears to have been abandoned by her husband. So Christine and Marion add trying to locate him to their to-do list. Christine suspects that the secret of the king’s sorry state and the fatal

m ys t e r y WATCHER IN THE WOODS

Armstrong, Kelley Minotaur (368 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-250-15991-5

A Canadian town whose population includes people running from criminals and criminals running from the consequences of their crimes is infiltrated by a U.S. Marshal bent on bringing an unnamed resident to justice.

Rockton Detective Casey Butler is on an unusual new mission. Usually something of a maverick working alone to solve crimes, Casey has relied on the help of her sheriff, Eric Dalton, who’s not only her technical superior and frequent investigative collaborator, but the first man she’s ever committed to living with or calling her boyfriend. The two leave the safe haven of Rockton, a secret town in the Yukon, to recruit Casey’s sister, April, a gifted doctor, to operate on Kenny, a resident who’s been badly injured. Although Casey and April have never been |

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torch-throwing may lie in the queen’s inner circle of misfits, who are largely ignored by others in the court. She makes a special effort to get to know Alips, the queen’s dwarf, who may be the key to unraveling the mystery.

Historical details drive this period puzzle, whose heroine provides a steady presence against a backdrop of characters constantly fighting against their time and stations.

Katelyn Hamm, Joe’s counterpart in Shell County, is saddened and angry to see a herd of terrified mule deer fleeing, some to their deaths, from an unregistered drone aircraft that disappears in the direction of Twelve Sleep County. This isn’t the first time locals have spotted the drone, and Katelyn wants Joe to track down its owner. Joe obligingly traces the rogue aircraft to the compound of Bill Hill, who gets him just as furious as Katelyn by freely admitting the offense, crumpling up the citation Joe gives him, refusing to follow him to the sheriff ’s office, and assuring Joe that he’ll never have to answer the charge—and that Joe himself will be in trouble if he presses too hard. Trouble promptly arrives in the form of two FBI agents from the nation’s capital who warn first Katelyn, then Joe, off the case, which they consider no big deal compared to the threat against thousands of lives—“maybe tens of thousands....

Maybe millions”—they’re handling but refuse to identify.

Meanwhile, four professional killers, including a particularly fatal female, are headed to Twelve Sleep County from Arizona, where they’ve just killed their latest target, his wife, and a friend who happened to have stopped by. Squeezed between the feds and the Wolf Pack, a murderous arm of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joe will himself be targeted, along with Katelyn, the FBI agents, the local sheriff, his wife’s best friend, and his own friend the outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski, for elimination before the killers can move on to their real target.

It’s obvious where all this is going, but Box gets you there, in one of most tightly wound tales, with more thrills than a snowy road on a steep mountain and more authority than the governor of Wyoming.

A DEADLY TURN

Booth, Claire Severn House (288 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-7278-8845-7 When Missouri Sheriff Hank Worth lets six teenagers in a speeding car off with a warning instead of a ticket, he thinks he’s helping them learn a lesson— until a crash minutes later kills them all.

Worth’s guilt is hardly the only problem he’ll cope with in Booth’s latest installment (Another Man’s Ground, 2017, etc.) set in and near Branson, Missouri.

He learns that one of the passengers in the car is using a false identity. Then he learns that another local teen has suffered a near-fatal fall the same night as the crash. When a murder is also committed, Worth and his team will have to work with— or despite—the presence of other law enforcement agencies.

While Worth’s chief deputy, Sheila, is more than capable, young deputy Sam is still unsure of himself following an earlier incident. The plot unfolds too slowly, especially at first, when all the victims’ families are visited and multiple names are introduced. When another plot tangent involving an aged country music star is included, the reader can only agree with a deputy, who says “OK, I’m not really sure what’s going on.”

But if the author’s plotting is confusing, her ability to sketch believable characters is strong, making us understand people, especially superstrong and cool Sheila. One does wish that Hank would move on a little quicker from his guilt and teary eyes, but it’s an affectionate portrayal nonetheless.

A little too much inner thought and not enough outer action keep this Missouri mystery on a slow ride.

MRS. JEFFRIES DELIVERS THE GOODS

Brightwell, Emily Berkley (288 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-451-49222-7

A Victorian police inspector never realizes that his amazing success rate is due to his household staff.

Inspector Gerald Witherspoon of Scotland Yard is called in to a case of suspected murder at the Lighterman’s Ball. James Pierce, who runs a successful shipping business, has for many years hosted a dinner and ball for his employees. This year he’s added friends and members of his board of directors and moved the affair from a pub to the Wrexley Hotel. When Stephen Bremmer, who’s about to join the board, keels over after drinking a champagne toast, Dr. Bosworth, a police surgeon, and Wiggins, Witherspoon’s footman, are by chance both attending as guests. Bosworth immediately suspects that Bremmer was poisoned. While Witherspoon pursues official paths, his household staff and their circle of friends and informants set out to dig up information about anyone sitting at the head table who seems most likely to have had the chance to poison Bremmer when the lights were turned off just before the toast. A man

WOLF PACK

Box, C.J. Putnam (384 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-525-53819-6

of hired killers.

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Fired after his last colorfully insubordinate outing (The Disappeared, 2018), Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett is back on the job in Twelve Sleep County just in time to follow the trail from a routine misdemeanor to a quartet

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When Auntie Poldi loses her inner equilibrium, it takes a volcano to restore her to balance. auntie poldi and the vineyards of etna

A BEAUTIFUL CORPSE

universally disliked for his rudeness and snobbery, Bremmer married a slightly older woman with money, but the allowance she’s granted him hasn’t been enough, and he’s been making extra money by blackmailing people in his social circle. So many of them have secrets they’re desperate to cover up that it will be no easy task to unmask the killer. Mrs. Jeffries, the housekeeper with an amazing talent for uncovering the truth (Mrs. Jeffries and the Three Wise Women, 2017, etc.), is enshrined at the center of the web, as all who work in the household and many who don’t bring her the tidbits of information she needs to solve the puzzle.

All who enjoy Victorian mysteries will enjoy this complex tale of love, hate, class snobbery, and murder.

Daugherty, Christi Minotaur (368 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-250-14887-2

BROKEN BONE CHINA

Childs, Laura Berkley (336 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-451-48963-0

Hot air balloons and drones fail to play well together.

Theodosia Browning of the Indigo Tea Shop and her tea expert, Drayton Conneley, have catered a fancy tea for a balloon rally whose leading attraction is a balloon ride. Drayton, already white-knuckled, is horrified when a drone that appears among the balloons suddenly attacks one of them, causing it to crash and killing all the occupants. Soon Theodosia’s frenemy, Detective Burt Tidwell, arrives and questions them. The police think Don Kingsley, the CEO of local tech firm SyncSoft, was the primary target. Before he went down with the balloon, Kingsley had some money problems and a wife, Tawney, whose expenses rehabbing a classic Charleston house into a B&B were getting out of hand. Antiques dealer Tod Slawson tells Theodosia and Drayton that Kingsley was also the owner of an original Gadsden Flag, a Revolutionary War artifact that vanished from his home immediately after his death.

A flag worth millions, an obvious motive for murder, brings Theodosia’s sleuthing instincts to the fore. She speaks with several dealers who’d been interested in buying the flag and with Tawney Kingsley, who’s gone directly from prospective divorcée to heiress. Theodosia’s boyfriend, Charleston police detective Pete Riley, is out of town, leaving her on her own except for Drayton and a few other friends. Taking time out from her responsibilities at the shop and all the special tea parties she’s staging, Theodosia agrees to help out a friend whose boyfriend, a whistleblower at SyncSoft, is in the frame. Her continued sleuthing soon makes her a target of a killer who will stop at nothing.

Has the year since Childs’ last tea-shop mystery (Plum Tea Crazy, 2018, etc.) whetted your appetite? Although the mystery is weak, the tea is strong, and the loving descriptions of Charleston, tea, and the accompanying food almost make up for it.

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A crime reporter who’s still obsessed with the long-ago murder of her mother faces more present-day murder.

One reason Harper McClain became a crime reporter for a Savannah newspaper was her excellent relationship with the police. That ended when she took down the man who was like a father to her, the former homicide chief who’s now doing time for murder (The Echo Killing, 2018). As a result, most of the cops shun her and make her life miserable, and her romantic relationship with homicide detective Luke Walker has been shattered. A new murder case plunges Harper back into all the bad memories. Harper’s bestie, Bonnie Larson, works at the Library bar along with beautiful law student Naomi Scott, who leaves early on a quiet night. A call from Harper’s photographer, Miles Jackson, sends her racing to River Street, the heart of the tourist area, which has become a murder scene. She’s devastated to see that the body is Naomi’s. The police fasten on her boyfriend, Wilson Shepherd, but Naomi’s father insists on Wilson’s innocence. Detective Julie Daltrey, who’s caught the case, grudgingly gives Harper enough information to get her started on a story that could turn into a blockbuster. Meantime, Harper has other problems to spare. Someone’s gotten into her apartment despite all her security measures, and she constantly feels that she’s being followed. The case does get her back in touch with Luke, and the passion they shared flares again. The police, unable to develop enough evidence to hold Wilson, begin looking at Naomi’s boss and a fellow law student she dated and then began to fear. Although Harper worries about her stalker, she doesn’t see the danger coming from both past and present.

This first-rate adventure for Daugherty’s heroine is fast-paced, intriguing, and romantic. A message from her stalker intimates her next adventure will be just as exciting.

AUNTIE POLDI AND THE VINEYARDS OF ETNA

Giordano, Mario Trans. by Brownjohn, John Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (352 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-328-91902-1 When Auntie Poldi loses her inner equilibrium, it takes a volcano to restore her to balance.

Having decided after all not to drink herself to death with a comfortable view of the sea (Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, 2015), Bavarian expatriate Isolde Oberreiter has settled into a pleasant routine in her villa in Torre Archirafi. Mondays: the beach. Tuesdays: the fish market with Uncle |

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Martino. Wednesdays: language school in Taormina. Thursdays: tea with her neighbor Valérie. Fridays, sex with Commissario Vito Montana. Saturdays: gin rummy with Signora Cocuzza and Padre Paolo. But routines can do only so much to tame a force of nature like Poldi, as she is known to her family, friends, and neighbors, which include the entire population of Torre Archirafi and a good bit of neighboring Catania. Soon she’s on a quest: to find out who killed Lady, Valérie’s scruffy, gentle mongrel.

Vito inadvertently provides her first clue. Invested in a brand of pillow talk only he and Poldi could devise, he concludes one Friday afternoon’s adventures with an account of the death of Elisa Puglisi, a member of Catania’s provincial Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia, who was conked by a bottle of Polifemo.

Well, anyone depraved enough to kill a district attorney might do the same to a defenseless animal, and next thing you know, Poldi is riding her multicolored Vespa up the slopes of Etna to the Avola vineyard, the source of the bottle that put a premature end to Puglisi’s career. And because Poldi “was just not made for compromises, for the grey areas of life, for rear-view mirrors, loopholes or get-out clauses,” she pushes forward to an encounter with a winemaker that proves as explosive as the hill beneath her feet.

Giordano gives his heroine’s second outing as much punch as her debut. Long may she reign.

daughter of Caroline and Michael; his parents later brought her up as one of their own because his mother was Caroline’s sister. DCI Bill Rackham, the friend Jack brings on the case to get access to police records, is glad to help because he’s taken a shine to Jenny. But then someone who knew the Trevelyans in the past is murdered, and Jenny’s father becomes the main suspect despite her aunt’s protestations that he’s as innocent now as he was back then.

A delightful period piece you won’t put down until the truth is revealed.

THE STRANGER DIARIES

Griffiths, Elly Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (352 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-328-57785-6 A secondary school English department in West Sussex is turned upside down by a series of bookish killings.

Clare Cassidy is heading into middle age with just her teenage daughter, her faithful dog, her diary, and her teaching job to occupy her time. The most exciting part of her life may be the biography she hopes to write of R.M. Holland, a writer of gothic tales who once lived in the school where she works. But when one of her colleagues in the English department at Talgarth High is found murdered with a line from “The Stranger,” the very same Holland story that has long obsessed Clare, left on a Post-it next to her body, she quickly realizes the murderer must be someone who knows an awful lot about her. This suspicion is confirmed when, the day before Halloween, Clare discovers that someone else has left her a note in her own diary. As the violence escalates, Clare and the police must figure out why the killer seems so fixated on Clare—and what a supernaturally tinged tale more than a hundred years old has to do with the quiet lives of small-town Brits. Griffiths alternates points of view among Clare, her 15-year-old daughter, Georgie, and DS Harbinder Kaur, the queer policewoman in charge of the murder investigation. Thrown into the mix are excerpts from “The Stranger,” itself a delicious homage to writers like M.R. James.

Though all these ingredients occasionally cause some structural unwieldiness, Griffiths (The Vanishing Box, 2018, etc.) hits a sweet spot for readers who love British mysteries and who are looking for something to satisfy an itch once Broadchurch has been binged and Wilkie Collins reread.

Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first standalone novel with immensely pleasurable results.

FORGOTTEN MURDER

Gordon-Smith, Dolores Severn House (240 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-7278-8846-4

A flash of déjà vu involves an amateur sleuth in a bizarre case in a mystery set in 1920s England.

Now married to author Jack Haldean, whom she first met when she was a murder suspect (After the Exhibition, 2014), Betty Wingate invites her friend Jenny Langton for a girls’ night out, little suspecting that it will lead to one of Jack’s most unusual cases. The ambitious Jenny has secretly been feeding her estate-agent boss articles on the capabilities of modern women, so he gives her the chance to go and write up a property.

The housekeeper of the 1882 dwelling is delighted to show her around, but Jenny has the strange feeling she’s seen it before and even knows the color schemes of the rooms before she sees them. Although she’s greatly upset by these feelings, she’s utterly unprepared for the moment when she touches a cedar tree in the garden, sees a monster, and faints. When she confides in Betty that evening that she fears she’s losing her mind, Betty urges her to talk to Jack, whose very practical suggestion that Jenny had either visited or lived in the house as a child is supported by further investigation. When Caroline Trevelyan vanished from the house in 1907, her husband, Michael, was suspected of murdering her even though her body was never found. Jenny asks her brother, Martin, about this history, and he grudgingly admits that Jenny had indeed lived there as the 36

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Murder strikes yet another writers’ retreat. cyanide with christie

CYANIDE WITH CHRISTIE

Murder strikes yet another writers’ retreat.

Readers who anticipate a raucous tale of a poisoner who enlists New Jersey’s exgovernor as an accomplice will be sorely disappointed to see Hyde serve up that hoariest of chestnuts, a country-house murder. The house is Windy Corner Writers’ Retreat Center, an old Victorian mansion on the Oregon coast inherited by Reed College professor Emily Cavanaugh. Hoping to lure the next generation of Austens and Dostoevskys to create their masterworks in her library, Emily names each of the mansion’s many bedrooms after a literary titan. Windy Corner’s maiden effort at promoting literary greatness includes a Reed College adjunct who studies Forster’s “view of the individual in society, across all the novels,” a memoirist, a “well-known writer of highbrow mysteries,” a writer of cozies, and straight-outta-Paris Marguerite Grenier, Emily’s best friend, who talks to her pal in untranslated French. At first, memoirist Dustin Weaver looks like the obvious victim. He snubs the adjunct, ridicules the other writers, and scarfs down whatever alcohol he can find. (Since Emily’s too refined to keep whiskey in the house, he has to make do with the sherry she reserves for cocktail hour.)

But the arrival of bestselling author Cruella Crime puts Weaver in his place. Ostentatiously mean, Cruella seems to have the goods on every member of the party and isn’t shy about slinging innuendoes. Enter the obligatory ice storm, and the trapped authors get to watch in horror as Cruella downs a cordial laced with cyanide during a game of charades. Emily’s long-suffering beau, Lt. Luke Richards, lands the task of finding out who killed Cruella as well as the honor of sleeping on Emily’s fold-out loveseat every night.

Hyde (Bloodstains with Brontë, 2017, etc.) invites her readers into a confined space that’s stuffy, not tense. Even her villain has no bite.

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receive a hostile reception from Christian Lemaire, the officer in charge. Prejudice is clearly at work when local priest Father Roy, who was found at the scene with a rifle in his hands, is escorted away, while Amadou Duchon, a young black member of the mosque, is arrested. Scores of reporters, community activists, and the premier’s press liaison descend on the town with their very different agendas. The crimes seem almost to have been committed by two different people. The women were all calmly shot with a handgun in the basement; a violent rage upstairs apparently fueled the deaths and woundings of dozens of men with an assault rifle. Esa, who always gets intensely invested in his cases, becomes even more so because of the involvement of university student Alizah Siddiqui, whose sister’s murder he investigated (A Dangerous Crossing, 2018). Alizah has a campus radio talk show that constantly battles another station intent on stirring up hatred in an area where Francophile sentiment already runs deep. The neo-Nazi Wolf Allegiance is run by Maxime Thibault, an arrogant preppy who has a love-hate relationship with Alizah.

Rachel is both attracted to Lemaire and deeply distrustful of him and other police officers she suspects of bigotry. Khan peoples her police procedural with believably nuanced characters to highlight the consequences of hate.

The tension never lets down in this horrifying look at mass murder and the often mundane factors that inspire it.

Hyde, Katherine Bolger Severn House (208 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-7278-8844-0

DEATH BLOW

Maldonado, Isabella Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (312 pp.) $15.99 paper | Mar. 8, 2019 978-0-7387-5103-0 Phoenix homicide detective Veranda Cruz has many reasons to want cartel king Hector Villalobos captured, but her job becomes even more complicated when it gets personal.

In this third installment of the series (Blood’s Echo, 2017, etc.), Cruz admits that she is actually the daughter of Villalobos, born to her mother, Lorena, after Villalobos killed Lorena’s husband and then raped her. Cruz and her team have had some success in stopping the cartel. However, Villalobos’ acknowledged daughter, Daria, is determined to kill Cruz to prove to her father that she is capable of eventually running the cartel and just as willing to use his weapons of torture and murder to accomplish her mission. As the two groups battle, with betrayals on each side, the scenes of violence are sometimes balanced by the realistic cop-humor dialogue, made believable by the author’s background in law enforcement and only sometimes slowed down by overwrought writing (“Frustration had whipped through her like a fresh squall churning an already stormy sea”).

The author further enriches the plot with glimpses into Veranda’s loving relationship with her family without letting readers forget for one moment how tough and hardheaded she is.

If you’re in the mood for a nonstop exposé of every fear you’ve ever had about cartel crime, Veranda Cruz is the woman to follow.

A DEADLY DIVIDE

Khan, Ausma Zehanat Minotaur (384 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-1-250-29828-7

A sadly relevant look at the consequences of racism and bigotry.

Esa Khattak and his partner, Sgt. Rachel Getty, are the mainstays of Canada’s Community Policing Department, which deals with hate crimes and terrorism. Their latest case takes them from their Toronto base to a small Quebecois town where someone has just massacred members of the local mosque. Both Rachel and Esa, who is a secondgeneration Canadian Muslim, are deeply disturbed when they |

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ALIBIS & ANGELS

from two old college pals who live nearby. Tish’s first break comes when her landlord, handsome lawyer Schuyler Thompson, recommends her for a catering job. Local library queen Binnie Broderick, whose other firm has cancelled their contract with her, wants Tish to cater a big fundraising dinner for an impossibly low price. Knowing that Binnie is difficult, Trish stands firm, and all goes reasonably well until Binnie douses her prime rib with hot sauce, chokes, and expires before the guests’ eyes. Since Tish knows that having someone die at a dinner you cooked is bad for business, she starts a campaign to deliver feelgood treats around town and decides that a little sleuthing can’t hurt. She soon realizes that Binnie’s habit of using her money and family influence to get her way made her the most hated woman around. She’d purged the library of many books she didn’t like, openly insulted many townsfolk, including her own daughter and son-in-law, feuded with the town’s well-known romance writer, and wasn’t above blackmailing people whose secrets she’d discovered. Tish’s initial worry about her legal liability for food poisoning is ended by the news that Binnie died from arsenic, not a trace of it found in any of her food or drink.

Sheriff Reade, who witnessed it all, is remarkably tolerant of Tish’s snooping, but she finds it difficult to question her helpful new friends, all of whom have motives to kill Binnie.

Meade (Well-Offed in Vermont, 2011, etc.) introduces a series that breaks no new ground but offers pleasing characters and a reasonably challenging mystery.

Matthews, Olivia Kensington (352 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 26, 2019 978-1-4967-0942-4 A possible murder spices the 40 days of Lent for Sister Louise LaSalle and her cohort in the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Hermione of Ephesus.

Somebody wants Heather Stanley out of Briar Coast—somebody who’s sending her anonymous letters calling her “Outsider” and threatening dire consequences if she runs for re-election as the town’s mayor. So it’s not entirely surprising when Opal Lorrie, the town’s director of finance and management, suffers a fatal fall while she’s wearing the coat Heather loaned her on her way to a meeting with the board of education she’s attending in Heather’s place. It’s not surprising when Heather, who doesn’t think deputies Fran Cole and Ted Tate, are up to the job, begs Sister Lou, who’s already demonstrated her sleuthing chops (Peril & Prayer, 2018, etc.), to investigate.

(After all, Heather is worried because “my margin of victory over Owen Rodney was very small, not even twenty percent.”)

It’s not surprising when Sister Lou identifies Heather’s most intimate professional associates—administrative assistant Kerry Fletcher, chief of staff Arneeka Laguda, interim finance manager Penelope del Castillo, communications director Tian Lu—as prime suspects. It’s not surprising that the motive for the attack on Opal, and another on Heather herself, has roots in the past. And it’s also not surprising that even though Sister Lou is a sister, not a cloistered nun, she knows from Easter. Luckily, her nephew Chris’ girlfriend, Sharelle Henson, is utterly oblivious about Catholicism even though she’s a seasoned reporter for the Briar Coast Telegraph, where recently hired cub reporter Harold “Don’t Call Me Hal” Beckett is thirsting for her job. So Sister Lou has plenty of chances to explain utterly unsurprising moral concepts and religious practices to Shari and equally clueless readers.

The target audience, in fact, is clearly genre fans allergic to surprises. The whole production almost makes you forget what an almighty surprise the first Easter must have been.

DEATH AT THE WYCHBOURNE FOLLIES

Myers, Amy Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-7278-8850-1

A festive gathering of actors ends in disaster.

When Lord and Lady Ansley invite a group of theatrical types to Wychbourne Court to give a performance that will benefit charity, Lady Ansley, herself a former Gaiety Theatre star, fails to predict how much awkwardness will arise among several prima donnas who aren’t friends despite, or because of, their common interests. Growing ever more nervous, Lady Ansley counts on her chef, Nell Drury, a purveyor of magnificent meals and a fountain of strength, and Tobias St. John Rocke, a keeper of secrets and comforter to the theater tribe, to smooth things over. In an awkward moment, Lady Ansley lets slip the name of Mary Ann Darling, an actress she replaced but never met before the woman vanished and turned up dead several years later, presumably the victim of an unsolved murder. Invoking a shadow from the past only increases the squabbling among the guests, who are not all happy about the production’s being moved to the local inn and opened to the public. After the show, Lady Ansley discovers that she’s lost a valuable brooch. When Nell and Lord Ansley return to the inn to search for it, they discover the bloody body of Tobias dead near the village church.

COOKIN’ THE BOOKS

Meade, Amy Patricia Severn House (208 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-7278-8849-5

A fresh career choice and hometown spell trouble for a newly minted chef.

Now that Tish Tarragon has rented a shop in the lovely old Virginia town of Hobson Glen, she plans to open Cookin’ the Books Café, a literary-themed restaurant and catering business, with help 38

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Sharp-eyed Nell can’t help but notice evidence being covered over by snow. Scotland Yard sends Inspector Alexander Melbray, whom Nell had helped before (Dancing with Death, 2017) and thought of as more than a passing acquaintance. So she’s especially put out by Melbray’s cold treatment of her. In between whipping up dinners for the guests, Nell finds time to comfort Lady Ansley and hunt for clues to Rocke’s murder. Although the police arrest a local man, Melbray’s clearly not satisfied until the answer to several connected murders is revealed by some shocking secrets from the past.

Plenty of period detail and shoals of red herrings keep the story moving as the clever heroine seeks answers and a better relationship with the handsome inspector.

CHOCOLATE À LA MURDER

Weiss, Kirsten Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (312 pp.) $15.99 paper | Mar. 8, 2019 978-0-7387-5713-1

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THE WOMEN’S WAR

Glass, Jenna Del Rey (560 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-984817-20-4

High fantasy with a feminist perspective. Sort of.

Alysoon lives in Aalwell, the capital of Aaltah. Her mother, Brynna, was queen until Alys’ father, the king, set her aside for a new wife and sent her to live at the Abbey of the Unwanted. There, women are free to use petty magic—men are the adepts in this world—but they are also sold for sex. Alys’ husband has recently died, which means that she and her children are now dependent on her father even though “she still hadn’t forgiven him,” and her half brother. Ellinsoltah of Rhozinolm is a princess until a terrible accident makes her ruler.

Everyone expects her to yield rule to the wise men around her, and they expect her to find a king consort soon, but Ellin finds sovereignty to her liking. Alys and Ellin are adjusting to their new lives when they learn that Brynna has worked a powerful spell that fundamentally transforms their world: “From now on, no woman will conceive or carry a child unless she wishes to of her own free will.” Once Brynna unleashes her magic...not much changes, at least not quickly. In this faux medieval world, the ability of women to control their own reproductive destinies should be a big deal. It’s baffling that it isn’t. Not only are men not freaking out about their loss of power, but it takes many, many pages before it’s clear that women understand that they can now enjoy sex with men without worrying about pregnancy.

Part of the problem is one of perspective. We learn a great deal about the minutiae of Alys’ and Ellin’s lives, but we don’t know much about what’s happening beyond their chambers. Another issue is worldbuilding, an essential feature of fantasy. George R.R. Martin knows more about Westeros than he will ever tell us. Ursula K. LeGuin kept returning to Earthsea because she kept discovering new stories about the place even when she thought she was done. And of course, there’s the example of J.R.R. Tolkien. Glass’ Seven Wells seems more like a stage set than a real universe. This is, apparently, the first in a three-book series. One suspects there is enough material for one excellent novel in those three volumes.

Timely, fascinating idea. Confounding execution.

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A wine and chocolate fest brings plenty of business and a chocolate-dipped murder to San Benedetto, California.

Maddie Kosloski has added a Magic of Chocolate exhibit to her paranormal museum and is feeling good about the museum and life in general, with her best friends, Adele and Harper, always on hand to help. All is ready except for the delivery of chocolate from Reign, the local artisanal chocolate store.

Tired of waiting, she decides to go pick it up only to find a man covered in chocolate lying on the floor, and her best efforts at CPR don’t work. The first officer on the scene is Detective Laurel Hammer; a bully in high school, she still hates Maddie, especially since Maddie has been dating Detective Jason Slate.

The dead man is Atticus Reine, co-owner with Orson Malke of the chocolate shop, which has gained a great reputation. Maddie has never been able to pass a murder by (Deja Moo, 2018, etc.), and this time is no different even though it’s difficult for Jason to have his girlfriend as witness and sleuth. Although she dearly loves her friends, she and Harper are being driven crazy by Adele, whose wedding plans are constantly changing as problems arise and she nitpicks every decision. Still, Maddie finds time to speak to Orson and his wife, Lola, and Atticus’ wife, India, who all worked in some capacity at Reign. There is also one employee they fired who was picketing when Maddie arrived, but he is not first on her list of suspects—especially once Tilde, the bookkeeper at Reign, is murdered and Maddie herself has a few suspiciously narrow misses. Although there are only a few serious candidates, Maddie must winkle out the truth before she becomes the next victim.

Driven by its quirky characters, this series offers plenty of whimsy but not much mystery.

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Daniel Cumberland was born free in Massachusetts, but his education and professional status did not protect him from being kidnapped and sold into slavery, an experience that destroyed his faith in God, country, and himself even after he’s rescued. At night, memories of his time in captivity haunt him, but by day he is a detective with the Loyal League, one of the North’s most important spy rings. Daniel is ruthless and heartless, motivated by an all-consuming thirst for vengeance that sets him apart even from his fellow spies, with their naïve optimism that the war can bring about a better life for people of all races. Janeta Sanchez had lived a pampered and privileged life as the daughter of a Cuban plantation owner who had settled in Florida. But when Yankee soldiers imprison her father and quarter themselves in her home, she agrees to travel to Ohio to infiltrate the Loyal League and spy for the Confederate cause.

In unfamiliar terrain, where others’ perceptions clash with her self-image, Janeta “was coming to understand both her place in this country and her own inner geography better; she was recharting the map of herself.” Cole conveys the ways Janeta’s and Daniel’s layered identities pose challenges while affording them strengths of insight and character. Cole weaves a tense and gripping plot into a tapestry of fascinating and authentic historical detail, told from the distinct perspectives of people of color, without skimping on the growing feelings and strong desires that bring two lovers together.

Forbidden attraction and the threat of betrayal are the initial hooks for what turns out to be a sumptuously written and meticulously researched tale of a country at war with itself and two damaged people who find themselves in each other’s arms.

MYSTIC

Brooks, Cheryl Sourcebooks Casablanca (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2019 978-1-4926-6163-4 Intrigue, science, and a charming feline alien combine in this sci-fi romance as an anthropology student searches for a medical miracle.

As part of the Zetithian race, a feline and human extraterrestrial hybrid, Aidan Banadänsk has the ability to see visions.

Sometimes they are prophetic, and at other times they signal an event that requires his intervention. When he sees a young woman named Sula Enduran plummeting into a ravine, he’s unsure of which type of vision it is. His only solution is to find her and figure out how he fits into her life. Sula is still reeling from the sudden and unexplainable death of her boyfriend, Raj, after he contracted a disease that was long thought to be eliminated. Now, Sula is searching for a cure, and she’s desperate to keep her plans to herself. While she graciously accepts Aidan’s help—seeing as he saved her life—she’s wary of sharing too much of her research. Having it fall into the wrong hands could be disastrous, but Aidan’s connections prove too beneficial to pass up. What Sula doesn’t expect is to find herself falling in love with the Zetithian, especially while she’s on a mission to avenge her former lover. The setting Brooks (Maverick, 2018, etc.) creates is confusing at best: a litany of fictional planet names, unfamiliar alien races, and out-of-place modern references to Indiana Jones and Indian food. It’s hard to get a grip on how the galaxy functions in relation to Earth, leaving readers to figure it all out with the vague hints they’re given. Though Aidan and Sula get their happily-ever-after, their connection lacks believability. Their attraction is palpable (perhaps too much, as Sula frequently lapses into thoughts about the wellknown sexual prowess of the Zetithians), but their lust never seems to evolve into something satisfying.

Bewildering.

TEMPT ME WITH DIAMONDS

Feather, Jane Zebra (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2019 978-1-4201-4360-7

In this series debut, the heiress to a diamond mine discovers that her unwelcome houseguest has a legitimate claim to her estate—and to her heart.

Diana Sommerville is surprised to find Rupert Lacey, her late brother’s best friend—and her ex-fiance—in her Cavendish Square mansion. The last time she saw Rupert, he was in South Africa, where he and Jem had helped the English army protect her family’s diamond mine before Jem was killed in battle. “Pointless to die in a war over diamonds and gold,” Diana remarks. And she would be married by now if Rupert hadn’t betrayed her. Now, Rupert tells her, they will have to share the mansion, since Jem left half the estate to him and he does not intend to move out. To avoid a scandal, Diana enlists the help of her friends Petra and Fenella to pretend that she and Rupert are already married until the two of them can reach an agreement on how to divide the assets. Inhabited by a horse named Kimberly Diamond and a pair of dogs named Hera and Hercules,

AN UNCONDITIONAL FREEDOM

Cole, Alyssa Kensington (320 pp.) $15.95 paper | Feb. 26, 2019 978-1-4967-0748-2

The third book in Cole’s (A Duke by Default, 2018, etc.) Civil War–era Loyal League series pairs a broken man bent on retribution with an inexperienced but courageous double agent.

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GOVERNESS GONE ROGUE

the house has more sentimental than financial value for Diana.

But as her old feelings resurface, heated arguments with Rupert over how to run the estate get even hotter in the bedroom.

Rupert, ever the gentleman squatter, tries to win Diana’s heart with honesty and consideration. But just like she did with the estate, Diana makes him work for what’s already his.

For the girl who has everything—diamonds, a mansion, a racehorse—finding someone to share it with is the best gift of all. A solid start to the series.

Guhrke, Laura Lee Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2019 978-0-06-285369-1

DUCHESS BY DECEPTION

Force, Marie Zebra/Kensington (320 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2019 978-1-4201-4785-8

On the eve of his 30th birthday, Derek Eagen, the Duke of Westwood, having failed to find a wife, is prepared to lose his title and land. Then he meets, falls for, and weds Catherine McCabe without disclosing his status as an aristocrat. Will mistaken identity drive them apart before their love story even begins?

When Derek meets Catherine for the first time, she’s dressed in men’s clothing and digging for something on his property. When he confronts her, she faints, and Derek nurses her back to health. When she wakes up, she confesses that she is looking for a key her grandmother buried years ago—and mentions that she distrusts the aristocracy. In order to learn more about her, the duke pretends to be his own estate manager and offers to help her find her grandmother’s key. He learns that she has run away from her family, which, having recently ascended to the ranks of the aristocracy upon the death of her father’s older brother and nephew, has promised her hand to a viscount 30 years her senior. Derek and Catherine quickly fall in love and are married just a few days before the duke’s 30th birthday—his deadline to find a wife or forfeit his title. When Catherine finds out that she’s been tricked into marrying a member of the gentry, she finds his dishonesty unforgivable. A side story involving Catherine’s sister, a flu epidemic, and a death scare are among the things that keep the story moving, though each problem is solved so quickly and/or easily that readers might struggle to maintain interest. The sex is plentiful if somewhat inconsistent, including an encounter that happens in spite of a pretty clear lack of consent.

Insta-love, a contrived plot, and florid dialogue might leave all but Force’s (Fatal Invasion, 2018, etc.) hardcore fans wanting.

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A ruined lady dresses as a man to be hired as a tutor and falls in love with her employer and his two sons—but her past casts a long shadow.

Before being notoriously seduced and maligned by an aristocrat, Amanda Leighton loved being a teacher. Unable to find another position, she is piqued to hear a nobleman claim that “no woman can prepare a boy for Harrow and Cambridge.” Desperate, she disguises herself as a man to apply to tutor the gentleman’s infamously naughty twin sons despite the unwritten rule that “women, alas, could not be tutors, not to boys. It wasn’t done.”

Amanda, as “Mr. Seton,” soon has the boys settled into a routine and engaged in her lively lessons, but it’s not too long before their father, Jamie, realizes she’s a woman. The boys are already attached to her, though, and convince him to let her stay as their governess “Miss Seton.” Jamie and Amanda are attracted to each other, but Amanda realizes her sordid past would threaten his position as a Member of Parliament. She also believes he’s still devoted to his dead wife. Jamie knows Amanda has suffered unwelcome attention from previous employers, plus he’s acutely aware that Amanda has brought order and joy to his household, so he doesn’t want to jeopardize the status quo despite his growing feelings. However, when Amanda’s past threatens everyone’s happiness, it forces Jamie and the boys to clarify their feelings and stand up for her in unexpected, heartwarming ways. Guhrke continues her delightful Lady Truelove series with similar charm, creating another irrepressible heroine and making another nod to the frightful historical disparity between women’s and men’s freedoms but adding two adorable kids and a gentleman who needs to be reminded of what’s important—à la Mary Poppins—to the mix.

A clever, sexy, and endearing historical romance.

THE WHOLE PACKAGE

Harte, Marie Sourcebooks Casablanca (352 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2019 978-1-4926-7044-5 Reid Griffith and Naomi Starr are married to their jobs, but a mutually beneficial relationship quickly blossoms both in the office and in the bedroom.

Reid’s moving company, Vets on the Go!, is a small but successful enterprise that quickly takes off after his brother, Cash, is caught on camera saving a kid and foiling a robbery.

Reid has always been concerned with responsibility and doing the right thing as a son, a brother, a soldier, and now as the |

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THE ONE YOU FIGHT FOR

owner of a business that helps vets adjust to civilian life. Naomi, of Starr PR, is managing on her own after having left her former job and a relationship with her boss when her success proved a threat to both. After seeing footage of Cash’s heroic rescue, Naomi sets up a meeting and offers her services to Reid, whom she is immediately attracted to. While dealing with the chemistry between them and their respective workloads, Reid and Naomi are also juggling outside complications. Reid’s mother passes away, and he and Cash are left to deal with the practicalities of death as well as their grief. Naomi is forced to work alongside her ex-boyfriend/boss when they’re both hired by a firm she’s hungry to work with. The sex is hot enough, and Harte is to be applauded for an attempt to normalize safer sex and good communication about boundaries, but those are by far the highlights of the book. The conflicts are a little superficial and either easily or unsatisfactorily resolved.

There’s enough plot and strong writing to make it readable but not enough substance to make it memorable.

Loren, Roni Sourcebooks Casablanca (416 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 1, 2019 978-1-4926-5146-8 A school shooting survivor, Dr. Taryn Landry has devoted her life to preventing teen violence, but just as she’s launching a promising new program, unexpected obstacles arise, and a sexy trainer she’s working with harbors secrets that might derail everything she’s worked for.

After a disastrous first date, Taryn finds herself at open mic night at a bar. She sings her heart out and finds herself revisiting teenage dreams only to have an anxiety attack at the end, landing in the arms of Lucas, a sexy stranger who helps her out then disappears. Both disappointed and relieved, she reminds herself that she doesn’t have time to hang out in bars or meet sexy but mysterious men for coffee, because she has to focus on her research and the program she’s presenting to the local school board, designed to target potentially harmful teens and get them the support they need before they turn violent. However, her resolve falters when her best friend guilt trips her into starting an exercise plan and she discovers her trainer is none other than the sexy good Samaritan. The two share an explosive attraction, though he rebuffs her advances until he finally admits that he’s actually Shaw Miller, the brother of one of the shooters who attacked her school. Entering into a secretive affair, they both realize it can’t last, but that doesn’t keep them from growing more intense even as Taryn’s career is threatened.

Loren continues her breathtaking The Ones Who Got Away series with another Long Acre shooting survivor who finds love with a problematic partner and who must rediscover who she is as she fights for her happiness. Taryn risks her livelihood and the good will of her family when she falls for Shaw, but in exploring their relationship, Loren deftly and elegantly explores guilt and forgiveness as Taryn learns to truly open her heart to Shaw and his love.

Extraordinary.

CRAZY CUPID LOVE

Heger, Amanda Sourcebooks Casablanca (416 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2019 978-1-4926-7275-3 In a modern and magical world where Greek myths are very real, one matchmaking Cupid learns to harness her powers of enchantment.

Eliza Herman comes from a long line of Cupids, or as she prefers, Erosians.

Unfortunately, she’s a Cupid who hates romance after experiencing years of embarrassing accidents. Injuring a person makes them susceptible to falling in love with the first person they see, and, sadly, Eliza is a top-notch klutz. But when her parents’ Cupid agency is in dire straits, due to the ever evolving matchmaking technology and her father’s sudden heart attack, Eliza is willing to strap on her Cupid bow for the sake of helping them out. Temporarily. Because Eliza is a little rusty and never fully finished getting her Cupid license, she needs a mentor: Jake Sanders, fellow Cupid and former childhood best friend. Heger (Semi-Scripted, 2016, etc.) creates a light, bubbly, heart-filled environment in present-day California that will tickle any reader who has a weakness for mythology. However, some of the more integral details regarding the nuts and bolts of Cupid-ing are absent; the worldbuilding takes a while to fully coalesce. The romance is adorable, though, with Jake first surprising Eliza with her favorite childhood snack, Dunk-A-Roos—discontinued in the U.S.—which he’s brought back from Canada for her. As the black sheep, Eliza has a bittersweet relationship with her family. She longs for their approval, but the success of her twin brother, Elijah, in the family business often makes her feel invisible. Because the majority of the action lies in establishing a contemporary Cupid mythos, the growing relationship between the main characters suffers at times.

Still, the cheekiness is positively infectious.

An effervescent, pick-me-up romance.

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THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE DUKE

MacGregor, Janna St. Martin’s (368 pp.) $7.99 paper | Nov. 27, 2018 978-1-250-29597-2

All a spinster wants for Christmas is a charming rake to call her own.

Paul Barstowe, the Duke of Southart, was a dissolute second son known for his disreputable behavior. The deaths of his father and elder brother days apart gave him the title and a new determination to change his ways. To |

start burnishing his reputation, he bids on a property where he hopes to establish a charity hospital, but temptation arrives in the form of heiress Lady Daphne Hallworth, the sister of Paul’s best friend–turned-enemy. Home Alone style, Daphne is abandoned in London by her family in their rush to depart for the Christmas holidays. She decides to get started investing her fortune and energies to found a charitable home for unwed mothers. Interest in the same property puts Paul and Daphne in close proximity, as does the loss of her reticule containing a journal in which she shared not only her family’s secrets, but some of her own, including a longing, since childhood, for the handsome Paul. Daphne’s trust in Paul to help her avoid scandal shocks him. As they become closer, “Something shifted within him. A crack opened up, allowing a want to crawl out from the depths of his soiled soul and emerge, shaking every manacle free.” MacGregor (The Luck of the Bride, 2018, etc.) weaves a compelling story redeeming Paul from rakish behavior depicted in previous installments of The Cavensham Heiresses. Paul works his way back into the good graces of his family and friends as Daphne discovers her independence and strength beyond the genteel, circumspect, and invisible good sister and good daughter she has always been. MacGregor’s prose is wordier and her plotting more leisurely than necessary, but Paul and Daphne are very appealing characters.

A rake is redeemed and a spinster unspun in a sweet historical romance.

readers to the multilayered, nuanced portrayal of Chi-Town, from Lilí’s posh condo in the Loop to the working-class neighborhoods Diego patrols to the middle-class suburb of Oakton where the Fernandez sisters were raised. New readers will have no trouble jumping in, although the action picks up right where the second book ended. Oliveras (Her Perfect Affair, 2018, etc.) tackles domestic violence and substance use disorder with nuance and empathy, though at times her depiction is limited by genre requirements, as when Lilí and Diego smolder at each other over a crime scene.

A surfeit of mental lusting only slightly mars a rich romance between two very different Chicagoans of Puerto Rican descent whose clashes over social justice are less important than their love of music, family, and each other.

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THEIR PERFECT MELODY

Oliveras, Priscilla Zebra (352 pp.) $4.99 paper | Nov. 27, 2018 978-1-4201-4430-7

A tough Chicago cop can’t stop thinking about the softhearted victims’ advocate who drives him crazy in ways both good and bad.

Lilí, the youngest of the three closeknit Fernandez sisters, is a victims’ advocate at a clinic on Chicago’s West Side.

After experiencing some difficult times, she is determined to help those who suffer from injustice, especially women and children. Her caring approach clashes with the hard-nosed tactics of cop Diego Reyes, who has seen it all and doubts that violent offenders can change. Despite clashing professionally, Lilí and Diego are attracted to one another, an attraction that deepens when they realize they share a love of music. Diego plays classical guitar, while Lilí once danced and sang with her father’s trio. They both believe that “Familia primero”: “The faraway, almost blissful expression on Diego’s face as he spoke about his mami was like a lasso looped around Lilí, drawing her to him.

It spoke of a kindred yearning for those who had shaped their lives, and continued to do so, even though they were no longer with them.” Lilí’s loving, boisterous family entices Diego, but he has familial secrets, keeping him frustratingly elusive. The third entry in Oliveras’ Matched to Perfection series returns |

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nonfiction GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN by Hanif Abdurraqib.............................. 44

Abdurraqib, Hanif Univ. of Texas (216 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2019 978-1-4773-1648-1

CHAMBER MUSIC by Will Ashon...................................................... 46 LOVE AND RESISTANCE Ed. by Jason Baumann; photos by Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies...............................47 THE BACK CHANNEL by William J. Burns.......................................50 AN AMERICAN SUMMER by Alex Kotlowitz................................... 64 SPROUT LANDS by William Bryant Logan...................................... 64 REVOLUTIONARY by Robert L. O’Connell........................................ 68 FIGURING by Maria Popova.............................................................. 69 HELP ME! by Marianne Power............................................................70 THE MASTERMIND by Evan Ratliff................................................... 71 CHINA’S INVISIBLE CRISIS by Scott Rozelle & Natalie Johnson.....72 THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS

by Edward Wilson-Lee.........................................................................79 AN AMERICAN SUMMER Love and Death in Chicago

Kotlowitz, Alex Talese/Doubleday (304 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-385-53880-0

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Memoir meets cultural criticism in this bittersweet appreciation of hip-hop visionaries A Tribe Called Quest.

Poet and essayist Abdurraqib (They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, 2017, etc.) avoids the temptation to oversell his subject while maintaining a tricky structural balance. He somehow does full justice to the musical achievements of Q-Tip and his crew, to the influence of the musical world on this singular group, and to how deeply the experience permeated the young fan who might not have become a writer—and certainly not this writer—without their inspiration. In recent years, the author found himself with students as young as he once was who, as contemporary hip-hop fans, “had never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, and then, later, only knew them as a phoenix, risen from the ashes.”

There was a 17-year interval between albums, and by the time what appears to be the last one was released in 2016, friendships had frayed and a crucial collaborator had died. This is a history of how two boyhood friends, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, teamed up (though the former overshadowed the latter), how they differed from each other, and how they needed each other. Some of the book takes the form of letters from Abdurraqib to each of them and to others. Elsewhere, the author chronicles the progression of rap and how the way that Dr. Dre challenged Q-Tip was similar to the way that the Beatles pushed Brian Wilson, as well as how the East-West synergy later turned vicious and dangerous.

“It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous,” writes Abdurraqib toward the beginning of the book, a somewhat inexplicable pronouncement that he proceeds to explicate and elucidate over the rest.

Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process.

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Full of vivid detail and emotion, this compelling memoir captures the ache of a young child desperate for safety and security. the broken circle

THE BROKEN CIRCLE A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan

Ahmadi-Miller, Enjeela Little A (288 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-5039-0378-4

REAL QUEER AMERICA LGBT Stories from Red States

Allen, Samantha Little, Brown (304 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-316-51603-7

In a cross-country journey, a transgender reporter revisits red-state locations from her past.

In 1989, before the United States was quite as divisively separated into red and blue states, reporter Neil Miller traveled across the country |

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Looking back on her perilous flight from Soviet-invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Ahmadi-Miller re-creates a child’s terror and loyalty to her family.

One of eight children in a wealthy family in Kabul, the author remembers her enchanted childhood before war as a time of “fun and camaraderie.” Her father, Padar, an engineer by training, worked at the American Embassy down the street from their house in the Karte Seh neighborhood and also as a landowner. His elegant wife, Miriam, was “a modern woman” who sewed beautiful clothes for the children, although she had a heart problem that would require her to leave for an operation in India. As one of the youngest, Ahmadi-Miller adored her older sisters, who had suitors and fine clothes. As the author records in this fluid text, she grew up in the 1970s, which was “one of the most prosperous periods in the history of Afghanistan,” when privileged children of both sexes were allowed to go to school and there were elements of Western mores and gender equality. However, in the countryside, there still existed devastating poverty and staunchly old-fashioned, conservative beliefs, as she would discover as they fled to Pakistan. With the violent arrival of the socialist, Soviet-backed coup, the family was no longer safe in Kabul. Padar, a proud, devoted Afghan, was being monitored by the Soviets and descended into alcoholism; Miriam fled with two of her children to India, leaving the others to fend for themselves.

Even as a young child, the author came to the sinking realization that “Padar would never leave, and Mommy would never return to a country at war” despite Ahmadi-Miller’s ardent hopes that she would. The most harrowing section of the narrative concerns one of the family’s loyal bodyguards and his determination to whisk the remaining children into Pakistan without their father.

Full of vivid detail and emotion, this compelling memoir captures the ache of a young child desperate for safety and security.

interviewing men and women living openly gay lives in settings outside of the usual urban gay meccas. The resulting book, In Search of Gay America, is a clear precursor for the present volume

by Allen (Love & Estrogen, 2018), a GLAAD Award–winning journalist who covers LGBT issues for the Daily Beast. Despite some progress over the last several years, discrimination and human rights violations continue to plague the LGBT community, particularly in rural regions within red states. The author traveled from Provo, Utah, where she attended Brigham Young University, to locations in Texas, Bloomington, Indiana, where she met her wife at the Kinsey Institute, as well as Tennessee and other spots in the South. Along the way, she reacquainted herself with friends and mentors from her past or recent social media contacts, many of whom are also transgender. Readers old enough to recall the memorable profiles captured in Miller’s book might expect a similar approach here, at least based on the book’s summary and the author’s journalist credentials. However, Allen tells a more personal story relating to her own transformational experience, which, while often instructive, pulls attention away from the fascinating individuals she encountered on her trip. Though she generously acknowledges the strong work they are doing within their communities and sheds meaningful light on the progress achieved within these red-state regions, she doesn’t allow their portraits to come into clear focus; all too often their stories revert back to her. By the end of the book, few of these folks will be memorable for readers.

While expanding awareness on the efforts being made in the LGBT community within red states, this journey feels somewhat perfunctory, and the narrative rarely sustains the promise shown in the opening chapters. (16-page 4-color insert)

RUNNING HOME A Memoir

Arnold, Katie Random House (368 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-425-28465-0 A female runner learns more about herself with each race she runs.

Arnold, a Santa Fe–based contributing editor at Outside magazine, shares the specifics of her childhood and the relationship she had with her father, a photographer for National Geographic, a profession she respected even as a child (“just the thought of this gave me a little shiver of pride”).

When he fell terminally ill, the author embarked on a search to find out who he really was and why he left her mother when she was a young girl. In meticulous detail, Arnold recounts the many times she and her sister visited their father over the years and the ways in which he pushed her to do more than she thought she could. The first example was a six-mile race she ran at the age of 7, an event that set the author up to be a dedicated runner for life. She used running to deal with her father’s death, to overcome her doubts as a mother, and to find herself kirkus.com

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my 2019 wish list Photo courtesy Leah Overstreet

Santa may be gone (thanks for the tube socks!), but I have plenty of remaining literary wishes for 2019:

in each phase of her life. Inviting descriptions of the surrounding countryside, the natural highs of extreme exercise, and the pursuit of a peaceful existence balance the monotony of learning how Arnold prepares for each race, each one seemingly longer than the last. She describes setting personal goals prior to each race and how she pushed through the pain and self-doubt to finish. Interwoven with stories of her father and running are the author’s reflections on being a mother of two girls and life with her husband, who also runs but who gives Arnold the space and freedom to pursue her own goals.

Although overlong, Arnold’s memoir will appeal to runners of all types, whether they participate in short-distance races or ultralong endurance tests.

A contemplative, soul-searching account of the death of the author’s beloved father and how she used long-distance running as a way to heal from the grief.

Concise science books for nonscientists: Because the war on science has rarely been stronger, we need more books for those who—like me— believe wholeheartedly in scientific pursuits but aren’t ready for a 500page book on quantum mechanics or microbiology. Think Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Sixth Extinction, etc.

More books from historically marginalized perspectives: Despite the current administration’s conviction that the default “normal” is white, straight, and Christian, the U.S., as a whole, is far different in its sociological and cultural makeup—and a much better place because of it. Consequently, we need more books from historically marginalized perspectives to counter misinformation and provide much-needed education on diversity and intersectionality. My colleagues on the children’s and YA side, Vicky Smith and Laura Simeon, are pioneering with the groundbreaking Kirkus Collections program. Let’s follow their lead into the new year.

Any book from a New Yorker contributor: Lawrence Wright, Jill Lepore, Atul Gawande, David Remnick, Roz Chast, Elif Batuman, Hilton Als, Steve Coll, Ronan Farrow, Dana Goodyear, Adam Gopnik…I could go on for pages.

I’m not sure I’ve read a mediocre book from any regular contributor to the New Yorker. If you can write for them, it seems you are capable of writing an acclaimed book.

More sports books like Dave Zirin’s Jim Brown: I’m a huge sports fan, but I shy away from many sports-related books because they’re too superficial or dry in their recounting of scores, stats, etc. Zirin’s biography included a significant sociological and political element that deepened the narrative immensely. Granted, Jim Brown’s life is a subject that invites further investigation off the field, but sports biographers could take some cues from Zirin’s portrait. —E.L. Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.

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CHAMBER MUSIC Wu-Tang and America (in 36 Pieces)

Ashon, Will Faber & Faber (380 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 19, 2019 978-0-571-35000-1

An illumination of hip-hop, race, religion, and America, through a close reading of an influential debut album.

On the surface, this book commemorates the 25th anniversary of “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” but there is much beneath the surface, making for a conceptually audacious critical study about the conceptual audacity of the Wu-Tang Clan—and well beyond.

Ashon (Strange Labyrinth: Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London’s Great Forest, 2017, etc.) investigates how avant-garde jazz musicians, whose styles were dismissed at the time as nonmusic or anti-music, led to howls from the hip-hop abyss to an even more powerful and popular artistry initially dismissed as nonmusic: no musical instruments, no conventional melodies, no singing. He also explores how that music and its culture has since swallowed up the culture at large as well as the affinity that radical black American artists have felt for Asia in general and kung fu movies in particular, identifying with the other as it battles cultural oppression. In perhaps the most audacious chapter—or “chamber,” as it references the title of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut, which itself references the title of a kung fu movie—the author declares, “hip hop is a martial art. That is the key insight of the Wu-Tang Clan....It doesn’t share certain practices with a martial art. It actually is a martial art....The legendary MC and thinker KRS-One describes hip hop as ‘a mental survival tool for the oppressed,’ and once you begin to tunnel down into what that might mean, the parallels become clear.” Ashon also devotes considerable space to religious esoterica, the pseudoscience of race, guns, and drugs, recording technology and economics, the Staten Island Indian tribes, and the cultural history of 42nd Street. |

A moving queer tapestry honoring a beleaguered movement’s legacy through art, veneration, and gravitas. love and resistance

LOVE AND RESISTANCE Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era

Near the end, the author addresses cultural appropriation, as well, acknowledging that “this book shouldn’t exist”—not by a white author from an ocean’s remove, but, “I wrote it anyway, even knowing I shouldn’t.” Hip-hop fans and anyone interested in the deeper seams of American culture will be glad he did. (b/w photos throughout)

LONG SHOT The Inside Story of the Snipers Who Broke ISIS

Azad Atlantic Monthly (412 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-0-8021-2907-9

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A pictorial time capsule from the pivotal days of a budding gay rights movement.

Baumann, coordinator of the New York Public Library’s LGBT Initiative, presents a dramatic collection of images, drawn from the career archives of photo-documentarians Lahusen and Davies, charting the rise of grassroots gay activism from the mid1960s to the mid-’70s. It was a time when LGBT activists took to the streets of New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New Jersey to creatively and defiantly demonstrate against intolerance and inequality and whose “vision and courage changed our world.”

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A gritty account of street combat against the ruthless fighters of the Islamic State group.

In clear, thoughtful prose, Azad presents the experiences of many who responded to the jihadi threat in the Middle East. The author volunteered to join the Kurdish resistance against the Islamic State group in Rojava, a region that declared autonomy in the Syrian civil war, becoming an unlikely bulwark against extremism, especially considering their collective decision-making. “In Kobani,” he writes, “between September 2014 and January 2015, two thousand of our men and women stopped ISIS’ twelve thousand. Six months later, we pushed all the jihadis out of Rojava. Our defeat of ISIS set in motion their collapse.” The narrative alternates between the campaign for the town of Kobani and recollections of Azad’s upbringing, during which his progressive family experienced the territorial conflicts and aggression that have long bedeviled the Kurdish people. Although disillusioned with Iranian rule, Azad was obligated to serve in the military, from which he deserted in 2002, ultimately receiving asylum in the U.K. and learning English. Despite enjoying the West’s openness and opportunity, nearly a decade later he felt compelled to return.

“Since my arrival in England,” he writes, “I had abandoned my purpose.” Azad’s small militia gradually secured Kobani despite numerous setbacks. They were aided by coalition air strikes against IS fighters, who were known for routinely committing atrocities. The flexibility of Kurdish defenders—they were able to move the small unit of snipers where most needed—allowed them to gradually seize the military initiative even though many volunteers did not return. “So many of my friends had died,” writes the author, “that I had acquired a new, unwanted duty: to survive, to keep their memories alive.” His ruminative prose reflects the unforgiving chaos of close-quarters battle between ruthless enemies, and he coolly describes the sniper’s isolated, time-consuming experience of combat.

A propulsive memoir that captures the grim reality of small-scale conflict and reveals the fragmented politics of the Middle East today.

Baumann, Jason—Ed. Photos by Lahusen, Kay Tobin & Davies, Diana Norton (192 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-324-00206-2

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Lahusen was active in early lesbian solidarity organizations while Davies was best known for chronicling the feminist, peace, and social justice activism movements of the era. Their photographs, accompanied by Baumann’s commentary and descriptions, represent separate perspectives within a unified theme of LGBT equality throughout each of the book’s four sections. “Visibility” displays images of a wide variety of gays and lesbians in the primes of their careers and endeavors; “Love” celebrates the power of community and affection in the face of societal hate; “Pride” memorializes the sacred queer spaces where activism, collaboration, and solidarity flourished; and “Protest” demarcates the demonstrations and rebellion against rampant gay oppression. Iconic activists like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Barbara Gittings, and Ernestine Eckstein share space with gay writers, artists, performers, and media founders. Haunting and arresting, the photos illustrate a historic American era when same-sex affection was forbidden in public and considered both a mental illness and an atrocity. A literary celebration commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the epic Stonewall riots, the book is elegiac yet also provides a reflective and hopeful reminder for future generations that change and promise can arise from struggle and sacrifice. Though the book is a reflection of a different age and struggle, it is also timely given that LGBT freedoms remain ever endangered within the current political climate.

A moving queer tapestry honoring a beleaguered movement’s legacy through art, veneration, and gravitas. (116 color photos)

UNBECOMING

Bhagwati, Anuradha Atria (336 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-5011-6254-1 How the challenging, complex world of the Marines turned a woman into an activist.

After graduating with honors from Yale, Bhagwati left her graduate studies at Columbia to join the Marines, a move that shocked her stern Indian parents, both of whom were wellrespected economists. In this honest and unflinching memoir, the author briefly chronicles her early years before moving on to share the highs and lows of her time as a Marine. She discusses the brutal physicality of the training and how she pushed herself as far as she could in order to excel at every level. She often outcompeted the men in her unit and loved the strength she found deep inside herself. Bhagwati also bares the details of the sexual harassment she and other female Marines experienced, a situation that was—and still is—commonplace in many areas of the armed forces. When she left the Marines, she realized her career had left invisible yet permanent scars; she suffered from depression, low self-esteem, and a lack of sexual desire, among other ailments. Like other veterans, she turned to the VA for support, where she received mixed results. This led Bhagwati to start the Service Women’s Action Network, which advocates for military sexual harassment victims, and she also helped change some 48

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government policies regarding women serving in combat roles.

Running throughout the narrative is the author’s palpable sense of confusion, dismay, and anger at the way women are treated in the military, particularly in the predominantly male domain of the Marines, and how these feelings affected her life as a civilian. Her candid story pulls back the curtain on a hidden world in which highly capable women who thrive on the challenge of being a soldier are hindered by the men who surround them.

An intense, fierce woman generously shares her instructive experiences as a Marine and how her service time turned her into an activist for women’s rights in the military.

SHAMELESS A Sexual Reformation Bolz-Weber, Nadia Convergent/Crown (224 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 1, 2019 978-1-60142-758-8

The whip-smart pastor and author of Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (2015) channels Martin Luther and calls for the church to reform its approach to sex.

Too many of Bolz-Weber’s congregants have been hurt by Christian teachings about sex: couples who marry as virgins only to find they can’t “flip a switch” to suddenly approach “sex as joyful and natural and God-given”; or middle-aged women who can’t bring themselves to wear a V-neck because they are haunted by teachings about modesty they learned as teens. The author, who is now divorced, insists that the church should not be more faithful to abstract principles than to people. “If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people,” she writes, “we should rethink those teachings.” Indeed, a healthy attitude toward sex might be more faithful to the Bible’s teachings anyway. In the Creation story, notes Bolz-Weber, Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply—“the very first blessing was sex.”

Among many other issues, the author, a recovering alcoholic and former comic, addresses pornography, abortion, and debates about transgender bathroom use. Consistent with the title, BolzWeber wants readers to feel unashamed about their bodies even as she invites them to grieve the moments in their sexual histories where they have been hurt or caused hurt. She also writes straightforwardly about desire: “I know that when I see my lover, something within me uncoils...a wildness, part velvet, part forest fire.”

Not exactly the usual stuff of Christian sex books—and that’s a good thing. Throughout, the author’s voice is inviting, as is the narrative layout: Homiletical reflections on scriptural themes are set in clearly separated boxes, and illustrations—e.g., a risible page from a Christian workbook that details the kinds of cosmetics and speech that increase femininity—make the book an easy, enjoyable read.

Sure to be helpful to many readers and just as sure to be controversial.

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YOU CAN’T GO WRONG DOING RIGHT How a Child of Poverty Rose to the White House and Helped Change the World Brown, Robert J. Convergent/Crown (240 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 15, 2019 978-1-5247-6278-0

A memoir from one of the most understated yet pivotal players in the history of American civil rights.

While most of his work occurred outside of the spotlight, Brown has left a deep imprint on the history of the AfricanAmerican struggle for equality. Oft-identified as a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and “the only person allowed to visit Nelson Mandela” during his Cape Town imprisonment, the author fleshes out a lifetime studded with important experiences. Growing up in the Jim Crow North Carolina of the 1930s

and ’40s, Brown endured a hardscrabble childhood under the love and tutelage of his compassionate grandmother “Mama,” Miss Nellie Brown. “Whether singing in our church’s gospel choir or canning vegetables,” writes the author, “she called out Jesus with the best of them and she set our moral compasses with lessons from the Bible.” After a stint in local law enforcement, the author landed a job in New York as a federal narcotics agent, launching a series of events that would lead to his meeting with King in 1958 and later executing a staged narcotics buy for the “Senate Rackets Committee’s top lawyer,” Robert F. Kennedy. With greater ambitions, Brown moved back to his home state and founded the public relations firm B&C International, which become the anchor of his significant role as a race-relations liaison between the black and white communities—business, political, or otherwise. Among his many achievements, the author chronicles his five years working as special assistant to President Richard Nixon, a job in which he developed the pivotal Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Throughout the volume, weaving together the stories of milestones personal and cultural, Brown continually falls back on the echoes of his

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A former U.S. ambassador to Russia and career Foreign Service officer delivers a resounding defense of American diplomacy and the need for negotiation in a non–zero-sum world. the back channel

MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WE WAIT? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote

grandmother, whose wisdom included the mantra, “you can find good anywhere, and you can do good everywhere.”

A humble and timely book that speaks to an era of sweeping change and a reminder that faith and love are two of the best weapons to counter hatred.

THE BACK CHANNEL A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal Burns, William J. Random House (512 pp.) $32.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-525-50886-1

A former U.S. ambassador to Russia and career Foreign Service officer delivers a resounding defense of American diplomacy and the need for negotiation in a non–zero-sum world.

Diplomacy involves considerable skills that seem little in evidence in the current White House, requiring of its practitioners “smart policy judgment, language skills, and a sure feel for the foreign landscapes in which they serve and the domestic priorities they represent.” There is also the matter of what Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls “strategic adaptation,” the ability to read the winds and adjust course to accommodate the tack one’s interlocutor is taking. Consider Vladimir Putin, a man who leaves Burns unimpressed. By the author’s account, Putin was none too happy when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, and part of his program seems to be to get both up and running again. At the same time, for all his wiles, Putin is capable of misreading situations, as he certainly did after 9/11, when the Bush administration proved “indifferent to Putin’s calculus, and generally disinclined to concede or pay much attention to a power in strategic decline.” Some of the most newsworthy elements of this book, in fact, involve how the State Department crafted a response to 9/11, if one that largely went ignored. One might understand how Putin might feel inclined to angle for an American leader who would serve his interests. Enter Donald Trump. If Burns is evenhanded and careful, glad to praise Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton alike for their successes in service, he clearly reckons Trump to be a disaster for American foreign policy. Still, he persists: Burns believes that “diplomacy is one of our nation’s biggest assets and bestkept secrets. However battered and belittled in the age of Trump, it has never been a more necessary tool of first resort for a new century.”

Excellent reading for students of contemporary geopolitics and recent American history.

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Cassidy, Tina 37 Ink/Atria (304 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5011-7776-7

A remarkable tale of the woman who drove the fight for women’s suffrage.

Former Boston Globe journalist Cassidy (Jackie After O: One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expec­ tations and Rediscovered Her Dreams, 2012, etc.), now chief content officer for InkHouse, chronicles the life of Alice Paul (1885-1977), a Quaker from New Jersey who became one of the leaders in the struggle for women’s rights in the early 1900s—and beyond. She was the daughter of a wealthy banker and earned multiple graduate degrees. While she was studying social justice in Birmingham, England, she was profoundly moved by the “suffragettes” Christabel Pankhurst and her mother, Emmeline. Raised to expect equality for all, she stayed in London and joined the fight. She was arrested multiple times in six months, went on a hunger strike, and suffered permanent physical damage from force-feeding. Running parallel to Paul’s story, Cassidy gives us the background of the suffragist’s biggest stumbling block, Woodrow Wilson.

Born in Georgia at the end of the Civil War, his father, a minister, authored a booklet outlining his misguided argument for how the Bible condones slavery. Wilson’s outlook was firmly fixed along those lines, and he even said, “universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country.” He cast himself as a progressive, but that didn’t include women or blacks.

Paul joined the fight for equality in America, a struggle that was not as confrontational as England’s but just as dedicated.

While those in charge fought for states’ resolutions, she felt an amendment to the Constitution was absolutely necessary. To say Paul was the driving force is not an exaggeration. She was tireless, always sure of her tactics and willing to endure many setbacks, arrests, and Wilson’s continued obstinacy. Dedicated women like Inez Milholland, Alva Belmont, and Lucy Burns stood right beside her.

This book should be required reading until Alice Paul becomes a household name. She not only fought for voting rights and the 19th Amendment; she kept fighting for another 50 years.

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QUEEN BEY A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter Chambers, Veronica—Ed. St. Martin’s (240 pp.) $27.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-250-20052-5

A diverse chorus of voices praises the acclaimed songstress and cultural icon.

Chambers (The Go-Between, 2017, etc.), the editor of the New York Times archival storytelling team, who, in addition to her own books, has co-authored books by Michael Strahan, Timbaland, Robin Roberts, Eric Ripert, and Marcus Samuelsson, collects essays from distinguished professionals in entertainment, media, and social activism. In an introduction celebrating the “fire in her belly, the almost otherworldly level of focus and ambition in her eyes,” Chambers lauds Beyoncé’s “soundtrack of power and possibility,” which buoyed the editor

through unexpected life changes. Nigerian author and speaker Luvvie Ajayi rhapsodizes over the singer’s immense cultural influence and celebrates her memorable, career-defining performance at the 2018 Coachella Festival. Data journalist Meredith Broussard’s graphic biography of “Bey” vividly combines art and geographical statistics. The perspectives Chambers assembles are delightfully manifold and aptly representative of Beyoncé as a veteran entertainer and an influential cultural icon transcending age and social status. YouTube sensation Kid Fury commends Beyoncé on how much her inclusive productions have consistently impacted the gay community. Other contributors examine Beyoncé’s referential, allusive artistry, her evolving feminism, her Instagram account, and career comparisons to the upper echelon of female rappers, and there are fairminded criticisms of her “Formation” and “Lemonade” albums.

Collectively, these well-balanced essays amplify the popularity and reach of Beyoncé’s music and persona across generations of women (and men). The anthology closes with award-winning journalist Caroline Clarke attesting that while perfectionism can be a common trap for girls, when it is applied to superstars

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like Beyoncé, it makes her “a pretty damn good role model for my daughter or anyone, including me.” With such a dynamic ensemble of opinions and reflections, the collection will be sweet reading not just for Beyoncé’s superfans, but also for activists, feminists, and budding vocalists.

An uplifting and resounding ovation. (two 8-page color inserts)

Cox’s memoir, written in the early 1980s and posthumously published, provides a plainspoken account of a transformative moment in history and Cox’s own journey from commercial photographer to committed revolutionary. His daughter Kimberly Cox Marshall provides a loving foreword (“Daddy, I kept the title you wanted”), and publisher Steve Wasserman offers further context in his introduction, describing the author’s work “as Field Marshal in charge of weapons procurement, gunrunning, and planning armed attacks and defense” as well as “his star turn as a party spokesman raising money at the Manhattan home of Leonard Bernstein.” Cox recalls a taste for nonconformity from an upbringing in Missouri and California, but his radicalism coincided with the 1965 Watts uprising. “I admit to having felt joy—joy and pride at seeing blacks finally saying, with their actions, that they were fed up.” In 1967, he positively impressed founding Black Panthers David Hilliard and Huey Newton, and he discloses early plans for ambushes of police to serve as a blow against race-based brutality. The group seemed both righteous and practical in their outlook, but circumstances spiraled out of control following

JUST ANOTHER NIGGER My Life in the Black Panther Party Cox, Don Heyday (256 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 1, 2019 978-1-59714-459-9

An unapologetic firsthand account of the Black Panthers during their turbulent prime.

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violent skirmishes and Newton’s arrest. With key leaders in jail or killed in police shootouts, surviving members pursued a Marxist-Leninist ideology of rigid purification. Cox documents plenty of internecine drama as he rose through the ranks, culminating in his visit to the fugitive Eldridge Cleaver, who “told me [Hilliard] had sent me to Algiers for them to kill me!” About his 1972 resignation, the author ruefully concludes, “many of the conspiracy cases brought against the party were due to our own mistakes and excessive zeal whenever a police agent was discovered in our ranks.” The narrative is intimate and exciting, although Cox seems too close to events: He elides some peoples’ identities and makes arcane references to late-1960s radicalism, such as the conflict between the Panthers and black nationalists.

Despite flaws, a valuable primary-source recollection from an incendiary time.

book pulls them into the limelight yet again, where they can be addressed by a new generation of parents and girls.

Practical solutions backed by solid research that will help many girls overcome their high levels of stress and anxiety.

UNDER PRESSURE Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls

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Damour, Lisa Ballantine (288 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-0-399-18005-7

New insight into the old issue of teen girls suffering stress and anxiety.

Adolescent girls have always struggled with anxiety, but it’s even more of an issue now with the rise of social media, cyberbullying, and the cutthroat competition to get into elite universities across the country. Damour (Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood, 2016), an adolescence columnist for the New York Times and director of the Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls, re-examines this problem through real-case scenarios taken from her private practice as a clinical psychologist and her work at her all-girls school. The author helps readers identify key areas where girls may be feeling pressure: home, school, in their relationships with their peers and with boys, and with the culture at large.

In readily accessible and easily assimilated prose, Damour first explains how some stress and anxiety is actually good for a girl, as it pushes her out of her comfort zone, forcing her to stretch and reach beyond her safety level to new stages of development. It’s when this stress becomes overwhelming that it becomes a problem, and here the author jumps into the many arenas where this is an issue. She discusses the difference between healthy competition and aggressive behavior in school academics, how most girls need more sleep, and how they can protect themselves and each other from sexual harassment. She explains how to build downtime into a hectic schedule so that when things go awry, as they inevitably do, it doesn’t lead to a serious mental and emotional collapse.

She also makes many other common-sense suggestions to help parents help their daughters in these highly competitive times.

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A gripping memoir about a gay man with feet in India and the U.S. as well as a book about how to put together a life. an indefinite sentence

AN INDEFINITE SENTENCE A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex

various gay coming-of-age moments—e.g., the first time he was tested for HIV and his encounter with a Keith Haring mural, which “hit me with the force that Picasso’s Guernica had.” Equally affecting is Dube’s inquiry into the ways in which his personal and professional lives have intersected. For example, he undertook research into the unfolding HIV crisis in India at a time when female sex workers were in the bull’s-eye of HIV discourse in India. They had, Dube writes, “spared us blame and persecution for carrying the ‘gay plague,’ ” and the author had a kinship with them—like him, they knew what it was like to feel like an outcast. Yet in his policy writing, he “deliberately chose to keep silent about what I knew for a fact, that a significant proportion of Indian men were having unprotected sex with other men, thus putting themselves at risk of contracting HIV.” Dube also offers insights into the trials of love and of middle age. His account of the end of a long-term relationship—with its pitch-perfect description of two people who still love each other who can’t admit they are breaking up—will resonate with many readers.

A gripping memoir about a gay man with feet in India and the U.S. as well as a book about how to put together a life.

Dube, Siddharth Atria (384 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 8, 2019 978-1-5011-5847-6

A public health visionary gets personal with a powerful exploration of “the beguiling possibilities of gender beyond the conventional bipolarity of male and female, and the mysterious, limitless permutations of sexual desire.”

World Policy Institute senior fellow Dube (Sex, Lies, and AIDS, 2001, etc.) was born in Calcutta and is known for his work on poverty and AIDS. In this memoir, published in India in 2015, he recounts his journey to come out as a young gay man in India and America and his efforts to find a loving relationship in midlife.

Much of the book, which begins when the author was 10 in 1971, reads like a novel, and he delivers many moving descriptions of

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THE AGITATOR William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism

OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Duffy, Peter PublicAffairs (288 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-5417-6231-2

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A touching and necessary manifesto and history featuring firsthand accounts of the recent Indigenous uprising against powerful oil companies.

In this carefully researched and much-needed history of settler colonialism in the United States, Estes (American Studies/ Univ. of New Mexico)—a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and co-founder of the Red Nation, “an organization dedicated to Native liberation”—is particularly focused on the resistance efforts of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations. The narrative is particularly interesting for the way it connects current

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A biography of an important 20thcentury activist who was one of the first to stand up to “the well-publicized injustices of the Third Reich.”

The subject of Duffy’s (Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring, 2014, etc.) latest is Bill Bailey (1915-1995), a merchant seaman with little formal education who joined the American Communist Party as a teenager and became increasingly angry about the U.S. government appeasing Hitler during his rise to power and subsequent comprehensive repression of any form of dissent.

Bailey’s fleeting fame occurred when he and a few like-minded Nazi haters boarded the Bremen, “the flagship of Hitler’s commercial armada,” in New York Harbor in 1935. A dress-up party was in progress to celebrate the departure of the massive ship.

Bailey and his colleagues had devised a plan to scale the mast and remove the Nazi flag, which featured a swastika. The plan succeeded, becoming “the first blow landed against the Third Reich by foreign adversaries, delivered without guns or bomb, years before America, or any country, chose to take military action against a regime that was already signaling its treacherous intentions.” However, local authorities, feeling duty-bound to protect a foreign vessel against politically oriented trespassers, arrested Bailey and a few accomplices. Throughout the narrative, Duffy offers detailed sections about the Bremen and its impressive luxury, the duties of merchant mariners, the American Communist Party, Hitler’s rise, the German persecution of Jews, and the failure of most Americans—including President Franklin Roosevelt—to counteract the evils of Nazism in the early 1930s. In addition, the author critiques the criminal justice system as he provides detailed coverage of the trial that resulted in the acquittals of Bailey and his colleagues. After the acquittal, Bailey remained a political activist, union organizer, and merchant mariner, serving in World War II. For the last few decades of his life, he remained out of the spotlight.

A well-fleshed-out biography featuring an appropriate amount of historical context.

Estes, Nick Verso (288 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 26, 2019 978-1-78663-672-0

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An engaging and disquieting analysis of America’s recurring choice between ‘a humane ethic of social citizenship’ and barbarism. the end of the myth

environmental efforts—namely, the “Water is Life” movement at Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016—with the earliest attempts by Indigenous nations to protect their homeland, as well as with international politics. The author takes readers back to early U.S.–Indian wars in order to examine two competing value systems: the epic disagreement between Native-Americans and Europeans on how to use and respect America’s land.

Exploring a wide variety of historical touchpoints, including the damming of the Missouri River, issues of eminent domain, the massacre at Wounded Knee and its later occupation, the American Indian Movement, and Indigenous recognition at the United Nations, Estes elucidates how and why the Dakota Access Pipeline protest emerged. He explains why Indigenous resistance never dies and what energized it in recent years. The author’s account is especially impressive as he criticizes his own tribe for attempting to ease the way for oil companies. “Now,” he writes, “Lower Brule had crossed a picket line, betraying not only their relatives...but also frontline communities around the world being devastated by climate change and extractivism.”

With an urgent voice, Estes reminds us that the greed of private corporations must never be allowed to endanger the health of the majority.

An important read about Indigenous protesters fighting to protect their ancestral land and uphold their historic values of clean land and water for all humans.

SPIES OF NO COUNTRY Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

Friedman, Matti Algonquin (272 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-61620-722-9

A focused espionage tale of the beginning of Israel and the spies who “turned out to be...the embryo of one of the world’s most formidable intelligence

services.”

In his latest book, former AP correspondent Friedman (Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War, 2016, etc.), whose reporting has taken him to many parts of the Middle East, writes primarily about Arab Jews from the Islamic world who left their countries because they were persecuted and harassed. Unfortunately, in Israel, they were condescended to, ignored, and pushed to the fringes, believed not to be a real part of Israel. “The Israeli identity is increasingly Middle Eastern,” writes the author, “but the old languages and mannerisms are gone, as the Zionist movement always intended.” Friedman tells the fascinating story of the Arab Section, part of the Palmach, the Jewish underground army before there was a Jewish state.

These men were from the Islamic world, thus easing their task to infiltrate it. Friedman focuses on four specific spies, all under the age of 25—Gamliel Cohen (from Damascus), Isaac Shoshan (Aleppa), Havakuk Cohen (Yemen), and Yakuba Cohen (Jerusalem, British Palestine)—who served as the link between the 56

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amateurish, small-scale beginning of Zionist intelligence, when Israel was a wish and not yet a fact, and the more professional efforts after 1948. The Palmach had very little money; the spies contrived their own cover stories, and equipment and communications were sketchy at best. At that time, Israel was many things, and the author deftly navigates the complicated identities and the stories beneath the stories. (One of his sources is the only remaining spy, Shoshan. As Friedman readily admits at the beginning of the book, this is not a comprehensive history of the birth of Israel—and it can’t be, since records are few, confusion was the norm, mistakes were made, and many died.

An exciting historical journey and highly informative look at the Middle East with Israel as the starting point.

THE END OF THE MYTH From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

Grandin, Greg Metropolitan/Henry Holt (384 pp.) $30.07 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-250-17982-1 A history of how America’s conception of its borders reflects its changing identity.

From the time of the country’s founding, the frontier has had mythical significance, symbolizing limitless opportunity and grand ambition. Today, that expansive idea has been replaced with that of an isolating border wall. In an authoritative and compelling analysis, Bancroft Prize winner Grandin (History/ New York Univ.; Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, 2015, etc.) traces America’s evolution from the 18th century to the present, as expressed in the metaphorical meaning of frontier. “Where the frontier symbolized perennial rebirth, a culture in springtime,” he contends, the wall now reflects “a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change.” The author locates the mythology of the frontier in an essay by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who “emancipated the concept of ‘frontier,’ unhitched it from its more mundane earthbound means—used to indicate a national border or a military front—and let it float free as an abstraction” that signified “an aspiration.” The vast, open West portended political equality and unlimited natural resources, independence and individualism: deeply held—though idealistic and overly romantic—values. Democratic values surely did not shape pioneers’ treatment of Native Americans, who were slaughtered, displaced, and forcibly segregated; nor of AfricanAmericans, who never shared in the apparently bountiful economic and political rewards of westward expansion. Virulent racism infected the concept of frontier during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, which was characterized by the brutal campaigns of the Indian Removal Act. At a time of fast-paced change, urban growth, and economic volatility, Jackson promised to rein in government intrusion and restore “primitive simplicity and purity.” Throughout the 19th century, Grandin |

THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF GERMANY From Julius Caesar to Angela Merkel—A Retelling for Our Times

amply shows, the nation became involved in wars in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia that redefined the relationship of frontier to domination, exploitation, and “the panic of power.” Trump’s border wall, writes the author, “is a monument to disenchantment,” resentment, and rage.

An engaging and disquieting analysis of America’s recurring choice between “a humane ethic of social citizenship” and barbarism. (4 maps)

Hawes, James The Experiment (256 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-61519-569-5

A fast-moving encapsulation of German history focusing on the thesis that Prussia’s aggression was a short-lived anomaly in the big picture and not reflective of the true German spirit.

German-steeped British academic Hawes (Creative Writing/Oxford Brookes Univ.; Englanders and Huns: The Culture-Clash Which Led to the First World War, 2014, etc.) imparts plenty of useful information in this handy history for students looking to define a sometimes-inscrutable people with a tainted recent past. At the beginning, the author implores readers to “throw

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A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack. don’t let me down

away a great deal of what we think we know about German history, and start afresh.” First, he reminds us that “Julius Caesar had invented the Germans,” that is the barbarians who lived east of the Rhine who differed greatly from the Romans, who, according to Tacitus, “had degenerated into a people made soft by vice and luxury, who merely groveled to their emperors.”

Hence the beginning of the rather romantic character of Germans as wild and noble tribesmen on the frontiers. Hawes sees the birth of Germany as we know it with the partition of Charlemagne’s kingdom into West Frankish (France) and East Frankish (Germany); the practice of “electing” a king—Conrad in 911 C.E.—meant much of the subsequent German history was “one of a permanent battle between royalty and high nobility.” The author traces how the separation of west Germany from what was known as East Elbia occurred with the rise of the Junkers (“young lords”) and the increasing militarization of “muscledup” Prussia under Frederick the Great, leading Prussia to its bellicose apotheosis from 1866 to 1945—“the great deformation,” asserts Hawes. The true liberal democratic spirit of the robust, enterprising Germans resides in the west, rather than the east, now again courting right-wing parties.

A marvelously concise effort, especially compelling as Angela Merkel is set to step down in 2021, leaving an uncertain vacuum in Europe. (100 maps, images, and diagrams)

while losing [myself].” Permeated with events like church boot camp and school graduations, the narrative is near cinematic with insights about gender roles, love, and sex gained through experiences involving her parents, romantic relationships, God, and rock music. Struggling through a host of various traumas both minor and major, her mother’s inability to break free, and her father’s battle with cancer and eventual death, Hosier delivers a memoir that is less about chasing an identity and more about having one cast upon her and coming to terms with it.

A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.

A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE From Pericles to Putin

Jenkins, Simon PublicAffairs (400 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5417-8855-8

A concise and somewhat quirky treatment of European history from ancient times to the present.

In a natural follow-up to A Short His­ tory of England (2011), Guardian and Eve­ ning Standard columnist Jenkins (Britain’s Hundred Best Railway Stations, 2017, etc.) begins and ends with classical metaphors.

He opens by noting how Europe was named for the place on the island of Crete where Zeus, after seducing the Phoenician princess Europa, swam with her to engender a new civilization.

The author ends with the story of the magnificent Piraeus lion, carved in Greece in the fourth century B.C.E. and removed to Venice, where it stands outside the Arsenal in Venice, revealing what Jenkins sees as a metaphor “to free ourselves from our own place in history and see the past as a distant land.” Indeed, the cultural currents forming Europe and shaping its destiny have been staggering. From the ascendancy of Rome to its overrun by barbarian invaders to the establishment of a Frankish kingdom by Charlemagne to the invasions of the Vikings, Europe experienced a violent founding characterized by many forced migrations of diverse peoples. Yet it has also been the crucible of enlightened civilizations, from the enterprising Scandinavian tribes to the Norman builders to the rise of powerful nationstates to the galvanizing ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation. Throughout this chronological work, Jenkins touches on many usual suspects—e.g., Julius Caesar, Constantine, Catherine de’ Medici, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler, and Putin—yet he deals with schisms and wars of dynasty with admirable restraint, distilling the research to the bare essentials. He organizes his work by themes such as “The Old Order’s Last Cry: 1840-1850,” and he manages to capture the dwindling “strains” of a disunited present-day Europe. The 20 pages of maps at the beginning, as well as the timeline, are endlessly helpful in navigating this vast history.

Jenkins says it best: “This short book is aimed at those without the time and inclination for a longer one.” An accomplished introduction for any nonscholar interested in European history.

DON’T LET ME DOWN A Memoir

Hosier, Erin Atria (320 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-4516-4495-1

A successful literary agent recounts her life and especially her relationship with her father, who was “a mass of contradictions: a pacifist and a tyrant, an optimist with demons, a hippie and a conservative, a proud father and jerk, and a boy and a man.”

Hosier (co-author: Hit So Hard, 2017) has long dealt with unresolved “daddy issues,” but she thought she had tucked the baggage neatly away—that is, until her mother sold the family home and, salvaging the last few childhood relics, the author dug out a Beatles-heavy stack of inherited records. After that opening scene, Hosier proceeds to detail her life story, one closely intertwined with her father, who reared the household on the entire Fab Four canon. “The Beatles records...had provided the soundtrack to our lives and seen us through every great joy and tragedy,” she writes. “Dad and I used those songs to both connect with and escape from each other, to both understand and rebel against each other.” Titled with songs from “Blackbird” to “Hey Jude,” each chapter reveals chronological milestones that shaped the author’s coming-of-age in rural 1980s Ohio. Underneath what seemed an idyllic “Here Comes the Sun” childhood stirred a controlling father who became increasingly volatile. Eventually, writes Hosier, life became “the anxiety of constantly walking on eggshells, the need for order and control, [and] the impulse to try to save others 58

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RECLAIMING OUR SPACE How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets Jones, Feminista Beacon (224 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2019 978-0-8070-5537-3

A feminist writer/community activist offers insights into what she sees as the defining practices of 21st-century black

feminism.

For Philadelphia-based social worker and activist Jones, black feminism is “the key to Black liberation.” One tool that the author believes that black feminists have used successfully in their ongoing struggle for social justice is Twitter. She argues that hashtags, which help Twitter users find “specific topics and associated social media posts,” have become vital mechanisms to grow communities that extend far beyond the narrow

confines of academia. Some, like #FridayNightHorror (which focuses on black women in the horror film genre) and #BlackGirlsAreMagic (which focuses on the accomplishments of black women), are social, educational, and/or inspirational in nature.

Others, like #BlackLivesMatter, have become the foundation for worldwide political movements. Jones believes that Twitter has become such a successful tool for black feminists/activists because the “forum [is] rooted in the African call-and-response tradition,” wherein participants aid in the development of a message while also influencing its direction. She also suggests that Twitter has become a way that black feminists like herself have been able to build followings that have allowed them to continue much-needed conversations elsewhere. Tweets on sex-positive feminism, for example, led Jones to create a widely read blog and, later, articles for Ebony.com. While the author concedes that what exists online “can be negative and harmful to [black] progress,” she also suggests that continued sharing of ideas among black feminists “will strengthen and improve the way the next generation interacts with each other.” Sharp and provocative, the narrative is most powerful in its implication

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Lili Anolik

COME FOR THE LA INTRIGUE IN ANOLIK’S DEBUT; STAY FOR THE SURPRISING MORAL OF THE STORY

By Bridgette Bates

Lili Anolik with Eve Babitz

Lili Anolik is unabashedly head over heels for the subject of her new book. She and Eve Babitz regularly text and talk on the phone; Anolik sends packages of chocolate-covered strawberries. The spark was ignited in 2010 when Anolik came across a quote by her future subject. “I don’t remember the exact quote, but it was of course about LA and sex, and I was instantly entranced and I wanted to know who this woman was.”

The woman is an author of seven books; a designer of album covers for the likes of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt; the goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky; a graduate of Hollywood High; the nude woman playing chess with Marcel Duchamp in the famous photograph; a lover to many including Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, and Harrison Ford; basically, the epi60

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center of the burgeoning pop-cultural scene of Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s.

Anolik tried to learn more about this fascinating figure, but books by Babitz were out of print, and very little was written about her. Anolik managed to track down one book, Slow Days, Fast Company, sealing the deal for her infatuation with Babitz’s work. “Her sensibility was idiosyncratic and unexpected, and her prose had a real rhythm to it,” says Anolik. “I thought she has this feeling for place—for Los Angeles, which is this kind of beautiful city that’s filled with hope and optimism, but underneath the hope and optimism I just felt like she got the city with all of its ironies and all of its complexities.” Anolik pitched a story to Vanity Fair, where she is now a contributing editor, and began an investigation into this it girl who fell out of the limelight.

When Anolik first tried to make contact with Babitz—by finding her address in the phone book and mailing her requests to meet—she was given the cold shoulder. Gradually connecting with Babitz’s inner circle— her sister, a cousin, the photographer of that Duchamp pic—Anolik finally made some inroads and hopped on a plane from her home in New York to have lunch with Babitz in Los Angeles at the iconic Original Farmers Market. Very little was revealed over burgers except for Babitz’s insatiable appetite, but after many more conversations, Anolik published a 6,000-word profile that she says only began to scratch the surface. Luckily, Babitz approved of the Vanity Fair article. “She left a voicemail saying, ‘So glad you got in the story about the blow job,’ ” Anolik recalls.

Once Anolik had the trust of her subject, she had to keep going. “[Eve] had this fascinating, complicated life with multiple acts,” explains Anolik. “She started as a daughter of Hollywood—her mom’s an artist, her dad’s a musician…their house was this wonderful salon of musicians and writers and poets. And then she becomes a muse and a groupie and the posing in the picture with |

a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap, or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse or sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.

This emphasis of “sense” and “pulse” and a dreamlike unfolding also drives Hollywood’s Eve, which does not fit the mold of a biography—it’s a bona fide love story. Anolik achieves an incredible intimacy with her subject, who talks to almost no one these days—especially about her “final act.” In a freak accident while driving home from a family brunch on a Sunday morning, Babitz caught herself on fire while trying to light a cigar. This tragic accident in the late ’90s left her in chronic discomfort, and she lives a very quiet existence today. Although Babitz never returned to the social scene that she dominated for decades, “The force of her personality and the force of her spirit are unchanged,” Anolik says. “She still sounds just the way she sounds in her books in a funny kind of way.” In a final ode, Anolik writes about her subject at peace in the present:

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Marcel Duchamp…and then in her 20s she’s discovered as a writer by Joan Didion, and then penultimately she’s this California horror story.”

Each of these titillating acts is explored—with great admiration and love—in Anolik’s new Kirkus-starred book, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (Jan. 8). This chronicle of how Babitz’s deep entanglement in LA’s “café society”—where she was a fixture at places like the Troubadour, Barney’s Beanery, and the Chateau Marmont—is about more than just being a wallflower on the Sunset Strip. “It wasn’t the gaudy glitter of celebrity that so dazzled Eve. It was all that brilliance assembled in one place, on one scene,” writes Anolik, who shines a light on the brilliance of Babitz herself.

Babitz’s sharp and funny voice, provocative lifestyle, and all her stranger-than-fiction experiences create a Hollywood biopic that no movie director could have ever imagined. “Evie’s memory is frighteningly good for someone who’s abused drugs and has participated in every form of debauchery that they are offered,” says Anolik, who often questioned the plausibility of Babitz’s recollections, but she was always able to corroborate the stories. And Babitz’s stories are beyond extraordinary: Harrison Ford was her pot dealer; she was one of the first people ever to wear contact lenses because her next-door neighbor invented them; she was the one to suggest that Steve Martin perform in a white suit and that Jim Morrison don leather pants; she was the host of a dinner party where Michelle Phillips told an anecdote to Joan Didion, who asked to use it for the seminal ending of Play It Like It Lays.

Anolik traces some of these real-life stories through the narratives behind Babitz’s own books. Her autobiographical novels, several of which were published by Knopf at the time, were a “cult favorite, never a mainstream success,” unlike the books of Didion and Nathanael West, both of whom offered much grimmer views of California. As the unofficial champion of Babitz’s literary canon, Anolik’s initial Vanity Fair piece helped to launch a resurgence of interest, and since then several of Babitz’s books have been reissued. In Holly­ wood’s Eve, Anolik devotes extra attention to her personal favorite and first read from Babitz’s oeuvre, Slow Days, Fast Company (1977, reissued in 2016), which she quotes throughout the book, including this passage:

Eve is now in her mid-seventies. Her hair is no longer a silvery shade of platinum but straight-up silver. The drugs she takes are to ward off pain rather than induce psychosis and are paid for by Medicare. And yet she remains a beloved and brilliant little girl: beautiful, serenely self-absorbed, wholly without conscience or remorse, and an unending source of marvel and freshness and delight.

Bridgette Bates’ poetry collection What Is Not Missing Is Light is the recipient of the Black Box Poetry Prize. Hollywood’s Eve was reviewed in the Nov. 1, 2018, issue.

HOLLYWOOD’S EVE Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. Anolik, Lili Scribner (288 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 8, 2018 978-1-5011-2579-9

You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost….No one likes to be confronted with a bunch of disparate details that God only knows what they mean. I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make

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Interesting reading for students of cultural history as well as Spanish-American relations over the centuries. the spanish craze

WISE GUY Lessons from a Life

that, unless born to privilege, all Americans, regardless of race or gender, now “feel something akin to what Black people...have always experienced.” Understanding black (female) struggles is therefore critical for everyone.

Smart, savvy, and unapologetically fierce.

THE SPANISH CRAZE America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939 Kagan, Richard L. Univ. of Nebraska (640 pp.) $39.95 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-4962-0772-2

From Hispanophilia to Hispanophobia: a well-considered study of the shifting but, in its main outlines, surprisingly constant view of American elites toward the Spanish Other.

American culture has been bound up with Spanish, SpanishAmerican, and Hispanic cultures for far longer than the matter of Donald Trump and his wall, although that ugly business is just a reverberation from and continuation of the past. As Kagan (Emeritus, History/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, 2009, etc.) recounts in this scholarly study, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and a host of other influential Americans advanced the “Black Legend” of “the Spain of bloodthirsty conquistadors who slaughtered their way across the Americas” and otherwise contrasted Spanish civilization to the infinitely more enlightened—in their telling—Anglo-Saxon one. Against them were writers such as Washington Irving, who told tales of a sunny Spain, “a light-hearted, quasi-Oriental country that was charming, hospitable, and, most important, relentlessly romantic and picturesque.” William Dean Howells, for his part, called the Spanish “the honestest people in Europe,” leaving it to the likes of Ernest Hemingway to tell his compatriots that not all of them were top-notch fellows; even after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway could be persuaded to go to Franco’s nation to catch a glimpse of his beloved bullfight.

Kagan carefully documents changing attitudes over three centuries of Anglo-American interaction with Spain and its colonial descendants, attitudes that hinge on stereotypes good and bad, from Zorro to the Inquisition and Dolores del Río to Valeriano Weyler. Occasionally, the author even turns the tables, as when he notes that Hearst was broadly considered little more than a looter of Spanish culture “whose seemingly unquenchable appetite for Spanish art and antiques resulted in wholesale ‘destruction’ of Spain’s artistic and architectural patrimony,” just as Americans of many generations have appropriated things Spanish and Hispanic.

Interesting reading for students of cultural history as well as Spanish-American relations over the centuries.

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Kawasaki, Guy Portfolio (288 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 26, 2019 978-0-525-53861-5

The tech and marketing guru offers stories from his life and career.

Born in Hawaii in 1954 and noted as the evangelist for Apple’s Macintosh in the 1980s, Kawasaki (The Art of the Start 2.0, 2015, etc.) is now “chief evangelist” at Canva, the graphic design website. In this book of inspiration and advice, he describes his working-class youth as the grandson of Japanese immigrants, his education at Stanford, and highlights from his years as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and marketer.

Organized around nearly a dozen themes (“Education,” “Apple,” “Values,” etc.), the book consists of short anecdotes about life decisions followed by nuggets of wisdom drawn from each story.

Results vary: The anecdotes are entertaining, reflecting varied experiences, from learning how to sell at a jewelry company to career-defining work under Steve Jobs to the joy of raising his children to his love of sports. The wisdom bits are often trite or cloying: “Seek opportunities.” “Respect authority.” “Do the right thing.” “Help people and be generous.” And so on, with tiresome predictability. Kawasaki’s candor, however, is refreshing: “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart,” he writes of a Stanford friendship that led to his Apple job. And: “It’s very hard to evangelize crap.” There is also payback for Hillary Clinton’s “hubris” in rejecting his offer of social media help in her presidential campaign. Kawasaki is direct, funny, and sometimes contradictory. “Be humble,” he writes in a book with more than 20 photos of himself with others. His soft side is balanced by fearless practicality on the key to success: “Life is sales.” There is a genuine desire to share lessons learned and help readers get ahead. Do what’s right (he resisted Trump), find challenging teachers, avoid paranoia, and set goals, even superficial ones, if you want to succeed.

Kawasaki is a likable guy, but this one is best browsed to avoid saccharine overload.

THE FUTURE IS ASIAN

Khanna, Parag Simon & Schuster (432 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-5011-9626-3

An India-born, Western-educated strategic adviser and author offers a comprehensive worldview from an Asian perspective.

Now residing in Singapore—“the unofficial capital of Asia, a melting pot that embodies Asia’s potential to make the most of the Europeanization and Americanization of the past and, most importantly, |

the Asianization of today and tomorrow”—Khanna (Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 2016, etc.) enlists his considerable global experience and education to elegantly lay out the vast range and enormous potential of what he calls the Asian “system” of moving beyond geography and embracing “alliances, institutions, infrastructure, trade, investment, culture and other patterns.” As such, Asia encompasses China, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam as well as the Gulf states (“West Asia”) and India, Russia, Iran, and, strategically, Australia. Seeing the world from an Asian point of view first entails jettisoning accumulated stereotypes—e.g., that Asia needs the U.S. more than we need Asia. This is not true, and Asian nations have become increasingly wary of Washington’s “unreliable promises.” Khanna begins with a dazzling distillation of the history of the world from an Asian perspective, emphasizing how the main swath of early civilization was situated in Asia and how briefly (though intensively) the Western powers inserted themselves into the picture. The author underscores that “Asia’s linkages have been continually propelled through commerce, conflict, and culture.” Following the historical

narrative, Khanna moves into “Asia-nomics,” or how each country is developing its particular economic strength. For example, after the first wave of modern Asian growth in postwar Japan and South Korea, followed by China, the current wave is now propelled by Southeast Asia (India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia). Then, the author addresses the phenomenal Asian diaspora in America and in Europe; China’s forays into Africa; and how liberal democracy probably does not suit Asian countries as much as the technocratic model (“good despotism”) of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore.

Western readers with a strong devotion to individual liberties may be turned off, but Khanna is thorough and clear, offering abundant food for thought.

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Who Were the Men in Orange?

Behind a gruesome ISIS beheading video lies the untold story of twenty-one brave men and the faith community that formed these unlikely modern-day saints and heroes.

“Striking.” —Publishers Weekly “Illuminating.” —Die Zeit February 2019 Hardcover | 272 pages | 9780874868395 | $26.00 • Major events in New York, Washington DC, and London • National publicity campaign

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Kotlowitz offers a narrative that is as messy and complicated and heart-wrenching as life itself. an american summer

AN AMERICAN SUMMER Love and Death in Chicago

SPROUT LANDS Tending the Endless Gift of Trees Logan, William Bryant Norton (384 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-393-60941-7

Kotlowitz, Alex Talese/Doubleday (304 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-385-53880-0 A chronicle of dreams and gun violence one summer in the city of Chicago.

In 1991, Kotlowitz (Journalism/Northwestern Univ.; Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago, 2004, etc.) published the modern classic There Are No Children Here (1991), which told the story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah and their experiences in one of Chicago’s violent housing projects. Years later, the author received a call in the middle of the night and learned that Pharoah may have been involved in a murder. In his latest powerful sociological exploration, the author masterfully captures the summer of 2013 in neglected Chicago neighborhoods, rendering intimate profiles of residents and the “very public” violence they face every day. One example is Eddie Bocanegra, who killed a rival gang member as a teenager. “Eddie did the unimaginable,” writes Kotlowitz. “He took another human life. I suppose for some that might be all you need to know. For others, it may be all you want to know about him.

And that’s what Eddie fears the most, that this moment is him.

That there’s no other way to view him.” We also meet Anita Stewart, a dedicated social worker who watched one of her favorite students get murdered and another struggle with the aftermath. Heartbreakingly, the author writes early on, “I could tell story after story like this, of mothers who drift on a sea of heartache, without oars and without destination.” Throughout, Kotlowitz raises significant issues about the regions where violence has become far too routine. “After the massacre at Newtown and then at Parkland we asked all the right questions,” he writes. However, “in Chicago neighborhoods like Englewood or North Lawndale, where in one year they lose twice the number of people killed in Newtown, no one’s asking those questions.”

Kotlowitz offers a narrative that is as messy and complicated and heart-wrenching as life itself: “This is a book, I suppose, about that silence—and the screams and howling and prayers and longing that it hides.”

A fiercely uncompromising—and unforgettable—portrait.

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An arborist celebrates the intrinsic creativity of trees.

When Logan (Air: The Restless Shaper of the World, 2012, etc.) was hired to train and care for 92 trees in front of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he became obsessed with sprouting—the ability of any leafy tree or shrub to grow new branches after its trunk is cut or burned—and with the ancient practices of coppice and pollard that nurtured this regenerative power. Resprouting allows a tree to stay alive after damage or disease. “Eighty percent of the trees in a leafy forest are not virgins from seed,” the author reveals, “but experienced sprouts,” some extending the life of a tree for thousands of years. Logan’s lively obsession inspired him to travel the world—to England, Spain, Sierra Leone, Norway, Japan, and the redwood forests of California—to investigate the rich and intimate connection between trees and humans. His astute attentiveness and curiosity have resulted in a radiant, insightful amalgam of botany, history, travel memoir, anthropology, archaeology, philosophical meditation, and, not least, environmental ecology. In coppicing, he explains, trees are cut or burned down to the ground; in pollarding, trunks are cut higher. Both practices yield astounding new growth: “the wood jumps back into the sky,” attaining heights of 6 feet or more in the first year. Beginning in the Mesolithic age, humans depended on the two practices for energy, warmth, and structure. Trees could provide straight, strong vertical branches for building; curved branches for barrel hoops; small branches to make into charcoal. In the Basque Country, an elaborate form of pollarding gave boat builders thick, curved timbers for a ship’s hull. With a “very active relationship to trees,” humans listened and observed as trees taught them how to cut, when to stop, and how to wait, lessons that are still salient. “If we are to get out of the dead end that our mastery of nature has backed us into,” Logan writes, we would do well to heed the intelligence of trees.

A graceful homage abounding in fascinating discoveries. (15 b/w illustrations)

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WHO KILLED MY FATHER

Louis, Édouard Trans. by Stein, Lorin New Directions (92 pp.) $18.95 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-8112-2850-3

KILLING WITH PREJUDICE Institutionalized Racism in American Capital Punishment

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A memoir implicates French politicians in the suffering of its citizens.

When he was growing up, Louis (His­ tory of Violence, 2018, etc.) didn’t get along with his father. The patriarch lived by a simple creed: “be a man, don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot.” Surprising words for young Louis, who is gay, to hear, even more so given that a man who would “sneer at any sign of femininity in a man” once dressed as a cheerleader and cried while watching opera. A détente began when the author’s father was injured at the factory where he worked.

Something heavy fell on him and “mangled” his back, and he was so weak that he got winded walking to the bathroom. Most of the book focuses on Louis’ relationship with his father, but then, in an abrupt shift, the author spends the last 15 pages enumerating policies that he argues have emasculated his father and worsened life for France’s poorest citizens. Sometimes, the author’s attempts to connect his family’s tragedy to world events go too far, such as when he invokes concentration camps.

More relevant are his critiques of French politicians: former President Jacques Chirac’s announcement “that dozens of medications would no longer be covered by the state”; former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s change to basic unemployment benefits that forced Louis’ father to take jobs such as street sweeper; and the current president, Emmanuel Macron, who cut 5 euros per month from the subsidy that allows France’s poor to pay their rent while he cut taxes for the wealthy. Whatever one’s politics, readers of this impassioned work are likely to be moved by the Louis family’s plight and the love, however strained, between the author and his father.

In 2004, fascinated by the Berlin Wall, 12-year-old Louis peppered his father with questions about it. As this poignant book shows, there are still walls—within families, between leaders and citizens—that need to be torn down.

In 1978 in Atlanta, Georgia, Warren McCleskey, an AfricanAmerican, was arrested for killing a white police officer during a furniture store robbery. After years of litigation, writes Maratea (The Politics of the Internet: Political Claims–making in Cyberspace and How It’s Affecting Modern Political Activism, 2014, etc.), his death penalty sentencing was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision that overlooked “compelling empirical data suggesting that Georgia’s death process was replete with systemic racial bias.” McCleskey was executed in 1991. In this thoughtful and disturbing account, the author traces the story of the case. He argues not that McCleskey was innocent but that he was sentenced to death under a system in which killers of white people were four times more likely as killers of blacks to be sentenced to death. The latter assertion, made by McCleskey’s lawyers, was based on a “detailed and peer-reviewed” study of 2,500 Georgia murder cases by University of Iowa law professor David C. Baldus. He concluded that all individuals convicted of murdering whites were far more likely to receive the death penalty. In its 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled the defense failed to show evidence of deliberate bias by law officials and dismissed the data on disparities in sentencing as inevitable in the criminal justice system. Noting that the decision “affirmed institutionalized racial disparities” in the capital punishment system, Maratea examines the force of “old habits of mind and racial attitudes” going back to the Civil War era. He finds that “capital punishment has borne a close resemblance to lynching in Georgia, where more extralegal executions of black Americans occurred than in any other state.” As lynchings declined in the 20th-century South, “the infliction of the death penalty by the courts increased,” according to historian William S. McFeely.

Provocative reading for anyone concerned about the intersection of race and capital punishment.

THE POPE Francis, Benedict, and the Decision that Shook the World

McCarten, Anthony Flatiron Books (256 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 29, 2019 978-1-250-20790-6

A tale of two popes.

Novelist, screenwriter, and playwright McCarten (Darkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink, 2017, etc.) provides a sensationalized examination of the Catholic Church’s two most recent leaders. The groundbreaking decision by Pope Benedict XVI to resign the papacy in 2013 led to widespread speculation and gossip about his motives, and the author digs into many of those theories. Describing Benedict at one point as “a frail and confused old man drowning in shallow waters while those closest to him watched,” McCarten is largely dismissive of Benedict as anything aside from an academic. Though he occasionally takes pity on the former pontiff—e.g., noting that his desires to go into seclusion went unheeded by his

Maratea, R.J. New York Univ. (224 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 19, 2019 978-1-4798-8860-3

The story of the Supreme Court decision McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), which underscores “the lingering racial and socioeconomic inequalities endemic to capital punishment in the United States.” |

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in it was all a dream, black millennials offer candid views of the challenges they face

Photo courtesy Nina Subi

If the word “millennial” evokes an apolitical smartphone-addicted brat who wastes money on avocado toast, you’ve probably not read much about the realities of being a young black person who came of age in the 1990s. In It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts The Bro­ ken Promise to Black America (Jan. 8), journalist Reniqua Allen, an Eisner Fellow at the Nation Institute, interviews dozens of millennials from California to Mississippi who are working in professional fields or unemployed and incarcerated. Reniqua Allen They are Republicans; LGBTQ; HIV-positive; first-generation Nigerian-Americans; suffering from PTSD; comedians in Hollywood; MIT graduates working in technology; and much more.

“There’s no one way to be a black millennial,” Allen says. “That’s the thing young black people have constantly been searching for.”

But that’s about the only good news the book offers. The promise of previous generations the title alludes to was overall equality—economic, social, and cultural—but it hasn’t happened. By all traditional measures of American success, blacks still lag far behind whites.

“There’s been a lot of superficial progress” for blacks, Allen says. “But when you really look at the power structure and who is controlling the world, it is not us.” Allen met many black Americans working hard to get ahead but not succeeding “because there are real structural impediments. Young black people don’t feel like they have the freedom to do the things they want to do.

“I think being young and black in America is a joy and it’s heavy and it’s hard,” Allen adds. “We’re expected to succeed and thrive in a society that tells us we’re garbage and we’re not worth it. The fact that we’re persisting is incredible. It’s amazing that we’re still daring to dream.” —J.S. It Was All a Dream was reviewed in the Oct. 15, 2018, issue.

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predecessor, John Paul II—the author mainly describes him as lacking any interpersonal skills and being utterly disconnected from the real world or the church he was called to lead. Benedict was a strong defender of orthodoxy, so his resignation came as a surprise; indeed, “the most conventional man in the Catholic Church [did] the most unconventional thing in its modern history.” McCarten sees in that decision a mixture of guilt over failures to stem the church’s sex abuse scandal and overwhelming inability to lead in the light of his own shortcomings and the Vatican’s continued scandals. Though the author is obviously more aligned with Pope Francis’ progressiveness, he does not spare the newest pope from scrutiny. He provides a disconcerting report of Francis’ career in Argentina, strongly suggesting that he was complicit, even if only through silence, with the brutality his nation faced in the late 20th century. Ultimately, though intermittently intriguing, this book is just another average addition to the well-saturated genre of Vatican intrigue works. Since the author fails to provide much new information or analysis, serious readers will want to look elsewhere.

Only slightly better than a tabloid look at papal controversies.

DYING OF WHITENESS How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland Metzl, Jonathan M. Basic (352 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5416-4498-4

Nationalism, meet mortality: A social scientist and psychiatrist examines the interplay of racial identity and health.

Metzl (Center for Medicine, Health, and Society/Vanderbilt Univ.; The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, 2010, etc.) identifies several public health trends related to white identity politics and the left-behind sentiments of its adherents. One epidemiological chain goes like this: Whites without opportunity in the hinterlands drop out of high school at ever higher rates. According to studies by the author and others, “failure to attain a high school diploma correlated with nine years of life lost, in conjunction with rising rates of smoking, illnesses such as diabetes, and missed doctor visits.” Want to guarantee a disaffected white rural populace? Slash the education budget, as former Kansas governor and Trump appointee Sam Brownback did. Similarly, Metzl lucidly examines rising rates of suicide by gun, noting that from 2009 to 2015, “non-Hispanic white men accounted for nearly 80 percent of all gun suicides in the United States, despite representing less than 35 percent of the total population.” Although gun suicide is a clear threat to the public health, “whiteness” includes adherence to views that privilege the Second Amendment at the expense of any public good. In other words, although everyone knows there’s a problem, the problem is variously attributed to nonwhite criminality or mental illness, not the easy availability of guns and lack |

Fortunately, no grades are given out in these classes, just a ‘genuine intellectual experience’ to learn from a first-rate literary critic. far country

of background screening. Furthermore, writes the author, the numbers point to the fact that “non-Hispanic white, male, selfidentified conservative Republicans over the age of thirty-five overwhelmingly owned and carried the most guns in the country.” Opposition to the Affordable Care Act has hinged on the notion that the undeserving (read: nonwhites) are free riders on a system that the government has no business being involved in.

And so forth. While Metzl notes that white identity politics has enjoyed great successes, he concludes that they come at significant cost and “heighten the calculus of risk.”

Long on description, shorter on prescription; still, a provocative, instructive contribution to the literature of public health as well as of contemporary politics. (39 b/w figures and illustrations)

FAR COUNTRY Scenes from American Culture

A literature professor invites us to sit in on some classes.

The co-founder of Stanford’s Literary Lab and Center for the Study of the Novel, Moretti (Emeritus, Humanities/Stanford Univ.; Distant Reading, 2013, etc.) collects an “odd quintet” of his university lectures on fiction, film, drama, and art and adds another, “Teaching in America,” in which he bemoans the university acting like a store seeking “financial dreams,” thus betraying “its intellectual purpose.” The author clearly wants us to enjoy the “magic” of literature and then “filter it through the skepticism of critique” to acquire an “aesthetic education.” He extracts short passages from the works discussed to analyze how language and style create form. In one of the best lectures, Moretti looks at how Hemingway’s style in “Big Two-Hearted River”—short sentences, a “spectacular” use of prepositional phrases, repetition—acts as a response to the never-mentioned World War I to create a “sort of retrospective exorcism of an unspeakable trauma.” In “Walt Whitman or Charles Baudelaire?” Moretti picks the American when it comes down to the battle “between two incompatible conceptions of modern poetry.” Indeed, Whitman provides “the fundamental model for a democratic aesthetics.” In the engaging and insightful “Day and Night,” Moretti examines the historical and antithetical significance between Westerns and film noir. “Words don’t matter in the Western,” he writes, whereas film noir is “unimaginable without words.” After World War II, these two genres, writes the author, were critical to establishing American cultural hegemony. Next up, “Causality in Death of a Salesman”: “American myths, everywhere: and they all turn to ashes.” Lastly, and most ambitiously, there’s a somewhat hopscotching piece on Vermeer and Hopper/Rembrandt and Warhol. Throughout, Moretti draws on a wide range of authors to assist him in his skeptical critiques. |

THE HUMAN TIDE How Population Shaped the Modern World

Morland, Paul PublicAffairs (352 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5417-8836-7

The world is changing, dramatically and in large part because of shifts in population.

University of London demographer Morland (Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict, 2014) considers population dynamics as a driving force in historical change—not just at the macro level, but in the lives of individuals. As he notes, only a few generations have passed since 1-in-6 British children died before their first birthdays, whereas “today, just over a century later, only one child in three hundred born in England does not reach the age of one.” At the same time, sub-Saharan African nations whose birth rates had once leveled off have grown in population but not in economic opportunity, propelling a wave of migrants northward to a Europe whose Indigenous populations have been steadily shrinking—in Italy, for example, by a projected 20 percent by the end of the century. This reiterates a historical trend in which exploding European populations led to migrations to the Americas and Australia, and even if European and Europeandescended—and especially British—peoples remain politically and economically more powerful than the rest of the world, “they have significantly retreated as an ethnic group within their own states.” Other nations have experienced patterns of growth and decline: Japan, for instance, whose population is rapidly falling, and Russia, which had a comparatively huge population in late czarist times but became the first state in the world to legalize abortion in the Soviet era—only to retract it in 1935, when “Stalin declared ‘man the most precious resource.’ ” Today, Putin’s Russia faces a decline in ethnic Russians. Demography is not necessarily destiny, but the trends Morland identifies are suggestive of broad political changes to come, including the prospect that a grayer world may also mean a greener one: “Where human population starts to decline, from Japan to Bulgaria, nature moves fast into the void.”

Useful for students of geopolitics, international economics, and demography alike.

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Moretti, Franco Farrar, Straus and Giroux (144 pp.) $23.00 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-0-374-27270-8

Fortunately, no grades are given out in these classes, just a “genuine intellectual experience” to learn from a first-rate literary critic.

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BE WITH ME ALWAYS Essays

Noble, Randon Billings Univ. of Nebraska (180 pp.) $19.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-4962-0504-9

A motley collection of pieces—often quite brief, many previously unpublished—on topics ranging from broken love to stretch marks to Tylenol.

Essayist Noble has a focused, tight style, often employing the technique of looking at somewhat discrete items (or memories) and seeking connections among them. Early in this debut volume, for example, is a series of snippets about the author’s experiences looking in mirrors, from childhood to the present—yes, Narcissus makes an appearance.

Later, Noble examines a collection of rings that once belonged to her late grandmother, and she riffs on each one, giving us the histories of the various stones (“Pliny wrote that wearing a diamond wards off insanity”) and the memories she has of them.

The author displays admirable candor in some reflections about her love affairs, chronicling not just how they began, but also how they cracked and crumbled, and she does not hesitate to recognize that she was sometimes the one to initiate the cracks.

Noble also writes bluntly about her fears of childbirth. Another technique she uses is to compare her life with the lives of literary and historical figures. In a piece about one of her relationships, for instance, she cuts back and forth to and from the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Evident throughout is Noble’s fondness for reading and literature: Virginia Woolf drifts in and out of a number of essays, and she alludes to Wuthering Heights, Montaigne, Robinson Crusoe, Joan Didion, and Sherwin Nuland, among numerous others. Throughout the collection, Noble delivers many sharp-edged sentences. At the end of an essay about shotgun shells, Noble writes about a spent shell and her target: “I hold a shell in my hand and look at the cardboard box half-shredded on the ground. My thumb, the size of the shell; the hole, the size of your heart.”

Unique eyes look at familiar things and somehow make them seem both odder and more familiar.

REVOLUTIONARY George Washington at War

O’Connell, Robert L. Random House (384 pp.) $32.00 | Apr. 2, 2019 978-0-8129-9699-9

A provocative biography arguing that George Washington’s greatest accomplishment was guiding a rare revolution that turned out well for the revolutionaries.

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that most subsequent revolutions featured mass murder and ended in tyranny. In the first half of the book, the author travels familiar ground but does it with insight and wit. An unapologetic patrician, Washington yearned to scale Virginia’s aristocracy and Britain’s military. He succeeded in the first, becoming a leading figure in the French and Indian War and marrying Virginia’s richest widow. His failure, despite aggressive lobbying, to receive a royal commission was Britain’s first great mistake. A member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, he dutifully supported opposition to Britain’s clumsy attempts to tax the colonists. By the time fighting broke out in 1775, everyone knew that Washington wanted to lead the army because he arrived at the Continental Congress in full dress uniform. Modern historians snicker, but it resonated with contemporaries, already impressed by his dignity, modesty, and reputation. He was the unanimous choice. O’Connell points out that Britain had long been crushing rebellions in Ireland and Scotland and saw no reason to change tactics in America. Even discounting patriot propaganda, looting and rape were common, prisoners were treated badly, and commanders known for cruelty were mostly British. Scholars wonder at his deference to the ineffectual Continental Congress. As generalissimo with a loyal cadre, he could have taken charge at any time but never did and expressed outrage when others suggested it. “He fervently believed in his own high-mindedness and was determined to conduct himself accordingly,” writes the author. “Nothing compromises morality like a long, violent revolution, and George Washington... remained a bulwark of decency, a remarkable achievement and possibly his greatest contribution to the Glorious Cause.”

A delightfully convincing case that Washington was history’s least ruthless and most successful revolutionary.

THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

O’Meara, Mallory Hanover Square Press (368 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-335-93780-3

An idiosyncratic, much-needed biography of “a woman before her time.”

Screenwriter and genre film producer O’Meara’s first book is an engaging chronicle of Milicent Patrick (1915-1998), a woman trailblazer in the film industry, as well as the personal story of O’Meara’s own, not always pleasant, experiences in the industry. As the enthusiastic author writes, in 2018, Patrick is “still the only woman to have designed an iconic movie monster.”

Yet “she’s not just the queen of monsters, the goddam Joan of Arc.” O’Meara set out on a nearly three-year journey to piece together the life of this largely unrecognized artist. Mildred Elisabeth Fulvia Rossi was born in El Paso, Texas. When she was 6, her father, Camille, was hired to be the on-site superintendent of construction for the William Randolph Hearst |

A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more. figuring

estate, and Patrick spent 10 wonderful years as “Alice in Wonderland.” Years later, she changed her name in honor of Hearst’s wife, Millicent (Patrick left out the second “l”). In 1935, she began her study of illustration and drawing at the Chouinard Art Institute. In 1938, “her work caught the eye of Walt Disney,” and she joined his studio, working on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Dumbo. Patrick did some bit acting and modeling before getting a big break in 1952, when she was the first woman hired

by Bud Westmore for his famous special effects makeup department at the male-dominated Universal Studios. After designing monsters for some science-fiction movies, she took on her most famous design, Gill-Man, for the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, “still one of the best designed and recognizable movie monsters in Hollywood history.” She never received any on-screen credit, and a highly successful tour she did promoting the film got her fired by a jealous Westmore.

Jam-packed with many funny, goofy footnotes, this passionately written biography will do much to bring Patrick the recognition she deserves.

Peterson, Mark Princeton Univ. (832 pp.) $39.95 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-0-691-17999-5

A historian thoroughly scours the record to resurrect the history of a wellintentioned ideal society that was ultimately “undermined by fatal flaws.”

Unlike many of the doomed early American experiments at colonization, such as Walter Raleigh’s “lost” Roanoke Colony and other failures in Newfoundland, Boston—created to escape “the imperial decay and religious persecution that threatened England’s government and church”—succeeded, both as a center of Atlantic Puritanism as well as a trading hub. Created by a charter issued by King Charles I in 1629, the “city-state” of Boston, writes Peterson (History/Yale Univ.; The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England, 1997), was founded as a “self-conscious attempt to build an autonomous self-governing republic modeled on biblical and classical republican ideals in a New World environment.” Though silver and gold were not discovered nearby, furs and codfish took their place and were entirely exploited due to a judicious bartering with the Native inhabitants, who, unlike the early settlers, were hunters and fishers. When these commodities became scarce and the economy in relation to English trade tanked, the enterprising Bostonians looked to the Caribbean colonies, where sugar production was booming. They began building their own ships, and slaves were imported by the mid-17th century. Sustaining Indian wars and Atlantic trade competition, Boston emerged from being a “backwater, a bystander in the puritan crusade against the Spanish foe, into a new transatlantic center of colonization to which other plantations looked for assistance.” |

FIGURING

Popova, Maria Pantheon (592 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-5247-4813-5 The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture.

“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes the author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.” In between, she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life, one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out of a world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into a radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865, Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson, who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler, Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne....

A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.

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THE CITY-STATE OF BOSTON The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865

From there, Boston exerted its unique position by issuing its own coins, extending its territorial reach, and “fending off the crown’s agents.” Through specific historical personages such as John Adams and African-American poet Phillis Wheatley and chapters framed on biblical allusions (“The Selling of Joseph”), Peterson leads us through the city’s Enlightenment ideals and how they clashed with the city’s links to the American South’s slave-driven economy.

A meaty, methodical exploration of a crucial American founding stronghold. (8 color and 69 b/w illustrations; 19 maps)

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A GIRL NAMED LOVELY One Child’s Miraculous Survival and My Journey to the Heart of Haiti

Porter, Catherine Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $17.99 paper | Feb. 26, 2019 978-1-5011-6809-3

An award-winning Canadian journalist tells the story of her experiences in post-earthquake Haiti and of the special relationship she forged with a young survivor and her family.

In January 2010, the Toronto Star sent Porter (now the Canada bureau chief for the New York Times) to cover the Haitian earthquake as a foreign correspondent. Stories of human suffering “were on every street corner, each one more compelling and alarming than the next,” but the one that captivated her the most was that of a 2-year-old girl named Lovely, who had been pulled from the rubble, nearly unharmed, six days after the earthquake. The author first encountered the child at an emergency makeshift clinic in Port-au-Prince. Impressed by the girl’s preternatural toughness, the author searched for—and miraculously found—the child on a subsequent trip to Haiti. Awed that the girl had managed to stay alive “many days longer than was medically possible,” Porter decided to write about Lovely.

Breaking “the cardinal rule of journalism,” she also became directly involved in the girl’s life, paying for her education and giving money to help her parents get on their feet. The author also eventually donated money gathered from her Canadian readers to fund a school. Her efforts met with mixed results: Lovely thrived scholastically, but her father failed to make a go of his motorcycle taxi business, and they constantly struggled with their finances. The school Porter funded succeeded, but money mysteriously went missing from its accounts. Yet in the end, the author had no regrets. As messy and complicated as her relationship to Haiti had become, she also realized that her life and the lives of her family members had become immeasurably enriched through that connection. Powerful and searching, Porter’s book offers an unforgettable account of how one woman’s humanitarian gestures not only changed her, but also made a difference in the lives of people living in unimaginable misery.

A movingly candid memoir about finding some measure of hope in “the poorest country in the western hemisphere.” (16-page 4-color insert)

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HELP ME!

Power, Marianne Grove (384 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 15, 2019 978-0-8021-2906-2 London-based journalist Power chronicles the harrowing, often side-splitting adventures she embarked on while pursuing happiness and inner peace.

“At thirty-six,” writes the author, “my friends were ticking off the various life stages while I was stuck in the same life I’d had since my twenties. I was always single, I didn’t own a house, and I didn’t have a plan.” One weekend, while suffering through a particularly wicked hangover, Power decided to undertake an extended safari through the wilds of the self-help aisle. For years, the author had turned to self-help books for “comfort,” affirming the commonality of her “insecurities and anxieties.” Now, she hit on “an idea that would stop me from being a depressed, hungover mess and turn me into a happy, highly functioning person: I wasn’t just going to read self-help, I was going to DO self-help.”

Power set out to act on “every single bit of advice” offered by a different self-help book each month for a year in hopes of “systematically” tackling her flaws “one book at a time.” What began as a 12-month “plan” slowly morphed into a 16-month “roller coaster” as the author torturously plumbed the recesses of her psyche at the behest of self-help and spiritual behemoths like Susan Jeffers (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway), Tony Robbins, Stephen R. Covey (Power gave up at Habit 2 of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), and Eckhart Tolle, all in hopes of achieving “some sort of profoundly moving (but neat and tidy) epiphany.” During her grand inner tour, Power faced down some of her darkest demons. Throughout this consistently entertaining book, she writes with unflinching honesty—and bald hilarity, especially as she encountered deadpan reality checks from her mother, sisters, and skeptical friends—about the throes of facing her fears, tackling money issues, living in the present, opening herself up to rejection, and getting over her hang-ups with men (“all Power of Now zen vanished in the face of dating”).

A winner. Bridget Jones meets Buddha in this plucky, heartwarming, comical debut memoir.

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A wholly engrossing story that joins the worlds of El Chapo and Edward Snowden; both disturbing and memorable. the mastermind

GRAIN BY GRAIN A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food

THE MASTERMIND Drugs. Empire.

Murder. Betrayal.

Ratliff, Evan Random House (496 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-399-59041-2

Quinn, Bob & Carlisle, Liz Island Press (272 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-61091-995-1

An organic farmer and entrepreneur in Montana shares his experiences and ideas for changing the way America pro-

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duces its food.

The organic spokesman’s story is co-authored by Carlisle (Lecturer/School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences/Stanford Univ.), whose previous book, Lentil Under­ ground (2015), also focused on an entrepreneurial Montanabased organic farmer. After her explanatory prologue, Carlisle remains hidden so that the experiences and the opinions represent Quinn’s voice. The book is partly memoir: Readers learn about Quinn’s upbringing on a Montana farm, his various ventures into organic farming, his work to improve soil quality, and his launching of a wind farm and biofuel project. However, the text serves mainly as an argument about the necessity of valuing quality in food and how it can help heal people instead of making them sick, alleviate poverty by rebuilding rural communities, and reduce damage to the environment. Central to the story is an ancient grain from Mesopotamia that Quinn experimented with and the building of Kamut International, a large wheat corporation operating internationally. The picture that emerges is that of an experienced farmer and a resourceful, community-minded businessman. Quinn’s tale is also a diatribe against America’s widespread agricultural-industrial complex.

He rails against “Americans’ fiercely held attachment to cheap consumer goods, particularly cheap food. Transformed from producers into consumers at the same time as their economic status diminished, the American middle class insisted on lower and lower prices, spurred on by corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s.” That’s the bad news. Quinn does provide evidence of progress, as more and more people, especially millennials, are becoming informed consumers, interested in where their food comes from and how it is produced, and an increasing number are becoming farmers, producing organically and selling locally. The few black-and-white photographs scattered throughout add little to the text, which stands alone quite well.

A compelling agricultural story skillfully told; environmentalists will eat it up.

A complex tale of true crime on a global scale.

Wired contributor Ratliff (editor: Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger, and Heartbreak from the Atavist Magazine, 2016), the co-founder of Atavist Magazine, digs deep into a story that seems utterly appropriate to the computerized, globalized, transnational age.

The protagonist is Paul Le Roux, a Zimbabwe-born computer programmer. Having moved from South Africa to Australia and later to the Philippines, he discovered early on that cyberspace was a frontier in which to grow rich serving humankind’s lesser instincts: pornography, trolling, gambling, addictions of various kinds. Eventually, as the author foreshadows in an opening salvo of incidents, he founded a crime network with many nodes across the world, one with hired killers, corrupt doctors, software specialists, and countless other players. One branch began by selling painkillers under the flimsiest of medical screenings: A customer would type in a complaint that she had back pain, a doctor would sign off, and drugs would arrive in great quantities, with one small-town Wisconsin pharmacist alone filling 700,000 illegal prescriptions and being paid millions in return from a Hong Kong bank account. Killings followed as Le Roux stretched his hand to North Korean methamphetamine manufacturers, international mercenaries, Colombian cartels, and black-ops hackers. Writes Ratliff, each of these pieces “seemed like a kind of message from an adjacent reality that few of us experience directly”—a reality that ended in a massive counteroperation on the part of the Drug Enforcement Administration and other law enforcement agencies, bringing down long prison sentences and massive fines. “In 2013,” writes the author, “UPS paid $40 million to resolve federal accusations of knowingly shipping drugs for illegal online pharmacies.” Sifting through detail after nefarious detail, Ratliff serves up a taut narrative that limns a portrait of a sociopath whose powers were most definitely used to evil ends.

A wholly engrossing story that joins the worlds of El Chapo and Edward Snowden; both disturbing and memorable.

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PRISONER My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison—Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out

THE TRIAL OF LIZZIE BORDEN

Robertson, Cara Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-5011-6837-6

A new history of the trial of the late 19th century: Lizzie Borden (1860-1927), accused of the murder of her father and stepmother.

Robertson, a former Supreme Court clerk and legal adviser at The Hague, amply shows how the wheels of justice often move slowly, by small steps. First, there was an inquest, in which Lizzie testified along with her maid, Bridget Sullivan. Lizzie and her sister Emma were estranged from their father and, especially, their stepmother. They were also jealous of property their father had purchased for his wife’s sister; attempting to mollify them, unsuccessfully, he had deeded another property to them. Accounting for her morning, Lizzie offered differing statements about what she was doing. With Emma visiting out of town, it was only Lizzie who had the opportunity to kill both parents, even hours apart. After the inquest came Lizzie’s arrest and imprisonment, where she exhibited a stoic demeanor that would carry her from the preliminary hearing through the trial. She was self-possessed and unruffled, ready to accept whatever fate dealt her. While she did break down a few times, as when her father’s skull was presented, for the most part she seemed confident and intent on following every testimony. Constantly whispering in the ear of George Robinson, her lawyer, she seemed to treat the trial as an exercise in controlling what the jury was allowed to hear. Robertson presents the story with the thoroughness one expects from an attorney, but she manages to avoid the tedious repetitiveness inherent in a trial by providing close looks at other contemporaneous elements such as Lizzie’s attempt to buy poison, a newly discovered hatchet, and the contradictions of the prosecution’s witnesses.

Readers are given every bit of evidence available and will be hard-pressed to reach a verdict; it’s fun trying, though. Fans of crime novels will love it.

Rezaian, Jason Anthony Bourdain/Ecco (320 pp.) $29.99 | Jan. 22, 2019 978-0-06-269157-6

Washington Post opinion writer and CNN contributor Rezaian recounts his 544 days of imprisonment at the hands of the Iranian regime.

A native of Iran whose family had immigrated to the United States decades earlier, the author moved to Tehran to head the Washington Post bureau there. It was a good gig, well paid in dollars, while, because his wife was an Iranian citizen, they were allowed to pay in local currency. “Life was good,” he writes.

Although he favored local-color stories, often about food, and guided Anthony Bourdain through the city for an episode of Parts Unknown (this book is published under Bourdain’s imprint), he still managed to fall afoul of the secret police. The charge eventually cooked up for him was definitively Orwellian: “As a member of the American press writing what could only be perceived as neutral stories about Iran, I was attempting to soften American public opinion toward the Islamic Republic”—a softening that would allow American values to circulate within the country. After developing strategies to avoid despair while in solitary confinement (“if you’re lucky you learn to quiet your mind, just a little, and live softly”), Rezaian could do little more than wait it out even as Iranian agents threatened to add time to his sentence because his mother was publicly protesting his imprisonment. “Why is your mother coordinating with the BBC to ruin your life?” asked one. The author credits a concerted campaign on the part of Post editor Martin Baron, his brother, and other intermediaries for his release after having been “the plaything of some of the nastiest authoritarian ideologues to roam the earth in many decades.” Rezaian also allows that one of his captors got at least one thing right: He correctly predicted the outcome of the 2016 election in the U.S., saying, “Trump is the candidate that hates Muslims most.”

Of interest to students of the Iranian system as well as free-press advocates.

CHINA’S INVISIBLE CRISIS How a Growing UrbanRural Divide Could Sink the World’s Second-Largest Economy

Rozelle, Scott & Johnson, Natalie Basic (288 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5416-4482-3

A sharply focused study that elucidates clearly why China faces grave problems in shifting to the next growth level.

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A smooth, expert, and often startling history that emphasizes that no behavior separates us from other animals, but we remain an utterly unique species. the book of humans

THE BOOK OF HUMANS 4 Billion Years, 20,000 Genes, and the New Story of How We Became Us Rutherford, Adam The Experiment (272 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-61519-531-2

A lively exploration of “the epic meandering journey that every organism has made.”

That humans are conscious, cultured, and much cleverer than any other animal—but an animal nevertheless—is no secret to popular science writers. A steady stream of books explains how we got that way, and readers will not regret choosing this cheerful addition to the genre from British science journalist Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, 2017, etc.). Humans use tools, he explains, but many mammals and birds do the same. They are often no more than sticks poked into a hole to tease out food, but ingenious variations arise; many are adopted by others, becoming a rudimentary cultural element. In the author’s native Britain, out of 1,000 sexual acts that could result |

in a baby, only one actually does, as he reports in a long section shooting down the belief that only humans have sex for pleasure. The author then steps back, admitting that one can never know why nonhumans engage in nonproductive intercourse, but innumerable creatures do so. Readers under the illusion that behavior like homosexuality, anal intercourse, and even necrophilia are “contrary to nature” will learn that the opposite is true. Rutherford also ably explores current conceptions and focus on cooperation through communication. Animals can deliver signals, and a few ancestors of Homo sapiens may have talked, but we took it to a new level. “We transmit information,” writes the author, “not just via DNA down the generations, but in every direction, to people with whom we have no immediate biological ties. We log our knowledge and experience, and share them. It is in the teaching of others, the shaping of culture, and the telling of stories, that we created ourselves.”

A smooth, expert, and often startling history that emphasizes that no behavior separates us from other animals, but we remain an utterly unique species.

AFTER THE MIRACLE The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets

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Economist Rozelle (co-author: From Marx and Mao to the Markets: The Economics and Politics of Agrarian Transition, 2006, etc.), the co-director of Stanford’s Rural Education Action Program, has observed and worked in China for more than 30 years, especially within the vast, poor, rural interior that is worlds apart from the shiny stories of the upwardly mobile and educated in the megacities. In this compelling study that reads like a cautionary tale, Rozelle and researcher Johnson encapsulate the divide between rural and urban in China, underscored by the hukou system (the household registration system), which delineates all residents at birth as either rural or urban, and explain why this discrepancy is a looming problem. The authors note that 36 percent of China’s population is urban and thus fairly well-educated, yet the remaining 64 percent (as many as 700 million people) is rural and uneducated. For many years, there was no glaring crisis with this discrepancy since globalization dictated that factories and industry recruited the legions of low-skilled labor for their needs. However, now that wages have risen, the workforce is fully employed, and factories have moved to cheaper places like Vietnam, China is wrestling with the “Middle-Income Trap,” and it cannot move higher (as South Korea, Ireland, and Taiwan have done) because it has woefully neglected its human capital. Like Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, and South Africa, China is stuck, and as long as the vast majority of its population is not trained for the next level—due to inadequate education, nutrition, and early childhood development— the Chinese may turn to the informal sector and to crime while its leaders are lured to nationalism.

A convincing argument and stern warning—with ample worse- and best-case scenarios—that without investment in human capital, a struggling country cannot rise.

Shamsky, Art & Sherman, Erik Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-5011-7651-7

A fond remembrance of a legendary baseball team and the teammates who kept in touch throughout the ensuing decades.

On Oct. 16, 1969, the New York Mets defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series. Playing in right field for those Mets was Shamsky (The Magnificent Seasons: How the Jets, Mets, and Knicks Made Sports History and Uplifted a City and the Country, 2016), who—along with sportswriter Sherman (Kings of Queens: Life Beyond Baseball with the ’86 Mets, 2016, etc.)—offers a narrative of that season and later memories anchored by the teammates’ 2016 trip to visit ailing pitching ace Tom Seaver. On paper, the 1969 Mets were average. Outfielder Cleon Jones finished third in the National League in batting average, yet no one on the team hit more than 26 home runs or drove in more than 76 runs. The team succeeded because of two main factors: the guiding hand of their manager, Gil Hodges (“Sixtynine would never have happened if not for Gil Hodges,” says Jones), and the fact that these Mets, in the words of first baseman and World Series MVP Donn Clendenon, “epitomized the word team.” Thus Shamsky, who hit .300 that season, split time in right field with Ron Swoboda, who made a key catch in Game 4 of the World Series. Neither Clendenon nor Swoboda had played a single game in the National League Championship Series. The narrative of the season itself, which takes up two-thirds of the book, is informative and entertaining, and Shamsky effectively places the team’s magical year within the social and political contexts of 1969, including the moon landing, the Vietnam War (shortstop kirkus.com

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THE AGE OF DISENCHANTMENTS The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War

Bud Harrelson missed time to fulfill his military obligation), and the now-all-but-forgotten rioting in York, Pennsylvania. Moreover, the author persuasively argues that the team helped unify New Yorkers during a turbulent time. However, the reunion itself is somewhat anticlimactic, and Shamsky probably overstates his case that the ’69 Mets inspired the nation as a whole.

An enjoyable tale of a storybook season.

THE TROUBLE WITH MEN Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power

Shields, David Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press (188 pp.) $18.95 paper | Feb. 25, 2019 978-0-8142-5519-3

The provocative essayist contemplates the precarious mechanics of human intimacy.

In this bold mixture of stark honesty and humor, Shields (Other People: Takes & Mistakes, 2017, etc.) ponders how sex, love, attraction, and power all coalesce to both fortify and complicate the human mating experience. Snippets and subdivisions of thought, critiques, and inspired scenarios abound as the author’s entertaining musings range from confessional—he unmasks facets of his own marriage and imagines a love letter to his wife or a novel about their exchange of sexual fantasies—to examinations of oddities and taboo aspects of sexuality. The author explores intimate relationships through personal examples and experiences as well as copious references and allusions (presented in a collage style similar to that of the author’s Reality Hunger) drawn from a spectrum of well-respected writers, poets, journalists, and medical professionals; most reinforce Shields’ ideas and assessments and add zesty commentary to an already fiery topic. The book is separated into five sections, each one progressively more explicit. An introductory chapter of bite-sized observations on human togetherness as seen through the lens of popular culture heralds further introspections on the author’s own emotional landscape. Personal anecdotes on his awkward adolescence and family life and scenes of both romantic love and explicit sex interweave with outtakes from an ensemble of opinionated voices— e.g., utterances from a pre-presidential Donald Trump and a piece by sexologist Pepper Schwartz that psychoanalyzes Bernie Madoff ’s behavior. In the opening pages of a graphically descriptive chapter on sexual fantasy and pornography (“the world’s one true religion”), Shields asks, “is sex really that awful?” The answer, found in a dizzying array of explicit and racy perspectives, will depend on the reader’s reactions to the author’s revealing adventures, each buttressed by a supporting chorus of sex-positive cheerleaders and damning naysayers. Entertaining and contemplative, Shields offers focused philosophy and effervescent wisdom on some of society’s knottiest topics.

A sharp-eyed collection of bits and pieces that will appeal, at least in part, to readers on both hot and cold sides of the intimacy spectrum.

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Shulman, Aaron Ecco/HarperCollins (496 pp.) $29.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-06-248419-2

A prominent literary family reflects Spain’s tumultuous past.

Making his book debut, journalist Shulman creates a deeply researched portrait of the Paneros, one of Spain’s most notorious families: patriarch Leopoldo (1909-1962), a well-regarded poet during the Franco dictatorship; his unhappy wife, Felicidad; and his three tormented sons. The author’s fascination with the family began in 2012, when he watched El desencanto, a documentary made in 1976, in which Felicidad and her adult sons spoke candidly about their relationships with Leopoldo and one another, revealing anger, bitterness, and loneliness.

The movie elevated the Paneros “into a cultural phenomenon,” Shulman writes, and sparked his own interest in the family’s “refreshing weirdness, poetic obsessions, and sacrilegious taste for destruction.” He is not alone in responding to their “lasting magnetism.” They have inspired academic studies, fiction, poetry, songs, films, memoirs, volumes of correspondence, and republication of their own works—“a literary subgenre unto themselves.” Central to the family’s story is the question of Leopoldo’s commitment to fascism. Like others of his generation, he chose “survival over principles” in supporting Franco, “warts and all.” As a well-respected poet, he knew that Spain needed cultured men “to burnish the country’s reputation—and to defend it, a cause he assiduously took up.” He served as a censor, took a diplomatic post in London (where he befriended T.S. Eliot), directed a government-sponsored literary magazine, convened literary conferences, and became editorial director of the Spanish Reader’s Digest. If his political stance enraged the likes of Pablo Neruda, who attacked him as “a Francoist executioner,” in Spain his reputation flourished. A success professionally, his personal life was a mess. He was, Shulman reveals, “a cryptic, complicated, and often difficult man, and his personality and the power he wielded over his family left a profound mark on his wife and children.” Felicidad felt unloved and oppressed; his sons, beset by their own demons, failed to achieve the literary success to which they aspired. Spain’s roiling history, beginning in the 1930s, forms the backdrop to the family’s turmoil.

A richly detailed history chronicles a family’s pain.

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FREE ALL ALONG The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews

EINSTEIN’S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum

Smith, Stephen Drury & Ellis, Catherine—Eds. New Press (336 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-59558-818-0

Smolin, Lee Penguin Press (352 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 9, 2019 978-1-59420-619-1

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The latest update on physicists’ painful efforts to make sense of quantum mechanics.

So far they’ve failed, but Smolin (Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, 2013, etc.), a founding faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, believes they’re on the right track, and readers who pay close attention may understand what he is attempting to explain. Einstein’s theory of relativity delivered an accurate explanation of space, time, and matter for most of the universe, but it breaks down at the level of atoms: the quantum world.

Quantum mechanics works beautifully but only by postulating paradoxes and nonsensical behavior such as an electron being both a particle and a wave depending on the experiment. Einstein insisted that this didn’t make sense, but most colleagues had no objection. Smolin reminds readers that this is an argument between realists and nonrealists. Realists ask, “does the natural world exist independently of our minds?” and “can we understand enough about the laws of nature to explain the history of our universe and predict its future?” Current quantum theory says no. Nobel Prize winner Louis de Broglie proposed a “realistic” explanation in his 1927 pilot wave theory. Unlike the already dominant anti-realist view of Bohr and Heisenberg, his electron remains a particle, and an electron-wave flows through space, directing the particle where to go. The concept of pilot waves did not catch on, but after 1950, some mainstream physicists began looking seriously into realistic theories through concepts such as hidden variables, the many-worlds view, and nonlocality. None of these men are household names, and their studies poke a few holes in traditional theory without simplifying matters. Since quantum mechanics continues to work well, most physicists pay little attention.

This is a philosophical debate that has disturbed thoughtful scientists for a century. Its ideas are fundamental, but the details are complex. Smolin works hard and with mixed success to explain these to a lay readership.

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An anthology reinvigorates Robert Penn Warren’s long-overlooked collection of civil rights interviews.

Published in 1965, Warren’s oral history Who Speaks for the Negro? received mostly lukewarm reviews and little fanfare.

Among critics, the 450-page volume of interviews was billed as everything from “the very best inside report” on the civil rights movement to “boring.” The interviewees include Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, and the volume brims with Warren’s own reflections, revealing as much about the author as it did the movement (critics claimed it had nothing new to say). After decades of fading from memory, Yale University Press reprinted Who Speaks? in 2014. Here, Smith and Ellis (co-editors: Say It Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity, 2010, etc.) present a modified, highly relevant version of Warren’s enormous undertaking. “In this edited anthology,” they write, “the focus is on the interviews themselves.” Not all of the interviews are retained— but two are added: Septima T. Clark and Andrew Young—and Smith and Ellis stripped away the poet’s personal observations and digressions, returning to the raw transcripts and allowing the stand-alone interviews to drive home their own measures of insight. One example is the opening interview with the Rev. Joe Carter, the first African-American to register to vote in Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish. What is now published as pure monologue describes in powerful detail Carter’s 1963 experience of harassment and arrest by a mob of whites as he defiantly attempted to register. Among other changes, the editors shed Warren’s interview titles, replacing them with the subject, date, and location followed by a page of “biographical and historical context.”

It’s clear the editors made dozens of nips and tucks to maximize their stated goal of “clear and engaging reading” while remaining “faithful to the spirit and substance of the conversations.” The result is an anthology that arguably holds more contemporary importance as a historical document than the original release.

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TEN CAESARS Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine

Journalist Stroud has developed a specialized beat for periodicals about corporations who develop technologies for law enforcement agencies and prisons. In this overview, he shows pointedly that technological devices—including Tasers, body cameras, computerized crime control, facial recognition software, surveillance cameras in public places, and cellphone tracking—may make policing more convenient but do not lead to better outcomes. Much of the narrative is historical, as the author explains how law enforcement evolved in the United States. He takes readers back to 1905, when Berkeley, California—like many cities at the time—lacked a police department.

So an ambitious local resident named August Vollmer created a law enforcement unit and sought out whatever firepower technology could provide. Some of Vollmer’s ideas—hiring educated officers, reaching out directly to neighborhoods (although more enthusiastically to white enclaves than those with people of color)—were progressive. However, the brute force Vollmer employed set the tone. A century later, Stroud explains, the massive police departments that can most easily afford technology, especially Los Angeles and New York City, are the leaders, with smaller departments often following examples that may be counterproductive. The author’s primary narrative thread involves the development and marketing of stun guns, which are often referred to by the name of one brand, the Taser. Though Stroud’s lengthy discussions about the financial hurdles faced by stun gun manufacturers become tiresome, on the whole, the author writes clearly and compellingly, and he shows how some companies oversold their technologies to police based on a desperation for profits. Stroud also weaves in concerns about ethics and civil rights and how, often, “the confidence that politicians place in [the technology] reflects an oversimplified understanding of the underlying difficulties.”

A useful book. Wisely, Stroud never loses sight of an overriding reality: that technology is never a substitute for compassionate policing based on trust between cops and the citizens they are paid to serve.

Strauss, Barry Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4516-6883-4

A set of lively biographies of the 10 best-known emperors of Rome.

Few educated readers respect many of Hollywood’s grandiose versions of events (though HBO’s series, Rome, did better), so history buffs will not wince to read about the cruelty, murder, betrayal, and arrogance of even highly regarded emperors. Rocking no boats, Strauss (History and Classics/Cornell Univ.; The Death of Cae­ sar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, 2015, etc.), who has written numerous useful popular books on the classical period, agrees that the ancient Republic was moribund when Julius Caesar delivered the coup de grace. But it took a vicious 20-year civil war before his grand-nephew took power in 27 B.C.E. and proclaimed the restoration of the old Roman Republic; then he gradually assumed the mantel of emperor as Augustus. Historians and contemporaries agree that he did a solid job as emperor, and he was widely mourned at his death.

Few historians but Strauss admire his dour successor, Tiberius, who, although a general, avoided war and continued the nearly 200 years of Pax Romana. The author delivers short accounts of all emperors during these years, expanding on the not-alwaysawful Nero and the admirable Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and ending with Marcus Aurelius, who closed out Rome’s golden years. Strauss skims over the disastrous century that followed before concentrating on Diocletian and Constantine, who stabilized the empire mostly through persistent warfare but also reorganized the administration, largely abandoning the city of Rome and the western realm, which vanished a century later, leaving the wealthier eastern Byzantine empire to continue for more than another 1,000 years.

Fresh documentary evidence on these times rarely turns up to add to the skimpy surviving chronicles (by Pliny, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius et al.), so popular histories have little new ground to break. They must be read for pleasure, and this one delivers good value. (8-page b/w insert; b/w illustrations throughout; 3 maps)

ONCE A WOLF The Science Behind Our Dogs’ Astonishing Genetic Evolution Sykes, Bryan Liveright/Norton (320 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-63149-379-9

THIN BLUE LIE The Failure of High-Tech Policing

How did wolves evolve into dogs?

Sykes (Genetics/Oxford Univ.; The Nature of the Beast, 2015, etc.) reviews the state of the art on matters canine and lupine.

Past studies of canine evolution have relied on osteological and archaeological evidence, but since 2005, the fully sequenced dog genome has been available, allowing, among other things, for “re-drawing the evolutionary tree of dog breeds constructed with mitochondrial DNA over twenty years previously.” Five years later, writes the author, a new

Stroud, Matt Metropolitan/Henry Holt (272 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-250-10829-6 An exploration of how high-tech advancements in law enforcement are failing.

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Fans of Markoff, Levy, Lanier et al. will want to have a look at this intriguing portrait of coding and coders. coders

ZORA AND LANGSTON A Story of Friendship and Betrayal Taylor, Yuval Norton (304 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-393-24391-8

The tale of a famous literary friendship that ended in bitterness.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Langston Hughes (1901-1967) were major figures of the Harlem Renaissance and, for several years, collaborators and loving friends. Taylor (co-author: Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, 2012, etc.), senior editor at the Chicago Review Press, places their friendship at the center of a revealing examination of the alliances, betrayals, rivalries, and aspirations that characterized the African-American literary and arts world in the 1920s and beyond. In 1926, Hurston bestowed the nickname “Niggerati” on the many young writers and artists, “opposed to the literary conventions of the older generation of the black elite,” who gathered in Manhattan for social and literary activities. They were supported—sometimes with publicity, sometimes financially—by admiring white New Yorkers Hurston called “Negrotarians,” including Carl Van Vechten, Hart Crane, Muriel Draper, Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neill, George Gershwin, and H.L. Mencken. Foremost |

among them was Charlotte Mason, an heiress who inherited her husband’s vast wealth after his death in 1905. Among her passions were parapsychology, psychic healing, and AfricanAmericans and Indians, who she believed were unsullied by “the ills of civilization” and possessed of “primitive creativity and spirituality [that] would energize and renew America.” A major collector of African art, she disdained white culture, declaring herself “eternally black.” In 1927, she decided to become a personal patron to many figures of the Niggerati. She must be called Godmother, she insisted, and demanded nothing less than complete filial devotion in exchange for monthly stipends of $150 (for Hughes) and $200 (for Hurston) to allow them to pursue their work. Mason, Taylor writes, was “a jealous god, controlling and wrathful,” dictating what kind of projects her “children” pursued and, in Hurston’s case, prohibiting her from showing her writing to anyone without Mason’s consent. Drawing on published and archival sources, Taylor creates a perceptive portrait of the bizarre patron and of the Hurston-Hughes friendship.

A fresh look at two important writers of the 1920s. (9 b/w photos)

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family tree was published, with all 64 breeds—even the Chihuahua—pointing back to the wolf. Some of those breeds are “ancient,” such as the Basenji and Samoyed; others are quite recent. Making those breeds required domestication, for which Sykes finds no evidence before about 50,000 years ago—still far earlier than previous studies have projected.

Like other scholars, the author locates that origin in shared hunting, a process that may have altered humans as much as dogs in “the unstoppable current of natural selection.” Scholarly argument persists over whether the original raw materials of the dog were really wolves and not coyotes, jackals, hyenas, and other canids. Sykes charts the development of the Carnivora before settling, persuasively, on the scenario of Paleolithic hunters working in concert with wolves to bring down large game such as bison. The author goes on to examine some of the mutations that subsequently allowed human breeders to select for certain characteristics, whether the ridge of the ridgeback or the pigmentation of the bull terrier (with a passing nod to the heterochromia exhibited by David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust). Melanism, hyperuremia, progressive rod-cone retinal degeneration: The author’s discussion can be densely technical at times but never enough to render the text inaccessible to those without a background in genetics and population dynamics. Moreover, he closes by looking outside of nature to find the nurture connected to our love of dogs, that “amazing psychic symbiosis.”

Scientifically inclined dog lovers will find this a trove of information and provocation. (20 b/w photos)

CODERS The Making of a New Art and the Remaking of the World Thompson, Clive Penguin Press (448 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-7352-2056-0

Of computer technology and its discontents.

Computers can do all kinds of cool things. The reason they can, writes tech journalist Thompson (Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, 2013), is that a coder has gotten to the problem. “Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things,” he writes, “so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible.” Some of those things, of course, have proven noxious: Facebook allows you to keep in touch with high school friends but at the expense of spying on your every online movement. Yet they’re kind of comprehensible, since they’re based on language: Coding problems are problems of words and thoughts and not numbers alone. Thompson looks at some of the stalwarts and heroes of the coding world, many of them not well-known—Ruchi Sanghvi, for example, who worked at Facebook and Dropbox before starting a sort of think tank “aimed at convincing members to pick a truly new, weird area to examine.” If you want weird these days, you get into artificial intelligence, of which the author has a qualified view. Humans may be displaced by machines, but the vaunted singularity probably won’t happen anytime soon. Probably. Thompson is an enthusiast and a learned scholar alike: He reckons that BASIC is one of the great inventions of history, being one of the ways “for teenagers to grasp, in such visceral and palpable ways, the fabric of infinity.” Though big tech is in kirkus.com

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the ascendant, he writes, there’s a growing number of young programmers who are attuned to the ethical issues surrounding what they do, demanding, for instance, that Microsoft not provide software to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Those coders, writes Thompson, are “the one group of people VCs and CEOs cannot afford to entirely ignore,” making them the heroes of the piece in more ways than one.

Fans of Markoff, Levy, Lanier et al. will want to have a look at this intriguing portrait of coding and coders.

SISSY A Coming-of-Gender Story Tobia, Jacob Putnam (336 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-7352-1882-6

A gender nonconforming writer and performer debuts with a memoir about growing into the “most effervescent, gorgeous, dignified sissy that the world has ever seen.”

From early childhood, Tobia’s “femininity came as naturally as my masculinity.” But in a household defined by a “mundane, practical masculinity,” Tobia found few avenues for self-expression. Once in preschool, the author found that gender identity was so heavily policed by parents, teachers, and other children that they renounced all outward markers of femininity a few years later. Church—and specifically, the handbell choir—became a space that allowed Tobia to quietly “queen out.” The author also discovered another refuge among schoolmates whose tastes in anime and fantasy allowed them access to “lots of gay-leaning stuff: shows about sparkly dragons, cartoons about fairies, anime with buff shirtless dudes screaming in ecstasy as they shot their giant laser beams at other dudes.”

Female high school friends gradually helped the author take their first steps toward accepting their homosexuality and femininity. But Tobia still faced opposition from others, including the members of their beloved church congregation. It was in the relative freedom of college at Duke that Tobia fought to claim their “femininity in the light of day.” By senior year, the author, who was a member of the Biden Foundation’s Advisory Council for Advancing LGBTQ Equality, became a respected, highly visible gender activist who proudly wore skirts and heels.

Tobia’s “coming-of-gender” story about a trans identity that refuses to be contained within the cisgender masculine/feminine binary, is refreshing, courageous, and important. Though the author sometimes overdoes the self-congratulation and snarkiness, these flaws are more than overcome by the feisty candor and wit, especially when discussing their relationship with their parents and the church that at first rejected but then finally accepted Tobia’s sparkling “queer spirit.”

A funny, sharply observed, and intelligent journey into self-identity.

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THE GRAND FOOD BARGAIN And the Mindless Drive for More

Walker, Kevin D. Island Press (360 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-61091-947-0

A cri de coeur against the excesses of industrial agriculture in a time in which bigger is usually anything but better.

Walker, a farmer and international development worker, opens with a telling anecdote of traveling across the Kalahari Desert with a San Bushman who located a clutch of ostrich eggs and, choosing one to eat, left the rest to hatch, “something almost unfathomable to a Westerner.” That’s because, by the author’s account, Westerners have passed through the phase of gathering and then the great leap forward of settled agriculture to a “third relationship to food,” the bargain of the title that says that I get lots of cheap food from you in turn for not asking you too many questions about how that food was produced. Where food shortages had been the norm and a driver of history, now food surpluses have become common and, where not common, much desired standards to attain. The result?

Walker offers a familiar litany of examples, such as tomatoes that don’t taste like tomatoes and potatoes whose nutrients have been stripped away, the better to make the tubers “a cheap medium to deliver fats (oils, butter, sour cream) and sugars (ketchup).” There are some useful data on hand here, such as the author’s observation that a “refined” food is one where just those nutrients have been removed and an “enriched” food is one where those nutrients have been added back in. It’s quantity and not quality that drives such a system, the desire for profit over considerations of environmental and human health that yields such things as cornbased biofuels. Readers of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, or of Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan, will have a good handle on these matters already, and it’s a touch obvious to note that “America’s track record of recognizing and then stewarding finite resources has not been good.”

A well-intentioned book that doesn’t bring much new to the table.

POLITICAL ACTION A Practical Guide to Movement Politics

Walzer, Michael New York Review Books (110 pp.) $14.95 paper | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-68137-353-9 The reissue of a political action guidebook that has withstood the evolution of American government.

Originally published in 1971 and preceding a prolific oeuvre of treatises and foreign policy critiques, Walzer’s (Emeritus, Institute for |

An elegantly written, absorbing portrait of a visionary man and his age. the catalogue of shipwrecked books

THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library

Wilson-Lee, Edward Scribner (416 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-982111-39-7

The story of Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son who became a humanist and scholar in the age of Renaissance and Reformation.

In 1502, 13-year-old Hernando Colón (1488-1539) accompanied his father on his last trans-Atlantic voyage, a disastrous expedition marked by mutiny, betrayal, storms, and starvation. Columbus returned to Spain a broken man, though no less a hero in his son’s eyes. Wilson-Lee (English/Sidney Sussex Coll., Cambridge; Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet, 2016), drawing on rich historical and archival sources—including Hernando’s writings—creates a thrilling |

narrative of the perils of 16th-century exploration, where the atmosphere onboard ship was rife with panic, paranoia, and rebellion; giant lizards crawled the shore; sharks circled menacingly in the waters; and sweltering, mosquito-infested islands were inhabited by hostile tribes. The author’s focus, though, is not on Columbus but rather on Hernando, who became obsessed with two missions: to burnish his father’s reputation and to amass a vast, comprehensive library of printed matter: books, images, pamphlets, and all manner of ephemera. For Hernando, his father’s quest of circumnavigating the Earth was akin to “enclosing its knowledge in one library” and thereby gaining power and control over the unknown. Traveling extensively, he acquired thousands of books: 1,674 from Venice; 4,200 from a trip to northern Europe, and, eventually, 3,204 printed images, the largest collection in the world. His library swelled to over 15,000 volumes, making it the largest private collection in Europe. But even more astonishing than the sheer number of items was Hernando’s intricate system of ordering. From an early 20-page handwritten index, an alphabetical key to the people, things, and concepts in Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Hernando developed several encyclopedias and inventories as well as a card catalog that enabled readers “to digest many volumes at a sitting, sorting relevant material from irrelevant.” As Wilson-Lee aptly notes, with “profound intuition” about the potential of burgeoning printed information, Hernando created, in effect, the first “search engine.”

An elegantly written, absorbing portrait of a visionary man and his age. (illustrations and maps)

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Advanced Study at Princeton; A Foreign Policy for the Left, 2018, etc.) first political call to action resonates as much in today’s tense, precarious climate as it did when the author originally crafted it. Writing in the weeks just following the American invasion of Cambodia, the author drew ideas and inspiration from his experiences as a civil rights and anti-war activist.

Throughout this brief, lucid guide, he illustrates the sequential steps necessary to become active in citizen politics, beginning with discovering a movement one is passionate about, finding support, and discovering an initiative that “belongs to its members, as do, for a time at least, the crucial decisions.” While the author educates and instructs on the nuances of resistance movements, he also cautions readers against the dangers of hubris and avoiding the pitfalls of indulging in the “fantasies of social and political changes they cannot actually bring about.”

He poses key questions on whether movements should be single issue–oriented or represent a palette of special interests. The answers, viewed through Walzer’s highly practical, intellectual lens, steer budding movements toward a single cause initially.

He counsels readers on the importance of a movement projecting a “national image,” lists the qualities inherent in an effective leader, the pros and cons of money raised and spent, strategic tactical political maneuvers, and how to cope with both internal and external conflict and antagonism. “Solidarity is a political tie,” he writes, “subject to political strains.” Ultimately, Walzer’s potent manual validates protest movements of the past while underscoring the relevance of resistance initiatives in the contemporary political climate. With a new preface by the author and introduction by Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener, this remains an inspired political motivating tool and an erudite work of political food for thought.

An authoritative master plan for forming effective, influential citizen activism.

THE PROMISE Tales of Love and Loss in China

Xinran Trans. by Spencer, William I.B. Tauris (288 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 28, 2019 978-1-78831-362-9

Love in a time of totalitarianism.

“The past century has seen more upheaval than any other time in the 5,000-year-old history of Chinese civilization,” writes Xinran (Buy Me the Sky: The Remarkable Truth of China’s One-Child Generations, 2015, etc.), a London-based journalist whose books have focused on social mores and family life in her homeland. “The ways in which people show love for each other have also changed in the face of war and cultural development.” One such change is an emphasis on “talking love.” Since public displays of affection are not commonplace and privacy is difficult to secure, it is a way of falling in love by conversing and negotiating. So the dictionary says, though Xinran insists it is far less clinical than all that. By way of illustration, she examines the course of a single family over a century, beginning with the marriage of a man and woman in 1919 who then went on to produce nine children whom they named after favorite colors: Orange, Green, Cyan, and so kirkus.com

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forth. Getting to their stories, as Xinran writes, required navigating difficult tangles of emotion; so psychically painful were many of the events of war and revolution that older Chinese people invent less terrible pasts for themselves, a comfort to the memory but one that weighs against historical accuracy.

Of the pre-revolutionary generation, those memories are of a country that no longer exists. The child named Red, for instance, was contracted in marriage when she was just 9: “My marriage sentence began that day,” she tells Xinran quietly, later remembering an argument from long ago over whether to believe newspaper accounts of the Korean War. Relates Green, three of the siblings went abroad, three remained in Communist China, and “three met death before their time.”

Their descendants now live much different lives, including a young woman who studied in the U.S. and dates an American whom she met there: “Doesn’t it sound just like a love story from a movie?”

A minor but graceful work that restores a lost generation to history.

the author supported during the 2016 election. (She zings the winner of that election a few times, too.)

Broad-ranging, introspective, and honest essays that reveal a fine writer’s experiences, mind, and heart. (11 illustrations)

THIS FISH IS FOWL Essays of Being

Xu Xi Univ. of Nebraska (304 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-4962-0682-4 A novelist and essayist with a peripatetic life returns with a collection of recent and revealing pieces that range from the intensely personal to the analytical to the appreciative.

Xu Xi, who writes in English, has published a number of novels (That Man in Our Lives, 2016) and a memoir (Dear Hong Kong, 2017). Here, she collects 30 tight essays—many previously published—and arranges them, sometimes chronologically, in four categories. Among the most wrenching are those dealing with her mother’s long descent into Alzheimer’s and the author’s care for her (“the typhoon that was my mother’s Alzheimer’s changed my world, shifting all its known compass points”). The author is also candid about her two divorces, her current and long-lasting relationship with another man, and her brother’s death. She also writes affectingly about writing itself: why she writes in English (she says her Chinese is not all that good) and how she, in some ways, disappointed her mother, who did not eagerly approve of her daughter’s decision to become a writer.

The author also chronicles a long process of decision about what she should do besides write—something that would earn her a steady, predictable income. She was in the corporate world for a number of years and then moved into academe, where she now works as the co-director of the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. In one essay, the author discusses how she likes to “loaf,” but these essays reveal a writer who is intensely focused on her work. There are a few political pieces, as well, including one that features, woven throughout, letters to Hillary Clinton, whom 80

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children’s WILLIAM WAKES UP

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Ashman, Linda Illus. by Groenink, Chuck Disney-Hyperion (40 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-4847-2283-1

SUPERLATIVE BIRDS by Leslie Bulion; illus. by Robert Meganck....83 STEVE GOES TO CARNIVAL by Joshua Button & Robyn Wells; illus. by Joshua Button..........................................................................83 THE WOOLLY MONKEY MYSTERIES by Sandra Markle................. 92 THE TRUE HISTORY OF LYNDIE B. HAWKINS

by Gail Shepherd.................................................................................. 94 THE DAY THE UNIVERSE EXPLODED MY HEAD

by Allan Wolf; illus. by Anna Raff...................................................... 98 THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD AND ME by Toni Yuly......................... 98 VROOM VROOM GARBAGE TRUCK by Asia Citro; illus. by Troy Cummings..................................................................... 107 LITTLE BOAT by Taro Gomi............................................................... 117 WHY THE FACE? by Jean Jullien...................................................... 121 WILL LADYBUG HUG? by Hilary Leung.......................................... 123 ANATOMY FOR BABIES by Jonathan Litton; illus. by Thomas Elliott....................................................................... 123 PEEK-A-WHO? by Elsa Mroziewicz.................................................129 A PILE OF LEAVES by Tamara Shopsin & Jason Fulford................. 133 ROSA LOVES CARS by Jessica Spanyol............................................. 135 CHILLY PENGUIN by Constanze von Kitzing; trans. by Lisa Rosinsky........................................................................ 137

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A young boy and his animal friends awaken from a long winter’s nap and prepare to welcome a special guest.

William looks out the window of his forest cabin to a dawning, blooming world. Calling to the hibernating animals who share his bed, he says, “Wake up! It’s spring! / Today’s the day— / a special guest is on the way.” Only Chipmunk answers the call initially, and the two bake together until they realize the job is too big for just them. William returns to the bed, calling the other animals one by one to come assist in the cleaning and decorating. When “special guest” Bluebird finally arrives—and after sluggard Raccoon agrees to help Bluebird build its nest— they finally sit down to a spring picnic. The animals wake in a similar order to how they settled in during Ashman and Groenink’s previous book, William’s Winter Nap (2017). And as with that title, the countdown and the rhyming text with a repeating chorus make this an ideal read-aloud for young listeners. The mostly mono- and bisyllabic vocabulary lends a simple elegance to the tale. Earth tones keep the pencil-and-Photoshop illustrations warm and cozy, and additional feelings of familiarity arise from the drafting style, which is reminiscent of mid-20th-century illustration. Prominent pencil marks are grainy and natural, complementing the woodsy story setting. William has pale skin and straight, black hair.

A classic-feeling, homey celebration of spring’s beginning. (Picture book. 2-5)

BECAUSE OF THE RABBIT by Cynthia Lord.................................... 90

GOODBYE, MR. SPALDING

Barr, Jennifer Robin Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills (272 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-68437-178-5

ROSA LOVES CARS

Spanyol, Jessica Illus. by the author Child’s Play (14 pp.) $4.99 | Oct. 1, 2018 978-1-78628-125-8 Series: All About Rosa

Twelve-year-olds Jimmie and Lola will always be best friends forever. That’s Rule No. 12.

Shibe Park’s very short right-field fence is across the street from the flatroofed houses where they live, allowing them to see all the home games of their beloved Philadelphia Athletics from a unique perspective. Homeowners set up |

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there’s lots to look forward to in 2019 bleachers on the roofs (Rule No. 11), charging a small fee for fans who can’t afford stadium tickets, which provides essential income for the families struggling in the Great Depression.

Now Mr. Shibe wants to build a high spite fence to block their view, which will endanger their economic survival. Influenced by his other rules involving responsibility and commitment, Jimmie comes up with several harebrained schemes to stop Mr. Shibe while staying constantly watchful of the Polinski brothers, frightening neighborhood bullies (Rule No. 19). Lola abets him in his schemes, but when the dangers seem to outweigh any benefits, their friendship is nearly destroyed. Barr carefully constructs a well-paced adventure, involving some real events in a very specific time and place, while making Jimmie’s worries about negotiating that world completely accessible to modern readers. All the characters, assumed white, are well-developed, even the real Connie Mack and Jimmie Foxx. Quotes from the 1934 Sporting News that head many chapters further illuminate the actual events. The wall gets built, but friendship endures.

Life lessons, baseball, and good friends; it’s all here. (author’s note, photographs, resources) (Historical fiction.

9-12)

Photo courtesy Leah Overstreet

It’s always a little odd to write my annual “what to look forward to” Jan. 1 column, as I do it a good month or so before the New Year but have been paddling about in next year’s books for months. I feel as though I’m writing in three times at once. No wonder the books I’m thinking about are science fiction and fantasy: books that often play fast and loose with time.

Disney’s Rick Riordan Presents imprint continues to expand, with a follow-up to last year’s Aru Shah and the End of Time (Aru Shah and the Song of Death, April 30) and openers for two new series. The Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee (Jan. 15), takes figures from Korean cosmology and weaves them into a gripping space opera about a 13-year-old shapeshifting fox spirit named Min who disguises herself as a boy to join the Space Force and discover what happened to her beloved older brother. While it stays nominally earthbound, the funny and heartfelt Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, by Carlos Hernandez (March 4), gives its CubanAmerican protagonists the ability to explore the multiverse from their arts-focused Miami middle school.

Three other sequels of note this spring join the current effervescence of non-European fantasy, a burgeoning that’s made me really aware of the thematic limitations of the traditional canon: Henry Lien’s Battle of Champions (Jan. 22), Sayantani DasGupta’s The Game of Stars (Feb. 26), and Daniel José Older’s Freedom Fire (May 14).

There’s one upcoming ghost story I am very eager to read, and that’s Trace, by Pat Cummings (April 2). I’m excited first because I do love a good dose of earthly eeriness to mix in with the more otherworldly fare and second because this is the veteran picture-book creator’s first novel in a career that’s spanned 35 years.

But the book I’m most looking forward to? It’s that fabulous one I don’t know about yet, the one that reaches out and grabs our reviewer so they levitate with excitement and make me want to float too. —V.S.

THE TALL MAN AND THE SMALL MOUSE

Bergman, Mara Illus. by Sif, Birgitta Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-1-5362-0168-0

When the titular tall man and small mouse finally discover they’ve been sharing a house, they quickly become collaborators.

The book begins with the pleasant sound of a nursery rhyme: “On a tall hill / in a tall house / lived a tall man / and a small mouse.”

Here and throughout, the text is large, easily seen against pale backgrounds. Whimsical, lightly lined drawings with watercolor washes keep the mood light and comforting. The tall man—who is white and also comically thin—does “tall things / that needed doing,” such as picking apples and rescuing cats and kites from trees. The small mouse, who creeps around the house while the man sleeps, wears a dress and a hooded cape from which large, white ears protrude. She excels at getting into tiny spaces and moving small items, restoring lost bits and pieces to the man.

The minor crisis of the book occurs when, after a long day of effort, the tall man cannot figure out how to fix the town’s tower clock. (There is no evidence of anyone else worrying whether the clock works, but it’s obviously important to the tall man.) A funny sequence of vignettes as he gets dressed the next morning concludes with him almost stepping on the mouse, who had been sleeping in his tall, old-fashioned shoe. Gentle rhymes and rhythm combine with equally gentle art as the two characters become a working team and then friends.

Sweet fun for storytime and bedtime. (Picture book. 3-6)

Vicky Smith is the children’s editor.

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With characteristic humor and carefully crafted language, poet Bulion offers readers amazing facts about birds of our world. superlative birds

THE CRAYON MAN The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons

for repeated sounds and pleasing internal rhymes. Each is constructed according to a different pattern, described in the backmatter. Meganck’s digital illustrations reflect the humorous tone. The round eyes of his bird caricatures often stare directly at readers. An amusingly anthropomorphic chickadee, “the great communicator,” guides readers through the text from beginning to end, pointing out in speech bubbles those characteristics birds share with other species and three that are theirs alone: feathers, a furcula (wishbone), and syrinx (“a two-sided voice organ”). (The two unfamiliar words are defined in context.) Like any good teacher, this avian instructor summarizes and repeats at the end. From the tiny bee hummingbird in Cuba through the well-traveled Arctic tern to the familiar chickadee whose warnings many species understand, these record-breaking birds come from all over the world, and their special characteristics vary widely. Excellent resources for further bird study complete this delightful offering.

Entertaining and educational, a superlative package. (glossary, acknowledgements) (Informational poetry. 7-12)

Biebow, Natascha Illus. by Salerno, Steven HMH Books (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-328-86684-4

Through persistent experimentation Edward Binney gave children a cheap and safe coloring medium.

In this chatty, engaging picture book, Biebow provides the historical context around the invention of Crayola crayons. The story covers the media predecessors (breakable, often poisonous artists’ crayons; clay) that were the basis for the Crayola and the trial-and-error process Binney undertook to create a safe, colorful product that children from diverse economic backgrounds could afford. Such visual cues as boldface type for the names of colors throughout the story aid readers in recognizing the colors that Binney developed and that they might encounter in their own crayon boxes. Biebow moves past the invention to recognize the impact this product has had on childhood worldwide. Salerno brings readers close to the story through his illustrations, right onto the lab table where Binney and his team (both impressively mustachioed men and women, all white) developed the crayon. What Jon Klassen achieves emotionally in his characters’ eyes, Salerno manages with eyebrows here. He uses crayon pencils for the bulk of the work; children’s pictures in a couple of later spreads are done, appropriately enough, with Crayolas. A well-organized bibliography with both primary and secondary sources, including interviews with Binney’s greatgranddaughter, is supplemented by text boxes throughout the book that offer additional informational snippets such as the composition of Crayola’s pigments.

A suitably colorful introduction to the life of a person whose name readers may not know but whose invention they all use. (factory snapshots, author’s note) (Picture book/ biography. 6-9)

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STEVE GOES TO CARNIVAL

Button, Joshua & Wells, Robyn Illus. by Button, Joshua Candlewick (56 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-1-5362-0034-8 A true international animal fantasy.

Co-written and illustrated by an Aboriginal author from the Walmajarri people of Western Australia in collaboration with a white author from Broome, Australia, and set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this story follows Steve, a huge brown gorilla, as he escapes from the zoo for a night of dancing at a jazz club during Carnival. As he searches the city for Antonio, his favorite zookeeper, a yellow hat effectively disguises Steve until his boisterous dancing with “a beautiful dancer with zigzag hair” makes it fly off his head. The hostess cries, “Opa! A Gorilla!” but the dancer continues, unfazed. And Steve actually does find Antonio, the zookeeper, who loves music and dance as much as Steve does. Portuguese words that appear throughout the text are translated in a closing glossary. While this is not an #ownvoices story, Button and Wells accurately portray the art, yellow trams, food (coconut sweets, bonbons, black bean soup, etc.), and the celebration of Carnival. Less accurate is the focus on jazz music, when samba figures more prominently than jazz during Carnival. Despite this minor inconsistency, the book’s Raschka-esque art—lively, childlike, colorful, and full of movement reflective of music and dance—will keep readers interested and engaged.

A compelling, child-friendly tale that will increase readers’ global awareness while it entertains. (Picture book.

5-10)

SUPERLATIVE BIRDS

Bulion, Leslie Illus. by Meganck, Robert Peachtree (56 pp.) $15.95 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-56145-951-3

A chatty chickadee introduces bird species standouts.

With characteristic humor and carefully crafted language, poet Bulion offers readers amazing facts about birds of our world. Poems and accompanying science notes describe 18 birds that excel in some fashion and explain what nearly all birds have in common; the first poem introduces her focus, and the last notes environmental threats. These engaging poems read aloud beautifully. Thoughtful word choices allow |

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In its curved corners and moonlit scenes, the artwork couldn’t be more inviting. the night bear

THE RAMBLING

Bear is wide-eyed and cuddly, with a big heart-shaped belly. In its curved corners and moonlit scenes, the artwork couldn’t be more inviting, and Night Bear’s choice of meals is obviously a much-needed public service, as any child would agree. The front endpapers offer detailed origami instructions to make a takeout box for Night Bear, while the rear endpapers depict a bevy of tasty nightmares. Tom presents white.

Whimsical, light, and soothing, like a pretty good dream that Night Bear would surely never eat. (Picture book.

4-9)

Cajoleas, Jimmy Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-06-249878-6 On an odyssey through the swamp to find his father, a boy discovers the magic of life, love, and storytelling.

After accidentally setting fire to his mother’s bakery, 11-year-old Buddy runs away to the swamp to be with the father he hasn’t seen in five years. Pop’s not only his hero, but the best Parsnit card player around. But no sooner does Buddy see Pop than his father is kidnapped by Boss Authority’s henchmen for reasons revealed later in the novel. In a witty, conversational style and Southern cadence, Buddy narrates his journey to rescue Pop. While initially the setting feels like the American South, Cajoleas’ lush worldbuilding reveals a multiracial community that does not seem to carry the region’s racial history. In this community, Buddy meets an array of folkloric characters of varying races who heighten the swamp’s spookiness. Brownskinned Tally, one of the spider-folk, saves Buddy from eerie encounters, and he in turn helps his new friend see the beauty of her gift. Paralleling the journey are Buddy’s descriptions of Parsnit. In this dueling card game, overseen by a witch, players test their Orating skill to recount the best stories. As Buddy learns Parsnit tricks, he realizes that loving a flawed parent is even trickier and that real life is more wonderful and mysterious than any story. A few characters are described as black or brown; the default is white.

Vivid imagery and thought-provoking musings make this an ideal read-aloud adventure. (Fantasy. 8-12)

POWER UP

Fishman, Seth Illus. by Greenberg, Isabel Greenwillow (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-0-06-245579-6 Math and science enthusiasts, this one’s for you!

Fishman and Greenberg, the author and illustrator team of A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars (2017), take readers on a journey through the amazing human body, noting that a pinkie finger “has enough energy to light up one of the biggest cities in the world for an entire day.” This informational book explains how the body produces, expends, and recharges energy through such activities as eating, sleeping, and exercising. The author’s note at the end focuses not on what the characters have been doing throughout the book but on Einstein’s equation E=mc2.

In child-friendly language, the note explains what an equation is, how Einstein used this one to solve tough problems, and how all of this relates to the body’s energy. While this book could effectively be used in school lessons about energy, kids likely study Einstein’s equation much later in school than this book’s target audience. Greenberg’s multicultural cast of characters models different aspects of the body’s use of energy, the primary character being a black girl with her hair in two puffballs. While most of the characters have strangely angular features, the stark color contrasts and interesting facts will keep readers engaged.

Parents and kids alike will appreciate the book’s exhortation to stay curious.

A fresh, scientific look at one aspect of the incredible human body. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

THE NIGHT BEAR

de Moraes, Ana Illus. by de Moraes, Thiago Andersen Press USA (32 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5415-5509-9 A bear who dines nightly on children’s nightmares can’t stomach a particularly pleasant dream.

Every night the Night Bear comes into town on a bus and eats the bad dreams of children who are deep in sleep. The monsters and spiders and scary storms that torment kids’ thoughts are delectable to Night Bear. “Scary pirates being mean taste like strawberries and cream.” But one night, when the Night Bear unwraps a less-nightmarish meal—unicorns and rainbows—he sets off to find someone who might want this disgusting stuff. Tom, a boy who’s still up, is happy to exchange his spider and snake for the unicorns, and Night Bear goes back to his bear friends with the story of his first encounter with a fur-less human child. The frightening meals are approachably toothless as written and illustrated by the de Moraes, and Night 84

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BECOMING EMILY The Life of Emily Dickinson

Cake needs: candles, icing, and a ribbon! Fish, upon eyeing the ensemble, approves wholeheartedly. Animals cheer when Cake finally arrives at the party and invite him to dance and play. But when the chorus of “Happy Birthday” starts and Cake’s candles get blown out, the party starts to take a different turn. Hendra and Linnet’s latest contributes another clever comedy to their oeuvre. The digitally rendered illustrations are bold and colorful, with cartoon figures set against patterned backgrounds. Careful readers will not only intuit Cake’s implied fate, but also notice the clues in the images that foreshadow the surprise ending.

A tasty confection iced with a (darkly) silly sense of humor. (Picture book. 5- 7)

Goddu, Krystyna Poray Chicago Review (192 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-0-89733-003-9

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A normalizing portrait of one of Western literature’s most enigmatic poets.

Having previously examined the life of Jazz Age poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (A Girl Called Vincent, 2016), Goddu here turns the spotlight on an even larger American literary figure, Emily Dickinson.

Known widely for her tight cryptic verses published primarily following her death, Dickinson is often viewed as a sort of “madwoman in the attic,” biographers zeroing in on her particular manner of dress and preference, particularly later in life, for staying home and limiting her social interactions. Much of Goddu’s account seeks to redeem that portrayal, focusing on exceptional forces throughout Dickinson’s life that contributed to her artistry. She makes much of Dickinson’s Puritan heritage and education; Dickinson was never at a want for money and, thanks to her father’s prominence as a U.S. Congressman, was at the forefront of Amherst intellectual society. The author makes the compelling case that with Dickinson’s unique talents—including learning to play piano at age 2—frail health, and proclivity for intense relationships with kin and friends, she had little reason to leave the house. Through Dickinson’s love for nature, science, and reading, worlds opened. Archival photographs enhance the telling.

With select poems, revealing passages from letters, and a richly detailed narrative, this thorough study is sure to entice middle-grade readers to explore one of the 19th century’s greatest poets. (timeline, notes, bibliography) (Biography. 10-14)

CAKE

Hendra, Sue & Linnet, Paul Illus. by the authors Aladdin (32 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5344-2550-7 A naïve cake’s first slice of birthday partying puts him in pastry peril.

Cake, an anthropomorphic yellow sponge cake with eyes, mouth, and appendages, sits reading in his living room when the unsigned invitation arrives: “You are invited to a party!” Filled with excitement, frosting, and a little uncertainty, the attendeeto-be makes it his mission to dress to impress his hosts. None of the accessories Cake tries on get the green light from his pet goldfish, Fish, so Cake slips away to the local hat shop in search of some more subtle flair. Alas, the merchandise is also missing that certain je ne sais quoi. In a last-ditch effort, the shop assistant (a penguin) disappears into the back to grab “just the thing” |

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WHEN PLANTS ATTACK Strange and Terrifying Plants

the words to the newly declared national anthem, “The StarSpangled Banner,” and sing it at the fireworks display, proudly declaring their new American status. Demonstrative, stylized paintings feature an assortment of sturdy, earnest young men (all pale-skinned) dressed in blue/green uniforms planting a plethora of tree saplings. The author’s not-so-subtle metaphor illustrates how Pavel’s work allows him to feel rooted in his new country just as his plantings grow and thrive in today’s national parks and forests.

A timely theme to emphasize America’s promise for each generation of newcomers. (author’s note) (Picture book.

6-8)

Hirsch, Rebecca E. Millbrook/Lerner (52 pp.) $31.99 PLB | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-5415-2670-9

This survey of wild, unusual, and terrifying flora munches across eight chapters but may leave some readers asking for seconds.

Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors and Morticia Addams’ pet Cleopatra inspire new generations of curious youngsters to seek out information on the plant kingdom’s bizarre and peculiar subjects. Hirsch proceeds admirably with her topic, combining the well-known (Venus fly trap, kudzu) with the lesser-known (the stinging tree, which can kill; the pisonia tree, the seeds of which can strangle birds). Along the way, folklore is interwoven with facts, suggesting ideas of how these plants’ legendary abilities may have been promulgated. The chapters are presented in a series of easily digested segments, each introducing a new plant and a new way to terrify readers. Large color photographs are supplemented by a scattering of diagrams illustrating more-complex descriptions. Readers who make it through to the backmatter will encounter an author’s note, a weedy garden of source notes, a glossary, and other useful pieces of information. The source notes are not referenced in the text, making this useful tool one that might be overlooked. The only word for which pronunciation is given is “kudzu,” though arguably some of the earlier terms merit such treatment as well. The eye-catching cover (and immediate shelf appeal) makes up for these few missteps, but librarians and educators should expect follow-up questions from voracious readers.

Perfectly adequate as a starter course. (Nonfiction. 9-12)

WHY SHOULD I WALK? I CAN FLY!

Ingalls, Ann Illus. by Evans, Rebecca Dawn Publications (32 pp.) $16.95 | $8.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-58469-638-4 978-1-58469-639-1 paper A fledgling makes its first foray into the sky.

With not a little apprehension, a young robin considers the possibilities and perils of its inaugural flight. Though it’s every bird’s destiny to spread their wings and leave the nest eventually, it’s a scary proposition. Just when the feathered protagonist decides to give flight a pass, its mom deems the moment right for a gentle shove, causing it to tumble clumsily from its safe haven and make awkward attempts to rise. Encountering a toothy cat below leaves the bird no choice but to keep pumping its wings in an escape effort—then, holy fluttering, robin!—up it soars like the expert avia(n)tor it was meant to be. This is a charming tale, with the bird narrating fears and self-doubts, then exhilaration, in simple, lilting verse that aptly floats along breezily. Young readers/listeners will easily empathize as they contemplate daunting firsts of their own and take heart as they discover that pluck and practice win out. Equally appealing are the bright, delightful watercolor illustrations of the very expressive bird. (So saturated are they that the mother’s plumage looks darker than it does in real life.) Two double-page spreads of further information for children and adults extend the story’s usefulness with a child-friendly Q-and-A illustrated with photos and literacy and STEM activities.

Flying with this bird should leave young human chicks feeling encouraged to spread their own wings. (Picture book.

3-6)

PAVEL AND THE TREE ARMY

Hyde, Heidi Smith Illus. by Vavouri, Elisa Kar-Ben (32 pp.) $17.99 PLB | Feb. 1, 2019 978-1-5124-4446-9

In Depression-era America, Pavel, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, joins the Civilian Conservation Corps and learns to blend his new American identity with his Jewish one.

On the advice of his rabbi, Pavel decides to take a job planting trees all over the country as part of the new program established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Arriving in Idaho, Pavel’s first impression is that this empty landscape seems quite foreign compared to a bustling, busy New York City, but Pavel is encouraged by the prospect of three meals a day and hardearned money to help support his family. However, some of the men he meets on his team scrutinize Pavel’s accent and claim he cannot be a real American. Pavel wonders how he can prove that he is just as American as his co-workers. As the Fourth of July approaches, Pavel and his fellow immigrant workers learn 86

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The plot is rather thin, but the grayscale illustrations with green and yellow highlights are utterly charming. the little rabbit

BEWARE OF THE CROCODILE

that feels in need of some tightening and oiling. In this post– World War I England, all the nonmetallic characters seem to be white given that even the flesh affixed to robots is described as a “white mixture” that develops “a fleshy pallor.” Hard-tofollow action sequences and pseudoscientific terminology blunt the emotional stakes, which are felt more in the side characters than the main quest.

Young science-fiction aficionados will appreciate this story despite its malfunctions. (Science fiction. 8-12)

Jenkins, Martin Illus. by Kitamura, Satoshi Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-7636-7538-7

A picture book that presents some information about crocodiles.

The book begins: “If there’s one thing you should know about crocodiles, it’s that they’re really scary.” And that does crocodiles a huge disservice. While the story does present some crocodile facts—crocodile mothers build nests of leaves and lay between 40 and 60 eggs; crocodiles don’t need to eat that often—the bulk of the story focuses on how crocodiles sneak up on their prey and eat them. Author Jenkins’ tone is conversational and droll, but the dry humor doesn’t outweigh the story’s fearmongering (“waiting for something—or even somebody—to come down to drink”). It’s hard to know what purpose this serves, other than developing in readers a fear of the natural world. Kitamura’s mixed-media illustrations, featuring large, toothy crocodiles that sprawl, side-to, across double-page spreads, are largely redundant. Sometimes the crocodile faces left, sometimes right. The backmatter offers additional information: There are 16 kinds of crocodiles; the crocodiles featured in the book are saltwater crocodiles. As this is not relayed in the story itself, readers may feel some confusion with basic facts: Do all kinds build nests out of leaves? Do they all lay 40 to 60 eggs? “More Information” lists all of two websites, one last updated in 2012.

A story that sacrifices facts for drama about creatures that have lived on Earth since the dinosaurs (a fact readers won’t find in this book). (index) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

THE LITTLE RABBIT

Killen, Nicola Illus. by the author Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-5344-3828-6 Series: Little Animal

TIN

Kenny, Pádraig Chicken House/Scholastic (288 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-338-27755-5 Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics get a middle-grade twist.

Christopher thinks he’s a 12-year-old boy. He lives with Absalom, an unlicensed engineer who uses his robot inventions to grift vulnerable people out of their money, and an endearing cast of other mechanical creations.

When Christopher gets hit by a car selflessly trying to rescue one of his metallic friends, he accidentally discovers that he is also a robot—a highly illegal one, as he’s clearly “ensouled”—and is promptly whisked away by men purporting to be from the government agency overseeing such matters. Worried, Christopher’s friends, constructs and flesh, go on a quest to save him.

They even enlist the help of the most renowned engineer in history, the man who created Christopher to fill a void in his own family. Points of view bounce around confusingly, with prose |

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A cozy home-away-home adventure with Ollie and her bunny.

A little girl named Ollie who is dressed in a gray rabbit costume is eager to play outside in the puddles with her stuffed toy, Bunny, after the rain stops. As soon as they venture out-of-doors, golden petals, depicted in glinting foil detail on the jacket and in many illustrations, blow by on the breeze. Although text is not clear on this point, the petals seem to have magical powers that transform the toy rabbit into a real animal. Bunny scampers off after other rabbits, and Ollie follows. Their ensuing adventures have Ollie rescuing and comforting Bunny as they brave the elements and seek refuge in a treehouse. The plot, which culminates in a return home and Bunny’s return to toy status, is rather thin, but the grayscale illustrations with green and yellow highlights are utterly charming throughout the book. Die cuts at beginning and closing stages of the book indicate movement between realistic and fantastical realms, but their presence isn’t integral to the storytelling, and they come across as superfluous, even indulgent, given how likely it is that little fingers exploring them might tear the pages.

Lovely to look at but little story to follow. (Picture book.

2-5)

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Jonah Winter

ELVIS IS KING! IS A POETIC, THOROUGHLY ENGAGING PICTURE BOOK

By James Feder Photo courtesy Annie Boutelle

ous cults around the icon, some of which are predicated on a very real sense of Elvis as holy. While his editor steered him away from such an approach, he says that, in the end, Elvis Is King! (Jan. 8) retains some of his original allusions to the religiouslike trajectory of the star’s life, albeit in a tighter, more serious fashion. “His life began in such pain, such sorrow, such limitation,” he explains. “What he turned his life into—that was something close to a miracle.”

Odds are, when you think of Elvis, you think of him with his greased-up hair, swiveling hips, and that instantly recognizable voice, but when Elvis was born, such a fate would have seemed nearly impossible. A scrawny, shy, blond boy from a poor family in the Midwest, his is truly a rags-to-riches story. For Winter, the genesis of Elvis Presley resonated on a very personal level.

“The idea that you can overcome your shyness, your stage fright, your self-consciousness through, ironically, being as outrageous as possible is something I understand to my core,” he says. In his early 20s, Winter too decided to shake loose his identity as a “nerd” and an “outcast” and rebrand himself as someone more outgoing. There’s a sort of reverence when Winter discusses Elvis’ decision “to just utterly transform himself from a shy blond-haired poor boy [into] something that would, at the very least, turn heads, get people’s attention, be totally different from everything else in his environment.”

Beautifully illustrated by Chris Sickels, with whom Winter has collaborated on two other books, Elvis Is King! is a standout piece of visual art in and of itself. “The amount of work and detail that went into every illustration is staggering,” Winter reflects, “and the humanity with which he imbued his illustrations of Elvis helped my story be what it ultimately wanted to be—a very human portrait of a very human figure.”

Indeed, the portrait that Winter delivers doesn’t mask the blemishes. Behind the shimmer of raw talent and elec-

Jonah Winter is no stranger to larger-than-life characters. The prolific author of more than 30 nonfiction picture books, he’s explored the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Willie Mays, and, in his New York Times bestseller Barack, Barack Obama. That he should set his sights on the King, Elvis Presley, is no surprise—what’s surprising is how he first envisioned the book.

“I originally conceived of this book as a modern saint’s story,” Winter says, citing his fascination with the numer88

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tric charisma lies a young man who struggles with fame and money and fast food. Importantly, Winter also notes the tensions inherent in Elvis’ story: charges of cultural appropriation, or making African-American music more “palatable” for white audiences. Winter doesn’t question that that’s exactly what record labels wanted from Elvis, but he does push back when it comes to criticism of Elvis himself. “Could any of the genres of modern popular music have happened without the never-ending borrowing and stealing that happens in music?” he asks. “What would music history be if all the musicians up to now had simply ‘stayed in their lane’?”

Winter offers an honest and fitting tribute to the King, exploring the power of music to heal and to inflame, to lift a talented boy out from poverty to the very peaks of success. “I hope that kids who are growing up in poverty will see that it’s possible to rise out of that through music,” he says of the book. “I hope that those kids who are not growing up in poverty will see that money is not what made Elvis a great musician.”

RONAN BOYLE AND THE BRIDGE OF RIDDLES

Lennon, Thomas Illus. by Hendrix, John Amulet/Abrams (304 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4197-3491-5 Series: Ronan Boyle, 1

James Feder is a writer based in Tel Aviv.

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A 15-year-old recruit becomes the newest faerie-fighter in Ireland in the first of a series, Lennon’s debut.

After the imprisonment of his parents, curators at the National Museum of Ireland wrongfully accused of stealing the Bog Man by shady art dealer Lord Desmond Dooley, young Ronan Boyle is taken in by a sympathetic member of the Galway garda as an intern in the evidence department. Being skinny, Boyle is summoned to a castle ruin to rescue a changeling baby that a leprechaun has thrown down an oubliette. His success leads to his recruitment by the Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog, the Irish land of faeries. After a required course of study that includes tin whistle, he embarks on a series of adventures that eventually point in the general direction of the Bog Man and his parents’ fate. They don’t arrive there, but they’re heading that way, and it’s the vagueness of Boyle’s quest and the plot as a whole that are the novel’s primary weaknesses. Dry Irish humor and relentless wackiness are its primary strengths; with lines like “Pat Finch is what a heart attack would look like if it could walk around eating fish-and-chips and saying terrible things about Roscommon Football Club’s starting lineup,” the joy is in the journey, not the destination. The cast is default white, with diversity mostly of the nonhuman variety.

As flavorful as the strongest Irish stout, though equally an acquired taste. (map) (Fantasy. 8-12)

SEVENTH GRADE VS. THE GALAXY

Levy, Joshua S. Carolrhoda (288 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5415-2810-9

When extraterrestrials impound a spaceship full of students and teachers 400 light-years from Earth, it’s up to Jack and his buddies to get them all back home.

Life on Public School Ship 118 has been hard for Jack ever since his science-teacher father was fired and kicked off, leaving him alone and outcast. It gets dramatically worse when the ship comes under attack. In the chaos, Jack’s father texts him via communicator ring with directions to save the school—but implementing them strands the entire ship in Elvidian space, where they are swiftly imprisoned. While the Earth kids are forced to attend Elvidian school and wear Elvidian contact lenses, Jack discovers that his father had been fired for tinkering |

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DIANA DANCES

with the P.S.S. 118, illicitly equipping it with the means to get them home—if only they can figure out how to get all of them back on the ship. Fortunately, the Elvidians seem to be a touch hypochondriacal and do not recognize Earth diseases....Levy’s novel, festooned with futuristic tech, is aimed at action-oriented readers, but too much telling rather than showing, especially initially, may turn them off prematurely. Repetitive details such as frequent references to Jack’s dad’s firing further bog the plot down. Jack presents white on the cover; Ari, who is Jewish, is depicted with brown skin; and Becka has light skin and long, dark hair.

Younger, less-sophisticated sci-fi fans who can get past the backstory-filled opening might find this just the ticket.

(Science fiction. 9-13)

Lozano, Luciano Illus. by the author Trans. by Canetti, Yanitzia Annick Press (40 pp.) $18.95 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-77321-248-7 A young girl finds her inner beauty in music and dance.

Diana is white, short, and chunky, and she wears glasses. She is not a good student at school, unable to concentrate, especially in math. It is in a psychologist’s office that her life turns around. When the doctor steps out to talk to her mother, he leaves the radio on, and Diana is literally swept off her feet as “her body moved gracefully, following the rhythm of the music.” The next logical and prescribed step is ballet school, and now Diana smiles, does well in math, and imagines herself performing on stage—“maybe.” Lozano’s little tale, originally published in Spain, is a lesson for children in both self-worth and not allowing body types to restrict development. And while, realistically, a child looking like Diana would most likely have a difficult time succeeding in ballet, the author graciously allows for participation at a student’s level and the opportunity to dream. His loose, fine-lined figures with cartoon-style faces are set against a white background. They depict one schoolmate in a wheelchair and several diverse children. The ballerinas she dreams of dancing with are tall and lithe; one is a person of color.

Dreams may or may not come true, but the opportunity to have them is wonderful. (Picture book. 4-6)

BECAUSE OF THE RABBIT

Lord, Cynthia Scholastic (192 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-545-91424-6 A young girl learns about honesty, integrity, and friendship when she finds a lost rabbit and starts school for the first time.

Home-schooled by her mother, young Emma is very close to her parents and brother. She has beautiful memories of visiting her grandparents (now deceased) across the border in Quebec, where she learned about French-Canadian farming culture. Mémère taught her to bake, while Pépère told her stories about Monsieur Lapin, the rabbit, and all his woodland friends. But now Emma’s life is changing. Her older brother, Owen, was her constant companion until he started high school and built a social life all his own. Lonely and hoping to make a friend, Emma decides to quit home schooling and enter the fifth grade at Lakeview Elementary. The night before she embarks on her first class, she accompanies her game-warden father on a call, and they find a pet bunny stuck in a fence.

Mischievous Lapi—named for Pépère’s stories—will offer both challenges and lessons to Emma as she navigates her new school and the politics of making friends with an unpopular boy. The beauty in Lord’s tale of finding home in a new community is the way Emma’s grandfather reaches her with his stories of magic even after he is gone, teaching her important lessons about following through on one’s promises. Emma and her family are white, their Franco-American heritage a rarity in children’s literature.

Delightful. (Fiction. 8-12)

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THE WOLF IN UNDERPANTS

Lupano, Wilfrid Illus. by Itoïz, Mayana with Cauuet, Paul Trans. by Sacks, Nathan Graphic Universe (40 pp.) $26.65 PLB | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5415-2818-5 Is a frosty fanny the cause of the forest creatures’ fear?

The woodland denizens fear the wolf and its “crazy eyes” and “fangs like ice picks.” Their marketplace bristles with stalls hawking anti-wolf alarms, wolf-defense karate, and wolf traps, and lectures about the wolf are always well-attended. However, when the critters, led by the heavily armed “anti-wolf brigade,” actually meet the wolf, they are surprised by his mild manner and prominent red-and-white–striped undies. Soon they learn that a chilly keister had made the wolf uncomfortable, causing its eerie howls and terrifying demeanor. The animals now face an existential crisis; who will buy wolf traps and attend lectures now? The wolf sensibly tells them, “maybe you need more in your lives than just fear.” With numerous mentions of butts and underpants, expect the requisite giggles. Those assuming this is another tale of self-acceptance will be pleasantly surprised |

Magras deftly balances introspection and action as Drest proves herself willing to risk everything. the hunt for the mad wolf’s daughter

A SCARF FOR KEIKO

by the turn to the dangers of fear and prejudice. (Those hoping for some address of the language demeaning mental illness will be disappointed.) Older readers with a keen eye should be able to spot a darkly comic twist at its conclusion. Large, earthtoned illustrations range in size from lush two-page spreads to smaller, compact, borderless panels, creating an engaging hybrid between a picture book and graphic novel that would work well read independently or aloud.

Young readers will howl for this tale that combines a timely, smart message alongside crowd-pleasing silliness.

(Graphic/picture-book hybrid. 5-9)

Malaspina, Ann Illus. by Liddiard, Merrilee Kar-Ben (32 pp.) $17.99 PLB | Feb. 1, 2019 978-1-5415-2164-3

THE HUNT FOR THE MAD WOLF’S DAUGHTER

Magras, Diane Kathy Dawson/Penguin (288 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-7352-2929-7 In the gripping last act of The Mad Wolf ’s Daughter (2018), crafty Drest escaped with her life from Faintree Castle—but doing so has made her the prime target in a traitorous plot.

In addition to freeing her da—the Mad Wolf—and her brothers from Faintree Castle, she also saved Emerick, Lord Faintree, from his scheming uncle. They are recovering with friend Tig’s family in Phearsham Ridge when a disguised castle knight infiltrates the town, spreading lies. He is searching for Emerick. And because Drest has become his protector, a price is on her head. The Mad Wolf is determined to protect Drest, but his methods no longer suit her. She, Emerick, and Tig refuse to go on the run, planning instead to take the battle to Faintree Castle. But who’s loyal? Who’s duplicitous? In feudal 13th-century Scotland, powerful alliances are necessary for success, as the thoroughly researched story makes clear, and forging them allows Drest to continue to develop her newfound diplomatic skills, solidifying her reputation as an ingenious, righteous leader. Her position is not an easy one, as the political winds continue to shift, betrayals abound, and battles rage. Magras deftly balances introspection and action as Drest proves herself willing to risk everything—and the result will leave readers cheering.

Fair-minded men and strong women in unusual roles make this a standout among quest tales for middle graders. (glossary, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)

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An act of kindness during World War II still resonates today as a boy reaches out to a girl whom the government does not consider a suitable or loyal American citizen.

The United States has entered World War II, and Sam’s class in Los Angeles is knitting socks for soldiers. Unfortunately, Sam cannot get his knitting needles to work properly as he tries to knit for his older brother, who is fighting overseas. Frustrated, he rejects an offer of help from his neighbor and classmate, Keiko, a girl of Japanese descent. Keiko is taunted and her father’s flower store is vandalized, and then the family is sent to an internment camp. Sam and his parents are sympathetic—as Jews they understand persecution—and his mother offers to keep safe Keiko’s mother’s treasured tea service. When Keiko leaves her bike with Sam, she includes knitted socks for Sam’s brother. It is then—finally—that Sam comes up with a most neighborly gesture: He will knit a scarf for Keiko because desert nights can be cold. Carefully, stitch by stitch, he finishes his project. The illustrations, in browns, greys, and reds, focus on the faces of the characters and express their frustrations, fears, and concerns. The author’s note briefly explains both President Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order and the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. A gentle and accessible story of tolerance during a war overflowing with racial and ethnic intolerance. (author’s note, photographs) (Picture book. 5-8)

MARIGOLD FINDS THE MAGIC WORDS

Malbrough, Mike Illus. by the author Philomel (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-5247-3743-6

A feline magician learns there’s magic in manners.

Marigold, a chubby, round-eyed, orange-and-white cat, goes all out for his birthday parties. This year, he’s performing a dazzling magic act. One trick goes awry, though: A bouquet that should vanish becomes a finch! Perfectionist Marigold believes he forgot the magical incantation. Trying again, he’s annoyed when the finch remains; still, the guests cheer. Marigold utters a different spell and two pigeons appear; the audience roars. Next try: three sea gulls. Marigold’s livid, yet everyone howls. This sleight-of-paw thing’s not working, and when his final attempt yields another failure, disconsolate Marigold shrieks for his audience to disappear. Finally, success! Realizing he needs to do something to coax partygoers back, Marigold says the best magic words there are. This works, too: Everyone returns—with |

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Another cleareyed and engaging book by a master of the genre. the woolly monkey mysteries

BABY DRAGON, BABY DRAGON!

some surprise visitors. The lively, energetic watercolors stand out and drive the story well. Marigold is highly expressive, his face and large eyes registering self-satisfaction, bluster, anger, and bewilderment to appealing comical effect; endpapers display accoutrements of the magician’s trade. Many words are capitalized in larger fonts throughout to heighten humorous dramatic tension.

Not truly magical but fun and appealing. (Picture book.

4- 7)

Marr, Melissa Illus. by Podesta, Lena Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-399-17525-1 A bright red baby dragon flies around a village of the European past with a young child chasing after.

Readers first spot the child, cued as a girl with long pigtails, pitching hay into a wagon, but all of a sudden, she is in a castle with a sword at her side. She wears a sleeveless green tunic and gray leggings, and it is hard to tell who she is within the hierarchy of her world. She speaks to the dragon: “Baby dragon, baby dragon, what a fast flight!” Marr uses this admiring, repetitive, rhythmic phrasing throughout the story but lets readers down by following up not with a rhyme but with bland prose text: “Baby dragon, baby dragon, what a big climb! / You scale tall walls and go up so high.” The girl clearly enjoys keeping up with the fun-loving dragon, flying on its back, looking at its treasures, and even cuddling up in its nest, but the text is persistently pedestrian. There is a strong sense of movement in the cartoonlike illustrations, created with both traditional and digital media. The child protagonist is light-skinned; some diversity among the kingdom’s inhabitants is shown in an amusing feasting scene in which the dragon fastidiously eats with the very tip of its tail, a bib around its neck.

It’s good to see an active girl in medieval times, but this dragon story never really soars. (Picture book. 5- 7)

THE WOOLLY MONKEY MYSTERIES The Quest to Save a Rain Forest Species Markle, Sandra Millbrook/Lerner (40 pp.) $31.99 paper | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-5124-5868-8

Markle introduces the woolly monkey, one of the largest monkeys in the rainforests of South America.

Using accessible language complemented by engaging photographs, the author describes the habitat, characteristics, importance, and scientific research related to this critically endangered primate. As they are considered a keystone species, the importance of learning more about them is critical to the survival of the rainforest. A clear, double-page diagram allowing readers to visualize the different layers of the rainforest sets the stage for understanding the woolly monkey’s habitat. There are two species: the yellow-tailed woolly monkey, which lives only in the cloud forests of Peru, and the lowland woolly monkey, which can be found in the rainforest areas of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Markle details the research undertaken by several scientists, in particular the use of camera traps set up in the forest canopy by the Tree Top Manú Project.

Readers will thrill at the idea of scientists climbing up trees as high as a 14-story building. By scanning the QR codes scattered among the pages children can see and hear the monkeys as well as follow a scientist as she observes the monkeys. The book ends with a suggested activity for children to start them off as potential future scientists.

Another cleareyed and engaging book by a master of the genre. (author’s note, glossary, further reading) (Non­ fiction. 8-12)

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SPEND IT!

McLeod, Cinders Illus. by the author Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-399-54446-0 Series: Moneybunny In Bunnyland, money matters get an early start.

McLeod’s Moneybunny series aims to teach young readers “a few simple facts about money.” In this volume, the focus is on making choices about what to buy. Sonny, the young bunny protagonist, wants to buy everything, but he only gets 3 carrots a week as an allowance. (In keeping with the conventions of currency, McLeod uses numerals instead of spelling numbers out.)

Sonny’s mom, who dispenses wisdom while raking up a Technicolor pile of leaves, tells Sonny he is going to have to make choices because different things cost different amounts of carrots. That toy rocket costs 2 carrots, and the pogo stick costs 3 carrots, while the bouncy castle costs 100 (represented in a double-page spread of 100 carrots, arrayed in five rows of 20). (“That’s RIDICULOUS!” cries Sonny.) His mom suggests he give it some thought, to which Sonny blurts the universal credo: “I don’t want to THINK! I want to SPEND!” Good thing Sonny |

KARL’S NEW BEAK 3-D Printing Builds a Bird a Better Life

hasn’t got a carrot credit card. So Sonny gets to thinking how to spend his carrots, and a supercritical lesson is learned: consider how and what you spend your money on. (Saving was tackled in Earn It, 2017.) The lesson goes down smoothly because it presents options for ways to satisfy the urge to spend—it also helps that Sonny is cute as a you-know-what.

Financial planning never looked so good. (Picture book.

4-8)

Nargi, Lela Illus. by Popham, Harriet Capstone Editions (32 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-68446-026-7

Mincks, Margaret Viking (288 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-0-425-29093-4 Series: Poplar Kids, 2

Poplar Lane’s seventh-graders are back for a second outing following Payback on Poplar Lane (2018), exploring magic, manipulation, and politics.

Clover, a popular girl, and Mike, a budding magician, are both nominated to run for class president. New kid Amelia, a self-described “wonk,” and Peter, a fervent entrepreneur, are running Mike’s campaign, while Clover’s best friend, Rachel, is managing hers. Unfortunately, Mike’s managers craft an image of the candidate that’s mostly deceitful, turning him from a boy who’s happy to sit quietly with headphones on, comfortably blocking out the world, to a glad-handing, baby-kissing fraud. He’s only running so he can use the election to help him get into magic camp. Clover is using her campaign to try to restore her connection to Rachel, who’s become friends with Amelia, leaving her feeling excluded.

The story is presented in the nicely distinct alternating voices of Clover, who’s the second of five sisters and also coming to grips with her mother’s newest pregnancy, and Mike, who’s sure his father is disappointed in him for not being athletic. Mike is black, standing out among the mostly white central cast. In a refreshing variation on most middle school fiction, all of the kids have good points and bad, creating a full roster of believably rounded characters navigating sometimes–silly situations, rich with droll, timely humor.

The votes are in: This one is a winner. (Fiction. 9-12)

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Using a 3-D printer, zoo employees construct a prosthesis for an injured bird.

At the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., staff members are concerned with the feeding difficulties of Karl, an Abyssinian ground hornbill living in the cheetah exhibit.

Hoping to restore his ability to eat normally so they can breed him, they come up with a solution for his broken bottom beak.

They mend it using a pattern from a museum skeleton and 3-D printing technology. A number of recent titles for young readers describe the work of humans to make lives better for injured or abandoned animals. Unusually, here the special focus is on the process: the complicated and painstaking repair of Karl’s lower beak, including the construction of its replacement part.

Thoughtful design makes this very clear: Illustrations cleverly combine actual photographs with drawings and diagrams, printed in blue and white like blueprints. Readers see Karl in his enclosure, before-and-after close-ups, and the veterinarian, exhibits specialist, and exhibit curator (all white-presenting) who work together to restore the beak. There are also photos of the printing process as well as sanding and gluing the new bill. The straightforward text introduces the bird, explains how hornbills use their beaks in the wild, and follows the process step by step. Backmatter includes more facts about hornbills in the wild and about Karl in particular as well as a glossary with unusually helpful definitions.

For fans of animal-rescue accounts and 21st-century technology. (Informational picture book. 5-9)

PRESIDENT OF POPLAR LANE

THE REVENGE OF MAGIC

Riley, James Aladdin (320 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4814-8577-7 Series: Revenge of Magic, 1

After 12-year-old Fort’s father is abducted during an alien attack on Washington, D.C., he jumps at the chance to attend a school of magic that is preparing to go to war with the invaders.

Fort is anxious to start his new school, but he finds Oppenheimer School to be nothing like Hogwarts. Instead of a castle with turrets and magical creatures roaming the forest, Fort’s new school is on a military base complete with armed soldiers and high-tech security. Although the school teaches both Healing magic and Destruction magic, Fort is determined to master the latter in order to avenge his father. When he arrives, Fort |

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THE TRUE HISTORY OF LYNDIE B. HAWKINS

is given an ultimatum: learn three spells in three days or be sent home. While he quickly makes enemies with the aggressive Destruction students, he also makes important friends.

Jia Liang is a master of Healing magic. Rachel, a wielder of Destruction magic, helps Fort fight his battles. And Cyrus, newly transferred from London, uses his clairvoyance to keep everyone out of trouble. While this new take on a magical academy is imaginative, the narrative wanders, spending too much time on bickering, dead ends, and flashbacks. Fort’s indecision is his greatest stumbling block, making him a lackluster leader.

An open ending suggests more to come. The book adheres to the white default; Jia is a Chinese immigrant, and Rachel is African-American.

A potent mixture of magic and monsters that never materializes. (Fantasy. 8-12)

Shepherd, Gail Kathy Dawson/Penguin (304 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-525-42845-9 “There is such a thing as honorable lying,” declares 11-year-old Lyndie B. Hawkins, who has a keen eye for history, research, and the truth.

It’s 1985. Lyndie and her parents have moved into her grandparents’ home in Love’s Forge, Tennessee. Her dad is a Vietnam War veteran who drinks in his car and disappears for days. Her classmates taunt her about her “Hippie Commie Alabama Trash” mother, who stays locked in her room with headaches. What really sticks in her craw, though, is her grandma Lady, who is determined to mold her into a wellmannered Southern girl, demanding silence about their family secrets. But a newfound friendship with a boy named D.B. from the frightful Pure Visions juvenile detention center sparks in her the courage to find and speak the truth. The hills and valleys of the Smoky Mountains mirror this prideful Southern family, full of pain and loyalty and the importance of appearances. Teasing out the details of D.B.’s troubled life allows Lyndie to re-evaluate the varnished truth of both her own family and that of where she lives. Were her white ancestors really the first to settle Love’s Forge? More immediately, what happened to Daddy in Vietnam? Why does Lady keep secrets? Daddy says, “You’d best take care, what you lend your heart to.” Readers will lose their hearts to this sassy and aching heroine. Full of Southern toughness and mountain charm, her fierce and funny voice fills the pages with fine storytelling.

This hope-filled book is a beautiful picture of broken humanity, a storytelling wonder. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

PEEKITY BOO—WHAT YOU CAN DO!

Roemer, Heidi Bee Illus. by Wohnoutka, Mike Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-1-250-12232-2 This rhyming picture book follows a family through their toddler’s bedtime routine.

As caregivers know, the bedtime routine is the cornerstone of a toddler’s day’s end. It is time for bath and books and snuggles and, of course, a little fun with mom and dad. Silly nonsense phrases such as “Blibbity blub” and “Buggity boo!” will make small kids laugh and have them repeating the words. They also ensure that the rhyme proceeds in sprightly fashion; though not all the couplets include them, they ward against forced rhymes, as does the author’s decision to employ assonance on occasion: “There are ears to nuzzle. / Towel to snuggle.” Wohnoutka’s brightly colored illustrations, done in acrylic gouache and showing both mom and dad participating in different bedtime tasks, are sweet and recognizable for kids and will help them embrace their own bedtime activities. While none of this reinvents the wheel, that’s not really the point; the familiarity will strike chords in readers, who will thoroughly enjoy knowing the protagonist is going through the same loving routine that they are. The dad presents white and the mom has brown skin and wavy black hair, making this a mirror for a lot of interracial families.

A calm, quiet book that children will find delightful, enjoying the repetition and seeing themselves through the eyes of a book. (Picture book. 2-5)

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THE NORTH STAR

Shepherd, Kat Yellow Jacket (256 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4998-0809-4 Series: The Gemini Mysteries, 1 Four kids solve a theft of jewelry in this series opener.

When 12-year-old Sophia Boyd decides to auction off the North Star necklace, a family heirloom, to support a fundraiser for a sanctuary for endangered gibbons, the necklace is stolen at a party held to preview it. Twins Zach and Evie Mamuya, the biracial children of a deceased Tanzanian-immigrant cop dad and white crime-reporter mom, along with their South Asian friend Vishal Desai, wind up at the crime scene with the twins’ mother, ready to investigate. After finding a magnet used to open safes, the young self-appointed detectives, along with Sophia, decide to take matters into their own hands and question the guests who |

This immigrant narrative beautifully captures the emotions of loss, love, and belonging that the little girl experiences, embedding readers in Asha’s developmentally spot-on perspective. the yellow suitcase

NOT YOUR NEST!

attended the party. Following much trial and error (punctuated by the occasional lesson in American racism patiently delivered by the three kids of color to wide-eyed, white Sophia), their path of investigation leads them to the unlikely conclusion that the stolen necklace changed more than one pair of hands after it was taken. As a whodunit, the story underwhelms; readers are unlikely to be able to follow the clues and red herrings to the solution and so will be stumbling along with the characters.

Character development takes second place to plotting, furthering dissatisfaction.

A dry plot with little investment in character development makes for a weak detective story. (Mystery. 8-12)

Sterer, Gideon Illus. by Tsurumi, Andrea Dial (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-7352-2827-6

THE YELLOW SUITCASE

Sriram, Meera Illus. by Sethi, Meera Penny Candy (40 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-9996584-1-3

A young girl goes back to India to visit her grandmother’s house after her death.

Debut author Sriram shares a poignant story based on her daughter’s personal experience. Young Asha travels with her family from the United States to her grandma’s house in India, towing her favorite yellow suitcase. Everything looks familiar in India, except her grandma is not there. But the house is full of other people, both relatives and people she doesn’t recognize, and they’re all talking about Grandma. Asha reminisces how she always carried gifts for her grandma in her yellow suitcase and how her grandma always showered her with gifts to carry back to America. When she asks her father if she’ll ever see her grandma again, he cries. Asha doesn’t quite know how to deal with her grandmother’s death and responds with aloof moodiness. Two weeks go by, and just as she is about to leave India, she realizes her grandmother left behind a special surprise for her.

This immigrant narrative beautifully captures the emotions of loss, love, and belonging that the little girl experiences, embedding readers in Asha’s developmentally spot-on perspective.

The illustrations, done in a pastel palette and flat perspective, reveal authentic snapshots of India, though the characters feel stiff at times, which may limit their appeal.

A thoughtful story that artfully addresses the loss of a grandparent from an immigrant perspective. (Picture book.

5-8)

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A tiny yellow bird has just finished building a nest, but other animals in the savanna think it looks like a good place to rest, too.

The design has been planned. The twigs gathered. One last leaf and the nest will be complete. But as the yellow bird flies happily toward the tree, a larger bird is already there. “You can build another,” says the bully of a bird. “I guess I could...” says the tiny, crestfallen bird. So plans are made again. Twigs are gathered. One last leaf—and suddenly there’s a fennec in the nest! Each attempt to build a cozy home brings a more absurd animal to the tree. A warthog, a gorilla, an elephant, and more balance precariously as they settle in, each with their own sound reason as to why the dwelling suits them. Frustrated and exhausted, the yellow bird finally finds some powerful help to knock everyone out of the tree. But maybe there is a way to share after all. Tsurumi’s expressive animals (sometimes uppity, sometimes sheepish—all forming a dejected, collective slump when they realize how they’ve treated their friend) definitely rule the roost. Laid out in mostly double-page spreads and with wry text set entirely in speech balloons, the visual storytelling easily engages readers, perhaps most impressively as the little bird scowls with determination, perched on a wildebeest’s horns as it charges directly at readers.

Giggle-inducing buffoonery; but thankfully, bigger rivals don’t get the last laugh. (Picture book. 3- 7)

THE DOG WHO WANTED TO FLY

Stinson, Kathy Illus. by Scott, Brandon James Annick Press (36 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-77321-280-7

In this Canadian picture book, Zora, a small brown dog, is determined to fly.

When Zora stares at the squirrel that yaks at her from the fence and chases it, she isn’t fast enough to catch it.

Again. But she knows that if only she could fly, she would succeed. Even as Tully, a cat lounging on a tree branch, informs Zora quellingly that “dogs can’t fly,” Zora, nonetheless, tries.

She leaps—and falls; jumps on a teeter-totter vacated by two children—and falls. She splays on the ground, imitating the shadow of an airplane flying overhead, whispering, “Up! Up! Up!!” but she still doesn’t fly. Disheartened, Zora heads off to nap when she is interrupted by a cry for help and sees Tully, hanging perilously from the branch (illustratively shown in an impressive angled overhead view that visually emphasizes |

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With a bird on each spread and a key in the back, it serves as a Where’s Waldo–type introduction to birding guides, one readers can return to again and again. ruby ’s birds

WHEN I PRAY FOR YOU

the height and the danger). “Zora’s everything tingled!” She leaps high for Tully, catching her. Stinson’s story has endearing, unexpected details and is a heartwarming affirmation of the powers of aspiration and determination. Scott’s images show a sophisticated color sense that creates depth and atmosphere with their push/pull of warms and cools, and his portrayal of Zora gives her a remarkable degree of movement and expression. His varied viewer perspectives, too, are noteworthy.

A clever and endearing story, expertly illustrated, with an affirming message. (Picture book. 3-8)

Turner, Matthew Paul Illus. by Barnes, Kimberly WaterBrook (48 pp.) $11.99 | Feb. 19, 2019 978-0-52565058-4

Turner adds another title to his picture-book series that highlights the miracles in the mundane (When God Made Light, 2018, etc.).

In the vein of children’s-bookshelf stalwart Oh, the Places You’ll Go, Turner’s rhyming text includes both prayers and life advice for a growing child, beginning with infancy and moving on to adolescence. At times the rhyme and meter are strained, muddling meaning and making the tempo feel occasionally awkward when read aloud. Overall, though, the book executes its mission, presenting Christian theological truths within the rhythmic inspirational text. For this third series installment Turner’s text is paired with a new illustrator, whose bright illustrations of wide-eyed children have great shelf appeal. While David Catrow’s previous illustrations in the series featured effervescent black protagonists, the child in Barnes’ illustrations appears white, though she occupies an otherwise diverse world. While illustrated as a prayer from a mother for her daughter, the text itself is gender neutral.

Though it will never usurp Dr. Seuss, it will still find a home where Christian families of faith seek inspirational picture books. (Picture book/religion. 3-6)

RUBY’S BIRDS

Thompson, Mya Illus. by Dávila, Claudia Cornell Lab Publishing Group (40 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 27, 2019 978-1-943645-33-6 A young girl learns how to bird-watch from her neighbor, then teaches her family.

Ruby, a black girl with afro puffs and a missing front tooth, likes to spice things up when it’s “too quiet” at home. When her neighbor, Eva, hears Ruby making noise, she invites Ruby to the park—Central Park. When they get to the woods there, Eva is quiet, looking up, using binoculars, frozen—but smiling.

Ruby starts singing again, and a frustrated Eva sits her down to tell her about the golden-winged warbler she was looking at, a bird she’d only seen back home in Costa Rica. They try to find him again, staying quiet and paying attention. On Sunday, Ruby begs her family to go to Central Park during their regular family time. She leads them into the woods and shows them how to watch, quiet and still. Her efforts are rewarded when she sees a warbler. Dávila’s illustrations, done with the abundant green and brown of nature and splashes of colorful clothing against ample white space, depict caring relationships and communities. With a bird on each spread and a key in the back, it serves as a Where’s Waldo–type introduction to birding guides, one readers can return to again and again. A bird poster and an endnote addressed to children round out the package.

A good story, perfect for bird lovers and likely to entice the uninitiated. (Picture book. 4-8)

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A COLORFUL TAIL Finding Monet at Giverny

Waites, Joan Illus. by the author Schiffer (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 28, 2019 978-0-7643-5705-3

A fox wants to preserve seasonal colors throughout the year.

Each year, as spring progresses to summer and then autumn, a red fox appreciatively watches a garden shift from pale hues to “flaming orange, vibrant red, and golden yellows.” But in winter, when snow buries everything, he longs for the other three seasons. Can he preserve nature’s colors past their cycle?

He gathers petals, but a deer eats them; he collects pebbles (a confusing representation of summer—wouldn’t their color be stable year-round?), but the pond rises over them; he arranges autumn leaves, but gusts of wind blow them away. Only an accidental encounter with a human reveals a way to keep nature’s colors past their time: with paint, on a canvas. The painter is Claude Monet—identified in the story only through his name and the garden’s arching green bridge. Waites’ illustrations offer no bridge to Monet or impressionism, though a brief author’s note provides some introduction. Trees, petals, lawns, and the fox are smoothly filled-in shapes with neat edges. Grass blades are clear and straight. There’s no abstraction, no content made from dots or daubs. The tiny canvases |

BECAUSE

depicted do feature dots, but they do not convey impressionism. Many illustrations curl tidily inside a clean circle, itself sometimes perched inside a clean square, divorcing the feel even more from impressionism. Illustrations regarding a fine artist needn’t mimic their work, but this bland, simplistic style highlighting smoothly curved edges forms no visual pointer to Monet or impressionism.

Skip. (Picture book. 3-6)

Willems, Mo Illus. by Ren, Amber Hyperion (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-368-01901-9

MAGIC RAMEN The Story of Momofuku Ando

Wang, Andrea Illus. by Urbanowicz, Kana Little Bee (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-499-80703-5

The true story of Momofuku Ando, who persevered to invent a speedy, nutritious, and tasty ramen to help feed the hungry in post–World War II Japan.

A year after the war ended, people were still starving for food. Realizing that the “world is peaceful only when everyone has enough to eat,” Ando decided to make food his life’s work. In a backyard shed, Ando attempted to realize his dream of a more nutritious ramen. He experimented by adding different ingredients to a basic recipe of flour, salt, and water: eggs, powdered milk, and even spinach! He invented a way to infuse the noodles with flavor, but the noodles were still too tough. Then, watching his wife make tempura gave him a brilliant idea—fry the noodles! Frying creates tiny holes in the noodles, causing them to soften after just a few minutes in hot water. Voilà: tender, chewy noodles in hot, tasty soup that was ready in two minutes! With an aesthetic that’s straight out of a Hayao Miyazaki animated film, Urbanowicz’s illustrations pair deliciously with Wang’s concise, conversational text. Clever use of lighting, white space, and comic-book compositions moderate pacing in all the right places. The illustrator earns brownie points for accurate cultural details: geta (wooden sandals), cascading cherry blossoms, kanji characters, etc.

Eaters of all ages will enjoy learning about the history of this popular food gone global. (biographical note) (Infor­ mational picture book. 4-10)

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Willems departs from his usual comic fare in this ode to the many people that inspire and contribute to the creation of art in young people.

Each spread in the first half of the book states a causal effect: “Because a man named Ludwig wrote beautiful music— / a man named Franz was inspired to create his own. // Because many years later, people wanted to hear Franz’s beautiful music— / they formed an orchestra.” Musicians who have practiced diligently are invited to participate, workers make sure the concert hall is ready, and ushers open the doors. This chain continues as each person contributes to the culmination of a present-day grand orchestral performance at which a little tawny-brown– skinned girl is present, “because” her uncle has caught a cold and given her his ticket. This little girl is changed by this experience, and in the second half of the book, she grows up to create her own music that then inspires another child, who listens outside. Debut illustrator Ren’s delicate cartoon art depicts both a realistic multicultural community and magical representations of music and inspiration. Both the protagonist and the child who hears her are depicted borne aloft by tendrils of colored music.

While many books celebrate the arts and creativity, this one stands out for recognizing the importance of community support; from the orchestra librarian to the music lovers who purchase tickets, everyone contributes to the culture of creativity. (Picture book. 4-8)

STARDUST

Willis, Jeanne Illus. by Smith, Briony May Nosy Crow/Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2019 978-1-5362-0265-6 A little girl caught in her big sister’s shadow comes to see her inner light.

The text’s unnamed, first-person narrator struggles as the younger sibling to a talented elder sister, whom other family members refer to as a “star.” She wants to be a star, too, but she always seems to come up short. Her big sister wins a costume contest, finds her mother’s lost wedding ring, and knits a scarf without holes. Finally, her grandfather notices the protagonist’s dejection, and he helps her see herself as a star, too. This help arrives, in part, through a science lesson reaching back to the Big Bang that tells her how she, like all living things across time, is literally made of stardust. Illustrations in these scenes fantastically depict the girl accompanied by her grandfather in outer space, under the sea, and so on. This loving interaction allows her to adopt her inner stardust as metaphor |

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BANANA PANTS!

for how special she is, a heartfelt connection that the protagonist accepts but that may underwhelm readers. The book’s end, however, reveals that the confidence this understanding inspires propels her to become an astronaut. Throughout, all main characters in the full-bleed illustrations appear white with pale skin, though background characters in a few scenes are depicted as multiracial and multiethnic.

Warm and light. (Picture book. 4- 7)

Wunsch, Emma Illus. by von Innerebner, Jessika Amulet/Abrams (144 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 5, 2019 978-1-4197-3180-8 Series: Miranda and Maude, 2 Miranda and Maude’s friendship is put to the test as their different interests cause some big disagreements.

Princess Miranda and not-a-princess Maude became unexpected best friends in series opener The Princess and the Absolutely Not a Princess (2018), and both are loving school and life. Unfortunately, school suddenly becomes much duller as their class is forced to take long exams. Fed up with nonstop testing, their teacher takes a stand and announces they will embark on a creative endeavor: a school play, which they call Banana Pants. As the kids bend their passions toward the play, Miranda and Maude become inspired to make positive changes of their own. Maude writes letters to protest the use of Styrofoam in the cafeteria, while Miranda works on the cause of love. When the girls can’t agree on whose is more important, conflict ensues. Once again, Wunsch writes a story with accessible themes and silliness that kids will enjoy. Balancing such serious topics as forgery and lying with the more lighthearted ones of stage fright and cooperation, she creates a strong storyline exploring conflict resolution. Von Innerebner again contributes amusing illustrations that add to the text, depicting Miranda with brown skin, straight, dark hair, and glasses and Maude with pale skin and tousled light hair. With short chapters, charming text, and pleasing drawings, this book is a delightful read.

A solid sequel with new topics, themes, and fun. (Fiction.

7-10)

THE DAY THE UNIVERSE EXPLODED MY HEAD Poems to Take You into Space and Back Again

Wolf, Allan Illus. by Raff, Anna Candlewick (56 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-7636-8025-1

Poems about stars, planets, moons, and other astronomical wonders, accompanied by stylish anthropomorphic illustrations.

Opening with a “Solar Sunnet” (“Next time you want to wish upon a star, / you need not even wait for night to fall”) and a spectacularly silly “Moon Buffet” (“Ophelia’s made of tacos / and Europa’s made of Spam”), this versified tour of the solar system and beyond offers both astronomical and metrical delights. Of the latter, Wolf ’s frequent use of multiple voices (cued by lines in different colors) plays to fine effect in zippy exclamations by three shooting stars from the Perseid shower, the measured strains of tidally locked Pluto and Charon as they whirl in a stately do-si-do, and an effervescent rap on astronomical distances: “They call us DJ Energy / and MC Square! / Physics is our business. / We’re a relative pair.”

Raff puts faces, generally with goofy expressions, on nearly all of the cartoonish heavenly bodies she depicts posing against starry backdrops, including both light- and dark-skinned human figures in some scenes. The author unpacks select facts and concepts on each poem in closing notes, and he also identifies his meter, poetic type, and any literary references.

His comment on the title poem’s climax is a cogent one: “If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will eventually.”

A giddy ride through our stellar neighborhood and beyond. (glossary, URLs) (Picture book/poetry. 7-13)

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THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD AND ME

Yuly, Toni Illus. by the author Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 19, 2019 978-0-7636-9263-6

Eye-catching, perspective-shifting illustrations pair beautifully with simple text to embrace a child’s world.

Spare, poetic text offers a steady rhythm that builds from a small flower to a fish, from a cloud to a child, as the story slowly widens its view to encompass the natural world. A young, blackhaired, light-skinned girl who presents Asian explores the land, sea, and sky around her, from the smallest bug to the biggest wave. Unafraid, she instead feels connected and reflects: “I am a small part of it all,” embodying curiosity and wonder. Sprawled at the bottom of a hillside, she says, “I’m a pebble that rolls down a mountain,” as a pebble plummets down a mountain peak in the background. Her unbridled joy at interacting with |

The book’s tone is uniformly upbeat, emphasizing the fun to be had outdoors with friends and indoors, snuggling with family and enjoying the cozy warmth of home. snow kisses

the natural world is infectious, and readers won’t be able to keep their own smiles hidden for long. Collage artwork features ink, charcoal pencil, torn tissue, and cut paper for bright, patterned textures to discover. Bold colors frame but do not overtake the gentle story, and the composition of each spread deserves close attention—Yuly carefully balances white space and color and zooms out from macro focus to wide angle to demonstrate scale and perspective.

A story that ends as it begins—colorful, peaceful, and just right for the youngest naturalists. (Picture book. 3-6)

board & baby books SNOW KISSES

The joys of winter, indoors and out, celebrated from a toddler’s perspective.

This appealing board book reminds toddlers that there’s plenty of cause for excitement in the coming of winter. The simple, rhymed text is reminiscent, in both meter and enthusiasm, of the writing of Sandra Boynton: “Snow is falling! Winter is here! / Let’s all give a snowflake cheer!” Snowflakes adorn each page of the book. Pages of text face scenes of the wintry activities described, both outdoors (sledding, skiing, and snowball fights) and indoors (curling up in a warm blanket and drinking hot cocoa or cuddling on the couch after a day of outdoor play).

Each scene features sweetly rendered animals at play or at rest, from snow-appropriate creatures such as penguins and polar bears to cats, ducks, tigers, and, perhaps most inexplicably of all, honeybees on skis. The animals are expressive and engaging; colors are muted pastels of light pink, purple, blue, or snowy white. The book’s tone is uniformly upbeat, emphasizing the fun to be had outdoors with friends and indoors, snuggling with family and enjoying the cozy warmth of home after a busy day of playing in the snow. The final scenes set the stage nicely for bedtime, with polar-bear goodnight nuzzles and a tired penguin tucked into bed, dreaming of snow kisses (“good night, sleepyhead”).

A winter winner. (Board book. 1-4)

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America’s Test Kitchen Illus. by Frost, Maddie Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (26 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 16, 2018 978-1-4926-7003-2 America’s Test Kitchen presents 26 facts about food and cookery for aspiring chefs.

Designed as a multileveled text intended to grow with its reader and laid out one letter per page, the book first presents a statement in a large typeface: “K is for Kumquats.” A short explanation that “Kumquats are tiny citrus fruits” follows in smaller type, and this is succeeded by a long, expository paragraph in even tinier print. Combined, it makes an overwhelmingly print-heavy page. Writing for young foodies is a tasty concept, but the book’s ingredients don’t quite meld. There are pages among the esoteric mix of food and cooking techniques detailing familiar items such as “oven” or “vanilla,” but too many cover topics far too sophisticated for the audience. Few toddlers will grasp that “Umami” enhances taste or that lox “is cured but not smoked.” Older foodies may appreciate the material but not the board-book format, and all readers may find the clinical tone, like an unbrined turkey, to be a little dry. Digitally collaged illustrations gamely make the subject as much fun as possible, with lively faces plastered on food and utensils and vibrant colors to make the tasty morsels pop. Dashes of wit spice things up, such as a peppermint leaf soaking in a hot mug of water, spa candles and fuzzy slippers at the ready. A simultaneously publishing companion, 123 the Farm and Me, shares both approach and flaws.

This well-intentioned but overambitious book has too many ingredients to create a delectable whole. (Board book.

1-4) (123 the Farm and Me: 978-1-4926-7004-9)

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Abbot, Judi Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (20 pp.) $7.99 | Nov. 13, 2018 978-1-5344-3075-4

A IS FOR ARTICHOKE A Foodie Alphabet from Artichoke to Zest

MR. BEAR’S ABC

Aracil, Virginie Illus. by the author Twirl/Chronicle (58 pp.) $19.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-2-74709-500-6 Explore a quirky collection of creatures and things in this ABC book with a decidedly retro feel.

With an aesthetic reminiscent of 1951’s The Little Golden ABC, French author/illustrator Aracil presents a throwback abecedary infused with modern hipness. A blocky, oversized uppercase letter dominates the verso with a trio of smaller letters beneath: lowercase block, as well as upper- and lowercase cursive, though does the ABC set really need familiarity with cursive? Three small Day-Glo bears inconsistently peek out from most large letters; their emotionless, mouthless faces border on

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The book finds its hooves and paws with its graphically gorgeous design and illustrations. abc animals

disconcerting. The unexpected continues on the recto: While there’s the familiar “ant” and “alligator” among the assortment of “A” objects, the distinctly unusual choice “ax” also appears.

Elsewhere, “Ulysses” (the Greek hero) and “Yeti” (munching a selection of Day-Glo popsicles, naturally) also make appearances. “P” epitomizes this sauciness, with its small boy (back to) and his golden stream. Adult readers who smirk at this tonguein-cheek humor are likely to love this book; if not, move on.

The illustration styles vary wildly, from smooth-edged funky vintage “cars” to a “fox” rendered in wild, brushy style. Animals both anthropomorphized (a “rhino” holding a “racket”) and untamed (a roaring “jaguar”) share a sense of swanky flamboyance, accented by those Day-Glo highlights. The dazzling orange binding and the extra-tall trim will surely lure little eyes.

Those who relish an eclectic vibe will fall for this odd offering. (Board book. 2-4)

ABC ANIMALS Alpaca, Bonobo, and Chinchilla - 26 Cool New Animals to Discover

Arrhenius, Ingela Peterson Walter Foster Jr. (36 pp.) $12.95 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-1-63322-628-9 Series: Little Concepts

Tired of learning about the same-old, same-old “cat” and “rabbit”? Here’s an opportunity to meet 26 new animal friends.

Opening on a verso with the usual critters and a recto crammed with lesser-known species, an awkwardly rhyming introduction challenges readers to learn more about unusual animals. Abruptly, the book then transitions into a traditional ABC format with “A is for Alpaca,” presenting one letter and animal per page, a change that makes it read like an awkwardly stitched-together rhyming book and alphabet book. Its goal of broadening awareness of animal diversity is laudable, but with the creatures sporting only names and no other supporting information, readers might remain lost about what exactly is a “fossa” or a “quokka.” Thankfully, the book finds its hooves and paws with its graphically gorgeous design and illustrations.

Showy, stylized animals achieve a delicate balance between cute yet realistic, and they look especially spiffy against sleekly patterned or richly saturated pastel backgrounds. Each doublepage spread offers its own harmonious color combination, so the bright pink highlights and green-striped background of the “okapi” inversely mirror the opposite page’s “pademelon” and its vivid pink background and bushes in shades of green.

Though this feels rather like a bound set of attractive animal-themed flashcards, it might be just right for keen young zoologists. (Board book. 1-4)

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I CAN BE ANYTHING!

Auerbach, Annie Illus. by eOne Scholastic (16 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-338-22883-0 Series: Peppa Pig

Peppa Pig, of British TV fame, loves to dress up and imagines herself in a variety of professions on these subtly Peppa-shaped pages.

In dance class, she pretends to be a ballerina, and at “Mummy Pig’s volunteer firehouse, Peppa imagines she is a firefighter, too.” In five further double-page tableaux, she roleplays—and bucks some gender stereotypes—at being a chef, a nurse, a construction worker, and an astronaut. Peppa Pig fans will recognize their favorite pink heroine, complete with her signature Picasso-esque eye placement and red dress, and several supporting critters (including Pedro Pony) of a variety of species fill out the simply drawn, bland, full-bleed digital scenes.

The text consists of two to three sentences of simple narration and the name of each career with a few important action words set in bold, colored type. The final spread reviews all the jobs Peppa explored, emphasizing that she “loves to imagine that she can be anything when she grows up.”

Peppa Pig partisans will be pleased, but the book does little that hasn’t been done elsewhere already. (Board book.

2-4)

BABY FEMINISTS

Babbott-Klein, Libby Illus. by Walker, Jessica Viking (24 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-0-451-48010-1

Yes, Billie Jean King, Dr. Mae Jemison, and Malala Yousafzai were all babies at one time.

On each recto, there is a flap with the picture of a grownup feminist icon. When the flap is opened, readers see a baby picture of this individual in a scene that includes an item that was visible through a die-cut hole. Grown-up Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar turns into baby Ruth’s bib, and both adult Frida Kahlo and baby Frida wear flowers in their hair. The patterned text is a series of simple reverse-order statements, each of which starts on the verso and finishes beneath the flap with a repeated refrain: “Before she imagined peace, Yoko Ono was... / a baby.”

Walker adeptly creates recognizable images of well-known figures, but the expansive, cream-colored backgrounds dwarf and isolate many of the babes under the flaps. While empowering young girls is a worthy goal, the historical significance of these figures is likely to be lost on youngsters who are still learning the meanings of yesterday and today. The disembodied raised fists of adult Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in their famous Esquire magazine photo and the baby-sized counterpart fists are particularly confusing. The four concluding |

double-page spreads consist of a review of the figures who have come before, some encouragement to follow in their footsteps, and a one- to two-sentence biography of each.

Simultaneously iconic, well-meaning, and developmentally inappropriate. (Board book. 1-3)

a limb, or at least of a hiding place. That said, the artwork and design are irresistible, and a well-supervised child should get many rewarding readings out of a copy of this book. The action unfolds, pun intended, in a series of two-page vignettes.

Each set piece starts with the titular question. The answers, revealed by unfolding each sequence’s corresponding flaps, include “Here I am,” as Teddy’s arms are folded down to reveal his eyes in classic peekaboo fashion; “Under the umbrella with Daddy”; “Under the covers with Mommy”; “In the box, with all the toys”; and the climactic “Look, I’m right here with you,” as the accompanying flap reveals Teddy holding a mirror to reflect his young readers. There are a few surprises along the way—one stack of blocks conceals not Teddy but a robot friend; Teddy is hiding behind the other stack. Better still, one two-page spread has not one but three flaps to unfold, but Teddy isn’t behind any of them. The call-and-response format encourages vocabulary-building and verbal skills, but late talkers will be delighted as well.

Great fun; potentially brief life span. (Board book. 1-3)

BUGS AND OTHER LITTLE CREATURES

Babin, Stéphanie Illus. by Convert, Helene Twirl/Chronicle (16 pp.) $14.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-2-40800-433-0 Series: Touch and Explore

WHERE ARE YOU, TEDDY?

Babin, Stéphanie Illus. by Roode, Daniel Twirl/Chronicle (18 pp.) $11.99 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-2-40800-434-7

WHO EATS WHAT?

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Feel a bee’s fuzzy body or marvel at holographic butterfly wings in this tactile board book.

Oversized bugs are the center of attention, with body parts and species labelled and a descriptive sentence about the particular characteristics of each one. The book alternates between spreads introducing one insect per page and in-depth double-page spreads. These double spreads are composed of smaller illustrated squares with factoids about the featured insect’s habitat or life cycle on the verso with magnified insect on the recto. Though the various tidbits are informative and acquaint older children with entomology-related vocabulary, early learners won’t sit through the cumbersome and wordy sentences. Soft-colored digital illustrations strike a nice balance between portraying the creepy-crawlies representationally yet nonthreateningly, although the wasp might remain too realistic for the comfort of many. Tactile elements enrich understanding of bug anatomy, from debossed segments on a grasshopper to a ladybug’s puffy wings, while sparkly papers and prismatic highlights capture an insect’s natural ostentatiousness, allowing a sentence like “the wings on my back are bright and shiny” to be brought to life with blue-green iridescence. Like insects, this book seems doomed by its fragile binding to a short life span, and a sticky (and out of place) earthworm will soon become as dirty as the real thing.

Though it isn’t built to last, scientifically minded preschoolers will be abuzz over this multisensory board book.

(Informational board book. 2-5)

Babin, Stéphanie Illus. by Kiko Twirl/Chronicle (14 pp.) $12.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-2-40800-436-1

Little ones learn about the diets of various critters.

Each of the six double-page spreads is set in a different environment, beginning with “In the Home” and ending with “In the Jungle.” Rectangular windows with featured animals (a ladybug, frog, and robin on the “In the Garden” page, for example) appear on the recto with square, easy-to-move sliding panels that reveal their foods of choice (aphids, earthworm, and dragonfly, respectively) with a swipe to the left. On the verso, these same animals, drawn in toddler-friendly, cartoon fashion, appear in their habitat while simple lines of first-person text float nearby relating how each beast hunts or forages. Some of the information is oversimplified (the bear accesses honey from a conveniently pre-sawn stump with nary a bee in sight) and not entirely accurate (it can be unhealthy for birds to eat bread).

While the panels are fun to slide, little naturalists may want to uncover their information elsewhere. (Board book.

2-4)

This book’s peekaboo-inspired design is charming—and delicate.

This lovely board book gets big points for inventive design and one demerit for its use of flimsy stock for the fold-a-flap elements. Grabby youngsters could quickly deprive Teddy of |

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INTO THE FOREST

Baker, Laura Jean Illus. by Taylor, Nadia abramsappleseed (10 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 30, 2018 978-1-4197-3354-3 A sweet introduction to some of the animals that inhabit a North Amer-

ican forest.

As a squirrel searches for its mama it encounters a few other animal families along the way. Some are named, such as foxes, bears, deer, and rabbits, and some are not, such as frogs, birds, and butterflies. Squirrel’s search is described in rhyming text—“Hopping and stopping, / Squirrel sees deer! / But not her Mama— / she isn’t here.” There are plenty of rich vocabularybuilding verbs, such as “scurries,” “darts,” “scampers,” “peer,” and “peek.” But the real joy in this board book is in the design and illustrations. Young readers will love the layered and shaped die-cut pages that reveal a different group of animals on each spread. The illustrations are bold and bright, employing a palette of mostly green, brown, orange, and blue. Exploring little hands will delight in passing their fingers over the raised designs found on every page as well as the smoothness of Squirrel’s spot gloss. And Squirrel’s quest? “Finally, who does Squirrel see? / It’s Mama and her family! / Now Squirrel is right where she should be— / napping in her favorite tree.”

A book toddlers will enjoy reading with an adult but also on their own. (Board book. 1-4)

I DOUBLE DARE YOU!

Battault, Paule Illus. by Ameling, Charlotte Twirl/Chronicle (20 pp.) $14.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-2-40800-432-3

A lighthearted look at things that go bump in the night.

Eventually, every child has a bad dream. This book aims to empower toddlers by putting their nightmares into perspective and their monsters in the closet. Fun, inventive artwork and a battery of well-deployed tactile elements admirably reduce nightmare bugaboos to manageable, nonthreatening proportions. This “hair-raising touch-and-feel book” boasts a wide assortment of fuzzy, furry hides, googly eyes, stringy strands of hair, debossed ghosts, bumpy werewolf noses, scratchy dragon scales, and sticky giant-squid suction cups to keep small hands busy as tykes read along with caregivers. The brightly colored monsters meld monstrous size and teeth with shapes and expressions just goofy enough to convey charm and approachability rather than menace. The combination works. The scarier qualities of these monsters acknowledge children’s fears rather than dismissing them, but the humorous and gentle touches allow children to reassess the level of danger their nightmare creatures actually pose. Children are “double dared” to interact 102

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with each monster, scratching the ogre’s hairy feet, pulling the witch’s stringy hair, tickling the ghost, and so on. Young readers can then banish each menace with the admonishment, “Go away, Nightmare Monster! INTO THE CLOSET!” What level of protection that offers, who knows, but every kid loves an invitation to yell.

Great fun, but perhaps best saved till after the first nightmare! (Board book. 18 mos.-5)

BABY’S FIRST CHRISTMAS

Beets, Sally DK Publishing (14 pp.) $6.99 | Sep. 18, 2018 978-1-4654-6867-3

New babies don’t know much about Christmas. This simple board book aims to correct that situation.

The cover art of a smiling white snowman against a bright red background sporting a green-and-red stocking hat, scarf, and gloves invites readers in. Simple stock images, often of toys, one per page, highlight additional objects often associated with secular aspects of the holiday. Each item is shown in its most generic form, embossed and glossy against high-contrast backgrounds. Thankfully, not all the pictures are green and red. The first pages—of a snowflake and ornament—have blue and yellow backgrounds. The next two pictures, of a polar bear and penguin, are odd choices since they really have nothing to do with the holiday. A Christmas tree, angel, present, stocking, reindeer, and “santa” (the last printed in lowercase as if a generic) are more closely associated with the celebration. The angel is a knitted brown doll with a white handkerchief dress.

The reindeer is a stuffed animal. Each object is clearly labeled, and an exclamation or question (“Look at her sparkly halo!”) in a smaller font extends the conversation. The final spread reprises all the images except the snowman.

An unremarkable but effective way to inculcate familiarity with standard Christmas iconography. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

BIBLE ANIMALS

Beets, Sally DK Publishing (14 pp.) $5.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-1-4654-8015-6 Series: Baby Touch and Feel An introduction to a menagerie of animals found in the Bible, with tactile swatches embedded in the pages, for the littlest readers.

Most of the images are clear photos set, in signature DK fashion, against a white or solid color background. Each animal—an ox, a camel and calf, a lion, a sheep, and more—is captioned with a black sans-serif lowercase label, and a small textural feature, often less than a square inch, is set into the |

The real point of this book is the music, which comes through clearly regardless of how the book is handled. i love the nutcracker

I LOVE THE NUTCRACKER

page. The whale has a bit of blue-gray vinyl on its tail, and the donkey has a blue fabric blanket. A few creatures, such as the lamb and the dove, appear with embossed textural elements (shiny hay, feathers) instead of embedded fabrics. For no apparent reason, the shiny foil image of the fish is not a photo but rather the only graphic representation in the book.

Biblically literate grown-ups will recognize that these animals appear in the Bible, but there is no quote or verse notation to locate them.

Winning photos but unsatisfyingly small touch-andfeel elements. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

Billet, Marion Cartwheel/Scholastic (16 pp.) $9.99 | Sep. 25, 2018 978-1-338-26720-4 Series: My First Sound

TESS THE TRACTOR

Bently, Peter Illus. by Chebret, Sebastien QEB Publishing (24 pp.) $8.95 | Nov. 6, 2018 978-1-78603-310-9 Series: Whizzy Wheels Academy Another series of board books about trucks hopes to find an audience in a crowded marketplace.

The premise is simple—chunky, rather generic-looking vehicles attend Whizzy Wheels Academy to learn driving skills from their instructor, Rusty, a yellow pickup truck. Like the other vehicles in the class, red tractor Tess sports a smile between her headlights. Rusty has a mustache (maybe to make him look older?). All the trucks have large eyeballs in their windshields—Tess’ are lashed—but no drivers in sight. Tess thinks she already knows everything a tractor needs to know. She wants to go “faster.” She gets stuck in the mud and must be rescued by Rusty and Lenny the loader. This turn of events comes across as more than a bit sexist since Tess is the only female in the truck fleet (or at least the only one with eyelashes). In contrast, Fergus the Fire Engine, publishing simultaneously, gets a gold star from Rusty for rescuing a man from a burning building and putting out the fire, all without help from a firefighter.

With two to eight lines of text per page, complicated storylines, and blatant character-education messages, these stories are not ideally suited for very young children and should be regarded as an additional purchase at best for older children desperate for new books about trucks.

These driverless vehicles aren’t quite road ready. (Board book. 2-4) (Fergus the Fire Engine: 978-1-78603-312-3)

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Six of the most recognizable songs from Tchaikovsky’s ballet receive brief board-book treatment.

The prominently boldfaced title of each dance is followed by a brief suggestion of what to listen for or find in the illustration. Toddlers will easily locate and press the button that plays the 13 to 16 seconds of the opening bars of each song. There is no real attempt to place the whimsical tunes in context or to follow a storyline; instead, each spread is illustrated with dancing cartoon animals dressed in brightly colored, vaguely ethnic costumes. For example, for the “Russian Dance,” three gray foxes wear Cossack-type hats and embroidered jackets. Two pandas wearing Mandarin suit jackets dance around a teapot to illustrate the “Chinese Dance.” Most readers, whether toddlers or adults, will wonder what’s going on in the “Dance of the Mirlitons”; the animals “performing” it are wearing generic Western play clothes. No matter; the real point of this book is the music, which comes through clearly regardless of how the book is handled. A power supply installed in the last, extra-thick page has an “on/off ” switch hidden under a flap. Instructions in tiny print explain how to replace the three button cell batteries.

In the age of YouTube and downloadable music, a holiday board book with recordings is probably not an essential purchase, but this is a well-executed alternative for caregivers wanting to incorporate music with reading time.

(Board book. 1-3)

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Blay, Amy Illus. by the author Trans. by Maurin, Susan Allen Adapt. by Bradley, MaryChris Auzou Publishing (10 pp.) $10.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-2-7338-5625-3 Series: My First Fairy Tales

This board-book retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” features colorful, retro-style illustrations and a few movable flaps.

This version of the red-caped protagonist sports a distinctive cone-shaped hood as she enacts the familiar motions of the story. The sturdy interactions include a swinging basket, a blanket that covers the wolf on Grandma’s bed, a spinner that depicts the wolf ’s dreams; they give younger kids something to manipulate but do not add much to the story. There are regrettable inaccuracies and elisions in Bradley’s adaptation of Maurin’s translation of the original French text. The neck of a bottle protrudes from the basket, which readers are told contains “cake and butter” for Grandma, and the wolf wears a pair of frilly pajamas, which the text calls “one of [Grandma’s] nightgowns.”

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Whether quietly reading, running in a tiger suit, singing with mom in the car, ears flapping in the breeze, or enjoying the safety of mom’s embrace, Pookie’s appeal continues unabated. i love you, little pookie

This quick story ends with the hunter shown wielding a pair of scissors on the wolf ’s bulging belly as the text recounts that he “rescued Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother” (who emerge unscathed with the pull of a tab). One of the main disappointments of this shortened (but still text-heavy) version is that it skips the “Grandma, what big eyes you have!” routine.

The publisher recommends an age range of “0-36 months,” which is consistent with the format but not with the audience’s developmental readiness. Companion title Pinocchio, with illustrations by Tiago Americo, is similarly awkward and unsuitable.

Skip. (Novelty board book. 3-5) (Pinocchio: 978-2-7338-5626-0)

HELLO BIRDS, WHAT DO YOU SAY?

Botman, Loes Illus. by the author Floris (12 pp.) $9.95 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-1-78250-488-7 Series: Hello Animals

A sequence of birds answer the titular question with their signature sounds, accompanied by impressionistic paintings.

This book is a Dutch import via Scotland, and its origins show in the lineup, as five of the 12 birds represented do not typically occur in North America (and at least two others, the starling and the sparrow, are invasive imports). Still, although most North American children may not recognize the bullfinch or the Eurasian coot, they will get a kick out of chiming in as their caregivers read “Pipe pipe” or “Kowp kowp,” respectively.

Botman presents each bird on a single page, the features closest to viewers (usually feather details) quite distinct, while the edges blur into dappled, soft-focus backgrounds. There is a peculiar inconsistency to the presentation: While the blue tit and great tit are represented opposite each other as two distinct species, for instance, a mute swan, a mallard drake, and a herring gull are described only as “swan,” “duck,” and “gull.” Still, there’s no denying the illustrations are very attractive, and the predictable pattern and onomatopoeia (“Chatter chatter says the magpie. / Chook chook says the blackbird”) vigorously support pre-literacy skills.

Though many of these birds aren’t likely to be found in most North American backyards, it’s nevertheless a friendly introduction to birds and bird calls for children on this side of the pond. (Board book. 1-3)

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Boylan, Frank Illus. by Manning, Mary Flowerpot Press (20 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 16, 2018 978-1-4867-1545-9 While not poetically perfect, this is an undeniably sweet salute to the enduring nature of parentchild bonds.

Warm and lovely watercolor illustrations of an adult bear and cub, both genderless, enjoying special moments of togetherness make this sentimental celebration of family work. Snuggling, picnicking, singing, and dancing together are beautifully rendered and expressed. Boylan also specifically references the strength of the family relationship as a support for the alltoo-familiar phenomenon of separation anxiety in a very calm and reassuring way. “Because me and you”—grammar aside— “are true friends through-and-through, / you know all that I have we can share. / Like the thoughts that I think and I keep in my bank / for the times I know you won’t be there.” This theme is reiterated at the end: “So the times you’re alone or times I’m not at home / and you feel your heart starting to fuss, / borrow these thoughts and make them your own / and then think all these things about us.” The final image is the cub sleeping peacefully, dreaming of snuggles, and secure that they are loved. The tone is forgivably syrupy and effusive at times, but it often strikes just the right note: “I love when we have quiet time all alone, / when there’s no one around for a while. / And when I look at you and then you look at me / and we just take a moment and smile.”

Lovely to look at and sweet in sentiment if a little shaky in poetic expression. (Board book. 1-5)

I LOVE YOU, LITTLE POOKIE

Boynton, Sandra Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (18 pp.) $5.99 | Dec. 4, 2018 978-1-5344-3723-4 Series: Little Pookie A sweet celebration of the bond between a mother and her Pookie.

The eighth installment in this always charming series eschews the episodic drama and silliness of earlier outing such as Spooky Pookie (2015) in favor of a mom’s-eye–view celebration of her child and the time they spend together. There is, of course, nothing wrong with drama and silliness. But while the lack of conflict and plot in favor of unapologetic sentiment makes this book a quick read, that doesn’t make it any less endearing. The rhymed verse captures a mother’s wonder as she observes the many facets of her child’s personality: “Ah, Pookie.

My little one. My funny one. My child. // Sometimes you are quiet. Sometimes you are wild.” On the simple joys of shared moments, she notes, “I love to go walking with you by my side. |

/ I love when we sing when we go for a ride. // And I love just to watch as you think and you play. / The way that you are is a wonderful way.” Paired with author/illustrator Boynton’s irresistible renderings of a porcine mommy and her playful, snuggly little piglet, the result is impossible to fault. Whether quietly reading, running in a tiger suit, singing with mom in the car, ears flapping in the breeze, or enjoying the safety of mom’s embrace, Pookie’s appeal continues unabated.

An unabashed love letter from mother. (Board book. 1-4)

MERRY CHRISTMAS, LITTLE POOKIE

Boynton, Sandra Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (18 pp.) $5.99 | Sep. 18, 2018 978-1-5344-3724-1

Bucknell, Kate Illus. by Seal, Julia Flowerpot Press (14 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 12, 2018 978-1-4867-1519-0 Series: Little Monsters

A little girl becomes “the silly monster” after she returns oversugared and overexcited from a birthday party.

In this board book, Tilly returns from a birthday party, bag of candy in hand, and becomes the titular monster—illustrated with corresponding illustrations of a red monster with blue spots—jumping on the couch and bugging her brother. Her father’s intervention turns the monster back into Tilly with some quiet time. Adult readers will be familiar with this “silly monster” that often overtakes their child, and children may be familiar with the feelings of post-party mania. What’s lacking in Bucknell’s text, however, is a mechanism to help young readers understand and own these feelings. The book ends with Tilly’s unrealistic promise to her father that the silly monster won’t ever return again rather than a reinforcement of the calming practices she’ll use the next time she turns into the monster, because readers certainly know she will. Seal’s cutesy illustrations appear on stark white backgrounds, and while they do include some nice details, they do little to invite readers to linger on pages. Tilly has pale skin and dirty-blonde hair, while her father has light-brown skin and brown hair. Simultaneously publishing titles feature the lazy, sleepy, and hungry monsters and follow the same concept and structure: A child overcome by a “monster” is guided back by a parent.

Uninspired illustrations and an unrealistic conclusion make this one to pass on. (Board book. 2-4) (The Hungry Monster: 978-1-4867-1520-6; The Lazy Monster: 978-1-4867-1521-3; The Sleepy Monster: 978-1-4867-1522-0)

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Seven years after Little Pookie (2011) first appeared, this popular piglet is finally celebrating Christmas.

“Oh Pookie! Come look! It’s beginning to snow,” says a maternal-looking pig. But where did Pookie go? Past the Christmas tree, to put on a snowsuit of course. Pookie’s ever cheerful mama is willing to go out too. After all, “It’s a magical time to be walking with you.” When she observes, “Our noses are frozen. It’s time to go in,” Pookie protests in typical toddler style: “But I’m not c-c-c-cold!” The next three pages highlight indoor holiday preparations—making paper garlands, baking and decorating cookies. The rhyming text mirrors the spare illustrations. A spidery type that emulates handwriting makes it clear when Pookie is speaking. Then “the doorbell is ringing. / Our family and friends have arrived for the singing.”

The second-to-last spread shows Pookie, mama, and six other pigs—and Boynton’s requisite chicken—singing (“Con brio”), “MER-RY CHRIST-MAS! MER-RY CHRIST-MAS! AND A HAP-PY NEW YEAR!” Conveniently, this text is placed beneath the musical notation. Finally Pookie hangs a stocking and goes off to bed without any fuss, anticipating presents on Christmas morning.

The small size, a predictable winter adventure, and Boynton’s very toddlerlike character make this a fine stocking stuffer or an ideal Christmas Eve read to share with other little piggies. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

THE SILLY MONSTER

ONE EAGLE SOARING

Budd, Robert Illus. by Vickers, Roy Henry Harbour Publishing (20 pp.) $9.95 | Aug. 4, 2018 978-1-55017-828-9 Series: First West Coast Books Following Hello Humpback! (2017), Budd and First Nations artist Vickers (Tsimshian, Haida, and Heiltsuk) are back, this time counting up from one to 10.

Vickers offers vivid illustrations of West Coast animals in their natural habitats along with traditional Pacific Northwest Indigenous motifs. Each number is presented on one doublepage spread, except for seven swans and eight robins, presented together. Each line of the rhyming text begins with the written number and animal shown on that page, printed in raised glossy black uppercase letters; the rest of the sentence is in cursive lowercase letters. Corresponding numerals are printed in the

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corners. “FIVE SEA LIONS like it sunny // SIX BEARS hunt for honey.” Many of the animals are also presented in raised glossy illustrations with vivid colors. The Indigenous motifs are often subtly incorporated, as with two glossy all-black herons embossed against matte black backgrounds. Every turn of the page brings a new, dramatic landscape that showcases these animals. Although not all the animals in the book are specifically iconic to the Pacific Northwest, the tactile raised elements and the Indigenous motifs add a unique and important component to the enjoyment of this book.

This book showcases the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and will delight and engage resident and nonlocal toddlers alike. (Board book. 1-3)

HI-FIVE ANIMALS!

Burach, Ross Illus. by the author Scholastic (20 pp.) $6.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-338-24567-7

The user instructions on the cover of this board book are simple: “Read, Hi-Five, Repeat.”

Black-lined cartoon images of 12 different animals holding out various appendages for readers to slap are accompanied by rhyming invitations to play this greeting game. Burach assumes, probably correctly, that toddlers already know how to give a high-five, but any who don’t will soon. His rhymes work: “STOMP YOUR FEET! / Hi-five a trunk! // Hold your nose. Hifive a skunk!” But they introduce vocabulary that many toddlers may not yet possess, as in an elephant’s “trunk,” so caregivers will need to be ready to help interpret. Sometimes meaning becomes lost in the cleverness, as with “Belly slide, flipper flap! / Round the back, polar clap!” This rhyme is paired with a stylized penguin and an extremely abstract polar bear that’s positioned back to, holding its paw behind its back. Each animal has googly eyes, and usually one wing, paw, or fin is extra-large to make a target. The exaggerated appendages that facilitate the game also make the animals look out of proportion and even less like the real thing. The book’s sturdy construction and extra-thick pages will survive the repeated rough handling it invites.

Burach earns a fist bump if not an actual high-five.

(Board book. 2-4)

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ALL IS MERRY AND BRIGHT

Burton, Jeffrey Illus. by Clark, Don Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (26 pp.) $24.99 | Nov. 20, 2018 978-1-5344-2912-3 Series: Shine Bright Book This oversized board book may be too heavy for little children to lift, but the foil-clad pages will draw their eyes.

It’s large (10 inches high and 9 inches wide but also 2 inches thick)—with pages twice as thick as in most board books. Foil pages with embossed text and subtle tactile decorations are reminiscent of expensive holiday giftwrap. There is no story here (and no punctuation), but there is action. Most panels depict a varied cast of children engaged in winter and holiday activities. The words call to mind “Silent Night,” but this is not a rewrite of that classic carol. Rather, the poetic text and modern design evoke the spirit of the holiday season. Three to six well-chosen words in uppercase text centered on either recto or verso are well-matched to the stylized illustrations. For example, on the third spread, the words “WHEN LIGHTS SHINE” are surrounded by holiday ornaments in silver, copper green, blue, and red against a deep green background. Similarly, on the eighth spread, a family greeting a troupe of carolers (both groups multiracial) shares a picture window with the words “SINGING RINGING VOICES RISE.” More than 35 shiny musical notes float above the scene.

Display this shimmering keepsake under the tree every Christmas to remember the spirit of the season. (Board book.

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BOO AT THE ZOO A Lift-the-Flap Book

Burton, Jeffrey Illus. by Trithart, Emma Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (14 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 24, 2018 978-1-5344-2033-5

Zoo animals dress up for Halloween trick-or-treat in this lift-the-flap board book.

Rhyming text and interactive features should guarantee a hit with toddlers. Unfortunately, the rhythm is off. Poor scansion makes even acceptable rhymes like “toe” and “glow” or “tune” and “moon” awkward. “Guess Boo?” inserted after each verse is confusing for young children just learning to play “Guess who?” games. The large flaps in each double-page spread are almost the same size as the page they hide; that they can be lifted is only implied by the decorative die-cut edges, and their thinness makes them quite difficult for small fingers to grasp. Similarly, the notion of costumed animals is a promising premise, but the wordplay introduced by Burton assumes too much background knowledge for the board-book audience. For example giraffes are dressed as “Giraffenstein,” penguins as “Penguincesses,” and |

The text is hand-lettered into each illustration; the volume of each “rumble” and “vroom” is conveyed calligraphically, by the relative sizes of the letters. vroom vroom garbage truck

MY FIRST I SEE YOU A Mirror Book

monkeys as “Apirate.” These made-up words are difficult to pronounce and assume young children will recognize Frankenstein, princess, and pirate costumes when they turn the flaps. The fact that singular nouns are used to describe some of these groups of costumed animals is also confusing. The “Under-wearwolves” are particularly obscure. (And what toddler knows underwear as “tighty-whities”?)

Too much trick and not enough treat. (Board book. 2-4)

LOOKING GOOD!

Busby, Ailie Child’s Play (12 pp.) $6.99 | Aug. 20, 2018 978-1-78628-194-4 Series: Just Like Me!

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Carle’s iconic illustrations are recycled for a new generation of toddlers.

As she did in My First Peek-a-Boo Animals (2017) and My First Busy Book (2015), designer Hannah Frece has chosen images from the Eric Carle backlist to illustrate a simple board book.

This time mirrors have been added to images on the right-hand side of each spread. If the book is held just right, the child’s face is reflected within the outline of a cloud, a sun, a tree, a moon, and a star. (Sticky fingers quickly scratch and smudge the mirrors.) A heart-shaped cutout on the cover reveals the first mirror and complements the butterflies on the first-page verso.

Rhyming stanzas starting with “I see you in...” are completed by a description of an appropriate action. So a butterfly “flutters so high,” clouds “float across the sky,” a lion “roars,” the sun “shines,” a monkey “swings,” and so on. Some actions, seemingly forced by the need to rhyme, may puzzle young children. Do puppies really play peekaboo? The final double-page spread invites children to repeat each action. After one reading most toddlers will already be fluttering, roaring, and waving along, but the reprise is a reminder that reading with toddlers should be an interactive experience.

Carle’s illustrations are lovely as always, but this repackaging seems unnecessary—more marketing ploy than essential purchase. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

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An affirming, upbeat board book compares animal features to those of a diverse group of kiddos.

A simple factual statement about an animal is presented on the verso; a simplified image of that animal printed on a shaped gatefold on the facing page opens to show a smiling child exclaiming, “So do I!” Uncluttered illustrations of an elephant’s “floppy ears,” a bush baby’s “big eyes,” a fox’s “pointy nose,” a crocodile’s “sharp teeth,” and a lizard’s “little fingers and toes” are matched behind the gatefold page by children with the same characteristics. The children are all drawn in the same style, with round heads and prominent eyes, but with various shades of brown skin. Three other books published simultaneously follow the same pattern and design. Feeling Great! attributes human emotions to animals. Who knows whether a chipmunk is “excited” or a camel is “grumpy”? But young children will understand the concept and happily chime in “So do I.” Feeding Time! and On the Go! successfully deal with moreconcrete concepts. Toddlers will quickly adopt their refrains of “Me too!” and “Just like me!” Refolding the large, rather heavy gatefold flaps so a toddler can turn the page can be awkward but is a minor concern.

Overall, these durable board books are well-suited to the interests and attention spans of toddlers, who naturally see themselves at the center of the universe. (Board book. 1-3) (Feeding Time!: 978-1-78628-192-0; Feeling Great!: 978-1-78628-195-1; On the Go!: 978-1-78628-193-7)

Carle, Eric Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (14 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 10, 2018 978-1-5344-2454-8 Series: World of Eric Carle

VROOM VROOM GARBAGE TRUCK

Citro, Asia Illus. by Cummings, Troy The Innovation Press (30 pp.) $8.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-1-943147-43-4 A 30-page tour de force of a board book that is even better than its title would suggest.

Given a toddler’s natural fascination for heavy equipment in general and for garbage trucks in particular, this volume could have offered far less and still been a hit. But, surprise, this cleverly written and lovingly rendered volume should prove an absolute delight for caregivers and tots alike.

This onomatopoeic opus is ideal read-aloud fun, a slice-oflife snapshot of a garbage truck featuring all the signature sounds that alert tykes that the truck is nearby. It’s still dark when the titular truck wakes to the “plip plop” of raindrops and then starts with a click, headlights on, ready for a creaking, clanging day of rubbish collection. The illustrations are charming and economical, imbuing the protagonist with |

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Carefully composed sketches similar in style to Jules Feiffer’s cartoons evoke the city’s hustle and bustle against white backgrounds. in the city

huge amounts of personality with surprisingly few (satisfyingly thick) lines. The text is hand-lettered into each illustration; the volume of each “rumble” and “vroom” is conveyed calligraphically, by the relative sizes of the letters. The day of sanitation engineering is replete with drama and triumph, whether braking for ducklings or backing up (“beep beep beep!!!”) to collect trash from a man who overslept (“AAAAAAAAAAAH!!!” is the one line of dialogue in the book). The smiling truck dumps its load from its aft end in a panel that could have come from a book on potty training and then heads home for the night.

The book may be about garbage, but it’s pure gold.

(Board book. 1-5)

ZOOM! BEEP! VROOM! BUSY CITIES

Illus. by Cleland, Josh Duo Press (13 pp.) $9.95 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-1-947458-27-7

Vehicles, geography, and onomatopoeia come together in this sturdy board book for toddlers.

Cartoonish illustrations are active, colorful, and vibrant, and they buzz with vehicular activity. Each double-page spread focuses on a different city, presenting a well-known city landmark and the city skyline. The name of the city is also clearly indicated: on a big red double-decker bus in rainy London, on a young man’s T-shirt at a train station in Mexico City, on a child’s hat in Vancouver. And what the toddlers are really going to be interested in is the assortment of vehicles in all those cities. Spare narrative text is enhanced by onomatopoeia, which adds interest and action: the “zoooooooooooooooom” of a bullet train in Hong Kong, the “woo woo woo” of a police car and the “wee uuu wee uuu” of an ambulance in Tokyo, and the quiet “whir whir whir” of a stroller in Vancouver. Diverse adults and children, with skin and hair of many different shades, are present in all the cities, and women are shown driving a fire engine in New York, a bulldozer in Seattle, a bicycle in Paris, and, with a headscarf, flying the Dubai Air plane.

With plenty to see, hear, and identify, young children will enjoy the many busy cities and the plethora of vehicles in them. (Board book. 1-3)

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HATS OF FAITH

Cohan-Petrolino, Medeia Illus. by Walsh, Sarah Chronicle (14 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 24, 2018 978-0-9576364-7-7 What are you wearing on your head?

This board book is an introduction to traditional religious head coverings from different faiths. “Many religious people share the custom of covering their heads to show their love for God,” it opens. Each page presents an illustrated portrait of a person from a particular religion, faith, or culture wearing their head covering. The painterly portraits show people of varied skin tones, eye colors, and hair colors and are religiously accurate—the South Asian Muslim man wearing a topi has a full beard, and the young Jewish boy wearing the kippah has long sidelocks. The spare text includes the name of the head covering, its phonetic pronunciation, and the faith/culture where it is often worn. “This is a Patka (Putt-kah), / which many Sikh boys wear.”

It celebrates Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, Rastafarian, and Christian head coverings. There are other words that can be used for the same head coverings that are not mentioned (yarmulke for kippah, dupatta for chunni), and some of the pronunciations may be suspect (tou-pi or toh-pi? choon-ee or choon-nee?). Despite this, it is a book in which global kids can see themselves and others, a mirror as well as a window. With no real context supplied, this serves as just an introduction.

A useful starting point for an interesting discussion with preschoolers and elementary school students on head coverings, faith, and respect in our diverse world. (Board book. 3- 7)

IN THE CITY

Colman, Michelle Sinclair Illus. by Schmid, Paul Knopf (24 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 18, 2018 978-1-5247-1500-7 Series: You See, I See A child does all the talking in this deceptively simple board book about the city adventure of a child with puffy pigtails and their lanky dad who sports a hipster’s porkpie hat.

Uncomplicated rhyming sentences are set in a blue type for what dad sees and orange for what the child notices, making their different perspectives clear. Carefully composed sketches similar in style to Jules Feiffer’s cartoons evoke the city’s hustle and bustle against white backgrounds. Seemingly casual pencil strokes deftly show dad’s and child’s changing emotions. For example, on the second spread, Dad looks up at “big skyscrapers,” while the child is more curious about a pile of newspapers.

Dad seems always to have a destination—a bakery for apple strudel, a shortcut through the square—while the child is distracted by poodles and pigeons. Rural and suburban children |

may be confused by familiar vocabulary used in new ways, as in the sentence, “You see so much from the car” paired with a picture of the child craning to see out a subway train’s window. But everyone will understand the frustration expressed in the next line: “I cannot see very far.” Throughout, it is clear that this duo, both with light-brown skin, enjoy each other’s company.

Excellent for sharing before or after a city walk. (Board book. 1-3)

ON THE FARM

Colman, Michelle Sinclair Illus. by Schmid, Paul Knopf (24 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 3, 2018 978-1-5247-1447-5 Series: You See, I See

FOOD HIDE AND SNEAK

Illus. by Contraire, Bastien Phaidon (26 pp.) $9.95 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-0-7148-7723-5

WHAT’S IN THE FOREST?

Cosentino, Ralph Illus. by the author Insight Kids (24 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-1-68383-235-5 Series: Peanut Bear

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In rhyming verse, explore a farm alongside an enthusiastic toddler.

This tame board book features a toddler and their (extremely youthful) mother admiring scarecrows, playing with ducklings, and spotting various animals and machinery about the farmyard. Books about a day on the farm are an oft-repeated theme for the board-book crew, and there’s no new ground broken here. Digitally rendered, the loose-lined humans and animals have a breezy, caricaturelike style, but they aren’t imbued with much charm. Stick-figure animals populate the backgrounds, and even animals like baby lambs that should be objectively adorable instead resemble shapeless scribbles. While there are scattered perky pages with contrast and color—a page of bright red apples opposite another of golden honey—a vanilla palette of listless, desaturated colors daubed in patches against stark white pages dominates, making this one bland barnyard. Its narrative has an equally dull sound. Ho-hum rhyming reports what mom and baby spot in an overly singsong rhythm that doesn’t flow effortlessly when read aloud: “You see corn in a row / I see a big scarecrow.”

Mom and toddler both present white.

It’s docile and harmless, but there are already better barnyard-themed books available to choose. (Board book. 1-3)

objects of similar shape and color. One object that just doesn’t belong has been cleverly snuck into each grouping. As the title suggests, the groupings are all food related—though with candy, ice cream, and sodas included, “edibles” might be a better word.

Sometimes it can be function that marks the odd one out, as with the road sign that sneakily stands among the candy and lollipops or the rocket ship that looks so much like the bottles and containers of drinks. In other instances it’s a different category of food, as with the banana among the meats. But each spread provides a rich opportunity for adults to engage children in examining, describing, and discussing categories. Should there be questions about the correct answers, the last double-page spread has a visual key.

Young readers can practice observational and organizational skills with this clever book that masquerades as a game. (Board book. 2-5)

Peanut Bear, Cowbunny Bo, and Owlivia live and cavort in the magical forest of Yippity Yay. Many of these critters are a mashup of two things: bear plus peanut (which gives the titular character the look of a Weeble), corn-on-the-cob plus unicorn (Unicorny), whale plus squirrel (Sqwhale), and more. (Cowbunny Bo appears to be just a rabbit in a 10-gallon hat, however, and Owlivia simply an owl with ridiculously long legs.) These friends tell one another jokes, frolic among the trees, and splash around in the lakes and ponds. At the end of their meanderings, Peanut Bear enjoys a “forest meal” with his family, all of whom are also peanut-shaped, in their home that resembles a sideways peanut. Cosentino’s art, a radical departure from his bestselling superhero picture books, is playful and engaging, executed in gentle pastels and with a crayonlike line quality. However his character mashups are better suited to children older than the board-book crowd; it’s preschoolers who will have learned to identity these animals and can better appreciate the wordplay. The story is largely forgettable, exposition joining speech bubbles to pepper the pages with dry, unfocused narration.

Here’s hoping this whimsical cast of characters finds a story worthy of their talents. (Board book. 2-4)

As the Sesame Street song goes: “One of these things is not like the others, / One of these things just doesn’t belong, / Can you tell which thing is not...?”

Indeed, this mostly wordless book introduces readers to the spot-the-odd-one-out game with a play on those words. Using a limited palette of pink, green, and brown against a white background, each (mostly) double-page spread displays a group of |

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LITTLE CHRISTMAS TREE

Courtney-Tickle, Jessica Illus. by the author Big Picture/Candlewick (12 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 16, 2018 978-1-5362-0311-0

The old-fashioned feel of this extralarge board book invites exploration of the natural world.

Four-line rhyming stanzas on each spread describe the winter woods. In the first, “A little Christmas tree wakes up / and sparkles in the light.” The tree is never harvested; its only decorations are snow and birds. The sequence of events may confuse young children. Initially, the pictures are full of snow.

By the third spread, the text and illustration hint at an early spring thaw, but on the next page snow starts to fall again, just in time for “this snowy Christmas night.” The book is pretty enough that this may not matter. Silver foil “snow” on the tree and snowflakes that decorate the otherwise matte pages invite touch. Finding the animals, bugs, and plants hinted at in the text becomes a lift-the-flap game, with most spreads including four flaps. Some are obvious; some blend in with the illustrations so effectively that the flaps can only be found by running a hand across the page. Some of the flaps are also quite small, making them difficult for tiny fingers to manipulate, but overall it is ideal for one-on-one reading and quiet conversation.

The sense of wonder and awe this artistic board book evokes should not be limited to the Christmas season.

(Board book. 2-5)

I AM LITTLE FISH! A Finger Puppet Book Cousins, Lucy Illus. by the author Candlewick (16 pp.) $12.99 | Dec. 11, 2018 978-1-5362-0023-2 Series: Little Fish

There’s more puppetry than poetry in this slight but entertaining underwater adventure.

Little Fish is a colorful finger-puppet character who comes to life with a little help from the reader. The animated protagonist swims through the cover scene and seven double-page spreads of bright and simply rendered underwater scenes via a series of die-cut holes in the pages of the book. The rhymed text provides exposition if not much plot: “Hello! I am Little Fish, swimming in the sea. I love to splash and splish. Come and play with me.” The brightly hued finger puppet projects beyond the cover of the book and protrudes through each scenario within, as the cloth tube that invites fingertips to animate Little Fish is thick and stiff, resisting collapse. An odd consequence of that is that it seems to limit the finger puppet’s range of motion. Little Fish can be moved side to side or vertically, up and down, but as 110

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the puppet doesn’t collapse, it can’t swim out through the diecut holes, nor explore in many different directions, either. The cartoonish artwork is appealing; Little Fish’s undersea friends swim against a deep blue background punctuated by occasional bubbles or underwater plants. The book ends happily, with a tribute to Mom, “the one,” Little Fish admits, “I love the best.”

Fun if not profound. (Board book. 1-3)

FARM FLEET

Coyle, Finn Illus. by Bassani, Srimalie Flowerpot Press (14 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-4867-1488-9 Series: Finn’s Fun Trucks Young heavy-equipment fanciers can feast on this agriculturally oriented entry in the Finn’s Fun Trucks series.

Farmer Sandy introduces children to some of the heavy gear used to grow and harvest the produce that they eat. Following the same format as the other books in the series, Sandy observes that each machine has its own specific purpose and then challenges readers to guess its function. Featured equipment includes a tractor, plow, spreader, harvester, and baler.

Each machine is named on verso and pictured opposite, with three key components labelled; readers are asked to guess what each one does. The page with the diagram then folds out to show the equipment at work, with an explanation of its use. The simple, utilitarian artwork is easily interpreted, and the book introduces some useful industrial and agrarian vocabulary. The fold-out flaps will engage readers eager to see the machinery in action. “A plow attaches to the back of the tractor. It turns the soil over so crops will grow tall and healthy,” for example.

After presenting his farm fleet, Sandy, a white man with a gray beard, asks, “Can you guess what they can do when they all work together?” Answer: “They can grow all kinds of great food.” The simultaneously publishing Rapid Responders gives emergency vehicles the same treatment.

The lesson that a lot goes into producing the food we eat is a valuable one, and the trucks make it go down easy.

(Board book. 2-4) (Rapid Responders: 978-1-4867-1487-2)

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Deneux’s palette is as important to the illustrations as the dots.

Contrasting, deeply saturated colors help give context.

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CARS & TRUCKS

Illus. by Cummings, Troy Chronicle (5 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 11, 2018 978-1-4521-6546-2 Series: Read & Ride

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Deneux, Xavier Illus. by the author Chronicle (32 pp.) $22.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-1-4521-7390-0 Dots take on the shapes of animals in this progressive counting board book.

Part guessing game, part counting exercise, this oversized board book with extra-thick pages introduces animals, numerals, and counting to 10. The introductory spread for each number and animal includes a raised, brightly colored numeral alongside its written form. Next to that are a series of dots in the corresponding number. The dots are covered by a solid-colored page with die-cut circles so that a flip of the page reveals what the dots become: Three dots become a heavily stylized duck; five a horse; and nine a snake, for example. The structure invites readers to guess what the dots might become, a playful element for little ones with big imaginations. Deneux’s palette is as important to the illustrations as the dots. Contrasting, deeply saturated |

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YOU AND ME

Dotlich, Rebecca Kai Illus. by Reagan, Susan Creative Editions/Creative Company (14 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 21, 2018 978-1-56846-321-6 A preschool-age child adjusts to life with a new baby in this emotionally sat-

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Four vehicle-shaped board books packaged together with three road scenes invite young transportation enthusiasts to play.

A police car, a taxi, a fire engine, and a recycling truck fit together like a simple puzzle in a cutout nestled in the bigger book. When the books are removed, the cutout is just a plain black space in the middle of the right-hand page. Pages that frame the cutout open to create three different wordless road scenes decorated with stylized buildings, animals, and more vehicles. Even though the book-vehicles don’t have moving wheels (just pictures of wheels), toddlers might be more interested in them as toys than books. Each little book has an introductory sentence (“Hurry! The recycling truck is almost here!”) followed by labels (“glass”; “paper”; “bin”) near the relevant objects in the illustrations. Some of the vocabulary is rather abstract for toddlers. For example, in the taxi book, one of the labels is “checkers.” The front of each vehicle makes a convenient handhold for toddlers just learning to turn pages.

However, the plastic cover that holds the small book-vehicles in place doesn’t fit easily into the cutout and will be quickly lost, making this package a shelving nightmare. The cartoon people shown driving the taxi, taking out the recycling, calling on a police radio, rescuing a cat, etc., are various shades of brown but no distinct ethnicity.

An original idea that’s not quite road ready. (Novelty board book. 2-4)

colors help give context, as with the glowworm that appears on an entirely black background. Because the animals are made up of dots, they are abstract. This works well for some but not all; many readers may see the 10-dot dinosaur as a green horse, for instance. While this allows readers to interpret what they see, it could also be frustrating that the animals are not all immediately identifiable.

A nice approach to the counting book that does well overall even if its abstract illustrations aren’t a perfect take.

(Board book. 2-4)

isfying board book.

Cooing comments about the new baby on the left-hand page are paired with somewhat disparaging observations from an older child in italics on the right. The older child matterof-factly points to actual skills and accomplishments. So what if the baby has soft skin? The older sibling can count to nine!

Dotlich’s poem was originally published in Climb into My Lap: First Poems to Read Together, edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins and illustrated by Kathryn Brown (1998). It’s just the right length for a board book, but the storyline is more suitable for a picture-book reader. The older sibling is beyond board-book age, as indicated by the line, “Yesterday I lost two teeth.” Young children will also miss the visual humor in Reagan’s realistic watercolors. When the child proudly asserts, “I can tie all by myself,” those shoes are on the wrong feet. A family read-aloud with both the older sibling and new baby is an ideal setting for this story. The illustrations capture the mood of the poem but may throw readers when they notice that the woman reading with the protagonist in the final picture does not look like the grandmother portrayed five pages earlier. Maybe it’s mom?

The importance of giving positive attention to the child who may be feeling overshadowed by a new baby cannot be overstressed, and it’s nice to have the reminder delivered in such a lovely, sensitive package and featuring a loving, brown-skinned family. (Board book. 6 mos.-5)

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Sreenivasan’s illustrations are colorful, detailed, and authentic, and they carry the book. diwali

DO YOU KNOW A SUPERHERO?

Duopress Labs Illus. by Escudero, Jesús Duo Press (22 pp.) $7.95 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-1-947458-24-6

Superhero community members are featured in this board book.

Going beyond the usual suspects (firefighters, doctors), this book nicely features some less-obvious superheroes: an author, a music teacher, and a physical therapist, to name a few. There is also the odd inclusion of parents who design toys as heroes, presumably because kids love toys, but it feels odd juxtaposed with the nurse and the firefighter. Just how exactly do “they save the day, every day”? Each double-page spread features a different superhero, generally following the same repeated text structure. The bright, neon-colored illustrations that accompany each page of text feature the hero engaged in their work in a child-friendly, animation-inspired style. There are nice little touches of traditional superhero garb on each illustration, such as chest insignias, capes, and boots. While the featured superheroes are fairly diverse, some fulfill stereotypes (the author is a white, bespectacled woman; the nurse, a black woman; the zookeeper, a black man). A few of the characters are described as a mom or a dad, while others are not, which reads like a messy attempt to demonstrate that parents are superheroes, too. The concept of community helpers as heroes is a familiar one, and while it’s nice that some atypical occupations are included, it’s not enough to make this one stand out.

A zippy art style doesn’t completely mitigate awkward choices, making this one to safely pass on. (Board book. 18 mos-4)

DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS

Eliot, Hannah Illus. by Gutierrez, Jorge Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (24 pp.) $8.99 | Jul. 24, 2018 978-1-5344-1515-7 Series: Celebrate the World The traditions and history of one of Mexico’s most important holidays are introduced in this latest of Eliot’s Celebrate the World series.

From setting up the flower-festooned altars to decorating the calaveras, the preparations depicted involve entire communities over several weeks. Characters in cowboy hats, sombreros, and baseball caps place the final touches on skeletons in full lucha libre regalia or spangled mariachi outfits. However, instead of accurately using Mexico’s name for the holiday, Día de Muertos, Eliot uses the English back-translation, “Día de los Muertos,” as is common in the U.S. even though the story evidently takes place in Mexico. Also, aside from stating that the celebration “is an ancient tradition,” there is no mention of its 112

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Indigenous, pre-European/Christian roots nor does the book actively distinguish between Día de Muertos and Halloween.

The first-person narration vacillates between child and adult perspectives. “We do all this to celebrate the beauty of life and death rather than mourn it.” Gutierrez’s mixed-media illustrations are convulsive, crowded panes of frenetic activity. Exaggerated facial features border on stereotypical caricatures—snouts and bug eyes abound. Contributing to the crowded page design is the unfortunate choice of board rather than picture-book format. Consequently, the initial perception is that this series is geared toward toddlers, when it is the school-age child who would most benefit from the information in this book.

Pass. (Board book. 4- 7)

DIWALI

Eliot, Hannah Illus. by Sreenivasan, Archana Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (24 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-5344-1990-2 Series: Celebrate the World Diwali, the festival of lights, a fiveday celebration that has many different forms, is celebrated in different ways across India and in many other countries.

This board book cursorily presents the different rituals associated with this celebration of the Hindu New Year, including getting the house ready to welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth; decorating the house with rangoli and diyas; and celebrating with family, friends, fireworks, and good food. The text is simple and gives only very basic information. “On the fifth and final day of Diwali, we celebrate brothers and sisters. The lifelong bond between siblings is special, and we honor that.”

The illustrations show four different sets of siblings celebrating each other in different ways, none of which are mentioned in the text, making it difficult for younger readers to understand the complexity of the celebration. Sreenivasan’s illustrations are colorful, detailed, and authentic, and they carry the book.

They feature happy and smiling dark-haired people with a range of skin tones, diverse in ethnicity and dress. In bright, vivid colors, intergenerational families and friends from different regions come alive, dressed up in their colorful best, celebrating and enjoying the festival together in different ways. The board format of this title does not match the age range and conceptual level of the text.

Amid inconsistencies of format and information, the illustrations end up giving the most clarity about this festival. (Board book. 4-8)

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THE LITTLE MERMAID

Adapt. by Eliot, Hannah Illus. by Ortiz, Nivea Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (24 pp.) $8.99 | Dec. 18, 2018 978-1-5344-3575-9 Series: Once Upon a World

LUNAR NEW YEAR

Eliot, Hannah Illus. by Chau, Alina Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (24 pp.) $8.99 | Dec. 11, 2018 978-1-5344-3303-8 Series: Celebrate the World The Celebrate the World series spotlights Lunar New Year.

This board book blends expository text and first-personplural narrative, introducing readers to the holiday. Chau’s distinctive, finely textured watercolor paintings add depth, transitioning smoothly from a grand cityscape to the dining room table, from fantasies of the past to dumplings of the present. The text attempts to provide a broad look at the subject, including other names for the celebration, related cosmology, and historical background, as well as a more-personal discussion of traditions and practices. Yet it’s never clear who the narrator is—while the narrative indicates the existence of some consistent, monolithic group who participates in specific rituals of celebration (“Before the new year celebrations begin, we clean our homes—and ourselves!”), the illustrations |

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WHAT’S INSIDE MY LUNCH BOX?

Eliot, Hannah Illus. by Elio Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (12 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 3, 2018 978-1-5344-1594-2 Youngsters can see what their peers eat around the world.

The first double-page spread features lunchboxes from around the globe arrayed in an arc over a smiling planet Earth; each has a flap for readers to open. The subsequent eight pages give readers a closer look at dishes from Brazil, India, and Italy, to name a few. One line of a rhyming couplet floats at the top of each page: “In China, some lunches are steamed and some are stir-fried. / In France, we have a bit of fruit and cheese on the side.” Below each line, six or seven containers appear with more flaps that open to reveal a variety of signatures dishes from the featured nation. South Korean lunchboxes, for example, may contain simmered seaweed, kimchi, and gimbap (glossed parenthetically, as are many non-English terms, as “vegetable roll”). Elio’s cheery, whimsical cartoons in vibrant colors are fun to look at, but many foods may not look much like what the captions say they are; the stylized peanutbutter–and-jelly sandwich and dinosaur-shaped chicken tenders on the American page come immediately to mind. The whole, oblong package includes a die-cut handle at the top to give it a lunchbox look and feel.

While the book is undeniably playful, toddler readers won’t come away from the experience with much hope of identifying any of these foods in the real world. (Board book.

2-4)

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This board-book version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale is set in the Caribbean.

Eliot’s adaptation eliminates some of the more-disturbing plot elements in Andersen’s original, making it feel much closer to the Disney version but with brown-skinned humans and merfolk. Once she’s been given her feet, the Little Mermaid does not feel as though she’s walking on glass and she is not motivated by a desire for an immortal soul, but the heroine still sacrifices her voice, her birth family, and her agency for the love of a rather clueless prince. The Caribbean setting is a good choice for a story in which the sea features prominently. Ortiz’s lush illustrations reflect her Puerto Rican heritage. The sea witch, with her pointy nose, red lips, sharp-angled eyes, hoop earrings, and colorful headwrap is reminiscent of the vejigante masks that are part of carnival in Puerto Rico. However, the small trim size does a disservice to the art. The story has been simplified, but with four to seven lines of text per page, it is still too long for the board-book audience. As with other titles in the series, a larger, picture-book format would help this tale find a receptive audience of school-age children who are able to critique the subtext of the classic story even as they appreciate this version’s gorgeous original art.

Another format-audience mismatch for the Once Upon a World series. (Board book. 2-5)

depict different people in every image. Indeed, observances of Lunar New Year are as diverse as the people who celebrate it, which neither the text nor the images—all of the people appear to be Asian—fully acknowledges. Also unclear is the book’s intended audience. With large blocks of explication on every spread, it is entirely unappealing for the board-book set, and the format may make it equally unattractive to an older, more appropriate audience. Still, readers may appreciate seeing an important celebration warmly and vibrantly portrayed.

Lovely illustrations wasted on this misguided project.

(Board book. 4-8)

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PEPPA’S FIRST 100 WORDS

eOne Scholastic (14 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 30, 2018 978-1-338-22877-9 Series: Peppa Pig

With over 250 television episodes featuring Peppa Pig airing on Nick Jr television stations, this vocabulary board book will find an audience.

The large trim size (nearly 10 inches square) allows for plenty of space for seven categories, each with 17 to 23 words. Many are compound words or phrases (“sand castle”; “party hat”) and/ or words not found on standard beginning reader word lists (“scooter”; “cash register”). Most of the groupings are logical (Daddy and Mummy Pig are “In my house,” for instance), but placing “Granny Pig” and “Grandpa Pig” “In the garden” feels arbitrary. Presumably, they could just as easily be found “At the park” or “At the supermarket.” Each spread includes two to four sturdy flaps that hide pictures and more vocabulary. Occasionally, what is hidden defies logic. For example, moving the unlabeled drawbridge on a “castle” on the “Playtime” pages reveals a “dinosaur,” but the label is outside the castle. Why is there a single “banana” behind a full “basket”? Librarians will suck their teeth when they see that the “book” flap lifts to reveal a green “marker.” Still, the “spider” behind the “picture” hung on the wall is a mordant touch. Since the popular pig is featured multiple times on every spread, these details won’t matter to Peppa’s fans.

Fine for Peppa’s partisans, but similar and betterdesigned vocabulary books abound. (Picture book. 1-3)

HORSE TALES

Fehr, Molly Illus. by the author Chronicle (10 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 11, 2018 978-1-4521-7088-6 Series: Double Booked!

Meet various horses and hear their stories in this lift-theflap ode to all things equine.

Cut into a barn shape, this board book splits down the middle so that the barn doors open outward. On each side is a stall with door-shaped flaps. Through brief, somewhat stiff biographies, readers meet 12 of the (fictional) horses with surprisingly variant stories, from Clyde the firefighter to Biscuit, the itty-bitty pony who prides in taking children “on their first ride.” Each stall displays eclectic paraphernalia that reflects the horse’s particular backstory. Circus horse Nutmeg’s stall showcases fancy feathers, framed photos of her glory days, and lift-the-flap stall doors painted in circus tent stripes that reveal Nutmeg herself, prancing and costumed. Though there’s no plot, there’s a cozy summation as readers meet new mother Maple on the final page, ruminating about which path her own tiny foal might take. Quaint, pastel-colored illustrations feel as 114

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though they might be stills from a vintage animated film. All of this warmth however, is reined in by the unwieldy design.

Though the cover proudly proclaims “26 lift-the-flaps inside!” it’s too many to comfortably read with a lap-sit child, with flaps flying open unexpectedly and making it difficult to see the sweet horses in their entirety.

Though the book’s flaps are overambitious, horse lovers will be champing at the bit to meet these new farm friends. (Board book. 2-4)

BABY’S FIRST HASHTAG

Feschuk, Scott & Allan, Susan Douglas & McIntyre (28 pp.) $12.95 | Oct. 13, 2018 978-1-77162-191-5

Here’s a book that is as much fun for the parents as it is for their infant or

toddler.

“A is for #artisan...whatever that means. / B is for #beard... and two-hundred-buck jeans.” This abecedary presents hipsterthemed words for each letter of the alphabet, with interesting photographs and entertaining rhyming couplets—one line for each letter, and one letter and photograph on each page. The words selected poke gentle fun at the vocabulary and lifestyle that are popular with a section of today’s young parents (“gluten,” “kale,” “followers,” “plaid,” “selfie”)...and soon to be familiar to their children as well. “M is for #manbun...somehow trendy still. / N is for #Netflix...you’re too young to ‘chill.’ ” Photographs show hipster parents, some with tattoos and/or long hair, with beards abounding. Although some of the photographs feature children and adults of color, well over half of them contain people with fair skin and fair hair, which diminishes the impact of this book. This is not written as a book for kids, although infants and toddlers will enjoy seeing the faces of people while sitting on the laps of their favorite adults, who will be chuckling or maybe even laughing out loud. And that is what the young toddler will remember—the contagious joy of the adult reading the book, linking reading to fun.

This gift book for babies and new parents will have both readers and listeners laughing. (Board book. 1-5)

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A cute-as-a-button reminder that growth comes in sequential ages and stages. watch me grow!

BABY DRESS UP

wisely chose children of a variety of skin tones and ethnicities, with a just about even distribution of white-presenting babies and babies of color.

A cute-as-a-button reminder that growth comes in sequential ages and stages, this should be of special use in households with new baby siblings. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

Flowerpot Press Flowerpot Press (20 pp.) $6.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-1-4867-1461-2 Series: Baby Firsts

WATCH ME GROW!

Flowerpot Press Flowerpot Press (20 pp.) $6.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-1-4867-1462-9 Series: Baby Firsts

Developmental milestones modeled by charmingly photographed babies may reassure new parents, and toddlers will see themselves in the pictures.

Each spread shows two winsome babies of the same age, capturing them milestone by milestone. They are almost always smiling, though the 1-year-olds just beginning to stand on their own look slightly panicked. (Curiously, they also look older than the 15-month-old toddlers on the next spread who are walking with help.) Exclamatory text in a large clear type on the upper-left page describes a behavior while the typical age for each skill is highlighted in a quarter circle on the lower-right-hand corner. The editors seem to have picked the upper end of the age range for each milestone.

Standing is labeled at 12 months and walking is at 15 months though babies can actually reach these markers up to three months earlier, a simplification that is understandable given the format. These babies’ behaviors include drawing and eating with a spoon as well as gross motor skills. The editors |

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BUSY CITY

Illus. by Frost, Maddie Workman (12 pp.) $5.95 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-1-5235-0468-8 Series: Indestructibles Vibrant color, diverse people, and assorted sounds welcome infants and toddlers to the metropolis.

Each of the five double-page spreads in this short book contains one sentence of spare text introducing the action (“Traffic zooms by”; “People shop and eat”). People presented are of various skin colors and hair colors and of a variety of ages, from kids to gray-haired older adults, and there is one woman in a hijab. She’s riding a bus, but young readers will also see women as a firefighter, a police officer, a bus driver, and as construction workers. Cartoonish illustrations are colorful, vivid, and detailed. Cats, dogs, and birds appear on most pages, and such onomatopoeic words as “chomp,” “swoosh,” “clank,” and “rustle” are written next to the person or thing making that sound.

There are many interesting details to point out, identify, and talk about with a lap-sitting infant or toddler in the different locations of the city shown, including a residential neighborhood, a construction site, and a city park. The Indestructibles are not printed on board pages but on thin, flexible pages that are “chew proof, rip proof, non-toxic and 100% washable.” Copublishing titles include Hello Farm! and My Neighborhood; the two are very similar to Busy City in illustration and text, but they do not include onomatopoeia, which seems a missed opportunity. Furthermore, My Neighborhood presents single-page scenes, making for busy and confusing spreads.

This detailed book will be best enjoyed one-on-one by engaged adult-baby duos. (Baby book. 6 mos.-2) (Hello Farm!: 978-1-5235-0467-1;My Neighborhood: 978-1-5235-0469-5)

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A multiethnic series of babies and toddlers are dressed up and photographed in various outfits, from a bear to a watermelon.

While not up to Anne Geddes’ level of creativity, the costumes range from the impromptu (a white baby playing with a toy saxophone is a “musician”) through the store-bought (the iconic Halloween pumpkin get-up) to the homemade (a crocheted snail outfit). A simple, one- or two-word caption set in large, black or white type floats at the top of the page.

Many of the babies are photographed on white backgrounds, which gives the image a spacious look, but a few look as if they were staged in a photographer’s studio with copious props nearby. Laudably, just over half of the tots appear to be children of color, including “Princess” and “Dinosaur.” One dubious inclusion—“Safari Guide”—presents a toddler with light brown skin in a pith helmet posing with a box camera and a large dog wearing a fake lion’s mane. Given the colonial roots of safari in its modern, Western understanding, this feels like a very poor choice indeed.

While babies will always enjoy seeing images of other tots, the whole project feels like what’s routinely found on social media on or after Oct. 31, with some unfortunate stereotyping to boot. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

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Slight? Right. But fun? A ton! creature vs. teacher

CREATURE VS. TEACHER A Book of Rhyme Fuller, T. Nat Illus. by Meyer, Alex Eben abramsappleseed (16 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 24, 2018 978-1-4197-3155-6

Even the most studious kids know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

This visually arresting, rhymed board book may be a quick read, but it says a lot with few words: roughly one word per page, in fact. Caregivers will recognize the setup immediately—a day in the life of the eponymous Teacher, a bespectacled kid in a lab coat with fuchsia, Einstein-esque hair, poring over formulae and experiments, and the Creature, a playful, green colossus that looks like a friendly version of Frankenstein’s monster.

The stylized, colorful illustrations propel the story, told in rhymed couplets presented over a series of two-page vignettes.

“Book,” reads a drawing of the Teacher, head buried in a tome.

“Look!” yells the Creature, while showing off their juggling skills.

Unfortunately, their efforts go unnoticed. Similarly, when the Creature invites the Teacher to go fly a “kite,” it never breaks the latter’s concentration; the Teacher continues feverishly to “write.” When the ever hopeful Creature suggests, “Dance,” though, the Teacher gives a glance and finally decides a recreation break is in order. Four scenes of silliness and play follow, at the end of which the Creature must “rest” while the Teacher picks up the book again. The rhyming text is a great way to get kids experimenting with sounds, and the playful, cool artwork suits the themes perfectly.

Slight? Right. But fun? A ton! (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

AUTUMN BABIES

Galbraith, Kathryn O. Illus. by Pons, Adela Peachtree (20 pp.) $6.95 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-68263-066-2 Series: Babies in the Park

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LULLABY & GOOD NIGHT

Illus. by Garland, Sally Flowerpot Press (20 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 16, 2018 978-1-4867-1546-6

A board-book collection of familiar, classic lullabies and children’s rhymes.

Garland’s illustrations of a darling bunny family accompany this set of childhood favorites, from “Rock-a-Bye Baby” to “Hush, Little Baby.” Two original rhymes that share the book’s title are included as bookends to the others, both to the tune of “Hush Little Baby.” These two are, frankly, unnecessary additions, with awkward lines that pale in comparison with the others. Because the lullabies are well-known, the watercolor-and-ink illustrations really take center stage. Each spread shows the bunny mother and her two little bunnies progressing closer and closer to bedtime, reading (and acting out) the rhymes as they go. There is excellent use of repeated, echoing images, including the tree and its famous rock-a-bye branches and the moon that the cow jumped over. The animals of “Hey, Diddle, Diddle” are adorable and make for a painting that readers might wish they could hang on the wall. The collection could nicely be used as a bedtime book for young readers or simply as a one-poem-at-a-time resource—just be sure to skip the first and last.

This one’s all about the charming illustrations; readers will enjoy the familiar lullabies, but it’s not a seminal collection. (Board book. 6 mos.-4)

THE 12 PETS OF CHRISTMAS

A group of toddlers and their pup enjoy the change of seasons playing in a park.

Colorful stylized illustrations depict a park with lollipopshaped trees, shades of red, yellow, and orange setting the scene: “It’s autumn in the park.” The text that runs along the bottoms of the pages on a beige-colored strip describes the illustrations: “Leaves swirl. / Acorns fall. // Squirrels dig” (though this particular squirrel is just holding an acorn). Then readers see a group of toddlers—one black, one brown, one olive-skinned, and one white—playing. They “toss,” “stomp,” “roll,” “romp,” and play with a puppy. The verbs imply action; the illustrations, though, are somewhat static. The book concludes with “It’s autumn!” as a child peeks out from a pile of leaves. Following the same format, the companion book, Winter Babies, is set in the same park, and the same children are now playing in the wintry scene.

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Their tongues catch snowflakes as they drift down, their boots sink in the snow, and they ride down a slope on a sled. As a child peeks out from a snowdrift the book declares, “It’s winter!”

Sweet and attractive but not much more. (Board book. 1-3) (Winter Babies: 978-1-68263-067-9)

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Garland, Taylor LB Kids/Little, Brown (24 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 30, 2018 978-0-316-42082-2 Series: Celebrate the Season

No partridges, no pear trees—just cute pets in Santa hats in this board-book adaptation of the traditional carol.

The animals, one set per spread, are photographed against white backgrounds. Against a red background opposite or above, the words in gold mostly follow the expected format. “On the first day of Christmas, / Santa gave to me / A SLEEPY LITTLE PUPPY.” From “2 FLUFFY CATS” on up, the formula is set, varying only in the large white numeral, the adjective, and the name of the animal. This arrangement makes it easy to use the book as a simple counting activity.

The vocabulary is sometimes challenging, with “3 SQUIRMY |

HAMSTERS,” “6 KITTENS SNUGGLING,” “7 PUGS A-PLAYING,” and “8 HEDGEHOGS HIDING.” Counting the critters is fairly straightforward (none are hiding). Weary caregivers may be thankful the designers skipped the cumulative recitation that normally followers each stanza. Toddlers wouldn’t sit still for it, especially since they are unlikely to know the original song. The final page is the only place the backward countdown appears. Somewhat confusingly, the “sleepy little puppy” shown there is the pup on the cover and not the original “sleepy little puppy.”

For animal-loving toddlers learning to count at Christmas. (Board book. 1-4)

LITTLE BOAT

Gomi, Taro Illus. by the author Chronicle (22 pp.) $6.99 | Aug. 21, 2018 978-1-4521-6301-7

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Gravel, Elise Illus. by the author The Innovation Press (22 pp.) $8.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-1-943147-40-3

This board book invites young readers to think about the many ways a child can be.

The message of embracing who you are is a popular one in contemporary children’s books; this latest offering comes in the form of humorous cartoonlike figures representing some of the many silly—and not so silly—ways a kid can feel, behave, interact, and so on—“(except mean or rude, of course).” Standing out from the white background, on each page a wacky and exaggerated cartoon is accompanied by a single word: “funny,” “sensitive,” “grumpy,” “smelly,” “caring,” etc. Each word is appropriately embellished to match its subject; “artsy” is rendered in fancy letters, and “dirty” drips small blobs of mud. Occasionally, the author adds some side comments that are sure to elicit giggles in young readers; for example on the “Smelly” page, a parenthetical “(sometimes)” keeps it light, along with speech bubbles that add “oops!” “sorry” and “toot!” But most importantly, the author concludes, just being “YOURSELF” is best.

The children illustrated represent different skin and hair colors, though none have visible disabilities.

Adult readers and their young listeners will find this book best used as a conversation springboard. (Board book.

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Intrepid Little Boat encounters pintsized obstacles before returning safely to his family.

Here’s an author who understands how much bravery it takes to be little in a big world. Little Boat floats through mild perils that will feel quite familiar to most toddlers: a crowded shipping lane where he fears being bumped, a frightening runin with a much bigger freighter, concern about a scary storm, and loneliness. Little Boat’s anxiety is apparent, as he’s pictured teeny-tiny against the waves, but the clouds are so sweet-faced and the waters so gently rolling that it’s clear there’s no real danger. After he successfully navigates the challenges, Little Boat’s parents congratulate him on his brave solo expedition, and toddlers will similarly bask in his feeling of accomplishment. Although the small ship is ostensibly on his journey alone, he’s gently advised and reassured by a narrator who makes sure everyone, including the audience, knows that “Little Boat is fine!” The spare art is expressive in its simplicity, with ships made of basic shapes, rustically outlined and perfectly personified with paint-dabbed faces, all set against a tonally pleasing palette of blue, teal, and rose. Our hero’s white hull, jaunty triangular flag, and blush-pink–dotted cheek are both easily spotted and eminently charming.

With this masterful board book, little listeners are in for some smooth sailing. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

YOU CAN BE

ALWAYS IN MY HEART

Groom, Juliet Illus. by Hahessy, Roisin Tiger Tales (12 pp.) $8.99 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-68010-557-5

This heart-shaped board book offers an idealized model of unconditional parental love.

“You and me = we” ungrammatically begins and ends this sweet paean to love. A rotund penguin with pink cheeks assures a baby penguin that love is constant, whether they are together or apart, in rain or sunshine. Each page describes in rather vague terms a temporary separation of a caregiver and child— the caregiver riding a bus or train (perhaps to work) or the child spending a day with Grandpa. Occasional repetition of words or phrases keeps the meter consistent (if the grammar is occasionally not) while emphasizing the core message: “You’re right here with me—You’re here in my heart.” The seven pastel pages are cut in successively larger hearts to form a pleasing pastel rainbow and make it easy for little fingers to turn the pages. Key words and smaller vignettes are highlighted in decorative hearts on each page. A companion volume, You’re My Little Star, reiterates the same message of unqualified love using a layered starshaped format. A doting owl tells an owlet, “There’s nothing |

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you can’t do” and that the baby is the “warmest,” “coziest,” “comfiest,” “cutest,” “smartest,” “sweetest,” “sparkliest,” “brightest” star.

A worthy message that children need to hear marred by saccharinity and clunky grammar. (Board book. 6 mos.-3) (You’re My Little Star: 978-1-68010-558-2)

LET’S PLAY SOCCER

Hall, Nancy Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (16 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-5344-3136-2 Series: Let’s Play

too placidly after such a lively beginning. Kids will enjoy the wry second-person narration and animated scenes of monkeys swinging from chandeliers and having feathery pillow fights, but it’s the grown-ups who have woken, sore and disoriented in floor tents of their own, who might have the most rueful of smiles. The predominantly white background sets off the thicklined cartoon illustrations and draws attention to the brown and tan monkeys and the white girl’s gingery hair. Clever visual gimmicks—cameos from other animals from the When Your... series, books with such titles as The Count of Monkey Cristo—all add to the general sense of silliness.

Preschoolers will giggle, and many a tired caregiver will secretly rejoice in knowing that other families also struggle with bedtime-averse monkeys. (Board book. 2-4)

A child’s first introduction to soccer in a board-book format, shaped like a

soccer ball.

Each page of simple text presenting basic terminology is accompanied by photographs of multiethnic children engaged in playing soccer along with a close-up of a referee and a diagram of the 11 team positions on the field. The photographs are well-designed, visually conveying the meaning of the text (for “two teams,” two young players, one wearing a red jersey and one in blue, are pictured; the page explaining that hands are not used in the sport shows a close-up of players’ shoes). Action shots picture the free kick/penalty kick and corner kick. Diagrams of the field and player positions as well as some of the rules will be obscure for the audience: “Sometimes a player wins a FREE KICK or a PENALTY KICK. / Sometimes a player takes a CORNER KICK.” Children held in the laps of enthusiastic, knowledgeable adults will fare best, and those who are lucky enough to play in leagues for the very young will be able to integrate the information.

Colorful, informative introduction to soccer. (Board book. 2-4)

WHEN YOUR MONKEYS WON’T GO TO BED

Hill, Susanna Leonard Illus. by Wiseman, Daniel Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (26 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-5344-0565-3 Series: When Your…

A clever child uses sneaky tactics to lull two energetic monkeys to sleep.

Charged with getting her recalcitrant monkeys off to dreamland, a resourceful young girl concocts a series of games (go upstairs “without touching the floor!”), tactics (pretend to yawn so the monkeys will too), and projects (build a cozy tent in order to entice them into slumber) to accomplish the nightly ritual of bath, teeth brushing, stories, and bed. Although the girl eventually prevails, it’s not before she too conks out on the bedroom floor with the monkeys, an ending that drifts off a tad 118

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HELLO KNIGHTS!

Holub, Joan Illus. by Dickason, Chris Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (26 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-5344-1868-4 Series: A Hello Book In this rhyming board book, knights meet dragons and become friends after an almost-battle between the two is defused by silly undergarments.

Readers first meet the knights as they’re attending the queen and the king, marching, and guarding the castle.

When dragons approach ready to fight, the knights halt the hostilities by raising the king’s underwear on a flagpole.

Laughter ensues at the silliness, and the knights and dragons become friends when they start a party that readers find under a nifty, crenellated double foldout. Holub’s rhyming couplets are easy to read and have a rhythmic quality that feels almost like a classic epic poem. Dickason’s cartoony, detailed illustrations with comic-book influences will appeal to younger readers. The bold, brightly colored spreads illustrating “Hello dragons!” and “Goodbye dragons” stand out as the clearest and show admirable restraint. Details such as the king’s tattoos are a fun wink to adult readers. Preschoolers will giggle at the king’s undies flying high and will also feel relieved at the peaceful, happy resolution to the book’s climactic clash. While the story is a bit nonsensical—why do the knights decide to fly the underwear on a flagpole?—the overall silliness will appeal to younger readers who won’t mind the plot holes.

A goofy story and zippy illustrations make this a niceenough book but not a must-have. (Board book. 2-3)

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Illustrations are pure fun, an homage to old-school comics and arcade games, with spiky speech bubbles, motion lines, classic video-game display type, and flying projectiles. hello ninjas!

HELLO NINJAS!

Holub, Joan Illus. by Dickason, Chris Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (26 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-5344-1869-1 Series: A Hello Book

THIS LITTLE SCIENTIST A Discovery Primer

Holub, Joan Illus. by Roode, Daniel Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (26 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 25, 2018 978-1-5344-0108-2 Series: This Little

An introduction to 10 scientists for the youngest readers.

Each historical or modern figure is featured on their own double-page spread, which includes a close-up portrait and rhyming couplets on the verso, and the facing page features the scientist in action and a caption of a sentence or two offering more information about their work but often written at a level far beyond the board-book audience’s developmental capacity. The usual suspects are here, including Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, but women and scientists of color can also be found, such as naturalist and painter Maria Sibylla Merian and particle physicist Sau Lan Wu. The verse is strained, forced, and often doesn’t scan (for Katherine Johnson: “This little scientist got the math right / to help NASA astronauts launch outer space flight”). In an evident attempt |

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BABY CODE!

Horning, Sandra Illus. by Crowton, Melissa Penguin Workshop (14 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 17, 2018 978-0-399-54257-2 Series: Girls Who Code Another book that aims to jump-start toddlers’ STEM careers.

Using retro-style art and coding syntax well beyond a toddler’s comprehension, this board book tries to simplify the complex language of code. The pale-skinned girl clad in polkadot onesies is certainly cute, maybe even gifted, but that doesn’t mean she can understand the principles of coding. The selected real-world examples of coding are valid. Baby telling a dog what to do and code telling computers what to do are parallel constructs. The problem is that babies, no matter how much we want them to, cannot yet comprehend such abstract concepts. Girls (and boys) need real experience with the real world before they can begin to understand command language.

The insertion of speech bubbles with “real code” near pictures of computerized toys (“train.go[ ]”) or tools (“repeat 3: phone. ring[ ]”) is simply clutter on the page and will not help babies who are still puzzling out the physical mechanics of the world understand how these devices work. Encouraging young girls to explore technology is certainly a worthy goal, but a board book marketed under the Girls Who Code umbrella will not do the job.

To become coders, babies need to play with sequences, patterns, language, and logic—but not this book. (Board book. 1-3)

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Crafty ninjas take on both math and samurai masters to win a tasty taco treasure.

Ten young ninjas and their plucky Siamese cat are hot on the trail of some tasty grub before they lose it to a rival gang of kid samurais and their petulant pup. Chaos ensues until the ninjas’ smooth moves turn the coveted tacos into taco salad for everyone to savor, a meal that unmasks a racially diverse group of boys and girls. Underlying the rollicking adventure is a math component about fact families, with ninjas dividing into different equations that equal 10: On a lone fold-out page, “Five ninjas chop! Five do spin kicks!” It’s refreshing to see a fairly conceptually sophisticated math board book, though the ninjas occasionally clump so tightly that distinguishing how many are in each group is challenging. Illustrations are pure fun, an homage to old-school comics and arcade games, with spiky speech bubbles, motion lines, classic video-game display type, and flying projectiles that suggest that ninjas will “crash” or “swoop” in at any second. The contrast of the black-suited ninjas against the bright, complementary color scheme enhances their dynamism. With its relentless rhythm and enough punctuation that grown-ups can really ham it up, it’s a blast to read aloud.

Wannabe ninjas will flip over this board book’s cool vibe, awesomely frenetic art, and dual math and sharing narrative. (Board book. 2-4)

to be cute, the phrase “This little scientist...” introduces the figures and has the effect of demeaning the women, people of color, and people with disabilities depicted. The art, like others in the This Little series, features bobbleheaded caricatures of each figure in bold colors. The final two pages present 17 additional scientists in portraiture from throughout history and around the world and a brief caption, with a blank space left open for “You!” A mismatch in every way. (Board book. 2-3)

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Few sights can compete with a hairless, newborn aardvark sleeping peacefully against its mother’s belly. fiona’s friends

FIVE SILLY GHOSTS

a cow chew her cud only makes the grass in her mouth (which is not a cud) wiggle a tiny bit. The art of both offerings is similar even though it is by two different creators, employing soft tones and rounded lines to create big-eyed, friendly creatures.

Endearingly playful. (Board book. 1-3)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Illus. by Kushnir, Hilli HMH Books (12 pp.) $6.99 | Jul. 17, 2018 978-1-328-86659-2

A large peekaboo on the cover reveals five friendly ghosts for toddlers to count in this unscary twist on the traditional fingerplay “Five Little Pumpkins.”

Kushnir substitutes ghosts that “float by” for the usual pumpkins sitting on the gate. The second line remains, “There are witches in the air,” but the third ghost adds “Boo” to the usual “I don’t care.” The lines for the fourth and fifth ghost are similarly altered, but the final line returns to the satisfying “ ‘Wooooooo,’ went the wind, and out went the lights” of the original. The revised rhymes work reasonably well, though caregivers may struggle to get the original verse out of their minds.

The ghosts are translucent gray instead of white but still stand out against nighttime scenes rendered in dark purple, green, and orange. Each ghost is dressed for Halloween with distinct costumes: kitty, pirate, witch, clown, and king. The three witches have green and yellow faces. Typical Halloween icons (yellow moon, jack-o’-lantern, candy bowl, bat, cat, and candles) revealed in well-placed cutouts on each page hint at what is to come and remind children of what came before. The cutouts also serve as handholds for little fingers just learning to turn pages.

Useful for counting practice and where simple, sturdy Halloween board books are needed. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

BABY ANIMALS

Illus. by Huang, Yu-hsuan Auzou Publishing (10 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-2-7338-5915-5 Series: My First Interactive Board Book Little fingers can make young critters grow and play by sliding relatively-sturdy tabs and panels.

On the cover, a lion cub grows into an adult male lion with a full mane and a tuft at the end of his tail with a right swipe of a tab. Most of the internal pages follow a similar pattern.

First, readers are introduced to each baby animal’s home or environment on the verso; the interactive feature appears on the recto, often with a finger-sized hole in the panel for ease of sliding, with a sentence of descriptive text floating above it.

The cleverest gimmick is a nested double panel that pulls out from the right-hand page so a young snake can grow longer. The final double-page spread, which reviews what has come before and introduces brand-new concepts, includes four flaps and four panels with simple queries and captions. A companion title, On the Farm, illustrated by Mélanie Combes, is formatted identically and introduces youngsters to chickens, pigs, and more. Readers can shear the wool off a sheep with a single swipe.

Some of the features are a bit more subtle, as the panel to make 120

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FIONA’S FRIENDS

Hutton, John blue manatee press (14 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-936669-68-4 Fiona, the photogenic baby hippo, returns with a menagerie of baby animal

friends.

Although Fiona’s fabulous face graces only the cover and three interior pages of this compact, sturdy board book, the pulchritudinous pachyderm’s eponymous friends provide plenty of interest for animal-loving tots and toddlers. Our hippo heroine’s youthful playmates represent 10 different species and include a baby rhinoceros, a red panda, a takin (a Himalayan gnu goat), a manatee, a giraffe, a flamingo, an aardvark, a tiger, a cheetah, and a gorilla. As in Fiona’s previous board-book outing, Fiona’s Feelings, the photographs from the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden’s collection are lovingly curated and thoroughly charming. The text is simple, with each animal’s name and species in one line of a rhymed couplet: “Fiona the hippo loves to play. / Let’s meet some of her friends today! // Kendi the rhino, brave and strong. / Cora the giraffe, twisty and long.” It’s not Shakespeare, but it should delight youngsters by capitalizing on their natural fascination with exotic fauna. While Fiona is clearly a star in her own right, the other animal babies in this volume are equally irresistible. Few sights can compete with a hairless, newborn aardvark sleeping peacefully against its mother’s belly.

A winning and wonderful way to foster a child’s fascination for wildlife. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

SHARE THIS BOOK

Hutton, John Illus. by Brown, Christina blue manatee press (14 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-936669-67-7 Caregivers are encouraged to read with their babes.

“On your lap, snug and warm, / every day since I was born.”

So open the uneven rhymes that encourage family bonding through books. Author Hutton is a pediatrician, and he imparts sage early-literacy advice within the pages of the book and in a note to caregivers on the back cover. Brown’s art, which only uses pink, blue, black, white, and gray and instantly recalls the work of LeUyen Pham, shows both the joys and the sometimes-less-than-joyful realities of reading with the very young.

The most delightful spread depicts a hulking, beleaguered, |

neck-tie–wearing parent attempting to read with a tiny, squirmy, wide-eyed infant in four droll vignettes. Diverse families are represented, but the limited palette means that gray rather than shades of brown are used to signify darker complexions, which leaves some looking a little bit ill.

There is much to love here; it’s a pity it doesn’t shine in full color. (Board book. 0-2)

SO SMALL! YOSEMITE

Iwai, Melissa Yosemite Conservancy (15 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-1-930238-86-2

EARS, NOSE, EYES...

SURPRISE!

Jones, Sarah Illus. by the author blue manatee press (14 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-1-936669-62-2 Series: ROYGBaby

Use your five senses to find the clues and guess the surprise!

This latest board book in Jones’ ROYGBaby series continues to explore key concepts in a baby’s world. It prompts young readers to consider parts of their bodies—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and hands—and relate them to their five senses.

An endearing young child, brown-skinned with short, dark hair, acts as guide. The rhyming text is simple and short, building anticipation with just one line on each double-page spread, one |

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WHY THE FACE?

Jullien, Jean Illus. by the author Phaidon (32 pp.) $14.95 | Aug. 13, 2018 978-0-7148-7719-8

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A bear and a chickaree enjoy small treasures in Yosemite National Park.

As a companion to So Big! Yosemite (2017), this board book features the same question-and-answer format accompanied

by Iwai’s illustrations, this time featuring tiny natural resources found in Yosemite National Park: the chickaree squirrel, a sequoia cone, an alpine shooting star flower, and others. On each recto is the question with the object shown on its own.

On the verso of the next double-page spread is the unchanging answer (“SO SMALL!”) and the object shown with a jovial black bear for size contrast. “How small is a Sierra Nevada yellowlegged frog? // SO SMALL!” Including the bear in each answer illustration gives some sense of scale (the granite pebble is shown in the bear’s paw, for instance), but it may be difficult for toddlers to get an idea of just how small the object in question actually is without direct familiarity. It does not help that some of the objects, the frog, for instance, are shown in different sizes on different pages, and there is no comparison between familiar objects, most toddlers never having gotten up close and personal with a black bear.

This introduction to Yosemite may work well in conjunction with a visit, but as a book to learn about what is small, it misses the mark. (Board book. 1-3)

per sense. “My eyes see... / something round.” On the verso, the child’s eyes are open wide, and on the recto are the silhouettes of balloons. Most of the objects in silhouette are simple and familiar and are shown on a colored, patterned background that varies with each page turn. “My nose smells... / a yummy treat” shows popcorn, which may be the only silhouette difficult for readers to distinguish. The final double-page spread shows multiethnic children enjoying the protagonist’s birthday party, with all the clues shown before in silhouette presented in full color and labeled.

Presenting nonfiction in a fun and interesting manner for our youngest readers, this delightful board book will keep kids engaged. (Board book. 1-3)

Cartoon faces with a variety of expressions invite readers to guess what might be causing “the face.”

One on each recto, nine different faces (with different hairdos and colors and different skin tones ranging from light brown to dark brown) sport distinctive and very quirky looks. Each face is accompanied by the recurring page-filling, boldfaced question “WHY THE FACE? on the opposite page. The answer to each can be found by unfolding the gatefold pages beneath the faces in this sturdily constructed board book. The gift here is the fold-out page, as it allows children time to use their imaginations and encourages conversations between children and adult readers before unfolding the page and revealing the answer. The answers are as distinctive and quirky as the faces. The answer to a scrunched-up face is revealed to be a collection of smelly objects—from an elephant’s backside with a swarm of flies around it to a shoe— accompanied by “WHOA! THAT STINKS.” And the face with spirals for eyes? A collection of electronic screens along with a plea for “FIVE MORE MINUTES!” Allowing for differences in attitudes, two different faces—one happy, one disgusted—reveal the same answer: bugs. The accompanying text succinctly expresses the contradictory feelings: “OOH COOL! / EWW GROSS!” (In an extra-delightful touch, the feminine face is delighted by the bugs, while the masculine one is repelled by them.)

Witty, smart, and funny—kids will love it! (Board book.

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AUNTIE AND ME

Katz, Karen Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (14 pp.) $6.99 | Dec. 4, 2018 978-1-5344-2923-9 Series: Karen Katz’s Lift-the-Flap Books There are plenty of books about the love that mommy, dad, grandma, and/or grandpa feel for a child, but good luck finding a book about the special bond between a child and an aunt. This board book meets that need.

On each bright, cheery spread an aunt is shown playing with a niece or nephew. Two of the children present female; two present male. The last two scenes feature the same infant in a pink onesie. There are no mixed-race duos; each pair has similar skin tones, hair color and texture, etc. But in each case, the delight Auntie and toddler take in each other’s company is clear.

On the first page a little girl practically leaps to open the liftthe-flap door on the opposite page because, “It’s Auntie!” This pattern of a question with the answer revealed behind an easily manipulated flap is repeated for every spread. One tot asks, “What’s in your purse, Auntie?” (a toy dinosaur). Another pair is playing hide-and-seek. Excursions to a fancy restaurant and the zoo are featured in the next two scenes. The final scene—of Auntie and child reading together—ends with “A big Auntie hug and kiss!” Katz’s bold, patterned illustrations, straightforward text printed in a clean type, oversized flaps, and a diverse cast of characters make this a fine choice for celebrating this special relationship.

This book is such a pleasure it prompts the question: Can we have an uncle book next? (Board book. 1-3)

THE MISSING BOUNCY BALL

Kenison, Misti Illus. by hte author Schiffer (28 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 28, 2018 978-0-7643-5600-1 Series: Fox & Goat Mysteries

Detectives Fox and Goat use their powers of deduction to locate the titular lost bouncy ball.

Setting out with lofty goals—to teach visual discrimination and the process of elimination, with a lesson in opposites along the way—the book opens with a glimpse at the eponymous small ball boinging away. On each subsequent page the animal sleuths locate a different ball and explain which characteristics differ from the lost ball: A football is the wrong shape; a tennis ball has an incorrect texture. Its concept is swell, but the execution lags. Only one of the oppositional pairs is clearly shown, making it challenging to compare the two balls, and a vague page of “clues” at the end is useless. The case closes when a stalwart pup delivers the ball to the crying child, an ending that may satisfy observant readers who spotted the dog, ball in mouth, on earlier pages, but it will disappoint those invested in solving 122

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the riddle via clues. Equally pallid computer-generated art features a distracting background starburst motif, and the heavily stylized animals, with dark shades for Goat and awkwardly fitted props for both, edge toward uncanny. The detectives appear in a second, similarly flawed book attempting to locate a young black child’s Lost Race Car from among a barrage of vehicles.

Upon further investigation, this board book is better off skipped. (Board book. 2-4) (The Lost Race Car: 978-0-7643-5599-8)

ZOOM ALONG AT THE CONSTRUCTION SITE

Kids Can Press Illus. by Phillips, Jessica Kids Can (16 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-1-77138-886-3 Series: Zoom Along

Construction-obsessed tots will find themselves reflected in these pages.

Almost every page features a different vehicle, such as a bulldozer, an excavator, a front loader, and a dump truck, operated by a driver with a large, round die-cut hole for a head. Through the holes, little ones can see themselves in the Mylar mirrors embedded in the inside front cover and the antepenultimate page. The members of the construction crew wear orange or green work gloves, so youngsters of all skin tones can try the cosplay. One sentence of simple, friendly text in large, black letters appears on each page, while sound effects and action words (“Sweep!” and “Beep! Beep!”) float in a jauntier display type in one of the top corners. The art employs graphically simple, accessible images in friendly colors. The construction-site–specific nature of this effort combines with the plethora of vehicles to be found there to help remedy some of the flaws of Zoom Along (2018).

While nothing new, the oversized mirror makes this offering appealing. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

12 LUCKY ANIMALS A Bilingual Baby Book

Lee, Vickie Illus. by Chou, Joey Godwin Books/Henry Holt (13 pp.) $7.99 | Dec. 31, 2018 978-1-250-18424-5

An introduction to the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac in an entertaining bilingual format.

This delightful board book opens with the rat, the first animal in the repeating zodiac cycle, and ends with the pig. Each oh-so-cute animal is presented in vivid color on the left page and again in a more muted tone along with its English moniker and Standard Chinese character on the right. Pinyin and phonetic pronunciations are also included. In pinyin, “rat” is prou and phonetically as “shoo.” In addition, the traits nounced “sh˘” |

Leung hits all the right notes in this useful and appealing volume that reminds kids that gestures of physical affection aren’t always welcome and that it’s OK to say, “No.” will ladybug hug?

ascribed to a person born in a particular year (much like Western astrology) are also listed. According to the book, someone born in the Year of the Rat is “clever, curious, loves to eat and stay up late,” which readers familiar with the zodiacal principles may feel is somewhat true but is also unsurprisingly simplistic.

Little ones will love the adorable illustrations, and older ones will enjoy trying to pronounce the Mandarin Chinese words.

Developmentally en pointe, the book’s familiar animals take on striking geometric shapes that children will recognize. However, if precise pronunciation is the goal, this book is best read aloud by someone who knows basic Mandarin Chinese.

A welcome addition to the limited English–Mandarin Chinese bilingual board books available. (Bilingual board book. 1-5)

WILL LADYBUG HUG?

A sweet and simple introduction for toddlers to the ideas of consent and

boundaries.

Author/illustrator Leung hits all the right notes in this useful and appealing volume that reminds kids that gestures of physical affection aren’t always welcome and that it’s OK to say, “No.” A series of vignettes presents the simple lesson, in Q-and-A fashion, in paired two-page scenes. The first two pages introduce the protagonist, Ladybug, who “loves hugs! She hugs to say hello. She hugs to say goodbye....” The following spread poses the book’s fundamental question: “...but will her friends let Ladybug hug?” For the rest of the book, Ladybug asks permission of her cute animal friends to hug them, enjoying several consensual hugs and being an understanding friend when she learns that “Sheep does not want to hug, and that’s okay.” The artwork is clean and simple, the backgrounds colorful, and the characters charming and expressive. In the denouement, Ladybug’s friends gather to see her off at the airport (in the final illustration, she flies away on her own power, sans airplane). “Does Ladybug want a super group hug? Yes.” Everyone clinches but Sheep, and that’s apparently still OK; no one gets hurt feelings.

Sheep does accept a high-five, suggesting that, hugging preferences aside, Sheep is a part of, and not apart from, the group of friends.

Clear, endearing, and important. (Board book. 1-4)

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Litton, Jonathan Illus. by Elliott, Thomas Doubleday (22 pp.) $8.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-0-525-64877-2 Series: Baby 101

A useful book in the “science for babies” genre that, for once, isn’t way over baby’s head...or shoulders, knees, and toes, either.

Some science board books for toddlers are so relentlessly ambitious they seem aimed at caregivers hellbent on producing the next baby Einstein rather than at kids, but anatomy is a subject in which most any child takes a natural interest. New arrivals to the world typically begin their explorations by investigating their own bodies first. Fittingly, the first body parts named herein are the aforementioned head, shoulders, knees, and toes of the classic children’s song. As an adorably rendered, racially diverse cast of toddlers models each body part under discussion, simple, clear, and enthusiastic statements guide children from the outer extremities to the mysteries within. “Your body is amazing! Think of all the things it can do... // You have a lot of bones!”—as a lab-coated professional X-rays the chest of a child, revealing the ribcage—“They support and protect your body.” The book introduces the brain, muscles (they “help your body move”), and skin (it “keeps your insides in”). The lungs and cardiovascular system are described in easily grasped terms, as is the alimentary canal, the concept of taking energy from food, and eliminating waste (potty-trainees, take note). A description of the senses and sense organs follows.

Instructive and not overwhelming—just right! (Board book. 1-4)

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Leung, Hilary Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (40 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 30, 2018 978-1-338-21560-1

ANATOMY FOR BABIES

ARCHITECTURE FOR BABIES

Litton, Jonathan Illus. by Elliott, Thomas Doubleday (22 pp.) $8.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-0-525-64880-2 Series: Baby 101

Think architecture isn’t for little ones? This informational board book distills architectural concepts into manageable pieces.

Throughout this well-organized text, short sentences clearly define various architectural terms, informing readers that “an architect plans a building.” Topics include architectural history, with illustrations of an early hut, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Colosseum; varieties of construction materials; and different architectural styles. Art and words smoothly blend to make information accessible but without talking down to child readers; a page with the text “Some buildings are made of stone” has a small image of interlocking stones above a medieval castle so readers can visualize how they form a wall. Larger, bolder type nicely emphasizes building-related words. The narrative collapses slightly when naming “classical” and “modern” |

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Patane’s scenes are striking enough, the black animals and foreground settings making for striking contrast with the scenery in the background. i love you little one

styles along with a single example (the Taj Mahal for the former and the Sydney Opera House for the latter); it’s dubious if it will be enough information to be conceptually meaningful. Pleasant cartoon art in cheery colors and the technically precise buildings will draw readers, especially a single portrait-oriented page that captures the “fairy tale” ornateness of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

The book ends with two children of color (all the humans are racially diverse) creating a blueprint for a block tower, followed by a sturdy flap revealing the towering structure, bringing it all back to a child’s level.

Architecture really is for kids! This is a surprisingly informative and accessible concept book. (Board book. 2-4)

BOTANY FOR BABIES

Litton, Jonathan Illus. by Elliott, Thomas Doubleday (22 pp.) $8.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-0-525-64878-9 Series: Baby 101

Another attempt to simplify a complex topic for babies or toddlers.

From the first, Elliott’s stylized plants all have the look of the plants children draw in kindergarten—cheerful, but not scientifically accurate—and seem calculated to emphasize a sense of bounty rather than order. One spread is littered with seeds, but only seven are labeled—unless some are rocks or pebbles?

Three following spreads try to explain the difference between roots and shoots, utilizing cross-section views to illustrate belowground growth. Without using the term, photosynthesis is summarized: “Leaves use sunlight to create energy and food for plants to grow.” Similarly, the statement “Bees take pollen from flower to flower so the plants can make seeds” just scratches the surface. The picture of a smiling oversized bee accumulating pollen at the bottoms of all six feet does little to clarify. After a discussion of fruit and fruit seeds, the final spread shows two children (a child of color and a white-presenting child) gazing in amazement at a flower bud that blooms when a flap is lifted. Altogether a confusing disappointment, making this an unfortunate outlier in the Baby 101 series. Zoology for Babies, published simultaneously, is more successful. The topic is more familiar, and animals are more easily sorted by common features and habitat. Just don’t believe its ending proclamation, “Now you’re a zoologist!”

Overreaches and oversimplifies at the same time. (Board book. 1-4) (Zoology for Babies: 978-0-525-64879-6)

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I LOVE YOU LITTLE ONE

Lloyd, Clare Illus. by Patane, Claire DK Publishing (18 pp.) $12.99 | Dec. 4, 2018 978-1-4654-8016-3

This board-book entry in the competitive-loving genre features silhouettes of animal parent-child pairs against variously colored nighttime scenes.

Each spread begins with the same question, presumably voiced by the child: “How much do you love me?” The parent’s response reaches for lyricism, not always successfully, and always includes a comparative statement. “I love you more than the moon’s glowing light,” says the parent rabbit in the first spread, while the elephant parent avows, “I love you more than all the stars at night,” in the second, establishing the rhyming pattern. Other animals include whales, monkeys, penguins, owls, wolves, and cats; each animal in the pair is labeled with the generic for the adult and the specialized term for that animal’s young for the child. Patane’s scenes are striking enough, the black animals and foreground settings making for striking contrast with the scenery in the background. Lloyd’s verse scans fine, but it can seem desperate, as when the owl responds, “I love you more than the fluffiest feathers,” in order to rhyme with the penguin’s “I love you more than snowy weather.” The book is weighted down by its final page, which holds a battery that allows readers to illuminate the moon on the cover with tiny LED bulbs when an icon is pressed. Despite this gimmick, this book feels little different from many of its peers.

Pretty but ephemeral. (Board book. 1-3)

BEDTIME

Illus. by Loiselet, Camille Auzou Publishing (10 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-2-7338-5914-8 This interactive French import illustrates a number of common bedtime routines.

The interactions begin on the cover, where a white bunny in green PJs lies on its bed, and children can slide the curtain across the window, changing the scene from day to night; bunny will also be awake or asleep accordingly. Cute and friendlylooking anthropomorphic animals describe their typical evenings on the interior. A little tiger chooses a story, brushes its teeth, puts on its pajamas, and slides under the covers. Readers choose which of two pairs of pajamas it should wear by sliding the sturdy tab. In another scene a bird family readies for bed, with Mommy singing a lullaby and Daddy reading a book. Again, readers are asked to slide the tab to choose one of two princess stories. A sheep tells children, “I count sheep to help me sleep.”

Children can spin a wheel to see sheep jumping over a gate. As |

a koala sleeps cuddling a raccoon, “Outside, the moon and stars shine bright.” By sliding the tab little ones can make the stars shine. On the last spread some illustrations depict bedtime objects—a soft toy (here called Lovely), a pillow, slippers, and a bed. Other illustrations ask a question, with the answer revealed by lifting a flap.

Nothing new but sweet enough. (Board book. 1-3)

The progression of the story from plans to moving in is logical and believable, a thoughtful touch. It’s really MacNeill’s skillful hand with the detailed illustrations that sets this one apart.

The pages incorporate graph paper, the front and back covers have ruled edging, and the large numbers of the countdown are filled with tiny patterns that echo the larger illustrations.

Perhaps the most delightful of these details is that the final two pages point out to readers that a heart is hidden on each page, encouraging a seek-and-find reread. The only reason to raise an eyebrow is to the scale of a couple illustrations: If it’s truly a mouse house that the animals are building, then aren’t the bear-sized stairs (built by six bears) rather inconvenient?

The charming mixed-media illustrations provide so much visual interest readers probably won’t mind, and the ageappropriate rhyming text is a sweet accompaniment.

The beautiful, inviting illustrations ensure readers will keep coming back, finding new details to delight in upon each revisit. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

DECKED OUT FOR CHRISTMAS!

Long, Ethan Illus. by the author abramsappleseed (20 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 16, 2018 978-1-4197-2305-6

ONE HOUSE

MacNeill, Sarah Illus. by the author Orca (26 pp.) $9.95 | Sep. 25, 2018 978-1-4598-1659-6 A handy group of creatures comes together to build a house for the neighborhood mouse.

Step by step, each contributing critter helps with the construction of a new house, from the 10 toucans drawing up the plans to the five snails who are “driving nails.” The countdown starts with those 10 toucans and works its way down to one, enumerating animals and steps along the way. All of the pages include simple rhyming phrases that read tightly and naturally. |

IN WINTER / EN INVIERNO

Madinabeitia Manso, Susana Illus. by Momohara, Emily Hanako blue manatee press (14 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-936669-66-0 Series: Seasons

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What are these helpful mice decorating? That’s the question this board book poses readers.

Each illustration is accompanied by three or four words of text (“First the lights! / Then, the garland!”) with further hints in the snowy scenes. Long focuses on decorations that even young children may notice early on in the seasonal frenzy. Two of the mouse elfs might be male; they have green-and-white stocking caps perched between their ears with matching green-striped tops slightly flared at the bottom. The third mouse elf sports a red-and-white hat and scarf with a green top and longer red skirt and seems to be female. They all have red socks and curly elf feet. Regardless, they throw themselves equally into their tasks, opening boxes labeled “decorations,” hanging lights and garland, juggling ornaments. Not until Page 13 do readers start to wonder what exactly they are decorating. Why do they need snacks and sunglasses or a map, air freshener, and fuzzy dice?

The mystery is solved on the next-to-last spread when a Santa polar bear appears in a festively decorated sleigh. Adult readers will appreciate the visual humor: The star perched on a coil is made of cheese; the slogan on the mug proclaims “COCOA is the new COFFEE.” Older toddlers will enjoy the clever mouse antics and surprise ending.

A fresh take on well-worn traditions. (Board book. 2-4)

A bilingual Spanish-English board book about winter.

Having already introduced the other seasons, this book about winter concludes the series (In Summer / En Verano, 2018, etc.). Photographs show a brown child with a cute tuft of curly hair and a colorful knit sweater demonstrating the things the preschooler will do when winter comes. As the child poses against a light-green knit-textured background, the accompanying text follows a repeating pattern: “In winter...I am going to keep warm with my scarf and mittens!” or “I am going to catch snowflakes with my tongue!” followed by a question addressed to readers: “How are you going to keep warm?” or “How many are you going to catch?” The Spanish text follows the same format: “En invierno...¡Voy a abrigarme con bufanda y manoplas!” and “¡Voy atrapar copos de nieve con la lengua!”

(Spanish-speaking readers will notice the grammar mistake— it should be “¡Voy a atrapar copos de nieve con la lengua!”)

These statements are followed by the questions in the Spanish equivalent. In the end readers are encouraged to reflect on what they like about winter.

A sweet book that does the job. (Board book. 2-4)

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I LOVE TO GOBBLE YOU UP!

Magsamen, Sandra Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (10 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-338-11092-0 Series: Made With Love

This short, sweet, and silly Thanksgiving puppet book is no turkey.

Despite a title suggestive of a treatise on unrepentant cannibalism, this book should prove a read-aloud delight for caregivers and toddlers alike. Seemingly indestructible, it features plush turkey feathers that extend from the top of the book to adorn the turkey depicted on the cover and on each succeeding two-page set piece. The message is simple: “If kisses were gobbles, I’d gobble you up! // I’d gobble your nose... // and your cute little toes.” The brief text includes only two additional sentences, with a total of five additional “gobbles.” “Gobbles” may be read aloud, turkey-style, or while miming munching of the relevant extremities; either way, much giggling should ensue. Author/illustrator Magsamen’s artwork is done in faux-needlecraft style, as though assembled from pieces of felt stitched to the backgrounds, and embellished by copious hearts. The two turkey protagonists are rendered with a nonrealistic, cartoonish simplicity, with blank expressions that nonetheless imply affection, curiosity, and playfulness. They’d look right at home in a Thanksgiving episode of South Park. Varied compositions, with turkey No. 2 in the foreground or on a distant barn roof, or turkey No. 1 standing on grass, then on a fence, and then backside toward readers, create an impressive sense of action while keeping turkey No. 1 firmly attached to its feathers.

Delightfully delicious. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

MAMA LOVES HER SILLY GOOSE!

Magsamen, Sandra Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (10 pp.) $6.99 | Dec. 26, 2018 978-1-338-30577-7 A selection of five nursery rhymes and songs embellished with Magsamen’s signature characters, patterns, and faux stitch-work.

With a tall, skinny trim size (9 inches high by 4 inches wide), each double-page spread presents one stanza or verse of a classic rhyme, from the chorus to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to the first verse of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” In muted pastel hues, a variety of cute critters act out each verse in illustrations that mix spot art and large tableaux. Words are handlettered in white, with select, highlighted words reproduced 126

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with the illustrator’s trademark prints, so “Jack” and “Jill” appear in multicolored, patterned letters, for instance. These embellished words crowd out the art in some spreads, particularly “Hey, Diddle, Diddle.” Most of the classics are presented straight, but “Humpty Dumpty” gets comfort from parents rather than a hapless response from all the king’s horses and men. This is emotionally satisfying, but it also plays havoc with the rhyme’s scansion: “Mommy and Daddy knew what to do... / They gave him lots of hugs and kisses, too!”

While tall in trim size, it’s short on content. (Board book.

6 mos.-2)

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, YOU’RE MY STAR

Magsamen, Sandra Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (12 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 31, 2018 978-1-338-24312-3

This heart-shaped book comes with a star-shaped finger puppet.

There exists a subgenre of children’s books so exceedingly gushy and effusive it seems clear the text was written for starryeyed adults rather than for the children to whom they read the books. This die-cut, valentine-shaped board book is a case in point. For the most part, it reads like a mawkish love letter from caregiver to child, heaping on the hyperbole to a degree that feels almost unctuous. To be fair, of course, parenthood is one of the few human experiences so profound that those new to the role might find themselves in total agreement with the sentiments somewhat cloyingly expressed herein: “Twinkle, twinkle, little one; / your precious life has just begun. // You fill the world with hope and light, // my special child you shine so bright.” Perhaps it’s best that this book is intended for an audience too young to fully grasp its meaning; that sort of praise could lead to some seriously swelled heads. Fortunately, the highfalutin doggerel is undercut by the emergence of a smiling, yellow, star-shaped finger puppet from a hole in the center of the book; wagging this star at youngsters while reading aloud makes the experience just silly enough to counteract the treacle. The text ends on a down-to-earth note: “Twinkle, twinkle, you’re my star; // I love you just the way you are!” Bright colors and hearts abound.

A bit cringey, but who doesn’t love finger puppets?

(Board book. 6 mos.-2)

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The cartoonish illustrations are charming and rich in detail, and they are rendered in a lush, pleasing palette with a refreshingly brown-skinned Santa as the star. all aboard! the christmas train

YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE Magsamen, Sandra Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (6 pp.) $7.99 | Dec. 26, 2018 978-1-338-30576-0

ALL ABOARD! THE CHRISTMAS TRAIN

Mara, Nichole Illus. by Kolb, Andrew abramsappleseed (10 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 16, 2018 978-1-4197-3295-9

Five cars of holiday fun and snowy scenery—now if only Santa can find his boot!

This delightful, non-narrative excursion unfolds—literally— in a sturdy volume that extends into a yuletide train over 4 feet long. As with Mara and Kolb’s first rail outing, All Aboard! (2017), once the concertina pages are folded out, each one is a unique car on the train, with the exterior of each lifting up to reveal the goings-on within. Die-cut windows, bright colors, holiday decor, elves, toys, penguins, pies, and Santa Claus make this a visually engaging read for those Christmas celebrants among the preschooler set. As the gingerbread engineer drives the train, Santa goes searching for his missing boot, which takes him through every car on the train. Questions and activities accompany each scene: “Can you find two snowflakes that match?” “Can you find a toy that zooms? One that spins?” Reversing the extended pages, meanwhile, reveals the snow-covered countryside past which the train is chugging, with skiers to count, snowmen to spot, hills, houses, and water. With so much to see, seek, and answer, this book has a ton of interactive appeal. The |

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MY FIRST MANDARIN WORDS WITH GORDON & LI LI

McSween, Michele Wong Illus. by Doan, Nam Cartwheel/Scholastic (24 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 30, 2018 978-1-338-25372-6

Pandas Gordon and Li Li learn common terms in English and Chinese.

In this apparent compilation of earlier bilingual books by McSween (Gordon & Li Li: Words for Everyday, 2009; Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin, 2010; and Gordon & Li Li Count in Mandarin, 2010), the two pandas introduce vocabulary in three separate chapters: Everyday Words, Animals, and Counting. Each page covers four different concepts with, for each, the word in English, the translation in simplified Chinese characters, an illustration of one or both of the pandas, the corresponding pinyin, and a phonetic pronunciation of the Mandarin. The crowded layout, with eight concepts on a two-page spread, discourages focus and learning. The ad hoc phonetic guidance offers little help to readers unfamiliar with the language—printed accents give no functional clue as to tonal differences—and those familiar with pinyin will not need it. With the pandas prominently featured in each image, sometimes obscuring the vocabulary item, the boldly colored digital illustrations do not convey concepts particularly effectively. The text overall reads as a mashup of three books, with no overarching trajectory and the phrase “Bye-bye!” occurring one-third of the way into the book.

A dearth of bilingual Chinese-English books for children means those looking to introduce young readers to Mandarin will be glad that this book, though quite flawed, exists—but they may prefer the stand-alone offerings.

(Board book. 6 mos.-8)

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A familiar song repackaged as a board book doubles as a finger puppet.

Many a caregiver has sung this refrain to a newborn or toddler, ignoring the decidedly sad lyrics of the original. Magsamen lays claim and sweetens it up. She uses only the chorus and changes the last line to “I’ll give you lots of hugs... / and kisses every day” instead of the expected “Please don’t take my sunshine away.” Her cheery artwork, reminiscent of applique, recalls the song’s country-music roots and is anything but sad. The pages are decorated with hearts and cuddly-looking caregiver-child animal pairs—foxes, skunks with sunny yellow umbrellas, bunnies, raccoons, and squirrels. The thick, heartshaped pages include a circular die-cut hole through which readers might poke the smiling felt sun puppet attached to the back cover. A finger inserted from the back makes the sun wiggle and will capture even the youngest baby’s attention. The puppet feature does not obstruct the initial page turns, but when a toddler says, “Do it again” (as they doubtless will), quickly repositioning the finger puppet is somewhat challenging.

A fun but inessential novelty, as much toy as book.

(Board book. 18 mos.-3)

cartoonish illustrations are charming and rich in detail, and it is rendered in a lush, pleasing palette with a refreshingly brownskinned Santa as its star.

Train-loving tots may fancy this Christmas ride all year long. (Board book. 2-6)

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The teddy bear, with its cream-colored yoga pants, stitched-on smile, and constantly closed eyes, is a nonjudgmental and race-neutral role model. mindful poses for little yogis

MINDFUL POSES FOR LITTLE YOGIS

Meddy Teddy Photos by the author Random House (26 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 9, 2018 978-1-63565-129-4

Toddlers are invited to imitate 21 basic yoga poses modeled by a serene teddy bear that is also available for purchase.

Only the poses are shown. There are no hints about how to achieve the pose (getting into pigeon or eagle position using only the illustration may prove difficult), modify the posture, or transition between poses. Nor is there any discussion of meditation or the philosophy behind yoga practice. The uncluttered, child-friendly design overshadows these concerns. Caregivers can find instructional information in other, more detailed manuals or videos or on the Meddy Teddy website, where a bear that can be bent into yoga positions is sold. The book is designed to help young children recognize and perhaps try the poses, even if they do not have the poseable bear. The teddy bear, with its cream-colored yoga pants, stitched-on smile, and constantly closed eyes, is a nonjudgmental and race-neutral role model.

Most poses are shown on a single page with “Upward-facing dog” and “Forward-fold split” each occupying a double-page spread. Each posture stands out clearly against a solid-colored background. The designers avoid the use of confusing metaphors, labeling each pose with the most commonly used term for that position.

Despite the commercial tie-in, this is a worthy and useful addition to the growing list of books for young yogis.

(Board book. 2-4)

I LOOK UP TO… MICHELLE OBAMA

Membrino, Anna Illus. by Burke, Fatti Random House (22 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-0-525-57954-0 Series: I Look Up to . . .

An earnest board-book introduction to a strong female role model for young feminists.

Actually, this book is more for caregivers eager to raise a feminist than it is for children. Membrino addresses her readers familiarly, equally casually referring to her subject as simply “Michelle” following the first-page introduction. She focuses on the former first lady’s key messages: working hard, being healthy, having fun, getting an education. In the patterned presentation, a sentence from Membrino about how Obama lives her values is followed by a quote. Burke’s vivid, playful illustrations use bold colors against patterned backgrounds. Obama is almost always dressed in bright pink. The illustrations get her stance and posture right; her eyes are exaggerated, looking directly at the reader. Her famous arms are proudly flexed on the page 128

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about “BEING HEALTHY.” The type uses contrasting colors and all-caps for emphasis. A companion book, I Look Up to...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, follows the same format. Again, Burke nails Ginsburg’s posture; her eyes look exactly like Obama’s, but she gazes from square-framed glasses. Ginsburg also wears her iconic decorative collar in every illustration, even when she is shown exercising.

Will be welcomed by caregivers looking for heroines to inspire young children. (Board book. 2-4) (: I Look Up to…Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 978-0-525-57952-6)

HELLO, LOVE!

Miura, Taro Illus. by the author Chronicle (22 pp.) $6.99 | Dec. 24, 2018 978-1-4521-7087-9 Winsome animals greet each other from across the gutter in this Japanese import.

Two creatures meander about on opposite sides of a doublepage spread until a page turn joins them at the gutter, suddenly bringing two monkeys’ hands together and two goldfish face to face. Even readers who might normally gloss over book design will notice and appreciate the fresh way Miura has used the book’s layout to connect the friends. Circle-headed humans join the mix on the final three spreads, with a beguiling child cuddling cheek to cheek with Mommy before Daddy also appears at the lovefest on the following spread. (These humans have pale skin and brown hair.) All the most elemental features are exaggerated on the flat, cartoonlike representations, all sitting on minimally detailed backgrounds that draw the eye to the duos. White ducks silhouetted against rich blue have enormous golden bills, pointy little tails, and vague lines that suggest wings. Unfortunately, while it works visually, it fails textually.

Each pair has an original salutation to share with each other, but the resulting statements are so clunky that it’s a struggle to read aloud: “Fish swim HELLO! / ...by touching noses.” Also problematic is the confusion about which animal greetings are fabricated and which are real. Some are accurate, such as the elephants that shake trunks, but ducks do not “quack HI! / ...by tapping beaks.”

Although this pretty book holds a sweet sentiment, it’s not substantial enough to satisfy. (Board book. 1-3)

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WHO AM I?

Mory, Tristan & Babin, Stéphanie Twirl/Chronicle (22 pp.) $12.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-2-40800-435-4 Sturdy, slide-and-see puzzles introduce toddlers to a few favorite animals in

SUPER POOPER AND WHIZZ KID Potty Power!

Moyle, Sabrina Illus. by Moyle, Eunice abramsappleseed (24 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 14, 2018 978-1-4197-3157-0

A super-duper primer for that critical toddler milestone, potty training.

Encourage toddlers to embark on that next, great adventure with this practical, funny guide to toilet training. Two masked heroes, a dog and a cat clad in capes and underpants and armed with rolls of toilet paper, teach children what to do “when you need to go #1 or #2. / That’s secret code for pee and poo.” The pastel colors are warm and bright; the anthropomorphized pee drop and poo pile are instantly recognizable and, well, kind of cute. Our protagonists learn to recognize the signals (“a rumble in my bumble...or a dance in my pants”—here the “pee-pee dance” is lovingly, hilariously rendered) and act fast. They race to the toilet, pull down their pants, sit down and wait (“the hardest part”). But good |

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PEEK-A-WHO?

Mroziewicz, Elsa Illus. by the author Minedition (22 pp.) $11.99 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-988-8341-57-3 Just when you thought it couldn’t be done, there’s a new twist—ahem, fold— on a classic guessing game! Read the clues, then open triangular flaps to see animals hidden beneath.

Folded into a robust, surprisingly compact triangle, the book opens into a diamond shape with a simple, animal-sound– related hint, such as “Who says MOO?” printed across. Pull down one flap and then the other to reveal a charming red cow.

Giving readers two separate flaps per spread extends the delicious anticipation of discovering who’s hiding, making it a slow, almost theatrical reveal. Underneath are elegant, painterly animals in bold, matte colors embellished with wispy dashes and tiny dots in contrasting colors, all of whom gaze directly toward viewers, making the book equally useful for playing a spirited game of peekaboo as well as guess who. No mere novelty, the flaps are integral to Mroziewicz’s animals, folding upward into perky ears on an impressionistic cat’s face or down for dangling turkey legs. Putting the flaps back in place is fiddly but easy enough, though the book’s eye-catching triangular shape makes shelving difficult. Each of the 11 animals has its own evocative typeface and accent color. Warm pink flaps open to a zany patchwork piggie; the snake’s “HISSSSSSS” is printed in wavering, slithery type.

Caregivers will flip over the innovative flaps, warm animal art, and opportunities to interact with little listeners.

(Board book. 6 mos.-3)

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this French import.

In a book designed to be operated by rough, young hands, several animal friends hide, more or less, in plain sight.

“Who am I?” the cover queries, as two big eyes peer out of a nondescript explosion of yellow, with a few black, ambiguous lines. Pull on the easy-to-grip tab, and two ears, a nose, and a mouth slide up into place, revealing the unmistakable features of a cat whose tail, readers will note slinks around to the book’s back cover. Inside, the front cover’s reverse page sports featureless masses of tan, orange, and brown. The facing page asks, “Hoo, hoo... / Who is awake when night comes?”

Pull the tab again: “It’s me, the owl!” The book goes on to present a frog, a bear, a tortoise, a snail, a rabbit, a fox, an elephant, and a duck, each with an appropriate animal sound and one easily assimilated fact per creature. The final image is of an egg, from which a chick hatches when a helping toddler hand slides the page open. There is much here to captivate the youngest readers: interactive tactile activity, animal sounds to replicate, and questions that can all be answered in the repeating format, “It’s me, the frog [or bear, tortoise, snail, etc.].”

The elegant simplicity of the artwork, content, and format should make this a repeatable favorite for kids and caregivers alike. (Board book. 1-3)

things come to those who wait (“Like lollipops! And gold stars! And big hugs!”), so caregivers should be prepared to deliver when the mission is accomplished. Once kids master pooping and peeing in the potty, the super duo assures them, “Your parents will be so proud! / Because who doesn’t want a superhero in the family? // And you’ll earn Big Boy and Big Girl underpants!” Jubilation and wonderfully bad bathroom puns ensue, followed by reminders to wipe, flush, and wash those hands with soap.

A direct and uproarious way to start a critical conversation. (Board book. 2-4)

POOR LITTLE RABBIT

Mühle, Jörg Illus. by the author Trans. by Chidgey, Catherine Gecko Press (10 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 1, 2018 978-1-77657-177-2

Little Rabbit has fallen over and injured his elbow. It hurts!

Having helped to put Little Rabbit to bed (Tickle My Ears, 2016) and also to give him a bath (Bathtime for Little Rabbit, 2017), in this new installment readers are now asked to help Little Rabbit feel better. Tapping into a toddler’s developing sense of empathy, the author talks directly to children as he guides them through the actions that will help Little Rabbit. As the little white rabbit with a tear on his face shows off a bruised, red elbow, readers are asked to “Try blowing on it—wfff, wfff, wfff.” With the turn of the page, readers see their blowing didn’t help; Little Rabbit is bleeding. As he cries even harder, the author suggests children put a bandaid on. Turn the page, and—“Perfect!”—the crying has subsided somewhat, but a little more comforting is needed. A “magic rhyme,” perhaps: “Rock-a-bye bunny, in the treetop.”

The hurt bunny is still crying so readers are asked to stroke his ears. “Thank you, that worked!” Now it’s time to wipe away the tears and blow his nose. “Very good!” The only thing remaining is to brush off the dirt and send Little Rabbit on his way. Little Rabbit’s feelings are so apparent in the expressive cartoon illustrations that young readers will easily connect with him.

A sweetly engaging book powered simply by imagination and a turn of the page. (Board book. 1-3)

LOIS LOOKS FOR BOB AT HOME

Nosy Crow Illus. by Turley, Gerry Nosy Crow/Candlewick (12 pp.) $8.99 | Dec. 24, 2018 978-1-5362-0254-0 Lois, a winsome kitty, looks for Bob, her unlikely bird companion, in this clever lift-the-flap board book.

The black-and-white cat with expressive, large yellow eyes looks “behind the guitar,” “on the table,” “in the cupboard,” “by the coats,” and “on the windowsill” before finally finding Bob “on the armchair.” Behind each object, printed on a shaped gatefold, is a different animal—just not the bird hinted at on the cover until the last. When the animals are revealed, they are identified by a proper name rather than by the generic name of the animal; this is followed by a comment or question. The narrator announces that it’s “Daphne!” (a mouse) inside the cupboard and then asks, “Do you think she’s supposed to be eating that cheese?” Young children who are just learning to recognize common animals may initially be confused by a bunny named “Clifford” or a fish 130

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named “Eugene,” opening up an opportunity for adult-child conversation that’s reinforced by the follow-up question. A companion volume, Lois Looks for Bob at the Park, follows the same format. The sturdy flaps are large, interesting shapes that are also easily manipulated. The illustrations are clear and uncluttered, tuxedo cat Lois standing out against muted, pastel backgrounds.

Best for sharing one-on-one with little ones. (Board book.

1-4) (Lois Looks for Bob at the Park: 978-1-5362-0255-7)

HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE

Illus. by Quintanilla, Hazel Flowerpot Press (14 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-1-4867-1564-0

One of a quartet of board books of familiar nursery rhymes.

Cover images of a smiling, spotted cartoon cow jumping over a beaming moon stand out against a dark background. Liberal use of patterning, such as a subtle blue stripe in the night sky, gives the otherwise flat illustrations depth. A view of a cat sleeping in a window on the first, wordless page hints at what is to come, and sure enough it takes out its fiddle by the third double-page spread. Companion nighttime title Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star uses a similar, appropriately dark palette. Also publishing simultaneously are The Itsy Bitsy Spider and Little Bo Peep, both lighter and brighter than the first two but with the same smiling animal faces and decorative patterns in collagelike pictures. Quintanilla avoids questions of race and gender by using animal characters throughout, making Bo Peep an Old English sheepdog instead of a shepherdess. All four texts are true to the original rhymes, without embellishments or added verses, making them a reasonable way to introduce toddlers to the traditional rhymes. However, the hefty sticker prices make them rather expensive additions to a toddler’s library, especially since many caregivers can probably recite them from memory. A more comprehensive book of nursery rhymes such as My Very First Mother Goose edited by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells (1996) would be a better investment.

For settings that would value the rhymes in separate packages, sturdy, serviceable efforts. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

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The cartoonlike pets aren’t the cutest critters on the block, but it’s a genuine pleasure to watch pleading eyes and drooping bodies transform into perky, effervescent animals. pet the pets

PET THE PETS A Lift-the-flap Book

Reul, Sarah Lynne Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (18 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 14, 2018 978-1-5344-0939-2

MINE! A Counting Book About Sharing Rivadeneira, Caryn Illus. by Gulliver, Amanda Beaming Books (28 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 14, 2018 978-1-5064-4679-0

As the title and subtitle suggest, this rhyming board book depicts countable items for a beach picnic as children learn about sharing with friends.

From one to 10, each double-page spread features a child readying a quantity of supplies for the culminating beach party.

Rivadeneira’s rhyming quatrains are broken into two couplets across two spreads each, which sometimes awkwardly breaks up the rhyme, and readers stopping to count the objects on the pages will lose the rhythm. The story’s final four pages include the full quatrain without breaks, making for a tighter read-aloud. Most of the stanzas have a solid cadence, but some are forced: “I have five ripe mangoes. / I sprinkle them |

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BABY SEE, BABY DO Lift & Look in the Mirror!

Rogge, Robie Photos by Hale, Jennifer Chronicle (20 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 7, 2018 978-1-4521-6890-6

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A collection of needy pets “all feel better” with a little help from their child reader friends.

It’s a rough day to be a pet! There’s an animal in mild crisis on each double-page spread. Poor kitty’s yarn is a total mess.

But never fear! Youngsters are told exactly how to touch the page (“swirl the yarn to wind it”), and with a gratifying lift of the flap, the kitten is now snuggling a “nice and neat” ball of wool. A direct address from the pet praising readers for the assistance that “saved the day!” taps perfectly into a toddler’s deep desire to help. Among the instructions are a wide variety of ways to interact with pages, and while some, such as “open,” and “push,” will be familiar, others such as “pat” and “pinch” may build vocabulary. (These activities are mostly imaginary, as the physical interactions are confined to lifting flaps.) With their sketchily drawn bodies, the cartoonlike pets aren’t the cutest critters on the block, but it’s a genuine pleasure to watch pleading eyes and drooping bodies transform into perky, effervescent animals. If the concept is a sweet surprise, the book itself is not. The dots of its halftone printing are distractingly apparent, and several of the curved, not-particularly-substantial flaps catch and crease. Additionally, flaps and backgrounds share the same deeply saturated colors, making the flaps’ edges frustratingly difficult to find.

Although the book’s production quality leaves something to be desired, toddlers will adore helping out their new animal buddies. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

with salt. // I have six avocadoes. / One’s too mushy (not my fault!).” Gulliver’s illustrations are softly drawn and include nice details that readers will enjoy pointing out: playful cats and dogs, adults busy in the background, bugs on the coffee mugs. The illustration with five mangoes could confuse younger readers, however, as there are actually six items (one mango is cut in half). The final two pages are a note to parents about children learning how to share. It’s a thoughtful inclusion even if the book mostly focuses on counting things and not so much on sharing.

So-so rhymes with charming illustrations, this one doesn’t stand out for either teaching counting or sharing.

(Board book. 1-3)

This board book features photographs of babies’ faces displaying basic emotions and movements.

From smiling to sad, crawling to stretching, this book covers all of the baby basics. Each two-page spread features the same baby on each side, the verso a wide shot and the recto a close-up headshot in a circular frame. Taking the title seriously, the book’s magnetic, wrap-around cover includes a mirror inside that remains open even while turning pages. Though this feature may be cumbersome for caregivers balancing a bouncing baby and the book at the same time, it capitalizes on babies’ love of self and encourages readers and listeners to practice the faces illustrated on each page. Pages that feature a movement (“Baby waves”) include an overlay of lines that emphasize the action (curved lines around a waving hand), which serves as a hint to readers to act out the movement and draw attention to that part of the photograph. In a sweet wink to readers, the baby on the last two pages of the book is reading this very book, as if to show that it really can be enjoyed by its intended audience. The biggest flaw here is that this type of book is a dime a dozen, both in terms of cute photographs and Mylar mirrors. Babes pictured are a diverse range.

While it doesn’t do anything truly original, it’s saved by the mirror play and adorable featured babies. (Board book.

6-18 mos.)

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The charming illustrations of the toddler hippo, buried beneath preposterously thick layerings of scarf, should provoke happy giggles. bundle up

I LOVE YOU THROUGH AND THROUGH AT CHRISTMAS, TOO!

Rossetti-Shustak, Bernadette Illus. by Church, Caroline Jayne Cartwheel/Scholastic (26 pp.) $8.99 | Sep. 25, 2018 978-1-338-23010-9 Loving assurance comes wrapped in holiday sentiments.

Church’s round-faced toddler will be instantly recognizable from previous titles thanks to the tiny eyes and toothless smile. Whether inside or out, both the child and a teddy-bear companion sport bright red Santa hats. The gentle, firstperson text assures this winsome toddler of the narrator’s unconditional love while the text evokes both the frenetic activity of Christmas preparations and the ideals of the season. “[S]hopping and wrapping / making and baking” are balanced by “I love you because you are patient and kind, // merry and bright, // helping and giving.” Sometimes the text rhymes (“I love you with bells and wreaths, // garland and trees”), but instead of forcing consistent rhymes, Rossetti-Shustak relies on rhythm and pacing to deliver her message. Muted greens, russet reds, and tawny backgrounds scattered with stars and snowflakes give the illustrations an old-fashioned feel. The sturdy binding and padded covers will survive rough handling. There’s not a real story here; just an attitude of unmitigated acceptance. The child has light skin and a few wisps of brown hair.

Good for a holiday snuggle with a little one. (Board book.

1-3)

CAN YOU FIND IT?

Sajnani, Surya Illus. by the author Words & Pictures (20 pp.) $12.95 | Aug. 14, 2018 978-1-91027-774-4 Can you find the smiling purple eggplant in a page filled with different shades of purple? The basketball in a

similarly orange page?

Each double-page spread in this large search-and-find book focuses on a different color, hiding everyday objects for children to find. “Can you find it in...yellow?” Six different objects, animate and inanimate, shown on each right hand page are hidden on the opposite one, concealed in the asymmetrical, complex, mosaiclike pieces of different shapes and in many vibrant shades of that one color. For yellow, they are a bee, a slice of lemon, a block of cheese, a duck, a banana, and a pencil. A bonus question at the bottom of the page shows one shape—for yellow, a diamond—for readers to find as well. Although most of the objects are familiar to young children, their shapes are spiky and angular, in keeping with 132

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the mosaic-inspired composition on the verso, which makes them challenging but interesting to spot. The darker colors, especially black, are especially difficult, but the other pages are vibrant and colorful. The extra-large size of this book facilitates the game but may make it difficult to fit in standard board-book shelves.

Challenging, fascinating, and fun, this book is entertaining for adults and children to enjoy together. (Board book. 2-4)

BUNDLE UP

Sattler, Jennifer Illus. by the author Sleeping Bear Press (22 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 15, 2018 978-1-53411-002-1 A cute, purple hippo models winterwear in a variety of colors and makes a snowman an offer it can’t refuse.

This sweet and simple board book engages children on several levels, first by introducing colors and various winter garments, then by encouraging them to review those colors—reading them, if they’re able—and count the number of instances of each. Not bad, given the deceptively simple narrative. The book opens with the unnamed pachyderm protagonist at the window, watching the snow fall. A series of two-panel spreads follows, text on verso, illustration on recto. “Where are my yellow mittens?” asks the hippo with a puzzled look on its face. The question is answered with a turn of the page: “Here are my yellow mittens,” the hippo announces, forefeet snugly fitted inside the protective handgear in question. The rest of the book follows suit, with a green scarf, a red coat, and a blue hat. The charming illustrations of the toddler hippo, buried beneath preposterously thick layerings of scarf on one page or eyes obscured by an impossibly floppy hat on another, should provoke happy giggles. Once bundled, the little hippo runs outside and exchanges all that winter gear with a snowman, making off with its yummy “orange” carrot nose. The final two pages review the colors, spelled out letter by letter, and the names of the pictured items (gloves, scarves, carrots, etc.) and invite readers to count how many times each appears.

Brief—but surprisingly useful, and adorable to boot.

(Board book. 1-3)

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LOOK WHO’S TALKING

Scholastic Inc. Cartwheel/Scholastic (14 pp.) $14.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-338-28396-9 Series: Scholastic Early Learners

ARF! BUZZ! CLUCK! A Rather Noisy Alphabet

Seltzer, Eric Illus. by Creighton-Pester, David Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (24 pp.) $7.99 | Jul. 3, 2018 978-1-5344-1297-2

A beastly cacophony of read-aloud fun from A to Z. This “rather noisy alphabet” invites a spirited, call-andresponse reading from caregivers and young children, who can brush up on their animal sounds and their ABCs at the same time. Rendered in cartoonish but friendly fashion—even the loud, growling tiger wears a big, warm grin—a variety of animals squeak, chirp, and howl their way through this unevenly rhymed but generally appealing board book. The action plays out over a series of two-page scenes in settings that range from barnyard to brook to forest to glacier to African veldt. Great poetry the text is not, but it is serviceable at least most of the time: “We Arf, we Buzz, we Baaah, we Coo. / We Chirp and Cluck and cock-a-doodle Doo!” Each featured letter of the alphabet is capitalized in context, even when it’s not the first letter of the word, as in, “we eXitedly twitter.” Most of the rhymes flow pretty smoothly, although the text does, |

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A PILE OF LEAVES

Shopsin, Tamara & Fulford, Jason Illus. by the authors Phaidon (24 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 17, 2018 978-0-7148-7720-4 An art book, an autumn book, a discover-the-world-around-you book, all

rolled into one.

As the book starts, young readers are told, “A pile of leaves is like a collage. Each layer adds something new and hides something underneath.” When children turn to the next page they’re in for a delightful surprise. Indeed there is a pile of leaves, but what a pile of leaves it is! A series of board-framed acetate pages makes up the pile. Each seethrough page has an image or two on it. As children uncover the layers by turning the pages, they encounter different kinds of leaves, an acorn, ants, a grasshopper, a worm, a mitten, and someone’s lost key. As the pile on the recto gets deconstructed, the pile on the verso builds up in reverse.

Some children may be inspired to tuck in their own little additions to the pile. What a wonderful way to invite children to explore not just this book, but also the world around them, where so many simple treasures hide in plain sight. For those curious to know the names of the different leaf types, bugs, and objects in the leaf pile, the last double-page spread identifies each.

Published in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, this book is its own little work of art. (Board book. 2-4)

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A lift-the-flap and press-the-button board book that includes photographs alongside illustrations of 25 words with baby signs.

Each page in this large-format board book features a different typical baby first word. Beneath the picture of the named object on the flap is the illustration of how to sign it and an additional photograph that depicts a baby with that object. While the photographs of the babies are fairly diverse, the children signing in the illustrations are mostly white. As companion to each page and featured word, the sound buttons accessible at all times to the right of the recto have matching, corresponding pictures and text. Thankfully, these sounds also have an off switch; while they may be of some use in families with very limited English, they also discourage a caregiver’s reading aloud or a child practicing the words. The final two pages cram together 15 small flaps and signs. The larger illustrations and descriptions are much clearer and easier to understand than the tiny versions at the end. It’s not clear how these “baby signs,” as they’re described on the back of the book, relate to the American Sign Language standard.

This book struggles to do too much at once, and as a result, it buries the illustrations of the signs, arguably the most valuable part. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

on occasion, abandon meter to an awkward and confusing degree: “On Ice we bark, in water we Jump, on snow we Kiss... / We Lick, we Laugh, we snap like this.” Most of the featured sounds are utterances, although a few describe an animal’s locomotion (“Vrooom” and “Zoom,” for example).

Not perfect but maybe just right for a raucous reading or 12. (Board book. 1-4)

RIDDLE DIDDLE FARM

Shore, Diane Z. & Calvert, Deanna Illus. by Bauer, Stephanie Amicus Ink (10 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 21, 2018 978-1-68152-406-1 Rhymed riddles with lift-the-flap answers offer guessing-game giggles for toddlers.

Readers can guess at and reveal the identities of five barnyard friends in its two-page set pieces: a rhymed riddle, sans solution, on the verso and a relatively easy-to-open flap on the facing page that conceals the answer, presented in both picture and word form. The rhyme scheme and meter vary a bit; caregivers would do well to practice before sharing |

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to avoid tripping over the occasional bit of overcomplicated phrasing: “I’m the morning ALARM / heard out on the FARM. / Wake up! I cock-a-doodle-dooed, SIR. / Keep the gate SHUT / or out I will STRUT / I’m proud to be such a fine....” A peek behind the flap on the next page reveals the answer: a brightly colored, crowing rooster. On a practical level, by the time a child has managed to locate and lift the flap, the rhythm of the line is disrupted, losing some of the momentum of the rhyme. Other rhymes are simpler and more straightforward, though, and funnier, too: “I wallow in MUD / and eat lots of CRUD / For slop, my appetite’s BIG. / You think I STINK? / I’m tickled PINK! Oinkity-oink! I’m a....” The wallowing pig and other farm animals are stylized but recognizable; the colors are bright and earthy. Companion title Riddle Diddle Safari shares both this volume’s strengths and its weaknesses.

Uneven but fun. (Board book. 2-5) (Riddle Diddle Safari 978-1-68152-407-8)

DIWALI LIGHTS

Singh, Rina Orca (24 pp.) $9.95 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-4598-1908-5 Diwali, the festival of lights, is one of the largest Hindu festivals, and it’s celebrated all around the world; this nonfiction board book presents its sights, sounds, and celebrations.

Each page of brief, often rhyming text is paired with a vivid photograph depicting wide-eyed toddlers and young children of the Indian diaspora, with dark hair and skin of varying shades of brown. These photographs are the best feature of this book. The text, as narrated by an adult to a young child, talks about the various aspects of the Diwali celebration, including new clothes, prayers, henna, sweets, firecrackers. It occasionally reads awkwardly, and readers may have to hunt for rhymes: “Buy diyas, candles / and paper lanterns.// Henna for hands / and rangoli sand.” With its focus on very young children, the book shows how Diwali is celebrated rather than why. However, notably absent is the holiday’s important community aspect.

And although there are multiple mentions of diyas, these beautiful clay lamps that are a highlight of this festival are neither depicted nor explained; neither are such other specialized vocabulary as “jaan” or “rangoli.” A short note at the back of the book gives a smidge more information for older children. There are not many board books for very young kids on this topic, and this one is not everything it could have been.

The photographs carry this board book even though the presentation and text disappoint. (Board book. 2-4)

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MERRY CHRISTMAS

Sirett, Dawn DK Publishing (14 pp.) $5.99 | Sep. 18, 2018 978-1-4654-7282-3 Series: Baby Touch and Feel A shiny board-book package for baby’s first Christmas.

Each page displays one clear, simple picture of an object traditionally associated with a secular Christmas: bells, a star, a toy elf, and reindeer, among others. Caregivers will almost automatically focus on the developmentally appropriate task of naming objects, since they are labeled in a large lowercase type below each picture. Descriptive phrases in a smaller font that curve around the pictures provide ways to extend the conversation with a little one: “star / so sparkly!” Toddlers will quickly discover the textures embedded in each picture.

The snowman’s scarf has a soft patch. The Christmas stocking and Santa’s sack are both partially made of red fabric. However, many of the tactile elements are quite subtle. The silver ornaments and bows on a green Christmas tree are just slightly raised; bells on Santa’s sleigh are just shiny gold. The fluffy fur on “a cuddly...Christmas toy” labeled “puppy” may not survive Christmas morning. Its threads easily pull loose and will almost certainly find their way into baby’s mouth. (The book is not labeled for ages 3 and up, implying it’s been vetted for choke hazards; the hairs are extremely wispy and fine.) The thick pages are sturdy, the layout is clean, and the familiar objects are recognizable.

Add this one to baby’s first Christmas stocking. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

SHARING DOES NOT COMPUTE

Slack, Michael Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (36 pp.) $7.99 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-1-5344-0569-1 Series: Standroid & Dandroid Two robot buddies struggle to share a remote-control car.

Standroid and Dandroid, a pair of robots constructed from lightly detailed simple shapes, one in fuchsia and one in gold, are “powered up” to play. At first, their individual games all mesh to create even better playtimes, as when one’s soap and the other’s water combine to make supercool bubbles, but a difficult-to-share remote-control car causes tension.

For inanimate objects, the expressive motion lines and evocatively angled circular eyes against white background make the robots’ many emotions abundantly clear. They are never more so than when the increasingly jealous fuchsia robot (which is which is never entirely clear) declares that “sharing does not compute.” A tussle erupts, and the remote comes apart, revealing a “secret button” inside. Chagrined, they decide to press |

As with Spanyol’s stellar Clive books, Rosa’s favorite activities buck gender stereotypes. rosa loves cars

the button together, which starts a raucous laser show and “dance party.” It’s a feel-good ending for sure, but it’s also unsatisfying. Though the androids declare their decision to share, the phrase used—“Overriding self mode. / Initiating share sequence”—is bewilderingly confusing, and the two androids never actually model any sharing; rather it’s the improbable secret button that saves the day. Read aloud, the book achieves an appropriately robotic tone, but an overreliance on sophisticated tech words such as “sensors” and “activate” seems intended more for adult readers than the child audience.

The robot’s lively antics are amusing, but the story feels overly mechanical. (Board book. 1-3)

ROSA LOVES CARS

As with Spanyol’s stellar Clive books, Rosa’s favorite activities buck gender stereotypes.

The toddler races toy cars, jumps monster trucks, and builds a car out of a cardboard box with her buddies in what looks like a day care or preschool setting. Spanyol’s childlike lines, soft palette, and chunky figures are as cheerful as ever.

The text is mostly straightforward, simple narration peppered with exclamations from Rosa and her chums: “Rosa and Marcel play in the sandpit. ‘Dig-a-dig, dig-a-dig, scoop!’ sings Rosa.”

Rosa has brown skin and black, curly hair, and she wears bright yellow eyeglasses. Her friends include Samira, who uses a wheelchair and is likely of South Asian descent; Mustafa, who appears black; Biba, who has light-brown skin and straight, black hair; and Sarah and Marcel, who both present white. Three other equally charming titles accompany this offering. In Rosa and Her Dinosaurs, the heroine dons a purple dress and plays with a collection of toy dinosaurs. Rosa and her buds (all wearing helmets) roll through the pages of Rosa Rides Her Scooter. And in Rosa Plays Ball, Rosa pushes a cart with various kinds of balls to toss about with her friends outside.

An effervescent celebration of play in the early years. (Board book. 1-3) (Rosa Loves Dinosaurs: 978-1-78628124-1; Rosa Plays Ball: 978-1-78628-126-5; Rosa Rides Her Scooter: 978-1-78628-123-4)

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This ambitious board book aims to promote an eclectic appreciation for music of all kinds.

Music, from drumming to computer-generated sound, is introduced as a linear historical sequence with two pages devoted to each of 11 styles, including medieval European, orchestral, blues, and more. Most of the musicians are portrayed as children, many with darker skin tones and with hairstyles and garb commonly associated with each type of music.

Radford works in a retro cartoon mode, varying his presentation slightly with each new musical style but including a dancing dachshund on almost every spread, presumably to enhance child appeal. Unfortunately, the book just can’t succeed in reducing such a wide range of musical styles to toddler-appropriate language. The first two spreads read: “We start with clapping, tapping, and drums. // Lutes, flutes, and words are what we become.” The accompanying illustrations show, respectively, half-naked drummers and European court figures reading, writing, and playing a flute. Both spreads feature both brownskinned and pale-skinned figures. At first reading this seems innocent enough, but the implication that clapping and drumming are somehow less civilized or sophisticated than a European style is reinforced in Stosuy’s glossary of music terms. He describes “Prehistoric Music” as “rhythmic music [made] with rocks, sticks, bones, and...voices,” while “Renaissance Music” is defined as “multiple melodies played at the same time.”

The history of music is a big topic, and more-nuanced explanation is needed than the format allows. (Board book.

2-4)

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Spanyol, Jessica Illus. by the author Child’s Play (14 pp.) $4.99 | Oct. 1, 2018 978-1-78628-125-8 Series: All About Rosa

WE ARE MUSIC

Stosuy, Brandon Illus. by Radford, Nick Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 21, 2018 978-1-5344-0941-5

WHOSE BUM?

Tougas, Chris Illus. by the author Orca (24 pp.) $9.95 | Sep. 18, 2018 978-1-4598-1647-3 Alternating pages show the posterior and then the anterior of a variety of creatures.

Pen-and-ink cartoons of each animal appear against highly saturated, solid-colored backgrounds with white-lined outlines that give hints as to their environs. The blue lizard’s posterior appears over a medium-green backdrop on the recto as the white, lowercase text reads “whose bum?” With the turn of the page, readers learn the answer as they see, from the front now, the lizard clinging to the same white-outlined tree branch against the same color background as the previous page. The pattern continues with animal after animal until finally readers see a diapered backside, and the page-turn |

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Whether readers have brown skin or light skin, are mothers, fathers, or elders, this book—with its kisses and its concept of counting—is “as welcome as the light from the sun.” kiss by kiss / octêtôwina

KISS BY KISS / OCÊTÔWINA A Counting Book for Families (English and Cree Edition)

reveals it belongs to a baby with an ochre complexion and a wisp of black hair. Tougas’ cartoons are pleasingly round, if a little serious of expression (few are shown smiling), and consistent in shape. Nevertheless, most of these critters, which include a turtle, a bunny, a puppy, and teddy bear, are distinct enough to be easily recognized.

Pleasingly cheeky. (Board book. 1-3)

DOT, STRIPE, SQUIGGLE

Tuttle, Sarah Grace Illus. by Nerlove, Miriam Creative Editions/Creative Company (28 pp.) $8.99 | Aug. 21, 2018 978-1-56846-325-4 Nine different marine animals are featured in detail with emphasis on their dots, stripes, and squiggles.

What begins as a set of three simple, colored dots at the opening of the book grows to become the dots, stripes, and squiggles of different underwater creatures. After the colored dots (one in each primary color), readers see close-up snippets of each animal—a head, a tail, fins, tentacles, claws— before each is revealed in its entirety. Nerlove’s vibrant watercolor illustrations are presented on a stark white background on each double-page spread, allowing readers to really take in each tiny sucker on the blue-ringed octopus and every spine on the zebra lionfish. The opening color palette of the three dots in red, blue, and yellow is echoed in each of the subsequent illustrations, subtly hidden in the yellow striping on the eel and the blue dots on the jewel damselfish. The rhythmic movement of Tuttle’s repetitive “dot, stripe, squiggle” in various iterations invites readers to point and observe, although they may do little else. The real stars here are the lifelike illustrations, and the words certainly get out of the way. A really clear, simple illustrated key to the animals pictured closes out the book, presenting names as bold and unusual as the animals themselves.

Curious, observant young readers will love the impressive artwork, which is ultimately the standout in this board book. (Board book. 1-3)

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Van Camp, Richard Trans. by Collins, Mary Cardinal Orca (26 pp.) $9.95 | Sep. 18, 2018 978-1-4598-1621-3

A dual-language counting book in Plains Cree “Y” dialect and English for the board-book crowd.

Starting at kiss No. 1 and counting to 10, smooches between children and their caregivers, or from one child to another, stir tenderness within and bring smiles to readers’ faces. Pictures that fill and spill off the edge of the versos invite readers and listeners into intimate family moments. Astute readers will notice a diverse set of families and individuals depicted in the photographs, including couples that are perhaps adoptive, biracial, or gay parents, and more than a few of the images appear to be of First Nations or Indigenous American children and their caretakers. Those hoping to see the Plains Cree language featured above the English will have to wait for any potential sequels.

However, the Plains Cree “Y” dialect is printed in a sans-serif font, clearly distinguishing it from the English though nearly similar in pitch, and key words in English are printed in a similarly colored manner to its Plains Cree translation. Whether readers have brown skin or light skin, are mothers, fathers, or elders, this book—with its kisses and its concept of counting— is “as welcome as the light from the sun,” as Van Camp’s (Tlicho Dene) text aptly puts it.

A wonderful expression of love and welcome song of hope manifested in a book about counting kisses. (Plains Cree glossary) (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

I AM A ZAMBONI MACHINE

Viola, Kevin Illus. by Migliari, Paola & Rigo, Laura Cartwheel/Scholastic (8 pp.) $5.99 | Aug. 28, 2018 978-1-338-27773-9

Learn how Zambonis clean ice in this awkwardly shaped book.

In the voice of the Zamboni, dull pronouncements about each step of the ice-cleaning process give readers a rudimentary but adequate overview of how the vehicle works. The book is cut into the shape of a Zamboni machine (and driver), but the unusual format adds nothing of substance and even detracts from the story. Each page turn removes a section of the Zamboni, but the image under the cutaway doesn’t necessarily match, creating pages with two confusingly juxtaposed scenes.

Though the pages are thick, they are prone to fraying, and the edges remain sharp and jab fingers painfully, especially around the severe cuts defining the driver’s face. The pen-and-ink–style digital art is underwhelming, and attempts to make the art feel lively fall flat. A puppy sitting next to the driver is far too |

rabbitlike, and the American flag found on every page looks odd, as if a poor quality sticker were applied over the images.

There’s a single hockey player of color; the driver and crowds are white.

While an audience of young vehicle aficionados or avid skaters might be attracted, this is a disappointing and poorly designed book. (Board book. 1-3)

THE CHILLY PENGUIN

von Kitzing, Constanze Illus. by the author Trans. by Rosinsky, Lisa Barefoot (24 pp.) $7.99 | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-78285-406-7

YOU ARE MY MAGICAL UNICORN

Wan, Joyce Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (14 pp.) $6.99 | Dec. 26, 2018 978-1-338-33410-4

YOU ARE MY SWEETHEART

Wan, Joyce Illus. by the author Cartwheel/Scholastic (14 pp.) $6.99 | Oct. 30, 2018 978-1-338-04536-9

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A penguin tries out various methods of getting toasty before settling on the warmest way of all—a hug with a friend.

Dapperly topped with a black derby hat, the smudgy, delicately lined avian stands out handsomely against a marbled, icy-blue background, looking miserably cold. Eager to solve the frosty problem, the penguin poses short, direct “what if ” questions and then experiments with those ideas, a perfect calland-answer format for young listeners to predict and problemsolve. Some attempts, such as knitting a fashionable red scarf, don’t quite bring the heat, while others, notably building a fire directly on the ice, have unpleasant, watery consequences. The eventual solution, in which the protagonist and another penguin inch closer together over the course of several page turns until they cross the gutter and hug will make everyone feel “warm and snuggly.” Throughout, von Kitzing masterfully uses scale and perspective to create drama, from the extreme closeup of an exhausted penguin collapsed after ice-skating, defeated and “still chilly,” to the unexpected plunge through the melted ice that causes the bird to break the bottom edge of the frame.

Small details such as the dotted-pink cheeks that appear on both penguins’ faces during their embrace make the minimalist art feel rich and full.

A cozy little charmer. (Board book. 1-4)

or leaps cunningly. It repels angry thunder clouds as it trots along a rainbow and emits stars as it’s exhorted to “sparkle and dazzle” in front of a small throng of admiring woodland animals.

The artist’s signature thick, black outlines and smiley faces (except for the frowning thunder clouds) give the book a solidly cheerful feel that is reinforced by the pastel palette. Landing as it does in an environment in which an emphasis on resilience is superseding rank cheerleading in early-childhood instruction and in which empathy must be cultivated, it feels only halfbaked. It’s all well and good to tell babies to “let your wondrous light shine through. / Baby, I believe in you!” But with no modeling of how to overcome adversity beyond the instruction not to “let fear stand in your way” nor even any sense that other creatures may be equally deserving of attention, it feels like the cotton candy it resembles.

Sweetness with no substance. (Board book. 1-3)

A simple rhyming board book covers all things sweet and loving.

Wan’s glitter-encrusted board book is a sweet, delicious ode to pet names for a baby from “sweetie pie” to “cuddlebug.” Each double-page spread features these anthropomorphized symbols of love, drawn in bold lines with sweet cartoon expressions.

The name of the focal object is highlighted by its own matching display type. The word “rosebud,” for example, is drawn with tiny roses inside the letters to match the accompanying illustration. Each layout includes sweet details: The background of the pages echoes the main illustration (and even the bee flying toward the rosebud leaves a trail in the air in the shape of a heart). Readers will enjoy finding new details to admire each time they sit down with the book. From start to finish, the text reads as one rhyming poem, giving it a nice rhythm and pace.

Adults reading to little ones in their laps will take full advantage of the book’s direction to cuddle, kiss, and hug. Overall, this simple, well-paced read is sure to elicit a smile from caregivers and their honeybuns alike.

There’s nothing abundantly original in this book, but it’s just sweet enough to earn a spot on little readers’ bookshelves. (Board book. 6-18 mos.)

Wan takes her rhyming formula, previously applied to pumpkins, cupcakes, and more, and uses a unicorn as a vehicle for her newest outing in esteem-building.

“You are magical, my little one. / Reach for the stars, the moon, the sun.” In each image, a rotund white unicorn with flowing, rainbow-colored mane and tail, stubby yellow horn, and yellow stars on its rump poses fetchingly, gallops adorably, |

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OPPOSITES

project is a bit of a letdown as the tactile elements appear only on every alternating page.

While underwhelming in its exploration of textures, it does succeed as a playful introduction to animals of the African savanna. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

Illus. by Wilson, Katie Flowerpot Press (20 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-1-4867-1460-5 Series: Discovery Concepts Ten pairs of common opposing concepts are featured in this board book for toddlers, with active illustrations of diverse people of a variety of ages, hair, and skin color.

The settings, a different one on each double-page spread, are ones that many young children are familiar with. A bus filled with people, including a woman in a hijab, goes “Over” a bridge, while a small boat goes “Under” it; children play and swim in the “Wet” waves while others play on the “Dry” beach. There is just one capitalized word on each page, and the illustrations are done with watercolor and colored pencil in a muted multicolored palette that complements the spare delivery. Some spreads vary from the single-setting presentation, instead featuring the same setting in opposing conditions. On the verso representing “Hot” is a pond in summer, with kids wearing shorts and sleeveless dresses and eating ice cream. On the recto, “Cold,” bundled-up kids skate on the same pond. Opposites are a difficult concept for young children to understand, and some of the pairings in this book are either too subtle or not well-portrayed, such as “Open” and “Closed” (umbrellas on a rainy day), “Near” and “Far” (subway trains), and “Stop” and “Go” (halted traffic and walking pedestrians, including a girl who uses a wheelchair).

Featuring typical opposites in familiar settings, this board book offers little new. (Board book. 1-3)

TEXTURES

Illus. by Wilson, Katie Flowerpot Press (20 pp.) $9.99 | Oct. 2, 2018 978-1-4867-1459-9 Series: Discovery Concepts

WHERE’S SANTA BOO?

Yoon, Salina Illus. by the author Random House (18 pp.) $6.99 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-0-525-57956-4

This Christmas board book includes a peekaboo game.

Boo, a black cartoon cat first introduced in Where’s Boo (2013), sports a Santa hat on the cover. A half-circle cutout reveals the hat’s fuzzy white pom-pom on the final page, but before they reach it, youngsters are asked whether the cat is hiding behind a gingerbread house, a snowman, or a toy snare drum. The flocked puff is incorporated into each holiday scene, standing in as a cookie, snowball, or smoke from a toy steam train as the pages turn. Finally the cat is found hiding behind the Christmas tree beside a fireplace decorated with Christmas stockings. Each cheery illustration’s seasonally iconic images give little ones much to discover and talk about. The repeated question (“Is he behind...”) allows even the youngest toddler to quickly guess the response (“No, that’s a...”) and feel smart when they correctly guess the cat’s obvious hiding place. After a couple shared readings, they may even return to “read” the predictable story independently. The large cutout makes turning the pages easy for little fingers.

A fine addition to holiday collections that anticipates the excitement of the season while steering clear of both religious overtones and commercial hype. (Board book. 1-3)

Youngsters can go on safari in this tactile venture.

A friendly, brown-skinned “guide” waves to readers on the opening double-page spread and offers an invitation to explore the savanna. Nine tableaux follow with a textural element embedded in or affixed to every other recto. There is an encounter with a “fuzzy” zebra with soft black stripes, a “bumpy” crocodile with embossed, green vinyl for skin, and a “furry” lion mane created with flannel. One to two sentences of introductory text, written in a cordial tone, hovers above the scene, and each animal is identified with a large caption in an appealing type that has a handwritten feel. Wilson’s art is endearing, and critters look quite cuddly in her childlike style and soft, watercolor palette of pale green, yellow, blue, and brown. The adventure ends with the guide hunkering down for the night in a tent made with a canvas fabric swatch. Given that the title and the cover (with jeep tires to touch) promise a texture-rich experience, the 138

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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Ahmed, Samira Little, Brown (304 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-0-316-52269-4

INTERNMENT by Samira Ahmed......................................................139 LOVELY WAR by Julie Berry.............................................................141 THE EVERLASTING ROSE by Dhonielle Clayton............................143 YOU MUST NOT MISS by Katrina Leno.......................................... 149 ONCE & FUTURE by Cori McCarthy & Amy Rose Capetta............150

TIN HEART by Shivaun Plozza......................................................... 151 NIGHT MUSIC by Jenn Marie Thorne...............................................154 KISS NUMBER 8 by Colleen AF Venable; illus. by Ellen T. Crenshaw................................................................. 155 KISS NUMBER 8

Venable, Colleen AF Illus. by Crenshaw, Ellen T. First Second (320 pp.) $17.99 paper Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-59643-709-8

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FEAR OF MISSING OUT by Kate McGovern................................... 151

Layla was a regular American teenager until the new Islamophobic president enacted Exclusion Laws.

Muslims are being rounded up, their books burned, and their bodies encoded with identification numbers. Neighbors are divided, and the government is going after resisters. Layla and her family are interned in the California desert along with thousands of other Muslim Americans, but she refuses to accept the circumstances of her detention, plotting to take down the system. She quickly learns that resistance is no joke: Two hijabi girls are beaten and dragged away screaming after standing up to the camp director. There are rumors of people being sent to black-op sites. Some guards seem sympathetic, but can they be trusted? Taking on Islamophobia and racism in a Trump-like America, Ahmed’s (Love, Hate & Other Filters, 2018) magnetic, gripping narrative, written in a deeply humane and authentic tone, is attentive to the richness and complexity of the social ills at the heart of the book. Layla grows in consciousness as she begins to understand her struggle not as an individual accident of fate, but as part of an experience of oppression she shares with millions. This work asks the question many are too afraid to confront: What will happen if xenophobia and racism are allowed to fester and grow unabated?

A reminder that even in a world filled with divisions and right-wing ideology, young people will rise up and demand equality for all. (Realistic fiction. 13-18)

THE MANIC PIXIE DREAM BOY IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

Appelhans, Lenore Carolrhoda (272 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-5415-1259-7

A Manic Pixie Dream Boy learns he’s more than just a label.

Riley is TropeTown’s second-ever Manic Pixie Dream Boy—a subset of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.

After twice deviating from his script on a job, the Council assigns Riley to mandatory group therapy with a motley crew |

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historical fiction gems: a promising sign for the new year Somehow, I managed to fall in love with history despite what happened at school. We glossed over the experiences of immigrants like my Greek grandparents who came through Ellis Island and certainly never studied the contributions of Asians even though the Japanese-American side of my family fought in the 442nd and worked on the sugarcane plantations of Hawaii. History class was something to be endured— apart from the deathly boring presentation, which sucked the life out of any potentially interesting stories, it was a total erasure of my family and a slog through a past in which no one like me (or many of my classmates) seemingly existed.

Nevertheless, I ended up majoring and getting a Master’s in history, but only because I eventually encountered teachers and professors who opened up different vistas. Today, more than ever, history is a battleground over whose voices matter, whose lives matter, whose stories are worth telling. History is important because what we believe about the past directly shapes the present we think we inhabit and the future we believe we should build.

Even if many textbooks remain incomplete (or worse), I am heartened by some original and engaging works of historical fiction coming out in early 2019. They offer teen readers glimpses into less frequently covered settings, show how exciting history can be, fill in curricular gaps, and highlight struggles that are relevant to the present day. While certain well-trodden topics continue to be milked for material, I hope these titles are a sign that more surprises are in store.

Inventing Victoria by Tonya Bolden (Jan. 8) explores the intricacies of social class within the African-American community of 140

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post-Reconstruction–era Washington, D.C. Rather than situating black history in a context that centers on the attitudes of white people, this book follows one young woman from Savannah as she pursues a very different life among the fashionable and intellectual elite, navigating differences that resonate today.

Although more than 20,000 European Jews fleeing Hitler joined the already vibrant Jewish community in Shanghai, it is likely that Someday We Will Fly by Rachel DeWoskin (Jan. 22) will be the first time that many teen (and adult) readers get to know this group of people. The themes of antiSemitism and refugees fearing for their lives and learning to adapt in a new culture are sadly all too relevant to current events.

The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf (Feb. 5) sheds light on a pivotal event in Malaysian history: the race riots that began on May 13, 1969, and tore apart this multicultural nation. Focusing on one teen girl caught in the midst of the chaos, this is a story of mental health struggles and strangers crossing ethnic boundaries to form bonds of trust in a time of crisis. It’s a tough and honest read that showcases Asian history for a change. —L.S. Laura Simeon is the young adult editor.

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of Manic Pixie Dream Girls. There, he falls for Zelda, of the Geek Chic subtype, and finds an unanticipated group of friends.

However, something’s not quite right in TropeTown, and Riley has to decide if he is willing to risk termination to learn the truth about TropeTown and protect the Manic Pixies. Underdeveloped worldbuilding and a general lack of subtlety leaves elements of characterization and plot unsatisfying. There is plenty of discussion about the concept of Manic Pixies, but any attempted critique is undermined by the continued centering of Riley, a male character who finds himself through the help of secondary women characters. Barely-veiled digs at John Green’s many Manic Pixies abound; a painfully self-conscious discussion arises between white characters exploring the similarities and differences between Manic Pixies and racist tropes like the Magical Negro as well as the benefits and detriments of tropes as representation. A few of the women characters have been in same-sex relationships, and characters default to white.

Ultimately, just as frustrating, underdeveloped, and problematic as the trope this novel tries to interrogate.

(Speculative fiction/satire. 13-17)

Barthelmess, Nikki Flux (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-63583-028-6

To her confusion, 17-year-old Victoria is ripped from her father and stepmother’s home in Reno by Child Protective Services in the middle of the night.

Placed in foster care, she must focus on completing high school and applying for college while wrestling with whether to share the truth of what happened that night with anyone. It’s clear from early on that Victoria’s father accused her of making sexual advances on him, but what is not clear and helps create suspense is why her father now wants her out of his life and whether Victoria will come to terms with the psychological damage from her abuse that initially leads her into denial. At first Victoria tries to keep her foster care status a secret at school, but circumstances make this increasingly difficult. She then starts to consider the danger her 14-year-old stepsister might still be in. Debut novelist Barthelmess has written multifaceted characters that are believable, particularly Victoria, her strict foster mother, and her troubled foster sister, Jamie. Slightly less believable, because they are unfailingly kind, understanding, and wise, are Victoria’s new friend Latinx Christina (the sole character of color) and her love interest, a boy named Kale. Victoria’s first-person voice is strong and appealing, and her story is a positive addition to the sparse YA literature on foster care.

This hard-to-put-down novel takes on grim topics unflinchingly but also gives readers hope that honesty and kindness will prevail. (resources) (Fiction. 12-18)

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Love’s enduring power faces off against the horrors of war in this sumptuous Greek mythology–inspired romantic page-turner.

In a Manhattan hotel on the eve of World War II, Hephaestus catches his wife, Aphrodite, in a compromising position with his brother Ares. To exonerate herself of the crime of adultery, she weaves an intricate tale of mortal love during wartime that demonstrates the endurance of the human spirit. Vacillating between the present and the past, the goddess’s narrative centers on Aubrey, an African-American musician; Colette, a Belgian singer; Hazel, a wide-eyed British pianist; and her paramour, James, an aspiring architect (the latter three are white), who are all brought together by happenstance during the First World War. The resulting interweaving story is an epic of Shakespearean emotional depth and arresting visual imagery that nonetheless demonstrates the racism and sexism of the period. Scheherazade has nothing on Berry (The Emperor’s Ostrich, 2017, etc.), whose acute eye for detail renders the glittering lights of Paris as dreamlike in their beauty as the soul-sucking trenches on the French front are nightmarishly real. The mortal characters are all vibrant, original, and authentic, but none is more captivating than the goddess of love herself, who teaches her husband that love is an art form worthy of respect and admiration.

An unforgettable romance so Olympian in scope, human at its core, and lyrical in its prose that it must be divinely inspired. (Fiction. 13-adult)

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THE QUIET YOU CARRY

LOVELY WAR

Berry, Julie Viking (512 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-451-46993-9

COLD DAY IN THE SUN

Biren, Sara Amulet/Abrams (320 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-4197-3367-3

It’s not easy being the only girl on the boys’ varsity hockey team.

It’s especially difficult when your arrogant team captain calls you a nickname you hate, townspeople are free with their opinions about how you shouldn’t be allowed to play with the boys, and your journalism teacher is riding you hard about the articles you’re producing. Holland isn’t having a great time of it, and when that same arrogant team captain turns out to be the piece that’s been missing in her life—well, love doesn’t exactly make things any easier. Now, in addition to having to prove herself over and over in terms of her hockey skills, she also has to prove that she isn’t getting special favors because she’s dating the captain. A fun romp of a teen romance via an exciting hockey season, this book has all

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the right ingredients—a spunky, multifaceted main character, a love interest who turns out to be a decent individual, and plenty of internal and external conflict. Some of the lines feel a little timeworn, but overall the plot whips along with verve, driven by fully embodied characters who chase after love like they’re chasing after a puck. The cast presents as white and includes a gay partnership.

A teenage love story steamy enough to melt the ice in the rink. (Fiction. 14-18)

SKY WITHOUT STARS

Brody, Jessica & Rendell, Joanne Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (624 pp.) $19.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-5344-1063-3 Series: System Divine, 1 Political and romantic intrigues ignite when three young people’s lives intersect in the slums of Laterre, one of the 12 planets humans settled after the First World ended.

This first installment in an ambitious epic modeled after Les Misérables depicts a futuristic society with a class system loosely modeled on the estates of pre-Revolutionary France and a thriving criminal underbelly policed by a fearsome cyborg inspecteur.

Brown-haired, gray-eyed thief Chatine, the daughter of a dangerous gang leader, is known in public as a boy called Théo, but her real identity is not her only secret. A chance encounter with the handsome, dark-haired grandson of a high-ranking Second Estate general leads to her being hired to spy on Marcellus, whose father was in the Vangarde, a resistance group. The use of an old written language for secret communications by the resistance is a compelling element. Meanwhile, dark-haired Alouette, who never knew her mother, is tech-savvy and kind.

Raised by a mysterious order that protects the books and histories of the First World, she is curious about the world outside the Refuge but finds herself in over her head when she sneaks out and meets Marcellus. The authors play with formulaic elements to freshen the story. Skin color is rarely mentioned, and the book seemingly defaults to white despite the presence of black people in early modern France.

A fast-paced, immersive, and imaginative romp. (maps) (Science fiction. 12-18)

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Brown, Scott Knopf (320 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-5247-6624-5 When you surpass the scale to which you’ve drawn your ideal self, are you man or monster?

4’11” isn’t a height, it’s a sequence of numbers that makes growth-stunted Will Daughtry invisible in high school’s wild kingdom. His diminutive height is countered by a hearty wit, his defense against the pain of not getting what he really wants: a girl and a growth spurt. The girl, Monica, is brainy, beautiful, and unfettered in San Diego’s domestic homogeny.

They’ve been pals since he and his best friend–cum-stepbrother, Drew, discovered an uncharted beach with her, solidifying their bond as a trio. When Will gets the courage to break the vows of their rule book à trois and 1) deceive Drew 2) ask Monica out, he falters only to have the nail of failure driven further in when Drew and Monica hook up instead. With their triptych fractured, a monstrous frustration mounts in Will—so does an appetite and subsequent growth. Will meets another challenge: His ego is growing, too, and the three that once were, might possibly never be again. Will’s first-person narration is ripe with a humor that marries dry wit, invented vocabulary, and an honest-to-goodness good time even when things are dreadful. The son of a zoologist, Will examines his Californian enclosure like a brash and bawdy Goodall. Will, Drew, and most secondary characters are white; Monica is cued Latinx.

A coming-of-height specimen whose humor you won’t outgrow. (Fiction. 13-18)

DEAR ALLY, HOW DO YOU WRITE A BOOK?

Carter, Ally Scholastic (336 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-338-21226-6

A nonfiction how-to guide for teen writers by popular YA author Carter (Not If I Save You First, 2018, etc.).

Presented in an accessible questionand-answer format, Carter walks young readers comprehensibly and comprehensively through the steps of writing a novel, beginning with planning, worldbuilding, characters, and plot and ending with editing and a wholly realistic look at publishing. Breezy and honest, she encourages her audience to focus on the joy of writing, not the potential monetary rewards, and stresses repeatedly that there are many different ways to approach a story: “You have one job, and that’s to find the process that works for you.” Along the way, she addresses questions to and gathers data from a diverse crew of 30 established YA authors, among them Z Brewer, David Levithan, |

Thrills of action, magic, romance, and revolution. the everlasting rose

Soman Chainani, Melissa de la Cruz, Julie Murphy, and Jay Coles.

Several pages are devoted to the timely and important question of writing characters who are different from oneself, whether in gender, ethnicity or other ways. Unfortunately, the section on story structure presents the classic Western three-act narrative as universal, a disservice to aspiring writers who may wish to explore forms from other cultural traditions. Entertaining and informative charts showing answers from her guest contributors reinforce the myriad ways there are to succeed as a writer.

Written in a friendly style, this guide contains plenty of information and encouragement; fledging writers are wellserved. (table of contents, contributor biographies, glossary) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

FAT ANGIE Rebel Girl Revolution

When everything’s awful inside and out, how can you take the bull by the horns?

Angie’s girlfriend has moved away.

Angie’s war-hero sister was killed by terrorists in Iraq (Fat Angie, 2013, etc.), and glossy local and national tributes leave Angie alone and confused in her grief. Angie’s mother mourns “the good one” of her children, restricts Angie’s food, and threatens Angie with gay conversion therapy. When Angie breaks a bully’s nose in self-defense, witnesses lie and Angie faces legal prosecution. Depression, anxiety, panic, betrayal—how can Angie get out from under? A road trip—emotionally messy and awkward, with an ex-friend who ghosted her, one of the lying witnesses, and someone who films everything. With legal prosecution and conversion therapy looming, Angie stumbles her way through a road trip itinerary left by her dead sister. Charlton-Trujillo’s mildly unorthodox prose style features extra hyphens (“surprising-not-surprising,” “loud-loud,” Angie’s “couldn’t-understand mother”). While less funny than Fat Angie, this has hilarious moments: If a sign says, “DO NOT FLUSH / FEMININE FEMALE PRODUCTS,” could you flush a “butch tampon”?

Angie’s white; her fellow RV-ers are a racially diverse group.

Fortunately and refreshingly, the text gives Angie no weightloss arc; unfortunately, the use of fatness as a misery symbol throughout dilutes the explicit self-acceptance ending.

A welcomingly awkward, offbeat journey for a “gay-girl gay” girl with many heartaches. (Fiction. 12-16)

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Cicatelli-Kuc, Katie Scholastic (336 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-338-23291-2

Despite the title’s promise, romance takes too long to blossom.

On their way home to Brooklyn from the Dominican Republic, Flora Thornton, who is assumed white, kisses halfMexican/(presumably) half-white Oliver Russell, and the two teenagers, who are diagnosed with a rare form of mononucleosis dubbed “tropical mono,” are forced into quarantine together in a Miami hospital. (It’s not clear how tropical mono differs from regular mono.) In actuality, Flora figured that quarantine would be a much-needed break from her life, so she messed with her thermometer reading to make it look as though she had a fever.

To help Oliver elicit the attention of his crush, Kelsey, Flora comes up with a hashtag, #quaranteens, to share their experiences on social media. Along with Flora’s and Oliver’s mothers, Kelsey becomes a regular visitor to the #quaranteens—visitors are permitted (although kissing them is off limits) as long as they wear protective gear. It is clear from the outset that Kelsey is only interested in Oliver because she hopes that he will garner her attention on social media. Chapters alternate between Flora’s and Oliver’s points of view and are not long enough for readers to fully invest in either protagonist for long.

By the time Oliver and Flora finally get together, readers will have lost interest in this novel’s obvious conclusion.

(Romance. 12-18)

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Charlton-Trujillo, e.E. Candlewick (352 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-7636-9345-9 Series: Fat Angie, 2

QUARANTINE A Love Story

THE EVERLASTING ROSE

Clayton, Dhonielle Freeform/Disney (352 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4847-2848-2 Series: The Belles, 2 The sequel to Clayton’s The Belles (2018) freezes blood and steals breath.

With the capricious and conniving Princess Sophia poised to seize the throne and already capturing Belles in her obsessive greed and ploy for domination, Camille, her sisters, and the young soldier Rémy are all fugitives. Orléans society is in a frantic uproar trying to stay in the soon-to-be queen’s mercurial favor, and as the orderly veneer of an economy of beauty trade crumbles away to fully reveal its darker, underlying structures of enslaved magical labor and implicit violence, the dehumanizing attitudes Sophia emboldens throughout the kingdom endanger Belles everywhere. Camille knows her only hope is to find the recently awakened Princess Charlotte, who is the rightful heir, but as Camille realizes the horrifying extent of Sophia’s cruelty and

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A swashbuckling steampunk mashup. the last voyage of poe blythe

as her own actions and alliances grow more questionable, it becomes clear that putting things right may cost her everything she has known, about her world and herself. The opulence of Clayton’s world gives way here to the stark contrast of its sinister underbelly of material beauty and class oppression. Narrative craft that can hold the tension of the implicit (and sorely lacking) value of black and brown features as beautiful as it intertwines with incisive commentary on the overall commodification of beauty is no small feat, and Clayton manages thrills of action, magic, romance, and revolution as well.

Beauty comes at a price; so too does freedom. (Fantasy.

14-18)

THE LAST VOYAGE OF POE BLYTHE

Condie, Ally Dutton (336 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-525-42645-5

Revenge and rebellion collide in this new dystopian stand-alone novel by Condie (The Darkdeep, 2018, etc.).

Two years ago, Poe Blythe lost her best friend/budding love interest Call when raiders attacked their dredge, or gold-mining river ship.

Focused on revenging his death, Poe has turned the Outpost’s dredges into armored, bladed machines. Unexpectedly sent on the Gilded Lily’s last voyage, newly promoted Capt. Poe distances herself from her crew—older mechanic Naomi, effervescent cook Tam, brooding Brig (who resembles dark-haired, blue-eyed Call), and curious cartographer Eira—and soon faces both raiders on the river and a saboteur among her shipmates.

The initially slow plot picks up steam when the Lily embarks, and per requisite dystopian story arc, relentless, rigid, and righteous Poe discovers dark secrets about the Outpost, sympathizes with the rebellious raiders (or drifters as they prefer to be known), and reconsiders romance. Race is barely noted— 17-year-old Poe has “sun-black hair” (and few other physical descriptors), while Call, Brig, and the Outpost’s leaders appear to be white. A callout to the Matched series should satisfy loyal readers while the constant twists and a cliffhanger ending will encourage new audiences to anticipate possible sequels.

A swashbuckling steampunk mashup of Mark Twain and Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines Quartet. (Science fiction.

12-18)

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BRAWLER

Connelly, Neil Levine/Scholastic (320 pp.) $17.99 paper | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-338-15775-8 High school wrestler Eddie MacIntyre’s scholarship-filled future evaporates the moment he loses control in a violent outburst at the Pennsylvania state semifinals.

Facing arrest, Mac, who is white, accepts a shady offer to join a secret fighting organization called the Brawlers, a lucrative mixed martial arts–style organization that broadcasts ultraviolent, pay-per-view fighting matches on the internet. Leaving his mother behind, he is given a couch to crash on with his trainer, Khajee, a Thai-American high school girl, and her uncle. Channeling his anger at his abusive father (who is currently in jail), Mac is a natural at the brutal fights but quickly gets in over his head as he is forced to accept side jobs strong-arming and terrorizing the fight club owner’s business partners. Meanwhile, Khajee and her uncle are his only lifelines to the world outside of violence, and as their friendship grows Mac is able to face his own past and his relationship with his father. Detailed descriptions of brutal fights and unrepentant violence may be too much for some, but Connelly (Into the Hurricane, 2017, etc.) also conveys the skill, training, and finesse required to win. While Mac’s internal transformation and the ultimately happy ending may require some suspension of disbelief, it is satisfying when the bad guys get their due.

Nonstop graphic violence takes center stage in this otherwise solid story of self-discovery and redemption. (Fiction.

14-18)

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WHAT MAKES GIRLS SICK AND TIRED

De Pesloüan, Lucille Illus. by Darling, Geneviève Second Story Press (48 pp.) $11.95 paper | Mar. 18, 2019 978-1-77260-096-4

This Canadian import presents an illustrated list of the negative effects of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and other prejudices that impact the lives of girls and women.

The blunt, wide-ranging text can feel repetitive as it describes girls’ reactions to the myriad expectations and limitations imposed by society on female individuals. From physical and verbal harassment to rape and murder, body shaming to economic inequality, the litany of challenges runs the risk of utterly overwhelming readers. Some statements include supporting footnotes; most are simply presented as fact. Darling’s graphic-novel–style illustrations, created in shades of lavender, purple, and white with black outlines, have a retro feel vaguely reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art. They show girls and |

women with a variety of skin tones and body types, sometimes interacting with others, sometimes staring out at the reader.

While there is no arguing with the accuracy of the challenges cataloged, it’s difficult to imagine finding just the right audience for this consciousness-raising manifesto. Girls already aware of inequality will likely be looking for more ideas about how to combat it. Readers who have yet to notice the existence of gender- or race-based inequities or other forms of bigotry may not be inspired to discover it here.

The final shoutout for feminism and solidarity is a welcome positive note, but readers will have to look elsewhere for ideas on how to take action. (Nonfiction. 13-18)

IZZY + TRISTAN

Dunlap, Shannon Poppy/Little, Brown (336 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-316-41538-5

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Fleet, Katherine Page Street (384 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-62414-711-1

A heartbreaking love triangle, for readers who can’t stand love triangles.

Once, 17-year-old Meredith “Mer” Hall loved the ocean, indie music, and especially Ben Collins, her lifelong best friend–turned-boyfriend. Now she fears the sea, resents any human connection, and especially loathes herself for the way she ruined things. Still, even after hurting him so badly, she treasures the few secret hours she can snatch with Ben; so when new boy Wyatt Quinn—handsome, cocky, barely hiding his own pain—starts to get close, Mer’s afraid of risking her fragile stability. Alternating between flashbacks of her slowly developing relationship with Ben and her current efforts to cope with her crumbling life, Mer’s spiky, acerbic narration cannot conceal the agonizing undercurrents of insecurity, grief, and despair. The lushly described setting in North Carolina’s Outer Banks echoes her interior landscape: bleak, desolate, and subtly off-kilter. The twisty narrative avoids problem-novel territory, instead engaging with and exploring the underlying issues surrounding trust, autonomy, teenage sexuality, and depression frankly and nonjudgmentally, with more emphasis on emotional ramifications than graphic details. Secondary characters (like the protagonists, apparently all default to white) are loving and mean well but are hobbled by their own flaws and mistakes. Some readers might find the big reveal a bit over-the-top, but with Mer’s final choice—both unexpected and oh-so-right—a final dollop of magical realism provides a sweetly hopeful conclusion.

Harrowing but cathartic. (Fiction. 14-18)

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“Izzy” (short for Iseult), a white IrishAmerican aspiring future doctor, and Tristan, a Trinidadian-American chess prodigy, become caught up in a risky love polygon.

Izzy moves to Brooklyn from Manhattan and has to adjust to her new life and the increased distance she feels from her twin brother. Tristan plays chess in the park at the behest of his cousin, Marcus, who makes money from Tristan’s wins. Hours before the two lovers meet, complicated events lead Marcus to ask Tristan to be his wingman as he woos Izzy. Later, Tristan and Izzy end up hiding their relationship from everyone—or trying to. The consequences of their deception are broken relationships and body parts. Tristan has to make some tough choices, finding that sometimes events are set in motion that we cannot control. Flowery language does nothing to hide an unbelievable romance, and some characters feel flat, seemingly introduced purely for foreshadowing and plot advancement. The topic of race in this interracial romance is not explored sufficiently, and a scene (and subsequent conversation between Tristan and his aunt) in which Izzy’s brother threatens Tristan with a knife following a chess match resulting in the arrival of the police shows a lack of understanding of the experience of black families with law enforcement.

This updated version of the medieval classic disappoints. (Fiction. 14-18)

THE SOUND OF DROWNING

TAKING COVER One Girl’s Story of Growing Up During the Iranian Revolution

Homayoonfar, Nioucha National Geographic Kids (160 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 1, 2019 978-1-4263-3366-8 At 5, Nioucha moves with her Iranian father and French mother from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tehran—just three years before the revolution.

Though disoriented by the move, she quickly picks up Farsi and begins to enjoy her new life surrounded by her Iranian family. But then the Islamic Revolution breaks out and the war with Iraq commences, and Nioucha’s life changes dramatically. Dress codes are strictly enforced, there is no more learning French, schools are segregated, and police patrol the streets looking for lawbreakers—that’s life under Ayatollah Khomeini,

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Melissa de la Cruz

IN 29 DATES, THE WRITER CREATES A WORLD THAT BREAKS STEREOTYPES

By Megan Labrise Photo courtesy Denise Bovee

Officially, Melissa de la Cruz majored in art history and English at Columbia University. Unofficially, the future No. 1 New York Times bestselling author (Alex & Eliza, the Descendants series, etc.) studied the traditional Korean practice of matchmaking, with her best friend as a primary source.

“She was dating regularly in college, and it wasn’t like this was the only path,” de la Cruz says of the seon (matchmaking) blind dates her friend attended, arranged by a professional matchmaker. “It was definitely just one way to do it, a nod to her Korean heritage and respect for her parents. It was kind of like, ‘Well, this is something 146

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that we do, and if it works out, it’s great!’ And she did make some friends from it.”

It isn’t exactly working out for Kim Ji-su at the beginning of de la Cruz’s charming new YA romance, 29 Dates (Dec. 18). A rising high school senior in Seoul, Ji-su is an average student and typical teen whose affluent parents demand a bright future for their only child. To that end, they engage the services of professional matchmaker Ms. Moon, aka the Matseon Queen, to send Ji-su on a series of seons with other scions.

“Ji-su grabbed her phone back and looked at the picture on the screen,” de la Cruz writes. “She wished for a reaction—her heart beating faster, a tiny stomach flip, anything. But her body remained static. There was nothing. He wasn’t not cute. He just looked like every other squeaky-clean, accomplished, coiffed son of a well-off family.”

When Ji-su skips the date to attend a concert with her best friends, Min and Euni, it’s the final straw. Her parents send her to San Francisco to attend a progressive coed prep school (based on real-life academy Lick-Wilmerding), where she can build up her grades, get into an Ivy League college, and dutifully continue the seons.

On her own in a new country, at a new school, with new friends, however—including Filipino-American heartthrob Austin Velasco and handsome Korean-American lacrosse captain Dave Kang—Ji-su must determine her own measures of love and success.

“I wrote it to be fun, and I wanted it to be entertaining,” de la Cruz says of 29 Dates. “I wanted to show a diverse group of kids, because those are my friends, that’s the life I lead. The cute guy? He’s Filipino. And the other cute guy? He’s Korean. I was tired of the fictional world where everything’s a little whitewashed.”

In 29 Dates, de la Cruz, who grew up in Manila before immigrating to San Francisco in high school, represents a panoply of Asian and American teens who defy stereo-

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types. In an admiring review, Kirkus writes, “Characters of a range of ethnicities populate the book, and the cultural details about life in Korea are realistically drawn and impressive in their accuracy.”

“If you are going to write about an experience that’s not your own, you’ve got to do a lot of research,” says de la Cruz, whose manuscript was inspired and heavily vetted by her sister-in-law, who came to the United States from Korea at age 14. “It is a lot of work, but [fear] shouldn’t stop you.

“I don’t get it right all the time,” she says. “Even when I wrote about my Filipino experience, people said, ‘Oh, well, you know, that’s [not right].’ You’re always going to get criticized. You can’t be scared of that, you can’t take it in a bad way....Just think, ‘I’m going to learn from that,’ or ‘That’s really a misunderstanding of my work, and I stand by it.’ ”

whose version of Islam Nioucha learns is nothing like what most people practice or say of the religion. But life must go on, and so it does, but with many nights spent in the makeshift bomb shelter or sneaking around behind her parents’ backs and hoping not to get caught by the Zeinab Sisters or morals police. But one hot summer day, Nioucha is caught, taken in a black jeep to an isolated part of Tehran, and locked up in an abandoned building for disobeying the law. Dancing through time between Nioucha’s detention by the Zeinab Sisters and her experiences acclimating to Iranian culture throughout the 1980s, Homayoonfar weaves a gripping coming-of-age tale set in a fraught political era that continues to affect our world today. Family snapshots and excerpts from her diary help to ground her story.

A candid memoir that offers a personal, particular perspective on life in Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. (Memoir. 12-16)

WAITING FOR FITZ

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Hyde, Spencer Shadow Mountain (240 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-62972-527-7 While seeking treatment for mental illness in a psychiatric ward, a teen contemplates the meaning of life.

When her obsessive-compulsive disorder rituals become severe, 17-year-old Addie Foster must defer her senior year of high school to enter Seattle Regional Hospital’s psychiatric ward as an inpatient. Although her first-person account describes how her OCD manifests and some of her treatment plan, the focus is on her relationship with fellow patient Fitz, who suffers auditory hallucinations. An aspiring playwright, Addie becomes consumed with a homework assignment that questions Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Issues with Fitz and the play converge as the two find fun with puns and other wordplay and notice how people are always acting and wearing masks, both on- and offstage. The story escalates when Fitz asks Addie to help him escape the hospital and find closure to a painful secret. In the process of connecting with Fitz, Addie not only begins to understand the waiting in Beckett’s play, but also life itself. This complex story of merging metaphors and symbolism is for sophisticated readers who prefer reflection to adventure. Debut novelist Hyde offsets the painful realities of mental illness with gentle surprises and such humor as Fitz’s naming his hallucinations after popular country singers. One patient is Mexican-American; the default for all other characters is white.

Thoughtful and thought-provoking. (Fiction. 13-18)

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THE AFTERWARD

Johnston, E.K. Dutton (352 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 19, 2019 978-0-7352-3189-4

Lady knights return to town as heroes—and struggle with life after fame.

Sir Erris Quicksword returns victorious to the city of Cadria with her six faithful companions, having managed to find the magical godsgem and destroy the evil Old God. Welcomed home with great rewards and acclaim, Sir Erris marries the king, and peace returns to the kingdom. Bisexual Olsa Rhetsdaughter, the one lowborn member, feels utterly abandoned and falls back into a life of struggle and thievery. Meanwhile, apprentice knight Kalanthe Ironheart, who is lesbian, returns from her first mission only to prepare apprehensively for marriage—likely to a wealthy man hoping for heirs and willing to pay off her family’s debt. Johnston (That Inevitable Victorian Thing, 2017, etc.) weaves a compelling fantasy world in which meticulously crafted female characters slip easily between chain mail and dresses, enjoying many freedoms and yet facing economic and biological pressures to marry men. The narrative flits between the great quest and “the afterward,” revealing the romantic love between dutiful Kalanthe and defiant Olsa. The characters are diverse—including trans and asexual representation—and many are portrayed as beautifully dark-skinned with natural hair. Impatient readers will note that there’s an awful lot of armor and weaponry with very little questing. It’s with some relief that there’s trouble in the realm once again.

Fascinating female characters in a richly built fantasy world that delivers slowly on adventure. (Fantasy. 13-16)

DIG

King, A.S. Dutton (400 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-101-99491-7 An estranged family’s tragic story is incrementally revealed in this deeply surreal novel.

Alternating narration among five teens, many of them unnamed but for monikers like The Freak, The Shoveler, and CanIHelpYou?, as well as an older married couple, Gottfried and Marla, and the younger of two violent and troubling brothers, an expansive net is cast. An unwieldy list of the cast featured in each part melds well with the frenetic style of this experimental work but does little to actually clarify how they fit together; the first half, at least, is markedly confusing. However, readers able to relax into the chaos will be richly rewarded as the strands eventually weave together. The bitingly sardonic voice of The Freak, who seems to be able to move through space 148

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and time, contrasts well with the understated, almost deadpan observations of The Shoveler, and the quiet decency of Malcolm and the angry snark of CanIHelpYou?, who is falling for her biracial (half white, half black) best friend, are distinctly different from Loretta’s odd and sexually frank musings. Family abuse and neglect and disordered substance use are part of the lives of many of the characters here, but it’s made clear that, at the root, this white family has been poisoned by virulent racism.

Heavily meditative, this strange and heart-wrenching tale is stunningly original. (Fiction. 14-adult)

TRAIL OF CRUMBS

Lawrence, Lisa J. Orca (256 pp.) $14.95 paper | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-4598-2121-7 Fire up your Coleman lanterns: Greta needs all the light and warmth she can get in this story of abandonment, poverty, and sexual assault.

Greta and her twin, Ash, have every element of a tragic life: a very wicked stepmother, a spineless and pathetic father, and being abandoned in the middle of a brutal Edmonton winter with no heat except from an oven, no food, and no rent money. As if that wasn’t enough, Greta is also suffering following a sexual assault and the subsequent ostracism and bullying by the cool kids at her high school. The cast of supporting characters in Greta’s story have enough emotional issues to keep a team of psychologists working around the clock: Greta’s withdrawn brother, an elderly, track-shorts–wearing landlord, his estranged toughtalking daughter, and a lonely neighbor kid. Greta longs to recreate a family that has only been a memory for years but still possesses enough grit to get some sense of closure and justice from those who harmed her. Nothing is candy-coated: The writing includes the blunt language one would expect in this treatment of the very important topics of sexual assault and victim blaming that will resonate with and inform readers. Main characters present as white, but names suggest some diversity among Greta’s classmates.

Lawrence (Rodent, 2016) has an admirable relationship with the written word, and after many chapters of sharp edges and dark corners, readers will discover reason for hope. (afterword) (Fiction. 14-19)

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Readers will ponder this exceedingly creepy tale long after turning the last page. you must not miss

THE FEVER KING

Lee, Victoria Skyscape (383 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2019 978-1-5420-4017-4 Series: Feverwake, 1

YOU MUST NOT MISS Leno, Katrina Little, Brown (304 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 23, 2019 978-0-316-44977-9

A depressed New England teen writes her perfect world into reality and uses it to exact revenge.

Sixteen-year-old Margaret “Magpie” Lewis’ father left soon after she caught him having sex with her mother’s sister.

Since then, Magpie’s older sister, Eryn, a college senior, has stopped communicating with her, and her mother’s drinking has gotten much worse. In addition, her ex–best friend, Allison, has shunned her and branded her as a slut after a horrid encounter with Allison’s boyfriend, Brandon. School is an afterthought, but Magpie has made new friends: Clare, whose father committed suicide; bisexual Luke; Brianna, who suffered a humiliating incident; and Ben, who is trans. Magpie also copes by writing about a place called Near. After a portal to Near manifests in |

IF YOU’RE OUT THERE

Loutzenhiser, Katy Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-06-286567-0 She swore she’d always put “ladies before mateys,” then she ghosts on her best friend? That’s just shady.

Zan Martini and Priya Patel are inseparable. They share a nickname game, a wealth of inside jokes, and years of happy memories. Zan knows she’ll miss Priya when she moves to California. But when Priya ignores all her texts, phone calls, and emails, Zan is devastated. All she has left is Instagram, but Priya’s inane, pseudo-motivational posts sound nothing like her smart, articulate self. Nearly everyone in Zan’s life counsels her to move on—including her therapist mom, the dad she sees every week, the police officer who once coached her in selfdefense, even their manager at the restaurant, whose paychecks keep bouncing from Priya’s new address. The only one willing to listen to Zan and assist her amateur sleuthing is Logan, the handsome new kid in school. But Zan’s not sure she’s ready to trust someone else with her heart, and even Logan seems to harbor a dark secret. Loutzenhiser’s debut is an engaging (although not impenetrable) puzzler anchored by well-realized and endearing characters with diverse family structures. Zan, Logan, and their birth families are white. Priya’s mother is Indian, and her stepfather white. Zan’s mother has a live-in girlfriend with brown skin. The supporting cast includes Latinx and Korean characters.

A light, charming mystery and a heartfelt ode to female friendship. (Fiction. 12-18)

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In Carolinia, one of the nations of the former United States, magic enters people like a virus, mostly killing them.

If you survive, the magic stays and you become a witching. Noam, the Jewish Latinx son of undocumented immigrants from neighboring Atlantia, is one. With his parents dead, Noam is brought to the witching training center, receiving personal tutoring from the minister of defense, Calix Lehrer. Noam sees this as an opportunity to work from the inside to bring rights to the many refugees who have come to Carolinia to escape the virus that still plagues other areas. Fellow student Dara, a dark-skinned and beautiful teen boy, meanwhile favors an anti-refugee politician who has a frosty relationship with Lehrer. If not for the fact that Noam, who is bisexual, harbors lusty feelings for Dara and is sneaking around to maintain a relationship with a father figure at the Migrant Center, or that no witching can be trusted if you don’t know what types of magic they’re good at, things would be simple. Lee’s debut is a thriller with obvious allegorical connections to today’s political climate, but it doesn’t read as message-y; even those with genre fatigue shouldn’t regret giving it a try. If it weren’t for the unsatisfying, obviously sequel-ready ending, this would be a standout.

Diverse characters, frank discussions about sexual and mental abuse, and reasonably plausible science-based magic elevate this above many dystopian peers. (Dystopian science fiction. 15-18)

Magpie’s backyard shed, she spends days there with her Stepford-esque family—one untouched by tragedy—but as Magpie tests her new abilities, her numb, shattered heart tells her that revenge will be sweet, no matter the cost. Poor Magpie’s spiral is a heartbreaking example of how deep pain often masquerades as cruelty, and her actions are tragic. Leno (Summer of Salt, 2018, etc.), channeling early Stephen King at his best, offers no neat conclusions, and her frank examination of depression, grief, alcoholism, and the ruinous aftermath of sexual assault is grim yet effective. Characters are presumed white.

Readers will ponder this exceedingly creepy gut punch of a tale long after turning the last page. (Thriller. 14-adult)

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Dazzles with heroic flair, humor, and suspense. once & future

SQUAD

MacCarthy, Mariah Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-374-30750-9 A cheerleader loses her squad but discovers herself in MacCarthy’s debut novel.

For Jenna Watson, a junior on her high school’s competitive cheer team, life is suddenly collapsing around her. After an incident at a party, Jenna’s best friend, Raejean, replaced her with another girl on their squad. Without Raejean, she feels alone and left out by the rest of the team. Desperate pleas for Raejean’s attention escalate into sabotage and, ultimately, an accident during competition that makes Jenna quit the team.

Grief and loneliness take Jenna on an unexpected adventure, reconnect her with her single mom and goth brother, and help her find strength to move on. While the prose is unpolished, overall MacCarthy captures the raw emotions of heartache and betrayal. Jenna’s romance with James, a transgender boy, models consent and open communication. As her relationship with James develops, Jenna seeks out information about trans experiences by researching on her own time rather than burdening him with intrusive questions. Aside from background characters the cast is predominantly white.

Rough writing but still a story with appeal for its themes of overcoming insecurities and friendship drama.

(Fiction. 14-18)

ONCE & FUTURE

McCarthy, Cori & Capetta, Amy Rose Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown (368 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-0-316-44927-4 A girl with a sword and an impulse problem embarks on a perilous quest to save her family and free the galaxy from the clutches of a power-hungry corporation.

When Ari, an on-the-run refugee from planet Ketch, pulls Excalibur from a tree on Old Earth, she sets a centuries-old cycle into motion. By claiming the sword, she unknowingly attracts the enchantress Morgana and awakens the backwardaging magician Merlin, both of whom are doomed to an eternity of reliving the same story of King Arthur’s rise and fall. Honest to the core and averse to pageantry, Ari rejects her destiny as “the one true king” until she discovers her connection to the Arthur cycle may help her raise a resistance against the Mercer Company, who imprisoned her mothers and are threatening everyone Ari loves. In this intergalactic reimagining of Arthurian legend, a racially diverse queer and trans ensemble of characters leads the battle against the tyranny of capitalism.

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Capetta (The Brilliant Death, 2018, etc.) and McCarthy (Now a Major Motion Picture, 2018, etc.) develop complex conflicts on multiple fronts, including a passionate, whirlwind romance between Ari and her Gweneviere. The women in the story grow together through their challenges with one another and learn from their differences.

All hail this worthier-than-ever, fresh, and affirming reincarnation of the legendary king and her round table of knights which dazzles with heroic flair, humor, and suspense. (Science Fiction/Fantasy. 14-adult)

FUNNY, YOU DON’T LOOK AUTISTIC A Comedian’s Guide to Life on the Spectrum

McCreary, Michael Annick Press (176 pp.) $11.95 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-77321-257-9

A breezy, upbeat memoir from a 22-year-old Canadian autism advocate and stand-up comic.

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age 5, McCreary is quite unlike the stereotypical Aspie (a term he uses interchangeably with autistic person, person on the spectrum, and similar phrases): hopeless at math but extroverted, verbose, and in love with performing. He repeatedly emphasizes that ASD manifests differently in everyone—indeed, his younger brother, also autistic, is in many ways his polar opposite. He recounts his journey to his dream of becoming a professional comedian, including triumphs and humiliations, family, teachers, friends, and enemies, all in a wry, self-deprecating voice peppered with innumerable pop-culture references and relentless optimism. Along the way, he provides an intimate glimpse of one autistic person’s inner life, highlighting common experiences, explaining widespread coping mechanisms, and demolishing popular misconceptions. Some readers might yearn for his advantages of economic means, supportive community, and excellent, well-funded special needs programs in the public schools; still, he acknowledges his struggles with living independently and that some persons with ASD may never achieve that.

Nonetheless, the hard-won lessons he shares—be understanding, don’t judge, live for the moment, never give up, and “shut up and listen”—are worthwhile for autistic and neurotypical alike.

“I didn’t want to be inspirational; I just wanted to be funny.” Happily he manages to be both. (Memoir. 12-18)

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FEAR OF MISSING OUT

McGovern, Kate Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-0-374-30547-5

TIN HEART

Plozza, Shivaun Flatiron Books (336 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-250-31276-1 Seventeen-year-old Australian Marlowe Jensen—just returning to high school after a successful heart transplant—obsesses about her anonymous donor while also navigating relationships with friends, family members, and her

first love.

Marlowe, who is of Danish descent, narrates the tale in present tense. Among her many anxieties: “There is no ‘me’ anymore.

They’re seeing a girl with a borrowed heart.” Although this and other insecure musings pepper the text, it is also filled with Marlowe’s witty comments. Her zany, controlling mother and adoring younger brother provide additional humor: Mum, owner of the “vegan-organic-wellness store called Blissfully Aware,” participates in showy, anti-establishment protests, and 10-year-old |

OPPOSITE OF ALWAYS

Reynolds, Justin A. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (464 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-0-06-274837-9

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After two years in remission, Astrid’s brain tumor is back—and this time, it’s not going away.

Sixteen-year-old Astrid Ayeroff has a tumor wrapped around her brain stem.

Since she’s already beaten cancer once, Astrid’s single mother and her Indian-American boyfriend, Mohit, are convinced she can do it again. Thanks to Astrid’s internship at her doctor’s office, though, she’s learned enough to realize that this time she’s unlikely to survive, even if she enrolls in a promising new clinical trial as Mohit and her mom wish. So while her mother researches experimental treatment options, Astrid investigates cryopreservation, a scientific technique for freezing a body at the moment of death and possibly reviving it in the future. In the process, she realizes she needs to make some difficult decisions about how she wants to live—which means deciding how she wants to die. A deeply felt, nuanced story of coping with terminal illness, McGovern’s (Rules for 50/50 Chances, 2015) novel features a protagonist whose voice strikes just the right balance between poignancy and wit. The well-paced plot prioritizes Astrid’s grief while simultaneously providing windows into the struggles of the people she loves, including a diverse cast of characters. Astrid’s best friend, Chloe, has two mothers; Astrid and her family are assumed white.

A heartbreaking story of loss and grief peopled with nuanced, endearing characters that ultimately leaves the reader with a feeling of triumph. (Fiction. 14-18)

Pip—who seems younger—uses every possible occasion to wear outrageous, painstakingly created costumes. High school bully Eddie Oro and his bubble-headed followers are stock characters, but Marlowe’s budding friendships with cool, gay Zan Cheung and maybe-the-sister-of-Marlowe’s-heart-donor Carmen Castillejo ring true. So does the slow move from adversary to love interest with Leo, the next-door butcher’s son—which begins with a series of escalating pranks on both sides. Without didacticism, the text offers a glimpse into two sets of rare challenges: those faced by Marlowe, grappling with the fact that her life was restored by another’s death, and those faced by Carmen and her father, still grieving over 16-year-old Luis, whose organs were donated after a car accident.

Readers will cheer for Marlowe’s bildungsroman— simultaneously unique and universal. (Fiction. 12-16)

Romeo and Juliet meets Groundhog Day and Love Story in this wonderfully romantic story of teenage love and second chances.

What can Jack say about a college freshman girl who’s dying? That she is beautiful and brilliant? That she loves writing, witty banter, and him? Or that he is destined to meet her over and over again? In this engrossing debut novel, Reynolds creates both a pair of unforgettable protagonists who are doomed to love, lose, and work to find one another again and again and a wellrounded cast of supporting characters. Jack King, who is African-American, is an only child, caught in a love triangle with his two best friends: Franny, a resilient and optimistic Latinx boy, and Franny’s Italian-American girlfriend, Jillian, who is grappling with family issues—and who is the one who got away. All of that changes when Jack meets Kate, an AfricanAmerican student tour guide, during his visit to her university.

When she stands him up for prom, he is heartbroken—even more so when he learns that she has a serious genetic condition. Among the best elements of this supernatural romance are the three-dimensional relationships between Jack and his parents and between him and his two best friends.

A realistic teen drama that tackles complex subjects in an uncompromising way. (Fiction. 14-18)

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DEALING IN DREAMS

Rivera, Lilliam Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4814-7214-2

Rivera (The Education of Margot Sanchez, 2017) crafts a feminist, futurist Latinx dystopia.

Mega City appears to be the only urban center left standing after a massive earthquake known colloquially as the Big Shake, a place where ideals of a feminist eutopia have devolved into gang violence, economic inequality, rampant drug addiction, and callous objectification of men. In this world of toxic femininity, Nalah, better known as Chief Rocka, leads a group of teen girls in patrolling the streets and pursuing an elusive dream of residing among the elite. When an assignment from on high sends Nalah and crew beyond the borders, she is exposed to new ideas and long-buried memories which threaten the foundations of her life. While addressing many hot-button issues, gender identity and expression lie at the heart of the drama. The pacing comes in fits and starts.

Bursts of staccato action, frequently violent, are contrasted with languid interludes of pensive, often redundant, introspection. After spending much of the book blindly loyal to Mega City, the protagonist’s inevitable change of heart comes with a rapidity once reserved only for the Grinch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this leaves many loose ends, ample hanging threads ripe for a sequel. Though characters’ ethnicities are never identified, the world they live in, which creatively flips the hallmarks of machismo on their head, is steeped in Latinx-Caribbean culture.

Intriguing premise but the verdict is still out. (Science fiction. 12-17)

THE DATING GAME

Roache, Kiley Inkyard Press (384 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 26, 2019 978-1-335-01756-7

Three college freshmen strike gold with their successful dating app created for a class project, but will they stay united when business and romance mix?

Sara, Braden, and Roberto meet in a competitive entrepreneurship course at the fictional Warren University in Silicon Valley, California.

When their famous venture capitalist professor challenges them to pitch a winning product idea—or fail the class—they knock out the competition with Perfect10, a dating app in which users rank one another based on desirability. Sara, a whipsmart Midwestern blonde, has already developed a flourishing software system; Braden, a privileged social climber, is set on establishing his own legacy apart from his father; and Roberto is Latinx on scholarship from Oakland with a Spanish-speaking 152

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father and deported mother in Mexico. Sara and Braden are presumed white. In Roache’s (Frat Girl, 2018) sophomore effort, multiple voices rotate narration of each chapter. As the trio faces difficult decisions that illuminate their individual values about greed and profit, this had the potential to be a timely story about ethical entrepreneurship in the tech industry. However, the overarching and predictable romance plot dilutes the impact. Sara’s voice is the strongest, with perceptive insights on roommates and love, but Robbie’s story frustratingly lacks depth; his chapters often serve as a vehicle for dialogue between Braden and Sara. An author’s note about undocumented immigrants is a blithe period at the end of a thin story.

Swipe left on this one. (Fiction. 14-18)

DIFFERENTLY NORMAL

Robinson, Tammy Piatkus Books (352 pp.) $13.99 paper | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-349-41904-6

You know the story: Boy meets girl.

Boy and girl fall in love. Heartbreak ensues.

Nineteen-year-old Albert loves surfing, avoids his abusive father, and works with horses trained for therapy riding.

That’s where he meets Maddy and her sister, Bee, who has autism, epilepsy, and other unspecified developmental disabilities requiring 24/7 care. Outside of work, Maddy has devoted her whole life to helping her single mother and sister and has no expectation or desire for change. But now, with Albert, she can’t help dreaming of something more....This weepy New Zealand romance is marketed to John Green fans but reads more like an old-school tear-jerker spiced up with tasteful sex.

Albert is the ideal boyfriend—gorgeous, athletic, charming, infinitely supportive—even saddled with a cardboard bully parent. Maddy demonstrates more nuance, if inconsistently; a devastating revelation is never mentioned again, and her avowed passion for photography appears only when narratively useful.

Bee’s many disabilities are described with realism and sympathy, but she is portrayed as a bundle of symptoms grafted onto a saccharine stereotype: “innocent, heartbreakingly so.” Maddy never expresses frustration or resentment since her sister functions only to teach patience, tolerance, and unconditional love.

Except for half-Maori, half-white Bee, who has a different father than Maddy, all main characters present as white; one incidental Thai character speaks only in painfully fractured English.

Delivers a good cry but not much else. (Fiction. 14-18)

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The plot is breathlessly fast, with creepy spirits, a satisfying romance, and political twists and turns. bloodleaf

YOU ASKED FOR PERFECT Silverman, Laura Sourcebooks Fire (272 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-1-4926-5827-6

BLOODLEAF

Smith, Crystal HMH Books (384 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-328-49630-0 Magic and royalty interweave with contemporary concerns in this dark fantasy.

Renaltan princess Aurelia is a witch.

She studies forbidden books and avoids contact with the ghosts she sees while trying to hide her powers from a magic-fearing populace.

She’ll be safe once she marries the prince of another monarchy, quelling a centuries-old feud, but secretive, scheming powers knock those plans awry. Fleeing to the magically fortified city of Achleva she pretends to be a commoner with uncommon magical skill as deadly machinations swirl around her.

Aurelia’s and her friends’ skin colors range from pale to dark brown, but racial identities don’t come into play in the story.

The plot is breathlessly fast, complete with creepy spirits, a satisfying romance, and complex but clear political twists and turns. The plot is purely fantasy, involving a cure-all that only |

CHICKEN GIRL

Smith, Heather T. Penguin Teen (240 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2019 978-0-14-319868-0 A Canadian teen wallowing in suffering gets pulled out of it by people worse off than her.

About six months ago, the internet was mean to Poppy. She posted a picture of herself posing like Rosie the Riveter, someone digitally edited a hamburger in her hand, fatphobic comments ensued, and Poppy retreated from her life. She stopped doing roller derby and took a job advertising for a restaurant while dressed in a full-body chicken suit. Her parents and twin brother, Cam, worry, but all Poppy wants to do is keep upsetting herself, binging on social media atrocities. When Poppy meets a small girl named Miracle, she’s introduced to a community of homeless people and their friends and slowly learns to see outside her own pain. The plot reads like multiple lessons and morals haphazardly cobbled together instead of a novel. Miracle’s mother is a sex worker, which appalls judgmental Poppy. Cam recently came out as gay and experiments with flamboyance, leading Poppy to conclude that he’s forgetting who he really is, and a rape scene plays into homophobic tropes about predatory gay men. One character seems to exist only to teach the reader about transgender issues, reduced to his desire for bottom surgery and his experiences with transphobia. The book follows a white default with some implied diversity in secondary characters.

There’s a lot to enjoy about Poppy’s voice, but heavyhanded moralizing impedes the reading experience.

(Realistic fiction. 14-18)

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Ariel has always been a straight-A student, but now it’s senior year.

For this overachiever, that means taking a kajillion AP courses, practicing violin, and making everyone think he’s a perfectionist to whom it all comes easy.

But Ariel’s dream of Harvard begins to waver when he fails a calculus quiz. Thankfully, Amir comes to the rescue by agreeing to tutor him. Gay Amir is Pakistani Muslim, and bisexual Ariel comes from an observant Jewish family; the boys have been in the same school for years and their families are friendly, but it is only now that they really notice—and quickly fall for—one another. With AP exams approaching, college applications due, a violin recital and numerous family events looming—not to mention Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—Ariel begins to realize that effortless perfection requires quite a bit of effort after all. As their romance grows, Ariel finds himself unable to keep up with the various elements of his life: the stresses of school, romance, and family. Ultimately, he learns the importance of stepping back, seeking help, and admitting to weakness. Silverman (Girl Out of Water, 2017) writes a coming-of-age novel that will charm readers with its relatable and diverse characters, quirky storyline, and interweaving of faith, queerness, and the everyday lives of seniors navigating the pressures of college applications, grades, and relationships.

Heartwarming and engaging. (Romance. 14-18)

comes after bloodshed, a horrifying ghost called the Harbinger, and the violent undoing of protective spells. However, some aspects—a protective but deadly wall, corrupt leaders who manipulate a repressive, pleasure-denying religion for their own ends, and King Domhnall, a hypocritical, whoring, “very stable genius”—will feel immediately relevant to savvy readers. The mythology feels classic yet fresh and interesting, though descriptions of “blood magic” (where practitioners often make themselves bleed) might warrant a trigger warning for self-injury.

Political, romantic, magical, timely, yet also traditionally appealing. (Fantasy. 14-18)

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A smart, funny, engrossing romance with a social conscience. night music

SHERWOOD

so few she can quickly count and list them, Oscar notes with good humor. Race matters in the course of their budding romance, but Oscar’s rising star and Ruby’s uncertain future factor in far more. Ruby struggles to figure out the next stage of her life while Oscar wants to avoid ugly assumptions about his interest in his mentor’s daughter. Ruby and Oscar’s sweet and intense romance sparkles. Readers will root for them not just as a couple, but as individuals trying their best to understand their gifts and passions while facing pressures from the adult world.

A smart, funny, engrossing romance with a social conscience. (Fiction. 13-18)

Spooner, Meagan HarperTeen (496 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-0-06-242231-6 A new hero dons the iconic green cloak in this retelling of Robin Hood’s tale.

Young Lady Marian of Edwinstowe is not a typical damsel in distress.

Long betrothed to Robin of Locksley, Marian relishes freedom more than future romance, prizing horseback riding, archery, and Sherwood Forest over feminine, domestic pursuits. But when Robin falls to stockcharacter Saracens in the Crusades, Marian is nevertheless devastated and wonders how to protect Robin’s people, Locksley villagers and outlaws alike. Haunted/guided by Robin—or an idealized version of him—Marian uses her noble station, tall stature, and unparalleled archery skills to become Robin Hood. The requisite (albeit not-so-) Merry Men, daring heists, and archery contest follow, all retold with feminist and egalitarian undercurrents. Secondary character Guy of Gisborne—black-clad, scarred, seemingly sinister and servile—surpasses his traditional toady role and evolves to become a suitable foil to feisty Marian. Spooner (Hunted, 2017, etc.) grounds Marian’s adventures with rich historical details and offers a flawed, fervent heroine whose revolutionary desires and short-term schemes encounter brutal medieval realities like war, death, taxes, and the inherent chauvinism of chivalry. All characters are assumed white.

Steeped in tradition but infused with feminism and political concerns, a Robin Hood for a new audience.

(Historical fiction. 12-18)

NIGHT MUSIC

Thorne, Jenn Marie Dial (400 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2019 978-0-7352-2877-1 After failing her audition at an elite music school, Ruby falls for Oscar, her father’s musical genius protégé.

A disastrous audition at the prestigious Amberley School of Music would be heartbreaking for anyone with their heart set on a musical career. But for Ruby Chertok, what does the future hold if not a career as a classical pianist, a birthright from her loving, accomplished, but imperfect parents?

Her father is on the faculty of Amberley and is in charge of the upcoming season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Enter Oscar Bell, a charming prodigy and YouTube sensation from Maryland who’s spending the summer studying with Ruby’s father. Oscar is African-American. Ruby and her family and friends are white—aside from her seven black friends, 154

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SECOND IN COMMAND

Van, Sandi West 44 Books (200 pp.) $19.95 | Feb. 1, 2019 978-1-5383-8262-2

After his mother departs on a sixmonth tour of duty, 16-year-old Leo, his father, and his younger siblings, Jack and Reina, are left to cope.

Leo is on his way becoming an Eagle Scout, he wants to join the Summer Youth Police Academy, and he is committed to embodying the principles of the Scout Oath. His workaholic father, who is hardly ever home, sees him as the reliable one and gives Leo too much responsibility for the care of his siblings. Leo has always vowed to have Jack’s back, but when the 13-year-old starts acting out and gets in serious trouble, Leo finds it hard to hold up his end of the bargain. He becomes close to Zen, a girl who belongs to their support group for families of deployed military personnel, but that relationship is later put at risk. Leo must figure out how to help his brother while also pursuing his own dreams.

In her heartfelt debut novel that explores the challenges facing military families left at home, Van effectively utilizes verse to impeccably convey the feelings of sadness, anger, displacement, and lack of belonging of young people on the brink of adulthood. Leo’s father is a Cuban immigrant, and Zen is KoreanAmerican; other characters are assumed white.

Reluctant readers will enjoy exploring Leo’s loyalty to his family and ideals, strong threads woven through the fabric of this emotional story. (Verse novel. 12-18)

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KISS NUMBER 8

Venable, Colleen AF Illus. by Crenshaw, Ellen T. First Second (320 pp.) $17.99 paper | Mar. 12, 2019 978-1-59643-709-8

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The discovery of long-buried family secrets brings Amanda closer to owning her own.

Amanda is the demure sidekick to the wild and sexy Cat, who knows how to have a good time but doesn’t always know how to be a great friend. Her real best friend, though, is her Catholic dad. They go to Sunday baseball games, share favorite TV shows, and trounce each other in video games. When Amanda discovers that her runaway grandmother was actually an early transgender rights activist who transitioned late in life, it brings unbearable tension into their relationship. It also makes Amanda wake up to parts of herself she’s not yet been able to acknowledge, such as how she really feels when she’s around Cat. These revelations wreak havoc on her relationships. Fortunately, Amanda, who is white, finds a new, multiracial crew from the public school. Their lack of need for labels, for the gender binary, or to overexplain themselves allows Amanda to relax into self-acceptance. It’s a story of family and friendship and love in all its forms, perfect for the graphic novel format and elevated by the combined art and narrative.

For example, when Amanda’s father tells his mother’s story, his distorted recollections are laid out in juxtaposition with actual events, resulting in an achingly moving vignette. The characters shine, fully human and permitted to be flawed. Hope prevails.

A rare blend of tender and revolutionary. (Graphic novel.

13-18)

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Sh e lf Space Q&A with Hannah Oliver Depp, Managing Partner of Upshur Street Books

By Karen Schechner

so much about the city focus on the neighborhood in such detail was fantastic, and we were able to partner with our local library, which is just a couple of blocks away, to reach as many people as possible. We capped off the night with drinks in our partner bar, Petworth Citizen, just next door to the bookstore. It’s the kind of literary community night that Paul Ruppert, the owner, dreamed of when opening the store.

How does the bookstore reflect the interests of your community?

Washington, D.C., instantly embraced Upshur Street Books and vice versa when the general bookstore opened in 2014. President Barack Obama and his daughters shopped there; 44 and family bought Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Voigt’s Elske, and more. Upshur Street Books covers everything from poetry and politics to essay collections and cookbooks. We talk with managing partner Hannah Oliver Depp about the ways the bookstore serves the multiple needs and wants of D.C. and “why indie bookstores…exist.”

How would you describe Upshur Street Books to the uninitiated?

We’re a small store on the cornerstone block of Petworth, D.C. This neighborhood is a perfect mashup of quiet, neighborhood-oriented, culturally diverse D.C. and the tidal wave of gentrification and new business that has flooded our capital in the past decade. Our bookstore is working hard to be a physical representation of that intersection; a “third place” where you can meet whether you’re rushing home from work and need to grab a book for your kids’ reading list or killing 40 minutes waiting for a table at one of the many great restaurants on our block.

If Upshur Street Books were a religion, what would be its icons and tenets?

Obviously, our icon is an open book. Read whatever makes you happy, just keep reading.

Which was your favorite event and/or most memorable disaster?

We just had an event with George Pelecanos, who features the store in his latest novel, The Man Who Came Uptown, and pays homage to Petworth in general. Having someone who cares 156

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Well, you’ve hit the big question right now for us. When we opened, the owner envisioned more of a traditional corner bookstore. But the neighborhood and the industry have changed dramatically over the past few years, and the store is currently pivoting to adapt. Our market wants not only a place to bring their kids to read books, but also an evolving gathering place that ties into the bar next door with literary cocktail nights, provides coffee on your morning rush, and features unique offerings of gifts and custom services. We do a lot of programming with community groups and literary organizations, and formalizing those relationships is a big part of our plan for next year. Our current focus…is changing over our inventory to reflect the diverse community we serve and finding more unique gifts for the holiday season.

What trends are you noticing among young readers?

It’s not so much a trend as why indie bookstores, and ours in particular, exist. People want that personal recommendation.

It’s the No. 1 reason they come to a physical bookstore. Kids’ books featuring children who look like the children in our neighborhood schools, whether YA or picture books, have been huge. There is a strong interest in diverse children’s literature, the sort that deals with larger cultural traumas but also runs the gamut of the everyday life of a young person: eating breakfast with family, falling in love, solving crimes in a timetraveling shoe. You know, the basics.

What are some of the bookstores’ top current handsells?

We can literally never sell enough A Is for Activist in our store!

That board book could be half of our kids’ section, and I think it would still move.

Karen Schechner is the vice president of Kirkus Indie. |

indie HER WIDOW

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Alden, Joan Dog Ear (202 pp.) $19.57 paper | $9.99 e-book Oct. 18, 2018 978-1-4575-6298-3

TRIPS by Arthur W. Goodhart..........................................................166 THE WONDER CODE by Scott Mason.............................................. 172 FORTY STEPS AND OTHER STORIES by Terrence Murphy............ 174 RADIAL BLOOM by Amy Ratto Parks...............................................176 TWO COINS by Sandra Wagner-Wright............................................180

Ratto Parks, Amy Folded Word (84 pp.) $12.00 paper | Nov. 15, 2018 978-1-61019-114-2

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RADIAL BLOOM

A heartfelt journal spans the year following a partner’s death from ovarian cancer.

Alden (When I First Knew, 2016, etc.) wrote this in memory of her partner—photographer and graphic designer Catherine J. Hopkins (1940-1996), with whom she lived in Catskill, New York. At that time, the legitimacy of their same-sex relationship wasn’t widely acknowledged. The local courthouse and church both refused to marry the women, but their pastor performed a wedding ceremony at their home in 1991, and Alden considered Catherine her wife. However, she would later feel shunned at a bereavement support group, and her parents, who never approved of her relationships with women, announced that they wanted nothing further to do with her. Month by month, these diary entries from 1996—addressed as letters to the late Catherine—illuminate the first year of sometimesdesperate grief. The author recounts her struggle to accept her identity as a widow: “I don’t know this person who can’t find meaning or pleasure in anything.” Flipping through photo albums unearthed memories of parties and vacations, but early on, it was the painful scenes that tended to linger: cleaning Catherine’s stomach tube, the final moments before her death, and the rituals of washing her body and informing relatives.

Looking back, though, Alden could see that, however ironically, “those difficult days were the most intimate.” The journal artfully sets the enormity of loss in the context of everyday activities. Life goes on with a broken toilet to be fixed, a wedding to attend, and an ex-lover’s body to identify. Short, poetic notes on the weather close most of the entries, providing a sense of inevitable forward motion. Catherine’s black-and-white photographs also illustrate the seasons’ passage. By September, the narrative sees the author moving on—selling their house, moving to start a new teaching role, and facing breast cancer unfazed. She resolves to “remember the past with gratitude” and “neither to flee the darkness nor fly toward the light,” instead taking a cleareyed view of life’s mixed fortunes.

Tender, realistic snapshots of life during bereavement.

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bibliophagy Indieland supports reading omnivorously. So, in 2019, I’ll be foraging for (in addition to my perennial favorite, interior, well-written literary fiction) transporting photography collections; biting social commentary; and well-researched nonfiction, especially by women writers.

I’d love to see more books like Lara Jo Regan’s Dogs on the Beach (Regan, a photojournalist, became internet famous when she introduced Mr. Winkle, which rewards Googling, to the world). These images are joyful and eye-catching—a blend of William Wegman and William Eggleston. Two dogs’ batlike ears rhyme with hang gliders at the top of the frame; a Boxer poses against a multicolored boardwalk; a Chinese crested, planted on wet sand, gazes wisely at the viewer.

I’ll continue to look for boundary-pushing satire. I know I can count on the prolific Jacob M. Appel, who has racked up a nice constellation of Kirkus stars. In his most recent short story collection, The Amazing Mr. Morality, “The Children’s Lottery” blends Jonathan Swift and Shirley Jackson. In this lottery, the “winning” child is sacrificed to a camp of pedophiles to keep the rest of the children safe.

It’s the complicity that’s the kicker in these mordant morality tales.

And I’ll be keeping a lookout for more terrific nonfiction from Judy Juanita. She first caught my attention with her starred collection, De Facto Fem­ inism, which our reviewer describes as “an extraordinary set of autobiographical essays [that] gives insight into a black woman’s life in the arts.”

Her most recent book, Homage to the Black Arts Movement: A Hand­ book, also starred, is a “multigenre study guide [that] invites readers to investigate, through fiction, poetry, drama, and essays, the many facets of the revolutionary black artistic and political movements of the 1960s and ’70s.” —K.S. Karen Schechner is the vice president of Kirkus Indie.

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MOZART AND GREAT MUSIC

Alexander, Mark Andre The School of Pythagoras (180 pp.) $7.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Dec. 9, 2015 978-1-937597-24-5

This fourth installment of a series focuses on the music of Mozart.

Alexander (Sex and Romance, 2015, etc.) continues his series of manuals with a slight departure from the norm. Previous volumes have centered on providing readers with lucid, accessible guides to such practical matters as sex, romance, money, finances, and general life lessons, but in this updated version of Book 4, the emphasis turns quite specific: the journey, music, and genius of Mozart. The author contends that listening to and properly appreciating Mozart’s music can usher readers into what Alexander calls a “heavenly state of consciousness.” Great art, according to the author, transports listeners to a realm where they ask: How is it possible that a human being actually made something so beautiful and stirring?

Offering copious musical examples, Alexander deftly describes several of Mozart’s best known or most technically virtuosic pieces, grounding them in the particulars of the composer’s life and career. The author presents e-book readers with links to YouTube clips featuring Mozart performances or various discussions by experts on the music’s splendor and significance.

At several points, readers are taken on deeper examinations of key works (both Mozart’s and those of other classical composers who either influenced or were inspired by his music). The Mozart offerings range from popular operas like The Marriage of Figaro and complex pieces like the string quartets and quintets to such towering achievements as the “Jupiter” Symphony. The technical details of instruments and arrangements are broken down in clear language. The author is always alert to the ways Mozart “stretched the ears” of his listeners, perfecting many of the musical forms that had come before him and foreshadowing several later developments in the genre. And throughout the book, as in the previous entries in this series, Alexander is very effective at stressing the excitement of discovery, the great personal rewards to be reaped with patient and meticulous study. The guide is brightly and invitingly designed, clearly intended to welcome readers to a grand adventure.

A thorough and enthusiastic introduction to the life and works of Mozart, perfect for readers of all ages.

STORMY SATURDAY

Blyth, Jennifer Illus. by Kerber, Kathy AuthorHouse (42 pp.) $13.99 | $9.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Dec. 8, 2015 978-1-64361-247-8 978-1-64361-246-1 paper

RAINBOWS IN THE STORM

Cairns, Angela Flemming Westbow Press (380 pp.) $39.95 | $5.99 e-book | May 8, 2018 978-1-973622-45-1 Cairns’ debut recounts her emotional journey of caring for two ill children, culminating in her daughter’s heart transplant.

When the Australian author was 19 years old, her parents introduced her to her future husband, then-15-year-old Lucas, and his family: “I could never have known...one day, that family, along with the health challenges ahead they had to face, would become mine too.” Years later, she and Lucas fell in love, got married, and moved from Sydney to the small town of Grafton, where they raised their young boy, Elijah. Soon they had a daughter, Luka-Angel, who was born with viral meningitis. After the birth of their third child, Jazziah, a doctor realized that the two youngest children had congenitally weak hearts—a condition called cardiomyopathy,

THIS IS THAT Stories

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A little girl and her big brother make the most of a rainy day by using their imaginations to have fantastical adventures indoors.

Eight-year-old Braydon and his almost-5-year-old sister Brooklynn (pictured by illustrator Kerber as two blond white children) are stuck inside their home on Sammie Street on a rainy day. Piles of laundry and bedding in Braydon’s messy room turn into “Mount Clothia,” a mountain so high it reaches the stars. A blustery wind blows open a window and the children must escape a giant’s clutching hands (the drapes) in the “Flying Forest.” The basement laundry room becomes “Whispering Waterfalls,” home to trolls. The adventures and the full-bleed, brightly colored illustrations that depict them offer child-pleasing mild humor and suspense. Beyond encouraging young readers to cultivate creativity and use their imaginations—with no screens to distract them—Blyth (Escaped the Night, 2016) offers a message about the rewards of brothersister bonding. Braydon’s initial reluctance to spend the day with Brooklynn, giving way to enjoyment as his sister eagerly follows along, rings true. The 8-year-old’s snippy reluctance to become the follower when Brooklynn comes up with her own adventure is overdone, but there is pleasing warmth in the resolution of the escapade and the siblings’ return to their everyday life.

Celebrates inventive play and offers a refreshingly positive message about sibling harmony.

which ran in the Cairns family. The children struggled to live normal lives with a condition that had the potential to put them into cardiac arrest with too much exertion. Finally, the family made the terrifying decision to put Luka on a waitlist for a heart transplant, despite the risks. They flew across the country at a moment’s notice so that young Luka could undergo the dangerous, life-changing procedure. The memoir’s first third is dragged down by tangential stories about family life and an upsetting account of an abusive neighbor. However, Cairns narrates the transplant itself with great care, depicting the delirium that comes from waiting countless hours for news as well as the long and uneasy road to full recovery. She’s also very effective at relating the sadness of restricted childhoods; at one point, for instance, she tells of having to drag young Jazz away from a race that he wanted to run. The author mixes in intimate diary entries, drawings, and photos that will help to give readers a fuller view of her emotional state throughout her ordeal.

An affecting memoir that takes readers into the struggles of a life-threatening condition.

Chehak, Susan Taylor Foreverland Press (95 pp.)

Nov. 2, 2018

A collection of short stories centered on the complications of love and the disorientation of grief.

Chehak (It’s Not About the Dog: Sto­ries, 2015, etc.) isn’t cowed by the notion of tackling the most exigent existential issues in this assemblage of 16 tales, all but one previously published, mostly in literary magazines such as The Minnesota Review. Many of them confront the pain of loss. For example, in the first, titular piece, Nessa Lowe, a 60-year-old woman, struggles to get her bearings after her longtime husband abandons her for a younger woman—a fate that’s no less humiliating for being clichéd. Nessa contributes to her own solitude by alienating her other family members, as she’s an ungovernable alcoholic, inclined to mercurial acts of violence. Similarly, in “Helium,” Maudie’s spiritual desolation after the death of her husband reduces her to finding companionship in an artificial boy fashioned from balloons. As is characteristic of Chehak’s writing, the story manages to seamlessly weave despair with morbidly outlandish humor, as characters use the latter as a means to negotiate the former. In “Idiot,” a story that’s less than a page in length, an unnamed protagonist returns to her ex-boyfriend’s place to retrieve a pair of shoes only to hurl them into a lagoon shortly after—an act of selfredemption following a self-betraying submission. The author seems keen on flouting conventions; the story structures aren’t always linear, and many of them feel more like quick, impressionistic portraits of emotional states than they do literary chronicles of events. The concluding piece, “That is This: Resurrection,” resembles narrative verse with its series of short questions and declarative statements: “Is she dead? She is dead.” |

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Coppola has a keen eye for the passion of childhood friendships and the subtle indignities and joys of being 9. fly away free

Chehak’s prose offers an impressive variety of styles, ranging from long, cascading sentences to linguistic parsimony, from short snapshots to longer, more plot-driven narratives.

She has a talent for packing a lifetime of retrospection into one or two sentences, such as these, from “Coxswain”: “We ran through the streets, chanting for justice and an end to the war and peace on earth and love and he held my hand and I threw the rock that smashed the sign. There was darkness then and he kissed me then, he shattered me like glass.” Most of the pieces in this book are driven by character, and even the unnamed figures in them are powerfully drawn, if enigmatic. In “Suffer the Children: Four Quartets,” for instance, readers don’t know much information about Ellen—a woman in search of a new home, away from her mother—or about Mrs. Norton, the grifter posing as a house seller, but the mad desperation of both women is palpable. The author also sensitively juxtaposes personal anxiety with its global iteration; in “Apocalypse, Tonight,” the unnamed protagonist—her anonymity conspicuous in a story brimming with named characters—makes elaborate preparations for a New Year’s Eve party that could possibly include a Y2K catastrophe, but lurking in the background is the impending death of her father.

A poignant assortment of stylistically daring stories.

FLY AWAY FREE

Coppola, Anne Turner Page Publishing (142 pp.) $29.99 | $19.99 paper | Jul. 17, 2014 978-1-4990-4915-2 A bird in danger leads a woman to reminisce about the geese she tended as a girl.

In this posthumously published debut middle-grade novel, Coppola introduces readers to Tessie Farrell, an adult who lives in Florida. When she rescues an injured osprey and goes after the boys who harassed and abducted the bird’s relatives, Tessie reawakens memories of her childhood in 1950s upstate New York. At 9 years old, Tessie is sensitive about having been adopted and has an uneasy relationship with most of her classmates, particularly mean girl Sharon Grand. A slowburning friendship with librarian and ornithologist Maudie Carrol begins to soften Tessie’s sharp edges (“Instead of criticizing or bossing me, she simply explained why things were”), and caring for a pair of abandoned geese finally gives her a sense of purpose. The geese, Wilbur and Orville, are the subject of Tessie’s science project. Taking care of them allows her to excel in a classroom where she often feels overlooked and to understand the motivations of adoptive parents like her own. The story is a quiet one, focused on Tessie’s internal development rather than a dramatic plot. Coppola has a keen eye for the passion of childhood friendships (“I loved and trusted her so much that if she had told me Santa Claus was real, I would have believed in him again”) and the subtle indignities and joys of being 9 (“In place of friends, I had imagination, and I created one-character 160

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plays in which I gave energetic and highly emotional performances, lacking only an audience”). Tessie is a prickly and selfcontained character, but an endearing one who allows readers to understand her conflicts and growth in detail. The prose could have benefited from additional editing, particularly the several points at which the first-person narration inadvertently switches to third-person. But there are also simple but elegant turns of phrase (“Spring comes like a shy bride in Upstate New York”) that make for enjoyable reading and a satisfying story.

An engaging middle-grade tale about the power of love and letting go.

SECRETS HAUNT THE LOBSTERS’ SEA

D’Avanzo, Charlene Maine Authors Publishing (210 pp.) $16.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Jun. 25, 2018 978-1-63381-136-2 Mystery writer D’Avanzo (Demon Spirit, Devil Sea, 2017, etc.) is back on the coast of Maine, dealing with a bunch of lobstermen who want no truck with nosy outsiders.

In the very first chapter, marine biologist and amateur sleuth Mara Tusconi discovers a body under her cousin Gordy Maloy’s mussel aquaculture raft, a body that had belonged to lobsterman Buddy Crawford. Whodunit? Mara soon finds herself on Macomeck Island, a speck in the Gulf of Maine about 25 miles off the coast. Lobstermen have lived on the island for generations, and something akin to the law of the frontier holds sway. Mara, who is fighting her own demons of loneliness and insecurity, finds comfort in grandmotherly Abby Burgess. Abby’s daughter Patty, Gordy’s girlfriend, is sure that the killer is hotheaded Tyler Johnson, reputed druggie.

But Mara keeps sniffing around and uncovering old wounds, grudges, and hatreds. There are also very vivid scenes such as a near catastrophe when a sudden squall threatens to swamp Mara’s sea kayak. Pushing on, she begins to recover from her own wounds (some self-inflicted), and the final episode in a submersible with her old flame, Ted McNight, may just put her life back on course. It should also be mentioned that her best confidant is a lobster named Homer, (who of course is very discreet). D’Avanzo writes well (“The knots in my stomach would have made a sailor proud”) and delivers a nice mix of Mara’s outer challenges (who killed Buddy?) and inner (will she ever find love?). She also delivers a lot of very interesting facts about oceanography and marine biology, having earned a Ph.D. from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. That alone is worth the read. She switches to dialect when she deems it appropriate (“lobstah,” “habah,” “remembah”). Some readers may find this charming; others may find it a bit tiresome and distracting. This installment contains a preview of her next Mara Tusconi mystery, Glass Eels, Shattered Sea (2019).

Anyone interested in a good mystery along with insights into marine life will enjoy D’Avanzo’s latest.

OLDE ROBIN HOOD

MURDER ABOARD THE HIGHLAND ROSE

Danley, Kate Self (313 pp.) $12.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Sep. 20, 2018 978-1-72384-312-9

In this 18th entry in Fischer’s (Ashes to Ashes, 2018, etc.) mystery series, a Hollywood novelist/screenwriter runs into danger when his latest project threatens to expose old secrets about President John F. Kennedy’s father.

Joe Bernardi, once a top Hollywood publicist, has shifted careers to write novels and screenplays, but he often finds himself investigating Tinseltown murders and scandals. In 1963, his publisher intriguingly asks him to write a nonfiction account of a 35-year-old murder aboard the yacht Highland Rose.

The alleged shooter was Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the president’s dad—and surprisingly, the book proposal is coming from JFK’s inner circle. Apparently, the president’s enemies are preparing their own hatchet job, and his allies want to get ahead of it. The trail’s gone cold since 1929, when the elder Kennedy was a rich but relatively unknown bootlegger. Murder victim Archie Farrell, a second-rate, alcoholic talent agent, was similarly obscure.

But some Hollywood bigwigs were on the yacht, too, including Farrell’s wife, the glamorous actress Gladys Cooper; and Gloria Swanson, Kennedy’s mistress. Bernardi tracks down the original newspaper, police, and crew accounts in Monterey Bay, where the yacht was moored, as well as still-living witnesses, including Cooper and Swanson. He also confronts lies, evasions, and beatings, which only spur his resolve—but in the end, the facts may not be the most important thing. Fischer is a former screenwriter and producer for such TV shows as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, and he knows how to tell a compelling story.

The gumshoe-style mystery at the heart of his novel is intriguing in itself, but it gets an extra boost from the Hollywood glamour that surrounds it; for example, readers get to visit the set of the film My Fair Lady, in which Cooper is one of the actors, and Bernardi offers his opinion that casting Audrey Hepburn as the lead is a terrible idea. The story has a sense of pathos, as well, revealing how less-powerful players were affected by the Highland Rose incident, and as Bernardi bemoans the bitterness, anger, and division of 1963, the author holds a mirror up to our own fractious era.

An entertaining, fast-paced mystery.

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This epic fantasy retelling of a classic story delivers characters both new and familiar.

Danley’s (A Spirited Manor, 2018, etc.) tale has a mythic bent from the beginning, as the corrupt sheriff of Nottingham murders Robin Hood’s father and burns their family farm to the ground. This episode invokes the idea of the monomyth (and a call to action, especially for the farm boy). From there, the story hits familiar beats but keeps them fresh with information from folktales and oral traditions apparently pre-dating the Robin Hood mythos of modern popular culture. Exiled, Robin escapes to Sherwood Forest, where he meets Little John (fleeing the sheriff ’s service). The two become friends and join forces with others, adopting a moral code even as they turn to highway robbery to survive. Interestingly, this code is less contingent on their targets’ wealth than their honesty, as Robin and his companions visit justice on only those who lie when asked if they have money. Rather than resorting to violent acts, they have a strict rule against killing and, in fact, invite some weary travelers to join them in their feasts. Further, Robin renounces Christianity early in the story, seeing clergymen as another aspect of the corrupt state, preying on the downtrodden and coveting riches beyond their needs. This stance—as well as the fact that Robin is neither a nobleman nor a loyalist to an absent king, as in some adaptations—sets Danley’s protagonist apart from the simplicity of the morality plays the character often stars in and introduces pagan religion and a philosophy akin to political anarchism, with its strong opposition to unjust hierarchies. Some readers may find that these elements fail to breathe new life into the tale’s well-trod ground, especially as the plot proceeds. Robin (now beloved by the poor) is pitted against an increasingly irate sheriff, forcing the hero to use only his wits and skills to save his friend and lady love. The bones of the narrative are familiar (Little John says of Robin: “He gets one taste of treating folks with kindness, and it is like a thirst that is never quenched”). But the classic story endures for a reason, and many readers will likely find themselves intrigued and entertained by the novel’s rich prose, intense action, historical and mythological depth, and captivating innovations.

A tried-and-true heroic tale made fresh with novelty and well-researched details.

Fischer, Peter S. Grove Point Press (226 pp.) $9.99 paper | Mar. 12, 2018 978-0-9960491-7-7

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23 Great Indie B ooks Wo r t h D i s c o v e r i n g [Sponsored] TOR’S LAKE

TIME FOR WONDERLUST

by Jennifer Mason “A literary novel about one woman’s strange journey through Northern California.”

A dense, inventive, challenging account of one woman’s bizarre West Coast entanglement.

by Forrest J. Wright “An intriguing combination of economics, philosophy, history, and advice aimed at readers who wish to plan for a meaningful retirement.”

A must for future and current retirees; an entertaining excursion through the world of philosophy for everyone else.

HOME IS THE PRIME MERIDIAN

VODKA CALIPHATE

by Bill Felker

“In Sweetapple’s novel, two scientists, one a former special ops undercover agent, are kidnapped off the coast of Nigeria.”

by Lee A. Sweetapple

“An almanac provides meditations inspired by encounters with the natural world.”

A brief, intense, and entirely enjoyable tour of nature.

WAREHOUSE OF SOULS

FAMILY DINNERS

by A.X. McKneally

by Roger Croft “MI6 agent Michael Vaux returns to track down a security breach in Lebanon in Croft’s (The Maghreb Conspiracy, 2014, etc.) thriller.”

An espionage tale with believable characters that draw readers into the action.

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A layered, action-packed mystery with a cautionary message about the need to protect our environment.

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“A debut memoir examines narcissism and women’s rights.”

A strong, important account of self-preservation.

LOOPHOLES OF REAL ESTATE

RAPTOR

by Garrett Sutton

“In this sci-fi–tinged novel, winged superheroes called Raptors battle demons in a dystopian city.”

by B.A. Bostick

“Investing in real estate is as easy as understanding the tax code and personal-injury law, according to this informative but daunting primer, part of the Rich Dad Advisors series.”

A gritty and engaging, if dense, supernatural noir thriller.

Readers looking for easy money may be discouraged by Sutton’s demonstration of just how complex real estate money can be, but others will find helpful guidelines, tips, and tricks presented in a clear, engaging style.

by Leslie Johansen Nack

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MOSAIC OF THE DARK

FOURTEEN

by Lisa Dordal “A debut poetry collection explores faith and sexuality.”

“A debut memoir reveals a turbulent adolescence.”

Humming with inspired metaphors and everyday relevance, these poems are gems.

An engaging account, gripping from start to finish, that should appeal to a wide audience, including sailing enthusiasts.

FAITH, POWER, JOY

SURVIVED

by Sheryl A. Stradling

by A. Michael Marsh

“A debut multigenerational memoir focuses on the strong women in the author’s family tree.”

“In Marsh’s (The Changed, 2013, etc.) sequel, a superpowered contingent hopes to harness alien devices that can tame a plague.”

A highly readable family story that brims with heart and optimism.

Marsh blends superpowers, paramilitary action, and alien machinations to triumphant effect in this follow-up.

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23 Great Indie B ooks Wo r t h D i s c o v e r i n g [Sponsored] THE NIGHT IS FAR GONE

WILDFLOWERS

by Tim Jorgenson

“In this novel, three AfricanAmerican childhood friends try to reconnect many years later, with varying success.”

by Delores Lowe Friedman

“A debut historical novel depicts the fall of the Romanov family during the Russian Revolution.”

A mesmeric peek into the modern dismantling of the Russian monarchy.

A solid historical novel with engaging characters.

DEMON SPIRIT, DEVIL SEA

SECRETS HAUNT THE LOBSTERS’ SEA

by Charlene D’Avanzo

by Charlene D’Avanzo

“In this mystery sequel, D’Avanzo (Cold Blood, Hot Sea, 2016) puts her heroine, Dr. Mara Tusconi, off the coast of British Columbia to investigate some fishy activity on Haida Gwaii archipelago.”

A fine entry in D’Avanzo’s oceanography-themed series, which fills an unusual niche in the mystery genre.

NORTH POINT

by David Vlcek & Steve Spremo “Adolescent siblings may be in a position to stop a ruthless mogul from taking Christmas away from Santa Claus in Spremo and Vlcek’s debut adventure tale.”

An entertaining, unique spin on the popular holiday that caters to readers of all ages.

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“Mystery writer D’Avanzo (Demon Spirit, Devil Sea, 2017, etc.) is back on the coast of Maine, dealing with a bunch of lobstermen who want no truck with nosy outsiders.”

Anyone interested in a good mystery along with insights into marine life will enjoy D’Avanzo’s latest.

HARP SONG FOR HIROSHIMA

by Sheila Fugard “English-born South African author Fugard’s (Lady of Realisation, 2016) collection delivers 15 poems on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and five travel stories of Japan.”

A triumphal work that addresses the incalculable horror of nuclear war yet offers a message of hope that redemption remains possible.

THE LAST CRUSADER KINGDOM

SUN TZU: THE ART OF MAKING MONEY

by Helena P. Schrader

by Michael M.K. Cheung

“Schrader (Envoy of Jerusalem: Balian d’Ibelin and the Third Crusade, 2016, etc.) follows up her Jerusalem Trilogy with an imaginative, fictionalized account of the d’Ibelin and Lusignan families and the founding of the Kingdom of Cyprus.”

“Using the principles of Sun Tzu, the ancient general and military tactician, Cheung draws parallels between military and financial strategies.”

Perhaps too mercenary for some, but when implemented properly, the mostly sound principles can lead to financial stability and success.

Best for fans of historical fiction but engaging enough for a broader audience.

WHY TALK IS CHEAP

by Sara Lumer

“A communication executive expounds on employee engagement in this debut guide.”

by Karen Horn

“A debut author recounts her experiences before and during the Holocaust.”

Astute and instructional; should help point the way to effective employee relations for company leaders.

A simple, disciplined, and affecting addition to the genre of Holocaust memoirs.

PROTEUS RISING

by Peter Dingus “In Dingus’ (Worlds in Transition, 2017) sci-fi novel, a 24th-century scientist, caught in a Martian revolt, tries to protect his two secret projects: an advanced computer intelligence and a group of children who are a leap forward in human evolution.”

Engagingly rendered, thoughtful hard sci-fi.

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I CARRIED THEM WITH ME

The author regales readers with engrossing poker play-by-play rendered in clipped but colorful jargon. trips

TRIPS People, Places, Poker

ETTY STEELE Vampire Hunter

Goodhart, Arthur W. The Gate Press (263 pp.) $10.27 paper | $3.81 e-book Nov. 23, 2018 978-1-73128-961-2

Grave, Grayson Self (178 pp.) $6.50 paper | $0.99 e-book | Jul. 20, 2018 978-1-71783-616-8

Poker becomes the key to understanding life and history—though not to winning money—in this meditative gambling memoir.

Literary agent and novelist Goodhart (Cards, Kafka and Prague, 2016, etc.) entered Texas Hold ’em tournaments in Prague; Nottingham, England; and the French seaside resort of Deauville, pitting his eternal hopes against repeated, inexorable experiences of failure. Feeling overmatched by the obsessive young men in dark glasses and hoodies who dominate poker tournaments, he fortified himself with magical thinking—he found himself bargaining for divine assistance by offering a percentage of the prize money to charity if he triumphed—and conflicting advice from poker manuals, which had him lurching from his instinctive “tight weak” style of “doing nothing” whenever possible to ill-judged “loose aggressive” betting that occasionally won big pots but inevitably ended with him going bust. The author regales readers with engrossing poker play-by-play rendered in clipped but colorful jargon—“I’m up against Ace, Queen and 7s, way behind, at least until the flop when 10, Jack, 10 gives me a huge lead”—as he tries to figure the odds, suss out opponents’ thinking, and tame his own psychology as he veers between timidity and recklessness. (A glossary and appendix on the rules of Texas Hold ’em should help newbies decipher the goings-on.) He fills in the downtime between hands with beguiling travelogues, snatches of history—he interprets the tragic miscalculations leading to the outbreak of World War I as a kind of botched poker game—and wide-ranging intellectual ruminations. (He imagines a lunchtime meeting between Einstein and Kafka that might bring out their clashing perspectives on the universe as a coherent expression of scientific laws or a tissue of happenstance and enigma.) Goodhart infuses the mechanics of poker hustling with philosophical and literary resonances—“Hansen counsels using my chips, making some moves, stealing a few pots, going for it; Rilke suggests patience and discipline. Never listen to a poet”—in a piquant counterpoint that’s both insightful and entertaining.

An engaging picaresque that explores the role of chance and fate inside the casino and out.

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Witches, vampires, and vampire hunters tangle in this middle-grade adventure.

Ten-year-old Henrietta “Etty” Steele thinks that all vampires drink blood and are evil, pale, coldblooded, and emotionless. She also believes that they see poorly in bright light, have “extremely white” teeth, and stink like cabbage and other rank substances. She knows this because her no-nonsense mother, Felicity Steele, told her so. Felicity is married to a much-loved grocer, but she isn’t very friendly herself. Neither does she put bows in Etty’s hair or encourage her to make friends. Instead, Felicity, as an undercover vampire hunter, expects her daughter to develop supernatural hunting skills. She trains Etty in cemetery reconnaissance and how to kill vampires that transform into bats. However, Etty is perplexed when her skills remain weak despite nonstop summer practice. She’s also confused by a gentle, stuttering vampire boy named Vladimir Nox, who doesn’t smell a bit noxious. It terrifies her when her only friend, April Showers, whose style is as bright and cheerful as hers is dark, befriends him. Like Etty and April, Vladimir has a first name he dislikes, so he asks to be called “Dimi” instead. April’s kind attitude toward him causes Etty to reconsider what she thinks she knows about vampires. Debut author Grave, a former primary school teacher, deftly draws readers into the story via Etty’s perspective with simple yet creepy language (“The further we walked, the darker the graveyard became”).

There are some moments of violence in the brisk text, but the author effectively counters the tension with humor, as when Felicity slyly compliments a “ratty” vampire on his teeth that look “almost perfect,” and he replies, “I brush twice a day.”

The book has a less-than-happy ending, but this may also lead to real-life discussions about parent-child conflicts.

A fun, fast-paced, and spooky read that may get young readers talking.

MEANT FOR YOU

LILY LO AND THE WONTON MAKER

Hagen, Layla EverAfter Romance (328 pp.) $15.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Nov. 13, 2018 978-1-63576-508-3

Delicious wonton soup brings together a Chinese-American girl, her grandfather, and the community in this middle-grade novel.

Third-grader Lily Lo of San Francisco wants nothing more than for her school’s soccer team, the Leopard Sharks, to go to the Big Match. But there’s one thing she wants almost as much: to show off her skills to her grandfather Gung Gung. He’s never come to her games before, but with her mother’s new work schedule, Gung Gung will be there, and Lily can’t wait. But whenever she looks over to the stands, her grandpa is reading his newspaper and clipping coupons, not even looking at the field. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Morales, grandparents of Lily’s best friend Rosana, are on their feet, watching and cheering Ro’s every move. Another anxiety is starting Chinese school; Ro won’t be there, but Deb, the bossy, critical daughter of the soccer coach, will. Lily’s frustrations make her lose focus at crucial moments, but she gets a new perspective on her grandfather when he teaches her to make wonton soup from scratch and takes her to the senior center. She realizes he’s given up his time with friends to take her to games, and his coupons have gone toward buying ingredients for soup served at the center.

After the Big Match, Lily teaches the Sharks how to make soup for the seniors, and her friends realize that being a team goes beyond winning games. Hall (1964-2016) was a writer and producer who received three Emmy Awards. In her sole novel, she offers an easily relatable character in Lily, with her energy, desire for attention, and bursts of resentment or worry. These lead her to mistakes, often comical, if not to Lily, but the incidents give her cause for self-reflection. She learns to look beyond her own concerns and consider others’ hardships. The book explores the Chinese-American experience—not just through making wonton soup, but also, for example, when Lily discovers she enjoys learning traditional Chinese characters—and the universal delight in delicious food, which the ending spotlights. A glossary of unfamiliar terms is included.

A well-told, thoughtful, amusing story of maturing perspective.

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In this third installment of the Connor Family series, a detective and a nonprofit director take a chance on love.

Paige Lamonica is happy to return to Los Angeles. The development director for Three Emeralds, a nonprofit group dedicated to human growth, she recently spent three years in Paris. While she enjoyed the opportunity to work in another country, she missed her family and LA. She has two major projects on the horizon: selling her grandmother’s inn and securing funding for an education center for the homeless. While Paige celebrates her homecoming with friends at the vacant inn, a concerned neighbor who suspects a break-in calls the police. Detective William Connor, relieved the call is a false alarm, is instantly smitten with Paige. He soon embarks on a campaign to win her affections, including helping her select an alarm system for the inn and inviting her to his sister Lori’s wedding. Paige is deeply attracted to the ruggedly sexy and warmhearted Will, but she is wary of pursing a relationship because of the dangers of police work. As their connection deepens, Paige and Will discover the rewards of building an intimate relationship and wonder if they have found true love. The latest entry in Hagen’s (Wild with You, 2018, etc.) series sparkles with sharp storytelling, appealing characters, and passionate romance laced with wit and warmth. Like the previous installments, the chapters alternate between the two protagonists’ first-person perspectives. This approach is particularly successful when it explores Paige’s hesitation about pursuing a romance with Will. Her father served in the Army, and she was always worried about his safety. For this reason, she is concerned about repeating the same pattern with Will since he faces perils as a detective. Paige and Will’s attraction develops quickly, but Hagen effectively keeps the romance at a slow burn punctuated by scenes that showcase the author’s talent for lively dialogue and erotic heat. Family is the emotional center of the series, and Will’s and Paige’s extended clans are prominently featured.

A sweet and tender contemporary romance that should please genre fans.

Hall, Frances Lee Inkshares (132 pp.) $12.99 paper | $6.99 e-book Nov. 27, 2018 978-1-947848-64-1

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Christopher Greyson

PUBLISHING TIPS FROM THE BESTSELLING THRILLER WRITER

By Rhett Morgan covery, I wrote Pure of Heart, but the publishing world was much different back then, and I shelved my dream.

Twenty years later, my wife asked for help getting her book published, but e-books had now transformed the whole process. I didn’t want to experiment with self-publishing on my wife’s book, so I wrote Girl Jacked, and the minute my fingers hit the keyboard, the decision to become a writer was made for me. I need to write.

What were some of your inspirations for Jack Stratton?

Jack is a mix of my grandfather and Steve McQueen, with a dash of Errol Flynn. Even as a child, I was fascinated with my grandfather’s story. He had a brutal childhood and bore deep scars, both physically and psychologically, from the war. None of this was evident to me, yet there was a story there. Jack’s a real blend of different inspirations, but when it comes down to it, Jack’s a wounded white knight in a fallen world.

Three years ago, Christopher Greyson was working the night shift at Target and had long put dreams of publishing a novel behind. He felt that the publishing world was only open to a select few, but the rise of digital self-publishing made him reconsider. After putting his novel Girl Jacked on Amazon as an experiment, Greyson’s thriller connected with readers and turned him into one of the platform’s biggest successes. To date, he has sold more than 1 million of his Jack Stratton mystery books and recently released the print version of his stand-alone thriller exploring the psychological aftermath of a murder, The Girl Who Lived, in bookstores across the nation.

When did you decide to become a writer?

I wrote my first book in college. I was a dancer and broke four ligaments in my knee, and it ended my career. In re-

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Why do you think readers have connected so much with this series?

Because it’s about pain and love and overcoming. I didn’t set out to write that. I set out to write a mystery with these two main characters who happen to be very broken. In a way, everyone is broken somehow. A traumatic event, a deep loss, repeated failure—everyone’s story has those elements. When they read about people who maybe have it a little bit worse off than them but rise above, it makes them feel good.

What’s your best tip for those first trying self-publishing?

The No. 1 tip I have for getting started might surprise people—ask a librarian! They love books and will go to any length to help you add to the multitude surrounding them. I talk to librarians all the time now. They can help

you with everything, from pointing you to books that will help get you started to helping you understand the genre you’re writing in. If you want to become a writer, get to the library.

How did you get Jack Stratton to stand out among the other mystery and detective series on Amazon?

It’s edgy and clean, which is a rare combination nowadays. There’s nothing explicitly graphic in the books, yet there’s plenty of gunfights, romance, and grit. I think watching a lot of 1940s cinema helped. My readers range from mothers to Marines, grandmothers to grunts.

That’s a huge spectrum, but it’s worth it because it gives me a huge reader base.

What do you have coming up next for your readers?

I’m writing a trilogy of action books with a female yakuza assassin named Kiku as the protagonist. She’s appeared in some of the Jack Stratton stories, and she’s one of my favorite characters.

In this erotic thriller sequel, a New Orleans vampire and his human lover struggle to understand their enigmatic but undeniably strong bond.

Dante Gabriel and Erin Hamilton’s first time together culminates in her consenting to the vampire biting her neck and consuming her blood. But coming out of her euphoric haze, Erin is disconcerted by the full realization that her lover is a vampire. Though she steers clear of “the V word,” she can’t deny their mutual allure. This, according to Dante, is a blood bond, an occurrence so rare that information on it is scarce. The Vampyre Texts may explain it, but Dante’s grandfather Bill hasn’t yet finished the translation.

But why has it been so long since anyone has translated the ancient tome? That’s just one of the countless mysteries challenging the couple. Erin, for one, has bite marks on her thigh and doesn’t know where they’re from, which likely means a vampire—most assuredly not Dante—has attacked her. There are also patients disappearing from University Hospital, where Erin, an emergency room nurse, works. She connects the missing patients by blood: They’re B positive, the same type the hospital keeps running out of. And though she’s trying to accept that vampires exist, Erin soon encounters more of the supernatural, including ghosts and, maybe, werewolves.

Dante, meanwhile, is still recovering from his decade of captivity, courtesy of a female vampire known only as the queen.

Her voice is constantly in Dante’s head, insisting she retains control of him.

As in the preceding novel, Hardt’s (Unchained, 2018, etc.) second installment, though split into three parts, is one cohesive story. In fact, this book picks up immediately following the earlier one, carrying over mysteries ranging from Erin’s inexplicable bite marks to the still-unknown queen.

The couple’s relationship shows unmistakable progress: While the first book teased their inevitable sex, Dante and Erin now face entirely new hurdles post-coitus. The most striking example is Bill’s claim that if their blood bond is broken, both will die. The author’s simple, concise prose sets an impressive pace. Succinct but descriptive details make periodic scenes in the ER exhilarating, as Erin and fellow nurses or doctors need to make quick decisions. Similarly, brevity during the explicit sex scenes amps up passion: The two are so desperate for each other that they typically forgo foreplay, leading to a fair share of thrusting and animalistic growling. The story grounds much of the supernatural elements, making the highlighted romance more believable. Dante, for instance, stresses that vampire myths are generally baseless (vamps are born and can’t transform humans by biting them).

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Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator living in Paris.

UNHINGED

Hardt, Helen Waterhouse Press (384 pp.) $15.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Oct. 30, 2018 978-1-64263-014-5

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believe in ghosts. Along with spirits, Hardt adds numerous mysteries in the second volume and leaves quite a few questions unanswered. Nevertheless, there’s some resolution (for example, the fates of Dante’s father and uncle, who vanished while searching for their abducted relative) and plenty of material for the third book.

An electric, often tantalizing installment enhances this vampire series.

THE THROWAWAYS

Hawker, L.S. Vanishing Point Press Ltd. (382 pp.)

Jan. 22, 2019 978-1-890391-09-6 978-1-890391-10-2 paper Four men find their identities, ethics, and friendships tested in this high-stakes thriller.

George has finally stopped feeling like a nobody. When he’s accepted to the University of Kansas Law School Class of 1989, he jubilantly calls his parents—only to be reminded that they still see him as a shadow of his older brothers—athletic and academic superstars, twins who died tragically at the age of 22. Despondent, George heads to the local liquor store and runs into a sorority girl named Stacia, who flirtatiously cajoles him into giving her a ride and taking a shot of absinthe. The next thing George knows, he’s disoriented and covered in blood. His back seat is strewn with a gas can and a bloody knife, and the house Stacia entered has been blown up. His only coherent thought is to stash the incriminating car back in his hometown of Niobe, Kansas. But he didn’t plan on running into his three closest childhood friends: Curt, a sensitive artist who has broken his family’s tradition of farming; Bill, a physics professor dealing with major marriage and debt issues from his cocaine addiction; and Travis, a hardworking security guard who has always dreamed of becoming a cop. They’ve all felt abandoned by George, but the ensuing days of chaos and crisis will test their loyalty beyond what they could’ve imagined. Hawker (End of the Road, 2017, etc.) expertly balances external and internal drama, gradually fleshing out these men’s lives against the backdrop of an ever expanding criminal conspiracy. Upon first meeting Curt, Bill, and Travis, there’s very little to differentiate them, but as the story progresses, they each become memorable, with the portrayal of Bill’s addiction a particular standout. The plot trots along with plenty of satisfying revelations, and George’s character development remains intriguing right to the end. He claims that throughout his life, others’ “disappointment was like a physical presence,” following and “scowling” at him—but the thought of disappointing the friends who mean the most to him in these critical moments could finally spur the personal change he’s been seeking.

A twisty, emotionally rich drama.

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THIS IS THE FARM

Hendrick, Perrin & Trienens, W.J. Illus. by Hendrick, Perrin Laser Pig Press (34 pp.) $17.99 | $4.99 e-book | Aug. 20, 2018 978-0-692-17461-6 Farmyard animals engage in flights of fancy in this debut picture book.

In the clever rhyming couplets, farm animals are introduced with their inventive dreams. The pig wants to fly; the mouse wants to go on Indiana Jones–type missions; the cat plans a heist; and the sheep negotiates with aliens for peace on Earth. On the left-hand page, the creature appears in a realistic watercolor and pen-and-ink painting. On the right, a full-page illustration in the same style shows the animal’s whimsical adventure: The duck, in a tie and glasses, gives a lecture on quantum physics to a bunch of chickens; the superspy horse, dressed in a hat, trench coat, and glasses, lurks near the corner of one of the barns, carrying a briefcase. Some of the dreams are believable—the cow hovers outside the farmhouse window to watch television, and the dog cavorts in a messy kitchen—but most are extravagant fictions sure to delight young readers with their absurdities.

The verse uses a simple rhyme scheme and accessible vocabulary, flowing well from page to page. But Hendrick’s humorous, beautiful, and elaborate images are the real stars.

Imaginative children should love these animal escapades—and even sticklers for realism may find themselves laughing at the antics.

WHERE TRIPLES GO TO DIE

Hutcheon, Phil Inkwater Press (404 pp.) $19.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Sep. 27, 2017 978-1-62901-514-9

A put-upon academic copes with feuding jocks, corrupt professors, randy students, and an even randier wife in this comic novel.

As a middle-aged English professor at subpar California State University, Malcolm Wade toils thanklessly to improve his classes’ semiliterate writing while occasionally fending off propositions from bosomy students seeking better grades. His sideline as counselor to the school’s athletes is more dramatic—and gratifying to his sports obsession. He gets to mentor baseball/football phenom Juke Jackson but also has to clean up a tangle of jealous betrayals and rape accusations involving the player, his girlfriend, and a teammate.

Complicating Wade’s job is an African-American history professor whose low academic standards—jocks get automatic A’s—threaten CSU’s accreditation. When Wade challenges her, she graphically belittles his manhood and cries racism (even though she is secretly white). At home, Wade’s wife, Angela, a gorgeous nympho who is also his dean, flummoxes him by

A moving glimpse into the lives of a group of famous but mysterious women. faces of the matriarchs

FACES OF THE MATRIARCHS An Artistic Depiction of Women in Genesis Lewis, Melanie Sociosights Press (56 pp.) $33.26 978-1-946295-02-6

An artistic exploration of four prominent women from the Torah.

Debut author Lewis has long been fascinated by the intersection of Judaism and art, and she finally found time to devote herself to examining it in depth after she retired in 2000 from her position as a college biology professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She began taking art classes and eventually rented studio spaces and exhibited her work in art shows. Inspired by an exhibit of artist Natalie Frank’s work, which offered “feminist re-imaginings” of the Brothers Grimm’s famous fairy tales, the author set out to conduct an artistic investigation of four biblical matriarchs: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. Lewis created 12 original paintings of them, done in acrylics and pastels, all beautifully reproduced in this coffee table–worthy hardcover. Each image is accompanied by relevant biblical quotes, fleshing out each story’s context, as well as Lewis’ own commentary, including an account of her artistic process. Her approach is personal but panoramic, and in her artworks, the reader gets the opportunity to see each figure from a variety of angles. For example, Sarah is portrayed as the “face of power,” the “face of joy,” and “the face of brokenness.” Lewis doesn’t produce an iconoclastic deconstruction of these women in this book; instead, she attempts to capture

their lives as they lived them, mostly as “spouse, homemaker, child bearer, and caregiver.” As the author herself points out, her art style is clearly inspired by Russian-French artist Marc Chagall’s work, with its dreamy juxtaposition of images, its hint of surrealist imagination, and its use of brilliant color.

Overall, Lewis’ collection of artworks is an engrossing one.

She aims for a realistic fidelity to her subjects, but, for her, that doesn’t mean photographic realism. She powerfully captures the complexities of all four of these intriguing figures, all “exemplary yet flawed,” and by extension, she provides profound illustrations of different aspects of humanity. The author also manages to deliver astonishingly complete expressions of the four women despite the limited information that’s available about them: “what we do know suggests they are women of strength: they speak their minds and act; they show loyalty to God and their spouses and families,” she writes. Her descriptions and commentaries offer lucid, even plain, language, permitting the pictures, and the pertinent quotations from Scripture, to take center stage. She also limits the scope of her commentaries on the art itself, mostly offering observations about technical production; this gives readers the interpretive space to freely fashion their own responses to it. What emerges is a moving glimpse into the lives of a group of famous but mysterious women—thrillingly concrete images that gesture in the direction of something more intimate. This book will be an unconventional treat for anyone who shares the author’s interests in modern art and the history of Judaism. The book also hints at a broad, if less modern, interpretation of feminism along the way.

A gorgeous, thoughtful, and quietly provocative assemblage of art.

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announcing that she wants to adopt a child and then reveals that her ex-boyfriend is blackmailing her with a sex tape. In this third installment of Wade’s misadventures, Hutcheon (Despera­ tion Passes, 2015, etc.), a film and writing professor at Delta College, stuffs a meandering, episodic narrative with off-the-wall situations, lurid characters, and punchy, gleefully scabrous dialogue. (Sample marital exchange: “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand out there twiddling your dick?”) The result is a sometimes-cynical, sometimes-affectionate spoof of academe that’s masculinized with locker-room bawdiness. (When his oral ministrations fall short, Angela rebuffs Wade “like a pitcher being pulled from the game.”) The author writes with skill and brio but sometimes offers readers too much. Scenes can drag on just to showcase the jokey repartee, and the professor in him veers off on didactic tangents about everything from cancer awareness (“Half of the men in America don’t even know what a prostate is until their own tries to kill them”) to the plight of returning veterans (“After all they’ve been through in Afghanistan or Iraq, do we care enough to make sure they can make a decent living here?”). Still, the nebbishy but subversively funny Wade makes an endearing ringmaster for this rollicking collegiate circus.

An entertaining picaresque that mixes higher education and sports in hilariously inappropriate ways.

BRAT AND THE KIDS OF WARRIORS

Lyons, Michael Joseph Bravur Media (358 pp.) $22.95 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 1, 2018 978-1-946957-02-3 In this middle-grade novel, three kids go on a dangerous adventure when their father, a lieutenant colonel in the 4th Armored Division, deploys to West Germany in 1957.

Military insiders think of “brat” as a term of endearment.

Seven-year-old Kirsten McMasters, aka Rabbit or “Wild Child”; her sister, Laura, nicknamed “Queenie”; and their secretly “wild” but publicly well-behaved brother, Jack, accept the “brat” label “with great pride.” So does debut author Lyons, who traveled the world as a so-called “Army brat,” and he draws on this life experience in a romp that’s spiced with risk and history lessons. Its tight, fast-paced plot will maintain readers’ interest, beginning with the McMasters children crossing the Atlantic on a troop ship, enjoying various escapades in off-limits areas while their seasick mom stays in bed. The dramatic tension this creates foreshadows dangers on the Army base in Baden-Württemberg; these include Jack’s violent classmate, Ryan Kerrigan, |

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and his pack of bullies, who are mysteriously intent on keeping other kids out of the nearby woods. The author creates believable characters, including Jack, a reluctant hero who’s bad at sports; with some help from friends and a kind Little League coach, his own math skills, and inspiration from Spartan military culture, Jack becomes a “warrior” on the baseball diamond and beyond. Kirsten is oblivious to surrounding perils, while the older McMasters kids tensely sort out puzzles, such as why American soldiers are needed in Germany if the Nazis lost the war; where their father’s tank command goes; who the “Commies” are; and why their mom hides fully packed suitcases in her closet. Jack and Queenie are particularly perplexed when their German nanny, who supposedly speaks little English, accidentally reveals her fluency in the language and warns them not to tell their parents. Throughout, Lyons’ simple yet direct writing style features engaging, realistic dialogue even when characters are explaining complicated topics, such as sonar tracking.

A lively yet serious read that both teens and younger children will enjoy.

HAMLET The Algonquin Cat

Martini, Leslie Illus. by Mongiardo, Massimo Roundtree Press (40 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 4, 2018 978-1-944903-47-3

A stray cat wonders if he has what it takes to be the feline-in-residence at the Algonquin Hotel in this illustrated children’s-book sequel.

One day, a scruffy orange tomcat is on the street; the next, he’s the new “Algonquin Cat” at the famed New York City hotel, now that Matilda is retiring. Since 1932, there have been 11 such cats, with the females named Matilda and the males, Hamlet.

Matilda shows the new Hamlet how to greet guests and flatter them. But he wonders if it’s all a mistake: “I am clumsy and I snore.” Matilda reminds him that all Algonquin felines were once street cats and recommends drawing courage from the famous Round Table. While snoozing below it, he hears a disembodied voice: “Do not be afraid. It is time to take your place.”

Heartened, he confidently steps into his role. Two final pages supply background on the hotel and the Algonquin Cat tradition. Martini (Matilda the Algonquin Cat, 2016) offers a pleasing fable about feeling worthy when good fortune comes one’s way.

This outing is less hotel-focused than the previous installment, but it still conveys the Algonquin’s special flavor. Gentle humor nicely balances Hamlet’s moments of anxiety. Mongiardo’s simple but effective tricolor illustrations beautifully convey Hamlet’s personality and the hotel’s appeal.

A charming tale, particularly for fans of the legendary hotel.

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THE WONDER CODE Discover the Way of Haiku and See the World with New Eyes

Mason, Scott—Ed. Girasole Press (371 pp.) $24.95 978-0-692-93035-9

The winsome Japanese verse form can restore a sense of delight and creative adventure to jaded hearts, according to this poetry primer and anthology.

Mason, a poet and editor of the online journal The Heron’s Nest, offers haiku as a cure for “the subtle ways in which our culture and times estrange us from wonder.” It’s a popular form because of its friendliness to poets and readers alike: three brief lines (or occasionally two or even one), with no confining rhyme schemes or meters. (The iconic 5-7-5 syllable pattern can be broken at will.) The resulting bite-size poems go down easily, but, the author argues, they pack great power within their diminutive expanse. He discusses haiku in the framework of Zen aesthetics, illustrating with poems gleaned from The Heron’s Nest. Haiku portrays the Buddhist principles of focusing on the ordinary and small-scale (“last night’s rain / cupped in a banana leaf / a small green frog” by Ferris Gilli) and finding a world in a grain of sand (“city sidewalk / colors swirl in a bubble / of spit” by Brenda J. Gannam). They capture life through rapt sense impressions (“autumn evening / the clink of carnival rings / on empty bottles” by Chad Lee Robinson). Evanescent and usually in present tense, they abide in the moment and evoke large meanings from concentrated images (“in the rest home lounge / the silent piano / its line of cracked keys”

by John Hawkhead). And they traffic in everyday mysteries (“soap bubbles / how softly mother / bursts into laughter” by Kala Ramesh). Mason situates haiku in opposition to a Western mindset that perceives objects as discrete and atomized.

Haiku, by contrast, flows from a holistic Eastern worldview that sees everything as connected, in which “our perception of boundaries...starts to give way.”

Debut editor Mason includes nearly 500 poems in this sparkling anthology, showcasing the extraordinary versatility of moods and subject matter haiku can address and the vividness of its stripped-down but potent imagery. There are many landscapes and nature scenes (“winter hills / with each boot crunch / the scent of sage” by Jo Balistreri) as well as lyrically grungy urban tableaux (“dumpster / the iridescence / of starlings” by Bill Kenney) and suburban nightmares (“suburban darkness / only the rumble / of garbage can wheels” by Robert Forsythe). There is sensual intimacy (“click-clack / of the bead curtain— / the sway of her hips” by Sandra Simpson) and social satire (“singing gondolier / the passengers’ / fixed smiles” by Kay Grimnes).

There is birth (“circle of lamplight— / I complete the baby quilt / begun for me” by Carolyn Hall), aging (“sudden winter / the press of cold metal / against the paper gown” by Beverly Acuff Momoi), unbearable sorrow (“hot afternoon / the squeak of my hands / on my daughter’s coffin” by Lenard D. Moore),

A delightfully engaging collection that will educate and inspire other writers. writers on writing

JOHN MARK Born in Africa—Martyred in Africa

remembrance (“her last words / snow falling / on beech leaves”

by Jeff Hoagland), and enigmatic hope (“she said she’d return / as a seagull / which one” by Mason).

A superb haiku collection for readers who thought they didn’t like poetry, richly expressive and very accessible.

Mench, John Westbow Press (246 pp.) $35.95 | $19.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Aug. 21, 2018 978-1-973637-07-3 978-1-973637-05-9 paper

VISIONS

McCrea, S.T. iUniverse (334 pp.) $31.99 | $20.99 paper | $1.99 e-book Jul. 27, 2018 978-1-5320-5279-8 978-1-5320-5277-4 paper

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A woman inherits a psychic ability that helps her find missing children, but now she’s a target.

Milford, Connecticut, special education teacher Sara Slane Allbrooke can enter the minds of missing children—an ability she uses to help her husband, Detective John Allbrooke, solve tough cases. While she’s in the mind of the kidnapped Teddy Hansen, she hears the words “Let’s play a game!” and knows what comes next. The kidnapper, a cult member who also possesses psychic powers, has been feeding clues to Sara, specifically music notes, as a part of a twisted game. Even though she can see and feel everything the child does, the kidnapper remains faceless. She meets Samuel Hawk, a retired Navajo detective, at the scene of a crime. He believes this same kidnapper struck his reservation before and ominously warns her that when a gift like hers is stopped, there are repercussions. Soon after, a co-worker gives her a difficult ultimatum: She must choose between teaching and working with the police. Sara—emotionally drained from her mind melding with children and desperately wanting to keep her teaching job—says she’ll stop helping the cops. Caleb, Sara’s brother, who also shares her talents, enters into the mix.

Slowly it becomes clear that the kidnapper doesn’t want these children; he wants Sara. Debut author McCrea builds a robust narrative by focusing in on each of the complicated characters, such as the kidnapper’s conflicted son, who wants to distance himself from his father’s cruelty. And at one point, Sarah’s husband, John, wonders: “What kind of man let—even pushed— his wife to continue doing something that was destroying her?”

Sara’s skill attracts characters interested in the power, including Samuel. While some subplots distract from the narrative, a shocking reveal and a cliffhanger ending leave a lot to anticipate in the planned sequel.

An absorbing but overpacked thriller with a multilayered cast.

With care and verve, Mench breathes new life into ancient Christian Scripture.

Mench (Constantine, 2018, etc.) offers a creative extrapolation on the life and times of the man many know simply as Mark, the author of the second Gospel of the Christian Bible. Mench describes his motives in fleshing out this figure in an author’s note, writing that he “has been conflicted by the lack of personality within the New Testament.”

His book is an effort to breathe life back into the Bible. In his own words, Mench “endeavors to add perspective to the message of the testament by creating lives for those who wrote and developed Jesus’ message.” So the author puts flesh on these old bones, spinning a captivating tale of Mark’s (or John Mark’s) birth, meetings with Jesus, and teaching and writing career. But the best part of his novel is that he holds true to the style of the original. Mench’s prose—like Mark’s—is direct, concise, and digestible. Here is just a brief taste from a passage about John Mark’s childhood encounter with Christ: “Soon, Jesus started to speak. John could hear Jesus’ voice now and again, but he couldn’t see him. His driver picked John up and put him on his shoulders.” There is an admirable clarity to the language here—and throughout—that renders Mench’s story intimate and accessible. According to the book of Acts, John Mark is a friend of Paul’s and Barnabas’, and he bops around the ancient Near East spreading the good news of the early church. Mench’s John Mark does the same, but if in the Bible he is a footnote, here he gets his own star turn. Perhaps the only weakness of this well-imagined historical novel is that the author doesn’t provide a bibliography.

An energizing account of the creation of the second Gospel.

WRITERS ON WRITING Conversations With Allen Mendenhall

Mendenhall, Allen Red Dirt Press (232 pp.) $16.95 paper | Jan. 4, 2019 978-1-73273-832-4

A collection of question-and-answer sessions that offer in-depth insights into the writing craft.

Mendenhall (The Southern Philosopher, 2017), the editor of the Southern Literary Review, has long been drawn to interviews with creatives and artists—an interest that |

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he’s fueled over the years by perusing the hallowed archives of the Paris Review. As an associate dean at the Jones School of Law at Faulkner University, it’s perhaps unsurprising that he’s also highly aware of the various ways in which “people respond differently to probing inquiry.” However, one never gets the sense that the 46 writers he interviews in this book are being put on the stand; on the contrary, Mendenhall’s lines of questioning are subtle, and he successfully fulfills his stated intention of letting “the writers do the talking.” This collection will familiarize readers with the approaches, techniques, and concerns of a diverse set of authors in a broad range of genres. Mendenhall’s interviewees include crime-fiction writer D.J. Donaldson, historical-romance novelist F. Diane Pickett, and (twice) poet and essayist Julia Nunnally Duncan, among many others. The Q-and-A’s touch on a spectrum of issues and offer rich and varied discussion as well as powerful sound bites. Memoirist Robert P. Waxler, for instance, offers compelling commentary on the importance of books in a world increasingly dominated by “screen culture”: “Screens invite us to watch, to surf the current that pulls us along. By contrast, books, especially literature... slow us down, offer an opportunity...to become self-reflective.”

Historical novelist Steve Wiegenstein speaks of the exhilaration of writing: “It’s the closest I’ll ever get to walking the high wire.” And YA novelist Colleen D. Scott writes of her desire to expose the impact of social segregation: “I fear that lately we are showing the signs that we might forget how important it is to recognize our similarities and cherish our differences.” A foreword by author and Mississippi State University professor Robert West, which ponders the construction and meanings of the words “discover” and “interview,” is mildly interesting, if superfluous. Overall, though, this is a delightfully engaging collection that will educate and inspire other writers.

A fruitful discussion of authorship.

FORTY STEPS AND OTHER STORIES

Murphy, Terrence iUniverse (206 pp.) $23.99 | $13.39 paper | $3.99 e-book Jul. 27, 2018 978-1-5320-5303-0 978-1-5320-5301-6 paper Sixteen tales span about 1,000 years as a New England town emerges, becomes an art colony and tourist destination, and faces a dark age.

This collection returns to Murphy’s (Assumption City, 2012) fictional community of Egg Rock on Massachusetts’ North Shore. In an elegiac tone that brings to mind Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, the tales follow characters as they make important decisions and show the ramifications of their actions. The book opens with Vikings arriving at a “magical” paradise—the future Egg Rock. The stories then sail on to address the town’s early-1800s ice trade with the Caribbean; the impact of prejudice on Boston’s Irish 174

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community during a cholera epidemic; New England’s abolition and pacifist movements before the Civil War; the dangers of 1880s lighthouse-keeping; mental health care in the early 20th century; U-boat spying during World War II; the agony of veterans following various wars; and the rise of feminism. The book breaks the narrative flow with a compelling literary experiment, as “John’s Peril I” and “John’s Peril II” offer different outcomes for the same character. It’s reminiscent of author Jack Finney’s twig-in-a-stream concept in Time and Again (1970), showing how small occurrences bump into one another to alter history.

Indeed, the idea of cause and effect forms a strong undercurrent in this collection—one that results in intriguing effects. In “Shore Leave,” for example, a lighthouse keeper’s wife teaches her son, Ben, everything she knows about the heavens (“She made sure Ben saw moonrises and moonsets and the morning and evening stars”), and, by doing so, she inadvertently sets in motion Ben’s undoing in “Bottoms Up.” Readers may wish that the author provided a map of the many characters in these tales, but they’ll still find it fun to track their connections.

A quirky, rich, and elegantly written epic.

DEAD MENTORS

Nichols, Sandra BalboaPress (268 pp.) $35.99 | $17.99 paper | Feb. 27, 2018 978-1-4525-6846-1 978-1-4525-6844-7 paper Nichols’ literary novel examines the physical, psychological, metaphysical, and spiritual evolution of Sophia Deming, an unfulfilled 54-year-old Canadian expatriate, from the point of view of John Burns, a psychic who can remotely view the major events of her life.

Deming and Burns meet only once in the prologue to Nichols’ first novel, when Deming sits for a psychic reading from clairvoyant therapist Burns. She leaves skeptical of his predictions and returns to her life in Florida, her loving husband, and a job she is good at but increasingly dissatisfied with. By using Burns’ remote viewing as the basis for the narrative, Nichols pulls off a neat literary trick: an omniscient narrator who can delve into Deming’s thoughts as well as actions without the usual restrictions on editorial commentary. Burns can even see the auras, imps, sprites, tricksters, and ghosts surrounding Deming, allowing for well-wrought imagery that resonates through both their realities: “I could even see Ella Fitzgerald slowly emerge from the black and white poster like a smoky apparition singing a requiem for buried souls above the Kelly girls’ table,” says Burns. After various episodes of character building, Deming discovers The Antiquity, a play dedicated to her, written by the dead mother she’d always felt was closer to her two sisters. This discovery unleashes Deming’s true journey to full personhood—a path that simultaneously parallels both Burns’ predictions and the futuristic world foretold in The Antiquity. Nichols’ use of the psychic narrator generates an

elegant prose style reminiscent of 19th-century writers: “The very first of these signals was the voice of a songbird whose whistles accompanied me during a walk on a summer afternoon near Wood Island.” Ultimately, the author adroitly guides Deming’s character toward an ending that satisfies on multiple levels.

Well-written and compelling; will appeal to both fans of the paranormal and serious students of the human condition.

THE GIRL IN THE BLUE TIE-DYE SHIRT A Mud Street Misfits Adventure

their visit. The authors also grasp that their audience may have a nascent interest in both scientific and supernatural phenomena, and they offer great jumping-off points for further research, as in the line, “matter on a subatomic level exists essentially as vibration.” Parents will be tickled by mentions of the rock band Rush and 1970s radio hits, such as Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” However, they may be less enthusiastic about the kids’ dangerous overnight undertaking in the tale’s final third. Nevertheless, most readers will reach the end wanting to get to know the Mud Street Misfits better.

A sweet adventure that celebrates the wisdom of young and old generations.

O’Dell, Brian & Lauderdale, Beth Mud Street Misfits (110 pp.) $7.99 e-book | Oct. 8, 2018

Perkinson, John Illus. by Woodall, Ken Wow Cow Publishing (16 pp.) $12.95 | Jul. 1, 2017 978-0-692-76227-1

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This middle-grade novel tells the story of a musically talented young man who hits his head, gains a strange ability, and draws his friends into a mystery.

In the small town of Ozark, Liam MacLeod and his best friend, Connor Harrison, ride their bikes to Ashford Park. Liam crashes and ends up with five stitches in his temple. Later, in school, he suffers a headache during a test, which heightens his stress over a school orchestra dress rehearsal. He also must deal with bullies Dylan, Kaylee, and Brandon. Despite these distractions, Liam plays bass well during the rehearsal, and his teacher, Mr. Walsh, nominates him for the Musicians Honors Performance Program. After school, on Mud Street, Liam and his sister, Molly, head to Connor’s house to hear a new vinyl record that his uncle gave him—the Allman Brothers’ 1972 album “Eat a Peach.” While listening, Liam holds the used album’s sleeve—and somehow, he’s briefly transported to a different bedroom with “wood-paneled walls and dirty red carpet.” There, he sees a crying girl in a blue, tie-dyed shirt— just before finding himself back at Connor’s place. Liam begins researching extrasensory perception and hears a story from his dad, Lloyd, about a spectral visit that he received from his own grandmother just before she died. Curiosity becomes fright, however, when the sobbing girl again appears to Liam during orchestra practice. Connor suggests that the Mud Street gang should track down the record’s previous owner—Greg Ortman, who wrote his name on the sleeve—to solve the puzzle.

For their nostalgic debut, authors O’Dell and Lauderdale craft a musical mystery that will appeal to children and adults.

Though clearly set in modern times (Liam uses Google and Wikipedia), the kids experience an idyllic childhood with bike rides, engaged parents, and secret missions into a nearby city. In total, there are five Mud Streeters, including Liam’s classmate Sarah and her younger brother, David, yet the narrative doesn’t attempt to give everyone equal time, instead choosing to focus on Liam and Connor. This is a wise decision that makes for an exceptionally well-paced story. Side characters, such as Cora, a psychic expert and the owner of a shop called Cora’s Crystals, appear briefly but memorably; she intriguingly tells the kids, “I didn’t realize it was already Wednesday,” as if she was expecting

THE COW WHO SAID...WOW!

A cow explores a farm and encounters animal friends in Perkinson and Woodall’s debut board book.

As she roams her farm, a friendly cow watches other farm animals in their natural habitats—a running colt and a horse, a “lamb jumping a fence,” “piglets playing in mud,” and ducklings swimming and splashing in a pond. The cow even watches as chicks hatch. Lastly, she comes across a farmer and his son riding a tractor. The bovine is visibly enthralled by all she sees, and upon each encounter, she says: “Wow!” Woodall’s lively, graphic illustrations are charming, featuring bold colors. Many pages include wide expanses of textured green grass juxtaposed with a blue sky. All animals depicted have similar cartoonish eyes and cheerful smiles. The pictures also include fun details, like a reoccurring airplane flying in the sky. Although barnyard scenes are commonly featured in children’s literature, the interactive elements here make the book more unique. The book includes a red sound button that emits the word “Wow” when pressed.

The story ends abruptly after the cow’s encounter with the farmer and his son; it would’ve been satisfying to see the cow and her animal friends gather together at the end. Still, the sparse text using simple language and repetitive phrasing (“and the cow said...Wow!”) will appeal to very young audiences.

A fun storytime pick that emphasizes child participation and sensory skill development.

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Contemplative and original. radial bloom

TR’S LAST WAR Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy

focuses on the run-up to the war, he manages to paint a comprehensive view of Roosevelt’s life and the “sheer bloodlust” of which he was formidably capable. This is a fine scholarly achievement: psychologically searching, scrupulously devoted to accuracy, and dramatically gripping.

A captivating look at a singular American figure and the tumultuous history he helped fashion.

Pietrusza, David Lyons Press (424 pp.) $34.95 | $32.99 e-book | Sep. 1, 2018 978-1-4930-2887-0

A historical account examines Theodore Roosevelt’s quest to prepare the United States for its entry into World

War I. In 1915, the British ocean liner the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat while making its way from New York to Liverpool, killing nearly 1,200 passengers. Roosevelt was enraged by this act of naval aggression and equally furious by what he considered President Woodrow Wilson’s pusillanimous response to it. Roosevelt became obsessed with preparing the nation for war, though the country had neither the men nor the supplies—and perhaps not the funds—for a protracted foreign engagement. Wilson opposed him bitterly and staked his presidency on the attractive combination of peace and prosperity. Roosevelt seriously contemplated a bid for the presidency in 1916, but the GOP was deeply distrustful of him as well as resentful given the way his failed third party bid in 1912 essentially ushered Wilson into office. Pietrusza (1960, 2018, etc.) powerfully captures Roosevelt’s frustration: “He wanted the presidency, craved vindication, fairly lusted for a chance to crush Woodrow Wilson and all his old enemies.

But he knew that for all his heroism, he lacked public support, and that fatal defect preyed upon him.” The author provides a remarkably detailed account of the 1916 election and Roosevelt’s indefatigable push for military readiness as well as the emotional toll the war took on him—all four of his sons fought in it, and one lost his life.

Pietrusza’s research is magisterially rigorous, swinging expertly from microscopic details to a vivid drawing of a more general tableau. The fulcrum of the book is Roosevelt’s capacious character: his near-comical obsession with the trumpeting of manly virtue, his thunderous economic populism, and his great sensitivity to loss—he had a “significant suicidal streak”—all somehow contained within one man. The author memorably contrasts the former president with Wilson, a man Roosevelt came to deeply loathe, a patrician academic who longed to disentangle the nation from Europe’s savage intramural disputes. Pietrusza clearly harbors an admiration for his subject but avoids any fawning hagiography, though one could argue his depiction of Wilson could be more generous.

Further, the author adeptly tracks the transformation of the country’s mood, which gradually moved closer to Roosevelt’s sentiments: disdainful of Wilson’s intrusive foreign policy in the Americas but dispassionately neutral when it came to Europe. Pietrusza’s prose is sharply buoyant and transparent, and the story unfolds almost in novelistic fashion, presented as an electric contest of dominating wills rather than a dry recitation of historical facts. And while the author’s treatment 176

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RADIAL BLOOM

Ratto Parks, Amy Folded Word (84 pp.) $12.00 paper | Nov. 15, 2018 978-1-61019-114-2 Ratto Parks’ (Song of Days, Torn and Mended, 2015, etc.) mosaic novel pieces together the inner life of a woman through a succession of prose poems.

After alliteratively establishing her “normalcy” in the prologue—“Before you know the rest, you should know this: I live in a pleasant house on a quiet street in a modern-day Mayberry with mountains”—Ratto Parks’ protagonist proceeds to tell of her most irregular inner being in a series of poetic vignettes. The pieces focus on a man, perhaps a muse, perhaps a ghost, or maybe an adult version of an imaginary friend, a conjured personification of cravings, desires, and thwarted fulfillment; he is sometimes a lover, sometimes cruel, and sometimes just a friend playing catch with a baseball. Ratto Parks’ work is contemplative and original: “I sat at the end of the long hall of myself watching my life while I witnessed all of those sacred places invaded” or “the silent ghost of old traffic made every sound bright.” She augments her own polished verse with references, allusions, and outright quotes from a wide variety of people and sources: Dante, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, R.M. Rilke, and even John Wayne. Hallucinatory and dreamlike, the author repeatedly considers themes of loss either in water (“Then we finally gave in to the stones in our pockets and we sank through the salt brine”) or simply into thin air (“off like kites blowing endless through the ether”). Throughout, her dream man and dream land prove as fickle as reality. He often comes and goes at whim; appearing and disappearing without warning: “He was there after the rain, in the night lawns, thick and arcing, and I could feel him leaving me, falling away from the fabric of human air.”

Brilliant, at once dense and ethereal; rewards multiple readings.

DIONNA’S WARRIOR A Reverse Harem Romance

Ryan, Ruby Juicy Gems Publishing (430 pp.) $12.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Apr. 25, 2018 978-1-982965-06-8

Semegran, Scott Mutt Press (328 pp.) $15.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Feb. 1, 2019 978-0-9997173-8-7

A young clerk gets caught up in a costsaving scheme at work that rattles the Texas political establishment in this novel.

J.D. Wiswall has left his rural hometown of Brady, Texas, and moved into a tiny cinderblock house in Austin. He’s taken a job with the state, working as a data entry clerk for the Department of Unemployment and Benefits. His first day is unusual, as he finds his new boss, Brent Baker, outside of the office, passed out in some bushes. Brent claims he has epilepsy, but J.D. isn’t so sure. At work, his few colleagues consist of Deborah Martinez, a financially strapped mother of a grown son; Rita Jackson, a grandmother who runs the office lottery pool; and Conchino Gonzalez, a silent car fanatic. The duties are tedious, but Rita spices things up with hopes about a state contest. If the employees can generate an idea to save Texas money, there is a $10,000 prize. They plan to split the winnings if they succeed but have no good ideas. Back home, J.D.’s mother writes that his aunt is worried about him in the big city: “I keep insisting that you would never befriend hippies or smoke marijuana, but she is inconsolable.” Meanwhile, a reporter is called to the office of the Texas governor, a slippery partisan in a gold-plated wheelchair. He promises the journalist an exclusive, but she discovers something monumental on her own. At J.D.’s office, the harddrinking Brent thinks he has found a way to claim that $10,000 and arranges a fateful meeting with the “Big Boss” that could be life-changing for all involved. Semegran’s (Sammie & Budgie, 2017, etc.) gently humorous foray into the depths of Texas’ bureaucracy takes a while to get going; after all, he is describing one of the more boring jobs around. But the pace picks up beautifully in the second half, as some chance occurrences and accidental muckraking come together in a manner worthy of Texas politics.

Characterization is strong throughout the novel; the dialogue always rings true; and little touches add local color. For example, J.D. is never without pecan treats from his beloved hometown.

The conclusion is notable for all that’s changed but also what will likely stay the same.

A comic sendup of state government that remains lighthearted, deadpan, and full of affection for both urban and rural Texas.

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Ryan’s (Touched by Death, 2018, etc.) first romantic fantasy in a new series tells the story of an inexperienced magic user forced into a war.

In a massive country known as the Archenon, Dionna is training to be a Pyromancer, a sorceress who can control and weaponize fire. Before she can take her Assessment and graduate, her academy is attacked by the Silithik, a race of giant, monstrous beetles with whom the Archenon have had an uneasy truce. The Silithik slaughter most of the other students—and all but one of the other wouldbe Pyromancers—after sneaking in through a window that Dionna left open while meeting her boyfriend for a nighttime tryst. Now that war with the Silithik is back on, every fighter in the Archenon must prepare for battle. Dionna is assigned to a Quintelaide—a platoon of soldiers composed of one master from each of several disciplines—as their replacement Pyromancer even though she has grave doubts about her abilities as well as near-crippling guilt. In order to defend her country and redeem her mistakes, she’ll have to win the trust of her team, including its Warrior, Jaxon, who lost his love in the attack.

Ryan’s prose effectively captures the adventure and whimsy of the sword-and-sorcery genre as well as its magic: “The fireball became white-hot flame the moment it left my fingertips, a thousand hearths compressed into a single sphere the size of my fist.” It also includes some romance-novel eroticism, which gives it an unexpected extra dimension: “I yelped as he hefted my body as easily as one lifts a cup of wine, and then he was kissing me again, tongue prying apart my lips and dancing with mine.” Throughout, the author proves to be highly competent in both of these modes, and as a result, the novel as a whole offers readers a satisfying bit of easily digestible escapism. Fans of Ryan’s earlier Gryphons vs. Dragons series will particularly enjoy this novel, which serves as prequel and promises more installments to follow.

A sexy, swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery fantasy.

TO SQUEEZE A PRAIRIE DOG An American Novel

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The story becomes progressively weirder without losing its buoyant tone. dennis dunkle: on the road (and off)

THE QUINARY

Simmonds, Tracy BalboaPressAU (310 pp.) $19.92 paper | $3.99 e-book May 23, 2018 978-1-5043-1292-9 In this fantasy debut, a woman with powerful magical abilities discovers that her fate is entwined with those of heroes from another world.

Twenty-three-year-old Addy Piper lives in a room underneath the house of a gruff man named Rodic in the village of Darton. One night, he receives a phone call from Addy’s mother, Verity, who left her there 13 years ago. The abusive woman now wants her daughter back so that she might exploit Addy’s vast but untapped talent for witchcraft. The young woman tries to flee, but her mother and a sinister man named Zyklon quickly find her.

They hide Addy in a cave, where she wakes tied to a giant, spinning wheel. The power-hungry Verity explains that Addy may belong to a mysterious group known as the Quinary and that she can perform a specific chant to pass her powers to another upon her death. Soon, however, a shape-shifter named Aquilae helps Addy escape. She clambers through the wilderness until she reaches the farmhouse of Rachel and Dane, who offer to help her hone her witchcraft. Later, when Rachel betrays Addy to Verity and Zyklon, Dane reveals that he’s an agent of the aforementioned Quinary, a council on

This Issue’s Contributors # ADULT Colleen Abel • Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Colette Bancroft • Joseph Barbato • Sarah Blackman • Amy Boaz • Ed Bradley • Jeffrey Burke • Tobias Carroll • Lee E. Cart • Kristin Centorcelli Melissa Chadburn • Jennifer Coburn • Ben Corbett • Kathleen Devereaux • Amanda Diehl • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Kristen Evans • Mia Franz • Harvey Freedenberg • Devon Glenn Amy Goldschlager • Michael Griffith • Natalia Holtzman • Jessica Jernigan • Tom Lavoie • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Elsbeth Lindner • Karen Long • Sawyer Lovett • Georgia Lowe • Michael Magras • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Clayton Moore • Ismail Muhammad • Christopher Navratil • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • Therese Purcell Nielsen • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota William E. Pike • Steve Potter • Carolyn Quimby • Evelyn Renold • Erika Rohrbach • Michele Ross Bob Sanchez • Rosanne Simeone • Linda Simon • Margot E. Spangenberg • Rachel Sugar • Deborah Taffa • Claire Trazenfeld • Jessica Miller • Steve Weinberg • Marion Winik • Lauren Winner CHILDREN’S & TEEN Lucia Acosta • Autumn Allen • A. Arethna • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Christopher A. Brown Jessica Brown • Patty Carleton • Hicham Chami • Alec B. Chunn • Jeannie Coutant • Erin Deedy Luisana Duarte Armendáriz • Omar Gallaga • Laurel Gardner • Carol Goldman • Melinda Greenblatt Vicky Gudelot • Heather L. Hepler • Gerry Himmelreich • Julie Hubble • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Megan Dowd Lambert • Hanna Lee • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Kyle Lukoff • Joan Malewitz • Gauri Manglik • Michelle H. Martin PhD • Jeanne McDermott • Mary Margaret Mercado • J. Elizabeth Mills • Tori Ann Ogawa • Deb Paulson • Rachel G. Payne • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Asata Radcliffe • Kristy Raffensberger • Amy B. Reyes • Erika Rohrbach • Leslie L. Rounds • Lenny Smith • Rita Soltan • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah Taffa • Pat Tanumihardja Renee Ting INDIE Alana Abbott • Rebecca Leigh Anthony • Kent Armstrong • Jillian Bietz • Julie Buffaloe-Yoder Darren Carlaw • Charles Cassady • Michael Deagler • Stephanie Dobler Cerra • Steve Donoghue • Joe Ferguson • Lynne Heffley • Jennifer Helinek • Justin Hickey • Elizabeth Kazandzhi • Ivan Kenneally Mandy Malone • Rhett Morgan • Katerina Pappas • Joshua T. Pederson • Sam Power • Matt Rauscher Sarah Rettger • Alicia Rudnicki • Jerome Shea • Barry Silverstein

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the planet Thear that guards four elements, including time itself, from attackers. Is it possible that Addy governs a fifth element? In this debut, author Simmonds offers a narrative that sprints through a mix of supernatural fantasy and myth.

Her main strength is her worldbuilding, evidenced, in part, by her inclusion of such creatures as Brownies, dragons, and demons like Ehruh—who granted Verity unnatural youth. At its heart, Simmonds examines “the most important decision” that anyone can make: “whether the world is your friend or not.” Throughout, Addy is shown to be torn about using her powers; however, magic, when it does appear, is evoked cleverly: “It swirled around her, a soft peppermint mist.” There’s also a distinct environmentalist theme; at one point, Lord Glock notes, “The biomass on earth is being depleted faster than it can restore itself.”

A fearless, briskly paced tale that explores how the potential for positive change lies within everyone.

DENNIS DUNKLE On the Road (and Off)

Simms, David Livingston Press (158 pp.)

Dec. 20, 2018 978-1-60489-215-4 978-1-60489-214-7 paper

In this comic novel, a librarian searches for the potential love of his life while on a cross-country road trip.

After years of loneliness, Dennis Dunkle reluctantly joins the dating site Amorous After Fifty to look for love. There, he gets pinged by Denise Dunedin, “only because she was also from Saint Plato—although not the New Jersey Saint Plato where Dennis has spent most of his life but the North Dakota one, a place he hadn’t heard of since grade school, when fourth-graders in the two Saint Platos wrote letters back and forth.” But it isn’t long before Dennis realizes that Denise is the woman he’s meant to spend the rest of his life with. That’s why, when she invites him to come live with her and her cat, Tuffy, in North Dakota, he abruptly quits his job as the librarian at Saint Plato Community College; packs his own cat, Sebastian, into his weathered Chrysler Cruiser; straps a toilet to the roof (Denise’s is broken); and heads out on a hastily planned road trip across the continent. When he reaches North Dakota, however, he finds a note saying that Denise has run off with another man—a man from Saint Plato, Alabama. After spending a night in her house, Dennis gets a call from Denise asking him to meet her in that third Saint Plato. She made a mistake, she claims, and she’s willing to marry Dennis if he just comes to Alabama. Dennis does and is informed that he’s just missed her. There’s another clue left for him, another promise, another destination—but as Dennis quickly learns, actually getting to Denise is much harder than driving to any one point on the map.

Simms’ (The Stars of Axuncanny, 2006) rapid prose is full of detail and cartoonish humor, as when Dennis remembers

how his mother despised him and his affection for felines: “The more she hated cats, the more she hated Dennis, although she already hated him a lot. She tried to poison him once, he was three, but the hot dog smelled funny to him. New type of hot dog. Eat! she demanded.” There’s a bit of 1990s nihilism underwriting the book’s worldview, but it never gets too desperate or ceases with the one-liners. The novel’s premise is unbelievable and yet also completely tenable given the slanted logic of the world the author creates.

Real human relationships have the same push and pull as Dennis and Denise’s, even if they usually don’t require so many road trips, and it’s fairly easy to sympathize with the protagonist’s quixotic mission. Even Denise manages to feel less like a villain than an intriguing mystery caught up in her own equally quixotic whirlwind. The story becomes progressively weirder without losing its buoyant tone, and despite the satirical edge, readers should come to truly care for Dennis and wish him success in his quest.

A short, funny, and oddly engrossing tale about a man looking for a woman.

recollection, he’s nearly ousted from a neighborhood tavern for being a “dirty kike.” And just as Soviet authorities disseminate false information to the outside world, they shield their own from exposure to more successful alternatives. Tsesis was denied permission to use his vacation time to take a cruise to the Mediterranean, the desire to travel considered inherently suspicious. The author’s remembrance is an edifying look at the wages of authoritarian rule, which resulted in the routine deaths of young children from easily treatable conditions like dehydration. His account is unflinching and often moving: The story a tearful wife shared with Tsesis captures the heart of this book. Her husband had to beg an official to give their sick child the proper medicine. She lamented: “I am a law-abiding citizen, but I ask you, is it fair to go through all this humiliation?”

A historically eye-opening memoir told with insight and wit.

COMMUNIST DAZE The Many Misadventures of a Soviet Doctor Tsesis, Vladimir Indiana University Press (238 pp.) $60.00 | $19.00 paper | $18.99 e-book Feb. 13, 2017 978-0-253-02594-4 978-0-253-02586-9 paper

A physician recounts three years of service in a small Soviet village and the horrors of the communist medical system.

In exchange for tuition-free medical school, Tsesis (Why We Remain Jews, 2013) was obligated to perform three years of service as a doctor in an “underserved area”—in his case, Gradieshti, a farming village of 5,000 inhabitants in rural Moldova. The author was almost forcibly pushed into military service—he was threatened with academic failure—but was saved from that fate because he was a pediatrician, a specialty dangerously underrepresented in the Soviet Union, which was plagued by terrifyingly high infant mortality rates. When he arrived in Gradieshti, he encountered remarkably primitive conditions—few homes enjoyed the unreliably delivered electricity or had indoor plumbing; poverty was crushing; alcoholism was “rampant”; and the sanitary conditions were appalling.

In short, it was a woeful microcosm of the Soviet Union at large, vividly captured by the author. And the health system itself was nothing like the “grandiose global show” theatrically staged by the government—in fact, there were chronic shortages of basic medicines, including penicillin; undertrained doctors deprived of the best equipment; and ubiquitous corruption, all masked by mendaciously contrived data.

In his memoir, Tsesis also chillingly describes his unfortunate encounters with an all-too-common anti-Semitism—in one

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YOUR HOME SWEET HOME How to Decide Whether You Should Stay or Move in Retirement

Tzougros, Penelope S. Wealthy Choices (306 pp.) $19.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Sep. 14, 2018 978-0-9709870-3-7

Unlike general retirement guides, this book focuses on decisions related

to housing.

Recognizing that one’s living situation is a crucial retirement issue, financial planner Tzougros (Long Term Care Insur­ ance, 2016, etc.) raises key housing-related questions and offers factual answers without overlooking the emotional decisions related to staying put or relocating. Obviously, housing is a complex problem, and where to live in retirement is a very personal choice, so this manual neither simplifies nor minimizes the various aspects of this matter. It covers the financial side of determining if a house is a retirement asset, provides ways to assess one’s current residence as a place to grow older, surveys numerous options (with an especially helpful comparison chart), and ponders the physical, emotional, and monetary implications of moving. Part of the strength of the book is its heavy reliance on numerous stories of retirees facing and making different decisions about housing based on their own unique circumstances. In a nice touch of personalization, for example, one chapter chronicles an evening party in which retirees chat about housing; recipes for food served at the soirée are even included in an appendix. These vignettes, often told from the perspective of each retiree, make it clear to readers that there is no single solution to what can become an emotional, if not financial, dilemma. Perhaps most helpful is the manual’s “Decision Guide” that effectively summarizes the content and facilitates objective verdicts about housing.

Tzougros cleverly structures the volume in two versions. One, |

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a narrative version, encourages written answers to specific questions; the other, a chart, distills the account into suggested answers and allows readers to simply circle the right ones to make a “Stay” versus “Move” decision. Throughout the authoritative book, and in the appendices, the author includes questionnaires and additional charts to be completed with various information, such as costs associated with the current residence versus potential new housing. Some of the charts in particular may seem intimidating, but they should prove valuable in making a more lucid decision about retirement housing.

A well-executed, clear, and highly informative retirement manual, if a bit overwhelming at times.

BLACK IRON

Veaux, Franklin & Rickert, Eve Thorntree Press (336 pp.) $19.95 paper | $11.99 e-book Oct. 26, 2018 978-1-944934-65-1 Veaux and Rickert’s (Polyamory and Jealousy, 2016, etc.) steampunk novel tells the story of a conspiracy that threatens to bring down the British monarchy.

Thaddeus Mudstone Ahmed Alexander Pinkerton wakes up in the gutter in New Old London, suffering temporary amnesia after literally falling out of the sky. The year is 1855, but in this alternative history, England is ruled by Queen Margaret the Merciful, ally of the Francebased Reformed Holy Catholic Church in its struggle with the Catholic Church of Rome. Her London is filled with refugees from the war as well as clankers (11-foot-tall, mechanical iron men). Thaddeus has just leapt out of the queen’s personal

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TWO COINS

Wagner-Wright, Sandra Wagner-Wright Enterprises (504 pp.) $17.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Feb. 1, 2019 978-0-9963845-4-4 In this riveting historical novel based on true events, political tensions in a Scottish mission in 19th-century Calcutta, India, give rise to a sexual scandal.

Mary Pigot has been the superintendent of the Ladies’ Association Female Mission in Calcutta for 10 years before the Rev. William Hastie arrives in 1879. Hastie, the principal of the Scottish College, quickly finds fault with Pigot’s policies, practices, and mannerisms; for example, he feels that the orphanage that she manages isn’t up to Scottish standards of cleanliness. Hastie and his comrades also don’t agree with her proselytizing approach: “educate first, convert later—if ever.” Nor does Pigot share Hastie’s resentment toward members of the Free Church, which broke away from the Church of Scotland in 1843. She’s quick to assist anyone who needs help—even members of the local community whom Hastie finds questionable. The growing friction between Pigot and Hastie culminates in a formal investigation of the superintendent followed by libelous claims that she’s abusive, neglectful, incompetent, and immoral. Due to her casual demeanor with male colleagues, her enemies accuse her of “fornication” with

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zeppelin after putting an incriminating item in the queen’s cabin, though not before being spotted by Alÿs de Valois, a princess of France. When Thaddeus’ planted ring is discovered, the queen is arrested on the suspicion that she’s secretly in league with Rome; meanwhile, back on the ground, Thaddeus is nearly murdered by the mysterious man who sent him on his mission. The plot that he’s set in motion may bring down the queen and her country unless he, Alÿs, and some other pawns in the game can figure out just what’s going on.

Veaux and Rickert summon their fictional alternative London with all of its slang, soot, and Victorian (or rather, Margaretian) squalor: “night had finished its long fall and was lying sprawled out over the disorganized heap of Old New London. Rows of gas lamps created uneven pools of light along the roads. Deep shadows lurked between.” The authors show a great deal of relish for the milieu they’ve created for this story, which, for example, also includes animates—undead laborers stitched together from dead-body parts: “They were frightfully expensive, and as beasts of burden they were only moderately useful, but they’d been all the rage since that doctor from Geneva had started making them a couple of years back.” The enthusiasm is infectious, and readers will quickly find themselves becoming caught up in the characters, the intrigue, and the slightly altered customs of this well-plotted mystery.

A satisfying alternate-history work that doesn’t skimp on adventure.

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A limber and suspenseful second volume. stranger

an Indian man and a fellow missionary. To clear her name and take back her position, Pigot takes Hastie to court, leading to an unpredictable, sensational trial. Although the book is set in the 1800s, its approach to political, religious, cultural, and gender-related issues is surprisingly relevant. WagnerWright (Rama’s Labyrinth, 2015, etc.) paints India’s culture and climate in stunning detail: “March comes on like a slow fire. Another week, and we’ll have the humidity.” The realistic, intricate characters take turns narrating the tale, panoramically revealing themselves through their perceptions. At one point, for example, Hastie narrates, “I stop and take a breath, composing myself for this audience of fools.” The plot’s first half proceeds at an unhurried pace, but when the trial starts, its momentum resembles that of a competitive sporting event.

Wagner-Wright’s extensive research allows her to stay remarkably true to history while her creativity brings an outstanding story of courage and fortitude to life.

A powerful story with a vivid setting, compelling plot, and multifaceted characters.

Wheeler, R.K. Self (152 pp.) $0.99 e-book | $17.46 audiobook Jan. 2, 2018 Wheeler (Scions of Azazyel, 2017, etc.) launches a fantasy series with a tale of a witch-turned-vampire whose new life includes mythical creatures and her own coven.

Lilith has been capable of wielding magic and conversing with spirits ever since she was a child. After her parents die, she opens a shop, telling fortunes and selling amulets in the town of Endor. There, she meets a man named Lamech, and the two gradually fall in love. Lamech admits that he’s a vampire, and Lilith allows him to turn her so that the two can spend immortality together. She later gets pregnant and subsequently gives birth to a gorgon, whom they name Medusa.

But when King David, who has a policy of banishing and killing magic-users, sends troops to Endor, the couple and their child flee. While they’re at sea, sailors attempt to rob them, inciting a fiery confrontation that separates Lamech from his wife and child. Lamech, who believes that Lilith and Medusa are dead, becomes the prisoner of a powerful immortal, while Lilith establishes a coven of vampires in Greece. Years later, she hears of Maldivar, a vampire using werewolves in a quest to destroy others of his own kind, and it isn’t long before he and his beastly lackeys come for Lilith’s coven. Wheeler’s story seamlessly blends Christian elements with Greek mythology.

Medusa’s father, Lamech, for example, is Cain’s descendant, whose vampirism stems from accidentally killing his ancestor; thus, he’s afflicted with Cain’s curse. There’s a plethora of other recognizable figures, as well, from fallen angels to Lilith’s lover Adonis and their twin gorgon daughters, Sthenno and Euryale.

Wheeler effectively teases the series’ epic potential by prefacing chapters with snippets of verse, which sometimes allude to

STRANGER Clash of the Aliens

Wood, M.B. Faucett Publishing (333 pp.)

Stranded in Ohio after a nuclear war, an alien from an extraterrestrial expedition strives to revive human technology to repair his damaged spaceship in this sci-fi sequel.

Wood’s (Collapse, 2018, etc.) series curtain raiser featured Cleveland area engineer Taylor McPherson assuming leadership after a global nuclear strike by Islamic terrorists. That attack caused the “Collapse,” a decline of worldwide civilization into pre-industrial savagery. McPherson and some Ohio neighbors formed “the Clan,” a community to defend against raiders and looters.

Now, 20 years later, the Clan is a self-sustaining, agricultural nation-state. But—led by status-hungry “Elders,” who barely remember old times—the group is also insular and tribal, little better than its backward rivals like the “Midwest Federation” downstate. Into the Federation, however, arrives an extraordinary visitor who was a subplot in the first book. Bilik Pudjata belongs to a deep-space mission by the reptilian Qu’uda, who detected life on Earth—ironically just before the nuclear holocaust. With their starship crippled by shots from an automated defense satellite, the aliens’ one hope is Bilik, clumsily re-engineered as humanlike to infiltrate the “dry land egg-sucking mammalian vermin” and restart metal-forging technology to build crucial replacement parts. Readers with memories of the later, darker chapters of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court may note the captivating parallels. Bilik—his name phonetically misinterpreted as “Billy Potato”—becomes the technocratic boss of the Federation and reintroduces electricity, mass-produced guns, and regimented discipline to barely comprehending feudal barbarians. Meanwhile, a suspicious and bellicose Clan needs the advice of the aged, deposed McPherson on what to do about unfamiliar weapons, trained soldiers, and flying machines. Wood’s first installment of his Clash of the Aliens five-part series was a well-told but standard post-apocalyptic survivalist tale. Here he contributes a limber and suspenseful second volume. McPherson and especially Bilik are among the few sympathetic characters in this coarse world, with each one heroic and tirelessly resourceful yet ultimately cast aside by their selfish brethren. Wood offers considerable battle scenes (“That’s a lot of gunfire....It was Shig’s last thought as a large caliber lead ball smashed through his chest, lifting him out of his saddle”). Amid the vivid clashes is |

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THE WITCH OF ENDOR Vampires

larger events, such as the biblical Great Flood, which Lamech witnessed firsthand. A 15-year narrative gap omits essential parts of Lilith’s backstory, including her process of amassing her coven, but this and other events may yet be explored in planned sequels.

Familiar mythological characters populate a creative, enjoyable story.

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the tantalizing question of whether the two remarkable protagonists will ever actually meet and what might ensue. The prospect of future books is indeed promising.

A superior second installment of an intriguing dystopian saga.

CHINESE MOSAIC Memoirs, Short Stories, Essays and Columns

Yu, Shiao-Shen Xlibris (184 pp.) $29.99 | $19.95 paper | $11.99 e-book Jul. 26,2018 978-1-984543-08-0 978-1-984543-09-7 paper A writer offers autobiographical vignettes, short stories, and reflections on Chinese culture and history.

In this book, Yu (Two Swordmasters, 2018, etc.) reveals that her “official and reported” birth date in north China is April 1, 1939. A self-described “unwanted girl child,” she was born after the Nanjing Massacre, when Japanese troops murdered an estimated 3 million Chinese people in a matter of weeks. Her father had been captured by the Japanese to work as an interpreter while her busy mother kept eight children safe from the Japanese army. In 1949, Yu’s family escaped from Communist China to Taiwan. Many years later, the author wrote columns for an American newspaper, the Pueblo Chieftain, and dreamed of publishing a book about China. After battling cancer in 2006, she was determined to realize her dream and pass down stories to her grandchildren. The end result is this heartfelt compilation of childhood memories and tales about Chinese culture and history. Divided into two parts, the book’s first section presents 16 easy-reading selections: autobiographical pieces, short stories, and essays. Sometimes the volume feels like an informative classroom lecture; for example, in the essay “Three Chinese Poems,” Yu briefly discusses classical Chinese poetry.

Other works are much more personal. Once, on a terrible train ride, Yu’s mother hid from Japanese soldiers by disguising herself as a man and her daughters as boys. The author also paints a memorable portrait of the outmoded custom of foot binding.

In “My Mother’s Big Feet,” Yu’s mother—whose forward-thinking father wouldn’t allow her feet to be bound—was ridiculed her entire life for having “big” (smaller than size 5) feet. And the tender reflections in “A snowy night in Canada” chronicle the author’s struggles to raise her daughters alone. The second section presents 41 newspaper articles with details that should leave a lasting impression on readers of all ages. For example, “The Archer and the Moon Goddess” explains why ceramic rabbits are popular gifts for children during the moon festival.

While they are not chronological, these succinct works are easy to browse, and Yu’s lively prose brings her subjects to life.

Quick, colorful glances at a rich culture.

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Appreciations: Kingsley Amis Pours a Drink B Y G RE G O RY MC NA MEE

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Of bibulous literature there is no end—at least before these abstemiously puritanical times. We have the example of François Rabelais, who wrote, “Most illustrious drinkers…to you and you alone are my writings dedicated.” There is Euripides, whose Bacchae records a drinking party gone very bad, and Petronius, whose drinking parties never ended. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano warns that if the liver doesn’t get you, the lava will, and then there are Ernest Hemingway and poor F. Scott Fitzgerald, both victims of the bottle. Even James Bond, that most suave of tipplers, must have felt awful on awakening, as did Bertie Wooster, who at least had Jeeves to bring him an antidote and a steaming plate of B&E. Of bibulous readers, of course, there is also no end, which explains why Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide has sold so steadily for more than 80 years. To those readers we must commend Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking, whose title is more than self-explanatory. Amis (1922-1995) was an English novelist who set an example of manly self-indulgence for the readers who escaped Ian Fleming—Christopher Hitchens, for instance, who learned to drink at Amis’ knee, which may not entirely be a recommendation. Indeed, drinking and gender roles went hand in hand in Amis’ universe: “Most gin in this country is drunk with tonic and ice and lemon. And, if you want to take the trouble, a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. After many years of exposure, I find this a rather unworthy, mawkish drink, best left to women, youngsters and whisky distillers.”

What whisky distillers have to do with gin must remain a mystery, but Amis reveals himself to be a fellow of stern and unshakable opinions. One concerns pairing food with wine. By Amis’ account, there’s a certain “tyranny of wine” at play, and no wine whatever goes with many things that figure on the table, such as eggs, sausages, fish and chips, salads, and “a whole range of staple unsmart British dishes.” And what does? Beer, of course, which is why you’ll find hobbits and dwarves and suchlike creature sucking down the suds in those veddy British Tolkien novels. A nice roast chicken, on the other hand, can accommodate either red or white wine, so long as there’s no stuffing involved— for there the rules change.

Everyday Drinking is a lot of fun to read with a glass of something in hand, as is Tom Standage’s History of the World in Six Glasses, Christopher Finan’s Drunks, and many another boozy book. The thing is to be careful, for science has yet to produce a cure for the hangover, apart from mounds of anti-inflammatory painkillers and gallons of water and the passage of time. Where science fails, art must enter. Amis would shudder with nationalist horror, I imagine, but a traditional Mexican remedy serves: eat a large, steaming bowl of tripe laced with exquisitely hot chiles. The chiles, known analgesics, will ease the pain, and the tripe will soak up some of the evil afloat in your bloodstream. Now go forth, most illustrious drinkers….

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.

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