September 15, 2024: Volume XCII, No. 18

FEATURING 306 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children’s, and YA Books

MARY L. TRUMP’S FAMILY DRAMA

What’s it like to grow up Trump? Donald’s niece delivers another heartrending memoir

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

UNHAPPY FAMILIES

“EACH UNHAPPY FAMILY is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina , an oft-quoted line that deserves its own Hallmark card at this point. It’s a truism that our cover subject, Mary L. Trump, understands all too well, and her uniquely unhappy family was already the subject of a bestselling memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2021). e dangerous man in question, of course, is the author’s uncle, Donald Trump; she attributes his character—“arrogant” and “cruel,” in her words—to the emotional abuse he and his siblings su ered at the hands of their father, Fred Trump, a “high-functioning sociopath” who pitted the brothers against one another.

e Trump family is again the focus of Mary’s new

book, Who Could Ever Love You (St. Martin’s, Sept. 10), though the camera angle has shifted: Here we learn more about her father, Freddy, Donald’s eldest brother, who was subjected to the “sti ing control and blanket disapproval” of their father; he died, alcoholic and broken, when Mary was just a teen. And we learn about her mother, Linda, who married into this toxic clan and found herself iced out when Freddy died. As she tells contributor Marion Winik in the interview on page 54, this upbringing left Mary in intensive trauma therapy and still, after two books, sifting through the wreckage.

Memoirs of dysfunctional families could have their own number in the Dewey Decimal System. Here are a few other recent titles that our critics recommend:

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Everything/Nothing/ Someone by Alice Carrière (Spiegel & Grau, 2023): e author of this intense and unforgettable memoir grew up privileged in a Manhattan town house, the daughter of artist Jennifer Bartlett and actor Mathieu Carrière. eir aloofness and self-absorption left her unmoored, and at a young age she began to self-harm. e onset of a full-blown dissociative state led her to a psychiatric facility and, eventually, a kind of healing—all of it depicted in vivid and evocative prose. Our starred review calls it a “spellbinding memoir.”

Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder (Viking, 2023): e daughter of Warhol “superstar” Viva (and older sister of actor Gaby Ho mann) grew up in the Chelsea Hotel at the mercy of her mercurial mother’s moods and whims. Visits to Viva’s childhood home reveal that the star came from a fractious family of her own. ese memories are interspersed with current-day episodes in which Viva, as di cult and imperious as ever, visits her

adult married daughter. “Auder makes the most of her magni cent mess of material,” says our starred review.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 5). is astonishing graphic memoir, dense with personal narratives and the events of modern Chinese history, represents the author/ illustrator’s reckoning with her immigrant mother and grandmother. Sun Yi was a journalist who ran afoul of the Communist authorities and su ered a mental breakdown from which she never truly recovered. Her daughter, Rose, living in the United States as an adult, was scarred by her mother’s decline and felt caught between two worlds. Hulls’ trip to China with Rose inspired this work that “glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers,” according to our starred review.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

TOM BEER

Interactive Content

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“Rich personal and cultural history of a young woman in Berlin’s Belle Epoque.”

—Publishers Weekly/ BookLife Reviews

“A tender, personalitycentered biography of golden age Berlin.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A wonderfully composed portrayal that could be considered narrative Art Nouveau.”

—BookTrib

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Contributors

Nada Abdelrahim, Colleen Abel, Reina Luz Alegre, Paul Allen, Stephanie Anderson, Jenny Arch, Kent Armstrong, Mark Athitakis, Nada Bakri, Audrey Barbakoff, Sally Battle, Robert Beauregard, Nell Beram, Elizabeth Bird, Sarah Blackman, Amy Boaz, Jessie Bond, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Jessica Hoptay Brown, Cliff Burke, Anna Calame, Catherine Cardno, Charles Cassady, Ann Childs, Alec B. Chunn, Tamar Cimenian, Rachael Conrad, Adeisa Cooper, Jeannie Coutant, Perry Crowe, Michael Deagler, Cathy DeCampli, Dave DeChristopher, Elise DeGuiseppi, Steve Donoghue, Jacob Edwards, Lisa Elliott, Tanya Enberg, Chelsea Ennen, Jennifer Evans, Joshua Farrington, Brooke Faulkner, Katie Flanagan, Hillary Jo Foreman, Renee Fountain, Robbin Friedman, Roberto Friedman, Nivair H. Gabriel, Elisa Gall, Laurel Gardner, Chloé Harper Gold, Carol Goldman, Danielle Galván Gomez, Melinda Greenblatt, Christine Gross-Loh, Tobi Haberstroh, Geoff Hamilton, Alec Harvey, Peter Heck, Katrina Niidas Holm, Julie Hubble, Kathleen T. Isaacs, Darlene Ivy, Wesley Jacques, Kerri Jarema, Jessica Jernigan, Danielle Jones, Mikayla Kaber, Jayashree Kamblé, Ivan Kenneally, Katherine King, Stephanie Klose, Andrea Kreidler, Carly Lane, Christopher Lassen, Tom Lavoie, Judith Leitch, Maya Lekach, Elsbeth Lindner, Coeur de Lion, Barbara London, Karen Long, Patricia Lothrop, Kyle Lukoff, Douglas MacLeod, Joan Malewitz, Thomas Maluck, Joe Maniscalco, Gabriela Martins, Matthew May, Dale McGarrigle, Zoe McLaughlin, Don McLeese, Kathie Meizner, J. Elizabeth Mills, Tara Mokhtari, Rebecca Moore, Andrea Moran, Rhett Morgan, Molly Muldoon, Jennifer Nabers, Christopher Navratil, Mike Newirth, Randall Nichols, Therese Purcell Nielsen, Sarah Norris, Katrina Nye, Tori Ann Ogawa, Mike Oppenheim, Emilia Packard, Derek Parker, Hal Patnott, Deb Paulson, John Edward Peters, Christofer Pierson, William E. Pike, Margaret Quamme, Carolyn Quimby, Kristy Raffensberger, Maggie Reagan, Caroline Reed, Kelly Roberts, Amy Robinson, Lizzie Rogers, Elisa Rowe, Gia Ruiz, Lloyd Sachs, Bob Sanchez, Gretchen Schulz, Jerome Shea, Sadaf Siddique, Danielle Sigler, Karyn N. Silverman, Linda Simon, Laurie Skinner, Jennifer Smith, Wendy Smith, Margot E. Spangenberg, Allison Staley, Allie Stevens, Mathangi Subramanian, Jennifer Sweeney, Deborah Taylor, Eva Thaler-Sroussi, Desiree Thomas, Lenora Todaro, Valeria Tsygankova, Bijal Vachharajani, Katie Vermilyea, Elliott Walcroft, Katie Weeks, Grace L. Williams, Vanessa Willoughby, Kerry Winfrey, Marion Winik

SEPTEMBER HIGHLIGHTS

is is a month of great ction releases from authors either familiar or new. And at least one author is both familiar and new— lm director Pedro Almodóvar is making his ction debut with e Last Dream (translated by Frank Wynne; HarperVia, Sept. 24), a collection of stories that give “his merrily transgressive takes on life a good literary workout,” according to our starred review. “I don’t distinguish between genres,” Almodóvar writes, and these 12 tales—written between the 1960s and today—feel

sometimes autobiographical, sometimes gothic; among the characters are priests, actors, and vampires, and our review concludes that “every page [is] worth reading.”

Danzy Senna’s sixth book, Colored Television (Riverhead, Sept. 3), is about a novelist named Jane who’s been barely squeaking by—along with her artist husband and their two kids—as she spends a decade writing the “mulatto War and Peace.” When her editor rejects it, Jane works her way under false pretenses into a

project with a hot TV producer who’s trying to develop a biracial comedy.

ere’s suspense: Will Jane decide there’s more artistry in television than in the literary world? Will she nd success before her husband— or the producer— gures out what she’s doing? Our starred review calls this a “brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book.”

In his third novel, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 3), Garth Greenwell explores a 40something poet’s lifethreatening illness. After su ering an incredibly painful tear in his aorta, the narrator spends several days in the intensive care unit, giving him plenty of time to ruminate not only on the state of his body, the health care system, and his own powerlessness, but also on his life in the outside world. “Greenwell—such a nely tuned, generous writer— transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life,” according to our starred review.

Australian author Liane Moriarty is known for high-concept page-turners that make terri c TV shows. Her latest novel, Here One Moment (Crown, Sept. 10), opens with a scene that’s sure to grab the reader’s attention: A group of passengers are on an airplane headed for

Sydney when a nondescript woman starts walking down the aisle and making predictions about her fellow passengers’ lives—specically, how old they’ll be when they die and their cause of death. at baby in his mother’s arms will drown at age 7. Other people will be lucky enough to die of pneumonia or pulmonary disease at 84 or 103. A 42-year-old engineer will die in a workplace accident at 43. Should the woman be believed? “A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions,” says our starred review.

Louis Bayard specializes in historical novels, some starring literary gures such as Dickens and Poe and others featuring presidents Lincoln and Kennedy and their wives. His latest, e Wildes (Algonquin, Sept. 17), focuses on Oscar Wilde and his family in 1890s England, both before and after his infamous court cases, exploring the fallout as it a ected Wilde’s wife, Constance, and their two sons. “Bayard turns the Wilde family’s tragedy into an engrossing, eternally relevant fable of fame, scandal, and love,” according to our starred review.

LAURIE MUCHNICK

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

Laurie Muchnick is the ction editor.

EDITOR’S PICK

e ctional memoir of a gay biracial British actor of rare intelligence and elegance, over a half decade of social change.

Hollinghurst’s seventh novel features a narrator who, like his creator, is about 70: David Win—the dark-skinned son of a British woman and a man she met while working as a typist in Burma after World War II—was raised by his mother on her own in provincial England. e story opens with a fairly recent event: the death of Mark Hadlow, a mentor whose family o ered a scholarship that allowed David to attend an elite prep school from the age of 13 in the early 1960s. Along with

the challenges he faced there due to his race and class, he was often targeted by Hadlow’s son Giles, a bully who we know has grown up to be a right-wing member of parliament in the era of Brexit, even now “tearing up our future and our hopes.” e rst half of the book relies on what Win calls his “famous memory” to unfold the story of his adolescence—one brilliant section is set during a seaside holiday when his head whips back and forth between a good-looking Italian waiter, the men on the beach in their bathing suits, and his mother and her business partner, Mrs. Croft, funder of this vacation, now revealed to be much more

Our Evenings

Hollinghurst, Alan | Random House | 496 pp. $30.00 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9780593243060

than a friend. e expansive architecture of this book uidly slips you from one phase of David’s life to the next, examining the ups and downs of his acting career and his love a airs—and then suddenly there’s an ending you will likely nd

yourself reading several times so you can fully take in its subtlety, power, and emotion.

Hollinghurst continues to amaze and delight, hitting both the most delicate grace notes and portentous chords perfectly.

A novel blends mystery, SF, and politics in an uneasily multicultural Europe.

IXELLES

I Might Be in Trouble

Aleman, Daniel | Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) | $29.00 Dec. 3, 2024 | 9781538766347

When a onenight-stand dies in his bed, a struggling writer sees a way to resuscitate his career.

In his first book for adults, having written two YA novels, Aleman creates a protagonist with an autofictional vibe—David Alvarez, the 28-year-old gay Latine author of two books—and places him in a gleefully cooked-up situation. After a roaring success with his debut and a wholesale flop with his second book, Alvarez learns from his agent, the soigne Stacey Hixon-Jones, that his publisher has passed on his third manuscript. Broke, friendless, and lonely, he turns to Grindr to drown his sorrows and meets up with what seems like the man of his dreams. The charming, handsome, slightly older guy who invites him to the Plaza Hotel and escorts him around town on a boozy, thrilling date seems like he could fill the hole left by the loss of his erstwhile partner, Jeremy, a casualty of David’s absorption in his career drama. Unfortunately, in the morning, the dream date appears to have expired— and David doesn’t remember whether he murdered him or not. In a panic, he calls Stacey, who pops over with dollar signs in her eyes. Surely they can turn this dead body into a bestseller! As they execute Stacey’s bizarre idea for next steps, things get crazier and campier by the minute,

sometimes staying on the funny side of ridiculous and sometimes…not. The plot keeps thickening, that’s for sure, and contrasts a bit uncomfortably with the earnest portrayal of David’s emotional landscape; his father, stepmother, and half brother in New Jersey could be characters from a different novel.

For fans of Grant Ginder and Jean Hanff Korelitz, Aleman could be a writer to watch.

Ixelles

Anyuru, Johannes | Trans. by Nichola Smalley | Two Lines Press (468 pp.) $20.00 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781949641691

A multilayered novel blending mystery, SF, and politics in an uneasily multicultural Europe.

“A departure hall for travelers with no destination.” Thus a banlieue of Antwerp where Ruth, a consultant in a shadowy enterprise, has deep connections she’d sooner forget. Twenty-Seventy, nicknamed Baghdad—as in, says Ruth’s late beloved, activist/writer Mio, the Baghdad that the Mongols sacked—is grim, depressed, dangerous. But it’s also a place of life, full of people whom Ruth’s firm is working to dispossess so that the place can be colonized by “a different segment of the population than the people who live there today: people with real spending power and professional careers.” Mio is not among the to-be-displaced: He is dead, either killed in a car wreck or stabbed, the

choices offered to Ruth and Mio’s young son, Em, who, Telemachus-like, seeks his father’s ghost if not his father—for a mysterious CD has turned up with Mio’s voice on it, leading Ruth to think that he’s faked his death to lead a revolution from underground. “It was easy to disappear,” some emanation of Mio recounts. “As though I’d never really existed.” In a tale part Borges, part Stieg Larsson, and part the P.D. James of The Children of Men , Anyuru explores the nonexistence of the underclass: a famous novelist in his home country who, unrecognized, works as a custodian; a young man murdered, “as though he wasn’t really here.” Poet/novelist Anyuru, of Ugandan and Swedish parentage, populates his pages with multiethnic figures who resist erasure and amnesia in an unwelcoming Europe. If the mystery he poses never quite resolves, he presents arresting episodes that add pages to “a library of the memories and hopes of the poor.”

Memorably inventive: the work of a writer, well established in Sweden, whom American readers will want to know.

Baxter, Ella | Catapult (272 pp.) | $27.00 Dec. 3, 2024 | 9781646222551

An artist blurs the line between reality and performance as she livestreams her stalker’s abuses on the eve of an important gallery show. Sabine is a successful conceptual artist about to debut her newest work, “fifteen photographic portraits of her… covered from head to toe in sheer costumes. These wearable puppets, several feet long…featured silicone faces that Sabine could position over her own.” Titled things like “Crone,”

Kirkus Star

Woo Woo

“Baby,” “Stay at Home Mother,” and “Baba Yaga,” the portraits purport to explore the archetypes of female identity as experienced by the individual, and singular, female artist. Or, as Sabine explains it to a collector and the gallery owner, Cecily, “It’s about pretending to be something you already are.” The problem is the show could also be about falsity, or juxtaposition, or “the face and the body and the night,” or any number of other things depending on the viewer. This difficulty with definition, and Sabine’s oscillation between her sense of utter failure and artistic victory, tears at her as she flounders through the pre-opening publicity push wherein her main strategy is to livestream both the bizarre and banal of her everyday in an attempt to “coauthor a work with the public…to start a dialogue with the viewer…in real time.” Throughout it all, Sabine’s beleaguered husband, Constantine; her friend Ruth, whose whale-shaped cakes “occup[y] the intersection between baking and marine life”; and Cecily’s partner, Freya, whose sculptures sell for thousands, attempt to soothe and bolster her ego, with little success. As Sabine’s anxiety ramps up, she’s visited by the apparition of feminist art icon Carolee Schneeman, offering protection against the insistent attentions of a stalker who peers in Sabine’s windows with the muddied face of a Rembrandt self-portrait. The whirligig pace of the novel relentlessly intensifies from chapter to chapter as Sabine navigates the boundary between real and manufactured, all in front of a live audience. If Sabine mistakes art for life, or vice versa, the results could be deadly—both for her body of work and her actual body. The book is a pointedly absurdist send-up of the pretensions of the art world, which nevertheless carries at its core a real exploration of what is at stake when one lives for art. Baxter continues her triumphant exploration of real lives lived on the fringes of the surreal.

Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.

[Non]Disclosure

Bondy, Renée D. | Second Story Press (184 pp.) | $22.95 paper Oct. 17, 2024 | 9781772603927

A woman grapples with the long aftermath of having been sexually abused by her childhood priest. Growing up a Catholic schoolgirl in 1970s Ontario, the nameless protagonist of Bondy’s debut novel does just about everything that’s expected of her, from joining the choir to helping out the priest at the rectory with various tasks. The narrator knows she’s no standout, and she likes it that way: “I’d always been quiet…I wore quiet like a woolen shawl, protective and comforting.” But it is perhaps this very lack of remarkableness that makes her a target for the pedophile priest—“Father Feeler”—at her parish. Years later, after she’s found her calling by opening up her home as a hospice for gay men dying of AIDS—who were mistreated, or failed to be treated, at traditional hospitals and banned from seeing their partners or friends—other victims of the priest begin to come forward. As the narrator weighs whether or not to join them in telling her story, she learns the insidious power that secrets have to fracture families and communities—as well as how healing might be possible. In the novel’s afterword, Bondy reveals the novel’s inspiration as a real-life case out of Chatham, Ontario, and her desire to explore the lesser-known stories of female victims of church abuse. The necessity for home hospice networks for AIDS patients in the 1980s was also, sadly, very real. Bondy’s decision to juxtapose the two scenarios gives the novel much of its power. But the nameless protagonist—who sometimes shifts into the plural first person—seems designed to be a kind of everywoman for victims and so never develops a vivid personhood of her own, undoing some of

Bondy’s intentions to move and outrage the reader through the power of fiction.

Underdeveloped characters dampen this well-intentioned, thoughtful tale.

Feast While You Can

Clements, Mikaella & Onjuli Datta

Grand Central Publishing (304 pp.)

$30.00 | Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781538742259

A young queer woman who’s lived her whole life in the dead-end mountain village of Cadenze finds herself violently possessed by an ancient, malevolent, memory-eating entity that inhabits the caves bordering her home. This novel tells the story of Angelina Sicco, who’s determined to be content with the cards she’s been dealt—both good and bad—and her generally uneventful small-town existence. All that begins to change, however, when her brother Patrick’s ex-girlfriend, Jagvi, returns to Cadenze. Jagvi is hardheaded, undeniably alluring, and fiercely loyal to the Sicco siblings despite their complicated past, and Angelina struggles to deny her growing attraction to her. The tension between them gradually ramps up in intensity until it feels like one or the other will have to give in to their emotions or go mad with desire, propelling the story forward at a rapid pace. To make matters more complicated, Jagvi’s return to Cadenze appears to have awakened an ancient creature lying dormant in the caves surrounding their home. It soon attaches itself to Angelina, who finds that the only thing that keeps the creature conveniently at bay is Jagvi’s touch. Throughout the novel, Cadenze itself feels like a living, breathing entity. It’s full of life, character, local lore, and the complicated relationships harbored by all small towns, fictional or otherwise. Similarly, the novel’s portrayal of growing up queer in an

isolated location never feels disingenuous or overwrought, adding a different layer of anxiety and complexity to the story. These emotions, in turn, deftly weave in and out of the horror created by Cadenze’s resident monster. A fresh, queer spin on possession horror with a sharp focus on deeply complex small-town dynamics.

Near Strangers

Crotty, Marian | Autumn House Press (168 pp.) | $18.95 paper Oct. 11, 2024 | 9781637681008

Crotty’s second collection shares the everyday struggles and joys of women and girls peppered through Middle America.

There are no spectacles in these stories, and they are all the better for it. The characters, many of them queer, are familiar, well meaning, and flawed. The conflicts they face range from universal to less common, including first heartbreak, rocky transitions into adulthood, losing an infant, and surviving sexual assault. “Halloween” centers on high school senior Jules and her whirlwind romance, amid crushed toppings and sticky counters, with frozen yogurt–shop co-worker Erika, a college student. Advised by her kooky grandma Jan, Jules learns that while the most thrilling connections are not always the healthiest, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick around to see what happens. The title story features 73-year-old Betsy, a volunteer for an organization that provides support to survivors in the aftermath of rape, and 23-year-old survivor Lenna. Though Betsy does not identify as a “do-gooder kind of person” and only began volunteering after her therapist suggested it would help her cope with estrangement from her only child, her compassionate presence lays the groundwork for connection between two lonely

people. In “Dear Matt,” Caroline, newly graduated from law school and recovering from a breakup, implores her new brother-in-law to help her sister, Ella, forgive her after an explosive fight triggered by the clashes between Matt and (now) Ella’s Mormon beliefs and Caroline’s sexuality. While this story isn’t as tight as some of the others, the letter format adds some nice variety to the collection, and the line “I realized this was her real and actual life, the one she wanted and meant to keep” is a gratifying distillation of a theme that runs through the book. Crotty repeatedly signals that it is not just all right, but good, to realize your perception of someone is fundamentally misaligned with their perception of themself; her characters make confident assumptions, feel surprised, back up, and reacquaint themselves with one another, becoming wiser and more tolerant with each misjudgment and readjustment.

Eight heartening reminders that there are few connections impossible to forge or mend.

Canoes

de Kerangal, Maylis | Trans. by Jessica Moore | Archipelago (185 pp.) | $19.00 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781953861962

A searching story collection considers the meaning, textures, and echoes of language.

French author de Kerangal’s eight stories—seven very brief tales and one novella—constitute a sensitive group marked by vocal suggestions, impressions, and reverberations. Several listen closely to the timbre of a voice, as in “Stream and Iron Filings,” where a woman lowers her tone to sound less fragile, more trustworthy, for her new radio job. In “Nevermore,” the narrator is reading the titular Edgar Allan Poe poem in a sound studio, part of a recording project combining many voices, hers

described as “light canoe on dark ocean.” In the touching “A Light Bird,” a father and daughter argue over the deletion of the answeringmachine message spoken by their wife and mother, now dead for more than five years. For the father, the voice exists in an “infinite present” while he and his child resemble “two blind people in a canoe, paddling countercurrent.” Teasing canoe references crop up widely, from the nucleus of Halley’s comet in “Arianespace” to an actual craft, hovering, wedged between walls, in “Ontario.” While several stories have a French setting, the novella, Mustang, describes the strain of a French woman’s temporary relocation to Golden, Colorado, tolerating her partner Sam’s wish for a change of course after a tragic event. Sam’s voice becomes louder and slower in this foreign setting as he more deeply absorbs a U.S. culture with which they are not unfamiliar, having heard much about the States—or the “stets”—back home. Yet this is “another planet” to the narrator, where she shifts and roams, gathering up experiences to take back. Cerebral, dotted with unusual vocabulary— “cadastral,” “ruderal”—the stories capture fleeting ideas and moments, sometimes hazily. Above all there’s an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future.

An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance.

Frozen Lives

Dornbush, Jennifer Graeser Blackstone (350 pp.) | $17.99 paper Oct. 29, 2024 | 9798212638364

A doctor who returns to her hometown to help with the case of a missing child gets more than she bargains for when her best friend goes missing too.

When she hears that her friend Jo Blakely’s 11-year-old

Proof

that fiction of political intrigue can still be stranger than the truth.

THE SLATE

son, Jeremiah, has disappeared, Dr. Emily Hartford rushes from her work as a Chicago surgeon to her hometown of Freeport, Michigan. She’s able to connect about the case immediately with her old friend Detective Ishkode Aditson about the case, but there’s nothing to learn. Emily offers Jo what comfort she can, but she knows from her father’s line of work as a coroner that the worst may be coming. So Emily’s as thrilled as Jo when Jeremiah comes home safely. Though he has little memory or information about where he’s been, his family is deeply relieved, and Emily can shift her focus back to life in the Windy City and her neglected relationship with her boyfriend, Brandon. But no sooner does she breathe a sigh of relief than the trouble multiplies. This time, not only is Jeremiah missing, but so is Jo, shocking Emily into investigative mode. Was Jeremiah’s earlier absence part of some deeper plot? Emily fears that this double disappearance may be related to the case of the Sailor Slayer, a killer who kidnapped boys on Lake Michigan, doing unspeakable things before tossing their bodies away. In the absence of obvious leads, she draws on her experience as the coroner’s daughter and on her knowledge of Jo to find out what happened to her friend and stop a potential killer.

Everyday family dynamics are darkened by a creepy backdrop.

The Slate

FitzSimmons, Matthew | Thomas & Mercer (300 pp.) | $28.99 | Oct. 8, 2024

9781542009508

Twenty-one years after one rising U.S. congressman covers up a mess involving another, the bill comes due, and it’s a whopper. Long before he became president, Rep. Harrison Clark liked to party. After one of his playmates, Charlotte Haines—a staffer to his buddy Rep. Paul Paxton—ended up dead of poison-laced drugs on his bathroom floor, Paxton sent his chief of staff, Agatha Cardiff, to sort things out. She called on her old friend Darius McDaniel to move Haines’ body to a less compromising location and incidentally to snap a few pictures of Clark helping her lug the corpse outside his building. Now that Justice Albert Northcott is about to announce his retirement from the Supreme Court, Paxton wants his job, and he’s willing to threaten Clark with those photos to get his nomination. Agatha, who’s been married and widowed and fallen off the map, will get pulled back into this latest round of blackmail as soon as she succeeds in freeing her tenant Shelby Franklin from the high-placed sugar daddy who promised her to the guests aboard a yacht currently sitting in international waters outside Saint Thomas. Agatha’s negotiations go surprisingly smoothly, but nothing else does. Soon she’s fighting both senior White House aide Felix

Gallardo and his old schoolmate, Washington Post reporter Isha Roy, for the upper hand in a dizzying series of complications. FitzSimmons keeps all these double-dealings heartlessly entertaining, with every carrot attached to a hefty stick. As Agatha tells Paxton, who wonders how anyone could be monstrous enough to kill someone, “We’ll be lucky if there’s only one monster.”

Proof that the fiction of hard-knuckle political intrigue can still be stranger than the truth, at least this week.

Dogs and Monsters

Haddon, Mark | Doubleday (288 pp.)

$28.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780385550864

Timeless spins on classic Greek myths. These stories generally begin in media res, leaving the reader to puzzle along with the characters over just what’s going on. The protagonist is often given no name, and the context and circumstances are unclear—as is the border between the natural and supernatural. Time itself is apparently an illusion, a construct. Can the narrator be trusted? The narrator’s world? Yet through the accretion of detail the story begins to cohere, often in the manner of a fairy tale or parable, offering a moral that is both instructive and unsettling. “He is drifting a long way from the shore on some dark, interior sea,” describes the plight of the protagonist of “The Quiet Limit of the World,” one of the longest and most expansive tales, apparently covering centuries. Its epigraph invokes Tithonus, the human lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Her father (Zeus, presumably) has granted the protagonist immortality, though nobody mentioned eternal youth, so the protagonist is sentenced to wither away without end. “You are going to spend a long time with a very old man. Or you are going to leave him,” the father says

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with a laugh. Many of the stories lack any sort of resolution, making them seem all the more existential. There’s a sense that they exist outside of time, that they have been repeating themselves forever, and will continue to do so, even as the gods of classic myth have given way to science and technology (as in the experimental gene-editing facility of “The Wilderness”). “My Old School” is an outlier here, more a story of contemporary realism than recast myth, yet also offering a moral for its untrustworthy narrator. The author seems to be toying with the essence of storytelling, the way that it has persevered and sustained itself through the ages. “The decades spin past,” he writes. “The blur of dragonfly wings.”

The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.

Tidal Lock

Hill, Lindsay | McPherson & Company (160 pp.) | $24.00 Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781620540633

A young woman tries to find a straightforward narrative track amid a tangle of unreliable memories.

The poet Hill’s first novel in a decade—following the award-winning Sea of Hooks (2013)—seems to present life itself as an existential mystery. “My name is sometimes Olana,” says the narrator, who leaves everyone else either unnamed or with a nickname. “My father was thirty-nine when he disappeared. I was thirteen. This was years ago” is how she explains the pivotal point of reference to which the narrative keeps circling back: They had boarded a train but he returned to the station, leaving her onboard. That was the last she saw of him. Perhaps. She now lives somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a place without a name, desolate and barely populated. Or

maybe she lives inside the labyrinth of her mind. She doesn’t believe the woman who calls herself her mother is so. She has no idea how and why she came to be seeing the therapist she isn’t sure is a therapist. She keeps going to movies at an abandoned theater, where there is no one to tell the disembodied voices around her to keep quiet. Every chunk of narrative (generally little more than a paragraph) has a title, and most seem disconnected from the one preceding or following. Though it looks like the protagonist is getting nowhere, and the reader as well, the narrator frequently advises that “the past is patient.” Patience brings rewards and revelation. Is the narrator in hell? (Maybe.) Is there a way out? What happened to her father? Was she complicit? What about this woman who says she’s her mother? As the narrator comes to learn, “Sometimes life seems less the sum of the choices you’ve made and more the remainder of the subtractions you’ve endured.” Maybe it’s all just a matter of tricky arithmetic. Very controlled writing and challenging reading.

Kirkus Star

The Collaborators

Idov, Michael | Scribner (272 pp.) $28.99 | Nov. 19, 2024 | 9781668055571

Young CIA operative Ari Falk becomes enmeshed in a cutthroat international financial scheme with grave political implications. Working under the cover of media investor, Falk is supposed to help Russian opposition journalists come up with stories damaging to the Kremlin. His latest success is with blogger Anton Basmanny, an openly gay provocateur known for his outrageous man-onthe-street livestreams whose viral performance video from a

high-ranking Russian official’s secret villa leads to the official’s deposal. On the same flight as the one intended to whisk Falk to safety, tech billionaire Paul Obrandt is seen seated with a mystery woman (her identity is key) shortly before he’s reported dead by an elaborately planned suicide. Not believing her Russian-born father did such a thing, his feisty and fearless 23-year-old daughter, Maya, leaves their Los Angeles home to pursue the truth in Portugal, where he left her a house. Hooking up (in both senses of the term) with Falk, she risks her life to find out not only what happened to her old man, but also where $5 billion missing from his investment account went. A classic globe-trotter, the novel spreads its cold-blooded killings among several countries. But unlike most spy fiction, it’s driven in the liveliest sense by young characters who reflect their generation. Falk, a millennial who wears Weezer tees, and Maya, who was up for a part in a Peacock vampire series, are an irresistible pairing. The aspirations of youth also drive the backstory of Paul Obrandt’s efforts as a 25-year-old billionaire to effect positive political change in Russia during the fading days of the Yeltsin administration through the creation of a telecom firm. Good luck with that. Sharp, freshly conceived, thoroughly entertaining spy fiction.

Rosenfeld

Kessler, Maya | Trans. by Maya Thomas Avid Reader Press (400 pp.) | $28.99 Nov. 19, 2024 | 9781668053454

An erotic obsession becomes all-consuming for a female Israeli filmmaker. Kessler’s debut is an X-rated deep dive into the overwhelming fascination of a 36-year-old narrator named Noa Simon with a “fat man dressed in a white shirt—or, on second glance,

pink—one button excessively undone, exposing a hint of his tanned chest.” This is Teddy Rosenfeld, whom Noa meets at a wedding. He and his business partner, Richard Harrington, are so impressed with a video Noa has made as part of the entertainment that they suggest she come work for them at their marine biotech firm. As the wedding reception progresses, Noa and Teddy smoke cigarettes together, go to the bathroom and pee together, and flirt with each other almost violently, though Teddy stops Noa’s game far short of what she’s hoping for. As they part, Noa sends a final salvo: “There’s no woman in this world, in your entire life, who’s wanted you as much as I want you.” Over the next almost-400 pages, the force of Noa’s desire will generate a ferocious sexual affair, conducted as she becomes an employee of Delmar Bio Solutions and gradually overcomes Teddy’s resistance, increasingly involving herself in his complicated personal life, which includes multiple children and ex-wives. Noa is a wild, angry, difficult woman; Teddy is a big, sexy mensch women are crazy for; and Kessler portrays their relationship, their conversations, their sex, and their arguments with abandon—behind Noa’s obsession with Teddy is Kessler’s obsession with both of them. As the drama goes on and on, digging toward the aspects of their lives that the couple are withholding from each other—in Noa’s case, her estrangement from her mother; in Teddy’s, a “situation” with his second wife—the experience of reading it is a bit like sex that goes on too long. (Beige. I should paint the ceiling beige.) But obsession is as obsession does.

An unruly addition to the literature of passion that might have worked better as a novella.

The Ancients

Larison, John | Viking (400 pp.) | $30.00 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780593831168

Two inimical societies seek to escape the ravages of climate change in this imaginative novel.

Extend the post-apocalyptic sections of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and you’re in the territory of Larison’s tale. Set in unspecified locations—though one imagines Alaska at one end and southern California at the other—it begins with children of a hunting clan who have been abandoned. That’s not through any neglect on the part of their elders, but because they’ve been shanghaied into slavery. The children set out to find their people, braving tall mountains, fierce critters, and snow that Larison writes, poetically, “looked like knapped flint falling through water.” Explains another to the youngest, a brave but hapless brother, “Nothing wrong in this world is ever the fault of children.” Far away, their captive mother thinks much the same thing: “Children shouldn’t be blamed.” Nonetheless, children grow up to be strange beings. One is a scholar named Cyrus, a student of history and confidant of the emperor manqué of the slaveholders, who manages a network of spies and snitches that the Stasi might envy: “In this village, there were so many eyes.” Indeed, though, when that young brother finds his unlikely way into the city, no one but the higher-ups pay him much mind. Perhaps that’s because everyone’s preoccupied with a deadly drought, with all the hunger and want

The pursuit of an erratic white-collar criminal becomes an absurd thrill ride.

it brings. The ruling class has an out—an ark whose bearings are set on a rumored green land far away, “a land of lakes and grass, fruit trees and nuts, grapes and endless harvests, a land that knew no drought and no winter.” Will they get there? The ending is a touch melodramatic, and even predictable, but Larison does a good job of worldbuilding overall, with believable characters and (mostly) believable plot twists. Warnings are wrapped up inside of portents in turning today’s headlines into literature.

What Are the Odds

List, David | Blackstone (350 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9798212337212

The pursuit of an erratic whitecollar criminal becomes an absurd thrill ride. In his fiction debut, screenwriter List’s skill set is on display from the opening scene of his fiction debut: Tough-as-nails retired NYPD detective Raymond Dawson is flummoxed and frustrated to find himself “bloodied, bound, and buck-naked” in the middle of nowhere, while next to him sits owlish ex–Amco Oil executive Wilbur Bailey, a fellow captive who watches a scorpion crawl over his shoe. The story rolls back from this vivid tableau to the road these two protagonists followed to get there. Wilbur’s dealings with shady Russian Mika Salko have landed him in the crosshairs of dogged IRS agent Phil Dancourt. Ray, a divorced ex-marine who took early retirement from the NYPD after being wounded on the job a handful of times, feels professionally adrift until he finds a lifeline in alluring Stephanie Morego. Wilbur, devastated by a cancer diagnosis and feeling heat from the law, goes on the run. A casual meeting between Wilbur, Ray, and Stephanie in an elevator begins a series of mishaps that eventually put Wilbur and Ray on a

perilous path littered with a gallery of oddballs, with Phil in dogged pursuit as interpolated flashbacks fill in their backstories. List’s title aptly foreshadows the erratic plot. His energetic depiction of every episode, full of sharp character portraits and droll details, engages interest and keeps the story moving. An outlandish and entertaining comic thriller.

Haunted

Martin, Kat | Kensington (320 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 24, 2024 | 9781496744050

Jerome, Arizona, was once known as the Wickedest Town in the West. And in some ways, things haven’t changed. Jenny Spencer inherited the Copper Star Saloon and Hotel from her uncle, much to the dismay of his feckless son, Eddie. Jerome’s reputation for ghosts draws tourists, but Jenny finds herself facing problems with some new rooms she installed in an area of the hotel her uncle left unused. Then she meets Cain Barrett, the new owner of the Grandview Hotel, and her hormones go into overdrive. Cain, who sported a bad-boy reputation even when he was a few years ahead of her in high school, turned his life around and went into mining, making a fortune he’s now plowing into remodeling the Grandview. Jenny accepts his offer of a part-time job advising him on hotel management, despite the dangers of her attraction to him. Cain also owns a ranch from which an expensive cutting-horse stallion has gone missing, and he hires a detective to help find the horse, along with some horses that are missing from other ranches. Meanwhile, Jenny does some research to determine whether the ghosts in her hotel are real manifestations of evildoers or just illusions created by someone who wants to ruin her business. After the missing horses are

found, Cain is furious to learn that his stallion has been gelded and mistreated. Then a man is found brutally murdered in a room in the haunted area of the Copper Star. While she and Cain are riding at his ranch, Cain is shot and wounded, broadening their search for two prospective killers. It’s all here: ghosts, mysteries, local history, and steamy romance.

This Motherless Land

May, Nikki | Mariner Books (304 pp.)

$30.00 | Oct. 29, 2024 | 9780063084292

This Mansfield Park retelling follows the trials and tribulations of two cousins— one Nigerian, one English—from 1978 to 1992.

Ten-year-old Oluwafunke

Oyenuga enjoys a happy life in Lagos with her Nigerian father, Babatunde; her English mother, Lizzie; and her little brother, Femi. Though Funke loves hearing stories about Lizzie’s youth in Somerset and the “magical palace” called The Ring where her mother was raised, Funke has never met her family there. Lizzie’s parents disapproved of her marriage to Babatunde, and her sister, Margot, spurned Lizzie after her fiance jilted her due to the scandal. But when a car crash claims Lizzie and Femi’s lives, Funke is sent to England, where she quickly discovers that her mother’s idyllic tales don’t live up to the reality. Her grandparents are distant, her aunt Margot is often outright hateful, and The Ring is cold, gray, and dilapidated. The only bright spot in Funke’s new life is her cousin, Liv. Free-spirited and good-natured, Liv seems to be as different from the rest of the Stone family as Funke is. The two girls become fast friends and remain true allies throughout their teen years, during which Liv gives Funke a new Anglo name, Kate. But when their grown-up ambitions—Kate plans to attend university in Bristol; Liv is

hoping to be “discovered” in London—set their lives on different courses and tragedy finds the family once more, the cousins are torn apart. Can they right generational wrongs, or will the specter of loss continue to haunt them? Frequent time jumps sometimes make it difficult to fully connect with the characters, but the author is gifted at bringing her settings to vibrant life. The heat and humidity of crowded Lagos sizzles off the page, while the gray clouds and isolation of Somerset perfectly mirror the suffocating expectations of legacy, culture, and identity that Kate and Liv face. A meaningful modern tale of becoming, belonging, and the ties that bind.

Death Stake

Mayne, Andrew | Thomas & Mercer (315 pp.) | $16.99 paper Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781662522222

The search for the perpetrators of a disturbing cybercrime uncovers a nefarious international network. Retired FBI agent Brad Trasker, who now works as the head of security for the billion-dollar company Wind Aerospace, gets an unexpected call from a furious Colonel Melchor at the Pentagon about a damaging security breach. At length the crime is traced to Josiah Levenstein, a young man who works at a Panda Express in North Hollywood, not exactly the typical base of a master criminal. Trasker, who narrates in a puckish first person, decides to handle the matter himself, leaving Wind Aerospace CEO Kylie Connor in the dark—a decision he’ll come to regret. He confronts Josiah, a small and nervous young man, and convinces him to spill everything he knows and hand over his laptop. But the case isn’t exactly closed, for Josiah subsequently dies by suicide (or is it murder?). Enter the entire Wind Aerospace team, the discovery that

A powerful tale of love made more poignant by the loss that preceded it.

THE HEARTBEAT LIBRARY

hapless Josiah is just the tip of an international criminal iceberg, and a twisty pursuit to Guam, Costa Rica, and Thailand. A spy ring, internal betrayal, and “a weird little intelligence agency” figure prominently. Trasker’s lively second adventure mirrors his debut in Night Owl (2023) as it speeds through multiple locations and subsets of characters like a runaway train. The story is breezy but a bit head spinning, kept afloat by the charm and dependable wisecracks from the savvy Trasker. A slick and amiable thriller with a series of colorful backdrops.

Kirkus Star

The Heartbeat Library

Messina, Laura Imai | Trans. by Lucy Rand | Overlook (400 pp.) | $27.00 Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781419772498

A 40-year-old children’s book author and illustrator returns to Kamakura from his home in Tokyo to clear out his mother’s house—and decides to stay.

About a year before his mother died, Shūichi shut himself off from all emotions in order to survive, for reasons that don’t become clear until later. After her death, he sets about methodically clearing out her house, hiring a workman to help make the process less personal. But then he discovers that a small boy has been stealing items that are being temporarily stored in the garage: a watering can, a stained apron, a chipped cup—nothing of true value. The unexpected

oddity of it intrigues Shūichi, and he begins to observe the boy. From this small beginning, a friendship blossoms between 8-year-old Kenta—who had been spending his afternoons with Shūichi’s mother while his parents worked—and Shūichi, who decides to stay in his mother’s house after all. This story, told in chapters as well as small snippets, unfolds much like origami: There’s Shūichi’s separation from Aya, his former wife; his growing relationship with Sayaka, who prepared his mother for burial; and his inability to deal with the devastating event that originally caused him to suppress his emotions. But in closing himself off from pain, he has also closed himself off from joy. This is a masterful second book by Messina, author of The Phone Booth at the End of the World (2021); from the richly drawn characters to the slow unveiling of the story to the constant presence of the ocean, nature, and the steep hill that Shūichi lives on—reading this lovingly drawn story is an immersive experience. A powerful, unforgettable tale of love that is made more poignant by the loss that preceded it.

Enclosure Architect

Milliken, Douglas W. | West Virginia Univ. Press (246 pp.) | $21.99 paper Sept. 1, 2024 | 9781959000211

narrator of Milliken’s high-concept third novel. Milliken’s story is more lyrical than direct, but it’s clear that some kind of mass conflagration has forced Margaux and her fellow art students from their safe university for fear of bombs. From a distance, she and her cohort are free to paint, photograph, and hook up in various ways and in variously gendered arrangements. But when one safe haven, owned by a woman known as the Pigeon Queen, burns to the ground, artists and lovers soon disperse. An older man, Otto, pontificates on art and geometry, which prompts Margaux to begin imagining an “enclosure” that would replace the ad hoc squats that she’s forced to bounce around between. But Milliken isn’t interested in plot so much as pondering the ways that institutions stoke or stifle creativity; the so-called apocalypse is far off-screen, emphasized less than the emotional and intellectual storms in Margaux’s head. (There are references to belligerent “Partisans,” but only vague explanations of their politics and motivations for their aggression.) Which is to say that the story is very abstract and a bit pretentious, using sex and dystopian tropes to goose some overworked musings. (“How can we possibly remember the rapidly transpiring NOW when so preoccupied with remembering the perpetuating mudflats of THEN?”) In the book’s sharper moments, Margaux emerges as a wryly comic observer of an “era of festival and squalor,” like a character written by veteran postmodern writer Steve Erickson (who’s referenced) or others. But Margaux’s persistent dissatisfaction and ennui often leave the reader without emotional toeholds or a sense of meaningful stakes.

An artist ponders love, art, and sex as the world around her collapses.

“Today’s apocalypse was actually pretty neat,” observes Margaux, the

A brainy but torpid riff on creative tension.

THE KIRKUS Q&A: TONY TULATHIMUTTE

Rejection is the title—and the unifying theme—of this author’s new book.

BY NINA PALATTELLA

Tony Tulathimutte is adept at conjuring unease through ction. His rst novel, 2016’s Private Citizens, plumbed the lives and anxieties of four college graduates in the mid2000s, a searing e ort that Kirkus deemed “witty, unsparing, and unsettlingly precise.” In his second book, Rejection (Morrow/HarperCollins, Sept. 17), Tulathimutte further ups the ante, taking his readers through meticulously detailed rabbit holes of discomfort in seven stories all connected by the titular experience. e result, according to Kirkus’ starred review, is “a hilariously brazen and existentially unsettling portrait of modern life, love, and identity.” Tulathimutte, 40, spoke to Kirkus via Zoom from his home in Brooklyn; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired rejection as the theme for this book? Is there a real-life rejection behind the decision?

Not really one in particular, more like a lot of them. I wrote this book for the reason that a lot of writers write their books, which is that I wanted to read a book about rejection and I couldn’t nd one…that used it as its organizing theme and really entered it in the narrative, instead of just employing it as a plot device.

How do you categorize the book? Do you think of it as a novel in stories, as a collection of interlinked stories, or as something else entirely?

It’s funny, right? Because on the cover of the book, it says ction, instead of stories or a novel, and I’ve never seen a book do that before. I was OK with it, because I sort of have a hard time categorizing it myself.

So the idea to call it ction on the cover wasn’t your idea?

No, it wasn’t my idea, and it’s because I toggle between the two [a collection of stories and a novel]. If I wanted to properly set people’s reading expectations, I would probably say stories, but I always think of everything that I work on with a novel-writing

attitude, which is that the whole thing is interlinked and interdependent. I don’t think of any of the stories as existing in isolation, and they are incomplete, in a way, without the context of the others.

Were there other books that inspired you when you were creating that structure?

Structurally, no. It’s kind of an odd book. It was even odder when I was working on it—I had in mind a book of mixed ction and non ction, and there’s not even a name for that. I guess you could call it hybrid genre, or multigenre, but that’s sort of horribly inelegant. I was thinking of it as being a 50-50 split between ction and et cetera, and the et cetera consisted of a long essay and a lot of really weird things like a glossary and

logical propositions and stu like that. But, frankly, the ction part just kept on getting much longer, until it would be something more like an 80-20 split, and that just felt awkward to me. I think you can see, in the end result, the aftere ects of that non ction turn, originally, because the book does sort of strain against the boundaries of ction in its last three pieces. A lot of that material was adapted from the non ction material I had before.

The idea of identity and who has the right to do or say what recurs throughout the book, like the narrator of “The Feminist” repeatedly referring to his “QPOC agender friend.” It’s really uncomfortable, but it’s also very thought-provoking. I think that identity heavily mediates all human relationships, and this is

Clayton Cubitt

especially the case when you get to the theater of romance. One’s sexual orientation often has to pass through these lters of gender codes, and I wanted to get at that from both extremes, from a character like Craig in “The Feminist,” who can really only see things through the lens of identity, to Bee in “Main Character,” who wants to subvert or ultimately annihilate that idea. In both cases, it’s arguably inescapable for them; Bee, I think, nds a sort of solution in total isolation and total technological mediation, but that’s not a solution that’s tenable for most people.

Private Citizens was dubbed “the rst great millennial novel” by New York magazine. How do you feel about that label?

I actually wrote an essay about this for the New York Times. I think it’s de nitely

attering, but it’s deployed as a kind of superlative when, really, it’s just a descriptor of a genre, which is usually younger people in their teens or 20s, often living in a city or hitting the road and doing things that are considered of a piece with the zeitgeist. So you have books like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, which ended up naming not just one but two generations, and before that, books like On the Road, which got the same label, but I nd it funny that, even though my book ts this bill, I don’t really believe that there is such a thing as a single book that can encompass the experiences of an entire generation. It can be deceiving, the way that ction works on its reader to feel relatable, even if the characters are very di erent from you and their experiences are very di erent than yours.

The subject matter of your book is often heavy, but it also has a lot of humor, especially that mock letter rejecting the book at the end. Was that piece fun to write? Or was it also a little painful?

The answer always is “Both.” The rejection letter was fun because I got to make my best e ort at presenting a version of how all the stories tied together. But because I don’t like to give up the game and spoon-feed the reader what I’m trying to do, it was important to me [that the letter writer’s critiques of the book] had to be wrong—but not dumb. I really tried to lean into what the letter itself called “adversarial auto ction,” where if you take a certain set of premises, which are di erent than mine, and use that to interpret the book, you end up with a much di erent one than I wrote. I thought that that really aligned well with

the overall perversity of the book. I didn’t want to end on some kind of triumphalist or redemptive note—I wanted to do the exact opposite.

What can you tell us about your next project?

I don’t know much about it yet. I pretty much started from scratch about two months ago. I had a novel in the works before that, which I am poaching some material from, but all I know right now is that it’s ction. Time has shown that my rst idea about what a project is usually does not sustain itself. It tends to buckle under its own weight at some point….I nd that progressing as a writer really has a lot to do with stripping away successive layers of denial about what kind of writer you are or what a project is meant to be.

Nina Palattella is the editorial assistant.

Book to Screen

Emily Bader To Star in People We Meet on Vacation Adaptation

The actor and Tom Blyth have been cast in Netix’s lm based on Emily Henry’s novel.

Emily Bader will star alongside Tom Blyth in the

Net ix lm adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, Entertainment Weekly reports.

Henry’s novel, published in 2021 by Berkley, follows Poppy and Alex, two longtime friends who reunite after a falling-out; free-spirited Poppy still harbors feelings for buttoned-down Alex. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a warm and winning When Harry Met Sally… update that hits all the perfect notes.”

The lm adaptation will be written by Yulin Kuang (I Ship It) and directed by Brett Haley ( All Together Now ).

Bader, who recently starred in Amazon Prime Video’s series adaptation of Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows’ My Lady Jane, will star as Poppy, while Blyth (Billy the Kid ) will portray Alex.

could not feel any more con dent that my readers, and then so many more people who don’t even know about the book, are going to completely, completely fall in love with Poppy and Alex with you guys playing them.”

— MICHAEL SCHAUB

On the social media platform X, Net ix posted a video of a group call in which Haley told Bader she had been cast in the lm. “You’re lying!” an ecstatic Bader said. “Wait, I’m getting overwhelmed. Are you serious? Are you kidding? I’m going to cry.”

Henry joined the call, telling the actors, “I just truly

For a review of People We Meet on Vacation, visit Kirkus online.

Emily Bader

Donnaville

Minkowitz, Donna | Indolent

Books (211 pp.) | $16.00 paper

Oct. 31, 2024 | 9781945023354

A simmering rebellion breaks out in the city of the author’s mind. Journalist Minkowitz’s mystical and imaginative debut novel conceives of her mind as a sprawling city full of degenerates, deities, and everything in between. The novel opens with Donna, or “The Narrator,” telling the reader that her therapist does not understand the “lush,” “sprawling,” and “strange” nature of her internal landscape, or what she calls Donnaville. She tells us that Donnaville has always cultivated resistance, and the reader is about to see “what happened when that resistance took flight.” The book contains a three-page list of characters—almost all of whom are parts of the author herself—the jailer, the harlequin, the divine mother, and the child, to name a few. Almost immediately, it’s clear that something is off in Donnaville: The harlequin, the city’s happiest, most beautiful citizen, asks himself “why…things feel wrong.” The citizens are restless and worrying and acting out of character—and the most important citizen is in danger. In the heart of Donnaville, there’s a prison, and in the heart of the prison, in the “most hidden and best-defended place in Donnaville,” lives the child. The child cannot be reached even by the most powerful citizens; she can only be touched with rage by the jailer, who believes his only purpose is to punish

people. The divine mother knows the child is in even more danger than usual—and it’s up to the other citizens and deities to save her. Written in vignettes jampacked with tangents and asides, the novel jumps around Donnaville and the happenings of its citizens—which presents an often disorienting reading experience. That said, Minkowitz’s writing is especially strong when exploring identity, abuse, and the power that comes from breaking free of the prisons created for us and by us.

An unabashedly honest and queer debut that is equally strange and heartwarming.

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

Montague, Anna | Ecco/HarperCollins (256 pp.) | $28.00 | Oct. 22, 2024

9780063353640

Is there an expiration date for self-discovery?

Psychiatrist Magda Eklund, the mordant protagonist of Montague’s debut novel, is on the cusp of her 70th birthday and is dealing—sort of—with the death of her close friend Sara. Though their relationship had been somewhat fraught before Sara’s death, Magda is grieving the loss of their long-term connection, perhaps even more than Sara’s widower, Fred, who has relinquished his wife’s possessions, correspondence, and ashes for Magda to winnow through. While exploring Sara’s notes, Magda finds the outline for a birthday road trip Sara planned

An unabashedly honest and queer debut that is equally strange and heartwarming.

DONNAVILLE

for them, with an itinerary including locations of sentimental importance to both friends. Magda embarks on the trip herself, accompanied by Sara’s ashes, a lifetime of memories, and a sense of confusion about what Sara had intended the trip to accomplish. As Magda travels from state to state and from inns to motel rooms to convenience stores, she experiences a longing for Sara while encountering other people who manage to live with considerably less angst. (More importantly, she delays visiting a stop related to a critical time in her own past.) Grappling with the reality of Sara’s death is just one part of the problem Magda needs to solve; another is how to be happy, if possible, in a world where she has never acknowledged, openly, what (or who) she wants in life. Montague portrays Magda’s slow journey to self-acceptance and actualization with sensitivity and sketches out the social, familial, and professional forces that have been roadblocks along the way. Humor and bemusement at human foibles characterize the narrative but never detract from the seriousness of Magda’s delayed search for happiness and comfort in her sexual identity. The hard lessons and gifts acquired through loss are illustrated here in the most sensitive way.

Kirkus Star

Black Butterflies

Morris, Priscilla | Knopf (288 pp.)

$28.00 | Aug. 20, 2024 | 9780593801857

The human costs of the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s are recounted in a compelling debut. Zora, a 55-year-old painter and art instructor, lives a busy life  in Sarajevo with her older husband, Franjo. When, during the early days of the partisan conflict, the family’s equanimity is upset by

The human costs of the siege of Sarajevo

are recounted in a compelling debut.

BLACK BUTTERFLIES

squatters trying to take possession of Zora’s mother’s apartment, Zora and Franjo decide that he will accompany her mother on an earlier-than-planned visit to their daughter and son-in-law (and beloved granddaughter) in England. Unable to believe or comprehend that the military action beginning to envelope the city will last for very long, Zora stays behind to watch the family’s properties and continue her work. Over the course of the following year, Zora struggles to survive as battling factions fight for control of a city that had previously been marked by the calm cohabitation of residents of various nationalities and religions. As residents of her apartment building band together in mutual support after the city loses telephone, electric, and water services, Zora resorts to desperate means to survive the quickly developing brutal circumstances. Faced with no way to escape the freezing weather, dwindling food supplies, and the constant danger of bombardment, Zora finds her lifelong artistic endeavors curtailed. Based on two episodes in her family’s history during the siege, Morris’ account of finding strength in human connection and artistic creation illustrates the cultural, social, and human damage caused by the internecine Balkan conflict. The chronicle of Zora’s ordeal, while sobering, contains episodes of page-turning uncertainty and heartbreaking pathos.

A classic cautionary tale of contemporary relevance.

An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth

Moschovakis, Anna | Soft Skull Press

$16.95 paper | Nov. 19, 2024

9781593767839

A woman who has come to a crossroads in her life travels a city in the midst of a cataclysm to find someone she intends to murder. The unnamed narrator of Moschovakis’ latest is an actor at the end of her career. Just prior to an ongoing seismic catastrophe that will alter the basic structures of society, she had an event of her own that rearranged the underpinnings of her identity. At a production in a park in which the narrator had a pivotal role, a protest had broken out and she forgot her lines for the first time in years, but instead of forcing the show to go on, she addressed the protesters directly, admitting, “You’re right, you’re right—We don’t know what we’re doing—We don’t know what we’re doing and we keep doing it anyway… But I’m an actor—I don’t speak, I repeat.” After this was proclaimed a disaster “of the career-ending, unmitigated kind” by the critics, and the narrator was forced to take in a boarder to make ends meet. The boarder, Tala, has what the narrator can no longer lay claim to: youth, beauty, and the kind of self-confident elegance necessary to do things like “cross the room without even stumbling” in the world of constant aftershocks the two inhabit. The narrator’s interest in Tala develops into a fixation that, when Tala doesn’t

return home one morning, becomes a full-blown obsession—to find Tala, wherever she is, and murder her, so that by Tala’s erasure the narrator’s own identity as someone who speaks rather than just repeats can take form. What follows is an existential journey through the largely abandoned streets of the trembling city and through the narrator’s past in the world of theater, where, in order to become a character, she first had to learn how to unbecome herself. Told in a multitude of forms, including journal entries, transcriptions, and a form of collage cutup, this story advances the thematic precepts of Moschovakis’ earlier work: rejecting binaries for the more shrouded truths that can be found when language, morality, and even individual selfhood are deconstructed. Moschovakis continues to provoke her readers to ask: What is a story? Or, even, what is a life?

Sister Deborah

Mukasonga, Scholastique | Trans. by Mark Polizzotti | Archipelago (200 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Sept. 17, 2024 | 9781953861948

The uncanny rise of a feminist cult. Award-winning French Rwandan novelist Mukasonga evokes her country’s tumultuous history in a lyrical, allegorical narrative, translated by Polizzotti, set in the 1930s, when white Catholic missionaries proselytized to a population already steeped in myths. Into the restive Belgian colony a contingent of Black evangelicals arrived from America, “an unknown world,” Rwandans believed, “where the Blacks were as powerful as the Whites.” Central among them was Sister Deborah, whose reputation as a healer excited the community, reaching the mother of Ikirezi, Mukasonga’s narrator. Ikirezi was a sickly child whose ailments, her mother was certain, “came from either people or spirits.” Sister Deborah both healed and inspired Ikirezi; after earning a

For more by Anna Moschovakis, visit Kirkus online.

doctorate in anthropology at Howard University, she became an “eminent Africanist,” returning to her village to investigate the woman who so deeply affected her life. Sister Deborah, Ikirezi discovers, preached liberation: a celestial woman would descend on a cloud, scattering “a marvelous seed that would yield abundant harvests without the need for farming, thereby ending the servitude in which women were mired.” In preparation for this great coming, women must carry out a revolutionary plan: “uprooting the cursed coffee plants, chasing away the agronomists with their stupid boots, scattering the medallions of the tax collectors and missionaries.” Fearing the spread of a rebellious cult, the army intervened. Chaos ensued, and Sister Deborah may or may not have been killed, may or may not have reinvented herself as Mama Nganga, and may or may not have finally been burned to death in a fiery rout. Ikirezi’s fate, too, is unsettled: Told she will give birth to the Messiah, she flees Rwanda, knowing in her heart that “spirits never come when you expect them.” A haunting tale.

Prey

Norman, Hilary | Severn House (176 pp.) $29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781448313495

A two-part story presenting a multigenerational tale of strong women facing deadly challenges. Harriet Yorke’s architect father, Peter, inherited Calla House from his parents, but after he buys himself a cottage in Cornwall, he gives the spacious Belsize Park home to his daughter. Talented Harriet had hoped to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, but when Peter becomes gravely ill, she takes a job at the BBC and converts Calla House into three flats, keeping the topmost for herself. As World War II engulfs Britain, her nightly walks with her terrier worry her tenants, but

Harriet never realizes that her greatest danger is not from the Nazi Blitz but from a neighbor whose childhood trauma led to a dangerous obsession with women’s hair. More than 50 years later, Harriet’s granddaughter, cartoonist Libby Jerome, has further divided Calla House into five flats. Like Harriet, she’s close to her tenants, so when she discovers asbestos throughout the house, she hires builder Reggie Brownlow to remove it, prioritizing safety above profit. The dislocation caused by the residents’ removal turns out to be more than an inconvenience, threatening deadly harm to Libby and her tenants alike. Norman interweaves the two plots so deftly that Libby’s story echoes Harriet’s without duplicating it. And she adds elements that make each story true to its era: the looming threat in Harriet’s story is global warfare, in Libby’s, environmental contamination. But the real toxin that sends chills up the reader’s spine is intergenerational trauma.

Like London’s buses, Norman’s latest is a double-decker treat, especially for fans who like a little danger.

I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom

Pargin, Jason | St. Martin’s (400 pp.)

$30.00 | Sept. 24, 2024 | 9781250285959

A comical road trip that may end in mass destruction.

Abbott Coburn drives his father’s Lincoln Navigator for Lyft and spends his free time in online

chat groups. A young woman named Ether asks him to take her and her black box from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., almost 3,000 miles out of his normal range. He wants to say no, but she doles out an incredible wad of cash to entice him. Money doesn’t matter that much to Abbott, but Ether reads his mind well and is quite persuasive: “What you’re about to do,” she tells him, “this is every downtrodden schlub’s dream come true.” So off they go, but someone with a cellphone notices their cargo bearing a sticker that looks like a radiation symbol. No one knows what’s in the box, by the way; Ether is delivering it for someone else. But soon the rumors are “all over Twitter. The cops found nuclear material at a gas station.” Word spreads to internet chat groups that a dirty bomb will detonate in the nation’s capital. The story bubbles over with quirky characters, like Tattoo Monster and a scary dude named Malort who chases Abbott and Ether because he wants the box. There’s retired FBI agent Joan Key, whose colleague is a “boxy LEGO figure of a man who had probably looked like an FBI agent in his mother’s ultrasound.” A lot happens quickly: Chat rooms go nuts with gossip as the box progresses eastward. Along the way, Abbott and Ether are snagged into helping two women find a lost bunny named either Petey or Dumptruck, depending on which woman you talk to. But that’s the least of the problems as the story builds to a screwball, action-packed climax. Meanwhile, Abbott and Ether have some great conversations. He says he learned how to shave from the internet instead of from his father, while she makes insightful observations about the nature of friendship. Wacky, thoughtful, and fun.

Like London’s buses, Norman’s latest is a double-decker treat.

Drafted

Parker, Rick | Abrams ComicArts (256 pp.)

$24.99 | Sept. 24, 2024 | 9781419761591

Veteran illustrator Parker presents a graphic novel about his three years in the army during the late 1960s.

After a brief family history (he was an only child born to hardworking parents in 1940s Georgia, raised mainly by his bedridden grandmother, who instilled in him a love of comic strips), the artistically inclined Parker explains how flunking out of junior college led to his getting drafted by the Army and entering the strange world of military life as a 19-year-old. Parker narrates his experiences with sly humor and self-deprecation, capturing his overwhelm and isolation in the face of extremes both physical (pushups, running, simulated combat) and psychological (rigid rules for addressing others, for the size of bites at dinner, for who can walk on the sidewalk). With a keen eye for detail, Parker captures the process of spit-shining combat boots, and with a keen ear for storytelling, he reveals the gruesome aftermath of a drunk-driving accident. Parker eventually enters officer and artillery training—more from a general competency rather than any particular skill—and these developments keep him from being deployed to active combat in Vietnam. He stumbles through a series of responsibilities like training with German soldiers and organizing a military funeral. His interest in drawing recurs, as when he’s recruited to draw naked women for the walls of a makeshift officer’s pub, but it doesn’t develop into an arc. Parker hits humorous and emotional beats via skilled cartooning (exaggerated facial expression, outsized physicality), though his linework can feel caught between simple and intricate, with the weight of some lines flattening out details and

rendering figures unappealingly stiff. Parker makes a pleasant narrator of his extreme experiences, but the work doesn’t coalesce into a larger statement on war or art or self.

A collection of details that might appeal to military history buffs.

Kirkus Star

Water Finds a Way

Perry, Meghan | Delphinium (360 pp.)

$28.00 | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781953002419

In a small town on the Maine coast, life is anything but easy. Released from jail after serving 20 years for killing a man, Blake Renato returns to the area she once fled to try to start over. The house and land her grandparents bequeathed her are in such desperate condition that she rents a nearby garage apartment from a diner waitress named Nora Hayes. After being hit hard by her husband’s death and her daughter’s departure for medical school, Nora has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and now her pain and weakness have begun to interfere with her ability to work or get around at all. Blake, a towering woman with a silent, forbidding mien and long black hair, doesn’t plan to get involved with her landlady, but Nora’s sweetness and her disability draw her in and the two bond as they work together in Nora’s beloved garden. Blake gets a job as sternman for Leland Savard, a struggling young lobsterman who’s raising his third-grade daughter, Quinn, on his own, further hamstrung by blood feuds that reach back generations and a lifelong hopeless crush on Nora’s daughter. Perry limns the fragile connections among these hardbitten characters with care and patience that mirror the attention they pour into their flower and vegetable gardens, yearning toward the sun, and

the reader comes to deeply care for them. Each of them has already endured so much—Blake’s whole personality is shaped by abuse and loss—but  by keeping the past under wraps, they give it power to wound them anew. Nine-year-old Quinn is their saving grace, collecting her “swear tax” on their constant cursing and telling the truth when no one else will, but the way forward is almost lost altogether before the buds of redemption can unfurl.

Full of grit and atmosphere, suspense and feeling—a powerful and promising debut.

Two Good Men

Redfearn, S.E. | Blackstone (350 pp.)

$27.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9798212263146

Do the aftereffects of a brutal crime ever end?

Dr. Richard Raynes suffers under the shared custody agreement with his ex-wife, Caroline. His children are increasingly distant and seem happy with Pete, the new stepdad who makes Dick feel like an outsider. When his sister, Dee, frantically calls him with the news that her neighbor Otis Parsons is out of prison, Dick feels compelled to act. Twelve years ago, Parsons raped the young brother of Dee’s boyfriend, Joe. He sent Dee a taunting letter from prison upon the birth of her son, Jesse, 11 years ago. Now that Parsons is back on the street, that letter feels like a threat. Dick does act, and cleverly. Knowing of Parsons’ peanut allergy, he leverages that knowledge into murder. Flown in from D.C. to assist Sheriff Barton in his investigation of Parsons’ death, dogged FBI agent Steve Patterson finds several details at the murder scene suspicious and feels compelled to investigate. Although Redfearn’s thriller involves several violent acts, its focus is psychological, primarily following Steve’s pursuit and Dick’s

Murder sparks a feminist uprising in the small Caribbean nation of St. Colibri.

PASSIONTIDE

struggles to avoid arrest as his guilt wrestles with his love for his sister and with the haunting, seemingly incongruous memory of Parsons helping him save his mother’s life. When Steve begins dating Denise Raynes, who has her own harrowing crime backstory, his relationship with his kids inexplicably improves. Short chapters add pace and facilitate the novel’s multiple shifts of focus, which extend to a handful of secondary characters. The plot is somewhat herky-jerky, but the novel asks compelling and provocative questions. A brisk and gritty thriller with a strong psychological undercurrent.

Passiontide

Roffey, Monique | Knopf (368 pp.) | $28.00 Sept. 10, 2024 | 9780593802472

Murder sparks a feminist uprising. In the small Caribbean nation of St. Colibri, femicide is so prevalent—500 women killed in the past five to six years—that most residents are inured to it. Though feminist activist Tara Kissoon successfully campaigned to pass legislation against sexual and domestic violence and to establish an Office for Murdered Women within the police department, the situation remains unchanged. Newspaper journalist Sharleen Sellier is accustomed to her articles about local dead women going unnoticed, but when a foreign woman is found strangled in the city of Port Isabella the morning after Carnival, she and Tara sense an opportunity. The

victim, Sora Tanaka, was a 23-year-old professional musician from Japan who regularly visited St. Colibri to play pan with a top steel orchestra. Tara initially suggests Sharleen write a story to sell abroad and attract international attention for their “local problem.”

Then Port Isabella’s mayor holds a press conference blaming Sora’s death on her skimpy costume and insisting that “it is up to women to avoid being molested” during Carnival. In response, Tara and Sharleen join forces with Gigi Lala, founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective, to organize an all-female occupation of a public square. As their movement gathers steam, the Office for Murdered Women’s embittered male leader feels intensifying political pressure to arrest someone—anyone—for the crime; the perpetrator hunts for his next target; and Sora’s ghost stays tethered to the tree under which she perished. Inspired by a real-life incident in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Roffey’s vibrant take on a detective novel employs a kaleidoscopic close-third-person narrative and exquisitely rendered, emotionally complex characters to spotlight issues at once local and universal. The central mystery gets short shrift, but vividly drawn set pieces, dialogue delivered in a lilting patois, and a plot steeped in regional culture help invigorate the tale, lending it texture and palpable stakes. Powerful and empowering.

The Magnificent Ruins

Roy, Nayantara | Algonquin (448 pp.) $29.00 | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781643755847

Lila De’s life in Brooklyn is a success, but a bereavement that pulls her back to her homeland of India forces her to confront her demons.

Twenty-nineyear-old Lila is understandably saddened to hear of her grandfather’s death in India, the country she left at age 16. But she’s also shocked to learn she has inherited his enormous, historic, decaying mansion, still inhabited by generations of the Lahiri family, including her volatile, sometimes toxic mother, Maya, who divorced Lila’s father when she was an infant. Although just promoted to co-editorial director by the new management of her employer, a Manhattan-based publishing house, and involved in a relationship with a writer named Seth, Lila must return to Kolkata for eight weeks to attend the funeral and sort out her inheritance. Back in India, she is quickly swallowed up by family, responsibility, and memories, rediscovering her complex feelings toward Maya, whom she describes as “beautiful and fragile and cruel in the way children can be.” Then there’s Adil, her teenage love, still irresistible but now married. Soon, however, they are lovers. While seeming at first a novel about binary choices—New York or Kolkata, work or family, Adil or Seth—over (considerable) time this book’s core reveals itself to be darker and different, which helps explain the wariness and unpredictability that often characterize Lila’s responses. The narrative is long, and Roy doesn’t always seem in control of her pacing or able to keep all her plates spinning simultaneously, as the story widens to embrace legal shenanigans, national politics, and a family wedding. The book’s somber heart remains unrevealed until very late, arriving finally

For more by Monique Roffey, visit Kirkus online.

in a rush and a disconcerting shift of gears and narrative perspectives. Afterward, Roy works to restore order but more neatly than plausibly. A rich but shape-shifting, imperfectly synthesized family saga.

Kirkus Star

The Burning Plain

Rulfo, Juan | Trans. by Douglas J. Weatherford | Univ. of Texas (192 pp.)

$21.95 paper | Sept. 3, 2024 9781477329962

A new translation of the sole shortstory collection published in the lifetime of Rulfo (1917-86), Mexico’s greatest modernist fiction writer.

In this—beg pardon—searing collection from 1953, Rulfo airs a worldview dark enough to make Cormac McCarthy look like P.G. Wodehouse. El Llano Grande, or Great Plain, is a real place in Rulfo’s native Jalisco. Here, as in his classic novel Pedro Páramo (1955), it is a place of constant suffering that ceases only at the grave. In the opening story, four guerrillas cross the sun-blasted desert, aching for rain after a “lone drop that fell in error is quickly devoured by the earth and disappears in its thirst.” Rain will not come, nor the drink from the distant river that would have been theirs had they horses to ride. But no; laments one, “So much land, so immense, and all for nothing.” The locals don’t have it any better; in one bitter story, Rulfo conjures up an all-shattering earthquake in an impoverished town on which the grandiloquent governor and coterie descend, practically eating the survivors out of house and home: “We concur in the assistance,” the governor bloviates, “not with any Neronian desire to find pleasure in the suffering of others…imminently willing to munificently utilize our efforts in the reconstruction of all

homes that were destroyed, fraternally willing in the consolation of those homes brought asunder by death.” Death is everywhere: Many of Rulfo’s characters are murderers, whether accidental or by careful design (“The dead weigh more than the living; they push you down,” thinks one), while others are victims, as with—shades of the present—a villager who travels north to find work in the orchards of Oregon, only to be killed, perhaps by the border patrol or perhaps by bandidos, and return home a ghost. Spectral stories shot through with violence and sorrow, and beautiful for all that.

The Trial of Anna Thalberg

Sangarcía, Eduardo | Trans. by Elizabeth Bryer | Restless Books (176 pp.) | $22.00 Sept. 10, 2024 | 9781632063731

Anna Thalberg is the red-haired peasant woman at the center of this witch trial, set in the Holy Roman Empire during the Protestant Reformation.

Resented by the villagers for her otherworldly beauty, Anna is accused of witchcraft by a jealous neighbor who suspects that darkness lurks underneath her good looks. Dragged from her home, Anna finds herself locked in a prison tower in the nearby city of Würzburg. The only people determined to prove her innocence

are her husband, Klaus, and Father Friedrich, a Catholic priest navigating his own crisis of faith. Isolated in her cell, Anna is tortured by a sadistic guard as Klaus and Friedrich appeal desperately to the powerful men holding her there; Anna will burn at the stake should they fail. Outside the prison, reports of strange goings-on within Würzburg’s city walls are growing. Religious persecution, the dangers posed by spreading superstition, and the myriad ways in which characters suffer can make this book feel bleak—but the suspense of Anna’s dwindling time propels it relentlessly forward. Although on the surface this is a novel concerned with the supernatural, its underlying concerns are about the historical oppression of women, the dehumanizing effects of institutions, the mundanity of evil, and—at its core—the question whether God truly exists. The author sometimes adopts a deliberately jarring, offbeat rhythm to shake the reader out of the reverie his often-poetic text may lull them into. With echoes of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob and A.K. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches , Mexican author Sangarcía’s debut novel draws on themes that continue to inspire authors across the world. Challenging the reader to reflect on who wields power and the ways women are still subjected to violence, Sangarcía illuminates the connection between Anna’s plight and that of women fighting for autonomy today. A compelling debut, tracing a direct line from women in the past to those in the present.

Rulfo’s work is dark enough to make Cormac McCarthy look like P.G. Wodehouse.

THE BURNING PLAIN

Star 111

Seiler, Lutz | Trans. by Tess Lewis New York Review Books (592 pp.) | $19.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781681378534

Left behind by his East German parents, who flee to the west following the collapse of the GDR, young Carl Bischoff falls in with an unruly crew of utopian anarchists in Berlin—where he finds himself as a poet.

In response to his mother Inge’s flood of letters, Carl assures her that he’s looking after their house in the central state of Thuringia. But he drives his father Walter’s beloved Zhiguli to Berlin, where he makes a little money as an unpapered cabbie and lives and works with a group of squatters whose mission is to rebuild a wide stretch of dilapidated and war-damaged buildings for people to live in. The more involved in the communal project and visions of a new future Carl becomes, the more inspired he is as a poet. His poems, he is told, capture “the present moment and its sound at perception’s ground zero.” Initially separated en route to a transit camp across the border, his parents make do with various jobs on the other side (Walter teaches computer programming). Ultimately, and unpredictably, they find freedom—with Carl—in Los Angeles. There, his accordion in tow, Walter plans on joining a band. A prizewinner and bestseller in Europe, the novel is loosely and sometimes elusively tied to its era, departing reality with corrosive dark visions including Nazis who look like Elvis. As a result, the story doesn’t always have the resonance it should. Long sections of the nearly 600-page book rather ploddingly record day-to-day developments. But Seiler’s dry wit and command of language, which can itself be musical, keep the pages humming. And when things slow down, there’s always an eccentric

called the Shepherd and his pet goat, Dodo, for comic relief.

A powerfully imagined novel of the new Germany worth sticking with through its dull spots.

Kirkus Star

Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light

Stephenson, Neal | Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) | $29.76 | Oct. 15, 2024

9780062334497

An adventurous young woman makes her way into the Soviet Union’s intelligence service in the first volume of Stephenson’s new Bomb Light series.

It’s 1933. Bonnie and Clyde are all over the American newspapers, the Soviet Union is casting its mark on the world stage, and scientists are making exciting breakthroughs that are beginning to transform society. A young woman meets an old friend, an engineer named Bob, at a San Francisco diner. Dawn Rae Bjornberg, who was born to an American anarchist mother, was raised in Russia by a Leninist father, and spent her teen years in Montana, has faked the death of her American identity and intends to make her way from California to the USSR so she can start a new life in the service of socialism. But when Dawn—now going by her Russian name, Aurora— attracts the attention of the newly formed Soviet intelligence agency, she’ll have to explain how her strange childhood in Russia led to her colorful adolescence in America, or risk being killed as a suspected spy. And if she succeeds in proving her innocence, the USSR may have even more dangerous plans for her. The first installment in Stephenson’s historical epic paints an engrossing picture of the United States during the Great Depression, the Soviet Union in its tumultuous and

violent early years, and the looming threat of the technological advancements that will soon lead to the atomic bomb and the space race. Dawn/Aurora’s early life is captivating on its own, but Stephenson manages to set her up with a brilliant cliffhanger that will have readers begging for the next volume.

A deeply immersive historical epic.

Kirkus Star

The Shadow Key

Stokes-Chapman, Susan | Harper Perennial/HarperCollins (464 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Sept. 10, 2024 | 9780063392427

Dismissed from the London hospital where he works, a young doctor reluctantly accepts a position as a private physician at the isolated and unwelcoming Welsh estate of Plas Helyg during the summer of 1783.

When Henry Talbot first arrives at Lord Julian Tresilian’s estate with little more than his doctor’s bag and the clothes on his back, both the residents of Plas Helyg and Penhelyg, the neighboring mining village, are less than agreeable and, in some instances, downright aggressive toward him. While this behavior could easily be written off as cultural animosity between the Welsh and the English, Henry can’t help but feel that there’s something else amiss. With the gatehouse where he was meant to stay falling into irreparable shambles, the lady of the house struggling to maintain a tenuous grip on reality, and signs pointing toward his predecessor’s death having been the result of foul play, Henry turns to Linette Tresilian, Julian’s niece, for help. Linette quickly proves herself to be self-sufficient, stubborn, and thoroughly unconventional for an 18th-century woman. She prefers men’s clothing, has little interest in

A freelance sleuth is a master of disguise in a literally mind-boggling way.

SECRET DEAD MEN

marriage, keeps the books for the Plas Helyg estate, and spends much of her time looking after the men who toil in Julian’s mines. At first unsure of what to make of one another, Henry and Linette quickly join forces to uncover the dark and dangerous truth that so many of Plas Helyg’s residents have kept secret. Stokes-Chapman has crafted an engaging work of historical fiction that is a love letter to Welsh culture as well as a gripping and atmospheric mystery pitting scientific reason against the supernatural. A gripping and unsettling gothic novel steeped in Welsh history and folklore.

Secret Dead Men

Swierczynski, Duane | Titan Books (304 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Sept. 24, 2024 9781835410486

A roguish freelance sleuth is a master of disguise in a literally mindboggling way.

Swierczynski’s riotous crime novel, first published in 2004, begins typically enough, with a pair of FBI agents poring over the scene of a double homicide in Woody Creek, Illinois, in the mid-1970s. The puckish narrator, Special Agent Kevin Kennedy, even cradles a doughnut and a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee. But the story goes deliriously wonky and never looks back when Kennedy confides in the reader that his real name is Del Farmer and he’s a “soul collector.” Del stores his stolen souls in his Brain Hotel, a series of “rooms” in his brain. The residents there seem

to have settled in comfortably, occasionally offering him assistance. The latest soul belongs to Brad Larsen, one of the two murder victims. Swierczynski pulls off a tricky balancing act. Even as he methodically lays out the rules and details of his offbeat premise, he keeps the plot grounded in the conventions of the crime genre, which require Del to find the killers of Larsen and his wife, Alison. Additionally, Del finds himself a hunted man, runs afoul of a femme fatale, and faces off against The Association, a fiendish criminal enterprise. Swierczynski’s brisk pace and light comic touch often resemble vintage Donald Westlake. Many of the funniest bits are tossed-off riffs, as when a ragtag group of souls in one room of his Brain Hotel watch an episode of The Bionic Woman . A delicious comic thriller with a science-fiction twist.

Ruined a Little When We Are Born

Zambrano, Tara Isabel | Dzanc | $17.95 paper | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780983740582

Parenthood and family amid the Indian diaspora, both fantastical and realistic, form the basis for this new short story collection. In each of these 40 stories, family pulls at the characters in different ways. In “Mother, False,” it’s in a fantastical way, extra hands growing out of her body after her mother dies and she must take over that role in the household. In “There Are Places That

Will Fill You Up,” a girl leaves the comfort of her father’s home for the dangerous magic of her unknown mother’s world. In “Nartaki,” a girl runs from the responsibilities of her family to join a group of dancers led by a woman everyone calls Mother, which is both her making and her downfall. In contrast, there are also stories that are almost painfully real. In “Fever,” the reader follows a relationship between a man and woman through some of its important moments. “Shabnam Salamat” follows a daughter’s relationship with her family when her father marries a second, younger wife in an attempt to finally have a son. “Saanwalee” sees a girl trying to bleach her skin as she falls for a lighter-skinned boy, and “White Ash” follows a couple whose daughter has gone missing. The thing that connects all these stories is Zambrano’s poise with a sentence. Each word is meticulously planned, with short thoughts connecting to create sprawling worlds. Despite the author’s skill with brevity, it’s her longer stories, rather than the two- or three-page snippets, that truly shine. Spending more time with the characters pays off with a sense of realism and empathy that rings true. Sometimes the precision is perhaps a little too precise, giving the stories the feeling of textbook entries, but the good more than outweighs the bad. Masterfully written tales of family and humanity.

For another great story collection, visit Kirkus online.

IN THE NEWS

Edna O’Brien

Dies at 93

The Irish author was known for ction that explored the lives of girls and women.

Edna O’Brien, the Irish author whose sometimes controversial works explored the lives of girls and women, has died at 93, the New York Times reports.

O’Brien was born in County Clare, Ireland, and educated at a convent in Galway. When she was a teenager, she moved to Dublin and found work in a pharmacy. She was married for a period of time to the author Ernest Gébler; after the two divorced, she moved with her children to London.

In 1960, she published The Country Girls, about two young Irish women who move to a big city to escape their strict Catholic upbringing. She wrote two sequels to the book, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss; all caused controversy because of

their depictions of sex, and all were banned in Ireland.

She would go on to write more than 20 other novels and short story collections, including The Love Object, I Hardly Knew You, The High Road, Time and Tide, and The Light of Evening. Her most recent book, the novel Girl, was published in 2019; after it was published, she suggested that it might be her last.

O’Brien was remembered by admirers including Irish President Michael D. Higgins, who wrote, “Edna was a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed.”—M.S.

Edna O’Brien

For reviews of Edna O’Brien’s books, visit Kirkus online.

AWARDS

Winners of the 2024 Eisner Awards Are Revealed

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s Roaming took home three awards at San Diego Comic-Con.

The winners of the Eisner Awards, given each year to recognize achievement in comic books and graphic literature, were announced at ComicCon International in San Diego.

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novel Roaming took home three awards: best writer for Mariko Tamaki, best penciller/inker for Jillian Tamaki, and best graphic album—new.

Writer Chelsea M. Campbell and artist Laura Knetzger won the prize for best publication for early readers with Bigfoot and Nessie: The Art of Getting

Noticed, while Pedro Martín won in the category of best publication for kids with Mexikid. Taking home the award for best publication for teens were Ryan North and Erica Henderson for Danger and Other Unknown Risks. The award for best reality-based work went to Bill Gri th for Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy, while Thien Pham won the prize for best graphic memoir with Family Style: Memories of an American From Vietnam. James Sturm and Joe Sutphin won the prize for best adaptation from another medium for their graphic novel based on Richard Adams’ Watership Down. The award for best graphic album—reprint went to the late Ed Piskor for Hip Hop Family Tree: The Omnibus

The Eisner Awards, named for legendary cartoonist Will Eisner, were rst given out in 1988. Previous winners include Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Gene Luen

Bigfoot and Nessie: Yang.—M.S.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

For a review of Roaming, visit Kirkus online.

Jillian Tamaki, left, and Mariko Tamaki

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5 Chewy Novels About Adult Siblings

Jami Attenberg

By Nora Lange

Rockin’ Around the Chickadee

Andrews, Donna | Minotaur (288 pp.)

$27.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781250894359

A murder with a double helping of likely suspects brightens the Christmas holidays for Meg Langslow and the good people of Caerphilly, Virginia. What do you think of when you think of Christmas? Probably not the same thing as Meg’s nephew, truecrime podcaster Kevin, who’s worked with his partner, Casey, and Meg’s grandmother, Cordelia Mason, to organize the Presumed Innocent conference, which aims to celebrate the hardworking folks who toil to win reversals or new trials for those falsely convicted of murder. The event brings together lawyers like Meg’s cousin Festus Hollingsworth, who’s worked many such cases himself; potential clients like Ginny Maynard and Janet Pollard, both of whom are determined to help a friend, and Madelaine Taylor and her aunt Ellen Mays, who are bent on setting a relative free; and alumni exonerees Ezekiel Blaine, whose conviction wasn’t overturned till after he’d served nearly 50 years, and Amber Smith, who’s been out on bail since her prosecutors failed to disclose relevant evidence to her defense attorney. Unfortunately, it also attracts nut cases like Godfrey Norton, who won’t rest till everyone in attendance shares his belief that wrongful convictions are rare. No points for predicting that Godfrey will be killed, since pretty much everyone on the scene has a good motive for killing him, whether out of fear that he’ll tarnish their reputations or tank their cases or just out of plain annoyance with his hectoring manner. Andrews keeps everything moving along smartly till the unsurprising ending, though the relative dearth of humor this time around shows what happens when

you kill off the snarkiest character early on.

Nothing says Christmas like innocence, except of course for guilt.

Brew Unto Others

Balzo, Sandra | Severn House (208 pp.)

$29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781448314393

A funeral reveals a puzzle fueled by decades-old family intrigue. Maggy Thorsen’s business partner, Sarah Kingston, has always been a prickly soul—but the people she loves, she loves steadfastly. She raised Courtney and Sam Egan after the death of their mother, Patricia, the third partner in the Uncommon Grounds coffee shop. And she served as a surrogate mom to her sister Ruth’s daughter, Arial. Although Ruth didn’t formally abandon Arial, Ruth and Sarah’s mother, Edna Mayes Kingston, never let Ruth forget that Arial was born out of wedlock, the result of a one-night stand. Sarah offered the otherwise unwelcome Arial the love and support the girl’s mother and grandmother denied her. Still, Sarah is shocked when Ruth fails to attend Edna’s funeral. When Maggy and Sarah go back to Edna’s house, they discover why: Ruth never picked up Arial from the airport because she was lying in bed, overcome by carbon monoxide. As Ruth languishes in the hospital with a coma, Sarah, Arial, and Maggy review a host of possibilities. Was Ruth poisoned by accident? Did she try to kill herself? Or did someone try to murder her? The answer brings the trio back to Edna’s childhood home in Monterey, California, a trip that sheds new light on how Sarah became the person she is.

A challenging puzzle with an ingenious twist that’ll keep you awake more effectively than a shot of espresso.

Killing Time

Beaton, M.C. with R.W. Green Minotaur (256 pp.) | $27.00

Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781250898708

Agatha Raisin is bedeviled by murders past and present in the Cotswolds.

Sir Charles Fraith, who knows how to get Agatha’s attention, tells her about a murder that took place in 1660. He wants Agatha, a former star in public relations, to stage a big event to introduce Château Barfield wines, and since he knows she can never resist a puzzle, he uses that historical murder to tempt her into helping. Signing on, Agatha enlists the help of her friend Roy Silver, another PR expert with a stylish flair. Agatha already has plenty to do with her detective agency, but her excellent staff can hold things together while she works on the project. In the meantime, a number of break-ins have puzzled the police, and the Mircester Chamber of Commerce hires her firm to find the culprits. Because she thinks of adding an auction to the Barfield extravaganza, Agatha accompanies the antique dealer Mr. Tinkler to an auction, where she gets carried away by the fierce bidding on a clock that she’s determined to make her own. Keeping the clock in his shop for his twin brother to repair, Mr. Tinkler hands it over just before he’s murdered. Agatha promptly begins to get death threats in the form of puzzles, adding to her list of things to solve. She takes time to go meet her lover, John Glass, a retired police officer who works on a cruise ship as a dance instructor, but leaves in a rage when his dance partner intimates that they’re more than just colleagues. Returning home, she concentrates on all her cases and eventually solves them in surprising ways. Agatha is always a hoot, but behind the extravagant exterior lie a clever mind and an iron will.

Put

on your thinking cap, and check your empathy at the door.

THE CHRISTMAS JIGSAW MURDERS

The Christmas Jigsaw Murders

Benedict, Alexandra | Poisoned Pen (288 pp.) | $16.99 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 9781728284446

Murder strikes again and again without leaving a single emotional trace in this game-heavy seasonal bonbon. Readers who think the story is the main event here will be briskly redirected by the author’s opening announcement that the book contains three different word puzzles—involving Dickens novels, Fleetwood Mac numbers, and a Christmas song—before the killer gets down to business by sending a taunting message signed “Rest in Pieces” to Edie O’Sullivan, the Pensioner Puzzler renowned among fans for the ingenious crosswords she creates. Edie is a high-maintenance octogenarian who begins by recalling her breakup with a lover, Sky, 20 years ago and then proceeds to quarrel with her son, DI Sean BrandO’Sullivan, his husband, Liam Brand-O’Sullivan, and her 90-yearold next-door neighbor, Riga Novack, at every opportunity. She’s the kind of person who thinks reflexively in anagrams, and the target audience for this brainy confection will be kindred spirits. Four locals will die in the week before Christmas, each corpse found with a corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle, each victim otherwise utterly disposable (three of them are introduced shortly before their demise). The murderer, once identified, is equally forgettable. What readers in

Benedict’s sharply limited niche will remember long after they’ve forgotten the plot is the abundance of games played by and on the characters throughout the story. Even the closing acknowledgments take the form of three anagrammatic crossword puzzles, though the appended recipes are written in plain English. Put on your thinking cap, and check your empathy at the door.

Spoiler’s Prey

Blake, Robin | Severn House (288 pp.) $29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781448311453

A battle between tradition and new ideas leads to unrest and murder in 1748 England as the movement to enclose farmland takes off.

A letter from his friend Dr. Luke Fidelis urges Titus Cragg, Lancashire’s county coroner, to come to the little town of Ingolside, which Fidelis fears has been the site of a murder. Fidelis is attending Mrs. Lumsden, mother of the local squire, whose determination to enclose land the villagers rely on for grazing and growing food will bring them to ruin. Cragg stays with a relative while he investigates—much to the squire’s disapproval—the case of a man found dead in the town marketplace. John Lavenham, a documents expert looking into land holdings, had arrived with surveyor Wilkin Tree as part of Lumsden’s plan to throw people off their land. When Fidelis examines the corpse, he finds damaged lungs, bruises, and a postmortem gunshot wound. Before

he died, Lavenham escaped a fire that destroyed an inn where he was drinking, but there’s much confusion about how he was rescued and whether the fire was arson. Investigations lead Cragg to believe that Lavenham was forging documents that gave Lumsden the right to seize the land he wanted. After hearing testimony, an inquest delivers the verdict of accidental death from smoke inhalation, leaving many questions unanswered. A farmer forced off his land sells his wife for money to emigrate, and a boxing match held in town stirs up mixed emotions. Lumsden, meanwhile, uses every dirty trick to carry out his plan as Cragg and Fidelis search for the truth.

A minor mystery greatly enhanced by fascinating historical details.

A Case of Matricide

Burnet, Graeme Macrae | Biblioasis (288 pp.) | $18.95 paper | Nov. 12, 2024 9781771966474

Burnet concludes his trilogy, which began with The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2017) and continued with The Accident on the A35 (2018), with a third and final case for Georges Gorski, lackadaisical chief inspector of France’s Saint-Louis police.

Pretending once more to be translating a novel by one Raymond Brunet (get it?), Burnet takes his time introducing the usual suspects of Saint-Louis and their customary haunts before having Gorski respond to a call from Madame Duymann, who’s convinced that her son, an insurance clerk turned novelist, is planning to kill her. Robert Duymann dismisses her fears as delusional and makes a point of introducing every subsequent meeting with Gorski with the announcement that he hasn’t killed his mother yet. While unwary readers innocently wait for further

developments, Gorski, whose wife, Céline, has recently left him, commences a mutual flirtation with Emma Beck, who runs the flower shop on the first floor of his aging mother’s apartment building; feels constantly guilty that he’s bungling the non-affair at every step; and flashes back repeatedly to an episode in which he, at the age of 8, impulsively but deliberately crushed his family’s mustard spoon and then covered up the misdeed. There will eventually be a matricide, and the identities of both the mother and her killer will surprise many readers. But in a poker-faced afterword pointing out many clever touches you may have missed, it’s hard to disagree with Burnet’s remark that, whatever his strengths and attractions, “Brunet is incapable of keeping his mind on the narrative business at hand.”

Like meta? Here’s meta. Resonant plot or characters worth caring about, not so much.

Murder Takes the Stage

Cambridge, Colleen | Kensington (304 pp.)

$27.00 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781496742599

Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan’s trial move from Devon to test the waters of London is marked by a series of theatrical murders they ask their housekeeper to solve.

Summoned to the Adelphi Theater by her distraught friend and employer, Phyllida Bright joins Agatha and Max in mourning the death of Archibald Allston, whom producing couple Hugh and Melissa Satterwait had been eyeing as the possible lead for Wasp’s Nest, a play based on one of Agatha’s stories. Examining the scene and the body a lot more closely than the police would have approved of, had anyone thought to call them, Phyllida concludes that Archie died of natural causes. The same can’t be said for Trent Orkney,

Who’s more evil, a hired killer or the Missouri cops chasing him?

JOHNNY-BOY

the Benvolio clubbed to death at the Belmont Theater the next day. Drama critic Abernathy Vane’s alliterative headline—“Benvolio Bashed on Balcony at the Belmont! And Alston Asleep in Armchair at the Adelphi”— playfully suggests that the two deaths are connected, a suspicion that’s less playfully confirmed when Claudia Carmichael, the star of Peter Pan , is catapulted from her rope harness to her death at the Clapham. Even as she does her best to protect the most likely next target—Daphne Dayberry, who plays Lucy in the Dunsary Theater’s production of Dracula —Phyllida, encouraged to her surprise by Scotland Yard inspector George Wellbourne, works tirelessly to figure out the motive behind the rigorous but random-seeming pattern. The result is her most ingeniously plotted case, though also her least original.

Poor Agatha Christie is given nothing to do here but collect material to rehash in one of her own most celebrated novels.

Johnny-Boy

Carter, A.F. | Mysterious Press (360 pp.) $17.95 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781613165805

Who’s more evil, the hired killer who’s blown into a Missouri town or the cops who’ve vowed to protect its citizens?

As the Baxter Police Department’s chief of detectives, Delia Mariola has seen many victims of violence. But few of them rival Case Dixon, a high school kid who wandered away from a local

hangout utterly incapable of fending for himself and wasn’t seen till three days later, when he was found strangled to death after prolonged torture. Everybody in town—from Case’s father, a lumberyard owner on the board of Baxter’s Chamber of Commerce, to police commissioner Vern Taney—thinks it would be just great if Case’s nasty schoolmate Bard Henry, who’s threatened him repeatedly and was seen just outside the spot he disappeared from, did time for his murder. But even after they arrest the youth, neither Delia nor Blanche Weber, the detective in charge of the case, thinks Bard could have planned or executed a crime that required this much foresight. And they’re right. The real murderer was Johnny-Boy Witten, an assassin currently calling himself Paul Ochoa, who loves his work so much that he passes the time in torture killings while he’s waiting for a chance to tag Theo Diopolis, the autoworker he’s been hired to kill. Professional as he is, Johnny-Boy narrowly misses his chance to put down Diopolis. Now the pressure is on him to make good on his contract even as Delia and Blanche dig up evidence of a much wider ring of civil servants and cops in their own department. The results are as suspenseful as they are ultimately predictable.

Carter ends with a bonus: There’s plenty of corruption left for her detectives to fight in the next round.

For more by A.F. Carter, visit Kirkus online.

Death at a Scottish Christmas

Connelly, Lucy | Crooked Lane (256 pp.)

$29.99 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781639109302

The death of a rock star in his Scottish hometown brings many secrets to light.

American emergency room doctor Emilia McRoy has settled into life in Sea Isle, where she was recruited by wealthy paternalistic Constable Ewan Campbell to care for the needs of the populace, even after death, as both the town’s doctor and coroner. Though she’s solved several murder cases, when her friend Mara asks her to help transport the U.K.-famous band Bram and the Stokers, whose van has broken down, she never suspects that handsome, charismatic Bram will be the next victim. Much as Emilia enjoys dancing with Bram after a terrific set the band plays at the pub, she can’t help noticing that Ewan and Bram seem to have a problematic past. When she finds Bram dead on the beach in suspicious circumstances, Ewan has to be considered a suspect. Emilia’s thorough examination reveals a puncture in Bram’s brain stem, indicating that he’s probably been murdered. Emilia and the entire team, including abrasive DI Bethany Thomson, who vocally suspects Ewan, focus on the band members and their manager, Davy Albright. Bram’s medical records and reports of his behavior suggest that he may have had early-onset Alzheimer’s, which would certainly have changed the band’s plans for the future. When Davy becomes the next victim, Emilia has to combine sleuthing with her serious involvement in the town’s delightful Christmas festivities and avoid a stalker who may be targeting her for death.

An intricate murder mystery combines with the delights of friendship and the Christmas spirit in a charming Scottish town.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

Dugoni, Robert | Thomas & Mercer (384 pp.) | $28.99 | Oct. 22, 2024

9781662517990

Five years after attorney Patsy Duggan, Seattle’s Irish Brawler, got CEO Jenna Bernstein found not guilty of killing a scientist about to reveal some ugly secrets about her firm, Jenna has to rely on Patsy’s daughter, Keera, when she’s accused of killing an even more highly placed co-worker.

The sad truth about the LINK, a revolutionary “Fountain of Youth” technology that allows noninvasive refashioning of human tissue, is that it doesn’t work. Hours after Erik Wei, a researcher at Ponce de León Restorative Technology, had threatened to go public with this unwelcome news, he was shot dead, and Jenna, the wunderkind boss he reported to, was arrested for his murder. Patsy’s fancy footwork won the day for her back then, but now Patsy, an alcoholic with a long history of health problems, is too old and inconsistent to defend Jenna in a new case, in which she is accused of shooting Sirus Kohl—her CFO, her COO, the owner of 48% of PDRT, and, it turns out, the lover who was about to turn on her. Keera agrees to take it on, though that’s not a decision she makes lightly, since from the time they were in school together, she’s regarded Jenna as a narcissistic liar who certainly could have shot Kohl. The victim’s daughter, PDRT general counsel Adria Kohl, certainly thinks she did, and she’s willing to say whatever it takes to put Jenna away for good this time. With a mountain of circumstantial evidence against Jenna, Keera has her work cut out for her. Dugoni draws freely on a celebrated real-life criminal trial interested readers will identify within the opening pages, but the

nerve-racking changes he brings to the trials of the defense are entirely his own.

A cunning master class in why you should always trust your lawyer, and what it’ll cost you if you do.

Murder, She Wrote: A Killer Christmas

Fletcher, Jessica & Terrie Farley

Moran | Berkley (272 pp.) | $28.00 Oct. 8, 2024 | 9780593640722

A merry Christmas is challenged by murder. Jessica Fletcher is looking forward to an old-fashioned Christmas with a visit from her nephew Grady’s family. But Cabot Cove is turned upside down when it becomes one of 10 towns chosen to compete to be named Maine’s Christmas Town, a contest which not only provides great publicity but also features a monetary award. As a member of the festival committee, Jessica has to come up with some projects that would be helped by the reward money. While she’s getting her hair done at the salon, Jessica learns two pieces of gossip: First, one of her favorite former students, Albert Pellecchia, has returned to town, and second, realtor Eve Simpson is about to make a big sale to a wealthy businessman. With everything else going on, she’s hard-pressed to keep up with the outline for her new book as she prepares for the family visit and helps Eve by attending a dinner party to welcome her big client, John Bragdon. All goes well until Kenny Jarvis turns up. His sister, who’s selling the house and land to Bragdon, had him declared dead years ago, but now that he’s not, he refuses to sell. Frantic Eve insists that since he was declared dead, Kenny has no claim. The dinner party for the Bragdons goes well enough, but a tea party Mrs. Bragdon hosts at the hotel has disastrous results after Kenny barges in and threatens her. She

immediately falls ill and later dies. Kenny’s the obvious suspect, but Jessica, Sheriff Metzger, and Dr. Seth Hazlitt all imagine a motive closer to home.

A down-home Christmas mystery filled with good cheer and just enough murder to add spice.

Blue Christmas Bones

Haines, Carolyn | Minotaur (352 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781250885968

A Christmas vacation for a pair of southern belles with backbones of steel becomes a working holiday.

Sarah Booth Delaney and Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, partners in the Delaney Detective Agency, have joined their pals Millie Roberts and Cece Dee Falcon for a trip to Tupelo, Mississippi, to compete in an amateur Elvis Presley impersonator festival. On display at the Arena Center is a magnificent replica of Elvis’ bejeweled Las Vegas belt created by artist Sippi Salem; it belongs to Grace Land, a wealthy local woman who made a fortune starring on a reality TV show called Boyfriend Boot Camp When the belt is stolen, the volatile Grace offers Sarah Booth and Tinkie big bucks to recover it. They soon learn that their beautiful client is a widely disliked inveterate liar, making it difficult to narrow down the list of suspects. Surrounded by sexy Elvis impersonators, the ladies are delighted when their men arrive. Sarah Booth’s lover, county sheriff Coleman Peters, is especially welcome because Tupelo police chief Yuma Johnson, a suspect himself, is freezing them out. It turns out there’s no insurance on the $3 million belt because the insurance agent hates Grace and didn’t remind her that her payment was late. Between shopping, competing, and winning, the ladies still find time to investigate a large cast of dubious characters, one of whom is out to kill Grace.

A mystery with plenty of humorous suspects and a treasure trove of trivia guaranteed to delight Elvis fans.

Den of Iniquity

Jance, J.A. | Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) | $30.00 | Sept. 10, 2024

9780063252585

As the Covid-19 lockdown looms in 2020, J.P. Beaumont keeps himself busy with two pro bono cases both linked to old teddy bears. Long ago, as a Seattle PD patrol officer, Beaumont gave Benjamin Harrison Weston Jr. a teddy bear to comfort him for the murders of his family members. Now a homicide detective, Weston uses that memory to lean on Beaumont to reexamine the fatal fentanyl overdose of Darius Jackson in 2018. Even though the police closed that death as an accident, Matilda Jackson, Weston’s old Sunday school teacher, has always insisted that her grandson was murdered. Beaumont’s collaborations with assorted experts and his own eye for detail ultimately lead him to “a serial killer on steroids” who’s dispensed lethal overdoses to at least five men with checkered histories and left a posthumous gift of two $100 bills to each of them. In the meantime, Beaumont gets an unscheduled visit from his grandson, Kyle Cartwright, distraught because his parents are divorcing over his father’s affair with coffee shop server Caroline Richards, whose colorful past, once Beaumont digs into it on behalf of Kyle as his nonpaying client, turns out to also involve a teddy bear. Although his investigation, which ends up drawing in a legion of active cops, assistants, and an unusually helpful forensic economist, is thorough, conscientious, and continuously absorbing, Beaumont can’t help feeling that “the wheels I had set in motion might not turn out well for anybody.” He’s right to worry, but he’s

also right to keep pushing the envelope in the strongest of his recent cases. The only false note is the characters’ uncannily accurate foresight about the effects of the coming pandemic.

Betrayal at Blackthorn Park

Kelly, Julia | Minotaur (320 pp.) | $28.00 Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781250865519

In World War II Britain, a newly minted agent for the top-secret Special Investigations Unit finds her routine first assignment anything but. In A Traitor in Whitehall (2023), Evelyne Redfern went from typing to sleuthing when one of her workmates was murdered. Reluctantly teamed up with the attractive David Poole, she solved the crime, protected government secrets, and was recruited as an agent for an unofficial but vital intelligence group. Now, fresh out of training, Evelyne is sent, with David as her handler, to infiltrate Blackthorn Park, a secret government installation developing clandestine weapons, to try to figure out why some materials have gone missing. Prime Minister Winston Churchill is due to arrive there in a few days for a demonstration, and tensions are high. Evelyne arrives in the village of Benstead, where Blackthorn Park is located, pretending to be visiting a relative, and does enough snooping on her first day to convince herself that the facility is far from secure. Slipping into the grounds of Blackthorn Park that night, she finds the dead body of Sir Nigel Balram, the brilliant but unpopular engineer who heads the project. Suspicious of his apparent suicide, Evelyne takes charge until David can arrive. David poses as a police detective investigating the death and seeks to discover whether material is being stolen or sabotaged, since several of the devices made at Blackthorn Park have proved unreliable. Apart from his differences with his team, the short-

When a child goes missing in the wilderness, even more crimes are uncovered.

GATHERING MIST

tempered Sir Nigel had made enemies through his habit of sleeping with other men’s wives. Checking alibis and snooping through Sir Nigel’s paperwork open up several promising leads. So does another murder staged to look like suicide. Now Evelyne and David must find the reason for the weapon malfunctions and determine whether the murders are connected.

A surprising denouement caps a budding romance in a country torn by war.

A Woman Underground

Klavan, Andrew | Mysterious Press (312 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781613165539

Klavan, who’s evidently determined to make each adventure of assassin turned English teacher Cameron Winter more feverish than the last, turns up the heat again in this triple-decker tale.

As he sits in the office of therapist Margaret Whitaker, Winter is willing to talk endlessly about anything but Gwendolyn Lord, the previous therapist who was in love with him. He recalls his mission to track down Jerry Collins, a fellow agent of the shadowy Division who vanished while he was on his way to eliminate Istanbul child trafficker Kemal Balkin; his childhood love for Charlotte Shaefer, whose distinctive perfume he’s just smelled outside his apartment; and his reading of the joltingly fascist novel Treachery in the Night, whose heroine seems an awful lot like Charlotte. To Margaret’s complaints that he’s

meandering, he replies: “In my mind, it’s all one story.” And that’s not even counting the unwelcome news that his academic colleague Roger Sexton plans to abandon his wife and young son and settle down with his student Barbara Finley, who turns out to have set her own sights more broadly. The stakes rise further when Winter follows a clue halfway across the country in hope of finding Ivy Swansag, the reclusive author of Treachery in the Night, and stumbles onto a trail even more violent than the one that led to Jerry Collins. Everyone involved in every one of the stories he spins for Margaret seems willing to blackmail, betray, or kill everyone else. Instead of hoping for a happy ending, readers will find themselves praying that this will all somehow come together. Not by any means Klavan’s best, but in some inscrutable ways Klavan’s most.

Long Time Gone

Martian, Hannah | Crooked Lane (288 pp.) $31.99 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781639109692

Echoes of the past may become dangerous when a private eye’s investigation of her aunt’s disappearance becomes even more personal. When her aunt Cora goes missing, Quinn Cutheridge returns to the town of Wonderland, Wyoming, for the first time in a decade. Although Quinn’s line of work gives her a professional lens that might help get to the bottom of Cora’s disappearance, she’s ambivalent about taking on the case. She hasn’t seen or spoken to her aunt since

Cora unceremoniously told her then-teenage niece nearly 10 years ago that she wasn’t welcome in Cora’s home anymore. Because Quinn’s mother was sort of a nonentity, Cora’s house had been Quinn’s respite, and she still has no idea why she was sent away. But Hunter Lemming, Cora’s 21-year-old female ranch hand, is adamant that Quinn return, so she reluctantly does. Even though she’s trying to do Hunter a favor in searching for Cora, Hunter remains distant, calling her “Princess” and sharing the minimum amount of information she might need to solve the mystery. It’s not clear if Hunter’s unfriendliness stems from knowing more than she’ll say or if it’s a reaction to the undeniable spark between her and Quinn. Quinn is particularly suspicious of Hunter’s chumminess with local Sheriff Maddie Bridgers, who comes from the town’s high-powered Coldwater family. Suspense builds along with the rising tension between the women. Interspersed chapters tell the 40-year-old story of Jessica Coldwater, who was murdered as a teen. The townsfolk assume that her best friend, Holly Prine, killed her, though Holly’s disappearance means that no one has ever been sure. If Quinn can only figure out how her present-day case is linked to this presumably solved crime, she can find out what happened to Cora. Suspense and romance build in a story about the shattering pressures of hiding the truth.

Gathering Mist

Mizushima, Margaret | Crooked Lane (256 pp.) | $29.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 9781639108947

When a child goes missing in the wilderness, even more sinister crimes are uncovered. Deputy Mattie Wray and her K-9 partner, the German shepherd Robo, are summoned from Timber

Creek, Colorado, to Washington state for an ultrasensitive search-and-rescue mission. River Allen, the 9-year-old son of actress Chrystal Winter, has wandered away from the movie set where his mother is filming a new movie and into the region east of Olympic National Park. Winter’s revelation that she recently received death threats raises the possibility that this was an abduction and not a simple disappearance. Other questions surround the matter, like why nanny Sally Kessler wasn’t with River at the time. The timing is very bad for Mattie, who’s a week away from her wedding to faithful beau Dr. Cole Walker, but duty calls. Mattie and Robo are part of a large operation involving multiple other pairs. Mizushima’s ninth Timber Creek K-9 mystery rolls slowly, with rich descriptions of the rugged terrain and the procedural details of a large-scale search-and-rescue mission, particularly those involving K-9 partners. There are interviews with the handful of individualists who live in the area, including the reclusive Edward Campbell and the blind Cecil Moore. The restless Cole, who has a contentious relationship with his family, joins Mattie and Robo on the rugged mission. A dark discovery changes the search and amps up its urgency. Series fans will likely be pleased that the novel ends sweetly, with the anticipated wedding. Tidy procedural with a canine accent.

The Night Woods

Munier, Paula | Minotaur (320 pp.)

$29.00 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781250887917

A spate of murders in Vermont is somehow linked to The Odyssey. Despite her experiences in the military police, Mercy Carr finds pregnancy the scariest thing she’s ever faced. But her condition doesn’t keep Mercy and her Belgian Malinois, Elvis, from hiking through the woods

to visit Homer Grant and his bloodhound, Argos. Homer, a linguist who plays Scrabble for money with Mercy once a week, isn’t in his cabin, but a dead man is, along with pages of The Odyssey strewn all over. Finding Homer badly wounded in the woods, Mercy fashions a makeshift sledge the dogs can pull to higher ground, where there’s cell service. She texts her husband, Troy, a Vermont game warden, who arrives in a helicopter with help. Certain that her friend Homer is no killer, she plans to investigate, much to the horror of her mother. The dead man, Dr. Leon Vallance, had joined Homer to work on a new translation of The Odyssey. Then Troy and his Newfoundland tracker dog, Susie Bear, find the body of a missing man dead in a swamp in nearby Artemis Park, a large private game preserve stocked with exotic animals, including dangerous wild boar, run by and for the wealthy. This death attracts interest from both the government and Mercy, who thinks clues can be found in The Odyssey. She becomes a target while heavily pregnant, with only Elvis and her young cousin for support in a wild chase, as she seeks to escape a determined killer who’s only part of a much bigger plot.

Cerebral clues and high adventure combine in an exciting character-driven brain teaser.

Kirkus Star

The Mermaid Mystery

Myers, Tamar | Severn House (224 pp.)

$29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781448313198

A wacky plan to save a town leads to big trouble. Tidal Shores, South Carolina, has never recovered economically from the Covid-19 pandemic. Now a group calling itself

the Big Ten has come up with a novel way to revive the coastal town.

Taxidermist Gunner Jones melds

together the body of an albino female bonobo with the bottom of a goliath tigerfish and calls it a mermaid. The idea is for Miss Lucy to be found washed up on the beach, making Tidal Shores famous and enabling the town residents to sell mermaid-related merchandise. Following the truism that a sucker is born every minute, boat captain Hoyt Hunter will take people out and convince them that the dolphins that follow his boat are mermaids. Pledged to silence about the genesis of Miss Lucy, the Big Ten soon convince a sizable segment of the population that mermaids exist and start raking in money hand over fist.

Zoe Porter, a reporter for the Observer Today, lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is the great-granddaughter of Big Ten member Georgina Legare, aka Gan-Gan. Arriving in Tidal Shores to cover the mermaid craze before the TV talk show Dr Pat and Pal blows it open, she stays with Gan-Gan and takes in the show’s taping, which is quite a spectacle. Determined to expose the fake mermaid, Zoe finds that it’s not easy to overturn a big lie. When Jones is murdered, Zoe turns sleuth to catch his killer.

A hilarious tale with some serious wisdom about how easy it is to create a cult that refuses to believe the truth.

The Conspiracies of the Empire

Qiu Xiaolong | Severn House (192 pp.)

$29.99 | Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781448313082

The search for a missing poet triggers an avalanche of reveries in 7thcentury China. Dee Renjie, who serves as imperial circuit supervisor of the Tang Empire, is summoned by the widowed Empress Wu and tasked with finding the poet Luo Binwang, who played a role in a recent (unsuccessful) rebellion led by General Xu and hasn’t been seen since. Renjie—who’s known as Judge

Dee because of his age and exalted position—immediately sets out, accompanied by doggedly faithful servant Yang. Their investigation takes them into the damaged countryside and pockets of the populace riven by the rebellion, far from the safety of the palace. Little Swallow, a delicate young “fishing girl,” fetes them with one of her popular sampan meals and provides some intel about Luo. The subsequent tragic fate of Little Swallow and others convinces Judge Dee of the urgency of wrapping up his investigation by any means possible. A postscript explains the novel’s factual roots, noting that Judge Dee, Luo Binwang, Empress Wu, and other characters really existed.

Grounded in history, this second Judge Dee mystery—following The Shadow of the Empire (2022)—balances a passion for literature with a measured, character-driven investigation, each arguably a MacGuffin for the other. Every chapter opens with quotations by cultural heavyweights ranging from John Donne to Arthur Schopenhauer to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and bits of verse, often from Chinese poets of the time, are sprinkled throughout. An elegant souffle of history, mystery, and classic poetry.

Rough Pages

Rosen, Lev AC | Forge (272 pp.)

$27.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781250322449

The gay community has bigger problems than nothing to read when a bookstore’s owners go missing.

It’s 1953 San Francisco, and Evander “Andy” Mills, a gay ex-cop turned private eye, has been summoned by a concerned friend: A bookstore that sells queer books has inexplicably closed for a week. Did the post office tip off the feds about the store’s monthly book service, which sends “obscene material” through the mail? And why is there no sign of the shop’s two owners, who seem to have vanished along with their list of

Fans know that no one does low-rent courtroom drama like Rosenfelt.

THE MORE THE TERRIER

book-service subscribers, all of whom are ripe for exposure or blackmail if their names get into the wrong hands? As Andy starts working the case, his search for the truth coincides with a need to conceal his own truth, including the scandalous reason he was kicked off the police force. The novel plays like a counterpoint to the muscularity of iconic 1950s noir. Sweet-tempered gumshoe Andy’s narration is about as hard-boiled as a scrambled egg, and while the book is inescapably an homage to the classic detective novels of San Francisco and elsewhere, it offers the central satisfaction of a cozy mystery: entrée into a stalwart and loving community bent on achieving justice. There’s a bit too much sighing and eye rolling, and as worthy as the book’s messages are, their airing can be somewhat ponderous (“These are our stories, and we need to read them, no matter what the government says”). But the plot is well oiled and, gratifyingly for the romantics out there, spiked with tender interludes that pay tribute to forbidden love.

A mystery for throwback-loving fans of Dashiell Hammett and Douglas Sirk alike.

The More the Terrier

Rosenfelt, David | Minotaur (304 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781250324542

Lawyer Andy Carpenter leaves the comfort of Paterson, New Jersey, to defend a Rutgers student accused of killing his professor.

Brian “BJ” Bremer quarreled with his mentor, Prof. Steven Rayburn,

over the grade on one of his assignments. That’s no big deal, of course, but Middlesex County prosecutor Timothy Nabers wants a jury to believe it’s the reason BJ beat Rayburn to death in the professor’s home. Apart from the flimsy motive, the evidence is dismayingly strong. The cops found BJ—who claims Rayburn broke protocol by summoning him to an off-campus meeting—standing over his professor’s bloody corpse, and a search of the student’s apartment reveals a hidden stash of cash and Rayburn’s Rolex, which BJ claims somebody planted. Luckily, Murphy, a foster terrier Andy had farmed out to BJ’s mother, finds his way back to Andy’s home just in time for Christmas and moves him, as urged by his tenderhearted wife, Laurie Collins, to wrestle BJ’s defense away from James Howarth, a do-nothing attorney who’s being paid by unnamed sources who want BJ to take a plea deal that will release him from prison in plenty of time to collect Social Security. Despite the evidence against his client, the whole setup stinks to high heaven, and it’s not long before Andy links Rayburn to a trio of online assailants and a serious Russian mobster the prosecution dutifully pooh-poohs. The unmasking of the killer is a soggy climax to a case that’s not exactly loaded with surprises, but the road there is consistently amusing.

Yes, yes, dogs and Christmas. But fans will know that no one does low-rent courtroom drama like Rosenfelt.

For more by David Rosenfelt, visit Kirkus online.

The Treasure Hunters Club

Ryan, Tom | Atlantic Monthly (384 pp.)

$27.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780802163639

e lives of three strangers become inextricably intertwined in a small Nova Scotia town lled with secrets, unexplained deaths, and old stories of hidden treasure.

When Peter Barnett receives an invitation from his estranged grandmother Mirabel Bellwood Johnson to join her at her Maple Bay mansion, a veil lifts from Peter’s aimless and confused life. Meanwhile, back in Maple Bay, a teenager named Danielle “Dandy” Feltzen is mourning the death of a beloved grandfather who left her with a mysterious directive: She should take his place in a secret society dedicated to nding treasure that the pirate crew of a ship called the Obelisk had buried on the coast.

Neither Peter nor Dandy realized that they, along with Cass, a failed writer turned Maple Bay housesitter who dreams of restarting her career with a new, breakout book, would be drawn into a centuries-old web of murder and intrigue. Shifting points of view and deft plotting keep readers guessing about the suspicious deaths—like that of Peter’s grandmother and those of her oldest acquaintances—that occur after Dandy joins her grandfather’s society. Slowly, through stories contained in Bellwood family journals and letters, Dandy’s private sleuthing and Cass’ research into the history of the Obelisk treasure, truths begin to emerge not just about lost pirate gold, but about deadly intergenerational battles between fathers and sons and friends and families that haunted, corrupted, and completely destroyed lives. Ryan’s masterful interweaving of multiple storylines, surprising plot twists, and often eccentric characters makes for a novel that is as enjoyable as it is suspenseful.

An edge-of-your seat, pageturning delight.

The Troubling Death of Maddy Benson

Shames, Terry | Severn House (256 pp.) | $29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024

9781448311828

e small-town Texas rumor mill is less help than usual in the death of a newly arrived woman.

Jarrett Creek police chief Samuel Craddock gets a phone call from the sister of Maddy Benson, who might be in trouble. Maddy answered her sister’s call from a deserted spot far from her home and was vague about why she was there. When Craddock and his deputy, Maria Trevino, go to check on her, they nd Maddy shot dead on a private road. Maddy was a widow who moved to town with her son and daughter-in-law, both of whom are authors. Josh Benson writes scholarly tomes, and his wife, Krista, bestselling romance novels. Krista’s a air has put their marriage on the rocks, but Maddy had hoped they would reconcile. Craddock has to dig deep into Maddy’s life to nd a motive for her death. She was independent, and Josh and Krista don’t seem to know what she did with her time or why she had a go-bag. Although homicides in small towns are ordinarily the business of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the DPS seems willing to let Craddock investigate, and at length he turns up the information on Maddy that may have made her a target. e wife of the local Baptist preacher gives Craddock an earful about Maddy, who she claims was an abortionist who deserved to die. Maddy was working with a secretive group that helps women who need abortions get to out-of-state providers. Now Craddock has to gure out whether her murder was a result of her activism or a more personal motive.

A hot take on the state of abortion access since the demise of Roe v. Wade.

Buried Lies

Tingle, Steven | Crooked Lane (256 pp.) | $26.99 | Oct. 15, 2024 9781643859125

A slick shamus probes a quirky murder in an even quirkier small town. After a messy episode that capped two decades as a private investigator in Charleston, South Carolina, Davis Reed now lives in a remote cabin in the small town of Cruso, North Carolina, with a vague plan to write a book. anks to his buddies Dale and Floppy, he’s plugged into the local crime scene. Dale, head deputy for Haywood County, contacts him about a weird and fatal accident on a local golf course. e victim is Cruso bigwig Prentiss Wells, who died after being beaned with a golf ball. Yes, the whole situation looks suspicious. e more Davis digs, the more unsavory details he uncovers, and the deeper the mystery becomes. In an unfortunate incident “way back,” Prentiss killed a boy with his car. e glamorous and unnervingly blithe duo Vance and Linda Roth have an inordinate interest in the case. ey press Davis to investigate the bizarre accident, and why not? When Davis nds a shotgun shell on his doormat, he begins to take the case and his safety more seriously. Sparks y when David meets Elizabeth Harper, who’s so alluring that she even asks him about his book. Is she a potential partner or a femme fatale?

With its amiable rst-person narrative, bro banter, and multiple interviews with various persons of interest, Tingle’s second Davis Reed crime novel has a relaxed, retro feel. Tingle includes several familiar tropes but incorporates them deftly. His character portraits are succinct and engrossing.

A colorful crime yarn that goes down easy.

Book to Screen

Tessa Thompson To Star in His & Hers Series

Net ix is developing the adaptation of Alice Feeney’s 2020 thriller.

Tessa Thompson is set to star in a Net ix limited series adaptation of Alice Feeney’s His & Hers, Variety reports.

Feeney’s thriller, published in 2020 by Flatiron, follows a woman whose murder is investigated by Anna Andrews, a BBC journalist, and Jack Harper, a police detective. A critic for Kirkus noted of the book, “There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers,” and praised the novel’s “taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.”

The adaptation of the novel will move the setting from the U.K. to Atlanta. Thompson, known for her roles in the lms Dear White

People, Selma, and Sorry To Bother You, will also serve as an executive producer, alongside actor Jessica Chastain and William Oldroyd (Eileen), who will direct the rst episode of the series.

Two of Feeney’s previous novels have been optioned for the screen before. In 2019, Deadline reported that a series based on Feeney’s debut novel, Sometimes I Lie, was being developed by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and in 2021, Variety reported that the author’s Rock Paper Scissors would become a

For a review of His & Hers, visit Kirkus online.

Net ix series. Neither of those projects has yet made it to the screen.

Feeney reacted to the news of the His & Hers series on Instagram, writing, “I feel incredibly lucky that so many wonderful people are involved in making this show, and I can’t wait to see Anna Andrews and Jack Harper come to life on screen.”

—M.S. on screen.”

Tessa Thompson

BEST BOOKS OF AUGUST 2024:

Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss (Viking)

Island of Whispers by Frances Hardinge, illus. by Emily Gravett (Amulet/Abrams)

Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay (Kokila)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Adam by John Gordon

Artistic and Life-Like: Photography in Washington, 1850-1900 by Tim Greyhavens

Make America Kosher Again by Marc Daniels

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.

Fully Booked

A dazzling new narrator duets with the unforgettable Adunni in Abi Daré’s And So I Roar BY MEGAN LABRISE

EPISODE 384: ABI DARÉ

On this episode of Fully Booked , novelist Abi Daré joins me to discuss And So I Roar (Dutton, Aug 6), the highly anticipated follow-up to her New York Times –bestselling debut, e Girl With the Louding Voice (2020).

Adunni, the vibrant, irrepressible 14-year-old protagonist of e Girl With the Louding Voice, returns as one of two narrators in And So I Roar. Her equally memorable counterpart is Tia, a wealthy, educated, compassionate woman living in Lagos, who helps Adunni escape indentured servitude and secure the education she desperately desires. Here’s a bit of our starred review:

“As this novel begins, just days after the previous one ended, Adunni is staying with Tia, the neighbor who rescued her, and is about to enter a boarding school on scholarship. Unfortunately, those plans are interrupted when Mr. Kola and a chieftain from Ikati, the village where she grew up, appear at her door and accuse her of murdering Khadija, demanding she return to the village for judgment.

Determined to clear her name, she goes with them—and Tia goes, too.…Daré doesn’t shy away from melodrama; deaths, injuries, and children born to fathers whose identities are concealed pile up rapidly. But readers willing to go along for a ride will be treated to prose that is alternately poetic and comic, two heroines worth cheering for, and sharp insights into the contrast between urban and rural Nigeria.”

Daré and I begin by discussing what it was like to receive such a warm reception for her debut novel. We chat about whether to call And So I Roar a sequel or a follow-up to e Girl With the Louding Voice, and why the distinction matters. We contrast what it

And So I Roar

Daré, Abi

Dutton | 400 pp. | $28.00 Aug. 6, 2024 | 9780593186558

was like to write in the voice of Tia, who’s wealthy, educated, well-traveled, and a bit sheltered, with what it was like to write in the voice of Adunni, whose use of English undergoes a transformation as she acquires more vocabulary and experience. We talk about the length of time the novel covers, di erent modes of storytelling, Adunni’s sense of humor, Daré’s research for the book, and much more.

And in a sponsored interview, I speak with Barbara O’Neal, whose new novel is Memories of the Lost (Lake Union, July 30). In this romantic mystery, a successful artist uncovers a life-changing secret in the months after her mother’s death.

en editor-in-chief Tom Beer, ction editor Laurie Muchnick, and young readers’ editors Mahnaz Dar and Laura Simeon share some of their top picks in books for the month.

Editor-at-large Megan Labrise hosts the Fully Booked podcast.

Kirkus Star

Confounding Oaths

Hall, Alexis | Del Rey (448 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Aug. 27, 2024 | 9780593497586

Fairy mischief descends on Regency England once again. The Caesar family occupies a delicate position in 1815 London. They are welcome at most society functions because Lady Mary is the daughter of an earl, but they’re kept at arm’s length because her husband is a Senegalese freeman, leaving the family’s three children at odds as they enter adulthood. The eldest son, Mr. Caesar, knows he ought to find a career and settle down, but he has no interest in doing so—he’s a dandy, plus he’s only attracted to men. For the most part, he keeps to the sidelines, until he punches a major in the teeth for insulting the older of his two sisters, Miss Caesar. Not long after, Miss Caesar makes a deal with a fairy that turns her into “the Beauty Incomparable,” making the Caesars the center of conversation across London. All this sudden excitement brings Mr. Caesar into repeated contact with Captain Orestes James, a Black man who lives his life much more authentically alongside a steadfast group of soldiers called the Irregulars—which causes Mr. Caesar to imagine other possibilities for his life. And who recounts this complex and quirky story for our mortal enjoyment?

Just as in Hall’s Mortal Follies (2023), it’s none other than Robin Goodfellow, still in exile from the court of Oberon and grumpy as ever at having to write up yet another story of foolish mortal behavior in order to make ends meet. (And while this volume stands alone fairly well, it will be best enjoyed after having read the first). His deliciously cruel and flippant voice once again provides a clever framework for the story’s balance of levity and gravity. As “the vagaries of mortal physicality mean little” to Robin, the story is fairly

closed-door by Hall’s standards, but there are sparks of chemistry between Mr. Caesar and Captain James. And though the romance often takes a back seat to the grander plot, thanks to piles of rich detail, mythological references, and interactions with the Other Court, readers may not even notice. A queer and fantastical romance that enchants in more ways than one.

Prime Time Romance

Robb, Kate | Dial Press (336 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Sept. 3, 2024 | 9780593596555

When a birthday wish goes wrong, a 30-year-old woman finds herself transported into the world of her favorite teen soap opera. Brynn Smothers thought she’d found her happily-ever-after, but instead she finds herself celebrating her 30th birthday divorced, miserable, and living with Josh, a roommate she barely knows. Her one constant is Carson’s Cove, a Dawson’s Creek –like teen drama from the 2000s. Every problem in Carson’s Cove has a way of working itself out by the end of the episode—it’s a place where, as Brynn puts it, “the worst fight can always be fixed with a grand romantic gesture.” That’s nothing like real life, and Brynn longs for things to be that easy. Which is why, when she blows out the candle on the birthday cake that mysteriously gets delivered to her front door, she wishes to finally get her own happy ending. The next thing she knows, she and Josh are waking up in Carson’s Cove…but they’re no longer Brynn and Josh. Brynn is Sloan, the good girl who loves sundresses and bike rides and should have ended up with the town heartthrob, Spencer. Josh is Fletch, the quintessential town bad boy who works at a bar. And they’re stuck in Carson’s Cove until Brynn makes sure that Spencer and Sloan get a happy ending instead of the cliffhanger the show ended on. But now that Brynn’s living inside her comfort watch, she can’t

help noticing that things in Carson’s Cove aren’t as perfect as they seemed on TV. As she and Josh try to find their way out of the show and back into the real world, their feelings for each other develop into something that could wreck the entire town…or, maybe, change it for the better. Anyone who watched the teen shows of the 2000s will find much to appreciate here, including lots of easter eggs from Robb, who’s clearly a devotee of the genre. The magic that brings Brynn and Josh to the Carson’s Cove universe gets a little confusing if you think about it too hard, so it’s best to simply enjoy the ride. Brynn and Josh have smoldering chemistry and plenty of heart, making this an incredibly entertaining and smart romance. A fun and nostalgic ode to our favorite teen dramas (with a welcome dose of reality).

Fang Fiction

Stayman-London, Kate | Dial Press (400 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9780593729120

When a hotel manager gets dropped into the world of her favorite book series, everything she thinks she knows about its so-called villain is flipped upside-down.

Tess Rosenbloom hasn’t had much of a life recently. Working the night shift at a Brooklyn hotel helps her manage the chronic insomnia she’s been dealing with ever since a traumatic experience caused her to drop out of grad school. The only escape she’s had through her biggest ups and downs are her favorite vampire books from the Blood Feud series, which she’s reread so often she has entire passages committed to memory. While it’s fun for Tess to playfully subscribe to the long-running theory among online fans that the island where Blood Feud takes place is real, she knows better than to take it too seriously. That all changes when Octavia Yoo, one of the vampires from the island, shows up

at the hotel, knowing Tess’ name and begging for her help. Soon, Tess finds herself on the isle, surrounded by vampires and feeling way out of her depth—especially once she learns that Callum, Octavia’s twin and the supposed villain of the series, might actually be the good guy. As Tess spends more time with Callum, every preconceived notion she has about his character is turned on its head. Armed with new knowledge, Tess fights to bring Octavia back to the island where she belongs, even as bigger evils lurk. Meanwhile, who is August Lirio, the pseudonymous author of the Blood Feud books, and how could they have gotten the details so wrong? Stayman-London’s first venture into the paranormal is paired with a dash of comedy for an injection of fun into a normally serious subgenre. That said, the plot does introduce heavier elements, such as the traumatic event in Tess’ past, which creates a disjointed tone at pivotal moments. Also, spending time on a romance for Octavia back in New York detracts from the central story, when each couple could have easily received their own book. This comedic take on the vampire romance has one too many moving parts.

How To Help a Hungry Werewolf

Stein, Charlotte | St. Martin’s Griffin (368 pp.) | $18.00 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9781250352330

A woman returns to her New England hometown and discovers that she’s part of the supernatural world.

Cassandra Camberwell had an idyllic childhood in the small town of Hollow Brook, but when she was in high school, her lifelong best friend, Seth Brubaker, started bullying her in an effort to fit in with the popular crowd of mean boys. Soured on the town, Cassie stayed away for a decade. Now she’s returned to clean out the

home she inherited after her grandmother’s death and prepare it for sale. The first night she returns, Seth knocks on the door, insisting he needs one of her grandmother’s journals. After Cassie witnesses him going through a shocking physical transformation, Seth reveals that he’s a werewolf. He begs Cassie to try brewing the concoction her grandmother made to help him control his wolf. Cassie’s potion is even more effective than her grandmother’s was, and Seth realizes she must be a very powerful witch. Once she opens herself up to the possibility, Cassie discovers she can wield magical items and communicate with other magical creatures; she realizes she’s been suppressing her innate powers her whole life. Seth offers to teach her and guide her through this new world in exchange for her continued potion-making efforts. Readers will delight in Cassie’s gleeful discovery of the magical world, populated with zany, inventive details such as flying vacuum cleaners, fairies riding caterpillars who feed on thimbles full of honey, and a sentient microwave oven threatening legal action. Cassie’s romance with Seth lacks the same vitality and energy. They dance around their painful past, unable to communicate their true feelings. Only after the return of her other high school bullies does Cassie realize that Seth feels more for her than friendship. Their romance is rushed and underdeveloped compared to the rich magical world they exist in. A fun book worth reading for its inventive magical world.

I Did Something Bad

War, Pyae Moe Thet | St. Martin’s Griffin (336 pp.) | $18.00 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 9781250330512

Tyler Tun for Vogue Singapore even as she’s reeling from the recent end of her short-lived marriage. The assignment feels like a ticket to a permanent job and life in Singapore, away from her seeming failures in Yangon, Myanmar, where she lives and where Tyler is about to start filming a movie. Shadowing Tyler for two months and getting a scoop about his future plans seems like it will be easy—till the two of them accidentally kill a stranger who was menacing Khin on location at a park late at night. Though initially suave and genial to the point of unknowability, Tyler lets down his guard around Khin after they collude to hide the incident from the Myanmar police, a decision they make to avoid being railroaded into prison and ruining the first major Hollywood movie directed by and starring people from Myanmar. But Khin’s professional goal and ethics start to war with her feelings for Tyler once he confides several secrets, setting up an inevitable third-act dark moment that any romance reader will see coming. This debut novel falls into the “romantic suspense” category and shows some newbie flaws, including a greater reliance on telling rather than showing character traits. But the Myanmar setting and characters are novel, as is the theme of supporting abortion access in a country where it’s illegal (an issue Khin has written about). While more could have been done to flesh out the Yangon backdrop and finesse the deus ex machina resolution to the murder plot, it’s a creditable attempt to rejuvenate a somewhat neglected subgenre with celluloid glamor.

For fans of movie star fiction and rarely seen Asian romance.

Hollywood meets Myanmar in a murder-meetsromance plot. Freelance journalist Khin Haymar jumps at the chance to do a cover story on Hollywood star

Non ction

JOHN McMURTRIE

A WINDOW ON THE WORLD

GREETINGS, DEAR READER!

I’m delighted to be writing to you for the rst time as the new non ction editor of Kirkus Reviews

I’ve worked in the book world for many years—as the books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle for a decade and as a freelance book critic, a manuscript editor, and an editor at McSweeney’s Books and the literary journal Zyzzyva . During that time, Kirkus was a rock for me. e breadth of its books coverage is astounding. It is very often the rst outlet in the nation to write about thousands of titles. It’s also a reliable voice, known for its intelligence and verve. So I’m overjoyed to now be a part of this treasured institution, joining a smart and kindhearted crew in helping guide readers and spark more conversations about books.

I am a proud generalist, led by my insatiable curiosity. On airplanes, I always request a window seat so I can stare outside. I’ll wonder: Who was living on that land down there, centuries ago? How is it that this steel behemoth is gliding

so e ortlessly through the air? What is the decibel level of a roaring jet engine relative to the cries of that poor baby in the next aisle? e novelist Gustave Flaubert had a ne observation about being alive to one’s surroundings: “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” at’s how I view the world. And I love books that have that power, books that open doors or help me perceive things di erently.

It’s one of the most common questions in the book world—and, ideally, in life in general: What are you reading these days? Like anyone, I have my interests and passions—baseball, tennis, French culture (my mother was French), architecture, the art of Giotto and David Hockney and Stanley Whitney, the music of Nick Cave and Shirley Horn and Derrick Hodge, Japanese food, Vietnamese food, Ethiopian food—but I want to keep adding to them, as we all should. Books, of course, are among the best ways of making those discoveries, of lighting up our brains. So, what have I been reading?

Here’s a sample—and you can read reviews of the books at kirkusreviews.com:

Feh by Shalom Auslander (Riverhead, July 23): Auslander’s memoir Foreskin’s Lament had me laughing out loud, and this one, as irreverent and insightful about his religious upbringing, has the same e ect.

A Complicated Passion by Carrie Rickey (Norton, Aug. 13): I adore Agnès Varda’s lms—her sense of curiosity helped fuel mine—and Rickey’s portrait of the director lovingly captures this singular talent.

Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 20): ere can’t be enough books about

walking in cities—I’m especially fond of Michael Kimmelman’s e Intimate City —and Frazier’s valentine to this underappreciated New York City borough is wonderfully eye-opening. Paris in Ruins by Sebastian Smee (Norton, Sept. 10). You might feel you’ve had your ll of Impressionist art—all those sumptuous canvases we’ve seen so often—but Smee’s history o ers an enthralling backdrop for this revolutionary art movement. And what are you reading? Feel free to share your favorites. You can reach me at jmcmurtrie@kirkus.com.

John McMurtrie is the non ction editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

EDITOR’S PICK

Accessible account of how the Webb telescope has revolutionized the eld of astronomy.

Panek is highly respected as a science writer who won the American Institute of Physics communication award for e 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. In Pillars of Creation —the title refers to twin towers of gas and dust in a nebulous cloud 41 trillion miles from Earth— he continues the theme, focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021 as a successor to the long-serving Hubble Telescope. e whole project almost failed to get o the ground, as Panek explains in the rst section here. ere were huge technical issues

about the equipment that Webb would carry, and the delays and budget blowouts were so great that Congress nearly shelved the entire undertaking. But somehow the problems were overcome, and the rst spectroscopic images were sent back in February 2022. Much of the information received from Webb has led to a fundamental rethinking of astronomical models, especially the possible age of the universe. ere have even been hints of life on distant exoplanets and unexpected clues about the composition of galaxies and cosmic dust. Panek tells the story with infectious enthusiasm and looks ahead in an epilogue to the next step in astronomical exploration, the Habitable

Renee Bracey

Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos

Panek, Richard | Little, Brown | 224 pp. $29.00 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780316570695

Worlds Observatory, which is planned for deployment in the early 2040s. Sixteen pages of remarkable photographs, including some of nearby planets, are a bonus in this enjoyable text. Webb’s images are available for download from the

Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, named for the former senator who saved the project.

An essential read for anyone interested in the new frontiers of science, written with clarity and authority.

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia Riverhead (320 pp.) | $30.00 Oct. 8, 2024 | 9780593329856

Sharply observed descent into the labyrinth of finance and semantics with which nations and the superrich secure their wealth. Abrahamian unravels the opaque world of “special economic zones” and other places she terms “legal fictions,” where national and economic boundaries are blurred. She examines “how consultants, lawyers, financiers, and other mercenaries have carved out physical and virtual space above, below, and between nations.” Her research entailed travel to places that “are a product of colonialism, capitalism, technology, megalomania, and a pinch of alchemy,” including remote regions of Laos (economically co-opted by China) and an “open” Norwegian settlement near the North Pole. Other areas she investigates are the wide use in shipping of deceptive flags of convenience and likely future struggles over asteroid mining and ownership of space. Her focus begins appropriately with Geneva, where she grew up, termed a “City of Holes” for its legendary discretion, “a kind of black hole straddling globalization and regulation,” forever marked by the “steep moral cost” of its financial complicity with the Nazis during World War II. She describes the Geneva Freeport warehouse as an example of actual physical spaces not fully subject to state controls, “essentially a legal hack” with a clear role in hiding artworks for the rich to evade taxes. Other chapters examine how Western financial interests promoted “free-trade zones” in remote nations like Mauritius, noting, “This made it profitable for American firms to seek out manufacturing opportunities abroad rather than making

products in the U.S., where labor cost more.” Abrahamian also considers trendy concepts like “charter cities,” noting, “To cede this territory to rigidly ideological capitalists alone would be a big mistake.” Her wellresearched, engrossing work manages the minutiae of several fields, including telecommunications, maritime law, and fine art, to stitch together a multilayered tale of how privilege works to protect itself. Important documentation of how mechanisms favored by the 1 percent increase global inequalities.

The Road Is Good: How a Mother’s Strength Became a Daughter’s Purpose

Aduba, Uzo | Viking (336 pp.) | $29.00 Sept. 24, 2024 | 9780593299128

The Emmywinning actress remembers her childhood, her beloved mother, and more.

Aduba, whose Igbo first name translates as “the road is good,” grew up in a family of five in an almost all-white Boston suburb, and one of the most enjoyable parts of her memoir is her evocation of the camaraderie among her siblings and close-knit relatives, including the colorful gatherings and parties they had during her childhood. Her adolescence was marked by loneliness and bullying, but as her standout vocal and acting talents emerged, key mentors helped her find her way. The description of her days in New York as an aspiring actress is satisfyingly detailed, as is the story of her landing the part of Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Since she doesn’t tell the reader what the show is even about other than to say it is “a story about mass incarceration,” perhaps she is assuming that her audience is well acquainted with its premise and the particulars of her character, but if

that’s the case, those readers would likely be interested in further detail and additional anecdotes. Instead, the subject comes up late in the book and is given only a few pages. Somewhat more satisfying is her description of playing Shirley Chisholm in FX’s Mrs. America . Though a great deal of hard work went into writing this memoir, it sometimes feels unfocused, and it could have benefited from some culling and shaping by a professional writer. (Where’s J.R. Moehringer when you need him?) The description of her mother’s life and death are the most dramatic and interesting parts, but they are not well integrated into the overall structure.

Fans will enjoy this generous account of life as a Nigerian American daughter, sister, and actress.

Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything

Baird, Julia | HarperOne (320 pp.)

$27.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9780063414358

Examination of grace in the wide array of human life. Australian journalist Baird offers a humanistic, wide-ranging, and generally vague look at “grace.” Her attempt to define the term takes up a page of text and can be summarized in three points: “to be fully, thrillingly alive,” “something undeserved,” and “the ability to see good in the other.” She explores grace from this starting point, not always with great success. Through a panoply of stories about people across the globe, past and present, together with personal anecdotes and quotes from various authors, Baird takes the reader through a few rough categories in which grace is found. These include cycles of life, family and friends, strangers and random encounters, forgiveness, justice, and nature. Finding grace in the author’s rambling prose is not always easy or obvious,

Not every sports program deserves a coffee-table book, but this one is an exception.

ALL THE SMOKE

however, and even when it is, the lesson learned is not always particularly remarkable. At one point, Baird highlights an exhibition of heartbeats found in Japan, a record of thousands of individuals’ heartbeats. The reader is left wondering whether grace is found in this exhibition, in the lives of those represented, in the care taken in recording these lives, or something else. A particularly odd chapter begins with a focus on Napoleon’s preserved penis, which has been bought and sold many times. The chapter goes on to discuss famous men who have been cruel to women, and the overall point is simply lost on the reader. Following somewhat in the footsteps of Anne Lamott, Baird is candid in style and progressive in viewpoint, but her prose can be cold and unengaging. “The pursuit of awe, wonder and light is one of the driving principles of my life,” she states. However, the reader must squint to find those attributes in this book.

Grand ideas fall flat.

All the Smoke: All the Stars, All the Stories, No Apologies

Barnes, Matt & Stephen Jackson

Black Privilege Publishing/Atria (272 pp.)

$39.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781668048139

Anthology blending visuals and spoken-word transcripts shares stories from the popular sports podcast. Not every sports program deserves a coffee-table book, but in this instance, NBA legends turned

hosts Jackson and Barnes prove they are the exception rather than the norm. Based on interviews conducted on their podcast of the same name, All the Smoke invites readers to partake in some sips and bites from the athletes, entertainers, musicians, and sports media moguls who have appeared on the show. Here, the hosts get into the hearts and minds of their guests while discussing topics that run the gamut. They also use eye-catching candid photos and brief biographies of their guests to put readers in the room, helping newcomers or those not in the know to catch up on the who’s who. They’re unabashed about cannabis use: “It was burnt lips at first sight,” says Barnes, explaining the sign of a smoker that made him know he and Jackson would get along. Once a substance that could get players banned, weed is now less controversial in society and—at least according to guest and former teammate Baron Davis—“the NBA has adopted it.” Each dispatch is heartfelt, educational, hilarious, and sometimes touching, as when interviewees recount real-world and real-life examples that inspired and sustained them. The book is peppered with the duo’s adventures and shenanigans, as well as the respect for each other that inspires their daily work. An entire chapter dedicated to the late Kobe Bryant—“he meant everything to me,” declares Isaiah Thomas—precedes one devoted to Michael Jordan. Also part of the discussion are chapters centered on parenthood, mental health, and hip-hop. A final chapter, “Flowers,” turns the proverbial microphone around and allows their guests to clap for Barnes and Jackson. A lively peek into the room where it happens.

Kirkus Star

Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve

Bracey Sherman, Renee & Regina Mahone

Amistad/HarperCollins (400 pp.)

$29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780063228153

Two Black journalists share honest stories to break the “abortion stigma.” Bracey Sherman and Mahone aim to eliminate the shame and blame that still surround the subject of abortion by offering myriad accounts of women who have had abortions and by scouring the historical record. As “two Black women who have had abortions and experienced the anti-Blackness of the ‘pro-life’ movement,” the authors write as a collective “we” as they explain why working for reproductive rights means more than allowing women to decide for themselves if and when to become parents rather than being dictated to by the government or doctors. Reproductive justice, they argue, means equitable access to health care, education, contraception and fertility treatments, gender-affirming care, and abortion for all, not just for those who can afford it. It means proper funding to ensure this access and to feed and house families in need. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs, they note, abortion is further restricted for women of color, while misinformation about it abounds. The authors walk the reader through what exactly an abortion is, whether performed with surgery or medication or “self-managed.” They demonstrate that abortion has roots in American and world history that reach all the way back to ancient Egypt, documenting how providers were gradually demonized over the centuries. They offer stories of people who have worked for reproductive rights over the decades, such as the

courageous women of the so-called Jane Collective in Chicago from the late 1960s until abortion became legal in 1973. Despite this necessarily sobering material, their tone is determinedly upbeat, and their informative text will help young women especially to navigate difficult decisions. An affirmative vision that places abortion within a social justice context, calling for equitable support for all families.

Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World

Bronin, Sara C. | Norton (208 pp.)

$28.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780393881660

The many benefits of landuse controls for cities and their residents. Bronin, former chair of the Hartford, Connecticut, Planning and Zoning Commission and professor of law and city and regional planning at Cornell University, maintains that livable, prosperous, and sustainable cities require a sensitive, flexible application of zoning regulations. To make her case, and among numerous other examples, she tells of how zoning revitalized the Remington neighborhood in Baltimore by legalizing nonresidential uses, supported historic preservation in Galveston, nurtured urban farming in Boston, and manages Las Vegas’ unique signage. She also writes of instances when zoning has been problematic—e.g., stifling affordable, multifamily housing in West University Place, Texas, and squandering water resources in Scottsdale, Arizona. Although Bronin acknowledges that “zoning too often intrudes and imposes on deeply personal choices,” she believes that with “sensible reforms” it can realize its potential as “a tool that can be used creatively, imaginatively, and carefully to build community in an ethical and intentional way.” The author omits one

Bronin maintains that livable cities require flexible zoning regulations.

KEY TO THE CITY

important caveat: zoning does not initiate or execute development. If investment is absent and disinvestment has overwhelmed residents and property owners—cases she discusses— zoning loses its relevancy. Still, though it may not be “the key to our cities,” as she claims, it is hard to imagine a regulatory technology more critical for well-functioning and livable urban areas. Even Houston, known for its lack of a zoning ordinance, employs regulatory devices via other means. Bronin brings to life the impact of zoning on people and places and makes a convincing case for its importance. An ardent and articulate argument for expansive regulation of urban development.

Earthly Bodies: Embracing Animal Nature

Chakour, Vanessa | Penguin Life (336 pp.) | $20.00 paper | Sept. 24, 2024 9780143137757

Part memoir, part ecology, part fable.

Chakour, who practices herbalism and leads rewilding retreats, argues that modern humans are “detached from [our] bodily existence” and presents the story of how she became a “more embodied, instinctual self.” To invite readers to “embrace [our] animal nature,” Chakour adds to her narrative the stories of 23 nonhuman (“morethan-human”) animals. The interspersed vignettes—about foxes and bees, hawks, and black bears— are meant to correct the harmful

misunderstandings that keep humans from living in harmony with these other species, to highlight what we have in common, and to serve up life lessons. Recalling a time when she worked as a personal trainer and encountered firsthand the appearance-based anxieties of other women, Chakour wishes we could emancipate ourselves from the “bondage” of caring about exteriors and, like fierce and matriarchal hyenas, focus instead on cultivating sisterhood and strength. Writing about a partner who wished to live in New York while Chakour herself favored Massachusetts provides an occasion to contemplate seagull pairs that argue so long over where to build their nests that they never make a choice. The animal parallels go some way toward adding interest to the story, which, for all the promised wildness, reads as relatively tame; after a period of indecision, the author leaves her relationship, joins Bumble (the animal that appears in this chapter is not difficult to guess), and buys some land. The animal stories allow Chakour to incorporate many urgent ecological topics into her narrative and give readers a chance to learn about the important systemic roles of wolves, beavers, vultures, and others. Inhabited by so many complex and interesting creatures, Earthly Bodies asks that we pay attention on behalf of the planet. Sometimes meandering, but makes an urgent case for ecological thinking.

For the Best Science & Nature Books of 2023, visit Kirkus online.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Overcoming the 500-Year Legacy

Chavis Jr., Benjamin F. & Stacy M. Brown SelectBooks (224 pp.) | $22.95 | Oct. 8, 2024 9781590795699

An overview focusing on slavery’s grim legacy.

Activist Chavis and journalist Brown trace the course of African slavery from its beginning in the 16th century, recounting its genocidal cruelty but emphasizing that emancipation did not eliminate institutional racism, economic and social exploitation of non-whites, or post-colonial oppression of Africa and its people. Sixteen chapters summarize this history but concentrate on its consequences. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime; the authors point out that from post–Civil War Black Codes to mass incarceration today, prison has been a vehicle for African American oppression. Redlining (banks denying loans to residents of low-income neighborhoods) is illegal, but a Black family looking to buy a house rarely has an easy time, they note. Urban renewal lost its shine when it became clear that it destroyed Black neighborhoods, but gentrification has had its own destructive impact. The authors acknowledge that progress has been made since the 1960s but contend that at the current rate it will take 500 years to close the economic gap. A long final section makes the case that reparations are due for the massive wealth that centuries of unpaid labor have delivered to whites and their businesses, even those not directly involved. Readers may be surprised when the authors recount examples of local governments approving restitution and even making modest payments, although these have been confined to cities and blue states; Congress has no current plans to get involved. It’s clear that the authors do not expect to win over skeptics but to

inspire the like-minded, which their blistering recounting of centuries of injustices may well do.

Fact-filled and unsettling.

Kirkus Star

American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order

Copulsky, Jerome E. | Yale Univ. (384 pp.) $40.00 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780300241303

A survey of extreme religious dissent in the American polity, from colonial times through the current age.

Copulsky, a scholar at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, explains that he uses the term heretics in his title “loosely and a bit playfully, against a background of religious pluralism and liberty, but also with serious intent—as a way of registering the fundamentally religious nature of their dissents and highlighting the irony that they did so while claiming to be upholding Christian orthodoxy.” The orthodoxy these dissidents have opposed is one represented by Tocqueville’s portrait in Democracy in America of multiple sects and creeds peacefully coexisting in a pluralist democracy, sects that in Europe had gone to war against each other for centuries. The ostensible reason for this harmony: the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the basis for the separation of church and state. Each chapter concerns a different strain of heresy, beginning with Anglicans scandalized by their fellow colonists’ rebellion against the Church of England and ending with the National Conservatives of our time who align themselves with illiberal “populism” in Hungary and around the world. The chronological approach enables Copulsky to make clear from the start the non-Christian origins of the nation’s founding documents and

the fallacy of the latter-day “heretics” like Jerry Falwell who insisted on the contrary. He quotes his subjects generously, giving them plenty of room to make their often shocking cases. All are learned, well-versed in history, and some, like the pugilistic Catholic integralist L. Brent Bozell and extreme Christian reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony, write, charismatically, and almost persuasively. A chilling consideration of persistent mutations of American thought still threatening our pluralist democracy.

Kirkus Star

What Happened to Belén: The Unjust Imprisonment That Sparked a Women’s Rights Movement

Correa, Ana Elena | Trans. by Julia Sanches | HarperOne (240 pp.) | $28.99 Sept. 24, 2024 | 9780063316737

How an Argentinian woman became the face of the battle for women’s reproductive health rights. Belén was a 25-year-old Argentinian woman who was wrongfully imprisoned after she suffered a miscarriage, without her knowing she was pregnant. After being admitted to a hospital in Tucumán that was next to a men’s correctional facility, Belén endured pain in her midsection that soon led to hemorrhaging. Due to strict reproductive health laws in Argentina, Belén’s physician reported her to the authorities for allegedly murdering her unborn child. Her assigned prosecutor charged her with “homicide aggravated by relationship.” She was placed into police custody and, while she recovered, a male nurse brought her a box containing a dead fetus from the bathroom where she had been. “This is your son,” he said. “Look what you did, bitch.” Belén remained behind bars for almost three

years. After two failed attempts at clearing Belén’s name, her feminist lawyer, Soledad Deza, turned to social media to rally support. Before long, Belén’s story gained international traction from organizations such as Amnesty International. The hashtag that went viral while she was locked up, #NiUnaMenos, “Not One Less,” sparked conversations about women’s health issues, such as abortion, and encouraged women to support each other. When Belén left prison, cameras got a shot of her wearing a white mask to conceal her identity. The mask would become a symbol of Belén’s fight and a symbol of hope to those who have suffered similar atrocities. As this stirring account shows, there are many women like Belén whose names we don’t know, but whose stories are just as important.

An uplifting chronicle of one woman’s fight for justice.

Mysticism

Critchley, Simon | New York Review Books (320 pp.) | $18.95 paper Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781681378244

The quest for illumination, examined by an English philosopher.

Critchley, who admits to being “temperamentally a mystic,” celebrates the “cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits…and stand with what is there ecstatically,” a process that has come to be known, sometimes pejoratively, as mysticism. The word itself, he reveals,

emerged from the 17th century’s “modern, enlightened worldview” to describe “an existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” This feeling of ecstasy, Critchley asserts, has the potential of liberating us “from misery, from melancholy, from heaviness of soul, from the slough of despond, from mental leadenness.” Although mystics report intense experiences of what they call God, Critchley argues that mysticism can transcend religion to be primarily aesthetic: joy and rapture can be inspired by art, poetry, and, especially for him, music. In his journey into mysticism, Critchley draws on the writings of mystics, including Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux, Margery Kempe, Meister Eckhart, and contemporary writers such as Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. For Critchley, Dillard’s Holy the Firm and Eliot’s Four Quartets explore “the relation between art and the divine.” Both writers struggle to convey “some dimension of experience that cannot be expressed verbally and is perhaps closer to music.” Critchley is moved by any music that “triggers the energy of religious conversion”: the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, for example, and the Krautrock group Neu! “We know that the modern world is a violently disenchanted swirl shaped by the speculative flux of money that presses in on all sides,” Critchley writes. “Yet, when we listen to the music that we love, it is as if the world were reanimated, bursting with sense, and utterly alive.” Erudite and impassioned, Critchley’s intimate examination of mysticism speaks to a yearning for personal transformation and nothing less than enchantment. A stirring, lyrical meditation on transfiguration.

Critchley argues that mysticism can transcend religion to be primarily aesthetic.

Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight

Dasgupta, Sayantani | Univ. of North Carolina (180 pp.) | $22.00 paper Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781469681771

Reflections on being a Southeast Asian immigrant woman in America and on the meaning of finding—and making—a home in the West.

Dasgupta, now a UNC-Wilmington professor of creative writing, became entranced by the world outside India after reading Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a 9-year-old in New Delhi, never imagining that her love of words would lead her to the United States. In this compendium of 18 essays, the author muses on the peripatetic path that took her from the heat and crowds of New Delhi to an MFA writing program in rural Idaho in 2006 and, later, to a job on the North Carolina coast. Her first challenge was navigating majority-white spaces that, while not overtly hostile, made her uncomfortably aware of her foreignness. Despite feeling excluded, alone, and homesick for India, Dasgupta found a way forward through friendships, marriage to an Indian American Sikh, and a life that, like the Modcloth dress she wore as a wedding gown, defied the Hindu traditions in which she had been raised. When she eventually left to take up a professorship 2,800 miles away, the author surprised herself by feeling “constantly homesick” for Idaho. As had been the case in graduate school, her job made Dasgupta feel the singularity of her status as a brown-skinned female professional among white Americans. At the same time, it also offered her the chance to indulge her passion for adventure while making her crave reconnection to India, which she found by cooking the foods of her childhood. As she explores issues of

race, culture, and gender, Dasgupta’s lively, intelligent book celebrates the “honor and dignity” of embracing the discomforts of the transnational life, which offers the unexpected rewards and delights of the unfamiliar. Witty, thoughtful reading.

The Use of Photography

Ernaux, Annie & Marc Marie | Trans. by Alison L. Strayer | Seven Stories (208 pp.) | $22.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9781644214138

A Nobel Prize–winning author and her journalist lover tell the story of their affair.

In 2003, Ernaux began a passionate relationship with her co-author, Marc Marie. At the time, Ernaux had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment and was about to have surgery for breast cancer. The author soon discovered that her physical desire for Marie was matched by an equal desire to take pictures of the “material representation[s]” of their sexual encounters. When she told Marie that she was photographically recording the “[clothing] compositions…that organized themselves according to unknown laws, movements and gestures,” she learned that he had felt a desire to do the same. In this book, Ernaux pairs 14 of the more than 40 photos they took together with two essays, each produced independently of the other, by the author and by Marie. The photos record colorful “landscape[s]” left in the aftermath of encounters that took place over several months in multiple locations, including various rooms in Ernaux’s home and foreign hotels. As they describe each “scene,” the essays provide details about Ernaux and Marie’s developing relationship, like how they spent their time together on the day of the photograph or the songs they chose to represent “the elusive succession of their days.” With her

trademark clarity and simplicity, Ernaux’s essays also grapple with her struggle to come to accept both her diagnosis and the physical changes brought about by her cancer treatments, like baldness, loss of body hair, and scarring. The result of the pair’s unique word-and-image collaboration is a deeply poignant yet also celebratory expression of eroticism. Luminous and reflective writing in the face of death.

Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth

Esposito, Richard | Crime Ink/Penzler (360 pp.) | $30.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 9781613165775

A lively portrait of the legendary New York crime reporter and columnist. In this expansive, laudatory biography of the celebrated and often controversial journalist (1928-2017), Esposito, himself a veteran print and TV reporter as well as Breslin’s former newspaper colleague, meticulously chronicles his coverage of major events that shaped New York City. The book begins with Breslin’s reporting on the Son of Sam murders in 1977, including the exclusive letter he received from the killer, which exemplified his knack for being at the center of major stories. It also established his celebrity status: “With Son of Sam, Breslin knew he was ready to become even bigger, to become larger than life to an audience of millions.” Esposito explores Breslin’s connections to underworld figures, showcasing his ability to navigate both the streets and the corridors of power. His infamous interview with Mafia boss Jimmy Burke (immortalized as Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas) and his coverage of the John Gotti trial demonstrate Breslin’s unparalleled access to New York’s criminal underbelly and highlight his distinctive style of reporting as storytelling,

giving voice to a broad range of people he encountered in local bars and other urban venues. “Some would call this the heart of the New Journalism,” writes Esposito. “Breslin described it as the old journalism, saying that the only thing he and his colleague Tom Wolfe had discovered was that storytelling had been lost in journalism.” Esposito offers insights throughout into Breslin’s methods and the changing landscape of newspapers during his career. While his admiration for Breslin’s journalistic prowess and stature as a significant figure in American journalism is understandable, the book could have benefited from a more nuanced, less sycophantic perspective; it occasionally reads more like a eulogy than a balanced account. Entertaining and detailed, if overly reverential.

Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon

Fader, Mirin | Hachette (400 pp.)

$33.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780306831188

Straightforward, no-frills biography of Nigerian basketball player Hakeem “the Dream” Olajuwon. From Olajuwon’s beginnings as an athletic, competitive handball and soccer player in Lagos, Nigeria, to his time with the University of Houston playing for the Cougars, to his storied career with the Houston Rockets and Toronto Raptors, to his easygoing retirement on the Jordan mountainside, readers are provided many pertinent details about one man’s personal journey from an unwieldy, erratic upstart to a pious, wellrespected leader both in basketball and in the Muslim community. Olajuwon, who spent a good portion of his career being called “Akeem,” was an icon not only because of his stellar game play (he perfected

MARY L. TRUMP

With Donald Trump again on the ballot, the reluctant memoirist once more pulls back the curtain on her clan.

BY MARION WINIK

LIKE HER FIRST BOOK, A MEMOIR called Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary L. Trump’s latest, Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir (St. Martin’s, Sept. 10), arrives in an election year. ough the two books cover some of the same material, and both earned Kirkus stars, the di erence between them is apparent from their covers. e rst depicts the grinning face of an adolescent Donald Trump; the second features a childhood snapshot of Mary, backed up against a

chain-link fence. Mary, who holds graduate degrees in literature and in clinical psychology, spoke to us over Zoom from her home o ce in Manhattan about her books and her evolution as a writer. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to write this follow-up?

Originally, because I owed St. Martin’s a book. I was working on a novel, but they weren’t interested—with election season coming up, it wasn’t the time.

Despite the fact that I’ve now written three non ction books, as a writer, non ction is not really my thing. Then it occurred to me that I did not get to write the book I wanted to write the rst time around.

Because it focused on Donald?

Yes. That was the book that needed to be written. Although the book was embargoed for months before publication, Donald became aware of it shortly before it was out. He went to court to prevent it from being published. He managed to prevent me from speaking about it for two weeks after publication, but that was it. That September, I sued my family for fraud relating to the distribution of my grandfather’s estate. Donald countersued for $100 million. My suit was dismissed after three years. Donald’s suit is proceeding.

So this time you changed the angle— including material that had been left on the cutting room oor?

Yes. I had family stories left to tell. And I hoped to correct some of the assumptions people make about me, imagining I had a glorious childhood and very supportive parents.

As we learn, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, you’re still in trauma therapy stemming from the

Part of me hopes that this is the last nonfiction book. Right after this election is over, I’d like to go to a beach somewhere and write a novel.

negligent way your mother handled your childhood asthma. When you struggled to breathe at night, she would have you climb into bed with her, putting o getting help until the situation was dire.

Yes, in some ways I’m still trapped in that room, unable to breathe.

Did you struggle with depicting your dead mother in such a negative light? Mother is alive.

Oh, gosh, I just assumed… so she might read this book?

We haven’t spoken since 2019, so I have no idea. You’re right that it was not easy to tell this story, but I believe I was fair.

If you’re estranged from your mom, and your father died when you were just 16, how do you know all the stories about your parents’ early lives and marriage? I got most of them from my mother, a long time ago. Interestingly, my dad, who many people have told me was a phenomenal storyteller, never told me any stories. By the time I knew him, the person he actually was—the commercial pilot, the WASP from Queens who became the rst non-Jewish member of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, the guy who ew his friends out to Montauk in his Piper Cherokee for weekends of clambakes and deep-sea shing—didn’t exist anymore.

Because of his alcoholism?

More because his family, especially his father, completely destroyed him.

You revisit in the new book the painful questions you have about his death. When I went to say goodbye to my father the day before I left for boarding school, my grandmother told me he wasn’t home—but also wouldn’t let me in the house. Three weeks later, I learned over the phone that he had died.

The very rst time he was brought to the hospital was the day he died, though he was very, very ill for a long time before that. They just didn’t do anything about it. When he nally did go to the hospital, nobody went with him. I still

Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir

St. Martin’s | 288 pp. | $29.00 Sept. 10, 2024 | 9781250278470

wonder, did he ask for me? If they had called me, I could have been there.

Those scenes are very moving. In this book I feel I’ve gotten closer to the kind of writing I have always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, and one of my goals here was to make this as novelistic as possible while still telling the truth.

There are certainly hard truths to tell. For example, you refer to being repeatedly sexually abused when you were 4 years old by the teenage son of your day care provider.

One of the good things about having complex post-traumatic stress disorder is that I disassociate. I don’t feel much of anything about my past. My trauma therapist would have you know that’s not a good thing.

Another horrible thing is the unsigned letter that was sent to your mother when you were in fth grade, which inspired the title of the book. It was a terribly cruel letter, penned by a schoolmate but clearly with adult assistance. Do you still have this letter?

No. If it exists, my mother would have it. But while I couldn’t reproduce it verbatim, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was my rst piece of hate mail, and I didn’t know if it was written by someone I knew, possibly even someone I considered a friend. It put me

in a complete tailspin; it made me question everything. The real kicker is that my mother thought I needed to know about it.

Your brother, Fred Trump III, has also written a book, All in the Family. Did he have similar experiences?

I wouldn’t know because I have no interest in reading it.

But I saw that you defended him against an attack from Eric Trump. My brother has always struggled to support his disabled son, and Eric lied about the circumstances that required Fred to ask the family for money. My brother would have been able to take care of his son just ne if the tens of millions of dollars that should have come to him from the estate had been distributed. So, whatever my di erences with Fred, I was deeply o ended by what Eric did.

Do you have any idea if Fred or other family members have read your books?

That also is not of interest to me. Though if I had to guess, I’d bet [my aunt] Maryanne read them obsessively.

What’s next for you?

Part of me hopes that this is the last non ction book. Right after this election is over, I’d like to go to a beach somewhere and write a novel.

How about a YA novel about a little girl with asthma?

It’s interesting you say that—a friend of mine suggested that the rst three sections of this book could be the basis of a graphic young adult novel. I love that idea. In fact, I’ve already started.

How are you feeling about the election?

I don’t want to get ahead of things, but I’m feeling hopeful for the rst time in a very long time. But we need to be vigilant, and if the Harris campaign calls, I’m entirely at their disposal.

Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.

SEEN AND HEARD

Memoir

by Liza Minnelli

Coming in 2026

The entertainment legend will tell the story of her life and career in a new book.

Liza Minnelli will tell the story of her life and career in a new memoir.

Grand Central Publishing has acquired the book from the legendary singer and actor, the press announced in a news release, saying that the memoir, written in collaboration with singer Michael Feinstein, “promises to capture her vibrant and irreverent voice.”

the musical Cabaret and won an Oscar and Golden Globe for her performance. That same year saw the release of her now-legendary television concert Liza With a “Z.” In her later years, she has continued to sing and act, notably guest-starring on the sitcom Arrested

Development.

“Over dinner one night, I decided, it’s my own damn story.…I’m gonna share it with you because of all the love you’ve given me,”

Minnelli said in a statement. “So, until this book arrives, know that I’m laughing, safe in every way, surrounded by loved ones, and excited to see what’s right around the curve of life. Kids, wait ’til you hear this!”

Minnelli’s memoir, as yet untitled, is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2026.—M.S.

. She was also released her rst

Minnelli, the daughter of actor Judy Garland and lmmaker Vincente Minnelli, was born in Los Angeles in 1946. She began acting and singing as a child, winning a Tony Award at 19 for her performance in the musical Flora the Red Menace. She was also a teenager when she released her rst albums, Liza! Liza! and It Amazes Me

For more celebrity memoirs, visit Kirkus online.

In 1972, she starred as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s lm adaptation of

. Liza Minnelli

IN THE NEWS

Alexander Waugh Dies at 60

The author and grandson of Evelyn Waugh was known for his memoir, Fathers and Sons.

Alexander Waugh, the critic and author who wrote about his own literary family in a 2004 memoir, has died at 60, the New York Times reports.

Waugh, a London native, was the son of journalist Auberon Waugh and the grandson of legendary novelist Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited ). He was educated at the University of Manchester and began his career as a journalist, rst contributing cartoons to newspapers and then working as an opera critic for the U.K. Mail on Sunday and Evening Standard

He made his literary debut in 1995 with Classical Music: A New Way of Listening, which he followed up with Opera: A New Way of Listening, Time, and God. In 2004, he published Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, which told the story of his literary ancestors as well as his own life as a writer. The book drew praise from critics, including one from Kirkus, who called it “a candid, intimate and

touching portrait of the author’s masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.” Five years later, he wrote The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, a biography of the famed German Austrian family. Waugh’s admirers paid tribute to him on social media. On the platform X, journalist Elizabeth Winkler wrote, “I’m very sorry to hear about the death of Alexander Waugh, a kind, generous, and brilliant man who possessed, as this obit notes, the ‘full measure of the family’s eccentric and provocative wit.’” —M.S.

Alexander Waugh

For a review of Fathers and Sons, visit Kirkus online.

what was called “the Dream Shake,” his signature move) and his impressive height (roughly 6’10”) but primarily because he proved that a sports star can be proud of his heritage, nationality, and religious beliefs while entertaining crowds around the world in what was once traditionally considered an all-American game. Fader is effective in the early chapters, which have a documentary feel similar to that of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series combined with Leo Gast’s When We Were Kings ; we are shown how Africa, a continent generally stereotyped as struggling, has a rich culture with resource-rich countries and talented peoples. Fader efficiently portrays Olajuwon maturing from a young rabble-rouser who punched players and referees into a caregiver and guide for novice players just starting out. The best parts of the biography chronicle his multiple accomplishments and accolades: back-to-back championships, MVP wins, participation as a Nigerian American for Team USA in the Olympics, impossible comebacks from multiple injuries and illnesses, endorsement deals, etc. Fader falters somewhat in writing about the games themselves, so exciting to Olajuwon and to all those who experienced watching him, but curiously flat in her descriptions. Stronger as a portrait of an influential figure than as an exciting piece of sportswriting.

Fearless Speech: Breaking Free From the First Amendment

Franks, Mary Anne | Bold Type Books (256 pp.) | $29.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 9781645030539

Franks dreams of a world in which fearless speech is encouraged and defended.

FEARLESS SPEECH

An indictment of the First Amendment for protecting toxic speech while stifling speech that “challenges hierarchies of gender, race, religion, and class.”

A law professor at George Washington University and the author of The Cult of the Constitution , Franks claims that the First Amendment contributes to injustice by enabling powerful and privileged individuals and organizations to use speech to harm the most vulnerable. Cushioned by the law, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in 2017, and Twitter (now X) hosts and circulates bigoted and threatening posts. Such reckless speech strengthens racism and misogyny, she argues, while discussions of diversity, equality, inclusion, race, and gender are restricted in many public schools. Worsening matters is the false portrayal of the private, commodified world of social media as the new public sphere. Franks dreams of a world in which fearless speech that speaks truth to power is encouraged and defended. She thus shifts the debate from free versus censored speech to reckless versus fearless speech. Her heroes are people like Sophie Scholl, an outspoken student activist executed by the Nazis, and Christine Blasey Ford, who, at Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings, testified about his alleged teenage sexual assault on her. Although Franks discusses legal issues, she is more concerned that speech be evaluated in the context of “objective, historical, material conditions of subordination.” The issue is whether speech enhances or degrades justice and democracy, and her argument leads away from judicial reform to broad educational initiatives. Franks’ zealous tone and uncompromising approach, which may put off some readers, are nonetheless appropriate, given her view that the First Amendment has long been used to validate speech that causes

harm and glorifies violence beyond what a just and decent society should tolerate. Franks leaves it for others to make the counterargument.

A compelling case that any just assessment of free speech means thinking outside the frame of the First Amendment.

The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father

Franz, Caleb | Post Hill Press (272 pp.) $18.99 paper | Oct. 15, 2024 9781637589892

A reintroduction to a largely forgotten American hero.

Franz’s enlightening new text champions the Rev. John Rankin (1793-1886) as the “father of abolitionism” and as a most vital “conductor” in the Underground Railroad, a system that helped enslaved people escape and find eventual freedom. Born in Dandridge, Tennessee, in a Presbyterian (Calvinist) household, Rankin, who was surrounded by abolitionists in a slave-endorsing state, believed that slavery was oppressive and a sin against God. His convictions, which grew during the Second Great Awakening and after Gabriel Prosser’s slave rebellion, led Rankin to become a minister at Abingdon Presbytery in Tennessee—that is, until his abolitionist views were overshadowed by the slave-owning views of his congregation. The pressure became too great, so he, his wife, Jean, and their children left

Tennessee and moved to the free state of Ohio. Rankin built his home on what is lovingly called Liberty Hill in Ripley, Ohio, just across from the Ohio River, and spent the rest of his days there with his family, saving the lives of enslaved people crossing the river from Kentucky. Franz reveres Rankin; his admiring portrait leaves readers with a firm understanding of why Rankin is so significant a figure. Marshaling copious amounts of research, including Rankin’s autobiography, Franz provides a comprehensive look not just at Rankin but also at the lead-up to the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation. Abolition was a painstaking process, endangering the lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves to ensure that all had equal freedoms under the law, and ultimately costing the lives of thousands. Franz’s laudable work shines a light on one person who undertook that perilous cause.

An abolitionist’s love of God, country, and his fellow human beings superseded all else, including his life.

Shirley Chisholm In Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings

Ed. by Fraser, Zinga A. | Univ. of California Press (304 pp.) | $24.95 Oct. 8, 2024 | 9780520386983

A compendium of works by the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress. A former teacher, Chisholm represented Brooklyn’s 12th congressional district for seven consecutive terms, from 1969 to 1983. This collection of her writings is divided thematically into eight sections, including education, criminal justice, racism and civil rights, and women’s rights and leadership. The preface provides a sweeping introduction by Fraser, director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism at Brooklyn College. “Public oratory,” Fraser convincingly

writes, “is at the center of the Black freedom struggle, serving as one of its most valuable weapons.” The first of Chisholm’s writings here is a 1973 address she gave, titled “The Necessity for a New Thrust in Education Today,” in which she said, “Our primary function as educators must be to break from tradition when that tradition does not serve the present or retards the future; to reorient our school systems... in terms of imparting to our students and children a sense of self-respect, a sense of hope, a sense of belonging, a sense of power.” The importance of education for Black people serves as a consistent theme in Chisholm’s speeches, as does women’s activism. She was a rare voice who argued against spending money on weapons, writing, “I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending $9 billion…on elaborate, unnecessary, and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation’s capital get nothing.” Chisholm’s bracing collection could not be more timely, with Vice President Kamala Harris vying for the office that Chisholm hoped to win in 1972, when she ran as the first Black woman to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Potent and relevant pieces by a groundbreaking Black politician.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer

Freebury-Jones, Darren | Manchester Univ. Press (296 pp.) | $36.95 Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781526177322

A British scholar shows how the Bard’s works are embedded in a network within the English early modern dramatic scene.

Shakespeare scholars have long perpetuated the idea—first set forth by

Shakespeare’s First Folio editors—that the Bard was sui generis: a literary unicorn. In this book, Freebury-Jones posits that, while Shakespeare was a supremely gifted writer, he also engaged in various acts of literary “borrowing” that go beyond the occasional lifting of phrases from the works of his contemporaries. He arrives at his conclusion not only by considering relationships Shakespeare had with fellow actors, playwrights, and theater company managers, but also by using a textual database called Collocations and N-grams, which contains over 527 plays from 1552 to 1657. As he discusses Shakespeare’s connection to wellknown contemporaries like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe and lesser-known ones like George Peele, Freebury-Jones mines this database— which allows users to track continuous word sequences (collocations) between plays—to uncover phrases that connect various playwrights, but also to speculate on the true extent of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his peers. For example, the author suggests that the playwright made liberal use of such Kydian dramatic devices as the playwithin-a-play and also drew far more heavily on Kydian language in plays like Richard III than most scholars have believed. This evidence, combined with such historical “knowns” as the way Elizabethan playwrights imitated and collaborated with each other, adds to Freebury-Jones’ compelling theory that Shakespeare’s plays are the dialogic artifacts of a greater artistic community, rather than the brilliant “soliloquies” of an isolated genius. Persuasive and precise, this exceptionally well-researched book is an invaluable addition to scholarship that examines how literary collaborations shaped the modern Shakespeare canon. Digital scholarship at its best.

For an exploration of Shakespeare’s identity, visit Kirkus online.

A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches From Arizona

Grant, Richard | Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $29.99 | Sept. 17, 2024 | 9781668011027

A British journalist profiles the American city and state where he has spent half his life. Grant first lived in Tucson on something of a whim in the early 1990s as a 20-something looking for a life with few constraints or demands, pushing the boundaries of both luck and risk. Over the next 20 years there, he married, divorced, and married again; built a robust freelance journalism career chasing stories flavored with danger; and consorted with various slightly offbeat writers and creators. After about a decade away, Grant arrives back in Tucson with his wife and young daughter shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, finding a beloved city somewhat changed and himself leaning more into his role as a father, less enchanted by the personal risks that marked his past pursuits. The story of Grant’s return to Arizona and his keen, bemused observations of its position in the present sociopolitical context combine with memories from his earlier days and outline the contours of his own life, career, relationships, and longing for excitement. His reflections strike a chord of wistful satisfaction, tinged with just a hint of late-professional bravado, but this is counterbalanced with the humility and sincere wonder contained in his musings on his daughter and parenthood. Into the space created by his own narrative threads, he pours the characters, politics, and landscape of the city and state he has made home, revealed through accounts of a cherished literary mentor, polarizing campaign rallies, and family camping trips. Shot through with harrowing events and idiosyncratic characters, Grant’s text resists easy tropes to deliver an endearing, if at times

absurd, portrait of a surprisingly alluring American hotbed for every issue from immigration and gun laws to climate change and Native American tribal rights.

Tender and hopeful, an engaging read.

How Banksy Saved Art History

Grovier, Kelly | Thames & Hudson (224 pp.)

$35.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780500027059

Hypermodern alt-art works best when fully aware of its lineage, says this study. The artist Banksy has always been an oddity. His works appear in public spaces but he is determined to remain anonymous. He is applauded as a creative entrepreneur but he disdains the established art world. Cultural critic Grovier sets out to unravel Banksy’s work and to understand how and why he has risen out of the morass of underground art. The key, Grovier says, is Banksy’s deep understanding of the history of European art, coupled with his willingness to reference and parody some of its most famous pieces. Grovier employs a simple technique to make his point, placing an image of the original work alongside Banksy’s derivation of it, with a short explanatory essay. A prehistoric cave painting becomes a quasi-graffiti piece, except that the caveman is pushing a shopping cart. Michelangelo’s David wears a flak jacket, and Degas’ petite ballerina is now equipped with a gas mask. The pathetic survivors in Gericualt’s The Raft of the Medusa are transformed into desperate asylum seekers trying to hail a passing luxury yacht. In one of the most ironic pieces, Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can emerges (with a strange inside-out drollness) as an economy Brand X soup can. Some of these are satirical fun, while others have a tragic undertone hidden by the apparent roughness of the execution. Grovier does a good job of providing

context, and readers who are familiar with Banksy’s work will become aware of an extra dimension. Those who have only heard of Banksy’s name may be pleasantly surprised to find that there is more to him than meets the eye. Thought-provoking images and insightful text delve into the humor and resonance of Banksy’s work.

Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports

Jacob, Mark & Matthew Jacob Rowman & Littlefield (272 pp.) | $35.00 Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781538181454

Abe Saperstein changed the face of American sport, says this account. It might be hard to believe now, but there was a time when basketball was a somewhat marginal sport. A key figure in taking it to popular, professional status was Abe Saperstein, best remembered as the owner and promoter of the Harlem Globetrotters team. The Jacob brothers, both experienced sportswriters, set out to tell his story, admitting that the task was made difficult by Saperstein’s tendency to embellish, exaggerate, and invent. In fact, it is not even clear when the team was founded, although it was sometime in the late 1920s (and the team was from Chicago, not New York). Saperstein, the son of Jewish immigrants, saw a wealth of talent in the Black community and took his team on a series of grueling crosscountry tours, including to the segregated South. It was tough going, but the team, combined with Saperstein’s talent for marketing, slowly climbed to the championship level. When the Trotters started doing entertaining tricks at halftime, the spectators loved it. The show became a trademark, and Saperstein developed tactics that turned the game into a dynamic, crowd-pleasing spectacle. He was a tough and often paternalistic

boss—and sometimes criticized for playing up Black minstrel stereotypes—but when Saperstein died in 1966, he left a legacy of breaking down racial barriers and changing the nature of the game.

The Jacob brothers provide a fast-paced narrative of an underappreciated game changer.

The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought

Jameson, Fredric | Verso (480 pp.) | $39.95 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781804295892

A cauldron of ideas.

In the spring of 2021, during the Covid-19 lockdown, literary scholar Jameson delivered his Duke University course remotely. The transcription of those 24 classes, edited by Welch, comprises an intellectually rigorous overview of post–World War II French thought, “informed,” Jameson notes, “by an autobiographical impulse” and reflecting his abiding philosophical interests in Marxism, aesthetics, utopia, and political theory. His sweeping cultural and philosophical history explores a period of “tremendous intellectual energy” that expressed itself, beyond philosophy and metaphysics, “in anthropology, in literary studies, in statecraft, in psychoanalytic forms,” becoming “not philosophy but theory.” Jameson considers existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and Marxism in the context of tumultuous historical events, including the Nazi occupation of France, the Cold War, De Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, France’s emergence as “a modern technocratic capitalist state,” and the uprisings of 1968. Arguing that the history of philosophy “is not a history of ideas” but “a history of problems,” Jameson

examines the problems that occupied thinkers such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze, Latour, and Lévi-Strauss. Among those myriad problems are these: “Where did my unique consciousness come from?” Can language “really express reality”? “How can you have a society without power?” Portraying a “period of great rivalry,” Jameson provides biographical context for many individuals in his wellpopulated study: Lacan was a physician who traveled in surrealist circles and whose patients included Sartre, who came to him suffering from hallucinations. Bataille was a librarian with an interest in “anything heretical or underground.” The abrasive Derrida “would drive people crazy.” Tracing webs of influence, and rebellion, among them, Jameson conveys the intellectual vitality of a vastly changing world. Challenging lectures that reward attentive reading.

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

Kirsch, Adam | Norton (160 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 20, 2024 | 9781324105343

A poet and critic argues that an academic idea has alchemized into jet fuel for antisemitism. In this slim, carefully argued book, Kirsch contends that the notion of settler colonialism is now a lethal ideology, drunk on its own violence. An editor at the Wall Street Journal , Kirsch says this danger burst into view in the widespread global response to Hamas’ slaughter of 1,200 Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. “In a time of terrible grief and anger, the ideas discussed here may seem abstract,” he writes, “but in the long term, nothing does more than our ideas to determine the ways we feel

and act.” He describes a “frank enthusiasm for violence against Israeli civilians” in much of the current political discourse, asserting that “it’s impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the worldview that derives from it.”

Kirsch identifies its most famous construct, from Patrick Wolfe, a British-born Australian scholar. Wolfe wrote in 1968 that settler colonialism is enacted when “the colonizers came to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” Scholars pointed this lens initially at Australia, Canada, and the United States. Kirsch sees land acknowledgments as one voguish thread. Others have critiqued land acknowledgments as toothless moral theater, appealing to American Puritanism. But when the settler colonialism lens is applied to Israel, the Jewish state is deemed to be illegitimate, outraging Jewish citizens who see these contested spaces as home. Such seemingly innocuous practices as land acknowledgments, Kirsch argues, lead to young people harassing their Jewish peers on college campuses. They “are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.” Kirsch, who often writes about Jewish ideas, believes there is “no true indigeneity.” He writes compellingly, laying out his arguments with the care of a poet. But by keeping his focus assiduously off of Israel’s lethal assault on Gaza—and the wider issue of Palestinian suffering—the author dilutes his case.

A rigorous moral reckoning falters by leaving out half of the equation.

For more by Adam Kirsch, visit Kirkus online.

The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks: The Story of a Design Icon

Konstanski, Daniel | Sourcebooks (336 pp.)

$39.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781464234415

A lifelong LEGO fan delves into the history and operations of one of the world’s most beloved and successful toy companies. Hard to believe, but LEGO (shorthand for “Play well” in Danish) began in 1932 as a manufacturer primarily of wooden toys. The family business, based in Billund, Denmark, turned to plastic as the main medium for its output when the founder’s son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, was inspired by a conversation on a train with a Copenhagen toy store buyer to develop a “system” of toys that children (or their parents) could step into with one purchase that could lead to another and another. Christiansen’s insight was to create a modular little plastic brick that children could use to build small replicas of objects in their daily life—houses, cars, trucks, gas stations, ships, airplanes, etc. Konstanski’s curiosity about the design principles behind the success of this little artifact from the 1950s leads him on an exploration into the particulars of the steps and leaps in the company’s organization and creative processes over the decades. His research reveals a company ever ready to experiment and innovate. All along the way, LEGO built carefully and conservatively on what came before. “Novelty is instilled not by new parts,” Konstanski observes about one area of the business that could stand for the whole, “but by using existing elements in fresh and exciting ways, or through incorporating subject matter not being explored elsewhere in the product portfolio.” Readers of any age will be enchanted by the colorful illustrations showing off LEGO construction at its finest and most complete.

The text may stymie casual readers, but collectors, designers, and

entrepreneurs will find loads of great information here.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

Lewis, Rhodri | Princeton Univ. (400 pp.)

$39.95 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9780691246697

An expansive look at 10 plays. Following up on his book on Hamlet , Lewis offers ambitious and intriguing discussions about Shakespeare’s tragedies. The Princeton professor wants to “understand as fully as I can what Shakespeare wrote, and why he wrote it and when he wrote it.” We must, he argues, attend closely to the tragedies as “works of dramatic art,” allowing us to engage with history, philosophy, theology, and politics and to understand how the Bard was influenced by his sources and centuries of humanism. Among his early tragedies, the “slasher movie” Titus Andronicus is “difficult to love,” but much that we love in the late plays, Lewis reminds us, is here in “embryonic form.” Romeo and Juliet is “not a work of tragic inevitability, but one that takes tragic inevitability as one of its subjects.”

Lewis neatly shows how errors of judgment drive the plot in Julius Caesar. In Hamlet , “Shakespeare makes the case…for tragedy as the best and perhaps only medium through which one might discern what it is to be human.” In Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra , Shakespeare slyly “wants us not only to see ourselves, but to see the ways in which we see ourselves,” something his tragic protagonists fail to do.

Lewis believes Othello is Shakespeare’s “most intellectually demanding play.”

In Macbeth, “tragedy comprises not only the mimetic presentation of being in time, but of our various attempts to go beyond it.” Succinctly put, King Lear translates “calamity into tragedy,” and Coriolanus is a “tragedy of selfhood and vexed identity.” Ulti-

mately, Lewis sees the tragedies as a “series of experiments” whose brilliant aesthetic order reflects the disorder of human experience. An erudite and scholarly exploration of the Bard’s work.

Amplify!: My Fight for Asian America

Lim, Dion | Third State Books (272 pp.)

$29.95 | Sept. 10, 2024 | 9798890130006

An Asian American newscaster uses her platform to shine a light on bigotry, then confronts the complexities of activism.

Lim, anchor of San Francisco’s ABC news and author of a workplace self-help book (Make Your Moment: The Savvy Woman’s Communication Playbook for Getting the Success You Want, 2019) begins this account on Feb. 24, 2020, the day she received a horrifying video depicting the beating of an elderly Asian man in the street. “Just two weeks before, I had been yukking it up with celebrities on the red carpet at the Oscars, wielding a bedazzled microphone and wearing a mass of fake red hair,” she confesses, but this proved a watershed moment. She persuaded her bosses to let her cover the story and began what is by now a four-year campaign to draw attention to the toll of anti-Asian hate, which was then about to spike due to Covid-19. One of her early reports put her at odds with San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, whose hand-ling of the case against Eric Ramos-Hernandez for his attack on 84-year-old Rong Xin Liao enraged the Asian American community nationwide. Lim steadfastly continued her mission to get the word out, eventually suffering panic attacks and other difficulties. Lim offers little detail about her personal life; the first time you hear about her husband, it’s to learn that he’s Greek American and so cannot fully empathize with her

distress. The continual complaints of her mother about her high-profile efforts provide a note of humor: “Didi, We saw you and Dementia Biden’s picture on Facebook. Most people don’t approve of Biden. 90% do not say good things on him, viewers made very good point. Biden is unpopular with American people So is Camaleeee.” The appalling truth of anti-Asian hate is delivered in carefully researched detail.

Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes

Macy, Jon | Street Noise Books (320 pp.)

$24.99 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781951491338

Graphic biography of “the most famous unknown of the [20th] century.”

With visual stylings that recall Jazz Age poster art, Macy evokes the life and times of modernist Djuna Barnes, whose social circle was a veritable Rolodex of the Lost Generation. Macy begins in medias res, as Peggy Guggenheim rushes to Barnes’ rescue for the umpteenth time in 1938, “another bad year for Djuna Barnes.” Macy then takes readers back to 1912 and Barnes’ early career as a journalist, at 19 supporting her mother and younger brothers. From there, he goes back even further, to Barnes’ decidedly unusual childhood in an ill-fated utopian commune established by her grandmother to promote free love— and from which she was married off at 17 against her will. Her father, characterized by Macy as “an idiot manchild,” was a talentless artist, but Barnes had talent to spare. Her “special brand of snark” helped her find a home with the literary elite, among whom “Djuna was on a mission to be as experimental an artist as possible.” To give readers a taste of what this means, Macy works quotations of her writing into the dialogue from time to time. These snippets attest to her facility

with modernist wordplay; his presentation of an English-language reading of her 1958 play, The Antiphon , reveals her at possibly her most challenging (“What does ‘fornication of the mint’ mean?” wonders an audience member). Barnes’ fiery red hair draws the eye in Macy’s otherwise monochromatic panels, visually underscoring the vitality that made Guggenheim and T.S. Eliot such loyal friends. She was not so lucky with lovers, of whom there were many and of such variety that in her waning years “she became an LGBT icon” (but rejected the label). By the end, readers will understand Macy’s admiration for this woman whose “greatest creation was herself.”

A powerful introduction to a formidable personality.

It Gets Better...Except When It Gets Worse: And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me

Maines, Nicole | Dial Press (224 pp.)

$29.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780593243121

A young transgender woman tells of her fight against bigotry and misogyny. Maines “came out as trans when I was three years old,” realizing her “boy-body felt wrong to me.” By age 10, she had socially transitioned—no longer Wyatt, now Nicole. She was the anonymous plaintiff in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court case in which the court ruled that her school district could not deny her access to a female bathroom for being transgender. Maines was also the subject of the bestseller Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (2015), “about my parents learning how to raise a trans child, especially my dad, who was cast as having the story’s ‘biggest transformation of all’”: from NRA conservative to trans advocate and motivational speaker.

During the course of her life story, we learn about the trauma and eventual resolution of her gender reassignment surgery, her being cast as TV’s first trans superhero on the CW’s Supergirl (2018), and her finding roles as actress, activist, and comic book creator. Maines attests that she did not bend her experience to fit an arbitrary inspirational story arc, but her singular voice powers the book; she is open and humorous and a bit sly. She claims to be “just one plaintive voice, begging people not to be bigots and homophobes,” but she sells herself a bit short. Readers learn about the value of puberty blockers, how a gender-segregated bathroom becomes “the site of potential, and likely, panic,” and how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid might be the story of a girl born into the wrong body, “a positive picture of what transition could mean.” This is the memoir of a still young and confident woman, with more accomplishments yet to come. A proud transgender woman is “loved and wanted as I was.”

Kirkus Star

You Lied to Me

About God: A Memoir

Marich, Jamie | North Atlantic (296 pp.) $19.95 paper | Oct. 15, 2024 9798889840442

A spiritual memoir that does not shy away from abuse, queerness, or the multifaceted character of God. Marich, an acclaimed therapist and author of several books, grew up between religions—her mother’s Catholicism and the Evangelicalism to which her father converted when she was young. In the confusion bred by her opposing yet equally devout parents, Marich learned to hate her body and fear hell, symptoms faced by many survivors of spiritual abuse. “Not only did

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Book to Screen

Britney Spears Biopic in the Works

Jon M. Chu will direct a lm adaptation of Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me.

Britney Spears’ blockbuster memoir is heading to the big screen, Variety reports. Universal Pictures is developing a lm adaptation of Spears’ The Woman in Me

The memoir, published last year by Gallery, tells the story of the singer’s often troubled life and career. A critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman.”

The lm will be directed by Jon M. Chu, known for such movies as Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights. The rst part of Chu’s two- lm adaptation of the musical

Wicked is scheduled to premiere in November; he is also working on a movie adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Spears’ memoir, which sold more than 2 million copies in its rst three months on sale, came two years after the singer, known for hit singles including “... Baby One More Time” and “Oops!…I Did It Again,” was released from the conservatorship she had been under for more than 13 years. The book quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Spears made an oblique mention of the adaptation on social media, nodding to Marc Platt (Legally Blonde, La La Land ), who will produce the lm. “Excited to share with my fans that I’ve been working on a secret

project with #MarcPlatt,” Spears wrote on the platform X. “He’s always made my favorite movies…stay tuned.”—M.S.

For a review of The Woman in Me, visit Kirkus online.

Britney Spears

they lie to me about God,” Marich writes, reckoning with the long-lasting effects of her childhood. “They lied to me about me. My body. My sexuality. My essence as a person.” As Marich became an adult and continued her own spiritual searching, she uncovered those lies and began the spiritual healing journey that would allow her to engage in the therapeutic and activist work she does to help many other survivors like herself. With tender honesty, Marich writes about the abuse she experienced from her parents, especially her father, as well as all the people who have helped her through addiction recovery, in learning to embrace her queerness and restore her faith. This faith, placed in a queer, feminine divine constructed from several traditions, has given Marich the love and belonging she never found in the narrow, fear-filled faiths of her childhood and early adulthood. Though readers who did not grow up religious may struggle to relate with Marich’s spiritual story, it will likely resonate with readers of any faith, past or present. At the end of each chapter, “expressive arts” prompts invite readers to engage in the work of examining their relationship to spirituality by constructing their own spiritual memoirs. An intimate and important memoir of deconstructing and reconstructing faith after abuse.

The

Raceless Antiracist:

Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism

Mason, Sheena Michele | Pitchstone Publishing (224 pp.) | $17.95 paper Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781634312523

understanding and eliminating the root causes of racism. The majority of current antiracist thought and action fails, Mason argues, because it provides a superficial fix to the scientifically debunked category of race. In other words, “trying to reform or reconstruct race/ism is like trying to fix a house with a rotten structure by throwing a new coat of paint over it.” For Mason, the only way forward is racelessness, or, “the undoing of our belief in human ‘races’ and our practice of assigning ‘races’ to humans.” Mason positions herself as “a registered independent…as far to the left as you can be without being completely off of the spectrum” and her argument as “the furthest logical conclusion” of the more familiar work of critical race theorists and “my antiracist contemporaries, such as Ibram X. Kendi.” Aware that a call for racelessness is controversial and has the potential to be misinterpreted, Mason repeatedly distinguishes her approach from “colorblindness” (as frequently invoked by the political right) and admonishes those who would willfully misuse her arguments. Mason has good reason to do so; her discussion of race and police violence could be easily co-opted by those with no vested interest in antiracism. At times, Mason writes in an accessible, direct manner—“Stay with me, reader, this is not your typical antiracist book...”—and yet the analysis that predominates in the book’s second half makes it best suited to an academic audience. Similarly, the “45-Day Guide” in the appendix includes several activities that few readers, outside of a classroom, would be inclined to undertake.

Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy

Michaels, Jon & David Noll | One Signal/ Atria (384 pp.) | $29.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 9781668023235

Examination of an America driven by rightwing anger and revenge.

A provocative contribution to antiracist literature.

Sheena Michele Mason (Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism), 2022) offers readers the “togetherness wayfinder,” a tool for

A considered but ultimately unpersuasive argument for racelessness as the future of antiracism.

For more antiracist literature, visit

Law professors Michaels and Noll start off with a chilling quote from right-wing political strategist Steve Bannon, who offered his podcast listeners some advice: “You just have to impose your will .” He was urging his fans to resist the inauguration of Joe Biden as president; that comment was broadcast on Jan. 5, 2021. Bannon, the authors argue, is in the vanguard of a new class of political vigilantes: “loosely connected cadres of right-wing activists, lawyers, thugs, grifters, and plutocrats who rally around a twice impeached president and blame their problems—real and manufactured— on Democrats, minorities, foreigners, scientists, bureaucrats, and educators.” The authors trace the origins of what they call “Vigilante Democracy,” a system that recruits “citizen culture warriors” to uphold white Christian power, to right-wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Sarah Palin. They also discuss the right’s embrace of George Zimmerman, who gunned down an unarmed Black teenager in a gated Florida community, and Kyle Rittenhouse, who after an altercation shot and killed a protestor at a Wisconsin racial justice demonstration. Vigilante Democracy, Michaels and Noll write, “deploys lawyers, gunslingers, thugs, parent associations, snitches, podcasters, influencers, keyboard warriors, and QAnon trolls” to ban books, restrict abortion, and demonize transgender children. The remedy, the authors conclude, lies with blue states playing “constitutional hardball”; they propose a series of laws that the states could

Kirkus online.

pass to combat right-wing extremism. Concerned progressives, who have been beaten down by MAGA adherents but energized by recent liberal electoral victories, will find this interesting and inspiring reading. The examples of vigilantism the authors give won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has paid much attention to American political culture, but the book does present a coherent narrative that explains the nation’s descent into violence and authoritarianism. Red meat for progressives, tempering its outrage with hopefulness and a plan for moving forward.

Here, Now: Essays

Mirsky, Michelle Suzanne | Northwestern Univ. (192 pp.) | $22.00 paper | Oct. 15, 2024 9780810147843

An Austinbased essayist examines the evolution of her grief after a beloved son’s death.

On the morning after Election Day 2010, Mirsky’s threeyear-old son Lev died of cancer. His passing left a mark so indelible that every fall since then, the author prepares herself “for the nameless but certain catastrophe I know is coming.” In this collection of 18 essays, Mirsky traces the personal and emotional trajectory of the decade that followed her loss. Divorce and the end of life in her dream house came within a year of her son’s demise. Yet through this unimaginable sorrow, Mirsky came to see that rather than creating a void that demanded self-annihilation, Lev’s absence had created a “vessel” that demanded to be filled “with wonder and experiences and joy.” She set about this task by learning to make new friends, “dating and discarding” men like a teenager, and venturing into the world of stand-up comedy. As her sadness settled, Mirsky found she could “tell the whole story of Lev’s life…with a smile” and better cope

with the shocks—like the election of Donald Trump in 2016—that sometimes came around the anniversary of her son’s death. Six years afterward, grief had become more of a “lens” through which she could accept the senselessness of things she could not change. A year later, in 2019, she remarried, and by the time Covid-19 shut down the world in 2020, she had learned to take “nothing for granted” and had found unfamiliar tranquility in both her life and relationships. Lyrical and probing, Mirsky’s essays plumb the depths of maternal grief while celebrating the resilience and capaciousness of the human heart. Generous and emotionally immersive.

Stories Left in Stone: Trails and Traces in Cáceres, Spain

Nahumko, Troy | Univ. of Alberta Press (368 pp.) | $29.99 paper Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781772127744

A Canadian teacher fashions a travelogue about his adopted hometown in Extremadura, Spain, hub of diverse civilizations. Returning to live in his wife’s hometown in Spain, raising his children, and teaching English as a profession, author Nahumko, from Edmonton, offers a deep exploration of the southwestern county of Cáceres, deep in Extremadura, an agricultural center bordering Portugal. The town itself is notable for the Paleolithic rock art found in its Maltravieso cave, some painted by Neanderthals more than 60,000 years ago. Although the author begins with a rarely permitted dive into the cave, he does not return to this fascinating paleoanthropological story until later, rather concentrating on his own story involving always being considered the outsider, confronting the Fascist past, and taking side trips to Moorish, Roman, and early Christian ruins.

As a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1986), Cáceres is Europe’s third-largest intact medieval city and rarely changes. Nahumko also writes about his search for a house and why most Spaniards live in apartment houses— which seems to have its roots in the mass exodus of people from the countryside to the cities in search of work after the Spanish Civil War. As a teacher he is keenly interested in the profession and how the lives of Spanish civil servants “depend entirely on how high they score on the list of available jobs.” He seeks out tour guides, shop owners, and politicians and finds that the town is less conservative than it used to be. The city is a rare find, yet many involved in its preservation despair at what already has been lost to careless development.

A fresh and engaging outsider perspective on life in Spain.

Kirkus Star

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History From NPR Music

National Public Radio, Inc. | HarperOne (352 pp.) | $40.00 | Oct. 1, 2024 9780063270336

A wide-ranging exploration of the role of women in popular music over the last century. The book draws on the NPR project

“Turning the Tables,” created by Ann Powers, Jill Sternheimer, and Alison Fensterstock, to document how women have been “musical pathfinders, innovators, and standard-bearers.” The text of the book consists mainly of segments from that show, along with bits from other NPR shows like “All Things Considered,” some only a few sentences long. They cover female artists from 1920s pioneers like Bessie Smith and Mother Maybelle Carter to midcentury icons including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Barbra

Streisand, rock stars Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, right up to modern-day chartbusters Beyonce and Taylor Swift, with lots of others from every school of music. And there is a fair bit of attention paid to non-U.S. performers such as South Africa’s Miriam Makeba, Iceland’s Björk, and Brazil’s Gal Costa. Of the longer essays, some are largely biographical, while others record the artist’s impact on the writer’s own life. The shorter ones vary between interview snippets and comments on specific records, the latter drawn from two lists created for the radio show (and included in the book) of “greatest albums” by women—one covering the whole history of recording, the other from the 21st century. Omissions are inevitable in such an ambitious project, but almost every reader is likely to find a host of new names to check out. Recommended for anyone who takes music—especially women’s music—seriously.

An indispensable survey of the too-often neglected role of women in creating the music we all listen to.

First Lady of Laughs:

The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian

Overbeke, Grace Kessler | New York Univ. (320 pp.) | $35.00 | Sept. 17, 2024 9781479818150

Long-overdue assessment of a pioneering female comic. For many years, Jean Carroll (19112010) was one of the few women headlining a comedy act in vaudeville and, once her husband and partner was drafted in 1943, probably the only one working as a “single.” The author of this valuable if decidedly academic study opens with a 2006 tribute to Carroll at the Friars Club to spotlight

An “absinthe underground” enabled a con artist to sell bottles filled with ersatz blends.

THE ABSINTHE FORGER

her enormous influence on subsequent generations of female comics; Joy Behar, Lily Tomlin, Rita Rudner, and Anne Meara were among those testifying to the thrill of seeing her on The Ed Sullivan Show and elsewhere in the 1950s. From an immigrant Jewish family, Carroll was onstage before she turned 11 and already tough enough to get paid by threatening to expose a rigged amateur contest. She seamlessly made the transition from vaudeville to radio to television and nightclub stand-up comedy, along the way transitioning from playing stereotypical “Dumb Dora” bits and joking about her looks to unabashedly presenting herself as a polished, attractive, assertive woman whose jokes, frequently at the expense of her husband, were based on personal observations and delivered in a conversational style that was new at the time. Overbeke, an assistant professor of theater at Columbia College in Chicago, sketches Carroll’s career in the context of an evolving show business landscape, noting that “the changing venues altered Carroll’s work and the overall genre of stand-up comedy.” She also focuses on the way Carroll challenged stereotypes about women in general and Jewish women in particular, “demonstrat[ing] that Jewish femininity was compatible with sophistication and even glamour.” More excerpts from Carroll’s monologues and fewer academic catchphrases like “representation” and “double coding” would make this book more appealing to a general readership, but anyone interested in the history of comedy will find valuable material here. A welcome first step in making a legend among her sister comics better known to a wider audience.

The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit

Rail, Evan | Melville House (368 pp.)

$32.00 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781685891541

The cultural history of absinthe, via an audacious contemporary fraud. Rail, most of whose previous books are about beer, assembles a multilayered account of absinthe’s return to mainstream society, navigating the history of decadence and moral panics that led to most countries banning the liquor from 1915 until about 2007. The existence of an “absinthe underground,” fixated on illicit distilling and on unearthing stashes of pre-ban absinthe bottles, enabled a con artist calling himself Christian to sell reclaimed antique bottles filled with his carefully ersatz blends, which simulated highly sought-after pre-ban absinthes that routinely sold for thousands of euros in these online communities. “He made a small fortune on it, but he basically ruined the whole absinthe community,” one distiller comments. Rail explores how Christian fooled even connoisseurs: “The man was a cornerstone of the absinthe world, a trusted authority on both antiques and spirits.” While attempting to track down Christian (who scrubbed his online presence after exposure by other prominent “absintheurs”), Rail wanders through European locales where absinthe distilling has revived, including Switzerland and

Czechoslovakia, and meets iconoclastic figures from the absinthe revival, most of whom were befriended and then burned by Christian. Rail argues that the incident exemplifies the degree to which high-end drinking culture relies on trust and social currency, concluding that as a result of Christian’s exposure, “Doubts extended to the entirety of absinthe culture. Part of the problem was that no one knew how long the counterfeits had been circulating.” His writing is lively and informed but sometimes rambling, with digressions about his food writing, the science behind unmasking the phony spirits, and the contentious personalities of the since-dispersed underground absinthe scene. An entertaining survey of spirits culture past and present.

I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage

Raskin, Allison | Hanover Square Press (304 pp.) | $28.99 | Oct. 15, 2024 9781335012517

Marriage, commitment, and modern-day relationships in Western society. From author and comedian Raskin comes a sincere examination of the laws, history, and social norms surrounding Western society’s expectations for a successful relationship and marriage. Drawing on personal experience as well as interviews and first-person stories from American couples, she explores the cultural effects of marriage and how modern-day relationships continually change and evolve. Beginning by questioning what the actual definition of marriage is and why so many unions are often dissolved, she invites readers to explore the complexities of marriage in society today. “I think our changing world is developing a new relationship toward it. People

considering marriage are confronting different variables...and it’s left them with a lot of uncertainty and differing opinions than past generations.”

Weaving research and statistics with viewpoints shaped by her experiences with OCD and anxiety, Raskin challenges her audience to ask questions and to explore the “why” when deciding what modern-day marriage means to each person. Ten chapters explore the different variables to consider when determining whether marriage is right for someone, including sex, cultural norms, financial issues, couples therapy, religion, and divorce. Ending on a compassionate note, Raskin urges readers to define marriage for themselves and their individual needs. “I think the true value of modern marriage is getting to build your own definition of what it actually means to be married,” she writes. “In Western society at least, marriage has shifted from a requirement to a choice. And not just the choice of whether to get married, but the choice of what kind of marriage to build together.”

An engaging and eye-opening investigation.

A Rift in Time: Travels With My Ottoman Uncle

Shehadeh, Raja | Other Press (272 pp.) $16.99 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 9781635425215

Tracing the journey of his great-great uncle through onceopen multiethnic Ottoman borders, a Palestinian writer finds their shared activism in “resistance politics.”

Shehadeh’s great-great uncle, Najib Nassar, was a Christian journalist from Haifa in the pre–World War I Ottoman Empire, where many ethnic groups lived together amicably and the borders were fluid. The rise of nationalism, especially Turkish

nationalism and Zionism, the author writes, destabilized and fragmented the region. As the editor of the newspaper Al Karmil , Nassar advocated for Arab independence “within the Ottoman structure” and worried that “the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would open the gates for the colonization of the Levant.” Nassar favored the Allies against the German/ Austrian/Ottoman alliance in World War I and went underground in March 1915, often taken in by Bedouins and eluding arrest for three years. After the war ended, he argued that the British mandate in Palestine favored Jewish immigration. The author, a human rights activist, alternates flashbacks to his own threats of arrest, either by Israel or by the Palestinian Authority, with the retelling of his great-great uncle’s story. Delineating his family’s narrative of displacement, he notes that they have grown to “feel and act like fugitives in our own land.” He crisscrosses the territory spreading out from the Rift Valley—where throughout history armies of Canaanites and Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, Muslims and Crusaders, Ottomans and Europeans have all battled—and describes the vast, troubling changes. A sorrowful, occasionally bitter disquisition on the loss of Palestinian agency.

Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics

Shenk, Timothy | Columbia Global Reports (264 pp.) | $18.00 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 9798987053669

A history professor finds a clue to what happened to the Democratic Party (and what might become of it) in the careers of two influential political consultants. The U.S. hasn’t had the chance to deliver its verdict yet, but for the left

in some parts of the world, this has been a pretty good year. Voters in the U.K., France, and Mexico handed electoral victories to liberal and center-left politicians, which U.S. Democrats might count as good news if they weren’t so worried about what might happen here in November. In his new book, Shenk refrains from predicting who might win the next U.S. election, but he does offer some context about how the Democratic Party (and its center-left counterparts in the U.K., Israel, and South Africa) came to be what it is today and what it might become. Shenk tells the story of the party through two influential political strategists, Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen, bitter enemies whose ideas, he writes, “provided guideposts for the careers that followed, shaping campaigns in the United States and across the globe.”

Both men’s careers evolved as the Democratic Party was transformed from one dominated by the working class into what it is today: a party that, in Shenk’s words, “owes more to universities than to unions...an alliance between the most educated and the most oppressed, where the virtues of diversity are obvious but solidarity is harder to come by.”

Future Democratic victories, he writes, won’t be possible “without restoring the party’s connection to a broad swathe of the working- and middle-class.” Shenk’s account of Greenberg and Schoen is fascinating but will likely appeal most to readers with a taste for the inside-baseball of U.S. politics. Anyone on the American left, though, will find a wise analysis on the past, present, and future of liberalism here.

Perfect for political junkies with an abiding interest in liberalism.

Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul

Shetterly, Aran Robert | Amistad/ HarperCollins (336 pp.) | $28.99 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780062858214

The full story of an atrocious, racially motivated mass shooting still too little known after a half century.

Journalist Shetterly (The Americano:

Fighting With Castro for Cuba’s Freedom) offers an exhaustive and authoritative rendering of the murderous attack by Klansmen and neo-Nazis that killed five participants at an anti-Klan rally on Nov. 3, 1979. The rally took place near a public housing project called Morningside Homes in Greensboro, North Carolina; it was organized by the Communist Workers Party, a grassroots, multiracial organization. Shetterly’s meticulously researched book draws on discoveries among the files of the FBI civil rights investigation (code-named “GreenKil”), the records of the court cases that followed the shootings, and his interviews with more than 70 individuals, including organizers, survivors, and witnesses of the 88-second attack. (In his acknowledgments, Shetterly thanks in particular then-CWP activist and rally organizer Nelson Johnson and FBI special agent Cecil Moses for their cooperation and insights.) The author masterfully uses this material to construct a detailed, nuanced, and gripping narrative that describes all of the principals’ motivations, struggles,

Shetterly offers an authoritative rendering of the deadly attack at an anti-Klan rally.

and aims. Shetterly builds compelling personal profiles of those involved, which enhance his narrative and provide balance. His work constitutes the most definitive account to date of the Morningside massacre and its subsequent political, social, and legal ramifications. Astonishingly, the attack’s perpetrators were all acquitted, but Shetterly notes the inspiration that many of the survivors took from the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, launched in 2001 to search for the justice that local and federal law enforcement and courts of law could not or would not provide. A must for anyone interested in the history of race and social structure in the United States.

Da Baddest

Taylor, Katrina “Trina” with Sesali Bowen Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) | $27.99

Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781668008768

In a smart, sassy memoir, rapper Taylor recounts her experiences with fame and loss. Raised in Miami by an ambitious and caring mother, a series of supportive father figures, and a “huge family of loud talkers,” Taylor found more pleasure in performing as a majorette and clubbing than in academics. After a brief stint trying to sell real estate, she realized she could make more money as a stripper. She shot to fame in 1998 by rapping a verse from a raunchily female point of view on her friend Trick Daddy’s song “Nann,” which led to multiple concert performances. That in turn brought a contract with Miami-based Slip-NSlide Records, with whom she produced several albums. Then came a friendship with rapper Missy Elliot, who wrote the foreword for this memoir. Throughout Taylor’s career, which reached its peak in the early 2000s, her mission was “to make music that women connect with.” Her memoir reveals a clear under-

standing of both the ups and downs of the music business and of herself as a performer: “I love melodies and R&B, but I am not a singer by any stretch of the imagination,” she writes. She is levelheaded enough to also recognize that “Trina the artist is an enhanced, performed version of who I am in real life.” She gets into the highs and lows of her romantic life, including relationships with fellow rapper Lil Wayne and basketball star Kenyon Martin, and her strong ties to her extended family in Miami, including the sorrow she suffered over the death of a murdered brother and the loss of her mother to cancer.

A treat for fans of the rapper and those looking for insights into the music industry.

All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way

Trump, Fred | Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) | $30.00 July 30, 2024 | 9781668072172

Another Trump unburdens himself. Grandson of the family’s founder and nephew of the current Republican presidential candidate, Fred C. Trump III doesn’t share MAGA politics but claims to be on good terms with his uncle. He attended the 2017 inauguration, visited the White House several times, and is invited to many, if not all, Trump family affairs. He maintains, not always successfully, that this is an overview of his family and life independent of his “polarizing” uncle. Donald is a major supporting character throughout, but this is also a believable memoir of Fred, now 61, who has managed a successful career outside the Trump organization but remains a member in fairly good standing of the toxic clan. He grew up in an already vast real estate empire ruled by his tyrannical grandfather who left behind four living children,

including the president-to-be, who was already taking charge. A fifth sibling, the author’s alcoholic father, who hated working for the grandfather, died in 1981. Except for being rich, Fred’s early life was unremarkable. His accounts of other family members reveal a mixed bag, and the future president is recognizable even from childhood as self-centered and brash. Never part of the inner circle, the author does not delve deeply into Trump business details but regularly digresses to describe his uncle’s behavior—generally cruel, malicious, and even racist but occasionally, unpredictably generous. But this is, in the end, the author’s story, and while readers might gnash their teeth at Donald Trump’s often cartoonish villainy—such as snatching more of his father’s estate by disinheriting Fred and his sister—they will feel for the author’s devastation at the birth of a severely impaired child and understand why the cause of caring for such children preoccupies him today. More thoughtful than most of the Trump genre, but definitely not intended for the fan base.

Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

Unger, Craig | Mariner Books (368 pp.)

$29.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780063330603

A journalist argues that Jan. 6, 2021, wasn’t the first instance of Republican treason.

The term “October surprise” describes a spectacular act or revelation meant to capture the hearts and minds of undecided voters. Ronald Reagan’s October surprise, by Unger’s account, was never made public: his intermediaries negotiated a deal, working with Israel, to ensure that the Iranians would not free the U.S. embassy workers they took hostage in November 1979 and held for 444 days. The aim was to make

Jimmy Carter’s administration look feckless, and within minutes of being sworn in, Reagan announced that the hostages were freed, a seeming coincidence that in itself spoke of backroom bargains. “Carter had been told of clandestine dealings between Reagan campaign officials and the Iranians,” writes Unger, but the president did not make sufficient hay out of acts that, Unger holds, were treasonous. The deal was orchestrated by former CIA executive William J. Casey and two Iranian arms dealers, but it had plenty of ancillary players. It was also, Unger argues, an open secret, even though Iran’s deposed president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, publicly revealed “that the Republican campaign was making a concerted effort to bar the hostages’ release.” It took 11 years for Congress to investigate; by that time Casey was dead, George H.W. Bush—also an actor in the proceedings—was in office, and other acts of Reagan administration criminality were well known. Still, Unger says with regret, Americans were little worked up by the persistent revelations of that despicable political maneuvering. Unger’s book, which he has been working on for decades, comes late to the table, but it’s welcome all the same, complete with its gloomy conclusion: “Most Americans did not know their past well enough to have forgotten it.” A compelling account of political wrongdoing.

Kirkus Star

Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use To Win

Valenti, Jessica | Crown (256 pp.) $25.00 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780593800232

The history of abortion in post-Roe America. Valenti, a prominent feminist author and creator of the newsletter Abortion, Every

Valenti

voices her anger for having to write a book to defend women’s right to choose.

ABORTION

Day, begins her trenchant analysis of one of America’s most controversial political topics by voicing her visceral anger and resentment for having to write a book to defend women’s right to choose: “Women should not have to convince the world that we are full people worthy of rights, protections, and the ability to control our own bodies.” Drawing from research and analysis published in the newsletter, she also tracks abortion news and tells individuals’ stories to shine further light on the subject. For example, Marilyn Lands won a seat in the Alabama House after running a pro-choice ad of a woman having to travel 10 hours out of state to obtain a safe abortion. Lands noted that when she had been in a similar situation years earlier, she was able to get the assistance she needed close to home. Emphasizing the point that many women and girls no longer have access to safe abortions, Lands’ story is just one of many Valenti uses to illustrate how far America’s political landscape has devolved since the Dobbs decision, putting women in distress throughout the nation. Additionally, she cuts through widely spread misinformation about birth control, such as that in videos claiming that the Pill changes women’s “natural” body rhythms. Ending with a section of resources and tips for how to talk about abortion with different groups of people, she sets up women to successfully and succinctly argue for their rights and freedoms. A call to action for both inexperienced and seasoned pro-choice activists.

The Plot Against Native America: Uncovering the Fateful Legacy of the Native American Boarding Schools

Vaughn, Bill | Pegasus (400 pp.)

$29.95 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781639367467

How North American schools committed cultural genocide.

Vaughn’s narrative history charts the growth and impact of Indigenous residential boarding schools in North America, offering insights into their pedagogical rationale, day-to-day operations, and enduring consequences. In illuminating detail, he covers the collaboration between government and church powers in creating the schools as well as their efforts over two centuries to evade responsibility for the myriad abuses that took place across the continent. As Vaughn notes, the sometimes highminded rhetoric of those who designed and managed these institutions was belied by the more cynical intentions guiding official policies: “Indian boarding and residential schools were used by the government to steal Native land by degrading indigenous cultures and reducing their communal will to resist the plunder.” Vaughn’s sensitive accounts of those who attended the schools vividly convey the realities of individual suffering and the cultural losses incurred by institutionalized attempts at cultural assimilation. It is now beyond question, he demonstrates in detailed summations of recent historical scholarship, that physical and sexual abuse, along with staggeringly

high mortality rates, were common at the schools. Vaughn perceptively delineates the significance of figures such as Richard Henry Pratt, the founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, whose ideas about Indigenous education became hugely influential. The concluding sections emphasize the failure of American and Canadian schools to carry out their ultimate aim: the complete eradication of Indigenous cultures. Vaughn rightly emphasizes the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of attempted annihilation: “Although these forces attempted and sometimes succeeded in suppressing Indigenous languages, customs, economies and spirituality, Native people resisted.”

An informed, astute, and often harrowing account of institutionalized assaults on Indigenous peoples.

The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning With His Life and His Nation

Walton, Anthony | Godine (264 pp.)

$28.95 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781567927283

Sharp essays on race relations from the era between the Civil Rights Act and Black Lives Matter.

Like many Black cultural critics, Walton (Mississippi: An American Journey, 1996, etc.) sees Trump-era racism as the culmination of decades of American bigotry, fueled by Jim Crow and the Southern Strategy. His goal is to show how persistent the problem has been even during what many perceived to be the calmer waters of the 1980s and Obama era. The opening essay, first published in the New York Times in 1989, calls out the bigotry and fearmongering of George H.W. Bush’s campaign ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black convict. A well-turned profile of the Rev. Al Sharpton focuses on his

street-level appeal amid efforts to diminish his profile in the wake of the Tawana Brawley case. Walton explores how various occasions have given whites license to broadcast their racism, from a 1957 article by William F. Buckley defending segregation to a PBS documentary on George Wallace to the case of Christian Cooper, a demure New York City bird-watcher on whom a white woman called police simply because he wanted her to follow dog-leash laws. In the title essay, he explains why decades of “going along to get along” conduct by Black people haven’t improved race relations, asking for a society “that no longer privileges white psychic stability and emotional comfort.” Walton is plainly inspired by James Baldwin’s fury and some of his rhetorical approaches—one essay is framed as a letter to a white friend. But Walton is too resigned to thunder for change the way Baldwin did. Nor does he call for broad policy prescriptions, though he does reasonably ask why Black people have been largely denied access to the economic boom within the tech industry. Only by claiming respect for themselves rather than waiting for whites to confer it on them, he argues, can Black Americans avoid becoming the “collateral damage of a public system that fails more often than it succeeds.”

A spirited and informed assessment of American racism beyond headlines and politics.

Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays

Wasserman, Steve | Heyday (384 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781597146470

old days. There is much of this in Wasserman’s collection of essays, the first of which was published in 1979. But there are also insights about the evolution of American society and how we reached the point where we now stand. Wasserman spent much of his career as an editor in the world of newspapers and books, although he also published his own thoughts in a wide variety of magazines. Some of his essays have stood the test of time, but others, such as his laudatory pieces on the Black Panther Party and the Cuban revolution, now seem like messages from an alternate universe. In other cases, he heaps praise on writers who have faded into obscurity. His profiles of Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, however, are affectionate and revealing. He believes that the internet upset the cultural ecology of America, decimating the publishing industry and reducing the opportunities for serious reviews of serious books. He has harsh words for Jeff Bezos and Amazon and for the newspaper proprietors who ignored their social responsibilities to chase profits. Through it all, Wasserman’s love of reasoned debate and good writing shines through, and he often displays an impish wit. Some readers, especially those of a certain age, will enjoy this book and admire Wasserman’s style. Younger readers might simply wonder what he is talking about. In any case, the book is a remarkable record of a well-lived life.

Written with care, passion, a keen eye for fakery, and a willingness to puncture it.

Slaveroad

Wideman, John Edgar | Scribner (224 pp.)

$26.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781668057216

The road from there to here has had many strange twists and turns, according to an acclaimed social critic.

A memoir of a long life inevitably has a tone of nostalgia, a sense of pining for the good

substantial following who will applaud this latest work. The opening pages, which describe his elder son’s struggle to attend his dying mother, Wideman’s ex-wife, and his younger son’s long imprisonment, may suggest a straightforward autobiography to come, but the author’s musings on what this book might be called (“poetry, novel, history, fiction, biography, holy writ, etc.”) hint that what follows is not journalism but high literature. Almost immediately, Wideman rewinds the clock to introduce characters who may be but probably aren’t his ancestors: Rebekah, servant or slave of a wealthy religious southern couple who is sexually used by the husband and brutally beaten and crippled by the wife. A major figure is William Henry Sheppard, a Black Virginia-born American missionary sent to an outpost on the Congo River in 1890 “about the same time Joseph Conrad had passed through.” Wideman’s Sheppard does not ignore the white colonial abuse that Conrad recorded, but mostly he treasures the acceptance he enjoys in an all-Black society, so much so that he betrays his wife. Although Sheppard died in 1934, Wideman cannot stop thinking of parallels in their lives. Wideman’s writing in this and earlier works has been described as experimental, mixing sentence fragments with page-long sentences, eschewing punctuation and employing stream-of-consciousness techniques that owe more to James Joyce than to Toni Morrison. Readers with a few college literature courses under their belts will have an easier time.

Less a memoir than a passionate prose poem.

A distinguished author riffs on his life and the Black experience. A prolific, much-honored writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Wideman has a

For more by John Edgar Wideman, visit Kirkus online.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

Sa yyah’s War by Hiba Noor Khan (Allida/HarperCollins)

Being Home by Traci Sorell, illus. by Michaela Goade (Kokila)

Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Ru Thorpe (Morrow/ HarperCollins)

ALSO MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE:

We Are Still Here!: Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorrell, illus. by Frané Lessac

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump by Randy Fertel

Blok 42 by Debrianna Obara

The Assays of Ata by K.I.S.

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.

Fully Booked

The reenvisioning of a home garden leads Olivia Laing to bright insights. BY

MEGAN LABRISE

EPISODE 378: OLIVIA LAING

On this week’s Fully Booked podcast, Olivia Laing discusses e Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (Norton, June 25), in which the writer and critic explores concepts of paradise and utopia while replanting the garden surrounding their home in Su olk, England. Kirkus calls this agile, engrossing work of non ction “an intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey.”

Laing is the acclaimed author of seven books, including e Trip to Echo Spring (2013), e Lonely City (2016), and the novel Crudo (2018). ey’re a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for non ction. eir books have been translated into 21 languages.

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of e Garden Against Time : “When Laing, author of Everybody, Funny Weather, and other acclaimed books, bought a house in Su olk, she did so mostly for the garden. Especially during the early pandemic, the dilapidated yet lush yard became her personal project. Spending hours with her hands in the dirt, she became enraptured not just with her own garden, but with the history of gardens and their association with paradise. e result is this intellectually stimulating, vibrant book. Laing describes gardens of her own acquaintance in sensuous, compelling detail, allowing readers to see, smell, and touch them alongside her. Similarly, the author moves through fascinating currents of thought, ranging from Paradise Lost to the history of enslavement in plantations, with tactile dexterity....As the author unpacks the fraught history of colonialism and class inequality in relation to gardens,

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise Laing, Olivia Norton | 336 pp. | $27.99 June 25, 2024 | 9780393882001

she o ers intriguing examinations of utopias.…Su used with Laing’s distinctively skillful prose, this book is an impressive achievement.”

Laing and I begin by discussing the experience of visiting Empress Livia’s garden frescoes at the Palazzo Massimo in Rome. ey read aloud from the beginning of e Garden Against Time and talk a bit about why the book begins with a dream. We discuss whether writing the book was a pleasurable experience, and whether they perceive their garden rehabilitation project as a revision of the land or the authoring of a new habitat. We talk about the privilege of land ownership; what gardens can teach us about time; climate change; climate activism; and much more.

en editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

Sandra Mickiewicz

To listen to the episode, visit Kirkus online.

AWARDS

Imani Perry Wins Inaugural Inside Literary Prize

The new award was voted on by more than 200 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons.

Imani Perry won the inaugural Inside Literary Prize, the rst-ever American book award judged exclusively by people incarcerated in prisons.

Perry was named the winner for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon To Understand the Soul

of a Nation, published in 2022 by Ecco. The book previously won the National Book Award.

Three other books were on the prize’s shortlist: Tess Gunty’s novel, The Rabbit Hutch, Jamil Jan Kochai’s story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, and Roger Reeves’ poetry collection Best Barbarian

More than 200 incarcerated people voted on the prize.

One, an inmate at Minnesota Correctional Facility–Shakopee identi ed as Chelsea, said, “Being a judge…just meant a lot for me. It meant that my voice mattered, because for the last four and a half years, my voice hasn’t mattered.”

The award comes with a cash prize of $4,860,

which, according to the organizers, “represents ve years’ of work at 54-cents-per-hour, the wage earned by [Freedom Reads CEO Reginald Dwayne] Betts when he was incarcerated and worked in the prison library.” —M.S.

The Inside Literary Prize was launched by the groups Freedom Reads, the National Book Foundation, and Center for Justice Innovation, along with Lori Feathers, the owner of Interabang Books in Dallas.

For a review of South to America, visit Kirkus online.

Freedom Reads, the National

with Lori Feathers, the owner

From left, Imani Perry, Roger Reeves, and Tess Gunty

Children's

PAVING THE WAY FOR A MORE EXPANSIVE VIEW OF HISTORY

READING RITU HEMNANI’S

Lion of the Sky (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, May 7), a verse novel set during the 1947 Partition of India, I was struck by the author’s note. e Partition had an indelible e ect on the lives of Hemnani’s parents and grandparents—and on the millions of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs who were displaced when India gained its independence from Great Britain. e country was divided into two, and a new Muslim state, Pakistan, was created. Her young daughter, however, had only a limited understanding of the subject. So Hemnani headed to the library to nd stories to help unpack this fraught chapter of South Asian history; she came up empty-handed.

“My daughter accused me of making the whole thing up,” she writes. “It broke my heart.” Like Hemnani’s daughter, I never saw Partition re ected in the literature I read growing up.

ough my grandparents lived through it, it felt hazy, distant, and, I suspected, unimportant in the grand scheme of things. e Boston

Tea Party, the Gettysburg Address, the bombing of Pearl Harbor—that was real history; novels like Johnny Tremain and the American Girl series told me so.

Stories are powerful. ey make long-ago events feel visceral, and their absence can convince us that some historical moments matter more than others. I’m heartened to see so much recent kid lit that o ers a more expansive, global view of history, including several middle-grade novels about the Partition. ese books address grim realities—the arbitrary nature of the borders drawn up by the British, the violence that refugees experienced as they ed—with honesty and empathy, grounded in details that will speak to young readers.

Turmoil looms as Hemnani’s novel begins, but 12-year-old Raj isn’t worried about the talk of the impending Partition—at least not yet. His primary concern is winning the kite- ying festival—and nally earning his stern father’s respect. But after the

country is split in two, Raj and his family realize that their beloved Sindh is now part of Pakistan; they and other Hindus must leave the only home they’ve ever known. Hemnani draws thought-provoking parallels between Raj’s turbulent adolescence and India’s newfound independence, both marked by pain and upheaval.

Two other novels speak to the lingering e ects of this tumultuous period. Veera Hiranandani’s Amil and the After (Kokila, Jan. 23), illustrated by Prashant Miranda, picks up after the events of her Newbery Honor–winning book, e Night Diary (Dial Books, 2018). After leaving Mirpur Khas—now part of Pakistan—Amil and his family must adjust to life in Bombay, but the 12-year-old

is haunted by memories of their journey. Set in the present, Saadia Faruqi’s e Partition Project (Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins, Feb. 7) follows Pakistani American Mahnoor as she bonds with her Dadi (Grandmother), who recently left Lahore to move in with Mahnoor’s family. Dadi opens up about her experiences of the Partition— devastating memories she hasn’t shared in years. Both stories blend their protagonists’ more relatable concerns (sibling dynamics, their artistic aspirations) with nuanced meditations on memory and trauma. Hiranandani and Faruqi emphasize that the past is always with us; it’s up to us to confront it.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

A child-centered account of the origins of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. e lighthouse keeper’s children wake to a foghorn’s blast. Pa rushes out the door to see the work begin on the new bridge. e children watch, too. Steel and concrete square o against fog, wind, and surf. But the “impossible” challenge of building the world’s longest suspension bridge (at the time) rallies builders. Dynamite and machines reshape the land. e foreman stops by the lighthouse—based on the real-life Lime Point Lighthouse, where lighthouse keepers and their families lived—for co ee and

pancakes. During one visit, the children even get to see the bridge’s blueprints. Construction goes on for days, months, even years as the children take in the sights and sounds. e author carefully recounts each step until opening day on May 27, 1937. e whole family wakes early once more to join the celebration as the completed bridge hums with life and excitement. Making playful use of language, Partridge’s immersive, meticulously detailed second-person narration pairs seamlessly with Heck’s intricate, realistic images for a child’s-eye glimpse of the whole thrilling process.

Golden Gate: Building the Mighty Bridge

Endpapers beautifully mimic the iconic bridge, with close-ups on the reddishorange steel. e afterword o ers essential historical context, including a note about Mohawk ironworkers who helped build the bridge. e family is light-skinned. A riveting look at an iconic landmark and architectural feat. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

A Brush With Magic

Ahn, Flora | Illus. by Jenny Park Quirk Books (288 pp.) | $16.99

Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781683693208

A California girl makes an unexpected friend during a summer abroad visiting relatives in Seoul.

Twelve-year-old Yumi is taking her first trip to South Korea, her parents’ homeland, along with her 16-year-old sister, Minji. Yumi hopes the trip will help the sisters be close again, but she soon feels left out when Minji leaves her behind to explore with their teenage cousins. Forlorn, Yumi spends her days with Harabujee, her beloved grandfather, who teaches her brush painting, tells her Korean fairy tales, and shares old memories of Yumi’s mom’s childhood. One day, Yumi goes to a neighborhood art store, where she finds an unusually beautiful brush. But when she brings it home and tries to paint with it, a dokkaebi, or Korean goblin, emerges. At first it seems that Dodo, the goblin, will alleviate Yumi’s loneliness. She shape-shifts into Yumi’s look-alike, makes paintings come to life, and leads her on adventures through the city. But Dodo’s erratic behavior soon has Yumi wondering whether she can trust her, while simultaneously allowing her insights into Minji’s own feelings about growing up. Apt details of contemporary Korean life are woven naturally throughout the narrative, and the well-rounded characters are welcome representations of the diversity of modern-day Korean youth. Fantastical elements are seamlessly woven into this engaging, entertaining story. Park’s charming brush painting–style spot art adorns the text.

A universal coming-of-age tale becomes extraordinary through an encounter with Korean folk magic. (Adventure. 8-12)

An uplifting tale of family connection and self-discovery

CLYDEO TAKES A BITE OUT OF LIFE

Bounce!: A Scientific History of Rubber

Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781623543792

How a natural goo with miraculous properties flexed its way into sports, technology, and our daily lives. Coming from cultures where the best balls available were stuffed with feathers or dried peas, 16th-century Europeans were likely astonished at seeing the bouncy latex ones in use in the American lands they were plundering. A few centuries later, the rubbery stuff was making up everything from boots to balloons, rubber bands to rubber duckies—especially after Charles Goodyear in the U.S. and Thomas Hancock in England simultaneously figured out how to stabilize, or “vulcanize,” it, and later scientists concocted synthetic versions. Albee expands on this story, giving full credit to the Indigenous peoples who first discovered latex and used it, and also forthrightly acknowledging that expanding demand for the natural product has subsequently led to widespread human rights violations and environmental problems. In seamlessly interwoven scientific digressions, she digs into the chemistry of polymers and of vulcanization, explains how rubber can float (or not), and notes why a rubber tire (which is “basically a huge, tire-shaped molecule”) grips the road so well. Ewen reflects the narrative’s effervescence with views of diverse groups of

modern children, prim European figures in 19th-century dress, and Indigenous athletes, all exercising vigorously in pools, upon bicycles, or on various playing fields. Albee plainly has a ball, and readers will, too. (author’s note, timeline, bibliography, quotation sources) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

Clydeo Takes a Bite Out of Life

Aniston, Jennifer | Illus. by Bruno Jacob HarperCollins (32 pp.) | $21.99

Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780063372368

Series: Clydeo

Drawing inspiration from her rescue dog Clyde, Emmywinning actor Aniston tells the story of a pooch seeking his passion.

The Clyde family are a talented bunch of canines: Uncle Clydester adores surfing, Auntie Clydette digs for dinosaur bones, and Great-Grandma Cly-Clyde dances salsa. “Everyone [has] something that [makes] them stand out”—except for young Clydeo, who doesn’t feel special. Clydeo sets out to discover what he loves, guided by an optimistic mantra: “Take a bite out of life, I always say!” As he tries out various relatives’ hobbies, he asks for advice: How will he know when he’s found his “thing”? Grandpa Clyderton, the daredevil, says that his passion makes him “light up.” Second cousin Clydesto, who paints blindfolded, says that art makes his world brighter. Plucky, persistent Clydeo keeps searching. He finds answers while helping his mother cook for a big

Kirkus Star

Albee, Sarah | Illus. by Eileen Ryan

Ewen | Charlesbridge (48 pp.) | $18.99

family meal. “Clydeo [feels] a warm feeling in his belly…He love[s] his family, and he love[s] cooking for them.” Clydeo’s notion of taking a bite out of life proves to be his thing— cooking. The alliteration of the family members’ names, their kernels of wisdom, and the book’s lovable protagonist make for a pleasurable, meaningful read. Jacob’s illustrations of big-eyed, expressive dogs exude charm and personality and make searching for one’s passion seem like utter joy. An uplifting tale of family connection and self-discovery. (author’s note, photos) (Picture book. 4-8)

Clovis Suspects a Sneak

Aronson, Katelyn | Illus. by Benji Williams | Page Street (32 pp.) | $18.99

Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781645678991

Jokes aside, this bull owns a china shop. Our hero, whom readers will recognize from Clovis Keeps His Cool (2021), sells attractive merchandise in his cozy store. He has decorated for the winter holidays and put out tea and caramels for friends and customers. But several items—a silver sugar bowl, sugar lumps, tea lights—have disappeared. Is someone stealing? Clovis begins eyeing customers warily and even explodes at his friends at football practice. Suspicion’s bad for business; customers stop coming. Things still disappear. Clovis lays a nighttime trap for the thief by preparing caramels and soon discovers the burglar, who’s been on the premises all along: a mouse who “borrowed” his merchandise for a tea party. Clovis explodes—in laughter— explaining the difference between borrowing and stealing. “Next time, little mouse, ask me,” he tells her. “I may be a bull, but I’m no bully.” The remorseful rodent in turn reminds Clovis that he’s displayed a fierce temper in the past. Chastened, he decides to apologize to the friends he offended; the shop’s warm ambience is

restored. This cute but thin story is appealing, though the denouement falls somewhat flat. The message about asking permission to borrow things is important, yet the mouse never explains if she planned to return what she took. Still, the vividly hued illustrations are comically lively. Towering Clovis is blustery yet able to mend his ways—also a good lesson— and the all-animal cast is endearing. Gently conveyed lessons in friendship and trust. (Picture book. 5-8)

Tiny Floating Coral

Auld, Mary | Illus. by La Scarlatte Red Comet Press (28 pp.) | $15.99

Nov. 19, 2024 | 9781636551234

Series: Start Small, Think Big, 3

Massive coral reefs grow from tiny beginnings. In this entry in her Start Small, Think Big series, Auld describes the life cycle of coral, from its beginning as a microscopic organism, through its growth and development as part of a colony and later a reef (specifically the Great Barrier Reef, which is visible from space). The main narrative, set in short bolded sentences on appropriately colorful spreads, is a first-person account from the point of view of a single coral polyp, which describes its development from tiny planula to being part of a reef, its feeding and spawning, and the current threats it faces, including warming waters, pollution, and invasive crown-ofthorns starfish. Further information appears in two smaller type styles. The life cycle of coral is complex and quite different from that of creatures with which children may be more familiar. Auld has done a good job of explaining coral simply and building young readers’ understanding of their life cycles, including the algae that live inside the coral polyps and help supply food, and the neighboring corals that together form the stony reefs that provide homes for many other sea creatures. A final four-page foldout

includes a map and a diagram of the life cycle. Scarlatte’s accurate, detailed images deserve careful attention; the drawings and maps and their clear labels add to the informational value of this clever presentation. Educationally sound and engaging. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

The Band in Our Basement

Baptist, Kelly J. | Illus. by Jenin Mohammed Abrams (40 pp.) | $18.99 | Nov. 12, 2024 9781419769078

Two siblings postpone bedtime to listen to their father’s jazz band practicing in the family basement. The young narrator and brother Kenny are upstairs in bed but finding it hard to fall asleep. Hearing the strains of Dad’s music, they can’t help dancing along: “The rhythm’s steady, / the trumpet’s sweet. / Before too long, / we’re on our feet!” Soon they decide to sneak downstairs to listen more closely. As they enjoy the music, they recognize the singer: “That’s Mama’s voice stealing the show!” They’re discovered, but rather than sending them back upstairs, the adults invite them to jam. The narrator starts banging on the drums, while Kenny grabs the mic. Finally, it’s bedtime; too tired to protest, the children head upstairs, with thoughts of playing in Daddy’s band again filling their heads. Centering on a tightknit, music-loving Black family, this lively story exudes joy. Laced with onomatopoeia and alliteration, Baptist’s jaunty verse sets a swinging tone ideal for storytime. Children will enjoy following along with the mischievous siblings. The exuberant collage illustrations pair perfectly with the text, their colorful fluidity bathing the scenes in deep blues and reds and depicting musical notes swirling dramatically across the pages. A rollicking read-aloud, sure to have youngsters on their feet dancing along with its young protagonists. (Picture book. 4-8)

Plotting the Stars: Ashgarden

Barry, Michelle A. | Pixel+Ink (368 pp.)

$18.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781645951322

Series: Plotting the Stars, 3

In this third series installment, Myra and Canter return to the Moon. Myra, Hannah, and Bernard, who have been exiled to the Old World, learn what life has been like there for centuries. Meanwhile, the Botans, including Canter’s mother, Fiona, the original creator of the moongarden, live in close harmony with plants and have formulated a serum that’s effective against the Old World’s toxins. But weather-wielding adepts called Meteorons inflict violence on the Botans, whom they resent. Alternate chapters focus on Canter’s life on Venus, where he and Lila befriend Eli, a younger, nonmagical mechanical prodigy. Canter’s father also tries to reconcile with his son and thwart the insidious ambitions of Jake Melfin, who has a monopoly on food resources for the Settlements. Barry excels in demonstrating the parallels between and intersections of magic and technology and magic and skill. “If you love what you do and you’re good at it, that’s what counts,” Myra observes, emphasizing that magic isn’t the only route to accomplishment. This theme is demonstrated in the ways that the Botans work with plants to facilitate building, communication, and transportation, while Eli has an innate, hands-on understanding of electronics. A constant, intriguing underlying element threaded through

this densely packed narrative is the exploration of the bridges that magic and technology provide for each other and the imaginative and practical possibilities they open.

A strong, satisfying conclusion that will please series fans. (Science fiction. 9-14)

Kirkus Star

Mabel Wants a Friend

Bernstein, Ariel | Illus. by Marc Rosenthal Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (48 pp.)

$18.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781665940405

Mabel learns about making and keeping friends.

Following You Go First (2023), Bernstein and Rosenthal have once more created a world of winsome, sportily dressed, anthropomorphic young animals whose all-too-human behaviors will be immediately recognizable. Mabel, an egocentric fox in a pink frock, gets to the front of the long line for the ice cream vendor by tricking the others: “Mabel always [gets] what she [wants],” we’re told. Obtaining privacy is a breeze for Mabel (who has no friends), and she finds a way to rationalize disappointments. (“I don’t want it anymore,” she tells herself when another child is enjoying a playground ride she’s initially interested in.) When she inadvertently helps an adorable, red-sneakered rabbit named Chester, she discovers the advantages of friendship. It’s easier to play catch when you’ve got a pal, and at last she can use the seesaw. Unfortunately, her selfish instincts overcome her better side until Chester becomes

Sharp insights on honing social skills, wrapped up in an immensely appealing package.

MABEL WANTS A FRIEND

frustrated. Gently humorous art shows Mabel trying—unsuccessfully—to convince herself that she’s better off alone. Mabel practices being patient, helpful, and kind, all of which pay off in unexpected ways. This simply told, funny, and charmingly illustrated tale delivers sound lessons in friendship, without ever verging on preachy or sentimental—no mean feat. Bernstein and Rosenthal demonstrate a keen understanding of the way children see the world, in both their desire to have their own way and their strong capacity for generosity.

Sharp insights on honing social skills, wrapped up in an immensely appealing package. (Picture book. 3-6)

Dear Vincent

Bird, Michael | Illus. by Ella Beech Thames & Hudson (40 pp.) | $19.95 Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780500653388

An artist hopes to paint the picture of his dreams. Vincent is struggling. He paints and paints, but his work is derided. He needs sunshine, fresh air, and new friends. His brother, Theo, supports and encourages him, funding a trip to “the sunny South” and providing art supplies. Vincent sets his easel among the apple and peach trees, explores the surrounding countryside, and meets his new neighbors. Painting portraits of Postman Joseph and his family results in blossoming friendships, while an encounter with a farmer planting sunflower seeds will eventually lead to his dream coming true. Theo displays and shares Vincent’s works—including his depiction of the sunflower—with visitors, who aren’t impressed, but one little girl is enthralled. The author never tells young readers that the artist is the very real Vincent van Gogh; the name might not have resonance for them, but adults will realize who he is—and can offer additional context. Language and syntax are remarkable in simplicity and imagery, presenting a

warm and compassionate view of this extraordinary talent. Beech’s brilliantly hued, expressive illustrations add dimension and delight, often invoking Van Gogh’s most famous paintings. Text and art are woven together well, appearing in a variety of combinations, from double-page spreads to scattered vignettes. Little readers and their grown-ups will respond to Vincent and Theo’s loving relationship and will admire Vincent’s beautiful art, which may lead to a museum visit. Background characters are diverse. Tender and thought-provoking. (Picture-book biography. 5-9)

Snack, Please!

Birkett, Georgie | Candlewick (32 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781536238969

Series: Cheery Street

A determined snacker breaks her habit. Gertie, a fuzzy blue mouse, loves eating her dad’s cooking. In fact, she loves eating just about anything; she even tries to scarf down a slug in the backyard one time (yuck!). But then, Gertie discovers her most favorite food of all: snacks. “Sweet banana chips! Carroty rice cakes! Crunchy, munchy crackers!” Snacks are incredible, as evidenced by the “nom, nom” sounds that ensue when Gertie devours her favorite treats in the bathtub, in bed, on the couch—in short, everywhere. Gertie eats so many snacks that she isn’t hungry at mealtime anymore. All she says is “Snack, please!” (One exception is when she’s observing the ducks; then she says, “Snack, snack.”) Fed up, Daddy takes Gertie to the community garden, where she picks vegetables alongside Grandma. Gertie then helps Daddy make a special meal for her friends. She’s so excited that she eats everything on her plate! Taking ownership of what she eats helps Gertie realize how fun food preparation can be. Birkett’s big-eyed, softly rounded anthropomorphic animals help the encouraging message go down

easily, and the author/illustrator reassuringly notes that “Gertie still eats some snacks, of course. Everyone does, don’t they?”

A satisfyingly conveyed and empowering message about choosing what to eat. (Picture book. 3-6)

Star Sailor: My Life as a NASA Astronaut

Bolden Jr., Charles F. & Tonya Bolden

Candlewick (112 pp.) | $19.99

Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781536216325

A veteran of the Space Shuttle program looks back over his long career. Rather than spin this memoir out in a single chronological thread, the co-authors (who are not related) open with the good stuff—the recruitment of “Charlie B.” into NASA in 1979 as the fourth Black astronaut and his four space flights between 1986 and 1994. They follow with information about his childhood, his early career as a Marine pilot and test pilot, and his later stint as the head of NASA from 2009 to 2017. He brings an unusually personal tone to his experiences in training and in orbit, so that whether describing routine meal prep, the pleasure of viewing lightning and atmospheric auroras from overhead, or the fraught process of deploying the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites, he will draw readers into each highlight moment. So, too, will the plethora of official color photos and, along the closing timeline, family snapshots. Though he generally isn’t one for recording complex emotions (even watching the Challenger explode only days after his own first mission touched down gets a relatively low-key reaction), his deep satisfaction at a host of difficult jobs done well comes through clearly. In at least some of the group scenes, the astronaut is joined by other people of color. As he says, “What a ride!”

An important and inspiring astronaut memoir. (source notes, index) (Memoir. 11-13)

Zips and Eeloo Make a Friend

Boukarim, Leila | Illus. by Alex Lopez Andrews McMeel Publishing (80 pp.)

$11.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781524884369

Series: Zips and Eeloo, 2

An energetic extraterrestrial duo makes forays into friendship. Zips, a frenetic orange singleeyeballed alien, and Eeloo, a taciturn, crabclawed little green creature, continue their quest to emulate earthlings in their second graphic novel. The “make” in the title is literal; the two of them decide to create a new companion out of a collection of scraps. As ambitious Zips points out, “You humans clearly cannot live without a friend.” Zips adds, “I’ve never had a friend.” Eeloo, who’s a good helper and an excellent pal, immediately looks exasperated and sad, though Zips remains oblivious. The two get started patching together a friend, using a milk jug for the body, a red rubber ball for the head, and a straw and a breadstick for legs; the discouraged yet dedicated Eeloo surreptitiously munches on the breadstick. Throughout, Zips expresses excitement at finally having a friend; Eeloo continues to look put out. Though the initial pun and premise are humorous, Zips’ insensitivity to industrious second fiddle Eeloo feels crueler the longer the book goes on—indeed, the narrative ends without Zips ever showing Eeloo any appreciation. Nonetheless, the pair’s inventive energy and Lopez’s colorful cartooning string the story through with lightness and heart. A pun brought to life, a friendship tested—this silly story mixes creativity, comedy, and snark, with mixed results. (craft activity, guidance on making friends) (Graphic fiction. 6-9)

Sayonara Magic: Wizards in School

Burakkuberi | Illus. by Kumanakris

Trans. by Dana Guterman Levy

Andrews McMeel Publishing (240 pp.)

$12.99 paper | Sept. 10, 2024

9781524886769 | Series: Sayonara Magic, 1

The Japanese Tanaka triplets— Akira and her brothers, Hiro and Naoki— haphazardly and mischievously use their magical abilities.

First-person narrator Hiro and his siblings have inherited spell-casting abilities from their father; their mother, like most people, is nonmagical. Through a blend of appealing manga-style illustrations and expressive text, the story follows the trio’s antics. Whenever a sibling casts a spell to address an issue, something goes awry, and the others must intervene and attempt to undo the damage. The triplets fear that their public use of magic will be discovered by their parents (or the troublesome reporter who keeps hanging around), which would result in their being sent away to a school for wizards, ruining all their fun. When Hiro casts a spell of invisibility to get a peek at an upcoming math test—he’d rather watch his favorite show than study—it turns out that everything he touches also becomes invisible, and he makes the test, various classroom objects, and even a fellow student disappear. Naoki and Akira help him find a powerful spell that will undo everything, but they discover why their dad warned them about “side effects.” Next, Akira casts a “super-confidence” spell to help the extremely shy Naoki talk to his longtime crush. Unfortunately, Naoki’s excessive confidence leads him to blurt out honest but unkind remarks and leads to an uproar. The expressive illustrations, fast pace, and humorous sibling dynamics will hook readers. An engaging mix of magic and chaotic energy. (character guide) (Fantasy. 9-12)

Serves up a feast of swirling

and kinetic digital illustrations.

THE OTHER SIDE OF TOMORROW

Kirkus Star

Clutch Time

Butler, Caron & Justin A. Reynolds

Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) | $19.99

Sept. 10, 2024 | 9780063069640

Series: Shot Clock, 2

Being the best on the court doesn’t mean you don’t have a lot to learn about playing the game of life. Being a topranked player comes with a lot of new pressures for 14-year-old basketball phenom Kofi Douglass. Though their Milwaukee community has suffered a recent tragic loss, Kofi and his mother are also still reeling from the day his father was arrested seven years ago—and basketball has become a complicated way of coping. Through all the challenges, Kofi has a staunch best friend in Mecca, but even she’s beginning to recognize how he’s started to let basketball and his ego get in his own way. Meanwhile, former friend (now bitter rival) Ripp Ransom will take advantage of any misstep to get ahead of Kofi, leading to some action-packed showdowns on the court. These scenes, coupled with flashbacks that contextualize Kofi’s story, make for a compelling sports drama with a lot of heart. In this stand-alone companion to Shot Clock (2022), the authors believably frame Kofi’s slow path toward maturity on and off the court, presenting it as the real key to his overall success. Ballplayers will appreciate the hoops details, playful slang, and healthy dose of trash talk, while the images of healing from loss and unfairness will

be accessible and refreshing for any readers. The cast members predominantly read Black.

Thoughtfully portrays a boy who’s balancing hoop dreams and emotional maturity to achieve impressive ends. (Fiction. 10-14)

Escape From the Dungeons of Snerbville

Carman, Patrick | Blackstone (160 pp.)

$16.99 | Sept. 24, 2024 | 9798212538398

Series: Bonkers, 3

A boy who is prepared for anything, a doll-size girl, and a scientist save the world from an experiment gone wrong. After a thoroughenough recap for brand-new series readers, the 40-foot chicken that Barker McMifflin rode into a giant hole in the ground leads him to another encounter with the disgustingly troublesome creatures from Jenny’s armpit known as Snerbs. Still determined to get to the bottom of the strangeness clearly connected to the scientific research facility in their town, Barker takes off into Snerbville, an underground network of tunnels full of secrets and hungry Snerbs. Lucky for him, nine-inch-tall Tilda Huxley, daughter of the founder of Colossal Chemistry, is right behind him, her quest to un-shrink herself having turned into a rescue mission. Unfortunately for them all, blundering scientist Maverick McFadden’s ineptitude has allowed the Snerbs to run rampant, and the kids, along with Dr. Vernsy von Vexler, must save the earth from

being consumed entirely. Some readers may find the shifting perspectives among series hero Barker, Tilda, and Dr. Vexler challenging, though chapter titles add context to assist in determining narrator shifts. There is no shortage of witty repartee or inventive descriptions; it’s perhaps the silliest and most entertaining series entry yet. Illustrations show Barker with brown skin, while Tilda describes herself as a “mix of [B]lack, brown, and white,” and Dr. Vexler presents as white. Ridiculous and hilarious. (Paranormal. 8-12)

Apple Pie Tired

Charles, Beth | Illus. by Hannah Brinson Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 Aug. 1, 2024 | 9781534112735

A delightful account of helpfulness, plans placed on hold, and disappointment avoided. Each year, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Lola’s parents make and sell apple pies from their orchard store. Lola wants to help by preparing Thanksgiving dinner herself. She has all the right ideas, like organizing a daily schedule to get the advance prep done, and an eagerness to take responsibility. But each morning, as she consults her projected list— peel potatoes, snap green beans, cut carrots—she notices that her parents need her help with their task that day. Charles takes readers step by step through the pie-making process. Day One is devoted to making the bottom crust: Dad weighs and mixes the flour, Mom portions out the dough, and then Dad presses it into a pan—with assistance from Lola. In the following days, the family works on the top crust and peels and cores the apples. Finally, each family member helps with baking and selling. The job all done, Lola is “too pooped to mash, and too tuckered to cook.” So what about dinner? Then her extended family arrives, bearing contributions, and everyone pitches in,

because “big jobs sure work better with a little help.” An author’s note describes the real-world model for the farm; a pie recipe and photos are appended. Warm, slightly idealized pastel illustrations add autumnal spice to this sweet book. While the protagonists are lightskinned, the farm’s clientele is diverse. A mouthwatering, heartwarming story of teamwork. (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

The Other Side of Tomorrow

Cho, Tina | Illus. by Deb JJ Lee HarperAlley (224 pp.) | $24.99 Nov. 12, 2024 | 9780063011083

Two young strangers dream of better lives outside North Korea.

Ten-year-old Yunho cares for his halmoni and sells rusty nails and bits of iron that he finds in the dirt. “Fifth-grade dropout” Myunghee, 11, has become a street seller, supporting herself and her sick great-aunt. In 2013, North Korea is a tough place to live. Both children’s communities have been devastated by famine, poverty, and a cruel government that forbids freedom of thought. A dramatic life-or-death moment briefly brings the young people together before their paths diverge. When the timing is right, each child risks everything to illegally cross North Korea’s border into China. Myunghee and Yunho travel alone, facing dangers, until Yunho is reunited with his omma, who’s sent for him from China. Soon, another chance encounter compels the three to become traveling companions. They must obtain new identities and avoid arrest; capture could mean death or imprisonment in a concentration camp. This graphic novel serves up a feast of swirling and kinetic digital illustrations. Smooth swaths of muted color sweep across the pages in alternating cool and warm tones. The

shifting palette builds tension and contrasts dire moments with the hope and the comfort of found family. Told from their alternating perspectives in welcoming, conversational verse, Yunho’s and Myunghee’s suspenseful, harrowing journeys provide readers with a realistic and devastating portrayal of life under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. Triumphant, moving, and unforgettable. (historical note) (Verse graphic adventure. 9-12)

Kirkus Star

When Love Is More Than Words

Chung, Jocelyn | Illus. by Julia Kuo Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780593533574

There’s more than one way to say “I love you.”

An unnamed Asian-presenting child notes, “Some people say they love you with hugs, kisses, and three special words…But in my family, we do something different.” Actions big and small and contextual clues send the same message. Great-grandma A-tzo always gives her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren the most luscious loquats from her garden. A patch of blooming blue irises planted by the child’s now-deceased grandpa Keyo A-gong is a reminder of his presence. Mama saves the young narrator the tastiest part of the fish—“even if it means she gets the tail.” Observing siblings, aunties, uncles, and more caring for one another, the child realizes that “I have a village of people around me.” It’s through “their laughter / their sacrifices / and their presence” that the child hears “I love you.”

Chung’s elegant text is rife with concrete details, while Kuo deftly uses bold colors, black lines, and textures to create warmly energetic scenes of family gatherings and tables heaped with food. With joy and tenderness, Chung and

Kuo convey an important truth; young people whose families express love in di erent ways will feel seen, heard, and embraced. Phrases in Taiwanese and Japanese appear throughout. Readers will feel the love—in every well-chosen word and each exquisite image. (Picture book. 5-8)

Bleakwatch Chronicles:

Tinker Bell and the Lost City

Clark, Zack Loran | Disney Press (256 pp.)

$14.99 | Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781368098625

New fairy adventures await underground in London.

One day, as Tinker Bell combs the Never Land beach for neat “lost things” from the human-populated Mainland, she makes an amazing discovery—a mechanical, fairy-size ying vehicle that runs on pixie dust—and its fairy pilot is still inside! ough she’s been hurt in the accident and can’t speak, Elmira communicates by writing and drawing. She’s from the Mainland (where fairies rarely live), and she’s lost something precious. Never one to pass up an adventure, Tink repairs the ship and ies to London to investigate. ere she meets the Flutterpunks, a crew of scavenger fairies, and barters some of her stash of pixie dust for their help with her search. Tinker Bell’s eyes are opened to this secret population of fairies who have adapted to survive near humans by using “shadow-talents” and “dreamtalents.” But there’s trouble brewing for their community of Bleakwatch. Fans of the Disney Fairies franchise will appreciate this steampunk- avored series opener with new content that extends the universe. is novel ts right into the canon and yet o ers its own original narrative that lls a niche for audiences who have moved on from the books for younger readers. e new Flutterpunks characters are interesting and gru y endearing; they’re described

as diverse in skin tone, and their leader, Quin, uses they/them pronouns. Tinker Bell presents white. A pleasurable o ering for readers eager for more Disney fairy content. (map, cast of characters) (Fantasy. 8-13)

Chloe and the Fire ies

Clarkson, Chris | Illus. by Julie

Abrams (32 pp.) | $18.99

Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781419766480

Jarema

For the rst time, Chloe can relax. Chloe’s had some tough foster experiences in the past, but life now feels like a wonderful dream. Chloe bakes cookies, dances, gets all A’s in school, nally makes real friends, and bonds with a loving pair of foster parents (both of whom present male). But will Chloe have to leave once again? Longing to stay, the youngster makes a wish on a re y. One evening at sunset, Chloe’s surprised by a message on the driveway written in chalk: “Welcome Home, Chloe!!!!” Chloe’s foster parents and friends beam and hold out their arms in celebration. anks to swirling re y magic, Chloe’s wish was granted. Images in a calming pastel palette, with soft, wide brush strokes, set a tranquil tone. e bright, syrupy-sweet artwork alternates between full-page illustrations depicting Chloe’s house and ethereal vignettes set against a solid background as Chloe re ects on various memories. It’s a reassuring tale, but one that glosses over the harsher realities of the often fraught and complicated foster-care system; adults seeking stories that unpack foster children’s complex emotional journeys should look elsewhere. Still, many kids will be buoyed by Chloe’s happy ending. Chloe and one of the foster parents present Black; the other foster parent appears white, and the supporting cast is diverse. An uplifting, rose-colored story of the search for a forever home. (Picture book. 4-6)

The Empty Place

Cole, Olivia A. | Little, Brown (320 pp.)

$16.99 | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9780316449427

A girl whose father disappeared in the woods for a year needs to know where he went—and why.

Henrietta

Lightfoot’s father went missing while caving in a forest; he was creating content for his popular YouTube channel, “Discovery Joe.” She isn’t bold or outgoing like her dad, though—she loves the companionable silence she shares with her best friend, Ibtihaj, who’s also the only person to call her by the name she prefers, Henry. At her 12th birthday party, exactly a year after his disappearance, Henry’s dad appears, in terrible physical condition and saying things that make no sense. In the hospital, he directs Henry to look in his bag, where she nds his special gift for her: an exquisite necklace, wrapped in a map of Quinvandel, the forest where he vanished. Armed with the map, Henry sets o to retrace her dad’s steps. She ends up in a land of the lost, where mysterious things happen. While some plot points feel underdeveloped, Cole’s latest is infused with beautiful language that accentuates the somber tone. Introspective readers who are seeking a weighty, serious adventure of self-discovery will appreciate this work, in which individuals strive to overcome challenges as they seek their truths. Henry is white, and there’s racial and ethnic diversity among the supporting cast.

A solemn and compelling read. (Fiction. 8-12)

For more by Olivia A. Cole, visit Kirkus online.

An uplifting, rose-colored story of the search for a forever home.

CHLOE AND THE FIREFLIES

Impossible Possums

Colón, Justin | Illus. by James Rey Sanchez

Disney-Hyperion (40 pp.) | $17.99

Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781368099776

Even rotten possums get happy endings.

Carl’s a “bad-to-thebone” possum. He pops kids’ balloons and licks their ice cream. Hunched over his “villainous devices,” he also plots world domination. Being nasty is lonely, so Carl gets creative: He’ll literally make friends. He orders a “Possum Populator” machine so he can create new “perfect” possum pals as nefarious as himself. Carl ignores the instruction manual, sloppily assembling the machine himself. The carelessly scrambled machine goofs; instead of a “possum empire,” it spits out a “penguin jazz choir.” Carl’s furious, though the performing penguins become the toast of the town. His subsequent commands to the Populator yield no better results, producing pigeon poops, playful pandas, and various other animals and foods beginning with P. Besieged Carl finally consults the manual and fixes his machine, but the screen says it won’t work for 100 years! Seems Carl is doomed to be alone. But wait—is that a balloon-busting, ice cream–licking, “bad-to-the-bone” penguin seeking his acquaintance? Kids will giggle over this comically inventive story and Carl’s exaggeratedly humorous wickedness and will enjoy coming up with additional outlandish P possibilities the Populator could deliver. The dynamic, colorful digital illustrations are equally riotous,

conveying sound effects and deploying typographical creativeness. Fast-paced fun and hijinks. (Picture book. 5-8)

Timelight

Conlon, Faith | Flashpoint (304 pp.)

$19.95 | Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781959411819

Can a young Seattle soccer player save the world from a power-hungry time traveler?

As Charlie Winter nears his 13th birthday, his grandmother is gravely injured in an explosion. Before the ambulance arrives, she gives him the Winter Stone, a family heirloom. Then, vengeful time traveler Malcolm Mordrex starts stalking Charlie. Malcolm claims to know where to find Charlie’s mother, who’s been missing for three years, but he wants the silver wolf amulet, which Charlie doesn’t have. Later, Nana tells Charlie that the Winter Stone allows gifted individuals like them to time travel via an energy force called Timelight. Mr. Tanaka, Nana’s Japanese American bookseller friend, shares information about the silver wolf. Drawing conclusions from what he learns, Charlie plans an illicit trip back in time to May 8, 1945, V-E Day, but when Malcolm pursues him, he ends up accidentally time traveling with three of his friends. A leisurely build-up leads to adventures that come thick and fast once the characters start going back in time. The time-travel mechanism is creative and intriguing but excessively complicated, with an abundance of convenient rules that

crop up when needed to get the desired results. Charlie is a sympathetic character, with loyal friends readers will want to know more about. Many questions remain unanswered at the end of this series opener. Charlie presents white; his friends are cued white, Black, and Chinese American. An imaginative premise let down by overly convoluted worldbuilding and too many coincidences. (author’s note) (Science fiction. 9-12)

Star Wars: The High Republic: Beware the Nameless

Córdova, Zoraida | Illus. by Pétur Antonsson | Disney Lucasfilm (336 pp.)

$14.99 | Aug. 27, 2024 | 9781368095198

Series: Star Wars: The High Republic

As the Nihil terrorize the galaxy with the Nameless, their Force-eating monsters, a nature-loving Huttlet, an ambitious Jedi youngling, and a senator’s daughter unite as they try to survive on a ransacked planet.

Churo the Hutt never wanted to leave the security of his greenhouse, but he has no choice when his sister sends him to steal a mysterious weapon from the Nihil. After he crash-lands on Palagosal, a once-peaceful planet, he meets Jamil Sollis, a human Jedi youngling who dreams of advancing to the rank of Padawan, and Zenny Greylark, the daughter of a Republic senator who’s searching for her sister. Despite Churo’s concerns about his family’s approval and his fear of encountering danger, he joins Jamil, Zenny, and their team as they set out to investigate the remains of an outpost that was evacuated after the Nihils’ invasion. Dangers lurk in the shadows of the wreckage, and the unlikely allies must rely on each other to confront it. Alternating between the perspectives of a cast of diverse and endearing characters, this High

THE KIRKUS Q&A: DAVID ALMOND

A glimpse into the “magical and miraculous” world of the veteran U.K. children’s author.

BY LAURA SIMEON

DAVID ALMOND IS one of the world’s most celebrated authors for young people. In addition to winning numerous U.S. and U.K. awards for individual books, he’s been granted prestigious international honors that recognize his signi cant, lifelong contributions to children’s literature, such as the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Nonino International Prize (he’s the only recipient to date who’s British and the only one to write for children), and the James Krüss Prize for International Children’s and Youth Literature, awarded for writing that’s “distinguished by linguistic brilliance, originality, imaginative storytelling and cosmopolitanism.”

Puppet (Candlewick, Sept. 3), illustrated by Lizzy Stewart, tells the tale of Silvester, an old puppeteer whose home feels empty after he donates his puppets, costumes, and stages to a museum. One evening, from bits and pieces of mismatched leftover materials, he creates Puppet. To Silvester’s astonishment, Puppet (or Kenneth, as he’s later known in town) comes to life. e pair venture out, befriending an inquisitive little girl named Fleur and her mum, who fondly remembers Silvester and his late wife Belinda’s Magical Puppet eatre. is charming story of imagination and human connection encompasses moments of sheer wonder and joy.

Almond spoke with us over Zoom from his home in Tynemouth in the Northeast of England; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There are echoes of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio in Puppet. Was that a conscious in uence? Have you long had an interest in puppets?

I wrote an introduction to Pinocchio some years ago for the Folio Society edition, and so I read Collodi’s Pinocchio again, and what a fantastic thing it is. It’s been

lingering in my mind ever since. A couple of years before I started writing Puppet, I bought myself a couple of marionettes. One that I call Jack was sitting on the shelf while I was writing the book—inspiring me and keeping an eye on me. When my daughter was little, we would play with her soft toys and make them

come to life. It’s a natural thing to do with young children—play with teddy bears and pretend they can speak—and children just accept that. It’s a very natural process to turn things into puppets.

One of the things that generated the book was [that] I was sitting in a garden one day and just playing, picking up some sticks. You put two sticks together, and suddenly it looks like a living creature. The world is lled with potential puppets.

I loved that even though Silvester is a master of his craft, Puppet is far from perfect—his gait is uneven; he has three ngers on one hand and four on the other. I’m really interested in imperfection. I think

imperfection is the heart of everything we do, everything [that’s been] created. So, you know, a nished book like Puppet itself looks perfect. But of course, that’s an illusion. It comes from an imperfect place—the human mind. Like Silvester making his puppet, it comes from bits and pieces, from fragments that you’ve put together. And you hope it might stand up and walk; the book itself is like a puppet. We can’t be perfect. We’re imperfect beings in an imperfect world.

When I’m working in my notebooks, they are imperfect. They don’t look like nished pages. They are attempts, shots at something. And I think, I’ll do it again. I’ll do it better. We often teach children as if they should be aiming for

some kind of perfection— especially when we teach writing—but we can’t be.

When Fleur is missing her father and says, “I’m happy, and I’ll always be happy, and I’ll always be sad as well. I’ll always be dark and light,” it struck me as such a profound insight into living with grief—and also, in a lot of ways, an apt description of much of your writing. These things come out in my books. It’s not as if I plan to do this. It’s just that every time I write a book, it’s, Oh well, here it is again, OK. And I just have to accept it. Children need honesty. Children need to be shown an honest world. What Fleur said, I think that’s the human condition, and I think if we try and protect children from that, we’re doing them a

disservice. It’s not as if we have to make them confront all these serious issues; it’s just that’s how the world is. That’s how life is.

I was in Italy recently, talking about [my debut], Skellig, with a big group of children. And one boy said, “You know, we assume that children have to be protected from things like death, but in Skellig, the only people who ever use the word dead or death are the children.” I hadn’t thought about that; that wasn’t planned. I had a childhood where I experienced lots of death and bereavement. That’s what made me what I am, and that’s what made lots of people what they are—the fact that they have gone through some kind of pain, some kind of torment. Then we come through, and we

You put two sticks together, and suddenly it looks like a living creature. The world is filled with potential puppets.

transcend it, but we still retain that pain and that darkness. In a sense, maybe it makes the joy greater, makes the funny things funnier.

Your books often don’t t neatly into age or genre categories. I especially appreciate the blend of “real” and “magical.” I think the world’s amazing. Maybe the world is stranger and more complex and more magical and miraculous than we often think it to be. Again, it’s not something I deliberately do, but it just seems to be something about the way that I see the world. I remember when I was writing Skellig, I never expected to write for young people, and I was astonished [when] I found myself writing particular sentences. I

Puppet

Almond David; illus. by Lizzy Stewart

Candlewick | 240 pp. | $18.99 Sept. 3, 2024 | 9781536239171

thought, Oh, you can’t do that. And then I thought, Yes, you can, because the readers of this are young people with exible minds, exible imaginations.

I read that an agent once turned you down because she already had another working-class Northern author.

People would say to some writers, “Don’t be too local. Don’t be too speci c, because then you won’t be read outside [your region].” But it’s the speci city of writers that makes me want to read them. I write speci cally about this place. It’s a kind of reimagined Northeast, but it’s based here, it’s grounded here. The same with the voice—it’s lled with Northern rhythms, the same that [led me to be] told by that agent, “I’ve got you already. I don’t need you.” It was thought not to be cultured. It was thought not to be something that would interest anybody. There is still prejudice in England about people with an accent like mine or people from somewhere like I come from, but it is changing.

What advice did you give your creative writing students at Bath Spa University?

The important thing is to nd your own vision—and your own vision might not be accommodated within those narrow bounds that we often impose on ourselves. So it’s important to nd yourself, to nd your own vision, and nd your own voice. You have to think beyond what you are told you are. You have to think you’re bigger than you might be allowed to be.

Republic adventure centers on three young heroes who are seeking to better understand themselves, their values, and their places in the galaxy. Through Churo, Córdova adds refreshing complexity to the Hutts, who are traditionally depicted as the embodiment of corruption. The characters’ emotional growth occurs amid high action and conflict with a daunting enemy. Final art not seen. A worthwhile series expansion written from a new perspective. (Fantasy. 8-12)

Goodbye, Hello: A Going Home Travel Adventure

Dale, Angela H. | Illus. by Daniel Wiseman Holiday House (32 pp.) | $18.99 Nov. 5, 2024 | 9780823454778

An engaging and heartwarming depiction of a military family’s reunion.

In a small U.S. city, a paleskinned mom and brown-skinned child and infant in arms bid goodbye to “Pop-Pop” and “Gram” and climb into a yellow cab for the start of a long journey. They’re going to be reunited with a U.S. Navy sailor in a new port; they eventually reach Japan after moving by mobile walkway, elevator, air-train, plane, and bus. Brisk two-beat alternately rhyming lines whisk readers along through the tedium of travel, though the many people portrayed are mostly smiling, and some are particularly helpful. Finally the big ship looms on the page horizon, and the family joyfully embraces their other mom, a Black sailor: “Now we’re four / More to love.” Readers can play seek-and-find to spot the dozen uniformed workers who interact with travelers and the various modes of transport depicted, including a wheelchair. Wiseman’s vigorous but precise fine black outlines show a wide variety of skin colors, though most travelers wear bright, casual outfits. Distant, aerial perspectives include a viewpoint high above the fantastically

colorful buildings lining city blocks. Repeat trips through the pages are guaranteed by the numerous details to pore over (though one crucial detail somehow escaped Wiseman’s discerning eye: seat belts!).

Armchair travelers, first-time fliers, and airport habitués will buckle up willingly for this vicarious voyage. (author’s note) (Picture book. 2-5)

Reasons To Look at the Night Sky

Daniel, Danielle | Tundra Books (256 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781774883532

A space-loving kid learns to adapt to change. Eleven-year-old Luna McKenna loves outer space more than anything, which is why she’s so excited for her class astronomy unit and accompanying in-depth research project. Unfortunately, her beloved teacher is on leave, temporarily replaced by substitute Ms. Manitowabi. Now their final project will combine science with art, a subject Luna finds unappealing. Other undesirable changes are afoot, as well: Mom’s promotion at work and subsequent new schedule means the end of the family’s Tuesday Taco Night tradition, and Luna’s friendship with bestie Maggie Cho faces threats from Maggie’s parents’ impending split (she’ll spend half her weekends downtown with her dad) and Maggie’s competing friendship with classmate Astrid. Slowly, Luna comes to accept that not all change is bad and begins to see connections between art and science, particularly after Ms. Manitowabi shares her Ojibwe Sky Stories with the class. Despite the significance the Sky Stories have to Luna’s journey, none of them actually appear in the book. Readers may also wonder why first-person narrator Luna tells her story in verse, given how early and often she repeats her dislike of poetry. Still, Luna’s love of space and fear of change

may endear her to similarly minded kids. Luna presents white; her father uses a wheelchair, and his disability is naturally woven into the work. A solid story about dealing with discomfort and change. (Verse fiction. 8-12)

Bea Breaks Barriers!: How Florence Beatrice Price’s Music Triumphed Over Prejudice

DeLems, Caitlin | Illus. by Tonya Engel Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers (48 pp.) | $18.99 | Oct. 29, 2024 9781635924275

A tribute to the perseverance of an underrecognized Black composer. Growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) had high musical aspirations, which were initially stymied “because Black girls did not give recitals in public buildings.” Bea (born Florence Beatrice Smith) attended a segregated public school. She played piano at her home and absorbed the rhythms of the spirituals, folk, juba, and classical music that surrounded her. She created her own compositions from an early age. In 1903, Bea was accepted to the New England Conservatory of Music—one of only two Black students among 2,000. Afterward, she taught lessons and continued to compose but couldn’t get her work published. She and her husband, Thomas Jewell Price, moved to Chicago, where she found some success while also scraping together a living to support their two daughters. Her version of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord,” famously sung by contralto Marion Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, finally, if briefly, brought her the recognition she deserved. DeLems’ narrative reads more like a resume than a story, succumbing to cliches and a profusion of unwarranted sentence fragments. Nevertheless, Bea Price’s contributions

A tribute to the perseverance of an underrecognized Black composer.

BEA BREAKS BARRIERS!

to the musical world surely merit a biography, and this one makes a strong case for her impressive body of music. Relying on a pastel palette and precise period details, Engel’s delicate illustrations bring both warmth and energy to the narrative.

A much-needed account, though not without its shortcomings. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, music glossary, timeline, archival photographs, list of artists active during Bea’s era, selected bibliography, picture credits) (Picture-book biography. 7-10)

Each Day Is a Gift

Detlefsen, Lisl H. | Illus. by Natalia Vasilica Beaming Books (32 pp.) | $18.99 Nov. 19, 2024 | 9781506492520

Kids express their thanks for everyday wonders.

“Each day is a gift.” Some are eagerly desired, like a bicycle or a trip to an amusement park, while others are a bit drearier, such as new pajamas at Christmas. Some are unexpected: A baby bird that falls from its nest is couched as “an opportunity” for a caregiver and child to show the small creature kindness. The unseen narrator adds that “some gifts feel very unwanted…the kind of gift you’d rather return or tuck out of sight to gather dust.” A child whose dog has recently died sits on a porch holding a collar gloomily. “But instead of hiding it, you take a moment to hold it up to the light.” The child memorializes the deceased pet in a treehouse, a hidden sanctuary. And some gifts are wonderful surprises: A child meets new neighbors, one of

whom turns out to be a classmate. The tenderly reassuring text will help kids learn to weather storms, secure in the knowledge that better days are around the corner. The attractive, softly hued, painterly illustrations convey much of the book’s meaning and are rife with details for observant readers. The dog who later dies is seen on an early page, and on the final spread, the child happily leads a new dog. In the book’s first scene, a child yawns while a bird—perhaps the parent of the one that later falls—perches on a window. The characters are diverse. Gentle guidance for life’s inevitable ups and downs. (Picture book. 4-6)

The Hotel Balzaar

DiCamillo, Kate | Illus. by Júlia Sardà Candlewick (160 pp.) | $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 9781536223316 | Series: Norendy Tales

A mysterious hotel guest tells stories to a maid’s child. It’s been a long time since the last letter arrived from Marta’s soldier father; without him, Marta and her mother have landed in the attic room of the Hotel Balzaar, where her mother works as a maid and Marta must be always unobtrusive. But when a flamboyant elderly countess with a parrot arrives, the new guest spots Marta right away and insists the child come to her room to hear stories. The stories enchant and frustrate Marta in equal turns, being both compelling and ending in places that leave her unsatisfied. But the stories also seem interconnected in

ways that inspire Marta to examine them for deeper meaning. Pieces of the fablelike stories relate to Marta— especially to her father. Marta’s holding out in her belief that he will return to them one day, and she finds the more magical takes on reality offered by the countess’s stories reassuring in the face of her life’s ambiguities. Readers, too, will enjoy piecing together the connections among the stories and will be encouraged to seek deeper truths about people and the world around them. The vintage, baroque artwork features bold, confident lines that capture the timelessness of both Marta’s story and the countess’s tales. Characters present white.

A delightful, thoughtful escape to a magical world. (Fantasy. 7-10)

Bella Ballerina

Draper, Sharon M. | Illus. by Ebony Glenn Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum (40 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781534463967

A young Black ballerina practices for an upcoming recital.

Little Bella loves to spin and whirl at the Crystal Pointe Ballet Academy. She enjoys the music and learns positions such as chassé, passé, and pas de chat. Along with a diverse cast of young dancers, she takes lessons from a Black ballet teacher, with a Black pianist accompanying them. The class is appropriately fun for these youngsters, who pretend to be dragons and little ducks. When Bella loses her shoe in class, a friend is there to assist. We briefly see the students prepare for the show. Soon Bella finds herself onstage, fighting nerves. What will help her spring into action? Reaching out to support a fellow dancer through a moment of uncertainty grounds Bella—and gives her the strength to soar. With digital illustrations sparkling with stars, set against pink, yellow, and blue backgrounds, the pages are cheery, like a trip to a candy

store. Keeping the energy levels high, Glenn depicts the characters’ swirls and twirls. While the narrative’s dramatic tension is quite minor, readers will appreciate this gentle tale that emphasizes the importance of helping a friend in need. Told in chirpy rhyming verse, the simple narrative would be a good read-aloud. Portraying dancers of various ethnicities, with Black adults as teachers, this title also offers a refreshingly inclusive depiction of ballet.

A gracefully illustrated, uplifting story for young balletomanes. (glossary) (Picture book. 3-8)

Quantum!: The Strange Science of the Smallest Stuff in the Universe

Edge, Christopher | Illus. by Paul Daviz Candlewick (48 pp.) | $18.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 9781536237627

A novelist sets out to explain quantum physics in simple terms. Readers sucked in by curiosity and by Daviz’s animated, retro, Pixar-style illustrations will likely come out the other end of this informational wormhole more confused than ever, but perhaps the book’s confirmation that the subatomic realm really is weird and unintuitive—and what that tells us about how much we have yet to understand about how the physical universe ticks—is worth the trip. Edge attempts to address a huge range of topics, from the Big Bang to Schrödinger’s “zombie” cat, to supernovas, black holes, and dark matter and energy. With such scope, shortcuts are unavoidable; not only does he never get around to defining what quantum actually means, but he also doesn’t explain the differences between “up” quarks and “down” quarks, or how they all got their droll designations. Likewise, he neglects to mention that there are considerably more than three states of matter, and although he does discuss quantum

entanglement and spaghettification, his blithe promise to “shed a little light” on how photons can be both particles and waves remains unkept. Dressed in lab coats, human figures diverse of race and gender, and some who use wheelchairs, appear occasionally in the pictures as the free-form quark narrator progresses through both macro and micro universes. Sketchy and wildly ambitious, though lightened by a free-wheeling spirit. (Informational picture book. 8-11)

My Friend LeVar

Edmond, Ezra | Illus. by Jenna Nahyun Chung | Charlesbridge (32 pp.) | $17.99 Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781623543174

Edmond draws from personal experience for this story of a Black child whose love of books is nurtured by LeVar Burton, host of TV’s Reading Rainbow. Mom, who presents white, and Dad, who is Black, introduce the young narrator to “someone special,” whom they know “from a famous TV show called Roots.” Entranced, the child is inspired to seek out the books LeVar recommends, from Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day to Jeanette Winter’s Follow the Drinking Gourd. The narrative culminates with the child meeting LeVar by chance in the grocery store; they hug, Mom takes a picture, and the child proudly shows off the photo in school the next day. Reading Rainbow isn’t mentioned by name until the backmatter; many adults will easily recognize the show, but for younger

readers, Edmond includes a helpful blurb about Burton and the books and TV episodes referenced. Though these stories let Edmond see himself reflected on the page, he observes that many of them were by non-Black creators; in his powerful author’s note, he stresses the importance of spotlighting books by Black authors and artists, “because representation in the hand that holds the pen is just as important as representation that is seen on the page.” Chung’s cartoon illustrations effectively depict the young narrator’s flights of fancy, from quilting alongside LeVar to sailing the high seas with him. While the book is light on plot, Edmond’s reverence for Burton, his impact, and the magic of childhood memories is palpable. A meaningful ode to a literary hero and youthful imagination. (Picture book. 4-6)

Kirkus Star Work: Interviews With People Doing Jobs They Love

Feinberg, Shaina | Illus. by Julia Rothman Candlewick (64 pp.) | $18.99 | Dec. 3, 2024 9781536232660

Drawing inspiration from their New York Times business column, Feinberg and Rothman offer introductions to people happily engaged in 28 unconventional careers. These concise profiles include a veterinarian in Uganda, who explains how to transport live giraffes; owners of an antique toy shop on City Island in the Bronx; and a pair of vegan

Tantalizing glimpses of working worlds beyond the office or computer screen.

butchers who live in Minneapolis but grew up in Guam, to mention just a few. Based on live or video interviews, each entry combines brief background notes and quotes distributed in easily digestible blocks around Rothman’s lively portraits and lavishly detailed views of storefronts, crowded display shelves, workspaces hung about with specialized gear, and outdoorsy gatherings of wild or domestic animals. Here, a tour guide in Australia’s Budj Bim National Park exhibits a special net that he and other Gunditjmara people use to trap eels. There, a research assistant in Chicago’s Field Museum notes that the ability to write very tiny numbers is a job requirement. Why? In order to label very tiny bones. The author and illustrator close out with entries on their own work and a list of helpful prompts for would-be interviewers. The workers here are as diverse racially and culturally as they are geographically; one (an architect and accessibility consultant) uses a motorized wheelchair. This fascinating survey will leave readers exhilarated by the options before them, inspired to think big, and eager for more—hopefully, Feinberg and Rothman have a follow-up in the works.

Tantalizing glimpses of working worlds beyond the office or computer screen. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-10)

The Class With Wings

Fleischman, Paul | Illus. by Hannah Salyer

Cameron Kids (40 pp.) | $18.99

Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781949480436

Led by their teacher, budding birders imagine their lives as veeries.

When Ms. Lee turns off the lights and starts playing rainforest sounds, her students know it’s time to fly into their imaginations. In vibrantly hued scenes, honey-colored veeries—“Sort of like robins but smaller”—flit over the dark shadowy blue of the classroom.

Ms. Lee sets the scene, describing the birds’ eating and migration habits. Bright, saturated images of the birds contrast with faded depictions of the schoolchildren. In one spread, the young, Black-presenting narrator holds out an arm, which becomes a multicolored wing. As the students follow the veeries’ migration from Brazil to the United States and Canada, they learn that deforestation, dogs, and lit windows all pose dangers. The children draw parallels between themselves and the birds. Just as veeries fall prey to raptors, kids are vulnerable to bullies. One youngster begins wondering about a relative’s immigrant journey—was it as perilous as a veerie’s travels? Matter-of-fact text pairs well with dreamy illustrations that illuminate the students’ thoughts as effectively as the “bird river” they’re imagining. In the final spread, the narrator comes face to face with a real bird, and the two share a curious moment: “I think it knows I’m a veery, too.” Ms. Lee presents Asian; her students are diverse. A visually stirring guide to empathizing with the natural world. (further reading, facts about birds) (Picture book. 5-9)

The Headless Doll Ford, Mike | Scholastic Paperbacks (224 pp.) | $7.99 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9781546111764

Three friends help a ghost find her missing doll. Jen is spending the summer with her aunt on Maine’s Big Rock Island while her naturalist parents research spiders in Costa Rica. Aunt Liv has a business making and repairing dolls that draws in customers worldwide. She runs it out of her home, historic Pratchett House, named after the sea captain who built it. Legend has it that the island is haunted by the ghosts of Arthur Crunk, the lighthouse keeper responsible for the shipwreck that killed Capt.

Pratchett, and young Pearl Pratchett, who died after catching a chill. She’d gone down to the shore looking for her father and found a headless doll that washed up from the wreck. After some unexplained phenomena at the house, Pearl appears to Jen. Jen, assisted by new friends Joe and Maddie and by Edith, an eccentric local woman, tries to help. They set themselves the task of reuniting the head and body of Pearl’s doll, but both pieces are missing. And they soon realize that there’s a danger to the island that’s decidedly not supernatural—the local lighthouse owner who wants to turn Pratchett House into a hotel. Suffused with Down East flavor, this lightly spooky, thoroughly enjoyable novel is ideal for readers who prefer their ghosts friendly and their villains easily foiled. Most characters read white; Joe is Passamaquoddy.

Offers ghostly thrills set against a well-developed New England backdrop. (Supernatural. 8-12)

Bear at the Fair

Gholz, Sophia | Illus. by Susan Batori Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) | $18.99 Aug. 15, 2024 | 9781534112803

Self-awareness can sometimes help us avoid acting out our bad moods.

A big, grumpy black bear goes berserk at a carnival: popping a fox kit’s balloon, upsetting the face-painting booth, failing at line etiquette. Though a raccoon clown tries to divert him, Bear is having none of it. Briefly, a scent seems to draw him, until a hare magician’s attempt to corral him with a rope renews his ire. Then a trap baited with food snares him, spurring an apology, explanation, and tears. As in the creators’ Bug on the Rug (2022), a last-minute mediator identifies the problem: Shrew understands what being “hangry” is like. Though Bear is offered a cupcake, we never see him eat, but he does help with cleanup and even makes friends. On the final pages, Shrew also becomes

hangry but cheerfully explains the word’s meaning. The spare text moves briskly through a half-dozen rhyming sounds, though the unconventional typeface might confuse some beginning readers. The two-beat rhythm vanishes at times (“Others hide and howl, / as Bear snarls and scowls”), but the message is clear: Though this sort of behavior is unacceptable, it is understandable. The candy-colored, cartoonish illustrations include some unusual animals (a yak, an elk) among the fairgoers, and the creatures’ faces are all emotionally expressive. Young readers will enjoy visiting this animal fair. (Picture book. 4-8)

Mommy Crumbs

González, Paula & José Carlos Andrés Illus. by Anna Font | Trans. by Cecilia Ross NubeOcho (36 pp.) | $17.99 | Nov. 5, 2024 9788419607386 | Series: Somos8

A tribute to a long, welllived life.

Young Paula identifies with swift animals, like horses and dolphins, but especially sky-skimming birds. Grown up, she cooks sumptuous stews for her family (two small beings are pictured) and her dog, Leon. Her zest for food leaves her covered in breadcrumbs and earns her the name Mommy Crumbs. Years flow by with the turn of a page: Leon has died and is fondly remembered; Mommy Crumbs is now a grandmother. These days, her cooking is limited to snacks, but she’s still covered in crumbs, so her grandkids bring her a gift: a chick that gobbles them up. The chick quickly grows enormous, and Mommy Crumbs, folded against its wing, is “very, very old.” Sitting atop the fowl, she smilingly bids goodbye to her family, happy that she is going to achieve her lifelong dream: to fly. Now the family misses her, but every crumb they see is a reminder of the enduring presence of their beloved matriarch. Andrés and his mother, González, have written a

An

epicurean tale of bravery and tasty discoveries.

UMAMI

refreshingly uplifting, understated take on loss. Translated from Spanish, their words are illuminated by brilliant, offbeat color-block, collagelike images that play blue and orange tones off each other, with a fine disregard for small accuracies (Paula has cyan hair, and though she and many characters are light-skinned, other have bluish skin).

A tender, subtle introduction to death. (Picture book. 4-8)

Umami

Grant, Jacob | Viking (40 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 29, 2024 | 9780593624067

A penguin embarks on a culinary adventure.

Tired of fish, fish, and more fish, a brown-andwhite penguin named Umami declares, “I’m finished with all of it.” She sails off in a little boat, eager for new gastronomic opportunities. Along the way, she discovers salty, sour, bitter, and sweet foods that tease her palate and evoke joy. She even comes across a savory flavor that bears her name (umami), along with the heat and vigor of spice. Determined to share her findings with her fellow penguins, she returns to her home shores full of ideas and motivation. But will the other penguins be as daring as she? “There’s only one way to find out,” she declares as she whips up dish after dish for her village, enticing them with delicious new smells. As they each take a bite, silence falls over the penguins, and Umami discovers one more thing—her new purpose and calling as a chef for her friends and family. Grant’s spare text guides

Umami through her journey, paired with a classic illustration style that alternates an ocean of white space with bold, textured backgrounds seasoned with red, green, and yellow, evoking Umami’s culinary evolution. While readers might have some questions about the connection between the protagonist’s name and the actual meaning of umami, her experience will certainly inspire them to be similarly adventurous in their own eating habits. An epicurean tale of bravery and tasty discoveries. (Picture book. 4-7)

Ellie’s Deli: In a Pickle!

Greenwald, Lisa | Illus. by Galia Bernstein Andrews McMeel Publishing (224 pp.) $11.99 paper | Sept. 17, 2024 9781524883621 | Series: Ellie’s Deli, 2

Ellie Glantz— loyal friend and champion worrier—returns for a second outing and faces new problems to solve.

Nina, who was introduced in the first book as a new addition to Ellie’s friend group, hasn’t gelled equally with all the pals and is stirring up drama. The venue where Ellie’s friend Charlie wanted to hold her bat mitzvah party closed, so she may not get to celebrate after the religious service. This leads Ellie to push for her family’s deli to add an event space, which could save the day for Charlie and expand their business. With all the distractions in her life, Ellie has totally lost focus on school—badly enough that her adviser has told her parents. The challenges Ellie faces feel a little more disjointed

in this volume: The realistic nuance of Nina’s disruption to long-standing friendships seems to belong to a different story than the rosy collaboration of the event space project. As before, the problems take some wrangling, but all are completely resolved, even if somewhat implausibly and instantaneously. Though the specifics of Ellie’s academic challenges remain fuzzy, readers may take comfort in the practical, organizational support that helps her get back on track after a rough start to sixth grade. Spot illustrations and occasional recipes break up the text, contributing to the quick pace.

Readers looking for optimistic contemporary stories will breeze through this reassuring, relationship-driven tale. (Fiction. 7-10)

Little Orange Pumpkin: A Heartwarming Halloween Book for Children

Guendelsberger, Erin | Illus. by Jennifer Zivoin | Sourcebooks Wonderland (40 pp.)

$12.99 | Aug. 6, 2024 | 9781728289595

Series: Little Heroes, Big Hearts

A pumpkin gets plenty of excitement on Halloween. Little Orange Pumpkin sits on the porch with her parents on Halloween night. They review three rules: Remember your manners when given candy; no eating any until getting their OK; stay close. While Little Pumpkin thinks she’s old enough to trick-or-treat alone, her parents believe otherwise. Frustrated and angry, she rolls off the porch, under which she sees a warm orange light. Curious, Little Pumpkin follows it to a hole leading to a wooden door. In front of her is a spooky house. A monster, reminiscent of Daddy, offers a tour. A series of exciting adventures ensue, in which she meets and proves her mettle by engaging with skeletons, goblins, ghosts, a witch (resembling Mommy), a gargoyle, a vampire, bats, and spiders.

When Little Pumpkin returns home, her parents assure her that they’re not mad and still love her, even though she shouted. Little Pumpkin concedes that she wants them to observe the third rule: Stay close. This is an enjoyable tale with an uplifting message. Readers will appreciate the Halloween trappings, which form a backdrop for its real story: a child desiring independence, taking those first tentative steps toward it, and being assured of a warm welcome by loving parents. The colorful digital illustrations are animated and filled with non-frightening Halloween characters and symbols. Background humans are diverse. Halloween might be scary; independence needn’t be. (Picture book. 4-7)

Do Not Enter! 1: For Boys Only

Héroux, Caroline | Forbidden Press (248 pp.) | $15.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9782925004042 | Series: Do Not Enter!, 1

A sixth grader records his peeves and pranks at home and in school. Charlie resolutely insists that he’s keeping a “notebook,” not a “diary,” because “only girls do that,” and anyway, he adds, “at least the stories I write are interesting. Nothing to do with what girls write.” He rejoices in harassing his teenage half sister, despite being inevitably caught and confined to his room by his “witch” of a mom, regards his younger twin siblings as “leeches,” shrugs off schoolwork, laughs when a schoolmate is fat-shamed, and nurses a crush on new classmate Justine. Readers are likely to scoff when Charlie suddenly turns out to have been a good kid all along, befriending the bullied classmate (whom he attempts to compliment in a problematic aside, “The more I look at him, the less I think he’s fat”), buckling down to improve his grades, and treating the twins more kindly. Casual misogyny

and fatphobia pervade the story: “My dad’s the coolest (especially when mom’s not around)” and “today, FAT BOY (we call him that sometimes) needed his inhaler.” The cast largely presents white; one child with an Asian name is, stereotypically, “the BRAIN of the class,” and a friend’s nanny “from somewhere in Asia” doesn’t speak English, so “we can say ANYTHING we want…” Several blank ruled pages at the end offer room for diarists (or even boys) to fill in with personal grievances.

Contains an abundance of wellworn tropes alongside regressive stereotypes presented as humor. (Fiction. 8-12)

Do Not Enter! 2: Horror Stories!

Héroux, Caroline | Forbidden Press (248 pp.) | $15.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9782925004080 | Series: Do Not Enter!, 2

The preteen diarist goes to summer camp and makes a new, albeit spectral, friend. Sounding just as insecure but less whiny in this second volume of his private notebook, Charlie has a mostly idyllic summer thanks to Kamp P. He shares a cabin (whose name, bizarrely, is said to mean Earth in “Native American”) with school friends and idolized cousin Joje and repeatedly runs into the deliciously terrifying but friendly ghost of a camper who drowned 50 years before. Writing in mixed font sizes, with words printed in green for emphasis, Charlie also records injuries, wasp stings, camp activities, and pointed life lessons. William, Charlie’s bullied friend (“He’s such a GOOD GUY, I don’t know why it’s so hard for him to make friends… I know why: he’s too FAT”) shows up at camp, many pounds slimmer, announcing, “I’ve changed what I eat. I was sick of being fat and ugly.” Charlie is more a reactor than a ruminator, but readers will pick up on his feelings

easily enough, even when he’s unsure what he feels after the news that his antagonistic older half sister was in a coma and nearly died after being hit by a car. Nevertheless, Charlie ends on an upbeat note, rather callously, all things considered, reflecting on the “BEST SUMMER, EVER!” As before, toxic masculinity appears throughout: “Look at the bright side. We didn’t get beat by girls.” Characters read white.   A summer camp story let down by fatphobia and other problematic content. (Fiction. 8-12)

My First Book of Fancy Letters

Hische, Jessica | Penguin Workshop (32 pp.)

$16.99 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780593385012

Each letter of the alphabet gets fresh and fancy in this primer from typography guru Hische. “Letters can be A-for-Athletic,” “J-for-Jeweled,” or “U-for-Unique,” but one thing’s for sure: “Each and every letter is AWESOME!” On each page, lowercase letters are rendered in pastel 3D block lettering, while uppercase counterparts take on stylized typographic pizzazz to match the descriptive text, which features lively adjectives that begin with the corresponding letter. Each anthropomorphized letter has a simple, expressive doodled face and stick limbs. Lowercase b uses a tiny bubble wand to blow a soapy, uppercase bubbly B. Uppercase M is drawn with curling serifs and a rabbit-filled top hat and a wand, much to the delight of the lowercase m spectator. Each scene is colorfully detailed, though visually a bit flattened by the stark white background. While the design is inspired, however, it isn’t clear who this book is intended for. The intricacies of the art may go over the heads of readers learning their ABCs; older children and typography-loving adults, as well as fans of Hische’s work, feel like this book’s true audience. Those readers may find the presentation and format a

bit on the young side, while preschoolers will likely struggle with words such as vibrant, prickly, and electric A charmingly illustrated and designed work that will have trouble finding its readership. (Picture book. 3-7)

Samba! The Heartbeat of a Community: Ailton Nunes’s Musical Journey

Hoelzel, Philip | Illus. by André Ceolin Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) | $18.99

July 1, 2024 | 9781534112957

A salute to a Brazilian community’s spirit and music. In the Mangueira neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, residents prepare for the annual Carnaval samba parades in the city’s huge Sambadrome by making bright costumes. The members of the competitive bateria, “the drum section and beating heart of the show,” practice their parts over and over into the night. Along with explaining the important role of local samba schools in Brazil as not just musical academies but social centers, too, Hoelzel focuses on the experiences of one musician, Ailton Nunes, who began drumming at age 5 and went on to help Mangueria’s bateria win a Carnaval award in 1990 before leaving to teach and perform; he was called back in 2011 to form and lead a new corps to another first prize. The biographical information is thin, and neither the narrative nor the pictures do much to evoke the music’s distinctive sound. Still, Ceolin does illustrate this invitation to think of samba as “a way to honor the past and dream for a better future” with scenes of smiling brasileiros with various shades of brown skin, dressed in ordinary or festive clothes, dancing enthusiastically or beating drums of diverse shapes and sizes on city streets and before huge stadium crowds. Backmatter offers more information on the music and Nunes, as well as a catalog of samba drum types.

A generic but celebratory introduction to a distinctive musical genre. (source list, glossary) (Picture-book biography. 6-8)

Second to None

Howell, Destiny | Scholastic (336 pp.)

$7.99 paper | Nov. 12, 2024

9781338746730

Middle school life is about to get even more complicated in this stand-alone follow-up to 2022’s High Score DJ leads a group of friends who complete jobs for other Ella Fitzgerald Middle School students. Audrey is their charming face, Conor is quick and tech-savvy, and Monty is the gentle muscle. DJ is the mastermind and the one they trust to come up with the best plans. After his latest job, he finds a mysterious note with a broken pencil in his locker. Around the same time, Malik, a friend who was on his team at his old school, reappears, kickstarting a mission like none that DJ’s embarked on before. He quickly finds himself wrapped up in a conspiracy that threatens the very balance of middle school life, and he must forge unlikely alliances with other groups at his school if they stand a chance of solving the mystery before it blows up—and they become collateral damage. Interesting, well-written characters with wildly different personalities engage in witty banter, coming together to create the ultimate middle school team. The mystery draws readers in as it unravels and the pieces fall into place. The satisfying ending ties up all the loose ends without feeling forced or rushed. The first book established that DJ is Black and Conor and Audrey are white; Monty has a French father and an Arabic-speaking mother.

A clever school story with a welldrawn cast and a page-turning mystery. (Adventure. 8-12)

A sweet family Christmas purchase

that will be treasured through the years.

I LOVE YOU, JINGLE BELL BABY

I Love You, Jingle Bell Baby

James, Helen Foster | Illus. by Petra Brown

Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) | $18.99

Aug. 1, 2024 | 9781534113121

Christmas and bunnies: What could be sweeter?

A grown-up rabbit and an adorable youngster prepare for the holiday. They decorate their home and get in some tobogganing. They bake pumpkin pies, plum pudding, cake, and star-shaped cookies adorned with red and green sprinkles, then wrap presents and hang mistletoe. There’s still more holiday prep to do, and some activities involve joining with others. They play, dance, sing, and ring bells; build snow bunnies and snowballs from freshly fallen snow; and gather with family and friends to sing carols, ending the evening by sipping hot cocoa and preparing for bed. The adult helps the little one wish on a star and utters the best words a child can hear at Christmastime or any time: “Jingle bell baby, I love you. Sleep tight.” This is a delightful holiday tale, expressed in lilting verse, and just right for reading all cuddled up with one’s own “jingle bell baby.” It will work better, however, as a personal purchase rather than a library one—and as a lovely Christmas gift—because the book’s opening page invites inscriptions and the final two pages include one on which a parent, grandparent, or other loving caregiver is encouraged to write “A Special Letter to My Favorite Bunny” and one on which to paste a photo. The cheery, colorful illustrations are as soft, warm, and lush as rabbit fur.

A sweet family Christmas purchase that will be treasured through the years. (Picture book. 3-6)

Jingle

Bells

Kirchner, Ben | Boxer Books (32 pp.)

$18.99 | Sept. 3, 2024 | 9781914912924

The classic song gets an updated, racing twist. Excitement’s at fever pitch: “The 1st Ever Snowball Run” will be held on Christmas Eve! “All Sleigh Classes Welcome!” The route: from Jinglewood to Elftown. And, set to the classic winter song’s lyrics, the four teams are off! What makes this book especially fun is that even nonreaders will be able to join in on the “text” because, for the most part, this energetic holiday tale, first published in the U.K., can be sung. Most of the text is comprised of the familiar song’s lyrics, with the repeated “Jingle Bells” refrain italicized. Readers and nonreaders familiar with that classic will be able to sing along while closely observing the racing participants in the illustrations and enjoying the thrilling dash to the finish line—and, near the end, “a mid-air collision” with an extremely famous sleigh driver. Some lyrics have been newly written expressly for this book to perfectly match the rhythms of the original song; these are set in roman type, and adults sharing this title can sing the fresh lyrics, too, thus enhancing the book’s enjoyment. Hereafter, whenever youngsters sing the song, they’ll likely envision these colorful, dynamic, cartoony illustrations featuring an almost-all-animal

cast of sleigh racers that include a walrus ship captain character and a rule-breaking blue yeti. Human characters are diverse.

Lively, cheery holiday fun. (Picture book. 4-7)

Bringing Back Kay-Kay

Kothari, Dev | Walker US/Candlewick (304 pp.) | $18.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 9781536233643

Sibling love and rivalry are two sides of the same coin for a brother and sister growing up in Lamora, India.

Tween Lena Krishnan, aka El-Kay, is enjoying an idyllic vacation from school without her 15-year-old brother, Karthik, aka Kay-Kay, who’s gone away to summer camp in Goa. Her parents are finally being more attentive toward her, and she wishes he might stay away a bit longer. But everything changes when Kay-Kay doesn’t make it home after camp. Although he boarded the overnight express train with his classmates, he wasn’t there when it arrived in Lamora. The Krishnan family begins to unravel with his disappearance. Worse, the police are dismissive and seem to think her brother is a runaway. Lena decides to take matters into her own hands and look into his disappearance. Her investigation leads her to speak with Karthik’s friends and teachers and learn about his time at camp. In the process, Lena finds out more about her brother—and herself. Despite some slow moments, the book is well paced overall. Kay-Kay’s poems, which Lena discovers, are a tad banal, and the police response feels unconvincing, but Lena’s first-person narration, enhanced by pages from her notebook, is engaging, and Kothari’s writing is fun and assured.

A fast-paced mystery thoughtfully exploring family relationships.

(Mystery. 10-14)

6 Feel-Good Novels To Chase Away the Blues

Myth-making with

a majestic monster at its heart, laced with style and suspense.

THE NIGHT MOTHER VOL. 1

Eyes on the Sky

Kramer, J. Kasper | Atheneum (256 pp.)

$17.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781665944205

Unexplained flying objects cause chaos in post–World War II Roswell, New Mexico. Twelve-year-old Dorothy Duncan is accustomed to finding solace in the sky. Several years ago, when Ma was sick, Pa was ineffectually pursuing get-rich plans, and older brother Dwight was a trainee pilot in the Army Air Forces, Dorothy took to climbing the dilapidated windmill on her family’s forlorn ranch and firing rockets into the air. Now, with her parents dead and her brother resentful about being forced to come home to care for her, she’s grown more reckless. She launches a weather balloon in a thunderstorm—and two subsequent explosions make her fear that she’s accidentally brought down a plane from the nearby Roswell military base. When Dorothy and her schoolmate Hugo Martinez search the desert for potentially identifiable wreckage, they find otherworldly debris—and curious Dorothy takes something that the strangers want back. Part gritty historical fiction, part The War of the Worlds, the novel uses adventure and science fiction to make some pointed observations about the effects of war. Some characters feel less fully rounded and slightly more like plot devices, but Dorothy, Hugo, and the place they call home are vividly rendered. Most characters are cued white or Latine. A courageous hero and some unexpected twists make for a

compelling read. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)

The House With a Dragon in It

Lake, Nick | Illus. by Emily Gravett Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781665955683

A young girl unleashes a wishgranting witch. Fourth grader Summer has never had a key to the house where she lives—she knows that foster parents don’t trust her not to steal. She does have a best friend, Aishwarya, and her current foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Pattinson, bought her the first brandnew school uniform she’s ever had. But one day, after she shouts “You’re not my dad!” at Mr. Pattinson, a sinkhole opens up in the living room. No one is sure what to do, so they carry on living with the giant hole—until the night when Summer hears a gravelly voice and discovers a dragon, surrounded by human skeletons, guarding a treasure in a cavern at the bottom. After she helps the dragon by pulling a sword from a stone, it gives her a bottle labeled “Contaynes one witch. DO NOT OPEN.” Breaking the wax seal and removing the cork, Summer releases the spirit of a witch, who grants her wishes—but they come at a price. Summer uses her wits and kindness to navigate the perilous events that follow. Summer’s characterization is authentically shaped by her childhood experiences: She retains fond memories of her mother (the reasons why they’re no longer together aren’t specified) and

at first holds the Pattinsons at a distance. Gravett’s charmingly expressive illustrations add to the worldbuilding of this well-paced story. The main characters present white. An emotionally resonant and empathetic high-stakes adventure. (Fantasy. 8-12)

The Night Mother Vol. 1

Lambert, Jeremy & Alexa Sharpe

Oni Press (88 pp.) | $14.99 paper

Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781637154946

Series: The Night Mother, 1

In a moonlit world, a girl contends with her own shadowy origins. The sun is nowhere to be seen, and the moon bathes a small riverside town in ominous gloom. Gravedigger and astronomer Barnabas Tock observes this phenomenon with increasing concern. His adopted daughter, Madeline, is plagued by whispers from the graveyard dead’s whispers and by near-constant nightmares. Alternating between third-person narration and 12-year-old Madeline’s perspective, the book deftly lays the groundwork for an intriguing legend: A Night Mother governs the lunar world and turns the souls of the departed into moonlight when the moon is full. In every generation, a new Night Mother is born, ascending at the age of 13. The current Night Mother is a tyrannical phantom, plunging the world into darkness so she can consume the souls of the living as well as the dead. She harbors a dark plan for her offspring—brave, hard-bitten Madeline. To save her father, her town, and the souls bound in moonlight, Madeline and new friend Nura must find a way to stop her mother. Galactic greens, blues, and purples evoke inky darkness, while the immense Night Mother feels inescapable—a horrifically elegant Victorian ghost who resembles a gothic twist on Maxfield Parrish–esque tableaux. Barnabas is

tan-skinned with gray hair, Madeline is light-skinned with dark hair, and Nura is brown-skinned with blue-green hair. Myth-making with a majestic monster at its heart, laced with style and suspense. (Graphic fantasy. 9-15)

Mauntie and Me

LaRocca, Rajani | Illus. by Nadia Alam Candlewick (40 pp.) | $18.99 Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781536229417

A girl of South Asian descent learns to share the time she spends with a beloved relative. Whenever Priya’s extended family comes over, her older siblings and cousins run off to play, telling her that she’s too young to join them. Priya doesn’t mind, though, because she gets to hang out with Mauntie (“My Auntie”)—the nickname she’s given her mother’s sister. Both the youngest in their generations, the two experiment with extravagant hairstyles, eat delicious treats, and tell each other riddles. Then one day Priya’s cousin Aditi comes to visit. Aditi, who’s close to Priya’s age, ends up intruding on Priya and Mauntie’s time, taking over a game of Go Fish and answering Mauntie’s riddles before Priya has a chance to think them through. When Aditi announces that she and her family are moving back to the neighborhood and will be around more, Priya panics. Can she find a way to share Mauntie? This clearly written, deeply empathetic book is a tender look at how families grow over time, with relationships evolving as people change locations. The story’s message stops just short of preachy, while Alam’s art, with its visible pencil strokes and details such as patterns on the curtains and wallpaper, sets an intimate tone. The illustrations depict characters with a variety of skin colors, testifying to the diversity of the South Asian experience.

A gentle exploration of shifting family dynamics. (Picture book. 4-8)

Like This

Lebourg, Claire | Trans. by Sophie Lewis Transit Children’s Editions (32 pp.)

$19.95 | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9798893389029

A gentle ode to childhood and a parent’s undeniable love.

Echoes of cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé reverberate throughout this most charming French import, which follows two birds and their baby. One of the parents recounts the highlights of the little one’s child’s life. “The day you were born was a sunny day…,” the parent says. The accompanying image depicts a little bird swaddled up tight. Turn the page, and the thought is completed with the phrase “like this,” alongside the illustration of a beautiful day seen through a window, white curtains billowing. This pattern continues throughout the book, with the parent discussing a first smile, bumps on the head, nightmares, and more, pairing such moments with dreamy, evocative, and touching images. The result is a poetic encapsulation of what childhood feels like not simply to youngsters, but to parents as well. Though the book is told from the perspective of a caregiver, children are often entranced by the thought of what their earlier lives might have been like, and this book expertly taps into those feelings. Watercolor illustrations accompanied by thin pen lines fill the book with a sense of light and buoyancy.

Amid a sea of books devoted to parent/child bonds, this loving portrait soars. (Picture book. 3-6)

The Flying Circus

Levi, Patrizia | Illus. by Laura Barella Clavis (40 pp.) | $19.95 | Oct. 8, 2024 9798890630803

Flying Circus rain down on a village. A flock of birds descends from the sky with a striped circus tent. The townsfolk hand in their tickets and enter. After the lemur ringmaster tells a magical story, a series of images take shape. A swarm of buzzing bees appears, then turns into a waterfall. A forest grows; birds, animals, and fireflies emerge. The tent fills with water and sea creatures. A unicycleriding, juggling bear dazzles the crowd. A whale leaps through the air; a tiger and other endangered or extinct creatures and plants materialize. Readers learn that the Flying Circus is actually “nature’s messenger asking for help on behalf of the trees, the animals, and every life form.”

Departing audience members receive a “precious gift: a seed to plant in the hopes of transforming their wounded world.” The birds that delivered the tent prepare to carry it elsewhere and will leave seeds there, too, to remind successive audiences to cherish the earth. This odd, overlong story, originally published in Belgium and the Netherlands and translated from Dutch, offers a warning about protecting the planet—a laudable message. Unfortunately, the confusing, bizarre imagery and plodding text don’t convey that vital takeaway effectively; the connection between the circus acts and the conclusion feels unclear. Still, the lush illustrations have some appeal. Human characters are mostly light-skinned.

An earnest but perplexing tale about ecological preservation. (Picture book. 5-8)

Clive Penguin

Lewis Jones, Huw | Illus. by Ben Sanders Union Square Kids (32 pp.) | $18.99 Sept. 3, 2024 | 9781454955214

An unusual circus comes to town.

Colorful bird feathers bearing tickets to the

Deciding that penguin life isn’t cool, Clive takes steps to change things. Clive Penguin is suffering an identity crisis. Being a penguin isn’t so

hot. Clive’s sick of the “same old snow” and the “same old penguins.” Clive wants out of the frigid environment, longing to be somewhere else or even “someone else.” The fed-up penguin decides to skip town, believing that something wonderful must be right around the corner. Then Clive makes an epic discovery. Readers will giggle that Clive ignores a colossal whale in favor of something orange floating in the sea—a “unique, fashionable, versatile” tea cozy covering a teapot. Clive models the object in various ways, then returns to huddle among the penguins, sporting the cozy as a hat. However, lest readers think Clive has found a happily-ever-after ending, by the book’s conclusion, our hero is “boiling.” This drily witty story will have young readers chuckling, but it’ll make them think, too, for it’s about being unsure of yourself and where you belong and taking steps toward finding your place in the world. Clive’s return to the colony proves that while familiarity can breed discontent, it may also bring warmth and safety. The lively, uncluttered illustrations feature blues, whites, oranges, and yellows. A warm and—in more ways than one—very cool story about discovering one’s own identity. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Star

Deer Run Home

LeZotte, Ann Clare | Scholastic (224 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781339021904

A Deaf girl in an abusive situation has a chance at a new home.

Twelve-year-old Effie and her sister have been sent away from their mother and sexually abusive stepfather to live with their neglectful father. Effie’s family and peers don’t know ASL and barely try to communicate with her, and her two Deaf friends have gone off to a residential school.

She’s repeating fifth grade because of her poor English and math skills, both stemming from language deprivation and neglect. Only ASL interpreter Miss Kathy sees that something very wrong is going on in Effie’s life. The story is told from Effie’s point of view in non-diegetic narrative poems that convey the feelings and thoughts she’s unable to communicate to her family. Effie learns that poetry allows her to celebrate her way of expressing herself, free from the pressures of grammar. LeZotte conscientiously portrays a Deaf child who’s experiencing language deprivation, a member of an often-forgotten population. Though Miss Kathy plays a pivotal role in turning Effie’s life around, the author is careful not to deify those who assist people with disabilities. She juxtaposes Effie’s storyline with that of her friend Cait, who has cerebral palsy and struggles with a controlling and condescending paraprofessional. While the issues Effie faces are huge, the story avoids didacticism; this poignant and compelling book is meant for anyone, yet it is accessible to kids who, like Effie, struggle with reading. Effie presents white.

Quietly extraordinary. (resources, ASL learning links) (Verse fiction. 10-14)

Dive, Dive Into the Night Sea

Lu, Thea | Candlewick Studio (32 pp.)

$19.99 | Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781536234152

Catch a glimpse of the eerie beauty of the night sea. By the light of a full moon, a scuba diver, seen in silhouette, hovers over the water before

jumping in. The diver’s elongated shape drifts through the darkened seascape, a ray of light from a headlamp cutting through the shadowy underworld. Capturing the quiet vastness of the ocean, Lu employs dark blue tones to depict a realm that may appear calm and quiet yet is full of movement. As readers turn the pages of this vertically oriented book, each atmospheric spread reveals another breathtaking wonder: from enormous manta rays with “gaping mouths” to tiny, bioluminescent plankton. The spare, inquisitive text complements this hazy dreamworld: “I shine my light and wait to see who will come to me.” The beam of the flashlight provides a sharp focus against the dark blue sea life, with lift-a-flap panels offering thought-provoking facts (e.g., parrotfish bed down in protective cocoons that they create out of goo). Returning to the surface, the diver swims through a pod of sleeping sperm whales, suspended upright like giant floating stones. Though many children fear the dark, Lu makes clear that there’s nothing to be afraid of here— this is a moving journey into the unknown.

A fascinating, poetic tour. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Loose Threads: A Story About Me, Mom, and Dad

Ludin, Airien | Clavis (40 pp.) | $19.95 Oct. 22, 2024 | 9798890630834

A look at death, grief, and the messy emotions they evoke. Readers are informed that this story “is intended

A tenderhearted story that shows that our loved ones never truly leave us. THAT DAY

to be read aloud by an adult to a child.” Six key points are outlined on how to do so. Then we meet our young protagonist and her parents, all tan-skinned. Mom loves sewing stuffed toys with her daughter, who narrates, but she soon gets sick and passes away. Grief gets buried, the father and child grow distant from each other, and Mom’s belongings are tucked into boxes. A ball of yarn, its threads coming undone, proves a helpful metaphor for the girl’s feelings. Only when she screams, “I WANT IT TO BE LIKE IT WAS BEFORE!” does Dad intercede, and the two begin the healing process together. The bulk of the book wraps itself in the girl’s isolation and misery, only coming to practical advice and heartfelt platitudes in the last few pages. Backmatter asks readers to reflect on their own feelings. Earnest though a bit didactic, the book is buoyed by the skillful illustrations, which visualize vigorous and strong emotions. Originally published in Belgium and the Netherlands and translated from Dutch, the story would have benefitted from concentrating more on how the girl and her father intend to rebuild their relationship. Nonetheless, for those experiencing similar situations, the book offers a map for unmarked territory. There is no playbook for mourning, but this tale provides a gentle guide for the unthinkable. (Picture book. 3-6)

That Day: A Celebration of Love and Memories

Lyet, Pierre-Emmanuel | Trans. by Sarah Ardizzone | Pushkin Children’s Books (64 pp.) | $19.95 | Nov. 5, 2024 9781782694663

Nature and memories help with the loss of a loved one. A child cautiously walks through the crowd of unfamiliar people at home paying respects to the family after the loss of Grandma. Looking to get away

from the sad scene, the child bundles up and takes a walk out in the snow, recalling the bonding moments shared with the beloved grandmother. A strong gust of wind reminds the protagonist of Grandma brushing her hair; a pine cone recalls Grandma’s bun; thick tree trunks call to mind her “ankles and how they hurt.” Eventually, Grandpa treks out to find his grandchild, and the two head home, boosted by their memories. This sentimental look at death and mourning is buoyed by its positive portrayal of the recently deceased and her relationship with the protagonist. As the child recalls the beloved grandmother, her face and body reflect the realities of getting older. The text, translated from French, contains short sentences that mostly start with “I remember,” making this a good choice to share with young readers. The illustrations’ bright color palette makes the harsh winter climate shine, yet occasionally clashes with the text; during the wake, for example, “everything seemed to be in black and white,” yet the scene is shown in bright yellows, oranges, and reds. A tenderhearted story that shows that our loved ones never truly leave us. (Picture book. 4-7)

Carried on the Wind: It Starts With a Seed

Mabry, Sheri | Illus. by Kristina Jones Whitman (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Oct. 3, 2024 9780807573723

A journey that begins with a puff of breath demonstrates important scientific concepts.

Aiming, as Mabry explains in her afterword, to explore both our connections with the natural world and chaos theory in operation, this globe-spanning episode starts with a tan-skinned child who lives in Alaska breathing on a puff of dandelion fluff—some of which ends up in a Rufous hummingbird’s nest. Eventually, one of the baby birds grows

up and flies away to Central America to pollinate a coral bean flower. One resulting red seed floats over the ocean to a West African beach, where a doodlebug that nibbles on it is later eaten by a hoopoe, and so onward in a chain of natural connections and migrations that ends with a painted lady butterfly settling on the knee of that same, though older, child. Carefully explaining that though these particular encounters are made up, they are rooted in fact, the author pairs nature notes identifying species and locales in slightly smaller type to her measured, simply phrased narrative. Both are set into brightly hued, sharply detailed outdoor scenes that Jones populates with exactly rendered flora and fauna.

Big ideas, delivered with quiet precision. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Star Call the Bee Doctor!: How Science Is Saving Honey Bees

Markle, Sandra | Millbrook/Lerner (48 pp.) $33.32 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9798765626795

Markle provides a heartening update on honeybee health. When she was researching her book The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees (2013), as Markle recalls in her author’s note, bees’ “future looked grim.” But apiologists, the titular “bee doctors,” have been hard at work, first trying to understand the colony losses that devastated U.S. apiaries in the mid-2000s. Realizing that there was not one cause but a combination, they then turned to creating a kaleidoscope of solutions: developing honey bee vaccines, concocting nutritional supplements, and breeding parasiteresistant bees. As in her earlier book, Markle emphasizes science as a process, and she respects her readers’ curiosity enough to get fairly technical

with both vocabulary—readers will appreciate the closing glossary—and descriptions of some experiments. For her research, she went straight to the apiologists conducting this critical work; one measure of this field’s cutting-edge nature is that she cites her interviews rather than publications as sources. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of what she calls the “honey bee–plant partnership.” Explaining clearly how climate change is an immediate threat, she empowers readers with practicable tips to help. Photographs, some quite astonishing, accompany the text, along with captions that provide further informational enrichment.

An important peek into how scientists work to solve big problems. (further reading) (Nonfiction. 10-14)

Bigfoot’s Big Heart

Marsh, Sarah Glenn | Illus. by Ishaa Lobo Viking (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Dec. 17, 2024 9780593352243

Being a mythical creature can be lonely, especially on Valentine’s Day. Timid Bigfoot usually holes up inside his cave, afraid to venture out. Everyone makes loud, terrifying noises whenever they see him. But at least he has other misunderstood monster pals who appreciate his plight, among them Nessie, who lives in Scotland; Mothman, who’s from the Appalachian Mountains; and the Chupacabra, who resides in Puerto Rico. All of them long for friends, but people fear them. Bigfoot decides to mail them valentines reminding them of their positive qualities. He carefully creates cards, but when he goes out to mail them, he’s seen by a scout troop and, in his haste to escape, drops them. Hiding in the bushes, Bigfoot sadly says, “I don’t think the mailman would have known just where to deliver them anyway.” Luckily, the scouts have a worldwide network, which comes together to help deliver the valentines to all of the monsters’

A heartfelt reminder that everyone needs love—even monsters.

BIGFOOT’S BIG HEART

vague and secretive locations. Marsh’s tender tale takes an expansive, global view and demonstrates that anyone can experience loneliness, even seemingly formidable beasts. None of the creatures are frightening; Lobo gives them each kind eyes and shy smiles that make them endearing and downright cuddly despite their pointy teeth or multiple appendages. The scouts are a diverse bunch.

A heartfelt reminder that everyone needs love—even monsters. (Picture book. 4-7)

Haiku Kaiju Ah-Choo!

McClements, George | Hippo Park/Astra Books for Young Readers (40 pp.) | $18.99 Dec. 3, 2024 | 9781662640360

Kaiju has sniffles. / Who will help the poor monster? / Maybe human friends!

Even huge blue monsters aren’t immune to colds, it seems. Waking up “feeling yucky and too hot” one morning and emitting a thunderous sneeze, Kaiju stomps off toward the nearest city in search of comfort, stepping carefully around the little cars and buildings while trying to ignore all the hovering helicopters. Fortunately, a Kaiju-speaking lad and his likewise olive-skinned scientist dad, who works at Kaiju Central, quickly diagnose the problem and order an army of robots to produce an outsize tissue, blanket, and bowl of soup—just the tickets to relieve the grateful giant’s symptoms and send him back to his volcanic cave to snuggle down. McClements frames the entire

narrative, including sneezes and wailing sirens, in conventional 5-7-5 haiku, which, rather than sounding forced or monotonous, actually offers lively, comical accompaniment to the cartoon illustrations by lending a rhythmic lilt to the telling. “Kaiju is back home. / Many adventures today— / now it’s time to rest.” Fleeing humans, when large enough to tell, look racially diverse. Younger snifflers will / sympathize, and delight in / this read-aloud cinch! (Picture book. 5-9)

Like a Curse

McNicoll, Elle | Random House (304 pp.)

$17.99 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780593649527

Series: Like a Charm, 2

In this sequel, a young Edinburgh witch once again faces off against a megalomaniacal siren. Following the events in Like a Charm (2023), 13-year-old dyspraxic witch Ramya is still reeling after her last encounter with the power-hungry siren Portia, who can control humans with her bewitching voice. Throughout Scotland, magical creatures known as the Hidden Folk are being forcibly rounded up and kidnapped. With cousin Marley and new dryad friend Alona, Ramya sets off to help the Hidden Folk escape Portia’s oppressive clutches. Now, Portia is seeking a magical creature in Loch Ness. When Ramya and her friends happen across a dragon in the loch, they wonder if this is who Portia wants. McNicoll (whose author’s note

indicates that she was diagnosed with dyspraxia at age 8) offers readers deftly constructed worldbuilding with enough of a recap of events that new readers can step into the series. Ramya struggles with her confidence and self-identity with regard to her dyspraxia, but is helped by an aunt who’s also neurodivergent, who serves as a sage role model. The fast-paced prose is electric, revealing jawdropping secrets and twists galore, but is occasionally marred by the odd plot contrivance. Quibbles aside, this smart tale is a clever exploration of disability, family, and friendship set in an accessible fantasy world. Main characters present white.

An immersive and intriguing fantasy with real depth. (Fantasy. 8-12)

Swing

Meeker, Audrey

| Feiwel & Friends (256 pp.) | $22.99 | $14.99 paper Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781250864031 9781250864048 paper

A contemporary graphic novel about swing dancing, cyberbullying, and stepping into one’s own.

Eighth grade has just started, and Marcus McCalister is poised to be a star on his school soccer team, but his heart isn’t in it. He distances himself from the team, and tension builds. Meanwhile, Marcus is paired for swing dancing in gym class with Izzy Briggs, whom his classmates perceive as a fashion- and theater-obsessed, purple-haired “weirdo,” leaving him worried about how others will see him. The two don’t cooperate or listen to each other, so their teacher offers them a deal: If they perform at the school talent show, he’ll change their failing grade, and they won’t have to repeat gym. Izzy agrees—as long as Marcus lets her lead—and as the two work together, a friendship blossoms. Marcus grows more self-assured and comes to better understand Izzy, who’s

enduring bullying at school and an overbearing, academics-obsessed mother at home. When the bully discovers what they’re up to, he sets his sights on them both. Marcus struggles with being targeted, but ultimately learns to be a confident and supportive friend. Though the bullying could have been portrayed with more nuance and the toxicity interrogated more deeply, the quickly moving plot feels fresh. Straightforward cartooning, with bold black outlines and solid-colored backgrounds, keeps the focus on the plucky protagonists and their dramatic interactions. Both Marcus and Izzy present white.

A friendship-focused comingof-age story that successfully challenges gender stereotypes. (Graphic fiction. 8-13)

Over and Under the Wetland

Messner, Kate | Illus. by Christopher Silas Neal | Chronicle Books (56 pp.) | $18.99 Aug. 13, 2024 | 9781797210872

Series: Over and Under

Swamps can be subtly spectacular, if you know where to look and what to see.

This addition to Messner’s and Neal’s successful Over and Under series sees readers through the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Florida. Dark-haired “Grandma” and a skirt-wearing child “wander, through curtains of green,” on a boardwalk. What lives in the subtropical wilderness beneath and above them? Many, many animals populate this “secret kingdom”: a barred owl and pig frog; a painted bunting, red-bellied woodpecker, and redshouldered hawk (one page is devoted to their various sounds); a blackcrowned night heron, banded water snake, and cottonmouth; a dazzling white egret, and roseate spoonbills eating small fry; a swamp lily and red-bellied turtle, the latter immediately

snapped up in the jaws of an alligator; a strangler fig hugging a cypress; a raccoon family; a swallowtailed kite and mosquito fish; anhinga, Florida panther, ghost orchid, and sphinx moth. The pages that follow provide detailed information on the habits, appearance, features, and contributions of each named member of the ecosystem, as well as additional information about the specific sanctuary depicted. Neal’s delicate, colorful, and accurate mixed-media art invites readers to linger. The images, without lines or shadows, bring the hidden wetland world right before readers’ eyes. A quiet and beautiful celebration of an elusive, underappreciated, and often threatened natural resource. (further reading) (Informational picture book. 4-8)

The Spotless Giraffe

Millett, Peter | Illus. by Alison Hawkins Happy Yak (32 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780711296343

Being different can be hard—but wonderful, too. On Kipekee the giraffe’s first school day, she’s uncertain which class to join. Her coat’s brown, so Hana Hippo suggests the camels. Azar Aardvark ties a fake hump on that falls off when Kipekee swims with the class. Azar proposes the llamas, though Kipekee lacks a woolly coat. Pia Panda’s sure one will grow; Hana places a woolly rug over Kipekee’s back, but it flies off when she climbs rocks. Hana suggests the zebras because most young zebras’ coats are brown with stripes. Pia wraps Kipekee with toilet paper strips, which unravel. Kipekee joins the gazelles, though she lacks horns. A headband with springy “horns” fails, falling off when Kipekee jumps hurdles. Finally, she takes stock of her physical attributes. Noticing the “Giraffe Class” sign, she understands where she really belongs and settles in beautifully. The helpers agree and add

| Illus. by Audrey Meeker Colors by Sarah Davidson

a picture to the sign: one depicting a giraffe without spots—like Kipekee! When the giraffes throw a party, Kipekee invites her new best buddies. No matter they don’t resemble anyone else: Appearances don’t count among pals. Children will be charmed by this delightful tale about friendship, uniqueness, inclusion, and acceptance, based on the true story of Kipekee, born in a Tennessee zoo in 2023, the first giraffe without spots born in the United States. The lively color illustrations, featuring an all-animal cast, are full of expressive, comical fun. A whimsical reminder that our differences are what make us special. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)

Mama’s Roti

Mirchandani, Raakhee | Illus. by Shreya Gupta | Little, Brown (40 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 29, 2024 | 9780316339469

Roti has great significance in Indian life, history, politics, and culture. Though roti is made with flour, salt, oil, and water, it’s so much more than that, as Mirchandani explains. Similar in structure to Kevin Noble Maillard’s Fry Bread (2019), illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal, the book relies on statements beginning with the phrase “Roti is.” Roti is the memories of mothers and grandmothers passing their recipes across continents and over generations. It’s the farmers who grow and harvest the grains—and who lie awake at night, worried about their crops. It’s the parents who fret about their children going hungry. It’s the agriculturalists protesting unfair laws and those who march beside them in solidarity. Roti is also a way for immigrants to bring their cultures with them when they leave home. “Roti is life,” as the author concludes. Gupta’s warm illustrations, dominated by earthy yellows and deep blues, alternately follow a family of farmers in India and a family of immigrants carving out new lives in America—

both linked by their love of this South Asian flatbread. This tender, lyrical picture book is a clever, poignant look at the myriad ways food nourishes us. It also explores issues of systemic inequality, though readers may be confused about the demonstrations referenced in the narrative. The author’s note states that in 2020, Indian farmers, primarily from Punjab and Haryana, protested “unfair” laws—a vague explanation that will require additional context. Overall, though, this is a visual delight and a pleasure to read.

A touching ode to a South Asian culinary staple. (Picture book. 3-7)

Amu Nowruz and His Violets

Mohammadi, Hadi | Illus. by Nooshin Safakhoo | Trans. by Sara Khalili Elsewhere Editions (34 pp.) | $19.95 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781953861924

In this translated retelling of a Persian folktale, the spirits of winter and spring briefly meet. Naneh Sarma lives in the land of Winter. With “hair as white as snow” and a “gown woven of wintersweet flowers,” she “[spreads] winter everywhere” as she swings over the snowy clouds. Safakhoo relies on a minimal palette for these barren landscapes, with Naneh Sarma’s red socks and scarf standing out against the stark white backgrounds. But winter ends, and Naneh Sarma is alone. The pages explode in vibrant greens and reds as readers meet Amu Nowruz, who lives in the lush land of Spring. Amu Nowruz plants all day long, “while serenading the sun to shine bright.” Lonely Naneh Sarma hears him and wishes he would visit her. Waiting for him “at the edge of winter and spring,” she eventually falls asleep. When Amu Nowruz finds her, he puts violets into her hands and sneaks away. She wakes and shouts to him, only to hear him reply, “Tend to

the violets…The New Year is coming!” These events happen each year, readers are told, “at the dusk of winter and the dawn of spring.” Detailing the origins of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, this is a lovely, vividly illustrated tale. Though the elegant figurative language may be too lofty for younger children, older ones will appreciate it, especially if knowledgeable adults can offer context about Nowruz. Artistic and wistful, this is a sophisticated ode to the changing seasons. (Picture book. 5-9)

The Ogre Who Wasn’t

Morpurgo, Michael | Illus. by Emily Gravett Two Hoots/Macmillan (32 pp.) | $18.99

Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781035010264

An ersatz ogre effects lasting happiness. Upon discovering a tiny ogre in the garden, Princess Clara gives him a new home in a shoe under her bed. They’re soon besties, and at bedtime, Clara finds herself confiding in her new pal. Ever since Clara’s mother died, her father, the king, has had little time for her. She loves frolicking barefoot, climbing trees, and adopting wild creatures, but the “pernickety nanny,” “bossy butler,” and “grumpy gardener” charged with her care disapprove of these activities; they bark orders, shriek at her pets, and, in short, make “life a misery.” Clara’s friend confesses that he’s no ogre; he’s “King Toad” and will grant Clara’s wishes for a mother and a more involved father. He asks to return to the garden, where he invokes an amphibian horde who permanently banish the scolders. Clara throws open her doors to all wild animals. More happiness awaits: Her father returns with a kindly new wife, everyone appreciates running around barefoot, and all enjoy the animals’ company, especially that of King Toad. This charming U.K. import reads like an old-fashioned fairy tale with a few modern twists, complete

Artistic and wistful, this is a sophisticated ode to the changing seasons.

AMU NOWRUZ AND HIS VIOLETS

with a satisfying ending. The delightful illustrations, created with colored pencil and watercolor and finished digitally, sparkle with energy, as do the personable characters, especially King Toad. Clara, her father, and the caretaker staff are pale-skinned; Clara’s new mother is brown-skinned.

Toad-ally enchanting. (Picture book. 4-7)

When Grandmas Cook: In the Kitchen With Grandmas, Nonnas, and Abuelas

Mustich, Margot | Illus. by Alette Straathof duopress/Sourcebooks (22 pp.) | $8.99

Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781728297699

The language of cooking goes global.

“When grandmas cook for us, they make us happy. And that makes them happy.” The opening lines of this board book capture the essence of this title. Children are invited into the kitchens of grannies from different cultures, including the U.S., Mexico, Italy, India, and Nigeria. Each page captures the grandmothers’ love and warmth for their families, while also introducing readers to each culture’s word for grandmother and a favorite comfort food. On one page, for instance, a South Korean halmoni makes mandu, or dumplings, for her family. On the table, the tools and ingredients for making this Korean dish are labeled, among them daepa (scallions) and baechu (cabbage). On another page, a Ukrainian babusia prepares borscht (“a scrumptious soup you can eat hot or cold”) using a kivsh

(ladle) and a kastrulya (large pot). Though the text is somewhat on the advanced side for board-book audiences, little ones will enjoy poring over the illustrations, guided by loving caregivers; the use of accurate terms results in a rich reading experience. The soft illustrations depict characters diverse in terms of skin tone, hairstyle, and clothing. Children are shown assisting with the cooking, making for loving family settings where everyone is included in food preparation. A vibrant survey of traditional foods from all over the world, laced with multigenerational love. (Board book. 2-5)

White House Clubhouse: White House on Fire!

O’Brien, Sean | Illus. by Karyn Lee Norton Young Readers (288 pp.)

$17.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781324053071

Series: White House Clubhouse, 2

The second book in the White House Clubhouse series transports siblings back to the War of 1812. Fourth grader Clara and her 12-year-old sister, Marissa, are the daughters of U.S. President Julia Suarez. In the earlier installment, the girls discovered a secret, magical room that’s been used by generations of children who have lived in the White House, allowing them to time travel to different periods in American history and “make a difference…because we can.” One day, the girls smell smoke in the clubhouse and find themselves in a White House that’s on fire. Paul

Jennings, an enslaved teen who is the president’s valet, thrusts a rolled-up painting into Clara’s hands, imploring her to keep it safe from the invading British. Fleeing, the girls encounter President James Madison, Frances Scott Key, Frederick Hall, and many other historical figures. In this tale that’s packed with nonstop action, the events of the War of 1812 are told through a human lens that eschews the glorification of battle and includes the role of Black people in the British and American armies. While the rollicking narrative is full of humor, it doesn’t shy away from hard questions. As Marissa contemplates the phrase “we the people” in the opening line of the U.S. Constitution, she asks, “Did Madison think that meant all the people?”

The author’s note points out that the president enslaved over 100 people. Marissa and Clara present Latine. Final art not seen.

Timely and wildly entertaining. (map) (Adventure. 8-12)

The Little Red Chair

Ogren, Cathy Stefanec | Illus. by Alexandra Thompson | Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) $18.99 | Aug. 1, 2024 | 9781534112902

A chair and a child form a bond that lasts over many years.

“The little red chair tightened its buttons, fluffed its tufts, and straightened its tiny brass wheels. Squeakity-squeak! Maybe today, thought the little red chair.” Just as Hans Christian Andersen brought to life an evergreen tree, the author does a fine job revealing the innermost thoughts of a chair. (Though, unlike Andersen’s tale, this one ends happily.) A girl named Mia persuades her mother to buy the chair, which has been languishing in an antiques shop and is in poor condition. Mia’s mother adeptly reupholsters the chair, and the child happily shines its brass wheels to perfection. A series of delightful illustrations accompany text

6 Books Based on True Stories

that shows the chair’s many roles for Mia, including playing “tuffet to Mia’s Little Miss Muffet” and gradually becoming a repository for the teenage Mia’s belongings. The chair’s feelings are sometimes expressed in physical terms: its tufts fluff up with Mia’s vow of friendship and deplete when she hugs it farewell and leaves for college. More often, italicized phrases show the chair’s feelings, including exclamations such as “Squeakity-squee!” and “Squeakity-squish.” The clever latter phrase describes its moving-van trip when Mia’s parents move to a smaller home. The chair endures years of lonely attic time until the sweetly predictable, multigenerational ending. The simple but lyrical prose features the judicial use of repetition. Both Mia and her mother are light-skinned. A gentle read-aloud or independent read at day’s end. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

Love Is Hard Work: The Art and Heart of Corita Kent

Paley, Dan | Illus. by Victoria TentlerKrylov Candlewick (40 pp.) | $18.99 Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781536220322

A vibrant but ultimately disappointing profile of the influential artist and social activist.

Unfortunately, this picture-book biography’s appeal for younger audiences will be largely confined to the illustrations. True to the subject’s visual style and predilection for combining punchy imagery drawn from daily life with powerful words, the artwork offers stimulating scenes of densely cluttered studios and bustling public spaces exploding with dazzling colors and eye-catching signs and slogans. Alas, Paley weighs down the narrative with abstract, cerebral references to the artist’s “innate talent and creative yearning” in childhood, the “interplay of elements” that marked her mature style, the ways she taught her students to find “new connections between disparate objects,” and how

she “engaged with the overlapping artistic and social revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s to spur change.” He’s clear about the importance of faith and scripture to Kent from her youth on, even after she renounced her vows as a nun rather than knuckle under to a conservative cardinal in the wake of Vatican II. He ends his biographical overview in 1968—she lived and worked for 18 more years before dying of cancer in 1986—to close with summarizing praise of her social activism and loving message. Though she’s misleadingly shown in a nun’s habit for the book’s final image (she wears secular clothing in the previous picture), she appears throughout among racially and culturally diverse fellow artists and activists. The book lacks a timeline, and the select list of information sources is weighted toward adult readers.

Evocative visuals wasted on an uninspired narrative. (author’s note) (Picture-book biography. 7-9)

Salt, Pepper, Season, Spice: All the Flavors of the World

Pasquet, Jacques | Illus. by Claire Anghinolfi Trans. by Ann Marie Boulanger

Orca (48 pp.) | $24.95 | Oct. 15, 2024 9781459839984

Budding cooks and history buffs alike will relish this introduction to some common flavor enhancements.

Beginning with those stalwarts, salt and pepper, this book dips into chili, mustard, and ginger, then samples sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and chocolate, finishing with tea and coffee. Putting spices on our foods is a way to encounter other lands and cultures— and the past. The text is concise, providing information on whatever history is known, the spice’s sources, a bit about its chemistry and uses (occasionally including uses outside of cooking), and describing different versions of each spice, such as black,

green, oolong, white, and even herbal tea. Readers learn how mustard and sugar are produced or refined, meet the “young slave” who developed the process of hand pollination for vanilla plants, and encounter some of the ways to brew coffee. Pasquet retells the charming story of the Yemeni goats who are said to have stayed awake all night after eating coffee berries. He also attributes the discovery of tea to an accidental leaf-fall into the cup of the Chinese emperor Shennong in 2737 BCE. Sidebars serve up such related tidbits as the Pepper Imps in Harry Potter and the fairy Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Attractive gouache vignettes offer appealing realistic detail in a stylized presentation. An appetizing menu of culinary complements. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)

The Firelight Apprentice

Paulsen, Bree | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (224 pp.) | $24.99 Oct. 29, 2024 | 9780063266599

A girl who’s endowed with magic navigates a postwar society that’s populated by nefarious beings.

Safi Defoy and her family—her father and older sister, Ada—work hard to maintain a business in their stone-walled city that’s nestled in a green valley. A recent war, which devastated people and businesses alike, left Papa with damaged lungs. Like her deceased mother, Safi is a magician; with training, her electrical powers could prove to be of great value. Those who possess magic are in danger, however: Liches—the souls of dead magicians who died in the war but weren’t properly laid to rest—are searching for power and hunting living magicians. Liches hide behind deep disguises, making it hard to know whom to trust. Ada takes Safi to see a show by famous traveling magicians Sergio and Caliban. During their

A magical steampunk exploration of difference, danger, and sacrifice.

THE FIRELIGHT APPRENTICE

performance, they notice Safi’s unbridled magical sparks. Afterward, they invite her to be their apprentice, offering Ada and Papa hope that she’ll be kept safe. This volume focuses more on building this world, which evokes 19th-century Central Europe, and developing the endearing characters than on telling a propulsive narrative. When the climactic action does arrive, it wraps up quickly. The clean, regular, richly colored panels, which include emotionally resonant wordless sequences, communicate the emotional weight of the fantastical elements. Most characters are light-skinned, and some are racially ambiguous and cued queer. Ada is aromantic.

A magical steampunk exploration of difference, danger, and sacrifice. (Graphic fantasy. 10-14)

A Hat for House: One Storm, Many Helpers

Perrott, Audrey | Illus. by Druscilla Santiago Putnam (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Nov. 12, 2024 9780593615775

House’s roof is blown off in a storm, but help arrives in many forms.

One day, “a big, blustery gust of wind” steals House’s “hat” (roof). A nearby oak tree stretches her limbs and leaves over House, but more wind WOOSHes away the attempted protection. Birds, squirrels, and mice try to help, but the wind whisks their replacement roof away, too. Human neighbors arrive to help, securing a tarp over House. The tarp protects the neighbors inside House during a rainstorm, after which

a rainbow appears and roofers arrive to install a permanent roof, allowing House to “feel like myself” again. House’s front resembles a face, with windows on either side of a door with a small window in it; these features function as eyes and a mouth, and window treatments provide plenty of variety in expression (to great comic effect on the final page, when House eyes storm clouds and warns, “Don’t even think about it”). House’s inhabitant has brown skin and a long dark braid; neighbors and roofers appear to be a diverse bunch in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity. Centering a house instead of a human as the main character provides a bit of distance and humor to a potentially scary topic, but House expresses feelings, too. The color palette reinforces this tone: House is a cheery yellow with teal trim, the oak tree’s leaves are rust-orange, and the storm clouds and gusts of wind are a steely blue-gray.

Hats off! (Picture book. 3-8)

Chai Jinxed

Pinto, Emi | Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $19.99 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780063275775

A misfit in a magical world struggles to develop friendships and fulfill her goals.

Twelve-year-old tea witch Misha Dayaan longs be a chai brewer and take over her family’s business, Dayaan Tea Shop—after she saves it from their competition, Sunny’s Chai Shop. But even though she’s careful, her enchanted brews always lead to

“chai-tastrophe.” She’s already been expelled from six tea schools—has she been jinxed? When Misha receives an unexpected invitation to join Margaret’s Academy of Tea and Brewing, which has a forbidding reputation for strictness, she runs away from home to attend. Unsurprisingly, once she arrives, her troubles continue, and she fails the placement exam. Undeterred, Misha steals a gold apron from the headmaster’s office, placing her in the school’s highest caste. But simply possessing the apron doesn’t shield her from mishaps and mysteries. She also faces competition at school from rival Emery Sunny, encounters creepy scarecrows, and deals with the alarming news that fellow tea witches are going missing. All the while, Misha desperately hopes to become the Wizard of Chai’s next apprentice. Pinto works delightful wordplay and original fantasy elements into her work that’s set in a South Asian–inspired world. Readers will enjoy Misha’s messes and appreciate her imperfections. Unfortunately, the middle of the story drags and feels repetitive, and the characters and their relationships feel flat. Capers and calamities reign supreme in this fantasy that struggles with uneven execution. (Fantasy. 8-12)

I Am Wind: An Autobiography

Poliquin, Rachel | Illus. by Rachel Wada Tundra Books (80 pp.) | $19.99

Nov. 5, 2024 | 9780735272187

Series: I Am Nature

Storm-swept illustrations carry a full bag of facts, myths, legends, and original poems about our planet’s winds.

“I am Wind,” Poliquin writes in a tone-establishing opener. “And I am wild.” Her free verse expressions on that theme alternate with short but clear explanations in prose and Wada’s vivid, sometimes schematic depictions of types and causes of storms, from destructive katabatic

winds to hurricanes and tornados. Poliquin and Wada also explore wind in myth and history. Beginning with a gallery of dramatically expressive wind gods and demons, they weave together pithy retellings of a Māori origin myth, the story of how the bag of winds given to Odysseus by the wind god Aeolus caused such woe, and the tale of the “Kamikaze” winds that twice saved Japan from Mongol invasions. They also offer frightful accounts of the “Great Storm” that ravaged England in 1703 and the mile-wide tornado that blew disastrously through parts of Bangladesh in 1989. An overview of prevailing wind patterns worldwide and of the different types of sandstorms will expand readers’ perspectives on meteorological matters, as will views of various kinds of windmills and a closing look at how the 182 million tons of dust that “migrate” westward from the Sahara every year affect multiple ecosystems in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas. Human figures are small and are generally posed angled away from viewers, though characters of color do appear. Broad and forceful, like its subject. (index, further reading) (Informational picture book. 7-9)

Frisky Families!: Penguin Pip’s Ice Cold Seek-andFind Book

Pompen, Bente | Clavis (32 pp.) | $19.95 Sept. 24, 2024 | 9798890630889

Chatty Pip the penguin covers the ins and outs of these flightless birds. Pip starts by introducing readers to her family, a closeknit colony of chubby, personable emperor penguins who live at the South Pole. (A “family album” appears in the endpapers.) Pip mentions other penguin breeds who also reside there and imparts scientific facts about penguins, including mating and breeding habits (“love is in the air!”),

some statistics (emperors can hold their breath for up to 32 minutes underwater), and the fact that they can’t fly. Though the information is sound, the book has a whimsical flair. Pip’s relatives are depicted wearing articles of clothing and other accoutrements; they engage in jocular repartee with Pip, who invites readers to participate in various seek-and-find exercises. The penguins are covered in blue-and-white feathers instead of their actual black-and-white ones (and gray ones for chicks). Overall, this title, originally published in Belgium and the Netherlands and translated from Dutch, is sweetly appealing and will engage children. They’ll appreciate the characters’ warm, winning personalities, as well as the delightful, lively illustrations, cast primarily in soft blues to reflect the icy setting. The book concludes with a cautionary message from a New Zealand penguin scientist and a seek-and-find quiz that will require children to re-read; answers are included. A light, captivating introduction to penguins. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Peace on Earth

Prasadam-Halls, Smriti | Illus. by David Litchfield | Candlewick (40 pp.) | $18.99 Sept. 3, 2024 | 9781536235708

Prasadam-Halls extols the virtues of peace as Litchfield depicts a sailing jaunt threatened by discord.

Peace on Earth, the author explains, takes various forms, such as “a smile, a wave, a laugh, a kiss” (the accompanying illustration portrays two friends meeting in a pristine meadow) or a sparkling ocean (the pair join another friend on a sailing trip). But one friend’s suggestion to sail to a nearby cave unnerves the others, though it’s unclear why, especially as the cave offers shelter from a sudden rainstorm. Two of the youngsters exchange words

that “hurt… / and sting. // And fires rage / and burn within.” These fires are frighteningly—and rather disproportionately—externalized as a volcano erupts and snakelike creatures surround the protagonists. Never fear: “Peace can change the angry word / to something known and something heard.” The author never explains how, unfortunately. Instead of discussing their emotions, the pair appear to reconcile instantly when the third friend brings a glowing orb retrieved earlier during a dive. “Peace will never look away— / it lights a candle, here to stay,” the text proclaims. But as current and historical conflicts demonstrate, true peace isn’t so easily achieved or effortlessly maintained—a complexity that the simplistic rhymes and idyllic, glimmering illustrations fail to address. Peace may live “in those who hope and love and DO,” but readers won’t find actionable peace-promoting ideas here—or even a clear understanding of the concept. Two of the friends are brown-skinned; the other is lighter-skinned.

Well meaning but misses the mark. (Picture book. 4-6)

Sari Sisters

Rao-Robinson, Anitha | Illus. by Anoosha Syed | Viking (32 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780593526354

A young South Asian girl finds a way to feel included when her sister reaches a milestone. Ruhi is eager to kick off the weekly dance party with her sister, but Kayra isn’t there. Her mother tells her that today is Kayra’s big day. A curious Ruhi peeks under Kayra’s closed door just as Kayra steps out dressed in her very first sari. Ruhi is enthralled by her sister, but a nervous Kayra keeps dismissing her. At a family gathering, all the aunties fuss over Kayra. Feeling ignored by her sister and aunts, Ruhi joins the other kids in the playroom;

then, watching her cousins dance, Ruhi comes up with a plan. At home, Ruhi practices pleating, knotting, and tying scarves into a sari of her own. At their next family gathering, the cousins tie and drape colorful scarves as saris and invite everyone to their sari dance party. While Ruhi gets Kayra to the dance floor, her makeshift sari unravels, but Kayra helps knot it back together, confessing that she struggled initially, too. This sweet story bonds two sisters and shows the coming-ofage tradition of girls wearing their first sari. The gorgeous pink, yellow, and blue illustrations are richly embellished with intricate designs and patterns. Ruhi is an endearing main character, with her mismatched socks, sprouting ponytail, and love for her family. A winning story about mingling old and new traditions. (author’s note, photos) (Picture book. 4-8)

An Adventure for Lia and Lion

Rodin, Al | Knopf (32 pp.) | $18.99 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780593903322

Lia and Lion, each seeking a pet for a different reason, discover truths about the nature of friendship. Tan-skinned Lia scrutinizes a meadow’s abundant wildlife for a pet she can “take on an adventure.” Lion, browsing nearby, wants a pet that will “follow his lead.” Predictably, upon encountering each other, they argue. Each wants a pet—not to be one—and to define adventure in their own way. Lia strides resolutely through some tall grass, but the foreboding darkness within frightens her. Lion, musing that the “surprise” he seeks might lie within, enters the grass with Lia. “Ginormous” berries, toadstools, and ancient trees enchant them, and a wild rainstorm cements their bond as they huddle together in fear. “Let’s think of it like a party,” Lia suggests. Though the thunder is frightening, the two yell

back at it. As they emerge into the dripping green-gold of the storm’s aftermath, Lia is homesick. “Is it still an adventure if we have to go home?” she asks. “Oh definitely,” Lion responds. “Who knows what we’ll find on the way!” Rodin skillfully imbues this tale with the emotions and conflicts of childhood, as well as the ability to acknowledge and resolve them. Each character unconsciously recognizes and accepts the other’s fears. Rodin’s vibrant illustrations in gold, green, and blue employ gestural marks to convey drama and delicate line for details.

A new friendship, tested and affirmed through adventure. (Picture book. 3-7)

Agreement Under the Stars

Rosique, Susana | Cuento de Luz (38 pp.) $19.95 | Oct. 21, 2024 | 9788419464828

Shrinking, crowded forests force the animals to agree that some will become nocturnal.

Thanks to farms, homes, and development, the forest is getting smaller and smaller. Animals who used to live in harmony find themselves in a cramped, loud environment. At an emergency meeting, a committee decides that some of the animals will be active during the day, while others will be active at night. The night animals postulate that they were assigned their time slot because they aren’t as beautiful as the others. When a poacher sets traps at night, the nocturnal animals try to warn the others, who ignore their calls and wind up caught in snares, traps, and cages. Despite their treatment, the nocturnal creatures free the others from the traps and are welcomed back during the day. But the night animals decide that they prefer the welcoming peace of the forest after dark and that night is where they want to stay. This story makes an interesting comment on

deforestation that is paired with an afterword explaining the topic further. Blank lined pages invite readers to note “Things I Can Do To Take Care of the Forests.” Rosique makes masterful use of color, playing the shadows of the forest and night against the vibrant reds of the diurnal creatures. The animals have realistic features and will be appealing to children. This modern parable makes for an enjoyable story as well as a conversation starter. A powerful pairing of story and illustration. (Picture book. 4-6)

It’s a Gas!

Roth, Jonathan | Kids Can (104 pp.)

$16.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781525305689

Series: Rover and Speck, 3

Exploring space is Speck-tacular with Rover and Speck. In book three in Roth’s Rover and Speck graphic series, both robots are on a mission to discover life on other planets. The pair examine glowing spheroids and battle spark sharks that could be alternate life forms and, when Rover is damaged in battle, are rescued by a space jelli, whom they later help become a space-exploring GAStonaut. When a superstorm and spark sharks threaten the jelli community, Rover and Speck discover that the spark sharks are only protecting the glowing spheroids that are their eggs; Rover sings a fun variation of “Baby Shark.” Fun Science Fact panels define topics such as gas giants and their superstorms, the Goldilocks Zone, and the different states of matter. Gentle potty humor centered on the word and concept of gas, as well as puns—such as labels on two tanks of helium (HE) turning HE HE into “hee, hee”—keep the story fun. Backmatter introduces Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter, both of whom proposed the idea of life on gas planets in the form of floaters (jellis in this story), hunters (spark sharks), and

sinkers (not present in the story, but, as Rover jokes, maybe they all sank!). Information about four different planets may inspire readers to use their imaginations to draw life there. An imaginative mission into space filled with information, humor, and action. (Graphic informational fiction. 8-12)

One More Story, Tata!

Salamon, Julie | Illus. by Jill Weber Minerva/Astra Books for Young Readers (40 pp.) | $18.99 | July 23, 2024 9781662651717

Fridays are special for a toddler named Ruby. Every week, Mommy and Daddy take Ruby to visit her grandparents Papa and Yaya and her great-grandmother Tata. Ruby and Tata are alike in their determination to manage challenges, with Ruby struggling to snap the seat belt in her stroller and Tata working hard to use her walker to rise from her chair, both trying over and over until they succeed. Together, Ruby and Tata go for a walk around the neighborhood (with Yaya pushing Ruby in her stroller), nap in a shared room, and look at a box of family photos, which confuses and fascinates Ruby, who names herself as the small girl in every picture—a developmentally appropriate action for her age. But best of all are Tata’s many dream-inspired, magical stories about how she once rode atop a “blueberry bird,” how she danced on a table with her mother, and how she saw four beautiful flowers blooming in a field. Candles are lit for Shabbat dinner, Ruby makes a wish for more challah, and together they sing “Shabbat Shalom.” This multigenerational family expresses love, caring, and pride at nearly every moment, with Jewish traditions woven seamlessly throughout. Bright, digitally collaged illustrations perfectly mesh with the text and provide lovely details in the setting, action, and character

reactions. Young readers will be delighted by Ruby and her special bond with Tata. Characters are light-skinned.

A wonderfully warm and tender tale. (about Shabbat, about this story, Tata’s family tree) (Picture book. 3-8)

Seven Samosas: Counting at the Market

Sehgal, Kabir & Surishtha Sehgal

Illus. by Jing Jing Tsong | Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) | $18.99

Oct. 29, 2024 | 9781665934008

An Indian grandfather and child head to the market to stock up for a party— and find themselves embarking on a lesson in counting. Sona and Dada (Grandfather) wander around, encountering foods from a variety of Indian culinary traditions. They pick up “20 ladoos at this store” and then “19 elaichis from a drawer.” The book continues counting backward as the pair buy “18 sheeras from that man.” What’s next? “16 mangoes in a line,” “15 flavors on the sign!” and “13 tikkis—so delish!” Sona and Dada even stop for eclairs, which, the authors explain, are served in the southeast Indian city of Pondicherry, once a French colony. At the end of their shopping trip, the two return home and prepare a celebratory picnic for friends and family. The book’s bright illustrations make use of enticing patterns and feature background characters with a variety of skin tones and hair textures. Filled with color and movement, the artwork brims with joyful chaos. The jaunty verse, presented in couplets, cleverly covers a wide variety of foods, although at times the authors sacrifice word choice for the sake of a rhyme. Accompanying the main text are explanatory notes in a smaller font, which include pronunciations for Hindi words and definitions. This is a well-thought-out, refreshingly original work, with whimsical illustrations

beautifully complementing the exuberant text.

A charming concept book, an upbeat romp, and an ode to South Asian cuisine, all in one delectable package. (Concept book. 3-6)

Unlocking the Universe: The Cosmic Discoveries of the Webb Space Telescope

Slade, Suzanne | Charlesbridge (48 pp.)

$17.99 | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781623544591

A verbal and visual shoutout to space telescopes, which have added new depth and clarity to our views of the universe. Slade focuses on the Webb Space Telescope, the largest so far to be sent into orbit, but the galleries of spectacular space photos that accompany her descriptions of how it was conceived, designed, tested, redesigned, assembled, and lifted into space include many taken by (or in conjunction with) several of its cousins, from the venerable Hubble to the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The author notes that Webb’s construction was the work of many hands—20,000 people were involved over the course of three decades—and includes photos of racially diverse crews, often working in “clean” rooms and shrouded in full-body “bunny suits.” She then explains how technical problems were discovered and ingeniously solved, describes the observatory’s instrumentation, and takes readers through its 2021 launch from the Guiana Space Center in South America. Readers who might be interested in the brief controversy surrounding naming the telescope after an administrator who oversaw NASA during the homophobic “lavender scare” will have to look elsewhere for details (or even mention), but those with stars in their eyes will find the book to be a stimulating reminder of what wonders astronomy

A celebration of the latest high-tech eyes on the skies.

UNLOCKING THE UNIVERSE

can show us, given the right gear in the right location.

A celebration of the latest high-tech eyes on the skies. (bibliography, resource list) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

A Dinosaur a Day: 365 Incredible Dinosaurs To Take You Through the Year

Smith, Miranda | Illus. by Jenny Wren, Xuan Le, Juan Calle, et al. | Bright Matter Books (224 pp.) | $24.99

Oct. 15, 2024 | 9780593903339

What is your birthday dinosaur? This intriguing presentation describes 366 species of dinosaurs from around the world, one for every day of a leap year.

From Eoraptor to Ruyangosaurus, this abundance of prehistoric reptiles (and a few early birds) is presented with illustrations, fast facts, and a short informational paragraph apiece. The album opens with introductions to dinosaurs and their world and closes with a spread that explains their demise, along with “nearly threequarters of all animal and plant species on Earth at the time.” The day-by-day presentation doesn’t appear to follow any organizational underpinning, although occasional clusters feature groups of six dinosaurs who have something in common—for example, February highlights “speedy dinosaurs” and “insect eaters,” while July has categories labeled “meat-eating dinosaurs” and “sea reptiles.” The attractive illustrations, from vignettes

to double-page spreads, are bright and engaging and provide some sense of each animal’s habitat. There are no sources for the information nor any explanation for the colors the artists have assigned them. The likely audience for this collection consists of very young dinosaur enthusiasts, who will revel in the variety of creatures that have been discovered. Titles such as Yang Yang’s The Secrets of Dinosaurs (2021) present these reptiles chronologically and give readers a better idea of who their neighbors were. Remarkable for the number and variety of dinosaurs displayed. (pronunciation guide, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 5-9)

Shy Steve

Spaeth, Katerina | Paw Prints Publishing/ Baker & Taylor (32 pp.) | $9.99 paper Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781223188621

Shy Steve’s life changes after a moment of bravery and the spark of new friendship.

Shy Steve finds comfort in his routine. Every day, he goes to the same coffee shop (where they misspell his name on the cup), goes to the same gloomy office building, and takes the same bus home. On an unusually unpredictable day, Steve meets and then slowly befriends Marianna, who plays her guitar and hums on the bus. Side by side on their ride, he writes lyrics while she plays. Bolstered by his newfound friendship, Shy Steve makes dramatic changes in his life and has a revelation that he should have spoken up for himself long before he did.

Spaeth’s unique illustrations are threedimensional collage, with textured elements like buttons, felt, fabric, yarn stitching, and clay. Shy Steve and the other characters (some human, some animal) appear Claymation-like. Steve has pale skin and fiery red hair with tightly twisted curls, while musician Marianna has brown skin and tightly coiled black hair with purple highlights. Shy Steve works an adult job and has an adult boss, but children will surely relate to his timidity and anxiety. The book has meaningful ideas for little readers to note: One small act of bravery can be enough to positively effect change, and all voices deserve to be heard.

A story with distinctive illustrations and a definitive message. (Picture book. 5-7)

Kid Musicians: True Tales of Childhood From Entertainers, Songwriters, and Stars

Stevenson, Robin | Illus. by Allison Steinfeld Quirk Books (224 pp.) | $14.99 Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781683693918 Series: Kid Legends, 10

Digestible nonfiction summaries of the childhoods of musicians and performers from the 20th and 21st centuries. The latest title in the Kid Legends series focuses on big names in the music industry, from those who are more recognizable to young readers today (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles) to older legends (Ella Fitzgerald, Prince, Yo-Yo Ma). The content is divided into four themed parts: “Dreamers to Pop Superstars,” “Jazz Clubs and Concert Halls,” “Songwriting and MusicMaking,” and “Rhythm and Blues and the Motown Sound.” Each section includes four powerhouse performers. The focus is primarily on each person’s childhood, including challenges they faced. Stevenson also covers their adult

accomplishments and accolades, advocacy efforts, and experiences of segregation and discrimination. She provides brief, meaningful explanations for elements of the stories that readers may be unfamiliar with; in Joni Mitchell’s profile, she describes polio epidemics and the lack of a vaccine when she was young, information that helps contextualize the singer’s bout with the disease. Humanizing details—Dolly Parton lived in poverty and was bullied at school; Cher struggled with dyslexia—provide readers with reassurance that people’s lives, even ones filled with success and celebrity, are complex and storied. The full-color spot-art illustrations throughout break up the text and capture some iconic images. Informative and compelling; a useful and meaningful resource. (bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)

The

Rock and the Butterfly

Stinson, Kathy | Illus. by Brooke Kerrigan Orca (32 pp.) | $21.95 | Oct. 15, 2024 9781459837003

A butterfly undergoes an emotional metamorphosis when its beloved rock disappears.

“Once there was a rock that sat solidly on the ground. And once there was a butterfly that flitted and fluttered everywhere.” The butterfly and the rock have the perfect relationship: The rock enjoys staying in place and listening to the butterfly’s tales, while the butterfly loves going on wild adventures, then returning home to the reliable safety of the rock. But one day, the butterfly comes back to discover the rock is gone. “Without the rock, how would the butterfly rest? Who would listen to the butterfly’s stories?” As the surrounding sky and sea become gray and stormy, the exhausted butterfly finally drops onto a dip in the ground. After the sun and moon offer comfort, the butterfly regains its stamina—and discovers

something that will permanently lift its spirits. Kerrigan’s artwork complements Stinson’s simple, lyrical text, depicting the rock’s solidity while adding motion lines around the butterfly’s vibrant wings. This gentle metaphor for loss will soothe children grappling with grief. It’s a poetic, attractive package that will lull youngsters at bedtime but might also stimulate conversation. (What happened to the rock? Why does the butterfly feel better at the end of the story?)

A moving, thoughtful meditation on life and loss. (Picture book. 4-8)

Up Periscope!: How Engineer Raye Montague Revolutionized Shipbuilding

Swanson, Jennifer | Illus. by Veronica Miller Jamison | Little, Brown (40 pp.)

$18.99 | Nov. 19, 2024 | 9780316565486

A young Black woman revolutionizes warship design for the U.S. Navy. Swanson skips most of her subject’s private life to focus on her engineering career, which was inspired by a childhood tour of a WWII submarine in 1943 and culminated in the first naval ship to be entirely designed by computer. Taking to heart her mother’s lesson that she could “learn anything, do anything, and be anything,” Montague defied rules and conventions to take shop in high school, advance from clerk typist for the Navy to ad hoc operator of the early UNIVAC computer, finally earn reluctant admission to the Naval Ship Engineering Center, and head a

software-development team so underfunded that she had to recruit her mother and 3-year-old son to ensure that she met her deadline. Montague went on to a long and distinguished career. As she told the author in 2017 (she died in 2018, which goes unmentioned among the closing tally of later honors and awards), she wanted to be remembered for her achievements, not as the first woman, nor the first Black woman, but as the first person to create what she did. As she proceeds from pigtails to gray-haired eminence in Jamison’s illustrations, Montague’s lively, intelligent gaze shines out. Aside from one group portrait of her racially diverse design team, she poses either with other brown-skinned female colleagues or with dismissive, oblivious, and/or astonished white men.

An inspiring and definitely underrecognized role model. (author’s note, source list) (Picture-book biography. 7-9)

Kirkus Star

Take It From the Top

Swinarski, Claire | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (256 pp.) | $18.99 Nov. 19, 2024 | 9780063321731

During their sixth summer at Lamplighter Lake Summer Camp for the Arts, two girls’ broken friendship is tested even further. Thirteen-yearolds Eowyn Becker and Jules Marrigan became best friends during their first Wisconsin camp summer. Over the years, though, their friendship has developed

An inspiring and definitely underrecognized role model.

cracks. Talented Eowyn suffers from severe stage fright, desperately misses her deceased mother, and resents her doctor father and Broadway-star brother, who have little time for her. She covets Jules’ supportive family and effortless onstage presence. For her part, West Virginian scholarship camper Jules covets Eowyn’s wealth and connections and feels that Eowyn doesn’t understand her less-fortunate circumstances. Jules is also bothered by Eowyn’s oblivious need for attention, which ruined last summer’s show, taking the spotlight off Jules in her lead role. When both girls (who present white) earn starring roles in Wicked this summer, can they, like Galinda and Elphaba, find their way past their mutual loathing and become friends who truly see each other? Told in Eowyn’s first-person voice in the present and Jules’ third-person perspective in the past, this masterful exploration of friendship gone wrong is permeated with a bone-deep, wartsand-all love of both camp and theater. Evocative worldbuilding brings Lamplighter to life for the intimately developed, well-intentioned characters, who often struggle to see other points of view. The well-paced interweaving of multiple summers’ experiences builds tension and shines light on how the past reverberates into the present. Brilliantly executed: a gem that’s a love letter to theater and summer camp. (Fiction. 9-13)

Happy & Sad & Everything True

Thayer, Alex | Aladdin (272 pp.) | $17.99 Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781665955249

A socially struggling sixth grader finds herself in the unlikely position of providing counsel to others.

After Desdemona Hillman Diller learned that she and her best friend, Juniper, were going to be in different classes, her

mom tried to sell it as an opportunity to make new friends. But Dee always felt that Juniper was enough. A subject of mean gossip, Dee now spends her Snack and Stretch breaks hiding in the bathroom. After an unfortunate Parent PE Day during which her mother deeply embarrasses her, Dee flees to the bathroom, where she hears clanging through a vent that connects to the boys’ bathroom. Her classmate Harry, who’s upset about something his father did, is next door, kicking the grate. After Dee consoles Harry, he asks if they can meet again the next day. Only it isn’t Harry who shows up, but a distressed second grader from the elementary school one floor down who was cruelly teased for a spelling mistake. Soon, Dee is giving advice to schoolmates both younger and older—even as Juniper moves on to new friends, who are unkind to Dee. Debut author Thayer skillfully and authentically captures the often-painful social transitions of middle school. In a satisfying growth arc, quiet, kind Dee comes out of her shell, realizing she’s worth more than the judgments of others made her believe. Main characters are cued white.

A compassionate window into the awkward and isolating stages of growing up. (Fiction. 10-14)

Airi Sano, Prankmaster General: International Menace

Tokushige, Zoe | Illus. by Jennifer Naalchigar | Philomel (320 pp.) | $14.99

Nov. 5, 2024 | 9780593465844 | Series: Airi Sano, Prankmaster General, 3

Airi Sano goes global with her pranks when her family vacations in Japan in this third series entry.

Sixth grade is ending, and Airi and her family are going to Japan over the summer. Airi is excited to visit her mother’s relatives and tiny hometown and see the sights in Tokyo and

Osaka, but she’s a little bummed that she has to spend the summer with her boring brother and not her new friends. Even though the prank squad had a great school year together, she’s worried they’ll have so much fun that they’ll forget her. Airi pressures herself: She’s determined to make this the most fantastic trip ever, so she’ll have stories to entertain her friends with. Airi plans and executes pranks, and even enlists her brother as her deputy. But when some of her jokes and antics backfire, causing real problems and hurting people’s feelings, Airi reflects on her behavior and how she affects others. Following the same format as before, this volume includes Airi’s situation reports, text threads, emails, and funny, informational footnotes, all of which support this comical and captivating narrative. The story thoughtfully explores themes of friendship and family, including sibling and intergenerational relationships. Entertaining black-and-white illustrations add cultural context to the family’s home in Hawai‘i and destinations in Japan. A fun balance of mischief, personal growth, and Japanese culture. (Fiction. 8-12)

Baby Bat Bedtime

Towler, Paige | Illus. by Gavin Scott Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 Aug. 15, 2024 | 9781534113220

Baby bat wants to stay up all day, but Mama helps her settle down. At dawn, small brown bats in the rainforest prepare to sleep—all but one determined baby. She is not tired, not hungry, and definitely not in need of a bath. Luckily, experience and caring lead mother bat to supply a delicious beetle snack and a wash-up, and when Baby is “still not that tired,” Mama takes her on a “soft, warm,” swooping, rocking flight until, snug and (of course) comfortably upside down, Baby hears the night songs of other bats and abruptly falls asleep. The remaining

third of the book offers fascinating information about bats, their ecosystem, and the Smithsonian Bat Lab in Panama, addressing such topics as how bats contribute to their environment, how scientists study bats, what kind of bat features in this story, and how readers can be a bat buddy at home. The nonfiction pages are illustrated with photographs—of bats living their lives, of the Smithsonian lab, and of two female scientists holding, watching, and recording bats. The fiction pages depict violet-winged bats with only slightly anthropomorphized facial expressions, in a rosy, lavender predawn jungle turning gradually brighter. Bats are both interesting and lovable in this book.

A fascinating introduction to an essential animal, coupled with a familiar bedtime-averse-child story. (further reading) (Informational picture book. 4-8)

When Wishes Were Horses

Voigt, Cynthia | Illus. by Ramona Kaulitzki Greenwillow Books (224 pp.) | $18.99 Aug. 13, 2024 | 9780062996923

Be careful what you wish for: In this fast-paced, lightly magical read, fifth graders Bug, Zoe, Casey, and Billy each receive two wishes.

In four parallel short stories set in what appears to be the same neighborhood, each character receives two pieces of tissue paper, each representing a single wish. Bug asks for material items but later discovers greater joy in sharing and helping others. Zoe initially wants her parents to stop their “Ugly Fighting” and ultimately makes a wish that declares a positive hope for her family. Casey desires a dog and also wishes for her mom to open her heart. Billy impulsively asks for a unicorn—and then must figure out what to do with it. Each story explores the balance between selfishness and selflessness.

A cautionary moral lesson lies at the heart of these narratives, with the characters’ inner conflicts and social-emotional learning adding depth and captivating interest. As the stories progress, they become more philosophical and abstract, highlighting the transformative impact of connecting with other people and animals. The characters’ lives encompass various family configurations and living situations, enhancing the book’s appeal. Newbery-winning author Voigt skillfully weaves modern-day fairy tales that will resonate with readers, imparting timeless lessons about what truly matters in life. Kaulitzki’s spot art adds a sweet and whimsical touch. The characters are minimally described and largely present white. This enchanting book will leave readers contemplating their own wishes and the deeper meaning behind them. (Fantasy. 7-11)

Taylor Swift: Wildest Dreams, a Biography

Wainer, Erica | Illus. by Joanie Stone Clarion/HarperCollins (40 pp.) | $14.99 Dec. 3, 2024 | 9780063399174

An unabashed panegyric for swooning fans of the pop singer. Looking lit from within in Stone’s emblematic scenes, Taylor Swift certainly makes good on her surname as she goes from a barefoot child running through her family’s Christmas tree farm and “creating magical memories” to a 16-year-old recording artist and then on to near-instant pop deification. The illustrator depicts Swift serving cookies to a small diverse group of fans and writing songs in fountain, glitter, and quill pens. Swift performs her hits for millions of adoring fans, cradles an armful of Grammy Awards, cuddles a cat, and displays an “I voted” sticker on her cardigan as a rainbow banner flows behind her. Amid quick mentions of

her family’s move to Nashville, where she was discovered, and her decision to re-record several early albums to regain control of her music, Wainer threads in meaningful observations about how her songs make “sparks fly,” reflect “the enchantment of first love, friends and bad blood ,” and highlight the importance of “shaking off criticism.”

Her tumultuous love life goes unexamined, to the likely disappointment of many, but the author does clearly lay out Swift’s proven credentials as a writer as well as performer and concludes with a suitably rapturous message: “There’s no stopping Taylor. She has so many stories left to tell.” Haters gonna hate, but for the rest, here’s a real-life fairy tale in which our wildest dreams come true. (sources) (Picture-book biography. 6-8)

Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories: Spices and Spuds: How Plants Made Our World

Warner, Andy | Illus. by Andy Warner Colors by Eleri Harris & Luke Healy Little, Brown Ink | (248 pp.) | $12.99 paper Nov. 5, 2024 | 9780316498272 | Series: Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories, 2

An informative and eye-opening explanation of the impact plants have had on our lives.

“This very moment is a turning point in the relationship between people, plants, and everything,” Warner writes, summing up the central concept of this nonfiction graphic offering. He offers overviews of 10 agricultural products—wood, wheat, corn, rice, peppers, sugar, potatoes, tea, tulips, and cotton—and describes the ways they’ve shaped history, culture, and diet over time. Interesting facts and bits of trivia spanning prehistory to the present day will engage and inform readers. Alongside the triumphs, Warner doesn’t shy from presenting the negative effects of the

vulnerability of monocultures, people’s quest for wealth and power (e.g., the colonization of Indigenous nations, enslavement of African people, and starvation caused by Hitler’s Hunger Plan), and more. Repetition of the tongue-in-cheek line “This seems like something we can just sustain forever, right?” drives home the point that the “relationship between people and plants, and how we changed each other” is dynamic and constantly in flux. The book can be read cover to cover or dipped into; each section works as a self-contained story. The colorful, detail-filled illustrations and chatty, conversational tone are welcoming. Fans of the You Wouldn’t Want To Be graphic nonfiction history series and similar offerings will immediately be drawn in.

A concise overview of a complex and fascinating history presented in a digestible visual medium. (index) (Graphic nonfiction. 9-12)

Whirligigs: The Wondrous Windmills of Vollis Simpson’s Imagination

Weatherford, Carole Boston | Illus. by Edwin Fotheringham | Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers (32 pp.) | $18.99 Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781662680410

The ultimate “fix-it man” builds a mechanical, whimsical windmill farm. As a child in North Carolina, Vollis Simpson (1919-2013) “was fixing things before he could read.” He joined the Army during World War II and created a wind-powered washing machine with parts from a B-29 bomber. Once home, he ran a machine-repair shop, where he continued to tinker into his 60s. After he closed the shop, a dream inspired him to create a series of unusual mechanical windmills using scrap metal, gears, and chains—towers that “turned and whizzed.” Vollis constructed animals, airplanes, and guitar players to inhabit his towers,

An informative and eye-opening explanation of the impact plants have had on our lives.

ANDY WARNER’S ODDBALL HISTORIES

using junk like bike wheels, broken silverware, mirrors, and chimes. His colorful machines—whirligigs— attracted tourists and schoolchildren, and when Simpson’s health prevented him from maintaining his “noisemaking mechanical marvels,” they were moved to different sites, including the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Weatherford conveys the joyful obsession and dedication that fueled Simpson’s creative endeavors. Fotheringham’s cheerful, cartoonish illustrations capture the energy of Simpson’s work, with busy images piling one on top of the other, replicating pinwheel shapes, fast-moving action lines and dots, and splashes of onomatopoeic words like thud , thonk, and boing, boing. Today, according to Weatherford’s author note, Simpson’s whirligigs sit in a North Carolina park dedicated to his work. Simpson is white; other characters are pictured with a variety of skin tones.

This illuminating biography of a mechanic-turned-folk-artist brings his whirligigs to clanking, stirring life. (author’s note, bibliography, archival photos, song lyrics for “Vollis Simpson’s Windmill Farm”) (Picture-book biography. 7-10)

Chomp!: The Truth About Sharks

Whipple, Annette | Illus. by Juan Bautista Reycraft Books (32 pp.) | $17.95 Oct. 15, 2024 | 9781478885788

What would you like to know about sharks? This title follows the format of Whipple’s previous books about cats,

frogs, dogs, and more, using common questions and striking photographs to entertain and inform young readers. The information on each spread is organized by a series of queries such as “Are sharks fish?” and “Can sharks smell blood”? Short paragraphs provide the answers. Most spreads also include a “shark bite” of gentle humor, often a pun. What will most engage readers are the images: sharks of all kinds, close up and labeled by species. Teeth are often a feature, and two spreads are devoted to their number, shape, and variety. Readers will learn about diet and sleep habits, shark anatomy and habitats, and eggs, live births, and babies; they’ll also learn the answer to the question, “Will a shark bite me?” (Answer, unlikely: The chance is 1 in 11 million.) With so many species and so much variation, the answers tend to be general, but most answers have enough information to satisfy curious readers. Surprisingly, the very first spread never reveals whose teeth, fins, or snouts are in the pictures; the answers can’t be found by studying the photos throughout the book. A concluding spread highlights 13 unusual species. The exposition is followed up by a “fact or fiction” page and an experiment on buoyancy; the book concludes with a short glossary and suggestions for web research, but no sources are listed.

Sink your teeth into this one! (Informational picture book. 6-10)

For more by Annette Whipple, visit Kirkus online.

Will have kids riveted and learning far more than they’d ever expect.

ARE YOU SMALL?

Wish Monster

White, J.A. | Harper/HarperCollins (336 pp.)

$19.99 | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780063082069

Sixth grader Violet Park is heartbroken when her beloved dog dies—so, when she encounters a monster in a cave in the woods who gives her the opportunity to wish Midnight back to life, she jumps at the chance.

Violet is satisfied that no one else remembers that Midnight is supposed to be dead—until classmate Hudson Causeway expresses his suspicions. Hudson is an odd kid: smart and kind but constantly overlooked by teachers and most other students, except for his one friend, Quinn Taylor. As Violet tries to figure out why Hudson is immune to the effects of her wish, she realizes that the monster wants her to bring it more wishers. She invites beleaguered shop owner Mr. Kazem to meet it, but when his wish has a terrifying side effect, Hudson and Violet realize that the wish monster may not be the benevolent entity they thought it was, and they set out to destroy it. When they learn that Hudson’s mother knows more about the monster than she let on, a horrifying truth dawns on them. Packed with plenty of twists and action, this thoughtful novel explores the unintended consequences of getting one’s deepest desire. Violet is cued Korean American, Hudson presents white, and Quinn has dark skin and “a mass of frizzy brown hair that [gives] off a distinct mad-scientist vibe,” a description

that unfortunately evokes negative racial stereotypes. Monstrous good fun. (Supernatural. 8-13)

Grown With Love

Wicker, Valeria | McElderry (40 pp.)

$18.99 | Dec. 3, 2024 | 9781665947084

A young plant grafter struggles to find a solution to a neighbor’s persistent case of “black-thumbitis.”

Oliver’s plants are a gift to those around him. His “Climatus Enduris” extends like an umbrella over the mail carrier, keeping him dry in the rain, while his “Shrub Architectis” fences in Ms. Lloyd’s yard so her puppy can’t run off. When Oliver meets Mrs. Kroftombottom, he quickly realizes that her case is dire: She kills every plant she touches. Oliver tries planting some flowers that can survive even the toughest soil; they quickly die. And even Oliver’s “Daisy Heavy-Dutyum” expires once he gives it to her. Oliver realizes that lonely Mrs. Kroftombottom and her plants need companionship and a little TLC to thrive. This charming story is a testament to the transformational power of meaningful relationships. The illustrations, reminiscent of stills from Pixar films, are most captivating when depicting Mrs. Kroftombottom’s lonely home, the light from the window playing across the floor in an empty room. A close-up of a wall of photos is evidence of a life filled with love; several images depict Mrs. K. with a loving spouse, now missing from her life. The pacing and simplicity of this

story make it an appropriate fit for the preschool and kindergarten crowd. Oliver is brown-skinned, while Mrs. Kroftombottom is light-skinned; their community is diverse. A sweet tug on the heartstrings. (Picture book. 4-6)

Kirkus

Star

Are You Small?

Willems, Mo | Union Square Kids (32 pp.)

$17.99 | June 4, 2024 | 9781454951452

Willems once again veers into the realm of informational books for the very young. In the wake of his Elephant/Piggie/Pigeon days, the author/illustrator has undeniably found firm footing in the realm of preschool nonfiction. Following up the success of Are You Big? (2024), Willems trades in his telescope for a microscope. A stick figure–like child with a smiling, purple face is asked, “Are you small?” The answer is much more complex than you might think. After all, “this book is small. (But it has BIG ideas in it.)” And “a hamster is small. (But it can be a big friend.)” Even smaller than a hamster, a baby tooth is “a BIG deal when it comes out.” On and on it goes until the book literally gets to quarks (cleverly hidden in the corners of the page), ultimately acknowledging that maybe there’s an undiscovered something even smaller than that. This unexpected dive into science, with dancing water molecules and caped electrons, isn’t the usual fare for preschoolers, but thanks to its kid-friendly art and tone, it nevertheless makes quantum physics comprehensible to even the youngest set. Willems once more displays a keen eye and ear for what makes a book fascinating to little readers. Backmatter clarifies scale.

This exploration of all things teenytiny will have kids riveted and learning far more than they’d ever expect. (Informational picture book. 3-6)

Phil’s Big Day: A Groundhog’s

Story

Woodruff, Liza | Margaret Ferguson/ Holiday House (40 pp.) | $18.99

Nov. 12, 2024 | 9780823453870

Phil the groundhog fights nerves on his family’s biggest day of the year.

The night before Ground-

hog Day, Phil is too worried to sleep. His family has high expectations for him tomorrow—what if he messes up when he makes his big announcement? With some assistance from little sister Marla, however, Phil pulls it off. Together, the siblings tell the waiting crowd of anthropomorphic animals that they still have six weeks of winter to go. Readers who have felt overwhelmed by anxiety will relate to Phil, whose feelings are cleverly captured by the illustrations. In one scene, Phil sits in bed surrounded by looming thoughts of his parents and siblings, who dwarf him in size. On another page, a winding trail of questions swirls around him: “What if I shake? What if my voice is too soft?” And when the big day rolls around, the other animals are depicted in shadowy silhouettes with unnerving stares. Happily, though, readers also see Phil try a variety of coping methods: distracting himself by making pancakes, talking through his feelings and rehearsing with Marla, and ultimately seeking out help in making a successful proclamation. His world brims with delightful details, from the little underground rooms for each member of the family to the adorable accessories depicted on the endpapers. The book concludes with a recipe for “Phil’s Pancakes” and a brief explanation of Groundhog Day.

A sweet and candid representation of anxiety, with a creative twist. (Picture book. 4-8)

We Celebrate the Light

Yolen, Jane & Heidi E.Y. Stemple

Illus. by Jieting Chen | Rise x Penguin

Workshop (32 pp.) | $18.99 | Oct. 8, 2024

9780593752296

Yolen and Stemple honor the ways many cultures spread light, literally and figuratively, during the darkest days of the year.

Lyrical verse reflects on the commonalities shared by many traditions, while the illustrations highlight a diverse array of winter holidays. The juxtaposition of the universal and the specific embodies the book’s profound message: The ways we are different can unify us, and both our differences and our similarities are worth celebrating. Various groupings of family and friends observe Diwali, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day, and Lunar New Year; amid the glow of rangolis, kinaras, lighted trees, menorahs, lanterns, and moonlight, they spend time with loved ones, decorate, sing, eat, and remember deceased ancestors. Unobtrusive footnotes provide a brief definition of each holiday, with longer descriptions in the backmatter explaining a few of the symbols and rituals. Rife with details for observant readers, the artwork sets a cozy tone, whether portraying families crowded round the kitchen table or outside by a roaring fire. The celebrants include people of many different ethnicities, abilities, and ages, and they gather in groups of various sizes and compositions. With its emphasis on inclusivity, this is an excellent choice for classrooms or libraries looking to discuss winter holidays. Luminous. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

Mr. Lepron’s Mystery Soup

Zoboli, Giovanna | Illus. by Mariachiara Di Giorgio | Trans. by Denise Muir Candlewick Studio (48 pp.) | $18.99

Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781536233391

A rabbit learns a lesson in doing what he loves best—for the right reasons. It’s the first day of autumn, which means it’s time for the debonair

Mr. Lepron and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to pick vegetables and herbs so he can make his special soup. The meal is loved by all, sparking word-of-mouth buzz that brings throngs of animals and diverse people to his forest abode to partake. The business-minded hare soon decides to mass-market his confection, with “a big brick building where soup will be made around the clock.” As his soup becomes more famous, his dreams, once calming and a contributing factor to the delicacy’s tastiness, become frenzied and anxious, depicted as surreal nightmares, in stark contrast to the light, airy visions of the past. Customers no longer appreciate the soup as much. Realizing that he’s changed, Mr. Lepron closes his business and retires to the forest, where he does what he enjoys most: spending time with family (and cooking soup now and again). Zoboli’s lengthy, descriptive text, translated from Italian, and Di Giorgio’s watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil art, together infuse Mr. Lepron with a deep humanity and construct a compelling, dreamy world that harkens back to the past in its tone and look but, with its nods to the all-consuming nature of capitalism, feels grounded in current realities, much like their previous collaboration, Professional Crocodile (2017).

A clever, compassionate, and elegantly wrought reminder to do what makes you happy. (Picture book. 5-8)

For more by Liza Woodruff, visit Kirkus online.

Young Adult

LAURA SIMEON

BACK TO SCHOOL WITH YA FICTION

BY

MID-SEPTEMBER, summer vacation might feel like a distant memory, but school provides plenty of inspiring material for novelists: friendship highs and lows, romantic entanglements, personal growth, extracurricular challenges… even murder (fortunately in ction, for the most part). e following titles capture all the teen drama, in and out of the classroom.

Perfect Little Monsters by Cindy R.X. He (Sourcebooks Fire, May 7): If twisty thrillers are your

thing, look no further. After queen bee cheerleading captain Ella is poisoned, readers learn why so many people who attended her party might have wanted her dead. e chapters alternate between storylines set in the past and present, among di erent characters’ rst- and third-person points of view, laying bare the teens’ complicated histories and relationships.

Louder an Words by Ashley Woodfolk and Lexi Underwood (Scholastic, June 4): Transferring in

your junior year brings myriad challenges, and dealing with nasty social dynamics can be especially brutal. After being expelled from her private school, Jordyn hoped for a fresh start—but when she’s targeted by the person running an anonymous gossip podcast at her new public school, she feels vulnerable all over again. is story explores activism and friendship while keeping readers guessing.

Rules for Camou age by Kirstin Cronn-Mills (Little, Brown, June 18): It’s unlikely that anyone would say navigating high school is easy, but when you’re neurodivergent and your biology teacher is a rigid bully who threatens to stop you from graduating, it’s even harder. For Minnesota senior Evvie, volunteering at the zoo with Aretha the octopus is a highlight of her life. Fortunately, she also has accepting allies at school in this heartfelt and beautifully inclusive story.

Under the Surface by Diana Urban (Putnam, Aug. 13): In this nail-biter, an American teen seeking novel content for her YouTube channel gets more than she bargained for during a trip to Paris with her French class. Readers will tear through the story, desperate to nd out what happens

after Ruby follows her best friend into the su ocating, mazelike Paris catacombs.

ey and two other classmates end up lost and in fear for their lives.

e Sticky Note Manifesto of Aisha Agarwal by Ambika Vohra (Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins, Aug. 27): In this refreshingly funny and relatable story, Aisha, a girl who’s been trying her best to do everything right, meets an unexpected challenge in the form of an essay prompt from her dream college: “Share a time you left your comfort zone.”  rown for a loop, Aisha embarks on a quest to expand her horizons, one that brings her a new sense of self—and a sweet romance, too.

Class Act by Kelsey Rodkey (Harper/HarperCollins, Oct. 1): A protective sibling bond lies at the heart of this engaging body-positive fake-dating romance. Ella has always looked out for her younger sister, Connie, and if that means taking on the obnoxious class president after he deliberately shames Connie on the rst day of school, she’s up for it. In the process, Ella challenges the status quo, nds love, and negotiates healthier family relationships.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

EDITOR’S PICK

A plus-size playwright stars in his own high school drama.

Eugene Guterman, a fat Jewish high school junior living in New York City, aspires to be a famous playwright, but he just can’t seem to put pen to paper to write the drama club’s fall play as promised. Meanwhile, new student Daisy Luna has caught his eye, but he struggles to imagine a story in which the big guy gets the girl. When a misguided attempt to impress Daisy leads to his accidentally breaking the school quarterback’s wrist, Eugene joins the football team as an o ensive lineman

to make amends, even though he knows nothing about the game. Now, both popularity and Daisy’s a ections are within reach, but as he continues to blow o both his playwriting duties and his friends, he must decide who he truly wants to be. Eugene is instantly lovable, with a nice balance of sincerity and snark, and his experiences as a fat kid ring true, from his mother’s unwanted comments about his weight to his reluctance to dance in public lest he become a meme. e secondary characters are well rounded; even quarterback Harry Habib and his cronies have

The Donut Prince of New York

depth to them, and Eugene’s best friends, Mia Kim and Ishaan Iyengar, are equally nuanced. eater references sprinkled throughout add some fun for thespians, but readers need not be familiar

with either the stage or the football eld to enjoy this excellently crafted novel. A pitch-perfect journey of self-discovery. (Fiction. 14-18)

Marisha Pessl

Isabel Ibañez

Maiya Ibrahim

The tricks, bittersweet lessons, and lingering ache of longing are satisfying.

FAERIES NEVER LIE

A French Girl in New York

Adams, Anna | Wattpad Books (312 pp.)

$12.99 paper | Oct. 15, 2024

9781998854622

A young musician sets out to pursue her dreams and find her family, but along the way she finds herself. Growing up as a Black girl with an uncaring foster family (who are cued white) in the small French town of Carvin, Maude never felt like she fit in. When an influencer posts a video of the aspiring opera singer performing in a Parisian cafe during a school trip and it goes viral, an elite vocal coach invites Maude to New York for training. After the 16-yearold orphan learns that her French Nigerian father once lived in New York, she realizes this career opportunity could help her learn more about her origins. Maude also faces critical choices about matters from musical genres to love interests. Meanwhile, Black record company exec Terence Baldwin and his family, her American hosts, are there supporting her as Maude learns about music and her Nigerian heritage (Mrs. Baldwin is Nigerian American). While the pacing is uneven, the complexity of the characters and their realistic interactions shine through; readers will feel engaged in—and occasionally even frustrated by—their decisions. The final reveal is strong. In her debut novel, Adams beautifully captures the internal struggle of balancing hope with the fear that reality might not meet the expectations one has built up over the years.

An emotionally resonant coming-ofage story about claiming your identity. (Fiction. 14-18)

The Ranch at the End of the World

Bettridge, Emma | Illus. by Josephine Birch Cadno/Graffeg (112 pp.) | $15.99 paper Oct. 17, 2024 | 9781802586497

A troubled English teen uncovers the strength to face life as it comes. New arrivals to Ransh Cyfle Olaf, or Last Chance Ranch, learn that “this isn’t prison; this isn’t holiday camp. This is a place to start at the beginning.” The novel opens with Nell and four other young people on a bus in rural Wales. Nell tells readers, “I’m quick to rage, will flip if pushed, and I like girls.” As she does chores, tends to the horses, and explores the hills, forest, and river surrounding the ranch, Nell makes new friends, including Fran, whose mother runs the farm. Both Nell and Fran have had complicated relationships with girls they fell for who then betrayed their trust. Nell also discovers that she can calm Gully, a horse who’s anxious around people due to previous mistreatment. As Nell begins to heal, the complicated details of her past come to light. The climax unspools with a dramatic event that takes Nell and Fran into the hills. The conclusion is, realistically, not tied up neatly, and readers, especially those who feel different in any way, will be satisfied with the romance, friendship, and sense of mental quiet. Bettridge’s

writing is descriptive and lyrical as well as accessible to reluctant readers. Nell’s first-person voice rings true as she details her time away from the modern world. Most characters present white; in Birch’s fluid, impressionistic art, Zed has brown skin and curly black hair. An engaging story of hope and new beginnings. (Fiction. 12-18)

Anti-Semitism: Hatred on the Rise

Blohm, Craig E. | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678207847

This concise primer on the rise of antisemitism from 63 BCE to the present day principally addresses the impact on the Jewish community in the U.S.

The book begins with a timeline of selected historical events and an introduction that describes the themes to be covered. Blohm addresses an ambitious array of topics, including the history of violence, intimidation, and incendiary acts against Jews, as well as the importance of being educated about and speaking out against antisemitism and protecting the vulnerable. Despite the author’s research, space limitations result in some issues being treated too briefly and without sufficient depth. For instance, he links the foundation of prejudice to the incorrect belief that “Jews of all generations bore responsibility for the death of Jesus,” yet the book lacks citations to any of the numerous sources that debunk this myth. Photos, including a graphic image from a Nazi death camp, are interspersed throughout the text, sometimes disrupting the flow: A 1938 picture of Kristallnacht appears between paragraphs about antisemitism in biblical times. Given current events, a survey on the roots, resurgence, and increase of antisemitism is timely and necessary. Despite its flaws and

organizational issues, this short, accessible book provides an outline of the historic and contemporary situations and could serve as a starting point for research.

An overview of a critical topic that cries out for supplementation with more robust works. (picture credits, source notes, organizations and websites, for further research, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Saltwater Boy

Christmas, Bradley | Walker Books Australia (400 pp.) | $19.99 Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781760659400

“Listen to what the ocean was tryin’ to tell ya today. Learn from it.”

With his father in prison and his family unable to pay the rent, 12-year-old Matthew and his mother relocate to the small Australian town of Crawley Point to fix up the beachside cottage his late grandfather had dreamed of retiring to; selling it will bring much-needed cash. When the surfing-obsessed local teens prove unwelcoming, Matthew, who’s cued white, finds companionship with Bill, an old Indigenous fisherman who takes Matthew under his wing, dubbing him a “saltwater boy.” As he gains in confidence, his angry, jealous father, who’s been released on parole, shows up, upending the family’s stability and threatening his friendship with Bill. The story is set in 1992; references to a landmark Indigenous land rights case, Mabo v. Queensland , offer parallels to U.S. history. There’s a heartbreaking authenticity to Matthew’s first-person narration. The incidents of domestic violence, including the verbal and physical abuse and gaslighting he experiences, are intense and unflinching. When Matthew raises justifiable concerns, his mother, frustratingly, makes excuses for his father: “He’s dealing with a lot at the moment. We’ve got to stick by

him. That’s what families do.” The redemption arc of the father-son dynamic relies heavily on the aftereffects of external events, eschewing more serious consequences or internal character growth and inviting readers to unpack complex issues. Australian slang adds to the sense of place. A beautiful, moving debut for sophisticated readers. (Fiction. 13-18)

Faeries Never Lie: Tales To Revel In

Ed. by Córdova, Zoraida & Natalie C. Parker Feiwel & Friends (320 pp.) | $19.99

Sept. 24, 2024 | 9781250823847

Series: Untold Legends, 3

Promised wishes, bewitching kisses, wild revels, and treacherous beauty—this collection of 14 tales plays with the beloved tropes found in the lore of faeries and immortal spirits across multiple cultures.

Hoping to save her ailing grandfather, a girl chases a xian in Chloe Gong’s “An Eternal Fire.” In “Fool,” by Rory Power, one faerie courtier ventures to Paris to steal a ballet dancer whom Mab admires. In Dhonielle Clayton’s “The Senescence,” Ambrosia leaves “the faerie ward of New Orleans” for its human counterpart to secure the future of her family’s court. Discontented and heartbroken teens flee from their pasts, bargain to rid themselves of pain, and brave monsters to find lost loved ones; they contend with nightmares, stolen memories, the allure of magic fruit, and the dangerous power of names. Political tension and intrigue swirl in the background, whether the story is set in the faerie realm or the mortal one. Not every tale has a happy ending, but the tricks, bittersweet lessons, and lingering ache of longing are satisfying nonetheless. Some of the stories visit worlds established in the authors’ other novels, but the vivid

prose, enticing characters, and self-contained conflicts allow the entries to stand alone. The lineup of contributors, including Anna-Marie McLemore, Kwame Mbalia, L.L. McKinney, and Holly Black, will draw readers in. Fey and human cast members alike reflect a diversity of racial and cultural identities as well as gender identities and sexualities. A tantalizing taste of trickery and enchantment. (contributor bios) (Anthology. 14-18)

Teen Guide to Life Skills

Currie-McGhee, Leanne | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678207748

A basic, readable, and useful introduction to “adulting.”

Currie-McGhee targets the major skill areas of work, money, housing, transportation, and health. Some teens will have a grasp of the essentials through experience in their families, jobs, or schools, but many others will benefit from the sensible overview she provides. Tips for finding, landing, and starting a job make up the first chapter. Managing money as a key to independence and security is the next focus. In this chapter, the author cites “utilities” as an expense but only clearly defines and breaks them down toward the end of the section on housing. The discussion of “needs” vs. “wants” distinguishes between teens whose parents still cover many daily expenses and those who need to be self-sufficient. The guidance around timing a rental search and obtaining renters’ insurance is useful. The health chapter includes advice on cooking, exercise, health insurance, friendships and romantic relationships (including unhealthy ones), and mental health. Text boxes cover supplemental information, such as the importance of sleep. Photos showing a racially diverse range of young people enliven the text.

Frequent brief accounts of young people applying specific skills provide real-life models and encouragement. Many of these exemplars are social media content creators, however, which may pique readers’ interest but perhaps bolster unrealistic ideas about how feasible such career options are. A solid starting point for young adults navigating independence. (source notes, for further research, sources, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

They Watch From Below

de Becerra, Katya | Page Street (368 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 29, 2024 | 9798890030801

An incoming college freshman discovers horrors lurking on campus.

Adria “Addie” Velde is excited to join an orientation program at the University of the Arches, her mother’s alma mater on the California coast. Haunted by childhood memories of lurking shadows and her mother’s strange aloofness, Addie quickly discovers that going off to college might not provide the escape she was hoping for. The campus is littered with strange symbols, she meets creepy instructors, and a purportedly “fun activity” leads her to descriptions of strange rituals. From her dorm window, Addie can see the Devouring Well, which has a padlocked lid and is a source of ominous campus folklore. Addie becomes close to a group of other legacy students whose parents were linked through a strange class and an even stranger (and now mysteriously vanished) professor. The first half of the novel consists of slowly paced buildup, with clumsy interstitial chapters describing scenes from the Velde family’s home videos. The most interesting information is revealed through dream sequences and infodumps. Repetitive references to vibes and vibrations stand in for more

evocative descriptions of horror, while the stilted prose hampers the story’s forward momentum. The romantic subplot (involving twin brothers) never quite takes off. Addie’s grandparents came from Belarus and Italy; there’s some diversity in race, nationality, and gender identity among supporting characters. Melodramatic dark academia. (author’s note, content warnings) (Horror. 14-18)

Shadowed

Deuker, Carl | Clarion/HarperCollins (352 pp.) | $19.99 | Nov. 5, 2024

9780063376342

Nate Dravus has lived in his older sister Amelia’s shadow, but now he’s trying to find his own path. Soccer is an obsession in Nate’s Seattle home, but he’s a mediocre player who doesn’t enjoy the game. Meanwhile, Amelia garners a full-ride scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. When Nate summons the courage to tell his parents he’d rather play basketball, they agree to let him switch but refuse to pay for the club he wants to join. Nate is crushed—his parents don’t encourage him the way they do Amelia, and worse, he overhears them making cruel remarks about his soccer abilities. But Nate is disciplined and driven—and soon he’s playing regularly with new neighbor Lucas Cawley, who’s a beast on the court. The two of them become unstoppable. Lucas stands out for other reasons— his family is poor, his parents are often absent, and he’s a devoted caregiver to his twin sister, Megan, who has unspecified special needs. Bullies call him Creepy Crawley. When tragedy strikes, Nate is unprepared to deal with his intense feelings. This fastpaced story takes place over the course of Nate’s high school years. Deuker’s prose, which evokes the excitement of

sports announcers, will keep readers spellbound, and the short chapters make this an accessible work for reluctant readers. Unfortunately, Megan feels more like a plot device than a fully fleshed-out individual. The main characters are white. A page-turning sports story that delves into a boy’s emotional growth. (Fiction. 13-18)

Defy

de Waard, Sara | DCB Young Readers (196 pp.) | $16.95 paper Oct. 26, 2024 | 9781770867581

In a dystopian world, a teenager tries to save his sister from an imminent death. Darius Anah, 17, lives with his mother and younger sister, Mahlah, in a city where every major milestone—known as a Life Event—is dictated by The Book of Zalmon . The teens’ father was a Leaver, someone who took off for the Town Beyond, past the forest surrounding Zalmon, which is a source of great shame—and also temptation— for Darius. The government justifies its control of the citizens by claims that it promotes “equal opportunity and liberty.” Instead of a Natural Death, which is presented as deeply traumatic, people spend their last days before their assigned death dates at a facility called Quiet End. Physical affection is restricted to “conception duties.” Despite this intrusion, there are rumors of an Underground world. One day at work, Darius peeks at his boss’ account at Central Processing, hoping to see whether his crush might be his Life Match. When he looks up Mahlah’s life partner, he’s horrified to learn she’s been assigned an imminent death date. Darius spirals out of control as he attempts to save her life and, in the process, discovers a shocking web of dark secrets. The narrative beautifully combines dystopian elements with a moving

story of love, grief, and defiance. The engaging, evocative writing builds suspense and develops characters in ways that will keep readers invested. Main characters are cued white. Compelling and thought-provoking. (Dystopian. 14-18)

Teen Guide to Managing Money

Diggs, Barbara | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678208226

A basic overview of financial literacy with some techniques for managing income and expenses. Diggs points out that in a 2023 survey, Gen Z respondents got only about 25% of the basic questions about financial literacy correct. She certainly addresses a need—but she does it in a superficial and drearily conventional way that will stir few teen readers into making any major changes in their financial practices. Opening with a discouraging introduction to a young capitalist who was able to retire at the age of 42, she urges readers to make and stick to monthly budgets, leverage “the wonder of compound interest” by regularly saving, invest in the stock market, and understand the hazards of impulse buying and overusing credit cards. All of these are solid, if standard-issue, considerations and strategies. But the author makes misleadingly blithe claims that there’s money to be made through the digital economy (by selling “homemade products on Etsy, gaming, or creating social media channels”) and investing in cryptocurrency. In showing how savings or investments can grow, she also neglects to give proper weight to taxes, banking and brokerage fees, inflation, and other common, often variable, expenses. Much of the content has been savvy advice since money was invented, and so is available in far livelier, more practical iterations, such as Berna

Anat’s Money Out Loud . Occasional stock photos feature a racially diverse group of young adults.

Stodgy and superficial. (source notes, for further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Civic Minded: What Everyone Should Know About the US Government

Fleischer, Jeff | Zest Books | $19.99 paper Oct. 1, 2024 | 9798765611500

A deep dive into the nitty-gritty of the U.S. government’s inner workings and their relevance for citizens. Fleischer pulls back the curtain on concepts that are discussed—often “proudly and loudly”—by voters who may have “confident opinions based on complete misinformation.” The text is divided into chapters that tackle broad subjects, among them spending, taxes, the economy, infrastructure, wealth, debt, and international treaties and trade. The book highlights popular federal programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. While the detailed descriptions can sometimes make the topics seem daunting, thanks to the inclusion of numerous figures, the explanations are thorough, informative, and divided into concise, manageable chapters. The author explores important matters, such as how interest rates affect individuals and banks and how unemployment and economic growth are measured. Fleischer provides historical context for his chosen topics, offering deep insights into laws and their implications. Sidebars throughout the book give readers helpful extra details without overwhelming them. Occasional photographs add interest, for example of a reindeer-drawn postal sled in Alaska. The text avoids advocating for any particular course of action, instead presenting a balanced

view that shows how hot-button issues are often more complex than partisan sound bites suggest.

Clear and stripped of partisan hyperbole; every American can benefit from this book. (image credits, selected bibliography, further information, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

We Called Them Giants

Gillen, Kieron | Illus. by Stephanie Hans Image Comics (104 pp.) | $19.99 Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781534387072

Wondrous visitors encounter a desperate pocket of humanity. Lori, a white orphaned teen who’s finally been adopted after bouncing around various foster homes, awakens to discover that nearly everyone has disappeared. The rapture? Maybe. She runs into her classmate Annette, who has brown skin and curly black hair, and they partner up to scavenge for food. The pair tries to evade several threats, such as the large Wolves and a gang called The Dogs. Supernatural Giants arrive, seemingly from space, speaking an impenetrable language of “musical chiming and weird bass-rhythms.” Lori and Annette then meet Beatrice, an older white woman who shares important observations about the Giants and Wolves. The tone of the story then subtly shifts from post-apocalyptic desperation to one that’s somewhat playful. After a certain point, a visual element that appears early on takes on clear significance and meaning in the context of the story at large, offering a subversively humorous twist for readers to consider and a creative element that deviates from other alien invasion narratives. Hans’ artwork and paneling fill each scene with wonders. An interaction with a giant sees the red, violet, and pink figure standing against a bright, otherworldly white-and-blue backdrop with dark contours. Elsewhere, Lori and Annette pause at night as they behold

ominous shadows, their foggy breath forming clouds, and they hear a “KRRNCH” sound. The quick-moving plot wraps everything up neatly. Lush visuals bring this thoughtfully constructed tale to life. (character designs) (Graphic science fiction. 14-adult)

You’re Not Alone: Understanding and Managing Depression

Gimpel, Diane | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.99 Sept. 1, 2024 | 9781678207762

A quick glimpse into how depressive mood disorders affect adolescents. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 20% of American teens have experienced depression—and the rates are increasing. This handy reference guide aims to educate young people about the varying types of depression, as well as their causes and treatment. Broken up into six concise parts, the book also includes pictures, text boxes, and pull quotes, making the information easy to digest and accessible to a broad range of teens. Of particular note is the chapter that thoughtfully delves into depression’s subtypes, such as major depressive disorder, persistent depressive disorder, and seasonal affective disorder. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is often overlooked in informative texts, is covered here. The chapter on treatment discusses psychotherapy, medication, brain stimulation therapy, and hospitalization, as well as lifestyle changes that may help fight depression. Interspersed throughout, the stories of real teens—including well-known names such as Simone Biles, Justin Bieber, and Billie Eilish—relating their experiences with depression serve to remind readers that they are, indeed, not alone. Importantly, the narratives include teens across the LGBTQ+

spectrum with information and resources tailored to their specific experiences and challenges; the impact of racism goes unaddressed, however. A thoughtful read that offers a solid base upon which teens can build their understanding of depressive mood disorders. (source notes, getting help and information, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

Where the Library Hides

Ibañez, Isabel | Wednesday Books (400 pp.)

$20.00 | Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781250822994

Series: Secrets of the Nile, 2

A young woman pursues a dangerous quest in late-1800s Egypt in this sequel to What the River Knows (2023). After Inez Olivera was nearly murdered while assisting with her uncle’s archaeological expedition in Egypt, Tío Ricardo is eager to ship her home to safety in Argentina. But Inez burns with the need to stay and make sure that those who committed crimes against her family are held responsible. Unfortunately, the law precludes Inez, as a young unmarried woman, from accessing her inheritance (needed to fund her quest for justice) without her guardian uncle’s permission. Whitford Hayes, a former British soldier and her tío’s aide-de-camp, proposes marriage, which could solve her problems. But can Inez trust the secretive Whit? More danger and intrigue lurk at every turn in this exciting duology closer, which fully addresses the first entry’s jaw-dropping cliffhanger. The wellpaced plot encompasses many fresh, new adventures and betrayals in this reimagined historical setting in which ancient magic abounds and not everyone or everything is what it seems. Even more captivating, however, is the complicated, nuanced love story between Whit and Inez. Their

chemistry sizzles, but their relationship is achingly layered with both profound loyalty and deep deception. As their journey unearths new enemies and priceless archaeological finds, the duo must try to trust each other enough to survive.

A thrilling, beautifully written page-turner. (cast of characters, map, timeline) (Historical fantasy. 14-18)

Kirkus Star

Serpent Sea

Ibrahim, Maiya | Delacorte (512 pp.)

$19.99 | Nov. 19, 2024 | 9780593127001

Series: Spice Road, 2

In this sequel to Spice Road (2023), Imani and Taha face impossible circumstances as they try to save their home and loved ones. The novel begins soon after the events of the first entry, with Imani and her crew narrowly escaping imprisonment by King Glaedric’s Harrowlanders after rescuing her brother, Atheer. The king now knows about the misra tree growing in Qalia— the source of magic Spice—and he poses an imminent threat of invasion. The only hope for saving the city is to help Qayn (the djinni who’s soulbound to Imani), find his jeweled crown, and restore his power. Imani’s and Taha’s journeys crisscross, putting them separately through heartbreaking losses and emotionally difficult experiences, only for them to be thrust together again. Despite mistrust and mistakes, they must rely on each other if they are to save Qalia. As their complicated feelings are put to the test, they face the possibility of death while struggling internally. Ibrahim’s strength lies in her ability to create a fully fleshed-out world and contemplatively examine the complexities of relationships, blurring the lines between enemy and friend. The narrative unfolds in alternating voices that seamlessly weave together

the leads’ stories. Surprising pivots contribute to this engaging read, set in a world that draws inspiration from Arab and medieval Western cultural elements. The unique and compelling setting will capture a broad range of readers.

A middle volume that builds on its predecessor’s successes, delivering a captivating and emotionally resonant adventure. (Fantasy. 13-18)

How Can I Help?: What Individuals Can Do About Climate Change

Kallen, Stuart A. | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678208028

This concise volume offers a brief overview of the causes of climate change, the reasons to be worried, and the positive choices that make a difference.

Pointing out that Americans are uncertain about which actions might actually help the effort to slow climate change, Kallen has selected six areas of focus: diet, travel, low-waste lifestyles, energy use, greening the world, and activism. He provides background information, explains the issues, uses examples (often involving teens), and cites experts and statistics from varied sources. This volume is attractively presented, with plentiful, informatively captioned stock photographs that support the content. Text boxes focus on particular problems, such as air travel, plastics, smartphones, and urban heat islands. The author’s suggestions will be reasonable and realistic for many to implement. For example, he encourages readers who may not be ready or able to follow fully plant-based eating to instead embrace reduced-meat diets, and he explains the health and environmental benefits of this shift. His advice for aspiring activists stresses researching their chosen issue, crafting a cogent message, lobbying politicians

in effective ways, and building a team. This smoothly written, thoughtfully focused presentation should be welcomed by teens who might feel overwhelmed by bad news about climate change and unable to imagine that their own individual choices could make a difference.

A positive approach to an immense problem. (picture credits, source notes, organizations and websites, for further research, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

The Encyclopedia of Epic Myths and Legends: Extraordinary and Mesmerizing Stories That Will Boggle Your Mind

Kaplan, Arie | Wellfleet/Quarto (256 pp.) $19.99 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 | 9781577154518

A revealing study of ways in which mythology is still very much with us in today’s books, films, and cultural values.

“These old stories are swirling all around us,” Kaplan writes, “and they won’t stop anytime soon.” To develop his premise, while making good on a promise to look beyond Eurocentric mythologies, he begins with quick recaps of select (non-Biblical) creation myths from Dahomey to Japan. He then goes on to profile prominent deities, heroes, tricksters, villains, and monsters from cultures worldwide. What distinguishes this work are the frequent nods to pop culture and contemporary figures. Kaplan points to Beyoncé’s references to Osun from Yoruba cosmology, the persistence of belief in Sasquatch (whose origins lie among the Sts’ailes people of present-day British Columbia), the ubiquity of certain stock characters (“So. Many. Merlins.”), appearances of Japanese folk hero Kintaro in anime and video games, and films set in the Star Wars, DC, and Marvel Comics universes that draw on mythological influences. He notes how traditional

narratives characterizing Loki, Medusa, and “Big Bad” Morgan le Fay as villains have recently been challenged and offers shoutouts to such modern “Mythic Masters” as Neil Gaiman and Zora Neale Hurston. Kaplan delivers this content in a light tone, whether describing how the Romans “rebranded” the Greek gods or suggesting that the Hindu prince Rama is a “surprisingly relatable” hero. Dramatic digital art accentuates the text.

An engaging overview that offers a broad perspective and unusually rich and stimulating parallels. (references, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

The Dead Will Never Haunt Me

Kuehn, Stephanie | Scholastic (288 pp.) $12.99 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781338764611 Series: Murder, She Wrote, 3

Teen sleuth and true-crime blogger Bea is back in this third and final entry in the Murder, She Wrote series, this time leaving her home in Cabot Cove, Maine, for New Mexico. Bea is glad when her father invites her to join him on a work trip to Albuquerque. She’s looking forward to the opportunity to meet with a filmmaker who teaches at the University of New Mexico. Professor Vance made a docuseries about a cult called the Starlight Society, which may have targeted Bea’s mother’s family when she was little; Bea’s paternal grandfather was part of a network of cult deprogrammers. The new setting combined with the rapid introduction of many new characters creates an appealing departure from the insular feel of the first two books. Tragedy strikes while Bea is in New Mexico, and her unfamiliarity with the people she’s surrounded by means that she finds herself in strange situations, creating suspense. Once Bea heads back to Maine, however, the

6 Books SocietiesExploring in Crisis

By Moira Bu ni

A brilliant character study that examines the e ects of war, genocide, and misogyny.

By Ian X. Cho

Andrea L. Rogers

Sarah Lariviere

By Ben Oliver

story resolves abruptly. Her return to Cabot Cove feels a bit perfunctory, providing a rushed ending to the ongoing mystery of a sort of scavenger hunt she’s been playing with her friends Leisl, Leif, and Carlos. Previous books established some racial diversity among the cast members.

An engaging, if choppy, conclusion that offers an understated end to the overarching mystery. (Mystery. 13-18)

Charles M. Schulz: The Creator of Snoopy and Peanuts

Kuki, Yuzuru | Trans. by Mari Morimoto Udon (160 pp.) | $13.99 paper Oct. 1, 2024 | 9781772943443

Series: Manga Biographies

This mangastyle biography translated from Japanese focuses on the “Peanuts” creator’s early struggles to master his art before making a living from it.

This work immediately immerses readers in the life of Charles “Sparky” Schulz, a shy, fundamentally decent Midwestern boy who grew up to be the same sort of young man, then family man, then grandfather, all while becoming one of the most iconic cartoonists ever. The story frames the dedicated young artist’s strenuous efforts to succeed in both craft and career. Following manga conventions, quickening heartbeats and other sound effects crank up the feels. The big eyes, sweet smiles, and static figures intimately bent toward one another in Kuki’s mix of color and monochrome panels provide twinkly undertones to the subject’s rise to world-class professional artist. Readers may be disappointed to find only a few samples of the original strips, and Franklin, a Black character Schulz introduced in 1968, whose integration with the white characters caused controversy in some circles, is strangely omitted. The rich array of details about

how Schulz named and developed his characters, as well as insights into how they reflected his own experiences with anxiety and unrequited love, are fascinating, however.

Bland and a bit selective but still a gold mine for budding cartoonists and “Peanuts” fans. (historical note, timeline, character list, photos, sources, photo credits) (Graphic biography. 12-16)

The Civilization

McKenzie, K.M. | Iskanchi Press (250 pp.) | $23.00 paper | Oct. 11, 2024 9781957810126

A 17-year-old Black Canadian girl with roots in an African country “not located on any maps” attempts to find her grandfather and is drawn into another world, where a battle rages against darkness.

Kadsa Abasi’s Grandpa Edoje wants her to care as much as he does about finding his homeland; he’s searched across the continent of Africa for a way back. During their exploration of a cave in Chad, he at last finds a portal that will allow him to return to Marut. Grandpa Edoje, who’s said “she’d make a good godtalker,” gives Kadsa a large crystal. But Kadsa, whose father is dead, starts researching her mother— and she discovers troubling information that implicates her grandfather in the events that led to their separation. Before they can be reunited, however, Kadsa spies something frightening as she gazes into the crystal: Grandpa Edoje appears to be fighting with a shaman they met in the cave. She returns to the site of the portal, where the shaman tries to take the crystal from her. In the subsequent struggle, Kadsa ends up in Marut, a world that’s struggling under the Dark Enchantment of Akwanshi, a powerhungry priestess—and some see Kadsa as their long-awaited source of

salvation. The story’s worldbuilding and action sequences are engaging, although the uneven character development detracts from the narrative. Nevertheless, genre fans will find much to enjoy.

An original blend of Africaninspired mysticism and adventure. (Fantasy. 14-18)

Hurt Help Hope: A Real Conversation About Teen Grief and Life After Loss

Moll, Clarissa & Fiona Moll | Wander (176 pp.) | $15.99 paper | Oct. 8, 2024 9781496487247

“It was the worst news, the worst time, and the worst day of my life.”

Drawing on their own experiences of losing a husband and father, the mother and daughter co-authors of this faith-based handbook help to normalize grief. They encourage readers to embrace their unique nonlinear journeys through this universal experience and all its physical, mental, and emotional challenges. The work is designed to be useful whether read through or dipped into as needed. Text boxes throughout the work invite moments of self-reflection, testimonial, and prayer. A rich appendix offers information on U.S.-based health resources, along with playlists, books, and films. The tone of the writing has an easy intimacy to it that’s both approachable and sincere, evoking the authentic voice of a trusted peer or empathetic adult (college student Fiona’s mom and co-author, Clarissa, is a middle school teacher). The Molls’ sensitivity in contextualizing feelings provides teens with the ability to understand and discuss their responses and symptoms. The authors also help readers understand when they should reach out to health care professionals and other forms of support. The duo deftly navigates questions of faith and

the fluctuating relationship to God that readers may experience when navigating loss.

A thoughtful Christian grief guide that will comfort and support teens and adults alike. (grief relief tool kit, creating a memory book, Bible verses, endnotes) (Nonfiction. 12-adult)

Electric Vehicles: How Green Are They?

Mooney, Carla | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678207922

A thoughtprovoking comparison of the costs and benefits of electric vehicles. Against the obvious advantages of vehicles that don’t create toxic emissions and use little to no fossil fuels, Mooney weighs many of the hidden costs. Such costs range from serious human rights violations related to where cobalt and other essential materials used in batteries are mined to the fact that most of the ever-increasing amount of electricity used in manufacturing and recharging EVs is currently generated by power plants that use coal or natural gas. Still, along with citing a recent study estimating that EVs make up for the carbon footprint of their manufacturing process in about two years of use, the author paints an optimistic picture of ongoing efforts to reduce EVs’ drawbacks even further. As examples, she points to Norway, where 96% of all electric power is already generated by hydropower, an MIT research project on making batteries entirely from organic materials, a pilot project in Detroit where a roadway wirelessly recharges EVs, and more. Readers who think that the case for switching to EVs is obvious will appreciate the author’s judicious and nuanced observations, all based on official reports and other authoritative publications. Sparse stock photos break up the text, showing some of the

technology under development and other relevant scenes.

Topical and judicious. (picture credits, source notes, organizations and website, for further research, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Science Fiction Fan’s Guide to Science

Nardo, Don | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678208165

A select overview of topics addressed by scientists and science fiction writers alike. In a cursory way that will leave explorers of both the experimentally demonstrated and the speculative reaches of science unsatisfied, Nardo covers a few general areas—interstellar travel, time travel, intelligent life on other planets, parallel universes, and sentient machines—in which science and science fiction have been chasing each other for a long time. Interspersed with glancing mentions of wormholes, AI, and a limited number of other fizzy topics in scientific research, he name-checks or briefly summarizes films and novels that incorporate such topics, some of which younger audiences may recognize. But many references feel less relevant: hoary 1950s classic films (The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet) and novels that are typically assigned than read voluntarily (H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle). Along with showing a preference for less-than-fresh examples, the author neglects to cover several currently hot common areas of interest, including cyborgs, nanotechnology, quantum entanglement, and various frontiers in the social, political, and biological sciences. Apart from Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang, the human figures in the thin assortment of photos are white. A limited, superficial survey of one of human culture’s most fruitful

synergistic pairings. (source notes, for further research, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Here Goes Nothing

Ohland, Emma K. | Carolrhoda (272 pp.) $19.99 | Nov. 5, 2024 | 9781728487656

Much Ado About Nothing gets a boldly queer contemporary twist.

Beatrice’s best friend has always been her little sister, Harriet, who goes by Hero. Ever since their mom died and their dad checked out, Bea has looked out for Hero the best she can. Bea’s biggest enemy is Bennie, a neighbor in their Indianapolis suburb; the girls have exchanged sharp barbs since they were in the fifth grade. When Bennie abruptly returns home from boarding school and Hero starts dating Claude, one of Bennie’s best friends, the nemeses’ worlds collide. But a crisis leads Bea to wonder what’s really been behind their conflict all along. Ohland has created a diverse cast (Bea, Hero, and Bennie present white, Bennie is pansexual, Claude is Black and bisexual) that embraces not only inclusivity but also the fluidity of sexuality and the necessity of selfexploration. As Bea works through her complicated feelings about Bennie, she confronts her own identity, questioning whether any label feels right. In the process, she leans on Pedro, a Latine friend of Bennie’s, who’s investigating identity questions of their own. Bea and Hero’s bond as they face their mother’s absence at pivotal points in their lives is a high point, but ultimately neither the characters nor their motivations ever quite come alive, and Bea and Bennie’s eventual romance feels flat and one-dimensional. Though it takes admirably big swings, this reimagining doesn’t live up to its potential. (content note, discussion questions, author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)

We Are Hunted

Oyemakinde, Tomi | Feiwel & Friends (320 pp.) | $19.99 | Sept. 17, 2024

9781250868169

A Black British teenager attempts to survive after a family vacation unexpectedly turns into a blood-soaked nightmare. In another version of reality, Femi Fatona would be excited to visit Darlenia. The tropical island, discovered by entrepreneur and CEO Richard Jenkins, features a technologically advanced resort and is populated by strange, “vicious-looking” animals. Going there means accompanying his dad and older brother, Dapo, however. Femi isn’t on the best terms with either of them, for different but equally significant reasons. Mr. Fatona, who found his own “passion in organometallic chemistry,” disapproves of his son’s music career dreams and wants him to continue his formal education. Last summer, Dapo was severely injured in a life-changing accident that Femi feels was his fault. Femi’s mum opts out in favor of a Malta trip with her own friends and hopes the Darlenia excursion will force father and sons to repair their cracked bonds. But soon after their arrival, the animals break free of the island’s control systems and start hunting the tourists. As Femi and his family try to outsmart the terrifying predators, they uncover the island’s hidden history of exploitation and destructive corporate greed. Oyemakinde’s sophomore novel balances nail-biting action with explorations of guilt, forgiveness, familial relationships, and the consequences of neocolonialism. The first-person

narrative highlights the depth of Femi’s inner thoughts and emotions. Vivid imagery captures the awe-inducing, colorful world of Darlenia.

An engaging thrill ride of a story that spotlights a complex, relatable hero. (bonus scene) (Fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Star

Darkly

Pessl, Marisha | Delacorte (416 pp.)

$19.99 | Nov. 26, 2024 | 9780593706558

Seven teens are chosen for a mysterious internship with the Louisiana Veda Foundation, investigating the remnants of board-game empire Darkly and its enigmatic founder.

Arcadia Gannon, 17, who presents white, comes from Eminence, Missouri, is bad at school but good at puzzles, runs her mother’s antiques shop, loves Darkly games, and knows as much as anyone can about Louisiana Veda, the long-dead mastermind behind their (impossible, often terrifying) games. The internship involves being marooned—along with Poe from France, Franz-Luc from Germany, Cooper from the U.S., Torin from Ireland, Everleigh from Iceland, and Mouse from Nigeria— on the island off the coast of England where the Darkly factory is located. They’re tasked with finding a missing boy, who disappeared while playing a never-released game, the sole copy of which was stolen years earlier. The prize: £1,000,000 and complete ownership of a Darkly game of their choice. What follows is a treasure hunt, a mystery both present and past, a sometimes-terrifying adventure, and, for Dia, a coming into her own after a life of being overshadowed by a flighty mother whom she’s had to parent. Like a Darkly game, the whole is mesmerizing, improbable, deeply compelling, and best enjoyed after dark. Pessl’s

impeccably controlled prose plays with ideas about presentation and storytelling on a meta level even as Dia grapples with the same ideas (as well as the concepts of destiny and determination) in Veda’s life and her own. Roll the die, flip the card: We have a winner. (Mystery. 14-18)

Kirkus Star

Leap

Popescu, Simina | Roaring Brook Press (304 pp.) | $24.99 | Nov. 12, 2024 9781250838292

Students at an elite dance school in Bucharest confront their identities and futures. Ana Florean and Carina Scarlat have been secretly dating for three years. In Romania, being out can have dangerous consequences, and Carina doesn’t want to jeopardize her promising ballet career. Ana understands—mostly— and resigns herself to supporting Carina, stepping in as her practice partner in empty studios. But with Carina busy rehearsing, Ana finds herself wondering whether she even likes dancing anymore. She starts spending more time with her new roommate, Sara Dumitrescu, who’s also in the contemporary dance program. As the two become friends, Ana finds someone she can trust with her ambivalent feelings about Carina, and Sara, who thinks she might be gay, too, finds someone who’s willing to visit queer spaces with her. As the girls move through the dynamically illustrated panels, they explore their sexuality and what they want from dance. Most of the work features bold, fluid, black linework against a soft pink background, but many dance sequences include bright bursts of color. While the portrayal of the world of pre-professional ballet is sobering, reflecting the struggles of many dancers who present as queer or have

For another tropical island horror novel, visit Kirkus online.

bigger bodies, it also shows glimmers of a better future as the girls rediscover the joy of dancing and explore how gender norms can be bent or broken. An ultimately hopeful portrayal of dance, coming of age, and being true to yourself. (Graphic fiction. 14-18)

Megalodons, Mermaids, and Climate Change: Answers to Your Ocean and Atmosphere Questions

Prager, Ellen & Dave Jones | Illus. by Alece Birnbach | Columbia Univ. (240 pp.) | $24.95 paper | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780231212496

“Questions are the lifeblood of learning,” the authors proclaim, and questions— and answers— abound in this reader-friendly tome.

In an effort to “promote improved understanding and combat misinformation” in an age where the latter is far too prevalent, marine scientist Prager and meteorologist Jones have compiled “some of the most frequently asked and zaniest questions” they and their colleagues have encountered. Each chapter explores a variety of topics related to an overarching subject that’s adjacent to the authors’ respective fields, including marine life and ocean health, extreme weather, astronomy, and the dangers of scientific illiteracy. The chapter entitled “Supernatural, Suspicious, or Science” covers such far-ranging matters as rumors about the Bermuda Triangle, lenticular clouds (which are often mistaken for UFOs), and the science behind so-called chemtrails. The authors present information in a detailed, frank, and conversational manner and clearly explain technical terms. The book includes sobering information about current risks to the environment and the impact human activity has had on it. The text doesn’t sugarcoat the dire nature of climate change, but it is lightened and

enlivened by a fair amount of humor, especially in Birnbach’s scattered cartoon spot art. The work lends itself to being read cover to cover or dipped into by those who wish to learn more about a specific area, enhancing its usefulness.

A solid and engaging overview of a host of scientific concepts. (authors’ note, sources and additional information, index) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

Thunder City: A Mortal Engines Novel

Reeve, Philip | Scholastic (336 pp.)

$19.99 | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781546138235

In a long-awaited new Traction Era tale, a motley band of adventurers sets out to take a city back from a ruthless usurper. Setting his tale between the timelines of the Fever Crumb series and the Mortal Engines Quartet, Reeve sends a band of unlikely underdogs up against fiendishly clever new dictator Gabriel Strega. Strega is bent on turning the formerly peaceful mobile town of Thorbury into a ravening urban predator with the help of a small army of mercenaries, a sinister pair of killers, and a squad of hulking cyborg Revenants. The author parades his appealing ensemble—led by genteel but steely tutor Lavinia Torpenhow, boozy ex-soldier Oddington Doom, and Tamzin Pook, a deceptively unprepossessing young gladiator of tantalizingly obscure origin—through a breakneck series of brushes with disaster in various locales, from blood-soaked arena sands to one of posh floating spa Bad Luftgarten’s literal Air B&Bs. He then pitches his cast into climactic hails of snapping bullets, titanic bot vs. bot battles, and fan-pleasing scenes of massive cities chowing down on one another. The famously rude waiters at the trendy Baguette Pneumatique bistro

in mighty, peripatetic Paris and similar sly tweaks relieve the overall plot’s grimmer tendencies. Readers will wind up as exhausted as the cast, which, aside from a short encounter with members of the African Zagwan Empire and passing reference to the silk weavers of the eastern Shan Guo kingdom, largely presents white. A rousing, swashbuckling, dystopian romp. (Science fiction. 12-18)

The Next Generation: NFL Star Quarterbacks

Roland, James | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.) | $33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 9781678208127

Profiles of six young quarterbacks with dazzling skills and promising futures. Roland’s roster includes one biracial, two white, and three Black elite young arrivals—Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, Brock Purdy, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, and C.J. Stroud—who played for teams all over the United States. Unfortunately, he expends so little effort differentiating his chosen players that their distinctive talents or styles of play, not to mention lengthy strings of feats, statistics, and awards, all tend to blend together. Their backgrounds are dispensed with in a few lines: They were coached or loyally supported by parents, excelled in multiple sports in high school, went on to winning careers in college football while posting record-breaking statistics, and then were drafted into the NFL, where they quickly became starters and have set or challenged more records, all while leading their teams to big post-season games. Aside from Stroud, Houston’s “humble young leader,” the child of a minister who has been incarcerated for many years, their stories are told in ways that make them sound alike. Other than Mahomes and Jackson, whose NFL debuts came in 2018, none of them have played long enough to demonstrate consistent star

quality. The young men’s off-field causes and activities are largely addressed in text boxes. Roland barely acknowledges significant losses and season-ending injuries and confines direct quotes to bland sound bites and platitudes. The photos are sparse and only occasionally depict game action.

May be of interest to football fans now but is superficial and certain to date quickly. (picture credits, source notes, for further research, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Your Throne: Volume 1

SAM | WEBTOON Unscrolled (288 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Oct. 1, 2024 9781998854790

A fierce, wronged woman pursues revenge— although perhaps she’s after the wrong person. Everyone is happy to see the heir to the throne of Vasilios become engaged to his beautiful fiancee— everyone except for the forgotten young woman who was supposed to be the crown princess. After Lady Medea unfairly loses her position to the bubbly Psyche, her anger continues to simmer until she decides to take action, unconcerned by Psyche’s attempts to foster a friendship between them. The two young women get into a fight in a temple, Psyche pushes Medea into the water, and as she goes under, Medea beseeches the guardian deity of Vasilios: “Give me the chance to rule instead of this foolish wench. Give me everything she has!” When Medea comes to, she discovers that she and Psyche have switched bodies. While Psyche is terrified, Medea finds the events hilarious—that is, until she sees a darker side to the prince. As Medea continues to uncover layer upon layer of conspiracy, she realizes that surviving as Psyche might be more challenging than she imagined. In this thrilling and engrossing compilation of the first 12 episodes of a popular

WEBTOON series, the full-color illustrations effectively use the contrast between dark and light. As the story unfolds, the characters develop in complexity, and their relationships grow more intricate. The cast members in this pseudo-European world are light-skinned.

Political intrigue and suspense frame this smart, satisfying page-turner. (Manga. 13-18)

Once Bitten, Twice Dead

Schmidt, Tiffany | Amulet/Abrams (304 pp.)

$19.99 | July 16, 2024 | 9781419771040

Series: Monster High

A tale of starcrossed love and existential danger featuring characters from the uber-popular Monster High TV series. When a tragic event robs Draculaura of her adoptive father, it also throws things into chaos for Monster High, where Dracula was the principal. A cemetery meet-cute with brooding but (unfortunately) human Poe leads to an ill-fated romance that will put them both in danger if Draculaura’s real identity is discovered by Poe’s monster-hunter father. As strange and dangerous events threaten the safety of everyone at Monster High, Draculaura discovers a secret about her family that forces her to decide once and for all where her loyalties lie. The trappings of the Monster High fandom are laid over a fairly standard genre framework, and although the beginning is quickly paced and compelling, the story gets bogged down in the middle and loses some steam. Draculaura, Cleo de Nile, Ghoulia Yelps, and the others aren’t fleshed out enough to hook newcomers to this world, but existing fans will likely be mostly satisfied despite the shallow characterizations and predictable plot. The nonstop puns, chirpy tone, and focus on friendship are true to the source material, though, and the cast members

encompass many different types of monsters. Poe has tan skin, sandy hair, and blue eyes, and Draculaura is pale-skinned.

Familiar, beloved characters are the highlights of a slightly hollow story.

(Paranormal. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call

Shea, Jamison | Henry Holt (336 pp.)

$19.99 | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781250909589

Series: Feed Her to the Beast, 2

In this thrilling sequel to 2023’s I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, a former prima ballerina reckons with the ramifications of her decision to forge a deal with a primordial deity—as well as with her grief, guilt, and the god’s growing demands.

Laure Mesny, the current embodiment of the eldritch Wicked Dark, drinks, parties, and dances to cope with the aftermath of events that killed her best friend and sealed her Mephistophelian pact. She begins to suspect that her alliance with the god Acheron is more parasitic than symbiotic and fears she’s losing what little agency and selfhood she has as he nests within her body. Meanwhile, people are dying violently on the streets of Paris, and the immortal land of Elysium, in “a dimension beyond Paris,” inexorably begins to rot. As brown-skinned Laure investigates, she’s shocked by the secrets she uncovers that threaten both the mortal and immortal worlds. Laure feels grotesque, unloved, and abandoned, saying, “Perhaps I was a monster to be put down, when all I’d ever done was try to survive.” But she’s a fierce and vulnerable antihero, someone who protects herself as well as outcasts and the vulnerable. Beneath the viscera, the story underscores that the real horror isn’t the monsters we

become in order to survive a cruel world, but the powers that try to bend and break us to commit atrocities for their benefit.

This bold and bloody coming-of-age story is an enthralling page-turner. (author’s note) (Horror. 14-18)

HappyHead

Silver, Josh | Delacorte (400 pp.)

$19.99 | Oct. 22, 2024 | 9780593812020

Series: HappyHead, 1

Being selected for the HappyHead Project seems like the best way forward for struggling teen Sebastian Seaton. Between anxiety, bullying, and being closeted, Seb has a lot to deal with. So when he’s selected to join the HappyHead Project, a brand-new retreat in the Scottish wilderness for struggling teens like him that claims to have the answer for the epidemic of teenage unhappiness, his family is ecstatic. But Seb has a bad feeling about HappyHead—what kind of researcher wants 100 17-year-olds to isolate themselves from their friends, families, and phones for two weeks? Despite his misgivings, Seb decides to participate, trying his best to genuinely focus on self-improvement and make his family proud. Almost immediately, though, something seems off about the place—and things just get weirder from there. Can Seb overcome his fear and discomfort to achieve true happiness, or is there indeed something sinister lurking beneath HappyHead’s positive exterior? Silver’s debut addresses relevant, very real questions about life in the digital age: Mental health, peer pressure, and the exploration of what happiness really means are at the core of this novel. Some pacing issues detract from the intriguing premise, and the sudden ending will leave readers hanging until the next series entry. Sebastian and other leads present white; contextual cues point to racial diversity in the rest of the cast.

Surprisingly dark and twisty: a solid, character-driven dystopian thriller weakened by an abrupt ending. (author Q&A) (Thriller. 14-18)

Exploring Careers in Music

Snyder, Gail | ReferencePoint Press (64 pp.)

$33.95 | Sept. 1, 2024 | 9781678207946

A concise guide with advice to readers who are curious about careers in music. Snyder profiles six career paths that young people with a passion for music may not have considered: background singer, booking agent, DJ, music teacher, music therapist, and session musician. Each chapter describes the profession, outlining the responsibilities, number of jobs, median pay, necessary education, ideal personal qualities, typical work settings, and future job outlook. The author includes quotes from professionals who offer advice, discuss their career paths, and describe a typical workday. Former American Idol contestant Alex Trugman explains that background singers must be able to sight-read music, even though lead singers sometimes cannot. Readers may be surprised to learn about the ongoing expenses DJs have to cover out of their payments for gigs, from transportation to software subscriptions. Music therapists share moving stories of helping premature babies and people who are terminally ill. Each chapter closes with additional resources, such as websites for trade associations and industry directories. The engaging style and clear, concise language make this work accessible to a wide range of readers. The real-life examples shed light on the people behind the statistics, balancing informative content with engaging storytelling and offering valuable insights into the music industry. Stock photos show racially diverse people at work.

An enlightening resource that offers valuable information for aspiring

music professionals. (source notes, interview with a booking agent, other jobs in music, index, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

The Champions

Thomas, Kara | Delacorte (336 pp.)

$20.99 | Aug. 27, 2024 | 9780593379974

Series: The Cheerleaders, 2

A teen who aspires to be a cuttingedge journalist becomes enmeshed in the cover-ups surrounding her upstate New York town’s football team. Hadley’s major focus for her senior year at Sunnybrook High School is being made editor in chief of the school newspaper, a post that she feels will give her an edge in her application to study journalism at Columbia. Her rival for the position is Peter—and she’s still sore about their personal history. A cute member of Sunnybrook’s celebrated football team convinces Hadley to go to a party, but after he ends the night unconscious and in the emergency room, she and Peter find themselves diving in deeper than either might want to. Together, they explore bleak secrets and scandals involving the team, including academic cheating, dating violence, and sexual assault. Set in the same community as The Cheerleaders (2018) and featuring some returning characters (here appearing mostly in secondary roles), this stand-alone companion novel constructs a similarly intricate mystery that takes its time unwinding. Readers will easily empathize with Hadley as she doggedly pursues the truth, even when doing so creates difficulties for her and causes her to be bullied by her classmates. Hadley and Peter read white; there’s racial diversity among the secondary characters. An engrossing, thrilling, and at times grim mystery with a likable protagonist. (Mystery. 14-18)

Indie

ORIGIN STORIES

ADOPTION CAN RAISE a lot of questions for all involved regarding cultural identity, family history, physical and mental health, and more. ese three notable memoirs explore several perspectives on the experience of adoption: that of a mother forced to give up her son, a daughter eager to know about her birth family’s Mexican heritage, and a couple of friends who started their searches for the biological families together and got very di erent results.

Patti Eddington, a reporter, writes about her own adoption in e Girl With ree Birthdays. A surprising page-turner, the book investigates the con icting accounts of why the author’s birth mother chose to put her up for adoption. Eddington describes the process of locating her birth family and learning her birth name (Mary Ann Lopez), birthday, etc. She also writes compellingly about her Mexican heritage and the ways her background might have a ected how her white biological parents viewed her. Our reviewer notes, “In some ways, the memoir is typical of many adoptee

stories, as in Eddington’s conclusion that people’s true parents are the ones who raised them. But it’s also a bracingly honest look at the author’s feelings about the birth family she discovered.”

In her memoir Childless Mother, Tracy Mayo recounts how her parents forced her to give up her infant son. In the 1960s, Mayo was a pregnant teenager when her military family, then living at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, sent her under a pseudonym to Norfolk’s Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. Childless Mother movingly depicts Mayo’s e orts to nd her boy and the feelings that arose from losing him. Our reviewer says Mayo’s “account of life in the Florence Crittenton Home, and her research into its history, provides readers with plenty of insight into past attitudes toward unwed pregnant women. e author also examines the complexities of reuniting with children given up for adoption— including birth parents’ acceptance of, and by, the families that raised their children—in a nuanced and insightful manner.”

Teacher, musician, and photographer Sherri Craig-Evans always wanted to know about her birth origins, and good friend Trish Diggins, a designer and writer, wondered about her own; Diggins was especially curious about the health history of her biological family. ey decided to team up and, along with some friends and “search angels” (people who help strangers nd biological family), began combing DNA databases to see what they could learn.

Found: Adopted Friends Search for eir Birth Families recounts the co-authors’ dramatic realizations and upended expectations. Our reviewer notes, “Craig-Evans found a mother who was

eager to connect and a father who did not want his family to know that he had another daughter. Diggins discovered that her father had lived a short, tragic life, and that her mother was reluctant to tell her own family about this fact of her past.” e duo considers many issues about adoption and o ers good insight into the nature of familial ties, both chosen and biological. “Craig-Evans and Diggins engagingly re ect on many adoption-related issues, such as what creates a sense of connection, or why people choose to accept or reject a biological bond,” says our reviewer.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

CHAYA SCHECHNER

Chaya Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.

EDITOR’S PICK

In Schulze’s novella, a new parent decides to raise his son in an analog-only household and imagines a future revolution.

One night, two weeks after nalizing the adoption of his 4-year-old son Quentin, an unnamed man in Danvers, Massachusetts, is suddenly struck by the enormity of his new responsibilities as a parent. e narrator, who describes himself as a “Zillennial”— someone who’s “too young to remember the 90s but old enough to remember a world before the Internet”— decides that he and his much-older husband, who was born in 1964, will raise Quentin without any modern digital technology. Instead of relying on smartphones and tablets to entertain and educate his son, like other parents, he plans instead to replicate a

pre-internet lifestyle to nurture Quentin’s developing mind. As he tucks Quentin into bed, he vows that his son will be “raised right. With love of this world. e real world. IRL.” Invigorated and inspired, the narrator loses himself in an elaborately constructed vision of the future, in which Quentin graduates college with no friends and no career prospects, due to his lack of a digital footprint; after a failed suicide attempt, he creates a web-based manifesto condemning the internet’s in ltration of every aspect of society, and the millennials who encourage such an environment for their children, ending with a call to “#Unplug” that goes very viral. Schulze’s novella is a biting and viciously funny satire about politics, capitalism, faux nostalgia, online radicalization, and

By Maggie Boxey

Unplugged

hypocrisy in politics. e book is written almost entirely in the future tense, which has the e ect of elevating the dry humor to a high level. All the characters (including gments of the narrator’s imagination whom Quentin will allegedly meet) are well developed, and the story ows at a nice pace throughout. Readers may especially enjoy the story’s

By Michael George

By Kevin Hincker

exploration of intergenerational con ict, as well as the sincerity of the depiction of the existential anxiety of parenthood: “How am I supposed to do this?” the narrator despairs at one point. “How does anybody do this?”

A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.

By David Schulze

Schulze, David | Self | 187 pp. | May 30, 2024

The 3 Things

Your Own Way Home

The Curse at the End of the World

Unplugged

Love and Other Cages

Ares, Emilia | Sera Press (450 pp.)

$29.95 | Oct. 15, 2024 | 9798990383920

Young lovers are ripped apart by sinister, criminal forces beyond their comprehension in Ares’ second installment in the Love and Other Sins series.

Oliver Mondell and Mina Arkova are a young couple who’ve finally found happiness in each other. When intruders break into Mina’s home, leaving her mother requiring hospitalization, Mina worries that her father has angered an underground Russian crime organization. Her worst fears are realized when, while her mother languishes in a medically induced coma, Mina is kidnapped by members of a criminal syndicate and taken to Belarus. Oliver, at a complete loss over what to do, teams up with Mina’s best friend (Nyah) and his friend Xavi to pick up her trail and find her again. The narrative alternates between Mina’s and Oliver’s perspectives, providing insight into both of their journeys as the story progresses; the story takes Oliver across Los Angeles and Mina into a mysterious training school called Lavidian that prepares young women to become fighters and agents. A lot happens in the story— the pacing is enticing and exciting in some parts, but other sections become mired in extraneous detail that slows the narrative. For instance, Mina’s time at Lavidian parallels the development of Oliver bringing Xavi on board with his electronics resale business; this thread feels drawn out, even though it does contribute to the developing plot. The inclusion of so many characters occasionally becomes confusing, but Ares does a great job of keeping readers guessing as to which players Mina and Oliver can trust, adding to the thriller element of the novel. The author develops brilliant chemistry between the two leading characters; while everything else is

uncertain around them, readers will truly believe in “the intoxicating, nearly gravitational pull [Oliver] had on [Mina],” which proves to be the most compelling part of the novel. A heart-wrenching thriller with multiple twists that will keep readers hooked until the final page.

The Turning Point: Only a Little Into the Future

Blackwood, W.J. | Troubador Publishers (320 pp.) | $21.10 paper Nov. 28, 2024 | 9781805141112

In Blackwood’s thriller, the target of a worldwide sex-trafficking ring and her two new allies aim to turn the tables on their pursuers and spark a worldwide revolution.

At first, Judy Ruono seems to be a guileless 20-something, while the seemingly omnipotent Foundation is portrayed as a many-tentacled organization that enslaves young women as part of their plans to blackmail powerful figures around the world. However, it soon becomes clear that the Foundation isn’t the unassailable juggernaut it seems to be, and that Judy’s no pushover. Although she’s initially fooled by the Foundation’s promises of an overseas acting gig, it isn’t long before she begins to unravel the awful truth about “Panomnes Productions” and the “Gartfoil Agency.” She’s helped in this endeavor by a couple of new acquaintances with whom she bonds after surviving a murder attempt: former lawyer James Torquil Graham and his friend Roddy, both from Scotland. The trio are undeniably brave and resourceful, but they aren’t superheroes; Blackwood pointedly renders them as ordinary folks. Indeed, they effectively embody one of the novel’s central themes: that ordinary people can be powerful when push comes to shove. This theme is developed further when Judy moves beyond the goal of her own liberation

and sets out to champion other victims of the wealthy Foundation. In many ways, Blackwood delivers a revenge fantasy that feels well suited to the present day, despite its future setting. It’s too often bogged down by unwieldy lines, however, as in this late sketch of a major villain: “He had an air that denied any possibility of reform, but only of stunned acceptance for a while with the pretence of cooperation with humanity before, in time, another means might present itself for taking revenge on society for whatever were its faults in his eyes.” Still, the adventure remains engaging, largely due to the lively interplay between Judy, James, and Roddy, and the triumphant glee they find in taking on corrupt and dangerous institutions. An often-entertaining adventure story about fighting back and settling scores.

Kirkus Star

The 3 Things: A Practical Path to Collective Recovery

Boxey, Maggie | Rise Books (240 pp.) $20.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781959524021

Teacher and activist Boxey frames recovery from addiction as a communal effort in this nonfiction guide. The author grew up with an alcoholic father and had her own “party girl” era that began when she was a teen. The trauma of her childhood led to her own less-than-healthy choices as a young adult. As Boxey began her own journey to recovery, she found that these words of her father’s, which her family had adopted as a credo, could serve as her guide: “You are part of a family. Be true to yourself. Glorify God in all that you do.” In this book, she expands upon these principles for those seeking sobriety. Family, she argues, is a product of our hardwired

A passionate work about taking action to stop would-be dictators.

need to connect; addiction, on the other hand, is often the result of individualism run amok. Boxey asserts: “We’re attempting to meet needs that can’t be met alone, no matter how hard we try. Instead of asking for help, we turn to comforts and coping tools, or self-medication.”

For the author, “family” extends beyond her family of origin to include all of humanity. Boxey posits that being in good relationships with others begins with living one’s values fully, without fear or shame, and without lies. As for glorifying God, the author explicitly states that this “is not a Christian book.” Here, “God” means higher power—or, as Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, “a power greater than ourselves.” (Among the exercises offered at the end of each chapter is one designed to help those raised without religion to define what a “higher power” might mean for them.) Boxey is a gentle coach; she recognizes that habits we may regard as bad might have begun as adaptive traits—that is, behaviors that, at some point in our lives, helped us to survive. She is also refreshingly honest about the fact that she is speaking from a place of imperfection: One section of the book is called “THE LIBERATING EXPERIENCE OF BEING A FUCKUP.”

A heartening guidebook for finding healing through connection with one’s core values and with the world.

TO STOP A TYRANT For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

Quick and Quirky Stories and Photos

Cary, Lorin Lee | Self (134 pp.) | $10.99 paper | June 3, 2024 | 9798990057104

Cary presents a set of short tales that offer humorous and profound insights into the peculiarities of human existence. This collection includes more than two dozen flash-fiction stories, each less than 1,000 words in length, as well as scattered black-and-white photographs by the author. Each vignette introduces readers to a variety of offbeat characters, including a person with hypochondria who claims to have a “brain-eating” disease (“My Problem”). In “Superhero,” a superpowered man named Ken seeks medical help for intense, malodorous flatulence that affects his job: “In a few cases the bad guy has died because of…the emission,” he tells the physician. “It depresses me.” The doctor tries to be sympathetic while fanning the air and dabbing her nose. The images are as compelling as the text and add an extra layer of wit and charm; they aren’t meant to directly accompany the tales, but instead offer narratives of their own. Sometimes, they showcase observational humor, as in an image of street signs in front of cemeteries stating “No Passing” or “Dead End.” Cary’s ability to craft extraordinary tales from seemingly mundane scenarios is particularly impressive; stories such as “The Key,” which turns a simple find into a surprising narrative, present imaginative premises and satisfying payoffs.

The author also has a knack for crafting opening lines that immediately draw readers in, as in “Accident”: “When Jake’s head exploded, it surprised me. I mean, what woman wants blood all over their living room?” A few stories feature writers as characters, including one of the standouts, “Rosie,” about a restaurant server who uses conversations and events she experiences during her shift to craft her own books.

A clever collection that provides an effective combination of brevity and wit.

To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers To Make or Brake a Toxic Leader

Chaleff, Ira | Wonderwell Press (338 pp.)

$28.50 | Sept. 3, 2024 | 9781637560563

Chaleff, the chair emeritus of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation, offers a call for political activism in the face of rising authoritarianism.

In these pages, the author asserts that leaders, including would-be autocrats, are powerless without followers. In his examination of the relationship between the leaders and the led, he describes five categories of the latter: the general populace, activists, bureaucrats, influential elites, and, finally, confidants—the leader’s true inner circle. He also describes the steps of an autocratic leader’s ascendancy, from “striving for office” to “abusing power,” “consolidating power,” and “tyrannical rule,” noting that the window for interrupting this progression remains open right up until the moment a “prototyrant” takes the step of consolidating power and eliminating challenges to his rule. He analyzes the ways that ordinary citizens can make a difference in this crucial interval, from following a diverse range of news

sources to taking effective action via the legal system and the vote. Chaleff writes with tremendous gusto and a sense of optimism. He skillfully arranges the levels of political involvement like layers of an onion, which will doubtless feel empowering to readers on the outer layers, who might feel frustrated and helpless to even comprehend more powerful political forces. His call for activism, for instance, is inspiring: “While the populace goes about its business of daily living,” he writes, “the activist makes political change their business.” The timing of his book may strike many readers as apt in a divisive election season in which fears of authoritarianism are front and center, although Chaleff pointedly notes that he intends his book to be used “not in tomorrow’s election, but in any age.” One hopes that it’s not too late when the author urges readers to “act while the window is open, and the fresh breezes of political freedom still find their way into the halls of government.”

A passionate work about taking action to stop would-be dictators.

Jackie and the Books She Loved

Diamondstein, Ronni | Illus. by Bats Langley Sky Pony Press (36 pp.) | $13.49 Nov. 7, 2023 | 9781510776425

Diamondstein celebrates Jacqueline “Jackie” Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and her lifelong love of reading in this debut illustrated children’s book. Following a tidy biographical timeline, the author shows the impact that literature had on Jackie throughout various stages of her life and how a passion for reading deepened the first lady’s personal connections. Readers first meet Jackie as a bookish youngster who forgoes naptime for reading, writes stories, and memorizes poetry with her grandfather, who encourages

her to write poems of her own. Jackie’s spirited rhyme “Sea Joy” appears in the book (“I can think of nothing I want more / Than to live by the booming blue sea / As the seagulls flutter round about me”). In her teens, Jackie writes for the school newspaper, and her college essay (“People I Wish I Had Known”) wins a Vogue magazine contest. Later, while working as a journalist, she meets her future husband, fellow book enthusiast and then-senator John F. Kennedy. Readers learn about Jackie’s weekly newspaper column (which boosted her husband’s profile during his presidential campaign), the White House guidebook she helped create as first lady, and the ways in which she instilled a love of reading in her children. After she is widowed in 1963, Jackie and her children make a fresh start in New York City and she eventually secures her first publishing job, editing nearly 100 books throughout her career. Langley’s whimsical illustrations, rendered in realistic colors, capture the sparkling creativity of Jackie’s world, while Diamondstein’s quiet, no-frills text reflects the informed and calm demeanor of the crisply tailored subject herself. Excellent additional details can be gleaned from the artwork, such as a selection of books Jackie edited (including Amy the Dancing Bear by singer-songwriter Carly Simon and My Book of Flowers by the late Princess Grace of Monaco). The author, a school library media specialist and teacher, uses age-appropriate language to introduce early readers to a captivating female historical figure and handles delicate themes with care. History fans and book lovers of all ages will adore this. An enlightening and visually superb bookshelf addition.

Lookin’ for Love

Edwards, Susen | She Writes Press (424 pp.) | $17.99 paper | Oct. 15, 2024 9781647427900

Edwards’ novel traces a woman’s descent into the world of drug trafficking and her search for a better life.

For more Indie content, visit Kirkus online.

“You made your bed. Now go lie in it,” says Ava Harrison’s harsh mother when her daughter seeks help to escape her abusive marriage. After a childhood of neglect and emotional abuse in New Jersey, Ava marries Tom in 1963, only to discover that they will never make the loving home she craves after Tom beats and rapes her on their wedding night. As a naturally gifted performer, Ava eventually finds liberation through the easy money of dancing at the local club, Gentlemen’s Delight, and she manages to escape her marriage with her two young sons. With hippie drug culture in full swing, it isn’t long before Ava relies on a combination of marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol to fuel her performances and get through her days. After losing custody of her children, she meets her second husband, a loving but lazy stoner named Jack Novak, and the charming Mike Ambrose—a drug trafficker who draws Ava into his world of international smuggling. From Colombia to Kenya, Ava follows Mike into a wild existence very different from her humble beginnings—one with extreme consequences. Edwards immediately captures readers’ sympathy for Ava from the moment she describes her childhood spent as an average girl who just wants her parents’ love and approval. Each of Ava’s increasingly terrible decisions flows logically from her history and the societal pressures on women of the time; it’s hard not to empathize. The novel’s first-person narration has a flowing, conversational style, but it can feel a bit flat at times—in some

chapters, it’s as if Ava is merely summarizing large swaths of her life for readers rather than immersing them in her experience. However, some truly harrowing scenes involving abuse, drug smuggling, and foreign prisons all ratchet up the tension and will keep readers engaged along her winding road to redemption.

An endearing narrator and surprising turns elevate this novel’s cycles of abuse, addiction, and recovery.

I Feel Real Guilty

Epstein, Jane | Life to Paper Publishing (280 pp.) | $24.95 paper Sept. 9, 2024 | 9781990700309

In this memoir, Epstein writes of her experience as a survivor of abuse, and how she spent years hiding her story and battling secret feelings of shame.

In an impressive series of vignettes, the author chronicles her adulthood after living through a childhood marred by sexual abuse by an older sibling. The author clarifies her painstaking efforts to understand how her trauma informed later behavior in frank discussions of hypersexuality in early adulthood, her domestic struggles during two marriages, and her use of therapy and writing to better understand her experiences. She also writes about her work to cultivate a public persona as an advocate for survivors of sibling sexual abuse. Over the course of this memoir, Epstein recounts startling moments of clarity during the early stages of reckoning with her past, including painful recollections upon opening a photo album (“Despite the happy memories captured in these images, I couldn’t shake the notion that something was amiss in our family”) and having a stilted conversation in 2019 with the person who’d sexually abused her for six years. Epstein’s writing is strongest during these moments, which have a

disarming vulnerability that will draw readers in. She also relates her journey toward forgiveness in simple but elegant prose. At some points, though, the memoir’s high level of detail—as in a drawn-out account of a conversation between the author and her husband, which ends with a trip to the bakery—slows the book down, and these lulls grow more frequent as the book progresses. That said, Epstein succeeds in her goal of bringing attention to a shockingly common and tragically underrepresented form of abuse, marking a milestone in her ongoing advocacy project.

An important and often moving remembrance.

A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom

Gaiter, Leonce | Legba Books (337 pp.) $14.99 paper | June 24, 2024 9798990289901

A troubled screenwriter reflects on his origins in Gaiter’s literary novel. Louisiana-born, Harvard-educated Jessie Vincent Grandier III comes to Los Angeles to break into screenwriting. It’s something of an adjustment; Jessie has been raised mostly among the white people on his Black father’s military bases and the upper-class, light-skinned Blacks of his Creole mother’s New Orleans family. Staying with relatives in South LA, he’s exposed to an entirely new Black community—and the culture shock is profound. Just as discombobulating is the realization that Hollywood is not filled with the semioticians of his Ivy League film classes but with businessmen who place little value on art or imagination. When he loses his job as a script reader at a television network, Jessie begins a slide into alcoholism and bitterness. As he does, his memory travels to his childhood as a

military brat, the lone boy in a family of five; his failures to live up to his violent father’s standards of masculinity; his attempts, in high school and college, to excel beyond other people’s racist expectations; his relationship with his now-deceased mother, Lulene; his love of music; and the complex emotions he has regarding his own identity as a gay man. Is it too late to become the person Jessie has always wanted to be? Perhaps he is destined to become as embittered and uptight as the man he’s never wanted to emulate: his father. Gaiter’s lively prose presses against the confines of every sentence: “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he addresses the reader midway through, “somewhere along the line, between the vicious, whip-wielding nuns, and Grandier’s military fist, Jessie had developed an aversion to authority, being told what to do, and having others’ assumptions thrust upon him.” The book’s real pleasure is in this dynamic voice rather than the plot, which doesn’t develop so much as accumulate through a series of flashbacks. The text includes occasional news articles, poems, and photographs; together, these shards memorably tell the story of a man attempting to assemble the ill-fitting pieces of a life. A distinctive, fragmentary story of an artist’s painful coming of age.

Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts

Gardner, Nick Rees | Madrona Books (182 pp.) | $18.99 paper | Aug. 13, 2024 9781960593030

Residents of a Rust Belt town dream, scheme, get high, get sober, and start over in Gardner’s gritty collection of linked short stories.

“I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered: Oxycontin, Xanax, blunts, and booze.” So begins the first, titular story in

Foot-stomping SF with a complex cosmology beneath its boisterous facade.

PLANET: LAY OF THE LAND

Gardner’s collection; its unnamed narrator, an aspiring writer, hopes to pen a novel about the opioid epidemic, with his own addiction thinly veiled as “immersive research.” Gardner’s characters, too, desire drugs, but they want more than that: escape, a new direction, to make peace with the past and build anew. They pursue these similar ends in myriad ways. For example, the cast of “Delinquents” pins their hopes for deliverance on a homemade rocket ship; the protagonist of “Lifers, Locals, and Hangers-on,” suffocated by the monotony of her life, sees in a visiting cowboy the possibility of far-off adventure. In “Digging,” a character seeks comfort in a relationship with a younger man who’s troubled by self-loathing and fixated on a violent episode in local history. The collection’s longest story, a novella titled “Captain Failure,” focuses on a recurring character named Dunk, unveiling his traumatic past as a former cult member. He seeks a peace that eludes him, even in sobriety, until he’s hired to consult on a movie about the cult, forcing him to confront his childhood. It’s notable that few of Gardner’s characters ever actually leave their town of Westinghouse, Ohio; instead, they seek relief in each other, themselves, intoxication, or sobriety. The author masterfully switches up the pace with writing that’s alternately blunt, frenzied, and meditative to evoke the grinding conditions of his characters’ lives, the elasticity of time in Westinghouse, and the unique manifestations of shared desperation for something more. Gardner seems uninterested in a traditional sort of redemption for his characters, instead forcing readers to meet them on their terms. The result is a propulsive and startlingly moving collection.

Hard but hopeful tales of middle America, addiction, and the human condition.

Planet: Lay of the Land

Garmisch, Paul | Dorrance Publishing (358 pp.) | $31.00 paper April 1, 2023 | 9798885274135

In Garmisch’s SF series starter, a humanoid people called Quantums fight a centuriesold war with a neighboring world and an onslaught of genetically engineered monsters.

In a star system “about 24,990 light years from Earth,” enclosed in an impenetrable web of trapped asteroids, are three spacefaring civilizations. Quantums, who are much like humans but with extra thumbs, once neared extinction. Now they live a harmonious way of life that sustains themselves and their planet; they exert perfect mental control over their bodies (and, consequently, sculpt themselves into conventionally attractive bodybuilder and centerfold-model types) and can live for millennia. Their enemies, with whom they’ve been fighting a 5,000year war, are the greedy Strokes, who aim to conquer and exploit the star system. The primatelike Imeons are in thrall to the Strokes but nurture their own ambitions, driven by profit and obsessive sexual reproduction. Quantums are organized into husband-andwife teams, with none more formidable than rugged Alboro and “blonde bombshell” Vesta. The latter is heroically killed in action, but not before investing Alboro in a divinely

inspired plan (involving God and Satan themselves) to smite the Strokes and rehabilitate the Imeons. The Imeons’ DNA manipulations spawn monstrous Biotoap life forms, which pose an even worse threat. Garmisch delivers an elaborate, lively yarn that has a thoroughgoing, often-comical Tom Robbins–like tone, featuring tributes to Laurel and Hardy, crude jokes, and characters who talk like cartoon cowboys. Violent, hard-combat SF is also present, and the first act firestorms with exotic, sometimes-phallic weapons; ships, tactics, and troop movements; and action-scene rumpuses featuring frequent capitalization, random italics, some boldface text, and barrages of exclamation points. In more relaxed intervals, the dialogue effectively expounds on the fateful, difficult path that led the Quantums to spurn consumerism and conventional government for a “Spirit-of-Life” ethic—an aspect that seems crafted to sway today’s Earth-based readers. However, lest those same readers think that this an apocalyptic climate-change sermon, the author also includes a “Closing Note” that targets what he calls “Fictitious Lying” about global warming.

Foot-stomping SF with a complex cosmology beneath its boisterous facade.

Kirkus Star

Find Your Own Way Home

George, Michael | Livingston Press (216 pp.) | $19.95 paper Aug. 2, 2024 | 9781604893717

The search for a missing girl gives blighted lives hope for redemption in this haunting verse novel. George’s story centers on the romance between Bad Boy—a ne’er-do-well who robs pharmacies and joyrides around the town of Hollow Rock, Tennessee—and his 15-year-old girlfriend Alison, whose

grandmother has threatened to shoot him. After a season of furtive, passionate trysts, Alison dumps him for a local meth-head, which leads to violence and to Bad Boy taking Alison against her will across the Mississippi to West Memphis, Arkansas; she finally escapes him at the Flying J truck stop and is last seen jumping into the cab of a random trucker who drives off with her. The novel then shifts to the perspective of “the Chaplain,” an ex-con who stages Christian revival meetings in a tent backed by a band featuring Debbie, a former sex worker, on drums. The Chaplain’s sermons stress that no one is too sinful and low to be forgiven and saved by Jesus, a proposition that’s challenged by a sinister trucker who announces his own unforgiveable sin: killing a girl. The Chaplain and his band fall in with a female trucker who witnessed the Flying J incident, retrieved the pink sneaker Alison left on the tarmac, and has been putting up missing-persons posters with Alison’s picture wherever she goes; at one of the Chaplain’s meetings, the sinister trucker comes onto her radar as a likely suspect in Alison’s disappearance. The stories of Ruth, the trucker’s sister who recalls his disturbing childhood behavior, and the West Memphis police detective who shrugs off Alison’s disappearance but gets pulled in deeper, are also braided into the narrative.

The story unfolds in a perfectly rendered, hardscrabble South seen through the eyes of working-class people with industrial-strength vehicles navigating an archipelago of strip malls and truck plazas connected by roaring interstates and shadowy county roads. George writes in a poetic meter as supple as the most naturalistic prose; the writing is grounded in plain, earthy English but has a musicality that makes it feel like a biblical parable or a hillbilly highwayman’s ballad. (“A dustball cheapskate town and Broad / Street much the way is just two lanes, / which goes to show you what broad counts / for here—and Hollow Rock is Nowhere / Tennessee, but, like they say, / it’s home.”) The author writes about tawdry lives riddled with bad

decisions, but finds a lyrical beauty in them. (“A girl like Alison you don’t / find at the Carroll County Fair. / She’s like a light you see at night / too low on the horizon and / you think you see an airplane crashing—you listen for the sound and hear / none, turn on the TV and there’s / no news, and then you wonder what / you saw and did you even see it?— / something bright and terrible, / the beauty hurts your eyes, you only / wish you’d see it once again.”) Readers will be captivated by George’s dark, hallucinatory vision and gorgeous language.

This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.

Wink: Young Adult Tales That Wink at Classic Children’s Books

Ed. by Herz, Henry | Illus. by Adam Gustavson | Brigids Gate Press (232 pp.) $16.99 paper | June 29, 2024 9781957537887

In this anthology, a bevy of authors deliver a collection of YA SF and fantasy tales, each inspired by a literary classic.

In Leah Cypess’ “The Scent of Cotton Candy,” Julia is worried about her teenage brother, who’s seemingly obsessed with tracking down their former nanny. Julia can’t help but wonder why this nanny, who’s capable of magic, is so invested in children. This story, like the others in the book, takes ideas from a “childhood classic” and spirals off into a markedly different direction. The new takes often go darker; for example, Seanan McGuire’s “Special” follows a narrator who believes “Bad People” don’t share—and their way of making others share leads to a spine-chilling turn (“we’re going to play the biggest game of Secret Laboratory there’s ever been”). In some cases, the inspiration (cited at the end of each tale) isn’t immediately clear. That’s certainly true

for Stacia Deutsch’s “Other Earth,” in which people have evacuated Earth to survive inside the Bubble, an artificial atmosphere (not everyone agrees with the plan to expand the Bubble when it involves cutting down oxygenproviding trees). The stories are also linked by similar genres and themes: The SF/fantasy yarns smartly cover such topics as artificial intelligence, post-apocalyptic worlds, and alternate dimensions. It’s not all doom and gloom, however; the clever “My Science Project,” courtesy of editor Herz, zeroes in on high school science/ SF nerd Wes. One day, he video chats with two cosplayers in top-notch froglike masks, only to discover that they may actually be the aliens they claim to be. This impressive gathering of authors includes Maggie Stiefvater, Jonathan Maberry, Kendare Blake, and Nancy Holder. The writing is pithy throughout, instantly dropping readers into narratives that thrive on engaging characters and unpredictable, diverting turns. Gustavson’s striking black-andwhite artwork prefaces each tale and often hints at the source of inspiration, like a familiar hat for Stiefvater’s “State of Mind.”

A superb collection of genre stories that prove just as rousing as their inspirations.

Finding Your Peace: The Magic of Living Here and Now. Five Decades Exploring Inner Space

Heston, Brian | Self (100 pp.) | $24.98 $11.99 paper | Feb. 22, 2023 9798378615278 | 9798371107879 paper

Heston combines spiritual selfhelp with memoir in this nonfiction work. The author’s life changed in Chicago in 1971. Encouraged by teacher and mentor Prem Rawat’s “1,000 watt smile,” Heston took up the Indian teacher’s techniques and never

stopped practicing them. The ideas expressed in this book are plain, simple, and straightforward. The author’s spirituality is based on lived experience—for example, Heston believes Heaven and Hell are not merely concepts but states that can be experienced on Earth. He wants readers to realize they have a choice about how they want to feel. One good choice is gratitude; those who are grateful are happier, healthier, and behave toward others in kinder ways, per Heston. Merely the act of breathing in and out each day is cause for appreciation and joy. (“If you are alive, you have a priceless gift.”)

When Susan, Heston’s wife, suddenly died of lung cancer, Heston’s training helped him to turn his grief into thankfulness and offered the realization that Susan still lives within him. Creativity is another aspect of life the author recommends tapping into; he is a musician and photographer, and the book is illustrated with his black-and-white images, digitally abstracted to resemble block prints. Heston writes with a winning gentleness and humility. Though he mentions Prem Rawat often, he doesn’t overhype the teacher, encouraging readers to make up their own minds by providing links at the end of the book to YouTube videos, books written by Rawat, and the Prem Rawat Foundation’s website. The book is brief in length and sometimes has the feel of casual journal writing, as the author occasionally rambles slightly off-topic (as in a story about a man in Germany who played hockey in Canada and gave Heston a ride). Ultimately, the author’s sincerity and and his own gratitude for life are what stay with the reader.

Simple yet deep ideas to live by, based on the teachings of Prem Rawat.

Kirkus Star

The Curse at the End of the World: The Book of Touch

Hincker, Kevin | Self (266 pp.) | $24.99

$15.99 paper | June 14, 2024

9798326159649 | 9798327502017 paper

Series: The History of Light, 5

The concluding installment of Hincker’s The History of Light pentalogy chronicles an emotionally fractured painter’s attempt to save the world.

Skysill Beach, an artists’ colony / tourist trap on the Southern California coast, has seen better days: A curse is “dismantling” the world, and everyone outside of the colony may already be dead. Asher Gale, a painter and recovering drug addict at Skysill Beach, has visions (or twisted hallucinations) increasingly filled with apocalyptic images: “I saw the Earth devastated. Everything shattered. A dark disk in the sky. Cities leaning, empty, oceans dried, mountains thrown over.” Reality isn’t much better—the sun has begun to inexplicably go out (“there was a round, black disc in the sky in its place, and darkness deeper than grave shadow everywhere I looked”). Nightmarish monsters are falling from the sky, and grotesque spirits are emerging from inhabitants’ backs like cicadas freeing themselves from shells. With his girlfriend Caroline dead and his essence progressively fracturing, Ash must somehow figure out how to stop the curse and free billions of spirits stuck on Earth yearning to travel through dimensions to the Forgiving Sea, where they can wash their spirits clean before time ends. While this story works well as an eschatological fantasy, it’s ultimately not so much a narrative about unlikely heroes at the end of the world as it is a story about the transcendent power of love. Although Hincker heaps on Ash’s

sarcasm and snark throughout the series (sometimes to the detriment of the story’s intensity), the emotional connection between him and Caroline is intense and authentic. Their relationship is the fuel that powers the narrative to its stand-up-and-applaud conclusion. Readers will be enthralled right up to the very last page. A fitting end to a wild and unique paranormal fantasy saga.

Drag Wars: Fangula vs. Pridezilla

Karl, Robert A. | Self (275 pp.) | $12.99 paper June 28, 2024 | 9798987912669

In Karl’s LGBTQ+ novel, a newcomer queen and an up-and-coming performer are set on a collision course in the extra-fabulous Drag Wars tournament.

Donnie’s life is far from easy—his job as a waiter barely earns enough money to take care of his younger brother Carlito while their mother is lost to the streets of Philadelphia, hopelessly addicted to a drug called Tranq. Donnie finds a reprieve on the dance floors of Club Fuego on Friday nights, when it’s taken over by the “Queers, the Queens, the Fashionistas, even the Bizarros,” each writhing body looking for love or just attention. Watching the drag queens perform, Donnie dreams of finding fame on the stage as Fangula, a Latine sensation with fans, an entourage, and a man (not a player) to love him. A new queen right off the bus from Baltimore named Jalen arrives, a voluptuous vision called Pridezilla with a singing voice that can bring even unsuspecting crowds to fevered standing ovations. Both Fangula and Pridezilla look to the advice and legacies of their elder queens to get a leg up in their inevitable showdown in the Drag Wars finals at Club Fuego. Much like the dual protagonists’ acts, everything in Karl’s book

A fun tale for little ones while sitting around a

campfire.

THE SCARIEST CAMPFIRE STORY YOU’VE EVER HEARD

is exaggerated; the dialogue takes on a campy, John Waters–esque crassness. Despite this larger-than-life presentation, the novel still evinces a strong and serious social awareness, including nuanced discussions of poverty, sex work, and pronoun use. Pridezilla’s participation in Drag Story Hours illustrates the harmlessness and kindness of these supposedly controversial events, and both Jalen and Donnie face the same violence and bigotry toward themselves and those in their community as real-world LGBTQ+ people do. The performances onstage come alive on the page despite the lack of lights and booming pop music, and the addition of the Greek chorus–like “Snark Sharks,” with their playful yet savage jibes, brings even more humor and style to the proceedings. The story has spicier moments as well—while some are more romantic than others, they all manage to turn up the heat faster than any brightly shining stage light. Sex, humor, social commentary, and musical numbers animate this absorbing drag drama.

Made in Italy: Strings

Attached—Four Seasons of an Italian Violin

Kelley, Thomas Walter | Old Stone Press (180 pp.) | $19.95 paper | Sept. 3, 2024 9781938462665

Kelley takes readers on a discursive tour through the life of an Italian violin.

In May 2000, Kelley and his professional violinist wife

Cheri realized their dream of owning a Cremonese violin. In Kelley’s view, however, “You never truly own one of these violins, you simply pass through its life.” So begins Kelley’s unique and informative journey from the recent past through the four seasons of the violin’s life, starting with 18th-century Cremona during the golden age of violin making. He details the masters of the form, Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, as well as the life, work, and continuing influence of the composer Antonio Vivaldi. In the second season, the violin comes to America, making its first documented appearance in 1901, when it was purchased in Illinois from a traveling salesman. In the third season, Kelley introduces the craftsmen responsible for the violin, focusing on Giovanni Battista Ceruti, who didn’t open his violin shop until the age of 40. Throughout, the author also provides heartfelt anecdotes about his wife and her dedication to her craft. Kelley shares his own past as a former serious musician who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in violin performance but realized toward the end of his college tenure that he’d never be able to make a living as a violinist. Instead, he ended up working in a small community bank, which eventually, through a series of mergers, became one of the largest banks in the U.S. Occasionally, the author gets sidetracked, recounting events that are only tangentially related, often including trips to Italy and the people he encountered along the way, but all in the same goodnatured, effervescent, inquisitive tone. The picture that emerges is of a thoughtful, dedicated man who’s

earnestly pursuing both personal history and the history of violin making, weaving together his own experiences with deep research into the history of Italian violin making. An appealingly personal and informative journey through the life of a violin and the couple who “own” it.

The Scariest Campfire Story You’ve Ever Heard

Keres, Ron | Illus. by Arthur Lin Buzzbook Press (39 pp.) | $13.95 paper April 30, 2024 | 9798989916016

Series: Scariest Silliest Stories, 2

In Keres’ series picture book, two siblings have a silly fright during a family camping trip. After a day of typical camping activities (including fishing) in a wooded area, two kids and their father try to sleep in their tents—but then they hear something out of the ordinary: a “moan, then a whine” and then “panting and wheezing.” Suddenly, the creature howls, and the moonlight reveals that the mysterious beast has big, scary claws. Maybe it’s a wolf or a bear—or possibly a sasquatch, they think. Should they climb a tree for safety? As the delightful rhymes, images, and comically illustrated onomatopoeias go by, young readers will be on the edge of their seats as they try to imagine what’s outside the tent. In the end, they see the monster’s true face and learn why it came for a visit. Young children are likely to be entertained by Keres’ succinct yet playful storytelling and Lin’s expressive, full-color cartoon illustrations. It’s the perfect book to bring on a family camping trip, as it presents a scary campfire story that won’t have kids losing sleep afterward. The family members are portrayed with pale skin. A fun tale for little ones while sitting around a campfire.

Cash Is King: Maintain Liquidity, Build Capital, and Prepare Your Business for Every Opportunity

Kingma, Peter W. | Wiley (208 pp.) $23.99 | May 7, 2024 | 9781119983354

A comprehensive overview of all aspects of finance and cash management in business.

Kingma, a financial expert, acknowledges the long shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic, which not only shut down many of the world’s economies, but also highlighted how elongated and interconnected the global supply chain has become. Kingma acknowledges that businesses deal with many complicated factors, like supply-chain issues, product design and advertising, market competition, interest rates, and so on, but from his experience and research, he derives a very simple truth: “It takes cash to address market shocks.” This simple truth has a vast and complicated network of realities underpinning it, which the author explores by means of an ongoing fictional device: an electrical equipment company called Owens Electrical, run by a man named Bob. Owens does mostly businessto-business commerce, and since Bob rose through the company’s ranks to become its CEO, his perspective gives Kingma the perfect vehicle to explain the intricacies of cash management in a successful company that does all of that managing in-house. The author goes over every aspect of order-to-cash (OTC) mechanics: gaining customers, taking their orders, invoicing and billing them, and receiving their cash in the bank. Along the way, Kingma dispenses a great deal of technical advice on all levels of finance, usually revolving around “days sales outstanding” or the number of days on average required to collect money from a particular customer.

The author’s experience is obvious on every page. His ability to get to the heart of the many complicated subjects

he raises is exemplary, as is his skill at dissecting those subjects in ways that will be immediately accessible to non-specialists (up to a point, anyway; the book clearly targets those in the business/finance world). Document, document, document, he advises: “Be very clear in how you manage credit and risk so that any deviation can be seen and approved in the proper chain of command.” He reminds readers who may be overly inclined to delegate and compartmentalize responsibilities that, much like those over-stressed supply chains, everything is connected. Kingma is an invaluable guide to his subject, but the biggest and most pleasing surprise of his book is the fact that he’s also a decent writer of fiction. His hypothetical company of Owens Electrical convincingly grows and becomes more complicated as it faces each new issue he wants to illustrate. At times, his characters sound like business seminar transcripts instead of people: “We had to challenge our assumptions regarding talent and whom we needed in key roles,” says one android to another. “We modified our metrics and incentives and transformed operations reviews.” But most of the time, readers will find themselves at least as involved with the narrative as with the concepts. They’ll cheer on Makayla, a surgeon raised by an immigrant mother in rural Missouri; they’ll appreciate the fact that visionary Caesar likes to have new hires around him, to guard against the complacent thinking of the old guard; and they’ll be just as surprised as Annette’s co-workers when the steely, no-nonsense woman unexpectedly cracks a joke. Readers will come for the financial know-how, but some of them may very well stay in order to root for a company that isn’t even real. A thoroughly informative—and surprisingly gripping—manual for cleareyed money management.

Between Us: Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology

Ed. by Lindholm, Marika & Elizabeth Anne Wood | University of Chicago Press (339 pp.) | $22.00 paper | June 5, 2024 9780226833873

A range of sociologists offer practical applications of their science to lay readers in this nonfiction anthology.

“Sociology,” write editors Lindholm and Wood in this book’s introduction, “pulls back the curtain to reveal the communities, groups, and social structures that shape our lives.” Far too often, the book contends, sociology is overlooked by other disciplines or relegated to the ivory towers of universities. Yet, the contributors here—all scholarly, trained sociologists—assert that their field can help everyday people “live more meaningful lives.” Wood, who provides end-of-life doula services, describes how studying sociology helped her to contextualize her own depression and anxiety, since both are connected to harmful expectations regarding roles and cultural norms, and Lindholm describes how sociology gave her “a purpose.” The book’s 45 essays are divided into eight parts that span topics that touch on class, education, and popular culture, and they often blend personal memoir with sociological insight. University of Washington professor Pepper Schwartz’s essay, for instance, reflects on her graduate training at Yale University, where she says she learned “hard lessons” about misogyny, class, and power through experiences with the elitist bulwark; Grace Kao, a Yale University professor, reflects on her love of K-pop music and how its popularity could reduce racist violence against Asian Americans. Other chapters break down complex sociological theories that people often willfully misconstrue in public debates,

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such as systemic racism and queer identity. Lindholm taught courses on inequality, diversity, and gender at Northwestern University, and Wood earned her doctorate in sociology from Brandeis University. The book also features work by many other academics with prestigious CVs. However, the book eschews jargon; its team of sociologists aim to “free powerful ideas from their academic trappings” and focus on practical ideas and intimate real-life stories. To this end, chapters effectively conclude with glossaries of “Key Concepts,” questions for discussion or reflection, and suggested readings. The editors even helpfully offer an alternative thematic division of the book’s chapters, which, combined with its impressive index, makes it an ideal primer and reference tool.

A well-researched and often poignant survey of the discipline of sociology.

Stranger From Across the Sea

McBride, Regina | Green City Books (310 pp.) | $27.99 | June 11, 2024 9781963101010

An American woman revisits the scene of a traumatic experience she suffered as a teenager in McBride’s novel.

In 1973, a 16-year-old Violet O’Halloran travels from her home in New York City to Northern Ireland with her mother, but the trip is clouded by her grandmother’s unexpected death. Violet’s mother unloads the rebellious teen at St. Dymphna’s, a Catholic boarding school, for the duration. Her sole companion is the only other resident, Indira Sharma, a blind girl who speaks in enigmatic riddles. The pair become fast friends, inseparable as sisters, bonding over their contentious relationships with their mothers and the absences of their dead fathers; their tender connection is delicately drawn by the author in this

emotionally haunting work. Indira dies in a drowning accident—Violet nearly dies herself trying to rescue her. It’s a traumatic event she has trouble clearly recollecting, and from which she cannot fully be free. In New York City, 13 years later, Violet meets Emmett Fitzroy, a handsome photographer who grew up near St. Dymphna’s. He invites her to become the temporary caretaker of his family’s home there, a position she accepts, plunging back into memories of her summer there and the “catastrophic land” she cannot help but miss. In this subtle and complex tale, the author explores the possibility that both the proximate and remote past can be mined for lucidity and the idea that the dead can help the living discover an otherwise elusive resolution to emotional conflicts, albeit with great difficulty. (“The Irish say it is only a thin curtain that separates the living from the dead, but they are poets and those are beautiful words. It is a harder partition than that, and more mysterious. There are times when it feels impenetrable.”) McBride’s prose is ruminatively poetic and broodingly searching, and powerfully captures Violet’s distress against the symbolically pregnant backdrop of Northern Ireland’s political tumult. This is a deeply thoughtful work, elegiac and impressively sensitive.

A nuanced exploration of trauma, personal and historical.

The Dream Collector: Sabrine & Vincent van Gogh

Meek, R.W. | Historium Press (654 pp.)

$42.99 | $27.67 paper | April 30, 2024 9781962465342 | 9781962465359 paper Series: The Dream Collector, 2

An adventure tale featuring medicine, madness, and art in Meek’s historical novel set in 19thcentury France. Young Sabrine Weiss is talented,

beautiful, innocent, and deeply disturbed. She’s also subject to what seem to be epileptic fits. When the novel opens, her fiercely protective older sister, Julie, has liberated her from the Salpêtrière, the most famous teaching asylum in Europe, hoping that the wider and more stimulating world of the Paris art scene will prove therapeutic. Julie is an editor and translator with ties to the vibrant Impressionist community, and all the expected scenesters are here: Cezanne, Degas, Pissarro, Monet and Manet, Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh and his fiercely protective brother, Theo. Vincent, of course, is also deeply disturbed, famously slicing off his ear and committing suicide at 37. (Sabrine and Vincent eventually become soul mates.) Julie has many talents, among them hypnosis, by which she can probe people’s distant pasts; she also can coax their dreams from them, which is her friend Sigmund Freud’s cue to enter the story. Will Sabrine be cured of her epilepsy, and her traumatic secret unearthed? This epic battle of science versus faith is one of the novel’s recurring themes, while medical advances and discoveries also take center stage. Freud’s alienist theories were just beginning to be warily respected. He had been the mentee of the famous Dr. Charcot, director the Salpêtrière, but they eventually parted ways. Julie sums it up by insisting (rightly) that the cause of her sister’s disturbed mind is not physiological (per Charcot) but psychological (per Freud). Meek notes changes in the three challenging decades that ushered in modern science and modern sensibilities. He’s a competent writer and keeps the plot moving. He revels in detailed scenes like the artists’ wild parties; and, in the denouement, readers get a sympathetic portrait of “Father” Pissarro, getting on in years but still delighting in the service of art. It’s a wonderfully upbeat note to end on.

A sensitive and well-plotted recreation of perhaps the most scientifically and culturally significant era in French history.

Best Indie Books

The Sound of Light,

Book One: The Age of the Sonic Soldier

Miltenberg, Robert Allen | Self (226 pp.) $9.99 paper | March 31, 2024 9798321503959

Miltenberg’s YA SF tale suggests that post-apocalyptic worlds don’t have to be gruesome or dreary.

The Nation of the Frii follows a religion built on classic rock and uses giant dragonflies for transportation. Soniqa StarCloud is a teen who is most comfortable on her dragonfly, Lucy. Soniqa and her six-member band, the Beyond, face their Proving, a coming-of-age ritual. Their tribe’s priestess, the High Holy Roller, sends them on a mission of exploration beyond the Prismatic Edge. First, they discover KelpLand, a mass of kelp clusters. Next, the band learns to camp on a cloudplain. Finally, they reach their goal: the Prismatic Edge. Soniqa observes a momentary hole in the Edge that will allow them to cross it. The next time the opening appears, she and her mate Vol go through. Inside, they find the nation of Emo-At, in which a gray populace is rendered mute by their leadership. Among these sheeplike people lives Statistic, a Frii captured decades before who chose to assimilate. Soniqa and Vol escape, and the band returns home, where they become legendary for their exploits. But as she ages, Soniqa can’t escape the fear that the Emo-At aren’t done with the Frii. This volume is the first in Miltenberg’s Sound of Light trilogy, which he describes as “a sci-fi word-symphony in three movements.” This book’s function as a scene-setter becomes obvious when not much happens in the final quarter of the book beyond the Frii leadership exploiting the band’s discoveries. The author does an admirable job of establishing an extensive backstory for his world; still, while his bastardized versions of names

and places start out cute, the conceit soon feels like it devolves into a game of deciphering vanity license plates. (If ever a tome cried out for a glossary, this is it.) Miltenberg has successfully introduced a colorful world—if readers can absorb it all.

This SF symphony mostly hits the right notes in this trilogy opener.

Journey to the Pacific: One Man’s Quest

Perkins, Judith A. | ReadersMagnet (346 pp.) | $20.15 paper | Nov. 21, 2023 9798890913401

In Perkins’ historical novel, a young boy raised in an Illinois orphanage vows to one day see the Pacific Ocean. George Seevers was born in Streator, Illinois, in 1859, and he was just 2 years old when he was sent to an orphanage. He was his parents’ unexpected third son, after his two older brothers lost their lives in the Civil War, and his father died from dysentery; his mother fell into a severe depression and could no longer care for him. For the next 13 years, George endures an arduous childhood marked by various kinds of labor, finding relief only through his love of reading. Stories about the Pacific Ocean inspire him, and he hopes to one day reach its shores. As he approaches his 15th birthday, he runs away, hops a freight car, and begins his journey west, landing in Rapid City in the Dakota Territory; he spends 10 months as a ranch cook there and then heads to Cheyenne in the Wyoming Territory, which turns out to be a turning point in his life when Fred Lewis hires him as his assistant in his hotel restaurant. Fred and his wife, Mary, have three daughters: 17-yearold Marie, 15-year-old Susan, and 10-year-old Jane. George enjoys cooking and baking, and he falls in love with Marie, who’s equally smitten with him. Their marriage provides

George with a close extended family that will eventually travel with him to Portland, Oregon, and finally to Rawlings, in what will become Washington state. In unadorned, straightforward prose, Perkins presents a pleasant, engaging narrative of the American West. Despite a few crises here and a couple of tragic losses, the narrative features few surprises and little tension. Still, George is a fully developed character who will capture readers’ hearts, and they’ll enjoy the book’s intricate inside view of the development of the small town of Rawlings, which grows from an end-of-the-line railroad community into a burgeoning city. Overall, this is an uplifting family saga with plenty of optimism and warmth.

A quiet, amiable read that extols the determination and fortitude of 19th-century Western settlers.

Not the Same River

Polf, W. A. | Atmosphere Press (316 pp.)

$26.99 | $17.99 paper | Aug. 3, 2024 9798891323377 | 9798891323056 paper

Polf tracks moments of personal change in this collection of literary short fiction. A woman hires a Romanian caretaker for her mother, who is slipping into dementia, only to become jealous of the bond her mother forms with the charismatic immigrant. A man moves to 1960s San Francisco to become a writer and takes a job at the city zoo, which leads to a standoff between his primary literary (and romantic) rival and a pair of lions. A nervous boy spends an initiatory night hanging out with older teens, drinking booze and siphoning gasoline. (“He held the other end of the hose to his mouth with his thumb an inch from the end, just like he had learned, and began to suck, tentatively at first, then with more confidence. He could feel pressure at the other end of the hose; that should mean the gasoline

was coming.”) A man inadvertently causes a car accident by stepping off a curb, though in the aftermath he can’t get anyone to appreciate the guilt he feels. Across 15 stories, Polf dramatizes everyday moments of crisis and transition, from a broken toilet that needs a plumber to a rainstorm that requires a mom to pick her son up from school. The author’s prose elevates the often-mundane problems in the stories to dramatic—and sometimes comedic—heights. Here, the man who causes the accident grasps for cosmological metaphors to explain it: “If he hadn’t stepped off the curb at precisely that moment, Miriam would have either already passed by or would not yet have arrived…It could be explained only in cosmic terms, Marlowe concluded, like the random chance of a particle splitting an atom and the ensuing explosion devastating everything.” Not every piece lands, and many of the tales would be improved if they pushed a bit deeper into their characters’ crises. The worlds are always richly drawn, however, and Polf proves himself a capable recorder of the human psyche.

Probing, realistic stories of aging, learning, failing, and growing.

Method Matters: A Practical Guide to Achieving Your Goals Through Critical Thinking

Quinn, Brandon | Self (232 pp.) | $13.99 paper | Dec. 1, 2023 | 9798864308332

Writer, musician, business owner, and software engineer Quinn presents a beginner’s guide to using critical thinking as a way to better formulate plans and achieve goals.

The author begins his handbook by defining critical thinking as “the process of making observations, reasoning about those observations along with the available facts, and

drawing conclusions based on the results of your reasoning process.” He goes on to differentiate between the four types of reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, and goal-based. Each section contains a case study of a specific scenario to demonstrate the appropriate use of each type of reasoning. For example, Quinn notes that scientists discovered—using what they already knew of physics—that Uranus’ orbit was very different from what it should have been, based on their calculations; they then used goal-based reasoning, which uses the “desired goal or outcome” as the starting point, to work out that an undiscovered planet was influencing Uranus’ orbit. Quinn also delves into factors that can influence critical thinking, such as preconceived biases that make one more inclined to accept logical fallacies, which may then be used “to avoid an undesirable conclusion.” Later, he offers a detailed discussion of creating “sub-goals” to achieve an end goal. The last two chapters are dedicated solely to case studies. The first tackles the critical thinking methods used by John Snow, the English scientist who discovered how cholera spread so rapidly in the mid-1800s; the second is a personal look at the author’s own experience inventing a quarter-tone technique for the saxophone and then writing and marketing a book about it.

All of Quinn’s examples prove to be easy to follow and are largely based in real-world scenarios. When he walks readers through mistakes and missteps that led to him being unable to graduate college in five years, or the various clues that should have tipped him off that he’d arrived at the wrong house for a party, he provides an accessible look into what critical thinking is and what its application means in daily life. The narrative tone is similarly approachable, with very little use of jargon. The few terms that may prove unfamiliar to beginners are in bold and are helpfully recapped in the final chapter, glossary-style. There are no illustrations or diagrams, however, which may disappoint visual learners. Quinn’s everyman approach to the

different styles of reasoning is refreshing, as is his willingness to admit his own faults when employing them. For instance, while explaining his journey toward publishing his saxophone book, he concludes, “In essence, I did execute the critical thinking process successfully to create the book itself, but not on the business or other concerns of the project.” The numerous personal anecdotes and historical examples keep things engaging for readers who value the practical over the theoretical. Overall, the book is a helpful overview of a range of skills that may prove helpful in readers’ everyday and professional lives.

A simple introduction to critical thinking and its practical benefits that readers will find easy to grasp.

Kristin B. and Other Stories

Raffetto, Joseph | Noovella.com (250 pp.) | $12.99 paper April 22, 2024 | 9780990614982

Raffetto’s collection of stories is haunted by one of American literature’s most glamorous and tragic couples. The romantic but troubled relationship between the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda permeates all three of these collected stories to some degree. From beyond the grave, Scott Fitzgerald narrates “Young Scott and Zelda” (“I died at the peak of my writing powers”), commemorating a time when his youthful confidence was boundless despite obstacles (Scott’s mother disapproves of his novel writing, preferring him to pen ads, and editor Maxwell Perkins doubts that Scott’s book will sell many copies). Zelda, ambitious herself, doesn’t want to marry. Yet, suddenly, life becomes a fairy tale—Scott’s novel is a bestseller, and Zelda agrees to wed. In “Three A.M.,” Scott no longer narrates, and the couple’s lives sour. Scott and Zelda throw wild parties, flirt with others,

and accumulate debts. Scott is often a mean drunk, while Zelda develops mental health issues that lead to her hospitalization. “Kristen B.,” the last story, is only peripherally about the Fitzgeralds. A young woman, Kristin, shows her Scott and Zelda screenplay to a producer who sexually assaults her. Emotionally scarred, Kristen begins an intense relationship with Holden, a sensitive former baseball player with a violent family history. Well-chosen vignettes from the Fitzgeralds’ lives fill the first two stories, such as Scott callously kicking a tray out of the hands of a woman selling food and Zelda’s scorn at Scott’s flinching when he dives into water. But in “Three A.M.,” the narrator’s intrusive opinions weaken the story; readers are told it’s laughable to imagine Scott and Ernest Hemingway as lovers, and that Zelda would probably have left Scott “if their story had taken place sixty years in the future.” “Kristen B.” is the strongest of the three stories, capturing the flavor of the Fitzgeralds in modern times. Like Zelda and Scott, Kristen and Holden are damaged, unable to assimilate into the practical world of 9-to-5 jobs and sedate married life. Unlike the Fitzgeralds, Kristen and Holden move beyond trauma (albeit not in an ideal manner) and end on a hopeful note.

Stories that capture both the magic and disappointment of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s lives.

Mysteries of Bowie and Other Oddities

Raffetto, Joseph | Noovella.com (306 pp.) | $13.99 paper

April 23, 2024 | 9798218398651

George Orwell and David Bowie are recurring figures in fiction and nonfiction pieces that examine passion, truth, politics, and authoritarianism in Raffetto’s collection.

“Inside Orwell”is a fictional recounting of George Orwell’s life and his transformative experiences in the Spanish Civil War. (“He, like no other author, was undeceived by the period’s politics, wars, current events, and the struggles of the workers and the powerless.”) “Bowie and the Berlin Wall” is an extensively footnoted essay analyzing David Bowie’s connection to Berlin. Raffetto draws parallels between Bowie and Orwell, who both used pseudonyms, “creating alter egos who became groundbreaking artists and cultural icons.” “Venice to Venice” is a story about an FBI agent named Brian who served as an intelligence officer in Iraq in 2006. In 2017, he is working for the FBI in Venice, California, trying to repair his relationship with his 19-year-old daughter Emily. Brian reflects on the 1987 Bowie concert that he attended at the Berlin Wall: “Thinking of those days, when he was a junior analyst at the agency, made him nostalgic. He had been so optimistic then, so different from the dark pessimism he felt now.” “The Mysteries of Game Theory” takes place in a future Los Angeles where James, a former Facebook data scientist, emerges from two years underground after a pandemic to search for his sister, Cleo. James becomes involved in the fight against the authoritarian government. “The Georges” explores a white man’s rage over the hypocritical coverage of the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, his killer (“This type of Orwellian logic has become a cancer on our society”). Raffetto writes deftly in both fiction and nonfiction modes. Incorporating many facts of Orwell’s life and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War with fictional re-creations of those experiences adds to the realism of “Inside Orwell.” The extended length of the stories, with their recurring themes of authoritarianism and political division, allows the main characters to develop realistic family and romantic connections. Ultimately, the threads of Orwell and Bowie woven throughout prove fascinating.

A thought-provoking collection of fiction and nonfiction.

The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: True Stories. Soul-Baring Moments. No Apologies. (A Collection of Short Memoirs From Around the World)

Ed. by Richards, Marguerite | Leave It

Better Books (568 pp.) | $19.99 paper

June 28, 2024 | 9798989298402

Richards collects short essays from Muslims across the planet in this anthology of creative nonfiction. What is often described as the Muslim world is, of course, many worlds. The fact that many Americans view such a large section of the globe as a single entity has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. “I was consumed by the fact that so many Westerners are entirely unaware of the breadth of cultural differences coming from Muslim worlds,” writes Richards of her decision to begin this project back in 2015. Since then, she has assembled the voices of 41 writers from various Muslim communities—Sri Lanka, Yemen, Andalucía, Nigeria, Illinois— to speak to these individual human experiences. One contributor recounts how, anonymous in her niqab, she ran into her estranged father in a restaurant in Durban, South Africa, and was unsure whether she should approach him. A journalist writes about her childhood on the Philippine island of Sulu prior to the separatist uprising that turned the place into a war zone. American writer Noreen Moustafa remembers her childhood summers in Alexandria, Egypt, and laments how much the city’s seaside has changed in recent years. “At least they didn’t take the sea away,” Moustafa quips, displaying an anguish that characterizes much of this collection and its recurring aches of immigration, war, loss, and grief. As Duaa Randhawa notes in an essay about her grandfather’s garden in Pakistan, “eventually, with the seasons, and despite the

feeling of betrayal, we too fall into the rhythm of orbital resonance. Degrees obtained, cities changed, love fallen into and out of; after all the wear and tear of the heart, it still goes on.” It’s an unusual book in that it’s so thematically flexible—the work proves Richards’ point about the diversity of the Muslim experience by interpreting even the adjective “Muslim” quite loosely. The writing is so strong, however, and takes readers into such far-flung corners of the world, that it can’t help but surprise and delight. A simmering, wide-ranging collection of informative nonfiction.

Re-Storying Education: Decolonizing Your Practice

Using a Critical Lens

Roberts, Carolyn | Page Two (224 pp.)

$29.95 paper | Sept. 10, 2024

9781774584965

A manual for educators to decolonize their classrooms and put the focus on Indigenous cultures.

The author—a direct descendant of Chief Hunter Jack of the N’Quat’qua Nation and a former elementary school principal for the Squamish nation—is a proponent of re-storying education in Canada, which she describes as “a process of dismantling old narratives to rebuild and re-story new narratives to include historically silenced voices in education, to make space for all stories of this place to be told.” Her book is aimed at educators, encouraging them to teach Indigenous history and interact with Indigenous students more authentically. To do this, she argues, educators need to unlearn the colonial framework of education. The book’s eight chapters include a history of how the public education system has failed Indigenous people (and how to correct that failing), a discussion of how colonialism is manifested in the classroom, and a plan for assessing how these changes are

being implemented. The chapter titled “Journey Through Education,” in particular, is full of useful information from the author’s personal memories of an education that served to reinforce the colonial point of view to arguments for more Indigenous representation in school curricula to ways in which grade-school curricula need to be revamped and updated. (This chapter also tackles weighty topics about representation and racism in the classroom.) This is all very heavy material, but the author doesn’t get bogged down. The structure of each chapter—including musical playlists to listen to as you read, a handful of questions for reflection, and a handy list of resources—makes for an easy read, one that not only explores the problems it raises, but also offers a range of solutions. All of this combines to give the reader a thorough look at what the author finds lacking in the Canadian education system and the steps that can be taken to help correct it.

A well-presented consideration of a generations-long problem in education.

Falling Stars

Rogers, Julie | 56 Mountain Press (461 pp.) | $21.99 paper April 27, 2023 | 9780997107470

Rogers offers a genre-bending mother-and-son tale infused with vampire mythology. Like Bram Stoker’s original Dracula , Rogers’ story is a nested narrative. In the prologue, a pulp

fiction writer is pitched a new story that may or may not be real. The narrative then jumps to June Lucas and her adopted son Tommy, who has terminal cancer. They are traveling from Chicago to June’s hometown of Eureka Springs, Arkansas; during the ride, Tommy reads the pulp fiction story pitched in the prologue, which mirrors his own journey. In the story, a young viscountess from Wales, sick with leukemia, is on a ship bound for New York Harbor. She is escorted by her brother, who is eventually revealed to be a vampire. Tommy—who wears a cape, is extremely pale, and only eats red food—seems more than a little like a vampire himself and believes that he has some cursed vampire blood in his family tree. The pulp story, which chronicles the life of vampire Viscount Claudius Fallon as he makes his own pilgrimage to Eureka Springs in 1939, continues to mirror the present-day story of June and Tommy meeting a mysterious local artist and gallery owner who may hold the cure for Tommy’s illness. Despite the rich story and characters, Rogers makes some missteps by repeatedly introducing and briefly revealing the thoughts of side characters throughout. She is largely adept at adjusting her prose to fit the styles of the different periods and characters, though some of the less central figures, like Chelsea Dumont, a Black Gen Z Creole woman who becomes Tommy’s online friend, are less successfully realized than others (“Chelsea was just that way, broadcasting booyah to the room wherever she went”). Readers’ patience may waver following the various strands of the story, but they come together satisfactorily in the end for those willing to stick with it.

A compelling, if sometimes convoluted, twist on the classic vampire story.

FALLING STARS

A compelling, if sometimes convoluted, twist on the classic vampire story.

Arty

Schneider, Penny | Monarch Educational Services (102 pp.) | $18.99 paper

Sept. 10, 2024 | 9781957656595

A betta fish secretly longs for friendship in Schneider’s illustrated children’s book.

Arty is a purple betta (also known as a Siamese fighting fish) who feels the weight of always having to be a fighter. It’s a lonely life when other fish are always afraid of you. Before the beginning of the story, Arty asks the reader, “Hello. Can I ask you something? Did you ever have a wish, a secret wish, that you know you shouldn’t wish, but you just do?” Arty reveals some secret thoughts of his own: Nobody likes him, he’s alone, and he’s always felt different. At betta school, all of the other fish seem content to fight all the time and be aggressive warriors, but bettas are also curious by nature, and Arty wants a friend. He decides to go in search of the wise old Snail for advice. Along the way, he meets a sea slug and, being a betta, squashes him. But then Arty apologizes, and the sea slug’s curiosity is piqued: “He said sorry?! This is not how bettas act!” Intrigued, the sea slug follows Arty, and when a hungry red piranha attacks the betta, the sea slug saves Arty’s life. To Arty’s surprise, the sea slug becomes his friend. Schneider’s comic-book illustrations depict foamy watercolor seascapes; the characters are mostly rendered in muted block colors with bold black pen outlines that make their features pop. The book uses classic comic framing—split panels on many pages and bold thought, speech, and action bubbles. Diverting little details, like exclamation and

question marks, musical notes, and captions (like “DANCE PARTY!” when Arty is imagining what friendship must be like) add texture to an already spellbinding read. The growing friendship between Arty and the slug is dynamic—sometimes funny, droll, or sarcastic, sometimes sweet and sentimental. The buoyant prose keeps the pace up even when Arty is having his existential crisis, and the slug (who eventually settles on the name Slug), with his googly eyes and placid expression, makes for a most charming foil.

A quirky and ingenious deep-sea dive into an unlikely friendship between two enchanting outsiders.

The Search & Find World of Shadowboxes: Rediscover the ABCs

Seeley, Laura L. | Best Friends Art Gallery (64 pp.) | Oct. 1, 2024 | 9780986425035

Seeley offers a visually resplendent, alphabet-themed, word-search picture book. “Spot animals. Objects! / Find WORDS and much more! / And discover a world of things / when you explore.” So tasks “Shadow,” the cute, cloudlike critter who narrates this collection of picture searches. Readers are presented with a two-page spread for each letter of the alphabet. The first page of each contains text in a simple ABCB rhyme structure: “I is for icecubes / and ice cream cones, too. / Look for irises, flowers / of indigo blue.” Every instance of the featured letter is in color (in contrast to otherwiseblack text), and words beginning with that letter float ghostlike in the background. The flow is dreamy, and it takes a little work to keep in rhythm (children will likely gloss over the words altogether and dive straight into the picture searches). Each letter’s illustration page is presented as if within a large picture frame containing a collage of painted illustrations, each bursting

with images inspired by the letter in question. The letter M, for instance, features macaroni, a monkey sitting on a moon (with a mouse sniffing about), a mermaid (wearing mittens) with mountains in the background, and a marshmallow tree with marigold flowers. The images are rich and intricate, much in the style of Graeme Base’s classic Animalia (1986), and offer endless encouragement for poring over by keen young eyes.

A lovely book to read and pass down through the generations.

She Took a Turn: A Memoir of Climbing Over Guardrails Into Growth

Smith, Kristi J. | River Grove Books (440 pp.) | $22.95 paper June 13, 2024 | 9781632998279

A memoir of one woman’s journey as she navigates life, love, and learning to be her authentic self. Smith reflects on growing up in a conservative, religious Southern family and following certain familial expectations without question. She maintained a loving but complicated relationship with her parents (especially her mother) as they attempted to guide her down what they believed was the “right path,” including a pre-med track at Princeton. But as she explored more of the world, the author began wrestling with her own dreams and ideas of right and wrong. From falling for a boy who didn’t share her Christian faith and her stint at Teach for America in North Carolina to the complexity of becoming a wife and a mother, Smith’s journey toward personal and professional fulfillment was anything but straightforward. As the author discusses the experiences that profoundly affected who she is today, she draws strong parallels between the past and present, and between herself and others. When she compares her son’s inability to recognize hunger cues with her own

inability to relax until she’s made herself physically ill, her astute reflections invite readers to ruminate on their own idiosyncrasies (she clearly carries a lot of empathy for those around her). Smith’s warm, introspective (and occasionally self-deprecating) narrative voice is one that readers will likely find utterly compelling. This proves especially true in her recollections from childhood, many of which contain delightfully entertaining moments of wry amusement: “I actually remember praying privately to God (in Jesus’s name) the night before the state tournament basketball games—not for victory, not for strength to handle whatever happened…but that He would please delay His second coming until after the championship because I really wanted to win this thing before the apocalypse hit.”

An authentic, compassionate memoir full of impressive insight.

Thinking at the Speed of Bias: How To Shift Our Unconscious Filters

Taylor, Sara | Berrett-Koehler Publishers (192 pp.) | $22.95 paper July 9, 2024 | 9781523006762

Field-tested advice on implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in one’s community and workplace.

In Taylor’s previous book, Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World (2017), she created the categories “Frames” and “Filters” to help readers see the mostly conscious and almost entirely unconscious perceptions that shape our interactions with others as well as the communities we create, from classrooms to cities to corporations. Here, she returns to and expands upon these concepts. Frames, she explains, are informed by objective facts. How one chooses to respond to an objective fact, however, will be affected by one’s Filters. These are patterns of belief that

may or may not be objectively true, and they are so ingrained that we don’t think about them or question them. And, as Taylor explains, we are more likely to attribute negative qualities to a whole category of people if we’re reacting to someone whom we regard as not like us—especially if their identity seems unfamiliar and even threatening. This is unconscious bias, and it’s not difficult to see how this sort of stereotyping or othering perpetuates inequity at individual and systemic levels. What is difficult, though, is recognizing and interrogating our own unconscious biases in order to unlearn them. In this book, Taylor continues the work of helping readers do exactly that by applying Frames-and-Filters analysis to such phenomena as polarization and microaggressions. The author supports her work with useful insights from psychology and social science research. For example, her model for the stages of cultural competence is a synthesis of the work of three different researchers who study cross-cultural communication. Despite the bullet-pointed summaries and useful infographics, this text is sometimes dense and perhaps not best suited for a training handbook. However, the discussion questions at the end make it a good choice for a book study group.

A data-driven, actionable guide for executives, community leaders, and individuals invested in fostering a culture of belonging.

After David

Texier, Catherine | Itna Press (254 pp.) | $18.00 paper May 14, 2024 | 9798988282914

In Texier’s novel, a woman seeks love, romance, and a connection to her former self in the world of dating apps. Eve is a 62year-old Frenchwoman living in New York. Long divorced from David,

her ex-husband and the father of her two daughters, Eve finds herself dipping her toe into online dating. She matches with younger men, receiving many messages until one from Jonah, aged 37, stops her in her tracks. Eve and Jonah embark on an uneven love affair that oscillates between being adoring and distant, with questions about age, careers, and maturity roiling at its center. Readers are often hard-pressed to find unapologetic, fulfilled, mature female leads in fiction; Eve, as a character, is a refreshing antidote to the all-toofrequent erasure of older women in the media, one who delights in sex, friendship, and travel. Texier does not make her too self-assured; Eve is confident, but she still suffers the pitfalls of modern dating and an uncertainty that often calls into question her marriage to David and her other serious, long-since-ended relationship with a man named Vadik. Eve declares passionately, with great resonance, “I didn’t aspire at all to a life without desire. Wouldn’t life be dreary without us putting a spell on each other?” While Texier’s message is welcome, the novel’s vignettelike approach to storytelling occasionally feels a little too much like a streamof-consciousness ramble—not quite the voyage of discovery the narrative was perhaps intended to be. The men in Eve’s life often loom like shadows despite her independence, which makes the ending of the story feel not as convincing as readers might hope. Still, the meandering narrative reminds readers, quite bracingly, that women above the age of 50 are not fading into the twilight of their lives—they’re still discovering themselves.

A fascinating and sexy heroine sets this romance novel with a difference alight.

Aye, Captain, there is intelligent life in this involving SF adventure. FOUND

Found

Weber, Lesli | Sicilia Stories (318 pp.) | $14.99 paper Aug. 30, 2024 | 9798218472634

Onetime Mars colonist Michelle Arensen, suddenly lost in deep space, nds herself in the custody of an intimidating alien race. In humanity’s space-colonizing future, would-be Mars settler Michelle Arensen tries to put the suicide of her father behind her, working with her husband and brother to build a lasting Red Planet base. Suddenly, a bizarre phenomenon engulfs Michelle and other women on the expedition, who nd themselves held prisoner by faceless, noncommunicative humanoids. After a series of cruel, fatal medical experiments, the prisoners revolt. When Michelle awakens (a mystery narrative gap that author Weber wisely never lls in, letting the reader’s imagination do the job), she has been revived after decades of drifting in space by a di erent extraterrestrial people. Her new hosts—or captors—are the Vinyi, bipeds with six principal limbs and easily twice the size of humans. Despite such a monstrous-by-humanstandards physiognomy (“Grey skin. Tentacles. Tusks. Black eyes. Huge”), the Vinyi are not as nasty as the faceless creatures who killed Arensen’s co-workers (demonstrated when a shift in narrative voice takes readers into the minds of the crew of the Vinyi spaceship). eir discovery of Michelle is the rst Vinyi contact with any species like Homo sapiens.

Providentially, Michelle is a linguist. She adopts the Vinyi tongue and communicates her dilemma to them and learns Mars, Earth, and even the Milky Way are unknown to Vinyi civilization. e marooned hero must convince them she has worth and value as a sapient being, not just a lab specimen. e fast-paced plotline, conveyed in a direct, nonjargony prose (some may recall genre master Alan Dean Foster), has much in common with the “Robinsonade” type of SF, in which a resourceful human ghts to navigate and survive a perilous alien environment. at this one is a dicey shipboard society and culture rather than a hostile planetary body makes author Weber’s material more nuanced, and much weight is accorded to the emotional states of the players (human and nonhuman), even with a rather too-neat action wrap-up.

Aye, Captain, there is intelligent life in this involving SF adventure.

Healing Healthcare: Evidence-Based Strategies To Mend Our Broken System

Weinstein, Sharon M. & Dina Readinger

Amplify Publishing (232 pp.) | $27.00 Oct. 22, 2024 | 9781637559666

Weinstein and Readinger take a look at problems facing health care professionals and suggest ways to x them.

e authors make it clear from the rst line

of the introduction that American health care, as it stands right now, is a problem. “We talk a lot about the pandemic and the impact of its aftermath on our healthcare system,” they write. “But our system, although revered as one of the best in the world, has been broken for much longer than three years.” What follows is a blueprint to x this system, developed using a protocol called Diagnostic inking that included one-on-one and group interviews with nurses who pinpointed issues in the health care industry. ose interviews led to the three sections of the book: “Workforce,” which addresses problems nding quali ed nurses; “Well-Being,” a discussion about taking care of nurses in the workplace; and “Wisdom,” which outlines ideas for accomplishing these goals. Chapters in these sections include topics such as “Creating a Culture of Emotional Safety in Healthcare,” “Inspiring Gen Z To Stay,” “Frontline Nurses... Experiencing Well-Being,” and “Unleashing the Power of Nurses.” e nal chapter, “From Ideation to Reality,” is written by Weinstein, a nurse, and includes bulleted ideas (give nurses a voice; promote nurse health; identify needs and solve one problem at a time) that could serve as a call to action for health care leaders. is book isn’t for a general audience—it’s speci cally geared toward nurses and other health care professionals and is chock-full of supporting evidence regarding the problems that need to be tackled within the nursing workforce. e text is well organized and the methodology is spelled out in full, but this is much more an expanded research paper (including 20 pages of endnotes) than it is a highly readable look at the health care industry. But that isn’t what the authors were after—they want to shine a light on some serious problems, and this book certainly does that. It also serves up some answers and suggestions for a way forward to a healthier health care system. A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.